Shot in May of 1987, the video below is basically just a home movie as captured by a gentleman named Ted Barnett. He writes:
A walk down Bleecker Street (after a short tour of my apartment)... from: 95 Carmine Street, apt 6R (where Matt Lindland and Ted lived) to: 7-9 Carmine Street (where John Gaines and Ted had lived together 1984-1986)
I had a VHS video camera we had rented for Rick's wedding. I used it to capture a last walk down one of my favorite Greenwich Village streets. I moved away from New York a few months later.
A telling glimpse of a portion of the city that has changed dramatically in the ensuing 38 years, this slow, meandering clip (it’s about an hour and a half) might not be an immediate revelation, but those who remember what downtown Manhattan – and specifically Greenwich Village – was like well before the `90s, before September 11th, before COVID might be compelled.
Topographically, the streets are essentially the same, but … things have changed. Keep your eyes out for myriad, long-lost concerns like Grampa Munster’s old Italian restaurant through B. Dalton Books on 8th Street & Sixth Avenue and many other since-vanished businesses.
But beyond the stores, bars and restaurants, the whole feel of the city is different. The Greenwich Village seen here is vibrant and populated. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, no one is looking at their phones. The streets are lively.
When this was captured, I would have been a fresh-faced 19-year-old, recently sprung from my sophomore year of college and running around this very neighborhood, invariably buying records with money dubiously earned from working as a runner/assistant for a graphic designer.
My old colleague Ralph from my days at TIME/LIFE is now a contributor for The Spirit. Last week, he asked me to shoot my very big mouth off about the re-designed New York City subway map -- rightly predicting I'd have a thing or two pointed things to say. I was, of course, all too happy to oblige.
Happening too quickly to keep up with, but since Saturday, Dave Allen of Gang of Four/Shriekback, Big Al Barile of SS Decontrol and Clem Goddamn Burke of Blondie have all permanently left the building.
Invariably anticipating that it would drive me completely around the bend, my great friend Aleph forwarded me this bit of utter fucking nonsense on Facebook…
"After being tagged by William Faith in one of these top "10 favorite Punk songs ever" tag-people thingies. I'm gonna play, but I'm doing albums instead."
So, Aleph broke the “rules” by doing albums instead of songs. I, meanwhile, completely set fire to the rulebook and posted all my picks at once (sparing unwitting contacts an avalanche of music over the course of a week that they invariably didn't want to see in their feeds), and did way the Hell more than ten, because picking only ten favorite punk songs, for me, is a fool’s errand and a slow boat to madness.
But the part that almost made me part with my already tenuously harnessed sanity was the quandary of who to include and who to exclude. Because the stipulation was “punk” and not “post-punk,” I left out a slew of bands like Gang of Four, Public Image, Joy Division and my beloved Killing Joke. And because the stipulation was “punk” and not “hardcore punk,” I similarly omitted any citation of bands like the Circle Jerks, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Kraut, Bad Brains, etc. And because the stipulation was “punk” and not “proto-punk,” I skipped otherwise crucial names like The Stooges, The MC5, The Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls, The Modern Lovers, Pere Ubu, Dr. Feelgood, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, etc.
I also demurred from adding bands who, while technically lumped in with all things Punk, still could not sit comfortably under that tattered umbrella, … this would include bands like DEVO, Adam & the Antz, The Soft Boys, The Police, The Tubes, XTC, The Tom Robinson Band, etc.
But, honestly, there really isn’t anything more ponderously laborious than listening to a music geek work themselves up into a frothy lather about proper categorization, so let’s just get to it, shall we? My apologies in advance. Find my picks below, and feel free to start a big ugly fight about them! I'm ready for ya.
The videos below have been circulating for some time, for avid Cure heads, but possibly not for the layperson. I only recently discovered this footage, so thought it’d be worth sharing here, but not just because of the coolness of The Cure.
Shot in the summer of 1981 for a Spanish television special, this footage finds the Cure hitting New York City for two nights of their tour for the album Faith (the band having recently jettisoned keyboardist Matthieu Hartley, reducing themselves to a trio). I’m jumping to a conclusion, here, but I’m guessing that Spanish television took an interest in these gigs because of the venue. The Ritz – as a live-music venue for rock acts -- would have only just revealed itself as such about a year earlier, when it changed over from its iteration as Casa Galicia, an organization – according to Wikipedia -- that promoted cultural ties with Spain. While the venue was now operating as a rock club, it was still owned by Casa Galicia (as it still is today). Being that I don’t speak a lick of Spanish, I can’t actually tell you what the presenter in the beginning of the clip is saying, but you can still see the old paint job and some remaining signage from the Casa Galicia era behind him. Let’s go there now…
The live footage of the band, meanwhile, is sharp and stark, finding the band moving further away from their more accessible origins. The material they were promoting here from their third LP, Faith was quite a long way from the comparatively spritely pop of their first record, finding Robert Smith wading deeper into the dark waters of moribund introspection and existential dread. Brimming with ruminations of death, grief and empty religious dogma, tracks like “The Funeral Party,” “The Drowning Man” and “Other Voices” weren’t destined to become student-disco bangers so much as hymns for a future generation of perpetually black-clad lost sheep. While not as cruel, nihilistic and gloom laden as the record that would follow it, Pornography, the whole of Faith is still a grim horse pill of a listening experience. The songs captured here, meanwhile, … despite all my purpose prose for Faith, are both originally from the preceding album, Seventeen Seconds.
I’m sure the presenter, who returns to the screen to interview Robert in some ancillary chamber of The Ritz at about four minutes and ….er…. seventeen seconds (coincidence?) is expounding on comparable points, but again – I don’t speak Spanish, so I can’t say for sure. Unfortunately, Robert’s answers are obscured by a Spanish voice-over, so it’s hard to glean what he’s saying, although he seems to be politely taking exception to being repeatedly referred to as “a New Wave band.” You can’t really blame him for that. Mercifully, the live material resumes after that.
Of course, for those of you who don’t care so much about all that extraneous info, there’s this handy truncation featuring solely the performance footage. You’re welcome.
At the time of this filming in July of 1981, I was in between 8th grade and high school, and invariably hadn’t heard of The Cure, as yet. I would have been more deeply entrenched in my stubborn affinity of heavy metal and immersing myself further into adoration for bands like Devo and the burgeoning underground of Hardcore Punk (as it was then still called). In fact, I wouldn’t set foot in the Ritz until four years after this was shot -- in December of 1985 to see the Circle Jerks, D.O.A. and Redd Kross (as floridly discussed here). By that point, I’d have heard the Cure via their incongruously poppy MTV hits like “Let’s Go to Bed” and “The Walk,” which owed precious fuck-all to the pervasive emotional torpor of the Faith era. But with the release of The Head on The Door (and the crucial compilation Standing on a Beach) in the spring of 1986, I became a devout Cure fan, going on to see them several times, but never in a venue as intimate as the Ritz.
The picture up top, meanwhile, was quite likely snapped during the same day this footage was captured (given that they’re wearing the same duds). They’re pictured standing in the fabled Tunnel of Light at 127 John Street near the South Street Seaport, which I’ve written about too many times here (see list below).
I went down sort of a rabbit hole, recently, trying to locate someone I used to know at Danceteria via social media, and came across this odd gem. As originally spotted on the Danceteria Employees & Customers page by one Dee Cortex, this is Downtown Artists Against AIDS’s cover of Petulia Clark’s “Downtown.” Organized by Steve Saporta of Invasion Records, the D.A.A.A (I guess) featured folks like Kym Rider, Tish & Snooky of the Sic Fucks, Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads, Sara Lee of Gang of Four, Willie DeVille of Mink Deville, Cinema of Transgression director Beth B and some other folks. The clip was edited by Cortex and Paul Rachman.
The video was posted on YouTube in 2007, but I’d be super curious as to what year it was shot. Check it out. Who else can you spot? I recognize Michael Musto in there, at the very least.
In terms of Danceteria – which pops up throughout the clip – I was lucky enough to visit the 21st street iteration (the second of three) a few times before it sadly shuttered in 1986. Suggested reasons why it closed run the gamut. One pervasive and quite credible theory is that, in the wake of the murder of Jennifer Levin in the Summer of 1986, the city cracked down on establishments that took a pervasively permissive stance on serving alcohol to underage patrons, something that had previous been pretty rampant.
The second theory, however, as I fleetingly alluded to here, was that the club had to close in the wake of a freakish incident in which someone fell to their death after the building’s elevator doors opened at the wrong time. I was first told this tragic tale on a Kafka-esque blind date in the mid-`90s, and I always thought it sounded suspiciously apocryphal. But not too long ago, I happened upon this blog entry, uploaded in 2009, recounting in very great, grisly detail, the alleged incident from the surviving victim’s perspective. That individual lived to tell the tale (and, as of 2009, at least, became a club DJ in Berlin), but still no direct correlation as to whether that near-fatal accident had anyting to do with the demise of that iteration of Danceteria.
If you know, write in, do!
Also, if you never had the opportunity to walk around in Danceteria during its tenure on West 21st Street, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth has you covered. As poached from Dangerous Mindson this entry, she took it upon herself to capture the interiors on a video she called "Making the Nature Scene." I don't believe the offering elevator shaft makes an appearance.
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