Flaming Pablum

Manhattan of The Damned

The Damned first played New York City’s CBGB in 1977, the first British Punk band to do so (along with having been the first British Punk band to issue any vinyl). During that maiden voyage, the band were famously captured by erstwhile CBGB door-minder/photographer Roberta Bayley in the photo above, posing with great, snotty aplomb in front of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

The band ended up playing four April nights at CBGB, sharing the bill with their Buckeye counterparts in the Dead Boys. Here’s a shot of them during one of those doubtlessly volatile evenings, this one taken by Ebet Roberts.

Today, meanwhile, in trawling around the `net, looking for nothing in particular, I came across this uncredited photo from the same era. I’m making some assumptions here but based on the line-up (with guitarist Brian James still in the ranks), I’m guessing this was snapped during that same span of April days. I have no idea who took it, but my question is – where in Manhattan was this photograph snapped?

I’d say the awning behind Dave Vanian on the left is a big clue, as are the terraced apartments behind Captain Sensible’s head. I have a hunch which I’m going to investigate, but where do YOU think it was taken?

The Damned are coming back to New York City (with original drummer Rat Scabies with them, this time) this May, but the next day is my son’s graduation, so I don’t think we’ll be going. We did just see them in October, anyway.

Meanwhile, here’s a taste of one of those shows…

Reign in Lunch

Poached from Lydia Lunch's official Instagram page. Photo by Marcel Jas
Lydia Lunch, Effenaar, Eindhoven 1988.

You may be cool, but you'll never be Lydia-Lunch-in-a-Slayer-shirt cool. 

Tensing Up with the Jim Carroll Band

Cruelly, even in proper punk rock circles, the Jim Carroll Band seem relegated to “one-hit-wonder” status. And while, yes, that one “hit” – the ecstatic “People Who Died” – is a stone-cold classic by every concievble standard (unless you talk to my brother-in-law), it’s true that the JCB never really meaningfully bothered “the charts” (it made it to No. 103 on Billboard’s “Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart … for whatever that’s worth) a second time. The public can be fickle.

Of course, music was really never more than a dalliance for Jim Carroll, whose primary passion was as a writer and a poet, having penned “The Basketball Diaries,” a gripping memoir about growing up in New York City amidst drugs and prostitution, when he was still in his teens. I believe he was lured into rock’n’roll via his friendship with folks like Patti Smith, Keith Richards and the Max’s Kansas City crew, but I’m ultimately just projecting. He always seemed more comfortable behind the pen than the mic stand.

Regardless, Carroll formed a band, signed with Atlantic Records and released three LPs of music, the first being Catholic Boy in 1980, which featured the classic “People Who Died” as well as equally incendiary (if lesser celebrated) songs like “Three Sisters,” “It’s Too Late” and the title track. As a taste of the era, Catholic Boy is required reading, so to speak.

The JCB’s other two records, meanwhile, seem to be rarely discussed. 1982’s Dry Dreams (and how’s that for a title?) didn’t produce any comparably notable numbers -- although I still quite dig “Lorraine.” Those expecting another grim novelty number (although “People Who Died” was so much more than that) didn’t get it.

When I Write Your Name followed in 1983, the world seemed to have moved on. Even the inclusion of a cover of “Sweet Jane” by the Velvet Underground failed to move the needle (although Lenny Kaye and Lou Reed made a nice cameos in the video for same). In the wake of that record, while Jim Caroll would continue to write and even record, his days fronting a band were over.

I never got to see the Jim Carroll Band perform, but I did go to a couple of readings by the great man before he sadly passed away in 2009. “People Who Died” continues to inspire, finding placment in countless films, and getting covered by everyone from my friend’s band The Cryer Brothers to the Hollywood Vampires (the less said about that, the better). Suffice to say, you’re best off sticking with the original.

As mentioned in some earlier, ancient post, I first heard the Jim Carroll Band back in grade school via the preternaturally hippper taste of my classmate Zach. I dutifully ran out and bought myself a copy of Catholic Boy, and the whole album swiftly becme a favorite. That said, it was years before I bothered to snap up Dry Dreams and I Write Your Name to get the whole picture.

More recently, however, a lost studio track of the band’s surfaced. As recounted here, the studio rendition of “Tension” was prized out of the closet of some dude named Earl McGrath, and it’s genuinely revelatory slice of the Jim Carroll Band at the peak of their powers. I believe the track was later re-arranged/re-written as the track “Voices” that appeared on the final LP, I Write Your Name, but I am uncertain of the chronology.

You can here the studio versioh of “Tension” here, but some time ago, a former founding member of the Jim Carroll Band put up this live clip from their final ever appearnace. This is what bassist Steve Linsley said about this…

I am a founding member & the bass player. This is The Jim Carroll Band, playing the last gig, ever. This is the original band, with founding members. Brian Linsley, Terrell Winn, Wayne Woods, Stevie Linsley, and Jim Carroll. This final gig followed the final tour of what was the second incarnation of the Jim Carroll Band with Stevie and Wayne still on bass and drums and Lenny Kaye and Paul Sanchez on Guitars. Anyone else claiming to be a Jim Carroll Band member is fucking looking to open a can of asswhoop!

Asswhoop!!!

Anyway, here’s the clip in question. Also check out Legs McNeil’s epic-length interview with Jim from his days interviewing for “Please Kill Me.”

Nothing is Safe

Hey, it’s October again.

Normally, this is when I post an ancient clip of “Ghouls Night Out,” “Horror Business” or – wait for it – “Halloween” and assert that October belongs to the Misfits, but I thought I’d mix it up, this time.

Time was when I used to more enthusiastically keep up with all things Hip-Hop. I mean, while I’ll always be a rock guy, I was geniunely invested in select artists like Public Enemy, Beastie Boys (although one could argue their music transcends simply hip-hop), some aspects of Wu-Tang Clan, LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes, DMX, Ice-T, A Tribe Called Quest and lower-tier acts Das EFX, New Kingdom, Mystikal, Digital Underground, Funkdoobiest and a clutch of others.

But, to my mind, some of the more adventurous stuff seemed to fall by the wayside and get ignored when the era of Bad Boy, Death Row, No Limit and all that stuff seemed to rise to the top. Suffice to say, while I still love certain tracks by Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, I was kinda lukewarm on Eminem and absolutely never gave much of a damn about the Notorious B.I.G. et al. I just kinda stopped caring.

But Hip-Hop continued to ascend. When I worked at MTV News in the mid-2000's, it was steadily replacing all things rock and pop as the dominant genre of pop culture, a status it largely still holds today.

Given where I currently work, I’m still versed in the names, in not the music, of contemporary Hip-Hop, but I honestly cannot say I’m particularly moved by any of it. While I liked one or two of his early singles, I have no time for Kanye West in any capacity. I enjoyed some of Jay-Z’s earlier singles, but cannot fathom why some consider him the greatest rapper alive. I liked a few Childish Gambino songs, but haven’t kept up. I respect Kendrick Lamarr’s accomplishments, but don’t particuarly enjoy his music. I don’t give a single crap about Drake. I find Ice Spice, Meghan Thee Stallion, Doja Cat and all of that stuff to be rather profoundly depressing and unlistenble garbage. People keep informing me of the greatness of SZA, but what little I’ve heard has bored me to tears. I've yet to be impressed by the music of anyone who prefaces their name with a "Lil," apart from, maybe, Lil Jon. 

I’m relatively certain, however, that there is great, cutting-edge Hip-Hop that’s exciting and moving the genre forward, but I’m just not hearing it. I liked the last Run the Jewels record, at least.

But then I heard this band called … inexplicably … clipping.

On the genuinely unlikely label of Sup-Pop (the indie who brought us all things Grunge, in the early `90s), comes this enigmatic and grim trio (pictured above) whose music is dense, disturbing, dark, complicated and intriguing.

I’d heard something of theirs a while ago that really grabbed me by the lapels, but I never got the name of the track. I recently stumbled upon this track below – already from five years ago (where was I?), and I think it’s pretty amazing. Beyond the lyrical dexterity, the `80’s-horror-alluding production completely hooked me in (think Carpenter’s score to “Halloween,” which this video unmissably pays homage to). I think it’s pretty gripping.

I sent it to my colleague Jeff – way more versed in Hip-Hop than yours truly – and he said it was terrible, dated and – god forbid – corny. I beg to differ. I think it’s awesome.

What do YOU think?

Happy October.

St. Marks & Second, 1987

Someone on the Lower East Side: Back in the Days page posted an amazing shot by Dutch photographer Teun Voeten, over the weekend, that I wanted to share here.

This is the southwest corner of St. Marks Place at Second Avenue circa 1987. From about 1957 – although I’ve read that the business itself well predates that year – that corner was occupied by Gem Spa, a newspaper stand and candy store renowned as a neighborhood fixture. Its signature Egg Creams were touted as the best in the city (I cannot speak with any authority about that, but they were damn good), and it was famously immortalized in an iconic photograph of the New York Dolls by Toshi Matsuo (and later recreated by Roberta Bayley). I spoke about those elements back here.

The photo above was taken about fifteen years after that and features the same row of beat-up phone booths that Matsuo had the Dolls pose with. What struck me first about Voeten’s photo were the Rock Hotel flyers on the right, advertising a particular gig in December of 1987 featuring the Dead Boys, Kix, Circus of Power and a band called Hilfiger, which was a combo put together by guitarist Andy Hilfiger -- clothier Tommy Hilfiger’s little brother -- after the dissolution of the short-lived band King Flux, which featured Richie Stotts of the Plasmatics and Marky Ramone of – wait for it – The Ramones.

I was actually at that gig – which I wrote about here -- and still have that very flyer to this day. Here it was in my sorely under-utilized kitchen on East 12th Street back in the mid-`90s.

My memories of the show in 1987 are fleeting. I was home for Christmas break during my junior year of college. It was one of the Dead Boys’ annual reunion shows, albeit one of the final ones. I remember Kix – kind of a hackneyed hair-metal band who I wrote about here – being better than I’d expected. I sadly have no recollection about Hilfiger (sorry, Andy), but do vividly remember Circus of Power (who I wrote about here). Circus of Power always seemed like they should have been a bigger deal, but they were always kind of entirely out of step with the other New York City bands, at the time. Moreover, if I'm not mistaken, the guy in this photograph in the shades, backwards cap, black leather jacket and Ramones shirt looks like the incongruously named Gary Sunshine, guitarist for Circus of Power, although I can't be sure. 

The other thing that caught my eye was an invocation to one of my late friend Fran Powers’ bands, Whole Wide World, which you can see on the top right, just above the trio of Rock Hotel flyers.

Gem Spa closed in 2020. The space that Gem Spa formerly occupied is now a coffee shop called Poetica Coffee. The Dead Boys had already broken up, but the death of Stiv Bator in 1990 put a definitive stop to their annual reunion shows. Kix only broke up as recently as last year. Circus of Power technically broke up for a first time in 1995 but reformed in 2014 and are conceivably still at it. Whole Wide World was just one of Fran Powers’ many bands. They independently self-released an LP in 1987 (the same year as this photograph), and it contained a cover of The Nazz’s classic “Open My Eyes.” While he’d long since moved on to other projects beyond Whole Wide World, Fran Powers passed away in 2021.

Here's that full Dead Boys' set:

This was Circus of Power....

Spencer Speaks

Damian Abraham recently exhumed an older episode of his excellent podcast, Turned Out a Punk, wherein he posed questions to the great Jon Spencer of Shithaus, Pussy Galore (above, as captured in 1989 by Rick McGinnis), Boss Hog, Honeymoon Killers, Gibson Brothers, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, The HitMakers, etc. notoriety. Despite his reputation for cartoonishly amplified, potty-mouthed bluster, Jon comes across as very thoughtful, soft-spoken and self-deprecating. It’s an illuminating chat that delves into his original forays into making music, his move to New York City in the early `80s, his days being willfully negative and contrarian with Pussy Galore and much more.

If you’re inclined, do check it out. Jon Spencer’s currently touring, and comes to NYC next week. He’ll be at Town Hall. I’ll be there, will you?

You can hear the TOAP episode by clicking right here.

Revelation #9: Exhuming The Surburbs

Back in the mid-`80s, I had a significantly more voracious appetite for new music, and while that sounds like it might have been expensive and complicated, it was reasonably simple to track down the new stuff you liked without having to spend a king’s ransom, if you knew where to go.

I vividly remember, in the summer of 1986, hearing a single by a Minneapolis band, The Suburbs, called “#9.” That previous spring, I recalled my friend Walter at Denison University, repeatedly spinning that band’s 1984 EP, Dream Hog with some regularity, and quite digging it. This single, “#9,” sounded like quite a departure, given that it was on their comparatively slick, major-label debut (they’d signed to A&M Records, released one epoynmous LP, and were pretty much immediately dropped). I picked up a promo copy of The Suburbs for a couple of dollars at St. Marks Sounds, and slapped “#9” on many an outgoing mixtape, often nestled incongruously between Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” and “Away” by The Bolshoi.

As it happened, given the lacklustre performance of The Suburbs’ big label debut, the album was never released on compact disc and the band broke up.

In later years, somewhat predictably, The Suburbs reformed, toured, released new shit and re-released a lot of old shit, but their star-crossed LP, The Suburbs, was never re-visited. While my enthusiasm for the band has since long waned, I’d been harboring a hankering, over recent months, to experience “#9” again, having not heard it in literal decades.

Thing is, it’s not on Spotify. It’s not on Bandcamp and my copy of the LP lives in a flight case in the basement of my mother’s worryingly flood-friendly basement out on Long Island. Even here in the age of immediate technological gratification, I couldn’t manage to hear “#9” again.

I seemed to remember there being a proper music video for “#9,” but I could never find that, either.

Until today.

Someone posted the original video as recently as a year ago, and I only came across it this afternoon. Find that below.

What I’d remembered of “#9” was strikingly different from what I heard when I hit play. Through the prism of 2024, not only is the single very much “of its era” (in, frankly, not necessarily a good way), but it’s just kinda … dumb. I mean, I love a lot of dumb rock, but usually there’s something slightly clever or notable about it. In this instance, “#9” is just banal in its dumbness, and sounds like a bit of LP filler on the soundtrack to a sub-John Hughes coming-of-age flick.

Musically, beyond being rife with period-specific flourish, I learned that the LP which spawned “#9” was produced by former Prince drummer and fellow Minnesotan, Bobby Z. I guess that was designed to add some purple pomp and circumstance to the band’s otherwise strictly “New Wave” sound. And while lead singer Beej Chaney might dress, punkily preen and pout like Stiv Bator of the Dead Boys, this is pretty middle-of-the-road stuff, and I now regret disseminating it on so many mixtapes.

No wonder they got dropped.

It's Band T-Shirt Day

According to some colleagues of mine, today is Band T-Shirt Day. The official (?) website attests that "Band Shirt Day is a global fundraising initiative, where artists come together for a single day to sell merchandise on their official sales channels and donate proceeds to charitable organizations of their choice.”

Regardless, at my office, the folks that program content for the company’s intranet portal were soliciting pics of team members sporting their favorites. Being that I have pretty much a full-blown addiction to accruing band t-shirts, I was game to participate. Here’s what I submitted...

“I have what any normal person would consider a stupid amount of band t-shirts, but I can’t seem to bring myself to part with any of them. This one is among my very favorites. It’s Dread Zeppelin. Ostensibly, Dread Zeppelin was a reggae band that played Led Zeppelin covers with an Elvis impersonator as a lead singer. If that sounds ridiculous, that’s because it was. Suffice to say, they were a tremendously entertaining live band. I got this shirt at a tour stop in 1990 at long-since-vanished Wetlands Preserve, not too far away from our office. To this day, this shirt continues to confuse and upset Zeppelin purists … which makes it priceless, to my mind.”

I partially went with Dread Zeppelin not just because I genuinely love the shirt, but because I can only bang the gong so much about my allegieance to certain specific bands like Killing Joke before I lapse into self-parody. Funnily enough, my company’s recently-hired new Chief Financial Officer submitted a pic of himself sporting a Killing Joke shirt, which pretty much knocked me right off the porch. I’ll be discussing that with him soon, although I have to meet him first.

I also love the irony of our CFO rocking a t-shirt emblazoned with the cover of the album that spawned the single “Money Is Not Our God.”

Anyway, Happy Band T-Shirt Day to all that celebrate. To see more of my stupid pile of t-shirts, click here. 

Don't Listen to Shelby

Here’s yet another nasty little post wherein I pettily take some doe-eyed whippersnapper to task for getting shit wrong, contributing to the propagation of misinformation and helping further ruin my hometown. 

I don’t know who “influencer” Shelby Church is. I’m sure she’s a well-meaning, upstanding human being who is hard-working and kind to her neighbors. Regardless, like Brett Conti and Elena Taber before her (both of whom I’ve eviscerated here before – and who both appear in the video below), she’s decided to cast herself as some sort of amabassador for New York City, despite demonstrably knowing fucking nothing about it. She made the video below after being here for a month.

That sort of shit sets my teeth on edge. Ironically, this post is coming hot on the heels of my own heroically under-informed guide to Dublin, but I at least had the decency to point out that I'm nothing but a clueless tourist in that fine city. 

Now, granted, it can well be said that I essentially live in the past and pine in vain for a New York City that no longer exists and is never coming back. While that indeed may be true, and that I should acclimate to the hyper-gentrified reality, that doesn’t mean that facts have become flexible. Wrong is fucking wrong, and I’m here to point it out when I see it.

Some surface-level comments right from the start:

1. Stop sitting on the fucking pavement. We fucking HATE that.

2. NO ONE has EVER lived in Times Square.

3. Brett Conti is NOT NOT NOT a “native New Yorker.” He’s from Massapequa, Long Island. Very big difference.

4. Don’t listen to Elana Taber about anything. Also, there is significantly more to a neighborhood beyond its "cute" shops, restaurants and bars.

5. Union Square is NOT in the East Village.

6. The East Village is PART of the Lower East Side.

7. Washington Square Park is NOT NOT NOT in the West Village, it’s fucking Greenwich Village. Get it right. The West Village is WEST of fucking Sixth Avenue, you dolts! 

I could keep going, but I’ll let you experience it for yourself. Enjoy thirteen minutes of idiotic blather from a gaggle of clueless whistleheads. There is no useful information here at all.

"Great Bars of New York City"

While I do not know them personally, James & Karla Murray are renowned in the amorphous community of NYC-centric bloggers, vloggers, photographers, nostalgists and digital storytellers of which I am also a member. Over the 19 (jeezus!) years I’ve been “keeping” this silly blog, I’ve doubtlessly mentioned their name, evangelized their work and re-purposed their striking images countless times.

James & Karla's lovingly composed photographs of New York City corner shops, bistros, pizzerias, record stores, taverns and mom’n’pop concerns of all stripes have become a crucial part of the documentation of our ever-(d)evolving city, and their magisterial books like “Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York,” “New York Nights,” and “Broken Windows: Graffiti NYC” make any coffee table they are placed on that much goddamn cooler. I’ve frequently spied them out and about — Karla’s signature shock of punky, bleach-blonde hair is hard to miss. On the occasions in which I’ve accosted them (“hey, it’s James & Karla!”), they seem to be in a constant state of buoyant, infectious joy. They clearly live their entwined lives like one long, curious adventure, and are insatiable in their quest to see, go, do, experience, capture and create. I find them quite inspiring, in that way. 

Imagine my own joy, then, when I was contacted out of the proverbial blue by a publicist representing a new project for Prestel Publishing, that being the forthcoming book by James & Karla titled “Great Bars of New York City.” I relayed an enthusiastic “yes” to the publicist before I’d even finished reading the pitch.

Beyond my tireless affinity for waxing rhapsodic about the New York City of my growingly distant youth and/or my favorite willfully obnoxious, listener-hostile music, I am somewhat sheepishly notorious for my penchant for putting away many a pint of beer, and I quite relish doing so in any number of establishments — from the endearingly seedy to the stuffily stately — across the five boroughs (yes, dear readers, I have consumed beers on Staten Island). “Great Bars of New York City” speaks directly to that ….uhh…. unquenchable thirst with 239 pages of James & Karla’s brilliant photographs, augmented with text by food & culture scribe, Dan Q. Dao. The pictures are crisp, colorful and packed with nuanced detail, matched by Dao’s meticulous historical research and illustrative prose. It’s entirely splendid. If you harbor any of the same predilections as myself, you will not be able to put this book down, as I haven’t.

“Great Bars of New York City” is available on September 10th. Click here for more information. Also, don’t sleep on James & Karla’s Instagram page.

Cool Britannia

No, I never saw Oasis back in their heyday, alas.

But I *DID* see: Blur, Pulp, Elastica, Echobelly, James, Gene, The La’s, Happy Mondays, The Verve, The Charlatans, Inspiral Carpets, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, The Sundays, Mansun, Kula Shaker, Lush, Ride, Chapterhouse, Curve, My Bloody Valentine, The House of Love, Levitation, Kitchens of Distinction, Pale Saints, The Wedding Present, Eat, The Wonder Stuff, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Pop Will Eat Itself, Senseless Things, Mega City Four, Teenage Fanclub, Milltown Brothers, Therapy?, Silverfish, Ash, EMF, Jesus Jones, Birdland, Fatima Mansions, The Primitives, New Model Army, Gene Loves Jezebel, Flesh for Lulu, The Cult, The Mission, The Sisters of Mercy, Pigface, Cornershop, PJ Harvey, Tricky, Portishead, Massive Attack, Laika, The Lo-Fidelity All-Stars, The Futureheads, Joe Jackson, Gavin Friday, Julian Cope, Robyn Hitchcock, Billy Bragg, Adam Ant, The Buzzcocks, New Order, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Big Audio Dynamite, The Soft Boys, The Chameleons, Billy Idol, Squeeze, The Psychedelic Furs, The Fixx, General Public, The Damned, Still Little Fingers, GBH, Theatre of Hate, The Stranglers, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, The Cure, U2, Love & Rockets, Bauhaus, Cocteau Twins, The English Beat, The Specials, Gang of Four, Motorhead, Public Image Ltd. and fucking KILLING JOKE.

So, ... yeah, I think I'm covered.