New Wave — Up From the Ooze (How Kraftwerk, The Ramones, Television, Patti Smith and CBGB - a Twelve-Foot Room on the Bowery - Accidentally Invented the Future)

Five hundred million years ago, ( approximately 1977), something extraordinary happened on the floor of an ancient sea. Life — which had spent billions of years as little more than a few unremarkable blobs drifting in the dark — suddenly exploded into every possible form simultaneously. Claws. Fins. Shells. Eyes. Creatures of impossible elegance and alien strangeness, emerging from the murk and becoming something the world had never seen before. Scientists call it the Cambrian Explosion. It was the moment life stopped playing it safe.

Rock music had its own Cambrian moment. And like the original, it happened in the dark, in conditions nobody would have designed on purpose, among creatures that looked like nothing that had come before.

This is the first episode of American Song: New Wave — a new series tracing the origins, explosions, and enduring legacy of the genre that turned anxiety into an art form, made nervousness a fashion statement, and somehow got America dancing to songs about the end of the world.

In this episode: Kraftwerk emerges from postwar Düsseldorf like something that evolved independently of everything else — precise, alien, and more perfectly adapted to the future than anything sharing its environment. The Ramones reduce rock to its purest possible form and discover that what's left is still everything. Television proves that minimalism and virtuosity are not opposites. And Patti Smith walks into a twelve-foot room on the Bowery and claims the entire territory of rock and poetry for herself, without asking anyone's permission, because it hadn't occurred to her that permission was required.

New Wave didn't descend from the mainstream. It crawled up from somewhere older and stranger and more alive — from musicians too weird, too restless, or too furious to stay in the shallows. This is where it started. This is the murk.

Music In This Episode

• Peter Gabriel: Intruder
• Kraftwerk: Autobahn
• Kraftwerk: Trans Europ Express
• Gary Numan: Cars
• The Feelies: The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness
• Ramones: I Wanna Be Sedated
• Ramones: Beat on the Brat
• Ramones: I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend
• Television: See No Evil
• Television: Marquee Moon
• Patti Smith: Gloria
• Blondie (Rhythm Only): One Way Or Another
• B-52's: Rock Lobster

Interviews

• Ralf Hutter (Kraftwerk)
• Hilly Krystal (CBGB's)
• Marky Ramone (Ramones)
• Tom Verlaine (Television)
• Patti Smith (Patti Smith)

Next episode: Blondie. Talking Heads. Devo. The B-52s. Oingo Boingo. New Wave goes national — and it turns out the whole country had been waiting.

Transcript

The Cambrian Explosion (Or: The Day Everything Lost Its Mind at Once)

Here's what you need to understand before we go any further — and I realize this is an unusual way to begin a podcast about music, but I've always found the direct approach clarifying: rock music, for a very brief and deeply delusional window of time, believed it was one animal.

One animal. A single unified creature. It had a head. It had limbs. It had a spine. It had Elvis for a pelvis, which honestly explains most of what followed.

From a distance — and by distance I mean from the comfortable remove of not paying very close attention — it looked unified. One big happy family, roaming the cultural landscape with tremendous self-satisfaction, occasionally eating its own young and then acting confused about why its young kept trying to escape.

And then came the eighties.

The eighties were not a continuation. They were the Cambrian explosion. If you don't know what that is, don't worry, there won't be a test — here's the short version: it's the moment in Earth's history when life stopped being a few polite blobs drifting around in the ocean and suddenly decided to try absolutely everything simultaneously. Claws. Fins. Shells. Antennae. Eyes in places where no sensible designer would put eyes. Evolution looked at the situation and said: you know what, let's just see what sticks. The result was chaos, improbability, and eventually, us — which tells you everything you need to know about the relationship between creative desperation and actual progress.

The eighties did that to rock. Punk had just kicked down the door and relieved itself on the carpet. Disco had inflated into a magnificent, sequined bubble and then popped with the sound of a thousand polyester shirts deflating at once. "Disco Sucks" was not merely a slogan. It was a blood oath. People meant it the way people mean things when they've been personally offended by an entire genre, which is apparently possible.

The myth of a rock-and-roll mainstream — always a polite fiction, always held together with marketing budgets and the shared delusion of consensus — finally gave up the ghost and lay down on the floor.

What had once looked like one big animal turned out to be a reef. A teeming, incompatible, mutually suspicious reef of subcultures, each one convinced it had correctly understood the assignment. Punk. Post-punk. Pub rock. Dance-pop. Haircut bands. Power pop. Art rock. Roots rock. Heavy metal with umlauts — because apparently the devil needs diacritical marks. Rap. New Romantics. Speed metal. International imports arriving in the night like contraband.

Each subculture had its own mating rituals, its own hair, its own specific flavor of contempt for every adjacent subculture. It resembled parliamentary politics more than music, which is damning in ways I'll let you sit with.

And into this magnificent chaos stepped New Wave. New Wave was not a mutation. It was an attempted synthesis — the genre equivalent of someone standing in a burning building and calmly saying, "Maybe we could use some of these flames to heat the house?" It took punk's minimalism, disco's pulse, art-school irony, Beatlesque melody, and synthesizers that still smelled faintly of nightclub smoke, and tried to combine them into something that might, from a certain angle, resemble a center.

Pop-culture centrism. Three minutes long. Danceable. Clever. Slightly nervous.

OK, a LOT nervous. New Wave took the anxiety of the Cold War — that low, persistent hum of potential annihilation that everyone was just expected to get on with their day around — and turned it into an art form. Which, when you consider the alternative, seems like the only reasonable response. You can't punch a nuclear warhead. You can, however, make a very tightly arranged three-minute song about being afraid of it. And people will dance to that song at their high school prom, which is either the most hopeful or the most terrifying fact about human beings, depending on what kind of day you're having.

 The Anxiety Gets a Costume
 
 

In the late seventies, everybody in New Wave seemed to need a sedative. Or at minimum a good lie-down in a dark room with a cold cloth on their forehead. Nervousness was everywhere — not the charming kind, the embarrassing kind. It crept into band names: The Nerves, Nervous Eaters, Nervous Gender, Nervus Rex. As if someone had passed a law prohibiting calm. It showed up in song titles. "The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness." Which is either a diagnosis or a dating profile, depending on context.

It quivered in the voices of David Byrne, Mark Mothersbaugh, Danny Elfman, Tim Finn — men who sang as if the microphone might bite them, and who had apparently decided the correct response to a biting microphone was to lean in anyway, twitching. Their throats twitched. Their shoulders hunched. Their suits fit like borrowed identities, which, come to think of it, is how most identities fit most people, if you're paying attention on the wrong day.

Many of them came from art schools — institutions where anxiety is the curriculum, performance is the homework, and you get graded on how interestingly you fall apart. The nerves were part of the costume. The stammer was choreography. The whole trembling edifice was deliberate, which is either the most sophisticated thing I've ever heard or the most transparently therapeutic, and in my experience those categories overlap constantly.

Nervousness became a full-body philosophy. It replaced the shirtless swagger of seventies rock gods — those men who strode across stages like they'd personally negotiated peace with gravity — with something tighter and more honest about itself. The nervous singer did not conquer the stage; he negotiated with it. He kept a polite distance from the old masculine myths. No bluesman's primal howl. No arena-rock chest-beating. Just a man at a microphone who looked like he had a lot of thoughts and was not sure which one to lead with.

Here's the sly trick buried inside all this twitching: the nervousness wasn't weakness. It was strategy. It was a way of being in on the joke. New Wave made dance music for people who wanted to keep their glasses on — music you could dance and think to simultaneously, which is a very modern condition and also a description of what happens to me at every party I've ever attended. You didn't have to lose yourself. You could remain completely self-conscious on the dance floor, which was previously considered a design flaw and was now being marketed as a feature.

New Wave took the awkwardness of white, middle-class life — the mind-body split, the fear of looking foolish, the creeping suspicion that everyone else got the instruction manual and you didn't — and turned all of it into an aesthetic. It didn't cure the nerves. It amplified them, charged admission, and threw a fantastic party.

Autobahn / The Robots — Kraftwerk (Or: The Future, Delivered On Time, In a Clean Box)

New Wave didn't emerge from nowhere. It rode in on the wake that Kraftwerk — and their fellow krautrock travelers like Tangerine Dream — had cut through music's German waters in the 1970s. And to understand Kraftwerk, you need to understand the particular problem West Germany had in 1970, which was considerably more than rubble.

The problem was bad vibes. Specifically: old myths, old uniforms, old men insisting they were just following orders — which is the least musical sentence ever uttered and also, if you think about it, a fairly compelling argument against the entire concept of authority. Young German artists did what you do when the past feels genuinely radioactive: they went looking for a clean signal. Not a blues revival. Not another guitar hero in denim, sweating and pretending to be from Mississippi. Something that sounded like the future arriving on time, in a well-labeled box, with all the parts accounted for.

That's the soil Kraftwerk grew out of. Postwar West Germany. Düsseldorf. Art-school brains. A hunger to build a modern identity that didn't borrow from America or rhyme with anything that happened before 1945. They set up shop in a studio they called Kling Klang — which sounds like the noise a robot makes when it's happy, which was probably intentional — and got to work.

They had the nerve, or possibly the genius, which is frequently the same thing with a better publicist, to treat the traditional rock band like a folk costume. Four guys, guitars, sweating, proving they're real. Kraftwerk looked at this arrangement and essentially said: how charmingly primitive. Their studio wasn't a clubhouse. It was a workshop. They weren't selling rebellion. They were selling design. Repetition, precision, and the strange, almost pharmaceutical comfort of machines doing exactly what they're told. Unlike humans, who are always improvising disasters and then looking surprised.

Take "Autobahn." On paper this is a song about driving on a highway — a topic you'd assign to a student who missed the first three weeks of class. But Kraftwerk makes the highway feel like a prophecy. The rhythm is precise and mechanical, forward motion as a moral principle. The melody is simple on purpose, because the world is huge, the car is small, and the road goes on like a thought you can't stop having. The vocals hover somewhere between human and public address system. It's cozy and a little terrifying simultaneously, like suddenly noticing you've been alive for years and mostly you've been commuting.

Then "Trans-Europe Express." Kraftwerk takes the train — not as transportation, but as identity. Europe imagined as a linked system you can ride through. The groove is almost aristocratic, but completely automated: a computer-animated politeness machine making perfect time. And this track has one of the most jaw-dropping afterlives in musical history: Afrika Bambaataa pulls Kraftwerk's cold, polished European futurism down to the Bronx and plugs it into "Planet Rock," and suddenly Düsseldorf art school and South Bronx block parties are having a conversation nobody planned that completely changes everything. That's a hinge in history. It happens because music doesn't respect the borders that people keep drawing.

Then comes "The Robots." The chant — we are the robots — is funny until the moment it isn't. It wasn't funny in 1939, when the people only following orders had already demonstrated what a society of compliant, efficient machines actually produces. The point was never that technology is cool. The point is that modern systems want you predictable, replaceable, and on beat. Kraftwerk performed this observation with a perfectly straight face, which is always the funniest kind of comedy and also the most terrifying.

"Computer Love" is the most human thing Kraftwerk ever made precisely because it's the loneliest. Yearning rendered as circuitry. Longing with perfect timing. You can hear in it the template for every song ever written about romance mediated by a screen — which is to say, a genuinely enormous percentage of all the music made after 1995. Kraftwerk was basically announcing: congratulations, modern world. Everyone is connected. Most of us are alone. Hope you enjoy the future.

This is why Kraftwerk flows so naturally into New Wave that it barely needs an explanation. New Wave wanted modernity, irony, clean lines, nervous energy, and the reassurance that pop music could be smart without turning into homework. Kraftwerk handed over the entire toolkit, patted them on the head, and went back to the workshop. You can hear them all over Gary Numan — especially in the way "Cars" turns alienation into a sleek little anthem, the car as emotional armor, technology as the only relationship that won't disappoint you. You can feel their pulse in Depeche Mode and OMD, in New Order, in every synth-pop band that understood the machine wasn't decoration. It was the engine.

Kraftwerk helped invent a future where people spent decades arguing about whether electronic music was real. Meanwhile the entire planet moved inside electronics and essentially never came out. So it goes.

I. CBGB (Or: Five Bands, Five Futures, One Extremely Unpleasant Bathroom)

Before anyone called it New Wave — before record stores had those little divider cards and critics needed a term to organize what they were hearing — there was CBGB, a club whose bathrooms have been described, by people who were there, in ways that make the phrase "biohazard zone" sound like a gentle understatement.

Willy DeVille described a typical evening onstage with a specificity that remains unmatched in the annals of music criticism:

One time I'm on stage happily doing my bit, when all of a sudden a mixture of piss and wine starts dripping down on the mike. We used to have a terrible electrical ground, people would get blown 30 feet at CBGB. Sparks start flying from the mike, and this piss and goddamn sweet Thunderbird wine is coming down, hitting the mike, splattering on my lips, and burning me with sparks.

Piss. Sparks. Thunderbird wine. This is the creation myth. Remember this the next time someone tells you that important cultural movements begin in conditions of comfort.

CBGB did not look like the birthplace of anything except possibly lockjaw. The stage was small enough that ambition had to crouch. The audience stood close not because intimacy was fashionable but because the room was about twelve feet wide. And yet, in the mid-1970s, this narrow room on the Bowery became one of the few places in America where rock music stopped pretending it believed its own mythology — where the inflated gospel of arena rock met something fast, cheap, impatient, and completely uninterested in being impressed.

Arena rock had ballooned into cathedral proportions. Guitar solos stretched toward real estate investments. The rock star was no longer a person but a mythological creature — half prophet, half hair product endorsement — requiring stadium infrastructure, a production team, and a carefully managed mystique. The Ramones looked at all this and decided the problem was too many notes.

 The Ramones: Hey Ho, Let's Go
 
 

In the beginning, there were four skinny boys in leather jackets standing against a dirty brick wall in Queens, looking like they'd been asked to explain algebra and had decided the correct response was to look threatening about it. They all took the same last name — Ramone — like a street gang assembled by accident inside a comic book. Joey was tall and shy, with haunted eyes and a voice that could transform bubblegum into something that felt, inexplicably, like prophecy. Johnny stood like a Marine carved from plywood and left out in the rain. Dee Dee was chaos given a bass guitar and an army surplus jacket — an army brat with Nazi imagery and nursery rhymes rattling around in his skull simultaneously, which is a combination that should not have produced art and somehow produced an enormous amount of it. Tommy hit the drums like a man trying to outrun the decade.

America in the early seventies was exhausted. Vietnam kept going. Watergate proved the people in charge were crooks, which surprised no one who had been paying attention and devastated everyone who hadn't. Rock music had grown genuinely obese — double albums, triple solos, capes, fog machines, songs about wizards who kept refusing to land the plane. The Ramones looked at that circus and subtracted. Four chords. Two minutes. Sometimes less. Fourteen songs in under thirty minutes. It wasn't an album. It was a jailbreak.

They started at CBGB in August 1974, at a time when the club was less a temple than a narrow hallway attached to a bar with the ambition of a condemned building. At first they were sloppy. Then they got tight. Then they became a machine — but a machine with a heart buried inside it, which turns out to be the only kind worth listening to. By April 1976, their debut landed on the world like a very small, very loud meteor.

"Beat on the Brat." "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue." These were not Ph.D. dissertations. They were diary entries from the basement of the American psyche, scrawled by someone who had run out of metaphor and gone straight to the literal. The lyrics were funny and twisted and slightly deranged — the kind of thing you'd write in the margin of a high school biology textbook, hoping someone would find it later. Dee Dee tossed Nazi imagery into the stew not as allegiance but as provocation, as trauma trying to laugh itself out of its own history. Deeply sophisticated or deeply irresponsible — in his case almost certainly both, simultaneously, at very high volume.

They dressed like their fans because they were their fans. Leather jackets. Ripped jeans. Sneakers. The album cover — black and white, graffiti wall, four scowling boys — looked like a mugshot for the future. Kids who felt invisible saw themselves reflected there, which is either the greatest thing rock and roll can do or the second greatest, right after making you dance when you didn't intend to.

Blitzkrieg Bop — The Songs

Start with "Blitzkrieg Bop" — a title that sounds like it escaped from a World War II newsreel and landed, slightly confused, in a high school gym. It's fast, it's simple, and it's built like a brick wall that someone has set on fire for fun: downstrokes, eighth notes, no mercy, no apology, no explanation. That opening — the count-off, the explosion, the immediate relentless forward motion — is one of the most clarifying moments in rock history. Not because it's complicated. Because it is the absolute opposite of complicated and it works anyway. That chant — hey ho, let's go — is not poetry. It is permission.

"Judy Is a Punk." Two girls. Berlin. San Francisco. Maybe they join the SLA. Maybe they don't. The song is gone before you can ask. But notice what they do: right in the middle of this tornado of a track, they toss in "second verse, same as the first" — a line borrowed directly from 1960s bubblegum pop. That's a wink. That says: we know exactly what we're doing and we're doing it anyway. The Ramones were not anti-music. They were anti-pretension. There is a meaningful difference.

"Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue." A minute and a half. Two rhymes. Four lines. That's a haiku written by someone who failed shop class and is proud of it. The amateurism is weaponized. The stupidity is performed so precisely that the culture can see its own stupidity reflected back at it. That's not laziness. That's satire in a leather jacket. What they were doing required enormous discipline: they were making it look like no discipline was required.

And then — and this genuinely shocks people who assume punk was exclusively about broken glass and bad intentions — "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend." Practically doo-wop. Background oohs and ahs. Joey sings like a tall, wounded choirboy who wants very much to hold your hand but might not be ready for the public component of that arrangement. The guitars still slash. The tempo still nudges relentlessly forward. But there is melody soaked in sugar, and the sugar is not ironic. Punk, it turns out, could blush. And the blush was just as real as the sneer.

"Rockaway Beach" — surf music with jet fuel. They wanted you to hitch a ride, wherever there was, because the destination barely mattered; movement was the point. The Ramones' great gift, the one people undervalue in favor of talking about their cultural significance, was this: they were genuinely fun. In an era of cathedral seriousness, they made you want to move. Three chords and the truth, and the truth was that joy and speed and togetherness could arrive in under two minutes without requiring a laser show.

Musically, what they did was radical in the way that radical and obvious are sometimes the same thing: they reduced rock to its skeleton. Power chords. Pop structures. Hook after hook. They recorded their debut for about six thousand dollars at a moment when bands like Yes were spending months in studios to record — what? Tales from Topographic Oceans? It's no wonder Johnny Rotten once wore an I Hate Pink Floyd t-shirt. The Ramones were the antidote. They were saying: the emperor has seventeen minutes of pretentious guitar interlude and no clothes.

Their greatest gift, finally, was permission. You didn't need a wizard's cape or a twelve-minute drum solo. You needed a guitar, a friend, and the courage to be loud. Somewhere in England, a future generation took notes. Somewhere in Akron, Ohio, art students were watching very carefully and already forming a theory.

Television: See No Evil / Marquee Moon
 
 

Demolition is only half of architecture. Something else was taking shape inside CBGB alongside the Ramones — something that declined the invitation to be sloppy.

Minimalism, in the New Wave sense, does not mean monastery minimalism. It doesn't mean staring at a wall until enlightenment arrives. It means mechanical minimalism: take out the excess parts and see if the engine still runs. These were songs that moved like conveyor belts — steady, unsentimental, precise. Every so often a guitar would flare up like a trapped emotion. Then back to the line.

Television's 1977 debut Marquee Moon doesn't crash into the room. It unfolds. The guitar tone — Tom Verlaine's and Richard Lloyd's — is clean, almost brittle. Not distorted into mush. Not blues-saturated. Glassy and articulated, like someone had taken the standard-issue rock guitar and enrolled it in finishing school. "See No Evil" opens with a riff that feels straightforward until you notice that every note is intentional, separated, placed. Billy Ficca's drumming leaves air. The snare snaps dry. The bass anchors without announcing itself. It sounds lean because it has been engineered to sound lean, which is a completely different thing from accidentally sounding lean, the way someone looks when they haven't eaten in a week.

The title track, "Marquee Moon," is ten minutes long — audacious in a scene that was about to fetishize brevity as a moral principle. The main figure is skeletal. The rhythm section holds. Verlaine's extended solo explores rather than shreds — he repeats melodic fragments, alters them slightly, nudges them a quarter-inch forward. It is almost mathematical. Minimalism here does not mean fewer notes. It means fewer wasted ones.

In CBGB's cramped room, Television proved something essential: you could reject arena excess without abandoning skill. Virtuosity could reorganize itself. It didn't have to detonate. It could shimmer.

 Patti Smith: Gloria / Horses
 
 

Where Television refined, Patti Smith consecrated. Horses opens not with a power chord but with a declaration: "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." You can hear the room inhale. You can hear the room decide whether to be offended or electrified — and then decide to be both, which is the only correct response.

Her performances at CBGB blurred categories with the confidence of someone who never accepted that those categories were real. Spoken-word passages dissolved into noise. Lyrics stretched beyond meter. Lenny Kaye's guitar leaned toward garage simplicity but Smith's phrasing transformed repetition into invocation — into something that felt like a ritual you'd stumbled into and weren't entirely sure you were allowed to witness. She cited Rimbaud without apology. She referenced Jim Morrison without defensiveness. Poetry and rock were no longer separate territories. They were the same territory, and she was standing in the middle of it, claiming the whole thing.

Wrap Up

So. We've established a few things.

We've established that four men in Düsseldorf who dressed like accountants and named their studio after the sound a happy robot makes accidentally handed the entire future of popular music its operating manual. We've established that one of the most important cultural venues in rock history was also, by any reasonable measure, a crime scene. We've revealed that the correct response to arena rock's seventeen-minute guitar solos and fog machines and wizard capes was four chords, a count-off, and two minutes of pure clarifying noise — and that this was obviously correct, and that it took genuine courage to be obvious when everyone around you was busy being enormous.

We've settled that you could also go the other direction entirely — put every note back, place each one with surgical precision, make a ten-minute guitar piece that sounds like it was designed by a very gifted and somewhat humorless architect — and that this, too, was a valid answer. That minimalism doesn't mean lazy. It means relentless.

And we've confirmed that Patti Smith could walk into a room, say five words, and own the entire territory of rock and poetry simultaneously — without asking permission, without explaining herself, without pausing to check whether those were supposed to be separate territories. They are now. She said so. Nobody argued.

That's CBGB. That's New York. That's the beginning, in a twelve-foot room that smelled like Thunderbird wine and whose bathrooms were — and I want to be careful here, because I am a professional — not a place you wanted to go.

Here's what's coming next.

We're staying in New York, because we are not done there. Two bands we've only glimpsed so far are about to get the full treatment, and both of them deserve it, and one of them wore a suit so large that it requires an actual explanation.

The first is Blondie. Debbie Harry was already at CBGB — she was there the whole time, in fact, standing at the front of the stage with platinum hair and a look that said she knew exactly what she was doing and had known for a while and was prepared to wait for everyone else to figure it out. The thing she understood, that nobody else in that room had quite figured out yet, was that punk energy and pop ambition were not opposing forces. They were the same force pointed in slightly different directions. She pointed them at the same target. The result was some of the most purely enjoyable music of the entire era, and we're going to talk about why the word "pop" in her hands was never a compromise. It was a weapon. A very catchy, very precisely aimed weapon.

The second band is Talking Heads. Three Rhode Island art school graduates who showed up at CBGB in 1975 looking less like rock gods than like substitute teachers who had taken a very wrong turn on the way to a faculty meeting — and then, over the course of several albums and a collaboration with Brian Eno and a live film directed by Jonathan Demme, became one of the most intellectually ferocious and physically irresistible bands on the planet. David Byrne danced like a man who had received detailed written instructions about human movement but had never actually seen it done. He also, at the peak of their live show, wore a suit so enormous it made his head look like a golf ball carefully positioned on a sofa. He explained this was intentional. He said — and I am quoting directly here — that he wanted his head to appear smaller, and the easiest way to do that was to make his body bigger. This is either the most concise description of what New Wave was actually trying to do or an extremely good reason to own a very large jacket. Probably both. We'll get into it.

And pack your overnight travel bag, because we’re doing round the country club-hopping next time. First we leave New York. We go to Ohio, where two art students who were on campus the day the National Guard opened fire on their classmates did not process their grief by writing a folk song about it. They processed it by developing a complete unified theory of human civilization — de-evolution, the idea that we are not progressing but regressing, becoming more efficient and less free, more compliant and less alive — and then, and I genuinely need you to stay with me here, they put that theory in matching jumpsuits and red flower-pot hats and made it dance. The theory was called Devo. The dance was extremely good. This is not a contradiction. This is New Wave.

From Ohio we puddle-jump to Athens, Georgia — a college town, cheap rent, the kind of place where you can walk from rehearsal to record store to party without losing the thread — where a group of friends ended up in someone's basement after dinner and rather a lot of flaming rum punch at a Chinese restaurant. Whoever was in that basement that night ended up in the band. Except Owen. Owen stayed upstairs writing letters while the B-52s were invented twelve feet below him. Owen has had decades to think about those letters. Were they good letters, Owen? Were they worth it? The band he missed went on to rouse John Lennon from a five-year retirement, prove that alienation and a fantastic party are not mutually exclusive, and bounce floors hard enough to alarm structural engineers. I hope the letters were good, Owen. I really do.

And then — because New Wave did not belong to any one coast, any one city, or any one climate — we're going to Los Angeles – bring your sunscreen. Specifically, to a band of CalArts graduates who decided that what New Wave really needed was more carnival. More spectacle. More Danny Elfman, only a lad in those days, in a Day of the Dead costume fronting a band of skeletons doing something that was legally music. Oingo Boingo were operating on the other side of the country from CBGB, in a city the music press had largely written off as too sunny, too comfortable, too poolside to produce anything genuinely unhinged. Just goes to show you what some rock critics don’t know! Los Angeles had its own variety of crazy. It just came with better weather and a slightly more alarming stage show.

New Wave was never just a New York thing. It was a posture — a way of being in on the joke, of turning the anxiety into an art form, of refusing the bloated and the obvious — and that posture traveled. To Ohio. To a basement in Georgia. All the way across the country to a city of palm trees and sunshine and a man in skeleton makeup who was absolutely, furiously serious about what he was doing, which somehow made it funnier.

Next episode, we follow it there.