All the World, Onstage

FAMILY-ESQUE Dengue Fever, from left: Senon Williams, Ethan Holtzman, Chhom Nimol, Paul Smith and Zac Holtzman. (Photo: Rahav Segev for The New York Times)

October 1, 2006
A Night Out With Dengue Fever

By MATT GROSS
The New York Times

LOOK at my tongue — how is it?” asked the blond girl in the basement bar. “Am I healthy?” She removed her black plastic eyeglasses and said, “Ah.”

“The tip is a bit red, and you have thick grassy fur at the back of your tongue,” Zac Holtzman said, peering into her mouth with his Marty Feldman eyes and rubbing his expansive bib-like beard. The diagnosis? Too much yang, or heat energy, in her chi.

Mr. Holtzman offered no treatment plan, but then he’s only an amateur student of Chinese medicine. Professionally, he’s the guitarist for Dengue Fever, a band from Los Angeles that is reviving the psychedelic rock of 1960’s Cambodia, a style replete with playful Farfisa organs, guitar licks as fuzzy as an over-yanged tongue and vocals that blend the high-pitched wails of Indian pop with a surf-rock jauntiness — like the Beach Boys gone Bollywood.

Dengue Fever had just finished up a summer of touring with a packed show at Joe’s Pub, the band’s first-ever appearance in New York. Matt Dillon, whose Cambodian thriller “City of Ghosts” featured the band’s cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” came to show support, and Ethan Hawke was spotted in a green velvet suit.

Now, however, the band — Zac, his less-hirsute brother Ethan, on Farfisa organ, the drummer Paul Smith, the bassist Senon Williams and the singer Chhom Nimol — was unwinding at the subterranean bar of Peasant, an Italian restaurant on Elizabeth Street.

It was very late, and the weary musicians were spread out over several tables, drinking Menabrea amber beer and chatting with old friends.

A curvy brunette squeezed past Zac and told him, “I love your big, soft beard.”

“We’re just talking tongues tonight,” he said, unintentionally describing the band’s multilingual songwriting process.

When not covering Cambodian classics like “I’m Sixteen” and “Shave Your Beard,” the Holtzman brothers pen lyrics for Battambang-born Ms. Nimol to translate into Khmer, the language of Cambodia, which she then belts out in a room-filling voice both sweet and husky.

Ms. Nimol, whose wide smile and dramatic eyes give her the glamour of a 1940’s movie star, was sitting quietly next to John Pirozzi, a filmmaker who documented Dengue Fever’s trip to Cambodia in 2005. (The DVD will be released next year.)

She was sipping a glass of white wine — Peasant didn’t serve the Jägermeister and Red Bull she had requested — and looked stylishly compact in stiletto ankle boots, cropped Guess jeans and a black jacket.

She said that onstage, “I want to wear jeans, but all the men complain: ‘You’ve got to wear Cambodian dress!’ ” That night she had worn a slinky green-and-gold silk number that she had designed, provoking one audience member to declare her “unspeakably sexy.”

Her relationship with her bandmates appears decidedly sibling-esque: She glares at them onstage with a sister’s mock peevishness; they watch over her like brothers.

“She has, probably three-quarters of the time, this look of exasperation: ‘Oh, I can’t go on!’ ” said Mr. Williams, bald, brawny and wearing a blue-and-white striped T-shirt. “Then she goes on.”

Going on eventually became a necessity: It was nearing 4 a.m. and stomachs were beginning to rumble.

Zac Holtzman and Ms. Nimol were crashing at the apartment of Céline Dijon, the singer of the French-shtick band Nous Non Plus, whose refrigerator presumably contained Camembert and cornichons.

That would apparently not be enough for Ms. Nimol, who had one last word before she ascended to the street: “Pizza!”