Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / The CBGB Conspiracy: Murder in New York ’77 [Episode 368]

Transcript

The CBGB Conspiracy: Murder in New York ’77 [Episode 368] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Seventy seven was sort of the year that New York
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: City hit rock bottom. It was also the creative peak
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: of the downtown scene, the era around CBGB's In Maxis,
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Kansas City, a young poet is found dead in his
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: apartment with a hero needle hanging out of his arm.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: The cops think that it was just an accidental ode.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: His friends think that he was murdered. Were totally bumped
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: rock and roll. I mean gotta leave you. You're reading
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: little hens this. It's time to rock and roll, Rock
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: roll up. I totally booked.
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: Welcome back to Booked on Rock, the podcast for those
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: about to read and rock. Emeric Senich Gabriel Rottello. He
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: is the author of the new book titled The CBGB Conspiracy.
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the podcast, Gabriel, Thank you, Eric.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: How you doing.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: I'm doing great, Thank you so much for coming on.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: I always love reading fiction books that mix in some
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: rock and roll, and in this case, we've got some
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: New York City CBGB rock and roll and the book.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: Actually it's interesting because it mixes fiction with a host
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: of real events and historical figures tell us what the
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: story is about.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: So The CBGB Conspiracy is a murder mystery that takes
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: place in nineteen seventy seven in New York City on
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: the downtown scene around CBGB's. Seventy seven was sort of
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: the year that New York City hit rock bottom. It
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: was the year of the Great Blackout of seventy seven.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: It was the year of the Son of Sam. It
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: was the peak of crime, six murders a day in
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: the city, and it was also the creative peak of
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: the downtown scene. The era around CBGB's in Maxis Kansas City,
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: when so many new bands were forming. It was the
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: beginning of punk rock. It was also the era beginning
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: of hip hop and a lot of other things as well.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: And in the book, A Young Poet Has Found a
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: guy is found dead in his apartment with a hero
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: needle hanging out out of his arm, and the cops,
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: leaguered and overworked, think that it was just an accidental
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: od and they decide not to investigate, but his friends
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: think that he was murdered, and so they begin investigating themselves,
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: and his best friend Finn, goes through his apartment the
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: next night to see if there's any clues there, and
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: when he gets there, William Burrows, the great beat writer
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: William Burrows is coming out of the apartment, and so
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: he immediately begins to suspect that Burrows, who was a
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: famous junkie, was responsible for the person's for the kid's death,
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: and that's how it begins. And then it goes on
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: as sort of a wild goose chase through the scene
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: of CBGB's and max Is, the art scene, the music scene,
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: the fashion scene, mixing the real events like the blackout
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: and the Son of Sam, etc. And real people like
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: William Burrows and Herbert Hunky and all the great downtown
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: people that I knew back then, with a fictional story
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: of this murder, which we finally at the end will solve.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: Tell us about your history with the city of New York.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: You mentioned people that you knew.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so I moved to New York in seventy four,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: right after college, when I was twenty one years old,
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: and it was a very fortuitous time to move there
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: because the city was melting down. A million people had
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: left the city, and so it was extremely inexpensive to live.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: It's amazing when people think today of Manhattan in particular
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: of being an enclave primarily for millionaires and the smallest, little,
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: tiny apartment is thirty five hundred or four thousand. My
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: first apartment was ninety dollars a month, right in Manhattan,
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: down the downtown scene, and so was everybody else's. So
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: as older people were moving out of New York, younger
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: people were moving in and it became a nexus for
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: art people that wanted to be writers, artists, musicians, and
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: there was just this huge scene going on. And that's
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: right when I arrived there. I had trained as a
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: musician as a kid, really to be a classical musician,
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: but I wanted to be a rock and roll musician,
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: and one of the main places to do that was
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: New York City. And I'm from just outside New York City,
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: so that is where I moved and immediately connected with
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: that scene and spent the next fifteen years working as
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: a musician in New York, not always on the downtown scene,
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: but in the beginning on the downtown scene and hanging
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: out at CBGB's one of my favorite places to hang out.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: And because it was such a tiny scene when it
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: first started late seventy four early seventy five, CBS really began,
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: it had been there for a couple of years. Hilly Crystal,
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: who was a major character in the CBGB conspiracy. Founded
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: CBGB's as a blues and bluegrass and country place on
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: the Bowery, and the Bowery was arguably the most dysfunctional
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: street in America for most of the twentieth century. It
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: was where all the missions were that catered to alcoholics
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: and what the those days. We wouldn't say it today,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: I guess, but in those days people called Bowery Bombs,
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: so it was the street was just littered with drunk
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: people lying in the streets, fires burning in garbage cans.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: It was not the kind of place that you really
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: wanted to go to go out to a club, particularly
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: at night, and that's where Hilly opened his club, and
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: it was not doing very well. For the first few years.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: The only people that were in there were Bowery Bombs
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: and the Hell's Angels, who had a big house, a
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: big tenement building right around the corner, and they hung
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: out there too, but nobody much else showed up until
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: one day Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlane of the group
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Television were walking up the street and saw Helly working
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: on his awning, the famous and now famous awning of CBGB's.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: They looked inside, they saw that it was this huge
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: room with a great stage in the back and a
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: really major sound system, and they said, hey, you know
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: what is this? He said, it's a bluegrass place. And
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: they said, well, we don't play bluegrass, but can we
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: play here? So he said, yeah, why not? You know,
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: nobody else really seems to want to. And their manager,
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: Terry Orr made sure that they drew a big crowd
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: on their first night. There's probably more people than Hilly
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: had seen there since he opened the place, and so
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: he invited them back for a residency to play every Thursday,
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: Friday Saturday night for six weeks. And because the scene
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: was a very small scene, and because the guys in television,
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: Tom Berlane and Richard Lloyd knew everybody else on the scene,
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: like Patti Smith and Debbie Harry and the Talking Heads,
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: and none of the Ramones, none of whom were known yet,
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: most of them hadn't even played any place yet. They
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: all came to see Television play there and saw what
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: a cool place it was and asked Hilly if they
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: could play there too, and he said yes, and so
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: they began to play and a little tiny scene began
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: to evolve there. I was at the time very good
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: friends with Richard Sohle, who was the keyboard player of
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: the Patty Smith group, and he told me about it
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: and said, Patty's going to be playing there, you know,
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: next Thursday, you got to come see us in this
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: cool place on the Bowery. And I was like, the Bowery,
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: what are you talking about? But I went anyway to
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: see Patty and was blown away by the place. One
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: thing about Seabe's, by the way, despite the squalor of
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: the club itself, both the street outside and the club inside,
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: it had a fantastic sound system. Hilly was always meticulous
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: about the sound system. He didn't empty the ash trays,
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: they didn't mop the floor, you know, they didn't clean
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: the place out. It really it's stank in there. You
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: kind of got a slight headache where you'd go in.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: But the sound system was fantastic, and so a scene
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: began to develop, and it was a very tiny scene
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: at first, for the first maybe year or so. And
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: the thing that was really important about it to me
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: was that Hilly he was devoted to only originals. He
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: didn't want anybody to play covers. He only wanted original bands.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: And if he liked you. He let you come back
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: over and over and over again to play many, many times,
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: or even do residencies. Patty Smith had a residency there.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: We would play for a month, six weeks, two months. Whatever.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: The thing is most musicians can attest is that, you know,
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: one hour of performing in front of people on stage
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: is worth ten hours of rehearsal, just rehearsing. There's just
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: something great about performing live. And so people who started
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: out not very good got good pretty fast. In fact,
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: pretty much everybody was not very good the first I mean,
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Patty Smith already was I will say this, Patty and
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: her band, Lenny K, Richard Soul JD and Ivan Crawl,
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: they were quite good. But most everybody else the first
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: time I saw them, including Blondie, were just not that great.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: But they got good in short order because they had
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: this opportunity to play in front of people, and a
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: buzz began to happen, and the press began snooping around
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: and writing stories about it, and slowly, over that first
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: year it became better known and more and more people
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: being and showing up to find out what all the
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: talk was about, and it just grew into a scene.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: And then the record labels showed up and people began
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: getting signed, the Ramones and then Patty Smith and then
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Blondie and then Talking Heads and all these other bands.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: The shirts, there was a million of them, the Dead Boys,
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: just tons of bands. And by seventy seven, when the
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: CBGB Conspiracy takes place, it had now become such a
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: popular place that Hilly began complaining to me that he
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: was losing money because the place wasn't big enough. He
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: now had more people on the sidewalk outside than he
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: was able to let into the club because it only
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: held a couple of hundred people. And he began looking
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: for a new place that he could open that would
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: be much bigger, and he found it in this old
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Yiddish theater on Second Avenue in Fourth Street, called the
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: Anderson Theater, and he took that over and turned it
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: into what he called the CBGB Theater. So now there
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: was CBGB's on the Bowery and this much bigger place,
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: like the side the fillmore east, you know, a big
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: old theater that he called the CBGB Theater. But he
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: felt that he was being sabotaged because everything was going
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: wrong with that building. He wasn't being sabotaged. He had
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: just purchased a building that was in such terrible shape
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: that it needed way more work than he could possibly afford,
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: and so it failed in really kind of spectacular fashion.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: There was no heat, the bathrooms didn't work, bands were freezing,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: they couldn't play because their fingers were too cold, and
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: he closed it within a few months, and it was
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: really a financial disaster for Hilly that he never really
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: recovered from. But I took that and wove that into
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: the book as well. And in the book it is
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: being sabotaged by the same people that are responsible for
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: the murder that takes place in the beginning of the book.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: It's all interconnected, and so I sort of solve the
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: crime of what happened to the CBGV theater, even though
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: it wasn't a crime. I turned it into one and
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: solved that in the course of the book too, as
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: well as several other real crimes.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: Fantastic story. How do you think the city shaped you
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: differently than any other place could have?
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean New York has always been a kind
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: of a different place. I guess every place is different
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: from everyplace else, but New York always had this sense
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: that you were kind of in the fish bowl, sort
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: of in the center of things, because it's not just
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: a music town. It was also a literary town, media town,
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: and art town, sort of the center of the art world,
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: the fashion town, the center of the fashion world. And
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: my friends on that scene were mostly were gay because
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: I'm gay, and most of my friends that were on
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: the CBGB's scene were also gay. All those CBGB's was
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: not a gay place by any stretch of the imagination,
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: but there were a lot of gay people there. They
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: were all from different elements of the different scenes in
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: New York. I mean Stephen Sprouse and Stephen Mazell people
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: like that went on to stellar careers in fashion. People
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: like Jean Michel Basquillat went on to amazing careers in art.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: People went on too, amazing careers in literature and writing
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: as well as music. So it really was a thing
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: that you don't get necessarily in every other city, where
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: you're sort of in the center of all of these
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: huge cultural movements. And amazingly enough, the downtown scene, which
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: is and you know, by the way, Downtown New York
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: for people that don't know, it's basically from Houston Street
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: up to about fourteenth Street, and from maybe Avenue A
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: over to about Avenue about eighth Avenue. It's about one
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: square mile, and in those days, because it was so inexpensive,
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: pretty much everybody lived. Everybody who wanted to do those
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: kinds of things lived in that one square mile. So
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: everybody went to the same clubs, went to the movies
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: in the same movie theaters, ate in the same restaurants,
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: and bumped into each other all the time. You just
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: go out and walk around on the street. It's like
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: a mented college campus.
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: I was gonna say college campus, Yeah.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: Where you're simply the people that you're bumping into are
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: not your friends from college, are people that are about
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: to go on to these amazing careers as Blondie or
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: as Jean Michelle Bosquiat or you know whoever. So it
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: was really an amazing time and an amazing place. It
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: did not last. Gentrification began eating away at it as
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: early as the early nineteen eighties, and by the late
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: nineteen eighties already there was an exodus out to Brooklyn
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: and to far flung places like that because people simply
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: could not afford anymore. You could not find an apartment
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: for ninety dollars a month. You couldn't find an apartment
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: for nine hundred dollars a month. All of a sudden,
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: everything was fifteen hundred or two thousand, and kids who
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: just you know, arriving in the city at the age
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: of twenty one cannot afford that, so they moved away.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: The scene dissipated and kind of dissolved. But for about
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: ten years it was really amazing.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: The artists be then know they were part of something historic,
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: or they're just trying to survive day to day.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: Trying to survive and to do art day to day.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: I don't even think that survival was that much on
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: people's minds. It was more like what they're doing with
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: their art, their music, they're writing whatever. But no, people
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: had no idea that what was happening there was going
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: to resonate beyond there. I mean, when you think about
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: it in the seventies, I mean, rock and roll sort
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: of began in the sixties, and when it began, it
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: replaced what had happened before that, which was what was
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: going on in the forties and fifties, and that was
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: just discarded. I mean, you think of big band music
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: and stuff like that was just discarded, and when rock began,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: people thought that that would be discarded. Even the Beatles
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: said at some point earlier in their career that we're
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: only going to be able to do this for a
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: couple of years because we're just going to go out
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: of fashion and people aren't going to want to hear
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: us anymore. And we still had that attitude in the seventies.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: It hadn't been that a long and people just assume
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: that whatever we're doing right now is what we're doing
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: right now. But another generation of kids is going to
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: come along in a few years and we will all
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: be just forgotten, will sort of be like bing Crosby
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: or you know, Tommy Dorsey or something like that, and
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: they'll be doing a new thing. The fact that it
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: has lasted and that young people today are still very
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: interested in that kind of music, the music of the
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: late sixties, seventies, eighties is not something that we ever anticipated,
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: and it's something that still astonishes me today. I'm very
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: happy about it because everywhere I go, when you go
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: shopping in the store, the music that they're playing is
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: very frequently not the music that's popular right now. But
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: music from the seventies.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: Is that great, yeah, yeah.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: And you see young kids, I mean the kids behind
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: the counter that are in their twenties and they're nodding
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: to the music and their lips thinking the lyrics because
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: they know all the words to, you know, a led
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: Zeppelin song or whatever. It's like, dude, that was like
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: fifty years before you were born, Like, how do you
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: even know that?
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: But it's amazing. They got the Ramones T shirts and
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: the Blondie T shirts and you see them all around here.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: The CBGB's T shirts.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah yeah, CBGB. Just that name just represents something
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: just it's a defining period in history. Represents youth, that
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: represents fighting against mainstream culture.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: It does, and it also represents something that I think
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: that people are mourning a little bit of the loss
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: of a little bit these days, which is community, a
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: sense of a real physical community, not sort of electronic
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: internet community, but places that you can go where everybody
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: that line from cheers you want to go where everybody
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: knows your name kind of thing. That was still very
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: very much the case on the downtown scene. And I
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: flip flop back and forth between the West Village, which
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: was the gay side of downtown, in the East village,
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: which was the sort of the punk crock side of downtown.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: And I had my key places in the West Village
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: and my key places in the East Village, and all
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: my friends went to those places. You didn't have to
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: go with anybody. Just walk in the door and you'll
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: immediately see a zillion people that you know and hang
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: out with, and you influence each other. The artists influence
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: the musicians. The musicians influenced the fashion designers. And I
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: think that that has dissipated to a certain extent. And
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: I think that when people look back at that, they
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: wish that that was still going on. And I think
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: in some places it is still going on, but it's
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: a little more atomized now than it was back then.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: As a gay man, you've didn't feel danger or there.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: Was the famous, the famous incident. I happened to be
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: there that night with Jane County and Handsome Dick Manitoba,
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: where Jane County was Wayne County. Jane County was an
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: early sort of transgender person who actually changed his name
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: from Wayne to Jane and was a rock and roll
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: was a punk rock person and got a lot of
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: you know shit for that. And one night was getting
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: a lot of flak from a guy in the crowd
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: who was also a rock and roll singer, Dick Manitoba,
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: and he was saying very homophobic things to Jane as
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: he was walking in front of the stage at Seb's.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: In order to get to the bathrooms at Seb's, you
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: had to literally get up and walk right in front
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: of the stage and sort of block out the band
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: for a second.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: It was sort of I heard the bathrooms were kind
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: of dangerous.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: That's the thing you didn't I never went to the bathroom.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: There was an alley outside. I would go. If I
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: had to pee, I'd go outside.
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: God, I have heard that before.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, just as it's literally in a museum. Now it's
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: so skanky, it's literally been recreated a museum. But anyway,
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: so Dick was walking by and he said some really
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: homophobic things to Jane, and Jane had the mic stand.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: So Jane picked up the mic stand and smashed him
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: over the head and shoulder, gravely injuring him. I mean,
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: he was very injured and was in the hospital for
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: quite some time. So there was that kind there was homophobia.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: I mean, it was the seventies. It was homophobia, but
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: it was not It was not bad, and most people
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: were very welcoming, and many of the most prominent people
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: on that scene were gay, So I mean, how homophobic
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: could it really be. I think the thing that happened
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: with Jane and Dick was more of an aberration, so
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: I always felt completely welcome there.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: You include real figures in this story. You mentioned it.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: Tell us about that and how did you decide who
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: would appear in the book.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: Well, the genesis of the book really was that people
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: had been telling me for a long time that I
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: should write a memoir because I've done all these different things,
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: and I saw on that scene, and then I became
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: a journalist, and I was a you know, an AIDS activist,
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: and then I became a TV producers, So you need
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: to write a memoir. And I just didn't really want
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: to write a memoir about the seventies because of the eighties,
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: because of what was going to happen to my gay
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: friends in the eighties, which was that the AIDS epidemic
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: was going to send and many of them, the majority
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: of them, were going to die pretty horrible deaths just
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: a few years later. So I just said, no, I
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: won't write a memoir. But then one day I was
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: walking down the street and I thought, well, what if
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: I instead of writing it as a memoir, what if
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: I wrote it as a novel, as a fiction, like
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: as a murder mystery, and then just brought my deceased
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: friends back to life to sort of solve and to
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: have fun, to have fun doing this fun thing. We're
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: just trying to solve this murder. And it just struck
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: me as like, Wow, that would be kind of like
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: writing a memoir, but it would be a lot more fun,
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: and I wouldn't have to worry about what was going
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: to come later, just concentrate on this one two or
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: three month period of time when we were all still
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: healthy and creative and having fun. So that was the
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: genesis of it. And the people that I brought back
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: were just the people that I knew back then, all
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: of whom are deceased, because I didn't want to bring life.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: I mean, there are a lot of people from that
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: scene that are still live, and I mentioned people there
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: are characters in the book, like Patti Smith is a
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: character in the book, and Deborah Harry is a character
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: from Blondie is a character in the book, but they're
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: not actually characters with speaking roles. You go see Debbie
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: Harry and she's up on stage playing or Blondie Patti
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: Smith is going to be is playing in a concert,
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: and you're at the concert where Patty Smith is playing.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: But the people that I actually brought back to life,
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: as it were, are all public figures, and they're all deceased,
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: so I felt more freedom to sort of play with
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: them in this fun fictional way, and then it was
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: just a question of like channeling them and remembering what
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: they were like and trying to think of how they
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: would have reacted in the circumstances that I placed them
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: in in this fictional crime, and that was really fun.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: I just really enjoyed writing it so much. I was
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: really and I'm thrilled that people are liking it, and
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: I'm particularly thrilled that the people who were there then
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: one of their main comments people will say, Oh, it's
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: a wonderful murder mystery. I didn't figure out who'd done
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: it until the very end. It was a good plot
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: twist and everything. But the thing I loved the most
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: about it was that I felt like I was back there,
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: like you brought me back, and I just like on
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: every page. I just kept having this feeling like, Wow,
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: I had forgotten what it felt like. In this book
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: is making me remember what it felt like. And for
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: some friends. I was talking to somebody yesterday who said
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: that for him, it was reading it was a very
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: bittersweet thing. He's actually mentioned briefly in one page of
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: the book. It's a particular friend of mine, Richard Dottins,
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: and he said, I just was drawn into the sense
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: of promise. I'm an old man now, and then I
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: was young, and I had my whole future was in
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: front of me. And I had that whole sense in
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: reading the book that everybody was young and everybody's future
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: was ahead of them. And I just kept turning the
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: pages and going, yeah, this is a exactly what it
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: felt like. And I don't feel that way anymore. So
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: it's bittersweet for me to read it, but I'm very
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: pleased that people feel that way about it, because I
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: work very hard to try to channel nineteen seventy seven,
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: which was a rough year.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I don't think anybody could do it the
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: justice that you give it, unless it's somebody like yourself
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: who lived through it and you can tell and you
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: mentioned the character William S. Burrow. Now he's a significant
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: character in this story. He had a controversial reputation of
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: real life, both as a literary icon and a figure
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: connected to hair and addiction and a tragic shooting early
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: in his life. When you decided a real historical figure
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: would fall under suspicion, was he your first instinct or
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: did other names come to mind?
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: No? He was. That was actually literally so first I
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: came up with the idea of doing a murder mystery,
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: and then I was like, what would the murder mystery be?
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: Now I have to invent a murder mystery, and I'm
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: thinking walking my dog one day in Los Angeles, thinking
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: what is the murder mystery going to be? And then
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: I get that idea of a kid is found dead
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: in his loft from a heroin overdose. His friends suspect
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: that it was given to him deliberately, and in William
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: Burrows's book Naked Lunch, on the second page of Naked Lunch,
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: one of the characters, the gimp, is killed, is murdered
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: with a hot shot what's called a hot shot to
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: the arm. A over deliberate overdose of heroin takes place
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: in that book, and I knew that because I've read
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: that book a few times and I'm just walking down
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: the street walking my dog, and I thought, what if
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: a kid is found dead with a Heroin needle in
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: his arm and his friend goes to investigate and William
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: Burrows comes out the door. He suddenly thinks, oh my god,
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: it was Burrows. So that was literally the genesis of
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: the mystery. The whole story came from that thing. I
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: got so excited by that, and then the hard work became, Okay, well,
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: now you have to build this whole murder mystery and
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: is it really going to be Burrows or is going
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: to be somebody else who really does it? And there's
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: going to be plot twists and twists and turns and
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: all that kind of thing, And how can we bring
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: in all the other stuff that happened in the seventies,
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: including the blackout, et cetera. So he was, But that
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: was the initial inspiration, was that idea of.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: He was the guy from the get Go. Yeah, and his.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: Place, by the way, I had gone to dinner once
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: there in probably seventy seven, because he used to have
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: dinner parties there and he lived in a he lived
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: across the street from CBGB. He lived on the Bowery
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: in a huge old building that was a YMCA in
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds, and it had been decommissioned and it
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: was now sort of artists lofts and artist lofts and
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: things like that. And he lived in the men's locker
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: room of the YMCA, this sort of cement the huge
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: cement room with like five foot thick walls and hardly
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: any windows. Because he was a big gun nut and
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: he loved doing target practice, and he would do target
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: practice in that loft, like right in New York City.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: He was blasting away with these huge guns in his place.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: So he called it the bunker because it was like
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: a bunker. And I remember going there and having dinner
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: with a bunch of other, you know, sort of downtown
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: luminaries that night. And I did not realize until I
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: had finished writing the book and it was actually getting
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: ready to be published that after he left New York
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: in around nineteen eighty or so, another poet who lived
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: upstairs in another loft, John Giorno, who was a very
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: prominent poet and artist and a person who had considerable
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: financial resources, took over Burrow's loft took over the bunker
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: and preserved it exactly as it was when Burrows lived there.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: I mean the furniture, the rugs on the floor, the
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: art on the walls, everything about it, including his Orgone box.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: He had this famous Orgon box that he used to
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: sit in, this box that he was supposed to go
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: in and sit down inside and Orgone from the universe
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: will come and, you know, jazz you up and cure
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: you of all of your stuff. It was one of
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: those esoteric kinds of things. He was very into all
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: that kind of stuff, even the Orgone boxes there. And
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: then I found out that it has been preserved and
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: they give readings there, and the foundation, the John Giarno Foundation,
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: he has passed away as well, gives readings there. So
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: I went there to see if I had remembered it correctly,
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: because there was still time to fix the book. You know,
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: I had only been there once. It was what fifty
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: years ago, so I was like this vague memory. So
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: I went to an event there to see if I
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: remembered it correctly, because I had time to change the
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: description of it in the book, and to my pleasant surprise,
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: I didn't have to change a word. It was exactly
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: as I remembered it, which kind of blew my mind.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: But it maybe it also made me think when you
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: think of, like how much New York City has changed
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: in from nineteen seventy seven until now, and when you
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: think of how much the Bowery has changed, because as
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: I said before, it was like the most dysfunctional street
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: in America and now like every place else in Manhattan,
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: it's outdoor cafe, yeah, foods and shower, you know, shiny,
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: beautiful luxury condominiums. I mean, you can't even believe when
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: you walk down the Bowery that this. I want to
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: grab people and shake them and say, do you have
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: any idea you know, the ghosts that you're walking on here?
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: Taxi Driver with Denaro? Does that pretty much paint of yes,
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: pretty realistic picture of New York.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: That was seventy four And that was that was actually
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: the final scene of Taxi Driver where they carry the
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: bodies out and the crowd is waiting outside and the
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: paramedics carry the bodies out. That, believe it or not,
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: was shot on the block that I lived on in
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: the East Village. Then really yes, and one day I
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: was I had food poisoning and I was lying in
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: my apartment. I had two roommates. Was lying in my
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: apartment like really really horribly sick from food poisoning. And
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: my two roommates come in and say, come on, we
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: gotta go downstairs. They' shooting the scene of this movie
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: and they want extras. They want a crowd of people
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: to be standing around, and we're gonna go do it.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: And I was like, I'm sorry, I can't. I am
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: so sick that I So you guys go. So they went,
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: and then the movie comes out and there they are
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: the camera pans and there's Mark and James like they
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: for a second, they fill up the whole screen.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: It was like, damn, oh, you could have been in it.
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: If I hadn't had food poisoning, I would have been
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: in taxi driver because it was a radical seat. But
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: even that block, which was thirteenth Street between Second and
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: Third Avenues, is now gorgeous block. All the apartments. I mean,
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: I think our apartment there that was my second apartment,
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: was like I think it was one hundred and sixty
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: dollars a month, and those apartments are probably like four
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: thousand four a month. You know that kind of thing
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: now so yeah, the downtown scene has changed, my nayway.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: So of all the things that have changed, the idea
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: that William Burrow's loft is the one thing that's still
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: exactly the same as it was in nineteen seventy seven,
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: the time of the CBGV conspiracy is just just tickles
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: me tremendously.
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: Thanks so much for checking out the Booked on Rock podcast.
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: If you've just found the podcast, welcome. If you've been listening,
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: thank you so much for your support, and make sure
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: you tell a friend, a family member, share on social
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: media and let people know about Booked on Rock. And
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: if you do like the podcast, make sure you subscribe
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: give a five star review. Wherever you listen to the
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: Booked on Rock podcast, We're on Amazon, Apple, iHeart, Spotify, Spreaker,
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: tune In, and on YouTube music. You can check out
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: the full episodes on video, along with video highlights from
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: episodes on the Booked on Rock YouTube channel. Find it
• 30:59
  Speaker 2: at booked on Thanks again for listening. Now back to
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: the show. Why was Patty Smith the right focal point
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: for the looming quote unquote event in the story. Was
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: there a specific reason for having.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: Well because the opening night, I mean, I don't want
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: to give too much away or do any spoilers, but
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: the book concludes it turns out that there is a
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: big plot, and there are murderers, and things are really bad,
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: and something really bad is going to happen on the
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: night that Hilly opens the CBGB Theater on Second Avenue,
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: this converted theater that he converted, that something was planned
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: to happen there by the bad guys that was really
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: really bad, and that opening night was a real opening night,
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: and Patty Smith was the actual headliner that night, So
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: it made sense to have it be Patty because it's again,
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: I was trying to wind real things that actually happened
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy seven through this fictional murder mystery, and
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: so that's why it was Patty.
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: Gabriel Rottello, the author of the new book titled The
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: CBGB Conspiracy. Finn Burden is the He's both the investigator,
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: he's also an addict. What did you want His heroin
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: struggled to symbolize about that era.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: Was there a specific well, heroin was really big on
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: the downtown scene in the nineteen seventies. It was not
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: that everybody did it. I didn't really well I did
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: it once and I didn't really like it, so I
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: was saved from the temptation there were made me sick
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: from what I hear. I'm not going to do that anymore.
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: It was really horrible. But there was a sense then
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: that if you really wanted to be cool, I mean,
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: remember the time that we're in its nineteen seventy seven.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: So the fifties were the great explosion of bebop jazz
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: in New York, fifty second Street all that stuff. The
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: sixties was sort of the beats. The late fifties and
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: the sixties were sort of the beats, and Heroin played
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: a big role in all of that, and all of
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: that stuff was still going on. I mean, bebop jazz
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: was still going on, and the whole beat thing was
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: still going on. And so Heroin had this aura about
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: it that if you really wanted to be cool, the
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: really cool kids did Heroin, and a lot of people
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: messed up their lives really badly from that. They thought
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: that they were being cool. They thought that they could
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: keep it under control, and some people did. The guy
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: that was the model for Finn did to a certain extent,
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: but a lot of people didn't, and that opening scene
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: where Lucy and Lowe, the beautiful young twenty one year
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: old poet is found dead with a heroin needle sitting
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: at his kitchen table in his East Village tenement, actually
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: happened to a friend of mine. It was actually a woman,
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: Jesse Blue, not a guy, but a good friend of mine,
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: was actually found dead with a heroin needle in her arms,
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: sitting at her kitchen table. That kind of stuff happened
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: a lot. So if you were going to tell the
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: story and bring back what it was really like to
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: be on the downtown scene in the nineteen seventies, heroin
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: had to be a part of that. Heroin and a
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: lot of other drugs, but heroin had to be a
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: part of it because it was a part of it.
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: Tell Us about Julie the character Julie Is she the
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: moral center of the story.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: Well, Julie has an interesting evolution because she is. Julie
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: is the girlfriend of the deceased boy Lucien and Finn
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: is his best friend. And her journey is that she
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: was abused as a child. She comes from a very
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: rich family, half English nobility and half Indian from India,
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: sort of industrial nobility. If you will super rich family billionaires,
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: I guess. But she was abused as a child and
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: she's come to New York from England to sort of
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: get away from stuffy old England and she falls in
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: love with the downtown scene. She becomes the it girl
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy seven and sort of a punk goddess.
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: But she's struggling with her demons, and in the course
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: of the story, she basically comes to realize that she's
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: being a little too strident and that she needs to
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: sort of put her money where her mouth is, particularly
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: when it comes to people that have also been abused,
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: and that she has the power to do that because
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: she is so wealthy. So she has a real arc.
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: But my favorite arc in the book is Detective Sharon.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: It's basically a three character book. A lot of books
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: are focused on a main character, some focus on a couple,
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: but sometimes you focus on three characters. This is a
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: three character book, and the third character is the police detective,
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: Detective Sharon. He's in his forties. He's about the same
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: age as Hilly Crystal. He fancied himself a beat poet
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: when he was younger. That didn't work out, became a
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: police detective. But he still is in love with the Beats.
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: He's in love with Alan Ginsburg and Jack Carroll Wack
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: and William Burrows and Herbert Hunky and all those people,
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: and he hates the punks. He thinks that punk is
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: the worst thing that ever happened. He's been annoyed at
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: all the different trends of folk rock and the glitter
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: rock and the hippie thing, all the different things that
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: people went through in the ten years before punk. He
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: thought they were all terrible. But punk is by far
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: the worst one. And he doesn't realize that actually the
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: early punk, the punk that I'm talking about, the punk
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy seven, which was very poetical. I mean,
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: people like Patti Smith. They were real poets. They are
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: real poets. I'm very intellectual all that that. They were
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: really the beats of that time. They were basically carrying
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: on the legacy of the beat poets, and they idolized
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: people like Alan Ginsburg and William Burrows and became friends
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: with Alan Ginsburg and William Burrows and all those guys,
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: and Burrows and Ginsburg and those people came to seebgb's
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: a lot, but he doesn't realize that he just sees
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: the snarling poses and the mohawk hairdoos, and he thinks
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: it's really awful. And then slowly, as the novel unfolds,
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: he begins to get exposed as he's trying to help
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: Finn and Julie solve the murder, begins to get exposed
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: to their world. It begins to realize that there's a
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: lot more going on in the punk of nineteen seventy
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: seven than he had supposed. And there's an epilogue. Well
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: this is not a spoiler, but it's just an epilogue
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: that takes place today when he's now in his eighties
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: and he's you know, he and Julie are on their
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: way to a Patty Smith concert because he's in love
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: with Patty Smith and would miss it for the world.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: So I loved his arc. I wanted him to be
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: a stand in for readers who don't know that much
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: about punk in that era, because I read at some
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: point a couple of years ago, somebody had done an
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: opinion poll, like Pew Research or somebody like that to
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: ask people's opinions of different musical genres hip hop, rock
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: and roll, dance music, you know, whatever I mean, any
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: kind of pop music and punk rock came in Dead
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: Life last it had like a three percent positive rating
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: amongst the American people that they you know, and I thought, oh, wow,
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: that makes sense because it's been very misunderstood. People think
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: of punk as more like hardcore, what you would think
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: of as hard People today think of punk as sort
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: of hardcore, just angry people. The sex pistols, beginning of
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: the sex pistols and sort of ramones kind of thing.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: And that was definitely that was definitely part of it.
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: But that was not all of it. It wasn't even
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: most of it back then. So I wanted somebody. I
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: wanted a character in the book to start out that
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: way despising punk and then slowly realize what it really
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: was and finally go, oh my god, this is actually
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: fantastic stuff, and I, you know, I want in. So
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: that was the arc of Detective Sharon.
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: I thought of the actor Mark Ruffalo as the perfect
• 38:55
  Speaker 2: he's played that kind of character before.
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: He would be great.
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: It's the first person I thought of when I'm reading it.
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: There's the parlor game going on of people trying to
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: cast this book, like who's going to play the parts
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: in this book, and so you know whether it will
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: ever become a movie. I have no idea, but a
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: lot of people think that it should and they're all yeah,
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: sitting around going, you know who's going to play this?
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: It would make for a fantastic movie. You've got the
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: allure of the CBGB era and the punk rock and
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: all of that, but also it's a great murder mystery.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: It would be.
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: It would be a fantastic movie. Find the bookdown Rock
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: website at bookdown rock dot com. There you can find
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: all the back episodes of the show, the latest episode
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: in video and audio, links to all of the platforms
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: where you can listen to the podcast, plus all the
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: social media platforms were on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok,
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: and x. Also check out the Booked on Rock blog.
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: Find your local independent bookstore, find out all the latest
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: hot rock book releases, and before you go, check out
• 39:56
  Speaker 2: the Booked on Rock online store. Pick up some Booked
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: on Rock merch. It's all at booked on Rock dot com.
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: Without giving anything away, perhaps creating even more curiosity, here
• 40:08
  Speaker 2: you briefly weave in a recognizable New York real estate
• 40:12
  Speaker 2: figure from that era, as well did adding a real
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: figure associated with the city's future help the novel move
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: from a period piece into more of maybe a historical perspective.
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, it's hard to talk about this because there
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: are spoilers, but let's let it just suffice to say
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: that when I constructed the plot, I wanted the reason
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: for the murders that happened then and the planned mayhem
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: that happened then in the course of this story to
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: directly relate to the New York City that exists today.
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: And so I did that. And when you finally find
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: out who done it, as they say in the Murder
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: Mystery Biz, who done it has everything to do with
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: the way that New York City is today. So I
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: wove that character in and we will not say his name,
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: but there's a number of other characters. I mean, like
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: Roy Cone is a big the famous Roy Cone from
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: the McCarthy hearings and then you know all the terrible things.
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: He's a major character in Angels in America, the Tony
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: Kushner play. He is a character in this book. And
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: Steve Rubell from Studio fifty four and Truman Capoti. We
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: go uptown, we come downtown. It's it's centered on downtown,
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: but Julie's uptown and so you see that world and
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: that was that was going strong too. Nineteen seventy seven
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: was the year of Studio fifty four. That was the
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: year you see when you think of disco, and there
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: was a big dichotomy between disco in New York and
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: the downtown scene. The downtown scene just hated you know.
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: I used to go with Steven Spouse used to take
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: me to the Studio fifty four because he could always
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: just waltz right in and he would We would go
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: there together and it was like it was wild. It
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: was just like what you what you think about. You
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: never knew who you were going to see. It was
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: celebrities like everywhere you looked. And then downstairs there was
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: this basement. I tell you what was going on down
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: there it was, or even what was going on up
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: in the balcony. It was a lot of actual sex
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: went on in Studio fifty four, not on the dance floor,
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: but upstairs in the balcony and stuff like that. It
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: was really really well. But you didn't really want to
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: tell your friends at Cebe's or at Max's that you
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: had even gone there, because it was so uncool on
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: that scene, and yet from a cultural point of view,
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: what was coming out of New York in nineteen seventy
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: seven on that level, which was disco, you know, what
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: was going on there had more of a cultural impact.
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: I mean that's what led to you know, Saturday Night
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: Fever and all those kinds of things, which really did
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: change culture all over the United States. I mean, young
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: kids put on their disco shoes, and people opened disco
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: techts all over the country, and everybody is you know,
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: you make me feel like dancing. It was, you know,
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: that was really going on.
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: Did you see a lot of the SNL cast members there,
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: the original Saturday Night Live cast?
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: Don't really remember seeing them they I know that they
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: did go there.
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: And to see him around the city, I mean they
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: must have been around.
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: I you know, I don't That's funny. I don't really
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: remember bumping into scause. I know that John Belushi went
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: there and dan Aykroyd went there, but I guess not
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: on the nights that I went there, I just didn't
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: notice them or whatever. There was always people, I mean,
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: the one thing that was very cool about Sebe's was
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: that there was absolutely zero rock star pretension stuff going on,
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: you know what I mean. It was like you could
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: approach anybody. I mean the first time that I met
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: Deborah Harry, I had seen her play a week or
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: two before. There this was like right at the very beginning,
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: and that I walked in one night to see somebody
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: else and she was sitting at a table by herself,
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: and I just walked over to her and said, hey,
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: you know, I saw you play the other night, and
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: I know that you're friends with Steven, and I think
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: that you're friends with my friend Paul. Oh right, you're Gabriel.
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: And it was just, you know, there was just this
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: It was just like that. There was no like why
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: are you talking to me? I'm a rock star kind
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: of person. And it really did stay that way even
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: after people became famous. The other fun thing about Sebe's,
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: by the way, was that Hilly had a policy where
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: you could go outside and come back in. It wasn't
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: like you went in, you paid your money, and then
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: you're in and if you come out, you're out. So
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: there was a huge scene on the sidewalk. The scene
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: on the sidewalk was just as important as the scene
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: kid that was going on inside, and of course it
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: was in a weird way. Even though you were on
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: the Bowery, it was kind of nicer on the sidewalk
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: because Seb's just so it was like smoke filled, it
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: kind of staked. They never cleaned the play It was
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: like really a mess in there, whereas in the sidewalk
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: at least you're breathing what passes for fresh right City.
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: And when you see pictures even today, if you just
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: go on Wine and just type in CBGB images and stuff,
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: a lot of the images will be from the sidewalk
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: outside and you will see Joey Ramone talking to Alex Chilton,
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: and you'll see you know, Tom Verlane with his armor on,
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: Patty Smith, and there are just groups of people all
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: just hanging out, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and outside. And
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: so it was. It was that and no pretension and
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: no bull at all.
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I heard all the bands would help each other.
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: There was no competition or envy anything like that.
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: Bands not only helped each other, they use each other's
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: equipment and people would set up instead of having to
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: have four sound checks. If you knew the because Hilly
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: was so devoted to new music that once it got going,
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: he began having three and sometimes four bands a night
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: because he was trying to give everybody a chance. And
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: it's one of the reasons why this scene just stated
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: that way. Because he was giving people a chance, and
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: you knew the other three bands that were playing, you
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: would say, hey, can we just set up, we'll do
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: our sound check and then you can just use our
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: equipment instead of you having to lug everything off and
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: move everything back on again between each set, and people
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: just share their equipment, and they shared their girlfriends, and
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: they shared their boyfriends, and the drugs and they shared
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: their cigarettes, and they shared everything. It was a very
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: communal kind of scene.
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: And sadly today it's a clothing store, right.
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: It is John Vervados's clothing store, and it is sad.
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: I mean, it got put out of business by gentrification.
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: It used to be that there was a flop house,
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: if you will. I don't know what the right term
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: for that is. But these missions would open these places
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: for the Bowery bums where there would be like dormitory
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: beds and you could rent a bed for twenty five
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: cents a night and then in the morning they kick
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: you out and you went out and you drank on
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: the street. You drank your thunderbird or your ripple out
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: of a paper bag, and then at night you paid
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: you twenty five cents and you went back in. And
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: upstairs from seas was one of those places. It was
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: called the Palace Hotel, but it was a flap pouse.
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: And eventually it was sold by whatever mission ran it
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: to some real estate person and they jacked up Philly's
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: rent to a level that he could not afford, and
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: it was put out of business in two thousand and
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: three or something like that.
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: It was two thousand and six when I'm looking online.
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: Surprising it lasted that long.
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it was still going strong right to the end.
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: It was still going strong right to the end. But
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: John Varbados opened it as a clothing store. He has
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: a very super high end clothing store. I mean everything
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: is I mean a T shirt is two hundred dollars
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: in there, and then everything is up from there. But
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: I have to say this for John Varbados, he is
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: well aware that he is in a sacred space, and
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: so he had a new awning built that says John Varvedos,
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: that's exactly in the shape of the old CBGB's owning,
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: and when you walk in it looks like kind of
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: like CBGB's. There is actually a stage in the back
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: with a drum kit and some amps on it, roughly
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: where the original stage of CBGB's used to be. And
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: he pays homage to the fact that he is basically
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: camping out in this sacred space, and that's a lot nicer.
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: I mean, the other great club of that era was
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: Max's Kansas City, which was on seventeenth Street and Park
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: Avenue South. That was also a sacred space that goes
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: back even further than Seb's because Max's was where the
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: Warhol scene hung out in the back room of Max's
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: starting in nineteen sixty five with Baby Jane Holtzer and
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: Hollywoodlawn and Lou Reed and all those people, all the
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: people that lose things about and walk on the wild Side.
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: Where the people hanging out in the back room of
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: Max's in the sixties, and then it had a second
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: life in the seventies as the main competition to CBGB.
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: So I consider that to be just as sacred space
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: as CEB's, and that has been turned into one of
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: those giant Korean delis, And you know, it's like You
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: can buy sandwiches there, you can buy anything. They're hot
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: plates all over the place, and it's like Neon Lit.
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: I think it's open twenty four hours a day. And
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: when you walk in there, trying to close your eyes
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: and imagine that this is where we played. I mean
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: I played there on New Year's Eve of nineteen eighty.
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: That was one of the two best gigs that you
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: could get. You know, in the year. New Year's Eve
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: is the best night to play, and CBS and Max's
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: were the two best places to play. And I had
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: that gig. What was the name of your band? That
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: was Brenda in the Real Tones, This great singer Brenda
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: Bergman and Brenda the Real Tones. And I go in
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: there sometimes when I'm in the city, I'll walk in
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: the deli to buy a bag of potato chips or whatever,
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: just to go in there and just sort of kind
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: of close your eyes and feel that you're in that space.
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: And you can't really feel that you're just in this
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: giant Neon Lit delicatessen, whereas its Cbe's with John Arvados's
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: Golden Company, you do feel that you're in CBGBs. So
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: it's kind of nice that he did that.
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: The Book Down Rock podcast is part of the Boneless
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: Podcasting Network. If you're a fan of classic rock and
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: classic film like I am, go to Boneless dot lovable
• 50:15
  Speaker 2: dot app to find over twenty great shows there. That's
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: Boneless dot Lovable dot app. Or just go to book
• 50:21
  Speaker 2: down Rock dot com the Boneless Podcasting Network. It is
• 50:25
  Speaker 2: what you want it to be. Listen with confidence. One
• 50:30
  Speaker 2: last question for it and you get somewhat philosophical here, Okay,
• 50:34
  Speaker 2: is the CBGB conspiracy ultimately a murder mystery or a
• 50:38
  Speaker 2: story about a moment in time that was destined to end?
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: I think that it is a moment in time that
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: was destined to end. I mean I thought of it
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: as a murder mystery. That's what I wrote it as.
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: And then when I got an agent and it started
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: going out to publishers, everyone said, well, this is a
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: historical novel. It's a historical novel. It's comparable to something
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: like The Alienist by Caleb car or rag Time by E. L. Doctro,
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: where you take a particular period in time and you
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: add in the real characters, you know, President Theodore Roosevelt
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: or you know whatever that we're around at that time,
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: and you make them characters in your book. So it
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: is considered to be a historical, you know, historical novel,
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: and I didn't think of that. I was surprised when
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: people said that. For one thing. I was surprised to
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: be like, well, this is my can't be history. It's
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: my life. What are you talking about. I'm not that old,
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: you know. They're like, oh no, yes, you are. Fifty
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: years ago is definitely history, you know, so for sure
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: it is. So that's what it is. But for me,
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: it's it's a coming of age story. It is a
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: murder mystery. It is a story about how people can
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: overcome whatever bad stuff is put in their way. It's
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: a story about rock and roll and the genesis of
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: rock and roll, and it is it's a love story.
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: It's a lot of things, but ultimately it's a historical
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: novel set in that era.
• 52:06
  Speaker 2: Well not if when it gets turned into a film.
• 52:09
  Speaker 2: I want you to come back on I.
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: Will be glad.
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: The CBGB Conspiracy it's out now and it's wherever books
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: are sold. Look forward at your nearest bookstore. Go to
• 52:20
  Speaker 2: bookdown rock dot com to find your nearest independent bookstore
• 52:22
  Speaker 2: and see if they have a copy there if they
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: don't tell them to get one. Where could people find
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: you online, Gabriel.
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: I am on Facebook. I'm not a big social media person.
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: I also have a website Gabriel rotello dot com where
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: I have things about the CBGB conspiracy. So that's probably
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: the best place.
• 52:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, people can contact you to the website.
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: And they can contact me. My contact information is on
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: the website.
• 52:41
  Speaker 2: Perfect. Yep, Gabriel Rotella, thank you so much. This is
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: a fascinating discussion about an era. I wish I could
• 52:48
  Speaker 2: say I lived through but I was not old enough.
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: But I so many people wish they hadn't. You lived
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: through it, so thank you so much for sharing your
• 52:56
  Speaker 2: story and for writing such a fantastic book.
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: Eric, thank you so much, and thanks for the podcast.
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: It's a really true I think that's it. It's in
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: the books.