In order to grow and establish themselves within the music industry, bands must play live shows. Playing live is not only invaluable practice, but it is also a way to form a kinship with the audience and community. By playing live shows, the Velvet Underground in turn influenced the next generation of New York punks. Through their live shows, the New York Dolls confirmed the potential of glam, short for glamour, or glitter rock and proved to be the scenemakers of the lower Manhattan grouping of glitter bands.

For the generation of rock acts that reigned during the early- to-mid-1970s, the New York club scene provided necessary live experience. New York City rock critic, Richard Nusser, wrote for the Village Voice during the early punk movement and noted that the New York scene's new crop of bands was the last to be directly affected by the 1960s, meaning that these kids watched rock music become an economic product and were directly affected by the possibilities of punk's newness and potential. Where rock was becoming another adult-oriented product, as the Billboard charts of the early 1970s reflect, punk meant youth and youth culture. Barbra Streisand's 1974 "The Way We Were" was the movie theme song for an adult love story. Patti Smith's "Piss Factory" single of the same year was completely youth-oriented. It narrated Smith's adolescent dreams of getting out of her small home town and how she wanted to "be so big, I'm gonna be a big star," how she would "go on that train/ I'm going to New York City/ I'm gonna be somebody." Critic Dave Marsh rated "Piss Factory" number 718 in his book, The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made. Marsh put his finger right on what made Smith and her contemporaries so exciting and so different from accepted popular music. He wrote: "Smith unites herself perfectly with the material, a blast of rage and revenge, a shaggy dog story posing as a dirty joke that winds up as an anthem to show biz ambition..." (Marsh, 462).

Punk, being a post-1960s commodity, was about the rebirth and cleansing of rock to regain its freshness and youth. If 1960s rock was music's most influential product, then by the 1970s, the product was getting old. When the 1960s' most successful acts could no longer speak to the next generation, punk filled this gap. Punk was also a part of a link in the long chain of New York City's influence on America's mainstream music, ultimately overshadowed by more accessible versions of the same or similar music. Like early folk, punk rock started in the city, later becoming more popular in a different location. In folk's case, it was a migration from New York's Greenwhich Village to the West Coast or upstate New York near a town called Woodstock whereas punk started in New York City and moved to the streets of Britain....

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