Tag: ramones

ONLY NOISE: Summer In The City

What does summer sound like? For those of you living in respectable locales, it may sound like the buzz of John Deer lawnmowers, or a nighttime orchestra of cicadas. Summer anywhere but New York might hum along to the tune of unfurling picnic blankets and jet skis zipping across lakes. But for New Yorkers, the hot season presents a whole new catalogue of sounds – and smells – to take in.

Summer in New York is unlike summer anywhere else. Where July in, say, Bethesda, Maryland brings the whizzing of Frisbees on crisp air, NYC’s July sounds like asthmatics wheezing from air pollution. As a nine-year New York resident, my personal midsummer song goes something like this:

-The pitter-patter of dripping AC units.

– The rhythmic panting of the Husky next door.

– The raucous block party down the street.

-Wailing sirens.

-The rotund man who whips down Classon Ave on his motorized wheelchair, blaring soul music from a boom box.

– The lowrider bouncing by the Biggie mural on Franklin, blasting “Hypnotize.”

-Gushing fire hydrants.

-Wailing sirens

-Brawling rats

-Brawling cats

-Steaming trash

-Wailing sirens

On percussion: hamster-sized cockroaches, skittering across my bare body as I try to sleep.

I know. It’s gonna be a hit.

All this beautiful music got me thinking: sure, there are songs about summer in the city – i.e. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer In The City” – but where were the songs about summer in New York City? Where was the refrain for this special circle of hell we survive each year?

Yes, I am aware that soft rock crooner Michael Franks recorded a track literally called “Summer In New York” a while back, but have you listened to the lyrics of that song? Please tell me if any single summer day of your New York life has EVER resembled this:

“We’ll both review Fifth Avenue/From uptown to St. Pat’s/Indulge our vice: Italian ice/Then walk through Central Park/It’s summer in New York.”

Bullshit. Since when is Italian ice a vice? More like, “We’ll stumble down Kosciuszko/From the bar we just closed out/Indulge our sin: three liters of gin/Then dry hump by a bin/Of steaming trash.”

It’s summer in New York!

The fact of the matter is, there just aren’t a lot of songs that effectively capture the glorious grime of a New York summer – so I’ve found a few that make a comprehensive playlist for the season.

  • “Hot in the City” by Billy Idol

What’s the first thing you notice about summer in New York? (Certainly not “Shakespeare In The Park” as Michael Franks would have you believe). The heat! It’s hot as balls here – especially in the train cars sans AC. No one knew this better than Billy Idol, who immortalized the suffocating temperatures in his 1982 hit, “Hot in the City.” Idol also managed to pick up on the all-around friskiness that ensues when the temperatures (and hemlines) rise:

“‘Cause when a long-legged lovely walks by/Yeah you can see the look in her eye/Then you know that it’s/Hot in the city, hot in the city tonight, tonight.” 

By no means a meteorologist, Idol certainly tapped into the hot-blooded heartbeat of a New York scorcher.

  • “Rockaway Beach” by the Ramones

People often think that New Yorkers don’t go to the beach, as if we’re “too busy” – well we do go; and just because we don’t all own Priuses to transport us there doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. Some dig Fort Tilden and Jacob Riis, but for me Far Rockaway is the only beach. Sure it may be a bit filthy and drab, but it’s also home to a thriving surfing community, and Rippers, the best beach bar in town. As it turns out, Rockaway Beach was the sandbar of choice for a little band called the Ramones, too:

“It’s not hard, not far to reach, we can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach/Up on the roof, out on the street/Down in the playground, the hot concrete/Bus ride is too slow, they blast out the disco on the radio.”

  • “Hot Dog” by Elvis Presley

In a feat of terrible planning, someone somewhere once decided that Hot Dog Season must occur at the same time as Bikini Season. This cruel verdict was clearly authorized by a man, whose bikini bod has never been scrutinized by decades of advertising culture.

It makes no sense that I crave hot dogs every summer, when the rest of my appetite has receded in the grueling heat. But alas, hot dogs I crave – immensely. And thank god I live in New York, where I can literally get a hot dog every corner, 24/7. There’s Sabrett, Grey’s Papaya, and my personal favorite, Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs in Coney Island. Nathan’s is also host to the prestigious Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest – an event so barbaric it belongs in the arenas of ancient Rome, but I’d recommend going at least once.

It’s true, there aren’t a lot of great songs about hot dogs, and even this Elvis song (which is not about a hot dog but ostensibly a woman named Hot Dog) isn’t that good either…but at least it’s Elvis!

  • “Out There in the Night” by The Only Ones

Many people think this is a love song – and it is, but not about a human. In fact, The Only Ones’ Peter Perrett wrote it about his dear cat, Candy, who ran away from home one night never to return.

“But what does this have to do with summer in New York,” you ask? Well, I don’t know what borough you live in, but where I dwell the title “summer” and “season of the stray cat” are synonymous. They’re everywhere. On the street. In trashcans. Screaming in heat outside my window. Skittering in new litters on the parking lot concrete. Cats, cats, cats, everywhere. It almost makes sense why Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote that ghastly musical about them. Almost.

  • “Trash” by The New York Dolls

Back in the 1970s, when New York was still dangerous and you could get a dime blowjob where M&M’s World now stands, The New York Dolls were rock n’ roll’s enfants terribles. Surely they had to deal with trash (or, in its summer form: “hot garbage”) far more than we do today. But we still deal with it.

It’s not that there is more or less trash season-to-season, it’s just that the hot sun tends to bake and boil the existing refuse, opening up the pores of all that is rotting so we might smell it more. A LOT more. And don’t even get me started on hot garbage juice, which is the aforementioned boiling refuse in liquid form. Unfortunately the only songs I could find entitled “Hot Garbage” are not too good.

Enter: The New York Dolls. Who could sing about “Trash” better than a cross-dressing miscreant like frontman David Johansen, who, might I add, is from the floating garbage formation itself: Staten Island. No one. I will also ask you: has ever a more New York lyric been penned than:

“Trash, won’t pick it up, don’t take my knife away.” ?

Probably not.

I’m sure I’m missing a few things, but the truth is there just aren’t any good songs about cockroaches or day drinking or swamp ass, which is a pity, because they are all very real things. Especially for summer in New York.

ONLY NOISE: Coney Island, Baby

coney

As the glad hand of summer tightens to a fist, I feel hungover. These three hot months we wait for all year melt us into believing that we can live this way forever; damp and in torn jeans, drinking beer at 2pm and eating hot dogs at 2am. Perhaps summer to others is less slovenly, but it’s hard to be fresh-faced in the New York sun, which radiates off black pavement and carries the scent of freshly baked garbage up your nostrils. Where else in the country does summer = hot garbage? Better yet: hot garbage juice, which I’m sure we have all stepped in, wearing sandals.

This of course, isn’t everyone’s summer in New York. Portions of the Upper East Side and Park Slope seem to be refuse-free. And while many would find the above description noxious, there is one place in New York that seems to spin all that trash into colored candyfloss every summer: Coney Island.

Coney Island was a place I loved long before I walked its busted boardwalk, jutting upwards like misaligned teeth. It was a place I knew from song, as it has been immortalized in many. It seemed to be a perpetual place of interest for Tom Waits, who recorded a salty version of “Coney Island Baby” for 2002’s Blood Money. The beachside town has achieved an honorable mention in Waits’ “Take It With Me” from the 1999 LP Mule Variations, and it seemed the rakish balladeer perhaps knew the place better than anyone else.

Yet the artistic fascination with Coney Island doesn’t start or stop with Waits. The Ramones bopped about it in “Oh, Oh, I Love Her So” from 1977, singing about going “on the coaster and around again” in the grade C theme park. The only coaster they could mean is the treacherous Cyclone, which has provided thrill-seekers with whiplash since 1927. In the same decade Coney was fetishized by the Ramones, films like Annie Hall and The Warriors tipped their hats as well. While its use in the former merely provides a comical backdrop (Woody Allen’s character grew up in a house beneath the Cyclone, hence his neuroses), the latter catapulted the area into cult status. Where Waits had provided a mood, The Warriors affronted with a forceful visual of dueling gangs in leather vests and headbands.

I knew far more about Coney Island than I should have prior to moving to New York. I knew about the Wonder Wheel, and the Freak Show, and Nathan’s Hot Dogs. I knew that it was most likely filled with large women, and men named Frank. But I didn’t fully understand the allure until I first went for myself in 2009. By then I had discovered another “Coney Island Baby,” the classic Lou Reed track off of his 1976 album of the same name.

Something churned within me as I got off the F train that summer…and I realize now that same feeling can be explained by Reed’s lyric:

“Ah, but remember that the city is a funny place/
Something like a circus or a sewer
/And just remember, different people have peculiar tastes”

It was right then that I grasped the elusive beauty of Coney Island: it is an absolute shithole. It appeared that all of the collective enthrallment with the neighborhood was very aware of this fact. What’s more, the contradiction between the dirt and depravity of such a hood and it being a place of magical, family entertainment only seemed to increase the morbid fascination.

“The city is a funny place/Something like a circus or a sewer.” This rotated in my head as I walked past a portly, sun-baked woman, the length of her strangled in a fluorescent pink fishnet bodysuit. To my left, children were running through sprays of water generated by large blow-up palm trees punctuating the beach. Seagulls dove through the mist as old men wetted their balding heads, no one discriminating against the offerings of the plastic foliage. A boom box accompanied a saxophonist blowing away to Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” and pieces of garbage floated past my feet, though none of the famed “Coney Island Whitefish” I’d heard so much about, a.k.a, used condoms.

While I can’t say the same of many places, Coney Island is exactly what I’ve always wanted it to be; and it maintains its appeal almost eight years later. When I went the other day it was waiting for me, running up to say hello with a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other. I accepted and sat on the cement benches at Nathan’s, listening to “Year Of The Cat” by Al Stewart and innumerable Fleetwood Mac tracks. Neither of these made any sense, and I wish I could say something like Reed or Waits was playing, but I was happy to choke down shameful food to something familiar, something un-Carly Rae Jepsen. And that is what this place is all about: shame, pleasure, and familiarity.

Perhaps the kernel of Coney Island’s appeal possesses the same molecules as comfort food, guilty pleasures, and poorly produced music. It isn’t so much about the overt, qualitative aspects of a thing, but the gut reaction it elicits. Did that hot dog feel good in my gut? No. But did it feel good in my gut’s heart? You betcha.

After waddling out of Nathan’s, where I once watched the world famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest (to the tune of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”) in another bout of poor taste, I made my way to MCU Park to take in my very first Brooklyn Cyclones game. Blaring out of the shoddy sound system were soundtrack versions of Disney songs: “Bippity Boppity Boo” and “A Whole New World” and the like.

Because Coney Island can only get weirder every time I go, the game is themed: it is princess and pirate night at the stadium, and there are hoards of terrifying children literally screaming for ice cream in sparkly pink dresses, tiaras, and pastel eye shadow. Large men with robust Brooklyn accents address their families with jovial shouting, which is later directed at the baseball team, only less jovially. As it turns out, the Cyclones are a pretty terrible team. A man behind me begins heckles the athletes while wearing a Cyclones shirt: “Come ON! My daughter hits betta than you!” he blurts. A princess-disguised hellion stands behind me, prodding my neck with something. I turn and realize it’s a chicken finger.

If it weren’t for Princess Poultry I may have stayed for the last two innings, but my companion and I were growing heavy from the heat and hot dogs. We laughed at the absurdity of such a place, and that a baseball game could be so comically bad. “You know what though?” my friend asked. I completed the thought before he could, “we would have been disappointed if they were really good.”

When I am asked to defend my bad taste, in the same way I must when my dad inquires about my preference for crappy bars as opposed to slick ones, I never have a ready-made reason at hand. But I think that it is the unrefined things that possess the most endurance. It is the rationale that against all of the information I possess about the health detriments of hot dogs, I still adore them. I know that Bob Dylan does not technically have a beautiful singing voice, but I will continue to love it. So when asked why in the hell I love Coney Island so much, I can’t help but counter:

“Ah, but remember that the city is a funny place/
Something like a circus or a sewer
/And just remember, different people have peculiar tastes”