The following item comes courtesy of loyal, longtime Flaming Pablum reader Dr. Bop, who regularly sends me curious minutia whether I’m soliciting it or not (let alone responding). Hopefully he’s reading this and knows that I do indeed appreciate it.
Either notorious or beloved, depending on your sensibilities, Alan Ginsberg was one of New York City’s more celebrated beat poets and political activists, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and a figurehead of downtown bohemia (despite actually coming from New Jersey). I remember reading his signature manifesto, “Howl,” in college and being duly captivated. Ginsberg was also renowned for his pronounced appetite for sex, which he explicitly delved into in his writing (specifically pertaining to his own homosexuality), much to the pointed chagrin of the self-appointed guardians of social mores of the time. I seem to remember fellow poet, proto-punk rocker and Flaming Pablum favorite Jim Carroll writing about Ginsberg’s voracious libido, at one point.
In any case, what many might not know (or, at least, I certainly didn’t) was that Alan Ginsberg was also a sort of amateur photographer. Dr Bop forward me a piece published earlier this week in Document Journal that culls together many of Ginsberg’s photos, including portraits of luminaries like Ai Weiwei, Hunter S. Thompson, fellow Beat icon William S. Burroughs, Gus Van Sant and Iggy Goddamn Pop.
I would love to say I was cool enough to go to Tier 3 was it was a going concern, but I would have 13 years old, at the time. That may not have stopped everyone, but it certainly stopped me.
To walk by 225 West Broadway today, you’d honestly never know anything punky, cool or hip ever occupied the space. Today, it’s a comparatively genteel Italian restaurant named Terra, which used to occupy a space across the avenue. Back back circa 1979-1980, this tiny venue played host to local and/or East Coast bands like Bad Brains, the Beastie Boys, DNA, The Bush Tetras, the Bonogs, Glenn Branca, 8 Eyed Spy, The Lounge Lizards, as well as British bands like The Raincoats, Madness, The Slits, Young Marble Giants, The Pop Group and eve Bauhaus. Today, at 225 West Broadway, you’re more likely to find a persnickety TriBeCan complaining about how their pasta primavera is too tepid. Where once this chunk of TriBeCa was a sort of a bohemian frontier, here in 2023, it’s a fairly monied, well-traveled slice of covetable real estate.
I probably first heard the name “Tier 3” in “After Hours,” when Terri Garr’s character, Julie suggests to bedraggled Griffin Dunne’s Paul Hackett, deep into an evening of Kafka-esque turmoil, that “Tier 3 is still open!” It was already long gone by the time I’d ever heard of it, so for me to wax rhapsodic about its absence is a bit rich. Luckily, however, there is Amy Rigby.
I first invoked Amy Rigby here and then went onto interview her here. A veteran of the original Tier 3 scene, Amy recently put the video below together. Here’s what she had to say about it.
I made this short film as an intro for a panel on Tier 3: The Little Club That Could at the 2023 PopCon academic conference held in April at NYU. Holly George-Warren moderated our discussion of this beloved lower Manhattan nightspot that played a big part in our lives. Hilary Jaeger (who brought us in and booked the bands), Cynthia Sley of Bush Tetras who played there many times, and myself part of the Stinky's dance party crew & club coat check girl - we were also joined by my brother Michael McMahon who made many of the club posters, and Angela Jaeger from Stare Kits (our early band - first to play at the club) and later Pigbag and Instinct. Tier 3 was one of the only women-run punk clubs on the East Coast. And it was much more than that: it was a clubhouse for misfits in the land of misfits. With photo contributions from Julia Gorton, Steve Lombardi, Hilary Jaeger, Lucy Sante, Robert Sietsema, Niles Jaeger, Angela Jaeger, Amy Rigby, Pat Irwin, Beate Nilsen, Charlyn Zlotnik Artwork by Amelia Faulkner, Michael McMahon and some uncredited folks, let me know who you are) and Video by Liza Bear and Michael Mclard Thanks for watching - so many bands and artists played and showed their work at the club, would love to expand this to include more of them.
As a revelation that should surprise absolutely no one, I run the Cop Shoot Cop Facebook page. The former members of the band didn’t particularly want to do it, so just they let me get on with it. And so I do, although that involves little more than doing periodic internet searches for pertinent mentions, pictures and videos and then posting them for the C$C faithful, who also send in assets to post. Back in 2013, I stumbled upon the shot below….
I had no idea of who shot it, where it was taken, what year it was snapped nor where it was first published, but dutifully shared it on the C$C Facebook page.
Ten years later, I’m happy to say that I can report that the photograph was taken by one Stephen Street to accompany a 1993 story in the British music-news weekly, Melody Maker written by legendary rock scribe Everett True. This was sent in by a C$C fan named Bill Farrar, who’s spotted it on Twitter.
The part that caught my eye, meanwhile, was the inclusion of the entire photograph (see below).
What I’d never realized about that first iteration of the photo is the location. The Cop Shoot Cop lads are pictured loitering menacingly around the Lower East Side Amphitheatre (or Bandshell, as some of us called it) in 1993, a full 30 (!!!) years before Mr. Farrar spotted it on Twitter.
I’ve written about the East River Bandshell several times here before (most recently here), but it was a significant Lower East Side landmark, for several years, especially as it started to gradually erode, slowly devolving into a hunk of urban decay like a set-piece from “Planet of the Apes.” In varying states of disrepair, it appeared in several music videos, notably “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy” by Kid Creole & the Coconuts, “Cold Turkey” by Cheap Trick (yes, a Lennon cover … also starring late skateboarder/scenester Harold Hunter), “Unsung” by Helmet and “Invisible People” by False Prophets, although I’m probably forgetting some others. It also made a prominent appearance in the classic hip-hop flick, “Wild Style.”
Of course, in later years, the East River Amphitheatre got a complete makeover, reducing the structure to its core shell, with some artful piping around it.
But then, in the wake of the damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, some contentious plans to radically re-structure East River Park writ large were put into motion, and the East River Amphitheatre was razed in 2021. I haven’t been down that way in a little while, so I have no idea what’s there at the moment, but I’m relatively certain it’s dispiriting.
Apropos of nothing, Oliver and I re-watched “The Warriors,” last night. The first time I showed him this movie, about two or three years ago, he was incredulous about how a group of so-called tough guys like the titular characters had such a difficult time navigating the mass transit system of their own city, and spent most of the film detailing quicker, alternate routes they might have considered to get from Dyre Avenue in the Bronx to Stilwell Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn. I told him to relax and enjoy the film.
While viewing “The Warriors" a second time, Oliver came up with other vexing quandaries and brazen plot holes, largely concerned with the physical limitations and logistical hazards of wearing roller skates on a subway platform, the inconsistencies of oft-repeated Warrior lingo (is Swan’s inherited title —following the presumed elbow-inflicted demise of Cleon — “War Chief” or, per Ajax, “War Lord”?), and some sartorial inquiries. Why, for example, does the taskmaster of the Gramercy Riffs —and, really, Gramercy??? — dress in a sequined robe that wouldn't look out of place on Liza Minelli?
These are all valid concerns, but the only perceived discrepancy in “The Warriors” that’s ever really bugged me is the notion that the ominous disc-jockey who relays directive from the Riffs in-between late-`70s funk and soul selections would actually drop the needle on a Joe Walsh record.
In any case, we were discussing the many locations featured throughout the film (and how, more often than not, they don’t really sync up with the narrative), and I exhumed this from YouTube.
It’s Easter, for those who celebrate. Enjoy your chocolate.
Personally speaking, despite being raised a Catholic and having attended fourteen years of Catholic school (including four years with the Jesuits), I cannot say I’m exactly the “best” Catholic out there. I mean, I’m pretty much what you could call “lapsed.” I would suggest I’m probably agnostic, more than anything else, but the combination of fourteen years of schooling and my first exposure to the music of Black Sabbath* really drove home the point that the church wasn’t really my bag. When it came time to go to college, I felt I was more than done with the whole religious bent. I developed a pronounced disdain for rigid dogma and a naughty affinity for brazen blasphemy that continues to rile certain members of my family. But while I may frequently think that the faith is too deeply couched in intolerance, guilt and fear (what? Am I wrong?), I don’t genuinely begrudge anyone else’s adherence to it, although my absolute favorite combination of words in the English language continues to be “Mass is cancelled.”
But last night, when my wife, son and I were wondering what we should watch after dinner, the notion of the seasonably appropriate “The Ten Commandments” was invoked (not by me, mind you). I actually don’t mind the film, but felt it was a bit too … lengthy for our purposes. My alternative was to suggest “Life of Brian,” a slavishly more enjoyable take on comparable subject matter, albeit filtered through Monty Python’s refreshing disregard for the sacrosanct.
After that was shot down (by the wife), I raised the notion of a film that might otherwise seem like an unlikely stretch for a church-dodger like myself, that being 1973’s “Godspell.” I have my reasons.
For a start, while it was never a hotbed of holy rollers, my childhood home did, oddly enough, come equipped with the original cast recording of the off-Broadway production of “Godspell,” which I remember being in somewhat regular rotation (again, mind you, not by me). The folksy-acoustic pop-friendly songs from same (a little lighter than the ponderously serious fare from the similarly inclined “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which was also quite a mainstay, at the time) fit perfectly when played alongside my mother’s Judy Collins, James Taylor, Carole King and Cat Stevens records. I remember my older sister playing the crap out of “Day By Day,” which is only cloyingly churchy if you pay too close attention to the lyrics. While I may bristle at the revelation, if you play those songs today, I can still practically sing along with them to the letter.
The film from two years after that LP’s release, however, has what I’d consider a special bonus that has absolutely nothing to do with absolution, salvation, forgiveness, evangelism or any of that incense-sodden claptrap. Filmed entirely in the New York City of 1972 (and starring the ridiculously afro’d Victor Garber as Jesus), “Godspell” is an unwitting time capsule of the same, gritty Manhattan captured in films like “Serpico” and “Mean Streets,” albeit with significantly less gunplay and swearing.
Not unlike the film adaptation of “The Wiz” or Milos Forman’s “Hair” from a few years later, the Manhattan depicted in “Godspell” is actually more of a painterly, fanciful portrayal than any presented by Martin Scorsese or Sidney Lumet. But given my particular predilections, I cannot help but be fascinated by it, even if it means enduring the Gospel of Matthew being sung at me.
Enjoy this taster, and Happy Easter.
*Actually, somewhat ironically, despite the band's ominous moniker, Black Sabbath’s stance on all things occult and/or Satanic was more a wary aversion than an espousal. Led Zeppelin was far more sympathetic of that sensibility, albeit in a nuanced way — unlike, say, Venom, although Venom’s endorsement of all things Satanic was more vaudevillian than in earnest.
I’ve invoked his name here on this blog numerous times, but back in my days as an erstwhile music journalist, I had the tremendous honor of twice interviewing Irish singer/songwriter/punk rocker Gavin Friday, former lead singer/provocateur of the Virgin Prunes turned surrealist cabaret chanteur. In later years, Gavin would branch out into film-scoring to become a respected composer in his own right. They say you should never meet your heroes, as all too often, the reality is an awkward letdown, but on both occasions, Mr. Friday was a chatty, affable and attentive conversationalist and a rivtetting raconteur, our sessions spilling way over the allotted times into meandering hours of deep, informative chat. The first time was at the sutiably atmospheric downtown loft of his then-manager, who lived on White Street in then-still-largely-ungentrified TriBeCa, the second at Sin-E, a tiny Irish bar/venue then on St. Marks Place. Once again, on both occaisions, Gavin Friday was a tirelessly amiable and engaging character.
In terms of perormance, I was able to to catch three shows of his here in New York, the fist being at CBGB on the tour for his first solo album, Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves (which I discussed here). The second was at the Bottom Line on West 4th Street at Mercer Street, wherein Gavin punctuated his set with daring leaps from stage to various table-tops with great dramatic aplomb. The third was at the Westbeth Theatre in the West Village. As of this writing, all of those venues are long gone – one’s an overpriced haberdashery, the second an antiseptic NYU facility and the third was literally bricked up and sealed away from the public like a tomb.
At this stage of the proceedings, I have grave doubts of ever interviewing the great man again, although with a new album of material allegedly in the can and ready to be set free on the world, one hopes another tour might follow.
The only reason I’m bring up Mr. Friday again is that he just did a the 100th episode of a great Irish pop-culture podcast called Let Christy Take It wherein he gamely unspools thoughts and anecdotes from each stage of his amazing journey as an artist. If you’re a fan, it’s well worth your time, and even if you’re not, Gavin Friday is a captivating storyteller.
For those following the arguably very convoluted tale of the backstory of Clics Mordernos, the final installment of Iñaki Rojas’s web series, “Modern Clix Super Powers” is now online (see way below), this episode largely concentrating on the late Fran Powers, the New York City punk rocker responsible for tagging the corner of Walker Street at Cortlandt Alley (above, as captured by one Vera Isler in 1982) with his band’s graffiti.
Even typing that paragraph was complicated, but here’s a very simplified-but-still-complexly-lenghty timeline:
At some point in the early-to-mid `80s, punk rocker Fran Powers (below) spray-paints his band’s name, Modern Clix, on the corner of Walker & Cortlandt Alley. Hey, it's the `80s….lower Manhattan is a lawless badlands. Rampant graffiti is the least of its problems.
As some point after that, fabled street-artist Richard Hambleton, renowned for painting cryptic “shadow men” – somewhat ominous black silhouettes of human forms -- augments Fran’s tag, making it look like the shadow man is leaning against it. During this era, these figures are all over downtown.
At some point in 1982, preeminent Argentine rocker Charly Garcia is sequestered over on Waverly Place while recording an album at nearby Electric Lady Studios on West 8th Street. He’s already got a title in mind for his forthcoming album, but during a walk around Lower Manhattan with a photographer named Uberto Sagramoso, he happens upon the corner of Walker & Cortland and spies both the Hambleton figure and the mysterious legend “Modern Clix” and has his picture taken sitting beneath.
So taken is Charly by the resultant image of him sitting beneath this striking tableaux of New York City street art, that he scraps his original plans, and makes Sagramoso’s photograph the cover image of his new record, which he is now re-titling Clics Modernos.
Time passes.
Clics Modernos, Garcia’s second solo album, gradually becomes one of the most celebrated Argentine rock albums of all time.
More time passes.
Rabid Argentine rock fans of a certain stripe start speculating about the whereabouts of the now-iconic corner pictured on the sleeve of Clics Modernos.
More time passes.
In 2011, actress/photographer Brooke Smith (most renowned for her work in “The Silence of the Lambs” and several television series) posts a clutch of period-specific photographs of her time as a member of the then-burgeoning hardcore punk scene on the Lower East Side.
Captivated by same, I post an entry about Brooke’s photos and notice a recurring face therein, that being one Fran Powers of many different bands with names, at the time, like Ultra Violence, Whole Wide World, East of Eden and – wait for it – Modern Clix, an amorphous ensemble that plays an amalgam of styles like rock, ska, reggae, funk and punk.
From those pictures, I rightly deduce that Fran was responsible for his own brand of cryptic graffiti, that being the Modern Clix insignia of the spear-throwing figure (above) which I’d remembered seeing around Astor Place several years earlier. You can see that same figure tattooed on Fran’s bicep below.
At some point in the mid-2010’s, I meet one Yukie Ohta, a blogger who starts The SoHo Memory Project, a loving tribute to the neighborhood of her youth. She and I frequently compare notes and share assets for our respective web-projects (even though hers is a much classier and more professional endeavor than mine) and we become friends.
Yukie Ohta’s SoHo Memory Project really takes off, and she hosts a party at a loft space in – wait for it – SoHo, which I attend.
On my way out of that party, I literally run right into Fran Powers (he was boarding the elevator I was exiting), but I stop him in his tracks with the excited exclamation, “Hey, YOU’RE FRAN POWERS OF MODERN CLIX!!” We start chatting about punk rock stuff and become friends.
One night not too long after that – circa 2015 – I’m sitting down to watch “After Hours,” my favorite movie of all time, for the bajillionth time. This time, however, I notice that none other than Fran Powers himself makes an amazing cameo. I reach out to him to see if he’d be game to discuss it for a post, which he does. You can read that here.
Richard Hambleton dies from cancer at age 65 in 2017, oblivious to the fact that his artwork graces the cover of one of the most beloved albums of Argentine rock ever (ask Wikipedia!)
In 2019, a friend of mine sends me the link to a video by Charly Garcia of a song called “Fanky,” which was shot around Lower Manhattan. I connect the dots and realize that I have heard of Garcia and post the sleeve photo of Clics Modernos, speculating if Fran Powers was aware that Garcia had appropriated his tag for his album --which, at the time, I am unaware is of such seismic significance to the Argentine rock community.
In 2021, a photographer named Bo G. Eriksson posts pictures he snapped in 1984 of Cortlandt Alley. I spot these on a Facebook page called Manhattan Before 1990 and immediately spy the location of Clics Modernos from the tell-tale street art. I brazenly poach Eriksson’s images (sorry, Bo) and I post these findings here on my blog.
Back in Argentine, writer/producer Iñaki Rojas somehow sees my post and falls out of his chair with excitement. He writes a very long and detailed missive to me about it, explaining how he’d been on a quest to divine the origins of the Clics Modernos cover and how my post had solved a few riddles for him, and enabled him to reach directly out to Fran.
In June of 2021, Fran Powers passes away after succumbing to an illness he’d been long battling.
As you’ll see in the video below, the corner of Walker and Cortlandt Alley will be named, this coming November, as a landmark of Argentine rock history in a small ceremony. Iñaki Rojas and Fran’s window Shoei are planning to be there. I’d imagine so will Yukie Ohta, and I’m going to try to coerce some of Fran’s friends like Brooke Smith and fellow NYHC scenster and sometime bandmate RB Korbet to attend. And, yes, I’ll be there, too.
And here, once again, is the final installment (we think) of "Modern Clicks Super Powers." You'll want to turn the CC on for English subtitles....
As I understand it, "Thunder" is an experimental film from 1982 made by a Japanese director named Takashi Ito. I shan't do it any semblance of justice, so here's Wikipedia's description.
Thunder features a series of photographic slides of a woman repeatedly covering and uncovering her face with her hands, projected onto the interiors of an empty office building. The images bend and distort against the interior surfaces. Additionally, a long ribbon of light is seen curling and oscillating. The effect of the ribbon of light was produced using long-exposure photography, created frame-by-frame by a person with a flashlight moving throughout the building's rooms during long single-frame exposures.
Well, an intrepid YouTuber named Artomo Sardanapale got a little experimental on his own, and decided to score those cryptic visuals with one of my favorite b-sides by my beloved Cop Shoot Cop, that being "Transmission," which appeared on the 1995 CD single for "Any Day Now." A slow-burning, dystopian narrative of paranoia with a suitably encroaching sense of dread imbued deep within its buzzing, dissonant core, "Transmission" builds to a head when drummer Phil Puleo punctuates the refrain ..."WHAT IS YOUR POSITION? REPEAT TRANSMISSION!"... with jarring strikes of a snare drum, as the ominous intonation fades into the noise. It's not exactly a peppy dance number.
Anyway, here is the spot-welding of those two disparate elements. The title of this post, meanwhile, comes poached from a great Ray Bradbury short story from 1953 about a man who travels back in time to shoot a Tyrannosaurus Rex, only to unwittingly alter the trajectory of time in the process.
PREAMBLE:I actually started this post quite a while back, but it required a bit of legwork, and then I got sick, so I’m trying to re-visit it now, but it may not be as robust as I was once planning it to be.
POST: Options for witnessing live music of a certain stripe, in Manhattan, are in pretty paltry shape, here in 2023. I mean, sure, there are still a handful of decent clubs and a few comparatively antiseptic live-music venues, but the glory days of legendary hotspots like Brownie’s, Wetland’s Preserve, the Limelight, The Ritz, Roseland Ballroom, Danceteria, the Mudd Club, Hurrah’s, Tier 3, Great Gildersleeve’s, Max’s Kansas City and – oh yes, do please wait for it – CBGB are all but sepia-toned memories of a vanished age in practically a different city.
But there is one more significant place that seems rarely invoked when folks rattle off names of celebrated rock clubs and live-music venues as I just did above. It was only open for business for about seven years and was perched on the otherwise unassuming byway of West 70th Street between Amsterdam and West End Avenues.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I rarely consider this patch of the Upper West Side when I think of carnal rock n’ roll bacchanalia. My knee-jerk associations with this area conjure more of kind of Jerry Seinfeld/Woody Allen/Steve Martin/Tina Fey vibe more than anything else, but as I ventured up there, a few weekends back, several of the neighborhood’s pop-cultural hotspots did reveal themselves to me.
For a start, to the south, there was the Tower Records on the northwest corner at West 66th Street & Broadway. While arguably not as iconic as the flagship store down on East 4th & Broadway, the UWS Tower played a major role for me when I was ravenous music-consuming high schooler. It’s long gone, of course … replaced by a Raymour & Flanagan, of all things. For those who scoff, at the invocation, Woody Allen shot a scene from “Hannah & Her Sisters” in the UWS Tower, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Just a few blocks up, of course, there was the similarly inclined HMV megastore, another great music outlet that shut up shop around 1999. I’ve not as many rose-tinted memories of that place, but I was glad it was there, at the time. There’s also that statue in Verdi Square that Blue Oyster Cult posed under (worrying close to “Needle Park,” a block or two to the south in Sherman Square, immortalized in “Panic in Needle Park”). There’s also the iconic Beacon Theatre and the former site of the P&G Bar, where Joe Jackson was once photographed drinking and that fleetingly appeared in the video for “Policy of Truth” by Depeche Mode. Of course, there’s also the subway station and surrounding corners that acted as the location of the first sighting of The Baseball Furies in Walter Hill’s 1970 classic, “The Warriors.” Then, of course, a few blocks up, there’s the Ansonia, which played host to `70’s swinger club Plato’s Retreat and, a few blocks to the East, there’s the Dakota, where “Rosemary’s Baby” was filmed and where John Lennon was shot. Not too far away was also the club, Hurrah, as well. Again, there is absolutely no shortage of pop cultural reference points in this neck of town.
But if you stroll down that stretch of West 70th today, you shouldn’t expect to get a whiff of any of that sorta vibe. Right now, at 210 West 70th, which shares a wall with stately Café Luxembourg to its east (where my mom met my wife’s parents, for the first time, about twenty years ago), you’ll find a dormant space which, until recently, was an Italian restaurant called Tavolla Della Nona. Back in 2015, meanwhile, the space was a steakhouse that called itself Lincoln Square Steak. Prior to that, in 2014, it was a venture called Marka. In 2012, it was an Asian eatery called Loi. In 2009, it was a bar called the Compass Lounge. Earlier than that year, things get a little harder to research, although I did discover that in 1976, the space was a cabaret named Grand Finale, where flamboyantly jazzy piano-botherer Bobby Short once played.
But from 1966 until about 1971, it was Ungano’s. One website I came across described it like this:
Brothers Nick and Arnie Ungano opened their club in 1966—or perhaps earlier, since singer/producer Genya Ravan recalls gigging there in 1964. Rock critic Mike Jahn described the 250-capacity basement venue as "an average-size club with a big back room checked off by four mirrored pillars. The stage is along one wall. Opposite it is a small, raised gallery for the press." Ungano's closed in 1971.
According to the period-specific print ads, Ungano’s played host to a wide array of bands including no less than Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Seger, The Kinks, The James Gang, The Grateful Dead, The Nice, Van Morrison, Mountain, NRBQ, Joe Cocker, The Amboy Dukes, John Lee Hooker, Dr. John, Badfinger and The Nazz. What really caught my attention was that it also hosted Parliament/Funkadelic, The MC5, Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath and The Stooges.
I first got wind of it via the widely circulated recording, Have Some Fun: Live at Ungano’s by the Stooges, which was captured shortly after the band had issued the greatest rock record of all goddamn time, that being their sophomore effort, Fun House. Three weeks later, meanwhile, Black Sabbath … fresh from releasing their own iconic album, Paranoid, graced the stage of Ungano’s, only to – legend has it – plug in their equipment and blow all the fuses in the building out … which, y’know, is fittingly METAL!
Anyway, romanced by the ideas of bands like the Stooges, Sabbath and the freaks in Parliament running amok in a 250-capacity club, I felt the need to go check the place out. Amazingly, even though it’s currently dormant (and, as mentioned, has been about nine-dozen concerns since its Ungano’s days), you can still get a basic feel for what the room was like. Check out my pics below.
Here’s one strictly for music geeks of a certain stripe, so ready thyselves.
As discussed in this post from last year, when the First and Last and Always incarnation of the Sisters of Mercy fell apart circa 1986, departing conspirators Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams made more than a few deliberate attempts to stick it to Sisters’ Mother Superior Andrew Eldritch on their way out of the convent. For a start, their initial plan was to name their new project The Sisterhood, an uncomfortably comparable name to the former order, that is until Eldritch beat them to it with a hastily released EP (recently re-issued on CD). Unfazed, the new band re-christened itself The Mission, also a dig at Eldritch, being that plans for the follow-up album that never transpired were to call it Left on Mission and Revenge.
But the jabs didn’t end there. The Mission wholly made off with the tonsorial/sartorial aesthetic of the Sisters, with Wayne adopting Eldritch’s shades-on-absolutely-all-the-goddamn-time and big-fuckoff-black hat flourish. A sharper sting was naming their debut LP’s lead single “Wasteland,” blithely cribbed from the title of an epic modernist poem by Eldritch’s beloved T.S. Elliot. It seemed as if the new band was going well out of its way to mock and taunt their former taskmaster at every opportunity.
Of course, the mighty Mish went onto find a grand amount of success on their own accord and soon defined their own identity, largely shaking off the shackles of their former association and, I want to believe, burying the bitter baggage along the way, although a full-scale reunion with Eldritch has yet to happen, and I’m not holding my breath.
But there was one more thing from the Sisters that the Mission kind of adopted that always intrigued me - the curlycue cross.
A big part of the early Sisters of Mercy was their bold iconography. Even before they’d properly honed their chops as a functioning band, they’d established themselves with a stark design scheme, a proper logo and even a preferred font, not unlike the template-founders in hallowed Motorhead before them. As the band developed, Eldritch basically assigned the now iconic head/star motif to the band’s label, Merciful Release, and soon adopted the so-called "Chinese Chop,” another cryptic design that graced the sleeves of the singles and the eventual release of the first LP, First and Last and Always, although when that line-up dissolved from attrition, Eldritch retired the “Chinese Chop” for good.
Doubtlessly recognizing the value of that type of readily identifiable insignia, the Mission, too, sought to similarly brand themselves, and settled upon the curlycue cross you can see at the top of this post, a sort of suitably baroque rune that hints at arcane lore. It was just vague enough to conjure any number of gothy connotations, and looked fuckin’ great on the back of a black leather jacket. One friend of mine always thought it looked like four condoms, ... a decidedly more pruriently priapic suggestion than I'd believe the band would prefer to espouse.
Personally speaking, I’d always been curious about the curlycue cross — what was its origin? What did it actually mean? Where did the band first find it? What was its true provenance?
I’d always assumed it was appropriated from some Celtic, pre-Christian art or swiped from some esoteric medieval source, and figured that, short of directly asking Wayne (which I actually had the opportunity to do, at a couple of points, in the early `90s as a fledgling "rock journalist"), I’d never actually solve the riddle.
And then came yesterday.
My wife and I had a dinner plan with one of her siblings on the Upper East Side later in the evening, but decided to go uptown early for a mild mid-winter stroll and maybe a quick museum trip. We settled on the Neue Gallery, a poshly teutonic little institution on the corner of East 86th and Fifth Avenue that, despite my having grown up in the same neighborhood, I’d never actually visited. The Neue is a comparatively tiny museum next to its stately neighbors like the Metropolitan Museum of Art to its south and the Guggenheim to its north. Its humble succession of rooms features treasures like several iconic paintings by Gustav Klimt, an impressive-if-random array of medieval arms and armor, some Austrian illustrations from two centuries ago and — quite incongruously — a tiny alcove filled with trivial ephemera from the classic film, “Casablanca.” The private collection of one wealthy German art-collector and rampant cinephile Ronald Lauder (of the Estee-Lauder gang), this trove of memorabilia featured a wide selection of movie posters, stills and promotional materials from the film, as well as the prop passports used by protagonists Rick, Ilsa and Victor Lazlo. It’s pretty impressive, if completely out of nowhere, even if you’re only a passive fan of the film.
So, I’m standing there, admiring Lauder’s collection and listening to Louis Armstrong’s throaty rendition of “As Time Goes By,” when I suddenly spot something that just about blows me out of the alcove. In a promo shot from the film, there’s a scene of the great Claude Rains, portraying French officer Captain Louis Renault, conversing with Humphrey Bogart’s Rick. Claude is attired as the jaunty policeman, and has his head cocked at an angle, revealing the top of his fetching chapeau — adorned with, mais, oui — qu’est-ce que cest?? Why, it’s the Mission’s curlycue cross!!! Here’s that shot now….
Further scrutiny reveals that the curlycue cross was something of an ongoing motif in the French military. Here it is on the the top of a cap from World War I.
Now, as far as I’m aware, the great Wayne Hussey doesn’t have a solitary drop of French blood in his person. He was born in Bristol, moved to Liverpool and cut his musical teeth in the local punk scene in bands like The Walkie Talkies, Pauline Murray’s Invisible Girls and then Dead or Alive before decamping to Leeds to join the Sisters. So, why the curlycue cross, and where did he first see it? Was he covertly a student of the sartorial finery of the French military or did he indeed swipe it from Claude Rains in “Casablanca”?
As has always been the case, probably only Wayne has the answer.
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