Flaming Pablum

Zbig's Vids in NYC

Remember Mr. Mister? Sure ya do. They were that uber-slick two-hit wonder from the mid-80s that your older sister probably dug. They’re the dudes responsible for “Broken Wings” and “Kyrie,” two syruppily overproduced pop singles that you can still hear today on Lite FM stations in laundromats and Duane Reades everywhere. If you were big into, say, Level 42, The Hooters and maybe The Outfield but possibly still put off by the burly rock authenticity and primal fury of, say, Tears for Fears, Mr. Mister would have been right up your street. Lead singer really, really wanted to be mistaken for Sting.

Snarky opinions aside, Mr. Mister did introduce the world to drummer Pat Mastelotto, who’d later find comparatively seismic credibility playing for the august likes of King Goddamn Crimson….quite a leap from “Kyrie.”

In any case, I stumbled upon the video below this morning purely by accident and while it didn’t change my sniffily dismissive opinion of the Mr. Mister lads, it resonated on another level.

Unmistakably directed in suitably surrealist style by visionary music video director Zbigniew Rybczynski, the clip for “Something Real” finds the Mr. Mister boys lost in a nightmare of special effects. Ultimately, it’s the very same aesthetic Rybczynski used for the video for Rush’s “Time Stands Still.”

But trippy effects aren't Zbig's only calling card. He’s also a big fan of shooting in New York City. He’s shot similar NYC-centrc clips for the Art of Noise (filmed on the then-derelict High Line), Circus of Power and Polish band Lady Pank (both in the landfill that became Battery Park City), Lou Reed (in TriBeCa), Nona Hendryx (in Grand Central), Yoko Ono (in the Financial District) and an all-time favorite of Flaming Pablum, “All That I Wanted” by Belfegore (on a pier off the West Side Highway in TriBeCa).

In Mr. Mister’s case, the director had the band dodging his goofball effects whilst posing stiffly in various alleys and vacant lots around Lower Manhattan, the most recognizable of which being the former lot between 21st and 22nd Streets between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. There it is up top.

Eagle-eyed viewers and regular readers might recognize it as the same lot wherein Josh Cheuse photographed the nascent Beastie Boys lounging like a gaggle of nogoodnicks below their own graffiti scrawl. At last — the missing link between Mr. Mister and the Beastie Boys has been established. How grateful all concerned parties must be.

Today, that lot is the site of a new development — invariably a tall, sun-blocking luxury condo.

Back to the Indie `90s

No one outside of furtive music-geek circles seems to talk about it these days, but the early pre-grunge and pre-Britpop 90’s had a lot of amazing music going for it. Personally speaking, while I was indeed thrilling to the skonky noise that was coming out of New York City’s downtown scene, specifically by bands like Cop Shoot Cop, Pussy Galore, SWANS, Foetus, Helmet, Surgery, Prong and more, I was also super into a lot of the comparatively poppy, user-friendly British indie community.

For a start, there was the whole “shoegazer” scene, spearheaded by My Bloody Valentine (themselves strenuous acolytes of 80’s forebears like the Jesus & Mary Chain and Cocteau Twins), but that also included bands like Lush, Ride, Chapterhouse, Curve, the Pale Saints, Swervedriver, Slowdive and — initially, at least — Blur. I was also quite smitten by The Wonder Stuff (that’s them up top), The Wedding Present, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Eat, Kingmaker, the Senseless Things, the Manic Street Preachers, Birdland, Daisy Chainsaw, the Venus Beads, Pop Will Eat Itself, Suede and literally thousands more. Then, of course, there were some not-easily-categorized acts like Fatima Mansions, Therapy? (both Irish, incidentally), Silverfish, Spirtualized, the House of Love, Levitation, Goodbye Mr. MacKenzie and several others. Let’s also not forget the whole Manchester thing with the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, The La’s, James, the Charlatans and more.

Unlike the comparatively impenetrable wasteland of the mainstream American music climate at the time, the British indie scene thrived in its fertile homeland, with new bands routinely championed across colorful covers of periodicals like Melody Maker and the NME. It was hard to keep up. There seemed to be some seismic, new development every week.

I’m not saying that each one of these bands made timeless contributions to the lexicon of music, but there were some truly amazing tunes to emerge from that wave. I loved a whole lot of it, but certainly not all of it. I couldn’t quite understand the adulation enjoyed by, say, Teenage Fanclub, whose sloppily dull power-pop-pastiche paled in comparison — to my mind — to, say, the frantic, proggy-punk attack of the Cardiacs, but whatever. To each their own.

As detailed in this post, in 1992, I was fully employed as an editorial assistant at LIFE Magazine by day, and writing for any number of dubious music magazines on the side, which routinely found me going out to myriad live music venues to see these bands when they swung through town, notably at the Marquee on West 21st (gone), the New Ritz on West 54th (gone), the Academy off Times Square (gone), Roseland on West 53rd (gone) CBGB on the Bowery (gone), Wetlands Preserve in TriBeCa (gone), the Limelight on Sixth Avenue (gone … now a mall and a gym), Woody’s on Second (gone) and Tramp’s on West 21st (gone) and quite a few others. See a trend here? Irving Plaza and the Pyramid are still around, at least.

Product-wise, I was fervently seeking out vinyl and CD’s by these bands at shops like Rocks in Your Head in SoHo (gone), Bleecker Bob’s on West 3rd (gone), Venus Records on West 8th (gone), Smash CD’s on St. Marks (gone), Pier Platters in Hoboken (gone), Route 66 in the Village (gone) NYCD on the Upper West Side (gone) and several others. Amazingly, my favorite shop for imports, Rebel Rebel on Bleecker is STILL THERE, bless’em. 

Anyway, this post kind of got away from me (as they often do), being that it was initially only meant to set up the video below.

Herewith a fleeting clip by a band that could easily be lumped in with all the luminaries cited above. If I’m being perfectly candid, I have to say that I was never particularly fond of the Mega City Four, they being of the same ilk as bands I was a bona fide fan of like the afore-cited Wonder Stuff, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and Pop Will Eat Itself. I’m not sure why, but I just never really warmed to them in the same way, although I’m sure they’re all perfectly decent fellas …. despite the white-guy dreadlocks.

Much like this video by excellent Kiwi-popsters The Clean from roughly the exact same era, here we see the MC4 pulling into New York City to play a gig at CBGB. You don’t see much of their show, but there’s some tantalizing shots of the Bowery as it was (i.e. prior the banks, bullshit and bespoke boutiquery), and some shots of the cramped little room in the back of the stage at CB’s that served as their “backstage” area. The gent with the mohawk is Rob “Bass Thing” Jones, then recently ex of the Wonder Stuff. By this point, he was starting a new band, nursing some very specific health problems of a certain kind and manning the register at the old Tower Records. I remember buying something there at the time, and boldly exclaiming "YOU'RE THE BASS THING!" to him, prompting a glare that could give an advancing shark second thoughts. Sadly, he — like Tower Records — is now gone, too.

There’s a very good chance I was at this show as well, despite my lukewarm feelings for the MC4. Take a look...

Spray Paint the Walls: Sights & Sounds of a Lost Downtown

Earlier this week, my pals over at the mighty Bowery Boogie put up a nice post (later picked up by Gothamist) regarding the amazing street photography of one Steve Butcher.

In his own words, Butcher is “an artist and designer who lives and works in New York.” His work is “informed by a lifelong interest in the history of art.”

The man’s website is a rich treasure for the eye, but what caught Bowery Boogie & Gothamist’s attention were his period-specific photographs of lower Manhattan in the 80’s and 90’s (also a favorite era for this weblog, of course).

As you doubtlessly know by now, I’m always looking for visual documentation of those incarnations of my home town. While I’m fully aware of the grim realities of those respective eras, my associations with that city are ones of vibrancy and excitement. At the risk of playing squarely into the hands of those who’d paint me as solely a blinkered nostalgist, I just don’t feel the same sensations of curiosity, intrigue and adventure on the streets of 2015’s New York City. Sorry, there it is.

In any case, while perusing Butcher’s pics, I came across a couple that speak directly to this blog’s preoccupation with NYC-centric music. First up is this one from “New York Then - 80’s"…..

Taken, according to Butcher, somewhere on East Houston, the shot obviously features some seriously distressed car wreckage. What struck me about it was the graffiti on the mangled car door — DRUNK DRIVING. Fellow NYC noiseniks and underground rock fans might recognize that as the name of Peter Missing’s pre- Missing Foundation ensemble, which also counted future Sonic Youth/Pussy Galore drummer Bob Bert in its ranks. I don’t believe they ever released anything.

As detailed in this interview I conducted a couple of years back with Chris Egan of Missing Foundation, Drunk Driving fell apart, leaving Peter to hook up with Egan, Mark Ashwill and droves of others to form Missing Foundation,….who, at their best, sounded like the clip below. Not for the timid.

And because, why not? Here’s another great chunk of Missing Foundation. The casual layperson may recognize the band’s notorious insignia here. Both of these tracks, I should mention, come from Missing Foundation’s album, 1933/Your House is Mine, which only exists at a tactile artifact on vinyl. Enjoy the niceness….

Another shot of Butcher’s that struck a similar chord is this one of East 3rd Street between Avenue A and B. It’s a compelling photograph no matter how ya slice it, but I love the primitive Cro-Mags tag at the bottom.

Another frequent subject of this blog, the Cro-Mags arguably single-hadedly embodied the best of NYHC before the most celebrated line-up fractured messily in an implosion that is still a sore spot for the concerned parties today (read more about that saga here and here).

Here’s the Age of Quarrel-era Cro-Mags firing on all cylinders circa November of 1986.

More recently, of course, lead singer John Joseph has been tirelessly active as a writer, health advocate, Ironman triathlete and rock’n’roll tour guide. Here he is doin’ his thing circa 2011…..

All this talk of NYC punk and graffiti reminded me of a shot a gentleman named Tom Langston recently posted on the Facebook group Manhattan before 1990. That’s this one here…

I’m reasonably certain that this is the same graffito I remember from East 8th Street between Broadway and Astor Place. You can’t quite make it out from the shot, but the figures wielding the spears were life-sized. I remember enjoying the cryptic, explanation-free nature of this art (see also Missing Foundation and, for that matter, Shepherd Fairey’s old Obey Giant campaign). Only later did I learn that it was specifically relating to a band, this one called Modern Clix.

Existing around the same time and playing some of the same venues as the NYHC bands, Modern Clix were actually something entirely different from Agnostic Front et al., playing more of a ska-punk-pop-reggae-funk hybrid that seemed to owe more to the dubby experimentalism of earlier bands like Liquid Liquid, Konk, ESG etc.

Here they are circa 1983, playing at the Peppermint Lounge (featuring some initial extrapolation from primary strategist Fran Powers).

Modern Clix evidently went through a variety of incarnations, later morphing simply into Clix and then Whole Wide World, I believe.

In a weird moment of happenstance, I actually ran into Fran Powers fairly recently. I was invited to an event in SoHo by fellow blogger Yukie Ohta of the SoHo Memory Project to celebrate the launch of her Kickstarter project (read more about that here). My wife and I hung out at this amazing loft space for a while before we decided to go out to grab a bite to eat. On our way out, I ran smack dab into Powers who was on his way in. Unable to stop myself in these situations, I said “You’re the Modern Clix guy,” which pretty much blew a new part in his hair.

We had a nice chat. These days, Fran’s encouragingly still making music with a band called Box of Crayons. Find out more here.

Fast Times

For every artist that made an indelible, culturally-significant name for themselves via the fertile New York punk scene — everyone from The Ramones to Blondie to Klaus Nomi to the Cro-Mags and beyond — there were countless bands who, for whatever reason, failed to grab hold of the rung to the next level.

The list of arguable b- and c-list bands to have graduated from the hallowed downtown dives is as equally august — if criminally undersung — as that of Patti Smith and Richard Hell’s fabled class. They may not be as well known, but many of them proved to be as equally influential to the overall scene than they’ll ever be given credit for. Sure, we all know Talking Heads and the Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys, but what about, say, the Speedies or the Shirts or Von Lmo or False Prophets or Modern Clix or Alice Donut or ___________ (insert your favorite here)? They may not be household names, but they were there, and they played their part.

One of those bands was The Fast, and courtesy of former member — and prescient photographer — Paul Zone, the band is now getting their due. Zone’s recently published memoir, “Playground: Growing Up in the New York Underground” is rife with period-specific, star-studded pictures, documenting Zone and his band’s time playing the downtown club circuit during the halcyon days of punk. Here’s the promo teaser for the book.

I’m not going to lie. I didn’t know anything about the Fast beyond their placement on the Max’s Kansas City compilation LP from 1976. Zone himself figures prominently on said collection’s sleeve, being the pointedly (and arguably unpunkily) hirsute gent posing out front, directly above the hydrant.

I should also point that in 1976, I was a 9-year-old third grader more enthralled by “Planet of the Apes” than rock’n’roll. I didn’t get ahold of the Max’s LP until my college years, and by then, most of the acts thereupon (beyond Pere Ubu, Suicide and Wayne County) seemed like also-rans. It must be a strange situation to have been present during such a seismic period, but be frequently omitted from its ensuing celebration.

Check out this link for more about Paul Zone’s book. Here, meanwhile, is a fleeting taste of the Fast…..

Finding Lennon's Manhattan

A number of years back, I composed a little entry here on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the death of John Lennon that wondered aloud about the Manhattan he loved so much. Sure, it was well established that he dug living in the Dakota (um….who wouldn’t?) and that he got a tremendous kick out of walking around Central Park (again…who doesn’t?), but I kinda wanted more. The idea of a former Beatle roaming these NYC streets is still such a strange notion. Where did he like to go? Did he have a favorite pizza place (as, it’s been documented, Paul does)? Did he have a favorite dive bar?

In later posts, I managed to answer some of those questions — learning anecdotal evidence that Lennon may (or may not) have hung out at least once at The Mudd Club and shopped for vinyl at Bleecker Bob’s. I also learned that John and Yoko spent a bit of time living downtown in the West Village at 105 Bank Street in the early `70s, before decamping uptown to the plush environs of the Dakota (pictured above, as captured by Kishin Shinoyama).

I believe my mom once spotted the couple shopping in a supermarket somewhere around town. Again — the mind reels at the thought. I’ve spotted Yoko on the Upper West Side on occasion, but have never seen any of the former Fabs in the flesh. Strangely enough, I did recently spot Julian Lennon at a Buzzcocks show at Irving Plaza.

In any case, I spotted this video making the rounds recently, and it certainly struck a chord. Scoring a snippet of the track “Meat City” from the Mind Games album, here’s some footage of John tearassing around midtown in a soon-to-vanish horse-drawn carriage.

Chickensuckin' Mothertruckin' Meat City shookdown USA http://t.co/R05kCZFrry #LENNONVinylBox #mindgames #meatcity pic.twitter.com/pUsXJRAMKi

— John Lennon (@johnlennon) May 25, 2015

Under normal circumstances, I’d launch into a “name those streets” challenge, but these are all too easy and — frankly — all too boring (midtown …. yawn).

But in doing some searching for more, I came across this other clip from around the same era that I’d never seen before, finding John striding confidently and horsing around with flocks of fans through the lush greenery of Central Park (once again). There’s also some nice footage of the old Central Park Zoo (pre-makeover, when it was — essentially — just kind of an animal jail). Hard to fathom that they once had elephants there. You also get John doin’ a little soft shoe in the Bandshell, getting — I presume — breakfast at Tiffany’s (it’s a sight gag) and attending some thematically appropriate event at the Beacon Theatre.

Overall, it’s a lovely clip of a since-lost artist in a since-lost city….

 

'And Drunk on Just Being There'

One of the more difficult aspects of working at my former place of employment was having to — well, not so much feign interest for — but hold my forked, venom-drenched tongue when it came to most of the musical artists that were routinely featured on the website (and its accompanying television show). Even if you’ve only given my blog a cursory glance-over, it’s fairly evident that I take music probably more seriously than I should. Not only am I passionate about the music that I love, but I am equally vitriolic about the music that I don’t. In my less diplomatic moments, I’m prone to make sweeping indictments like “Life is too short to tolerate bad music,” and then cite my target of the day. It’s a stubborn holdover from a petulant adolescence.

In any case, one of the artists whose merits I was pointedly averse to supporting was one Sara Bareilles. I should preface the rest of this by saying that I never met the woman. I’m sure she’s absolutely lovely and preternaturally talented and just a genuinely admirable human being. That all said, there came a point where I would have rather hacked off my own ears with a rusty hatchet and slowly bled to death than ever subject myself to another airing of her breakout single, “Brave.”

I have no problem with the song’s sentiments of empowerment. That’s all fine, but it’s really the shrill way Miss B. hits the high notes on the chorus and the fact that the song was NIGH ON INESCAPABLE for much longer than it should have been (in my opinion, mind you). I’m sure there are songs that have this same affect on you. You’re probably just more mature about dealing with it than I am.

Anyway, I don’t work at that place any more, so I’m free to say disparaging things about Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Sara Bareilles,….not that anyone really cared then or cares now. But this is my blog, so here’s where it counts.

In recently trawling around the `net, however, I came across this other clip by Sara Bareilles that hits a bit closer to home (literally). That song is called — WAIT FOR IT — “Manhattan.”

Essentially a weepy breakup song, Bareilles’ “Manhattan” (not to be confused with Cat Power’s “Manhattan,” which I think is ace) is a veritable Big Gulp-cup of treacly melancholy, but it’s not entirely offensive. In the video, Miss B. wanders around a sun-kissed, black n’ white West Village (spending an inordinate amount of time staring across the Hudson at Jersey City, which is a bit odd, considering it's a song about Manhattan). While I find the music a bit schmaltzy and the sentiment a bit hackneyed, the video is not without its merits.

See what you think…

Night of the Disco Vampires

Here’s a bizarre one. Below is clip from an oddball 1979 exploitation flick called “Nocturna,” which is — I gather — essentially about a female vampire running amok in Manhattan ala George Hamilton in “Love at First Bite,” except nowhere near as coherent or funny.

In any case, in this clip, actress Nai Bonnett (the “Nocturna” in question, one assumes) starts off on the Upper West Side (specifically the sailors’ memorial on Riverside Drive), and then hails a cab to Times Square, all scored to a tune by disco diva Vicki Sue Robinson (of “Turn the Beat Around” fame) called “Nighttime Fantasy."

It basically plays like a music video, presumably intended to showcase the glitz and glamor of New York City, but all it seems to do is show stacks of trash, porn theaters, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Florsheim Shoes.

About halfway through, she is unsurprisingly accosted by some cat-callers, who she giggly engages with while swanning down what looks like 7th Avenue.

It’s all very weird, but it was the disco era, let’s remember. Read more about "Nocturna" here.

Goodnight, David

I probably should have done this yesterday, as last night was Dave’s last show, but prompted by same, I was reminded of the time I went to see him.

In January of 1988, I was junior in college, and my high school pal Rob secured us tix to go see “Late Night with David Letterman.” As such, we dutifully showed up 30 Rockefeller Plaza (he was still with NBC at the time … I place I would later work….for a while) on the 13th of the month (I suppose I was still on Christmas break? That seems unlikely, but — in any case — there I was).

Honestly, I don’t remember that much about it. I do remember it being damn chilly in the studio. The guests that night turned out to be Brother Theodore (who we loved — and later went to see at that tiny repertory theatre on East 13th between Fifth and Sixth Avenues), the guy who played Mad Headroom (Matt Frewer) and a woman who cut paper with her fingers, if memory serves.

I do recall being struck by how Dave would just *stop talking* to his guests the second the camera went off. I suppose he wanted to go over things in his head and save the exchange for the show, but it seemed really weird and rude at the time.

All told, not a remarkable show, but we enjoyed it. The next night, of course, Robin Williams and Mick Jagger were on (or someone of that caliber). Just our luck.

In any case, in remembering same, I managed to dial up the episode in question on YouTube. I love this old intro where the camera zooms through the Old Town Bar & Grill. And much like my fleeing cameo in Killing Joke’s live DVD, I make a blink-&-you’ll-miss me appearance in the audience, starting at exactly 09:00 minutes in.

In case you missed it, here I am….top row in the back, all the way to the right. I’m seated just next to the standing page, wearing a black shirt (naturally).

Loud Laundry

Almost ten years ago, while sloppily composing the entirely rushed “biography” blurb for the About Me section of this blog, I blithely asserted that I had “every intention of wearing silly band t-shirts well into [my] forties.” I was a comparatively carefree 37-year-old when I wrote that.

Practically a decade later, I’m now quite beyond the perilous Rubicon of “well into my forties,” and yes — I am indeed still sporting a frankly ludicrous array of rock t-shirts. As an increasingly silver-topped 47-year-old, while my once-fervent fandom for comic books has cooled and I now enjoy the original “Star Wars” films significantly less than I ever used to, my tribal instinct to wear rock t-shirts — somewhat worryingly — has not waned in the slightest.

Given my current circumstances, I am actually afforded the opportunity to wear them quite often, if not regularly. I just sometimes worry that said practice is becoming, well, unseemly.

About six years ago, you may remember, I endeavored to slightly curtail my habit by putting my no-longer-wearable shirts into storage. All that really did, ultimately, was free up shelf-space, and since closing my increasingly unaffordable mini-storage space in 2012, those shirts are now back here in our apartment. Oy.

As mentioned in myriad previous posts, I feel about these shirts much the same way I feel about my compact discs — to part with them would be like ripping up photographs. Most of them are now inexorably imbued with some personal, anecdotal significance. Even if they are — by all standards — no longer wearable (for any number of reasons, though mostly related to my girth), I can’t part with them. Does that make me a hoarder? I’m afraid of the answer. My collection certainly rivals — or at least equals — Adam Duritz’s. Again, this is not necessarily a good thing.

In any case, as a first step in grappling with the problem, I decided to borrow a page from the arguably icky likes of photographer Terry Richardson. As mentioned back on this post, Terry apparently has a fetish (one of many, doubtlessly) for rock t-shirts much like I do, and catalogs them on his website. I decided to follow suit, and started a Tumblr site for same.

What wil you learn from Loud Laundry? Well, you’ll doubtlessly glean that I own entirely too many Killing Joke shirts, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise at this stage of the proceedings.

Honestly, I’m not sure why I’m doing this, but it seems like a step closer to putting them in perspective. If I can keep them here in the digital realm, maybe I can let some of them go in the physical realm.

More to the point, this isn’t even all of them. I still have some in boxes out at my mom’s place, and some in the cramped storage space in our basement. Sadly, there are some that I no longer own that I wasn’t able to document. In the old days, particularly worn shirts would go to my mom. I have fond memories her wearing my old X shirt (from their show at Columbus’ Newport Music Hall on the Ain’t Love Grand tour in the late fall of 1985) while whipping up dinner.

Incidentally, my very first rock t-shirt was a Pink Floyd The Wall one. The front featured a crude rendering of Gerald Scarfe’s fabled illustration from the inside of said album’s sprawling gatefold (the wife, the teacher, the mother, Worm the Judge, etc.) and the back had the signature light/prism/rainbow motif from the cover of Dark Side of the Moon. These designs were silkscreened on a poor-quality black garment that honestly felt like cheese cloth. I bought it in the spring of 1980 at an establishment on Madison Avenue around East 63rd Street called — and I shit you not — The Happy Head Shop (suffice to say, poor quality knockoff rock shirts were not their primary stock in trade).

As you’d rightly imagine, I wore it lovingly until it fell apart (that’s me in it at the top of this post, taken at a goddamn Wyoming dude ranch in the summer of 1980).

Avail yourselves to the silly, sartorial splendor of LOUD LAUNDRY by clicking right here.

More Than Zero

Quick preamble: For those Inspector Gadgets among you who no longer care about vinyl LPs, cassettes, compact discs or even MP3’s -- opting instead to stream to your hearts' content -- this will probably seem stilted and preposterously old school (in a pointedly uncool way). Whatever. Get off my goddamn lawn.

Otherwise....

There are loads of bad, bullshit soundtracks out there, especially ones linked with “coming of age” flicks from the 80’s and 90’s. We all have our favorites.

In a recent weed-wacking in my garden of compact discs, I found myself jettisoning handfuls of such collections. Some were redeemed by the inclusion of a single track. The soundtrack to the entirely abortive 1994 Joe Pesci film “With Honors,” for ridiculous example, was saved due to the placement of the strangely rare Butch Vig mix of the Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary.” Other titles weren’t so fortunate, being so rife with crapola that I found myself wondering how I’d ever come to posses them in the first place.

Sure, there are some curious ones, like the heroically awkward OST for 1993’s "Judgement Night", featuring a clutch of largely ill-advised “rap-rock” collaborations (the best, for my money, being “Freak Mama” by Mudhoney and Sir Mix-a-Lot). Similarly, 1998’s “Small Soldiers” soundtrack gave an array of classic rock warhorses some entertaining hip hop makeovers, some of which worked better than others.

The official soundtrack disc for “Goodfellas” remains a heartbreaker, as it featured only a paltry snippet of the music that the sprawling film actually used. Notably absent from that disc is “Jump into the Fire” by Harry Nilsson, used to score the coke-fueled helicopter-pasta-drug-bust scene towards the climax of the film.

In any case, while sorting through these, I was struck by how amazing the soundtrack to 1987’s “Less Than Zero” is. While it neglected to include the Elvis Costello track of the same name (was it even in the movie?), it offered a surprising array of choice goodies you won’t find anywhere else.

Immediately overlooking the obvious crap (Aerosmith’s awful rendering of “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” and Poison’s ham-fisted cover of KISS’ “Rock & Roll All Night"), there’s Slayer’s somewhat obvious-but-enjoyably turgid trudge through Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” and the Bangles’ surprisingly burly take on Simon & Garfunkel’s “Hazy Shade of Winter,” which jettisoned the folky finger-picking in favor of high voltage riffing. These are both excellent.

I have zero recollection (parton the pun) about Oran “Juice” Jones’ “How to Love Again” nor the Black Flames’ “Are You My Woman?” I love Joan Jett, but I don’t remember “She’s Lost You” at all. Whatever.

The reason I first picked up this album (I originally owned it on vinyl) was because of “Bring The Noise” by Public Enemy. I’d been deejaying at my college radio station (WDUB 91.1 FM in Granville, Ohio), and my friend Seth called in demanding I play it one night. While already a fan of the Beastie Boys, Run DMC and LL Cool J, I had to confess that, at the time, I was unfamiliar with Public Enemy, so I dutifully dropped the needle at my friend’s behest. What followed was a revelation that I can’t even begin to properly encompass here.

I’d initially slept on Yo! Bum Rush the Show, but It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (which includes “Bring the Noise” and a slew of other amazing tracks) was released the following spring. But it was the “Less Than Zero” soundtrack that got me there first.

We’re not done yet — the "Less Than Zero" OST also debuted “Going Back to Cali,” which further cemented LL Cool J as a name not to be trifled with. If you can’t appreciate this, I just can’t help you.

Okay, all that stuff is great, but the really inspired shit was the Roy Orbison/Glenn Danzig collaboration, “Life Fades Away” and Danzig’s turn with the Power & Fury Orchestra, “You and Me.” Caught between his Samhain/Danzig makeover, Glenn was at his best on both of these tracks, and it’s a testament to Rick Rubin’s insight to have put them together.

“You and Me” also hinted at heights Danzig (both the man and the band) might have scaled had the vocalist not succumbed to his own iron-willed preoccupations. It’s a sweeping, swelling meisterwerk that is as powerful as it is accessible….arguably Glenn’s finest vocal turn? You decide.

As far as “Less Than Zero” the film? I’ve never actually seen it in its entirety.