"A locus of art and energy"

Ask someone to name a venue/club that was at the epicentre of New York's exciting punk and no wave scene of the late 1970s, and chances are CBGB will come to mind first. The infamously grotty dive on Bowery is perennially celebrated, with good reason - most recently with the release of a new 101-track box set (and this Guardian article by Garth Cartwright).

In the words of the venue's photographic chronicler Gary Green, "New York was gritty, dirty and poor in those days. And CBGB reflected that." This characterisation of the city very much echoes the portraits painted in the books written by regular patrons and performers Thurston Moore and Lenny Kaye.

CBGB wasn't the only punk mecca in town, however. Moore's very first gig in New York was, at his friend Harold's insistence, actually at Max's Kansas City, where Suicide and the Cramps blew the two teenagers' minds.

Unlike CBGB, Max's had significant stature before the punk era properly kicked off, with Andy Warhol declaring it "the exact spot where pop art and pop life came together", the Stooges regular visitors and the Velvet Underground enjoying a two-month residency. But it really came into its own in the late 1970s, branded "a social hub of the subterranean universe" by Kaye's bandmate Patti Smith.

Prompted by the publication of a memoir by booker Peter Crowley, Daniel Dylan Wray has traced the curiously named venue's rise and fall. It may have been marginally classier than CBGB, but it too offered a vital space for experimentation and innovation to fledgling acts. Together, they helped to forge (in Crowley's words) "the cultural future of America".

Meanwhile, elsewhere in New York, another club was busy writing its way into music history. Punk had a largely antagonistic relationship to disco, but both flourished at roughly the same time and place - and Studio 54 was disco's equivalent to CBGB and Max's, albeit a whole lot more salubrious and glam. Photographer Tod Papageorge was on hand between 1978 and 1980 to capture its decadence and dazzle.

While Lenny Kaye's Lightning Striking explores "ten transformative moments in rock and roll" from around the US and indeed further afield, Jesse Rifkin focuses solely on New York-based scenes for his book This Must Be The Place: Music, Community And Vanished Spaces In New York City. This Quietus article and the playlist he put together is testament to the city's musical vibrancy, drawing attention to some of the lesser lights who "never quite got their due".

Rifkin's take-home message is unequivocal: "One of the most important things we can do to allow for future Death By Audios - or CBGBs, or Mudd Clubs, or Sidewalk Cafes - is to put as much energy into nursing current scenes as we do celebrating past ones." Amen to that.