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.
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