Transformative Year of NYC: 1977 Overview

The first to die by the killer's gun was 18 year old Donald Loria last July. Six months later Christine Freund became his second victim. He's struck six times and police say they're nowhere near solving the case. In 77, Son of Sam was running around and shooting people. Everybody was scared to death. In 1977, we had soaring murder rates. We had a city that was really gripped with every form of crime. The city was dirty. It was experiencing an epidemic. of arson, it was covered in graffiti. The city was so broke that city services had been cut back profoundly. They laid off 5,000 cops. They closed firehouses. They laid off thousands of teachers. Nobody knew from day to day whether the Big Apple would be... become the bankrupt Apple. You had to really hold on to your purse. There was an element of danger. But it was also wonderfully sleazy. Times Square wasn't Disney World. It was prostitution and pimps. You know, it was great. It was like the Wild West. And it didn't cost anything to fucking live here. 1977 was the year of the 25-hour citywide blackout that led to massive looting and, in fact, the largest mass arrest in the city's history. and New York City went through one of the most contentious mayoral elections in 1977. And it came to be seen as an election for the soul of the city in the future. People were confused, disillusioned, afraid. All of these emotions were spawning all kinds of music. That was the year that disco exploded in New York. Back in 77, we took hip hop from the South Bronx, brought it into the club. We never thought it would blow up like it did. Yeah, 1977 was a big year for punk rock. There was a buzz at CBGB's. Everybody wanted to sign punk bands. It was no coincidence that during this period of really kind of ultimate decay for New York. It was an incredibly exciting place to be. It was free. It was open. You felt like you could do anything you wanted. Most people thought that New York City's great days were over. My attitude was, fuck them. Koch came through 123rd Street. And they were selling reefer so fast and so crazy till they was trying to sell him a bag. It was open-air supermarkets. 77. Was the Bronx burning? Well, the Bronx wasn't burning. The Bronx was burnt. I mean it was deteriorating like at a rapid pace man. I mean so fast whole areas was just wiped out man. Gangs really controlled areas and a lot of times things would happen and the police wouldn't even show up. The gangs gave kids this sense of cohesion in what was otherwise, for many of them, a completely chaotic world. Most of the people's parents, they were struggling. They were broke. You know, they had two jobs or no job, or they were strung out themselves on drugs. So a lot of these kids were monitoring their own life. And they were going to high school, and they were out, you know. They were on their own, basically. And the only positive thing we had was music. Hip-hop, I believe, came about as a culture because there was a fairly substantial group of young people in African-American and Latino communities that felt that there was nothing there for them. school system, because of the fiscal crisis at that time, had abandoned most music programs throughout the city. You know, you couldn't belong to a marching band in your high school if your high school didn't have one. You couldn't go to a rec center if you didn't have a rec center. We didn't have a school system. We something that really belonged to us, you know. Everybody had their own movement, you know, and 77 was actually a breakout showcase year for hip-hop. I went to a band party, and I was totally blown away. Something about seeing that music channeled out that way. Definitely appealed to me. You would follow the vibration of the music and you would arrive at the block party. You would see some people doing graffiti writing on the wall, live. And there would be people with cardboard boxes out there. doing b-boying. The center of the party would be the DJ. Early on, of course, you had people like Hollywood and Chief Rockabizzy B and Lovebug Starsky, but Afrika Bambaataa is the godfather of hip-hop. Come down, baby I came out of the street gang movement that we had at the time which was called the Black Spades. In my area of the Browns River Houses we had a center where I used to play music in the many of the youth stuff. feeling the energy of these DJs, these breakers. So I went out there and started transforming the street gangs into something positive. And it was the culture called hip hop. It comes out of the gang culture. gets an epiphany and begins to organize in his community. Afrika Bambaataa did an unbelievable job with, you know, getting all the youth and the gangs together to try to not be violent, to do it through music. The party that he gave resonated throughout the neighborhood and then soon throughout the Bronx. From then on, that's all I wanted to do. Kaz actually took the initiative, you know what I mean, and told me, listen, man, you know, do this with me, you know what I mean? And once I got behind the turntables, it was something that was overwhelming, something that actually took over. In 77, if you were a DJ, you had to have your own sound system. I don't mean like you just put your records under your arm and just... Oh no, you had to have the speakers and the amplifiers and the turntables and everything. and you brought all that out to the park to play. You know, we were kids, you know, we were teenagers, and, you know, we really didn't have that kind of money. I was lucky because I had a few dollars saved in the bank that my father had left me and I had to convince my mother once that, once I knew that this is what I wanted to do, hey ma, I need that money. You know what I mean? I found what I want to do. I don't want to go buy sneakers with it. I don't want to go, I want to buy some DJ equipment. I want to be a DJ. We never would have had the ingenuity to plug ourselves in. system up to a light pole. I don't think if we was in Omaha. You understand what I'm saying? We wouldn't have had the resources at hand, the mindset to say, yo, that's electric light, ain't it? Look in that pole. Look in the bottom, man, and see if it's anything in there. You know what I mean? Just takes that kind of mindset and ingenuity to say, OK, let's find something to make this work. We didn't have those big industrial extension cords now. We had them little nine, six foot, nine foot. extension cord you had to plug one up to the other and we had to buy like 15 or 20 of them and run them all the way from the pole all the way into the park but that's what it took to keep the party going so that's what we did no one was watching us I mean the police weren't coming to the park to shutting our parties down I mean if you go to a park now and try to hotwire a street lamp and to a party you'll be shut down in five minutes I mean I mean they just were busy doing other things You know what I mean? And thank God for that. In 1977, New York City was a great place to be if you wanted to be wild and promiscuous. For AIDS, you could fuck on stage in Times Square. There were literally 1,200 streetwalker prostitutes. from 34th Street to 50th Street and 8th Avenue. The 42nd Street was a mess. You wouldn't take your wife and walk with your family on 42nd Street. You really wouldn't. Times Square was anything goes. It was a neighborhood where hustlers intersected with tourists. And the tourists came out on the bottom end of that deal for sure. In Times Square, you had the Broadway theater, but you had side-by-side with that, porno establishments, massage parlors, some 200 of them all across 42nd Street. It was girls, girls, girls upstairs, take a ticket, take a ticket, you know. Black beauties, black beauties, check it out, check it out. I went to a movie premiere called Deep Inside Annie Sprinkles. And the people were jumping up. I'm giving people standing ovations after sex scenes. When you went and saw porn, you saw it on a giant screen. I mean, the penises were like 150 feet big, you know. Lots of bushy pussies. Men had pubic hair up to their navels. Times Square now compared to Times Square then is to go from, you know, something that was X-rated and dangerous to something now that's G-rated. I don't think it's bad just because I saw how bad it was. The people of this city. No one understands the tremendous problems we had in the last three and a half years. In 1977, New York City went through one of its most contentious mayoral primaries in its history. Several polls say any of the four candidates could make it. They are Bella Abzug, Mayor Beam, Mario Cuomo, or Congressman Koch. Morning, everybody. I'm Ed Koch, running for mayor. At a televised debate the other night, someone threw a pie at Mayor Beam. Watch. I remember Abe Beam being probably the most ineffective mayor we ever had. New Yorkers just didn't give a damn about him. In some ways, many New Yorkers didn't give a damn about the city because we felt that, you know, the city wasn't the city that... we knew it was a shell of its former self. It was really a moment when the city wanted someone who was going to kind of be tough and get tough and who was also going to lift the spirits of the city, lift the morale of the city. Mayor Abraham Beam is in big trouble. His principle of... Opponent is the lady in the floppy hat Congresswoman Bella absurd one of the things you have to know about all the polls They not only show that I'm leading but they also show that of all the candidates only one person has been regarded by them as a leader Bella Abzug was charismatic. She was New York with that hat and that accent and the flamboyant gestures. But now you have a situation where the city's going to hell in a handbasket, the country doesn't care, and could Bella Abzug lead the city out of such a grim and dark period? The... problems that we shared during the day we came together in the evening to overcome together or to get away from together or to escape together and one of the ways that we came together was on the disco dance floor in 1977 disco came into the mainstream and it was an outgrowth of several factors that all came together at the same time. One was the emancipation of gay people, which created an explosion in the gay community of clubs that were opening up, and the visibility of being an out gay person, which had been very clandestine, been very underground before that time. -I love you more and more, I love you more and more... It really does all start with David VanCusel's love. It wasn't a bar, it was just his home. And he was having parties there every Saturday night. The first time I saw David VanCusel, he's in this dark booth and all you see are his eyes and his beard and his hair. And so it actually looked like Jesus was in there playing records. In the front of the room by the front windows and stuff like that, he kept a Christmas tree. up year round with presents and toys and stuff like that and there was a rocking horse and stuff like that underneath it to kind of make people always feel like you know it was christmas every time you came in because it really did the loft started on broadway at great Jones. And in 1977, Soho was a vast wasteland. You know, people would look at you like, what are you, crazy? You're not talking about going down to Prince Street or going down to Crosby Street. Going to the law for the first time, I was 16. I had rough times at home. And so I got out of the Bronx and straight to Manhattan. There's always one person that feels like the odd man out or the odd girl out, if you will. You feel like the black sheep or you're told you're the black sheep. You feel alone to a certain degree. Well, that's the way I felt until I went to the law, and I realized that there were more people in the world just like me. And so it made me completely comfortable. It was the first time I had actually just completely let everything go. JOHN TULENKO, You had guys who were 15, 16 years old thrown out of their houses the day they had the guts enough to tell their parents that they were gay. Well, where did those people have to go? The one place where those people had to go was the law, where they were accepted for who they were. DERRICK GARCIA, Just the freedom, it spoke volumes about who and what I was. And that was it. I was hooked. The winter of 77 was when the Paradise Garage first started. The garage was having construction parties to raise money to build the place. Saw this on the floor in the small room and the speakers piled up and so forth. That's when, you know, the first... parties began. But you know, that's what everybody was into then. However raw the space was, the better, you know. All you needed really in it was a sound system and a couple of lights. And there was a big snowstorm and it was so cold and I saw people. Swarming down 7th Avenue. I mean, you knew where they were going. The heating wasn't together, but you would be on the dance floor, and it would be 100 degrees. People would be sweating like pigs. And 20 degrees in this hallway that was less than 10 feet away. That was the beginning of Paradise Garage. And obviously, it was still the underground scene. Garage was a little bit different from the loft because as it began to expand into the straight community it began bringing in a much wider variety of people. People always ask me what made the garage the most incredible club and I said because it was a place where black, white, straight and gay came together and if people can dance together they can live together. The Lower East Side was really scary. It was bombed out. You've got to remember, 1977, you know, was a time and a place. And New York City, on the Lower East Side, I mean, there were burned out buildings that they just left that looked like... You know, these facades of destroyed ruins in Germany at the end of World War II. It was a part of town that was considered very undesirable. It was crime-ridden, you know, it was full of drug dealers and drug users. And we liked it that way. You know, it was great. It was like the Wild West. And it didn't cost anything to fucking live here. And people would come, and they'd run away from home. They'd run away from, like, Ohio or someplace, and their parents would call, and we'd have to say, yeah, yeah, your kid was here, you know, because they'd find it in a diary. I am moving to New York City. I'm going to go to CBGB's. None of us ever fit in. We were never, like, Miss Popularity at school. We were all a bunch of misfits. Because we weren't the guys wearing macrame or sandals or, you know, saying groovy. You know, we're punks. Punk was becoming a scene around the same time that disco was reaching its apex. But you'd be coming out of the loft and suddenly you see a bunch of people coming in another direction. And it's like, wow, what club are they coming out of? And you realize it's another group of people going to another space. I started hanging around down at CBGB's because there was a buzz around that that things were starting to happen. CB's was just like going into somebody's crummy basement and there were big stuffed you know easy chairs and Hilly had these dogs that would crap all around and it was very very funky. Hilly Krista was the man that owned CBGB's he basically was I won't call him a failed country and western singer but he was a pseudo he wanted to be a country and western singer. I figured I gotta have something that stands for what I want to do, which was CBGB, Country Bluegrass Blues, and OMFEG, and other music for uplifting gourmandizers. Hilly, they only had one rule about bands in CBGBs, was that they had to write their own songs. Because at that time, most bands up until then had played cover songs. So it was always new, it was always interesting, it was always very different. It could be some crazy loud people the next night. It could be some experimental jazz people the next night. It's somebody with a fiddle and a tuba the next night. It could be five loud guitars. You never knew what to expect. was looking for this kind of rawness and not you know trying to get away from the overproduced sounds and I don't know specifically I think every band had their own little direction 1977 me and my band Richard Hell and the Voidoids we were like the house band You know, I'd started in television back in 1974, and we spotted CBGB's first. The idea was to look for a venue that was bad enough off that they would let us play there, you know, on a regular basis. You know, the Ramones were there within a month. Let's go, Jaguars! The downtown scene was vital to what actually became the Ramones. And when we were playing CBGBs, none of us thought of it as a commercial endeavor. It was an artistic endeavor. I remember the first time I saw them play, they must have played like 16 songs in 12 minutes, and I didn't understand a word of what they had done. And the whole concept, it just went by so fast and so powerfully. I thought it was like the SS. I mean, it really took your breath away. I mean, hey, ho, let's go. Hey, you know, I mean, it was just like, and I looked around, and CBGB's was like this hellhole, ball-weary bar, and I said... This is the cavern, these are our Beatles, this is the future right here. When people saw us, they realized that what we were doing was making music from the way we felt rather than from necessarily virtuosity. So we went back to basics, so that people could think, oh, wait a minute, I could pick up an instrument and play too. This opened the doors for many people to pick up musical instruments and form bands. Here she comes now. You know her. In 77, the people who went to CBGB's were mostly musicians. One night television might be on the stage, but in the audience would be Blondie and the New York Dolls and the Talking Heads and the Miamis and the Ramones and so on. And then the next week... the Ramones would be on the stage and the Talking Heads would be among the other people in the audience. So they were playing for each other and they were playing for people they knew. We were the most intense thing going on in the world for sure. Just full of life and ideas. At the same time, it was a dead end, little nowhere joint that was only known to a really devoted and intense three or four hundred people in New York who had these very specific extreme tastes. tend to look back in retrospect and say, you know, great bands were playing there. Well, no, about eight bands were playing there. They got great later. You know, having had the place to be bad, they got good. Went to CBGB's with Junebug, God bless. We went down there one time, one time, and I walked in there and looked around and I said, this ain't the place for us, man. It's like, have you ever been in a situation where everything looks like it stops and everybody just goes, and we went back to the same. I'll tell you, we went back to the safety of the Bronx. It's the same energy, that punk movement and the hip-hop movement uptown. Punk was the next generation rockers saying, you know, that's too tame. or that's like our mom's music. And that's where the frenetic energy of punk came from. At the same time, we took the hottest parts out of records that already existed and kind of pumped them up. And you know what I mean? That adrenaline that created hip hop up in the Bronx. In 77, we went to this big rap show in the South Bronx. It was completely a new thing to me. There was no separation between the audience and the stage. Everybody was just, you know, running on stage and doing a few, you know, a few. lines and jumping back into the crowd. It was just like so exciting. It was great. And I was the first to invite the punk rockers, the white people, who wasn't nervous to come to a black Latino area and party with the people. Most people thought it was going to be chaos, racism, fights and everything. When we put that music on, the music took control and became universal and everybody just partied like we was partying on the mother. mother 77 is when hip-hop static coming into his own because at that time used to have the DJs battles in the parks with both groups will play at the same time and it'd be like a sound class and we ever had the loudest system with overruled. In 77, you know, Wiz, he goes and he starts, you know, and gets, sets up a battle against Bambada. Now, it wasn't me, because Wiz is always the one like, yo, let's go battle them, yo, let's go get them. Let's go battle them. Back in those days when you DJed, you know, there was a lot of player hair. There was a lot of animosity, you know what I mean? And they wanted to get at you, and they would talk a lot of trash. There was a lot of trash talking back in those days. I mean, that's part of hip-hop too, you know what I mean? We come in there with the most equipment that we can find, pieced together, you know what I mean? Odds and ends, speakers, you know, from here and there and everything. And we think we're ready. We go in there. So I have the nerve. to put on We Will Rock You by Queen. So I put it on and it comes on and it's like Doom doom cha, doom doom cha, doom doom cha, doom doom cha Audio rolling, making big noise, laying in the trees You know what I mean? I'm like, like... Mr. Biggs, who was an emcee for Bambada, got on the mic and bellowed, Casanova, turn up your system. We can't hear you. I'm like, okay, try to crank it up. Said, do, do, cha, do, do, cha, do, do, cha, do, do, cha. He was like, Casanova, we still can't hear you. This is what it sound like. Put on the same record, do, do, cha. Boom, boom, drop. Boom, boom. Yo, we just like, okay, grab the wires. Let's start unplugging. Like, yo, let's get out. Oh, my God. It was, oh, that was like one of the. the most humiliating things but it was another one of those life lessons man and another thing that we survived in in 77 you know what i mean that could another crew or another group that That would have been the end of them. You would have never heard of them again. They was done. They would have been done. But I pop up like toast, man. Columbia University co-ed Virginia Voskarichian was gunned down in March. The killer police are looking for is called the.44 caliber killer because of the weapon he has used. A modern version of the old.44 caliber pistol used in the day. of the old west. I remember driving around, you know, with my friends trying to look for this guy because everybody wanted to catch this guy. I mean, everybody was looking for him. We didn't know what we were looking for, but I knew three people who got shot. I knew somebody who died and I knew two people who got shot. got shot. People were in certain areas afraid to be out too late and given and you know self-imposed curfews and and and people carrying weapons who never carried weapons before. For New Yorkers it has been heart-wrenching watching as the city copes with crisis after crisis. I know what it is to walk around in my childhood without any problems and happy-go-lucky and go where I want but no longer like that. You have to look over your shoulder and I find people when you're walking people just look over their shoulder. With a serial killer on the loose, crime has become a central issue in the campaign. A recent poll shows that Congressman Ed Koch and his tough stance on crime has moved ahead, while former frontrunner Bella Abzug has dropped to a distant third. The city was in the dumps. It needed law and order. And Bella was more about, come on, let's be nice. And Koch was more about, if he comes into your neighborhood, I'll smash that. Son of a bitch. That was an era of survive and enjoy yourself. And Studio 54 was this unbelievable island where nothing mattered other than feeling good. The person that helped start Studio 54, a woman named Carmen D'Alessio. was originally a loft metal. Then she went to Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, who were actually doing a party at a place called the Enchanted Gardens in Queens. When they saw the project of the studio, and I, with my enthusiasm, described what I envisioned, they got enthusiastic and they decided to go for it. 77 was the year that everybody wanted to learn to disco dance, they wanted to learn to do the hustle, they wanted to get into Studio 54, they wanted to be part of that glamour. Studio 54 was bigger than most clubs, it was built inside a theater, so... It had a balcony, it had a bridge over the dance floor that would come out on rollers, and so there was people dancing on the dance floor and over the dance floor, and there were lights above the dance floor that would come down into the dance floor. And it had a Coke spoon. swinging into the nose of a half moon. It was like part of the design of the club. Any idea that would go through my mind to make it more spectacular, they would go for. When Bianca Jagger celebrated the birthday, we conceived the idea of Lady Godiva on a white horse. So we had this girl stuck naked on a white horse with her gold braids all the way to the floor. And then Bianca got so... enthusiastic about this that she just jumped on top of the horse and went around the dance floor this grabbed the attention of all the photographers and before we knew it it was all over the world you never knew who you were going to see in the basement of studio 54. i remember once i hadn't really paid that much attention to the person that was sitting to my left the gentleman next to her tapped her on the arm and turned to her and handed her a joint she took it from him very expertly I might add. When she handed it to me, I looked in her eyes, and I realized that I'm looking to the eyes of Lillian Carter, the mother of the President of the United States of America. I went there, yes. It was just bizarre. And inside were underage girls dancing in men's tailored shirts without anything else. And lots of very decadent looking people doing decadent things. It had youth booze. Drugs and hormones all combined. I definitely saw people going at it up in them balconies, I tell you. Sex was everywhere on any given evening. It was absolutely appropriate to go out into the ladies room and have sex with someone in one of the stalls and or do drugs with them. It's fabulous to be young in a moment in which you want to be irreverent and irresponsible and daring and there are no consequences. A lot of clubs in New York had a lot of what was going on at 54. It was just CO4 sort of 54 made it really popular and it sort of introduced it to the masses. It was the right time. the right moment and we created magic. We were dead set against disco at Punk Magazine. In fact, John Holmstrom wrote Death to Disco in the first editorial of Punk Magazine. But now I listen to disco and it doesn't sound that bad, you know, it's like, ooooh. How do you like it? How do you like it? I'm sorry. Well, 1977 was definitely a watershed year for me personally. We recorded Blank Generation in 1977. It was really thrilling, you know, doing that, making that record, and none of us had ever been in a recording studio before. So we were on top of the world, you know, and we had a real big following at CBGB's. and, you know, the stuff was starting to break around the world. I think Richard Hell, I think he wanted to be successful. I think he wanted to be a rock star. When I first heard Blank Generation, I thought that that was going to be the anthem for the generation. And I remember when my daughter was born, all that was going through my mind was, I was saying, let me out of here. It's such a gamble when you get a face. Ha-ha. I was saying, let me out of here before... Such a gamble when you get a face. It's fascinating to observe what the mirror does, but when I die, it's for the wallace. I belong to the blender. When punk started, and our people, the record labels, would say, these people can't play. What a bunch of junk. All of a sudden, a song starts selling in Australia, and it was a song called In the Flesh. That was the tip-off, that there was something happening. And the story was that they played it by mistake, thinking they were playing the A-side of the single. So needless to say, they weren't ready for punk rock or what we were doing, which was very raw compared to the one song that they had heard. The song got to number one in Australia, which... At that time, might as well have been the moon to most Americans, but it was number one somewhere. And if you could be number one somewhere, you could be number one anywhere. Suddenly we were shuttled around the world, and Debbie's image was everywhere. and most people saw what she looked like before they heard the music. When we first went to England, everybody just went physically nuts at our shows. It was so exciting. And all of a sudden, everybody wanted to sign punk bands. There was a huge buzz on the talking heads. In fact, Joey Ramone was the first person to tell me about them. And I went down at CB's, and I'm standing out there, and all of a sudden I hear... when my love stands next to your love. You know, and I said, what is this? This music was so hypnotic. I was being sucked into the room. Then I ran up after they were over. They had no crew, they had nothing. And I helped Tina, this beautiful young girl, you know, take the stuff off the stage. I said, you have to be on my label. 77 is actually a landmark year for CBGB. The punk scene gets a lot of attention. Not only the local press, the New York press or the American press, but the world press came to CBGB right away. We had as many There were only 600 people inside CBG before Ramon showed. Somehow, you used to see like two or three layers of people. People standing on the ground, then people standing on chairs, then people standing on the railings. So it's like, you know, the barrier is on fire. 1977 is the seminal year. It opened up a whole new world of music to people and it opened the eyes of an industry that needed the new Elvis and then comes along this collection of people in this small venue and they're creating change. Obviously, we need more police on the streets. Tonight, an ABC News poll shows Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo are running neck and neck among the candidates for mayor. It appears this is fast becoming a two-horse race. How many people here are voting for Mario Cuomo? Raise your hand. Nobody? How many people here are voting for Ed Koch? I do! Yay! Cuomo, New York's Secretary of State, is the hand-picked candidate of the governor. Mario Cuomo's the governor's little boy. Say it again. Say it again. Cuomo jokes about being prepared for a TV talk show. I make a man look at me and he says, I take this as a personal challenge. Mario Cuomo was the young, vigorous guy from Queens who now says to Ed Koch, he's not married, he's from Greenwich Village, so who do you think he is? It was during that campaign, of course, that the Vote for Cuomo, not the Homo flyer started. appearing all over the city, although no one ever got Ed Koch to come out publicly, even to this day. But it was the low point of homophobia in New York City politics. It was a scurrilous campaign, and there were lots of people. who believed I was gay and voted for me, lots of people who didn't believe I was gay who voted for me, and most people didn't care, and my attitude was, fuck them. There's been mudslinging from both the Koch and Cuomo camps, and with only weeks left until the primary, anything could happen. Good evening. Early this morning, the.44 caliber killer tried to kill again, and almost did. The killer has taunted authorities by writing two letters. Both were signed, Son of Sam. One for the police, the other to jail. Jimmy Breslin, the popular columnist for the New York Daily News. I'm home Friday morning, and Anne-Marie Caggiano from the New York Daily News, where I work, she called up to say, we've got a letter here and I don't like it. And it gives me... me to creeps. I said, well, what does it say? It says it's from a guy's son of Sam, she says. I hear about Reeder. It's creepy. He says hello from the gutters of the city of New York and the sidewalks with the cracks and the dried blood and the da-da-da-da-da. I says, wow, that's great cadence. So they got the letter and they looked at it and the police headquarters said, sure enough, it had a fingerprint on it that matched the fingerprint they had on another letter. The Daily News on its front page, teased the fact that, you know, on Sunday, Jimmy Breslin is gonna come in with his column on his communication from Son of Sam. So the Daily News sort of milked it for all it's worth. And meanwhile, the New York Post is going nuts. So it was a tabloid war for the Son of Sam story, which certainly only heightened the city's sense of fear. JIMMY BESLIN, It didn't really touch my neighborhood. It didn't really come uptown. Son of Sam wasn't hanging at Harlem. Yeah, well, he didn't come to our neighborhood. That's for sure. First of all, we would have smoked his ass in a minute. That's first thing. So we would have saved the cops. We would have saved the cops a lot of manpower. Every neighborhood had its, like, neighborhood flavor. I mean, in the Bronx, in the summertime, you knew what was happening. The sprinklers was open. Kids was playing, you know what I mean, in the street. Basketball games and basketball talks. and picnics and just like every other place, but it was in parks. We did a lot of free parties. Echo Park, Arthur Park, 1A Third Street Park. One particular day, we were playing. myself and my DJ partner Disco Wiz out in the park in the Bronx. Cash and I were challenged to a battle, to a street DJ battle. Just like any other day, we were in 183rd Street in the park between Violent Time and Raya. So we kind of hot-wired the street like, you know, like we always did and got the juice, got the party going and everything. So we come on, right, so we ready, you know what I mean, to put the turntable. Got my records ready. I put the first record on and I know that as soon as people hear this, they're gonna go wild. Wow, so boom, energy is flowing, record is going, right? I grab the next record, I bring it in. The lights start going out. The street lights along the street start going out. One at a time, like in a row. Poof, poof, poof. We just looked at each other. Wow, did we do this? I mean, because we were jacked up to a street lamp, you know what I mean? I was home, sitting here, watching television. Bingo. All the lights go off, television goes off. I go up to the roof, look out. Darkness. I'm 12 years old. I'm watching Bewitch on television. And... The lights go out. I thought it was just us. Because that's a common occurrence. I looked outside and everything was black. On the night of the blackout, my friend Cheech was visiting. Cheech from Cheech and Chong, you know. And I got a call. The lights went out. I said, come on, let's go up to the Bronx. I'm covering the story. Oh, I was in the middle of a blow job with a client at Caesar's Retreat, and all the power went out. It was July 13, 1977. New York was at the beginning of what would become a brutal 10-day heat wave where temperatures were daily over 100. Con Ed says the blackout was triggered when severe lightning knocked out transmission lines that connected Indian Point, the state's main... main power grid to the city. With those lines down and with demand for power unusually high because of a heat wave, other generating plants, unable to handle the load, began cutting themselves off. It took only minutes before it was all over. New York had been disconnected from the nation's electric system. The first reality check was a bodega right across the street from where we were playing. The gate went down. So, so... All pandemonium broke, and people just started screaming, blackout. And then you heard, like, bottles breaking and people just running, and we were, like, stuck out there with all this equipment. And to be out there in the blackout, you were primed, you know what I mean? You were primed for the picking. Everybody was like, hit the stores. It was like, hit the stores! And everybody just started running all at once. Some started running towards us. Me and Wiz, we had other ideas. Okay, we pull out the guns, we like, no, no, run that way, okay? Don't run this way, run that way. Wiz stayed with the equipment and I proceeded around the corner because there was an electronics store, the sound room, and they had DJ equipment in there. And this is my first time admitting this, telling this story, but yes, I did sneak in there, help crash the gate down. and crawl in and pull out a Clubman to make some... Okay. But like I said, couldn't just say, I'm gonna be a DJ. You needed equipment. And that's all I really, you know, wanted. I wasn't trying to lose... everything I could find. Before that blackout, we had literally just maybe four or five legitimate DJ crews. The next day, the very next day, it sprung this whole revolution of DJs. That was a huge... spark and a huge contribution to the hip-hop culture. The rest of the city had other things on their mind. Supermarkets, department stores, banks, check cashing places, jewelry stores, everything. The morale The police department was very low because there had been layoffs and pay freezes. So when they got the call to start showing up for work the night of the blackout, a lot of them were not inclined to do so. Now guys are starting to come in. We're all in uniform. We're all sitting around. And the door flies open. And this guy comes in. What the F is going on? They're walking away with my... store the CEO hears this and he comes out he says who you he says I'm the commanding officer you're the commanding officer well command something he says they're walking away with Broadway so we take streets to get up to Broadway there was thousands Thousands of people in the street carrying chairs, carrying refrigerators, carrying TVs. How are we going to arrest all these people? So I says, let's get the cars over here. Take what we can take and the rest of it, you know, the hell with it. We're putting two and three guys in the back seat. We're putting televisions in the trunks. We're putting televisions in the back seat on their laps. Sometimes we're putting two guys in the trunk. Closing the trunk and transporting him to the precinct. Guys were making arrests left and right and there were shots being fired. We were firing back, you know, wherever we would see a flash, boom, we open up in that direction. saying we need more ammo and the words were no longer out of my mouth then here comes emergency service they start throwing us boxes of ammo hundreds of rounds and we're loading up and the exchange of gunfire continued Getting on top of a bus, I started yelling to the crowd. I said, the world is watching and cool down. Everybody's got to go home. The lights will be on soon. Everything's going to be OK. I never figured that even as hard on its luck as New York was at the veneer of civilization. was that thin, that people who were marginal people, or even in their regular lives law-abiding people, suddenly became this crowd of anarchists in it for themselves. The Jekyll and Hyde personality came out, and people that you would never expect to house. housewives, some of them. I mean, not all, by any means, minorities either. I'm bugging out because church-going, upstanding citizens, the ones you know are teachers and doctors and in the community, they are now reduced to looters, thieves, and rioters. I was shocked. I was afraid. I was frightened at the second Sound of glass breaking, cars screeching, guns going off, and get away from my door. When it was all over, I said to myself, my God, how many bodies are they going to find? They didn't find a single body, not one. They talk about the riots, but the fact of the matter is very few people were killed. if any, were killed during that time. People weren't turning that violence outward toward... They were doing violence to property. And they were doing violence to property specifically because they had problems with the people that owned the property. Most people went to bed... ...at night really not knowing what was happening around them. So people woke up the next morning and I think there was this sense of shock. The power was still out. And the other problem was that the police had arrested thousands of people. And there was nowhere to put them. They had to open the tombs, I remember. A prison that had been closed for many years. And people were getting bitten by rats and stuff. Because that place had been closed for so long. what's going on my mother sat me down she said son when there is no light man is reduced to animal i began to look at people deeper than what they were showing me on the outside at age 12. it's when it's when i became a man People's actions, you know, were brought on by their conditions. The message to the city is that we need help here. We're doing bad. There's nothing here for us. There's no jobs, housing, you know, healthcare, nothing. You know what I mean? We're at the end of our rope. We are just surviving by a threat. July 14th, New York City, early morning. It was a night of no electric power, a night of no lights, elevators, subway trains, air conditioning, traffic signals, or televisions. What the city did have in the dark streets was a wild outburst of crime, arson, looting, mugging, and a thousand false fire alarms. I think it's really disgusting, you know? It makes you really want to throw up when you look at what's happened. And we gotta live here. There's no place for us to go. Take out everything I lost, all my money. I worked about ten years for this. I lost everything. I can't talk, Ligato. Everything is gone, everything. The cops were inadequate, didn't have enough of them, and I urged Mayor Bean to ask for the National Guard, and I meant it. I don't think you should... should be able to destroy the property of other people with impunity. Particularly the people who lived in Brooklyn who owned stores. They were poor themselves. As New Yorkers get ready to vote, Mayor Abraham Beam is in big trouble. I know that I'm not usually known for any public exhibitions of temper, but I want you to know I'm damned angry. A. Beam is an incompetent... The president's mayor should never be re-elected, and he can't run a second-class candy store, and that's the way he's run New York City. That election came to be seen, I think, as an election for the soul of the city in the future, because there was this whole feeling that the people that ran the city had lost completely any control they may have had. Mr. Mayor, what should have happened here if police saw looters in this man's store right in front of them? What should they have done? done obviously one would answer that they should have arrested the person but i think we ought to find out what the answer was well this man was here what happened the police said stay outside let them take what they want you'll get hurt you had the feeling that if the lights went out again that everything you had was up for grabs your your possessions your family your the sanctity of your space and Koch was ruthless in his perception of the anxiety that New Yorker suffered and his prescription for fixing it. How am I doing? I need your help. Yes. Am I going to get your help? Yes. Thank you. Look at where we agreed. One, the death penalty. The Son of Sam issue rises to the top in the summer, as does the blackout. The city is gripped with crime. It has these extraordinary events. And it was really at that point that Koch became the death penalty candidate for mayor. That's when he seized on it and he would whisper to people, I have to do it. It's the only way. way I can get in. In the tight race, Koch has taken a narrow lead and gained the endorsement of the New York Post and Daily News, while Mayor Beam, suffering a dramatic dip in approval after the blackout, struggles to bring calm to a city in turmoil. The people of this city know and understand that we can improve the quality of life here in our city. We had soaring murder rates. We had a city that was really gripped with every form. And, you know, the quality of life violations would never even occur to anybody. The quality of life was supposed to be violated. Ice swingers, where Larry and Mary, corner of Plato's Retreat. Only on-premise swing club in New York. We're a couples-only private charter club. On our premises, we have three separate air-conditioned swing rooms, two whirlpools, disco music, and a lounge area with sofas and pillows. There is absolutely no pressure at our club. Larry Levinson created Plato's Retreat. He was a slob. He was a these, them, and those kind of dummy of a guy. He and his wife at the time had little swing parties. It was in the air privately, and somehow they parlayed that into a public club. The first... so-called swing club and soon to become the most successful one ever. You might go to Plato's retreat and you'd look into the orgy room and there'd be literally a hundred people, a sea of naked bodies having sex. This was at the height of the disco era, so Plato's was indeed like a disco. Plato's retreat was like Studio 54 in the sense that it was also cost-free. No AIDS, no addiction, no law enforcement interference. Sex is good, sex is great, sex with anonymous strangers allows you to fulfill fantasies that only a multi-millionaire might otherwise be able to. I would go to Plato's Retreat and everyone went there for the sex. Sometimes a coke, I wasn't a big drug user, but I went there for the buffet. Very good buffet. I personally liked the buffet better than sex at Plato's Retreat. I think people were really interested in sex. Sexual exploration. And seeing 200 couples having sexual intercourse on the big mattress, it was paradise. It was sex at its best, and I was part of it. Larry Levinson, what made you organize, originate? Plato's retreat. Couples that want to be free-thinking, free-living adult couples, they don't believe in monogamous relationships, they would rather get involved with other people, but together with their spouses. You do it in public view, and you mix it up with strangers. Isn't there something very sick about that? It's certainly not sick. It is a victimless activity. Why is that? I find it revolting. In 1977, you had maybe 10,000 to 15,000 riders just blasting all over the city. You had every train covered with the most beautiful murals. Be cleaned and the ones that are caught should be cleaned. They should clean it, the ones that they catch are doing that. What's the sense of paying 75 cents when you have to ride your 3D trains, you know? Violation of public robbery. I think it's disgusting. Because we get... by the queen of the damn place we move three and a half million people a day they have rights too i think a lot of the artistic expression became ultimately destructive and i think graffiti is a good example of that that people would not go in subway cars that were marked up because there was a fear of lawlessness and I think it added to the paranoia. In 1977 I was 20 years old and I became king of the subways because I actually did more trains than anyone else. Anytime a train would go by at least twice on a 10 car train my name would be on it both sides. The basic graffiti message is you know look at me I'm famous. And this game is carried on first and foremost amongst your peers. You know, you sign your name and you're underlining. That underlining is your statement of, I was here. Writing was getting up. Getting up meant your mural traveled the city. So that's getting up. Just like hip-hop, man. Did people know that they made elaborate sketches before going out to do it? And that they, you know, blew these things up, projected them onto the trains in their minds, and did them on the trains in the dark with the proportion. portions all correct on this huge canvas. You wake up, you know, the parents are asleep, 2 in the morning you actually slip out of the house, go out and you would go inside the tunnel, everything is pitch, pitch dark and you can see what you're doing but it's very, it's very dim. You actually get a feel for being in that environment and you can't see anything but you can still create something like this that's like Flawless in the dark, even though at any moment you can get pinched by the cops coming from any direction So you have to be alert all the time what they learned Was how exciting it was to get your piece up and to see it ride But then they learned that if they didn't do it over and over again. They just disappear So you had to be dedicated. I knew that I wanted to create and I needed to have the tools to do that. And I guess more frightening to me was actually getting paint. And at that time we were all advanced as kids. We were advanced in the... guerrilla warfare tactics. And you would steal spray paint. You'd flip your Lee or your Wrangler Jackal over your shoulder. At the time, the baby diapers had the big safety pins. It was none of that pampering stuff. You put the safety pin in the center of the sleeve... and then you would fill the sleeves up with spray cans and it just looks like you're carrying your jacket over your arm. So, of course, you would get six cans of paint, three in each sleeve, and you would do that, and at the end of the day, you still had 20 or 30 cans of paint, and you could go nuts all summer. They're saying that the kids run the subways, that the system is out of control, and that graffiti is a symbol of that. No, I ain't running the system. Hell yeah. I'm bombing the food. Wow, you know, how is this all coming out in a city that's so corrupt and broke and there's this beautiful thing coming out. So I was fascinated by that and that's why I rode my cars to watch people walking into the cars or people walking out, you know, or maybe from the... of their eyes like looking over and peeking from the wall you know from their journal or the times and just like oh you know they were like in this secretive festivity you know like watching this stuff and being being part of a of a of a celebration my car is i call call them celebrations. Even though we had the city fathers struggling against it, portrayants would pull into the station and people would applaud. You know, it was just something, there would be some really great pieces, but there's always a big, you know, debate on what's art and what should be where. Well, I love Warhol's phrase, art is anything you can get away with. I love that. Gun, against the grain attitude definitely appealed to me it's one for the brains two for the triple grand master cash on the level somebody say my recollection of hip-hop was coming from the parties they used to throw in the parks. Those parties were good for the time that they were there, but then the problem happened. You got the little stick-up kids started running around at that time. Gangs and gunshots, and people didn't want to party in the parks anymore because somebody was always winding up getting hurt. To bring the whole sound system out to the street, you had to have a lot of moxie and a lot of balls, you know what I'm saying, and a lot of backup because you can get your stuff taken completely at any time, and a lot of people did get their stuff taken. A lot of people got their parties shot up. All right, man when the fever came about and we decided well, let's take hip-hop from the street bring it indoors provide security providing and controlled environment and See where it goes from there. God knows we never thought it would blow up like it did the fever is the last Untold story of hip-hop all the rappers have a story in the fever Russell Simmons story Curtis blows Mr. Magic Grandmaster flash Heavy D did his first show that run the MC did their first show their beastie boy all got their first break at the Fever. Whoa, Bugstar G at the Disco Fever every Monday night. Shake a vibe. Right about now, Notorious 2. Like this, ha! My father went and opened up a club for me in 76. The grand opening was Disco Fever, and my father wound up putting a white DJ in the club. And he wasn't working out. But I noticed every time this other DJ leaves and G gets on, the crowd is just. picking up. Now the night's supposed to be ending, but the energy level of the crowd is picking up. And he's rhyming over the records. And I'm like, what the hell is he doing? When Si was there and he heard that, he looked up again and was like, what the heck was that? And then he saw the reaction from the crowd, like everybody, ho, ho, ho. You know, they started jumping and everything. He was like, what's going on here? I had my dentist come in there. He's a white guy. And then I had a. lawyer and then I had a pimp and then I had a hooker and then I had a drug dealer and then I had a bank robber. But at that point they were all as one. Nobody was thinking about nobody as anything different. Who had more money, less money? Who was more dangerous? Who wasn't? Who was afraid? Who wasn't afraid? At that point, everybody was just having a good time because of this rhyming over the music. I said. G, who's the biggest DJs around? G told me the Grandmaster Flash is playing at the park. And Flash is scratching, he's turning around with his elbows, and he gets up with his feet, he's scratching with his feet, and he blindfolds himself. He was just unbelievable. So I said, this guy's like a show with himself. And I approached Flash about playing in the club. And I said, look, you come here, I'm going to guarantee you become a star. Because you're going to have a place where people can come. come see you every week on a weekly basis. So here it is. It's going to be the first Hip Hop Night. Grandmaster Flash at the Fever on a Tuesday. I only had five days of advertisement. Made little bullshit paper flyers. And this guy, 600 people show up. And the gimmick was a dollar to get in, a dollar a drink. And. And we ran that night. I mean, we ran around like chickens without a head, but it was such a big thing. And the kids got the word out, and it just blossomed from there. Now everybody's talking about it. Holy shit, the Fever's packed. There's a million people over there. But it was teenagers, you know? And we knew we could pack the kids in. And when we started allowing them to come in with sneakers, that was it. 600 people to get there next week. And then it was just every weekend. And then I started, I had to make more revenue We needed bouncers because it was getting wild and it was too many people. So when I came up, I was the first one to do it. A dollar to get in, because I didn't want to change the dollar, but $5 for sneakers. But everybody wanted sneakers. But if you wore shoes, you got it for a buck. And back in that time, drugs was hot. Cocaine, dust, angel dust was real prevalent. We knew people were gonna do it. But we provided a safety system for the people that came up there. We had a little red light buzzer system that set up in the cashier booth downstairs, which flashed in the DJ booth, which the DJ would... When he saw that, he knew to say Code Blue. And everybody had gotten accustomed to when Code Blue was said, that means the police are coming upstairs. It was just like a speakeasy, the old speakeasies back in the 20s. So when that light went off, the DJ, no matter what he was doing, he could be in the middle of a wraparound. or whatever he knew that light go off code blue code blue everything would disappear if it was on the tables or whatever somebody was doing it in the corner it was gone not only that the police department loved us too because we took five six hundred kids off the streets put them inside of a building and control environment so if they were looking for somebody to stuck somebody up what would they do they come up to the club and look around to see if they could find them Grandmaster Flash, who got discovered at the fever, just got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And you know what? That says it all. A killer who has roamed the boroughs of New York for the past year has struck again. The killer's eighth attack in just over a year came on this lonely street in Brooklyn. Police poured over the car where the young couple was shot. Two witnesses say the gun... walked up to the car, crouched, then fired four shots through an open window. He was covered with blood. The girl was covered with blood. It was a horror. This guy screaming, just screaming and screaming. We always looked at some summonses that were issued in the general area where the crime was committed. It so happened in Brooklyn, when Moskowitz gets murdered, we started looking at the summonses again. When we do, we find a double-par summons issued by a hydrant to a car registered up in Yonkers. So they checked the ticket out, and it was to a David Berkowitz, Pine Street, Yonkers, New York. So they call up the Yonkers, and the Yonkers police said, that guy's a pain in the neck. We've had a lot of trouble with him. So now everybody's antenna gets raised. They stake out the car. Berkowitz comes out of his apartment house. He approaches the car. They go over to him. They identify themselves and he says, well, you got me. I'm the son of Sam. He admitted it right then and there. This is the man police say is the 44 caliber killer. Young, dark haired, almost chubby. They found hundreds of rounds of ammunition and two more guns, including a machine gun. said Berkowitz planned to use in his next attack, which they said was planned for a Long Island disco. In the end, it was something as simple as his $25 parking ticket that led police to the killer. Which leads to the joke that in New York, you can get away with murder as long as you don't park at a fire hydrant. He wore a fake smile as police moved him around the city today from arrest to booking to court, finally to a mental... award and i'll never forget i was in a club that night the night he got caught and i couldn't believe the joy of how everybody was hugging and crying and i mean guys strange all hugging and kissing each other it was like the biggest relief and celebration and then it was all uphill after that you It's 3 a.m. this September morning and still at Studio 54. people crowd the doors hoping to get in. Studio 54 became, in 1977, this unbelievable island where nothing mattered other than status and feeling good. Nothing. Most places you could expect to just at least get in. With Studio 54, there was this big crowd of people standing around outside who couldn't get in. And so that made it a bit more exclusive if you did get in. Oh, you're not shaved. There's no way anyone else is going to get in. And that's... It doesn't matter if you're not shaving. Listen, just go home. Nobody knew with Steve at the door what was the trick. He would just pick them up randomly. He would stand at the door and people would, Steve, Steve! And he would pick somebody and then take their $20 and put it in his pocket and send them past the gate where they would actually pay to get in. One night there was a couple that had just married and they were in a honeymoon and they had decided to go to the studio. He decided that he could go in, but she wouldn't. And he walked in and left her outside. I mean, it was like crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. Plain God. Once you got in, and it wasn't anything that was spoken, but it was the sense you got that everybody thought they were special because they were able to go to Studio 54. And that bothered me. The idea that I'm better than anybody else because I'm here. And look at me, I'm standing next to Liza Minnelli. Or look at me, aren't I wonderful? I'm here with all these people. And it was something that I think they encouraged because it made them an extraordinary amount of money. There was some party and we drove over to Studio 54 and we all climbed out and they wouldn't let us in. That was where it was Debbie, Harry, it was me, you know, you think they'd let Blondie in, you know. I never went to Studio 54 that much. It was all about, you know, rich people. Bianca Jagger and all that stupid crap. The Velvet Rope Syndrome just became the norm after a while. You know, we tended to stay downtown. I see nips on pottage, so they wave you in when we can't go. I guess we're just interested to see what's going on. It's a fascinating place, I must say. It's probably one of the most interesting places in New York. The CBGB is like, it's getting worse because there's a lot of... People coming here want the right kind of people, you know? And like, not the old crowd, like the new crowd. 77 at CBGB's, the bands were complete opposite reactions to the disco period studios. 54s and that stuff, but once everything got going, it just became pop music all over again. I mean, the Ramones, Dunkin'Heads, Blondie, Richard Hell. I think they got better with their commercialization. You know, it became a business. And for record companies, their job is to be in business. This was a time when the British were getting involved in coming over and seeing what was going on at CBGB's and feeding it back with their own take on it. The Sex Pistols were getting unbelievable attention in Britain because everyone found them so shocking. And they went on the Bill Grundy show and said the word fuck. And then they did their tour of the US, you know, cities. It was getting beat up, and there was always blood, and this is what the press grabbed onto, and this is what became known as punk rock. There was a lot of trepidation in the American music industry and in the radio. We had to really sell ourselves. And a lot of it just had to do with their expectations of what punk was, you know? Punk had bad connotations. So I tried to come up with a different phrase than punk. And because New York had been rather dormant in the years before all this action started taking place on the Bowery, I called it the new wave. One way or another. Yeah. I remember hearing some of our music on the radio for the first time. It was a thrill, and there were lots of moments like that. One of the songs was a hit, or hearing one of the songs went number one or something like that. It was all these high points. Debbie, she had a great commercial voice. And I remember them saying, you're really going to be a... I was amazed when you see us on stage at Madison Square Garden. And I was thinking, okay, I know I like this, but I wasn't thinking that. And sure enough, they got there, you know. Blondie had it. The Talking Heads are another real example. The most imaginative, interesting music played by people whose imaginations at the time even exceeded their ability to execute it. But it didn't matter, and they made hit records. We had just finished our best album, Rocket to Russia, and we went on tour. We thought this was going to be the record to break us. We do two European tours. 151 shows is what I call the beginning of the nonstop world tour. We did an incredible show in Stockholm, Sweden, where the audience tore out the first two rows of seats. And when I heard that, I said, oh my God, you know, we're getting famous. 1977 was a fabulous year for Sire Records because we were in the right place at the right time. It just got better and better and better. This is not just a fluke. This plays on the Bowery called CBG. G.B.'s continues, you know? By the end of 1977, punk rock took off around the world. It was a moment that I don't think will ever exist again in New York City, and that's probably a good thing. It was almost like Rome was burning, and you wanted to get in your last lay before the walls fell down. Tuesday, September 20. At election day, New Yorkers had to slog through torrential rains to vote, and the man they elected mayor, Ed Koch, got 55% of the vote. Koch served three terms. He really did an excellent job. He saved... the city. I did bring the city back to fiscal stability and I gave the city back its spirit so the people who lived here are once again proud of being New Yorkers. We have been tested but we have survived and soon we will begin again to flourish. We are the city of New York and New York in adversity. towers above any other city in the world. So the city has changed, but 1977 was a very, very pivotal year. A lot of what we see in music and popular culture now, the seeds were sown back in that period. There's something about these moles. where everything seems so sort of dark and everything seems to be decaying, that that's often when kind of great art is born. You need a catalyst, and I think that the Ramones were a great catalyst, and the Talking Heads and... and, you know, Blondie, that whole early group of artists. All these groups were important because they laid the foundation for what was to become punk rock, alternative music, new wave. Now it's indie. At the end of the 77th, Saturday Night Fever came out. Being such a popular movie, it took that concept of disco and made it mainstream. And that's when really all these record companies started signing, you know, anybody that could sing. You know, the Avon lady had a disco record. And it's... sign her and put her out and throw all this money at her. The public by and large was just beat over the head with it to the point where people just couldn't take it anymore. It seemed to accelerate and then disintegrate at the same time. It was like all this disco, disco, disco and then anti-disco. What came out of it dying was house music. You know when you got people like Madonna doing a house record, everywhere in the world house music is pop. Well, basically, I didn't think hip-hop was gonna last. It's, what, 2007 now, and it's still here and growing stronger? Hip-hop has done a lot for our people. And when I mean our people, I mean, you know, minorities in general. Imagine a world without hip-hop right now. You know, imagine if this world never occurred. I mean, we'd all be breakdancing to bluegrass music. I mean... Who knows? I mean, right? It's something that just the constellations were aligned the right way. Physically, the city today is such a changed place. We've seen over the years those empty lots are now decent housing and something was changing in the communities in which crime is so prevalent. And some of the credit for that should go to those communities themselves and how they got themselves together. If you go to the Bronx or even the West Side, the Lower East Side, half of Brooklyn, buildings that were abandoned by landlords in 1977 are now... Yuppie condos with the views that are selling for hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. Living in New York now, you feel safe. The city is cleaner than it's ever been. But it feels a little bit dull. It's Indianapolis is all it is. There's no life to this. I want to see whores on 42nd Street. I had enough of this. People coming in from the... You don't even know what a whore looks like. From the suburbs. From the suburbs to see the Lion King. I liked the city better when it was sleazy. I don't think big cities should be safe for women and children and families. It's just not good for the arts, you know? It all becomes fucking real estate after a while.

In 1977, we had soaring murder rates. We had a city that was really gripped with every form of crime. The city was dirty.

It was experiencing an epidemic. of arson, it was covered in graffiti. The city was so broke that city services had been cut back profoundly. They laid off 5,000 cops.

They closed firehouses. They laid off thousands of teachers. Nobody knew from day to day whether the Big Apple would be...

become the bankrupt Apple. You had to really hold on to your purse. There was an element of danger.

But it was also wonderfully sleazy. Times Square wasn't Disney World. It was prostitution and pimps.

You know, it was great. It was like the Wild West. And it didn't cost anything to fucking live here.

1977 was the year of the 25-hour citywide blackout that led to massive looting and, in fact, the largest mass arrest in the city's history. and New York City went through one of the most contentious mayoral elections in 1977. And it came to be seen as an election for the soul of the city in the future. People were confused, disillusioned, afraid. All of these emotions were spawning all kinds of music.

That was the year that disco exploded in New York. Back in 77, we took hip hop from the South Bronx, brought it into the club. We never thought it would blow up like it did. Yeah, 1977 was a big year for punk rock.

There was a buzz at CBGB's. Everybody wanted to sign punk bands. It was no coincidence that during this period of really kind of ultimate decay for New York. It was an incredibly exciting place to be. It was free.

It was open. You felt like you could do anything you wanted. Most people thought that New York City's great days were over. My attitude was, fuck them. Koch came through 123rd Street.

And they were selling reefer so fast and so crazy till they was trying to sell him a bag. It was open-air supermarkets. 77. Was the Bronx burning? Well, the Bronx wasn't burning. The Bronx was burnt.

I mean it was deteriorating like at a rapid pace man. I mean so fast whole areas was just wiped out man. Gangs really controlled areas and a lot of times things would happen and the police wouldn't even show up. The gangs gave kids this sense of cohesion in what was otherwise, for many of them, a completely chaotic world. Most of the people's parents, they were struggling.

They were broke. You know, they had two jobs or no job, or they were strung out themselves on drugs. So a lot of these kids were monitoring their own life. And they were going to high school, and they were out, you know. They were on their own, basically.

And the only positive thing we had was music. Hip-hop, I believe, came about as a culture because there was a fairly substantial group of young people in African-American and Latino communities that felt that there was nothing there for them. school system, because of the fiscal crisis at that time, had abandoned most music programs throughout the city.

You know, you couldn't belong to a marching band in your high school if your high school didn't have one. You couldn't go to a rec center if you didn't have a rec center. We didn't have a school system. We something that really belonged to us, you know. Everybody had their own movement, you know, and 77 was actually a breakout showcase year for hip-hop.

I went to a band party, and I was totally blown away. Something about seeing that music channeled out that way. Definitely appealed to me.

You would follow the vibration of the music and you would arrive at the block party. You would see some people doing graffiti writing on the wall, live. And there would be people with cardboard boxes out there.

doing b-boying. The center of the party would be the DJ. Early on, of course, you had people like Hollywood and Chief Rockabizzy B and Lovebug Starsky, but Afrika Bambaataa is the godfather of hip-hop.

Come down, baby I came out of the street gang movement that we had at the time which was called the Black Spades. In my area of the Browns River Houses we had a center where I used to play music in the many of the youth stuff. feeling the energy of these DJs, these breakers. So I went out there and started transforming the street gangs into something positive. And it was the culture called hip hop.

It comes out of the gang culture. gets an epiphany and begins to organize in his community. Afrika Bambaataa did an unbelievable job with, you know, getting all the youth and the gangs together to try to not be violent, to do it through music.

The party that he gave resonated throughout the neighborhood and then soon throughout the Bronx. From then on, that's all I wanted to do. Kaz actually took the initiative, you know what I mean, and told me, listen, man, you know, do this with me, you know what I mean?

And once I got behind the turntables, it was something that was overwhelming, something that actually took over. In 77, if you were a DJ, you had to have your own sound system. I don't mean like you just put your records under your arm and just...

Oh no, you had to have the speakers and the amplifiers and the turntables and everything. and you brought all that out to the park to play. You know, we were kids, you know, we were teenagers, and, you know, we really didn't have that kind of money.

I was lucky because I had a few dollars saved in the bank that my father had left me and I had to convince my mother once that, once I knew that this is what I wanted to do, hey ma, I need that money. You know what I mean? I found what I want to do. I don't want to go buy sneakers with it.

I don't want to go, I want to buy some DJ equipment. I want to be a DJ. We never would have had the ingenuity to plug ourselves in.

system up to a light pole. I don't think if we was in Omaha. You understand what I'm saying? We wouldn't have had the resources at hand, the mindset to say, yo, that's electric light, ain't it?

Look in that pole. Look in the bottom, man, and see if it's anything in there. You know what I mean?

Just takes that kind of mindset and ingenuity to say, OK, let's find something to make this work. We didn't have those big industrial extension cords now. We had them little nine, six foot, nine foot.

extension cord you had to plug one up to the other and we had to buy like 15 or 20 of them and run them all the way from the pole all the way into the park but that's what it took to keep the party going so that's what we did no one was watching us I mean the police weren't coming to the park to shutting our parties down I mean if you go to a park now and try to hotwire a street lamp and to a party you'll be shut down in five minutes I mean I mean they just were busy doing other things You know what I mean? And thank God for that. In 1977, New York City was a great place to be if you wanted to be wild and promiscuous.

For AIDS, you could fuck on stage in Times Square. There were literally 1,200 streetwalker prostitutes. from 34th Street to 50th Street and 8th Avenue.

The 42nd Street was a mess. You wouldn't take your wife and walk with your family on 42nd Street. You really wouldn't. Times Square was anything goes.

It was a neighborhood where hustlers intersected with tourists. And the tourists came out on the bottom end of that deal for sure. In Times Square, you had the Broadway theater, but you had side-by-side with that, porno establishments, massage parlors, some 200 of them all across 42nd Street. It was girls, girls, girls upstairs, take a ticket, take a ticket, you know. Black beauties, black beauties, check it out, check it out.

I went to a movie premiere called Deep Inside Annie Sprinkles. And the people were jumping up. I'm giving people standing ovations after sex scenes. When you went and saw porn, you saw it on a giant screen.

I mean, the penises were like 150 feet big, you know. Lots of bushy pussies. Men had pubic hair up to their navels. Times Square now compared to Times Square then is to go from, you know, something that was X-rated and dangerous to something now that's G-rated.

I don't think it's bad just because I saw how bad it was. The people of this city. No one understands the tremendous problems we had in the last three and a half years.

In 1977, New York City went through one of its most contentious mayoral primaries in its history. Several polls say any of the four candidates could make it. They are Bella Abzug, Mayor Beam, Mario Cuomo, or Congressman Koch.

Morning, everybody. I'm Ed Koch, running for mayor. At a televised debate the other night, someone threw a pie at Mayor Beam. Watch. I remember Abe Beam being probably the most ineffective mayor we ever had.

New Yorkers just didn't give a damn about him. In some ways, many New Yorkers didn't give a damn about the city because we felt that, you know, the city wasn't the city that... we knew it was a shell of its former self. It was really a moment when the city wanted someone who was going to kind of be tough and get tough and who was also going to lift the spirits of the city, lift the morale of the city. Mayor Abraham Beam is in big trouble.

His principle of... Opponent is the lady in the floppy hat Congresswoman Bella absurd one of the things you have to know about all the polls They not only show that I'm leading but they also show that of all the candidates only one person has been regarded by them as a leader Bella Abzug was charismatic. She was New York with that hat and that accent and the flamboyant gestures.

But now you have a situation where the city's going to hell in a handbasket, the country doesn't care, and could Bella Abzug lead the city out of such a grim and dark period? The... problems that we shared during the day we came together in the evening to overcome together or to get away from together or to escape together and one of the ways that we came together was on the disco dance floor in 1977 disco came into the mainstream and it was an outgrowth of several factors that all came together at the same time.

One was the emancipation of gay people, which created an explosion in the gay community of clubs that were opening up, and the visibility of being an out gay person, which had been very clandestine, been very underground before that time. -I love you more and more, I love you more and more... It really does all start with David VanCusel's love. It wasn't a bar, it was just his home. And he was having parties there every Saturday night.

The first time I saw David VanCusel, he's in this dark booth and all you see are his eyes and his beard and his hair. And so it actually looked like Jesus was in there playing records. In the front of the room by the front windows and stuff like that, he kept a Christmas tree.

up year round with presents and toys and stuff like that and there was a rocking horse and stuff like that underneath it to kind of make people always feel like you know it was christmas every time you came in because it really did the loft started on broadway at great Jones. And in 1977, Soho was a vast wasteland. You know, people would look at you like, what are you, crazy? You're not talking about going down to Prince Street or going down to Crosby Street.

Going to the law for the first time, I was 16. I had rough times at home. And so I got out of the Bronx and straight to Manhattan. There's always one person that feels like the odd man out or the odd girl out, if you will. You feel like the black sheep or you're told you're the black sheep. You feel alone to a certain degree.

Well, that's the way I felt until I went to the law, and I realized that there were more people in the world just like me. And so it made me completely comfortable. It was the first time I had actually just completely let everything go.

JOHN TULENKO, You had guys who were 15, 16 years old thrown out of their houses the day they had the guts enough to tell their parents that they were gay. Well, where did those people have to go? The one place where those people had to go was the law, where they were accepted for who they were.

DERRICK GARCIA, Just the freedom, it spoke volumes about who and what I was. And that was it. I was hooked. The winter of 77 was when the Paradise Garage first started.

The garage was having construction parties to raise money to build the place. Saw this on the floor in the small room and the speakers piled up and so forth. That's when, you know, the first...

parties began. But you know, that's what everybody was into then. However raw the space was, the better, you know.

All you needed really in it was a sound system and a couple of lights. And there was a big snowstorm and it was so cold and I saw people. Swarming down 7th Avenue. I mean, you knew where they were going.

The heating wasn't together, but you would be on the dance floor, and it would be 100 degrees. People would be sweating like pigs. And 20 degrees in this hallway that was less than 10 feet away. That was the beginning of Paradise Garage. And obviously, it was still the underground scene.

Garage was a little bit different from the loft because as it began to expand into the straight community it began bringing in a much wider variety of people. People always ask me what made the garage the most incredible club and I said because it was a place where black, white, straight and gay came together and if people can dance together they can live together. The Lower East Side was really scary.

It was bombed out. You've got to remember, 1977, you know, was a time and a place. And New York City, on the Lower East Side, I mean, there were burned out buildings that they just left that looked like...

You know, these facades of destroyed ruins in Germany at the end of World War II. It was a part of town that was considered very undesirable. It was crime-ridden, you know, it was full of drug dealers and drug users.

And we liked it that way. You know, it was great. It was like the Wild West.

And it didn't cost anything to fucking live here. And people would come, and they'd run away from home. They'd run away from, like, Ohio or someplace, and their parents would call, and we'd have to say, yeah, yeah, your kid was here, you know, because they'd find it in a diary. I am moving to New York City.

I'm going to go to CBGB's. None of us ever fit in. We were never, like, Miss Popularity at school.

We were all a bunch of misfits. Because we weren't the guys wearing macrame or sandals or, you know, saying groovy. You know, we're punks. Punk was becoming a scene around the same time that disco was reaching its apex.

But you'd be coming out of the loft and suddenly you see a bunch of people coming in another direction. And it's like, wow, what club are they coming out of? And you realize it's another group of people going to another space. I started hanging around down at CBGB's because there was a buzz around that that things were starting to happen.

CB's was just like going into somebody's crummy basement and there were big stuffed you know easy chairs and Hilly had these dogs that would crap all around and it was very very funky. Hilly Krista was the man that owned CBGB's he basically was I won't call him a failed country and western singer but he was a pseudo he wanted to be a country and western singer. I figured I gotta have something that stands for what I want to do, which was CBGB, Country Bluegrass Blues, and OMFEG, and other music for uplifting gourmandizers. Hilly, they only had one rule about bands in CBGBs, was that they had to write their own songs. Because at that time, most bands up until then had played cover songs.

So it was always new, it was always interesting, it was always very different. It could be some crazy loud people the next night. It could be some experimental jazz people the next night. It's somebody with a fiddle and a tuba the next night.

It could be five loud guitars. You never knew what to expect. was looking for this kind of rawness and not you know trying to get away from the overproduced sounds and I don't know specifically I think every band had their own little direction 1977 me and my band Richard Hell and the Voidoids we were like the house band You know, I'd started in television back in 1974, and we spotted CBGB's first. The idea was to look for a venue that was bad enough off that they would let us play there, you know, on a regular basis.

You know, the Ramones were there within a month. Let's go, Jaguars! The downtown scene was vital to what actually became the Ramones.

And when we were playing CBGBs, none of us thought of it as a commercial endeavor. It was an artistic endeavor. I remember the first time I saw them play, they must have played like 16 songs in 12 minutes, and I didn't understand a word of what they had done. And the whole concept, it just went by so fast and so powerfully.

I thought it was like the SS. I mean, it really took your breath away. I mean, hey, ho, let's go.

Hey, you know, I mean, it was just like, and I looked around, and CBGB's was like this hellhole, ball-weary bar, and I said... This is the cavern, these are our Beatles, this is the future right here. When people saw us, they realized that what we were doing was making music from the way we felt rather than from necessarily virtuosity. So we went back to basics, so that people could think, oh, wait a minute, I could pick up an instrument and play too. This opened the doors for many people to pick up musical instruments and form bands.

Here she comes now. You know her. In 77, the people who went to CBGB's were mostly musicians.

One night television might be on the stage, but in the audience would be Blondie and the New York Dolls and the Talking Heads and the Miamis and the Ramones and so on. And then the next week... the Ramones would be on the stage and the Talking Heads would be among the other people in the audience.

So they were playing for each other and they were playing for people they knew. We were the most intense thing going on in the world for sure. Just full of life and ideas. At the same time, it was a dead end, little nowhere joint that was only known to a really devoted and intense three or four hundred people in New York who had these very specific extreme tastes. tend to look back in retrospect and say, you know, great bands were playing there.

Well, no, about eight bands were playing there. They got great later. You know, having had the place to be bad, they got good.

Went to CBGB's with Junebug, God bless. We went down there one time, one time, and I walked in there and looked around and I said, this ain't the place for us, man. It's like, have you ever been in a situation where everything looks like it stops and everybody just goes, and we went back to the same.

I'll tell you, we went back to the safety of the Bronx. It's the same energy, that punk movement and the hip-hop movement uptown. Punk was the next generation rockers saying, you know, that's too tame. or that's like our mom's music. And that's where the frenetic energy of punk came from.

At the same time, we took the hottest parts out of records that already existed and kind of pumped them up. And you know what I mean? That adrenaline that created hip hop up in the Bronx.

In 77, we went to this big rap show in the South Bronx. It was completely a new thing to me. There was no separation between the audience and the stage. Everybody was just, you know, running on stage and doing a few, you know, a few. lines and jumping back into the crowd.

It was just like so exciting. It was great. And I was the first to invite the punk rockers, the white people, who wasn't nervous to come to a black Latino area and party with the people.

Most people thought it was going to be chaos, racism, fights and everything. When we put that music on, the music took control and became universal and everybody just partied like we was partying on the mother. mother 77 is when hip-hop static coming into his own because at that time used to have the DJs battles in the parks with both groups will play at the same time and it'd be like a sound class and we ever had the loudest system with overruled.

In 77, you know, Wiz, he goes and he starts, you know, and gets, sets up a battle against Bambada. Now, it wasn't me, because Wiz is always the one like, yo, let's go battle them, yo, let's go get them. Let's go battle them. Back in those days when you DJed, you know, there was a lot of player hair.

There was a lot of animosity, you know what I mean? And they wanted to get at you, and they would talk a lot of trash. There was a lot of trash talking back in those days. I mean, that's part of hip-hop too, you know what I mean?

We come in there with the most equipment that we can find, pieced together, you know what I mean? Odds and ends, speakers, you know, from here and there and everything. And we think we're ready. We go in there.

So I have the nerve. to put on We Will Rock You by Queen. So I put it on and it comes on and it's like Doom doom cha, doom doom cha, doom doom cha, doom doom cha Audio rolling, making big noise, laying in the trees You know what I mean?

I'm like, like... Mr. Biggs, who was an emcee for Bambada, got on the mic and bellowed, Casanova, turn up your system. We can't hear you.

I'm like, okay, try to crank it up. Said, do, do, cha, do, do, cha, do, do, cha, do, do, cha. He was like, Casanova, we still can't hear you. This is what it sound like.

Put on the same record, do, do, cha. Boom, boom, drop. Boom, boom.

Yo, we just like, okay, grab the wires. Let's start unplugging. Like, yo, let's get out. Oh, my God. It was, oh, that was like one of the.

the most humiliating things but it was another one of those life lessons man and another thing that we survived in in 77 you know what i mean that could another crew or another group that That would have been the end of them. You would have never heard of them again. They was done. They would have been done.

But I pop up like toast, man. Columbia University co-ed Virginia Voskarichian was gunned down in March. The killer police are looking for is called the.44 caliber killer because of the weapon he has used.

A modern version of the old.44 caliber pistol used in the day. of the old west. I remember driving around, you know, with my friends trying to look for this guy because everybody wanted to catch this guy. I mean, everybody was looking for him. We didn't know what we were looking for, but I knew three people who got shot.

I knew somebody who died and I knew two people who got shot. got shot. People were in certain areas afraid to be out too late and given and you know self-imposed curfews and and and people carrying weapons who never carried weapons before.

For New Yorkers it has been heart-wrenching watching as the city copes with crisis after crisis. I know what it is to walk around in my childhood without any problems and happy-go-lucky and go where I want but no longer like that. You have to look over your shoulder and I find people when you're walking people just look over their shoulder. With a serial killer on the loose, crime has become a central issue in the campaign. A recent poll shows that Congressman Ed Koch and his tough stance on crime has moved ahead, while former frontrunner Bella Abzug has dropped to a distant third.

The city was in the dumps. It needed law and order. And Bella was more about, come on, let's be nice.

And Koch was more about, if he comes into your neighborhood, I'll smash that. Son of a bitch. That was an era of survive and enjoy yourself. And Studio 54 was this unbelievable island where nothing mattered other than feeling good.

The person that helped start Studio 54, a woman named Carmen D'Alessio. was originally a loft metal. Then she went to Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, who were actually doing a party at a place called the Enchanted Gardens in Queens. When they saw the project of the studio, and I, with my enthusiasm, described what I envisioned, they got enthusiastic and they decided to go for it.

77 was the year that everybody wanted to learn to disco dance, they wanted to learn to do the hustle, they wanted to get into Studio 54, they wanted to be part of that glamour. Studio 54 was bigger than most clubs, it was built inside a theater, so... It had a balcony, it had a bridge over the dance floor that would come out on rollers, and so there was people dancing on the dance floor and over the dance floor, and there were lights above the dance floor that would come down into the dance floor.

And it had a Coke spoon. swinging into the nose of a half moon. It was like part of the design of the club.

Any idea that would go through my mind to make it more spectacular, they would go for. When Bianca Jagger celebrated the birthday, we conceived the idea of Lady Godiva on a white horse. So we had this girl stuck naked on a white horse with her gold braids all the way to the floor. And then Bianca got so...

enthusiastic about this that she just jumped on top of the horse and went around the dance floor this grabbed the attention of all the photographers and before we knew it it was all over the world you never knew who you were going to see in the basement of studio 54. i remember once i hadn't really paid that much attention to the person that was sitting to my left the gentleman next to her tapped her on the arm and turned to her and handed her a joint she took it from him very expertly I might add. When she handed it to me, I looked in her eyes, and I realized that I'm looking to the eyes of Lillian Carter, the mother of the President of the United States of America. I went there, yes. It was just bizarre. And inside were underage girls dancing in men's tailored shirts without anything else.

And lots of very decadent looking people doing decadent things. It had youth booze. Drugs and hormones all combined.

I definitely saw people going at it up in them balconies, I tell you. Sex was everywhere on any given evening. It was absolutely appropriate to go out into the ladies room and have sex with someone in one of the stalls and or do drugs with them.

It's fabulous to be young in a moment in which you want to be irreverent and irresponsible and daring and there are no consequences. A lot of clubs in New York had a lot of what was going on at 54. It was just CO4 sort of 54 made it really popular and it sort of introduced it to the masses. It was the right time.

the right moment and we created magic. We were dead set against disco at Punk Magazine. In fact, John Holmstrom wrote Death to Disco in the first editorial of Punk Magazine.

But now I listen to disco and it doesn't sound that bad, you know, it's like, ooooh. How do you like it? How do you like it? I'm sorry. Well, 1977 was definitely a watershed year for me personally.

We recorded Blank Generation in 1977. It was really thrilling, you know, doing that, making that record, and none of us had ever been in a recording studio before. So we were on top of the world, you know, and we had a real big following at CBGB's. and, you know, the stuff was starting to break around the world. I think Richard Hell, I think he wanted to be successful.

I think he wanted to be a rock star. When I first heard Blank Generation, I thought that that was going to be the anthem for the generation. And I remember when my daughter was born, all that was going through my mind was, I was saying, let me out of here.

It's such a gamble when you get a face. Ha-ha. I was saying, let me out of here before... Such a gamble when you get a face.

It's fascinating to observe what the mirror does, but when I die, it's for the wallace. I belong to the blender. When punk started, and our people, the record labels, would say, these people can't play. What a bunch of junk.

All of a sudden, a song starts selling in Australia, and it was a song called In the Flesh. That was the tip-off, that there was something happening. And the story was that they played it by mistake, thinking they were playing the A-side of the single. So needless to say, they weren't ready for punk rock or what we were doing, which was very raw compared to the one song that they had heard.

The song got to number one in Australia, which... At that time, might as well have been the moon to most Americans, but it was number one somewhere. And if you could be number one somewhere, you could be number one anywhere. Suddenly we were shuttled around the world, and Debbie's image was everywhere.

and most people saw what she looked like before they heard the music. When we first went to England, everybody just went physically nuts at our shows. It was so exciting.

And all of a sudden, everybody wanted to sign punk bands. There was a huge buzz on the talking heads. In fact, Joey Ramone was the first person to tell me about them.

And I went down at CB's, and I'm standing out there, and all of a sudden I hear... when my love stands next to your love. You know, and I said, what is this? This music was so hypnotic.

I was being sucked into the room. Then I ran up after they were over. They had no crew, they had nothing. And I helped Tina, this beautiful young girl, you know, take the stuff off the stage.

I said, you have to be on my label. 77 is actually a landmark year for CBGB. The punk scene gets a lot of attention. Not only the local press, the New York press or the American press, but the world press came to CBGB right away. We had as many There were only 600 people inside CBG before Ramon showed.

Somehow, you used to see like two or three layers of people. People standing on the ground, then people standing on chairs, then people standing on the railings. So it's like, you know, the barrier is on fire.

1977 is the seminal year. It opened up a whole new world of music to people and it opened the eyes of an industry that needed the new Elvis and then comes along this collection of people in this small venue and they're creating change. Obviously, we need more police on the streets. Tonight, an ABC News poll shows Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo are running neck and neck among the candidates for mayor. It appears this is fast becoming a two-horse race.

How many people here are voting for Mario Cuomo? Raise your hand. Nobody?

How many people here are voting for Ed Koch? I do! Yay!

Cuomo, New York's Secretary of State, is the hand-picked candidate of the governor. Mario Cuomo's the governor's little boy. Say it again.

Say it again. Cuomo jokes about being prepared for a TV talk show. I make a man look at me and he says, I take this as a personal challenge.

Mario Cuomo was the young, vigorous guy from Queens who now says to Ed Koch, he's not married, he's from Greenwich Village, so who do you think he is? It was during that campaign, of course, that the Vote for Cuomo, not the Homo flyer started. appearing all over the city, although no one ever got Ed Koch to come out publicly, even to this day.

But it was the low point of homophobia in New York City politics. It was a scurrilous campaign, and there were lots of people. who believed I was gay and voted for me, lots of people who didn't believe I was gay who voted for me, and most people didn't care, and my attitude was, fuck them. There's been mudslinging from both the Koch and Cuomo camps, and with only weeks left until the primary, anything could happen. Good evening.

Early this morning, the.44 caliber killer tried to kill again, and almost did. The killer has taunted authorities by writing two letters. Both were signed, Son of Sam. One for the police, the other to jail.

Jimmy Breslin, the popular columnist for the New York Daily News. I'm home Friday morning, and Anne-Marie Caggiano from the New York Daily News, where I work, she called up to say, we've got a letter here and I don't like it. And it gives me...

me to creeps. I said, well, what does it say? It says it's from a guy's son of Sam, she says.

I hear about Reeder. It's creepy. He says hello from the gutters of the city of New York and the sidewalks with the cracks and the dried blood and the da-da-da-da-da.

I says, wow, that's great cadence. So they got the letter and they looked at it and the police headquarters said, sure enough, it had a fingerprint on it that matched the fingerprint they had on another letter. The Daily News on its front page, teased the fact that, you know, on Sunday, Jimmy Breslin is gonna come in with his column on his communication from Son of Sam.

So the Daily News sort of milked it for all it's worth. And meanwhile, the New York Post is going nuts. So it was a tabloid war for the Son of Sam story, which certainly only heightened the city's sense of fear.

JIMMY BESLIN, It didn't really touch my neighborhood. It didn't really come uptown. Son of Sam wasn't hanging at Harlem.

Yeah, well, he didn't come to our neighborhood. That's for sure. First of all, we would have smoked his ass in a minute. That's first thing. So we would have saved the cops.

We would have saved the cops a lot of manpower. Every neighborhood had its, like, neighborhood flavor. I mean, in the Bronx, in the summertime, you knew what was happening.

The sprinklers was open. Kids was playing, you know what I mean, in the street. Basketball games and basketball talks. and picnics and just like every other place, but it was in parks. We did a lot of free parties.

Echo Park, Arthur Park, 1A Third Street Park. One particular day, we were playing. myself and my DJ partner Disco Wiz out in the park in the Bronx. Cash and I were challenged to a battle, to a street DJ battle. Just like any other day, we were in 183rd Street in the park between Violent Time and Raya.

So we kind of hot-wired the street like, you know, like we always did and got the juice, got the party going and everything. So we come on, right, so we ready, you know what I mean, to put the turntable. Got my records ready.

I put the first record on and I know that as soon as people hear this, they're gonna go wild. Wow, so boom, energy is flowing, record is going, right? I grab the next record, I bring it in. The lights start going out. The street lights along the street start going out.

One at a time, like in a row. Poof, poof, poof. We just looked at each other.

Wow, did we do this? I mean, because we were jacked up to a street lamp, you know what I mean? I was home, sitting here, watching television.

Bingo. All the lights go off, television goes off. I go up to the roof, look out.

Darkness. I'm 12 years old. I'm watching Bewitch on television. And...

The lights go out. I thought it was just us. Because that's a common occurrence. I looked outside and everything was black. On the night of the blackout, my friend Cheech was visiting.

Cheech from Cheech and Chong, you know. And I got a call. The lights went out. I said, come on, let's go up to the Bronx. I'm covering the story.

Oh, I was in the middle of a blow job with a client at Caesar's Retreat, and all the power went out. It was July 13, 1977. New York was at the beginning of what would become a brutal 10-day heat wave where temperatures were daily over 100. Con Ed says the blackout was triggered when severe lightning knocked out transmission lines that connected Indian Point, the state's main... main power grid to the city. With those lines down and with demand for power unusually high because of a heat wave, other generating plants, unable to handle the load, began cutting themselves off. It took only minutes before it was all over.

New York had been disconnected from the nation's electric system. The first reality check was a bodega right across the street from where we were playing. The gate went down.

So, so... All pandemonium broke, and people just started screaming, blackout. And then you heard, like, bottles breaking and people just running, and we were, like, stuck out there with all this equipment. And to be out there in the blackout, you were primed, you know what I mean?

You were primed for the picking. Everybody was like, hit the stores. It was like, hit the stores!

And everybody just started running all at once. Some started running towards us. Me and Wiz, we had other ideas. Okay, we pull out the guns, we like, no, no, run that way, okay?

Don't run this way, run that way. Wiz stayed with the equipment and I proceeded around the corner because there was an electronics store, the sound room, and they had DJ equipment in there. And this is my first time admitting this, telling this story, but yes, I did sneak in there, help crash the gate down.

and crawl in and pull out a Clubman to make some... Okay. But like I said, couldn't just say, I'm gonna be a DJ. You needed equipment.

And that's all I really, you know, wanted. I wasn't trying to lose... everything I could find. Before that blackout, we had literally just maybe four or five legitimate DJ crews.

The next day, the very next day, it sprung this whole revolution of DJs. That was a huge... spark and a huge contribution to the hip-hop culture. The rest of the city had other things on their mind.

Supermarkets, department stores, banks, check cashing places, jewelry stores, everything. The morale The police department was very low because there had been layoffs and pay freezes. So when they got the call to start showing up for work the night of the blackout, a lot of them were not inclined to do so. Now guys are starting to come in.

We're all in uniform. We're all sitting around. And the door flies open.

And this guy comes in. What the F is going on? They're walking away with my...

store the CEO hears this and he comes out he says who you he says I'm the commanding officer you're the commanding officer well command something he says they're walking away with Broadway so we take streets to get up to Broadway there was thousands Thousands of people in the street carrying chairs, carrying refrigerators, carrying TVs. How are we going to arrest all these people? So I says, let's get the cars over here.

Take what we can take and the rest of it, you know, the hell with it. We're putting two and three guys in the back seat. We're putting televisions in the trunks.

We're putting televisions in the back seat on their laps. Sometimes we're putting two guys in the trunk. Closing the trunk and transporting him to the precinct.

Guys were making arrests left and right and there were shots being fired. We were firing back, you know, wherever we would see a flash, boom, we open up in that direction. saying we need more ammo and the words were no longer out of my mouth then here comes emergency service they start throwing us boxes of ammo hundreds of rounds and we're loading up and the exchange of gunfire continued Getting on top of a bus, I started yelling to the crowd.

I said, the world is watching and cool down. Everybody's got to go home. The lights will be on soon. Everything's going to be OK. I never figured that even as hard on its luck as New York was at the veneer of civilization.

was that thin, that people who were marginal people, or even in their regular lives law-abiding people, suddenly became this crowd of anarchists in it for themselves. The Jekyll and Hyde personality came out, and people that you would never expect to house. housewives, some of them. I mean, not all, by any means, minorities either. I'm bugging out because church-going, upstanding citizens, the ones you know are teachers and doctors and in the community, they are now reduced to looters, thieves, and rioters.

I was shocked. I was afraid. I was frightened at the second Sound of glass breaking, cars screeching, guns going off, and get away from my door.

When it was all over, I said to myself, my God, how many bodies are they going to find? They didn't find a single body, not one. They talk about the riots, but the fact of the matter is very few people were killed.

if any, were killed during that time. People weren't turning that violence outward toward... They were doing violence to property.

And they were doing violence to property specifically because they had problems with the people that owned the property. Most people went to bed... ...at night really not knowing what was happening around them.

So people woke up the next morning and I think there was this sense of shock. The power was still out. And the other problem was that the police had arrested thousands of people. And there was nowhere to put them. They had to open the tombs, I remember.

A prison that had been closed for many years. And people were getting bitten by rats and stuff. Because that place had been closed for so long. what's going on my mother sat me down she said son when there is no light man is reduced to animal i began to look at people deeper than what they were showing me on the outside at age 12. it's when it's when i became a man People's actions, you know, were brought on by their conditions.

The message to the city is that we need help here. We're doing bad. There's nothing here for us. There's no jobs, housing, you know, healthcare, nothing.

You know what I mean? We're at the end of our rope. We are just surviving by a threat.

July 14th, New York City, early morning. It was a night of no electric power, a night of no lights, elevators, subway trains, air conditioning, traffic signals, or televisions. What the city did have in the dark streets was a wild outburst of crime, arson, looting, mugging, and a thousand false fire alarms.

I think it's really disgusting, you know? It makes you really want to throw up when you look at what's happened. And we gotta live here.

There's no place for us to go. Take out everything I lost, all my money. I worked about ten years for this. I lost everything. I can't talk, Ligato.

Everything is gone, everything. The cops were inadequate, didn't have enough of them, and I urged Mayor Bean to ask for the National Guard, and I meant it. I don't think you should...

should be able to destroy the property of other people with impunity. Particularly the people who lived in Brooklyn who owned stores. They were poor themselves.

As New Yorkers get ready to vote, Mayor Abraham Beam is in big trouble. I know that I'm not usually known for any public exhibitions of temper, but I want you to know I'm damned angry. A.

Beam is an incompetent... The president's mayor should never be re-elected, and he can't run a second-class candy store, and that's the way he's run New York City. That election came to be seen, I think, as an election for the soul of the city in the future, because there was this whole feeling that the people that ran the city had lost completely any control they may have had. Mr. Mayor, what should have happened here if police saw looters in this man's store right in front of them?

What should they have done? done obviously one would answer that they should have arrested the person but i think we ought to find out what the answer was well this man was here what happened the police said stay outside let them take what they want you'll get hurt you had the feeling that if the lights went out again that everything you had was up for grabs your your possessions your family your the sanctity of your space and Koch was ruthless in his perception of the anxiety that New Yorker suffered and his prescription for fixing it. How am I doing?

I need your help. Yes. Am I going to get your help? Yes. Thank you.

Look at where we agreed. One, the death penalty. The Son of Sam issue rises to the top in the summer, as does the blackout. The city is gripped with crime. It has these extraordinary events.

And it was really at that point that Koch became the death penalty candidate for mayor. That's when he seized on it and he would whisper to people, I have to do it. It's the only way. way I can get in.

In the tight race, Koch has taken a narrow lead and gained the endorsement of the New York Post and Daily News, while Mayor Beam, suffering a dramatic dip in approval after the blackout, struggles to bring calm to a city in turmoil. The people of this city know and understand that we can improve the quality of life here in our city. We had soaring murder rates. We had a city that was really gripped with every form.

And, you know, the quality of life violations would never even occur to anybody. The quality of life was supposed to be violated. Ice swingers, where Larry and Mary, corner of Plato's Retreat. Only on-premise swing club in New York. We're a couples-only private charter club.

On our premises, we have three separate air-conditioned swing rooms, two whirlpools, disco music, and a lounge area with sofas and pillows. There is absolutely no pressure at our club. Larry Levinson created Plato's Retreat. He was a slob.

He was a these, them, and those kind of dummy of a guy. He and his wife at the time had little swing parties. It was in the air privately, and somehow they parlayed that into a public club.

The first... so-called swing club and soon to become the most successful one ever. You might go to Plato's retreat and you'd look into the orgy room and there'd be literally a hundred people, a sea of naked bodies having sex.

This was at the height of the disco era, so Plato's was indeed like a disco. Plato's retreat was like Studio 54 in the sense that it was also cost-free. No AIDS, no addiction, no law enforcement interference. Sex is good, sex is great, sex with anonymous strangers allows you to fulfill fantasies that only a multi-millionaire might otherwise be able to. I would go to Plato's Retreat and everyone went there for the sex.

Sometimes a coke, I wasn't a big drug user, but I went there for the buffet. Very good buffet. I personally liked the buffet better than sex at Plato's Retreat.

I think people were really interested in sex. Sexual exploration. And seeing 200 couples having sexual intercourse on the big mattress, it was paradise.

It was sex at its best, and I was part of it. Larry Levinson, what made you organize, originate? Plato's retreat.

Couples that want to be free-thinking, free-living adult couples, they don't believe in monogamous relationships, they would rather get involved with other people, but together with their spouses. You do it in public view, and you mix it up with strangers. Isn't there something very sick about that?

It's certainly not sick. It is a victimless activity. Why is that?

I find it revolting. In 1977, you had maybe 10,000 to 15,000 riders just blasting all over the city. You had every train covered with the most beautiful murals.

Be cleaned and the ones that are caught should be cleaned. They should clean it, the ones that they catch are doing that. What's the sense of paying 75 cents when you have to ride your 3D trains, you know? Violation of public robbery.

I think it's disgusting. Because we get... by the queen of the damn place we move three and a half million people a day they have rights too i think a lot of the artistic expression became ultimately destructive and i think graffiti is a good example of that that people would not go in subway cars that were marked up because there was a fear of lawlessness and I think it added to the paranoia.

In 1977 I was 20 years old and I became king of the subways because I actually did more trains than anyone else. Anytime a train would go by at least twice on a 10 car train my name would be on it both sides. The basic graffiti message is you know look at me I'm famous.

And this game is carried on first and foremost amongst your peers. You know, you sign your name and you're underlining. That underlining is your statement of, I was here. Writing was getting up.

Getting up meant your mural traveled the city. So that's getting up. Just like hip-hop, man. Did people know that they made elaborate sketches before going out to do it? And that they, you know, blew these things up, projected them onto the trains in their minds, and did them on the trains in the dark with the proportion.

portions all correct on this huge canvas. You wake up, you know, the parents are asleep, 2 in the morning you actually slip out of the house, go out and you would go inside the tunnel, everything is pitch, pitch dark and you can see what you're doing but it's very, it's very dim. You actually get a feel for being in that environment and you can't see anything but you can still create something like this that's like Flawless in the dark, even though at any moment you can get pinched by the cops coming from any direction So you have to be alert all the time what they learned Was how exciting it was to get your piece up and to see it ride But then they learned that if they didn't do it over and over again.

They just disappear So you had to be dedicated. I knew that I wanted to create and I needed to have the tools to do that. And I guess more frightening to me was actually getting paint. And at that time we were all advanced as kids.

We were advanced in the... guerrilla warfare tactics. And you would steal spray paint.

You'd flip your Lee or your Wrangler Jackal over your shoulder. At the time, the baby diapers had the big safety pins. It was none of that pampering stuff.

You put the safety pin in the center of the sleeve... and then you would fill the sleeves up with spray cans and it just looks like you're carrying your jacket over your arm. So, of course, you would get six cans of paint, three in each sleeve, and you would do that, and at the end of the day, you still had 20 or 30 cans of paint, and you could go nuts all summer. They're saying that the kids run the subways, that the system is out of control, and that graffiti is a symbol of that.

No, I ain't running the system. Hell yeah. I'm bombing the food.

Wow, you know, how is this all coming out in a city that's so corrupt and broke and there's this beautiful thing coming out. So I was fascinated by that and that's why I rode my cars to watch people walking into the cars or people walking out, you know, or maybe from the... of their eyes like looking over and peeking from the wall you know from their journal or the times and just like oh you know they were like in this secretive festivity you know like watching this stuff and being being part of a of a of a celebration my car is i call call them celebrations.

Even though we had the city fathers struggling against it, portrayants would pull into the station and people would applaud. You know, it was just something, there would be some really great pieces, but there's always a big, you know, debate on what's art and what should be where. Well, I love Warhol's phrase, art is anything you can get away with. I love that.

Gun, against the grain attitude definitely appealed to me it's one for the brains two for the triple grand master cash on the level somebody say my recollection of hip-hop was coming from the parties they used to throw in the parks. Those parties were good for the time that they were there, but then the problem happened. You got the little stick-up kids started running around at that time. Gangs and gunshots, and people didn't want to party in the parks anymore because somebody was always winding up getting hurt. To bring the whole sound system out to the street, you had to have a lot of moxie and a lot of balls, you know what I'm saying, and a lot of backup because you can get your stuff taken completely at any time, and a lot of people did get their stuff taken.

A lot of people got their parties shot up. All right, man when the fever came about and we decided well, let's take hip-hop from the street bring it indoors provide security providing and controlled environment and See where it goes from there. God knows we never thought it would blow up like it did the fever is the last Untold story of hip-hop all the rappers have a story in the fever Russell Simmons story Curtis blows Mr. Magic Grandmaster flash Heavy D did his first show that run the MC did their first show their beastie boy all got their first break at the Fever. Whoa, Bugstar G at the Disco Fever every Monday night.

Shake a vibe. Right about now, Notorious 2. Like this, ha! My father went and opened up a club for me in 76. The grand opening was Disco Fever, and my father wound up putting a white DJ in the club.

And he wasn't working out. But I noticed every time this other DJ leaves and G gets on, the crowd is just. picking up.

Now the night's supposed to be ending, but the energy level of the crowd is picking up. And he's rhyming over the records. And I'm like, what the hell is he doing?

When Si was there and he heard that, he looked up again and was like, what the heck was that? And then he saw the reaction from the crowd, like everybody, ho, ho, ho. You know, they started jumping and everything.

He was like, what's going on here? I had my dentist come in there. He's a white guy.

And then I had a. lawyer and then I had a pimp and then I had a hooker and then I had a drug dealer and then I had a bank robber. But at that point they were all as one. Nobody was thinking about nobody as anything different.

Who had more money, less money? Who was more dangerous? Who wasn't?

Who was afraid? Who wasn't afraid? At that point, everybody was just having a good time because of this rhyming over the music.

I said. G, who's the biggest DJs around? G told me the Grandmaster Flash is playing at the park.

And Flash is scratching, he's turning around with his elbows, and he gets up with his feet, he's scratching with his feet, and he blindfolds himself. He was just unbelievable. So I said, this guy's like a show with himself.

And I approached Flash about playing in the club. And I said, look, you come here, I'm going to guarantee you become a star. Because you're going to have a place where people can come.

come see you every week on a weekly basis. So here it is. It's going to be the first Hip Hop Night.

Grandmaster Flash at the Fever on a Tuesday. I only had five days of advertisement. Made little bullshit paper flyers.

And this guy, 600 people show up. And the gimmick was a dollar to get in, a dollar a drink. And. And we ran that night. I mean, we ran around like chickens without a head, but it was such a big thing.

And the kids got the word out, and it just blossomed from there. Now everybody's talking about it. Holy shit, the Fever's packed. There's a million people over there.

But it was teenagers, you know? And we knew we could pack the kids in. And when we started allowing them to come in with sneakers, that was it.

600 people to get there next week. And then it was just every weekend. And then I started, I had to make more revenue We needed bouncers because it was getting wild and it was too many people. So when I came up, I was the first one to do it.

A dollar to get in, because I didn't want to change the dollar, but $5 for sneakers. But everybody wanted sneakers. But if you wore shoes, you got it for a buck. And back in that time, drugs was hot. Cocaine, dust, angel dust was real prevalent.

We knew people were gonna do it. But we provided a safety system for the people that came up there. We had a little red light buzzer system that set up in the cashier booth downstairs, which flashed in the DJ booth, which the DJ would... When he saw that, he knew to say Code Blue.

And everybody had gotten accustomed to when Code Blue was said, that means the police are coming upstairs. It was just like a speakeasy, the old speakeasies back in the 20s. So when that light went off, the DJ, no matter what he was doing, he could be in the middle of a wraparound. or whatever he knew that light go off code blue code blue everything would disappear if it was on the tables or whatever somebody was doing it in the corner it was gone not only that the police department loved us too because we took five six hundred kids off the streets put them inside of a building and control environment so if they were looking for somebody to stuck somebody up what would they do they come up to the club and look around to see if they could find them Grandmaster Flash, who got discovered at the fever, just got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And you know what?

That says it all. A killer who has roamed the boroughs of New York for the past year has struck again. The killer's eighth attack in just over a year came on this lonely street in Brooklyn.

Police poured over the car where the young couple was shot. Two witnesses say the gun... walked up to the car, crouched, then fired four shots through an open window. He was covered with blood.

The girl was covered with blood. It was a horror. This guy screaming, just screaming and screaming. We always looked at some summonses that were issued in the general area where the crime was committed. It so happened in Brooklyn, when Moskowitz gets murdered, we started looking at the summonses again.

When we do, we find a double-par summons issued by a hydrant to a car registered up in Yonkers. So they checked the ticket out, and it was to a David Berkowitz, Pine Street, Yonkers, New York. So they call up the Yonkers, and the Yonkers police said, that guy's a pain in the neck.

We've had a lot of trouble with him. So now everybody's antenna gets raised. They stake out the car.

Berkowitz comes out of his apartment house. He approaches the car. They go over to him. They identify themselves and he says, well, you got me. I'm the son of Sam.

He admitted it right then and there. This is the man police say is the 44 caliber killer. Young, dark haired, almost chubby.

They found hundreds of rounds of ammunition and two more guns, including a machine gun. said Berkowitz planned to use in his next attack, which they said was planned for a Long Island disco. In the end, it was something as simple as his $25 parking ticket that led police to the killer.

Which leads to the joke that in New York, you can get away with murder as long as you don't park at a fire hydrant. He wore a fake smile as police moved him around the city today from arrest to booking to court, finally to a mental... award and i'll never forget i was in a club that night the night he got caught and i couldn't believe the joy of how everybody was hugging and crying and i mean guys strange all hugging and kissing each other it was like the biggest relief and celebration and then it was all uphill after that you It's 3 a.m.

this September morning and still at Studio 54. people crowd the doors hoping to get in. Studio 54 became, in 1977, this unbelievable island where nothing mattered other than status and feeling good. Nothing.

Most places you could expect to just at least get in. With Studio 54, there was this big crowd of people standing around outside who couldn't get in. And so that made it a bit more exclusive if you did get in. Oh, you're not shaved.

There's no way anyone else is going to get in. And that's... It doesn't matter if you're not shaving. Listen, just go home. Nobody knew with Steve at the door what was the trick.

He would just pick them up randomly. He would stand at the door and people would, Steve, Steve! And he would pick somebody and then take their $20 and put it in his pocket and send them past the gate where they would actually pay to get in. One night there was a couple that had just married and they were in a honeymoon and they had decided to go to the studio.

He decided that he could go in, but she wouldn't. And he walked in and left her outside. I mean, it was like crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. Plain God.

Once you got in, and it wasn't anything that was spoken, but it was the sense you got that everybody thought they were special because they were able to go to Studio 54. And that bothered me. The idea that I'm better than anybody else because I'm here. And look at me, I'm standing next to Liza Minnelli.

Or look at me, aren't I wonderful? I'm here with all these people. And it was something that I think they encouraged because it made them an extraordinary amount of money.

There was some party and we drove over to Studio 54 and we all climbed out and they wouldn't let us in. That was where it was Debbie, Harry, it was me, you know, you think they'd let Blondie in, you know. I never went to Studio 54 that much.

It was all about, you know, rich people. Bianca Jagger and all that stupid crap. The Velvet Rope Syndrome just became the norm after a while. You know, we tended to stay downtown.

I see nips on pottage, so they wave you in when we can't go. I guess we're just interested to see what's going on. It's a fascinating place, I must say.

It's probably one of the most interesting places in New York. The CBGB is like, it's getting worse because there's a lot of... People coming here want the right kind of people, you know? And like, not the old crowd, like the new crowd.

77 at CBGB's, the bands were complete opposite reactions to the disco period studios. 54s and that stuff, but once everything got going, it just became pop music all over again. I mean, the Ramones, Dunkin'Heads, Blondie, Richard Hell.

I think they got better with their commercialization. You know, it became a business. And for record companies, their job is to be in business.

This was a time when the British were getting involved in coming over and seeing what was going on at CBGB's and feeding it back with their own take on it. The Sex Pistols were getting unbelievable attention in Britain because everyone found them so shocking. And they went on the Bill Grundy show and said the word fuck.

And then they did their tour of the US, you know, cities. It was getting beat up, and there was always blood, and this is what the press grabbed onto, and this is what became known as punk rock. There was a lot of trepidation in the American music industry and in the radio.

We had to really sell ourselves. And a lot of it just had to do with their expectations of what punk was, you know? Punk had bad connotations. So I tried to come up with a different phrase than punk. And because New York had been rather dormant in the years before all this action started taking place on the Bowery, I called it the new wave.

One way or another. Yeah. I remember hearing some of our music on the radio for the first time. It was a thrill, and there were lots of moments like that. One of the songs was a hit, or hearing one of the songs went number one or something like that.

It was all these high points. Debbie, she had a great commercial voice. And I remember them saying, you're really going to be a... I was amazed when you see us on stage at Madison Square Garden. And I was thinking, okay, I know I like this, but I wasn't thinking that.

And sure enough, they got there, you know. Blondie had it. The Talking Heads are another real example. The most imaginative, interesting music played by people whose imaginations at the time even exceeded their ability to execute it. But it didn't matter, and they made hit records.

We had just finished our best album, Rocket to Russia, and we went on tour. We thought this was going to be the record to break us. We do two European tours. 151 shows is what I call the beginning of the nonstop world tour.

We did an incredible show in Stockholm, Sweden, where the audience tore out the first two rows of seats. And when I heard that, I said, oh my God, you know, we're getting famous. 1977 was a fabulous year for Sire Records because we were in the right place at the right time.

It just got better and better and better. This is not just a fluke. This plays on the Bowery called CBG. G.B.'s continues, you know? By the end of 1977, punk rock took off around the world.

It was a moment that I don't think will ever exist again in New York City, and that's probably a good thing. It was almost like Rome was burning, and you wanted to get in your last lay before the walls fell down. Tuesday, September 20. At election day, New Yorkers had to slog through torrential rains to vote, and the man they elected mayor, Ed Koch, got 55% of the vote. Koch served three terms.

He really did an excellent job. He saved... the city. I did bring the city back to fiscal stability and I gave the city back its spirit so the people who lived here are once again proud of being New Yorkers.

We have been tested but we have survived and soon we will begin again to flourish. We are the city of New York and New York in adversity. towers above any other city in the world.

So the city has changed, but 1977 was a very, very pivotal year. A lot of what we see in music and popular culture now, the seeds were sown back in that period. There's something about these moles. where everything seems so sort of dark and everything seems to be decaying, that that's often when kind of great art is born. You need a catalyst, and I think that the Ramones were a great catalyst, and the Talking Heads and...

and, you know, Blondie, that whole early group of artists. All these groups were important because they laid the foundation for what was to become punk rock, alternative music, new wave. Now it's indie. At the end of the 77th, Saturday Night Fever came out.

Being such a popular movie, it took that concept of disco and made it mainstream. And that's when really all these record companies started signing, you know, anybody that could sing. You know, the Avon lady had a disco record. And it's...

sign her and put her out and throw all this money at her. The public by and large was just beat over the head with it to the point where people just couldn't take it anymore. It seemed to accelerate and then disintegrate at the same time.

It was like all this disco, disco, disco and then anti-disco. What came out of it dying was house music. You know when you got people like Madonna doing a house record, everywhere in the world house music is pop.

Well, basically, I didn't think hip-hop was gonna last. It's, what, 2007 now, and it's still here and growing stronger? Hip-hop has done a lot for our people.

And when I mean our people, I mean, you know, minorities in general. Imagine a world without hip-hop right now. You know, imagine if this world never occurred. I mean, we'd all be breakdancing to bluegrass music. I mean...

Who knows? I mean, right? It's something that just the constellations were aligned the right way. Physically, the city today is such a changed place.

We've seen over the years those empty lots are now decent housing and something was changing in the communities in which crime is so prevalent. And some of the credit for that should go to those communities themselves and how they got themselves together. If you go to the Bronx or even the West Side, the Lower East Side, half of Brooklyn, buildings that were abandoned by landlords in 1977 are now... Yuppie condos with the views that are selling for hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. Living in New York now, you feel safe.

The city is cleaner than it's ever been. But it feels a little bit dull. It's Indianapolis is all it is.

There's no life to this. I want to see whores on 42nd Street. I had enough of this.

People coming in from the... You don't even know what a whore looks like. From the suburbs.

From the suburbs to see the Lion King. I liked the city better when it was sleazy. I don't think big cities should be safe for women and children and families.

It's just not good for the arts, you know? It all becomes fucking real estate after a while.

Transcript for:Transformative Year of NYC: 1977 Overview

Transcript for:
Transformative Year of NYC: 1977 Overview