Flaming Pablum

Re-Exhuming ...If I Die, I Die by the Virgin Prunes

I noticed, quite recently, that this coming November will be the 40th anniversary of the release of the first “proper” album, ...If I Die, I Die, by the Virgin Prunes, a willfully difficult-to-categorize Irish band who emerged in tandem with the markedly-less-complicated U2, back in the very late `70s. I believe I first wrote about my adoration for this album back in the neonatal stages of this blog (which I shan't link to, being that it's a phase of this endeavor which I'm still embarrassed by), which I’m cleaning-up and repurposing here….

I didn't find out about the Virgin Prunes from my usual channels. It was the summer of 1986. I was working thanklessly as a dish-washer at a crappy "gourmet eatery" out in Westhampton on Long Island, scraping burnt croissant crusts off of baking sheets and basically being a surly bastard. Most of the kitchen was a bright, airy place...apart from the dish-washing area, where myself and a couple of other lackeys wallowed in damp, airless squalor, listening to `round-the-clock airings of Black Flag and Iron Maiden (after we'd disconnected the restaurant speaker which force-fed the rear of the kitchen tireless lashings of Sade, Swing Out Sister and the soundtrack to "Annie," as discussed here). It didn't pay especially well, but it was a job.

Every summer, legions of Irish kids would seemingly flock from Dublin to Long Island to snatch up waitressing and au pair jobs, and this particular establishment quickly became a hotbed of plucky lasses with adorable accents. One such young lady was a baking server named Fiona, who lived in a suburb of Dublin called Lucan. In relatively short order, Fiona and I became friendly (and I, in turn, soon developed a bit of a crush on her...to absolutely no effect or great avail whatsoever). In any case, she kept going on and on all the time about this gent back home named Guggi who she completely fancied (even though she allegedly already had a boyfriend who played in an excellently named band called Those Handsome Devils). Guggi was this chap who evidently sang in a band called the Virgin Prunes. Unimpressed, I sniffed that I'd never heard of them. And being that Fiona was otherwise obsessed with Lloyd Cole & the Commotions, I didn't imagine they were, as they say, "much cop."

So, I'm trolling around my usual network of downtown record stores during one of my weekly trips into the city (where my other job as an apprentice to a graphic designer kept me running all around town delivering mock-ups to ungrateful cosmetic companies) and I happened to spy an album cover emblazoned with the name Virgin Prunes. But....what's this? THEY LOOK LIKE SCARY, PUNKY, SCREWED-UP, CROSS-DRESSING PYROMANIACS!!! HOW COULD THIS BE ANYTHING BUT COMPLETELY BRILLIANT!!!! Clearly, no drab, mawkish Lloyd Cole-isms were going to be found here. Fiona's stock instantly rose a few more degrees, and I snatched up a copy of ...If I Die, I Die (great title, too!) on the spot!.

Despite not being able to get my head around what Fiona could possibly have seen in Guggi (himself of presumably indeterminate sexual preference), I was instantly intrigued by this mysterious band with the funny names, obscure language and pointed disdain for convention. Certainly a bit Bauhausesque, but Bauhaus never sounded this disheveled and possessed (except for maybe on "Stigmata Martyr"). As with many of what became my favorite albums of all time, this record literally has a sound that is completely all its own … or if there's another record out there like it, I sure as hell haven't heard it.

Meandering between creepy atmospherics and pounding caterwaul, ...If I Die, I Die is a primal, tribal, nightmarish YAWP of a record, and decidedly not right for every occasion (the album was met by a dependable chorus of "what the fuck is this shit?" by every college roommate I ever had). It's a lot to swallow in one sitting if you're not in the mood, but the single-y tracks (the positively jaunty "Baby Turns Blue" and the jagged "Pagan Love Song") alone are worth wading through the disquieting stuff. There are just some great moments here, from the ghoulish shanty of "Theme for Thought" (boasting the fiendish chorus of Die-d-Die-Die-Die-Die-d-d-d-Die as crooned by a drunken ensemble of evil Leprechauns) to the serpentine guitar stomp of "Caucasian Walk.”

Nothing ever ended up happening between myself and Fiona. She left at the end of the summer to go back to Lucan (and never wrote), but I still felt I got something great out of it. Subsequent `Prunes records didn't quite pack the punch of ...If I Die, I Die (though I later found a whole new appreciation for lead singer Gavin Friday's solo work).

Here in 2022, outside of the “Elder Goth” community (good lord, did I just use that term in earnest?), people here in the States mostly haven’t a clue who the Virgin Prunes were, apart from maybe invocations of their connections to U2. For the longest time, it’s almost as if the Virgin Prunes were this great little secret -– a rarified collective who made a handful of hard-to-find and equally hard-to-fathom records and then seemingly vanished. As mentioned on this post, when Gavin launched his solo career, I was immediately onboard, although by that time, he’d ditched the more theatrically confrontational aspects of his music in favor of a more refined, cabaret approach. There were a few posthumous compilations and import re-issues, here and there (I am not-at-all-ashamed to concede that I have bought If I Die, I Die… in various formats no fewer than four times, and still have all of them) and they even re-convened for an impromptu one off in 2009 (I missed it), but for all intents and purposes, all matters concerning the Virgin Prunes as a going concern were closed.

Or so I thought.

This past June, out of the proverbial (Baby Turns..) blue (sorry), my social media feeds were suddenly filled with sounds and images from the Virgin Prunes as part of a new campaign to advertise that unlikeliest of outcomes, that being that the entirety of the band’s brief-but-unwieldy five-album discography was suddenly available for streaming on a wide array of platforms. They launched a proper website, complete with news, video, a comparatively exhaustive bio of the band (so much for their once-beguilingly impenetrable anonymity) and the inevitable merch store (you can now, for example, procure yourself an official Virgin Prunes tote bag emblazoned with their frightwigged pates and thousand-yard stares). I was initially shocked to incredulity by the manufacturing of actual Virgin Prunes “action figures” until I realized they were just an unaffiliated artist’s novel one-off.

Having taken this unexpected step into the 21st Century (given that the original line-up had disbanded prior to the wider advent of the compact disc), will this dramatically change the fortunes of the Virgin Prunes? Will a new audience of attention-deficit-disordered teens now discover the harrowing charge of “Come to Daddy” or the disquieting list of “Heaven”? I kinda doubt it, but who knows? But if they start anywhere, they should start with ...If I Die, I Die.

Here, from that aforementioned website, is an compelling breakdown of how the album came together, as recounted by Gavin Friday himself.

Enjoy…

Godspeed, Teresa Taylor

Rumors have been circulating that Teresa Taylor, one very important half of the two-person percussive team that fueled the most celebrated, most notorious and most gonzo iteration of Texas’ inimitable Butthole Surfers, is in hospice and shortly to say goodbye. I don’t know the woman. I never met her, but the news struck me as terribly sad, as I have long counted myself as a fan of her band.

While the band accrued a reputation that, in many instances, is blithely reduced to cartoonishly profane shock-rock shtick, it must be emphatically underscored that no matter how bizarre their aesthetic, there was quite assuredly NO ONE like the Butthole Surfers, and Taylor’s contributions to same were a crucial ingredient. And, yes, indie cinephiles, she also had an iconic, fleetingly-star-making cameo in fellow Texan Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” (see poster image above).

I first went to see the Butthole Surfers — at the time, somewhat lazily lumped in with a slew of hardcore punk bands, although the `Surfers eschewed all semblance of that scene’s sonic uniformity — at a low-ceilinged, rec-room-like bar called Stache’s in Columbus, Ohio during my freshman year of college in 1986. The only problem was — they didn’t show up. Earlier in the day, we were told, the band had parted ways with their bass player. He’d either voluntarily exited — or was forcibly ejected — from their touring van while said vehicle was in motion. So we got our money back.

The Butthole Surfers returned a year later, though, in the much more expansive Newport Music Hall up the block from Stache’s, and promptly made amends for their earlier misfire.

You hear lots of talk about various bands being “scary” or “dangerous” or “volatile,” but with the possible exception of maybe the late GG Allin & the Murder Junkies, nobody really held a credible claim to those descriptors more than the Butthole Surfers. Assuming the stage in a thick, aromatic fog, the band arrived with a screen behind them, showing film loops of natural catastrophes, barnyard anomalies and some deeply disquieting footage of reconstructive genital surgery. Lead singer Gibby Hayes stalked the stage with a bullhorn and repeatedly smacked a lit cymbal doused with lighter fluid, sending splattery plumes of worryingly real flame towards the ceiling. One got the impression that this stage flourish had never been mentioned to the venue’s management. The sound was dense, impossibly loud and trippy in a manner that suggested all involved were experiencing a pronounced lysergic augmentation. Behind Gibby, guitarist Paul Leary, bassist Jeff Pinkus and a not-at-all-titilating topless dancer with devil horns and Fu Manchu beard named Kathleen were twin drummers King Coffey and Teresa Taylor, hammering away on their instruments with a synchronized precision that entirely belied their bug-eyed, bedraggled appearance. Beyond Gibby’s vocal theatrics and Paul Leary’s guitar squall, THIS was the core of the Butthole Surfers, a pounding, tribal battery that never stopped reminding you that this band was a living, breathing, moving, roiling organism. To witness the Butthole Surfers during this particular era was genuinely nothing short of seismically astonishing,…. fucking astonishing.

I’ve posted several entries about that show here on this blog. I went on to see the band several times after that, as well, and while never quite as jarringly indelible as that first experience, they absolutely never left an audience indifferent.

Bliss Blood from the Pain Teens posted the video below of the Butthole Surfers in action from around the same era as the show I detailed above, and it is perfectly indicative of the chaos of their live experience, and the force of supernature that is Teresa Taylor.

Godspeed, Teresa.

Re-Discovering the `Present

Contrary to the title of this post, let me assure you, dear reader, that NO -- this entry is not about refuting the sickly allure of rampant nostalgia that otherwise drives this blog ....er... would it be forward or backward? It's not about re-discovering the present, but rather the re-appraising and rekindling of my love for a British indie band called The Wedding Present. 

Comb back into the archives of this blog, and you'll see them mentioned several times, but not to much recently (the last time was probably this one). I first heard the Wedding Present in 1989, and their singular brand of no-nonsense, guitar-overdriving punky indie rock pretty much defined much of the ensuing decade for me (it was really between them and Cop Shoot Cop). In time, though, I kinda felt I'd heard all I needed from them, and stopped feverishly following their very prolific output by about 2005.

This is their new single below, and it kinda blew me right off the porch .... David Gedge discovers Nile Rodgers (with a bassline cribbed from "Change" by Killing Joke, itself swiped from "Me & Baby Brother" by War). Crank it.

Back to Coney Island High

I’ve written long, lengthy, heartstring-plucking entries about both The Upper Crust (most recently here) and St Marks Place (find that here) before, so please avail yourselves to those weepy epistles if you are feeling so inclined. Suffice to say, both are gone, here in 2022.

Earlier this week, I found myself back on St. Marks Place for a reason I can no longer remember. Not unlike certain other byways such as, say, Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, West 8th Street in Greenwich Village, 21st Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and/or the westerly regions of Spring Street in SoHo, St Marks Place is a street I have very strong associations with. Like whole nations of other people, for me, this gateway to the East Village used to be a veritable bazaar of cool, bohemian insouciance. Of course, that sounds like a fanciful pastry full-o’-crap today, but it genuinely was this super-cool destination, peppered with so many concerns that exuded its overall punky aesthetic. It was the epicenter, for a long while, of pretty much everything I was looking for from a comparatively underground pop culture that wanted nothing to do what the jocks and the preps and the beautiful kids cared about way north of 14th Street, however ridiculously clichéd that may now sound.

Here in 2022, once again, that St. Marks Place is long, long gone. Between the demolition on its northwesterly corner (still slated to host a sun-blotting corporate tower of some variety) and the proliferation of shoddily assembled and poorly maintained dining sheds, St. Marks Place is in both literal and figurative disrepair. Obviously, this problem isn’t relegated solely to St. Marks (take a stroll south on Thompson Street, some morning, and you’ll encounter a similar situation that affronts the senses), but St. Marks now seems bereft of any of its former character and relative luster. With the possible exception of concerns like Search & Destroy and maybe Funkytown, there’s nothing left for the punks among you, here. All the record and disc shops like Sounds, Mondo Kims, Venus, Free Being and Rockit Scientist are all long, long gone. Ventures that once defined the strip like DoJo and the Grassroots Tavern are similarly missing in action. St. Marks Comics moved to Industry City in Brooklyn, and Trash & Vaudeville moved deeper into the East Village. So much of what made St. Marks Place cool … or even inviting, for me … is gone. It’s a graveyard.

While waiting to hear back from a mercurial vendor, this morning, I was killing time on YouTube and stumbled upon the video below of the Upper Crust in 1998, gracing the stage of Coney Island High, a storied-albeit-comparatively-short-lived live-music venue that used to be smack dab in the middle St. Marks between Third and Second Avenues. Formerly the site that hosted the GREENDOORNYC parties (as mentioned here), the site was acquired by local punk hero Jesse Malin (more about him here and here). I was actually at this show, but Coney Island High was a frequent stop of mine, at the time. Other bands I saw on that diminutive stage include The Damned, The Dickies, Barkmarket, The Dandy Warhols, The Prissteens, DGeneration, The Dictators and Firewater, to name a small few. It was an amazing space that was closed roughly a year after this was recorded by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in his war on New York City nightlife … as if anyone needed another reason to hate that fuckin’ guy.

In any case, here’s a brief taste of what it was like…..enjoy.

"Watching My Name Go By"

Yep, it's another antiquated documentary about graffiti, this one a British production from 1976. I love the way the voice-over in the beginning pronounced SoHo. The theme music is also sort of strangely unsettling. 

Enjoy.

Exhuming "Mondo New York"

Prompted by an invocation of Tama Janowitz on the most recent episode of “Desperately Seeking the `80s,” I was back-n’-forthing with a friend about the once-celebrated scribe's endeavors beyond the written page, and cited cinematic opuses like the adaptation of her breakout novel, “Slaves of New York” (starring Bernadette Peters … which I briefly discussed without much charity here) and “Mondo New York,” only to check my facts and realize that Ms. Janowitz had fuck-all to do with the latter. Ah, the tendrils of senility are flowering, even now.

Certainly born of the same era and aesthetic as Ms. Janowitz, “Mondo New York” was actually the brain child of director Harvey Keith and writer David Silver. Released in 1988, it featured a series of vignettes starring era-appropriate downtown luminaries like Joey Arias, Joe Coleman, Karen Finley, Phoebe LeGere, Ann Magnuson, John Sex, Annie Sprinkle and Flaming Pablum-favorite, Lydia Lunch, all embroiled in a wide array of diverse scenarios. Sounds promising, right?

To be perfectly honest, I rented it a few years back (having not seen it upon its original release in the late `80s), and I have to say … perhaps it was eye-opening, at the time, but I frankly had a hard time sitting through it. In fact, I think I got irretrievably bored halfway through and abandoned ship. I have loads of time for anything Lydia Lunch is involved in, but she only really supplies a suitably smarmy prologue and then vanishes from proceedings .. unless, of course, she comes back towards the end, but I didn’t make it that far.

In discussing same, I went to try and find just Lydia’s aforementioned prologue, … but actually found the whole film on YouTube, so ….dear reader … take a look and decide for yourself.

Enjoy (if possible)… “Mondo New York” (or while it lasts on YouTube, at least). Because it is “age-restricted,” it is un-embeddable (boo), but find the whole film for your viewing pleasure here.

Bye Bye to the `Boogie

I was really saddened to learn — via NY1, no less — that my friend Elie from Bowery Boogie is discontinuing the long-running blog after 14 years. I first met Elie way back when we both members of the so-called “NYC blog mafia” alongside folks like EV Grieve, Jeremiah Moss, Hunter-Gatherer, Ephemeral New York and a few others. Elie and I both even took part in a NYU discussion panel back 2009, talking about our different approaches in covering our respective turfs.

Where my blog spiraled further into richly overwritten, myopic navel-gazing, Elie’s became a bona fide resource for neighborhood news, expanded its reach with other staffers and actually got in the habit of breaking stories before the “legitimate” media sources were even aware. I was and remain in awe of Elie’s resourcefulness and tenacity.

The internet (and the Lower East Side) will be much less interesting without his efforts. Here’s hoping he’s moving onto more interesting pastures.

Here’s Elie and me at Motor City (long, long gone) on Ludlow Street in 2011.

At War with The Fitness Freaks: The Battle for Bond Street

Regular readers — again, if they exist — might remember a short series of entries I posted here back in 2016 wherein I attempted to divine the exact location of a short lived basement-level live-music venue called Downtown circa 1989. I remembered it as a place on Bond Street in NoHo that my beloved Killing Joke had been slated to play (going so far as having their name cited on a notice board outside its entrance). The venture actually closed before that show could take place. Other folks remembered it as place they’d seen local bands like White Zombie, the Lunachicks and the Cycle Sluts from Hell along with bigger names like Celtic Frost, Clan of Xymox, Cronos from Venom and Gang Green.

Honestly, I don’t think I ever found out much more about the place beyond pinpointing its location as the spot I’d remembered from that aborted Killing Joke gig. It was mere steps to the east of Broadway at Bond Street. here I am in front of it circa 2016.

It seems in the years since its tenure as Downtown — however fleeting that was — the space at 1 Bond Street has undergone a series of transformations, its days hosting loud rock n’ roll now but a romantic, sepia-toned notion for silver-scalped rock dads like myself. These days, it caters to a very different demographic.

As lamented here, in recent years, pretty much the entirety of the surrounding so-called “NoHo” neighborhood has become a de-facto “fitness corridor,” peppered with places like boxing-gym Rumble, David Barton, Soul Cycle, Equinox, Barry’s Boot Camp and a wide host of other workout-centric endeavors. I don’t necessarily decry the concept of physical fitness, I just don’t quite understand the necessity of such a high-volume concentration of said businesses in one single neighborhood.

True to this trend, the space at 1 Bond Street that had, once upon a time, been the rock club Downtown is now an adjunct space of a venture called Crossfit Union Square (who are technically located at the ominous location of 666 Broadway). From that lower-staircase, the clientele of same now regularly meet by the corner of Bond and Broadway, … and wait for their signal.

And when they get that signal — maybe it’s a starter’s pistol or a pertly chirped whistle or a gruff bark from a drill sergeant with a meaty neck — they run. And they run with a gravely humorless sense of determination around the circumference of the block.

The sprint sweatily and shirtlessly with rippling musculature towards Lafayette Street, at which point they turn like harried stags in flight of a hunter’s shotgun to the south and bound with breathy bravado down that stately avenue to the corner of Bleecker Street, where they turn west to lope like charging stallions back towards Broadway. Upon reaching that main artery, they course-correct like hoary steeds of glory to race north with steely focus. At Bond Street, they turn with great, dewy aplomb and complete their lap, glowing with an almost viscous radiance.

All to which I say, … “HEY, WE HAVE PARKS FOR THAT!”

I’m not sure if my handful of readers are at all familiar with the streets in question, but suffice it to say that the byways of Bond, Lafayette, Bleecker and Broadway can be handily described as “busy." Around that single block, highly trafficked businesses like Blick Art Materials, Bond No. 9, Showfields Department Store, Los Tacos No. 1, LeVain Bakery, Aape New York, Le Pain Quoditen, Wendy’s and a City MD (to name a few) all steadily operate. As such, the surrounding sidewalks are regularly teeming with foot traffic. In front of Los Tacos and LeVain alone, aspiring patrons literally line-up in anticipation of their turns. Navigating these stretches of crowded pavement even at a casual stroll can be demanding, lest you collide with an impatient muffin-consumer or taco enthusiast. Now, inject into this equation regular herds of fast-moving, self-absorbed, endorphin-addled fitness freaks and you have a roiling, organic obstacle course ready to detonate at any second.

Once again, I’m not saying anyone should necessarily refrain from working out or seeking to actualize their idealized visions of their healthiest, sexiest selves, but there’s a time and place for that shit, and the already pointedly crowded byways of lower Manhattan assuredly ain’t it.

Take it to the parks, people.

Where Strode the Warriors?

Over on Facebook, my friend and fellow NYHC acolyte Lou posted a shot from a deleted scene from "The Warriors." Lou writes

A scene that never made it into the movie or as a deleted scene. The Warriors walking through The Savage Huns territory. It was filmed in an alley in Soho.

Here's that photo now....

Now, I like to think I'm fairly familiar with the topography of lower Manhattan, at this point, but I can't think of an alley in SoHo that matches this terrain. It's certainly not Cortlandt Alley off of Canal. 

I postulated that this might be St. John's Lane, an alley that extends between Laight Street and Beach Street at the mouth of Tribeca, just steps to the west of Sixth Avenue. There's been a lot of development since 1979, but here's that strip now...

\

What do we think? Weigh-in, Boppers. 

 

Loud Laundry Rides Again

According some sources I would charitably describe as “dubious,” today is evidently "Band T-shirt Day,” a “global fundraising initiative where artists come together for a single day to sell merch on their official sales channels and donate proceeds to charitable organizations of their choice.” I would say to this, here in 2022, given the paltry avenues of revenue the average band have access to, said proceeds should pretty much go right to the band, but I’m not knocking the philanthropic bent of this endeavor in the slightest. If you’re interested, click here for more information.

But, as the lamentable cliché that I am, I feel compelled to point out that if you’re a serious about your music fandom, fucking EVERY day is band t-shirt day. As I’ve mentioned before, when I launched this silly blog back when the earth was young, I mentioned that I had every intention of wearing music t-shirts “well into my forties.” Well, suffice to say, that august decade has already come and gone. I’m not worryingly into the midpoint of my fifties, and still sport a wide and colorful array of band t-shirts on the regular. Is this unseemly and simply “not done”? Ask me if I give a single fuck.

Of course, these days, I’m finding more and more of my old t-shirts regularly on the back of my teenaged son Oliver who, a as budding music head in his own right, has come to appreciate the images and iconography of certain artists as much as he enjoys the music. To me, seeing my boy sport them is kinda the next best thing to me wearing them — especially as they fit his wiry frame more flattering than they do upon my steadily enriching girth, but that’s another matter.

In any case, with all this silliness in mind, I figured it was time to exhume and revive Loud Laundry, the Tumblr page I started back in — good lord — 2015 which sought to document my ever-widening collection. It is by no means comprehensive — or important or notable in any meaningful way — but it’s fun, if that’s your thing. It’s certainly my thing.

Find that here.