I was depressed, the band was falling apart, I’d lost my day job, and the landlord at the loft wanted us out. One night in bed listening to the radio I realized I had to get out of Ohio. I’d been to LA and San Francisco three years before and it was going to be somewhere west or somewhere east, or so I told people. I think now that it was always going to be New York. There was some area in my brain devoted to this image I’d built of the city. Mostly it was a collage of frames from movies: King Kong, An Affair to Remember, Midnight Cowboy, the Warhol movies, Taxi Driver, Naked City, Miracle on 34th Street. All the music I’d heard made the soundtrack: The Ramones, Patti Smith, James Chance and the Contortions, Charlie Parker, The Five-Spot, Sinatra at the Paramount, the Shangri-las, Ronnie Spector. I’d been listening to NYC music for years; now I was going to hear it first-hand.

I took a train to Penn Station; Byron met me with a joint and we smoked it in the cab. I stayed with him for ten days, touristing in the daytime and partying at night. On my first night he took me to the Mudd Club to see The Feelies.

Another trip back home for a triple anniversary celebration. My brother Pat is here outfitted in a prime mid-70s ensemble, probably imported by J.C.Penny. I'm not sure how I was able to afford the flights to Columbus so often. Airfare became remarkably cheap in '81 with People Express out of Newark, but that short-lived revolution had not yet occurred. That really changed things; I once paid nineteen dollars for a one-way to Columbus. The terminal was always a madhouse; I waited in lines that made me miss flights.

Lari-Ann was a party-throwing bohemian from Sayler Park who'd become a friend; I'd wanted to do a portrait ever since she'd gotten pregnant. I first heard the B52s at an Elvis birthday party at her place while Byron and I danced on the roof of the garage. Ed Davis did a song called Lari-Ann which actually had nothing to do with her or anyone else. Her name just scanned well.

No one ever knew it, but inebriated impotence was the actual subject: Oh Lari-Ann / don’t think I can. There is no way audience members at the time could have understood anything I was singing. The PA systems were usually pretty crappy and I wasn’t a powerful singer. They understood the lines I repeated in chorus after chorus, things like last year at Surf City… or you / are an asshole…

The man in the picture is Lari-Ann's boyfriend Scott; I hired him as a bouncer and doorman for the last loft party/Ed Davis gig. I put him into a couple pics because I didn't want him to think I was hitting on his girlfriend. I'm not sure they're still together after all this time (forty-five years till date, as Indian English speakers sometimes say). Someone told me that Lari-Ann had gone off to California or some other state that wasn't Ohio; I did the same thing.

My last portrait of Sandy—a Polaroid—one of the last photos I took at the loft. Within a year or two she'd moved to Texas to help found the Jump-Start Performance Company and later, to marry. She'd been a muse to me for eight years.

In the background of the second and third photo in the Jeff Series at the bottom of this article is a decaying print in a decaying frame. Two lovers at midnight, perhaps, though it looks more like noon. I'm reminded of the pickup line the Melvyn Douglas character keeps dropping on Soviet apparatchik Greta Garbo in Ninotchka: It's midnight. Look at the clock, one hand has met the other hand, they kiss... In the superb Wilder-Brackett-Reisch script, the proletariat finally yields.

I could watch Garbo in anything; I could watch her eating a bowl of cereal. I think of the final frames of Queen Christina: she's left her throne behind, her lover (real-life beaux John Gilbert) has just died in her arms, and she's standing at the windy prow of the ship taking her far from home. The camera executes a tracking shot right into a closeup of that face, then holds it longer than you expect. Think of nothing, director Rouben Mamoulian told her.

Ninotchka is the first Garbo movie I ever saw and I wish I could say all her others were just as good. Under the direction of Lubitsch (to the left) she is at her very best. Ernst Lubitsch didn't make bad movies: the empathy he had for every character and his throughly European world-view briefly made Hollywood a place for grownups. Worse than his death, said Billy Wilder at the funeral, "No more Lubitsch movies."

Was I thinking of Douglas and Garbo when I got the print? I probably bought it at some Columbus garage sale or pulled it out of a garage myself. I had it on my wall for around fifty years; there was some fascination in watching it fall apart. I wanted to do a solo show of my photos where every selection would be hung in a similarly decayed frame. I even left a cache of wooden frames outside in the elements with that in mind. I never had that show, but I still think it was a good idea.

The fellow in photo one and three below is the same Jeff from New York who had been a friend and mentor since my first year at college. This is probably the last time I saw him, days before I moved out of the loft. He went on to Texas and another wife and an early death when his heart stopped. Photos two and three are in that corner of the loft that had been my room. The only thing left of my furnishings is the print hanging in that decayed frame.

It was the last days of We're Just Like You. We'd run out of gas and people were walking away. Fran and I were the last two remaining in the loft. The Ed Davis Band, originally an offspring of WJLY assembled for the large-scale performance piece Third Variation on the Alternate Pieta, had done well on its own and that might have been part of the trouble. A lackluster piece we staged for the Nine in the Ninth series at the Contemprary Art Center—Dinner Without Will at Dot and Bill's Video Grill— and the usual boring substance abuse issues had left us with diminished expectations.

I left for New York at the end of June. A month or so before that we threw a final loft party that also became the last Ed Davis Band gig. Fran was on piano, Bob on lead guitar—Byron had left for NYC several months earlier—Curt on drums and vocals, and I played bass and sang. Binder shot an excellent Portapack video of the show and an excerpt is shown above. The remainder of the performance is now in the Media Burn Archive in Chicago and I hope to see it digitized while I am still functioning.

The party was wild. I hired Scott (Lari-Ann’s boyfriend) to work the door and gave him a guest list of about a hundred. Everyone else paid two dollars, which made me enough money (about six-hundred bucks) to pay for the beer, the sound system, and the other band, which was The Customs. They were in their original lineup; I think they had just recorded their first 45—Long Gone—for Shake It Records, our producer Jess Hirbe’s label. They were a fabulous band; Peter Greenberg was one of the best guitarists in the city and Tom Heil was a superb front man.

There must have been about four hundred people there. I spent the evening trying to stop any trouble. At one point I climbed up to the roof (a fourteen-foot ladder straight up, then a hatch) and found a group of young people wandering around intoxicated from Quaaludes. The only barrier to sudden death from the top of this six-floor building was a one-foot-high wall along the precipice. I got them all down that ladder somehow.

Quaaludes were a popular drug in Ohio during the seventies; they were manufactured in a plant outside of Columbus and I often saw them distributed from gallon-sized plastic bags. We also called them sopors (derived by some underground marketing genius from the word soporifics) and 714s, the number printed on the large white tablets. The effect was like a five-martini drunk that hit you (after a half-hour waiting period) almost instantly. I remember one night in the University of Cincinnati cafeteria when I bought a bagel; between the time I lifted it off the table and the time it reached my mouth the full impact of the drug kicked in. I was immediately intoxicated and made it back to the dorm bouncing off the walls on both sides of the hallways. (Fun fact: There is a Quaalude reference in the tune Lari-Ann also played that evening: I do a 714 / and I fall down.)

I heard later that during our set another group of party attendees became trapped when the elevator descended to the basement, would not go back up, and would not open. This had happened to us once or twice but during business hours when others in the building heard the alarm. Supposedly they crawled out the through the trapdoor at the top of the car. By then I was past caring; I’d moved on to my own world of alcohol and cocaine. I saved the coke till after we were done playing; I knew from experience that it made us play too fast (even for the punk tunes).

The small stage was set up near the back of the loft in front of a row of windows facing the alley at the back of the building. If I looked to my left from the stage I could see my bedroom in the corner, separated from the rest of the loft by a very large paper umbrella leaning on its side. At one point during one of the more frenetic numbers—I think it was the B-side of the single, a song called Asshole—I could see an intoxicated and angry young Cincinnatian pick up a large metal trash can and start throwing it around my room. I tried to signal to someone offstage but I was right in the middle of the tune. He finally stopped; I hope he wandered off into the night and got hit by a car.

All in all it was a successful evening. As the old East Village proverb goes, it’s not a good party till somebody pees in the sink.

After seven years in conservative Cincinnati I needed to be somewhere else. The prospect of staying at Byron's apartment on Third Avenue and 12th made my decision, and on June 27 I moved to 139 East 12th Street, New York, New York. I had my amp, my guitar, and two-hundred and fifty dollars, a parting gift from my dad. It seems insane to me now that I was ready to do this without any income guarantees or preparation; I guess that's why you do this crazy shit when you're young. Byron put me up for a couple months and I looked for work.

Byron’s apartment was on the second floor of this small building on the corner of Third Avenue and 12th Street. I think all four windows on the avenue side were Byron’s. It was a small place for two people: a studio. The entrance was on the 12th Street side. Sometimes we'd sit up on the roof drinking beer and watching the prostitutes work the other side of the avenue; three years earlier 13th had figured prominently in Taxi Driver. I was there about three months.

I slept on the sleeping bag I bought for my trip to the West Coast in ’76. I see my Strat leaning against a small amp Byron had for playing around the apartment. We smoked a great deal of pot, and I can also see that we were still drinking Jack Daniels out of the bottle. Our tastes got a little less exclusive in the poverty years that were just beginning for both of us. A couple years later I would just ask for whatever whisky was cheapest; once I scored a bottle of Old Museum, named after the bourbon museum in Bardstown, Kentucky. It was pretty raw and the bottle had a layer of dust on it.

Why did we drink so much? Why did we feel so driven to be somewhere else? Maybe it’s different for each of us; maybe it’s the same. Looking back now it seems hard to understand. I used to call it a homicidal drunk; I wanted to drink till something was dead. Now I don’t care so much, I still get the depressions but not nearly so frequently. Taking a walk every day certainly helps. A psychologist friend takes walks with his patients during their first few meetings. Maybe I just got old, when all feelings—except certain regrets—have diminished.

I can see by the headline that the plane crash that killed Thurman Munson of the New York Yankees had happened just a few days before. He was an incredibly popular player, captain of the team—an honor conferred by the players and not the management. For many NYC baseball fans it was an almost traumatic event.

To start the confusion, this ticket seems to be marked 8 / 20. After doing an image search on Google for Mateus at the Palladium stubs from 1979, I can confidently say that this is not a date. For instance, a Dire Straits ticket from September 11 is marked 08 / 08 in the same place on the stub. Other stubs show that the numbers in this location bear no relationship to otherwise clearly marked dates. In addition, 8/20 in August of ’79 is not a Friday (see below).

Traveling a little further to the right, we find the string 8 : 0 0 P FRI SEP with the last word torn in half. We are probably talking about a Friday night show in September. As further confirmation, we find the string 9 2 1 just to the left of the Mateus at the top of the ticket. In analyzing other stubs, I find this is a date marker most of the time. I did find one stub—a Rockpile show on August 20, 1979—where the string is 1 1 0 9. I found several other stubs where the numbers corresponded to the dates. My conclusion: this is probably from a Clash show that happened September 21, 1979.

Why does any of this matter? It doesn’t matter, not in the larger sense. It's just point in time; around the planet many things happened. It was the same day, for instance, that José Eduardo dos Santos became President of Angola, a position he enjoyed for the next thirty-eight years. I didn't know or care but it had great significance to the people in Angola. He caused the usual amount of suffering and death, probably even more than his share. But ultimately dos Santos doesn’t matter, either.

The universe begins when each of us becomes aware of the universe, and it ends the day that awareness ends. That is all we know from our senses. These senses are the models the brain builds as it governs our reactions to the flow of molecules and particle/waves around us, models that evolved to ensure we stay alive a few minutes longer. We don't know why we want to stay alive; we just do. Why do we care about anything else? Yet we do care, we care desperately, about all kinds of trivial shit like the date of this ticket.

Trivial, yes, but an excellent Clash concert. And if we take a look at the cover art of London Calling (an album the band had just finished recording) we see an iconic photo: Paul Simonon disassembling his bass in a fit of sublime punkness. The date: September 21, 1979.

P.S.: That date—of course—is a matter of some conjecture. The photo is often claimed to be from the Palladium show the night before. I refer you to this excellent piece of research from Black Market Clash for why I think it happened when I say it did.

I was there and saw it happen, you know. Trust me, right? Well, not if you've read Elizabeth Loftus. Never bet your life on an eye-witness.

It's easy for me to remember the time I spent at the Kenmore Hotel, one of the lowest points this sheltered midwestern boy ever had. Room 523 was about the size of a cell and everything I had was jammed into the space. The walls had been painted a dark lacquered green at some point in the distant past. An industrial flourescent lit the bed, the small sink, the mirror above it; I sat on the bed and watched roaches crawl in and out of the drain.

The bathroom for our floor had a permanent inch of water on the floor; the showers were in there, too. I never walked out feeling clean. Guys in adjacent rooms—and they were exclusively men—were the same New Yorkers seen talking to themselves on sidewalks throughout the city. One next-door neighbor had a small television that was on 24/7 while he screamed I'll kill you! I'll kill you! all day and all night long. For a reason that remained obscure even after thirteen years of talk therapy, the squalor of Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy had always attracted me. Now here I was, right in the middle of it.

I had nothing to do but look for work, and that wasn't going well. My phone had been cut off because a couple of long-distance calls to Ohio had been charged to my room. You paid your phone tab at the end of the week and I'd either forgotten the fact or never knew it in the first place. I needed the phone to find a job; I remember explaining this to the man behind the cage at the front desk and encountering for the first time the indifference of a New York veteran who had seen everything many times over. (The offending eighteen dollar charge can be seen on the receipt below-right; click on it to enlarge and get a really good look.)

The enforced idleness and isolation did spark the creative juices, however, and I wrote an instrumental called Surfin’ Shadow that became a staple of the Desi Desi and Desi set list. I also wrote a short story inspired by a brief trip to the health club in the hotel’s basement. You can read it here.

In an article published in 1994 when the entire building–the entire building!—was seized by US marshalls in a drug raid, the New York Times called the Kenmore The Place at the End of the Line. Truer words were never spoken.