As a kid, I liked to watch the “Bowery Boys” movies on TV. The series featured a gang of nutty juvenile delinquents in funny situations getting into all kinds of trouble. Before I moved to New York, this was how I pictured the Bowery, as a playful hangout for ne’er-do-wells and drunkards.
I first saw the Bowery with my own eyes in September of 1974. At the corner of Bowery and Houston, you were likely to see a bunch of guys drinking cheap wine, such as Thunderbird or Night Train, and hanging on for dear life to the chain-link fence that surrounded the lot there. One or two would be vomiting, and another would have his pants down around his ankles as he relieved himself and then wiped his ass with his bare hands in broad daylight while traffic whizzed by. Some of the crazier guys would venture out into the intersection to direct traffic. Others would ask for a handout from people in cars stopped at the light while “cleaning” their windshields with an oily rag or a piece of dirty newspaper. In those days, these poor drunks were known as bums.
There were many dreadful flophouses on the Bowery where you would never want to end up. The American composer Stephen Foster, who wrote “Oh, Susanna” and “Camptown Races,” spent the last, alcoholic years of his life on the Bowery, in the eighteen-sixties; it was in one of those flophouses that his songwriting partner George Cooper found him, collapsed and bleeding, and took him to Bellevue Hospital, where Foster died a few days later, at age thirty-eight, with thirty-eight cents in his wallet.
It was not unusual to have to step over or around a dead body as you walked down the street. Most of these corpses were men who drank themselves to death or toppled out of a flophouse window. The long history of the Bowery is one of crime, misadventure, debauchery, desperation, and death. Pickpockets and thieves hung out in every bar. People were drugged, robbed, and kidnapped. Muggers lurked in the shadows. I kept telling myself that I would never end up a bum and, if things got bad, my family would surely look after me.
Jamie Dalglish, a good friend from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and a great painter, had a loft at 52 Bond Street, with his wife, Susan. David Byrne had been camping out at their place, sleeping on the couch and helping them fix things up; David was now in a relationship with Andrea Kovacs, another friend of mine from RISD. Jamie and Susan were warm and generous people. Jamie knew that I was planning to start a band in New York, and he told me that there was something going on across the Bowery, at a place called CBGB, which stood for Country Bluegrass Blues—the styles of music preferred by its owner, Hilly Kristal. I went over to see what was happening that very night.
I had been dreaming of a place where my as-yet-unformed band could play. I imagined that there could be somewhere as important to our band as the Cavern Club and the Star Club had been to the Beatles in their early days, a welcoming place for people who craved interesting new music. That night, when I walked into CBGB, it seemed lonely and sad, a real Bowery dive. No one was there. No music played, not even on the jukebox. The place smelled of beer, dog shit, and roach spray. I asked the bartender for a bottle of Rolling Rock. Then I heard the sound of a pool game in the back of the club. I followed the sound, tripping over the uneven floor. There were four guys shooting pool. One of them was dressed in a silver, iridescent sharkskin suit, black shirt, and purple tie, with big, silver Elvis Presley shades. His hair was about an eighth of an inch long all over. It was a wild look. I watched them play for a few minutes, and then I asked them whether there was going to be any music that night. The guy in the sharkskin suit said, in what sounded to me like a heavy Mexican accent, “No, man. Not tonight, but come back on Friday and the Ramones will be here.” Hmm, I thought—Mexican music? I told him, “O.K., I’ll be back.”
I took the subway back to Long Island City, where my girlfriend, Tina Weymouth, and I were enjoying the hospitality of her brother, Yann, and his girlfriend, Julia McFarlane. Yann was well over six feet tall and super-bright, fit, and handsome. He was recently divorced from Lally, the daughter of the Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. He gave Tina and me no end of encouragement. I joined Tina, Yann, and Julia for a glass of wine and told them about CBGB. I said that in the morning I would get the Village Voice and start looking for a loft. Yann, who was a loft-living pioneer, told me to forget the Village Voice: “Look in the New York Times’ industrial real-estate section. Look for a raw space.” That’s how he had found his loft. He did all the design and construction work himself—he had been I. M. Pei’s chief designer for the east wing of the National Gallery and would be again for the Grand Louvre, in Paris, but now he was branching out on his own.
Yann and Julia were kind to us, but we didn’t want to impose on them for too long. I had the first bout of insomnia in my life that night. I felt anxious about finding a place to live, getting a day job, starting a band, and succeeding as an artist. In the daylight hours, I had great confidence and never doubted myself, but, at night, when I lay down to sleep, the wheels would not stop turning and I imagined the worst. I had chosen the life of an artist, and the real meaning of that was beginning to sink in. There were no guarantees of anything. Tina and I were on our own, and we had to be brave.
The next morning, I started the search for a loft. I needed a place where a band could rehearse and Tina could paint, since she had not yet agreed to join the band. Of course, we would also need to live there. Most of the places I found were either dungeons or run-down factories. One place we went to see, in Alphabet City, was on fire; smoke was billowing out the windows, yet no one came to put the fire out. I found this incredible, but it was the reality of the Lower East Side in 1974.
The Ramones were not a Mexican band after all. They were four guys about my age. The guitarist and bass player had stylish shag haircuts like the Bay City Rollers. The drummer was tiny and had a minimalist playing style. The singer was tall, shockingly skinny, and sang with a faux British accent. Their songs were hard, loud, and very fast. “Blitzkrieg Bop,” for instance, is a hundred and seventy-six beats per minute and only about two minutes long. Sometimes they would stop in the middle of a song and yell at one another about mistakes they’d made or just to announce that they didn’t feel like playing that song tonight. I had never seen anything like it. With song titles such as “I Don’t Care,” “Beat on the Brat,” and “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around with You,” the Ramones seemed like a conceptual-art piece. Even though they had a lot of polishing up to do, they were wholly original and I loved them. As I left CBGB that weekend, the pretty girl at the door told me that next week a cool band called Television was playing. I told her that I’d be there.
After a couple of weeks of loft-hunting, I went to see a place at 195 Chrystie Street, between Stanton and Rivington—three blocks from CBGB. It was twelve hundred square feet on the ninth floor, with a big freight elevator and a clear view of uptown and the Empire State Building. A couple of sinks were the only fixtures it had; the toilets were in the hall. It was definitely raw. The rent was two hundred and eighty-nine dollars per month. There was no key money because no one had lived there before. As far as I could tell, no one else was living in the building, so there wouldn’t be complaints about band rehearsals. I told the agent that I would take it. When I signed the lease that afternoon, the owner of the building looked at me with obvious skepticism. He asked me what I was going to be doing there, and I told him that it would be my painting studio. He just smiled, shook his head, and accepted my check for five hundred and seventy-eight dollars: the first month’s rent and another month for the security deposit.
I told David that I was starting a band and that I hoped he would join me. David had a strong presence and individuality; his point of view was different from most people’s, and we shared a love of art rock. I felt in my heart that it was an artistically sound idea to take a chance on partnering with him. Tina and I may have been the only people in the world then who believed in David as a musician and bandmate. David had trouble looking me in the eye when I asked him about forming a band together, but I heard him say, “I guess so.” It was not exactly the reaction I had hoped for, but it was a start.
Tina and David agreed to be my roommates and split the rent. About a hundred dollars a month per person, plus electricity, seemed doable. I went out to buy paint to freshen up the place, white for the walls and two different grays for the concrete floor, on which we created a checkerboard effect. Tina drove me, in her old Plymouth Valiant. It was the first time I had been on Chrystie Street after dark. The street was lined with female sex workers of all shapes and sizes. When Tina was with me, they said nothing—they respected her. But, when I was on my own, they’d ask, “Wanna go out?” or “You need a date?” They serviced off-duty cabdrivers and other guys who would pull up in cars. Their pimp was a fiercely handsome, long-haired Latin dude who never said a word to us. He wore the same funky, knee-length, brown fur coat every day, with a baseball bat concealed underneath. I never saw him use the bat, but I have no doubt he would have if he’d ever felt the need.
Tina, David, and I had to steel ourselves to live in this nightmare of a neighborhood. The three of us had grown up in various suburbs; our parents had been supportive in every way and given us every advantage. But we were determined to live an artistic life, and, to us, that meant living in New York City, the cultural center of the universe. If our parents had any doubts about us moving to the Lower East Side, they never said so, although the first time my father visited us on Chrystie Street, he said, “You know, I could never bring your mother here. She would never stop worrying about you.” Tina’s parents were more philosophical about it. I think that they believed Tina’s brother, Yann, would look out for us, and he did, as much as he could. David’s parents came to visit one time and acted like this hellhole was completely normal. They were Scots, and his mother plopped down in a chair and said, “Ooh, put the kettle on!”
And there was another side to the Bowery. I could walk down the street and bump into Debbie Harry in one of her kooky thrift-shop outfits. Debbie and Tina were like roses in a rattlesnake nest. Another friend from RISD, the designer Stephen Sprouse, lived just a block away, in the same building as Debbie and her boyfriend, Chris Stein. I could cross paths with Johnny Thunders and his girlfriends of the moment, wondering why he always looked like such a mess and yet his girlfriends looked so fine. Robert Rauschenberg lived and worked one block over, on Lafayette Street, in an old orphanage that he had bought and restored. The saxophonist Ornette Coleman had a loft and rehearsal space nearby. The gorgeous gap-toothed model Lauren Hutton had a place near the corner of Bowery and Bond. Willem Dafoe was living in the neighborhood, too, as was Robert Mapplethorpe, the conceptual artist Vito Acconci, the artist and musician Charlemagne Palestine, and the feminist writer Kate Millett. The poet John Giorno, whom I met at RISD, when he did a reading from his book of poems “Cancer in My Left Ball,” had lived on Bowery for years. In 1966, William S. Burroughs moved into Giorno’s building, and Mark Rothko painted his “Seagram Murals” there. There was a huge artistic community—not that it was ever visible from the outside.
Out on the street, you would beeline to the place you were going. There was no promenading. You looked straight ahead and avoided eye contact with anyone you didn’t know—and even some you did. There were a few places to hang out and have a drink. There was Phebe’s, which back then was a hangout for the Off Off Broadway crowd from the nearby La Mama Theatre. Some nights, you could find the drag queen Divine holding court at the bar, and she was always a hoot. Farther down the street was the Tin Palace, a jazz club that served decent wine and food; the new tenor-sax star David Murray, even younger than we were, was a frequently featured artist there. Sometimes he would chat with Tina and me before his set. He was curious about what was happening in the downtown art and music scenes beyond the world of jazz. One time, I walked into the Tin Palace for a drink and saw Mick Jagger sitting alone at the bar, wearing a huge, quilted, pimp-style newsboy cap. He was high as a kite. The jukebox was playing Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” and Mick was singing along at full volume but changing the lyrics to “blowing me softly with his lips. Blowing me softly . . . with his lips.” I admired the Stones but decided that I would wait for another time to introduce myself.
As we painted the loft on Chrystie Street and tried to make it nice, I had no doubt that one day we would live in a more desirable area, but for now we needed to concentrate on writing music and work hard at it. We felt like we had something new to offer to the world, and we set about doing just that.
This excerpt is drawn from “Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina,” by Chris Frantz, out this month from St. Martin’s Press.
