A stage show that intermingles music and life stories isn’t new in rock; just ask Bruce Springsteen and Ray Davies. But Jesse Malin already knows one way in which his first foray into the genre will be set apart from those that came and rocked before.
“The play opens in the hospital,” Malin says from his East Village home in New York. “And I’m telling somebody what happened to me and that I’ve canceled tours and haven’t played my guitar. There’s a guitar next to the bed and a wheelchair, and I’m just thinking about what I’m going to do.”
Two years ago this month, Malin, a longtime fixture and champion of New York’s punk scene, suffered a rare spinal stroke that left him unable to walk. In the agonizing time since, he’s endured a regimen of demanding physical therapy, and even stem-cell injections. Musician friends have rallied to his aid, releasing an album of Malin covers (featuring Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, Billie Joe Armstrong, Elvis Costello, and others) and honoring Malin at two tribute concerts at New York’s Beacon Theatre last year that brought together Williams, Costello, Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz, and more.
Once the Beacon shows were over, however, Malin wasn’t sure what was next, especially when it came to paying for medical bills that are not covered by insurance. “After [the tribute shows], I didn’t know what else to do,” he says. “I’m thinking I can’t tour right now. You don’t make money from records. You gotta play live. And a good friend suggested an idea of a residency.”
That proposal has led to Silver Manhattan, a combination of concert and play that will weave together Malin’s music — from his bands Heart Attack and D Generation through his solo records — with tales from his life and career. Opening Sept. 6, the show (written by Malin and produced by Tommy Kriegsmann / ArKtype and David Bason, and presented by Peter Shapiro) will be performed once a month on select Saturdays at New York’s Gramercy Theatre: Oct. 4, Nov. 22, Dec. 6, and Jan. 11, 2026, in addition to the September premiere. “I thought, ‘I want to do something where I can work and be in New York,’ and we found a theater ten minutes from my house,” says Malin, who needs a walker and cane to take even a short stroll. “I want to tell a story I’ve always wanted to tell. And now there’s this new element into it.”
Months before his stroke, Malin was indeed already at work on a memoir, for which he had more than enough material, starting with his childhood in Queens, New York. “It was really a story about coming of age in a New York that doesn’t exist anymore, growing up in a broken home with a single mom, getting exposed to music at a young age and coming into the city and playing CBGB and putting out my first hardcore single,” he says. “Then touring and learning in the early Eighties about this positive outlook that wasn’t the nihilism of the Seventies punk, then forming bands, finding a family in the city of people with similar mindsets and seeing how much music brings people together. It’s filled with funny characters, humor and just these struggles. So I started the book, and then this happened.”
Malin resumed working on his book after the stroke, a process he says he found “sometimes painful, sometimes depressing.” Some of that material will provide the foundation for Silver Manhattan, named after a song on Malin’s second solo album, 2004’s The Heat. “It’s a kind of hybrid play-slash-concert,” he says of the show. “It’s not a one-man show. The full band will be up there. Yet there is a story with characters from my childhood up through D Generation. I want to take aspects from the story of my life, the struggles I had to overcome at a young age, and then I’m hit with even more of a challenge at this current point.”
Messing with the notion of a traditional residency also appealed to Malin. “I just didn’t want it to be where I play my songs once a month,” he continues. “That’s great for Billy Joel, and I’d love to go see that. But when I was thinking about the idea of making a show, I was very inspired by David Byrne’s American Utopia, and how uplifting it was. It had music and stories, and it was presented in a fresh way, and you left there feeling very alive.”
The precise structure of Silver Manhattan is still being worked out, but at the moment, Malin envisions a show that, after opening in the hospital, will feature him talking about his upbringing and performing at least a dozen songs from his back catalog with his band, with a minimal set and possibly actors portraying people from his life. “It’s definitely going to be a show, a concert for my fans, but also a platform and a story. We’re going to keep simple and work within our means, which is something I learned from punk rock,” he says. He thinks the show will incorporate sets, but, he adds with a chuckle, “It’s not going to be super-elaborate where I’m going to be flying over the audience in a harness or something.”
As the show progresses through his early life and solo career, Malin imagines it will flash-forward — “Goodfellas style,” he says — to his stroke, a subsequent trip to Argentina for stem-cell treatments, and his initial efforts to stand up from his wheelchair and take early steps. “The buildup, the Rocky Balboa of this, is me wanting to get back to my life, which is in front of my audience,” he says. “I’ll be trying to make my body do the most I can, and not just sit there and accept that I’m paralyzed with this disability. So when you see the show each night, you’ll be seeing that in real action.”
After two years, Malin still has no feeling in his legs and undergoes regular physical therapy. But the last few months have offered glimmers of hope, especially after he began to focus on building up his calves and hips. “There’s some things I see progress in,” he says. “I made it a goal to want to be able to find a way to stand up, even if it was just for a song. To find a way to get my body up onto that mic stand to sing. And we worked at that for six months.”
That goal was on display at a tribute concert to Patti Smith at Carnegie Hall last month. After arriving onstage in his wheelchair, Malin stood up, clutched the microphone stand, and sang Smith’s “Free Money,” a song he picked for the occasion. “I was nervous to get up there and I was trying to get out of a wheelchair and stand up to sing a song like that and make sure I didn’t fall,” he recalls. “There’s a non-stop barrage of words and no musical breaks.” But he made it through and received a standing ovation. “It really touched my heart,” he says.
For all its focus on his struggles, Malin hopes Silver Manhattan will also transcend his story. “I don’t want to just target my core fans,” he says. “We’re here to make sure it’s a good time in the end, that it’s fun —even though there are a lot of things that happen along the way. I’m not going to run my usual five miles along the water near the Brooklyn Bridge. Every day is a challenge, but I’m going to keep pushing through. That’s why I call this ‘a musical guide to survival.’”
Tickets for Silver Manhattan go on sale Friday, April 11 at 12 noon ET, with Citi and Artist presales set for April 9 at 10 a.m. ET (PW: JESSE) and April 10 at 10 a.m. ET through LiveNation (PW: DANCE) and Ticketmaster (PW: SYNC).
