It’s been yet another crazy-busy period at work. I have multiple complicated projects on the burner, all requiring heaping amounts of deft navigation, thoughtful strategy and efficient execution. Similarly, I'm vainly trying to plot out my family's summer -- from my youngest's second COVID shot through transporting same back to camp in Vermont again and wrangling fleeting vacation accommodations, to say nothing of my wife and I's looming 20th anniversary. While I do genuinely consider the two posts I put up this week to be interesting and worth your time, I’m always looking to post more substantial things than placeholder entries built around esoteric YouTube videos. But, y’know, we all have our things to contend with.
In any case, I wanted to write about this sooner, but I was let off my leash briefly last weekend to meet an old friend of mine I’d not seen in two or three years. Now that restrictions are easing, it seemed like a fine time to meet up, so we settled on a place I’ve been dying to return to since the pandemic first turned our collective existence into a c-grade disaster movie, the Ear Inn over on the western end of Spring Street in SoHo.
A longtime favorite bar of mine, I’ve had more memorable evenings within the Ear’s storied interiors than I can count. It’s arguably the oldest bar in Manhattan, although McSorley’s and Pete’s Tavern make comparable claims. Regardless, I’ll take the Ear over both those joints every damn time.
Despite just being informed by my primary care physician —who I’d also not seen since before the pandemic —that I’d gained seven pounds since my last visit, I ordered a cheeseburger and had a few pints with my friend in that great bar. While it, too, boasts the trappings of responsible social distancing, I am very happy to report that its splendor remains undiminished.
If you're a fan of the band, you may have already heard about this documentary, Charles Atlas' "Put Blood in the Music," which is a profile of the New York music scene circa 1989, concentrating on John Zorn and Sonic Youth. You have to wade through about two minutes of needless extrapolation from "The South Bank Show," but the doc itself is well worth your time.
Here’s a clip from short-lived French/American outfit Band Apart, who were allegedly part of the No Wave scene. I honestly don’t know that much about them, but immediately warmed to this clip not just for its ominous, metronomic electronic pulse (reminiscent of both “Faith Healer” by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and “Requiem” by Killing Joke), but also for the footage of NYC circa 1981 (including a blink-&-you'll-miss-it shot of Dojo on St. Marks Place)…. Enjoy.
Possibly the first time I ever heard this song, it was while watching a fellow student I shan’t accurately name emphatically lip-synch to it with great, dramatic aplomb from across the divide of “the senior section” in the student commons of my high school. Kris (not his real name) was miming the lyrics with astonishing conviction at his steady date and school-wide crush, Nora (not her name), strangely providing a vague glimpse into their otherwise deeply private, interpersonal dynamic for the rest of the student body to bear full witness to. As a somewhat brazenly doe-eyed freshman rather strenuously unversed in the ways of the teenaged heart, it was a visceral vista into a world I was desperately trying to comprehend. Did it help? I have no idea. Probably not.
A rather succinctly worded summation of a genuinely toxic relationship, “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell — a song originally made famous as a Northern Soul hit by Gloria Jones in 1965 — does not exactly paint a rosy picture of the conventional romantic interaction. Pairing the swooningly wounded vocals of one Marc Almond with the spartan electronic arsenal of Dave Ball, “Tainted Love” was both disarmingly emotive and icy cold, incongruously framing Almond’s sultry cooing within a chilly, dot-matrix soundscape. Sure, in later years, I’d learn of the influence of trailblazing electronic proto-punk duo Suicide on the nascent music of Soft Cell, but, at the time, it was genuinely unlike anything I’d ever heard. Mechanized blips, metronomic beats, robotic beeps and Marc Almond’s campily sonorous account of emotional dysfunction, “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell — to say nothing of the preferred extended mix appending a steamy cover of the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go?” — was the sound of a fraught, heartbroken future. Never had amorous tumult sounded so stylishly erotic.
Duly intrigued, I remember going with my forward-thinking grade-school comrade Pogo (not his real name, but immortalized here) to Disc-O-Mat on East 58th to pick up the 12” single of “Tainted Love.” For whatever stupid reasons, I remember being reassured that, on the back cover, Marc Almond was depicted sporting spikes on his wrists not at all unlike my favorites like Billy Idol, the Lords of the New Church, the Circle Jerks or Judas Priest. It was a relatively meaningless sartorial flourish, but it helped me contextualize it all.
What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was the single’s reach. While I may have projected upon it an indelible impression as an envelope-pushing bit of underground electronic pop, “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell was an ascendent phenomenon. At one point, I remember shuddering as I my own goddamn father pulled out his own copy of the 12” single from his collection while I was over at his apartment for dinner, one evening (him having divorced my mother several years earlier) and hearing him try to convince me of its groovy brilliance (I having already discovered it months earlier). I may have uttered an emphatic “please just shut the fuck up, Dad,” but don’t quote me on that. Suffice it to say, it did the single no favors, for me.
Sometime after that I remember being at some holiday get-together and having the preadolescent nephew of a friend of mine asking me to play it on the home stereo for the “laser sounds" on the 12” mix to score an imaginary conflict between him and another nose-picking rugrat in attendance. Clearly, the bloom was off the rose.
Moments like those made it hard for me to retain my initial impression of “Tainted Love” as that rarified collision of cutting-edge sonic technology with timelessly resonant songwriting, but clearly the song has endured as a classic, regardless of any genre-anal peccadilloes or predilections. It no longer belongs to any sub-group, it’s everyone’s favorite.
Here in 2021, you’re likely to hear “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell on the sound-system of your local grocery store. It has long severed its connecting tendrils to the comparatively subversive subcultures it might have once been associated with. It’s now just another slice of pop-culture nostalgia that doesn’t require that deep a dive. At the very least, one hopes that fact has fortified the coffers of Messrs. Almond and Ball, let alone the song’s original songwriters. But its days of being a seductively decadent dollop of freakydeakiness, are basically over.
To this day, however, I cannot shake the image of Kris singing it to Nora.
The concept of worth is an elusive thing. There are things out there in the world, somewhere, that probably mean next to nothing to the individuals who own them, but that I would consider positively invaluable. I’ve mentioned it several times here before, but there’s a certain elusive Cop Shoot Cop gig flyer circa 1990 at CBGB that I would gladly pay a handsome sum for, but I’ve just never been able to put my hand to it. Very recently, I came across a photograph of a lost bit of graffiti that I’ve been preoccupied with finding for literally over three decades, but when I asked the photographer’s representative how much a print of same might cost, the answer was in the thousands (translation: ain’t gonna happen). Why would someone pay handsomely for an old gig flyer? Why would someone pay for a photograph of old graffiti? Why ask why? Why do you like and pursue the things you do?
Then, of course, there are things that I happen to possess and don’t give a great deal of thought to that have gone on to become arguably valuable. I have a couple of books about No Wave and paperback copy of “The Stranglers Song by Song” (as mentioned here) that have gone out of print and strangely since become evidently rarified and summarily pricey artifacts. I have stacks of compact discs that might have been worth more than I’d originally paid for them, but the bottom has basically fallen out of that particular market.
Then there are things that may have once been entirely incidental that have ascended in perceived value to such an extent that they’re now shown in fuckin’ museums and prestigious collections. That will never cease to amaze me.
Another example of that revealed itself to me today when I stumbled upon the website of Gallery98. As I was perusing through their collection of party notices, gig flyers and nightclub invites, I noticed they featured a few of the distinctive cards for GREENDOORNYC. For the uninitiated, GREENDOORNYC was this series of regular parties, back in the mid-to-late 90s, in the East Village and Lower East Side thrown by Jesse Malin of D Generation. Originally, they were held at a variety of different locations until finally coalescing at the space on St. Marks Place that Malin would later commandeer as Coney Island High. These events were well-attended and raucous gatherings of East Village rock’n’roll types and went on for hours on end. I was lucky enough to go on three or four occasions, and always had a damn good time.
As such, I have a number of these silly cards, usually depicting period-specific antiheroes like Stiv Bator, Johnny Thunders, KISS, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Debbie Harry and the like. They formerly adorned my fridge on East 12th street or were pinned up to any number of bulletin boards at any of the several different jobs I’ve had since that era as mementos of my misspent semi-youth. They now live in a selection of battered envelopes of ephemera hastily amassed when I was leaving any one of those afore-cited jobs. They’re no longer pinned up and displayed, but I still have them, buried in the closet.
As a lark, I reached out to Gallery98 to inquire as to how much these cheaply printed and thinly produced scraps of cardboard are currently selling for.
Apparently, they’re currently selling for $100…. EACH!
My son Oliver is 15 years old. As recently mentioned in this post, now that both my children are well into their teens, I am generally less inclined to feature and refer to them as much as I might have done when they were littler. They have their own interests, likes, dislikes, identities and lives, and I try to respect their privacy. That all said, Oliver recently put together a video for a school project, and while, granted, I am incredibly biased, I think it’s pretty spectacular.
Peculiarly tasked with crafting a project about time travel, Oliver was able to utilize his passion for stop-motion animation. Here are the fruits of his labors. Be warned: While the recurring theme of grisly patricide might give one pause, “The Grandfather Paradox” is indeed a genuine example of doomy, paradoxical theories about the potentially damaging travails of time travel.
I honestly have no earthly idea how or why my friend Jeremy ended up on a YouTube channel hosted by a talking tennis ball, but …. y’know,… maybe he lost a bet or something.
In any case, my friend and fellow music geek Jeremy Shatan was recently on a YouTube program called “Dad Jokes with Dennis Ball” wherein he got to chat about a number of different things. I’ll try not to be too brazenly namedroppy about this, but along with being an exceptionally good guy and a man of exquisite musical taste (Jeremy is a similarly avowed Killing Joke acolyte and also hosts an exhaustive blog about music fandom called An Earful), Jeremy has a few notables to his name, namely that (a) he was a founding member of The Young Aborigines, the teenage punk band that would gradually mutate into the Beastie Boys and (b) it was our Jeremy who took the wide-angled panoramic photograph of the intersection of Ludlow & Rivington on the Lower East Side that would grace the cover of the Beasties’ legendary sophomore LP, Paul’s Boutique.
Now, despite having these fairly impressive items on his curriculum vitae of cool, to spend any time chatting with Jeremy, you’d absolutely never know it. He’s an affable, grounded and normal guy, and he generally speaks about these things with the same nonchalance you might recount a goofy anecdote about some silly shit you did with your friends when you were a kid, which is more or less precisely the scenario. It’s just that the friends in question happened to become genre-straddling iconoclasts.
In any case, I’m happy to evangelize any endeavor Jeremy’s involved in, so please enjoy the clip above.
The shot below, meanwhile, was one I snapped in about 1995. If you cannot figure it out, it’s the same corner Jeremy captured on the front panel of Paul’s Boutique. If you visit this spot today, it looks like nothing of the sort. The last time I walked by it was a cafe of some kind, and there’s a massive mural of the Beasties on its east-facing facade. But circa `95 (only six or so years after Jeremy’s photo), it was still more or less the same concern.
Once I gleaned that the original site of the elusive Plasmatics mural from my distant memory was the tellingly-titled Graffiti Hall of Fame on 106th & Park Avenue (this discovery coming courtesy of an uncredited photo on “Graffiti Database”), I started to wonder if I could find any other — and/or preferably better — photographs of the art in question, but tireless Google searches were giving me nothing further on the subject. I mean, Hell, I was lucky to find that first photo to begin with.
Branching my search out further, however, I noticed that there is a very robust subculture of reverent graffiti-centric publishing. As such, when I spotted a fetching, paperback coffee-table book on Amazon that was exclusively dedicated to the very spot where the original mural was, I figured there was a sporting chance it would include another shot of it. And even if it didn’t, I was intrigued enough by the story of the place and its accompanying images that it would be cool to own. Tweny-something bucks later, it was mine. It arrived today.
Much to my delight, fourteen pages into the book comes a beautiful wide shot of the wall in question that was obviously snapped at least a year or two earlier, as the artwork is still vibrantly colorful and unsullied by other tags. This photo was taken by maverick shutterbug Martha Cooper. I remain mystified as to why these artists chose to immortalize the Plasmatics in this manner, but, again, perhaps they were just simply fans.
As a lark, I have reached out to Ms. Cooper to see if she’s consider selling me a print of the photo. We’ll see.
Incidentally, you can check out more of Cooper's amazing work on her Instagram page. Tell'em Flaming Pablum sent ya.
It’s the Friday of what has felt like a very long week, and while I still have a pile of work stuff to do, I am just not feeling the motivation to tackle any of it, at this very moment. Instead, herewith a rumination on a beloved slab of vinyl from eons past.
While arguably not quite as ear-&-brain opening as its forebear compilation Let Them Eat Jellybeans from 1981 (which I wrote at great, sepia-toned length about here back in 2006), the live compilation Rat Music For Rat People provided a more organic taste of early-80’s hardcore punk than I’d previously been privileged enough to experience, capturing several crucial bands in their untethered live element. Much as on storied live albums like It’s Alive by The Ramones and No Sleep `til Hammersmith by Motorhead, the live renditions of these already-frenetic songs were faster, harder, louder and sloppier than their comparatively genteel iterations from humble recording studios. Select tracks on this collection by D.O.A., the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, T.S.O.L. and, most notably, Bad Brains took on furious new dimensions onstage, whereas turgid treks through pieces like “Scream” by Black Flag and “Life” by Flipper toppled out of the speakers as if slathered in hot oil and set ablaze in slow-burning agony. From top to bottom, the music on this LP was executed with bracing degrees of bug-eyed deliberateness. The bands weren’t trying to entertain, they were trying to exorcise.
Technically released in 1982, I don’t think I picked up my copy of it until the spring of 1983, purchased solely on the listing of bands cited above. The album also featured tracks by outfits who were new to me like Crucifix, The Dils and The Avengers, but it was really selections like Dead Kennedys’ “I Am The Owl,” prefaced with an inimitable rant by Jello Biafra about looming Orwellian governmental oversight, a particularly nihilistic bash through “Live Fast Die Young” by the Circle Jerks and a neck-snapping sprint through “How Long Can a Punk Get?” by Bad Brains that rendered the album so incredibly crucial.
Taped onto a 90-minute cassette that somewhat incongruously featured Iron Maiden’s Piece of Mind on the flip, Rat Music for Rate People largely scored my somewhat furrow-browed summer of 1983, wherein I was exiled to summer school for flunking geometry and my mother and step-father’s marriage was steadily metastasizing. It was the music that “got me through it all,” so to speak, and even hearing a fleeting few seconds of those recordings today takes me right back to that era.
Today, my well-loved copy of the LP lives in a flight case in my mother’s basement out on the east end of Long Island with hundreds of other LPs I consider wildly significant. I never re-picked it up on compact disc. I believe they appended two more volumes of the series into a single disc, but even that is invariably well out of print, these days. Not sure if it’s streamable, but you can, for the moment, hear it via YouTube.
It’s by no means a stretch for any blog that concentrates on downtown NYC, but I’m sure I’ve mentioned Downtown Beirut here a few times, the long-lost watering hole on First Avenue. Don’t bother looking for it today, of course. I honestly can’t remember what’s there in 2021, let alone if said venture is even operational, at this stage. But, in any case, as Downtown Beirut, it was practically a holy site for folks of a certain disposition.
I cannot remember the first time I set foot in the bar, but it was invariably at some point around 1988 or 1989, relatively late into its storied tenure. True to its oft-repeated legend, it did indeed have a robustly adventurous jukebox of the old-school variety, and I remember being fairly gobsmacked to find bands like the Buzzcocks and Modern Lovers on it. It was a favorite spot for my fellow paylessly disgruntled SPIN interns and I to frequent, along with being the first place I ever witnessed my friend Dusty’s star-crossed garage-noise band, The Bastards of Execution, perform.
To my recollection, Dowtown Beirut feels like the place wherein the 80s transformed into the 90s, the decade that would eventually turn the bar's lights out. By 1994 or so, it was but a memory. To this day, invoke its name and watch folks who pair their greying temples with increasingly ill-fitting Lunachicks t-shirts get moist around the eyes. Many of today’s bars try to emulate its singular brand of grimy, punky cool, but like the CBGB, Mars Bar and the Lismar Lounge, it is now the stuff of legend.
It’s precisely for this reason that videos like the one below are so special. While you cannot darken the doors of Downtown Beirut anymore, here’s as close a taste to the experience you’re as likely to find, courtesy of one Mike Enright. It has the loose narrative of a student film, but the visual specifics are fantastic. I especially love the sticker on the jukebox that reads "New Missing Foundation - I DARE YOU!"
Site back and enjoy … “Night At Downtown Beirut.” By the way, the lovely photo at the top of this post was taken by one David Vega.
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