The following are article I've scanned in from a copy of The History of Rock (Issue 44) published in 1982. It is written by Lenny Kaye.

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It's often said that New York is a city of strangers; all come from somewhere else to etch their mark in the arts capital of America, The same might be said of its music. With nearly all national and international acts making the city a must on their itineraries, it has seemed at times as if local music takes a back seat; on the other hand, with so many outside stimuli, is it any wonder at New York-bred performers have been among the most forward looking of artists, and its concerts scene the most vital in the world?

By the mid Sixties, New York was ready for a change. Its last great music explosion had taken place in subway tunnel sand hallways, with singing groups gathering casually to 'hit notes', riding the scale a cappella, or, if they lucky, backed by a band on one of the many independent labels that helped popularise the doo-wop sound. The style had nearly run its course by the time the British invasion rendered it obsolete overnight in a revolution in sound and fashion that held the Brill Building - that Broadway centre of writers and producers - in a veritable state of siege.

Yet New Yorkers needn't have worried. The shift in the power structure only meant that new outlets would have to be found for creative expression. Even as the Beatles were greeted by screaming fans as they stepped off the plane at Kennedy airport, a double-pronged tuning fork aimed at the future was resonating in Manhattan. Downtown, a booming circuit of folk clubs clustered around Greenwich Village; uptown, a new breed of urban discotheque took root. Together they would move New York's rock into yet another golden era.

Scattered along Bleecker and MacDougal Streets, often in reconverted beatnik-era coffee houses, the folk traditionalists displayed themselves at acoustic showplaces like the Gaslight, the Cafe Au-Go-Go, the Cafe Wha and the Bitter End. Their conscientiously underground style and anti-commercial leanings contrasted nicely with the discotheques and their electric house bands, blossoming into national fad proportions with the success of the Peppermint Lounge on West 45th Street, home of the Twist and Joey Dee's Starlighters. Soon, for every Dave Van Ronk that held forth at the Gaslight, there was a Jordan Christopher and the Wild Ones at Arthur (run by Sybil Burton), Phil Ochs at the Au-Go-Go matched by Mike St Shaw and the Prophets at the multi-media Cheetah. On a typical Saturday night, you could choose between Judy Collins at Folk City or Dow Jones and the Industrials at Trude Heller's.

This contrast between acoustic and electric began to break down when Bob Dylan moved into folk-rock. Suddenly, it became acceptable for folkies to add a bit of wattage to their strum, while the discotheque groups, previously little more than inspired bar bands, began to strive for identities of their own.

Rockin' Lord Fauntleroy
The sudden rise of the young Rascals exemplified this quest for personality. Keyboard player Felix Cavaliere had been a temporary member of Joey Dee's band, joining them mid-tour in Europe in the early Sixties. 'When we went on stage for the first time,' he remembered, 'the first thing I saw was a Hammond B-3 organ. I had seen them before but I had never touched one in my life.' It provided him with the concept for the Rascals' sound, utilising the rich-sounding, furniture sized organ 'as a blanket' while keeping the guitar and drums for essential rhythms.

Coupled with the Rascals' orientation towards blue-eyed soul and their penchant for dramatic, highly-stylised reworkings of current songs, the group's popularity soared.

After an apprenticeship in the Long Island summer resort of the Hamptons, where they dressed in Lord Fauntleroy caps and breeches, manager Sid Bernstein felt confident enough to flash a cryptic message across the Shea Stadium scoreboard during the Beatles' August 1965 concert: 'The Rascals Are Here.' The band moved onto the Manhattan disco circuit that fall, playing clubs like the Phone Booth (which featured table phones to dial your intended dance partner). An Atlantic recording contract was arranged, and several hits later - 'Ain't Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore', 'Good Lovin', and 'Lonely Too Long' - the band had turned into an American institution.

The Rascals touched off an explosion in their B-3 wake, a caravan of bands that starred at Scott Muni's Rolling Stone discotheque (304 East 48th Street), travelled uptown to Ungano's (270 West 70th Street) and back down to Times Square and the Cheetah (and ii). But the real home of the Long Island sound, as it came to be known, was a large club outside the city in Island Park called the Action House, where groups like the Vagrants (featuring guitarist Leslie West), the Rich Kids, the Hassles (with a young Billy Joel behind the Hammond) and the Vanilla Fudge indulged in all manner of baroque showmanship, complete with drummers twirling sticks, heavily-vibratoed voices, ornamental starts and melodramatic stops.

Village Voices
Down in the Village, the scene was more relaxed. Once the controversy over electric instruments was settled, the Night Owl Cafe on West 3rd Street and clubs like the Cafe Bizarre and the Gold Bug made room on their stages for folk-oriented rock bands like the Lovin' Spoonful, the Magicians and the Flying Machine, as well as good support acts like the Fugitives, the Strangers and the all-girl UFOs.

Of them all, the Spoonful's success was certainly the first important breakthrough. Strangely Californian in spirit, they honed their music in the basement of the Albert Hotel, a musician's hangout on West 10th Street. Leader John Sebastian's look of quiet grace offset Zal Yanovsky's madcap streak, and their string of hits - 'Do You Believe In Magic', 'Summer In The City' and 'Daydream' - took their music deep into the Sixties heartland.

The Magicians had good pop songwriting, courtesy of Gary Bonner and Alan Gordon, and fine recording presence (as their only semi-hit, 'Invitation To Cry', will attest); in retrospect, their music seems to have missed only through sheer subtlety. The Flying Machine contained James Taylor and session guitar ace Danny Kortchmar, but the former, at least, would have to wait for the early Seventies' singer-songwriter boom before finding success.

As with any folk scene, the blues was an important influence, and soon electric bands modelled on Chicago aggregations began to take shape. John Hammond utilised Levon Helm and his Hawks for back-up (as did Dylan - they were yet to be known as the Band), while Danny Kalb, Tommy Flanders, Steve Katz, Andy Kulberg, Roy Blumenfeld and Dylan keyboardist Al Kooper formed a Bleecker Street supergroup of sorts with the Blues Project. Their debut album, recorded live at the Cafe Au-Go-Go, helped to crystalise the burgeoning musical excitement in New York, with Kalb's fast-fingered electric leads setting a new guitar standard.

The Au-Go-Go's all-star 'Blues Bashes' also helped provide a showcase for new as well as established talent. At one such in August of 1966, a black guitarist named Jimmy James dropped by from his nearby gig at the Cafe Wha to pick a few tunes, climaxing with a wild display of guitar pyrotechnics that included tonguing his instrument and playing it behind his neck. A few months later he would change his name back to its original Hendrix, heading for England, the Experience, and eventual mythology.

The psychedelic explosion hit an underground magnet like Greenwich Village predictably hard, and along with the establishment of the first 'head shop' selling cannabis smokers' paraphernalia came a host of lysergic-eyed bands (though the East Village across town would absorb most of the nascent hippie population). The Blues Magoos donned electric suits and promoted 'We Ain't Got Nothin' Yet' into a good-sized hit, while 'Lothar' of Lothar and the Hand People was actually a Theremin, an unusual instrument into which the group breathed life. The Group Image, a communal band of floating musicians, could often be seen playing freely and for free, though their only album, A Mouth In The Clouds, came too late to capture their indescribable allure.

Far-out Fugs
Music wasn't the only important influence in a cosmopolitan city like New York, and so it was hardly surprising when poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg formed the Fugs in December 1964 after a series of readings at Le Metro cafe. What was a shock was how successful the group's cross-breeding of high and low art could be, both commercially and artistically.

Sanders had chosen the name of the group from Norman Mailer's euphemism in The Naked and the Dead (he had also gained a good deal of notoriety as editor of Fuck You, a .magazine of the arts), and though Kupferberg saw rock as basically 'ephemeral nonsense', they quickly acknowledged the wisdom of using 'the rhythm and the feel, the spirit of the music, only giving jt a little more intelligence, or poetry, or what-have you. . . .' Along with nominal drummer Ken Weaver, bassist John Anderson, guitarist Vinny Leary and keyboard player Lee Crabtree, the Fugs began appearing at various underground happenings, including performances at Izzy Young's Folklore Centre and Diane Dj Prima's American Poets theatre, finally setting up a months-long residency at the Players Theatre on MacDougal Street. Their 'tragic smutabilly' included such songs as Tuli's 'Kill For Peace', the celebratory 'Slum Goddess' and a multithemed 'Virgin Forest' that moved through Burroughsian science fiction and primitive mating calls before swelling to a hymnal 'Death Stay Thy Phantoms'. Their show was as theatrical as it was thought-provoking.

The Fugs found the going rough when they expanded their following outside N ew York, with concerts banned, pressing plants refusing to manufacture records and, at times, uncomprehending audiences. Yet their troubles hardly matched the travails of the Velvet Underground, the most influential group ever to emerge from New York, in its time so misunderstood that for years the Velvets refused to play in Manhattan, a self-exile made all the more poignant by their umbilical attachment to the city.

The Velvets were spawned in a cold-water flat on Ludlow Street where songwriter Lou Reed, Tanglewood music school drop-out John Cale, lanky guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Angus MacLise spent a long winter in late 1965. Their first actual gig was at the high school in Summit, New Jersey, and by the time they finally managed to land an engagement at the Cafe Bizarre, Angus had left for India. Maureen Tucker was asked to loan her drum set, becoming a formal member of the band by show time.

The Velvets were distinctly out of tune with the gentle 12-string guitars and Byrdsian harmonies along MacDougal Street, but their heightened urban sensibilities fitted in with a new scene growing across town at an artist's bar called Max's Kansas City. Opened by Mickey Ruskin in January 1966, it was located along Park Avenue South above Union Square in an area favoured by fashion photographers and models. Friends brought friends, but it was Andy Warhol and his Superstars, holding court in the backroom with a continuous parade of outré characters, that set Max's trash-glamour tone.

Film-maker Barbara Rubin brought Warhol to a Velvets performance at the Bizarre, and he in turn brought the whole travelling circus. Warhol had just been offered a large sum of money to put on a show at Murray the K's World on Long Island, and had been on the lookout for a rock band. ' Andy had a good way of picking out situations for us to appear in,' remembers Cale and, as environmental advisor, Warhol staged 'The Exploding Plastic Inevitable'; this multi-media event provided the ideal setting for the Velvets' confessional, the subverted meanings and broken glass of 'European Son' backed against the fragile delicacy of chanteuse Nico's reading of 'Femme Fatale.'

Purity and Paranoia
The Velvets took the art of New York to its perverse limit; they took the forbidden sensualities of 'Venus In Furs', the drug culture references of 'Waiting For The Man' and 'Heroin', the paranoia of 'White Light/White Heat' and the claustrophobia of 'Sister Ray', transcending them to attain the relative spiritual purity of Tm Set Free'. By the time they returned to Max's to play the summer-long engagement in 1970 that would prove their swan song, it was as if they had recognised an era had ended. Lou told the story of Ginny from Long Island, twirling the dials of her radio set: 'You know her life was saved by rock'n'roll . . .'

The local scene had changed irrevocably. As the Sixties closed, two clubs seemed to symbolise the outward growth of New York's insular music, the reciprocal hospitality offered in return. Steve Paul's The Scene provided a watering hole for the late-night superstar, giving over its small, stamp-sized stage to after-hours jams and visiting dignitaries, the coming of age of all that would be known as Sixties rock. Down on Bleecker Street, Nobody's was a rock'n'roll bar geared towards socialising and catching the overflow from Bill Graham's Fillmore East, the first legitimate rock'n'roll theatre in New York.

Back on the street, in the clubs, they were already making room for the Seventies.