Flaming Pablum

Goodnight, Andy Rourke

It sounds too perfect now, but the very first time I ever heard "How Soon is Now?" was on the dance floor of the 21st Street iteration of the fabled Danceteria in the spring of 1985.

I'd graced the venue a week earlier in the wake of my otherwise abortive senior prom when, at the suggestion of my significantly hipper classmate Liz Robaina, we ditched the increasingly maudlin interiors of Studio 54 (then in its spiraling death throes) for a markedly cooler destination downtown. That first visit (in a dorky rented tux, no less) proved indelible, and I was back a week later. Coaxed onto the dance floor by a mixture of temporary beery confidence and the airing of "Love like Blood" by my beloved Killing Joke, I was suddenly met with guitarist Johnny Marr's sensory-engulfing, reverb-drenched Bo Diddley beat and Andy Rourke's signature bass, veritably submerging the entirety of the club in a strange, slow-mo collectively swoony sway. Of course, Morrissey's lugubrious bleat was part of that mix, too, but the less said about him the better. Regardless, I bought the 12" single the next day, and life was never the same.

Andy Rourke just died from pancreatic cancer. He never seemed to get his proper due as a truly gifted musician (and he was even in the aforementioned Killing Joke for about five minutes). Rest in peace.

Play it loud...

Back to Tier 3

I would love to say I was cool enough to go to Tier 3 was it was a going concern, but I would have 13 years old, at the time. That may not have stopped everyone, but it certainly stopped me.

To walk by 225 West Broadway today, you’d honestly never know anything punky, cool or hip ever occupied the space. Today, it’s a comparatively genteel Italian restaurant named Terra, which used to occupy a space across the avenue. Back back circa 1979-1980, this tiny venue played host to local and/or East Coast bands like Bad Brains, the Beastie Boys, DNA, The Bush Tetras, the Bonogs, Glenn Branca, 8 Eyed Spy, The Lounge Lizards, as well as British bands like The Raincoats, Madness, The Slits, Young Marble Giants, The Pop Group and eve Bauhaus. Today, at 225 West Broadway, you’re more likely to find a persnickety TriBeCan complaining about how their pasta primavera is too tepid. Where once this chunk of TriBeCa was a sort of a bohemian frontier, here in 2023, it’s a fairly monied, well-traveled slice of covetable real estate.

I probably first heard the name “Tier 3” in “After Hours,” when Terri Garr’s character, Julie suggests to bedraggled Griffin Dunne’s Paul Hackett, deep into an evening of Kafka-esque turmoil, that “Tier 3 is still open!” It was already long gone by the time I’d ever heard of it, so for me to wax rhapsodic about its absence is a bit rich. Luckily, however, there is Amy Rigby.

I first invoked Amy Rigby here and then went onto interview her here. A veteran of the original Tier 3 scene, Amy recently put the video below together. Here’s what she had to say about it.

I made this short film as an intro for a panel on Tier 3: The Little Club That Could at the 2023 PopCon academic conference held in April at NYU. Holly George-Warren moderated our discussion of this beloved lower Manhattan nightspot that played a big part in our lives. Hilary Jaeger (who brought us in and booked the bands), Cynthia Sley of Bush Tetras who played there many times, and myself part of the Stinky's dance party crew & club coat check girl - we were also joined by my brother Michael McMahon who made many of the club posters, and Angela Jaeger from Stare Kits (our early band - first to play at the club) and later Pigbag and Instinct. Tier 3 was one of the only women-run punk clubs on the East Coast. And it was much more than that: it was a clubhouse for misfits in the land of misfits. With photo contributions from Julia Gorton, Steve Lombardi, Hilary Jaeger, Lucy Sante, Robert Sietsema, Niles Jaeger, Angela Jaeger, Amy Rigby, Pat Irwin, Beate Nilsen, Charlyn Zlotnik Artwork by Amelia Faulkner, Michael McMahon and some uncredited folks, let me know who you are) and Video by Liza Bear and Michael Mclard Thanks for watching - so many bands and artists played and showed their work at the club, would love to expand this to include more of them.

Without further ado, here’s Amy’s video.

Back to the East River Amphitheater ... with Cop Shoot Cop

As a revelation that should surprise absolutely no one, I run the Cop Shoot Cop Facebook page. The former members of the band didn’t particularly want to do it, so just they let me get on with it. And so I do, although that involves little more than doing periodic internet searches for pertinent mentions, pictures and videos and then posting them for the C$C faithful, who also send in assets to post. Back in 2013, I stumbled upon the shot below….

I had no idea of who shot it, where it was taken, what year it was snapped nor where it was first published, but dutifully shared it on the C$C Facebook page.

Ten years later, I’m happy to say that I can report that the photograph was taken by one Stephen Street to accompany a 1993 story in the British music-news weekly, Melody Maker written by legendary rock scribe Everett True. This was sent in by a C$C fan named Bill Farrar, who’s spotted it on Twitter.

The part that caught my eye, meanwhile, was the inclusion of the entire photograph (see below).

What I’d never realized about that first iteration of the photo is the location. The Cop Shoot Cop lads are pictured loitering menacingly around the Lower East Side Amphitheatre (or Bandshell, as some of us called it) in 1993, a full 30 (!!!) years before Mr. Farrar spotted it on Twitter.

I’ve written about the East River Bandshell several times here before (most recently here), but it was a significant Lower East Side landmark, for several years, especially as it started to gradually erode, slowly devolving into a hunk of urban decay like a set-piece from “Planet of the Apes.” In varying states of disrepair, it appeared in several music videos, notably “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy” by Kid Creole & the Coconuts, “Cold Turkey” by Cheap Trick (yes, a Lennon cover … also starring late skateboarder/scenester Harold Hunter), “Unsung” by Helmet and “Invisible People” by False Prophets, although I’m probably forgetting some others. It also made a prominent appearance in the classic hip-hop flick, “Wild Style.”

Of course, in later years, the East River Amphitheatre got a complete makeover, reducing the structure to its core shell, with some artful piping around it.

But then, in the wake of the damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, some contentious plans to radically re-structure East River Park writ large were put into motion, and the East River Amphitheatre was razed in 2021. I haven’t been down that way in a little while, so I have no idea what’s there at the moment, but I’m relatively certain it’s dispiriting.

Here, meanwhile is Cop Shoot Cop circa 1993.

Back to Cornelia Street

I think the first time I ever set foot on Cornelia Street (above, as stylishly captured by one Jean-Phillipe Rebuffet) was probably in about 1983, when my geeky grade-school chum and fellow Upper East Sider Spike (not his real name, but immortalized on this post) decided he could no longer tolerate living with his well-intentioned-but-somewhat-smothering mother on East 96th & Park Avenue (an apartment we used to refer to as “Checkpoint Charlie” given its placement on the then-seemingly-perilous border of East Harlem) and moved in to his newly-divorced dad’s swinging neo-bachelor pad at 2 Cornelia Street, a stately tower that loomed over the surrounding byways like a comparatively diminutive Flatiron building.

I can’t exactly say how chuffed Spike’s dad was to suddenly have his petulant 16-year-old son suddenly running amok in his swanky Greenwich Village apartment, but Spike made the most of it, fully availing himself to all the new experiences of the surrounding environs. While I’d dipped my toes in the water, so to speak, it was really Spike who coaxed me downtown to explore all the benefits of the then-still-seemingly bohemian Village. Had it not been for Spike, I’d have probably never discovered record-shopping at Bleecker Bob’s or live music at Folk City or cult movies at the 8th Street Playhouse. And we did all this with 2 Cornelia Street as our base of operations.

I don’t think that arrangement lasted more than two or three years, but that Cornelia Street address still comes with a lot of memories. It was there, for example, during some early Spring afternoon, we were lazing around his dad’s well-appointed living room watching some cable access channel and I first saw the video for Killing Joke’s “Eighties,” which shocked me right out of my lethargy to the point wherein I sprinted out of Spike’s place and sped across Cornelia Street to Subterranean Records (long gone and pictured below, but discussed at some length here, here, here, here, here, here and here) to frantically purchase the 12” single of same. It sounds silly, but this was a HUGE moment for me. It effectively changed my life, actually. 

I remember an evening hanging out in Spike’s room (his bedroom window was on the second floor, over what, for the last several years, has been a sexual paraphernalia/"party" store called Crazy Fantasy). We were enjoying a late-night pie from nearby Joe's Pizza -- and listening, as I recall, to a radio broadcast of a live Twisted Sister concert, as one would -- while gazing out the window across Sixth Avenue, directly opposite the little park that abuts the Washington Square Diner (which, I believe, is officially called The Golden Swan Garden) and the basketball court to its south, formally known, ominously, as "The Cage." It's no longer there, but there used to be one of those free-standing newsstands on the sidewalk in front of both those landmarks. Despite the late hour, the newsstand in question was still open, but was getting ready to close up shop for the night. As we sat there working on our slices, we watched as a group of three or four dubious-looking dudes approached the newsstand with obviously less-than-convivial intentions. Without missing a beat (I'm guessing he'd gone through this before), the newsagent sprang out of his little stand swinging a fucking baseball bat, clipping at least one of the would-be thieves across the gums with an impact we could hear across the avenue and over the shrill din of Dee Snider's voice. It was like watching an elaborately choreographed (and very violent) stage play. In short order the flashing red and blue lights of a police car were splashed across the windows and walls of Spike's place and the street-side show, as such, was over. We finished our pizza. 

But Cornelia Street is still so much more to me than simply Spike's place and punk rock records from Subterranean Records. There was also Le Gigot, a tiny French bistro (that I think is actually still there) wherein I watched my beloved step-father John nearly give himself a cerebral hemorrhage trying to order "just an AMERICAN cup of coffee, goddammit!!" It's also the home to Palma, a great little Italian restaurant and, across the way, the former site of the Cornelia Street Cafe, a very-sorely-missed neighborhood landmark that featured great food and live music in its basement. 

At its southern end, Cornelia Street (which my high-school classmate and native Greenwich Villager Jason C. would continually insist was pronounced like "KORN-ELLA" and not like the female form of Cornelius) t-bones into Bleecker Street at its busiest juncture, where concerns like Golden Disc Records (... later re-christened Bleecker Street Records...gone), Route 66 Records (gone), Murray's Cheese Shop (still there, but different location) and John's Pizza (amazingly still there) could be found. 

So, yeah, much like songwriter Louie Fleck in the last post, I have my own private associations with this particular strip of Greenwich Village. But here in 2023, it seems Cornelia Street has taken on an almost global significance -- one that finds hordes of zealous, crestfallen Taylor Swift fans flocking to an address in the middle of Cornelia Street (23, if you care) that the pop star fleetingly rented in 2016 and evidently immortalized in song. The reasons for this, as detailed in this piece in Vulture, involve Swift's recent breakup with some gent named Joe Alwyn, with whom the over-rhapsodized songwriter previously canoodled, presumably, at the Cornelia Street address. As a result, Cornelia now endures regular pilgrimages from distraught "Swifties" leaving flowers and sometimes loudly imploring their idol to "come out," entirely oblivious to the fact that Swift now lives several blocks downtown in TriBeCa. If her current address is a secret, it's the worst-kept secret imaginable. 

People are stupid. 

In any case, on my walk to work today, I took a momentary detour off Sixth Avenue to stroll down Cornelia Street. Spike's father left 2 Cornelia Street at some sad point in 1986, I believe, and decamped to Shelter Island. Spike joined him for a little while before going to Duke University and then moving into a grim apartment in midtown. He and I had a stupid falling-out in the early `90s, but ran into each other again on the street about ten years ago, but neither of us have called each other since. Subterranean Records, as mentioned above, closed for good in 2008 or so. Le Gigot is amazingly still there, although the Pearl Oyster Bar to its south has closed. Palma also remains, but the space that had been the Cornelia Street Cafe is dormant, gutted and tragic. 

Speaking of tragic, upon walking past the infamous 23 Cornelia, I did spot a sad, solitary flower, presumably left in tribute to Taylor Swift's star-crossed personal life. Ho hum.... One imagines this, too, shall pass. 

"Back Then"

I stumbled upom the video below, over the weekend, and it kind of struck a chord, pardon the pun.

Put together by a songwriter named Louie Fleck, “Back Then” is a music video of Fleck’s memories of the Greenwich Village he used to know, circa 1978-1984, when Manhattan was still, in his own words, “a folky-punky music town.” Set to a slightly incongruous reggae beat, Fleck’s song is a straightforward breakdown of the things he held dear that, by and large, are mostly no longer there.

While I recognize several of the images he utlilizes (I believe he may have even poached a scan I made of an old SPIN photograph of Freebing Records on St. Marks Place, but whatevs … I’m certainly no stranger to liberally appropriating images), I’m sure Fleck’s recollections are just as heartfelt and vital (to him) as the ones I continually cite here are to me, even if the touchstones and landmarks he highlights aren’t immediately familiar to me.

Everyone has their own New York City, here’s Louie Fleck’s….

The Distant Sound of Drums: Finding the Lost Club by the Bridge

So,in somewhat typical fashion, after posting that piece about Pussy Galore and The Gun Club playing at a mysterious club called Drums near the 59th Street Bridge, I became preoccupied with finding out more. This kinda happens to me a lot.

This was challenging on a number of fronts. For a start, the very name of the club – Drums – isn’t one that readily lends itself to easy research. I mean, the term is going to come up in virtually every entry about live music in one form or another.

Secondly, there’s the neighborhood it was allegedly situated in. Personally speaking, I consider that midtown, but – technically – East 59th Street is broadly seen as the southern border of the Upper East Side. It may not feel like the Upper East Side to some folks like yours truly, but be that as it may, it has been thus established.

Thirdly, while really not that long ago, Drums seems to have only existed for a hot second. It would have been in operation when I was old enough to drink, mix and mingle within its interior, so why I myself had never heard of it is a mystery, especially since it was hosting arguably scary bands I cared about like Pussy Galore and the Gun Club, but I spent much of 1988 still in college, so I can only assume that’s why I missed it.

Anyway, fixated with finding out more, I went up there, on rainy Saturday, to check the neighborhood out. I don’t know what I expected to find, but I felt compelled to go look.

Back in the day, so to speak, I spent a little bit of time around the 59th Street Bridge. My late friend Danny and I used to frequent a video arcade on First Avenue not too far from the comedy club, Dangerfield’s. Similarly, my fellow avid comic-collecting friend Jeremy’s divorced father had a sad studio apartment at 300 East 59th Street that we sometimes hung out at. Lastly, my own dad had a relationship with an airline hostess (yeah, I know) who lived in a cramped little apartment under the bridge’s overpass on super-depressing East 61st street. Lest that sound worse that it was, Dad actually married her, rescuing her from said flat. She was his third wife of ... several, but was a genuinely nice lady. They divorced, too (spoiler alert), but that’s a whole other story. Her former street looks a little bit better today, but it’s still a long way from salubrious.

Anyway, on Saturday, I circumnavigated the area, speculating where a live-music venue and/or rock club might’ve once held court. I’d hope to come across a neighborhood Irish bar wherein I might have found an old mainstay who’d have recalled such a venture, but no such luck. There was one spot I had a hunch about, but more about that later.

Overall, however, that little cluster of sloping streets – now outfitted with a Trader Joe’s under the bridge – exuded very little to suggest that a band like the antagonistically slovenly Pussy Galore had ever plugged in and rocked out nearby, especially but a stone’s throw from the posh environs of Sutton Place. That all said, while snapping some pics, I did see one little trace of “downtown.” Spraypainted high on a wall adjacent to the bridge was the telltale Missing Foundation logo, normally never seen north of Union Square. To tie it back to this story, prior to joining Pussy Galore, drummer Bob Bert did play in Drunk Driving, the band fronted by Peter Missing that would later turn into Missing Foundation. I took that as a sign.

Over the next few days, meanwhile, I continued my largely fruitless Googling, but made very little progress. More recently, however, a regular reader named G (that’s it … just G) wrote in to say he, too, had been to Drums, but was not largely impressed. He did, however, suggest that it was on East 60th, and not East 59th. That one little tip made all the difference.

I started Googling “Drums” and “East 60th Street” and BOOM, up came a “Sounds Around Town” piece by John Pareles from a 1987 issue of New York Times that cited the address of Drums as 333 East 60th Street.

My hunch was correct. The space that used to be Drums in the late `80s later became an outlet of the strip-tease franchise Score’s (I was actually taken to this very address for my bachelor party in 2001), only to later morph into the venture it is today, which is another strip club called Sapphire, which caters to hip-hoppin’ high rollers.

While that doesn’t shed very much light on what Drums was all about, that does kind of close the case.

Pussy Galore, meanwhile, sounded like this, at the time....

Back to Zoo York

In a not-at-all-surprising development, I have now become obsessed with divining the exact address and location of Drums, the club mentioned in that last post, allegedly somewhere in the shadow of 59th Street Bridge circa 1988.

Thing is, though, this is an incredibly difficult one. I mean, for a start, try Googling “Drums,” and “rock club” and see what comes up. It’s not the most distinctive name. It might take me a while, ... a long while. 

In any case, in my vain searching, I stumbled (or re-stumbled, more likely) on the photographs in Flickr of one DMAX3270, and, more specifically, their album, “A Zoo York State of Mind: 1985-1993.” It’s a captivating look at a city that is now virtually unrecognizable.

FIXED: Check it out here. 

Let There Be Drums

Here’s an odd one.

Bob Bert, legendary drummer/percussionist, former Piers Platters record-shop attendant and tirelessly cool guy posted an interesting pic with the following legend (which I am liberally cribbing from the great man, sheerly for the sake of this post):

On this day in 1996 Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club left the planet On this day in 1988 Pussy Galore played a short lived club called Drums which was by the 59th Street bridge in NYC with B.A.L.L. And the Gun Club. This was the night that I met Don Fleming. photo by @maciocephotography @popcatastrophe @juliecafritz @kwolf13 @jonspencerhitmaker @instantmayhem

Drums? 1988? 59th Street Bridge? Gun Club? No bells rang for me, so I started doing some digging.

This site sort of confirmed Bob’s account that the Gun Club played (they evidently opened with their cover of Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit,” which is a bold choice, but sadly failed to play my favorite Gun Club song, “Carry Home”), although suggest that the gig happened on March 29th, not the 31st. Personally, I’m usually more inclined to believe the guy who was there and played onstage more than some random website, but whatevs.

But then I happened on this picture above, snapped by one Derek Von Essen, of the great Jefferey Lee Pierce. Mr. Von Essen reports that said photo was snapped on March 31, 1988 … but in Toronto, Canada.

Chiming in on Bob’s post came a remark from Stan Demeski, another drummer who played with an array of great bands like The Feelies and Winter Hours. Steve says he played at Drums, too (albeit he did not specify which band) and mentioned that there was an awkward pole in the middle of the stage.

The only other mention I could track down of anyone else playing such a venue came from Wikipedia (oh how reliable) about an early iteration of the Black Crowes playing there.

Just for laughs, I then looked on YouTube, and sure enough…. my always forward-thinking friend Greg Fasolino was also there (of course) and recorded the Gun Club’s set …. also citing the 29th. I’ve mentioned him before, here, but Greg is like the Punk Rock “Zelig.” He was everywhere, I tell ya….

So, anyway, I think this all handily confirms when the gig was and who played it, but I am still intrigued by one crucial missing aspect. Yes, I understand the club was in close proximity to the mighty Queensboro Bridge (quite an odd neighborhood for these types of bands to be playing in, if you ask me), but what was the actual address of the venue? And what is there today?

Anyone? Anyone? Weigh in…

Back to the Dustbin

I first saw Ned's Atomic Dustbin in the early weeks of 1991 at a long-vanished club on the westernmost edge of West 21st street that I've mentioned here several times called The Marquee (with the louder/noisier/hairier Swervedriver opening). When the Neds hit the stage, it was this technicolor explosion of flailing hair, goofy t-shirts, oversized sneakers and gangly limbs, with each member of the band (barring drummer Dan-Dan The Fast Drumming Man) airborne more often than not. I was 24 at the time. 

This clip below, meanwhile -- recorded a mere two years ago -- suddenly finds the Neds (and their fans) having succumbed to the travails of age (this from someone significantly older, fatter and grayer than he was in 1991) and looking very much like the gaggle of dads they probably now are.

But they still bring the goddamn goods! Crank it!

Let Gavin Have It

I’ve invoked his name here on this blog numerous times, but back in my days as an erstwhile music journalist, I had the tremendous honor of twice interviewing Irish singer/songwriter/punk rocker Gavin Friday, former lead singer/provocateur of the Virgin Prunes turned surrealist cabaret chanteur. In later years, Gavin would branch out into film-scoring to become a respected composer in his own right. They say you should never meet your heroes, as all too often, the reality is an awkward letdown, but on both occasions, Mr. Friday was a chatty, affable and attentive conversationalist and a rivtetting raconteur, our sessions spilling way over the allotted times into meandering hours of deep, informative chat. The first time was at the sutiably atmospheric downtown loft of his then-manager, who lived on White Street in then-still-largely-ungentrified TriBeCa, the second at Sin-E, a tiny Irish bar/venue then on St. Marks Place. Once again, on both occaisions, Gavin Friday was a tirelessly amiable and engaging character.

In terms of perormance, I was able to to catch three shows of his here in New York, the fist being at CBGB on the tour for his first solo album, Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves (which I discussed here). The second was at the Bottom Line on West 4th Street at Mercer Street, wherein Gavin punctuated his set with daring leaps from stage to various table-tops with great dramatic aplomb. The third was at the Westbeth Theatre in the West Village. As of this writing, all of those venues are long gone – one’s an overpriced haberdashery, the second an antiseptic NYU facility and the third was literally bricked up and sealed away from the public like a tomb.

At this stage of the proceedings, I have grave doubts of ever interviewing the great man again, although with a new album of material allegedly in the can and ready to be set free on the world, one hopes another tour might follow.

The only reason I’m bring up Mr. Friday again is that he just did a the 100th episode of a great Irish pop-culture podcast called Let Christy Take It wherein he gamely unspools thoughts and anecdotes from each stage of his amazing journey as an artist. If you’re a fan, it’s well worth your time, and even if you’re not, Gavin Friday is a captivating storyteller.

Check it out here, and tell’em Flaming Pablum sent ya.