Punk Avenue Read online

  HIGH PRAISE FOR

  BY PHIL MARCADE

  MARCADE’S GREAT SENSE FOR STORYTELLING, as well as his knack for being in the right place at the right time, make this a must-read for those interested in the history of punk.

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  A MUSICIAN’S MEMOIR OF PUNK ROCK in its New York City heyday shows how much fun it was while it lasted, before AIDS and heroin had the last laugh… A must-read for those who love that era and want a fresh perspective on it.

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  IT WAS HARD TO PUT THIS BOOK DOWN. A fun and dishy read! … Gives us the real 411 about both CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City and the drug scene that was happening.

  —PUNK GLOBE

  A FAST, FUN READ THAT FILLS IN historical gaps and establishes Phil Marcade as more than a character lurking in the shadows. Fans of CBGB and American punk will dig it.

  — RAZORCAKE

  MARCADE DETAILS A LIFE CONSUMED with rock & roll, and his arrival in New York from France at a time when The New York Dolls were new and igniting the wave of bands that tried to follow in their footprints.

  — GOOD TIMES

  GET IT! It’s great!

  —VICE

  A COMPELLING ACCOUNT OF LIFE as an artistic Parisian in Downtown New York, back in the good/bad ol’ days of sex and drugs and rock n roll. In a subculture of anti-fashion and nihilism, Marcade stood out with an urbane, sophisticated sound and style deeply rooted in R&B musicology—that makes sense now more than ever. Vive La Revolution!

  — STEVEN BLUSH, AUTHOR/FILMMAKER, NEW YORK ROCK, AMERICAN HARDCORE

  AN INCREDIBLE INSIDER’S JOURNEY through New York’s 1970s underground music scene. … From the hallways of the Chelsea Hotel to psychedelic barges on the canals of Amsterdam, from wild cross-country tours with his band The Senders to backstage antics at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, to the notoriously deadly dope houses of the Lower East Side, he experienced it all … and lived to tell. … A must-read for anyone interested in a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the nascent Manhattan punk scene … or American rock ‘n’ roll history.

  — PLEASANT GEHMAN, AUTHOR, SHOWGIRL CONFIDENTIAL

  JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU LED a fascinating, fun, wild, scary life, along comes this maniac. I’m amazed Phil’s still here. But thankful he managed to make it back with these untoppable tales from the inside of the inside—of his pals Johnny Thunders, Joe Strummer, Debbie Harry, Dee Dee Ramone, of Max’s, CBs and the long-ago Lower East Side, all told in a matter-of-fact style that only makes them more incredible. A definitive dispatch from the trenches (and gutters) of New York punk.

  — ROBERT DUNCAN, MANAGING EDITOR, CREEM; AUTHOR, THE NOISE

  A RIVETING ACCOUNT OF DESPERATE DAYS and high-octane nights that vividly recall the gritty glamour of New York in the 1980s, that penniless yet golden age of sex not sexting, drugs not hugs, and pure, unadulterated rock and roll. Written in blood by somebody who was there, in the combat zone, loving every manic minute.

  — MAX BLAGG, POET

  ONE OF THE GREATEST VIEWS OF NYC’S golden age you will ever find … from the leader of one of the greatest unheralded bands ever—The Senders. We see rockers, junkies, punks, dealers, poets, street characters stripped of their myth and experienced as they really were. Marcade’s book is historically important, invaluable in fact, but it’s also a fun, fast, nasty read.

  — JAMES “THE HOUND” MARSHALL, BAR OWNER, RADIO PERSONALITY, COLLECTOR, HISTORIAN, NEW YORKER

  PHIL’S MEMOIR OF NYC in the 70s is almost as much fun as being there.

  — PETER CROWLEY, MANAGER/BOOKING AGENT, MAX’S KANSAS CITY

  FEELS LIKE HAVING A CHAT with an old friend, remembering and laughing over those crazy, glorious times.

  — IDA S. LANGSAM, RAMONES’ PUBLICIST

  Punk Avenue: Inside the New York City Underground 1972–1982

  by Phil Marcade

  © 2017 by Phil Marcade

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. For permissions, please write to address below or email [email protected]. Any members of education institutions wishing to photocopy or electronically reproduce part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to: Three Rooms Press, 561 Hudson Street, #33, New York, NY 10014.

  This is a work of creative nonfiction. The events are portrayed to the best of author Phil Marcade’s memory. Some parts of this book, including dialog, characters and their characteristics, locations and time, may not be entirely factual.

  ISBN 978-1-941110-49-2 (trade paperback)

  ISBN 978 -1-941110-50-8 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955388

  Originally published in French as Au delà de l’avenue D by Philipe Marcadé (Scali, August, 2007, 978-2350121765; Camion Blanc, November 2009, 978-2357790490). Translated by the author.

  COVER AND BOOK DESIGN:

  KG Design International: www.katgeorges.com

  FRONT COVER PHOTO:

  “Steve Shevlin, Johnny Thunders, and Phil Marcade, 1979”

  © Photo by Marcia Resnick: www.marciaresnick.com

  PHOTO, PAGE 118

  “Phil Marcade and Stiv Bators at CBGB, June 1978”

  © Photo by Eileen Polk

  DISTRIBUTED BY:

  Publishers Group West: www.pgw.com

  Three Rooms Press

  561 Hudson Street, #33,

  New York, NY 10014

  threeroomspress.com

  [email protected]

  For Pierre

  A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between, does what he wants to do.

  —Bob Dylan

  All my friends are dead, or else they’re not feeling too good.

  —Tom Waits

  PREFACE

  Why were the seventies so important and interesting? Probably because nobody cared. There wasn’t much money involved, there was no Internet, New York City was no man’s land, and the terrorists were blowing up things all over Europe. Meanwhile, we were trying to play music that very few people were interested in hearing, so much the better. By the time the labels got interested, the best part was over.

  Chris and I met Philippe in New York at CBGB’s. He was the prettiest thing and his French accent was so intense I was embarrassed to ask him to repeat things because I couldn’t understand him. He played and sang and looked great on stage.

  We finally had a show together booked in a small theater on Eighth Avenue, which is now dedicated to dance shows. We asked him to translate “Denis” for me to sing the song in French, not knowing the full history of the Sylvie Vartan version. On that same day, there was a truly ridiculous scene created by a madman we once had for a manager and the owner of the theater. They were acting more punk than any of us and came to blows outside in front of the theater.

  So Philippe and I never got to play that show together, but we got a really sweet translation of “Denis Denis.”

  —Debbie Harry

  FOREWORD

  If I ever was going to direct a movie of Please Kill Me, the book Gillian McCain and I did, I would put Philippe Marcade in the background of every scene, giggling with some exotic French beauty—just like in real life.

  Philippe Marcade, while not a household name, was friends with everyone at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, and a bona fide member, in good-standing—of the N
ew York Punk Rock Scene. Of course, there were only about two hundred in the beginning. John Holmstrom and I were relative latecomers on the scene, when we launched Punk magazine, and Philippe was already hanging out with the cool kids—Johnny Thunders, Richard Hell, and Dee Dee Ramone. And later, Stiv Bators, Sid Vicious, and Nancy Spungen.

  I can’t really speak to Philippe’s musical abilities—despite what you might have read, I’m not a rock critic. I’m a pop culture historian, but I know what I like—and The Senders were great. Beyond that, I don’t know anything about them. I can’t tell you who was in the band, because Philippe was the only one I ever watched. He was a star, back in the day when that word meant something. Of course, nowadays, everyone is a star, so the word has lost all meaning. I’m using the original meaning of the word “star,” when it meant fascinating, brilliant, and gorgeous.

  Philippe was one of those guys my eyes went to—in a room full of stars: Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and Joey Ramone. He was always at the right table or the perfect backstage scene, saying the right stuff with that thick French accent.

  Don’t get me wrong, like most Americans, I hate the French, but if everyone in France was like Philippe Marcade, I would move there tomorrow.

  You see, Philippe Marcade was cool, when that word meant that you wanted to be sitting at his table, laughing along with all the cool people to Philippe’s latest joke.

  He was always dressed right, had the right words, the best hair, and like I said—the best skinny, top-shelf French model hanging on to his arm.

  When Gillian and I wrote Please Kill Me, it was our hope that it would inspire kids around the world to document and record their own twisted lives. I know now that we have succeeded, because if we could inspire a deadbeat like Philippe to write a book, we can do anything!

  Seriously.

  When I started assembling the list of people to interview for Please Kill Me, Philppe was at the top of the list, just because I wanted to know what was going through his head during the punk days.

  I was probably thinking, “Is Philippe really that cool?”

  The answer, of course, is yes—otherwise you wouldn’t even be reading this, moron.

  His interview was even better than I expected. Philippe was just so damn funny. Philippe is one of the reasons doing the book was so much fun. It’s so great to sit down and ask someone I’ve known—since I was eighteen years old—what they were thinking and what they remember, twenty years after the fact.

  More people should do it, because it’s very therapeutic.

  I think it’s also important to tell people what you think of them before they shuffle off this mortal coil. Thank God I got tell Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny Ramone what I thought of them before they all died.

  Interviewing people I’ve known for so long is great, because I usually find out that they were even more special than I thought.

  One last note: if anyone out there is ever thinking about doing an oral history, and you want to make it good and funny, you need to talk to funny people. The reason so many people like Please Kill Me is because of all those lesser-known names like Jeff Mangum, Bob Quine, and Philippe Marcade, who were mainstays on the scene—and so hysterically funny in real life.

  Funny is more important than one might think and gets us all through the day.

  Philippe also paid me the greatest compliment when I ran into him a couple of weeks after we did the interview.

  Philippe told me that after talking about punk for a few hours, he appropriated that talk in his everyday life, which led to him telling his boss, “Fuck off!”

  And his girlfriend.

  And his bandmates.

  And his mother, for all I know.

  What was even better, is that Philippe was laughing hysterically when he told me.

  Yeah, I know, cool.

  —Legs McNeil

  Contents

  Happy Birthday to You

  Going Mobile

  I Love That Dirty Water

  Venus of Avenue D

  Boogie Chillen

  My Gal is Red Hot

  Return to Sender

  Chinese Rocks

  Run, Run, Run

  Phil, 1972

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU

  Phoenix, November 1972

  FOR MY EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY, I WAS transferred from the juvenile detention center in Phoenix, Arizona, to the federal penitentiary in Florence, Arizona.

  In the car, handcuffs on my wrists, I asked the cop behind the wheel how long I was going to have to stay in that jail.

  “That’s gonna be for the judge to tell you, kid, but you can bet your ass it’ll be at least five years,” he said, laughing.

  Five years in jail. It was with that in mind that I walked into the prison’s main building, where I was told to strip before being searched butt naked, then sprayed from head to toe with lice killer. Pointing out that I didn’t have lice didn’t turn out to be such a good idea.

  “From now on you only speak when a guard asks you something,” that fat sweaty pig told me before spraying me right in the face with his fucking powder.

  “From now on your name is 419031 and you better remember it if you’re called,” said the other creep at the counter where I got my uniform: jeans, a pair of white socks, white underwear, white sneakers, and a gray T-shirt with my new name, 419031, printed across the back.

  Then, escorted by two armed guards, I had to walk down this long corridor in front of all the cells where my new neighbors, most of them heavily tattooed Mexican murderers, were held. I only got a few steps down that hellish hallway before they all started screaming, “She’s mine!” “Hey, bitch, you my new whore?” and other such warm greetings.

  Though I’d turned eighteen that very day, I looked more like fifteen. I wasn’t shaving yet, had hair down to the middle of my back, and my face was covered with white lice-killer powder. They liked me.

  I’m dead meat, I told myself, trying to keep my fear from showing too much. Fortunately, I got locked up some distance from those friendly fellows, in a large dormitory with about thirty losers who weren’t quite as dangerous. That’s where they kept guys who hadn’t been sentenced yet, which meant they were all on their best behavior, hoping to improve their fates.

  The non-sentenced block. Thank God!

  As soon as the huge automatic metal door shut behind me, I heard a familiar voice call me by my old name:

  “Philippe?”

  It was Bruce, my traveling companion. We’d been busted together a week earlier.

  “Bruce! It’s so great to see you,” I shouted out, at the last second holding myself back from taking him into my arms. Maybe this wasn’t quite the right time. …

  I had met Bruce eight months earlier in Holland, where I was hanging out instead of attending my drawing classes at the Academie Des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where I grew up.

  Bruce, an American of Italian descent, always wore white shirts with the collar buttoned up all neat. He was six years older than me, had very long hair, and had already graduated from Boston University where—thanks to his grades, popularity, and unbeatable stamina—he’d been elected Student Body President, a title usually reserved for future prominent lawyers, judges, or presidents of the United States.

  He had just finished crossing Europe on a motorcycle with a head full of dreams and a back pocket full of acid, when I met him, under the pouring rain, on the steps of the Paradiso in Amsterdam. He turned me onto one of his little pills, some Orange Sunshine, and we spent the following weeks watching raindrops exploding into rainbows on the pavement of the old port, listening to After the Gold Rush. Bruce lived with a Dutch girl named Marion, though he spent most of his time fucking a German girl named Astrid.

  He came back to Paris with me. I put him up in my room where we spent most of our evenings smoking hash, listening to records, dreaming
of adventures, and eating the hundreds of strawberries and cherries that we stole, by the crate-load, from the sidewalks in front of the neighborhood grocery stores at five in the morning, stoned out of our minds.

  You could never be bored with Bruce. He was completely unpredictable.

  One day, for example, we were peacefully walking down the Boulevard Montparnasse when he suddenly walked into a beauty parlor, snatched a blond wig from the head of a mannequin in the window, and came right back out laughing his ass off and with the huge barber chasing after him. Fortunately, we were faster than he was, and he gave up on us after a few blocks, completely out of breath. The wig ended up on a skull we stole from the catacombs at Denfert-Rochereau.

  We were tripping on acid almost every night in Paris—like the time we went to see T. Rex and ended up in the meatpacking district at Les Halles at 5 a.m. With our getups, we were not well received. It started with one over-excited butcher throwing a piece of meat at the back of my head and it got worse from there. We had to run like hell as about fifty of them started bombarding us with chunks of meat. It was flying in all directions and was terrifying—especially on acid. Suddenly escaped from that hell, we decided to step into Notre Dame. It was still early in the morning and the cathedral was completely empty. Bruce must have thought he was the Pope, because he decided to go sit in the huge throne on the main center stage. This must have been strictly forbidden, as we were run out of there too—this time by an old priest, mad as hell. But at least he wasn’t throwing chunks of meat at us.