The CBGB Conspiracy! -With Gabriel Rotello

27:23One was Max's Kansas City. There it is. Yep. Which was up on Park Avenue South and had been a major Warhol hangout in the 60s. Did you meet him? Oh, yeah. I figured you did. Everybody did. You know what? This is crazy. I never knew he had a wig. I never thought about it. Oh, yeah. That was a wig. I didn't know. Yeah. It was yak hair. I had, for some reason, it was just last year I read about his wig. I'm like, yeah, that was a wig. I mean, I knew I had crazy hair, but it just, oh yeah. Go ahead. So there was that, that had been a famous club, but it was that Warhol back room in the sixties until Warhol got shot in 68.

27:59And then he stopped going there, but then it had a second life in the seventies as a rock club. And it became the main competitor to CBGB. So that you, you played one week at CBGB and you played the next week at Max's. And so that was the one club. And then the other one was studio 54, which also took off in 1977. And one of my main characters is a, as a young woman who was the, the girlfriend of the deceased poet musician, um, who was very, very wealthy from a super rich family and lives uptown and spends a lot of time at studio 54. And there's a number of scenes at studio 54 with Steve Rubel and Truman Capote and all of those people.

28:39So you, I did meet him a couple of times at studio 54. Yeah. Um, yeah. I want to hear some more. I mean, the thing about it is in those days, that scene was both the Studio 54 scene and the downtown scene were relatively small. It was not a big scene at all. I mean, when CBGB started, I would say for the first year, the hardcore audience there, the people that went over and over and over again, it was maybe 100 people. Wow. And so, of course, everybody knew everybody. If you keep going to a club and it's the same hundred people night after night, week after week, sooner or later, you know, every single one of them.

29:21And it's just amazing to me. And I had no idea that this was going to happen. And I don't think anybody did have an idea that this was going to happen. That so many of them would turn out to be famous and go on to become famous. And not just the rock musicians, but also the clothing designers and the artists. I mean, Jean-Michel Basquiat, who is a character in the book, he's a significant character in the CBGB conspiracy. I assume you met him. I did meet him, yeah. Can you tell us a little about him? Well, he was very much kept his distant. So I only knew him because he was good friends of a couple of good friends of mine.

29:59I found him a little bit sort of intimidating, kind of whatever. But he's a major character in the book. He was very young in 77. He was 17 years old. but he was on the scene and he was doing his Sammo tag made him famous originally. Steven Sprouse, the fashion designer, Steven Sprouse, who was one of my best friends and was my boyfriend in 1977. He's one of the three main characters of the book. I changed his name because I just was too intimate to use the same name. But that if anybody who reads it, who Finn Burden is the name of the character immediately goes, Oh, that's Steven Sprouse. So there were fashion people, there were art people, there were writers, there were poets, there were a lot of beat people.

30:44I mean, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs went to CBGB. So you got to know everybody, not having any idea that any of them were going to become famous. And then it was so thrilling to watch over the next two or three years as at least the musicians among them did start to become famous. And Patti Smith was the first who became really quite famous. And then the Ramones became very famous. And then Blondie became one of the biggest. I mean, by the end of the 70s, Blondie was like kind of like Beyonce today. It was like the number one act in the world. And she was a waitress who was playing at CBG for his spare time.

31:23It was a big part of my growing up. Yeah. So, I mean, you knew that that was going to happen. And people constantly ask me today, well, so what was that like to be this legendary and to know all these people? It was like, it wasn't like anything. I mean, it was, it was, you had no idea that that was going to happen. It was just a bunch of kids playing. When you're in it, you don't realize what you're in. And also the fact that it was on the Bowery and that you would walk outside because we spent a lot of time outside. Hillie would let you go out and he had a cover charge. He would let most of us in for free, but he had a cover charge, but he would let you go out and come back in.

31:54So there was always a big crowd when the weather was halfway decent, a big crowd or even a bigger crowd on the street outside than there was inside because it was so skanky inside that you just want to get out of there. And you could do drugs outside, you know, whatever. So you go outside and say, well, nothing much is going to come from this scene because look where we are. You know, there's stepping over, you know, there's bodies lying on the street. Who's going to become a rock star in this place? Yeah. But people did. But they did. So how long did it take you to write the book? It took, the first draft took a very short time, just a couple of months.

32:32And then I got an agent. I sent it out to agents and I almost got picked up by Dutton, who had published my first book. But they had a bunch of notes. And so I decided that I was going to address their notes and COVID happened. And suddenly I was just sort of off like everybody was off. And so I addressed their notes and the second draft took a year. That's not bad though. It's not bad, but it was just, it seemed funny that it almost got published for the first draft that took two months, but the second, but it made it so much better and their notes were so great. How did you feel when you finished it?

33:05You never really finish it. You know what I mean? It's like you're, it's right up to the last minute, but, um, but I felt good. I mean, I really felt, and I began sending it out to friends and people were just calling me up going, oh my God, this is so great. Like, I can't believe what a great story it is and what the characters are. And I didn't get it. I finally found out who'd done it at the end. I was totally shocked and flummoxed and, you know, whatever. So it felt really good. I mean, it's really fun. And it was just fun to write. I love that. It was fun to go back into that era. And the guest that you had a month or two, Jonathan Mahler, had written a book called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning, which is a history of New York in 1977.

33:47At the same time, your book is taking place. The exact same time, covering the exact same place. Right. and his book had already come out. It had been out for quite a number of years when I was writing this. So I constantly referred to that to remind myself. And there's also this wonderful documentary on, it was a VH1 documentary. I used to make a lot of VH1 documentaries. I didn't make this one, but it's the kind that we used to make in the era of behind the music and all those kinds of documentaries. And it's called 1977, the coolest year in hell. That's where that phrase And it's a it's a two hour documentary about New York City in 1977.

34:21And it's wall to wall archival footage. So I can watch that in my spare time and just remember, you know, what we were wearing and what it looked like and the fires that were breaking out and crime and the garbage and the graffiti and all that stuff. So though this of his book and that documentary helped me a lot. But mostly I just relied on my memories. How do you feel when you look back at those days? I feel like a therapist right now, but, you know, like when you look back now where you're like, wow, those are great memories, even though it was great memories. And I don't regret it. No regrets.

34:58No, no regret. I mean, my, my one regret is that young people today don't have the opportunity to have that kind of thing. At least in cities like New York, it's just too expensive and everybody's saddled with their student. no dime beds you can stay in like you mentioned earlier you know it's just it's all just the whole world became corporate and it all just went to me it just kind of went to hell um and people say oh well everybody always says that about when you were young things were better when you were young but that's not really true at all because my parents grew up in the depression and all i heard or heard about when i was a kid was how terrible it was when they were young and how great how lucky I was to be growing up in the 60s when things were great.

35:40You should have been around the 30s. And then we had World War II. It was horrible. You kids today have no idea how great it was, you know, how great you have it today. So I think that people have a pretty good idea of when times are good and when times are bad. And for us, times were good. I mean, they weren't good if you were really poor. They weren't good, you know, in New York, if you were a Bowery bum or whatever. And the reason why people were leaving New York was because they felt that it wasn't good. But if you were young and you had something to say or you wanted to try to have something to say, it was good in a way that it is not today.

36:15People try to, you know, to recreate the same kind of thing on the Internet and creating communities and things like that. And they try. And I think that people do it to the extent that they do it. But it's not the same as everybody being together and hanging out every night in person. Without cell phones. without with there were no cell phones there was no social media there was no internet there was no computer you had to have a computer find your friends you had to find your friends and then everything was and they will never know this there was not even any when i first got to new york there weren't even any telephone machines i mean if you you know some actors had a phone service where you would call and they would say you know so-and-so's residence and you would leave a message because they needed to know for auditions and stuff but most people didn't have that if you called somebody they weren't home the phone just rang and rang and rang exactly that was it and you know you pull you put a dime in a in a phone booth and called your friend from the phone booth because you know it was like that so about how nasty those phone now now that i think about how nasty pay phones were and we didn't think anything didn't think anything yeah the thing that we were pissed off was when they went from a dime to a quarter exactly how dare they it's supposed to be right well tell us about the gay scene in the 70s and was there a gay scene at cbgb's as well There was a gay scene at CBGB's.

37:32I was on that scene as a gay person. And my friends, I mean, people, one of my very best friends, Richard Soule, was the keyboard player of the Patti Smith group. And he was gay. And Stephen Sprouse, who we talked about earlier, the designer, was gay. There were quite a number of gay people at CBGB's. But there were two, there was a different scene. The East Village scene around CB's was very, very different from the West Village scene. In those days, the main gay scene was in the West Village, centering on Christopher Street and Sheridan Square. When I got to New York in 1974, I met with a friend who I lived in Nepal and Kathmandu just before that.

38:11I had met somebody who invited me to stay with him. And he took me out when I, like the first night I got here was summertime, springtime, warm spring night. And he said, I'm taking you to Christopher Street. And we walked out and walked over to Christopher Street. and they were just thousands of people out in the street, thousands of people, almost like a street there. And it was all, it was just gay men. There were not a lot of lesbians. It was gay men and everybody like had their shirts off and they were just cruising and smoking cigarettes and doing their thing. And I was like, what is this?

38:49Like, what, what is this? It's like, is there a party tonight he said oh no and you're how old here i was 20 just turned 21 wow and um and he's and i said is there is there a is this a street fair i said oh no it's like this every night it's like this every night and and it was and christopher street was lined with gay bars and sheridan square gay bars um and that was the scene and this was just at the moment that disco was beginning to take off the very first disco songs appeared right when I started going to the West Village like Donna Summers type stuff or is that even earlier rock the boat you know the boat don't rock the boat yeah yeah yeah the first first disco song yeah we're on the jukebox at the ninth circle which was my bar that was our favorite bar if we came over from the East Village to the West Village we went to the ninth circle because that was the bar that had the best jukebox in town All the other jukeboxes were starting to really just kind of do disco.

39:47And the Ninth Circle was a rock and roll jukebox. And it also was the place that people like Andy Warhol and Lou Reed and David Bowie, if they were going to go to the West Village and go to a gay bar, it would be the Ninth Circle. So we just had our regular tables in the back of the Ninth Circle. You could just go by yourself and you would meet tons of friends there. And then from there, you'd go over to CBGB. But they were different scenes. and you were a little bit torn if you were gay between the one scene and the other. And I also had a boyfriend at the time for 15 years. My friend, Hap Hatton, who I first met when I first, I actually met him in Greece before I moved to New York and then we met him when I got to New York.

40:30Just by coincidence or? No, I mean, I got his number and he said, if you ever come to New York, look me up. He was the first openly gay person that I had met. He was 10 years older than me. and I was an exchange student in Europe and um he I met him and he was 10 years older and he was openly gay and if you come to New York meet me I was not out at the time he didn't know I was gay until I arrived in New York and and called him up and you remember me from you know a year and a half ago in Greece oh my god come over right now um and I went over and said oh by the way I'm gay he said you are oh my god and we became a couple for 15 years until he died in his age in 1988 um yeah and um and he wasn't on either of those scenes he wasn't into the west village gay thing at all he never went to a gay bar he never went to a bathhouse and he would only go to the place to the rock places if when i was playing he would go to see me he was super supportive of me so whenever i had a great thing that was playing and he would come to it but otherwise he was on his own scene, which was about all about museums and about culture.

41:38And he was very erudite and very well-read and just a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful person. So there were so many different scenes going on. We, on the, on the East village scene, we became a little bit tired of the West village scene and we had a very snotty attitude about it. We really did. I mean, I mentioned earlier howie montaug who introduced madonna yeah at dan satiria years later um started a fake group and it just wasn't an actual group but he started sort of like a fake group called bags against facial hair because the whole thing the clone look had taken over in the west village and the clone look was this you know sort of like the mustache yeah the aviator glasses the jeans with the hanky sticking out of the pocket, the signified whatever, the jean jacket with the hoodie.

42:29A little village people-ish. Totally village people. And everybody was wearing that look. And everybody had to have the mustache. And we didn't have mustaches. So Howie started this thing called Fags Against Face. So we just thought that the whole disco thing, as it evolved, and by 77, when the CBGB conspiracy is taking place, disco rules the roost. I mean, that's the peak, peak. And now you're talking Donna Summer and all that. It was like, that's all you heard coming out of the, out of the clubs in the West village. Um, and we hated it, which is funny cause I love it now, but socially what it signified to us was this sort of kind of mindless, nihilistic, just, you know, just dance, you know, dance your troubles away.

43:11And we thought that there was just much more important stuff to be doing. And the punk thing was much more important. I mean, if you listen to Patti Smith or what people are seeing like television, what their lyrics about they're they're emulating bob dylan they're it's protest music they're talking about real things and the disco thing is just you know it's raining men hallelujah you know and we just thought that was just really not something we wanted so funny associated with because we just had an attitude we were real snobs yeah we were totally snobby but and a lot of the the punk movement did have a major element of snobbery in it sort of cultural i'm cooler than you kind of thing which is unfortunate um and it's just funny that now that all those kinds of music have lost their cultural meanings and are just just exist now as music I listen to disco all the time because it's so great such great music really and it's really fun to dance to and it was a great dance music but at the time no we were not having that at all so yeah yeah so um and you guys were you and Happ were together how long?

44:1715 years. And then of course, AIDS happened in the eighties and, uh, in 1981, the first reports of it, um, it took most people quite a long time to realize what was actually happening. I guess, cause I was paranoid. It didn't take me very long. Um, and I radically changed my behavior, but most of my friends were a lot looser than me and did not. And between like 81 and 84 or so is when most people became infected with HIV. And then the, just the tsunami of death just swept over the community. And I would say that conservatively 50 % of all of my friends died and it's probably closer to 70%. And it just went on and on and on, which is why I then joined ACT UP in 1988, I guess it was, and then founded Outweek Magazine.

45:14I was going to say, tell us about Outweek Magazine too. So ACT UP became the big AIDS protest. Right, I remember. And it had two sides to it. One side were the protest people who did demonstrations and shut everything down. And the other side were the treatment activists who understood the science. And they would tell us who to demonstrate against. They would say, you need to do this and do that. And I felt that the world needed a magazine or a newspaper that would reflect this new form of AIDS activism and gay activism and lesbian activism. And there wasn't one. New York had the New York native and nobody read that.

45:50It was just this crazy rag, really. Hate to say it, but it was. And so I founded Out Week magazine to reflect the new mood. And it just took off like a rocket. and became like this major force in activism and source of information and also sorts of activism. That's where outing came from. I mean, if you remember the outing controversy of dragging people out of the closet, all of those things. I mean, so Out Week really became an activist thing rather than just reporting about activism. It became its own activist thing. It became a must read in New York for a couple of years. and then I went on from there to become a columnist at Newsday and to write a book about AIDS prevention when it became clear that we were not succeeding in preventing new infections of the younger generation which was not yet infected they were coming into the community and were destined to become infected at about the same levels that are generally even though we were doing condoms and safe sex and all that it was working on a personal level but a population level it wasn't so I wanted to know why so I wrote that book about it um and then finally AIDS abated because of the drugs although it's still going on but you don't really die from it that much anymore you lost half in 88 so that was relatively early from age yeah sorry about that so that that continued thank you that continued another eight or nine years after his death but then when that happened I left and I went to Hollywood and became a TV producer I was gonna say and started having fun did you did you um uh go to the march on washington in 93 i did yes and i was there you were there okay yeah yeah i wrote about that i wrote that that was when i was a columnist at newsday right and i wrote a column that became kind of a famous column about that um yeah all those things i was really into it in the late 80s and 90s i was You know, I can't imagine how New York City felt because, you know, I was living in Orlando and I lost friends in Orlando as well.

47:56Right. You know, and I just can't imagine what happened to New York City, which was like the epicenter of that. What happened in. Yeah, it was the epicenter and San Francisco also. But New York is so much bigger. I think that like more there's more gay people in New York than there are people in San Francisco. So it's just the scale is so enormous. And then it was still largely concentrated in the gay population. And the gay population was largely concentrated in downtown Manhattan. So you just saw people every time you walked out the door, you know, walking down the sidewalk with a cane covered with Kaposi's sarcoma lesions.

48:35People that had been these gorgeous. Wasting away. Yeah, just wasting away. It was horrifying. It was absolutely horrifying. It was. And nobody cared about it. It wasn't. Just nobody cared about it. It just literally was just ignored. Until Rock Hudson. Until Rock Hudson. And then they were only afraid because they thought that maybe straight people would start getting it because they thought that Rock Hudson was straight. Correct. But otherwise, people just did not care about it at all. And we had to force them to do it, which was what ACT UP was all about. And you played a big part of that, too.

49:03So it's amazing. And ACT UP, yeah. And Out Week magazine. And we would target the New York Times. We would target and we would have huge demonstrations. We shut down City Hall and closed the Brooklyn Bridge, you know. So we did, and we said, no, you must pay attention to this. And the drug companies must pay attention to this. And the government must pay attention. And today people like Tony Fauci and Dr. Ho, the people that were most responsible for the drugs that we now have, say it was you guys that forced us to do this. I mean, we became friends with them eventually. We targeted them, but eventually they brought us into their world and said, what should we do?

49:44And there were enough smart people in ACT UP who had plans for what they should do that they were deeply impressed by that and began doing this. This is like fast tracking drugs to get them into people's bodies, even before you're sure that they're going to work, since you're going to die anyway. Why? All these kinds of things. And it transformed the drug making process in the United States. And it led to these compounds, the triple combination therapies, years before they otherwise would have been. I mean, hundreds of thousands more people would have died of AIDS had it not been for that fast tracking that really came from ACT UP.

50:22So, yeah, it was very successful. Wow, you've done a lot of amazing things. Well, I didn't do that. I mean, I helped that. I know, but you've been involved, at least, you know, so that's incredible. Gabriel, unfortunately, we have to go now. Our time is up. but you know, hopefully one day if you want to come back on the podcast and talk, cause I feel like we have so much more to talk about. It was fascinating talking with you. So I would like that one day. Great talking with you, Kelly. Yeah. Well, I have one more question for you. Okay. Before I would let you go, Gabriel, we here at the New Yorkers podcast want to know what it means to you, Gabriel Rotello, to be a New Yorker.

51:05Well, what it means to me to be a New Yorker is to be somebody who is deeply connected to the world because New York is this. I know that people hate to hear this when they're from other cities, uh, in other countries or whatever, but New York is the center. It's the metropole. It's the Rome of ancient Rome. It's the Athens of ancient Greece. It's the, it's the metropole of the world. And, um, to be in it is to be, you know, where the action is. And I always just wanted to be where the action was. So New York was the logical place to be. It has changed. It is a place of just constant reinvention.

51:43The New York that I fondly remember and am nostalgic about in the 70s was completely different from the New York of the 1950s. Because when I got here, people were nostalgic for the New York of the 50s. And the people in the 50s were nostalgic for the New York of the 1920s. And in the 90s, people were nostalgic for the 70s. And today, people are nostalgic for the nights. It constantly changes. It looks different. Although Canal Street doesn't look any different where your studios are. It looks exactly, they're selling those same fake Rolex watches right outside the door that they were selling in 1981.

52:15But, um, it's a, it's a constant reinvention, but as it constantly reinvents itself, it's always centrally located in the imagination of our civilization. And it's like the Metropole, It's the central place. And so to be here is to be in this wonderful cauldron where if I lived in ancient Rome, I would want to be in Rome. And if I was in ancient Greece, I would want to be in Athens. And in this civilization, I want to be in New York. Wow. What an awesome answer. I love that. Really, really awesome. Thank you for joining us today, my friends, for this week's episode of the New Yorkers podcast. Gabriel, why don't you let everyone know where they can find you on social media and where they can purchase your book as well.

52:57So you can find me on social media. I'm not great on social media, but I'm on Instagram. If you just do Gabriel Ortello on Instagram, I think the place that people would most enjoy finding me on is YouTube because a lot of my musical projects from the late seventies and eighties are on YouTube. And if you just go on YouTube and punch in Gabriel Ortello, you'll see all sorts of really fun things that I was doing in those days. And as far as my book, I mean, I think these days, most people buy books online. So barnesandnoble.com, Amazon, whatever, or, you know, wherever fine books are sold. The CBGB.

53:30The CBGB conspiracy. Once again, everyone, I'm your host, Kelly Kopp, also known as New York City Kopp, across all my social media. Please like and subscribe to the New Yorkers podcast and you can follow the New Yorkers on social media at the New Yorkers podcast. You can leave a rating or a comment to let us know how you are enjoying the show. We read through all your comments and DMs, So please, we would love to hear from you, my friends. Thank you, Gene Fleming, Bridget Rui, and Thierry Tavernier for your kind words of the last episode. If you want to be featured at the end of an episode, leave a rating on Apple Podcasts or a comment on Spotify or YouTube.

54:11And thank you, the New York City, the NYC Walking Show, Sincerely Maureen and Studio J170 for your comments on Instagram. Have a lovely day, everyone, and we will see you next time. Goodbye.

54:27This is the last stop on this train. Everyone, please leave the train. Thank you for riding with MTA New York City Transit.