Flaming Pablum

Goodbye, Pete Shelley

They arguably lacked the spittle-drenched fury of the Sex Pistols or the alleged political acumen of The Clash, but The Buzzcocks were, quite simply, the perfect band. They struck a precise balance between the adrenalized sprint of the purest punk rock and an always-melodic brand of shiny, candy-colored pop. In frontman/guitarist Pete Shelley, they had an adept songwriter who could effortlessly pen shrewdly non-gender-specific lyrics that were immediate, universal and astonishingly nuanced. Simultaneously sweet, pugnacious and irrepressibly catchy, the songs of the Buzzcocks were and will always remain nothing short of total genius.

Pete Shelley died today at 63. I first heard the Buzzcocks courtesy of their deceptively prurient single, “Orgasm Addict,” which prompted me to pick up their seminal (pardon the awful pun) compilation, Singles Going Steady and was instantly smitten by their sharp, funny and inimitable brand of rock ‘n’ roll. One of the most exciting live shows I’ve ever been lucky enough to witness was when the band reformed in 1989 and played the New Ritz on West 54th Street. When the Buzzcocks assumed the stage and burst straight into “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays,” that storied room -- formerly Studio 54 -– burst wide open in a veritable explosion of joy.

I went on to see them several more times, though tapered off in more recent years. Pete was starting to look a little worse for wear and seemed to be less enthused the last time I saw them play at Irving Plaza a few years back. I am saddened I will never get to see them perform again, and heartbroken that yet another musical hero whose songs have meant so much to me since I first heard them several decades ago has left us.

Pour one out for Pete. Go buy every Buzzcocks album you can get your undeserving hands on. Thank me later.

Please Please Please Don't Let the Rumor Be True

There are some heartbreaking rumors about Pete Shelley.

Idles

Hey all. It's another crazy-busy, bugfuck insane pre-holiday week at the office and on the home front. Lots going on, so not always enough time to post my usual brand of silly shit here. Lengthier, arguably more substantial content is coming, but in the short term, here's a clip of a band that would make the top of my "Favorite New Music of 2018" list, ... if I bother making one. They're IDLES from Bristol, England, and as you'll see, they're kinda bananas. Enjoy.

Rest in Peace, Bleecker Bob Plotnik

I wrote about the significance of Bleecker Bob’s here seemingly more times than can be humanly quantified, the last meaningful post, I believe, being the one documenting my visit to the frankly mediocre Japanese restaurant that now operates in its former space. Above is how it looked in about 2010 or so (that’s m’self and Oliver).

The final chapter, alas, came this week with the news that “Bleecker Bob” Plotnik himself passed away. Plotnik suffered a stroke in 2001, and had been in declining health ever since.

Reactions to this news were candid and mixed. By most accounts, Bob was a frequently disagreeable and polarizing figure, prone to treating people fairly brusquely. Speaking as one of his frequent customers, I certainly weathered my share of his scorn on occasion.

That said, I do fondly remember one afternoon when my friend Rob B. and I were in there and Bob was involved in a surreal exchange with a trio of Scandiweigian metalheads. They’d evidently asked Bob to look at some rareified hair-metal artefact behind the counter, but their clipped, broken English was making the exchange somewhat painful for all parties concerned. Never known for his wellspring of patience, Bob was swiftly losing his easily-abandoned cool with these dudes, and even glanced at us for moral support at one point. My takeaway from that was that we may have been irritating shitheads to him, but we were HIS irritating shitheads. That’s as close to a warm’n’fuzzy moment about the man as I can recount.

Prior to working together at the New York Review of Records, estimable Brit rock-crit legend Kris Needs manned the cash-register at Bleecker Bob’s (indeed it was hirsute Kris who sold me my first vinyl copy of Acid Bath by Alien Sex Fiend). On Kris’ Facebook feed this morning, he posted this nice tribute to Bob…

Sad news; I worked at Bleecker Bob's for nearly three years (86-89). He could be a narcissistic oaf who treated his customers like shit and staff even worse, shouting, spitting when he spoke, getting me to run and get his McDonald's in icy blizzards, take his great dane Max out in all weathers with pooh sack ready, insulting to my friends and often treating me like a slave. But he also encouraged a weird fierce loyalty, looked after me when I was in hospital (catching pneumonia from those food runs!) and did much to bring great records to NYC (and export old LPs to the UK which I boxed in the basement). I didn't like it when old black guys came in to the store with their precious jazz collections, he gave them a dollar apiece like he was doing them a favour then marked them up to $40 a pop after they'd left and many other cruel traits but, underneath the scary broadsides lurked a heart of gold and he certainly didn't deserve to spend his last years crippled from a stroke. I fell victim to the city and had to leave his minimum wage employment, under something of a cloud I'm not proud of, but the man was an iron girder of the old NYC that has now vanished into the history books. RIP Bob.

Bleecker Bob Plotnik may have been a cantankerous, misanthropic curmudgeon, but my early days of music fandom would have been markedly dimmer without his shop.

Rest in peace, sir. 

Colloquial Semantics

Regarding this ridiculous story, if I'm not mistaken, the coinage of the term "to 86 someone" actually originates right here in NYC, stemming from the practice of forcibly removing someone from the premises of age-old speakeasy (since-turned-revoltingly bespoke eatery) Chumley's in the West Village, which I referenced most recently here. 

If you were selected to be thrown out of the bar, you were ushered out via its backdoor on 86 Bedford Street....hence "86'd."

It has nothing to do with murder (that's "Deep 6").

Laughing in London: The Killing Joke Wrap-Up

I cannot imagine how/why anyone would care, at this stage, but I was taken to task offline for not finishing the saga, so here is a rudimentary wrap-up.

Having decided shortly upon my glum return to New York after my Nashville work-event that inadvertantly caused me to miss that Killing Joke show that I was going to make up for my loss by flying to London for the finale of the band's 40th Anniversary “Laugh At Your Peril” tour, I booked my tickets and made my arrangements. Little did I know that on the day I was to fly to England, a sizable snowstorm was to engulf New York and ensnare traffic in and out of the city to a virtual standstill …. in friggin' November, no less. 

I left my office around 2:30 pm that afternoon, and the snow was already coming down in buckets. The Uber I’d called the night before to pick me up at 4:00 pm arrived at my front door perfectly on time, but there began the trouble. In th past, the trip from my building in Greenwich Village to Newark International Airport has taken more or less 35 to 40 minutes on a normal day. On this day, the journey took an agonizing THREE HOURS. I shit you not. It took an hour to crawl to the Holland Tunnel, another hour to inch our way through that tunnel, and then a third hour to limply stagger through the un-ploughed roads to the airport. I’d planned an earlier departure than normal, but it was still fairly nerve-wracking. I gave my poor Georgian driver (as in Eastern Europe, not “The Devil Went Down To…”) a hefty tip before he turned to make the arduous slog back to Manhattan.

During the course of that drive, I kept checking my Virgin Atlantic flight’s depature time, but it was still boldly asserting 9:35, however unrealistic that was seeming. I checked in aound 7pm and helped myself to a beer.

As predicted, though, the schedule began to change. My plane’s takeoff time started to gradually get pushed back further and further, ostensibly to allow the crew scheduled to work the flight to make it to the airport through the tempest as I had just done. Eventually, what had originally been scheduled as a 9:35 pm flight turned into a 1:30 am flight.

That part didn’t really bother me so long as the flight wasn’t cancelled at the last minute (as many other flights around me had been). The wait was long and painful to the extent that even drinking beer lost its allure. I was already angry. I didn’t need to be drunk and angry. But, eventually, they let me on board and …. off we went.

The rest of the story is pretty straightforward. I was met, upon my late arrival, by two estimable members of The Gathering, a sort-of online cabal (originally a humble mailing list) of fervent KJ fans. For the first night, I traveled to the little village of Long Hanborough where my friend Rob M. resides. From there, we took the train into neighboring Oxford. After a few rapturous pints at a pub supposedly once regularly frequented by sparring storytellers J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, we met up with more of our scowly flock and adjourned to the Oxford Academy -– sort of a Bowery Ballroom-sized venue -– for a blistering gig that found the disarmingly fit foursome in feral form. We went backstage for a small bit, but backstage visits are almost always awkward. We said some quick “hello”’s and whatnot, but were soon our of their face. I never want to be that hanger-on fanboy.

We went back to Long Hanborough and stayed up until just past 2:00 watching vintage reggae videos and drinking irresponsible quantities of cider.

For Saturday, we decamped to London for the main event, the tour-closer at the historic Roundhouse, a storied venue in Camden that was formerly a massive railway facility.

Prior to the gig, we had ourselves some dinner at a sort of nouvelle fish’n’chips joint before crossing the road for a few pints at the allegedly historic Dublin Castle, a somewhat grotty bar/music venue favored by fans (and band members) of local titans like The Vibrators and Madness.

We hit a few more pubs en route (notably the eardrum-shattering World’s End and Camden Underworld) before entering the Roundhouse, which is a formidable space to the say the least.

The show itself was the stuff of legend. A blinding set from start to finish, touching on most of their sprawling catalog, albeit nary a track from certain albums --- Fire Dances, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, Outside The Gate and Hosannas from the Basements of Hell -- you assuredly cannot please everyone.

All in all, it was glorious. 

Waxing Nostalgic

 

At first, I didn’t really know it was a thing that people did.

Back in 2017, you may remember, I posted a quick entry about an Instagram page dubbed Vinyl Wife, which showcased the doings of a young Finish lady with a penchant for displaying her collection of vinyl LPs. In short order, I soon gleaned that this was indeed a thing people did – pose for pictures with their favorite records. Given the school of thought – which I happen to share – that the tactile aspect of the physical manifestations of music is part of the whole experience (i.e. the appreciation of holding the complete work of art in your hand), I suppose it makes sense that people would take it to the logical extreme of posting pictures that further fetishize the physical media. It may seem silly, but it makes far more sense to me than posting pictures of your food, and people continue to do that.

In any case, I soon stumbled upon similarly inclined Instagram pages like Carol’s Vinyl and Mionyl that, ultimately, served the same end – albeit with varying extremes of presentation (Mio really goes all out with her posts). Gradually, these pages turned too multiple to count, invariably featuring an individual – usually female – playing to the camera while holding an album of arguable significance. The more prurient aspect of this practice is probably best observed on the Instagram page, Vinyl and Girl, which pretty much displays what it says on the label, so to speak. While I’d imagine said pictures are designed to titillate, I suppose it’s a testament to either my convictions or nerdy music snobbery that I immediately find someone significantly less attractive if they’re depicted lovingly caressing an album by post-1987 Aerosmith. But, y’know, to each their own.

Personally speaking, I am not really a vinyl fetishist of this variety at all. While I’ve amassed a strenuous amount of records in my day, I made the vinyl/compact-disc changeover back in the 90’s and never really looked back. That said, the thought of parting with any of my wax was and remains still largely anathema to me. As a result, my living space soon became compromised by unwieldly amounts of each medium … and let’s not forget all those pesky cassettes.

Then, it happened. I got married.

Once hitched, I opened up a mini-storage space deep in the West Village and stored a bunch of my stupid shit – including a crate or two of vinyl LPs -- there. Similarly, I took full advantage of my long-suffering mother’s good will and stored four or five beefy flight cases of vinyl (and boxes of cassettes) in the comparatively expansive basement of her home out on Long Island. In 2002, the wife and I moved out of my old apartment on East 9th Street and into a slightly larger space in more or less the same neighborhood (one better equipped to handle the arrival of children) and even more of my vinyl went into storage.

Times change and circumstances evolve. I closed down my West Village mini-storage space a few years back in favor of a cheaper, more convenient option in the basement of my building (one that we’ve since completely filled). Along with my CDs --- themselves becoming swiftly irrelevant artifacts of anachronism – our current apartment holds a smattering of my vinyl collection, with the rest of it remaining sequestered out in Long Island in my mom’s basement.

Periodically, I like to go downstairs and exhume it. Over this past long, holiday weekend, that’s exactly what I did — blighting my friends’ social media feeds with silly images of me brandishing cherished slabs of wax -- and a few select cassettes -- of eons past.

I am in no way competing with folks like Carol or Mio, but I now feel a new appreciation for what they do. Herewith some of the dubious evidence of last weekend….

Indulge me. 

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody!

 

Long Story Short ...

... I made it, this time.

I promise to finish the saga that started here, continued here and proceeded to here as soon as I can. Understand that I had to take off time to accomplish it all, and I'm furiously trying to make up for said time at the office now while also playing "beat the clock" before various holidays. 

But, suffice to say, .... it was awesome.

Broken Images

Hey all,...

Yes, I, too, have noticed a preponderance of broken images on many a post here of late. Not sure why that is, but rest assured I am aware of it, and investigating the problem with my blog service.

Suffice to say, I'm not any happier about it than you are.

Stand by.

Cheers,

-Alex