New York Groove

by Peter Aaron, December 28, 2011

From 1973 to 1977, the years covered in senior Rolling Stone critic, NPR contributor, and former SPIN editor Will Hermes’s riveting new book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (Faber and Faber, Inc.), New York’s five boroughs literally rocked with an explosion of revolutionary new musical movements: hip-hop, punk, free jazz, disco, salsa, Minimalism. Once they left their Gotham incubator, these bold new styles would spread like wildfire and inspire whole new variations, but their idiosyncratic, big-bang incarnations could only have been born in New York City. Its name a riff on the title of Talking Heads’ 1977 debut single, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire maps out the concurrent gestations of the key players in each of the above genres as they broke new ground amid the concrete and asphalt.

Hermes, who lives in New Paltz and has taught journalism and creative writing at SUNY Albany, SUNY New Paltz, and the University of Minnesota, will read from the book at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock on January 14 at 4pm. Admission is free.
(845) 679-8000; www.goldennotebook.com


Writing about New York and any facet of its hectic cultural history—even a five-year span, as you’ve done here—seems a daunting proposition. What made you decide to take it on?
Back in 2005, I interviewed Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye for the Village Voice on the occasion of the 30th anniversary [of the Patti Smith Group's debut] Horses, a pivotal record that also meant a lot to me personally growing up. It was inspiring to talk about how they saw their music as simultaneously upholding and upending tradition, with one foot in the ’60s and another in the thin air of the ’70s. And it made me think about how much other incredible musical innovation happened during those years. To paraphrase a disco song, once I got started, I couldn’t stop.

What makes the book especially enthralling is how the narrative flits back and forth between what was happening in all of these seemingly disparate genres, demonstrating how often things intersected, with the artists inspiring each other—e.g., Lou Reed jamming with free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, who lived upstairs from Talking Heads’ Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, or avant-gardist Rhys Chatham having an epiphany while seeing the Ramones at CBGB. Did you have any inkling of the extent of this melting pot phenomenon beforehand? Any other examples of this that really surprised you?
Both those examples surprised me. So did David Byrne when he told me about his love for the Monday night “Salsa Meets Jazz” sessions at the Village Gate—of course, he’d go on to make a sort of salsa record himself, Rei Momo. But New York always holds a lot of parallel universes side by side, and sometimes the connections were simply proximity. I was amused when the saxophonist David Murray told me he lived a few doors down from the Ramones; he knew and liked the guys. Apparently, they all bought weed from the same dealer.