Will Hermes, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever. New York: Faber & Faber, 2011. (and check out the book’s multimedia companion here!)
By Scott Borchert
New York City in the mid-1970s was a pretty grim place. The post-war economic boom that brought prosperity and stability to more Americans than ever before was faltering, and the economy’s long-term tendency toward stagnation returned. NYC was feeling it, and the city soon fell into a state of severe fiscal crisis. Bankruptcy seemed imminent. Living standards declined, services were cut, workers were laid off. Crime rates rose, and a kind of ambient violence permeated every block and avenue, punctuated by spectacular acts like political bombings and the Son of Sam murder spree. Sections of the city literally went up in flames, the work of arsonists, and few seemed to care. Burning buildings had become mundane.
And yet, something was happening in the city’s dingiest clubs, in its tiny lofts and unassuming rec centers. It’s a cliché at this point, but it’s true: musical history was being made by the unlikeliest of people in the interstices of a crumbling city. In a dilapidated theater that threatened to collapse at any moment (and, in fact, did, in 1973), a bunch of dudes in drag were redefining rock and roll. A handful of DJs, their sound systems drawing power directly from the jacked wires of streetlights in a Bronx park, were changing the way people played (and performed along with) records. Jazz musicians busted open the genre in each other’s living rooms. A wiry girl from New Jersey, quite consciously taking a cue from Bob Dylan, decided that poetry could use a rock and roll backbone. And on and on, from every corner of the metropolis and its outer-borough peripheries.
This didn’t mean that new art forms were necessarily being created, as Will Hermes points out in Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (and what art is ever truly “new”?). Rather, these artists were taking the musical forms transmitted by the past and reworking them according to their own desires and the demands of their current moment. In that sense, the music they created was both a commentary on the music of dead generations and a projection into the future. As Hermes puts it, “all this activity—largely DIY moves by young iconoclasts on the edge of the mainstream—would grow into movements that continue to shape music around the world” (xi). If it’s possible to think about such diverse activities as a cohesive, mid-70s New York “scene,” then it’s the iconoclasm, the DIY ethic, and the effort to break down and repurpose past forms that are its major characteristics.
Structurally, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire rests on a simple premise: take a five-year span in the history of New York City’s music scene, in this case 1973 to 1977, and tell its stories. Hermes does so through a series of vignettes and passages, typically no longer than a page, arranged more or less in chronological order. His critical commentary is sparse and he lets the history speak for itself. The effect is anecdotal at times but in its presentation the book approaches the simple elegance of a no-bullshit Ramones tune or a minimalist Philip Glass composition. In other words, what may seem superficial in form carries, in its own plainness and directness, the weight of unencumbered truth.
If there are truths to be discovered in this book, though, they’re the truths about music—and about life—as seen through the eyes of a teenager from Queens. Hermes grew up there, and his adolescent self makes an occasional appearance in the text, tragically missing historic shows, luckily catching others, chasing girls against a fondly remembered soundtrack. And, of course, listening to a lot of records. His enthusiasm for the time is undiminished but never sinks into a lame nostalgia that reminds us with a smirk, I was there, man. The personalization is subtle, and just right—it informs the adult Hermes’s judgment but reflects the fact that, from 1973-77, he was just another kid in the crowd, struggling to take it all in.
And of course, there was plenty to take in. Aside from the rock and punk scene famously centered around CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, Hermes explores the worlds of minimalist composers and loft jazz musicians downtown, the burgeoning hip-hop and salsa scenes in Harlem and the Bronx, dance club life city-wide being changed by disco, and how musicians from these loosely delineated territories mingled and influenced one another. The narrative, while heavy with sources, is mostly Hermes’s, and he’s a damn good storyteller. But the few quotations he unearths from the artists are gems. Richard Hell recalls his fellow Heartbreaker Johnny Thunders “furiously … ripping chords from his guitar like they were love letters he stopped himself just in time from sending”; Patti Smith, turning down an offer to join Bob Dylan on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, explains “It’s like if you have an electric chair, you need somebody to electrocute; you don’t bring in another electric chair” (159, 156).
The text crackles with this sort of energy, and at times the hundreds (thousands?) of names—of musicians, producers, writers, albums, venues, publications, films, etc.—are overwhelming. Every page has something you’ll want to investigate further, so keep a pen and notebook handy. I didn’t and I regret it. (Thankfully, there’s a comprehensive discography, bibliography, and filmography in the appendix.)
Love Goes to Buildings on Fire raises some questions that it doesn’t quite answer, if they can be answered at all. For one, how did such a vibrant music scene, inhabited by musicians working in wildly diverse genres, flourish in a city that seemed to be collapsing in on itself? Was it a desire to create stable artistic communities in a rapidly deteriorating and alienated society? To express something meaningful or even beautiful against the banal violence and decay of the 1970s? The city’s long history as an incubator for cultural innovation? Cheap rent and studio space? Easy access to drugs?
Hermes gestures toward an answer along all of these lines, but never quite gets there. And maybe this isn’t the kind of book that needs to. Maybe it was an accident of history. But one question he does not raise, and which I feel myself compelled to think about, is this: will we ever see something like the NYC music scene of the 1970s again? You can argue that similar instances have appeared since: Seattle in the 1990s, of course, and other, more focused, genre-specific locales. But are the conditions that allowed the NYC scene to exist dead, superseded by the technological innovations of the digital age?
Probably so. The scene Hermes describes is, in a crucial sense, defined by its very place-ness. Think of it in material terms, as a kind of infrastructure: the scene as, first of all, a network of clubs and practice spaces and the modes of transportation that link them, in close spatial proximity to record stores, radio stations, major record labels, and other media outlets. You had the places where musicians could play and (importantly) hear each other play, where they could hang out, where they could practice, and the subways, trains, bus lines, bridges, and tunnels that brought them together. And you had the means of getting them heard, by other musicians and by the consuming public, the whole distributive apparatus, right there in the same city. This common infrastructure—from the seediest clubs to the offices of the major labels, and from the trashiest zines to the New York Times reviews section—was what allowed the scene to exist as a cohesive (while heterogeneous) whole. It was, I think, the necessary condition for such a wide array of artists to mingle and influence each other, because, without it, the scene simply could not exist.
That’s not the case today, of course. Digital distribution via the internet (not just of music but of music criticism and commentary), along with the growing sophistication of home recording techniques, makes it possible for a scene to be de-territorialized. In fact, there’s no good reason why a scene needs to be embedded in a particular geographical space at all, other than that, until now, it was the only way a scene could effectively exist. I’d even say the very concept of a “scene” is undermined by the digital revolution, along with some basic assumptions about how music is produced and consumed as a commodity (but that’s a whole other essay).
So if scenes are both “everywhere” and “nowhere,” so to speak, does this mean a more universally diverse and democratic music-producing and -consuming culture around the globe? Or another step toward a more atomized and fragmented social being, where music is one more thing we experience through the medium of a computer interface, alone, eyes wide in the glare of the screen?
For now, probably both. We’re on some kind of trajectory for sure, and I won’t presume to guess where we’re headed. But I will guess that the further we go, the more foreign a place like New York City from 1973-1977 will look, at least in terms of its music scene (if not the images of economic decline and social breakdown). And the more foreign it looks, the more we’ll wish we could have been there, too, when a relatively tiny number of people were changing modern music, at relatively the same time, within city blocks of one another, while buildings burned around them.
Scott Borchert has written for a variety of publications, including Monthly Review, MRzine, Counterpunch and the Indypendent. You can read his essay “Woody Guthrie: Redder than Remembered” here. Scott plays drums for Robbin’ Pain and lives in Jersey City.
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Spotify announced today two major upgrades to its music streaming service: gapless playback and crossfading. So now all you deadheads and DJ kidz can get down with jammed out segues and smooth mixes the way they were meant to be heard. Not sure what we’re even talking about? Well then…
