This has already been making the rounds (I spotted it over on Jeremiah’s site yesterday), but it’s really not to be missed if you’re a fan of old school New York Hardcore. As JM described, former CBGB-scenester-turned actress Brooke Smith (best known as the senator’s daughter who is reluctant to “put the lotion in the basket” in “The Silence of the Lambs”) submitted a clutch of photos to the blog Street Carnage of her days rubbing tattooed elbows with the cognoscenti of 80’s NY hardcore. Herein you’ll find some vintage shots of folks from Murphy’s Law, Agnostic Front, Bad Brains, The Cro-Mags, Youth of Today et al. and their friends, fans and followers, mostly hanging out in the East Village, the Ritz and at the fabled CBGB hardcore matinees. In 2010, it’s once again hard to fathom how much that particular little strip of the Bowery has changed.
In perusing this collection, I was bemused to stumble across a photo of one Natalie Jacobson. I fleetingly worked with Natalie in the very early 90s at a small independent music mag called The New York Review of Records. I'm not sure where our managing editor found her, but he swiftly drafted her into our ranks, and she added a refreshing dash of tough, smart-mouthed femininity into our boys club of music dorks. We briefly bonded over our complimentary tastes in bands, and I started seeing her at a couple of shows at the Ritz after that, but there was always something strangely familiar about her that I couldn't quite place. It wasn't until a couple of years after we'd both left the magazine and had long since stopped running into each other that I connected the dots and figured it out. She was the same Natalie profiled in that fabled 1986 New York magazine cover story about punk rock who was the girlfriend of Murphy's Law's Jimmy Gestapo. A couple of years after that, Natalie put in a spoken-word cameo on the Home Alive compilation (now a 90s artifact well-worth seeking out). In 1997, Natalie penned a novel called "No Forwarding Address." What's happened to her after that, I have no idea. I doubt she'd remember me, but I'd be curious to catch up with her now and talk to her about her days in the NYHC scene.
For another compelling glimpse of that scene, click right here.
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