New York 1973-1977

The following contains excepts from the book, Love Goes to Buildings On Fire (Will Hermes).

Will Hermes is a senior critic for Rolling Stone.  In this book, he chronicles the musical events in New York City from 1973-1977.  “In the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented- block by block, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another.  Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the infrastructure was collapsing.  But rent was cheap, and the possibilities for musical exploration were limitless.  Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (reveals) the era’s music scenes and the phenomenal and surprising ways they intersected.”

“Much has been written about New York City in the 70s, how bleak and desperate things were.  The city had careened into bankruptcy, crime was out of control, the visionary idealism of the ‘60s was mostly kaput…Even the music was failing, it seemed.  Jimi, Janis, and Jim were dead; the Beatles and the Velvet Underground had split.  Sly and the Family Stone were unraveling amid mounds of cocaine.  The grateful Dead buried Pigpen.  Dylan grew a beard and moved to Los Angeles.  R&B was losing power as slick soul and featherweight funk took over.  Jazz and ‘classical’ music seemed irrelevant- the former groping fusions or post-Coltrane caterwauls, the latter dead-ended in sexless serialist cul-de-sacs.”

There were new strains of creativity happening, however.  “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.”

1973

“Meredith Monk…a thirty-year-old composer, singer, dancer, and multimedia artist, had rented Town Hall…performed Our Lady of Late”.

“Bruce Springsteen, age twenty-three, a small, skinny dude with a scrubby beard…liked playing the lone troubadour, and he could be riveting in that role…began a six-night opening-act residency with his band at Max’s Kansas City on January 31.”

“Lou Reed’s Transformer, produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, was released in November ‘72.  It earned its name: it transformed Reed from rock musician into rock star.  In early ’73 the single ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ was a radio staple, reaching number 16 on the Billboard charts.”

“It was a tough period for most New York jazz vets.  Bebop and post-bop seemed like ancient history.  Coltrane had been dead for five years…Miles Davis, who, ever ahead of the curve, began inventing ‘70s jazz in 1969, first with the sublime electrified sounds of In a Silent Way…Miles’s band boasted two Hendrix-influenced electric guitarist, Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas.  They came on like a lava flow, often working a single chord while drummers would pile on churning cross-rhythms.” 

“Hommy, a Latin Opera was cooked up by flamboyant composer-bandleader Lawrence Ira Kahn, a,k,a, Larry Harlow.  Kahn grew up in Brooklyn, the Jewish son of the opera singer Rose Sherman…The ‘salsa’ of the early ‘70s was not only more traditional than boogaloo, it was hotter, faster, brighter…New York salsa was fusion music; you could hear urbane Havana son and country Puerto Rican jibaro styles, jazzy horn and flute solos, Santana-styled rock guitar, wah-wah keyboards, long percussion jams that drew on funk and African music while mixing in various Caribbean and South American rhythms.  It was integrated, like the city it came from.” 

Steve Reich and Terry Riley, along with Juilliard class-mate Phillip Glass were involved in the development of the new classical music genre of minimalism.  “Riley showed Reich a new composition written on a single sheet of paper.  In C was a series of fifty-three melodic modules, each to be repeated by each group member as often as he or she liked, until moving on the next, each at his or her own pace.  It was simplistic, anarchic, and, in practice, ecstatic.”  Reich was a great fan of the music of John Coltrane, “whose gigs he caught whenever possible, often at the Jazz Workshop in North Beach.”

We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to be eclectic in their listening and studying of many styles of music.

“John Rockwell describes a ninety-minute performance of an earlier work, Music in Changing Parts, that spring at the loft of Glass’s pal Donald Judd, the sculptor:

Glass’s ensemble that night played with the spirit and precision that only years together can bring.  The music danced and pulsed with a special life, its motoric rhythms, burbling, highly amplified figurations and mournful sustained notes booming out through the huge black windows and filling up the bleak industrial neighborhood.  It was so loud that the dancers Douglas Dunn and Sara Rudner, who were strolling down Wooster Street, sat on a stoop and enjoyed the concert together from afar.  A pack of teenagers kept up an ecstatic dance of their own.  And across the street, silhouetted high up in a window, a lone saxophone player improvised in silent accompaniment like some faded postcard of fifties Greenwich Village Bohemia.  It was a good night to be in New York City.”

1974

New York “was near bankruptcy; by fall, its short-term debt would hit $5.3 billion.  Unemployment was rising, and along with crime and filth there was a new physical manifestation of the fiscal crisis: lines at fuel pumps.”

“Patti Smith arrived in New York via bus in the spring of 1967…began writing about rock music for the magazines Crawdaddy, Circus, and Rolling Stone.”  

“Arthur Russell…was born in 1952 in Oskaloosa, Iowa, where he began playing cello, moved to San Francisco to study European and North Indian classical music, then moved to New York in the fall of ’73 after being accepted to the Manhattan School of music…worked with Phillip Glass.”  We teach the concepts of minimalism to students in our music school in Odessa, Texas.

“If the musical birthplace of disco, in its strictest aesthetic definition, is Philly, its cultural birthplace is unquestionably New York, where records like Eddie Kendricks’s ‘Girl You Need a Change of Mind,’ the Temptations’ ‘Law of the Land,’ and ‘TSOP’ achieved their full expressive potential in clubs where DJs ‘performed’ the music in a context where it could move people in a profoundly new way.”

“The New York salsa scene was at its apex in 1974, but if you were an outsider to the culture, you’d hardly know it…At this point, salsa was the catchall brand name for new Latin music, in large part due to its use in the pages of Latin NY…If Glass’s and Reich’s use of electric keyboards was an affront to the classical music status quo, as was Joe Zawinul’s to jazz purists, Larry Harlow’s use of them, starting with the 1971 LP Electric Harlow, was no less radical.  Salsa groups like Tipica ’73 used electronics and rock textures, too…Eddie Palmieri…in 1974…released The Sun of Latin Music, the most far-reaching recording salsa had ever produced.” 

“Born to Eastern European Jews in Brooklyn, (Harvey) Averne discovered Cuban music as a teenager playing accordion with dance bands in the Catskills…To Averne, the segregation of the Latin audience that occurred a decade earlier when rock exploded was tragic…Averne and Palmieri figured they could make a new fusion, something that could cross over to sophisticated rock and jazz listeners without betraying the Latin dancers… ‘Adoracion,’ the song that capped Palmieri’s show at the Woodstock Playhouse in ’73- and even more so on the The Sun of Latin Music.”  The singer Celia Cruz became the lead in this music.  

“Dance club culture was not just popularizing records but was also beginning to influence the way a certain kind of dance music- now know specifically as ‘disco’ – was made…Labels were beginning to understand how particular beats and song structures appealed to dancers and DJs.  If they wanted to tap their power to propel hits, they needed to shape their music accordingly.  Thus was born the ‘disco mix’; and the 12-inch single.  Both can be credited to the DJ Tom Moulton…Disco was a sociocultural movement as well as a rhythmic one.”

1975 

“In Times Square, Bruce Springsteen was recording his follow-up to The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle…it was a good one: ‘Born to Run.’”

“Salsoul, nominally the equation of salsa plus soul, was a small New York indie label run by the Cayre brothers, Joe, Ken, and Stan: a business-minded family…The Latin scene Salsoul emerged from was still indie…The few non-Latinos paying attention to this cultural explosion came largely from the disco community, where its rhythm science was understood.”  We encourage the student sin our music school in Odessa, Texas to experiment with merging contrasting styles in order to initiate new outcomes.

“James Wolcott…quoted Pete Townshend, who felt that ‘rock music as it was is not really contemporary to these times.  It’s really the music of yesteryear.’  Wolcott’s reply both agreed and disagreed: ‘What’s changed is the nature of the impulse to create rock.  No longer is the impulse revolutionary- ie: the transformation of oneself and society- but conservative: to carry on the rock tradition.’  As David Byrne remarked some years later: ‘The days of the naïve, primitive rock bands are gone.  The punk thing was a very self-aware reaction and in that sense it’s very historically oriented.  Part of its meaning and importance comes out of that historical perspective.  Without that I don’t think it would have seemed important at all.’  About the era’s best jazz and salsa- even DJ music and modern composition- one might say exactly the same thing.”

Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith released their albums ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Horses’ respectively.  “The similarity between the two records is striking…both South Jersey kids were maximalists, given to extended and verbose songs.  And both embraced rock ‘n roll as a kind of religion.  Springsteen was more the fundamentalist, testifying to old-school verities; Smith more the Sufi-style mystic.  But, at core, both were telling stories of escape, from narrow hometowns and narrow conceptions of life’s possibilities.  And for both, escape equaled New York City…(it) was where you ran away to, the place where real life was.”

“The name of this band…Talking Heads…It was clearly performance art as much as pop music…The band had finished writing a new song around this time, called ‘Love Goes to Buildings On Fire.’  It was an anthem set to a loose march rhythm, its chorus revolving around Byrne’s insistent, catchy declaration of ‘it’s not love,’ and the comparison of his feelings to a building on fire.”

1976

Punk was on the rise, and “there were plenty of…aesthetic arguments made against disco.”  Robert Palmer of the Times called Punk “a Western form of ‘trance music.’  Maybe we need a whole new aesthetic for the disco, one that includes the ritual as well as the music.”

The Ramones’ “lyrics flirted with nihilism, the sound was as ecstatic and kinetic as any disco mix.”

“Concepts in Unity, produced by (Rene) Lopez…pushed salsa’s Afro-Cuban rhythmic roots way up front, mixing Santeria bata drums and guiros into guaguanco, guajira, plena, mazurka, jazz, and rumba grooves without ever sounding…folkloric…As with reggae, which Latin N.Y. magazine liked to call ‘Jamaica’s Salsa,’ a crossover seemed just a single or album away.”

In Jazz, “The best of the loft players drew on jazz history and international music in different ways.  David Murray and Lester Bowie were two of the most exciting players on the scene.”  We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to study the effects of jazz in the history of our culture.

In Classical music, “Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson were rehearsing Einstein on the Beach…Rhys Chatham grew up in Manhattan…studied composition at New York University…began studying with the composer Morton Subotnick.”  Chatham went to a rock concert for the first time.  “Chatham recalled… ‘I was looking for a musical voice…I thought: ‘Steve Reich uses Ghanaian music, Phil Glass uses jazz instrumentation, La Monte Young comes out of Indian music.  I’ve got my own thing.’  Then I heard the Ramones, and I said, ‘That’s my voice.’”  It is interesting to see the cross-polonization that happened between Classical music’s minimalism and Pop music’s Disco.  Both used cyclical patterns of repetition.  We encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to study this as it relates to current EDM styles.

“In the discos, the music was more creatively ecstatic than ever.  Double Exposure’s ‘Ten Percent.’ The first mass-marketed 12-inch single, was a relentless ten-minute soul jam.”

“Then came a trifecta of diva gems.  The best of Diana Ross’s disco coming-out party ‘Love Hangover’…Paul McCartney and Wings topped the charts in May with ‘Silly Love Songs,’ which flaunted a disco-style bass line and string arrangements.  Elton John did the same in August with ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’…followed by the Australian soft-rockers the Bee-Gees with ‘You Should Be Dancing.’

“Music has the ability to induce a kind of waking dream state.  But creating a hypnagogic experience for hundreds or thousands of people in a room at one time requires serious sound-science.  There were plenty of professional and amateur physicists working on it in the mid-‘70s.  Two of the foremost were also interested in the interaction of psychedelic drugs and auditory experience.  Owsley Stanley, the fabled LSD chemist and crony of the Grateful Dead, helped create the band’s fabled ‘Wall of Sound’ PA in 1973 and 1974.  It sounded amazing , but the cost and effort of transporting, setting up, and breaking down the 75-ton system- which at one point included 641 speakers driven by 48 individual amplifiers pushing around 26,000 watts of power, far beyond the state-of-the-art at the time- would contribute to the band’s decision to stop touring for nearly two years.”

1977

Larry Harlow produced a new salsa project.  “La Raza Latina was a four-part suite depicting Latin music’s evolution, from Africa (Part 1), through Cuba and the Caribbean (Part 2), to the New York big bands in the ‘50s and ‘60s (Part 3), and into the future (part 4).  How to imagine the latter?  Just as he had studied 78s while making his Salsa LP, Harlow looked again to Cuba, this time for new sounds.  Sitting in from of his shortwave radio day and night, as Don Cherry often did, he listened in on Cuban broadcasts- which, given the U.S. cultural boycott, were like transmissions from another planet.  He came across a group called La Orquesta Cubana de Musica Moderna, who had turned Gershon Kingsley’s Moog synthesizer composition, ‘Popcorn’…into dizzying, guitar-fuzzed rumba.  The bandleader’s ideas began to flow.”

Patti Smith was onstage at the Palladium.  In one of her songs, ‘Ain’t It Strange’ she ‘began her dervish twirls, around and around.  Then she reached for her microphone, tripped over a monitor at the lip of the stage, and fell backward…She dropped down fourteen feet from the stage onto a concrete floor.”  Doctors told her she would never perform again.  “One recommended spinal surgery; another, rigorous physical therapy.  She chose the latter.”

The Latin singer, Celia Cruz rejoiced in finally becoming an American citizen, “roughly seventeen years since she had left Havana.  Walking out of the federal courthouse on Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn after the swearing-in ceremony, she began screaming, shrieking, with joy.  A cop came over to see if she was all right.  She told him she was.  Yes, indeed, she very much was.”

Arthur Russel went up to CBS studios on Fifty-second Street to cut some demos for John Hammond.  The Flying Hearts had turned into a real band…In May, an expanded version of the Hearts played Russell’s minimalist composition Instrumentals at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation on Centre Street.  It was a shorter performance than the composer’s idealized forty-eight-hour one.  Still, it got a glowing review.”

By fall, 1977 was looking like the most successful year in the history of the music biz.  Disco was why.  At the annual Disco Forum conference at the American Hotel, the hungry and the giddy talked about a $4 billion industry- bigger than films and television.”

In the two years that had elapsed since Born to Run, however, New York City rock had become ‘punk rock,’ and the music was being mirrored back from Britain… As a voice, Springsteen was morphing into an Everyman for America’s New Depression.”  Springsteen and Patti Smith produced an album together, one of the biggest songs, ‘Because the Night’ fused Springsteen’s earthy physicality with Smith’s mystic ecstasy.  “The song was amazing, no doubt; it was arguably as great a song as either Springsteen or Smith had produced.”

Epilogue

“In October 1978, Frank Sinatra unveiled his version of ‘Theme to New York, New York’ at Radio City Music Hall.”

“The concentrated vitality of the ‘70s music scene diminished in the ‘80s and ‘90s as the city revived economically and Manhattan’s downtown artist ghetto became a high-end playground and marketplace, driving nascent musicians elsewhere.  But the creative impulse never faded, and some of the most visionary fusions were ahead.  There was the jazz-punk-funk-disco mixing of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s that rose up in Manhattan venues like the Mudd Club, Tier 3, and the Knitting Factory…And there was hip-hop’s golden era in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, which occurred farther afield, from the crime-plagued Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City (Marley Marl, Nas) to suburban Long Island (Public Enemy, De La Soul).”

“After scoring her hit in 1978 with ‘Because the Night,’ Patti Smith bought her mom a big fridge stocked with Omaha Steaks…Bruce Springsteen became Elvis Presley: the archetypal American rock hero.  Except he never allowed himself to fall off.”

“Talking Heads lasted until 1991.”

“Disco dominated pop for a little while longer in the wake of Saturday Night Fever” then “downscaled and returned to its home in the clubs.”

“Arthur Russell died of AIDS in 1992.  He never had a mainstream hit, but he released some visionary dance tracks, and left behind a thousand tapes of unreleased music.”

“Eddie Palmieri remains as mercurial as ever, playing for both concert audiences and dancers.”

In jazz, “The so-called neo-classical movement of the ‘80s and ‘90s also hurt the loft scene.  It was led by the New Orleans trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, son of Ellis Marsalis- an educator and musician who worked with Ornette Colemen in the ‘50s, among others- and Marsalis’s New York City mentor, Stanley Crouch, who made a philosophic shift recalling Irving Kristal’s flip from young Trotskyist to neoconservative paterfamilias.  Together, the pair preached a back-to-basics formalism, rooted in New Orleans tradition, swing verities, hard-bop cutting contests, and Fifty-second Street suit-and-tie fashion sense.  It was welcomed among grant-supported arts presenters at a time when edgy work of all sorts was being defunded (or, in the case of Patti Smith’s pal Robert Mapplethorpe, put on trial).”  

“This was good news in some ways.  Jazz became enshrined as a classical music- the one truly American classical music- and it helped recapture some of the cultural ground jazz lost in the wake of the ‘60s rock ‘n roll revolution.  A summer concert series in 1987 evolved over time into Jazz at Lincoln Center.”

“The downside of all of this was that for years, the achievements and advances of the free jazz, loft jazz, and fusion scenes were pretty much written out of the canon…Miles’ electric music is dismissed as merely ‘playing tennis without a net.’…The spirit of the loft scene never disappeared.  When the Knitting Factory opened on East Houston Street in 1987- the same year Jazz at Lincoln Center was born- it built on the loft’s genre-stretching aesthetic.”  We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas the importance of synthesizing elements of freedom with elements of discipline for the highest quality in music-making and art.

“The Vision Festival, begun in 1996…usually takes place in various corners of Lower Manhattan.  The festival’s purpose is to advance avant-jazz, which its mission statement defines as ‘not a freedom from melody or composition or rhythm’ but freedom for musicians ‘to choose any tradition or vocabulary as part of their palette when either composing or improvisation’- a pretty succinct summary of the loft aesthetic…The city remains the global center of jazz, a hive of players and fans.”

In Classical music, Steven Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians was finally released on ECM in ’78.  Phillip Glass finally got Einstein on the Beach issued as a four-LP box set in ’79…A full-scale revival of Einstein was planned for the 2009-10 New York City Opera season…returning the production to Lincoln Center for the first time since 1976…The New York minimalist composers have had a marked influence on rock bands, beginning with the Velvet Underground.”

“Hip-hop, meanwhile, grew up to rule the world.  Rappers began making records, something that was inconceivable during the early days of the park jams…it was amazing to watch hip-hop evolve over the years…On September 11, 2001, Jay-Z released The Blueprint, arguably his greatest record.  In 2009, Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion was released.”  

“After the death of Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith in 1994, Patti Smith left Detroit, where she’d been living since 1979, and returned to New York City.  During the 2000s, as in the 1970s, she would usually play a series of year-end shows…On December 30, 2009, Smith’s sixty-third birthday, she comes onstage in a faded Knicks T-shift, skinny jeans, and the familiar black sports jacket…in the middle of the song ‘Land,’ Smith begins freestyling: ‘All the memories that we’ve built up thru the years,’ she incants, her band working the groove, ‘Jonny walks over them, stone by stone…’ And everyone there, young and old, walks with him.”

While the book seemed more like the spray of a shotgun’s blast than a well-crafted history, the author did manage to create interesting ties between the genres existing in New York during those years.  Since I was there close to that time, I can attest that the book succeeded in capturing the feel of the city in all of its chaos, energy, filth and experimentation.  Many of the materials cited should be given deeper listening time and study.  The author intuitively derived his title from the Talking Heads song ‘Love Goes to Buildings On Fire’ to indirectly reference the September 11 attacks, which forever marked the psyche of the city.  Perhaps Patti Smith serves as a hopeful metaphor looking for the city’s artistic stamina and rebirth.