By the end of 1980 I was splitting my nights between driving at Dover Cab and running sound at A7. I also rehearsed there and played on the small stage with Desi Desi and Desi on too many nights to count. I began my nights at 11 PM and headed home well after dawn. I remember one Desi set that started at 6:45 AM—we still had an audience. A7 could easily have five or six bands on weekend nights. When I had money I'd stop on the way home for peirogis at Leshko's; it was catty-corner to the club across Avenue A and 7th Street.

The only way I know this poster is from one of the early A7 shows is 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 Gibson, owner of the club. I still have in my files 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, for instance, and 8BC just on the other side of Tompkins Square.

The club was finally shut down in 1984 or so. Dave began to play with cocaine and got involved with some skivy types who weren't involved with the music. The group was always closeted in a very small room off the main stage I'd used to mix and record; suddenly I was evicted. I ran sound there for about a year during '80 to '81. I was paid $75 a week, free rehearsal space, and all the booze I could drink. The Desis rehearsed there several afternoons a week.

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.

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.

Fran walked away with a Nagra 4.2 as part of our dissolution agreement with We're Just Like You. The precision Swiss deck, built like a rock, was designed to record sound in sync with a motion picture camera. It was the industry standard from the '50s through the 1990s, recording location sound for thousands of single-camera setups. WJLY never made a sync-sound film; we had all the gear for it and none of the money. I underused the deck dramatically as a tape delay while recording music on my Tascam 3340. Fran and I, broke as usual, finally sold it to a mysterious buyer for a single gold Krugerrand.

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 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.

The World Trade Center from the same 10th Street rooftop seen in the previous pictures. Doug moved in around the time I moved out; I lived in 4B, he lived in 3B. He's a fine painter; later we taught in the same art department at Bronx Community College.

The Puerto Rican families that were a big part of the community were starting to move out, just as the Ukranians and Jews had moved out in the 50s and the Germans and Italians after WWI. The hipsters enjoyed the cheap rent and the pierogis as 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.