London Calling

Back in 1981 or so, a good friend of mine and I were making a series of very odd, very inspired sounds in his roach-infested apartment over on West 10th street. As it turned out, Kinky Friedman lived in the apartment upstairs, so that as a result John Cale heard us playing and came down and hung out with us for a while, perhaps seeing in us something similar to himself, pre-Velvets (he made a series of noise recordings in the early/mid 60s that are interesting and now available). This eventually turned into an invite for us to play with him on one of his gigs at the club Stillwende, down in Tribecca. This was how we became Doppler Effect, a footnote-to-a-footnote in the history of post-punk NYC.

Interestingly, it seems someone bothered taping a gig Doppler Effect played with John Cale at Stillwende, a one-time notorious punk club down in Tribeca. Doppler Effect was the band I was in during the early 80s and that technically had it’s first official gig with Cale, as you can hear here.

Meanwhile, as for the rest of the post-punk and no-wave scene, there’s a new book of photos that has come out and that’s certainly worth a look. This is the world of New York in which we grew up and the outside of which we scarely thought of or even imagined actually existed.

Between this and the other book of graffitti photos, for some reason I’m being led down some kind of memory lane these days. Here’s a couple of pix from those days, including Glenn Branca (whom Cale praised back in the day and who I finally saw perform live last year at the Roundhouse over in Camden):