If you're a fan of the band, you may have already heard about this documentary, Charles Atlas' "Put Blood in the Music," which is a profile of the New York music scene circa 1989, concentrating on John Zorn and Sonic Youth. You have to wade through about two minutes of needless extrapolation from "The South Bank Show," but the doc itself is well worth your time.
Enjoy.
The concept of worth is an elusive thing. There are things out there in the world, somewhere, that probably mean next to nothing to the individuals who own them, but that I would consider positively invaluable. I’ve mentioned it several times here before, but there’s a certain elusive Cop Shoot Cop gig flyer circa 1990 at CBGB that I would gladly pay a handsome sum for, but I’ve just never been able to put my hand to it. Very recently, I came across a photograph of a lost bit of graffiti that I’ve been preoccupied with finding for literally over three decades, but when I asked the photographer’s representative how much a print of same might cost, the answer was in the thousands (translation: ain’t gonna happen). Why would someone pay handsomely for an old gig flyer? Why would someone pay for a photograph of old graffiti? Why ask why? Why do you like and pursue the things you do?
Then, of course, there are things that I happen to possess and don’t give a great deal of thought to that have gone on to become arguably valuable. I have a couple of books about No Wave and paperback copy of “The Stranglers Song by Song” (as mentioned here) that have gone out of print and strangely since become evidently rarified and summarily pricey artifacts. I have stacks of compact discs that might have been worth more than I’d originally paid for them, but the bottom has basically fallen out of that particular market.
Then there are things that may have once been entirely incidental that have ascended in perceived value to such an extent that they’re now shown in fuckin’ museums and prestigious collections. That will never cease to amaze me.
Another example of that revealed itself to me today when I stumbled upon the website of Gallery98. As I was perusing through their collection of party notices, gig flyers and nightclub invites, I noticed they featured a few of the distinctive cards for GREENDOORNYC. For the uninitiated, GREENDOORNYC was this series of regular parties, back in the mid-to-late 90s, in the East Village and Lower East Side thrown by Jesse Malin of D Generation. Originally, they were held at a variety of different locations until finally coalescing at the space on St. Marks Place that Malin would later commandeer as Coney Island High. These events were well-attended and raucous gatherings of East Village rock’n’roll types and went on for hours on end. I was lucky enough to go on three or four occasions, and always had a damn good time.
As such, I have a number of these silly cards, usually depicting period-specific antiheroes like Stiv Bator, Johnny Thunders, KISS, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Debbie Harry and the like. They formerly adorned my fridge on East 12th street or were pinned up to any number of bulletin boards at any of the several different jobs I’ve had since that era as mementos of my misspent semi-youth. They now live in a selection of battered envelopes of ephemera hastily amassed when I was leaving any one of those afore-cited jobs. They’re no longer pinned up and displayed, but I still have them, buried in the closet.
As a lark, I reached out to Gallery98 to inquire as to how much these cheaply printed and thinly produced scraps of cardboard are currently selling for.
Apparently, they’re currently selling for $100…. EACH!
It’s by no means a stretch for any blog that concentrates on downtown NYC, but I’m sure I’ve mentioned Downtown Beirut here a few times, the long-lost watering hole on First Avenue. Don’t bother looking for it today, of course. I honestly can’t remember what’s there in 2021, let alone if said venture is even operational, at this stage. But, in any case, as Downtown Beirut, is was practically a holy site for folks of a certain disposition.
I cannot remember the first time I set foot in the bar, but it was invariably at some point around 1988 or 1989, relatively late into its storied tenure. True to its oft-repeated legend, it did indeed have a robustly adventurous jukebox of the old-school variety, and I remember being fairly gobsmacked to find bands like the Buzzcocks and Modern Lovers on it. It was a favorite spot for my fellow paylessly disgruntled SPIN interns and I to frequent, along with being the first place I ever witnessed my friend Dusty’s star-crossed garage-noise band, The Bastards of Execution, perform.
To my recollection, Dowtown Beirut feels like the place wherein the 80s transformed into the 90s, the decade that would eventually turn the bar's lights out. By 1994 or so, it was but a memory. To this day, invoke its name and watch folks who pair their greying temples with increasingly ill-fitting Lunachicks t-shirts get moist around the eyes. Many of today’s bars try to emulate its singular brand of grimy, punky cool, but like the CBGB, Mars Bar and the Lismar Lounge, it is now the stuff of legend.
It’s precisely for this reason that videos like the one below are so special. While you cannot darken the doors of Downtown Beirut anymore, here’s as close a taste to the experience you’re as likely to find, courtesy of one Mike Enright. It has the loose narrative of a student film, but the visual specifics are fantastic. I especially love the sticker on the jukebox that reads "New Missing Foundation - I DARE YOU!"
Site back and enjoy … “Night At Downtown Beirut.” By the way, the lovely photo at the top of this post was taken by one David Vega.
Night At Downtown Beirut from Mike Enright on Vimeo.
Hey all. Pardon the relatively prolonged silence, but it’s been one of those weeks wherein I feel like I’m being swallowed whole by a work project. I have some cooler, longer stuff in the works to post here, but that’ll have to wait for a bit. In the short term, though, I wanted to pass on a few things.
I did a number of posts about the Plasmatics here over the course of the last few months, which – in the grand scheme of things – is a bit odd, considering they’ve been dormant since the dawn of the 90s, much less since Wendy O. Williams passed away in 1998. In any case, the estimable Please Kill Me website just posted a lengthy and meaty piece on the band, featuring interviews with guitarists Wes Beech and Richie Stotts (above) and they touch on many great anecdotes from the band’s heyday. Should you care, it’s worth checking out.
ADDENDUM: Were that not enough, the boys also just participated in a podcast/video. See that here.
Next up, you may remember a couple of posts I put up about singer/songwriter Amy Rigby, whose book “Girl to City” was a real favorite of mine last year. I got to interview Amy during the height of the pandemic, last year, and she and I have since become pals on social media, which is fun. Recently, someone posted a recording of her No Wave band, The Stare Kits, recorded live in 1979 at Tier 3 over on West Broadway. You can hear Amy bashing away on the drums. It’s very cool. Go check it out here.
Lastly, some of you might remember a few posts I devoted to John Lurie, some years back. In a nuthsell, on a couple of occaisions, I posted about the man, his music and his story, and then he, in turn, weighed in. We had a bit of a dialogue going, for a while. Since those days, he released more music under his alter-ego, Marvin Pontiac, and debuted a new series on HBO called “Painting with John.” The latest news is that he has a long-promised memoir about to come out called "The History of Bones." If, like myself, you’re eager to read that, click here for more info.
I’ve said it here several times before, but I always preferred Sonic Youth when they were artier and weirder than the cuddly alt.rock darlings they sort of became. In any case, here’s a clip from that era, circa the release of Bad Moon Rising, as captured at Stache's on High Street in Columbus, Ohio (above) in August of 1985. A month after this was shot, I would start attending college at nearby Denison University.
I first posted this footage, along with a rumination about the venue in question, back in 2011, but that video — like so many others in the wilderness of YouTube — vanished into the ether. It resurfaced here as recently as this past January. Here’s what I had to say about it back in 2011.
I haven't been back to Columbus, Ohio since about 1990, but as I understand it, Stache's was torn down some years ago. A quick search on YouTube, however, brought up a few clips that brought back some memories of the place. Below is a video of, ironically enough, New York's own Sonic Youth rocking the wood panelling off the walls at Stache's (playing my favorite-ever song of theirs, "Death Valley `69"). This was recorded in August of 1985, a good month or so before I'd ever set foot in the place. Like Stache's itself, the clip is low on frills (and it's amusing to watch the scant few paying patrons blithely walk in front the "stage" whilst the `Youth are in throes of strumming their fingers bloody). Still, it gives you a quick taste of what it was like. Plus, it rocks. Enjoy.
As it happens, I may be headed back to Columbus some time later this year to take my daughter to look at some prospective colleges. If so, I might swing by the former site of Stache’s and see what’s there today. But here’s a taste of how it was….
As I’ve mentioned before, while my musical tastes tend to skew strenuously towards the guitar-as-weapon aesthetic, I do consider myself lucky to have grown up in New York City during what I believe is roundly considered to be the golden age of hip-hop. Without even trying, I was regularly exposed to the burgeoning stages of the genre via several forward-thinking classmates of mine in high school and, honestly, just from walking around these Manhattan streets, wherein records by names like LL Cool J, Run-DMC, Kurtis Blow, Houdini, MC Lyte, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, KRS-One, Kool Mode Dee and — yes, do please wait for it — the Beastie Boys were seemingly always in the air, so to speak. I was in college when Public Enemy made their mark, and that really changed everything.
After graduating in 1989, as mentioned here, I scored an internship at then-still-credible SPIN Magazine, wherein my horizons were further broadened to the genre that, by that time, was really hitting its stride. At one SPIN party or another at a long-since-vanished club on 14th Street called Nell’s, I was privileged to watch the nascent hip-hop band, A Tribe Called Quest perform, not realizing, at the time, how significant a name they would become. Following my stint at SPIN, I got involved with a venture ambitiously named The New York Review of Records, which I’ve mentioned before. Largely via the enthusiasm of the magazine's editor and erstwhile club disc jockey Brad Balfour and fellow “staffer” Kris Needs (who I spoke about here), a lovably insouciant veteran of British Punk, former Bleecker Bob’s employee and erstwhile rock journalist, I was exposed to further crucial hip-hop like De La Soul, Leaders of The New School, Brand Nubian, X-Clan, Kool G Rap & DJ Polo and countless others. I may have otherwise been occupying myself with the hoary goth melodrama of The Mission and willfully antagonistic noise-rock by Cop Shoot Cop and Prong, but despite my best efforts, I had become unwittingly versed in the contemporary hip-hop of the day.
This all said, I am still entirely clueless when it comes to the hip-hop that seems to resonate most with the masses. I have no clue why people latched onto the all the Bad Boy and Death Row stuff and the way more innovative Native Tongue stuff sort of dwindled out. Beyond inarguable names like Public Enemy, Wu-Tang and the Beastie Boys, my favorite hip-hop records, by and large, were from acts no one seems to care about anymore like Das EFX and New Kingdom, bands who had immediately recognizable style, to my ears. Why neither became huge is a mystery to me, especially considering the awful bullshit that DID rise to the top.
So yeah, I’m basically a contrarian idiot, when it comes to hip-hop, but one record that I lovingly remember as being an across-the-board favorite of all parties concerned, at the dawn of the 90s, was a curious concept album called Sex Packets by an inventive collective called Digital Underground. Hooked in by the unapologetically libidinous storyline (something about an illicit hallucinogen that replicated the ultimate sexual encounter) and irrepressible singles like “Dowhutchyalike” and “The Humpty Dance,” Sex Packets seemed like a Mothership Connection for the hip-hop generation (no accident, that). While, again, I was otherwise besotted with guitar bands like The Wedding Present and Pussy Galore, at the time, Digital Underground was a crowd-pleasing palette-cleanser like no other. Smart, funny, incredibly produced and musical, the album still sounds amazing over half my life later. Later singles like “Same Song” and “No Nose Job” were also fucking fabulous, to say nothing of the whole album, Sons of the P. Great stuff.
If you’re a music head, you might already know where this is going. Primary mouthpiece and founder Shock G (aka Humpty Hump aka Piano Man aka Gregory Jacobs) passed away yesterday at the age of 57. He’s another hip-hop luminary that didn’t see enough recognition for his work, to my mind. I wrote his obit for work. Read that here, if you care, and go out and buy yourself a damn copy of Sex Packets and thank me later.
Rest in peace, Shock G.
I suppose I should stop repeatedly mining the Facebook group Manhattan Before 1990, but some great stuff pops up there, periodically, and it’s worth evangelizing. In any case, that’s the initial source of this entry.
In any case, a member of said group named Kathy B. posted the photograph below, and I found it quite striking. Taken in 1986 by one Susan Aimee Weinik, this is a shot of former Palladium doorkeeper Yeh Jong Son.
I mean, it’s a great photograph by any stretch of the imagination, capturing both the stylish insouciance of the enigmatic Ms. Son and some great nocturnal atmosphere of a since-vanished New York City. As if on cue, however, the chatter started, speculating as to the location of the photograph. Many, if not most, seemed to assume that, given Ms. Son’s vocation, it must’ve been snapped within the environs of her stomping ground at the Palladium, that being East 14th Street between Union Square and Third Avenue. Sure, that might’ve made sense in a rigidly linear sort of way, but I couldn’t reconcile that featured architecture, specifically the hulking building in the background.
Acting on a hunch, I took a circuitous route home from my office down by the World Trade Center (notice I didn’t call it “the Freedom Tower”? Nor should you!), and sure enough, I was correct. As just discussed in a relatively recent post about the former site of the Plasmatics World Headquarters on Thomas Street, that large building behind Ms. Son is the western-facing façade of the massive Western Union building on Hudson Street. That puts her having a ciggie just steps to the south of Puffy’s Tavern, where she very well might have been having a post-Palladium-shift drink. To make good on my sleuthing, I captured the exact spot where Ms. Son was snapped smoking.
While I certainly made it to the Palladium a few times, I cannot say I was ever hip enough to be able to recognize Yeh Jong Son at first glance, although I was never stopped from entering the place, so I guess that counts for something. If you want to get a feel for what the interior of the Palladium was like click right here.
Here in 2021, the Palladium is, once again, long gone – razed to accommodate a massive NYU dormitory that churlishly bears the old club’s name. Puffy’s Tavern on Hudson Street is indeed still there, as it has been since about 1945, and it has refreshingly not changed very much.
As to the whereabouts and doings of the sleekly svelte Yeh Jong Son these days, who can say?
Though usually namechecked for their involvement in the CBGB scene alongside The Ramones, The Dead Boys, Television and other pioneering New York City punk bands, I believe the first time I’d ever heard of The Dictators was because they’d toured with my childhood heroes in KISS, leading me to assume, having not yet heard their music, at the time, that they were a hard-rock/metal band. To be fair, the Dictators didn’t really look like what people came to associate with “punk rock,” either. But it was really their irreverent approach to proceedings and their idiosyncratic lyrics that set them apart from of the more po-faced “rawk” of the time, earning them a seat at the table with other punk forebears, ... even if they didn’t always get along with those folks either.
As a result, the Dictators’ status as perpetually square pegs in a sea of round holes always captured my imagination, and I wanted to learn more about them. But, back in the early 80’s, when I started seeking them out based almost exclusively on their legend, their first three albums were long out of print and seemingly impossible to find. As luck would have it, though, the ROIR Cassette label – the same indie that had released the seismic hardcore compilation New York Thrash and the barnstorming debut by Bad Brains – had issued a live reunion album of theirs in 1981. I found that cassette, entitled Fuck’Em If They Can’t Take A Joke, in the downstairs tape area of Disc-O-Mat on 58th and Lexington at some point in about 1982 and bought it on the spot, having never heard a single note off of it.
I don’t know if I’d known what to expect, by this point, but Fuck’Em… immediately went into heavy rotation on my Walkman, fighting for incongruous dominance with the Circle Jerks, Venom, Gang of Four, Rush, Devo, Motorhead and the Dead Kennedys. They weren’t hardcore. They weren’t really metal. They didn’t really sound like anyone else, but I grew to love several songs on that tape, notably their cover of the Stooges’ “Search & Destroy” and a song called “Loyola,” which I especially dug, as it was the name of my high school.
Indoctrinated into the faith by Fuck’Em If They Can’t Take a Joke, I serendipitously happened upon a pristine vinyl copy of the band’s second album, Manifest Destiny a few years later in a box of “records for a dollar” outside of the Ronald McDonald House for Pediatric Cancer Patients on East 86th Street (from that same box I also prized a copy of the oft-maligned With Sympathy by Ministry). A more polished affair than Fuck’em…, this album contained studio versions of by-then-favorites like “Science Gone Too Far” and “Young, Fast & Scientific,” as well as a studio cover of “Search & Destroy.”
By this point, however, the band was long over. Lead singer Handsome Dick Manitoba had started a new band called Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom, lead guitarist Ross The Boss had started the very metal Manowar (who I also kinda got into, however ridiculous) and guitarist Scott “Top Ten” Kempner formed the Del Lords, who were perfectly fine, but a bit more rootsier than my usual fare. While I still dug their music, for all intents and purposes, the Dictators were done.
Years went by. I found myself a couple of years out of college and hanging out in a bar on Avenue A and 2nd Street called … wait for it … 2A. It was the latter part of a divisive evening wherein two friends of mine were quarreling. All I wanted to do was have a beer. We head in and who should be holding court behind the bar, but Handsome Dick Manitoba, prompting me to geek out ala Wayne Campbell (“We’re not worthy!”) much to the pronounced embarrassment of Handsome Dick (real name: Richard Blum). He listened to me gush like a fanboy for a while then went on to other patrons. About forty minutes later, Handsome Dick gets into an altercation with a customer further down the bar, marches back over to where I’m sitting, grabs me by the lapels and drags me over to extrapolate about how cool the Dictators were, and I happily -- and laboriously -- obliged.
A couple of years after that -- and here’s where my chronology starts to getting muddled – Handsome Dick opened his own bar on Avenue B called Manitoba’s. Around this time, the Dictators reformed in various capacities with some members coming and going. My good friend Dean Rispler even joined for a long while on bass. I even got to see them perform again a few times at places like Coney Island High and The Bowery Ballroom.
After that, things got complicated. Handsome Dick unwittingly became something of a divisive figure, sometimes alienating people all over the map with some pointed political opinions. Then his bar got some noise complaints. Then some ugly allegations were leveled at him. The band stopped speaking to each other. The bar closed. It was all very unfortunate.
Very recently, members of the Dictators reformed, albeit without Handsome Dick, and started recording music again together. Then something else happened.
I’d heard rumors about it from some similarly inclined friends of mine, but those rumors were confirmed for me by a sad Instagram post from Handsome Dick. Evidently Scott “Top Ten” Kempner has been sadly diagnosed with early-stage dementia. Though estranged from his friend since childhood, Handsome Dick wrote a heartfelt tribute to Top Ten on his Instagram page. Read that here, if you’re interested.
Whether they’ll ever patch it all up remains a mystery, but the reports of Kempner’s tragic affliction and Richard Blum’s anguish for his estranged friend frankly break my heart.
Play it loud…
I’ve written about Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics countless times here, over the past fifteen plus years. But I seemed to have devoted a comparatively inordinate amount of bandwidth to them this year alone. As such, it seemed fitting to mark Wendy’s passing today. Twenty-three years ago Tuesday, Wendy Orlean Williams sadly took her own life in the woods near her home in Storrs, Connecticut. Pour one out for the great lady.
From earlier this year,….
Beyond The Valley of 84 Thomas Street: The Search for Plasmatics World Headquarters
Be Cruel to Your Pool: The Search for the Cover Location of New Hope for The Wretched
...and don't forget....
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