Flaming Pablum

Let There Be Drums

Here’s an odd one.

Bob Bert, legendary drummer/percussionist, former Piers Platters record-shop attendant and tirelessly cool guy posted an interesting pic with the following legend (which I am liberally cribbing from the great man, sheerly for the sake of this post):

On this day in 1996 Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club left the planet On this day in 1988 Pussy Galore played a short lived club called Drums which was by the 59th Street bridge in NYC with B.A.L.L. And the Gun Club. This was the night that I met Don Fleming. photo by @maciocephotography @popcatastrophe @juliecafritz @kwolf13 @jonspencerhitmaker @instantmayhem

Drums? 1988? 59th Street Bridge? Gun Club? No bells rang for me, so I started doing some digging.

This site sort of confirmed Bob’s account that the Gun Club played (they evidently opened with their cover of Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit,” which is a bold choice, but sadly failed to play my favorite Gun Club song, “Carry Home”), although suggest that the gig happened on March 29th, not the 31st. Personally, I’m usually more inclined to believe the guy who was there and played onstage more than some random website, but whatevs.

But then I happened on this picture above, snapped by one Derek Von Essen, of the great Jefferey Lee Pierce. Mr. Von Essen reports that said photo was snapped on March 31, 1988 … but in Toronto, Canada.

Chiming in on Bob’s post came a remark from Stan Demeski, another drummer who played with an array of great bands like The Feelies and Winter Hours. Steve says he played at Drums, too (albeit he did not specify which band) and mentioned that there was an awkward pole in the middle of the stage.

The only other mention I could track down of anyone else playing such a venue came from Wikipedia (oh how reliable) about an early iteration of the Black Crowes playing there.

Just for laughs, I then looked on YouTube, and sure enough…. my always forward-thinking friend Greg Fasolino was also there (of course) and recorded the Gun Club’s set …. also citing the 29th. I’ve mentioned him before, here, but Greg is like the Punk Rock “Zelig.” He was everywhere, I tell ya….

So, anyway, I think this all handily confirms when the gig was and who played it, but I am still intrigued by one crucial missing aspect. Yes, I understand the club was in close proximity to the mighty Queensboro Bridge (quite an odd neighborhood for these types of bands to be playing in, if you ask me), but what was the actual address of the venue? And what is there today?

Anyone? Anyone? Weigh in…

Friday's Paper

One for the history books...

Back to the Dustbin

I first saw Ned's Atomic Dustbin in the early weeks of 1991 at a long-vanished club on the westernmost edge of West 21st street that I've mentioned here several times called The Marquee (with the louder/noisier/hairier Swervedriver opening). When the Neds hit the stage, it was this technicolor explosion of flailing hair, goofy t-shirts, oversized sneakers and gangly limbs, with each member of the band (barring drummer Dan-Dan The Fast Drumming Man) airborne more often than not. I was 24 at the time. 

This clip below, meanwhile -- recorded a mere two years ago -- suddenly finds the Neds (and their fans) having succumbed to the travails of age (this from someone significantly older, fatter and grayer than he was in 1991) and looking very much like the gaggle of dads they probably now are.

But they still bring the goddamn goods! Crank it!

Broken Images Again

Once again, please excuse the periodic broken images. It’s an ongoing problem Typepad seems to be having, and it’s really driving me absolutely fucking muderously crazy.

Under House Arrest: The Proper Way to Listen to 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions

Despite repeatedly asserting, over the course of this blog’s ….jeezus… almost 18-year existence, that Fun House, the second album by The Stooges, released in August of 1970, is the greatest rock’n’roll album of all goddamn time (usually punctuated with a needlessly antagonistic flourish like “if you can’t appreciate the furious majesty of Fun House, you should probably start listening to Janis Ian records and collecting ornamental doilies, because you just don’t understand rock’n’roll played fucking properly!”), I have twice committed what some Stooges purists might consider abject heresy by decrying the 1999 deluxe release of Rhino Records’ sprawling, 7-CD box set, 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions.

I first got candid about it here, and then documented my tragic attempts to unsuccessfully pawn the thing here.

In a nutshell, my issue with the lavish package was that while the original album clocked in at a meaty 36 minutes and 35 seconds of pure, lean rock perfection, this Rhino collection – played from start to finish – takes 7 hours and 52 minutes to get through. More to the point, despite its unwieldy length, the Rhino Box basically only features the same 7 songs, apart from a few, brief dalliances with unfinished compositions. The majority of the box set is comprised of maddeningly multiple takes of each of the original album’s tracks. Disc Two, for example, offers 19 versions of the album’s second song, “Loose.” Those aren’t even all the versions in the box. There are still NINE more versions of “Loose” waiting for you on friggin’ Disc Three. I first heard “Loose” in 1985 and it swiftly became a contender for one of my favorite songs of all time. After trying to sit through 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions in its entirety upon foolhardily purchasing it in 1999, I practically never wanted to hear it again.

As laboriously rhapsodized in those older posts, I used to unrealistically imagine that the original Fun House was swiftly recorded with devil-may-care aplomb over the course of one heady afternoon when Iggy and the boys were fleetingly sober enough to find the “record” button, before traipsing off into the night to snort, smoke-&-drink the town dry and pillage accordingly. The Rhino box set cruelly decimated that fanciful myth, revealing the Stooges to be more meticulously nitpicky perfectionists than slovenly protopunk pirates.

With that sad realization, my copy of the box was relegated first to a high, dusty shelf in my previous apartment (to be spied at and foolishly coveted by similarly nerdy friends of mine) before, upon moving to our current apartment in 2002, my dreaded front-hall closet, to which tragic piles of ephemera from my stupid youth are sentenced, dispatched and summarily crammed into endless dormancy like a Punk Rock Guantanamo Bay.

A few years back, however, I’d been all too efficient in paying off some bills, which found my bank account suddenly leaner that I’d otherwise prefer it. To temporarily remedy this problem, I hastily figured it was as good a time as any to sell my rarely played copy of 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions, but my efforts to do so were met with blankly ignorant stares or, at best, tragically low-ball offers that didn’t even come close to half of the cost I’d originally spent on it. As such, I still possess it. It’s in the back of that closet as I type this.

So, here we are in 2023, 53 years after the original album’s release, 24 years after the Rhino box set’s release and 18 years after first posting about my disappointment with it, I fielded a very thoughtful message from one Robert Cook, who wrote….

I'm glad to have the COMPLETE FUNHOUSE SESSIONS. The thing is, no one (or very few) will enjoy listening to different takes of the same song over and over and over in sequence. The way to enjoy this set is to put it on shuffle mode in the CD carousel and let the tracks play at random...AND...limit yourself to 45 minutes to an hour for each listening session.

Or, sequence different takes of each song in the same track order as the released album, and burn each sequence onto a cd-R. Then you can listen to FUNHOUSE, Version A, or FUNHOUSE, Version C, etc., etc. whenever you have a hankering to hear FUNHOUSE. You won't be pummeled into terminal boredom and you'll be listening to different versions of FUNHOUSE each time to play it (them).

I might just have to give that a shot.

Meanwhile,.... here's "Loose."

Let Gavin Have It

I’ve invoked his name here on this blog numerous times, but back in my days as an erstwhile music journalist, I had the tremendous honor of twice interviewing Irish singer/songwriter/punk rocker Gavin Friday, former lead singer/provocateur of the Virgin Prunes turned surrealist cabaret chanteur. In later years, Gavin would branch out into film-scoring to become a respected composer in his own right. They say you should never meet your heroes, as all too often, the reality is an awkward letdown, but on both occasions, Mr. Friday was a chatty, affable and attentive conversationalist and a rivtetting raconteur, our sessions spilling way over the allotted times into meandering hours of deep, informative chat. The first time was at the sutiably atmospheric downtown loft of his then-manager, who lived on White Street in then-still-largely-ungentrified TriBeCa, the second at Sin-E, a tiny Irish bar/venue then on St. Marks Place. Once again, on both occaisions, Gavin Friday was a tirelessly amiable and engaging character.

In terms of perormance, I was able to to catch three shows of his here in New York, the fist being at CBGB on the tour for his first solo album, Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves (which I discussed here). The second was at the Bottom Line on West 4th Street at Mercer Street, wherein Gavin punctuated his set with daring leaps from stage to various table-tops with great dramatic aplomb. The third was at the Westbeth Theatre in the West Village. As of this writing, all of those venues are long gone – one’s an overpriced haberdashery, the second an antiseptic NYU facility and the third was literally bricked up and sealed away from the public like a tomb.

At this stage of the proceedings, I have grave doubts of ever interviewing the great man again, although with a new album of material allegedly in the can and ready to be set free on the world, one hopes another tour might follow.

The only reason I’m bring up Mr. Friday again is that he just did a the 100th episode of a great Irish pop-culture podcast called Let Christy Take It wherein he gamely unspools thoughts and anecdotes from each stage of his amazing journey as an artist. If you’re a fan, it’s well worth your time, and even if you’re not, Gavin Friday is a captivating storyteller.

Check it out here, and tell’em Flaming Pablum sent ya.

From TriBeCa to Argentina & Back Again: The Clics Modernos Timeline ... and Finale?

For those following the arguably very convoluted tale of the backstory of Clics Mordernos, the final installment of Iñaki Rojas’s web series, “Modern Clix Super Powers” is now online (see way below), this episode largely concentrating on the late Fran Powers, the New York City punk rocker responsible for tagging the corner of Walker Street at Cortlandt Alley (above, as captured by one Vera Isler in 1982) with his band’s graffiti.

Even typing that paragraph was complicated, but here’s a very simplified-but-still-complexly-lenghty timeline:

• At some point in the early-to-mid `80s, punk rocker Fran Powers (below) spray-paints his band’s name, Modern Clix, on the corner of Walker & Cortlandt Alley. Hey, it's the `80s….lower Manhattan is a lawless badlands. Rampant graffiti is the least of its problems.

• As some point after that, fabled street-artist Richard Hambleton, renowned for painting cryptic “shadow men” – somewhat ominous black silhouettes of human forms -- augments Fran’s tag, making it look like the shadow man is leaning against it. During this era, these figures are all over downtown.

• At some point in 1982, preeminent Argentine rocker Charly Garcia is sequestered over on Waverly Place while recording an album at nearby Electric Lady Studios on West 8th Street. He’s already got a title in mind for his forthcoming album, but during a walk around Lower Manhattan with a photographer named Uberto Sagramoso, he happens upon the corner of Walker & Cortland and spies both the Hambleton figure and the mysterious legend “Modern Clix” and has his picture taken sitting beneath.

• So taken is Charly by the resultant image of him sitting beneath this striking tableaux of New York City street art, that he scraps his original plans, and makes Sagramoso’s photograph the cover image of his new record, which he is now re-titling Clics Modernos.

• Time passes.
  
  
• Clics Modernos, Garcia’s second solo album, gradually becomes one of the most celebrated Argentine rock albums of all time.
  
  
• More time passes.
  
  
• Rabid Argentine rock fans of a certain stripe start speculating about the whereabouts of the now-iconic corner pictured on the sleeve of Clics Modernos.
  
  
• More time passes.

• In 2011, actress/photographer Brooke Smith (most renowned for her work in “The Silence of the Lambs” and several television series) posts a clutch of period-specific photographs of her time as a member of the then-burgeoning hardcore punk scene on the Lower East Side.
  
  
• Captivated by same, I post an entry about Brooke’s photos and notice a recurring face therein, that being one Fran Powers of many different bands with names, at the time, like Ultra Violence, Whole Wide World, East of Eden and – wait for it – Modern Clix, an amorphous ensemble that plays an amalgam of styles like rock, ska, reggae, funk and punk.

• From those pictures, I rightly deduce that Fran was responsible for his own brand of cryptic graffiti, that being the Modern Clix insignia of the spear-throwing figure (above) which I’d remembered seeing around Astor Place several years earlier. You can see that same figure tattooed on Fran’s bicep below.

• At some point in the mid-2010’s, I meet one Yukie Ohta, a blogger who starts The SoHo Memory Project, a loving tribute to the neighborhood of her youth. She and I frequently compare notes and share assets for our respective web-projects (even though hers is a much classier and more professional endeavor than mine) and we become friends.

• Yukie Ohta’s SoHo Memory Project really takes off, and she hosts a party at a loft space in – wait for it – SoHo, which I attend.
  
  
• On my way out of that party, I literally run right into Fran Powers (he was boarding the elevator I was exiting), but I stop him in his tracks with the excited exclamation, “Hey, YOU’RE FRAN POWERS OF MODERN CLIX!!” We start chatting about punk rock stuff and become friends.
  
  
• One night not too long after that – circa 2015 – I’m sitting down to watch “After Hours,” my favorite movie of all time, for the bajillionth time. This time, however, I notice that none other than Fran Powers himself makes an amazing cameo. I reach out to him to see if he’d be game to discuss it for a post, which he does. You can read that here.

• Richard Hambleton dies from cancer at age 65 in 2017, oblivious to the fact that his artwork graces the cover of one of the most beloved albums of Argentine rock ever (ask Wikipedia!)

• In 2019, a friend of mine sends me the link to a video by Charly Garcia of a song called “Fanky,” which was shot around Lower Manhattan. I connect the dots and realize that I have heard of Garcia and post the sleeve photo of Clics Modernos, speculating if Fran Powers was aware that Garcia had appropriated his tag for his album --which, at the time, I am unaware is of such seismic significance to the Argentine rock community.
  
  
• In 2021, a photographer named Bo G. Eriksson posts pictures he snapped in 1984 of Cortlandt Alley. I spot these on a Facebook page called Manhattan Before 1990 and immediately spy the location of Clics Modernos from the tell-tale street art. I brazenly poach Eriksson’s images (sorry, Bo) and I post these findings here on my blog.

• Back in Argentine, writer/producer Iñaki Rojas somehow sees my post and falls out of his chair with excitement. He writes a very long and detailed missive to me about it, explaining how he’d been on a quest to divine the origins of the Clics Modernos cover and how my post had solved a few riddles for him, and enabled him to reach directly out to Fran.
  
  
• In June of 2021, Fran Powers passes away after succumbing to an illness he’d been long battling.
  
  
• As you’ll see in the video below, the corner of Walker and Cortlandt Alley will be named, this coming November, as a landmark of Argentine rock history in a small ceremony. Iñaki Rojas and Fran’s window Shoei are planning to be there. I’d imagine so will Yukie Ohta, and I’m going to try to coerce some of Fran’s friends like Brooke Smith and fellow NYHC scenster and sometime bandmate RB Korbet to attend. And, yes, I’ll be there, too.

And here, once again, is the final installment (we think) of "Modern Clicks Super Powers." You'll want to turn the CC on for English subtitles....

Back to Wollman Rink

My friend Mark posted a link on Facebook, yesterday, that there are plans afoot to turn Wollman Rink — a large ice-skating rink on the southern side of Central Park that was uncomfortably saddled with associations to bag-of-human-garbage Donald Trump — into something like the world’s biggest Pickleball Court. I don’t know if you’ve been following the great Pickleball Struggle, but evidently zealous Pickleballers are at war with a nation of Manhattan parents over coveted and rarefied playground space. The Picklejocks want it for Pickleball, the parents want it for their kids. Several public spaces have actively banned Pickleball, as a result, and the Picklejocks are up in arms. Personally speaking, my kids are out of the playground stage, so I don’t really have a horse in this race, but I’m siding with the parents on this one. The people I’ve met who are into Pickleball seem a bit too precious and, well, douchey about it, and it’s called fucking “Pickleball,” which is stupid and embarrassing, as far as I’m concerned, so they can fuck right off.

In any case, this development triggered a bunch of recollections.

For a start, when I was growing up, when it came to ice-skating, we didn’t really go to Wollman Rink, but rather Lasker Rink on the upper end of the Park. I’m not sure why, though. Maybe it was cheaper? In any case, it was demolished in 2021, so don’t go looking for it.

That all said, one of my very earliest memories of being out and about with my family (quite possibly with my father, although it’s all very fuzzy, this many years later) is of being in Central Park as a very small child and going to Wollman Rink where, from the upper deck, we watched what appeared to be the filming of a television commercial — one that involved several anthropomorphic, cone-shaped chocolates frolicking around haphazardly on the ice. I have no idea why we were there — were we just passing through? — but we stopped and watched this bizarre display. The image of those poor people dressed up like giant chocolates and bumping into each other remains vivid in my memory. It sounds very silly, yes, but remember this for later in the post.

Beyond its facility as an ice-skating rink, right in the magisterial shadow of what it now referred to as Billionaire’s Row, Wollman Rink also played host to the Schaefer Music Festival from 1967 to about 1976. This series had a dizzying array of acts over the course of its run, not least by big time rock luminaries like The Who, Jethro Tull, The Kinks, The Doors, Traffic, Blue Oyster Cult, Led Zeppelin and, as I wrote about way back here, King Crimson (to name a very small few). For whatever reason, Schaefer Beer pulled out in 1976, and the cause was taken up by Dr. Pepper, who, after a year or two of hosting middle-of-the-road stuff, started staging a more forward-thinking roster of bands including some of my favorites like Blondie, Joe Jackson, The Tubes, The Ramones, Talking Heads, The B-52s, The Cars, The Pretenders and DEVO.

I’m not sure why that all stopped, but it did. The concert series decamped Central Park for Pier 84. I caught a few shows there, but I’m sad to say I never saw any of the Wollman Rink shows.

The reasons for its closure, however, probably had something to do with — according to Wikipedia — the concrete beneath Wollman Rink buckling in 1980. This prompted an expensive and protracted period of renovation that found Trump stepping in with various promises, but evidently not before most of the actual work was already done, as I understand it, but — naturally — taking all the credit for it. Regardless of his contributions to the restoration of Wollman Rink, Trump’s ties to both Wollman and Lasker Rink were severed by Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2021. So fuck you, Donald.

So, now….after all that, it’s gong to be a big Pickleball court. Again, I don’t really care, but hey …. if you’re a Pickleballer, get excited.

In any case, while writing all of this, I started searching for any verification of my distant memory of that commercial…..

…and found this….

Now, I have no way of actually knowing if this was from the same shoot my very young eyes witnessed, nor is there a wider shot of what could (or could not) be Wollman Rink, but sure enough…. here are those dancing, anthropomorphic chocolates or, more specifically, Rolos, as it turns out.

The one thing that makes me think this is the same one is at 00:18, when they suddenly cut to a beaming child brandishing a roll of Rolos … otherwise inexplicably depicted wearing a wool hat and scarf for winter weather … precisely the garb you’d wear to Wollman Rink.

Obviously, the dancing Rolos footage could very well have been captured on a soundstage, but … why would I remember it, then?

Pic of the Day

My son made this on Photoshop. A dad could not be prouder. 

And Zoso It Goes

Yesterday, a young colleague of mine came to the office wearing a Led Zeppellin t-shirt, despite the fact that he’s – by his own admission – never voluntarily listened to Led Zeppelin in his (comparatively very brief) life. His listening habits are generally more inclined towards contemporary pop ala Taylor Swift, Doja Cat, Ariana Grande, Maren Morris and their vile ilk. His reasons for wearing the garment in question had more to do with (a) it allegedly being the “most comfortable” t-shirt he owns and (b) he knew it would piss me off. I can’t speak to (a), but (b) was certainly true.

In response, I literally wrote a ten-paragraph (before I stopped) screed about it, invoking an episode from 18 years prior wherein a former (and also significantly younger) colleague of mine at MTV News Online failed to recognize the name “John Bonham,” despite being -– and I’m not making this up -– our allegedly hyper-informed, go-to specialist for all things heavy metal.

An urgent bundle of assets I’d been waiting for all day arrived before I could finish my epic poem, and in re-reading it this morning, I felt like the moment had passed, so I shan’t be posting it here.

In its place, though, here are my top ten favorite Zep songs. Hurrumph! 

1. “When the Levee Breaks”
2. “In the Light”
3. “Kashmir”
4. “In the Evening”
5. “The Battle of Evermore”
6. “Communication Breakdown”
7. “The Song Remains the Same”
8. “Over the Hills & Far Away”
9. “How Many More Times”
10. “The Ocean”