New York Rocker - Gary Valentine

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Résumé :
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 19th-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.

Biographie:
Gary Lachman, as Gary Valentine, was a founding member of Blondie, the revolutionary band inducted into Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, and he wrote the group's early hits. His books include A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult, Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Acquarius, and A Secret History of Consciousness. He lives in London.