Glenn O'Brien's TV Party

[swag]

Sorry for my second DVD promo post of the night, and I don't really want to buy another piece of product my own self, but I was an Interview magazine addict in the early 1980s and read "Glenn O'Brien's Beat" each issue, so I was excited to hear about this stuff, and a new documentary about the show.


Glenn O'Brien interviewing Jean Michel Basquiat

TV Party.

In 1978, two revolutionary trends emerged in New York City, public access cable TV and punk rock. These two phenomena came together spectacularly in Glenn OBriens TV Party. OBrien recruited his pal Chris Stein, the guitarist of Blondie, as his co-host, fellow Factory kid Walter Steding as leader of The TV Party Orchestra, and underground film director Amos Poe as director and the rest, as youll see, was history. Hipsters tuned in to follow the antics of the TV Party gang and such guests as Iggy Pop, David Bowie, P-Funks George Clinton, The Clashs Mick Jones, Kid Creole, Klaus Nomi, as well as performances from acts like Tuxedo Moon, the Brides of Funkenstein, Alex Chilton, and more.

Glenn O'Brien interviewed in Pop Matters

I was going to film school at Columbia University and a friend of mine and I got hired by Andy Warhol to work on Interview, which had been going for about a year and they could never find anybody reliable enough to do it. We wrote about films for the Village Voice and we managed to land this job. I became the editor of Interview magazine, I guess when I was around 24. I did that for several years and then I went to work for Rolling Stone for awhile, got involved with music writing, and then I guess around 1976 I started a band with a friend of mine who was an art director at at Esquire, young guy, and we had a band called Konelrad and it was kind of a funny band because we did political songs but they were sort of humorous in nature. We called ourselves the world's first socialist/realist rock band.

Then when we stopped doing that I kind of missed the performance thing and I was editor-at-large of High Times magazine and I came back to Interview and started doing a column called "Glenn O'Brien's Beat". I was writing about the punk bands and what they called the "new wave bands" and that whole scene that was going on at CBGB's and Max's Kansas City. I knew this woman — I guess she had some connection with High Times — but she had a show called If I Can't Dance You Can Keep Your Revolution. It was a live public access show on Manhattan cable. She asked me to come on her show and I did and the next day, all these people, even strangers, told me that they had seen it. I couldn't believe it because I knew about public access and I even knew somebody that had a show but I didn't realize that anybody was watching. So I decided to start a show. And that's what I did with my friends.

. . .

There were some great performances. I liked David McDermott's "Homosexual Minute". That was a funny bit. The night Nile Rodgers brought out a ventriloquist's dummy was a pretty good night. We don't have the tape anymore, but Iggy Pop came on the show and that was kind of a big thrill. There were some funny incidents, like two times we had to pretend the show was over because guests wouldn't leave. One time we had this San Francisco punk band on called the Mutants and they became kind of hostile and they wouldn't leave, so we said the show was over and started turning out the lights. But it wasn't really over; we had about half an hour left, so they left and we said, "Oh, we were just kidding; the show is still on".

Kind of a similar thing happened with Legs McNeil, who's sort of a well known writer now, with the big punk book. Legs came on and he had taken a lot of something and he was with Tom Baker, who was sort of a legendary character who'd been a Warhol actor and he was Jim Morrison's best friend. They were both really messed up and Legs wouldn't leave and he got the microphone wire in his mouth and he had like superhuman strength, like they say people on angel dust have or something. So we convinced him the show was over and he left.

There was also a blurb in last Sunday's NYT big ol' Style magazine (or whatever it was called, but I can't find that online, so fuck it.

Anyway, this looks like my idea of good TV fun.

[bettyellen]

1. almost bookmarked, but i'm soooo sleepy.....

maybe i can get up the energy to read. and/ or bookmark this on tues.
but for now, :boring:

[swag]

2. Goodnight, bettyellen.

You been workin' too damned hard.

Get some sleep.

[swag]

3. Thread canceled due to lack of interest.

[jpgray]

4. The rakish angle of the sunglasses was offputting

[mitchum]

5. "It's a cross between the Communist Party and a cocktail party"