Flaming Pablum

A Prize from The Priestess

I’ve written about my nascent love of the Plasmatics entirely too many times here, already (see links below), but something reared its head, this morning, that begged for another entry.

As laboriously unspooled on this ancient post, the first time I ever encountered the Plasmatics was in a long-vanished record store in midtown, on Madison Avenue at about 44th street, tucked incongruously between Brooks Brothers and Grand Central Station. Thumbing through their racks, I suddenly came across the band’s just-released second proper LP, that being Beyond The Valley of 1984. As a dyspeptic eighth-grader at war with the world, I was immediately won over by the brazen ludicrousness of the cover art and bought the LP on the spot, having never heard a solitary note of their music. I seem to remember taking pains to smuggle the record into my home, afraid the arguably lurid sleeve would give my mother pause. When my mom did finally catch sight of the album on my desk some weeks later, she only blithely remarked that poor Wendy’s décolletage looked perilously sunburned. So much for shock and horror.

Musically speaking, the actual songs, such as they were, on Beyond the Valley of 1984 matched the band’s image to a tee. In a nutshell, the Plasmatics were dutifully loud, pugnacious and obnoxious -- finesse and subtlety were very much not the order of the day. One might be very hard-pressed to credibly argue that the Plasmatics’ songs were as timelessly incendiary as those of their contemporaries in more respected bands like The Ramones and the like, but one got the impression that songwriting may not have been their first priority. That all said, to my 14-year-old sensibility, at the time, tracks like “Masterplan” “Living Dead,” “Pig is a Pig” and “Sex Junkie” (an exotic condition I was very assuredly unafflicted by, at the time) checked all the right boxes for me.

I played the shit out of Beyond the Valley…, but it was really the follow-up e.p., the equally over-the-top Metal Priestess that delivered the goods. While only six tracks (including two live versions of songs from Beyond the Valley…), it captured a leaner, more disciplined and more ….er… musical iteration of the band. Standout compositions like the occult-flecked “Doom Song” and “Lunacy” (where Wendy got to actually sing instead of gruffly exhort or hoarsely bellow) belied the band’s otherwise unshakeable reputation as simply substance-free spectacle. The album title was a telling one, signifying a shift in style that would come to full, hoary fruition on the follow up LP in 1982, Coup D’Etat (which I wrote about on this post). Even the visuals marked a departure from their punkier origins, finding the band adopting a sartorial aesthetic more akin to conventional heavy metal. The mohawks were still very much to the fore, but they were now augmented with more black leather, spikes and inverted pentagrams — essentially pre-figuring Motley Crue’s whole Shout At The Devil image. Somewhat ironically, around this same era, Motley Crue was in the habit of buzzsawing the heads off of mannequins made to look like Wendy O. Williams onstage. Odd, that — you’d have thought they’d have been kindred spirits.

In any case, in the wake of the follow-up album, the afore-cited Coup D’Etat, the original band basically fell apart. Technically, there was one more album — Maggots: The Record, but it was basically just Wendy and rhythm guitarist/songwriter Wes Beech. After that, Wendy’s voice was essentially shot, although that didn’t stop her from releasing a few solo records.

By the end of the 80s, both Wendy’s solo career and the Plasmatics were pretty much done. Wendy withdrew from the public eye, worked in animal rescue and tragically took her own life in 1998.

Arguably overshadowed by their penchant for wanton destruction, the Plasmatics never really got a critical reappraisal or second life. Beyond the Butcher Babies — an American band named after an early Plasmatics song — most invocations of the Plasmatics are purely lip-service. You might remember me taking Miley Cyrus to task to appropriating the iconography of the Plasmatics — yep, being a gatekeeper again — yet choosing to cover Blondie on her album. What?? Was “Pig is a Pig” too difficult to learn?

In any case, the only reason I’m bringing any of this up is because a piece of Plasmatics history just strangely showed up on eBay. As he prefaced on the Plasmatics Facebook page, one Vinnie V. writes:

Not sure where it will go next, but it's been cool owning it for a while, displaying it on and off and renting it out. Got it from a German friend of Wendy O's who was also a part of the NYC music scene in the 80's. It was folded and collecting dust beneath a pile of junk. Can't believe it actually survived that tour. Too bad CBGB wasn't still around. It should stay in NYC and be seen.

Mr. V is talking about the giant inverted pentagram from the album cover of Metal Priestess, the same one on the t-shirt I’m seen sporting at the top of this post, and the same that adorned the stage behind them on their fabled (by some) turn on “SCTV.”

It’s a curious artifact, to be sure, and would doubtlessly be fun to own (if you have the real estate to properly house and showcase it), but the sticky wicket is that Mr. V is asking just shy of $4,000.00 for it. As much as I still cherish my Plasmatics records and do indeed collect a lot of their fleeting ephemera, that’s a whole lotta cheddar for anyone to drop.

If you, however, are not as deterred as I, please avail yourself to the auction by clicking right here. Give it a good home, won’t you? Wendy would doubtlessly thank you.

CODA: According to the WikiPedia entry for Metal Priestess, songwriter Dan Hartman (who later had a big pop hit with “I Can Dream About You” from the “Streets of Fire” soundtrack) approached the Plasmatics after he heard Beyond the Valley of 1984 (he must have been as smitten as I) and went to visit them. Apparently, although I don’t know the source or any further specifics, Wendy O. Williams and band-manager/svengali Rod Swensen were based in a TriBeCa loft at the time. WHERE IS THAT LOFT?

More About The Plasmatics on FLAMING PABLUM:
“Doom Song” by The Plasmatics

Where Was Wendy’s Wall? 

Twelve Years Gone

There’s No Escape When It Infects You

Wild in the Streets: Plasmatics on East 42nd

Where Wendy Still Waits

Get Plasmasticized

Mohawks in Chinatown

Coup De Grace: Plasmatics on Pell

Hands Off The Plasmatics

Christadora House Through The Trees

Earlier this afternoon in Washington Square Park...

The Gatekeeper Says 'NO!'

It’s probably not a new term, per se, but I’ve been seeing it invoked more and more, recently, in discussions about my favorite music, and it’s not a complement. The word is gatekeeping.

Gatekeeping, as I understand it, is sort of on par with mansplaining — it springs from a sort of exclusionary claim to be more vested in a specific artist or sub-genre to the extent that newbie novices need to be properly vetted and schooled before they’re allowed to fully appreciate said artist/music themselves. The Gatekeeper is the guy that demands that you name three songs by the band whose t-shirt you’re wearing. The Gatekeeper is the guy that cites the record just prior to a band’s breakthrough album as that band’s greatest achievement. The Gatekeeper put in his hours, and now expects you to follow suit, … if you’re worthy. The Gatekeeper’s motto, invariably, is “Fuck do YOU know about it?”

Unsurprisingly, given my oft-unsolicited opinions, I have been credibly accused of gatekeeping. Fair enough. I can own that. There are myriad examples here on this blog, be it my affinity for the Circle Jerks or my penchant to safeguard the iconography of the Plasmatics, to name but two.

To my mind, however, my tendencies to “gatekeep” stem from my ever-distant youth, when deviation from popular convention was more often treated with derision and contempt rather than admiration. To put it bluntly, If you’re 13 years old and your classmates give you shit for wearing the t-shirt of a band they don’t know or can’t understand, that experience is gong to stay with you. Years later, when everything is post-ironic and retro-philic and, thanks to the internet, all most music is accessible to everyone at all times, and no one has to put any time or effort into seeking it out, you can bet your bottom goddamn dollar I’m going to demand you cite three songs by fucking Flipper before I let you blithely walk around wearing their shirt just because friggin’ Kurt Cobain once did.

But I digress.

Today, on Facebook’s excellent No Wave group page, someone posted a video that speaks to the very thing that ignites one’s inner Gatekeeper. Entitled “5 Albums to Get You Into No Wave,” this clip is exactly the sort of content I ranted about back in 2017 on this post.

To my mind, videos and articles of this kind make me grind my teeth because they’re so inorganic. Music discovery should be a natural process. You need to listen and discern for yourselves, not cut corners with some half-assed “get hip quick” scheme. Videos like these seem like lazy “how to” manuals for people who want to create the right impression, rather than folks who might be genuinely interested in hearing and learning about new music.

But, in terms of the specific musical phenomenon of the fleeting No Wave scene, though, videos like this are a genuine disservice, as they kind of give everything away. For me, a big part of my affinity for No Wave came after the initial jolt of shock and confusion. That MUST be a part of it.

I vividly remember first dropping the needle on my college radio station’s long-neglected copy of the fabled Brian Eno compilation, No New York, which culled together tracks from a handful of pertinent bands from that tiny, insular scene. Being that the radio station in question was more renowned for playing yawnsome crap like Little Feat and Hot Tuna, the mere fact that they had a copy of No New York at all was reason enough to play it.

I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting upon that first listen (live on the air, no less), but it sure as shit didn’t sound like the Punk Rock I was enjoying at the time. In a nanosecond, it made records by the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and the like sound positively quaint and conventional (which, in retrospect, they basically are). It was such a stark strike of renunciation. Fuck your rock’n’roll rules! Fuck your precious melodies and danceable rhythms! Fuck playing these instruments the “right way!”

Without experiencing that jarring epiphany, I don’t think you can really absorb what No Wave was all about. You can’t skip to the last chapter and spoil the impact like that.

You have to be punched in the face by No Wave before you get to like it.

If believing that makes me a Gatekeeper, so fucking be it.

Decide for yourselves…

John's Bag

I first came in contact with John Darnielle via Ilxor, which — as Urban Dictionary so succinctly describes it — was “a rather fine but occasionally tempestuous, pretentious and easily-distracted internet-based message board, initially conceived as a music forum.” I should’t say “was” as, technically, it’s still going today (find it here). John and I were both regular fixtures there for a great while in the late 90s through to the late-2000’s. Or at least that’s when I largely dropped out. John might still regularly participate there, I’m not sure.

While it might seem like heresy to some, I must admit that upon first engaging with John, I was entirely unfamiliar with his status as the singer/songwriter in the Mountain Goats. As far as I knew, John was just some similarly inclined music head with just as much of a passion for discussing all facets of the subject, and given his predilections for several of the same hoary goth, punk and metal bands that I voluminously espoused on a regular basis, we became fast friends in that forum. From where I was standing, John and I spoke the same language, and he managed to jovially overlook my pugnacious penchant for contentious overstatement (something not exactly everyone in said forum was inclined to do, much to my continued embarrassment, this many eons later). As the years went by, we bonded further over a mutual affliction (John and I both suffer from Tinnitus, although I haven’t heard an update from him on the subject in some time) and both became doting dads.

The funny thing, though, is that while I just sorta considered him this super-knowledgable music-geek pal o’ mine, it only gradually dawned on me that he was critically revered in several significant circles. Beyond being an established musician of some renown, John’s also a burgeoning author, having now published a couple of well received novels. Not too long back, another friend of mine was looking at my contact lists and spotted John’s name. “Dude, you know John Darnielle?” For some reason — inarguably to John’s credit as a regular, approachable human being — it still never occurs to me that he’s this crucial figure.

In any case, the last time I saw John in person, I believe, was actually the first time I saw John in person. I was walking up Thompson Street in SoHo and he suddenly shouted my name (see pic above). To this day, John and I are in fairly regular contact on Facebook, but I just spotted something that showcases both the bottomless depth of John’s affinity for music and his perpetually inclusive, affable nature. John was featured on “What’s In My Bag?”, Amoeba Records’ excellent web series I wrote about back on this post. To my mind, despite his numerous accolades and notable cameos (he was a featured guest on Damien Abraham’s “Turned Out a Punk” podcast, last summer), this is a true honor befitting his vast wealth of knowledge and his convivial, big-hearted nature. Way to go, John! 

I am in awe and roiling with envy.

Enjoy….

Word on The Street

Own a Piece of Gem Spa

For this inclined towards this sort of thing, an organization called Workhouse has put together an auction (culminating on January 7) for various original artifacts from Gem Spa, the iconic corner shop on St. Marks Place. Want the sign? Bid on it. Want the Egg Cream display? Bid on it. Want the Kostabi-painted gate? Bid on it. Want the milkshake machine? Bid on it. Etc.

Here's the official statement:

"Due to Covid, we were forced to close like so many beloved New York City businesses. To honor the special spirit of the shop, we are auctioning off memorabilia, egg cream equipment, and signs from the store. These are the last remnants of an iconic institution and we hope that with this auction, they will find a new home with someone who loves old New York and wants to preserve a piece of precious history."

- Parul Patel, Gem Spa 

 

The Lost Murals of CBGB

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?

Goodbye to Sammy's

I had heard about Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse probably a good decade before ever knowingly setting foot on the Lower East Side, albeit for one of the most ignominious of reasons.

You see, as a Manhattan brat growing up on the Upper East Side in the mid-to-late `70s, we had cable television. As such, when word spread like wildfire around my grade school that there was gratuitous nakedness to be seen on the cable-access channels if you quietly stayed up late enough, my friends and I took very serious note. If you managed the trick of not waking your parents, you could treat yourself to the prurient idiocy of a legendary New York City cable-access program called “Midnight Blue,” the brainchild of iconic “Screw”-magazine founder/publisher, Al Goldstein. While essentially just a half-hour of grainy raunch interspersed with potty-mouth rants from Goldstein himself and loads of commercials for escort services and the burgeoning phenomenon of phone sex, watching “Midnight Blue” felt like the most legitimately taboo activity imaginable, and most of my classmates and I were furtively regular viewers.

How does Sammy’s enter into all of this, you ask? Well, amidst all that low-resolution sleazery, Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse distinguished itself by having the solitary non-smut-related advertisement on the program. In between fleeting segments of porn stars Marilyn Chambers and John Holmes flailing their genitalia around, lurid tirades about bad customer service from Al Goldstein and ads informing you that “the extra E is for extra….” (don’t Google it), you’d see footage of giddy, `70’s-era patrons partaking of steaks with schmaltz in the low-ceilinged confines of Sammy's Roumanian Steakhouse on Chrystie Street. One imagined that after a while night of unfettered carnality at the oft-cited Plato’s Retreat, the swinger set would put their pants on and go enjoy a fine meal at Sammy’s (this may well have happened, but Plato’s was on the Upper West Side, while Sammy’s was Lower East, so it’s logistically flawed). I can still vividly hear the background music used in that stupid ad.

Years and years later, some friends and I went to Sammy’s and partook of its fine fare — which is strikingly different from anything you’d find in a more conventional steak place, all served with schmaltz — liquified chicken fat that comes in a bottle that you’re supposed to pour over your steaks. It looks disarmingly like orange juice. While we didn’t spot any porn stars, let alone Al Goldstein, we did have the pleasure of sharing the space with none other than David Lee Roth, who was entertaining guests at a neighboring table. For a friend of mine’s bachelor party in the late `90s, five of us had a rousing dinner at Sammy’s that culminated with our waitress emphatically giving us the finger, for some long-forgotten reason.

I had a cherished black Sammy’s shirt (“Schmaltz It Up”) that I wore religiously for decades, usually with a pair of tattered camoflauge cargo shorts.

Today, my comrade Elie from Bowery Boogie reported that, like countless other favorites in recent months, Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse is no more.

Pour one out with extra schmaltz. New York City is being disemboweled.

2020: My Year in Pictures

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.

If possible, enjoy...

 

 

The Mystery Song

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.