The Downtown Pop Underground

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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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Off-Off-Broadway actor Benton Quin contributed props and sets to Blondie’s early live shows after Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, and Gary Valentine moved into the Bowery building where he lived, which became known as the ”Blondie Loft.” [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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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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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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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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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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Cartoonist John Holmstrom cofounded Punk magazine with Eddie “Legs” McNeil and Ged Dunn Jr. after attending the School of Visual Arts with Blondie's Chris Stein, who became a regular contributor to the magazine. [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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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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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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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 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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While working at Manhattan Cable’s public access television division in the mid-1970s, Pat Ivers cofounded the Metropolis Video collective and produced the early public access television show Rock from CBGB’s, featuring Blondie, the Heartbreakers, Talking Heads, and others. [more]

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Pat Loud was one of the breakout stars of the first reality television series, An American Family, which landed her and the family on the covers of national magazines and television shows; she would later be seen at CBGB cheering on her son Lance Loud and his friends in the Mumps. [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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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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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 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]

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William Burroughs was the author of Naked Lunch and was a Beat era icon who, by the mid 1970s, was living with poet John Giorno in the Bowery, a couple blocks south of CBGB and a few doors down from the Blondie Loft. [more]