Another Girl, Another Planet - The Only Ones - The Only Ones - 1978

I was speaing to a friend earlier today about a place I had crashed for a while when I first moved to NYC. It was located on Bleeker St. in the days when that section was still somewhere in between Dylan's village and the attrocious alterna-mall it has since become...though it was already well on its way to being crap.

Anyway, as I'm fairly sure I've mentioned, when a person first moves to the city in their mid-twenties they are generally ungodly poor for at least the first year. Rents are astronomical, everything is expensive, and there is just SO MUCH TO DO and you don't want to miss a thing.

My girlfriend at the time had this sublet for the summer, and I was crashing with her while looking for my own apartment. She lived with another girl from her college that summer, and that girl also had a boyfriend that basically lived in the apartment too...so essientially there were two couples splitting a one bedroom on bleeker street and we were all flat broke. We had all pooled our money and gone down to the local grocery store and had bought the ingredients to make some sort of chicken noodle/cream of mushroom casserole sort of thing.

I spent the better portion of the evening cooking this thing, and then we took it out of the oven and sat it on top of the stove to cool. We then retreated to the living room/our bedroom to watch some tv while we anticipated our feasts. A few minutes later, we heard the crash and we all knew what it meant.

Like many NYC apartments, the floor was kind of slanted. This had caused our caserole to slowly, slowly slide forward off the stove. And there it was all over the kitchen floor.

The other guy and I took stock of the situation and immediately grabbed a pair of forks and squated on the floor and went to work. The ladies whoever stopped us. The girl who I was not dating was actually a rich upper west side girl (she had never taken the subway till that summer) "slumming" in the village, so she saw this as the excuse to whip out her mommy's "For emergencies only" credit card and bought us all chinese. To this day, I was still totally willing to eat the floor caserole.

Anyway, this classic by The Only Ones is sort of the Ur-text, along with "Lipstick" by the Buzzcocks, for a kind of punkish british power pop. To this day it's still a fairly amazing song, and has lost little of it's power.