Editor's note: This is part one of a two-part piece. Part two will run on Monday, April 28, 2014.

This is the time of year when New Yorkers pack away puffy coats and channel their inner Patti Smith to wander the streets. Like shoots of grass pushing their way through cracks in the sidewalks of Alphabet City, determined and passionate people such as native Manhattanite Lisa Robinson — Vanity Fair contributing editor and author of the new book There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll — reach for the high of being truly alive.

Inspired by the East Village neighborhood in which countless artists and musicians have lived, on and around Avenues A, B, C, and D, we’ve compiled a two-part A-to-Z primer to the cultural enclave of Robinson’s world as rendered in her candid and fascinating memoir.

“Most performance artists are considered freaks. Until they get older. Especially the women. Now that Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, and Marina Abramović are too old to be thought of as sexual in this culture, they get respect.”

“Over the years, I did many, many interviews with David [Bowie]. They ranged from lucid, funny, charming and insightful, to strange encounters and mumbled gibberish. He was rarely dull — except for the period when he rode around in a convertible, making sure he was photographed giving some sort of salute while extolling Hitler.”

“CBGB’s was a dump, but it was our dump. Many of us who went there on a regular basis were so wary of the unsanitary conditions, we only drank beer straight out of the bottle.”

“You never knew which Bob Dylan you were going to get. He could give you a limp handshake or a flirtatious grin. He could look right through you or have a spark of recognition in his eyes. For years, he was one of the few I never really wanted to interview. He jerks journalists around.”

“I went to Interscope’s offices and looked through an entire storage room with boxes of magazine and newspaper articles about Eminem. He was called a sociopath, a master storyteller, white trash, brilliant, homophobic, misogynistic, antisocial, dysfunctional, touching, inventive, heroic, twisted. He was compared to T.S. Eliot, Robert Browning, Howard Stern, Mark Twain, Andrew Dice Clay, Rimbaud, and yes, Lenny Bruce. I was intrigued.”

“I don’t remember this, but my husband Richard recalls that when we were in London in 1972 with Lou Reed and David Bowie at the gay club El Sombrero, Freddie Mercury, who was at that time selling secondhand clothes in a stall at the Kensington Market, joined us and told us he was starting a band called Queen.”

“The following day, on September 11, I went to Gaga’s parents’ apartment in a beautiful art deco building on the Upper West Side … Gaga was at the kitchen sink. She was wearing a black Chanel dress, a platinum Daphne Guinness-styled wig, sky-high Louboutin shoes, full makeup, and glass earrings. She was chopping cherry tomatoes for a homemade pasta sauce. 'Kill Bill' was on a computer monitor screen with the sound down.”

“He went on and on about Indian music and the Hare Krishnas and Hinduism. He talked about god and Vedic literature and Swami Muktananda. No one who has ever done a proper interview with him would ever describe George Harrison as the ‘quiet Beatle.’”

“And many years later, when Iggy was in better shape, he told me, ‘You know, when I met you and a lot of people from New York, well, you know where I come from [a trailer park outside of Detroit, Michigan], and I was thrown into a scene that was very much … mondo. I think it turned me a little bit evil.’”

“Before the [1975] tour started, when I interviewed Mick [Jagger], he said, ‘There really is no reason to have women on tour, unless they’ve got a job to do. The only other reason is to fuck.”

“‘Exactly,’ Bono said. ‘But you want to know my favorite Kafka story? He met a little girl once who was crying and crying because she lost her favorite doll. And Kafka said to the little girl, ‘No, your doll is fine, I’ve seen her, she’s just taking a trip around the world and she’s having a wonderful time … And for years afterwards, he wrote her postcards from various places all over the world, signing the cards with the name of her doll.”

“He [Robert Plant] told me that he'd had a lot of time to think about the rock and roll life: ‘The insanity, the hours, the flying around, the rampaging the way we do. I think I need to get back to my farm on the Welsh border and be with my family — which doesn’t mean I’ve lost the grease off my shoes. I’m still part of this thing that Led Zeppelin is. But you need to go back to your corner every once in a while to get the energy that you need to perform in front of all these people.”

“One afternoon, way back in 1983, Madonna was at the East Side Manhattan apartment of fashion photographer Steven Meisel. Steven and I were friends at the time. He was going to take the photo for Madonna’s 'Like a Virgin' album cover. He wanted me to talk to her. He put her on the phone. ‘I want to rule the world!’ she squealed.”

Stay tuned for N through Z, posting on Monday.