Clothes Shopping With Patti Smith

On the Verge With 'Radio Ethiopia' 1976

A few months after writing my last post about Neil Young's "Tonight's the Night" for Creem magazine, I was settled back in New York as the pop music writer for Newsday, then a Long Island-only paper with daily circulation of 550,000 and Sunday of more than 600,000. Many of the arts writers worked in a small Manhattan office, and I lived in a fifth floor walkup on E. 26th Street near Lexington. It was a medium walk or quick bus ride down to CBGB, the cool core of a developing scene that would become known as punk rock. I was there at least two or three nights a week, catching the developing acts such as the the Ramones, trio Talking Heads, bands as various as the hard rockabilly Tuff Darts to the intense flights of guitar ecstasy of Television. I wrote a cover story about the businss of punk in the Sunday Jan. 4, 1976 Newsday, the Ramones on the cover. (Click the red to read the Substack Jan. 29, 2023).

The Patti Smith Group was at the nexus of this then-marginal marginal neighborhood a…