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The Damned first played New York City’s CBGB in 1977, the first British Punk band to do so (along with having been the first British Punk band to issue any vinyl). During that maiden voyage, the band were famously captured by erstwhile CBGB door-minder/photographer Roberta Bayley in the photo above, posing with great, snotty aplomb in front of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
The band ended up playing four April nights at CBGB, sharing the bill with their Buckeye counterparts in the Dead Boys. Here’s a shot of them during one of those doubtlessly volatile evenings, this one taken by Ebet Roberts.
Today, meanwhile, in trawling around the `net, looking for nothing in particular, I came across this uncredited photo from the same era. I’m making some assumptions here but based on the line-up (with guitarist Brian James still in the ranks), I’m guessing this was snapped during that same span of April days. I have no idea who took it, but my question is – where in Manhattan was this photograph snapped?
I’d say the awning behind Dave Vanian on the left is a big clue, as are the terraced apartments behind Captain Sensible’s head. I have a hunch which I’m going to investigate, but where do YOU think it was taken?
The Damned are coming back to New York City (with original drummer Rat Scabies with them, this time) this May, but the next day is my son’s graduation, so I don’t think we’ll be going. We did just see them in October, anyway.
Meanwhile, here’s a taste of one of those shows…
The originally appeared, early last year, on Howie Abrams’ excellent No Echo site, but sheerly for the sake of evangelizing it, I’m sharing it here, too.
For backstory, check out Howie’s account, but this is Bad Brains just prior to I Against I as captured in the original Rock Hotel, over on Jane Street (which I’ve spoken about several times here, most recently here).
It’s remarkable stuff. Enjoy.
I know I already addressed it in this post, but I have to share a few more words about the passing of Clem Burke, and so hot on the heels of the deaths of folks like Al Barile of SSD, Dave Allen of Gang of Four/Shriekback, Brian James of The Damned, Rick Buckler of The Jam and David Johansen of The New York Dolls. We’re only a quarter into it, and 2025 has already been pretty catastrophic for all things Punk Rock.
I first heard Blondie, along with so many other crucial bits of music, via an older sibling. My sister Victoria brought home a copy of Parallel Lines at some point in 1978 – inarguably prompted by its inclusion of “Heart of Glass” -- and it was yet another epiphany. Our first tastes of proper Punk Rock had landed a summer earlier, courtesy of a big box of promo LPs our father had sent us from London. That pacakge included the first Clash album and Pure Mania by The Vibrators, but Parallel Lines seemed like planets away from that sort of sound.
Between the sleek, unabashed disco of “Heart of Glass” to the nervy, more conventionally punky numbers like “Hanging on the Telephone” and “One Way or Another” to the sparking pop of “Sunday Girl,” Parallel Lines was really a tour de force, and we both ate it right up. I was already immersed in fandom for the Sex Pistols, The Ramones, Devo and Adam & The Antz, but, in later months, it would be Victoria who brought home further informative records like the first album by The B-52’s, Outlandos D’Amour by The Police, and New Clear Days by The Vapors, all gradually weaning me away from stodgy old standbys like KISS, Boston and Pink Floyd. An older sibling who shares music with you is the best type of sibling to have.
For any number of deeply stupid reasons, lots of folks wrote off Blondie as also-rans from the CBGB scene, largely thanks to their -- shock, horror -- major label success with "Heart of Glass," negating their chops as a bona fide rock band, let alone proper PUNKS. But spend even thirty seconds watching/hearing Clem Burke smack the shit out of those drums (while still looking untouchably cool), and that's all some moot, misguided bullshit. Blondie fucking rocked, and Clem Burke was their propulsive engine room. Respect is due!
Shot in 2018, here’s a great little mini doc about Clem, featuring loads of archival footage of Blondie and the New York City of his era. It’s very well done and worth your time.
Rest in peace, Clem.
Shot in May of 1987, the video below is basically just a home movie as captured by a gentleman named Ted Barnett. He writes:
A walk down Bleecker Street (after a short tour of my apartment)... from: 95 Carmine Street, apt 6R (where Matt Lindland and Ted lived) to: 7-9 Carmine Street (where John Gaines and Ted had lived together 1984-1986)
I had a VHS video camera we had rented for Rick's wedding. I used it to capture a last walk down one of my favorite Greenwich Village streets. I moved away from New York a few months later.
A telling glimpse of a portion of the city that has changed dramatically in the ensuing 38 years, this slow, meandering clip (it’s about an hour and a half) might not be an immediate revelation, but those who remember what downtown Manhattan – and specifically Greenwich Village – was like well before the `90s, before September 11th, before COVID might be compelled.
Topographically, the streets are essentially the same, but … things have changed. Keep your eyes out for myriad, long-lost concerns like Grampa Munster’s old Italian restaurant through B. Dalton Books on 8th Street & Sixth Avenue and many other since-vanished businesses.
But beyond the stores, bars and restaurants, the whole feel of the city is different. The Greenwich Village seen here is vibrant and populated. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, no one is looking at their phones. The streets are lively.
When this was captured, I would have been a fresh-faced 19-year-old, recently sprung from my sophomore year of college and running around this very neighborhood, invariably buying records with money dubiously earned from working as a runner/assistant for a graphic designer.
Enjoy the trip back through time.
My old colleague Ralph from my days at TIME/LIFE is now a contributor for The Spirit. Last week, he asked me to shoot my very big mouth off about the re-designed New York City subway map -- rightly predicting I'd have a thing or two pointed things to say. I was, of course, all too happy to oblige.
You can read my rantings here.
Happening too quickly to keep up with, but since Saturday, Dave Allen of Gang of Four/Shriekback, Big Al Barile of SS Decontrol and Clem Goddamn Burke of Blondie have all permanently left the building.
:(
The videos below have been circulating for some time, for avid Cure heads, but possibly not for the layperson. I only recently discovered this footage, so thought it’d be worth sharing here, but not just because of the coolness of The Cure.
Shot in the summer of 1981 for a Spanish television special, this footage finds the Cure hitting New York City for two nights of their tour for the album Faith (the band having recently jettisoned keyboardist Matthieu Hartley, reducing themselves to a trio). I’m jumping to a conclusion, here, but I’m guessing that Spanish television took an interest in these gigs because of the venue. The Ritz – as a live-music venue for rock acts -- would have only just revealed itself as such about a year earlier, when it changed over from its iteration as Casa Galicia, an organization – according to Wikipedia -- that promoted cultural ties with Spain. While the venue was now operating as a rock club, it was still owned by Casa Galicia (as it still is today). Being that I don’t speak a lick of Spanish, I can’t actually tell you what the presenter in the beginning of the clip is saying, but you can still see the old paint job and some remaining signage from the Casa Galicia era behind him. Let’s go there now…
The live footage of the band, meanwhile, is sharp and stark, finding the band moving further away from their more accessible origins. The material they were promoting here from their third LP, Faith was quite a long way from the comparatively spritely pop of their first record, finding Robert Smith wading deeper into the dark waters of moribund introspection and existential dread. Brimming with ruminations of death, grief and empty religious dogma, tracks like “The Funeral Party,” “The Drowning Man” and “Other Voices” weren’t destined to become student-disco bangers so much as hymns for a future generation of perpetually black-clad lost sheep. While not as cruel, nihilistic and gloom laden as the record that would follow it, Pornography, the whole of Faith is still a grim horse pill of a listening experience. The songs captured here, meanwhile, … despite all my purpose prose for Faith, are both originally from the preceding album, Seventeen Seconds.
I’m sure the presenter, who returns to the screen to interview Robert in some ancillary chamber of The Ritz at about four minutes and ….er…. seventeen seconds (coincidence?) is expounding on comparable points, but again – I don’t speak Spanish, so I can’t say for sure. Unfortunately, Robert’s answers are obscured by a Spanish voice-over, so it’s hard to glean what he’s saying, although he seems to be politely taking exception to being repeatedly referred to as “a New Wave band.” You can’t really blame him for that. Mercifully, the live material resumes after that.
Of course, for those of you who don’t care so much about all that extraneous info, there’s this handy truncation featuring solely the performance footage. You’re welcome.
At the time of this filming in July of 1981, I was in between 8th grade and high school, and invariably hadn’t heard of The Cure, as yet. I would have been more deeply entrenched in my stubborn affinity of heavy metal and immersing myself further into adoration for bands like Devo and the burgeoning underground of Hardcore Punk (as it was then still called). In fact, I wouldn’t set foot in the Ritz until four years after this was shot -- in December of 1985 to see the Circle Jerks, D.O.A. and Redd Kross (as floridly discussed here). By that point, I’d have heard the Cure via their incongruously poppy MTV hits like “Let’s Go to Bed” and “The Walk,” which owed precious fuck-all to the pervasive emotional torpor of the Faith era. But with the release of The Head on The Door (and the crucial compilation Standing on a Beach) in the spring of 1986, I became a devout Cure fan, going on to see them several times, but never in a venue as intimate as the Ritz.
The picture up top, meanwhile, was quite likely snapped during the same day this footage was captured (given that they’re wearing the same duds). They’re pictured standing in the fabled Tunnel of Light at 127 John Street near the South Street Seaport, which I’ve written about too many times here (see list below).
More About The Cure on Flaming Pablum
Thirty Years of Disintegration
Lured to the Lost World: Reconvening with The Cure
More About The Ritz on Flaming Pablum
Slaytanic Fits at the Ritz in `86
A Requiem for the Ritz, A Wake for Webster Hall
Sisters vs. Black Flag at The Ritz
More About the Tunnel of Light at 127 John Street on Flaming Pablum
Walk Into the Light
Joe Walks Into the Light
I went down sort of a rabbit hole, recently, trying to locate someone I used to know at Danceteria via social media, and came across this odd gem. As originally spotted on the Danceteria Employees & Customers page by one Dee Cortex, this is Downtown Artists Against AIDS’s cover of Petulia Clark’s “Downtown.” Organized by Steve Saporta of Invasion Records, the D.A.A.A (I guess) featured folks like Kym Rider, Tish & Snooky of the Sic Fucks, Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads, Sara Lee of Gang of Four, Willie DeVille of Mink Deville, Cinema of Transgression director Beth B and some other folks. The clip was edited by Cortex and Paul Rachman.
The video was posted on YouTube in 2007, but I’d be super curious as to what year it was shot. Check it out. Who else can you spot? I recognize Michael Musto in there, at the very least.
In terms of Danceteria – which pops up throughout the clip – I was lucky enough to visit the 21st street iteration (the second of three) a few times before it sadly shuttered in 1986. Suggested reasons why it closed run the gamut. One pervasive and quite credible theory is that, in the wake of the murder of Jennifer Levin in the Summer of 1986, the city cracked down on establishments that took a pervasively permissive stance on serving alcohol to underage patrons, something that had previous been pretty rampant.
The second theory, however, as I fleetingly alluded to here, was that the club had to close in the wake of a freakish incident in which someone fell to their death after the building’s elevator doors opened at the wrong time. I was first told this tragic tale on a Kafka-esque blind date in the mid-`90s, and I always thought it sounded suspiciously apocryphal. But not too long ago, I happened upon this blog entry, uploaded in 2009, recounting in very great, grisly detail, the alleged incident from the surviving victim’s perspective. That individual lived to tell the tale (and, as of 2009, at least, became a club DJ in Berlin), but still no direct correlation as to whether that near-fatal accident had anyting to do with the demise of that iteration of Danceteria.
If you know, write in, do!
Also, if you never had the opportunity to walk around in Danceteria during its tenure on West 21st Street, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth has you covered. As poached from Dangerous Minds on this entry, she took it upon herself to capture the interiors on a video she called "Making the Nature Scene." I don't believe the offering elevator shaft makes an appearance.
Footage of the performance captured below -- namely the Fall performing "Totally Wired" on a stage in New York, possibly the Mudd Club, in 1981 -- has been around for eons (I even wrote about it back in 2016). The photograph by the great Laura Levine above -- taken presumably at the same gig, given vocalist Mark E. Smith's distinctive, stripy sweater -- might give a clue or two. Does anyone remember that pressed-tin ceiling at the Mudd Club?
This past June, meanwhile, a cryptic little YouTube channel called, aptly enough, Lost Concert Films, uploaded this cleaner, crisper and clearer cut of the footage. It is fucking marvelous. Sadly, this video is the only video on that channel.
Regardless, ... enjoy!
I’ve spoken about the old Knitting Factory – the original one on East Houston Street – a few times here, before (notably here, here and here). Like many of the live-music venues of its era, the club had its own vibe and character, even while hosting a truly wide array of different musical fare. I remember catching a diverse selection of bands there, including everyone from noise-rock royalty Sonic Youth to the post-hardcore oddballs in the Meat Puppets to quirky indie stalwarts King Missile through freaky jazz mutant James “Blood” Ulmer and the rock-disemboweling Casper Brotzman Massacre within its comparatively intimate confines. If you were looking to catch a bluesy bar band covering sleepy Clapton classics, you’d be shit-out-of-luck, but if you wanted to have you mind-blown and eardrums ravaged by members of the avant-garde giving the envelope a proper shove, the Knitting Factory was your go-to destination.
Suffice to say, that original iteration of the Knitting Factory is long gone. It moved to Leonard Street in TriBeCa, for a few years, and I saw some great shows in that spot, before it moved again to Brooklyn. I never went to that last version of it, but it closed in 2022. As I understand it, the venue that briefly took over the old Pyramid Club space on Avenue A, Baker Falls, had some affiliation with the Knitting Factory folks, but that, too, has moved and now conducts its biz out of the old Rockwood Music Hall space on Allen Street. I have no idea if the Knitting Factory is still a part of that venture.
But a reader named Jeremy found one of my old posts about the East Houston Street days of the Knitting Factory and reminded me of something. I can’t entirely remember where it used to hang in the interior (in the fabled “Knot Room,” maybe?), but there used to be this entirely cool, analogue collage of about a hundred 4x6 snapshots of the exterior that someone had painstaking assembled into a surreal depiction of the club, its fixed vantage point giving the subject and its surrounding an environs a sort of distorted, wide-angled bulbous quality you might otherwise capture with a fish-eye lens. I remember it also graced the cover of one of the CD compilations the Knitting Factory used to periodically issue. In fact, here’s that arresting image now…
Cool, right?
In any case, it turns out Jeremy, the guy that wrote in, is the artist who made that cool collage. Here’s a bit of what he had to say about it.
Came upon your blog looking for old knit stuff. I dated bartender/manager, knew Doughty well as a kid just out of college, made the famous photo collage at the Knit that was used as album cover and allowed me to see shows and drink free for years. That collage was in Houston Street, then Leonard Street, then in the Knit Brooklyn when it sold, and full circle is now in the dressing room of the former Pyramid Club on Ave. A. A second version of is in City Winery.
You can check out the full array of Jeremy’s work on his website by clicking right here. Tell him I sent ya.
Bizarrely, I think Jeremy’s Knitting Factory collage was the inspiration for my friend Joanne to capture a similarly surreal depiction of some friends of mine and I at their wedding some short years later. That, too, hangs in a frame in Brooklyn. Today, the sophisticated digital technology readily available in one’s smart phone can conjure equally nifty visual projects out of thin air, but back in the mid-`90s, that shit took a whole lot more work, ingenuity and imagination.
Here's a far-less arresting image of that very same doorway today. The downstairs space is (still) a bar named Botanica, while the upstairs space -- while very briefly a compact disc outlet -- is now a restaurant called Estela.
If you’re curious about the backstory of the original Knitting Factory, check out this cool collection of antiquated clips…
While I said I was going to stop complaining about this issue, I did say I’d relay any new developments, so here goes.
First up, I’d like to thank all the folks who’ve written in, both here and offline, expressing support and sharing their own comparable experiences. I never thought this quandary was unique to me, but it’s been heartening to hear what other people have done to combat this sort of thing, although one or two of the missives I fielded did kinda scare the crap out of me.
In any case, since my last post on this subject, I’d been following my new rules, for the most part, and trying to do the right thing. I started drinking more water, and I added a host of different supplements to my daily intake, specifically vitamins B, D and magnesium. In observance of things I’d read online (not always the best plan, admittedly), I started to steer clear of stuff like soft drinks, trans fats and carbs. I also paired down my consumption of both coffee and beer, basically cutting in half my ritualistic intake of the former and almost completely swearing off the latter, apart from a couple of pops on the weekends (which, of course, I immediately felt guilty about). Additionally, I tried wearing some compression socks (Bombas) and started doing certain exercises I’d spotted on some YouTube clips. At the same time, I still didn’t really have much to go on.
The last time I’d seen my podiatrist, Dr. Doolittle (again, not his actual name), he’d given me some mild injections and put me on an anti-inflammatory pill for two weeks. As I’d previously mentioned, I wasn’t sure if either of them — combined with all the other stuff I was doing — had any measurable benefit. In the interim, I’d started amassing a long list of questions to run by him to ideally get some clarity on the big question, that being whether I was dealing with a neuroma (ostensibly an isolated tumor on a nerve) or neuropathy (an irreversible, body-wide condition). I was obviously hoping for the former and dreading a formal diagnosis of the latter.
Earlier this week, I walked back over to his office for a follow-up. I relayed all the bullshit I just mentioned, and he listened patiently. In terms of my questions, he assured me that there are a couple of tests — notably a “nerve conduction velocity” test and a electromyography test, the latter of which is allegedly “quite painful” — to make the sort of determinations I’m after, but he didn’t see the need for either, just yet. At this stage, Doolittle is, in his own words, “confident” that my problem is a neuroma and not, in fact, the dread neuropathy. In a nutshell, he assured me that while these symptoms — specifically the numbness — I’m experiencing are giving me pause, he doesn’t see a need to worry about it — and nor should I. He recommended a new supplement — a combo of Lipoid Acid and the difficult-to-pronounce benfortiamine. We skipped any more injections, for now, and he said I could drop that anti-inflammatory and come back in six weeks.
As far as my other questions, he told me to stop wearing compression socks, as they can actually exacerbate a neuroma. Likewise, I should knock off those exercises I’d started doing, as they, too, can worsen a neuroma. He completely ruled out gout and diabetes, as those would have turned up on the blood tests. He said acupuncture is fine, as is continuing to consume water, bananas and, were I up to it, “mushroom coffee.” I asked him bluntly if dietary habits and/or intake of caffeine or alcohol had any effect on a neuroma, … and he said “not at all.” That evening, I celebrated unreservedly with a couple of pints of Guinness.
So, that’s where I’m at. I ordered up a bottle of the Lipoid Acid/Benfortiamine pills and am curious if they’ll make any noticeable difference. While I’m still without a concrete diagnosis, Doolittle’s convincing assurance that I “shouldn’t be worried” did indeed ease my mind. That all said, I’m going to try to continue to adhere to my not-as-many drinks during the course of the week regime, as cutting back is still a good idea.
Watch this space.
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