Here's a clip from a rather famous Warren Zevon show at the old Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey back in 1982 - a double track: his classic Poor Poor Pitiful Me and a cover of Springsteen's Cadillac Ranch. Zevon was one of the great live acts, as well as true melodic poet and rare wit. I remember this show like it was yesterday.
For a bridge and tunnel kid in 1980 New York...check that...for a Catholic bridge and tunnel kid in 1980 New York, Jim Carroll's Catholic Boy was canonical, a bass-charged liturgy of the word - if the word descended from the Beats and Allen Ginsberg, its bearer transfigured into a poetry-pouting punk rocker with an angry hit record. The record's cover hangs framed in my basement rec room, near the Rock Band video game set-up and my 14-year-old's drum kit. Nearly 30 years ago, it was always in the stack on the turntable and the Jim Carroll Band's shows at the Ritz always brought out the punk royalty, from Patti Smith to Stiv Bators to Richard Hell. At least in my (somewhat gauze-wrapped) memory, they were real events and Carroll - who couldn't really sing per se, but still knew how to sell the story - was treated like an archbishop.
And based on that one record, it didn't seem too much to bend and kiss the ring. It was great, from the iconic People Who Died to the title track (which I quoted in a Lenten post earlier this year).
I was a Catholic boy
Redeemed through pain
And not through joy
Carroll died of a heart attack at 60 last week, and my friend Gerry Howard has a moving tribute in Slate (via Jim Wolcott):
Cognoscenti of downtown culture knew Jim as a literary prodigy who was publishing his poems and diaries in the Paris Review in
his teens. He was a fully paid-up member of New York's hip aristocracy,
Lou Reed's peer, Patti Smith's lover, Allen Ginsberg's acolyte, Robert
Smithson's friend, permanently welcome in the Valhalla of Max's Kansas
City's back room. And I had the pleasure of publishing most of his work
when I was an editor at Penguin in the '80s.
Tall, slim,
athletic, pale, and spectral as many ex-junkies are, Jim was a vivid
presence in any setting. He was a classic and now vanishing New York
type: the smart (and smartass) Irish kid with style, street savvy, and
whatever the Gaelic word for chutzpah is. The line of succession runs
from Jimmy Cagney and Jimmy Walker through Emmett Grogan and Al
McGuire. In the '30s they would have cast him immediately as a Dead End
Kid—he certainly had the unreconstructed accent for the part, an urban
rasp that was sweet music to my aboriginal ears. He came up
athletically in an era when New York produced the best basketball
players in the country—and a lot of them were white. Despite playing
his high-school ball for a Manhattan prep school, Jim could more than
hold his own on some of the toughest playgrounds in the city against
the likes of Lew Alcindor and Dean "the Dream" Meminger. But his
street-kid affect never quite hid his essentially generous and
vulnerable nature and his poetic soul.
I love that line about the Dead End Kids and Carroll's place in their ranks. Though a literary darling as welcome in the back room of Max's as any of the downtown cognoscenti, Carroll's work covered a different New York entirely. Still, his death does mark yet another great name leaving a city that used to house voices that stirred many a poetic soul. As Wolcott says:
"With his passing, another link to the Beats and the St. Marks poetry
scene and the Warhol Factory joins the posthumous fraternity of the
starry Kerouac night."
Here's a video of the Jim Carroll Band hammering through People Who Died on Friday's (h/t Dennis Perrin):
Here's David Bowie opening the incredible Concert for New York in October, 2001 with one of my favorite Paul Simon songs. One of the things that struck me about this show (which was the moving cultural experience of my life) was deep appreciation of New York City and its position and role in the world by British musicians like Bowie, Jagger and Richards, Townshend and Daltrey, Elton John, Clapton, and Paul McCartney, who organized the concert. In some ways, their emotion and empathy drove the entire evening - and provided a release to the cops and firefighters who packed the Garden. It's almost as if - like the Queen, who ordered the Star-Spangled Banner played at Buckingham Palace - these British rockers really took the meaning of "America" (as they call call it) to heart. Anyway, Bowie:
I've always been a total sucker for Squeezing Out Sparks, the hook-filled 1979 release from Graham Parker and the Rumour. It wasn't punk and it wasn't really New Wave (Parker being a hair older than those dudes), but it fit the times as perfectly as this record's eight-track fit the ride out to Jones Beach. Here's Local Girls, a wry commentary on man's innate (and ultimately unsuccessful) drive to remain cool and aloof, and a spiffy old school music video besides.
In honor of the late Edward Kennedy, a bit of vintage Billy Preston, dedicated to the Senatorial soldier in the war on poverty:
So much has already been said, I figured this does the trick. Those who came closest to my feelings about Edward M. Kennedy: Dennis Perrin and Chuck Butcher. The last lion, indeed.
The Bruce Springsteen shows from 1978 at the Capitol Theater in Passaic have made the rounds as the among the best live bootlegs ever hawked. Here's a terrific Darkness on the Edge of Town, back when Bruce was still selling it. It's a bit grainy in black and white and gray, but that fits the tune.
I'm guessing it was 1981 when we all went to Burger King for cardboard crowns before heading down to the Peppermint Lounge to catch Joe "King" Carrasco and the Crowns, in town from Austin and playing a wild, over-the-top tex mex rave set. This cheesy TV performance doesn't quite catch the adrenaline-fueled Carrasco set of that era, but it is Joe's biggest hit. In the days before wireless systems, Carrasco would use the longest possible patch chord on his Tele and wander around the hall, climbing on the balconies and venturing out in the street while the Crowns played on. They say Joe's still playing down in Mexico. Here's Buena released originally on Stiff Records:
Here's Stiv Bators belting out the lyrics to The Stooges' Search and Destroy in a video from - I'm guessing here - 1979 or so, judging by the outfits. Not sure what stage they're on. That's guitarist Cheetah Chrome on the right. Stiv's not well known in the rock pantheon and he was run down and killed by a cab in Paris in 1990. Cheetah's still active and rumored to be writing his memoirs. Still, these guys were quite the working band for a few years and have to be on any shortlist of late-70s New York punk acts.
from Amazon.
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