Flaming Pablum

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Too Much is Never Enough

A little earlier this month, a friend of mine was planning a birthday party for his wife with “an `80s theme,” and he asked if I could help him out with a playlist. “But” he qualified, “please -- nothing TOO obscure or esoteric, y’know?” Knowing my bug-eyed zeal for the era in question, he didn’t want me to deliver a playlist choked with arcanely unwieldy chestnuts from bands like Belfegore, Naked Raygun, Theatre of Hate, Clock DVA and the Virgin Prunes. He was looking for something a bit more accessible. Of course, I said “Sure,” and got to work on it immediately.

I pretty much banged out a stately collection of suitable songs right away but kept periodically adding titles as they occurred to me over the course of the following few days. After a while, I felt sufficiently satisfied that I’d checked all the requisite boxes, I emailed my playlist to my friend. As I did so, I happened to spot the running time. At 225 songs, it clocked in at a ridiculous 15 hours and 53 minutes.

In my defense, I would assert that one person’s `80s is all Prince, George Michael, Madonna and Michael Jackson, while another’s might be Loverboy, Huey Lewis, Journey and Pat Benatar. My own would inarguably be Killing Joke, the Circle Jerks, Motorhead and The Sisters of Mercy, but another’s might very well be LL Cool, Salt N Pepa, Run-DMC and Public Enemy. The era is many different things to many different people.

To compile a playlist that felt even remotely comprehensive was no small task.

Anyway, the party in question was this past weekend. Held on his back lawn, my friend had one amplified source playing a mix his daughter had made at one end, and my epic-length opus playing at the other. As one drifted drinkily between these two poles, I believe the intended atmosphere of the event was well-achieved.

In retrospect, I suppose I could be credibly accused of maybe giving this assignment a little too much thought, but who am I to turn down a playlist request? I was all too happy to do it.

And unlike the painstaking mixtapes I used to agonize over for hours in bygone decades, I still have a laboriously unwieldy playlist to share with you now, days after the event.

Now, once again, don’t come in hot, expecting this to be filled with Einsturzende Neubauten, GBH, Coil, Black Flag, the Butthole Surfers and Gaye Bykers on Acid. Sure, there are a few curve balls in there, but by and large, this playlist was designed for the broadest of possible audiences. I even slipped several tracks in there by artists I legitimately cannot stand.

Anyway, if so inclined, put on your parachute pants and have at it. Oh, be sure to play it on "shuffle," too. 

What did I miss?

The Revenge of the Mystery Spike

According to the stats on the backend of this blog, Flaming Pablum -- which normally gets a few hundred views a day, give or take -- got 8,537 views on August 11, 2023, which I’m fairly certain is the most views it’s ever gotten within the course of a single day. Zowie!! 

I had a similarly mysterious spike in 2018 (although not nearly as high as this one), but that ended up being some technical glitch. But this one looks legit.

Unfortunately, I didn’t pay attention to it in real time (assuming it was another hiccup, of some kind) and it’s now too late to discern specifically which post was garnering so much attention.

Oh well. 

 

Rockin' West Broadway

I feel like this photo’s been making the rounds for a while, now, but the above image was snapped by one Peter van Wijk, capturing an unknown band playing a soundcheck on a stage in the middle of West Broadway at White Street in the Summer of 1979.

It’s a cool shot for a number of reasons. For a start, I love how it speaks to how informal that neck of town used to be. A million years ago, I did gopher work for a graphic designer who used to say that on weekends, people who lived off West Broadway used to string a volleyball net across the expanse of the avenue and play pickup games. There was so little traffic, at the time, that it wasn’t a hassle for anybody. This imaged exudes that same sort of vibe, or to me, at least.

Secondly, New York nostalgist trainspotters might note both Teddy’s and Tier 3 behind the band (on the easterly side of the avenue). I spoke about Tier 3 quite recently here. Teddy’s, of course, later became El Teddy’s (I’m assuming it had something to do with new management and/or a change in cuisine?), and famously hosted a replica of the Statue of Liberty’s crown on its roof. I took this picture of same at some point in the late `90s. 

Thirdly, of course, the looming towers of the former World Trade Center are a stark, sobering reminder of the neighborhood’s since-altered topography.

I have zero idea of who this band might have been. I appreciate that the guitarist in the center appears to be playing a lovely Gretsch, hollo-body White Falcon (the weapon of choice for The Cult’s Billy Duffy, among a few others).

Here in 2023, nobody seems to set up impromptu concerts in TriBeCa. The space formerly occupied by Tier 3 (where bands like the Bush Tetras, 8 Eyes Spy, the Stare Kits and even Bauhaus and The Pop Group played) is now an Italian restaurant. The building that housed El Teddy’s was raised to erect yet another condominium with a pricey hardware store in its ground level. I have no idea what became of the giant Liberty crown.

As of this morning, this very spot in Peter van Wijk's photograph looked like this….

This neighborhood -- arguably the "main drag" of TriBeCa -- is also all over the video below, a widely maligned single by Lou Reed which I've written about before...

Cop Shoot Cop's Lost Leftovers

Out of nowhere, a YouTube channel named Peeter’s Drumming & Music has seen fit to release a cache of rare Cop Shoot Cop tracks. Now, to be fair, most -- if not all -- of these songs have either surfaced before as b-sides ( “New God,” “Transmission,” “The Queen of Shinbone Alley” can all be found on the CD single of “Any Day Now,” “Anonymous” appeared on the “Two at a Time” single), on movie soundtracks (“3am Incident” appeared in the Johnny Mnenomic soundtrack) or as curios appendages (“Schweinhund!” is on the split-ep – the indelicately titled Dick Smoker Plus -- with the Italian band Meathead).

The remaining tracks like “Baby Broke Down,” “The Sky is Blue,” “Transmitter,” “Hole in the Sky” (not a Black Sabbath cover) and “Get Gone” have all periodically popped up on the internet, over the ensuing decades, on various platforms. This all said, for comparatively passive fans (unlike bug-eyed completists, like yours truly), it’s nice to have them all aggregated into one, convenient package.

Peeter asserts the following:

“(Mostly) Unreleased and unmixed songs from the Release session in 94 and also what i believe is the band's last session in 95. A whole album worth of material!”

My chronology is fuzzy, at this point, but this was indeed probably the last session that Tod [A] participated in. After Tod jumped ship from proceedings, the remaining members re-worked some of this material (with Natz taking over all vocals), stripped away Tod’s contributions and re-released it as the Red Expendables (a self-deprecating new band name alluding to the unfortunate, red-shirted crew members of the Starship Enterprise who always seem to die first). The Red Expendables (or RedEx) were evidently of no interest to Interscope Records, who dropped them upon news of their former commanding officer’s departure. The album was later released in 1999 on a tiny indie called Grimmwerks. If you’re curious to hear that, you might be able to track down the physical CD on eBay, but the whole album was uploaded ten years ago onto YouTube here. Also, it’s amazingly on both Amazon Music and Spotify.

These days, Tod is in Turkey, working on new Firewater material. Phil Puleo is still working with SWANS. Natz is a visual artist (see his work here) and recently released some new music under the name EXP. Jim Coleman is always working on new music, and since parting ways with Human Impact (which Phil was also a member of), he's planning on a new release, next month, from his project called The Children. Steve McMillen is now a lawyer, living down in Texas. 

In any case, enjoy the very final music the band made as Cop Shoot Cop below….

The Probably Very Brief Return of … “News From Home”

I first wrote about it here in 2012, then it was pulled off YouTube. It then re-appeared on YouTube in 2015, and I posted about it again, but then was pulled down. It made another appearance in 2021, which I wrote about, before being yanked a third time.

I’m talking, of course, about the film “News From Home” by Belgian director Chantal Akerman. If you’ve not seen it and are too lazy to go back and click on those links above, here’s a very brief synopsis:

Letters from Chantal Akerman’s mother are read over a series of elegantly composed shots of 1976 New York, where our (unseen) filmmaker and protagonist has relocated. Akerman’s unforgettable time capsule of the city is also a gorgeous meditation on urban alienation and personal and familial disconnection.

It’s slow …. very slow … but it’s worth your time.

I doubt it’ll be up again for long, so watch it sooner than later.

Get Up, Get Out Into Something New: Exhuming Emotional Rescue by The Rolling Stones

Earlier this week, as I was walking down Broadway to work, I passed by a clothing shop just north of Canal Street that was using a crate of vinyl LP’s as some kind of prop in their front window, with various albums strewn around artfully. One such record was a weathered copy of an old favorite of mine, Emotional Rescue by the Rolling Stones, which was oddly fitting, as said album always reminds me of the summer, and one specific summer in particular.

Back in 2009, I wrote up a little post for a since-vanished blog called The New York Nobody Sings, extolling the merits of a particular track that mentioned an arguably iconic Manhattan street corner by name. Sadly, the blog no longer exists, but here’s what I wrote back then … which I’ve edited/updated slightly, as warranted.

Sure, there are plenty of Rolling Stones songs that cite New York City ("Honky Tonk Woman," "Harlem Shuffle," "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo [Heartbreaker]," "Shattered" and, of course, "Miss You" spring immediately to mind), but, to my recollection, they've never cut a song that references such a specific New York address as they did on "Dance Pt. 1," the opening number off their transitional album from 1980, Emotional Rescue. Ten seconds into the track, Jagger starts lipping off to Keith, rhetorically postulating as to why they're "standing on the corner of West 8th Street and Sixth Avenue." Why indeed?

It's a fair question, I suppose, being that said main drag into the formerly most-traveled area of Greenwich Village hardly seems like the hippest stretch of real estate for the fabled Glimmer Twins to be loitering on (although they were known to favor a block just across town a couple of years later). I'd imagine the explanation for the location is that portions of the Emotional Rescue album were recorded just up the street at Electric Lady Studios. Still, I've always loved the fanciful image of Mick & Keef in full-on flouncy rock-fopp mode, striking any number of ridiculous poses in front of what would have been Gray's Papaya, at the time, wondering what to do with their evening.

The previous album, Some Girls, had found the Stones capably keeping up with the times, crafting soon-to-be classic rock radio staples like the afore-cited "Miss You" and "Shattered" that stylistically borrowed from the pulsing disco and raging punk rock of that era. The Emotional Rescue record, however, was lambasted as more of a forced effort, one that breathlessly strove to mimic the more organic sounds of its predecessor. In truth, many of the tracks were actually leftovers from the Some Girls sessions. While not as maligned as later tepid endeavors like Dirty Work or the entirely needless A Bigger Bang, Emotional Rescue is rarely touted as a stand-out effort in the burly Stones catalog.

It's rare, but it happens. This is one of those times.

The album was released in June of 1980. At the time, I was 13 years old, and had been sequestered -- largely against my will -- to a camp in the verdant environs of Maine called Great Oaks. All the kids at the camp were split up into a dozen cabins, each named after a state (I lived in "West Virginia," a cabin almost immediately re-christened "West Vagina" for the purposes of tirelessly prurient juvenile comedy). Each cabin was looked after by a designated counselor. My cabin's counselor was a Swedish twentysomething named Eric, who had long, shaggy blonde hair much like that of his more celebrated countryman, Bjorn Borg. Eric was also a Rolling Stones freak. While he tolerated the endless airings of the Devo and Ramones tapes we'd insist on playing, there were fewer things Eric enjoyed more than hearing the Stones. So, when he got his hands on a cassette of Emotional Rescue during a field trip into town, one day, it was pretty much solidified that we'd be listening to precious little else for the remainder of the summer (although Joe's Garage Act I by Frank Zappa was also a West Vagina favorite, if memory serves). By the end of the summer, I knew Emotional Rescue back-to-front. To this day, I still think it's an excellent album. You can read more about my Great Oaks experience here.

While "Dance Pt. 1" has never been my favorite song on the record (that honor goes to "Where The Boys Go"), I've always dug it. Not just for the shoutout to West 8th Street -- a strip I'd soon-after become a regular on thanks to its then-thriving (and now vanished) network of record stores -- but for its shameless espousal of grooving. While many would decry the band for trying to jump on some sort of disco-rock bandwagon, "Dance Pt. 1" (which was evidently recorded several times -- there are seemingly handfuls of alternate versions floating around out there) is a million times funkier -- and more legitimately danceable -- than similarly-inclined efforts by, say, Kiss ("I Was Made for Loving You") or Pink Floyd ("Another Brick in The Wall Pt. II"). I'd suggest that Queen surpassed them in the credible funk department with "Another One Bites the Dust" (released the same year) but blame it on that bass line. And while gratuitously hedonistic, "Dance Pt. 1" still retains Keef's signature dirty guitar, sneerily reminding you at every turn that even when wearing their boogie trousers, the Stones still rocked harder than you.

Here in 2023, Electric Lady is still holding court on a West 8th Street that is entirely unrecognizable from its 1980 incarnation. Without fail, though, I absolutely cannot cross that corner of 6th Avenue without the opening of "Dance Pt. 1" shimmying into my head. Get up, get out....

So, that was the end of my post for The New York Nobody Sings. I didn’t even begin to delve into some of the other great tracks on the album in question, notably the endearingly yobbish “Where The Boys Go,” the frankly ludicrous “Send It To Me” (wherein Mick recites a laundry list of ladies of various nationalities he wouldn’t turn his nose up at), the frantically priapic “She’s So Cold” and, wait for it, the slow-loping disco-rock of the title track, replete with Mick’s bizarre recitation about being “your knight in shining armor coming to your emotional rescue, riding across the desert on a fine Arab charger.” These are all amazing moments.

On the not-so-great front, there are admittedly clunkers like the deeply inappropriate (but still kinda fun) “Summer Romance,” the roundly wrong-footed “Indian Girl,” the dirgey “Down in the Hole” and the mean-spirited “Let Me Go,” but I never said it was a perfect record.

It's not a perfect Stones record, not by a long shot (if they have one, I'd probably suggest it's Let It Bleed, but you may beg to differ). But I still love it. Beyond all the personal associations I've assigned to it, I just think it's a fun, interesting slice of the Stones' history. I was also a big fan of the artwork. Ironically, the aesthetic they were mining for a modern, futuristic look -- those distinctive, thermographic photos -- looks irretrievably dated today. I remember taping the massive poster that came inserted with the original LP to my bedroom door out at our old house in Quogue, and my mother practically hissing every time she saw it (as I mentioned here, she was decidedly not a fan).

Given that I travel in idiotic, rock-dork circles wherein canonical albums and hallowed artists are routinely subject to endless rankings and needless re-appraisals, my invocations of the under-appreciated greatness of Emotional Rescue have been plentiful, over the years. But I've yet to find that many people that agree with me. 

Give it another chance.

El Gringo Está Realmente Muerto

Back in 2007, I wrote what was soon to be a somewhat typically (for me) nostalgia-fueled post about how the westerly-facing façade on the northeasterly side of St. Marks Place near Third Avenue that previously hosted the massive portrait of “Gringo” (i.e. the somewhat notorious local punky junkie named John Spacely) now just sported a plain, white field with the word “Muerte” on it. I interpreted that cryptic Spanish as emblematic of the direction the neighborhood’s character was headed. In ensuing years, no further artwork graced that wall, beyond another morbid legend that read “RIPSTMARKS.” Beyond that, it just got grimmer.

By most accounts (including not one, but two independent feature films -- one of which inspiring director Lech Kowalski to commission that massive mural), the actual subject, John Spacely, was not really that admirable a character. Essentially a colorful-albeit-troubled, substance-abusing actor, scenester, hustler and heroin dealer, John Spacely may have looked cool, but he arguably exemplified the very least salubrious aspects of the East Village, and many understandably resented that grand, artfully inescapable glorification. By the turn of the millennium, that resentment finally convinced the building’s landlord to paint over it. Meanwhile, Michael Jackson’s equally massive mural on nearby East 11th remains undisturbed, despite multiple allegations of child molestation, but I suppose that’s a post for another day.

In any case, when I first spied the “Gringo” mural in the early `80s, I had no idea who John Spacely was. To my impressionable mind, it was just a striking bit of artwork that completely captured the tenor of the times and vibe of the neighborhood. Contrary to my laboriously pedantic nature, I wasn’t particularly bothered by the unseemly specifics of its origins. It just seemed like the gateway to coolsville.

Years passed and the neighborhood kept changing. Around 1993, they erected Cooper Union’s first dormitory on the same strip, just north of where the Continental, St. Marks Pizza and the corner Optimo used to stand. As discussed here, commissioned as a freelance reporter by a colleague from LIFE Magazine, I wrote an article profiling the new dorm for Cooper Union’s alumni magazine and remember walking around the neighborhood interviewing locals about it. I vividly remember chatting with a Mohican kid in a vintage Germs t-shirt who ominously foretold the dull future of St. Marks Place. “I’m sure that’s just the beginning of the end,” he predicted. He wasn’t wrong. Seven years later, “Gringo” was whitewashed.

In 2019, meanwhile, news broke that an eight-story, mixed-use office building was to be built on the corner of St. Marks at Third Avenue, displacing all the businesses between the Cooper Union dorm and the corner, including the sites listed above and a particularly tragic McDonalds. Presumably, the pandemic slowed the process down, and the construction site sat in a state of eroding dormancy for a very long time.

To this day, even though the “Gringo” mural has been gone for about 23 years, my eyes still kind of expect to see it when I look to the east from Astor Place. Not to get too histrionic, but it’s much like how my eyes used to search for the two towers of the World Trade Center in the years after the events of September 11th. These were things that made a lasting impression that one didn’t expect to just vanish.

This week, however, I spotted something new that kind of took me by surprise (although it shouldn’t have). Taking an easterly route to my office, on Monday, I swung toward the Bowery and looked to my left and did sort of a double take. Not only was “Gringo” no longer there (duh!), but in the lot slated for the new office building, there now grew tall, infrastructural spires.

Dormant no longer, that building is definitely coming, and St. Marks will change even further.

 

Injury, Oatmeal, Salad & Resentment: A Summer 2023 Overview

Hey again, all. I apologize for the relative slow-down, once again, but here at the high-end of the summer downslope, life’s been a bit busy. I’m sure your own personal circumstances are no different.

By way of a quick update, though, at the risk of boring you right off the blog, I finished my fourth week in the boot and went back to wearing standard footwear. In exceptionally short order, however, my resumption of regular activity revealed that the foot in question didn’t actually feel that much better. I mean, sure, not walking directly on it for four weeks had alleviated some of the discomfort, but I’ve since still been grappling with soreness, stiffness and numbness. I’m still doing the bone-stimulation treatments (for whatever they’re worth), but I cannot say the problem has been meaningfullly rectified. Dr. Quip (you remember him) says to check back in with him in a month, wherein we’ll investigate whether I need physical therapy. Oh joy.

Elsewhere, I was breezily informed by my primary care physician that, in the wake of some long-delayed lab tests, evidently both my cholesterol and triglyceride numbers were higher than they should be. He then proceeded to give me a laundry list of comestibles and imbibables to curtail from my diet, like dairy, egg yolks, cheese, fatty meats, sweets, pasta, breads, rice, potatos and – WAIT FOR IT – alcohol. In typical form, I suggested adding oxygen, music and sex to the list to really seal the deal in making my life as joyless as possible. He laughed. I didn’t.

So, y’know, it’s been oatmeal, salad and resentment for me, in the past couple of weeks.

Summer’s end is already visible, and I still have one lobster bake, one funeral, one wedding and one daughter to bundle back off to college in Scotland before it’s all said and done. This all said, I do have a few new items on the burner that I hope to bring to life here soon, so watch this space.

Continue having a nice summer. Mind how you go.

Pee Wee...

I really didn't expect this one. Rest In Peace, sir.  This is still one of my all time favorites.