In the wake of so many conflicting reports, I decided to swing by the Corner Bistro this morning, and I'm happy to relay that they are indeed back open for biz, beers, booze and -- wait for it -- burgers.
I spoke with the owner, who was loading new supplies into their kitchen. As speculated, they were indeed re-doing the floors, but after "some idiot on Barstool" started the rumor, he'd been inundated with texts and calls and panicky emails, etc.
In any case, it's still goin'. Go tonight, why don't you?
In about 1997, one of my best friends, Rob D. – then still a freshly-minted husband to my friend Joanne (I unwittingly introduced them, some years prior), decided that he and his new bride were swiftly outgrowing the five-story walk-up in the East Village they’d been renting. Technically, Rob had moved into Joanne’s apartment on East 9th Street after hopscotching around between Manhattan and his original home turf in Pleasantville (where, we were fond of pointing out, Ace Frehley had allegedly lived). Prior to all this, Joanne had lived in an apartment on East 4th Street that, we learned well after the fact, had also played host, at an earlier point, to unlikely neighbors Madonna and Peter Missing of Missing Foundation.
Regardless, they needed more space, so Rob & Joanne said goodbye to the East Village and decamped to Hell’s Kitchen, right off the “The Deuce” at 303 West 42nd Street, just a few steps to the west of 8th Avenue. The building’s biggest claim to … er … fame was that it played host to the notorious Show World Center, an age-old “sex emporium” from the neighborhood’s fabled bad old days.
Circa `97, while the surrounding area was sharply in the throes of some seriously intense gentrification (largely courtesy of the authoritarian reign of Mayor Giuliani), I believe Show World was still conducting its usual business, which largely consisted of live-sex shows (I shouldn’t have to explain to you what this entails) and floors lined with these strange adjoining booths (see pic below, courtesy of Jeremiah Moss' Vanishing NY).
“Dancers” – for want of a better term – would wait outside of these closet-sized booths, and when a patron expressed an interest, they would each enter their respective halves (kind of like confessionals in a church). The patron would summarily enter tokens he’d have procured upon entry to the premises into a slot, and a hatch would ascend like a curtain between the two halves of the booth, revealing the “dancer” on the other side of a doubtlessly smeary windowpane. To keep the hatch from descending and obscuring full view of whatever the “dancer” might be doing, the patron would have to keep pumping tokens into the slot. Eventually, he’d either run out of tokens … or steam, so to speak, … and the hatch would slam shut. End of show.
Here's a great shot of the 8th Avenue entrance, as captured by Gregoire Alessandrini.
While all that was going on, meanwhile, Rob and Joanne were setting up their new home in a comparatively spacious and bright one-bedroom several flights above. Right off the living room/open-kitchen area, there was a wide fire-escape, where we’d often hang out for hours, drinking beers and talking nonsense. If you climbed those fire escape stairs, you were treated to an amazing roof-top with a full, birds-eye view of the entirety of the surrounding Hell’s Kitchen. That part of it was legitimately magickal.
Newly enamored of Hell’s Kitchen, I picked up a copy of “The Westies” by T.J. English, an exhaustive -- but truly excellent -- history of Hell’s Kitchen’s era under the reign of the titular Irish mob, led by colorful figures like Mickey Featherstone, Jimmy Coonan, Mickey Spillane and their bloodthirsty cohort. That book loosely served as the inspiration for the similarly inclined 1990 film “State of Grace,” starring Sean Penn, Gary Oldman and Ed Harris. Like a pair of green-gilled dilettantes, Rob and I started exploring many of the neighborhood’s less salubrious drinking establishments like Mr. Biggs (formerly owned by mobster Jimmy Coonan as the 596 Bar, where Coonan had rival mobster and loan shark Carles “Ruby” Stein murdered and beheaded), The Savoy, McHale’s, Siberia Bar, The Bellvue Bar, Druids, Rudy’s, The Holland Bar and several others, grimly romanced by the neighborhood’s already swiftly eroding character.
As it happened, however, Rob & Joanne’s stay in their adopted Hell’s Kitchen ended up being pretty short. After only about a year and a half, they decamped to City Island in the Bronx (right across the water from haunted Hart Island) and then, very shortly after that, to New London, CT, the former stomping grounds of Rob’s literary hero, Eugene O’Neill. In the grand scheme of things, Rob & Joanne had only been in Hell’s Kitchen for barely an instant, but the changes to that neighborhood (from a grimy sleaze Mecca in a lawless badlands into a Disneyfied tourist trap) during their brief tenure were pronounced.
Once R&J had split, my journeys into the heart of Hell’s Kitchen decreased in frequency until I took a job – briefly, as it would turn out – at MTV News Online in neighboring Times Square in the mid-to-late 2000’s. Now, almost two decades later, I barely recognize Hell’s Kitchen when I’m back in it. The very name itself – Hell’s Kitchen – has come under fire, in more recent years, from real estate developers trying to re-christen the neighborhood in an arguably more inviting/less inflammatory manner.
Since those days in the `90s, most of the bars I cited have vanished, notably The Savoy, McHale’s, Siberia, The Bellevue Bar and Druids. I believe the Holland Bar might also have closed but am not sure. Rudy’s and Mr. Biggs are still there, last I checked. In the summer of 1998, just prior to meeting the lady who I’d later marry, I had a truly surreal and disastrously Kafka-esque blind date that culminated in Mr. Biggs. Suffice to say, that ridiculous experience left me disinclined to ever want to return to that undoubtedly cursed space (even though, today, it’s just another douchy sports bar). Bad vibes, to say the least.
But, again, this is just my experience. For a more nuanced, detailed and authoritative take on Hell’s Kitchen, check out this documentary below…
As I was strolling home from work on the evening of May 2, 2017, I glanced over at 77 White Street, and who should I spy sitting on the storied stoop of the former Mudd Club but the great James Chance himself. He was taking part in what was doubtlessly an awkward interview. I tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, but I could not stop myself from snapping the picture below.
So, for the last eight years or so — apart from during COVID — I’ve been lucky enough to attend the annual Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremonies at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square.
Basically, the organization I work for volunteers its services to capture video of the inductees and presenters, so I go with a small crew and set-up in the “production corridor,” hoping to catch various luminaries as they’re coming offstage to try to get them to share a few words about the honor and the experience, and all that. It’s usually a very long night, but it’s quite fun and I’ve gotten to meet and talk with a pretty wide array of songwriters.
Last night was this year’s ceremony, and —as you may have read — among this year’s class of inductees came R.E.M. There were other names on the list, of course, like Donald Fagan of Steely Dan, SZA, Timbaland, Hillary Lyndsey, Dianne Warren and Dean Pitchford, but R.E.M.was the big fish I was looking to reel in.
We did pretty well, although Donald Fagan blew us off, as did SZA. But, pretty much everyone else came down, including the fellas in R.E.M., who truly couldn’t have been nicer. After asking my requisite questions, I broke from the script and mentioned how much their music had meant to me, over the years, and each of them broke into a wide smile and shook my hand. Bill Berry took it a step further and complemented my tie. So, yeah, that happened.
Meanwhile, on Monday, I was incredibly flattered by my fellow writer/music journalist/bug-eyed rock freak Joel Gausten for having me on his YouTube channel on Monday to discuss our respective professional trajectories, some mutual favorite bands whose names I probably don’t even have to invoke (you can probably guess) and other geeky fanboy minutia.
Personally, I have a very hard time watching/hearing myself speak, but if you can tolerate my seemingly constant fidgeting, strange hair and ponderous bloviation, there’s a chance you might enjoy….
This post was inspired by the most random thing – a quote from President Jimmy Carter, that being..
If you have a voice and an instrument, you are welcome in my home.
A lovely sentiment, right? My friend Frank Coleman posted that on Facebook, and I … being a cheeky fucker … responded with the video below, appended with the legend, “Mr. President, there’s a Mr. Branca here to see you!?...”
I’ve posted that particular video here a number of times, and it always makes me smile. I mean, yeah, sure, on a superficial level, it seems entirely absurd – watching the late Glenn Branca take a battered, long-suffering six-string to task like a man positively on fire in the name of untethered experimental noise ain’t exactly everyone’s cup o’ concrete, but there’s also something so completely beautiful about it.
As a musician, Branca could be a polarizing figure, although I’m fairly sure he felt more alignment with avant-garde conceptual artists than with comparatively conventional musicians. As I mentioned back on this post, I came to own a couple of his records by way of a big crate of LP’s undeservingly bequeathed to me by this hepcat named Arthur who was courting my mother, back in the mid-`80s (he claimed, at the time, that he was “going digital,” and had evolved beyond vinyl, or some ridiculous bullshit like that, and I happily obliged that evolution). It was a gift – albeit with an agenda – that I’d assuredly done nothing to genuinely deserve.
But while I immediately pounced on Arthur’s former copies of beloved albums by Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Fall, SWANS and Public Image Ltd., these oddball records like The Ascension and Lesson No. 1 by this enigmatic Branca figure were just, for lack of a better word, … confusing. I mean, they were certainly compelling, given the sheer expanse of enveloping sound they packed, but a wall of detuned electric guitars playing movements like an orchestra was invariably too heady a horse pill for me to digest, given my stubborn affinity for more traditional rock. I wouldn’t grow to truly appreciate Branca’s music for several years, largely prompted by name-drops and accolades from folks like Sonic Youth and David Bowie.
I think I genuinely decided to give his stuff another shake when I saw a few interviews with the man. I mean, not only was he this strangely hirsute, unshaven, and irascible badass, but he was also completely hilarious (his moments in Don Letts’ “Punk: Attitude” and the otherwise truly abortive “documentary” on No Wave, “Kill Yr Idols” are snide comedy gold). Like his contemporaries like James Chance, Suicide and Lydia Lunch, as well as obvious acolytes like Michael Gira and the late Steve Albini, Glenn Branca suffered no fools, made no compromises, and gave absolutely zero fucks.
I soon learned that, prior to recording and releasing the records I’d come to own via “Going Digital” Arthur, Branca had been part of the whole No Wave phenomenon, given his membership in a band called Theoretical Girls. I’d first become intrigued by the music of the deliberately user-hostile No Wave scene from reading about it, but actually tracking down the records, at the time (this was the mid-`80s, let’s remember) was no small feat. Fate fleetingly smiled on me, however, when I happened upon a long-neglected copy of No New York, arguably the quintessential primer on all things No Wave, curated and “produced” by self-appointed No Wave ambassador Brian Eno, while I was deejaying at my college radio station. Being that the station in question largely accommodated the stridently unwavering listening habits of classic rock retrophiles hopelessly addicted to a steady diet of the Allman Brothers, Joni Mitchell, and the Grateful Dead, it was safe to assume no one was going to miss the LP if I “borrowed” it in perpetuity. Sure enough, when I played its opening track on the air, that night – that being “Dish It Out” by the Contortions, featuring a positively splenetic explosion of saxophone insanity courtesy of James Chance – I believe listeners called in with death threats.
But Branca’s band, Theoretical Girls, didn’t make it onto No New York. Allegedly, Eno’s choice of who made the cut unwittingly drove a wedge into the No Wave community, given that inclusion on the record seemed to establish a sort of tenuous hierarchy. Given that Theoretical Girls were SoHo-based and not Lower East Siders like most of the other bands (in retrospect, a kind of ridiculous distinction, given their geographical proximity), Theoretical Girls were arguably even perceived as outsiders by the outsiders.
For the longest time, the only song I’d ever heard by Theoretical Girls – who also included Jeff Lohn, Wharton Tiers and Margaret Dewys – was a fittingly discordant number called “You Got Me.” Contrary to what one might assume given such a comparatively banal song title, “You Got Me” is not a romantic testament of any kind, but rather a frenzied admission of homicidal mania (“I’m really scared when I kill in my dreams”) that kicks off with a series of staccato bursts before settling into a pounding, jackhammer rhythm flanked by chugging guitars, jittery keyboards and Branca’s anxious bark. Suffice to say, it ain’t yacht rock, but hear it for yourself…
Being one side of a 7” single, the only official, self-issued release by the Theoretical Girls during their brief existence, “You Got Me” went onto be included on myriad punk, post-punk and no wave compilations, over the years, including great ones by Atavistic and Soul Jazz. I don’t think I even heard the flipside of the single, “U.S. Millie,” until more recently, and it is somewhat surprisingly nothing like its counterpart, largely abandoning Branca’s murderous guitar skronk for some stiff-backed, tinny keyboard doodling under Jeff Lohn’s bizarre poetry and a martial rhythm. Hear it for yourself…
In any case, other bits and pieces documenting the brief, noisy existence of the Theoretical Girls surfaced over time, not least Ericka Beckman’s 2010 documentary, “135 Grand Street New York 1979,” which featured footage of Branca & Co. (also in the guise of Branca & Lohn’s pre-Theoretical Girls band, The Static) playing in a cramped little space in – wait for it – 135 Grand Street. Here’s a tantalizing bit of that now. I believe the footage was first intended as part of a German television program…
Ever since first seeing that footage, I’d always meant to seek out more. I can’t remember when I first spied that clip of solo Glenn going bonkers in black n’ white at the top of this post, but I remember being struck that said explosive performance also happened on Grand Street, albeit a few blocks further to the west. I decided to go back to the scenes of the crimes.
The space at 135 Grand from Beckman’s documentary is today a concern called R. Swiader, a business that describes itself as a “gender-optional, Made in New York clothing line from designer Raf Swiader. It is his vision of a future when everybody feels at home in in their body, starting with their clothes.” If the R. Swiader folks are even remotely aware – let alone if they’d even care – that their space once played host to the racket-raising likes of Messrs. Branca, Lohn, Tiers, etc., they're not interested in discussing it, and there's no mention of it on their website.
The space that played host to Branca’s solo freakout, meanwhile, was at Jeffrey Lohn’s old storefront loft at 33 Grand Street. Lohn would allegedly use the loft as a performance space and invite other neighborhood envelope-pushers like Laurie Anderson and Tim Wright to hang out, watch stuff and be cool. About a decade later, that space would be re-imagined as a bar called Naked Lunch with a William S. Burroughs theme. It was hard to miss their signature metallic cockroach sculpture that hung on the corner of the building at the southwest intersection of Thompson and Grand.
Like all genuinely cool stuff in New York City, Naked Lunch closed in 2013, and was slated to become a more cloyingly chic endeavor (in keeping with the then-devolving character of Soho of the era) called the Regent Cocktail Club, but instead morphed into yet another transient-looking delicatessen. The metallic roach stuck around for several years before mysteriously vanishing during COVID.
Here in 2024, once again, the Theoretical Girls are an element from the past, mourned predominantly by a dwindling nation of record collectors and pedantic music nerds (although original editions of the “U.S. Millie”/”You Got Me” single are asking $150-$200 on eBay). I am unfortunately unfamiliar with the circumstances of the band’s dissolution, but certain sources have made vague suggestions about “external pressures and internal politics.” Make of that what you will.
Branca, of course, went on to cultivate a revered career as an avant-garde composer, continuing to make music until his death in 2016 from throat cancer. Jeff Lohn continues his pursuits in conceptual art and composition, but largely demurred from the public eye. Somewhat ironically, Wikipedia says that he's since moved from SoHo to the East Village. Keyboardist Margaret De Wys devotes her life to being a composer and sound-installation artist and her works have been performed in prestigious venues like MoMa and the Whitney Museum. She apparently lives between Upstate New York and Southeast Nigeria. Drummer Wharton Tiers went onto become a respected musician, audio engineer and producer, performing both as a solo artist and with Laurie Anderson, as well as producing albums by Sonic Youth, Das Damen, Helmet, Dinosaur Jr., White Zombie, Quicksand, Unrest, and Gumball, among many others. As a special note to this stupid blog, it should be noted that Tiers engineered Headkick Facsimile, the debut EP by my beloved Cop Shoot Cop.
In the ensuing years since Theoretical Girls’ fleeting tenure, there have been two distinct compilations devoted to them, strangely divvied up – like their lone 7” single – between Branca’s music and Lohn’s music, almost like they’re two different entities. Personally speaking, I find it hard not to project some hint of acrimony between Branca and Lohn as the reasons behind this arrangement. Regardless, Songs: `77-`79 on Atavistic covers Glenn Branca’s material, with eight suitably bracing tracks by both Theoretical Girls and The Static. Jeff Lohn’s take, meanwhile, is represented on Acute Records' Theoretical Record, a comparatively sprawling collection of tracks. For those who don’t like to get their hands dirty tracking down the physical manifestations of music, I should note that you can find both collections on Spotify. Of the two, only Theoretical Record can be found on Bandcamp. Being the dweeb that I am, I had to have physical copies of both.
While the sound quality on each of these releases bounces between varying degrees of what audiophiles would probably consider entirely untenable, I find both discs to be really exciting, and way more accessible than I’d been expecting, striking a compelling balance between bare-bones punk sneer and art-damaged downtown weirdness. Unsurprisingly, Branca’s tracks tend to be less conventional and more cacophonously pugnacious, but that was kinda his shtick. This is not to say Lohn’s songs aren’t equally challenging (Lohn’s instrumental diversion “Polytonal” is just as headache-inducing as Branca’s “Fuck Yourself”), but when Theoretical Girls lock in together and play as a cohesive unit, like on “Don’t Let Me Stop You,” “Lovin’ in the Red,” “No More Sex” and their Ramones-baiting titular theme, “Theoretical Girls – Live,” the end results can totally hold their own.
To walk up and down Grand Street today, though, with this music in my headphones, it’s hard to reconcile that it all happened here.
CODA:Having fleetingly bribed my approval via an avalanche of post-punk vinyl, “Go-Digital” Arthur did indeed end up briefly dating my mother, but I believe he may have harbored an affinity for certain stimulants that my mother just wasn’t down with, and their short-lived fling fizzled out. Mercifully, he never asked for his records back, although I strenuously doubt that he was ever able to fully replicate his collection on compact disc. I believe he has since passed away.
I was beginning to slowly piece together an entry about some comparatively ancient doings along the stately byway of Grand Street (which may still see the light of day) but got sidetracked by another item about a former location near the westerly end of that street, namely the Moondance Diner.
Read any write-up of the Moondance Diner on the web, and you’re likely to see many of the same invocations about how the iconic eatery was featured in episodes of “Sex & the City,” “Miami Vice” and “Friends” and in movies like “Spider-Man” and “After Hours.” I can’t speak for those other dumb-ass titles with any authority, but I’d really like to (again) clear up the misconception that the Moondance Diner ever appeared in “After Hours,” a film which is something of a preoccupation of mine
While, yes, the Moondance Diner was very definitively in SoHo -– the geographical heart of “After Hours” -- not that far from various other neighborhood-specific locations in that film, Scorsese actually filmed the diner scenes (both the interior and the exterior shots) at a diner in Hell’s Kitchen called the River Diner on West 36th Street on 11th Avenue (where John Lennon was once photographed). It certainly would have made more sense to film them at the Moondance, but for whatever reason – he didn’t. So, when you read that bullshit on WikiPedia and/or in any other articles on the subject -- don’t believe the hype!
Now, of course, I already addressed this inanely trivial bullshit in this post from back in 2010, wherein I lamented the absence of the Moondance Diner with juxtaposing photos of the deeply shitty hotel that was erected on its former site. One would think that was the end of the story, right?
One would be wrong.
The way it shook out, the Moondance Diner was allegedly forced to close its doors circa 2007, when they could no longer realistically meet the demands of lower Manhattan’s spiraling rent. The physical diner itself – complete with ornate, rotating-moon signage – was sold and shipped to the wide-open spaces of a town called La Barge in Wyoming, of all places.
That should have been it, but, tragically, the winter climate of Wyoming (where, one assumes, they get a significantly greater amount of snowfall than Sixth Avenue & Grand Street ever does) spelled a comparatively quick demise for the Moondance diner, which closed again in 2012.
On a personal level, the Moondance Diner was a longtime favorite of mine from both when I was a single, beery rock pig on the hunt for greasy food after an evening of ill-advised high decibels and from when I became a doting dad to two little, tiny people. Not only was it an iconic spot on the map, but the food was spot-on. Since its departure, I always envisioned some grand road trip I’d take upon retiring, wherein I’d drive around the continent, visiting bits and pieces of downtown Manhattan’s past like the Moondance Diner, and the bar from the Cedar Tavern (now in a bar in Austin, TX) and the giant lizard from the top of the Lone Star Café (now also located in Texas). That expedition probably won’t be happening.
As of this time last year, as reported in this story in the Cowboy State Daily, the dormant diner was being eyed for re-opening by various parties, but I don’t know if any of that has come to pass since the publishing of this article.
I realize I technically already logged my eulogy to Steve Albini, but when has that ever stopped me?
I’ve mentioned him a few times, here (notably here, here, here and again here), but my friend Greg Fasolino was a near “Zelig”-like figure in terms of attending (and, even better, recording) certain gigs back in the day, and he and I share an almost perfectly aligned taste. A great example of this is the clip below.
The summer Greg recorded this video – capturing vintage Big Black at CBGB in the July of 1986 – I would have been sequestered out in a group house on Long Island, washing dishes at Ina Garten’s Westhampton Beach iteration of The Barefoot Contessa. That honestly doesn’t matter, as I wouldn’t go on to first hear Big Black until the fall of 1987, when a friend of mine walked into my shift as a disc jockey at my college radio station and demanded I play the 45 he was shoving in my face (the “He’s a Whore”/”The Model” 7”). I dropped the needle on the Cheap Trick cover and was a convert for life.
Being quicker to the table than myself, Greg not only went to this gig, but he captured it on video -- which was still no small feat, in 1986, if you consider how unwieldy and bulky video equipment was, at the time.
The resultant footage is a revelation. Here’s Steve Albini, looking sorely undernourished, unleashing a ferocious onslaught of visceral noise and invective, interspersed with bone-dry quips of the blackest pitch. It’s also a telling example of what shows in the intimate confines of that fabled room were actually like. Peter Prescott of Mission of Burma/Volcano Suns joins them for later numbers.
I was going to say, “not for the faint of heart,” but given the tragic circumstances of Albini’s death, that seems a bit tasteless … which he’d have probably endorsed.
I honestly don’t remember for how long it was installed at the Forbes Gallery on lower Fifth Avenue, but it was at least several years. I almost want to say I remember first seeing it when my father still worked at the magazine back in `80s, but I may be projecting. In any case, after my children arrived on the scene by the mid-2000’s, when they became more ambulatory, I used to periodically take them to check it out.
By “it,” I’m referring to what my littlest used to call “The Marble Thingy,” which was an art installation that hung on the north wall of the Forbes Gallery’s vestibule. We could just duck in and spend time watching it do its thing. By “its thing,” I mean an inventively complicated obstacle course for a series of metal ball bearings, finding them running down ramps, bumping off bells, whirling through shoots and triggering other mechanisms in the manner of something between a gravity-controlled pinball machine and a Rube Goldberg contraption. My kids absolutely loved it, and we could literally spend upwards of an hour in that little room.
My son Oliver was especially enamored of “The Marble Thingy,” and we were rarely able to walk down that stretch of Fifth Avenue, specifically between 12th and 13th streets, without popping in to check in on it. He’d have happily spent all day just watching it.
Unfortunately, like so many other elements of New York City, the Forbes Gallery closed abruptly in November of 2014. The building that had once housed the magazine’s editorial offices and Malcolm Forbes’ stately gallery of artifacts closed up shop for good. The magazine ended up moving to Jersey City (where I’d later fleeting interview for a position as a science & technology editor I had zero aptitude for) and its old headquarters on Fifth Avenue became yet another NYU facility (as is so often the case).
Sadly, “The Marble Thingy” vanished along with the rest of the Forbes Gallery. I would later learn that the piece in question was titled, fittingly, Wallpiece IV by a sculptor named George Rhoads, and it later sold at auction for a figure between five and seven thousand dollars. Regardless, it was priceless to my little boy, and we both still invoke it when we walk down that street.
This isn’t the exact piece in question, but it’s a good example of what it was like.
Invoke the inaugural class of mid-`70’s New York punk bands, and the usual names will probably immediately pop up — The Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, The Dictators, The Dead Boys, Mink DeVille, etc. But, it should be remembered, that for every band that managed to vault themselves into that elite class of established household names, there were droves of other bands who — regardless of their merit — seem forever designated with the status of second tier, ancillary and/or also-ran. For whatever reason, bands like The Shirts, The Mumps and The Speedies — to name just three — graced the same stages of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, but are rarely name-checked with the frequency of their contemporaries cited above. Those are the breaks, I guess.
Another of those outfits who were arguably saddled with second-tier status was a combo called the Tuff Darts. Originally fronted by vocalist Robert Gordon, the Tuff Darts were more of a retro-reverent rock’n’roll band than the more celebrated CBGB regulars, largely due to Gordon’s rockabilly leanings. Though they were fleetingly captured on Live at CBGB, a compilation of seemingly random bands who frequented that now-fabled hole in the wall, Gordon split the ranks for a solo career before the Tuff Darts could release their proper debut album on visionary Seymour Stein's Sire Records. Gordon was replaced by by a character named Tommy Frenzy, who arguably leant proceedings a bit more of a punkier edge.
Personally speaking, I didn’t hear the Tuff Darts until way after the fact. I’d probably thumbed by their one and only album in the racks of any number of record stores. For whatever reason, I always seemed to confuse them with British band The Toy Dolls.
But the Tuff Darts finally got my attention, at one point, when I learned that John, the most reasonable gent behind the counter at Bleecker Bob’s during its tenure on West 3rd Street, was a former member. Full name John DeSalvo, John had been the bass player of the Tuff Darts about a decade or so before my friend Rob and I had become Bleecker Bob’s regulars. We’d adopted the habit of referring to John as “Ringo at the Register,” albeit not to his face, given an arguably similar physiognomy to the fabled Fab. Unlike famously abusive proprietor “Bleecker” Bob Plotnik, John was a markedly even-keel (and super knowledgeable) source of intel, ready to assist and answer any dumb questions we might have sprang on him. It was John who sold us the Now We Are Six ep by infantile noise duo, The Happy Flowers, charitably describing the 7” single as “… kind of not music.” We loved John.
Not everybody loved John, though. Pompous blowhard and self-proclaimed “Dean of Rock Critics” Robert Christgau (who I’ve lambasted before) gave the Tuff Darts album a C (it was Christgau who came up with the “hey, let’s give letter grades to other people’s music” system), saying…
Maybe Robert Gordon left this band to escape resident sickie John DeSalvo, one of those guys who sounds like he deserves to get fixed by the knife-wielding lesbians he has nightmares about. The only way to make their record more depressing would be to add a hologram of Gordon's replacement, Tommy Frenzy, whose slick blond hair and metal teeth now set the band's android-delinquent "image." Then again, you could take away Jeff Salen's guitar.
I can’t say I can credibly cite the exact lyric Christgau is alluding to (although it might be his interpretation of “Slash”), but suffice to say, much like their peers in the Ramones, their British counterparts in the Stranglers and their West Coast contemporaries in FEAR, the Tuff Darts entirely amplified a deliberately outrageous and black-humored aesthetic in their songs. I mean, if you’re taking compositions like “(Your Love is Like) Nuclear Waste,” “She’s Dead” and, God help you, “Phone Booth Man” at face value, you’ve really got to get out more often. That Christgau was so humorlessly taken aback by John’s lyrics is surprising, given his alleged fandom for the Ramones (the lyrics to da brudders’ “Beat on the Brat” and “53rd & Third” are certainly no less violent, tasteless and ostensibly offensive than anything you’d find in the Tuff Darts’ small discography). As such, one wonders how Christgau felt about, say, “I Love the Dead” by Alice Cooper from just a few years before (answer: he found it “tolerable”). And as long as we’re decrying tastelessness, it should be remembered what Christgau wrote about Wendy O. Williams in 1982, which was just as shamelessly misogynistic as any of this stuff, but I digress.
While the Tuff Darts might have gone out of their way to be “shocking” in a lyrical context, the music contained on that first album is a good deal more conventional, basically concentrating on burly-but-melodic power pop. Some of it wouldn’t have sounded at all out of place played alongside early Kiss records like Dressed to Kill, although I’m sure that assessment would make John wince. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, no one makes music like the kind found on Tuff Darts! anymore. Listening to it through the prism of 2024, it sounds very much of its era (which is a much kinder way of saying “it’s dated”), but for the predisposed, it’s still pretty entertaining.
As I understand it, the band broke up shortly after the release of the record for reasons that I am not privy to, but I’m sure they’re not very surprising. I have no idea when John started working at Bleecker Bob’s, but he was certainly there when I first started shopping in the West 3rd Street iteration in the early `80s.
In later years, the Tommy Frenzy-fronted iteration of the band reformed. Robert Gordon never returned to the ranks of the Tuff Darts, having cultivated a successful career as a rockabilly singer. In 2007, the reunited Tuff Darts actually released a new record, entitled You Can’t Keep a Good Band Down, although it was released only in Japan. Sadly, founding guitarist Jeff Salen died of a heart attack at the young age of 55 the very next year. The band reconvened again, circa 2011 – with John, again, but I’m not sure how long that lasted.
From that point forward, the Tuff Darts trail goes kind of cold, apart from a few re-releases.
I don’t honestly know what John DeSalvo is up to these days. His longtime stint at Bleecker Bob’s came to a close 11 years ago this month, when the shop shut its doors in April of 2013. You can see him all over this video commemorating that sad milestone.
I gather John still works in the vintage vinyl trade. The picture on the right was snapped by former Cramps drummer Miriam Linna, presumably at a record fair at some point in 2018. Hopefully, he’s doing alright.
The world lost a second former Tuff Dart in 2022, when Robert Gordon passed away at age 75.
The New York City of the Tuff Darts era continues to (d)evolve from what it was during their existence. The bars and clubs they drank and played in like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, among several lesser-celebrated others, are all long gone. The record stores that sold their music are mostly gone (although I did find a lovely re-released edition on 180-gram audiophile vinyl at Generation Records, not that I bought it … I still have my shitty CD version from a few years back). The rock rags that wrote about them are all long out of business. The neighborhoods they formerly stalked are now gentrified and largely unrecognizable.
Well, maybe not totally unrecognizable. The photo of the band at the top of this post was snapped by Blondie’s Christ Stein, who shared it on his Facebook page. That’s John on the far left with his had on the top of the car.
I took one look at this shot and immediately knew the spot. They’re standing in Abe Lebewohl Park in front of St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery on 2nd Avenue and East 10th Street.
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