The CBGB Conspiracy! -With Gabriel Rotello

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the New Yorkers, a podcast by New York City Cop. I'm your host, Kelly Kop, publish photographer, New York City tour business owner, content creator, podcaster, and above all else, a New Yorker. Ladies and gentlemen, the next Brooklyn found train in Valhalla. Stand clear of the closing doors, please. [00:00:36] Speaker B: This is. Transferring the gentleman to the shuttle to Grand Central. [00:00:54] Speaker A: With me today, everybody, I have writer Gabriel Rotello. He is the author of two books, Sexual Ecology, AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men and the CBGB Conspiracy. He became the first openly gay op ed columnist for a major American newspaper, is the founder of Out Week magazine. He has also written, directed and produced dozens of TV documentaries for major networks like hbo, Netflix and the History Channel. But above all else, Gabriel is a New Yorker. I love what you've done. You've done so much and I can't wait for all of us to talk about it right now, my friend. But above all else, you know, Gabriel is a New Yorker. Welcome to the show, my friend. How are you today? [00:01:34] Speaker B: I am fine, Kelly. [00:01:35] Speaker A: How are you? I'm great, you know, you know, I mentioned to you earlier when we, when we talked to, you know, that initial conversation that we have, and I learned about everything that you do and did. I mean, I was like, he is a New Yorker. We have to talk to him and everybody has to hear what you have to say. So thank you for being on the show. [00:01:56] Speaker B: Well, thanks for having me. [00:01:57] Speaker A: So, so tell us about you. You know, from the very beginning. Were you born in New York City? Where did you grow up? Give us a little background on about yourself. [00:02:05] Speaker B: I grew up in Danbury, Connecticut, which is 60 miles from New York. So I began coming into New York at an early age. My parents had a rule that you couldn't come into the city by yourself until you were 15 years old. But my brother was two years older than me, so he could take me so, so I could start coming in when I was 13 and I just absolutely loved it. I would just start to get glowing and tingling on the train. [00:02:29] Speaker A: Do you remember your first time in New York, York City? [00:02:32] Speaker B: I, you know, I think the first time in New York City, I was, I was like 5 or 4, and my parents took us to the top of the Empire State Building. And I remember being so excited we're going to go to New York City. But I, I was young. [00:02:44] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:02:45] Speaker B: Really get it. But by the time I was getting to be 11, 12, 13, I was sort of figuring things out and New York was just so exciting. I mean, coming in from Connecticut, you go through the Bronx. It's not looking that great. I didn't care. [00:03:00] Speaker A: Did you drive or that? Was it the train? You said a train. No, you said that. Yeah. [00:03:04] Speaker B: And do you have a car? I beg your pardon? [00:03:06] Speaker A: Do you have a car now? [00:03:07] Speaker B: I do have a car now. [00:03:08] Speaker A: Oh, wow, that's a big deal. Okay, but go ahead. For a New Yorker. But go ahead. And. [00:03:13] Speaker B: And then. And I realized that I was gay and I was not going to be possible. This was like the 60s to be gay in a little town in Connecticut, whereas New York City had this burgeoning gay world going on. So I always sort of knew that I was going to move to New York, and then I wanted to become a rock musician as a keyboard player. And New York was one of the key places to do that as well. So when I graduated from college in 74, the very first thing that I did was move to New York City, which was a fantastic time to move to New York city for a 20, 21 year old, because you could get an apartment for a hundred dollars a month and it was a wide open town, you know. [00:03:59] Speaker A: When did you realize you were gay? Like, what age? [00:04:02] Speaker B: Like 11, 12, something like that, you [00:04:04] Speaker A: know, he's like, I'm gay, man. [00:04:06] Speaker B: That's it. [00:04:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Pretty simple. And how were your. How's your family? Everybody's good with it? [00:04:11] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I mean, no, they weren't that. Because I didn't tell anybody then. I mean, I didn't. You. In those days, you didn't come out. We were just talking about this the other day with somebody that when I got to New York in 74 and immediately connected with the gay community and started sort of having a gay life, as it were. [00:04:27] Speaker A: Right. [00:04:28] Speaker B: I immediately began asking my friends, okay, so how do I come out to my parents? [00:04:32] Speaker A: Right? [00:04:33] Speaker B: And everyone said, oh, don't do that. Why would you do that? That's crazy. And I was like, what do you mean? They were like, oh, you can't tell your family. I mean, that's. That's for. Why do they even need to know you're good here? So it was just a different world and a different attitude, a different time. Stonewall had only happened a few years before. [00:04:51] Speaker A: So this is what you're talking about basically for 74. [00:04:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So. And I think that a lot of people, when they did come out in those days, got disowned by their families immediately. And, you know, so people were just like, if things are good here in New York or in San Francisco or Wherever you have. [00:05:05] Speaker A: Right. [00:05:06] Speaker B: Why rock the boat? So I ignored that advice and did come out. Oh, wow. Family was absolutely fine with it, but it was just. It was a very different world. But as far as what New York was like in 1974 and 5 and 6 and 7. Yeah, it was on the skids. It was. Had really collapsed. You know, the whole manufacturing sector had collapsed. Small manufacturing in New York. The factories had all moved out of the city. Crime was just exploding. The city's budget had collapsed. The city was going bankrupt. Remember Ford to city, drop dead. When the city tried to get the federal government to bail them out and President Ford said no. And so the city was going bankrupt. They were laying off cops, they were laying off firemen, garbage piling up in the streets. So it was an absolute mess. And everybody, the middle class, was basically fleeing the city. I think the city lost something like a million people in population. [00:06:02] Speaker A: Wow. [00:06:03] Speaker B: In the 60s and into the 70s. [00:06:06] Speaker A: I didn't know this. [00:06:07] Speaker B: It got even worse in the 70s. So what. But what that meant was amidst all the crime and the garbage and the noise and the squalor was that if you were young and you didn't care about any of that, you could come in Jay today. Exactly. Just like Jay today. You could come into the city and find an apartment for nothing. I mean, I got a job at the Strand Bookstore. [00:06:31] Speaker A: Which one was it? Just the main one? [00:06:33] Speaker B: Yeah, the main one. Right. But that was. There was only one. [00:06:36] Speaker A: Right. [00:06:36] Speaker B: That paid something like $80 a week, I think was my take home pay. [00:06:41] Speaker A: What neighborhood? Live in the East Village now? Of course. Yeah, yeah. [00:06:45] Speaker B: And you could get an apartment in the east village for 100 bucks, you know, and so people, kids, life that must into the city. Anybody that wanted to be a writer, a musician, an artist, a dancer, you know, anything in the arts, anything creative, this was the place to do it. And you could come in and you could afford to live here. It was easy to afford to live here. And everybody just poured into the city and it was just a cauldron of creativity and all that kind of thing. And most of that, not all of it, but most of it happened downtown. By downtown, I mean below 14th street, from Houston street to 14th street, which is really, when you think about it, it's only a square mile. So everybody ate in the same restaurants and went to the same clubs and, you know, got their hair cut in the same barbershops. You just ran into your friends all the time walking around. It was like a demented college campus. And it was just absolutely Fantastic. If you didn't mind that bullets were going off all the time and people were getting broke, they'd come home and their apartment would be broken into and their black and white TV set would be gone. It's like, damn, they got my TV again. [00:07:56] Speaker A: You know? But what's scared about that? Right? [00:07:58] Speaker B: Exactly. Who cared about that? [00:08:00] Speaker A: So that was, you know, you make it. I hate to. It's funny to say this, but you're. You're painting a picture in my head. I'm like, gosh, I wish I lived here at that time too. It was. [00:08:08] Speaker B: I mean, it's so different from now. [00:08:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:08:10] Speaker B: I mean, now you practically have to be a millionaire to live in Manhattan, you know, so everyone's spread out to the Bronx and Brooklyn and Queens and they're all spread out into all these little neighborhoods. And I'm sure that that's great if you live in a particular neighborhood and you've got your friends and there's a scene, but it's not the same as when everybody. The whole scene is concentrated in one single place. [00:08:31] Speaker A: Right. [00:08:32] Speaker B: And that led to this sort of creative explosion because the. The poets would influence the rock and rollers and the rock and rollers would influence the artists and the artists would interview. Influence the writers. And it was just this creative cauldron. And from that arose places like cbgb. [00:08:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:08:52] Speaker B: Which was a rock club on the Bowery. [00:08:55] Speaker A: Yes. Where was it? Can you give me an idea where it was on the Bowery and Bleecker. And Bleecker. [00:09:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:09:01] Speaker A: Oh. So, you know, I don't know the specific spot it was at. So I'm have to look that up now. [00:09:05] Speaker B: A clothing store, John Varvatos clothing store. [00:09:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Very well known. Yeah. [00:09:11] Speaker B: That I didn't know is cbgb. [00:09:14] Speaker A: Wow. [00:09:15] Speaker B: And John, I have walked by. [00:09:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:09:17] Speaker B: And he, he maintained the awning of CBGB at a very. It's very famous awning that used to say CBGB own fog on it. And he. When he turned it into John Verbato's clothing store, he maintained the shape of the awning and he also maintained the interior. And it kind of looks like CBGB's inside. [00:09:33] Speaker A: You know what you're making me remember now? Years ago, 10 years. Well, maybe seven or eight years ago, this. My good friend Gary Bennett from the UK came here and he wanted me to show him and his family for CBGB's was. And so that's the first time I had walked by it. So, yeah, now I do remember. [00:09:51] Speaker B: But you cannot believe the difference in the Bowery well, in New York, in Manhattan in general, but the Bowery in particular. In those days and for most of the 20th century, the Bowery was America's skid row. It was sort of like the most dysfunctional street in America. It's where all the missions had their missions that you could rent a bed if you were an alcoholic, if you were sort of a chronic, what they called in those days. We wouldn't say this today, but while Bowery bums, basically chronic alcoholics, you could rent a bed for, I think, 10 cents a night. They kicked you out in the morning and you went out and you drank your Ripple out of a brown paper bag and passed out on the street. And then at night they would let you back in. And so the street was just littered with alcoholics that were just sitting there. They were like little trash fires and garbage cans, and it was just, you know, there was broken glass and you'd step over a body and you didn't know if they were alive or dead. And it was just a really. And it was famous for that. Right. So when Hilly Crystal, who was the owner of CBGB's, decided to open a club in 1972 or three and decided to open it on the Bowery, everyone told him that he was completely out of his mind. Because who would go there to go to a club? And he wanted a club that was going to be for blues and bluegrass and country, and who in their right mind would go there? [00:11:18] Speaker A: So CBGB stands for. [00:11:21] Speaker B: Oh, shoot, you got me on the spot here. I know what it stands for, but it's like this vlog for country, bluegrass and blues. Country, bluegrass. And then Ohm Fug stands for the [00:11:32] Speaker A: young chap here just helped us out or gormandizing something. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. [00:11:38] Speaker B: So. So nobody came. Yeah, we had it for a few years and it was just a. Not a success. The Hell's Angels lived right around the corner. So it was kind of a Hell's Angels bar. [00:11:46] Speaker A: Wow. [00:11:47] Speaker B: And it was a bar for Bowery Bombs. [00:11:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:11:49] Speaker B: Bowery bums would come in. I shouldn't keep saying that word, but they would come in and drink. Drink at his bar and. But it was basically empty and he wanted it to be a music club and very few people wanted to play there. And then one day in 1974, the year that I moved to New York, Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd of the band Television, the brand new unsigned band Television, were walking up the Bowery one day and they saw Hilly out there futzing with his awning. And they said, what is this place? And he said, oh, it's a club, you know. And not many people come. They said, could we play here? And he said, yeah, sure, why not? So a couple of weeks later they played. And their manager, Terry Orr, made sure that they drew a very big crowd. Because they knew everybody on the scene. Because they were very much part of that scene. And their friends were people like Patti Smith. [00:12:40] Speaker A: Wow. [00:12:41] Speaker B: And Deborah Harry and Chris Stein from Blondie and the Ramones. And, you know, all of these people, none of whom had any place to play in Manhattan. They had all been forming these bands, but there was no place to play. So when they came in and saw Television playing in CBGB and saw this great room with a great sound system. Because Hilly was a fanatic about sound system, not about anything else. CBGB's was as skanky as they come. It was really, really bad. I just. There was like splatter all over the place. They never cleaned out the ashtrays there. You stepped over gunk. You didn't even want to know what it was. The bathroom is so famous, it ended up in a museum. It's like the most dysfunctional bathroom. You would never go there. I used to go outside, go around the corner to an alley to take a pee because I wouldn't even go cleaner. Exactly. But the sound system was fantastic. [00:13:34] Speaker A: That's all that matters. [00:13:35] Speaker B: And they saw that, and so they all said. Patti Smith said in the Ramones. And everybody said, could we play here too? And Hilly said, sure. And he began giving people residencies where instead of just playing one night, they would play like every Thursday, Friday, Saturday for six weeks or something, like a regular residency. And all of a sudden, this scene appeared that came to be called punk rock. [00:14:01] Speaker A: Right, right. [00:14:02] Speaker B: And that was the birth of punk rock. It really all came from CBGB's and from Hilly allowing these, you know, woe begone kids, East Village kids to play in his club. And it's now this legendary thing. Well known, well known and super famous. But at the time, it was just this crazy. [00:14:20] Speaker A: And you. Did you play there? [00:14:22] Speaker B: You said, yeah. [00:14:23] Speaker A: What did you do specifically? [00:14:24] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So I played with lots of different people. My own band, which was called the Grown Ups, didn't actually debut there until 79. And we played there. 79. 80. Hilly became a major sort of mentor of mine. And we became very good friends. But that was sort of later, few years later, but the heyday of when everybody was getting signed to record contracts out of CBGB's was like 76, 77. Patti Smith got the first record contract. [00:14:54] Speaker A: The Ramones and never Harry, right? [00:14:57] Speaker B: And Harry and Blondie played there all the time. The Talking Heads played there all the time. Richard, Helen, the Voice. [00:15:04] Speaker A: And so they were just starting out, out, just beginners, all of them were. [00:15:07] Speaker B: And I'll. And I'll say this, and I don't think that anybody would disagree with me, except for Patti Smith. None of them were very good when they started. They really kind of suck. And. And the thing that was fascinating was that Hilly saw something in them and said. And said, you know, first of all, you're not very good. [00:15:27] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:15:28] Speaker B: Secondly, you're not really drawing a crowd, and I'm not making any money. But come back again in two weeks and play for four nights in a row, that kind of thing. He gave them the chance. And I watched because I started going there in 74 when it first opened. I watched them one by one just get better and better and better, which is what often happens with bands. If you have a chance to play in public, which most bands don't have that chance to do, other than once every few weeks or once a month, you have a gig. But he would give these long residencies. And that's almost like the Beatles in Hamburg, you know. When they got there, they weren't that great. By the time they left Hamburg, they were the Beatles, you know. Well, Hilly gave people that opportunity and people got better and better and better. And people saw a scene happening and record companies began sending scouts down there, A and R people. And seeing people play and going, wow, this is new and fresh. Because the 70s also were an era when rock and roll had become very bloated. It was stadium rock, you know, Emerson, Lake and Palmer and elo, and people like these giant shows. You had to play, like, rock man enough to, you know, get signed to a record deal. And punk was very stripped down. It was like the original rock and roll. It was just sort of people playing guitar and not necessarily, you know, brilliant musicians, but they had something to say and he gave them a place to say it. [00:16:52] Speaker A: Do you remember the Butthole Surfers? [00:16:53] Speaker B: I totally remember. [00:16:54] Speaker A: Did you meet them? [00:16:55] Speaker B: I did, but that was some years that was more like the 80s, you know. [00:16:58] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. You know, it's. That's my punk era. [00:17:02] Speaker B: Right. [00:17:02] Speaker A: Yeah. That. That. That style or that funny thing about [00:17:06] Speaker B: punk is that it wasn't. I think today people equate punk after. After the Ramones went to England and David Johansson, those guys went to England and Malcolm McLaren. And those guys saw them and started groups like the Sex Pistols. And punk became this thing of loud, angry white guys screaming their anger. And it became this sort of hardcore thing that then became so famous. And the Sex Pistols became so famous that ever since, I think people have equated punk with this hardcore kind of screamy, angry thing. But if you think of Blondie, they were not like that. If you think of Patti Smith, nothing like that. If you think of Talking Heads, they're nothing like that. If you think of television, Tom Brain in television, they're nothing like that. It was hilly, didn't even like the term punk. He wanted to call it street music because it was this wide variety of different kinds of things. And the thing that people had in common was that they were influenced by poetry and literature and they had something to say as opposed to just wanting to be rock stars and play in stadiums. Whatever. [00:18:21] Speaker A: It's fascinating. [00:18:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:18:22] Speaker A: Did you, did. Did you ever go to the Chelsea Hotel when it was. Oh, yeah, I'm sure you've been there. A lot of history there too. You just made me think of when you said Sid, Nancy. Didn't they die at the Chelsea? [00:18:36] Speaker B: Supposedly Sid killed Nancy in the Chelsea Hotel. Yeah, he was arrested for it. And then he was released and of a drug overdose shortly thereafter. And it's always been considered that he killed her. I don't think that he did. I think that most people that knew him as I did don't think that he did. I think that she was killed. He was passed out because he was a very drug addicted person. And. And she was a really. She was a tough gal that didn't take any guts on anybody. And I think that people came in to rob them, that he had $10,000 and the $10,000 was missing. After they found her, they robbed and. And stabbed her. And she crawled into the bathroom and died. And he was passed out on the bed. And then they arrested him and he didn't remember because he had been passed out. And then he died shortly thereafter. So it's always been going down in history that he killed her. And maybe he did, but I don't think that he did. [00:19:30] Speaker A: I also know that Madonna lived there for a while, supposedly. Did you ever meet her too? I feel like he was only in [00:19:36] Speaker B: clubs for a second. And she would usually be cordoned off. You would be brought over to meet her and you would shake her little tiny hand. [00:19:42] Speaker A: Yeah, little tiny hand. [00:19:44] Speaker B: And then. And then be carted away with by her bodyguards. So I didn't really know her. Yeah, but she was on the scene in the. In the early 80s when I was doing my downtown dukes and divas shows, how my friend Howie Montag, who had a. A show, a similar kind of show at Dance a Terrier, the club dance area. [00:20:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:20:00] Speaker B: Was the person who introduced her, she. That's the first time she ever played in public was in Howie's show. There's videos of that. People can see that every. [00:20:07] Speaker A: That song, Everybody, I think, was her starting song. [00:20:10] Speaker B: And you can see that you just go on YouTube and type in Madonna Dance a Terrier. Yeah, we Montoy, you will see her the very first time and you see how polished she was even in her very first gig. She had dancers and she had choreography. She knew exactly what she was doing, you know. But that was all later. The CBGB's thing was it was years before. [00:20:31] Speaker A: This is also fascinating. So now this leads to what also I think we should hear about is your book you just wrote, which is a CBGB conspiracy. [00:20:39] Speaker B: Correct. [00:20:40] Speaker A: Tell us all about it. It's amazing. [00:20:42] Speaker B: CBGB's conspiracy is a novel. It's a murder mystery that takes place in New York in 1977 around CBGB. And the genesis of it basically was that over many, many years people have been urging me to. To write a memoir, particularly around about that time. And I have always resisted that, you know, because I was on that scene. I would tell stories and say, oh, you should write a memoir, you know. Yeah, and I'm not going to write a memoir. And the reason why was because I'm gay. In the 70s, you write a memoir about your life in the 70s and all your friends in the 70s, you know, that looming over that is the 80s, when they were all going to die horrible deaths from aids. And so I was just like, no, that's never going to happen. But one. But people kept bugging me about it. And then one day I was walking down the street and I suddenly this idea popped into my head. What if I instead of writing a memoir, what if I wrote a novel and resuscitated resurrected my deceased friends from the 70s, but not as a memoir, but as a novel, like a murder mystery, and then populated it with real, [00:21:46] Speaker A: real people, which I love, there then. [00:21:50] Speaker B: And that would be fun. I could do that. That wouldn't like, break my heart, basically, that. Because that would be fun. It was like bringing them back to life to solve this fictional murder mystery. And most of them became public figures. They were all famous people. So it would be a historical novel kind of thing. Like ragtime or something like that. But then, of course, I needed a story. And then one day, I'm walking down the street again, like a month later, and this idea just pops in my head. Okay, what if there's a kid, like a beautiful young poet, artist, musician, and he's found dead in his East Village tenement with a heroin needle sticking out of his arm? Obviously died of an overdose. The cops just dismiss it as an accidental overdose. But his friends don't think it was an overdose. They think that someone may have deliberately injected him because he didn't do heroin. And why would he be dead with a heroin needle in his arm? So his best friend goes over the next night to snoop around the apartment. And when he gets there in the middle of the night, he notices that someone's in the apartment. He hides in the hallway. And William S. Burroughs, the great beat writer William S. Burroughs, comes out of the apartment. And he suddenly thinks, oh, my God, it was Burroughs. You know, we. He did. The kid didn't even know Burroughs, but somehow it's Burroughs. And so this sets them off on this chase through the world of CBGB's and also the downtown world of literature, the beat poets, fashion and all that stuff in 1977. And I. And I said it in 1977 because that was the year that New York City really hit rock bottom. And we were talking before about how bad things were in. 77 is widely considered to be the year that it really hit rock bottom. It was the year of the Son of Sam murders. The serial killer that was preying on people in their parked cars in the Bronx. [00:23:33] Speaker A: Real quick, you were here in for that real life. [00:23:36] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [00:23:36] Speaker A: You know, so real how. What was the vibe in the city at that point? Was it terrifying? Was it. [00:23:41] Speaker B: Well, not for us in Manhattan, because the Son of Sam didn't strike in Manhattan. Basically, he would go to Lovers Lanes in the Bronx. And then he branched out to Brooklyn as well, where kids would make out in cars. And he would shoot through the car windows, killing the girls and the boys that he was trying to kill. And we didn't have Lovers Lanes in Manhattan. Nobody had a car. So we weren't really particularly worried about, you know, this is not him. We were totally aware of it. And it was front page news, just constantly. He killed a lot of people. It went on for a year. So any. You know, we had a big caliber gun. He kind of blew people's heads. [00:24:18] Speaker A: And he said, like, a dog told him to do this or something. [00:24:21] Speaker B: Right? That was when he finally caught him. [00:24:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:24:24] Speaker B: So that was going on and then the blackout of 1947, when on the hottest night of July when everyone was out in the street at like 9 o' clock at night or whatever it was, suddenly the juice went out and the city just erupted into just riots and looting. The city was just caught on fire. It was like city on fire. It was also the year of the Everard Bathhouse Fire, which is much less famous for most people, but for us gays, it's pretty famous because the Everard was the most famous gay bath house in New York. And it caught fire in the spring of 1977. [00:24:59] Speaker A: I didn't know this. [00:25:00] Speaker B: There were the, you know, exits were boarded up and the windows were boarded up and there was no sprinkler system whatever. So a lot of people died in the Everard Bath house. So. And that was also the year that sort of New York went bankrupt, etc. So that was what was going on in that year. People sometimes call it the coolest year in hell because it was. We were having a blast with all this terrible stuff. So I wanted to create a plot with this murder mystery that would include the Everard Bathhouse fire and include, because [00:25:31] Speaker A: I did not know about it till [00:25:32] Speaker B: now, include the Son of Sam and include the blackout and tie together all of the things that were going on with all of these historical characters, like William Burroughs and Hilly Crystal and Patti Smith and some people that I didn't know, like fat Tony Salerno of the Mafia and Roy Cohn, the famous lawyer who became Donald Trump's good friend. And so I just worked on this plot and created a plot and wrote the book. [00:26:00] Speaker A: Fascinating. [00:26:01] Speaker B: And there it is. And so, and, and the, the one thing that, I mean, it's gotten very good reviews and people seem to really like it. But the thing that I like the most about it is that when people who were around then, old friends that were around then read it, people invariably call me up and say, oh my God, you transported me right back. I had forgotten what it was really like. And you painted this picture that just made me so. So that was what I was trying to do, was to bring back that time. And when you hear from people that were here then that you succeeded in doing that, that's my biggest reward. [00:26:33] Speaker A: What about the celebrities who you wrote about in the book that are real? You know, have they commented to you? [00:26:38] Speaker B: I mean, most of the people, the vast majority of people that I wrote about whose real names I used are deceased. [00:26:43] Speaker A: I was going to say that so [00:26:45] Speaker B: There are people like Deborah Harry and Patti Smith and people like that in it, but they're sort of like supporting characters. Yeah, you never, they never speak. You never hear them speak. But the, the people like William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg and Lou Reed and amazing Leonard Cohen and the Ramones. [00:27:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:03] Speaker B: And, you know, people like that, that populate the book and our major characters in the book are all deceased and so they can't tell me what. [00:27:11] Speaker A: They also touch on the famous clubs in New York City. Correct. Like the Limelight and. [00:27:16] Speaker B: Well, the Limelight hadn't opened then. The only other club. There's two other clubs that are mentioned in the book that were prominent at the time. One was Maxis, Kansas City. [00:27:25] Speaker A: Yep. [00:27:26] Speaker B: Which was up on Park Avenue south and had been a major Warhol hangout in the 60s. [00:27:32] Speaker A: Did you meet him and was. [00:27:33] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, sure. I figured everybody did. [00:27:36] Speaker A: You know what, this is crazy. I never knew he had a wig. I never thought about it. Oh, yeah, that was a wig. [00:27:40] Speaker B: I didn't care. [00:27:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I had for some reason was just last year I read about his wig. I'm like, oh, he was. Yeah, that was a wig. I mean, I knew I had crazy hair, but it just. [00:27:49] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, go ahead. It was absolutely awake. So there was that. That had been a famous club, but it was at Warhol back room in the 60s. [00:27:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:57] Speaker B: Until Warhol got shot in 68 and then he stopped going there. But then it had a second life in the 70s as a rock club and it became the main competitor to cbgb. So that you. You played one week at CBGB and you played the next week at Max's. And so that was the one club and then the other One was Studio 54, which also took off in 1977. And one of my main characters is a young woman who is the girlfriend of the deceased poet musician who was very, very wealthy from a super rich family and lives uptown and spends a lot of time at Studio 54. And there's a number of scenes at Studio 54 with Steve Rubell and Truman [00:28:37] Speaker A: Capote and all of those people ever. [00:28:41] Speaker B: I did meet him a couple of times at Studio 54. Yeah, yeah. [00:28:45] Speaker A: Oh, I want to hear some, some more. [00:28:46] Speaker B: I mean, the thing about it is in those days, that scene was. [00:28:51] Speaker A: Yeah, tell us. [00:28:52] Speaker B: Both the Studio 54 scene and the downtown scene were relatively small. It was not a big scene at all. I mean, when CBGB started, I would say for the first year, the hardcore audience there, the people that went over and over and over again, it was maybe 100 people. [00:29:11] Speaker A: Wow. [00:29:11] Speaker B: And so, of course, everybody knew everybody. If you keep going to a club and it's the same hundred people night after night, week after week, sooner or later, you know every single one of them. And it's just amazing to me. And I had no idea this was going to happen. And I don't think anybody did have an idea that this was going to happen, that so many of them would turn out to be famous and. And go on to become famous. And not just the rock musicians, but also the clothing designers and the artists. I mean, Jean Michel Basquiat, who is a character in the book, he's a significant character in the cbg. [00:29:47] Speaker A: I assume you met him. [00:29:49] Speaker B: I did meet him, yeah. [00:29:50] Speaker A: Tell me a little. Tell us a little about him. [00:29:52] Speaker B: Well, he was kept very much kept his distance. So I only knew him because he was good friends of a couple of good friends of mine. I found him a little bit sort of intimidating, kind of whatever. But he was. He's a major character in the book. He was very young in 77. He was 17 years old, but he was on the scene, and he was doing his Sammo tags made him famous. Originally, Stephen Sprouse, the fashion designer Steven Sprouse, who was one of my best friends and was my boyfriend in 1977, he's one of the three main characters of the book. I changed his name because I just was too intimate to use the same name. But if anybody who reads it, who Finn Burden is the name of the character, immediately goes, oh, that's Stephen Sprouse. Of course that's Stephen Sprouse. So there were fashion people, there were art people, there were writers, there were poets, there were a lot of beat people. I mean, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs went to cbgb. So you got to know everybody, not having any idea that any of them were going to become famous. And then it was so thrilling to watch over the next two or three years as at least the musicians among them did start to become famous. And Patti Smith was the first who became really quite famous. And then the Ramones became very famous, and then Blondie became one of the biggest. I mean, by the end of the 70s, Blondie was like kind of like Beyonce today. It was like, number one act in the world. And that she was a waitress who was playing at CBG in his spare time. [00:31:23] Speaker A: It was a big part of my. My growing up. Yeah, yeah. [00:31:27] Speaker B: So, I mean, who knew that that was going to happen? And people constantly asked me today, well, so what was that like to be this Legendary. And to know all these people, it was like. It wasn't like anything. [00:31:36] Speaker A: I mean, it was. It was. [00:31:37] Speaker B: You had no idea that that was going to happen. It was just a bunch of kids playing. [00:31:39] Speaker A: When you're in it, you don't realize what you're in. [00:31:42] Speaker B: And. And also the fact that it was on the Bowery and that you would walk outside, because we spent a lot of time outside. Hilly would let you go out. He had a cover charge. He would let most of us in for free, but he had a cover charge. But he would let you go out and come back in. So there was always a big crowd when the weather was halfway decent, a big crowd or even a bigger crowd on the street outside than there was inside, because it was so skanky inside that you just wanted to get out of there and you could, you know, do drugs outside, you know, whatever. So you go outside and say, well, nothing much is going to come from this scene, because look where we are. You know, there's stepping over, you know, there's bodies lying on the street. Who's going to become a rock star out of this place? [00:32:22] Speaker A: Yeah, people that they did, you know. So how long did it take you to write the book? [00:32:27] Speaker B: It took. It did. [00:32:28] Speaker A: The. [00:32:29] Speaker B: The first draft took a very short time, just a couple of months. And then I. I got an agent. I sent it out to agents, and I got. I almost got picked up by Dutton, who had published my first book, but they had a bunch of notes, and so I decided that I was going to address their notes, and Covid happened, and suddenly I was just sort of off. Like, everybody was off. And so I addressed their notes, and the second draft took a year. [00:32:53] Speaker A: That's not bad, though. [00:32:54] Speaker B: It's not bad, but it was just. It seemed funny that it almost got published. Yeah, the first graph, that took two months. But the second. But it made it so much better, and their notes were so great. [00:33:03] Speaker A: How did you feel when you finished it? [00:33:05] Speaker B: You never really finish it. You know what I mean? It's like you're. Is it. Right up to the last minute? [00:33:10] Speaker A: Yeah, but. [00:33:11] Speaker B: But I felt good. I mean, I really felt. And I began sending it out to friends, and people were just calling me up, going, oh, my God, this is so great. You're like, I can't believe what a great story it is, what the characters are. And I didn't get. I finally found out who done it at the. I was totally shocked and flummoxed and, you know, whatever. So it felt really good. I mean, it's really fun. And it was just fun to write. [00:33:33] Speaker A: I love that. [00:33:34] Speaker B: It was fun to go back into that era. And the guest that you had, Jonathan. [00:33:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:33:41] Speaker B: Had written a book called Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, which is a history of New York in 1977. [00:33:47] Speaker A: At the same time, your book is [00:33:49] Speaker B: the same time covering the exact same thing. And his book had already come out, had been out for quite a number of years when I was writing this. So I constantly referred to that to remind myself. And there's also this wonderful documentary on. It was a VH1 documentary. I used to make a lot of VH1 documentaries. I didn't make this one, but it's the kind that we used to make in the era of behind the Music and all those kinds of documentaries. And it's called 1977, the coolest year in Hell. That's where that phrase. And it's a. It's a two hour documentary about New York City in 1977. And it's Wall to wall archival footage. So I could watch that in my spare time and just remember, you know, what we were wearing and what it looked like and the fires that were breaking out and the crime and the garbage and the graffiti and, you know, all that stuff. So though. So his book and that documentary helped me a lot. But mostly I just relied on my memories. [00:34:44] Speaker A: How do you feel when you look back at those days? I feel like a therapist right now, but I mean, but you know, like when you look back now where you're like, wow, those are great memories. Even though it was. [00:34:52] Speaker B: Yes. [00:34:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:34:53] Speaker B: Great memories. And I. Yeah. [00:34:56] Speaker A: Don't regret it. No regrets. [00:34:58] Speaker B: No, no regret. I mean, my, my one regret is that young people today don't have the opportunity to have that kind of thing. At least in cities like New York. It's just too expensive. [00:35:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:35:08] Speaker B: And everybody's saddled with their student no [00:35:11] Speaker A: dime beds you can stay in. [00:35:12] Speaker B: Like you mentioned earlier, it's just, it's all just. The whole world became corporate and it all just went. To me, it just kind of went to hell. And people say, oh, well, everybody always says that about when you were young, things were better when you were young. But that's not really true at all because my parents grew up in the Depression. And all I heard. Heard about when I was a kid was how terrible it was when they were young and how, how lucky I was to be growing up in the 60s when things were great. Okay. You should have been around the 30s and for. Then we had World War II. It was horrible. You kids, they have no idea how great it was, you know, how great you have it today. So I think that people have a pretty good idea of when times are good and times are bad. And for us, times were good. I mean, they weren't good if you were really poor, they weren't good. You know, in New York, if you were a Bowery bum. Right, whatever. And the reason why people were leaving New York was because they felt that it wasn't good. But if you were young and you had something to say or you wanted to try to have something to say, it was good in a way that it is not today. People try to, you know, to recreate the same kind of thing on the Internet and creating communities and things like that. And they try. And I think that people do it to the extent that they do it, but it's not the same as everybody being together and hanging out every night in person without cell phones. Without. There were no cell phones. There was no social media. There was no Internet. There was no computer. [00:36:40] Speaker A: You had to have a computer. Find your friends. [00:36:42] Speaker B: You had to find your friends. And everything was. [00:36:44] Speaker A: And they will this. [00:36:46] Speaker B: It was not even any. When I first got to New York, there weren't even any telephone machines. I mean, if you, you know, some actors had a phone service where you would call and they would say, you know, so and so's residence, and you would leave a message because they needed to know for auditions and stuff. But most people didn't have that. If you called somebody, they weren't home. The phone just rang and rang. [00:37:05] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:37:05] Speaker B: That was it. And, you know, you pull. You put a dime in a. In a phone booth and called your friend from the phone booth because, you know, it was like that. [00:37:12] Speaker A: So about how nasty those phones now. Now that I think about how nasty payphones were. And we didn't think anything. [00:37:16] Speaker B: They didn't think anything of the thing that we were pissed off was when they went from a dime to a quarter. [00:37:21] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:37:21] Speaker B: How dare they? [00:37:24] Speaker A: Right, well, tell us about the gay scene in the 70s. And was there a gay scene at CBGBs as well? [00:37:30] Speaker B: There was a gay scene at CBGBs. I. I was on that scene as a gay person. [00:37:34] Speaker A: Right. [00:37:35] Speaker B: And my friends, I mean, people. One of my very best friends, Richard Soule, was the keyboard player of Patti Smith Group, and he was gay. And Steven Sprouse, who we talked about earlier, the designer, was gay. There were quite a number of gay people at CBGBs, but there were two. There was a different scene, the East Village Scene around Seabees was very, very different from the West Village scene. In those days, the main gay scene was in the West Village, centering on Christopher street and Sheridan Square. When I got to New York in 1974, I met with a friend who I. I lived in Nepal, in Kathmandu. Just before that, had met somebody who. [00:38:12] Speaker A: Wow. [00:38:12] Speaker B: Who invited me to stay with him. And he took me out when I. Like. The first night I got here was summertime, springtime, warm spring night. He said, I'm taking you to Christopher Street. [00:38:23] Speaker A: Right. [00:38:23] Speaker B: And we walked out and walked over to Christopher street. And they were just thousands of people out in the street. Thousands of people. Almost like a street fair. [00:38:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:38:34] Speaker B: And it was all. It was just gay men. There were not a lot of lesbians. It was gay men. And everybody, like, had their shirts off and they were just cruising and smoking cigarettes and doing their thing. [00:38:46] Speaker A: I love scene. [00:38:48] Speaker B: What is this? Like, what. What is this? It's like, is there a party tonight? He said, oh, no. [00:38:53] Speaker A: And you're. How old are you? [00:38:54] Speaker B: I was 20. Just turned 21. [00:38:56] Speaker A: Wow. [00:38:57] Speaker B: And. And he's. And I said, is there. Is there a. Is this a street fair? I said, oh, no. It's like this every night. It's like this every night. [00:39:03] Speaker A: And. [00:39:04] Speaker B: And it was. And Christopher street was lined with gay bars and Sheridan Square gay bars. And that was the scene. And this was just at the moment that disco was beginning to take off. Very first disco songs appeared right when I started going to the West Village. [00:39:23] Speaker A: Like Donna Summers type stuff. Or is that even earlier? [00:39:26] Speaker B: Rock the Boat. You know, Rock the boat. Don't rock the boat. [00:39:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:39:30] Speaker B: The first. First disco song were on the jukebox at the Ninth Circle, which was my bar. That was our favorite bar. If we came over from the East Village to the West Village, we went to the Ninth Circle because that was the bar that had the best jukebox in town. All the other jukeboxes were starting to really just kind of do disco. And the Ninth Circle was a rock and roll jukebox. And it also was the place that people like Andy Warhol and Lou Reed and David Bowie, if they were going to go to the West Village and go to a gay bar, it would be the Ninth Circle. So we just had our regular tables in the back of the circle. You could just go by yourself, and you would meet tons of friends there. And then from there you'd go over to cbgb. But they were. They were different scenes, and you were a little bit torn if you were gay. Between the one scene and the other. And I also had a boyfriend at the time for 15 years, my friend Hapat, who I first met when I first. I actually met him in Greece before I moved to New York. And then we met him when I got to New York. [00:40:30] Speaker A: Just by coincidence or no. [00:40:32] Speaker B: I mean, I got his number, and he said, if you ever come to New York, look me up. He was the first openly gay person that I had Met. He was 10 years older than me, and I was an exchange student in Europe, and he. I met him, and he was 10 years older, and he was openly gay. And if you come to New York, meet me. I was not out at the time. He didn't know I was gay until I arrived in New York and called him up. And you remember me from a year and a half ago in Greece, oh, my God, come over right now. And I went over and said, oh, by the way, I'm gay. He said, you are? Oh, my God. And we became a couple for 15 years until he died in AIDS in 1988. [00:41:09] Speaker A: Pretty cool. [00:41:10] Speaker B: Yeah. And. And he wasn't on either of those scenes. He wasn't into the West Village gay thing at all. He never went to a gay bar. He never went to a bath house, and he would only go to the place. To the rock places. If when I was playing, he would go to see me, he was super supportive of me. So whenever I had sounds like a great guy thing that was playing any place, he would come to it. But otherwise, he was on his own scene, which was all about museums and about culture. And he was very erudite and very well read and just a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful person. So there were so many different scenes going on. On the East Village scene. We became a little bit tired of the West Village scene, and we had a very snotty attitude about it. We really did. I mean, I mentioned earlier, Howie Montag, who introduced Madonna at Danzateria years later, started a fake group. And it just wasn't an actual group, but he started sort of like a fake group called Fags Against Facial Hair. Because the whole thing, the clone look, had taken over in the West Village. And the clone look was this, you know, sort of like the mustache, the aviator glasses, the jeans with the hanky sticking out of the pocket signified whatever. The jean jacket with the hoodie, a little Village People. [00:42:30] Speaker A: Ish. [00:42:31] Speaker B: Totally Village People. And everybody was wearing that look. And everybody had to have the mustache. And no, we didn't have mustaches. So Howie started this thing called Fags. Against facial hair. So we just thought that the whole disco thing, as it evolved. And by 77, when the CBGB conspiracy is taking place, disco rules the roost. I mean, that's the peak. [00:42:50] Speaker A: Peak. [00:42:50] Speaker B: And now you're talking Donna Summer. And, you know, all that. It was like, that's all you heard coming out of the. Out of the clubs in the West Village. And we hated it. Which is funny because I love it now. But socially, what it signified to us was this sort of kind of mindless, nihilistic. Just, you know, just dance, you know, dance your troubles away. And we thought that there was just much more important stuff to be doing. And the punk thing was much more important. I mean, if you listen to Patti Smith or what people are seeing, like television, what their lyrics about, they're. They're emulating Bob Dylan. They're. It's protest music. They're talking about real things. And the disco thing is just, you know, dance raining men, Hallelujah, you know, and we just thought that was just really not something we wanted to associated with because we just had an attitude. We were real snobs. Yeah, we were totally snobby, but. And a lot of the punk movement did have a major element of snobbery in it. Sort of cultural, I'm cooler than you kind of thing, which is unfortunate. And it's just funny that now that all those kinds of music have lost their cultural meanings and are just. Just exist now as music. I listen to disco all the time because it's so great, such great music. [00:44:05] Speaker A: It really is. [00:44:05] Speaker B: And it's really fun to dance to. And it was a great dance. He was like, but at the time, no, we were not having that at all. [00:44:11] Speaker A: So. [00:44:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:44:13] Speaker A: Yeah. So. And you guys are. You and Happ were together how long? [00:44:17] Speaker B: 15 years. And then, of course, AIDS happened in the 80s and 1981. The first reports of. Took most people quite a long time to realize what was actually happening. I guess because I was paranoid, it didn't take me very long. And I radically changed my behavior. But most of my friends were a lot looser than me and did not. And between like 81 and 84 or so is when most people became infected with HIV. And then the just. The tsunami of death just swept over the community. And I would say that conservatively, 50% of all of my friends died. And it's probably closer to 70%. [00:45:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:45:05] Speaker B: And it just went on and on and on. Which is why I then joined ACT UP in 1988, I guess it was. And then founded out Week magazine. [00:45:14] Speaker A: I was gonna say, tell us about Outweigh magazine, too. [00:45:16] Speaker B: Well, that was a. So. So act up became the big AIDS protest. [00:45:20] Speaker A: Right. I remember. [00:45:21] Speaker B: And it had two sides to it. One side were the protest people who did demonstrations and shut everything down. And the other side were the treatment activists who understood the science, and they would tell us who to demonstrate against. They would say, you need to do this and do that. And I felt that the world needed a magazine or a newspaper that would reflect this new form of AIDS activism and gay activism and lesbian activism, and there wasn't one. New York had the New York native. And nobody read that. It was just this crazy brag. Really hate to say it, but it was. And so I founded Out Week magazine to reflect the new mood. And it just took off like a rocket. It became like this major force in activism and source of information and also sorts of activism. That's where outing came from. I don't know if you remember the outing controversy of dragging people out of the. Out of the closet, all of those things. I mean, so. So Out Week really became an activist thing. Rather than just reporting about activism, it became its own activist thing. It became a must read in New York for a couple of years. And then I went on from there to become a columnist at Newsday and to write a book about amazing AIDS prevention. When it became clear that we were not succeeding in preventing new infections of the younger generation, which was not yet infected. They were coming into the community and were destined to become infected at about the same levels that are. Even though we were doing condoms and safe sex and all that, it was working on a personal level, but a population level it wasn't. So I wanted to know why. So I wrote that book about it. And then finally, AIDS abated because of the drugs, although it's still going on, but you don't really die from it that much anymore. You lost half an 88. So that was relatively easy. [00:47:11] Speaker A: Sorry about that. [00:47:11] Speaker B: So that. That continued. Thank you. That continued another eight or nine years after his death. But then when that happened, I left and I went to Hollywood and became a TV producer. [00:47:21] Speaker A: I was gonna say that. [00:47:23] Speaker B: And started having fun. [00:47:24] Speaker A: Did you. Did you go to the march on Washington in 93? [00:47:30] Speaker B: Do you remember that? [00:47:30] Speaker A: Yes, I was there. [00:47:32] Speaker B: You were there. [00:47:32] Speaker A: Okay. [00:47:33] Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah, I wrote about that. I wrote that. That was when I was a columnist at Newsday. [00:47:37] Speaker A: Right. [00:47:37] Speaker B: And I wrote a column that became kind of a famous column about that. Yeah, all those things. I was really into it in the late 80s and 90s. [00:47:47] Speaker A: I was, you know, I can't imagine how New York City felt because, you know, I was living in Orlando and I lost friends in Orlando as well. Right. You know, and I just can't imagine what happened here in New York City, which was like the epicenter of that. What happened in. [00:48:03] Speaker B: Yeah, it was the epicenter. And San Francisco also. But New York is so much bigger. I think that like more. There's more gay people in New York than there are people in San Francisco. So it's just that the scale is so enormous. [00:48:15] Speaker A: Right. [00:48:16] Speaker B: And then it was still largely concentrated in the gay population. And. And the gay population was largely concentrated in downtown Manhattan. So you just saw people every time you walked out the door, you know, walking down the sidewalk with a cane. [00:48:31] Speaker A: Right. [00:48:32] Speaker B: Covered with kaposi sarcoma lesions. People that had been these gorgeous. [00:48:36] Speaker A: Wasting away. [00:48:37] Speaker B: Yeah, just wasting away. It was. It was horrifying. It was absolutely horrifying. [00:48:41] Speaker A: It was. [00:48:42] Speaker B: And. And nobody cared about it. It wasn't. It was just. Nobody knew about it. It just literally was just ignored. [00:48:47] Speaker A: Until Rock Hudson. [00:48:48] Speaker B: Until Rock Hudson. And then they were only afraid because they thought that may straight people would start getting. Because they thought that Rock Hudson was straight. [00:48:54] Speaker A: Correct. [00:48:55] Speaker B: But otherwise people just did not care about it at all. And we had to force them to do it, which was what act up was all about. [00:49:01] Speaker A: And you played a big part of that too. [00:49:05] Speaker B: And Out Week magazine, and we. We would target the New York Times, we would target. We would have killed. Huge demonstrations. We shut down City hall and closed the Brooklyn Bridge. You know, we did. And we said, no, you must pay attention to this, and the drug companies must pay attention to this, and the government must pay attention. And. And today people like Tony Fauci and Dr. Ho, the people that were most responsible for the drugs that we now have, say it was you guys that forced us to do this. I mean, we became friends with them. Eventually we targeted them, but eventually they brought us into their world and said, what should we do? And there were enough smart people in ACT Up UP who had plans for what they should do that they were deeply impressed by that and began doing this. This is like fast tracking drugs to get them into people's bodies even before you're sure that they're going to work, since you're going to die anyway. Why all these kinds of things? And it transformed the drug making process in the United States and it led to these compounds, the triple combination therapies, years before they otherwise would have been. I mean, hundreds of thousands more people would have Died of aids. Had it not been for that fast tracking that really came from ACT up. [00:50:22] Speaker A: So. [00:50:22] Speaker B: Yeah. So it was very successful. [00:50:24] Speaker A: Wow. Europe. Done a lot of amazing things. [00:50:28] Speaker B: Well, I didn't do that. [00:50:29] Speaker A: I mean, I. I know, but you've been. You've been involved. [00:50:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:50:32] Speaker A: At least, you know, so that's. That's incredible, Gabriel. Unfortunately, we have to go now. Our time is up. But, you know, hopefully one day, if you want to come back on the podcast and talk, because I feel like we have so much more to talk about. It was fascinating talking with you, so I would like that one day. [00:50:51] Speaker B: Great talking with you, Kelly. [00:50:53] Speaker A: Perfect. [00:50:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:50:54] Speaker A: Well, I have one more question for you. [00:50:55] Speaker B: Okay. [00:50:57] Speaker A: Before we let you go, Gabriel, we here at the New Yorkers Podcast want to know what it means to you, Gabriel Rotello, to be a New Yorker. [00:51:05] Speaker B: Well, what it means to me to be a New Yorker is to be somebody who is deeply connected to the world, because New York is this. I know that people hate to hear this when they're from other cities and other countries or whatever, but New York is the center. It's the Metropole. It's the Rome of ancient Rome. It's the Athens of ancient Greece. It's the Metropole of the world. And to be in it is to be, you know, where the action is. And I always just wanted to be where the action was. [00:51:36] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:51:36] Speaker B: So New York was the logical place to be. It has changed. It is a. It is a place of just constant reinvention. The New York that I fondly remember and I'm nostalgic about in the 70s was completely different from the New York of the 1950s, because when I got here, people were nostalgic for the New York of the 50s, and the people in the 50s were nostalgic for the New York of the 1920s. And, you know, in the 90s, people were nostalgic for the 70s, and today people are nostalgic for the 90s. It constantly changes. It looks different. Although Canal street doesn't look any different where your studios are. It looks exactly. They're selling those same fake Rolex watches right outside the door that they were selling in 1981. But it's a. It's a constant reinvention. But as it constantly reinvents itself, it's always centrally located in the imagination of our civilization. And it's like the Metropole. It's the central place. And so to be here is to. Is to be in this wonderful cauldron where, if I lived in ancient Rome, I would want to be in Rome. And if I was in ancient Greece, I would want to be in Athens. And in this civilization, I want to be in New York. [00:52:42] Speaker A: Wow, what an awesome answer. I love that. Really, really awesome. Thank you for joining us today, my friends, for this week's episode of the New Yorkers Podcast. Gabriel, why don't you let everyone know where they can find you on social media and where they can purchase your book as well. [00:52:57] Speaker B: So you can find me on social media. I'm not great on social media, but I'm on Instagram. If you just do Gabriel Ortello and Instagram, I think the place that people would most enjoy finding me on is YouTube, because a lot of my musical projects from the late 70s and 80s are on YouTube. And if you just go on YouTube and punch in Gabriel Ortello, you'll see all sorts of really fun things that I was doing in those days. And as far as my book, I mean, I think these days most people buy books online, so Barnes and Noble.com, amazon, whatever, or you know, wherever fine books are sold. [00:53:29] Speaker A: The cg, cbgb. [00:53:30] Speaker B: The CBGB Conspiracy. [00:53:32] Speaker A: Yeah. Once again everyone, I'm your host, Kelly Kopp, also known as New York City Cop across all my social media. [00:53:39] Speaker B: Please like and subscribe to the New Yorkers Podcast and you can follow the New Yorkers on social media at New Yorkers Podcast. [00:53:48] Speaker A: You can leave a rating or a comment to let us know how you are enjoying the show. We read through all your comments and DMs, so please would love to hear from you my friends. Thank you Jean Fleming, Bridget or Wee and Thierry Tavernier for your kind words in the last episode. If you want to be featured at the end of an episode, leave a rating on Apple Podcast or a comment on Spotify or YouTube. [00:54:11] Speaker B: And thank you, the New York City, the NYC Walking Show. Sincerely, Maureen in Studio J170 for your comments on Instagram. [00:54:20] Speaker A: Have a lovely day everyone and we will see you next time. [00:54:23] Speaker B: Goodbye. This is the last stop on this train, everyone. Please leave the train. [00:54:32] Speaker A: Thank you for riding with MTA New York City Transit.