By: Sunnie Gao

In 1977, the storied music venues of Manhattan were alive and aloud with excited, underage patrons.

They passed their days at Stuyvesant High School. They came from the High School of

Performing Arts and Murrow. They went to Friends Seminary, Walden and Dalton, and to

Brooklyn Friends, too. Some were dropouts and runaways, and others were from the suburbs.

But they all had one thing in common. Almost all of them were under 18.

Over the next four years, these teens spent their time in the rock scene, playing aggressive, witty, sophisticated, and intense pop and punk for fellow teenagers. This style of play would not be commonplace in the future. Instead, it would be a unique moment in music history that would change the lives of the people who heard it, even if their stories were largely untold.

Eric Hoffert was one of those teens. He was a regular, hardworking teen during the weekdays, doing four hours of homework from Bronx Science and practicing his guitar for four hours, but the weekend belonged to his band, the Speedies, exclusively.

Another teen was Arthur Brennan, a 16-year-old who regularly hitchhiked 20 miles to the only newsstand where he could buy magazines that covered new music. Soon after, he renamed himself Darvon Staggard and ran away to New York City to join a band.

And Kate Schellenbach, a ninth grader at Stuyvesant, had heard a rumor that groups her age were playing the most famous music clubs in the world, just blocks from where she lived. Interested in wave music, she wore overdyed painters’ pants from Unique Clothing Warehouse, white go-go boots from Reminiscence in the West Village, a bowling shirt, and an

Elvis Costello pin on her first day of school.

There, she met Nancy Hall, “who was the coolest,” Kate said, sitting on the sink. Nancy Hall suggested that Kate see a band playing at CBGB later that week called the Student Teachers.

“If I hadn’t seen the Student Teachers that fateful night, I might never have been a drummer,” said Schellenbach, who helped found the Beastie Boys in 1981 and went on to form Luscious

Jackson. “Seeing Laura Davis play drums, seeing Lori Reese play bass and how exciting the whole scene was, everything about it made me think, ‘Oh, maybe this is something I can do,’” she added. “These people were still in high school — it seemed attainable.

Key bands in that music movement were the Student Teachers, who played art pop with elegiac touches reminiscent of Roxy Music, the Blessed, who were the first, sloppiest, and most fashionable group on the scene, and the mega poppy mod group the Colors, who was enamored with bubble-gum music.

And if those bands had anything in common, it would be their affection for big

choruses, flashy, colorful clothes, and an arrogant certainty that punk rock was now theirs to inherit.