Roberta Bayley remembers working the door: 'I would say for the first year of Blondie, you know, they were kind of looked at, quite frankly, as the band least likely to succeed. But a few months later, CBGB opened blocks away, and that's where Stein and Harry's new band Blondie played its first gig in the spring of 1974. In August of 1973, Mercer Arts literally collapsed. Debbie Harry performed in a band called the Stilettos that featured three female vocalists and a male backing band, eventually including Stein on guitar. He saw the Dolls perform at Mercer Arts and befriended Emerson, who became his roommate and sometime bandmate.

'And it was beautiful, a lot of people who would see each other on the street, and this gave them a chance to be in the same kind of place.'Īt the time, Chris Stein was a student at the School of Visual Arts. 'A scene started kind of coming around us,' Johansen explains. 'I was friends with Eric Emerson, who had a band called Magic Tramps, and he said that he was going to do a gig at this new place, Mercer Arts Center, and would my band want to come and open for him?'īy the summer of 1972, that gig turned into a weekly engagement, with the Dolls sharing the stage with guests including Jayne (then performing as Wayne) County and Ruby and the Rednecks. New York Dolls frontman David Johansen says it found a home just north of Bleecker Street and east of Washington Square. By the early 1970s, the Greenwich Village folk scene had faded, and a new sound was wafting up from the street.

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