Five years of NYC music that changed history

The rancid stench of garbage hovered above the city's sidewalks in the wake of a summertime strike by sanitation workers. Stores were looted overnight after a blackout plunged rioting neighborhoods into darkness. And a financial crisis pushed the city to the brink of bankruptcy in an era that gave birth to both Travis Bickle and the Son of Sam.

"It's very refreshing being in the 21st century," said Will Hermes, senior critic for Rolling Stone magazine, longtime contributor to NPR's "All Things Considered" and author of "Love Goes to Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York City That Changed Music Forever."

Hermes' musical journey begins an hour after midnight on New Year's Day 1973 in downtown Manhattan with a performance by The New York Dolls and concludes on the city streets in 1977 on New Year's Eve.

The sometimes dangerous and often depressed conditions of the era is briefly referenced but provides an omnipresent backdrop of a five-year span that gave birth to a musical culture that has inspired a world of art ever since.

"I wanted to write a history that was something people could sit down and enjoy. I wanted it to be a good read, and I also understood I was bringing something to the table growing up during those years in New York," Hermes said.

The book documents a changing musical culture, from arena rock to Bowery bar punk, and an era of transformation in the worlds of salsa, hip-hop, jazz and the classical avant-garde.

"There were these incredibly influential movements, some that were born simultaneously, side by side, and sometimes intersecting," said Hermes, a teenager in the early '70s growing up in Queens, the busy lights of the Manhattan skyline glowing on the western horizon; change was in the air.

A performance by Bruce Springsteen at the now-defunct Palladium on 14th Street lit the fuse.

"Seeing Bruce Springsteen from the last row on the top balcony at the Palladium where I had to stand on my toes to see the stage ... that was certainly one," he said. "That's still one of the greatest concert experiences that I have ever had."

In his book, Hermes' prose relating the experience takes on Lester Bangs-esque flair.

"I thought I would be sucked off the balcony and through the air into the white-light energy onstage," he writes. "After the show, I walked down the steps to the subway feeling like I'd been baptized."

Going to CBGB's and seeing the band Television provided another pivotal experience.

"That was the first time I had seen rock music in a club, and it was as amazing as the bands playing at Madison Square Garden. That was really striking," he said. "And the first Patti Smith record -‘Horses' - that was also very powerful."

The scene unfolding in Manhattan and Hermes' recollections putting together the book were aided, at least in part, by upstate connections.

Glens Falls resident Paul Pines, an accomplished poet, writer and host of Lake George Jazz Weekend, is noted for presiding "over one of the incredible venues for the loft jazz scene" in downtown Manhattan at the time.

And ZBS studios, located off Route 4 between Schuylerville and Fort Edward along the Hudson River, helped launch projects by Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson. Interviewing Anderson in 2010 in her Canal Street loft, the performance artist told Hermes her work at ZBS "changed my life more than anything else."

Hermes wrote segments of the book at Yaddo Mansion in Saratoga Springs, following in the literary footprints of nearly a century of writers who came before him.

"Yaddo is an amazing place. I can't say enough about it. I was at a hard point in the book. I hadn't hit the halfway point, and the time there was invaluable. I did a huge amount of writing. It's an incredibly special place for writers and artists," he said.

- Thomas Dimopoulos, January 2012.

Springsteen drummer on the E Street Band: We're like a mist that coalesces into liquid

SARATOGA SPRINGS - Max Weinberg is having a ball.

There have been the 36 years as Bruce Springsteen's drummer, the 17 years as Conan O'Brien's band leader and the eight months that have passed since his open-heart surgery that he said has given him a new lease on life.

"I feel better now than I ever did and because of that, I play more vigorously. When I get behind the drum set, I always tend to act like a 12-year-old. Now I feel like a 12-year-old. So on that count, everything is OK," said Weinberg, describing his 15-piece band, as having a "muscular" approach.

"That's one of the hallmarks of my drumming; I take no prisoners," he said. "This is not sitting back in the dark clubs and snapping your fingers. This is full-body shaking music."

Throughout his career, the drummer, who Springsteen dubbed "Mighty Max," has proved his mettle - delivering the percussive beating that lead into the "Badlands," gunning the cymbals to let listeners know they were entering "Candy's Room" and providing an all-out assault on his drum kit, while still keeping time, during the anthemic "Born in The U.S.A."

Weinberg grew up admiring Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Buddy Rich and other musicians he would see performing on variety TV shows in the 1950s and 60s.

He was considering a law career and pounding out beats in an orchestra pit on Broadway for a theatrical run of the musical "Godspell" when he answered an ad search for a drummer in The Village Voice that launched his career on E Street in 1974.

A newly released documentary marking the historic return of Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band to the recording studio in 1977 brought some memories of those early days back to the forefront.

"We were really young kids," said Weinberg, whose youthful face is curtained by a five o'clock shadow in the "The Promise," which is currently airing on HBO.

"When I see this documentary it feels like I'm looking at my son," said the 59-year-old drummer."

"It was an incredibly fertile time in music, outside even of what we felt we were doing," he said, rattling through a list of then-young bands that included The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Police, Elvis Costello and Graham Parker.

"There was, of course, The Ramones and all the New York groups that were very prolific, in punk. We were definitely touched by that scene. We kind of even looked a little like a punk band at times. We played like a punk band - the idea of raw, stripped-down rock 'n' roll was a sort of antidote to the excesses of the mid-70s and what rock 'n' roll presentation had become," Weinberg said. "It was very present in what we were doing and the things that we liked going on around us."

The documentary is a prelude to the release of a multi-disc issue chronicling the band's "Darkness on the Edge of Town" era.

"It's really a fascinating document. You have two full CDs of unreleased material that were recorded during those sessions - any grouping of which could have been a fabulous album- but it wasn't what Bruce wanted to hone in on at the time. It's great that they're seeing the light of day. There's also a wonderfully shot, I think brilliantly performed, current-day version of the entire album that we did in a theater with no one in it. Just us, playing the ‘Darkness' album, front-to-back."

A student of the history of the instrument, Weinberg is quick to credit William F. Ludwig's invention of the bass drum pedal as the catalyst for the emergence of musical combos and points to pre-rock 'n'roll percussionists like Baby Dodds and Zutty Singleton for possessing powerful almost rock-like drumming execution.

While he moved in a rock ‘n' roll direction with his drumming, Weinberg was always a big fan of that big horn sound. The titles matter little.

"Music is the kind of thing that is completely open-ended. You never stop learning; you never stop digging deep if you care to. And in a nutshell, I care to," he said.

Time and touring has not faded the memory of a performance with the E Street Band in Saratoga  during the summer of 1984..

"I absolutely remember that show we played at SPAC. It was raining. We played (John Fogerty's) ‘Who'll Stop the Rain,' and miraculously, it stopped raining. I can attest to that."

Weinberg said his long-term professional goal is simply to keep playing as much drums as he can. Regarding future projects with the E Street Band, Weinberg said, "I'm very much looking forward to that, but we keep it really loose. It's sort of like a mist that coalesces into liquid.

"I think the band has played as well if not better than we've ever done in the past. The fans certainly seem to still enjoy it. So, why not?"

His open-heart surgery, which entailed mitral valve and tricuspid valve repair was conducted in February at The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. The result has left him feeling "terrifically healthy," he said.

"It is amazing what they can do today, it really is. They can stop your heart, they can take it apart and they can put it back together again," Weinberg said.

"I really do have a new lease on life. While I've always been someone who has smelled the roses, when you're laid up like that your physicality is so out of your reach that it does change you. It changes you spiritually, it changes you emotionally."

- Thomas Dimopoulos, interview with Max Weinberg, 2010.