The Downtown Pop Underground

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Al Carmines served as the associate minister for the arts at Judson Memorial Church, where he wrote songs for plays that Judson produced in addition to giving sermons and other ministerial duties. [more]

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Alan Betrock launched his DIY paper New York Rocker in early 1976, not long after he produced the first Blondie demos (Debbie Harry’s first cover story was in New York Rocker, with a photo taken by Lisa Jane Persky). [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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The original drummer for the Velvet Underground, Angus MacLise first collaborated with John Cale and Tony Conrad in LaMonte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music. [more]

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Ann Harris began collaborating with her six children in the early 1960s after her oldest son—an eleven-year-old soon-to-be Hibiscus—hatched the idea to start a family theater troupe after learning that his mother had written two plays in college that had moldered in a trunk for years; by the early 1970s, she was writing songs for Hibiscus and his sisters in the Angels of Light. [more]

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After the young fashion designer Betsey Johnson met Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol, who needed silver outfits for a film they were shooting, she began designing clothes for the Velvet Underground and married group member John Cale in 1968. [more]

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Bette Midler was cast in the 1965 La MaMa production of Tom Eyen’s Miss Nefertiti Regrets at the age of 18, and later performed a cabaret act at gay bathhouses with with pianist Barry Manilow (who also sometimes performed at Caffe Cino). [more]

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Daughter of artist Al Hansen, Bibbe Hansen was a regular at the Factory in the mid-1960s—where she co-starred with Edie Sedgwick in the 1965 Warhol film Prison and also appeared onstage as a go-go dancer at an early Velvet Underground show. [more]

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Bill Graham grew up in New York as a German Holocaust survivor and an aspiring actor, and after moving to San Francisco he found success as a live music promoter by opening the Fillmore Auditorium to capitalize on the city’s thriving psychedelic music scene before opening the Fillmore East in 1968. [more]

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In the early 1960s, Bob Dylan could be seen performing at downtown locations such as the Gaslight coffeehouse and The Living Theatre before becoming a Sixties icon. [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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Craig Leon produced early singles and albums by Blondie, the Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and others. [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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Best known as the star of several John Waters films, Divine also appeared in several Cockettes shows, as well as Tom Eyen’s Women Behind Bars (along with Lisa Jane Persky, who also performed in the 1976 production at the Truck and Warehouse Theater). [more]

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Ed Sanders was a mimeo publisher, frontman of the Fugs, and potty-mouthed poet who opened the influential Peace Eye Bookstore on the Lower East Side, cofounded the Yippies, and was also involved in the underground film scene. [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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DIY theater impresario Ellen Stewart cultivated an extended family of theater folks after she founded La MaMa in the basement of an East Ninth Street building, which then moved to various East Village location before settling in its permanent home on East Fourth Street. [more]

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Eloise Harris, the fifth child of the Harris family, got her Equity card at the age of nine performing in Invitation to a Beheading at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and later joined her brother Hibiscus in the Angels of Light. [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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An early member of the Cockettes in San Francisco, Fayette Hauser relocated to New York City and performed with fellow Cockettes Pam Tent, John Flowers, and Tomata du Plenty in the drag group Savage Voodoo Nuns, which opened for Blondie and the Ramones. [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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George Harris, Jr. was married to Ann Harris, and together they raised six children who were all involved in theater at Caffe Cino, La MaMa, and Judson Church. [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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Hair co-creator Gerome Ragni could be seen hanging out in downtown hotspots such as the Chelsea Hotel to La MaMa, soaking up ideas that eventually made it into the Broadway version of that show. [more]

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Harry Smith is perhaps best known for compiling 1952’s Anthology of American Folk Music, though he was also a notable underground filmmaker, occultist, and world-class eccentric. [more]

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Hibiscus was a gender-fluid performer and founder of the psychedelic drag troupes the Cockettes and Angels of Light who was among the very first who succumbed to the AIDS epidemic, in 1982. [more]

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Hilly Kristal began his nightlife career in 1959 as the manager of the jazz club the Village Vanguard, and went on to open Hilly’s on East Thirteenth Street, where he booked folk and blues acts throughout the 1960s until changing the bar’s name to CBGB in late 1973. [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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Jayne Anne Harris, the oldest of the Harris sisters, appeared in the Judson production Sing Ho for a Bear, an adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh, among many other productions; in the early 1970s, she joined Hibiscus’s Angels of Light. [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 Freeman was embedded in the social networks that linked the downtown’s overlapping arts scenes; he was an assistant to Andy Warhol who was responsible for a teenaged Chris Stein opening for the Velvet Underground, and later collaborated with Stein and members of the Cockettes on a public access television show. [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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Experimental composer and theorist John Cage shared a studio at the Living Theatre with dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, with whom he collaborated for performances at Judson Memorial Church and elsewhere. [more]

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Born in South Wales, John Cale moved to New York as a young man and participated in an eighteen-hour performance organized by John Cage soon after arriving, then played with La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble and cofounded the Velvet Underground. [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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Lighting designer Joshua White studied lighting at film and theater school and worked at discothèques like Trude Heller’s before his tenure at the Fillmore East, where he masterminded the Joshua Light Show. [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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Minimalist composer La Monte Young moved to the city in 1960 and became involved in Yoko Ono’s Chambers Street Loft Series and the Fluxus art movement; his Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble included John Cale, Tony Conrad, Billy Name, and many others. [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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Lendon Sadler grew up in Atlanta and visited New York City as a teenager before moving to San Francisco, where he met Hibiscus and joined the Cockettes; he then settled in downtown New York after the Cockettes' debut in the city. [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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Future Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren lived in New York while he was managing the New York Dolls and often went to CBGB, where he Richard Hell’s chopped hair and ripped, safety-pinned clothes—a style McLaren popularized with his partner, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. [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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The youngest of the Harris family siblings, Mary Lou Harris appeared in several Off-Off-Broadway productions in the 1960s before teaming up with her sisters and brother Hibiscus to form the Angels of Light. [more]

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Actor Michael Arian joined the Play-House of the Ridiculous, where he worked with director John Vaccaro for many years and met Ruby Lynn Reyner, whose band Ruby and the Rednecks featured Arian as a backup vocalist. [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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After Tony Conrad left the Velvet Underground, its classic lineup was rounded out by drummer Maureen “Moe” Tucker; Reed was a friend of Maureen’s brother, Jim Tucker, and they cofounded a mimeo poetry zine, Lonely Woman Quarterly, while the two attended Syracuse University. [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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Free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman collaborated with Yoko Ono and other avant-garde artists; his 1959 residency at the Five Spot was legendary, expanding the possibilities of jazz. [more]

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Before moving to San Francisco, meeting Hibiscus, and joining the Cockettes, Pam Tent lived in downtown New York—where she met future New York Dolls frontman David Johansen, and eventually resettled with a new boyfriend, Dee Dee Ramone. [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 Dougherty got involved in video during the early 1970s as a college student and later documented the nascent punk movement in New York City, cofounding the Metropolis Video collective with Pat Ivers while working at Manhattan Cable’s public access station. [more]

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Cabaret performer and Off-Off-Broadway music composer Paul Serrato managed the Paperbook Gallery in Greenwich Village, where he met Jackie Curtis and began writing music for Curtis's Lucky Wonderful and the underground hit La MaMa show, Vain Victory. [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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Folk musician Peter Stampfel moved from the Midwest to New York in late 1959, just a few months before Dylan arrived in the city, and by 1963 he formed the Holy Modal Rounders with Steve Weber (which later included drummer and playwright Sam Shepard). [more]

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Composer Rhys Chatham became involved with the Kitchen after Daniel Nagrin asked Chatham to accompany the dancer at a performance at that Mercer Arts Center performance space, after which he began booking music at the Kitchen. [more]

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Getting his start in the music business during the early 1960s, Richard Gottehrer co-wrote the girl group classic “My Boyfriend’s Back” before cofounding Sire Records and producing punk acts such as Blondie, the Fast, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. [more]

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After moving to the Lower East Side in 1966 and became part of the underground poetry scene, Richard Hell eventually transitioned to rock ‘n’ roll with his old friend Tom Verlaine, with whom he started the Neon Boys and then Television, before quitting to form the Heartbreakers and then his own band, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. [more]

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CBGB doorwoman Roberta Bayley was also a photographer who shot the cover photos of some classic punk records, including the Ramones’s self-titled debut and Blank Generation by Richard Hell and the Voidoids. [more]

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Off-Off-Broadway actress and musician Ruby Lynn Reyner was the star of several Play-House of the Ridiculous shows, including Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit and Cock-Strong; her band Ruby and the Rednecks often played the Mercer Arts Center, Max’s Kansas City, and CBGB throughout the 1970s. [more]

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Playwright Sam Shepard was a key figure in Theatre Genesis, and was also the drummer in the Holy Modal Rounders—which is how he met Patti Smith, with whom he collaborated on the play Cowboy Mouth. [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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Guitarist Sterling Morrison met Lou Reed at Syracuse University and later reconnected with the songwriter in New York City, where he joined the fledgling Velvet Underground. [more]

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Television manager Terry Ork landed the band its first gig at the newly-renamed CBGB after suggesting that they play on the bar’s worst night—Sunday—which helped spark the emerging punk scene, and he later set up his own independent label, Ork Records. [more]

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Tom O’Horgan was a multitalented director, musician, and choreographer who worked on dozens of shows at La MaMa before hitting the bigtime as the director of the Broadway musicals Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, though he continued to return to La MaMa after his mainstream success. [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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Tomata du Plenty was a former Cockette who formed the punk band the Screamers in Los Angeles after settling in downtown New York during the mid 1970s. [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]

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Jack Smith’s friend Tony Conrad helped create the soundtrack for Flaming Creatures and performed in La Monte Young’s group the Theatre of Eternal Music with Billy Name and John Cale before performing in an early version of the Velvet Underground. [more]

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Jazz musician Tony Cox met Yoko Ono through their mutual friend La Monte Young, and together they had a daughter, Kyoko, when they lived together at 87 Christopher Street; their next door neighbor was the playwright Harry Koutoukas. [more]

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Off-Off-Broadway actor Tony Zanetta played the Andy Warhol character in Pork; when he and the cast performed in London, he befriended David Bowie and became president of his management company, Main Man, during the Ziggy Stardust era. [more]

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Beat poet Tuli Kupferberg could be seen selling his own mimeo poetry publications at Jonas Mekas’s film series and in 1965 joined forces with Ed Sanders to form the Fugs after Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore opened next door to where he lived on East Tenth Street. [more]

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Before she lived at 87 Christopher Street, multimedia artist Yoko Ono organized downtown Manhattan’s first loft events, the Chambers Street Loft Series, in what is now called TriBeCa (the triangle below Canal Street). [more]