#hilly kristal

“Our first shows were at CBGB’s on August 16 and 17, 1974. It was just an old, dumpy little bar on the Bowery, as everyone knows. Hilly Kristal and his wife ran the place, and they had nothing going on there besides winos, so they started letting these new bands play there, like Television and Patti Smith’s band. Dee Dee had heard about it, and so we decided to give it a try. It was like a practice in front of ten people. We had gotten a lot better by then, and we had more songs. At that point, we were still dressed in partial glitter because the Dolls were still the big thing in New York. I had these silver lamé pants made of Mylar and these black spandex pants I’d wear too. I was the only one with a real Perfecto leather jacket—what the Ramones would later be identified with—which I had been wearing for seven years already.” (extract from Commando Johnny Ramone’sbio).

Johnny Ramone during the early Ramones glam rock phase, photo by Chris Stein ca 1974

• via christein
  

theunderestimator-2:

A glimpse of New York’s late-’70s nightlife/ bohemian decadence: 

early punk scenester & member of the ‘Revenge Girls’ gang that used to run punk hangout & clothing store ‘Revenge’Debbie Wheeler along with the late Anya Phillips, co-founder of the Mudd Club/ fashion designer/ dominatrix, Cheetah Chrome of the Dead Boys & his then girlfriend and later on thunderous R’n’R bassist Gyda Gash (the quintessential punk couple rivaled only by Sid and Nancy, without the killing-each-other part), captured by Eileen Polkin1978 on the staircase next to CBGB, leading up to Palace Hotel, the biggest flophouse on theBowery that housed hundreds of homeless people per night.

The Palace Hotel space began life in the late 1870s as a tenement house with liquor stores on the ground floor, in an area rife with taverns, inns and saloons frequented by slaughterhouse workers for almost a century after the meat processing industry expanded north on theBoweryfromChatham Square. In1949 the stores became the Palace Hotel Restaurant Bar and in 1969 a man named Hilly Kristal began leasing it. By 1973, when he founded CBGB there, the hotel had gone from palatial to poverty-stricken, providing cheap rooming for homeless, drunks and junkies that lived in the neighborhood.

The rest you already know.

(via&via)