The problem is me, continued: The Psychedelic Furs at the Marble Bar

Psychedelic Furs, Marble Bar, Baltimore, Sunday 5 July 1981

A George Herriman-inspired flyer for the Marble Bar announcing the upcoming Psychedelic Furs show. [1]
Poster by George R. Wilcox/Musigrafix. Image source: Accelerated Decrepitude

After the end of the academic year in Chicago I would return to the family home in Baltimore to work for the summer. There were three advantages to being at home: I didn't have to pay for meals, I had the use of a car, and the drinking age in Baltimore was only 18, which meant I could see shows at venues where alcohol was served. The chief disadvantage, of course, was that I was living at home.

Fortunately for my sanity Baltimore had become home to the City Paper, an alternative weekly similar to Chicago's Reader and New York's Village Voice. As part of my exploration of punk rock (see The problem is me) I began to notice ads for interesting-sounding shows at a place called the Marble Bar. It was located on West Franklin Street in the basement of the Congress Hotel, a former luxury hotel that was now an SRO in a run-down neighborhood just north of downtown. The Marble Bar had live local bands almost every night and once or twice a month hosted a group on tour.

To enter the Marble Bar you had to walk down narrow, dimly-lit stairs into a vast basement room. On the far side was a bar of solid marble. I've seen multiple online claims that the bar was 72 feet long; whatever its dimensions, it was huge.

The Marble Bar's marble bar. Image source: Baltimore Business Journal

The owners, Roger and LesLee Anderson, tended bar except when they'd take the stage with the house band (otherwise known as The Alcoholics) to do vintage rock 'n' roll covers. As I recall, a can of Budweiser cost $1. I would generally buy one when I arrived and then nurse it for the rest of the night. In my defense, I was an impoverished student and was supposed to be saving money for my return to college in the fall. And hey, it probably made for a safer drive home after closing.

LesLee and Roger Anderson at the Marble Bar. Photo courtesy LesLee Anderson. Image source: Baltimore Magazine

I don't remember the first night I went there in the summer of 1979 or 1980, but I soon went there regularly on Friday or Saturday nights. (Yes, I was one of the derided "weekend punks.") I would also go on a worknight (ah, youth) if a band I'd heard of was appearing there.

For a Baltimore basement dive the Marble Bar hosted some surprising shows, including Black Flag with the Minutemen (circa What Makes A Man Start Fires?), the Bush Tetras (circa Rituals), The Cramps (circa Smell of Female), the Dead Boys (circa Night of the Living Dead Boys), the Dead Kennedys (circa In God We Trust, Inc.), Iggy Pop (circa New Values), Sonic Youth (circa Confusion is Sex), The Teardrop Explodes (circa Kilimanjaro), Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan, the Undertones (circa Positive Touch), and X (circa Wild Gift—a great show, and unfortunately one of only two of those listed that I was able to see, the other being the Bush Tetras). Baltimore's location between New York City and Washington DC meant that it was a logical place for bands to stop over on their East Coast tours, and musicians probably spread the word about Roger and LesLee's stalwart support of the local scene.

Poison Ivy of The Cramps at the Marble Bar, 2 March 1983. Image source: Jim M (Flickr)

The bar wasn't air-conditioned and the only ventilation was its open door, so on nights when it was packed it could get pretty muggy and airless. It was, of course, also the era when people smoked in bars, and so before the night had advanced very far there was always a thick pall of (mostly) cigarette smoke hanging in the air. When you arrived home after a night at the Marble Bar your hair and clothes smelled like an ashtray.

The most crowded I ever saw the place was when the Psychedelic Furs played there. Like so many English punk and new wave bands they were formed after a Sex Pistols concert, but their sound also hearkened back to the early 70s glam rock era. [2] Like Roxy Music, the Furs included a saxophonist (Duncan Kilburn) in their lineup; like Lou Reed and David Bowie, vocalist Richard Butler sounded world-weary and his lyrics were often elliptical. But although their sound drew on many influences, Butler's gravelly, whiskey-and-cigarettes vocals and John Ashton's flanged guitar also made it distinctive.

The Marble Bar had a sign near the door announcing that the maximum occupancy was 449 people, but I'm guessing there were many more jammed into the club that night. We were so tightly wedged together in front of the stage that you couldn't move; had there been a fire none of us would have made it out alive. I have no idea how the Furs made their way through the densely packed crowd massed between the dressing rooms and the low platform that served as the stage, but somehow the band suddenly materialized a few feet in front of me. In addition to Richard Butler, Ashton and Kilburn, the band included Roger Morris on second guitar, Butler's brother Tim on bass, and Vince Ely on drums. When they launched into the first song, "Into You Like A Train," we all started jumping up and down in unison, because that was the only way you could move. And if the people jammed up against you were jumping up and down, you did too. I understood instantly why English punks had invented the pogo.

The Furs had just released their second album, Talk Talk Talk, and played most of its songs, including "Mr. Jones," "All of This and Nothing," and "Pretty in Pink," plus many favorites from their first album (here is the setlist). Although they would go on later to have some hit synth-pop and dance singles, and "Pretty in Pink" would even become the title song of a John Hughes movie [3], for me the band was at its peak this July night in a sweaty Baltimore basement.

Astonishingly, the Marble Bar show was recorded and has been posted. I'm amazed that 43 years later I can, at least aurally, relive that night, sound system issues and all (you can hear the high end drop out towards the end of "Pretty in Pink" at about 27:24 in the video, and it stays out for the rest of the show). At the end of the show (around 55:12 in the video) Roger Anderson says "this is one of the best shows we've ever had here," while apologizing for the sound and proactively refusing the refunds that no one was asking for—we just wanted an encore. A very Marble Bar moment. I don't recall being disappointed by the sound, but I was very close to the stage—so close that I remember watching the ever-lengthening ash on Richard Butler's cigarette, waiting for it to fall. The song "Fall" from their first album was not, alas, on their set list; probably it was planned for an encore that didn't happen due to the sound system issues. Whatever the problems with the sound system, it was a great concert and a peak Marble Bar experience.

https://youtu.be/KjQn895U4n0

Coda: On 26 April 1984 Roger Anderson had a fatal heart attack in the Marble Bar. [4] LesLee tried to keep the club going for another year or so, but in May 1985 she gave up the lease. Apart from some sporadic shows over the next few years the Marble Bar has been empty ever since, and the neighborhood is even more desolate now than it was then.

I'm clearly far from the only person with fond memories of the Marble Bar. Tom Warner's blog Accelerated Decrepitude offers some excellent posts about the place and the people who made it special:

• Marble Bar Poster Art
• Marble Bar Pixs
  
• Retro Baltimore: The 2016 Marble Bar Photo Shoot

Baltimore Magazine published a good retrospective on the 35th anniversary of the Marble Bar's third "closing forever" party in 1987:

• The Marble Bar, a Haven for Punks and Misfits, Closed Its Doors for Good 35 Years Ago by Kendell Shaffer and Hope C. Tarr, Baltimore Magazine, May 2022
  

The Psychedelic Furs show at the Marble Bar was not the only memorable event of that summer. Just nine days later I went to see another exhilarating show by a favorite band in a very different venue: a volleyball gym.

Next time: Ramones

Last time: The problem is me: The Sex Pistols, Steve Jones, and Lonely Boy

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1. The flyer suggests that the show took place in June; however, a June calendar for the club doesn't list a Furs show, and multiple sources (including Setlist.fm and YouTube) confirm the 5 July date. Note the $5 ticket price (in advance).
   
2. Alex Ogg, "All Of This And Nothing: The Psychedelic Furs On Talk Talk Talk." The Quietus, 2010, https://thequietus.com/articles/05128-the-psychedelic-furs-interview-talk-talk-talk/
3. In Alex Ogg's interview linked above, Richard Butler says "The idea of the song was, 'Pretty In Pink' as a metaphor for being naked. The song, to me, was actually about a girl who sleeps around a lot and thinks that she’s wanted and in demand and clever and beautiful, but people are talking about her behind her back. That was the idea of the song. And John Hughes, bless his late heart, took it completely literally and completely overrode the metaphor altogether!"
4. In the image of the article on Baltimore Or Less, the first character of every line in the first column is cut off, and so I think the transcription misstates the date of Roger Anderson's death. According to the retrospective article in Baltimore Magazine linked above, he died on 26 April 1984, not 6 April. [Since this was written, almosthipguy (Tom Warner) has corrected the date—many thanks!]
   

Poor Things

Poster for Poor Things. Image source: CelebMafia.com

Poor Things (2023), starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, and Mark Ruffalo; screenplay by Tony McNamara, based on the novel by Alasdair Gray; directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos' film version of the novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, is a bit like a postmodern Bride of Frankenstein. In the opening moments of the film a young woman in Victorian dress commits suicide by leaping from London's Tower Bridge into the Thames. [1] We learn later that her corpse, still warm when pulled from the river, is revivified after receiving a brain transplant from her own unborn baby. We then follow the adventures and misadventures of Bella (Emma Stone), who has a child's rapidly developing consciousness housed in an adult woman's body.

Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) in Poor Things. Costume design by Holly Waddington.

Godwin Baxter, the doctor who reanimates Bella, is portrayed in the film by Willem Dafoe. In a brilliant touch, his face is criss-crossed with scars, a visual correlative of the novel's hint that his famous surgeon father Sir Colin "had manufactured God by the Frankenstein method" (p. 274). Baxter is himself the product of an experiment [2]:

Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) in Poor Things. Prosthetic design by Nadia Stacey.

In the novel, Baxter says of Bella that she

'has all the resilience of infancy with all the stature and strength of fine womanhood  Her menstrual cycle was in full flood from the day she opened her eyes, so she has never been taught to feel her body is disgusting or to dread what she desires. Not having learned cowardice when small and oppressed she only uses speech to say what she thinks and feels, not to disguise these, so she is incapable of every badness done through hypocrisy and lying—nearly every sort of badness. All she lacks is experience. . .' (Poor Things, p. 69)

Virtually every man she meets wants to exploit the beautiful but naïve Bella for his own sexual gratification. But Bella has her own agency, not to say wilfulness. Eager for the experience she lacks, she abandons her earnest fiancé, Baxter's assistant McCandless (Ramy Yousef; for no clear reason, McCandless is renamed Max in the film from the novel's Archibald) and runs off with hedonistic lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). In the novel, Bella reports in her letters to Godwin and Max that she frequently "weds" Wedderburn; in the film, instead of employing this cleverly apposite pun, she calls sex "furious jumping."

A child's brain in a woman's body is the misogynistic Wedderburn's erotic ideal. (And not only his, of course: the position of women in Victorian society is largely one of enforced childlike dependence.) Wedderburn tricks Bella into boarding a ship bound for the Mediterranean in the delusional hope that he can control her better onboard. But despite his best efforts he cannot prevent Bella from learning about the world through reading, conversation with cynical fellow passenger Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael), and direct experience. And with experience comes, as it does for all of us, the bitter knowledge of deceit, injustice, and cruelty: the immense suffering that humans, and the social and economic systems we've created, cause other humans.

Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) in Poor Things.

When the ship makes port in Alexandria, Bella disembarks and is thrown into an intellectual and emotional crisis by the extreme poverty and misery she sees. This crisis awakens her moral conscience and her outrage. When Wedderburn finally gets lucky in the ship's casino, the unworldly Bella hands his winnings to two of the ship's crewmembers to distribute among the poor. (Of course, they only distribute the money between themselves.)

Bankrupt and thrown off the ship in Marseilles, Wedderburn and Bella make their way to Paris. There Bella encounters the madam Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter; in the novel her character is named Madame Cronquebil). Bella discovers that in Swiney's brothel she can earn money working only 20 (unpleasant) minutes every hour, and can spend the rest of her time as she chooses. In the brothel she is befriended by fellow prostitute Toinette (Suzy Bemba), who introduces her to both the principles of socialism and the joys of sapphism.

When Bella returns to London, unwelcome revelations await her. From Baxter she learns the horrifying truth of her origin. And then her wedding to McCandless is interrupted by her former husband Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott; the character is named Aubrey in the novel), a general in Britain's imperial army. With all the power of money and the law behind him (and aided by Bella's desire to learn about her past), he takes her back to the life that as Victoria Blessington she so desperately wanted to escape. She soon discovers why.

I've mentioned a few of the differences between the novel and the film above; there are many more, large and small. A very large one is the ending, which in Tony McNamara's screenplay is entirely rewritten. Gray's book is also set in a recognizable version of the historical 19th century; the film's elaborate production design by Shona Heath and James Price places the characters in an alternate world that gives us an ironic distance from the action. In a steampunk Lisbon, aerial trams whoosh by on cables; Alexandria looks like an Arabian Nights fantasy; and Madame Swiney's Paris brothel could have been designed by an erotomaniacal Antoni Gaudí.

Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter) watches from the doorway of her brothel as Bella approaches in Poor Things.

But the most significant difference is that the movie's focus is mainly on Bella's personal development rather than, as in the book, her awakening to the necessity of political action to bring about social change. In Lanthimos' movie Bella decides to become a doctor because, as she tells McCandless, Baxter's surgery is the place where she is happiest. In the book, it is because she discovers from Baxter that the city in which she lives is filled with "stinking, overcrowded rooms where you will find as much huddled misery as you saw in the sunlight of Alexandria" (p. 196). Bella studies medicine in order to combat the miseries of poverty by treating the sick, giving women the knowledge and means to control their own fertility, and fighting for basic measures of sanitation and public health. As she learns, "prevention of disease was more important than cure" (p. 198).

The novel has a multilayered metafictional structure that would be very difficult to realize on film; perhaps the production design is Lanthimos' attempt at recreating Gray's distancing effects in a visual medium. Purporting on the title page to be edited by Alasdair Gray, the novel opens with an introduction by him describing the discovery of the volume among boxes of discarded law office files, and closes with his "Notes Critical and Historical." In between lies the text of a memoir of which only one copy was ever printed. Written by Archibald McCandless, M.D., and intended for the eyes of his wife Victoria, it tells the story of Victoria's transformation into Bella. The memoir is followed by a letter from Victoria McCandless to her grandchildren disputing and complicating her husband's version of her life. She points out,

He has made a sufficiently strange story stranger still by stirring into it episodes and phrases to be found in Hogg's Suicide's Grave with additional ghouleries from Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. What morbid Victorian fantasy has he NOT filched from? I find traces of The Coming Race, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Trilby, Rider Haggard's She, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes and, alas, Alice Through the Looking-Glass. . .He has even plagiarized work by two dear friends: G.B. Shaw's Pygmalion and the scientific romances of Herbert George Wells. (pp. 272-273)

Mild spoiler alert: The movie has a happy ending of sorts, with Bella finding fulfillment by creating a polyamorous intentional community around her. Although in The Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx and Engels wrote of a revolutionary society "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all," Alasdair Gray's ingrained pessimism as a Scotsman, socialist, and student of history doesn't permit him to end on a note of merely personal contentment.

One of H.G. Wells' "scientific romances" is The War in the Air (1907), written just a few years after the Wright Brothers' first flight. Set just a decade or two after its publication date, the novel depicts aircraft as decisive weapons in a world war launched by Germany. As major cities are bombed into rubble, a global financial collapse and a virulent plague lead to the complete destruction of industrialized society. At the conclusion of the letter to her posterity, Victoria McCandless writes,

H.G.'s book is a warning, of course, not a prediction. He and I and many others expect a better future because we are actively creating it. . .H.G. Wells' warnings should be heeded. But the International Socialist Movement is as strong in Germany as in Britain. The labour and trade-union leaders in both countries have agreed that if their governments declare war they will immediately call a general strike. I almost hope our military and capitalistic leaders DO declare war! If the working classes immediately halt it by peaceful means then the moral and practical control of the great industrial nations will have passed from the owners to the makers of what we need, and the world YOU live in, dear child of the future, will be a saner and happier place. (pp. 275-276)

The letter is dated "1st August, 1914."

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1. Alasdair Gray's novel is set in 1880s Glasgow, not London.
2. In the novel, Godwin is described as being "a whole head taller than most" with a "big face," "ogreish body" and "thick limbs" (p. 13); visible scars are notably absent from this description and from Gray's illustrations.