Flaming Pablum

Word on The Street

Goodnight, Meat Loaf

In my 54 years, I have never owned a single album by Meat Loaf. But in the same way I described the ubiquity of the music of The Cars and Foreigner, there was an era wherein you didn’t need to possess a Meat Loaf record (or, let’s face it, that specific Meat Loaf record) to know every note off of it. For whatever reason, I never bought a copy of Bat Out of Hell, but could just as emphatically sing along to “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” with every other snot-nosed fifth grader in my class. It may have lacked the doomy crunch of heavy metal, the funky libidinousness of disco and/or the adrenalized bile of punk, but there was no arguing with those songs and that gigantic goddamn voice.

His career extended far beyond that single record, of course, recording 12 studio albums in all, but only a few with storied producer Jim Steinman, who passed away in 2021 (the same eccentric dude behind “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler and “This Corrosion” by my beloved Sisters of Mercy). Meat Loaf also enjoyed a prolific career as an actor. The man was no slouch.

To be honest, I don’t know if “kids today” have any clue who Meat Loaf is. I don’t believe his records have been adopted by a new generation in the same manner albums by, say, Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac have. I don’t know if you can purchase a copy of the LP at Urban Outfitters next to slabs of piffle by Lana Del Ray or Tyler, the Creator. To my ears, those songs off Bat Out of Hell seem inexorably rooted in the hazy late `70s. Drop the needle on any track on that record and watch the faces of the fiftysomethings react ... and invariably sing along with Ellen Foley’s emphatic declaration of ”STOP RIGHT THERE….. as Meat rounds third base and sprints for home.

May he rest in peace.

ADDENDUM: I did not mention it in this original post, which was more about the man's music and his impact, but after reading further details about Meat Loaf's passing, I find it PROFOUNDLY depressing and senseless that he's needlessly dead because he considered COVID protocols some form of fascism. To die that stupidly and to cause your loved ones that undue pain is pretty indefensible, to my mind.

Back to the Record Shops

Regular readers here might recall several posts I’ve devoted to long-shuttered record and disc shops all around Manhattan. I’ve gone well out of my way, on occasion, to track down any possible remaining visual vestiges of certain concerns. There are still some that seem to now only live on in my mind, with no tangible record of their existence to be found.

Imagine my glee, then, to have stumbled upon the Tumblr site, Indie Ephemera. Run by kindred soul Jennifer Matson, this page represents, in her own words, “the flotsam and jetsam of my life in indie pop/indie rock from the late 80s to the mid-90s, Boston/NYC slant. Emptying one from the shoebox occasionally.”

Sounds cool, right? Well you can check it out right here. Below were a few of the bits of arcane NYC minutia she curated that resonated with me. 

Suffice to say, all these places are long, long gone....

Legs, Dee Dee, Deputy Dawg & Me: SPINterning in `89

I’ve spun this yarn (pardon the pun) before, but in the summer, fall and early winter of 1989, I interned at SPIN Magazine, then on West 18th Street just off Fifth Avenue. For a broader telling of that tale, check out this post, but one notable aspect of that experience was being in the company of then “editor-at-large,” Legs McNeil. For those who may not know the name, Legs McNeil is a somewhat notorious character who was one of the founders of Punk Magazine (alongside John Holmstrom, who I discussed earlier this week). He was, technically, Punk Magazine’s “resident punk,” and, y’know, conducted himself accordingly, insouciantly establishing the tone, attitude and spirt of what would become “Punk Rock,” and championing then-unknown bands like The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, The Dictators, The Dead Boys, etc. I suppose it would be fair to brand Legs McNeil a tastemaker, but he’d probably sneer at you for it.

In the wake of the dissolution of the original run of Punk in 1979, I’m not entirely sure what Legs got up to — invariably nothing good -- but via the foresight of founding SPIN publisher, Bob Guccione Jr., he was plucked back out of obscurity in 1985 and put to work in the nascent auspices of SPIN, a then-genuinely cutting-edge periodical that offered a bona fide alternative — before that descriptor was appropriated — to jurassic contemporaries like Rolling Stone.

Given his origins, Legs leant both credibility and a palpably sharp edge to SPIN’s editorial efforts, even if frequently clashing (figuratively and literally) with the magazine’s top brass. It was not at all uncommon to see Legs stomp into the office and actually kick a desk over and/or hear him shout out a stream of hilariously profane invective at one hapless staffer or another. While incredibly cool, uproariously inappropriate and always very funny, Legs was also quite capable of being kind of … difficult. It just went with the territory, I guess.

One of my best friends at the magazine was my fellow intern Sam, and Sam and I pretty much idolized Legs. As representatives of the very bottom rung of the magazine’s hierarchy, it really didn’t bother us to watch Legs storm around the office, throwing tantrums and cursing people out. I mean, we were interns. We got no respect. Everyone hated us or, at the very least, went out of their way to ignore us. In my experience, though, that’s pretty much true everywhere. At SPIN, however, it seemed especially pronounced. We did shitty tasks no one would ever want to do, had to frequently fetch fucking lunch for editorial staffers (don’t ever do this to your interns) and didn’t get paid. Sam and I made up for the last part by liberally helping ourselves to stacks of disregarded promo albums, SPIN coffee mugs and piles upon piles of SPIN t-shirts and sweatshirts. As I type this, I’m wearing one of two SPIN sweatshirts I brazenly purloined. I’ve been wearing it for 32 years. It even still fits … kinda.

In any case, when not alphabetizing promo photos, putting stamps on mailers, manning the front desk phone when Claire the punky receptionist went to lunch (much less fun than you’d imagine, although it did afford me the opportunity to fleetingly chat with Ted Nugent, of all people), Sam and I would occasionally be assigned something actually interesting. While Legs was normally loathe to acknowledge us (again, … we were interns), he reeled in a big fish, one day, and needed some support.

Legs had somehow cajoled Dee Dee Ramone into giving him an exhaustive, tell-all interview. While the band’s primary songwriter, responsible for such classics as “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Teenage Lobotomy,” “53rd & Third,” “Pinhead,” “I Wanna Be Sedated" and countless others, Dee Dee had grown fatigued by the rigid, militaristic uniformity of The Ramones and unthinkably jumped ship. At this stage, I believe he was holed up in the Chelsea Hotel, plotting his next move — one that would manifest in a spectacularly misdirected reinvention as a rapper named Dee Dee King, although that was yet to come.

In any case, Legs landed this big scoop — a sprawling, ten-hour conversation with Dee Dee — and needed it to be transcribed. A laborious chore at the best of times, interview transcription can be a time-consuming, mind-numbing affair. While usually best tackled by the person writing the resultant interview (so they’d know which quotes to keep and which to dump), Legs didn’t want to bother with that, so grabbed Sam and I to handle the whole work. I mean, why not, right? What else are interns good for?

Given Sam’s rich, Southern drawl (hailing, as he did, from Boone, North Carolina), Sam had already made an impression on Legs, who — shortly after hearing Sam speak for the first time— re-christened him “Deputy Dawg.” Sam also cut a distinctive figure with his penchant for loud patterned shirts. As far as Legs was concerned, I was just yet another ancillary, insufferable college-boy intern. I mean, I can’t really blame him for that. I looked like this, at the time.

But for this onerous function of transcribing Dee Dee Ramone, I’d suffice. We were bestowed handfuls of cassettes and yellow, legal note pads covered with Legs’ jagged approximation of shorthand, and told to get to work.

As insalubrious as that sounds, both Sam and I considered this a plumb assignment. Both of us being lifelong Ramones fans didn’t hurt, and we dove headlong into the job, giddily abandoning our otherwise corrosively banal daily tasks to wade into what we considered “real music journalism!"

But as invested as we were in the project, it was genuinely hard work. Between Legs’ indecipherable notes and Dee Dee’s practically Joycean tangents (nobody speaks in clear, fluid, perfectly crafted paragraphs, least of all the lyricist of the Ramones), making any semblance of sense of the narrative was no small feat. For several days, Sam and I came in early, skipped lunch breaks and stayed long after our allotted shifts to help bring Legs’ interview to fruition. I remember one editor being taken aback by our dedication. “What are you guys still doing here?” she asked, one early November evening as Sam and I were still beavering away at the Dee Dee saga. We were committed to getting it done.

Towards the end of the task, Thanksgiving was looming. Sam and I were putting the final touches on the full transcription (which, in hindsight, the magazine could probably have farmed out to a professional agency to take care of in a fraction of the time, but whatever), and committed to finishing before the break. We hadn’t really interacted with Legs in days. We heard him around the office (he was hard to miss), but it was almost like he was deliberately avoiding us, which seemed entirely likely. Towards the end of the day, he came trucking by the intern/copyeditor area and made a cameo on his way out the door (I took the picture of him above at that moment). He seemed in a not-atypical foul mood. As he passed by us, we eagerly told him we’d finished the transcription and to have a happy Thanksgiving. As he turned away from us and walked down the corridor, we heard him grumble a “yeah, yeah, whatever” on his way to the elevator.

Sam and I looked at each other with a sort of “we tried” shrug. A beat later, Legs re-appeared with the sort of wobbly smile Charlie Brown sports at the end of each holiday special. “Hey, guys,” he finally said, “Happy Thanksgiving to you guys, too! GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!”

Some time after that, Sam left SPIN to go back to his college in North Carolina. I left at the end of December after the managing editor who alluded to hiring me full-time got fired. Legs quit SPIN for one reason or another, possibly even before I did. Here in 2022, Sam, like myself, is married and has teenagers of his own. He lives in Portland now and we are still great friends.

I want to say I remember at least part of Legs’ interview with Dee Dee Ramone appearing in an ensuing issue of SPIN, but can’t find any record of it now.

In later years, I ran into Legs in the East Village and accosted him. He kindly said he remembered me, but that struck me, then as now, as heroically unlikely. His cantankerous edges had clearly softened a bit, and he was happy to chat. In 1996, “Please Kill Me,” his authoritative tome with Gillian McCain about the rise and fall of Punk Rock, was released and practically became a standard by which all new oral histories are executed, exalting Legs to a new level of respectability he’d probably never experienced. Personally speaking, hyperbole aside, “Please Kill Me” is unquestionably my favorite book of all time. He also went onto publish acclaimed books about the pornography industry, Joey Ramone, teenage diarist Mary Rose and, last I heard, was working on an oral history about the Manson Family.

Along the way, he helped launch the similarly inclined Please Kill Me website, which featured some great posts over the years (including an eye-opening interview with John Oates, of all people). For whatever reason, however, in arguably typical fashion, Legs must have had a falling-out with his partners at the website and has since abandoned the venture, branching out on his own with a new website called — wait for it — Legsville. Three decades after first meeting and working alongside (kinda) Legs, I’m still a big fan of his work, so I went over to Legsville recently to check it out.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find that interview with Dee Dee Ramone there at long last. Check it out here ...tell'em Flaming Pablum & "Deputy Dawg" sent ya. 

John Holmstrom Speaks

I’ve written about Punk co-founder and illustrator John Holmstrom here a few times, but he recently appeared on my favorite podcast, Killed By Desk (which I’ve also discussed several times here). In any case, it’s a great discussion — John delves into his origins in illustration and publishing, his travails with mainstream magazines and, of course, his days putting out Punk Magazine with Legs McNeil, including a tale about “lost issue #9” that evidently featured and in-depth interview with Kiss. One can’t help wondering how the publishing of that issue might have affected Kiss’ credibility (in possibly a good way). We’ll never know, because — to hear John tell in — dark forces intervened.

It’s great. Check it out.

Ronnie Goes to Mott Street

We lost the great Ronnie Spector, yesterday. I actually got to see her perform as a surprise guest at one of Joey Ramone’s birthday bashes at Coney Island High back in 1997. I was there to see The Dickies and the Pristeens, but who shows up but a bona fide rock n’ roll legend. The chemistry between her and Joey was palpable.

In any case, someone posted the below clip on Facebook today, and it immediately struck a chord. Here are Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes pursuing some hapless Italian fop on Mott Street in SoHo in 1964. Crazily enough, the bakery featured towards the end of the video is actually still there here in 2022, although the rest of the street looks entirely different.

Rest in peace, Ronnie.

Meet the (Trouser) Press

It is 1982, and I am irretrievably in the throes of my fanatical allegiance to DEVO, underscored by the release of their fourth major label LP, the slavishly underrated New Traditionalists. It being prior to the age of the internet, press invocations about the band are, at best, few and far between. But upon a trip to (long-vanished) Revolution Records on Lexington Avenue and East 63rd Street, I spy a glossy magazine with my boys on the friggin’ COVER and buy it on the spot. The periodical is curiously called Trouser Press, and it is devoted exclusively to exactly the variant of bold, new music DEVO is at the forefront of. I become an immediate zealot for the mag in question.

Beyond the cover story (a conversation between DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerry Casale with subversive iconoclast/writer William S. Burroughs), this issue of Trouser Press (named, I would later learn, after a track by the Bonzo Dog Band) was chock full of meaty information on a host of new and different bands, all written with a smart, cheeky insouciance rarely found in mainstream publications. The guy behind this whole trailblazing endeavor was a music journalist named Ira Robbins.

Shortly after this, I am schlepping around a posh Fifth Avenue bookstore and spot a colorfully-covered tome titled “The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records,” edited by Ira Robbins. Again, I buy it on the spot, which was exactly the right goddamn thing to do, it being a rarefied trove of so much great information. The book goes on to be reprinted with no fewer than five great editions. I still have all of them. I consider them priceless.

I am a goddamn die-hard Ira Robbins fan and have been since picking up that first issue of Trouser Press. I opined on a post about businesses Time Out Magazine deemed worthy of bringing back, and fucking Ira Goddamn Robbins weighed in on the thread with a post that speaks to the core of this here stupid blog of mine.

Enjoy Ira Robbins’’ Rock and Roll Ghosts.

COVID Comes Calling

Hey all. Apologies for the relative slowdown, but … as might have been inevitable, depending on which news source you give your patronage to … the Flaming Pablum household has been touched, this week, by the sickly tendrils of the coronavirus.

Fret not, we’re all fine, but safety protocols have dictated some emergency measures involving half the family staying put and the other half temporarily sequestering elsewhere. The afflicted party had previously been vaccinated and boosted. As such, they are a bit fatigued and mildly congested, but should be perfectly fine. The other three are testing regularly and remaining vigilant. It’s more of a logistical hassle than anything else.

It’s real. You should probably expect it.

I’ll be back when life calms down, a bit.

A Handy Reminder

As we approach the one-year anniversary of January 6, here's a helpful synopsis of the facts.

Back Into Exile: Exhuming The Siberia Bar

Watch any documentary about a since-closed music venue, nightclub or bar, and you’re bound to hear some of the same stupid shit. Whether conscious of it or not, at least one of the participants will make one ridiculously clichéd remark or another about how the establishment in question was this unique confluence of poetically unlikely factors that could not, should not and never will exist again. Invariably, there will also be florid testimonials about the fabled proprietor of the place which portray that individual like some sort of star-crossed visionary from another dimension. While such declarations might even have varying degrees of truth to them, these soundbites have become so deeply and dependably rote as storytelling devices that these movies all practically blend together.

Given my blog’s brazen predilections for New York City nostalgia, I am, of course, no stranger to these sorts of films. “Life After Dark: The Story of Siberia Bar,” a 2008 documentary directed by one Jack Bryan, is no exception to the rules lamented above. That all said, you should still check it out.

I’ve written about both Manhattan iterations of the Siberia Bar here a few times, notably here and here. I honestly cannot remember who first told me about the place, but being that I worked at TIME Magazine, just down the block from the subway stop that played host to the first iteration of the bar, once I learned about it, I had to go check it out. This would have been around 1997, I’m guessing, and I swiftly became one of a cloying legion of irritating, drunk-journalist types prone to hanging out within its endearingly decrepit confines. I’m the inebriated jackass in the center of the photo above, taken at Siberia around `98, given the then-recently-procured Damned t-shirt I’m sporting (they’d played a Coney Island High — also gone, but no documentary yet — a few days prior). If you were a self-styled, world-weary, laboriously smug scribe of one stripe or another, you were bound to be found drinking irresponsibly there sooner or later.

Around 2000, the Siberia Bar decamped from its celebrated closet-sized perch in the midtown subway system and moved into Hell’s Kitchen. While the new location lacked its predecessor's seedy charm and intriguing mystique, the much roomier second version of the Siberia Bar retained the spirit of the old place … complete with those infamous stipulations about swearing and gratuitous hittin' on women.

Around the same time, however, I’d gotten married. As such, my nights darkening the already-very-dark doors of Siberia were somewhat sharply curtailed. I’d go every now and again, but hardly with any frequency. And then, sadly, in 2007, it closed for good.

I never knew of the documentary below’s existence until earlier this week. A reader named CB hipped me to it. Granted, I’m about 14 years late to the table, but for your viewing pleasure and edification, here it is….

Life After Dark: The Story of Siberia Bar from Jack Bryan on Vimeo.