Blank Generation

Haven't been here lately. My bad. Actually, I've been busy working hard to make ends meet. I spent most of the Memorial Day working on a grant proposal for a big city hospital here. And I've started a part-time job at music school (3 days a week), while freelancing the other two work week days, plus nights and weekends. Eight days a week round here, but I'm happy with what I'm doing, even though it ain't that glam, it's honest work.

Since our last visit, I've finished Jonathan Mahler's "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning" (a pretty good read, especially the description of the rioting in Bushwick during the '77 blackout and the brutal feud between Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner). It's so hard to believe some of the things that went down from a post-Guiliani perspective (the following is from a description of Game 2 of the 1977 World Series):

"An hour before the first pitch, a fire started in Public School 3, an abandoned elementary school a few blocks west of the ballpark. By the time ABC began its broadcast at 8 p.m., orange flames were licking toward the sky. The network cut to its camera in a helicopter hovering above for an aerial view. "There it is, ladies and gentlemen," announced Howard Cosell, who later misidentified the building as an apartment complex, "the Bronx is burning."

"By the late innings the fire had grown to five alarms, and Yankees' fans were getting restless. Play was stopped repeatedly while stadium police chased fans across the field. Rolls of toilet paper, whiskey bottles, and firecrackers rained down on the field. the residents of the upper deck dumped beer on the owners of the box seats below. A cop was assaulted when he asked several fans to lower a banner that was obstructing the view of those behind them. One fan pulled down his pants and hung from the scoreboard. Another tossed a smoke bomb from the stands that beclouded the outfield in an electric green haze.

"New York's nationally televised degredation was still not complete. During the final out of the game, a fan pegged Dodgers' right-fielder Reggie Smith in the head with a hard rubber ball. Smith required immediate medical attention and left town the next day in a neck brace."

I remember being in the upper deck of Yankee Stadium in either '77 or '78 and seeing grown men my dad's age pouring giant cups of beer over the side on the poor saps below and my dad being so disgusted with their boorishness (but you can bet he had enough sense not to interfere...he didn't want to get beat up). That kind of pervasive fan behavior and Steinbrenner's continual torture of Martin were enough to stop him from taking me and my brother to games at the stadium in protest...

Since I'm delving into the history of New York in the Seventies (all this cool stuff that was happening while I was a blissfully ignorant kid), I've been tearing through "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk," by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. A few things I've learned so far:

1) The drugs is bad, kids. Really bad. People died. People did incredibly stupid, hurtful, self-destructive things. People wasted time, money, their lives. People squandered their unbelievable talent. People prostituted themselves for drugs. They sold out everything for drugs. The drugs is real bad, kidz. Incredibly bad.

2) Lou Reed was a jerk. We're told this over and over by many, many different people. So, I'm left to assume that Lou was a jerk. Transformer is still a damn good album, though.

3) People in the NY "punk" scene (Ramones, NY Dolls, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Television, Heartbreakers, etc.) didn't really have a bloody clue how much they influenced the UK punk scene until some of them toured there. The especially bizarre thing was that the UK punk scene was based on how they imagined how tough and violent the NY scene must be (but really wasn't). The Sex Pistols and The Clash and all their fans were imitating something that didn't exist, they based all their impressions solely on the images projected by the New York bands on their album covers and in their music, which wasn't real.

4) All the New York "punk" bands didn't consider themselves "punk" until after the first fanzine, called "Punk," started covering the bands playing Max's Kansas City and CBGBs. The Ramones thought they were just playing rock'n'roll. Up till that point in pop culture, punk primarily meant being someone's same-sex sex toy in prison, if you get my meaning.

5) Malcolm McLaren managed the New York Dolls -- disasterously. Didn't do too much better with the Sex Pistols, either, really.

6) An incredible number of cool, talented musicians and artists hung out together in the mid-70s in the East Village. And it's so hard to imagine that anything like this could ever happen again in New York. This kind of stupid pie-in-the-sky innocence (if you could call it that with all the drugs and sex and hedonism going on) will never exist again, as the Sixties will never play out again and give rise to everything that was the mid-70s NY punk scene. New York is no longer a town where a whole bunch of down-and-out musicians can survive by playing a crappy, unknown bar and live in a largely-ignored urban wasteland and create a whole new music scene that they didn't even know about. Ain't ever gonna happen again. Money is god now, that's why, and the whole shebang would have been exploited to bits before some of these bands would have been able to really hit their stride and change the music world forever...