.NickPaumgarten meets up with two members of Spoon during the band’s tour, which has been derailed by COVID setbacks.
Spoon, shooting pool. Or really just two members of Spoon, the rock band from Texas: Britt Daniel, the singer and songwriter, and Jim Eno, the drummer. They were in a West Village pool hall called the Cellar Dog, formerly the Fat Cat, which Daniel had discovered one night some years ago when the wait to get into a few other jazz clubs nearby was too long. Spoon had a scheduled appearance the next day on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and another after that at the Hammerstein Ballroom.
Originally from Rhode Island, Eno moved to Houston after college to work as a computer engineer at Compaq. A job at Motorola designing microprocessors, and an itch to make music, took him to Austin, in 1992, where he and Daniel, a student at the University of Texas, played in a rockabilly band called the Alien Beats.
“They just—didn’t want it.” Instead, he bought drumsticks and wore out the upholstery on the couch. “They were, like, ‘This is just another fad.’ ”The balls had got cluttered up in a way that made almost any shot impossible. Daniel did the thing where you sit on the edge of the table and shoot behind your back. Eventually, Eno sank the eight ball. Across the room, some musicians were setting up. Guitar, organ, drums. The organ, a B-3, lives at the Cellar Dog.