Okay, strap in, `cos this is really confusing one, and I’m bound to get something wrong, so please bear with me.
I covered a lot of this in this recent post, but at some point in about 2019, a friend of mine sent me a music video from an Argentinian artist named Charly Garcia. My friend rightly figured I’d be interested in it, as it featured several shots of my beloved downtown Manhattan circa 1989. In the course of writing about that, however, I realized that I had remembered this guy Charly Garcia because of an album he’d put out some years earlier called Modern Clix. I wasn’t familiar with the music on that record, but had been initially struck by the title and the sleeve. The cover art was significant as it featured a shot of Charly sitting beneath some familiar street art (specifically one of Richard Hambleton’s “shadow men,” which I’d addressed here), but more because of the legend “MODERN CLIX” that was scrawled in spray paint above his head. Whether Charly knew it or not, at the time, that was the name of a local punk band led by one Fran Powers.
Fran Powers was a face on the early New York Hardcore scene, given his membership in bands like Ultra Violence, Whole Wide World and, once again, Modern Clix (not actually a hardcore band, but more of a punk/ska/reggae/funk hybrid – you can hear some of their music here). I’d first spied Fran’s face via the photographs of Brooke Smith (who I just interviewed) and made the connection between Modern Clix and this cryptic graffiti I used to spy all over downtown – this warrior figure holding a spear. Shortly after that, I attended a party thrown by SoHo Memory Project’s Yukie Ohta in SoHo (duh!) and ended up running right into Fran Powers (I mean literally running into -- he was boarding an elevator I was exiting) and we started chatting. Shortly after that, I discovered he’d made a crazy cameo in my favorite movie of all time, Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” so I reached back out to him to interview him about that, and we became friends from that point on.
Again, I’ve already covered all this stuff a bunch of time, most notably here when I stumbled across some photographs that revealed the exact location of the Hambleton and Modern Clix graffiti that ended up on Charly Garcia’s album cover. As reported in that post, the spot was on the southwest corner of Walker Street at Cortlandt Alley. The shot up at the top is me at that same corner but, just as a refresher, here’s the cover photo from the original sleeve in question:
Alright, so I put up that post in April, and pretty much thought, “well, that’s that, right?”
Wrong.
Two things then happened.
The first was a note from a gentleman named Iñaki Rojas. Iñaki is a writer from Mendoza, Argentina who was putting a book together about the backstory of the Charly Garcia/Fran Powers/Richard Hambleton confluence that manifested itself as Garcia’s Modern Clix album. What I’d never quite realized, of course, was that Charly Garcia is not just “some Argentine musician” as I’d described him but evidently, like, practically the Latin American David Bowie -- an artist with profound reach and influence around that region of the world. His acolytes are legion. I mean, we’re such provincial snobs here in the United States that just because an artist doesn’t sing in English, we can’t be bothered to investigate their music, but I feel completely duty-bound to now go procure myself a copy of Garcia’s iconic Modern Clix album and do my due diligence.
The second thing to happen, tragically, was the untimely death of Fran Powers that following June. As I expressed in my farewell post to the man, there was so much more I’d have loved to discuss with him, but we simply never had the opportunity. As another random tendril of connection, Fran also played in a short-lived band with former Even Worse vocalist and fellow Flaming Pablum Interview survivor, RB Korbet.
Anyway, over the course of several emails, Iñaki quizzed me on some of the minutia I’d discussed in my previous posts on the subject and I shared some pictures of the location as it appears today (that’s where the shot at the top of this post comes from). Ever since then, he’s been working away on this master project, and has been gradually posting a series of YouTube videos that go into great, crazy, obsessive depth about the whole saga.
If you’re at all curious, you can check them out below. If, like myself, you don’t speak the language, simply click on the setting icon on the lower bar and select the English subtitles option.
Part One...
Part Two....
Look forward to Parts Three, Four and Five coming soon!
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