Do you know the famous Orson Welles’ speech from the 1949 classic The Third Man? Harry Lime, the smoothest sociopath ever captured on film, explains his theory of human creativity to his friend Holly Martins.
“You know what the fellow said … in Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Well, Italy under the Borgias had nothing on New York City in the 1970s. The problems are too numerous to discuss here but you can easily find them with a quick search.
Your New York City 1970s playlist
Suffice to say that the biggest, most powerful city in the world went bankrupt during the middle of the turbulent decade and the rest of the country – in the person of then-President Gerald Ford – essentially told it to go f*** itself.
But, my, what music that urban decay did bequeath.
In the brilliantly-researched 2023 book This Must Be the Place, Jesse Rifkin details that scene – along with plenty of others from the city’s storied musical history – through the neighborhoods, clubs and residences that spawned punk, new wave, and in time, hip hop.
I have my own pet theory that modern hip hop is the result of the collision between Paradise Garage-style feel-good disco beats and down and dirty political and social messaging coming from the nascent punks that operated on parallel tracks in the mid-late ‘70s throughout Manhattan and its surroundings. But that’s another story.
Today, we’re going to focus on the glam-punk-new wave explosion that transformed American music throughout the 1970s.
It was protest music. Social and political protest against a sick government structure, and artistic protest against the stultified carcass of rock and roll.
New York was the perfect pressure cooker to spawn something new. The city was blessed with visionaries, and not merely the artists who created the music. Mickey Ruskin and Hilly Kristal who owned the clubs. Sam Hood and Peter Crowley who booked a lot of the bands.
Plenty of others as well. The best of them had both an ear for talent and a genuine desire to foster a culture. The result has been captured in a lot of Hollywood movies – often badly – and on plenty of recordings, both official and bootleg, that give a better sense of what it was like.
We can’t go back, but we can still listen. What follows is a 13-song playlist to try and transport you back to lower Manhattan circa 1975. It is by no means complete. It merely scratches the surface with some stand-out bands and some fantastic rock & roll.
“Walk on the Wild Side” by Lou Reed (1972)
We’ll start with arguably the most famous song chronicling the early part of the era. Reed had left his seminal band the Velvet Underground a couple of years before (more on that soon) and began his solo career. On his second album, he recorded this tribute to the galaxy of superstars he knew from his early days with Andy Warhol.
They made the back room at Max’s Kansas City a magnet for young outsider artists and the tourists who want to get a glimpse of them. We’ll be saying more about Lou and Max’s shortly.
“Subway Train” by the New York Dolls (1973)
The Dolls were the most famous American branch of the glam movement that had briefly dominated the UK. But this was a rougher, more home-grown strand than the prettier leanings of Marc Bolan and David Bowie across the sea.
Frontman David Johansen may have worn a dress and the band may have flirted with gender confusion, but their music was pure proto-punk. “Personality Crisis” was the template, but this underrated track captures the city more perfectly to my ears.
“Born to Lose” by Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers (1977)
Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders had plenty of glam even though he was never as comfortable wearing actual dresses. He formed his band in the mid-‘70s after the Dolls broke up and became a soaring comet in the scene for some brief shining moments.
Thunders was a legend to almost every punk guitarist who succeeded him and “Born to Lose” seemed like a proud embrace of destiny. It gets at one of the fundamental paradoxes in outsider art where success can equal inauthenticity.
“Kids Just Wanna Dance” by the Fast (1976)
Let’s talk for a moment about Max’s Kansas City. In its first incarnation, it was an art-oriented club that attracted the Warhol crowd and their offshoots. Then it closed. When it reopened mid-decade, the emphasis shifted more toward the music and away from the elitism of the Warhol era. And that music was transformative.
This Fast song, which is a sensational early punk statement of the obvious, was released as part of a compilation album called Max’s Kansas City, which featured most of the iconic bands that played there in the mid-‘70s. The Zone brothers, like so many of their contemporaries, had a brief run of success at the end of the decade but did not last much longer.
“Ruby From the Wrong Side of Town” by Ruby and the Rednecks (1976)
New York offered it denizens every type of music imaginable. For a young woman like Ruby Lynn Reiner, who grew up in Brooklyn and fell in with the Warhol crowd early, the theatricality of Broadway was an vital part of her music.
An actress as well as a rocker, fronting a glam rock band at a place like Max’s was a perfect fit. Like her fellow Max’s friends, she dabbled in early punk, and it’s easy to envision what Liza or Bette would have looked like had they spent more time downtown.
“I’m Waiting for the Man” by the Velvet Underground (1972)
A couple of years after Lou Reed left VU, effectively ending their existence (there was a non-Reed release but that overly-maligned album is rarely discussed), this extraordinary live album was released, featuring performances recorded at Max’s. During one of those performances, Reed quit the band, never to return.
This song, originally released on the iconic Velvet Underground and Nico disc, kicks things off and offers a taste of what it sounded like to be there. A seminal tribute to the rarely-seen side of Manhattan that Reed documented throughout his entire career. (We’re not quite done with Lou.)
“Max’s Kansas City” by Wayne County & the Backstreet Boys (1976)
She was still Wayne when this tribute to the club was released in 1976. Soon, she would be known as Jayne County. And no – her backing band was not the boy band of the ‘90s. Not by a long shot. County is among the most important figures in New York music, a crucial bridge between glam and punk and the entire DIY ethos.
Lou Reed’s influence is obvious on this song, which name-drops virtually every band – big and small – who called Max’s home in the ‘70s. Since I am obviously leaving out far too many important acts on this short playlist, listen this song and make your own list of all the other bands you might want to check out.
“Sheena Was a Punk Rocker” by Ramones (1977)
Max’s and CBGBs were not separate universes. They were very different clubs but lots of bands played both. Like Ramones. The fact that they are more associated with CBGBs has helped establish Hilly Krystal’s club as the birthplace of punk. I won’t dispute that. I’ll just say that it wasn’t alone.
The four kids who made up Ramones grew performance by performance through countless appearances at CBGBs in the mid-1977. By their third album, Rocket to Russia, they were arguably the preeminent purveyors of punk in the world. The album cover featured a shot of the boys in the alley behind CBGBs.
“Fan Mail” by Blondie (1978)
CBGBs may be identified with punk but the first wave of famous bands that came from the scene were an eclectic mix. Blondie had punk elements but they were also surf rock, dream pop, and rap … all of which would come to define New Wave. Kind of makes sense coming from a club whose initials stood for “country, bluegrass, blues” but who came to be seen as a center of the punk universe.
“No Compassion” by the Talking Heads (1977)
The Talking Heads, like other vital bands from the time and place – Suicide, Television – carved out their own brand of art rock informed by the griminess of the East Village. “Psycho Killer” was the major hit off their debut album, but “No Compassion” is far less tongue-in-cheek.
“Gloria” by Patti Smith (1975)
Horses begins with the stunning voice of Patti Smith intoning “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine – Melting in a pot of thieves – Wild card up my sleeve.” Then she issues a defining tenet of New York music in this era. “My sins, my own – They belong to me.” Eventually, you find out she is actually doing Them’s 1965 classic “Gloria.” But it didn’t used to sound like this.
“Sonic Reducer” by Dead Boys (1977)
After the first wave of CBGBs bands began gaining national and international fame, it cleared the club for the next generation. Guitarist Cheetah Chrome, drummer Johnny Blitz, and vocalist Stiv Bators came to New York from Ohio to test the waters. CBGBs was always willing to take a chance on new bands and Dead Boys quickly cemented the new punk sound that Ramones had begun.
“Halloween Parade” by Lou Reed (1989)
We’ll close with one more Lou song, from a good ten years after the peak of the scene. Max’s was long shuttered by then. CBGBs was still viable, but it was in a long period of slow decline, when it became more of a myth than a reality. The world had changed. Urban renewal – represented in no small part by the current president of the United States – had gentrified the neighborhoods.
(Jonathan Mahler’s 2025 book The Gods of New York does a nice job of presenting this part of the story.)
Reed released his own magnificent chronicle of the city in 1989’s New York. The second track is another name dropper – like Jayne County’s “Max’s Kansas City,” mentioned above. But this is a list of mostly non-musical figures who had died in the previous decade.
Things were destined to change in the New York music scene, but AIDS poured rocket fuel on those changes. And as usual, Lou was there to capture it.
Oh man - I got to the end and forgot to include Richard Hell & the Voidoids' "Down at the Rock and Roll Club." Add that one too.
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