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I spotted the below photo on the ever excellent site of J.Yuenger, taken by one Walter Rosenblum in 1950. It's titled simply "Boy On Roof," and shot on Monroe Street on the Lower East Side (currently home to the Downtown Music Gallery). I love the angles and the bridge in the background.
It reminds me quite a bit of this iconic scene from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."
It’s easy to rhapsodize the gritty NYC of old, especially given how staid, safe, sanitized, corporate, avaricious and soulless the city is today. I’m certainly guilty of it. Myself and a cabal of other bloggers seem to constantly hearken back to eras when Manhattan was a more interesting, more diverse, more colorful and more dangerous place. We romantic cize it as if carrying a torch for a long-lost, unrequited love.
It’s prudent to remember, however, that the danger was real — despite whatever excitement and vibrancy came with it.
Somewhat uncomfortably tied to the release of J.C. Chandor’s new film “A Most Violent Year” (which I haven’t seen) comes the website NYC,1981, an ambitious and captivating collection of essays and pictures from the fabled year in question, touching on subsections like style, art & culture, music, graffiti and living. For someone like me, it’s a veritable candy store (although I note somewhat sniffily that they’ve covering a few things I wrote about ages ago, but I’m just a tiny little blog at the end of the day).
I haven’t had a load of time to explore it, but I note that my comrade, the scrupulous Jeremiah Moss is a contributor. I don’t recognize the other folks, but if Jeremiah’s involved, it’s worthwhile.
There’s also this mini-documentary
Here’s a fun one.
Being that it’s shot in gritty, grainy black n’ white, this seven minute film — shot on 16mm Bolex — by renowned tv archivist Ira Gallen of downtown Manhattan dates back to 1971, but it looks a bit older.
Some portions of it are easier to make out and recognize than others, but watch long enough and familiar locations will slowly roll into view. Though billed as “East Village,” Gallen's film ventures elsewhere. Stroll down St. Marks Place, and into the leafy byways of Tompkins Square Park (a decade and change before the squatters, punks and rioters) then zip across town to Washington Square Park, rife with giggling children, hirsute, strumming folkies and beardy Marxist prosthletyzers.
What a difference 43 years makes, eh?
So, I’ve been seeing the posters for this forthcoming TV Land series, “Younger,” which is being brought to us by Darren Star, the dubiously monikered gent who unleashed “Sex and the City” on the world.
Honestly speaking, I don’t know anything about “Younger.” I’m clearly not the target demographic for it. I’m not supposed to like it. It’s not for me.
That said, I kept pausing when I saw this poster for it.
It looks like the woman in the middle is wearing a vintage 999 t-shirt (adorned with the flyer below).
Like I said, I don’t know anything about the show. Maybe she’s a big fan of vintage punk? Maybe she bought CONCRETE and it changed her life?
Somehow, I doubt it.
For what it’s worth, here’s 999 from 1980, playing NYC’ s own Irving Plaza.
Flipping through my Facebook feed today, I was struck by an item posted by my long-ago former-place-of-pseudo employment, SPIN (I interned for the magazine for several payless months in 1989). Here’s the headline that caught my eye:
Punk Legends L7 Will Reunite for Festival Appearances This Summer.
Personally speaking, I really don’t give a damn. As far as I’m concerned, L7 were never much to get too excited about. You, of course, may beg to differ. That’s fine, but let’s get something straight. L7 were never “punk legends.” Both words are woefully misapplied. My ire piqued, I clicked on the link. Here’s the first sentence, which I barely made it through….
After nearly fifteen years of inactivity, '80s Los Angeles punk pioneers L7 have just announced their first reunion performances at festivals...”
“`80s Los Angeles punk pioneers”????
`80s LOS ANGELES PUNK PIONEERS?????
Look, not to get all slavishly pedantic, but L7 didn’t put out their first album until 1990, so let’s cut the “80s” crap from the get-go.
But “punk pioneers”???? PUNK????? PIONEERS??
What the HELL, SPIN? And this isn’t even about me being an insufferable music geek and self-styled knowitall, this is about SIMPLE FACTS. Calling L7 “punk pioneers” is just a goddamn LIE.
Listen, at the end of the day, while they were never my particular cup of tea, there’s nothing wrong with L7. My incredulousness about this piece has little-to-nothing to do with the band. If you want to groove out to them, you go right ahead. Knock your socks off. I’m sure they’re awesome individuals who are slavishly committed to their music. I'm not even going to add a picture of them to this post, because -- quite simply -- this isn't about L7.
Let’s just not call them “punk pioneers,” shall we?
What bothers me is that these statements were asserted under the once-estimable banner of SPIN Magazine. Now, granted, SPIN hasn’t really mattered in a long, long time (and some may question that it ever did). But I’ll say this: As the first mainstream American glossy monthly to endeavor to cover genuinely left-of-the-dial music (to say nothing of their early coverage — largely courtesy of Celia Farber — of the AIDS crisis), SPIN was once a credible force to be reckoned with.
Sure, editor-in-chief Bob Guccione, Jr. was arguably a bit of jerk, but SPIN still dared to cover punk, hardcore, indie and nascent hip-hop while Rolling Stone was still tirelessly putting the same old established warhorses on its covers and between its pages. SPIN employed folks like John Leland, Charles Aaron, Legs McNeil, Pat Blashil, and frequently took bold, fresh approaches to stories. Speaking as a devoted SPIN reader for many years, I never missed an issue (even after I’d seen in the inside of the sausage factory). I may not have always agreed with their editorial declarations (especially Guccione’s tirelsss advocacy of John Cougar Mellencamp), but for the most part, SPIN knew its shit and was much further ahead of the curve than Rolling Stone would ever hope to be.
That’s all ancient history, I guess. But calling L7 “punk pioneers”?
That’s some pretty disappointing, amateurish shit.
Well, it turns out NYC was largely spared the wrath of this "historic" snow storm. At the very least, we got some nice photos out of it....
Seriously, it's not molten lava. It's just snow. Calm the Hell down.
Back in 2010, you may remember a post wherein I wondered about John Lennon’s New York City. Obviously, it’s well established that he was deeply enamored of this town, but what were the specifics? Beyond hanging out with Yoko and Sean at the Dakota and maybe walking around Central Park, what did he like to do? Did he have a favorite pizza place? Did he like browsing through books at The Strand? Was he fond of perusing the perfume aisles of Bloomingdales? Did he just enjoy strolling through Greenwich Village (as photographer Brian Hammill caught him doing above in 1972)? What was John’s New York?
There is that anecdote I alluded to about John supposedly meeting Bobby Steele (then guitarist for the Misfits) at the Mudd Club, wherein the drunk soon-to-be ex-Misfit reportedly puked at the former Beatle’s feet, but there are evidently myriad variations of that particular story in which both the puker and the puked-upon are different luminaries. I believe there have been photos of John hanging out at Studio 54, but I love the idea of Lennon checking out the post-punk scene at the Mudd Club.
But speaking of post-punk, having recently finished Tony Rettman’s hardcore oral history “NYHC,” I’ve moved onto “Who Killed Mr. Moonlight?,” the new memoir by David J. Haskins, better known as simply David J., the perma-sunglassed bass player of Bauhaus and Love & Rockets. As a longtime fan, I’m slavishly enjoying it, and practically finished it in a single sitting.
In any case, during a chapter wherein the eloquently witty bass player recounts Bauhaus’ first visit to New York City, J. writes….
The following afternoon, I made my way down to Greenwich Village for some last-minute record shopping before we flew home. I bought a John Lennon bootleg at Bleecker Bob’s, where I learnt that, had I arrived ten minutes earlier, I would have seen Mr. Lennon himself rummaging through the crates.
“Yeah, he comes in here all the time,” Bob told me, “and ya know, he’s this skinny little guy. It’s funny, `cos ya tend to think of John Lennon as, like, this big guy, right? But he ain’t big at all. Skinny little guy!” (Three months later, I would be devastated by the news that Lennon had been shot and killed outside of his apartment building.)
David J. also expounds, at one point, that the song “Who Killed Mr. Moonlight?” off Bauhaus’ penultimate break-up album, Burning from the Inside, was ostensibly about John Lennon’s death. So, there ya go.
Anyway, I love the notion of John Lennon rifling through the racks at Bleecker Bob’s. I remember seeing Marc Almond of Soft Cell there, as well as the full membership of Agnostic Front….not that either are entirely comparable to a Beatle-spotting.
I also love this anecdote, as it further humanizes the somewhat polarizing figure of Bleecker Bob Plotnick himself (above in front of the original MacDougal incarnation of the store). Sure, he was thorny curmudgeon, but a genuine NYC character in his own right.
Oddly enough, while Googling around for further insight, I came across this curious page about location shots for an invariably abortive 2006 film about Lennon’s death called — wait for it — “The Killing of John Lennon,” featuring the Mark David Chapman character perusing the racks of — WAIT FOR IT, ONCE AGAIN — Bleecker Bob’s.
The complete Bleecker Bob's chronicles on Flaming Pablum....
Farewell to Bleecker Bob's
Back to Bleecker Bob's
Bedtime for Bleecker Bob's
Freezing Out Bleecker Bob's
Closing Time for Bleecker Bob's
Bleecker Bob's Last Day
Not So Sweet
Bleecker Bob's Flips the Final Finger
Back to Bonaparte
Bleecker Bob's today.....
For a great many folks, I’d imagine, mention 2B on Avenue B -- otherwise known as The Gas Station -- and the first thing to spring to mind will be a notorious early summer performance in 1993 by these photogenic fellows…..
Yes, it was GG Allin & the Murder Junkies (who I’ve spoken about here a few times) who arguably put The Gas Station on the map (and probably helped spell its demise). That GG Allin's legacy is inexorably connected with The Gas Station is probably a sore spot for the artists who originally conceived of the place, but that can't be helped now.
I’ve written about the Gas Station itself a few times myself (notably here and here) but Jeremiah Moss posted a great entry on Vanishing New York yesterday that goes into much greater depth about the origins of the former art space/performance venue, largely thanks to a recently unearthed video that goes way beyond its status as merely the final battlefield of GG Allin’s famously putrid campaign of degradation.
If you’re still curious about that fabled GG Allin show, merely google “GG Allin’s last show” or “…last day alive,” or simply click here. Of course, you should be warned. It ain’t pretty.
Some of you might remember a post I put up in 2013 about Nelson Sullivan’s tireless videos of downtown NYC from the 1980’s. Some of you might even remember seeing them air on cable access TV back in the day, alongside similarly inclined programs like “The Church of Shooting Yourself” and “Dog the Cat.”…. comparatively primitive video-diaries that basically acted as proto-video blogs. It’s great stuff when you can track them down. In Nelson Sullivan’s case, there was a actually a documentary about him that I think you can still find on iTunes.
In any case, Gothamist wrote up a little profile of Sullivan yesterday, citing that his archive of 1,900 hours of footage is now in the hands of NYU (Sullivan passed away in 1989). If you haven’t checked out his stuff and you’re nostalgic for the era in question, it’s really worth your time.
A lot of it was just Nelson walking around, having brunch and chatting with friends….nothing all that special much of the time. But in terms of capturing sights and scenes from that era, it’s pretty priceless. It also dispels a lot of revisionist mythology. Much as he did in that last post, my friend Drew shot me the clip of Sullivan’s below this morning and remarked how “normal” Avenue A looked in 1986 (having long been fed the yarn that it was a lawless badlands). Similarly, I put up a clip this past summer featuring a clip of Sullivan’s where he visits CBGB, revealing it to be just another night out on the town, and not a perilous dive into a violent underground scenario rife with chain-weilding mohicans. Clearly not every day in the 1980’s east of Astor Place was a dystopian apocalypse.
People will invariably cherry pick the things they like best about these clips. Personally speaking, my favorite site in the video above is the Rock Hotel flyer for an upcoming GBH show. I’ve spoken at length about the Rock Hotel flyers before.
Speaking of the Rock Hotel and the old NYHC scene, if you harbor even the slightest interest in that era, you really ought to treat yourself to Tony Rettman’s new book, “NYHC: New York Hardcore 1980-1990.”
Following in the now established milieu of other celebrated oral histories like Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain’s “Please Kill Me,” it’s a fairly exhaustive examination of this city’s contribution to hardcore as told by most of its principal players. Personally speaking, while I was only invested in about half of that time period (and frankly put off by more of the mookish, knuckle-dragging antics of much of the NYHC scene), I still found it to be an illuminating and compelling read. Contrary to popular stereotypes, not every mover and shaker on the New York hardcore scene was a complete lunkhead.
I was particularly intrigued by the whole Rock Hotel passage, a period wherein aspiring promoter Chris Williamson effectively exploited the until-then fairly insular NYHC scene. While he indeed may have broadened the horizons and audiences of these bands (and purposely cross-polinated them with the metal community), he is largely perceived throughout the pages of “NYHC” to have been an avaricious svengali figure who was ultimately only out for his own gain. Having been a big fan of the Rock Hotel shows, I found this to be a bit depressing but not especially surprising. Even then, he seemed like kind of an operator and a bit of cheesy sleazeball (witness his cameos in the Cro-Mags’ video for “We Gotta Know” as he ushers the youthful and impressionable band into waiting limousines on their tour with Motorhead).
Seems like a good excuse to dust this one off….
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