Events

[MUSIC/VIDEO] Time makes everything respectable, even that which struggles to be disgraceful. Just ask Mick Jagger or Pete Townsend. That’s especially painful for the original punk bands, formed to stick a thumb in the eye of the sanitized corpse of popular music of the mid 1970s. The beauty of GoNightclubbing, the videotaped collection of Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong, is that it preserves that attitude in as visceral form as you’re likely to get until someone invents a time machine to take you back to those disreputable Manhattan clubs of 40 years ago.

From 1977 through 1980, well before the sign-on of MTV, Ivers and Armstrong took their video cameras to joints like CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, and the Mudd Club to record new bands. Their archives, originally shown on public access cable in the 1980s, captured dozens of bands at their early primes, from punk to New Wave, No Wave, and early hardcore.

Ivers and Armstrong will be at Hallwalls on Saturday, September 30 to present two programs of the best of GoNightclubbing. The 7:30pm show includes punk bands like the Dead Kennedys, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, Rocket from the Tombs and Bad Brains, and early New Wave with the Suburbs, Ballistic Kisses, Bush Tetras, Human Sexual Response, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Our Daughters Wedding, Pylon, and more. The 9pm show includes a greatest hits collection with Divine, the Cramps, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, John Cale, Iggy Pop, and interviews with Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty of the Patti Smith Group, James Chance, Television’s Richard Lloyd, Cheetah Chrome of the Dead Boys and more. Tickets are $8 general, $6 students/seniors, $5 members. Wheel your grandma there and ask her what those clubs smelled like: You’ll bring a smile of nostalgia to her face.