Happy Birthday, Clem Burke!

A shout out to a former Ramone (for about 3 minutes, or as long as a single Ramones song lasts) and the class-act drummer for Blondie. Happy Birthday, Mr. Burke!

Max's Kansas City

Jayne County wrote a song about it. Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers released an album called Live at Max's Kansas City and so did the Velvet Underground.

Max's Kansas City was a nightclub (upstairs) and restaurant (downstairs) at 213 Park Avenue South, between 17th and 18th and was a gathering spot for musicians, poets, artists and politicians in the 1960s and 1970s.

Opened by Mickey Ruskin (1933-1983) in December 1965, it was a hangout for artists and sculptors like John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg and Larry Rivers, whose presence attracted hip celebrities and the jet set, and was also a favorite hot spot of Andy Warhol and his Factory devotees. The Velvet Underground played their last shows with Lou Reed at Max's in the summer of 1970. It was home for a short time to the Glitter rock scene that included David Bowie, Iggy Pop and, of course, Lou Reed. Bob Marley & The Wailers opened for Springsteen at Max's in 1973 at the beginning of Marley's career on the international circuit.

Max's Kansas City's popularity declined and the legendary establishment closed in December, 1974. Mayor Ed Koch later had a campaign office in the building.

The club reopened in 1975 under new ownership of Tommy Dean Mills who started with a formula of serving up disco. Peter Crowley, who had been booking bands at Mothers was hired to start booking bands there in a venue that was an alternative to CBGBs.

Max's Kansas City became one of the birthplaces of punk, featuring bands like Cherry Vanilla, The New York Dolls, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, Blondie, The Ramones, The Cramps, Mink DeVille, Steel Tips, The Misfits, The Dictators (who were rumored to have been banned from playing there, which turned out to be total bullshit), Wayne County, The Senders, The Rousers, The Fleshtones, Klaus Nomi and Patti Smith. After the breakup of the Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious played many of his solo gigs there. Also Devo played several shows at Max's in 1977, including a show where they were introduced by David Bowie as "the band of the future."

Max's closed its doors in November 1981. The building survives and now houses a deli (see pictures below). The best part is the old chandelier. Like a tattered prom dress that you wish could tell its story, it remains hanging from the ceiling, a constant reminder of days gone by...

What do drag shows, the New York Dolls and Errol Flynn have in common?

Two words, Club 82. This completely unmarked club - no sign, no street number even, is one of the last venerable mainstays of NYC gay and club culture. The New York Dolls began playing shows there on April 17, 1974, long after Errol Flynn was a famous regular who regularly whipped out his now infamous cock and played the piano with it. I went to the club once in the mid-90s. It was a bit of a tattered prom dress of a club, but not in a good way. Gone was the glam and in its place a series of glory holes. I had to convince the bouncer I was a lesbian before he'd let me in the door. I was a suspicious "breeder" in his estimation. Or maybe he thought I was some tranny cruiser. I've no idea.

Steve Shevlin, formerly of The Senders has promised a story about Club 82 and its heyday. So more updates to come. In the meantime check out these photos of the club.

People Who Died...Snappy little end of your life song

I was recently speaking with an old friend about the passing of Jim Carroll. He was the person who actually introduced me to Jim Carroll's writing. I remember many instances of being read passages from "The Basketball Diaries" while I showered. I am forever grateful to Robert Sullivan. When he read those passages to me it was as though the world had crack opened like an egg. I realized you could write how you talked. It didn't have to be all high-brow, just honest - your voice, your viewpoint. You can look at the bottom, study the under-belly and still see the beauty in humanity. Jim Carroll became a hero to me because of his innate ability to tell the truth, as he saw it. He was the original punk in my estimation. He understood early on that you could take everything that on the surface seemed ugly, desperate, challenged, destitute, worn out and torn and celebrate it. The tattered prom dress in all its glory and proud memories that was New York. So thank you to Jim Carroll, and thank you to Robert Sullivan for sharing the following Jim Carroll story. I salute you brother!

From Robert Sullivan (formerly of The Stellas and The Bastard Heirs) - I saw him in 1980-81 at a concert somewhere in Brooklyn (I think it was Brooklyn) everyone kept yelling Jim…E… Jim...E...and I was thinking I'm going to see Jim Caroll, it'll be this bastion of bleeding edge NYC hipster/punk types, but I was a little taken aback at how many in the audience just seemed like obnoxious Yankees fans or something...but they knew who Jim Carroll was, he was their boy, or though it seemed.

One guy threw a syringe on stage, about par for that crowd, you know tacky as hell, Jim Carroll stopped the band, squatted down, picked up the syringe and said rather quietly but emphatically into the mic, "this is really fucked up..." then a sinister grin started to come over his face and he said, "now if it was full, that would’ve been class..." then he threw it back into the crowd, and went on with the show...

Those Are People Who Died...R.I.P. Jim Carroll, September 11, 2009

I was 21 years old when I first read Jim Carroll's "The Basketball Diaries" in 1987. Not long after, I purchased The Catholic Boy record and played "Those Are People Who Died" ad infinitum et nauseaum. A month after I moved to NYC I saw him read at The Bottom Line, and subsequently saw him read and perform several times thereafter. Jim Carroll taught me that you could write how you talked and that there was beauty, poetry and great things to be observed and put on paper that didn't represent the fresh and clean NYC that TV shows like "Sex and The City" have celebrated. Life is messy. Life is hard, and sometimes it kicks you in the ass but you can still write great things that celebrate mean streets, borrowed clothes and no money fun. No one did that better than Jim Carroll. Not everything has a purpose or a happy ending, but pay attention to the little things, the small signs that every day life has to offer - Learn, observe, fall down, get up, live and fucking write about it if that's what blows your hair back.

Mind the grit and find the beauty, lesson and sweetness in the sometimes shitty things life serves up.

I am saddened beyond words that he has departed us too early and on a day that can easily eclipse his greatness but seems oddly fitting to the City that he was born and raised in. He was, to my mind, the best that NYC has to offer; a writer. A writer about a City and a time that kicked his ass, offered him life lessons - perhaps a bit too early, and gave us all some of the best writing and music I've ever had the pleasure to read, hear and live by.

This post is for you my brother...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/books/14carroll.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=jim%20carroll&st=cse

We're here. We're queer. We're not going shopping!

One of the first I'm here, I'm queer bands and very few people have heard of them. Before bands started dressing like they'd raided their mummy's closet, the Tom Robinson Band had thrown it on, worn it out and sung about it. So enjoy one of my all time faves and get ready for new posts about things you've only dreamt about...

Gone Fishin'...

Dying On Bar Time is on vacation and will return shortly with new images, posts and videos. Keep the faith!

A slight departure for the dearly departed...

We were all saddened by the untimely passing of Willy Deville. Sadder still is the fact that his death went largely unnoticed by the press. I received no New York Times News Alert as I had done when Ron Asheton exited stage left several beats too early. Bill Dickson, front man for The Rousers and 70s NYC music scenester and I were chatting about a week after Willy's passing and Bill had heard nothing about it. A shame, he thought, since by his estimation Willy Deville was one of the coolest fuckers to grace the NYC punk scene. With his New Romantic look and pencil mustache, he cutting quite a dashing figure in 70s and 80s NYC. No one looked like him, dressed like him and no one sure as hell sounded like him.

Perhaps best known as the fella who found Johnny Thunders' lifeless body at the St. Peter House in New Orleans in 1991, it's a wicked rippin' shame that Willy's death came and went with a whisper.

R.I.P. Bless Willy Deville's pointy lil' head...Sha babby.

This is The Bottom Line

In 1993 I had the great pleasure of seeing Allen Ginsberg and Jim Carroll at The Bottom Line. Mr. Ginsberg performed Don't Smoke amongst other poems/songs and Mr. Carroll read a lesser-known story featuring a snake and a deli. Not only were the stories great but the whole evening cost me $15 bucks. I was a waitress and bartender at the time so seeing two of my heroes for a price that wouldn't even buy me a t-shirt these days made me feel like I was getting over. It was the cultural equivalent of dine and dash!

The Bottom Line closed on January 22, 2004. Today it's a lecture hall for NYU law students but for whatever reason always looks empty...


Allan Ginsberg performs Don't Smoke





















Jim Carroll Band People Who Died















The Bottom Line then...


The Bottom Line today (August 2009)

And now for your listening pleasure...

Great bands, singers and performers EVERYONE should know about!

The Senders























The Rousers




















Vivien Goldman

Die Young, Stay Pretty

They say the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. Perhaps this explains the brief period that was punk music in New York City and its London counterpart. Sure there are bands that survived; Blondie, The Clash, The Ramones, The Talking Heads, etc. But even these bands have either altered their line-up, have unfortunately passed or no longer play together. Equally the venues in which these bands played; CBGBs, Max's Kansas City, the Pepermint Lounge, the 82 Club, Mudd Club, etc. burned bright but burned out. The venues have given way to delis, dorms, chain restaurants and lecture halls.

This is a visual and oral tour through that time. Enjoy...

The Night They Brought the House Down: The Rise and Fall of the Mercer Arts Center

Before CBGBs played home to The Ramones, the Mercer Arts Center was THE slummy locale to play and who better to headline there but the Lipstick Killers themselves; The New York Dolls. Located at the back of the Broadway Central Hotel near the corner of Mercer and 3rd St, the Arts Center was run by Sy and Cynthia Kaback. The front entrance was on Broadway and was a crummy SRO/residents' hotel. But the Arts Center housed performance spaces and was the perfect backdrop for a band who got its name from an uptown Doll Hospital. The New York Dolls played in the Oscar Wilde Room (among other similarly named performances spaces in the Center) until the hotel's collapse on August 3, 1973. In fact the Dolls played there every week from the middle of June 1972 until the beginning of October that same year. Seems oddly fitting that Personality Crisis would bellow out of a room named after another irreverent dandy with a penchant for feminine attire. My cousin Bill Dickson of The Rousers used to see the Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center. He and his band mates would get gussied up in their SVA art student finest and go shake a tail feather and then some to David Jo, Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, Syl Sylvain and Arthur "Killer" Kane. Good times...

The building collapsed just hours before hundreds of patrons were scheduled to file in. While sadly the collapse did kill 4 hotel residents, the subsequent remains of the hotel were demolished and a 22-story dormitory for law students (they still live in dorms?) was erected in its place, built by, you guessed it, NYU. Have a look...





And before its reconstruction...

What used to be and what is now...

For years now I've watched as the City has been systematically denuded of its coolness. The characters have been driven out with the homeless and the squeegee guys. You never see Gene Pool peddling around on his unicycle in his suit made of tin cans or astro-turf. The guy who used to sell stained glass jewelry in his daisy dukes and red cowboy boots (I called him the Wild Man from Borneo) on Broadway between Bleecker and Houston, gone. The Duck Man, once featured in the opening credits of Saturday Night Live, also, gone. And finally, the one I probably miss the most, the Bubble Man, who would walk down West 4th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues with an enormous pickle bucket filled with suds and a multi-holed bubble wand, waving the wand and leaving a tremendous cloud of bubbles in his wake, GONE. In a city as transient and mutable as New York, one has to get used to the fact that some things go the way of the dinosaurs. But I miss the grit. I miss the sense that you had to have balls, bravery or a bit of insanity to live in this City. So as my love note to the City I love and love to hate, I will be posting images and anecdotes about what places and people are gone (CBGBs, the Mudd Club, Mercer Arts Center, Homeless Man, etc.) and what chain, franchise, soulless conglomerate has moved in in their place.

As Lou Reed once said: I'll take Manhattan in a garbage bag with Latin written on the side of it that says "it's hard to give a shit these days..."

Opera and Its Characters

Is a book for which Grace City Limits, Inc. is doing the marketing and publicity. Please make sure to attend the reception, panel and book signing for Opera and Its Characters at Barnes and Noble/Lincoln Triangle, 1972 Broadway at 66th Street on Monday, November 10th at 7pm. A panel of participants will include Andrew Farkas, Aloma Bardi and Randolph Mickelson. For more information about the event, please contact Barnes & Noble, Lincoln Triangle 212/595-9340.


A spectacularly illustrated witty book full of historical information and performance history of twenty operas – informative, beautiful and clever all at the same time.

Behind the scenes at the opera house there is a zany world of outsized characters, both on and off stage. Irreverent discussions of opera are usually held behind closed doors. Opera and Its Characters is filled with exceptional and matchless tales as told by two singers and their friends giving you their take on twenty operas through the eyes of the characters, shown in full-page color illustrations by Francis Keeping.

While the book is chockfull of information – history of the individual opera, its cast, composer and librettist, the idea is to set the scene for the opening night. The show business aspect of opera and the nuttiness of its characters and stories are the source of inspiration.

The stories in Opera and Its Characters include: The Queen of the Night, aka the world's worst mother-in-law; Don José, the quintessential mama's boy and murderer; opera's most dysfunctional family, King Nabucco of Babylon and his unhinged daughters, Lakmé and her rather unusual Gerald, who falls in love with her even after she says, You know, I could have had you killed. These and many familiar and uncommon characters' stories are contained in this book and are told in a scholarly yet uniquely whimsical fashion.

Opera and its characters is a new book by Francis Keeping and Roberta Prada, Vox Mentor LLC, New York City, 96 pages, 21 full color plates.

New York is done

Just back from a trip to Europe. Kinda whirlwind. I hit Amsterdam - a complete haze filled with gorgeous people, canals and cannibus; Paris - surprisingly Parisians have become friendlier or I'm just more tolerant. They are sadly destroying their suburbs in what will, I suspect, become a similar set of circumstances to Katrina. They burn their own neighborhoods, those neighborhoods get bought up by land developers who then gentrify it making it impossible for the original inhabitants to return, making for a whole new increase in homelessness, lawlessness and general malaise; London - fab but too crowded! and well, LA, but that's not Europe just part of the overall trip.

More about this later...

Muzzy Rosenblatt Sucks Gutter Water

The prezzie of the BRC has served CBGBs with walking papers but the fight continues! Please sign the SAVE CBGBs petition, get involved and stop looking at this as some failing club that's past its prime! The club means more than just a place for aspiring bands to get their start. It is part of an illustrious and dying part of our history. I implore you to get involved. For those of us who believe the City is being systematically denuded of any character and edge, keeping CBs alive, open and thriving is an important factor in resisting the willingness for NYC to become a part of the rest of this God foresaken, sanitized, homogeninzed country.

Even Seymour Stein, former head of Sire Records said that "I believe in preserving our heritage in New York - we've lost so much. We didn't need Mrs. O'Leary's cow to kick over a lantern to destroy our city like in Chicago, or an earthquake like in San Francisco - we're doing it ourselves."

Didn't we all like NYC a little better when Gerald Ford told us to get fucked?!!?

I hate that I'm surprised...

CBGBs was served with evicition papers just a few weeks back. I went the other night to see my cousin's band, The Rousers. They've been playing there since 1978. Quite the crew showed up...The Rousers, of course and a fella named Philippe Marcade who was the lead singer for a band called The Senders (look 'em up, there's plenty), Brett Wilder from the Boilermakers, amongst others. Evidently to stave off the, and I hate to say this out loud as it pains me to do so, INEVITABLE eviction, good ole Hilly Crystal is paying some diehards (mostly 20-somethings) to sit in the bar all night, drink and watch TV. It's NYC law that you can't padlock a place that's occupied so long as someone sits inside, the BRC can't lock the place permanently. God bless Hilly and his own ingenuity. He was, and will always be, in many ways, the Mother of Invention.

I keep rolling it around in my head though...why won't somebody step in??! A record label, a policitician (beyond Bloomberg's failed and mostly half-hearted attempt)?...Why must we suffer the fate of our own complacency? And why is it that everyone dresses the same in a neighborhood that used to encourage and foster individulality. That's why I moved here, and it's why it felt like home. I had escaped the oppression of a stifling Southern mentality that required a specific address and dress code...Now I find myself surrounded and lacking an escape.

Jesus God! Won't somebody help??! Or are we really doomed to ruin ourselves?...

Long time no see...

Ok, yes, it's been a long while since I posted anything on this blog. To be honest, I started a new job that keeps me busier than f**k. But more to the point I've been really fucking disappointed in NYC lately. We seem to be a City intent on destroying itself by systematically denuding ourselves of any character, guts and edge we once had. These were the qualities that appealed to me and not least among the reasons for my leaving my safe little North Cackalacky home. The words sanitized, gentrified and strip mall come to mind to me now as the perfect descriptions of NYC. Just look at what's happening with CBGBs. I spoke to someone about this last year before there were real rumblings about the possibility of it closing. I had read that their lease was up in the summer of 2005 and I was worried shitless. A friend of mine who played there regularly in the 70s and beyond tried to assure me that CBs would never close. Well, guess what? He was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Are we as a City willing to turn our heads and avert our eyes to the possibility of an icon disappearing? The writer David McCollough has said "History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are." Are we willing to forget? To allow landmarks of a seminal time in NYC, in fact, in many ways the thing that still embodies the spirit that this City once embraced; the idea that you could do anything and be anyone you wanted, are we really willing to let that die?...CBs closing is not just about a building or a club that perhaps no longer attracts a crowd or future big-name bands, it's about the ideals that it represented - that some schmucks from Queens in leather jackets and bowl hair cuts could be one of the most influential bands of our time and only came into our consciousness because of a guy who was willing to give them a chance as the house band at his then-struggling club, that an era could be defined by people not willing to roll over for Disco or get scared away because of a few Bowery bums. DIY is dead or at least gasping for its last breath...

Things were so much cooler then

Well, despite receiving yards of shit about how bad I am at keeping up with this blog, I clearly have not posted in forever! Work, interviewing for a new job (which I actually did get, yeah me!), writing stuff for class and and an endless list of other excuses have pulled me in enough direction that I just didn't feel focused on writing more about how crappy New York has become. Of course crappy is a relative term. Perhaps because I grew up in a relatively bucolic setting, surrounded by neighborhoods, trees, yards and screaming children, I have always gravitated to environments that represent the complete other end of the spectrum - dirt, congestion, energy, decay, squalor, poverty with dignity. Maybe it's because I feel that this is truth. Stripped down, non-materialistic, have fun anyway because what else can you do, search your mind and explore the depths of your imagination to invent a life not focused on what it is you don't have.

There are still glimmers of this on Loisaida Avenue, my adopted home. The lower end of this Avenue before it becomes Pitt Street is still defined by its strong Latino culture. Salsa music, cherried out low rider bicycles with monkey bars and banana seats; Puerto Rican flags proudly displayed and old style boom boxes strapped to the handlebars or resting in the rider's lap blaring Tito Puente or Celia Cruz. These denizens aren't occupying the new high rises that seem to be sprouting up in a steady and endless stream west on 2nd Street and north on Avenue C. Quite the opposite, in fact. They live in the projects on Avenue D or Barrier Free Living on 2nd Street or any number of fairly run down buildings that still dot the avenues and side streets. What's my point? These folks seem to be able to celebrate life, know their neighbors, paint murals dedicated to fallen heroes or their neighbors' dead children in vibrant, unmistakable colors, to find happiness with just a few bucks in their pockets and a roof over their head. These folks aren't looking for the latest restaurant or hipster club or living in luxe apartments with doormen and T1 connections, and they don't seem to want to. They seem to want to hold on to and celebrate their culture and still assimilate just enough to keep themselves Latino, but Latino in New York.

Avenue C, and in general the East Village, is no longer identified as a melting pot of Jews, Latinos, Blacks, Whites, artists, musicians, performers, writers; people happily living on a shoe string in crappy apartments because their living arrangements meant that they could afford to make art and still live in NYC. The East Village is now a glut of chi-chi restaurants, hipsters living out some glamour filled dream on daddy's dime, gym rats and suits.

This City is disappointing me...

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Well, they would if they lived in the EV

The other evening I was channel surfing and came across one of my favorite movies, Blade Runner. In particular I love that scene near the end where Rutger Hauer tells Harrison Ford or rather Roy Batty tells Deckard that "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams ... glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost ... in time, like tears ... in rain. Time ... to die"

That line got me thinking about the EV, how the face and character of it has changed, how the fresh-faced transplants will never see what I've seen there, and ultimately how disappointing and sad that is to me. A cab driver once said to me there are 3 different kinds of people who live in NYC - the ones who live on the Upper East Side and treat the City like a suitcase town; gone every weekend; the ones who live on the Upper West Side who have babies and bigger apartments and then the ones who live in the EV where a bathtub in the kitchen was not unheard of and living in squalor was almost de rigueur. This cabbie said that the people who lived in the EV were the ones who truly loved New York because they would withstand anything, any living condition just to be here. This was 1995. This cabbie also let me smoke in his cab because he said, and I quote "smokers are better tippers". Since 1995, and before, really, the EV has seen the construction of a number of lookalike buildings with large, overpriced apartments housing students with parents who seem to have large pockets and girls who aspire to be Carrie Bradshaw, or at least to have her wardrobe. Everything is starting to look the same just with slightly different menu items.

Leg McNeil once said that Joey Ramone with his wall eye and receding chin, all lanky gawkishness and skinny legs, was able to take everything about himself that made him different and the potential object of ridicule, that on the surface was a deficit and celebrate it. And that was Punk. Take the shittiness and swim in it. Embrace it. Celebrate it. That's what the EV WAS like. Now it just seems to be a strip mall for former suburbanites.