I feel like this photo’s been making the rounds for a while, now, but the above image was snapped by one Peter van Wijk, capturing an unknown band playing a soundcheck on a stage in the middle of West Broadway at White Street in the Summer of 1979.
It’s a cool shot for a number of reasons. For a start, I love how it speaks to how informal that neck of town used to be. A million years ago, I did gopher work for a graphic designer who used to say that on weekends, people who lived off West Broadway used to string a volleyball net across the expanse of the avenue and play pickup games. There was so little traffic, at the time, that it wasn’t a hassle for anybody. This imaged exudes that same sort of vibe, or to me, at least.
Secondly, New York nostalgist trainspotters might note both Teddy’s and Tier 3 behind the band (on the easterly side of the avenue). I spoke about Tier 3 quite recently here. Teddy’s, of course, later became El Teddy’s (I’m assuming it had something to do with new management and/or a change in cuisine?), and famously hosted a replica of the Statue of Liberty’s crown on its roof. I took this picture of same at some point in the late `90s.
Thirdly, of course, the looming towers of the former World Trade Center are a stark, sobering reminder of the neighborhood’s since-altered topography.
I have zero idea of who this band might have been. I appreciate that the guitarist in the center appears to be playing a lovely Gretsch, hollo-body White Falcon (the weapon of choice for The Cult’s Billy Duffy, among a few others).
Here in 2023, nobody seems to set up impromptu concerts in TriBeCa. The space formerly occupied by Tier 3 (where bands like the Bush Tetras, 8 Eyes Spy, the Stare Kits and even Bauhaus and The Pop Group played) is now an Italian restaurant. The building that housed El Teddy’s was raised to erect yet another condominium with a pricey hardware store in its ground level. I have no idea what became of the giant Liberty crown.
As of this morning, this very spot in Peter van Wijk's photograph looked like this….
This neighborhood -- arguably the "main drag" of TriBeCa -- is also all over the video below, a widely maligned single by Lou Reed which I've written about before...
I’m talking, of course, about the film “News From Home” by Belgian director Chantal Akerman. If you’ve not seen it and are too lazy to go back and click on those links above, here’s a very brief synopsis:
Letters from Chantal Akerman’s mother are read over a series of elegantly composed shots of 1976 New York, where our (unseen) filmmaker and protagonist has relocated. Akerman’s unforgettable time capsule of the city is also a gorgeous meditation on urban alienation and personal and familial disconnection.
It’s slow …. very slow … but it’s worth your time.
I doubt it’ll be up again for long, so watch it sooner than later.
Earlier this week, as I was walking down Broadway to work, I passed by a clothing shop just north of Canal Street that was using a crate of vinyl LP’s as some kind of prop in their front window, with various albums strewn around artfully. One such record was a weathered copy of an old favorite of mine, Emotional Rescue by the Rolling Stones, which was oddly fitting, as said album always reminds me of the summer, and one specific summer in particular.
Back in 2009, I wrote up a little post for a since-vanished blog called The New York Nobody Sings, extolling the merits of a particular track that mentioned an arguably iconic Manhattan street corner by name. Sadly, the blog no longer exists, but here’s what I wrote back then … which I’ve edited/updated slightly, as warranted.
Sure, there are plenty of Rolling Stones songs that cite New York City ("Honky Tonk Woman," "Harlem Shuffle," "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo [Heartbreaker]," "Shattered" and, of course, "Miss You" spring immediately to mind), but, to my recollection, they've never cut a song that references such a specific New York address as they did on "Dance Pt. 1," the opening number off their transitional album from 1980, Emotional Rescue. Ten seconds into the track, Jagger starts lipping off to Keith, rhetorically postulating as to why they're "standing on the corner of West 8th Street and Sixth Avenue." Why indeed?
It's a fair question, I suppose, being that said main drag into the formerly most-traveled area of Greenwich Village hardly seems like the hippest stretch of real estate for the fabled Glimmer Twins to be loitering on (although they were known to favor a block just across town a couple of years later). I'd imagine the explanation for the location is that portions of the Emotional Rescue album were recorded just up the street at Electric Lady Studios. Still, I've always loved the fanciful image of Mick & Keef in full-on flouncy rock-fopp mode, striking any number of ridiculous poses in front of what would have been Gray's Papaya, at the time, wondering what to do with their evening.
The previous album, Some Girls, had found the Stones capably keeping up with the times, crafting soon-to-be classic rock radio staples like the afore-cited "Miss You" and "Shattered" that stylistically borrowed from the pulsing disco and raging punk rock of that era. The Emotional Rescue record, however, was lambasted as more of a forced effort, one that breathlessly strove to mimic the more organic sounds of its predecessor. In truth, many of the tracks were actually leftovers from the Some Girls sessions. While not as maligned as later tepid endeavors like Dirty Work or the entirely needless A Bigger Bang, Emotional Rescue is rarely touted as a stand-out effort in the burly Stones catalog.
It's rare, but it happens. This is one of those times.
The album was released in June of 1980. At the time, I was 13 years old, and had been sequestered -- largely against my will -- to a camp in the verdant environs of Maine called Great Oaks. All the kids at the camp were split up into a dozen cabins, each named after a state (I lived in "West Virginia," a cabin almost immediately re-christened "West Vagina" for the purposes of tirelessly prurient juvenile comedy). Each cabin was looked after by a designated counselor. My cabin's counselor was a Swedish twentysomething named Eric, who had long, shaggy blonde hair much like that of his more celebrated countryman, Bjorn Borg. Eric was also a Rolling Stones freak. While he tolerated the endless airings of the Devo and Ramones tapes we'd insist on playing, there were fewer things Eric enjoyed more than hearing the Stones. So, when he got his hands on a cassette of Emotional Rescue during a field trip into town, one day, it was pretty much solidified that we'd be listening to precious little else for the remainder of the summer (although Joe's Garage Act I by Frank Zappa was also a West Vagina favorite, if memory serves). By the end of the summer, I knew Emotional Rescue back-to-front. To this day, I still think it's an excellent album. You can read more about my Great Oaks experience here.
While "Dance Pt. 1" has never been my favorite song on the record (that honor goes to "Where The Boys Go"), I've always dug it. Not just for the shoutout to West 8th Street -- a strip I'd soon-after become a regular on thanks to its then-thriving (and now vanished) network of record stores -- but for its shameless espousal of grooving. While many would decry the band for trying to jump on some sort of disco-rock bandwagon, "Dance Pt. 1" (which was evidently recorded several times -- there are seemingly handfuls of alternate versions floating around out there) is a million times funkier -- and more legitimately danceable -- than similarly-inclined efforts by, say, Kiss ("I Was Made for Loving You") or Pink Floyd ("Another Brick in The Wall Pt. II"). I'd suggest that Queen surpassed them in the credible funk department with "Another One Bites the Dust" (released the same year) but blame it on that bass line. And while gratuitously hedonistic, "Dance Pt. 1" still retains Keef's signature dirty guitar, sneerily reminding you at every turn that even when wearing their boogie trousers, the Stones still rocked harder than you.
Here in 2023, Electric Lady is still holding court on a West 8th Street that is entirely unrecognizable from its 1980 incarnation. Without fail, though, I absolutely cannot cross that corner of 6th Avenue without the opening of "Dance Pt. 1" shimmying into my head. Get up, get out....
So, that was the end of my post for The New York Nobody Sings. I didn’t even begin to delve into some of the other great tracks on the album in question, notably the endearingly yobbish “Where The Boys Go,” the frankly ludicrous “Send It To Me” (wherein Mick recites a laundry list of ladies of various nationalities he wouldn’t turn his nose up at), the frantically priapic “She’s So Cold” and, wait for it, the slow-loping disco-rock of the title track, replete with Mick’s bizarre recitation about being “your knight in shining armor coming to your emotional rescue, riding across the desert on a fine Arab charger.” These are all amazing moments.
On the not-so-great front, there are admittedly clunkers like the deeply inappropriate (but still kinda fun) “Summer Romance,” the roundly wrong-footed “Indian Girl,” the dirgey “Down in the Hole” and the mean-spirited “Let Me Go,” but I never said it was a perfect record.
It's not a perfect Stones record, not by a long shot (if they have one, I'd probably suggest it's Let It Bleed, but you may beg to differ). But I still love it. Beyond all the personal associations I've assigned to it, I just think it's a fun, interesting slice of the Stones' history. I was also a big fan of the artwork. Ironically, the aesthetic they were mining for a modern, futuristic look -- those distinctive, thermographic photos -- looks irretrievably dated today. I remember taping the massive poster that came inserted with the original LP to my bedroom door out at our old house in Quogue, and my mother practically hissing every time she saw it (as I mentioned here, she was decidedly not a fan).
Given that I travel in idiotic, rock-dork circles wherein canonical albums and hallowed artists are routinely subject to endless rankings and needless re-appraisals, my invocations of the under-appreciated greatness of Emotional Rescue have been plentiful, over the years. But I've yet to find that many people that agree with me.
Back in 2007, I wrote what was soon to be a somewhat typically (for me) nostalgia-fueled post about how the westerly-facing façade on the northeasterly side of St. Marks Place near Third Avenue that previously hosted the massive portrait of “Gringo” (i.e. the somewhat notorious local punky junkie named John Spacely) now just sported a plain, white field with the word “Muerte” on it. I interpreted that cryptic Spanish as emblematic of the direction the neighborhood’s character was headed. In ensuing years, no further artwork graced that wall, beyond another morbid legend that read “RIPSTMARKS.” Beyond that, it just got grimmer.
By most accounts (including not one, but two independent feature films -- one of which inspiring director Lech Kowalski to commission that massive mural), the actual subject, John Spacely, was not really that admirable a character. Essentially a colorful-albeit-troubled, substance-abusing actor, scenester, hustler and heroin dealer, John Spacely may have looked cool, but he arguably exemplified the very least salubrious aspects of the East Village, and many understandably resented that grand, artfully inescapable glorification. By the turn of the millennium, that resentment finally convinced the building’s landlord to paint over it. Meanwhile, Michael Jackson’s equally massive mural on nearby East 11th remains undisturbed, despite multiple allegations of child molestation, but I suppose that’s a post for another day.
In any case, when I first spied the “Gringo” mural in the early `80s, I had no idea who John Spacely was. To my impressionable mind, it was just a striking bit of artwork that completely captured the tenor of the times and vibe of the neighborhood. Contrary to my laboriously pedantic nature, I wasn’t particularly bothered by the unseemly specifics of its origins. It just seemed like the gateway to coolsville.
Years passed and the neighborhood kept changing. Around 1993, they erected Cooper Union’s first dormitory on the same strip, just north of where the Continental, St. Marks Pizza and the corner Optimo used to stand. As discussed here, commissioned as a freelance reporter by a colleague from LIFE Magazine, I wrote an article profiling the new dorm for Cooper Union’s alumni magazine and remember walking around the neighborhood interviewing locals about it. I vividly remember chatting with a Mohican kid in a vintage Germs t-shirt who ominously foretold the dull future of St. Marks Place. “I’m sure that’s just the beginning of the end,” he predicted. He wasn’t wrong. Seven years later, “Gringo” was whitewashed.
In 2019, meanwhile, news broke that an eight-story, mixed-use office building was to be built on the corner of St. Marks at Third Avenue, displacing all the businesses between the Cooper Union dorm and the corner, including the sites listed above and a particularly tragic McDonalds. Presumably, the pandemic slowed the process down, and the construction site sat in a state of eroding dormancy for a very long time.
To this day, even though the “Gringo” mural has been gone for about 23 years, my eyes still kind of expect to see it when I look to the east from Astor Place. Not to get too histrionic, but it’s much like how my eyes used to search for the two towers of the World Trade Center in the years after the events of September 11th. These were things that made a lasting impression that one didn’t expect to just vanish.
This week, however, I spotted something new that kind of took me by surprise (although it shouldn’t have). Taking an easterly route to my office, on Monday, I swung toward the Bowery and looked to my left and did sort of a double take. Not only was “Gringo” no longer there (duh!), but in the lot slated for the new office building, there now grew tall, infrastructural spires.
Dormant no longer, that building is definitely coming, and St. Marks will change even further.
Regular readers may recognize the name Ricky Powell, who I’ve invoked several times here, over the years (notary here, here, here, here, here and this post, wherein the man himself chimed in on the comments). In Downtown NYC circles, he was a known quantity as a photographer, graffiti tagger, personality, and erstwhile comrade of the fledgling Beastie Boys. That latter association probably provided him with the most renown, but he was very much an established figure in his own right.
In any case, Ricky sadly passed away in 2021. Shortly after his death, Showtime released a documentary on the man titled “The Individualist.” Being that I don’t subscribe to that service, I was unable to ever see it.
Until now….
A regular reader named Crawford kindly wrote in …. with a link.
There used to be this great little, practically hidden-away café/bar/intimate performance space on St. Marks Place, in the early-to-mid `90s, called Sin-é, which was run by this eccentric Irish gent named Shane. In very short order, it became a very hip spot, and it was not at all uncommon to run into suitably cool celebs hanging in or around it. From local scenesters to rising stars and established luminaries, everyone seemed to mix and mingle at Sin-é without a great deal of fuss. It was just that type of place.
My favorite memory, though, was giving some out-of-town friends a sort of ersatz East Village tour, one drizzly evening. As we were walking west on St. Marks Place out of Tompkins Square Park, I started unspooling the backstory of Sin-é, and explaining that it was not at all unlikely to run into Irish rockstars like Bono, Gavin Friday and … as I pulled open the door, who came walking out as if on cue but … “ladies and gentlemen, Sinead O’Connor.”
She flashed a quick smile our way and walked out into the rain.
Sinead O'Connor was troubled, but absolutely preternaturally gifted. May she finally find peace.
While I’m currently committed to finishing “Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics,” a sprawling oral history by Dylan Jones all about London's fertile synth-pop scene in the late `70/early 80s spawned from fabled clubs like The Blitz (I’m about a third of the way through … it’s kind of slow-going), I popped into the Barnes & Noble near my office for a quick browse, yesterday, only to have the book pictured above practically leap out and grab me by the jugular.
Penned by one Jesse Rifkin, a historian who also conducts a varies series of music-themed tour of New York, “This Must Be The Place: Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City” seems verily tailor-made to my particular predilections. And given that, after a swift perusal of the index, I spotted invocations of names like Agnostic Front, SWANS, Missing Foundation and – OH DO PLEASE WAIT FOR IT – Cop Shoot Cop, I snapped it up and bought it on the spot. Expect a full, florid book report in relatively short order.
I want to say that I’ve encountered Mr. Rifkin in one instance or another, but cannot seem to find any record thereof. In any case, while I’m quite fired up to read his book, his Instagram account is entirely worth your time, touching on many of the same topics as my blog. Witness just two examples below.
Back in May of 2022, meanwhile, I posted a piece about Michael Gira’s fabled “bunker” at 93 Avenue B, a SWANS rehearsal space which doubled as his windowless crash pad. Via his Instagram page, Rifkin hosted a glimpse of that fearasome stronghold’s interior…
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 hard to write these entries without dramatically lapsing into hoary cliché, but it does genuinely seem like only yesterday that I launched this blog. That fateful date was eighteen years ago today, believe it or not. Were this blog a sentient human being, it would now be legally eligible to vote, run for political office, enter a contract and/or make a will.
Marching up hills of eloquently inspired fecundity and down into deep valleys of yawnsome, derivative drivel, Flaming Pablum has doggedly soldiered into its petulant late teens, with the pronounced penchants for willful obnoxiousness, door-slamming obstinance and acne-speckled histrionics that customarily come with that ill-mannered age. But I wouldn't expect a course-correcting dose of responsible maturity any time soon.
As I've said in previous anniversary messages, I still legitimately feel, each and every time I post something here, that it could be my very last entry, as I have no earthly clue when I might be next inspired to share something. But, I don't think I'm ready to hang it up just yet. Thanks to everyone who wrote in, got involved and contributed, this year, notably the Desperately Seeking the 80's ladies, Inaki Rojas of Pop Secret for including me in his epic series about Charly Garcia's corner, Flaming Pablum interviewees like Brooke Smith and Tod [A] and everyone who took the time to leave a constructive, informative or even simply encouraging comment.
The image at the top of this post, by the way, in case you can't decode it, is one of my stickers. This particular one was affixed to a light pole on East 10th Street between Third and Fourth Avenues (just a bottle's toss from the site of Jesse Malin's old Black & White Bar). I don't remember when I first slapped this one up, but where often they get covered, painted over, peeled off or amusingly defaced (my favorite being that one that replaced the word Pablum with the word Scrotum), someone actually tried to BURN THIS ONE OFF, with only middling success.
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?
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