The year was 1977, and the first generation of New York City punk and alternative bands moved to bigger venues and the international touring circuit. Hardcore thrash was still a few years away. Still, Manhattan’s famous music venues were thriving and buzzing with excited underage patrons.
They spent their days at Stuyvesant High School. They are from High School of Performing Arts and Mallow. They also went to Friends Seminary, Walden and Dalton, and Brooklyn Friends. Some had dropouts or runaways. Some came from the suburbs. Almost all were under the age of 18.
Over the next four years, they spent nights creating their own rock scene, playing aggressive, witty, sophisticated and hard-hitting pop and punk at venues like CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, Hurray and TR3. played for fellow teenagers. These weren’t the all-ages shows that would become commonplace in the city a few years later. This was a unique moment in the city’s musical history that changed the lives of many of the artists and audiences who were there, but their stories are largely untold.Manic Panic and Trash & Board Imagine an upbeat “Lord of the Fly” styled by Bill.
Their rank included Eric Hofert, who practiced guitar for four hours after doing four hours of homework at Bronx Science on weekdays. The weekend was in his band, the Speedies. His 16-year-old Arthur Brennan, from Groton, Connecticut, regularly hitchhiked twenty miles (20 miles) to the only newsstand where he could buy magazines featuring new music. He renamed himself Darvon Stagger and fled to New York City to join his band. Kate, her ninth year student at Stuyvesant College, said her Schellenbach had heard rumors that groups her age were playing in the most famous music clubs in the world, but only a few steps from where she lived. block ahead.
In September 1979, at age 13, Schellenbach began high school in an outfit collected to express her interest in new wave music. Elvis Costello pin.
“I remember walking into the women’s restroom,” she said brightly on video chat. Nancy suggested to Kate that later that week she would go see a band called Student Teachers playing at CBGB. Artistic Pop Her combo included a female rhythm section featuring the children from Friends Seminary.
Schellenbach, who formed the Beastie Boys in 1981 and then Lucious Jackson, said, “If I hadn’t met the Students Teachers that fateful night, I might not have been a drummer.” “I saw Laura Davis play drums, I saw Lori Reese play bass, I saw how exciting the whole scene was and I was like, ‘Oh, this could be something I could do.’ “These people were still in high school. It seemed feasible.”
The timing was perfect. It was the first generation to grow punk as a status quo rather than an exceptional rebellion. “Part of the call of history was that you shouldn’t just listen and accept it, you should listen to the conversation and form a band yourself,” says student-teacher keyboardist Bill Erning, now a prominent gallery. The owner and curator said in a video chat. Of course you should have formed a band. I couldn’t believe it was an “out there” idea. ”
A key group in the movement “wanted a fusion of the Beatles, the Sex Pistols and the Bay City Rollers.” It was the collective Glam Bubblegum Speedy. According to guitarist Gregory Crudson, Student Teachers played his art pop with an elegiac touch reminiscent of Roxy Music and Velvet Underground. Blessed people who were the first, sloppiest and most fashionable group on the scene. and The Colors, a mega-poppy mod group who loved the Speedies, were into bubblegum music, and were mentored by Blondie drummer Clem Burke. (Other bands on the edge of the movement included Stimulators and Miller Miller Miller & Sloan.)
If the core bands of the teen punk scene have one thing in common, it’s close to big choruses, a love of gaudy and colorful clothes, and an arrogance that the empowerment promised by punk rock is now theirs. I was sure.
“We didn’t know better,” said Blessed co-founder Nicholas Petty, who took the name Nick Berlin in 1977 at the age of 13. He spoke to The Times via video chat just before he attended the funeral of Howie Pyro, another founding member of the band. Pyro’s heirs, including Brian Fallon of the Gaslight Anthem, paid tribute to the New York mainstay at the anniversary show.
“I thought this was how you lived. ‘ said Petty from his home in Fort Bragg, Calif., director of the Culinary Arts Management Program at Mendocino College. “This is your life. This is not how you dress. It’s all about it,” he added. When we did , we brought two full changes of clothes for each set, which was certainly not our way of expressing ourselves at the time, but it was life as a performance art piece.”
Blessed (pronounced two syllables) was the band that Arthur Brennan joined after fleeing Groton. Two weeks later, when the money he had saved on his paper route ran out and a private investigator came looking for him, he happily left behind his new identity of Darvon Stagger. “After the first night, it’s really not fun to sleep in an all-night blimpy on 6th Avenue,” Brennan, now a public school teacher in Los Angeles, said in a video chat. “But I was so relieved to meet people like you. In your hometown, you’re considered a loser-slash weirdo. We’re learning how to act in the crazy, artistic adult world.” I was a child.”
Jonathan Lethem, author of his love of The Speedies and Miller Miller Miller & Sloan in “The Fortress of Solitude,” says his childhood was different in New York at the time. “The city was kind of chaotic, but it was very easy for us to navigate,” he said in a video chat. You can cross bridges, we feel like we essentially owned the city, and at the time we actually belonged to the city.
Jill Caniff, a scene patron who later founded Lucious Jackson with Schellenbach and Gabby Glaser, said the city seemed like a non-stop event. I was. If you’re a parent, you might think otherwise. Children go out to nightclubs. She’s only 13, so it’s very dangerous. No, it was really dangerous during the day on IS 70,” she added, referring to the public middle school. “My night was safe.”
How did the scene continue? Downtown venues like CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, TR3, and Studio 10, which are frequented by travelers, weren’t checking IDs regularly. In fact, CBGB owner Hilly Crystal and Peter Crowley, who managed and booked Max’s, seemed to welcome a wave of underage New Yorkers eager to discover music.
“Kids, in general, like alcohol,” Crowley said with a laugh over the phone. “But we did our best to make sure people were safe, even though I was wearing the ‘I’m not your mother’ badge.”
But was safety an illusion? Author Christopher Sorrentino said in an email, “For a long time, I have looked at this period of my life with nostalgia and sentimentality.” I began to realize just how much risk I was putting myself at risk with absolutely no one to pull the brakes, which is what a 15- or 16-year-old girl is “in a relationship” with a man in his late 20s or early 30s. doubled because they often had ”
Laura Albert, who has been on the scene since she was 13 and later rose to fame (and notoriety) under the moniker JT LeRoy, agreed. I wrote in my memoir of the announcement. “Having said that, there was a sense of possibility. Age was not a barrier. I was in foster care as a teenager, but I could still make phone calls on payphones and find my way around for a fanzine.” I was able to interview and still have access to musicians I admired.”
By 1980, the teenage punk scene was simultaneously evolving and disappearing as its members grew and moved on. Some of its participants have played important roles in the local hardcore punk movement. Hoffert and Crewdson of the Speedies produced the first Beastie Boys demos and the Stimulators became a cornerstone band of the local hardcore punk scene. Others got jobs that required going to college or staying up late in Max’s Kansas City or shopping creepers for a St. Mark’s Place brothel in the rear-view mirror.
“I thought that scene was cool, but then I realized I just didn’t want to be here. I wanted to go to college,” said student teacher drummer Laura Davis Chanin. “It was a big deal for me, given the incredibly shocking and thrilling world of rock and roll I was a part of,” he said in a video chat.
The punk scene that preceded this moment has been very well documented, but little has been written about the teens who ran through the nights that gave way to the ’70s and ’80s. None of the groups had a major record deal with his label, of which only his one band, The Colors, released his LP during the first period of his career. (The Speedies released his Archive Collection in 2007, mostly to make use of his one of their songs. “Please let me take your picture” in a Hewlett-Packard advertising campaign).
What was once a strong local scene never gained national or international prominence, with the Independent 45 scattered outside five boroughs only spreading rumors.But several of its members have gone on to notable careers both within and outside the art world.Crudoson, Speedys guitarist, He is an acclaimed tableau photographer. His bandmate Hoffert became a data technology pioneer, helped develop the QuickTime media player, and now serves as Xandr’s Senior Vice President. Allen Hurkin-Torres also plays for his Speedies and is a former New York Supreme Court Justice.
“From what we did, there was a magical empowerment that brought us to life,” Hoffert said in a video chat. It’s directly related to that.”
Schellenbach held similar views. Magical time in New York City! ”
Eli Atty, who began attending Max before he hit puberty, became a speechwriter for Al Gore and then a writer and producer for “The West Wing” and “Billions.” “It didn’t scare me,” he said of the scene. “I realized that your life is what you want it to be. No, you can write your own story.”
