Category Archives: East Village

THE BACK OF MIDDLE AGE by Peter Nolan Smith

Three years ago my friend George Wrage celebrated his 50th Birthday. I’ve known him since 1978. We worked together at Hurrah. I was the doorman and he was the ticket taker. We came up with the scam of reselling tickets for sell-outs. It was a good gig until another doorman snitched us out after we […]

Whence Comes the Storm

In 1978 I lived on East 10th Street with my girlfriend, a hillbilly from West Virginia. The bedroom of our 3rd floor apartment was situated on the airshaft. An actor friend lived on the 5th floor. Every night the building shivered with the screams of a woman in orgasm. This cascade of cries of ‘oh […]

STELARC- E11th and Ave. B NYC 1985

For the last two weeks I’ve been working at a high-level metal shop in Greenpoint with a friend from the East Village. Tim has been kind enough to employ me, even though I’m a threat to life and limb in a heavy machinery environment. Today was the final stage of my stint at Studio 40, […]

Pee On My Guitar

My younger brother Padraic send this photo accompanied by the following report from April 2012. “Someone at Billboard Brasil magazine has had the genius-slash-insane-slash-disgusting idea to experiment with alternative ways to play the guitar. A working guitar and amp has been installed in a urinal in the men’s bathroom at Bar Aurora in Sao Paolo […]

Damita of CBGBs

CBGBs was the la Scala of the East Village during the 1970s. Debby Harry was our Maria Callas, but not all the action was on stage. The lives of the musicians and regulars intertwined for minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. None of pretended that we were family, but I regard my friends and […]