Sure, maybe we look back on those early travels and they take on a bit of a golden glow.
But that’s how it goes when yer dealing with memories, yeh? The gigs were a little more packed, the people a little more friendly.

And the girls? pffft–ya kiddin me? Beauties, all!

After that first trip to New York, we returned to Cerritos with wild tales of all night diners, illegal nightclubs, the bars that didn’t open until 3am! Helping to lock up the doors of A7 at 8 a.m. and stopping off for bagels before calling it a night.

But Winter break was over at Cal State Long Beach, we went back to the garage, and we had to readjust to the 1:30 last calls and restaurants that started stacking the chairs at 9 pm.

We knew different now, me and the fellas. Like soldiers returned to their small town after a violent battle in a foreign land, we were changed, if by just a degree.

And when we were kicked out of the Brique at 1 a.m. but still wide awake, we would look to the Eastern night sky and imagine our new pals just getting ready to hit the late clubs, even with the 3 hour time difference…..

We came back just months later on the 1983 Light Out tour. We found the city smoldering in August heat, and discovered the slower, crankier side of the town:

Seems like we found an excuse to get back East whenever they’d have us. Was it really only a year later when we saw the year turn to 1984, again in New York?

And then we did our thing, you know–the hair… the cowboy boots….ahem…and our touring days seemed to be at an end.

We all grew up, got real jobs and started families.
Through the 1990’s everyone got serious, and took the time to build the lives they were supposed to live.

We made it back out to New York those years, of course.
But when we made it back to Manhattan those days, it wasn’t with 3 other knuckleheads drinking our way across a continent on a red eye, hoping the guitars weren’t getting crushed in the baggage locker under our Doc Martens.

No, we went back as civilians, on vacation or maybe trade shows for that paper clip company.

We stayed midtown now, on a fuckin expense account to be scrutinized by some humorless recovering alcoholic who highlighted every minibar charge with an incriminating yellow stripe.

So now you got to see the parts of this city that other people came for. Times Square and the Oyster Bar, a quick dinner at Tavern on the Green before catching Miss Saigon. And sure, the views were nicer over Battery Park.

But as you stood there swathed in Terrycloth and clutching a Glenlivet in a tumbler of crystal, you looked down on those city lights and wondered where you left your heart.

The band got its groove back– it was right around 9/11.

We practiced that very night, or were supposed to. We instead went to the bar and sat drinking silently, as the hanging TV’s showed the horrific scenes that we’d already been bombarded with all that day.

We worried about our friends under those wrong clouds.

*****************************************************************
As we were finishing the comeback Channel 3 album, Kimm got a call about a gig….. at CBGB’s!!
We were going back to New York as a band again!

We got back there a couple times with the renewed band, and reconnected with our friends.

Finally, we got invited to come back for a special weekend of shows to honor CBGB’s.
Yeah-hey closed the joint down, and for Fuck Sake! we’re holding our breaths those sodden planks won’t be re assembled as a tourist attraction on Fremont Street Vegas!

We stood on that spongy stage one last time, breathed in that air, thick with the sweat and urine of a thousand gigs.

And we thought– proudly!—that we contributed to that biological funk, our first deposits so long ago in the winter of 1982:

Scenes from 1983:

Looking back on all this, we always felt more at home- as a band I mean- back there than we ever were here in L.A. I don’t know why……

On our last day on the East Coast, a Sunday, we woke up in Philadelphia. We played a matinée at the fledging BYO house there, and then came back to the city for an early show at CBGB’s with UK Subs.

By now CB’s felt as familiar and warm as Grandma’s kitchen…..

This was our last night in NY, that first trip out.

After the gig, an early Sunday night, the usual crowd gathered at Jack’s pad once more. We were up there in the apartment, the guys and girls we’d spent these weeks with, saying our goodbyes.

In the morning we were going back to LA and the gray normalcy of Life.

Kimm was down on Eldridge, behind the wheel. The guys from Adrenaline OD and a couple Beasties were showing him how to push cars into the trashcans with our rental wagon.

Me and Doug were huggin it up, sayin good byes, when Larry breached the stairwell, breathlessly, and gasped the magic words–it’s snowing!

And on that night, we all filed down to the street. Punk rockers, Poets, Drug Addicts, and Fiends, they all went down to the street to amuse us—– the weirdos from So Ca who thought snow in the city was such a magical thing.

And then?
We had a snowball fight.

The toughest bastards and lowest scum, we picked sides and threw snowballs.

And yeah, though it started as a way to whatever! satisfy these Goddamn assholes from Los Angeles and get them out of here—before long we were ducking behind parked cars and making strategies to take over the other teams’ stockpile–

And the soon the narrow street echoed with laughter—and if you didn’t know better, you’d think it was the heartfelt laughter of children.

4pm on Thursday, 6th day of 1983, and it’s time to wake up!

Though we’ve only been staying at Jack Rabid’s flat for a week, we are starting to get into the groove of this NYC schedule.
Get up around 5, sit around and bullshit for a while, go down to the bodega for tall cans of beer, and slowly get ready to start a night again.
Get out on the streets, find out what is happening and where, and maybe a couple slices at St Marks Pizza before hitting the clubs.
We come home with the morning sun, after a sumptuous breakfast of cheeseburgers and pirogies covered in caramelized onions.

The lifestyle is delicious and unconceivable to us. We’re used to liquor stores that close at 10pm and only our beloved Naugles as a place to get fed after midnight.

We are comfortable now with the cozy clutter of the apartment, and have even gotten pretty good at smashing the cockroaches that flutter beneath the flyers and posters. Just more glue after all!

Jack, responsible soul that he is, actually has a normal job somewhere out there in the city. We see him when he comes home, bruised and battered by another day out in the harsh proletarian arena.
He comes into the apartment and looks around at the snoring and farting degenerates, yet another traveling band camped out in his warm home.
Yet he does not even allow himself a sigh, he is so used to the sight by now.

We chat a bit with Jack as he warms up some soup in a battered pot— unfathomable as it seems to us, when you have the world’s greatest pizza right outside that door.
But Jack is ready for a night of listening to records, thinking about them, and tapping out his manifesto on a typewriter.

We, on the other hand, have spent our days nights with the madman roommate, Doug Holland.

I guess I could thank, or blame, Doug for introducing us to the warped nightlife of the city, early eighties style. We might’ve discovered it on our own, eventually, but Doug gave us a crash course on how to behave like lunatics in a city that catered to lunatics.

See, besides being the guitar player for NY hardcore icons Kraut, Dougie also held down a job bartending at the famed A7 club down on –duh! A and 7th!

The club became a home away from home. We wouldn’t show up until 2am and would still find ourselves the earlybirds, fuckin toursists!!

The colorful crowd became friends, and when we would find ourselves with an off night (always dangerous and expensive for a touring band) we would simply make up a flyer in Magic Marker announcing a gig that night at A7, run off 50 copies, and hand them out to the late drinking crowd on St Marks Place. Why the hell didn’t we have anything like this back home??!! we kept asking each other.

Scenes from A7 1982:

There was lots of hanging out at CB’s, of course, and nightly trips to Bleecker Bob’s to trade albums for T shirts and other albums—- we’d wrap up the night at the Park Tavern, and listen to Ike rail against the strange Jamaicans that ruled his bar with subtle nods and trips to the bathroom.
And, hell— we weren’t above a voyeuristic journey through the different levels of Danceteria either!

But maybe our favorite thing were those few hours before going out, twilight hours in the cold darkness, when Jack’s apartment bacame a cozy Salon for the Punk Rock Illuminati of the day.

We would sit among the stacks of beer cans and LPs, listen to Jack and Doug argue, and marvel at the parade of characters that dropped by the pad.
Harley Flanagan, Bobby Steele. The guys from Adrenalin OD with Davey Gunner and Johnny Feedback. Jimmy Gestapo.
Bad Brains and Beastie Boys, they were friendly and interesting to a man.

Drinks were drunk, stories were told, and then Jack would excuse himself and head back to the typewriter.
It’s what–oh, midnight, around there…time to start thinking of a little dinner?

Doug laced up his combat boots and splashed that city water on his face, then would make sure we were all bundled up against the cold.

And we would head out, into that city and its unknown wonders one more time.

*originally posted 3/03/10

6 fucking 45 a.m on a New Years Eve morning. This is the not the time to be lurching about LaGuardia, searching for a bathroom, bowels bubbling, cheeks clenched tight.

We may be seasoned and jaded world travelers now, sure—- but a naive 20 year old kid on his first transcontinental flight does not yet know the combined effects pressurized cabin atmosphere, bloody mary mix beers and unlimited cocktail peanuts have on the lower intestine……

Oh, it was a jolly overnight flight alright-it always starts out that way, eh? There we sat, the four of us, just kids. Last row of an American Airlines jet, smoking, drinking and laughing through the night, even as the rumpled businessmen shot us angry peepers before adjusting their tubular headphones and harrumphing back to sleep.

We were finally on our way to New York City, Goddamnit! Gee, we were having a grand ol time…..Hey you–Monty Hall–what the fuck you lookin at, huh?

See, these were the days when you could still light up in the smoking section of a plane, and hell—-you could go back to the tiny standup bar next to the head, order a whiskey sour and actually stand there and drink it.

Try that next time yer up in the air and you’ll find your face smashed into the soiled carpet, a humorless Air Marshal administering a federally approved headlock. Trust us on this one kids.

Well, they call it a red eye for a reason. As we stumbled through the mysterious terminal, searching for the baggage claim and any porcelain receptacle, we first caught glimpses of the bleak grey winter day that dawned over the East.
And suddenly the bravado that saw us through the night, the casual goodbyes we shrugged to our Moms’—these things vanished as we stepped out of the terminal and breathed in the first icy diesel fumes and absorbed the bleats of a thousand taxi horns.
Welcome to our house, bitches!

Robbie Posh Boy Fields had a NY/UK tour all set up for us, Winter 1982, a trip with Blitz through a lot of English towns we’d never heard of. The No Future release of Got a Gun was quite the sensation over there, it seems, and some people actually wanted to check us out!

But at the last moment, Blitz broke up for the first time of many.
And though we were all packed and passported, set for this strange trip over the sea, I think we were all secretly relieved we didn’t have to go.
Robbie let us keep the New York portion of our tickets (one way!), and a few more East Coast gigs were thrown together.
Off we went.

Young Jack DeBaun had stayed on with the band since the Summer tour when Burton dropped out. Larry was still along for the ride, though this would sadly be his last tour with us.
And Me and Kimm? Hell, we were on semester break with nothing to do but play music and spend our Christmas money on cheap booze, pastrami and pizza!

Curbside now, sleep deprived and shivering against the bitter Atlantic chill, we flagged the Avis shuttle and loaded our gear onboard. We’d brought only guitars and luggage, but for some reason Jack brought out all his drums in 2 cardboard refrigerator boxes.

Avis Terminal, January 31, 1982, 07:55am: Institutional linoleum, harsh fluorescent lighting, wilted Christmas tree leaning on an ashtray.
A grim Jamaican gent with thick glasses took our paperwork and gave us the keys to a ’81 LTD Wagon.

Driving through Queens with the official Automobile Club Trip Tik spread over the dash, we negotiated the odd expressways and kamikaze taxi drivers until we finally made our way to the Lower East Side.
Kimm had made contact with Jack Rabid before the trip, and though you probably know him as the publishing magnate he is today, back then we just knew him as a good guy who graciously let a million bands stay at his flat.
You’d see Jack hovering around outside the club, a stack of BigTakeovers– mimeographed and stapled back then–cradled to his chest. He could talk to any musician about any band, and usually knew about your own band then you did!

And though Jack was still out in LA visiting his girlfriend, he assured us his roommate Doug Holland would be there to greet us and show us around til he came home a couple days later.
We made it to the corner of Eldridge and Houston, parked the wagon, and Kimm made a call from the bodega on the corner.

Larry, Jack and I stood on the corner and shrugged at each other. An ambulance sped past, a dreadlocked ursine bum groaned in the alley. We turned toward the sound and saw he had a brilliant metal flake gold goatee from huffing paint all night.

I’m sure Kimm went over the details of this trip before, but we probably weren’t really listening. And now, as we stood in the grey morning light and took in the city looming above us, we weren’t quite sure just what we were doing there. Kimm pulled another scrap of paper out of his magic daybook and dialed another number into the payphone. We shuffled our feet and tried to not look like tourists.

In a moment a window somewhere above us opened and a rolled up brown sock landed in the gutter in front of us. Kimm walked past us grinning as we squinted up at the building, trying to figure out who was throwing the laundry. Kimm picked up the sock, and pulled a single key out of it.
He opened the front door of the building.
We started climbing stairs.

We finally got to #14, knocked. The door opened and there was Doug, holding the door. We knew Doug was the guitar player from Kraut, but we’d never met before.
“Hey, alright. You guys made it.”
He smiled his smile, though I could tell we woke him up from a short night of sleep.
“You guys wanna smoke a bowl?”

We declined, and Doug let us into the apartment.
Now we’re all So Ca boys, born and bred, and used to the wastefully large suburban tract homes in the Brady Bunch ideal. This was my first time standing in an actual Manhattan apartment, and I kept looking for the rest of it.
We know now that Jack’s place was palatial for that nutty island, 2 bedrooms off of a kitchen with a small bit of day room to the side. A small useful bathroom opened right into the kitchen.

I was suddenly dizzy. The long night of drinking up in the sky, the surreal morning drive and now the radiator heat of the apartment pulled me down, like the warm gravitational comfort of a womb. I went to the sink and put a cupped hand under the faucet, drank deep of that city water, so cold you’d think your teeth would crack. Ah.

“So cool,” Doug said. “You guys are on the Irving Plaza show tonight huh?”
Oh right–we were actually here to play some shows! Seemed Doug was gonna DJ the night, and we sat and chatted for a while about the venue, the bands we knew in common and all the problems the promoters were having pulling things together in time.

Suddenly Doug looked around the apartment and cocked his head.
“So where’s all your guys’ stuff? Didn’t you bring out any gear?”
“Yeah we have some stuff,” Kimm casually said. “It’s all down in the car.”

Doug jumped out of his chair and ran to the window.
“You what? You fuckin crazy?”
“We locked it,” Kimm said. “Didn’t we lock it, Larry?”

Doug opened the window and looked down to the street.
“Hey! Mother Fucker!” He yelled.

We crowded around the window to get a look. Down there on Eldridge, just across from the apartment, the matted bum with the gold face stood next to the station wagon. In his hands, a heavy cracked corner of a cinderblock.
“Yo-Get the fuck out of there!” Doug yelled.
The man looked up to us and dropped his stone, gave a shy shrug and walked away.

Doug made us go down to the street and bring all the luggage, guitars, and drums back up the stairs, all the while shaking his head at us like we were the retard country cousins he never knew.

That wistful little head shake of his, it was a gesture I’d get to know well in the coming days.