Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes

This is a great book.  The title references the first single released by the Talking Heads, and the book itself follows the erupting music scene during the 1970’s in New York City, which was a hotbed of creativity.  I particularly love the coverage given to the music venues like CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, the Mercer Arts Center and the Bottom Line, where Bruce Springsteen headlined for five nights in 1975 (and literally set the world on fire.)

Of secondary importance to me, but no less edifying, is the coverage Mr. Hermes gives to the erupting rap and hip hop music scenes.  Who knew Grandmaster Flash’s real name was Joseph Saddler, or that he got his start in the South Bronx spinning records at parties in a park in the Mott Haven housing projects.  Having driven past this site many times while working in the city, I found it quite interesting.

Also covered in the book was the avant-garde, or modernist, music scene which was emanating from lower Manhattan, represented here by the likes of Philip Glass and Steve Reich.  Glass was a graduate of Julliard and Reich, early on, worked with the likes of Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten of Grateful Dead fame.  In fact, Lesh credits the work he did with Reich as being a precursor to the famous Acid Tests run by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, for which the Dead were the house band.  It’s little tidbits of information like this that really tickle my fancy.

Still, the most important parts of the book, for me, are concerned with the downtown punk scene that spawned the likes of the New York Dolls, the Ramones, Blondie, Patti Smith, the Talking Heads and the long forgotten but extremely influential Television, fronted by Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell (nee Tom Miller and Richard Meyers, respectively.)  These groups were influenced by others like the Velvet Underground and the MC5, and collectively they all influenced everything from the British punk scene to Guns N’ Roses.  That kind of reach is usually reserved for bands such as the Beatles and Rolling Stones.

Mr. Hermes slips in and out of genres, and you can read about performers as diverse as Wayne County and Celia Cruz on the same page.  He shows how jazz, salsa, rock, R&B and even disco had a hand in most everything coming out of the city at that time, and though it can be disconcerting to jump from Johnny Thunders to Grandmaster Flash, in some strange way it all comes together nicely by the end of the book.

I especially liked the section that covers the famous blackout of 1977, and what everyone who was anyone were doing at that time, like the aforementioned Thunders, who was getting off a flight from London at Kennedy airport in need of a fix.  Or how about Springsteen being stuck at the Record Plant while recording an album – remember when they were called albums? – and how he and producer Jon Landau took to wandering Manhattan in the darkness, grateful for the night off.  Information like that is what makes or breaks a book.

Another favorite is the epilogue, where the author covers what has happened to the bands involved in the intervening years.  The Dolls reformed, sans the members who have passed on, and have cut some new records, or CDs, if you will, and Patti Smith still performs a yearly New Year’s Eve show at the Bowery Ballroom.  Many of the other names, like the Ramones and Talking Heads, went on to international fame.  It really validates the need for this book.

I highly recommend Love Goes to Buildings on Fire.  You can tell it was a work close to the heart by the type of minutiae included by Mr. Hermes, a senior critic at Rolling Stone magazine, who has also been published in the New York Times and the Village Voice, amongst others.  He includes many personal asides that just add to the overall effect of the book (like the fact he couldn’t get into the Bottom Line with his fake ID procured from Times Square, but had no trouble at CBGB’s.)  Be you a novice to this scene, or a seasoned vet like me, read this book.