Irving Plaza has featured music in some form or another since the 1920s: ballroom dancing, folk hootenannies, Polish songs.
By the late 1970s, it was a rock venue. And if you were young and reasonably into up and coming bands in 1983, these are the groups you’d have been able to see.
The Violent Femmes! I wouldn’t mind going back in time to see them play in their heyday.
This ad appeared in the downtown alternative arts and entertainment paper the East Village Eye. Browsing their digital archive is a lot of fun.
Tags: 1980s East Village clubs, ads from 1980s rock clubs, East Village Eye, East Village in 1983, Irving Plaza 1980s, Violent Femmes concert in New York City
Ephemeral New York 
October 6, 2014 at 12:29 pm |
This brings back so many memories. I saw so many great performances there in the early Eighties. At a time when NYC clubs were already getting fancier and more pretentious, Irving Plaza was all about the music, and at a reasonable price. It was kind of rundown but clean, and I remember members of the Polish-American group that owned the building hung glumly to the back of the room, taking in the alien circus around them. A fun place.
August 2, 2019 at 5:32 pm |
I saw them there in 1985. In 1982 while in college we used to go down to a small bar in the village called Dan Lynch’s. They had live blues every Friday night. We’d get a pitcher of beer and dance like crazy. We’d be the only ones there besides the people drinking at the bar. One night there was this incredible trio, they played forever. They performed under some name like the Dancing Dogs or something like that. A couple years later I went to see the Violent Femmes at Irving Plaza with my housemates. I immediately recognized that these were they guys I saw at Dan Lynch’s. The guitarist’s girlfriend was there and when I went up to her and asked if they had played Dan Lynch’s a couple of years earlier she remembered me as one of the four people dancing all night, told me they played there incognito every time they came to NYC as Dan Lynch’s was where they played their first gig in NYC. We hung out all night and went backstage after and the band remembered me/us from that night.