It was the best of times and the worst of times – the best because we were young, the worst because we didn’t know any better.
That’s how we all ended up in the East Village. By today’s standards it was dangerous, but you developed street smarts quickly. With apartment rents costing less than $200 a month, it basically meant you didn’t need a steady job.
Patti Smith lived around the corner, as did Allen Ginsberg who winked salaciously as one strolled by, Jean-Michel Basquiat hung out on St. Marks, and Debbie Harry always mistook me for someone else. Everyone was a little famous because everyone read the Village Voice, and you had to be pretty lame not to get some kind of mention.
Turner & Kirwan of Wexford was the first band to play CBGB; we were friends of Hilly Kristal and as a favor played his opening night party at 315 Bowery.
David Johansen was the most famous person on the scene. His band, The New York Dolls had made it to the New York Times, their first single, Personality Crisis, was played often on WNEW-FM; besides, The Dolls dressed in a stagey transvestite manner, a somewhat suicidal move on the rambunctious streets of the Lower East Side.
With a name like Johansen, I had no idea David was half-Irish. I didn’t even know he was from Staten Island. But right from the start he knew how to dominate a stage.
In those days he threw classic Mick Jagger shapes – who didn’t? David even had his own Keith Richard, the inimitable Johnny Thunders, the equal of Keef any old day of the week, until junk got the better of him.
Everyone was cool on St. Marks. I never saw The Ramones tip their cap to anyone, they just swaggered by, looking neither left nor right. Their penniless jeans were always ripped. After their first photo session they realized they’d coined a style, now losers worldwide pay up to a grand for identical fashionista-ripped tight blues.
David Jo was different - way beyond pseudo-cool. He winked and smiled and had a word for everyone who looked him in the eye.
The Dolls might have been kings of downtown New York but they never gained national acceptance. They were too outrageous for middle-America - sneeringly explosive and shambolic at the same time.
They single-handedly ignited the whole punk scene when they toured the UK. The Brits always knew how to copy a good thing and, before you knew it, Malcolm McLaren had manufactured The Sex Pistols, led by another unruly Irish roots messiah, Johnny “Rotten” Lydon.
Mercury Records soon dropped The Dolls and the band broke up in late 1976, just as CBGB was taking off. Everyone showed up at CBs when The Ramones were being checked out by music mogul, Seymour Stein, head of Sire Records.
That’s when David Jo really made his mark on me. He led the applause for the stone-faced Ramones. I thought he would have been envious: after all, the dropped Dolls were going nowhere, they’d blown their chance and the Ramones were taking over.
David’s example saved me a lot of heart-scald down the years – don’t measure yourself against the achievements of your peers.
Oddly enough, Seymour Stein fell asleep in Paddy Reilly’s when he was scouting Black 47. True, he was jet-lagged but he must have had ears of concrete, such was our volume.
I didn’t discover David’s Irish roots until he recorded Staten Island Baby with Black 47. He told us great stories about his mother, Helen Cullen and her nourishing Irish clan.
The Cullens had lace-curtain aspirations, and when one of his aunts fell in love with a shanty Irish guy, her mother forbade the union. His attractive aunt ended up a spinster.
He floored us with his knowledge of Swing, Jazz, Juke-Joint, and New York Irish music. Take a listen to Staten Island Baby. His rhythm and comedic vocal flair are beyond comparison.
David Jo was the man – a happy warrior! He passed away last year.
All the Dolls and Ramones are dead now, and CBGB is an expensive men’s boutique. But I still hear echoes of their rattle-the-walls music whenever I pass by.
Those, indeed, were stirring days in Hilly Kristal’s punk emporium on The Bowery!
