It’s probably ridiculous for me to address proceedings this way, but I have a hard time posting profoundly trivial shit on my blog like arcane album-cover minutia and/or inane location-spotting photo-hunts featuring age-old punk bands with silly hair when the world is essentially going to Hell in a fuckin’ handbag.
Between the hearings, the shootings, the tweets, the terror, the name-calling, the propaganda, the red tape and the daily lashings of abject bullshit from the top on down, it’s hard to feel any semblance of optimism for the future. We are deeply into the shit, these days, and I don’t know about you, but I’m genuinly concerned that the only light at the end of this dank, idiotic tunnel is an oncoming train. I’ve lost a great deal of faith in the system, and pretty all faith in the competence of my fellow Americans. How did we get here? How do we get out? Yes, I know … vote the bastards out, but will the harried, distressed fabric of our union even survive long enough for us to do so?
Over in the teeming wilderness of Facebook, I’ve half-heartedly endeavored to curtail my firehose of venomous spleen-venting by posting music videos every time I’m tempted to let rip about the tumult of the day. It hasn’t always worked, but I’d like to believe it’s given some relief to those remaining friends of mine who, for whatever reason, may not share my frothy-mouthed ire regarding all things Trump.
In the wake of yesterday’s avalanche of dispiriting news, I put up the track below, expressing the need to hear something positive and life-affirming, given that all else was basically going “shitwards” (yes, I know – how eloquent!)
That, in turn, reminded me of a photo I snapped on West Broadway this past February. Below are my kids sharing a moment with the Starman himself.
If you’d ever have suggested that I’d post two entries devoted to Walter Steding back-to-back, I’d have verily scoffed at you. But, these are strange times, so here we are.
Sorry for another slowdown. My office held an “offsite” last week, which gobbled up a huge pile of time and energy, not least in that it meant we lost three days of office-time, meaning my department has been scrambling to catch up ever since. On other fronts, my wife just started a new job, and my kids are shortly getting out of school. There’s a lot of crap going on, so I haven’t been able to post as much as I’d like. I have some cooler stuff in the works, I promise, but please sit tight.
In the short term, however, in the wake of that last post about Walter Steding’s video for “Secret Spy,” I stumbled upon this other video of his, that being the title track to his album, Dancing in Heaven. Rife with Steding’s signature violin-playing and some very of-their-era electronic beats, “Dancing in Heaven” (shot in 1982) finds Walter and a gaggle of breakdancers holding court in what looks like a patch of New York City public space, with Walter overseeing proceedings on what looks like either a flagpole pedstal or bit of statuery.
In short order, I became predictably intrigued – where was this clip shot?
Watch the video first.
I posted it on Facebook and tagged my sleuthing pals Chung Wong and Bob Egan of PopSpots. Each gamely weighed in.
Chung wrote:
With the circular benches, traffic and office i thought it might have been TriBeCa Park by Beach St. But still trying to figure out what that column or pole on a pedestal is. Park benches look different but a background building looks similar.
Bob wrote:
contrast clue 1. My original thoughts were City Hall Park, Chrystie at Canal, and Asser Levy Park.
high contract clues for all the seekers
To my mind, TriBeCa Park – which I walk through every day on my way to work – seemed to make sense, given its proximity to Steding-centric spots like the former site of the Mudd Club at 77 White Street and the formerly arty bohemia of SoHo. Trouble is, there doesn’t seem to be a matching flagpole there, much less –as Chung noted – any curved benches.
I can’t honestly say I’d ever heard (or heard of) Walter Steding until seeing Glenn O’Brien’s “Downtown 81” in 2001, although I later retro-recognized his signature, somewhat-listing violin-playing on Blondie’s “The Tide is High.”
Evidently a member of that same clique that hung out with the No Wave bohos at joints like the Mudd Club and Hurrah, Steding utilized a violin in a manner not entirely unlike Laurie Anderson, seemingly seeking to re-imagine the instrument outside of the stuffy parameters of classical music. As a solo act, Steding actually opened up for bands at CBGB like Blondie, Suicide and the Ramones, which is a testament to how open-minded the early NYC scene was before all things “punk” became codified by uniforms and stereotypes.
In any case, I stumbled upon this clip of Steding’s from his 1982 album, Dancing in Heaven. The song, “Secret Spy,” was produced by Blondie’s Chris Stein, but the video below was evidently co-produced by Andy Warhol, finding our Walter sawing away on his violin on a west side pier off the Hudson River, when such places were more traveled by cruisers and thrill-seekers, and not stroller-pushers and sunbathers.
Appropos of nothing at all, I was recently perusing the epidsodes of “Here’s the Thing,” Alec Baldwin’s podcast series. I realize some people consider Baldwin a divisive figure, but I personally think he’s hilarious and insightful (although, truthfully, I think his Trump impersonation is actually kinda weak). Regardless, I feel he’s got a lot of interesting things to say, and I share a lot of his tastes. Case in point being his interview with Flaming Pablum favorite, Joe Jackson, the formerly “Angry Young Man of the New Wave,” not shitty Michael’s shitty dad.
If you’ve not heard it and you’re a fan, it’s really worth your time. Jackson comes across as wittily erudite as you might expect, but his penchant for being essentially a bit of a prickly curmudgeon is undiminished. As he also expressed in his bio some years back, Jackson ruminates on the discomfort he feels when he's accosted by his fans, which prompts Baldwin to recount an anecdote about approaching Joe Jackson back in the 80’s at an East Village joint called -– I think -– Binnybon? Does that ring any bells with anyone? In any case, Alec went up to Jackson and professed his fandom, and the notoriously thorny Brit ex-pat singer/songwriter gave him a brusque cold shoulder. That totally resonated with me, as I had my own awkward encounter with Joe Jackson a few years back. The man just does not enjoy the unsolicited company of his public, it seems.
In any case, that podcast got me revisiting an album of Jackson’s I'd not considered in a while, ironically one I do not own or really know at all. Night and Day II came out in 2000, its title alluding kinship with Jackson’s breakout album from 1982, i.e. the one that spawned "Steppin' Out," that being Night and Day.
The reason I started thinking about Night and Day II is because of its cover, which features a lovely nocturnal shot of Manhattan. Being that I walk up and down the length of the avenue in question five days a week, I recognize the depicted locale as West Broadway at Duane Street. But something about it still bugged me. Here's the album cover now. Click to enlarge.
Yeah, obviously, those are the twin towers of the World Trade Center, not to mention 7 World Trade Center in front of same. You might remember 7 WTC as the building that collapsed on September 11, 2001, despite not having been hit by any planes, a curious circumstance that led it to become the center of any number of conspiracy theories. Today, I work in the building that stands in that fallen structure's footprint. On one of my walks home from work, this week, I tried to replicate the album cover shot. Here `tis...
As you can see, not too much has really changed beyond the afore-cited buildings, although the shops and restaurants that lined both sides of that strip of West Broadway (between Duane and Reade Streets) have changed quite a bit in the past 17 years.
But still something was wrong. Then it hit me.
If you scroll up and look at the Jackson sleeve again, you'll see that the cab Joe's in appears to be heading left down West Broadway as it exits Duane Street. Therein lies the problem. Duane Street runs a one-way direction from west to east, meaning that the driver behind the wheel of Joe's cab has been driving against the traffic.
That might explain the look of concern on Joe's face.
Here's a little more about the album in question...
I know I said I was going to buy the 50th anniversary edition of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Bandjust to spite Salon’s Amanda Marcotte for her -– to my mind -– overreaching indictment of the album and the band’s unwitting impact on the music and culture that followed in said creative milestone’s wake, but that was initially just bluster on my part. I did end up actually picking it up this week not just out of my continuing objections to Marcotte’s article (do not get me started again on that front), but after a conversation with a new colleague.
Evan is my team’s new director of online development, but he’s relatively fresh from a stint as a recording engineer. While it’s all well and good for music geeks to wax authoritative about the minutia of bands both canonical and obscure, it’s that rare breed of nerd that can actually bring some credible technical knowledge to the table. I can assuredly hold my own in any music discussion based around pertinent personnel, legend and lore, but Evan is able to speak, parse and expound on recording-studio vernacular that is largely lost on the layperson. As such, his insights into why certain music sounds the way it sounds lends a refreshing new dynamic to the dialogue, although why he cares so much about weedy piffle like Smashing Pumpkins is something I’ll never know. Must be a generational thing.
In any case, Evan and I were recently ruminating on the dependable allure and (usually) accompanying let-down of re-released albums. Too often, lushly re-packaged, commemorative editions of certain lauded albums are reissued with the desperate rock-dad market in mind, usually emboldened with the tantalizing promise of a revelatory listening experience. It’s a bait I’ve gamely taken more times than I can count. But, more often than not, the only genuinely discernible differences one can glean from the reissues – especially for one such as I, whose hearing is already compromised from years of blithely irresponsible exposure to noise -- is simply an uptick in volume. There have been the odd exceptions to that rule, most notably the 1997 remixing of Raw Power by Iggy & the Stooges, which noticeably restored much of the band’s original heft to David Bowie’s comparatively anemic original job. One suspects there may have been pharmaceuticals in the studio, the first time around. Just a hunch.
The crucial difference, Evan helpfully pointed out, is the distinction between re-mastering and re-mixing. Maybe that’s obvious to you -- and perhaps it should be -- but I can’t say I really knew the granular distinctions between the two. As I understand it, any sonic nuances freshly revealed from a proper remastering will, generally, really only be evident to the ears of die-hard superfans, studio professionals and/or those with exceedingly detailed playback systems. But on a pair of shitty ear-buds – which, let’s face it, is currently the manner seemingly most people routinely enjoy their music – the added nuance will likelly go unnoticed by the average listener. Unless you’re a consummate audiophile with the hardware to deliver the best results, you probably won’t be able to tell the difference. I should point out, at this stage, that I mean no offense to the mastering engineers of the world. It’s not their fault that their finely detailed work goes largely unsung. Sadly, it should also be acknowledged that, by and large, the general public doesn’t really care about the finer points of fidelity. To paraphrase Sir Andrew of Eldritch, I don’t know why they gotta be so undemanding.
Meanwhile, remixing is a much more invasive procedure than remastering, as it involves delving back into each individual track (not track as in song, but track as in recording channel) and re-assembling those diverse parts into a new sonic configuration. As such, the end results of a proper remixing very much can deliver a relatively brand new listening experience.
Anyway, with all the above in mind, when I learned that the anniversary edition of the Beatles’ arguable masterpiece (some believe Revolver trumps it) was remixed and not remastered, and on the back of a surprise project with a neck-snapping deadline at work that I managed to excute stealthily and accrue kudos over, I decided to treat m’self and buy a copy. So, that’s what I did. Last night, I went home and ripped it to my iTunes (along with my equally anticipated copy of Deliquescence, the latest live document from SWANS, pictured above).
True to the hype, I did indeed feel that I was hearing this album in a brand new way. Like countless peers, I postively grew up with Sgt. Pepper’s. I don’t know who brought it into our house first, but there was always a copy of it in our home and its songs are verily the soundtrack to my childhood. To hear such genuinly fresh, new depth and dynamic in these inherently familiar songs --- crackling with new distinctions –- is legitimately amazing. From the shimmering opening chords of “It’s Getting Better” to the soaring harmonies in “With a Little Help From My Friends,” the album overflows with details that had been formerly blurred in the original mix. And it rocks harder, with an expansive bottom end that adds a muscular swagger to proceedings. Even tracks I’d have once skipped over -– like, sorry, “Within You, Without You” -– now bloom with fresh, multidimensional facets.
And, sorry, Amanda, as much as I genuinely love the Human League, it's fucking WAY BETTERthan Dare.
Bottom line: If you grew up loving this album, go get the anniversary edition. It’s worth the expenditure.
...although not the six-CD super-duper deluxe edition. That's just silly.
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