Punk Rock Is Back
Jimmy Webb died a year ago this April. The punk rock paradise that is Trash and Vaudeville still stands on 7th Street, where it moved when its iconic home on St. Mark’s was shuttered, but the East Village is a little less colorful without the store’s shaggy-haired, slashed-jeans-wearing longtime manager.
“The youths gone wild that were lucky enough to have their lives saved by rock and roll with help and encouragement from the guiding hands and kind words of the legendary Jimmy Webb were very blessed indeed,” the stylist Bill Mullen wrote me. “Jimmy ruled Trash and Vaudeville as an inclusive kingdom. He gave the same attention to a 14-year-old getting her first Doc Martens as he did to a 40-year-old procuring an army of Beatle boots for a fashion show.”
Mullen, like many Trash and Vaudeville shoppers over the decades, treasured his encounters with Webb. “To his fans and customers and anyone lucky enough to witness him boogie-ing onstage at an Iggy Pop concert, Jimmy was pure magic and a total superstar… Jimmy will be remembered first and foremost as a sweet and gentle man who loved music and fashion and all combinations of the two...”
It doesn’t help the East Village’s cause that around the corner from Trash and Vaudeville on Avenue A the Pyramid Club just permanently closed its doors on 41 years of good times. I Need More, the shop Webb opened on Orchard Street in 2017, a year after Trash and Vaudeville moved, is now strictly virtual, an e-commerce site for memorabilia.
Will the punk rock character of the neighborhood survive the pandemic? Webb believed it was a nature thing, not a nurture thing, but it would seem that forces are conspiring against this slice of the Big Apple. At least we have the fall runways. For his “Immortal Rock Spirit” show, Junya Watanabe collaged a genre-agnostic collection of vintage band tees – The Who, Def Leppard, Kiss, and Queen – with Versace scarves, MA-1 jackets, and vintage Levi’s, telegraphing both the alienation and the deep sense of belonging that comes with adherence to punk dress codes.
Watanabe is a fan to beat all fans, but he was far from alone in his embrace of rocker paraphernalia. Marine Serre – a Motorhead head, apparently – put a young family in patch-worked rock tees of her own. Kim Gordon posed for Coach’s look book with her daughter Coco Gordon Moore. And R13’s Chris Leba channeled the grunge via Sonic Youth T-shirts and Kurt Cobain flannels and shades. “I came to New York City in the fall of ’85; it was a different place [then]: a little scary and dangerous, very gritty – a much more irreverent version of what it is today,” Leba said. “I was an empty canvas, and what was painted on that blank canvas was everything that was going on in the East Village scene then. With each decade, things have been added to that canvas, but the foundation has always been and will always be rooted in those formidable years of the mid-’80s. Every decade and every new generation defines its own language of what cool is, mine was defined from there.”
Years ago, an old colleague of mine asked Webb, can you really be an authentic punk in 2013? He was resolute. “Yes. I smell it. I see it… You can be an authentic punk when it’s in your spirit.” A cool T-shirt doesn’t hurt either. (www.vougue .com)