Flaming Pablum

Cop Swap Cop: Another Track from EXCOP

Back in 2016, as discussed here, former members of my beloved Cop Shoot Cop (minus Tod Ashley, who was at home in Turkey, at the time) briefly reconvened for a benefit for Martin Bisi's fabled recording studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The gents partook in a jam session of sorts with former SWANS bassist Algis Kyzis filling in for Tod on second bass. Parts of that session were featured on a BC35 commemorative disc, credited to the name EXCOP. 

Some time later, -- around this time last year, really -- the release of that disc was celebrated at Brooklyn's St. Vitus with a live showcase, featuring EXCOP pummeling through an entirely improvisational set -- sort of like a burlier version of Spinal Tap's jazz odyssey without founding guitarist Nigel Tufnel. That's them above. It was a very festive occasion. 

Now, here in 2019, a second disc is surfacing -- BC35 Volume Two -- that features another great track from the original session. To celebrate same, EXCOP even cooked up a frankly disquieting video, replete with footage from the original session, spliced between unsettling snippets of all sorts of stuff. Easy viewing it is not, but what were you really expecting? 

Learn more here, but -- in the interim -- enjoy the video:

Back to the P&G

I spotted the below photo on the excellent Tumblr, NYC Nostalgia (refreshingly unencumbered with any blogger’s guilt about being unabashedly nostalgic, or “pasturbatory” as Kembra Pfahler of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black might say), and it put the hook in me.

This is, of course, as shot of the ol’ P&G Bar & Grill, which formerly stood on the northeast corner of West 73rd and Amsterdam Avenue. I’ve mentioned it a few times, notably here, here and here, but it was an excellent spot.

This photo was taken in 1980. I haven't been in that neck of the woods in an age but today, I gather, it’s a Blue Bottle Coffee franchise.

After Hours AOC

Despite appearances to the contrary, this post is not really about AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), but — since I just invoked her — I might as well concede that I think she’s pretty great. Sure, she’s young and probably still has a lot to learn about the office she now holds, but anyone who is capable of speaking truth to power with her level of conviction — to say nothing about causing so much angst and indigestion among key figures on the Right — is a-okay with me. You, of course, may beg to differ. That’s all.

In any case, a friend of mine recently posted the above photo on Facebook of AOC, posing with her signature, unblinking intensity on a weathered New York City stoop, her impeccably sharp, green ensemble creating a striking dichotomy with her otherwise rough-hewn surroundings. At first glance, I found it strangely familiar, but then I realized … there are doubtlessly thousands of stoops just like the one she’s depicted sitting on.

Then I thought back to an evening several weeks back. I was going to meet some out-of-towner friends who now live on the other side of the globe. They were briefly back in the city for a wedding, so we decided to meet up an at age-old favorite haunt, the Ear Inn on the westerly edges of Spring Street.

I’ve mentioned the Ear a few times here. It passively vies for the title “Oldest Bar in New York City” in meaningless competition with joints like Pete’s Tavern and McSorley’s, although — to my mind — it’s way better than either of those over-hyped establishments. Whether it’s genuinely the oldest bar in New York means nothing to me. It’s just a great place to meet friends and have a few beers. Long may it stay that way.

In any case, because I’m deeply neurotic and punctual to a fault, I arrived in the neighborhood ahead of schedule, which left me plenty of time to roam around the surrounding environs before assuming my place at the bar.

Time was when part of the Ear’s charm was that it was in such a remote, desolate backwater of a neighborhood. Apart from a deli or two, a couple of fellow bars (notably McGovern’s and the Emerald Inn) and, later, rock club Don Hill’s, there was practically nothing. The streets were empty and quiet. It’s for this reason that Martin Scorsese chose this patch of SoHo for many of the locations in “After Hours,” because it exuded such an eerily quiet, empty ambiance.

Suffice to say, this is no longer the case in 2019. These days, the westerly edges of Spring Street are a densely populated Emerald City of exclusive condos and monied luxury. Somehow, the Ear Inn has managed to hold on, but the days of it being a remote outpost are decidedly over.

This all said, there are still whispery elements of the neighborhood’s old vibe, if you look hard enough for them. As I circumnavigated the area on foot, I snapped a few pictures, trying to capture that rarified essence of place.

Circling the block on Renwick Street, just a street to the east of the Ear Inn, I came upon a certain stoop at the tail end of the building that formerly housed the Emerald Inn, the bar Scorsese re-cast as the Terminal Bar for “After Hours” (which I wrote about back here). I was struck by how grim and forbidding the stoop in question looked, so, I took a picture.

Sure enough, it’s the same stoop AOC was photographed on. Now, what was she doing there?

Hell if I know.

The Blowout: Renovation Complete

For those of you following along with this epic saga,...

Renovation has concluded on the kids' room blowout, successfully widening their chamber by a few, crucial feet. Things have been plastered and painted and now look more or less finished. This is not to say, however, that we're all done.

Our next task involves dismantling the bunkbed (still in use, as seen above), settling on new furniture (the wife is pushing for two elevated loft beds, while I'm pushing for one elevated loft bed and one "captain's bed," with drawers underneath) and divining the most advantageous configuration thereof.

After that, out will go the remnants of my desk (also still there) and the re-imagining of the living room space will commence, ideally accommodating our stuff in a practical and intuitive fashion within the newly-diminished space.

Should you care about such things, please stay tuned. 

 

Scrutinizing "Punk Lust" at the Museum of Sex

I wasn’t going to post about it, originally, but since a few people keep invoking it, I might as well throw in my two cents.

I’m talking, of course, about the Museum of Sex’s sorta-new “Punk Lust” retrospective.

I’d seen the posters advertising it for weeks, featuring a gratuitously cleavage-heavy shot of Alice Bag of storied L.A. punk bad, The Bags. Given my interest in the subject matter -– Punk Rock, not cleavage, although I do technically enjoy both -– I figured I should eventually go check it out. Four or five weeks back, I had an afternoon to myself, so I strolled up to 27th street and Fifth to have a look at “Punk Lust: Raw Provocation 1971-1985.”

Obviously, Punk Rock means many different things to many different people. A movement and a subculture predicated on renunciation, Punk smeared itself across a wide spectrum that extends far beyond simply music and fashion. While I’d sooner associate wanton carnality with certain other musical and/or cultural movements -– specifically disco and some of the less salubrious aspects of heavy metal -– sex, sexual politics, sexual identity and sexual expression all played their part within the much-ballyhooed parameters of all things Punk.

As such, this exhibit focusses on what I’d consider more of the obvious touchstones (although why they settled on this rather arbitrary time-span -- `71 to `85 –- pretty much eludes me). In a nutshell, while there were fleeting things I’d never seen before (details below), I didn’t really encounter anything too surprising.

This was my first trip to Manhattan’s Museum of Sex. While, sure, I’d been mildly curious, the whole endeavor has always seemed pretty silly. I couldn’t imagine myself paying an admission fee to go see an exhibit of “Dildos Through the Ages,” or some such. But slap the label “PUNK” on something, and I’m sure to show up, sooner or later.

Up three flights of stairs, you enter a reasonably large room adorned with myriad posters, photographs, record sleeves and other period-specific ephemera underscoring sexually-charged elements of Punk Rock both obvious and comparatively nuanced. Of course, there’s a whole big focus on Malcolm McLaren’s SEX shop, the very name “Sex Pistols” and the British scene’s strangely anemic associations with bondage gear (the `Pistols famously penned “Submission” at the behest of McLaren, but the lyrics were all about a submarine expedition). There are a few of Vivian Westwood’s naughty t-shirts, a giant-sized poster of the Cut album cover by the Slits (featuring the band topless and slathered in mud, in case you're unfamiliar), plus invocations of stuff like "Pay to Cum" by Bad Brains, “Love Comes in Spurts” by Richard Hell, “Orgasm Addict” by Buzzcocks, “Whip in My Valise” by Adam & the Ants, etc.

This all said, it’s all pretty obvious. I didn’t really need a museum to inform me about the sexual connotations of “Can Your Pussy Do The Dog?” by the Cramps.

To its credit, the show does display the original magazine photo-spreads of Gaye Advert (of The Adverts …. duh!) and Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle, two suitably provocative punk luminaries who posed nude for men’s magazines, back in the day. I had legitimately never seen those before, although to look at them preserved under glass like artifacts from ancient Egypt was a somewhat strange experience.

I will say this, though -– and here’s where my laboriously-well-established penchant for being insufferably pedantic rears its ugly head once more. If you’re going to invoke the particulars of Punk Rock -– even if historical minutia isn’t the thrust of your exhibit -– it’s in your best interest to get your facts right.

FOR EXAMPLE….

In their inevitable invocation of the Plasmatics -– a longtime favorite of this here blog and a band for whom sex obviously played a very big role -– while the emphasis may understandably be on the late Wendy Orlean Williams and her singular aesthetic of spot-welding an overt, defiant sexuality with suitably punky pugnacity, it’s important to remember that the Plasmatics -– for better or worse -– were still very much a band. There were other individuals involved beyond the late Ms. Williams. My beef here is that the Plasmatics’ Ivy-league Svengali Rod Swenson was their manager. He was not their bass player. While the band had a Spinal-Tap-like roster of members, bass detail was limited to Chosei Funahara, Michael David, Greg Smith, Jean Beauvoir and Chris “Junior” Romanelli. Swenson never played bass for them, or any other band. Ultimately, is this an important point? No, but facts are fucking facts. Get them right.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE…

There was a performer in the late 70’s named Cherry Vanilla, who’d originally emerged from the Warhol scene to reinvent herself as a sexually assertive chanteuse of New York City Punk. Through the auspices of IRS Records’ Miles Copeland, Cherry Vanilla decamped from the big splash she’d been making in NYC to London, where she was paired with a new band to help break into the British scene… only to ultimately fail at making much of a dent.

Cherry Vanilla’s forays into overtly aggressive, sexually-charged antics (most photos of her find her with tongue extended, groping herself and/or sporting a shirt with sequins that spell out “Lick Me”) are obviously the reason the Museum of Sex sought to highlight her in this exhibit. While she didn’t quite make the same impact as many of her peers, the nature of her approach makes her indeed suitable for inclusion. Fair enough.

In their treatment of her story, however, the Museum of Sex’s curators made what I would consider a rather huge omission. While Cherry Vanilla never became what anyone would consider a household name, she did inadvertently serve as something of a crucial stepping-stone for the nascent line-up of a little band called The Police. To fill out the London iteration of her act, Miles Copeland drafted original Police guitarist Henri Padovani along with Stewart Copeland and fucking STING as both her backup band and opening act, helping the rookie ersatz-punk trio further find their footing.

In “Punk Lust,” there’s even a sizable photo of Cherry with Sting playing right fucking next to her (above, just over her right shoulder), and he isn’t even identified.

Sorry, but shit like that is inexcusable. Do your damn homework.

Unsurprisingly, at the end of the exhibit, you’re invited to exit through the gift shop …. where you can buy a neon-yellow Nevermind The Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols shirt … for fifty bucks.

Skip it.

The Blowout Continues

After another day of demolition and construction that I was mercifully not privy to (I am up and out of the house before they arrive), we now have more of a tangible semblance of a new wall than we did on Wednesday. It still seems fairly surreal, but we are getting closer to a more clearly defined new space, and can start thinking about how everything’s going to fit.

That said, having largely removed and re-located everything from that side of the apartment, our home now looks like something that would make Marie Kondo angrily incontinent. They are stacks and mounds and piles of stuff just EVERYWHERE. There’s a stack of books messily assembled in this corner. There’s a pile of important papers hastily stowed in that corner. The rugs are all half-rolled up, askew and trampled upon. There’s a formless aggregation of kids’ clothes strewn in the front room. There’s a herd of half-empty boxes arranged like Stonehenge in the master bedroom. The closets have become makeshift storage facilities, with contents tenuously sardined into too-small compartments. The whole apartment feels like an overstuffed burrito of needless crap. I find myself swearily vowing to completely blitz the place of any non-joy-sparking deadwood once we’ve finished with the renovation.

Before that can happen, we still have to paint, disassemble the kids’ trusty bunkbed and divine the new configuration of their sleeping arrangements.

Again, watch this re-formulating space.

Forty Years of It's Alive by The Ramones

Released forty goddamn years ago this week, It’s Alive by the Ramones is many things for me.

First and foremost, it’s far and away my favorite Ramones release. Secondly, it’s without question my favorite live album of all time (which isn’t saying that much, being that live albums are frequently shit). Thirdly, it may be the single document that definitively captures that nebulous, elusive essence of Punk Rock. If you can listen to It’s Alive without wanting to get up and leap about like a loon or at least downstrum maniacally on a battered imaginary Mosrite, you should probably go buy yourself a Joan Baez record and go smoke some damn cloves.

Boasting a particularly feral incarnation of the original band that is tightly wound and ready to detonate, It’s Alive is essentially the contents of the first three Ramones albums played harder, faster and sloppier than their comparatively genteel studio-recorded iterations. Songs brusquely shove into you in a torrent of feedback, shouty count-offs and echoey harmonics. While you’re still recovering from the pugnacious assault of one song, da brudders are already three-quarters of the way through the next song, barely pausing a moment for Joey to make some bizarre quip about Indian food (“After eating that chicken vindaloo ….”) before Dee Dee has slammed his weathered Plimsoll down on the gas pedal once again. It’s not so much a performance as a stealthy execution. If you happen to enjoy it, that’s nice, but they’re not doing it for your listening pleasure in the slightest.

I first heard It’s Alive in the summer of 1980, when I was sequestered largely against my will at a camp in Maine called Great Oaks (as in “from little acorns, Great Oaks grow”). I’d already been exposed to punk rock via some hipper kids at my grade school, but had gotten a greater taste for it when my father, who was a London correspondent for Forbes Magazine in the late `70s, sent my sister and I a crate of promo LPs from a friend of his at CBS records. In said crate were the first albums by The Clash and The Vibrators, which I immediately gravitated to. How could one not?

But shamefully, while they were from my own hometown, the Ramones hadn’t yet made the same inroads for me. That all changed via a suitably battered (read: well-loved), homemade cassette of It’s Alive that circulated like a virus through the cabins of Great Oaks (each named after a state – ours was West Virginia, swiftly re-christened West Vagina by some wisenheimer or another). That cassette ostensibly belonged to a junior counselor named Andy Romeo, who I tenuously knew from my grade school back home in the city. When not blithely disregarding his duties as a junior counselor, Andy played in an acoustic punk duo called The Latrines with another counselor. I was largely just a pesky nuisance to Andy until I informed him, while canoeing across Saturday Pond one insufferably sunny afternoon, that I owned the first Clash LP (British edition, no less), which dubiously earned me his respect.

In any case, at the end of the summer, guess who went home with that battered, shitty, tinnily recorded homemade cassette of It’s Alive? This guy, that’s who.

I continued to play the shit out of it, thrilling to every manic nanosecond of its 28 furious tracks until my shitty tape recorder (notice I didn’t say “boom box”? I mean, shitty tape recorder, like those no-fidelity, one-speaker pieces of garbage) decided to unceremoniously eat the tape in a tangled spool of warbling disappointment.

Crestfallen, I immediately went out in search of the proper double LP, finding it in the cut-out bin at … of all places … Woolworth’s, a suitably shitty “five’n’dime” on East 86th Street and Third Avenue.

True to the no-frills nature of the recording, the sleeve art of It’s Alive displayed a comparable lack of finesse. Presumably taken from screen grabs of the video of the same performance (at London’s Rainbow Theatre on New Year’s Eve, 1977), the pictures on the cover and in the gatefold are grainy and strangely saturated with the overall visual aesthetic being “this’ll do.”

Regardless, the images of Dee Dee leaping, Joey leaning into his mic and Johnny about to strike another rafter-shaking chord absolutely thrilled me.

Thirty-nine years after first hearing the breakneck sprint of “Teenage Lobotomy” via that shitty, homemade cassette of It’s Alive, it remains dearer to me than I can practically put into words. Every fleeting moment of the It’s Alive recording is crucial to me, from Johnny’s first power-chord clashing with Dee Dee’s false-start count off (stepping on Joey’s terse introduction of “Rockaway Beach”) to the culminating gallop through “We’re a Happy Family.” It is a perfect record from start to finish.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, and I mean it most sincerely: I intend to be buried with a copy of it.

The Blowout Begins

As weepily foretold in this post, we are currently hurtling into the gaping maw of largely planless uncertainty as we undertake the renovation of our kids' room, expanding it approximately three feet to the east. Again, three feet might seem like small potatoes, but in an apartment as diminutive as ours, it should make a big difference.

On Wednesday, they removed the wall that formerly stood between Charlotte & Oliver's bedroom and my desk (see earlier photo) and erected the framework for the new wall. Amazingly, they did so with what seems like precision and very little dust. In that respect, so far so good.

In terms of how things are going to look upon fruition, meanwhile, that's still all up in the air. While the skeleton of the new room is in place, if you will, it's still very hard to envision how it's all going to work. 

Moreover, the matter of where my desk and other sundry items will go in the new iteration remains ... unsolved.

You'll notice the bottle of beer in the right hand corner. That's how I'm getting through this.

Watch this space.  

Szkodzinski’s Bands of the Night

In doing a little research for that last piece about Irving Plaza, I stumbled upon this genuinely amazing website by photographer Joseph Szkodzinkski (that’s a tough one to spell, lemme tell ya).

Drawn to his site because of the truly amazing portrait of Doyle, Glen and Jerry from the Misfits at Irving Plaza (above) that came up in a Google Image search, I ended up spending vast amounts of time perusing Mr. Szkod’s archive of pictures from a host of old NYC venues of bands like the Stimulators, 999, Bauhaus, the Shirts, The Clash, the Heartbreakers, Dead Kennedys, Tuxedomoon, DNA and droves more.

If you’re as besotted with this era of NYC music and nightlife as I, you’ll love it. Check it out HERE!

The Plight of the `Plaza

Arguably more than any other venue in NYC, Irving Plaza has played host to more of my favorite bands than I can count. Back in 2007, when news broke that they were changing the name of the venue to “The Filmore New York at Irving Plaza” (which, of course, they wisely demurred from a year or so later), I tallied a list of bands I’d seen there.

They included: The Ramones, Suicidal Tendencies, Devo, Buzzcocks, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Gang of Four, Echo & The Bunnymen, Foetus, Cop Shoot Cop, Firewater, Skeleton Key, Man or Astroman, The Cult, Robyn Hitchcock, Love & Rockets, The Dandy Warhols, The Circle Jerks, James, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, B.B. King, Mission of Burma, The Wedding Present, The Wonder Stuff, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Mission, Fishbone, Curve, The Fixx, Kula Shaker, The Lo-Fidelity All-Stars, Mansun, Nashville Pussy, Lush, Gus Gus, Cornershop, The Candy Snatchers, Emergency Broadcast Network, DJ Spooky, the Lunachicks and – YES, DO INDEED PLEASE WAIT FOR IT – Killing Joke.

In all candor, despite this august line-up of bands and its convenient proximity to my home, I still wouldn’t count Irving Plaza as my favorite New York venue. That title probably goes to the late, lamented Ritz, the Bowery Ballroom or the long-defunct and since-razed Marquee on West 21st Street.

BE THAT AS IT MAY ….

When word came down today, via Brooklyn Vegan, that Irving Plaza is slated to close for eight months for “renovations,” I shuddered.

Such things have closed for similar reasons before …. to never re-open.

Doesn’t Manhattan suck enough now already?