I’ve spun this yarn a bajillion times here, but I used to be next-door neighbors with noted photographer Glen E. Friedman. In case you’re unfamiliar with him, I last described him on this post as "the incredibly prescient and endearingly outspoken photographer that documented the crucial gestation period of skateboarding culture (seek out "Dogtown & Z-Boys" if you're unfamiliar with same) and some of the most iconic photographs of the then-still-percolating eras of hardcore punk and Hip-Hop. You've doubtlessly seen his handiwork on album covers by Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, Slayer, Minor Threat, LL Cool J, Ice-T, Suicidal Tendencies and countless others.” He’s also just a super cool, funny and thoughtful guy and a fellow New York City dad.
These days, while we don’t live down the hall from each other any more, we are still both in the same neighborhood, and do periodically run into each other and catch-up. Given our similar interests, Glen’s usually got something compelling to report. I ran into him today on my way back from running a couple of stupid errands, and true to form, he had coolness to share.
Glen recently stumbled on some video of a Minor Threat show at CBGB in 1982. He took some amazing photographs at that show — some of them now legitimately iconic images of the band. But the video acts as a striking testament to Glen’s skills as a photographer, as it demonstrates the complete chaos of an early `80s hardcore show. It's frankly astonishing that he was able to frame such distinct, singular, isolated moments during the complete mayhem that was doubtlessly swirling around his lens. Here’s what Glen had to say…
I made photos of Minor Threat during this show. It’s total bedlam… can’t believe I did.
The quality of the video is pretty horrible, but still worth checking out. I never saw it before today. It’s incredible how it brings my mind and body feeling right back to the intensity of the moment.
Check out the video below, and Glen was nice enough to allow me to share a couple of his pictures from that day underneath.
Earlier this week was Julian Cope’s 64th birthday, a sort of unbelievable number for such an ageless figure. I mean, sure, in more recent years, Julian has seemingly gone well out of his way to hide his fabled physiognomy behind a beard worth of Odin, but his mind and his muse seem as hyper-youthful as ever.
I last invoked him here and here, but he’s always been a big favorite of mine, even given his more indulgent forays into music that seems light years away from the stuff that first drew me to him (check out his sprawling discography, if you don’t believe me). While I’m personally partial to his Peggy Suicide phase from the early `90s, which found him balancing his growingly adventurous penchant for far-out experimentation with his preternatural gift for absolutely perfect pop, I was indeed a big fan of his early solo records like Fried and Saint Julian, which were indeed a bit more comparatively polished.
The excellent blog Dangerous Minds already did a magisterial post about this video — an MTV-recording of Julian’s show at the Ritz on East 11th Street in 1987 -- I figured it was worth re-surfacing with my own spin on it. Here’s the great man running through a set of his then strongest material, not to mention flailing about on his signature bendy mic stand. It’s great stuff, especially his cover of "Non-Alignment Pact" by Pere Ubu.
I only got to see Julian Cope perform twice — once at the Marquee on way West 21st street (gone) on the tour for Peggy Suicide and then again, a few years later, at the tiny Westbesh Theatre in the West Village (since bricked up, I believe) as a one-man show when he was promoting his album 20 Mothers. He’s still maniacally active, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for another Stateside live appearance.
Even if you’re not versed in the man’s stately oeuvre, it’s a nice taste of what a show at the Ritz was like. Enjoy….
Mondo Kim’s on St. Marks Place was a multi-tiered funhouse of geekily esoteric music and cinema that was truly a great place for those inclined towards that sort of stuff (i.e. me and my friends). But, of course, it was not to last. It had to leave that storied space in 2009 and relocate over to smaller plot over on First Avenue, where it lasted for another five years or so. When it was announced that the St. Marks iteration was closing, I wrote a couple of misty posts about it. Since it’s departure, that massive space has become a boozy arcade, if memory serves, but I’ve never stepped inside it as such, nor do I have plans to.
Photographers James and Karla Murray posted the below shot from 2001 on Facebook today, and it sent a jolt of nostalgic reverie right through me. I so miss this place. Click on it to enlarge.
Tumblr is a platform I don’t find myself using, too often (although I do still maintain my own space there, that being Get Back to Work). That said, there are a few specific Tumblr users who cotinue to raise the bar. One of my very favorites is OldNewYorkLandia, which is an astonishing well curated aggregation of archival images from eons past, mostly all responsibly credited. The one below is one such image, taken by Leonard Freed in 1954 or 1955. This is, of course, Jersey Street in what was then technically known as Little Italy but is now perceived more as just part of SoHo. Indie cinema heads might recognize it from the opening scene of Jim Jarmusch’s “Permanent Vacation” or from the video for “Down By Law” by Madball.
For more amazing vintage New York City pics, definitely check out OldNewYorkLandia, but be warned … it’s easy to get sucked in and spend hours scrolling.
Last night was my 36th high school reunion. Technically, the proper milestone would have been *last* year (35th, as we all love tidy increments of five), but because of COVID, that was reduced, last year, to a chaotic zoom call. But probably because COVID is still with us (thanks to the willfully ignorant and vax-reluctant), this 36th wasn’t quite as robustly attended as it might’ve otherwise been. Still, as my son now goes to the same school (and was giving tours to crotchety alumni), I felt obligated to go. Plus, y’know … open bar. Who am I to turn my nose up at that?
In any case, given my heartily cultivated neuroses, I, of course, arrived bang on time. This is a long-standing problem. Throughout my teens and twenties, I used to arrive at parties at the specified times, only to hear the sound of hairdryers still blowing behind front doors, prompting the necessity to walk around the block three or four times before making a more well-timed, fashionably tardy entrance. Not wanting to (still) be that guy, I decided to take a leisurely stroll around the surrounding environs before making the scene, so to speak. To score said stroll, I selected an album that was period-specific to my high school years, that being Welcome To The Pleasuredome by ye olde Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
While ambling south down Fifth Avenue, beneath the magisterial edifice of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I realized I probably hadn’t listened to this record in any real capacity in decades. Richly over-the-top and somewhat ridiculously overproduced (thanks, I believe, to former Buggle/Yes knob-twiddler Trevor Horn) Welcome To The Pleasuredome is a sumptuous and suitably audacious affair, but still kinda completely rocks (that bass!) Heard through the prism of 2021, where songs like “WAP” and “Pu$$y Fairy” win prestigious industry accolades, “Relax” *still* manages to sound uproariously un-nuanced and strenuously inappropriate in its espousal of indiscriminate ejaculation. “Two Tribes” hasn’t aged quite so well, and suffers from a bit of frowny heavy-handedness, considering the libidinous reverie of the rest of the album. But it still has that bass to recommend it, unlike “The Power of Love,” which remains po-faced and ponderous. Who decided to put an earnest Christmas carol on an album otherwise preoccupied with carnal gratification? There are also the covers — The Temptations’ “War” and a cheeky swish through Springsteen’s “Born to Run” — but neither threaten the main attractions here.
For me, though, the real revelation was the title track, a sprawling, thirteen plus minute suite, veering from the wide-screen audio depiction of a verdant garden of abundance into a driving, bass-driven odyssey ripe with lush and surprising sounds and instrumentation -- washes of space-age synthesizers, periodic bursts of clangy guitars, Morricone-cribbed “HOO HAH” chants and even a chugging harmonica subtly buried in the mix. The lyrics may not be the band’s finest work (“there goes a supernova … what a pushover!”), but Frankie never claimed to be profound.
As a single piece of music, the suite of “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” is practically as expansive and cinematic as latter-era Pink Floyd, albeit the horniest and gayest Pink Floyd you could ever hope to hear. That aspect really cannot be overstated, though. I would have been a high school junior upon first hearing the whole Welcome to the Pleasuredome album and otherwise slavishly devoted to laughably hyper-masculine punk, hardcore and heavy metal records. While just shy of any brazen bluntness (Holly Johnson’s zealous pronunciation of the present-tense verb/descriptor, “ERECT” while quoting Coleridge notwithstanding), Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s debut opus was still such a proudly in-your-face celebration of myriad facets of human sexuality. As a result, it felt a thousand times more taboo and dangerous than anything Suicidal Tendencies or Iron Maiden could ever hope to offer.
Even as the pimply and introverted geek that I was, I indeed knew what this album was all about. Much like “Love My Way” by the Psychedelic Furs, it duly fired my imagination about the mysterious realms of intimate physical interaction (a realm I would still be some years away from attaining, not for any lack of trying). It didn’t matter to me that these songs were almost certainly about gay sex — they were about sex, and performed in a manner that addressed the subject in a comparatively more welcoming, healthier and more relatable way than as handled on, say, Shout at the Devil by Motley Crue or Fair Warning by Van Halen, where sexual scenarios were invariably more predatory than celebratory. These songs, like the afore-cited “Love My Way” before them, scored many a fantasy of dancefloor and boudoir escapades with various ladies from my high school who shall remain forever nameless. While those ornate dreams were ultimately never realized, they still vividly exist in three-dimensional technicolor within the grooves of Welcome to The Pleasuredome.
How is this record regarded today? As far as I know, it hasn’t been feted with any critical reappraisal. No one’s penned a 331/3 edition about it (like Annie Zaleski’s excellent recent one on Rio by Duran Duran). ls it perceived as too empty, arch, affected or topically irresponsible? Is it marred by its proudly lavish production? I don’t quite understand it
As the title track came to its preposterous signature climax with Holly Johnson’s campy cackle roaring through my headphones, I glanced at my watch. It was time. I stepped inside my former high school with the impossibly bacchanalian strains of Welcome to the Pleasuredome still ringing in my ears to re-join the ranks of my now middle-aged classmates to reconvene and reminisce.
Just re-surfacing this for no real reason other than a colleague just asked me what I got for my birthday. I told her and she was surprised that there were no items of, as she called it, “dumb rock shit” (as she know that’s the type of stuff I like). I told her, though, that buying “dumb rock shit” presents for me is a perilous endeavor, being that, by and large, nobody really knows what I’m looking for. I mean, yeah, certain key friends of mine might know, but my wife and kids aren’t going to know some weird bit of arcane ephemera from one band or long-lost bootleg recording of another. They wouldn’t even begin to know where to track that kind of thing down. Nor should they, really.
More to the point, at this late stage of the proceedings, if anything, I should be getting rid of my stupid stuff and not accumulating more of it. I did make certain efforts towards that end, recently. I parted with a lovely-albeit-long-neglected Iron Maiden box set, giving it to a friend of mine who’ll doubtlessly appreciate it more than me. I mean, yeah, I still love Iron Maiden, but I hadn’t touched the thing in about twenty years. It’s been largely locked up in my front hall closet, untouched and unplayed. The friend I gave it to just got a fresh Iron Maiden tattoo on his friggin’ back, so he is clearly more deserving of it than I. I’d do well to continue parting with such items.
In any case, though, I conceded to my workmate that there is still one item I’m obsessed with finding. Here’s that backstory (last invoked on this post)…
As first mentioned in this ancient entry, I first became aware of New York City’s own Cop Shoot Cop back at the dawn of the 90’s. I’d initially been assigned to interview the then-notorious ensemble by a free weekly called New York Perspectives (long dead). Contrary to their fearsome reputation, I found the guys in the band to be thoughtful, grounded and funny individuals, and I became a swift and ardent fan of theirs, catching their shows at a variety of since-closed divey music venues. This being back during a more fertile age for music, the East Village and the Lower East Side in general were awash in gig flyers (much like the ones I collected from the Rock Hotel).
Anyway, around the release of their second album, White Noise, Cop Shoot Cop played a gig at CBGB. The band was renowned for their eye-catching, provocative gig posters — often utilizing bits of striking, inflammatory imagery, and the poster for this particular show was no different. I remember a tattered copy of it being pasted up on a disused notice board outside the forbidding edifice of that since-condemned public school on East 4th between First Avenue and Avenue A. The art utilized a bit of an Anime/Manga cartoon of a screaming, angry face behind bars, with COP SHOOT COP and CBGB displayed in a bold, angular font. It was quite a striking bit of art, and I coveted it.
The trouble was, they were gone almost overnight, either ripped down or covered up by other posters. That shredded one on East 4th Street was impossible to prize (and actually stayed up for several years before the notice board itself was dismantled for whatever reason).
I became friends with the guys in Cop Shoot Cop, and former vocalist/bassist Tod [A] even gave me an armful of old posters and flyers of theirs at one point, but this one was not among them, frustratingly.
In the ensuing years, that single Cop Shoot Cop poster became something of a holy grail for me, but I simply never saw it again. Tod [A] didn’t even remember it (and he did most if not all of the poster designs).
Maybe I’d dreamt it??
But then, as I’m watching “Sound and Chaos: The Story of BC Studio,” there comes a discussion of a particular happening at the studio wherein Cop Shoot Cop and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion partook in some sort of jam session. In a bit of archival footage from the event, they show a snippet of an interview with Spencer, and what’s on the wall behind the couch they’re sitting on?? THAT GODDAMN POSTER!!
The jam session in question (filmed in Martin Bisi's Brooklyn studio on the Gowanus) was later released as its own DVD entitled The New York Post-Punk/Noise Series Volume 1. Regular readers might remember me alluding to same in last summer's piece about annoying one's neighbors with loud music. In any case, that DVD even features the members of the band being interviewed underneath same. The shot above is actually members of the Blues Explosion and the program's host, not any of the C$C boys.
Anyway, that really blew a new part in my hair. If you have a copy of this poster — get in touch, `COS I WANT IT AND WILL PAY HANDSOMELY FOR IT!
Renowned photographer Godlis, who I've mentioned here a fewtimes before, is part of a this great new, inventive documentary. Here's the official description:
A 37TH DEGREE ORIGINAL FILM Between 1976 and 1980, young Manhattan photographer David Godlis documented the nightly goings-on at the Bowery’s legendary CBGB, “the undisputed birthplace of punk rock,” with a vividly distinctive style of night photography. Lewie and Noah Kloster bring his photos to life with electrifying immediacy, bolstered by black-and-white watercolor animation, a rollicking soundtrack, and voiceover narration by Godlis himself.
News of the tragic and untimely death of my dear former colleague and friend Eileen last week has had my head swimming in anecdotes about my 12 long years at the TIME Magazine News Desk, a lengthy period of my life that seems like both ancient history and strangely only last week or so. As I may have mentioned when I first left that job back at the tail end of 2005, I learned more there than I ever accrued at any school, and made countless friends that feel more like family than like former colleagues.
In any case, prompted by a Facebook post by a friend from a totally different gig, photographer Pat Blashill (who I interviewed for this old post), I was reminded of another News Desk story that left a big impression on me.
As a News Desk editor – essentially a liaison between the magazine’s senior editorial staff and the network of reporters and correspondents in the field around the world -- I had a somewhat unenviable graveyard shift: I would work a regular business day on Monday, I would have Tuesdays and Wednesdays completely off, I would work on Thursday evenings from 4pm and 4am and then the week would culminate in the all-night, Friday-night shift, from 8pm to 8am, the most crucial evening to man the desk as the magazine was being “put to bed,” as the saying went.
It wasn’t that bad, for a long while. It was great having such sizable swathes of time off in the middle of the week. Obviously, the Friday-night overnight put the kibosh on a lot of social plans, but I more than made up for it on the following Saturday nights (when, having only risen from my slumber in the early afternoon, I had lots of energy for late-night shenanigans). It was rough on my circadian rhythms (probably still re-adjusting to this day), but I made it all work for over a decade.
But being that most of my time in the office was spent during the small hours when no one else was around, I used to dress in a manner that could best be described as “informal.” My rationale was that if I was going to be there at 3am when the rest of the world was asleep, I was going to damn well be comfortable. It made sense, at the time.
One telling Friday evening in 1994 as I was just starting my shift, I checked in with my teammates as they were packing up and passing the baton, so to speak. They briefed me on the stories that were in the works and developments to watch out for. I fully expected yet another quiet night with minimal amounts of actual work in front of me. I’d even brought a book to read during what promised to be a long evening of newsless doldrums.
After a little bit, my fellow News Deskers checked out, leaving me the sole editor on duty for the remainder of the night. As if on cue, the phone rang. My colleague Katie asked with some bemused alarm the following question. “Did O.J. Simpson kill his wife?” I glanced up at the television across the room, always tuned to CNN, to see a strangely slow pursuit of a white Ford Bronco being tailed by a phalanx of Los Angeles police cars.
Like a shot, I leapt from my desk and took a sharp left towards the managing editor’s office, sprinting down the hall. I burst into his office with needlessly dramatic aplomb to dutifully relay news that beloved football legend, erstwhile actor and Hertz rental car pitchman O.J. Simpson was being pursued by police under suspicion of brutally murdering his spouse.
The managing editor calmly peered over his glasses at me from behind his desk. “Mr. Smith, …" he finally spoke, glancing back down at the story mock-ups on his desk. “What exactly is a Butthole Surfer?”
Formed well prior to the Stay Cats, The Rockats were British progenitors of a neo-rockabilly sound that was a little more accessible than the deliciously libidinous horror show of their forebears in The Cramps. The Rockats’ deft amalgam of rockabilly twang with punky panache was inarguably a huge influence on the similarly ambitious Brian Setzer, who later took an admittedly more reverent and arguably more authentic version of the Rockats’ formula right to the friggin’ bank. But as The Stray Cats took off, the Rockats were being persuaded to ditch their initial sound and style in favor of a more polished pop approach as Secret Hearts (this by label boss Tommy Motolla, the same horrible shithead who foisted Mariah Carey on the world). It failed. They broke up. People suck.
While never a big rockabilly guy one way or the other, I first heard the Rockats on the dancefloor at Danceteria one heady night in 1985, specifically “Make That Move,” as played in a set that also featured “How Soon Is Now” by the Smiths, “Master & Servant” by Depeche Mode,” “Kings & Queens” by Killing Joke, “World Destruction” by Time Zone, the Lords of the New Church’s priapic cover of “Like a Virgin” and “Ball of Confusion” by Love & Rockets -- British indie rock, synth-pop, post-punk, hip-hop, flagrant gothic rock and neo-rockabilly all rubbing elbows and sounding fucking great together.
Underpinned by an urgent pulse and heroically bequiffed Smutty Smiff’s insistent bassline, “Make That Move” came iced with reverberating guitars and a rousing, repeating refrain that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in “West Side Story.” It was a great, fun single that would unfortunately be the Rockats’ first and only brush with chart success.
The only reason I’m bringing The Rockats up now is because of this genuinely extraordinary story in yesterday’s New York Times. As my fried Mac asserted, it’s really a screenpay waiting to be written about New York City, rock’n’roll, theft, mystery and recompense that spans decades and the globe. I won’t give it away, but my feelings are best expressed by the title of this post.
Meanwhile, here’s the suitably bawdy video for “Make That Move,” which – now that I’m watching it again for the first time in eons – is also suitable for inclusion in that last post, although I can’t name any specific NYC landmarks, can you?
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