Flaming Pablum

Teenage Buzzcock With Camera in Fun City

Peruse through the fourteen years worth of posts here on Flaming Pablum, and you’re bound to find not-just-a-few allusions to, posts about and pictures & videos of the mighty Buzzcocks, inarguably one of England’s finest exports from the Punk years. I first heard them via the inclusion of “Orgasm Addict” on a mixtape a friend bequeathed me circa 1980, and life was never the same. Progenitors of tight, immaculately crafted tunes that seamlessly fused palpable pop hooks with punky pugnacity, the Buzzcocks were, simply put, a perfect band. Beg to differ and be laughably wrong.

I didn’t see the Buzzcocks in their prime, being that they officially broke up in 1981, only a year after I’d first heard them at the age of 13. But they reformed in 1989, featuring the classic line-up of Pete Shelley, Steve Diggle, Steve Garvey and John Maher. My friend Rob B. and I went to their reunion show at the New Ritz in November of that year, and it was one of those rare live-concernt experiences wherein the myth fully lives up to the hype – the band exploded onto that stage like a multi-dimensional Jackson Pollack painting of noise and color. Hands down, it was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever had the pleasure of attending.

In typical form, I’m letting my love of the Buzzcocks get the better of me, as this post wasn’t really supposed to be about them, or at least not directly.

This post is about original Buzzcocks drummer John Maher. I only saw him perform once – at that show at the New Ritz in `89. Stiff-backed and stoic behind a pair of black shades, Maher provided the tireless engine that fueled the band’s most propulsive songs. My favorite image of him is in the live video Auf Wiedersehen, which captured the band’s final, pre-breakup performance on German television in 1981. Maher wore a black ANARCHY shirt (which was sort of cheeky, being that the band’s songs were always more about romantic travails than revolution), black shades and a bowler hat.

After the 1989 reunion, Maher left the band again to focus more on his love of vintage cars – which was also somewhat ironic, given that one of the band’s early singles, “Fast Cars,” lamented the fetishistic materialism of car culture. In any case, the band carried on without him, initially recruiting fellow Mancunian and former Smiths’ drummer Mike Joyce to helm the drum kit. Maher would later join the band onstage a couple of times, but never fully returned.

Along the way, Maher also established himself as a photographer, gaining renown for his work. I stumbled upon his Instagram not too long back and it took me a minute to connect the dots and realize that this was the same John Maher that played on some of my favorite records of all time.

Anyway, quite recently, my favorite things in the world completely aligned, and John Maher commenced a new series (?) on his website wherein he shares images of New York City he took during the Buzzcocks’ earlier tours of the United States in 1979 through 1980.

Check them out here.

Pinheads in Plimsolls: Parsing the Footwear of the Ramones

I spotted the video below on Facebook this morning and was left on the fence

On the one hand, The Ramones never made a great deal of money when they were a going concern, so I get it, and this clip is certainly cute -- dutifully adhering to the band's familial, one-for-all/all-for-one, cartoony mystique (when, in truth, they were bitterly dysfunctional), but there is still a lingering aftertaste to this.

I am somewhat reminded of an abortive ad campaign for Doc Martens back in 2007 that featured the late Joey Ramone wearing a pair of Docs, when it's universally acknowledged the great man never wore anything but sneakers.

Also, not to totally become Johnny Pedantic, but I don't know that the Ramones actually wore Converse. I mean, yeah, they wore plimsolls (i.e. canvas sneakers), but were they Converse? Might they have actually been Pro-Keds?

I posed this question on Facebook, and my old MTV News colleague Brian Wallace weighed in with a truly exhaustive website devoted to the Ramones' preferred footwear (short answer: While they frequently sported Sperry "boating shoes," they were known to rock the odd pair of Converse). So, there you have it.

Gabba, Gabba...

“Summer of My Wasted Youth”

A video trailer for her book, here’s the video for “Girl to City,” the memoir of downtown chanteuse Amy Rigby. I first encountered Ms. Rigby via black and white photographs of her striking visage (some of the most iconic ones, like the portrait below, taken by Julia Gorton) that lead me to the conclusion that she was some sort of tempestuous No Wave vixen ala Lydia Lunch, Lizzy Mercier Descloux or Anya Philips. This wasn’t entirely the case, as Miss Rigby’s own music owed more to classic pop, folk and country, albeit practiced with the D.I.Y. aesthetic of the era. Suffice it to say, Amy Rigby was punk before the term became so rigidly codified.

In any case, this visual snippet of the great lady’s days on the downtown Manhattan scene – hanging in the East Village, playing at venues like Tier 3 and Folk City, etc. – leads me to believe that her book-- which came out only a couple of months back --  is something worth checking out.

Chowing Down in Chinatown

Chinatown. Invoke its name, and your head is immediately filled with images of winding, narrow streets bustling with activity. To stroll through its storied byways is to encounter countless sights, sounds, scents, flavors and options that are as enticing as they are intimidating. A city within a city, Chinatown makes me feel like a total tourist rube, even as a lifelong, native New Yorker.

Sure, I know a few arguably obvious spots for an evening out in Chinatown. As mentioned elsewhere here, I’ve dined on the dim sum in the magisterial expanse of Jing Fong on Elizabeth Street, I’ve sampled the fare at Wo Hop on Mott Street, although I probably only knew the latter because of the ubiquity of its dragoon-festooned t-shirt, a former sartorial staple of downtown Manhattan hipsters. I remember myself and a group of fellow dads from my kids’ elementary school having dinner at some great place on Bayard Street (name long-since forgotten), although I believe our original mission — one we failed — was to find the eatery Andy Warhol was once photographed in. I do recall repairing to a speakeasy on fabled Doyers Street called Apotheke afterwards. But these pointers and the criteria that informed them are still pretty threadbare. In terms of authoritatively knowing what Chinatown has to offer — and not solely in terms of cuisine — I am fairly clueless. As a side note, the location of the Warhol-preferred spot was later revealed here.

My wife actually hipped me to another great dim sum place, that being Dim Sum A-Go-Go on East Broadway. It may not look fancy or authentic, but its fare is amazing …. and cheap to boot. We’ve taken the kids there a couple of times, and its always a hit for all parties concerned.

But Chinatown still remains largely opaque to me, like a code I’m constantly trying to crack. While I’m more able to find my way around it these days — and not just the well-traveled strips of Bayard, Pell & Mott — it still feels fairly impenetrable.

Seeking out places like Downtown Music Gallery, a few years back, better acquainted me to the topography, however marginally. Obviously not a place to eat or drink, DMG is a hidden-beneath-the-street bunker on far-flung Monroe Street that specializes in uproariously esoteric music. Said music was leant even further mystique by way of the long journey through the streets east of East Broadway in order to acquire it. 

Then there's Mission Chinese on the other end of East Broadway. Eating here — while amazing — always feels like cheating, being that it’s not originally a local NYC concern. But Mission Chinese -- nor Downtown Music Gallery, for that matter --- really seem to belong where they are. They are not of Chinatown. I’ve always wanted to discover a great, authentic, long-established restaurant in Chinatown, but didn’t even begin to credibly know how to find it.

Stumped by the ever-perplexing quandary of what to get me for Christmas (any bits of music I want I usually go out and get myself, and I don't really want/need much else), the wife discovered a great company called Foods of New York, a group that's been conducting culinary tours of various likely neighborhoods for two decades. Now, before you protest, let me stop you right there --- YES, the idea of a food-tour of Chinatown sounds like an UPROARIOUSLY touristy thing to do, and if it's one thing New Yorkers absolutely loathe -- be they native or naturalized -- it's doing anything that may be construed as touristy. I get it. But, as I mentioned a few graphs up, I will be the very first person to concede that in terms of navigating the intricacies of Chinatown, I might as well be from friggin' Ohio. I needed help. Foods of New York were offering it. What's not to like?

Well, without giving too much away, Peg and I took the tour quite recently and it was a total revelation. For a start, our tour guide Raheem, who has being doing this sort of thing since 2007, could not have been cooler, more enthusiastic or more informed. Not only was he entirely versed the finer points of the cuisine that we were sampling from several different locations on the map, but his knack for bits of compelling historical trivia was striking. I feel somewhat remiss, I am sad to say, for having passed on a bit of incorrect trivia onto him, wrongly asserting that the album cover of the Ramones' Halfway to Sanity was shot in a doorway adjacent to one of the restaurants we visited, that being Peking Duck House on Mott Street. Turns out the cover shot of Halfway was actually taken a few hundred steps to the southeast. Ah well.  

In any case, during the three or four hours of the tour, we tasted some amazing food, learned of at least three or four absolutely must-visit-again spots and got a few great pointers for new places to knock back a few drinks. What can I say, I really, really enjoyed it and highly recommend it. 

Find them here. Tell them Flaming Pablum sent you. 

CBGB Express – When It Aboslutely, Postivevly Has To Be There, OMFUG!

©RichAllen

Spotted these two photos on the Facebook group, Manhattan Before 1990, taken by one Rich Allen, who very hopefully does not mind me repurposing them here.

Snapped in 1975, the photographs show two boys – Jeffreny and Fernando, evidently – playing hooky and messing around on the back of a delivery van. Closer scrutiny reveals the van to be apparently part of a new business concern called CBGB.

For those of us still lamenting the painful demise of the storied venue (though I’ve gone on record saying it’s high time to let go and say goodnight), this begs several questions, the most pressing and obvious one being….

If CBGB owned and operated a delivery van, ….what exactly were they delivering?

Cheers to Rich Allen.

©RichAllen

Lost in “New Rock City”

Nostalgia, once again, is a weird thing. For every period or era or, in musical parlance, “scene” that one person laments, there are individuals from before and after that particular passage of time who harbor entirely different affinities and associations. Witness the ongoing dialogue in the comments in some of my posts about NYHC, as one example. Everyone has their own period, their own perceptions of same, obviously, and their own attachments.

I was certainly around for the boom of new New York City bands that manifested around the turn of the millennium and just afterwards, with acts like The Strokes, Interpol, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture and genuinely liked a bunch of them (well, not so much The Rapture), but it was clearly no longer my class, so to speak. I was still carrying torches for earlier acts like Skeleton Key, Pussy Galore, Surgery, Barkmarket, Prong, Helmet and, yes indeed, Cop Shoot Cop. One alumnus of the latter -- Tod [A], of course --  formed Firewater, which almost bridged the chasm of those eras, going so far as sharing members with comparative upstarts like Gogol Bordello, but Firewater don’t often get a namecheck when discussing that next generation. I’m biased, of course, but I think that’s an oversight.

I’ve written about my issues with the whole “Meet Me In the Bathroom” generation of bands before, most windily here and also here. If you click on that first post, you’ll notice I appended a post-script to clarify that I didn’t mean to sound so grumpily prejudicial about Lizzie Goodman’s magisterial book on that era, but rather that I’d hoped for acknolwedgement of the continuum of great New York bands – which was actually kinda stupid, as that would have made poor Ms. Goodman’s already-quite-lengthy book much lengthier. What I need to do, simply, is acknowledge what I asserted in the first paragraph here – everyone is entitled to their own period, their own perceptions of same and their own attachements.

All this weighty preamble is to highlight the video below, which I stumbled upon on Vimeo. The clip was uploaded eight years ago, but seems to date back further than that (2004, maybe?). Dubbed "New Rock City,” this thirty-minute documentary attempts to capture the post-millennial/neo-post-punk (how’s that for a complicated descriptor?) generation by profiling bands like the afore-cited Gogol Bordello, FischerSpooner, Le Tigre, Blonde Redhead and some others, augmented by ruminations by rock journos like Sarah “Ultragrrl” Lewitinn and Joe Levy, two fellow (sorta) former SPIN alumni.

I think the thing that struck me about this film, however, is how the city and scene depicted therein already seem so long ago. That may have more to do with my own advancing age and perspective on things, but in the same way I look at books about New York's hardcore scene of the early-to-mid 80's and think “how is this even the same city?”, I get a comparable vibe from this. I am also reminded of “Goodnight Brooklyn” The Story of Death by Audio,” a compelling documentary that essentially told the story of an even more recent dyng scene that makes “New Rock City” look like friggin’ “The Decline of Western Civilization.”

Time passes. Things change. Scenes come and go and get replaced by new ones you won’t be privy to -- let alone endorse or understand -- because you basically get old and in the way.

I guess that’s just the way it is.

In any case, enjoy “New Rock City.”

Keef in the Streets

Down here in Greenwich Village or – as I’m frequently heard to describe it – the veritable crotch of NYU, there’s a certain ground-floor apartment in the much, much nicer building across the street from mine that has always sparked a bit of speculation. Easily spotted from the sidewalk outisde, one can see a robust selection of handsome electric guitars hung around the high-ceilinged peremeter of a stately sitting/media room. I remember spying it sometime shortly after moving onto the street circa 2002 and becoming immediately curious as to the resident. At the time, I knew of certain celebrities like Julian Casablancas from The Strokes and Chris Noth from “Sex & The City” (and other roles, of course) living in the neighboring environs, but this room looked to be owned by someone at a more elevated level of affluence. The doorman of the building in question has, unsurprisingly, never been forthcoming about it (and, yes, I did ask). Lots of people in the `hood have theories.

“Keith Richards lives there,” is the one I’ve heard the most, although I furrow my brow every time it’s suggested.

For a start, while it had long been said that the storied Rolling Stone guitarist -- captured above by Timothy White -- “kept” a home somewhere in downtown Manhattan, it never struck me that the street-fighting man would have taken an apartment with a street-facing window. That just didn’t add up. He’s a Rolling Stone, for cryin’ out loud. Surely, die-hard Stones-heads would’ve figured it out and set up shop outside his window. But somehow, that theory persisted.

I also pooh-poohed the notion as -- however fun it would be to have Keef as a neighbor -- in the roughly seventeen years I’ve lived on this street, I have never once spotted the Midnight Rambler arriving or departing from the address in question. I’ve never even spotted a vehicle worthy of transporting same parked nearby. The whiff of Richards’ singular brand of louche badassery is nowhere to be smelt on my strip between University Place and Broadway. Given my own preoccupations, I assure you – if Keith Richards was living that close by, I’d damn well know about it.

Now, this not to say Keith hasn’t been spotted around, even if the spotting hasn’t been done by yours truly. As lovingly documented in Christopher McKittrick’s new book “Can’t Give It Away on Seventh Avenue” – which I’m currently reading – the Rolling Stones have an inexorable relationship with New York City, with all the band members having lived here at one point or another. Keith was said to have had a an apartment in the East Village until about 1983, although I’m uncertain as to where. And beyond periodically appearing on small stages across town to jam with certain notables, Keith was said to be a regular customer at Myers of Keswick, the traditional British grocery store over on Hudson Street in the West Village.

The rumors about Keef living in the buildng next door to me were officially dispelled in 2016, meanwhile, when it was reported that the great man was selling his Manhattan residence – an iconic duplex penthouse at One Fifth Avenue – for a tidy $12.2 million. Apparently, the Richards family barely owned that apartment for two years, having bought it some time in 2014, but they didn’t find a buyer for the place until last year.

This all begs two questions…..

Where was Keith Richards’ pad in the East Village?

…and…

Since it’s not Keith, who DOES live in the pricey guitar apartment across my street?

Coming Up from "Somewhere Below..."

Just to close the loop on this, I finally got my copy of Karen O'Sullivan's "Somewhere Below 14th & East," and it is indeed astonishingly compelling.

In the grand tradition of Bri Hurley's "Making a Scene" and Drew Carolan's "Matinee," this collection of photos provides a striking glimpse into the NYHC scene of the early 80's, one that showcases the breadth of this particular comnunity, the pertinent topography and myriad characters from therein, both obscure and renowned. As I've laboriously observed on similar posts in the past, it's hard to reconcile that we're living in the same city that fostered this scene. 

The last time I did that, of course, I was called out by a regular reader for being a boujie ex-punk (or something to that effect) who'd divested, seemingly oblivious to the the next generations' iterations that picked up where this earlier scene left off. To that point, I'd suggest that I'm not negating the idea of a thriving New York hardcore community here in 2019, but rather pointing out that it doesn't operate as this one did, nor around the same environs. My point is less about the continuing existence of hardcore and more about how much this city has changed. 

Anyway, should you be interested, I recommend ordering a copy with the "bonus zine," which simply gives you more images to look at, including this cool shot of Jack Natz (then of The Undead, later of Virus and my beloved Cop Shoot Cop). 

Bad Happenings on Avenue B

Evidently, Harvey Weinstein stepped out on the town, last night, to attend an event at a frankly douchy-looking new L.E.S. establishment called the Downtime Bar. Back in the 90’s, there was a Goth club called Downtime on West 30th Street – this is not affiliated with that. In any case, during the course of the evening, it was gleaned by certain event participants that the infamous Mr. Weinstein was in attendance. Tempers unsurprisingly flaired, although the outcome didn’t result in Weinstein’s ejection from the bar, but rather the ejection of two of his confronters. You can read details of the whole icky account on Gothamist.

If even a fraction of the stories about Weinstein have even a modicum of truth about them, he’s the abhorrent scumbag we all assume he is, and he deserves no pity. I hope he had a shitty evening. But speaking of shitty evenings, there was something strangely familiar about the location.

I did a bit of Googling and found Downtime’s website – which revealed it to be just as, once again, douchy as I’d been expecting. It turns out, however, that it’s located at 25 Avenue B, and that’s what put the hook in me.

I don’t remember what sort of concern 25 Avenue B was back in the comparatively carefree, balmy days of 1993, but it was considerably less salubrious than what Downtime aspires to be today. In fact, the address is directly across the street from the former site of the infamous Gas Station, a notorious venue I’ve spoken about here a few times. Depending on who you ask, The Gas Station is arguably most renowned as being the site of the final performance by the late GG Allin in June of 1993. GG went on to overdose on drugs later that same day, but not before needlessly stripping naked, assaulting a few people, pelting anyone within pelting-distance with fistfuls of his own excrement and inspiring a riot that spilled out onto the busy byways of Avenue B. You can see lots of same in the grainy video below.

About twenty-five minutes into the video, after the “concert” has been effectively scuttled, watch how the Geeg boldly bounds out of the Gas Station and onto the avenue, wherein he proceeds to bash his head against a light pole, roll around naked in the middle of street – as one does, I guess – throw a bottle at a bus, flip off said bus, and then fleetingly take shelter from the scrutiny of the nearby constabulary by hiding in the doorway of what -- I think -- today is the Downtime Bar.

Here in 2019, GG Allin has been dead for twenty-six years. The Gas Station was razed and a new building with a Duane Reade now stands in its footprint. Harvey Weinstein, meanwhile, is still walking the streets. 

There’s some bad kinda karma on that strip of Avenue B, to be sure.

Joking on The Steps

I posted this on Facebook today, but I might as well share it here, too, because … well, why not?

According to several reports, notably this recent one in Vulture, certain fans have discovered the location of an evidently crucial scene in “Joker” and started to make touristy pilgrimages to the site in the Bronx. I say “evidently” as I still have not seen the film, and have no real desire to. To my mind, as I may have stated here before, we don’t need another telling of the Joker story, in much the same way we do not need another James Bond, or another goddamn “Star Wars” installment. Shouldn’t we all be bored to tears with these mythoses by now? How about new stories, new heroes and new anti-heroes. Just a thought.

In any case, while I might not give a rat’s ass about “Joker,” I really cannot get mad at folks for getting excited about tracking down those stupid Bronx steps, given the fact that I’ve undertaken countless pilgrimages of similar intent to any number of significant locations from photographs, album covers and films, usually in the company of my very patient kids. Many long-time visitors to this blog may remember same.

Here are some you might remember, should you care….Click on them to enlarge.