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By Root 860 0

who wore his leather vest over a wide-load body that spurned bathwater and soaping those hard-to-reach places as intrusions of civilization. You could smell him coming and you could smell him going, his pungency notable even in this tramp steamer: he had reached the stage when only a fire hose on full blast would help. “Do you think he knows how bad he smells?” one regular asked, to which another dryly replied, “I dunno, you could always go ask him.” Which of course would have resulted in a horizontal ride to the emergency room. The Angels were not to be trifled with, theirs was not a sporting manner. One of the scariest early moments I had in New York was when I was sharing a crosstown taxi with a former teacher of mine from Edgewood High who had temporarily moved to Manhattan to do graduate work at New York University’s theater department. The cab stopped mid-block in the East Village at a red light. “Jesus, look at that fat slob,” my teacher said. It was a hot summer evening, the cab windows were rolled down, voices carried, and the fat slob in question resting on his gut was a Hells Angel squatting on the steps of the Angels’ clubhouse on East Third Street, the same clubhouse where a woman had been thrown to her death from the rooftop by one of the members. It was unclear whether the Angel on the steps had caught the exact phrasing of the exclamation from my teacher, but his head turned in our direction and his eyes twitched, the shift of his buttocks indicating he was about to rise to his feet. The light was still red, two or three cars were in front of us, and then it turned blessedly green, the cabdriver easing forward so that it wouldn’t seem he was hurrying guiltily away. “Sorry,” my former teacher said, his voice overlapping with the driver’s saying, “Man, don’t ever do anything like that again.”

If nothing else, the seventies in New York taught me situational awareness, a vital attribute for every slow-moving mammal prone to daydreaming. Like so many who came to see Patti, I would sometimes glide backward to the street when the opening band began tormenting their guitars after tuning up on each other’s nerves for five or ten minutes. It wasn’t like cooling your heels out on the piazza. Bottles would be dropped from the Palace Hotel men’s shelter above CBGB’s, their green and clear glass smashing on the sidewalk, some of them exploding with pee, the contents recycled from the beer or Thunderbird that the bottles formerly contained. It wasn’t a nightly occurrence, but it happened often enough to keep you limber. Scraggly panhandlers who didn’t bother to work up an inventive line of patter to go with their outstretched palms would pester anyone stationary, even though CBGB’s customers themselves were the very portrait of slim pickings and linty pockets. Abuse was shouted from passing cars, on general principle, not for anything in particular, and the occasional curiosity-seeker or casual-date couple would serenade by, open the front door for a peek, and get a faceful of inchoate racket blasting from the stage—all the deterrence they needed to keep moving to find a different lovebird destination, assuming they weren’t eaten by cannibals before they got to Canal Street.

One night after Patti finished her first set, she stopped to say hi at the bar and leaned in with a pointed suggestion: “James”—she always called me “James”—“you should stick around for these guys. They’re really amazing, you’ve got to see them up close.”

It wasn’t too much to ask, given that it was said to be two of the members of Television, Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine, who had convinced Hilly Kristal to book them there on otherwise empty Sunday nights, a band that hardly conformed to Hilly’s original concept as musical host, the full initialed name of the club being CBGB & OMFUG: “Country Bluegrass Blues & Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers,” a mirthful mouthful. Inside and out, CBGB’s looked like a hick joint, a misplaced honky-tonk, an impression fortified by Hilly’s flannel shirts. So, in retrospect, Television’s guitar duo were the