Flaming Pablum

Meet the (Trouser) Press

It is 1982, and I am irretrievably in the throes of my fanatical allegiance to DEVO, underscored by the release of their fourth major label LP, the slavishly underrated New Traditionalists. It being prior to the age of the internet, press invocations about the band are, at best, few and far between. But upon a trip to (long-vanished) Revolution Records on Lexington Avenue and East 63rd Street, I spy a glossy magazine with my boys on the friggin’ COVER and buy it on the spot. The periodical is curiously called Trouser Press, and it is devoted exclusively to exactly the variant of bold, new music DEVO is at the forefront of. I become an immediate zealot for the mag in question.

Beyond the cover story (a conversation between DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerry Casale with subversive iconoclast/writer William S. Burroughs), this issue of Trouser Press (named, I would later learn, after a track by the Bonzo Dog Band) was chock full of meaty information on a host of new and different bands, all written with a smart, cheeky insouciance rarely found in mainstream publications. The guy behind this whole trailblazing endeavor was a music journalist named Ira Robbins.

Shortly after this, I am schlepping around a posh Fifth Avenue bookstore and spot a colorfully-covered tome titled “The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records,” edited by Ira Robbins. Again, I buy it on the spot, which was exactly the right goddamn thing to do, it being a rarefied trove of so much great information. The book goes on to be reprinted with no fewer than five great editions. I still have all of them. I consider them priceless.

I am a goddamn die-hard Ira Robbins fan and have been since picking up that first issue of Trouser Press. I opined on a post about businesses Time Out Magazine deemed worthy of bringing back, and fucking Ira Goddamn Robbins weighed in on the thread with a post that speaks to the core of this here stupid blog of mine.

Enjoy Ira Robbins’’ Rock and Roll Ghosts.

COVID Comes Calling

Hey all. Apologies for the relative slowdown, but … as might have been inevitable, depending on which news source you give your patronage to … the Flaming Pablum household has been touched, this week, by the sickly tendrils of the coronavirus.

Fret not, we’re all fine, but safety protocols have dictated some emergency measures involving half the family staying put and the other half temporarily sequestering elsewhere. The afflicted party had previously been vaccinated and boosted. As such, they are a bit fatigued and mildly congested, but should be perfectly fine. The other three are testing regularly and remaining vigilant. It’s more of a logistical hassle than anything else.

It’s real. You should probably expect it.

I’ll be back when life calms down, a bit.

A Handy Reminder

As we approach the one-year anniversary of January 6, here's a helpful synopsis of the facts.

Back Into Exile: Exhuming The Siberia Bar

Watch any documentary about a since-closed music venue, nightclub or bar, and you’re bound to hear some of the same stupid shit. Whether conscious of it or not, at least one of the participants will make one ridiculously clichéd remark or another about how the establishment in question was this unique confluence of poetically unlikely factors that could not, should not and never will exist again. Invariably, there will also be florid testimonials about the fabled proprietor of the place which portray that individual like some sort of star-crossed visionary from another dimension. While such declarations might even have varying degrees of truth to them, these soundbites have become so deeply and dependably rote as storytelling devices that these movies all practically blend together.

Given my blog’s brazen predilections for New York City nostalgia, I am, of course, no stranger to these sorts of films. “Life After Dark: The Story of Siberia Bar,” a 2008 documentary directed by one Jack Bryan, is no exception to the rules lamented above. That all said, you should still check it out.

I’ve written about both Manhattan iterations of the Siberia Bar here a few times, notably here and here. I honestly cannot remember who first told me about the place, but being that I worked at TIME Magazine, just down the block from the subway stop that played host to the first iteration of the bar, once I learned about it, I had to go check it out. This would have been around 1997, I’m guessing, and I swiftly became one of a cloying legion of irritating, drunk-journalist types prone to hanging out within its endearingly decrepit confines. I’m the inebriated jackass in the center of the photo above, taken at Siberia around `98, given the then-recently-procured Damned t-shirt I’m sporting (they’d played a Coney Island High — also gone, but no documentary yet — a few days prior). If you were a self-styled, world-weary, laboriously smug scribe of one stripe or another, you were bound to be found drinking irresponsibly there sooner or later.

Around 2000, the Siberia Bar decamped from its celebrated closet-sized perch in the midtown subway system and moved into Hell’s Kitchen. While the new location lacked its predecessor's seedy charm and intriguing mystique, the much roomier second version of the Siberia Bar retained the spirit of the old place … complete with those infamous stipulations about swearing and gratuitous hittin' on women.

Around the same time, however, I’d gotten married. As such, my nights darkening the already-very-dark doors of Siberia were somewhat sharply curtailed. I’d go every now and again, but hardly with any frequency. And then, sadly, in 2007, it closed for good.

I never knew of the documentary below’s existence until earlier this week. A reader named CB hipped me to it. Granted, I’m about 14 years late to the table, but for your viewing pleasure and edification, here it is….

Life After Dark: The Story of Siberia Bar from Jack Bryan on Vimeo.

Dead Again: Exhuming The Dead Boys

A couple of weeks back, I was motivated to write a post about my Christmas vacation of 1987. I was a junior in college and back home in NYC for a couple of weeks. During said two weeks, however, I was blessed enough to catch a string of shows at the Ritz, including incendiary gigs by Fishbone with Murphy’s Law and The Toasters (which i discussed in greater detail here), a rousing stop on the Ramones’ tour for Halfway to Sanity, a high-spirited performance by ska-malgam (I just made that term up) band Urban Blight and, kicking it all off, another floridly chaotic reunion show by The Dead Boys (see flyer above). It was one of my most memorable and cherished weeks as a feedback-deafened, rock-addicted newly-minted twenty year old.

So, yeah, I thought about writing up a whole post about that Christmas break and those shows and that venue, but then it occurred to me that I’d pretty much covered all that ground here already, and why would anyone really care? So, I abandoned it.

This all said, I found the video below … recorded about a month after that Christmas Dead Boys Reunion show … that really captures what the band were like at the time, and thought I’d share it here.