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I know this only really speaks to a fairly elite coterie of readers/users/viewers/whatever here, but even though I only just posted that footage of Cop Shoot Cop at CBGB last week, someone else just posted two more archival clips, these both dating back to May 30, 1990 at the recently-shuttered Pyramid on Avenue A. I don’t reall know why these videos are suddnely becoming more frequent, but I’m not complaining.
Enjoy, if you are so inclined…
In 2002, I moved from an apartment on East 12th Street to an apartment on East 9th Street. The guy who moved into the 12th Street apartment after me was a dude named Carl.
Yesterday, Carl emailed me to tell me that a UPS package arrived for me there -- a full 19 years after I'd moved out.
I will find out later what it is.
It will doubtlessly be anticlimactic, but ... so mysterious.
Watch this space.
Just a serene little moment in soon-to-vanish East River Park
As mentioned back on this post from 2015, I should preface this by saying I regrettably never made it to the Peppermint Lounge in either of its locations. A storied club dating back to the late `50s, the original venue was on West 45th Street and played host to everyone from The Beach Boys to Black Flag. The second iteration of the club appeared circa 1982 and lasted until 1985. Today, the original spot on 45th street is no more, razed at some point in the `80s, and the second spot on Fifth is currently an empty storefront in the wake of playing host to numerous retail outlets. There is no Peppermint Lounge anymore.
The clip below, meanwhile, dates back to 1981, and was captured in the 45th Street location. This is, of course, the original line-up of the Circle Jerks, one of my favorite all-time bands, arguably at the height of their powers. This performance would have been recorded just three months after Black Flag’s fabled appearance at the same club (with New York’s own Even Worse as opening act). By this point, the Circle Jerks would have also graced stages around town at spots like the Mudd Club, and would later play spots like The Reggae Lounge (formerly the Rock Lounge), Irving Plaza, the 10.18 Club (aka The Roxy), and The Ritz. I don’t know that they ever actually played CBGB prior to the `90s (when they famously performed a cover of the Soft Boys’ “I Wanna Destroy You” with Debbie Gibson on guest vocals), but don’t quote me on that.
As detailed on this post, I wouldn’t actually get to see the band until 1985, playing alongside DOA and Redd Kross, and by that time, original bassist Roger Rogerson and drummer Lucky Lehrer were long out of the ranks. When this video of the original band was captured at the 45th Street Peppermint Lounge – almost exactly a neck-snapping FORTY YEARS AGO -- I would have only recently graduated from 8th Grade, been sequestered out in Quogue, Long Island with my family, very deliberately NOT playing any tennis and otherwise begrudgingly mowing lawns for paltry sums. It would also have been that same summer when I was being lured away from comparatively conventional Punk records by The Ramones, The Clash, Generation X and the Sex Pistols and towards the splenetic strain of Hardcore by my friend Brad’s tireless evangelizing of records like the Circle Jerks’ Group Sex, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Dead Kennedys and the seminal Let Them Eat Jellybeans compilation.
But while I was being indoctrinated, it was already happening, as can be vividly seen here. I think I was so struck by this video as it flies rather squarely in the face of the misconception that Hardcore was somehow a less “musical” variation of by-then-conventional Punk. While, indeed, Hardcore may have been a more feral and streamlined variation that was built for speed, so to speak, even a casual viewing of powerhouse drummer Lucky Lehrer amply demonstrates what a finessed and versatile musician he was.
Such highfalutin pretty talk aside, the band is fucking on fire here.
Enjoy.
Someone evidently uploaded this fleeting slice of Cop Shoot Cop having a bash through "Shine On, Elizabeth" and "Hung Again" at CBGB in 1992 onto YouTube, and it's a great one, despite the shaky camera, the frequently black screen and the technical difficulties the band itself is grappling with (broken mic stands, etc.). I was actually at this show with my comrade Rob D., who would have been dancing with great, dramatic aplomb somewhere behind the cameraman here, sadly not captured for posterity. I'd love to know if there is more video from the night than just this.
In any case, if you never made it to CBGB, here's a taste of what it was like...
My friend John (who I mentioned here) put up a telling post on Facebook recently that struck a firm chord with me. A similarly besotted music geek, John recounted coming back into possession of a big crate of records he’d stored at his mother’s place back in the 90’s. His mother had moved house, however, at some point, and a friend of John’s picked up those albums from her home and sent them back to him. Years after first sending them away for safe-keeping, John found many of the LPs to be in rough, unplayable shape. Coupled with the fact that he has since aquired the means – like most of us – to play most of the music on those records on multiple other formats, John was struck with a quandary, which he neatly summed up in the following three sentences….
I'm not going to play these records. They sit in their box taking up space in the house, and anchor me to a past that no longer exists. But I can't bring myself to just throw them away.
Maybe Freud could have a holiday with this particular syndrome, but I, too, stored many of my old records at my mother’s house. While I’d formerly been loath to part with any of them, when my wife and I moved from my old apartment on East 12th Street to our current apartment on East 9th Street in 2002, I stored about a third of my vinyl collection at a mini-storage space on Vandam Street (never do this) and packed the other two-thirds into a series of stylish flight cases procured at long-vanished Eightball Records on East 9th (which later turned into a long-running sushi joint called Yuba, which has also now closed) and kinda snuck them into the basement of my mom’s house in Quogue out on Long Island.
I ended up having to forego my Vandam Street storage place when it got too expensive and discreetly migrated those records into our apartment. The other two thirds – still in those flight cases, covered in deliberately offensive stickers by prurient hot-rod artist Coop so that my mom wouldn’t want to touch them – have been down in that basement ever since, tucked away in an ersatz playroom with board games, toys and old coats no one will ever wear again. At some point, this will have to change, especially if my mom ever makes good on her threat to sell the house.
We went out to visit mom over Memorial Day Weekend, and given the unseasonable chill and pervasive rain, I succumbed to a ritual I’ve been keeping for some time. Every three or four years or so, I go down to the basement and exhume my old records from those flight cases. At this stage of the proceedings, there is no turntable in my mother’s home to play them on, nor do I expect there ever will be. So, all I can do is take them out, look at them and feel that anchor John was talking about pull at my neck.
When not fretting myself an ulcer about work demands and pressing life matters, my brain frequently finds the time to wake me up in the middle of the night to plot out what I’ll have to do about those records. Honestly, I’d consider farming them off to my nephews, but I don’t know that they’d genuinely want them or even give a damn. I mean, truthfully, I don’t want to give them away, but I don’t know that I can keep them. I’d rather they go to “a good home,” so to speak, but who knows?
In the short term, here are a few of them.
As recently mentioned, I don’t know that I’ve ever been busier both at home and at work. I am struggling to keep my head above water both on a litany of demanding projects at the office and on host of pressing needs at home. As such, the blog may be taking a bit of hit, but I was struck by something this evening, and this post just wrote itself. It won’t mean much to many, but for those who know and care, enjoy.
In retrospect, there was always something a bit crass and vindictive about “Wasteland,” the breakout single from God’s Own Medicine, the debut LP by The Mission. Having been a die-hard fan of the First And Last And Always-iteration of the Sisters of Mercy, I was enthralled, of course, by the “Great Goth Schism” that ripped that band apart, finding founding guitarist Gary Marx jumping ship first, shortly to be followed by bassist Craig Adams and relatively recent recruit, guitarist Wayne Hussey. While Marx was happy to split from the program entirely, Adams and Hussey seemed wholly intent in sticking it to the Sisters’ Mother Superior, Andrew Eldritch, on their way out the door by initially appropriating an uncomfortably comparable moniker — The Sisterhood — before Eldritch beat them to the punch by releasing a deliberately difficult ep, — Gift (German, don’t you know, for “Poison”) — before they could make good on the name.
Unfazed, Hussey and Adams re-dubbed their new combo The Mission, also a swipe at Eldritch’s vision, it being an arguable allusion to that version of the Sisters’ never-to-be follow-up album, Left on Mission and Revenge. Adding insult to injury, Hussey wholly adopted his former taskmaster’s tonsorial and sartorial aesthetic (shades at all times and a big, black fuckoff gaucho hat), arguably blurring the already vague lines, for those who weren’t really paying attention, between who did what and who was who in the notoriously enigmatic Sisters of Mercy.
But while Hussey wrote about half the music on the Sisters’ debut LP, there was kind of a crucial difference — the lyrics. Where Eldritch reportedly agonized over lyrical nuance and veiled symbolism, Hussey basically just “got on with it” and strung bits of portentous prose together. While the early work of The Mission certainly bears the sonic hallmarks of the Sisters, the lyrics, by and large (and by all accounts, even Hussey’s in later years) don’t really mean anything. Like, at all. They are simply words that fit the bill and sound nice together.
But taking it a step further, Hussey continued to mine from Eldritch’s sandbox. The very title “Wasteland,” of course, comes from the classic romantic poem of the same name by T.S. Elliot, a frequent source of inspiration for the inarguably erudite Eldritch. Now, was Hussey himself as versed in the storied works of said Modernist poet? Or was he just brazenly swiping yet another aspect of Eldritch’s aesthetic? Even a casual perusal of Hussey’s lyrics don’t suggest a familiarity with Elliot’s complex wordplay, if that was indeed was he was trying to emulate. It sounds more like a stylishly funereal way of taunting his former bandmate.
Were that not enough, the core of “Wasteland” is essentially Craig Adams’ brooding bass line, itself basically lifted wholesale from 1981’s “Over the Wall” by Hussey’s fellow Liverpudlians in Echo & The Bunnymen.
So, yeah, add it all up, and “Wasteland” was basically an emphatic middle finger (with stylish black nail polish) from The Mission to Andrew Eldritch in the form of an essentially empty vessel that cribbed all the fixin's — but none of the actual meat — from the turkey that was the First and Last-era Sisters of Mercy. It did not go unnoticed. When the time was right, Eldritch shot back directly at Hussey & Co. with “This Corrosion,” a withering rejoinder rife with over-the-top, Hussey-ian fluff that took his former bandmates to task for the pilferage. It didn’t hurt that it became the reconstituted Sisters of Mercy’s biggest hit to date.
So, yeah, I know all that, and huge swathes of these suspicions were confirmed by Trevor Ristow’s magisterial tome, “Waiting for Another War” last year (see posts about same here, here and here), but I still have a confession.
I still fucking love “Wasteland.”
I can still remember spying the video for “Wasteland” on MTV”s “120 Minutes” one evening and being immediately smitten, going out the next fucking morning to prize the LP from a long-shuttered and short-lived record store on First Avenue. “Wasteland” went onto rub shoulders with “She Sells Sanctuary” by the Cult, “51st State” by New Model Army, “All That I Wanted” by Belfegore and — yes, do wait for it — “Eighties” by Killing Joke as one of my favorite songs of all time. Despite its inherent lyrical vacuity and liberally pastiched sonic elements, I still swoon every time I hear Wayne’s hoarily ominous intro (“I still believe in God … but God no longer believes in me!”) and air-strum accordingly along with Wayne’s shimmering twelve-string and lead guitarist Simon Hinkler’s florid e-bowing. It’s silly, but I will always love it. In a world where people champion laughable fucking piffle by Drake, Cardi B. and Justin Bieber as the crowning achievements of the species, I feel not a jot of shame.
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