Punk’s First Publicist
If you’ve done any reading about the history of alt-rock, you may have come across the name Danny Fields. The New York Times has this profile of Danny long with a look ahead to a new documentary on the man called Danny Says.
This month, a private screening was held for a rough cut of “Danny Says,” a documentary about the New York rock music legend Danny Fields. The theater was full of old friends of Danny’s and potential investors, but Mr. Fields was not in attendance.
Afterward, the director, Brendan Toller, who hopes to debut the film in March at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Tex., answered questions from the audience. The actor John Cameron Mitchell, who in the film refers to Mr. Fields as a “handmaiden to the gods,” asked if Mr. Fields would ever see it.
Mr. Toller, he later confessed, had been dreading that question. He hesitated. “Well —— ” he said.
“I’m never seeing it,” Mr. Fields, 75, wryly declared a few days later, sipping some microwaved sake in the living room of his West Village apartment. The man who introduced Jim Morrison to Nico, Iggy Pop to the world, and cocaine to Iggy Pop, simply doesn’t want to. “That’s Brendan’s thing,” he said.
Danny’s thing — and he is known to people in the business as “Danny” — was music. For roughly two decades, Mr. Fields found himself at the center of a revolution. He broke into the industry working for Elektra Records, first doing publicity for the Doors, then signing both Iggy Pop’s band the Stooges and the MC5 (on the same day), which would ultimately lead to his managing the Ramones. You could make a convincing case that without Danny Fields, punk rock wouldn’t have happened.
