All Historic

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 ...

The Batcave was a meeting place or nightclub for the deviants of London. This is the birthplace and the start of what is referred to as today’s “Goth” scene or subculture. The Batcave opened its doors every Wednesday at 69 Dean Street in central London at the Gargoyle Club. Date of conception: July 1982. The house bands included Specimen, and spawned some of the following people who are icons in the music scene today: Nick Cave, Robert Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, Steven Severing, Bauhaus, and Marc Almond. The regulars would wear bat necklaces.. More ...