Flaming Pablum

Damaged Hours: Back to Mohawk Night at Club Berlin

Mention the words “New York Hardcore,” and certain band names are inevitably going to be invoked –- notably classic ensembles like Agnostic Front, Cro-Mags, Murphy’s Law, Kraut, Antidote, Heart Attack, Cause For Alarm, Warzone, Madball, Sick of It All and several others. But, since its gradual gestation from about 1981 (around the time when Bad Brains expatriated to NYC from Washington D.C.), there have been countless bands born under the NYHC banner, from The Undead, Even Worse, False Prophets, The Stimulators, Virus, The Mad and the fledgling Beastie Boys through Gorilla Biscuits, Judge, Youth of Today, Biohazard, Leeway, and about nineteen-dozen other crews from all over the five boroughs. To try to encapsulate, quantify or even simply know all the pertinent outfits that are tethered to the scene in one form another is a fool’s errand – although my excellent comrade Drew Stone has done one helluva job in exhaustively doing just that.

When it comes to keeping score of all things NYHC, I may talk a good game, but I’m ultimately something of a dilettante. While I was furiously in thrall to certain key bands (I have always been a bug-eyed zealot for KRAUT), and went to as many shows as I could, back in the day, I would never call myself an authority so much as a loyal, reverent enthusiast. Not for nothing, but classic New York City hardcore also came burdened with a bit of an aura of menace. Whether warranted or not, the tightly knit scene didn’t always exude a warm welcome for the uninitiated. Being a Upper East Side kid with a pipe-cleaner physique, at the time, didn’t exactly put me in good fettle to withstand a frenetic Sunday matinee moshpit or a skinhead “wall-of-death” across the Ritz ballroom floor, but I did my best.

All this is to say that while I’ve always counted myself a fan and supporter of all things NYHC, I don’t pretend to even begin to know every solitary aspect of the scene and its myriad proponents, which is precisely why I couldn’t speak with any certainty about the speculation below until I go verification. Here goes….

Regular readers (if they actually exist) might recall several mentions here of a guy named Fran Powers. Tragically no longer with us, Fran was a member of quite a few New York City bands, over the years, but was an active participant of the NYHC scene as a member of a band called Ultra Violence, although his main outfit was a genre-straddling combo called Modern Clix. If that latter name rings more of a bell, that’s because, in the past few years, the revelation of the origin and geographic location of a bit of cryptic graffiti that ended up as the title to a pivotal album by Argentine rockstar Charly Garcia (he obliviously named his album after Fran’s band, after having his picture taken under a striking tableaux of graffiti tags on Cortlandt Alley in TriBeCa) came to light, and I, somewhat unwittingly, played a role in determining the exact location. Initially unbeknownst to Fran, that album went onto become comparable to the Abbey Road of Latin American rock. It’s a long, confusing story, but click here for a bit more detail, should you care.

But, anyway, before all that stuff bubbled to the surface, I’d met Fran at a party in SoHo, about ten years ago, and we became friends. Some short time after that, I was at home watching my all-time favorite film, Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” from 1985, and was amazed to discover that my then-new-friend Fran had a major cameo appearance in the movie. I reached out to him to see if he’d be game to discuss the experience for a post here on this blog, and he did just that, which you can read here.

Cut to 2024….

Given my interests and predilections, Facebook frequently fills my feed with stuff it thinks I’ll be engaged by. Right they were, this morning, when they posted an entry on a public group named simply “Hard Core.” The entry was a photograph of a period-specific band from New York City, and snapped by the late photographer Bri Hurley, who published one of the earliest documentations of the New York Hardcore community in her book "Making a Scene." Here’s that photo now.

For those who do not recognize this band, this is a combo called Damage. While I’d heard their name and am familiar with some granular minutia about their membership (more about that in a second), I must confess that they were simply not “one of my bands,” so to speak. In my days as a self-styled hardcore kid, I latched onto several particular bands, but for whatever reason, these guys just weren’t one of them, and I missed the boat. To be fair, they were only around for about five years. They released one studio album, entitled Sins of Our Fathers and, later, a live recording captured at CBGB before they split.

The only things I really knew about Damage were that it was the band that bassist Mike Kirkland played in before forming Prong (another favorite of mine) with former SWANS drummer Ted Parsons and erstwhile CBGB soundman Tommy Victor. Another notable bit of trivia is that drummer Patrick Blank –- formerly of the original line-up of the Undead with former Misfits guitarist Bobby Steele and future Cop Shoot Cop bassist Jack Natz -- played in their ranks for a short period of time.

Regardless, I’d never seen a photograph of the Damage guys until this morning. Take another look at the picture. Future Prong bassist Kirkland is the gent sitting in the center, holding a beer. I believe Pat Blank is sitting in front with the shades on. As a curious aside, the blonde dude in the upper right-hand corner is wearing the same Discharge t-shirt design sported by Kirk Hammett on the back cover of Metallica’s Ride the Lightning that I recently spoke about on this post.

But the guy that really jumped out at me was the mohican fella on the bottom left. I felt like I immediately recognized him, and then it hit me, and it took me right back to the Club Berlin scene in “After Hours.”

Let’s go back there now, shall we?

Upon reviewing, I went back to the Hard Core page and postulated my theory that, since Fran Powers of Ultra Violence and Modern Clix, Bobby Steele of the Undead and the notorious John “Gringo” Spacely all made quick cameos, could the “hey mon!” punk who enters Club Berlin before Paul in “After Hours” be Damage frontman Ted Warner (at specifically 00:58 in the clip above)?

Much to my great surprise, Warner, who, in later life, went onto study at Pratt Institute and is now evidently a software engineer at Bloomberg (and no longer sports a mohawk) said “yes, that’s me!”

And THERE YOU HAVE IT!

Here’s a bit of Damage now. Crank it up and hoist one for Ted!!

Incidentally, while Club Berlin, which Kiki, in the film, says was on West Broadway at Grand Street, did indeed exist, the exterior used in "After Hours" is not that actual venue. I wrote about that actual spot back here. These days, it's all under scaffolding awaiting a new iteration of who knows what?

For a truly exhaustive rumination on all things "After Hours," click here. 

Neil Young in Washington Square Park

Captured just a few yards away from the location of his album cover for After the Gold Rush, presumably at some point in the early 1970s.

More recently, that particular spot looked like this...

 

A Wide Open Space

One for the Canegie Hill kids…

Someone posted the photograph above on the Facebook group, Manhattan Before 1990, a little while back, and it really put the hook in me. Taken by Frank Fournier, who allegedly says it was captured on Madison Avenuat at 93rd Street in 1977, the picture has haunted me ever since.

For a start, it is, of course, a stunning photograph. But its composition is not what I quibble with.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, many times, while I largely concern myself with downtown doings here, I was originally born on the Upper East Side, however unfashionably square that is, and lived, for a spell, right on East 93rd Street. Moreover, I had several friends who also lived along the very strip this image was supposedly captured (notably Shawn, Pogo, Spike and Peter, as mentioned, respectively, here, here, here and here). I would, have been about ten years old when the photo was snapped and otherwise preoccupied with all things KISS and “Star Wars.”

That said, while I do remember a vacant lot just steps to the north of East 93rd on Madison, it was in no way this vast. The lot I remember wasn’t even half this size, although who knows what sort of lens Fournier was using, much less what his vantage point was? Was he standing on Madison, shooting to the east, or was he in the actual lot and shooting north or south? Either way, I just have no recollection of a big, open space like this that would synch up with any patch on Madison Avenue between, say, East 91st and East 96th.

Today there's a big high-rise halfway down the block (between 93rd and 94 on Madison, on the eastern side of the avenue) that could conceivably fill a space this massive, but I don't believe there is a Park Avenue-facing building behind it that would match up with what's in the photograph.

Of course, I’ve been wrong before.

Who remembers?

This is The Hand ... The Hand That Takes

In early 2001, I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a music message-board community called ILX. Someone thereupon had expressed an opinion about a certain band that – shock, horror – ran pointedly contrary to my own, and I zealously jumped into the fray to offer my equally pointed dissent. In short order, however, I found lots of similarly inclined souls with lots of interesting things to say, and I duly stuck around. Here in 2024, ILX is surprisingly still around, although I stopped regularly contributing quite some time ago. That said, many of the individuals I first encountered and befriended on ILX are now my friends on various social media platforms and even in “real life.”

In any case, one of these individuals invoked a Spotify playlist, early this week on Facebook, and it got me thinking about the subject in greater detail. Basically, my friend Mike observed that the platform’s algorithms, in the assembly of a playlist dubbed their “Anti-Anxiety Mix,” made some laughable choices, specifically the inclusion of Laurie Anderson’s haunting, signature single from 1981, “O Superman.” Calling it “one of the most portentous songs” he’d ever heard, Mike wondered aloud how a song with the recurring refrain of “Here Come the Planes…” could ever be considered anything other than the quintessence of anxiety writ large. Indeed, with cryptic lyrics like “Well, You don’t know me, but I know You” and, of course, “This is the Hand …the Hand That Takes,” the deceptively gentle sprawl of “O Superman,” to my ears, doesn’t exactly equate with any peaceful, easy feeling so much as a languid infusion of quietly encroaching dread.

Accounts have differed, from time to time, but Anderson herself has alluded that the song was inspired by Operation Eagle Claw, the U.S. Army’s failed 1980 mission to rescue 52 members of the American Embassy’s staff who were being held hostage in Iran. The song, however, remains vague enough for listeners to project their own impressions and associations. During an interview for a documentary about iconic British disc jockey John Peel (who almost single-handedly made Anderson a household name by first playing the unthinkably bold single when no one else would touch it), Anderson described “O Superman” as both “kind of a national anthem” and also a “kind of weird, warped lullaby.”

Like so many other pivotal records, “O Superman” first revealed itself to me by way of the adventurous tastes of a friend of mine. On a snowy day in late 1981, my friend Jeremy and I repaired to the Crazy Eddie’s on East 57th street (above), just steps from Third Avenue. As expressed on other posts, prior to my discovery of the multitude of independent record shops in Greenwich Village, SoHo and the East Village (most of them long gone, here in 2024) and prior to the arrival of Tower Records (which wouldn’t arrive in NYC until 1983), myself and my fellow Upper East Side kids regularly procured our music at places like Crazy Eddie’s, Disc-O-Mat and King Karol. To be fair, there was one indie record shop near Jeremy’s place on about 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue called Revolution Records (long gone …there’s a pizza parlor in its place today), but for the most part, we made do with the aforementioned chains. This Crazy Eddie’s, meanwhile, had an enviable collection of exotic British imports.

In any case, while I’d been slowly immersing myself in all things Punk Rock (as detailed in this recent post), I still harbored a stubborn hankering for more conventional fare, and I’d set my sights on picking up Moving Pictures, the then-latest album by the brazenly not-at-all punky trio, Rush. My friend Jeremy -– who I’d met the previous summer being astonishingly irresponsible on the rifle range of our sleep-away camp, Great Oaks -– usually opted for stuff from further afield, selecting the debut LP by the Tom Tom Club (featuring the at-the-time ubiquitous “Genius of Love,” later ruined by a tenacious association with Mariah Carey) and this freaky looking 12” single by some lady called Laurie Anderson.

Back at Jeremy’s mom’s palatial apartment on 63rd and Park, I sidled up to their ridiculously expensive sound system and sloppily dropped the needle on “Tom Sawyer” by Rush, doubtlessly scaring their well-heeled neighbors with that whalloping opening note and assumed a rote routine of clench-jawed, air-guitar poses. But the noodling, rock-virtuoso heroics of Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart left my friend Jeremy entirely unimpressed, and the long-suffering, pricey stylus was shortly relieved from that weighty task. Since I’d already asserted my fatigue of hearing the inescapable “Genius of Love,” Jeremy cued up his mysterious “O Superman” purchase and the energy in the room immediately changed.

In case you’re unfamiliar, here it is now ...

Like so many others, I was mesmerized. When Laurie released the full album, Big Science, a year later, I picked that up, and have pretty much been a fan ever since. But while Anderson has gone onto release several albums and ambitious multi-media projects (and, at some point during the proceedings, married Lou Reed), “O Superman” continues to be her most well-known work and something of a timeless classic.

During my college years, I was a disc jockey at my school's radio station – WDUB, 91.1 FM in Granville – and frequently spun “O Superman” during my late-night shift. Beyond its hushed, chilling brilliance, it was a great track for a disc jockey to cue up when you had to go to the bathroom. I remember doing just that, one very late evening, and ducking out of the station (which, at the time, was housed on the ground floor in the rear of a building full of classrooms, directly beneath the sociology/anthropology department) and quickly jogged towards to the men’s room. As Laurie’s pulsed sequence of “ha … ha… ha…”’s echoed creepily down the long, empty corridors of the building, I heard the heavy door to the radio station slowly close behind me and the sound its lock clicking into place. I scrambled to the security phone down the hall to fetch the nearest guard on duty to let me back in. Amazingly, he made it, unlocked the door and I sprinted back in just before the song’s eight minutes and 21 seconds had elapsed. I don’t believe I ever made it back to the men’s room, that night.

Similarly, “O Superman” was a go-to track late into the evenings during my tenure at the TIME Magazine news desk. From about 1996 until the end of 2005, I used to work as a news-desk editor for two overnight shifts a week, and in the dead of night, when broken news didn’t need attending to, I’d frequently cue up music to hasten the hours and fill up the otherwise oppressive silence (beyond the three, muted television screens showing CNN, MSNBC and FOX News). Prone to freaking myself out, I’d often dial up vaguely disquieting tracks like “Hamburger Lady” by Throbbing Gristle, selections from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II and “O Superman,” again marveling at the steady, deliberate undercurrent of unease buried in that sound as it echoed down the empty hallways of the TIME offices.

Inspired by all this, I strolled home from work, last night, from the bottom of TriBeCa along the Hudson River with “O Superman” – both the original studio version and the live version from Live in New York, recorded just about a week after the events of September 11, 2001 – in my ears, unintentionally replicating the back cover photograph of Nonesuch Records’ 2008 re-release of Big Science, which found Laurie walking north along that same strip, away from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. As mentioned above, given some of the song’s ominous lyrics, many have projected a disquieting prescience to “O Superman” with regards to 9/11, an interpretation that was probably not lost on Anderson during that fragile, strange 2001 live recording.

More recently, I just learned, “O Superman” has enjoyed another, odd uptick in popularity and exposure, that via the unlikely realm of TikTok. It seems someone featured a snippet of the track in a video to convey some semblance of implied poignance to a coincidence, and it suddenly become something of a trend on the platform. Given that I can’t speak to TikTok in any meaningful capacity, I’d encourage you to watch the below video if you’re at all curious about that.

At the very least, it’s encouraging people to seek out this amazing music, and that can’t be bad.

Side notes:

1. Another odd inclusion on Spotify's "Anti-Anxiety Mix" is Pink Floyd's "Goodbye Blue Sky," basically a song about the psychological rigors of living in England during the Blitz. 

    2. Beyond “O Superman,” I would have to say that my very favorite Laurie Anderson album is The Ugly One with The Jewels. It's ostensibly a spoken word record, although there is a lot of ambient music woven throughout, as Laurie spins a series of suitably surreal anecdotes and fragments of larger narratives. It’s strangely hypnotic and tranquil.

Carried Away at Katz's

By this point, Katz’s Delicatessen, on the southwesterly corner of Ludlow at East Houston Street, is both a hallowed Manhattan culinary institution and something of a tourist trap. These days, if you want to partake of the fabled pastrami, you’re likely to have to wait on a line comparable the ones that used to form outside of hipper haunts like The Mudd Club and Studio 54. Blame it on the ever-spreading gentrifaction of the Lower East Side or its fabled cameo in “When Harry Met Sally” (the “I’ll have what she’s having” scene), but Katz’s has been very officially “discovered.”

Personally speaking, I believe I started availing myself to Katz’s fare in the early-to-mid `90s, around the same time I was darkening the doors of nearby concerns like Max Fish (rip), The Bank (rip), The Luna Lounge (rip), The Ludlow Street Café (rip), Barramundi (rip), Motor City (rip) and the Mercury Lounge (amazingly still in operation), although, if truth be told, when it came to late-night, post-beer food, I was usually more inclined to go to Turkish joint Bereket just up the block, which vanished for a long spell, but is now actually back in business.

But Katz’s was still a major landmark. One particular event there, I remember, was a record release party, celebrating the “major label sell out” of my beloved – WAIT FOR IT – Cop Shoot Cop. 

It was a beerily festive and food-heavy occasion, culminating with a “pastrami toss,” which is as ridiculous as it sounds. Later on that evening, they would play at The Grand on East 13th Street.

At the time, the boys in Cop Shoot Cop were readying the release of their major label LP for Interscope Records, that being 1993’s Ask Questions Later, a suitably pulverizing slab of rough-hewn industrial clamor that even fleetingly bothered the charts via the inclusion of slightly less-listener-hostile selections than their previous fare such as “Ten Dollar Bill” and “Room 429.”

Regular readers might remember when I sought out the young “cover star” of that album, that being the (at the time) mysterious Crosby. Crosby was the screaming child on both the front cover of the album and the star of the video for “Room 429,” which was directed by Cinema of Transgression mainstay, Richard Kern.

By the late 2010’s, however, shaggy young, feral Crosby had grown into an ambitious young, street-savy artist, selling a series of truly distinctive timepieces. Again, you can read more about that here.

Here in 2024, meanwhile, Cop Shoot Cop is long gone, having acrimoniously split circa 1995 whilst half-heartedly recording what would have been their third album for Interscope (which was later re-arranged and repurposed as the Red Expendables album). If I’m not mistaken, the Ask Questions Later album was later re-released, this time exclusively on colored vinyl, in 2014 by Cleopatra Records. This record and the band’s final 1994 release … titled Release … remain probably the easiest two records by the band to still put your hand to. But while C$C is a memory, both Katz’s Delicatessen and young Crosby are both still thriving.

In fact, Crosby just posted this video below on his Instagram page, finding him rapping and gesticulating accordingly right in front of Katz’s. While it’s musically really not my usual cup of tea (yeah, but what do I know? I'm old and in the way), hats off to the enterprising lad for continuing to pursue his dreams.

...and, just for kicks, here he was as an angry little, stick-wielding, corpse-dragging tot:

Please Stand By

As alluded in some previous recent posts, there's a bit of flux going on at this end, so please excuse the delay in regular service here ... if you've even noticed a lull.

When life calms down a little bit, and the ...er... fish stops happening, I'll be back.

Your patience and understanding are always appreciated. 

Thanks. 

Out of Hand at Mulberry & Grand

I don’t know if it’s the same way if you’re a native of Bozeman, Montana or a native of St. Louis, Missouri, but if you’re a native of New York, New York, precious few things are likely to irk you more than misinformation about the local lay of the land. This certainly holds true for me. Couple that with an inclination to be deeply, insufferably pedantic, and you get posts like this one.

Yesterday, NY1 – a local media institution that, given its core mission, really ought to know better, reported a story about a partial wall-collapse in downtown Manhattan. Their headline for this story, both online and during the evening broadcast, was …

Partial Wall Collapse in SoHo Impacts Traffic, Local Businesses

That’s all well and good, but scratch the surface, and the reporting revealed that the wall-collapse in question occurred on a corner of the intersection of Mulberry and Grand Streets.

If you’re employed at NY1, a cable news channel founded by Time Warner Cable in 1992, exclusively dedicated to 24-hour coverage of any and all doings in the five boroughs of New York City, YOU SHOULD FUCKING KNOW that the intersection of Mulberry and Grand – while, yes, technically south of Houston Street – is NOT IN FUCKING SOHO.

Mulberry Street is basically the spinal cord of Little Italy, and that cross-section of streets is practically its very heart. It’s not even in the recently designated “Nolita” (North of Little Italy), it’s right smack in the center of Little Italy, a neighborhood that has been called such since the late 19th century.

Now, conceivably, some of the movers and shakers at NY1 might consider “Little Italy” to be an increasingly anachronistic term, given both the steady advance of gentrification and the gradual encroachment of Chinatown to its south, but that does not at all alter the fact that the particular byway in question is inescapably festooned with the visual and culinary trappings of its long heritage. You would have to be significantly impaired to not glean that the street in question is the quintessence of Little Italy.

It's ultimately a totally trivial point, but details matter.

Shame on you, NY1.

"BACK TO THE FRONT!"

Back in April of last year, Metallica released their eleventh studio album, 72 Seasons. Not only did I not buy it (or even stream it), but I have no recollection of ever even hearing the first single (the ridiculously titled “Lux Æterna”). If I’m being honest, I cannot say I’ve given a great deal of thought about Metallica since the release of… gosh, I don’t know … maybe 1997’s Reload. I think I just concluded, at some point, that I’d amassed all the Metallica records that I’d ever need. In retrospect, I have no regrets about that, as what material of theirs they released in the wake of Reload that I did hear failed to really impress me.

Suffice to say, this was not always the case. As I’ve laboriously alluded to several times on this blog over the years (most floridly here, I guess), I bought Ride the Lightning, the band’s second album, as a high school senior in 1984 based solely on the fact that on the back cover, guitarist Kirk Hammett was depicted sporting a Discharge t-shirt. I had not heard a single note off of it. But I figured that if these guys liked the bands on their t-shirts like Discharge, GBH and the Misfits (all big faves of mine), they must be on to something. Happily, I wasn’t wrong.

Pairing the adrenalized sprint of the hardcore punk bands extolled on their t-shirts with the signature heft of proper heavy metal (considerably weightier than most of the NWOBHM … look it up … bands of the time), Metallica – during that era – was this legitimately groundbreaking terror squad of iconoclasts, giddily upending trendy convention in pursuit of their finely distilled amalgam that was credibly re-defining the genre (alongside bands like Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth, but also droves of other, lesser-celebrated outfits, to say nothing of forebears like Motorhead and Venom). Metallica’s particular variant of the form, however, was especially realized and arguably the most impactful, compared to all their contemporaries (I’m sure Slayer fans will beg to vociferously differ). It’s really no accident that they rose to prominence faster than many of their peers.

Even their big breakout album in 1991 – the eponymous, Spinal Tap-alluding “Black Album” – was still excellent, even if it largely eschewed the roaring locomotive pace of their previous work. It suddenly made them household names, and there was simply no going back.

After that, however, to my mind, they got a bit lost. While many were shocked by their “new direction” with 1996’s Load (please, people… haircuts don’t matter), I was encouraged by their impetus to branch out, and I still like quite a few songs on that record. By Reload a year later, though, it seemed like everything that had initially drawn me to the band had been largely jettisoned. They were also reaching a level of fame and media saturation that continued to irrevocably housebreak their earlier mystique. In a nutshell, they were becoming as pop-culturally ubiquitous and gimmick-friendly as, say, U2. This was never what I needed from them. As such, I stopped dutifully picking up their albums (in much the same way I’d basically abandoned U2, after years of similarly following them).

Here in 2024, Metallica is still a going concern (as, for that matter, is U2), but the band seems as far removed from the cutting edge as can be imagined. Not only are they basically a lumbering dinosaur, but “rock itself” – in the minds of those who give a fuck about the zeitgeist – has been relegated to the back burner. Despite their arguable irrelevance, they’ll allegedly be playing around here in August of 2024, but I already saw them in 1988, 1992 and 1997. I wish them well, but it’s highly unlikely that I’ll be attending.

So, why am I bothering to discuss them here and now?

Well, as alluded in the post from the other day, 2024 is revealing itself to be one mean son of a bitch. My mother and her boyfriend of forty-someodd years, Jimbo, were about to begin their yearly migration down to a rented cottage in Florida. Jim has COPD, y’see, which makes breathing especially difficult in the cold weather … as if being 89 wasn't difficult enough, already. They normally spend most of their time out at my mom’s house in Quogue (on Long Island). They were both ready to make the trip – first from Quogue to New York, where Jimbo has a small apartment, and then down to Florida – when Jim suddenly contracted bacterial pneumonia. When he seemed well enough to travel, they made the trip into the city. Somehow, along the way, both my mother and already-sickly Jimbo contracted COVID. So, all of sudden, both of them are incredibly sick and sequestered in Jim’s tiny one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. As such, I was suddenly recruited to aid and abet their survival and hopeful recovery, a mission which found me literally darting around Manhattan to secure them groceries, medical supplies, and prescriptions to – ideally -- safely deliver them through this fraught sickly period. I’ve been doing so pretty much since last Friday afternoon.

For a reason I can no longer recall, during one particularly testy sortie wherein I was trying to prize a pair of compact humidifiers for them, I dialed up the entirety of Master of Puppets -- inarguably Metallica’s finest hour – to score my attack, the breakneck stride of songs like “Battery,” “Damage Inc,” the sprawling title track and the furious thrash of the track below providing the frenetic soundtrack to my ducking and weaving through the sluggish human cattle of the Upper West Side whilst executing my provision-procuring duties. I found the bleakly bracing “Disposable Heroes” to be an especially galvanizing force to propel me through the stressful tasks of the day. From there, I moved onto a live rendition of “Creeping Death” from Live Shit: Binge & Purge which may have pushed me a little over the edge, being that I couldn’t stop myself from zealously chanting, through gritted teeth, DIE… DIE… DIE… DIE.., much to my fellow pedestrians’ pronounced alarm, during that morbid anthem’s stomping middle-eight.

If you need some sonic inspiration during your next stressy chore, you could always do worse than classic Metallica. Thank me later.

CODA: Mom and Jimbo aren't out of the woods just yet (and not yet in Florida), but are, so far, feeling a little bit better. 

 

2 Bands, 28 Years

1996: Having established myself as a regular customer (as recently discussed here) at Route 66 Records in Greenwich Village (long gone), I reveal myself to be something of an easy mark to excitable proprietor Andy, who immediately starts evangelizing the just-released singles by a British indie band called Kula Shaker. I take the bait and end up buying the CD singles for both “Tattva” and the embarrassingly titled “Hey Dude,” both featuring brazenly retrophillic allusions to the hippy-dippy psychedelic era and the guitar heroics of lead singer/songwriter Crispian Mills (son of actress Hayley Mills) who does effectively channel the soaring tones of Dave Gilmour on “Tattva.” When their debut long-player K (that’s it … just K) comes our soon after, I snap that up, as well, and even see them play live when they swing into Irving Plaza some months later. After that, however, my enthusiasm wanes with later, comparatively tepid releases and I abandon ship, somewhat perplexed by my earlier affinity for their music.

2010: Despite regular testimonials to their greatness by my at-the-time colleague, Drew, I remain resolute in not giving the band Pissed Jeans any consideration, prompted by their stupid and frankly disgusting name. I figure that if this band can’t come up with a better name than Pissed Jeans, they simply do not deserve my time and attention. Undaunted, Drew demands that I see them perform when they pull into town to play at the tiny firetrap of a club on Ludlow Street, Cake Shop (long gone). I reluctantly agree, and we pack into the downstairs performance space with about a hundred sweaty hipster kids (as described here). In exceptionally short order, Pissed Jeans reveal themselves to be a fittingly slovenly mess of a band, somewhere between Black Flag and the Jesus Lizard, and their name IMMEDIATELY makes perfect, immaculate sense. Their music and their show are repulsively glorious, and I become an immediate fan, vowing never to doubt Drew again. I then proceed to search out Pissed Jeans’ latest album and then subsequent releases, and harbor zero regrets.

2024: In the first week of January, both Kula Shaker and Pissed Jeans release brand new singles (see below). The new Kula Shaker single, with only a quick cursory play, suggests that the band have not progressed or even budged one single inch forward since their K days. I shall not be snapping this one up with the zeal I once reserved for them.

The new Pissed Jeans single, while strangely in an otherwise unthinkable major key, is still hugely enjoyable.

Experience both for yourself.

2024 is Already a Hydra

Well, 2024 is off to a fierce and ferocious start.

Two elder members of my family are currently dealing with complications from contracting COVID, ... again ... on top of a lengthy laundry list of pre-existing, serious medical problems … but then, ANY medical problem is serious when you’re in your 80s. I’ve been running around town, procuring provisions for them to try to keep both of them alive without compromising my own health and losing my sanity … or what’s left of it … in the process.

I’m also doing battle with the dreaded FAFSA, after the IRS delayed it six months, and trying to chase down necessary documentation for that and then bundling my daughter back off to college this weekend.

As such, please be patient. I'll be back.