I spotted the below photo this afternoon on the Facebook group, Greenwich Village Grapevine. Posted by one Ellen W., albeit without a date or photo credit, the photo below displays the northwest corner of East 11th Street at University Place. Sure, yes, that the old office of the Village Voice (later to decamp to 13th and Broadway, and then later still down to Cooper Square), but I was more struck by this early depiction of the second incarnation of my beloved Cedar Tavern, seemingly from an era prior to the advent of their second story.
In later years, the above site of the Voice's office would become a series of restaurants, notably a Thai place called Lemongrass, and then a more conventional bistro called Jack's, before eventually closing and being transformed into a TD Bank.
The Cedar Tavern, of course, closed suddenly in 2006 with an announcement that its building's air rights had been sold and that a new development was being erected above it. The community was assured that it wasn't going away for good, but that turned out to be a fat, fucking lie. The place was closed, gutted and razed, only to have an artless condo erected in its footprint. Its street-facing ground floor sat empty for years until it became occupied by European Waxing Salon. This link contains links to the whole sorry saga.
Hey all. Sit tight, please. It's only Tuesday, and it's become a busy week. I have some stuff I meant to put up last night, but time got away from me. Tonight, meanwhile, I'm off to go see FLAG (i.e. the Black Flag reunion combo featuring pretty much everyone other than Henry Rollins, Greg Ginn, Ron Reyes, Chuck Biscuits, Robo or Kira). I'm quite psyched, although it's at the Gramercy Theatre, a venue normally reserved for acts that cater slavishly to clueless millennials. We'll see how it all pans out.
In the interim, check out this amazing photo -- presumably snapped by Chris Stein -- of Debbie Harry, the legendary Blondie frontperson and sexiest woman alive, WEARING A GODDAMN BLACK SABBATH SHIRT!!!!
THE LEVELS OF COOL ON DISPLAY HERE ARE BEST QUANTIFIED AS "STRENUOUS."
I actually don’t honestly remember how or when J. Yuenger and I officially became “internet friends,” but I believe it had something to do with our mutual appreciation of a richly curated Tumblr called This Isn’t Happiness(which -– to my mind -– represents the very best that particular social networking site has to offer). I believe it was from a strange overlap there that we started following each other’s blogs (his being the excellent image-driven J.Yuenger) and we were off and running.
If you’re not a rock geek, you may not instantly know his name, but unless you’re maybe my mom, you’ve probably heard his music. Put simply, J. Yuenger played guitar for the highest profile incarnation of White Zombie, a band I’ve spoken about here on several occasions (most recently here, in a post that inadvertently kicked off my feverish odyssey to pinpoint the location of that Lunachicks photo). If you were standing within proximity of a television tuned to MTV during the mid-to-late `90s, you doubtlessly saw his dreadlocked head banging in time with that band’s endearingly bottom-heavy sturm und drang on such inescapable hits as “Thunderkiss `65” and -- WAIT FOR IT -- “More Human Than Human.” In fact, fuck it – let’s go there now…
Incidentally, I don’t care how canonical or popular or populist or “so `90s” or not-indie-enough or however you might consider it, that’s still a goddamn excellent song. Feel free to disagree, but you’re just fuckin’ wrong. Also, how many rock songs with esoteric, titular allusions to “Blade Runner” can you actually name? For that alone it’s fucking great. Shut up. You’re wrong.
In any case, J. Yuenger is the other dude with dreadlocks in that clip (i.e. the one providing that vicious slide-guitar and slabs of molten power-chordage alongside the rumbling low end of bassist Sean Yseult). “More Human Than Human” was one of those songs that, like, say, “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC from a decade earlier, managed to escape the parameters of its genre’s demographic and infiltrate the listening habits of the layperson. As a result, it no longer belonged exclusively to the leather, flannel-&-wallet-chain set, but rather to the zeitgeist of its era. You could just as easily hear it being croaked drunkenly at a bachelorette karaoke party as blasting out of a passing, pointedly muffler-less Dodge Charger. White Zombie, as a result, were suddenly EVERYWHERE. They even played it on Letterman.
`Twas not to last, of course. The band split shortly after that, with lead singer Rob Cummings/Straker/Zombie pursuing a solo career with a increasingly profitable sideline in moviemaking. Yseult and Yuenger went off to other things as well.
But for those same laypeople who’d lazily lump White Zombie in with all things metal, the truth of the matter is a very different story, one that Yuenger has taken great pains to tell in the last couple of years via the brand, spankin’ new Numero Group box set, It Came from N.Y.C. Here, once again, is a taster…
It should be noted that the book that accompanies the music is a lovingly detailed account of the band’s unconventional trek to stardom, and an amazing document of a time and a place that is well worth investigating, even if you’re not a punk or a metal head or rock geek of one colorful description or another.
I reached out to J. to see if he'd subject himself to a Flaming Pablum interview. Gamely, he said yes...
FLAMING PABLUM: You just finished a mammoth project of putting together a richly cultivated box set that deeply delves into the surprising backstory of White Zombie, It Came from N.Y.C. How did that all come about? Was there an impulse to set the record straight on the band, to your mind?
J: Yeah, absolutely. Here’s what the history looks like to most people : band magically appears, song is constantly on radio and in every movie preview, band plays arenas, band vanishes. We are not usually included in the history of heavy metal, because we were not strictly a metal band. We aren’t part of grunge, or 90s alternative. We pre-dated nu-metal. Well, I guess we had a hand in creating nu-metal. Sorry about that.
We’ve always wanted to tell the White Zombie story, from the beginning to the end, but the real catalyst was probably the CD box set, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, which came out in 2008. It’s a slapdash, shitty thing, devoid of text, neither Sean nor I were consulted about any part of it, and we were both deeply, deeply disappointed in it (it got worse when I was doing research for It Came From NYC and I found that some of the audio on the CD box was compromised).
The opportunity to make something richly visual was really exciting for us, as was being able to present the music in such a way that, if you travel down the timeline from Gods On Voodoo Moon to "Thunderkiss ’65," as different as those things are, the trip makes sense.
Was Rob Cummings/Straker/Zombie involved in the project in any capacity?
Only in that he was interviewed for the book.
If my math is right, you were the fourth (?) guitarist to infiltrate the ranks of the band. When you first joined, were you still playing alongside the noise-rock set like Rat at Rat R, Pussy Galore, Live Skull and Dig Dat Hole, or had the band headed towards a more definitively metal direction?
I was the fifth guitarist.
These were the people who were around, in the neighborhood, and once I was in the band I began meeting members of Pussy Galore, Cop Shoot Cop, Rat At Rat R, because Sean and Rob knew them. Now I was in the position of saying hello to members of Sonic Youth, at gigs or when I saw them in the subway, which was exciting. But WZ had been moving towards being a metal band for a while before I joined, and I don’t remember playing with any L.E.S. art-noise groups. (names are coming back to me now : Band Of Susans, Surgery, Reverb Motherfuckers, Honeymoon Killers.. etc.)
In Manhattan, we played with bands who were metal-ish, but with an art-school sensibility, like Raging Slab, Blitzspeer, Lunachicks, Prong — and we started opening for major-label groups. Danzig, Slayer. Then, all of a sudden, we were playing with Biohazard and Suicidal Tendencies out at L’amour in Brooklyn - which in hindsight seems insane. We didn’t get booed; we sold t-shirts. To Brooklyn skinheads.
What were your favorite venues to play?
CBGB. The place had a weird layout, acoustically, but by the time I got there (my first time was with my teen punk band in 1984, opening for Flipper, and the second time was in 1989 with WZ, a few weeks after I joined), they’d been putting on 5 bands a night, every night, for years and years, and the sound was absolutely dialed-in. Every band sounded good and loud in the house, and the fat monitor sound onstage made you feel like you were really playing well.
Anecdote. The very first time I walked into the club, there was a gang of fearsome-looking skinheads, smoking a joint and listening to a demo tape over the CBGB sound system. We had heard a lot about how violent NY skins were, how they were ruining The Scene for everyone, and we cowered in a corner, waiting to put our stuff on stage. The music sounded great to me, though; raging hardcore with a metal edge. I couldn’t help myself. I walked over to the smallest skinhead, a menacing-looking kid in a crombie, and asked him what we were hearing. The kid, who I would come to know years later as Harley Flanagan, broke character, looked delighted, and said, “The Cro-Mags!”
I gather the living conditions during your NYC tenure while in the band were pretty squalid. What are you own recollections of life on the Lower East Side during that era? Decades later, what do you think the biggest misconception is about the downtown NYC of that period?
Conditions were pretty squalid. Rob and Sean were living in an illegal basement plywood-walled apartment when I met them, and I was basically homeless for the first year I was in the band. The area was starting to gentrify, which meant that rents were high while the streets were still completely chaotic. Violence could erupt at any moment, and the cops couldn’t do anything about anything. There was a heroin supermarket at 2nd and A with a long line of people in front of it. This was after a lot of mental health facilities had been shut down, and there were crazy people everywhere, pissing on everything and screaming.
A lot of my L.E.S. misadventures happened while I was delivering pizzas there. The first time I got robbed was in an Avenue D project hallway, where I was pushed me to my knees and a knife was held against my throat. They got my tips, but not my bank, which I’d stuffed into my sock. The second time, somewhere across Houston, Ludlow Street maybe, there was a gun in my face. It was a revolver, and when you see one of those from the front, you can tell if it’s loaded or not. I looked at the bullets in the cylinder and gave up all my money.
As for misconceptions, I think when people picture New Yorkers, they think of, like, two fat Italian guys yelling at each other. Throughout my time in NY, people were usually surprisingly friendly. The city’s very different today, of course, but New Yorkers, to me, still have a kind of humanity that is sometimes lacking in people in other cities.
Name three things you miss from your time in New York.
Well, the main thing would be New York itself. I am peripatetic by nature; when I’m done with a place, I move on. That said, when Sean first had the idea of moving the band to L.A., I was very, very resistant. It later turned out that she was 100% right, but NYC is the only place I’ve ever lived where I thought I would stay forever. And, of course, the pre-Giuliani city I’m talking about is a place none of us can ever visit again.
I guess I miss the idea of NYC as the center of the universe. The city was a beacon even in my earliest awareness of the world. Sesame Street is clearly New York. I looked at the publishing info in comic books, Marvel and DC. New York is where comics come from. Later, when I had some records of my own, I looked at the back covers - New York is where music comes from. The first left-of-the-dial sounds I heard, Blondie, Ramones, The Cramps, New York. Movies, from "Shaft" to "The Warriors," "Basket Case" to "C.H.U.D.," New York. When I finally got there, there were coolest people, and the biggest freaks, and everyone was doing things. There were records and t-shirts and stuff you couldn’t find anywhere else. Yes, now that every store sells things that you can easily get online, I have to say that I miss the shopping.
I miss an afternoon with the windows open, sun streaming in, listening to your favorite NY music, choose your poison, Lou Reed, Monk, Tribe Called Quest. Knowing that the artists have most certainly walked down the street where you are, because you are where everything is happening. That’s a feeling I can’t really describe.
When the band went major, the band decamped to sunny California. Did you ever return to New York City after the band imploded? Have you been back since?
Sure, lots of times, though I’m there less so now that a lot of the music industry has moved itself to Nashville. The last time was for a wedding in Brooklyn, and I never even went into Manhattan. Everything is sodifferent now that visiting is kind of disturbing for me, and the people I know who still live there are forever talking about the latest tragic shuttering of a place we used to go.
What are you up to these days?
I worked a lot in 2015, on the WZ box set and on a bunch of other records for various labels, and then I moved to Spain at the end of the year. I’m taking some time off, but the turnaround time for vinyl is really long (and getting longer), so stuff has been coming out throughout 2016. Two of those records that I’m very proud of are the soundtracks/scores to "The Warriors" and "Taxi Driver," both of which I mastered for Waxwork Records.
Having cut your teeth in the hardcore age, do you think the looming new administration (be it Clinton or :::shudder::: Trump) might at least inspire a new age of suitably angry protest music?
I don’t think so. I don’t think the next battle-cry will be a song. This will probably sound very “kids these days..”, but young people just don’t place music at the center of everything the way people my age (there are a lot of different metrics, but I guess you could say I’m a senior member of Generation X) did, or, especially, how the Baby Boomers did. Music is more like a single arrow in the Millennial quiver, so to speak.
I hope I’m wrong, though. If Americans, who are supposed to be so angry about everything, finally do take to the streets, perhaps some of them will start singing.
I'd really like to thank J. for his time and enthusiasm. If you haven't already, you really need to check out It Came from N.Y.C.Find it here.
I have a couple of posts in the works, notably yet another Flaming Pablum Interview, which I hope all will enjoy.
Unfortunately, the news events of the day (from the Brexit to the continued failure to enact meaningful gun control legislation to the ongoing, terrifying circus of abject idiocy that is Donald Trump), make it all feel more meaningless and trivial than can be quantified.
As such, consider this applicable tune a place-holder....
As detailed in Jeremiah’s post, the villain in this story is not the competition from big name chains like Barnes & Noble, nor the online bookseller juggernaut that is Amazon or even people forsaking actual books in favor of idiotic devices like Kindles and Nooks (do people still use those? I’m so behind the times). No, the culprit is our city’s spiraling rents, pure and simple.
In 2016, we’ve already lost Left Bank Books on 8th Avenue, and after a long protracted demise, the beleaguered St. Marks Bookshop from its exiled perch on unforgiving East Third Street. Personally speaking, I’m still smarting from the departure of Shakespeare & Co. back in 2014.
Before you click your tongues, roll your eyes and dust off that weary adage that change is the only constant in an urban environment, please go fuck yourselves, and let me underscore, once again, that brick n’ mortar establishments of these kinds (both book shops and record/disc shops) are more than simply places wherein to purchase goods. They are places for like-minds to gather, connect and share. They are places wherein to learn and discover. They are places to find solace and kinship. Beyond all that, they’re also places simply to browse, something you can do in fewer and fewer places.
Support your local bookshop, goddammit.
This news found me looking up this video from 2013, which I wrote more extensively about here, wherein bespectacled indie dude Fred Nicolaus of Golden Suits circumnavigates Manhattan’s network of book shops for the purposes of buying up every single copy of “The Stories of John Cheever” he can get his hands on.
In the three years since this was filmed, about four of the shops Fred visits in the video have already vanished.
Given the dad-centric tone of this entry, I probably should have posted it yesterday, but c’est la guerre.
With both of my kids now into their diminutive double-digits (a Rubicon I was sad to see them cross, if I’m being honest), the evenings wherein I read to them are fewer and further between. Charlotte, my eldest at 12, is a voracious reader by this point, prone to pulling books at random off our shelves when she’s run out of her own selections. As such, she’s as versed in works of Agatha Christie as she is in J.K. Rowling. At 10, Oliver has yet to catch that particular fever, but has a few stand-bys he’ll happily page through, although they usually involve LEGO in some capacity. I’ve also introduced him to the myriad joys of Asterix the Gual and Marvel Comics, both of which certainly acted as gateway drugs-of-sorts for me towards more adventurous fare when I was his age. Here’s hoping that works for him, as well.
In any case, prior to the organization turning my life into a roiling, daily morass of paranoia, shame and mental flagellation, my former job at TODAY.com had me occasionally write about parenting, and back in the deceptively placid days of 2012, I wrote up a dewy-eyed ode to reading to my kids, dubbed Bedtime Stories: 6 Children’s Books Best Read Out Loud. One of the selections I cited was P.D. Eastman’s canine classic, “Go, Dog. Go!” But as much as my kids and I continue to love that particular book, there’s always been one aspect of it that mystified me. I’m talking about the ongoing hat exchange, obviously.
Should you be unfamiliar with the narrative in question, it’s basically a series of vignettes wherein a female dog asks for validation and approval from a male dog in regards to her choice of headwear. No, I know that dogs don’t generally wear hats, but let’s remember … this is a children’s book.
But as a children’s book (albeit one first published in the arguably not-as-enlightened era of 1961), the message this particular thread of the otherwise-largely-nonexistent plot sends is puzzling. Not only is the male dog in the exchange somewhat needlessly brusque and rude, but the depiction of the female dog repeatedly seeking his positive acknowledgment isn’t something I’d ever want either of my children to emulate.
To this point, I recently discovered an amazing post by a writer named Raquel D’Apice. For a blog called The Ugly Volvo, D’Apice has penned “An Open Letter to the Female Hat-Wearing Dog from ‘Go, Dog. Go!’” It hilariously speaks refreshingly to my above concerns, and is well worth your time.
I have this screen-saver device on my crappy desktop computer (yes, I still use one of those) that selects images at random from a folder that I routinely stuff with nonsense I find on the web. Not too long back, I had to prune some images from it that were arguably unsuitable for children for when the kids were in the room (and, given the diminutive size of the apartment, they’re basically always “in the room”). I’m not talking about porny images, but violent Cop Shoot Cop flyers, a picture of Michael Gira of SWANS with a noose, a shot of Raven from Killing Joke wearing a “FUCK THA POLICE” shirt, etc.
By this point, the folder in question is stuffed with countless images. I’ve largely forgotten what’s in there, so I’m frequently surprised by what comes up in the rotation. This morning, one appeared that I hadn’t seen in a while, and I ended up looking at it in a whole new way, and noticed a curious detail. Here’s the shot in question now…
This is, of course, the mighty Cramps — featuring the classic line-up of Lux and Ivy flanked by drummer Nick Knox and the endearingly Boris Karloffy Bryan Gregory on second guitar.
The thing that caught my eye this time around that I’d never noticed before is the room they appear playing in. Stop me if I’m wrong, but are they playing in front of the United Nations emblem?
I know the Cramps enjoyed playing unconventional venues (witness their celebrated performance at the Napa State Mental Facility as a prime example), but I cannot imagine the unlikely circumstances of the potty-minded Cramps unleashing their signature blend of barbed psychobilly on the august body of U.N. dignitaries.
Anyone know the scoop?
ADDENDUM:A reader named Arem helped out. The venue is Georgetown's Hall of Nations, and it was a pivotal show from 1979 that acted a crucial catalyst for the Washington D.C. punk scene as told here by Henry Rollins.
I spotted the photo above in a random search and let out a gasp. No, I'm not going to try to name the location (I'm sure someone can, though, can you?) No, I was intrigued in that it's a rare shot by one Chalkie Davies for a very specific reason. Here's how Getty describes it....
American punk group The Ramones in New York, April 1977, with graphic designer Arturo Vega, who designed the band's logo. Left to right: Arturo Vega (1947 - 2013), singer Joey Ramone (1951 - 2001, drummer Tommy Ramone, bassist Dee Dee Ramone (1951 - 2002) and guitarist Johnny Ramone (1948 - 2004).
Nice, right?
Only, there's one problem. That's not Arturo Vega on the far left. That's Marc Bell, shortly to be re-christend Marky Ramone.
Here is Arturo Vega in `77 (courtesy of the great Godlis)
And here, once again, is Marc Bell a.k.a. Marky Ramone
In exceptionally short order, both master location-spotters Bob Egan and Chung Wong chimed in(Chung on Facebook) in with the readily evident details that the estimable brothers Ramone were captured by Bob Gruen standing manfully on the south side of East 1st Street between Bowery and Second Avenue, …i.e. ACROSS THE STREET AND A FEW STEPS TO THE WEST OF THE VERY SPOT that Joe Dilworth would photograph the Lunachicks fifteen years later.
The giveaway for me should have been the vertical “PARKING” signage at the far left-hand side of the frame, which matches up with this old image of Extra Place.
For another vantage, point, the Ramones are basically standing directly across the street from where Lou Reed and then-wife Sylvia Morales are pictured here in a still from the video of “Sweet Jane” by the Jim Carroll Band.
Which is essentially just around the corner from the lot that was adjacent 295 Bowery (which I captured here)...
Obviously, that spot today bears no resemblance to its former incarnation....
I am fully aware that I just spent the last month driving myself (and maybe a couple of others) to distraction with my search to pinpoint the location of Joe Dilworth’s 1990 shot of the Lunachicks, and that I should probably relax my sleuth capacities for a while, but y’know what? Fuck that. Life is short, and when something catches your eye, you should jump on it. So that’s what I’m doin’. Hop on board, or get outta the way, `cos this is happening.
Okay, so a little backtracking…
I finally got to swing back out to the Queens Museum, last weekend, to check out that celebrated Ramones exhibit. Incidentally, if you haven’t yet, you have until the end of July to get on it. And while, yes, the idea of anything to do with punk rock literally being in a museum is slightly off-putting (see this atrocity as a prime example), I have to say that the Queens Museum did a pretty great job.
The collection of Ramones artifacts -– from Johnny’s first Mosrite through to the “Gabba Gabba Hey” sign to the pinhead mask and all points in between -– is pretty unimpeachable. If you’re a fan of this stuff (and, if you’re not, why are you reading my blog?), you do owe it to yourself to check it all out, if you can.
In perusing through the three big rooms of stuff, however, I was immediately drawn to a foursome of photographic prints by the great Bob Gruen. Two of them were entirely familiar, but the other two… not so much.
You might remember a recent post wherein I speculated about Gruen’s 1975 photo of the band ascending from an unnamed subway station, and I determined that it was the F stop where Second Avenue t-bones East Houston. This particular photo was taken during the same session that resulted in iconic shots of the band posing in front of CBGB (just a block away from that station) and another famous image of the band on a subway with their guitars in shopping bags. Those two photos were presented in this section of the exhibit, appended by a shot of the band I’d never seen before, evidently taken in the band’s home `hood of Forrest Hills before boarding that Manhattan bound train, and the last one featured up top, showing da brudders posing like a gang of leather-clad thugs on some downtrodden East Village backwater. Here’s that photo again…
One of the more striking things about this photo is just the sheer condition of depicted scene. I have a friend who’s always remarking when he sees footage of the East Village of the 1980’s, how “not-so-bad” it looks compared to legend and lore. Granted, the `80s were five years on from this shot, but the patch of NYC captured in this photograph truly looks like a city in steep decline. Here’s my attempt at a sharper image of it. Click to enlarge.
Anyway, I’m sure you know here this is going…
In noticing how distressed the surrounding cityscape looks, I started trying to picture what that same spot might look like today, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t immediately place it. Now, given that it was presumably snapped during the same session that resulted in those afore-cited subway shots (i.e. between CB’s and Second Avenue….i.e. pretty much the exact same area as the Lunachicks photo), it makes sense that it was taken in that same vicinity. But I can’t picture it’s current incarnation….
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