Friday Ephemera - Luc Sante flyers from the Downtown era, Pt. 2

Here is Part 2 of the flyers from Luc Sante. Again, thanks to him for permission to post these here. Check out his books here - you won't regret it.

Friday Ephemera - Luc Sante flyers from the Downtown era

These goodies come from the personal collection of Mr. Luc Sante - well known writer, and (from the little known fact department) former lyricist for the Del Byzanteens. Check out his books here.

Friday ephemera - Del Byzanteens

Despite what you might read, they were not a No Wave band. Post punk, maybe. New Wave, maybe. No Wave? Definitely not. Learn your genres, kids!

Del Byzanteens on YouTube
Del Byzanteens on Myspace
Del Byzanteens on Wikipedia

Del Byzanteens - Peppermint Lounge

Thanks to Philippe of the Del Byzanteens for this gem of a flyer from the early-80's:



Listen to the Del Byzanteens: Sally Go Round the Roses (MP3)

Del Byzanteens-related items:

Luc Sante on Downtown NYC

Thanks to friend of Stupefaction, Philippe, for pointing out this excellent recollection by Luc Sante on his perspective of life in New York City in the late 70's. It appears to have been written in 2003. I wonder what his take on things would be now, only 4 years later?

The idea of writing a book about New York City[1] first entered my head around 1980, when I was a writer more wishfully than in actual fact, spending my nights in clubs and bars and my days rather casually employed in the mailroom of this magazine. It was there that Rem Koolhaas's epochal Delirious New York fell into my hands. "New York is a city that will be replaced by another city" is the phrase that sticks in my mind.

My god...I was downtown last night for a meeting at 2nd Avenue & Houston Street. Standing in front of the Whole Foods waiting for Michael & Nick, I was smoking a cigarette with my back to traffic, facing the Whole Foods. Between the store I was in front of, and the people walking by, I forgot where I was for a minute. I realized I could have been in any neighborhood of Manhattan - the upper west side, Chelsea, anywhere! I think to myself maybe I'm done with New York...but then, true to form, I get sucked back in.

I struggle with my fascination for the recent past - the nostalgia & sentimentality. I could really get carried away with seeking out a part of life that I've already lived. It's just like the drug addict's attempts to recapture that first high. I need a damn job...something to balance out my time and bring me back a bit more into the present and reality.

December 6, 1981

Courtesy of our friends at Acute Records, here's a nice flyer from a CBGB show in late '81 by Jim Jarmusch's old band, the Del Byzanteens, and Ike Yard (see yesterdays post).

New York Noise, Vol. 2

Released today in the UK, it should be easy to find here in the States...I've been looking forward to this for a while now from Soul Jazz.

TRACKLISTING
1. pulsallama - ungawa pt. 2
2. mofungo - hunter gatherer
3. red transistor - not bite
4. vortex ost - black box disco
5. certain general - back downtown
6. sonic youth - i dreamed i dream
7. rhys chatham - drastic classicism
8. clandestine feat ned sublette - radio rhythm (dub)
9. glorious strangers - move it time
10. felix (arthur russell/nicky siano) - tigerstripes
11. the del byzantines (w/jim jarmusch) - my hands are yellow
12. don king - tanajura
13. jill kroesen - im not seeing that you are here
14. ut - sham shack
15. the static (glenn branca) - my relationship
16. y pants - favorite sweater

This is the second volume of Soul Jazz Records’ New York Noise and delves further into the post-punk/dance world of New York in the 1980s. The music ranges from the guitar-driven experimentation of Sonic Youth, Red Transistor and minimalism of Rhys Chatham to the dubbed-out disco of Arthur Russell and Nicky Siano and Pulsallama. All alongside a healthy dose of punk-funk from the likes of Y Pants, Vortex and more. Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham (minimalist classical composer), Jim Jarmusch (film-maker and founding member of Del Byzantines), Arthur Russell, Ned Sublette (writer), Thurston Moore -all included here- played key roles in bringing the New York music and art scene together in the early 1980s alongside the artist Jean Michel Basquiat, actor Vincent Gallo, poet Lydia Lunch and a host of other characters. This album features text, original photos and interviews documenting this amazing period.

For more from Soul Jazz, go here. Be on the lookout for an early hip hop comp from them this year as well.

Phone Home, Michael Zilkha

A couple of years late, but what the hell...they're still great records, and this is a fantastic piece by Sasha Frere-Jones! (Although I still don't understand the backpackers reference.)

Phone Home, Michael Zilkha: I’m Throwing You a Party, Please Come

by Sasha Frere-Jones
February 27 - March 5, 2002 (Village Voice)

Quite a time, those early '80s in this here New York. The subways were dangerous, the clubs weren't, and you could still shoplift refillable markers from Pearl Paint. Artsy-fartsy types danced to live bands, and sometimes there were people of color on the stage and in the audience. The DJs edutained us by playing what they wanted to play, and clubs like the Ritz played videos like they were something special to look forward to. (I am not making this up.) Misty, revisionist nostalgia? Or was the bang bang boogie qualitatively different then? Get yourself some digitized past and make the call yourself. At the very least, you can figure out why so many Brooklyn bands in 2002 are trying to party like it's 1982.



Without encumbrance of plot or character, the film Downtown 81 (Virgin import) documents, pretty accurately, the Lower East Side and Tribeca and the tenants on their way to boldface: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Deborah Harry, Arto Lindsay, Kid Creole, Fab 5 Freddy, and many Mudd Club regulars I swear I see at the Grand Union now. The soundtrack, blessedly inexpensive but weirdly unnoticed, captures a cross section of the NY hybrid strain. You get Basquiat's band, Gray, playing their one great abstraction, "Drum Mode"; some sweet tango from Pablo Calogero; essential live tracks from Kid Creole and the Coconuts (now performing a '70s disco revue in Hamburg, sigh—Oh What A Night); refusenik noise from Lydia Lunch and Suicide; and three of the most important songs of the era: Liquid Liquid's "Cavern," DNA's "Blonde Redhead," and Rammelzee & K. Rob's gob-stopping "Beat Bop," which backpackers will continue to not reproduce for years to come.

Anti NY (Gomma import) compiles seven downtown rarities, pads the album with five Euro remixes, and puts our buddy Ba$quiat on the cover. Sounds like some Hamburger Helper aggregation of justly forgotten curios looking for cred, but it works. The subsection here is a clump of bands that played Mudd Club and Hurrah, or imagined they did. The celeb quotient will pull some—Gray, again; an early track by Rammelzee (not yet set free from human cadence); and a tune by Jim Jarmusch's band, Del/Byzanteens, co-written by Luc Sante (literate, new wavy, kinda dope)—but the unknowns hold it together. Ike Yard's rough electro piece is so Right Now you'll think the surface noise is a plug-in. Sexual Harassment's monotone come-on sounds like an answer to the Normal's "Warm Leatherette," except this guy's not very scary: "If I gave you a party, would you come? If I offered all my loving, would you run? Well, I'm throwing you a party, please come." And then everybody has a party! In the background! Photographer-writer Vivien Goldman's sole 99 Records single, "Launderette," is a disarming lil' dub song about dating and washing recorded with members of Aswad and PiL: "I wanted 10 pence for the dryer/Yes, that was how we met/My laundry bag was broken/My clothes were soaking wet/I felt I needed hugging/You needed board and lodging." "Launderette" exhibits two of the attributes bringing people back to this music: a sense of fun that didn't instantly drag wacky and dumb along for the ride, and an artless approach to cultural borrowing that favored party-starting over impressing trainspotters. Samplers hijacked that process a few years later, but it's not like folks weren't looking for ways out of the rock box.

But where would New York be without England to remind us of our successes, without New Order and A Certain Ratio to appreciate Man Parrish more than we did? (For starters, notice that none of the comps discussed here are on U.S. labels.) The thesis of In the Beginning There Was Rhythm (Soul Jazz import) is that punk met funk over in old Blighty and something beautiful happened. Compared to the NY culture clash, the U.K. results have a higher quotient of politics and Jamaican ingredients and a wider spread of scores, too. A Certain Ratio's cover of Banbarra's breakbeat classic "Shack Up" still sounds like somebody's dad trying to catch wreck; Human League's "Being Boiled" got better when it became Visage's "Fade to Grey"; and the difference between Throbbing Gristle's probably very subversive 20 Jazz Funk Greats and Gray's equally boring but sensually pleasurable "Drum Mode" is probably the difference between England and America. (The difference between "Drum Mode" and This Heat's "24 Track Loop" is the difference between luck and genius, though.) But there's always a Led Zeppelin—an English group that can find a sweet spot between Euro and African American rhetoric that we just can't. In 1981, they were called the Gang of Four, and if you've never heard "To Hell With Poverty," I wish I could be there when you do. You'll be forming a band within the week, even if you're the mayor. And if you're Kenneth Lay, you're already singing it! If it's white boys on funk we're after, Mark Stewart and his Pop Group (or Maffia) seem to be aging better than, say, James White and his Blacks (or Contortions). It'd be nice to think it was their early anti-globalization stance that pulled the kids, but more likely "She Is Beyond Good and Evil" appeals to kids because the caterwauling and feedback are a more comfortable road into the funk than, say, putting on a sharkskin suit and punching people. (If it's not white boys you're after, be warned: This history is looking whitewashed. Either Defunkt or James "Blood" Ulmer coulda smoked everybody here with their black/white cookies, but neither are being name-dropped. No, not at all.)



By the '90s, all this folderol was forgotten. Dance music could no longer contain both a song and a beat, rock bands were redirected instantly to Wetlands if they essayed a dance number, and non-narrative lyrics became the status quo for indie bands. You can turn back the clock and live larger than that. They had a party, so why don't you go?