Being that you’re probably as bored reading about it as I am talking about (let alone living with it), I’m going to forego yet another update about my stupid broken foot. Instead, here’s some stuff ya might have missed.
I’m dead certain I devoted at least five or six posts to it when it was happening in real time, but when CBGB was finally being disassembled and gutted upon its hotly contested shuttering circa the latter months of 2006, I probably hadn’t set foot in the actual building in several years (I might be mistaken, but I think the final show I ever witnessed at 315 Bowery was either a Kraut reunion show or a secret Firewater gig around 2001). Put simply, while inarguably a New York City institution, CBGB, in its declining years, ceased being a nurturing ground for exciting, new music.
Then, of course, it closed for irritating reasons and suddenly, this revered cultural flashpoint was gone, shortly to have its footprint co-opted by a fatuously bespoke haberdashery, which I’ve covered here ad nauseum.
While I’ve posted countless weepy paeans, pics and video of CBGB when it was still a going concern, my friend Emily posted something on Facebook that provided a refreshingly more granular view. While there are countless photographs of CBGB’s endearingly grotty exterior, its disarmingly intimate stage and its notoriously un-private bathroom, a gent named DJ Jason posted his snaps of the interior of CBGB taken, presumably, at points in either the late `90s or early `00s, and they are refreshingly thorough. That’s one of his above but you can see the rest here. You can almost smell the stale beer.
I was dispatched, quite recently, by the Mrs. with another load of old clothes we’d decided (or, really, she’d decided) that we should part wit. Per usual, I walked over to the Goodwill outlet on the west side of West 8th Street between MacDougal and Sixth Avenue with the intention of dropping it off, only to find the place permanently shuttered.
This particular strip of West 8th has been in pretty rough shape, for a little bit. The squat buildings on the norther end were razed some time ago to accommodate some new development, but that has yet to come to any fruition. South of that, the storefront that formerly played host to concerns like the ill-fated Mainline Records and comparatively storied Disc-O-Rama before that later morphed into some sort of pet-centric business before becoming yet another cannabis dispensary called City Vibes, but that, too, has now closed. The curio/head-shop joint called 8th Street Gifts seems to be hanging by a thread. Goodwill is now gone. Covert restaurant Frevo (it looks like a gallery on the outside, but there’s a secret door) and posh stationery outlet Goods For The Study are holding their own, but the derelict storefronts to their east are attracting a much less salubrious crowd than their businesses would probably prefer.
Just south of there, of course, is an urgent-care facility run by Mount Sinai. Seemingly a million years ago, this space was TLA, a comparatively sprawling and esoteric video store (remember those?). Of course, before all that, it was the site of the fabled 8th Street Playhouse, which stood there from about 1929 until its somewhat seedy demise in 1992. I remember seeing films like “Liquid Sky,” Penelope Spheeris’ “Suburbia” and “Repo Man” for the first time in that theater. Below is a little “before and after” of the Playhouse’s heyday. It’s striking how “distressed” the theatre and the surrounding environs look in the bottom shot.
Next up, I picked up a copy of “Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the `80s Hard Rock Explosion,” a great oral history by Tom Beujour and Richard Beinstock. While it’s no “Please Kill Me,” I devoured it whole (it isn’t exactly Tolstoy) over the course of the holiday weekend and have to say that I enjoyed it thoroughly. Sure, the era of so-called hair metal was inarguably a very stupid time, but I can’t say I was immune to the charms of early records by bands like Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister and a select few others. If you ever spent any time banging your head to truly idiotic anthems like “Fuck Like a Beast,” “Burn In Hell" or “Looks That Kill,” you will eat it right up.
In any case, towards the latter pages of the book – documenting the hotly contested “death by Grunge” days when bands like Warrant, Dokken and Winger were getting the short shrift in the wake of the rise of all things Cobain – a New York City band called Spread Eagle gets invoked as one of the hair metal scene’s late-comers. Now, even as an avowed rockhead and self-appointed knowitall regarding New York City bands of certain stripes, I have absolutely ZERO recollection about Spread Eagle. I mean, while New York City did have a small-but-stubborn hard rock/hair metal scene formed around bands like Circus of Power and the like, I cannot say I ever encountered Spread Eagle, who apparently were based in the East Village. Who knew?
Here they are runnin' from the cops, man!!
I looked'em up and sure enough ... here they were stomping around Avenue C and Tompkins Square Park etc. It's not really my cup o' tea, but see what ya think...
Recent Comments