When Tom Verlaine wrote his great lyric about Broadway looking so medieval, he wasn’t thinking about the rather down-at-heel recording studio in an office building where his band, Television, made their first demos in December 1974. Good Vibrations was the name of the studio and it was a bit of a misnomer, given the way things turned out.
A few weeks earlier I’d been taken by some New York friends to hear Television and another new band, called Blondie, at the Truck and Warehouse Theater on East 4th Street. This was the kind of event on which the Downtown music scene built its 1970s reputation. A decade after Lou Reed had conspired with John Cale in a Ludlow Street apartment, lower Manhattan was still a place where artists could find affordable lodgings in a congenially picaresque environment. New bands performed in front of encouraging audiences comprising poets, painters, photographers, fellow musicians and scene-makers.
