Rumors have been circulating that Teresa Taylor, one very important half of the two-person percussive team that fueled the most celebrated, most notorious and most gonzo iteration of Texas’ inimitable Butthole Surfers, is in hospice and shortly to say goodbye. I don’t know the woman. I never met her, but the news struck me as terribly sad, as I have long counted myself as a fan of her band.
While the band accrued a reputation that, in many instances, is blithely reduced to cartoonishly profane shock-rock shtick, it must be emphatically underscored that no matter how bizarre their aesthetic, there was quite assuredly NO ONE like the Butthole Surfers, and Taylor’s contributions to same were a crucial ingredient. And, yes, indie cinephiles, she also had an iconic, fleetingly-star-making cameo in fellow Texan Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” (see poster image above).
I first went to see the Butthole Surfers — at the time, somewhat lazily lumped in with a slew of hardcore punk bands, although the `Surfers eschewed all semblance of that scene’s sonic uniformity — at a low-ceilinged, rec-room-like bar called Stache’s in Columbus, Ohio during my freshman year of college in 1986. The only problem was — they didn’t show up. Earlier in the day, we were told, the band had parted ways with their bass player. He’d either voluntarily exited — or was forcibly ejected — from their touring van while said vehicle was in motion. So we got our money back.
The Butthole Surfers returned a year later, though, in the much more expansive Newport Music Hall up the block from Stache’s, and promptly made amends for their earlier misfire.
You hear lots of talk about various bands being “scary” or “dangerous” or “volatile,” but with the possible exception of maybe the late GG Allin & the Murder Junkies, nobody really held a credible claim to those descriptors more than the Butthole Surfers. Assuming the stage in a thick, aromatic fog, the band arrived with a screen behind them, showing film loops of natural catastrophes, barnyard anomalies and some deeply disquieting footage of reconstructive genital surgery. Lead singer Gibby Hayes stalked the stage with a bullhorn and repeatedly smacked a lit cymbal doused with lighter fluid, sending splattery plumes of worryingly real flame towards the ceiling. One got the impression that this stage flourish had never been mentioned to the venue’s management. The sound was dense, impossibly loud and trippy in a manner that suggested all involved were experiencing a pronounced lysergic augmentation. Behind Gibby, guitarist Paul Leary, bassist Jeff Pinkus and a not-at-all-titilating topless dancer with devil horns and Fu Manchu beard named Kathleen were twin drummers King Coffey and Teresa Taylor, hammering away on their instruments with a synchronized precision that entirely belied their bug-eyed, bedraggled appearance. Beyond Gibby’s vocal theatrics and Paul Leary’s guitar squall, THISwas the core of the Butthole Surfers, a pounding, tribal battery that never stopped reminding you that this band was a living, breathing, moving, roiling organism. To witness the Butthole Surfers during this particular era was genuinely nothing short of seismically astonishing,…. fucking astonishing.
I’ve posted several entries about that show here on this blog. I went on to see the band several times after that, as well, and while never quite as jarringly indelible as that first experience, they absolutely never left an audience indifferent.
Bliss Blood from the Pain Teens posted the video below of the Butthole Surfers in action from around the same era as the show I detailed above, and it is perfectly indicative of the chaos of their live experience, and the force of supernature that is Teresa Taylor.
Yep, it's another antiquated documentary about graffiti, this one a British production from 1976. I love the way the voice-over in the beginning pronounced SoHo. The theme music is also sort of strangely unsettling.
Prompted by an invocation of Tama Janowitz on the most recent episode of “Desperately Seeking the `80s,” I was back-n’-forthing with a friend about the once-celebrated scribe's endeavors beyond the written page, and cited cinematic opuses like the adaptation of her breakout novel, “Slaves of New York” (starring Bernadette Peters … which I briefly discussed without much charity here) and “Mondo New York,” only to check my facts and realize that Ms. Janowitz had fuck-all to do with the latter. Ah, the tendrils of senility are flowering, even now.
Certainly born of the same era and aesthetic as Ms. Janowitz, “Mondo New York” was actually the brain child of director Harvey Keith and writer David Silver. Released in 1988, it featured a series of vignettes starring era-appropriate downtown luminaries like Joey Arias, Joe Coleman, Karen Finley, Phoebe LeGere, Ann Magnuson, John Sex, Annie Sprinkle and Flaming Pablum-favorite, Lydia Lunch, all embroiled in a wide array of diverse scenarios. Sounds promising, right?
To be perfectly honest, I rented it a few years back (having not seen it upon its original release in the late `80s), and I have to say … perhaps it was eye-opening, at the time, but I frankly had a hard time sitting through it. In fact, I think I got irretrievably bored halfway through and abandoned ship. I have loads of time for anything Lydia Lunch is involved in, but she only really supplies a suitably smarmy prologue and then vanishes from proceedings .. unless, of course, she comes back towards the end, but I didn’t make it that far.
In discussing same, I went to try and find just Lydia’s aforementioned prologue, … but actually found the whole film on YouTube, so ….dear reader … take a look and decide for yourself.
Over on Facebook, my friend and fellow NYHC acolyte Lou posted a shot from a deleted scene from "The Warriors." Lou writes
A scene that never made it into the movie or as a deleted scene. The Warriors walking through The Savage Huns territory. It was filmed in an alley in Soho.
Here's that photo now....
Now, I like to think I'm fairly familiar with the topography of lower Manhattan, at this point, but I can't think of an alley in SoHo that matches this terrain. It's certainly not Cortlandt Alley off of Canal.
I postulated that this might be St. John's Lane, an alley that extends between Laight Street and Beach Street at the mouth of Tribeca, just steps to the west of Sixth Avenue. There's been a lot of development since 1979, but here's that strip now...
It feels strange to discern that despite my blog being topically preoccupied with my youth in New York City, in the 16 plus years I’ve been writing Flaming Pablum, I have only mentioned the fabled Dorrian’s Red Hand in a single instance, and then only in passing.
What makes that strange is that for someone growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the neighborhood I called home from my birth in 1967 to my departure for the greener pastures downtown in 1996, Dorrian’s was this hugely significant locale, for a lot of folks.
By way of quick explanation, for those who may not be familiar with the establishment in question, Dorrian’s Red Hand (I’ve never been quite sure what the full name was about, but something from hoary Celtic lore, I’m assuming) has been a neighborhood Irish bar perched on the southeast corner of East 84th Street and Second Avenue (directly across the street from former comic-book stronghold, Supersnipe, for all my fellow nerds out there) since 1960. During the height of the `80s, of course, Dorrian’s developed a pronounced reputation for its permissive door policy, making it an absolutely crucial destination for, shall we say, aspiring drinkers of smaller-than-necessarily-legal years. For whatever reason, Dorrian’s rather brazenly got away with serving under-age patrons on the regular, and made a presumably lucrative business doing so.
The odd thing about that, though, was that it was largely perceived as being basically “perfectly okay” by both a nation of (probably equally drinky) UES parents and, evidently, the local constabulary. I don’t ever remember the bar getting busted for what was basically their bread-&-butter business (that being the hawking of booze to minors), but I guess the pervading sentiment was “better at Dorrian’s than somewhere else” (as if Dorrian’s was, like, your kindly grandmother’s basement rec room or something).
That, of course, would all change in the wake of one humid August night in 1986.
I’m referring, obviously, to the notorious “Preppy Murder” case wherein one Robert Chambers left Dorrian’s with one Jennifer Levin. From Dorrian’s, the pair adjourned into the sepulchral darkness of Central Park. At 6:15 the following morning, Levin’s half-naked corpse was found by a tree near the back of the Metropolitan Museum. Chambers was arrested and shortly charged with strangling her during what he continues to allege was a bout of “rough sex.” In pursuit of a bargain, Chambers pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter, for which he was sentenced a five-to-15 year term.
Following the media frenzy that was that strenuously salacious trial, the Levin family understandably went after Dorrian’s, alleging that the bar overserved Chambers that evening, a claim which Dorrian’s later settled out of court. In due course, Chambers went to prison, Levin went to the cemetery and Dorrian’s, more or less, went back to business as usual … well, following a brief loss of their liquor license and some dodgy tax trouble.
The ramifications of the “Preppy Murder” rippled out across the city’s nightlife, and certain businesses all around town that once turned blind eyes were suddenly cracking down and asking for IDs. Many ventures actually closed. I’m thinking specifically about Danceteria on West 21st Street, a club that was known for its similarly permissive stance, although I’ve heard rumors that … there was another reason, but that’s a post for another day.
In the ensuing three decades since that fateful night, Chambers served out his full, 15-year term -– albeit with numerous disciplinary infractions -– and was released in 2003, only to hopscotch in and out of prison for myriad drug offenses over the next several years. As of today, he’s currently incarcerated at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility upstate. He could get out as soon as 2024, but I wouldn’t bet any large sums that he’d be out for long.
Meanwhile, I’ve never really been able to reconcile how Dorrian’s managed to soldier on, following the toxic PR fallout from the “Preppy Murder” case, but somehow, it bounced back. It’s still open and considered a venerable neighborhood institution to this day. I cannot attest to the current scene being in any way comparable to the way it was back in the `80s, but I’ve heard tell that, at the very least, the surface-level trappings are more or less all still there. The awning’s still red. The tablecloths are still the same red-checkered pattern. The jukebox is also evidently still filled with `80s favorites, which is odd, considering that one might have assumed the bar would like to move on from the associations of that era. In the `90s, I actually interviewed their door-minder Kerry for an article I was penning for New York Perspectives about great Upper East Side jukeboxes, although can't remember what I said about it.
For the longest time, I avoided talking about Dorrian’s Red Hand because, well, it was just never my scene. I mean, I certainly did darken its doors on several occasions, as did countless people from both my grammar and high schools, but never felt particularly comfortable doing so (especially when I was still officially underage). More to the point, though, while I grew up on the Upper East Side and attended the same schools as the regulars at Dorrian’s, I didn’t really share an affinity for that crowd and its accompanying trappings and priorities. I harbored no desire to be perceived as a prep in any capacity. My former brother-in-law once memorably described my sartorial aesthetic as having one foot in Brooks Brothers and the other in CBGB, an uncomfortably incongruous amalgam of styles that found no safe haven in ventures like Dorrian’s Red Hand. The fact that I was also an awkward, pointedly self-conscious geek certainly didn’t help matters.
In the latter half of my high school years, I lived only a couple of blocks away from Dorrian’s, but, of an evening, was usually more likely to be found skulking about on the edifice of the Metropolitan Museum (as detailed here) or tucked discreetly just inside the entry way to Central Park on the southwest corner of 79th & Fifth Avenue, furtively sipping contraband beers in the company of certain comrades next to a boombox playing favorites by Rush, AC/DC and Iron Maiden (we referred to this spot as “Klub 79”). By the time I was actively and legally going to bars, my UES/Yorkville watering holes of choice were either The Gaf on East 85th (long gone) and Ryan’s Daughter on East 84th, just steps off First Avenue. Ryan’s Daughter had a vastly superior jukebox and the diminished likelihood of abject douchebaggery you were likelyguaranteed to encounter up the block at Dorrian’s. Also, by this point, I was way more than likely to be headed to points downtown than spending time in the (to my mind, at the time) cripplingly staid environs of the Upper East Side.
But, there’s another reason I’ve been disinclined to delve too deeply into the story of Dorrian’s, Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin, and that’s because I used to know Robert Chambers.
As fleetingly alluded in a few posts, over the years, “Robert C.” and I both attended St. David’s on East 89th street. Whenever this is invoked “in real life,” I am usually very quick to point out that “when I knew him,” we were both children, presumably prior to his gradual transformation into a thieving, drug-fueled and murderous sociopath. Robert was in the grade ahead of me, but unlike most of the other boys in his class, never lorded that over we underclassmen or treated us like a dick. As an irretrievably hapless nerd, I certainly knew more than my fair share of bullies, but Robert was never one of them. I don’t mean to sugarcoat anything or condone his actions later in life, but when we were schoolmates, Robert was a perfectly good kid. He even saved my friend Spike and I from being robbed and beaten up (as recounted on this ancient post). Sorry if that doesn’t jibe with the popular narrative, but there it is.
But my reasons for never really discussing it here before have less to do with being concerned about besmirching Robert Chambers’ name (I’d suggest he’s already done a fine job of that himself), and more about how the community from which all these figures sprang still seems to feel about it. Perhaps I’ve been entirely projecting, all these years, but I get the sense that a whole lot of folks would rather this story just not be discussed any further. Granted, it’s a dark, ugly chapter that has been irretrievably sensationalized, but one gets the pervasive vibe that that’s not the reason. It still hits home very deeply for a lot of people on a level I’m not entirely sure I can empathize with, and I don’t know that I’ll ever reconcile that.
Incidentally, while the case predictably inspired a host of horrible made-for-tv movies, the “Preppy Murder” case also went onto inspire several musicians. Along with prompting songs by Hole and The Killers (two bands I have zero fascination for), it also manifested as the topic of the song “Eliminator Jr.” on Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. Here’s them playing that now, not that you’d necessarily be able to tell it’s about that…
There’s been a lot of chitter-chatter, of late, about certain characters in Jordan Peele’s new horror film, “Nope,” wearing period-specific band t-shirts by less-householdy names like the Wipers, Mr. Bungle and the Jesus Lizard. Now, if you’ve spent any significant amount of time reading my silly blog, you probably know I have more than a little to say about the sporting of band t-shirts and the protocols and etiquette thereof. This all said, I haven’t seen “Nope,” nor do I have any immediate plans to, so I cannot credibly weigh in much further. Suffice to say, however, that I am strenuously skeptical that I would approve of the usage.
Never a band for the fair-weather fan or the faint of heart, here’s the mighty Jesus Lizard doing their thing on the fabled stage of CBGB during the dying embers of August 1992. At the time (and, honestly, still) I was more enamored of their pals and frequent touring companions in Cop Shoot Cop, local boys I’ve devoted far too much bandwidth to here. My friend Joanne and I would regularly debate the merits of each ensemble with a degree of fervor which suggested that fisticuffs were an entirely viable recourse to resolve the conflict. In retrospect, I’m not sure why we needed to establish which outfit was dominant — they were both equally fucking brilliant.
Regrettably, at the time this performance was captured on video, I was not in attendance (although I’m reasonably certain Cop Shoot Cop were also on the bill). In late August of 1992, I was very busily nursing a wounded, histrionic heart from being on the losing end of an office-romance breakup and invariably waging a doomed campaign, that evening, to restore what was never going to be meaningful repaired. Ah, … youth.
Flaming Pablumfavorite RB Korbet exhumed this footage and put it up on Facebook this morning, and I felt compelled to share it here. With all due respect to my beloved Cop Shoot Cop, there were truly precious few bands as visceral and unpredictable as the Jesus Lizard at full throttle, and this is ample proof of that.
Every now and again, someone will latch onto an old post of mine and share it on social media. It’s rare that I’m able to track down how the post is being framed or re-purposed, but I’m also curious as to which posts garner such second winds. I noticed one such post get a re-discovery boost today, and felt compelled to bring proceedings up to speed.
Regular readers might remember an entry I posted here back in 2015 about an arguably obscure British band from the early `70s called Dr. Feelgood (not to be confused with the Motley Crue album of the same name). In a nutshell, Dr. Feelgood was a “pub rock” band who played a taut, hardscrabble brand of R&B (and by that I mean guitar-based rhythm and blues, not schmaltzy loverman ballads) in an era when the pervading tastes were more inclined towards mellow, Laurel Canyon-styled singer/songwriters and the more indulgent aspects of shaggy prog rock. They were loud, bawdy and aggressive and played songs that were comparatively short, sharp and shocking. Basically, Dr. Feelgood were out-of-step punks before punk was punk.
In any case, this particular post of mine concentrated on a tiny aspect of a documentary made about them by filmmaker Julien Temple called “Oil City Confidential.” In one fleeting seqeunce therein, Temple divulges that former lead singer Lee Brilleaux (above) had passed away in 1994 from cancer. While recounting same, Temple showed strangely incongruous footage of a tiny memorial plaque in Brilleaux’s honor on a park bench in my own Manhattan’s West Village. Acting on a hunch, I tracked down the actual bench and plaque, as documented in that post, in Jackson Square. On the surface, it made absolutely zero sense to have a memorial plaque to Lee Brilleaux in the West Village of Manhattan, given that the fabled frontman never lived on these shores, nor had any tangible connection to New York City.
Towards the end of that post, meanwhile, I disclosed that a compatriot of mine had solved the riddle, sharing that a nearby art gallery, White Columns, had done a whole installation about Dr. Feelgood, one aspect of which was affixng Lee’s small plaque to a bench in Jackson Square. The link I posted in that orignal entry no longer goes to the explainer page, but I found another page with the full story (and pictures) still available here. Apparently, the plaque was put up at some point in 2005, a decade before I discovered it through Julien Temple’s film.
Noting that my post was being re-circulated, however, I thought it was prudent, once again, to bring things up to date. If you go looking for Lee Brilleaux’s memorial plaque here in 2022, I am sad to relay that you will not find it. For whatever reason, what started off as the only memorial park-bench plaque in Jackson Square has been replaced by a slew of new ones commemorating since-deceased figures who, more than likely, actually have some genuine connection to the park, unlike dear, departed Lee. That makes sense, of course, but I miss the strange little anomaly of that furtive tribute.
Meanwhile, for those curious, here’s some great footage of Dr. Feelgood in action, taken from a French television program from 1976 called “Beau Fixe Sur Pithiviers.” The band shows up in a vintage blue convertible in the beginning, then plug in and rock your face off starting at around 01:59.
Having grown up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the `70s and `80s, I feel reasonably confident in suggesting that, like most of my fellow UES residents, I probably took the Metropolitan Museum of Art for granted. Here was this truly monolithic cultural institution of almost incalculable significance, but it was right there for us at all times – virtually at our beck and call. My mother started bringing my sister and I there as tiny children – primarily as a time-filling activity, probably, more than as a means of broadening our little minds. It was an affordable, educational and versatile destination. Sure, it housed priceless antiquities and rarified works of art, but it was also this giant, labyrinthine palace filled with stately galleries, towering ceilings, grandiose vistas and sweeping staircases, to say nothing of all its hidden nooks, secluded chambers and clandestine meeting spots. Not only was it home to countless items of ravishing beauty, the building in itself was an astonishing work of art. Once ensconced inside, we were let off our little leashes and set free to explore it. And explore we did.
As a child, it was a place of genuine wonderment. I remember regularly spending hours in the Arms & Armor wing, marveling at the gleaming knights on horseback and feeling creeped out and claustrophobic in the narrow corridor of the tomb at the entrance of the Egyptian Wing (technically the Mataba Tomb of Perneb). I remember being taken to see the gigantic tree, every Christmas, and staring at all the Renaissance filigree arranged all over the boughs and the Neapolitan Baroque creche at its base. I remember being taken to “luncheons” with my grandmother in the (long-since vanished) restaurant in the southern wing (just beyond the Greek and Roman statuary). The tables were organized around an elaborate fountain, if memory serves, wherein many a coin was tossed. In later years, I remember the much-feted openings of the American Wing, the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing filled with oddities from far-flung islands and, of course, the acquisition of the iconic Temple of Dendur.
There was also a great deal of fun in simply getting lost in the museum – willfully charging as deep and as far into the massive building to see how disoriented you could actually get. I remember “discovering” whole new exhibits and comparatively under-celebrated galleries this way. That sheer, disorienting vastness of the museum is also a recurring theme in its lore, as documented in films like “Dressed to Kill” and “The Thomas Crown Affair” and in an iconic children’s book called “From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiller,” wherein two kids (not at all unlike my older sister and I) carefully manage to elude security and spend several, painstakingly strategized nights within the museum. I’m also reminded of a passage in my (cheap plug) friend Dave Gilbert’s novel “& Sons” wherein the protagonist is informed by the girl he is romantically pursuing that she is hiding “somewhere” within the sprawling confines of the museum. She offers a beguiling challenge in that if he manages to find her before an appointed time, he gets to sleep with her. I won’t ruin it for you by telling you how that ends.
By the time I got to high school in the early `80s, I knew the ins and outs of the museum like the back of my hand. At this stage of the proceedings, while we might still stroll around within the giant building, we’d become more inclined to hang out on, around and literally on the very edifice of it. The iconic front steps were frequently a spot for gratuitous loitering. The sloped rear lawn directly behind the glassed-in courtyard of the American Wing was a particularly favorite plot of grass whereupon certain friends of mine would regularly convene and waste time over several spring and early summer afternoons. Less salubriously, in the summer of 1986, one Jennifer Levin met her grisly end at the hands of a former grammar schoolmate of mine just steps away from that favorite plot, but that’s a post for another day. During that same era, a certain friend of mine and I discovered a handy little alcove tucked just behind and underneath the southernmost pedestal on the front façade, a hidden little perch that became the perfect locale for surreptitious, evening get-togethers. I’m not sure when they closed it off, but that covert little spot cannot be accessed today. Just as well, though, as the outdoor security has invariably been beefed up since those days.
My visits to the Metropolitan Museum largely tapered off again until I had kids of my own. When they were still delightfully small, I replicated my mother’s methods and frequently took them there to while away an afternoon or resourcefully defy a rainy day. I remember being struck by how – when met with certain works of art – they assumed the same comedic poses my sister and I used to when we first encountered them. Much as evoked in this post about Holden Caulfield and the Museum of Natural History, I love the feeling of (relative) permanence at the Metropolitan. Times, trends, circumstances and chapters come and go, but most of the familiar items at the Metropolitan tirelessly remain right where you left them. There is comfort in that constancy.
In more recent years, my daughter attended high school at Marymount directly across the street from the Museum. As a result, she, too, spent hours inside and out of it in much the same way I’d done years earlier. She now knows it in a manner that is both parallel to mine but still entirely her own. I love that.
My reason for writing this weepy entry stem from two discoveries, the first being the photo at the top of this post, which I brazenly purloined off of the New York Times’ excellent Tumblr, The Lively Morgue. Snapped by one Neil Boenzi on a hot June day in 1976 (I’d have been in Fourth Grade, at the time), it shows a group of kids frolicking in one of the (old) iconic fountains. Even back then, this sort of activity was frowned upon, but hey … a hot day is a hot day. Today, those fountains have been replaced by new ones that put on the sort of hydraulic….ummm…. aquabatics one might expect to see in the fountain of a Las Vegas hotel. That they were donated by the noxious Koch Brothers makes them even more lamentable.
The other discovery is this weird little video below. Also shot in 1976, this details a day in the life of one Ray Cusie, a faithful employee of the museum, at the time (might he be still?), wherein he recounts his duties in the audiovisual department. It’s a telling little glimpse back in time to a seemingly simpler era of New York City (does anyone have accents like this anymore?) and a love-letter to the institution in question.
I’m also quite amused by the incongruous workout scene, wherein our Ray takes a breather from his daily schedule, puts on a “heavy metal” record (a strangely instrumental cover of “Radar Love” by Golden Earring) and demonstrates his weight-lifting prowess.
Prompted by a regularly re-circulated photograph of Pussy Galore and its invocation on the most recent episode of the podcast I recently discussed, Desperately Seeking the `80s, I did some blithe YouTube-searching this AM and came across this relatively new documentary about the Rivington School. I posted about same back in 2015, and like the videos on that post, this one was put together by Rik Little, the figure behind The Church of Shooting Yourself (more about him here).
These days, nothing so interesting really transpires on Rivington Street, but suffice to say …. `twas not always thus. Photo above courtesy of Toyo Tsuchiya/Gallery 98.
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