Yeah, sorry, it’s another tenuously Sex Pistols-related post. Sort of. Deal with it.
I’ve posted a couple of entires about John Lydon’s tenure in New York City here before, but this video below caught my eye, as he gives some detail about his accommodations here prior to the release of the This is What You Want, This is What You Get album. In this interview from 1983, Lydon asserts that when in New York, he was living in a “huge loft with a stage” somewhere in a “commercial zone.” He then goes on to recount his experience of filming “The Order of Death” with Harvey Keitel (which I discussed back here).
While it’s inarguably true that John Lydon has since become something a laborious provocateur (wasn’t he always?) with a desperate penchant for contrarianism, I am still intrigued by the notion of where he might have been living.
My first hunch is that the “huge loft” was somewhere in SoHo, which – back in 1983 – indeed was still something of a “commercial zone.” I’m sure the invoked Martin Atkins knows.
No one wants to know about your intra-band acrimony. No one needs to know your current thoughts about the monarchy. No one needs to hear your sympathetic feeling for Donald Trump. No one wants to hear that you’d rather listen to Steely Dan than your own music. No one needs to see your new revisionist biopic. That story’s already been told more times than is necessary. No one needs to buy yet another compilation of material that’s already been released dozens of times. You released one perfect album. Respect that.
If I recall correctly, I remember first seeing “This is Spinal Tap” with my mother shortly after its 1984 release at a lavish movie theatre on West 57th, just down the road a piece from Carnegie Hall. As an avowed heavy metal acolyte, then as now, I was particularly impressed that Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean had gone the extra mile in their satire by actually writing, recording and performing all original music for the film and its accompanying soundtrack album (which, I believe, I went out and bought the same day). They cut no corners.
Clumsily marketed as some sort of slapstick endeavor (the original poster actually featured a guitar twisted into a pretzel mimicking the poster for Zucker-Abrams-Zucker’s “Airplane”), “This is Spinal Tap” was a thousand times more nuanced and clever than just a string of cheap gags. Written with a genuine reverence for the music it was parodying, the film hit a little too close to home for several musicians (I believe Gene Simmons says he can’t watch it to this day). It was also a watershed moment not only for Christopher Guest (who’d go onto write and release similarly studied parodies like “Best in Show” and “Waiting for Guffman”) but in popular culture writ large — whether tongue-in-cheek or not, it birthed the concept of (and officially coined the term)… “rockumentary.”
I remember unapologetically putting tracks from the `Tap album — notably “Hell Hole,” “Big Bottom” (an all-bass composition that predated my beloved Cop Shoot Cop by five or so years), “Tonight We’re Gonna Rock You Tonight,” “Stonehenge" and “Sex Farm,” to name my favorites — on several mix tapes, sandwiched between songs by bona fide metal bands singing no-less-ridiculous songs like “Looks That Kill,” “Number of the Beast, “All Men Play on Ten,” “Balls to the Wall" and “Animal (Fuck Like a Beast).” I was entirely onboard team Spinal Tap, and even snapped up their Christmas single, “Christmas with The Devil.”
Thirty-eight (!!!) years later, the film, for the most part, still holds up, its iconic lines like “Hello, Cleveland,” “Mime is money,” “These go to Eleven” and “Have a Good Time, All the Time!” having been fully baked into the pop cultural vernacular. Comedy, culture and music have all changed so much in the ensuing decades that it can’t help, in parts, seeming like a dated period piece, but I don’t believe its creators ever expected it to have the longevity it attained.
I feel like there’s more and more Sex Pistols content in my social media feeds, these days. Today makes sense, as it would have been Sid Vicious’ unthinkable 65th birthday, but beyond that, the band has been catapulted back into the headlines over (yet another) bitter feud, that being the one over an entirely needless biopic on the FX channel. Despite being directed by Danny Boyle (he of “Trainspotting” fame) and allegedly based on “Lonely Boy” the memoir of Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones, “Pistol” is pretty much already dead on arrival due to a number of factors. First and foremost, legendary Pistols frontman John “Rotten” Lydon, patently refused to participate in/abet/endorse the film, and has since gotten venomously litigious about it, to which I say, fair enough. I may still have pointed misgivings about the man’s confusing politics (as addressed here, here and here), but he has my full support on this matter.
Secondly, I think there’s also a bit of fatigue about this particular period of popular culture, and I don’t think the masses otherwise preoccupied with Kanye West, Pete Davidson and BTS really harbor any real fascination for the heyday of British Punk. What once seemed barbarous and shocking has essentially become a tired old, over-rhapsodized chapter of “Dad Rock.”
Beyond that, in the specific case of the Sex Pistols, there’s already been a wealth of documentation about their sneery ascendance and their messy implosion. I mean, just off the top of my head, there was the band’s own abortive film, the Julien Temple-directed “ Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle,” there was “The Punk Rock Movie,” there was Alex Cox’s flawed “Sid & Nancy,” and Julien Temple’s documentary, “The Filth & the Fury.” Not to be outdone, Temple even did a third Pistols move, “There’ll Always Be an England,” which documented an anniversary performance. There have also been numerous books and biographies. Lydon’s written at least three memoirs. The story of the Sex Pistols has been told and re-told too many times already. There was never a need for a biopic.
For my money, however, I’ve always been of the opinion that if you’re genuinely curious about the Sex Pistols, the ONLY thing you ever needed was a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks. Go get that. Listen to it … and get on with your lives.
Just a quick follow-up to this post. Being that this photo keeps getting strangely invoked every couple of years, I figured I’d dig out the negative to make some better prints of it. My friend Howard (invoked here, a million years ago) actually expressed interest in getting a blown-up print of it, so that’s what I did. Honestly, it’s a wee bit darker than I’d prefer, but it’s still pretty nice. I made a few, so if you’re interested, as well, do let me know.
Once again, here in 2022, the space that once was Magickal Childe at 35 West 19th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is now slated to open up in May as Vinyl Steakhouse. Find out more about that venture right here.
Meanwhile, here's a glimpse of Magickal Childe in it's hellfire-flecked heyday...
ADDENDUM:In searching around, I also happened upon this video ... an homage to Magickal Childe by an ensemble called Cruz Machine. My photo again appears here about three minutes in, wherein they try to conjure its return...(and still I get no credit). Anyway, enjoy...
Like so much of what would become my favorite music, my introduction to David Bowie came via my older sister, Victoria, specifically her copy of Changesonebowie. A seismic compilation (although I don’t think either of us realized that, at the time), Changesonebowie arrived onto the stack of LP’s next to the family stereo circa summer 1978, and swiftly became an all-killer/no-filler favorite of the household (and a much-needed respite from the otherwise tireless airings of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and my well-loved copy of Dressed to Kill by KISS). A jaw-dropping array of seamless pop, balls-out rock, sinuous funk, spacey weirdness and glammy panache, Changesonebowie really had just about everything one could ever want, and like certain crucial records before it, notably Mothership Connection by Parliament, Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd and A Night at the Opera by Queen, it was a record we both completely adored in equal measure.
That said, we may have been more divided on the track listing itself. While my sister warmed to the poppier aspects of the record, like “Fame” and “Golden Years,” I tended to lean toward the more riff-driven barnburners like “Diamond Dogs” and “Suffragette City.” I could never quite reconcile the specific sequencing of side two, wherein the cocky guitar stomp of “Rebel Rebel” slid right into the faux-Philly soul shenanigans of “Young Americans,” largely signaling the end of the big rock portion of the record. I didn’t know it, at the time, but it was that very accomplished versatility to shape-shift that ultimately made the man the renowned artist he was, but everyone knows that, now.
If anything, that bemoaned sequencing of that compilation was no accident, itself being a canny encapsulation of what had occurred in that era of Bowie’s trajectory. While touring the grimly dystopian Diamond Dogs (far and away my favorite album by the great man), Bowie grew fatigued with its spiky guitars and proto-goth melodrama and started ditching its trappings for a different sound and style entirely, swapping corroded glam rock for so-called blue-eyed soul. This somewhat bewildering transition is best captured on the live projects David Live and Cracked Actor.
By the release of next studio LP, Young Americans, the transformation was complete. Smitten as I’d been by my first taste of Bowie’s oeuvre, when I started investing in his back catalog in the ensuing years, I deliberately eschewed Young Americans, unable to shake the stigma of that first association. The title track alone started to get on my nerves, a brazen crowd-pleaser for drunken sorority girls who couldn't seem to remember — let alone parse — the actually-quite-complicated lyrics when shouting along to it at keg parties, I considered “Young Americans” a pandering cop-out. Fuck that populist shit, I thought. Give me the weird stuff.
I, of course, was a stupid, young American myself, at the time.
In time, my ironclad adherence to solely “that which rocked” relaxed a bit. As ideally comes with gradual maturity, my tastes broadened to embrace bits of music outside of the parameters of whatever flimsy tribal affiliations I might have previously assigned to myself. Decades later, as a perplexed 54 year old trying to navigate the shifting tectonic plates of popular culture, I no longer care about how my listening habits might be perceived. In terms of my Bowie fandom, I became deeply enamored of all aspects of his discography, from the hard angles of his Berlin period to the folksy whimsy of his first recordings to the brazen accessibility of the Let’s Dance era and all points between and beyond.
But I never bought Young Americans. Or not until today, at least.
My friend John made a coyly telling declaration on Facebook, a couple of days ago, that being…
my cranky old hipster level is "I thought your movie looked cool until the trailer had a 70s Bowie tune in it and then you seemed real basic”
I smiled and hit “like” immediately, assuming he was talking about the clunkily witless placement of “Starman” in the preview to the new Pixar movie about Buzz Lightyear. Turns out he wasn’t. He was actually referring to the use of “Time” from Aladdin Sane in the trailer for “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” (a film he’d later concede was crazy well done). But the point remained the same. While not quite a deep cut, the employment of even a lesser-celebrated single like “Time” in a film’s trailer just seems like a lazy stab at broadcasting some aspired connotation of cool invariably well beyond the scope of your movie. Points off.
But then last night, while chugging through several episodes of Season 1 of Netflix’s “Mindhunter” (yes, I realize I’ve been leaning a bit too uncomfortably into serial-killer content, of late) I was struck by a nuanced, period-specific placement of a libidinously undulating funk track that I immediately recognized as David Bowie, but had still never heard before. Turns out, that song is called “Right,” and it’s the fourth track off of —WAIT FOR IT — Young Americans.
It’s, of course, brilliant.
Today, I strolled up to Academy Records on West 18th, ponied up eight bucks and finally succumbed to the charms of Young Americans.
At some point in the spring or summer of about 1997, I snapped a picture of the storefront at 35 West 19th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, which was a shop called Magickal Childe. I’ve spoken about it before, here, quite a few times, but Magickal Childe was essentially an occult emporium, selling esoteric books and black magic knickknacks for spells, rituals, ceremonies, conjurings and the like. It was the perfect gift shop for all the Aleister Crowley acolytes in your family. A lot of folks spoke about Magickal Childe in hushed, ominous tones, but I never felt any sense of dread or unease in the place. The one item I remember actively buying there was an inverted pentagram pendant because,….well… METAL!
Personally speaking, Magickal Childe, to me, always embodied that now-rarefied essence of New York City. It was this wildly niche sorta concern that catered to a very specific demographic, but was still a thriving venture, very much an “only in New York” sorta place. It was there for several years, as I remember, until it closed in 1999, in the wake of the death of its proprietor, a guy named Herman. The vacated space at 35 West 19th Street became a tapas restaurant, as reported here, named Sala in 2004 and lasted until the pandemic forced its closure in 2020. Today, the space is in transition, but there are signs in the window that say “VINYL STEAKHOUSE,” suggesting a strange amalgam of record store and steak joint. Not quite sure how that works, but I being that I like both records and red meat, I wish them all success.
In any case, back in 1997, I was genuinely fascinated with Magickal Childe, so I snapped that picture. Those with a sharp eye for detail might notice that I even appear in the photograph, reflected in a mirror in the center of the shop’s window (just underneath and slightly to the left of the gold pentagram). I had no agenda in capturing the image beyond thinking it just looked cool.
Some years went by, and I ended up posting the photograph, along with several others, on an entry on this stupid blog under the title “Things That Are Not There.” As it turns out, photographs of Magickal Childe must be few and far between, as people started to reach out to me about it. I fielded a request from one reader to sell a print of it to him. I think I just ended up sending him a copy of it free of charge. I didn’t think much of it.
Years after that, some readers might remember my laborious search for the location of a certain photograph of the Lunachicks. When I finally got in touch with the photographer, a guy named Joe Dilworth, he graciously emailed me the contact sheet with the mystery photo in it. Along with the answer to my quest, that contact sheet also boasted a shot of the Lunachicks chatting with this guy who looked strangely familiar. I swiftly deduced that the guy in question was the same kid depicted in some age-old hardcore matinee photos by Drew Carolan. I realize this is all very confusing, but bear with me. As if on cue, that kid — named Anderson Slade — bizarrely got in touch with me out of the blue on Facebook. By this point, he was no longer a little punk rock kid from Staten Island, but now an aspiring actor and filmmaker who was putting together a documentary about Magickal Childe and wanted to use my photograph. I said “sure,” and then let him know about the photo of him and the Lunachicks, which blew his mind. You can read a more detailed about that whole chapter here.
Slade’s documentary, entitled “Horrible Herman’s Warlock Shop,” was in development for quite a while, and even had some trailers posted on YouTube, but those have since been taken down and there’s no news of any release dates. Anderson Slade is also no longer on Facebook. The plot thickened.
Cut to 2022. With the wife in London for the London Book Fair, I am suddenly free to watch stuff on television that I wouldn’t normally be able to. As such, I start watching “Sons of Sam: Descent into Darkness,” a four-part documentary series on Netflix that explores one investigative reporter’s feverish quest to break the story that David “Son of Sam" Berkowitz did not act alone. Even as a sniveling ten year old during the summer of 1977, I still vividly remember the atmosphere of paranoia that gripped New York City, so have always been fascinated with the story. Here’s the trailer…
In any case, halfway through the first episode, they start discussing the uptick in fascination with the occult in the `70s, stemming from disillusionment with the hippy ideal of the late `60s. In doing so, they start showing images of Wiccan ceremonies, illustrations from the Rosicrucian secret histories of the world, Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, Aleister Crowley and …. fleetingly … MY PHOTOGRAPH OF MAGICKAL CHILDE.
I instantly sat up from my bowl of General Tso’s chicken and hit pause. What the fuck, Netflix? I don’t remember being asked about use in any Son of Sam doc. Laughably, I suddenly felt sort of violated, but then…. given the already-established paucity of images of the exterior of Magickal Childe, outside of screenshots from the Nicholas Cage film “Vampire’s Kiss” in which the shop makes a cameo, mine seems to be the first thing that comes up in a Google image search. Being no stranger to liberally appropriating images for this blog, I shouldn’t be surprised. But still, having a rinkydink blog post a pic without due credit is one thing — use in a major feature film on Netflix is another.
I started combing through my emails, with friends' voices in my head shouting “you can SUE them!” I wasn’t really interested in any financial gain from this, I was just kind of curious how they found it and a little hurt that they didn’t see fit to ask me if they could use it.
Then I figured it out.
Chalk it up to the fog of the pandemic or the steady erosion of my short-term memory, but in July of 2020, a company called “Radical Media” apparently reached out to me to say they were putting together “a documentary series for Netflix that features a storyline about the occult presence in NYC back in the 1970s and 80s, and we wanted to feature a photograph of the occult book shop Magickal Childe. It turns our there are very few photographs easily accessible, but a photo that you took of the storefront is one that comes up and is of good quality."
Evidently, I said “sure, no problem,” and even signed a release. I did not charge them anything for the use. They asked how I’d like to be credited, and apparently I wrote “Alex S./Flaming Pablum” in the email.
I watched the first episode to the end credits. Under the “photos courtesy of…” section, neither my name nor my blog’s dumb name came up. I watched the second, third and final episodes. A credit was never mentioned. I guess my signed release absolved them of that necessity, but that still kind of bummed me out.
That petty affront notwithstanding, I still recommend “Sons of Sam.” If you’re a bona fide New Yorker and a true crime buff, it’s a fascinating series, however grim (what? you were expecting frivolity??)
I was running errands earlier this week, and found myself not far from 35 West 19th Street, so took a short detour to revisit it.
Irish filmmaker Vivienne Dick helped define New York’s No Wave film scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The No Wave movement embraced a brash guerrilla aesthetic and Dick’s films, shot on Super-8 and starring an unruly cast of artists and musicians, perfectly capture the lo-fi glamour of the scene. Guerrillere Talks is Dick’s first film, it consists of six cartridges of Super-8 footage strung together, each running for three and a half minutes.
Watch any documentary about a since-closed music venue, nightclub or bar, and you’re bound to hear some of the same stupid shit. Whether conscious of it or not, at least one of the participants will make one ridiculously clichéd remark or another about how the establishment in question was this unique confluence of poetically unlikely factors that could not, should not and never will exist again. Invariably, there will also be florid testimonials about the fabled proprietor of the place which portray that individual like some sort of star-crossed visionary from another dimension. While such declarations might even have varying degrees of truth to them, these soundbites have become so deeply and dependably rote as storytelling devices that these movies all practically blend together.
Given my blog’s brazen predilections for New York City nostalgia, I am, of course, no stranger to these sorts of films. “Life After Dark: The Story of Siberia Bar,” a 2008 documentary directed by one Jack Bryan, is no exception to the rules lamented above. That all said, you should still check it out.
I’ve written about both Manhattan iterations of the Siberia Bar here a few times, notably here and here. I honestly cannot remember who first told me about the place, but being that I worked at TIME Magazine, just down the block from the subway stop that played host to the first iteration of the bar, once I learned about it, I had to go check it out. This would have been around 1997, I’m guessing, and I swiftly became one of a cloying legion of irritating, drunk-journalist types prone to hanging out within its endearingly decrepit confines. I’m the inebriated jackass in the center of the photo above, taken at Siberia around `98, given the then-recently-procured Damned t-shirt I’m sporting (they’d played a Coney Island High — also gone, but no documentary yet — a few days prior). If you were a self-styled, world-weary, laboriously smug scribe of one stripe or another, you were bound to be found drinking irresponsibly there sooner or later.
Around 2000, the Siberia Bar decamped from its celebrated closet-sized perch in the midtown subway system and moved into Hell’s Kitchen. While the new location lacked its predecessor's seedy charm and intriguing mystique, the much roomier second version of the Siberia Bar retained the spirit of the old place … complete with those infamous stipulations about swearing and gratuitous hittin' on women.
Around the same time, however, I’d gotten married. As such, my nights darkening the already-very-dark doors of Siberia were somewhat sharply curtailed. I’d go every now and again, but hardly with any frequency. And then, sadly, in 2007, it closed for good.
I never knew of the documentary below’s existence until earlier this week. A reader named CB hipped me to it. Granted, I’m about 14 years late to the table, but for your viewing pleasure and edification, here it is….
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