There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  *

  By 1980, Lou was engaged to Sylvia Morales, a woman who was rumored to have been a former dominatrix, and they invited us to their wedding. I went. Richard skipped the ceremony, which was held at Lou’s apartment on Christopher Street with a reception afterwards at the Greenwich Village restaurant One If by Land, Two If by Sea. At the restaurant, in elaborate, drunken detail, I told Lou’s father how important I felt Lou was to the culture. He listened quietly as I went on and on about how, if there was a space capsule a thousand years from now, Lou’s “Sweet Jane” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” should be inside it to truly show the greatness of rock and roll. Not Jimi Hendrix, not the Beatles, not Bob Dylan. Just Lou. Mr. Reed listened. Then he looked at me. “You know what makes me happy?” he asked. “Guess what Lou and Sylvia wanted for their wedding present?” I waited. “Storm windows,” he said.

  • • •

  We started Rock Scene magazine because Richard thought it would be amusing to do a magazine of just photos and bitchy, funny captions, like the “Eye” section in Women’s Wear Daily. It was an irreverent, cult music magazine that documented and glamorized the rise of glamrock and punk rock. The first issue, in March 1973, had David Bowie on the cover, and the magazine lasted until the end of the decade. Richard was on the masthead as Managing Editor, and Doug Thompson, a name he made up, was the News Editor. A heading on the cover read “Alternative to the alternatives,” which meant it was not Creem or Crawdaddy, which were the alternatives to Rolling Stone. The concept of only captions was an attempt to avoid large writing tasks. Longer articles came later. Part fanzine, part tabloid, Rock Scene was where you could see what happened before or after the show, particularly at parties and backstage. I used to drag Bob Gruen and Leee Black Childers around backstage to take the pictures. Richard, Lenny Kaye and I put the magazine together at our dining room table over the course of a few nights every other month. Then we shipped the issue—with all the photographs—to the publisher in Connecticut. We never thought anyone saw it other than the crowd at Max’s, then later, at CBGB’s. But it made everyone in that small scene think they were huge stars. Among the photo spreads were “David and Cyrinda At Home,” “A Subway Ride with The Ramones,” and “David Byrne in The Supermarket.” Peter Hujar took the photos for “At Home with Fran Lebowitz,” which I “art directed”—except that no one called anything in any rock magazine “art direction.” Peter and I moved her few pieces of furniture around so that in the photos, her one-room apartment appeared to be four rooms. There were plenty of backstage photo spreads of Bowie, or Roxy Music, or the Stones, or me on tour with Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith. Wayne County wrote an advice column. While Wayne’s onstage material—“Rock and Roll Enema,” “It Takes a Man to Be a Woman”—escaped mainstream attention, in Rock Scene he was a very big deal. Years later, as Jayne County, he sent us postcards from Germany describing his sex change operation in graphic detail. He thought we would be providing a public service to baby transsexuals if we printed them. We declined. Clearly, she was way ahead of her time. And, there can be no doubt that years later, Hedwig and the Angry Inch was more than just a bit influenced by Wayne’s memoir, Man Enough to Be a Woman.

  We had a regular column called “Know Your Rock Writer” which featured, among others, James Wolcott, Cameron Crowe, and Lester Bangs. Lillian Roxon wrote a food column. Robert Plant won our “Chest-O-Rama” contest for “Best Chest.” Coverlines, at one time or another, included “Holly Woodlawn: The New Cher?” and “The Stones Have Lunch!” Every so often, we would try to hold an editorial “meeting,” with friends such as Danny Fields, Donald Lyons and Fran Lebowitz—all of whom would suggest potential coverlines. Some of Fran’s were: “Average White Band—I’ll Say,” “Bryan Ferry Ill—In Quality Hospital,” and “Queen, Just Another Bunch of Limey Queers.” My favorite fan letter to Rock Scene was: “Dear Richard, Your magazine sucks. I’m tired of glitter. Glitter nauseates me. My god, your magazine is depraved. Please, for the sake of keeping mankind divided into two sexes, stop exploiting the actions of a handful of musically innocuous homosexuals. Name withheld, Medford, New York.”

  *

  Rock Scene was printed on cheap paper and the ink came off on your hands. The few ads we got were for things like “The Astonishing Power of Automatic Mind Control!!” It quickly became a shameless promotional vehicle for me. There wasn’t an issue without numerous photos of me, grinning, with Freddie Mercury or Bryan Ferry or at a party for the Rolling Stones. A picture of me and Bowie and Iggy and Danny Fields in the back room of Max’s was accompanied by the caption: “Lisa and Dave can hardly contain their delight as Iggy and Danny Fields discuss an old Holiday Inn hotel bill.” And then, in the middle of nowhere, we’d stick in a review of something we liked—like cabaret singers Mabel Mercer and Bobby Short at the Carlyle and St. Regis Hotels. Patti Smith was one of Rock Scene’s main subjects, and an avid fan. “I read some of the stuff that’s written about me,” she told me very early on in her rock and roll incarnation, “but I think people like to hear the human side. The rest is for school. I mean, they can put books out about that stuff if they want to analyze it. When they start writing that stuff about Norman Mailer’s white negro and penal envy, I don’t even know what they’re talking about. I just like to look at Rock Scene or Creem to see what I had on, or if the pictures are good.”

  Years after Rock Scene was out of print, musicians—Michael Stipe, Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes, Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament, Thurston Moore, Chrissie Hynde and many others—would tell me that they grew up trying to find it in their small towns, reading it, and wanting to come to New York and go to those parties and backstages that they saw in those grainy black and white photos. It’s like that old joke about the Velvet Underground: Rock Scene didn’t have many readers, but it seemed as though everyone who bought it formed a band. (It also had a little-known, but far-reaching influence. We once had a photo caption identifying Lenny as “rock genius Lenny Kaye.” Apparently, the fledgling fashion photographer Steven Meisel and his pal, transsexual model Teri Toye, were Rock Scene fans, and thought this so hilarious that they would go around pronouncing certain things “Genius!!” as a dramatic, Diana Vreeland–like declaration. It was the first time that this term was used in the fashion world as an adjective, and Meisel’s influence in the 1980s was such that it caught on—with models, hairdressers, makeup artists—and it was only a matter of time before it was everywhere.

  • • •

  When Bowie first came to New York he wanted to go to Max’s Kansas City to see Andy Warhol, not realizing that by then, Andy had moved on from Max’s back room to . . . oh, I don’t know, certainly well on his way to the Reagans. But in the early 1970s, when I went practically every night—because if you didn’t, you felt as though you were missing something—Max’s was still fun. It was filled with the likes of Lou Reed and David Johansen and Cyrinda Foxe, Warhol regulars like the witty Dorothy Dean and Donald Lyons, who famously said, “No one ever goes to Max’s when they’re happy.” And Lillian Roxon and Fran Lebowitz and Ruby Lynn Reyner and Danny Fields and Warhol “starlets” Geraldine and Maria Smith, Donna Jordan and Jane Forth. Patti Smith has written about how she never felt that she really belonged there, but I recall her being there almost every night. After all, she dated Bobby Neuwirth and Sam Shepard and those guys were welcome anywhere. Years later, photographer Steven Meisel told me that as a teenager, he and his friend Richard Sohl (who would later play piano in Patti Smith’s band) would come in from Long Island and stand outside and watch people go in and out. We sat in the booths with the bowls of the grayish white, chalk-like chickpeas on red, polyester-clad tables and some sort of rough wall covering that felt like mouse hair. But by the time bands started playing upstairs at Max’s, it was almost an afterthought. The fake Velvet Underground (with lead singer Doug Yule, the band that Danny Fields called “the Velveteens”) and Wayne County all, at one time or another, performed upstairs. So, apparently, did
Bob Marley—although I must have missed that night. And Bruce Springsteen. Most infamous and memorable were the Stooges shows, especially when Iggy fell on broken glass. Or cut his chest until it bled just to get a reaction. Or threw up. Years later, Iggy told me, “In my live work, I was going for the quick thrill, rather than spend time concentrating on my voice. I figured I’d get on, make as many quick movements as I could, dance my ass off for five minutes, then move into the insult portion of the evening. Then, at the end, create some kind of chaos until the forty-five minutes were up.” But no one really went to Max’s for the bands. Nothing upstairs could ever compete with that crowd downstairs. Towards the end of Max’s, bands like Tuff Darts or Lance Loud’s Mumps played there, and the place was on its way out. But for a while, we all felt as though Max’s was the center of everything. Until it wasn’t.

  *

  Then one day in 1974, guitarist Tom Verlaine, who had formed Television with the writer/bassist Richard Hell, wandered into a tiny, ratty club next door to a flophouse on the Bowery. He asked owner Hilly Kristal if his band could perform there. Hilly had wanted to showcase country and western music—hence the CBGB, which stood for Country, Bluegrass and Blues—but he reluctantly agreed. Later, Hilly would tell me, “Television was terrible. And the Ramones were even worse.” CBGB’s was a dump, but it was our dump. Many of us who went there on a regular basis were so wary of the unsanitary conditions, we only drank beer straight out of the bottle. Hilly’s dog Jonathan was always slobbering, or asleep, or both, on the floor by the front desk at the entrance. It’s hard to imagine now, but often, after midnight and desperate with hunger, we would order and actually eat hamburgers cooked on a questionable grill and served with potato chips on paper plates.

  CB’s has been well chronicled as a graffiti-laden, long railroad-like room with a pool table, long bar, tables and chairs, and a disgusting restroom downstairs. The backstage area, such as it was, consisted of a few rooms with no locks on the doors, some sagging, filthy sofas, and not much else. The backstage door led into an alley strewn with broken bottles and needles and worse. If you were with a band that had what passed for a soundcheck on the day of a show, you arrived in the afternoon and were greeted with the smell of stale beer and cigarettes, not unlike any bar in any city, anywhere in the world. Except that there was an undercurrent of change in this club that made us feel we were taking part in bringing rock and roll out of its doldrums. We were naive enough, at that time, to think that this would change the world. The music of the 1960s actually had changed the world; in the 1970s, the New York bands were just trying to change it back. And after all the mellow, big business rock coming out of Los Angeles, and the fluffy hot pink and orange concoction that had been David Bowie, bands like Patti Smith and the Ramones and Television were our own little black and white eight millimeter movies that affected the world. It seemed like the center of the rock and roll universe. Until it wasn’t.

  *

  At that time, New York City was still affordable for misfits who came from somewhere else: Lou Reed from Long Island. Debbie Harry and Patti Smith from New Jersey. Tom Verlaine (né Miller) from Delaware. The Ramones from Queens. They were drawn to Manhattan to get famous, don’t think not. But it really was for the music; the music was the scene. “Any group that gets onstage, even at CBGB’s,” Blondie’s Chris Stein told me, “dreams of becoming as big as the Beatles.” Still, no one really admitted that they went into this wanting a hit. No one thought they would ever get a hit. There was no radio station that would play this stuff. There was no cable TV. There were no television shows catering to these kinds of rock bands. The closest these bands got to television was when Richard directed the first Blondie video and videotaped the first Ramones set in a studio. Or when Bob Gruen chronicled the New York Dolls with his portapak. Or when Amos Poe filmed nights at CBGB’s. The entire New York band scene started with five to ten bands who basically all hated each other, were jealous of each other, had nothing in common with each other, and yet, were lumped together in the mainstream press as “punk.”

  None of these bands had any money. They all lived in semi-squalor. There was a lot of jockeying for position: who got signed first (Patti), who got more pages in Rock Scene (Patti, Television, Ramones) and who had hits (at first, only Blondie). Patti wasn’t punk; she defied categorization. Television thought they had more in common with John Coltrane—and their lengthy improvisational jams probably, in actual fact, had more in common with Pink Floyd or the Grateful Dead. Blondie, with its adorable lead singer/star Debbie Harry, started out as an art project by Debbie and Chris Stein—who wanted to create some sort of performance art piece around a blonde lead singer who had pop hits (sound familiar?). Blondie was ahead of their time when they embraced disco and rap. The Talking Heads were an arty trio from the Rhode Island School of Design. If anyone could legitimately be called “punk” it was probably the Ramones, four boys from Queens, none of whose name was Ramone, who wore jeans, leather jackets and sneakers. But then again, I always thought the Ramones’ songs sounded melodic—sort of like the Beach Boys on speed. Early on, Tom Verlaine told me, “We definitely are part of a New York atmosphere, but within that atmosphere, there are eighteen ways of saying the same thing. I don’t know if we’re associated with Patti or not. There are some people who come to see her when she plays with us, and there are some people who come to see us. Probably more people come to see her, because she has records out. But it’s better than being associated with the Ramones.” Debbie Harry put it this way: “We never did anything as serious as Patti did. She came from a poet’s background, she made a statement, she came on as an artist. Blondie was always more of an entertainment type thing.” And years later, singer, songwriter and undisputed leader of the Talking Heads David Byrne gave a left-handed compliment to Alice Cooper. “Before our band was together,” he told me, “I got the idea for ‘Psycho Killer’ from that Alice Cooper album Billion Dollar Babies. I thought it was real funny stuff. So I thought, Hey, I can do this. But rather than make it dramatic and theatrical the way Alice Cooper would, I would underplay it and go for what’s going on in the killer’s mind. It came out okay, it was pretty popular, and so after that I thought, yeah, I guess I can write songs. Being lumped together with the punk scene in New York really annoyed me at the time, and I know it annoyed a lot of other people. But looking back on it, I guess it helped draw attention to all of us.” These bands, and CBGB’s, immediately rendered everything else that was going on in the rock scene obsolete. Most of these bands cut their hair short, which instantly looked right. I recall one year, maybe two, when Richard and I went to CB’s practically every night. Whenever I would return to New York from an out-of-town trip with another band, I would immediately go to CB’s, especially to see Television. And always when they performed there on New Year’s Eve.

  • • •

  In November 1973, Lenny Kaye started to accompany Patti Smith on guitar for her poetry readings. These dovetailed into some 1974 cabaret appearances at Reno Sweeney’s—the nightclub where Manhattan Transfer and the delightful Genevieve Waite and her junkified husband John (Mamas and the Papas) Phillips also performed. Patti wore a feather boa (yes, she did), sang Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low” and paid homage to Anna Magnani and Ava Gardner. This did not catch on. But there would be no holding her back. Patti and Lenny’s first record was “Piss Factory,” a single that was a little poetry, a little rock and roll. Soon, she and Lenny formed the Patti Smith Group with keyboardist Richard Sohl (who they called DNV after the adorable boy in the Visconti movie Death in Venice), guitarist Ivan Kral, and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty. But Patti’s energy, her immediate embracing of the form, was euphoric, exhilarating, and new, especially coming from a girl. It wasn’t Appollinaire’s “Zone,” or Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” but the way she punched the air with so much attitude (some said artitude) and combined her poems with the music behind her, created a sense that something was happening here, and whatever it wa
s, it didn’t happen often. She was pretentious as hell. She rambled onstage for a long time, then would catch herself with a flirtatious, little girl smile, and say, “There have been a few art forms throughout history: housecleaning, sculpture, rock and roll. Listen, I talk a lot of crap up here. If you don’t like it, talk amongst ya.” She’d lose me for a minute or two with the Rimbaud rants, or the William Burroughs tributes or the references to Blake (and Richard would move towards the bar) but then she’d reel us back in with “Do the Watusi/do the Mashed Potatoes” or “G-L-O-R-I-A” or “The boy looked at Johnny” or “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” It was joyous rock and roll: part circus, part dance party, part political rally. It could not be explained to tourists. And in fact, you couldn’t have had one part of her without the other. Without the cringe-inducing Rimbaud references or the poetry or the earnest rambling prior to the music, it wouldn’t have been Patti. No one else had done anything like this before. No woman, certainly.

  *

  Because of our friendship with Lenny, and our editing Rock Scene and Hit Parader magazines, and my syndicated column, syndicated radio show, columns in Creem and—a few years later—my column in the New York Post, I became close to Patti, who certainly knew how to work the press. But we also became friends. We confided in each other. We did hours and hours—and hours—of interviews. Patti always joked that we could do the long, stream-of-consciousness interview or the “snappy, showbiz, Earl Wilson gossip column interview.” Basically, to interview Patti was a breeze; all you needed to do was to turn on the tape recorder and she would talk. Words like Haile Selassie and Brian Jones, Sam Shepard and Verlaine and Keith Richards and Simone Signoret would fall easily and constantly from her lips. She claimed that she never thought she would go very far, that she was honored to be in rock and roll. That she just wanted to inspire other people who would see that if she—a fan of Brian Jones and Brigitte Bardot and Keith Richards and Marianne Faithfull and Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison and Jeanne Moreau—could do this, so could they. She wanted people to say “Fuck her” and go off and do it themselves. “It’s like Surrealism,” she said, sounding very much like David Bowie, who had a similar rap at the time. “Someone writes the manifesto and then other people run with it.”