As a dyed-in-the-wool fan of The Clash since first receiving a copy of their debut LP in a box of records shipped to my sister and I from London in the summer of 1977, I have, of course, discussed the iconic sleeve of their third album, London Calling, here, quite a few times.
But a friend of mine online shared the pic above, today, and it struck me that I don’t think I’d ever seen it until now. This is, of course, Clash bassist Paul Simonon in the moments just after introducing the business end of his bass guitar to the unrelenting stage floor of New York’s Palladium, as famously captured on Pennie Smith’s legendary album cover.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere here, the building that had been the Palladium was razed in 1998, and a large NYU dormitory – churlishly named “Palladium” – now stands in its footprint. Adding insult to injury, there’s a Trader Joe’s in its ground floor.
The spot wherein Paul took his bass to task is basically now the where the produce aisle is.
Just in case…
Courtesy of the No Wave page on Facebook comes this time-capsule-worthy gem. Here's the description from YouTube:
1979, NYC. Filmed on a grant from NYU Film & TV, Mr Lonely featured many Mudd Club personalities, even some famous no-shows such as Lux Interior from The Cramps. Shot by the infamous Robert Herman of Hipstamatic book fame, this video was struck from the original work print that premiered in 1982 at The Rock Lounge in NYC. It has not been shown publicly in over forty years. Please enjoy this beautiful fantasy of life, where time stands still forever.
Cool, right?
If you first caught Life in a Blender performing on a squalid New York City stage at a code-violating firetrap back in the distant mid-`80s and a strangely attired voyager from a then-unthinkable future suddenly materialized to matter-of-factly impart to you that they’d still be around thirtysomething cruel years later, promoting their eleventh studio LP, you’d have invariably chortled into your chipped, slimy mug of overpriced, tepid beer and wandered out into the elements to escape such folly. But the prophecy was true. The soggily storied rock clubs and dive bars that first hosted the band, like CBGB, Tramps and McGovern’s, may all be cannabis dispensaries, dubious foot-rub spas and bubble tea emporiums today, but Life in a Blender have kept on ….er… blendin’.
That aforementioned new album, Bent by The Weather, continues to mine the band’s finely honed sweet spot, pairing songwriter/vocalist Don Rauf’s signature brand of off-kilter lyrical narratives with the accomplished chops of the longest-lasting line-up of the ensemble since their inauspicious inception during the Reagan-era. Flanked by founding drummer Ken Meyer, guitarist Al Houghton, guitarist/cellist Dave Moody, bassist Mark Lerner, violinist Rebecca Weiner and the punchy brass panache of the Colony Collapse horns, Rauf is given free rein to showcase his surreal storytelling skills, buoyed by their considerable melodic horsepower. Whether evocatively painting a portrait of the gambler’s aspiration in “Fountains of Bellagio” or the flush of first, tween-age love on “My Heart Your Sweat Does Feed” or the disarming poignance of “On the Sand,” while Rauf’s tongue remains firmly planted in … ummm … his cheek, his lyrics can be deceptively nuanced, richly conjuring scenarios with an economy of carefully curated descriptors. And while, yes, there’s usually punchline on the way, the depth and the loving composition of these songs cannot be denied.
My son Oliver and I had the pleasure of catching Life in a Blender’s album-release party at Joe’s Pub several weeks back, and were treated to a first live-airing of much of this material, with favorites like “Go-To Man,” “The Answer,” “Soul Deliverer” and “Mobile Wash Unit” liberally sprinkled amidst the set like sugar from a saltshaker.
Lucky for you, it was captured for posterity by the venue:
Here’s another unfair little post that takes an arguably needless potshot at the younger generation for daring to have different perspectives, different life-experiences, different priorities and for not knowing their historical minutia. In the past, I fired similar shots across the bows of YouTuber influencer-types like Brett Conti, Cash Jordan and Sarah Funk, although all three of those characters have thousands upon thousands of subscribers, while I only have a dwindling hallelujah choir of like-minded curmudgeons and a few loyally tenacious trolls, so, honestly, what the fuck do I know?
Invoke the words “East Village” to certain folks – especially ones of a certain age – and you’re bound to conjure a wide spectrum of associations.
Some will cite the Tompkins Square Park riots of 1988 or the cannibalistic exploits of Daniel Rakowitz, who dismembered his girlfriend, cut off her head and purportedly made soup from her brain which he, in turn, fed to the homeless in their encampments around that park.
Others might think of the Gas Station, a former filling station turned a junkies’ shooting gallery turned metallic sculpture park and performance space where GG Allin delivered his final anarchic and poop-slathered performance before overdosing later that evening.
Some might remember vanished bars and clubs like CBGB, Great Gildersleeves, The SideWalk Café, Save The Robots, Lucky Cheng’s, The Lismar Lounge, A7, The Life Café, The World, Alcatraz, Club 57, Coney Island High, Beowulf, Downtown Beirut, Manitoba’s, Lakeside Lounge and the Pyramid Club.
Others will immediately spout off a long list of luminaries like David Peel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ann Magnuson, Klaus Nomi, Deborah Harry, Richard Hell, Joey Ramone, Johnny Thunders, Iggy Pop, Lydia Lunch, John Lurie, James Chance, Arto Lyndsay, Thurston Moore and Jeff Buckley, or maybe lesser-known local characters like photographer/documentarian Clayton Patterson, Tompkins Square Park denizen L.E.S. Jewels, Mosaic Man Jim Power, graffiti muralist Chico or the late photographer Bob Arihood.
Some might whip out a mixtape of bands like Missing Foundation, Cop Shoot Cop, SWANS, Pussy Galore, the Black Snakes, Rat at Rat R, White Zombie, Prong, Surgery and Helmet or hardcore bands like Reagan Youth, Agnostic Front, Kraut, the Cro-Mags, Murphy’s Law, False Prophets, the Stimulators, The Undead, Leeway, Sick of It All … and the Beastie Boys.
Some might reminisce about Eddie’s Toy Tower on Avenue B, seeing Dee-Lite at Wigstock in the since-razed Tompkins Square Bandshell and attending poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café on East Third Street.
Depending on who you ask, the East Village will be remembered as the home to hippies, yippies, punks, hardcore kids, freaks, hipsters, drag queens, gangbangers, activists, squatters and the unhoused. It will forever be remembered as a bohemian haven for artistic freedom or a lawless badlands or a richly varied enclave of immigrants or the home to the largest Ukrainian population outside of their homeland-under-siege.
You’re also bound to encounter folks who’ll correct you with the assertion that it’s just the Lower East Side and that the very term “East Village” was coined by colonizing gentrifiers and avaricious real-estate developers.
But here in the 2020’s – for better or worse – for a whole new generation, the names, faces, sights, sounds, stories and scenes all mentioned above mean precious little if anything at all. As I wrote at the top of this post, it’s admittedly unfair of me to task young vlogger Elana Taber and her comrade Margot with knowing about each and every aspect of the East Village’s multifaceted back-history (and lord knows I left out a shit-ton of stuff myself), but one can’t help feeling that reducing the neighborhood to simply a convenient aggregation of “quirky and funky” thrift stores and coffee shops is a strenuously myopic disservice.
But y’know, I’m a cranky old poop so, again, … what the Hell do I know?
I spotted both of the photos below, this week, in Facebook groups I belong to. The top one appeared in Greenwich Village Grapevine, and is a depiction of East 8th Street just steps to the east of Fifth Avenue. The image was captured by one Andrea White in 2020.
The second photo, from Lower East Side: Back in the Days… is – ostensibly speaking – the same street (well, 8th Street, between Astor Place and Avenue Be, becomes St. Marks Place). This is East 8th Street between Avenues B and C circa 1981. There was no name credited to the photograph, unfortunately.
Two different strips of pavement along the same long street, divided by neighborhood, economics, sensibility and 39 years…
I was perusing through my feed, this AM, and was stopped in my tracks by an advertisement. Being the insufferable rock t-shirt dweeb that I am (and oh yes, … I have rules!), my Facebook page is often peppered with invocations of same, usually from illegitimate knock-off oufits like Redbubble and the like. In any event, up popped the image below.
This is, of course, a design based on the cover art from Duran Duran’s big breakthrough sophomore album, Rio, from 1982, presumably so-chosen, by the band, to evoke the sleek, glossy aspirations and aesthetic of that era’s high-flyin’, hard-partyin’ jet set. The image was designed by artist Patrick Nagel, who’d previously found renown via his suitably sexy illustrations for Playboy Magazine.
Before we go any further, let’s just clear some shit up: Duran Duran were brilliant. While I was otherwise besotted with all things punk and metal, at the time, there was, to my mind, absolutely no arguing with their brand of hook-laden pop. I remember first hearing “Hungry Like the Wolf” at a high school dance, and the rapturous reaction from the girls of my class upon the sound of that first thwomping slide down the guitar neck (not that different, in retrospect, from the opening drop into the sinewy groove of “Down on the Street” by the Stooges) was indelible. And, they rocked. We saw them last summer in Forrest Hills, and they brought the fuckin’ house down. They’re great. Still don’t like’em? Too bad for you.
In any case, what struck me about this particular t-shirt design – not that I’d necessarily want to wear it – was that I’d certainly never seen it before. Yes, of course, that’s the comely, smiling visage of Duran’s titular heroine, but unlike on the album sleeve, she’s depicted as saucily topless (on the sleeve, she seems to be draped in something like a flamenco dancer’s dress with an exaggerated ruffle over her left shoulder.) Much like that abandoned original Ramones design for Road to Ruin (that would eventually come to be sold, incongruously, as a t-shirt at Brandy Melville), I started wondering if this was maybe the original Nagel design before he adjusted it for the Duran sleeve.
I started doing a bit of pointless Googling, but nothing substational really came up. Evidently, Mr. Nagel was specifically commissioned for this job, so it’s doubtful that it was modelled or modified from a previous illustration of his. But who knows? In all probability, this more risqué design is just a modified replication of Nagel’s original illustration that jettisons all semblance of nuance in favor of a blunter blend of prurience. Who needs subtlety?
Anyhoo, whilst coming to that conclusion, I was struck by a surprisingly tragic coda on one artist’s bio of the man.
From Duran Duran Fandom Dot Com…
In 1984, at the age of 38, the artist participated in a 15-minute celebrity "Aerobathon" to raise funds for the American Heart Association. Afterwards, he was found dead in his car, and doctors determined by autopsy that he had suffered a fatal heart attack.
Pour one out for Patrick….
In the wake of my summer of avascular necrosis, allegedly brought on by obliviously breaking a small bone – I honestly forget the name of it – on the underside of my foot, somehow, I started experimenting with some ideally more accommodating footwear to help acclimate and/or ease the discomfort brought on by the persistent ache in my arch and the disconcerting numbness in my toes – two conditions, I was told, that were basically here to stay.
At the suggestion of several folks, I started investigating this new (or new to me, anyway) brand of running shoe called Hokas. Whenever I spotted a pair on the street or in the elevator or wherever – which is easy to do, given the company’s dogged insistence on slapping their name in big block-capital letters across all their products – I’d frequently ask the wearer what they thought of them. To the last, every person in Hokas I asked spoke of them with a fervor that bordered on the rapturous.
I finally relented and limped over to the Hoka outlet on Fifth Avenue (which, incidentally, has since moved to a roomier location three or four blocks to the north). I was immediately skeptical. Regardless of the alleged podiatric benefits the shoes seamlessly provide, they looked like garishly colored clown shoes. But the store was positively hoppin’ with enthusiastic patrons. A salesperson working the floor engaged me and I dutifully unspooled my needlessly detailed tale of podalic woe, prompting her to recommend a “Bondi 8” model. I started perusing those and asked to try on a pair.
After all the street-side testimonials I’d fielded, it was kind of inevitable that the miraculuosly velvety caress I’d been expecting didn’t really materialize. I felt significantly taller in them than my already lofty six feet. But, in that fleeting instance, the problem foot felt newly cushioned … they didn’t feel bad, so I picked out a comparatively simple black pair (as opposed to their normal, retina-burning options like circus-in-town-style turquoise-&-orange, hot chartreuse, vomit rainbow and/or radioacitve-urine yellow), brought them to the counter and officially became a Hokalyte.
After a day or so of wearing them, I was moved to start writing a deeply ridiculous post for this here blog, weepily recounting my former habits of adjusting my sartorial choices based almost exclusively on my musical tastes. To that end, in my distant younger days, I’d started wearing black, hi-top Chuck Taylor All-Stars given that the Ramones wore them. Similarly, after hearing Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke extol their merits in an interview in the mid-`80s, I’d dutifully started wearing clunky black Doc Martens. In typical fashion, I floridly detailed my gradual embrace of other styles of footwear based on equally idiotic criteria (my stubborn fondness for Nike’s contraband Black N’ Tan dunk-lows, as detailed here). My intended takeaway, I suppose, was that I’d crossed a rubicon, of sorts, and was now forced to wear what essentially amounts to the dread “dad shoes,” and how – woe unto me – there is nothing cool about Hokas. You don’t, after all, see any sneery, post-punk iconoclasts wearing them, now do you?
In a fleeting moment of clear-headedness, however, I came to my senses and abanoned that waste-of-time entry. In walking around Manhattan, I now see Hokas on pretty much everybody -- jogging yuppies, irritating tech bros, balding dog-walkers, pony-tailed woo girls, disgruntled high schoolers, non-binary NYU students, grumpy octogenarians, nuns, everybody. I even bought myself a second pair (albeit not quite as cushiony). I’ve made my peace with them.
Or so I thought.
This morning, a reel popped up in my social media feeds of Michael McDonald – the high-piped fleet admiral of all things Yacht Rock – discussing the challenges of his keyboard parts on the title track of the Doobie Brothers’ Minute by Minute. And what was he wearing in this video? THE VERY SAME PAIR OF BLACK BONDI 8 HOKAS THAT I FIRST BOUGHT. Not Colin Newman of Wire. Not Cronos from Venom. Not East Bay Ray of the Dead Kennedsys. Not Daniel Ash from Bauhaus and Love & Rockets, but fuckin’ Michael McDonald of the friggin’ Doobie Brothers.
ARRGH!
Yesterday, writer Arthur Nersesian, whose first novel “The Fuck-Up” was a big favorite of mine, posted an old image of Astor Place on his Facebook page. That’s it up top. Odd, right? He didn’t slap a date on it but considering the Astor Place Cube (real name: “The Alamo”) was first erected on that spot in 1967, and given the make of the cars pictured in the lot in the background, I’m guessing this could have been taken at some point in the `70s or early `80s, but I can’t be sure.
It’s also striking in that so many of the elements depicted in this photograph are no longer recognizable. I mean, yes, that’s obviously the Alamo on the left side or your screen, and presumably the edifice on the right across the street is the lower façade of the Carl Fischer Music Building, but that parking lot is long gone, as are all the row houses in the distance on the eastern end of Cooper Square. There’s now a giant glass tower – which my kids and I used to refer to as “The Shampoo Bottle” – with a bank on its ground floor where the parking lot used to be. To stand on this very spot and look south today, they would be obscured from view, but the buildings featured in the background are largely all gone anyway, replaced by the space-station-like Albert Nerken School of Engineering and the Cooper Square Hotel, which I once described here as a “priapic pillar of avarice” and a “gigantic robot phallus.” You’re welcome.
In any case, on my way to work, this morning, I tried to replicate the shot Arthur posted. As I mentioned, a lot has changed.
Funnily enough, “The Alamo” was never meant to still be here. It was initially installed for a six-month spell in 1967, but when it was time to move it, the community rallied together to keep it there. Also, it was never designed to be interactive. Artist Tony Rosenthal didn’t assume people would take to spinning the thing. But, of course, spin it they do.
Here's another little fun artifact, an NYU Tisch school student film from 2003 called, simply, “Alamo.” Only 21 years ago, but it already seems like a totally different city. The “Shampoo Bottle” was only just under construction, and the giant “Death Star” monolith that is 101 Astor Place had not yet replaced the humble Cooper Union classroom buildings.
Enjoy the short trip back in time…