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?
But there were other stops on our circuit, a crucial one being at the Pizza Box on Bleecker Street to wolf down slices while examining our spoils. As with all of the concerns cited above, that — too — is gone. To be fair, a paltry handful of our former regular haunts still hang on today, those being Record Runner, Generation Records, Academy Records and Downtown Music Gallery, but one would be remiss to suggest that their respective prospects were especially promising in 2020. That’s just the way it is.
But from around 1987 to late 1988, we had another regular stop.
If you stand on the southeast corner of West 8th Street on Sixth Avenue — basically right in front of the hulking space that formerly housed a Barnes & Noble and a B. Dalton books before that — and look south, you’ll probably still see a bunch of folks selling dubious shit on the sidewalks. Old magazines, DVDs, vinyl LPs, books and other largely weathered ephemera are periodically up for sale along this strip even today. But back in the 80’s, it was a much more robust ersatz marketplace, one that stretched as far down as the basketball courts on West 3rd.
I don’t remember how we first happened upon him, but Rob and I came to know a young merchant on this strip named Tim. An unassuming kid from somewhere on the Upper West Side — usually sporting a mammoth pair of headphones — Tim was in the business of selling bootleg cassettes. For the layperson, this means illegal live recordings of the same variety that got nearby Second Coming Records in trouble (as discussed at greater length here). We’d show up about once a week and check out Tim’s little briefcase of offerings, immaculately presented in alphabetical order and all marked with the inky font of a thick black sharpie. Like ourselves, Tim was especially besotted with a few specific bands, and his stock leaned heavily in those directions. For whatever reason, his two favorite bands were the Minutemen and the Sisters of Mercy, but he also had tapes by ancillary acts like fIREHOSE and my then-faves in The Mission, along with sundry recordings by bands like U2, The Cult and The Cure. We were very clearly his target demographic, and frequently availed ourselves to his wares.
In the middle of penning this post, I heard from Rob and he informed me that we once went to Tim’s evidently sprawling townhouse on the Upper West Side, but I have absolutely no recollection of that whatsoever. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I just don’t remember it.
In any case, the one specific tape I remember buying off our Tim in May or June of 1987 was a pristine, soundboard recording of The Mission playing a gig I very bitterly missed at The Ritz on East 11th Street in just that previous April. I’d missed the show in question being that I was away at school when the band drunkenly plowed into town. Capturing the Mish at the hoary height of their powers, it featured roaring runs through their early singles, a few odd covers and tracks from their debut LP, God’s Own Medicine, including a lungful reading of “Wake,” a throaty middle-finger to their former taskmaster Andrew Eldritch of The Sisters of Mercy. I played the absolute shit out of that tape, taking it with me a bike trip across Western Europe, managing not to lose it in any number of grotty youth hostels along the way. I absolutely cherished it. Much like the XTC tape I discussed the other day, I still have it, although nothing to play it on. But sadly, unlike the XTC tape, I’ve never found a recording of the Mission at The Ritz in April of 1987 anywhere else. Not on disc. Not on YouTube. Nothing.
Anyway, sometime after all this, we again happened upon Tim on Sixth Avenue again while schmooing. At this stage, he mentioned that he was considering giving up the whole bootleg cassette venture. We earnestly tried to urge him to stick with it, but he informed us of a growing spiritual investment in Tibetan Buddhism. In short order, Tim fully renounced his materialistic endeavors, and stopped showing up to ply his cassettes.
Here is a (very) late follow-up to a post from … jeezus … 2014.
The original spot of Bleecker Bob’s was not on Bleecker Street. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, it was never actually on Bleecker Street. In someone’s infinite wisdom, it was a good idea for the late Bob Plotnik to assume some sort of catchy nickname that assigned him some kind of local renown, so he became Bleecker Bob despite possibly never having operated any business on that particular strip. Whatever.
The original spot of his shop was on MacDougal Street, just steps to the south of West 8th Street (see above). At some point at the dawn of the 80’s, though, Bob pulled out of that location and moved over to 118 West 3rd Street between MacDougal and Sixth Avenue. It was at this address that I first visited the shop in about 1981 or 1982. And it was this iteration of the shop that bore his nickname until it closed in 2013.
Before the space was Bleecker Bob’s, however, it was another similarly inclined shop called – inexplicabaly – Bonaparte. I never set foot in Bonaparte, so I cannot credibly tell you a thing about it, but I recently found a better shot of its exterior than the one I first posted here.
Here in 2020, the 1188 West Third street is still Asian eatery Miyagi, which I wrote about here, although I haven’t been back since. The original Bleecker Bob space on MacDougal off 8th Street played host to a number of ventures over the years – inclulding, very briefly, another record store – before morphing into a barber shop, a tea salon, a sandwich joint and other things. These days, it’s completely vacant.
Bleecker Bob Plotnik, meanwhile, passed away in 2018. Amazingly, Ben's Pizza is still there.
Lots of people kept their vinyl LPs and singles. I certainly did, even after the advent of the compact disc. Of course, I’ve also kept all my CD’s in the wake of them being rendered anachronistic by mp3s, the comparatively brief reign of the iPod and then streaming. Ask me if I care. You can take my physical music media when I’m dead, and not a nanosecond before.
But because I’m an extra-sad bastard, I also kept a healthy supply of my cassettes. I no longer have anything — or anything that works, anyway — to play them on, but there are several that I just simply refuse to part with. Sure, I ditched several workaday store-bought cassettes when I upgraded to compact disc. But I have stacks of cassettes that I consider otherwise irreplaceable. This is about one of those.
I managed to ruffle some feathers on social media, last night, when I made some cheekily uncharitable statements about Philadelphia’s myriad failings, prompted by the agonizing wait for Pennsylvania to tally their vote count in the election. I imagined my invocation of the Hooters might have tipped some people off that I wasn’t being entirely serious, but some folks started getting genuinely hot under the collar about it. Again, these are tense, divisive times.
In any case, in thinking about complementary things to say about the so-called City of Brotherly Love, i was reminded of a certain live-music venue, albeit one I never got to visit. More to the point, the venue in question wasn’t actually in Philadelphia, but rather just across the Delaware River in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. It’s unsurprisingly long gone, these days (razed after a fire in the mid-80’s), but once upon a time, this place was called Emerald City.
Now, despite some people’s claim that Philadelphia is New York City’s “sixth borough” (a notion that I’m sure irks the shit out of native Philadephians), I can count the number of times I made it to that city on one hand. I went once in 1994 to see Pink Floyd at Veteran’s Stadium, and twice in 1997 to see U2 at Franklin Field and, lastly, the Sisters of Mercy at the Electric Factory. That’s it. It’s not that I had anything against going to Philly. I just didn’t have enough of a reason to go, most of the time.
The only reason I had any clue about nearby Emerald City, however, was via a crucial bootleg cassette I bought from a guy named Greg during my freshman year of college.
Prior to going to Denison University in 1985, all I knew about XTC was “Senses Working Overtime,” which — while a sublimely catchy, well-crafted pop tune — was in somewhat stark contrast to the steady diet of Black Flag, Motorhead and Bauhaus I was otherwise concerning myself with, at the time. Once ensconced at Denison as a gloomy punk fan amidst a student body otherwise fixated with Ziggy Marley and The Grateful Dead, I was lucky enough to align myself with a tight gaggle of similarly inclined folks for whom tye-dyed t-shirts and interminable Jerry Garcia guitar solos had refreshingly little appeal.
Regularly convening with my friends in the dank ground floor of Crawford Hall (in a room half-ironically referred to as “Anarchy Hall”), I had my horizons forcibly broadened to music by bands previously beyond my narrow vista like The Velvet Underground, R.E.M., King Crimson, fIREHOSE, The Hoodoo Gurus, The Lime Spiders, Split Enz, The Modern Lovers, The Feelies, The Cramps, The Stooges, Television, NRBQ, The Tom Robinson Band, The Three O’Clock, The Smiths and — oh yes, wait for it — XTC.
On many a beery Friday and Saturday night did we in that room repeatedly crank the entireties of Chronic Town by R.E.M. and Black Sea by XTC before four or five of us set out to wobble around the campus in a drunken stupor, looking for trouble.
Besotted by tracks like the punkily rousing “Respectable Street” and the manic skank of “Living Through Another Cuba” from those high-volume evenings, I went out in search of more XTC, finding only a Portuguese edition (no joke) of the English Settlement cassette in our campus bookstore. Then, I happened upon Greg, a somewhat standoffish cat who lived downstairs from me in Huffman Hall. Greg and I didn’t have much in common, but he had a sideline business in buying and trading bootleg cassettes. Most of it was crap I wouldn’t play at a dog like Van Morrison and the like, but he did have one cassette I snapped up and bought from him without hearing a note off of it. It was XTC recorded a year earlier in Philadelphia on the tour for Black Sea. I brought that cassette with me to the next Friday night meet-up in “Anarchy Hall” and I was practically treated like the returning prodigal son. The fatted calf was verily slain and that much-loved tape was put into maddeningly regular rotation for our Friday/Saturday beer summits.
Originally broadcast on Philadelphia rock station 93.3 WMMR, the recording of XTC at Emerald City was a revelation. Pairing the adrenalized sprint of punk with irrepressible pop hooks and choppy, clanging guitars, it was high-energy music that was propulsive and frenetic, but more clever and jubilant than angry and nihilistic. In short order, I became an ardent fan of the band and followed them into their less exuberant, “bucolic” phase. But I’ll always adore this particular era of the band.
I always wondered what the interior of Emerald City looked like, speculating if it was more of a proper theatre or a conventional rock club. I pictured a utopian sort of scene where punks and rudeboys and hip-hoppers and hardcore kids and goths and New Wave babes and all stripes in between would mix and mingle, not unlike the then-about-to-shutter Danceteria back home in New York City. That might totally have been a fanciful projection, but it made me enjoy the listening experience of that cassette all the more. Some cursory googling revealed an ad for the venue that might reflect the same performance by XTC (see above). Shortly after that gig, bands like The Plasmatics and Joe Jackson played, lending credence to my image of the place. Who knows, though…. maybe it was a shithole?
Anyway, thirty-five years later, the footprint of Emerald City now plays host to a Subaru dealership. XTC put out several more albums before going into hibernation after 2000’s Wasp Star. I ended up finding a copy of the Emerald City recording on disc titled Fab Foursome in Philly several years back, but you don’t need to hunt that down. The entirety of it is on YouTube.
It’s been a real week of loss for my neighborhood. First came word that the Strand Bookstore was in trouble, which prompted me to take the wife and kids over there for a book-buying bonanza. Then came word that Astor Place Hairstylists was shutting down, which prompted my son to jog over and get one more trim from our favorite cutter Speedy. Then I noticed that Otto, Mario Battali’s eatery in the ground floor of 1 Fifth Avenue had given up the struggle and put a “FOR LEASE” sign in its window. Granted, Battali turned out to be a grabby schweinhund during the #MeToo era, but he recused himself from the operation in 2015. I cannot count how many great meals my family and I had in that space. We are heartbroken to see it go.
This weekend, after yet another trek around the East Village with no particular destination in mind, I was heading back home up East 10th Street. The strip in question has already lost a few businesses to the pandemic, notably the gimmicky Ikinari Steak House, City of Saints Coffee and Turntable Lab. While my kids are very happy that Sundaes & Cones is still hanging on, I was crestfallen to spot yesterday that Jesse Malin’s Black & White Bar is no more. I stood in front of its exterior with mouth agape. The interior has been gutted, and so have I.
I’m told they are “moving,” but there is no destination as yet.
I logged many a happy evening in the dark confines of the Black & White Bar. Subtle, low-key, comfortable and owned and operated by afore-cited NYC punk veteran Jesse Malin, the Black & White Bar was always a perfect destination. Somewhere, I have an envelope of photographs dating back to about 2003 of myself in the company of various members of Killing Joke’s road crew and a couple of erstwhile SWANS being very decidedly drunk within the intimate watering hole.
It’s the morning after this year’s frankly anemic and depressing Halloween (no trick or treating, no parades, no parties, etc.), and I found myself up at what was going be 8:00 am but turned into 7:00 am due to Daylight Savings. As such, I decided to go for an early-AM walk.
Standing at my front door, I did something of a mental coin-toss and decided to head east, serpentining my way through quiet East Village streets until I reached Avenue C, and then meandering back. While detritus from the last night’s muted festivities were indeed evident, comparatively speaking it might has well have been any other Saturday night. St. Marks Place, meanwhile, is looking its most anarchic in a long time, between hastily assembled al-fresco-dining sheds, shuttered age-old businesses like Gem Spa and Khyber Pass and a robust array of blithely-strewn garbage. I happened to glance up the stoop at the doorway of Search & Destroy as I was heading back west, and noticed a small detail.
I honestly don’t know how often they formally redecorate their exterior, if ever, but only scant weeks ago, in the porthole-like window in the center of their door had been Ray Stevenson’s iconic photograph of Johnny Rotten, glaring with signature punk insouciance under the legend “FUCK YOU, CORONA.”
A little under a month later, however, Johnny’s gone, replaced by the similarly over-rhapsodized mug of his late comrade, Sid Vicious.
I know, I know … big friggin' whoop.
But, I couldn’t help wondering. Might this be in response to John Lydon’s recent espousals of Trump that I’ve been repeatedly wringing my hands about?
I have a couple of regular readers who sounded off mightily on this point, incredulous that, in my last twoposts on the subject, I was allegedly treating Lydon/Rotten’s latest stream of half-baked humbug -- especially his quips arguably diminishing the impact of COVID-19 -- with kid gloves and not asserting the same burnt bridge policy I applied to, say, Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine after he asserted from a stage somewhere to a baying audience that Obama orchestrated the mass shootings during his administration as an excuse to ramp up gun control. Deal-breaking comments, to be sure.
With Lydon, it’s just more complicated. Beyond the seemingly obvious irony and neck-snapping reversals of the guy who penned “Anarchy In The UK” suddenly chugalugging the Kool-Aid of a “law & order”-fixated administration Hell-bent on lining the pockets of the corporate elite, amplifying racial divide, overturning basic human rights, disenfranchising immigrants, manifesting a draconian overhaul of our Supreme Court and basically dismantling our democracy, I’m just wondering if John’s own once-razor-sharp powers of cognition are in decline. I’m just having a very hard time reconciling his lapses in judgement.
Actually, the real reason for this post is that quite recently, I stumbled upon an outtake from my friend Drew Stone’s excellent film, “Who The Fuck Is That Guy?,” an absolutely amazing documentary about storied A&R exec Michael Alago. It is fucking required viewing. In any case, given Alago’s longtime association with John Lydon, Stone sought him out as a contributor fo the film. Lydon — always with something to say — happily obliged with typical aplomb.
In the clip below, however, Stone got Lydon talking about his tenure living over on the western fringes of Chelsea in New York City in the 80s — a topic near and dear to this blog’s heart. He also takes some enjoyable potshots at NYU and Rudy Giuliani.
Listening to the lucid and reasonable John Lydon here reinforces my stated suspicions above, although that’s ultimately all just projection. Who knows what’s a wind-up anymore?
Weirdly or perhaps fittingly, Brooklyn started becoming a “hip” thing right as I was exiting that whole realm.
After years of being a beery and sneery Manhattan rock pig, prone to darkening the doors of any number of seedy bars and irresponsibly loud live-music venues in the East Village and Lower East Side, I found myself suddenly married and siring children just as things were kicking off on the other side of the East River.
Prior to all that, I’d certainly been to Williamsburg — where friends in pre-hipster bands like EBN and Cop Shoot Cop had decamped in the name of affordability — but it seemed more like Belfast during the Troubles than the future site of any burgeoning, Pabst Blue Ribbon-fueled subculture. By the time the Mrs. and I had moved from East 12th to East 9th and were picking out baby gear, the great sea change of relevance was well underway, and apart from very occasional sorties across the river to check out the new scene, I was very much not a part of it.
If my previous missives poo-poohing Lizzie Goodman’s sprawling “Meet Me In the Bathroom” didn’t already amplify same, I was largely okay with all that. I’d had my time and my era, and while I didn’t think quite as much of the new bands and the new scene — let alone their somewhat cloying cultural touchstones and sartorial/tonsorial trappings — there was undeniably some amazing music that was spawned from it all. But while it was happening, I really wasn’t there. I was more likely to be found rocking one toddler or another to sleep or blearily wandering the aisles of Buy Buy Baby in a slumber-deprived stupor quite unlike the ones I’d cultivated at Max Fish, The Pyramid or CBGB just scant years prior.
Here in the apocalyptic epoch-eclipse of 2020, meanwhile, Hipster Brooklyn has summarily fallen prey to a neck-snappingly steep level of gentrification, albeit in a seemingly more accelerated manner than what happened here in Manhattan, although that may just be my biased projection. And much as with Jesse Malin’s bars and clubs still strategically positioned around the East Village, while some holdout venues and ventures remain peppered around Williamsburg and Greenpoint, the hipsters are basically all gone.
In turn, that has led to the requisite advent of nostalgia, a word I am certainly no stranger to. And while it seems like only weeks ago to oldsters like myself that McCarren Pool was a cool concert venue or that the first Grizzly Bear album came out, there is now a groundswell of longing by former participants for the bona fide brand of Brooklyn cool that once thrived over there. I call it …. Hipster Hiraeth.
Case in point is this weepy article that came out in Inside Hook yesterday, Dubbed “Remembering the Early-Aughts Hipster Bars That Built Williamsburg As We Know it,” it’s a slavishly detailed run-down of since-vanished concerns that allegedly defined the core of Hipster Brooklyn, and I cannot say I knowingly entered into any of them apart from having a fleeting couple of beers at Enid’s with erstwhile Killing Joke drummer Big Paul Ferguson back in 2004. Beyond that desperate bit of name-dropping, I cannot begin to add anything to this article as it pertains to a world and an era I just wasn’t privy to. Why is that? Because I’m old.
While it’s certainly weird to find oneself steeped in nostalgia, a quandary I frequently weep about here, it’s even weirder to watch younger individuals start to come to grips with it. As someone smart, famous and sadly dead once sagely sang, hey look out, you rock’n’rollers — pretty soon now, you’re gonna get older.
In any case, below is a fleeting snippet of the Hipster Brooklyn I remember best….
Long have I wondered about the photo above with regards to its location. Obviously, that's the great Iggy Pop, but I'd always speculated as to what bar he was depicted sitting in with such solemn, stoney-faced stoicism.
Given his longtime residency in Lower Manhattan (to my knowledge, he's lived in at least two apartments downtown -- one on Mercer Street between West 4th and Bleecker and one at the Christodora House over on Avenue B, a tenure he devoted an entire glum album to, 1999's Avenue B), I'd assumed it could have been any one of a hundred mostly since-closed neighborhood bars. Lucy's? Sophie's? Lakeside Lounge? Manitoba's, The Park Lounge? Mars Bar? Which one?
I actually encountered the great man at Sin-E on St. Marks Place, one rainy evening, back in the 90's. I was still a single guy, at the time, and had been out with three friends at some random party over on Avenue C -- which was a markedly wilder patch of real estate, in those days. In any case, fate decided that all three of my comrades would find themselves in beguiling entanglements with willing members of the opposite sex, that evening, leaving me to my own devices. As such, I ended up walking home -- in the rain, fittingly -- across Tompkins Square Park and up St. Marks Place. Soggy and sour of mood, I happened to glance up right as I was walking by the long-since-shuttered Irish spot, Sin-E, and who should be sitting right by the open door enjoying a beer, but Iggy Goddamn Pop. I immediately exclaimed his name out loud, and he looked up, gave me a big goofy grin and a thumbs-up, which immediately decimated my self-pity-party.
Anyway, the photo doesn't look like Sin-E. But, I was fairly resigned to never figuring it out.
As it happens, the photographer responsible for the sombre shot, one Steve Rapport, disclosed the location on his website (and you can buy a nice print of the shot, among many others, here).
Just a stone's throw from his old haunt at the Christadora, Iggy is seen here imbibing within the confines of 7B, otherwise known as Vazacs Horseshoe Bar, which I've discussed here.
These days, Iggy lives in Miami. 7B, meanwhile, is still going strong.
Time to dust off Iggy's old tour of that neighborhood.....
Here’s a curious artifact, although many will doubtlessly find it depressing and abhorrent.
I’ve spoken about transgressive filmmaker/photographer Richard Kern a bunch of times here (notably here, here and here), but he was a big pal and creative contemporary of the Cop Shoot Cop guys, as well as a primary figure in the Cinema of Transgression scene and former member of The Black Snakes. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, as I said on those posts, please explore it with discretion, as it’s not really appropriate for every audience, and all that that entails.
In any case, this video clip finds Kern being interviewed in 1985 on what appears to be an L.E.S. rooftop by a strangely listless interviewer named Victoria from a program called "Videowave." Kern here is fresh off the filming of the gratuitously gory video for Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley `69” (which I spoke about not long ago here), and doing so with characteristic low-key nonchalance. Fittingly, about 47 seconds in, when Victoria is asking about Kern’s penchant for drugs and violence, there seems to be the sound of gunshots from the streets below.
It just gets weirder from there, really. Victoria awkwardly gets Kern to out himself and seems to fish for purely salacious content, and the filmmaker remains fairly blunt and understated throughout. He does make a fairly prophetic prediction, at one point. After Victoria fails to re-engage Kern on a correlation between his depictions of abuse and his own experience “in the Gay movement,” they switch topics to music, and Kern exclaims that “music videos are gonna die.” He was right about that.
In any case, it’s a bizarre glimpse of Lower East Side life from a different era. I wonder what transpires on this rooftop today. It’s probably someone’s private roof-deck.
New York hardcore trainspotters like myself might appreciate that Kern’s wearing a vintage VIRUS shirt.
Lastly, as unconventional Victoria's interview style may have been, "Videowave" did manage to stage quite a few interesting chats. See more of them here.
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