If Television personified middle-class rebellion against the status quo (Meyers and Miller had met at boarding school before they dropped out in their teens), the Ramones were made of grittier stuff. Its four identically surnamed members had grown up in homes full of alcoholism and depression, and as teenagers they were considered the “obvious creeps” of their neighborhood in Queens. For the Ramones—particularly twenty-one-year-old Dee Dee, the hyperactive son of an alcoholic American soldier and a war-traumatized German showgirl—music provided the only escape from their boring lives. The Ramones might work by day at the dry cleaner’s or in the mailrooms of office buildings, but at night they could transform themselves into rock-and-roll heroes just by copping an attitude and producing a lot of fast, hard noise. It wasn’t about “thinking that you had to be it, or work for it,” Dee Dee later wrote. “You just had to shout and demand it . . . It gave everybody a chance to say something. That’s revolution.”
The Ramones’ August debut at CBGB was cartoonishly inept: the band stumbled badly over the three-chord songs, and Dee Dee tossed his bass up in the air at the end of each set and let it bounce a few times, thinking this “the ultimate in glamour,” until it broke. After the show, Hilly told the band that nobody was ever going to like them, but he personally had taken a shine to the Ramones and would keep them on.
As a topper for the evening, Dee Dee stumbled out of the club drunk at four o’clock that morning to find “this babe” in a black evening dress and spiked high-heeled shoes sitting on the hood of an old car on the Bowery, filing her nails like “an ancient vampire countess.” Connie Gripp, former girlfriend of the Dolls’ Arthur Kane, was nearly a decade older than Dee Dee and made her living as a go-go dancer at the Metropole on Forty-Eighth Street, turning the occasional trick to earn money for heroin. Dee Dee fell for her instantly and soon moved into her apartment on Sixteenth Street, but their drug and alcohol abuse and constant screaming fights got them kicked out of first one flat, then another. Finally, they washed up at the Chelsea, where Connie had once shared a room with Jobriath, a former Hair actor who’d become the city’s first openly gay rock star and who billed himself as the “True Fairy of Rock & Roll.” Stanley remembered Connie and naturally—despite the couple’s junkie demeanor and Bowery clothes—assigned the couple a room.
To Dee Dee, the Chelsea Hotel seemed like a kind of vortex in the middle of Manhattan: whatever you put into it was what you got back, tenfold, but some people never escaped. In recent months, as the economy continued to worsen, a wave of long-term tenants had given up the struggle: Florence Turner returned to her hometown of Edinburgh, Scotland, and even Shirley Clarke left her pyramid to teach video and film at UCLA. But others survived, at least for the time being: Richard Bernstein still churned out celebrity-art covers for Warhol’s magazine Interview in his ground-floor studio while gossiping with the twenty-year-old designers Elsa Peretti and Zandra Rhodes; Jobriath, who had inherited Shirley’s pyramid penthouse and installed a white grand piano at its most “psychically powerful” point, on a platform one-third of the way up from the floor, was now at work on another self-transformation, this time into a tuxedoed, Weimar-era cabaret singer. And, as always, a stream of aspiring newcomers passed through—this year, that included a couple of interesting Midwestern bands, Pere Ubu and Devo—to pick up their Chelsea Hotel street cred while on tour.
The Ramones’ growing popularity had finally compelled Dee Dee to give up his mailroom job. He now lived in what he called a “void of irresponsibility with nothing but free time”; he chose to spend most of that time on heroin. While heroin use was not unheard-of—in fact, it was part of a long, even distinguished, tradition in the hotel—this road toward a derangement of the senses could be a hard one, as Terry Southern pointed out in an essay at the time. “Almost no one kicks a major junk habit,” Southern wrote, “only super-artists, whose work is even stronger than the drug itself: Burroughs and Miles Davis are rather obvious examples. Mere mortals, however, beware.”
Dee Dee and Connie were not reading Southern. Instead, they were rubbing elbows with the junkie poet Gregory Corso, whose drug-infused rages led him to threaten to trash the apartment that Isabella Gardner still kept at the Chelsea if she didn’t pay him two thousand dollars and who set a mattress on fire in front of Harry Smith’s door. Meanwhile, Belle’s daughter, Rose, overdosed at a party in the hotel and somehow ended up so badly beaten that she suffered permanent brain damage. Horror stories flew through the corridors about what exactly had happened, some blaming the Hells Angels, others convinced that Harry Smith had lured her into a drug-addled, sadistic, black-magic ceremony.
Although that was extremely unlikely—Harry freely admitted he loved Rose—it was true that the recent receipt of a grant from New York’s Creative Artists Public Service Program had, in his own words, “precipitated a drinking and eating frenzy unparalleled in my recent history.” Of course, he believed in drugs’ usefulness in stimulating creative and organizational abilities. “For those who are interested in such things,” he once divulged, the films “Nos. 1 to 5 were made under pot; No. 6 was schmeck (it made the sun shine) and ups; No. 7 with cocaine and ups; Nos. 8 to 12 almost anything but mainly deprivation, and 13 with green pills from Max Jacobson, pink pills from Tim Leary, and vodka; No. 14 with vodka and Italian-Swiss white port.” Mahagonny, his most complex and ambitious film, naturally required an even greater derangement, through vodka and Dexedrine. So, joined by his young admirers—including a contingent of self-described “Harry-heads” who dressed in identical trench coats and recorded things they hoped would interest him—“I said ‘Whoopie,’ and we had a big party, and I bought a lot more records, and a lot more books.”
Jonas Mekas chose that moment to move out of the hotel. “There were all kinds of disasters going on there,” he explained. Sooner or later, he was convinced, Smith and Corso would burn the Chelsea down.
Dee Dee and Connie fit right into this milieu, getting drunk, screaming curses, breaking champagne bottles on the radiator and tossing the broken bottles out the window, and trying to kill each other. Although they passed out every night, they started each day as though everything were back to normal, commuting downtown to cop some dope on the Lower East Side. “We were both dope addicts,” Dee Dee later wrote. “I felt horrible.” The thought crossed his mind that maybe there was “some systematic plan from somewhere to fuck up people in America. Letting dope into the country on purpose to fuck up fools like me.” Yet his and similar musicians’ presence at the Chelsea attracted groupies, drug dealers, and other musicians, just as it had in the Fillmore East days. And with Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, and the Mirrors and the Electric Eels from Cleveland making their presence felt—some renting rooms and others just dropping in with their entourages to hang out or buy drugs—smack became easier and easier to get. Stanley tried to put most of the junkies on the lower floors so he’d be able to keep an eye on them. However, despite his vigilance, some residents soon discovered that they could sell pieces of the hotel’s cast-iron grates and etched-glass windows to Urban Artifacts on the Bowery for fifty dollars each, and then it was just a short trek to Avenue C to score junk with the cash. With more drugs came more violence: that November, Billy Maynard, a well-liked rock photographer who specialized in transvestites and drag bands like the Cockettes, was beaten to death in his eighth-floor room.
The following month, December 1974, Hilly Kristal gave up country music and introduced a rock-only policy at CBGB, allowing the bands that had started there to further establish themselves while making room for such new groups as the Dictators, Suicide, Rocket from the Tombs, the Dead Boys, and Talking Heads. In February, the Patti Smith Group, with the classically trained pianist Richard Sohl added to the Patti-Lenny duo, unleashed the poetry-rock style they called “three chords merged with the power of the word” in a two-month CBGB residency with Television. Sitting at the tables in the tiny club watching Patti and her group were such notables as the ever-supportive
Mapplethorpe, dressed all in black leather; Lou Reed, looking “like someone’s cranky old drunken father” to this younger crowd; and Malcolm McLaren, who had just completed a disastrous U.S. tour as the self-appointed manager of the New York Dolls during which the band had self-immolated on alcohol and drugs.
As a former participant in the Fourier-influenced 1960s situationist movement in Paris, McLaren was blown away by the completely self-generated, passionately expressive, mutually supportive musical subculture taking root at CBGB—a kind of “liberated zone” of its own that the nineteenth-century anarchists would have recognized and applauded. McLaren particularly liked the look of Richard Hell—his spiky hair, laced-tight bondage gear, and torn T-shirt reading Please Kill Me—and the sound of his song “Blank Generation.” During the past year in London, McLaren had been working out his own vision of a music based on what he called the “politics of boredom.” Imagining a lead singer in Nazi garb performing songs with titles like “Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die,” he gave that name to his clothing boutique on King’s Road. When he caught Steve Jones, a self-styled musician, shoplifting in the store, McLaren decided to rent a rehearsal space and try to help him put together a band. The results were horrible, as only one of the band’s members—Glen Matlock, an art student—knew how to play an instrument. But McLaren still saw some potential in using working-class kids like these to make a statement that combined art and politics. In New York, McLaren tried to persuade Hell to front a group for him in London, but the poet-musician wasn’t interested, and the boutique owner went home alone to figure out how to use what he’d learned.
The scene on the Bowery was still tiny, but at least it was bringing something real back to life. As William Burroughs said, the name of the game was survival when the negative forces were in control. That April 1975, the war ended amid televised images of army helicopters fleeing Saigon, and Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and other elders performing in a final War Is Over rally in Central Park. At the same time, a new generation—the Burroughs generation—was breaking through the cultural static at CBGB. Ivan Kral, the Patti Smith Group’s new Czech guitarist, documented those downtown nights with a 16-millimeter camera he’d bought in a pawnshop, and he later turned the footage into the “punk documentary” Blank Generation with the help of the filmmaker Amos Poe. The scene continued to shift, with Hell leaving Television to form the Heartbreakers with Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan of the Dolls, and Television drafting Fred Smith of Detroit’s MC5.
Life got more intoxicating, and more dangerous, through the summer as the Ramones played CBGB over and over to earn money for rent and dope. For convenience’s sake, the band rented a loft, sandwiched between a crazy painter on the top floor and six drag queens below, around the corner from CBGB on East Second Street. Adjoining their building was a graveyard that had been dug up by the city; Dee Dee was able to pluck a diamond ring off a cadaver’s finger and pawn it for enough to buy dope and Hostess cupcakes for months. Dicey as the neighborhood was—so perilous that people didn’t dare go out alone to buy drugs—Dee Dee and Connie moved in. They were soon kicked out, after Connie almost destroyed the place during a fight, but Dee Dee continued to spend time there writing songs with such lyrics as “I don’t wanna walk around with you, / so why you wanna walk around with me?”— songs that pretty much summed things up for the kids across the country who had had it with commercial sentimentality.
That summer, a go-go dancer named Nancy Spungen started hanging about the loft as well, commuting from her tiny ground-floor apartment on West Twenty-Third Street and Ninth Avenue, a block west of the Chelsea Hotel. Younger than the other girls, the product of a middle-class Jewish home in suburban Philadelphia, Nancy had suffered from emotional problems all her life—tantrums, nightmares, hyperactivity, anxiety—possibly due, her mother claimed, to oxygen deprivation at birth. Throughout Spungen’s childhood, doctors had treated her with prescriptions for everything from phenobarbital (at age three months) to Thorazine (when she was eleven). By age twelve, she was self-medicating with heroin and other street drugs; she ran away to New York City for the first time at the age of fourteen, drawn there by her love of rock music. When she turned seventeen, her family gave in to the inevitable and helped her move to the city for good.
By coincidence, Nancy’s upstairs neighbor on Twenty-Third Street turned out to be Lance Loud, the boy (now grown) whose flamboyant performance in An American Family had helped draw Nancy, as well as hundreds of other teenagers, to Manhattan—and the Chelsea—in recent years. Attempting to cash in on his notoriety, Loud had formed the Dolls-influenced band the Mumps, which joined the lineup at Max’s and CBGB. Nancy soon became a regular there, one of the bevy of groupies competing to shoot up and have sex with the downtown band members. “There’s really a lot going on here. Good bands. Not plastic,” she wrote to her mother in 1975. Hoping to find a way to document the scene for local rock magazines, she built a circle of contacts that included Debbie Harry, Joey Ramone, and Richard Hell.
But the friendships were one-sided. The band members’ girlfriends hated Nancy and didn’t have a problem expressing their opinions of her on CBGB’s bathroom wall. Even the male musicians who had sex with Nancy did their best to avoid her later, as her aggressiveness and whining voice got on their nerves. At eighteen, she had bleached her hair blond and started dancing topless in Times Square, possibly turning a trick now and then to support her heroin habit. That spring, she became infatuated with the Heartbreakers’ drummer Jerry Nolan. Shortly after he left for London to play in a band there, Nancy overdosed; she survived only because Lance Loud found her and took her to the hospital. In August, realizing that the CBGB crowd wanted her dead, she entered a methadone program and began saving money so she could follow Nolan to London and start over.
The fall of 1975 was when the tiny movement that Hilly Kristal called “street rock” finally got an official name. The word punk had turned up in various essays and downtown novels in recent years, but it really gained traction only when Punk magazine surfaced that season, thanks to John Holmstrom’s, Ged Dunn’s, and Legs McNeil’s determination to publish entertainment for “other fuck-ups like us,” people whose lives consisted mainly of “McDonald’s, beer, and TV reruns.” When they dropped in at CBGB, they were thrilled by the short, fast, loud songs—like “53rd & 3rd,” about a male hustler who kills a john to prove he’s not a sissy—and by the exhilarating sense that at last, through this music, “everything that was humiliating, embarrassing, and stupid had been turned to an advantage.” Inspired, they plastered the city with posters reading WATCH OUT! PUNK IS COMING! which forced everyone who saw them to ask, “What’s punk?” Punk must just be “another shitty group with an even shittier name,” Debbie Harry decided. “I always thought a punk was someone who took it up the ass,” observed Burroughs.
Positive reviews started appearing in the Village Voice, SoHo Weekly News, and elsewhere; bigger crowds started to gather outside the Bowery club to watch club-goers arrive and depart in yellow cabs and the occasional stretch limo; and more and more people pushed their way inside to check out both the music and the graffitied bathroom walls. Finally, the music industry began to pay attention. The Ramones couldn’t believe their luck that summer when Sire Records offered them a six-thousand-dollar contract. Two months later, Arista booked Electric Lady Studios for the Patti Smith Group to record the album Horses, with John Cale producing. The album opened with lines from Smith’s early poem “Oath”—“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”—and then moved, faster and faster, into a stunning, jump-up-and-down, CBGB version of Van Morrison’s “Gloria.” In “Land,” Smith let loose with one of the powerful stream-of-consciousness improvisations she had trained herself to deliver at the Mercer Arts Center and the Hotel Diplomat years before. “I felt like it was The Exorcist,” she said later of the trancelike state that produced the song. “It really frightened me.” By the time the album was released in December, though, the twen
ty-nine-year-old had taken ownership of the experience, boasting to a pair of New York Times reporters, “I have a lot to learn about records and mixing and things like that, but nobody can tell me about the magic. The magic is completely under control.”
The soul cry emanating from the Bowery was an appropriate response to the Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” but conservatives’ determination to let the markets run their “infallible” courses regardless of the consequences was having a devastating effect on the Chelsea Hotel. That Christmas, the long-term residents celebrated as they always did: by throwing eggnog parties, organizing outings to the theater, and trekking up to Kleinsinger’s jungle to watch The Little Star of Bethlehem accompanied by his musical score. But this year, the soiled silver Christmas tree squatting in the lobby seemed only to add to the depressing sense of the Chelsea as some sort of outlaw mental-health clinic. Since summer, a smattering of new or returning tenants had moved in: William Ivey Long, a young assistant to Charles James, with dreams of designing costumes for Broadway; Clifford Irving, arriving for another stay while his wife, convicted for assisting in the Howard Hughes fraud, served time in jail; Viva, returning from her pioneering life in California, without Michel, to promote her new novel Baby; and even a particularly adventurous stockbroker—a real coup for these times—Jonathan Berg, who took a penthouse apartment, explaining, “I’m creative with money.” But despite the newcomers’ presence, for some residents, the strain was beginning to show.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 39