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.
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.
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.
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.
It might seem inconceivable that I’ve found yet another reason to write about “After Hours” (the last time, I believe, being this recent post), but here we go.
The reason is the somewhat sad news that 296 Spring Street, the building on the southwest corner of Spring and Hudson Streets that served as the location of Club Berlin in “After Hours” (as lengthily discussed here) is no more. As mentioned in that earlier post, there was an actual Club Berlin in SoHo back in the day, but it was over on West Broadway and Grand Street, I believe. Today, there’s a subterranean club on Second Street and Avenue A called Berlin NYC, but that’s not really related, I don’t believe.
In any case, 296 Spring was originally a bar called JJ’s West. Circa the filming of “After Hours,” Scorsese had its exterior painted in a checkerboard fashion to stay in tune, I guess, with the edgy fashion of the times. In later years, that corner became one of the neighborhood’s few delicatessens. It was seemingly the only spot for miles around to procure sundry items like beer and sandwiches in the dead of night.
My most vivid memory of that deli involves a late night in about 1990 at McGovern’s just down the block on Spring Street. Myself, my friend Sam and a young Australian lady named Madelene had gone to go see age-old noise-rock weirdos Alice Donut play. We stepped into that deli, after the show, and --- for whatever reason – bought three more beers with the intention of consuming them while we walked. We did so, but then just stood outside the deli – awkwardly – drinking those beers. The only reason it was awkward was that, at the time, Sam and I were sort of both courting fetching Aussie Madelene, and it was gradually becoming apparent that Sam had “won” this little competition.
The trouble was that he was having kind of a tough time conveying that information. As something of an ice-breaking punctuation, Sam gave the top of my beer bottle a tap with the bottom of his bottle, an annoying little stunt we were wont to do that usually resulted in the recipient’s beer foaming over. As the suds washed over my fingers, I managed to figure out what he was trying to imply, and I retaliated in kind, unwittingly using too much force as I brought the bottom of my bottle down onto his. The narrow rim at the top of his bottle quietly snapped off, leaving behind a sharply edged shard that no one initially noticed.
I stammered out some anemic comment like, “okay, well, I guess I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” leaving them to what I imagined would be doubtlessly amorous shenanigans. As I was turning to walk away, I watched Sam obliviously raise his now-broken bottle back towards his mouth, and time started to move in slow motion. I frantically flung my arm out to intercept the sharp end before it reached Sam’s face, slamming the bottle to the ground where it shattered, and practically tripping over myself in the process. Not knowing that he’d been about to puncture his face (which also would have been entirely my fault), Sam was understandably confused and angry, compounding the already embarrassing circumstances of the whole scenario. I explained the whole sequence of events, which frankly sounded dubious at best, and I’m not entirely sure either of them believed me.
I started skulking in the direction of the subway back to my then-home on the Upper East Side, until I realized that in only a few short hours’ time, I’d have to come back down to SoHo to open up at the art gallery on Mercer Street where I was working, at the time. I ended up drearily walking to the gallery at about four in the morning, unlocking the door and sleeping on a narrow bench behind the rickety metal desk until opening time. It was not a great evening.
Be that as it may, that deli lasted well into the new millennium. I’m not sure when it officially closed up shop, but in the last few years, the façade was all boarded up.
Sure enough, here in late July of 2024, all that remains of the deli and the location of Club Berlin is a hole in the ground.
Today, 296 Spring Street is gone. McGovern's closed at some point and became a club called Sway, although the McGovern's sign still hangs out front. Madelene ended up breezily fooling around with both Sam and I before repairing back to Australia, never to be seen again. Sam moved to Portland, Maine, then to Seattle, got married, had kids and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he still lives today.
I'm seeing a surprising amount of weepy teeth-gnashing on social media about the closing of the Astor Place Starbuck's, which -- to my mind -- as a single establishment, almost singularly typified the disemboweling of the original character of the neighborhood (later further eroded by Kmart, CVS, Raising Cane chicken, Wegman’s, etc. etc.). I still lovingly remember the Astor Riviera (which you can see here, courtesy of the amazing Glenn Losack) that held court on that corner well prior to the arrival of the Seattle coffee chain.
Someone commented in response to this same topic on a friend of mine's Facebook page: "Vampire landlords are sucking the blood out of this city." While, true, yes, they are, the notion of a fucking Starbucks being indicative of "the blood" of this city made me wince.
I’ve wrung this rant-rag dry, by now, but New York City used to be comprised of an amazing network of independent mom’n’pop ventures, not plagued with endless fast-food franchises and big-box retail outlets. That shit was for the strip malls and the suburbs.
But, sure enough, largely thanks to the efforts of this fucker, Starbucks moved into town in the mid-`90s, and proceeded to spread faster than a spilled cup of pumpkin spice latte.
My favorite memory of the Astor Riviera involves a friend of mine and I ordering a pair of milkshakes there, once, on a hot summer day. An endearingly surly waiter brought them over and plunked them down on our table, only without straws. When we spoke up about needing straws, he took two out of his apron and blithely tossed them in our direction from about a yard away, which reduced us to hysterics. So, yeah, maybe the service wasn’t exactly top notch, but I’d take the Astor Riviera over a Starbucks every single day of the apocalypse.
ADDENDUM: Someone on what used to be Twitter actually typed this with a presumably straight face:
End of an era. For old NYU grads, Starbucks on Astor place and the Kmart by it felt like forever places. St. Marks is also not what it used to be.
It almost goes without saying that the next occupant of that stately space will be another bank, a fucking cannabis dispensary or yet another addition to the maddening proliferation of fitness outlets that now define "activewear alley" or the "fitness corridor." Fuck all that.
You can see “coming soon – the Astor Riviera” (misspelled as “reviera”) in this clip from “Downtown `81,” starring Jean-Michel Basquiat and, in this scene, man-from-the-past David McDermott.
Meanwhile, my feelings about the departure of Starbucks are best summed up by this clip of the Brothers Ramone.
Spotted the clip below, this morning, and it struck me for two reasons. Firstly, it underscored the recent negation of the MTV News archives, which still completely confounds me. Secondly, it reminds me of a period of my life that now seems quite a long, goddamn time ago.
And while, yes, 32 years is indeed a long goddamn time, I can still pretty vividly remember this day. I believe I’ve spoken about it here before (I have), but I attended Sonic Youth’s July 4 performance, with Sun Ra opening, at the Central Park Summerstage in the balmy summer of 1992.
I would have been 25, at the time, and working as an editorial assistant at LIFE Magazine. I want to say I went with my friends Rob D. and Vicky S., and I remember being frankly confused by Sun Ra and, if I’m being honest, kinda bored by most of Sonic Youth’s set as, by this time, they were heading off in a direction that I didn’t find quite as compelling as their weirder, noisier material from just a couple of short years earlier. They played a bunch of stuff that would surface later that month on Dirty, which I wasn’t that into. But, they were still Sonic Youth, thus — still cool. When they launched into favorites like “Teen Age Riot,” “The Burning Spear” and “Expressway to Yr Skull,” I was well enthused, but disappointed that they didn’t bust out “Death Valley `69.”
I also remember milling around before hand in the park outside the Summerstage area, chatting briefly with R.E.M’s Pete Buck, who was just kinda hanging out, and getting in a strange argument with some dude about the politics of Laibach. He was adamant that they were nazis, while I was countering that their aesthetic was archly ironic … he walked away unconvinced.
In any case, in the eras since this clip was shot, Sonic Youth would release nine more studio albums before splitting up over the sad dissolution of the marriage of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. The rising wave of “Alternative Rock” — as a mainstream concern, at least — would shortly crest and summarily crash, paving the way for flatly indefensible garbage like Blink-182, Creed, Linkin Park and Avril Lavigne, not to mention the inevitable return of glossily slick teen pop ala Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and the like. Hip-Hop — then in the throes of what many largely consider its “golden era” — would continue to rise, mutate, and shortly completely overtake all things rock in terms of the music of popular youth culture. Sun Ra, meanwhile, would die less than a year after this show.
In the weeks that followed this afternoon, I embarked on a dubious office romance with a young lady from LIFE’s production department that — not unlike “Alternative Rock” — would crest and crash in remarkably short order, leaving me shaking my fist at the notion of a beneficent god for honestly far longer than I should’ve. I got laid off from LIFE in 1993, but got picked up by TIME and stayed there for 12 years before splitting for — wait for it — MTV News, who’d, in turn, lay me off two summers after that. I’d then kill time at MSN for two years before joining the website of the TODAY Show (what was I thinking?) for about four and half years before unceremoniously getting the keys to the street, again, and floundering for several months before landing the job I have now, where I’ve been for eight years and a little bit.
Oh, I also got married in 2001 and had two kids.
But back in July of 1992, none of that had happened yet….
I’m always amazed when someone writes in about something I posted eons ago. I mean, I am still routinely fielding comments about the whole Radiohead/Chuck Kolsterman thing (a story that will seemingly never go away), but when someone zeroes in on something a little more fleeting, I always get a tiny jolt of validation.
Case in point: In 2013, I posted a trioofentries speculating on the origins of a specific pair of stenciled depictions of an artist that were formerly spray-painted virtually all over SoHo. The original featured the head of an Asian man with spiky hair, framed by the legend, “There’s a New Kid Town.” In due course, meanwhile, someone started spray-painting a morbid parody of that, featuring a replication of the head, but with smoking gun next to it under the unfortunate declaration, “End the Joke!”
I did eventually track down photographic evidence of each, but never really got the whole backstory. Eleven years later, meanwhile, I just fielded a note from a reader named Uli, who is a – wait for it – “ stencil graffiti researcher.” In response to those two posts, Uli wrote:
"I got some news for you. Did you find the artist yet? I found a good photo where you can read the slogan next to the portrait: “There's a new kid in Town.”
He then linked to a frankly remarkable trove of street-art photographs, which you can see here, saying:
“Those photos were shot by late stencil Polish artist Tomaz Sikorski on his visits in NYC in the mid 1980s. Here is the one. I think you did not mention that yet. Also interesting: In a French book, “Pochoir a la Une,” Paris 1986 on page 99. There is an illustration of that very stencil. Another photo of the suicide parody of it is here, and a nearly untouched version of the suicide version is in David Robinson's book SoHo Walls from 1990 on page 72.”
So, there’s a little more information about those stencils. Below are just a couple of shots from Sikorski’s amazing street-art page, though. Check them out!
The shot captured above is almost undoubtedly the work of the late Fran Powers of Modern Clix. The figure with the oddly pointed head was his de facto insignia, as can seen on this post.
I couldn't begin to tell you with the stoop above is (somewhere in the East Village, I'm assuming), but it's the same stairs that served as the location for this MTV News spot on the great Lydia Lunch.
I've shared several of these before, but herewith a clutch of photos of mine of the East Village and Lower East Side in the mid-to-late `90s and early 2000's.
It’s not very often that I go drinking in east Midtown, but when I do, … you might just find me at Strangelove, located just a few steps to the east of East 53rd and Third Avenue.
Insufferable music geeks of a certain stripe will doubtlessly recognize that address as the location of one of the Ramones’ more infamous songs. Back in the mid-to-late 70’s, 53rd & Third was a notorious strip of real estate for male, teenaged hustlers looking to turn tricks for quick cash from a very specific demographic. As documented in the prose of late junkie-turned-poet-turned-author-turned-punk rocker Jim Carroll and in song by Dee Dee Ramone, the furtive business transactions of 53rd and Third provided them both with the financial wherewithall to feed their respective drug habits and the inspiration for their art, so to speak, although while Carroll was quite candid about his doings with the cruisers, Dee Dee couched his with a bit of poetic license. While he expresed in Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain’s “Please Kill Me” that he could only write songs through personal experience, the protagonist of “53rd & Third” claims to be a Green Beret that served in Vietnam before he stabs his John to prove he’s not a “sissy.” I can’t honestly say if Dee Dee ever stabbed anyone, but he certainly never served in Vietnam. But anyway…
To stand on the corner of 53rd and Third Avenue today, you’d never know such activities ever took place there. But continue walking towards Second Avenue, and you will eventually pass the stoop of Strangelove. I can’t honestly remember when they first opened their doors, but they’ve probably been open for about ten years, maybe? (If you know, do write in). Taking their name, presumably, from either the Depeche Mode single or Stanley Kubrick’s fabled anti-war satire (or possibly both), Strangelove has a raison d'être that is pretty straightforward – “Cheap Beer/Punk Rock.” Being that I’m an avowed connoisseur of both, you can imagine why the place might be a favorite of mine, albeit in a neighborhood I’m less likely to be hanging around in.
I actually drove past Strangelove earlier this week during a woefully expensive yellow cab ride (learn from my mistakes, people), and was suddenly struck by something.
Back in 2012, I’d come across a photograph of the legendary Johnny Thunders, the former guitarist of the New York Dolls and The Heartbreakers, (whose birthday it was yesterday), stepping off of a stoop on a midtown street (although the original source material wrongly identified that street as St. Marks Place). After my initial post, my comrade Bob Egan of PopSpots weighed in with usual authoritative aplomb and extensive photo documentation to support his declaration that the building Thunders was depicted exiting was 229 East 53rd Street. See that post here.
In 2012, 229 East 53rd Street was a wine bar called Cello. Here in 2024, however, Cello has since moved across the street, and 229 East 53rd Street is now … wait for it … Strangelove.
If they don’t already, I’m pretty sure the folks at Strangelove would love to know that. Here’s that picture now:
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