Flaming Pablum

Be Cruel To Your Pool: The Search for the Cover Location of New Hope for The Wretched

In the grand tradition of this post, I was originally going to launch a new quest to divine the cover location of the Plasmatics’ first album, New Hope for the Wretched (above), but the answer came quickly and was nothing I was ever going to have been able to solve on my own, so I’m just going to share it all here now. Oh, you're welcome. 

Despite being technically the band's first album, New Hope for the Wretched was the last Plasmatics studio album I was to attain, not including a few compilation discs they put out posthumously in the last two decades. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I came to own this particular album in a fairly dishonorable way. Here’s a very brief explainer about how that happened, as unspooled on this ancient post.

I'm really not proud to admit this but I once shafted a local used record store over a Plasmatics record. They were selling a copy of the band's debut LP, New Hope For The Wretched as a deluxe picture disc (the vinyl platter looked like someone had vomited radioactive slime all over it), but the shop was asking a king's ransom for it. Like a dick, I slipped that record out of its sleeve and swapped it with another record. I brought the picture disk -- now sheathed in a different album's cover -- to the counter and paid pennies for it. I was never a bad kid -- I didn't make a habit of ripping stuff off, but for some reason, I had to have this picture disc. Decades later, I still feel guilty every time I walk by the shop in question.

That last line is true. To this day, I still feel compelled to go into the shop in question (still there, amazingly) and confess my wretchedness, pardon the pun. It’s forever tainted my ability to fully enjoy the record in question, given its inexorable ties to my bottomless wellspring of guilt.

Regardless of how you come to New Hope for The Wretched, you should know, going in, that it’s really not for everyone. Still finding their way, at the time, the band was obviously having a problem in trying to make their album match the sensationalized impact of their live show. Let’s face it, songwriting was never their primary strength.

Playing a loose approximation of what had become known, by that point, as “punk rock” (although, by the time of the release of this record, the Clash had already stylistically branched out with London Calling and Sandinista, Sid Vicious was already dead, John Lydon was making way more experimental music with Public Image Ltd. and The Ramones were recording with Phil Spector), the songs are energetic, if not especially inspired. Standout selections like “Monkey Suit” (see below) and “Butcher Babies” are entertaining enough, but one could credibly suggest that their efforts on later records were a bit more successful, in this capacity.

The most inspired moment probably comes during their cover of “Dream Lover,” originally by Bobby Darin. Their version boasts a noisy gimmick that unwittingly borrows a page from the burgeoning No Wave scene that would have been going on, at the time, in that during an extended passage of the recording, the musicians were isolated from each other and could not see or hear what each other were playing — the ends results being as discordantly cacophonous as you’d expect. You can’t say the Plasmatics didn't try. 

This all said, much like their kindred spirits in KISS, the Plasmatics' early records were still overshadowed by their penchant for violent and prurient spectacle, and New Hope was no exception, which might handily explain the knowing ludicrousness of the album’s cover, featuring the band posing in and around a suburban backyard pool, appearing as if they’ve just driven a car into it and also destroyed a nearby television set for good measure … as you do.

After I’d posted my findings about the band’s Tribeca headquarters last week, my comrade Bob Egan of Popspots NYC fame challenged me to tackle finding this location. As it happened, I did find the below bird’s eye view of the location shoot, but it didn’t really give that many clues.

From there, I went directly to the source. Many years back, I used to work side-by-side with a woman at a certain media outlet who, for the purposes of this narrative, I’ll call Gwen. Gwen was a whip-smart colleague who was a remarkably versatile journalist and also the quintessence of a no-nonsense, common-sense-espousing mom. Despite this, not only did the younger iteration of Gwen spend a formidable amount of time in the nascent New York hardcore scene, but she also dated — for a spell, I gather — Richie Stotts, the guitarist of the Plasmatics. I initially found this hard to reconcile, given the impeccably professional manner in which Gwen comported herself, but when pressed on the subject, she could (and still can) rattle of period-specific minutia like a genuine insider. Gwen is no poser.

As such, I asked Gwen if she might know the location, and without missing a beat, she cited Sunshine Park, a former nudist colony Plasmatics manager/svengali Rod Swenson had evidently been a member of in the mid-70’s. Don’t go looking for Sunshine Park today, though, as it closed in 1983 after neighbors complained and health violations were cited. Some folks just have no sense of fun.

I then did some further snooping around came across a tweet from the … ahem…. American Association of Nude Recreation that linked to this creepy photo below. By 2009, evidently the campground had fallen into a state of neglect and was being reclaimed by nature. Is THIS the very same pool, I wonder? See more pictures of the abandoned Sunshine Park campground here. I have no idea what goes on there — if anything — today.

Here they all were in more hopeful days….

My Mosaic Valentine

Oddly fitting, so close to Valentine’s Day.

A few years back, I happened on some photographs of stalwart proto-shoegazer band My Bloody Valentine taken in New York City around the time of their watershed 1991 album, Loveless. I was quasi-lucky enough to see them on that tour at the Ritz, on a high-decibel triple bill with Dinosaur Jr. and Superchunk that I am convinced took a palpable toll on my hearing. In any case, in one or two of the photos, the band were depicted standing with their backs against a mosaic pattern that was inarguably the work of Jim Power, an East Village fixture whose signature art adorns many corners of the neighborhood to this day. The thing that was so perplexing, however, was that the picture of MBV also featured these strange, mask-like faces that looked so incredibly familiar to me, but I could not place where they might be. In my downtime, I searched far and wide or a wall with those faces on it, but always came up empty.

Eventually, I gave up and lost the pics in question. Life went on.

Last week, someone invoked My Bloody Valentine in one online forum or another, and up popped that very picture again. Here it is now.

Again, those strange background faces jumped out at me. I knew I’d seen them before, but certainly not recently.

Eventually, I figured it out.

The mask-like faces are no longer on that façade, that being on the southern side of the street on St. Marks Place just steps to the west of Avenue A. At the time, that would have been the side of rock’n’roll bar Alcatraz. It would later turn into a sushi bar and is more recently a taco place called Empello al Pastor.

Like I said, the faces are gone (knocked off by a vandal or Jim Power collector fanboy?), but the rest of the mosaic is still intact. You can see the same side of the patterned dish to the left of guitarist Kevin Shield’s head right above my son Oliver’s head below.

Mystery solved.

For the uninitiated, this is My Bloody Valentine....

More about My Bloody Valentine on Flaming Pablum here….

Jobless, Marooned & Loveless

Valentinnitus

All You Need is Loveless

Take It Back to Tumblr

My friend Chung was instigating a conversation on Facebook, earlier today, based around a controversial billboard used to promote the Rolling Stones’ 1974 album, Black and Blue, which featured an image of a woman who’d been tied up and abused. While also comparable to a similarly objectionable billboard the Doors used to promote L.A. Woman (which featured a woman incongruously crucified on a telephone pole), I immediately thought of an old poster I’d spotted promoting a gig by — of all bands — Kraftwerk. I did some quick Googling to find the image in question, but came up with nothing. Then, I remembered that I’d probably put it on Get Back to Work, my ancient Tumblr page.

I started Get Back to Work (or Get Back Vassifer, really) as a complete lark — much like this blog — mostly as a means of aggregating images that appealed to my sensibility. This included album covers, GIFS, flyers, tour posters, promo photos, comics, memes, drawings, weird ads, archival pictures of New York, outtakes, t-shirts, movie stills, foreign movie posters, magazine covers, curious videos, risqué images, sci-fi, monster movies, cool graffiti, interesting book jackets, propaganda posters, Japanese robots, concert shots, ticket stubs, odd postcards, political humor, old New Yorker illustrations, badges, strange animations, unexplained phenomena, prurient doodles, and other bullshit like that, all presented usually without any explanation, in no order and more often than not without any helpful tags.

I occasionally had an agenda. It was a good place to store images, or at least set them to one side for later potential use here on Flaming Pablum. After a while, though, it just became an unwieldy pile of cool stuff collected for no readily apparent reason.

It seems I’ve occasionally added a scant image or two over the past year, but it’s far from a regular stop. But in searching for that Kraftwerk poster (which I eventually found here), I took a long, perilous trip down the rabbit hole. There are some truly great things to be found, if you’ve got the time.

Check it out here.

A Vocation in Location

I used to be a big fan of this blog called Scouting New York, which was run by this film-location scout who’d pinpoint and document famous locations from a wide array of films and point out weird urban anomalies and curious facts. For whatever reason — I believe it’s because he moved to another city — Scouting New York stopped updating in 2015, and I was sad to see it end. Regardless, the site is still up, so I encourage anyone with an interest in that sort of thing to go check it out.

I am happy to report, however, that a (relatively) new obsessively eagle-eyed cinephile has risen to the challenge to pick up where Scouting New York left off. Launched, evidently, in 2016, the straightforwardly titled NYC in Film seeks to accomplish much the same mission, and its attention to slavish detail is encouraging and impressive, not at all unlike the exacting eye for architectural minutia and fine-toothed scrutiny of my pal Bob Egan of PopSpots NYC.

I’d noticed some repeat visits to an old post of mine from 2018 regarding the former site of Disc-O-Mat, a record store I frequented in the very early `80s. Turns out, said post was of some use to NYC in Film, who reference while in the process of divining specific locations from the 1986 thriller, “F/X” staring Aussie Bryan Brown.

I’m late, of course, but I’m glad to welcome NYC in Film into the NYC blogosphere, such as it is — he even takes on my favorite and oft-cited film of all time, “After Hours.”

Hearkening Hagen

Incongruously prompted by an invocation of Diamanda Galas, earlier this week, I recently dug up some old Nina Hagen music for a reappraisal.

My first brush with Nina Hagen came via my grade school chum, Rich, who I’ve spoken about before (notably here). While Rich’s musical recommendations were usually directly on target — it was Rich, after all, who'd first turned me onto the burgeoning downtown hardcore scene, as well as doomy British bands like Theatre of Hate — I simply didn’t understand, much less buy, his assertion that the imaginatively titled Nunsexmonkrock by this crazy East German lady was on the same level of greatness. He gamely tried to force-lend it to me — as was his wont — but I was having none of it. It just didn’t click with me.

Shortly after that, Nina Hagen started appearing incongruously on MTV, albeit only in the form of her video for “New York, New York” from her 1983 album, Fearless (sometimes referred to as Angstlos). If I’m being honest, while I didn’t understand Nina’s music on Nunsexmonkrock, I have to say that I actively hated this new single, which saw Ms. Hagen embracing an arguably more accessible dance-club diva approach. That said, her pointedly mannered vocals and bizarre overall aesthetic weren’t exactly giving the Donna Summers and Alicia Bridges of that world any cause of concern. More akin to willfully off-center artists like Lene Lovich, Grace Jones and her fellow Teuton Klaus Noms, Nina Hagen was still making music for the more adventurous ear, not solely tracks to get your rump shaking. Regardless, I was still not buying it, largely writing her off as a shrill, bug-eyed source of annoyance.

In fact, let’s go there now. Here is Nina performing “New York, New York.”

But while I’d churlishly failed to grasp her appeal, I started exploring the wider world of music, only to discover that Ms. Hagen was great friends and sometime collaborators with certain other artists I’d come to admire, leading me to suspect that I might have been premature in my dismissal of her earlier material. I’m still far from what you could ever call an ardent supporter, but I respect her work more than I ever used to.

I made the connection from Diamanda Galas, meanwhile, from a fairly superficial point. Like Diamanda, Nina Hagen writes and performs music that flaunts convention and with the frequent purpose of making the listener uneasy. Both artists are classically trained and boast operatic voices that are powerful and elastic. Both artists were informed and inspired by the original, parameter-nullifying possibilities of Punk. These are all indisputable assertions, but the thing that linked them for me is that while both individuals seem to go well out of their way to look as disarming and often as flat-out scary as possible, they are both preternaturally beautiful women. Like I said, it’s a shallow, typically hetero-male observation, but there it is.

In any case, in looking for images for this post, I came upon this shot of Nina Hagen on the streets of what looks to me like SoHo here in downtown Manhattan. I want to suggest that this is Broome Street looking west, but I’m not convinced I’m correct. Anyone want to weigh in? 

Click on it to enlarge.

Looking for the Lost Luncheonette

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? 

Have at it, sleuths. 

Back ... Again ... To The Mill

Some of you might remember an entry from 2015, spurred from an original post in 2010, about The Mill at Burlington House, a curious midtown attraction from the 70’s I’d wrongly remembered from my childhood as “Burlington Mills.” It had become one of those intangible memories I was on a quest to find verification of. When I learned of my naming error, I did some feverish googling and found out more about the place, as detailed in that post from 2015.

Well, on a lark, I did some further searching this past weekend and actually found a video of the thing. See that below.

What’s striking about the video is how, well, …. dull the thing seems. I mean, I realize thrills were few and far between in the mid-70s, but I can’t imagine why these kids (or me, at the time for that matter) was so captivated by the thing.

Anyway, ya can’t go home again. But you can now go back to the Mill, thanks to YouTube….

London Acquiescing

Some of you might remember a pair of posts from 2018 wherein I delved into the curious story of Dave Marin, a fellow traveler on the roads of rock ’n’ roll pedantry.

Dave’s singular quest was to rectify a long-held discrepancy between the memory of his first-hand experience witnessing a specific moment at a Clash show at the Palladium on East 14th Street in the comparatively carefree days of 1979 and the documentation of same on the back cover of The Clash’s celebrated third album, London Calling. That singular moment, of course, was the smashing of Paul Simonon’s star-crossed Precision bass guitar, a fleeting moment of rage prefigured by Pennie Smith’s fateful snapping of a photograph of the instant just prior. While that photograph went onto become inarguably one of the most iconic images in rock history, Dave maintained that the archivists in the Clash camp got the date of the show in question wrong on the back cover, and it had become his mission to amend that particular oversight ever since.

Last night, Dave shared some happy news…

Hi Alex. Just to put this to bed, today “The Clash” official Twitter account sent out the following: “20th + 21st Sept 1979 The Palladium NY Take The 5th Tour. Paul Simonon smashed his Fender P Bass on stage in frustration towards the end of the show. Pennie Smith captured the moment and it became London Calling album sleeve, which dated the image on 21st. In fact it was on 20th!” Take care. D

Today, after being on loan to the deeply dubious Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, the remaining pieces of the bass guitar in question are back with Paul Simonon. The Clash officially disbanded in 1986, in the wake of the arguably abortive Cut The Crap album. Lead singer/songwriter Joe Strummer passed away in 2002. The Palladium was razed in 1998, and a NYU dormitory was built in its footprint. Today, the exact spot where Paul took his bass to task is the produce aisle of a Trader Joe’s that I was actually in yesterday afternoon. 

And Dave Marin? Now he can fitfully sleep through the night.

Happily Ever After Hours

In the wake of my last couple of posts on “After Hours" — let alone the many posts I’ve devoted to the film over the last fifteen years — a regular reader who posts under a wide array of names posed the following questions…

What was the coffee shop where Paul and Marcy met? Who was the punk girl who gave Paul the flyer to Mohawk Night? I mean backstory (casting, what she went on to do etc.) Any real deal NYHC people in the Mohawk This Guy! scene? I bet Davey Gunner from Kraut and/or Doug Holland from Kraut and Cro-Mags were extras.

Okay, let’s dive in and see what we can answer…

What was the coffee shop where Paul and Marcy met?

Okay, I have two theories about this, actually. In terms of the storyline, Paul resides on the Upper East Side, although I don’t believe his exact address is ever revealed. The interior of the coffee shop looks somewhat similar to a former restaurant on Lexington Avenue between 77th and 76th street, although I don’t believe it is still there.

This all said, it also resembles another spot on Park Avenue South (just a few blocks to the north of the building wherein Paul’s character works), but — 35 years after the facts — these locations no longer look as they did in 1985. There’s a shot when Marcy is speaking that you can see a large-paned window behind her that reveals some detail of the street running perpendicular to the avenue the coffee shop is on. I’m projecting, but it looks a bit like East 25th street. Again, though, I do not have the concrete answer to this question.

Who was the punk girl who gave Paul the flyer to Mohawk Night?

That being this fetching young lady …

I cannot honestly say I recognize her, although several bona fide punk folks from the NYHC scene do appear in the film, so she might be more than simply an actress.

Any real deal NYHC people in the Mohawk This Guy! scene?

Funny you should ask, as YES, which I went into great detail about on this old post.

I bet Davey Gunner from Kraut and/or Doug Holland from Kraut and Cro-Mags were extras.

I don’t believe either of those gents were, ALTHOUGH the classic A7 t-shirt Doug Holland sports in the video for Kraut’s “All Twisted” does indeed make a quick cameo.

More about "After Hours" on Flaming Pablum:

SoHoliloquoy (7/16/2007)

 Kiki Bridges Revisited (1/16/2010)

 The Sounds of After Hours (2/26/2010)

 Long After ‘After Hours’ (7/18/2012)

 ‘This Dark, Funny, Paranoid New York Summer Movie’ (6/13/2013)

 Terminal Times for the Emerald Pub (6/20/2015)
Mohawk Night at Club Berlin (6/29/2015)

Somewhere "After" the Rainbow (6/16/2017)

After Hours AOC (4/15/2019)

"Ric Handed Me Back the Cheese" (1/08/2020)

Paul is Dead: Who is the Man in Black at the End of "After Hours"? (7/10/2020)

"After Hours" in Avalon: A Tale of Two T-Shirts (7/11/2020)

"After Hours" in Avalon: A Tale of Two T-Shirts

I’m not sure I know a credibly viable way into this post, so I’m just going to write it and worry about that later. But, suffice to say, it’s probably the least consequential/most trivial thing I’ve ever posted here … which is saying something.

I’ve long been obsessed with Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” a film he released in September of 1985 in the immediate wake of Paramount scrapping his longtime dream project, “The Last Temptation of Christ” (an ambitious undertaking he’d later go on to release in 1988). “After Hours” was the furthest thing imaginable from a sweeping Biblical epic — a black comedy documenting the tragicomic travails of a mild-mannered yuppie (played by Griffin Dunne) lured into the bohemian wilderness of the downtown Manhattan of the mid-80’s. Comparatively speaking, it’s a small movie with a relatively niche audience.

If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you know what I mean when I say I’ve obsessed over this film. I’d devoted posts to its locations, its score and even minor members of its cast. As a result, I used to think I knew everything there is to know about the film, but as yesterday’s post demonstrated, this is clearly not the case.

I originally started this post back in mid-May. I started writing it with the working title, “Unanswerable Questions About a Certain Scene.” Well, I regret to say that in the ensuing weeks, I’ve all but forgotten what most of those allegedly “unanswerable” questions were, but I do remember one major observation, and it concerns the scene below. Bear in mind that this has more to do with my original perceptions and preconceptions.

In this scene, we see the beleaguered Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne’s protagonist) entering the Terminal Bar on the far western end of Spring Street in SoHo during a midsummer downpour. In actuality, the Terminal Bar did not exist. At the time — and for several years after “After Hours” was filmed -- this location was a bar called The Emerald Pub, although don’t go looking to have a pint there these days. The Emerald Pub closed in 2015 and the space has been dormant ever since. In any event, Paul repairs to the Terminal Bar to get out of the rain and to try to make sense of the chaos of the evening. Upon entering, he encounters cocktail waitress Julie (one of four pivotal blonde sirens through the film) and bartender Tom. While the scene plays out, a young, hip couple dances in the background to “You’re Mine,” a classic number by doo-wop duo Robert & Johnny.

Again, the rest of this is just about my silly projections, and has precious little to do with the film’s actual content.

In any case, for the longest time, I was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that the male half of that young, hip dancing couple was wearing a black, sleeveless t-shirt emblazoned with the back-cover design of Avalon by Roxy Music. Being that Avalon came out in 1982, three years before “After Hours” was released, it fit the chronology. Moreover, a cool, black sleeveless Roxy Music t-shirt seemed like just the thing a hip SoHo scenester might’ve worn while dancing in a downtown bar in the small hours of a summer night. In the event that you’re unfamiliar, the back cover of Avalon — designed by Peter Saville, who also did the iconic sleeves for both Unknown Pleasures and Closer by Joy Division— features some sort of crimson stone embedded in a gold, medieval amulet. Here it is now…

Cool, right? It’s also worth mentioning that Avalon is an amazing record. While not as adventurous as Roxy Music’s first few albums, it marked the high point of the band’s more sophisticated pop era and sadly served as their swan song. During my college years, it was an album that could be found in virtually every dorm room on campus and, like Diamond Life by Sade, its airing within same was sonic shorthand for “don’t come knocking.” Chances are, if you came home to hear your roommate playing Avalon, there was a good chance he or she was doing some very intimate entertaining sans pants.

Anyway, ever since spotting it in “After Hours,” I’d started keeping my eyes out for it, as it seemed like it would be a cool artifact to own, given both its association with my favorite film and my affinity for the album in question.

But I was never able to find it, which always frustrated me.

Fast forward to stumbling on the scene above in YouTube, I was suddenly able to get a much closer look at the garment in question, equipped with the pause button. In doing so, I managed to capture the screen grab below.

Suffice to say, that is very much not the back cover of Avalon. I’d been mistaken all these years. Under closer scrutiny, I figured it out and  Googled on a hunch what the actual t-shirt was and immediately struck oil. The dancing hipster in the Terminal Bar is wearing this….

In case you’re unfamiliar, it’s a Sha Na Na shirt. Sha Na Na was (and still is?) a doo-wop revival group who had their own television show back in the late `70s. They even played at friggin' Woodstock.

While not nearly as cool as a Roxy Music shirt, it actually makes way more sense as something a guy voluntarily dancing to a door-wop tune by Robert & Johnny would wear.

So, yeah, end of story. I was wrong about that.

This, incidentally, is Roxy Music...