They Shot Rock ’n’ Roll

Originally posted November 7, 2009.

David Byrne. © Marcia Resnick

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

A bespectacled Tina Weymouth was sitting on the edge of the stage, watching projected photos of CBGB pioneers, including David Johansen eating pie, the Ramones Ramoning, and Weymouth herself playing bass with the Talking Heads. Lively NYC rocker Jana Peri was explaining that she missed some of the photos at the opening of the Brooklyn Museum exhibit “Who Shot Rock & Roll” because she had to run to the museum’s Beaux-Arts Court to catch featured act Blondie (with a nonblond Debbie Harry). Photographer Danny Fields, endearingly incoherent, was lamenting the exhibit’s exclusion of a few worthy colleagues but was gleeful that he had walked off with a bunch of copies of the companion book (not realizing they weren’t giveaways).

Johnny Thunders eyes Cheetah Chrome. © Marcia Resnick

This was Exile on Bowery’s Tuesday-night celebration—with such luminaries as painter Duncan Hannah, designer Anna Sui, and former Talking Head Chris Frantz (husband of Weymouth) also on hand—of its seven photographer members whose work made the landmark exhibit, which covers 1955 to the present. As Jana Peri, who had her first record release party at CBGB’s, told me, the group Exile on Bowery provides a place for CBGB “alumni” of all sorts—performers, waiters, habitués—to regularly get together. The theme is always spelled out with CBGB OMFUG as its acronym, just as in the party invitation (below).

Here’s what one of the CBGB Seven, photographer Marcia Resnick, said of the event, held at the Bowery Electric: “What a blast from the past! The same approximate location, the same enthusiastic people, the images by the same photographers made it feel like some kind of time warp.” Take a look at Resnick’s evocative photos, shown above courtesy of the photographer, and you’ll find yourself on the Bowery—and in another decade—too.