Flaming Pablum

Back to McCarren Pool: Devo in 2008

Tonight will be either the eighth or ninth time I’ve seen my beloved Devo perform, having previously caught them at shows at Radio City Music Hall, the Palladium, the Newport Music Hall in Columbus, the Central Park Summerstage, the Hammerstein Ballroom, the McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, Irving Plaza and at least one or two others I’m forgetting. I had tix to see them return to Radio City Music Hall in 2021, but that got nixed. As Devo was my first-ever concert in 1981, I’m bringing Oliver, and they will be HIS first-ever concert. We are very much looking forward to it.

Someone recently uploaded the whole show at McCarren Pool from 2008, which was an amazing gig indeed. I ranted about it in real time here. This video omits the very end, however, when Devo tried to come out for an encore (with Booji Boy) and some McCarren Pool goon literally snatched the mic out of Mark’s hand. So much for Brooklyn being laid back.

Here was Jerry’s take on the incident (from this oral history):

Casale: At the end of every Devo show, the band comes out with Mark wearing the Booji Boy mask and we do “Beautiful World.” The sound always comes down and Booji Boy does a faux-Springsteen satire telling long drawn-out stories, but not at McCarren. The pool had a ridiculously early curfew of 10 p.m., but we didn’t think it was a hard and fast rule. Before we started, the mics and the amplification went dead thanks to the long arm of the law. I’m screaming at the sound guys on the side of the stage, the audience is booing and hissing, it’s getting ugly. Two security guards walk out on the stage and tell Booji Boy he’s got to go. In his high-pitched voice he’s saying, “I just want to talk to them,” and the guards grab him by the arms and walk him off the stage. We thought, “We’re the headliners, they have to let us finish our set.” We couldn’t believe it. All those radiation suits and energy domes became sad clown outfits.

A then-derelict giant swimming pool. I remember dutifully rockin’ out at this show in a pair of battered ol’ Chuck Taylors. After two hours of boucin’ up and down on the pool’s unrelenting, cracked concrete floor, I could barely walk.

A few years later, McCarren Pool stopped hosting live music and was converted back into a public pool in 2012, something of a death knell for that era of Williamsburg's character. 

Six years after this performance, original Devo member Bob "Bob 2" Casale passed away, the second original member to die after drummer Alan "Human Metronome" Myers in 2013. Today, the surviving members -- Mark Mothersbaugh, Jerry Casale and Bob "Bob 1" Mothersbaugh -- are flanked by longtime drummer Josh Freese -- who has played with everyone from A Perfect Circle and Guns N' Roses through Weezer, The Vandals and Nine Inch Nails -- and guitarist Josh Hager, formerly of The Rentals and ShadowParty.  

Crank it.

Back to Downtown NYC `89 … via Japan

Here’s a quick weird one.

As I understand it, “Zip’s” was a Japanese travelogue/pop-culture television program. In this particular episode, they focused on various spots around downtown Manhattan, notably The Gas Station on Avenue B. It’s all very disjointed and odd, but an enjoyable look back.

Retrovirus & Art Gray Noizz Quintet Drop a Bomb on Drom

Just a quick note to say I checked out Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus performance last night at Drom on Avenue A, with the mignty Art Gray Noizz Quintet opening. Sadly, we missed most of the first opening band, Skull Practitioners, but what little I caught was very cool.

Both the AGNQ and Retrovirus, meanwhile, played some truly amazing sets. I was really excited to finally see the former, and they absolutely did not dissapoint, even throwing in some hallowed Lubricated Goat tunes into the mix as well as an inverted cover of “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” by Bachman Turner Overdrive. Wasn’t expecting that.

Retrovirus, over the past few years, have truly become a force to be reckoned with. While Lydia’s signature brand of invective remains undiminished, when flanked by drummer Bob Bert, bassist Tim Dahl and dynamo guitarist Weasel Walter, there is practically nothing she can’t revisit from her sprawling back catalog that isn’t given a more sonically muscular new life. They didn’t play some of the Eight-Eyed Spy tunes I was hoping for, but they genuinely delivered one of the most cathartic live-music performaces I’ve experienced in loooooooong goddamn time.

While this was my first time in the venue as Drom, the space this all went down in was the basement-level venue that was more recently named Opaline, and – prior to that – a fetid sludge-metal cave, Beowulf.

As an added note, scattered amidst the crowd were various members of SWANS, Live Skull, Fractured Cylinder, the Bush Tetras and even Chet, the former cover star of many an Alice Donut album cover.

More Technical Difficulties with Cop Shoot Cop

So, not only did I do two posts in a row about the Plasmatics, I’m now also doing two posts in a row about Cop Shoot Cop. Please feel free to leave your compaints in the comments section, should you so desire.

Back in June of 2021, I stumbled upon a tantalizing snippet of a live Cop Shoot Cop performance caught within the storied confines of CBGB. It wasn’t technically superb – it was shot from somehwere in the crowd, was a little shakey and only featured sound in one channel – but it still captured the band in rollicking form. I wondered aloud, at the tail end of that post, if there was any more video from that particular night.

It turns out there was.

While the original video – uploaded by one Gary TseTse Fly --- asserted that the show was recoded in 1992, this new clip says May of 1991. Honestly, who knows which to believe?

Regardless, from that same evening, here’s Cop Shoot Cop having a growly bash from one of my very favorite selections, “Burn Your Bridges.”

Happy Valentine’s Day!

A Solid Evening of Quality Hearing Loss

As should be of no surprise to anyone, I run the “official” Cop Shoot Cop facebook page. It’s “official” in that all the former members of the band are more or less aware that I do it, and would just as soon I keep on doing it, just so they don’t have to. As such, I am routinely searching for images, videos and ephemera to host on said page, ... and much of that same content ends up here, as you may have noticed.

In any case, at one point last week, I stumbled upon an old, signature ad from presumably The Village Voice or possibly New York Press for then-upcoming gigs at CBGB. Dating back to probably about 1992 or 1993, the gig on said ad boasted Cop Shoot Cop supported by an estimable coterie of similarly inclined outfits like Barkmarket, Soul Coughing and Motherhood Bug. As I mentioned, it was, by all accounts, a solid evening of quality hearing loss.

Being that I’ve already posted a host of archival Cop Shoot Cop and Motherhead Bug footage (including some from the very interior of CBGB, like here and here), I thought I’d take the time to evangelize the other two bands on the bill.

I wrote about Soul Coughing here, back in 2015, but there were a pretty genuinely unique ensemble. As recounted in lead singer M. Doughty’s hilarious memoir, “The Book of Drugs,” it’s frankly pretty astonishing that they managed to last as long as they did, given the fact that they didn’t get along at all. These days, Doughty pursues a solo career as a singer/songwriter. Drummer Yuval Gabay played drums on the first album by Firewater (featuring, of course, former Cop Shoot Cop frontman Tod [A]). I have no idea what happened to the other two gents. Here they were in marginally happier days.

Barkmarket was the power trio led by Dave Sardy, who later found considerable renown as a mixer and producer. Not only did he work with Cop Shoot Cop, but he also helmed the production for bands like Helmet, Skeleton Key, Enon, Atari Teenage Riot, Monter Magnet, Slayer, System of a Down, Bush and Marilyn Manson, among others. As amply evident on Barkmarket’s own records, Sardy’s penchant for big, expansive sound served him well. His production work took off, so Barkmarket went onto the back burner, sadly. These days, I believe he’s scoring films to widespread acclaim. I rant into Barkmarket's drummer, the excellently named Rock Savage, not too long back, on the subway, and he enthusiastically told me about his new band, World of If, who play kind of psychedelic post-rock soundscapes. No idea what happened to bassist John Nowlin. 

Anyway, as Barkmarket, they made a delightfully oomphy, heavy racket. Like so…

Today, Cop Shoot Cop is no more. Tod lives in Istanbul, working as a writer and threatens to revive Firewater someday soon. Jim Coleman and Phil Puleo play in Human Impact with Chris Spencer of The Unsane and Chris Pravdica of SWANS. Jack Natz is a full-time studio artist, but was recently working on a new musical project called EXP.

Motherhood Bug disbanded shortly after the release of their debut album, Zambodia. Ringmaster Dave Ouimet played with a number of other outfits, notably Foetus, Firewater and Sulfur, before fully concentrating on his career as an author and illustrator of truly striking children's books. 

As mentioned, Soul Coughing broke up in 2000. Doughty used to openly shoot down talk of any reunions, but evidently did try to get them back together (as detailed here). He has a new project called Ghosts of Vroom.

Barkmarket made five albums and two EPs before disbanding.

Today (or yesterday, technically) CBGB looks like this....

 

John Holmstrom Speaks

I’ve written about Punk co-founder and illustrator John Holmstrom here a few times, but he recently appeared on my favorite podcast, Killed By Desk (which I’ve also discussed several times here). In any case, it’s a great discussion — John delves into his origins in illustration and publishing, his travails with mainstream magazines and, of course, his days putting out Punk Magazine with Legs McNeil, including a tale about “lost issue #9” that evidently featured and in-depth interview with Kiss. One can’t help wondering how the publishing of that issue might have affected Kiss’ credibility (in possibly a good way). We’ll never know, because — to hear John tell in — dark forces intervened.

It’s great. Check it out.

Ronnie Goes to Mott Street

We lost the great Ronnie Spector, yesterday. I actually got to see her perform as a surprise guest at one of Joey Ramone’s birthday bashes at Coney Island High back in 1997. I was there to see The Dickies and the Pristeens, but who shows up but a bona fide rock n’ roll legend. The chemistry between her and Joey was palpable.

In any case, someone posted the below clip on Facebook today, and it immediately struck a chord. Here are Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes pursuing some hapless Italian fop on Mott Street in SoHo in 1964. Crazily enough, the bakery featured towards the end of the video is actually still there here in 2022, although the rest of the street looks entirely different.

Rest in peace, Ronnie.

Back Into Exile: Exhuming The Siberia Bar

Watch any documentary about a since-closed music venue, nightclub or bar, and you’re bound to hear some of the same stupid shit. Whether conscious of it or not, at least one of the participants will make one ridiculously clichéd remark or another about how the establishment in question was this unique confluence of poetically unlikely factors that could not, should not and never will exist again. Invariably, there will also be florid testimonials about the fabled proprietor of the place which portray that individual like some sort of star-crossed visionary from another dimension. While such declarations might even have varying degrees of truth to them, these soundbites have become so deeply and dependably rote as storytelling devices that these movies all practically blend together.

Given my blog’s brazen predilections for New York City nostalgia, I am, of course, no stranger to these sorts of films. “Life After Dark: The Story of Siberia Bar,” a 2008 documentary directed by one Jack Bryan, is no exception to the rules lamented above. That all said, you should still check it out.

I’ve written about both Manhattan iterations of the Siberia Bar here a few times, notably here and here. I honestly cannot remember who first told me about the place, but being that I worked at TIME Magazine, just down the block from the subway stop that played host to the first iteration of the bar, once I learned about it, I had to go check it out. This would have been around 1997, I’m guessing, and I swiftly became one of a cloying legion of irritating, drunk-journalist types prone to hanging out within its endearingly decrepit confines. I’m the inebriated jackass in the center of the photo above, taken at Siberia around `98, given the then-recently-procured Damned t-shirt I’m sporting (they’d played a Coney Island High — also gone, but no documentary yet — a few days prior). If you were a self-styled, world-weary, laboriously smug scribe of one stripe or another, you were bound to be found drinking irresponsibly there sooner or later.

Around 2000, the Siberia Bar decamped from its celebrated closet-sized perch in the midtown subway system and moved into Hell’s Kitchen. While the new location lacked its predecessor's seedy charm and intriguing mystique, the much roomier second version of the Siberia Bar retained the spirit of the old place … complete with those infamous stipulations about swearing and gratuitous hittin' on women.

Around the same time, however, I’d gotten married. As such, my nights darkening the already-very-dark doors of Siberia were somewhat sharply curtailed. I’d go every now and again, but hardly with any frequency. And then, sadly, in 2007, it closed for good.

I never knew of the documentary below’s existence until earlier this week. A reader named CB hipped me to it. Granted, I’m about 14 years late to the table, but for your viewing pleasure and edification, here it is….

Life After Dark: The Story of Siberia Bar from Jack Bryan on Vimeo.

Dead Again: Exhuming The Dead Boys

A couple of weeks back, I was motivated to write a post about my Christmas vacation of 1987. I was a junior in college and back home in NYC for a couple of weeks. During said two weeks, however, I was blessed enough to catch a string of shows at the Ritz, including incendiary gigs by Fishbone with Murphy’s Law and The Toasters (which i discussed in greater detail here), a rousing stop on the Ramones’ tour for Halfway to Sanity, a high-spirited performance by ska-malgam (I just made that term up) band Urban Blight and, kicking it all off, another floridly chaotic reunion show by The Dead Boys (see flyer above). It was one of my most memorable and cherished weeks as a feedback-deafened, rock-addicted newly-minted twenty year old.

So, yeah, I thought about writing up a whole post about that Christmas break and those shows and that venue, but then it occurred to me that I’d pretty much covered all that ground here already, and why would anyone really care? So, I abandoned it.

This all said, I found the video below … recorded about a month after that Christmas Dead Boys Reunion show … that really captures what the band were like at the time, and thought I’d share it here.

Exhuming The B-52's

Music geeks around my age love to wax rhapsodic about the first time they heard certain artists and having that epiphany, ...that bolt of lightning that immediately changed everything for them. While it’s ostensibly a statement about the groundbreaking nature of the music in question, all it often boils down to is a desperate assertion on the part of the storyteller, designed to subtly telegraph the notion that he or she was hip enough to immediately recognize said music’s groundbreaking significance and was cool enough to get in on the ground floor (i.e. “when it mattered, maaaaaaaan). This is how gatekeepers are born.

While I was indeed fortunate enough to hear a lot of bands “early on,” it was usually either (a) purely by accident or (b) via the good graces of genuinely hipper friends. As has been said, people who introduce you to new music are good people to have around. People who laboriously lord it over you? Not so much.

In any case, while I was fully onboard upon my first exposures to outfits like The Ramones, Devo, Blondie and the Sex Pistols, there were indeed several artists that I was either very slow to appreciate or that I simply “did not get,” at the time. I am somewhat to ashamed to admit, for example, that I did NOT immediately warm to the B-52’s.

Having cut my teeth on the juvenile spectacle & bombast of KISS and the po-faced pomp & circumstance of Pink Floyd, I didn’t quite know what to make of the first B-52s record, the one in the blindingly dayglo-yellow sleeve. It was my older sister that first brought it home, having already introduced the household to records by Blondie and The Police. At this stage, I’d sank my teeth into Devo, The Ramones, the `Pistols and the Clash, but …this wasn’t that. The B-52’s lacked the buzzsaw attack of those latter three bands. And while the B-52’s certainly shared a lot of the willfully odd aesthetics of early Devo, they lacked the Akron quintet’s pronounced penchant for confrontation. The B-52’s weren’t cynical iconoclasts. They just wanted to have a good time.

Beyond that, though, they were just silly. I mean “Rock Lobster”? What the Hell is that? My sister’s tireless spins of that now-iconic single and “Dance This Mess Around” frequently prompted me to skulk back into my own room for yet another world-weary spin of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, the ponderously self-indulgent magnum opus unleashed on the world just four months after the Athens’ band’s comparatively spritely debut. I suppose I figured I’d find more solace in the bitterly heavy-handed exhortations of Roger Waters than the giddily nonsensical declarations of Fred Schneider. It’s odd, now, to think that these two vastly different records were released in the same era.

While they basically annoyed me, at first, I did gradually warm to certain tracks, notably “Planet Claire” and “52 Girls,” the former for its spacey re-imagining of the Peter Gunn riff and the latter for its insistent surf guitars, both courtesy of B-52’s string-bender Ricky Wilson, a crucial element of the band that stopped them from being just a kitschy novelty act. He may not have been Ace Frehley or David Gilmour, but Ricky played his battered Mosrite (the same brand of guitar used manfully by Johnny Ramone, though you’d never know it, given the differing styles of the respective players) to incendiary effect, adding a muscular, pugnacious shove to even tracks like the otherwise idiotic “Rock Lobster.” It’s no accident that Ricky’s guitar is pictured prominently on the album’s back cover. Beyond the retro outfits, Fred’s inane barking and Kate & Cindy’s signature harmonies, it was the B-52’s’ secret weapon.

While I’d indeed started to slowly appreciate the first record, all it took was a solitary spin of “Private Idaho,” the first single of the follow up album, 1980’s Wild Planet for me to completely surrender. The opening notes of Ricky’s guitar alone were so goddamn satisfying. While I still have absolutely zero idea of what the song’s actually about, “Private Idaho” completely redefined the band for me, and I became fully invested from that point forward.

The only reason I’m thinking about them today was on my walk to work today, “Private Idaho” came up on my iPod just I was turning off Canal Street onto Cortlandt Alley, formerly the forbidding pathway towards the former Mudd Club at 77 White Street, a venue the B-52s were no strangers to.

The clip below, meanwhile, was not captured at the Mudd Club, but rather several blocks to northwest at Hurrah’s (also gone) courtesy of maverick videographer Charles Libin.

And, again, at the time, I did not get it. But now? It’s practically sacred.

Look out for the bikini whale!