Flaming Pablum

Diggin' Up Dig Dat Hole

It must be said that, if nothing else, the pandemic has been a positive boon for the uploading of esoteric shit on YouTube. I guess with everyone on lockdown with loads of downtime on their hands, the moment finally seemed right to digitize and upload all sorts of far-flung crap, at long last.

Such is the case this week, as just goddamn yesterday, a YouTuber named E3 — how cryptic! — saw fit to upload the so-called Adult Contemporary mix of the debut by Dig Dat Hole.

For those playing along at home, Dig Dat Hole was the band Tod [A] played in after his stints with The Dum Dum Boys, The Crabs and Shithaus, but before his celebrated turns helming the mighty Cop Shoot Cop and his current-albeit-temporarily-dormant combo, Firewater. DDT also featured future Cop Shoot Cop drummer/percussionist Phil Puleo (later of the Audio Dyslexia, The Body Lovers, Angels of Light, and more notably SWANS and, most recently Human Impact) and a guitarist named John Rose. They played a few gigs here in the city alongside names like Railroad Jerk, Pussy Galore, Rat at Rat R and White Zombie, to name a small few, at since-vanished venues like CBGB and the Lismar Lounge. 

E3 shared some more info…

DIG DAT HOLE
Vocals/Bass: Tod A.
Guitar: Mike Rose
Drums: Phil Puleo

DIG DAT HOLE was the band Tod A and Phil Puleo were in just before forming Cop Shoot Cop. Most are familiar with them from the Kneejerk test pressing on Ruthless Records. What most don't know is that the record was also going to be released by Tom Smith on his Adult Contemporary label. What's more, the Adult Contemporary mix is waaaay better than the Ruthless Records mix, however it's impossible to find... except by me. I have a taped copy that was sent to the Ugly American zine by Tom Smith back in the early 90s.

I had to fly in A Similar End and a short part of Cooler Than You (don't worry. you won't notice the splice) from the Ruthless version due to an overdubbing accident that happened years ago.

Track listing is:

1) Six Good Reasons

2) I Exist

3) Dig Dat Hole

4) Spiritual Monday

5) A Similar End

6) Cooler Than You

7) Down

8) Infected Again

Here is Tod & Phil talking about the troubled record during a Cop Shoot Cop interview with the Ugly American fanzine on Feb 4 1990:

Tod: Steve Albini, who is just a weasel, dicked us out of a promise he made to us.

UA: Oh yeah, wasn't he going to produce?

Tod: No, he was just going to put out our record, but he like hedged and hawed, you know, he just strung us along for, what is it? A year and a half? A year?

Phil: Something like that.

Tod: And someone else before that, so it was just kind of like, "fuck it." We had other ideas, so...

UA: Was the other guy Tom Smith?

Phil: They know all about Tom Smith.

Tod: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

UA: Do you hate Tom Smith?

Tod: Um, Tom Smith is just kinda pathetic, like when I finally met him it was just... I went there with the intention of beating the shit out of him, but he was just sort of a pathetic drug addict. So I just left.

UA: What did he tell you about releasing the record?

Tod: He said he'd been doing a lot of cocaine and he used up all the money he was going to put out records with, um, doing cocaine and it was like, uh, cool... cool record label. Yeah, like "I'm sorry, I was really fucked up and I had to go out to my dad's place to build boats to straighten out."

One wonders, where is Tom Smith today?

Enjoy...

Julian & The C-Word

I love Julian Cope. He’s a singular talent who admirably does not do what is expected of him. Despite possessing a dazzling knack for crafting perfectly realized pop (evident on singles like “World Shut Your Mouth,” “Trampoline,” “Charlotte Anne,” “ Beautiful Love,” “Try Try Try” and countless others), he’s often way more prone to indulging his adoration for the pointedly inaccessible and wildly esoteric.

After about twenty years of writing, recording and performing more conventional post-punky pop with both his original band The Teardrop Explodes and via his solo career, Julian pulled out all the stops and started releasing music that owed precious little to those earlier records, opting instead to dabble in a wide amalgam of styles including drone-laden experimental post-rock, ironic ersatz heavy metal, metronomic Krautrock homages and the like. It was like he was going out of his way to distance himself from that which had won him his initial success and renown.

I tried to keep up, but after a few unwieldy and — sorry, Jules — frankly unlistenable projects, I kinda fell off. I’d pick up a new single or album of his every now and then (I’ve been meaning to check out his 2017 album, Drunken Songs, which he composed after discovering the joys of alcohol years and years after the fact), but his signature magic was often sorely missing — although I did quite enjoy the pugnacious title track to 2007’s You’ve Got a Problem With Me.

Regardless of wherever his musical muse might be leading him, I will always remain a fan. He’s also a tirelessly entertaining author.

I was fortunate enough to see Julian perform twice — once on the tour for the watershed opus Peggy Suicide and then again, some years later, at a solo-acoustic show circa 1995’s 20 Mothers. In both instances, not only did he fucking rock — as that’s what he does — but he was a hilarious raconteur. Which leads me to the clip below.

While I don’t believe he’s ever officially released it, Julian Cope has been performing a song called “Cunts Can Fuck Off” for some years now. I managed to track down this live video — filmed at London’s legendary Roundhouse in 2017 — that finds him explaining the backstory of the song.

Enjoy. 

Where We Are

Wata Wears the Mask

This is Wata, guitarist for the high-decibel Japanese trio, BORIS. She rocks harder than you ever will.

If she can wear a mask, so can you.

Be like Wata. 

Happily Ever After Hours

In the wake of my last couple of posts on “After Hours" — let alone the many posts I’ve devoted to the film over the last fifteen years — a regular reader who posts under a wide array of names posed the following questions…

What was the coffee shop where Paul and Marcy met? Who was the punk girl who gave Paul the flyer to Mohawk Night? I mean backstory (casting, what she went on to do etc.) Any real deal NYHC people in the Mohawk This Guy! scene? I bet Davey Gunner from Kraut and/or Doug Holland from Kraut and Cro-Mags were extras.

Okay, let’s dive in and see what we can answer…

What was the coffee shop where Paul and Marcy met?

Okay, I have two theories about this, actually. In terms of the storyline, Paul resides on the Upper East Side, although I don’t believe his exact address is ever revealed. The interior of the coffee shop looks somewhat similar to a former restaurant on Lexington Avenue between 77th and 76th street, although I don’t believe it is still there.

This all said, it also resembles another spot on Park Avenue South (just a few blocks to the north of the building wherein Paul’s character works), but — 35 years after the facts — these locations no longer look as they did in 1985. There’s a shot when Marcy is speaking that you can see a large-paned window behind her that reveals some detail of the street running perpendicular to the avenue the coffee shop is on. I’m projecting, but it looks a bit like East 25th street. Again, though, I do not have the concrete answer to this question.

Who was the punk girl who gave Paul the flyer to Mohawk Night?

That being this fetching young lady …

I cannot honestly say I recognize her, although several bona fide punk folks from the NYHC scene do appear in the film, so she might be more than simply an actress.

Any real deal NYHC people in the Mohawk This Guy! scene?

Funny you should ask, as YES, which I went into great detail about on this old post.

I bet Davey Gunner from Kraut and/or Doug Holland from Kraut and Cro-Mags were extras.

I don’t believe either of those gents were, ALTHOUGH the classic A7 t-shirt Doug Holland sports in the video for Kraut’s “All Twisted” does indeed make a quick cameo.

More about "After Hours" on Flaming Pablum:

SoHoliloquoy (7/16/2007)

 Kiki Bridges Revisited (1/16/2010)

 The Sounds of After Hours (2/26/2010)

 Long After ‘After Hours’ (7/18/2012)

 ‘This Dark, Funny, Paranoid New York Summer Movie’ (6/13/2013)

 Terminal Times for the Emerald Pub (6/20/2015)
Mohawk Night at Club Berlin (6/29/2015)

Somewhere "After" the Rainbow (6/16/2017)

After Hours AOC (4/15/2019)

"Ric Handed Me Back the Cheese" (1/08/2020)

Paul is Dead: Who is the Man in Black at the End of "After Hours"? (7/10/2020)

"After Hours" in Avalon: A Tale of Two T-Shirts (7/11/2020)

Fifteen Years of Flaming Pablum

Under normal circumstances, I would probably make a much bigger deal about this, but in the grand scheme of things, who really cares?

In any case, today marks the 15th anniversary of this blog — which I originally started as a complete lark after a colleague started his own. His lasted a few years. A decade and a half later, I’m still doing mine. Seems like only months ago I noted the ten-year anniversary. Time is truly flying.

Anyway, I’m very grateful to all of you who read it. I don’t know where it’s headed, but why stop now?

Cheers.

"After Hours" in Avalon: A Tale of Two T-Shirts

I’m not sure I know a credibly viable way into this post, so I’m just going to write it and worry about that later. But, suffice to say, it’s probably the least consequential/most trivial thing I’ve ever posted here … which is saying something.

I’ve long been obsessed with Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” a film he released in September of 1985 in the immediate wake of Paramount scrapping his longtime dream project, “The Last Temptation of Christ” (an ambitious undertaking he’d later go on to release in 1988). “After Hours” was the furthest thing imaginable from a sweeping Biblical epic — a black comedy documenting the tragicomic travails of a mild-mannered yuppie (played by Griffin Dunne) lured into the bohemian wilderness of the downtown Manhattan of the mid-80’s. Comparatively speaking, it’s a small movie with a relatively niche audience.

If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you know what I mean when I say I’ve obsessed over this film. I’d devoted posts to its locations, its score and even minor members of its cast. As a result, I used to think I knew everything there is to know about the film, but as yesterday’s post demonstrated, this is clearly not the case.

I originally started this post back in mid-May. I started writing it with the working title, “Unanswerable Questions About a Certain Scene.” Well, I regret to say that in the ensuing weeks, I’ve all but forgotten what most of those allegedly “unanswerable” questions were, but I do remember one major observation, and it concerns the scene below. Bear in mind that this has more to do with my original perceptions and preconceptions.

In this scene, we see the beleaguered Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne’s protagonist) entering the Terminal Bar on the far western end of Spring Street in SoHo during a midsummer downpour. In actuality, the Terminal Bar did not exist. At the time — and for several years after “After Hours” was filmed -- this location was a bar called The Emerald Pub, although don’t go looking to have a pint there these days. The Emerald Pub closed in 2015 and the space has been dormant ever since. In any event, Paul repairs to the Terminal Bar to get out of the rain and to try to make sense of the chaos of the evening. Upon entering, he encounters cocktail waitress Julie (one of four pivotal blonde sirens through the film) and bartender Tom. While the scene plays out, a young, hip couple dances in the background to “You’re Mine,” a classic number by doo-wop duo Robert & Johnny.

Again, the rest of this is just about my silly projections, and has precious little to do with the film’s actual content.

In any case, for the longest time, I was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that the male half of that young, hip dancing couple was wearing a black, sleeveless t-shirt emblazoned with the back-cover design of Avalon by Roxy Music. Being that Avalon came out in 1982, three years before “After Hours” was released, it fit the chronology. Moreover, a cool, black sleeveless Roxy Music t-shirt seemed like just the thing a hip SoHo scenester might’ve worn while dancing in a downtown bar in the small hours of a summer night. In the event that you’re unfamiliar, the back cover of Avalon — designed by Peter Saville, who also did the iconic sleeves for both Unknown Pleasures and Closer by Joy Division— features some sort of crimson stone embedded in a gold, medieval amulet. Here it is now…

Cool, right? It’s also worth mentioning that Avalon is an amazing record. While not as adventurous as Roxy Music’s first few albums, it marked the high point of the band’s more sophisticated pop era and sadly served as their swan song. During my college years, it was an album that could be found in virtually every dorm room on campus and, like Diamond Life by Sade, its airing within same was sonic shorthand for “don’t come knocking.” Chances are, if you came home to hear your roommate playing Avalon, there was a good chance he or she was doing some very intimate entertaining sans pants.

Anyway, ever since spotting it in “After Hours,” I’d started keeping my eyes out for it, as it seemed like it would be a cool artifact to own, given both its association with my favorite film and my affinity for the album in question.

But I was never able to find it, which always frustrated me.

Fast forward to stumbling on the scene above in YouTube, I was suddenly able to get a much closer look at the garment in question, equipped with the pause button. In doing so, I managed to capture the screen grab below.

Suffice to say, that is very much not the back cover of Avalon. I’d been mistaken all these years. Under closer scrutiny, I figured it out and  Googled on a hunch what the actual t-shirt was and immediately struck oil. The dancing hipster in the Terminal Bar is wearing this….

In case you’re unfamiliar, it’s a Sha Na Na shirt. Sha Na Na was (and still is?) a doo-wop revival group who had their own television show back in the late `70s. They even played at friggin' Woodstock.

While not nearly as cool as a Roxy Music shirt, it actually makes way more sense as something a guy voluntarily dancing to a door-wop tune by Robert & Johnny would wear.

So, yeah, end of story. I was wrong about that.

This, incidentally, is Roxy Music...

 

 

Paul is Dead: Who is The Man in Black at the End of "After Hours"

I actually had yet another “After Hours” post already in the works a few weeks back, but lost the urge to finish it, at the time, as it was strenuously beyond trivial. While I may soon revisit that, a friend of mine on Facebook recently called my attention to clip below, which dives into the mysterious minutia of the film’s very final scene in great detail, begging the question …. who is the mystery man in black?

Check it out here.

Funhouse Turns 50

I’ve already written at great length about the album in question on this silly blog, but Funhouse by the Stooges turned 50 years old this week (it was released on July 7, 1970) and it’s worth evangelizing the FACT that it’s the single greatest rock album of all goddamn time, full stop. Here’s what I wrote about it back in 2005…

Expressing my love for the second album by the Stooges doesn't exactly put me out on any precarious limbs; its status as a genre-defining, legitimately seminal benchmark has been laboriously extolled by every credible rock journalist, elitist music snob and dubious hack to ever submit an opinion. It's simply a bona fide classic. Henry Rollins once cited it in a column for SPIN Magazine as one of his top two favorite albums of all time (the other was White Light White Heat by the Velvet Underground). Mark E. Smith of the Fall told Mojo Magazine that it was an album that "changed his life." It sold poorly upon its 1970 release. It doesn't contain any singles you're likely to hear on a commercial radio station. You'd be hard pressed to find it in your local sports bar's jukebox. While it managed to log in at #191 on Rolling Stone Magazine's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" (its more user-friendly predecessor, The Stooges, ranked at #185), your average passive rock fan probably has no idea of its brilliance, let alone its existence. But ask your typical vinyl-hoarding, unshaven and bleary-eyed music geek to part with his or her copy of it, and you can expect tears and pugilism.

I first layed undeserving ears on the album during my freshman year of college in 1985, as it came blasting out of my scowly friend Jay's dorm room in unintentionally girl-scaring, hourly rotations. I'd heard Iggy Pop before, but I knew precious little about his pre-70's incarnation. Quickly indoctrinated into the faith via Jay's relentless airings, I immersed myself in this savage artifact. Despite rearing their heads towards the tail end of the hippy dippy 60's, the Stooges were the very antithesis of peace-espousing love mongers (unless the love being mongered was of a purely physical kind). They were rude, filthy, scary, sleazy, sexy, druggy and loud (in other words, they were perfect). Stripping rock music down to its raw rudiments years before the Ramones and the `Pistols, the Stooges were the definition of proto-Punk. Had their notorious predilections for hedonism overtaken them prior to recording Funhouse, I'd suggest that rock music would sound very different today.

I was going to launch into the predictable track-by-track description, painstakingly detailing every barbed nuance of this album's seven tracks, but whole battalions of learned rock scribes have done that more eloquently than I can probably muster (though somewhat surprisingly, Continuum books' 33 1/3 Book series has yet to attempt to tackle Funhouse). Suffice it to say, if you can listen to the first three tracks ("Down on the Street", "Loose" and "T.V. Eye") without adopting a pronounced swagger to your stride or if you can hear "1970" without wanting to leap around like a tight-trousered hellion, then you should probably go buy yourself a Judy Collins record and start collecting ornamental doilies. If you don't appreciate Funhouse by the Stooges, then you simply don't enjoy hearing rock'n'roll played properly, dammit.

Happy Birthday, Funhouse, you were and remain a life-changer.

The Plan for Lilac Time