Flaming Pablum

The Dinosaur on Third Avenue

Everyone remembers the big lizard that used to hold court atop the Lone Star Café. Don’t bother looking for it now, of course. Not only is the lizard long gone (now in Texas), but the building that acted as his perch -- first a Schraft’s ice cream parlor, then the Lone Star Café, then a nightclub called Mr. Fuji’s Tropicana, then a weird deli and finally a derelict and empty shell -- has been razed to accommodate the luxury condo that stands in its footprint. That big green lizard (who also logged a little time on a TriBeCa pier during the 90’s) was a local icon. But,… there was another.

Prior to its incarnation as, in its proprietor Trigger’s own words, a "classy dive bar," Continental on Third Avenue at St. Marks Place was, of course, a rollicking live music venue, catering largely to the high-volume predilections of the neighborhood’s punk legacy. I wrote about that incarnation here and here. Prior to that, however, circa the dawn of the 90’s, the venue as actually called The Continental Divide. I remember going once or twice during that incarnation (then to see a band I may have mentioned here before called The Niagaras). It had a very different vibe compared to the venue it would later become.

In any case, while Continental prides itself today on being dark and gritty, back then it was a slightly goofier affair, capped off by the fact that on the roof of the place, there was a goddamn brontosaurus. I promise I’m not making that up, but I cannot seem to find any documentation (beyond Trigger’s vague allusion to the place being “a kitschy dinosaur-themed” venture). Hard to believe, but I promise you it's true.

Does anyone else remember or -– better still -– have photographic evidence to share?

Inundación on University Place

Walking home down University Place this evening, I spotted something that really made me stop and practically spit. 

The burger bar Stand on East 12th between University and Fifth Avenue closed unceremoniously towards the latter end of 2013. Prior to it being Stand, it had been an ill-considered Asian seafood place, and -- prior to that -- a Kinko's. Thought dormant these past several months, it is now newly papered up and titled with new, illuminated signage. The space is shortly to reveal itself as (yet another) Chipotle.

Why does this upset me? Well, despite the fact that there is already a Chipotle just to the north of Union Square on Broadway and another on 8th street between Broadway and University Place, the new spot sits uncomfortably close to Dorado Tacos, Tortaria on East 12th and the long-standing El Cantinero just around the corner and down the block. What's the common thread? All these establishments already serve original and lovingly executed Mexican fare with distinctive aplomb.

We need a Chipotle here like we need another bank branch.

Plugged Into the Matrix

I’ve mentioned the periodical in question a few times here, notably its arguably ham-fisted attempts to encapsulate New York City’s punk scene for its self-styled, smarmily urbane readership. In any event, while still an object of ire and derision for many friends of mine, I’ve always liked New York Magazine. As mentioned in that older post, my family always subscribed to it, much as my wife and I do today.

Well imagine then, if you will, my bliss last week when a representative of the mag reached out to ask if they could re-publish a photograph of mine for their “Approval Matrix” in the back of the book. They were interested in the Instagram shot I posted at the top of this entry from May of last year about Sounds on St. Marks. It is a lovely shot, if I do say so myself.

Having always wanted to contribute to New York (although I’d prefer it if they wanted me to write for them), I gamely said ‘sure,’ and lo and behold, my photograph is now on the back page of the current issue (the one with Alec Baldwin on the cover).

On the Matrix itself, it links to a Gothamist article that utilized a Google Maps image. Online, I don’t seem to get a photo credit (bastards), but if you buy the actual issue, you can see one in microphuckingscopic print on the spine. Yay me!

For posterity’s sake, here’s that photo again.

R.I.P. Sounds!

Feelin' Kinda Flatiron

Feels vaguely disingenuous to be raiding Facebook for content here, but following in the footsteps of the post above, here’s another cool little find, this one courtesy of a user on the also-quite-excellent Manhattan Before 1990 page. Herewith a quick little clip of the Flatiron district circa 1970. It’s fairly amazing.

Twenty-Two and Five in Seventy-Six

Just a quickie.

Spotted this one on the excellent Facebook page, Dirty Old 1970s' New York City. Herewith another photo by the great Edmund V. Gillon of Fifth Avenue, looking north just a few steps shy of East 22nd Street circa the Bicentennial year of 1976.

If you stand in this very spot today and look in the same direction, not that much has really changed, although there is a massive hotel now a few blocks north of the Empire State Building. 

The building on the right hand side of the photograph (with the clock) is now, of course, Restoration Hardware, and has been for some time. 

In 1976, I was a third grader on the Upper East Side, so didn't see much of this neck of the woods at the time. In later years, when I started exploring Manhattan, though, I do remember a tiny record store (c'mon, you knew that was coming), tucked into the middle of the south side of the block on 22nd Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway,... in what would now be the area closest to the cash registers at Restoration Hardware. It wasn't an especially distinctive record shop (i.e. it didn't cater to any specific genres or anything), but I still vividly remember it. Anyone else?

Anyway, do go check out Dirty Old 1970s' New York City, and see more of Gillon's work here.

ADDENDUM: Here's that approximate spot this morning (on my way to work):

Still Unsane After All These Years

It may seem quaint, but twenty-five years ago, New York City sounded like this...

Back to the Bottom Line

I popped out the other evening to make a quick visit to Shakespeare & Co. on Broadway. My daughter's caught the Harry Potter book bug, and had just finished the second novel. Wanting to feed her voracious need to keep reading, I volunteered to go procure her the next book in the series. As such, I found myself walking south on Mercer Street just as it was starting to flurry. I popped in my headphones and hit play, my skull filling with the adrenalized sprint of "Three Sisters" by the great Jim Carroll Band.

The track selection was oddly fitting, as I suddenly found myself walking by the former site of storied NYC rock club, The Bottom Line. Not quite as lionized as fellow-since vanished venues like CBGB or Max's Kansas City, The Bottom Line played an equally crucial role in Manhattan's gestation as a hotbed of music. The list of luminaries to grace the intimate stage of the Bottom Line is long, varied and distinguished (listen to the testimonials in the video below for ample examples of same).

Personally speaking, I didn't actually make it there that many times. I saw only a handful of shows there -- notably Jim Carroll (doing a reading of his poetry), an Irish folk band called The Furies and a rousing performance by Gavin Friday which involved the former Virgin Prune leaping from stage to table with dramatic aplomb. By the time I was a regular gig-goer, the Bottom Line was usually playing host to yawnsome acts like The Roches and The Church of Betty. I liked my live shows a little more visceral.

As has been pointed out here many times, the space the Bottom Line formerly occupied is now a rigorously non-distinct academic facility for NYU today (and currently shrouded in scaffolding). Even still, I still think of Take No Prisoners, the venomously bawdy live album by Lou Reed recorded live at The Bottom Line, every time I walk by the corner of East 4th and Mercer. I spoke a bit about that album on this post.

In any case, I stumbled upon this clip of former Bottom Line regulars, and thought I'd pass it on...

Hopelessly DEVOted

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I can’t tell you how sad the news of the death of Bob “Bob 2” Casale of DEVO made me today, it being the second member of one of my all-time favorite bands to die prematurely.

Oh, sure, I’d had other “all-time favorite” bands before DEVO -– notably KISS and Pink Floyd, but everybody loved KISS and Pink Floyd at the time. Declaring one’s fandom for either didn’t exactly put one out on any precarious limbs. It was, however, my fervent immersion in all things DEVO that, I’d suggest, turned me into the arguably insufferable music geek/knowitall/jackass/curmudgeon that I am today.

My first experience with DEVO was at my Uncle Carly’s place way out in the Berkshires. We were visiting for the weekend, and I was about eleven or twelve years old. My sister and I were allowed to stay up and watch “Saturday Night Live” (then still a very big deal), which we wouldn’t normally have been allowed to do. Comedian Fred Willard was hosting, and introduced a band called DEVO (I want to say they played the “Jocko Homo” footage with Boojie Boy and General Boy first), and then the band appeared in their yellow suits. I remember being so perturbed by the sight of these guys, and wasn’t quite sure whether it was a real band or just another sketch on the show.

In short order, their name got around. Their debut LP, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! became a required acquisition. It sounds quaint now, but I can’t tell you how much people just DID NOT LIKE this band. Seemingly more so than any ridiculous heavy metal ensemble or pugnacious punk outfit, the mere invocation of DEVO’s name used to make people actively agitated. I remember wearing a DEVO t-shirt on Lexington Avenue on the Upper East Side some Saturday, and a complete stranger well into his 30’s with a cop/porn mustache and a mullet came right up to me –- this gormless geek in a DEVO t-shirt, barely into his teens –- to emphatically state: “Yo, man…fuckin’ DEVO SUCKS!” I took it as an affirmation that I was on the right side.

Prior to their “big hit single” (and even afterwards), DEVO fandom drew a line in the sand. I remember several of my friends being pointedly put off by my bug-eyed espousal of their music, their message, their aesthetic, as if I’d joined some cult that involved voluntarily taping a “KICK ME IN THE FACE” sign to my chest.

DEVO was my first ever proper concert. Radio City Music Hall on Halloween night 1981. The New Traditionalists tour. Under a block away that same evening, FEAR would abortively play on “Saturday Night Live” (with future members of Minor Threat and the Cro-Mags in tow). My second ever concert was DEVO a year later on the Oh No! It’s Devo tour, downtown at the Palladium on East 14th Street (it’s footprint now occupied by a NYU dorm and a fucking Trader Joe’s). I can’t tell you how much of an affect these performances had on me.

Anyway, blah blah blah. I became an ardent Devotee for life. They’ve meant a great deal to me. They still do. And always will.

In any case, rest in peace, Bob 2. Duty Now!

More about DEVO on Flaming Pablum from over the years...

Why Brooklyn Sucks: McCarren Pool Disses Devo
Devo Comes Back
Devo at Hammerstein Ballroom, 8/05
In Praise Of...Q:Are We Not Men?

Of Punk, Price and Product

In 1989, an indie lable named Restless Records saw fit to release am ambitious-albiet-somewhat-revisionist box set by one of my favorite bands, Buzzcocks. The starkly named Product arrived on discriminating music shop shelves in a perfect, silver box, culling together a potent arsenal of the British Punk band's oeuvre, omitting selections by their earliest incarnation as led by since-departed vocalist Howard Devoto. Regardless, Product collected the rest of the then-defunct foursome's recordings in one tidy package, appended with an extra disc, the hotly-coveted Many Parts, which featured a bracing live set and some super rare odds and ends. All told, Product was an absolute must for any Buzzcocks fan.

There was one problem. In 1989, I was freshly sprung from college, paylessly interning at SPIN Magazine, doing pick-up administrative work at an Upper West Side real estate agency and occasionally gallery-sitting at a gallery in SoHo (which I described on this post). I was living at home (like a loser), so I was saving money there, but I was otherwise not raking in the dough. Like, at all.

Product, meanwhile, in all its pristine, lovingly boxed splendor (the first real box set for a Punk band?) cost a whopping $35.00. At the time, that was an unthinkable amount of cash. Rob B., my primary co-hort in feverish music immersion (not to be confused with Rob C. or Rob D.), was similarly financially contricted. Also still living at home, while I was earning pennies answering the phone at a second-floor art gallery in SoHo, he was simiarly scraping by working at a neighborhood video rental place in his native Queens called Video Box. Together, we could barely pool together paltry beer money, let alone pony up the cash for our beloved Buzzcocks.

As such, in swift course, Product became an increment of financial measurement by which all goods and services were quantified. "Leanne's rent is crazy," Rob would exclaim about a friend. "She basically has to pay 48 copies of Product a month!" "I'd love to try that new East Village sushi place," I'd counter, "but a meal there is easily at least a copy and a half of Product."

In November of 1989, we did go see Buzzcocks' triumphant reunion show at the New Ritz on West 54th Street (the former site of Studio 54). A year or so after that, the band (albeit without original drummer John Maher, who left again to resume his career racing cars) would release the Alive Tonight e.p. (see super-rare video for same below). Honestly, I never actually procured a copy of Product. Being that I already owned most of the music on it in one form or another, I could never justify the expenditure. I did manage to track down a copy of the mighty Many Parts disc (featuring rollicking renditions of "Breakdown" and "Time's Up") courtesy of the soon-to-vanish Sounds on St. Mark's Place.

To this day, Rob B. and I still use Product as a unit of cost, despite the fact that Product is long out of print (and the lable that released it long out of business) and the box set itself has become (for most) the quitessence of obsolescence. In time, Rob and I both secured more lucrative variations of employment to the extent wherein the weighty cost of Product wasn't so intimidating.

Twenty-five years later, Buzzcocks are still going (and currently crowd-sourcing funds for a new album on PledgeMusic). Most of the downtown Manhattan records shops wherein Rob and I fleetingly held copies of Product in our sweaty palms are long, long gone. In all likelihood, all the tracks from same are out on the `Net somewhere. You can now attain your own copy of Product via eBay for sums not too removed from the original asking price.

 

Vintage Buzzcocks:

Buzzcocks circa 1991:

Back to the Scrap Bar: Coda

It must seem somewhat peculiar for me to go banging on about The Scrap Bar when so many other locales are circling the drain these days, especially since The Scrap Bar basically closed up shop in the mid-90's.

Yeah, it's been long gone for quite some time, but since posting that entry about the place the other day, it's been on my mind, so when I found myself strolling south on MacDougal Street yesterday, I figured I'd go pay my respects.

As you can see here and here, the former exterior of the Scrap Bar boasted some far-out metalwork designed to broadcast the post-apocalypitc bunker aesthetic of the place. In most instances, when places close up shop, the slate is wiped clean, and all evidence of that particular incarnation vanishes. Not so with the Scrap Bar.

I'm not sure what takes place now -- if anything -- in the subterranean space the Scrap Bar formerly occupied, but I was heartened to see some remnants of the old exterior's metallic spillover still in evidence on MacDougal Street. It was probably too much work to fully dismantle.