Flaming Pablum

The Ear Punk Broke

I haven’t posted anything about Tinnitus in a little while, so thought I’d revisit for a quick update, although, ultimately, it’s not like I have anything new to relay in that department.

The ceaseless ringing in my right ear commenced one bright morning in October of 1999 (on the eve of my now very distant 32nd birthday), and has been a constant, cloyingly unwelcome companion ever since. When it first revealed itself — after years upon years of cumulative damage presumably brought on by irresponsible headphone-usage and continued exposure to amplification without protection — I plunged headlong into a pronounced depression, forsaking my steady diet of live music and routine ear-pod usage for a good two years, or so. During this fraught period, I sought the counsel of different ENT doctors and audiologists, experimented with a host of so-called homeopathic “remedies” (like the promisingly named “RingStop” ... as if) and allegedly effective combatants like Whey, Ginko Biloba and Lipo Flavonoid. I even tried a few nuttily ill-advised stunts like ear-candling and Chinese ear-picking. Honestly speaking, I regret to concede that none of the above ever did a single goddamn thing for it. The ring rang on.  

I’m sure I was a complete barrel of laughs to be around, during those days, especially upon gleaning that, along with exposure to loud noise, allegedly a succession of otherwise largely banal elements like the intake of salt, sugar and alcohol could all potentially make the ringing worse. “Oh, that’s great,” I'd routinely express, “… everything that makes life worth living. They might as well add oxygen and sex to that list and really seal the deal.” I was histrionic about it at the best of times.

This all said, for the most part, I was getting off light. I only suffered from the ring in a single ear, while several musician friends of mine (and one who believes he contracted it from scuba diving) had it — and invariably still have it — in both. It could have been significantly worse, for me. Tinnitus has been widely reported to drive certain individuals to unthinkable ends. Like I said, comparatively speaking, I had it pretty easy.

In time, after all those purported treatments and supplements failed me, I just acclimated. I was never interested in any masking devices or white noise machines as I wasn’t intent on hiding the noise so much as DESTROYING it. But, then as now, despite some hopeful developments, there is no quick fix. Tinnitus has no cure.

While I’ve made my peace with it (and long-since re-entered the realms of attending live music and headphone-usage, albeit responsibly), it still comes with a hefty price. Just last night, the wife and I went to a live taping at Carnegie Hall of NPR’s news quiz-show, “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me!” (how’s THAT for punk rock?), and up in the balcony of that great room, I still had to cup the back of both of my ears to credibly discern anything from the stage. If I’m at a crowded function of a certain capacity, there invariably comes a point wherein I can’t hear a fucking thing anyone is saying and basically just resort to smiling and nodding. That part genuinely sucks.

When it comes to concerts and rock shows in grubby clubs, I usually fill my jacket pockets with angry fistfuls of ear-plugs ahead of time in preparation, although just a few weeks back, I went to go see LCD Soundsystem at Brooklyn Steel and forgot that precaution. Never considering LCD to be that kind of band, I figured I’d be okay, but lemme tell ya, when James Murphy & Co. hit the stage, it was loud — like fuckin’ SWANS loud. After just a couple of songs, I retreated to the rear bar, and even there it was pretty stentorian. I went right to the merch booth and bought a pair of earplugs for way more than they should’ve cost.

Incidentally, a quick word about ear-plugs: While, no, they don't look cool (who cares?), they actually do help you experience the music better by ostensibly filtering out all the noise and distortion. You actually hear what's being sonically conveyed in a clearer, more manageable way, I promise you. 

In any case, I’m lucky in that while my hearing has certainly deteriorated a bit (aging does not help), the ringing has remained at a more-or-less tolerable level. It’s worse in the mornings and sometimes after a night of big imbibing, but nothing I’m not able to handle.

But, y’know, every person reacts differently. Recently, I came across testimonials from folks I personally really admire like Nick Cave (above) in his Red Hand Files (read that here) and Lol Tolhurst of the Cure and Budgie of the Banshees, who discussed in the most recent episode of their “Curious Creatures” podcast, in this instance interviewing comely Primal Scream bassist Simone Marie Butler. Hear that here.... if you can. 

By the way, if anyone ever tells you you’re too old if it’s too loud, kick them squarely in the fucking balls.

Farewell, Jet Black

In very sad news, today, it seems one of my all-time heroes, Jet Black of The Stranglers, has passed away at the age of 84, dying peacefully at home surrounded by his family.

I’ve spoken of my adoration for The Stranglers a thousand times here on this blog, so this one hits me pretty hard. An iconic presence since the band’s mid-`70s inception, drummer Jet Black – also boasting inarguably the coolest punk rock moniker ever – was already 39 when 1977’s summer of punk dawned. Like the scowly band he founded, Jet was the embodiment of wilfull contrarianism in an era of herd mentality. For a start, having honed his chops in jazz, Jet Black could actually play. And quite unlike the acne-speckled, safety-pin-punctured teenagers in the bands of the day, Jet Black was an unapologetically older, portly gentleman who even deigned to sport facial hair (as if having a keyboard player in the ranks of The Stranglers wasn’t heresy enough). But if punk was all about disdain for convention, what could possibly be more punk than eschewing the subculture’s own rigid uniformity?

Helming the band through their post-pub-rock years into the breach of punk and giddily antagonizing all and sundry along the way, Jet Black and The Stranglers happily played up their differences and continued to evolve where many ran aground. After two albums of still palpably bracing punk (the endearingly nasty Rattus Norvigicus and No More Heroes) the band started to shift gears into more experimental territory with Black and White, while simultaneously retaining their richly cultivated air of menace.

Later eras found the band morphing further still, then shedding members along the way and continuing to evolve. Jet finally stepped down from the drum kit, officially, in 2018, but even the last time I saw the band perform here in New York City at the Highland Ballroom in 2013, Jet was not with them.

Strangely enough, in more recent years, my own son Oliver has become a sizable fan of The Stranglers. Many recent evenings have heard him sequestered in his room trying to play “Peaches” on his acoustic guitar. He, too, will be crushed by this news.

Goodnight, farewell and thank you, Jet Black. You will be sorely missed.

Zopa in The Snow

We’re already knee-deep into December, and it still looks like mid-October, outside. That’s not a joke. Right outside my office, there’s a ring of trees still fully outfitted with a rich array of strikingly golden leaves that would otherwise suggest that Halloween and Thanksgiving have yet to transpire. But we know differently.

Personally speaking, despite that strange dichotomy, I’m very much looking forward to a lustrously snowy winter. I look forward to a thick blanket of the white stuff coating these New York City streets sometime soon, but I’m not holding my breath. Beyond it still looking fully autumnal oustside, the thermometer is telling me it’s 55 degrees out. Not exactly a winter wonderland.

Lucky for me, then, that I stumbled upon the video below, “Red Sky” by the band Zopa. The only thing I know about this outfit is that it features actor Michael Imperioli on vocals and guitar. This might sound like heresy to some, but I’ve never watched a full episode of “The Sopranos,” so I really only know Imperioli from Season 2 of “The White Lotus” and from his fleeting cameo in “Goodfellas,” wherein he plays luckless mob barhop Spider who gets maimed and then murdered by Joe Pesci’s Tommy over a botched drink order.

In any case, on top of “Red Sky” being an ample demonstration of Imperioli’s musical abilities, its video – directed by his (wife? sister? daughter?) Victoria Imperioli is a lovely montage of New York City in the show.

Enjoy….

“My Picture at the Movies, Baby”: Bad Brains in `79

I’ve seen snippets of this film before, but evidently, 10 months ago, someone saw fit to upload the whole enchilada. It’s a little grainy, of course, but he’s the entirety of “My Picture in The Movies, Baby,” largely shot at CBGB in 1979.

While not quite as sharp as that amazing `79 footage from Central Park or that other `79 footage from CBGB I posted last year this video is still a pretty compelling argument in favor of why the band is held in such lofty regard. Shot prior to Bad Brains’ migration from the hometown of Washington D.C. and well prior to the release of their seminal eponymous debut album on ROIR, this footage still captures the absolutely manic virtuosity of the band firing on all goddamn cylinders.

There is, of course, yet another show of theirs at CBGB that was immortalized on video, that being the Live at CBGB 1982, but – put simply – there’s no such thing as a slice of live video of this band that isn’t entirely astonishing.

Enjoy this while it lasts.

Fuck SantaCon

Just heard that SantaCon, despite its organizers acknowledging that it’s not universally beloved (to say the fucking least) is happening here in New York on December 10th, to which I say …..Fuck That and Fuck YOU!

If you need me to explain why this annual blight is a problem, you’re clearly just not paying any attention. Suffice to say, if you’re a fan of SantaCon or are planning on participating in it this year, please get the fuck off my blog and never come back. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Just go directly to Hell.

The Penance of Pussy Galore

I’ve mentioned them quite a few time here, over the years, but I used to be a big fan of this band called Pussy Galore. I say “used to,” as they don’t really exist anymore, their members having long-since disbanded to form and play in myriad other projects. But, back in the day, as they say, Pussy Galore were one of those bands that stopped you dead in your tracks. Whether because of their deliberately prurient name (I used to routinely point out that, technically, they were named after Honor Blackman's character from the James Bond classic,“Goldfinger, but no one ever really bought that) or because of their singular sonic signature -- a sort of slovenly punk-blues blitzkrieg featuring crazed, yowling vocals, volatile guitars and rusty kitchen-sink percussion that sounded like the Tin Man from “The Wizard of Oz” being forcibly shoved down a flight of stairs --- Pussy Galore left few people indifferent. They were entirely loud, messy and wilfully obnoxious. In other words, they were kinda perfect.

That all said, they still kinda weren’t for everyone. I always thought their uproariously offensive, middle-finger-for-all aesthetic was fairly obviously cartoony, but not everyone got the joke. While maybe not quite as universally objectionable as, say, the oeuvre of GG Allin & the Murder Junkies, choice Pussy Galore song titles could certainly ruin someone’s day and/or land one in Facebook jail for violating community standards if invoked in a post. Put simply, not everyone appreciated Pussy Galore’s tireless rampage of potty-mouthed invective, much less their clamorous brand of music.

But being purposefully provocative was part and parcel of Pussy Galore. They went all in and, as fans, you were expected to do the same. And in the wake of a succession of what I considered hilarious slabs of wax like (sorry) Groovy Hate Fuck, Sugarshit Sharp, Dial ‘M’ for Motherfucker and Corpse Love (to name just a small selection of their discography), I became wholly enamored of the band to the extent that I proudly procured myself a shirt of theirs emblazoned with the scrawled text from a former gig flyer. The copy on same read: “Live from the Hate Fuck Capital City of the World: PUSSY GALORE.” I bought this garment at a now-long-dormant record shop in SoHo called Rocks in Your Head. Today, after playing host to a real estate agency for several years, the space that had been Rocks in Your Head is now a dessert emporium called Sugarwood that exclusively serves genital-shaped treats. I find this somewhat entirely appropriate.

I wore my Pussy Galore shirt quite a bit, initially, although it usually didn’t do me any favors. While it may have garnered the odd nod of recognition from fellow noise-rock nerds, it more often than not prompted confusion, consternation and verbal abuse from the layperson. After a while, it was kind of more trouble than it was worth, so I gave it to my nextdoor neighbor.

So, why am I bringing all this back up now? Well, I’m friends with former Pussy Galore drummer Bob Bert on social media. Along with Pussy Galore, Bob also served in the ranks of several other amazing bands like Sonic Youth, Bewitched, Chrome Cranks and Drunk Driving. These days, he splits his creative time between Lydia Lunch’s amazing Retrovirus (you may remember my rapturous live review from earlier this year) and a trio called the Wolfmanhattan Project. In any case, Bob posted an amazing bit of Pussy Galore ephemera, today, concerning the very flyer that ended up on that star-crossed t-shirt. In much the same way the shirt invited some significant scrutiny, so did its original source material. Lovingly lifted with all respect from Bob’s Facebook feed, below find both the original flyer and, beneath it, the apology Bob was presumably prompted to write in response to the fallout. Amazing.

And, just for the Hell of it….here’s some vintage Pussy Galore.

Say Yes to The Hess

Several years back, my friend Rob B. gave me a Christmas present I genuinely cherished, a pristine print of a Cop Shoot Cop gig poster from 1994 by illustrator Derek Hess. I immediately took it to be framed, and it hung on the wall of my apartment on East 12th Street from 1996 until we moved to East 9th Street in 2002.

When we moved, however, our living space went from being “my old apartment” to “our apartment.” As such, what artwork made it up onto the walls was no longer just my own snap decision. Unsurprisingly, I had a few choice pieces around our previous apartment that the Mrs. was never really that fond of. I have a massive Plasmatics poster, for example, featuring a black-eyed and scowling Wendy O. Williams that routinely put my poor wife in a foul mood. When it came time to decorate our then-new apartment (where we’ve now lived for the past twenty years … more than I’ve lived in any other space in my life), some compromises had to be made. Suffice to say, that Wendy O. poster now lives in storage. The Cop Shoot Cop poster, however, went somewhere else.

From the generosity of Rob B. to the accommodating shelter of “the other Rob,” Rob D., the Derek Hess Cop Shoot Cop poster traveled north to New London, Connecticut, where the latter Rob happily agreed to babysit some of my cherished and lovingly framed posters. Along with that C$C Hess print, he got a framed Ramones poster (Holmstrom’s art from Road to Ruin), a Stranglers promo poster (MenInBlack tour), a Clash poster (Sandinista promo), a massive poster from the Maysles’ Altamont documentary, “Gimme Shelter,” and another Cop Shoot Cop poster from a CBGB gig with the Cows circa 1990. To this day, I believe, he still has all of them (at least I hope he does).

Anyway, blah blah blah … this post wasn’t supposed to be about me and my shitty "collector scum" hoarding problems. I do still have a smaller Derek Hess print … another one for Cop Shoot Cop, but a flyer … and I’ll absolutely never friggin’ part with it.

In the interim, it seems illustrator Derek Hess’ artwork has become more and more revered and no longer relegated to the “rock geek” ghetto. Check out this sprawling documentary on the man and his artwork below….

From TriBeCa to Argentina & Back Again

The latest episode of Iñaki Rojas’ ongoing unspooling of the Modern Clix confluence (most recently discussed here) is out.

In a still-very-complicated nutshell, in 1983, Argentine rocker Charly Garcia had decamped to New York City was recording his upcoming album at Electric Lady Studios on West 8th Street and living in a loft on Waverly Place. He’d already decided on a title for the record, but when he and a photographer spotted a bit of compelling street art just off Cortlandt Alley on Walker Street in TriBeCa, all that changed. The ensuing photo found Garcia unwittingly sitting under one of the late Richard Hambleton’s “shadow men,” along with a tag by local punk rock scenester Fran Powers’ band, Modern Clix. Garcia named this album Clicks Modernos, unaware of these connections. The album in question went onto become, as I understand it, one of the preeminent albums of Argentine rock.

Sadly, Richard Hambleton passed away before ever learning that his artwork ended up on the sleeve of a massive-selling album. But writer/videographer Iñaki Rojas connected the dots (with some fleeting support of some old posts of mine) and reached out to Fran Powers and hipped him to this somewhat bizarre bit of artistic synergy. I’d only gotten to know Fran from recognizing him at a party thrown by Yukie Ohta of the SoHo Memory Project from Brooke Smith's photographs of the early New York Hardcore scene (happening just across town on the Bowery and Avenue A from the neighborhoods where Charly Garcia was hanging around, at the time). Funnily enough, Brooke Smith just released a sprawling coffee table book of these photographs (which I interviewed her about quite recently) and held a book signing at Generation Records on Thompson Street JUST LAST NIGHT, which I, of course, went to, where she was interviewed by Drew Stone, who I spoke about yesterday.  The whole thing is quite bizarre.

Sadly, Fran Powers passed away last year. Charly Garcia, meanwhile, is still with us. He’s 71 and living in Buenos Aires. In the wake of all this, I decided to hunt down his album, and have spent the last couple of days checking it out. Not sure what I was expecting, but it’s actually pretty great — despite me not being able to decipher what he’s singing about.

In any case, here’s Iñaki’s latest installment of the series. You'll want to turn on the English subtitles (just click on the CC on the bottom bar of the YouTube screen). I make a tiny cameo.

Back to A7

Just a quick one to highlight this great "lost segment" from my friend Drew Stone, giving a great, authoritative history of A7 just off Tompkins Square Park, which was basically the flashpoint of the whole New York Hardcore scene. Lots of great history, here, do check it out:

The Candid Cashier

In recent weeks, the supermarket around our corner has seen something of a turnover in its staff of check-out cashiers. One new member of this team is a little lady named Consuela. This petite, elderly woman has checked my groceries out a few times, by this point, and now evidently feels entirely comfortable chatting with me, which I’m completely cool with. I’m pretty goddamn chatty myself.

A couple of weeks back, the wife and I had been planning on having some neighbors over for a few drinks, so I was dispatched to procure a few essentials. I hit the nearby liquor store first and got a bottle of white wine, then popped over to our supermarket, where I proceeded to grab a six-pack, some chips, some olives and maybe some cocktail napkins. With the wine bottle still tucked under my arm, I brought these items to the register where Consuela was waiting for me.

“Looks like you’re having a party,” she sighed as she was ringing me up. “Oh, just some of our neighbors,” I responded. She looked up at me expectantly as if to suggest that I might consider inviting her, too. “Oh, it’s not just you?” came her retort, augmented with a coquettish fluttering of her eyelashes. I laughed … not knowing quite what to do with that.

Last night, meanwhile, I was again back amidst the aisles of our supermarket, grabbing some makings for quesadillas (Oliver is perfecting his Mexican culinary skills) and, again, yet another six-pack of beer. As before, Consuela was waiting for me, doubtlessly ready to dispatch another surreal observation.

When she got to my beer -– a regular item of purchase for me – she asked to see my I.D. Having now bought an ill-considered quantity of the beverage in question from this establishment, I might have assumed that she could eschew this particular step of the process, but Consuela is either ardently bound to protocol or possibly just forgetful. Or just really fuckin' bored.

“I’m 55,” I said, handing my card to her, “but I’m truly flattered that you think I look so young.”

Handing my card back, she again looked up at me. “Well, your face looks like the face of someone in their forties, but this…” she exclaimed while waving an accusing finger at my midsection, “yes, …. this certainly tells me you’re into your fifties.”

“Wait, WHAT?” I was both highly amused and taken somewhat aback. I laughed, finding her blunt assessment almost kind of endearingly refreshing.

“I’m sorry,” she continued as she handed me my change, “I just have to tell the truth.”