Will Hermes, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever
I had a great time reading this. Hermes presents 1973-1977 NYC in a collage of stories about some of my favorite musicians: The Ramones, Television, Arthur Russell, Talking Heads, Lou Reed, Brian Eno…all the snippets quick and loaded with great stuff, which means the reading is really fast (I read it in a couple of days.) Hermes was a teenager during those years, so he laces the narrative with personal stories and cultural context—pot shortages, movies at the box office, blackouts, political elections, etc.
Since I’ve been obsessed lately with “the notion of authenticity,” here’s a paragraph from a NYTimes review:
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.
(In the book, 1974 is labelled “Invent Yourself.”)
Some of my other favorite bits:
- The story of Springsteen writing “Hungry Heart” for The Ramones
- The New York Dolls on The Old Grey Whistle Test
- Arthur Russell playing cello on a cut of “Psycho Killer”
Best of all, Jim Higgins made a Spotify playlist to accompany the book. (I made one on Rdio.)
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