Flaming Pablum

The Lingering Ghosts of the Murray Street Tinsel Toads

Murray Street, specifically between Church Street and West Broadway, comes with a lot of associations. Its name became fatefully entwined with the events of September 11th, 2001, when it was discovered that battered landing gear from one of the doomed, hijacked planes had fallen into a narrow alley behind 50 Murray Street. Sonic Youth, who were recording a new album at Echo Canyon Studios just across the way at 51 Murray Street, had to understandably abandon their sessions for a while in the wake of that calamitous event. When they were able to return, several weeks later, all of their instruments were covered with a grim patina of dust and debris. They ended up titling the resultant album Murray Street in observance.

Murray Street was also the home to New York Dolls, a holdover strip club from a less salubrious era of Manhattan, unwittingly named after the seminal proto-punk band of the same moniker. Directly across the street from New York Dolls was a large delicatessen called Amish Market, which stretched between Murray Street to Park Place to its south. Legend has it that rapper Cardi B, having recently dropped out of nearby BMCC (Borough of Manhattan Community College), took a job as a cashier at Amish Market. But after coming in late and lipping off to her manager, Cardi B was fired. Distraught, Cardi took her now-former manager’s withering advice and marched across the street to New York Dolls to get a job as a stripper, a vocation for which she earned considerable renown, eventually turning her penchant for performing into a music career. The rest, as they say, is history.

As neighboring TriBeCa started to further gentrify and essentially widen in size (originally, the southern “border” of TriBeCa was arguably considered Chambers Street a couple of blocks to the north of Murray Street), New York Dolls seemed destined be zoned out of existence, given its location in a burgeoning residential neighborhood. Somehow, they managed to hang on, possibly because the club’s owner bought the building in 2016. The club was re-christened FlashDancers Downtown during COVID and is still there here in August of 2024.

Back in late 2016, meanwhile, I started a job just a block or two to the south of Amish Market and, for that matter, New York Dolls. While I never gave any patronage to the latter, I did initially frequent Amish Market to procure my breakfasts, in the mornings. While a very busy and robust operation (I honestly have no recollection if Cardi B was still working there, at the time – I certainly never knowingly saw her, much less any actual Amish folks), I cooled on Amish Market pretty swiftly. The grill from which one might procure, say, an egg & cheese sandwich never operated with any pronounced stealth or efficiency. In time, I abandoned that option in favor of some frankly lackluster oatmeal but ended up giving that up as well after overhearing someone in my office’s elevator saying that they’d gotten food poisoning from Amish Market’s salad bar. From that point forward, I started getting my grub at the presumptuously named Corner Gourmet deli on Murray Street, on the other side of West Broadway. I know.... fascinating, right? 

Not quite as resilient to COVID as its scantily clad neighbors at New York Dolls, Amish Market closed permanently in 2020, and has been gutted and dormant ever since.

Here in 2024, I don’t have a lot of reasons to walk up and down Murray Street unless I’m bound for Benares, a decent option for Indian food at 45 Murray. But there is still something my eyes catch on almost every time I’m crossing Murray at West Broadway ---- the Tinsel Toads.

Either left over from some amphibian-themed function held at Amish Market’s second floor at some indeterminate point or part of some anachronistic promotion of some kind (maybe a special on frogs’ legs?), there are two silhouettes of splayed toads in silver tinsel still affixed to an upper window just off the corner, and I simply cannot wrap my head around why they’re still there, let along what purpose they may have once served.

Walk around the byways of Manhattan here in the years after COVID, and it’s impossible not to notice the sheer volume of still-empty storefronts and for lease signs everywhere. While, as I mentioned, I was not the greatest fan of Amish Market, its departure was inarguably a pronounced loss to the surrounding neighborhood, and I want to believe a new venture will occupy that cavernous space before too long.

Until they do, the tinsel toads of Murray Street will doubtlessly maintain their strange, silent vigil.

And here's Sonic Youth playing a 9/11 benefit in October 2001. Thurston Moore prefaces the performance with his thoughts about what was happening for them and for NYC writ large, at the time. Worth a listen...

Yule Be Sorry: C$C at CBGB's in December 1993

Just a great set by Cop Shoot Cop at CBGB, captured on that intimate stage right after Christmas 1993. I was actually at this show. I believe I shouted something just prior to "Shine On, Elizabeth." 

“New York City is Always Busy”: Forty Minutes in 1970’s NYC

Yes, it’s another one of these travelogue films about vintage NYC.

Here’s forty minutes of period-specific footage of Manhattan from the early-to-mid 1970’s. This thing that stuck out to me, in this clip, is the portion between 7:52 and about 10:44, wherein the sound suddenly comes on, and you see a pack of kids playing on East 90th Street between Park Avenue and Lexington, which – oddly enough – was the block my parents lived on when I was born.

From there, one of the youngsters starts narrating specifics about the city, while showing footage of the tykes playing in around around the Carnegie Hill area of the Upper East Side, where I spent my formative years.

Elsewhere, it's the usual hodgepodge of stock footage of predictable locales like Central Park, Times Square, Washington Square Park, Sixth Avenue, etc., but still a compelling trip back in time. Why it says "2002" on the upper left corner eludes me. 

SANE on the Train

I found a fascinating companion piece to Henry Chalfant’s “Style Wars” that profiles two notorious gents from Washington Heights. It’s a deep and often confusing dive, but it’s quite well done. Unfortunately, it's not embeddable, but you can see it here. 

Also -- it's in three parts, but each one unspools a compelling saga. It's really great stuff.

Exhuming "Police on My Back"

There are fewer things more ponderously laborious than a self-styled music nerd haughtily asserting the time he or she’d spent lauding a band before they were popular, but here I go doing it again.

I was fortunate enough to be clued into The Clash from very early on, thanks to an overly cited crate of records (which I only recently re-invoked here) from my then-London-based father in the summer of 1977 (arguably the only really decent thing he ever did for us, to my mind). When my older sister and I pulled out The Clash’s debut LP (British edition, no less) from that crate and stared at the stark depiction of Messrs. Simonon, Strummer and Jones – all drainpipe trousers, white socks, spikey hair and armbands -- standing like a trio of futuristic muggers in a narrow London alley – I snapped it right up. It sounds ridiculous now, but that first spin of “Janie Jones” was a genuine revelation. I mean, next to the music of the day (the big-charting records of that summer were by The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and a live album by fuckin’ Barry Manilow), it sounded positively feral, thinly rehearsed, rudimentary, hastily produced and, well, wrong. I remember my mother walking into the living room, exclaiming “What’s wrong with them?”

I loved it.

I adored that first LP, with “Complete Control,” “White Riot” and “I’m So Bored with the USA” being my go-to tracks. By the time their magnum opus, the undeniable London Calling, arrived two years later (I didn’t actually pick up their second record, Give’em Enough Rope until way after the fact, I feel remiss to concede), I almost started to write them off as over. I remember playing the “hidden track” (technically a last-minute addition too late to be amended on the cover art) “Train in Vain,” one afternoon, and my mother – the same woman who’d inferred the band’s collective cognitive impairment two short years earlier – came dancing into my room, giddily expressing, “now THIS I like!!!” That might as well have been the kiss of death.

Then I heard “Police on My Back.”

Not even a proper single off 1980’s Sandinista!, the sprawling triple-LP that spawned it, “Police on My Back” packed everything I loved about the band into one, single, incendiary song. It was all there … relentlessly clanging guitars, an urgent riff, a vague renunciation of the local constabulary, a rousing chorus … it was all fucking perfect. Of course, I’d later learn that much as with comparable Clash anthems like “I Fought the Law,” “Police & Thieves,” and “Armagiddeon Time,” they didn’t even write it. The track was originally penned as a pop single by The Equals, who counted future “Electric Avenue” singer, Eddie Grant, in its ranks.

But in the Clash’s hands, “Police on My Back” is positively set on fire. It’s probably considered heresy to suggest as much, but not only is “Police on My Back” my favorite song by The Clash, it’s also a song I’d cite as a quintessential Punk Rock song. Not everyone will agree, but whatever … start your own blog.

Upon the advent of the era of ringtones, I raged against them (you can read this bit of curmudgeonly idiocy here), but when I got my first smartphone, I gave in and, sure enough, made “Police on My Back” my ringtone. Where in that earlier post, I worried that incessant repetition of that ringtone might unwittingly forge a negative association with the song, whenever I hear “Police on My Back” now, I immediately assume my laundry’s done (my ringtone also acts as the alarm sound on my iPhone’s timer). Honestly speaking, “Police on My Back” has been my ringtone for so long that I don’t even know if I still know how to change it.

This all brings me to the video below, which initially came up in a random YouTube search for Other Music, the since-vanished music shop on East 4th Street. This clip features comedian Fred Armisen doing a cover of “Police on My Back” within the confines of the shop back in, good lord, 2011.

Now, yes, Fred Armisen can be both funny and alternately cloying, but I was impressed by this. Like his contemporary Jimmy Fallon, Armisen is always quick to assert his fandom for music, although I’d suggest he does so with considerably more taste and authority than Fallon, who is ultimately just a fawning fanboy. Prior to his career in comedy, Armisen was indeed a musician, playing drums in the Chicago band, Trenchmouth. Armisen was a rock guy first and a funny guy later.

Using loops in a comparable manner of cats like Reggie Watts and Marc Rebillet, here Armisen builds “Police on My Back” up from its isolated ingredients to more or less faithfully replicate the full song, although he does kinda fail with the vocals.

Check it out…

But, seriously, accept no substitute….

The Rise of a Post-Punk POTUS?

I don’t think I first started hearing it until the rise of George W. Bush at the turn of the millennium, but folks seemed to start pervasively exclaiming that they’d like a president that they could “have a beer with.” That never made a great deal of sense to me. Personally speaking, while I happen to love beer practically more than fuckin’ oxygen, I don’t need the leader of the allegedly free world and commander-in-chief to share my affinity for knockin’ back a few pints. I’d honestly rather have them be so strenuously intelligent, responsible, internationally engaged, and duty-bound that the thought of wasting an afternoon with me in a shitty bar or backyard barbecue with a cooler of cold ones would seem abhorrent. I’d be fine with that and wouldn’t take it personally.

I suppose the projected notion of a beer-swiggin’ president makes the prospective holder of that office seem more relatable and “of the people.” It’s ultimately just a populist ploy to humanize them. Otherwise, that individual might come across like just another elitist politician.

While that may fly with one side the of the fence (I’ll let you determine which one), the other side seems to strive to spin their prospective presidents as cool. Witness Bill Clinton’s cringe-worthy saxophone solo on the “Arsenio Hall” show or the regular announcements of Barak Obama’s Spotify playlists, filled with selections of songs that telegraphed an impossibly eclectic degree of cultivated taste. While I was a firm supporter of President Obama for the entirety of his two terms, I personally never gave a rolling rat fuck what music he may (or may not) have been listening to.

Here in 2024, we find ourselves in an unprecedentedly tumultuous pre-election period, and in the wake of an abominable debate performance, an assassination attempt, a bizarre Republican National Convention, a divisive pick for Trump’s Vice President, Biden’s hotly anticipated withdrawal from the race and his Vice President’s ascendance as the party’s presumptive nominee, we find the same shenanigans at play.

While it was already disclosed and heavily covered that Kamala Harris owns and regularly sports at least one pair of black Converse Chuck Taylors (i.e. the inarguably clichéd but still de rigueur choice of footwear of the insouciant rebel – capitalized on by illustrator Gary Taxali in the print above), a photo has also surfaced of Harris as a younger woman at some point in the 1980’s, wearing a black, high-collared coat with a shorter, period-specific quiff. Lots of enterprising folks have pounced on this and re-branded it as, and I’m quoting here, “Young, Butch & Goth.”

Now, given that Vice President Harris is 59 years old, it’s certainly not out of the question that she may have gone through an angsty goth phase, but … again, it doesn’t really matter, in the grand scheme of things.

If the notion that our current Vice President -- and potentially 47th President -- might harbor an affinity for Xmal Deutschland and Joy Division sways your vote her way, I’m totally fine with that. If that makes you feel better about it all, embrace it.

Regardless, just fucking VOTE, please.