KILL YER IDOLS

A couple of days ago I recieved a phone call from some girl who wanted to sell me Showtime ( and a few other channels) for 7 bucks a month for the next two months. I was caught off guard and bit. What the hell. I wasn't going anywere. So last night I'm watching Sundance and there's this movie Kill Your Idols on. It juxtaposed NO NY old timers like Lydia Lunch, Jim Thirwell, Arto Lindsay and Sonic Youth with 2002 flavors of the year Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, Black Dice, and other Brooklyn scenester bands. Lets see how they come off.
I had worked all day on a roof, my hands were cramped up like claws and the chicken and black had beans I had for supper had begun working some sort of gaseous horror in my system. I wore a ratty bathrobe and red polyester running pants. My long white beard was matted and stained with cajun chicken sauce. The shack was dirty and the fire was crackling in the stove. I laid the leftovers on the porch for the cats and as Thurston Moore pontificated like a college professor, and the chick from the YYYs giggled obnoxiously from behind her bangs, I nostalgically wandered back to those halcyon EV days in the early 80's.
I moved to NYC form SF as an art dealing conceptualist in 1983. Lydia , Jim, Thurston and their respective bands, as well as others like DNA, Mars, and Suicide were already darlings of the Village Voice, Soho News downtown scene. Pat Place, James Chance, Mr. and Mrs. Hell's son Richard owned the place. I had bought the NO NY album back in SF and dug it for it's anyone can do this shit attitude and gritty sexiness. Within a rather short time on the scene I had met most of this group and over the years I would play Richard Kern's FINGERED (featuring Jim and Lydia) in my gallery, build shelves for Kim and Thurston and Arto, and many times usher a drunk Thirwell out the door of Max. Fish. It took me until 1986 before I started my own band. Never singing a note, I was now I was a lead singer in a NYC band. How hard could it be?
As it turns out starting a rock band was one of the easiest things I ever accomplished. I grew my hair long (out of style at the time), donned my pointy toed boots, and an old tuxedo, grabbed the microphone and within a couple of months was opening for Meatloaf at the Palladium. So when I see Lydia moaning over how "soft" and "spoiled" the '02 bands are I think back to the day and realize just how wonderfully stupid, prententious and ridiculous every musical era is. Of course the newbies seem like fluff compared to these elder hipsters. But how stupid was Lydia in '78? If we survive we are granted sage status and looked on as being way more interesting than we ever were in reality. Let me tell you kids- we were all lame in our day. The only difference between the geezers and the youth is the media gobbles 'em up these days. If the YYY chick has any brains at all she'll be putting her cash in real estate and thinking about having kids. Honey, this ride isn't gonna last. Now I have to get back on that roof. Cool huh?