New York Rocker

By 1970, the hippie dream of the 60s was dead -- the soundtrack to the revolution had become a multimillion-dollar industry. But four years later, emerging from the rubble of rock, was a music whose hard edge matched the lifestyle of its home turf -- New York's East Village. Punk's initiators -- Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, and Patti Smith -- had one foot in 19"th"-century French symbolist poetry and the other in the raw sound of predecessors like the Velvet Underground. Now, in New York Rocker, Gary Valentine offers an inside account of this little-documented era. He talks about the luminaries -- like Debbie Harry, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Devo, and the New York Dolls -- and the gigs at CBGBs hitting the news as Warhol and his glittering crew descended. What began as a unique blend of fin-de-siecle ennui and edgy rock, exploded worldwide into an anarchic frenzy of safety pins and gutter decadence, then plunged into excess and eventual ruin -- with its survivors making a leap into the mainstream.