Flaming Pablum

You Give Me Fever...

I’d like apologize for yet another delay in regular service. Mercifully, the vexing broken-image problem I was bitching about in the previous post has been (for now) rectified, but I’ve been sidelined in a different capacity.

Around just this time last week, I suddenly came down with a persistent, low-grade fever. Having only just had COVID in December, I didn’t expect it could be that — and, sure enough, it wasn’t. I kept my temperature in check with some Tylenol and hoped it would swiftly pass. It didn’t.

With no other major symptoms other than frequent chills, perpetual aches and feeling trapped in a sort of a zonked-out stupor (more so than usual), I’ve endured the fever swiftly returning like clockwork every six hours. By Wednesday, it climbed to 104, which prompted me to go to urgent care. Mercifully, I have one right down the street.

They believe it’s this viral infection that’s been going around, and basically told me to stick with my Tylenol regimen, which I’m reluctantly doing.

Concentration is hard. Comfort is impossible. Energy is fleeting. Moods are sombre. I should be so lucky that I can even be this marginally coherent. And if you're bummed out about it, imagine how my office feels.

Bear with me.

Technical Issues

In what new seems like a quarterly occurrence, my blog is once again being plagued by a persistent outbreak of broken images. I'm told the Typepad folks are "looking into it," but the problem doesn't seem to be resolving itself. 

Suffice to say, this makes me positively fucking LIVID, so I may just hold off from posting until it's remedied, otherwise, you're just going to read a lot of hateful, potty-mouthed invective .... or, more than usual, I should qualify. 

Your patience and understanding are always appreciated. 

-The Management

Punk Before Punk Was Punk: More About Tom Verlaine

Following up on my last post about the late, great Tom Verlaine, even when he shared a fleeting moment of discourse with me (if you can even call it that) that rainy night on University Place, as we unwittingly sat side by side in the front window eating our respective slices and watching our neighborhood fill up with water, I knew not to push my luck and try to carry on a conversation with the famously icy icon.

But had I done so, I might have asked him what he thought about the word “Punk.”

Read any of the myriad obits for him in the last day, and you’re bound to see descriptors of Television’s distinctive musical style as “angular,” “lyrical,” “innovative,” all of which, I’d concede, is more or less accurate, if all a bit predictable. Billboard magazine even ran an obit, which I thought was pretty rich, given that Television really never came within squinting distance of vaulting a record onto the pop charts, which is really all Billboard cares about. One outlet referred to the dynamic of Verlaine and fellow string-bender Richard Lloyd as a “combative two-guitar assault,” which kind of made me laugh. Had this writer even heard Television? Despite inarguably being Punk pioneers (there’s a legend about them being the first band outside of the “country, bluegrass, blues” milieu to approach CBGB’s Hilly Kristal about playing the venue, but that may be apocryphal), Television didn’t really make music that bludgeoned its listeners, even at their most aggressive, like on this live recording of “Little Johnny Jewel” below.

There’s another possibly apocryphal anecdote about Television that always comes to mind in that when they were recording their debut LP, Marquee Moon, Verlaine ruffled Lloyd’s feathers by constantly insisting to co-producer/sound engineer Andy Johns that he wanted all the guitars to sound “smaller” and “dryer,” already looking to distance himself from the trajectory so-called “Punk Rock” was headed. It’s for this reason that, to this day, Marquee Moon’s eight songs still sound fresh and completely unlike anything else.

Once again, despite being Punk before Punk was Punk, what made Television a preeminent Punk band was their disdain for tired, staid convention. While original bassist Richard Hell — who split to form the more volatile Voidoids and Heartbreakers well before the recording of Marquee Moon — is credibly regarded as the tonsorial/sartorial blueprint of the “Punk Rocker” (being the first to cut short and spike up his hair and adhere his ripped clothes together with safety pins — more out of necessity than prescient fashion), Television didn’t really look like punks, and they certainly didn’t sound like what the media was spinning as “proper Punk Rock,” at the time. The comparatively mild-mannered Television were never going to deafen you with feedback or be gratuitously prurient. We had the Dead Boys for that.

All this is why I wonder — what did Tom Verlaine think of the term he was saddled with?

Goodnight, Tom Verlaine

I used to routinely see Tom Verlaine around the neighborhood, but one learned pretty swiftly not to bug the man. I once accosted him in front of The Strand like a gushing fanboy, and the sneer I received could have stopped a rhino in his tracks.

My favorite memory, though, was being caught in calamitous summer rainstorm in the late 90s and ducking in out of the maelstrom into Stromboli’s Pizza on University Place between 12th and 13th street (long gone). The only other patron in that tiny space? Yep, Tom Goddamn Verlaine. Remembering the Strand incident, I ordered my slice and left him alone …. only to have him remark in soggy solidarity, “It’s really coming down out there.”

Of his solo stuff, this has always (pardon the pun) been my favorite. Raise a slice to the great man.

Down on West 8th Street

In the latest episode of "Broken Record," Rick Rubin speaks with greatest living American, Iggy Pop. Regardless of what you think of Rick, it's a really great discussion. Find it here.

My favorite bit of trivia revealed therein: This song was originally titled "Down on the Beach," until Ig & the Ashetons visited NYC and walked down West 8th Street "between University Place and 6th Avenue" when it was "more active" (circa 1970), and were captivated by what they encountered. Love that a little chunk of my backyard (not *nearly* as "active" as it used to be, alas) inspired the greatest rock album of all goddamn time (fight me).

Crank it. 

Back to the Los Angeles of "Repo Man"

Prior to about 1994 or so, all I ever knew about Los Angeles and its surrounding environs came from the movies – specifically era-appropriatre films like “Grease,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “Valley Girl,” “Tuff Turf,” “Body Double,” Penelope Spheeris’ “Suburbia,” “Into the Night,” “Mulholland Drive” and several other choice selections. As viewed through the prism of those films, L.A. was this strange sprawl of freeway clovers, dusty back streets peppered with incongruous palm trees, shopping malls, suburban ranch homes and high schools.

But there was one film in particular that really seemed to sum up everything I thought I knew already about Los Angeles and Southern California writ large, and that was Alex Cox’s inimitably oddball sci-fi opus, “Repo Man” from 1984. In much the same way many folks latch onto the elusive exotica of New York City based on atmospheric flicks like “Taxi Driver,” “The French Connection” or even “The Warriors,” I was smitten with the idea of that chunk of the West Coast being the sort of run down, washed out, quasi-derelict urban badlands wherein Emilio Estevez’s Otto, Dick Rude’s Duke and Harry Dean Stanton’s eminently quotable Bud ran completely amok.

As mentioned in this ancient post, one of my best friends – Rob D – moved out there in the mid-90’s, essentially squatting in a well-appointed corner bungalow/cottage owned by his step-mother in Costa Mesa in nearby Orange County (or, as we laboriously referred to it, “Behind the Orange Curtain”). During his tenure there, I made a few lengthy visits to the Costa Mesa compound, entirely romanced by the notion of exploring the same endless byways, boulevards, buildings and barrooms depicted in the films I cited earlier. Once again, as mentioned in that ancient post, I was particularly smitten with locating the former site of fabled hardcore punk venue, The Cuckoo’s Nest, but never managed to pinpoint the right spot.

But about a beer-can’s reckless throw from the front lawn of Rob’s step-mother’s cottage was this deli-cum-liquor store that I would have absolutely SWORN was the one depicted in several key scenes in “Repo Man,” so much so that we came to regularly refer to the place as the Repo Market. Of course, this presumption was based on very little in the way of evidence.

Well, imagine my sad surprise to learn, this morning, by way of the exhaustively minutia-laden video below (clearly this man is my brother) wherein severl key locations from the beloved film in question are revealed. Suffice to say, that liquor store/deli was not in Costa Mesa.

Silly side bar: On some discussion board or another I frequent, someone invited people to list “movies about Punk Rock.” One participant put “Repo Man” at the very top of the list, which triggered my not-so-inner insuffferably pedantic streak. While, yes, Otto, Duke, Archie, Debbie and Kevin are all characters one would conventionally identify as “punk rockers” (to say nothing of the cameo by the Circle Jerks and a soundtrack rife with bands like Suicidal Tendencies, Fear, Iggy Pop and the Plugz), the film is really in no discenable manner about Punk Rock. It’s about a rogue scientist who kidnaps an alien’s cadaver and puts it in the trunk of an iconic 1964 Chevy Malibu and his surreal travails in dodging both federal agents and a plucky gaggle of repo men, whom protagonist Otto has taken up with, hungry to collect the bounty. If you’re looking to learn about Punk Rock, you won’t get far with “Repo Man.” Just saying.

Fermenting New Firewater: Tod [A] Looks Ahead

With the possible exception of Killing Joke, I don’t think there’s a band I’ve scribbled more about here than Cop Shoot Cop, the former NYC-based, clangy noise-rock ensemble of one Tod [A], who bowed out of said band, in the mid-`90s, during the recording of what would have been their fifth studio LP. Upon leaving C$C under arguably not the most amicable of circumstances, Tod turned his attention to forming Firewater, a loose collective of musicians who’d go onto to explore, over seven diverse albums, a far broader vista of musical styles than Tod’s previous band was ever likely to dare. Largely jettisoning Cop Shoot Cop’s full-frontal industrial assault in favor of a sinuous amalgam of influences from klezmer to ska to Middle-Eastern folk music to Romani to bhangra to sea shanties to Russian drinking songs to straight-ahead punk fucking rock and virtually all points and ports of global call in between, Tod’s inherent sense of wanderlust became deeply imbued into the music he was making. Putting his money where his mouth was, by the band’s sixth album, 2008’s The Golden Hour, Tod pulled up stakes and set out on a formidable trek across the imposing terrain between New Delhi, India and Istanbul, Turkey, recording with local musicians along the way. This experience not only fueled that album -– arguably Firewater’s finest -– but also served as fertile fodder for his first novel, “Banging the Monkey,” which surfaced in 2019.

I’ve been friends with Tod since the very early `90s, when I was tasked with writing up a cover story for a local freebie news weekly about “a hot new band that typifies the New York sound and sensibility.” Without skipping a beat, I chose Cop Shoot Cop, having become enamored of their wilfully chaotic live performances, their boldly unconventional approach (two basses, no guitars), their dark sense of humor (lost on large swathes of their audience), their unwieldy aesthetic and their cryptic poster campaign. Over the course of Cop Shoot Cop’s tumultuous rise and fall and then into the Firewater years, Tod and I have spilled many gallons of beer and ink about our respective trajectories. Now ensconced full-time in Istanbul, Tod only gets to New York City every so often, and he and I only get to convene in person every couple of years or so, usually around the holidays. The last time he was in town back in December, we caught up for a drink at an old favorite, the Ear Inn on the westerly end of Spring Street, and it dawned on me that I’d never subjected the poor guy to the Flaming Pablum Interview. So now, joining the estimable ranks of Big Paul Ferguson of Killing Joke, Chris Egan of Missing Foundation, RB Korbet of Even Worse, Erik Sanko of Skeleton Key, Fran Powers of Modern Clix, J Yuenger of White Zombie, Brooke Smith of Sunday Matinee, Don Rauf of Life in a Blender, and Andi Harriman of Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace, here with the Flaming Pablum Interview with Tod [A]…

FP: You’ve now been living in Turkey for almost 12 years. How’s that going? Of all the places you’ve lived, how does Istanbul compare?

I've lived in NYC, Denpasar, Phnom Penh, Calcutta, Surat Thani and now Istanbul. Though I didn't expect to be here quite so long, I can't complain about the city. Istanbul is the NYC of Turkey: it's a port city, which means it's quite multi-cultural. The cost of living is far less than NYC, and the town has public transport that doesn't reek of urine. It has a lot more cats and a lot less rats (do the math). I guess I feel as at home here as I have felt anywhere else, though the current Turkish government leaves much to be desired. Hopefully the people of Turkey will get rid of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named in the upcoming 2023 general election.

It’s been eleven years since you released International Orange, but now, I gather, have new music demoed and ready to be recorded — can you give us an update?

Having decided to procreate, I took some time off from recording and touring to concentrate on raising my daughter. I didn't want to be the father who was never there. In the meantime, I wrote fifty songs. I am now a free agent and I think I'm almost ready to get back to recording and touring. We shall see who winds up releasing these records.

Firewater has counted many illustrious names in its ranks, over the years — are you in touch with all those players? Might we hear from them again on the next LP?

Yes, we are mostly all still buddies. It's quite possible there will be some appearances from old friends once it's time to go into the studio and begin touring again.

If you had to characterize the direction and sound of the new material, how would you do so?

My itinerant lifestyle has certainly colored the new batch of songs, melodically, sonically, and rhythmically. There is a Turkish flavor to many of them. But somehow I can't seem to scrape all the American mud off my boots. I feel like my time abroad has given me perspective to write about the country of my birth.

Your first novel, “Banging the Monkey” was published in 2019. Are there more books in you waiting to come out?

Yes. I am working on a few new books at the moment: a novel (for adults), and some others for children. But I take my time. They will be done when they are done.

You were recently back in the States and in New York City for the first time in a while. How does your former home turf feel to you in the wake of all that’s happened?

I still love NYC. But as I told you when I saw you last, I feel safer raising my daughter in a quasi-dictatorship like Turkey where almost nobody has a gun, than in America where everyone seems to own multiple firearms.

In 2016, you joined some of your former Cop Shoot Cop bandmates for the commentary track of the live DVD New York Post Punk / Noise Series 1. Are you still back in contact with those guys today?

Yes, I am in touch with Jim Coleman and Phil Puleo and we are on good terms. During the lockdowns, we made some sporadic attempts to collaborate from afar, but nothing seemed to catch fire. Jim and Phil seem to be doing quite well with Human Impact, so more power to them.

Is there any Firewater (or, for that matter, Cop Shoot Cop) material left “in the vault,” so to speak? Stuff that was never released? If so, will it ever see the light of day?

Yes, there is quite a bit. But tracks get left in the vault for a reason, usually because they weren't quite ready.

What’s your take on the music of today? Are there any new artists you’re particularly enthused about? What have you been listening to?

When I was a young punk I thought the way to move forward was to obliterate the past. Now I'm much more interested in the historical continuity of music. I'm trying to catch up on the homework I should have done when I was 21, learning the musical secrets of all the songs I love. I'm delving back into the past: jazz, the birth of rock 'n' roll. I listen to a lot of early blues, jazz, folk and psychedelia. Mainly I'm focused on developing as a songwriter and composer. I've been studying soundtracks (Morricone, Elfman, Zimmer), and I try to learn from the lyricists I admire (Dylan, Waits, Bowie).

Of all the spots you lived around New York City, which was your favorite, and why?

It was definitely fun living in Williamsburgh in the late 80's – early 90's. The rents were incredibly cheap, and there was much fun to be had exploring the empty buildings. I remember setting fire to an abandoned car in a vacant lot and watching it burn. Neither police nor the fire department ever came. That's how much of a no man's land it was at that time.

…which was your least favorite, and why?

By the time I moved to Bushwick, I had already pretty much had it with NYC. The locals weren't too enthused about the bohemian gringos encroaching on their turf, so there was quite a bit of aggro. Also, I was arrested for drinking a beer on the street outside my building, about 20 feet away from the corner where a bunch of jackasses had been selling smack and crack for years. So once I got out of jail, I was off to Thailand.

Where in the world is the food the best?

Italy, of course. I have worked there a lot, and the Italians really know what they are doing. But I also love Thai street food. Such an amazingly subtle combination of flavors. And usually $1 a plate. Indian and Mexican. Turkish food is also amazing.

What’s your favorite Firewater album?

The Golden Hour certainly was the most fun to make. The adventure of recording it, in India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, combined with working with my buddies in Tel Aviv to complete it. Everything seemed to come together on that record.

What’s your least favorite? Why?

International Orange was a nightmare to make. My record company didn't support the concept, so I had to cut a lot of financial corners. As a result, even though the songs were as good as those on The Golden Hour, the sound quality on International Orange suffered because of budget problems. I would love to re-record those songs someday. My ugly experience making International Orange also made me want to wait until I could afford to record in the right way.

What’s your favorite Cop Shoot Cop album?

Release. At that time CSC was firing on all pistons, and we had producer David Sardy at the controls. After that record, everything went rapidly south for the band.

What’s your least favorite? Why?

White Noise. It just hasn't aged well.

The irony here is the White Noise continues to be my favorite album by the band. It’s aged just fine, to my ears.

Why do the vinyl re-releases of Get Off the Cross... and Golden Hour have different cover art?

When Scott Schaefer approached me about doing vinyl releases of the Firewater catalog, I saw it as an opportunity to make something special. So I decided to re-make all the covers by hand. It's been really fun to re-imagine the art. The vinyl series will be continued in the near future.

Beyond from family and friends, what do you miss most about the United States?

A genuine NYC slice, and a real bagel. And not much else.

What sort of music is your daughter listening to?

I knew going into this parenting thing that I had a window of maybe four or five years in which I could vet the music my daughter would hear. Being a control freak, I took full advantage of those years. I wanted her developing brain to get a solid grounding in classic melody and song structure before she was exposed to bullshit musical 'content' from off the internet. So I made her tons of mix tapes: nursery rhymes; classical stuff like Carl Orff, Peter and the Wolf, and the Nutcracker; plus kid-friendly songs from folks like Raffi, the Beatles, Donovan, Ivor Cutler, Monty Python, Spike Jones, Woody Guthrie and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

Yeah, well, to answer your question, the window has closed. You don't want to know what sort of music torture I am subjected to now. I can't wait till she's a teenager, and will start hitting me with some cool sounds.

What was the best concert you ever attended?

I can't name just one: Black Flag at some bowling alley in New Jersey circa 1984, Nirvana at the Reading Festival circa 1992, Tom Waits at the Beacon Theater 1999, Bone Machine tour, Motorhead in Istanbul, 2011. Plus any Jesus Lizard show. 

What five albums can you not live without?

Ramones - Ramones
Tom Waits - Rain Dogs
The Doors - The Doors
David Bowie - Diamond Dogs
Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited

The best songwriter is….

There are seven: Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Robyn Hitchcock, Leonard Cohen, and Ivor Cutler. (and me.)

The Soft Solution

Hey again, all … we’re still doing some tinkering at the back end, trying to parse the comment-leaving problems. We may find a solution, or we may not. I’ve reverted back to the old design, as I personally prefer it, and it’s got sort of what I project as an established identity. If I have to change it, I will, but not sure we’re there, as yet.

In any case, I do have some stuff coming up, including a Flaming Pablum Interview with Tod [A] of Firewater/Cop Shoot Cop and a rumination on Ungano’s, a fabled, long-vanished rock club in the unlikely environs of the Upper West Side. I’m looking forward to unleashing that one.

In the short term, however, please enjoy this live recording of The Soft Boys performing at the Portland Arms in Cambridge, England in 1978. This is, of course, Robyn Hitchcock’s first band (since we’ve been discussing him, of late), and it’s both an amazing recording and entirely hilarious. If I’m not mistaken, the Portland Arms is still there in 2023.

Enjoy. Back Soon.

“OWW, MY EYES!!! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE???”

Myself and the fine folks at Typepad, my blog provider, are trying to get to the bottom of that recurring time-out problem when it comes to leaving comments. As such, this blog may shortly be undergoing some visual changes, because we’re exploring the theory that my current design scheme might have something to do with the glitch.

I don’t want to change this design. I like this design. I genuinely am uncomfortable with change, but needs must, as they say.

In any case, don’t be alarmed, in the coming days, if you check back here and things look … different. Hopefully, it’ll only be temporary.

Cheers.

Two Records, Two Summers

One summer in the early `80s, my mother and step-father rented a small, two-bedroom house on Quantuck Lane in Quogue, out on the East End of Long Island. We’d previously owned a house about two blocks away from that spot, but my Mom & John had sold that, which should have been a giant bellwether of things to come, but I was an oblivious and petulant teen, at the time. Unbeknownst to my older sister and I, this particular summer would be one of our little family’s final ones all together, but things hadn’t quite gotten to that breaking point, just yet.

In any case, as my collegiate elder sibling claimed the rear second bedroom for herself, I was bequeathed the house’s ersatz “den” as my bedroom, which I immediately decorated by sloppily taping an Iron Maiden poster to the deep forest-green-painted wall. At the end of the summer, upon removing said poster, I would unwittingly remove some of that paint, but that’s a different anecdote.

I honestly don’t remember all that much about the house, other than having to — under pronounced protest — periodically mow its lumpy, uneven lawn with end results that failed to please any of the concerned parties. I also remember rummaging through its closets and finding a vintage, electronic sign for Champale — a festive malt liquor that allegedly tasted like sparkling wine — that changed colors when you plugged it in. I’d made a furtive plan in my head to take that with me when we left, at the end of the summer, but was talked out of it in the wake of sullying that aforementioned paint job in the den.

Beyond all that, however, my most indelible memories of the Quantuck Lane house involve the stereo system in the living room, a hotly contested piece of consumer electronics over which my sister and I vied for absolute dominance. Her copies of, say, the Flashdance soundtrack, Thriller by Michael Jackson and All This Love by DeBarge sat nervously in fragile and unconvincing detente alongside copies of some of my favorites like First Issue by Public Image Ltd., No Sleep `Till Hammersmith by Motorhead and the live hardcore compilation, Rat Music for Rat People. The conflict was constant, and each of us would brazenly disregard the other’s commandeering with blithe dismissal. It wasn’t at all uncommon to hear the jarring, signature scratch of a stylus being hastily wrenched from a record mid-spin, replacing an emphatic bash through “Live Fast Die Young” by the Circle Jerks with an umpteenth airing of “What a Feeling” by Irene Kara. It was simply that kinda summer.

But there was one LP, however, that always managed to restore the tenuous peace. Procured, I believe, during the latter portion of her years at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, my sister’s well-loved copy of So Far…, a compilation of songs by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, was a record that soothed both our intra-sibling ire, and whose melodic mellifluousness also appealed to our long-suffering mother and step-father, who were swiftly losing patience with our perpetual squabble.

While inexorably steeped in the very freewheelin’ hippie ideals my favorite punk bands strove to decimate, the songs off of So Far.. were pretty hard to argue with, although I tended to steer well clear of the more cloyingly twee selections like “Our House” (still kinda hate that one) and “Teach Your Children” in favor of the more assertive fare like “Ohio” and “Wooden Ships.” But whether they were singing about social injustice or the comely charms of folk singer Judy Collins (allegedly the subject of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”), the sheer combination of those voices — Graham Nash of the Hollies, Steven Stills of the Buffalo Springfield and former Byrds firebrand David Crosby (and, on occasion, Neil Goddamn Young, also late of the Buffalo Springfield) — that richly distinctive, inimitable sound could sway all skeptics and silence all naysayers. It may have lacked the ponderous heft of Venom, the splenetic fury of Black Flag and/or the willful contrarianism of John Lydon, but So Far.. was undeniable to me. And, again, beyond its sonic warmth and timeless songwriting, those songs became synonymous with moments of harmony and happiness in that little house on Quantuck Lane.

At the end of the summer, instead of swiping that flashing Champale sign, I swiped my sister’s copy of So Far…

Seemingly a bajillion summers later, when my own children were just barely out of their toddlerdom, I remember buying a copy of Greatest Hits by Crosby, Stills & Nash at a long-vanished bookstore in Westhampton Beach. That disc went onto become a “car favorite” of my little family’s, with both “Marrakesh Express” and “Southern Cross” becoming crucial to my kids (the latter being re-dubbed “The Beach Song,” as it perfectly scores the drive from our home to the beach, and the former because its opening guitar parts made my little Charlotte and Oliver giggle inexplicably).

We lost David Crosby, yesterday. I could write several paragraphs about why he was rightly revered as a true voice of his generation, a wildly talented songwriter and a notoriously erratic, drug-fueled rock star, but I’m relatively certain all that material has been well covered by every major music and news periodical. I figured it might be more impactful to express what his music meant to me, and that is nigh on indefinable.

I will forever associate the music of David Crosby and of CSN(Y) with family, happiness and home, and the loss of that singular voice is tremendous, no matter which particular band t-shirts you’re inclined to wear.

May he finally rest in peace.