I remember designing this flyer; I pulled the clip art from that week's TV Guide. The san-serif DESI was starting to become a brand.

8BC was an interesting joint, carved out of an abandoned tenement basement. I don't know who was paid off but there's no way the place could have had a valid Certificate of Occupancy. What remained of the first floor became the stage; somewhere in the remaining debris up there lived a white rabbit with a liquor habit. It would appear when you started to play, knock the beer bottle off your amp, and then lap it up from the floor. The audience was East Village creatives: louche, generally broke, and far hipper than Desi Desi Desi. As was often the case there was a mismatch between band and venue.

One of the two owners sat me down for a discussion when I tried to get a second gig at the club. I remember it as a detailed explanation of why I didn't fit in there. I was humiliated; it confirmed the worst fears I had about my own place in 80s NYC. I've wondered since if the guy enjoyed delivering the verdict. The worst thing about it was that he was right.

He gave us the second gig—see the poster further down this page—and I was so nervous I played especially hard and promptly broke a couple of strings. Of course I never had a backup instrument; I never even owned a second guitar. It was a problem at the time to just buy strings. Mike and Fran struggled to lay down a beat while I squatted behind my amp putting the replacements on. For the remainder of the set I was soaked in flop sweat. We never got another gig at 8BC, though I did play the space again with Salon Bonton.

We didn't take the gig at The Dive very seriously; it wasn't even in the East Village. What a snob I was! In those days I wouldn't even go to Brooklyn. A bit later in the decade the club developed a scene based on the 60s garage band sound, along with its psychedelic wing. Back in Ohio I'd been a veteran of both.

In the grocery today I heard The Yardbirds playing "For Your Love" and remembered it as one of the first songs my 1969 cover group—The Hague—ever attempted. Now it's a grocery-store soundtrack for old people.

Cassettes were ubiquitous in '84. I put one together to get more jobs and to memorialize our standard set. Telstar (vocal) was the first song, producer/composer Joe Meek's remarkable 1963 Tornados instrumental that I'd set to lyrics. The recording itself was one of the best we ever made, sixteen tracks in a good studio. There are things about it that I love—our voices through a Neumann U-87, the dueling guitars at the start, Byron's solo—but I never really felt we got it right. More about the recording here.

Destroyer Girlfriend was a tune that really showed what we did live. When we weren't playing pop songs this is how the band actually sounded. Raunchy poetry rhythmically chanted, PIL-inspired bass line, occasionally atonal guitar riffing, and a solid beat usually made it a compelling part of the set. When people were moving to it we might go on for ten minutes or more. We did other songs in the same vein; only Poto and Cabengo made it onto the tape. Also missing is "Kill the Dogs (Like China Did)," the groove number that ended our shows.

"Avenue A" has a nice melody and shows off Fran's girl-group chops. It's also emotional and the exact opposite of what folks living around Tompkins Square preferred for their listening pleasure. The words are about the gentrification of the neighborhood and the inability of its residents to cope with those changes. You'd think there'd be identification from at least a few listeners, but my suburban naiveté crumbled in front of real East Village audiences. I can't believe we played it in punk clubs. There's a page with lyrics and the "archaeology version" here. Listen to me stumble through the guitar solo, always a tense moment at gigs.

Denoting something as an archaeology mix means I went back to the 4-track tape and created new elements to disguise the deficiencies of the original recording. In this case the thing that bothered me most was the percussion track from a crude electronic beatmaker. I borrowed the thing from roommate David Solmonoff and used it for several recordings during the early 80s. I also did what I could to make each channel and the overall mix sound as legible as possible with the sound-shaping plugins of Digital Performer and ProTools.

Yes, You Only Live Twice is a cover of the Nancy Sinatra theme from the James Bond movie. I was trying to make a huge production soaked in reverb following my mix guru from the 60s, Phil Spector. This particular version is derived from a 45 I'd been obsessed with since 1967; it's the flip side of the Nancy/Lee Hazelwood hit, Jackson. It's not the John Barry-produced cut used behind the Bond title sequence; a session guitarist from The Wrecking Crew named Billy Strange arranged this version and it's much more guitar-heavy. I wanted to create my own perfect version of this—something that matched my memories of listening to it in the dark—on the Tascam 3340 using my Nagra as a tape delay.

It's recorded in my living room on 10th Street. I sang at a low volume, almost whispering into the mic; it was late at night and the world was asleep. Days later Fran recorded an indifferent harmony track; sometimes she couldn't be bothered and I could only get one take from her. I couldn't understand her attitude; I thought we were doing something important. I wish I could adequately describe the ineffable feeling I was after: I wanted the vocals and guitars to be lost in the sound of infinity itself.

I added the piano part and the drums years later in another archaeology remix. It can be heard on the Desi page in the Tunes section of this website. The song was a Desi standard for a couple of years and was another selection that puzzled our audience. It was mostly in my range except for one low note I had to fake after blowing my voice out on the faster numbers.

I'll talk about the tunes on the B-side of the cassette when I get back to working on this page again.

The left side of the note was an edited version of an article about the band published in The East Village Eye; I'm not sure when it appeared. Eric Darton of Salon Bonton, a performance art band that Desi members sometimes joined for gigs, wrote the piece and did the art design for the cassette. The right side contains some curiously incomplete liner notes on the recordings.

Meeting the touring President is an ancient ritual for local politicians. As a Republican office-holder running in the same year as the President dad was not going to miss the photo-op. In my self-assigned role as prodigal son I'd made sure that the family knew how I felt about Reagan, so it's a good example of my father's sense of humor that he sent me this pic. I responded predictably.

The Desis danced on Times Square sidewalks when the assassination headline appeared on the news ticker. Hell, I wrote a song called “Try Again Hinckley.” A likable actor—I think he's great in Kings Row—he was a hateful President. He embodied the worst excesses of the Southern California GOP, and the middle class in this country will never recover what he stole from us with his tax cuts. When The Ramones put out Bonzo Goes to Bitburg in 1985 I made sure I had a copy of the 12".

I watched Saturday Night Live when it first appeared in 1975. The National Lampoon had its footprints all over the thing at the start: Michael O'Donoghue was the original head writer and he was sick and offensive and completely unpredictable. Andy Kaufmann started showing up; the short films of Albert Brooks were brilliant; Howard Shore was the music director years before his great scores for Ed Wood and Lord of the Rings. The comedy was scathing and above all subversive. The writers had opinions and expressed them. And then there was the music—actual live music. Patti Smith, live; Elvis Costello, live. I no longer expected to see that on network television; there hadn't been live music since The Ed Sullivan Show. Nothing was live except sports; in pursuit of perfection and convenience the TV industry lost the ace in its deck.

I stayed with the show long enough to have opinions about Bill Murray in the second season. Gradually the writing became too tame to offend, and the musical acts were never what I wanted to hear—not until that exquisite Nirvana broadcast in '92, anyway. I’m not sure when I stopped watching, but I drifted away. The rest of the broadcast week was that vast wasteland Newton Minnow talked about so long ago. I had no favorite shows until 1990 when David Lynch floored us with Twin Peaks. There are years-long periods where I can’t identify any of the actors or theme songs or titles, years of programs that I did not see.

Then came decadence, at least in terms of broadcast television. Walking into the apartment after a night at the bar or the club or the benches of Tompkins Square, I wanted something funny and I wanted it as much as I wanted another beer. Cable was available at this point but I couldn’t afford it; VHS was hitting it’s prime but I couldn’t afford that either. But one local New York station had a flash of inspiration I can still barely believe: starting at 2 AM every weeknight, three episodes of Mary Tyler Moore were run back to back, followed by two episodes of The Bob Newhart Show. You were in clover till 4:30 in the morning. After that you just had to hang on till Davey and Goliath.

The older Checker cabs were disappearing and the replacement was the Chevy Caprice. Any one of the cabs in this picture could have been driven by me, at least on the night shift.

Friend Richard in the West Village by the gas pumps of the Dover Garage. We spent a good part of the eighties there. Richard had a tight band called Open City that played A7 in the early 80s when I was still running the sound. We renewed our acquaintance at Dover as we stood around in the shape-up every night. Later he opened a great CD shop on Ninth Street.

No matter what crazy shit we were doing, a fearless and angry Paul pushed it a bit further. I admired him and as a fellow fugitive from Ohio (Cleveland, in Paul's case) he became a good friend. He was also a generous tour guide through NY gay nightlife. The night Reagan was reelected we played at Danceteria; we got drunk and Paul thoughtfully guided me through some notorious West Village clubs. I don't recall much of the rest of the evening, though I do know it ended during a drag show at the Anvil, flat on my back with a bad case of hiccups.

Imagine our disappointment that night: not only had this guy been reelected, but reelected in a landslide! That night millions of Americans told me and my friends in New York that we weren’t in the same universe. I was genuinely shocked by the election results. How could they reelect a guy who sold missles to Iran (our archenemy in our comic book foreign policy) and then used the profits to fund the death squads in Nicaragua? It subverted the Constitution; Congress had specifically denied aid to these same death squads. Remember the four nuns? And the bishop, for christ’s sake, in the middle of a Mass? No one remembered outside of my own little neighborhood, it seemed. I’m still steamed, but then I have an excitable personality.

Paul died of a sudden heart attack several years ago after an extremely successful career teaching both the UK and Australian governments how to handle the new digital world. I miss him.