A few posts back when I reminisced about my first encounter with Pussy Galore and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion I ended up with the longest post I’ve ever written. I probably spent more time editing and going back to delete passages to shorten it than I did writing it in the first place. My mind went in so many directions listening to that record and looking at the cover I was almost overwhelmed with how many experiences and memories I could connect to a couple of bands that I previously wouldn’t have really considered “important” in my musical upbringing. While writing the post I re-watched the very entertaining Blues Explosion video for “Flavor”. In that video, one of the locations the band uses is Gem Spa on the corner of St. Marks Place and 2nd Avenue in the East Village of Manhattan. Gem Spa has been in the local news the past few years as the nearly 100 year old Village institution battled with lawyers and landlords to stay alive until becoming one of the city’s first major cultural casualties of the financial havoc wreaked by the Covid-19 epidemic. Back in May my social media feed was full of “foodies” and punks and artists and self-appointed NYC experts all lamenting its closing. I couldn’t help but think of the 2015 book “St. Marks Is Dead” by Ada Calhoun which tells the history of St. Marks and the East Village starting in the 1600’s with the Stuyvesant family, all the way to the year she was born, 1976 (my birth year as well) and goes on to describe her life growing up in a top floor walk-up apartment on St. Marks, right next to Tompkins Square Park, just a block from Gem Spa. I’m not doing it any justice trying to summarize it here but one of the recurring themes of the book is that for every cool “scene”, “happening”, “cultural revolution” or even “here today/gone tomorrow” trend that revolved around the inhabitants of St. Marks and its surrounding neighborhood, there was a previous population who had abandoned the area, declaring it artistically/creatively/culturally/socially “dead.” Whether they were priced out of the neighborhood, moved out of the city to chase the American Dream or just out-cool’d by younger new arrivals, there always seemed to be at least a handful of old timers (some as young as 30 in my experience) around to declare how great St. Marks or the East Village used to be before all these transplants and tourists discovered it.
Nowadays it’s definitely hard to walk down St. Marks and not feel like it’s almost completely devoid of culture and whatever made it a cool place to be at any point in time. The whole area has been swallowed by NYU and real estate developers and any evidence that it was ever a bastion of beatnik, hippie, punk, etc culture is long gone. The teenagers and college students and bridge and tunnel tourists that now line the sidewalks on any given day don’t seem to know or care about the record stores, book stores, vegan cafes, coffee shops, rock clubs, etc that once existed where there are now nothing but vape shops, souvenir stores and bubble tea cafes. I never liked the notoriously racist-staffed Continental Bar right around the corner on 3rd Ave but I saw many, many great shows there in the 90’s and seeing it abandoned and waiting to be demolished a few years back definitely made me a bit sad. St. Marks Books, Kim’s Mondo Video, Rockit Scientist, Sounds, and plenty of other places I can’t even think of now are all gone and it kinda seems like I permanently moved to NYC right as things started to really go downhill. As of writing this, I can’t even think of too many personal connections to that neighborhood who are even around or alive to continue to tell me stories about how cool it used to be. And aside from the uncomfortable twinge of the “I was there and you weren’t” sentiment of a lot of those stories, it still really bums me out.
To this day I can’t walk towards the beginning of St. Marks at 3rd Ave without peering up at the St. Marks Hotel on the southwest corner of the street and remembering a random, inconsequential moment in my life that happened somewhere between 10-20 years ago. (I can’t quite pin down the exact year but I know when it wasn’t.) I was with a friend who I had known for a few years by that point. He was in town for a day visit and we were making the rounds of record stores in lower Manhattan. As we approached the intersection of 3rd Ave and St. Marks he gestured at the St. Marks Hotel and said, “I stayed there once. With Jim Shepard. We came to town to see The Fall.” I knew my companion was friends with Shepard and had been for years up until Shepard tragically took his own life in 1998. I don’t think I thought much of his comment in that very moment, but it sorta stuck with me over the course of the next few days. The point of my friend’s story was more about the amenities (or lack thereof) of the hotel and The Fall’s performance that night. It wasn’t so much about his friend Jim. It still stuck with me and the memory popped back into my head a few weeks back when listening to “A Reverse Willie Horton”. After a few listens I threw on the recently released Vertical Slit “Live At Brown’s” LP, followed by the also fairly-new “Heavy Action” archive release, and eventually a handful of singles, like the “1978 Art-Data Sampler” pictured above. One memory after another and next thing I knew I was in a Jim Shepard rabbit hole and wondering if I’d ever have a falafel from Mamoun’s on St. Marks ever again.
I first heard of Jim Shepard in 1998 when V-3 “Photograph Burns” was released. Dynamite Records in Northampton, MA didn’t carry a ton of new releases on vinyl despite its size and vast inventory and because of this, any time they did carry a new release on vinyl I was always curious as to why they deemed it worthy. I seem to remember “Photograph Burns” being pretty cheap for an LP, possibly an introductory “nice price” and this coupled with the one clerk who would give me the time of day recommending it, I took a chance. For a blind introduction to Jim Shepard’s music, the record is a pretty good start.At the time I was still fairly new to the idea that lo-fi recordings weren’t a signifier of poor quality and in some/many cases were actually an enhancement and “Photograph Burns”, despite reportedly being recorded for only $500, was pretty hi-fi compared to the Shepard recordings that existed up until that point. I’m not sure what my frame of reference was for V-3 but I liked the record a lot and subsequent conversations with record store clerks regarding it only led to them recommending Guided By Voices (no thanks) and Pere Ubu (already knew about them) and that was about it. Was it possible V-3 was doing their own “thing” and wasn’t easily categorizable? I don’t think I was ready to even comprehend the possibility. I remember buying the “Elevator to the Gas Chamber” 7″ and thinking, “This is the same band that did ‘Bristol Girl’?” It was confounding.
I’d be lying if I told you that when I eventually picked up Shepard’s “Picking Through the Wreckage With A Stick” LP that I “got it.” Like a lot of things back then, I wanted to like it but it was so all over the place and not quite what V-3 was to me that I was sorta…frustrated. Regardless, it was that record that stuck with me as sort of a challenge and any time I came upon anything Shepard-related I would buy it without hesitation. When Shepard took his own life in 1998 I heard the news from a friend in Boston who then played me a cassette copy of the “Slit and Pre-Slit” LP for the first time, and I was not ready for what I heard. I was again thinking I was going to hear something like V-3 but instead what I heard was like listening to someone’s journal: Ideas coming and going quickly, only a few parts that would qualify as “proper” songs…I didn’t know what to think. Something so hard to categorize was frustrating for me as I still felt like I couldn’t enjoy music unless I could make sense of it. And Jim Shepard apparently made very little sense to me. And now he was gone forever.
As time went on I slowly put together a collection of Shepard’s recordings and without forcing it, without even realizing it, I slowly developed a deep love for his music…and I didn’t care about where it stood, what “kind” of music it was, or who to compare it to. Eventually I met people who knew Jim, who played with him, released music by him, loved him, hated him and they all had a lot to say about him not just as an artist but as a person too. Before I knew it, I kinda wished I had known the guy. I can’t say that about many other artists I enjoy and/or admire. I guess I kind of always assumed most of them wouldn’t have liked me. I don’t spend much time thinking about artists’ motivations or what the meaning behind their work is or anything like that. I’m happy to accept their art at face value, and enjoy it at face value. I don’t need an explanation. Shepard somehow falls into this “miscellaneous” category in my mind where his music, though often bleak, seems to be appropriate for any mood I’m in. If there’s one theme that seems to thread itself through almost all of Shepard’s music, from “Slit & Pre-Slit” in 1977 to the album V-3 recorded but never officially released before Jim’s death, it’s isolation. Angst. Uncertainty. Things everyone everywhere understands and can relate to. Shepard’s music is relatable without even really making you consider if you can relate to it. It just happens organically. It’s as natural as the feeling of your stomach sinking from jealousy, anxiety, claustrophobia. It demands your attention and makes you wonder what was behind it when he wrote it, when he performed it and when he decided to release it (or in some cases (apparently) when not to release it). The only downside to his music making me think so much is that I can’t help but feel like I missed out on something being the age that I was when he was still around. Listening to “Live At Brown’s” somehow makes me nostalgic for a place I’ve never been and things I’ll never experience. All I can do is listen to the music and be grateful for what he left us. As cliche as this might sound: Jim Shepard may be dead, but he is definitely not forgotten, and he’ll live on through his music and art as it’s discovered by new people every day.
Cheers’s to ever/never, Feeding Tube and Siltbreeze for releasing never before heard Shepard material the past few years and to Jim’s son Gabe Shepard who’s resurrecting his father’s private imprint Iron Press for future releases of material from the family’s archives.
