Steve Trimboli with Joe Strummer; Below: At his former digs, The Scrap Bar.

(All photos courtesy of Steve Trimboli)

If you are lucky enough to be a musician who ends up defining a period of American culture—Bob Dylan, say, or the Ramones, or hell, even Metallica—you gain a certain type of immortality. But the constellation of people who helped you get there—the siblings, the members of the “original” lineup, the manager—usually winds up on the sidelines.

Most overlooked of all in the star-making village are the scene-creators, who treat their venues like tumblers, shaking misfit kids and outcasts over and over, polishing some of them into rock gods worthy of the world’s stage. There are the occasional stars in this New York subset, men like Hilly Kristal of CBGB, Mickey Ruskin of Max’s Kansas City and, of course, Andy Warhol, with his Factory of talent.

For most, however, creating a home base for future stars is often anonymous work—as it has been for Steve Trimboli. He has spent the past 44 years bartending, managing or owning some of the most influential venues in the city’s underground music scene. Places like Be Bop Cafe, Tribeca and Scrap Bar were all legends in their own right, each a community hub for poets, prodigies, punks and others.

Today, only Mr. Trimboli’s last venture (or as he calls it, a “content generator”), Goodbye Blue Monday, still stands. And though Mr. Trimboli no longer owns or manages the establishment, he can still be found slouching in one of the repurposed cafeteria booths near the back, keeping an eye on the place. Like his previous bars, the venue would probably cease to exist if its guardian ever truly left.

Times have changed, though. Forced to sell the bar in 2010 after declaring bankruptcy, Mr. Trimboli can’t officially work at the bar in any capacity. But as he lives above it and is its sole founder, he can’t very well watch it die either. Mr. Trimboli has helped start an Indiegogo campaign to raise $50,000 for GBM, which was never the most financially stable business to begin with. At press time, the campaign had raised $1,210 of its $50,000 goal, with 35 days left to go.

It was freezing cold when I arrived at Goodbye Blue Monday to see Mr. Trimboli in the curio parlor/free-form music venue, located in the no-man’s land under the J line in Brooklyn, a slice of steel acting as a border between Bed-Stuy and the never-quite-gentrified part of Bushwick.

I walked straight past the twisted heaps of scrap metal that served as watchful gargoyles: the clawed metal gates, the motorcycle welded together and bearing a giant mannequin’s head as its rider, the seemingly infinite number of sharp edges and jagged spikes that guarded the entrance with a promise of tetanus. This used to be my home. I lived above Goodbye Blue Monday for two years in an old factory loft while tending bar downstairs.

Goodbye Blue Monday

Working at Goodbye Blue Monday was my connection to Scrap Bar, the legendary venue Mr. Trimboli opened in 1986, when I was just a kid. Scrap Bar was known as the place where punk went to die and hair metal held the wake, captured live and broadcast around the world by the burgeoning music station MTV.

Before the bar even opened, Allen Ginsberg stopped by to hold an impromptu lecture on the history of the space. Then on Day 1, Trimboli was forced to boot out his first customers for taking his new business cards and throwing them on the ground. After that, the Psychedelic Furs weren’t welcome at Scrap Bar.

On a random night, you could find guitarist Johnny Thunders of the Heartbreakers nodding off in the corner. The year it opened, MTV held its Christmas party there. Had you been there, you could have witnessed the birth of Pac-Man, or saw Joey Ramone having his face smashed into the bar (three times!) for using the N-word on a bouncer. It’s where Slash infamously received a blow job from porn star Savannah in full view of other patrons. Scrap Bar was also the watering hole for struggling comics like Jon Stewart and Colin Quinn, a place to grab a drink before taking another stab at the Comedy Cellar across the street.

Legendary though it was, Scrap Bar was not immune to more mundane disasters like theft, greedy partners and drug abuse. By 1995, the bar had been shuttered. “You know you’re not going to have a good business if your bookkeeper has tracks up her arms,” Mr. Trimboli said about his former bar, BeBop Cafe. By the time Scrap Bar was ending, the needles had given way to cocaine.

A regular night at GBM.

But he refused to die along with Scrap Bar. Unlike his contemporaries, who defined themselves by the music they listened to, the rock ’n’ roller from Brooklyn was adaptable. In fact, if there was one thing he hated, it was hearing the same song over and over. Hence the broken jukebox that seeded his next venture.

“There was this jukebox at Scrap Bar, and it had maybe 200 songs. Of course, we only got to hear about 10 of them. I’d call up the repair guys and say, ‘Hey, the jukebox is broken!’ Every couple weeks, they’d come in and see that someone had busted in the window and added some new LPs, taken other ones out.”

“I think finally they figured it out,” Mr. Trimboli said. “At least, they stopped trying to fix the jukebox.”

In the late ’90s, Mr. Trimboli was running a storage business in Hoboken, N.J. He found the Broadway location in 1999 and was planning to use it as space for items he had purchased at an estate sale. He moved in above the venue in 2006, the same year he began using the warehouse on Broadway as a sort of community coffeehouse. For new residents of the otherwise desolate strip, Goodbye Blue Monday was a godsend. Mr. Trimboli began to sell beer and wine at night. He also started encouraging local bands to play—the more varied the better.

“I knew it was going to be what I first envisioned for Scrap Bar,” Mr. Trimboli said. “It would be free-form. Whatever happened here, it would be that. It would be a metal bar if someone played metal, it was a jazz bar if people were playing jazz that night.”

If you wanted to play at GBM, all you had to do was sign up on the store’s MySpace calendar and confirm it with the owner. It was an obviously flawed plan, especially when there were four acts a night ... none of whom knew who’d they’d be sharing the bill with. There were a lot of open jazz nights. A lot of terrible music. But also some gems.

Before Boardwalk Empire, actors Michael Pitt and Michael Shannon were both known to show up and play sets. Vampire Weekend had one of their first performances in the space, and the Mountain Goats stopped by for a quick show. Bands came from various locales: Finland, England, Spain, Canada. If you had an idea and some friends and weren’t an asshole, Mr. Trimboli gave you a shot. That was the genesis of the Bushwick Book Club, where musicians like Joshua Bell would perform an original piece based on the night’s text.

Trimboli today

“Sure, there was a lot of free-form jazz and noise the first year ... there still is,” Mr. Trimboli explained. “But I wanted this to be open to all forms of musical expression.” Despite its financial struggle, the venue has won fawning accolades from The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Village Voice. Its concerts are regularly listed in all three publications.

“The vibe there is really cool, like a cross between an art gallery and a garage sale,” said Benjamin Miller, formerly of Mission of Burma, who first played at GBM in 2006 with one of his side projects and has frequented the stage since.

Not all of Mr. Trimboli’s discoveries were such gems. His Goodbye Blue Monday iTunes account offered an unlabeled library full of “Track One”s, and anything could turn up. On one occasion, his employees (myself included) wound up listening to a 30-minute spoken-word/noise compilation that we realized halfway through was the final recordings of the Jim Jones cult. We were literally listening to them drink the Kool-Aid.

When I asked Steve Trimboli why a half hour of mass suicide was preferable to the time I accidentally let Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” play twice over the course of the night and found myself on the receiving end of one of his more colorfully worded lectures. He shrugged at the memory. “It was the same as the jukebox,” he said. “I didn’t want to hear the same shit anymore.”

Ivanir, Hoffman, Keener and Walken in A Late Quartet.

In A Late Quartet, a somber, moody and uneven film about chamber music and the dedicated professional musicians who devote their lives to playing it, Christopher Walken takes some getting used to as a renowned cellist with Parkinson’s disease who is forced begrudgingly to end his career as leader of one of the world’s most celebrated string quartets. A far cry from the lurid and sloppy addicts, psychopaths and serial killers he usually plays as though walking in his sleep, it’s not the kind of role I would personally think of as perfect casting for him. Also, the movie is too slow, highbrow and sophisticated to draw the youth market that loves to see Mr. Walken play violent and stoned in trash like Seven Psychopaths. But playing the cello is such a pleasant change of pace that he eventually grows on you, scene by scene, proving for the first time since his role as Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled father 10 years ago in Catch Me If You Can, that he really can act. He—along with the rest of the elegant cast—keeps A Late Quartet in tune when it threatens to go flat. 

The Fugue, a famous ensemble much like the Guarneri Quartet, has been filling concert halls for 25 years. It consists of cellist-concertmaster Peter Mitchell (Mr. Walken), first violinist Daniel Lerner (Mark Ivanir), second violinist Robert Gelbart (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Robert’s wife, Juliette (Catherine Keener), on viola. As the new season begins, they are rehearsing all seven movements of the intricate Beethoven String Quartet, Opus 13. As soon as you realize the film runs the length of most chamber music concerts, you might panic at the thought of being forced to sit through the whole thing. Not to worry. Director Yaron Zilberman soon makes it clear that he is more interested in the emotional upheavals in the lives of the four high-strung musicians than he is in the music they play. It takes a long time to get around to the program they’re rehearsing, and by then you might wish they had started earlier. As soon as Peter’s crippling disease is diagnosed, the theme becomes “Move Over, Beethoven.”

You know it’s coming when Mr. Walken starts stretching his fingers to strengthen the grip on his bow. Clearly his reflexes and coordination are failing. The others, who have been with him for a quarter of a century, look the other way. But this is a pragmatic perfectionist. He starts to plan his farewell concert and seek a replacement. Robert, the second violinist, takes this inopportune time to announce his long-festering resentment of Daniel, the first violinist, who refuses to alternate solos.

The tension grows, opening a floodgate when Peter announces his plan to hire Robert and Juliette’s daughter Alexandra (Imogen Poots), who is a talented and promising cellist on her way to stardom, to replace him. Further complicating the volatility of an already complex situation is the fact that without Robert and Juliette’s knowledge, Alexandra, who feels neglected and ignored by her parents, is sleeping with the sensitive and petulant Daniel, her coach, who years earlier had an affair with Juliette, now causing a rift between mother and daughter. Worse still, Juliette, who never fully committed to her husband, catches Robert working out his frustrations in bed with another woman, and their marriage collapses. What began as an intelligent film about real music (instead of the junk that poisons contemporary rock soundtracks) loses its way and collapses under the weight of a shameless soap opera. With so much sturm und drang,it’s a miracle these musicians ever find the time to play a simple adagio.

Everyone ends up emotionally shredded, with the future of the Fugue Quartet endangered. Like all passionate artists, however, they come to their senses in time to realize that craft comes first and personal lives are a lower priority, and in the final minutes, we at last get around to the Beethoven. The movie sometimes gets stuck in its own awkward groove like a needle on a warped phonograph, but it has its moments. The script, co-written by the director Mr. Zilberman and Seth Grossman, contains technical information about how to construct, polish and cherish a good violin, and the four actors make you believe they actually know how to play their instruments. They skillfully demonstrate how each member of the quartet brings to the table one of the four legs that hold it upright: Mr. Ivanir has enough precision and driving perfectionism for four, Mr. Hoffman adds color and texture, Ms. Keener provides the mournful passion, and Mr. Walken is the patriarch of the group, with the heart, soul and discipline to keep the music balanced. The pileup of romantic entanglements and competitive egos gets in the way of the music, but the soundtrack is glorious, even if it is truncated. The final concert was filmed on the actual stage at the Metroplitan Museum, where the Guarneri Quartet gave its final performance after 45 years together. In A Late Quartet, life imitates art in more ways than one.

rreed@observer.com

A LATE QUARTET

Running Time 105 minutes

Written by Seth Grossman and Yaron Zilberman

Directed by Yaron Zilberman

Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken and Catherine Keener

2.5/4

Creepy, creepy Rick Springfield.

Sometimes a headline says it all, mais non? Like what more can we add to this, except that it's super creepy when Rick Springfield stops playing for two seconds during the part where the lyrics go "Where can I find a woman like that?" so he can acknowledge, "I love it when girls sing that line."

You are creepy! Creepy, Rick Springfield!

http://youtu.be/xPIHvCcjBZM
Why was Rick Springfield playing in an NYC subway station? We have no idea. We heard it may have something to do with an upcoming album ... but that can't be right, can it?

DJ Uncle Mike.

Right now, No. 8 is the most exclusive club in New York, unless you count the Zodiac, which consists of 12 male blue-blood WASPs, one of whom has to die before a new member can join. While more diverse and democratic, No. 8 does have a strict door policy. To get in, it helps if you’re famous, or know owner Bobby Rossi of LDV Hospitality or “brand partner” Amy Sacco, or preferably all three.

In his New York Times profile of Ms. Sacco (“The Empress Is In”), writer Bob Morris captured the scene at No. 8 on opening night last May, noting that patrons in the upstairs “rec room” were selecting old records and handing them to “a bearded deejay.”

I knew that had to be DJ Uncle Mike, who stopped shaving in 1990 and used to spin at Bungalow 8 and said things like “psyched,” “groovy,” “cool,” “groovy cool,” “joyous,” “happy,” “beautiful,” “lovely,” “blessed,” “lucky,” “good time,” “all good” and “life’s good.”

When Bungalow closed in 2009, along with Siberia and the Beatrice Inn, nightlife began to suck for me, especially after I found myself being picked up by two bouncers at Kenmare and bounced headfirst onto the sidewalk. Shamed, I fled to Park Slope. Soon, I felt so estranged from humanity I could only connect with my geriatric cat. Why don’t we all join the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and return the Earth to the critters? I thought.

I considered seeking help, but could no longer afford a shrink or life coach. Fortunately Uncle Mike agreed to meet with me early one early evening in August. It was weird seeing a fellow creature of the night at that hour. He looked the same, like a cross between Rick Rubin, Billy Gibbons, Rob Zombie, Santa Claus and The Dude, and he exuded a familiar vibe.

“Dude, I just always feel like I’m really lucky,” he said from behind the wheel of a rusty, ratty, dented, funky old car. “I love music, and I actually get to go to places and play music. I love happy people, and if I’m lucky, I can make people happy. It’s great.”

He was on his way to No. 8, where, as house deejay, he spins five nights a week upstairs. It was he who selected every one of the 8,010 records that line the shelves of the rec room. His other regular gig is at Brooklyn Bowl every Saturday afternoon. He has also done private parties for Elton John, Bono, Sienna Miller, Lenny Kravitz and Saturday Night Live; spun with Lindsay Lohan; opened for Toots and the Maytals; and performed solo in Montauk, Miami, Las Vegas, Brazil, Ireland, London, New Jersey and Vietnam.

He’s been underpaid, overpaid and paid right on the nose, but never paid as much as Skrillex, not the top end. When people ask him to deejay, he makes sure they know what they’re getting. Because if all they’re going to ask for is Rihanna—and that’s okay, that’s a whole vibe—that’s not what he plays, that’s not what he’s about.

According to his website, “DJ Uncle Mike plays an eclectic mix of ‘Vintage Music,’ including Rock & Roll, New Wave, Motown, Classic Rock, Punk, Funk, Surf, Disco, Reggae, Metal, Bubblegum, Ska, Soul, Rat Pack and more ...”

EXTRA: Click here for a Spotify playlist from DJ Uncle Mike.

“Music is magic and musicians are magicians,” he said cruising west on 14th Street. “There’s nothing like the face of somebody who hears a song and just gets turned on and lights up, and whether they get up into their crazy dancing, or maybe standing at the bar and paying their bill, tapping their credit card to the beat.”

He joked that his car radio only plays music from 1967. Actually it’s broken.

“Sometimes it’s nice to have no music,” he confessed before turning on Eighth Avenue. “And just have … thoughts. Thoughts are nice. At some point, music is great and it’s great to have it around all the time—I want music now, bam! I have Spotify, I have everything, bam! When I was younger, it wasn’t like that. You’d go buy records, tapes, you had your music and you had your gaps. But we live in New York, so we have to pay attention to what’s going on, and if I’m blasting music all the time, I’m not going to pay attention to, like, not running this guy over.”

Uncle Mike parked down the block from No. 8. He didn’t have to start spinning for a few hours. I asked him about the current state of nightlife.

“Things in New York change,” he said. “People get resentful, saying it’s not what used to be. It’s never gonna to be what it used to be. It is what it is right now! And I think we should just be making the best of out of what is right now. Some nights you deejay, and as soon as the club opens, people go, ‘There’s no one here!’ Yes, you’re the first one in. What did you expect, like the club to have a thousand people there dancing? I gotta tell you, if you are the first person there, you are privileged to start. The. Party.

“Party-starters are definitely appreciated,” Uncle Mike continued. “They come in, they don’t care who’s in the room, whether the room is full or empty, what the status of the room is. I think more and more, people just think you walk into a place and the party is already there. You’ve got to make it, you’ve got to put some effort into it, you’ve got to bring that positive energy of, ‘Yeahhh, let’s make this happen! I’m psyched! I’m psyched to go out tonight! I’m psyched to go out and see my friends! I’m psyched to meet new people! I’m just psyched!’”

I asked permission to call him Mike. He didn’t say yes or no.

“It’s all good, my friend,” he said, exiting his vehicle.

Outside No. 8 stood Disco, the legendary 6-foot-7, 290-pound doorman. Inside, Mike chatted with the manager Lily Cho, another Bung alum. The bartender (artist Ryan Metke) looked familiar too. Upstairs in the rec room, Mike ordered two tuna tartares, two grilled cheeses, two beet salads and one scotch. He told me that in 2008, he went out 125 nights in a row, and in 2009, his big toe started hurting. What the fuck is that? he thought.

“You got the gout!” a doctor told him. Mike had heard of this “disease of kings.” It happened when you lived well. The doc said he could either change his diet or take pills.

He quit booze no problem, but it was tough giving up things he loves—red meat, pizza, pastrami, chopped liver—and switching to chicken, fish, fruits and veggies. “It’s a sign,” he said of his condition. “Your body’s telling you, ‘Yo, change your shit up, and by the way, if you think that pain’s bad, boy I got some pain for you if you don’t fucking change.’ Listen to your body.”

When I returned from the men’s room, Mike shared his prevailing memory of me from Bungalow: “You walked up to me and, out of nowhere, said, ‘Metamucil, it’s really good for you!’ And I thought, ‘This is a nice guy.’”

So did he ...?

“No. I haven’t needed it, but the point is you were kind enough to impart me with some wisdom. So for that I gotta say thank you, brother.”

Besides us, the place was empty. Then Russell Simmons and a lady appeared, and someone cranked up the music. Mike and I moved to a private back room, a k a “the broom closet.” The view of the rec room through the one-way mirror made me think of 007’s bachelor pad or Otter’s place in Animal House if he had a million extra bucks. “If you’re not here, then you’re never going to know what it’s like,” Mike said. “But if you’re here, you’re never gonna forget it.”

He wouldn’t talk about the celebrities who have been to No. 8, among them Bono, Daniel Craig, Anne Hathaway, Demi Moore, Clive Owen, Waris Ahluwalia, Peter Beard, Jim Carrey and Ed Westwick. “I know nothing, nothing!” he said. “I show up and I deejay. People I work with are very nice to me. Give me wonderful food to eat. Let me play music to make people feel happy.”

He couldn’t say what happened last night. “I have a decent selective memory,” he said. “My memory remembers things when my memory remembers to remember them.” Or even what he might play that night. “I never know what I’m going to do, and I still won’t know until after I’ve done it, and even then, I might not remember it. I’m going to play some of the records in this room.

“Music’s the gift that never stops giving,” he continued. “I turn somebody on to a song they’ve never heard before, and now that’s there for them. They know that that pushes the happy button for them. It’s like, okay, hi, life sucks. What makes me happy in this life that sucks? These little things, songs—it’s called music.”

Dinner was served and quickly devoured. Mike told Lily Cho that the grilled cheese was “so there.” She called him the greatest. I asked what it was like being around beautiful women every night. “It’s fucking horrible,” he said. “It’s miserable. Pity me.”

At 10:45, he began pulling records from the shelves. He didn’t know how many he might pick out: “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be ambiguous about answers, but I don’t know. There’s a great Ozzy song, ‘Don’t Ask Me, I Don’t Know.’ Because I don’t know!”

At 11:02, he entered the deejay booth. It was time to get ready, make sure his shit was together, find his flashlight, check the power supply, mixing board, wires. He has about 15 crates of records back there, tried and true stuff, safe bets—the less organized the better.

His first selection was the “Batman Theme” by The Ventures. He cleaned the next LP off. Put headphones on. Put the needle on the groove. Took the headphones off. The Stones’ “Undercover of the Night” was a perfect segue. “I do a very relaxed style of deejay, not as mix-intensive as a lot of the other folks out there,” he confided. “I try to do the best version of me possible, rather than a lousy version of other people. DJ Uncle Mike does the best version of DJ Uncle Mike that DJ Uncle Mike could possibly do.”

Better than anyone?

“No, somebody could probably do me a little better than me. But it’s not an exact science.”

Russell Simmons and his date left. It was just the two of us again. Soon, though, we had company. Mike watched as pockets of people began to coalesce. Two party-starters were starting to feel it after he played the Police, followed by the Brothers Johnson, Blancmange, more Stones, Billy Idol, Stevie Wonder, ABC, Earth, Wind & Fire, Spandau Ballet, B.T. Express and David Bowie.

By 1 a.m., things were getting crazy. People dancing on tables, grinding on one another, falling over. Mike calls this stage “drunk o’clock.” It can happen anytime. With help from Rod Stewart, Steve Winwood, Blondie, more Stones, Aerosmith, Grandmaster Flash, Steve Miller, Talking Heads, Cheap Trick, the Monkees, the Bangles and more Stones, DJ Uncle Mike made sure it stayed drunk o’clock until 4 a.m.

UNCLE MIKE’S SCHEDULE is “fluid,” so there is no “usually.” But around 6 a.m., he often returns to his doorman building on the Upper East Side, where he has lived alone more than half his life. One late afternoon, he gave me a tour of his one-bedroom “cave,” which is like a museum of Mike then and now. There are childhood toys (Star Wars figures, a race car set, a Gumby doll), an 8-track player (a bar mitzvah present), a CB radio, a full can of Billy beer, a giant empty bottle of Beefeater, four pairs of Puma suedes and a life-size poster of Bill Cosby. Lots of rock ’n’ roll stuff, too.

On the bookshelves: The Cat in the Hat, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Yiddish, Writing Television Sitcoms, No One Gets Out of Here Alive, Crazy From the Heat, Hammer of the Gods, and two copies each of Wiseguy and Please Kill Me. On the walls: show posters, gold records of bands he has worked with, and framed photos of Mike with Ozzy Osbourne, Jeff Beck, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Alice Cooper and Joey Ramone.

On his computer: 25,000 songs, a list of the 266 bands he has seen in concert (“that I can remember”), and more photos of him: with Ozzy and Joe Frazier, Dickey Betts, Charlie Daniels, Joe Strummer, members of AC/DC and Cheap Trick, the drummer from the Sex Pistols, Evel Knievel, Liza Minnelli, Pia Zadora, Morton Downey Jr., posing next to a bummed-out Tommy Chong at a High Times event, by a dead body on a stretcher outside CBGB’s, being choked for real by the lead singer of Venom (“dude, it hurt”), with guys from Slayer, Pantera, Suicidal Tendencies, Rage Against the Machine, Pia Zadora again, Ronald McDonald, and backstage at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go in 1995 with Lemmy at the Motorhead singer’s 50th birthday.

Michael Schnapp was born late one night in Queens. He grew up in the Five Towns area, close to the airport, the city, the beach. “Nice area, nice family, nice house, nice friends,” he said. “Nothing too bizarre. No drama, didn’t get arrested, didn’t kill anybody. What can I say? We definitely had a good time. Definitely burned our hands on the flame of life a lot.” His father was in the perfume and garbage business, and before having kids, his mother had been a secretary at Look magazine. Mike was always a big, tall, kid, never skinny, popular but a loner.

Music was his first and only real passion. He remembers the first time he heard “Light My Fire” at age 7, the same year he went to his first concert: Roberta Flack. Before sending him to camp, his mother bought him a portable record player and a bunch of singles. He liked the ones by Elton John and Edgar Winter, and “Hocus Pocus” by the band Focus. “I also learned that records melt in the sun that summer,” he recalled. “The next thing you know, they’re like the Alps, up and down, up and down. Wow, can’t play that fucking thing no more! See ya!”

The first album he bought was Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The first concert he saw at the Garden was Peter Frampton. The guy sitting in front of him turned around, said ‘How you guys doing!” before pulling out an envelope stuffed with joints. R2-D2 came out onstage to do a duet with Frampton but was broken or had laryingitis.

Next he saw Jethro Tull. The opening act was James Taylor’s brother Livingston. The crowd began to boo right away. “It was getting to be a loud roar of hate,” Mike recalled. “By the end of the third song it was the ‘fuck you’ chant. ‘Fuck you! Fuck you!’ The whole Garden’s going ‘Fuck you!’ to one man on an acoustic guitar. That’s pretty impressive. Someone comes out and taps him on the shoulder, like, dude, you gotta go. So he turns around, walks off, and he gets about two-thirds off the stage, so everyone starts applauding. He turns around, comes back out, goes to the mike in says, ‘Oh, so I guess you really want me!’ and just starts playing again. It got violent. There was some hate in the air that night.”

In junior high, they made Mike take some tests and said he’d be a good architect.

He said, “What the fuck is that?” They said, “You build buildings.” He said, “I don’t want to build buildings. I mean, it doesn’t sound like fun.”

In college he took bowling as a class. His grandpa always used to say “learn a trade!” so he majored in communications, deejayed at the radio station and did security at concerts. After Dizzy Gillespie played an afternoon show, Mike volunteered to drive him and the band home. On the way, Mike was told to stop at a bank. The teller wouldn’t cash Dizzy Gillespie’s paycheck without ID, so the great man puffed out his cheeks. She didn’t recognize him. He just happened to have a picture of his large erect penis in action, said “that’s me!” and she screamed. Back in the van, everyone laughed and fired up joints.

Eventually, Mike landed a job at Combat Records, and was soon promoting metal bands like Venom, Slayer, Exodus, and Megadeth. And partying. “I did cocaine in the ’80s once for seven years,” he admitted. “It’s a funny statement, but at some point, yeah, I was on a fucking tear. Yeah! Smoking, drinking, snorting, popping, uhhh running around going nuts.”

So he got it out of his system?

“Yeah! The last time I ever ingested cocaine was February 1987, and it was one of those things where, ‘This is horrible, I feel miserable.’” He started doing it again for a few months and stopped again. He did it one more time and said never again.

Next he went on tour with Megadeth. One of Mike’s jobs was to keep the band from beating the crap out of each other. At the end of a show in Philadelphia, the band’s leader, Dave Mustaine, spat on drummer Gar Samuelson, who returned fire with a drumstick. After Mustaine hurled his guitar into the drum set, everyone went backstage and began screaming. “Come on pussy, what are you gonna do?” Samuelson asked Mustaine, who was waving a broken tequila bottle around, with Mike in between them.

Then they went out and played the encore. “They killed it,” Mike recalled. “The nice thing about this band was they played angry music, so it just added to the intensity of their performance.”

Mike had other pleasant memories of the six-week tour: “At some points it was so peaceful and beautiful, seeing rainbows over mountains, and I remember watching Alf a lot. Every Monday I ended up sitting in a hotel room with Dave smoking weed and watching Alf.”

In 1989, Mike went to work for Epic Records. He managed the Cycle Sluts From Hell, sent tapes of brand-new bands like Pearl Jam to influential people, and mentioned the Ozzy tickets he’d scored for them. After an appearance at Tower Records, the Prince of Darkness took a whiz on the manager’s office door while Mike kept a lookout.

In 1994, EMI Records lured Mike away with a ton of money and a fancy title. Right away he didn’t like the vibe (“horrible”), and after the first label meeting, he thought to himself, “What have I gotten myself into? I’m not happy. I fucked up.” One of his big projects was doing A&R for a band he signed, the Fun Lovin’ Criminals. When someone else at the company put a song of theirs on a sampler tape and sent 20,000 copies to record stores, Mike was psyched ... until he listened to the cassette. The song didn’t start at the beginning and sounded like shit, so he blew up at the guy: “I said, ‘You wanna know what I think of this tape?’ and I threw it against the wall. I just fucking lost it. I started screaming and yelling ‘You’re a fucking idiot!’”

Although the first Fun Lovin’ Criminals album sold a million copies worldwide, Mike’s two-year contract wasn’t renewed. He fell into a funk, and people stopped returning his calls. “I was bitter and angry and pissed off and not afraid to share it, and it didn’t do me well,” he said.

Mike went from “vice president of rock” to roadie. Former colleagues laughed when they found out he was now driving punk bands to concerts. “People were like, ‘Really, you’re a roadie?’” he recalled. “I go, ‘Yeah, but actually I was happy today.’ I never laughed as much as when I was on the road with the guys in Murphy’s Law.”

Mike took an office job at a music company but got sick of it fast. He preferred deejaying, which he’d been doing part-time, and hanging out at Amy Sacco’s first club, Lot 61. “She was wonderful and always nice, and we stayed friends ever since,” he said.

“It was kismet when we first met,” she emailed. “He is just ALL THAT and more?! I never asked him even one question, he was just ‘Uncle,’ gentle, ethereal, all knowing and a musical magician; with an essence of paco-rabane and an air of mystery ...”

Mike became a full-time deejay not long after Ms. Sacco opened up her second club in 2001.

“It was a collision of great people and great circumstances that made for one-of-a-kind nights of fun,” he said of Bungalow 8. “It was a wonderful experience to be able to be there and play music for people and see people be happy.”

The other night at No. 8, a very attractive young stylist approached DJ Uncle Mike. “So what’s your story?” she asked.

He started laughing, and then replied, “Talk to George in about a month. He’ll be able to tell you. It’s a long story, man.”

editorial@observer.com

Kanye West’s newest album, Cruel Summer—a compilation of his G.O.O.D. Music label's artists—is to be released next Tuesday, September 18. A few of the tracks have already been released, but today saw the release of the album's opening track, To The World, which features R. Kelly singing the hook. And at two minutes and 25 seconds in, the following verse comes from Mr. West:

I need a new crib to hold my plaques
Rick Ross had told me that.
Said I'd be all up in Goldman Sachs.
Like, "These ni**as tryna hold me back
These ni**as tryna hold me back."
I'm just trying to protect my stacks
Mitt Romney don't pay no tax
Mitt Romney don't pay no tax.

For those in need of contextual help herein: Rick Ross is a fellow rapper, and "stacks" refers to money. In other words:

• He's just trying to protect his money and find a decent place to invest it.
• He's been advised by fellow rapper Rick Ross to invest it with Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management, because people will no doubt try to prevent his liquid wealth from growing, by hook or by crook.
• Take Mitt Romney, for example!
• Mitt Romney found a way to ostensibly evade the full reach of the Internal Revenue Service—or at the very least, a tax rate for people as wealthy as he is—and if Mitt Romney doesn't have to pay taxes, why should Kanye West?

 
Previously, Kanye West famously told the world that former president George W. Bush "does not care about black people" and later imagined his eventual foray into fatherhood:

And I’ll never let my son have an ego.
He’ll be nice to everyone
wherever we go.
I mean
I might even make him be Republican
So everybody know he love white people.

And now Mitt Romney can say his taxes have been rapped about. Which his opponent can not.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

WHAT STARTED THIS

The profile, titled "The House That Hova Built"—released online September 6, and in print September 9—really started seeing pickup today for this particular line:

He gets a little agitated when the subject of Zuccotti Park comes up: "What's the thing on the wall, what are you fighting for?" He says he told Russell Simmons, the rap mogul, the same: "I'm not going to a park and picnic, I have no idea what to do, I don't know what the fight is about. What do we want, do you know?"

Jay-Z likes clarity: "I think all those things need to really declare themselves a bit more clearly. Because when you just say that 'the 1 percent is that,' that’s not true. Yeah, the 1 percent that's robbing people, and deceiving people, these fixed mortgages and all these things, and then taking their home away from them, that's criminal, that's bad. Not being an entrepreneur. This is free enterprise. This is what America is built on."

Jay-Z's certainly not the first person to criticize the Occupy movement for a perceived lack of direction, but he may be its most famous.

THE RESPONSE

One Occupier has since responded in kind by planning a protest (or "teach-in") outside of his upcoming concerts at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn:

On SEPTEMBER 28th we will arrive at his sold-out Barclays concert to lovingly show Jay-Z what we want and how he can help: by encouraging his fans to take action for social justice in their communities, schools, workplaces, and homes.

Join us September 28 at Barclays at 6pm for an Occupy Wall Street teach-in and musical performance. Let’s be a sincere answer to Jay’s question. In turn we will ask one of him, one Florence Reece wrote in the 1930s and still matters now, “Which Side Are You On?”

THE MIDDLEMAN

Meanwhile, Def Jam Records founder Russell Simmons—who was responsible for bringing Kanye West down to Zuccotti Park last year—published a blog post regarding Jay-Z's comments, in which he both defends the rapper and takes him to task for not knowing better:

Jay-Z's words matter. He was honest enough to say that he didn’t understand it. A lot of Americans don’t. He was also honest enough to recognize that there are some in the 1 percent who "deceiving" and "robbing," so I know in his heart he gets it. I know he is a compassionate person who cares about the poor, so I'm certain if I had two more minutes with him, I could change his mind.

PRECEDENT

Previously, Michael Skolnik—who is the editor-in-chief of Simmons's site, GlobalGrind—published a post about Jay-Z and Occupy Wall Street last November, when the rapper caused a ruckus by debuting a shirt after a Madison Square Garden concert that read "OCCUPY ALL STREETS."

The shirt, sold by Jay-Z's Roc-a-Wear apparel line, was controversial on its debut, as the company explained that it wouldn't be donating profits to the movement that ostensibly inspired the design. Back then, Skolnik and GlobalGrind decried any controversy over the shirt, noting the "factious [sic] media" who had, in his mind, drummed up controversy over nothing, and urged readers not to look too far into the shirt:

The corporate-controlled media is so thirsty for the blood of the celebrities that they try to find silly and frivolous things to separate great messengers from the people. The media, and I am not just talking about the right wing media, needs to give up on this divisive style of journalism and start to support the 99%. You can own your old-school corner of the media, but you cannot own our future. We are sick and tired of the media treating the Occupy Wall Street movement like it is some rag-tag group of hippies who are camped out in a park. This movement has grown so quickly and so widely that it has inspired heroes of ours, like Jay-Z, to spread the message for us.

It would appear, in retrospect, that Jay-Z was never too "up" on the message.

[Ed.: All of this goes without mentioning the fact, of course, that he's an investor in a basketball team playing at a stadium named for one of the largest financial institutions in the world, Barclays Bank.]

What happens now? Well ...

CONCLUSION

1. Occupy will have its musical protest outside the Jay-Z concert. They will likely not come up with anything as good as previous Jay-Z protesters, but here's hoping.

2. It will receive some degree of press coverage, but likely not too much (though more if the protesters are manhandled by security or cops).

3. Jay-Z will make a canny reference about the entire thing in a song.

4. Somewhere down the road, someone will have another opportunity to ask Jay-Z about this entire incident in a future magazine profile.

5. Repeat.

Further Reading:

Shocker: Jay-Z Officially Doesn't Care About OWS [ANIMAL New York]
Jay-Z Says He Didn't Understand Occupy, but That Didn't Stop Him From Profiting Off It With T-Shirts [Gawker]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Simpler times: Madonna in 1984.

Even as Madonna brings her world tour to Yankee Stadium for shows on September 6 and 8, longtime fans will have a sneaking suspicion that she’s already sung her swan song.

It happened in 2001, at the opening of the Grammy Awards. Performing a recent single, the unimaginatively named “Music,” the long-reigning Queen of Pop writhed on top of a car while a screen behind her projected legitimately iconic images from her career thus far—more writhing, in a wedding gown at the Video Music Awards; aping Marilyn in the “Material Girl” video; that whole Sex period. By the time she stripped off her black leather jacket to reveal a T-shirt printed with “Material Girl,” the game was up. It was the end of history for Madonna. Having stolen from New York’s drag queens, the nation of Argentina, Björk and the infinitely patient Camille Paglia, there was no one left to rob but herself. The snake had found its own tail and wasn’t letting go. “Music” was her last number-one single in America.

The subsequent 11 years have been no kinder to a pop singer who made untold profits by scandalizing the entire population all at once. In 2003, for instance, Madonna restaged the notorious VMAs “Like a Virgin” performance in which she’d mimed masturbation; it was such a sensational act back in 1984 that a worthy callback required the additional services of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, both of whom planted kisses on Mama. The stunt got ink, but felt a little derivative, unworthy.

We haven’t even gotten to the Super Bowl performance, this year, during which the chanteuse came out in a gilded barge, like Cleopatra, to intone “Vogue,” then almost fell off a set of bleachers while performing, once again, “Music.” Madonna duetted with of-the-moment hip-hop act LMFAO, gave airtime to Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. (who stole the show with a raised middle finger—proving she had learned from the best), and ceded the entire finale to reality-show judge Cee Lo Green, who belted out “Like a Prayer” while the ostensible star sang backup. Nothing here was new—not the reliance on the energy of younger pop stars (Madonna has, in the past 10 years, collaborated with everyone from Missy Elliott to Justin Timberlake and Kanye West), not the ostensibly new song she debuted (a retread of flimsy early material like “Burning Up”), and not the dopey “political” edge (her song ended with a plea for #Worldpeace).

Madonna’s ongoing world tour, following the halftime show that most of us were inclined to view charitably, has been marred by endless grabs for attention; the well-chronicled political mishmash has featured the comparison of a French politician to Hitler, the onstage brandishing of pistols, a merited-or-not mockery of Lady Gaga, and Madonna’s own fans booing her. And then there was Elton John, who declared, “Her career is over, I can tell you that” and compared her to “a fairground stripper.”

Which isn’t to say that Mr. John is the most relevant pop star of the moment, either, but he has a point.

Past Madonna tours were controversial; recall how natural she seemed in her 1991 tour documentary Truth or Dare, still discovering her power to provoke. Back in the day, the attention felt somehow earned, if often strenuously so—the Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra said a mouthful, for instance; “Papa Don’t Preach” still carries a frisson; and the apostasy of the Catholic-baiting “Like a Prayer” made up for the relative thinness of the music. It was an equal exchange—she gave us something to talk about, we bought her albums and got up to dance (for inspiration), whenever she commanded.

By comparison, Madonna’s bids for controversy these days come off as desperate, the Newsweek cover stories of Top 40 radio.

Or was it always a little troll-y? It’s possible that no public act has ever been more calculated than Madonna’s repeated cursing on Letterman—rewatching the 1994 segment today, you can see there is no spontaneity whatsoever. Madonna dropped the f-bomb because she had determined it was time to prove that she could be naughtier than we even believed possible. Her Erotica album doesn’t really sound like the work of someone who’s actually ever had sex (much less cruised the Lower East Side in a limo, hunting for hookups, or partnered with Warren Beatty, Sean Penn, JFK Jr., et al.). The Vanity Fair spread with her newborn daughter invented the current tabloid vogue for baby photos, but the earth-mother shtick felt like as much of a pose as the Hindi-inflected look she threw on at awards ceremonies around the period, or the British accent she would soon pick up. In retrospect, the British accent was when the pose overwhelmed the artist. Until then, it was easy enough to go along with Madonna’s act. Certainly it was more interesting on a semiotic level than just marveling, yet again, at the dully marvelous vocal power of contemporaries like Mariah Carey and Toni Braxton.

And yet Madonna seemed to grow rageful at the limits of the concord she’d struck with her audience. Her mid-career albums Ray of Light (1998) and Music (2000) got the first legitimately respectful reviews of her oeuvre—and the first Grammy wins aside from a 1992 music-video prize. Having proven herself as an artist and not merely a provocateur, Madonna released, in 2003, a musically interesting, politically moronic album called American Life. A video depicted her tossing a bomb at George W. Bush. This was the album on which she rapped about how dissatisfied she was with her household staff and her “soy latte” with a “double shot-té.” Rightly or wrongly, her discovery of Jewish mysticism—remember “Esther”?—came off as yet another pose, if an expensive one.

Her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor marked a retrenchment; the music was well-regarded precisely because it so closely mimed the spirit of the disco tunes that had initially made Madonna famous (with a bit of international house music mixed in). On tour in support of the album, Madonna ascended a glittering disco cross and wore a crown of thorns, to which the world replied with a mass eye-roll. What, precisely, was she even trying to say about the Catholic Church, 15 years after Like a Prayer? What was there left to communicate? The confessions weren’t forthcoming on Dance Floor, an album about having fun and waiting for boys to call and vaguely pushing oneself toward some undefined goal. (It’s worth noting that Confessions on a Dance Floor sold well, and that Madonna will always be able to count on an avid, if graying, fan base—in particular among gay men between 25 and 55 who grew up with her act.)

After a warmed-over hip-hop-ish album in 2008 came this year’s MDNA—a not-so-clever mash-up of her own name and the active ingredient in Ecstasy. One song features a rap bashing ex-husband Guy Ritchie; another bashes “some girls” who don’t have Madonna’s particular je ne sais quoi. There’s “Masterpiece,” a weak ballad from the Wallis Simpson bio-pic she directed. There’s a tune called “Gang Bang,” and a remix of the leadoff single “Give Me All Your Luvin’” produced by LMFAO. None of this has aged well, and the album came out in the spring.

Given Madonna’s undisciplined message, her buckshot approach to baiting controversy—if you throw every signifier out into the world, one is bound to hit—it’s perhaps no surprise that her lunch has been eaten by a crop of pop stars who absorbed her best moves and subtracted the air of breathless doggedness. Katy Perry has nailed the faux-naïf “Why are you paying attention to me?” quality. Rihanna captures the air of the profane. Nicki Minaj does the whole rapid-cycling-through-personae thing, albeit in fast-motion. And Lady Gaga, whose own popularity waxes and wanes in a Madonnavian manner, has adopted the sense of unashamed artifice, mixing in a bit more humor and perhaps a bit more heart, daring us, as Madonna once did, not to talk about her.

While Madonna performs old material and prematurely stale material and waves guns and twirls batons and invokes Godwin’s Law at Yankee Stadium, the world’s top pop acts will be in Los Angeles, at the MTV Video Music Awards. While the deal-makers who paid Madonna a reported $120 million over 10 years can count on strong attendance this one last go-round—she’s still Madonna, after all—the Madge business isn’t a growth industry. The last time Madonna performed at the VMAs was to reprise her past material and kiss Britney.

It turns out that Madonna’s 1987 album Who’s That Girl is the most appropriately titled of her career (certainly more so than Music). Some 30 years on, we’re no closer to finding out what makes this girl tick, what interests her beyond the glitter and flash of a camera. At this point, it may be time for her to take her own advice from one of her number-one singles, “Take a Bow.” “The show is over,” Madonna sang, back when the future seemed bright, or at least more full of possibility. “Say goodbye.”

Earl Sweatshirt (Earlsweatshirt.com)

Odd Future's Earl Sweatshirt—one of most popular crew members along with Tyler, the Creator and Frank Ocean (according to The New Yorker)—is getting ready to start laying down tracks on his next album. And the list of artists he plans on working with is very odd indeed.

According to FADER, most of OF's posse will appear on the album, which will be released via Tan Cressida, the Sony imprint he created. But it won't just be another infamous mixtape, as the lineup includes: "Tyler, the Creator, Domo Genesis, MellowHype, Frank Ocean ... Pharrell Williams, the Neptunes, the Alchemist and Vince Staples."

Below, Mr. Sweatshirt teams up with Donald Glover's Childish Gambino for a track called "Drop."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMGeuTAFWew&feature=related

'Strike Back' preview (Cinemax)

All the early Roman kings
In their shark skin suits
Bow ties and buttons
High top boots
Drivin' the spikes in *
Blazin' the rails
Nailed in their coffins
Top hats and tails
Fly away over
Fly away flap your wings
Fly by night
Like the early Roman kings
They're peddlers and they're meddlers
They buy and they sell
They destroyed your city
They'll destroy you as well
They're lecherous and treacherous
A-Hell bent for leather *
Each of 'em bigger
Than all men put together
Sluggers and muggers
Wearin fancy gold rings
All the women going crazy
For the early Roman kings

On the surface, Strike Back seems like an odd fit for the song's debut, as the show is about two members of an elite counter-terrorism unit that gets their international travel points by running around the globe and fighting the War on Terror. What political statement is Mr. Dylan trying to make by lending a track about early roman kings destroying cities to a show about two Americans racing around the Middle East, tracking a terrorist suspected of harboring WMDs?

This is not the only song Mr. Dylan has contributed to Strike Back: the show's August 17th season premiere will feature Tempest's "Scarlet Town" in its closing credits.

Matthew Perpetua, Buzzfeed's new music editor.

And again, we cue the HAS BUZZFEED HIRED ANYONE NEW TODAY Tumblr.  Jonah Peretti's Iowa Writers Workshop for People Who Love Videos of Domesticated Animals Stuck in Boxes has hired its first music editor. Earlier today, Buzzfeed executive editor (and coffee elitist) Doree Shafrir Tweeted out the news:

"Very excited to announce that Matthew @Perpetua will be joining @BuzzFeed on Monday as our first Music Editor!"

That's Matthew Perpetua, to you. A contributor to Pitchfork, Slate, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and MTV, Mr. Perpetua can be read anywhere, but know, he cut his teeth as a first-wave blogger: He's been writing about music on Fluxblog since 2002, the tenth anniversary of which was recently celebrated with a reading last night at Housing Works Bookstore. A Time Out: New York interview explains the origins of the blog's following:

He maintained a small but steady amount of Internet traffic until December 8, 2003, when he posted “Yeah (Stupid Version),” a song by a then-little-known band named LCD Soundsystem. “My numbers blew up,” says Perpetua. “I was the one to get that song out there, and that really put Fluxblog on the map.” Tastemakers from A&R types to DJs and editors began to look to his picks for trends and upcoming talent.

Most recently, Mr. Perpetua worked with Ms. Shafrir writing for her when she was working as the senior editor of RollingStone.com (until she was snatched up by Buzzfeed). As for what he'll be doing there, Mr. Perpetua was mum on details, but explained via email that the idea is "to cover music with a focus on enthusiasm."

"Most music sites are focused on critic culture and establishing that kind of top-down authority," he wrote, "but this is going to sidestep a lot of that, and hopefully better reflect how people on the internet engage with music and music culture now."

If that strikes you as a particularly high-minded answer that doesn't sound like the same site which recently published "18 Photos of Albert Einstein Being Super Chill," well, it is! He also explained that in addition to original reporting, Buzzfeed will "hopefully use music as a springboard to talk about other things going on in the world the site will be doing."

"Ultimately, the goal is to cover music in a way that is entertaining for both music nerds and casual listeners."

It's a noble goal, and so far, Buzzfeed has demonstrated the ability to deliver on the promise of combining original news and Internet Human Catnip. That said, Mr. Perpetua did not rule out "funny stuff." We say: Give the people what they want. Which is to say: "Seventeen Pictures of Babies Who Look Like Mike Love Listening to Outtakes from The 'Smile' Sessions," we eagerly await you.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek