The squat was on the third floor of 114 St Mark’s Place, a hundred-year-old derelict tenement house. The apartment, for want of a better word, had no functional front door, that luxury of middle-class life having been smashed as a prelude to burglary. Pity, or admire, the optimism of such a burglar. Brother, more power to your jemmy.
Someone, maybe several people, had lived there before. There was evidence of heroin use all around. Nor had occupancy been confined to members of the human species. A carnival of Manhattan’s smaller creatures had taken up tenancy.
Egress and entrance were effected by means of a curtain fashioned from a draped and smoke-stained American flag, each of whose discoloured stars had a cigarette burn in its centre, a feat that must have taken some ravaged junkie a whole night on the acid to accomplish. That gallant Stars and Stripes had been hideously befouled in other ways, too. I didn’t like picturing its sufferings.
A New York realtor would have called the house ‘airy’ since a good many of its floorboards and windowpanes were missing, as was the entire staircase leading to the property’s upper rooms. Weirdly, the bones of its banisters lay raggedly piled in a corner, a funeral pyre waiting to happen. Lower down, some of the ceilings had sagged or entirely caved in, following the rough removal of the tin ceiling-pieces old Manhattan dwellings used to have. Some doorways were bricked up, shards of shattered pipe-work strewn about. City Council notices advised in several languages, and with pictograms of skulls, that trespass upon this property was dangerous. Unless mad, blind, and lacking all sense of smell, you had likely come to that assessment by yourself. But still, every little experience can teach us something useful. I learned the Spanish word ¡PELIGROSO! from those posters.
If you could imagine Ozzy Osbourne’s mind turned into an apartment – and I counsel you never to attempt any such thing unless accompanied by an understanding nurse – you wouldn’t be far from the Pit. Even Seán’s habitual cheeriness was slightly dented by first sight of what would become our Manhattan base. But Fran, to his credit, made the best and bucked us up. It was better than nothing, he said. And by a whisker, it was.
On the landing reeked a bathroom, more accurately, a fungus room. Description I will spare you, if only because describing it would result in such a plethora of censoring asterisks that this page would look like a map of the Milky Way. You had the impression that the urban hawks that often settled on its windowsill were afraid to peck their way through the glass.
Seán is now a citizen of the United States. Fran does much of his work there. It could create problems for these gentlemen were it to be admitted in a book that they ever breached the terms of a tourist visa by working illegally in America. For that reason I make no such admission. At the same time, shall we say, it was known among undocumented immigrants one might meet in Irish bars about the city that there were ways of getting one’s hands on a few bucks without a green card: hotels that might require a washing machine to be fixed, restaurants with a lot of vegetables to get peeled before lunchtime. Seán, Fran and I did no such work.
Our headquarters had a roof and four bare walls, and we avoided the holes in the floor by placing stolen traffic cones around them, but the place could seem dark by four in the afternoon and that would lower the spirits. Clearly, we did not illegally tamper with the disconnected electricity supply in order to provide ourselves with basic light, still less did we manage to get the stopcock going. The main difficulty was the cold, which was unrelenting and vicious. At one time the house had boasted a furnace-fired central heating system, but even if Seán and I had broken into the basement to look at the boiler – which obviously we didn’t – we’d have seen that it was long rusted and quite beyond repair and that squirrels were now living in its innards. But frostbite is the mother of invention. We improvised.
Not far from us, on that stretch of the Bowery that intersects with Delancey, was a line of bargain warehouses that sold enormous fridge-freezers and other equipment from failed restaurants. One of us, I think Fran, discovered the happy fact that the cardboard boxes enwrapping the plywood crates in which these mausoleums of refrigeration were shipped could be used as sleeping partitions. On a chilly night the bubble-wrap might be employed as a blanket, if you didn’t mind an orchestra of poppings. A sack of Styrofoam marbles made a passable pillow. You could call it a policy of recycling, indeed we did call it that, which demonstrates, among other things, that we were creative.
We were fond of lighting candles so as to give the place a bit of homeliness. Doubtless, the situation was a fire hazard as well as a moral one. You crawled into your cardboard casket, accompanied or solo – sometimes, in Fran’s case, severally accompanied – and a certain degree of privacy might then be experienced. The situation, as may be understood, was far from ideal. My own tendencies when it came to the erotic were fairly vanilla. But the full 57 flavours were available in the Pit. Fran’s particular thing at the time was the wholesome, down-home type, the person whose previous experience might have been confined to a Saturday night make-out in the back seat of Mom’s Volkswagen somewhere in rural Ohio. His persuasiveness in the Pit became honed. Seán, less ambitious, was nevertheless a popular and handsome boy and his search for love was conducted extensively. Then there were the hangers-on and fellow travellers of which the Pit always had such a profusion. It could be a startling experience to totter home in the early hours of, say, Sunday morning, a bit the worse for refreshment, or disappointedly sober, and see six of these love-coffins twitching and bumping, alive with the ebullient cries and fervent machinations of newfound downtown friendship. Alone, you’d be irked by it, or saddened, or made jealous, as you tried to locate the miserable quadrant of rotting floorboard where you’d lie, resenting your comrades to the dawn. If accompanied by the darling of that night’s ambitions, you had no small challenge on your hands. Attraction would need to be unusually intense to survive the suggestion, no matter how subtle, that it be given expression in such surroundings. The phrase ‘share my bed’ may be tenderly uttered. The phrase ‘share my box’ not so much. The young of the East Village were experimental of spirit in those days, but the invitation to come back to what was in effect a filthy indoor shantytown was a somewhat risky overture. A bit of adventurous slumming is one thing. The Pit was another. There might be a lobotomised street-person in a corner torturing an electric guitar, a couple chewing at one another’s privates in the gruesome quarter we called ‘the kitchen’, a sophomore from the Tisch School of the Arts fighting the mouse-infested sofa or spliffing up to celebrate recent induction into the Fran Club.
And yet, the place was rarely empty of swains and maidens, particularly at night, when the punk rock raged, and the nothing about which there is much ado was vigorously and unselectively practised. It was as though the apartment had been featured, with a starred review, in some frightening underground publication about Gotham-based vice dens where few questions were asked and none answered. You walked into this armpit of sordor and you could almost smell the smouldering hormones, along with what I suppose must have been Teen Spirit. Recreational sex, in my birthland, was constitutionally prohibited, except for politicians, certain lady novelists and bishops. But the keys of the Manhattan candy store seemed to have been handed over and we made whatever use we could contrive of them. A gift horse is not to be looked at in the mouth, or, as Fran put it, anywhere else. Usually, we ourselves were the horses. Thinking back, it was the era when AIDS began decimating New York. You’d think we’d have known. We surely must. Seán tells me we all discussed it, were aware of safe practices. I’m sure he’s correct but in truth I don’t recall. What I remember is an increasingly chemical separation from realities, and not minding much about that.
You will feel I was unhappy. I should have been. But I wasn’t. It was a strange and murky and abandoned time, one of those eras around which a carapace appears to be forming even while you’re going about the business of living it. Perhaps every life contains one or two of those, or it would, were
it not for the gas bill. We weren’t so much going off the rails as ignoring them completely, or hacking at them with the crowbars of our recently realised pointlessness. Back in London, we’d had what a kind person might call the beginnings of a career. We stamped on it, hard, and twisted our boots, worsening the calamity of Top of the Pops by putting out an EP of songs we knew not to be ready. As for why, I can’t tell you. A psychiatrist would have theories. Perhaps we were afraid of what would happen if success came in the door. Or else we just drank too much. There are teenagers who spend a gap year backpacking around Australia or learning Chinese or doing good works. I wish I had been one of those, but apparently I wasn’t. I spent it getting out of my head in the East Village of New York. That winter is indeed a gap.
As a parent, I’d love to tell you that I wept with inner emptiness, that I longed for something meaningful to fill my God-shaped hole. But that wasn’t the way I felt at the time, and there may be little point in dwelling on why. Phil Spector said he approached every song as a challenge to say something memorable in three minutes. The longer it was, the worse it would sound on the radio. But there are seasons of every life that can’t be expressed in three minutes. I got through mine alive, for which I’m grateful to happenstance. A lot of kids don’t. I’ve known some.
Abutting the ground floor of our tenement was an oldsters’ dirty bar, in which the patrons watched sports and semi-legally bet on them: baseball, football, the ponies. Occasionally a drunken cheer would erupt from below, making you feel strangely happy on a wintry and self-anaesthetised evening with New York howling in through your windows. There was a Polish church on the next block with gorgeously sad bells, deep toned and sonorous, as though Chopin had forged them. For me, that sound will always be the music of Christmas 1984. Cubans and Puerto Ricans drank on Avenue C, a part of the Lower East Side sometimes known as ‘Loisaida’. Not far from us was the synagogue, with a mournfully beautiful music of its own that would drift into the Friday evenings, entreating and praising. To this day, I carry a map of those streets in my soul, a cartography of New York song.
In love with a dung heap, you wouldn’t notice a broken straw. At the same time, things had to change. Doing absolutely nothing is tiring and depressing, almost as much as hard work. Trez would never join us in the dark ways of indolence. Indeed her absence from the Pit became a sort of rebuke, and slowly we copped ourselves on. She had her old cello, Seán acquired a snare drum, and there was usually a guitar lying about among the squalor. Sometimes, around noon, we’d busk in Washington Square Park, a surprisingly pleasant experience. Often the same people came by, students, hangers-out, lunch-breakers who worked in the neighbourhood, and they were generous when we passed the hat. We did rockabilly stuff, with an occasional ballad. I’d been teaching Trez guitar, just the three-chord trick, but you don’t need much more for early Elvis or Eddie Cochran. On a good day, if you got a pitch beneath the monument arch, the takings would buy a couple of pizzas and a bottle of Rough Rider gin. Fran and Seán liked flirting with the crowd. There were days when we drew a couple of hundred punters. They started asking if we’d be here tomorrow, they wanted to bring friends. Would we gig at a party? Could we play at Hunter College? Music is the most merciful blessing in the world. It was turning us back into a band.
After a while, we noticed a particular man would often come by, a tall and rather nondescript-looking midfifty-ish gent with some quality that made you look at him anyway. He dressed like JFK on a Hamptons weekend and consequently seemed out of place among our crowd. Sometimes he’d come alone, occasionally with a dark-eyed, beautiful woman we later learned was his second wife. Once, he stopped by with the poet Allen Ginsberg, a figure you often saw downtown. Ginsberg nodded along as we cracked out an old Bessie Smith tune, ‘Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl’. Then he gave us beefy hugs and introduced his companion. He was Eric Wallace from an outfit called Urban Wreckage Records, a small label he’d set up primarily to record American poetry, though he’d diversified into blues, experimental rap and loft jazz. One bitterly cold January afternoon Eric invited us to the Waverly diner on Sixth. That was a coffee that changed our lives.
Eric was fantastically serious, like a prophet in a movie. I don’t think I ever saw him smile. He led us into the Waverly, requested ‘the usual’ from a waiter, who shook his hand and addressed him in Spanish. We took a booth near the window and he started to talk. He liked what we were doing. What was our plan? That didn’t take long. We didn’t have one.
He explained that his label was small and wasn’t seeking new signings, and, in any case, wouldn’t be the right home for our sound. But he wanted to give us a piece of advice. What we needed was to tour. Get out of the park, start building a base and earn what he called ‘the chops’. If we wished – no strings attached – he’d make a few calls on our behalf. Down the years he’d sent his acts on a beginners’ circuit to develop them, bars and clubs in the south, college venues in the Midwest. There would be no upfront money. This was made clear. We’d get 60 per cent of whatever door-takings accrued on the night; the remainder would go to the venue. ‘For good luck’ he would front us a grand in cash for expenses and he’d hire us good second-hand instruments. ‘I’m fond of the Irish. Pay me back when you’re stars.’ Consider it? We did. For all of ten seconds. ‘Okay,’ Eric said. ‘Let’s eat.’
We started out across the river in the dives of Jersey City, where they stood about the sticky dance floor in threes and fours, an archipelago of slightly drunken and strangely resentful islands hoping for reunification. We did our best but it was rarely good enough to make even the most twitching of slovens dance. One kinder soul, occasionally, might manage a little gibber before being stilled by the glares of his fellows. Playing music to a sparse audience who don’t really want to hear you is like trying to kindle a fire in the rain: if you’re lucky, a twig catches here, a coal smoulders there, and soon the assembled logs join in with the blaze, having no other option but embarrassment. But we ignited few fires on those chilly nights in Jersey. Often, we put them out.
Occasionally, as in the varsity town of Princeton, there was a local promoter who claimed intimacy with the scene, but his idea of advertising a concert by a totally unknown group was to hand out twenty fly-bills to winos in the park or students who dressed as though Banana Republic ran the world. A poster in the window of a bar in Point Pleasant Beach once read ‘The Ships – From England – Pool table!’ On another haunting occasion, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a coachload of old people turned up from a suburban retirement home, convinced that the name of the band would mean a pleasant evening of shanties about whaling. Believe me, had we known any, we’d have done our utmost to please. But their nurse took one look at topless Fran in his chains and satanic tattoos before leading her confused charges busward. We weren’t ‘the right fit’, she nervously confirmed. Scranton had a Cultural Studies Group, and that night we played to seven of its faultlessly welcoming members. The best I can say of the evening was that a dog on the street outside the town hall seemed to like us, to judge from his appreciative howlings.
The following Friday night found us on a Greyhound bus to Virginia, where the bar gig did not go well. America’s a trip in any sort of city. But out in the tall grass, things can be different. I’m fond of the new American South – which music-lover isn’t? – but an apparition like Fran was a pretty big ask. Tolerance for a person of his particular look was not what it might be in, say, a nightclub in Phuket.
The response of any sane person would be to rein in the fun-furs and butch it up a little for the indigenous peoples, at least until you’re north of the Mason–Dixon Line when you can return to expressing the fabulousness of your existence through the medium of tart-red lippy. Fran would have none of it. He became petulant, then reckless, avid with the rock-ribbed, fire-eyed arrogance that many insecure people get good at fronting up. Give him a top, he’d go over it. Soon as we rolled into Anytown, Georgia, he’d start referring to it as ‘a godforsaken
outpost of Darwin’s waiting room’. Then he’d make for its thrift store, returning, an hour later, with armfuls of controversial garb. A buccaneer’s hat. Diamanté drop-earrings. On one occasion the laced skirts and petticoats of a local flamenco artiste who died when struck by lightning. All he needed was the pineapple balanced on his head and he would have been Carmen Miranda. Reason with him? No. You were wasting your time. As well attempt to make a football out of raindrops.
It wasn’t at all that the tour lacked successes. In the college town of Oxford, Mississippi, a gracious and most hospitable place, we got the barroom jumping. And in gorgeous bluesy Jackson, 170 miles down the highway, encores aplenty were bestowed. Our problem was consistency. We couldn’t string it together. When a gig went well, we partied too hard, which meant that the following day, with its four-hour bus ride, would be encountered through the agony that even Dante never dared to conjure, the pain of a Jim Beam hangover. If Seán had lingered late with a belle of the South, he didn’t like leaving at all. Fran, on the other hand, always wanted to go. Mornings found him sulky, endlessly complaining. The room was too hot. You couldn’t get ‘proper tea’. The lady in the drugstore had regarded him strangely when he asked if he could try that eye shadow before purchasing.
Requested by a pleasant reporter from a local paper in Alabama to suggest two useful tips for the visitor to that state, Fran expressed himself with uncharacteristic economy.
(a) Think of something you like doing.
(b) Don’t do it.
This particular sort of attention-seeking isn’t without risk. The few punters such publicity attracts to your gig tend to be carrying marlinspikes and hammers. As is often the case, in any walk of life, a person’s most admirable quality is also his flaw. It would always be a difficulty, Fran’s refusal to compromise. Argument merely encouraged him.
The Thrill of It All Page 18