Flaming Pablum

Succumbing to Wet Leg

I am frequently heard to complain about how, evidently, all the good band names are taken – resulting in a veritable avalanche of indefensibly stupid band names like Dry Cleaning, Soccer Mommy, Mannequin Pussy, Car Seat Headrest, Laundry Day, Japanese Breakfast, etc. etc. My reaction to this has pretty much always been that if you can’t be bothered to think of a decent band name, you needn’t worry about me every giving a fuck about your music.

But, as has been well established elsewhere on this blog, I am a filthy hypocrite.

Back when the earth was young, I had a co-worker named Drew who shared a similar affinity for loud, obnoxious music. He was raving, at the time, about this band he liked called Pissed Jeans. As expressed above, I had zero interest, as I found their name to be idiotic and distasteful (and this coming from a guy who actively espouses bands like the Circle Jerks, the Butthole Surfers, the Revolting Cocks, etc.) In any case, Drew would not let up on his championing of Pissed Jeans, continually asserting that I was really missing out on a good thing. As if on cue, Pissed Jeans rolled into town and played at since-vanished music venue Cakeshop on Ludlow Street. Very begrudgingly, I went at Drew’s behest to check them out, churlishly expecting to be underwhelmed.

And, of course, they were fucking brilliant, as discussed here. Not only were they precisely a variant of slovenly, pugnacious rock that I happen to adore, once I saw them perform and heard their music, their “stupid and distasteful” name made completely PERFECT sense. They SOUNDED exactly like the state of being wherein urinating in one’s own jeans is par for the course. Mind changed and summarily blown.

Cut to 2022 and suddenly there’s a hotly touted band making the rounds called Wet Leg. My immediate reaction is a disinterested “fuck you” in very much the same manner I wrote off Pissed Jeans. If “Wet Leg” is honestly the best thing they can come up with, why should I be arsed to listen to what is inevitably a puddle of anemic sonic piffle, right?

Once again, however, I stand corrected.

For relatively no good reason, I clicked “play” on the video below, captured at last week’s Glastonbury festival in merry olde England, and was quickly totally engaged. It was embedded in a roundup in Vulture. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but when they kick into that guitar riff at 01:12, I was completely onboard. The fact that there are two zealous guys in the audience dressed like lobsters had nothing to do with it, I assure you.

This is a more amped-up performance than captured on the studio version, but I’m still really digging it. It is my recent understanding that the band chose their admittedly dumb name to take the pressure off them -– which is pretty much the same reason why one of my favorite-ever bands, Echo & the Bunnymen, chose theirs. Once again, I am revealed to be prematurely closed-minded and a filthy hypocrite.

Sorry, Wet Leg … please forgive me.

Johnny in The City

Yeah, sorry, it’s another tenuously Sex Pistols-related post. Sort of. Deal with it.

I’ve posted a couple of entires about John Lydon’s tenure in New York City here before, but this video below caught my eye, as he gives some detail about his accommodations here prior to the release of the This is What You Want, This is What You Get album. In this interview from 1983, Lydon asserts that when in New York, he was living in a “huge loft with a stage” somewhere in a “commercial zone.” He then goes on to recount his experience of filming “The Order of Death” with Harvey Keitel (which I discussed back here).

While it’s inarguably true that John Lydon has since become something a laborious provocateur (wasn’t he always?) with a desperate penchant for contrarianism, I am still intrigued by the notion of where he might have been living. 

My first hunch is that the “huge loft” was somewhere in SoHo, which – back in 1983 – indeed was still something of a “commercial zone.” I’m sure the invoked Martin Atkins knows.

Anyway, weigh in, if you know…

Word on the Street

Suddenly, Summer

And just like that, … we’re into the summertime.

Just like last summer, the Flaming Pablum family is neck-deep in activity. My daughter graduated high school, a few weeks back, and my son Oliver finished up his sophomore year, shortly after that. As it happened, that was all going on in tandem with a string of high-pressure projects at work that I was recently moaning about. I managed to wrap those up, as well, although they’re to be followed in swift succession by another slew of challenging tasks. I shouldn’t complain about that, though. It’s all part of the gig.

In the last few days, we drove back up to Vermont to drop our boy back off at camp. He’s going to be a counselor’s assistant, this time around, so I’m no longer worried about him up there (as I was the first time around). He was very much looking forward to it. So long as his shipped trunk arrived (we never got confirmation of that), all should be well. We’ll go back and fetch him again in a little over three weeks.

Today, meanwhile, we’re again putting my daughter on a bus bound for her grandmother’s place out in Long Island. This will free up the apartment for me to have the second of too many colonoscopies. Regular, strong-stomached readers may remember the accounts of my colonoscopic debut last year, wherein my disarmingly blunt gastroenterologist breezily informed me that they’d “found a bunch of stuff up there” and needed to schedule another one “next year.” That’s happening tomorrow. We’ll see how that pans out … pardon the disquieting turn of phrase.

Beyond that, we’re sadly not going to log any time at the Lamb Cottage, this summer. You may remember some of my anecdotes about same, notably my dealings with some high-volume neighbors. While we do indeed love that place, we just couldn’t afford it this year. Instead, in July, after we’ve gotten Oliver back from camp, we’re jetting off to Greece for our first proper vacation in a very long time. Following that, we’ll then be hopping back over the pond to drop my daughter of at her chosen university in Scotland this August. I’m expecting that to be difficult for me, but we’ll see.

In between all of those procedures and maneuvers, both the wife and I will be working away. After two summers of lulling, pandemic-mandated limitation, this summer’s schedule does seem somewhat exhaustingly frenetic, but we’ll see how it goes.

I’m sure, along the way, I’ll be carving out time, here, to ruminate about this and that. Watch this space, as they say.

Cheers, and Happy Summer!

They Had The Flavor

Back ... Again ... to Flickr

I can’t remember when I first launched my Flickr page, but it certainly predated the era of Instagram.

I uploaded boxes and boxes of photographs, mostly from the `90s through the early 2000’s onto the site, nominally captioned them with threadbare detail and …that’s it. I never really did another upload. To peruse through them here in 2022, those pictures do seem to collectively capture a completely different city than the one that exists around us today. Or that’s how I feel about it, anyway.

Page through them and see ancient pics of since-razed landmarks, punk flyers, street art, snow storms, drinks in shitty bars, old friends, decrepit rock clubs, fleeting road trips, long-vanished record stores, former apartments and some very early shots of my kids when that chapter kicked in.

If you’re curious, check them out here.

Status Report

Hey all…. Sorry for the slowdown in regular service, here (believe it or not, in a perfect world, I would post something every day), but it’s been a Hell of a few weeks.

On the plus side, my daughter graduated from high school, earlier this week, which was a grand and significant milestone that was truly emotional and overwhelming. She heads to college (a university in Scotland -- more about that later) this fall, which will be an amazing opportunity and experience for her, but will be somewhat bittersweet and sobering for me. It seems like only yesterday I was picking her up from kindergarten.

On the work front, we’ve had multiple high-pressure projects in the works, each very demanding. Everyone in my department seems to be burnt out, at wit’s end and flying on fumes. Both the stakes and the tensions are high. I’ll have more time to devote to this blog once the dust settles.

In the interim, here’s a handy approximation of how I’m feeling about it all….

Says It All

Posted today in my news feed .... but the American Association of Retired Persons.

Buried Beneath the Bollocks Deux: An Open Letter

A follow-up to this recent post:

Dearest surviving Sex Pistols….

You all need to shut the FUCK up.

No one wants to know about your intra-band acrimony. No one needs to know your current thoughts about the monarchy. No one needs to hear your sympathetic feeling for Donald Trump. No one wants to hear that you’d rather listen to Steely Dan than your own music. No one needs to see your new revisionist biopic. That story’s already been told more times than is necessary. No one needs to buy yet another compilation of material that’s already been released dozens of times. You released one perfect album. Respect that. 

Stop shitting all over your own legacy.

Sincerely, 
-Alex

See You In a Crate in My Mom’s Basement: Memories of a Teenage NWOBHM Head

My excellent friend Ned posted a great encapsulation of the NWOBHM on Facebook today. For those not “in the know,” the NWOBHM was the …ahem … New Wave of British Heavy Metal, an inarguably fertile period of music in the very early `80s wherein certain journos in the English music press tried to lend the much-maligned genre of Heavy Metal the same variety of exciting, headline-grabbing hype that was otherwise exclusively relegated to the then-current class of forward-leaning, angular post-punk and so-called New Wave bands. It didn’t entirely catch on with the masses, but it was a viable, bona fide movement all the same.

Not just a means of giving stodgy, long-haired rock purists equal time, the NWOBHM was indeed a legitimate crop of bands who were, at the very least, cribbing notes from their contemporaries in the hipper, punkier side of the tracks. While Iron Maiden to this day will vehemently deny it, their first two records with vocalist Paul Di’Anno (three, if you count the live Maiden Japan), definitely bore some of the trappings of `82-era punk rock ala Discharge, UK Subs et al, via the high-velocity rhythms and Di’Anno’s gruff, punky vocals. Tell that to bassist Steve Harris in 2022, and he’ll probably club you with his bass.

Other NWOBHM bands like Motorhead and Venom were more openly embracing of the aggressive stealth and disdain for finesse that largely marked the punk bands of the era. The former swapped members with the Damned, on occasion, and the latter even toured with Black Flag, for crying out loud.

In any case, suffice to say, I was wholly on board with all of it, and loved anything that bridged the raging chasm between the punk and hardcore records I was gobbling up and the old school metal I’d always loved. It also prompted the following two anecdotes….

I have vivid memories of coming home from Record Explosion (on 35th and Fifth Avenue ... now a shoe store) with a freshly procured copy of See You in Hell by Grim Reaper and running into two girls from my high school. Nervous chatter ensued until suddenly it seemed like it was actually "going well,"... or at least until the inevitable "what record did ya buy?" query came up. I sheepishly withdrew the album from the bag and it was as if a long corridor of what I can only call "doors of opportunity" suddenly started slamming. Such was the toll of NWOBHM fandom.

I also remember, some short years after the weepy anecdote above, having a sort of crisis on the eve of leaving for my freshman year of college. This still being the era of vinyl as dominant format (1985), I sat in my room with my unwieldy collection of LPs, having to make some "Sophie's Choice"-esque decisions about which records were coming with me, and which were staying behind. In a nutshell, all the punk, goth, hardcore, "New Wave," post-punk, etc. was a shoe-in, but when we got to the metal, while Sabbath, Venom, Maiden, Metallica, Slayer, Motorhead, Anthrax, Judas Priest and Accept all made the cut, the stack of neglected metal -- Ratt, Helix, Twisted Sister, Motley Crue, Quiet Riot, Fastway, W.A.S.P. (yes, I owned the 12" to "Fuck Like a Beast," I'll admit it) and ... yes, do wait for it ... Grim Reaper, all stayed home. It was, as they say, a moment of clarity.*

Of course, in (much) later years, as I’m keen to laboriously point out, I stopped caring about what other people might think about my listening habits, and have welcomed all those shaggy-haired prodigal sons back into the fold, so to speak.

Well, maybe not all. While I still own the LP (exiled to a sealed crate of vinyl in the dank confines of my mother’s all-too-flood-friendly Long Island basement), I can’t say I often pine to re-experience the sonic offerings of Grim Reaper.

To say that this song and video “haven’t aged well” is to demonstrate a level of selfless generosity light years beyond the grasp of Mother Teresa.

*ADDENDUM: In the anecdote about leaving some records behind when I left for college, I did not invoke the following bands, as to my mind and ears, they are not strictly "heavy metal." AC/DC (they came with), Blue Oyster Cult (they came with), Van Halen (they came with), Rush (they came with), Led Zeppelin (they came with) and Kiss (some of their stuff came with).