I'm not sure when he posted or completed this particular chapter, but our good friend Bob Egan of PopSpots now has a truly sprawling collection of all his minutia-laden detective work re: images and album covers of various luminaries in and around Central Park, like this great shot of Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley fraternizing with some old ladies at the Central Park Zoo (snapped originally by photographer Warring Abbott).
It's entirely worth your time. Find it here.
No sooner do I post a self-pitying entry about how uninspired I am during my boot-imposed exile than I stumble upon something truly worth evangelizing. My friend Joe Bonomo posted the below on Facebook and it’s quite cool.
Originally posted by one Rick Johnson, here’s the preamble:
Photos of NYC bars at the end of the 70s. From the January 1980 issue of New York Rocker. I’m jealous I wasn’t there to hang out then. There is no better feeling than being in a rock and roll club when the band starts playing! CBGB, Max’s, Mudd Club, Gildersleeves and more…all frozen in time. Check them out! All photos by Steve Lombardi.
These are the photos, with locations names in lower right-hand corner. There are a couple I don’t recognize. Who remembers Tomato?
Being that you’re probably as bored reading about it as I am talking about (let alone living with it), I’m going to forego yet another update about my stupid broken foot. Instead, here’s some stuff ya might have missed.
I’m dead certain I devoted at least five or six posts to it when it was happening in real time, but when CBGB was finally being disassembled and gutted upon its hotly contested shuttering circa the latter months of 2006, I probably hadn’t set foot in the actual building in several years (I might be mistaken, but I think the final show I ever witnessed at 315 Bowery was either a Kraut reunion show or a secret Firewater gig around 2001). Put simply, while inarguably a New York City institution, CBGB, in its declining years, ceased being a nurturing ground for exciting, new music.
Then, of course, it closed for irritating reasons and suddenly, this revered cultural flashpoint was gone, shortly to have its footprint co-opted by a fatuously bespoke haberdashery, which I’ve covered here ad nauseum.
While I’ve posted countless weepy paeans, pics and video of CBGB when it was still a going concern, my friend Emily posted something on Facebook that provided a refreshingly more granular view. While there are countless photographs of CBGB’s endearingly grotty exterior, its disarmingly intimate stage and its notoriously un-private bathroom, a gent named DJ Jason posted his snaps of the interior of CBGB taken, presumably, at points in either the late `90s or early `00s, and they are refreshingly thorough. That’s one of his above but you can see the rest here. You can almost smell the stale beer.
I was dispatched, quite recently, by the Mrs. with another load of old clothes we’d decided (or, really, she’d decided) that we should part wit. Per usual, I walked over to the Goodwill outlet on the west side of West 8th Street between MacDougal and Sixth Avenue with the intention of dropping it off, only to find the place permanently shuttered.
This particular strip of West 8th has been in pretty rough shape, for a little bit. The squat buildings on the norther end were razed some time ago to accommodate some new development, but that has yet to come to any fruition. South of that, the storefront that formerly played host to concerns like the ill-fated Mainline Records and comparatively storied Disc-O-Rama before that later morphed into some sort of pet-centric business before becoming yet another cannabis dispensary called City Vibes, but that, too, has now closed. The curio/head-shop joint called 8th Street Gifts seems to be hanging by a thread. Goodwill is now gone. Covert restaurant Frevo (it looks like a gallery on the outside, but there’s a secret door) and posh stationery outlet Goods For The Study are holding their own, but the derelict storefronts to their east are attracting a much less salubrious crowd than their businesses would probably prefer.
Just south of there, of course, is an urgent-care facility run by Mount Sinai. Seemingly a million years ago, this space was TLA, a comparatively sprawling and esoteric video store (remember those?). Of course, before all that, it was the site of the fabled 8th Street Playhouse, which stood there from about 1929 until its somewhat seedy demise in 1992. I remember seeing films like “Liquid Sky,” Penelope Spheeris’ “Suburbia” and “Repo Man” for the first time in that theater. Below is a little “before and after” of the Playhouse’s heyday. It’s striking how “distressed” the theatre and the surrounding environs look in the bottom shot.
Next up, I picked up a copy of “Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the `80s Hard Rock Explosion,” a great oral history by Tom Beujour and Richard Beinstock. While it’s no “Please Kill Me,” I devoured it whole (it isn’t exactly Tolstoy) over the course of the holiday weekend and have to say that I enjoyed it thoroughly. Sure, the era of so-called hair metal was inarguably a very stupid time, but I can’t say I was immune to the charms of early records by bands like Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister and a select few others. If you ever spent any time banging your head to truly idiotic anthems like “Fuck Like a Beast,” “Burn In Hell" or “Looks That Kill,” you will eat it right up.
In any case, towards the latter pages of the book – documenting the hotly contested “death by Grunge” days when bands like Warrant, Dokken and Winger were getting the short shrift in the wake of the rise of all things Cobain – a New York City band called Spread Eagle gets invoked as one of the hair metal scene’s late-comers. Now, even as an avowed rockhead and self-appointed knowitall regarding New York City bands of certain stripes, I have absolutely ZERO recollection about Spread Eagle. I mean, while New York City did have a small-but-stubborn hard rock/hair metal scene formed around bands like Circus of Power and the like, I cannot say I ever encountered Spread Eagle, who apparently were based in the East Village. Who knew?
Here they are runnin' from the cops, man!!
I looked'em up and sure enough ... here they were stomping around Avenue C and Tompkins Square Park etc. It's not really my cup o' tea, but see what ya think...
During the early weeks of the COVID 19 pandemic, when uncertainty held sway, my department at work — all sequestered in our respective homes and duly “sheltering in place” — was tasked with conceiving new content to produce to keep our audience (our creative community of affiliated songwriters, composers and publishers) informed. I pitched a series of short Q&A’s with certain songwriters to see how they were handling the challenges of this new strange era. I got the green light, and started firing off emails to various names. To my very great joy, the very first guy that got back to me was New York City punk legend Jesse Malin, who was entirely game. For those who may not recognize the name, Jesse was formerly a member of proto-hardcore trio Heart Attack, later a founder of D Generation and a prolific solo artist. He's also a tireless advocate for the heart and soul of New York City's rock n' roll past, establishing endeavors like GreendoorNYC, Coney Island High, The Black & White Bar, Niagara's, Club Berlin, Heaven Can Wait, and 96 Tears, among others. I lobbed a handful of questions over and within a day, he hit me back with some great, thoughtful and inspiring responses.
At this risk of lapsing into fanboy hyperbole, Jesse has always been the mover, the shaker and the tip of the spear. A true believer in the music of New York City, he makes things happen, and has kept the spirit of Punk Rock alive in a downtown Manhattan riddled by gentrification. He’s also a tireless advocate for giving BACK, and has been involved in more charitable initiatives than I can count. He’s truly one of the good guys.
Just recently, Jesse suffered a rare spinal stroke and, as a result, is paralyzed from the waist down. He vows to walk and dance again. Don’t bet against him. That said, given his livelihood as a touring musician, Jesse is facing some tough financial obstacles as he endeavors to move forward. Help him out, if you can.
The evening Jesse was stricken, he was purportedly out at a favorite East Village Italian restaurant — John’s of 12th Street, maybe — with some friends, celebrating the life and memory of his fallen friend, D Gen bandmate and fellow NYC Punk alumnus Howie Pyro. After Jesse collapsed, following some strange pains in his lower back, the story goes that his great friend, Jimmy G of Murphy’s Law carried Jesse to Mt. Sinai hospital on Second Avenue.
Below is Jesse and Jimmy from only two years back with their tribute to Todd Youth (also a knowing nod to “Waiting on a Friend” by the Rolling Stones).
The photo up top, meanwhile was taken by photographer Josh Cheuse of Jesse within the intimate confines of Subterranean Records on Cornelia Street, which is no longer there.
Godspeed, Jesse. May you once again stride amongst us with the quickness.
I know I said I was going away on vacation, but we don’t actually leave until Tuesday, and I spotted this video and felt compelled to share, so … fuckin’ sue me.
I went to go see explosive Japanese rock trio, Guitar Wolf, in about 1999 at CBGB, and they were entirely hilarious and amazing, but it was worryingly loud. Like, not just “my ears are sure gonna hurt tomorrow” loud, but more like “I think my fillings are dislodging themselves from my skull” loud or “I’m about to lose control of my bowels” loud. Mercifully, neither of those things happened, although that was also the same year I my Tinnitus revealed itself, so there may be a smoking gun in there, somewhere.
In any case, the below video might very well have been shot during the band’s same brief stay in New York City wherein I caught them at CB's, but it isn’t dated, so who knows? In any case here is Guitar Wolf practicing their nuanced, finesse-laden craft within the narrow confines of the ground floor of what, at the time, was Mondo Kim’s — the esoteric music and cinema super-store that held court on St. Marks Place before shuttering for good in …. fuck …. 2009.
Anyway, I love this video in that it captures both the rough-hewn, high-volume attack of the Guitar Wolf experience, but also because it brings me back to that room wherein I used to spend so much time perusing the racks.
Here in 2023, the space that was Mondo Kim’s is a lame video arcade with booze dubbed “Barcade.” Guitar Wolf, meanwhile, are STILL AT IT.
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...
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 Bongos, 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.
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.
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.
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….
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