Once Upon a Time in New York: The Birth of Hip Hop, Disco and Punk

This programme contains strong language from the start.

In the 1970s, the Big Apple was rotten to the core.

New York City in the middle of the '70s was a rough-looking place.

New York was wilder than any Wild West town, and probably deadlier.

But amidst the ruins and squalor, a golden era of music was born.

In downtown Manhattan, punk was created.

-We single-handedly lowered the standards...

-Yes.

-..of an entire industry.

We are responsible for whatever happened.

MUSIC: "Hey Ho, Let's Go" by The Ramones

In the Midtown, disco was king.

MUSIC: "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer

Studio 54, to me, was really no different than what I was seeing in punk.

It was the same freshness.

Especially in a downtrodden city, glamour means an awful lot.

Whilst on the streets of the Bronx, hip-hop sprung up.

We didn't have nothin' here in the South Bronx.

Hip-hop really came because there was nothing to do here.

I was a guy that never went downtown. I stayed in the neighbourhood...

and formed a culture called hip-hop.

In 1970s New York, you could be whoever you wanted to be.

You can come to New York City, and I know it sounds corny,

you really can fulfil your dream.

I always thought if you could make it in New York, you could make it anywhere.

If it doesn't work in New York, we're all in big fucking trouble.

MUSIC: "Rhapsody In Blue" by George Gershwin

New York - a sophisticated city with a refined musical tradition.

In the '30s and '40s, Broadway swung to the crafted sounds of George Gershwin and Cole Porter.

# It's lovely going through... #

And in the '50s and early '60s, a new generation of Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths

gathered in the Midtown's elegant Brill Building, to fashion polished pop that would dominate the charts.

However, in the late '60s, the musical zeitgeist went west

to capture the optimism of a new generation.

And with California taking centre stage, New York felt like an abandoned city.

Not since the Great Depression had the city been so wracked with economic and social woe.

Life Downtown, in the shadow of the skyscrapers, could be tough.

Around the corner from me, a block away from that corner, all day long

there was this swarm of about 11 or 12-year-old kids.

Like a whole, you know, cluster

of 30 of them, shifting all the time.

And they were there because they were runners for heroin buyers.

At that time, there was heroin everywhere.

The neighbourhood I'm now residing in over on the East Side, was just, like, lethal.

When I was doing lots of cocaine, I knew ten...

or more little stores I could just walk into and buy it at any given time, you know.

It was like that. Like a lot of...

..burnt buildings that were boarded up.

That kind of scene.

The neighbourhood we lived in was like that, anyway, the Lower East Side.

It was, er...

in urban decay.

There was a certain amount of danger.

Where I lived, I would sometimes come home at like,

you know, two or three in the morning, and there would be

gang members having knife fights,

using garbage can lids for shields

in the middle of the street.

MUSIC: "Venus In Furs" by Velvet Underground

But amidst the squalor, there were bargains to be had.

Rents could be cheap, especially if you were an arty type.

# Shiny shiny... #

I mean, at the time, there were things called AIR.

When I first moved, I had a loft down on Lispenard Street.

It used to be that you could...

have low rent if you went down to City Hall

showed them a painting and said you're an artist

and they'd give you your address with a plaque in front of it saying, "Artist In Residence".

That was all it needed.

Perhaps the most notable loft dweller was avant-garde artist and scene maker, Andy Warhol,

whose Union Square studio was known simply as "The Factory".

In 1965, Warhol was looking to extend his artistic output into music

and he happened upon a similarly avant-garde band.

We're sponsoring a new band called the Velvet Underground.

And, um...

And we're trying to...

We have this chance to combine music and art and films, all together.

Warhol was a magician with a wand, because when he discovered the Velvets,

they had played their second ever gig.

You know, their second show they every played in some, you know,

horrible little club in New York.

And they were totally unknown and making no money, and he pulled them out of that

and within, er...

Well, by February, he had them playing a major show at the Cinematheque

called Andy Warhol, Up-Tight.

That was the beginning of their, you know, multi-dimensional performances,

with the films, the dances, the lights and all that.

The Velvet Underground were not native New Yorkers, but disaffected college students

who'd been attracted to the seedy underbelly of Lower Manhattan

and its promise of artistic, sexual and chemical experimentation.

MUSIC: "I'm Waiting For My Man" by Velvet Underground

# Up to Lexington, 125

# Feel sick and dirty More dead than alive... #

The Velvets were essentially a kind of gritty urban newsreel,

what it was like to live on the Lower-Lower East Side.

And what they...

sang about was, was life on the fringe of New York existence,

very far removed from the glitz of Times Square.

Lower Manhattan was a drug haven at the time.

I mean, a lot of my... kind of worst experiences come from living down there.

But what they essentially did was show the other side of the peace-and-love coin.

# I'm waiting for my man... #

When Woodstock happened, I mean you were happy that everybody got stuck in the mud.

Just the whole "flower children" thing was just silly.

And we were advocating, you know, giving everybody all the drugs they wanted...

which wasn't weed.

In the midst of all the flower power ethic and all this, you know, sort of lightly hopeful music,

here's this fucking dark, brooding album about heroin and death and murder, you know?

So we all picked up on it and it, you know, that record is just...

a fantastic recording.

# ..My man, cannot be free

# Of all of the evils of this town... #

Recorded in just two days, the Velvet Underground's debut album

was far removed from the polished pop coming out of the Brill Building.

Both band and album failed to find success abroad or at home.

I think sometimes the prophet is without honour in one's hometown.

But their template, that sense of gritty urban realism and sensual depravity

and, er, drug-induced hallucination, er...

would prove very important for...

what would come after.

# H-e-e-e-eroin...

# It's my wife and it's my life

# Because a mainer to my vein... #

The Velvet Underground would become the imprint for a new generation of downtown New York bands.

But in 1970, their lead singer would leave and search for his own success.

MUSIC: "Walk On The Wild Side" by Lou Reed

And in 1972, Lou Reed would strike gold with an unlikely hit

inspired by his experiences in downtown New York -

Walk On The Wild Side.

The next thing you know it's coming out of every car window in New York.

It really was one of those songs you heard every day, ten times. You just couldn't get away from it.

# Holly came from Miami FLA

# Hitch-hiked her way across the USA

# Plucked her eyebrows on the way

# Shaved her legs and then he was a she

# She said, "Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side"... #

What he's doing there is the same thing he did with Velvet, from the best music from Velvet,

which is to use the Warhol world as a sort of palette...

to take his stories from.

Walk On The Wild Side is all about Warhol people - Joe Dallesandro, Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis.

# Candy came from out on the Island...#

Lou's muses were drag queens who hung out at the Warhol Factory.

# But she never lost her head

# Even when she was giving head

# She says, "Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side"

# I said... #

They were young men who came from outside the island.

In New York, they could experience the sexual freedoms they craved and become everybody's darling.

# Do de-do de-do... #

I met Andy Warhol very soon on through the drag queens, through Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis.

So I got to go up to the silver Factory.

I call myself Candy Warhol now.

THEY ALL LAUGH

I'm cashing in.

You know, I remember once, I just walked from the elevator to a little way into the Factory.

I ended up with all these pills in my hand,

and I was just looking at them.

And I started to take one or two and Candy Darling came over and she said,

"Oh, can I have the pink ones?"

I said, "Sure. Why? What do you want the pink ones for?"

She said, "You don't want to take them, dear. They'll make you grow breasts."

MUSIC: "Dance To The Music" by Sly And The Family Stone

Whilst you could be whoever you wanted to be downtown,

in the rest of New York, the moral majority still held sway.

On such a small island, it was inevitable that the two worlds would collide.

Because, if you don't flaunt it, who's going to know you're homosexual or not, you see?

What they wanted to do was to flaunt it...

CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK

-Should I get security in?

-No, let him stay.

-No.

-Let him stay.

Anita, let's pray. Anita wants to pray.

-SHE SIGHS HEAVILY

-That's all right.

Father, I want to ask that you forgive him.

-That we love him.

-And that we love him,

and that we're praying for him...to be delivered

from his deviant lifestyle, Father.

# Dance to the music... #

And back in the summer of '69, a routine police raid at a gay bar in Christopher Street

got out of hand and gave birth to sexual politics,

as well as a new musical movement.

In New York, the thing that started the dance movement, I think, was the Stonewall Riots.

Basically some gay people were partying in a bar

and there was a law that said

two people of the same sex couldn't dance together.

And so the police would come in every three months

and regularly bust everybody in the gay bars.

They said, "Fuck this shit. We don't have to take this shit. Everybody else is marching

"Even people in women's prisons are going against the wall.

"And then the black people are getting their rights

"everybody's getting their rights. What's happening to the fags?

"They come into the clubs, beat, us up and demanding to show our genitalia to prove what sex we are?!

"Fuck you!"

They came in this one night and this one drag queen didn't want to take it any more and she threw a bottle

and it started a riot, which lasted the whole weekend.

The cops got locked in the club. They were terrified. 7th Avenue was blocked.

We threw things, we turned back buses, we jumped up and down on police cars - it amazed people.

I knew this political hippy who used to say, "Oh, the fags will never organise. Those crazy queens -

"all they want to do is wear make-up and prance around and listen to The Supremes."

# I'm living in shame Mama, I miss you... #

"They'll never fight back." But on that night they did, they fought back.

That was the beginning of Gay Liberation as we know it today.

And it caused the mayor to change the law.

And once the law was changed, it gave everybody free rein to open some place to dance for gay people.

The Stonewall Riots gave birth to a new culture

and gay New York sprang out from the underground, into dance parties held in downtown lofts

heralding the birth of club culture.

The key loft party was hosted by the unlikely figure of Timothy Leary disciple David Mancuso.

Yeah. Certainly LSD had a role in it,

you know.

But not entirely, no.

It was always in a loft space which was in...kind of '65.

It was very rare to be living in loft spaces in New York anyway.

I had all this space, so, you know,

and I was always into sound,

so I started having parties in my loft space.

It was private and it was very special. David was very unique with his music.

It was all about the music and it was all about the sound.

And, er, you felt very special being able to get into the loft.

People begged you outside, "Please take me in." But it was very private.

Usually, most of us were socially outcast.

You had, er...

socially different backgrounds...

had different backgrounds, you know.

I was a white boy from Brooklyn, Italian boy, and I partied amongst Asians, amongst Latins,

amongst blacks. And...

I met people from all over the world.

And it was a cultural experience, you know?

To me, the loft was the first place I'd ever gone to where music was continuous.

He was one of the first to...

to start making the musical connections

that created what we think of as disco.

You know, connecting rock'n'roll and Latin music and African music

and all kinds of...R&B

and really seeing how they fit together.

The first time I saw a DJ who was not just playing records but creating atmosphere.

And, um, that was a big difference.

And I realise THAT'S what I wanted to do.

Not play records - create atmosphere.

Inspired by Mancuso's private parties, 17-year-old Nicky Siano and his partner

created their own loft, known as The Gallery.

We took an empty loft space and we created and designed

a space within the empty loft space, within this blank canvas.

We created an environment specifically geared towards dancing and blowing your mind.

# Nassau's gone funky Nassau's gone soul... #

Whereas Mancuso played records in their entirety,

Siano mixed them together with two turntables.

Just the whole idea that the music never stopped.

The whole idea that you can go from one turntable to another,

that was a major revelation.

The idea that you could have one turntable

and just mix the next record, was unbelievable!

The records don't stop?!

So that was the first thing,

that was the first big... innovation.

And that was the foundation of this idea of just DJs, and it was called disco.

The Gallery, is considered by many, the first "disco".

# Money! Money, money, money, money...! #

WHISTLING

Come on, boys!

The emerging disco scene would soon leave the loft of Lower Manhattan

and spread like wild fire across the island.

But in 1972, the hottest ticket in town was a bunch of mock queens

mostly from Queens, who had crossed the East River to fulfil their dreams.

I mean, we called ourselves New York Dolls, but...

I don't think we ever really expected to...

..go anywhere besides New York per-se.

You know, we were like the band of the East Village when we started out.

A new rock group has surfaced at Max's Kansas City and created a sell-out.

Joel Siegel went over to find out what it was all about,

and filming a rehearsal, he found a cross between the Rolling Stones and Alice Cooper.

# You're the prima ballerina on a spring afternoon

# Change on into the wolfman howlin' at the moon

# H-o-o-o-w-w-w... #

Basically what I would call would be the essence of what rock'n'roll is.

And that is, er...

sort of like, er, an attitude and a angst and anger and just wanting to express yourself

in a very kind of almost primitive way.

In those times, that really stood out.

Cos it had really gotten away from that, really.

REPORTER: 'The Dolls are a social phenomenon. In the city, they sell out wherever they play.

'They're in their late teens and early 20s, so is their audience.

'This is a new generation and a new music.'

Like, the last wave of rock'n'roll was like...

Mostly it was from San Francisco.

And it had a definite, um, purpose.

I mean, the franchisement of certain people to become united under a certain kind of music.

That's what rock'n'roll has always been.

This form of music just represents the next generation, like the under-21 kind of people

who like to listen to this music. It's like their own music.

We had no concern really for the prevailing trends in popular music, you know.

There were so many just mediocre bands, you know, that were...

selling a lot of records and that were filling up big theatres and stuff.

It just didn't mean anything to us, you know, cos we didn't think it was rock'n'roll.

It wasn't run by the bands or the kids any more.

It was, like, really industry and corporate and...

They were putting together music, so it lost its sex appeal.

They were the first band that valued attitude above, um,

anything that...

anything that was musical.

They were just about teenagers looking to behave the way teenagers fantasise.

Just defying grown-ups.

# ..Alive, I said

# Jet Boy's fly, Jet Boy's gone

# Jet boy stole my baby

# Flyin' around New York City so high

# Like he was my baby... #

The Dolls played at the Mercer Art Centre, a venue in a decrepit downtown hotel

which would collapse within a year.

Their combination of outrageous camp and raw R&B attracted a local crowd

and a parochial New York rock scene was born.

I remember standing there next to Danny Goldberg and he said,

he said he watched the Dolls and he said, "This is the most important band to come out of New York City

"since the Velvet Underground." I said, "Yeah, it is. They're the real Rolling Stones."

# My b-a-a-a-b-y-y-y... #

The Dolls would be a major influence on a new generation, but like the Velvet Underground before them,

the rest of America just wasn't ready.

Well they certainly were the first.

But everybody acknowledges that one of the reasons they kind of failed in America

was because people were so horrified by their first album cover.

You know, to see these guys in make-up like that. No-one was ready for that.

It's long before Whitesnake and all this fucking shit.

I mean, before us, really...

you know, you had to be the Beatles to get a record deal.

You had to play like Jeff Beck.

-We single-handedly lowered the standards...

-Yes.

-..of an entire industry.

We are responsible for whatever happened.

# Jet Boy's fly, Jet Boy's gone

# Jet boy stole my baby... #

For me, everything begins with the Dolls because before them there were no New York bands...

..of this particular era.

And after them, there were a few.

And after them, there were more than a few and... it kind of blossomed from there.

They had a great inspiration in encouraging people to pick up guitar and play on the streets of New York.

In 1973, New York wasn't exactly famous for its own rock scene.

It was still just a stop on a nationwide tour for stadium bands like Aerosmith and Kiss.

However, the Dolls do-it-yourself ethos would inspire others in New York's downtown.

One of the first bands to spring up in their wake was Television,

whose bass player was Richard Hell.

I had been, um...

impressed by the way it had worked for the Dolls,

that they were associated with the Mercer Arts Centre,

that I thought that we should find a venue that was doing badly enough

that they'd accept these terms we had in mind, which was that we'd play there,

you know...one night a week or something like that, regularly, um,

on a given night.

CBGB was a pokey dive, located in New York's infamous Bowery.

It had been intended for country and bluegrass bands.

Unfortunately, in 1974, there weren't many Americana acts on the Lower East Side,

so Television lucked upon a residency.

Inadvertently, they were to create a New York landmark.

My favourite memory was the first time I saw

Television play and I saw Tom Verlaine,

who I thought was just about the most beautiful fella that I'd ever seen,

and, er...

it was a Sunday as well. It was Easter Sunday, 1974.

And, um, I, er, I saw Tom Verlaine and we've been friends ever since.

Patti Smith was a beat poet who had teamed up with guitarist Lenny Kaye

to create an experimental music project.

With Patti, the thought that we would have an actual rock'n'roll band

was very far from our imaginations when we began to play.

We have a poet, we have a kind of rhythmic guitarist

and after a couple of months, we have a steady piano player

and we're doing a mixture of kind of cabaret songs

and "improv-isised" one-chord, uh, you know, rhythmatics.

We have Patti, who's creating imagery all over the map,

and we're trying to fold all these elements together

with our love of rock'n'roll.

The Patti Smith Group had been struggling to find a venue

where they could hone their avant-garde ideas.

It wasn't until we actually saw CBGB's and how it worked

that we realised we could have a home in New York

where, with other like-minded individuals and musicians,

that we could all find our way through the creative...swamps.

Although they made no waves in the mainstream press,

Television and Patti Smith attracted an audience of kindred spirits

looking downtown for somewhere to play.

Every other person who was at CBGB's from 1974 to the beginning of 1977,

on a given night, was in a band.

And in 1975 the regulars included David Byrne, John Cale, art student Chris Stein,

and former Max's Kansas City waitress Deborah Harry.

The original stage was either over there or over here.

I know it was on the other side

and it was much tinier and tiered with red carpet.

There was no existing house PA at the time,

people used to bring in their own PA systems and set them up.

This is kind of the famous shot down there.

If I have any visual memories of this,

it's just like neon signs and this long expanse of bar here.

Chris Stein and Deborah Harry formed Blondie, an art-rock band who would go on to conquer the world.

But in 1975 they had a long way to go and were still playing Motown covers.

# Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah, whoa... #

We were very experimental and all over the place, initially.

And that's what was good about being able to play here again and again,

just to, you know, refine and define what we were doing.

It was great to have that period where we played all the time,

you got better at doing what you wanted to do.

Many of the musicians were former art students,

attracted to New York's downtown for its experimental atmosphere,

including Talking Heads.

It was a great leveller, CBGB's,

it was the only place where we could play original music.

The first time I walked into CBGB's, in 1974,

I saw Debbie Harry and I saw the Ramones,

and that weekend I saw Television and Patti Smith.

Those of us who had lived out of town and had kind of come in onto New York City

and had chosen it as a spawning ground, so to speak,

it was because of the New York Dolls,

and the fact that there was a city that was so tolerant of this outrageousness,

that made it very appealing, very attractive. It was also very close to where we were.

And then we auditioned. I went up to Hilly Kristal and I said,

"We have this band, can we audition to play here?"

He said, "Well, like, yeah, I could put you on in front of the Ramones tomorrow night."

And so, it really was kind of a trial-by-fire thing.

THE RAMONES PLAY: "Hey Ho, Let's Go"

The only band who emerged at CBGB who could truly claim to be from New York was the Ramones.

Their garage sound heralded a return to classic rock'n'roll

that would ultimately transcend CBGB and New York

to take the world by storm.

# Hey ho! Let's go!

# Hey ho! Let's go! #

The Ramones was basically a concept that developed in my head

after I saw the New York Dolls and saw how entertaining they were.

Even though they weren't virtuoso musicians, they were very exciting.

They put on a good show and to me, it seemed like at this time, everybody was a virtuoso musician.

That was the thing. It started with Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, stuff like that.

Everybody was noodling away and I thought, "It's time for a change."

And we wanted to go back to the two-minute song,

which for us, it was more like a minute and a quarter!

They were like, you know, paratroopers descending,

like the SWAT team plunging through the plate-glass windows, you know?

It was very effective, always.

For me, the Ramones created a template of punk rock

that would be known as punk rock.

Punk was originally the name of a New York fanzine set up in 1976

to highlight the underground, downtown rock scene.

Punk as a musical idea would be truly realised later in another city across the Atlantic,

but the word was first applied to bands playing at CBGB.

# Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est?

# Ba-ba-ba... #

I don't know if Talking Heads really qualified as a punk band.

We thought of ourselves as artists who happened to be musicians as well.

We felt like we really had a strong connection

with bands like the Ramones,

and bands like Television and Patti Smith,

but I don't think they really thought of themselves as punks, either.

# You start a conversation and you can't even finish it

# You're talking a lot But you're not saying anything... #

Whether they were punk or not,

one thing was for sure.

Very few of the CBGB bands could get a record deal.

For me, the record labels took a while to figure it out down there,

because it was out of their realm of knowledge.

They didn't quite know what to do with these bands.

They sounded different than most of the groups that were selling on the radio.

And sometimes, when your head is in the clouds, you don't see what is happening down by your feet.

You got these huge corporations, and yet, 30, 40 blocks downtown,

there's a kind of excitement and a new thing,

but it takes a while for it to filter up.

# Johnny gets a feeling... #

And in the Patti Smith Group's case, it would be Midtown major label Arista

who would sign them and team the band up with producer and godfather of the downtown scene, John Cale.

# He saw horses, horses, horses

# Horses, horses, horses...

# Horses, horses, Do you know how to pony...? #

It was a band that had never been in a studio before,

and it was a band that also had really worked themselves up from nothing,

very carefully.

# Do the alligator... #

It definitely was like working with a hero,

but the nice thing about John is that he's quite a human being,

and he's a funny guy and as flawed and as ecstatic as we all are.

And so...once we got down to the actual working,

we found our rhythm.

Some of it was very confrontational.

When we went into the studio, everybody was probably playing their first instruments -

first guitar ever owned, first keyboard ever owned -

and we got into problems because they were warped and had all sorts of problems,

so I called up and I said, "Hey, send over a couple of guitars, send over a keyboard,"

and it really upset the apple-cart.

The result of the tense collaboration

would be the classic album Horses,

whose poetic ambition and return to three-chord rock'n'roll

would be a war-cry to a new generation,

and put punk on the global map.

# Life is filled with pain I'm cruisin' through my brain... #

What had been created downtown

had eventually been assimilated in Midtown New York

and served up to the world.

MUSIC: "Saturday Night Fever" by the Bee Gees

In 1977, exactly the same thing would happen to disco,

which had left its downtown roots far behind.

Set in New York, the movie Saturday Night Fever

exported disco-mania worldwide.

And in the affluent heart of Manhattan emerged the ultimate club.

MUSIC: "Turn The Beat Around" by Vicki Sue Robinson

It opened at the end of '77,

and the opening night was huge and fantastic.

# Turn the beat around... #

This is where you'd see Bianca Jagger,

in all her glory, or David Bowie, for that matter, or Iman,

or Diana Ross, or all of Houston, all the designers.

You'd see women with very, very extreme make-up,

heavily done up, huge platform shoes.

You know, it was disco.

Studio 54 was the brainchild of enterprising businessman Steve Rubell.

Steve really worked on getting it in the paper every day

and having these little, like Bianca's birthday party,

which happened almost within the first month we were open,

which I played for. She came in on this white horse,

and in the middle of the New York Daily News the next day,

there were all pictures of Bianca Jagger on this white horse

and the Bee Gees were in town at the Madison Square Garden,

and the Bee Gees got this much coverage,

and Bianca got this much coverage, so it was really like a weird time

when people were very into this scene, and exposing it.

THUMPING BACKGROUND MUSIC It's difficult to know what it is exactly that attracts people here.

All that one can be absolutely sure of is that it isn't the conversation!

Norman Rhys, News At 10, at Studio 54 in New York.

Studio 54, to me, was really no different...

than what I was seeing in punk.

Because it was the same freshness.

When I walked into Studio 54,

and I walked to the edge of the dancefloor,

and all this white powder was falling from the ceiling like snow,

but obviously, the image was coke,

and these frenzied people were dancing,

and there were all these fascinating people standing round talking to each other.

I just was in another room with people who were really alive and really there.

MUSIC: "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer

It felt really magical.

Erm, at the risk of sounding corny, if you got into Studio, you belonged.

And...if you belonged in Studio,

you were an interesting person and everybody treated you that way.

I remember just anybody that you got into a conversation with,

it felt like it was more interesting.

It felt like... you were talking to Truman Capote,

and you actually could be talking to Truman Capote!

You felt like you were talking to intellectuals, artists,

people who were gonna have some sort of impact on the world.

Precisely in a downtrodden city, glamour means an awful lot.

And glamour was really what that place was about.

It was a place where you felt like,

"I have arrived in the city, on some weird level I have access to it."

Well, it kind of worked for me because I ended up

giving two soldiers a blow job out on the balcony one night.

After doing about two bags of coke.

It was a fascinating place, there was the ground floor,

the famous dancefloor.

But if you weren't in the lower, the real action was on the balcony.

There weren't seats, people would be making out, people would be fucking,

people would be doing drugs...

It just felt really, uh...

it did feel decadent.

# You're a native New Yorker...

But the balcony was where people went to give blow jobs anyway.

Everyone gave blow jobs up on the balcony at Studio 54.

Believe me, in those days, before Aids came along, sex was rampant.

People would have sex at the drop of whatever

and of course a lot of people had to pay for it, but that's what it was like.

Within six months, Studio 54 had earned a reputation

for being a Midtown Sodom and Gomorrah

and suddenly everybody who was anybody wanted to be there.

And so Steve started getting all this press and all of a sudden there's lines around the block

and he decides to do this kind of, "You. Not you.

"You if take your shirt off and you lose your girlfriend,"

and all these things which were really, I thought, very, very rude.

No, you're not shaved, there's no way you're gonna get in.

It doesn't matter. Listen, just go home.

Studio was the antithesis of what most people at the beginning

felt disco was about.

It was certainly not at all democratic.

Studio 54 turned the all-inclusive, music-led ethos of the downtown club scene on its head,

selling exclusivity to the privileged few.

For those without the keys to the city,

the more they were turned away, the more they wanted to come.

We went down to Studio 54 and we were sure that Grace Jones had our name on a list,

she was like the queen of disco, queen of clubs.

and...you know, we get there and we try to get in, you know...

"Hey, it's, you know, CHIC."

"Chic who?"

"You know, CHIC." And we try everybody, it's not happening at Studio 54!

"You know, CHIC, 'Yowsah yowsah yowsah, dance, dance, dance...'"

"Well, I don't see your name on the list."

New Year's Eve was a heavy night at Studio.

When you're turning away enough people, there starts to be a real backlash against you,

not just people talking bad about you

but energy-wise, people thinking, "That guy sucks, that club sucks."

And, like the good ex-revolutionary and former Black Panther that I was,

the first thing I thought of was writing a protest song,

so I started jamming on this groove.

HE IMITATES GUITAR

And then Bernard just came right in...

HE IMITATES BASS GUITAR

And we start grooving and, I don't know what made me do it,

I just went, "Fuck off!" because it was just right.

# Freak out! #

Nobody black, or anybody I knew, were able to get into Studio 54.

They would just block off the whole block, so that was just like...ugh!

It was a severe hatred for Studio 54, it was like, "Fuck them, man,"

really, "I hope it burns down."

For millions of New Yorkers not fortunate enough

to belong to the city's elite,

the glamour of Studio 54 and the bohemian atmosphere of CBGB

were a far cry from the reality of the streets.

New York City in the middle of the '70s was a rough-looking place.

You talked about... There was corruption inside government,

there was a problem with fiscal spending,

and there was always a distrust of the mayorship around that time.

So you had services in New York City that were limited

and the first areas that felt the limited services

were the areas where black and Hispanic people were living.

Thus, you know, Uptown, Brooklyn and the Bronx

were having a rough time at it,

and kind of like dipped into the realm of being slums.

Well, I mean, this is a long history,

it goes back to when they built the cross-Bronx expressway.

Robert Moses, who was a giant builder,

had this mandate, that even superseded that of elected officials,

to build what he felt was necessary

and it was a big construction project that went through the Bronx,

and it really split the area apart,

it went right through the heart of the south Bronx,

it disrupted the neighbourhoods on either side,

and the area never quite recovered from it psychologically, the sense of cohesion was lost.

The south Bronx resembled a warzone.

Buildings that hadn't been demolished were torched by insurance-scamming landlords

and a city-wide blackout in '77

served only to enhance the atmosphere of lawlessness.

In '77, you see a lot of the stores, like right here,

a lot of these stores never came back from that blackout.

People came through and they started looting, breaking windows,

crashing bottles and just taking everything in sight.

That blackout was crazy.

I think the south Bronx suffered more from that blackout than any other borough.

We've been needlessly subjected to a night of terror

in many communities that have been wantonly looted and burned.

What was special, it was home, it was home.

People had their own negative version of what they thought the Bronx was.

The Bronx was burning, the Bronx was going to this, the Bronx had economic...social problems.

That was home for me.

There was really nothing to do here.

We only had one movie theatre, which was over there, which came apart.

We didn't have a lot of opportunities to come out in the south Bronx, that's what it was.

Unable to go to Studio 54 and lacking any local club scene,

young people took matters into their own hands.

It started with the de-emphasising of music education in the school systems.

And since so many things were taken away from the community,

the community sort of culturally compensated for that

with the creation of making something

out of things that just happened to be around.

Old turntables.

Um, old record collections.

Hooking systems up into street poles for wiring.

Making art out of a wall

and a spray can that happened to be left to the side.

Being able to dance on some cardboard.

MUSIC: "Good Times" by Chic

Open-air disco parties sprung up on the streets

and in the parks of the South Bronx.

And the DJs who hosted them became neighbourhood stars.

One of the first to get a reputation for doing something different

was DJ Kool Herc.

# Good times... #

I was a guy that never went downtown.

I stayed in the neighbourhood and formed a culture called hip-hop.

I was the guy that never followed with the rest of the people.

Basically, Kool Herc was the guy who got two turntables...

..and a system,

came out in a big park,

and rocked the park, know what I'm sayin'?

It wasn't called hip-hop when I was doing it.

It was called the "jam". "Comin' to the jam."

The thing about Kool Herc, he played a lot of stuff.

He was a DJ who played records you'd never hear on the radio.

A lot of breakbeats, a lot of hot breakbeats and all that.

"Breakbeat" was a term used for old funk records,

where the music broke down to a bare rhythm.

Herc would take instrumental breaks from different records

and then mix them together non-stop.

Other DJs soon picked up on the technique.

I figured out that to every great song, there's a great part.

And a lot of times,

you know, that part could've been ten seconds.

That really used to piss me off.

The best part of a record is when the drummer finally gets a moment

and the rest of the band members is just taking a coffee break -

so why can't this be five minutes?

So I had to figure out a way to take this particular passage of the record,

repeat that, but also add percussive noises.

Repeat it, and sort of do some kind of manual editing to it.

Kinda like do things to the record that the record shoulda had.

Guy's a scientist, goes to high school and wants to build technical things,

and makes a mixer and stuff like that,

and once again, it was one of those understatements of...

inner-city black children, Hispanic children,

that said, "We got our geniuses,

"and people want to have the quest to become smarter

"and have opportunities to do great things."

And the city was basically saying, "No, nigger,

"you're not gonna be anything more than just a, you know,

"a little slum creature."

And the minds and the spirits and the souls

came up through hip-hop and said, "No, we wanna be better than that."

HEAVY FUNK

Hip-hop was that thing that everybody at these particular parties

that got on the mic would at some point say.

"To the hip, the hop,

"the hibby-dibby-dibby-dibby hip hip-hop, you don't stop."

And that's how you would define one of those parties

as opposed to one of the disco parties.

These parties were an outlet for a lot of aggressive energy...

that was bottled up otherwise.

It was a place where guys who were criminals,

who wanted to prey on people that looked like them, could go.

What better place to rob someone

than a room full of guys wearing the same Snorkel and baseball cap.

The violence came from members of organised gangs

whose territorial wars were a major problem in the Bronx.

1975, '76, '77 -

this park right here was most famous for gang activity.

If you got into a situation with the gangs,

they'd probably bring you here to set you off.

It's real big, it's like Central Park.

So if they was gonna murder you, or beat you up, or take your stuff,

they would bring you in here.

It takes a long time for the cops to find you in St Mary's Park.

So most of the gangs, like the Bachelors, the Black Spades,

the Savage Nomads,

they used to have their gang fights right here in this park.

BONGOES

But one man would see the light.

Afrika Bambaataa was a committed gang member

until a close friend was shot dead by the NYPD.

Inspired by Kool Herc,

Bambaataa turned to DJing at block parties

in an effort to end gang warfare.

Yes, I was part of a great street gang

and many other street gangs that I have been involved with.

My greatest one was the Black Spades.

The Savage Spades.

-GRANDMASTER FLASH:

-There was a lot of pain

and a lot of distress going on in the Bronx

with the gang thing that was going on.

He took, like, a...

..a huge mass of people

that were so angry,

and turned that nervous energy into a coalition that's now worldwide.

You still got the Savage Nomads, the Seven Immortals and all them people.

It's the same thing, you know. Only thing is

they do all that crazy shit, man, dancing and all that.

Like they be showin' on TV. Instead of fighting, they dance each other to death.

Which is better than going out there with a .30-30 and shooting somebody.

The gang culture faded away

to the hip-hop culture.

Then you started getting crews and organisations.

Thus came... We had the Bronx River Organisation,

that became the Organisation. The Organisation became the Zulu Nation.

The Zulu Nation became the Almighty Zulu Nation

and the Almighty Zulu Nation became the Universal Zulu Nation.

Bambaataa had the wherewithal to say,

"Music can kind of like, you know...

"calm the savage beast," and kind of like make people say

"Forget the drama and the beef,

"let's kind of like...

"have a time, cos we're kind of all here together."

South Bronx in the house!

Yeah!

Is everybody in the house?

As the nascent hip-hop scene absorbed the street gangs' energy,

it began to flourish, and the word spread across town.

Subway trains tagged up in the Bronx's vast train yards

took graffiti, hip-hop's visual message,

right into the heart of Manhattan.

The New York art world was quick to see the potential in graffiti

and it was soon feted as the freshest thing

since Warhol.

Graffiti artists like Fab Five Freddy

became hip-hop's ambassadors for those curious to find out more - such as Blondie.

MUSIC: "Heart Of Glass" by Blondie

I kind of turned them on to hip-hop, took them to the Bronx,

showed them hip-hop in the raw, in the flesh.

And they kind of

took me to parties and introduced me to Warhol and I met kind of the cream

of the downtown arts scene.

# ..Only to find... #

Of all the downtown bands, Blondie had had the most success.

These so-called punks had even hit number one with a disco song - Heart Of Glass.

And having assimilated one New York musical form,

Blondie were keen to sample another.

# ..Soon found out, I was losing my mind

# Seemed like the real thing, but I was so blind... #

Fab Five Freddy would always come to my parties over in the Bronx and he had always said to us,

"Man, I'm gonna bring Blondie up here."

And we all thought he was full of shit,

because at that time, she had Call Me, all these songs...

-# Call me!

-Call me

# I'm alive Call me, call me any, any... #

Well, in '77, Freddy brought us up to the South Bronx

to this big hip-hop event and it had already been in full swing,

and it really parallels the downtown rock scene

and I called it a destructivist, reconstructionist form

where they're pulling things apart and playing it back together again,

taking their records, doing the scratching, all that stuff.

Similar to us pulling apart the old forms of rock'n'roll and putting them back together again.

The majority of my audience was, you know, blacks, Spanish, Latinos,

and there was this one blonde head coming through the crowd, you know?

Freddy was... "Fun, huh?"

And er...

She came, and she said, "You know something?

"I watched you, and it was so amazing watching you play the turntables,"

She says, "I'm gonna write a song about you."

Of course, I gave her a smile,

like, "Yeah, right!"

And erm, I guess their way of helping

was they made this record called Rapture

which mentioned me on the record.

They said, "Fab Five Freddy told me everybody's fly."

"There's a DJ named Flash, and he's the fastest..."

RAPPING: # Fab Five Freddy told me everybody's fly

# DJ spinning, I said, "My my"

# Flash is fast, Flash is cool

# Francois c'est pas Flashe non due

# And you don't stop, sure shot. #

You know, Debbie just took all that stuff

and spit it out in the rap that she did for Rapture,

which was probably the first time

most people heard this idea of rapping, you know,

"What is this?" And it was a huge record.

# And then you're in demand for more

# You go out at night eating cars

# You eat Cadillacs, Lincolns too

# Mercurys and Subaru

# And you don't stop... #

Rapture is really an homage.

It wasn't intended as an actual rap song.

But still, the guy from Wu Tang told me it was the first rap song

he ever heard, so that's kind of a mind-fuck, you know?

# They're stepping lightly

# Hang each night in rapture... #

Rapture's blend of New York influences went far beyond the five boroughs,

reaching the American number one spot in '81.

The song took hip-hop out of New York and into the wider world,

where it would become today's biggest selling genre.

# And it's finger-popping Twenty-four-hour shopping

# In rapture... #

The song stood at the pinnacle of a golden era of street music

in which New York's urban neighbourhoods gave birth to hip-hop, disco and punk.

There was some element of the hardcore,

of survivors in a frontier town.

The fact that you could walk two blocks in either direction

and be in an entirely different musical world.

It was a great place to be creative

and to realise that you were beyond a sense of rule.

Just think about this. We're talking about people going into a park -

a city school yard or a park -

with huge speakers...and you know, dancers, and blasting music.

That would never happen now.

That's a quality-of-life crime.

MUSIC: "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash

Manhattan has really fucked itself. It's shot itself in the foot,

by making it impossible for young people to move here.

It's really, really hard to move into New York these days.

Erm, so that's really created a big difference.

And there's no place today for the last remaining symbol of '70s New York, CBGB.

It shut its doors for the last time in October 2006.

They could have, like, built around a church.

They could have put the condos

and all the new, hip gentry that's come into the fucking area

would have been happy

to live in a very expensive condo over the CBGB's museum.

What's happening to New York?

Look around. Try to get an apartment.

# Don't push me Cos I'm close to the edge

# I'm tryin' not to lose my head... #

These days, New York is safe, clean and rich,

but the golden era of street music and making something out of nothing

seems to have gone forever.

# Crazy lady, livin' in a bag

# Eatin' out of garbage pails Used to be a fag-hag

# Said she danced the tango

# Skipped the light fandango

# A zircon princess, seemed to've lost her senses

# Down at the peep-show Watchin' all the creeps

# So she can tell her stories to the girls back home

# She went to the city and got so, so, so ditty,

# She had to get a pimp She couldn't make it on her own

# Don't push me cos I'm close to the edge

# I'm tryin' not to lose my head... #