Cheapen The Punch

  Britta and I last saw Tom in December 2018 when I was in New York for a gig. We had a late lunch at an Italian restaurant in Chelsea (he lived nearby), and Tom talked about how the neighborhood had changed. He hated that the ambulances were now equipped with super-bright LED lights that flashed through his fifth-floor windows at night. But his chief gripe was the new sign in Clement Clarke Moore Park on 22nd street, where he liked to sit with a cigarette, now prohibiting  adults except those accompanying children . As such, he had recently been accosted by one mother who told this tall 68-year-old guitar legend that he had to vacate the park. – Dean Wareham,  Encounters With Tom Verlaine,   www.counterpunch.org

  “The worst thing you could be was a sellout, and not because selling out involved money. Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.” – Chuck Klosterman,  The Nineties

 Links to radio shows for music heads into punk, garage, post-punk, drone, experimental, alternative, indie, folk, etc.  Kick Out the Jams and Toiling in Obscurity Heathen Disco Infernal Racket Dynamite Hemorrhage The Brian Turner Show Searching For A Thread Nonstop Pop Can't Stop The Bleeding Garbage in my Heart Signal to Noise Razorcake

  “They were trying to defend ‘the rules’ for no good reason other than to preserve their authority.” – Jann S. Wenner,   Like A Rolling Stone