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Back from NYC: A Rock and Roll Tour
An iconic wall of stickers and fliers, preserved under glass at what used to be CBGB's.
Remind me never to go back to New York City in the dead of summer: walking along the city's sidewalks as the sun sizzled temperatures to near 97 was just as hellish as any August day in our hometown of Houston. But it wasn't just the heat that reminded us of Texas – it seemed everywhere you turned, there was music in the big city.
The summertime is perfect for live music in New York, and there are plenty of "canned" live music events to satisfy any tourist, including but not limited to the Friday-morning TV-ready "concerts" staged for the network morning news shows. We didn't do those anyway – we had our hands full with all the other things going on.
New York City is of course a cradle of rock and roll history. You can go to about 100 places that have some significance in music history, from the Brill Building to the Iridium Club (where Les Paul used to play live on a weekly basis) to the Strawberry Fields-John Lennon memorial in Central Park (along with the adjacent Dakota apartment building).
Hard Rock Cafe exhibit is a reminder of our great recent loss.
We got the tourist stuff out of the way first, heading to the big Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square which is an attraction not for its food but for its rich store of rock memorabilia. No shortage of Beatles stuff here – from the actual doors from the Abbey Road studios, to early Beatles matching stage costumes, to beautiful album art covers autographed by all four Beatles, it's a Fab Four mother lode.
We were lucky enough to sit right under a Bruce Springsteen exhibit with a Boss guitar, a Little Steven guitar and a Clarence Clemons saxophone. We paid tribute once more to the Big Man – a great, great artist. Did you know that the Hard Rock is located in what used to be NYC's Paramount Theatre, where rock and roll pioneer Alan Freed staged some of his seminal shows back in the day? It's also the place where Elvis' first movie Love Me Tender had its world premiere in 1956.
We also walked into Greenwich Village, and in Washington Square park there were at least seven bands playing for tips along the sidewalks. Soon we were on Bleeker headed for the former location of CBGBs on Bowery St. The seminal punk club closed in 2006, and virtually overnight the owners uprooted just about anything that wasn't nailed down for a possible rebirth of the club someplace else.
I'd never been in the neighborhood before, it didn't seem the kind of place that hordes of mohawked and safety-pin-pierced punks would frequent, but I understand many things have changed since 1977. Right now the old CBGBs is an upscale fashion boutique ($800 for a leather jacket, and not a cool one at that!) and pretty much the only concession to history are some patches of wall that still sport hundreds of stickers and fliers from the punk daze, protected under a clear glass window.
Pretty much everywhere you turn in Greenwich Village, you see written on the subway walls and tenement halls two words of graffiti: "Lou Reed." In one three-block stroll on the way to the former CBGBs, I think I must have seen that name scrawled at least 100 times. I surmised that the graffiti had been created by Lou himself, after some sort of guerilla-marketing brainstorm (or a six pack). No matter – Lou Reed is perhaps the No. 1 rocker that comes to mind when I think of New York City.
Like I said: it's written everywhere in Greenwich Village.
Lou is also the unofficial King of Coney Island (King Neptune), and the next day we found ourselves on the D train headed for Brooklyn and Coney Island. There was a free concert on Coney Island the night before, with San Antonio's Girl In A Coma and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts headlining, but nobody wanted to ride the subway back late at night. So we arrived on the Boardwalk right about high noon, and there were smells of suntan lotion, hot dogs and cologne everywhere. I looked around for Lou, but no luck; I did, however, catch a few bars of "Coney Island Baby" emanating from Cha-Cha's Bar & Cafe.
Later that night, back in Manhattan, we cleaned up and attended "Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark" on Broadway. Although Bono and the Edge were rumored to be in town for an appearance on David Letterman, they were no-shows at the play. We particularly enjoyed one scene, where Peter Parker and Mary Jane dance in a club to U2's "Vertigo." It is the best song in the show.
Then, finally, the next night we headed for the Bronx to see some guy sing Beatles songs in Yankee Stadium. You can read all about that below; even the part about the guest walk-on by Billy Joel, who Paul McCartney called "a friend of New York." I would have to agree with that – mostly. Nobody asked me, but if you want Mr. Rock and Roll New York, go down to Greenwich Village and read the graffiti.
MP3: "Coney Island Baby" (live) by Lou Reed
This entry was posted on July 24, 2011 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Rock Rant with tags Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Clarence Clemons, Girl In A Coma, Joan Jett, Lou Reed, New York City, Paul McCartney, The Beatles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.