Steven Blush - New York Rock: From the Rise of The Velvet Underground to the Fall of CBGB

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To Alyssa Fisher and Jacqueline Fisher Blush

Toilet love: CBGB Mens Room, 2005. Photo by Tony Mann.

Writing a book on the definitive history of New York Rock was no easy feat.

Maximum respect to executive editor Elizabeth Beier for all her professional insight, and for always keeping me inspired, focused, and moving forward.

Much thanks to editorial assistant Nicole Williams, for dealing with my correspondences and pulling all the disparate pieces together. Freelance copy editor Ian Gibb and lawyer Henry Kaufman really helped strengthen the manuscript. Heartfelt appreciation for production manager Janna Dokos, production editor Eric C. Meyer, and designer Steven Seighman for making everything look so clean and simple, and to jacket designer Lisa Pompilio for taking me back to 1977. Extra thanks to publicist Rebecca Lang, marketing director Laura Clark, marketing manager Lauren Friedlander, and sales director Brian Heller for all your efforts. The biggest thank-you of all goes to Griffin publisher Jennifer Enderlin, for bringing this 20th-century subculture to the 21st-century mainstream.

I could never have written this book were it not for my personal editor and dear friend George Petros, and the editorial assistance of Deanna M. Lehman, Tony Mann, and the late great Jerry Williams. The scores of interview subjects, photographers, archivists, and musicians hassled for this project all deserve serious accoladesyou know who you are.

Mad props to my agent, Jim Fitzgerald at the James Fitzgerald Agency, for taking my career to another level. Much love to the Blush, Fisher, Goldstein, and Radick families for putting up with my nonsense. Alyssa Fisher and Jackie Fisher Blush, I am always touched by your presence.

New York City and New York Rock mean different things to different people. Everyone has ideas of what its all about. There are no absolutes. New Yorks a city in constant flux, so its tough to call anything quintessentially NYC.

The city represents endless possibilities. Its a cross-collision of art and commerce, style and substance, subversion and illusion, and tension and danger. Walking down the street, one can feel the ghosts of players past. Every inch of terrain has been trod. Theres relatively little new artistic ground to cover. So its all about reinvention, reflection, and retrospection.

New York Rock breaks down the rock scenes half-century connection to art, film, theater, poetry, and politics, in relation to the citys kaleidoscopic socioeconomic, racial, and sexual variants. It analyzes New York Rocks distinct subculture through the prism of influences, crosscurrents, and psychoactive distractions.

New Yorks rockers range from a handful of impressive stars to a glut of historically relevant washouts. The point of the 1,500-plus musicians, clubs, and labels discussed in this book isnt to retell every factbooks have been written on many of these charactersbut rather spell out how they played into the making of New York Rock. So, the prerock Precedents sections dont even try to recite well-known facts about New York City jazz, blues, disco, minimalism, et cetera; rather they identify how each of those fed into the creation of the citys rock subculture.

My years as a New York journalist, editor, publisher, promoter, DJ, and filmmaker (the latter with director Paul Rachman) have made me privy to some unreal behind-the-scenes situations. I was not onstage, but I was more than a cultural voyeur taking mental notes.

My father was born on Rivington Street in the Lower East Side. He and my grandfather ran a small printing shop at 195 Christie Street. Thats where I spent much of my youth in the 70s. There I picked up an understanding of publishing, and discovered at a young age the sins of the city. At around thirteen, I heard a weird band rehearsing upstairs that I peeked in on. Years later, I realized that was Talking Heads. During my forays, I frequented the local bars serving minors, one of them CBGB. I also stumbled upon the punk subculture on St. Marks Place. My father knew plenty of riffraff. One of them was Arthur Weinstein, to whom he was like a father figure (he attended my fathers funeral). Arthur owned the new wave disco Hurrah, and then the after-hours clubs the Jefferson and the Continental, and then the legendary World. Arthur brought me to his clubs and other nightspots, so I saw a lot of crazy action firsthand, at an early age. This book was born of years of lifestyle, not Web research or Facebook interviews.

In my four years in Washington, D.C., I was lucky to live through and be involved with that citys burgeoning hardcore punk explosion. Then, back in New York, I booked a few Downtown club shows that some people still talk about. I spun records at more than a few cool clubs and parties, and wrote for, edited, or published great magazines. Regarding Don Hills, Cat Club, Mars, Love Club, Carmelitas, 428 Lafayette, Metal Bar, the Pyramid, Paper, Details, RIP, Seconds, et ceteraI likely had a hand in it. Of the post-80s bands, I worked in some capacity and/or socialized with most of them.

One thing Ive learned from this process is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Each generation goes through the same bullshit, each subject to the same egotism and petulance and foibles, sparring over whos legit or old-school and whos fake or a sellout. The research also shows that most every genre or movement in the annals of modern culture traces straight back to New York, and if anything, New York rock musicians and scenesters deserve way more credit than theyve received. Most of these folks were too busy livin it to ever monetize it.

American rock has two epicenters: New York and Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a story unto itself that I will tell at a later date.

New York Rock was a twentieth-century art form, and means something very different in the twenty-first. Some hipster bands refer to what they do as post-rock. They are correct: we are living in a post-rock era.

The New York Rock of the Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, and Ramones symbolically ended when CBGB closed. New York Rock is a relic, like a museum piece, removed from its original intent as the soundtrack of the radical fringe.

Perhaps some kids are about to come along with a new sound to blow us all away, worthy of a new chapter for the next edition of New York Rock.

Steven Blush

New York City, 2016

Hey, ho, lets go: Joey Ramone and Dee Dee Ramone, Bowery, 1977. Photo by GODLIS.

Love comes in spurts: Richard Hell and the Voidoids, CBGB, 1977. Photo by GODLIS.