Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

time the economy goes south, art grows. If you were
an actuary or an accountant you’d consider those
years horrid, but if you were an artist, you’d consider
them magic. New York was peeling. It was piss
stained. It was falling down but at the same time, it
was vibrant.”
Painters, rockers, experimental theater troupes
and drag queens poured into these neighborhoods.
No matter how oppressive it was, for many of them,
it was better than the unhappy home life they’d fled.
And with a modicum of street smarts and a few
dollars for the cheap rents, they could establish a
genuine scene.
“You could live on practically nothing, which meant
you didn’t need to get a ‘real’ job, which left one time
to be endlessly creative,” says
actress/singer/performer Ann Magnuson, who
moved to the East Village from West Virginia in
1978 and hosted several of the New Wave revues at
venues like the Mudd Club and Irving Plaza. “Making
art or music or performance or just turning your
everyday life into a spectacle. Bowie had turned into
something godlike to certain kids who loved the
weird, the edgy, the arty and the glam. By that point
he had become deified.”
It makes perfect sense that he’d be drawn to
Manhattan at the end of the decade. The sounds of
both New Wave and the more caustic “No Wave”
movement (the ranks of which included Teenage
Jesus and the Jerks, D.N.A., Mars and other bands
collected on the 1978 No New York compilation,