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Summary
Summary
From Tony Fletcher, the acclaimed biographer of Keith Moon, comes an incisive history of New York's seminal music scenes and their vast contributions to our culture. Fletcher paints a vibrant picture of mid-twentieth-century New York and the ways in which its indigenous art, theater, literature, and political movements converged to create such unique music.
With great attention to the colorful characters behind the sounds, from trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie to Tito Puente, Bob Dylan, and the Ramones, he takes us through bebop, the Latin music scene, the folk revival, glitter music, disco, punk, and hip-hop as they emerged from the neighborhood streets of Harlem, the East and West Village, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. All the while, Fletcher goes well beyond the history of the music to explain just what it was about these distinctive New York sounds that took the entire nation by storm.
Author Notes
Tony Fletcher is the author of three music biographies and a novel. He founded the music magazine Jamming! and has contributed to Newsday, Spin, and Rolling Stone, among many other publications. He lives in Mt. Tremper, New York.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
From the Brill Building to CBGB, from Washington Square Park to the Apollo Theater, New York has been the birthplace and center of an astonishing variety of musical trends. In his richly detailed study of 50 years of the city's most important music history, music journalist Fletcher vividly recreates the birth and evolution of jazz, folk, pop, punk and hip-hop as the strains of these musical styles emerged from the urban cacophony of New York. Drawing on interviews and archives of well-known stories, Fletcher nimbly explores the ways that various musical styles benefit from and grow out of their contact with their surrounding cultures. For example, the music scene of the Lower East Side was a direct product of the area's thriving movements in poetry, filmmaking, avant-garde music and experimental theater. Fletcher chronicles the beginnings of the folk movement in the sing-alongs in Washington Square Park and the opening of the Folklore Center on MacDougal Street in 1957, where musicians could hold hootenannies. Fletcher observes the folk scene on the wane as John Sebastian leaves Jim Kweskin's Jug Band and teams with Canadian Zal Yanovsky, formerly of the Mugwumps (which became the Mamas and the Papas), to form the rock band the Lovin' Spoonful, and provides one of the best brief histories of CBGB. Fletcher's terrific music history captures the teeming life of New York's thriving music scene. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A lot happened in the musical life of New York City during the 50 years Fletcher chronicles. He chose the particular dates 1927 and 1977 because he considers them major musical peaks framing a period of explosion in popular music unlike any other. The Jazz Age was in full flower in 1927, while 1977 was the cusp of the disco and hip-hop eras and a pivotal year in NYC history, what with a skyrocketing crime rate and a major blackout. The genres Fletcher examines include Afro-Cuban jazz, Cuban pop, commercial folk music, harmony-group singing, punk, nascent disco, and early hip-hop, and discussed at length are Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Tito Puente and the Brill Building sound, Bob Dylan and Rascals lead singer Felix Cavaliere, Lou Reed and Talking Heads, the New York Dolls and Patti Smith, the Ramones and Blondie. Throughout, Fletcher's commentary melds very different cultures to show interrelationships and how new genres built upon the foundations of predecessors. This makes for an ambitious agenda whose demands Fletcher meets magnificently. Anyone interested in popular music and the rich cultural heritage of New York indeed, of all of the U.S. should read this book.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The Savoy Ballroom, 1938. THE story of pop music is usually told as a story of records, and records are poor witnesses. They can make day-work seem like divine whispers, or fail to explain why a musician found his stride in such a place at such a time. What they definitely don't do, though we very much want them to, is tell much about the places that produced them. A great cultural-event record - say, "Ran Kan Kan," by Tito Puente; "Why Do Fools Fall in Love," by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers; or "Blitzkrieg Bop," by the Ramones - is, deep inside itself, an index of the journeys of musicians and producers and promoters through particular neighborhoods with their hybrid slang, through clubs run by people with reasons for being crazy enough to open one, through cities changing their temperament through development projects and migration patterns. But, music being music, not much of this comes across when you're listening to it. "All Hopped Up and Ready to Go," by Tony Fletcher, an English music journalist who moved to Manhattan in the 1980s and now lives in upstate New York, aims to be something that the field of New York City pop-music studies really needs: a casebook of meaningful contact among its populations. The book's intention, Fletcher writes in his introduction, is to show how New York's cultural mix - primarily the black, Latino and Jewish parts of it - enabled its greatest music across a particularly fertile 50-year period, from 1927 to 1977. Its heroes, if you read closely enough, are the connectors between styles, the virus spreaders or hive pollinators who pop up in one chapter and then reappear 10 or 20 years later in another. Sometimes they're musicians; sometimes they're promoters or producers or fans. These are people like Mario Bauzá, the Cuban trumpeter who helped create Afro-Cuban jazz; George Goldner, a record producer in '40s mambo and '50s doo-wop; Richard Gottehrer, a Brill Building songwriter who went on to help found Sire Records and work with new-wave bands; Shadow Morton, producer of the '60s girl group the Shangri-Las and later of the proto-punk New York Dolls; and the musician and actor Eric Emerson, whose career, if you want to call it that, wended through acting roles in Andy Warhol's films, a short period fronting the glamrock band the Magic Tramps, and friendships with members of Blondie. "All Hopped Up and Ready to Go" - its title taken from the Ramones song "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" - earns its authority by chronicling the rise of one New York movement after another: bebop, mambo, leftist folk, doo-wop, Brill Building pop, glam, punk, disco, hip-hop. The book starts with Bauzá's first visit to New York in 1927, then 35 pages later jumps ahead to his collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie in 1947. In doing so it name-checkingly skims over the end of the stride-piano era, black musical theater, Ellington at the Cotton Club, Lindy Hopping at the Savoy Ballroom, and Barney Josephson's Cafe Society. This book actually covers 30 years, not 50. But Fletcher finds his groove in the '60s and '70s, with rock and disco, when the narrative bubbles along on outrageous anecdotes, aesthetic movements get charted with full prehistories, and minor players make basic and fascinating assertions. One comes to understand something about the way gay dancers at the Limelight gravitated toward melody over rhythm; and the lucky proximity, during New York's bombed-out mid-'70s, of CBGB to dope dealers and Gem Spa. (You could show your face at the club, go fix up with heroin and egg cream, and return in time for the headlining band.) A reader might wish that Fletcher didn't feel compelled to do all that official-history exposition, because these stories have been well told elsewhere. The secret heroes of this book are rendered more fully, and they support a thesis of real urgency. Fletcher attempts to address music as social history, and necessarily tells a few stories that don't have much to do with music. Some people still scratch their heads, for example, about why jazz in Harlem went off the boil. The answer is more than 60 years old, and Fletcher tells the story well: It was the Police Department's temporary closing of the Savoy in 1943, and the subsequent Harlem riots that year - ignited by a white cop's shooting of a black soldier, but foreshadowed by a growing frustration with institutional racism in the wartime economy. These events ruined many businesses along 125th Street and made white customers stay away; club owners sought surer business downtown, and that was the end of a scene. Whatever happened next in Harlem had to come from a completely different group of musicians, and so it did: vocal groups like the Ravens and the Crows, who promptly made uptown teenagers forget about jazz. Fletcher has done much original research. (At the same time, he uses press accounts a little more often than necessary.) But he's operating at a disadvantage, because most of these genres have already been covered vividly in other books. His task is to compress each genre into a series of clashes and dramas, then locate the strands that tie the genres together. His gift is enthusiasm. I've been grateful to him since first reading his fanzine, Jamming!, in London during the early '80s. Hand-stapled, with confused graphics, it cost the equivalent of about 50 cents, but Fletcher got it out there, proudly listing his age (13 when it started) on the masthead. But he seems so inured to the rhetorical lather of music journalism that in "All Hopped Up and Ready to Go," particularly when writing about sacred documents, he turns on his autopilot. Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" has "a sax solo straight out of a Harlem street corner at midnight"; the Velvet Underground's "White Light/ White Heat" is "one of the most uncompromising records ever to have stood the test of time." At times the book reads like a 400-page article for Mojo magazine. In rock criticism, a certain pitch of measured enthusiasm quickly grows monotonous. Fletcher has a rock fan's prejudice: a lot of his book boils down to tales of middle-class transgression. And that's O.K., given how much he knows about rock. But why spend so much energy describing the history of the Velvet Underground - a band little known in its time but painfully overanalyzed since - when you could be writing about the evolution of New York salsa, a popular movement still not adequately treated by historians? The reason is that the Velvets were part of a larger story: the East Village and Lower East Side rock scene of the '60s, a scratchy little world that he documents well. Then again, for the very reason the book's thesis makes sense - the fact that vastly different communities jostle together in New York, spilling aesthetics on one another - it might have been good to push it further, and within the individual chapters. How nice it would be, for instance, when the Lower East Side chapter rolls around to 1967, to see an appearance by the singer Ismael Miranda; he lived on East 13th Street, just a few blocks from Max's Kansas City, and that year, with Larry Harlow's orchestra, he sang the boogaloo hit "El Exigente," one of New York's great syncretic anthems, mixing soul and Afro-Latin music. Instead, we're left with a series of histories that want to be interconnected but end up a bit too self-contained. Vastly different communities jostle together in New York City, spilling musical aesthetics on one another. Ben Ratliff is a music critic for The Times and the author of "The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music," which has now been published in paperback.
Kirkus Review
Exhaustive historiography of New York City's role in shaping 20th-century American popular music. Music journalist Fletcher (The Clash: The Complete Guide to Their Music, 2005, etc.) offers a reasonably substantive 50-year survey of New York's lasting contributions, encapsulating everything from Afro-Cuban jazz, to the early 1960s Washington Square grassroots folk-music scene, to the oddly intertwined arenas of punk rock, disco and hip-hop. The author, a British expat and longtime New Yorker, exudes a sentimental Ken Burnsian reverence for not only New York's contributions to music history but also for its social and cultural history. Using previously picked-over musical subjects, Fletcher ably recycles and reorganizes this information in a well-engineered synthesis. Don't expect many theoretical conclusions, however. The author is more effective at reconstructing the note-by-note rise of musical movements and the often chaotic NYC neighborhoods that spawned them. There's plenty of relevant but overcirculated oral history on the Harlem Renaissance, the Dizzy Gillespie/Charlie Parker bebop era, the early-'60s girl-group/Brill Building years, the Bob Dylan/Woody Guthrie folk connection and the original CBGB scene. Fletcher does fill in a few crucial historical blanks, especially regarding the development of the early-'70s Manhattan dance-club scene. He gives an intimate portrait of some all-but-forgotten impresarios whose late-'60s/early-'70s dance-oriented loft parties later exploded into Studio 54 disco-era excess and exclusivity. Fletcher also digs into Manhattan's undervalued pre-disco gay dance-club scene, which effectively initiated the DJ and turntable artistry that would influence the Bronx-bred musical revolution known as hip-hop. Often short on revelation and analysis, but an informative historical record of NYC's half-century of unparalleled musical achievements. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Fletcher (Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend), who has worked in the music industry as a producer, consultant, and DJ, here examines styles that were developed and evolved on the streets of New York City from 1927 to 1977, covering jazz, blues, Brill Building pop, doo-wop, folk, punk rock, hip-hop, and disco. Fletcher provides compelling and convincing evidence on why New York and its unique cultural mix were essential to all of these scenes. He studies in detail how music that developed on the streets became important commercial genres and examines the intersections of all the styles over the 50-year period he discusses. Verdict This thoroughly researched, engaging, and perceptive book is aimed at all readers and doesn't duplicate anything that's already out there. Anyone with any interest in popular music in New York City will want to read it.-James E. Perone, Mount Union Coll., Alliance, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
