How I Met Your Mother

"It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him." -- Joseph Heller, Catch-22

That's pretty much what happened when I first laid eyes on my future Floor Models colleague Andy Pasternack.



Seriously. I walked into some dive -- possibly Folk City, although it might have been another joint on Bleecker Street whose name now escapes me -- sometime in 1979 and there was Andy, on a cramped stage, playing acoustic 12-string the way I'd always dreamed of it being played and singing a song of his called "Welcome to the Popular Culture," which struck me then (as now) as one of the funniest and most brilliant things I'd ever heard.

And instantly I knew -- I had to find a way to weasel myself into a band with this guy.

Here's Andy doing the song on WBAI-FM a few weeks later.



When the Floor Models finally got together, this was one of the first songs we worked up; our live version sounded something like Talking Heads having a philosophical discussion with Devo. We dropped it from our stage repertoire very quickly, alas; stylistically it didn't quite fit the Brit Invasion/Folk-Rock template we'd established for ourselves.

But What Will the Goyim Think?

Okay, herewith an mp3 of a live performance featuring my all time favorite Flo Mos inside joke.

The song, incidentally, is Andy's "What's Wrong With This Picture," which can be heard in a far better recorded version in the YouTube video in the post below.




In any case, as you can hear in both versions, there's a little instrumental section after the bridge in which the band basically goes "Da-dah! Da-dah!" and then the bass and twelve-string guitar play the riff from Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Kicks" before the last verse and the outro.

On this particular night -- at the Other End in 1982 -- Andy was moved to add a little instrumental snippet over the section in question, and I must confess I'd forgotten how hard I'd laughed at the time until Andy sent me the clip late last year.

As you'll note, the tune he's playing is "Hatikvah." I have no idea if Glen and Gerry caught it, but I suspect a few of our Jewish friends in attendance at the time did.

Video Mildly Irked the Radio Star

Part three of our award-winning concert film Floor X Four.



Seriously, this is a very nice document of a better than average set from back in the day, and I never fail to give thanks that the original VHS master tape survived. Granted, the videography looks like it was done by strapping a camcorder and a candle onto the head of a hyperactive seal, but it was the '80s and we were all a little over the top.

I should also add that the songs -- save for our covers of ABBA ("S.O.S.") The Monkees ("Last Train to Clarksville") and The Byrds ("All I Really Wanna Do") are copyrighted by The Floor Models 2011©.

That's in case the Coen Brothers are lurking and want to use a bit of this stuff in their next movie, you understand.

The Rickenbacker Variations

"Enough's Enough." Live at the Other End, 1982. Written and sung by Andy "Folk-Rock" Pasternack. The sound quality isn't stellar, but Andy's J.S. Bach-ian 12-string break still kills me, after all these years.




Just an amazing song, too. There's a better recorded very early four-track demo of this in the vaults somewhere, which I hope to exhume for the CD. But in the meantime, I thought I'd share.

I am a Camera

Help!!!!

I really want to use the Flo Mos portrait photos below on the forthcoming CD cover, and to give credit where credit is due, obviously. But for the life of me, I can't remember who actually shot them, and neither can the rest of the guys.









I/we do know that they were shot in the hallway at Lucas-McFaul Studios in New York City sometime in 1982 or '83, during a break in our first official recording sessions. And as far as anybody can recall, the only people in attendance that weekend (apart from the band, of course) were producers Dave Immer and Judy Mauer, neither of whom has yet stepped forward to claim the pix as their work.

In any case, I'm going to post a link to this post over at Facebook in the hope it may jog somebody's memory.

Oh -- I still can't believe I ever wore glasses like that, in case you were wondering.

The Way We Were

Greenwich Village, Winter 1983. Photo by Irene Young.

This site is very much a work in progress, so the early postings are going to be somewhat tentative and experimental; this first post, in fact, is mostly just a test to see if I know what I'm doing.

It'll get better soon, though. I promise.

In the meantime, these were the savage young Flo Mos on a very chilly day, in front of a wall somewhere near my digs on Bleecker Street. I imagine we were all having fantasies about those black-and-white shots of the Fabs in Hamburg.