The Downtown Pop Underground

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Agosto Machado was a Chinese-Spanish Christopher Street queen and Zelig-like figure who witnessed the rise of the underground theater and film movements, the 1960s counterculture, gay liberation, and punk rock. [more]

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Suicide frontman Alan Vega began as a visual artist and sculptor before his career trajectory was forever altered after witnessing Iggy Pop onstage in 1969, which led him to form Suicide with keyboardist Martin Rev. [more]

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Best known for his Pop Art silkscreened work, Andy Warhol was a key connector figure who circulated not only through uptown art circles, but also within the underground film, poetry, theater, and music scenes. [more]

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Interview magazine contributor Anton Perich—who documented the scenes at Max’s Kansas City and the Mercer Art Center with his Super 8 film and Portapak video camera—also began making his own public access show, Anton Perich Presents, which debuted in January 1973. [more]

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After moving to Downtown New York, Bruce Eyster became fast friends with the likes of Harry Koutoukas, Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling and others; he also appeared in a few of Koutoukas' shows until they had a falling out after the playwright demanded that Eyster bleach his hair white and shave off all his body hair for his play Too Late for Yogurt. [more]

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Born James Slattery, Candy Darling grew up in Massapequa Park, Long Island and moved to New York in the mid-1960s, where she became part of the street scene—eventually befriending Jackie Curtis, with whom she appeared in Warhol films. [more]

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Brooklyn native Chris Stein played in bands as a teenager (including a memorable opening gig for the Velvet Underground in 1967), before cofounding Blondie with Debbie Harry in 1974 and documenting the punk scene with his camera. [more]

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Clem Burke grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, where he was high school friends with Gary Lachman, who bonded with him over their love of glam rock and later joined Blondie on drums and bass, respectively. [more]

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Ramones manager Danny Fields was a ubiquitous presence downtown, which he documented in his column for the SoHo Weekly News. [more]

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A shape-shifting rock ‘n’ roll oddity who helped spearhead the glam rock movement in the early 1970s, David Bowie could be seen haunting various downtown locations such as Mercer Arts Center and Club 82. [more]

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Before becoming the New York Dolls’ frontman, David Johansen worked at a variety of downtown establishments—including a St. Mark’s clothing store that provided costumes for Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company and Max’s Kansas City. [more]

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In the late 1960s, Debbie Harry sang backup vocals in a short-lived hippie band named Wind in the Willows, then quit the group and worked as a waitress at Max’s Kansas City before joining the Stilettoes and eventually cofounding Blondie with Chris Stein. [more]

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Douglas Colvin (Dee Dee Ramone) was the Ramones’s bassist and boyfriend of the Cockettes’s Pam Tent, who connected him with others in the downtown arts scenes. [more]

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Off-Off-Broadway actress Elda Gentile performed in the Stilettoes with Debbie Harry after the demise of her previous band, Pure Garbage (which also included fellow Warholite Holly Woodlawn), and also had a child with Eric Emerson. [more]

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Eric Emerson was discovered by Andy Warhol while dancing in the audience at a Velvet Underground show at the Dom and was promptly cast in several Warhol films; he was also Chris Stein’s roommate while he was in one of downtown’s first glam bands, the Magic Tramps. [more]

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Blondie Loft landlord Benton Quin first introduced bassist Gary Valentine (born Gary Lachman) to Lisa Jane Persky, who later inspired the early Blondie hit he wrote, “(I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear.” [more]

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Poet Gerard Malanga became part of the Factory scene after being hired as Andy Warhol’s screen-printing assistant; he could also be seen wielding a whip while dancing to the Velvet Underground in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia series, and costarring with Mary Woronov in Vinyl at Caffe Cino. [more]

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Holly Woodlawn appeared with Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis in many Warhol films, on cabaret stages, and in underground theater productions, and was name-checked in the opening lines of Lou Reed’s classic song “Walk On the Wild Side” and appeared briefly in An American Family. [more]

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Born Jim Osterberg, Stooges frontman Iggy Pop first witnessed the Velvet Underground in 1966 when he played in a suburban Detroit pop band called The Iguanas (which earned his nickname, Iggy) before Danny Fields signed the Stooges to Elektra; he frequented Max's Kansas City's back room and upstairs performance area, where he could be seen slashing his chest with broken glass. [more]

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Before joining the Patti Smith Group, guitarist Ivan Král originally played with the scene’s ne’er-do-wells, Blondie, and codirected the 1976 punk documentary The Blank Generation. [more]

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The playwright and performer Jackie Curtis was a working class Lower East Side native who was raised by his grandmother, “Slugger Ann,” the proprietor of a rough East Village bar named Slugger Ann’s. [more]

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Before this California singer-songwriter rode a wave of popularity in the 1970s with laidback country rock songs, he passed through Max’s Kansas City, where he hooked up with the Velvet Underground’s Nico, who recorded three of his songs on her solo debut, Chelsea Girls. [more]

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Wayne County—who transitioned to Jayne County by the end of the 1970s—fronted several glam and punk groups throughout that decade: Queen Elizabeth, The Electric Chairs, and The Backstreet Boys (whose name was unwittingly ripped off by a 1990s boy band). [more]

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The actor, activist, and scenester Jim Fouratt was a regular at Caffe Cino, Max’s Kansas City, and other downtown hangouts; in addition to cofounding the Yippies, he witnessed the Stonewall Rebellion firsthand and later managed Studio 54 and Danceteria. [more]

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Blondie keyboardist Jimmy Destri entered the band’s orbit through Paul Zone and his brothers in the Fast, who introduced him to Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. [more]

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Joey Ramone (born Jeffrey Hyman) played drums for the glam band Sniper before joining the Ramones as their drummer, until it became clear that he was a much better frontman—so Tommy Ramone took over on the drum stool. [more]

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John Vaccaro was the mercurial director who orchestrated the Play-House of the Ridiculous, whose shows were unrelenting explosions of color, glitter, and noise underscored by social satire. [more]

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Before Queens native John Cummings played guitar as Johnny Ramone, he performed in a 1960s garage band called the Tangerine Puppets with drummer Tommy Erdelyi (aka Tommy Ramone) at school dances and around the neighborhood. [more]

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New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders later joined forces with Dolls drummer Jerry Nolan and former Television bassist Richard Hell to form the Heartbreakers. [more]

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Before Kristian Hoffman regularly played CBGB in the Mumps with his best friend Lance Loud, they both appeared in the first weekly reality series, An American Family, which premiered on January 11, 1973 and became an immediate pop culture sensation. [more]

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An American Family introduced audiences to the first openly gay man on television, Lance Loud, who had forged links with the downtown underground in the mid-1960s after striking up a long-distance friendship with Andy Warhol via mail and telephone. [more]

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Photographer and scenester Leee Black Childers worked as the vice president of David Bowie’s management company, Main Man, and was a roommate of Wayne County, Jackie Curtis, and Holly Woodlawn. [more]

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Lenny Kaye met his longtime musical collaborator Patti Smith at Village Oldies, where he was working at Village Oldies while also freelancing as a music writer and compiling Nuggets, an influential garage rock anthology that inspired many a punk rocker. [more]

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Long before forming the Velvet Underground and entering the Factory fold, Lou Reed began playing rock ’n’ roll in high school in the late 1950s and got his first post-college job as a songwriter for Pickwick Records, which he quit to form the Velvet Underground. [more]

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Suicide keyboardist Marty Rev produced a wall of sound from behind a bank of keyboards and other crude electronics while Alan Vega psychologically tortured audiences at the Mercer Arts Center, Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, and other downtown venues. [more]

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Before opening Max’s Kansas City in 1965, Mickey Ruskin ran the East Village’s Tenth Street Coffeehouse and Les Deux Mégots, and Greenwich Village’s Ninth Circle (which in the 1970s and 1980s transformed into a well-known gay hustler bar). [more]

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Andy Warhol’s groundbreaking multiscreen film The Chelsea Girls, which featured Nico, became an underground hit in 1966, the same year she joined the Velvet Underground; she later enlisted Jackson Browne to help with her solo debut, Chelsea Girls. [more]

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Born Robert Olivo, Ondine acted in Play-House of the Ridiculous plays and appeared in more Warhol footage than anyone (because of his acid tongue and ability to talk for hours, days even, while taking speed), landing memorable roles in The Chelsea Girls and other Warhol films. [more]

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Soon after moving to New York City, Patti Smith met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe—who shared a room with her in the Chelsea Hotel and later shot the iconic cover photo for her debut album, Horses; along the way she appeared in Off-Off-Broadway shows (at La MaMa and elsewhere) and performed poetry in various downtown locations. [more]

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Paul Zone, who would join his brothers’ group the Fast in 1976, had already earned a job at Max’s Kansas City as a house DJ (along with Wayne County) when he was in his early teens, and had success in the 1980s with the gay dance duo Man 2 Man. [more]

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Peter Crowley worked at the Living Theatre well over a decade before he began booking the Ramones, Blondie, and other punk bands at Max’s Kansas City; in both venues, he witnessed the dissolution of barriers that separated audiences from performers. [more]

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Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith became inseparable after meeting each other in the late 1960s, and could be seen sipping Cokes at Max’s Kansas City when they were living together at the Chelsea Hotel; in 1975, Mapplethorpe shot the iconic cover photo for Smith's Horses album. [more]

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Simeon Coxe was the keyboardist in Silver Apples, which regularly performed in Max’s second-floor room starting in 1968 and also performed as the accompanying musical act in the La MaMa production of the Play-House of the Ridiculous’s Cock-Strong. [more]

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Tom Miller met Richard Meyers in the mid-1960s at a boarding school in Delaware and were both drawn to New York, where they settled into a life of letters before starting a band together and rechristening themselves Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. [more]

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Tommy Erdelyi, aka Tommy Ramone, played drums in in the 1960s with the future Johnny Ramone (born John Cummings), and in 1973 Erdelyi encouraged him to start a new band, and was more of a manager figure during the Ramones’ early days who helped define the band’s image. [more]