Shine on, the lights of the Bowery

One more man gone.

Last fortnight, a year after the death of his brother in arms Joey from lymphatic cancer, Dee Dee Ramone died of a narcotics overdose. Gone, like Johnny Thunders, like Peter Laughner, like Lester Bangs, Billy Murcia, like Jerry Nolan, like Stiv Bators, like Eric Emerson, like Patti Giordano, like Robert Mapplethorpe, like Richard Sohl, like Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith’, like Robb Tyner, like Todd Smith, like Nancy Spungen, like Sid Vicious. The dum dum boys and the mystery girls no more.

The Ramones weren’t the originators of the Bowery scene, but they were the first of its brood to make it out of the traps and up the greasy pole of the record business. Sweethearts in wolves’ clothing, they played a reductio ad gonzo version of switchblade rock ‘n’ roll, halfway between the sweet sounds of the ’60s girl groups and the base metal of the garage bands. The Ramones were a new year zero, a bunch of streetwise reprobates fronted by a six-foot-six muppet, playing fast, loud, sawn-off rock ‘n’ roll songs built around themes of teenage disaffection that usually began with the phrase “I Don’t Wanna…”

One of the greatest bands that ever walked New York for sure, but their emergence signalled just the beginning of an unparalleled epoch in rock ‘n’ roll: the downtown scene based around CBGBs on The Bowery, an unlikely aggregation of individuals espousing self-invention, ambition, androgyny and sizeable doses of dumb fun cut with arty pretension.

“The hungry and the hunted explode into rock ‘n’ roll bands/And face off against each other out in the street”, Bruce Springsteen exulted in ‘Jungleland’ in 1975. He could’ve been prophesying what followed Da Brudders out of the Bowery: Patti Smith, Blondie, Television, Richard Hell & The Voidoids, The Heartbreakers, Suicide, Talking Heads, Wayne/Jayne County, The Dictators, Pere Ubu, The Dead Boys and more. The list of scenesters was equally impressive: Robert Mapplethorpe, Jim Carroll, Lester Bangs, Danny Fields, Iggy, Bowie, Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico and Bowery resident William Burroughs.

Now, 25 years after the apex of the blank generation, new bloods like The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Hives owe huge debt to the downtown aesthetic. The catwalks and fashion spreads are full of sunken-cheeked, heroin chic nouveau mod dandies. Enough books have been penned about the era to stock a small library. Former Punk magazine journalist turned filmmaker Mary Harron (American Psycho) is planning a film of the time.

The Bowery scene was largely a psychotic reaction to the supremacy of dinosaur acts plying advanced musical theory in arenas and stadia. It was a street thing, taking its cue from post-hippy misfits like The Stooges, The Velvets, The MC5, The New York Dolls and the garage acts anthologised by Lenny Kaye on the Nuggets collection. But aside from bringing the noise, these proto punks also copped a crucial love of melody and economy from sources like The Shangri-Las, The Beach Boys and the glitter rockers.

Original Blondie bassist Gary Valentine (author of ‘X Offender’ and ‘I Am Always Touched By Your Presence Dear’) documents the origins of the CBGBs scene in detail in his recently published memoir New York Rocker – My Life In the Blank Generation.

“It was just the lucky chance of so many people being in the same place at the same time,” he recalls. “It was literally taking place within a few blocks of everything. The whole Warhol influence was there, you’d have theatre people getting involved in the music scene, Blondie got involved doing this play with Jackie Curtis who was once in the Warhol crowd. Going to someone’s loft was the thing to do, either paintings or video, all that sort of stuff. Obviously people like Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell were reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire, this French symbolist poetry, and you had a generation that were very self-aware.

“In the early days in CBGBs there was a lot of upfront homage to earlier music. Patti Smith would throw something from Van Morrison or Them or ‘Land Of A Thousand Dances’ in there, or The Ramones were paying homage to Phil Spector, or we would do old cover tunes from The Stones and The Doors, it was all very song oriented. The only band who did long solos were Television. In a way they were kind of like The Grateful Dead, their fans weren’t like the punk fans, but they had great songs like ‘Venus De Milo’ or ‘Friction’. And bands like The Dolls showing that you could bash away at three chords and make kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll, that was liberating and exciting.”

The New York Dolls played a crucial role as John The Baptists to the Bowery scene, a bunch of mouthy, faggy, draggy skag-hags who might have been dismissed as lurid Stones copycats if not for the raucously sluttish drive of the tunes.

Says singer David Johansen: “We were very fortunate at that time that some lunatic had invested in an old hotel and gutted out the ballroom area and made these rooms for performance, theatre and cabaret and experimental video, it was called the Mercer Arts Centre. We got offered our own room, so we had a room where every week we could hold court and put it together. And if it wasn’t for that, God knows what would’ve happened because there was no place to play.

“Then CBGBs came about; a scene started developing. Maybe I didn’t articulate it at the time but I knew in my gut . . . I saw all these kids on the street that didn’t know each other but yet were into the same (thing). You could see them all walking around, they just had no place to get in touch with each other. And from that scene people met, they started fashion companies, whatever, all kinds of creative pursuits. So that was a big part of the Dolls thing; we brought these people into the same room, but they were just as creative as we were. That original audience was really a very artistic type of person.”

“I came back from Los Angeles in 1973,” recalls Television guitarist Richard Lloyd, “and the Mercer Arts Centre had been knocked down and I didn’t get to see The Dolls for a while. And then when I saw them I noticed something: the audience was much more interested in each other than the music. It was kind of like a giant prom of freaky underground people, like The Dolls were like a social catalyst for something else. But he’s right, when CBGBs started happening, the audience was made up of photographers and painters and journalists and everybody was kind of bitten by the same energy at the same time, so there was a giant maelstrom. People started magazines like Punk magazine and New York Rocker because of this little germ of a seed. So it wasn’t just a band, it was a whole sociological movement away from the barriers that usually exist between the performer and the concert-goer.”

Of course, The New York Dolls also had an enormous impact on the English punk scene via Malcolm McLaren, who managed the band when they were on their last legs. McClaren also offered his services to the fledgling Television, but they turned him down, so he returned to London to put together The Sex Pistols, whose sound and sartorial distress owed more than a little to New Yorkers like Richard Hell and Johnny Thunders.

“ He was a crafty fellow,” says Richard Lloyd. “He took Richard’s look and Television’s musical energy and The Ramones’ drive, coupled it with Johnny’s swagger and there he had The Sex Pistols. But what happened in England was they have weekly music papers they have to fill up, and they had a New York correspondent who started writing about this scene, but there was nobody recorded so you couldn’t satisfy that hunger. So it built up and built up, and then when The Sex Pistols and The Clash happened it was just a gigantic explosion, spontaneous combustion. You pack all that energy into one place and then it has to eventually explode.”

Not that punk meant then what it means now. Before John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil cooked up Punk magazine on New Year’s Eve 1975, to call someone a punk was to slander them as a wise-ass juvenile delinquent, or a fag, or a prison bitch, or all three. But then Basketball Diaries author Jim Carroll, Television’s Richard Lloyd and Dee Dee Ramone all made the scene as street hustlers getting blown or giving handjobs for forty bucks a pop. Dee Dee later documented the experience in ‘53rd & 3rd’ off The Ramones’ first album, named after a popular tricking spot. When the MC5’s Wayne Kramer first saw the word ‘punk’ in its new context in Billboard magazine, he was serving a four year stretch for dealing coke, and flushed the article down the toilet lest his fellow inmates get the wrong idea. Like all the great cultural happenings, CBGBs marked a convergence of high and lowlife, outsider art meets criminal underworld.

Television was the first of the new breed to play the venue. The band was originally called the Neon Boys, founded by Richard Hell (born Richard Meyers in Lexington, Kentucky) and Tom Verlaine (formerly a Jersey boy called Miller), later changing the name with the arrival of Richard Lloyd and drummer Billy Ficca.

Hell and manager Terry Ork first stumbled on CBGB-OMFUG (Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gourmandizers) when scouting out a location for a residency similar to The Dolls’ Mercer stint. The quartet made their Bowery debut in March 1974.

“It was a Sunday and Terry promised Hilly that he would get people in and that they would buy drinks,” Richard Lloyd remembers, “and if they didn’t buy enough Terry would buy all drinks for the house, to prime the pump. And I remember there was a bunch of people there, but at the end of the day we all made a dollar, one buck, after we paid for the cab to get the equipment.”

Lloyd might’ve framed it if he hadn’t needed it so bad. Soon though, word of mouth on the Television shows got Patti Smith’s attention, and a series of six co-headlining weekends put the venue on the map.

As it happened, Hell didn’t last long in the Television line-up, his boisterousness forever ruffling Verlaine’s catatonic cool (Patti Smith famously described her one-time lover as “a languid boy with the confused grace of a child in paradise”). He was replaced by Blondie bassist Fred Smith, and then the quartet set to work crafting the songs that would appear on Marquee Moon, arguably the most magical debut of the CBGBs era.

The speed with which Patti Smith glommed onto CBGBs bore testimony to her own skills as a scenemaker. While Warhol’s lot were holding court in Max’s Kansas City, she and her roommate and soulmate Robert Mapplethorpe squatted on the doorstep until they were allowed in.

By the time she partnered guitarist Lenny Kaye and put out the stunning ‘Piss Factory’ single, Smith had obliterated all competition as a performance poet in venues like Saint Mark’s Church. Mapplethorpe was quite the hustler himself, a Catholic boy from Queens who became the foremost documenter of the New York gay S&M scene, a revolutionary in the art world and a society figure. Philippe Garner of Sotheby’s described him as “the 1970s leather-clad equivalent of the great dandies and decadents of the nineteenth century – Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, Huysmans.”

Smith’s debut Horses, with its iconic cover portrait by Mapplethorpe, was a brainstorming meld of bone-through-the-nose rock, street attitude and free verse, produced by The Velvets’ John Cale, who’d already midwifed debut albums for Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers and The Stooges.

Cale: “In a lot of ways The Stooges didn’t need anybody there. Patti did, and she found a foil rather than somebody to hold her hand. You know, records are not meant to make literary landmarks, which is almost what happened with her first album. She became a popular success but that’s not what it was really made for.”

As Cale indicates, Horses launched Patti Smith as a punk Rimbaud, kicking off with the gender-bending, God-baiting, insurrectionary ‘Gloria’. It was an unprecedented debut.

Patti Smith: “Y’know, in ‘Gloria’ where I said ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine’ people would say to me ‘Oh, you’re an atheist, you don’t believe in anything’ and I said, ‘Obviously I believe’. It’s not that I didn’t believe in Him as a person and a strong force, but I wanted in that time in my life the opportunity to make my own choices about things. It was a format of addressing things and thinking about them in a real way, not just blasphemy or doing things to shock people.”

Meanwhile, Richard Hell formed The Heartbreakers with Johnny Thunders, who’d just crawled from The Dolls’ wreckage with drummer Jerry Nolan. The Heartbreakers’ band’s finest three minutes was probably ‘Chinese Rocks’, the first of many smack anthems to be associated with Thunders, although in actuality the song was written chiefly by Dee Dee Ramone with lyrical contributions from Hell.

Talk about toxic twins – both Thunders and Hell were fascinated with the immolation of the narcotic and cloistered self, half in love with easeful death. Hell’s favourite book was Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Against Nature, required reading for exquisites, dandies and palefaces of every pinstripe, the tale of Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, a wealthy voluptuary who having sampled every last decadence humanity has to offer, decides to quarantine himself in his own private world of synthetic scents, sounds and sensations. “It’s the artist’s job to be narcissistic, constantly analysing and paying attention to yourself to see how things affect you,” Hell told Lester Bangs. “One thing I wanted to bring back to rock ‘n’ roll was the knowledge that you invent yourself. That’s why I changed my name, why I did all the clothing style things, haircut, everything. So naturally, if you invent yourself, you love yourself. The idea of inventing yourself is creating the most ideal image that you could imagine.”

All this ten years before Madonna (whom Hell eventually acted alongside in Desperately Seeking Susan). Out of this mirror-mirror manifesto came his greatest song, ‘Blank Generation’, which he finally got around to recording when he left The Heartbreakers to lead The Voidoids, whose line-up included the brilliant guitarist Robert Quine (later to bring his splintered style to Lou Reed’s hottest live band of the early ’80s). The Voidoids live power was preserved for posterity and recently released in the rarities anthology Time on Matador Records.

‘Blank Generation’ was often misconstrued as a nihilist punk manifesto by those who couldn’t see past the neo-Situationist slogan ‘Please Kill Me’ scrawled on its author’s T-shirt. Indeed, The Sex Pistols came up with their own version of that manifesto in the form of ‘Pretty Vacant’.

But if Richard Hell had morbid tendencies, Suicide made him seem like a member of the happy clappy squad. One of the edgiest and most confrontational bands on the New York club scene, Suicide was a vocal/synthesizer duo when such a thing was virtually unheard of. Singer Alan Vega and keyboardist Martin Rev produced a spooky, spacey hybrid of throbbing electronica and freakish psychobilly. Under the auspices of Ramones associates Craig Leon and Marty Thau their 1977 eponymous debut became a touchstone for future industrial/electronic acts like Ministry, Nine Inch Nails and the Sisters Of Mercy.

“A lot of people conveniently write us out of the history of those times,” says Alan Vega. “It ticks me off, people should know better than to try to distort history. Suicide probably had more influence than The Dolls and all the other bands who get credit for this stuff. I saw some statement from Ben Vaughan, a rockabilly type guy, made about Suicide which I thought was the best ever, he said, ‘Suicide was ultimately the only really true punk band because everybody hated them’.”

Like any scene, the amount of logrolling and backbiting going on in CBGBs circles was

remarkable. Bands poached each other’s members, reviewed each other’s shows and established cliques within cliques.

But one of the grand ironies about the Bowery scene is that Blondie and Talking Heads, for so long treated like the runts of the litter, eventually became the most commercially successful of its graduates. Mind you, to start with, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein had little going for them except naked survival instinct, an uncanny knack for updating the pure pop of The Crystals and The Shangri La’s by way of Mod-ish retro-ism and NYC attitude, and of course, Debbie’s looks.

“Certainly when I first started playing with them I had this little schoolboy crush on her,” Gary Valentine admits.

“I mean practically all of the attraction in the early days was people just coming to see her. Musically we were nowhere, we were laughed at; we were known as the band that would open for anybody. It was only after we got Jimmy Destri in on keyboards that we actually came into our own as musicians.

“I have to say, Debbie always made it clear, even though it mightn’t have appeared like that, that it really was a band. She used to take the piss out of the whole image of being the sexy starlet Marilyn Monroe thing. For ‘Rip Her To Shreds’ she used to wear a wedding gown and she would tear it apart during that song. Again a mixture of this campy performance art stuff going on, it wasn’t just this beautiful girl singing with this combo in the background.”

Yet, as Valentine points out, there was an iron ambition at work. “She was around for a long time,” he says, “and I realise it more now than I did at the time that she was close to 30, and that’s getting up there trying to make it, and she probably felt like, ‘This is the last shot I’ve got’ and was determined to have it happen.”

Echoing Patti Smith’s remarks to Clive Davis when she signed a deal with CBS, telling him they had to make it happen fast because she didn’t feel she had much time left. All of which fuelled the rivalry between the two camps.

“There was a hardness to the New York thing,” says Valentine, “because when you’re out there locking sunglasses with the rest of the club, everyone’s trying to out-cool everybody else. I was just chuffed to be there, 18 years old and hanging out with these artists and poets and rockers, it was fantastic. But some of the older ones who’d been around for a while, you don’t want to give too much away to somebody else and show that you’re impressed by them. Some nights in CBGBs everyone would be there with the sunglasses on not responding to anyone else, barely lifting an eyebrow, like some Fellini movie.

After Blondie recorded their debut album Gary Valentine left to front his own group The Know, toured with Iggy Pop and eventually transferred his energies into writing. His former bandmates established themselves as a bona fide pop phenomenon with their second album Plastic Letters, while the follow up Parallel Lines was that rare thing – and album full of singles that worked as a sustained mood, particularly ‘Heart Of Glass’, reworked from a joke tune originally called ‘The Disco Song’. The novelty became gravity – Blondie were one of the few punk bands to survive the disco boom, hiring Georgio Moroder to produce their theme from American Gigolo ‘Call Me’, and becoming the first white rock act to bring rapping (of a sort) to the mainstream with ‘Rapture’.

But once any scene becomes conscious of itself – even one as self-conscious as CBGBs – the end is in sight. By 1977, Patti Smith, Blondie, Richard Hell and The Ramones had all signed record deals and moved on, and Television made their masterpiece Marquee Moon. Illuminated by the chemical interplay of Verlaine and Lloyd’s guitars plus Ficca’s jazzy drumming, songs like ‘Venus De Milo’, ‘See No Evil’ and the astounding title tune sounded luminous and silvery-strange as mercury. The band split after a poorly received second album Adventure, although they have played live intermittently since 1992’s eponymous reformation album.

Patti Smith made four albums that established her as one of the critics’ darlings of the decade, but after the Wave album she married ex-MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith and spent the next decade in semi-retirement in Detroit, before making a comeback following her husband’s death in the mid-90s.

Of the second wave of Bowery bands, Suicide, Pere Ubu, Talking Heads and The Dead Boys were by far the most interesting, but as the impact of punk dissipated into New Wave, electro and disco, the climate changed, and those with the sharpest pop instincts eventually outstripped the conceptualists.

Gary Valentine: “In a way it makes sense when you think about it because I don’t think Richard Hell’s sensibility could translate to a large audience, certainly not middle America. Maybe now after David Lynch, a broader (range of) people are into a weird sensibility. But Blondie was obviously commercial material with Debbie’s looks and the songs being hit-oriented, and Talking Heads really invented a white funky sound, so they became very danceable. Again, they changed – when I first saw them before they had Jerry Harrison from The Modern Lovers on keyboards, they were like this wind-up thing, there wasn’t any chatter between songs and David would do his very strange guitar stuff and Tina was like a tick-tock clock bass player, very static looking. They were like Television in that they had this very studied non-image. The collegiate crowd got into them at first. The Ramones turned into a touring band, and Patti Smith never had a really big hit apart from ‘Because The Night’ with Springsteen, and even that was pretty close to being MOR. But that’s a thing about New York, if you’re really successful there it spoils you for the rest of the country.”

By 1980, cocaine had replaced speed and heroin as the drug du jour and Studio 54 dwarfed CBGBs as the place to be seen. There was uptown and there was downtown and never the twain did meet.

“I wasn’t really part of that scene,” David Byrne says. “I think I went to Studio 54 once. I wasn’t doing cocaine and didn’t know anyone, so I didn’t really get the full experience. I was kinda bored after a while. It was like, ‘This is it, this is the most exciting thing in town? I think I’ll stick with the downtown clubs!’”

Those who couldn’t mutate went into hiatus, or the big sleep of opium, or became patrons of late ’80s No Wave acts like Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch. After Johnny Thunders recorded his own solo magnum opus So Alone in 1978, containing the all-time classic beautiful loser’s lullaby ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory’, the next 15 years became a twilight world of crummy one-night stands and Too Much Junkie Business. At one stage, he even gigged in a group called The Living Dead with Sid Vicious. The last Heartbreakers album appeared in 1984. Having exploited his talent for drugs, fancy clothes and a good time, he died of a suspected heroin overdose in a cheap New Orleans hotel room in April 1991, although rumours of foul play still persist. In his elegy for Thunders, included in his recently published collection Hot And Cold, Richard Hell wrote:

“The main qualities, the virtues that set Johnny apart were that he didn’t give a fuck and he dressed great,”

As an epitaph for the blank generation in its entirety, it’ll serve.