Sweet Maryjane how she rambles and rains/ down from the rooftops dropping her pain/ she looks like a photograph/ she looks like a photograph/ she looks like a photograph again
BACK IN 1977 when all the headbanging began for me, New York was a city of rooms: The Factory, the Bunker, The Punk Dump, Mickey Ruskin’s One University, The St Marks Poetry Project, CBGBs. The energy of change connected the people in CBGBs by a series of nerve tunnels leading to the landscape of the New York Underground. Chop up the channels of conversation, brainstorms, and interviews and the channels of unending anonymous sex that rumbled underneath the movie set action like Bill Wyman’s brilliant bass playing. Follow the hard work and great performances on the streets that lead into the secret heart of this great collaboration, the “bulletins between the Wild Boys and Wild Girls that remains the secret heart of the period,” (Jon Savage) and out will come the rock n’ roll stories by Damita X I published in Nerve magazine which its editor Legs McNeil called the best rock n’ roll stories he’d ever read.
New York is a city of rooms. When I walked into CBGBs that night in the fall of 1977 I found myself jumping up and down with a bunch of glowing boys and girls all pumped up on the joy of punk and in the transformation of each other. That was ground zero in my search for the connecting agents in that last great art movement I was about to play a role in shaping. We’re talking about the New York-based counterculture in its final climax from 1977-1983 before Aids brought it to a screeching halt.
The lead singer of The Mumps, Lance Loud, leaned over and told me, “You should start your own band.” I knew what he meant. The time was wide open. Time to walk in? I could have put together a group. I’d just made up a song with Amos Poe called “Joe Beuys.” And we’d actually bashed out a rough version with Walter Steding in some rehearsal studio when no one was listening. The chorus was, “Joe Beuys he made a lot of noise.” But I did not want to try to do anything I could not be the best at. I’d been publishing poetry and interviews in Interview, New York Rocker, High Times, The Voice and the Soho Weekly News and was on my way to writing books. I’d already transformed into that writer so I was not about to abandon myself. And as we shall see everything that came my way after I recovered from a very serious nervous breakdown that spring took me into all the rooms I knew about including several brand new rooms like Marcia Resnick’s loft at 530 Canal St. overlooking the Hudson River.
The thing was everybody was in their prime. Most of us were in the second half of our twenties, I was 28, too young for the sixties, I thought I’d never have my own scene. So, when it came surging out of those little clubs from Television, The Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, and The Patti Smith Band we were picked up and put down, amazed ecstatic and reborn, giving the whole scene something of a high school vibe. The effect of the whole thing pulsating in that tiny friendly club further illuminated by exotic drugs and the impulse to change mesmerized those people and wrapped them up in the hot embrace of constant fantasy fucking. Punk brought it to another level.
When all the frightened adjectives run amok history ceases to record their lock on time. There is no why. That such little things could disrupt the course of life as we knew it made us look for the door into another room. How do we find this door? Do we look for it with a magnifying glass or do we look for the magnified personalities we saw at CBGBs merging with each other in the ecstatic bath of anonymous sex sealed by the beat of The Ramones Beat on the Brat or the tantalizing trilling of David Byrne’s Psycho Killer.
Punk magazine was one of the very best things that happened to Punk because it treated the punk stars like celebrities and gave them a home and platform. Plus the two guys who ran it, Editor John Holmstrom and Resident Punk Legs McNeil, were both live wires. It was Holmstrom who grabbed me one night in CBGBs
We raced out the door onto the Bowery and made a left running up the block to where we made a right running across East Second Street and without pause ran up the front of a building and jumped through a window into a second floor apartment where I saw Joey Ramone grinning at us. Without hesitation I ran across the room and knocked him over. He soon regained his balance and was sitting on top of me pinning my arms to the floor. I struggled to overthrow him but soon subsided as if to say enough. Ha! No sooner did he let up than I made another determined effort to throw him off. Laughing he pinned me down again. When it was over I jumped up and we embraced. Instant friendship. Thank you, John Holmstrom!
This was when I started connecting people from different worlds because that is what New York is all about: cross referencing. The next night I dropped by Chris Makos place on Waverley Place at the top of Perry Street. Craig Gholsen and two other young guys were sitting on the couch with their flaccid penises laid out on their laps for a photo shoot. “I had such a great time last night,” I began and told them the story of becoming friends with Joey Ramone. “I’m in with the In Crowd,” they sang, “I go where the In Crowd goes,” as I fell on the floor laughing. It reminded me of the time I’d been breakdancing on the same floor when the writer Dotson Rader came by and I challenged him to a fight. Chris Makos place was one of my favorite rooms in that City of Rooms.
It was a time of change. Everything was changing all the time.
