Flaming Pablum

Fuck Trump, Fuck Barr, Fuck The DOJ...

London Acquiescing

Some of you might remember a pair of posts from 2018 wherein I delved into the curious story of Dave Marin, a fellow traveler on the roads of rock ’n’ roll pedantry.

Dave’s singular quest was to rectify a long-held discrepancy between the memory of his first-hand experience witnessing a specific moment at a Clash show at the Palladium on East 14th Street in the comparatively carefree days of 1979 and the documentation of same on the back cover of The Clash’s celebrated third album, London Calling. That singular moment, of course, was the smashing of Paul Simonon’s star-crossed Precision bass guitar, a fleeting moment of rage prefigured by Pennie Smith’s fateful snapping of a photograph of the instant just prior. While that photograph went onto become inarguably one of the most iconic images in rock history, Dave maintained that the archivists in the Clash camp got the date of the show in question wrong on the back cover, and it had become his mission to amend that particular oversight ever since.

Last night, Dave shared some happy news…

Hi Alex. Just to put this to bed, today “The Clash” official Twitter account sent out the following: “20th + 21st Sept 1979 The Palladium NY Take The 5th Tour. Paul Simonon smashed his Fender P Bass on stage in frustration towards the end of the show. Pennie Smith captured the moment and it became London Calling album sleeve, which dated the image on 21st. In fact it was on 20th!” Take care. D

Today, after being on loan to the deeply dubious Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, the remaining pieces of the bass guitar in question are back with Paul Simonon. The Clash officially disbanded in 1986, in the wake of the arguably abortive Cut The Crap album. Lead singer/songwriter Joe Strummer passed away in 2002. The Palladium was razed in 1998, and a NYU dormitory was built in its footprint. Today, the exact spot where Paul took his bass to task is the produce aisle of a Trader Joe’s that I was actually in yesterday afternoon. 

And Dave Marin? Now he can fitfully sleep through the night.

Honor Her Last Wish

Paranoid at 50

Been seeing a lot of stories in online outlets that normally wouldn’t touch the subject with a ten-foot pole about the 50th anniversary of Paranoid, the sophomore LP by Black Sabbath. While the band’s status as the preeminent heavy metal band remains unchallenged — sure, Zeppelin could certainly compete in the heavy department, but lacked the focus and purity of their black-clad Brummie brothers — Black Sabbath never seemed to have been taken quite as seriously by the — for lack of a better term — respectable establishment. Having original lead singer Ozzy Osbourne cash-in his well-earned gravitas as a genre-defining pioneer by becoming reality-show fodder in the mid-90s certainly didn’t help. But longevity wins, I guess, and now high-brow periodicals are being forced to reconcile with paying homage to a band whose music they’d normally write off as artless, sonic piffle for teenage delinquents smoking dope behind the local 7-11.

Ozzy may lack Lou Reed’s untouchable cool, Iggy Pop’s leathery pliability, Lemmy’s irrefutable badassery and David Bowie’s divine penchant for chameleonesque reinvention, but make no mistake — despite whatever clownery he got into during his years with the Sabs and during his frenetic solo career, the man has more than earned his place in that same pantheon of iconoclasts. And, let’s remember, he was only one quarter of the original Black Sabbath — a unit whose respective components were all equally vital to its proceedings. From the dark lyrics and ponderous thunder of bassist Geezer Butler to the explosive riffs of innovative guitarist Tony Iommi and the weighty swing of Bill Ward’s drums, Black Fucking Sabbath was an ensemble to be reckoned with. Mess ye not.

I first bought Paranoid when I was in seventh grade, lured in by the endearingly hammy heaviosity of “Iron Man” and my classmate Chris H’s assertion that I “needed to listen to more evil bands,” he and I having both cut our teeth on KISS. While the plodding pound of the song that indoctrinated me definitely paid off, experiencing the LP in all its weighty fulsome gestalt was a genuine revelation, with one oddball exception — the cover art.

While I’ve always assumed the blurry figures on the sleeve of Paranoid were meant to visually symbolize the subject of the album’s sprawling opening salvo, that being “War Pigs,” the execution seemed a bit botched. And when you consider the still-chilling and genuinely iconic sleeve of their first album, how this cover slipped by the decision-makers at their record label remains a mystery. Wearing what looks like pink felt and brandishing weapons better suited to a grade-school production of “Camelot,” the figures on the cover lend an overall visual impact that skews more towards silly than sinister.

That one bit of goofiness notwithstanding, opening the gatefold was a different experience entirely — revealing the four strikingly hirsute members of Black Sabbath in an otherworldly, sun-bleached field, staring directly at the viewer with grimly unblinking expectation. They looked like they’d just finished digging a shallow grave and were now ready to push you — dear, unsuspecting listener — right into it.

Dropping the needle on side one, of course, laid waste to any remaining doubts. I could go on and on about the entirety of the record— from the proto-punk chug of the title track to the cosmically jazzy meandering of “Planet Caravan” to the lysergic stomp of “Fairies Wear Boots” and all points in between, but it became a canonical favorite from that point forward. Any purple prose I could spool out here simply pales in comparison with the experience of simply listening. 

You may no like it. You may not understand its appeal. You may not get it. That’s okay. There are probably Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison albums you can go concern yourself with, if that's your thing.

But with regards to Paranoid, just make damn sure you respect it.

Word on The Street

The Science of the Lamb

If I was a fraction as cool as I sometimes like to pretend I am, I could blithely rattle off a litany of pithy factoids about Crash Course in Science, a sort of primitive electronic trio from Philadelphia. But, I’m just not that cool, alas, and must cop to the fact that I only learned about them today.

Posted by one Weasel Walter, erstwhile member of the Flying Luttenbachers and current guitarist for Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus, on a Facebook group about No Wave, “Cardboard Lamb” by Crash Course in Science — below — dates back to the grainy wilds of 1981. The band were allegedly fixtures on the NYC club scene, and released an EP around the same era, along with making appearances on New Jersey's own "Uncle Floyd Show." I'm not sure what transpired between then and now, but they’ve gone onto release two full albums since 2010.

Not sure if the “ahead of their time” flourish is entirely applicable, but CCiS dd seem to prefigure a lot of more minimalist electronic pop of more recent years — Cold Cave kinda springs to mind, what little of them I know.

In any case, I was more struck by the footage in the video below. While I know as recently as yesterday I made a declaration that I feel slightly uncomfortable lapsing into anything overtly nostalgic during the turbulence of the COVID-19 era, but this clip does hearken back to decidedly simpler age. Study the visuals, and you’ll notice the big Con Ed plant at the eastern end of 14th Street and what looks like the Williamsburg Bridge as two of the primary locations.

What is it all about? Hell if I know.

No More Time For Looking Back

The last time I posted the picture up top — an artful shot of the interior of Rocks in Your Head, a former, beloved record shop on Prince Street in SoHo, purloined from the wilds of Flickr, if memory serves — was January 2012, and it accompanied yet another entry of mine that weepily lamented the passage of time. Over the course of the last fifteen years, this blog has been largely defined by posts like that — sepia-toned homages to the Manhattan of my youth, a veritable lost continent peppered with places like Rocks In Your Head that were otherwise extinguished by gentrification, spiraling rents, shifting cultural sensibilities, the sickly convenience of new technology or a potently unwieldy combination of all of the above. This blog has frequently acted as one long fist-shake at the tirelessly amorphous topography of this urban environment, where sentimentality is for the weak and significance is perilously relative.

I wish I could recall the specific luminary in question, but I remember reading an interview with a certain woman— it was someone along the lines of Deborah Harry, Tina Weymouth or even Lydia Lunch — and the question was posed to her, “When did Downtown die?” I’m leaning towards it being Debbie Harry, but her immediate response was September 11th. If I recall correctly, she didn’t mean to suggest that the Downtown Manhattan of 2001 just prior to that event was as thriving and multifaceted a bohemian wonderland as it had been in the 70’s and 80’s, but rather that the seismic upheaval brought on by the horrific rigors of that fateful day firmly bookended the end of an era. The fanciful bubble had been popped in the most jarring of ways by the outside world, and there was never going to be any return to those days.

Whomever she was, she wasn’t wrong. While that transformation was already underway, New York City changed dramatically in the wake of 9/11, “bouncing back” in a trajectory that leaned very heavily in favor of monied exclusivity. In the past nineteen years, the city has gone onto become way more prohibitively costly, largely at the expense of all semblance of its former character, to say nothing of vast swathes of its former residents. Apologists will cite Heraclitis’ mantra that change is the only constant, but even a passive observer would concede that the metamorphosis of New York City since 2001 has been sharp, and vertically steep.

As the new city emerged — one feverishly pockmarked by chains and big box retailers and increasingly less by longstanding mom’n’pops — blogs like mine and far more scrupulous, focussed and studious ones like Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing Downtown and EV Grieve (to name my favorite two) appeared to document the carnage. While my blog is inexorably entwined rather narrowly with my own personal experiences and recollections, those two — and others -- presented wider vistas as to the ensuing effects on whole neighborhoods. I may have been preoccupied with vanishing record stores, punk bars and live music venues, but they were scrutinizing the tolls taken on the city’s fragile cultural ecosystem writ large.

After a while, the more brazenly nostalgic aspects of these types of endeavors made them easier to diminish. Reverently sipping Gem Spa egg creams in our authentic CBGB t-shirts, we were just stubborn, aging die-hards pining for the fabled "bad old days" and failing to appreciate the amenities of the new iteration of New York City. Of course we don’t want the old site of Bleecker Bob’s to become a frozen yogurt emporium. Of course we don’t think 14th Street should become a new tech hub. Of course we are offended by the notion of a newly bespoke Chelsea Hotel. Of course the reimagining of Chumley’s as a chic, tony bistro pisses us off. Etc. Etc.

Then, as if someone hit the smart bomb button in a giant game of “Defender,” the pandemic arrived.

Age-old speakeasy bar? Fuck you, you’re closed. Newly minted nouvelle Indian bistro? Fuck you, you’re closed. Niche curio shop for left-of-center gift ideas? Fuck you, you’re closed. Neighborhood institution helmed by third generation of proud proprietors? Fuck you, you are closed.

Like September 11th before it, the historical impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has rendered such provincial concerns moot and mute in a manner no scale of gentrification could ever match. Sure, lots of places are still hanging on, but the rulebook has been torched and businesses of all stripes are frantically trying to innovate on the fly and improvise a tenuous way forward.

Here in the throes — again, notice I didn’t say wake? This isn’t over yet — of the COVID-19 era (or the Trumpandemic, as I was calling it), virtually every New Yorker is now a brazen nostalgist, albeit of a possibly shallower calibration. While I may continue to sigh wistfully while passing the former site of a comic-book shop from my distant childhood that is now a cell-phone emporium, your average mask-wearer on the street is now nostalgic for just seven months ago, when he or she could walk out of their pricey condo and get a friggin’ boba tea and a new vape pen without worrying about contracting a viably lethal respiratory infection. No one has time to look back. We must all collectively look forward and figure out a future.

As a result, my usual, old habit of floridly ruminating ad nauseam about the New York City of my particular yesteryear feels less relevant than ever — which is saying something. Because, honestly, who could really give a rolling rat fuck about a favorite lost dive-bar I used to get drunk in back in 1989 when approximately 150 bars and restaurants here have permanently closed since March 1, 2020?

But, you know what they say about old habits. They die hard.

Walking home from a quick visit to my temporarily dormant office yesterday afternoon, I passed by the former site of Rocks in Your Head on Prince street, the record shop pictured at the top of this post, which closed in 2006. In the wake of the departure of Rocks in Your Head, the basement-space in question played host to a real estate agency, a concern that set up a rabbit-warren of office cubicles where racks and racks of rarefied LPs used to be. Evidently, said agency also recently fell prey to the conditions of COVID-19, and the space is now entirely vacant. I could not help peering in and capturing the photo below from roughly the same vantage point as the photo above.

Throw your support behind you favorite aspects and local businesses of New York City old and new, and may we all get through this.

Desktop Dump: Back to The Office Edition

Popped back into my office, today, for the first time in six months. My desktop was chockablock with extraneous crap. Here are some visual items I'd obviously set to one side for a later use that never materialized. 

Downtown Music Gallery when it was on the Bowery...

An old interior shot of Rocks in Your Head in SoHo. This shop closed, after many years, and became a real estate agency. I walked by over the weekend, and that concern has since closed up shop. The space is now vacant. 

The iconic old rooftop of El Teddy's on West Broadway. This building was razed and a condo was built in its footprint. The space that had been El Teddy's is now a hardware store. No idea where the crown ended up. 

An old shot of the exterior of The Pyramid on Avenue A. Still there, last I checked. 

The brothers Ramone. 

The west side of Broadway around 8th Street. Taken from a film. 

The show I didn't go to. 

Nixed sticker concept. 

No idea. 

Lafayette Street a long, long time ago (1975) as captured by Rich Allen (not to be confused with one-armed Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen).

Lou Reed with vacuum cleaners. 

 

 

If You Mess With The Bull, ... You Get The Horns

Listen, I know I’m super guilty of being a too literal about deeply silly shit, but this meme keeps popping back into my Facebook feed, and it’s making me apoplectic.

The implication, I’m assuming, is that John Hughes’ iconic characters of suburban Chicago high school students can each be summed up by the rosters of bands they’ve each been assigned. Speaking as both a stupefyingly pedantic music geek and a former bona fide high school student from the very same era depicted in “The Breakfast Club,” …. I HAVE SOME ISSUES. They are as follows…

1. There is NO WAY ON EARTH John Bender, The Criminal — played by Judd Nelson — would have been a fan of Joy Division, much less Tubeway Army. Did the individual who created this meme ever see the movie? In one pivotal scene, the kids repair to Bender’s locker to fetch his “doobage” and the interior of same is decked out with invocations of The Doors and The Scorpions, suggesting Bender was a fairly devout adherent to classic rock and metal. Joy Division’s tortured ruminations of existential dread would just not have been on his menu. Moreover, Gary Numan disbanded Tubeway Army circa 1979, and really only made a solitary dent in the mass American consciousness with “Cars” that same year — which would have come out when Bender’s character was in eighth grade. I doubt he’d have cared about Numan’s chilly synthesizers, to say nothing of the likelihood of even being aware of his former band.

2. Assigning Alison the Basket Case — played by Ally Sheedy — a list of ersatz goth & indie bands is truly lazy. For a start, the Pixies didn’t even EXIST in 1985, so it’s impossible she’d have been a fan. It’s a herculean assumption that she’d dig The Cure, The Smiths and The Banshees simply because she wears black. Not sure WHERE the assertion that she’d have liked the fun-loving B-52s comes from, but DID ANYONE ACTUALLY SEE THE FILM? Alison, during their lunch hour, actually whips out a copy of the cover of Prince’s 1999 and stares longingly at it, meanwhile, Prince is nowhere on this list. Do details no longer matter?

3. There is precious little indication throughout the film of what music Brian The Brain — played by Anthony Michael Hall — might have listened to, apart from the pot-smoking dance sequence. To blithely assume he’d have been into conventional mainstream pop like Hall & Oates strikes me as a dismissive move. Conversely, to assume a suburban Chicago high schooler would have even been aware of seminal-albeit-comparatively-obscsure New York punk stalwarts Television seems like something of a heroic leap.

DON’T BUY THIS REVISIONISM!!!!

Poll Pandemica

I spotted this survey on social media, and decided to take a whack at it...

Do you regularly wear a mask when you’re out of the house?
Absolutely, although I didn’t *start* wearing a mask until the first week of April. Prior to that, the messaging was mixed, and things were still developing. First we were told not to bother, and that they wouldn’t make a difference. Then we were told to leave them for the medical professionals. That made sense. Then there was sort of a “smoke’em if ya got’em” directive, but by that point, masks were still hard to come by. By April, it seemed prudent. Been sporting one ever since.

How many times a day do you wash your hands now?
More times than can be quantified, but I still need to remind myself to do it.

What do you feel when you see someone out and about without a mask?
Incredulousness, followed by abject contempt.

Have you cheated at all? (be honest)
I have attended at least one small gathering indoors wherein people felt relaxed enough to go maskless, although social distancing was still largely observed.  This was months back, and no one contracted anything, as far as anyone knows. 

Do you know anyone who has been infected?
Yes, I know a few folks who suffered through it — and suffered is indeed the word, based on their testimonials. This was no cakewalk. 

Do you know anyone who has died as the result of COVID-19?
Not as yet, thank God.

Have you dined al-fresco at a restaurant as yet? How was it?
We have. Depends on where you go, really. Some eateries have really embraced the concept with aplomb and really make it work.

Have you gotten a haircut in the last six months?
I caved and had one at the end of July. I work a mask, as did the haircutter. I need another one already.

Have you been to a dentist in the last six months?
Nope, and I’m starting to suspect that I need to. Not sure how I feel about that.

What was the last big gathering in close quarters you attended?
I went to see a band at a fairly intimate venue in the East Village in February — the fittingly named End of Hope at Niagara’s.

New York City is planning to open up indoor restaurant dining (with conditions) by the end of the month. How do you feel about eating indoors at restaurants again?
The mandatory conditions don’t especially sound like they lend themselves to a lot of fun. I will wait and see.

If you’re a parent, in what capacity are your kids back in school, and how are you feeling about it?
They’re both on hybridized in-person/remote-learning plans. We are wary but cautiously optimistic. Of course, with one cough or sneeze, it could all collapse like a house of cards.

What activity are you missing the most?
I know I’m supposed to say “live music” or “bars” or “eating out with friends” or something like that, but honestly, just being able to walk around without wearing the mask seems awfully dreamy, at this point. That said, I do miss going to some of my favorite bars, restaurants and hearing live music. Can’t imagine when the latter will happen again.

Do you think a vaccine is imminent?
I hear a lot of reports from every perspective, but I am haunted by a question a friend of mine posited: “How’s that AIDS vaccine comin’?"

Do you believe in herd immunity? 
Not being a scientist, my beliefs one way or the other have no real veracity. I suppose I believe it could happen, but as I dimly understand it, it would require a vastly greater percentage of people to be infected (and, summarily, to die) before it could transpire. Doesn’t sound especially promising.

Do you trust Dr. Fauci?
More than the others.

Do you trust Dr. Birx?
She’s a Trump toadie, so no.

Do you trust Dr. Atlas?
Not at all.

Do you trust the media?
Having worked in the media for most of my professional career, I am obviously biased in its favor. But media is not a single entity. There are good bits and bad bits. I consume information from a reasonable selection of media, apart from outlets like Fox and Breitbart, which is all just laughably pro-Trump propaganda bullshit.

Do you trust Donald Trump?
BAHAHAHAHAhAHAHAHAHA. Surely, you jest. Fuck that guy and all who follow and support him. The blood is all on his hands. 

What are your expectations for the next few months?
Regrettably, more of same. There is no plan, thus there is no end in sight.