In Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives (It Books, Sept.), Brendan Jay Sullivan, also known to his clubbing fans as DJ VH1, recalls the recent heyday of one of New York City’s hippest neighborhoods, where aspiring writers, latter-day hair metal acolytes, and wannabe pop stars dated one another, drank till the sun came up, and dreamed of making it big. One of them—Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, aka Lady Gaga—made it bigger than big, and Sullivan was there by her side to watch it happen.
Sullivan signs today at Table 15 in the Autographing Area, 2–2:30 p.m. Could Lady Gaga have come into her own anywhere other than on the Lower East Side? I really like the way you put that. There were venues opening [in 2006], and they wanted crowds. If you promised to bring people, they would let you do whatever you wanted. She developed in that world, not at some open mic or on Broadway or at the Apollo.
It seems strange to refer to a period just a few years ago—when you and your crew were in your 20s and 30s—as “the prime of our lives.” A prime number is divisible by itself and one. In the prime of your life you are divisible by yourself and one—you’ll meet that one and when they’re gone you’ll feel destroyed. It’s the feeling behind every single love song. It’s a feeling that you grow with. I’m told it comes back when you see your first child born. Maybe that’s next for us.
You mention early on that you’d often rise early and write stories. How is the process of writing a work of nonfiction different from writing fiction? Aw, man, I find this kind of embarrassing, but for the past 10 years I have written a thousand words every morning. It’s the reason I started working in nightlife—I wanted mornings to write. Stories and plays, but also seven novel-length manuscripts. My basement is a fire hazard of failure. After work, sort of for sketch practice, I would come home and write about my day—what a room looked like, where I ran into this person or that, how these two people know each other, the cute old man at the bank. Never with the constraints or structure I’d imposed on fiction work. Always freer, never watching the word count, etc. Plus I’ve been writing about bands for magazines all along. Rivington is the turducken of all my labors. Did you let people profiled in the book see drafts while it was being written?
Yes and no. There’s a hazard in sharing unfinished work. I had written a chapter about being very much in love with someone and sent it to her, maybe five years after we’d broken up. She wrote back, “That’s really beautiful, we really were in love.” Which was all I’d ever wanted to hear. Then I realized that chapter didn’t take place in New York, so I had to cut it. Which New York City neighborhoods are incubating the next big stars? You know how they say that there are more people alive today than have ever lived? I think there are more great things going on in New York than ever before. The next big star is already out there, singing an acoustic cover of the new Daft Punk song and trying to figure it out. But there will never be another Lady Gaga.
