| The Indie's Turn This month we take a look at Matador, home of Belle & Sebastian, Yo La Tengo and others. |
| Battle of the "Experts" Reality TV - fun or filth? Or both? Our contributors turn off the TV and come face-to-face on this topic. |
| Globetrotting And up we go to New York City, where genres were invented and legends were created. |
| Sight Unseen A look at some of the highlights of the Toronto International Film Festival from the eye of the storm itself. |
| Been There This month's concert moment: Paul McCartney brings a special encore to Toronto on his Drivin' USA tour. |
| Watching the Music A milk carton's quest to find a missing youth in Blur's "Coffee and TV". |
| Whatever Happened To... The Gin Blossoms were a popular rock band in the 1990s. Where did they go? |
| 8 x 5 Our contibutors pick five things they're digging this month. |
Globetrotting - New York City, New York
by Brighid Mooney
Ramblin' outta the wild West,Leavin' the towns I love the best.
Thought I'd seen some ups and down,
Til I come into New York town.
People goin' down to the ground,
Buildings goin' up to the sky.
- "Talking New York," Bob Dylan
Back in 1960, a young man known as Robert Zimmerman willingly traded his Midwestern roots for the bright lights and big city of New York. But Bob Dylan is far from the only one who has taken a chance with this uneasy transition. From Broadway down to Wall Street, New York City is a place where millions have come from all over the world to “make it,” including yours truly. Granted, “making it” for me involves languishing behind a computer for eight hours a day while stealthily turning out pieces for Being There Magazine, but for the far more talented and ambitious, New York is a city that can be both intimidating and welcoming, with endless outlets for burgeoning creativity. For decades, New York has continuously cultivated a well-earned reputation as playground, safe haven, and inspiration for all manner of artists, writers, and musicians. For the city's thousands of artists in residence, it isn't the Statue of Liberty or Times Square that stand out as New York's most memorable landmarks. Instead, it's the musical venues, and the history behind them, that help to define a city that has always had a somewhat symbiotic relationship with the arts.
In the 1950s, New York City served as a launching point for many of the writers of the Beat Generation, whose work had a profound influence on much of the culture and music that followed it. Many of the most famous Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, were either from the NYC area, or spent a significant part of their career there. The city and its citizens obviously provided a great deal of inspiration for Allen Ginsberg. His poems are littered with characters who “talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge.”1 The trendy East Village, as well as the adjacent Lower East Side, served as a stomping ground for radical Beat writers and artists with a legacy that continues to linger even today. The now annual East Village Howl! Festival honors that legacy with a week-long counterculture extravaganza of music, art and poetry dedicated to the memory of New York artists like Ginsberg, Charlie Parker, and Emma Goldman. But as much as New York itself influenced the Beat Generation, the Beat writers also continued to impact many of the musical and cultural movements that followed.
When folk music exploded into the mainstream in the early 1960s, New York City was once again at the hub of the movement. This time it was the neighbourhood of Greenwich Village that provided the venues and hangouts for the up-and-coming folk artists of the day. Especially prominent was the Cafe Wha?, where Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor all first began their careers. As well as hosting an impressive rotation of performers, the Cafe Wha? was also noted for its famous clientele, which at certain points included people like Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Bob Dylan. The Cafe Wha? is one of several New York venues of historical significance that has survived copious decades of changing music and continues to showcase a variety of musical acts today. When Bob Dylan first began performing in New York, it was at smaller venues like the Cafe Wha?, the Bitter End, and the Gaslight Cafe. By providing a stage for struggling artists, these venues were the roots of folk music in New York, and are therefore almost more important to its history than larger venues like the Carnegie and Town Halls, where Dylan started performing after the release of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Many other noteworthy artists of the folk scene, including Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and Simon and Garfunkel, are inseparable from their beginnings in New York City.
Long before Bob Dylan took the stage at the Cafe Wha?, and before Allen Ginsberg was holed up in an East Village apartment writing poetry, New York City was home to some of the most famous nightclubs in the country. The Cotton Club in Harlem was in full swing through the 20s and 30s and was one of New York's most popular musical venues. The segregated club featured many of the most famous black entertainers of the day, such as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong, but for an almost exclusively white audience. After the Prohibition the club moved downtown, but returned to Harlem in the late 1970s where it continues to operate today. Another important venue of the time was the Apollo Theater, also located in the heart of Harlem. With its illustrious Amateur Night, the Apollo Theater helped launch the careers of Ella Fitzgerald and James Brown, and went on to gain official landmark status in 1983. The Apollo has been recently revitalized and renovated, and regularly features headlining performances by artists as diverse as Tony Bennett, Stevie Wonder, and The Strokes.
The historical and musical importance and continued legacy of venues like the Cotton Club and the Apollo have not been lost on the legions of performers that have made New York their stage in the decades since. Lou Reed even paid homage to the Apollo in “Walk On the Wild Side,” a song that also tacitly reflects on another of New York's now former musical institutions, Max's Kansas City. Starting in 1965 and lasting through the early 70s, Max's was the place to be in the burgeoning pop-art turned punk scene. Because of the widespread success of bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash, punk rock has a strong association with England, when in truth, most of the British punk bands were actually heavily influenced by what was going on in New York at the time, and followed the lead of bands like The Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls, and The Stooges.
Andy Warhol was very influential around this time, working with The Velvet Underground and creating performance pieces like the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The Warhol Factory in New York mass produced some of his most famous artwork of mass productions. When The Velvet Underground became its house band, Max's was still very much about the merge of art and music, but eventually the music took over with the evolution of punk rock, and Max's was an epicenter. Also playing a huge part in the New York punk scene was CBGBs, located on the Bowery. The New York punk movement was born out of places like Max's and CBGBs, and the city's most famous punk bands cut their teeth at these clubs. But these places weren't just about the music, they were also about the scene, and whether they were performing or not, people like Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and various members of the Ramones, the New York Dolls, Television, and the Stooges were nearly always there. At Max's Kansas City, even the stars got starstruck, and everyone who was anyone walked through its doors at some point during its heyday.
Like Max's, some of the most important venues of that era didn't survive the 70s. And some, like Bill Graham's Fillmore East, almost didn't make it out of the 60s. Graham's psychedelic East Coast incarnation of the Fillmore Auditorium was only in operation for a few short years, closing down prematurely in 1971, but during its brief existence, the Fillmore East was a premiere concert venue, featuring performances by some of the greatest bands and musicians of the late 1960s. Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfuly, James Brown, The Byrds, Pink Floyd, The Band, and literally hundreds of others graced the stage at the Fillmore between 1968 and 1971. Another venue that has both east and west coast associations is the relatively recent landmark The Knitting Factory, located in downtown Manhattan's Tribeca neighbourhood. Established in 1987, The Knitting Factory caters mostly to jazz performers, but also features blues and alternative rock, and is one of downtown's most prominent clubs, with four separate stages and nightly performances.
Even though there hasn't been a musical movement since punk that belongs almost exclusively to the east coast, New York City continues to be an important part of the music scene. Many of the bands that are part of the indie and underground rock scene that has found more mainstream attention in the past decade have strong roots in New York, from The Strokes to The Walkmen and Interpol. And the city's music venues, from the Bowery Ballroom to the Mercury Lounge, continue to showcase a steady stream of the best and most worthwhile music that the country has to offer. Music has always been a defining part of New York City's identity, and no doubt will continue to be so for decades into the future. After all, Old Blue Eyes himself sang a song about New York. Beat that, L.A."Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough." ~ John Steinbeck
5 Decades of Making It and Breaking It In the City That Never Sleeps:
1950 - Jack Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, is published
1960 - Bob Dylan first visits New York to meet his idol Woody Guthrie - and stays.
1962 - James Brown records Live at the Apollo at Harlem's legendary Apollo Theater
1966 - Jimi Hendrix starts performing at the Cafe Wha?
1970 - The Velvet Underground performs as the regular house band at Max's Kansas City
1971 - Bill Graham's psychedelic Fillmore East closes down
1978 - The Cotton Club returns to Harlem with a performance by Cab Calloway
1980 - The IRS raids Studio 54
2004 - After thirty years, legendary music venue The Bottom Line finally closes its doors
How to Be There in New York City
What to Listen to:
* The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan (1963)
* Live at Max's Kansas City - The Velvet Underground (1972)
* New York Dolls - The New York Dolls (1973)
* Horses - Patti Smith (1975)
* Ramones - The Ramones (1976)
* Marquee Moon – Television (1977)
* The Concert in Central Park - Simon and Garfunkel (1982)
* Room on Fire - The Strokes (2003)
* Bows and Arrows - The Walkmen (2004)
What to Read:
* On the Road - Jack Kerouac
* Howl and Other Poems - Allen Ginsberg
* Junky - William S. Burroughs
* Please Kill Me - Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
* Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung - Lester Bangs
* Native's Guide to New York - Richard Laermer
* Subwayland: Adventures in the World Beneath New York - Randy Kennedy
What to Watch:
* Rear Window – Dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1954)
* An Affair to Remember – Dir. Leo McCarey (1957)
* Taxi Driver – Dir. Martin Scorsese (1976)
* Saturday Night Fever – Dir. John Badham (1977)
* Annie Hall – Dir. Woody Allen (1977)
* Manhattan – Dir. Woody Allen (1979)
* Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol – Dir. Chuck Workman (1990)
* Bullets Over Broadway – Dir. Woody Allen (1994)
* In America – Dir. Jim Sheridan (2002)
* Gangs of New York – Dir. Martin Scorsese (2002)
* Pieces of April – Dir. Peter Hedges (2003)
What to Do:
* Howl! Festival of East Village Arts – http://www.howlfestival.com
* Central Park SummerStage - http://www.summerstage.org/
* New York Film Festival - http://www.summerstage.org/
* New York International Fringe Festival - http://www.fringenyc.com/index3.html
* Big Apple Fest - http://www.bigapplefest.org/index.php
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