Flaming Pablum

The Last Laugh: Interborough Killing Joke

Considering all the bandwidth I’ve devoted to the telling of this tale, I should at least cap it all off.

Last night was the second evening of Killing Joke’s two-night stint in the New York area for this leg of their 2019 mini-tour (culminating in the incongruous environs of Las Vegas later this month). Both New York gigs were at comparatively intimate venues, Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge and Brooklyn’s St. Vitus. Despite being one of the busiest weeks of my year at the office, I went to both shows and had a blast both nights, reconnecting with old friends and making several new ones. I am now tired, hungover, sore and all that goes with that, but I’m incredibly glad to have made it to both shows ... and back again. 

I took a pile of pics on both nights (the shot above is from Le Poisson Rouge), but was astonished to find that the whole show from last night is already viewable online. I’ll spare you my bug-eyed, purple prose and let you watch for yourself (until it’s yanked from YouTube). Pay special attention to the percussive powerhouse that is the mighty Big Paul Ferguson on drums ... in feral form, as always. 

Killing Joke …. still laughing at your peril after all these years….

The Punchline: Killing Joke Comes Back to NYC

Regular readers might remember a series of posts, last year, that unspooled a weepy, tragicomic epic poem about my endeavors to witness my beloved Killing Joke’s 40th Anniversary tour. For those who were fortunate enough to miss those laborious entries, here’s a quick recap.

I’d procured tickets for their September gig at nearby Irving Plaza, only to later learn that a work event would have me in Nashville on the very same day. I managed to get my company’s travel representative to move Heaven and Earth to get me plane tickets that would get me back to New York in time to catch the show. However, an uncaring God intervened by way of a prohibitive thunderstorm, which diverted my plane to the chilly barrens of Syracuse. By the time we were back in the air again, the show was already underway. By the time I got out of the airport and back to Manhattan, the show was over. I did not make it.

While I was congratulated for my work on the Nashville project, I was inconsolable for having missed the Killing Joke show, assuming that given the significance of the anniversary, they weren’t likely to undertake a tour this way again. Fate briefly smiled on me in the form of a cash bonus – a reward for my hard work in Nashville. I took said cash and immediately spent it on plane tickets to catch the final two dates of the tour in England.

In November, the day my flight was to depart from New York City to London for these shows, God again tried to take a giant dump on my plans by conjuring a freakish fucking blizzard -– in NOVEMBER, once again -- that ground the city to a virtual halt and delayed several flights – notably my own.

I did, however, eventually get out and made it to both of those shows, which were amazing. Should you give a damn, you can read all about that chapter here.

Further mocking me from on high, our sadistic deity then saw fit to bring Killing Joke not only back to New York City, but for two goddamn shows, one of which in my very fucking neighborhood. Hilarity.

So, yeah, tonight they’re playing at the comparatively intimate Le Poisson Rouge. Tomorrow night, they’ll be tightly ensconced in St. Vitus. Both of these tiny club shows are sold the fuck out, but guess who got tickets?

I mean, honestly, how could I NOT?

Details to come.

Here's a shaky bit of the last show in London (I did not shoot this)...

Video Over SoHo

As it happens, I walk through SoHo every weekday on my treks to and from my office. During same, I cannot stop myself from taking pictures. Even though the neighborhood and its surrounding environs have dramatically changed over the last few decades, I am still moved by its singular architectural character, its vibe and the sense of history – both personal and civic --- it continues to exude. That above image of Broome Street I shot just this morning.

I haven’t mentioned her excellent blog in a little while (or not since 2017, I guess), but Yuki Ohta revamped her SoHo Memory Project not too long back, and it’s a wonderful trove of pictures and anecdotes for those who pine for the SoHo that was prior to it being a hotbed of prohibitively expensive real estate and luxury retail outlets.

I also noticed she has her own Vimeo account. Click here to check out some of the clips she’s amassed, lovingly capturing glimpses of that bygone SoHo. Enjoy.

Too Fast To Live, Too Young to Die, Too Old to Let Go

“Daddy, everybody there looked just like you. It was just old guys in blazers for miles.” So sayeth my 15-year-old daughter, yesterday, upon sending me the picture at right of Flea’s bass guitar, as housed in the Metropolitan Museum’s latest rock’n’roll-themed exhibit, “Play It Loud.” While I was pointedly underwhelmed by the Met’s last venture toward anything rock-related -– as you might remember from this ancient post -– I am indeed curious to go check out “Play It Loud,” as it’s more about actual instrumentation than fashion.

But of the myriad rock/punk-related exhibits going on right now -– you might remember my recent, pedantic takedown of the Museum of Sex’s somewhat one-dimensional “Punk Provocation” show -– I was quite enthralled by the Museum of Art & Design’s “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die” retrospective of so-called “punk graphics” (as first mentioned here yesterday). I qualify that with “so-called” as many bits of the ephemera on display had precious little do to with bona fide punk by any definition. I mean, I’m sorry, but while lead singer Holly Johnson may have been a veteran of fabled Liverpool punk club, Eric’s, Frankie Goes to Hollywood were not a punk band, nor were trailblazing all-female British band Girlschool, who were heavy metal to the bone. That said, I get it --- had punk not happened, neither of those two outfits would have existed, or certainly not as we would come to know them.

Insufferably arrogant, music-knowitall quibbles like that aside, the two-floored exhibit checked way more of the right boxes than wrong ones, showcasing a host of period-specific artwork from across the pertinent spectrum of bands/scenes/labels, etc. I audibly gasped several times at some of the posters displayed -– both out of genuine awe and affinity, but also out of recognition.

To be sure, it’s a very strange sensation to see things that formerly hung on your own walls now displayed in an official museum as rarified artifacts to be studied with reverence. Now sequestered at my friend Rob D’s place out in New London, for many years I had a lovingly framed poster from Road to Ruin by the Ramones on my wall, also framed at the M.A.D. show in a display case sturdy enough to hold The Shroud of Turin.

During the course of my prolonged meandering around the galleries, I was strenuously tempted to fact-check a curator who was leading a gaggle of patrons, but thought better of it. As much as she was getting some of the minutia wrong, no one likes that guy.

Anyway, if you’re as enamored of this stuff as I am, you’d do well to check it out. Below are some more of my favorite pieces from it.

Of Punk, Product & Pricelessness

Hey again, all. It’s been a crazy April -- what with multiple projects percolating at work and the home renovation all happening, and life is poised to stay well and truly frantic until mid-May, it seems. We’ve finished the kids’ room, by and large, but the renovation has had ramifications on the rest of the apartment, so we’re re-imagining our living room in a somewhat painfully piecemeal way. On the office front, I’m preparing for two massive annual events and orchestrating a complicated tribute video to a prominent music executive, so that all has me all fucking stressed out. But, I have faith we’ll get through it all.

In any case, while I’m planning a larger piece on the Museum of Art & Design’s exhibit about Punk Graphics, I thought I’d quickly post this silly update to an older post involving one tiny bit of same.

Back in 2014, some regular readers might remember an entry I posted about Product, arguably one of the first CD boxsets put out by a punk band, that being the almighty Buzzcocks. In that post, I recounted how, as recently sprung post-collegiates , my friend Rob and I desperately coveted Product, but neither of could afford it, at the time, which leant the artifact a rarefied air of incalculable value. It also became a standard of measurement for us. We’re regularly tally the cost of debilitating financial demands and/or comparably unattainable items in terms of how many copies of Product they would equal. It was a genuinely silly idea, but a tenacious one.

This past Saturday, I was briefly let off my leash to go check out the afore-cited “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die,” the retrospective of graphics from the Punk era, and, upon entering, what should I behold but --- WAIT FOR IT – you guessed it, a pristine and lovingly preserved copy of Product (the cassette version), presented under thick museum glass as if prized from an Egyptian tomb, lending complete and utter credence to Rob & I’s long-held reverence for the collection.

Sadly, in keeping with the Museum of Sex’s ham-fisted mishandling of key facts about the Plasmatics and Cherry Vanilla, the Museum of Art & Design somewhat unbelievably mislabeled this item as the Buzzcocks’ debut LP, Another Music in a Different Kitchen, despite the collection’s actual name spelled out in big, block capital letters.

That unfortunate quibble notwithstanding, it’s indeed a great exhibit. More to come about that.

Pour one out for Pete. 

Where the Music Stays

As much as I am slavishly prone to waxing rhapsodic about the great lost record/disc shops of New York City, the place I bought my first propler LP at was actually out on the East End of Long Island.

As I discussed here, Sam’s Record Shack in Westhampton Beach was two towns over from where my family spent the summers. I cannot put an exact year on it, but probably around the summer of 1976 or so, I waddled into Sam’s Record Shack as a wide-eyed 9 year old and plunked down three or four dollars (that’s how cheap LPs were, at the time … honestly), for my own copy of Dressed to Kill by KISS. If memory serves, I had originally intended to buy a copy of KISS ALIVE, but my meager funds dictated otherwise. Regardless, I brought it home and proceeded to play the shit out of it on my crappy mono record player at every conceivable opportunity --- its many lyrically lumpen connotations and hackneyed sexual innuendos lost on my small years. I’d long appropriated certain records from my older sister, but at last, this one was ALL MINE. I still have my battered, “well loved” copy of the LP to this day.

As its name might suggest, Sam’s Record Shack was assuredly nothing fancy. A cramped, narrow little storefront with racks on each side and a cash register in the back, it was a fairly humble operation. I’d go on to procure many arguably crucial albums there, including my first copy of Magical Mystery Tour by the Beatles, a cassette of Joe’s Garage Volume 1 by Frank Zappa, Piece of Mind by Iron Maiden and Coup D’Etat by the Plasmatics. I actually had the temerity to order that last choice. The shop ordered two copies from their distributor. I paid for mine and took it home (much to the chagrin of my family and/or anyone within listening proximity), and the other copy was displayed in the shop window, where it sat -– unplayed and pointedly unpurchased -– until Sam’s Record Shack closed for good in about 1984, or so.

While I lamented the loss of Sam’s, in its place came a new record store a few streets away. The Westhampton branch of Long Island Sound (a pun on the name of a nearby tidal estuary) was a much more expansive operation than Sam’s. As I mentioned here, while it wasn’t exactly staffed by imperiously pedantic record geeks like my favorite places in the city, it did indeed meet my needs in terms of new releases. I swiftly became a regular customer, in due course, of both the Westhampton branch and its sibling over in Southampton.

In time, of course, CD’s became the go-to medium. I’m not quite sure when Long Island Sound (both branches) closed, but close they eventually did. After that, one’s best options out in “the Hamptons” to buy compact discs became limited to big box retail joints in places like Riverhead. But, clearly, the physical manifestation of music was becoming scarcer and scarcer out there.

Back in Westhampton, by the mid-to-late 90’s, the only way you could really buy a CD was if you found it on the racks of a local pharmaceutical chain -– which did not suggest anything too promising about the likelihood of finding anything very esoteric.

These days, the pharmaceutical chain store in question on Main Street in Westhampton Beach --- just a block or so to the west of the former site of Sam’s Record Shack, which until recently had been a footwear emporium called Shoe-Inn -– is now a Rite Aid. It was called something else prior to Rite Aid -– although stocked the same shit –- but Rite Aid bought that interest out at whatever point. But, by and large, it’s been a big pharmaceutical outlet since the late 90’s, or so.

You probably see where I’m going with this, but since it became the lone place one could fetch CD’s in the area way back when, I’ve been in the habit of always perusing what’s on offer, which is usually dire and dispiriting. Multiple Christmas albums sit uncomfortably next to dubious compilations of “hits” by bands like Great White and Survivor. You’ll find the sophomore effort by Gnarls Barkly (which failed to yield a single like the once-ubiquitous “Crazy”) shoved in tightly next to a late-80’s Doobie Brothers effort and an opus by largely forgotten white funkstress Tina Marie. There is no rhyme nor reason to the selections. They are haphazardly stocked on a shelf in the same aisle you’ll find equally anachronistic DVDs (cinematic epics like “Meet the Fockers,” “Scream II” and “Ice Age”), batteries and device-chargers. Woe unto thee whose lovingly crafted music ends up here.

That said, there is strangely still turnover. New discs still come in and old discs still go out.

Except …. for one.

Released four years after their most successful album, Psalm 69, Ministry’s Filth Pig, their sixth studio album from 1995, was a comparative let down from its sprawling predecessor from 1992. Where Psalm 69 almost single-handedly spot-welded industrial caterwaul to metallic thrash in a manner that united acolytes from both of those formerly disparate clans and even fleetingly worried the pop charts, Filth Pig found the band retaining the intensity but sacrificing much of the melodicism that made the combination palatable. Not even a dour cover of Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” could really save it. In many respects, while still part of the overarching Ministry saga, Filth Pig marked the point where the band stopped stylistically progressing.

Anyway, if my math is right, there has been a lone copy of Filth Pig on that shelf at the Westhampton Beach Rite Aid since about 1998. Years have come and gone. Seasons have passed. Couples have met, courted, wed, procreated and reared children while Ministry’s largely maligned 1995 effort has sat silently in that aisle, waiting for a particularly forgiving variant of heavy, pugnacious rock fan to stumble upon it. Ministry themselves have gone onto release 11 -- read that number again: ELEVEN -- more studio albums since Filth Pig, yet that copy of it continues to stay on that shelf, waiting for a buyer, not unlike that second copy of Coup D’Etat by the Plasmatics at Sam’s Record Shop decades earlier.

Why haven’t I bought it, you ask? While, yes, I am indeed a fan of Ministry, I was sent my own copy of Filth Pig by Warner Bros. Records upon its initial release, having been a bona fide “music journalist” at the time. I still own it. I don’t play it exceptionally often, but I do have it. And, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, unlike certain iconic albums, it’s just not a record one feels compelled to own multiple copies of.

That said, my heart still aches when I routinely spy it sitting there – unloved – in its Rite Aid limbo. In more recent years, I’ve taken to documenting its timeless sentence, vainly hoping that one day, I’ll find it gone – sold to some skateboarding twerp whose curiosity was piqued by the needlessly bloody artwork. But then I realize, skateboarding twerps don’t really buy CD’s anymore, so it’s probably contingent on another cranky middle-aged rock dork like myself finding it.

Until such time, the sad vigil continues.

This past Easter weekend:

 

Cop Swap Cop: Another Track from EXCOP

Back in 2016, as discussed here, former members of my beloved Cop Shoot Cop (minus Tod Ashley, who was at home in Turkey, at the time) briefly reconvened for a benefit for Martin Bisi's fabled recording studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The gents partook in a jam session of sorts with former SWANS bassist Algis Kyzis filling in for Tod on second bass. Parts of that session were featured on a BC35 commemorative disc, credited to the name EXCOP. 

Some time later, -- around this time last year, really -- the release of that disc was celebrated at Brooklyn's St. Vitus with a live showcase, featuring EXCOP pummeling through an entirely improvisational set -- sort of like a burlier version of Spinal Tap's jazz odyssey without founding guitarist Nigel Tufnel. That's them above. It was a very festive occasion. 

Now, here in 2019, a second disc is surfacing -- BC35 Volume Two -- that features another great track from the original session. To celebrate same, EXCOP even cooked up a frankly disquieting video, replete with footage from the original session, spliced between unsettling snippets of all sorts of stuff. Easy viewing it is not, but what were you really expecting? 

Learn more here, but -- in the interim -- enjoy the video:

Word on The Street

Notre Dame in Flames

I spotted the quote below on the Metropolitan Museum's Facebook page, and I think it pretty much sums it up:

“Notre-Dame Cathedral is the very soul of Paris but so much more—it is a touchstone for all that is the best about the world, and a monument to the highest aspirations of artistic achievement that transcends religion and time. It has survived so much—from the French Revolution to Nazi occupation—to watch its devastation is excruciating.”

– Barbara Drake Boehm, Paul and Jill Ruddock Senior Curator for The Met Cloisters

After Hours AOC

Despite appearances to the contrary, this post is not really about AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), but — since I just invoked her — I might as well concede that I think she’s pretty great. Sure, she’s young and probably still has a lot to learn about the office she now holds, but anyone who is capable of speaking truth to power with her level of conviction — to say nothing about causing so much angst and indigestion among key figures on the Right — is a-okay with me. You, of course, may beg to differ. That’s all.

In any case, a friend of mine recently posted the above photo on Facebook of AOC, posing with her signature, unblinking intensity on a weathered New York City stoop, her impeccably sharp, green ensemble creating a striking dichotomy with her otherwise rough-hewn surroundings. At first glance, I found it strangely familiar, but then I realized … there are doubtlessly thousands of stoops just like the one she’s depicted sitting on.

Then I thought back to an evening several weeks back. I was going to meet some out-of-towner friends who now live on the other side of the globe. They were briefly back in the city for a wedding, so we decided to meet up an at age-old favorite haunt, the Ear Inn on the westerly edges of Spring Street.

I’ve mentioned the Ear a few times here. It passively vies for the title “Oldest Bar in New York City” in meaningless competition with joints like Pete’s Tavern and McSorley’s, although — to my mind — it’s way better than either of those over-hyped establishments. Whether it’s genuinely the oldest bar in New York means nothing to me. It’s just a great place to meet friends and have a few beers. Long may it stay that way.

In any case, because I’m deeply neurotic and punctual to a fault, I arrived in the neighborhood ahead of schedule, which left me plenty of time to roam around the surrounding environs before assuming my place at the bar.

Time was when part of the Ear’s charm was that it was in such a remote, desolate backwater of a neighborhood. Apart from a deli or two, a couple of fellow bars (notably McGovern’s and the Emerald Inn) and, later, rock club Don Hill’s, there was practically nothing. The streets were empty and quiet. It’s for this reason that Martin Scorsese chose this patch of SoHo for many of the locations in “After Hours,” because it exuded such an eerily quiet, empty ambiance.

Suffice to say, this is no longer the case in 2019. These days, the westerly edges of Spring Street are a densely populated Emerald City of exclusive condos and monied luxury. Somehow, the Ear Inn has managed to hold on, but the days of it being a remote outpost are decidedly over.

This all said, there are still whispery elements of the neighborhood’s old vibe, if you look hard enough for them. As I circumnavigated the area on foot, I snapped a few pictures, trying to capture that rarified essence of place.

Circling the block on Renwick Street, just a street to the east of the Ear Inn, I came upon a certain stoop at the tail end of the building that formerly housed the Emerald Inn, the bar Scorsese re-cast as the Terminal Bar for “After Hours” (which I wrote about back here). I was struck by how grim and forbidding the stoop in question looked, so, I took a picture.

Sure enough, it’s the same stoop AOC was photographed on. Now, what was she doing there?

Hell if I know.