For years after their breakup, the Velvets served as the benchmark of New York’s rock underground, in spite of the fact that they never reached mainstream audiences. Local radio offered no support. Once Warhol’s media experiments had expired, the band looked elsewhere for an audience, spending the end of the ’60s on the road. Many listeners, even sympathetic ones like Richard Williams of the British music paper Melody Maker, found their music “hard, ugly, and based on a kind of sadomasochistic world which few dared enter,” though Williams, for one, heralded their music as superior to Sgt. Pepper.50 The Velvets’ commercial failure would be attributed to their artistic integrity, since they rejected commercial radio format for representational practices — and subject matter — required by narrative and artistic agendas they set for themselves. The Velvets’ ill-fated career arc set a template for Television’s, as would the influence they eventually exerted on subsequent generations of musicians.
When Lou Reed played his final shows with the Velvet Underground at Max’s in the summer of 1970, a vacuum opened downtown. Warhol himself had been scarce since an attempted assassination in ’68. His party crowd still hung out. But what would it take as an organizing principle? The answer would come soon enough, flamboyant and covered in glitter, and the UK’s music and culture tabloids, addicted to Dylan and fearing they had come too late to the Velvets, would be in the right place to welcome it with arms open. Verlaine would later claim that CBGB’s bands “shared a dislike for ’70s bands, which may have included — besides bands like the Eagles and the Bee Gees — even the New York Dolls and that glamour rock crap.”51 But a closer look at the downtown scene throughout CBGB’s early years suggests plentiful continuities between New York’s glitter and nascent punk scenes. Television owed a greater debt to these camp nostalgists than is often assumed.
23 Gray (2010).
24 Licht (2003).
25 Laughner (1977).
26 McNeil and McCain (1996: pp. 167–8); Heylin (1993: pp. 93–4); Bell (1984).
27 Young (1977).
28 Hell (2007).
29 Kane (2003: pp. 17–23).
30 Mele (2000: chs. 4–5).
31 Zukin (1982).
32 Mele (2000: p. 142).
33 Noland (1995).
34 Sarig (1998: p. 18).
35 Verlaine (1976).
36 Licht (2006).
37 Fields (1973).
38 Mengaziol (1981).
39 Kane (2010: p. 198).
40 Gross (1997).
41 Hell (2007).
42 Heylin (1993: p. 98).
43 Verlaine, in Heylin (1993: p. 96); see also Robinson (1977).
44 Melillo (2009: p. 65).
45 Hell (1997).
46 Banes (1993: p. 55–8); Kaprow (1961).
47 DeRogatis (2009: pp. 62–72).
48 Grunenberg and Harris (2005: p. 242).
49 Joseph (2002); Bockris and Malanga (1983: p. 13).
50 Williams (2005: pp. 119, 121).
51 Verlaine (1976).
Downtown Satyricon
The back room at Max’s is a dimly lit, red-table-clothed, 20 by 20 foot den of iniquity. The food’s not much, and the drinks aren’t cheap, but no one really goes there to drink or eat; they go to see and be seen.
— Dave Marsh, Melody Maker, 6 October 1973
Marquee Moon bears faint traces of what the cultural historian Andreas Killen calls “Warholism”: the replacement of pre-’60s certainties about American life with “nostalgia, camp, and irony, the claustrophobic minutae of life inside the media echo chamber.”52 Television itself, however, was born directly under a Warholian sign, as was much of the music in the ’70s downtown scene. Warhol broke down barriers between high and low culture, injected the underground into the mainstream, made life into performance art. Rock ‘n’ roll seemed a logical medium for this project, but Warholism extended far beyond the limited reach of the underground, Velvet or otherwise. Dylan’s career offers an even more visible example of celebrity’s transformative force. If he was the patron saint of celebrity cool, Warhol was its theologian, and the Factory and Max’s Kansas City were its sacred spaces. There, identity transformations like those Dylan had repeatedly undergone took even more extreme forms, as Warhol surrounded himself with drag queens who laid bare the degree to which all identity, including gender, was performed. As Mary Harron wrote in 1980, looking back over an explosive two decades, Warhol had helped to create “an attitude” in New York, “tough, funny, sharp-witted — sustained by many of [his] superstars even when they were showing their scars. It was the attitude of people who had been through the mill and come out flaunting. Their detachment, the way they parodied themselves, was a form of courage — and if you were a drag queen in 1966, you needed all the courage you could get.” When Richard Hell, writing in CBGB’s early days, declared that “celebrity-hood” would be “the art form of the future,” he had similar principles in mind.53
The mass media fusion of life and celebrity characterized the downtown scene in the early ’70s, as did a parodic impulse that sealed off the scene from aggressive politicking like John Lennon’s. Following Warhol’s example of “consciously developing an image,” a pattern Bowie followed spectacularly as Ziggy Stardust, savvy downtown artists sought to use the media before they were used by them.54 Hell would follow this blueprint in Television’s founding, benefitting from local and international media interest in New York’s art and music undergrounds. Max’s back room was filled not only with artists and musicians, but also with critics and producers, a network of individuals with transatlantic influence who would cultivate a series of underground scenes leading up to the advent of Television and CBGB’s heyday. In the words of Danny Goldberg, journalist and later a record exec, this clique sought to function as a “collective conscience” that would “maintain the integrity of the rock culture” by promoting artists they believed had “authentic talent and energy.”55
Chief among this clique were Lisa and Richard Robinson, a journalist and an A&R man, and Danny Fields, an A&R man-turned-editor at 16 magazine. The three of them had introduced Bowie to Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and the Warhol crowd in the fall of 1971. Fields had signed the MC5 and the Stooges to Elektra in the late ’60s and had then managed the latter. Richard Robinson had engineered Lou Reed’s solo debut. A transatlantic columnist for NME, Lisa Robinson also edited Hit Parader magazine (a mainstream music monthly), wrote a cheeky rock fashion column for the Detroit-based Creem, and in 1973 founded Rock Scene magazine — which featured “a very camp sensibility but also a very New York sensibility” — with her husband and guitarist Lenny Kaye, specifically to promote unsigned New York bands.56
Like Tom Miller, Richard Meyers, and many other downtowners, from 1972 to 1975 these scenemakers were fans and ready advocates of a new band, the New York Dolls. Street smart, christened in Max’s back room, they combined the raw sound of early Who with Mick Jagger’s cocky swagger, all in a New York accent and injected with the campy glamour of Warhol’s drag stars. Though they were more or less straight, the Dolls played great stage queens, taking underground drag antics on stage, on vinyl, and eventually on the road. David Johansen and Johnny Thunders sometimes looked like they were about to make out while sharing a mic, and Johansen regularly waxed sibilant and flung a limp wrist for effect. On occasion — for interviews, photo shoots, their album cover, and some live shows — they dressed in drag. They also rocked like a Long Island rec room circa ’66, and on that score, they pushed glam’s fascination with ’30s glamour — a campy return to the world of cabaret — firmly into rock ‘n’ roll territory. Beginning in June ’72, they played a 17-week residency at the Mercer, whose more high-minded avant-garde owners hoped the Dolls’ trashy but growing following would help them make rent. Though Television would present itself two years later as an overt rejection of glitter, Hell and Verlaine initially took the Dolls as inspiration, and Marquee Moon itself bears discernable traces of Warhol’s and the Dolls’ downtown reigns.
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As Max’s and Mercer’s regulars, the Robinsons and Fields knew Patti Smith, who would become another force central to Television’s development. A relentless scene-crosser a few years older than Meyers and Miller, Smith had come to New York just after Meyers, in 1967, also aiming to be a poet. Breaking into underground theater first, she appeared in the gender-bending burlesque Femme Fatale (1969), written by Jackie Curtis and featuring a Warholian menagerie: Wayne County, Penny Arcade, and Mary Woronov. Staged at the East Village experimental theater La MaMa, Curtis’s play was produced under the aegis of the Theater of the Ridiculous, a company whose works centered on gender and sexuality and routinely featured Warhol types. Smith would perform in other plays, including Cowboy Mouth, which she co-wrote with Obie-winner Sam Shepard, with whom she was having an affair.
A few months prior to her performance with Shepard, in February 1971 Smith gave a reading at the Poetry Project while Lenny Kaye improvised on electric guitar behind her. She was opening for the poet Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s downtown guide in the early ’60s and whip-dancer in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Smith and Malanga pulled together several disparate threads of the downtown performing arts scene to create a who’s-who audience: poets (including Ginsberg) and musicians (Dylan’s friend Bobby Neuwirth), fashion models, rock journalists and industry types (including the Robinsons and Fields), other Max’s regulars (including Warhol assistant Terry Ork), along with Theater of the Ridiculous personnel.57 Kaye had his own connections: he was the music editor for the men’s magazine Cavalier, a regular contributor to Rolling Stone, and occasionally, like Patti, to Creem.
Smith deftly bridged the gap between downtown poetry and cabaret. She kicked off her reading with a performance of “Mack the Knife” in honor of Bertholt Brecht, then dedicated the rest of the evening to “all that is criminal, the great pit of Babel,” to Hell itself. Though she left the camp at the door — no one is more serious about Brecht and Weill than Patti Smith — she shared Theater of the Ridiculous obsessions with gender and religion. Her own tagphrase before long would be “beyond gender,” anticipating one of the keynotes of the post-Stonewall downtown scene.
Smith wouldn’t perform again with Kaye for another two years. In the meantime she appeared in a Saks fashion show wearing a ratty T-shirt (later cited as an inspiration by Richard Hell), was featured in Andy Warhol’s Interview, published four poetry chapbooks, opened regularly for glitter bands at the Mercer, and held two more solo readings at the Poetry Project. She published rock criticism and traveled to London with Malanga for a reading that received attention for Malanga’s connection with the Velvets. Smith’s poetry revealed her obsessions with rock stars; her criticism, like that of Creem’s Lester Bangs, was unabashedly autobiographical, reveling in her admiration for the Stones, Hendrix, Dylan. In late ’73 she and Kaye reunited for a “Rock n Rimbaud” extravaganza, celebrating the life and death of the French poet in a show at Les Jardins, a new gay discotheque on the rooftop of the Hotel Diplomat on W. 43rd St. For an audience full of Warhol’s inner circle, she and Kaye laid down a combination of French decadent poetry and rock ‘n’ roll that was already, unknown to her, percolating through Television’s earliest songs in their Chinatown rehearsal space.
Smith’s relationship with Kaye had been spurred by a piece he’d written on Philly and South Jersey doo-wop. She contacted him through the Robinsons and the two made fast friends, spinning old 45s and dancing through the aisles of Village Oldies records, where Kaye worked.58 Kaye’s music interests were broad and deep, philosophical and historical. In 1972, he convinced Elektra to issue Nuggets, a double LP of hard-to-find ’60s garage singles. The compilation of songs Kaye described as “punk rock” has been credited with fueling the revival of interest in garage-psych sounds such as the 13th Floor Elevators’ “You’re Gonna Miss Me” and the Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction,” which resonated with the New York Dolls’ energy and would also influence early Television.
It didn’t take long for the Dolls to register with the same London press that obsessed over Iggy, Bowie, Reed, and, before them, Dylan. Their first UK tour ended disastrously that November when their drummer overdosed in a fan’s bathtub, piping-hot coffee poured down his gullet while he was out. When they’d recouped and hit the road again, the Dolls perplexed American audiences outside urban areas. Creem sent Lisa Robinson to cover the tour, where she witnessed enthusiastic, lipschticked fans in LA but apprehension at most stops between coasts. Fields, also along for the ride, saw the Dolls as theater more than an actual band: “Anyone connected with this industry who talks about music, well that’s just astonishing,” he told Robinson for her Creem piece. “Play music indeed — thank God they don’t have to.”59
Talent or no, the Dolls inspired Meyers and Miller to form their own band, the Neon Boys, with Tom’s old Delaware bandmate, Billy Ficca, on drums. Ficca also shared Miller’s penchant for free jazz, especially for Tony Williams, who had drummed with the Miles Davis Quintet and would pioneer jazz-rock fusion. (Davis called him “one of the baddest motherfuckers who had ever played a set of drums.”) Though they never performed, the Neon Boys demoed a handful of tracks in early ’73. Meyers’s songs — “Love Comes In Spurts,” “That’s All I Know (Right Now),” and “High Heeled Wheels” — featured slightly sneering vocals, Dylan crossed with David Johansen, delivered over jangly guitar lines, like Lou Reed playing early Who. Like Miller’s songs (“Tramp,” “Hot Dog,” and “Poor Circulation”), the demos of which remain unreleased, most of Meyers’s compositions would make it onto early Television setlists. Unsatisfied with their sound, however, the band sat on the recordings and advertised for a second guitarist in the Voice and Creem: “Narcissistic rhythm guitarist wanted — minimal talent okay.” Respondents included Chris Stein, who would later play for the Stillettoes and Blondie, and Doug Colvin, later Dee Dee Ramone, but the band couldn’t settle on someone they liked and soon dissolved. Ficca moved to Boston. Verlaine would later say that he and Hell had already experienced creative differences over his distaste for Hell’s vocals.60
To understand the world the Neon Boys hoped to enter, consider a scene piece written by the 22-year-old journalist Nick Kent, who’d been sent by NME that spring to report on the post-Velvets underground that had spawned the Dolls. Kent was perfect for the job. He holed up at the infamous Chelsea Hotel and made the rounds of downtown hotspots. The article he eventually published, though, brims with disappointment. Max’s wasn’t nearly as seedy as legend had it. (Even the bathroom graffiti is boring, he complains.) The crowd consisted of “city boys in denims … toting their Jack Kerouac post-beatnik complexes.” Kent homes in on Eric Emerson, a pony-tailed “ex-Warhol extra” who looks “like a reject from Paul Revere and the Raiders.” Emerson and the Magic Tramps epitomize what Kent calls “the new-wave New York bizarro-bands that sprout from the more bohemian areas of the Big Apple,” a cluster of bands whose sound Kent traces to the mid-’60s Long Island white-boy R&B bands such as the Young Rascals, the Vagrants, and the “punk-mysterioso” Vanilla Fudge. This garage band tradition, Kent explains, opened the door to the Velvet Underground.61
In establishing these lines of influence, Kent’s piece lays important groundwork for Television’s entrance on the downtown scene. By 1973 the Velvets had come and gone, but Reed still served as a dysfunctional godfather to a nascent glitter scene, “smiling benignly if a little hazily down on the latest developments of the downtown Satyricon.”62 Kent, like Lester Bangs, was as put off by Reed’s new incarnation as he’d been drawn to the Velvets’ mystique. Reed had been a dirtier, underground version of the snarling proto-punk Dylan but now was a shallow parody of himself: stoned, bloated, easily bowled over by Bowie.63
Reed’s Transformer-era transformation made sense given the modulations the downtown scene itself had undergone: his celebration of Warhol’s drag superstars in “Walk on the Wild Side” was essentially a New York School poem, cliquishly self-referential to the initiated, set to a
radio-friendly pop pastiche. Kent thought the Dolls-centered downtown scene couldn’t decide whether to revive ’60s rock or parody it in a drag revue. Reed’s hit song expressed this ambivalence: it was the “very own anthem” of the Max’s scene, a product of the ’60s underground that still, somehow, would be fit for cabaret divas like Streisand or Midler to cover: “I think Bette Midler could absolutely tear it up,” Kent wrote.64
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