noise the column – Brooklyn Bugle

How did this column get its name, and what does THAT have to do with the Invention of The Beastie Boys?

June 27, 2014

Now, there is a reason these piles of sad, frightened, adamant, arrogant, deeply opinionated and frequently dilettante-ish words are called NOISE, THE COLUMN.

When I was merely 19/20, a wee pup of staggering pretension, I hosted a somewhat notorious radio show called Noise, The Show. My kind peers at WNYU provided me with thirty minutes a week to play classic punk, hardcore, and noise music. I played lot of demos – local and otherwise – on that show, too, and was very engaged in the local New York City punk scene, and that’s kind of what today’s story is about.

People seemed to really like Noise, The Show, which was on the air for exactly a year – 52 episodes, to be exact. Maybe 53. Maybe 51. Does it matter? No, it doesn’t. It was quite popular during its brief but exceedingly loud and volatile run, and 33 years later – 33 YEARS the lifespan of JESUS, for the LOVE OF THE SIX-ARMED MAHAKALA, who wears a crown of five skulls and is the “fierce” side of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion (much in the same way that Roger Waters represents the angry, vengeful side of compassionate Dave Gilmour, the Bodhisattva of the gently persuasive arpeggiated guitar) – people still seem to recall Noise, The Show quite goddamn fondly. You can find scraps of it on YouTube, on sundry download sites, and there’s even a facebook group or two commemorating it. What can I say? People like punk rock, and it was a bit more of an exclusive club in 1981/82, and the tribes needed someone/something to gather around.

The following happened during the salad days of Noise, The Show. I was 19 ½. When you’re that young, half-years matter.

In the Autumn of 1981, Two high school students, both barely 17, had requested a meeting with me, and now these two wiry young men, both with hair shorn to the closeness of suede, sat on a low bed in my NYU dorm room (the legendary Weinstein dorm, a locale sure to crop up again in my tales), looking up at me with expectation of the wisdom of experience I would most surely dispense.

The difference between 19 and 17 is enormous (or 19 ½, as the case may be). Do you recall? And not just that, we’re talking almost 20 and barely 17.

They had found me through my radio show. As explained, I frequently went out of my way to play, book, promote, and assist local bands. It was not at all uncommon for young bands to seek me out for advice, or to needle me for a favor.

For a few weeks prior to this meeting, someone had been calling the studio during my show shrieking a request. That wasn’t unusual; I would normally get fifty or more phone requests per half-hour. What was unusual about this request is that none of us in the studio – not me, not my engineer, not anyone else hanging around the little WNYU radio studio on the 9^th Floor of an utterly pedestrian bird-shit colored building on LaGuardia Place — had heard of the band. But these calls kept coming, no matter how many times we countered that the band being requested apparently didn’t exist.

There was something else different about these calls, too. Whoever was yelping and screeching on the other end of the line was funny. Not hostile, or pleading, or supplicating, as song requesters usually were, but genuinely funny.

I was usually too busy spinning records to actually speak to the people who called in, but something about this felt different, so after my show one evening, I called one of the these persistent mystery callers back (I gathered there were two of them who had been making the calls).

When I reached them, I quickly got them to admit that there really was no such band as The Beastie Boys (for that was the name of the band the callers kept on adamantly requesting). The band was, shall we say, in development. But whoever these kids were, they had a relentless charm, some kind of underlying sweetness, and it made me want to meet them and offer whatever wisdom an almost 20-year old college DJ who was spectacularly full of himself could offer.

(Now seems a good time to mention that Mahakala is also usually portrayed holding a cup made out of a skull, out of which he is drinking blood drawn from the hearts of his vanquished foes. But this was far, far from my mind when my 19 ½ year-old self spoke on the phone to these so-called Beastie Boys, who were imploring me to give them some drops of advice.)

So I summoned Adam Yauch and Michael Diamond to my dorm room.

I explained that there was one absolutely sure-fire way for a band that was almost a real band but not quite a real band to actually become a real band: Book a gig. Even if you’re not ready, even if you don’t think there’s any way you can be ready, if you actually book a show, you get yourself ready. So I volunteered to book them a gig. If I did that, I rationalized firmly, they would actually have to get their act together. Because, surely, once you saw your name in a newspaper ad, with a date and place attached to it, you then had to show up and play, or we would all look like asses.

Michael and Adam nodded respectfully.

I picked up the phone. There was a strange little place on 6^th Avenue and 9^th Street called The Playroom. It wasn’t an A-list club, it was barely a B-list club, but they did punk rock shows, and I knew there was one coming up that I was promoting on the radio show. So I easily talked the club into allowing a new band called the Beastie Boys to play third on a bill, opening for the far-more battle-tested Reagan Youth and the legendary Bad Brains.

There were two halves to the Weinstein Center for Student Living, on University Place between Waverly and 8^th Street. My room was in the back half. My 6^th Floor window overlooked a courtyard, through which all manner of reasonably happy, reasonably horny, reasonably stoned, occasionally studious young scholars and lovers and drug addicts and music geeks passed, hurrying from class to room and room to cafeteria and cafeteria to date. It was a perfectly normal late afternoon in New York City. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the Los Angeles Dodgers were about to beat the Yankees in the World Series; MTV had been on the air for three months, and far away in Sweden, just two weeks earlier, the first public cellular phone network had gone into service. If anyone had told me that with this little meeting in my little dorm room, a tiny cog in the great timepiece of music history had just turned in a significant way, I would have said you were high, then I would have asked you where I could get whatever it was you had smoked/sniffed/swallowed.

Slightly to my surprise, the band got their shit together and showed up to play the show I booked for them at the Playroom. They climbed on stage, and Michael Diamond stepped to the microphone. “This is for Timmy Sommer,” Michael snapped, in that weird yapping voice he used on stage, “who doesn’t believe we exist.” These were the first words the Beastie Boys ever said on stage.

Did I mention that the President of Weinstein Dorm was a gawky lefty named Warren Wilhelm, who later changed his name to Bill DeBlasio? I think I was too distracted by all that Mahakala stuff to bother with that info. Oh well out of space.

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Meringue, Merengue, and Further Evidence that the New York Times is Edited by Chimps (and not the cute suit-wearing kind)

June 26, 2014

In yesterday’s New York Times, an article about the heated congressional race between Charles Rangel and Adriano D. Espaillat contained the following paragraph:

“Mr. Espaillat, deployed timeless political tactics in his second attempt, lining up endorsements from local leaders in the Bronx and East Harlem and relentlessly sending sound trucks to blare everything from meringue to a cover of ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ at voters, from morning to night.”

The above is an EXACT quote. I did not change any punctuation, spelling, or wording, or move anything around. Nor am I taking this paragraph out of context.

Where can I even BEGIN? Aside from the obvious error – “I Believe I Can Fly” is SOOOO last century – look – I mean JUST LOOK – at the comma placement in the above paragraph: Perhaps, MAYBE if that paragraph had been written by Yakov Smirnoff and the fast-moving developments impelled Smirnoff to dictate to his assistant Hodor who then read the copy over the phone to Mickey Rourke back in Times HQ, maybe, MAYBE such a bizarre placement of punctuation MIGHT be excusable.

In Soviet Russia, Commas place you!

(The reporter, by the way, is named Nikita Stewart, and Odin forgive me for ethnic stereotyping, but maybe I’m not so far off with the Yakov Smirnoff thing?)

Secondly – well, thirdly, since really, did I really need to have the earworm of “I Can Believe I Can Fly” sluiced into my brain? – well, at least I should be thankful it wasn’t “Carry On My Wayward Son” by Kansas – Merengue is a much-treasured and popular form of dance music, with long roots in the Dominican Republic. MERINGUE (which according to reporter Stewart and the Times was blaring from the sound trucks) is a light, sweet, fattening desert made from whipped eggs and cream, popular in France and Switzerland.

Confusing Merengue and Meringue is a RIDICULOUS error, especially in a New York-based paper covering a story that took place in Harlem, and my editors at the Great Neck South Southerner, who kindly tolerated my ramblings about Syd Barrett and Wire in the late-ish 1970s, would have handed me my precious, pretentious, precocious ass ON A PLATTER if I made a mistake as IDIOTIC as that.

(Goddammit, why did I have to mention “Carry On My Wayward Son”?)

But maybe…maybe there ARE trucks that “blare” meringue. Maybe, just maybe I’m being a little too hasty in my judgement.

Perhaps these trucks cruise down the cool, neat streets of Lausanne in the moments leading up to New Years, dousing Swiss revelers with rich, fluffy, sugary meringue.

These revelers, all with masterfully tuned Swiss watches precisely set to count down the minutes and seconds until the New Year, their usually cool Swiss inhibitions loosened by the sweet, fruity Kirsch that they imbibe during the holiday seasons, virtually BATHE in the meringue spurting out of the Famous Meringue Camions de Pompiers (the Fire-Trucks re-fitted during the New Years’ Holiday for the SOLE purpose of dousing the happy Swiss with Meringue). And perhaps this tradition of the New Years’ Meringue-dousing originated in 1848, to mark the adoption of the first constitution of the Swiss Federation.

“Regarde, maman, les camions de meringue sont ici!” shriek the children as they see the Meringue Trucks entering the famous Rue De Bourg. The little ones climb on their parents’ shoulders, hoping for a good soaking of the silky, sweet confection.

“Soyez prudent, Pierre!,” warns Mama, with a gentle smile of reproach.
“L’année dernière, vous aviez trop et vomi partout dans la grand-maman et l’ambassadeur d’Autriche!” (Be careful, Pierre! Last year you had too much meringue and threw up all over Grandma and the Austrian ambassador!)

So, maybe that WAS Meringue being blared from trucks at candidate Espaillat’s rallies.

OR MAYBE, heck I am gonna go out on a limb here and say it is LIKELY (will you, dear reader, allow me this episode of limb going-on-out-ness?) THAT THE NY TIMES IS NOW BEING EDITED BY CHIMPS NOT EVEN SMART ENOUGH TO PLAY TAMBORUINE WITH LANCELOT LINK.

(Oh, and many thanks to a TRULY PROFESSIONAL editor, Great Neck North’s very own Nancie S. Martin, for tipping me off to this Editorial Altamont.)

So, the next time you get all mad at the New York Times for running yet another article on a useless piece of shit talentless Deejay and making you somehow feel guilty that you don’t give one single sloppily-coiled ice-cream-powered pile of shit about said Deejay; or when 6 articles in a single month tell you that you now have to move back into the neighborhood the Times spent all of last year telling you to move out of; or when the transparency of the Times’ mission to shill for the Russian billionaires who Bloomuiliani made the non-tax paying masters of Manhattan just becomes, oh, so INCREDIBLY transparent; please try to have pity and remember this:

CHIMPS EDIT THE NEW YORK TIMES.

The New York Times is edited by chimps who not only spray commas around a paragraph with the subtlety of Foster Brooks reading excerpts from a Jenny McCarthy anti-vaccination rant, but CHIMPS who CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A HIGH-END DESSERT AND A FORM OF CARRIBEAN DANCE MUSIC.

Chimps, I tell you, Chimps. And not the good suit-wearing kind. Mean, poop-throwing, ill-mannered chimps.

Tim Sommer has achieved a degree of notoriety as a journalist, avant-garde musician, music producer, record company executive, club and radio DJ, and VJ on MTV and VH1.

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Noise, The Column: If Only I Was Thor!

June 25, 2014

Apparently, I have a very similar email address to a Norwegian named Thor Sommerseth.

Not infrequently, I receive emails intended for this Thor Sommerseth. This is true. These are written in Norwegian and include a lot of exciting looking words featuring o’s with slashes through them. I have translated a few of these emails, and they are disappointingly mundane; they often involve work in risk management, and one even detailed what mighty Thor was expected to bring to a Church brunch.

Nevertheless, sometimes I like to pretend that I AM THOR SOMMERSETH, I mean JEG ER THOR SOMMERSETH, and not mundane ol’ Timothy Sommer; and I imagine what it would be like to march around the apartment, loudly proclaiming “I AM THOR SOMMERSETH, my will shall be done, now bring me a Fresca or I shall DAMN you to the Gods of the Clan Æsir, though honestly a Diet Ginger Ale will probably do the trick, too, preferably Canada Dry. May the God Nídhögg rain FIRE on you if you bring me Schweppes! Actually, if it’s all you’ve got, Schweppes would be okay.”

In that spirit, I also like to imagine what kind of letters I would write if I was, indeed, Thor Sommerseth.

Dear Columbia Pictures Television:

My name is Thor Sommerseth. My father and his fathers before him were proud holders of the bloodline of the clan Sommerseth, and may I remain true to the spirit of my paternal ancestors until the day the God Ragnarok dies and brings this world to an end in shuddering cataclysm of fire and ice; my mother, of the clan Adelbaum from Bayside, New York, was named “Most likely to Get a Partial Tuition Flute Scholarship” in the 1959 Miss Beth-El Synagogue Competition.

Over the last few years, I, Thor Sommerseth, have made quite a name for myself in the Norwegian television industry. But you probably already know that.

I, Thor Sommerseth, initially rose to prominence as associate producer of Trondheim’s second most popular morning show, titled En Annen Morgen av Svarthet is Og ld Med Sporadiske Muppets (Translation: Another Morning of Blackness, Ice and Fire with Occasional Muppets). More recently, one of the shows I, Thor Sommerseth, developed, Black Metal Idol, made headlines when the winning act was found to be responsible for the burning of 8 churches in the Sørlandet district.

After receiving the blessings of the God Loki of the Jötnar Clan, and under considerable pressure from my mother’s side of the family, the Adelbaums, I, Thor Sommerseth, have decided to attempt to sell some properties to the American television industry. I have geared these specifically to the American marketplace.

Three of these shows are what you Americans call “sit-coms” (here in Norway we call these types of shows “Dagligdagse Distraksjoner fra Dorbannelsen av Endeløs Natt Enøydes, Raven-Flankert Gud Odin har Kastet Over Oss” – that translates as “Mundane Distractions from the Endless Night that the One-Eyed Raven-Flanked God Odin Has Cast Upon Us”); one of these “pitches” is a “reality” show, and the final idea, which is my favorite, is a courtroom show.

Here are the sitcoms:

SHE’S THE MONKEY SHERIFF

WHO’S DAT MONKEY

MAMA’S MONKEY

Each of these are fairly self-explanatory.

The reality show, which is also fairly well explained by the title, is called:

WHO WANTS TO MARRY A MONKEY

Finally, I, Thor Sommerseth, have saved the best for last:

JUDGE C*NT

This is a show in which everyday cases are brought before a judge, who happens to be a total c*nt (this sounds like a winner to me, Thor Sommerseth!).

You may be surprised that I, Thor Sommerseth, am not suggesting any shows of the “saga” nature, involving great mythical kingdoms and the actions of fantastic beasts and giants; I, Thor Sommerseth, understand these are quite popular in the United States. I have dabbled in this genre before, but I find it brings me bad luck: in 2006 I produced a series called Gilligan’s Island of Ice and Lava, which was cancelled before it was even aired due to the presumption that it would offend Njörðr, one of the Gods who protects the sea; and I personally believe that a mini-series I co-wrote in 2009, My Mother The Car Who Is Inhabited by The Soul of Hrímthursar the Frost Giant, angered the Gods, since the Adelbaum’s had a significant alignment problem with their Hyundai very shortly after the series was aired.

Thank you for your time. I, Thor Sommerseth, look forward to working with you, and bringing the power of the creative spirit that originated in the bowels of the primordial realm of Niflheim to the American syndicated television market.

Kind regards, I am Thor Sommerseth

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Noise, The Column: The Long Echo of Steve Rossi and Stuart Sutcliffe

June 24, 2014

The incredible Josh Alan Friedman, one of the greatest annotators of the spirit of New York City, once wrote that yesterday’s cheers have a very short ccho. But the length of an echo does not necessarily explain the power and cultural resonance of a voice.

In this spirit, I want to mark the passing of a star of the last century, Mr. Steve Rossi. Steve Rossi was probably best known as the smooth crooner who teamed up with light-socket-haired funnyman Marty Allen. Allen & Rossi were one of the last of the great handsome man-and-a-monkey/shyster-and-the-shyster’d couplings that defined comedy for nearly a century (and descended in a straight line from the “Dutch” comics of Bowery Dime Museums of the late 19th Century and Vaudeville, reminding us that much American comedy is based on the immigrant’s experience of confusion and assimilation). Allen & Rossi were so loved that they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show 44 times (imagine being big enough to host SNL 44 times!), and were so well respected that they were personally chosen by Sullivan to appear on the same shows that the Beatles appeared on (in fact, Allen & Rossi appeared on three of the four Beatles/Sullivan shows). Steve Rossi was a much-loved figure amongst classic Vegas entertainers, and he worked regularly until the end of his life.

There was a time when fame was less a construct of social media and bad behavior, and more the result of artists who worked their asses off, made people laugh and cry, and left them wanting more of both; in many ways, that time is lost forever (though, of course, many artists still work hard for their success, and achieve fame via creating distinct, original, and creative work). We should always honor those men, like Steve Rossi, who stepped into the spotlight night after night after night in nightclubs glamorous and grim, and knew that their survival depended on treating every audience like a fresh ingénue to be wooed, seduced, and conquered. These entertainers, these people like Steve Rossi, are one of the treasured legacies of our culture, and I hope that there will be many, many beautiful journeys ahead for Mr. Rossi, who passed this weekend at age 82.

Today we also remember another star, one who did not live past 21.

Despite the fact that Stuart Sutcliffe achieved virtually no fame during his too-brief life, he is known throughout the world today, and his spirit and style helped shape one of the most ubiquitous creative forces of the last one hundred years.

Stuart Sutcliffe, who would have been 74 on Monday, June 23, was the original bassist for the Beatles; far more significantly, his deep artistic heart and his extraordinary sense of style (specifically his James Dean-meets-Dean Moriarty-meets-Left Bank cool) profoundly defined who the Beatles were and what they were to become; in fact, I don’t think it’s going too far to say that Sutcliffe’s powerful desire to inject the Beatles’ relatively pedestrian (circa 1960) music with the artistic heart of the American beats and abstract impressionists is what created what we came to know as “the Beatles,” and caused them to achieve a creative style and a cultural ambition that set them far, far apart from their Mersey and Hamburg contemporaries who played very similar American-based rock and pop. Sutcliffe, who was John Lennon’s best friend, was also essential in inspiring Lennon to bring a healthy dose of artistry and lunacy into the nascent rock band, and I personally believe Sutcliffe’s spirit was a formative part of Lennon’s personality until the day Lennon died.

In 1960 on the Beatles first trip to Hamburg, Sutcliffe met Astrid Kirchherr, and the two fell in love; Kirchherr (and her ex-boyfriend, Klaus Voormann) set about re-making the Beatles in their own image, turning them into remarkable existentialist hipsters, and most notably (in terms of the band’s long-term imaging) intimidating John, Paul, George, and Stuart into giving up their greaser-style DA’s and replacing them with fashionably sloppy French bowl cuts. Sutcliffe ended up leaving the Beatles to stay in Hamburg with Kirchherr – where he died of a stroke, violently young, in 1962 — but the effect that Sutcliffe, Kirchherr, and Voormann had on the Beatles is literally incalculable; they are minor players in very, very key roles on one of the great stages of history.

The Buddha said that all phenomenon is the result of causes and conditions; which is to say that in the great and massively diverse planetarium we call Entertainment, or Amusement, or the Silly, Serious, Tragic, and Trivial things that Distract us, nothing arises out of the blue. Nothing. A fundamental element of the Beatles’ character lies in the outsider interests of Stuart Sutcliffe, who we honor in this column; and the beautiful, twisting, corny, ever-shifting beast that is American comedy, descended from the trials and errors of the immigrant experience as interpreted by Weber & Fields, Abbott and Costello, the Marx Brothers, Olsen & Johnson, Martin & Lewis, and Allen & Rossi, also lay deep in the heart of Steve Rossi, who we also honor today, and bid farewell to. Your cheers echo loudly in my heart, Mr. Rossi.

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Noise, The Column: Dear NYTimes.com Are You Freaking Kidding Me?

June 23, 2014

On Saturday, I clicked on nytimes.com hoping for two simple things: an insightful piece marking the 50th anniversary of the murder of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, and an efficient rundown of the World Cup group standings and a preview of the day’s matches.

I found neither.

Instead, in SATURDAY’S nytimes.com, I found a preview of FRIDAY’S Italy vs. Costa Rica World Cup match. To repeat: a preview of FRIDAY’s match in SATURDAY’S paper. For the love of god, have they COMPLETELY stopped caring over there?!? Is Corky from Life Goes On editing the weekend sports’ section?

As for my modest hopes that the Great Paper might have a piece marking the anniversary of one of the most symbolic events in the Civil Rights movement (the Sheriff-authorized torture and slaughter of three college students who were helping African Americans in Mississippi achieve their constitutionally protected right to vote), instead I found a front page piece on something REALLY important: this REALLY COOL 30-something couple got a WHALE of a deal on an apartment on the Lower East Side! You JUST HAVE TO BE WILLING to look below Delancey!!! Since I read ntytimes.com and I am a MODERN New Yorker, isn’t THAT what matters to me?

I mean, is there ANYTHING more TIMELY than ANOTHER story about how WONDERFUL it is to be a kind-of young couple with OODLES of extra income getting an INCREDIBLE DEAL on an apartment in Co-op Village below Grand Street on the Lower East Side, and how LUCKY you are that there now diners near you that don’t JUST serve kosher food, and oh my oh my how SCRUMPTIOUS it was of that WONDERFUL Robert Moses to tear down those icky tenements and build these terrific BIG BRICK TOWERS where you can practically STEAL a two bedroom! Oh, all that AND a preview in SATURDAY’S paper of a major sporting event that took place on FRIDAY! Now, THAT’S JUST GIVING UP. And seriously, NYTIMES, on the 50th anniversary of one of the FUNDAMENTAL socio-political moments of the 1960s, MAYBE, just MAYBE you could have put something about THAT on your front page, instead of Amy Chozick’s offensive piece about finding a great deal on 1,200 square feet in Seward Park Cooperative.

I am sure Amy Chozick is a perfectly nice person who likes the Dum Dum Girls and gets sad when Sara McLachlan coos over pictures of abused puppies, but if I see one more piece by someone reminding us how cool and cutting edge the east fucking village was ten or fifteen years ago, I will remind them that some of us remember the East Village when it resembled Haiti after one of Papa Doc’s particularly gruesome bunga-bunga parties (yeah, I know I am mixing up some regimes there, but you get the idea); and listen, nyfuckingtimes, don’t even THINK of having someone tell me how “real” the East Village used to be UNLESS they are old enough to remember this handy acronym, dispensed as truly life-saving advice when I was a sprout during the Reagan administration: Avenue A means you’re Adventurous! B, Bold! C, Crazy! D, Dead! FDR: Found Dead in River.

Chozick’s piece reminded me of something Prince Charles, no bunga-bunga party thrower he, once said about the horrific modern architecture encroaching on London: Ol’ Charles – well, he wasn’t so old then – said that modern architects were going to finish the job the Luftwaffe started, and ruin the great old city. And you know what? The Chozick’s of the world, hot on the heels of endless years of Bloombuialani making the City safe for Russian Billionaires and Disney, are going to finish the work of Robert Moses, that hater of everything ethnic, rough, indigenous, and neighborhood-y in New York City. I know it’s really took late to save Manhattan, but I would rather the New York Times not rub it in my face every day.

Oh, and back to the World Cup: At the very effing least, I expect to open the goddamn paper of record (I said, THE PAPER OF RECORD) and see reasonable timely previews – NOT FUCKING PREVIEWS OF FRIDAY’S MATCHES IN SATURDAY’S PAPER (someone should really be fired for that), and I would have liked to see the group standings. But publishing the standings of this ENORMOUS world-wide sporting event was just too much for the widdle bitty Times to handle; apparently, the Times sports writers exhausted all their brain power writing those sixteen fucking pieces on California Chrome and needed to lie down with a Pamprin and an Enya CD, and therefore they can no longer be reasonably expected to meet even the MOST MEAGRE requirements for timely or accurate coverage of THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR SPORT.

And as for not mentioning the 50th Anniversary of the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner…that is a desperate, shivering shame.

Timothy Sommer has achieved some degree of notoriety working as a musician, record producer, MTV/VH1 VJ, journalist, club and radio DJ, and music industry executive.

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