Back to L'Amour

I recently became 'friends" on Facebook with a great blog called Long Island and NYC Places That Are No More. While they do post an awful lot of pictures of esoteric Nassau county stuff, they are an amazing trove of vintage NYC photography that you all need to go check out at once. Go. Now. Tell'em I sent'cha. Their Facebook page can be found right here.

In any case, they put up the below shot this morning and it instantly struck a chord. I spoke about L'Amour in Brooklyn back on this post, but it seemed worth re-exhuming.

As I said back then, I only managed to attend a single show at L'Amour, that being Faith No More, Voivod and Soundgarden in 1990. I went with my former colleague from SPIN (for whom I'd recently quit interning and Brent had quit copyediting). I believe I initially balked at the idea of traveling to Brooklyn to see the show, but both Brent and I were hugely into Louder Than Love by Soundgarden at the time, so it seemed like the right thing to do.

I went to at least two shows a week back then (ahhh....youth). If memory serves, I'd gone to see Dread Zeppelin (a white reggae band that played -- or plays, if they're still goin' -- Zeppelin covers with an Elvis impersonator as a lead singer) at Wetlands Preserve in TriBeCa only the night before, and the t-shirt I'd procured at that show prompted many confused gawks from the gathered metalheads at L'Amour.

In doing a bit of searching around YouTube, I actually came across some video of the FNM and Soundgarden sets that night. I haven't watched all of it, but if you see a guy in the crowd in a white Dread Zeppelin t-shirt, that's probably me.

Here it is below. For good measure, I'm also including my favorite Voivod track beneath it (as they were indeed there, I promise you).

At last glance, Soundgarden, Faith No More and Voivod are all back together and touring. Scarily, Dread Zeppelin are still going as well (you'd think that particular comedy cow would have been milked dry by this point). L'Amour closed in 2004. Brent moved to Los Angeles. I'm still right here.