I don't believe he spoke a single line of dialogue, and he basically had his ass handed to him entirely by foul-mouthed Ajax, but I was sad to learn that veteran stuntman Jery Hewitt -- who played the lead representative of the Baseball Furies in Walter Hill's 1979 urban combat epic, "The Warriors" -- just passed away.
I've written about my love for "The Warriors" a few times here (find those links here), but suffice to say, if you are of a certain age, let alone a New Yorker, it's a pivotal film for a lot of people.
Here's Hewitt's big scene on the mean streets of the Upper West Side. Pour one out for the great man.
Back in June, I posted a vaguely convoluted post about a gig poster from one of the final shows at The Cooler. In an attempt to tie several disparate elements together, I wrote this paragraph:
As it happened, that weird Ukranian disco was actually a weird Bulgarian disco called Mehanata. You can see snippets of the interior of that place in the video for “Start Wearing Purple” by Gogol Bordello. Gogol Bordello, incidentally, then counted guitarist Eugene Kaplan in its ranks, although Eugene also played for both Firewater and Botanica. Mehanata, meanwhile, was located directly over the former location of Dave’s Luncheonette, a fabled diner for the Mudd Club set which briefly made a cameo in the video for “Jukebox Baby" by Alan Vega of Suicide. See? It’s all related
I invariably patted myself on the back for connecting all those dots. But, alas, I had one detail wrong.
While it’s completely true that Mehanata then occupied the same building as the former Dave’s Luncheonette, the fabled all-night diner that was indeed a regular haunt of the Mudd Club crowd, the diner depicted in Alan Vega’s “Jukebox Baby” was not, in fact Dave’s. How do I know that? Well, for a start, let’s watch that video again.
How do I know that’s not Dave’s? Well, on one Facbook group I’m a member of, someone posted the below photograph of mid-80’s British pop combo, JoBoxers, standing manfully in front of Dave’s. See that picture below.
Okay, so on both the north-facing facade (“Luncheonette”) and westerly-facing facade (“Restaurant”) of Dave’s, the neon signage is very distinctive. Look again at the eatery Vega’s in, and you get totally different signage — much less ornate.
Put simply, it’s not the same place. But it still looked so familiar.
And then it hit me.
The luncheonette Vega’s depicted in is the same luncheonette depicted on the sleeve of the first 8 Eyed Spy record.
…..which begs the question: Where is that luncheonette? Does it even exist anymore?
But there were other stops on our circuit, a crucial one being at the Pizza Box on Bleecker Street to wolf down slices while examining our spoils. As with all of the concerns cited above, that — too — is gone. To be fair, a paltry handful of our former regular haunts still hang on today, those being Record Runner, Generation Records, Academy Records and Downtown Music Gallery, but one would be remiss to suggest that their respective prospects were especially promising in 2020. That’s just the way it is.
But from around 1987 to late 1988, we had another regular stop.
If you stand on the southeast corner of West 8th Street on Sixth Avenue — basically right in front of the hulking space that formerly housed a Barnes & Noble and a B. Dalton books before that — and look south, you’ll probably still see a bunch of folks selling dubious shit on the sidewalks. Old magazines, DVDs, vinyl LPs, books and other largely weathered ephemera are periodically up for sale along this strip even today. But back in the 80’s, it was a much more robust ersatz marketplace, one that stretched as far down as the basketball courts on West 3rd.
I don’t remember how we first happened upon him, but Rob and I came to know a young merchant on this strip named Tim. An unassuming kid from somewhere on the Upper West Side — usually sporting a mammoth pair of headphones — Tim was in the business of selling bootleg cassettes. For the layperson, this means illegal live recordings of the same variety that got nearby Second Coming Records in trouble (as discussed at greater length here). We’d show up about once a week and check out Tim’s little briefcase of offerings, immaculately presented in alphabetical order and all marked with the inky font of a thick black sharpie. Like ourselves, Tim was especially besotted with a few specific bands, and his stock leaned heavily in those directions. For whatever reason, his two favorite bands were the Minutemen and the Sisters of Mercy, but he also had tapes by ancillary acts like fIREHOSE and my then-faves in The Mission, along with sundry recordings by bands like U2, The Cult and The Cure. We were very clearly his target demographic, and frequently availed ourselves to his wares.
In the middle of penning this post, I heard from Rob and he informed me that we once went to Tim’s evidently sprawling townhouse on the Upper West Side, but I have absolutely no recollection of that whatsoever. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I just don’t remember it.
In any case, the one specific tape I remember buying off our Tim in May or June of 1987 was a pristine, soundboard recording of The Mission playing a gig I very bitterly missed at The Ritz on East 11th Street in just that previous April. I’d missed the show in question being that I was away at school when the band drunkenly plowed into town. Capturing the Mish at the hoary height of their powers, it featured roaring runs through their early singles, a few odd covers and tracks from their debut LP, God’s Own Medicine, including a lungful reading of “Wake,” a throaty middle-finger to their former taskmaster Andrew Eldritch of The Sisters of Mercy. I played the absolute shit out of that tape, taking it with me a bike trip across Western Europe, managing not to lose it in any number of grotty youth hostels along the way. I absolutely cherished it. Much like the XTC tape I discussed the other day, I still have it, although nothing to play it on. But sadly, unlike the XTC tape, I’ve never found a recording of the Mission at The Ritz in April of 1987 anywhere else. Not on disc. Not on YouTube. Nothing.
Anyway, sometime after all this, we again happened upon Tim on Sixth Avenue again while schmooing. At this stage, he mentioned that he was considering giving up the whole bootleg cassette venture. We earnestly tried to urge him to stick with it, but he informed us of a growing spiritual investment in Tibetan Buddhism. In short order, Tim fully renounced his materialistic endeavors, and stopped showing up to ply his cassettes.
Here is a (very) late follow-up to a post from … jeezus … 2014.
The original spot of Bleecker Bob’s was not on Bleecker Street. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, it was never actually on Bleecker Street. In someone’s infinite wisdom, it was a good idea for the late Bob Plotnik to assume some sort of catchy nickname that assigned him some kind of local renown, so he became Bleecker Bob despite possibly never having operated any business on that particular strip. Whatever.
The original spot of his shop was on MacDougal Street, just steps to the south of West 8th Street (see above). At some point at the dawn of the 80’s, though, Bob pulled out of that location and moved over to 118 West 3rd Street between MacDougal and Sixth Avenue. It was at this address that I first visited the shop in about 1981 or 1982. And it was this iteration of the shop that bore his nickname until it closed in 2013.
Before the space was Bleecker Bob’s, however, it was another similarly inclined shop called – inexplicabaly – Bonaparte. I never set foot in Bonaparte, so I cannot credibly tell you a thing about it, but I recently found a better shot of its exterior than the one I first posted here.
Here in 2020, the 1188 West Third street is still Asian eatery Miyagi, which I wrote about here, although I haven’t been back since. The original Bleecker Bob space on MacDougal off 8th Street played host to a number of ventures over the years – inclulding, very briefly, another record store – before morphing into a barber shop, a tea salon, a sandwich joint and other things. These days, it’s completely vacant.
Bleecker Bob Plotnik, meanwhile, passed away in 2018. Amazingly, Ben's Pizza is still there.
Lots of people kept their vinyl LPs and singles. I certainly did, even after the advent of the compact disc. Of course, I’ve also kept all my CD’s in the wake of them being rendered anachronistic by mp3s, the comparatively brief reign of the iPod and then streaming. Ask me if I care. You can take my physical music media when I’m dead, and not a nanosecond before.
But because I’m an extra-sad bastard, I also kept a healthy supply of my cassettes. I no longer have anything — or anything that works, anyway — to play them on, but there are several that I just simply refuse to part with. Sure, I ditched several workaday store-bought cassettes when I upgraded to compact disc. But I have stacks of cassettes that I consider otherwise irreplaceable. This is about one of those.
I managed to ruffle some feathers on social media, last night, when I made some cheekily uncharitable statements about Philadelphia’s myriad failings, prompted by the agonizing wait for Pennsylvania to tally their vote count in the election. I imagined my invocation of the Hooters might have tipped some people off that I wasn’t being entirely serious, but some folks started getting genuinely hot under the collar about it. Again, these are tense, divisive times.
In any case, in thinking about complementary things to say about the so-called City of Brotherly Love, i was reminded of a certain live-music venue, albeit one I never got to visit. More to the point, the venue in question wasn’t actually in Philadelphia, but rather just across the Delaware River in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. It’s unsurprisingly long gone, these days (razed after a fire in the mid-80’s), but once upon a time, this place was called Emerald City.
Now, despite some people’s claim that Philadelphia is New York City’s “sixth borough” (a notion that I’m sure irks the shit out of native Philadephians), I can count the number of times I made it to that city on one hand. I went once in 1994 to see Pink Floyd at Veteran’s Stadium, and twice in 1997 to see U2 at Franklin Field and, lastly, the Sisters of Mercy at the Electric Factory. That’s it. It’s not that I had anything against going to Philly. I just didn’t have enough of a reason to go, most of the time.
The only reason I had any clue about nearby Emerald City, however, was via a crucial bootleg cassette I bought from a guy named Greg during my freshman year of college.
Prior to going to Denison University in 1985, all I knew about XTC was “Senses Working Overtime,” which — while a sublimely catchy, well-crafted pop tune — was in somewhat stark contrast to the steady diet of Black Flag, Motorhead and Bauhaus I was otherwise concerning myself with, at the time. Once ensconced at Denison as a gloomy punk fan amidst a student body otherwise fixated with Ziggy Marley and The Grateful Dead, I was lucky enough to align myself with a tight gaggle of similarly inclined folks for whom tye-dyed t-shirts and interminable Jerry Garcia guitar solos had refreshingly little appeal.
Regularly convening with my friends in the dank ground floor of Crawford Hall (in a room half-ironically referred to as “Anarchy Hall”), I had my horizons forcibly broadened to music by bands previously beyond my narrow vista like The Velvet Underground, R.E.M., King Crimson, fIREHOSE, The Hoodoo Gurus, The Lime Spiders, Split Enz, The Modern Lovers, The Feelies, The Cramps, The Stooges, Television, NRBQ, The Tom Robinson Band, The Three O’Clock, The Smiths and — oh yes, wait for it — XTC.
On many a beery Friday and Saturday night did we in that room repeatedly crank the entireties of Chronic Town by R.E.M. and Black Sea by XTC before four or five of us set out to wobble around the campus in a drunken stupor, looking for trouble.
Besotted by tracks like the punkily rousing “Respectable Street” and the manic skank of “Living Through Another Cuba” from those high-volume evenings, I went out in search of more XTC, finding only a Portuguese edition (no joke) of the English Settlement cassette in our campus bookstore. Then, I happened upon Greg, a somewhat standoffish cat who lived downstairs from me in Huffman Hall. Greg and I didn’t have much in common, but he had a sideline business in buying and trading bootleg cassettes. Most of it was crap I wouldn’t play at a dog like Van Morrison and the like, but he did have one cassette I snapped up and bought from him without hearing a note off of it. It was XTC recorded a year earlier in Philadelphia on the tour for Black Sea. I brought that cassette with me to the next Friday night meet-up in “Anarchy Hall” and I was practically treated like the returning prodigal son. The fatted calf was verily slain and that much-loved tape was put into maddeningly regular rotation for our Friday/Saturday beer summits.
Originally broadcast on Philadelphia rock station 93.3 WMMR, the recording of XTC at Emerald City was a revelation. Pairing the adrenalized sprint of punk with irrepressible pop hooks and choppy, clanging guitars, it was high-energy music that was propulsive and frenetic, but more clever and jubilant than angry and nihilistic. In short order, I became an ardent fan of the band and followed them into their less exuberant, “bucolic” phase. But I’ll always adore this particular era of the band.
I always wondered what the interior of Emerald City looked like, speculating if it was more of a proper theatre or a conventional rock club. I pictured a utopian sort of scene where punks and rudeboys and hip-hoppers and hardcore kids and goths and New Wave babes and all stripes in between would mix and mingle, not unlike the then-about-to-shutter Danceteria back home in New York City. That might totally have been a fanciful projection, but it made me enjoy the listening experience of that cassette all the more. Some cursory googling revealed an ad for the venue that might reflect the same performance by XTC (see above). Shortly after that gig, bands like The Plasmatics and Joe Jackson played, lending credence to my image of the place. Who knows, though…. maybe it was a shithole?
Anyway, thirty-five years later, the footprint of Emerald City now plays host to a Subaru dealership. XTC put out several more albums before going into hibernation after 2000’s Wasp Star. I ended up finding a copy of the Emerald City recording on disc titled Fab Foursome in Philly several years back, but you don’t need to hunt that down. The entirety of it is on YouTube.
Earlier this month, I quasi-gave John Lydon the benefit of the doubt of just simply being antagonistic, predictably contrary and cheekily provocative when it came to his recent endorsements of Donald Trump, asserting that I choose to remember Lydon/Rotten as he was more than as he currently is.
Well, he’s only made that harder in the ensuing weeks by doubling down on his support for the president in advance of November 3, going so far as to go on Fox’s Greg Gutfeld show to wax vitriolic about Democrats and praise Trump for being a genuine “human being.”
Let me tell you, if you’ve ever been a fan of Lydon's and have even a modicum of awareness about the fetid nest of avarice and totalitarian megalomania that is the Trump Administration, it’s pretty rough going. Poor old giddily sycophantic Greg Gutfeld is barely able to get a word in as Lydon -- in typically self-congratulatory mode -- goes on a selective series of directionless rants about his misgivings with the Democratic Party and the Obama Administration, while repeatedly letting Trump off any and all hooks because he is, once again “thinking for himself” (more like thinkingONLY OF himself, John) and being “a human being.” Really? Last time I checked, the average human being had at least small degrees of empathy and compassion, two qualities Trump inarguably lacks.
How Lydon has gotten so snowed by this perception of Donald Trump is entirely confounding, but obviously, he’s perfectly entitled to his opinion. I was fully ready to sigh with resignation and leave it at that until, just towards the end of the interview, Gutfeld largely parts with Fox News policy and deigns to mention the pandemic, suggesting that he and Lydon get together in person when the COVID-19 crisis ends, to which Lydon replies “Did it ever really start?”
I’m not going to unpack chapter and verse about first hearing the music of the Sex Pistols and, later, Public Image Ltd., as I’ve probably done so numerous times in this blog’s fifteen year existence. Suffice to say, like many from my generation who share the particular predilections of Punk Rock, the impact that music, those records and those individuals — foremost among them Mr. Lydon — had on me is profound. At the risk of sounding rapturously histrionic, his was as informative a voice in my development and sensibility as those of some of my respected college professors and older work colleagues. He’s always been a figure I was inspired and galvanized by.
I believe I first heard Laibach during my indoctrination into so-called industrial music towards my latter years of college. Having been lured in by the post-pop iteration of Ministry, early Skinny Puppy and the Revolting Cocks, I started to branch out and investigate some of the genre’s arguably less accessible antecedents, from progenitors like Einsturzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle to New York City’s own contingent, featuring SWANS, Foetus (yes, I realize not actually from New York, pedants) and less style-conscious acolytes like Missing Foundation and Cop Shoot Cop. But, before all of that, I somehow latched onto Laibach — a band ultimately with only rudimentary similarities to all of the above.
Sure, they shared a penchant for big, ponderous percussion and impossibly deep, basso-profundo vocals, not unlike early SWANS, but where the latter was driven by raging self-loathing, cruelty and depravity, Laibach was entirely different.
Based, as I dimly understood it, at the time, out of Slovenia, Laibach was some sort of musical offshoot of a high-concept art collective that traded in the vagaries of propaganda, mixing and matching images and iconography from fascism and totalitarianism, but flecked with an archly sardonic world view. Much like several of my favorite bands before and since, exactly *what* Laibach was all about was never explicitly stated, or at least not easily gleaned from simply a cursory examination of their art and music. Given the propensity of other bands in the industrial community like Throbbing Gristle, Death in June, Current 93 and NON flirting — and, in some cases, embracing — not only the imagery but also the ideology of these elements, many assumed Laibach — who dressed in a decidedly Teutonic variant of military garb — were doing much the same thing. Understandably, this made a lot of people uneasy.
But unlike the swastika-sporting early British punks, the mookish skinheads of the National Front and the tasteless “pranks” and provocation of Boyd Rice’s afore-cited NON, the concepts and aesthetics meted out by Laibach were and remain far more complex and deliberate. As wry as their conceptual cousins in bands like The Residents, there was very assuredly a method to their particular brand of madness.
The very name Laibach was a clue, albeit one that was probably lost on most Western teenage music geeks in the mid-80s. The German name for Slovenia’s capital city of Ljubljana, “Laibach” is a reference to the Nazi occupation of the band’s homeland in WWII. The frankly disquieting art depicting a swastika formed out of battle-axes on the back cover of the band's third album, Opus Dei, didn’t exactly clear a lot of questions up for a lot of folks (and earned me no shortage of raised eyebrows from my fellow college disc jockeys at WDUB, who were more versed in Little Feat and Ziggy Marley than any obliquely ironic Slovenian industrial music). The design in question, however, was the appropriated work of noted Dadaist ANTI-Nazi artist John Heartfield who also served as the band’s conceptual forebear, who made a point of weaponizing art.
Long story short, Laibach were not Nazis. Not even slightly.
Back in 1987, when I first heard them via frankly hilarious and knowingly ridiculous covers of Queen’s “One Vision” and Opus’ “Life is Life,” I honestly didn’t consider the notion of them being actual fascists. They seemed a little too slyly camp for all that. There was a subtle wink to their music in a sound and aesthetic seemingly bereft of any semblance of subtlety. That their next endeavors involved equally preposterous covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and the entire Let It Be album by ye olde Beatles (sadly minus the title track) only furthered my suspicions that Laibach were not always to be taken deathly seriously nor completely at face value.
But hey, circa 1988, if you ever needed to clear a room with all speed, throw on some Laibach and people would be scrambling for the exits for any number of laughably misconstrued reasons. The girlfriend of a friend of mine actually stopped talking to me for a while after I slipped "Auf der Lüneburger Heide” (a traditional German drinking song popularized by Germany’s Heino) covered by Laibach on Let It Be in place of “Maggie May” on a mixtape for them. To be fair, she also had a huge problem with “Wunderbar” by British comedy-punks,Tenpole Tudor, which she decried as a “skinhead anthem.” Not really. But I digress.
Putting to one side Laibach’s potentially problematic presentation, their music was frequently unwieldy and stentorian, punctuated by pounding drums and vocalist Milan Fras' (a dead-ringer for Freddie Mercury, when he sported the mustache) gutteral growl. Laibach anthems would stride manfully out of your speakers like behemoths with a sonic heft that bordered on the physical. Live performances by the band were marked by envelope-pushing levels of amplification and blinding floodlights aimed directly at the audience’s eye level. Even if you “got” them, Laibach were absolutely never going to make it easy for you.
I kept up, for a while, but largely decamped by the mid-90’s in the wake of Jesus Christ Superstars. As much as I enjoyed their covers of the Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” and Prince’s “The Cross,” I was starting to feel like I had all the Laibach I really needed.
In the absence of my fandom, however, Laibach branched out further, scoring films, staging elaborate stage productions and embracing orchestral elements. This summer, they released a sprawling retrospective boxed set called Revisited (although not naming a Laibach box set LAIBOX seems like a truly missed opportunity). While duly intrigued, I could not rationalize dropping the money involved for a multi-disc Laibach box set, however fetchingly packaged.
Then came “Smrt Za Smrt.”
As part of the Revisited project, Laibach went back and reinterpreted/augmented much of their previous music. Earlier this week saw them release the below video for “Smrt Za Smrt,” a track from 1984.
No cheeky cover version of a beloved pop music standard, “Smrt Za Smrt” (Slovenian for “Death for Death”) is a harrowing rumination on absolute retribution. It is ponderous and powerful in both sound and sentiment, leant immeasurable impact by the visuals of the video that perfectly match the expansive, cinematic scope of the re-imagined track.
I might have to save up for that box set after all.
Long have I wondered about the photo above with regards to its location. Obviously, that's the great Iggy Pop, but I'd always speculated as to what bar he was depicted sitting in with such solemn, stoney-faced stoicism.
Given his longtime residency in Lower Manhattan (to my knowledge, he's lived in at least two apartments downtown -- one on Mercer Street between West 4th and Bleecker and one at the Christodora House over on Avenue B, a tenure he devoted an entire glum album to, 1999's Avenue B), I'd assumed it could have been any one of a hundred mostly since-closed neighborhood bars. Lucy's? Sophie's? Lakeside Lounge? Manitoba's, The Park Lounge? Mars Bar? Which one?
I actually encountered the great man at Sin-E on St. Marks Place, one rainy evening, back in the 90's. I was still a single guy, at the time, and had been out with three friends at some random party over on Avenue C -- which was a markedly wilder patch of real estate, in those days. In any case, fate decided that all three of my comrades would find themselves in beguiling entanglements with willing members of the opposite sex, that evening, leaving me to my own devices. As such, I ended up walking home -- in the rain, fittingly -- across Tompkins Square Park and up St. Marks Place. Soggy and sour of mood, I happened to glance up right as I was walking by the long-since-shuttered Irish spot, Sin-E, and who should be sitting right by the open door enjoying a beer, but Iggy Goddamn Pop. I immediately exclaimed his name out loud, and he looked up, gave me a big goofy grin and a thumbs-up, which immediately decimated my self-pity-party.
Anyway, the photo doesn't look like Sin-E. But, I was fairly resigned to never figuring it out.
As it happens, the photographer responsible for the sombre shot, one Steve Rapport, disclosed the location on his website (and you can buy a nice print of the shot, among many others, here).
Just a stone's throw from his old haunt at the Christadora, Iggy is seen here imbibing within the confines of 7B, otherwise known as Vazacs Horseshoe Bar, which I've discussed here.
These days, Iggy lives in Miami. 7B, meanwhile, is still going strong.
Time to dust off Iggy's old tour of that neighborhood.....
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