TÉMOIGNAGES

Darryl McDaniels, musician and member of Run-DMC

I lived on the quiet end of Hollis, Queens. The whole neighborhood was a lower-middle class suburban area. Every parent, every grown-up was your mother and father. It was like a village, y’know? You couldn’t do nothing stupid or bad because your friend’s mother was your mother, too.

The first single we ever made [was in 1983]: “Sucker M.C.’s” was the B-side of “It’s Like That.” “It’s Like That” was a record that was talking about all of the things that was going on in communities, society and also the world. It’s basically the most conscious, relatable record. And then we said, “We gotta do the real hip-hop that we’re actually doing at the block parties and at the house parties and at the park parties.” So we decided to make it all beat — no music, just me and Run [Joseph Simmons, another founding member of Run-DMC] doing the real hardcore, just rhyming on this record. That was “Sucker M.C.’s.”

I was still living at home. I was just out of high school. I was preparing that summer to start my first semester at St. John’s University. We recorded at a studio called Greene Street Recording Studio on Greene Street between Houston and Prince. I will never forget the day, because I didn’t tell my mother and father that I was going to make a record. I just left the house on a Sunday, went to make the record. And I got in trouble because I didn’t get home until like 1 or 2 in the morning. When me and Run would go to each other’s houses and rap together, we would go into the attic. And when my mother asked me where I was at, I just said, “Oh, I was in the attic.”

Charlie Ahearn, filmmaker and artist

My fantasy was to rent one of these theaters on 42nd Street and show my movie alongside Mad Monkey Kung Fu. To me it was all an art project. [Wild Style] opened in 1983, [at the Embassy 3] on 47th Street and Broadway. I’d paid high school kids to go on Thursday afternoons after school and hand out fliers. Everyone was very excited. There were lines around the block — the theater starting bumping it up to a second and third screening. This scrappy 16mm movie that people weren’t sure if it was a story movie or a documentary, everybody looked at it and said, “I know that guy!” They weren’t public figures; they were locally known graffiti artists, break-dancers, hip-hop M.C.s or D.J.s.

I felt like I was having the best entertainment of my life, because people were going up and down the aisle, going, “Loose joints …” People were talking throughout the whole movie going, “Yo, shut up!” It was just like the kung fu movies — they were the same audience. The weekend that it happened, I got a call at 2 o’clock in the morning from the owner of the theater. He goes, “What the hell are you doing to my theater? Someone broke the front glass and stole the poster. They put their names all over the men’s room!” The theater had been trashed. I said, “I’m very happy for you, you’re selling a lot of tickets. Sorry.”

Ann Magnuson, actress and performance artist

My days changed depending on what show I was putting on, what sort of rehearsal schedule I had and how late I’d been up the night before, though I had a rule for myself: Always be back before sunrise. My primary motive back then was to put on a show, and anything that slowed me down from that had to be curtailed. By 1981, I was no longer the manager at [the East Village performance space] Club 57, but I still helped out and performed there a lot. The Ladies Auxiliary of the Lower East Side — sort of a punk rock version of my mother’s Junior League group, which I started with some other girls from the East Village — hosted several events at the club. We had a prom, a debutante ball, a ladies’ wrestling night. In 1981, I suggested a bacchanal — a night of pagan merriment as spring was coming. So in April we held the Rites of Spring Fertility Bacchanal. We made an altar to a llama, and everyone dressed in kind of Greco-Roman outfits — I wore a toga with sequins. Wendy Wild made magic mushroom punch. We also created a percussive orchestra that was all pots and pans and a lot of racket, and that was the debut of the band Pulsallama. It was really like a combination of living theater and installation art, very communal. That’s what happened at Club 57 a lot: We told people, “This is the theme. Come be a part of it.” The doors would open and things would get going by 10, and by midnight it would be raging. In the mornings, usually around 11 a.m., I’d go to one of the coffee shops around the corner on Avenue A. Odessa was one, and Leshko’s was the other. People divided themselves into camps based on which one they favored — I liked Odessa better, but I’d go to both. That’s where you’d run into people, share breakfast.

Dapper Dan, fashion designer

We used to have a TV with a VCR on at all times, playing MTV and the guys coming up. All the music [in the atelier on 125th Street] came from the VCR. People would bring me their videos to pop in. They’d say, “Yo, Dap, listen to that.” All the hip-hop artists came [to the atelier]; there wasn’t any other place that catered to rappers. Those who set the tone — you had to have an outfit from me. Rapping and fashion were being born at the same time. One time a girl — a teenager, maybe 15, 16 — came in with her dad. She had made a video of herself dancing to LL Cool J. Her father said, “Dap, my daughter, she’s driving me crazy. Could you just call LL so she could just say hi?” Everybody knew I knew all the rappers and everything. So I call LL up and I let her speak to him for a few minutes. And when she gave me the phone back, she went into [hysterics]. LL wasn’t used to this kind of attention. He said, “Dap, what’s she doing?” I said, “She’s gasping for air now!” And I go attend to her. And then he asked me again: “Dap, what’s she doing? What’s she doing now?” She was like [hyperventilating]. I never saw that before — and he’d never experienced that. It was before he was onstage and all that; he was just starting out.

Stephen Koch, writer

I was living at almost the exact point where the Village meets the East Village, in the Colonnade Row building, right across the street from the Public Theater. I had half of the third floor, which was sort of the high-ceilinged fancy room, though it had long, long since stopped being fancy. My contemporary, the writer Ed [Edmund] White, had the apartment next door. I could wake up in the middle of the night and hear his typewriter going.

I met Peter Hujar through Susan Sontag. We became sort of like brothers. I’m a child of the Midwestern upper-middle class. Peter was straight out of Damon Runyon and Weegee. We were both rather exotic in each other’s eyes. Peter lived on the absolute margins — he never had anything. I remember thinking, How long can this go on? Peter can’t keep going that way, not in the city that it’s becoming now. Peter was so self-possessed and dignified, I never, ever thought of him as poor, even though he had no money. He’d walk in and be perfectly comfortable with the Duke of Edinburgh.

I invited him to dinner. The conversation was very interesting. Peter had no small talk at all. Then it got to be a habit. He’d come around maybe at 7 o’clock. We’d eat. I would drink quite a lot of wine. He would maybe drink half a glass of wine. Having had an alcoholic mother, he did not like being around people who drank much. We would sit at this coffee table and listen to records for an hour. Silently. Or with only a few comments in between. That is something I have never done with anyone else. Patsy Cline. Mozart. One of his favorite pieces was the Alto Rhapsody of Brahms, sung by Dame Janet Baker. Sometimes I would read him the week’s work. He had two responses: “Pretty good,” was high, high praise. The other was he wouldn’t say anything, just [shrug] — that meant it was a failure.

Alanna Heiss, founder of PS1 and the Clocktower Gallery

One evening Kenny Scharf and his whole group — which included Jean-Michel Basquiat, and certainly Keith Haring — were hanging out at the artists’ studios at the Clocktower Gallery [in the former New York Life Insurance Company Building at Leonard Street and Broadway]. They had gotten the idea that it was a very good headquarters. It was on the 13th floor of an old city building, and you had to walk up a whole floor from the 12th, which was the last floor served by an elevator. Certainly at night, few people were there, and few were there on the weekends. So the artists would often have free rein, and would sometimes sneak up to the roof, especially for the Fourth of July and other events like that.

Then, I didn’t have the kind of formal board that one would today. It was chaired by Brendan Gill, a great theater critic and architecture writer. And we had Tina Chow, who had such unearthly beauty — she would come into a room and just drift. Then we had Woody Allen. The deal with him was he never had to come and he never had to give any money, but he would give his name and a recommendation. And then we had Robert Rauschenberg, a rascal and a great man.

One night, one horrible July Fourth, I invited the board members up to the roof, and I discovered 40 or 50 people at a party that I think Kenny had organized. They were all drunk and wasted and they were happy. And they were there illegally. It was just shattering, but of course I had to pretend that this was the surprise that I had brought my board to see.