UNCUT
August 2024
Pages 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92
NEW YORK STATE OF MIND
In 1974, the newly formed BLONDIE took their first tentative steps into New York’s burgeoning underground scene. In this exclusive extract from his memoir Under A Rock, CHRIS STEIN recalls his first encounter with DEBBIE HARRY, flat-sharing with the RAMONES, supporting TELEVISION and life among the city’s downtown bars, dilapidated apartments and unsavoury neighbourhoods.
“A lot of weirdos showed up mixed in with actual musicians…”
So it came to pass that I heard about a girl group doing their first show. This was sometime in late September of 1973. The group, the Stilettos, included Elda, the girlfriend of Eric [Emerson, singer with Stein’s former band, The Magic Tramps]. In the cavernous Lower Manhattan midtown streets, small bars and restaurants are located in the midst of lofts, garment manufacturers and general still-functioning light industry. Elda shared an old loft with Holly Woodlawn that was almost directly upstairs from one of these neighbourhood bars on West Twenty-Eighth Street. This place was called the Bobern Tavern, after the owners, whose names were either Bob and Ernie or Bob and Bernie, depending on who one speaks to.
I got there before the band started. It was basically one of those long bars in a narrow space with some tables in the rear. I ran into a guy I knew, Timothy Jackson, who was also known as Thoth due to his devotion to things ancient Egyptian. As we were standing around talking, a very striking girl who was making the rounds taking to a few of the accumulating people suddenly distracted me. She had short dark hair and fantastic features. Timothy said this was Debbie and she was in the Stillettos together with Elda and a girl named Roseanne. He also knew her a little from the New York Dolls milieu. Debbie and I were briefly introduced and they did their show. The set was a combination of rock, cabaret, and R&B. The band was a trio. The stage was a large board jerry-rigged on some chairs or a pool table or something. The stage was lit by standard red, yellow and blue light bulbs. It was all spectacularly low-tech.
I did a few rehearsals with the group with the other two instrumentalists being uncommitted. We did a run of more shows at the Bobern Tavern and practised in Elda and Holly’s loft. At some point we picked up a drummer, a guy named Billy O’Connor. Billy, who was from Pittsburgh, was busy being a disappointment to his parents, who wanted him to pursue a career in medicine, not be an underground musician. The other band member was sometimes a guy named Youngblood who also played with Eric.
I was crazy about Debbie. We started hanging out together most of the time. She was living in New Jersey near where she worked at a hair salon and would commute back and forth in a blue 1967 Camaro. She struck me as very together, with a car and a job, as compared to my scattered situation. I was still benefiting from welfare and food stamps and occasionally hitting my mother up for some funding.
I was in Debbie’s apartment one afternoon when she came back from work at the salon in New Jersey and I saw that she had dyed her hair blonde. She said they hadn’t had many customers and she and her friend and coworker Ricky had gotten bored. She had it slicked down; it looked like Twiggy’s famous haircut.
One night we were in the back room of Max’s when Elda came in very excited. She said she had just come from a bar downtown where she had seen a band who were “dressed like old men”. This was, of course, referring to Television playing at CBGB’s.
We did a gig opening for Television and at the end of the show it seemed like every guy in the place surrounded Debbie. The Stillettos did more shows at CB’s opening for Television and did a big show at the 82 Club on East Fourth Street opening for Wayne County. The atmosphere at the 82 was more upscale than CB’s. It was an old basement drag club that had seen its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s when it was run by members of the Genovese crime family. It wasn’t really an LGBTO club, as the patrons were generally straight, but the performers were men in drag and the staff were women in male drag. By the ’70s it had passed its glory but had become popular amongst the members of the downtown new music scene. The Dolls did a great show at the 82 that found them all wearing dresses. The atmosphere was fantastic: mirrored walls and plastic palm trees that had survived but were falling into decay.
A friend, photographer Bob Gruen, brought UK journalist Chris Charlesworth to the 82 Club gig. Chris became entranced with Debbie and sent Bob’s pictures of the Stillettos to Melody Maker to accompany an article about the New York band scene. This may have been our first bit of UK media coverage.
The Stillettos continued doing shows into the summer of 1974, frequently opening for Television at CBGB’s. CBGB’s, at 315 Bowery, was still a very eccentric environment. There were old overstuffed easy chairs and small sofas at the edges. A bookcase in the front had some old, old titles and military manuals. There was a pool table in the rear and, for a time, a large, inflated raft hung from the ceiling. The stage was a small set of wooden platforms that was covered with red shag carpet. I’ve heard that Eric helped build the stage. The walls were layered with history. On the side opposite the bar were these little horse-racing murals that could have dated back to the ’20s or ’30s, when the place was some kind of sports bar. All around were bigger-than-life-size photographs of old vaudeville stars like Fanny Brice. At the end of th bar there were more modern murals that portrayed some of the denizens of the bar sitting around drinking or passed out at the tables. In later years Hilly told me that these paintings were done by a local woman artist and depicted some of his early patrons, who he knew by name. Hilly also had two dogs, big insect-like creatures, Salukis or Borzois or something. They would wander around slowly and contribute to the rarefied atmosphere.
On Debbie’s birthday, July 1, the Stillettos did a show, opening for Eric and his band Star Theater and the Dolls at something called Bacchus Rock Palace on West Forty-Eighth Street. The girls sang some backup for the Dolls. Shortly after, Debbie, drummer Billy, bass player Fred Smith and me left the Stillettos. The trio situation was too small to contain all the styles and ambitions of three leads and the group went the route of other girl trios with one member emerging.
We did at least two gigs at CB’s under the somewhat unfortunate name Angel And The Snake, which derived from an illustration I found in a magazine that depicted a girl who looked a bit like Debbie with a snake draped around her. The illustration, a realistic drawing, made for a good flyer if nothing else.
I Knew this kid Tommy from Mercer Arts. I ran into him somewhere and he said, “I heard you found a place to play downtown,” meaning CBGB’s. He said he had a band called the Ramones, and I wondered if they were a Latin act. Both the Angel/Snake gigs were with the Ramones and the first show on August 16 was the first time the Ramones played CB’s.
The Ramones were totally awesome even in their very raw state. We immediately became die-hard fans and went to several showcases they had at a rehearsal space called Performance Studios. The Performance Studios stage was tiered, with three or four steps in front. At one Ramones show, Joey sort of fell in slow motion but kept singing in an upside-down position.
One day Debbie came back to the apartment on Thompson Street and announced that several men in the street, including a guy leaning out of a truck window, had shouted, “Hey, blondie!” at her and she thought that would be a good name for the band. Blondie played at CBGB’s for the first time on October 12, 1974, and an ad for this show in the SoHo Weekly News seems to be the first instance of the band’s name in print anywhere.
The Ramones gave the scene a boost and they fit in well with our friends in other bands like the Miamis and the Fast. The summer nights on the street in front of CB’s were memorable, lots of time spent hanging out there.
CBGB’s would frequently be pretty full but never to the point of standing room and early on there was little or no dancing to the bands that were playing. It was a bit like the old beatnik coffee-shop days with people showing their low-key appreciation by snapping their fingers and applauding politely.
Debbie quit working at the salon in New Jersey and got a job at a bar called White’s on the fringes of Wall Street that catered to the afternoon low-level execs and drunken worker drones as well as the occasional street person and gangster. The girls had set locations along a very long bar and wore bikinis and bathing suits.
The first week that Debbie was there, of course all the customers swarmed her; she got all the tips and the other girls wanted to murder her, but soon balance was restored. I would go and visit but they didn’t want boyfriends hanging out, so I’d buy a drink and act like a customer, which was weird because I still looked like an outsider freak. We even played some shows there, setting up on the floor in front of the bar. Debbie developed some regular customers. One guy supposedly had such a huge cock that he’d start to pass out from low blood pressure if he got aroused. No-one verified this, as far as I know. Another guy was some mobster and he would give Debbie tips on the horses. He gave her a tip on the daily double and I went to OTB and bet 10 bucks. To our amazement we won over a hundred. I don’t know if I would have bet more if I’d had it, but I didn’t have it.
The early band period was exciting and vital while at the same time it was occasionally dull and frustrating. We didn’t make any money. The music scene was getting little attention from the outside world. The audience at Max’s and CB’s was largely composed of other bands and their entourages.
We shared a rehearsal room on West Thirty-Seventh Street with a bunch of rich kids who we knew from somewhere or other. These guys had a set of brand-new Peavy amps and a matching small PA. We started off paying rent but ran out of money and though they got pissed off, the rich kids never threw us out. One evening we came into the building to find the elevator not working. We walked up the 14 flights to the room. Looking down the stairwell, we saw that a bunch of guys were holding the elevator about five floors below. A lot of yelling of “Fuck you” back and forth ensued, with these guys finally challenging, “Why don’t you come down here, motherfuckers,” et cetera. We just went into our room and rehearsed and it was just as well we didn’t go down there, as it turned out they were robbing a furrier on that lower floor. Later on we came into the space only to find that all the peavey amps had been sawed in half. In some misguided quest for smaller gear, the rich kids had opted to chop up their equipment. The half amps sitting there looked like they were embedded in the floor.
Tommy Ramone began subletting my First Avenue apartment. Tommy was pretty normal and things were stable ’til Dee Dee moved in. There started being more late-night events – some guy got locked in the hall in his underwear, somebody else pissed in the hall, et cetera.
We kept playing at CB’s and Max’s and various other little bars like Brandi’s and Monty Python’s and the Mushroom, most of which were around that strip below Fourteenth Street on Third Avenue where Taxi Driver would later be filmed. A West Village buddy Steve reappeared on the scene, now calling himself Stepanji. We played some shows with him on congas. We were at one of these little bars playing to a handful of people when we were approached by a group of uptown-style folks who had been either slumming or at a downtown horse show or something, I don’t know how they happened to be there. A girl who introduced herself as Maude Frank asked us if we were available to play at a party she was having. A few days later we arrived at a very opulent uptown town house and set up our crappy amps in a first-floor parlour room in front of the big picture windows. A bunch of guests arrived and we did our best to rock it. “Lady Marmalade” was a huge hit and we would bow to public demand and play “Lady Marmalade” a lot. I’m pretty sure we played it at least three or four times at this event. The party ground on and finally the cops came and the guys giving the party were thrilled! The police had, of course, never come to their door before and they couldn’t give a fuck. They said they’d double our fee if we kept going past our agreed-upon cut off time.
Billy was so conflicted about his drumming versus his alternative life in pharmaceuticals that it was stressing him out. We were doing a show at Max’s and he had a panic attack and drank himself semi-unconscious and Jerry Nolan sat in. We still weren’t getting paid very much; I can sympathise with his predicament. Billy gave it up and we put an ad in the Village Voice. The ad read: Freak energy Musical Experienced drummer needed female fronted estab. working NYC rock band. Excell opty. money. Fun. Call NOW.
And it gave the phone number at Debbie’s apartment. I don’t know if we spent any time on the punctuation or capitalizaions but that’s exactly it.
We got lots of calls and held drum auditions at the rehearsal room. A lot of weirdos showed up mixed in with actual musicians. Some of them wouldn’t leave. One guy in a fringe jacket hung around and watched other auditions. We started out being very organised and taking Polaroids of the candidates but gave up after a while. I think we really saw 40-odd people. Then the very last guy was a kid from New Jersey who had a very “I got this” attitude. He knew who we were, had been to a Stillettos show at the 82 Club. He had great hair and a cool pair of boots on, so that was it, an easy decision. We started rehearsing with Clem Burke within a few days.
We went out to Bayonne to visit Clem and his room was filled with copies of Tiger Beat magazine. He was living with his dad, his mother having recently died. He was 19 or 20 when we met him. His father had played drums and Clem worshipped Keith Moon. We rehearsed with Fred and Clem. Ivan Kraal came around briefly before joining Patti’s band. I think we played with Ivan at CB’s at least once.
The rich kids had thrown us out of the rehearsal space for lack of funds but we had managed to find some hippie in a smaller room right down the hall who let us in. The rich kids’ room was demolished and they were never there and we sold an old beat-up player piano that was in there. There were never any repercussions.
We eventually did a gig at CB’s with Clem and sisters Tish and Snooky who were briefly out backup singers. The girls had jungle-themed costumes made out of animal prints and bits of tied-on fur. Fred told me after the show that Television had asked him to temporarily replace Richard Hell. I got the depressing impression that Fred’s move wouldn’t be temporary. Television was higher up on the food chain than we were and Debbie and me spent a couple of weeks being paranoid and sulking. Debbie auditioned for a Top 40 band to try and add to her bar-girl income.
We also supplemented our income by moving some weed. We met this guy who was a low-level Greek gangster named Pando. He was balding, around 40, with the eternally open shirt and hairy chest with a gold chain. Pando lived in a modern basement apartment on Twenty-Third Street. I don’t know how the hell we met this guy; maybe from buying pot.
At the same time one of the guys from the Magic Tramps who lived in the Ansonia was able to get his hands on pounds of high-end pot, in this case gold grass. So we would buy a pound or a half a pound and drive downtown and sell it to Pando for a profit of maybe 50 bucks. It was a meagre profit, considering the level of paranoia. One time we delivered some normal-looking green weed and Pando dumped a bunch of red food colouring on it. This went on for a little while until we gave up the life of crime.
Clem would call us and be encouraging, saying, “Let’s get it going, you can do it” and such. It was daunting. Replacing the bass player, a quarter of the band, was like starting over but we went into rehearsals with Clem. Clem was a local hero in Bayonne and after a while he would show up with a group of kids from his hood. It reminded me of my friends from Brooklyn, There was a guy named Prash or Crash and another kid named Ronnie Toast who had allegedly burned down his parents’ house and then gone back when it was a boarded-up shell and written ‘toast’ on it in spray paint.
Along with this motley bunch was a very bright, good-looking 19-year-old kid named Gary. Gary was starting out playing bass and guitar and was enthusiastic, so that was it. Gary was in trouble with the law back in New Jersey for having been with his underage girlfriend when he became adult age himself. Her parent had gotten him busted and he wasn’t supposed to leave New Jersey. This was the impetus for Gary and Debbie writing “X Offender”. “Heart Of Glass” in an early incarnation as “The Disco Song” was floating around and we worked on a version of the Doors’ “Moonlight Drive”. The first gig we did with Gary and Clem was at Broadway Charlie’s bar that I think was on Broadway and Eleventh Street. It was a very warm steamy night. We soon went on and did a few shows at CB’s…
Under A Rock is out now, published by Little, Brown
CHRIS STEIN: Everybody encouraged me to write a book after Debbie’s memoir came out. I wrote a lot during COVID, when we were a little isolated. I haven’t really written anything this long previously, but I enjoyed the process. Did I have a routine? No, I don’t adhere to many routines in life! As a rule, I don’t read music books. I remember once being on an airplane and seeing some guy who looked like a fucking lawyer reading Keith Richards’ Life and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of amazing…’ But I’ve read Debbie’s book and some of Richard Hell’s I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp, which was brilliant. Dee Dee Ramone isn’t known for being a writer, but his three books are fabulous.
I started taking photographs seriously around 1968, ’69, so those helped jog my memory while I was writing the book. Certain other memories or events are firmly implanted! The ’70s was an interesting time. The ’60s influenced all of us profoundly – the British Invasion, the music coming out of California – but at the beginning of the ’70s, corporate music took hold for the first time in America. Radio began representing big interests. Music started becoming about finance. We had our own homegrown artists in New York, of course. Dylan, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Velvets. When I was a kid, I played with this band called The Morticians, who went on to become The Left Banke. So I had a relationship with the New York music scene early on.
To a certain extent, there’s a point where the book is a memorial of some people who are no longer here. It’s part and parcel of getting to my age – everybody starts slipping away. Lou’s last apartment was upstairs here. Joey Ramone and I were very close. I have this life-sized painted plaster statue of Mother Cabrini, the first American saint, that I’d bought at a junk store on the Lower East Side for 10 bucks. I had to drag it home on a very hot day and up five flights of stairs. Dee Dee was living in my apartment at the time. He got scared of it – he stabbed it with a kitchen knife.
People ask, did you think this would be going on, 50 years hence? I don’t think any of us really saw much beyond our immediate futures. Everyone was pretty much in the moment. There was a kind of naivety to the time. I guess there was a good camaraderie between the bands back then – at least at first. Success put a damper on that. All our competitive aspects reared their heads as time went on. With us, photographers would show up and shoot a few pictures of the band and say, “We need to shoot Debbie by herself.” That was always going on. People would resent that. I guess it’s standard, though.
The first attention we got in New York was from the British papers – Melody Maker and those guys were over there before there was any national US press on the scene. Researching the book, I read a bunch of old interviews. I said so much stupid shit! So I guess the book puts some of that in perspective… INTERVIEW: MICHAEL BONNER
“THEY ALL HIT IT OFF”
Remembering ARTURO VEGA, known as “the fifth Ramone”
A guy started showing up dressed in a neat suit with a Lucha Libre-style wrestling mask. This was Arturo Vega, a Mexican artist who was living in a big loft right around the corner from CBGB’s on Second Street. Artie had a great aesthetic. He was the first one I ever saw leave toys in their clear plastic packaging and then hang them like artworks. He had a way of narrowing focus on an everyday object until it became something bigger. A series of large paintings of supermarket-food-price ads were an homage to Andy but also something more stripped down and raw. He did a series of brightly coloured swastikas that became a statement about the cheerful embrace of evil.
Arturo quickly befriended the Ramones and they all hit it off. They would rehearse and sometimes sleep at his loft. Artie made some attempts at styling the Ramones early on. Like many of us, he was a frequent shopper at Fourteenth Street’s many cheap and weird surplus clothing stores. There was a Flagg Brothers shoe store that I used to go to. It sold slightly damaged but new platform shoes very cheap, like five bucks a pair. I don’t recall actually observing this, but Arturo got the Ramones four cheap suits at one point. It didn’t take. He found these polyester T-shirts on Fourteenth Street with this red, white, and blue zigzag pattern. Dee Dee wore one at least once that I recall. Artie incorporated the zigzag design into a logo he made for the Ramones that was based on the eagle motif on a JFK fifty-cent coin. The zigzag pattern is on the eagle’s shield.
Arturo and Danny Fields, who started managing them the following year, became like extra band members; Artie was frequently referred to as “the fifth Ramone.” By the end, Arturo had been to nearly every Ramones show, more than 2,200, missing only two, one because he was in jail.
“SOUNDED FANTASTIC”
Watching the McLaren-era NEW YORK DOLLS
On February of ’75 the Dolls started a series of shows at the Hippodrome, a club up on Fifty-Sixth Street, under the auspices of Malcolm McLaren, who was now managing them. I don’t know any of the backstory of how the Dolls transitioned from longtime early manager Marty Thau to Malcolm, but several years earlier I’d gone with Eric to the Chelsea Hotel, where Malcolm had turned one of the rooms into a showroom for his clothing. This was during his Let It Rock period and some of the Dolls’ members, including David, were there hanging out so they all were aware of each other already.
Malcolm quite successfully styled the band and the shows. The Dolls were all dressed in coordinated red leather and vinyl outfits and their backdrop was a big hammer-and-sickle motif. Maybe some statement about fashions overtaking revolution, the hedonism of rock dressed up as working-class struggle – I don’t know, I never asked. But they sounded fantastic; the band was measured and specific and the sound design was great. I thought it was the best I’d heard them, and I’d heard them a lot at this point. They even started on time.
Ironically the first weekend they played, the opening act was some very pretentious Bowie-clone conceptual deal that included the protagonist singer hatching out of a giant egg. The band for this epic was the rich kids from our rehearsal room, the same guys who had sawed their amps in half.
When they came out at the end and did a number as just a band, they got a better response than with the fake Jobriath-egg dude. The next weekend Television opened.
To quote Debbie: “Soon after that the Dolls went down to Florida with McLaren to start a tour, and about twenty minutes later we all heard that Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan had left the group, flown to Paris and that was that. Another twenty minutes later we all heard about the Sex Pistols.”
That’s a little condensed but works as hyperbole.
