Oddly fitting, so close to Valentine’s Day.
A few years back, I happened on some photographs of stalwart proto-shoegazer band My Bloody Valentine taken in New York City around the time of their watershed 1991 album, Loveless. I was quasi-lucky enough to see them on that tour at the Ritz, on a high-decibel triple bill with Dinosaur Jr. and Superchunk that I am convinced took a palpable toll on my hearing. In any case, in one or two of the photos, the band were depicted standing with their backs against a mosaic pattern that was inarguably the work of Jim Power, an East Village fixture whose signature art adorns many corners of the neighborhood to this day. The thing that was so perplexing, however, was that the picture of MBV also featured these strange, mask-like faces that looked so incredibly familiar to me, but I could not place where they might be. In my downtime, I searched far and wide or a wall with those faces on it, but always came up empty.
Eventually, I gave up and lost the pics in question. Life went on.
Last week, someone invoked My Bloody Valentine in one online forum or another, and up popped that very picture again. Here it is now.
Again, those strange background faces jumped out at me. I knew I’d seen them before, but certainly not recently.
Eventually, I figured it out.
The mask-like faces are no longer on that façade, that being on the southern side of the street on St. Marks Place just steps to the west of Avenue A. At the time, that would have been the side of rock’n’roll bar Alcatraz. It would later turn into a sushi bar and is more recently a taco place called Empello al Pastor.
Like I said, the faces are gone (knocked off by a vandal or Jim Power collector fanboy?), but the rest of the mosaic is still intact. You can see the same side of the patterned dish to the left of guitarist Kevin Shield’s head right above my son Oliver’s head below.
Mystery solved.
For the uninitiated, this is My Bloody Valentine....
More about My Bloody Valentine on Flaming Pablum here….
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