Flaming Pablum

London Acquiescing

Some of you might remember a pair of posts 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.

No More Time For Looking Back

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.

Moments With Moby

I find it kind of striking that in the fifteen years — jeezus — that I’ve been composing this silly blog, I don’t seem to have ever mentioned the artist Moby beyond a passing invocation. I mean, it’s not like I was ever a massive fan of the guy, but I certainly had nothing against him. The most notable aspect of Moby with respect to the usual thrust of this blog is that he was formerly the upstairs neighbor of my friend Sean when they both lived on Mott Street just south of Houston. They’ve both moved on since (Sean went to Brooklyn, Moby went … somewhere else), but Sean did have one kinda dreadful anecdote about living beneath the man, that being a genuinely unfortunate plumbing mishap wherein Sean’s furniture became splattered with Moby’s …um… sewage in the wake of a burst pipe. Hey, this is what happens when you decide to live in a rustic old SoHo loft space, I guess.

In terms of Moby as a musician, I certainly own a few of his records, among them, of course, Play, the album that made him a household name — I believe my mother-in-law actually owned her own copy of that disc. It was Play that transformed him from a nebbishy underground electronic wunderkind into a bona fide celebrity — however awkwardly. It was then that the worm turned, so to speak, and Moby became a weird kind of irritant for a lot of folks. He seemed to develop a knack for putting his foot in it.

One example of this was when Moby asserted in Steven Blush’s strangely divisive documentary “American Hardcore” that he fleetingly sang for sludgy hardcore legends Flipper. Suffice to say, Flipper denied the claim, and the fallout from same seemed to cost Moby a deal of credibility (although, to be fair, there is video). This episode, however, was small potatoes compared to the brouhaha that ensued when Moby published a memoir — his second — in 2019, wherein he alleged a lurid involvement with actress Natalie Portman. Like Flipper before her, Portman shot down that claim, and the backlash was swift and brutal.

In the wake of that, Moby understandably went a bit quiet. I cannot say I’ve followed his professional trajectory too closely, but I was bemused to find he recently taped an episode of “Turned Out a Punk,” the podcast of erstwhile Fucked Up lead singer Damien Abraham (you may remember I mentioned this podcast when they interviewed Lydia Lunch). Given Moby’s pre-fame/pre-notoriety days in punk rock (he played in Connecticut bands AWOL and The Vatican Commandoes, back in the day), he was certainly a good “get” for Damien’s program. Discovering, this morning, that my trusty-if-anachronisic iPod was out of juice, I opted to listen to Damien interview Moby on my iPhone.

If you’re curious to hear more bits about Moby’s priapic entanglements, you won’t find those there, but Moby does delve into his days as a nascent suburban punk rocker, and discusses visiting some notable Manhattan record stores this blog holds dear like Rocks In Your Head, Bleecker Bob’s, Sounds etc., along with his experiences as some hardcore shows at the Ritz, The Mudd Club and some others. If you’re a fan of that sort of stuff, as I am, it’s worth your time.

Check it out here.

Where We Are: Clashing with The Clampdown

I cannot take credit for the image above — a cleverly manipulated re-rendering of Pennie Smith’s iconic photograph of Paul Simonon from the cover of London Calling by The Clash — that was put up on Instagram by a cryptic poster who goes by the elusive moniker M.O.T.E. But, upon spotting it earlier this week, it sort of fit my mood to a tee.

Smith snapped the original photo of Simonon at New York City’s Palladium, although you should really check with my friend Dave Marin about the exact date. It was not a choreographed shot. She simply captured the moment wherein the lanky Clash bassist lost his patience with his instrument and decided to take it to task. When storied Clash frontman Joe Strummer saw the shot on Smith’s contact sheet later, he purportedly zeroed right in. “That’s the album cover.” Case closed. I’ve always found some irony in the fact that while Smith’s photograph almost singularly captures the brazen iconoclasm of everything punk rock was allegedly about, London Calling was actually much more of a love letter to a broader range of musical styles than simply another slab of by-then conventionally vitriolic “punk rock.” That cover, however, remains a perennially resonant photograph, cramming myriad associations into a single image — frustration, nihilism, reckless abandon, rebellion and rage.

Replacing Paul Simonon’s doomed Precision bass with a hapless laptop, M.O.T.E. has obscured the context, but retained the associations. Suffice to say, over the last several weeks, I have routinely felt like treating my laptop like Paul Simonon’s start-crossed Precision bass and lashing it against the pavement. After four and a half months of working remotely, while myself and my extended team at work have amply demonstrated our prowess at staying busy and productive, the novelty has really worn thin. I remain rapturously thankful to still be actively employed in this doomily dystopian hellscape of an economy, but there seems to be an overall malaise, at this stage of the proceedings. Everyone’s testy, tired and irritable — exhausted by the uncertainties of the future, the inefficiencies of the present and the abject idiocy of the recent past, when a more thought-out federal response to the pandemic might have brought the situation under control sooner, as opposed to the literally plan-free anarchy that is our current reality. Collectively, I think we were all hoping and expecting to have things in hand, by now, but that’s just clearly not the case.

It’s also tragically laughable that even this many months — and this many deaths — into the pandemic, many of my slackwitted fellow countrymen are still balking at simple guidelines emphatically extolled by revered medical professionals. 155,000 Americans are dead, and we’re still seeing video after video of irretrievably dim Costco shoppers thwarting mask requirements and moaning about their personal freedoms being violated.

One of their own — Herman Cain — similarly refused to wear a mask, calling the pandemic a “Democratic Hoax.” He went mask-free to a Trump rally in Tulsa, OK. Shortly afterwards, he tested positive for COVID-19, got ill, was hospitalized and is now — WAIT FOR IT — dead.

What more evidence do you need, at this late point in the day?

Don’t be stupid like Herman. Wear a mask. Stay safe. And don’t smash your laptop …. you’ll regret that.

The Rise & Fall of OPEC SID’S Hardcore Hotline

Here in 2020, watch any documentary about the golden days of hardcore punk, and you’re pretty much guaranteed a couple of things. The first is that Ian Mackaye and Dave Grohl are bound to make a couple of cameos. The second is that somewhere along the way, someone is going to allude to the furtive network of communication — decades prior to the advent of the internet — that enabled bands and punk fans to connect, evangelize the music, book gigs, share crucial touring tips, establish scenes and thrive. Purple prose aside, it was the very essence of the “do it yourself” ethos in action, and it’s part and parcel of what made the hardcore scene of the 80’s totally organic and unique.

Today, of course, all of that type of information can be gleaned in seconds via any number of online resources. As with many things in the digital age, technology has enabled us to accomplish formerly complicated tasks without even having to put our pants on.

Once again, `twas not always thus.

Back when I was a sniveling little, acne-speckled teenage schmuck looking to find out when my beloved Circle Jerks were going to play New York City, my first go-to outlet of information was The Village Voice, a storied free weekly that came appended with loads of gig ads in the back pages. My second source of intel was just to walk the downtown streets. Prior to Mayor Giuliani’s draconian re-imagining of New York City’s quality of life, the exposed walls of Greenwich Village, SoHo, the East Village and certain other areas played host to a wide array of flyer campaigns. Longtime readers might remember my fixation with the Rock Hotel flyer series. After a while, my eyes were automatically conditioned to scan the walls for those signature black posters and their block capital white letters over a cryptic skull design — now considered fine art in certain circles.

The third reliable source was simply the word of mouth. As I was a regular patron of several likely concerns like Second Coming Records on Sullivan Street, 99 Records on MacDougal Street, Rocks in Your Head on Prince Street, Freebeing Records off St. Marks Place, Bleecker Bob’s on West 4th Street and many, many others (all vanished now, of course), my contacts behind the counter would routinely inform me of pertinent happenings on the regular. I was never at a loss.

I am somewhat embarrassed to confess, however, that I was evidently entirely unaware of another crucial means of disseminating this vital information. My writer friend Mike Stahl — a couple of years my junior, an otherwise meaningless difference in age that I used to routinely lord over him when asserting that the bands of my era were superior to the bands of his era … like it’s a competition — just penned a magisterial article for MEL Magazine (don’t ask me) about the phenomenon of OPEC SID. If, like myself, you are unaware of the significance of OPEC SID, you are in for a treat.

Click here and rise above.

Back ... Fleetingly ... to A7

Back at a media outlet I used to work for about a million years ago, a colleague of mine had unearthed a trove of footage from the early 80’s of scenes from outside the old A7 space on Avenue A (which, today, is the rear chamber of Jesse Malin’s Niagara bar). There was loads of it, and he and I watched it all, spotting various luminaries along the way. Why the media outlet in question had amassed it in the first place was sort of lost in the mists of time. For the layperson, it probably didn’t mean too much, but for those slightly more invested, it was a tantalizingly rarefied glimpse back in time.

At the time, my colleague was investigating the option of doing something more with the footage, or working with certain other individuals that were interested in doing something more with the footage. Years later, I have no idea whatever became of those plans, and being that I no longer work at the media outlet in question, I figured nothing would ever come of it, and I’d never see that footage again.

… until today.

It’s yet another work-from-home day wherein the onus of staying focussed and productive is proving elusive. In one of several needless breaks, I found myself trawling YouTube for interesting fodder. As I've mentioned recently, with all the time-at-home people have been grappling with during the pandemic, lots of new stuff has been popping up on YouTube, so I’ve been regularly plugging in certain key words and seeing what surfaces.

As it happens, the footage below was uploaded quite some time ago — 2018 — by a source called Global Image Works, but this is just a portion of that original trove of A7 footage I’d viewed all those years back with my colleague at my former media outlet. How Global Image Works came to acquire this sliver of it — let alone where the rest of it is — remains a mystery.

In any case, dubbed “Slam Dancing and punks on the Streets of New York,” here is a frenetic and maddeningly brief montage of images from outside the former A7 space on East 7th Street and Avenue B. If I had to put a date on it, I'd suggest 1981/1982, but I'll defer to the more informed.

Enjoy…

Helmet in the Park

I always felt I should like Helmet more than I did. Sure, they recorded some truly amazing songs, “Turned Out” and “Biscuits for Smut” being two of my faves. They were hard, heavy and uncompromising, but — by the same token — they seemed to lack a little of the sneery charisma of their peers like The Unsane, Prong, Barkmarket, Surgery and — oh yes, wait for it — Cop Shoot Cop. Page Hamilton was certainly an innovative guitarist (and an avowed acolyte of Killing Joke, no less), but too often, they fell a bit flat, for me. I just wanted a bit more.

The track below is not the original video for their “big breakout” single “Unsung,” from In the Meantime. That video found the band playing in a strobe-lit abandoned foundry (or something) with lots of corrugated metal, rusty pylons and sharp edges and … y’know … chains and shit, amplifying their metal chops, I guess. Lots of bands did that.

I don’t know if this was shot before or after that, but I love this version because it was shot in the old East River Park Bandshell, the same space used in older videos by Kid Creole & the Coconuts, False Prophets and a few others.

This clip also highlight’s Helmet’s kinda weird, clean-cut fashion sense — lots of utilitarian ringer t-shirts, shorts and white socks with black sneakers. Never really got my head around that vibe, not that it affected their music at all.

More striking, here, is the state of the bandshell circa 1991, which looks crumbly, abandoned and slathered with graffiti. The space got a huge makeover/overhaul about five or six years ago, and looks nothing like the place presented here.

Anyway, enjoy…

Diggin' Up Dig Dat Hole

It must be said that, if nothing else, the pandemic has been a positive boon for the uploading of esoteric shit on YouTube. I guess with everyone on lockdown with loads of downtime on their hands, the moment finally seemed right to digitize and upload all sorts of far-flung crap, at long last.

Such is the case this week, as just goddamn yesterday, a YouTuber named E3 — how cryptic! — saw fit to upload the so-called Adult Contemporary mix of the debut by Dig Dat Hole.

For those playing along at home, Dig Dat Hole was the band Tod [A] played in after his stints with The Dum Dum Boys, The Crabs and Shithaus, but before his celebrated turns helming the mighty Cop Shoot Cop and his current-albeit-temporarily-dormant combo, Firewater. DDT also featured future Cop Shoot Cop drummer/percussionist Phil Puleo (later of the Audio Dyslexia, The Body Lovers, Angels of Light, and more notably SWANS and, most recently Human Impact) and a guitarist named Mike Rose. They played a few gigs here in the city alongside names like Railroad Jerk, Pussy Galore, Rat at Rat R and White Zombie, to name a small few, at since-vanished venues like CBGB and the Lismar Lounge. 

E3 shared some more info…

DIG DAT HOLE
Vocals/Bass: Tod A.
Guitar: Mike Rose
Drums: Phil Puleo

DIG DAT HOLE was the band Tod A and Phil Puleo were in just before forming Cop Shoot Cop. Most are familiar with them from the Kneejerk test pressing on Ruthless Records. What most don't know is that the record was also going to be released by Tom Smith on his Adult Contemporary label. What's more, the Adult Contemporary mix is waaaay better than the Ruthless Records mix, however it's impossible to find... except by me. I have a taped copy that was sent to the Ugly American zine by Tom Smith back in the early 90s.

I had to fly in A Similar End and a short part of Cooler Than You (don't worry. you won't notice the splice) from the Ruthless version due to an overdubbing accident that happened years ago.

Track listing is:

1) Six Good Reasons

2) I Exist

3) Dig Dat Hole

4) Spiritual Monday

5) A Similar End

6) Cooler Than You

7) Down

8) Infected Again

Here is Tod & Phil talking about the troubled record during a Cop Shoot Cop interview with the Ugly American fanzine on Feb 4 1990:

Tod: Steve Albini, who is just a weasel, dicked us out of a promise he made to us.

UA: Oh yeah, wasn't he going to produce?

Tod: No, he was just going to put out our record, but he like hedged and hawed, you know, he just strung us along for, what is it? A year and a half? A year?

Phil: Something like that.

Tod: And someone else before that, so it was just kind of like, "fuck it." We had other ideas, so...

UA: Was the other guy Tom Smith?

Phil: They know all about Tom Smith.

Tod: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

UA: Do you hate Tom Smith?

Tod: Um, Tom Smith is just kinda pathetic, like when I finally met him it was just... I went there with the intention of beating the shit out of him, but he was just sort of a pathetic drug addict. So I just left.

UA: What did he tell you about releasing the record?

Tod: He said he'd been doing a lot of cocaine and he used up all the money he was going to put out records with, um, doing cocaine and it was like, uh, cool... cool record label. Yeah, like "I'm sorry, I was really fucked up and I had to go out to my dad's place to build boats to straighten out."

One wonders, where is Tom Smith today?

Enjoy...

Happily Ever After Hours

In the wake of my last couple of posts on “After Hours" — let alone the many posts I’ve devoted to the film over the last fifteen years — a regular reader who posts under a wide array of names posed the following questions…

What was the coffee shop where Paul and Marcy met? Who was the punk girl who gave Paul the flyer to Mohawk Night? I mean backstory (casting, what she went on to do etc.) Any real deal NYHC people in the Mohawk This Guy! scene? I bet Davey Gunner from Kraut and/or Doug Holland from Kraut and Cro-Mags were extras.

Okay, let’s dive in and see what we can answer…

What was the coffee shop where Paul and Marcy met?

Okay, I have two theories about this, actually. In terms of the storyline, Paul resides on the Upper East Side, although I don’t believe his exact address is ever revealed. The interior of the coffee shop looks somewhat similar to a former restaurant on Lexington Avenue between 77th and 76th street, although I don’t believe it is still there.

This all said, it also resembles another spot on Park Avenue South (just a few blocks to the north of the building wherein Paul’s character works), but — 35 years after the facts — these locations no longer look as they did in 1985. There’s a shot when Marcy is speaking that you can see a large-paned window behind her that reveals some detail of the street running perpendicular to the avenue the coffee shop is on. I’m projecting, but it looks a bit like East 25th street. Again, though, I do not have the concrete answer to this question.

Who was the punk girl who gave Paul the flyer to Mohawk Night?

That being this fetching young lady …

I cannot honestly say I recognize her, although several bona fide punk folks from the NYHC scene do appear in the film, so she might be more than simply an actress.

Any real deal NYHC people in the Mohawk This Guy! scene?

Funny you should ask, as YES, which I went into great detail about on this old post.

I bet Davey Gunner from Kraut and/or Doug Holland from Kraut and Cro-Mags were extras.

I don’t believe either of those gents were, ALTHOUGH the classic A7 t-shirt Doug Holland sports in the video for Kraut’s “All Twisted” does indeed make a quick cameo.

More about "After Hours" on Flaming Pablum:

SoHoliloquoy (7/16/2007)

 Kiki Bridges Revisited (1/16/2010)

 The Sounds of After Hours (2/26/2010)

 Long After ‘After Hours’ (7/18/2012)

 ‘This Dark, Funny, Paranoid New York Summer Movie’ (6/13/2013)

 Terminal Times for the Emerald Pub (6/20/2015)
Mohawk Night at Club Berlin (6/29/2015)

Somewhere "After" the Rainbow (6/16/2017)

After Hours AOC (4/15/2019)

"Ric Handed Me Back the Cheese" (1/08/2020)

Paul is Dead: Who is the Man in Black at the End of "After Hours"? (7/10/2020)

"After Hours" in Avalon: A Tale of Two T-Shirts (7/11/2020)

Ill Reconciliation

If you care even slightly about the Beastie Boys, you’ve probably already heard about this, but the Broken Record podcast reunited Adam Horovitz and Michael Diamond with Rick Rubin.

Again, if you care, it’s mandatory listening.