In his rock and roll heart, Lou Reed was first, a storyteller. His songs were rockhard vignettes of New York street life. There were tales of choices made, good and bad, and remembrances of beauty found in the most unlikely of places. If you lived in the Village in the 70’s, you recognized some of the real players in his songs, like Rollerena, the ubiquitous drag queen on skates in the elegiac, “Halloween Parade”: “But there ain’t no Hairy and no Virgin Mary / You won’t hear those voice again / And Johnny Rio and Rotten Rita / You’ll never see those faces again.”
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Posts by Emily Armstrong and Pat Ivers :
Watch the Suburbs in 1980 Before You See Them at Mercury Lounge This Week
“I don’t remember that song!”
Chan Poling was startled to see the video we posted from 1980 of the Suburbs’ last performance in New York. Studying his fellow band members, he allowed that lead singer Beej Charney looked great — “And we don’t sound so bad either!”
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Nightclubbing | Buzz and the Flyers, 1980
Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong are sifting through their voluminous archive of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at NYU’s Fales Library.
“We wore ’50s clothes, we loved ’50s music, we wanted ’50s amps — if it had been possible, we would have been in black and white.” That’s how Dig Wayne, lead singer of the great rockabilly band Buzz and the Flyers, recalled the band’s obsession with all things midcentury. “We even wanted to have one of those great big old microphones ’cause they looked so cool, but they sounded awful. So we got an old one and rewired it so the guts inside were new and the outside was old and fantastic.”
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Nightclubbing: DNA at Mudd Club, 1979
Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong are sifting through their voluminous archive of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at NYU’s Fales Library. This week: a look back at DNA.
“How dare you play your guitar like that! Don’t you know that’s the same instrument that Eric Clapton plays?” Audience members were often quick to share their dissatisfaction with the screeching dissonance that Arto Lindsay wrung from his instrument during a feverish set. So whenever his no wave band DNA finished up, Lindsay was sure to pack up quickly.
“It was the music I liked to play,” Lindsay says. “I thought the more far out you were, the more likely you were to be hailed as the next Jimi Hendrix. I just wanted to see what music would do to people. “
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Nightclubbing | Strange Party, 1980
Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong are sifting through their voluminous archive of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.
Described by the Soho Weekly News as “New York’s best party band,” Strange Party was a witty, stylish group serving up a fizzy cocktail of performance art with a dash of Latin-infused new wave. They were a huge outfit with six backup musicians and four vocalists upfront. And what vocalists! Led by downtown art star Joey Arias, the quartet was rounded out by Tony Frere, Paige Wood, and Janus Budde. They were eccentric and compelling — their guitarist George Elliot once described the band as “a little like heavy metal Ricky Ricardo.” Joey suggested they were just trying to turn art into fun.
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Nightclubbing | John Cale Band, 1979
Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

John Cale on the road. (Photo: Robert Medici)
- He studied musicology at London’s Goldsmiths College in the early 1960s, where his teachers dubbed him “Most Hateful Student” before awarding him a prestigious Leonard Bernstein scholarship to study with the Boston University Orchestra.
Nightclubbing | Student Teachers, 1979
Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

(Photo: Steve Lombardi)
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Nightclubbing | Richard Hell and The Voidoids, 1979
Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library

(Photo: Nicole Batchelor Regne)
It has probably reminded this self-deprecating and essentially very private man why he dropped from the public eye to begin with. The tension between his introversion and the will to perform has always been Hell’s biggest conundrum. And what better way to help relive that dichotomy than a book tour? Maybe it’s a form of therapy. We have the feeling he would rather chew glass.
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Nightclubbing | Human Sexual Response, 1980
Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.
It is hard to overstate the giddy hedonism of the early ’80s. Riding the tide of the ’70s sexual revolution, when feminism and gay power met the “if it feels good do it” ethos of the era, it was a great time to be young and on the prowl.
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Nightclubbing | Lounge Lizards, 1979
Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Lounge Lizards (Photo: Pat Ivers)
Some called what they played fake jazz but we loved their sinuous stew of no wave, be-bop and cinematic soundscape that Robert Palmer of The New York Times famously described as “somewhere west of Charles Mingus and east of Bernard Hermann.”
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