The first time I ever saw Martin Atkins was probably via the video for Public Image Ltd.’s “Bad Life,” wherein he was fleetingly depicted dancing disjointedly behind John Lydon’s insistent mugging. Who he was in the grand scheme of things, at the time, probably didn’t occur to me, as by that point, PiL had basically become the John Lydon show, despite the fact that Atkins had essentially become the main musical force behind the operation in the wake of the inevitably acrimonious departures of PiL alumni Jeanette Lee, Keith LeVene, Jah Wobble and Jim Walker. Shortly after that, Atkins and Lydon hastily assembled a new iteration of the band and toured Japan, which spawned their perfunctorily titled live album, Live in Tokyo.
While both that particular line-up of the band and the ensuing live album were roundly derided by music critics and Public Image acolytes alike — not to mention the band themselves — Live in Tokyo was something of a crucial release for me. I have very vivid memories of a laborious car trip to the Berkshires with a cousin one snowy January weekend, and we only had two cassettes — one was my “well-loved” (read: battered) copy of Live in Tokyo, and the other was my cousin’s incongruous selection, Tales from The Topographic Ocean by proggy stalwarts, Yes, a fractious sonic dichotomy to be sure (although, somewhat ironically, original PiL guitarist Keith LeVene is purportedly a massive Yes fan). To be fair, I, too, am a sizable Yes fan, but decidedly not of that particularly ponderous record. My repeated airings of PiL’s scathing romp through “Analisa” — to say nothing of my insistence on singing along — did little to make the trip any smoother.
Some time after that, Martin Atkins also jumped ship from the ranks of Public Image Ltd., joining a growingly august legion of musicians who found working in close proximity with John Lydon an untenable scenario. Apart from a single or two by his own band, Brian Brain, Martin Atkins didn’t pop back onto my radar until news broke that he was joining my favorite band, Killing Joke. Despite having previously atrophied into a duo of vocalist Jaz Coleman and guitarist Geordie Walker for the divisive Outside the Gate, Killing Joke had geared up for a bracing return to their feral former sound and recruited Atkins to replace the burly rhythmic battery of Big Paul Ferguson. While Martin’s frenetic drumming style was markedly different from Ferguson’s tribal whallop, the injection of the PiL veteran’s aggressive approach and manic energy reinvigorated Killing Joke, and the ensuing recorded results remain some of the band’s finest work.
I just realized that this post is turning into a sprawling re-telling to the great man's bio, which is not what I intended it to be. I actually interviewed Martin a couple of times (the first detailed here), and went onto meet him in Killing Joke circles over the years. He's an exceptionally knowledgable and affable gent. In case you're curious as to what he did after his tenure in Killing Joke, let me wrap that up by saying he formed several impactful bands like Murder Inc., Pigface and The Damage Manual, when not lending his percussive prowess to bands like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails.
In any case, Martin just recently hooked up with my comrade Drew Stone of New York Hardcore Chronicles fame and had an amazing and informative chat this afternoon, touching on much of the above and so much more. Stick around for the anecdote about a physical altercation with GG Allin.
Here is a (very) late follow-up to a post from … jeezus … 2014.
The original spot of Bleecker Bob’s was not on Bleecker Street. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, it was never actually on Bleecker Street. In someone’s infinite wisdom, it was a good idea for the late Bob Plotnik to assume some sort of catchy nickname that assigned him some kind of local renown, so he became Bleecker Bob despite possibly never having operated any business on that particular strip. Whatever.
The original spot of his shop was on MacDougal Street, just steps to the south of West 8th Street (see above). At some point at the dawn of the 80’s, though, Bob pulled out of that location and moved over to 118 West 3rd Street between MacDougal and Sixth Avenue. It was at this address that I first visited the shop in about 1981 or 1982. And it was this iteration of the shop that bore his nickname until it closed in 2013.
Before the space was Bleecker Bob’s, however, it was another similarly inclined shop called – inexplicabaly – Bonaparte. I never set foot in Bonaparte, so I cannot credibly tell you a thing about it, but I recently found a better shot of its exterior than the one I first posted here.
Here in 2020, the 1188 West Third street is still Asian eatery Miyagi, which I wrote about here, although I haven’t been back since. The original Bleecker Bob space on MacDougal off 8th Street played host to a number of ventures over the years – inclulding, very briefly, another record store – before morphing into a barber shop, a tea salon, a sandwich joint and other things. These days, it’s completely vacant.
Bleecker Bob Plotnik, meanwhile, passed away in 2018. Amazingly, Ben's Pizza is still there.
Lots of people kept their vinyl LPs and singles. I certainly did, even after the advent of the compact disc. Of course, I’ve also kept all my CD’s in the wake of them being rendered anachronistic by mp3s, the comparatively brief reign of the iPod and then streaming. Ask me if I care. You can take my physical music media when I’m dead, and not a nanosecond before.
But because I’m an extra-sad bastard, I also kept a healthy supply of my cassettes. I no longer have anything — or anything that works, anyway — to play them on, but there are several that I just simply refuse to part with. Sure, I ditched several workaday store-bought cassettes when I upgraded to compact disc. But I have stacks of cassettes that I consider otherwise irreplaceable. This is about one of those.
I managed to ruffle some feathers on social media, last night, when I made some cheekily uncharitable statements about Philadelphia’s myriad failings, prompted by the agonizing wait for Pennsylvania to tally their vote count in the election. I imagined my invocation of the Hooters might have tipped some people off that I wasn’t being entirely serious, but some folks started getting genuinely hot under the collar about it. Again, these are tense, divisive times.
In any case, in thinking about complementary things to say about the so-called City of Brotherly Love, i was reminded of a certain live-music venue, albeit one I never got to visit. More to the point, the venue in question wasn’t actually in Philadelphia, but rather just across the Delaware River in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. It’s unsurprisingly long gone, these days (razed after a fire in the mid-80’s), but once upon a time, this place was called Emerald City.
Now, despite some people’s claim that Philadelphia is New York City’s “sixth borough” (a notion that I’m sure irks the shit out of native Philadephians), I can count the number of times I made it to that city on one hand. I went once in 1994 to see Pink Floyd at Veteran’s Stadium, and twice in 1997 to see U2 at Franklin Field and, lastly, the Sisters of Mercy at the Electric Factory. That’s it. It’s not that I had anything against going to Philly. I just didn’t have enough of a reason to go, most of the time.
The only reason I had any clue about nearby Emerald City, however, was via a crucial bootleg cassette I bought from a guy named Greg during my freshman year of college.
Prior to going to Denison University in 1985, all I knew about XTC was “Senses Working Overtime,” which — while a sublimely catchy, well-crafted pop tune — was in somewhat stark contrast to the steady diet of Black Flag, Motorhead and Bauhaus I was otherwise concerning myself with, at the time. Once ensconced at Denison as a gloomy punk fan amidst a student body otherwise fixated with Ziggy Marley and The Grateful Dead, I was lucky enough to align myself with a tight gaggle of similarly inclined folks for whom tye-dyed t-shirts and interminable Jerry Garcia guitar solos had refreshingly little appeal.
Regularly convening with my friends in the dank ground floor of Crawford Hall (in a room half-ironically referred to as “Anarchy Hall”), I had my horizons forcibly broadened to music by bands previously beyond my narrow vista like The Velvet Underground, R.E.M., King Crimson, fIREHOSE, The Hoodoo Gurus, The Lime Spiders, Split Enz, The Modern Lovers, The Feelies, The Cramps, The Stooges, Television, NRBQ, The Tom Robinson Band, The Three O’Clock, The Smiths and — oh yes, wait for it — XTC.
On many a beery Friday and Saturday night did we in that room repeatedly crank the entireties of Chronic Town by R.E.M. and Black Sea by XTC before four or five of us set out to wobble around the campus in a drunken stupor, looking for trouble.
Besotted by tracks like the punkily rousing “Respectable Street” and the manic skank of “Living Through Another Cuba” from those high-volume evenings, I went out in search of more XTC, finding only a Portuguese edition (no joke) of the English Settlement cassette in our campus bookstore. Then, I happened upon Greg, a somewhat standoffish cat who lived downstairs from me in Huffman Hall. Greg and I didn’t have much in common, but he had a sideline business in buying and trading bootleg cassettes. Most of it was crap I wouldn’t play at a dog like Van Morrison and the like, but he did have one cassette I snapped up and bought from him without hearing a note off of it. It was XTC recorded a year earlier in Philadelphia on the tour for Black Sea. I brought that cassette with me to the next Friday night meet-up in “Anarchy Hall” and I was practically treated like the returning prodigal son. The fatted calf was verily slain and that much-loved tape was put into maddeningly regular rotation for our Friday/Saturday beer summits.
Originally broadcast on Philadelphia rock station 93.3 WMMR, the recording of XTC at Emerald City was a revelation. Pairing the adrenalized sprint of punk with irrepressible pop hooks and choppy, clanging guitars, it was high-energy music that was propulsive and frenetic, but more clever and jubilant than angry and nihilistic. In short order, I became an ardent fan of the band and followed them into their less exuberant, “bucolic” phase. But I’ll always adore this particular era of the band.
I always wondered what the interior of Emerald City looked like, speculating if it was more of a proper theatre or a conventional rock club. I pictured a utopian sort of scene where punks and rudeboys and hip-hoppers and hardcore kids and goths and New Wave babes and all stripes in between would mix and mingle, not unlike the then-about-to-shutter Danceteria back home in New York City. That might totally have been a fanciful projection, but it made me enjoy the listening experience of that cassette all the more. Some cursory googling revealed an ad for the venue that might reflect the same performance by XTC (see above). Shortly after that gig, bands like The Plasmatics and Joe Jackson played, lending credence to my image of the place. Who knows, though…. maybe it was a shithole?
Anyway, thirty-five years later, the footprint of Emerald City now plays host to a Subaru dealership. XTC put out several more albums before going into hibernation after 2000’s Wasp Star. I ended up finding a copy of the Emerald City recording on disc titled Fab Foursome in Philly several years back, but you don’t need to hunt that down. The entirety of it is on YouTube.
Author, political commentator and tight-black t-shirt enthusiast Thomas Friedman was on one cable news network or another last week, and made a cogent point. As awful as Trump’s first term in office was, it’s his second term that would do the most damage. The world can overlook his first four years and chalk it up as a mistake. Every nation elects an outlier, sooner or later. But by RE-electing him, we would be sending a message to the rest of the world that we are collectively just fine with what the Trump Administration has been doing for the past four years – and that would effectively seal off the United States’ former status as a global leader.
Ever after last night’s tumult, I realize it’s still early in the process, and there are millions of votes left to count, but the fact that it wasn’t a blue landslide speaks volumes.
To paraphrase what MSNBC’s Joy Reid observed, those of us that were hoping for a cleansing repudiation of Trump’s myriad atrocities – his coddling of white supremacists, his abjectly inept and duplicitous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, his draconian immigration policies, his litany of petty put-downs, his demonization of the free press, his constant and knowing stream of dishonesty, etc. – WE ARE NOT GETTING THAT. Surely, Biden might still make it to the finish line before Trump in the next couple of days, but that much-sought-after REBUKE of Trumpism is no longer on the menu, which means a vast swathe of the American electorate is perfectly fine with all that. That, to me, is fucking sickening and shameful.
Let’s put that in sharper perspective, shall we? According to the tally of the popular vote as of this very moment... 67,041,757 people are evidently perfectly jazzed-up for Trump go ahead and fire Dr. Fauci and continue spiraling -- without any semblance of an actionable, realistic, science-based plan -- into the gaping jaws of the pandemic. Unpack your bags and get comfortable, COVID-19, … it looks like you might be staying here for good.
Never mind it not being a landslide – it’s currently a narrow, practically neck-and-neck contest. The fact that it’s THIS FUCKING CLOSE has already confirmed that a frankly astonishing amount of Americans are simply A-O-FUCKING-KAY with everything Trump has done, said, threatened, implied, promised and fucking lied about.
Even if Biden wins, we have missed the mark in serving out to Trump what he deserves and what was supposed to happen. He needed be shown up, toppled and humiliated.
There’s been a lot of speculative chatter in the press and on social media about the very real possibilities of violent unrest in response to whatever transpires tomorrow — Election Day.
Late last week, I noticed a slew of businesses in my neighborhood — Staples, Sweetgreens, Warehouse Wines & Liquors and …er… The Nutella Cafe — all boarding up their exteriors, presumably in anticipation of the same kind of looting, vandalism and rioting that transpired back in June in the wake of revelations about the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police. While I understand that many already-struggling businesses really took a hit during that period — and really don’t want to have to go through it again — I have a hard time imagining the sort of insurrection that would prompt the populace to take out their ire on the Nutella Cafe, regardless of who is (and/or isn’t) declared our next president. That just seems a bit paranoid and over-compensatory to me, but maybe I’m being fancifully naive.
It feels disingenuous to me try to quantify the proper responses to these respective events. The brazen brutality blithely meted out to a defenseless black man by a white policeman— on fucking camera, no less — that resulted in his death ... and the hotly anticipated outcome of probably the most supercharged election of United States history are surely both triggering scenarios, but they ultimately speak to totally different parts of the brain.
The demonstrations and outbursts this past summer were viscerally emotional reactions to YET ANOTHERracially charged diminishment of a black man’s basic human rights, singularly amplifying that for all our alleged progress as a civilized society, there is still much to be done. The ensuing unrest spoke to lifetimes of prejudice, inequity and oppression. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were just two more names in an impossibly long list of victims that dates back centuries. Why those murders sparked outrage should not be a mystery to you.
Meanwhile, regardless of what the Trump Administration might have up their sleeves, there was always going to be an election tomorrow. Fraught or not, for many of us, since the day Trump was sworn into office, the clock has been counting down to tomorrow, and we have barely been able to conceal our zeal to get to this day and vote his evil ass out out. No matter how agitated all parties concerned are, this is still part of a quasi-orderly, centuries-old process.
But in terms of reactions to how it all plays out, … I don’t quite know what we’re all expecting.
For a start, while I am hoping for a landslide referendum that eliminates all possible doubt that Trump has lost the office, I fully realize that we may not get that. I also suspect we probably won’t get a decisive answer for days — or even weeks — after the fact.
Should that be the case, I fully expect that Trump will pull out all the stops to obfuscate and delegitimize the ballot count via whatever means are at his disposal. He probably won’t even be subtle about it.
At that possible stage of proceedings, I sincerely hope all my similarly-inclined friends on every strata of the Left realize that wanton violence will only fuel Trump’s narrative. Be angry. Be outraged, surely — but be focussed. Keep your shit together.
Now, if the inverse occurs, and Trump is indeed officially and legally ousted from the presidency, should we expect violence from the Right?
That's the big question. Will hordes of MAGA-hatted Proud Boys flood into New York City like marauding Orcs from a Peter Jackson film? Will the forces of QAnon and Antifa clash in the streets like an apocalyptic re-boot of "The Warriors"?
Personally speaking, I firmly believe Donald Trump is a lying, indefensible and proudly ignorant scumbag who has no clue what he’s doing. I’m getting up tomorrow morning just as the polls open at 6AM and am planning to cast my vote to remove him from the Oval Office.
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