The Freaks Came Out To Write: How The Village Voice Helped Make CBGB’s, E Street Band, Blondie, Ramones (Book Excerpt)

By Tricia Romano

In its heyday, New York City’s Village Voice had a profound impact on culture and politics far beyond its five-borough purview — especially its music coverage. The alt weekly was co-founded in 1955 by Norman Mailer, Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf and and between then and 2018 when it stopped publishing (it’s still around in some capacity), the Voice had front-row seats to the burgeoning punk, hip-hop, jazz, indie rock, dance music, no wave, electronic and other music scenes chronicled with some of the most talented music editors, writers and thinkers ever assembled. This included Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Nat Hentoff, James Wolcott, Greg Tate, Doug Simmons, Ann Powers, Robert Christgau, Joe Levy, Nelson George, Barry Michael Cooper, Carol Cooper, Ellen Willis, Evelyn McDonnell, Chuck Eddy, Simon Reynolds, Ed Morales, Jon Pareles, Vince Aletti, Maura Johnston, Rob Harvilla, Michael Musto and Tricia Romano among many others.

Romano has just written “The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture” (Public Affairs/Hachette Book Group), a wonderful oral history meticulously chronicling the paper’s colorful epoch. Looking through the prism of live and performance, Pollstar has excerpted two portions of the chapter, “The Music Section Was Suddenly in Flower” that highlights the paper’s indispensable classifieds section, which helped birth both Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band and Blondie, and a section that shows how Voice music journalists helped support and participate in the exploding punk, indie, art rock scenes coming out of CBGB’s located just down the street from the publication’s East Village HQ.

Excerpt from Tricia Romano’s book:

Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith Band, Musician): You would open up the Voice and see who’s playing at CBGB’s, so the listings were very important.

Frank Ruscitti (Writer): You couldn’t buy ad space in the Voice it was so hot. Every single person in New York wanted to be on the Village Voice bulletin board on the back page. The classifieds themselves— the apartment ads, which are, historically, the thing from the Voice— pretty much kept that paper in the black, year after year after year. Tuesday nights, people standing on line at the different kiosks, waiting for the earliest copy of the Voice to come in. And every single one of them was there because of the apartment ads.

Guy Trebay (Writer): The thing was so thick, it was like a doormat in the ’70s and ’80s.

Jackie Rudin (Ad Manager): Nothing sold as much per line than a classified ad. We couldn’t even handle the amount of classified advertising that came in. This is all apartment searching. People found their lives through the Village Voice, whether it was a partner, or a job, or an apartment.

Clem Burke (Blondie, Drummer): My two apartments I found in the Voice for sure; I found one on East Chelsea, and then my loft in Gramercy Park through the Village Voice.

Chris Stein (Blondie): Debbie and me, I wouldn’t be surprised if we got our 17th Street apartment through the Voice— the one with the photograph of her in the kitchen with the flaming frying pan. The music ads were a whole thing. That’s how we got Clem, our fucking drummer.

Debbie Harry (Blondie): Yeah, “freak energy drummer.” There were sixty applicants. It was insane. Some of the craziest people in New York, or ever anywhere, and all different kinds, all different types. It shows what kind of reach the Village Voice had.

Clem Burke: It wasn’t really a typical musical audition. Famously, they really liked my shoes.

Max Weinberg (E Street Band, Drummer): I got my job with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band through the Village Voice. The best thing about the Village Voice was it had every listing of every live show, it had extensive album reviews, and it had the largest want ads. The Village Voice really took their public-notice music section very seriously.

I was going to college, and I fell in with this group of musicians from upstate New York, and the Village Voice was their bible. I’d heard the name Bruce Springsteen around, but I hadn’t heard any of his music. Joe Delia, a well-known composer and pianist, said, “They’re still looking for a drummer. Here’s the ad they put in the Voice.” It said, “Wanted drummer and keyboard player.” For the drummer: “No Junior Ginger Bakers here.” Ginger Baker was the incredible, flamboyant, recently deceased drummer for Cream. He was a soloist. And it said, “All must sing, and the piano player should be able to play Chuck Berry to classical.” The wording of it was very specific, because where they refer to the drummer as “not a junior Ginger Baker,” that spoke to me; they wanted an accompanist.

Somewhere north of sixty drummers auditioned. I went there for an audition knowing nothing and having no preconceptions, and I thought I did terribly. But I saw immediately that him and the guys were unbelievable. He played standing five feet in front of me with the same intensity that he plays with in a stadium. It’s pretty hard not to feel that energy.

Everybody got a half hour whether they were good or not. But we played three hours that first time, so I didn’t know any different. Plus, I was from New Jersey. He asked me where I was from, and he said, “That’s good.” He was from South Jersey.

That’s how I got the job. So, the Village Voice had a major role in the next forty- six years of my life.

Robert Christgau (Music Editor): I get there in August of ’74. By April of ’75, I’d gotten this handwritten invitation to go see the Ramones. I saw them in April of ’75, and Patti Smith was beginning her first stay. She had a residency at CBGB.

Lucian K. Truscott IV (Writer): I got her one of her first paying gigs at Reno Sweeney. She and Lenny Kaye were just starting out. She used to come by the Voice, and when I wasn’t there she would get one of those pink memo slips for the telephone and write a little poem that basically said, “Hi, Lucian. It’s Patti. Why weren’t you here? I wanted a drink. I wanted to go to Bradley’s with you.” She wrote probably ten of them.

Reno Sweeney had just opened; they had an open mic night on Monday nights, and it was sucking. I said, “Well, I know somebody that can play for you.” At that point, Lenny Kaye was playing his guitar and she was chanting poetry, basically. I went to the first Monday night she played. There weren’t that many people there, but the word of mouth started spreading, and they got more people in there.

The thing that got me about her that was a little off-putting— but it’s the thing that she made her career out of— she had this earnestness. She was able to take what I thought at the time was a really limited amount of musical talent and just wring every fucking drop of oomph out of it. She really felt it in her bones.

Chris Stein: I saw her super early on. She would read poetry, and then Lenny would come out and accompany her, and it was almost like a parody. But she was amazing. I remember leaving one show and going, “Why doesn’t she have a band?”

Lenny Kaye: Before CBGB’s, all the places for New York bands to play were gone. All the other clubs were national acts. Max’s had closed, which had a brief spell of booking local bands. It was as simple as, “Gee, there’s a place for bands to play.” When we started performing regularly, we found a lot of support and energy from the Voice because it was our target audience.

Carola Dibbell (Author): Bob endeared himself to Patti. She was singing, it was just her and Lenny, and there was some asshole who wouldn’t exactly say, “Take it off,” but he was that mentality. He started to go like this [claps], and Bob typed up, “What is the sound of one asshole clapping?” It was a good opening.

James Wolcott (Writer): I got hired in the circulation department. I also manned the phones and listened to everybody’s complaints.

Lucian K. Truscott IV: I was friendly with Wolcott. Wolcott was always complaining to me, saying, “God. How do you get to be a writer here? I don’t want to sit here at this desk forever.” I said to him, “Well, if you want to write for the Voice, fucking write. What did you do last night?” He said, “I went into this place called CBGB.” I said, “Write about that.” And he did.

Robert Christgau: The motherfucker was a dream of a writer.

James Wolcott: Clay put me on a stipend, and then I had to turn in a certain number of pieces and keep writing. I was writing about television, and it became an actual column. I was assigned to write a performance review of Patti Smith, of whom I knew very little. I asked people about her, and I got totally disparate things. Some people said, “Oh, she’s fantastic, she’s really funny, she’s great.” And other people going, “Oh, she’s a complete poser.” It was fantastic, and I just loved CBGB. It was so cruddy and so informal and so loose.

“Patti Smith Mustang Rising”
By James Wolcott, Village Voice, April 14, 1975
Patti Smith moves through a room like a shark through the lower depths. Sharp features, oilblack hair, dark intense eyes. A lithe toughness.
So her smile catches you by surprise, not only because it’s switchblade quick, but because it’s not the smile of a killer. So many reports on Patti Smith have made her sound demonic, word-crazed— a cocaine Ophelia— that I was surprised to see her so poised a performer. Her flakiness is legendary but her smile carries the weight of professional confidence.

James Wolcott: I kept going back, and she was one who was, “You gotta see this band, Television. They’re really loud and often out of tune, but you gotta see them.” I was there maybe four, five nights a week, depending on who was playing. I saw the whole thing unfold.

Christgau was very dubious at first about the whole thing. He had a real devotion to the New York Dolls, and in the beginning he didn’t feel like any of these bands matched the New York Dolls. But Bob was nearby, so you would see him there, and he certainly wrote about it a lot.

Robert Christgau: I loved it myself. The things that were happening at CBGB were things I wanted to happen in music.

James Wolcott: All of a sudden, it was one amazing band after another. I saw the very first performances Talking Heads did there. They would open for the Ramones, and they were coming out in their little Lacoste shirts.

Robert Christgau: We adored the Ramones the first time we saw them, and it was early. Short, fast, catchy songs with a good beat. Just simple as that. That was the Ramones more than anybody, but it was also true of Blondie.

Debbie Harry: We started together in 1973. It wasn’t really a scene when we started playing there. And then we’d drag our shit in there and we’d play, and a lot of the older guys would sit at the bar holding their ears. We would have ten friends sitting around in front closer to the stage. And that was it. It was like a private party in your basement or something.

Lenny Kaye: I remember standing outside CBGB’s once, maybe ’75, ’76, and thinking, “This is a lot like the San Francisco scene.” It was Cheers for the Lower East Side. Everybody knows your name. What I loved about CBGB was that the early bands there sounded nothing like each other. Tom Verlaine once said that every band was like an idea. And there was very little similarity between us, Television, the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, and the other twelve bands that played there early on.

Debbie Harry: We started in ’73. I don’t think CBGB’s started to be a scene until ’76. It was like three years of farm work. Then all of a sudden, some people latched on to a couple of bands, and it became important very quickly.

Chris Stein: The Voice and the SoHo News were instrumental, certainly.

Robert Christgau: We treated every one of those albums as being a major piece of work, and I thought hard about who should review them.

Carola Dibbell: Talking Heads were really remarkable in that era. That’s when Richard Goldstein said his famous thing, right? About his voice?

Robert Christgau: About David Byrne. In a good way. He turned in what I consider this fucking classic piece.

“Talking Heads Hyperventilate Some Clichés”
By Richard Goldstein, Village Voice, February 2, 1976
Talking Heads is organized around a remote and skinny guy named David Byrne, who sings in a high somber voice, somewhat like a seagull talking to its shrink. . . .If Jonathan Richman plays the kid who ate his snot, David plays the kid who held his farts in. He doesn’t move like any rock star ever. He wobbles and cranes his neck— not spastically but with tension— and his voice rises as though he is about to yell at his mother. One soon comes to accept this as yet another pose— the neurasthenic Roy Orbison.

Robert Christgau: We spent two nights a week at CB’s, for about a year and a half. It was not unusual to have a double bill. Television and Talking Heads, two of the greatest rock bands in fucking history and on the same bill! Just for that, it was amazing.

Hilly put on this big ten-day festival, which we* missed because we were on vacation upstate, and Goldstein, not me, assigned Wolcott to cover it, and that story was a major, major story in the increasing visibility and importance of the Village Voice.

James Wolcott: I ran into people years later who said that that piece made them want to come to New York: “I wanna see this.”

“A Conservative  Impulse In The New Rock Underground”
By James Wolcott, Village Voice, August 18, 1975
What CBGB is trying to do is nothing less than to restore that spirit as a force in rock and roll. One is left speculating about success: Will any of the bands who play there ever amount to anything more than a cheap evening of rock and roll? I don’t know, and in the deepest sense, don’t care. These bands don’t have to be the vanguard in order to satisfy. In a cheering Velvets song, Lou Reed sings: “A little wine in the morning, and some breakfast at night / Well, I’m beginning to see the light.” And that’s what rock gives: small unconventional pleasures which lead to moments of perception.

Chris Stein: That was when everything really picked up a notch.

James Wolcott: There were no real barriers at CBGB. There was a long bar. There was a little backstage area, but nobody wanted to hang around the backstage area because it was so cruddy.

And then you had people like Lester Bangs, who was writing, but also he had a band.

He came to New York from Creem. People loved Lester, and they loved reading him. You couldn’t help but like him. He could be very funny, very self-deprecating. He was ready for anything. He was just another big fish among other big fish. He had to submit pieces, and he had a hard time initially. s

This article has been excerpted from “The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture” by Tricia Romano. Copyright © 2024. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.