Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.
Time’s a funny thing, especially where musicians are concerned. If the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones doesn’t scare you, perhaps the realization that we’ve shared nearly 36 years with Bono and 29 with Madonna will.
Still, it’s a little surprising that a mere 21 years separates the release of “Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely” in 1958 and the above video of Iggy Pop covering the LP’s iconic track, “One for My Baby,” at Hurrah’s in 1979. At first glance, the culture wars of the ’60s would seem to render irrelevant the bars, broads and bruisers ethos that Ol’ Blue Eyes represented. But for the generation that made up the original punks, those childhood memories of cigarette smoke, parents’ late nights and Sinatra’s music ran deep. Read more…
Mary ReinholzRalph Nader isn’t on the ballot this year, but the consumer advocate managed to fire up around 350 people, including rocker-writer Patti Smith, at Barnes and Noble in Union Square last night.
Introduced by former public advocate Mark Green, Mr. Nader touched on themes from his new paperback, “The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future,” and recalled how mass movements led by a handful of people produced radical change.
These days, Mr. Nader said, many everyday folks seem to have lost their passion for activism and have become far more narrowly focused – and with lame excuses to justify it. “They’ll tell you,” he said drily, “that they’re too busy changing their profile on Facebook.”
Others, he noted, fear being ostracized or crushed by the powers that be because of their belief that the “the big boys own the system and you can’t control it. There’s been a loss of nerve. But it took six women in 1840 to start the suffrage movement” in New York, he said. Read more…
Julia Pasternak Diana Beshara as Cavale and Geoffrey Pomeroy as Slim in “Cowboy Mouth.” The roles were originally filled Patti Smith and Sam Shepard.The building housing Lucky Cheng’s will get a “Sleep No More”-style makeover. “Cowboy Mouth,” a play written by Patti Smith and Sam Shepard during their whirlwind romance in a ransacked room in the Chelsea Hotel, will be revived in a room in which the audience sits on sofas next to needles, trash, liquor bottles and a drum kit. The roughly 25 audience members will even have to “find” the room by inquiring at the bar of Lucky Cheng’s and then being directed to an out-of-the-way set of stairs.
“It’s going to have an apartment-feel,” said Leah Benavides, the director. “There’s not going to be a definitive line between the audience and the stage. The audience is going to be really in it.” Read more…
Godlis A 1977 photo of CBGB, which operated on the Bowery from 1973 to 2006. Owners of the club’s assets are now planning a festival and seeking to revive it at a new site. For the last six years the name CBGB has been little more than a logo on T-shirts for young people in the East Village. Now a group of investors has bought the assets of that famous punk-rock club, which closed in 2006, and plans to establish an ambitious music festival this summer, with an eye toward reopening the club at a new downtown location.
The new owners of the club’s assets — some with ties to the original Bowery establishment — say they hope that the festival will revive the wide-open artistic aesthetic associated with CBGB, which in its heyday served as an incubator for influential acts like Television, the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Blondie, Sonic Youth and Patti Smith. Read more…
Courtesy of Bryan WatermanWith over 80 titles now published in the acclaimed series “33 1/3” (book-length critiques of particularly esteemed pop records running the gamut from “Electric Ladyland” to “Kid A”), it has fallen to Bryan Waterman, a NYU professor, to dissect Television’s 1977 recording, “Marquee Moon.” His study, which shares a title with the album in question, weighs in at a portly 222 pages (most of the books in the series are much shorter), and will delight both Television fans and nostalgists of seventies punk-era New York. Mr. Waterman explains why the album just might be the prize catch to emerge from the glory days of CBGB.
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Caryn Rose Patti Smith performed Wednesday night at a celebration commemorating the 40th anniversary of her first reading at The Poetry Project.The headstones filling the old churchyard at St. Mark’s Church-in-the Bowery churchyard lay buried beneath a deep blanket of snow on Wednesday night. But a line of people on East 10th Street braved an icy chill while waiting to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Patti Smith’s first reading at The Poetry Project, a St. Mark’s institution, which took place at the church on Feb. 10, 1971.
From that distant beginning, Ms. Smith’s lengthy career has gone on to include world wide recognition as a visual artist, songwriter, photographer, musician and writer. In 2010 she won the National Book Award for her memoir, “Just Kids,” describing her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.
The Poetry Project, founded at St. Mark’s in 1966, has included weekly readings, open mike events, and workshops provide a forum where both celebrated and unknown writers can present their work. John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, Yoko Ono, Ted Berrigan, Alice Walker, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Creeley are a few of those whose words have filled the vaulted chamber.
In 1971 Patti Smith viewed the full moon that illuminated the sky that night as a fortuitous sign. Gerard Malanga, an assistant to Andy Warhol at The Factory, and featured reader of the program, generously allowed Patti Smith to open for him.
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