I am reminded of two things, this morning. The first is my very first time within the hallowed halls of Radio City Music Hall circa 1975, when my mother brought me to see “The Wind & The Lion,” featuring Sean Connery as the Great Raisuli, a swashbuckling North African brigand with an inexplicable Scottish accent.
The second is countless evenings in the mid-90s at the TIME Magazine News Desk -- just across the street from Radio City -- in the company of my colleagues John Flowers and Mitch Frank. When broken news wasn’t in need of mending, John, Mitch and I had developed a persistent habit of reciting the complex lyrics of contemporary hip-hop in the reverently studied voice of the great Sean Connery. I don’t believe I have laughed so hard before or since.
Rest in Peace, OO7. You are truly the man now, dawg.
Earlier this month, I quasi-gave John Lydon the benefit of the doubt of just simply being antagonistic, predictably contrary and cheekily provocative when it came to his recent endorsements of Donald Trump, asserting that I choose to remember Lydon/Rotten as he was more than as he currently is.
Well, he’s only made that harder in the ensuing weeks by doubling down on his support for the president in advance of November 3, going so far as to go on Fox’s Greg Gutfeld show to wax vitriolic about Democrats and praise Trump for being a genuine “human being.”
Let me tell you, if you’ve ever been a fan of Lydon's and have even a modicum of awareness about the fetid nest of avarice and totalitarian megalomania that is the Trump Administration, it’s pretty rough going. Poor old giddily sycophantic Greg Gutfeld is barely able to get a word in as Lydon -- in typically self-congratulatory mode -- goes on a selective series of directionless rants about his misgivings with the Democratic Party and the Obama Administration, while repeatedly letting Trump off any and all hooks because he is, once again “thinking for himself” (more like thinkingONLY OF himself, John) and being “a human being.” Really? Last time I checked, the average human being had at least small degrees of empathy and compassion, two qualities Trump inarguably lacks.
How Lydon has gotten so snowed by this perception of Donald Trump is entirely confounding, but obviously, he’s perfectly entitled to his opinion. I was fully ready to sigh with resignation and leave it at that until, just towards the end of the interview, Gutfeld largely parts with Fox News policy and deigns to mention the pandemic, suggesting that he and Lydon get together in person when the COVID-19 crisis ends, to which Lydon replies “Did it ever really start?”
I’m not going to unpack chapter and verse about first hearing the music of the Sex Pistols and, later, Public Image Ltd., as I’ve probably done so numerous times in this blog’s fifteen year existence. Suffice to say, like many from my generation who share the particular predilections of Punk Rock, the impact that music, those records and those individuals — foremost among them Mr. Lydon — had on me is profound. At the risk of sounding rapturously histrionic, his was as informative a voice in my development and sensibility as those of some of my respected college professors and older work colleagues. He’s always been a figure I was inspired and galvanized by.
I believe I first heard Laibach during my indoctrination into so-called industrial music towards my latter years of college. Having been lured in by the post-pop iteration of Ministry, early Skinny Puppy and the Revolting Cocks, I started to branch out and investigate some of the genre’s arguably less accessible antecedents, from progenitors like Einsturzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle to New York City’s own contingent, featuring SWANS, Foetus (yes, I realize not actually from New York, pedants) and less style-conscious acolytes like Missing Foundation and Cop Shoot Cop. But, before all of that, I somehow latched onto Laibach — a band ultimately with only rudimentary similarities to all of the above.
Sure, they shared a penchant for big, ponderous percussion and impossibly deep, basso-profundo vocals, not unlike early SWANS, but where the latter was driven by raging self-loathing, cruelty and depravity, Laibach was entirely different.
Based, as I dimly understood it, at the time, out of Slovenia, Laibach was some sort of musical offshoot of a high-concept art collective that traded in the vagaries of propaganda, mixing and matching images and iconography from fascism and totalitarianism, but flecked with an archly sardonic world view. Much like several of my favorite bands before and since, exactly *what* Laibach was all about was never explicitly stated, or at least not easily gleaned from simply a cursory examination of their art and music. Given the propensity of other bands in the industrial community like Throbbing Gristle, Death in June, Current 93 and NON flirting — and, in some cases, embracing — not only the imagery but also the ideology of these elements, many assumed Laibach — who dressed in a decidedly Teutonic variant of military garb — were doing much the same thing. Understandably, this made a lot of people uneasy.
But unlike the swastika-sporting early British punks, the mookish skinheads of the National Front and the tasteless “pranks” and provocation of Boyd Rice’s afore-cited NON, the concepts and aesthetics meted out by Laibach were and remain far more complex and deliberate. As wry as their conceptual cousins in bands like The Residents, there was very assuredly a method to their particular brand of madness.
The very name Laibach was a clue, albeit one that was probably lost on most Western teenage music geeks in the mid-80s. The German name for Slovenia’s capital city of Ljubljana, “Laibach” is a reference to the Nazi occupation of the band’s homeland in WWII. The frankly disquieting art depicting a swastika formed out of battle-axes on the back cover of the band's third album, Opus Dei, didn’t exactly clear a lot of questions up for a lot of folks (and earned me no shortage of raised eyebrows from my fellow college disc jockeys at WDUB, who were more versed in Little Feat and Ziggy Marley than any obliquely ironic Slovenian industrial music). The design in question, however, was the appropriated work of noted Dadaist ANTI-Nazi artist John Heartfield who also served as the band’s conceptual forebear, who made a point of weaponizing art.
Long story short, Laibach were not Nazis. Not even slightly.
Back in 1987, when I first heard them via frankly hilarious and knowingly ridiculous covers of Queen’s “One Vision” and Opus’ “Life is Life,” I honestly didn’t consider the notion of them being actual fascists. They seemed a little too slyly camp for all that. There was a subtle wink to their music in a sound and aesthetic seemingly bereft of any semblance of subtlety. That their next endeavors involved equally preposterous covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and the entire Let It Be album by ye olde Beatles (sadly minus the title track) only furthered my suspicions that Laibach were not always to be taken deathly seriously nor completely at face value.
But hey, circa 1988, if you ever needed to clear a room with all speed, throw on some Laibach and people would be scrambling for the exits for any number of laughably misconstrued reasons. The girlfriend of a friend of mine actually stopped talking to me for a while after I slipped "Auf der Lüneburger Heide” (a traditional German drinking song popularized by Germany’s Heino) covered by Laibach on Let It Be in place of “Maggie May” on a mixtape for them. To be fair, she also had a huge problem with “Wunderbar” by British comedy-punks,Tenpole Tudor, which she decried as a “skinhead anthem.” Not really. But I digress.
Putting to one side Laibach’s potentially problematic presentation, their music was frequently unwieldy and stentorian, punctuated by pounding drums and vocalist Milan Fras' (a dead-ringer for Freddie Mercury, when he sported the mustache) gutteral growl. Laibach anthems would stride manfully out of your speakers like behemoths with a sonic heft that bordered on the physical. Live performances by the band were marked by envelope-pushing levels of amplification and blinding floodlights aimed directly at the audience’s eye level. Even if you “got” them, Laibach were absolutely never going to make it easy for you.
I kept up, for a while, but largely decamped by the mid-90’s in the wake of Jesus Christ Superstars. As much as I enjoyed their covers of the Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” and Prince’s “The Cross,” I was starting to feel like I had all the Laibach I really needed.
In the absence of my fandom, however, Laibach branched out further, scoring films, staging elaborate stage productions and embracing orchestral elements. This summer, they released a sprawling retrospective boxed set called Revisited (although not naming a Laibach box set LAIBOX seems like a truly missed opportunity). While duly intrigued, I could not rationalize dropping the money involved for a multi-disc Laibach box set, however fetchingly packaged.
Then came “Smrt Za Smrt.”
As part of the Revisited project, Laibach went back and reinterpreted/augmented much of their previous music. Earlier this week saw them release the below video for “Smrt Za Smrt,” a track from 1984.
No cheeky cover version of a beloved pop music standard, “Smrt Za Smrt” (Slovenian for “Death for Death”) is a harrowing rumination on absolute retribution. It is ponderous and powerful in both sound and sentiment, leant immeasurable impact by the visuals of the video that perfectly match the expansive, cinematic scope of the re-imagined track.
I might have to save up for that box set after all.
If you live, work or spend any amount of time on University Place between 8th and 9th Streets, you’ve invariably heard him. “One penny, ma’am? No one should be hungry.”
Perched on a milk crate behind a large water-cooler bottle upended to accommodate donations, Mark sat for a succession of years outside of the neighborhood Gristede's, chanting his gentle-but-sonorous plea like the verses of an unending song. A large man with rounded shoulders and kind eyes, Mark would bless each and every person who stopped to put change or bills in his bottle, visibly thankful for every cent he received. A neighborhood fixture for at least a decade, Mark was unbothered by shifts in the weather, only retiring when the damp turned into prohibitive precipitation. Where he went when he wasn’t in that exact spot and how (or if) he distributed his ensuing funds remains a mystery not unlike what happened to Al (aka “Rocky”) who used to sit a block to the north. But he bothered no one. He accosted no one. He badgered no one. Every time I dropped money in Mark's bottle, he asked how my kids were — whom he’d seen grow from tiny tots into teenagers. Always a kind word and a gentle, lilting laugh ….and then back into his mantra. “One penny? No one should be hungry.”
This morning, I popped out to Gristede’s to buy some milk for my coffee, and in Mark’s place was a humble collection of flowers and some notes. Evidently, Mark passed away yesterday, although the reasons and specifics of his demise are unknown.
Weirdly or perhaps fittingly, Brooklyn started becoming a “hip” thing right as I was exiting that whole realm.
After years of being a beery and sneery Manhattan rock pig, prone to darkening the doors of any number of seedy bars and irresponsibly loud live-music venues in the East Village and Lower East Side, I found myself suddenly married and siring children just as things were kicking off on the other side of the East River.
Prior to all that, I’d certainly been to Williamsburg — where friends in pre-hipster bands like EBN and Cop Shoot Cop had decamped in the name of affordability — but it seemed more like Belfast during the Troubles than the future site of any burgeoning, Pabst Blue Ribbon-fueled subculture. By the time the Mrs. and I had moved from East 12th to East 9th and were picking out baby gear, the great sea change of relevance was well underway, and apart from very occasional sorties across the river to check out the new scene, I was very much not a part of it.
If my previous missives poo-poohing Lizzie Goodman’s sprawling “Meet Me In the Bathroom” didn’t already amplify same, I was largely okay with all that. I’d had my time and my era, and while I didn’t think quite as much of the new bands and the new scene — let alone their somewhat cloying cultural touchstones and sartorial/tonsorial trappings — there was undeniably some amazing music that was spawned from it all. But while it was happening, I really wasn’t there. I was more likely to be found rocking one toddler or another to sleep or blearily wandering the aisles of Buy Buy Baby in a slumber-deprived stupor quite unlike the ones I’d cultivated at Max Fish, The Pyramid or CBGB just scant years prior.
Here in the apocalyptic epoch-eclipse of 2020, meanwhile, Hipster Brooklyn has summarily fallen prey to a neck-snappingly steep level of gentrification, albeit in a seemingly more accelerated manner than what happened here in Manhattan, although that may just be my biased projection. And much as with Jesse Malin’s bars and clubs still strategically positioned around the East Village, while some holdout venues and ventures remain peppered around Williamsburg and Greenpoint, the hipsters are basically all gone.
In turn, that has led to the requisite advent of nostalgia, a word I am certainly no stranger to. And while it seems like only weeks ago to oldsters like myself that McCarren Pool was a cool concert venue or that the first Grizzly Bear album came out, there is now a groundswell of longing by former participants for the bona fide brand of Brooklyn cool that once thrived over there. I call it …. Hipster Hiraeth.
Case in point is this weepy article that came out in Inside Hook yesterday, Dubbed “Remembering the Early-Aughts Hipster Bars That Built Williamsburg As We Know it,” it’s a slavishly detailed run-down of since-vanished concerns that allegedly defined the core of Hipster Brooklyn, and I cannot say I knowingly entered into any of them apart from having a fleeting couple of beers at Enid’s with erstwhile Killing Joke drummer Big Paul Ferguson back in 2004. Beyond that desperate bit of name-dropping, I cannot begin to add anything to this article as it pertains to a world and an era I just wasn’t privy to. Why is that? Because I’m old.
While it’s certainly weird to find oneself steeped in nostalgia, a quandary I frequently weep about here, it’s even weirder to watch younger individuals start to come to grips with it. As someone smart, famous and sadly dead once sagely sang, hey look out, you rock’n’rollers — pretty soon now, you’re gonna get older.
In any case, below is a fleeting snippet of the Hipster Brooklyn I remember best….
I’ve moaned about this here before, but it disheartens me to see people blithely pick from the carcass of The Plasmatics when they were so roundly disrespected in their day.
Sure, you might think they looked cool —and they damn well did —but unless you were genuinely invested in them, you shouldn’t go around appropriating their aesthetic unless you’re prepared to back it up with comparable aplomb.
I’m talking, of course, about Miley Cyrus, whose new album and promotional initiative pay a lot of lip service to her alleged “punk” roots and fandom for the Plasmatics. Witness the cover art on the right...
Speaking as someone who was unduly fond of the Plasmatics while they were still a going concern —for better or worse —I still harbor a lot of fond associations with the band. That they’ve been reduced to a punchline —especially considering the 1998 suicide of Wendy O. Williams —or a fetching t-shirt to be worn either ironically or by revisionist millennial twits is a fucking travesty.
Waggling your tongue about, wearing skimpy clothes and talking a load of crap does not equate you with the Plasmatics. For their myriad faults, the Plasmatics traded in provocation flecked with the dangerous and the verboten (granted, maybe not as much as, say, GG Allin or Missing Foundation, but those are different stories). The Plasmatics were loud, gloriously obnoxious, indelicate and endearingly ludicrous. They did a lot of stupid shit to be sure, but what they DIDN’Tdo was write and play slick, schmaltzy radio-friendly, r&b-flecked pop tunes.
As such, let’s leave their fucking iconography alone, shall we?
I can’t remember where I was, who I was with or how I old I was when I saw it, but I remember watching a film on television -– a black-&-white mystery, possibly “noir” -– involving a protagonist haunted by a recurring nightmare or vision. In that mysterious scenario, he’s in some clandestine chamber that holds some horrible secret –- a murder, perhaps? The thing that makes it distinctive, however, is that there is music playing -– a strange, lulling, creepy dirge. Again, the protagonist is driven to distraction by this eerie vision, but cannot connect the dots as to where it happened or its significance.
Later in the film, he's at some social function, and there is music playing via an old-time record player. At one pivotal point, a woman near that turntable bumps into it with her elbow, inadvertently changing the speed of the turntable to a slower revolution-per-minute, like dropping from 45 to 33 1/3. When she does this, the music playing suddenly replicates the creepy music in the protagonist’s recurring vision, and he becomes convinced that the clandestine chamber with the horrible secret is immediately nearby.
So, yeah, my quest was to divine the name of that film. A cinephile friend of mine suggested posting the link and the query on Kindertrauma, a pop culture blog devoted to arcane horror cinema, so I did that. I was not at all expecting anyone to respond. I figured it would be one of those things that I’d never figure out.
Until today...
A reader named Lisa H. wrote in and had this to say…
Hey, I read your 2019 post on Kindertrauma. I believe the film is "Nightmare" (1956). (Your description sounded so intriguing I got obsessed looking for it :-) )
Duly intrigued, I took to Wikipedia, and stumbled upon this telling descriptor of the plot:
"Nightmare" is a 1956 American film noir crime film directed by Maxwell Shane starring Edward G. Robinson, Kevin McCarthy and Connie Russell. The story is based on a novel by William Irish (aka Cornell Woolrich). The book also became a 1947 film, "Fear in the Night," made by the same writer-director. "Nightmare" had been the original title of "Fear in the Night."
PLOT: New Orleans big band clarinetist Stan Grayson (Kevin McCarthy) has a nightmare in which he sees himself in a mirrored room, killing a man, while in the background, haunting dirge-like music plays. He awakens to find blood on himself, bruises on his neck, and a key from the dream in his hand. Grayson goes to his brother-in-law, police detective Rene Bressard (Edward G. Robinson), about the problem but is dismissed. Later, the two men go on a picnic in the country with Grayson's girlfriend and sister. Grayson leads them to an empty house, the house of his dream, when it begins to rain. They find a record player, switch it on, and a catchy jazzy tune begins to play. While dancing, Grayson's girlfriend bumps into the record player, changing the speed. Slowed down, the dance music becomes the tune from the nightmare. They are then shocked to see that the house has a mirrored room just like in Grayson's dream. After it is found out that a murder did indeed take place, Grayson becomes Bressard's number one suspect.
It goes on from there. I don’t want to ruin it for you further, should you be intrigued enough to track it down.
In any event, YES! THIS IS THE FILM! I clicked on over to YouTube, and the film can be seen in its entirety there, including the turntable scene I first spoke of (from whence the screen grab at the top of this post comes from).
So, there you have it. Mystery solved!!! Thanks to Lisa H. and Kindertrauma for settling this.
Here’s the film. Check out the opening sequence, featuring the recurring nightmare in question….
Long have I wondered about the photo above with regards to its location. Obviously, that's the great Iggy Pop, but I'd always speculated as to what bar he was depicted sitting in with such solemn, stoney-faced stoicism.
Given his longtime residency in Lower Manhattan (to my knowledge, he's lived in at least two apartments downtown -- one on Mercer Street between West 4th and Bleecker and one at the Christodora House over on Avenue B, a tenure he devoted an entire glum album to, 1999's Avenue B), I'd assumed it could have been any one of a hundred mostly since-closed neighborhood bars. Lucy's? Sophie's? Lakeside Lounge? Manitoba's, The Park Lounge? Mars Bar? Which one?
I actually encountered the great man at Sin-E on St. Marks Place, one rainy evening, back in the 90's. I was still a single guy, at the time, and had been out with three friends at some random party over on Avenue C -- which was a markedly wilder patch of real estate, in those days. In any case, fate decided that all three of my comrades would find themselves in beguiling entanglements with willing members of the opposite sex, that evening, leaving me to my own devices. As such, I ended up walking home -- in the rain, fittingly -- across Tompkins Square Park and up St. Marks Place. Soggy and sour of mood, I happened to glance up right as I was walking by the long-since-shuttered Irish spot, Sin-E, and who should be sitting right by the open door enjoying a beer, but Iggy Goddamn Pop. I immediately exclaimed his name out loud, and he looked up, gave me a big goofy grin and a thumbs-up, which immediately decimated my self-pity-party.
Anyway, the photo doesn't look like Sin-E. But, I was fairly resigned to never figuring it out.
As it happens, the photographer responsible for the sombre shot, one Steve Rapport, disclosed the location on his website (and you can buy a nice print of the shot, among many others, here).
Just a stone's throw from his old haunt at the Christadora, Iggy is seen here imbibing within the confines of 7B, otherwise known as Vazacs Horseshoe Bar, which I've discussed here.
These days, Iggy lives in Miami. 7B, meanwhile, is still going strong.
Time to dust off Iggy's old tour of that neighborhood.....
I have several friends who have tattoos, but it's something I've just never done.
But, at one distant point circa 1987, some friends in college and I fleetingly hatched a half-baked plan to go get tattoos (beer might have been involved in this decision). I decided I would craft my own design.
In exhuming stuff from my front hall closet today, I came across the illustration I'd painstakingly replicated from two Killing Joke album covers. As it happened, the mission never came to fruition — which is just as well, really — but this was fleetingly intended to go on my pipe-cleaner like upper arm somewhere.
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