The Shop That Punk Built
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Version 0 of 1. To anyone passing by Trash and Vaudeville, the rock-and-roll emporium on St. Marks Place, the sinewy peacock with a bleached shag on the outside steps is a familiar sight. This punk of a certain age is the store’s manager and buyer, Jimmy Webb, who on an afternoon late last month wore a leather biker vest and ripped tiger-striped pants that sagged, revealing his black briefs. “People ask me questions because I’m a lone survivor and can make a sentence,” Mr. Webb said. He laughed, a signature dry cackle that dissolved into a rasp, and clapped his hands. The 50 or so silver bracelets on his tattooed arms rang like sleigh bells. Open since 1975, Trash and Vaudeville, which on this day was filled with teenagers with orange hair and Mohawks, is also a bohemian survivor, the last bastion of punk on a thoroughfare now overrun with noodle shops and yoga-mat-toting passers-by. This week, as fashion celebrates the movement (and eventual co-opting of it) with the “Punk: Chaos to Couture” exhibition at the Met, it is heartening to know that a piece of punk’s D.I.Y. history still thrives. “When punk was at its height,” said Marky Ramone, the drummer of the first-wave innovators, the Ramones, “it was the only place to go at that time, and it still is.” The entire band, as well as Blondie, the Heartbreakers, the Dead Boys and virtually every other group in the scene were frequent shoppers. “Me and Dee Dee would go there and try out the display clothing,” Mr. Ramone said. “Joey had a problem finding pants to fit him and would always buy them there. He was 6-foot-5 ½ with a 36-inch waist.” That style of black jeans, the house brand, is still for sale there. The store caters to disenfranchised rock fans as well as fashion insiders. “It smells of punk rock,” said Nicola Formichetti, now the artistic director of Diesel. “The store always has a solution. Every job, I start there. For my first ever Lady Gaga job, I went there and got her amazing stripper shoes and created an entire wardrobe for her dancers.” Mr. Webb, 55, sat in the garish shoe department surrounded by thigh-highs and Dr. Martens. (The shop was the first in the United States to carry the brand.) He works seven days a week and never takes a vacation. “It’s my new drug of choice, but it’s healthy,” he said, “and it never betrays me.” His journey to the store was long and often arduous, and began when he was 14 years old. “I’m from a hillbilly town upstate where they hunt deer,” he said. “We walked to the creek with Boone’s Farm a friend’s older sister bought us and listened to ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ on a transistor radio.” Lou Reed’s 1972 ode to hustlers, transsexuals and transsexual hustlers would alter Mr. Webb’s life. “A friend asked, ‘Do you know what it means?’ ” he recalled. “I did without knowing it. I knew I was a boy that had to leave to go somewhere.” At 16, he ran away to New York with a pillowcase full of clothes. It was 1975. “Coming into Trash and Vaudeville my first time, I knew I’d found a home and I wasn’t crazy,” he said. At first, Mr. Webb worked as a bar-back in a gay establishment on the Upper West Side at the height of the neighborhood’s Needle Park infamy, attended hair school (he flunked grandiosely) and was a regular at CBGB. He fell into heroin addiction for 20 years and lived in Tompkins Square Park, eventually returning upstate. “It got worse before it got better,” he said. “They thought I was going to die. After rebuilding my body and spirit, I wanted to go back to the city I loved.” Mr. Webb, who says he has been sober for 18 years, wrote a letter to the owner of Trash and Vaudeville seeking a job. “I would not be alive or the man I am without Ray Goodman,” he said. “I have the best life ever. He took a chance on me.” RAY GOODMAN’S FIRST TIME on St. Marks came when he was 13 and his mother took him to see an Off Broadway “Man of La Mancha.” “I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” Mr. Goodman said, “but it felt right, and I’ve wanted to be a part of it ever since. That energy still flows here. It’s changed, but you still see more interesting people going up and down this street than any other.” As a teenager, he would trek to St. Marks to buy posters and buttons to sell at his Jersey City high school. He attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, earning a degree in buying and merchandising. “I loved rock ’n’ roll,” he said, “but I wasn’t a good enough drummer to make it in a band. I had to figure out how I could stay close to the scene.” By 1975, he was working at a shop called Limbo, at 4 St. Marks Place, that sold rock paraphernalia and Army surplus. “This block was pretty funky, but not in the good sense,” he said. “It was gross and seedy.” St. Marks had a long countercultural history, from the beatniks to the hippies, but was then at an impasse. The Dom, where the Velvet Underground had residency, and the Electric Circus concert hall had closed. The tenements on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s 1973 “Physical Graffiti” album survive. When he was 21, Mr. Goodman, who at the time wore aviators and carried a pick in his back pocket for his Afro, bought Limbo from the owners. He had seen the words “trash” and “vaudeville” in the same paragraph in a magazine and thought they went well together. His rechristened enterprise was sandwiched between the New St. Marks Baths, the gay sex den, and the Valencia Hotel, a pay-by-the-hour haven for hookers. When the pinball parlor downstairs vacated, he took over the space, creating the two-story shop that exists today. When punk broke, it became the go-to shop in the city, frequented by icons like Patti Smith and Iggy Pop, as well as countless now-forgotten, unrecorded bands. When the British scene erupted, Mr. Goodman traveled to London and returned with its more theatrical take on punk, and sold bondage pants and other outré regalia. “The only other place you could find studded cuffs was at a gay leather shop,” Mr. Webb said. The fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger was a regular. “The Clash and Sex Pistols were playing really loud,” he remembered of the store. “All of the employees had tattoos and safety pin earrings and ripped T-shirts. Everything was black, white or red tartan.” At the time, Mr. Hilfiger owned upstate stores called the Underground and People’s Place. “We would buy clothes from Trash and Vaudeville and resell them,” he said. “We ran newspaper ads with a photograph of my brother Andy’s band, Vaudeville. They took the name from them they thought it was so cool. They were in punk gear, and the headline said, ‘Would you buy clothes from these people?’ ” Mr. Hilfiger’s guests at the Met gala included Mr. Ramone and his wife, Marion, who wore a custom dress by the designer of Trash and Vaudeville’s over-the-top in-house label (and wife of the owner), Daang Goodman. The couple met in 1984, but she was already a fan of the store. “It changed my life,” she said of her first visit. “I bought everything and went and dyed my hair.” A Laotian beauty, she still has bleached rocker hair. The label was renamed Tripp and is now sold in more than 300 stores worldwide. As the eras shifted, the store never lost its punk base but also incorporated the fans of whatever strain of rock was of the moment, surviving as the block was remade. “We are true mom-and-pop, the bodega of rock ’n’ roll clothing,” Mr. Webb said. “It’s here because of truth and spirit, just like Iggy Pop giving it his best every night and going all the way until everything in your body is broken except your soul and rock ’n’ roll. We can move it to Mars and still live.” One of the next-generation punk staff members, born decades after the store opened, put her hand to her throat and chimed in, “I’m getting choked up.” |