Flaming Pablum

4th Avenue Metal

I always felt kinda bad for Circus of Power. They seemed like a band I should’ve liked and supported, but it just didn’t happen. I saw them open for various other bands over the course of a couple of years -- notably Danzig and the Dead Boys -- but I never really warmed to them. More to the point, they just never seemed to “fit.”

Sure, they were technically a New York City band…prone to hanging out in suitably sleazeball metal haunts like the Lismar Lounge, the Scrap Bar and The Cat Club (all vanished, of course), but their whole aesthetic seemed kinda out of place.

Ostensibly, Circus of Power aspired to be New York’s answer to L.A.’s post-glam scene (ruled by acts like Faster Pussycat and Guns N’ Roses). As gritty and as tough as they were, they just didn’t make sense, basically playing heavy, bluesy roadhouse rock when the rest of the New York City concentrated on more extreme strains of the genre (ala Anthrax, Overkill, Carnivore and the whole NYHC scene). If Circus of Power were going to connect with anyone, they were probably more likely to find fans in the Midwest sooner than in their native hometown.

Also, it wouldn’t have hurt if they wrote catchier tunes, but that’s just my opinion.

That all said, somebody thought they had big potential, as they signed a major label deal and released a few albums and made an unlikely amount of videos. But, their day never really came.

I'm not writing this post to needlessly pick on Circus of Power. I don't believe they're still a going concern today, but good luck to'em, wherever they are. No, I penned this post as I found myself trawling through YouTube recently, and caught a couple of their videos. This one below for, ahem, "Call of the Wild" struck a particualr chord with me as it was basically shot but a relative stone's throw from my front door.

Herein we see the Circus boys playing their Doorsy brand of tattooed biker/garage-mechanic rawk at the late, lamented Cat Club (which I talked about in some depth here), and strutting around the nearby environs of 4th Avenue, a short offshoot of Park Avenue South that stretches between 14th Street and Astor Place. I can only assume they were going for a "Welcome to the Jungle" vibe with a little Manhattan flavor.

Regardless, there's some nice footage of the interior of the Cat Club, and some fleeting shots of the deli on the southeast corner of East 13th and some "Taxi Driver"-ish scenes of rain-slicked 4th Avenue.

Today, of course, the Cat Club (and all the venues it became afterwards) is long, long gone, as is that deli across the avenue, which is now a newly-opened business called, strangely, Pie Face. The southwest corner of East 13th is now home to a massive, and very expensive-looking hotel. The notion of Circus of Power and their feathered-haired acolytes haunting this neighborhood seems inconceivable today.

Just for laughs, here's another C.o.P. vid, this one filmed on a stretch of landfill in the shadow of the World Trade Center. Other clips filmed around this area include Belfegore's "All That I Wanted" and Lady Pank's "Minus Zero." Anyway, here's Circus of Power trying to assert their New-Yawkitude with "Vices." Spot the locations....

Stuff You Might Have Missed

Hey again, team….

Well, lots of things have been bubbling to the surface of late that I’ve wanted to put up here. As such, some of the items below may prompt you to roll your eyes and exclaim, “Oh, Alex…this is SOOO last week!” Give yourself a gold star. In any case, if you did miss any of this stuff, I’ve gathered it up for your perusing pleasure. Wasn’t that exceptionally swell of me?

Do you know any of the punks in the photo above (taken in Bristol, UK back in the early 80’s?). If so, Virgin wants to hear from you.

Wayne from the Mission picks his favorite albums. Some of his choices might surprise ya.

Can you tell the difference between IKEA and DEATH METAL?

Vulture catches up with Adam Horovitz from the Beasties and finds he doesn’t like “drunk mthrfckrs” in his neighborhood. 

Morgan Freeman narrates “Franklin’s Shitty Vacation.” Okay, it’s not really, but it’s a staggeringly good impression.

Vampire Weekend (above, in Courtlandt Alley off Canal) reviews the new Drake album in lovingly incongruous fashion.

Former Talking Head and bike enthusiast David Byrne may leave New York due to wealth inequality.

It's an argument I've been making for years, but early Ministry kicked ass!!

The ten most dangerous places in New York City (yep, that's one of them up above).

Lee Ving of FEAR plays smooth jazz!

And, to close, here’s a lovely clip of Galaxie 500 playing their stately rendition of “Ceremony” (which I wrote at greater length about here).

Return ... Again ... to Danceteria

Back in –- good lord -– 2009, I wrote a longer, windier rumination on my own fleeting visits to Danceteria in the summer of 1985, but I spotted something on the truly excellent Dangerous Minds this morning that prompted me to audibly gasp (well,…kinda).

Dangerous minds unearthed an old “video love letter” to Danceteria from Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon called “Making the Nature Scene.” While steeped in the arty pretentiousness you might already expect from the concerned parties, the video is notable in that if features several deathly slow pans across the interiors of the fabled club in question. Those with a keen eye for décor and detail might recognize it as the same location wherein Madonna dances with Marcy’s husband and erstwhile “spa king” in “Desperately Seeking Susan” (from whence that blurry screengrab of voguing goths above originates).

I’ve lifted the video from Dangerous Minds’ post, but check out their article anyway, which features a nice, quick recollection from Kim Gordon about Madonna sitting on the lap of Michael Gira (of SWANS). An unsettling image to be sure.

And purely for the sheer Hell of it, here's some appropriately arty footage of the Butthole Surfers performing at Danceteria circa 1986...

Looking Forward, Looking Back

For better or worse, this blog has largely become about looking backwards. I've made this observation before, as it's something that I sometimes worry about -- am I too consumed by the past? I suppose it goes hand-in-hand with my age and station in life. As a married father of two with a boatload of adult responsibilities, my opportunities to explore the cutting edge have been rather pointedly curtailed. In terms of my extracurricular interests -- music and its surrounding culture -- I'm afraid I've become less of a seeker and more of a settler. I'm still curious about new bands, new sounds, new scenes and so forth, but too often am either too busy, too lazy or too dismissive of the newer stuff to give it a proper chance.

Luckily I have a couple of friends who remain pretty plugged in and hip me to the newer music they think I'd dig. My colleague Drew -- a "cutting edge that never seems to dull" (as a former elder colleague once described my similarly-inclined younger self, many centuries ago before I became a cranky, middle-aged schlub) -- sent me the clip below, thinking it'd be right up my alley. Check it out...

Look familiar? Of course it does -- Skye's clip is basically an homage to the opening scene of Tony Scott's "The Hunger," (wherein youthful punkette Anne Magnuson vamps around Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie's pad, oblivious to the fact that she's about to have her throat slashed and sucked dry). I've posted that clip before (quite recently, actually), but here it is again for compare-and-contrast purposes.

Similarly, EV Grieve posted a clip by a band called Au Revoir Simone this week that pays slavish, detailed tribute to my favorite film of all time, Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" (a film I've written about here several times). Check it out.

Here's a glimpse of the original...

Silver Rocket in Sunset Park

This moring, the excellent Bowery Boys put up a link on their Facebook page about 10 free open house NYC events that don't need a reservation, highlighting awesome shit you can do around the city that you've probably never considered, like touring the completely mysterious Grand Lodge of the Masons on 23rd Street or going back inside the old TWA Flight Center (the weird, bird-shaped one I remember going into as a child). It's an amazing resource of cool stuff.

In any case, at the top of the post was this completely intriguing photo that immediately struck a chord with me (see above). At first glance, I thought it was the interior of the old WestBeth complex in the West Village, but upon closer scrutiny, I learned that it was the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park. Here's what the Bowery Boys have to say about it:

Believe it or not, this was designed by Cass Gilbert, the same person who gave us the Woolworth Building.  Completed in 1919, this was the largest military supply base in the United States through World War II, an awe-inspiring space that today is leased to private tenants.. If industrial architecture fascinates you and you haven't yet seen this building up close, make this your first stop of the day. 

I stared at this for a great while, trying to remember why I recognized it.

Then, it hit me.

Christmas is Cancelled

I first wrote about it back in April, but it looks like the time has finally come.

Given that it’s a spot I walk by every weekday on my trek to work, I’ve been staring up at the quintet of Christmas carolers that have stood above the entrance to the seemingly-long-dormant Commodore Criterion building on Madison Square for at least fifteen years, though I remember them being there from even way before that. In fact, I don’t recall a time when they weren’t there.

But today, when I glanced up upon crossing East 26th Street, I noticed what I’d been dreading.

They’ve been removed.

ADDENDUM: Weirdly, I just heard from a friend of mine, who writes:

Christmas Caroler statuettes have been packed up for safe keeping while scaffolding is installed. Porcelanosa (client) may ask New Yorkers what they would like to see done with them.... Ideas? 

Return to Senders

In response to this morning’s post about ‘Destroy TV,’ a reader named Ivan has a question. Ivan writes…

What is the band at 4:13? The 2nd band after the Cramps. The voice is familiar, but I just cannot place it. Never had cable growing up, but I did have it in the mid '90s. Then again, Queens had different public access channels.

Well, the band at 4:13 is a band called The Senders. You can see the full clip of the song in question, “My Baby Glows in the Dark,” below, taken from their 1989 album, Do The Sender Thing.

Though never poised to be a household name, the Senders are indeed a gritty, straightahead rock outfit. You could usually spot their records at garage rock haven, Midnight Records on West 23rd street (long gone now, of course). I want to say I saw them on a double bill with someone at The Continental back in the `90s, but don’t hold me to that, Sender purists. And they are still goin' today.

That awesome shot of them above, meanwhile, was snapped by the great Eugene Merinov about eleven years before the video below was filmed.

In any case, beyond being a nice, rollicking bit of barroom rawwwk, this particular clip is notable for its depiction of a the Lower East Side of the very late 80’s, when burnt out buildings and vacant lots still peppered the landscape. Their rooftop performance here echoes similar clips by less-drunky peers like Beat Rodeo and The Del Lords. Enjoy the trip back through time…

Exhuming 'Destroy Television'

I spoke at some length about local Punk luminary George Tabb here back in 2009, but I stumbled upon the below clip this morning and thought I'd share it.

As mentioned in that earlier post, when not playing guitar for bands like Letch Patrol, Roach Motel, False Prophets, Iron Prostate, the Gynecologists and Furious George, and not penning screeds for MaximumRockandRoll and New York Press, George produced "Destroy Television," one of the "longest-running punk rock cable shows," wherein he'd showcase live performances from local bands, exhume archival footage and indulge in lots of endearingly amateurish cable access shenanigans like a not-so-suburban "Wayne's World."

I can't remember when I first stumbled upon "Destroy TV," but I was instantly a fan. Below find a nine-minute highlight reel, featuring fleeting footage of the False Prophets, the Dead Boys, the Ramones, Furious George, The Dwarves, the Vacant Lot, Sea Monkeys, The Chimpanzees, the Dictators, New Republic, Iron Prostate, Letch Patrol, the Gynecologists, TIm Yohanonhan of MaximumRockandRoll, GG Allin, Johnny Thunders, The Cramps, Unk from Pigpen, the Action Swingers, Stiffs, Inc., Chicken Head and, as they say, much, much more.

Even if you're not a fan of the bands or scene in question, enjoy the vanished local color of Third Avenue's Space at Chase, CBGB and other shots of the Lower East Side.

Sid at the Chelsea: 35 Years Later

I noticed on Facebook -- courtesy of local photography hero Allan Tannenbaum -- that it's been, *gulp*, thirty-five years this week since Sid Vicious was led out of the Chelsea Hotel in handcuffs under suspicion of murdering then-girlfriend Nancy Spungen.

Three-and-a-half decades after the fact, there's still a lot of speculation over whether Sid really was the guilty party in this particular matter. The surrounding fog of punk mythology hasn't made divining the genuine facts of the case any easier, being that most of the characters involved have been reduced to cartoon characters. Some might further allege that they reduced themselves into cartoon characters to begin with, but that's a different argument.

Personally speaking, by this time this all went down in October of 1978, I was literally a day away from turning a ripe 11 years old. I'd heard the name "Sex Pistols" from some of my classmates (notably the preternaturally hip Zachary T. who -- even as a fellow snot-nosed fifth grader -- was light years ahead of the rest of us in terms of clueing into what was cool), but was still otherwise obsessed with KISS and "Star Wars." That would soon change.

I do remember watching the news reports about the case on the local stations, and naively wondering how it was that this lanky, spiky-scaled gent landed such a fitting surname. I probably didn't give it another thought until my friends Ralph M. and Brad O. convinced me to stop listening to KISS and Queen and check out Never Mind the Bollocks.

Today, the name Sid Vicious packs about as much genuine menace as the name Count Chocula, but I still can't walk west on 23rd street and pass the Chelsea Hotel without a `Pistols tune blaring through my head. I doubt I'm alone in that capacity.

Kiss Me on Sixth Avenue

I took the kids uptown today to run a few errands and run around in Central Park. On our way up Sixth Avenue, though, we passed by a particular spot (the southwest corner of West 55th) that always calls to mind an old, favorite photo of KISS. I actually addressed it before on this quiz, but with my iPhone at the ready, I took advantage of it again. 

1975:

2013: