NY Rocker #33

A couple of years ago I realized I probably needed to procure as many NY Rocker issues as I might be able to afford, before they started being priced like Slash currently is. Even now there are pathways to getting these for $15-$25 a pop, so that’s what I did a few years back – and then I wrote reviews of them here, here, here and here. Even now, I’m just catching up to the half-dozen or so I bought. I actually remember first seeing this while it was actively being published at Rasputin’s in Berkeley, CA, probably in 1981, but I was too broke and too much of a teenage dumb-dumb to be able to buy it.

NY Rocker, including in this December 1980 issue, brought together heroes like Don Snowdon, Byron Coley, Ira Kaplan, Don Waller and later Don Howland – a lot of Dons – along with guys who loved Chic and disco-dancing or whatever, and weren’t afraid to tell you. It never really reads to me as quite hitting the quality level of Slash or even Damage most of the time, but that’s irrelevant. It’s still absolutely stacked with the maniacal explosion of underground music that defined the times, both across the USA and in the UK, much of which NY Rocker pays close attention to, as well as anything else interesting beyond Manhattan’s borders.

First up after the table of contents, Ira Kaplan talks about how Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues finally screened in New York after years of legal purgatory, and how tough it was to get into one of the screenings. “Ironically, it’s possible that the only people more disappointed than those who didn’t get in were those who did….Cocksucker Blues’ strength is that it makes the fabled lore of the road – the drugs, the sex, the destruction of hotel rooms – look not merely ugly, but as we’ve been assured touring is, boring – a combination I’ve never seen pulled off before”. Bingo. My thoughts precisely on this film, which is a “watch once, discuss, then forget” sort of viewing. 

Cover star Captain Beefheart is interviewed with Doc at The Radar Station having just come out. If you’ve read Van Vliet interviews before, his style was give a millimeter, take an inch – so it’s difficult to get a bead on him aside from his eccentricity, which frankly, is enough for me. You just need to know what to expect going in. I suspect a collection of all his late 70s/early 80s interviews wouldn’t add up to much in terms of new revelations on, say, the creative process – but he’s just daffy enough and moderately confrontational that it’s still a fun read.

Jeff Hayes has a piece on a bunch of heavy metal teens going to a Molly Hatchet show, and about their subculture of booze, partyin’ and metal. The obvious comparison, of course, would be Heavy Metal Parking Lot from six years later. There’s an embarrassing Delta 5 interview by Jim Anderson where he wants to commit the 3 women in the 5-person band to a sort of “women in rock” solidarity with The Raincoats and the Slits and they’re having none of it. In 1981, when I was really diving into college radio for the first time, my initial favorites were the funk/bass-heavy, female-sung, post-punk rhythms of the Delta 5, Au Pairs and Bush Tetras, all sitting at ground zero in this December 1980 issue. It’s amazingly still a sound that hasn’t gotten old for me, likely because it was as formative as it comes (even though I rarely listen to anything else like it).

So much else going on! Jah Wobble is now driving a cab in London and figuring out his next move – which merits an entire short piece on him. “Lightnin’ Jeffrey” Lee Pierce has his own section on reggae records; the cream of the crop has already risen, and he knows it. He was doing these sorts of reviews and roundups for Slash too. There’s a takedown of the Times Square film, which I’ve never seen because I’ve never wanted to. And there’s a great interview with the band Information, plus later, an ad for their Tape #1 with Mofungo and Blinding Headache, a tape recently unearthed again here. Rick Brown from this band is still killing it with 75 Dollar Bill, 44 years later.

Byron Coley and Greg McLean do a passel of 45 reviews – Mission of Burma, Dead Kennedys, Jad Fair, Snakefinger and many, many lesser lights. There’s a “30 NY bands of the moment” centerspread – Bush Tetras, Zantees, Mofungo, Ut, Von Lmo, DNA, Lounge Lizards and Klaus Nomi (!), among others. And what a surprise – there’s a short piece on the mysterious Chain Gang with a great photo; it’s about how no one knows who they are, and how they’ll just pop up for a gig somewhere in NYC, maybe on a fishing pier, about once a year.

Finally, there’s a cornball Richard Meltzer piece to close out the issue. Meltzer’s inscrutability seems to have been one of his greatest calling cards for his small legion of fans, but I’ve always found that to be such a strange sort of put-on. I mean, Ulysses and Pynchon and countless others can reward one’s deep reading, but Meltzer at his abstraction-vomiting worst? The best I can say for him in pieces like this is that I know he was a canny jokester who loved making the scene uncomfortable, and certainly never took himself or much music seriously. But I’d hate to have to try to parse a blatantly uninteresting piece like “Borneo Jimmy’s Lost and Found” again. I mean what did Richard Meltzer ever do compared with Molly Hatchet anyway?