I’m always amazed when someone writes in about something I posted eons ago. I mean, I am still routinely fielding comments about the whole Radiohead/Chuck Kolsterman thing (a story that will seemingly never go away), but when someone zeroes in on something a little more fleeting, I always get a tiny jolt of validation.
Case in point: In 2013, I posted a trioofentries speculating on the origins of a specific pair of stenciled depictions of an artist that were formerly spray-painted virtually all over SoHo. The original featured the head of an Asian man with spiky hair, framed by the legend, “There’s a New Kid Town.” In due course, meanwhile, someone started spray-painting a morbid parody of that, featuring a replication of the head, but with smoking gun next to it under the unfortunate declaration, “End the Joke!”
I did eventually track down photographic evidence of each, but never really got the whole backstory. Eleven years later, meanwhile, I just fielded a note from a reader named Uli, who is a – wait for it – “ stencil graffiti researcher.” In response to those two posts, Uli wrote:
"I got some news for you. Did you find the artist yet? I found a good photo where you can read the slogan next to the portrait: “There's a new kid in Town.”
He then linked to a frankly remarkable trove of street-art photographs, which you can see here, saying:
“Those photos were shot by late stencil Polish artist Tomaz Sikorski on his visits in NYC in the mid 1980s. Here is the one. I think you did not mention that yet. Also interesting: In a French book, “Pochoir a la Une,” Paris 1986 on page 99. There is an illustration of that very stencil. Another photo of the suicide parody of it is here, and a nearly untouched version of the suicide version is in David Robinson's book SoHo Walls from 1990 on page 72.”
So, there’s a little more information about those stencils. Below are just a couple of shots from Sikorski’s amazing street-art page, though. Check them out!
The shot captured above is almost undoubtedly the work of the late Fran Powers of Modern Clix. The figure with the oddly pointed head was his de facto insignia, as can seen on this post.
I couldn't begin to tell you with the stoop above is (somewhere in the East Village, I'm assuming), but it's the same stairs that served as the location for this MTV News spot on the great Lydia Lunch.
I've shared several of these before, but herewith a clutch of photos of mine of the East Village and Lower East Side in the mid-to-late `90s and early 2000's.
Patient longtime readers might remember a short series of entries I posted starting in 2015 wherein I was trying to divine the precise location of a photograph by storied Dutch shutterbug Anton Corbijn of one of my favorite bands, Gang of Four. That’s the photo in question above.
I had a few theories in mind, most of them placing Messrs. King, Allen, Gill and Burnham in the East Village/Alphabet City area, but none of them really synched up. There was always one or two details that failed to match – like the placement of a particular window or the direction of a set of fire-escape stairs. I eventually figured I’d never figure it out and gave up in early 2016.
Eight years later, I have found my answer.
While scrolling through the photos of the Facebook page, Dirty Old 1970’s New York City, I stumbled upon the photo below by one Robert Mulero.
Everything matches up, including the ground-floor canopy and the tell-tale “BAR” sign.
According to Mr. Mulera, this location puts the original line-up of Gang of Four much further south than I’d posited.
The location depicted is South Street at Peck Slip.
Go figure.
Here, meanwhile, is Gang of Four playing at Hurrah on the Upper West Side in 1980.
Over the weekend, I took a stroll down to Fulton and Water Streets, i.e. the Seaport, to check out an outdoor retrospective entitled “Punk’s Not Dead,” featuring several iconic (and some not-so-iconic) photographs of all things punk by fabled shutterbugs like Roberta Bayley, Godlis, Bob Gruen, Ebet Roberts and a few others. Honestly speaking, most of the images in question are widely celebrated and circulated, so I wasn’t really expecting to see anything I’d never seen before, but several of them were blown up to maximum size, so I wanted to check that out. Also, it was a lovely, early summer day wherein I had nothing to do, so, it was a fun excursion.
In any case, after snapping a few pics of my own (and asking a Polish tourist to capture a shot of me standing in front of Godlis’ famous portrait of Joey Ramone on St. Marks Place), I ambled around the seaport and then eventually walked back home to Greenwich Village.
When I was going over my pictures back at home, however, I started to examine a legendary photograph that I’d never really studied that closely before, and I suddenly noticed a detail I’d never spied. But now, I have a suspicion, and I can’t seem to be able to solve it.
Despite being named after the arguably preeminent flash point of all things Punk Rock, the 1976 compilation album, Max’s Kansas City, was rife with significant omission. That same year, that storied club’s biggest rival, CBGB, also put out its own compilation record that also largely dropped the ball, in that very same respect. While both LP’s remain great, period-specific documents of the gestating New York City punk scene of the mid-70’s, both records are almost more notable for who they failed to include (like, say, the Ramones and Blondie) than for the class of largely lesser celebrated acts (like, say, the Tuff Darts and The Fast) who made the cut.
On the strength of Wayne (now Jayne) County’s homage to the premier punk club of New York City, I picked up a used copy of the vinyl LP of Max’s Kansas City in, somewhat ironically, Columbus, Ohio, at a shop on High Street called, inexplicably, Magnolia Thunderpussy, during my sophomore year of college. Truthfully, while I liked that song, Suicide’s “Rocket USA" and Pere Ubu’s original recording of “Final Solution” (before owning this LP, the only version I’d ever heard was Peter Murphy’s cover), the rest of the Max’s album kinda failed to excite my imagination. A passing glance at Bob Gruen’s class photo on the cover depicted a gaggle of individuals who didn’t so much resemble punky iconoclasts as shaggy haired, denim-bedecked refugees from the staid, beige decade they were supposedly renouncing. But, y’know, I was young and stupid. I filed the LP away and spun the tracks I liked, from time to time, but rarely gave it further thought … until this past Saturday.
Blown up to about seven feet tall (see pic at the top of this post), the details of Gruen’s portrait really popped, and I captured a few shots accordingly. Strangely enough, while it’s easy to pick out Jayne County because of her massive red hair, the Suicide guys are harder to spot, tucked discreetly in the back, in front of Max’s ground-floor storefront window. Paul Zone of the Fast also cuts a distinctive profile by the hydrant, with his long black locks and garish sunglasses (atop his head), not to mention his self-promoting t-shirt. But the rest of the gathered scenesters seem to blend together in a manner that’s hard to identify.
But as I scanned the picture, for the first time looked at the couple depicted sitting on the curb. Again, I’d never scrutinized this photo this closely, prior to this, but now maximized in sharper detail, the angles and contours of the face the gent on the left suddenly struck me.
Is that Jim Carroll?
Certainly, looks like him, right?
A certifiable regular at Max’s Kansas City, as well documented in both his writings and on his amazing spoken-word album, Praying Mantis, it would not at all be surprising or uncommon to expect Jim Carroll to be hanging out with the Max’s crew. While Carroll wouldn’t release his debut LP with the Jim Carroll Band, Catholic Boy until four years after the release of the Max’s Kansas City album, he would have already made a name for himself as a budding writer, poet and perennial cool cat.
Unable to find any credible who’s-who guide to Gruen’s photograph (neither on Gruen’s own website nor the Morrison Hotel Gallery site, who currently offer prints of the work), I did some inventive Googling, but came up empty. I then remembered a book I’d prized off the TIME Magazine discard pile back during my days at the news desk, that being Yvonne Sewalll-Ruskin's (Max’s proprietor Mickey’s widow) beefy coffee-table book, “High on Rebellion,” which documented the club with over 200 photos. Unable to put my hand to it, I suddenly remembered that I’d parted with the book in a bag bound for Goodwill about two months ago, and cussed in exasperation.
I even found another shot from the same session, but it doesn't really shed more light...
My copy of the old LP currently resides in a flight case in my mother’s all-too-flood-friendly basement out on Quogue, but I don’t remember a breakdown of who’s who on the cover included in the LP anyway. In 2017, meanwhile, a concern called Jungle Records re-released Max’s Kansas City as a deluxe, two CD/LP set, re-titling it Max’s Kansas City: 1976 & Beyond, now including recordings from the folks they should have had the first time around like Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, Johnny Thunders and Sid Vicious. If they included more information about the cover photo on that release, however, I’m still shit out of luck, as it’s already out of print.
As a going concern, Max's Kansas City itself on 213 Park Avenue South closed for good in 1981. In more recent years, it was a deli called Bread & Butter (as I captured in 2013, with my kids standing in for the punks), and later as a concern called Fraiche Maxx, but that, too, has closed.
Jim Carroll tragically left us in 2009. Photographer Bob Gruen is still around. Next time I spot him on the street (which does happen), I'm going to ask him, unless, of course, YOU know?
Is that Jim Carroll sitting on the curb? ADDENDUM: FIND OUT THE ANSWER HERE.
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.
Reverent jazzbos will doubtlessly know what I’m talking about, but in 1958, a storied photographer named Art Kane assembled 57 jazz musicians – including legendary players like Gene Krupa, Count Basie, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Dizzee Gillesie, Sonny Rollins, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus and a whole lot more -- to pose on and around the stoop of 17 East 126th Street for a centerfold spread in Esquire Magazine. The resultant photograph was titled “A Great Day in Harlem” and is deservedly considered an iconic artifact of jazz’s rich history. See it here.
Now, I can’t believe that legendary photograph wasn’t fully on the minds of organizer Katherine Ludwig and photographer Dub Rogers when they assembled this aggregation of East Village noise-rock practitioners for a periodical called NY Talk in March of 1985. Venerable SWANS guitarist Norman Westberg shared it on his Facebook page, and it kinda blew my mind. That's it at the top of this post. Click on it to enlarge.
Convened in the La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez Community Garden on East 9th Street between Avenues B and C, here are gathered members of Sonic Youth, Rat at Rat R, Steppin Razor, In The Vines, the Blowtorch Boys, Live Skull, Carbon, Details at 11, 3 Teens Kill 4, SWANS, and Missing Foundation (referred to here as “The Peter Missing Foundation”).
I love the tag line: Nothing homogenous here – no formula, no idols, no rules to break or follow. Their association is by location.
I have to confess that while I would have been a high school senior at the time of this photograph, I have absolutely zero recollection of ever seeing a copy of NY Talk. I’m curious to check it out, but back issues go for princely sums on eBay.
Most of these folks left the Lower East Side years ago, but, more recently, the terraced steps those musicians were pictured on looks like this….
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.
That’s Wendy O. Williams above, standing on top of a car and about to bring a sledgehammer down on an unsuspecting televisions set. This is just a screen-captured from the video embedded on this old post. The band were out front of a Sam Goody’s on East 42nd Street, just steps off Second Avenue around what some now desperately call “Pix Plaza,” doing a promotional stunt for the release of 1980’s New Hope for The Wretched
I stumbled on the photo below, meanwhile, presumably taken circa their follow-up album, 1981’s Beyond the Valley of 1984. I’m making that assumption given Ms. Williams’ tonsorial presentation -- a brunette mohawk in place her former dyed blonde locks. Again, by my estimation, Wendy is pictured back on East 42nd Street, albeit this time waiting at the southeast corner where The Deuce intersects with Madison Avenue. Ironically enough, I first bought Beyond the Valley of 1984 at a long-shuttered record store just a block or so to the north of that very spot, probably oblivious to the fact that Wendy herself was stalking those very same streets. It would have been something to run into her on the sidewalk (although her base of operations, as I documented a little while back, was way downtown). Still, one just didn’t imagine the Plasmatics walking around Manhattan.
Before I could verify the corner in question, I found an older photograph of practically the very same spot, this one taken, presumably, in the late `70s. That same Duane Read sign is visible in the shot of Wendy.
I haven’t made it back up to that neck of the woods recently enough to capture a glimpse of what that corner looks like these days, but here it was as recently as 2022.
The exhaustive clip below, meanwhile, was released last year in observance of the band’s 45th anniversary.
Here’s an entry I’m relatively certain I’m going to regret posting. But first, a bit of background….
Over the course of a long, deathly quiet overnight shift at the TIME Magazine News Desk in the late July of 2005, a little under a month after I’d first launched this silly blog, I composed an epic-length post ruminating on an article for SPIN that Chuck Klosterman had penned that was later appended to a collection of his writings. The subject matter was his not-entirely-serious postulation that Kid A, the arguably confounding and divisive fourth album by arty British alternative band, Radiohead, had predicted the events of September 11, 2001. Should you be curious and willing to overlook some invariable typos and maybe a broken image or two, you can find that here:
In the gradual wake of unwittingly posting that entry, it became one of the most frequently clicked pieces of this blog’s almost-19-year history, being frequently cited on any number of Radiohead fan forums and conspiracy-theory sites. It was linked to by legitimate outlets like Cracked and Noisey, with both repeatedly resurfacing those posts on social media, prompting me to post no fewer than five retorts, notably…
Each of these basically reiterated the same point, that being that I personally never really took the theory all that seriously nor, did I suspect, that Klosterman himself did, either.
But the clicks and links kept coming. Despite how many times I mentioned that I didn’t really care or that I thought it was all a bit in bad taste and that there were surely bigger fish to be fried, the interest in this bizarre theory hasn’t really waned or diminished.
To that end, I fielded a cryptic note today, almost nineteen years after that first post, from a reader named Paul. Paul wrote in, in all caps, “I AM GOING TO MAKE YOU CARE,” and included a link to a video. The accompanying text for that video is as follows:
SHARE THIS. SPREAD THIS.
Radiohead are the kings of 9/11 foreknowledge. They embedded *dozen and dozens* of visual and lyrical clues in three consecutive albums — OK Computer, Kid A, and Amnesiac. (Chuck Klosterman's half-assed writerly analysis of merely some lyrics in merely one album, Kid A, is a weak-sauce limited hangout.) Radiohead absolutely knew about 9/11 ahead of time, to an eerily specific extent, almost as if they were commissioned to perform a years-long artistic conjuring/welcoming ritual. I myself attended the Suffolk Downs show, and the vibes that night were off-the-charts spooky. Not just the ominous pre-show sunset, not just the panic-frequencies emitted by Thom Yorke all night, not just the planes from the adjacent Logan Airport flying around us all night. There was one moment I will never, ever forget. Just when the "Rain Down" section of Paranoid Android began and the music dramatically paused, a single plane roared directly over our heads, and the crowd erupted at the classic concert synchronicity. I don't know how anyone could have arranged it, that moment might have had a paranormal basis. Regardless: RADIOHEAD KNEW. Which is way, way more important than you probably think it is right now. They have been conspicuously omitted from all 9/11 Predictive Programming compilations, probably for a reason, and probably not a good reason. SPREAD THIS VIDEO. Copy the url, and text it to someone who will be interested, email it to your favorite conspiracy theorists, share it with any Radiohead fans, post it on social media, rip the video and post it on your own account, do whatever it takes to publicize this. DO NOT JUST READ THIS AND KEEP BROWSING. Do your part, please. Thank you.
Here is the video in question. Be warned -- there are some jarring passages herein, if you are triggered by this subject matter.
Please make of that what you will.
My only question to you, dear, patient readers, is this … where in New York City was the photo at the top taken? Weigh in, street-spotters.
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