In keeping with the 1977 flashback that’s dominated our late-summer “Don’t Ask Me to Blog, I’m on Vacation” posts, here’s an interview with John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil, founders of Punk Magazine, conducted by an Austrailian teen TV show, Flashez. It has a few regrettable silent spots in the soundtrack.
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Bryan noted in a post the other day that I was out of town: I’d been in Amsterdam and London on NYU Abu Dhabi business. I got back at the end of last week, but I didn’t stay in New York for long. At least, not present-day New York. My family was going to the Midwest for a week to visit grandma, so it seemed like a golden opportunity to step into my mental time machine and beam myself back to the summer of 1977, when the Rolling Stones were on the verge of recording the album Some Girls, which I’ve been contracted to write about for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series.
The summer of ’77, of course, is famous for the blackout that occurred in mid-July, setting off an orgy of looting and arson in all five boroughs.
I missed it; I happened to be in summer camp in Rhinebeck, NY that July, and I don’t think that the fact of the blackout made much of an impression on me when my parents told me about it on the phone.
So I decided to live it (I can’t very well say “re-live it”) by taking another look at Jonathan Mahler’s account of that year, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City, which interweaves the story of the ’77 Yankees (who went on to win the World Series) and the story of the city in which they played. In New York City, 1977 was notable not only for the blackout but also for the arrest of the “Son of Sam” serial killer, David Berkowitz, the opening of Studio 54, the beginning of Mick Jagger’s affair with Jerry Hall, Keith Richards’s arrest in Toronto for cocaine possession, and the ascension of one Ed Koch.
The title of Mahler’s book refers to a line that the legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell was reputed to have said during the World Series when an aerial shot of Yankee Stadium captured the view of an abandoned elementary school burning nearby. New York, like many cities in the nation, suffered an epidemic of arson in the 1970s, as landlords essentially liquidated unprofitable buildings by selling them to their insurance companies. The South Bronx was hit particularly hard, resulting in the burned-out landscape for which it would become infamous. Mario Merola, then Bronx District Attorney and a navigator in World War II, told Time magazine that “the destruction is reminiscent of the bombed-out cities in Europe.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Cosell said, “the Bronx is burning.” And so it was.
Except, it turns out, he never uttered the iconic line. The release of the broadcasts of the 1977 World Series on DVD apparently demonstrates that Mahler’s memory was faulty. (I write “apparently” because I don’t own the DVDs, being a Mets rather than a Yankees fan, and the disc hasn’t arrived from Netflix yet.) During the broadcast, reporter Keith Jackson comments on the size of the fire, and Cosell notes that President Carter has recently visited the area. In the second inning, Cosell noted that the burning building had been abandoned and that no lives were at risk. The fire wasn’t mentioned again during the broadcast.
During the making of the mini-series based on Mahler’s book, the producers investigated the provenance of the remark and couldn’t find it. The Wikipedia entry for Howard Cosell speculates that “Mahler confused the documentary with his recollection of Cosell’s comments when writing his book.” (You can read more about the discovery here.)
The title glitch aside, Mahler’s book is splendidly evocative of the time and well worth reading.
Vivien Goldman, from “To Hell & Back,” Sounds, 8 October 1977:
“I WONDER whether the bright spark who thought up the new Sire Records slogan Don’t Call It Punk realised exactly how spot on he/she was. Take a musician like Richard [Hell] – he isn’t a punk. True, he lives in a highly unsalubrious area of New York, way down on the lower east side, ideal turf for young punks to hang out on corners and shoot the shit, but Richard isn’t there because he’s a first generation American whose folks have just pulled in from Puerto Rico. He’s there because he’s one of the new generation of artist types flocking to low-rent areas, a process which will inevitably result in the rents slowly rising, the scabrous tenements being tarted up till the immigrant families can’t afford it any more and have to shift camp to somewhere even less advantageous. Right now, it’s still funky in the fullest sense of the word – mean, dirty and low down, just the kind of area your mother wouldn’t let you play in.”
Tags: Lower East Side, Richard Hell
The family of poet/singer/troublemaker Tuli Kupferberg has announced a public memorial service to be held at St. Mark’s Church tomorrow, Sat. July 17, from 11:45 to 3:00 pm. Surviving members of The Fugs will perform. The first hour will be a viewing. The service will be followed by a reception for friends and family and a private burial service Monday at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
The image above is a screenshot Brooklyn Vegan posted from one of Tuli’s final YouTube missives from the past spring:
The Times‘s full obituary is here; a “popcast” including conversation between Times music writers about Tuli’s legacy is here.
Tags: downtown scenes, The Fugs, Tuli Kupferberg
The EV Grieve cooling center, which I find to be surprisingly effective, prompted me to search out other means of virtually cooling off:
David Byrne gave a TED Talk last February, which has now been posted online. TED is a nonprofit organization that devotes itself to what it calls “Ideas Worth Spreading.” It started in 1984 as a conference that brought together leading practitioners from the worlds of design, entertainment, and technology. It now sponsors two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — as well as a number of other programs.
Speakers who are invited to give TED Talks “are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).” Here’s how Byrne describes his talk:
My own talk (it wasn’t a musical performance) was based on the idea that the acoustic properties of the clubs, theaters and concert halls where our music might get performed determines to a large extent the kind of music we write. We semi unconsciously create music that will be appropriate to the places in which it will most likely be heard. Put that way it sounds obvious … but most people are surprised that creativity might be steered and molded by such mundane forces. I go further — it seems humans aren’t the only ones who do this, who adapt our music to sonic circumstances — birds do it too. I play lots of sound snippets as examples, with images of the venues accompanying them.
The talk makes a nice follow-up to our Faculty Resource Network seminar on the idea of “Lost New York,” because Byrne (a crucial member of the downtown scene that we discussed in our consideration of the work of Arthur Russell) talks about the relationship between architecture and music. He even begins with CBGB, which cropped up frequently last week.
Tags: David Byrne
I finally saw Scorsese’s No Direction Home last week. Picked up the incredible soundtrack, too. What took me so long on both counts? There’s no adequate explanation.
No time today to say much about the film or the music, either, other than that the clip below left me feeling like punk rock was born in 1966.
Today my “Downtown Scenes” class will be considering conceptual art and performance and the stirrings of minimalism in music, painting, and sculpture. Some analogies and overlaps with the world of poetry we’ve been talking about and will continue to talk about as we move into the Second Generation New York School later this week. The first two figures we spent intensive time with were Ginsberg and O’Hara. Today we’ll think about the vast influence of John Cage.
Here’s my favorite early Cage clip. I know I’ve posted it before, but in case you weren’t reading at that point — trust me. It’s worth the time:
Here’s a 2007 performance of the same piece at Brown University.
Our reading for today includes Calvin Tomkins’s seminal New Yorker profile of Cage, originally published in 1965 and later included in his book Bride and the Bachelors. It’s not the most academic take on Cage, but I wanted to use it in part to consider it as a product of the period itself: it’s chatty, gossipy, and works to create Tomkins’s persona almost as much as Cage’s. But it also allows us to think about Cage before the longevity of his influence could have been known.
Our primary text, though, is Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, originally published in 1964 and expanded in 1970, with a new introduction by John Lennon (“Hi! My name is John Lennon / I’d like you to meet Yoko Ono”). Grapefruit is primarily a book of instructions, what some performance scholars call “event scores.” They are conceptual pieces that present themselves variously as instructions for music, dance, painting, film, or other artistic performances. Like musical scores, they do not depend on the composer being present to perform them, often blurring the line between artist and audience. (To what degree that’s actually true will be part of our discussion.) A number of these instruction pieces are collected as part of her website; she also regularly tweets instructions that work in the same vein as these early pieces.
Ono met John Cage through her first husband, the Japanese avant-garde composer Ichiyanagi Toshi, who had taken part in Cage’s seminar on Experimental Composition at the New School (along with a host of others who would become important to the Downtown Scene). She made her loft space on Chambers Street available for early experimental performances and loosely affiliated with Fluxus artists, based more or less in SoHo, who also operated under Cage’s influence. (The MoMA blog just last week ran a feature on Yoko’s Fluxus wallpaper featuring an imagine from her famous Film No. 4.)
Here’s a fairly recent clip of Ono reading from her instruction pieces:
I can’t remember where I read it, but somewhere I’ve encountered the claim that John Lennon thought of the lyrics to “Imagine” as akin, generically, to Yoko’s instruction pieces, which I suppose makes it appropriate to wrap up this post with Yoko singing that song:
P.S. If we have time at the end of class today, we’ll take a quick field trip to SoHo to see Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room. This class is turning out to be pretty fun — at least for me!
Just saw the news that the incomparable Lena Horne died yesterday. She was 92. Born in Brooklyn, she joined the chorus at Harlem’s Cotton Club as a teenager. She made her Broadway debut in 1934 at age 17, but didn’t fully establish herself as a nightclub performer, recording artist, and film star until the early 1940s. Much of her early work required tricky negotiations with mainstream American racism: her numbers were sometimes dropped from films when they were shown in the south; when she married an MGM composer/arranger in 1947 they had to elope to Paris because interracial marriage was illegal in California. After making the leap from racially segregated audiences and venues to mainstream stardom, a trajectory complicated further by her being blacklisted from Hollywood film work during the McCarthy era, she participated in major civil rights protests, including the March on Washington. There’s a nice overview of the remainder of her career here.
Here are three of my favorite Lena Horne performances, two more obscure than the third. The first is my initial memory of Lena Horne, in a guest appearance on The Cosby Show. Claire takes Cliff and the kids to see Lena Horne at a swank Manhattan dinner club as part of an elaborate surprise. What I remember about watching this as a teenager is how awesome it would be to have the kind of urban sophistication (and money!) to go see someone famous like that perform for your birthday. It’s an idealized notion of urbanity I cling to and have yet to realize:
I probably had already seen this 1973 appearance on another New York-based show I was fond of as a younger viewer:
And there used to be a great clip available of my favorite Lena Horne song of all, her version of Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When,” which was part of Words and Music, a 1948 film tribute to the songwriting team. The video’s been pulled from YouTube for proprietary reasons, but you can hear her standard recording of the same song from 1941 in this clip. It just may be my favorite performance of any Rodgers and Hart song, which is saying quite a bit. Has there ever been a more romantic recording?
Tags: Cosby Show, Lena Horne, Music, Sesame Street
We’ve had quite a bit of content on Patti Smith over the last however many years we’ve been running this site. She’s one of the figures from the downtown scene to whom we devote extended attention in our Writing New York class; students are expected to read Philip Shaw’s 33 1/3 volume on Horses, to search out and study the lyrics online, and to listen carefully to the album.
Our supplementary material on her and on the broader scene has been broad-ranging. I’ve linked to material I posted on another blog some years ago that offered a thumbnail of the trajectory from the Beats to the Punks that we’re tracing in this unit. On that same blog I prompted a discussion of Smith’s controversial song “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger,” placing it in the context of racial cross-imagination or appropriation we’ve discussed throughout our course. On the PWHNY side of the fence, I once posted an entire Rolling Stone interview from 1978 in which she talks extensively about her use of the N-word and her understanding of cross-racial solidarity in the experience of dissent and alientation. (She talks about a lot of other things as well.) And I wrote up a quick review of Patti Smith: Dreams of Life, the documentary by Steven Sebring, from which I showed a few clips in today’s lecture.
For fun, last year, I also compiled a video playlist that traced the interlinking histories of Beats, 60s downtowners, and 70s punks, and we linked to another site with some great photos from the scene back in the day. All of this stuff should be useful — or at least interesting — to our students or to those with an interest in the downtown scene in that era.
Tags: downtown scenes, Music, patti smith, punk
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