New York Rocker
My Life in the Blank Generation with Blondie,
Iggy Pop & Others, 1974-1981

By Gary Valentine
April 2002
Sidgwick & Jackson / Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0-283-06367-X
276 pages, illustrated
$22.50 paper original

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Three chords, black jeans, a pair of shades and a lot of attitude made music whose intensity matched the facts of life on its home ground, New York's East Village. The initiators of punk had one foot in nineteenth-century French symbolist poetry and the other in the raw sound of their predecessors such as the Velvet Underground. This first-hand account of a little-documented era features luminaries such as Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Divine, Devo and the New York Dolls, and tells of the gigs at CBGB hitting the news as Warhol and his glittering crew descended. Gary Lachman, as Gary Valentine, was a founding member of Blondie, and wrote the group's early hits. His first book, Turn Off Your Mind, is a history of the occult counterculture of the '60s. This is its natural sequel of the 70s.

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