Watch Jon Stewart Discuss His Punk Rock Past With Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes
Before he broke in as a stand-up comic, the Daily Show host Jon Stewart worked as a bartender at City Gardens, a legendarily squalid indie/punk club in Trenton, New Jersey. (As we learn in this great interview, one of his coworkers was future LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy, then a bouncer.) City Gardens is the subject of a new oral history called No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes, and last night, Stewart invited the book’s author Amy Yates Wuelfing onto The Daily Show. She also brought Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes, who played the club a bunch and who once came dangerously close to setting it on fire mid-performance. It’s a lot of fun to see Stewart happily reminiscing about this chapter in his life and to imagine an era when underground rock shows were actually dangerous. Watch the interview below.
No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes: An Oral History Of City Gardens is out now via DiWulf Publishing.