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?
The first time I ever saw Martin Atkins was probably via the video for Public Image Ltd.’s “Bad Life,” wherein he was fleetingly depicted dancing disjointedly behind John Lydon’s insistent mugging. Who he was in the grand scheme of things, at the time, probably didn’t occur to me, as by that point, PiL had basically become the John Lydon show, despite the fact that Atkins had essentially become the main musical force behind the operation in the wake of the inevitably acrimonious departures of PiL alumni Jeanette Lee, Keith LeVene, Jah Wobble and Jim Walker. Shortly after that, Atkins and Lydon hastily assembled a new iteration of the band and toured Japan, which spawned their perfunctorily titled live album, Live in Tokyo.
While both that particular line-up of the band and the ensuing live album were roundly derided by music critics and Public Image acolytes alike — not to mention the band themselves — Live in Tokyo was something of a crucial release for me. I have very vivid memories of a laborious car trip to the Berkshires with a cousin one snowy January weekend, and we only had two cassettes — one was my “well-loved” (read: battered) copy of Live in Tokyo, and the other was my cousin’s incongruous selection, Tales from The Topographic Ocean by proggy stalwarts, Yes, a fractious sonic dichotomy to be sure (although, somewhat ironically, original PiL guitarist Keith LeVene is purportedly a massive Yes fan). To be fair, I, too, am a sizable Yes fan, but decidedly not of that particularly ponderous record. My repeated airings of PiL’s scathing romp through “Analisa” — to say nothing of my insistence on singing along — did little to make the trip any smoother.
Some time after that, Martin Atkins also jumped ship from the ranks of Public Image Ltd., joining a growingly august legion of musicians who found working in close proximity with John Lydon an untenable scenario. Apart from a single or two by his own band, Brian Brain, Martin Atkins didn’t pop back onto my radar until news broke that he was joining my favorite band, Killing Joke. Despite having previously atrophied into a duo of vocalist Jaz Coleman and guitarist Geordie Walker for the divisive Outside the Gate, Killing Joke had geared up for a bracing return to their feral former sound and recruited Atkins to replace the burly rhythmic battery of Big Paul Ferguson. While Martin’s frenetic drumming style was markedly different from Ferguson’s tribal whallop, the injection of the PiL veteran’s aggressive approach and manic energy reinvigorated Killing Joke, and the ensuing recorded results remain some of the band’s finest work.
I just realized that this post is turning into a sprawling re-telling to the great man's bio, which is not what I intended it to be. I actually interviewed Martin a couple of times (the first detailed here), and went onto meet him in Killing Joke circles over the years. He's an exceptionally knowledgable and affable gent. In case you're curious as to what he did after his tenure in Killing Joke, let me wrap that up by saying he formed several impactful bands like Murder Inc., Pigface and The Damage Manual, when not lending his percussive prowess to bands like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails.
In any case, Martin just recently hooked up with my comrade Drew Stone of New York Hardcore Chronicles fame and had an amazing and informative chat this afternoon, touching on much of the above and so much more. Stick around for the anecdote about a physical altercation with GG Allin.
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.
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.....
I spotted an image of this poster on a random trawl through Instagram and it blew me away, so did some creative Googling and found this better scan above. Click on it to enlarge.
I have no recollection of this gig happening, but oof....what a line-up! Also, the art here was rendered by the great Danny Hellman, whose work I'm a great fan of. I actually own an original Hellman illustration he did for New York Press of Cop Shoot Cop and Iggy Pop, which you can see here. I reached out to him about this one, but he doesn't believe he even has the original illustration anymore, let alone any copies of the poster.
Suffice to say, if you have a print of this in your collection, please let me know. I'd pay handsomely for it.
I have no recollection of where I first spotted the New York hardcore logo (above, in case you’re unfamiliar, as rendered in blinding neon at Vinnie Stigma and Jimmy G’s tattoo shop on the Lower East Side), but it was invariably on a flyer for one show or another. While not quite as cryptic as other logos like, say, Black Flag’s bars or, later, Missing Foundation’s upended cocktail glass, it was an immediately arresting symbol that neatly encapsulated the scene and the subculture. In short order, not only was I spotting it everywhere, but I was summarily scrawling it everywhere. It usually prompted blank looks from the layperson — but if you knew, you knew.
Over time, the symbol took on a strange life of its own. As punks and hardcore kids turned into hardcore adults and started infiltrating the halls of industry, the symbol — or, more accurately, appropriated mutations thereof — started suddenly popping up incongruously in places not normally associated with hardcore. Gradually, variations of the the original NYHC logo became ostensibly “cool" shorthand for concerns looking to create certain impressions. As time went on, the original meaning and associations behind the symbol got lost in translation. I’ve spotted variations of the logo all over the place, and when I point out its origin, too often I’m met with stares as blank the ones I got back in the early 80’s. Much as with that Misfits Crimson Ghost image I spotted using to advertise a friggin' pilates class (read that tragic tale in the preamble to this post), the appropriators no longer bother to investigate where they’re getting their iconography from.
I think the most striking example of this I found was out in Quogue. A leafy, affluent enclave of Suffolk County where my mom lives, this sub-Hampton has never exactly been a hotbed of hardcore. My skulking around the town as a pointedly tennis-shunning teenager in a KRAUT t-shirt did little to change that. But about a year back, I was in a local chic boutique out there, looking for a birthday gift for the wife, when I spotted a t-shirt that pretty much knocked me out of my Chuck Taylor’s. I ended up buying it for my daughter, who wore it regularly for a while, blithely unaware and frankly uncaring of the symbol's antiquated roots in New York City punk rock.
In any case, my friend Drew Stone just posted another great installment in his ongoing video series that traces the roots of the symbol. If, like me, you spent large swathes of your youth evangelizing this insignia on every available surface with a sharpie, you should check it out.
Because I’m old, in the way and still preoccupied with anachronism of all shapes and sizes, I’m still a big, huge dope of a fan of album cover art. Nowadays, that aspect of “packaging” seems to be an afterthought, at best, in the contemporary realm of music consumption. But like many folks my age and older, I still hold the sleeves of myriad albums near and dear to my heart, and all-too-happily engage in minutia-laden debates on the subject any time it’s invoked – usually by greying, middle-aged and increasing paunchy old farts like myself.
I stumbled upon this article, today, and summarily lit up like a pinball machine, as it speaks directly to that afore-cited fixation. I have absolutely no idea who Ashley Benton of Barking Owl is, but I quite enjoyed reading about her favorites, especially as it got me to take a fresh look at one I virtually never consider.
Not my favorite Blondie album by a long shot, Plastic Letters from 1977 prefigured their more accessible makeover on the comparatively slick and iconic Parallel Line, which isn’t to suggest that it sounded like The Dead Boys, but it just wasn’t necessarily indicative of the marketable heights they’d soon scale. Personally, I just don’t think the tunes were there on this outing, but whatever – it’s still part of their story.
But, the cover is really something else. I’d never really considered it, but beyond the obvious – Debbie looks smoking hot in her hot pink minidress which, I’m projecting, was probably designed by CBGB fixture and James Chance’s girlfriend Anya Philips, and the boys in the band look suitably cool with their ciggies and leather pants -- check out the setting. The band is depicted loitering with louche aplomb all over a blue-&-white NYPD car, treating a vehicle belonging to New York’s Finest like a bongwater-scented rec-room couch.
I was immediately reminded of a photo shoot I was on with the boys in Cop Shoot Cop. I’ve alluded to this story before, but back in 1991 or so, I’d been incongruously drafted by a fellow rock-journalist friend of mine to come up with a piece for this series he was doing for a magazine called In-Fashion wherein hip, young bands of the moment were depicted hanging out on their home turf. While Cop Shoot Cop were quite literally the very furthest thing from the type of music your average In-Fashion reader might be interested in, I flew the notion by the C$C guys who were …. well, let’s charitably say they were not of one mind on the subject. But, recognizing an opportunity for wider exposure than they’d normally enjoy, they acquiesced. I wrote up a sprawling, epic-poem-length story to frame the accompanying photographs, but that was edited down to size with the ruthless efficiency of a battlefield triage surgeon. A great photographer by the name of Butch Belair was assigned to the project, and off we went around Williamsburg and the East Village to capture Cop Shoot Cop in their natural environment.
After a few shots of the gents striding manfully up and down Avenue A, scowling in front of their camo van and enjoying some midday beverages in the cave-like confines of CBGB, someone mentioned this derelict cop car over on First Avenue just south of East 6th Street. Sounding like too good an opportunity, we strolled over there and sure enough, there it was. We came away with one of my favorites … an unwitting homage to Plastic Letters by their NYC punk forebears in Blondie?
Some of you might remember a pair ofposts from 2018 wherein I delved into the curious story of Dave Marin, a fellow traveler on the roads of rock ’n’ roll pedantry.
Dave’s singular quest was to rectify a long-held discrepancy between the memory of his first-hand experience witnessing a specific moment at a Clash show at the Palladium on East 14th Street in the comparatively carefree days of 1979 and the documentation of same on the back cover of The Clash’s celebrated third album, London Calling. That singular moment, of course, was the smashing of Paul Simonon’s star-crossed Precision bass guitar, a fleeting moment of rage prefigured by Pennie Smith’s fateful snapping of a photograph of the instant just prior. While that photograph went onto become inarguably one of the most iconic images in rock history, Dave maintained that the archivists in the Clash camp got the date of the show in question wrong on the back cover, and it had become his mission to amend that particular oversight ever since.
Last night, Dave shared some happy news…
Hi Alex. Just to put this to bed, today “The Clash” official Twitter account sent out the following: “20th + 21st Sept 1979 The Palladium NY Take The 5th Tour. Paul Simonon smashed his Fender P Bass on stage in frustration towards the end of the show. Pennie Smith captured the moment and it became London Calling album sleeve, which dated the image on 21st. In fact it was on 20th!” Take care. D
Today, after being on loan to the deeply dubious Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, the remaining pieces of the bass guitar in question are back with Paul Simonon. The Clash officially disbanded in 1986, in the wake of the arguably abortive Cut The Crap album. Lead singer/songwriter Joe Strummer passed away in 2002. The Palladium was razed in 1998, and a NYU dormitory was built in its footprint. Today, the exact spot where Paul took his bass to task is the produce aisle of a Trader Joe’s that I was actually in yesterday afternoon.
And Dave Marin? Now he can fitfully sleep through the night.
The last time I posted the picture up top — an artful shot of the interior of Rocks in Your Head, a former, beloved record shop on Prince Street in SoHo, purloined from the wilds of Flickr, if memory serves — was January 2012, and it accompanied yet another entry of mine that weepily lamented the passage of time. Over the course of the last fifteen years, this blog has been largely defined by posts like that — sepia-toned homages to the Manhattan of my youth, a veritable lost continent peppered with places like Rocks In Your Head that were otherwise extinguished by gentrification, spiraling rents, shifting cultural sensibilities, the sickly convenience of new technology or a potently unwieldy combination of all of the above. This blog has frequently acted as one long fist-shake at the tirelessly amorphous topography of this urban environment, where sentimentality is for the weak and significance is perilously relative.
I wish I could recall the specific luminary in question, but I remember reading an interview with a certain woman— it was someone along the lines of Deborah Harry, Tina Weymouth or even Lydia Lunch — and the question was posed to her, “When did Downtown die?” I’m leaning towards it being Debbie Harry, but her immediate response was September 11th. If I recall correctly, she didn’t mean to suggest that the Downtown Manhattan of 2001 just prior to that event was as thriving and multifaceted a bohemian wonderland as it had been in the 70’s and 80’s, but rather that the seismic upheaval brought on by the horrific rigors of that fateful day firmly bookended the end of an era. The fanciful bubble had been popped in the most jarring of ways by the outside world, and there was never going to be any return to those days.
Whomever she was, she wasn’t wrong. While that transformation was already underway, New York City changed dramatically in the wake of 9/11, “bouncing back” in a trajectory that leaned very heavily in favor of monied exclusivity. In the past nineteen years, the city has gone onto become way more prohibitively costly, largely at the expense of all semblance of its former character, to say nothing of vast swathes of its former residents. Apologists will cite Heraclitis’ mantra that change is the only constant, but even a passive observer would concede that the metamorphosis of New York City since 2001 has been sharp, and vertically steep.
As the new city emerged — one feverishly pockmarked by chains and big box retailers and increasingly less by longstanding mom’n’pops — blogs like mine and far more scrupulous, focussed and studious ones like Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing Downtown and EV Grieve (to name my favorite two) appeared to document the carnage. While my blog is inexorably entwined rather narrowly with my own personal experiences and recollections, those two — and others -- presented wider vistas as to the ensuing effects on whole neighborhoods. I may have been preoccupied with vanishing record stores, punk bars and live music venues, but they were scrutinizing the tolls taken on the city’s fragile cultural ecosystem writ large.
After a while, the more brazenly nostalgic aspects of these types of endeavors made them easier to diminish. Reverently sipping Gem Spa egg creams in our authentic CBGB t-shirts, we were just stubborn, aging die-hards pining for the fabled "bad old days" and failing to appreciate the amenities of the new iteration of New York City. Of course we don’t want the old site of Bleecker Bob’s to become a frozen yogurt emporium. Of course we don’t think 14th Street should become a new tech hub. Of course we are offended by the notion of a newly bespoke Chelsea Hotel. Of course the reimagining of Chumley’s as a chic, tony bistro pisses us off. Etc. Etc.
Then, as if someone hit the smart bomb button in a giant game of “Defender,” the pandemic arrived.
Age-old speakeasy bar? Fuck you, you’re closed. Newly minted nouvelle Indian bistro? Fuck you, you’re closed. Niche curio shop for left-of-center gift ideas? Fuck you, you’re closed. Neighborhood institution helmed by third generation of proud proprietors? Fuck you, you are closed.
Like September 11th before it, the historical impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has rendered such provincial concerns moot and mute in a manner no scale of gentrification could ever match. Sure, lots of places are still hanging on, but the rulebook has been torched and businesses of all stripes are frantically trying to innovate on the fly and improvise a tenuous way forward.
Here in the throes — again, notice I didn’t say wake? This isn’t over yet — of the COVID-19 era (or the Trumpandemic, as I was calling it), virtually every New Yorker is now a brazen nostalgist, albeit of a possibly shallower calibration. While I may continue to sigh wistfully while passing the former site of a comic-book shop from my distant childhood that is now a cell-phone emporium, your average mask-wearer on the street is now nostalgic for just seven months ago, when he or she could walk out of their pricey condo and get a friggin’ boba tea and a new vape pen without worrying about contracting a viably lethal respiratory infection. No one has time to look back. We must all collectively look forward and figure out a future.
As a result, my usual, old habit of floridly ruminating ad nauseam about the New York City of my particular yesteryear feels less relevant than ever — which is saying something. Because, honestly, who could really give a rolling rat fuck about a favorite lost dive-bar I used to get drunk in back in 1989 when approximately 150 bars and restaurants here have permanently closed since March 1, 2020?
But, you know what they say about old habits. They die hard.
Walking home from a quick visit to my temporarily dormant office yesterday afternoon, I passed by the former site of Rocks in Your Head on Prince street, the record shop pictured at the top of this post, which closed in 2006. In the wake of the departure of Rocks in Your Head, the basement-space in question played host to a real estate agency, a concern that set up a rabbit-warren of office cubicles where racks and racks of rarefied LPs used to be. Evidently, said agency also recently fell prey to the conditions of COVID-19, and the space is now entirely vacant. I could not help peering in and capturing the photo below from roughly the same vantage point as the photo above.
Throw your support behind you favorite aspects and local businesses of New York City old and new, and may we all get through this.
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