Flaming Pablum

Rooftop Recap: Devo Returns to NYC

Just a quick recap of last night’s DEVO shot at the Rooftop at Pier 17.

This was my first time at this venue and, for the most part, I was pretty impressed. Essentially situated on top of what once was the “South Street Seaport” mall (that sort of red, barn-like building, back in the day), the views from the rooftop of Pier 17 are indeed pretty iconic; the looming spires of Manhattan’s financial district behind you, the promenade of Brooklyn Heights just over the water, and the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges behind the stage, etc.  It was a warm, beautiful night, so in that respect, it was perfectly idyllic. That all said, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a couple of grievances (who? ME??). So, let’s take care of those now, shall we?

Not unlike the restrictions mandated back at that McCarren Pool show I re-invoked yesterday, the Rooftop warns all and sundry well in advance that the event will end and remain very much over at 10pm sharp. Now, as a 54-year-old dad coming off a long, busy day at the office, that news didn’t really upset me, knowing that I’d still be back at home at a decent hour. But, honestly, it did serve to irk me a little bit when the opening act -- actor Creed Bratton from “The Office” …er….fame -- went a little long. I should preface this by saying I’ve never been a big fan of “The Office” to begin with, but Bratton’s acoustic singer/songwriter/raconteur schtick was really ill-considered for this event. Moreover, the man’s meandering set dribbled on past 8:00 pm. Devo didn’t hit the stage until 8:30 pm, so we got an hour and a half set, but one can’t help feeling that Bratton ate up extra time and did absolutely nothing to benefit proceedings beyond pissing off the Devo faithful.

Beyond that, I thought the merch stand was a little spartan, considering that, under usual circumstances, Devo practically rivals KISS in the needlessy gratuitous merchandising deparment. There was one (1) variety of t-shirt, one (1) variety of sweatshirt, some Devo socks, some stickers and the inevitable energy domes. That’s it.

Most upsettingly, beers at this venue -- and we’re only talking about tallboys of friggin’ Heineken or Dos Equis -- cost $17.00 a can. You read that right: SEVENTEEN dollars. Sip it slowly, spuds.

But all such bellyaching aside, the show was pretty great. This was my son Oliver’s first show, so that was kind of special, especially since Devo had been my first show, back in 1981 (as I’m keen to laboriously point out). The set wasn’t exactly rife with surprises -- most of the favorites were duly dusted off and given robust run-throughs (although I was a little disappointed not to hear “Praying Hands” and “Wiggly World,” but you can only cover so much ground in an hour and a half). For Mark Mothersbaugh’s 72 years (it was his birthday, yesterday), he’s in fine, fighting fettle (especially considering a severe bout of COVID, last year). This late in the day, Devo shows lack a bit of the energized chaos that marked their heyday, but hey -- these guys are kind of in their (late) autumn years. I hate to suggest it, but I can easily imagine the band curtailing their touring schedule a bit, following these dates.

Below are some of my pics, ….which brings me to another rant (sorry).

Look, I realize it’s 2022, and we’re all slavishly devoted (pardon the pun) to our multifaceted smart phones. Hell, I can barely walk one city block without whippin’ it out, taking a picture, filtering the shit out of it and posting it on Instagram. And yes, I took a handful of shots last night. But there was a guy right in front of me -- not unlike the girls I lamented at that Spoon show on this ancient post -- who somehow COULD NOT STOP HIMSELF from constantly taking out his iPhone to shoot video of portions of songs (and when he wasn’t doing that, he insisted on doing a wavy-arm/grindy-hip dance as if at a fuckin' Mariah Carey concert). But song after song, he evidently felt compelled to document (and edit, and zoom, etc.). I finally fucking snapped and tapped him on the shoulder, imploring him to “PUT THE FUCKING PHONE DOWN AND JUST ENJOY THE GODDAMN SHOW!” Amazingly, he complied (that never happens) and there was no confrontation or fallout (that usually happens). But, seriously – I know we all CAN capture live video at any time, but the resultant footage of those endeavors are never really that good, are they? They’re shaky and the sound is shit and you can hear people talking, etc. etc. Don’t believe me? Click over to YouTube -- there are clips from last night’s show up already.

Whatever happened to just savoring the moment?

The Mariah Carey/videographer can be seen below with his arms up, in a rare moment of not trying to video every nanosecond of the show...

Back to McCarren Pool: Devo in 2008

Tonight will be either the eighth or ninth time I’ve seen my beloved Devo perform, having previously caught them at shows at Radio City Music Hall, the Palladium, the Newport Music Hall in Columbus, the Central Park Summerstage, the Hammerstein Ballroom, the McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, Irving Plaza and at least one or two others I’m forgetting. I had tix to see them return to Radio City Music Hall in 2021, but that got nixed. As Devo was my first-ever concert in 1981, I’m bringing Oliver, and they will be HIS first-ever concert. We are very much looking forward to it.

Someone recently uploaded the whole show at McCarren Pool from 2008, which was an amazing gig indeed. I ranted about it in real time here. This video omits the very end, however, when Devo tried to come out for an encore (with Booji Boy) and some McCarren Pool goon literally snatched the mic out of Mark’s hand. So much for Brooklyn being laid back.

Here was Jerry’s take on the incident (from this oral history):

Casale: At the end of every Devo show, the band comes out with Mark wearing the Booji Boy mask and we do “Beautiful World.” The sound always comes down and Booji Boy does a faux-Springsteen satire telling long drawn-out stories, but not at McCarren. The pool had a ridiculously early curfew of 10 p.m., but we didn’t think it was a hard and fast rule. Before we started, the mics and the amplification went dead thanks to the long arm of the law. I’m screaming at the sound guys on the side of the stage, the audience is booing and hissing, it’s getting ugly. Two security guards walk out on the stage and tell Booji Boy he’s got to go. In his high-pitched voice he’s saying, “I just want to talk to them,” and the guards grab him by the arms and walk him off the stage. We thought, “We’re the headliners, they have to let us finish our set.” We couldn’t believe it. All those radiation suits and energy domes became sad clown outfits.

A then-derelict giant swimming pool. I remember dutifully rockin’ out at this show in a pair of battered ol’ Chuck Taylors. After two hours of boucin’ up and down on the pool’s unrelenting, cracked concrete floor, I could barely walk.

A few years later, McCarren Pool stopped hosting live music and was converted back into a public pool in 2012, something of a death knell for that era of Williamsburg's character. 

Six years after this performance, original Devo member Bob "Bob 2" Casale passed away, the second original member to die after drummer Alan "Human Metronome" Myers in 2013. Today, the surviving members -- Mark Mothersbaugh, Jerry Casale and Bob "Bob 1" Mothersbaugh -- are flanked by longtime drummer Josh Freese -- who has played with everyone from A Perfect Circle and Guns N' Roses through Weezer, The Vandals and Nine Inch Nails -- and guitarist Josh Hager, formerly of The Rentals and ShadowParty.  

Crank it.

We're Still All Devo

I’m usually a big WNYC fan, but I have to say that the interviewer here, David Furst sitting in for Alison Stewart, kinda drops the ball in this sit-down with Mark and Jerry (above) from Devo on the eve of their long-awaited return to New York City tomorrow night at the Rooftop at Pier 17. One doesn’t get the impression that the interview did more than a cursory perusing over Devo’s full story. Mark sounds bored and Jerry sounds increasingly agitated with the direction of the conversation. Kind of a missed opportunity, really.

I’m, of course, going tomorrow night, and I’ll be accompanied by my son. This will not only be his first Devo show, but his first concert ever, which is fitting, as Devo was my first concert back in 1981.

I’ll let ya know how it goes.

Back Again to Wendy's Wall

This is not a consequential one, but what the Hell?

Longtime readers – again, if they exist – might remember a few posts last year wherein a serendipitously unearthed a photograph of something I’d long been searching for, that being a depiction and exact location of a graffiti mural of The Plasmatics that I’d seen back in the early `80s from behind the window of a school bus traveling south in Spanish Harlem.

As first invoked here, then brought to fruition here. the wall in question ended up being the eastern-facing façade of a plot of real estate on East 106th & Park Avenue dubbed “The Graffiti Hall of Fame.” After some diligent Googling, I’d managed to pretty much divine the latitude and longitude of the spot and even found a representation of the (presumably) long-one bit of artwork.

Shortly after that, as documented on this follow-up post, I picked up a fetching coffee-table book about the Graffiti Hall of Fame and came across a better photograph of the wall and artwork in question. I reached out to the photographer in question – that being one Martha Cooper – and inquired about possibly purchasing a print of the photograph. Alas, the figure her handler quoted for same was a bit steep, so I didn’t pursue it. Oh well.

In any case, in the wake of that, I did indeed go up to re-check out the spot. As expected, the rendering of the Plasmatics logo (alongside a cartoony depiction of Wendy O. Williams brandishing a signature chainsaw next to Richie Stotts’ signature Flying V guitar, bisected and spurting blood) had long-since been painted over. I snapped some pics, but never got around to posting them here.

Over this past weekend, however, my son, Oliver, and I went back up to that neck of the woods, specifically for the purposes of checking out the Museum of the City of New York’s excellent “New York, New Music” exhibit (which is still there through September, incidentally). On the way, we got off the 6 train at 96th and Lex and walked up to Park Avenue and down the hill of that very tributary up to East 106th.

Here’s that same wall here in 2022. That's me in front, looking like I just spotted something unspeakable happening just off-camera. 

And this, once again, was the Plasmatics…

Back to The Bunker

I’ve evidently gotten to the age wherein I’m forgetting about stuff I’ve already written about here. I got about one third into a strenuously long-winded post about carving things in wet cement in Manhattan that was eventually going to meander around, after a few tenuous anecdotes, to the main point of the post, that being the cryptic concrete carving outside of 93 Avenue B, the former “bunker” of Michael Gira and Jarboe and SWANS headquarters (pictured above, courtesy of the Living Jarboe), only to remember that I’d already devoted a big ol’ post to it in 2013. Whoops.

In any event, that little strip of East Village has been on my mind, in the last few weeks, for another reason, that being the somewhat half-baked series, “Russian Doll” on Netflix. I enjoyed Season One as sort of a cloying hipster version of “Groundhog Day,” but I’m really struggling with Season Two. In any case, a lot of the action happens in and around Tompkins Square Park and its surrounding environs.  I took a stroll over there this morning, now a destination for mimosa-swigging brunches, to see if the SWANS tag was still etched into the concrete. 

Once again, this is the spiraling vortex motif that adorned their releases circa 1987’s Children of God, which found the band slowly evolving their sound out of slave-ship stern-und-drang and into more accessibly melodic terrain, largely via the addition of Jarboe, whose soaring vocals and introspective songwriting leant the band a more versatile palette.

The album in question, however, was sort of mired by the unwitting albatross of an ill-considered (to my mind) Joy Division cover (“Love Will Tear Us Apart”) which really did no one any favors apart from possibly the coffers of Ian Curtis’ estate. While it also featured SWANS favorites like “New Mind” (which prompted the band’s first ever “proper” music video, finding Gira lip-synching into a flashlight, drooling and brandishing an axe) and the strikingly delicate “In My Garden” (a full-on Jarboe contribution), my favorite moment of the album has always been the title track. Though still anchored by SWANS’ signature, pummeling rhythm section, the studio version features a haunting performance by Jarboe, harmonizing with herself a recurring, ominous mantra about the hollow promises of religious dogma.

It’s the live version, however, from 1988’s Feel Good Now that really defines it, for me. While his voice is absent from the comparatively ethereal studio version, Gira’s terrifying vocals duet with Jarboe’s in the live setting, providing the tyrannical counterpoint of a vengeful Pentecostal preacher. To my ears, this track is the perfect balance of the band’s brutal beginnings and its embrace of a broader aesthetic.

Today, SWANS are recording a new album with yet another new line-up. While she contributed to their 2012 album, The Seer, Jarboe is no longer a member of SWANS. The space that had been the SWANS Bunker is still a hookah bar/restaurant called The Horus Cafe, and the surrounding neighborhood is no longer quite as fearsomely dicey as it had been.

The carving in the cement in front of their old front door, however? That’s still there.

That Was Spinal Tap

If I recall correctly, I remember first seeing “This is Spinal Tap” with my mother shortly after its 1984 release at a lavish movie theatre on West 57th, just down the road a piece from Carnegie Hall. As an avowed heavy metal acolyte, then as now, I was particularly impressed that Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean had gone the extra mile in their satire by actually writing, recording and performing all original music for the film and its accompanying soundtrack album (which, I believe, I went out and bought the same day). They cut no corners.

Clumsily marketed as some sort of slapstick endeavor (the original poster actually featured a guitar twisted into a pretzel mimicking the poster for Zucker-Abrams-Zucker’s “Airplane”), “This is Spinal Tap” was a thousand times more nuanced and clever than just a string of cheap gags. Written with a genuine reverence for the music it was parodying, the film hit a little too close to home for several musicians (I believe Gene Simmons says he can’t watch it to this day). It was also a watershed moment not only for Christopher Guest (who’d go onto write and release similarly studied parodies like “Best in Show” and “Waiting for Guffman”) but in popular culture writ large — whether tongue-in-cheek or not, it birthed the concept of (and officially coined the term)… “rockumentary.”

I remember unapologetically putting tracks from the `Tap album — notably “Hell Hole,” “Big Bottom” (an all-bass composition that predated my beloved Cop Shoot Cop by five or so years), “Tonight We’re Gonna Rock You Tonight,” “Stonehenge" and “Sex Farm,” to name my favorites — on several mix tapes, sandwiched between songs by bona fide metal bands singing no-less-ridiculous songs like “Looks That Kill,” “Number of the Beast, “All Men Play on Ten,” “Balls to the Wall" and “Animal (Fuck Like a Beast).” I was entirely onboard team Spinal Tap, and even snapped up their Christmas single, “Christmas with The Devil.”

Thirty-eight (!!!) years later, the film, for the most part, still holds up, its iconic lines like “Hello, Cleveland,” “Mime is money,” “These go to Eleven” and “Have a Good Time, All the Time!” having been fully baked into the pop cultural vernacular. Comedy, culture and music have all changed so much in the ensuing decades that it can’t help, in parts, seeming like a dated period piece, but I don’t believe its creators ever expected it to have the longevity it attained.

This all said … while I am a “Spinal Tap” fan for life, … it very assuredly does NOT need a sequel.

Buried Beneath the Bollocks

I feel like there’s more and more Sex Pistols content in my social media feeds, these days. Today makes sense, as it would have been Sid Vicious’ unthinkable 65th birthday, but beyond that, the band has been catapulted back into the headlines over (yet another) bitter feud, that being the one over an entirely needless biopic on the FX channel. Despite being directed by Danny Boyle (he of “Trainspotting” fame) and allegedly based on “Lonely Boy” the memoir of Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones, “Pistol” is pretty much already dead on arrival due to a number of factors. First and foremost, legendary Pistols frontman John “Rotten” Lydon, patently refused to participate in/abet/endorse the film, and has since gotten venomously litigious about it, to which I say, fair enough. I may still have pointed misgivings about the man’s confusing politics (as addressed here, here and here), but he has my full support on this matter.

Secondly, I think there’s also a bit of fatigue about this particular period of popular culture, and I don’t think the masses otherwise preoccupied with Kanye West, Pete Davidson and BTS really harbor any real fascination for the heyday of British Punk. What once seemed barbarous and shocking has essentially become a tired old, over-rhapsodized chapter of “Dad Rock.”

Beyond that, in the specific case of the Sex Pistols, there’s already been a wealth of documentation about their sneery ascendance and their messy implosion. I mean, just off the top of my head, there was the band’s own abortive film, the Julien Temple-directed “ Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle,” there was “The Punk Rock Movie,” there was Alex Cox’s flawed “Sid & Nancy,” and Julien Temple’s documentary, “The Filth & the Fury.” Not to be outdone, Temple even did a third Pistols move, “There’ll Always Be an England,” which documented an anniversary performance. There have also been numerous books and biographies. Lydon’s written at least three memoirs. The story of the Sex Pistols has been told and re-told too many times already. There was never a need for a biopic.

For my money, however, I’ve always been of the opinion that if you’re genuinely curious about the Sex Pistols, the ONLY thing you ever needed was a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks. Go get that. Listen to it … and get on with your lives.

Astor Place 1983

A photographer named Peter Bennett captured the shot below in 1983, presumably from within (or on top?) of 770 Broadway (formerly Wannamaker's and later K-Mart, and allegedly soon-to-be Wegman's). I spotted it on Facebook, and it stopped me dead in my tracks, as they say.

Here we're looking east over Astor Place and its surrounding, East Village environs. This was obviously taken well before the Cooper Union dormitory was erected in 1992, before the comparatively squat NYU building on the left was razed to accommodate the giant Death Star/Rubik's Cube building went up, before the shampoo bottle condo tower was built in the southernly parking lot, before the corner of St. Marks & Third was razed and before the Gringo mural was painted over. 

This is the Astor Place I fell in love with. Click on it to enlarge. For more of Bennett's work, but sure to check out his website. 

Friday

If the calendar is to be believed, it is evidently Friday.

Celebrate accordingly.

Farewell & Goodnight, Howie Pyro

I was shocked and saddened to learn, this morning, of the passing of bona fide New York City Punk legend, Howie Pyro (above, as captured by Manel Armengol). There was certainly nobody cooler, but he was also just a genuinely nice, funny and inclusive guy. He actually left a couple of comments on this blog, over the years.

Rest In Peace, sir.

Here he is on bass detail with DGeneration in 1994 at Irving Plaza.

Turn it up and pour one out.