The Damned first played New York City’s CBGB in 1977, the first British Punk band to do so (along with having been the first British Punk band to issue any vinyl). During that maiden voyage, the band were famously captured by erstwhile CBGB door-minder/photographer Roberta Bayley in the photo above, posing with great, snotty aplomb in front of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
The band ended up playing four April nights at CBGB, sharing the bill with their Buckeye counterparts in the Dead Boys. Here’s a shot of them during one of those doubtlessly volatile evenings, this one taken by Ebet Roberts.
Today, meanwhile, in trawling around the `net, looking for nothing in particular, I came across this uncredited photo from the same era. I’m making some assumptions here but based on the line-up (with guitarist Brian James still in the ranks), I’m guessing this was snapped during that same span of April days. I have no idea who took it, but my question is – where in Manhattan was this photograph snapped?
I’d say the awning behind Dave Vanian on the left is a big clue, as are the terraced apartments behind Captain Sensible’s head. I have a hunch which I’m going to investigate, but where do YOU think it was taken?
The Damned are coming back to New York City (with original drummer Rat Scabies with them, this time) this May, but the next day is my son’s graduation, so I don’t think we’ll be going. We did just see them in October, anyway.
While I do not know them personally, James & Karla Murray are renowned in the amorphous community of NYC-centric bloggers, vloggers, photographers, nostalgists and digital storytellers of which I am also a member. Over the 19 (jeezus!) years I’ve been “keeping” this silly blog, I’ve doubtlessly mentioned their name, evangelized their work and re-purposed their striking images countless times.
James & Karla's lovingly composed photographs of New York City corner shops, bistros, pizzerias, record stores, taverns and mom’n’pop concerns of all stripes have become a crucial part of the documentation of our ever-(d)evolving city, and their magisterial books like “Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York,” “New York Nights,” and “Broken Windows: Graffiti NYC” make any coffee table they are placed on that much goddamn cooler. I’ve frequently spied them out and about — Karla’s signature shock of punky, bleach-blonde hair is hard to miss. On the occasions in which I’ve accosted them (“hey, it’s James & Karla!”), they seem to be in a constant state of buoyant, infectious joy. They clearly live their entwined lives like one long, curious adventure, and are insatiable in their quest to see, go, do, experience, capture and create. I find them quite inspiring, in that way.
Imagine my own joy, then, when I was contacted out of the proverbial blue by a publicist representing a new project for Prestel Publishing, that being the forthcoming book by James & Karla titled “Great Bars of New York City.” I relayed an enthusiastic “yes” to the publicist before I’d even finished reading the pitch.
Beyond my tireless affinity for waxing rhapsodic about the New York City of my growingly distant youth and/or my favorite willfully obnoxious, listener-hostile music, I am somewhat sheepishly notorious for my penchant for putting away many a pint of beer, and I quite relish doing so in any number of establishments — from the endearingly seedy to the stuffily stately — across the five boroughs (yes, dear readers, I have consumed beers on Staten Island). “Great Bars of New York City” speaks directly to that ….uhh…. unquenchable thirst with 239 pages of James & Karla’s brilliant photographs, augmented with text by food & culture scribe, Dan Q. Dao. The pictures are crisp, colorful and packed with nuanced detail, matched by Dao’s meticulous historical research and illustrative prose. It’s entirely splendid. If you harbor any of the same predilections as myself, you will not be able to put this book down, as I haven’t.
There are a few, ridiculously trivial “Holy Grail” items out there that I’d still donate an organ to track down. Foremost among them is the poster above, one of only a limited run, posted around downtown Manhattan in the summer of 1984, advertising two neighborhood gigs by The Sisters of Mercy. It's lovely, isn't it?
Sadly, while I’d just recently become a fan of the Sisters, by 1984, I was unable to attend this show, as I believe I was with a bunch of teenaged strangers on a bicycle trip, zig-zagging across the state of Massachusetts with the American Youth Hostel group, that summer, and invariably doing a whole lot of complaining, as was my wont, at the time.
Not only were these gigs notable as early appearances by the Sisters (they’d played New York prior to these gigs, notably at Danceteria), the second of these NYC shows was significant as it was an incongruous opening slot for ill-matched headliners, Black Flag, also a favorite of mine, at the time. So, yeah, I didn’t get to go to that.
But as with quite a few gigs I’ve alluded to before, my comrade Greg Fasolino (recently invoked in my eulogy to Steve Albini) did, and – as was his wont – took pains to record the show, god bless him. As this week marks the – good fucking lord -- FORTIETH -- anniversary of this show, Greg posted the below on Facebook.
40 years ago today: The Sisters of Mercy and (yes) Black Flag double bill at NYC’s Ritz, after a nice daytime record shopping trip to Slipped Disc. It was only the second time I’d been to The Ritz, and the first and only time I saw the Sisters live (and as you can see from the pics, I was front and center) An absolutely riveting performance. The smoke machine was stupendous. As I’ve written about in the past, it was also the weirdest bill in my concert-going history. They played with Black Flag as the headliner! So what you had here was an audience of half proto-goths and half hardcore punks. The punks were visibly and audibly hostile to the Sisters from the beginning of the show; on my tape of the show, you can hear Andrew Eldritch walk out and tell them to “settle down.” As for Flag, I worshipped their early records but by this time they’d gotten plodding and metallic and I wasn’t as into it as I’d hoped, though Henry was clearly a force of nature. August 9, 1984.
Nice, right? I’m taking the liberty of sharing a couple of Greg’s shots from the proceedings…
Here is Greg’s recording of the Sisters’ set…and you can indeed hear Andrew admonish the punks in the room…
So, yeah, even though it was by no means a normal show, given my adoration for both outfits (I’d go on to see both bands perform – separately, of course), it seems like a nexus point I should have been present for.
In any case, much like that elusive Cop Shoot Cop flyer I continue to scour the globe for, I’d happily pay handsomely for the poster pictured up top, fleetingly available on Etsy, some years back, for a suitably lofty amount of money. I am not holding my breath.
As a testament to his resourceful creativity, his own affinity for the Sisters of Mercy and consideration for his dear ol’ dad, my son Oliver mocked up a replica of the poster on his computer, which was damn swell of him.
Today, the Sisters of Mercy are still a going concern, albeit in their umpteenth line-up, finding vocalist/mother superior Andrew Eldridge as the only original member. They're slated to slither back into town next month to play Radio City Music Hall.
Ostensibly, Black Flag also still exists, although only as a sporadically touring vehicle for founding guitarist Greg Ginn and a rotating cast of largely anonymous henchmen. Henry Rollins left the ranks of Black Flag in 1986. I was actually privileged to witness one of that iteration of the band's final performances at the Newport Music Hall in Columbus, OH, but it was honestly not that memorable a show. Henry went onto pursue a wide range of other projects, not least the Rollins Band. He has since given up performing music entirely, but still tenaciously tours as a spoken-word performer. He's also a far more approachable, thoughtful and considerate figure than he ever was back in the `80s.
Irving Plaza, despite a brief, confusing stint as the Filmore East at Irving Plaza, is still in full operation here in 2024. The Ritz technically moved uptown to West 54th Street at the tail end of 1989 for a short few years before closing at some point in the middle of the `90s. The original space that had been The Ritz morphed back into Webster Hall and became more of a dance club. Webster Hall closed for a spell, but is currently back in full swing.
To my mind, part of the brilliance of the Beastie Boys wasn’t so much that they were super talented or preternaturally innovative (although, they kinda were), but rather that they just went ahead and did stuff only if they happened to find it amusing, whether the rest of the world was in on the joke or not. Their oeuvre seems exclusively predicated on making each other laugh – I always loved that.
I've spoken about it before, I believe, but the recording below was done for the twentieth anniversary of the release of Paul's Boutique and used as the special bonus commentary, but it’s basically just the three of them sitting in a studio, listening to the record, and unspooling ridiculous anecdotes, again primarily for the purpose of making each other laugh.
Murray Street, specifically between Church Street and West Broadway, comes with a lot of associations. Its name became fatefully entwined with the events of September 11th, 2001, when it was discovered that battered landing gear from one of the doomed, hijacked planes had fallen into a narrow alley behind 50 Murray Street. Sonic Youth, who were recording a new album at Echo Canyon Studios just across the way at 51 Murray Street, had to understandably abandon their sessions for a while in the wake of that calamitous event. When they were able to return, several weeks later, all of their instruments were covered with a grim patina of dust and debris. They ended up titling the resultant album Murray Street in observance.
Murray Street was also the home to New York Dolls, a holdover strip club from a less salubrious era of Manhattan, unwittingly named after the seminal proto-punk band of the same moniker. Directly across the street from New York Dolls was a large delicatessen called Amish Market, which stretched between Murray Street to Park Place to its south. Legend has it that rapper Cardi B, having recently dropped out of nearby BMCC (Borough of Manhattan Community College), took a job as a cashier at Amish Market. But after coming in late and lipping off to her manager, Cardi B was fired. Distraught, Cardi took her now-former manager’s withering advice and marched across the street to New York Dolls to get a job as a stripper, a vocation for which she earned considerable renown, eventually turning her penchant for performing into a music career. The rest, as they say, is history.
As neighboring TriBeCa started to further gentrify and essentially widen in size (originally, the southern “border” of TriBeCa was arguably considered Chambers Street a couple of blocks to the north of Murray Street), New York Dolls seemed destined be zoned out of existence, given its location in a burgeoning residential neighborhood. Somehow, they managed to hang on, possibly because the club’s owner bought the building in 2016. The club was re-christened FlashDancers Downtown during COVID and is still there here in August of 2024.
Back in late 2016, meanwhile, I started a job just a block or two to the south of Amish Market and, for that matter, New York Dolls. While I never gave any patronage to the latter, I did initially frequent Amish Market to procure my breakfasts, in the mornings. While a very busy and robust operation (I honestly have no recollection if Cardi B was still working there, at the time – I certainly never knowingly saw her, much less any actual Amish folks), I cooled on Amish Market pretty swiftly. The grill from which one might procure, say, an egg & cheese sandwich never operated with any pronounced stealth or efficiency. In time, I abandoned that option in favor of some frankly lackluster oatmeal but ended up giving that up as well after overhearing someone in my office’s elevator saying that they’d gotten food poisoning from Amish Market’s salad bar. From that point forward, I started getting my grub at the presumptuously named Corner Gourmet deli on Murray Street, on the other side of West Broadway. I know.... fascinating, right?
Not quite as resilient to COVID as its scantily clad neighbors at New York Dolls, Amish Market closed permanently in 2020, and has been gutted and dormant ever since.
Here in 2024, I don’t have a lot of reasons to walk up and down Murray Street unless I’m bound for Benares, a decent option for Indian food at 45 Murray. But there is still something my eyes catch on almost every time I’m crossing Murray at West Broadway ---- the Tinsel Toads.
Either left over from some amphibian-themed function held at Amish Market’s second floor at some indeterminate point or part of some anachronistic promotion of some kind (maybe a special on frogs’ legs?), there are two silhouettes of splayed toads in silver tinsel still affixed to an upper window just off the corner, and I simply cannot wrap my head around why they’re still there, let along what purpose they may have once served.
Walk around the byways of Manhattan here in the years after COVID, and it’s impossible not to notice the sheer volume of still-empty storefronts and for lease signs everywhere. While, as I mentioned, I was not the greatest fan of Amish Market, its departure was inarguably a pronounced loss to the surrounding neighborhood, and I want to believe a new venture will occupy that cavernous space before too long.
Until they do, the tinsel toads of Murray Street will doubtlessly maintain their strange, silent vigil.
And here's Sonic Youth playing a 9/11 benefit in October 2001. Thurston Moore prefaces the performance with his thoughts about what was happening for them and for NYC writ large, at the time. Worth a listen...
Just a great set by Cop Shoot Cop at CBGB, captured on that intimate stage right after Christmas 1993. I was actually at this show. I believe I shouted something just prior to "Shine On, Elizabeth."
Yes, it’s another one of these travelogue films about vintage NYC.
Here’s forty minutes of period-specific footage of Manhattan from the early-to-mid 1970’s. This thing that stuck out to me, in this clip, is the portion between 7:52 and about 10:44, wherein the sound suddenly comes on, and you see a pack of kids playing on East 90th Street between Park Avenue and Lexington, which – oddly enough – was the block my parents lived on when I was born.
From there, one of the youngsters starts narrating specifics about the city, while showing footage of the tykes playing in around around the Carnegie Hill area of the Upper East Side, where I spent my formative years.
Elsewhere, it's the usual hodgepodge of stock footage of predictable locales like Central Park, Times Square, Washington Square Park, Sixth Avenue, etc., but still a compelling trip back in time. Why it says "2002" on the upper left corner eludes me.
I found a fascinating companion piece to Henry Chalfant’s “Style Wars” that profiles two notorious gents from Washington Heights. It’s a deep and often confusing dive, but it’s quite well done. Unfortunately, it's not embeddable, but you can see it here.
Also -- it's in three parts, but each one unspools a compelling saga. It's really great stuff.
There are fewer things more ponderously laborious than a self-styled music nerd haughtily asserting the time he or she’d spent lauding a band before they were popular, but here I go doing it again.
I was fortunate enough to be clued into The Clash from very early on, thanks to an overly cited crate of records (which I only recently re-invoked here) from my then-London-based father in the summer of 1977 (arguably the only really decent thing he ever did for us, to my mind). When my older sister and I pulled out The Clash’s debut LP (British edition, no less) from that crate and stared at the stark depiction of Messrs. Simonon, Strummer and Jones – all drainpipe trousers, white socks, spikey hair and armbands -- standing like a trio of futuristic muggers in a narrow London alley – I snapped it right up. It sounds ridiculous now, but that first spin of “Janie Jones” was a genuine revelation. I mean, next to the music of the day (the big-charting records of that summer were by The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and a live album by fuckin’ Barry Manilow), it sounded positively feral, thinly rehearsed, rudimentary, hastily produced and, well, wrong. I remember my mother walking into the living room, exclaiming “What’s wrong with them?”
I loved it.
I adored that first LP, with “Complete Control,” “White Riot” and “I’m So Bored with the USA” being my go-to tracks. By the time their magnum opus, the undeniable London Calling, arrived two years later (I didn’t actually pick up their second record, Give’em Enough Rope until way after the fact, I feel remiss to concede), I almost started to write them off as over. I remember playing the “hidden track” (technically a last-minute addition too late to be amended on the cover art) “Train in Vain,” one afternoon, and my mother – the same woman who’d inferred the band’s collective cognitive impairment two short years earlier – came dancing into my room, giddily expressing, “now THIS I like!!!” That might as well have been the kiss of death.
Then I heard “Police on My Back.”
Not even a proper single off 1980’s Sandinista!, the sprawling triple-LP that spawned it, “Police on My Back” packed everything I loved about the band into one, single, incendiary song. It was all there … relentlessly clanging guitars, an urgent riff, a vague renunciation of the local constabulary, a rousing chorus … it was all fucking perfect. Of course, I’d later learn that much as with comparable Clash anthems like “I Fought the Law,” “Police & Thieves,” and “Armagiddeon Time,” they didn’t even write it. The track was originally penned as a pop single by The Equals, who counted future “Electric Avenue” singer, Eddie Grant, in its ranks.
But in the Clash’s hands, “Police on My Back” is positively set on fire. It’s probably considered heresy to suggest as much, but not only is “Police on My Back” my favorite song by The Clash, it’s also a song I’d cite as a quintessential Punk Rock song. Not everyone will agree, but whatever … start your own blog.
Upon the advent of the era of ringtones, I raged against them (you can read this bit of curmudgeonly idiocy here), but when I got my first smartphone, I gave in and, sure enough, made “Police on My Back” my ringtone. Where in that earlier post, I worried that incessant repetition of that ringtone might unwittingly forge a negative association with the song, whenever I hear “Police on My Back” now, I immediately assume my laundry’s done (my ringtone also acts as the alarm sound on my iPhone’s timer). Honestly speaking, “Police on My Back” has been my ringtone for so long that I don’t even know if I still know how to change it.
This all brings me to the video below, which initially came up in a random YouTube search for Other Music, the since-vanished music shop on East 4th Street. This clip features comedian Fred Armisen doing a cover of “Police on My Back” within the confines of the shop back in, good lord, 2011.
Now, yes, Fred Armisen can be both funny and alternately cloying, but I was impressed by this. Like his contemporary Jimmy Fallon, Armisen is always quick to assert his fandom for music, although I’d suggest he does so with considerably more taste and authority than Fallon, who is ultimately just a fawning fanboy. Prior to his career in comedy, Armisen was indeed a musician, playing drums in the Chicago band, Trenchmouth. Armisen was a rock guy first and a funny guy later.
Using loops in a comparable manner of cats like Reggie Watts and Marc Rebillet, here Armisen builds “Police on My Back” up from its isolated ingredients to more or less faithfully replicate the full song, although he does kinda fail with the vocals.
It might seem inconceivable that I’ve found yet another reason to write about “After Hours” (the last time, I believe, being this recent post), but here we go.
The reason is the somewhat sad news that 296 Spring Street, the building on the southwest corner of Spring and Hudson Streets that served as the location of Club Berlin in “After Hours” (as lengthily discussed here) is no more. As mentioned in that earlier post, there was an actual Club Berlin in SoHo back in the day, but it was over on West Broadway and Grand Street, I believe. Today, there’s a subterranean club on Second Street and Avenue A called Berlin NYC, but that’s not really related, I don’t believe.
In any case, 296 Spring was originally a bar called JJ’s West. Circa the filming of “After Hours,” Scorsese had its exterior painted in a checkerboard fashion to stay in tune, I guess, with the edgy fashion of the times. In later years, that corner became one of the neighborhood’s few delicatessens. It was seemingly the only spot for miles around to procure sundry items like beer and sandwiches in the dead of night.
My most vivid memory of that deli involves a late night in about 1990 at McGovern’s just down the block on Spring Street. Myself, my friend Sam and a young Australian lady named Madelene had gone to go see age-old noise-rock weirdos Alice Donut play. We stepped into that deli, after the show, and --- for whatever reason – bought three more beers with the intention of consuming them while we walked. We did so, but then just stood outside the deli – awkwardly – drinking those beers. The only reason it was awkward was that, at the time, Sam and I were sort of both courting fetching Aussie Madelene, and it was gradually becoming apparent that Sam had “won” this little competition.
The trouble was that he was having kind of a tough time conveying that information. As something of an ice-breaking punctuation, Sam gave the top of my beer bottle a tap with the bottom of his bottle, an annoying little stunt we were wont to do that usually resulted in the recipient’s beer foaming over. As the suds washed over my fingers, I managed to figure out what he was trying to imply, and I retaliated in kind, unwittingly using too much force as I brought the bottom of my bottle down onto his. The narrow rim at the top of his bottle quietly snapped off, leaving behind a sharply edged shard that no one initially noticed.
I stammered out some anemic comment like, “okay, well, I guess I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” leaving them to what I imagined would be doubtlessly amorous shenanigans. As I was turning to walk away, I watched Sam obliviously raise his now-broken bottle back towards his mouth, and time started to move in slow motion. I frantically flung my arm out to intercept the sharp end before it reached Sam’s face, slamming the bottle to the ground where it shattered, and practically tripping over myself in the process. Not knowing that he’d been about to puncture his face (which also would have been entirely my fault), Sam was understandably confused and angry, compounding the already embarrassing circumstances of the whole scenario. I explained the whole sequence of events, which frankly sounded dubious at best, and I’m not entirely sure either of them believed me.
I started skulking in the direction of the subway back to my then-home on the Upper East Side, until I realized that in only a few short hours’ time, I’d have to come back down to SoHo to open up at the art gallery on Mercer Street where I was working, at the time. I ended up drearily walking to the gallery at about four in the morning, unlocking the door and sleeping on a narrow bench behind the rickety metal desk until opening time. It was not a great evening.
Be that as it may, that deli lasted well into the new millennium. I’m not sure when it officially closed up shop, but in the last few years, the façade was all boarded up.
Sure enough, here in late July of 2024, all that remains of the deli and the location of Club Berlin is a hole in the ground.
Today, 296 Spring Street is gone. McGovern's closed at some point and became a club called Sway, although the McGovern's sign still hangs out front. Madelene ended up breezily fooling around with both Sam and I before repairing back to Australia, never to be seen again. Sam moved to Portland, Maine, then to Seattle, got married, had kids and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he still lives today.
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