The night Patti Smith, John Cale, Lou Reed and David Byrne jammed together
New York City is deceptively small. Manhattan, in particular, is a compact island that has served as the creative playground for some of history’s most talented artists.
During the 1960s and ’70s, the city became a magnet for the alternative crowd—the crème de la crème of emerging talent. Before gentrification took hold, New York offered up-and-coming artists the chance to find cheap rent and grind it out alongside their peers, creating a vibrant ecosystem for creativity. It was here that the early punk scene collided with new sounds booming from every dive bar and rock joint. But back then, New York was more like a village where everyone seemed to know everyone. Today, the idea of Lou Reed, John Cale, Patti Smith, and David Byrne sharing a stage feels like a once-in-a-lifetime musical miracle. Back then? It was just another Wednesday night.
If you dig into any local music scene, you’ll uncover a complex web of friends, acquaintances, and collaborators. In cities worldwide, up-and-coming artists orbit the same circles—meeting in green rooms, playing the same gigs, frequenting the same bars, and often mingling as bandmates swap and change within the bustling musical crowd. At its core, music is a social art form, creating natural opportunities for fans and artists to bond over a shared passion. Genres, too, play a vital role in this dynamic, forming camps and tribes where individuals connect instantly, seeing their tastes and styles reflected in one another.
In the 1970s in New York, that was going on like it still is today in venues around the world. As rock and roll began to morph into something new, the sound grew heavier as punk came together. With the opening of venues like CBGB, artists interested in this new style had somewhere to converge, setting the process into hyper-speed as musicians would meet, talk, start bands, watch shows, get inspired and then go make their own music. All of the acts routinely gracing the city’s favourite stages were entering into a kind of mutual sharing of influence, informing one another’s work and then sticking around for a drink and a chat after the gig.
That’s a long way to say that, simply, the legends we know today were friends. Patti Smith would hang out at the CBGB with her then-boyfriend, Tom Verlaine of Television. The couple would be chatting to John Cale, the Velvet Underground musician who produced Smith’s first album. On stage, the Ramones might have been tearing the place up, or Debbie Harry might have been launching Blondie, or David Byrne and his band might have been figuring out the first Talking Heads songs. While written into legend now as a kind of holy ground, the CBGB was simply a local venue.
“CBGB validated our mission,” Smith explained, “I didn’t just want to revolutionize rock & roll, or merge poetry and rock & roll. The real thing was to keep rock & roll in the hands of the people, keep it as a grass-roots and cultural voice, not something that was big and glamorous and materialistic. The real heart of rock & roll is its revolutionary cultural voice.” To her, this is what made the place so special – the people. In that bar, or any of the others the city’s musicians frequented, the importance lay in the act of meeting one another, of creating a scene and getting to know peers as they turned to friends.
The night of July 21st, 1976, is a perfect example of that. On the stage at the Ocean Club, a venue in SoHo, John Cale, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and David Byrne were all up there together, jamming their way through a bunch of Cale’s songs and a few covers, like The Modern Lovers’ ‘Pablo Picasso’.
Some of the connections between them are obvious; Cale and Reed knew each other from Velvet Underground, and though they famously fell out when Cale quit the band, they clearly put that to bed for one night as two old friends often do in a complex fight. Cale and Smith knew each other from the making of Horses, as well as through Smith’s long-running and well-documented love for the Velvet Underground. It’s Byrne who feels like the odd man out, but after their debut show at CBGB in 1975, Talking Heads were simply in the scene, so they naturally knew everyone. Reed saw the band play once and gave them some advice, and from then on, they knew each other like any acquaintances would end up connecting if they were consistently in the same places or milled around the same circles.
It just so happens that this circle of friends may just be one of the most talented to ever exist. It was a golden time in New York City as the scene buzzed with an excitement that would change the sound of music forever. But at the time, they likely didn’t know that. At the time, this was just four peers messing around on stage together.
What songs did they play together?
- ‘Ghost Story’ – John Cale
- ‘Buffalo Ballet’ – John Cale
- ‘You Know More Than I Know’ – John Cale
- ‘Guts’ – John Cale
- ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ – The Velvet Underground
- ‘I Keep A Close Watch’ – John Cale
- ‘The Jeweler’ – John Cale
- ‘Gun’ – John Cale
- ‘Pablo Picasso’ – Modern Lovers cover
- ‘Cable Hogue’ – John Cale
- ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’ – Jimmy Reed cover
