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My comrade Iann Robinson forwarded this little find on Facebook, and it's the type of thing that's liable to blow someone's mind, if it's legit. As the story goes, here's Bowie covering Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."
The story so far...
A chance meeting in 1983 had David Bowie, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook chatting away over beers in the Kings Arms in Salford. “…So we were all there just having a laugh and we joked that he should come n have a jam with us, then next minute - well, it was the next day actually, but i didn’t expect he’d definitely come by - and we were in the practice rooms and we were playing Love Will Tear Us Apart and I was like, f%$k we’re playing Love Will Tear Us Apart with David Bowie singing, this is crazy. We never released it - Bowie took a recording of it, and just layered some more vocals on for fun, sent it back to me…”
Want to hear it? Click here.
ADDENDUM: `Tis another hoax. Chris O'Learly of Bowie Songs writes....
Just to re-emphasize this point (as i was asked about this on Twitter), and to quote Tom Baker in City of Death: This is a fake.
not only is the singer one of the shoddier DB impersonators I’ve ever heard (the guy who sings on the fake Bowie “Penny Lane” is much better) but the backstory just makes no sense. Bowie’s “Serious Moonlight” tour ran from May to December 1983 and he was barely in the UK at all during it. Before that he was mixing/mastering Let’s Dance in NYC and rehearsing for the tour in the US. He also didn’t live in the UK at the time. So the idea that he’d be hanging out randomly in Salford in ‘83 is…not likely.
Could it have been after a New Order gig? Ok: Here’s a list of them in ‘83. The only ones that make any logistical sense are the two Manchester gigs. July 20? No, Bowie’s in Philadelphia then. So that leaves Jan. 26.
So in order for this to be real, you have to believe that Bowie takes time off from finishing Let’s Dance to fly to Manchester to see New Order at the Hacienda, then he hangs with them in Salford afterward and (he’s still there a day later?) goes to the “practice rooms” with them and cuts this. And his presence at the Hacienda isn’t noted by any of the music rags at the time, nor has this meeting ever been mentioned in any Bowie or New Order bio.
But people will believe what they like, so I’m sure this thing will circulate for the rest of the century.
Oh well, there you have it. Too bad. Here's a bit of vintage Dave to soften the blow...
I never actually made it to the Kitchen, which is sort of a shame, given its storied history. I do know it played host to some of my favorites, ranging from the giddily juvenile Beastie Boys (see a clip of them performing there here) through SWANS. In any case, news came down the pike this week that The Getty Research Institute recently acquired The Kitchen Archive, ca. 1971-1999 which contains “more than 6,000 video and audiotapes documenting performances and events at The Kitchen,” as well as “more than 130 linear feet of photographs and archival materials.” Sounds great, right?
According to the website, the material’s in the process of being cataloged and processed, but watch this space for details.
Then, I noticed, that you already can check out the archives via the Kitchen’s official site. Duh. In any case, go check it out.
A little while back, I picked up the hotly touted "Autobiography" by Morrissey -- albeit the American version, which purportedly finds some salacious passages regarding Moz's forays into homosexuality excised, quite mysteriously. While richly written, it's often somewhat impenetrable (paragraph breaks are few and far between). So, as a breather, I recently picked up a copy of James Greene Jr.'s "This Music Leaves Stains" whilst killing time before a haircut at Shakespeare & Co. Billing itself as "the complete story of The Misfits," I may have had my doubts (as Greene himself admits, a few of the band members refused to participate), but being that I'm a dyed-in-the-wool fan of the band, I couldn't say no to it.
Given that Greene himself is several years my junior, I presumptuously figured his book would be somewhat threadbare on credible facts, as how could someone who was born in 1979 (as the author's Facebook page asserts) really be of any authority on matters that transpired before his birth? Disregarding my initial blinkered, agist generalizing, I am very happy to report that Greene's done an amazing job. I'm only halfway through, but "This Music Leaves Stains" is a great, thorough, entertaining and illuminating read, rife with curious minutia. If you're a fan of the The Misifts, you really owe it to yourself to check it out.
Quite early on, though, Greene rolls out an anecdote that I have to confess I'd never heard before, and it's one that addresses a question that I'd always wondered about. Read on...
Back in 2010, some readers might remember an entry I posted about John Lennon's tenure in Manhattan. While, yes, it's well documented that the former Beatle (above as captured by the great Allan Tannebaum) was deeply enamored of New York City, details always seemed pretty sparse on the particulars. Right, who wouldn't love living in the friggin' Dakota, but what else? Where in the city did John like hanging out? Did he have a favorite pizza place? Was he a regular at Zabar's? Did he peruse texts at The Strand? What was his favorite dive bar? As I wrote back then...
I gather John and Yoko were largely sequestered away in that historic apartment for most of their time, rearing little Sean, but what about Manhattan did John really dig when he did step out the door (especially given his cited affinity for "steppin' out")? Did John ever catch Television or The Ramones at CBGB? What did he think about New York's burgeoning punk rock scene? Did he hang out at Max's Kansas City?
Well, in discussing the tenure of guitarist Bobby Steele in the ranks of the Misfits (that's him up top on the right with the guitar, he later of the Undead, and a die-hard East Villager), Greene writes of an incident in 1979....
Slightly more embarrassing was [Bobby] Steele's interaction with John Lennon at the Mudd Club five months later -- soused beyond belief, the Beatle-worshiping Steele inadvertently vomited all over his hero's feet just seconds after introducing himself.
I'm sure there's more anecdotal evidence to illuminate this particular tale, or is it ultimately just some fanciful rock n' roll lore? Either way, I'm so curious as to the particulars. According to this stately rundown of Misfits gigs, the band never actually played at the Mudd Club (although The Undead did -- see below), which unfortunately dispels my initial projection that Lennon had gone to the venue to check them out. Chances are more likely that the former Beatle and the shortly-to-be-ex Misfit (soon to be replaced by Jerry Only's burly little brother Doyle on guitar) were both out clubbin', and fate fleetingly put them messily together in the same room that frequently played host to the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Byrne and Lydia Lunch down the grimy path of Courtlandt Alley at 77 White Street.
About a year later, Bobby Steele would form The Undead (with future Cop Shoot Cop bassist Chris "Jack Natz" Nantz) in October of 1980, the same month Doyle would take over for Steele in the Misfits. Two months after that, John Lennon would be shot outside the entrance to the Dakota on West 72nd Street and Central Park West. The Mudd Club would stay open until 1983, the same year the Glen Danzig-led incarnation of the Misfits would acrimoniously flame out.
Here in 2014, Bobby Steele is presumably still living in the East Village, and still plays live. After reforming in 1995 without Glen Danzig, the Misfits carry on today. Glen Danzig continues to front Danzig, and frequently brings Doyle onstage to celebrate the Misfits' past (this is arguably as close to a full-scale reunion of the Misfits as one is likely to see). The building at 77 White Street that formerly housed the Mudd Club is now a pricey condominium. John Lennon, meanwhile, remains dead.
In any case, do pick up James Greene Jr.'s "This Music Leaves Stains," and check out its accompanying Tumblr.
ADDENDUM: So shortly after publishing this entry here, I posted it over on Facebook, where my comrade Tim Broun of Stupefaction looped in fabled Mudd Club doorman Richard Boch. Shortly aftewards, Mr. Boch himself weighed in on the proceedings, proclaiming....
This is total fabrication. Urban legend. There's even a version where the 'puked on shoes' belonged to Andy Warhol.
..so, take that as you will. I suspected it sounded too good to be totally true. Have you heard this story (or variations thereof?)
And since this post involves Bobby Steele and New York City, it's another fine excuse to dust off this favorite clip, finding our Bobby limping around early 80's Manhattan and brandishing a switchblade, ...as one does.
As I mentioned back on this post, it's not unlikely to spot Bobby Steele still strolling around the East Village. I've spoken with him a couple of times, and he's always incredibly gracious and chatty. We connected on Facebook for a while, however, and I learned that he's somewhat surpringly a raging Republican of the conspiracy-theorizing variety. Here he is more recently ... playing at a benefit for the New Jersey Tea Party. I wonder what the Tea Partiers thought of Steele's old school horror punk?
Despite the fact that I was just tearing John Varvatos a new one in my last post, I found myself walking up the Bowery with my daughter Charlotte ealrier today, and remembered a photo I'd snapped back in June of 2006 of my then-infant daughter in her stroller, incongruously parked in front of the decidedly toddler-unfriendly CBGB. Thought I'd bring that image to to date.
2006:
2014:
This is all, of course, only my opinion.
Look, it’s no mystery that I don't like John Varvatos. Not just because he’s a fatuous fashionista who has slavishly attempted to appropriate the legacy of CBGB by opening up his bespoke boutique in its beleaguered footprint, but it’s more that he just seems SOOOO DESPERATE to be accepted and taken seriously in the music community, despite the fact that he so clearly JUST DOES NOT GET IT!
Obviously, opinions differ greatly on these points, and I’ve certainly never met the man. That’s him up above, by the way. He’s the bald gent on the right sharing a microphone with the guy who very much isn’t Ace Frehley. Maybe Varvatos is a completely cool gent, but I think I speak for a large swathe of silly rock fans who take frowny offense to his monied reimagining of 315 Bowery. If you step inside this pricey haberdashery, you’ll find the walls floridly adorned with rock memorabilia. Varvatos’ affinity for rock n’ roll is presented well to the fore, but there’s something just so clunky about it. I mean, in the front, there’s a selection of lovingly presented album covers, but a huge number of them are from acts with absolutely zero connection to the former venue’s history. I mean, Rush, Bob Seger, Santana, Ted Nugent – these folks never trod the fabled boards in the rear of that room. Regardless of your stance on the argument, CBGB is as close to the Kaaba of punk rock as can be quantified. Why, then – if you’re so inclined on cultivating its enduring cool – clog the place up with invocations of acts who’d have never darkened its doors?
Another example of Varvatos getting it wrong is his latest campaign, featuring my childhood heroes (or two of them, at least) in KISS. As much I’ll continue to defend my fandom for (vintage) KISS `til I’m purple in the face, having them team up (doubtlessly for a princely sum) with John Varvatos to play within the former walls of CBGB (a venue they very certainly never played) just feels, well …. WRONG. Again, as much as I love KISS, they almost single-handedly define everything the original alumni of CBGB set out destroy. KISS embody excess, artifice and avarice (by their own admission), and even though they paired down their stage show (attempting to give a not-so-subtle nod to their comparatively stripped-down days circa Dressed to Kill), they remain one of the very last bands that belong on that particular stage.
YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG, JOHN!!!
Check out the clip of same beneath.
The self-mythologizing bluster of Messrs. Simmons & Stanley notwithstanding, it’s a pretty hollow stunt. “John Varvatos invited 200 guests to 315 Bowery for an intimate performance,” reads the preamble, “They were not told who they were about to see.”
Translation: They probably weren’t actual KISS fans.
The whole thing just reeks of self-congratulatory exclusivity. And money.
My third quibble with Varvatos has to do with a book he's hawking on his website, that being "Rock in Fashion." Is it a surprise that he's published a book about his dual loves of music and style? No, of course not. Ostensibly, there's nothing wrong with that. And I should point out that I've never cracked the binding on this tome, although the fact that it costs sixty big ones doesn't suggest that I will anytime soon. I know I shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but.....
To grace the stately and lovingly bound front of this handsome coffee-table text, Varvatos selected a storied Mick Rock photograph of Syd Barrett, then recently deposed from the ranks of the nascent Pink Floyd, circa the troubled recording of his debut solo album, The Madcap Laughs. Under the bedraggled apparition of the late Floyd leader is the legend, "JOHN VARVATOS -- Rock in Fashion."
I wince.
Why does this bother me? Well, here's where the pedantic rock geek in me (never far from the surface) gets really testy. Photographer Mick Rock was a good friend of Barrett's, and captured the then-notoriously fragile musician in some disarmingly candid and fraught images. By even the least passionate accounts of the recording of The Madcap Laughs, it is well established that Syd Barrett was stealthily unravelling. While he may look like an insouciantly cool cat in that photograph, even passive Floyd fans know that he wasn't entirely "all there" at the time.
As I understand it, the car pictured behind him had been a gift that he'd simply left on the street to rot and erode (there's another image from the shoot with a police sticker on the windshield warning its owner -- an impartial, dead-eyed Syd -- of its dereliction). Over the ensuing decades, Mick Rock's pictures of Barrett have become synonymous with the musician's tragic legacy. While striking and genuinely iconic, I'm not sure it's appropriate that they should be used to celebrate Syd's fashion sense, an infinitesimally incidental portion of the narrative. But, again, Varvatos doesn't get that. Clothes, I guess, are his big thing.
Much like my tongue-in-cheek indictment of that insufferable Counting Crows guy, I suppose I shouldn't be so hard on John Varvatos, given that we obviously share so many common interests. I just wish he'd try a little harder to actually get it right.
I’m not going to lie. I never liked Pizzicato Five. Several of my friends were quite into them at the time (my friend Sam used to play their single “Twiggy” incessantly, and it made me want to set him on fire), but I just never warmed to their kitschy-cutesy retro-shtick. Moreover, there was so much better music going on (in my opinion) during their mid-90’s heyday that I simply didn’t feel I needed to give them the time of day.
In any case, my good friend Erik recently shot me this clip of theirs from their New York-centric 1994 album Overdose, and it’s a weird trip back to the SoHo of 1994.
As I suggested above, 1994 was an amazing year for music. Sure, there were those obvious, roundly celebrated albums by artists like Jeff Buckley, Blur, Oasis, Massive Attack, Portishead, Weezer and Green Day, but 1994 also gave us what I’d consider pivotal releases from Flaming Pablum-favorites like Killing Joke, Cop Shoot Cop and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. I’m sure you have your own faves as well.
The weird thing is that I still kinda consider 1994 recent, which is ridiculous, as it’s now officially TWO GODDAMN DECADES AGO. Never is that more evident than in the video below. Even if – like me – you’re left cold and clammy by Pizzicato Five’s spindly brand of precious pop, this video for “On the Sunny Side of the Street” is well worth a viewing for the eye-popping depiction of a SoHo in transition … still endearingly pockmarked with posters, street art and its former patina of good ol’ rusty grime. Walk down these same streets today, and you’d barely recognize them.
Enjoy.
Well, fuck it, that was a hopeless waste of time.
Everything I wrote about the reasons for putting this blog on hold are still true. I’m still dealing with a problem that arrived out of the clear blue sky and is here to stay for a while (and hopefully only a while). My family is dealing with it, and we are in a better place than we had been with it. We’re on the road to recovery. It’s going to be a long journey to our desired destination, but at least the wheels are turning.
In the interim, while I’ve been preoccupied and miserable about that, I’ve also felt strangely out of sorts from not posting here (and, as a result, have probably been overdoing it on Facebook). So, what’s the point of my blog fatwa? I invariably derive more enjoyment out of composing this woefully indulgent vanity project than anyone else does from reading it, so why am I punishing myself? Yes, I’m in a different headspace these days, but blocking off one of my main avenues of pleasure right now isn’t doing me any favors.
Another reason to abandon the hiatus has been a veritable onslaught of topically-suitable potential content in the last several days, most of it of the unfortunately depressing sort. The news of closings has been as grim as it’s been stealthy, from the overnight shuttering of Milady’s in SoHo (one of my favorite haunts back in the 90’s) to the coming vanishing of the East Village’s 7A (pictured above behind my sneaker-clad offspring). Coming swiftly after the closing of Silver Spurs on Broadway, Jack’s on University Place, Sapporo in the East Village, Gray’s Papaya on West 8th Street and the mounting evidence that J&R Music World on Park Row is closing, it seems that the piecemeal destruction of what’s left of the New York City I know and love had reached a new, frenetic and omnivorous velocity. I stopped into Japonica (my local favorite sushi restaurant) and was chatting with a staff member there, and there were murmurs that it too may not be long for this world. How is this all happening??
So, anyway, the hiatus is over. I may not be posting as frequently, but there's no point in continuing this stupid ruse.
In the short term, thanks so much for your kind words of support and encouragement. Please keep reading.
Yes, I know I’m continuing to break my self-imposed hiatus, but I would be remiss in not posting this.
First spotted via Gothamist, herewith the Museum of the City of New York’s sprawling collection of photographs of New York City by one Edmund V. Gillon. It is much like this discovery from back in 2012.
Gillon’s pictures (like the one below of the Christadora House on Avenue B, or the one above of my beloved Cedar Tavern on University Place) capture a city that is barely recognizable to is contemporary incarnation.
All in all, there are 21 pages of amazing images. Be prepared to spend hours. You’re welcome.
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