I celebrated the Millennium in NYC while in the midst of a tour. The client that I had started working with in 1999, kept me busy for a year and a half and allowed me return visits to New York for the first time since 1990. I can only compare the feeling of coming back for the first time to the uneasiness of seeing an old girlfriend and realizing that you were still in love. But now she looked better than when you were dating her. I was still stuck in Nashville with a partially renovated heap of house that nobody would buy and life’s worth of possessions that I didn’t miss when I was away. Repeated viewings of Fight Club kept hammering home the same point:

Although almost a cliche by now, in 1999 this scene provided me with a needed manifesto that eventually provided the inspiration when naming this blog.

In July of 2001, Iggy released Beat Em Up with a back to basics vitriolic snarl. I guess he had been watching Fight Club as well.

Mask:

I came back off the road on September 5th, 2001, after having been mostly away with work for almost a year. The band I was working for headed back into the studio and I was looking forward to a little time off. Six days later, well, you know what happened.
In the ensuing days emails came in from fellow road warriors with stories about disrupted tours, canceled shows and an uncertain future for the touring industry in light of the events of 9-11.
The reaction in Nashville was muted, but that didn’t stop gas stations from tripling their prices overnight. In my neighborhood, the bubbas that had been flying the confederate stars and bars were now replacing them with stars and stripes.
I started making calls looking for work and realized that I would be home for a while.

Then half way through October, I had my own moment of clarity. I woke up one morning realizing that I was close to turning 40 and that event could not be celebrated if I was still living in Tennessee. It was time to finish the renovations on the house, sell it, and get back to NYC.
Fortunately, the schedule that had kept me away from home also kept me from spending more than just my overhead and I was sitting on a little cash. The credit card companies had sent me a pile of interest-free offers which I saw as interest free loans.
For the next 6 months my life was nothing but drywall, tile, paint, shop-vac, and minimum payments.
Back in those days the local Home Depot was open 24 hours and eerily surreal as I shopped alone at 3 am listening to a former client playing overhead from the crappy speakers.

In May of 2002, I left behind a fully renovated, pest-free, 2400 square foot reminder that I never wanted to see the inside of a Lowe’s or Home Depot again. What wasn’t essential ended up in the alley, and whatever was left over ended up in my sister’s basement in Detroit. I moved back to Gotham in a Mini-van. The house sold a month before any of the credit cards came due and I paid them off without spending a dime on interest.

I celebrated my 40th birthday in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam along with the rest of the country as my birthday just happened to fall on Tet (the chinese new year). It sure beat celebrating it in Nashville.

In 2003, Iggy released Skull Ring, a collaborative project that reunited him with fellow Stooges founders Scott and Ron Ashton. The Stooges got back together, toured extensively and released The Weirdness in March of 2007.

In April of 2007, 30 years after I laid eyes on him for the first time, Iggy turned 60. That week, he appeared on Jimmy Kimmel:

I Wanna Be Your Dog (almost 40 years later, still an institution):

1990’s Brick By Brick provided the soundtrack for my departure from NYC back to Motown. It took years for me to come back to this record as it served as a reminder of my last months in Gotham, a place that grew painfully more fond as I took up residence in the most desolate suburb known to man. My reasons for leaving were pure (to care for ailing grandarents) but with NYC heading into the recession of the early 1990’s I didn’t now when, if ever, I would come back. During this era, the all-consuming music media obsession with all things grunge led me to stop listening to rock n’ roll altogether as I plunged into a self restricted musical diet of 60’s/70’s R&B, 50’s and early 60’s jazz and Chess era blues. I lasted for just a year in Detroit after my grandparents died and headed south for the then affordable, safe, apparent bohemia of NashVegas.
I settled into temporary digs at the home of a friend of a friend who had just happened to have contributed guitar tracks to the latest Iggy offering, 1993’s American Caesar. The inimitable Mr. Pop was back, full throttle as I began my dixie odyssey.

Wild America:

My first Music city apartment? A 2 bedroom duplex with a gravel driveway and a yard ($315/month, not a typo). Problem? Getting a f**kin’ bartending job in a town that worshiped bartenders who worked at TGIF Fridays and lit drinks on fire. It took me six months, but I finally took a bar gig that nobody wanted. A year later I bought my first (flea, roach,termite and rodent infested) house with proceeds pulled from a bevy of inebriated trustafarians. I decorated the decrepit victorian with a rusty F-150, a .45 auto, 2 intimidating dogs, and a Marshall half-stack. It took a while, but I finally realized that when my neighbors shot off automatic weaponry they weren’t necessarily angry at anyone, they were just drunk and I stopped sleeping with a gun. Upside? Nobody complained about my stereo or my late night guitar noodling.

The mid-90’s British invasion hit a certain melodic sweet-spot within my jaded anima and brought me back to the RN’R fold. Amazon.co.uk could deliver to my door from outside of London in under a week and a yearly subscription to MOJO ran $78. Small price to pay even with the favorable exchange rate back then. Anglophilia makes a comeback. Full stop.

Iggy did a bit of acting. Can’t say I caught his appearance in Star Trek : Deep Space Nine, but I did catch him in The Crow: City Of Angels (sorry about the low volume)

I was obsessed with Supergrass, Suede and Babybird and totally missed 1995’s Naughty Little Doggie and 1999’s Avenue B. Avenue B was Iggy at his most personal and introspective and yielded Motorcycle, performed here solo acoustic:

But the mistake of missing those records was recently remedied, and discovering previously unheard Iggy is almost as good as getting new Iggy.

The 90’s ended with me leaving bartending and entering the world of professional babysitting. Iggy was just warming up for the aughts.

Iggy and Tom Snider 1980:

Iggy cleaned up and Released Blah, Blah, Blah in 1986. His most commercial sounding record and perhaps my least favorite. The album saddled many a future generation with “Real Wild Child” as bad film soundtrack fodder
I graduated college and got my first and only ill-fated taste of corporate life.

In May of 1988, I moved to NYC for the first time. Earlier that year, Iggy released Instinct, a return to a meat and potatoes guitar, drum and bass sound that featured Sex Pistols alumnus Steve Jones as guitar-slinger.

Iggy on Letterman July 21, 1988. Yes, that long-hair really is Steve Jones.

April 15th, 1977.

Your humble narrator is still shopping for clothes with his mother in the “husky” section of boyswear (an experience that has left me scarred to this day). Nobody, was less cool than I was. My older brother hears of a possible David Bowie appearance on the Dinah Shore Show (the Oprah of daytime TV in those heady days) and some guy from Detroit named Iggy. What follows is an experience that can only be matched by my first televised view of the Sex Pistols in the next year. Who knew that the chubby kid watching this would be taking fashion tips from The Road Warrior in the following years. And so it began:

Interview one (apologies for the quality):

Perhaps the first view of Hunt and Tony Sales who would end up in Bowie’s Tin Machine project?

Second Interview (D plays it cool):

Funtime:

I still have a hard time imagining the initial and subsequent conversations between publicist and talent booker but I was forever changed. This could only have only happened in the 70’s.

Recently, Alex over at Flaming Pablum and EV Grieve have been scouring the vaults for vintage NYC based videos and album covers and have come up with some true gems. Kudos, gents.
Unfortunately, I have been embroiled in a rather fruitless scouring of the “internets” for some new phenom to take up permanent space on my personal listening device. Suffice to say, they have done much better than I have.
I have, however, filled out my Iggy Pop discography with a few nuggets that had, till recently, only existed in my vinyl collection sequestered in my parent’s basement back in Detroit. New/old Iggy still beats the new school wunderkinder in spades, sorry Itunes. In my feeble attempt at solidarity with the aforementioned sultans of sedulity, I offer up a double whammy tribute: Punk Rock King/ Rock N’ Roll Alpha Male Iggy rolling thru Times Square. I can only hope to be half this cool at 60.
This hardly qualifies as vintage, but given how quickly the city is changing it might just take a few weeks. However, this manifesto deserves a second viewing in a New Music Tuesday world, even if it ended up in a Cadillac ad.

Growing up in suburban Detroit, the nightly newscast usually led with three stories that rotated in accordance to their severity: the big three, the UAW, and a murder. The good times in Detroit ended sometime before I started the 4th grade. But the decline of the automotive industry was just a state of reality that though I was aware of it, never truly had an impact on me. During the summer, my brother and I attended Ford Day Camp where we toured the Rouge Steel Plant and the Rouge Assembly Plant that put Mustangs together. Every Fall, Ford sponsored elaborate events showcasing their new models and invited employees and their families. Every Christmas we attended the Ford Christmas show for children of their employees. My college loan was through a program for Ford employees and I attended college at the University Of Michigan-Dearborn, built on the grounds of the Henry Ford Estate known as Fairlane and located within eye shot of their world headquarters. My first shirt and tie job was at Henry Ford Hospital. Three of my Four pickup trucks were Fords (dad never quite forgave me for the Chevy) and all of my cars were Fords. My dad was an accountant and luckily missed the white-collar layoffs he sweated through. My two sisters became engineers and both eventually ended up working in the automotive industry
Up until the seventies, if you weren’t college bound, there was a good chance a father, uncle or cousin who worked “on the line” could hook you up with a blue-collar “good job” within the auto industry. With factories running 24 hours, the jobs paid very well, provided rich benefit packages and with enough overtime a cottage “up north” was not out of the cards. Your kids would have braces and glasses if they ever needed them. The UAW made it almost impossible for you to ever get fired. Suburbs and subdivisions were clearly delineated between white and blue collar. After the plants started closing, I only knew of a handful of fathers that had lost their jobs.

After working for Ford for nearly 50 years, in 2007 my Dad lost his retiree health insurance. My sisters have moved on to the only growth industry in Detroit, the defense industry. They are the fortunate ones, for now.

Last night HBO aired Emmy winning Jon Alpert’s engrossing documetary Driving Dirty: Thundercars of Indiana. I had caught the trailer a few times but never imagined the strength of the piece chronicling the fate of small town Indiana in the throws of decline. The story covers a season of weekly “thundercar” (unmodified stock-cars) amateur racers and their lives away from the track. Here is the HBO synopsis:

“Auto racing is an obsession in Anderson, Indiana. Even with local auto factories closing down and jobs being lost, the town’s residents continue to flock to the local speedway every Friday night–and its drivers continue to pour their dwindling resources into their Thundercars. Emmy®-winning filmmaker Jon Alpert presents this look at this passion for racing in rust-belt America. Since the closing of a GM plant and the loss of 33,000 jobs, the once-thriving town of Anderson now stands witness to empty factories, shuttered stores and abandoned home–but also to packed houses at Anderson Speedway where people put their troubles on hold to watch the cacophony of screeching tires and crashing metal as drivers vie for Thundercar supremacy.”

Whatever snarky instincts I held while watching, very quickly disappeared as this story unfolded. It is told by the people themselves and speaks not only of a town in decline, but a way of life disappearing for many towns in addition to Anderson, Indiana. This is Wal-Mart nation with it’s back square against a wall, and whatever political views one might hold this eventually will, or already has, impacted us all.
This is something not to be missed, and in case you did, here is a link to the schedule of when it will be re-broadcast.

The decade that taste neglected still occasionally offers up some juicy relics. Behold this airbrushed chariot replete with befitting homage to the era’s musical titans and perhaps the original owner’s penchant to bag a young heart or two. Amazing that this glittered caravan is not in the Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame or the Museum Of Sex instead of parked in Soho. Gary Wright’s Dream Weaver kept playing in my head as I shot these pix. So click on the video below to set the proper ambiance as we travel back to those heady days of aesthetic abandon……..

And just in time for 2012….The Former Action-Hero Party weighs in?

Months from now, the surplus shirts will end up on the chests of the third world and hopefully continue to inspire…….

Mamoun’s falafel is in no need of publicity. But their chicken shawarma plate has been my default carry out choice for a while. I often marvel at the consistency of this humble yet sumptuous feast every time I crack the styrofoam carton. For 10 bucks there isn’t a whole lot that compares, especially when you have an insatiable jones for Arabic cuisine, something in short supply in the EV. Tonight, I opted for the lamb/chicken combo, with baba ghannouj, hummus and tabouleh. REAL grilled lamb, not the baaaaad gyro-style mystery loaf that is sadly de rigueur at many a local shawarma shack or doner dive. The tahini drizzled, grilled hunks of meat sit atop a crisp bed of lettuce, tomatoes, onion and tabouleh. Highly recommended, especially if like me, you have hit that falafel wall and can’t bring yourself to eat another one. The photo belies the sultan-size portion that they serve up.