For whatever reason, New York City in the depths of winter always reminds me of The Clash. I’m not entirely sure why. I just have vivid memories of listening to London Calling, Sandinista! and Black Market Clash during snowstorms, I guess.
In any event, given that the climate has prompted this once again, I found myself tracking through the band’s catalog and continue to marvel how well most of it completely stands up.
The video below came out in December, technically, but I thought it was still worth evangelizing. This coming May will be the whopping 40th anniversary of The Clash’s sprawling, 17-date residency at Bonds International Casino in Times Square. While that same year was the year I attended my very first concert, it was not one of those Clash dates, but rather Devo at Radio City Music Hall on Halloween night (see this post for more). I would have surely liked to see them at one of those fabled gigs, but it was simply not to be.
In the ensuing four decades, though, those shows have taken on a weightier significance, marking the band’s further evolution away from their punk roots into more experimental territory. Having stretched their oeuvre on London Calling to embrace established styles like rockabilly, R&B and jazz, the band were now racing forward, incorporating elements of funk and the burgeoning culture of hip-hop into their mix, crafting ubiquitous singles like “The Magnificent Seven” below, which was a thousand light years on from the barre-chord stomp of “Complete Control.”
The video, meanwhile, much like comparable videos for “This Is Radio Clash” and the longer-form documentary-style “Clash on Broadway,” features a host of period-specific footage of New York City that is, once again, barely recognizable to its current iteration.
I wonder whatever became of that banner that draped over the signage of Bond's, and also hung behind the band in the performance footage below. Museum somewhere?
I have to confesse that prior to “Pretend It’s a City,” Martin Scorsese’s extended love letter to Fran Lebowitz, I had never really given the writer/humorist/raccounteur a great deal of thought. To my mind, she was just one of those storied Gothamites like Tom Wolfe or George Plimpton; literary figures I was aware of, but had never fully invested in, given the generational divides between us. Her curmudgeonly sensibilities seemed akin to fellow dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker Woody Allen, albeit with a bit more urbane sophistication. What little I’d read of hers, I’d certainly enjoyed, but never gave it much more thought beyond that.
Here in 2021, thanks for Scorsese’s series on Netflix, Fran is unwittingly experiencing something of a rennaissance, having gained a whole new audience for her wry asides and acerbic observations. While she remains pointedly not for everybody (an old colleague of mine from TIME Magazinewrote a bit of a screed about her in the New York Times), I have to say that my admiration for her had quadrupled. Not only do I completely relate to her Manhattan-centric worldview, I find her completely hilarious. I think most of her detractors, like my friend from TIME, seem to take her just a bit too seriously and literally. This isn’t to say that I think Fran secretely does have an internet connection in her home – I’m sure she doesn’t -- but rather that I think she amplifies some of her diatribes for comedic effect. You, of course, may beg to differ.
One aspect of Fran’s life that had never even occurred to me was her fandom for the New York Dolls, which Scorsese fleetingly touched upon in the series. I wish they’d expounded further on that subject. I know she was a fan of Max’s Kansas City, but did Fran ever go to the Bowery in later years to check out CBGB? Did she ever get into Television or the Ramones? Hard to picture that.
In any case, if you’re still gagging for a fix after finishing “Pretend It’s a City,” Fran spoke with Kara Swisher for the New York Times’ “Sway Podcast” earlier today. Check it out here.
A few years back, I happened on some photographs of stalwart proto-shoegazer band My Bloody Valentine taken in New York City around the time of their watershed 1991 album, Loveless. I was quasi-lucky enough to see them on that tour at the Ritz, on a high-decibel triple bill with Dinosaur Jr. and Superchunk that I am convinced took a palpable toll on my hearing. In any case, in one or two of the photos, the band were depicted standing with their backs against a mosaic pattern that was inarguably the work of Jim Power, an East Village fixture whose signature art adorns many corners of the neighborhood to this day. The thing that was so perplexing, however, was that the picture of MBV also featured these strange, mask-like faces that looked so incredibly familiar to me, but I could not place where they might be. In my downtime, I searched far and wide or a wall with those faces on it, but always came up empty.
Eventually, I gave up and lost the pics in question. Life went on.
Last week, someone invoked My Bloody Valentine in one online forum or another, and up popped that very picture again. Here it is now.
Again, those strange background faces jumped out at me. I knew I’d seen them before, but certainly not recently.
Eventually, I figured it out.
The mask-like faces are no longer on that façade, that being on the southern side of the street on St. Marks Place just steps to the west of Avenue A. At the time, that would have been the side of rock’n’roll bar Alcatraz. It would later turn into a sushi bar and is more recently a taco place called Empello al Pastor.
Like I said, the faces are gone (knocked off by a vandal or Jim Power collector fanboy?), but the rest of the mosaic is still intact. You can see the same side of the patterned dish to the left of guitarist Kevin Shield’s head right above my son Oliver’s head below.
Mystery solved.
For the uninitiated, this is My Bloody Valentine....
More about My Bloody Valentine on Flaming Pablum here….
My friend Chung was instigating a conversation on Facebook, earlier today, based around a controversial billboard used to promote the Rolling Stones’ 1974 album, Black and Blue, which featured an image of a woman who’d been tied up and abused. While also comparable to a similarly objectionable billboard the Doors used to promote L.A. Woman (which featured a woman incongruously crucified on a telephone pole), I immediately thought of an old poster I’d spotted promoting a gig by — of all bands — Kraftwerk. I did some quick Googling to find the image in question, but came up with nothing. Then, I remembered that I’d probably put it on Get Back to Work, my ancient Tumblr page.
I started Get Back to Work (or Get Back Vassifer, really) as a complete lark — much like this blog — mostly as a means of aggregating images that appealed to my sensibility. This included album covers, GIFS, flyers, tour posters, promo photos, comics, memes, drawings, weird ads, archival pictures of New York, outtakes, t-shirts, movie stills, foreign movie posters, magazine covers, curious videos, risqué images, sci-fi, monster movies, cool graffiti, interesting book jackets, propaganda posters, Japanese robots, concert shots, ticket stubs, odd postcards, political humor, old New Yorker illustrations, badges, strange animations, unexplained phenomena, prurient doodles, and other bullshit like that, all presented usually without any explanation, in no order and more often than not without any helpful tags.
I occasionally had an agenda. It was a good place to store images, or at least set them to one side for later potential use here on Flaming Pablum. After a while, though, it just became an unwieldy pile of cool stuff collected for no readily apparent reason.
It seems I’ve occasionally added a scant image or two over the past year, but it’s far from a regular stop. But in searching for that Kraftwerk poster (which I eventually found here), I took a long, perilous trip down the rabbit hole. There are some truly great things to be found, if you’ve got the time.
Doubtlessly rekindled by my recent re-exploration of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, I dug out my old copy of Male, the live album by Foetus, which features a surprisingly faithful cover of the SAHB’s signature tune, “Faith Healer.” It had been a long damn while since I last spun Male, which kickstarted a whole new Foetus rennaissance for me. This is also fitting, as today is J.G. “Foetus”/”Clint Ruin” Thirlwell’s birthday.
Recorded at CBGB in 1990, Male is a sprawling, splenetic blitz through J.G. Thirlwell’s catalog, at the time, but significantly beefed up by the addition of a fully fleshed-out band. Prior to this era, Thirlwell had worked predominantly with manipulated tapes and samples. Augmented with a roster of noisy all-stars including Algis Kizys, Norman Westerburg and Vinnie Signorelli from SWANS, Dave Ouimet from Cop Shoot Cop and Hahn Rowe from Hugo Largo, Foetus’ indelicate blend of industrial caterwaul takes on a burlier, almost metallic heft, at points. There is still an avalanche of samples (courtesy of Ouimet), but they fight for dominance with the sternum-worrying crunch of the rest of the ensemble. It’s a burly, bracing listening experience that I highly recommend. About a year after the album was released, they released the show on video which – thanks to the benevolent magic of YouTube, you can watch here now. Duck & cover, …..
This of course, led me back to many of Thirlwell’s other records, including the excellent compilation Sink, his blistering major label debut Gash, Gondawanaland by his side-project Steroid Maximus and a few others. The last record of Foetus’ I tracked down was 2009’s Limb. About as far as you can get from the stentorian wallop of Male, Limb is filled with more nuanced, experimental pieces, though the end results are no less compelling. But I originally picked this album up in 2014 on the strength of its inclusion of “NYC Foetus,” a video documentary that’s as close to a definitive telling of the Foetus story you’re likely to get – featuring testimonials from pals and peers like Matt Johnson of The The, Michael Gira of SWANS, Martin Bisi, Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch and other likely suspects. I first mentioned it on this old post.
And, once again, if you wait long enough, …. these things surface on YouTube. Here it is now it its entirety … for the time being, at least, until someone with an interest in copyright demands its removal.
Enjoy with a nice slice a red velvet birthday cake for J.G Thirlwell….
Chris Stein of Blondie shared a photo on his social feeds today of some original artwork that adorned the wall behind the bar at CBGB (see that photo above). Here’s what he had to say about it.
These murals were behind the bar at CBGB’s at the far end near the stage. I took this the last week after it was closed . Hilly said he knew some of these guys names, they used to come into the place in the old days. Painted by a local artist in the early seventies, a woman. That’s all I’ve got on it. I’m not sure if they’re still there in Varvatos store, may have been covered up.
I’m assuming that by “the old days” he means prior the venue’s flashpoint as the birthplace of Punk Rock, when it was still a Bowery bar for the skid-row set.
When CBGB was being dismantled, I was still working at MTV News Online, and I *seem* to remember my colleague Chris Harris working that beat, and reporting that much of the original artwork on the walls of the place being painstaking removed and put into storage somewhere. I’m not sure that could really apply to this art, however, as the triptych looks like it was painted directly onto the actual wall.
One imagines they were covered up when John Varvatos moved it. Despite the clothier’s recent financial troubles, his business is still in operation on the Bowery, although I’m rarely in the mood to step inside. Anyone want to volunteer and go check it out?
This post is invariably going to cause me a lot of heartache, given my oft-cited blogging service's ongoing problem with broken images. But, here's hoping that'll abate. In any case, as you may have noticed, I take a lot of goddamn pictures. You may have seen several of these on this blog over the past 12 months, or you may have spotted them on my Instagram page, if you follow that. Whichever the case, here are some of my favorite images of the year in chronological order.
I used to have a problem with Patti Smith. I just never heard what everyone else claimed was so groundbreaking about her music, and I found her records to be sort of mewlingly overwrought. I did not equate her with her storied peers in bands like Television and The Ramones, etc. This opinion did me no favors.
Were that not enough, I was then asked by a rock-writer friend of mine, a German gent named Sky Nonhoff, to pen a chapter in a book he was putting together about sacred cows. Sky wanted me to address Patti’s oft-celebrated album, Horses, and give it the redressing it allegedly deserved. So, I did that, pulled no punches and went from being a passive non-fan of Patti Smith to an open detractor. The book came out — albeit only in Germany (I have a copy, but I’ll be damned if I can tell how Sky edited my copy) and the deal was sealed. Just for posterity, I re-posted my original English text here on my stupid blog. This was was even later sourced, much to my embarrassment, in Eric Wendell's 2014 book, "Patti Smith: America's Punk Rock Rhapsodist." Again, this did me no favors.
After years of alienating friends of mine with my continued reluctance to capitulate to the cult of Patti Smith, I started to suspect that my position was becoming an untenable one for lots of folks who otherwise liked and tenuously respected me (I had a similar problem with the Grateful Dead). As if on cue, Patti Smith published her memoir, “Just Kids.” I didn’t race to the bookshop for a copy, but — being unemployed that summer — I had lots of unsolicited free time, so eventually picked it up and read it, almost devouring the book whole in a only a couple of sittings.
In that rarest of instances, Patti’s book completely upended my preconceptions about her, and I suddenly felt like a world-class jackass for shooting my mouth off about her for all those years. I recanted with another post on my stupid blog, for whatever that was worth.
This all said, while I took back all the mean, dismissive thing I’d written about Patti Smith, I still didn’t really enjoy her music. I still found so much of her vocal delivery to be sort of cloying and affected — not unlike the same problem I’d formerly had with Tom Waits. But where I was able to overcome my Waits problem, I still had a hard time getting past Patti’s cadence and histrionics. I respected her way more than I’d ever used to, but I still didn’t want to hear her music, if I could avoid it.
Last night, I was coming home from visiting a loved one in NYU Langone Hostpial on 34th and First Avenue, zig-zagging my way slowly to the southwest through the bitterly cold and dark streets of the Medical Corridor. For whatever reason, this stretch of Manhattan always makes me think of New York City in the grim late 70’s. Sure, much of it has been re-built and radically gentrified like the rest of the island, but there’s still a bit of that dour, function-over-form, brutalist aesthetic that makes it feel depressing and charmless. As such, whenever I’m on that stretch, I tend to flip my iPod to listen to bands like the Jim Carroll Band, Richard Hell & The Voidoids and the afore-cited Television — artists whose music defined Manhattan’s vibe back then. In the middle of listening to a playlist I’d made in 2015, filled with those bands and others like Missing Foundation, The Feelies, The Lounge Lizards and the Dead Boys, this one song suddenly filled my headphones and almost stopped me in my frigid track right on Second Avenue.
It sounded like Patti Smith being backed by a way-less-indulgent ensemble, anchored by a taut, pugnacious groove and a suitably Television-like riff. Holy shit!! How did I ever miss this? Listening intently as I walked further, I couldn’t recognize the track as ever having been on Horses, nor later records like Easter or Radio Ethiopia. Was it from the “Piss Factory” era? Wracking my brain to identify the true provenance of the song, I simply hit play again without looking. How did this song even get on my iPod? Where did I get it, and how have I never appreciated it in all these years?
When I could no longer unspool the riddle and still without a flicker of an answer, I gave up and looked.
It wasn’t Patti Smith at all, but rather a comparatively obscure band from the original CBGB set called The Erasers. I’d gotten the song off the Numero Group’s truly excellent 2015 box set of the Ork Records stable. Prior to this cut, the only Erasers song I was even aware of was their fleeting turn in Amos Poe’s movie, “The Foreigner,” where they play a song called “No Se,” while the film’s protagonist Max gets beaten up by members of The Cramps. You can see that here.
Removed from the context of all their esoteric, historical minutia, when I heard “I Won’t Give Up” by the Erasers, I *immediately* assumed it was Patti Smith, which makes me wonder if others made that same assumption at the time.
In any case, today is Patti Smith’s birthday. If you are so inclined, cue up a bit of her music and raise a toast, but maybe also enjoy this taste of the Erasers, who probably wouldn’t have recorded anything were it not for Patti knocking down the original doors. For more about them click here.
Back in the early 90’s, my friend Roxanne (not her real name) had this completely bonkers gig in “club promotion.” She being younger, more energetic and significantly more fabulous than myself, it was literally a job of hers to hit six or seven hopping night clubs during the course of a single evening, handing out flyers for upcoming parties and events. On a couple of occasions, she dragged me along, opening up a whole new world to me. I was certainly familiar with a few of the major clubs, but mostly from going to see bands. Going to a club for the sheer sake of going to a club wasn’t something I was normally inclined to do, so this was a true learning experience.
On a few of those evenings in early 1991, I remember breathlessly trying to keep up as we hit long-vanished places like the LoveSexxy Lounge, Big City Diner, The Tunnel, The Palladium, a place, I think, called Morrissey’s (no relation to the Smiths) and about a half-dozen more hotspots. We’d glide past the velvet ropes, thanks to Roxanne's clout (her good looks didn’t hurt, either), and I’d wander around the place looking lost, drinking overpriced beers and listening to bad house music for fifteen to twenty minutes before she’d grab me and we’d swoop off to the next venue. We covered a lot of ground.
Between missions, we’d frequently repair back to the cavernous interior of the Limelight, which was the de facto base of her operation. I vividly remember one particular evening doing just that. Roxanne had to re-stock her supply of invites and check in with her boss, with dopey, uncool me tagging along behind her. I remember following her through the dark to what looked like a rugby scrum of garishly dressed characters. Roxanne marched right up to this one individual who was wearing a particularly bizarre ensemble involving clown make-up and assess pants. Through the ample rear portals on said pants, he had bright, electric blue teardrops painted on his buttocks. Despite the …er….”festive” nature his of attire, when he and Roxanne spied each other, he was all business, sternly rattling off a laundry list of directives for her to dutifully absorb and execute, as if he was the chief operating officer of very important organization. Between blunt orders to Roxanne, I think he gave me a withering glance or two, but then turned with dramatic aplomb and vanished into the crowd, with the rugby scrum dutifully following his posterior teardrops. I felt like I was trapped in an NC-17 version of “Alice in Wonderland.”
Roxanne grabbed me again and we headed off into the night. “What was up with that?” I asked as we slipped out some secret exit and onto West 20th Street. “Oh, that’s just my boss,” she sighed, “he can be kind of a ridiculous jerk, sometimes.”
First appearing in 2017 (above), taking the place of a mural depicting Joey Ramone incongruously sporting a pair of boxing gloves (a hollow allusion to Overthrow Boxing Club just steps away — part of the noxious corridor of fitness that had largely taken over the neighborhood), Shepard Fairey’s Blondie mural depicted the preternaturally gorgeous Debbie Harry gazing unblinkingly to the north from an original photograph by Bobby Grossman, flanked by allusions to their breakthrough 1979 album, Parallel Lines and images from the art of their then-new album, Pollinator, which Fairey had also designed.
Ostensibly conceived as a tribute to the neighborhood’s sadly fading punk roots (the site of the former CBGB is but a cheap beer-can’s toss to the east), Fairey’s painting remained largely unblemished for the past few years, until sometime this summer, when an increasingly less-relevant street artist saw fit to scribble his signature space octopus (or whatever it’s supposed to be) on Debbie’s comely neck.
Following that unsightly blemish, less finessed taggers went to town on the whole thing….
I’m happy to relay, as first reported by EV Grieve, that Fairey’s original work has been fully restored (below) to its sharp-lined glory, and Miss Harry’s distinctive physiognomy is back to being untainted by the sloppy doodling of bottom-feeding graffiti trolls. We’ll see how long that lasts.
I was half-thinking it might be time to mix it up, again, and put someone new on that particular spot. Richard Hell? Stiv Bators? Jayne Country?
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