New York Stories

The Strokes destroyed Manhattan. Vampire Weekend Ruined Brooklyn. And other insights from Meet Me in the Bathroom.

I love a good oral history. If you haven’t read Please Kill Me, The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, please go do that now. I’ve read it twice and I’m due to read it again - it’s THE story if you care about underground rock music. While you’re at it, listen to every record mentioned in the book. Then read Our Band Could Be Your Life, and listen to those records as well. Then…

I read Please Kill Me on tour with The Lemonheads in 1996. Evan Dando read it too, we all passed it around. Evan bought multiple copies of Please Kill Me that he carried around in his gigantic, chaotic suitcase. He gave them away to people, but he would also occasionally leave them in hotel rooms in place of Gideon’s Bible. If you strip the book of its jacket, it’s all black like a bible. If someone in a moment of weakness reaches for a bible for comfort but instead finds this incredible story, it might actually save a life. Or so we thought, since punk rock saved our lives.

Please Kill Me isn’t specifically about New York, but it has a fairly New York-centric world view. It makes a compelling case on punk’s New York origins. What got me thinking about it is that my beach read this summer break was another oral history influenced by PKM, Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011 by Lizzy Goodman. It’s a sprawling, ambitious 700+ pager that traces the history of the New York rock music revival from the first flicker of Jonathan Fire Eater’s industry buzz in the mid-90s through the peak of “blog rock” in the late 2010s.

In full disclosure, I’ve never lived in New York. I’ve visited several hundred times, however - sometimes for several weeks at a time. My dad, who closed out his academic career with a recent stint at Columbia and lives in Brooklyn part-time, became obsessed with New York and its culture in the 70s. He loved the restaurants, the street life, and energy, and the beauty of the place. He instilled an appreciation in my brother and me when he brought us to stay in his friend Joe’s apartment in the West Village. He’d take us on endless walks around Lower Manhattan. The streets terrified but also fascinated me. Back then, the mid-70s through the early 80s, every street had some sort of chaos going on at night.

Later, in the 80s and early 90s, my bands played there often, and I got to experience the East Village and Lower East Side in its grittier, riskier phase. I’d stay with my artist cousin, who moved from First Avenue at Tomkins Square to a loft in Williamsburg in 1990. I knew the area well before it started to gentrify over a decade later. A few times I stayed for a week or more. I had experiences in many of the iconic bars and venues discussed in Meet Me in the Bathroom, such as Max Fish, Tramps, The Mercury Lounge, 2A, etc. I thought about moving there, but never got it together.

First published in 2017, MMITB covers a time in music culture I mostly missed. I checked out of music in late 2001, 9/11 time, because that’s when I got married, started law school, and started a family. I remember when Evan turned me on to The Strokes’ EP tracks on a dubbed cassette in 2000. I hated rock music at the time and felt betrayed by the mainstream. What excited me about The Strokes wasn’t that it sounded especially original. It sounded extremely derivative to me, but also fresh. Their influences - Velvets, Modern Lovers, early Talking Heads, basically all my favorite records - were easy to spot. They reworked those influences into something that sounded contemporary. I didn’t hear it as something that would compete with the horrendous mainstream at the time. I expected it to be “indie-successful” - like Guided By Voices in ‘94. I did not expect them to kick off some huge cultural movement. Maybe I’d have felt differently if I’d seen them live, but the one show of theirs I saw in late 2001 bored me to tears. On their first tour, they seemed to have already lost interest in what they were doing.

In my transitional years taken up with law school and raising babies, I became increasingly detached from the music world. I bought CDs of bands I read about, bands that represented this alleged rebirth of real rock music. I wanted to get excited about Interpol, The White Stripes, and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But those records didn’t speak to me. I didn’t actively hate them like I hated all that shit on “alternative” rock radio and Nu Metal in the late 90s and early 2000s, but it wasn’t giving me the joy I felt in discovering my favorite bands a decade or more earlier. Was I getting old? Is this how everyone feels about music after 30? A few years later it became clear that I just needed a reset. I’ve been deeply passionate about music discovery ever since.¹ Listening to those records now, they still don’t do anything for me. Guess you had to be there.

The TLDR is that I enjoyed the book. Not as much as Please Kill Me, but it’s still a great read. It’s fun how many interview subjects are friends or acquaintances of mine, most of you will know people too. There’s way too much ground to fully cover in the sprawling book, so instead I’m going to delve into a few choice topics that are of particular interest to me.

The Imminent Collapse of the Recording Industry

I’ve always been a geek about industry stories, and MMITB has them in spades. The backdrop for the industry story of Early 2000s New York is fascinating. Major labels had recently consolidated, leaving dozens of signed and in some cases well-known acts without a label deal. Indies were on the rise. Napster represented a real threat, though the damage illegal file sharing did to the industry became more apparent over the course of the decade. Technology quickly transformed the industry as the consumption model slowly took shape. Napster, MP3 blogs, eventually the promise of mobile and on-demand streaming, everything changed incredibly quickly. In 2001, however, the Strokes signed their deal with RCA without much friction. They had enormous leverage and it just made sense to be on a major at the tail end of the monoculture. The market was primed and their imminent success require infrastructure.

Other acts, such as Yeah Yeah Yeahs (YYYs) and Interpol, struggled more with their business options. Major or indie? Is selling out a thing? Will we maintain our creative freedom? Former A&R executive James Barber had some particularly insightful things to say about the industry at , as follows:

You could write a book about the bands who got signed to labels and never had an album come out in 97, 98, 99, 2000…this moment, the evil warnings of getting swallowed by the system had actually really just happened to a bunch of artists. They had reason to be worried.

I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the antics of YYYs colorful manager, Asif Ahmed. Asif was a peer of the band, not some seasoned professional manager. He was openly hostile to label executives seeking to sign the band. He allegedly threw a drink in Atlantic co-head Craig Kallman’s face and called him a “major label corporate evil piece of shit.” He ended negotiations in outrage with Warner Records when Semour Stein fell asleep at a showcase, which he seems to have made a habit of doing late in his amazing career. Ahmed opted to turn down big-money offers for two (in my opinion very good) reasons: 1. Because the band would have stopped working if they became suddenly very rich on essentially borrowed money, and 2. Because they wanted to own their recordings and maintain creative control. They signed with Interscope because they were willing to put in writing that they’d stay out of the way creatively. ²

The book includes plenty of stories of the excesses of the A&R process in dealmaking with Kings of Leon, The Killers, Interpol, and others. Majors signed a bunch of acts in the wake of The Strokes’ success, hoping the wave would continue to build. But by the end of the decade, a different dynamic took over. In recession, with the future of the recording industry in doubt, labels scaled back. That gave indie labels plenty of oxygen to grow. Vampire Weekend - honestly probably my favorite band covered in the book - shunned major labels in favor of XL Recordings not only because the financial deal would have been better, but also because it felt like where they belonged. This momentum for indies continued for most of the next decade. That’s why most of the successful acts I worked with in the 2010s didn’t sign with a major label at the time. The deals sucked, the brands were problematic, and indies knew better how to build a grassroots audience. For a number of reasons and probably a different post, all of that is changing. If Vampire Weekend emerged right now, their options and incentives would look a lot different. I doubt their choice would be quite so simple.

During Kings of Leon’s period of label courtship they had the privilege of meeting Ahmet Ertegun when he still kept an office at Atlantic. Someone had to explain that the ancient “turtle-looking dude” signed half their record collection. Ahmet told the Kings, “I’m going to give you some advice: Don’t let the record label fuck you up. You are too good for that.” They seem to have done OK for themselves, despite the warnings. The scene produced several global superstars - KoL, The Killers, and Jack White - but none of them actually came from the NY scene. None of these careers would have happened (in the way they happened anyway) without The Strokes’ breakthrough.

Maybe Partying Will Help

I suppose it isn’t surprising that a book titled “Meet Me in the Bathroom” has a lot of drug anecdotes. That’s most of the book! I’ve read a lot of books about people doing drugs; it’s a fascinating subject. It is truly confusing to grow up idolizing known drug addicts. But we all did that, didn’t we? Paul Banks, singer of Interpol, sums it up as follows: “At that age, I felt like my only way of accessing real things was late at night, in a dark room, where drugs were involved.” Albert Hammond, Jr. of The Strokes noted that all of his idols had a serious drug phase - every artist has to go through it. This was an attitude shared by many rock musicians of my era, which only grew the myth during the decadent 90s.

The first wave of rock revival acts from New York collectively considered excessive partying, including copious amounts of cocaine and other hard drugs, to be a defining component of their scene and lifestyle. That produced some negative outcomes. The next wave of successful rock acts, such as The White Stripes and The Killers, seem to have largely avoided these traps, and they went on to have greater, more sustained success. Why? Why does music culture in the later 2000s - at among the popular bands from the area - seem so much less druggy?

Karen O notes a Millennial divide - slightly younger bands came up with a very different frame of reference and a different mythology in a world of infinite options. Maybe younger artists didn’t obsess about the lifestyles of their heroes as much as prior generations. Maybe it was more about the music than the lifestyle. Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend explains: “Partying is just not really my vibe…I get a lot of my best ideas after drinking coffee…that’s probably my favorite drug…when I picture people who consider getting fucked up on drugs or getting naked as some sort of rebellion, I picture people from my parents’ generation, and it feels deeply boring and done.” I love their music, but it’s never struck me as remotely dangerous. The previous generation of NY bands cultivated a “dangerous” image.

Musicians turn to drugs for a lot of reasons, some of them cultural but some having to do with their mental health. I’ve personally known musicians who signed huge record deals in the 90s and literally blew it all on drugs. It’s sad and pathetic - but it probably seemed cool, sexy, and dangerous. What is rock n’ roll without those things? Now that we know the potential outcomes - and the susceptibility of creative artists - it’s good that those perceptions seem quaint. I’d have been horrified by Ezra’s quote a generation ago - it’s so unbelievably uncool. In the age of the Opioid epidemic and fentanyl contamination, however, it just seems wise. Drink lots of coffee, kids. That sort of rebellion is dated.

End of an Empire

So…did The Strokes really destroy Manhattan? Sorta. Goodman makes a good argument in the book. The resurgence of downtown culture, spearheaded by The Strokes, along with crackdowns on street culture led by Mayor Giuliani, let to a wave of gentrification that turned Lower Manhattan into a high-end mixed use shopping mall. Then the resurgence of Williamsburg culture led to yet another wave of gentrification that made my dad an accidental real estate investment genius, but priced all the bands out of Brooklyn. That’s the problem with gentrification. It starts with creative folks who find slightly dangerous but cheap places in urban areas. The creative people attract new businesses like nightclubs, restaurants, and boutiques. Then the young professionals come in, then young families. Next thing you know, the rent goes up and all the hand-to-mouth artists are forced out. And that is what ended New York’s musical Renaissance.

It’s sad, because there’s so much cultural history in New York, so many resources, so much energy. I think Nashville has benefitted from the demise of New York as a grassroots creative hub for adventurous musicians. An act doesn’t need to go to an industry town to “make it” or “get discovered” or whatever. They seek out places with community and resources, where they can afford to live. New York isn’t one of those places anymore because it’s unaffordable. Nashville is affordable for now. I can speak to this because at age 18, when I had the opportunity to move for college on my parents’ dime, I had one thought: Where can I go to start a band that will have a chance? For kids moving to Nashville for Belmont or MTSU, it’s the same calculus.

When you look at all these historically important music scenes that produced influential acts, whether it’s New York, Seattle, Chapel Hill, or Boston when I moved there in the mid-80s, they have things in common. Tom Maxwell did a great job breaking it down in his Chapel Hill book linked above. Lots of young people in community with resources such as venues, media, studios, etc., and most importantly low cost of living. I supported myself with menial jobs in Boston. I never made any money from music! That’s the recipe for a great music scene, all that plus talent and inspiration to spare. How is that going to work in the future? Virtual scenes? I wish I knew, because we need fertile soil to inspire young people to do cool shit.

1. Quick aside about what woke me up to new music again in 2003. That Thanksgiving, my friend Maria Taylor from the band Azure Ray, a Birmingham native, invited me to open for Bright Eyes when they did a pop-up show in Birmingham. I’d listened to Bright Eyes but I wasn’t super familiar. I expected the crowd to be mostly our music scene friends, but no. On show day I learned that the 700 capacity venue sold out in a matter of minutes. The crowd was super young and fully engaged. The energy was different from any “indie” show I’d seen - that’s when I realized we were on to something new. That’s when I found my way back to music.

2. If you like music business stories like this, I recommend Sellout: The Major Label Feeding Frenzy that Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994-2007) by Dan Ozzi. It covers similar ground, some of the same characters. We’re in a similarly dumb time for the music business now, with very different themes and tensions. The concept of “selling out” - discussed in MMITB, seems quaint in 2024.