Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes

In America, we love electric guitars, and the dominant music for more than a half century has been guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll. A pastiche of African American blues, jazz, country, and gospel music, rock ’n’ roll distilled the rebellious energy beneath the conformist veneer of the post-WWII industrial age. As the nation changed, so did the music, fragmenting into a dozen genres, and eventually hundreds. Rock ’n’ roll touches every aspect of American culture. Worldwide, it’s an ambassador of what it means to be an American.

It’s no surprise that as this new artform emerged so did a parallel world of comment on the form. Rock criticism proliferated with rock ’n’ roll, and its practitioners vary in personality and writing style as wildly as rock musicians. Patti Smith’s recent memoir Just Kids takes a poetic, often soft-focus look at the author’s early years in New York with her onetime lover and dear friend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. When Smith first started out, she wrote for the rock ’n’ roll mag Creem. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me offers oral history as fractured and confrontational as the punk rock it catalogues. Lester Bangs’s Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung compiles years of smart, funny rambles on everybody from jazz to post-punk. The contemporary inheritor of these earlier writers has got to be Chuck Klosterman, whose Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs opens with the dictionary definition of solipsism … and then proceeds to use the word “I” several thousand times.

That inward-looking quality of rock criticism seems necessary, to a degree, simply because the experience of music strikes each of us so personally. Through rhythm, intensity, melody and instrument tapped to create a variety of sounds, the music lover can identify a song (or 10) as the soundtrack to an important life event, whether a kiss or a car wreck. Sense memory brings a moment bursting to life again more easily with music.

Will Hermes’s Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is the latest addition to the rock ’n’ roll journalism canon. A senior critic at Rolling Stone, Hermes’s comprehensive account of music in New York City from 1973-1977 tracks in exhaustive, colorful detail the progression of a variety of musical genres, from the evolution of salsa to the experiments of minimalism, from the loft jazz scene to the birth of punk rock at clubs like CBGB. The backdrop? New York at its dirtiest—these years of the Son of Sam murders, the city’s brush with bankruptcy, the great blackout, and some of the worst crime numbers of the 20th century.

That tense city life, argues Hermes, made a fertile breeding ground for huge advances in musical creation, a notion well-captured in the book’s title, taken from a Talking Heads song of the period. The sentiment makes a worthwhile read today, as the United States faces social unrest over economic injustice in the form of the Occupy Wall Street protests, the worst unemployment numbers since the recession of the early 1980s, and vicious political gamesmanship in the run-up to another presidential election.

For serious music fanatics, this book provides a comprehensive look at an innovative time and place in music history, even tracing the paths of music criticism of the time. Hermes proves a careful journalist, peppering the book with 15 pages of footnotes, including material culled from interviews with key players in the mid-’70s scene. Hermes’s special adoration for rock ’n’ roll comes through in descriptions of bands like the New York Dolls and Television, of icons-in-the-making like Patti Smith and Talking Heads’s David Byrne. The rock passages put the reader there in the sweat and stench of CBGB in a way the looks at the burgeoning disco and hip-hop scenes don’t.

The writer’s own experiences interweave with his genre-jumping narrative. In his mid-50s now, Hermes writes lots about his teenage years, spent in Queens reading comic books, dodging the violence that swirled the streets and, of course, collecting records. His writing here crackles with the energy of a wide-eyed kid recollecting his musical awakening. The feeling of having one’s nose pressed up against the glass, watching something unspeakably cool, and just out of reach, gives the narrative an ache, a longing that seems to be a constant in adolescence. It’s a treat to experience, and implies that Hermes hasn’t lost that excitement as he has aged.

There’s no mistaking that this book will have a special appeal for people who were exposed to this music when it was developing—mostly those living in New York in the mid-70s—but Hermes does what a good writer does. He makes the rest of us (this writer included) wish we’d been there. The connections Hermes makes among disparate music scenes fascinate, and the feeling that so much creation happened in New York in such a short time thrills. A huge discography in the book’s appendix can keep a reader busy for weeks—I found myself stopping to find recordings of unfamiliar songs, losing myself for a bit in the hypnotic opening to Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, and identifying key breaks that made up the vocabulary of the era’s emerging DJ culture.

The people and places that fill Love Goes to Buildings on Fire have now largely faded from view. CBGB finally closed to make way for condos a few years ago, and Philip Glass retired to the world of film soundtracks. Only one of the four original Ramones still lives, and Grandmaster Caz gives hip-hop history tours to well-heeled tourists. Still the echoes of this period come at us from everywhere: Television’s Marquee Moon plays nearly every day in at least one East Side bar in Austin. Creaky warehouse spaces like Death By Audio in Brooklyn (operated by Oliver Ackermann of the noise rock band A Place to Bury Strangers) still host cool concerts. The patchwork hybridization of Talking Heads has inspired glittering, weird pop bands like Dirty Projectors, and hip-hop, as Hermes puts it, “grew up to rule the world.”

The continuing influence of this period’s musical innovations, combined with the era’s similarities to the sociopolitical tenor of the United States today, begs questions. Who are today’s Television, DJ Kool Herc, Philip Glass, and Willie Colón? Is New York still the place to be? If not, where? How have the advent of the Internet and the collapse of the music industry changed the way music gets made? In another 35 years, what will music history say about today?

Time will bring answers to these questions. Until then, more musical frontiers will be discovered. Rock ’n’ roll forms—and critics—will come and go.

Georgia Young is editor of the theater section for Austinist, and a member of the Austin theater company Poison Apple Initiative.