Remembrances of Things Past Whilst I Can Actually Remember Them....

[captainsblog]

I've become friends with two chroniclers of things from my not-too-distant memories. One, from Buffalo, pens a "Torn-Down Tuesday" column in the Buffalo News; the other, in Rochester, usually posts Saturday memories of "Whatever Happened to...." I'll sometimes be reminded of something, and will send one or the other the suggestion of a column about it, only to find that they'd already written about it months or years before.

Anyway.... Alan from Rochester did a year-ending post last week which democratically chronicled (hee) which were the most-viewed posts of his from 2019. The Top Ten was made up mostly of restaurants (the most-viewed of which, coming in at second overall, was one I successfully put through Chapter 11 back then), a gaming place, a discount store, a macaroni factory, and, topping them all,  a racy public-access show on Greater Rochester Cablevision called "Life Without Shame." His very paper described it at the time as "a low-grade video version of the loathsome Howard Stern radio show," which alone is why I don't remember ever watching it. But it did bring back an even earlier memory of a late-night insane asylum of the airwaves from my Cornell days. 

Ithaca was one of the earliest adopters of cable, or as it was then sometimes termed, CATV for "community antenna television."  The reasons were demographic and geographic: Tompkins County was too small an area for its own over-air television stations, and the hills around the city kept signals from coming in well, if at all, from the nearest licensed metropolises of Binghamton, Syracuse and Elmira. So a pioneer named Anthony Cerrache built one of the first "community antenna" networks, even funneling FM radio stations through the pipes for those choosing that.  Ithaca was one of the first markets in the country to get to discover a new Warner Brothers offering called "Home Box," horribly priced unless you "knew a guy," usually named "Lou," who could do amazing things on top of a telephone pole to get you unscrambled eggs ifyaknowhaImean...

As governments got into the business of regulating these new inventions, one of the sops that the operators could give away for free-or-close was to dedicate a "public access" channel or two to either local governments for meeting broadcasts or announcements, or to anyone who came in to the company studio, first-come-first-serve-First-Amendment-protected.  That was the model that was still in place years later in Rochester when "Life Without Shame" came along.  In Ithaca in the late 70s, there were likely yoga classes, cooking shows, heated political discussions,....

and this guy.



My then-roommates would stay up late with me on Friday nights for the sheer high (heh) entertainment values (and low production values) of this public access program. The Sun, which got that picture (I might have written the caption), also wrote an entire piece on it, viewable in its entirety here, but some highlights from the digitized version of the 1979 story:

Getting ragged- wearing old clothes and doing what you feel at any particular moment, is the philosophy of Rod Ice, Punk rock fanatic and star of the television show "Punk Out." Punk Out appears Friday nights from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. on Community access television channel 13 . The show's format is loose . There is no script and everything is spontaneous says Ice , creator of the show . The idea behind punk is to mock things and be very crude , according to Ice . He says punk allows him to look at life as if it does not really matter and lets him look ragged , "I can get into rusty cars and looking ragged."

The piece also mentions featured performers like Manic McManus and Neon Diamond, but not the co-star we remembered, Punk Dave, whose job on the show was primarily taking 45s of disco records and blowin' them up real good on the air to the scream of "DESTROYYYYY DISCOOOOOO!"

Every Friday Ice arrives at the small television studio located on State Street an hour before air time in order to prepare the set for the night's performance Preparation consisted of putting on his leather jacket , spreading broken glass on the floor and adjusting a poster of Elvis Costello. Ice , in long hair and a beard is already wearing a lock and chain around his neck and chains on his pants and wrist when he arrives at the studio. The show is a low budget , one camera operation . All the actors , including Ice, are not paid.

I find no other Internet mention of Mr. Ice.  I tend to suspect, as I do about similar people from back then, that he now runs a hedge fund. (Last time I presumed that, it turned out I was right.)  Cerrache wound up selling to the conglomerate that became Time Warner Cable.  Public access channels are now buried in the bandwidth with little of interest appearing on them.

Raggedy, man:P

(I just sent my roommate from that era a copy of the article. He remembered Rod, having reached out to complain once that the show's playing the Sex Pistols' "Belsen was a Gas" was too over-the-top, even for us.  We'd planned on seeing Jim this week as he tried resolving his Deer Strucker vehicle situation, but in the end he decided to just take a local dealer's offer to buy the repaired car from him and not try to shop it around anywhere else locally. The car would always have a rap sheet from the accident and, even as a Honda, wouldn't be expected to hold any value. After learning of what a stupid parking lot fender-bender did to the value of my current car, I can't say I'm surprised.)

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I have other social media rabbit holes to my assorted waybacks. Facebook connects me with people from the town I grew up in, with groups of lawyers, and others from various eras.  I usually don't sit around reminiscing about these things, but they just come and find me. For instance, seeing this the other day as I was heading out of the DVD stacks of the library:



We had a Little Golden Book-and-songtape version of that story that we got for Emily when she was little. I knew the singer on the tape from his days performing in Ithaca (decidedly NOT from watching Punk Out), and think I even took Em to one of his folk concerts in Rochester after she came along. I became Facebook friends with him recently, and shared that picture with him, noting that our little girl was 28 now. His girls are in college now, too:) (I heard from him; he offered to send me one. I think I'll wait to see who has grandkids first;)  As I was sending the picture, along similar lines, Shawn Colvin’s cover of Zevon’s “Tenderness on the Block” came on our soundbar. (Not Patty Larkin as the video says.) A pretty touching composition for a guy who also brought us “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.”

Another group I'm in is dedicated to reminiscing about one famed Rochester music club of primarily the 80s.  Eleanor and I saw many shows there, but I also represented the owner back in the day.  It closed ages ago, and the place has turned over and is now in the hands of a local bar operator, who my current office represents.  I put some feelers out over the weekend about whether there would be any interest in having a Reunion Night of some of the old patrons, staff and maybe even performers who made the place so legendary.  The initial reaction was very positive, but it's going to take the cooperation and probably active participation of both old owner and new to make it happen. I do not want to turn this into an all-consuming effort on my part, but if there's interest and I can facilitate things, it would be one bloody amazing evening.

And don't worry, Rod: the place never did disco;)