that point. Maybe it was. My clearer memory, though, is that my father, who also had records by the Rascals and the Stones, thought my 5th grade teacher, his best friend and an avowed Abba fan, would dig Blondie’s girl-group vocals, and so I took the record to school for show and tell. We played it one afternoon in class as a reward for good behavior, though Mr. Smith, who’d previewed the lyrics sheet, made me stand like a sentinel by the turntable and jerk down the volume each time the word “ass” appeared in the song “Heart of Glass.” Maybe that record didn’t change my life, though I did wear it out. And somewhere in my parents’ library is a cassette tape of me singing my prepubescent heart out to that nuclear holocaust deep cut, “Fade Away and Radiate.”
I start with this anecdote not simply to situate myself chronologically or geographically in relation to the downtown New York scene this book seeks to reconstruct — and not merely to warn readers up front that I wasn’t at CBGB’s in the ’70s along with the dog shit, the bums, and the birth of the music that would define the rest of my life (to this point) — but to note that it had taken only four years for a dirty index finger of a bar on the Bowery in New York, a city of which I had almost no conception outside Sesame Street , to escape its underground origins and erupt into mainstream American consciousness, reaching even the rural hinterlands — all without the help of the internet. If you’d told someone at CBGB’s in the spring of ’74 that four years later the brassy blonde singer for the Stillettoes [ sic ] would have a record that sold 20 million copies, they would have assumed you’d been smoking up behind the club between sets. And yet here she was, arriving unsolicited in my uncle’s post office box, simply because he forgot to return a slip telling Columbia House he didn’t want his record of the month.
Not that I would know anything about CBGB’s or the Bowery for several years to come. That knowledge I pieced together as a teenager via a subscriptions to mainstream rock magazines and my discovery of the Readers’ Guide to Periodicals and Interlibrary Loan. Sending off for photocopies of old articles on my favorite bands, I learned that the post-punk/new wave music that filled my teenage years — thanks to hip kids I met at orchestra camp in the summers, and also to John Peel, whose show played very late nights on a KTNN, the Navajo Nation’s radio station — traced its genealogy back directly to that same club’s earliest bands: Television, Blondie, the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads. Even so, when I first read about REM’s admiring Television or U2’s declaration of indebtedness to the whole CBGB’s scene, I still knew no one who had even a third-generation dubbed cassette tape of Television’s or Patti Smith’s albums. My music, like my uncle’s before me, came primarily by mail-order, and I don’t recall CBGB’s old-timers as part of the catalog, with the exception of Talking Heads and Blondie, who’d scored a handful of pop hits in the ’80s. That very distinction — the commercial success of a few of the groups and the total unavailability of others — rendered Television or Patti Smith all the more iconic.
It wasn’t until later — when I was a college student, then a graduate student in American Studies, situated in more suitable climes in east coast urban centers — that the full CBGB’s constellation came into view. In college, outside the confines of pre-internet Smallville, I found friends with similar tastes and crates full of records I’d heard of but never seen, all mine for the cost of a few dozen blank cassettes. Serious record stores became a reality, not something I read about. Just about the time I finished my PhD, Napster (then Audiogalaxy, then Soulseek) became available and then even the most elusive bootlegs could be mine with a few keystrokes. Rather than spend much time
I start with this anecdote not simply to situate myself chronologically or geographically in relation to the downtown New York scene this book seeks to reconstruct — and not merely to warn readers up front that I wasn’t at CBGB’s in the ’70s along with the dog shit, the bums, and the birth of the music that would define the rest of my life (to this point) — but to note that it had taken only four years for a dirty index finger of a bar on the Bowery in New York, a city of which I had almost no conception outside Sesame Street , to escape its underground origins and erupt into mainstream American consciousness, reaching even the rural hinterlands — all without the help of the internet. If you’d told someone at CBGB’s in the spring of ’74 that four years later the brassy blonde singer for the Stillettoes [ sic ] would have a record that sold 20 million copies, they would have assumed you’d been smoking up behind the club between sets. And yet here she was, arriving unsolicited in my uncle’s post office box, simply because he forgot to return a slip telling Columbia House he didn’t want his record of the month.
Not that I would know anything about CBGB’s or the Bowery for several years to come. That knowledge I pieced together as a teenager via a subscriptions to mainstream rock magazines and my discovery of the Readers’ Guide to Periodicals and Interlibrary Loan. Sending off for photocopies of old articles on my favorite bands, I learned that the post-punk/new wave music that filled my teenage years — thanks to hip kids I met at orchestra camp in the summers, and also to John Peel, whose show played very late nights on a KTNN, the Navajo Nation’s radio station — traced its genealogy back directly to that same club’s earliest bands: Television, Blondie, the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads. Even so, when I first read about REM’s admiring Television or U2’s declaration of indebtedness to the whole CBGB’s scene, I still knew no one who had even a third-generation dubbed cassette tape of Television’s or Patti Smith’s albums. My music, like my uncle’s before me, came primarily by mail-order, and I don’t recall CBGB’s old-timers as part of the catalog, with the exception of Talking Heads and Blondie, who’d scored a handful of pop hits in the ’80s. That very distinction — the commercial success of a few of the groups and the total unavailability of others — rendered Television or Patti Smith all the more iconic.
It wasn’t until later — when I was a college student, then a graduate student in American Studies, situated in more suitable climes in east coast urban centers — that the full CBGB’s constellation came into view. In college, outside the confines of pre-internet Smallville, I found friends with similar tastes and crates full of records I’d heard of but never seen, all mine for the cost of a few dozen blank cassettes. Serious record stores became a reality, not something I read about. Just about the time I finished my PhD, Napster (then Audiogalaxy, then Soulseek) became available and then even the most elusive bootlegs could be mine with a few keystrokes. Rather than spend much time
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