Flaming Pablum

Degradation, Lubrication & Gentrification at 315 Bowery

You’d think that a whopping 13 years after the club closed its doors for good, I’d have run out of things to say or share about CBGB. Be that as it may, pictures, videos and/or simple ruminations about infamous gigs, specific scenes and/or happenings at 315 Bowery still keep rolling down the proverbial pike. In much the same way I cannot stop posting about places like The Cedar Tavern and Bleecker Bob’s, content pertaining to the lore, legacy, demise and degradation of CBGB still comes to me.

Today was just such an occasion. I came across a video shot by one Lisa Barnstone of a gig by Lubricated Goat -– who I posted about here -– back in mid-2006. Beyond simply being another glimpse of the fabled interior (bathroom included) of CBGB –- not unlike the video Harley Flanagan made of the interior that I posted about back in 2016 –- this video was notable to me in that it features Jack Natz -- above --  formerly of Cop Shoot Cop, on bass detail.

Personally speaking, when this video was shot, I was about one third into my somewhat chaotic tenure as a managing editor of MTV News Online, and had just become a father for the second time. My status as a busy dad to two tiny people had sharply curtailed my ability to regularly attend gigs as I’d previously done on a regular basis, thus I was not at this show. In fact, I regret to say that I cannot honestly recall the last show at CBGB I went to, although it might have been a Kraut reunion show in 2002.

Today, of course, the strip of the Bowery is a very different scene. The occupant of 315 Bowery is still John Varvatos, who I somewhat venomously took to task on this post. My take on same has not changed, and I still think he sucks and everything about his shop is bullshit. The surrounding neighborhood continues to gentrify, of course. Apart from the encouraging opening of Codex Books across the street (specializing in cool, used and rare volumes), there is precious little in that cluster of streets to hold my attention … beyond nostalgia.

`Twas not always thus. Take another look back. Miss Barnstone’s video also captures a lot of the post-show action out on the street.

CBGBs...last call..Lubricated Goat inside tour of the place and it's surroundings from lisa barnstone on Vimeo.

Check out more footage of the same gig, courtesy of the inimitable SkeletonBoy…

One More Chelsea Mourning

I’ve mentioned it before, but I’d love to say I was initially familiar with the signifiance of the Chelsea Hotel because of some of the more celebrated creatives, thesbians and bohemians who periodically resided within its hallowed walls, but much like probabaly most of my generation, I first came to know about the Chelsea because of one individual, and one individual only -- that being Sid Vicious. The now-very-late Mr. V notwithstanding, however, the Chelsea Hotel’s associations run an impressive gamut from literary icons like Arthur C. Clarke, Dylan Thomas, Arthurs Miller and Allen Ginsburg to musical luminaries like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Jim Miorrison, Edith Piaf, Janis Joplin to visual artists like Robert Crumb, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Mapplethorpe and countless others from virtually every artistic discipline. This list of its more celebrated guests is a veritable “who’s who,” full stop.

As detailed in a few older posts, I was fortunate enough to attend a few parties at the Chelsea Hotel back in the `90s, enabling me to travel beyond its lobby to meander through its storied halls. The last time I was able to do so was in 2010, as detailed here. It was on that occasion that I had the fleeting foresight to have my photo captured within. That’s it below, with me posing portentuously on the stairs, trying to look like a sinister, leather-clad punk, but simply looking like an inebriated, portly dad (guilty as charged, your honor).

Only a couple of years prior to that evening, the Chelsea’s beloved manager Stanley Bard had been abruptly deposed and many of its longtime tenants evicted. Turnovers in ownership started to take their toll. A year or two after my final visit, the Chelsea became entirely impenetrable – its fabled lobby closed and its edifice encased in scaffolding. A new management company promised/threatened that the Chelsea was to be re-imagined as a newly luxurious, bespoke hotel. Whatever remained of the hotel’s old interiors were stripped and gutted as it entered a new chrysalis phase. Patti Smith, some might remember, played an invitation-only event, which managed to rub a lot of people the wrong way, somewhat understandaby.

I actually did return to the building in more recent years. In 2014, there was a Blondie exhibition in a space just to the west of the hotel’s entrance, followed by Dee Dee Ramone exhibit (himself another former Chelsea tenant) a year or so later. But the hotel’s new iteration was still a work in progress, at the time.

But fruition never came. Walk by the Chelsea Hotel today in 2019, and it is still cloaked in a seemingly perpetual state of painful transition. This week, Gothamist posted a lengthy update on the hotel’s long saga and current, sorry state, complete with a frankly heartbreaking slideshow. Click here to see that.

What happens next is anyone’s guess, but I’m very glad I got to spend those few evenings there when I did. It’s a damn tragedy that they couldn’t just let it be.

Back ... Again ... to Crosby Street

I wrote a longer piece about Crosby Street back in 2015, but it occurred to me, this morning on my way to work, that I was steps away from the exact location of Thomas Struth's famously bleak picture of the intersection of Crosby & Spring from 1978, prompting me to try to replicate it. I think I did alright.

Click on it to enlarge. 

Got A Light?

It being a whopping seven degrees outside today, the wife decided it was a great opportunity to do some arguably premature spring cleaning around the apartment. Suffice to say, not every member of the household was as enthused about this plan as she was, but there we are. 

Whilst Peggy was on a ruthless search-&-destroy mission in our overly-stuffed linen closet, we came across an old jar of matchbooks I used to keep in our previous apartment's bathroom. For a while back in the 90's, we'd both gotten in the habit of absconding with loads of matchbooks from any bar or restaurant that was foolhardy enough to offer them. I cracked open said jar to reveal a host of establishments that simply no longer exist. 

Today, the space that was the old Hi-Life Bar & Grill on the Upper West Side (which had great neon signage) is now a relatively banal clothiers.

Merchants was a chain of kinda douchey, ersatz-posh bars scattered around town that are all gone, I believe.

Around The Clock was a standby 24-hour East Village mainstay on Stuyvesant street just north of St. Marks. Today, it's a Japanese bakery called Pan Ya. 

The Stanhope Hotel was a stately concern across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Upper East Side at 995 Fifth Avenue. The wife and I spent our wedding night there in 2001. It closed in 2005, and is now a luxury co-op. 

Grange Hall was a great restaurant on Commerce Street in the West Village with bright, airy space and a traditional American menu with inspired, Depression-era decor. It closed in 2004, and the space hosted a few other concerns in its wake. Today, it's newly vacant again.

Lakeside Lounge was a particular favorite Alphabet City bar I posted here about a few times. It closed in 2012, although it sort of lives on via its website. Today, the space it once occupied is part of Maiden Lane, the restaurant that took over the old Life Cafe space on the corner of 9th and Avenue B. 

The Cedar Tavern was my dearly beloved local on University Place between 11th and 12th. I wrote about it here extensively, most recently here. It closed suddenly in 2006 with news that the air rights above it had been sold. The plan was that they'd build above it, but that the bar would re-open. They lied. It closed and was gutted. The bar itself was removed and shipped to Austin, TX. In its footprint was built a strenuously ugly condo. The ground floor sat vacant for years until a "European" waxing space opened. Yeah, like we needed that. The circumstances of the Cedar's abrupt departure still make me palpably hostile. 

Cafe Noir was corner bar in SoHo with a kitschy Moroccan theme on the corner of Thompson and Grand Streets. It was a great spot for beers and tapas, but closed around 2012. I believed they re-located to TriBeCa. This particular space is now a somewhat ridiculous lingerie shop.

Technically, Chumley's on Bedford Street in the West Village and ACME on Great Jones Street are both still going, but both are newly "bespoke" versions of their former incarnations. I frothed at the mouth about the shitty new version of Chumley's most recently here. ACME, meanwhile, used to be a great BBQ joint with a disarming selection of hot sauces. It also came appended by a live music venue in its lower quarters called -- wait for it -- Under Acme. My friends' band The Hot Corn Girls played a gig or two there. More recently, however, ACME underwent a "culinary transformation" and now serves "French-meets-Italian" fare. The space beneath that was Under Acme is now reserved for private functions. Read: It went all upscale and prohibitively pricey and now, basically, sucks. 

Lastly, The Knickerbocker Bar & Grill at 33 University Place is still there, mercifully, and retains its rarefied character of old Manhattan. If it ever closes, I will be devastated beyond words. 

Screw Your LimeWire

DISCLAIMER: I started writing this on Monday. When I came back to it today –- Tuesday -– I found that what I’d penned read a bit … maybe churlish is the word? But …. c’est la guerre.

--

Are we really there already?

To be fair, if I’m being kind, objective and fair-minded, the article I’m about to discuss here is ultimately not that different from the countless entries I’ve posted that have lionized, say, the lost art of lovingly curating a mixtape or any one of the myriad paeans to the long-shuttered, otherwise-forgotten record shops of my youth. I still live, breathe and pine for these arguable anachronisms.

But if you hadn’t already gleaned as much, with the fleeting exception of my own cherubic offspring, I don’t have a lot of time for young people, so being kind, objective and fair-minded about this piece isn’t really on the menu. This is my lawn …. you are cordially invited to remove thyselves from it.

A young writer named Daisy Jones of Noisey – an outlet I’ve railed about here a few times before – recently posted a weepy homage to LimeWire, a iffy file-sharing service from the 2000s that picked up the baton first brandished by Napster, enabling a new generation of nascent-albeit-fucking-lazy (fight me) music fans to furtively explore, unwittingly infect their computers and -– to some minds -– violate copyright law and steal music.

Here's the graph that really set my teeth on edge.

On LimeWire, you could lose yourself for hours searching for the perfect thing to listen to, and because it felt like no one was watching, that could be anything. Before then, the only way to access music was physical, or through radio and music TV, but those platforms were often consumed publicly, so had the propensity to be performative. Suddenly, you didn’t have to pretend to like watching Kerrang or Kiss or whatever was cool among your friends. You could download Britney albums until 2AM, or get heavily into Norwegian metal. Whatever: LimeWire made your taste yours.

She goes on. Read if for yourself.

Regardless of its arguable -- oh dear me, god forbid -– “propensity to be performative,” access to the physical manifestation of music went on to be sharply curtailed thanks to ground first broken by services like Napster and LimeWire. Within a relatively swift period of a decade and change, the rituals of prior generations were virtually decimated, as once-thriving circuits of record and disc shops – both independent mom-&-pop’s and big, established chains – were forced out of business and their stock in trade reduced and devalued into dated period-pieces or ironic hipster detritus.

I find it hard to fathom that I’m about to start a paragraph with this qualifier, but…

BACK IN MY DAY…, when you wanted to hear, search out, discover and/or procure new music, you had to actually put your pants on and LEAVE THE GODDAMN HOUSE to go to places and meet with people who could enable and assist you in said endeavor. If the radio and/or MTV weren’t satisfying your needs, it made sense to actually go to places where the music you were interested in might be found. Along the way, you were bound to meet similarly inclined folks and forge new relationships, hear new things you weren’t expecting, expand your horizons, explore your city and a host of other benefits.

Personally speaking, I made many a great friend and discovered an unquantifiable amount of new music this way. Yes, I had to actually leave my home and interact with people and go to new places that I didn’t know – shock, horror, outrage. In short order, I became part of a communal subculture. That’s pretty much all gone, now, thanks to the jack-booted march of a technology that caters to a generation weaned on convenience, entitlement and immediate gratification.

Our way was better.

Starless & Static

Not sure why this should be surprising in any way, but in the 368 days since it served its final meal, rang in the New Year and closed its doors for good, the space that was the NoHo Star (above, this evening) on the corner of Bleecker and Lafayette Streets remains strangely, perfectly untouched.

The restaurant’s old chairs are still stacked on the tables, the fixtures and accoutrements that defined the space (the mosaics, the artwork and the clock above the bar I’ve always coveted) are all still there. In fact, I don’t think the lights in the kitchen were ever turned off — they’ve literally been on for a year and three days.

Not sure what makes me sadder — this strange state of limbo-like dormancy, or the thought of something else eventually taking the space.

Oh Nevermind: Cop Shoot Cop at the Pyramid on Avenue A

It should come as very little surprise to anyone that knows me, but I “run” and/or “manage” Facebook’s seemingly only Cop Shoot Cop page. Actually, to be fair, that’s not true — there’s also a group page called We Demand a Cop Shoot Cop Reunion, but it’s dormant on the best of days. If you’re looking for all things Cop Shoot Cop on Facebook, I am evidently your authority. At the very least, I’ve manage to amass arguably the greatest collection of C$C and C$C-related visual ephemera to be found on the `net. See that here, should you care. So, yeah, yay me.

Why don’t any of the original Cop Shoot Copy guys get involved? Dunno. I assume they either just don’t care, have way better things to do and/or are just fine with me handling it. I was drafted, let’s remember, at one point, with the task of putting together that star-crossed and ill-fated Cop Shoot Cop coffee-table book that regrettably never came to pass. One could argue that said aborted assignment gives me the right. Or not. Whatever. Regardless, I've kept it going for at least five years now, and I’m always heartened that people still contribute to it. It doesn’t happen with roaring fervor, but every now and then, someone posts something rare — which, in the grand scheme of things, is really the only pertinent descriptor for Cop Shoot Cop and their ilk — a scene, a sound and a sensibility that is swiftly becoming anachronistic. This week, that happened.

A user named Erin posted a super-rare flyer of the band’s yesterday. This was from the early days, when commanding officer Tod [A] -- that's him at the top of this post in an image respectfully purloined from Recalcitrant Monthly --  was toiling, by day, at a copy shop on West Broadway, a tenuous state of disgruntled employment that, at the very least, gave him access to vast amounts of paper and copying equipment with which to illicitly print up the band’s signature brand of provocative propaganda. For one particular gig at The Pyramid on Avenue A, Tod paired his own typically eye-catching graphic skills with an appropriated image from the illustrious oeuvre of one Tom of Finland. For those unfamiliar (although there was recently a bona fide biopic on the man), Tom of Finland was an artist from — WAIT FOR IT — Finland renowned for his beatific depictions of homosexual erotica, usually concerning workaday scenarios involving impossibly burly sailors, firemen, cops, etc. Imagine the artwork of children’s illustrator Richard Scarry, only instead of anthropomorphic cats, dogs and piglets, it was blissful, hulking men with titanic erections.

To wit, Tod came up with this poster below …. a bit of promotional material that doubtlessly furthered the notoriety of the band, probably to the pronounced chagrin of the local constabulary. People of delicate constitutions and easily-offended sensibilities should avert their eyes...

I’d actually seen this poster before, hanging on the wall of the original incarnation of Max Fish on Ludlow Street during a late-80’s/early-90’s flyer retrospective. I wish I’d brought my camera to that one.

Also this week, I happened to spy a flyer on the official Instagram page of the mighty Lunachicks for a series of gigs also at the Pyramid. Mind you, as discussed here before, the Pyramid on Avenue A used to be this amazing, ground-breaking, scene-sharing venue that hosted all stripes of subculture — from punks, hardcore kids, metal heads and noise-rock freaks through drag-queens, club kids and disco-zealots, all more-or-less happily co-mingling in this grotty little bar. I haven’t been back in decades, but if the video in this post is to be believed, that iteration has since been replaced by just another douchey disco.

Anyway, boo hoo. The thing that, of course, struck me about this flyer was the line-up. On the otherwise sleepy night of Thursday, April 26, 1990, Cop Shoot Cop shared a bill with the similarly inclined local band Rat At Rat R (who I discussed here) and a hip and happening little beat-combo from Seattle called …. Nirvana.

While that Nirvana show has since become the stuff of legend (for some), sadly, there is precious little documentation of the Cop gig, although — to be fair — it was only one of many nights they played this particular venue over the years. Two short years later, Nirvana and Cop Shoot Cop would both play the fabled Reading Festival in England, although Nirvana were headliners and Cop Shoot Cop were relegated to something called The Session Tent (flanked by their compatriots in the Lunachicks, among others). Cop Shoot Cop did eventually make it to the big stage at Reading Festival in 1994, although still at the bottom of the bill, under friends like Helmet and the Jesus Lizard, with …. er … the Red Hot Chili Peppers headlining.

Does any of this matter now? Maybe only to a few. But for those it does matter to, I’m happy to share.

Meanwhile, as discussed in great detail here,  I’m still searching for the rest of THIS poster….

Rest in Peace, Bleecker Bob Plotnik

I wrote about the significance of Bleecker Bob’s here seemingly more times than can be humanly quantified, the last meaningful post, I believe, being the one documenting my visit to the frankly mediocre Japanese restaurant that now operates in its former space. Above is how it looked in about 2010 or so (that’s m’self and Oliver).

The final chapter, alas, came this week with the news that “Bleecker Bob” Plotnik himself passed away. Plotnik suffered a stroke in 2001, and had been in declining health ever since.

Reactions to this news were candid and mixed. By most accounts, Bob was a frequently disagreeable and polarizing figure, prone to treating people fairly brusquely. Speaking as one of his frequent customers, I certainly weathered my share of his scorn on occasion.

That said, I do fondly remember one afternoon when my friend Rob B. and I were in there and Bob was involved in a surreal exchange with a trio of Scandiweigian metalheads. They’d evidently asked Bob to look at some rareified hair-metal artefact behind the counter, but their clipped, broken English was making the exchange somewhat painful for all parties concerned. Never known for his wellspring of patience, Bob was swiftly losing his easily-abandoned cool with these dudes, and even glanced at us for moral support at one point. My takeaway from that was that we may have been irritating shitheads to him, but we were HIS irritating shitheads. That’s as close to a warm’n’fuzzy moment about the man as I can recount.

Prior to working together at the New York Review of Records, estimable Brit rock-crit legend Kris Needs manned the cash-register at Bleecker Bob’s (indeed it was hirsute Kris who sold me my first vinyl copy of Acid Bath by Alien Sex Fiend). On Kris’ Facebook feed this morning, he posted this nice tribute to Bob…

Sad news; I worked at Bleecker Bob's for nearly three years (86-89). He could be a narcissistic oaf who treated his customers like shit and staff even worse, shouting, spitting when he spoke, getting me to run and get his McDonald's in icy blizzards, take his great dane Max out in all weathers with pooh sack ready, insulting to my friends and often treating me like a slave. But he also encouraged a weird fierce loyalty, looked after me when I was in hospital (catching pneumonia from those food runs!) and did much to bring great records to NYC (and export old LPs to the UK which I boxed in the basement). I didn't like it when old black guys came in to the store with their precious jazz collections, he gave them a dollar apiece like he was doing them a favour then marked them up to $40 a pop after they'd left and many other cruel traits but, underneath the scary broadsides lurked a heart of gold and he certainly didn't deserve to spend his last years crippled from a stroke. I fell victim to the city and had to leave his minimum wage employment, under something of a cloud I'm not proud of, but the man was an iron girder of the old NYC that has now vanished into the history books. RIP Bob.

Bleecker Bob Plotnik may have been a cantankerous, misanthropic curmudgeon, but my early days of music fandom would have been markedly dimmer without his shop.

Rest in peace, sir. 

Back to Astor Place

Our good friend Bob Egan of Popshots NYC posted the below photo over on Facebook, and I found it so striking that I was motivated to post it here. Here's how Bob prefaced it...

Astor Place, 1984, from the roof of 111 Fourth Avenue at 11-12th St.

Seemingly a million lightyears from its current, busy, teeming iteration, this is exactly the Astor Place I first discovered in the early 80's. Barren, uncluttered, spacious.... full of elbow room and ripe for exploring. 

 

Exhuming 'Recent Things'

Back in August of 2008, I posted an entry dubbed “Recent Things.” This was essentially just a series of photographs I’d snapped with my still-quasi-new digital camera (not iPhone) to offset a series of photo posts I’d portentuously titled “Things That Are No Longer There,” and variations thereof. I stumbled upon that latter post this morning, and was struck by how many of those things – a decade later – are themselves no longer there … or at least not how I’d left them, so to speak. Let’s review, shall we?

This, as the sign says, was Bleecker Bob's. I devoted almost as many posts to the slow demise of this storied stronghold of punk vinyl as I did to the untimely vanishing of the Cedar Tavern. In any event, it closed in 2013 and, contrary to original plans, did not turn into a rock'n'roll-themed frozen yogurt emporium, but rather a fair-to-middling Japanese restaurant I dined in in 2015. Read that account here, should you honestly care. 

This is a shot of my then-four-year-old daughter Charlotte standing cherubically in front of what had been the fabled Moondance Diner at the bottom of Sixth Avenue, just north of Canal Street. About year after this photo was taken, the Moondance closed (its physical manifestation moving out west to Wyoming, if memory serves) and a giant, fuckoff hotel was erected in its footprint. I sneer every time I walk by it ... which is daily. 

This is the former exterior of Marty's Cool Stuff on LaFayette Street just north of Bleecker. The shop was a complete, unmanageable mess, but Marty did indeed have the odd bit of genuinely ...er... "cool stuff." The only lasting bit of ephemera I have that I'd prized there is this orange metal sign that says "Smiths Overalls." It hangs just above the interior transom of our front door. Today, this is part of the noxious streetwear flagship, KITH. 

This is the former entrance to 9 Second Avenue, just steps to the south of the Mars Bar (also gone, of course) on East First Street. Largely derelict and abandoned by the time of this photo, the building's significant back history was lovingly told in an amazing documentary called "The Tao of 9 Second Avenue." I wrote about it here, but it's well worth seeking out. Today, the spot in this photo is part of a TD Bank branch.  

 

Fittingly just around the corner from the shot immediately above, this is the north-facing exterior of the old Mars Bar on East First Street between Second Avenue and the Bowery. A constantly shifting and captivating canvas for murals and spontaneous expressions of colorful street art, this strip of East First Street was always one of my favorite spots in Manhattan. It's all gone now. What's in this space now is that TD Bank, a chic condo's chilly lobby and -- last time I checked -- a business called The Alchemist's Kitchen. 

Believe it or not, this is Extra Place on the northern end of East First Street, just steps to the east of the Bowery. Yes, down at the end of that arguably forbidding dead end was the rear of CBGB. Many an atmospheric photo of punk luminaries was snapped in this forgotten byway. Today, it's a comparatively straight-laced and squeaky-clean strip of neatly appointed -- but frequently empty -- storefronts.

This last one probably doesn't need a lot of explanation. That's Charlotte, again.