Visions of Johanna

My mom was cat sitting for a guy she worked with and he had a cool bachelor pad, which she took me to, to feed the cats one cold new york night. He had a record collection and it was like being in a candy store. I poured over the vinyl, and put songs on while my mom washed the cat plate. I did not have much of anything and so I borrowed and taped a few of his LPs. Exile, Horses and Positively 4th Street. I returned most but not all of those magical discs. They were glorious. I was in 7th grade and I just L I S T E N E D. I remember how it felt to hear certain Dylan songs for the first time, to saturate in them. The nice thing about this one, (not on that borrowed album) is that it is one of his great ones, but not played as muzak, or on FM radio. You don’t hear it very often unless you put it on, so you can still saturate yourself in the words and images, as if hearing it for the first time.

Is it a stretch to say that this is a song about NYC?

“Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough

The country music station plays soft"

I picture a west village tenement, or maybe one of those apartments around Washington Square Park, those lofty spaces near Broadway with a noisy radiator, low lights, I can hear the music. Kind of like that apartment where I would go with my mom, wood floors, cool posters, good music, bare bulbs, so new york, you just wanna stay there, be there, feel it. I do.

The real clue of course are “the all-night girls who whisper of escapade out on the D train” a west village train. Anyway, I have no intention of being a Dylan scholar. But, boy, is this song beautiful.

The Mist Across The Window Hides The Lines

I had a conversation with some co-workers recently about spotting famous people on the streets of Manhattan. "I never see them," one colleague sighed. I couldn't empathize. Regardless of what neighborhood of town I was living in at the time, I've constantly spotted celebs walking the streets of this town. I once walked past Warren Beatty on Madison Avenue & 72nd Street. Bill Murray once asked me for change of a dollar outside of a newspaper store on 93rd Street. I've spied Sinead O'Connor slinking out of a bar on St. Marks Place and caught a fleeting glimpse of Pink Floyd's Roger Waters ducking out of an office building on Lexington Avenue. Look around you, they're everywhere.

I'm not usually starstruck when I spot celebs. A this stage of the proceedings, it's the very rare individual that impresses me anymore. That said, I spotted someone last year who threw me for a loop. I was waiting for the downtown 6 train to pull into the 33rd street station after a having a few after-work beers in midtown with my dad. When the subway pulled in, I boarded and assumed my normal stance by the opposite doors, my head filled with tidbits, anecdotes from the evening and other minutia. Glancing around the train I was immediately struck by the gent sitting next to the doors across from me. Looking bleached, subtly spiky of scalp and slightly bug eyed (made all the more piercing by the contrast of his pale skin to his blue eyes), British New Wave icon Joe Jackson sat gazing distractedly into the middle distance. Like I said, I see famous folks around Manhattan all the time, but here was someone I genuinely admire. I was legitimately starstruck.

As the train sped past 28th street and then onto 23rd street, I decided to confess my fandom for the great man's music. I have a long history of doing this, unfortunately. When the train reached 14th street, I crossed the train to Joe's side. After the doors closed, I leaned down and said, "Excuse me, I don't mean to bother you, but I'm a great fan of your music."

Joe's head whipped around suddenly as if someone had just lit off a bottle-rocket inside the train. Clearly, I'd caught the man off-guard. I extended my hand to awkwardly land the plane. Joe's eyes darted around nervously. I started to feel about a foot tall, but repeated my initial statement just to end the confusion. Joe limply shook my hand, never holding eye-contact for more than a few fleeting nanoseconds.

I felt like a prize-winning jackass. The trip between 14th street and Astor Place (my stop) was positively excruciating. Not wanting him to worry any further, I purposely looked away and acted as if nothing had happened. He sat to my immediate right, almost visibly twitching with unease. I felt as if I'd completely shattered his calm and ruined his night. I stepped off the train at Astor Place without another word to him,

I've got to stop doing that sorta shit.

In any case, when not having his solitude soiled by folks like myself, Joe Jackson has made a cozy little career for himself, not just as the fabled "Angry Young Man of the New Wave" as he was initially described circa Look Sharp, but he's branched out into everything from bebop to classical as an eclectic renaissance man (though arguably still the Salieri to Elvis Costello's Mozart). In 1982, meanwhile, he managed to incur the ire of the rock cognoscenti by further distancing himself from his punky beginnings with "Steppin' Out," the sleek, sophisticated first single from Night & Day. Rife with sweeping piano flourishes that sound like sparkling chandeliers and clinking champagne glasses, "Steppin' Out" is a romanticized depiction of Manhattan as seen through the eyes of a young, weary couple. The video, meanwhile, paints a picture of the sort of nightlife one would later find in Whit Stillman's "Metropolitan;" the shimmering New York City of wealth and prestige. I remember getting into a series of debates at the time about the hotel depicted in the clip (I said it was the Plaza, while my friend Ted said it was the St. Regis). In any case, it's still a stirring time-capsule moment.

And if you're out there, Joe, I'm sorry for startling you.

Drop Me Off In Harlem

I was recently the very lucky recipient of a portable record player, and it's been a tremendous help in letting me get through a fairly large pile of vinyl that had been accumulating...stuff I've picked up at flea markets, & thrift stores, and just couldn't really keep up with due to my current living arrangements.

Anyway, yesterday I was listening to Skyliner by the great New York native bandleader, Charlie Barnet, and on it is an excellent version of "Drop Me Off In Harlem" by the incomparable Duke Ellington. In the absence of finding Charlie's version online, here's a Duke & Louis Armstrong rendition that will more than suffice.

Sunday In New York

Bobby Darin performs today's selection, "Sunday In New York". It was written by Carroll Coates, who also wrote "London By Night" which can by heard today over at The London Nobody Sings as sung by Mr. Frank Sinatra.

i thank the lord for the people i have found

 

Thanks Tim, for making this blog. I love it. Thanks writers and reader, let me know you are out there!

Remember how it felt on September 11 in New York, how our city was changed and it seemed like it would never be ok again? Just a reminder that things change, bad stuff passes, there is always a second chance, life dances on. Sing on good people, sing on.

Rose trees never grow in new york City? I am not sure about that but yes, I thank the Lord for the people I have found. This is soooooo beautiful. rock on, dear ones.

 

XHolly

 

 

 

Now I know, "Spanish harlem" are not just pretty words

to say.

I thought I knew, but now I know that rose trees never grow,

in New York city.

 

Until you've seen this trash can dream come true,

You stand at the edge, while people run you through.

And I thank the Lord, there's people out there like you,

I thank the Lord there's people out there like you.

 

While Mona Lisas and mad hatters,

sons of bankers, sons of lawyers,

turn around and say, "good morning" to the night.

For unless they see the sky, but they can't and that is why,

they know not if it's dark out side or light.

 

This Broadway's got, its got a lot of songs to sing,

if I knew the tunes I might join in.

I go my way alone, grow my own,

my own seeds shall be sown, in New York city.

Subways no way , for a good man to go down,

Rich man can ride, and the hobo he can drown.

 

And I thank the Lord for the people I have found,

I thank the Lord for the people I have found.

 

While Mona Lisas and mad hatters,

sons of bankers, sons of lawyers,

turn around and say, "good morning" to the night.

For unless they see the sky, but they can't and that is why,

they know not if it's dark out side or light.

 

And now I know, "Spanish harlem" are not just pretty words

to say.

I thought I knew, but now I know that rose trees never grow,

in New York city.

Subways no way, for a good man to go down,

Rich man can ride, and the hobo he can drown.

 

And I thank the Lord for the people I have found,

I thank the Lord for the people I have found.

 

While Mona Lisas and mad hatters,

sons of bankers, sons of lawyers,

turn around and say, "good morning" to the night.

For unless they see the sky, but they can't and that is why,

they know not if it's dark outside or light,

they know not if it's dark outside or light.

East Broadway Rundown

In 1966, jazz tenor sax colossus Sonny Rollins released East Broadway Rundown on the Impulse! label. It would be his last album for a long 6 year period. On the free-jazz influenced album, his band included Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones, and Freddie Hubbard.

Clash at Bond's

reposted from my blog...

At 15, I saw the Clash at Bond’s International Casino on Broadway and 44th street. The space was a beautiful disco with lots of playful elements. There was a big staircase you walked up to get to the main room and each step made a sound when you stepped on it. I later saw the Ramones there(I am pretty sure) which is how I got to see what the palce looked like. On the night I saw the clash, the place was so packed I saw nothing, not even the band, really I went on the second night of the historic residency, before the fire marshalls shut it down, (due to over selling of tickets, which led the band to play 17 gigs, I believe, to honor all the fan’s tickets. Pretty interesting moment in new york rock history.)  

On the line to but the $10 tickets me and my friends met some guys and wound up hanging around with them a few times. The excitement on the line was amazing. It was cold and people were going crazy with fan-joy and everyone was playing Clash songs and having a great time.  

I saw the show on Friday may 29th, 1981. I wore my fav fiorucci heels and white calvin kline jeans that I made into super tight capri’s with zippers at the cuff. My girlfriend Susana’s mother actually tailored them for me, so they looked great. The show was oversold way beyond capacity and it was impossible to move around or see anything. I sat on the floor upstairs and listened to Janie Jones. I’m in love with Janie Jones, yeah! They opened with London Calling and closed with one of my favorites at the time, I’m so bored with the USA! I was young and into new wave, I didn’t yet appreciate the Sandinista funky or dark songs, I liked the poppy ones, and Bankrobber. The way I remember it, fire marshals arrive towards the end of the set and were trying to get people to leave.  

I do not remember the opening band, I read that it was the Modettes, who I am unfamiliar with. Unfortunately for me it was not the Dead Kennedys or the Bad Brains, or Lee Perry or some of the brilliant acts that played on the later nights.  

Shortly before or after that I was walking on eighth street with Susanna and low and behold, the Clash got out of a cab, Joe Strummer carried a Boom Box on his shoulder and danced his way into electric lady where they were recording Combat Rock I believe, or Radio Clash?  

There was another young girl there with her friend and she was really aggressively trying to get into the studio and kept ringing the bell fanatically and saying we had to go to the bathroom, she was probably 15, like us. Susana and I were walking away when we heard the buzzer ring, so we ran inside. We all used the bathroom and she boldly went into closed doors to find the band. I was tempted to follow but also a bit embarrassed to be associated with her fanatical-ness.  

Later that day as we were headed back to the subway and we spotted Paul Simonon on 6th avenue. We tried to approach him but he kept slipping away, making it very clear he didn’t want to be bothered.  

It always felt like the Clash were a New York band in a funny kind of way, maybe because of Bob Gruen’s photos and the way they popped up in The King of Comedy, and probably just because they loved NYC so much. I chalk it up to living in NYC, when many years later that I went to see Casino on Christmas night at the Ziegfeld with Juliette and a party of five that included Mick Jones. And one night I got a call from a friend asking if I was free to babysit for Joe Strummer’s kid. Lightening strikes not once but twice, a song about NYC recorded live at Bonds.

This Ain't No Party, This Ain't No Disco

I had to run some errands over the weekend and found myself over on Canal Street. Over the past several weeks, I've been logging a series of posts on my weblog dubbed "Then & Now," involving the juxtaposition of photographs of certain locales from five to fifteen years ago with those of their current incarnations. While on Canal, I decided to take a stroll down Cortlandt Alley to 77 White Street, the former site of the fabled Mudd Club. The picture above is how the building looked circa 2002.

I never made it to The Mudd Club during its heyday. Initially conceived as an antidote to the slick fabulousness of Studio 54, the Mudd Club was opened in 1978 and swiftly became a hip hotspot, not least for its hosting of punk, post-punk and fleetingly burgeoning No Wave bands like DNA, James Chance & the Contortions & Jean Michel Basquiat's band Gray. The club shut its doors in 1983. I was sixteen at the time, and still too young to have experienced it. But I knew its name and its reputation. That was largely thanks to a little tune by Talking Heads called "Life During Wartime."

I'd first heard the band thanks to a copy of Talking Heads `77 that belonged to the surprisingly hip father of my grade school chum Richard. After school, Richard & I were renowned for firing up the stereo in his family's apartment and zealously cranking local rock station, WPLJ. This being an era seemingly well prior to today's model of strenuously over-automated playlists carefully catered by market-tested demographics, WPLJ was admirably game to play a regular roster of "New Wave" bands alongside the dependable warhorses like Pink Floyd, Traffic, Zeppelin & the Doors. As such, it wasn't at all surprising to hear tracks by bands like Squeeze, the B-52's, Devo and Joe Jackson slotted alongside dinosaurs like Foreigner, Joe Cocker and Ten Years After. To my mind, it was a much healthier, more organic brand of programming -- and one that we probably won't see the like of again outside of college radio. When Rich and I weren't listening to `PLJ, we'd raid his dad's record collection, spinning likely platters by artists like the afore-cited Talking Heads, Ian Dury & the Blockheads, Elvis Costello and Lene Lovich.

The first time I heard "Life During Wartime" by Talking Heads -- off their jittery 1979 opus, Fear of Music -- I was in our kitchen on East 93rd Street. My sister & I were involved in some heated breakfast debate with our mother while the radio blathered on in the background. The sultry voice of D.J. Carol Miller then said she was going to debut a new track by a local downtown act and dropped the needle. All at once the urgent sprint of "Life During Wartime" came pulsing out of the radio and all conversation stopped. This Ain't The Mudd Club/ Or CBGB/ I Ain't Got Time For That Now. My sister immediately started doing "The Robot" whilst I started enthusiastically nodding my head. Clearly, our kitchen's jukebox jury had a new favorite song.

A paranoid glimpse of a clandestine existence during violent conflict, "Life During Wartime" painted a surreal, apocalyptic scenario of desperate times and desperate measures. Somewhat unfortunately, given its chorus of This Ain't No Party/This Ain't No Disco/This Ain't No Foolin' Around, the song inadvertently became a plank in the then-burgeoning anti-disco campaign, although anyone who'd spent even a fleeting moment listening to the music of Talking Heads should have immediately recognized that as a misappropriation. Though a quartet of awkward, gangly white folk, the `Heads have always been all about rhythm and movement and would never have willingly shunned the act of dancing. The rallying cry of "This Ain't No Disco" was, of course, followed by the reprise of "I Ain't Got Time For That Now," suggesting that given the protagonist's druthers, he'd love to be dancing the night away, but the circumstances of life during wartime simply no longer accommodate such pleasures. If anything, he pines for those days. The days of hanging out at the Mudd Club and CBGB are gone. Now, there is only resistance and survival.

Thirty years after the release of "Life During Wartime," we find ourselves living just that. No, we're not scourged with an occupying force as depicted in the song, but the story nervously extolled in the track doesn't quite seem as remote as it might have in the late 1970's. In the wake of the heightened state of alert of September 11th and all that has followed, the seemingly carefree days of NYC's heyday of squalidly splendid bohemia could not possibly seem further away. As I walked down Cortlandt Alley towards the nondescript former site of the Mudd Club (now a tony condominium), the notion of its former incarnation as a hotbed of music, art and inventive, iconoclastic counterculture seems like the stuff of fanciful mythology. Now, it's just a bit of pricey real estate. I'd love look up at it now and wonder what it must have been like to hang out in its hallowed halls, dancing to the brave new music of its era, but I ain't got time for that now.

We are ugly but we have the music

I didn't know anything about Leonard Cohen until 1986 when my girlfriend & I took a two week trip to Los Angeles. One of the folks we hung out with was an employee of Bleecker Bob's at Bob's then new store on Melrose. I barely knew him, but one evening he handed me a cassette. Side one was I Want To See the Bright Lights Tonight by Richard & Linda Thompson, and side two was Leonard Cohen's Greatest Hits. Both incredible albums. When I asked him why he had given it to me, he simply said that he thought I would like it.

I immediately fell in love with both albums, and could honestly say I had never heard anything like them before. I then learned that Cohen was a cult artist, for years much more appreciated & venerated in Europe than in his native North America - ain't that always the way? I also learned that he had influenced band's as unlikely as the Sisters of Mercy who had taken the name of one of Cohen's songs for their name.

There are two Cohen tunes on his original Greatest Hits collection that mention New York. Both are well known to fans, but perhaps the more infamous of the two is "Chelsea Hotel #2" (originally on New Skin For the Old Ceremony, 1974) which includes the mention of a certain sexual event in that storied building, and from which I borrowed some of my favorite lyrics for the title of this post.

However, "Famous Blue Raincoat" (originally on Songs of Love & Hate, 1971), in it's miasmic tempo & key, is to me the more alluring of the two. The opening verse sets the stage from the narrators perspective which seemed eerily close to the life I was living at the time. Every time I've heard it since, it's never failed to take me back to my life in the East Village in the mid 80's.

"It's four in the morning, the end of December
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better
New York is cold, but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening."



A couple of years after getting turned on to Cohen, I lived for a short time at 66 Clinton Street. Maybe it wasn't too far from what LC had in mind when he wrote this song...the ground floor of my building housed a latin record store with speakers that hung under an awning out on the street. There really was music on Clinton Street all through the evening...amongst other things. December 1988 also turned out to be something of a major turning point in my life.

at the zoo

The first time I ever spoke over a microphone was at Tin Pan Alley, the brilliant club on 49^thstreet. The scene in Raging Bull where Jake is at a long skinny strip club type place (right before he comes out and sees his brother for the first time since their big fight) was filmed there.

I think I have written about it before- it was run by a woman named Maggie I was a young teen at the time and knew that something was going on there. This woman had cool and interesting bands play at her club and she paid them and it was free to get in and the crowd may or may not have spent money at the bar and it was too good to be true.  I believe, and I may be wrong, that she took care of prostitutes, allowed them to work out of her bar, or something. This was during the early to mid eighties and times square was still 100% the real thing. And Maggie was a strong woman who was doing right by her community in one way or another. She was awesome! The bar was awesome, the jukebox was hip and modern and fucking great. Then there were all the characters and old timers sitting at the bar, drinking through the loud hardcore, or whoever was playing, Heart Attack, Appple, Swamp Goblins ( I think that was there name and Ricky I think was the black haired skinny singer), Rat at rat r, forive my poor memory, I am making guesses right now.

One night Billy Syndrome, who used to be in a band with Rick Rubin way before Rick and the Beastie Boys and all that, was playing there. Billy was gonna cover Iggy’s Dog Food and I asked if I could bark like a dog at the beginning, the way the iggy version starts. I was a worldly girl but so very painfully shy and self-conscious. It was sooo scary but I did it, I went up onstage before the song started and I did the bark.

In the end, my excruciatingly shyness couldn’t prevent me from what was meant and so a few years later I made my first band, and we played our one and only show at the Strip on one new years eve in the late 80’s. For anyone who doesn’t know, the Strip was in the basement of a super seedy old man bar on 14^th street and 7th ave, It had a real garage-y vibe, run by Deb Parker, who hung naked 60’s pin ups all over the walls, and Gary. I wrote  two compositions for the show and I sang and played guitar. We filled out the set with a few cover, including I Have a Boyfriend by the Chiffons (from the Bronx by the way), a few I do not remember, and finally At The Zoo, the brilliant Simon and Garfunkle song about the central park zoo. 

I spent much of my childhood at the Central Park Zoo before they renovated, when there was still a giant whale whose mouth you walked into and an ark you could go on in the children’s zoo, and large cats and apes in improper cages at the cpz proper. I am glad for the remodeling for the animals sakes but still in it’s old incarnation it was a magical place, perfectly captured in the song. The song captures that catcher in the rye, gary winnogrand, guggenhiem museum,1960’s new york city perfectly. And what a joy to sing it, especially when it kicks in... “but you could take a cross town bus if its raining or it’s cold….” And at the very end …”YEAH! What you gonna see,,, at the zoo”.

Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo. I do believe it, I do believe it's true.

Mmmmm. Mmmmm. Whoooa. Mmmmm.

It's a light and tumble journe y from the East Side to the park; Just a fine and fancy ramble to the zoo.

But you can take the crosstown bus if it's raining or it's cold, and the animals will love it if you do.

The monkeys stand for honesty, Giraffes are insincere, And the elephants are kindly but they're dumb.

Orangutans are skeptical of changes in their cages, and the zookeeper is very fond of rum.

Zebras are reactionaries, Antelopes are missionaries, Pigeons plot in secrecy, And hamsters turn on frequently.

yeah! You gotta come and see

At the zoo.