Loyal readers might remember a brief post of mine from 2009 about local L.E.S. legend Clayton Patterson and his film "Captured." If you're not familiar with him (that's the man up top, as captured by Phillip Greenberg of the New York Times), his film is really worth your time.
In any case, I spotted this on Clayton's Facebook page and thought I'd pass it on. Herewith the Lower East Side's own resident shutterbug/historian taking a walk down Ludlow Street in 2015, and offering his observations on the toll of the last several years.
You may remember a series of entries I posted here back in 2007 wherein I speculated about the apparent demise of Subterranean Records on Cornelia Street. Well, as it turned out, those rumors were false at the time, and the fabled, underground shop survived for a few more months before actually closing for good in 2008.
In that first post, you'll recall I reminisced about the shop's apparent owner, a guy we referred to as "Winter Hours," so dubbed after the band he played guitar in. Well, his actual name was Michael Carlucci.
I cannot claim to have known Michael very well. Myself and my good friend Rob B. were loyal Subterranean customers for many years (as I've laboriously pointed out before, `twas in said shop that I bought my first Killing Joke single -- an event that genuinely my life). Michael certainly recognized us, and even reached out to me to update the status of the shop when I was posting about its demise. I wish I could say I knew him better.
In any event, word from reliable sources is that Michael just passed away. I don't know any of the details, but the news struck me as quite sad. He was always a very nice guy.
Here's a bit of Winter Hours. Pour one out for Michael.
The whole notion of a trailer for a book still seems weird to me, but here's the one making the rounds for "City on Fire" (which I fleetingly discussed in the last post). It looks a bit promising, right?
The vocalist on the background track, by the way, is Hamilton Leithauser, who used to warble for The Walkmen. Not sure I'd equate his music with 1977 NYC, but hey ... it ain't my book.
I apologize for the relative slowdown again. Put simply, I’ve reached another nervy point in my ongoing struggle to re-insert m’self in to the workforce wherein something might be about to happen. Or not. I’ve been here before and seen it fall apart, so I’m trying to stay grounded. Time will tell, truth will out, etc.
Rest assured that I do have some longer stuff in the works. Stick around for that. In the interim, here’s something that just struck me last night.
I’m again being buried alive under a stack of books I want to read. I picked up a copy of Elvis Costello’s sprawling autobiography, but have not gotten around to it. Similarly, I’m very excited for Ada Calhoun’s “St. Marks is Dead,” as well as Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel “City on Fire.” I must say, however, I’m a little wary of the latter for two reasons. For a start, it’s a novel, and I’ve sort of lost my taste for fiction (despite the fact that it’s about NYC in the oft-rhapsodized “bad ol’ days.”) Secondly, it’s evidently upwards of 900 pages, which is a bit daunting. I tend to take my time with books. Moreover, I’m concerned that I’ll spend less time enjoying it and more time being insufferably pedantic about its attention to chronological and geographical detail. But, y’know, we’ll see.
I’m somewhat ashamed to say, meanwhile, that I’m still paging through James Wolcott’s “Lucking Out.” This isn’t to suggest that it’s not a quick, engaging read, but rather that I’ve been more caught up in the circumstances detailed in the first graph above to spend as much time reading for leisure.
That said, I picked it up again last night, and the passage beneath jumped out at me.
It turned out that the [Talking Heads] were sharing a loft on Chrystie Street that I visited with my then girlfriend. Reaching Chrystie Street, south of CBGB’s and pointed towards Chinatown, was not a stroll undertaken in the midnight hours without all of one’s bat faculties primed. The bordering Roosevelt Park was well stock with furtive hands ready to reach out for a rude gimme, and the nearby remaining Bowery flophouses, these remnants of the Depression with their last-stop Dreiserian stale aroma of defeat and spiritual malnutrition, drew panhandlers and derelicts to those cheerless streets looking for drink money if all the indoor cots were taken. The area also featured what [David] Byrne would describe as the skankiest hookers in New York, though of course that’s a subjective evaluation. But I had never been to an artist’s loft before and was a total Heads convert when the invite came.
As I complained before, Wolcott does suffer a bit, to my mind, from a pointedly Christgauian penchant to overwrite, but I do like certain turns of phrase above, notably “furtive hands ready to reach out for a rude gimme” on “those cheerless streets.”
I think what fired my imagination about this particular passage was that I was in that very pocket of the city just the other day. Taking a meandering route back uptown after dropping one of my kids off for a playdate just below the Brooklyn Bridge (in what they now somewhat cloyingly call “FiDi” …pronounced like FeeeDeeee), I wound my walk through portions of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Even in 2015, I’m still intrigued by this patch of the city. While most of the fabled grit has been literally and figuratively scrubbed clean, I still find myself straining for a whiff of that old scent of badlands. And while it’s hardly the dystopian nightmare Wolcott describes above, I still wouldn’t advise anyone to whip out their wallets and count their allowance in the middle of Roosevelt Park during certain parts of the day. Incidentally, it was in Roosevelt Park wherein Bob Egan and myself solved that Pussy Galore photo puzzle from last year.
Anyway, the other factor that struck me about James Wolcott’s description of “those cheerless streets” was a fluffy story that splashed across the local media last week. Evidently, there’s a new bar at 174 Rivington. On a street which splays to the east off Roosevelt Park, just north of Delancey, Stay Classy New York is now open for business, … basically a self-descriped “Will Ferrell Character-Inspired Bar with Retro Pin Up Bartenders.”
Now, I’m sure the folks who are employed at this establishment are fine, hard-working individuals, but I find the notion of a Will Ferrell-inspired bar to be somewhat unspeakably depressing. Yes, I do enjoy the odd Will Ferrell movie, but this endeavor just further affirms that the Lower East Side is now basically perceived as nothing more than a destination for high-fiving frat bros and woo girls (to say nothing about the brunch hordes that flock its streets on the weekends).
Sure, some may quibble with my romanticized preference for Wolcott’s era (and the eras that immediately followed in the 80’s and early 90’s), but call me crazy for opting for a culturally diverse, affordable-if-sometimes-dicey frontier for artists, musicians and bohemians over a nightlife enclave for boozy, vape-crazy douchebags.
I snapped the above shot of Magickal Childe back in about 1997. Today, as noted here, 35 West 19th Street is a tapas restaurant. But once upon a time, it was a place to procure all sorts of dark materials.
Today, Ruben Iglesias over on the excellent Facebook page, Manhattan Before 1990, put up a screenshot from "Vampire's Kiss" (Nic Cage's arguably ludicrous vampire movie), featuring a fleeting glimpse of the exterior of this fabled shop. As a bonus, however, Ruben included this fetching little clip below.
Enjoy a trip back in time as you step inside Magical Childe and peruse their wares....
Footnote: Regardless of your feelings about the occult and despite what the hirsute gent with the microphone says, West 19th Street is NOT "in the Village."
While I’d consider myself a pretty sizable fan of the Coen Brothers, I have to confess that I’ve never quite understood the cult that sprang up around their 1998 film, “The Big Lebowski.” Having been a huge fan of “Blood Simple,” “Raising Arizona,” “Miller’s Crossing,” “Fargo,” “Barton Fink" and even less celebrated ones like “The Hudsucker Proxy,” I remember going to “The Big Lebowski” when it came out and being somewhat underwhelmed. I mean, it didn’t suck, but compared to those other films, it just seemed like they phoned it in a bit.
In any case, invariably you or someone you know probably thinks it’s pure genius. I’m not going to argue with you, but I just don’t share that opinion.
So, imagine my confused chagrin when a shop in Greenwich Village solely dedicated to commemorating the film opened up a few years ago. I mean, why that film and not, say, “The Warriors” or “Blow-Up” or “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”? I just do not understand it.
Regardless, I kinda liked that the shop was there. I don’t believe I ever went in (nor had any reason to), but the fact that a shop with so goddamn niche a demographic could still operate here in New York City in the new millennium gave me some glimmer of hope that maybe not all the quirky, oddball funk had been syphoned out of my neighborhood.
Well, scratch that. I walked by The Little Lebowski (geddit?) today and noticed a big “FOR RENT” sign in the window.
I salute the endeavor for lasting this long!
Post-Script:I remember getting into a discussion about the Coen Brothers with Tod [A] from Cop Shoot Cop/Firewater not too long back, and even he seemed incredulous that I didn’t appreciate the film. When I continued to balk, he shot me the YouTube clip below of — admittedly — a damn funny scene.
Back when this blog was still young and arguably fresh, I used to post compilations of song suggestions tailored to Halloween. I’m not entirely sure why I stopped doing that, although it’s probably because I’ve become largely disillusioned with what Halloween has become (i.e. a cheap-gore-fixated New Year’s Eve for idiots dressed up like “sexy zombies.”) Maybe it was always thus and I just didn’t recognize it? Who knows?
That all said, given my childish preoccupation with all things macabre, I still thrill to things that are genuinely dark and unnerving (although I do like a bit of nuance and finesse … I’m still of the opinion that that which is unseen and unexplained is a thousand times scarier than gratuitous gore). With this in mind, now that we are in the thick of the Halloween season (although don’t tell The Strand that), I’ve recently acquired an album that seems absolutely tailor-made to the holiday’s intended sensibility.
Backwards by Coil — the boundary-immolating, experimental electronic duo of Jhonn Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson — was initially slated for a release in the mid-90’s via Trent Reznor’s Nothing label, but fates conspired to prevent the general public from hearing it. Altered and arguably diluted versions of its music have been released over the ensuing decades, but it wasn’t until this year that a label dubbed Cold Spring released a lovingly preserved and sonically pristine edition of the original Backwards in its entirety as a salve to Coil’s patient and loyal fanbase.
Cold Spring takes pains to point out that Backwards was originally put to tape in the wake of 1991’s Love’s Secret Domain and prior to 1999’s very-appropriately-titled Musik to Play in the Dark Vol. 1, and is perceived as the crucial, developmental link between those two works. Those dates, however, are entirely incidental. This is music predominantly untethered to any single moment in time, and there are precious little — if any — points of reference to the actual era in which it was recorded. These sounds could just as easily have been recorded this week, twenty years ago or conceivably twenty years from now.
A cherished-if-fatigued anecdote about Coil is that, back in the 80’s, famed film director Clive Barker commissioned them to score what would become his grisly horror classic, “Hellraiser,” but that in the final stages of the film’s production, their music was rejected and stripped from the proceedings for being — wait for it — ”too scary”. As cartoony as that sounds, it is very hard to listen to the breadth of Coil’s sprawling catalog and not take away the palpable feeling that something else is genuinely going on within this music. Coil isn’t something you just throw on during a cocktail party or while doing your ironing. Their music could pointedly affect the energy of the room.
As is evident in the graphs above, it’s significantly difficult to write about Coil without lapsing into a sort of ominous hyperbole. But, back to Backwards, as ghostly and deliberately unsettling as this album is, it might be further chilling — if a bit sensationalist — to remember that both of the men responsible for this music were dead before their time (Balance died from a fall in 2004, Christopherson died in his sleep in 2010). Without purposely sounding too maudlin, it’s hard to digest this music without those facts further affecting the atmosphere.
As Halloweeny as I might seem like I’m making Backwards out to be, however, you might want to think twice about using it to greet any doe-eyed trick-or-treaters, not least for the emphatic cries of "FUCK ME FROM BEHIND" that howl through the album’s lurching title track. Not just musically adventurous, Coil were never ones to inhibit their considerable libidinous urges. They made art that was meant exclusively for adults, preferably open-minded ones at ease with the myriad facets of human sexuality.
But Coil’s sexual proclivities were never what made them scary. I mean, sure — they were super horndogs, but certainly no more so than, say, Van Halen or the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They just weren’t hetero. No, the thematic elements of Coil’s music that meshed so disquietingly with the oft-ponderous and eerie essence of their sound were their intimate ruminations on death and emotional disorder, all delivered with an elusive vibe of surreal, lysergic menace. (To be fair, their early fixation with … well, poo … circa their first album, 1984’s fittingly titled Scatology — remains indelibly repulsive).
By the time Backwards was recorded, Christopherson and Balance had mercifully moved beyond that preoccupation. That, however, doesn’t mean that Backwards is any less harrowing. Even as I was walking about this afternoon in the bright, autumnal sun, I was touched by this album’s slimy malaise through my earbuds, prompting me to skip through "Paint Me as a Dead Soul,” as I found it almost overwhelmingly unsettling. And this track is hardly alone in that capacity.
In any case, for those who aren’t afraid of the dark, …seek ye Backwards.
As you might remember from this post, I recently sat down to watch Julien Temple’s 2010 documentary, “Oil City Confidential,” which delves into the story of proto-punk pub rock legends, Dr. Feelgood, who came of age in the unspeakably drab early 70’s, just prior to the cultural detonation of punk rock. Somewhat star-crossed by bad timing, Dr. Feelgood never seemed to make much of an impression here in the States and had some of their own (considerable) thunder stolen in their homeland by the comparative upstarts of British Punk, many of who cribbed liberally from Dr. Feelgood’s trailblazing antics.
Personally speaking, while I’d certainly read about Dr. Feelgood, given their connections to so-called “pub rock,” I lazily assumed they trod a similar road as artists like Dave Edmunds, Brinsley Schwarz and Ian Dury & the Blockheads. While there’s nothing wrong with those bands, they never struck me as especially exciting or incendiary. Well, not so with Dr. Feelgood. Fueled by vocalist Lee Brilleaux’s imposing gruffness and bug-eyed Wilko Johnson’s inimitable, slashing guitar theatrics, Dr. Feelgood’s high octane brand of booze-&-amphetamine-fueled R&B was a direct and indelible influence on later bands like The Jam, The Stranglers and Gang of Four. Put simply, they foocking rocked.
Here’s the trailer for the film….
Cool, right? I highly recommend it.
In any case, matching the rollicking nature of their music, the strong-willed characters in the band’s ranks didn’t always see eye-to-eye, finding secret weapon Wilko Johnson abandoning ship in 1977. Dr. Feelgood soldiered on without him, although they arguably never matched the musical volatility of that first incarnation of the band.
Vocalist Lee Brilleaux, meanwhile, was diagnosed with cancer in the early `90’s, and succumbed to his illness in 1994, effectively putting an end to the band.
As I was watching the film, however, a fleeting segment flashed on the screen wherein it was suggested that a plaque was erected in Brilleaux’s memory right here in New York City. It was a split-second scene, but I fully recognized the location, and immediately felt compelled to investigate.
The next morning, I strode up Greenwhich Avenue on a hunch, ending up at the little park in Jackson Square (where Greenwich intersects with West 13th Street at 8th Avenue). Sure enough, affixed to a bench on the northernmost corner of the park was Lee’s plaque. Here it is….
Having been entirely smitten by the music and the story of Dr. Feelgood (and having giddily snatched up a copy of their explosive debut album, Down By The Jetty at Rough Trade), I am entirely all for a plaque memorializing this amazing performer and his largely under-praised ensemble, but I have one burning question:
Why is it in Jackson Square?
I know Brilleaux had married an American woman, but by all accounts and reports on the `Net, it seems Brilleaux lived and died on his native soil of Essex, England (not far from the band’s stomping grounds of Canvey Island). While he toured the world with various incarnations of Dr. Feelgood, I could find no mention of the singer ever living in New York City, let alone the leafy byways of the West Village.
And not only is it in Jackson Square, but it is the only plaque dedication in the park, and seemingly in a very deliberate, specific location. Under normal circumstances, one might assume that this particular bench had some significance for the departed, although it seems the departed, in this case, had no traceable connection to this tiny plot of real estate.
Working on another hunch, I strolled just a few yards back down Greenwhich Avenue to an address just across Jane Street called Tea & Sympathy. Fittingly billing itself as “a quintessential corner of England in the heart of Greenwich Village,” Tea & Sympathy is a long-held haven for British ex-pats and Anglophiles yearning for a taste of ol’ Blighty. I figured, given the uber-Britishness of Lee Brilleaux and Dr. Feelgood, if anyone would know if Brilleaux had any palpable roots or reason to be memorialized just down the road in Jackson Square, they would know.
Given that not everyone is as smitten by obscure rock ’n’ roll trivia as I am, the young man behind the counter at Tea & Sympathy wasn’t especially enthused about my tangled line of questioning, but quickly fetched the shop’s endearingly gregarious owner Nicky.
Despite being caught off-guard in the middle of a busy morning, Nicky gamely listened to me clumsily unspool my yarn. Unfortunately, while she recognized the names of both Dr. Feelgood and Lee Brilleaux, she was as stumped as I am as to why he’s memorialized in Jackson Square. That said, she suggested asking an organization called, fittingly enough, the Jackson Square Alliance, a community group dedicated to improving the quality of life in and around said park. (That was a great idea, but I couldn’t seem to find an e-mail address for the J.S.A on their website).
Grasping at another hunch, I walked a couple of blocks to the west to Myers of Keswick, another purveyor of British goodies and groceries, … strangely in the same neighborhood (the competition between these two shops must be pretty fierce). While I love this shop, the young lady behind the counter barely looked old enough to know what Dr. Feelgood by Motley Crue was, let alone a comparatively ancient British band from the early `70’s. I demurred from bugging her with my sleuthing, and bought a can of grape-flavored Vimto.
So, there it lies. I am still in the dark as to why the great Lee Brilleaux of Dr. Feelgood is memorialized in a relatively tiny park in the West Village of Manhattan in New York City.
But, I’m still game to find out.
ADDENDUM:My friend and fellow bloggy-type, Tim B. of Stupefaction solved the riddle. Find the answer by clicking here. Candidly, I'm sorta bummed to know the answer ... I love a good, unsolved mystery.
Incidentally, storied former Dr. Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson himself was diagnosed with cancer like his fallen bandmate. Julien Temple again raised his camera to document Wilko’s endeavor to live life to its fullest with a cancer diagnosis. That film is coming soon….
After about 32 years of being a slavishly devout fan of Killing Joke, the job of reviewing their new studio album with any semblance of balanced objectivity is a tougher task than you might imagine. Those who have embraced the music, mythos and accompanying sensibility of Killing Joke tend to do so with a bug-eyed fervor that borders liberally on myopic zealotry. In short order, no other band matters nearly as much.
That was me for many a year. Sure, I listened to loads of different stuff, but no one touched Killing Joke. Not even close. Even their less salubrious moments — say, their first divisively populist single, “Me or You?” or Jaz Coleman's beleaguered ersatz-prog opus, Outside The Gate — still seemed a thousand times more intriguing than any contributions from the rest of the rock rabble, despite any inherent flaws or deviations from the script. Simply put, there is no one like Killing Joke, and when they are at their best, it can be the most inimitably volcanic combination of musical elements imaginable.
I’ve also been fortunate enough, over the years, to become somewhat privy to (portions of) the inner circle of the notoriously difficult band. Beyond interviewing Killing Joke a few times as a rock journalist, I became friends with bassist Paul Raven for a few years (until his untimely death in 2007). It was Raven who also orchestrated my sprawling interview with then-estranged drummer Paul Ferguson in 2004. I’d like to think that said interview —wherein the founding member broke his silence about his split from the proceedings — helped ease the path, in some small way, towards his return to the fold (an event which was ultimately brought about by the reconvening of all original members at Raven’s funeral).
Big Paul did, in fact, resume his role in the band shortly afterwards, mounting a full scale tour with the original line-up (with Martin “Youth” Glover back on bass detail) and releasing a rough-hewn collection of their re-recorded standards dubbed Duende: The Spanish Sessions.
With the line-up complete, the band launched into a prolific album-tour-album-tour routine, first unleashing the explosive Absolute Dissent in 2010, followed by the comparatively dour MMXII in — wait for it — 2012.
Okay, enough purple-prose-laden preamble….what about the new one?
Killing Joke's fifteenth album of new studio material is called Pylon, and it is perceived by the band as the final portion in a triptych that began with Absolute Dissent. Read any of the reviews currently making the rounds, and the usual citations are laboriously invoked (“covered by Metallica,” “worked with Dave Grohl,” etc.) Invariably due to their dogged bloody-mindedness, Killing Joke have repeatedly eluded the greater success they have otherwise inarguably earned. As a result, journalists are quick to explain them to the layperson by dusting off a few tired anecdotes and assigning them any number of misleading tags (foremost among them being “metal,” “gothic” and “industrial.”) While, yes, select elements of these (and other) sub-genres can be cherry-picked from within their music, Killing Joke have refreshingly never been accurately pigeon-holed, nor remained stylistically static. Their sound has been, at points, burly, stealthy and spartan as it has elegiacal, expansive and funky.
With this in mind, Pylon comes as close to a “something for everyone” record as the band is ever likely to record. This formidable collection of tunes finds the Joke frequently switching gears, from full-throttled paroxysms to stately, poignantly melodic anthems. Don’t get me wrong --- it sure as Hell ain’t Taylor Swift, nor is it suitable for twerking or inclusion in your local sports bar’s jukebox, but as a document of a single band, it handily demonstrates the breadth of their abilities.
Thematically speaking, however, Pylon mines some familiar veins. As has seemingly always been the case, being in Killing Joke means never having to say “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” as Pylon comes steeped in a brand of dystopian paranoia that has permeated pretty much all of the band’s work. But while previous albums cast Killing Joke in the role of a post-punk Nostradamus (would the plural of that be Nostradami?), perpetually warning of the immediately impending collapse of civilization, Pylon mostly addresses horrors already at hand. Forget worrying about the coming armageddon …. IT HAS ALREADY ARRIVED!
Less concerned — this time — about Mayan doom prophecy and its accompanying natural upheaval (although let’s not rule that out), the primary beefs rife throughout Pylon pertain to the Orwellian surveillance state, acute technophobia, the sinister, Machiavelian machinations of “the West” over “the servile brain,” and, of course, a requisite, palpable contempt for America’s corrupted capitalism. Like I said, “Bitch Better Have My Money” THIS AIN’T.
This all said, rarely has a scathing indictment of a callous society’s corrosive infrastructure sounded so life-affirming. Vocalist Jaz Coleman’s signature exhortations belie the band’s collective advanced years, trumped only by the inimitably thunderous engine that is Big Paul Ferguson. As ever, guitarist Geordie Walker’s guitar defines the band’s unique sound (at his “fire from Heaven” best, in my opinion, on “Star Spangled”), but it really is an intense, and intimate sounding group effort.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. While most of the album’s fifteen tracks (depending on which edition you acquire) arrive with all the gentleness of a weighty iron chalice of molten black coffee, Killing Joke exercise their comparatively — dare I say it — “poppier” side on songs like “Euphoria” and the downright optimistic “Big Buzz,” finding Geordie giving sway to the fabled bell-like tones of his hallowed, hollow-bodied Gibson ES-295 (a.k.a. “the Golden Harp”) over his equally lauded penchant for syncopated, metallic chugging. In a tradition of tracks like “The Raven King,” “In Cythera,” and, of course, “Love Like Blood” — the latter being the inarguable high-water mark of the band’s accessibility — these songs unveil Killing Joke’s stubborn regard for humanist compassion in a world otherwise wrought with radiation and moral squalor.
At the end of it all (if you’ll pardon the suitably apocalyptic turn of phrase), to the uninitiated layperson weaned on whatever anaemic piffle passes for "proper rock" in 2015, the powerful expanse of Pylon might go down like something of a weighty horse pill, what with the average song therein rarely clocking out before the five minute mark. But for the afore-cited bug-eyed zealots, Pylon is bracing evidence of the band’s still-viable and still-bloodthirsty life force. With the possible exception of Killing Joke’s contemporaries in SWANS (themselves no strangers to intimidating intensity and myriad fractures in membership), it’s hard to name another band of their particular generation that has side-stepped the pitfalls of nostalgic redundancy and is still capable of making music of this ferocious vitality. Pylon is out on October 23. GO GET IT!
Incidentally, those not entirely versed in the storied doings of Killing Joke (like, yes, immersing themselves in the occult, recording in the great pyramids, fucking off to Iceland, and indeed being covered by Metallica and playing with Dave Grohl) should avail themselves to Shaun Pettigrew’s long-in-the-making documentary on the band, “The Death and Resurrection Show."
It’s prudent to remember — be you a journalist, critic, blogger or published writer of any kind — that your subjects usually don’t exist in a vacuum. Sure, it’s easy to blithely peck away at your keyboard, composing pithy bon mots about public figures, but every now and then, something you write is bound to strike someone the wrong way and swim around to bite you on the ass like an angry shark. This has actually happened to me a couple of times — most humiliatingly with EMF (of all bands). People — even “rock stars” — read, and if you’re publishing your stuff online, a simple Google search can bring that stuff front and center (provided, of course, you composed your headline with an eye for search engine optimization).
This next instance doesn’t involve a random Google search so much as something of a lack of foresight on my part. Y’see, as it happens, I became Facebook friends with one Bob Bert not too long back. In case you’re unfamiliar with him, Bert is the former drummer for a couple of my favorite, legitimately pivotal bands, notably Sonic Youth (pictured above, as captured by James Welling) and Pussy Galore, although he’s also played with Drunk Driving, Chrome Cranks, the Knoxville Girls and his own band Bewitched. These days, Bert can be found playing with the inimitable Lydia Lunch and guitarist Weasel Walter in Retrovirus.
I actually don’t “know” Bob in any meaningful capacity, but I’ve certainly accosted him at a couple of shows around town (most recently a SWANS gig, if memory serves) and he’s always been an affable, approachable and totally down-to-earth guy. When I spotted him on Facebook at some point, I shot him a friend request, and — true to his inclusive nature — he accepted.
Anyway, like anyone else, Bob posts things on Facebook, frequently about stuff near and dear to me, given his own interests and pedigree. Just today, he posted something about an article in the current issue of Mojo wherein his old band mate, Thurston Moore, made a passing comment about Bleecker Bob’s while in the process of extolling the merits of Hoboken’s Pier Platters. Having read that very same article myself, I composed a little entry about it a few weeks back, somewhat taking Thurston to task for dumping on Bleecker Bob's. Today, seeing that Bob was addressing it, I posted a link to my piece on his thread.
Now, had I done the math, I probably would have deduced that Thurston was more likely than not also Facebook friends with Bob. As it turns out, quite unsurprisingly, he is. And as such, he got to read my little entry. And, as is his wont, Thurston replied….
Bleeker Bob Bolotnik was ok with me - his store was where I had many great mid-70s experiences in punk vinyl ecstasis. Plus we always liked each other (regardless of his constant dick-joke repartee).The Mojo "article" was actually just a transcribed phone interview with Stevie Chick made to appear as if I "wrote" it. If it was something I had actually penned the Bleeker Bob comment would probably not exist. Who knows (who cares) -- It's not like I got paid anything for my "article" but, hey, cool photos from the way back machine especially Suzanne Sasic in her striped pants refusing to look at the camera. Classic Sasic!
Obviously, it’s a minor point, but I’m glad Thurston had the opportunity to clear that up, and I feel like a jerk for putting him on the spot. Were that not enough, another luminary — notably Conflict/Homestead/Matador main man Gerard Cosloy — chimed in, suggesting that Thurston Moore was doubtlessly well aware of 99 Records, which I’d cited as being a shop just as cool as Pier Platters (although, to be fair, I never suggested or speculated that Thurston wasn’t already well aware of that).
Anyway, that’s enough brushes with greatness for one day. But as further evidence that Thurston Moore did shop at some of the other places I’d mentioned, here’s a curious little photo of him circa 1994 (with Liv Tyler) in front of my beloved Rocks in Your Head (an uncredited shot I found here).
And just because it never gets old, here's Sonic Youth's "Death Valley `69" (featuring Bob Bert and his replacement Steve Shelley). Crank it...
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