Bass player Sid Vicious, desperate to score some heroin, gets lost in Atlanta and Tennessee. Before he’s found he carves “I Wanna Fix” into his chest. The band makes their way to the venue. The show is oversold. Hundreds of angry ticket holders are throwing cans at the front windows of the hall. Coincidentally, it’s just blocks away from Sun Studios, the birthplace of Rock ‘N’ Roll. The band’s frustration with Vicious is evident in their loud, fast, aggressive performance. Not to be upstaged by the punk rock, zombie Frankenstein, singer Johnny Rotten terrorizes the audience. He snarls into the More ...

The Sex Pistols’ first performance on US soil. Five hundred audience members pile into a hall designed more for folk and country music than aggressive rock ‘n’ roll. Three vice squad cops warn US Road Manager Noel Monk that they will not tolerate the band raping women on stage, vomiting on the crowd, sodomizing each other, or beating up the audience. High Times magazine founder Tom Forcade and director Lech Kowalski begin filming for punk documentary D.O.A.: A Right of Passage. Fascinated with the Sex Pistols’ counter-culture manifesto, Forcade featured the band in his magazine prior to the US tour. More ...

Operated by the Los Angeles Archdiocese, the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery is 200 acres of ponds, brooks, waterfalls, shrines and lush gardens. It’s also a popular final destination for yesteryear celebrities. Click the Wikipedia link below for an extensive list of the deceased. Of particular interest, Germs frontman Jan Paul Beahm, AKA Darby Crash and horror film actor Bela Lugosi. Darby Crash’s grave is located near the rear entrance of the cemetery at Resurrection, T8, 114. Bela Lugosi’s grave can be found near the front entrance to the left at Grotto, L120, 1. More ...

Originally located at 484 Broome Street in New York, the Kitchen played host to most of the local No Wave bands. Music director Rhys Chatham Founded as an artist collective in 1971 by Woody and Steina Vasulka and incorporated as a nonprofit two years later, The Kitchen has from its infancy been a space where experimental artists and composers share progressive ideas with like-minded colleagues. It was among the very first American institutions to embrace the emerging fields of video and performance, while presenting visionary new work in established disciplines such as dance, music, literature, and film. More ...

Founded in 1899, the cemetery is one of the oldest in Los Angeles and the only cemetery in Hollywood. It’s the final resting place of hundreds of entertainment industry legends, including Johnny (1948 – 2004) and Dee Dee Ramone (1951-2002), the Screamers front man Tomata Du Plenty (1948 – 2000), musician and Runaways manager Kim Fowley (1939 – 2015), Judy Garland, Cecil B. DeMille, Rudolph Valentino, Mickey Rooney, Tyrone Power, Douglas Fairbanks, Valerie Harper, Chris Cornell, and hundreds of others. Every Year, Linda Ramone organizes a tribute event for her late husband Johnny Ramone at the cemetery.   More ...

The five-night music festival in May 1978 at the legendary gallery and performance venue Artists Space, at 105 Hudson Street in Tribeca, had no title. The flyers on the fences around vacant lots in Lower Manhattan said only “BANDS” with a lineup: Terminal, Gynecologists, Theoretical Girls, Daily Life, Tone Death, Contortions, DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. In the audience were The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, John Rockwell from The New York Times and Brian Eno, in town to produce the Talking Heads’ second album. The Contortions’ set on Friday night was halted when James Chance, the group’s singer, More ...

Former gay bar which hosted acts like Blondie, the Ramones, and the Talking Heads. In 2011, Blondie released a song dedicated to this bar. More ...

It was also a favorite hangout of Andy Warhol and his entourage, who dominated the back room. The Velvet Underground played there regularly, including their last shows with Lou Reed before he quit the band, in the summer of 1970. It was a home base for the glam rock scene, which included Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls, Wayne County, Dorian Zero and the Magic Tramps. While her band did not play there until the second incarnation of the club, Patti Smith and her boyfriend, artist Robert Mapplethorpe, visited Max’s almost nightly from 1969 through the early 1970s. Smith and guitarist Lenny Kaye also performed there as a duo on New Year’s Day More ...

Club 57 was an anti-disco, anti-glitz dingy diamond of the early new wave era, a ‘punk do-it-yourself’ romper room managed by budding performance artist Ann Magnuson. (She’s now an icon of the downtown New York scene. You may remember her from Desperately Seeking Susan.) According to Ann, she was hired in 1979 by the owner of Irving Plaza whose smaller club here at St. Mark’s needed to be spiced up with “‘alternative’ entertainment” that reflected the clientele of the neighborhood. With some creativity and abandon, Magnuson and her gang of misfits turned the basement into her own “low rent answer to More ...

The Mudd Club was named after Samuel Alexander Mudd, a physician who treated John Wilkes Booth in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. It closed in New York in 1983. To secure the space for the Mudd Club (a loft owned by artist Ross Bleckner), Steve Mass described the future venue as cabaret. Mass said he had started the nightclub on a budget of only $15,000. The club featured a bar, gender-neutral bathrooms and a rotating gallery curated by Keith Haring on the fourth floor. Live performances included new wave, experimental music, literary icons Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, and catwalk exhibitions for emerging fashion designers Anna Sui and Jasper Conran. More ...