TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer
The Web videos have turned Bill Able and Ann Bailey into unlikely celebrities, in Fishtown and beyond. "The other day I was walking down the street and some kids pulled up in a car and said, 'I've got a CD for you,' " Bailey said. At right, autographed pictures.
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Short-order critics are a Web hit
From Fishtown diner oldies, the dish on new music.
There's more than blueberry pancakes on the menu for breakfast at Sulimay's.
For the senior-citizen music critics Bill Able, Ann Bailey, and Joe Walker, a morning meal at the Fishtown diner typically involves listening to indie-rock and hip-hop acts like Jay Reatard and Young Jeezy.
The trio - Able, 75; Bailey, 66; and Walker, 84 - sit in a rear booth listening to music through earbuds, passing judgment American Idol-style for a periodic series of five-minute videos.
And now, fueled by positive notice from such cultural gatekeepers as the New Yorker and the music blog Stereogum, their show, Breakfast at Sulimay's, has become a Web sensation.
A clip from March in which Walker opined that the much-buzzed-about indie band Animal Collective isn't "going to get very far from Baltimore, Maryland," is approaching 100,000 hits.
National Public Radio recently aired a segment on Sulimay's. And the online taste-making bible Pitchfork, which avidly follows Sulimay's, found the latest episode - featuring Memphis rocker Reatard and Chicago rap crew BBU - to be "still funny."
The critics haven't been as impressed with Pitchfork. "This is why Pitchfork sucks," Able declared, in a dismissive review of celebrated harpist Joanna Newsom's album Ys, which Pitchfork awarded a stellar 9.4 out of 10.
The edgy music that Sulimay's mastermind Marc Brodzik plays for his trio of crusty, charming critics isn't exactly music to their ears.
"You won't remember any of these songs you listen to today years from now," said Able, a former boxer who pans - with a smile - almost everything he hears, on a recent morning at the Girard and Berks eatery.
By contrast, Bailey - the feisty mother of seven and grandmother of 17 who's gotten up to dance to R&B singer Raphael Saadiq's "100 Yard Dash" and makes an obscene gesture at the camera during the show opening - says she has an open mind.
"Lady Gaga, 'Poker Face,' " she countered. "You'll remember that one."
Walker, the sage thinker of the show who serves as a Fishtown Simon Cowell, usually weighs in last. "Lady Gaga," he repeated. "I tell you it did not impress itself in my mind, because I do not remember Lady Gaga."
The idea for the show occurred to Brodzik, 42, an artist and filmmaker who lives in Collingswood with his wife, Jen, and two children, when he overheard a group of seniors at Sulimay's a couple of years back. Brodzik, a Pew Fellowship winner, works nearby at his Woodshop Films office in Northern Liberties.
"One day when Marc happened to be having breakfast here, he overheard three very witty, erudite gentlemen talking," said Walker, a retired city employee and former stage actor. "He thought our wit and humor was so amusing that he wanted to put us on tape."
"I just remember being thoroughly entertained," said Brodzik. "I was an outsider looking in. I was talking to a friend of mine and said, 'Wouldn't it be funny to have them review music?' And I just came in and asked them, and we did it."
Breakfast at Sulimay's, begun in 2007, is the showpiece of Scrapple.tv, a compendium of left-of-center shows such as Smut Cave, which Brodzik says he produces "with sweat and spit and interns." The site's logo is an animated pig who sings, "Someday we'll get paid for this." For the most part, the Sulimay's crew doesn't, except with fame and pancakes.
Along with Able and Walker, the third original was a regular, Moon O'Brian, who dropped out after six episodes. "Moon didn't care for the hurly-burly of showbiz," said Walker.
Bailey "saw the opportunity and crowbarred her way in," Brodzik said.
"And you fell in love with me," said Bailey, a retired legal secretary.
Soon Bailey will follow Walker in doing interviews, focusing on metal bands (and donning leather outfits, naturally, for the shoots). But Walker is the breakout star of Sulimay's. In one episode, he compared Eminem's hyperspeed rapping on "We Made You" to the "patter songs" of Gilbert and Sullivan. His favorite Philadelphia musician: 1920s jazz guitarist Eddie Lang. "Compared to Eddie Lang," he said, "the modern guitar player is sadly lacking."
