Flaming Pablum

Fran & Charly's Art Collision in Cortlandt Alley

Okay, strap in, `cos this is really confusing one, and I’m bound to get something wrong, so please bear with me.

I covered a lot of this in this recent post, but at some point in about 2019, a friend of mine sent me a music video from an Argentinian artist named Charly Garcia. My friend rightly figured I’d be interested in it, as it featured several shots of my beloved downtown Manhattan circa 1989. In the course of writing about that, however, I realized that I had remembered this guy Charly Garcia because of an album he’d put out some years earlier called Modern Clix. I wasn’t familiar with the music on that record, but had been initially struck by the title and the sleeve. The cover art was significant as it featured a shot of Charly sitting beneath some familiar street art (specifically one of Richard Hambleton’s “shadow men,” which I’d addressed here), but more because of the legend “MODERN CLIX” that was scrawled in spray paint above his head. Whether Charly knew it or not, at the time, that was the name of a local punk band led by one Fran Powers.

Fran Powers was a face on the early New York Hardcore scene, given his membership in bands like Ultra Violence, Whole Wide World and, once again, Modern Clix (not actually a hardcore band, but more of a punk/ska/reggae/funk hybrid – you can hear some of their music here). I’d first spied Fran’s face via the photographs of Brooke Smith (who I just interviewed) and made the connection between Modern Clix and this cryptic graffiti I used to spy all over downtown – this warrior figure holding a spear. Shortly after that, I attended a party thrown by SoHo Memory Project’s Yukie Ohta in SoHo (duh!) and ended up running right into Fran Powers (I mean literally running into -- he was boarding an elevator I was exiting) and we started chatting. Shortly after that, I discovered he’d made a crazy cameo in my favorite movie of all time, Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” so I reached back out to him to interview him about that, and we became friends from that point on.

Again, I’ve already covered all this stuff a bunch of time, most notably here when I stumbled across some photographs that revealed the exact location of the Hambleton and Modern Clix graffiti that ended up on Charly Garcia’s album cover. As reported in that post, the spot was on the southwest corner of Walker Street at Cortlandt Alley. The shot up at the top is me at that same corner but, just as a refresher, here’s the cover photo from the original sleeve in question:

Alright, so I put up that post in April, and pretty much thought, “well, that’s that, right?”

Wrong.

Two things then happened.

The first was a note from a gentleman named Iñaki Rojas. Iñaki is a writer from Mendoza, Argentina who was putting a book together about the backstory of the Charly Garcia/Fran Powers/Richard Hambleton confluence that manifested itself as Garcia’s Modern Clix album. What I’d never quite realized, of course, was that Charly Garcia is not just “some Argentine musician” as I’d described him but evidently, like, practically the Latin American David Bowie -- an artist with profound reach and influence around that region of the world. His acolytes are legion. I mean, we’re such provincial snobs here in the United States that just because an artist doesn’t sing in English, we can’t be bothered to investigate their music, but I feel completely duty-bound to now go procure myself a copy of Garcia’s iconic Modern Clix album and do my due diligence.

The second thing to happen, tragically, was the untimely death of Fran Powers that following June. As I expressed in my farewell post to the man, there was so much more I’d have loved to discuss with him, but we simply never had the opportunity. As another random tendril of connection, Fran also played in a short-lived band with former Even Worse vocalist and fellow Flaming Pablum Interview survivor, RB Korbet.

Anyway, over the course of several emails, Iñaki quizzed me on some of the minutia I’d discussed in my previous posts on the subject and I shared some pictures of the location as it appears today (that’s where the shot at the top of this post comes from). Ever since then, he’s been working away on this master project, and has been gradually posting a series of YouTube videos that go into great, crazy, obsessive depth about the whole saga.

If you’re at all curious, you can check them out below. If, like myself, you don’t speak the language, simply click on the setting icon on the lower bar and select the English subtitles option.

Part One...

Part Two....

Look forward to Parts Three, Four and Five coming soon!

 

Panic on Pier 25: Revisiting “All That I Wanted” by Belfefore

Never mind fuckin’ “Thriller,” the greatest music video of all time is 1984’s “All That I Wanted” by Belfegore, and directed by bugfuck-insane Polish cinematographer, Zbigniew Rybczynski.

Don’t believe me? Watch the below and get ready to admit you were fatuously mistaken.

I’ve spoken about this clip before, but someone uploaded the crisper, sharper iteration of the video onto YouTube a few days ago, so I felt compelled to share.

The video was filmed on Pier 25, across the West Side Highway from N. Moore Street in TriBeCa. Today it looks like this…

Back in 2013, I had my kids try to replicate the video. Here’s them doing that now.

Belfegore, meanwhile, didn’t last. Despite being produced by noted Krautrock pioneer and Killing Joke producer Conny Plank, their self-titled LP on Elektra was also their last. I believe the lead singer later became a physical therapist.

Where Strode the Warriors?

Over on Facebook, my friend and fellow NYHC acolyte Lou posted a shot from a deleted scene from "The Warriors." Lou writes

A scene that never made it into the movie or as a deleted scene. The Warriors walking through The Savage Huns territory. It was filmed in an alley in Soho.

Here's that photo now....

Now, I like to think I'm fairly familiar with the topography of lower Manhattan, at this point, but I can't think of an alley in SoHo that matches this terrain. It's certainly not Cortlandt Alley off of Canal. 

I postulated that this might be St. John's Lane, an alley that extends between Laight Street and Beach Street at the mouth of Tribeca, just steps to the west of Sixth Avenue. There's been a lot of development since 1979, but here's that strip now...

\

What do we think? Weigh-in, Boppers. 

 

Back to The Blue Willow

I’ve been very lucky, over the years, to have found people for whom my weird little posts resonate. I’m always skeptical that some trivial factoid that I’m all hot and bothered about will actually connect with a reader that shares that particular enthusiasm, but every now and then, it happens. I’m also continually amazed that some items that I just blithely mention in passing get latched onto and widely circulated. Which stories find their audience and why are not an exact sciences, by any stretch.

In any case, this entry is something of a minuscule follow-up to one of those stories I was somewhat inexplicably all fired up about upon first posting it. Technically, all it’s really about is a room in a long-vanished restaurant where a photograph was taken, but something about the story has always continued to haunt me. Let’s see if I can capably encapsulate it.

Back in 2013, I put up a post titled “Searching for the Blue Willow.” The Blue Willow, by way of explanation was an eatery on the northeast corner of Broadway and Bleecker Street that was allegedly open between October of 1983 and some point in 1990. I never dined in that establishment, I’m sad to say, but it was notable to me in that I’d gleaned that one of its rear chambers had served as the location for the photograph that graced the cover of one of my favorite albums of all time, that being Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves by Gavin Friday and The Man Seezer. Here’s that cover now.

Cool, right?

Exuding a beguiling air of what I called “elegant decrepitude” in that first post, the sleeve of Each Man Kills… features Gavin Friday, former singer in Dublin’s macabre post-punk combo, the Virgin Prunes, leaning with louche aplomb against the piano of musical co-conspirator Maurice Seezer, depicted with his back to the viewer as he presumably plays. Beneath a stylishly distressed wall of stripped wallpaper, a nude couple embraces next to a glowing jukebox. Snapped by renowned Dutch rock photographer Anton Corbijn, the image says absolutely nothing about the era in which it was captured. It’s a mysterious picture that perfectly matches the sound, sentiment and sensibility of the album it sheathes. You’d never know that, at the time this photo was taken, the pop charts were caked with idiotic offal like “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred and “Gonna Make You Sweat” by C+C Music Factory, but I digress.

I have no idea whose idea it was to shoot the cover and accompanying promo images and single sleeves in the Blue Willow, but I can only imagine Gavin had happened upon it and been enchanted by its noirish, old-world atmosphere. Or maybe it was just a lucky fluke. Regardless, when I learned the name and the location of the restaurant (regrettably over a decade and a half after it closed its doors), I was immediately compelled, as detailed in that first post, to check out what was in that space in 2013.

At the time, of course, it was a douchey menswear emporium called Atrium who leant out its rear space — the very chamber where the the sleeve of Each Man Kills… was taken — to a pricey sneaker concern called, inexplicably, KITH. As you’ll see back on that first post, only traces of the original details of Corbijn’s cover could still be seen, notably the flooring and some of the marble trim that was depicted in some of the other photos from the shoot.

A couple of years after that, I posted a quick follow up to report that even those remaining elements were, by that point, covered up.

That was pretty much that. I remember posting the original piece on a discussion board about Gavin Friday and the Virgin Prunes. Already converted to the cause, so to speak, that community was duly intrigued and appreciative, but the layperson probably doesn’t care too much. But I remained so intrigued by the Blue Willow and always wanted to see more.

The only problem was…. there wasn’t much out there about it. I forget where I’d found it, but I did have an image of a matchbook from the place, as well as a fleeting mention of the eatery taken from a 1984 article in the Times about its then-slow-gentrifying neighborhood. Here’s the crucial mention from that piece.

'Back then, Lower Broadway was a bankrupt neighborhood with bums lying around in doorways,'' said Martin Fine. Mr Fine, a lawyer, owns the four-month-old Blue Willow restaurant at 644 Broadway at the corner of Bleecker Street. All the food in his restaurant is cooked without salt. Mr. Fine also owns the building it occupies, a former bank with handsome moldings and chandeliers. ''A few of us bought buildings here because we knew that someday the area would be hot,'' Mr. Fine said.

Where is Martin Fine today, one wonders.

In any case, beyond the images on and associated with Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves and that matchbook, I had no other visual ephemera to pair with the place.

Until today.

For no readily apparent reason, I was doing some random Googling, as I’m wont to do, and thoughtlessly entered the words “Blue Willow” and “Bleecker.” While the same images I’d posted on my blog about the Gavin Friday album came right up, a link to the Poster Museum also came up with a “vintage poster” of the place that practically blew a new part in my hair. Here’s the prefacing text.

"644 Broadway Corner Bleecker Street. New York, New York. Open Late."

Original vintage poster for a Chinese restaurant, the Blue Willow. The poster illustration features a bustling dining room, a waitress incoming with a majestic peacock on a platter—not to be eaten, I hope!

Artist: Kristen Johnson

Year: c. 1975

Condition: Fair, please note some small tears along the poster's perimeter. The appearance of tears can be significantly improved by having the poster linen-backed.

Here’s the image now….

Anyone notice the discrepancy?

Clearly, this is the very same Blue Willow, given the correlating address, but the Poster Museum believes this artifact dates back “circa 1975,” when, by the fleeting accounts I’ve tracked down, including the afore-cited New York Times piece, the restaurant didn’t open until 1983.

Like I said, this probably means so much less to most folks than it means to me, but the fact that since 2013, I’ve been able to discern that the Blue Willow boasted a kind of Belle Epoque vibe, served Chinese food and prepared its fare without any salt helps complete the picture.

Here in 2022, I can report that Atrium has since closed and vacated the premises at 644 Broadway. Noxious footwear concern KITH, meanwhile, decamped and moved a block to the east, taking over the old “Peace Pentagon” building that used to house Paper Tiger TV and Marty’s Cool Stuff.

Gavin Friday went onto release on a few more truly excellent albums before focussing predominantly on soundtrack work. His last proper solo album was 2011’s Catholic.

That ground-floor space at 644 has now been vacant, dormant and covered up since well prior to the pandemic. I am unrealistically hoping that whatever venture next occupies that space sees fit to restore some of the hidden trappings first captured on the sleeve of Each Man Kills…, but with my luck, its next iteration will be a AT&T cell phone outlet.

Some sonic context...

Wolfman Flees Park: A Dr. Feelgood Mystery Update

Every now and again, someone will latch onto an old post of mine and share it on social media. It’s rare that I’m able to track down how the post is being framed or re-purposed, but I’m also curious as to which posts garner such second winds. I noticed one such post get a re-discovery boost today, and felt compelled to bring proceedings up to speed.

Regular readers might remember an entry I posted here back in 2015 about an arguably obscure British band from the early `70s called Dr. Feelgood (not to be confused with the Motley Crue album of the same name). In a nutshell, Dr. Feelgood was a “pub rock” band who played a taut, hardscrabble brand of R&B (and by that I mean guitar-based rhythm and blues, not schmaltzy loverman ballads) in an era when the pervading tastes were more inclined towards mellow, Laurel Canyon-styled singer/songwriters and the more indulgent aspects of shaggy prog rock. They were loud, bawdy and aggressive and played songs that were comparatively short, sharp and shocking. Basically, Dr. Feelgood were out-of-step punks before punk was punk.

In any case, this particular post of mine concentrated on a tiny aspect of a documentary made about them by filmmaker Julien Temple called “Oil City Confidential.” In one fleeting seqeunce therein, Temple divulges that former lead singer Lee Brilleaux (above) had passed away in 1994 from cancer. While recounting same, Temple showed strangely incongruous footage of a tiny memorial plaque in Brilleaux’s honor on a park bench in my own Manhattan’s West Village. Acting on a hunch, I tracked down the actual bench and plaque, as documented in that post, in Jackson Square. On the surface, it made absolutely zero sense to have a memorial plaque to Lee Brilleaux in the West Village of Manhattan, given that the fabled frontman never lived on these shores, nor had any tangible connection to New York City.

Towards the end of that post, meanwhile, I disclosed that a compatriot of mine had solved the riddle, sharing that a nearby art gallery, White Columns, had done a whole installation about Dr. Feelgood, one aspect of which was affixng Lee’s small plaque to a bench in Jackson Square. The link I posted in that orignal entry no longer goes to the explainer page, but I found another page with the full story (and pictures) still available here. Apparently, the plaque was put up at some point in 2005, a decade before I discovered it through Julien Temple’s film.

Noting that my post was being re-circulated, however, I thought it was prudent, once again, to bring things up to date. If you go looking for Lee Brilleaux’s memorial plaque here in 2022, I am sad to relay that you will not find it. For whatever reason, what started off as the only memorial park-bench plaque in Jackson Square has been replaced by a slew of new ones commemorating since-deceased figures who, more than likely, actually have some genuine connection to the park, unlike dear, departed Lee. That makes sense, of course, but I miss the strange little anomaly of that furtive tribute.

Meanwhile, for those curious, here’s some great footage of Dr. Feelgood in action, taken from a French television program from 1976 called “Beau Fixe Sur Pithiviers.” The band shows up in a vintage blue convertible in the beginning, then plug in and rock your face off starting at around 01:59.

Where’s The Fire, Iggy?

Someone posted the photo below on Facebook, and it immediately got the wheels a-turning.

This is, of course, the greatest living American, Iggy Pop, louchely perched aside the vehicle of New York’s Bravest. Ig’s looking comparatively young, here, so I’m going to guess this was taken at some point in the early `80s. In any case, when I spied the terraced building on the left-hand side of the photo, I thought of the giant, white-bricked building on the corner of East 9th Street and Third Avenue (where Joey Ramone used to live), which would put Iggy on the northeast corner of St. Marks and Third Avenue, a locale he would have lived relatively close to in that era (for certain spells, Iggy had an apartment on Mercer Street, and then later in the Christadora House on Avenue B). Here’s the corner of St. Marks and Third, more or less, today….

Sure, they look kinda similar, but several things don’t quite add up to make this a lock.

The firetruck Mr. Pop is leaning against is emblazoned with (as far as we can surmise) the legend FDNY 16. According to some quick Googling, the firehouse for FDNY Engline 16/Ladder 7 is on East 29th Street. That’s neither here nor there, really, but what would a firetruck from East 29th Street be doing on St. Marks Place?

There’s a bit of signage at the top of the photo for a concern called “Ernest Lo Nano Interiors.” Further Googling reveals that said establishment was perched at 201 East 67th Street.

Et voia….

It’s partially obscured by trees, but I think this is the corner, although that does not explain why a firetruck from 29th Street (if that’s even accurate) was there, much less why the great Iggy Pop was in that neighborhood of the comparatively sleepy Upper East Sid.

That’s as far as I got.

Back to University Place: Fancy a Pint at Smith's?

The shot above was taken by one Richard Greene in about 1974. It was snapped on my own strip, University Place, just above East 13th Street. Were you to stand in this same spot today, you would essentially be standing in front of the newly-truncated Basics Plus hardware store. The southeast corner, until recently a juice bar, is currently occupied by a new deli.

In 1974, however, that corner was evidently held by Smith's Bar. Personally speaking, I don't remember a Smith's Bar on that particular corner, but I would have been very young, at the time. When I first moved into the neighborhood in the `90s, that space was occupied by a noodle restaurant. As described in this post from 2012, that venture suffered a fire and was then taken over by a Vietnamese restaurant. After that it became a sprawling, two-level hardware store, Basics Plus, with its own corner juice bar. That closed after several years, and the space was divided up again. A new, smaller and markedly less fabulous Basics Plus opened, and that afore-cited new deli took the corner space. 

In 2022, there aren't nearly as many bars along University Place as there used to be. Obviously, the Cedar Tavern is long gone. Jazz-bar Bradley's morphed into the douchey Reservoir which, despite rumors, never left. Our local, the Knickerbocker, is still going, but has kind of lost a bit of its luster, if I'm being honest. I would love to have Smith's Bar back, but I'm not holding my breath. That establishment clearly belongs to another era. 

On that post from 2012, a reader named Mykola shared thoughts about the bar...

On that corner in the late 1960s was Smith's bar, which used to be all over the city. A great place that served you beer or booze but also had a kitchen making corned beef sandwiches, knishes etc. I used to go there for lunch very often when I worked at Grove Press on 11th Street and University. Barney Rosset, the owner of Grove, who had recently passed away, always used to pop in for a pick-me-up drink. Ah, those were the days...

Sounds pretty great, right? Oh well. 

Funnily enough, my next-door neighbor actually gave me a Smith's Bar t-shirt (I have doubts about its legitimacy) several years ago. At that time, I only knew about the Smith's Bar on 8th Avenue in Hell's Kitchen. My friend Rob D. lived in that neighborhood, and we were always taken by its signature neon signage and its refreshingly unpretentious vibe. I have yet to find any other photos of this University Place iteration, but I'd be super curious to see more depictions of it. 

Who Made the Scene at By Any Means Green?

This will matter to an exceptionally small few of you, but it’s been bugging me, so perhaps it’ll intrigue you as well.

Regular readers might remember an entry I posted back in the fall of 2020 about By Any Means Green, which was a benefit show held at CBGB in the summer of, I think, 1991. I’d stumbled across a poster of it on instagram, and later found a better scan of it on a Jon Spencer fan site. Here it is now…

This artwork, as mentioned in that first post, is the handiwork of “Dirty” Danny Hellman, an illustrator who used to do amazing work for outlets like New York Press and Al Goldstein’s Screw, back in the day. Like I said, Hellman had also drawn an amazing illustration of Cop Shoot Cop and Iggy Pop in 1993 that I bought off of him several years back. To see Hellman reunited with Cop Shoot Cop again warmed my heart, and I asserted that if anyone still had a copy of this poster, I’d pay handsomely for it.

I actually reached out to Danny himself about it, but he conceded that even he didn’t have a copy of it, remarking instead about how he hates having to draw horses. Oh well.

I pretty much figured that was that until spotting a variation of the poster above last week. Beyond being seemingly divorced from Hellman’s illlustration, the details of the gig are different on this bill, finding the mighty Lunachicks occupying the top billing instead of Cop Shoot Cop.

Check it out below, and click on it to enlarge…

Now being that the benefit gig in question -- organized by Marguerite Van Cook and held on behalf of the Park Rights Council to “save Tompkins Square Park” -- transpired a whopping three decades ago this July, information on who played and how it all went down is all a bit hard to track down. But in doing some further creative Googling, I happened on this page, featuring a third flyer advertising the same gig. Once again, click on it to enlarge...

Heightening the mystery further, this fetching flyer –- drawn by John Terhorst, based on an original illustration by James Romweber, husband of event-organizer Marguerite Van Cook, and father of Crosby Romweber, the plucky tyke pictured on the sleeve of Cop Shoot Cop’s 1992 album, Ask Questions Later -- puts the colorfully named Reverb Motherfuckers in the top spot, despite citing C$C at the bottom. The Lunachicks get nary a mention.

So, I’m putting it out there – who went to this gig? Did you? What’s the story? Who officially ended up headlining By Any Means Green?

Today, meanwhile, whether effectively saved or not, Tompkins Square Park is still there, thirty years later. Cop Shoot Cop broke up circa 1995, although the resultant acrimony is largely water under the bridge, at this stage. The Lunachicks reformed quite recently, albeit without guitarist Sindi Benezra (pictured above). CBGB closed for good in 2006.

Back Again to Wendy's Wall

This is not a consequential one, but what the Hell?

Longtime readers – again, if they exist – might remember a few posts last year wherein a serendipitously unearthed a photograph of something I’d long been searching for, that being a depiction and exact location of a graffiti mural of The Plasmatics that I’d seen back in the early `80s from behind the window of a school bus traveling south in Spanish Harlem.

As first invoked here, then brought to fruition here. the wall in question ended up being the eastern-facing façade of a plot of real estate on East 106th & Park Avenue dubbed “The Graffiti Hall of Fame.” After some diligent Googling, I’d managed to pretty much divine the latitude and longitude of the spot and even found a representation of the (presumably) long-one bit of artwork.

Shortly after that, as documented on this follow-up post, I picked up a fetching coffee-table book about the Graffiti Hall of Fame and came across a better photograph of the wall and artwork in question. I reached out to the photographer in question – that being one Martha Cooper – and inquired about possibly purchasing a print of the photograph. Alas, the figure her handler quoted for same was a bit steep, so I didn’t pursue it. Oh well.

In any case, in the wake of that, I did indeed go up to re-check out the spot. As expected, the rendering of the Plasmatics logo (alongside a cartoony depiction of Wendy O. Williams brandishing a signature chainsaw next to Richie Stotts’ signature Flying V guitar, bisected and spurting blood) had long-since been painted over. I snapped some pics, but never got around to posting them here.

Over this past weekend, however, my son, Oliver, and I went back up to that neck of the woods, specifically for the purposes of checking out the Museum of the City of New York’s excellent “New York, New Music” exhibit (which is still there through September, incidentally). On the way, we got off the 6 train at 96th and Lex and walked up to Park Avenue and down the hill of that very tributary up to East 106th.

Here’s that same wall here in 2022. That's me in front, looking like I just spotted something unspeakable happening just off-camera. 

And this, once again, was the Plasmatics…

Astor Place 1983

A photographer named Peter Bennett captured the shot below in 1983, presumably from within (or on top?) of 770 Broadway (formerly Wannamaker's and later K-Mart, and allegedly soon-to-be Wegman's). I spotted it on Facebook, and it stopped me dead in my tracks, as they say.

Here we're looking east over Astor Place and its surrounding, East Village environs. This was obviously taken well before the Cooper Union dormitory was erected in 1992, before the comparatively squat NYU building on the left was razed to accommodate the giant Death Star/Rubik's Cube building went up, before the shampoo bottle condo tower was built in the southernly parking lot, before the corner of St. Marks & Third was razed and before the Gringo mural was painted over. 

This is the Astor Place I fell in love with. Click on it to enlarge. For more of Bennett's work, but sure to check out his website.