Charly Clicks With Fran in The Alley

Here’s a convoluted one.

Some of you might remember a couple of posts I devoted to my musician friend Fran Powers, over the last couple of years. He’s based in Okinawa, Japan, these days, but our Fran was previously a figure on the New York City scene, having played in a series of bands, the most notable of them probably being a combo called Modern Clix (pictured above), who played a cool amalgam of punk rock and reggae. You can hear some of their stuff by clicking — pardon the pun — right here.

Not unlike Missing Foundation’s cryptic cocktail glass insignia, Modern Clix had a tenacious presence on the graffiti scene. I recall seeing their symbol, a sort of warrior brandishing a spear, on walls all over the place, back in the day. In fact, a photographer named Tom Langton actually captured one of the ones I vividly remember from a garage door on East 8th Street between Broadway and Astor Place at some point in the mid-80’s. Here it is now…

Sadly, I never got to see Modern Clix perform, but I first got to know Fran from running into him on the street, a few years back, outside a party for Yukie Ohta’s SoHo Memory Project. Fran was waiting for the external elevator I was stepping out of. I recognized him from a series of photographs taken by one Brooke Smith, a former NYHC scenester-turned-actress (you’ll doubtlessly remember her as the poor girl down the well who’ll get the hose again if she continues not to put the lotion in the basket in Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of The Lambs”) who captured the nascent CBGB scene (which I wrote about here). He and I started chatting and that was that. A few months later, I was sitting at home re-watching my favorite movie of all time, Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” and — for the first time — realized that my new friend Fran had something of an amazing cameo in the film. As such, I reached out and asked if he’d speak to me about the experience for an interview on this here stupid blog. You can read that right here.

And THEN, you might remember a post from 2019 wherein I posted a NYC-centric video titled “Fanky” by an Argentine gent named Charly Garcia. The video in question found Mr. Garcia performing around various points of downtown Manhattan. The odd thing about that, however, was that some years earlier, Garcia spent time recording in New York, the end results being an album released in 1983 called Clics Modernos or …. wait for it … Modern Clix. Here is the album cover for same below…

That’s Charly sitting underneath one of artist Richard Hambleton’s “shadow men” (who I discussed here). But just to the right of the shadow man is the legend … “Modern Clix.” I am purely projecting, of course, but my assumption is that Charly spotted the words on the wall and just thought they sounded cool. Did he know Modern Clix was actually a band, at the time? Possibly, but I’m inclined to believe probably not.

Okay, so why am I bringing any of this ridiculous bullshit back up again now? Well, because earlier this week, a gentleman on the Manhattan Before 1990 page of Facebook named Bo G. Eriksson posted a pair of photographs he snapped in 1984 on Cortlandt Alley. Now, I have long love affair with this particular strip on TriBeCa, as I demonstrated here, so Mr. Eriksson’s pics immediately resonated with me. But under closer inspection, I noticed something that leapt out at me — the very location of the “Modern Clix” graffiti Charly Garcia posed in front of for his album cover a year earlier. Check out the pics below.

Basically, Charly was sitting on the southwest corner of Walker Street & Cortlandt Alley, just down the way from the Mudd Club at 77 White Street, a venue that was doubtlessly a hangout for Fran Powers and the Modern Clix folks.

Today, this corner doesn’t look all that different. In fact I took a shot of some cryptic graffiti on it just the other day, this is around the corner from where Charly was pictured sitting. Beyond that, there are now a couple of high-end art galleries on this strip of Cortlandt (one, oddly, owned by my former next-door East 12th street neighbor Andrew Kreps), as well as a restaurant called Au Cheval that was been dormant since the beginning of the pandemic.

Here in 2021, there is now a luxury hotel just steps to the west of where Charly sat. The Mudd Club is long gone … reimagined as luxury apartments. Charly Garcia is still at it at age 69. “Shadow Man” artist Richard Hambleton passed away in 2017, and Fran Powers is somewhere in Okinawa, Japan.

Comments

[Iñaki Rojas]

Dear Alex, a pleasure to greet you from Argentina. My name is Iñaki Rojas, I'm a writer and I'm here to tell you a story.

First of all, I should tell you that when I was 13 years old, back in 1983, being already a fan of Charly García thanks to his previous history, I bought his last album "Clics Modernos" and it immediately became one of the albums of my life. Not only for me: it is for millions of Latin Americans.

In 2018 I had an epiphany: finding the author of the "Modern Clix" graffiti. I searched for him on the net and found him, among other blogs, thanks to this one of yours. I wanted to find him to tell him the story of how his graffiti had given name to one of the most important albums of Latin rock. Thanks to you I found Fran Powers. I told him the story, and although he never liked Charly's idea of using his band's name (I can understand that), we became close friends. I, besides being a writer, also make videos and I'm a musician. In fact, I made two videos for Fran's current band, Little Old Ladies (they are on YouTube). Afterwards, Fran invited me to open her album "Relax, Songs for a sunday afternoon" with my song Piu Avanti, a real honor for me that makes me proud to the sky. He wanted to come to Argentina in 2020 (a dream come true!) with his wife Shoei but the fkn COVID affair complicated his plans.

The whole story of my research and its beautiful nooks and crannies ended up becoming a novel chronicle which I have called "Modern Clix" (with Fran's permission, of course). Although it is finished, it has not yet been published. Of course, Vassifer is in the final pages of my novel, in the consulted biography section.

Now I come across these full color images you have posted, plus the correct geographical location, which for my novel is a wonderful piece of information. I am writing to say GRACIAS for dealing with the musical history of 1980's New York. Without you, I could never have met such a wonderful person as Fran.

I send you a big hug from Mendoza, Argentina.

Iñaki Rojas