(First published 2010)

This morning I had a shock, a very good friend of mine, Brendan Mullen, the real Godfather of Punk, died in California last October. We’d been later-day Beats, but the vast expanse of sea that grew between us, meant that for the last twenty years we hadn’t so much as written a letter.

The last time I heard from Brendan was when he sent me a copy of Jim Morrison’s The Wilderness, he told me he’d found it in Allen Ginsberg’s City Lights book store in San Francisco. I suspect though, he would have found in a dime store in New York. But that wouldn’t matter, Brendan would simply have been living our dream of turning the truth into something far more romantic than reality.

I don’t have the book any more, an old friend of mine, Mike Wood, borrowed it. Mike and I were good friends too, so it didn’t bother me that he was sharing this gift from Brendan, but now, under the circumstances, I would be nice to at least hold it again.

Brendan and I were wild children in Manchester in the 70s. We lived on beer, guile, anxiety and drugs. We were both beautiful and a little bit insane and we shared an ambition to become writers … inexplicably we’d washed up together at the Ashton-under-Lyne Reporter.

We did something in the early 70s – something happened and I don’t know what. But Brendan and I left the Reporter with twin clouds of shame hanging over us. Whatever we did might have been shocking, outrageous, immoral or just plain crazy … but there is no doubt it would have been very very funny.

Brendan decided to head for New York and decided I should go with him. Almost that same day I found out I was to be an unmarried father. So, at 19 years old, I tried to face up to my responsibilities.

Brendan sailed for New York alone.

My ambition to be a writer was fulfilled partially as I tore a fairly successful career out of journalism. But Brendan in his own eccentric, single-minded, romantic way became the new Godfather of Punk. He opened a 10,000-square-foot basement behind a porn theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. He also made it as a music journalist.

When I heard he was dead, I had a picture of him in the recesses of my mind. He was still young, still dynamic, charismatic, dramatic, still drunk, still stoned … but he was 60.

A few minutes ago I saw a recent picture of him, he was unrecognisable, skinny, beat up, bald. I looked in the mirror … I have the same tracks in my face.

All I can say is, farewell Brendan. You will always be my friend.

Andrea Martin-Banks, chief researcher at the Preservation Society shared these Halloween photos from New York …

She was in McDougal Street when she spotted these skeletons climbing the wall near Bob Dylan’s old house near Café Wha?.  The house looks as if it is student accommodation now and somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to get the spooky figures attached to the wall and fences!

Greenwich Village is a lot different now from the place Dylan left for Malibu, but the village still has that grand air of statement honed in the 60s when people made pilgrimages to his white-painted doorstep.

Dylan himself described the Café Wha?, just seconds away from his front door,  as “a subterranean cavern, liquorless, ill lit, low ceiling, like a wide dining hall with chairs and tables,” but “that’s where I started playing regular in New York.”

Cafe Wha? is still a fixture of MacDougal Street but most of the other bars and cafes have gone and they have been replaced by coffee shops and boutiques.

Not far from the famous Chelsea Hotel, where Dylan also lived, Andrea came across the shop which appeared to be selling pumpkins by the wheelbarrow load.

Apart from Dylan living their New York’s most iconic hotel built a very rock n roll reputation – Sid Vicious Nancy Spungen there, Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey there. Dylan Thomas drank himself to death there, and Leonard Cohen famously wrote about Janis Joplin there.

Now that too has changed, and perhaps as far as rock n roll romance is concerned, not for the better.

#bobdylan #thevillage #mcdougalstreet #cafewha? #halloween #theskeletonhe’sintherain