A couple of weeks back, my lovely comrades over at the Desperately Seeking the `80s podcast solicited anecdotes from their listeners about Yorkville, the neighborhood just to the east (well, everything beyond Third Avenue) of the Upper East Side. Being that it's a turf I spent most of my teenage years on, I gamely contributed. But, seeing as both the Desperately ladies and myself have kinda milked the whole 84th Street Bombers cow dry, for the moment (most recently here), I figured I'd focus on a different aspect of my years growing up there. The laboriously windy story below is what I submitted. Regular readers might recognize bits and pieces from others entries here, from over the past few years, so, y'know .... don't be alarmed by that.
By most accounts, Punk Rock was a downtown concern. The punk clubs, record shops and hangouts – they were all downtown. The membership of Blondie, for example, all shared a squalid loft-space above a ramshackle restaurant-supply shop on the Bowery (that shop is still there, but Blondie moved out some time ago). The Talking Heads lived in a similar dump a few blocks away on the forbidding byway of Christie Street. Richard Hell lived – and still lives – in a modest apartment on East 12th Street. The Ramones hailed from Forest Hills, Queens, but operated out of their graphic-designer pal Arturo Vega’s loft just east of the Bowery. Harley Flanagan of the Cro-Mags lived for a while in an amenity-free squat in Alphabet City and bathed himself via open fire-hydrants. The Plasmatics had their headquarters in a far-flung walk-up in Tribeca and Thurston & Kim of Sonic Youth lived in a railroad apartment in a tenement in Chinatown. Bobby Steele of the Undead still lives around Tompkins Square Park, and his old bandmate Jack Natz of the Black Snakes used to sleep in Pussy Galore’s roach-ridden rehearsal space in a basement on Avenue B. I could go on and on, but you get the point – by and large, downtown was where the punk rockers were.
Yorkville, on the other hand – while only technically up the island from the punky Lower East Side – seems like it might as well be on a whole different planet. While it’s significantly gentrified, over the last several decades, then as now – Yorkville has remained a comparatively quiet, stable residential community, tucked, as it is, just to the east of the posher enclaves of the equally sedate Upper East Side. One might be hard-pressed to find any semblance of that particular aesthetic that far north of 14th Street.
One, however, might be entirely surprised.
For a start, as I expounded on over on my blog, not too long back, Yorkville actually had a pair of dueling, forward-thinking rock clubs, for a little while in the early `80s. There was Private’s on the otherwise unlikely corner of East 85th Street and Lexington, which played host to a slew of bold new bands like The Stranglers, XTC, Bauhaus, The Cramps, The Rockats and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, who even filmed the video to their breakout hit, “I Love Rock & Roll” at the intimate club. Just a block or two away, meanwhile, there was also a club called The `80s on East 86th Street between Third and Second Avenues. This short-lived club – formerly a subterranean German beer hall called The Lorelei – welcomed envelope-pushing acts like oddball accordion-botherer Phoebe Legere, The Dead Boys, the Bad Brains, The Soft Boys and even the chainsaw-wielding Plasmatics onto its cramped little stage. Who needed to hop the 6 train to the East Village when those names were coming to Yorkville?
As exciting as that all sounds, however, neither venture stuck around for very long. I’m not sure when either club officially closed, but neither made it out of the midpoint of the decade. The corner that Private’s called home is now a Starbuck’s, while the building that housed The `80s has been replaced by a monolithic condo with no evidence of its former iteration.
But Yorkville’s ties to Punk Rock don’t end with those two clubs.
Towards the westerly border of Yorkville, on Third Avenue between East 84th and East 85th Street, there used to be a record store called Musical Maze. Don’t bother looking for it now. The building that housed it was razed decades ago. I first remember waddling into Musical Maze in the late `70s when I was about 12 or 13 and being blown away by the interior — the walls were covered with psychedelic “black light” posters. I also vividly remember spotting all these KISS records (my main concern, at the time) that weren’t familiar at all to me. Turns out these were bootlegs — illicit live concert recordings.
Regardless, Musical Maze was a very groovy place, especially for the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But beyond that, it was also the birthplace of a crucial punk band. Upon decamping from his native Akron, OH, oddball Erick Purkhiser and his similarly inclined wife Kristy Wallace moved to New York City (somewhere on East 73rd street), reaching out to Erick’s pen-pal Dave Schulps (co-founder of the underground rock mag, Trouser Press). Schulps was working at Musical Maze, at the time, and being that he was as equally besotted with the unconventional, Erick got in touch to get the scoop on where to go in NYC, being the newbie that he was. As it turns out, Dave was about to quit his gig at Musical Maze, so Erick swiftly moved right into his spot, selling rock n’ roll records to Upper East Siders. That's him doing just that, in the shot above.
Once there, Erick met one Gregory Beckerleg, something of a dead-ringer for a young Boris Karloff with an equally macabre sensibility. Erick and Kristy, in very short order, decided to form a band with Greg and his sister Pam — pairing their adoration for schlocky American pop-culture, b-movie horror kitsch and stripped-down, rockabilly twang with a razor-sharp, contemporary edge. Regularly rehearsing and honing their boldly innovative sound in the basement of Musical Maze (see them practicing in the shot below), Erick changed his name to Lux Interior, Kristy to Poison Ivy Rorschach, Pam Beckerleg to Pam Balam and Gregory Beckerleg to Bryan Gregory — and The Cramps were born … out of a Third Avenue storefront in Yorkville.
By the dawn of the `80s, meanwhile, that Musical Maze went out of business and replaced by the more expansive music retail outlet, Crazy Eddie. By this point, my tastes had developed, largely forsaking KISS, Pink Floyd and shaggily mustachioed classic rock for all things Punk Rock and New Wave. I first walked into this new iteration of the Third Avenue shop in search of the then-newly-released single by my beloved Devo (that being ”Peek-a-Boo,” a suitably bizarre slice of electronic pop that failed to sustain the waning popularity they’d surprisingly earned via “Whip It” just two short years earlier). Given Devo’s diminishing returns in the album-sales department, it was surprising to find the single prominently displayed, but I later learned this was thanks to a certain Crazy Eddie’s employee. By this time, Lux and Bryan of the Cramps were long gone, but there was a new, young, spiky hooligan working the floor with tastes seemingly identical to mine. Over the course of my next few visits to this Crazy Eddie, this guy — also named Brian, as it turned out — would regularly complement me on records I was bringing up to the cashier (titles that included
Stukas Over Disneyland by the Dickies,
My Beach by the Surf Punks and the first eponymous LP by the Lords of the New Church). In turn, Brian started hipping my clueless Upper East Side ears to great records like the seminal
Group Sex by the Circle Jerks, a band I’d soon come to worship. Unsurprisingly, Brian himself had played in a local band. He played drums — under the moniker “Brian Damage” in a charming little combo called Genocide. I vividly remember him beaming with pride as he displayed a compilation called
Hardcore Takes Over that Genocide were featured on.
By the end of 1983, however, Brian had vanished, and Crazy Eddie actually moved two blocks up to East 86th without him, right next to the big Loew’s Orpheum movie theatre.
I later learned that in October of 1983, Brian “Damage” Keats (his full name) had been recruited to become the umpteenth drummer for The Misfits, a storied and notorious Lodi, New Jersey horror-core ensemble who had been hugely and indelibly influenced by, ironically enough, the Cramps. Brian had evidently spent weeks rehearsing with the band just prior to their Halloween show in Detroit. At that show — his first, and LAST with the band, Brian played thirteen songs at the band’s breakneck pace, but was purportedly too drunk to keep up. Burly Misfits guitarist Doyle (that’s it …. just Doyle) allegedly picked Brian up from behind his kit and forcibly threw him offstage, replacing him with the drummer from The Necros to finish the set. The Misfits broke up on stage that night.
Bryan Gregory of the Cramps abruptly and acrimoniously quit the Cramps in 1980 and died of heart failure in 2001.
Lux Interior of the Cramps died of aortic dissection in 2009.
Nick Knox of the Cramps (who replaced Miriam Linna, Pam Balam's replacement) died of cariogenic shock in 2018.
Poison Ivy Rorschach is still alive and well, living somewhere in Glendale, California.
Brian “Damage” Keats later played with a host of diverse musicians before succumbing to liver cancer in 2009.
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