Review by New York Times Review
THE first record made by Talking Heads, a single released in February 1977, was called "Love [arrow right] Building on Fire." If you knew about Talking Heads then, you might have been the kind of person who thought the formula-like vector tucked into the title was inspired by the deadpan propositions that the conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner was stenciling at that time on the walls of SoHo galleries - which, in turn, might have made you think that the song itself was some sort of self-conscious concept art, sonically and lyrically examining the idea of a soulful pop song even as the insistent beat and David Byrne's strained shouts and warbles made the song a real one, exuberant, funny in its way, and infectious. I heard it for the first time when I played it on the jukebox that winter at a place called the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club, on Chambers Street in TriBeCa. It was the only way to hear that kind of single then - unless you went to one of a handful of downtown record stores, like Bleecker Bob's. (The radio was playing a lot of the Eagles' "Hotel California.") I was waiting around at the bar for the live music to begin - a band like the Cramps, maybe, or someone who made music but not exactly, like Meredith Monk, or some experimental art-music composer like Arthur Russell (who would go on to do some fascinating things with disco), or one of the loft-jazz players like David Murray. The young women were mostly in Danskins and stovepipe slacks and Capezio jazz shoes, and the guys in secondhand sweaters and worn Levi's and scuffed, canvas Sperrys like the ones the Ramones wore. Everybody below Houston Street, it seemed, was making some form of art, or trying to, or looking as if he or she did. And when you left the Ocean Club early in the morning, you would look up at block after block of old manufacturing buildings and see here and there a milk carton on a window ledge, because those lofts had no refrigerators (or stoves), but mostly you would notice that so many lights were still on - so many people up working to something untried and provocative. Will Hermes doesn't ever explain why he called his book "Love Goes to Buildings on Fire," but I think that's what he had in mind. He was still in high school in Queens when all this new music was getting made downtown and in other undergrounds around the city in the 1970s. But he went on to become a warmly responsive rock critic, writing for Rolling Stone and discussing recordings on NPR, and now he has produced a prodigious work of contemporary music history, unearthing material from a wide array of sources -including clippings from The SoHo Weekly News, where I worked in the '70s - to tell the story, or better, stories, of what was arguably the most rangy, inventive and influential period of music making in the city's (and the nation's) life. Music geeks will find plenty of this familiar, and being music geeks, will fake knowing what they don't about how, say, in the early '70s, Latin dance music was being hotly reimagined by Willie Colón and others, or how Nicky Siano, at his proto-rave disco, the Gallery, was mastering, as Hermes writes, "the art of dropping out certain frequencies in a cut (usually the bass) at dramatic moments, then crashing them back in on the beat, à la dub reggae, detonating dance-floor pleasure bombs." Hermes's is a popular history, but if the success of Patti Smith's autobiographical "Just Kids" is any indication, the music life of '70s New York is saying something to a lot of people who weren't around or listening back then. The book has a montage-style structure underlying its basic year-by-year chronology, and as it cuts from one musician to some other band to still another composer or dance-party D.J., certain themes begin to emerge. It's interesting, in the wake of a '60s counterculture that embraced (or claimed to) the notion of "authenticity," how many of those making something new musically a decade later were also making themselves up - taking on names, getting their look down, buying instruments they didn't know how to play. Tom Miller, a 19-year-old boarding-school bad boy, arrives downtown from Delaware, reads and writes poetry, starts calling himself Tom Verlaine, buys a Fender Jazzmaster and forms the band Television. A teenager from the Bronx quits the Black Spades gang, travels to the Ivory Coast and Nigeria, returns, and establishes a party-promoting community organization called the Universal Zulu Nation, with himself as the self-appointed "master of records" -Afrika Bambaataa, he starts calling himself, and begins mixing some of the earliest grooves of hip-hop. And then there were the unrelated kids from Forest Hills who all took on the surname Ramone. Those working in the city's musical laboratories also tended to be extremely conscious of the history of the genres they were working in. You'd expect that from composers like Steve Reich or jazzmen like Sam Rivers (who ran a loft club downtown, Studio Rivbea, and lived there, too), but it was also true of the new rock musicians: that's what growing up in the first era of widely available and affordable recordings will do. Like Godard and Truffaut, who wrote for the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma in the '50s, championed American B movies and then went on to make New Wave cinema influenced by them, Lenny Kaye embraced the recordings of American regional garage bands of the mid-'60s, whose music was dismissed by FM-radio album-rock types as amateurish knockoffs; then helped curate a compilation of these songs, released in 1972, called "Nuggets"; then became Patti Smith's collaborator. Perhaps the most striking thing about those years was just how much live music there was, and in so many different kinds of places. Steve Reich played his works in progress at an art gallery, Philip Glass at his sculptor friend Donald Judd's loft. There were punk and downtown art bands nearly every night at CBGB and Max's Kansas City and uncategorizable music at art spaces like the Kitchen and Franklin Furnace. Of course, this had as much to do with the availability of cheap real estate as anything else. Hilly Kristal had acquired the Bowery bar that became CBGB for about $20,000. The rent on the second-floor loft where Nicky Siano opened his disco was $460 a month. What made so much space available, and so cheap, was the dire state of the city, about which Hermes has a lot to say - too much, actually. His isn't a story like Jonathan Mahler's "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning," in which the fate of the Yankees mattered to the broader city, as a sign of rebirth. No one living outside a few neighborhoods in New York - or similar neighborhoods in London and a few other cosmopolitan cities - knew about, never mind cared about, most of the music being made there in the mid-'70s. And most of those making the music didn't care about Mayor Abe Beame's woes or the robbing of Village food joints that Hermes documents. They embraced the urban blight aesthetically and liked that they could live and rehearse in lofts so inexpensive they could quit their day jobs. That - all of it - is long, long gone. TriBeCa is one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods, and experimentation downtown has for the past 20 years been about creating exotic financial instruments. If you are now making and playing the kind of music that is expanding the range of the possible in ways that might one day be consequential, you are probably in Bushwick. And you are probably embroidering on an idea or an approach developed to the west, across the East River, 35 years ago. From the Ramones and Talking Heads to Afrika Bambaataa to Philip Glass and Meredith Monk. Gerald Marzorati is an editor at large of The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* During the 1970s, various music scenes rock, punk rock, hip-hop, loft jazz, minimalist classical music, disco, salsa were taking place simultaneously throughout New York City, from the South Bronx to East Harlem, Midtown to the Lower East Side. Sometimes they even intersected. In Love Goes to Buildings on Fire the title is taken from a Talking Heads' song music critic Hermes moves effortlessly back and forth between the various musical genres while interspersing stories of New York at a time when the city was on the verge of financial ruin and moral collapse. Hermes concentrates on five crucial years, 1973 to 1977. He upends the myth that the early to mid-1970s were a cultural dead zone. On the contrary, during these busy years, he maintains, musicians were inventing new kinds of music, such as hip-hop, and reimagining older types, as with the minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Among the major musicians he describes in these very entertaining pages are Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, the Talking Heads, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls, the Ramones, Miles Davis, Grandmaster Flash, and Willie Colon and the Fania All-Stars. A fantastic journey through New York's 1970s underground music scene.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the 1970s it seemed like the end of the world had occurred in New York City; crime was rampant, the government was broke, and the idealism that had fueled protests in Washington Square Park and spurred new musical styles was shattered. Although the 1970s appeared to be a musical wasteland (remember Debby Boone?), senior Rolling Stone critic Hermes reminds us forcefully and refreshingly in this breathtaking, panoramic portrait of five years (1973-1977) of that decade that music in New York City was alive, flourishing, and kicking out the jams. He colorfully recalls how Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash hot-wired street parties with collaged shards of vinyl LPs; how the New York Dolls stripped garage rock raw and wrapped it in drag, taking a cue from Warhol's transvestite glamour queens; how Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith took a cue from Dylan and combined rock and poetry into new shapes; how Eddie Palmieri, Willie Colon, and the Fanta All-Stars were transforming Cuban music into multicultural salsa and making East Harlem and the South Bronx the global center of Spanish-language music; and how Philip Glass and Steve Reich were imagining a new sort of classical music, using jazz, rock, African, and Indian sources. Hermes's fast-paced and affectionate overview provides intimate glimpses into the often forgotten but profound changes wrought in the 1970s New York music scene. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Rolling Stone critic and National Public Radio contributor Hermes presents a chronological history of New York City's music scenes during the fertile period from 1973 to 1977. He covers the emergence of punk, hip-hop, disco, salsa, loft jazz, and the Minimalist composers. Music geeks will be well pleased, as no detail is left out of this meticulous day-by-day rendering. Fans of these particular genres may be better served by less chronologically and geographically bounded histories. VERDICT Seasoned narrator Adam Verner's enthusiastic baritone jibes with the encyclopedic sweep of the text, but the lack of accompanying music is a missed opportunity. Recommended to readers in New York City and music fans generally. ["Hermes writes with scene-setting observational detail and provides contextual background to events and social movements taking place throughout New York," read the review of the Faber & Faber hc, LJ 9/15/11.-Ed.]-Mark Swails, Johnson Cty. Community Coll., Overland Park, KS (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Rolling Stone senior critic Hermes (co-editor: Spin: 20 Years of Alternative Music, 2005) argues successfully for the vitality of the period. Many critics believe that the greatest innovation of the day was punk and/or New Wave--the Ramones, Patti Smith, the Talking Heads, Television, everybody who graced the stage at CBGBs, etc.--but Hermes points out that this was a time when the seeds of hip-hop were planted by the likes of Grandmaster Flash. In addition, thanks primarily to Philip Glass, minimalism became a legitimate and influential classical subgenre. It's this embracing of a wide variety of styles that sets the project apart from other books studying the era. Hermes digs into every style that NYC had to offer--e.g., his dissection of Latin music will have many readers seeking out Celia Cruz and Ray Barretto records. The author maintains a casual and conversational tone, and he's a fine storyteller. His attitude, sharp ear and smart big-picture view turn what could have been a small book into something special. A hip, clever, informative look at an unjustifiably dismissed musical era that will have readers scouring iTunes for the perfect accompanying soundtrack.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
