Tim Presley wiggles the fingers on his left hand to get a little squiggle out of his most intense guitar jams. On a damp Monday night in Brooklyn, Presley and White Fence wowed the sold out crowd at Baby’s All Right with a 65-minute performance that showcased the band’s great new album For Recently Found Innocent. The wiggling digits, the 180-twirl to face the monitor, the menacing aim of the guitar as if it’s a discharging bazooka. These are moves that only work as they do when you have a guitar player with so much jaw-dropping talent.

The gig was the first night of a short White Fence tour that covers 14 dates without a gap in the Northeast, Midwest and Canada. The tour finishes off back here with a couple shows during CMJ.

Not only was Presley in top form but the audience was the unknowing beneficiary of the band’s enlistment of Cate Le Bon who played backing guitar. Le Bon stood unobtrusively stage left. She was obscured from a portion of the crowd’s view behind stage equipment but Presley warmly introduced her a couple songs in and praised her readiness despite only “two days” preparation. Presley’s quip is no doubt an exaggeration given the ease with which Le Bon exhibited knowledge of the band’s material. The reaction from the rambunctious crowd when Presley announced Le Bon was on stage was mostly indifferent which I thought exposed a narrow music view from those assembled. Le Bon’s vocal contributions were amazing and gave live renditions of several cuts from For Recently Found Innocent a fresh, bolstered flavor. At times, Le Bon mouthed the words to songs out of the microphone’s range only to lean in to offer spontaneous harmonies as she did wonderfully on “Sandra (When the Earth Dies).”

I saw Ty Segall at Woodsist Fest fill the role Le Bon’s now in a few months ago. Le Bon’s spot was even better given the sweet high note vocals that came into play. Cate often peered into the eyes of Presley to calibrate her timing. There were no keyboards however.

White Fence didn’t go on until about midnight. They wrapped up with a loud Paranoid Bait. This was my first ever visit to Baby’s All Right. 12-ounce Bud bottles were five bucks. Admission bought in advance was $10.

You’d probably have to say Baby’s All Right is winning Brooklyn’s competitive band-booking business right now. With a capacity of 280 and a pretty convenient location, Baby’s quick rise to the throne was aided by the shutdown of 285 Kent and the dithering ways of similar sized venues in the borough. Death By Audio’s imminent closure won’t hurt either. Bands seem to want to play Baby’s – with some I’ve spoken to citing the club management’s hospitality and positive vibes.

I’ll almost always prefer the laid-back all-ages, more minimally organized club layouts but I think I’m ok with what Baby’s is doing. While the restaurant component at Baby’s at first felt a little too spiffy for a rock club, the night evolved such that the audience ended up dictating the feel in that part of the venue. Glasses of beer were dropped and patrons wiped up the mess on their own. Before it was over, the area separate from the performance space had the feel of the great below-ground bar level at Bowery Ballroom. The staff at Baby’s seemed to roll with the punches and were helpful to me as I learned the set-up which includes tricky-to-find bathrooms down a stairwell. Getting a beer was never a problem. Three different full bars were open and they let you walk around with glass.

The night before, I hit another big show. JEFF the Brotherhood played Death By Audio for what will likely be their last performance there. DBA is shutting down on the Saturday before Thanksgiving after a wonderful seven-year run as Brooklyn‘s busiest, most well-known DIY venue. The 110 capacity space on South 2nd near the water is run almost entirely by Edan Wilber. He’s always there.

DBA sits on a block that used to be occupied by almost all industrial endeavors. It was deserted at night, enabling the existence of all that goes with a club. But DBA’s building is now considered prime real estate and will make way for what reportedly are plans by Vice Media to locate offices there.

DBA is a special place for its inclusion of all-ages attendees, 3 dollar cans of High Life and an anything goes approach to the evening. That was on full display when JEFF hit the stage late Sunday night.

Nashville-based brothers Jake and Jamin Orral like Wilber and DBA and put on a tremendous show. They could easily fill a larger space but gravitate towards venues like DBA for the reasons I mentioned. The twist for me on this night was the inclusion of Chet Jameson on bass and Kunal Prakash on backing guitar. Forever a two-piece making four-piece sound, the Orral brothers are doing the current tour as a full band. They were joined by popular label-mates Diarrhea Planet who played in the slot before them.

I didn’t mark time but JEFF played about eighty minutes and closed with a great cover of Rush’s Working Man with the vocal aid of a Planet guy dressed as a fake-bearded wizard.

I stood off to the side to avoid getting jostled in the scrum up front. But even there, you had to keep an eye out for the feet of body surfers tossed around almost continuously during the set.

It wasn’t the final night in DBA’s history but it felt momentous. Great band at a great club with time running out.

A ticket bought in advance through the “Peatix” ticketing service cost $16.50. Peatix is a Japanese-based outfit that takes 2.5-percent of the ticket price plus 99-cents per transaction. Brown Paper Tickets and Eventbrite have the identical pricing scheme.

Last week’s one day walkout by workers who clean airplanes for Delta Air Lines at LaGuardia got significant media attention although the motive for the bold job action was misrepresented.

News outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg News and the New York Daily News reported that employees of Air Serv went on “strike” to protest insufficient protection from infectious diseases, explicitly invoking Ebola. Since any news connected with the Ebola scare is automatic buzz at the moment, both the media and the labor union backing the workers recklessly allowed the tenuous connection between Ebola and domestic air travel to become the lead paragraph and headline of the coverage.

But that’s not the real story here.

Air Serv is a third-party vendor corporation that offers manpower to perform airline work at costs significantly cheaper than that of an air carrier’s rank-and-file workforce. Most airlines now use outfits like Air Serv to perform cleaning functions including lavatory tank dumps and trash removal and spruce-ups in both the airplanes and gate areas.

What happened outside of Delta’s Terminal D at LaGuardia last Thursday wasn’t motivated by rational fear of contracting Ebola. It was about a group of workers tired of being paid shit to do an unpleasant, difficult work task with no real hope of seeing anything resembling a fair wage going forward.

The Service Employees International Union (local 32BJ) is the organized force behind the hundred or so Air Serv employees who displayed serious courage to man a picket line last week. The union is seeking to represent and collect dues from those workers and helped spin the Ebola angle. Really though, the oppressive plight of those workers is enough on its own to merit outrage without dragging Ebola into it.

Up until the late 90’s, my employer used in-house workers wearing the company uniform to clean airplanes and perform most of the functions associated with preparing a flight for departure. Piece by piece, much of that work has been farmed out. Outside vendors bid for that work and pay their employees less than half the going rate for mainline airline workers. The airline and vendor pocket the difference while job-starved members of the lower rungs of the labor pool get shitty pay for doing work that is not pleasant.

It’s warped tradition that these workers are pretty much voiceless which leads to the types of complaints we saw from the strikers last week: They lack basic protection from the waste they’re constantly working around. Since greed is the foundation of their arrangement to begin with, it’s only consistent that these vendors (with blind eye indifference from the airlines) often lack the proper tools to do their job effectively and safely. The SEIU deserves credit for shining light on this arrangement and enlisting help from OSHA and the airport operator. But stirring up the Ebola frenzy does a disservice to their push. Their fight is should be about a fair, living wage with safe working conditions which can be aided by effective and honest union representation.