Angela Jaeger: I Feel Famous
"I guess everybody's afraid of the word 'nostalgia,' but I don't really think it's a nostalgic thing, because these diaries were written in the moment."
Stare Kits at Tier 3, 1979. L to R: Angela Jaeger, Amy Rigby, Bob Gurevics. Photo by Niles Jaeger, courtesy of Angela Jaeger.
A recurring theme of my work is the necessity for small independent venues and underground music communities to welcome teenagers, who have the disposable time, energy, and dedication that most adults don’t. I wrote more about this at length in my book and the intro to my interview with Lunachicks guitarist Gina Volpe, so I won’t rehash it all here. But suffice to say that although teenagers’ excessive energy and lack of self-awareness can be excruciating on a one-to-one level, they’ve also been the glue that’s held a lot of influential music scenes together.
Angela Jaeger’s a great example. Growing up in the East Village in the ‘70s, she found her way to the scene around CBGB easily. Despite typical teen shynesses, she started going to shows constantly, often documenting them on a handheld tape recorder that she also used to interview her punk idols. Encounters with peers like Lydia Lunch and Howie Pyro and elders like the Cramps and Manic Panic’s Tish and Snooky Bellomo drew her closer and closer to the core of the scene.
Enamored with the Sex Pistols and the Clash, she ventured to London, similarly integrating herself in that city’s punk scene and becoming especially close with the Slits. Through the late ‘70s and much of the ‘80s, she regularly ventured back and forth between the two cities, making her the rare person who can claim to have had equitable intimate experiences of both US and UK punk. All this while she was barely over the line of legal adulthood.
Having already sung in a cover band as a young teen, she formed a band called Stare Kits with Bob Gurevics and siblings Michael McMahon and Amy Rigby (paid subscribers can read my interview with Amy here). They made their debut at Tier 3, a short-lived but influential post-punk venue in Tribeca that was booked by Angela’s older sister Hilary Jaeger. Stare Kits didn’t last long, but Angela’s had an active and eclectic career in music ever since, notably fronting the London-based post-punk band Pigbag among many other credits.
Last month, Angela bravely published her diaries from the era in a collection titled I Feel Famous: Punk Diaries 1977-1981, available from Hat and Beard Press. I say “bravely” because there is no way in hell I would ever publicly reveal anything I thought, felt, or did between the ages of 9 and 20, and I doubt I’m alone on that front. But to Angela’s great credit, seemingly very little of her youthful awkwardness has been excised from the book. Reading her diaries, I got a visceral sense of what it felt like for someone so young to get swept up in something so monumental.
We spoke over Zoom in mid-December.
At the start of the book, you're already infatuated with punk. But how did you discover it? What about it resonated with you so much? And how did you find your way to CB’s and into this community?
Growing up on 11th Street and Second Avenue, [my siblings and I] were always interested in music. My brother Niles is eight years older than me, my sister Hilary is four years older than me. Collectively, we really were absorbed with what was going on in the East Village. I could look out my window and see all these characters. I have memories of walking down St Mark's place with my sister, with my dad, and seeing kids, flower children, sitting in a circle.
We’d buy poetry books at East Village books on St Mark's, so I'm 11 years old, and I've got Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind; I loved that little collection just as much as I loved my Beatrix Potter books. I also loved musicals. As a kid, I used to go to 80 St Mark's with my mom to see Nelson Eddie and Jeanette McDonald musicals, and run out of that wonderful theater singing and dancing. The neighborhood was really interesting, and maybe there was a desire to just follow what was coming next.
When I got into punk I was in high school, and I was singing in a band all throughout high school. I had this band called 200 Proof, and we played a lot. We played all the schools in the city, so people got to know me from belting out “Somebody to Love.” So it was a combination of teenage angst and the need to explore and find something you could call your own that's not exactly what your sister and brother are doing.
Do you remember the first punk band you saw in the flesh?
I think it was with my brother and I want to say it was Talking Heads or Blondie, probably in ‘76. I think a couple of high school friends showed up at that gig. It was sort of like, Oh, this is interesting, and, Wow, I've been to somewhere in the neighborhood that was a big deal. But that was sort of an isolated experience, and then there was this period [of not going again for a little while]. I probably would have been about 16 at that time, but I was still wearing bell bottoms and singing songs from the ‘60s in the mid ‘70s, because I really loved that music, like Crosby Stills Nash & Young. And I still do, of course.
So it wasn’t not this hard rejection of everything that had come before. This was just another flavor.
Initially yes, but then it quickly became more of a “gotta reject everything” [mindset]. I remember going to Freebeing Records on Second Avenue, where I got a lot of my early punk stuff, and selling all my Joni Mitchell albums. And [I’d ask,] “Grandma, can you take in my black painters pants?,” because I couldn’t find black jeans. And I started buying Rock Scene magazine, and that was really important. I know a lot of people talk about that, but it really was a big game changer for me, and for Amy Rigby, Thurston [Moore]...
Hilary and Angela Jaeger in London, 1978. Photo courtesy of Angela Jaeger.
Is there a specific turning point for you where you start to feel less like an observer or a fan and more a participant in the punk scene?
I think it was around August ‘77, when the Village Gate had a three day punk [series] with Talking Heads, Blondie, the Heartbreakers, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. I went with my high school friend Marguerite, and I didn't know anybody. And then Lydia Lunch just comes up to me and says, “Do you want to roadie?”
One of the really fun things for me in this book was seeing a side of Lydia that doesn’t quite align with her public persona. She comes across as more of a vulnerable teenager, and I guess she would have been fairly close in age to you at that point, right?
We're the same age. That was the appeal of Lydia: I kind of knew she was a young girl like me, but she was so much more degenerate and experienced. I was really shy and inexperienced in a lot of ways. But she did just come up to me, and I think she was probably seeking out other people who were a little bit younger as well. But her whole Lydia thing - and this was true of several people - they have this kind of very harsh front, but in actual fact, they were big sweethearts. I thought of Lydia that way.
When you first start going to London, you compare what's happening in New York somewhat unfavorably to what's happening over there. And then, by the time we get to the end of the book, London seems sort of stale to you, and you’re thinking about going back to New York. Looking back at all of it now, how did those two scenes compare?
In the moment, so much was going on. I felt like I was very saturated in New York, but I was always angling to get to England. Hilary had gone to school there, and I was fascinated with British culture. When I think about my top punk singles, and I've thought about that numerous times through the years, most of them are English. But looking back, New York was as fabulous as England.
[Being in] England was huge for me. I was pretty young, and going to these clubs and seeing all these kids, I felt like the energy there was younger. It was definitely more in your face, flamboyant. You had the monarchy, and everything was very controlled, so if you were out of control (or whatever the punks seemed to be), it was all the more interesting.
In New York, there was an older crowd. People like Stiv Bators, Cheetah Chrome, and the Ramones were endlessly fascinating, [and] they had a similar kind of vibe. James Chance was a whole other ball game, which was what made [the Contortions] fabulous - it wasn't just about four members wearing leather jackets, suddenly it became something really different.
It was interesting to me to see that once you started going to the Mudd Club a lot, CBGB seems to recede in the narrative. Was it just the thrill of finding this new place? Or had CB’s changed in some way?
I thought it had changed, but that's a good question, because I think we were also outgrowing it at the time. I think meeting [siblings] Amy [Rigby] and Michael [McMahon] and [their social circle], and that really got me into dancing. I didn't really associate CBGB’s with dancing that much. We would do a little bit here and there, but the Mudd Club had a dance floor and deejays.
I have more diary entries of being at the Mudd Club than Tier 3, because I was back and forth a lot to England. The Mudd Club was super fun, but it certainly was not as comfortable as Tier 3. And I would always be partial, because my sister ran that club. The Mudd Club was more debauched, but it was also more of a formal, structured nightclub.
There's a lot of great cameos that pop up throughout the book. I already had a vague idea of your story from having interviewed Hilary and Amy, and some knowledge of who was involved in what, so I wasn’t completely caught off guard when Klaus Nomi or Basquiat made appearances. But I did a double take when [dub reggae pioneer] Keith Hudson showed up!
Ah! The Keith Hudson thing was all about the Slits in New York. We were into reggae, and we went to the West Indian Festival on Labor Day. Prior to going to England, where reggae was really celebrated and influenced the Clash and so many bands, my family were into it. My brother worked in a record shop in Boston in the early ‘70s where the Wailers did their first American shows, so he brought us home Catch A Fire. We saw Bob Marley at the Beacon. So reggae was already an important part of our lives.
So Keith Hudson, I mentioned going out there with Ari [Up] and smoking “chalice,” which is just funny. I smoked a lot of pot in high school, but at that point I wasn't really smoking that much. I remember being there with Ari, I think Viv [Albertine] and Gareth [Sager, of the Pop Group] were there, and Michael [McMahon]. How amazing that was to be around Keith Hudson - and little did I know he lived in Brooklyn! But Ari would have had that information. She was pretty well informed.I think I mentioned in the diary that walking around West London - where I lived, and the Raincoats’ squat was on Monmouth Road, which Amy [Rigby] also lived on, and Pigbag lived in Shepherd's Bush, and of course Rough Trade was in West London - all the dreads knew who Ari was.
But it was pretty wild to actually be there. Hilary was also very involved in reggae. We would also go to places like the Reggae Lounge - that was interesting, but there were some heavy duty crowds there. Hilary remembers a night where somebody came in with a gun and everybody had to hit the floor. That was also a thing in London: you had the skinhead violence, which was horrible, the National Front, this kind of racist vibe. Occasionally there was a stabbing or something. In New York, you would hear people were getting shot, and Son of Sam [was happening].
The diary ends with you joining Pigbag, and then there are long stretches of living abroad. During that period, the city changes a lot, and the scene changes a lot. When you were coming back to visit during that time, were there still elements of the earlier scene (or even just the city that you remembered) that still seemed to be there? Was it a shock to see the changes?
It was pronounced. The really pronounced part during my time in England would have been a little bit…when did Trump come on the scene? Because that was really the big change, the real estate boom. NYU bought buildings that blocked our view. Also the homeless - nobody really used the term homeless before. Then I was in England, and my brother was like, “You should see it, it's pretty crazy.” All across Second Avenue, people were lined up with their stuff to sell on the street. That was a real eye opener. That was more mid-’80s, I want to say.
I always would come back at Christmas, and then for the summer. [During those visits,] Michael and Amy and I were all going to [the seminal East Village hip-hop club] Negril. When I grew up it was the Reno Bar there, and it had these great neon lights. When I grew up in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, there was a lot of prostitution on the corner of 11th Street and Second Avenue. Like in Taxi Driver, there's that apartment building off 3rd and 13th which had that great scene with Jodie Foster - we were like, “That's our neighborhood!” Is that really a good thing? [laughs] Women were opening their coats to cars driving by. There was always a lot of action out the window, whether you were looking at punk rockers or beat poets or women [showing] what they had to offer.
So the Reno Bar becomes Negril, and that suddenly brings a hip-hop crowd Downtown. Negril was fantastic. It was small, and so punk. People that had been hanging out in the punk scene were there, like my siblings and Amy and Michael. This had already kind of happened at the Mudd Club, bits of it were at Tier 3. But then it really comes [together]: everything Jean-Michel Basquiat's doing gets attention, and Futura [2000]. The [graffiti on] subway cars at that time - that was fun to come back from England, and they're like, “Have you seen the Campbell Soup car?”
Later, [there was] the Fun Gallery, which was when I first learned the word “gentrification.” Galleries started to open in the East Village. I was in England, and my sister's telling me that all these galleries are opening in the neighborhood. I'm like, ‘What, really?!” It was a kind of a mixed reaction, because by the same token, these old Italian vegetable stands or whatnot were closed.
And then we went to the Roxy a lot to see Double Dutch Girls, Afrika Bambaataa, and the Rock Steady Crew with Crazy Legs, my favorite. Those guys were so great, and to see them up close numerous times was super exciting. I did move back to New York around ‘85 when Pigbag split up. And earlier, [I did] country with Last Roundup - who would have dreamed? I think any really great scene takes years to evolve and incorporate different styles of music and culture. It's happening now, I'm sure. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm open to finding out.
How has it felt looking back at your teenage self now as you're putting this together?
It's been anticipated, this book, but it feels a little weird. I can relate to the person I was then; I don't feel so far removed. I still feel that I have an interest in counterculture. I guess everybody's afraid of the word “nostalgia,” but I don't really think it's a nostalgic thing, because these diaries were written in the moment. It's not a memoir, I'm not looking back.
But of course, putting this out does make me think about those times and who I was. Mostly, I feel like I was a young girl trying to figure out what she believed in and what her place in the world was. I had a sense of that, but this helped me to discover a broader picture. I feel very lucky, in retrospect, that I was able to go to England. There's so many more entries and diaries, and plenty of it is typical teenage girl stuff, which is a little bit embarrassing. And plenty of this [book] is too. But I feel like it's real, it's what was happening.
You made several references to the tapes that you were going around and making of interviews and live shows. Do you still have them?
I do. Around 2006 I was living in Greenpoint, and Byron Coley and Thurston Moore came over. At this point I had started to [transcribe] the diaries and gather everything together. They just were totally smitten. It was so much fun, because there were those two guys on the floor just looking through this stuff. I was like, I guess it really is great.
Thurston said to me, “Well, you have to digitize these [cassettes]. I can do it for you.” And I said, “I don't know. If anything happens to these…” He was like, “No, no, no, I promise!” He took the tapes, and he [digitized] them all, and he gave them back to me [along with CD-Rs of the recordings that have] a xerox of the cover and what was on the back.
[Picks up a stack of CD-Rs and starts flipping through them]
“Slits at Bournemouth,” “Talking Heads at the Village Gate” - that was the summer ‘77. I even [taped] an NBC thing on punk rock. Here's the Ramones at the Rusty Nail - Byron was so excited to see that; he was like, “No way!” A lot of these have tons of room sound. Here’s a James Chance interview, the Cramps, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Spizzoil. There’s a lot of the Clash.
These tapes just serenaded me [at the time], particularly the Slits, who didn't have a record out. I went to London in the fall of ‘78 and fell in love with the Slits. I’d never seen anything like it. I had seen their photos in Rock Scene, the Bob Gruen pictures of them on the White Riot tour - images that will stick in my mind forever. And then I see the band, and get to know them a little bit. [Eventually], of course, their record came out, [but] it was almost more fun when it was just my own little thing that I had discovered. But I was so thrilled that Viv Albertine gave me a blurb. She was the first person I asked, and she wrote back within days. I just wanted to cry, it felt so great. It's been a tender moment. It brings back memories, and it makes me emotional.
The doorway of the Palace Hotel (above CBGB), 1978. L to R: Allison, Nick Berlin, Angela Jaeger, Mariah, Ty Stix, Hilary Jaeger, and Diane. Photo by Ronnie Johnson, courtesy of Angela Jaeger.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, brevity, and context.
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