Flaming Pablum

"If It Was Broken, You'd Be Screaming!"

…so sang the inimitable noise rock duo, Happy Flowers on their 1987 album, My Skin Covers My Body, which also featured timeless chestnuts like “I Wet the Bed Again,” “Jenny Tried to Kiss Me at Recess” and, of course, “Why Didn’t You Tell Me You Were Bringing Home a Baby!” While the `Flowers wrote blackly comedic songs from the perspective of a vexed, psychotic four-year-old, there was indeed an element of foundational truth to “If It Was Broken, You’d Be Screaming.” An expression widely shared in the wake of sudden injury, it's essentially conventional wisdom. When you break a bone, it’s usually pretty obvious.

Alas, as it turns out, and in doubtlessly many-if-not-most instances, you shouldn’t really rely on the medical counsel of the Happy Flowers.

But let’s back up, a little….

Well over a goddamn year ago, if not more, I started feeling an odd sensation in my left foot (with apologies to Daniel Day Lewis). Initially it felt, while walking around on it, like my sock was bunching up around the toe, and the “ball” of my foot was being uncomfortably compressed, in some way. Closer scrutiny routinely revealed this not to be the case, but my foot continued to feel different. With each step, it didn’t fall and land the way it previously did. It didn’t hurt — but it didn’t feel right. An expensive chiropractor I was consulting, at the time, indeed agreed that the foot appeared to be “rolling” a little. That guy ended up prescribing a pair of very expensive and roundly uncomfortable orthotic insoles that I maybe wore for a few weeks before abandoning.

But the weird foot problem continued.

I then consulted my primary care physician, who upon examining the exterior of my foot, said he couldn’t detect any readily discernible problems. It was also around this time that I was experiencing, as recounted in this brow-furrowing episode, this weirdly recurring blood-rushing-in-my-feet sensation. I speculated to my doctor that I might have gout, given my heroic intake of beer and such. He basically laughed that off, underscoring that — much like “if it was broken, you’d be screaming” - if I was experiencing gout, I’d fucking know it (gout is reportedly mega-fucking painful). “Alex,” he sighed, "you think you might have gout because, let’s face it, you think you deserve gout.” He has my number.

I never got a concrete explanation as to why that blood-rushing thing was happening, and it eventually went away. But not the ball-of-the-foot problem. That continued.

I then went to see an allegedly proper podiatrist recommended by my primary care physician. For the sake of this fraught narrative, this podiatrist will henceforth be referred to as Dr. Quip. I went in to see Dr. Quip who, as his alias might suggest, was quick with the wisecracks. I started explaining to him my problem with my left foot, and he basically interrupted my typically epic-poem-like saga, blithely informing me that what I was experiencing was “in all likelihood” a condition called “second toe capsulitis,” which, if I understand it correctly, is basically inflammation of the soft tissue in the ball of the foot. That certainly sounded plausible, and I was heartened by his immediate recognition of the problem.

In terms of next steps (pardon the pun), he said that a confirmation of that diagnosis would probably require both x-rays and an MRI, but being that it was probably capsulitis, I should just go ahead and order this other pair of orthotics (“you can get’em easily from ol’ Jeff Bezos" … hilarity) and, along with regular stretching, it’ll most likely clear the problem right up. I hit up Amazon and got a pair the very next day.

I dutifully inserted these new insoles -- considerably more affordable that my chiropractor’s ones -- into my sneakers and started basically wearing them exclusively while also regularly stretching my left foot. Unlike the previous insoles, I acclimated quickly to the new ones. The theory was that it should take about five or six weeks to alleviate the issue.

Despite my really wanting this treatment to clear up the problem — it just didn’t. Six weeks after first wearing them, my left foot was still inexplicably stiff, sore and frequently numb. But, at the same time, life was suddenly very busy again, with family issues, work demands and other stupid shit vying for my time and attention. As a result, I didn’t get the opportunity to get back in touch with Dr. Quip until a few months later.

I told him that the insoles weren’t really getting me where I needed to be, and that I was still experiencing this regular discomfort (that was actually getting incrementally worse). Again, he repeated that an MRI would really be the deciding factor, but I couldn’t do that until I’d had x-rays, so … x-rays were next on the docket.

Despite the predictable pushback dance from my frankly shitty insurance company, I managed to get coverage for x-rays and hobbled over to NYU Langone to get those radioactive pictures snapped. Those, in turn, were sent to Dr. Quip, who leisurely got back to me a few days later saying that they basically told him nothing new, and that the MRI was, again, the ticket.

As before, my insurers were pronouncedly reluctant to cover this cost, and issued disarmingly swift notices to this effect, cruelly asserting that, after supposedly reviewing the specifics, they didn’t see any tangible necessity for an MRI. In a rare moment of professional tenacity, Dr. Quip made a more compelling case to them and secured authorization, and we were off to the races.

After breathlessly showing up at the specified radiologist’s office for an after-work appointment on the other side of town, however, it was gleaned that giggly Dr. Quip somehow forgot to send them the prescription order, bouncing the appointment to the next day. Oh joy.

I eventually did get that MRI — and hoo-boy, I don’t know when the last time you had an MRI was, but that shit is LOUD — and those results were also then sent to Dr. Quip. After two or three days of my peppering his inbox with questions via the Patient Portal (or, in my case, the Impatient Portal), he wrote back the following…

“hey, it appears you have an avn, which means one bone in the bottom of the foot most likely was broken at some point and stopped healing/doesn’t have enough blood supply.”

Johns Hopkins has a slightly more grave-sounding take, as is their wont,…

"Avascular necrosis is a disease that results from the temporary or permanent loss of blood supply to the bone. When blood supply is cut off, the bone tissue dies and the bone collapses. If avascular necrosis happens near a joint, the joint surface may collapse.”

So, all that capsulitis stuff? That was basically a big fuckin’ snipe hunt.

I walk a lot. I walk forty-five minutes to my office every morning, and forty-five minutes home from my office every evening. On the weekends, I walk all over the goddamn map. I don’t run. I don’t go to the gym, and I only really ride my bike during the summer. My biggest physical outlet is walking, and I’ve apparently been walking around with broken bones in my left foot that are slowly eroding for, again, well over a year or more. While I’m completely capable of heroically injuring myself in any number of stupid instances (this one springs to mind), I have absolutely zero recollection of ever doing anything to, with or on my left foot that could have possibly resulted in the breaking of a bone therein. Once again, I figured that, if it was broken, ….I’d be screaming, but nothing like that ever happened.

Limping forward, the next step is a new kind of pad beneath the problem area in the short-term (and I’m about to depart on an invariably walk-heavy vacation, in a couple of weeks), followed by — in the long-term — probably a “cam boot” or “walking boot” for god knows how long.

Rant over.

Just remember …. just because you’re not screaming doesn’t mean it ain’t broken.

Vinyl Summers

It’s been said that, should you be of a certain sensibility, a friend that routinely introduces you to new music is one of the best friends you can have. I’ve been very lucky to have a few of those types of friends, over the years. While this post is ostensibly about punk rock records, it’s really more those friends. 

As mentioned back on this recent post, my grade-school classmate Brad — who was basically a bigger, (way) more athletic and (way, way) more popular kid than myself — first bonded over our mutual love of music. At first, it was KISS, which was a very common, bonding element in the late `70s. As mentioned in this post, then as now, you either loved KISS or you loathed them vehemently, and Brad and I — despite being polar opposites in practically every other capacity — both entirely loved them. Our respective mothers were great friends, so we would be regularly thrown into social situations, early on -- an awkward pairing of beefy soccer star with scrawny sci-fi nerd. But when our mutual KISS fandom was fully disclosed, that seemed to bridge the major gaps between us.

But Brad was almost always one step ahead.

Here we were some unfathomable years earlier … at some grade-school Christmas pageant (or something). Brad’s sitting in the forefront. I’m the little dweeb in the back. To my right is my great friend Danny, eulogized here (and first immortalized as Rocky here).

Again, recounted on this post, by the summer of 1979, Brad had largely abandoned KISS (who were pushing their widely-maligned Dynasty album, at the time, which I’ll continue to defend) in favor of immersing himself into his preoccupation with the Beatles and, more specifically, the “Paul is Dead” conspiracy theory, and dragging me right along with him. We spent the entirety of that summer and much of the following months playing records backwards and freaking ourselves out. But that horse was only going to run so far, it being the precipice of the 1980s.

By the time Punk Rock had arrived in force, Brad was typically a few miles ahead of me. We’d all heard the Sex Pistols and The Clash, by this point (I’d been gifted the first albums by The Clash and, oddly, The Vibrators, in a cache of promo LP’s my father had shipped to my sister and I from London while on extended assignment for Forbes Magazine). I was into it, and starting to explore other bands like Devo, The Jim Carroll Band, Blondie, The Ramones, The B-52's and Adam & the Ants, all of whom I loved. But Brad had typically done a much deeper dive.

I remember arriving at the house Brad’s mother had rented out in Quogue, in the summer of 1981, and being practically blown right off the porch by the fire-power of the stereo that came with the place, a bit of consumer electronics that Brad was fully availing himself to. Feeling woefully out-of-step in my Pink Floyd The Wall t-shirt, I found Brad in the living room, steadily giving the speakers a worrying workout (and his mother a splitting headache) via weapons-grade airings of Nobody's Heroes by a band called The Stiff Little Fingers, So Alone by an unhealthy looking gent named Johnny Thunders and the double-album of The Great Rock N’ Roll Swindle, which featured a hilariously sloppy cover of “Johnny B. Goode” by the Sex Pistols. I don’t know how he was first hearing this stuff, but Brad was unwittingly showing me up to be a total punk-rock dilettante.

Of all the records we spun, that summer, however, there were two in particular that really sank their hooks into me, and both continue to be all-time favorites today, regardless of era or categorization. Those albums were the eponymous debut LP by Generation X and Concrete by 999.

With the former, all it really took was a solitary play of “Ready Steady Go” to get me onboard. Where their relative forbears in the Pistols and The Clash repeatedly sang about destroying all things “rock n’ roll,” Generation X remained avowed fans, proudly name-checking outfits like the Beatles, the Stones and Bob Dylan in this ode to a mid-to-late `60s pop music television program. But that reverence was brazenly offset by this amazing sound — the sheer tone of Derwood Andrews’ guitar -- a brash, electrified roar that was at once densely melodic and unthinkably distorted, and it was all over this LP. Coupled with suitably yobbish choruses, Tony James’ insistent bass, Mark Laff’s pugnacious drums and the distinctive vocals of a gent who was shortly to take over the world, that being the endearingly sneery Billy goddamn Idol, Generation X was fucking unstoppable. While dismissed by many of the punk orthodoxy for being unapologetically poppy, there was just no arguing with that first album, allegedly recorded in a single week with finished cuts often culled from manic, single takes. To this day, it sounds like precious little else, and Derwood’s guitar still gets my blood rushing (especially the intro clang of "Kleenex"). 

Here they were lip-psyching to “Ready Steady Go" on “Top of The Pops”…

Even the album cover was awesome — a smeary, over-saturated, sepia-drenched portrait of a bunch of leather-clad nogoodnicks from an explosive future.

The other big record, Concrete by 999, wasn’t quite as overt, but matched Generation X in its insistency and attitude. Kicking off with energetic “So Greedy” (the first song Brad played for me), Concrete boasted a taut, musical finesse you probably weren’t going to find on records by their punky contemporaries. Where Generation X's songs sounded feral and deliberately rudimentary, 999’s playing was tight, urgent and sharp, but with more of an airier sonic dynamic than a lot of their peers. I didn’t know this, at the time, but 999 was formed by a gent named Keith Lucas, who’d honed his chops some years earlier as a guitarist playing in the pub rock band, Kilburn & the The High Roads alongside fellow proto-punk rocker Ian Dury (later of the Blockheads). Swept up in the energy and impact of the era, Lucas quit the High Roads, changed his name to the punkier Nick Cash (as in: to steal), and formed 999 — named after the British emergency telephone number — with his brother Guy on lead guitar.

Somewhat ironically, by the time Concrete was released in 1981, 999 were being perceived, in British Punk circles, to be second-stringers pretty much on their descent, following their more well-received albums like 999 and Separates, featuring incendiary singles like “Emergency” and “Homicide.” But back in Quogue, we didn’t have that context. All I knew was that this 999 record sounded liked an explosion of pure adrenalin that could not be found on most of the rock albums of the day, when the rest of the world was determined to keep listening to Journey, the J. Geils Band and Billy Squier.

Beyond the hiccupy freneticism of “So Greedy,” there were covers of garage nuggets like “Little Red Riding Hood” by Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs and “Fortune Teller” by the Rolling Stones, as well as stomping chant-alongs like “Public Enemy No.1,” “Break It Up" and “Don’t You Know I Need You.” Beyond that, alongside some filler like “Silent Anger” and “Mercy Mercy,” the Nines tried their hand at more exotic fare than most of their safety-pinned peers via atmospheric workouts like “Bongos on the Nile” and “Taboo,” but the “big single” was “Obsessed,” a frantic homage to the Spaghetti Western scores of Ennio Morricone, replete with “hoo-hah” chants and suitably twangy guitar hooks, all framing a song about Nick Cash’s fiery libido. Here they are performing it (well, miming along to it) with great, pogo-y enthusiasm, on a children’s show (!!!) called “Cheggers Plays Pop”

At my first opportunity, back in the city, I hungrily sought out both Generation X and Concrete, but they were not entirely simple to track down. This being just prior to my discovery (via my pal Spike) of the myriad joys of record shopping in Greenwich Village, I took Brad’s tip and checked out the Crazy Eddie’s on East 57th Street, just off of Third Avenue, who had a surprisingly enviable selection of imported vinyl. This shortly became a regular stop, for me. 

By the following summer, all things Punk had given way to all things Hardcore Punk, and Brad was still ahead of the pack, along with our mutual friend Rich, who’d turned me onto bands like The Mob, Flipper and the fabled New York Thrash cassette. Brad, meanwhile had moved on from late `70’s British Punk to evangelize homegrown hardcore outfits like Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Black Flag, DOA, the Circle Jerks and this amazing compilation called Let Them Eat Jellybeans, which opened up a whole new world of options. Things were happening in real time, now, and life was getting genuinely exciting.

Funnily enough, about a year earlier, I’d been taken to a dude ranch in Wyoming wherein my family befriended a family from Washington D.C. named the Blows. The youngest of the Blow clan (and yes, that was their real name) was this kid named Wendel, who was slightly older than myself. Wendel mopily stomped around with a shaved head and combat boots. As I recall, Wendel also had a habit of spitting at my feet when we crossed paths. In any case, he was allegedly a bass player in a local band called S.O.A. (which stood for State of Alert, although I almost had my lights punched out when I questioned whether it would be more grammatically correct to say Alertness). Unsurprisingly, Wendel and I never became friends, but one of the bands Brad was touting that following summer was none other than S.O.A., whose music on the Flex Your Head compilaton (another sterling Brad recommendation) was truly bracing. As a footnote for the non-record geeks amongst you, S.O.A.’s lead singer was one Henry Garfield, who later changed his name to Rollins, joined Black Flag and the rest is blah blah blah.

As further and further summers went by and we all assumed our respective trajectories of adulthood, our paths and our tastes naturally diverged. I remember running into Brad a few years later, and he’d started listening to bands I’d consider unthinkable, like Lynyrd Skynyrd. Rich, meanwhile, became a full-time Deadhead, for a while, although I can’t say I have any idea what he’s into these days. I pretty much stayed the course, and invariably take my preferred music way more seriously than I arguably should. I still listen to records like Generation X and Concrete to this day (although you won’t find the latter on Spotify, for those of you addicted to lazy convenience).

But I will absolutely never forget how these friends -– and countless others like Zachary T, Billy K, Ralph M, John C, Sean H, Rob B, Rob D, Jay F, Charlie F, Walter W, Tim R, Ben K and several more -– opened those initial doors for me, infusing and enriching my life with those sounds that retain the freshness and intensity of the feelings I experienced when I first heard them.

For that, I will always be grateful.

Ginsberg's Lens

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.

Check it out here.

Back to Charlotte Street & Robert Christgau is a Scumbag

It’s been a couple of minutes since I last invoked the Plasmatics, so here goes…

Appropos of nothing at all, I remembered an old story that, for the sleeve of what would be their third album, 1982’s largely-ignored Coup D’Etat, the band (or someone…maybe manager and conceptual svengali Rob Swensen) wanted the cover picture taken on a particular New York City street. That street, again, if legend has it, was Charlotte Street in the South Bronx. 

The alleged decision to shoot on this particular street stemmed originally from a visit to same five years earlier by then-president Jimmy Carter, which resulted in an infamous photograph of the man standing amidst the proverbial rubble. Three years later, as something of a cheap shot, Carter’s GOP rival Ronald Reagan traveled to the very same spot on Charlotte Street as a means of demonstrating how anemic Carter’s efforts had been, suggesting that only he could make the required difference to turn things around, reducing the plight of the South Bronx to little more than a political football and photo-op.

In response to this, the Plasmatics allegedly showed up on Charlotte Street with a big fuckoff tank, and called their record Coup D’Etat.

Great story, right? Well, here’s the thing -– I could find precious little documentation to back up the original story that the Plasmatics specifically went to Charlotte Street. Sure, study the cover of the album and it certainly looks like it could have been Charlotte Street. I mean, those are burned out buildings appearing behind them, after all, but it’s not like the South Bronx was the only place to find distressed urban decay. Flip the album over….

…and the only tangible information about the photography is that it was handled by a gent named Butch Star. Certain folks have suggested the Butch Star is actually the aforementioned Mr. Swenson, but, y’know, who knows? As a result, the trail to verify the location has gone cold.

Oh, as something of a surreal and depressing coda, the following September after Coup D’Etat was released on a disinterested public, the Plasmatics’ erstwhile touring mates in KISS also traveled to Charlotte Street, selecting it as the location for the laughably ludicrous (naturally) video for “Lick It Up.” One can only imagine the already-beleagured residents of the Charlotte Street neighborhood being somewhat bemused by all this attention.

KISS probably chose Charlotte Street because it looked suitably apocalyptic, not for any political reasons (that was never their scene). The Plasmatics chose Charlotte Street very much on purpose as a vague political statement, but then buried and/or abandoned that statement, inexplicably.

Regardless, while the full story may yet be told in some band biography, I could find zero evidence to verify that Charlotte Street was the location for the cover image Coup D’Etat or the video for “Lick It Up.” Ho hum. 

But in my travels around the `net trying to unearth info about the Plasmatics’ shoot, I did come across Robert Christgau’s review of Coup D’Etat for The Village Voice. For those who may not know the name, Robert Christgau is the self-titled “Dean of American Rock Critics.” Some years back, I started reading his book and got suitably turned off by his slavishly masturbatory prose (and this is coming from me). You can read that screed here.

In any case, here’s what Christgau had to say, as documented here:

Plasmatics: Coup D'Etat [Capitol, 1982] Now that they've copped to heavy metal tempos, they could last as long as Judas Priest, although since the HM hordes do demand chops, Wendy O. might be well advised to try singing with her nether lips. Not only can't she carry a tune (ha), she can't even yell. Inspirational Thing She Says Backward on Outgroove: "The brainwashed do not know they are brainwashed." Inspirational Message Scratched on Outgroove: "You were not made for this." D-

Did you catch that?

“She might be well advised trying to try singing with her nether lips”

I mean, seriously, Village Voice, I realize this was still 1982 … but what the actual fuck?

Meanwhile, back on Charlotte Street in the South Bronx, if you go looking to recreate the sleeve of Coup D'Etat with your own big fuckoff tank or try re-enact the priapic preening of Paul Stanley in front of a row of crumbling housing projects, the end results are not going to synch up very well. As documented in this first-person account from 2016, Charlotte Street is now a sleepy bedroom community that now plays host to an unrecognizable plot of suburban-style ranch houses. 

ADDENDUM: For better or worse, I’ve always been a strident Plasmatics fan and apologist, defending them at their silliest moments, which were myriad. I first snapped up a copy of the “official” Plasmatics book, “Your Heart in Your Mouth” circa 1983 from a posh bookstore on Fifth Avenue. In later years, I bought a second copy of it (why I did so now escapes me) at a WFUV Record Fair in Chelsea about twenty years ago. As such, I now own two copies of this  book which, in certain very silly circles, can fetch an admirable sum. I’d wrongly assumed the book was first published prior to the release of Coup D’Etat, but dug out one copy this morning to verify — and lo and behold, I came across this fleeting invocation of the band’s cover shoot for that album, quasi-confirming the notion that it was indeed the same Charlotte Street address, if the book — a band-sanctioned bit of self-mythologizing promotion — is to be believed. 

 

Back to Tier 3

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.

Without further ado, here’s Amy’s video.

The Walrus was Paul

Dates kinda fail me, on this one, but it must have been back in the summer of 1979 when my grammar-school pal Brad roped me into his preoccupation, at the time, with this astonishing (to us) conspiracy theory that had made the rounds in our classroom that previous spring. Apparently, some unfathomable amount of years earlier (really only about ten, but when you’ve only been alive for twelve or thirteen years, that seems like a crazy amount of time), Beatle Paul McCartney was rumored to have been killed in a car crash and covertly replaced by a lookalike, and the Beatles had peppered (pardon the pun) clues all over their albums about it. To underscore this remarkable (again, to us … it was already ancient history to the rest of the cognizant world) assertion, Brad dropped the needle on the already kinda spooky “I Am the Walrus” from Magical Mystery Tour, pumping up the volume towards the end to amplify entirely discernable utterances of “BURY ME!”

Suffice to say, this creepy revelation immediately put the hook in me, and Brad and I were off to the races, spending the rest of our summer scrupulously cataloging perceived clues, ruining the styluses on our respective families’ sound systems from spinning records backwards and basically freaking ourselves right the fuck out. Sure, it all sounds (and, frankly, is) patently ridiculous, but parts of what we “uncovered” were genuinely disquieting. Regardless of your stance on the whole “Paul is Dead” story, you cannot tell me you haven’t found parts of The White Album just a little quietly sinister.

There were, of course, several “clues” that were simply bananas. My favorite was the theory that if you held the cover of Magical Mystery Tour in one hand and a mirror in another, and then stood in front of another mirror just so, the starry letters that spell out “Beatles” would re-arrange, in the mirror you were holding, into a phone number (albeit, of course, without enough digits), and if you called that enigmatic number at -- FUCKING WAIT FOR IT -- Wednesday Morning at 5 o’clock (…as the day begins), you’d get, y’know,….. the whole story! I also enjoyed the theory that the cover of The White Album could be “scrubbed” to reveal some kind of ominous image underneath. Like I said, …. bananas.

But there were several instances when something was being intentionally expressed. Then as now, I never genuinely believed that Paul was ever actually dead so much as that the Beatles had been just fuckin’ with people, but that didn’t make the whole thing any less intriguing, for Brad and I, at least. Maybe it was all just a goof, but we still wanted to get to the bottom of it.

Here’s the thing: When you indeed spin “Revolution #9” backwards, it actually does seem to repeat “Turn Me On, Dead Man!” And when you play the mumbling bit right after “I’m So Tired” backwards, it actually does sound like “Paul is dead, man, miss him, Miss Him, MISS HIM!” I’m still on the fence about whether it’s “John Buried Paul” or “Cranberry Sauce” in the odd, flutey coda of “Strawberry Fields,” but either way, it’s fuckin’ creepy.

The only reason I’m mentioning any of this now, however, is that in the latest episode of The Dana Gould Hour podcast, the comedian devotes his “True Tales from Weirdsville” segment to the “Paul is Dead” story. Gould, who is fucking hilarious, delves into the surrounding circumstances and ephemera, but stops quite short of conceding that parts of the theory are legitimately weird.

Actually, there is one completely bonkers element that Dana fails to cite in his rumination. He mentions the anecdote about some journalists from LIFE Magazine (an alma mater of mine) confronting McCartney on his Scottish farm in the wake of the hysteria and how an exclusive cover story resulted from the incident. You can see that cover to the right.

The crazy thing about it, however, was that while the cover story was specifically designed to dispel the persistent rumor Paul had been killed in a car crash, it actually added further fuel to the fire (pardon another pun). How so? Well, on the flip side of the actual cover of that issue of the magazine was a full-page advertisement .... for a car. The image, if memory serves, is the front end of a car pointing towards the viewer. And, if you didn't see this coming, the smoking gun to this was that if you held the cover up to a light, the image of the front of the car appeared to bisect the image of Paul, which some perceived as irrefutable evidence that, y'know, it was all true. 

The image of same below was taken from this magisterial website. 

Regardless, Dana ain’t buyin’ it, but it makes for an interesting listen, and brought me right back to that very silly summer. Check it out here.

To this day, I still can’t listen to the end of “Long, Long, Long” on The White Album without being creeped out.

The Coffee Shop/Diner Dichotomy

The following post is actually an “open letter,” initially composed in response to the latest episode of the Desperately Seeking the `80s podcast, which I’ve discussed here several times before, most notably here. I started writing it and then it got to a length wherein I figured it would make a nice post on its own, so here we are. You’re welcome.

Incidentally, the lovely ladies of the`80s have graciously invited me to actually appear on their podcast. We’re recording that very soon, I believe, so watch this space for that. Hopefully I won’t come off sounding like a rambling, abject idiot, but I promise nothing.

So, without further ado, in response to Jessica’s portion of this latest episode (Episode #60), herewith my response….

M’kay… first of all, I totally recognize the elusive difference Jessica was driving at between the classic coffee shop and the diner, the latter being a sort of less salubrious affair, given its accent on burgers & fries over more delicate fare and the ability to order alcohol, an important distinction, in my latter years of high school and into college.

That discussion immediately conjured up places where I used to be taken as a child. There were at least two or three proper “coffee shops,” as I remember, on Madison Avenue, foremost among them being the one beautifully captured in the photograph above (I have no idea who took it or when, but I'd originally poached it for this old post), which was on the southwest corner of 84th Street, right next to the long-vanished Trans-Lux movie house (the only movie theatre on Madison Avenue, I want to say). For whatever reason, I remember coming to this place with my Dad, who always ordered “cinnamon toast” … which, should that need illustration, was just that: buttered white toast with cinnamon on top. I don’t remember us ever having anything else, but who needed anything else? Inside, it was a lunch place, but it wasn’t tawdry or beaten up, unlike more conventional diners, which were open later. I want to say there was another more haute coffee shop about a block up between 85th and 86th (and this is going way, way back) called The Puffing Billy (named, presumably, after a train), but I can find no evidence of that online.

In terms of all things DINER, meanwhile, beyond what I blathered about in this recent epic-length post, me and my own little gaggle of morons had our specific favorites, those being as follows: The Mansion on East 86th & York Avenue (this was my home corner from about 1984 until 1996), Gracie’s Corner on the – wait for it – corner of East 86th & First Avenue (r.i.p.), The Viand Restaurant on East 86th Street & Second Avenue and then, a little further afield, The New Amity on Madison and east 84th (r.i.p.) and one on Lexington between 77th and 78th that, in more recent years, was called the Lenox Hill Grill, but went by another name back in the 80s. There was also one on Madison Avenue and, like, East 63rd we occasionally went to which was called The New Wave Diner (or Restaurant) – an establishment we appreciated solely for its name.

The Mansion is still there today, but had something of an interior-décor reboot, some years back, that decimated everything I held dear about the place. It used to be comparatively dark inside. You could sit at the counter and enjoy your burger in a sort of atmospheric gloom, as opposed to the gleaming white walls that now frame one’s dining experience. I remember they had stills from “Casablanca” above the counter area, for whatever reason.

When my mother and my step-father split, my sister was already away at college, so Mom and I moved to East 86th Street between York & East End, just up the road a piece from where my grandparents had lived at Henderson House before decamping to Florida. It was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, so I was already fairly autonomous, and my mom was jump-starting a career as a real estate agent for the Corcoran Group, so I was frequently left to my own devices, which meant lots and lots and lots of visits to the Mansion for any number of meals. It was also a meeting place, a hangout spot and a safe haven, of a sort. For a hot second (and I do mean hot), I actually dated a young lady who worked behind the counter in the early `90s, but it was destined to crash and crumble like a slice of over-toasted cinnamon toast. More about that another time.

One of the cool things about living on East 86th Street, at the time, was the aforementioned abundance of diners and coffee shops. I seem to remember Gracie’s Corner on First Avenue being if not a 24-hr. venture, at least being a very late-night operation, and frequently repairing to its comfy confines for late-night fries with gravy (an homage to “Diner”? Who remembers?) and other inevitably drunken shenanigans (frequently after many an ill-advised hour spent in nearby public houses like Ryan’s Daughter and The (original) Gaf (formerly Pedro’s). I have a somewhat bleary-but-still-cringey memory of my college pal Edgar (not his real name … who, after spending weeks living on my couch, finally rented his own place nearby on East 84th off Second Avenue) basically abandoning a girl he’d been out on a date with (leaving her in my care, so to speak). She wasn’t so much crestfallen as confused. I walked her home, though – something Edgar invariably should have done. But, I digress..

The Viand (and we pronounced it with an inexplicable French accent, ala “vee-OND,” although who knows if this is correct?) was another staple. I remember very many meals at the Viand, either with my college friend Shafe (then-fresh from rural Florida) or my childhood comrade Rob D. Rob was famous for his last-minute veer-offs from convention when ordering, making roundly ill-advised detours into adventurous culinary territory ala “actually….scratch that, I’ll have the Cauliflower Au Gratin!” and other dishes one should ABSOLUTELY NEVER order at a diner.

My late friend Danny (initially immortalized as Rocky, on this post) and I used to frequent that Lenox Hill spot (right next to Lenox Hill hospital, a storied institution Danny was once ensconced in for a broken nose after a fateful run-in with the 84th Street Bombers in front of Mimi’s Pizza on Lexington and 84th). It lacked the homey comfort of the Mansion or the late-night debauchery-friendly vibe of Gracie’s Corner, but it was his local. The New Amity on Madison was a big favorite for some classmates of mine, but trying to have a meal there during the school day was always a nervy affair, as our free periods were only forty minutes long, so you were invariably going to be asking feverishly for a check before you’d finished your burger (or whatever).

Today, once again, the Mansion is still there, and recently made a cameo in “Only Murders in The Building” (although not cited by its actual name). The original Gracie’s Corner is gone, as is most of the block it occupied, but I think its building is still standing. The concern actually moved up the block and what had been The Viand is now called Gracie’s Corner, if I’m not mistaken.

I’m pretty sure the Lenox Hill Grill on Lexington at 77th is gone. The New Amity closed for good last summer. I think what had been the New Wave is still there, but called something else, by this point.

In terms of the cast of characters, my date-abandoning pal Edgar decamped back to his Midwestern hometown in the mid 2000’s. I fell more or less out of touch with Florida Shafe some years back after he got a bit more churchy, so to speak. My great comrade Rob D. got married to my friend J, had a child, moved to City Island, then moved to New London, CT. , got divorced and became an acclaimed writer and an esteemed man of letters, penning the preeminent academic tome on Eugene O’Neil and currently working on another sprawling book about a different celebrated writer. He still orders food ill-advisedly. My cinnamon toast-touting Dad passed away in 2011 and my great friend Danny died in 2018 in his adopted state of Colorado following a few cruel years paralyzed from a tragic bicycle accident.

The girl I fleetingly dated from The Mansion vanished into thin air circa 1993.

Back to the East River Amphitheater ... with Cop Shoot Cop

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.

Here, meanwhile is Cop Shoot Cop circa 1993.

Kiss on "The Midnight Special" in `75

Like so many other ponderously pretentious posts I put up here, I originally started this entry prefacing the video below with a needlessly laborious, multi-paragraph re-telling of the first time I’d ever seen a picture of Kiss and how that completely transfixed me and blah blah blah. Who cares? You shouldn’t.

The bottom line is this: Just like their make-up, it was black & white: either you immediately dug Kiss when you first encountered them, or you didn’t. Those who didn’t fucking hated them then and hate them still. Those who did, like myself, loved them and have invariably forgiven the band’s myriad lapses in taste, judgement and decorum, over the years, as… well … as the saying goes, you never forget your first kiss.

In any case, the clip below was posted on YouTube just a couple of days ago, and if you ever were a fan, it’s required viewing. Prior to the bigger-budgeted bloat and Ringling Brothers-worthy ridiculousness of later eras, this finds the band in leaner, sleazier mode than their more family-friendly incarnations.

Playing “She,” a somewhat lumpenly lusty exercise from their third album, Dressed to Kill, Kiss dutifully gives “The Midnight Special” their whole shtick, here, complete with some tragic choreography and needless preening. That all said, when this was taped, the band was still a loose, hungry outfit, and they were indeed all committed to the cause – from the three-part harmonies in the verses (who knew?) to Peter Criss’ beefy drums fills. As a commenter on Facebook noted, it’s all a cartoon until Ace Frehley steps up and takes over … then it gets real.

When this first aired in November of 1975, it would have been way past my bedtime, being that I would only have been about eight years old, at the time. But I was already onboard. That all said, I’m still not going to their final show.

Old Wave Goes No Navy

I routinely spend an inordinate amount of time bitching and moaning about places like The Gap, Urban Outfitter and, more recently, American Eagle hawking t-shirts with band insignias on them. Longtime readers might remember me foaming at the mouth about Flipper t-shirts being sold at Forever 21 and/or an obscure bit of Ramones artwork being inexplicably appropriated for a shirt sold by Brandy Melville. It’s getting as commonplace as canonical rock tunes like Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” being used in Carnival Cruise ads – it shouldn’t be shocking any more, but it still riles me.

This all said, someone posted something comparable on a Facebook group I belong to, today, that left me more puzzled than pissed-off. I cannot verify if this is actually true, but someone was selling an Old Navy t-shirt on eBay appended with the legend “NO WAVE NEW YORK – 1982 LOWER EAST SIDE,” augmented with an image of what looks like a derelict building (see below). Now, I have zero idea of the true provenance of the image, but the fact that it ended up on an Old Navy graphic t-shirt is truly bizarre.

Unlike, say, Nirvana, The Ramones, Rush, AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses or even Joy Division, the No Wave movement was a fairly niche concern, in the grand scheme of things, largely relegated to a more select demographic, to put it mildly. You’ll never find a bona fide No Wave record on a sports bar’s jukebox, nor is it likely to feature heavily in the offerings at your local karaoke establishment. Names like Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, DNA, Mars, The Contortions and the like may still be sacrosanct to your average egg-headed music nerd but aren’t liable to get any nods of recognition outside of the dusty record-shop contingent. Still quite capable of separating the die-hards from the dilletantes, the music of the very short-lived No Wave period is very pointedly of a “not for everyone” variety.

Moreover, if you really want to get pedantic, the juxtaposition of the term “No Wave” and the year 1982 also doesn’t really jibe, as by most credible accounts, No Wave was basically over by 1980. This garment begs so many questions. Click to enlarge. 

This all said, while I haven’t voluntarily stepped inside an Old Navy since my kids were still in their zealous nose-picking years, were I to come across it whilst perusing their wares, I’d probably buy it based solely on the sheer what-the-fuck? Incongruity of it all.

Actually.... it looks like you can get it on Etsy ... so treat yourself. 

For the curious, uninitiated and/or for the Old Navy shoppers……THIS is what No Wave sounds like….