A taxi industry historian could tell from these forms that I was still an employee of Dover Garage, a salary-man paid on a 43% commision plus tips. The garage paid for the fuel. I did this for about a year before I switched (or was switched) to the status of lease driver. This was an early example of the gig economy omnipresent in the 21st century. Instead of splitting with the garage whatever monies I took in on a ten to twelve hour shift, I would now pay upfront for the cab—the lease—and keep one-hundred percent minus about twenty bucks for the gas. Before leasing, a bad night meant the garage and I both suffered; after leasing the garage never had a bad night. They also never had to worry about me taking riders off the meter, a common practice at the time. It would take about half the shift to earn back the lease, and everything after that was gravy. There wasn't much gravy after midnight, though, particularly on weeknights. After I began leasing it was possible that I'd come home with less in my pocket than I had at the start of my shift.

Dover was used as the exterior of the Sunshine Cab Company in occasional shots on a network TV show called Taxi. The show ran from 1979 to 1984 during the exact time I was driving. People would ask, hey, is it like the TV show? And I'd answer, no, it's more like the movie. That is the best joke I ever made in my life.

I haven't written much about cab driving here because I hated it. I was terrified for every fucking second I worked. I'm still dreaming about it and it's almost fifty years later. The only thing I ever read about the job that told the truth was this article in New York Magazine. Especially the stuff author Mark Jacobson calls the Big Fear. Read it and weep for those who became so thoroughly lost they never found a way out.

An extremely rare photo of Dave Gibson, creator of the A7 Club, sitting at the club's bar around 1981. The three guys facing us were in a band that was the reason the photo was taken; I don't know their names and wish I did. Nor do I know the photographer.

I also don't know the woman to whom Dave is talking; many in the East Village had a similar pallor. Just at the corner of the bar sits Stephan Ielpi, lead singer of the False Prophets. They always packed the place and later recorded on Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles label. I remember watching the first space shuttle launch with Stephan in my apartment one morning after a late night at the club.

A7 was one of the places hardcore began. If you follow this genre you've probably heard its name. Desi Desi and Desi played there many times in 1981—almost every weekend, especially when I ran sound that year from March to September. I had dinner (a slice at Sal's Pizza next door) and then showed up around eleven. I was paid seventy-five dollars a week plus free rehearsal space in the afternoons and all the booze I could drink. I also used the small soundbooth to record bands on my Teac four-track: Kraut, Konk, Dog Eat Dog, the Crazy Hearts, many others. No, I don't have any tapes.

Running sound at A7 meant maxxing-out our crappy PA mixer and then running out to protect the equipment. Anytime a hardcore act began playing there was an immediate mosh pit in front of the stage, a stage only a foot off the floor in a space the size of a living room.

I know the poster below is from one of the early A7 shows because we still put the LESRMAS acronym prominently in the design. This stood for Lower East Side Rock Music Appreciation Society, a mythical organization created by Dave and his wife Janet Fox. In my files I still have an actual multi-page Xerox of the rules and rates of the organization, which in addition to putting on shows also intended to provide practice space, recording facilities, equipment rental, and many other services that were never offered. I think it was a half-assed scam to conceal the fact that Dave had neither a cabaret license nor a liquor license. Thus the three-dollar donation at the door.

Later Dave realized the only thing he had to do to keep the place open was to pay off the police. They would occasionally raid the place for appearances sake, confiscate any money on the premises, and take away all the booze behind the bar. Other than that he was free to stay open every night of the week from around eleven PM till seven in the morning (often later). It was a classic East Village after-hours club setup. There were several others in the immediate neighborhood: 171A was just down the street, 8BC was just on the other side of Tompkins Square, then further to the east and closer to Houston was Save The Robots. And there was the massive former ballroom that was The World, where I saw Spoonie G. performing his hit The Godfather.

Before it became a legit club at the end of the decade, Brownies tried the same thing on A between and 10 and 11. I remember sitting there with my future wife Carolyn—also in an A7 band, this one called Killer Instinct—one night after she got off work at Downtown Beirut. It was probably about five or six in the morning. I asked her about a guy sitting a couple tables away playing finger cymbals. "A coke dealer," she said. I knew him from somewhere else, though—my job at JHS 60. "That's our guidance counselor."

The entrance was the door with steps on the left; that's where the doorman collected money and/or threw people down the steps. The corner entrance was never used until A7 closed and King Tut's Wa-Wa Hut took over the space. As of this writing it's a bar called Niagara; in nice twist, it's owned by Jesse Malin from A7 regulars Heart Attack. The band sold Carolyn a 45 one long-ago night at the club, God Is Dead. She sold it last year on Discogs for $1,200, beer stains and all.

A7 was finally shut down in 1984 or so. Dave began to play with cocaine and got involved with guys who looked like the 42nd Street extras in Taxi Driver. They were not there for the music. The group was always closeted in my very small soundbooth off the main stage where I mixed the live sound and recorded; suddenly I was evicted.

Most nights in 1981 I was either driving at Dover Garage or running sound at A7. I was also rehearsing there and playing on the small stage with Desi Desi and Desi on too many nights to count. A7 nights began at eleven and ended when anyone still stumbling around had stopped buying drinks. I remember one Desi set that started at 6:45 AM—and we still had an audience. A7 could easily have five or six bands on weekend nights. When I had money I'd stop at Leshko's for pierogis before I went home; it was catty-corner to the club across Avenue A and 7th Street.

I recently came across this quote from a guy named Howard A. Rodman, probably in a Facebook post. I never met him or saw his bands but we were certainly contemporaries.

“As many of you know, in the tenderness of my youth I was a post-punk guitarist with the bands MADE IN USA, Arsenal, and Soul Sharks. We were broke, we were miserable, we took famously bad care of ourselves. Were I given the chance to live that part of my life over I would not change a thing.”

Eric Darton of Salon Bonton shot an entire Desi, Desi, and Desi set with my WJLY Portapack gear. The tune is called BMT Class War and it's sort of a no-wave number with noise guitar and Harold Hill patter. We included it in virtually every set that year. In that distant New York past people still knew what BMT meant; signs for it and the IND and the IRT were still all over the subway system. Other arcane references in the lyrics mention the QB and double L lines. The video displays typical Portapack tape disintegration.

Obviously we were not a hardcore act, and A7 at this time was not a hardcore club. All sorts of bands played there and the faster and louder they were the more it went over with the crowd. A year or so later A7 had become the center of the East Village hardcore scene. Henri—a junkie-thin Belgian who looked like part of the Exile on Main Street entourage—had yielded to Victor at the door. Victor looked hardcore.

That crowd was not interested in Desi, Desi, and Desi. We fell into cracks between several different kinds of music and never wore the rapidly solidifying hardcore uniform. I often had hippie hair and wore suits and long dangling earrings; the uniform was a buzz cut, a tee-shirt, jeans, and Doc Martens. Steve Wishnia of the False Prophets (club favorites) called us "oddball pop" and we did play pop tunes, but at least half our set was deep grooves with the noise and the rhythmic vocal stuff.

In our eclectic mix we certainly had tunes that sounded like hardcore: our live versions of I Still Hate the Nuns and Elusive Butterfly were just as fast and abrasive as any hardcore number. Owner Dave would wander into the room when we were onstage and tell us play that song about the nuns. The skinheads would crowd into the room for the next couple of minutes and then we'd do a Tammy Wynette cover and lose them all.

It wasn't the right club for us anymore. We had played there so many times that we'd improved as a live act and it wasn't too hard to find gigs at other places.

I'd been obsessed for a couple years with Joe Meek’s Telstar. Meek was a gifted producer making UK hits during the same years that Phil Spector was making hits in the US. The single hit the airwaves in 1963 and was the first British single to crack the American top ten. Meek used an instrumental group he had under contract called The Tornados for the production and filled it with outer-space noises and the unique sound of his homemade compression and reverb devices. I'm not sure what fascinated me so much with this 45 but I played it over and over. It was a vision of purity in the East Village squalor. I wrote faux-naive lyrics for it and sang it with Fran at every Desi gig.

Most of the time we played as a trio but every once in a while Byron would rejoin us for a few months. During one of these periods we had the idea of recording a single and I desperately wanted it to be "Telstar." Byron was advancing us the cash for the studio time and contributed a song (whose name I cannot recall) for the other side of the record.

We began the recording at Moogy Klingmann's studio in Midtown. We were excited; we'd heard it was the former Bell Studios, and that Lovin' Spoonful had recorded there. Maybe it was even true. Klingmann himself was well-known as a songwriter, music director, and keyboard artist. He wrote "(You Gotta Have) Friends" for Bette Midler. Moogy set us up with a rookie engineer, a young woman, and then disappeared.

After an hour or so we'd made zero progress on getting the session started; the engineer had serious problems getting the drums miked. When Moogy wandered back in he went crazy, screaming abuse at this poor girl. Our drummer Mike stood up from his kit and told him to stop; within a few minutes we were on the street. Moogy threw us out.

Soon we found another studio called J&J on 30th Street and went back in to try again. We recorded on a 16-track deck with a great engineer named Claude Achille; the atmosphere was much different, much less tense, and we made rapid progress with the two numbers.

The Telstar track starts with crickets and peepers and some satellite sounds from the Sputnik launch I found on a Nonesuch LP. Then Byron enters with his Dan Armstrong Plexi through a vintage Fender tweed—he'd used the same gear on the Ed Davis recordings. I answer with the second part of the melody on my '63 Strat with plenty of reverb through a Vox Royal Guardsman. Fran and I put our vocals down through a Neumann U-87 and our voices never sounded better.

We made two very rough mixes of Telstar, and for some reason I took home a dub of the version we didn't like. We intended to return for a mixing session but Byron ran out of cash and we never came back; we left J&J with that temp mix on a reel of 1/4” tape and that’s all that’s left of the entire effort. The studio is long gone and the original tape—probably 1/2”—we must presume lost. There was never a Desi single and no Desi vinyl to this day.

This was the view from the roof of my 10th Street six-story looking east. We were about five blocks from the East River, a short walk past Tompkins Square Park and Avenues A through D. Sometimes people called the area around these streets Alphabet City; sometimes they called it Loisada. Most thought it dangerous, a place where you might get mugged or murdered. You could get a fix but you couldn't get a cab. It was one of the centers of heroin distribution in the city, with the local epicenter at C and 3rd Street.

This is what the World Trade Center looked like on September 11 from the same 10th Street rooftop seen in the previous pictures. Doug Blanchard, who took the photo, moved in around the time I moved out. I lived in 4B, he lived in 3B. I could see into his kitchen from the holes around the sink in my rotting floor. Doug is a fine painter; later we taught in the same art department at Bronx Community College.

By 1981 the Puerto Rican families that were a big part of the community were starting to move out (if they could afford it), just like the Ukranians and Jews had moved out at the end of the 50s and the Germans and Italians had moved out after WWI. Successive waves of strivers enjoyed the cheap rent and the pierogis; the beats were replaced by the hippies and the hippies by the punks and the punks by the sons and daughters of wealth. One thing significantly different about the East Village these days: there are almost no music venues. All the clubs from that era are gone.

Avenue A is a Desi song about what was happening to our neighborhood.

Avenue A
lyrics

Great-aunt, great friend. When I was ten she took me downtown on the bus to see Charade at the RKO Palace. We liked it so much we sat through it a second time; no one had ever done that with me before. Later on my twelfth birthday she took me to Lazarus, a huge downtown department store that had a grand and very pink restaurant inside called the Chintz Room. We had lunch there every time we went to Lazarus. After lunch we found the record department and she told me to pick out any LP I wanted.

Lazarus had been an anchor for the Columbus downtown for over a hundred years and was so deco it was like walking onto a Van Nest Polglase soundstage at RKO. You expected to see Astaire and Rogers coming up the escalator. There was a high-tech barrier of forced air at the main entrance that made for a doorless transition into this fabulous space; I'd walk in and out just to experience it again.

By the way, the birthday LP (the first record I ever owned) was Henry Mancini's Greatest Hits. Ellen had a weak heart from a childhood bout with rheumatic fever; she died suddenly December 1, 1981.