(Image via: PunkingOutFilm.com - Used With Permission)About a month ago I was turned on to a great little film titled “Punking Out”, a documentary film shot in 1977 at what was then the world capitol of the punk-rock universe, CBGB in New York City. The movie features performance and interview footage of The Ramones, The Dead Boys, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, as well as people who were attending the shows, some of the CBGB staff, including owner Hilly Kristal, and some people who just happened to be checking out the scene. The film was recently screend in New York City as part of the 2009 Howl Festival and has been racking up awards around the globe since 1979. I couldn’t get my hands on a copy fast enough, and when I did, I decided I had to know a bit more about the film. So I emailed the films Managing Producer, Ric Shore, and he agreed to do an interview and give me some background on this historical document of that amazing moment in time. Ric called from his home in Venice Beach, CA via telephone and we spoke for just about an hour on a recent Saturday afternoon and this is what he had to say about the project.
TATSOL: Hi Ric, thanks for taking the time to do this interview. Fist off, I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about how you came to be involved in film making projects in general. Were you studying film in college or was it just a hobby?
RS: Well, I came to NYU after being really impressed by the “An American Family” series by Alan Raymond, and I ended up being in his workshop, it was the only year he was there, he wasn’t there when I got to NYU, but it was like one of those strange coincidences that happen when you focus on something. I wanted to do that kind of documentary work, the Frederick Wiseman “Fly On The Wall” type style, you know, and Alan Raymond took it to TV. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that series [An American Family], that’s going back quite a few years.
TATSOL: I actually learned about it about a year ago. When I was in New York in July of 2008, I ran into a guy named Bobby Albertson who used to play bass with a band called the Bush Tetras for a while around 1983, and he was telling me about that. He was actually friends with Lance Loud.
RS: Is that available on DVD? I think it is.
TATSOL: “An American Family?”
RS: There’s a store that has that stuff, Videots, down in Santa Monica.
TATSOL: Hi Ric, thanks for taking the time to do this interview. Fist off, I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about how you came to be involved in film making projects in general. Were you studying film in college or was it just a hobby?
RS: Well, I came to NYU after being really impressed by the “An American Family” series by Alan Raymond, and I ended up being in his workshop, it was the only year he was there, he wasn’t there when I got to NYU, but it was like one of those strange coincidences that happen when you focus on something. I wanted to do that kind of documentary work, the Frederick Wiseman “Fly On The Wall” type style, you know, and Alan Raymond took it to TV. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that series [An American Family], that’s going back quite a few years.
TATSOL: I actually learned about it about a year ago. When I was in New York in July of 2008, I ran into a guy named Bobby Albertson who used to play bass with a band called the Bush Tetras for a while around 1983, and he was telling me about that. He was actually friends with Lance Loud.
RS: Is that available on DVD? I think it is.
TATSOL: “An American Family?”
RS: There’s a store that has that stuff, Videots, down in Santa Monica.
Anyway, that’s how I kind of got into it. I loved bands like the New York Dolls, Lou Reed and things that came along that were like that, but those two bands were my favorites at the time. I wasn’t really following the punk scene, it happened so quickly and I kind of heard about it, and I started going down to CBGB’s and I was so amazed at the scene there and the Ramones were so fresh and new, that whole concept of the short, intense song, it was sort of self parody and self effacing, a sort of comic book sort of presentation. I didn’t really think of them all that seriously, I thought, “Oh, that’s cool.” And then the Dead Boys, we sort of stumbled into, they were there one night and they were just such a snotty, in your face, street-fighting band for real, kind of menacing. But when we gathered them to do an interview they were just regular guys. It was just the culture where they were from, you know?
TATSOL: I was just wondering how you happened to be in New York at that time. You said you were going to NYU in 1977?
RS: For a film degree, yeah. I was accepted into film school, I was really amazed. I was just a footloose sort of …you know, I was just out of high school, I was just ready to move to California. I was sort of a hippie in high school, I wasn’t really college material so to speak and I wasn’t all that sure I could be in college, you know. I was raised in a culture that was Ivy League all the way so it was really weird. But I sort of stumbled my way into it, they accepted me, it was really strange. It was just sort of a focus I had once I saw that “American Family” series and I wanted to do documentaries of the underbelly in subcultures and stuff like that. It just sort of came to…to…it realized itself. I didn’t really push it. But that year I had a project in the film workshop. In the workshop you’d vote on each other’s projects and there were only five directors and they’d get a film allotment from the school to do a film. So I was awarded a film allotment for my project, but it wasn’t the Punk Rock film of CGBG, it was about Army brat families that moved around all the time, something else that kind of fell apart.
TATSOL: I was just wondering how you happened to be in New York at that time. You said you were going to NYU in 1977?
RS: For a film degree, yeah. I was accepted into film school, I was really amazed. I was just a footloose sort of …you know, I was just out of high school, I was just ready to move to California. I was sort of a hippie in high school, I wasn’t really college material so to speak and I wasn’t all that sure I could be in college, you know. I was raised in a culture that was Ivy League all the way so it was really weird. But I sort of stumbled my way into it, they accepted me, it was really strange. It was just sort of a focus I had once I saw that “American Family” series and I wanted to do documentaries of the underbelly in subcultures and stuff like that. It just sort of came to…to…it realized itself. I didn’t really push it. But that year I had a project in the film workshop. In the workshop you’d vote on each other’s projects and there were only five directors and they’d get a film allotment from the school to do a film. So I was awarded a film allotment for my project, but it wasn’t the Punk Rock film of CGBG, it was about Army brat families that moved around all the time, something else that kind of fell apart.
So Alan Raymond came up to me and told me that he’d done some preliminary research on the Punk scene down at CBGB’s, and we started chatting it up. I was always interested in how subcultures are absorbed by the mainstream society mainly through fashion and music, stuff like this. I just remember walking with him for about an hour in the Village and he was a very spacey character, it was hard to get close to him – he was very focused on film projects. But he gave me all his notes and I pored over the notes, they were very good actually but they weren’t really structured into a film, it was just like...observing the scene. Punk Magazine was out at the time and he was talking to those guys [John Holmstrom and Legs Mcneil] and a number of the bands. [Alan] wasn’t a punk rocker or anything. So I kind of took it from the standpoint that I was a film journalist going to do a project and I was passed the baton from him and then I made it my own. I completely researched the crap out of it and lined everything up.
The guy who was with me at the time who was my assistant, Juliusz Kossakowski, I asked him if he wanted to be part of this project and he said, “Sure,” and he was from Brazil so he really didn’t get the scene much at all except what I prepped him with and then he latched on to it. He’d originally wanted to do a kabuki theatre thing. Maggie Carson was a friend of mine in a film class and she wasn’t attached to a project. People had to group up with the directors and I guess she was kind of grouped up with a guy who was going to do the Talking Heads, but only like a performance film. It was so boring, like why would you do something like that, just a performance film, you know, in color? We’re in film school for Christ sake. So we were kind of making fun of him, this guy, [Laughs] it was just moronic that this guy had no concept of a documentary. He actually did that film, I don’t know if he sold the footage or anything. So Maggie came over to my project because I invited her over and we got together and got excited about it because the scene was so exciting. It was just being born you know? Maggie was following the punk scene and she was into a lot of the bands so she was ahead of the curve in that regard. And then we said lets expand this allotment out by putting $10,000 of our own money into the project. With the film allotment it gave us about 10,000 feet [of film] to shoot, which, I forget how many hours that was but it was something like…
TATSOL: It says on your website you shot about 30 hours of film.
RS: That might be an exaggeration to tell you the truth, but yeah, roughly in that area. But anyway, we were working pretty good together. We were all students so the idea of sticking to roles was a foreign concept and it got us into trouble later on when we started to cut the film. But accumulating the footage wasn’t too bad. We brainstormed out questions for Maggie to ask [the people we were interviewing] and we were just posturing as just NYU students doing a film on punk rock and just had ‘em bounce off of that. It was a good idea because the foil just made the [interviewees] act out even more, you know? Like we were these straight yuppie kids and we dressed that way, we didn’t dress like punk rockers or anything.
TATSOL: Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. I was wondering how the bands felt about that, about being filmed?
RS: Well, with the Ramones, we had to go to Danny Fields first because he was managing them and he was all into it you know, Sire Records gave us permission and everything. But then Johnny [Ramone], when he saw us with the big light, we had this big light ‘cause it was so dark in the club, he immediately said, “No. Those guys can’t film,” and here we’re all set up and ready to do it. So I don’t know how it happened but we were eventually able to do it, I think Danny Fields intervened ‘cause we’d done an interview with him, it seemed like hours, you know, with a nude picture of Iggy Pop over his bed and everything, it was weird. But he intervened and we were able to do it. But there were restrictions on how close we could get [to the stage]. That’s why the footage of the Ramones is so horrible and it’s just from way back and we had to cheat a lot of the shots together, actually it turned out pretty well.
TATSOL: Yeah, I thought it so. It’s not hard footage to watch like a bad bootleg or something like that.
RS: It was an amazing thing how it all pulled together. It was the most excruciatingly difficult circumstances to film in that club, it was dark. I don’t know if you’ve been in the club have you?
TATSOL: Yeah, only once unfortunately.
RS: Yeah, so you know, it was very narrow, and there’s tables everywhere, and they packed the club past the limit and everything, it was so hard, but we kept passing the camera around, me and Juliusz were tag-teaming it, and I did all the interviews, but he was a thin nimble guy so he was ideally suited to kind of weave in for the closer shots. The interviews went phenomenally well. Maggie just had the instinct in timing. I think the idea with interviews is a timing thing, not to get in your own way and to let the subject talk and act out and stuff. Since Maggie was following the scene, she had the proper mindset and instincts about the tongue-in-cheek way to deliver things and so that was great.
We did a lot of interviews outside of the club, particularly at Punk Magazine and with Danny Fields and whatnot, but they were so boring compared to what was going on in the club, and then we cut them in to an hour and a half version of the film, but every time we went out of the club, the energy level went down so far it just didn’t seem good to us. The whole idea of collaborating that way, the way Maggie, Juliusz and I were doing the project, it falls apart when you start to make the choices about what stays and what goes and it got so problematic that we had some really nasty fights. What evolved was, it was really a clever way [of doing it] because there were three bands we divided it up along those lines and we just passed those units around and we took turn editing it. Maggie was a great editor and she assembled a lot of the film but what happened was, we sort of let audiences edit the film. We did it like Hollywood, we did these little focus group screenings and we’d invite people from all walks of life, blah, blah, blah, and we’d take notes afterwards, ask them questions and everything, so that’s how we got the idea of making the film shorter. Plus there was this opportunity to show it on PBS with Alan Raymond’s new film at the time, “Police Tapes”, but that deal fell through. But the focus groups kept hammering us about the energy loss whenever we went outside the club. We could have juiced it up with quick cutting techniques and cheating it by putting some music in the background and that kind of stuff, but at the time quick cutting didn’t really exist like it does today. The film, as it’s cut now, plays like a Ramones song sort of, like it’s short and sweet. It actually turned out OK so we were pleased with it.
The interesting thing about it is that there was a lot of footage of the interview with Richard Hell and the problem with that footage was that it made him look foolish because, you know, he’s a fairly articulate guy, but at the time he seemed to be out of it or something because he had great difficulty putting long, meandering sentences together. He also seemed to be so tired that he was falling asleep half the time but would then wake up suddenly. So he was so out of it that he couldn’t string together a thought, it’d be all over the place. We just couldn’t cut it in a way that would be flattering. We didn’t want to make fun of him being out of it, so it was problematic and we decided to cut it out entirely, plus it was outside the club again, that idea, so that’s why you don’t see any Richard Hell interview [in the film].
If I was to redo the film today, I could do an hour version that would absolutely rock. Legs McNeil gave a great interview and John Holmstrom as well. It was at Punk Magazine. We did a b-roll on the magazine and the production, it was really cool.
TATSOL: That would be cool to see. I wanted to ask you about that. I was wondering if you had ever thought about making a longer cut of the film, but it sounds like you already experimented with that idea and decided that this was the best cut for the film.
RS: An unfortunate thing happened at the editing suite we were in, they accidentally, I don’t know how it happened, but they thought we had left and they threw away a lot of our footage.
TATSOL: No way. Oh man, that sucks.
RS: Yeah, it’s pretty much gone except for clips here and there. But the version you see [on the DVD] was cut at the time and it was so fractious a thing to try to get it together to edit, it was just so emotionally exhausting to work that way. It’s amazing that it got pulled together at all, but that’s the situation really.
TATSOL: I was wondering if you ever did any filming over at Max’s Kansas City for this project? Or was that a whole other scene you weren’t interested in portraying in your film?
RS: Well, I’m a film formalist. When I do a film I always design it like a graphic artist would approach a canvas or other medium. They would think of the medium they would want to use and what feeling or tone they would want to establish by using a medium in a certain way. So that is why, by the way, it was the talk between me and Alan that established doing that film in grainy, pushed, news stock…like we did because it just suited the material, it looked like Maplethorpe’s photos and the posters and the album cover that the Ramones put out that year. I think it was “Rocket To Russia.”
TATSOL: Yeah, kind of a grainy black and white kind of graphics style.
RS: Exactly. You know, while that other guy was doing a performance film in pristine color, he wasn’t understanding why we were doing ours in news stock, so we’d get the graininess going. So that’s the idea, I always approach film in a painter-ly way so this goes back to the idea that Max’s and the other places weren’t the proper set because, you get where I’m going with this…here at CBG it was pure punk.
TATSOL: Yeah, you still had a bit of the glam-rock thing going on at Max’s at that time.
RS: Yeah, exactly. You couldn’t design a better set than CBGB. Hilly instinctively knew this, he knew to leave the graffiti up, to leave the swag and the posters up that people put up, right? He was the original analog, user-created venue, right? [Laughs]. Let people…kind of…what would you call it?
TATSOL: Do the interior design…[Laughs]
RS: [Laughs] Yeah, the interior design. You couldn’t get a better fuckin’ designer to do that. It just came across just super with our film because that was the background. And what happens when you watch a film, well, the background and the foreground and everything gets flattened and we were picking up the background as intense as the foreground and so on and so forth.
TATSOL: It’s kind of cool that it’s done in that kind of grainy film stock because now, years later it gives it a more historical tone.
RS: Well, yeah, that too. But at the time it just went along with the whole theme. A lot of forces came together to make the film happen other than just me and that’s what happens in film, that’s the magic of film-making. You gotta be quick on your toes to adjust and bring mistakes or so-called mistakes or things that you discover as you go along in to the project. But yeah, approaching it in the painter-ly way, I didn’t think we had to go anywhere else. You only had a certain amount of time to create an intense tone or feeling so why dilute it.
TATSOL: Well, it’s a great story. I’m thrilled that the film exists, it’s a really important historical document of a special time that many of us couldn’t experience because we were to young or whatever, especially now that the club is gone and there’s such an interest in that whole scene.
RS: To tell you the truth, I’m not following it, I’m just doing my own thing. What is the scene now? It seemed it slipped away for a while and then the lady I spoke to at the New York Public Library recently said it was on the upswing with that Howl Festival thing.
TATSOL: I think it’s that whole “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone” kind of thing.
RS: Really. But when did it start though?
TATSOL: The uptick in interest in that scene?
RS: Yeah, was it after CBGB’s folded?
TATSOL: I think it was coming before that. I think some of the interest was rekindled as the Ramones started to pass away a few years ago. I can’t remember where I read it in an interview someplace, but it was something to the effect of, “we never appreciated the people when they were here, and now that they’ve passed away, we realize we how much we REALLY DID like those people.” I think it applies to the club as well.
RS: [Laughs…]
TATSOL: And then the whole thing with the club eventually closing in 2006, there was some controversy there with the whole “Save CBGB” thing, and Hilly’s fight to keep the club open while he was being literally forced out. I think a lot of the revived interest came from that. It was in the media quite a bit.
RS: Well let me ask you, if you said you were in the club, how old are you?
TATSOL: I’m 39. I went to the club one time in March of 2004 and I actually met Hilly. I couldn’t believe it. It was about 10:30 in the morning and I was down there to take a few photos and there were these two guys standing outside the club, so I asked one of them to take a photo of me in front of the club and he said, “Sure.” And the front door was open, they were busy doing some cleaning inside and I asked the guy taking the photo if I could poke my head inside and he said he didn’t think that it would be a problem. He yelled inside and asked Hilly if he minded if I came in for a few minutes to take a look around, and Hilly said, “Yea, come on in.” I was shocked to be meeting him.
RS: He was friendly?
TATSOL: Oh, yeah. Totally cool. He let me come in and told me not to take too long, but I got a chance to walk in and look around a bit and actually talk to him for about 5 or 10 minutes. He even agreed to let me take a picture of him. He was telling me about how the Bowery was changing so much…how it was hardly recognizable anymore.
RS: Oh yeah, that was before it really turned, eh?
TATSOL: Yeah. He told me about a place where he said I could get a good sandwich up the block and I said goodbye and left. I was amazed that I had just met him. He seemed to be in reasonably good health then too, from what I could see, that was in 2004. And then he passed away just over two years ago, in August of 2007.
RS: [Losing the club] killed him…
TATSOL: Yeah, I think so too. It was his life and there had to be a lot of stress with that whole situation.
Well, anyway, it’s been really cool talking to you Ric, I appreciate you taking the time to talk and for giving me the chance to do something I’ve never really done before, like I said, you’re my first “real” interview for this blog, so it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. I’m glad to be able to help get the word out about your awesome film.
RS: Hey, that’s all right man…I wish you the best of luck with that. It’s been nice talking to you.
Punking Out
TATSOL: It says on your website you shot about 30 hours of film.
RS: That might be an exaggeration to tell you the truth, but yeah, roughly in that area. But anyway, we were working pretty good together. We were all students so the idea of sticking to roles was a foreign concept and it got us into trouble later on when we started to cut the film. But accumulating the footage wasn’t too bad. We brainstormed out questions for Maggie to ask [the people we were interviewing] and we were just posturing as just NYU students doing a film on punk rock and just had ‘em bounce off of that. It was a good idea because the foil just made the [interviewees] act out even more, you know? Like we were these straight yuppie kids and we dressed that way, we didn’t dress like punk rockers or anything.
TATSOL: Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. I was wondering how the bands felt about that, about being filmed?
RS: Well, with the Ramones, we had to go to Danny Fields first because he was managing them and he was all into it you know, Sire Records gave us permission and everything. But then Johnny [Ramone], when he saw us with the big light, we had this big light ‘cause it was so dark in the club, he immediately said, “No. Those guys can’t film,” and here we’re all set up and ready to do it. So I don’t know how it happened but we were eventually able to do it, I think Danny Fields intervened ‘cause we’d done an interview with him, it seemed like hours, you know, with a nude picture of Iggy Pop over his bed and everything, it was weird. But he intervened and we were able to do it. But there were restrictions on how close we could get [to the stage]. That’s why the footage of the Ramones is so horrible and it’s just from way back and we had to cheat a lot of the shots together, actually it turned out pretty well.
TATSOL: Yeah, I thought it so. It’s not hard footage to watch like a bad bootleg or something like that.
RS: It was an amazing thing how it all pulled together. It was the most excruciatingly difficult circumstances to film in that club, it was dark. I don’t know if you’ve been in the club have you?
TATSOL: Yeah, only once unfortunately.
RS: Yeah, so you know, it was very narrow, and there’s tables everywhere, and they packed the club past the limit and everything, it was so hard, but we kept passing the camera around, me and Juliusz were tag-teaming it, and I did all the interviews, but he was a thin nimble guy so he was ideally suited to kind of weave in for the closer shots. The interviews went phenomenally well. Maggie just had the instinct in timing. I think the idea with interviews is a timing thing, not to get in your own way and to let the subject talk and act out and stuff. Since Maggie was following the scene, she had the proper mindset and instincts about the tongue-in-cheek way to deliver things and so that was great.
We did a lot of interviews outside of the club, particularly at Punk Magazine and with Danny Fields and whatnot, but they were so boring compared to what was going on in the club, and then we cut them in to an hour and a half version of the film, but every time we went out of the club, the energy level went down so far it just didn’t seem good to us. The whole idea of collaborating that way, the way Maggie, Juliusz and I were doing the project, it falls apart when you start to make the choices about what stays and what goes and it got so problematic that we had some really nasty fights. What evolved was, it was really a clever way [of doing it] because there were three bands we divided it up along those lines and we just passed those units around and we took turn editing it. Maggie was a great editor and she assembled a lot of the film but what happened was, we sort of let audiences edit the film. We did it like Hollywood, we did these little focus group screenings and we’d invite people from all walks of life, blah, blah, blah, and we’d take notes afterwards, ask them questions and everything, so that’s how we got the idea of making the film shorter. Plus there was this opportunity to show it on PBS with Alan Raymond’s new film at the time, “Police Tapes”, but that deal fell through. But the focus groups kept hammering us about the energy loss whenever we went outside the club. We could have juiced it up with quick cutting techniques and cheating it by putting some music in the background and that kind of stuff, but at the time quick cutting didn’t really exist like it does today. The film, as it’s cut now, plays like a Ramones song sort of, like it’s short and sweet. It actually turned out OK so we were pleased with it.
The interesting thing about it is that there was a lot of footage of the interview with Richard Hell and the problem with that footage was that it made him look foolish because, you know, he’s a fairly articulate guy, but at the time he seemed to be out of it or something because he had great difficulty putting long, meandering sentences together. He also seemed to be so tired that he was falling asleep half the time but would then wake up suddenly. So he was so out of it that he couldn’t string together a thought, it’d be all over the place. We just couldn’t cut it in a way that would be flattering. We didn’t want to make fun of him being out of it, so it was problematic and we decided to cut it out entirely, plus it was outside the club again, that idea, so that’s why you don’t see any Richard Hell interview [in the film].
If I was to redo the film today, I could do an hour version that would absolutely rock. Legs McNeil gave a great interview and John Holmstrom as well. It was at Punk Magazine. We did a b-roll on the magazine and the production, it was really cool.
TATSOL: That would be cool to see. I wanted to ask you about that. I was wondering if you had ever thought about making a longer cut of the film, but it sounds like you already experimented with that idea and decided that this was the best cut for the film.
RS: An unfortunate thing happened at the editing suite we were in, they accidentally, I don’t know how it happened, but they thought we had left and they threw away a lot of our footage.
TATSOL: No way. Oh man, that sucks.
RS: Yeah, it’s pretty much gone except for clips here and there. But the version you see [on the DVD] was cut at the time and it was so fractious a thing to try to get it together to edit, it was just so emotionally exhausting to work that way. It’s amazing that it got pulled together at all, but that’s the situation really.
TATSOL: I was wondering if you ever did any filming over at Max’s Kansas City for this project? Or was that a whole other scene you weren’t interested in portraying in your film?
RS: Well, I’m a film formalist. When I do a film I always design it like a graphic artist would approach a canvas or other medium. They would think of the medium they would want to use and what feeling or tone they would want to establish by using a medium in a certain way. So that is why, by the way, it was the talk between me and Alan that established doing that film in grainy, pushed, news stock…like we did because it just suited the material, it looked like Maplethorpe’s photos and the posters and the album cover that the Ramones put out that year. I think it was “Rocket To Russia.”
TATSOL: Yeah, kind of a grainy black and white kind of graphics style.
RS: Exactly. You know, while that other guy was doing a performance film in pristine color, he wasn’t understanding why we were doing ours in news stock, so we’d get the graininess going. So that’s the idea, I always approach film in a painter-ly way so this goes back to the idea that Max’s and the other places weren’t the proper set because, you get where I’m going with this…here at CBG it was pure punk.
TATSOL: Yeah, you still had a bit of the glam-rock thing going on at Max’s at that time.
RS: Yeah, exactly. You couldn’t design a better set than CBGB. Hilly instinctively knew this, he knew to leave the graffiti up, to leave the swag and the posters up that people put up, right? He was the original analog, user-created venue, right? [Laughs]. Let people…kind of…what would you call it?
TATSOL: Do the interior design…[Laughs]
RS: [Laughs] Yeah, the interior design. You couldn’t get a better fuckin’ designer to do that. It just came across just super with our film because that was the background. And what happens when you watch a film, well, the background and the foreground and everything gets flattened and we were picking up the background as intense as the foreground and so on and so forth.
TATSOL: It’s kind of cool that it’s done in that kind of grainy film stock because now, years later it gives it a more historical tone.
RS: Well, yeah, that too. But at the time it just went along with the whole theme. A lot of forces came together to make the film happen other than just me and that’s what happens in film, that’s the magic of film-making. You gotta be quick on your toes to adjust and bring mistakes or so-called mistakes or things that you discover as you go along in to the project. But yeah, approaching it in the painter-ly way, I didn’t think we had to go anywhere else. You only had a certain amount of time to create an intense tone or feeling so why dilute it.
TATSOL: Well, it’s a great story. I’m thrilled that the film exists, it’s a really important historical document of a special time that many of us couldn’t experience because we were to young or whatever, especially now that the club is gone and there’s such an interest in that whole scene.
RS: To tell you the truth, I’m not following it, I’m just doing my own thing. What is the scene now? It seemed it slipped away for a while and then the lady I spoke to at the New York Public Library recently said it was on the upswing with that Howl Festival thing.
TATSOL: I think it’s that whole “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone” kind of thing.
RS: Really. But when did it start though?
TATSOL: The uptick in interest in that scene?
RS: Yeah, was it after CBGB’s folded?
TATSOL: I think it was coming before that. I think some of the interest was rekindled as the Ramones started to pass away a few years ago. I can’t remember where I read it in an interview someplace, but it was something to the effect of, “we never appreciated the people when they were here, and now that they’ve passed away, we realize we how much we REALLY DID like those people.” I think it applies to the club as well.
RS: [Laughs…]
TATSOL: And then the whole thing with the club eventually closing in 2006, there was some controversy there with the whole “Save CBGB” thing, and Hilly’s fight to keep the club open while he was being literally forced out. I think a lot of the revived interest came from that. It was in the media quite a bit.
RS: Well let me ask you, if you said you were in the club, how old are you?
TATSOL: I’m 39. I went to the club one time in March of 2004 and I actually met Hilly. I couldn’t believe it. It was about 10:30 in the morning and I was down there to take a few photos and there were these two guys standing outside the club, so I asked one of them to take a photo of me in front of the club and he said, “Sure.” And the front door was open, they were busy doing some cleaning inside and I asked the guy taking the photo if I could poke my head inside and he said he didn’t think that it would be a problem. He yelled inside and asked Hilly if he minded if I came in for a few minutes to take a look around, and Hilly said, “Yea, come on in.” I was shocked to be meeting him.
RS: He was friendly?
TATSOL: Oh, yeah. Totally cool. He let me come in and told me not to take too long, but I got a chance to walk in and look around a bit and actually talk to him for about 5 or 10 minutes. He even agreed to let me take a picture of him. He was telling me about how the Bowery was changing so much…how it was hardly recognizable anymore.
RS: Oh yeah, that was before it really turned, eh?
TATSOL: Yeah. He told me about a place where he said I could get a good sandwich up the block and I said goodbye and left. I was amazed that I had just met him. He seemed to be in reasonably good health then too, from what I could see, that was in 2004. And then he passed away just over two years ago, in August of 2007.
RS: [Losing the club] killed him…
TATSOL: Yeah, I think so too. It was his life and there had to be a lot of stress with that whole situation.
Well, anyway, it’s been really cool talking to you Ric, I appreciate you taking the time to talk and for giving me the chance to do something I’ve never really done before, like I said, you’re my first “real” interview for this blog, so it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. I’m glad to be able to help get the word out about your awesome film.
RS: Hey, that’s all right man…I wish you the best of luck with that. It’s been nice talking to you.
Punking Out
Visit Ric's website for more information on the film and find out how to obtain a DVD copy for your own home library at: PunkingOutFilm.com.
3 comments:
Just fantastic. I'm proud to know you!
Thanks, KB, I really appreciate it. Thank YOU for turning me on to the film in the first place...without your piece I might never have attempted this.
Isn't it great how in this digital age whatever comes out from someone's mouth and lands on a webpage tends to instantly be recognized as fact. Unfortunately the interviewer never did bother to corroborate this very slanted story by Ric Shore with Ric's friend filmmaker Maggie Carson nor with Ric's "assistant" Juliusz Kossakowski. My oh my, isn't ego a bitch!
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