Flaming Pablum

Manhattan of The Damned

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.

Meanwhile, here’s a taste of one of those shows…

Big Fun in Nitzer City

If I’m being honest, I was never that big a fan of late `80s industrial combo, Nitzer Ebb. I mean, I dutifully bought their 1989 album, Belief during my senior year of college, on the strength of their propulsive single, “Control I’m Here,” but they always seemed just a bit too … well, I guess “silly” is the word. At the time, I generally preferred my industrial rock with a bit more gratuitous menace ala Ministry and Skinny Puppy, although – in retrospect – “silly” is a term that could be generously applied around that subgenre. A lot of that stuff still sounds amazing today, whereas other bits … not quite so much.

In any case, by the time of Nitzer Ebb’s next album, 1990’s Showtime, I’d pretty much jumped ship completely, so I largely ignored the single below, “Fun to Be Had.” Also, who needed Nitzer Ebb when the Wax Trax gang was tirelessly pumping out great records by names like the Revolting Cocks, Pailhead, Acid Horse, PTP, 1000 Homo DJs, Lead Into Gold and many others? It should be noted that, in most instances, those records were all more or less made by the same five or six guys, give or take a cameo from Trent Reznor, Cabaret Voltaire, Ian MacKaye, Luc Van Acker et al.

So, I slept on this single in real time which, honestly, doesn’t really bother me, as I don’t think it’s “much cop,” as the Brits say. That said, I happened to spot it playing somewhere during my brief sojourn in Ireland, last week, and it struck me that it’s something of an unwitting period piece for a since-vanished Manhattan.

I don’t know what the director’s vision really was, but herein we see the two main dudes in Nitzer Ebb – Douglas McCarthy and … the other guy … walking around various neighborhoods. I can’t quite pinpoint the first location, but I definitely recognize those distinctive columns that Douglas emerges from. Elsewhere, we see the Nitzers stomping spiritedly across the Brooklyn Bridge, bounding through parts of the Financial District (notably beneath Jean DuBuffet’s massive sculpture at 28 Liberty Street), bouncing around what, at the time, was a comparatively desolate portion of the Meat Packing District, specifically 675 Hudson Street, which I spoke at length about here, in front of the signature orange exterior of what used to be the Great Jones Café on Great Jones Street, and down along what looks like West Broadway between Spring and Grand streets.

Throughout, proceedings remain suitably silly.

Enjoy.

Wind in the Rigging

Since 2019, the partially completed skyscraper at 45 Park Place in TriBeCa, between West Broadway and Church Street, has been in a dormant state following a Stop Work Order from the DOB issued in December of that year. The unfinished and unsightly tower looms over its surrounding portion of Lower Manhattan like a giant, silent sentinel, with a spindly crane perched atop a thin metal exoskeleton affixed to the building’s westerly wall. On windier days – like today – the crane actively swings worryingly around like a gargantuan weathervane. According to my friends at TriBeCa Citizen, the DOB allegedly makes routine inspections to the site and the crane, although further construction seems indefinitely stalled. TriBeCa residents are understandably displeased.

Adding arguable insult to injury, at some point, in recent months, an intrepid graffiti artist named RAMS somehow got inside 45 Park Place, ascended to its unfinished rooftop, and daringly rappelled down each of the four sides of the tower to leave huge, colorful tags. While an impressive-if-astonishingly-foolhardy feat, the end results lend proceedings at 45 Park Place a further veneer of neglect and decrepitude.

Personally speaking, the graffiti part doesn’t really bother me. If anything, RAMS did the community a backhanded favor by generating a new stir around a problem that continues to be seemingly ignored. By calling attention to it, perhaps there’ll be some movement.

But I’ll say this. To stand on the street and see that massive metal crane swing around in the wind is pretty chilling.

Reheated Pablum: Updates on Some Past Posts

I thought I’d take a moment to aggregate some updates regarding stuff I’ve written about here before. Here we go…

Some of you might remember this post from 2023, which documented the quiet closing of Miyabi, the frankly not-that-amazing Japanese restaurant that moved into Bleecker Bob’s former space at 118 West Third Street following the slow demise of that storied record shop in 2013. Well, after another period of dormancy – during which time the neighboring business to the west morphed from a dubious foot-rub/happy-ending joint into a frozen yogurt purveyor – it seems 118 is getting ready for a new tenant … one that involves, evidently, a “hibachi lab.” See the interior above.

Back in 2013, meanwhile, I wrote an entry about See/Hear, the furtive hive of zine culture, music-geek literature and underground comics that formerly held count in a basement-level space on East 7th Street. As you can see from the comments on that post, the mere invocation of the shop touched a nerve, for a lot of people. Well, for those folks, I’d like to highlight a new, comparatively exhaustive oral history that was just posted on Animal about the place that really goes into its back-history. Check that out here.

Lastly, some of you might remember a series of posts from 2017 wherein I became preoccupied with identifying a certain Manhattan corner upon which the fabled Misfits had once posed for a series of photos that had become relatively iconic (well, for Misfits fans, at least).

As detailed in those posts, I stalked the streets of Lower Manhattan trying to pinpoint the exact spot. At the same time, I reached out to the photographer, one Roxanne Lowit, to see if she could provide the answer, or at least some clues. Her assistant got back to me with some vague intel about where the location might be, and – in turn – I asked if I might reproduce some her photos for my posts. Unfortunately, the response was an emphatic NO, I could not. I got around that by linking to other sites who’d posted them, including photos of Lowit’s images on various bootleg singles and via some illustrations by my daughter, who was about 12 years old at the time. Here’s one of those illustrations now. This is Charlotte's interpretation of the print-out I'm holding in the shot above. 

Initially, I was surprised that Lowit – who’d gone on to do many, many other higher profile projects and is now a celebrated fashion photographer -- should have given that much of a damn that some rinkydink little blog like mine wanted to host her pics, but hey, I do understand. That’s her goddamn work. Those images are no one else’s. Respect is due.

Cut to 2024, and someone has evidently convinced Lowit to revisit her evening in the company of Jerry Only, Glen Danzig, Bobby Steele and Joey Image by way of a new photo book called, “We Walk the Streets at Night.” Documenting the full shoot wherein Lowit led the Lodi, New Jersey quartet around the then desolate streets of the West Village (the corner in question, incidentally, was West 11th at Washington Street), the book is frustratingly spare on details (not even a preamble from the photographer). Moreover, the images themselves are presented in their original form as blown-up slides. It’s a nice effect, I suppose, but I would have liked to see some of the pictures in a larger format – and with a bit of anecdotal augmentation, although if you’re curious as to the doings of the Misfits during that era, I would recommend the excellent book,“This Music Leaves Stains” by James Green Jr.

If you’re curious about “We Walk the Streets at Night,” meanwhile, you can pick a copy up at Generation Records on Thompson Street. Tell’em Flaming Pablum sent ya.

Lunachicks Through the Lense

Back in 2016, I posted an inordinate amount of entries detailing my frankly ridiculous search for the location of a photo of the Lunachicks, which culminated here, should you care. The photo above of the band above was not the photo in question, but taken from the same shoot. This shows the Lunachicks on the Bowery at Bond Street, just steps away from the former site of CBGB, and was snapped by one Joe Dilworth in 1990.

The charts may not be chock full of actual rock bands, anymore — their place taken by poorly-enuciating hip-hoppers and tempestuous pop twits — but flip on the streaming service of your choice, and you can avail yourselves to any number of hoary rockumentaries from all over the rock spectrum. In doing so, you're bound to hear lots or purple-prosed hyperbole and/or wildly exaggerated anecdotes about the band’s antics from a previous, more hedonistic age (and probably a soundbite or two from Dave Grohl), but lemme tell ya – the Lunachicks ain’t stretching the truth, in this trailer below.

Being a fellow native New Yorker, I had the immense privilege of seeing The Lunachicks perform many times, back in the `90s, but the show that …er… “sticks out” the most (this is an awkward turn of phrase, given the anecdote I’m about to unspool) was their opening slot circa 1990 for the Rollins Band at the Marquee Club on West 21st street in Manhattan. ADDENDUM: I just learned, via the Instagram page of Michael Wingerm, that this particular show was 34 years ago TODAY!!!!

In the trailer below, you’ll hear bassist Sydney “Squid” Silver mention a host of indignities the band had to weather during their dues-paying years, and I caught some of that firsthand, that night. Already a curious anomaly for the times (even at the dawn of the pre-Riot Grrl `90s, the notion of an all-female punk/hardcore/grunge/noise/metal/scrumrock band was still largely diminished as something of a lesser novelty), the Lunachicks usually had to do way more than simply “win over” a blithely disinterested audience that was otherwise there to see the headliner. They had to leave an indelible impression, which they usually did. Later that evening, in fact, Henry Rollins would endearingly thank the Lunachicks for allowing the Rollins Band to “to close for them.” Rarely did anyone walk away from a Lunachicks show feeling indifferent.

But in the middle of the Lunachicks’ own rollicking, high-voltage performance, that night, there was a bit of a commotion in the crowd (and not just the usual pit scuffle). The band even stopped mid-song to get involved. I was standing over on the right, and only saw what looked like a wolfpack of skinheads suddenly close in on someone and beat him senseless. The guy was pulled out of the scrum ... strangely with his pants around his ankles, and roughly frog-marched/dragged out of the venue and tossed onto the unrelenting concrete of the sidewalk. It was quite a scene.

From the stage, one of the Lunachicks called out thanks to the skins. As it turned out, the recipient of that rigorous beat-down was none other than one Dino Sex, erstwhile naked drummer for GG Allin's band, The Murder Junkies. As detailed in disquieting minutia in Todd Phillips’ excellent-if-repulsive documentary, “Hated: GG Allin & The Murder Junkies,” Dino could charitably be described as being not quite right in the head and was deeply obsessed with the Lunachicks. Dino had shown up at the Marquee that evening and was so caught up in the erotic rapture from watching the mightly Lunachicks play that he felt obliged to drop trou and commence masturbating right in front of them. Neither the band nor the skinheads in the crowd were especially enthused about this display and -- as they were wont to do – the skinheads responded accordingly.

While bloodied upon his forced exit from the Marquee, Dino did survive the experience more or less intact. The last time I saw him was years ago. By this point, he had taken up a side-hustle as a bike messenger. Calling it a “side-hustle” is actually kind of generous, being that playing drums for the Murder Junkies — naked or otherwise — probably wasn’t the most lucrative of vocations. In any case, Dino had taken to dying his hair — both on his scalp and his now bushy handlebar mustache — jarring shades of flaming orange and neon green, making him fairly hard to miss. 

I went on to see the Lunachicks quite a few times after that, and — again — it was never just another gig. I don’t believe they ever got their proper due, but I’m super psyched they’re finally getting recognized with this doc.

Check it out. 

They Were Just a Minor Threat

There’s a bit of a fatigued adage designed to make those of us rocketing through our middle-age years feel a little bit better around our encroaching decrepitude, and that is “I May Be Old, But I Got to See All the Cool Bands.” I may not express that in so few words (I tend to go the windier route), but I’ve certainly belabored that exact sentiment.

So, I’m sitting around, last night, with some old grade school pals, and discussion turns to that very subject. Back in the posh confines of our Upper East Side school, St. Davids, there was a specific coterie of what I considered preternaturally informed classmates who were always at least two steps ahead. These guys were listening to The Ramones and the Dead Boys while I was still wasting time with Kiss and Boston. By the time I’d caught up and gave up arena rock for Devo and the Sex Pistols, they were already digging into Black Flag and Bad Brains. I’ve mentioned some of these guys before, but I'm talking about guys like John C., Rich K., Zachary T., Chris H. and Brad O. (some of whom recently immortalized here), and while they’d laugh about it today, their counsel was both informative and invaluable.

In any case, we’re there last night, and talk turns to a particularly tumultuous gig at CBGB by Washington D.C.’s own Minor Threat in 1982. I spoke about that show here. I wasn’t at that gig, as I was probably safely sequestered back uptown playing “Pitfall” on my Atari 2600. Brad and John, however, allegedly were. I’m not going to say I was incredulous at this claim, but it’s a bit like saying you saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club.

But then John showed us the picture.

As presumably captured by maverick photographer Glen E. Friedman (my former neighbor), here’s my friend Brad … his face obscured by Ian MacKaye’s microphone wire.

Fucking TOP THAT! I can’t.

ADDENDUM:

So, in the wake of this revelation, I went back to that post I linked to from 2021. As mentioned, there, photographer Glen E. Friedman used to be my neighbor and, at one recent point, he'd decided to publish some never-before-seen pics from the early `80s, and shared some photos with me from that 1982 Minor Threat gig (again, the one I wasn't at). I started to look at this pics again, and was again blown away, specifically by this pic. 

Armed with the knowledge that my friends were in attendance for that show, I spotted my friend Brad AGAIN in the throng. That's him far-left in the Necros t-shirt.

As a side note, my allusion to "Pitfall" was initially hastily apocryphal, but I looked it up and the game was indeed introduced (by ActiVision for the Atari) in 1982, so there is a MORE THAN tragically LIKELY chance I was indeed at home playing this stupid game rather than getting the wind knocked out of me while slamming around to the melodious strains of "I Don't Wanna Hear It," "Bottled Violence" and/or "Small Man, Big Mouth."

...instead of...

Tensing Up with the Jim Carroll Band

Cruelly, even in proper punk rock circles, the Jim Carroll Band seem relegated to “one-hit-wonder” status. And while, yes, that one “hit” – the ecstatic “People Who Died” – is a stone-cold classic by every concievble standard (unless you talk to my brother-in-law), it’s true that the JCB never really meaningfully bothered “the charts” (it made it to No. 103 on Billboard’s “Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart … for whatever that’s worth) a second time. The public can be fickle.

Of course, music was really never more than a dalliance for Jim Carroll, whose primary passion was as a writer and a poet, having penned “The Basketball Diaries,” a gripping memoir about growing up in New York City amidst drugs and prostitution, when he was still in his teens. I believe he was lured into rock’n’roll via his friendship with folks like Patti Smith, Keith Richards and the Max’s Kansas City crew, but I’m ultimately just projecting. He always seemed more comfortable behind the pen than the mic stand.

Regardless, Carroll formed a band, signed with Atlantic Records and released three LPs of music, the first being Catholic Boy in 1980, which featured the classic “People Who Died” as well as equally incendiary (if lesser celebrated) songs like “Three Sisters,” “It’s Too Late” and the title track. As a taste of the era, Catholic Boy is required reading, so to speak.

The JCB’s other two records, meanwhile, seem to be rarely discussed. 1982’s Dry Dreams (and how’s that for a title?) didn’t produce any comparably notable numbers -- although I still quite dig “Lorraine.” Those expecting another grim novelty number (although “People Who Died” was so much more than that) didn’t get it.

When I Write Your Name followed in 1983, the world seemed to have moved on. Even the inclusion of a cover of “Sweet Jane” by the Velvet Underground failed to move the needle (although Lenny Kaye and Lou Reed made a nice cameos in the video for same). In the wake of that record, while Jim Caroll would continue to write and even record, his days fronting a band were over.

I never got to see the Jim Carroll Band perform, but I did go to a couple of readings by the great man before he sadly passed away in 2009. “People Who Died” continues to inspire, finding placment in countless films, and getting covered by everyone from my friend’s band The Cryer Brothers to the Hollywood Vampires (the less said about that, the better). Suffice to say, you’re best off sticking with the original.

As mentioned in some earlier, ancient post, I first heard the Jim Carroll Band back in grade school via the preternaturally hippper taste of my classmate Zach. I dutifully ran out and bought myself a copy of Catholic Boy, and the whole album swiftly becme a favorite. That said, it was years before I bothered to snap up Dry Dreams and I Write Your Name to get the whole picture.

More recently, however, a lost studio track of the band’s surfaced. As recounted here, the studio rendition of “Tension” was prized out of the closet of some dude named Earl McGrath, and it’s genuinely revelatory slice of the Jim Carroll Band at the peak of their powers. I believe the track was later re-arranged/re-written as the track “Voices” that appeared on the final LP, I Write Your Name, but I am uncertain of the chronology.

You can here the studio versioh of “Tension” here, but some time ago, a former founding member of the Jim Carroll Band put up this live clip from their final ever appearnace. This is what bassist Steve Linsley said about this…

I am a founding member & the bass player. This is The Jim Carroll Band, playing the last gig, ever. This is the original band, with founding members. Brian Linsley, Terrell Winn, Wayne Woods, Stevie Linsley, and Jim Carroll. This final gig followed the final tour of what was the second incarnation of the Jim Carroll Band with Stevie and Wayne still on bass and drums and Lenny Kaye and Paul Sanchez on Guitars. Anyone else claiming to be a Jim Carroll Band member is fucking looking to open a can of asswhoop!

Asswhoop!!!

Anyway, here’s the clip in question. Also check out Legs McNeil’s epic-length interview with Jim from his days interviewing for “Please Kill Me.”

Exhuming St. Marks Sounds

Back in 2015, after having weepily documented the long, slow demise of storied record shop, Bleecker Bob’s at 118 West 3rd Street, I posted an entry about myself and my friend Steve having lunch at Miyabi, the Japanese restaurant that had assumed the long-contested address on West 3rd. Late last year, however, Miyabi quietly closed without a great deal of fanfare. I’m not suggesting there’s any sort of cause-&-effect correlation there, but it happened anyway. As I type this, 118 West 3rd Street is back to being a dormant, vacant space.

I’m not saying the same thing’s going to happen this time, but … we’ll see.

I’ve written here about St. Marks Sounds -- or, to some, simply Sounds -- a bunch of times (see list below), but it was a longtime mainstay of St. Marks Place – well, actually, that’s a rather myopic declaration. St. Marks Place has gone through a wide series of iterations over its evolution (and devolution) in the course of its many decades (and I recommend Ada Calhoun’s excellent “St Marks is Dead,” if you’re curious about that history), so to assert that one single shop was a “mainstay” is a bit over-the-top. Certainly for folks of my era, it was a long-standing destination in the middle of the block between Third and Second Avenues wherein a veritable nation of New Yorkers procured their vinyl and, later, compact discs, but to suggest that it was anything more than that is probably just fancifully subjective projection.

Regardless, to myself and my similarly inclined gaggle of friends, it was a fairly crucial establishment. Up a sweeping stoop and behind a tall, heavy door was a high-ceilinged chamber filled with records, tapes and discs of all description. The walls were covered with posters (which they never parted with, much to my pronounced chagrin) and music was always blasting (although still not as loudly as at Freebeing Records down the block and around the corner on Second Avenue, where the volume was always excruciating).

Anyway, as time went by and things started to sharply change on St. Marks Place, Sounds stayed put … invariably because the guys who ran the place also owned the building [ADDENDUM - not true, it turns out...check out the comments]. In fairly short order, Sounds became the only the place to buy music on St. Marks (following the inevitable demise of ventures like Venus Records, Rocket Scientist and the magisterial Mondo Kim’s). Sounds held out the longest.

But, in 2015, St. Marks Sounds joined the ranks of those other shops — and other neighborhood hold-outs like the re-located-to-First-Avenue Mondo Kim’s, Birdman’s Rainbow Music on First Avenue, Norman’s Sound + Vision on Third Avenue, Other Music on East 4th, which shut up a shop a year after Sounds — and closed its doors. For a list of shops that *are* still there, click here … before another one vanishes.

Rumors swirled about what was to become of both the St. Marks Sounds space and the also-shuttered Grassroots Tavern beneath (which I wrote about here). There was chatter that the endearingly ramshackle Grassroots was going to turn into an exclusively bespoke bistro, but that evidently fell through, and it’s now a ridiculous doggie daycare endeavor called Manhattan Pawffice.

The space that had been St. Marks Sounds for so many years eventually turned into a hairstylists’ operation called MG Hair Artistic Salon, who evidently specialize in Asian-centric hairstyles. I stopped in today to check it out. They were very friendly, but very confused about my explanation of why I’d stopped in, but they let me snap a few pics anyway.

THE BIG ROOM THEN..

THE BIG ROOM NOW...



THE REGISTER THEN...



THE REGISTER NOW ...

"WENDY'S CORNER" THEN ...

"WENDY'S CORNER" NOW ... :(

Earlier posts about Sounds....

Fishing in a Warm Place (2/2009)
Sounds of St. Marks Place (5/2013)
Where Wendy Still Waits (6/2013)
Faked-Out at Sounds (12/2013)
The Silence of Sounds (2/2014)
Plugged into the Matrix (2/2014)
No More Sounds on St. Marks (9/2015)
Punked Out: Goodbye to the Old St. Marks (9/2015)
Unsound on St. Marks (4/2016)

Notes from The Flown Coop

I hate to keep apologizing for the slowdown here, as I’m sure most of you probably wouldn’t even notice it if not for me tirelessly pointing it out. There are a couple of possible causes for this.

For whatever reason, I’ve been experiencing a tenacious torpor ever since we dropped our son off at school. It’s a tremendous cliché to suggest that I’ve been stricken by the aforementioned “Empty Nest Syndrome,” but whether it’s that or seasonal affective disorder or that I’ve unwitting ditched my muse or that I’ve simply started to lose my edge --- or all of the above, somehow I seem to have depleted my supply of the idiotic bullshit that passes for “content” here which normally flows out of me like needlessly verbose sewage.

I do have one kind of labor-intensive post in the works, but if I had a dollar for each idea I’ve hatched then summarily abandoned, in the last couple of weeks, I could probably buy us all a nice lunch. I had a post prompted by an exchange in the comments section of Tribeca Citizen about the dispiriting proliferation of cannabis dispensaries in lower Manhattan, but figured that’s more my own grievance than anyone else’s. I had another pointed one about grill-ordering etiquette in Manhattan delis, but – again – that’s all about my own pet peeves. I had a less cantankerous one that looked back at Sounds on St. Marks Place, but somehow can’t bring myself to finish it. I am not feeling especially inspired. Maybe I’m just burned out?

Compounding all this, my lovely wife left for London, last Friday, for the London Book Fair, making our empty nest that much emptier. Left to my own devices, this past rainy weekend, I did all that I could to escape the maddening quiet of our apartment. I was so bored on Sunday morning that – apropos of absolutely nothing – I decided to make a soggy pilgrimage to the Bowie mural in Jersey City. It’s impressive, yes, but in a super random (and not entirely that nice) neighborhood. Moreover, as far as I’m aware, the great man never lived here .. which begs the question … why Jersey City?

On Saturday, meanwhile, upon hearing of a brand-new record shop in Park Slope (Sterling Records on Fifth Avenue at Sterling Place), I schlepped out there to check it out. I wasn’t really looking for anything, but felt compelled to be supportive and buy something, so I bought a fridge magnet with the cover of XTC’s Drums & Wires on it, then proceeded to walk all the way home – all the way down Flatbush Avenue and over the Manhattan Bridge.

Last night, driven by a hankering for South Asian grub, I found myself in one of the few remaining Indian restaurants on East 6th Street, trying to maintain my composure in defiance of a roiling plate of Chicken Tikka that was weapons-grade spicy (a descriptor that normally does not apply to this particular dish). As my eyes and nostrils flowed like faucets, a guy behind me was steadily boring his date into a drooling stupor with Grunge-era conspiracy theories about Whitewater, the Rose Law Firm, and the late Vince Foster. Had I stepped through some sort of tear in the time/space continuum?

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll snap out of it in due course, but please be patient with me in the short term.

 

The Pastrami Remains the Same: Katz's Delicatessen Then & Now

1998:

2024:

St. Marks & Second, 1987

Someone on the Lower East Side: Back in the Days page posted an amazing shot by Dutch photographer Teun Voeten, over the weekend, that I wanted to share here.

This is the southwest corner of St. Marks Place at Second Avenue circa 1987. From about 1957 – although I’ve read that the business itself well predates that year – that corner was occupied by Gem Spa, a newspaper stand and candy store renowned as a neighborhood fixture. Its signature Egg Creams were touted as the best in the city (I cannot speak with any authority about that, but they were damn good), and it was famously immortalized in an iconic photograph of the New York Dolls by Toshi Matsuo (and later recreated by Roberta Bayley). I spoke about those elements back here.

The photo above was taken about fifteen years after that and features the same row of beat-up phone booths that Matsuo had the Dolls pose with. What struck me first about Voeten’s photo were the Rock Hotel flyers on the right, advertising a particular gig in December of 1987 featuring the Dead Boys, Kix, Circus of Power and a band called Hilfiger, which was a combo put together by guitarist Andy Hilfiger -- clothier Tommy Hilfiger’s little brother -- after the dissolution of the short-lived band King Flux, which featured Richie Stotts of the Plasmatics and Marky Ramone of – wait for it – The Ramones.

I was actually at that gig – which I wrote about here -- and still have that very flyer to this day. Here it was in my sorely under-utilized kitchen on East 12th Street back in the mid-`90s.

My memories of the show in 1987 are fleeting. I was home for Christmas break during my junior year of college. It was one of the Dead Boys’ annual reunion shows, albeit one of the final ones. I remember Kix – kind of a hackneyed hair-metal band who I wrote about here – being better than I’d expected. I sadly have no recollection about Hilfiger (sorry, Andy), but do vividly remember Circus of Power (who I wrote about here). Circus of Power always seemed like they should have been a bigger deal, but they were always kind of entirely out of step with the other New York City bands, at the time. Moreover, if I'm not mistaken, the guy in this photograph in the shades, backwards cap, black leather jacket and Ramones shirt looks like the incongruously named Gary Sunshine, guitarist for Circus of Power, although I can't be sure. 

The other thing that caught my eye was an invocation to one of my late friend Fran Powers’ bands, Whole Wide World, which you can see on the top right, just above the trio of Rock Hotel flyers.

Gem Spa closed in 2020. The space that Gem Spa formerly occupied is now a coffee shop called Poetica Coffee. The Dead Boys had already broken up, but the death of Stiv Bator in 1990 put a definitive stop to their annual reunion shows. Kix only broke up as recently as last year. Circus of Power technically broke up for a first time in 1995 but reformed in 2014 and are conceivably still at it. Whole Wide World was just one of Fran Powers’ many bands. They independently self-released an LP in 1987 (the same year as this photograph), and it contained a cover of The Nazz’s classic “Open My Eyes.” While he’d long since moved on to other projects beyond Whole Wide World, Fran Powers passed away in 2021.

Here's that full Dead Boys' set:

This was Circus of Power....