Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes

Punk rock and hip-hop, disco and salsa, the loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists--in the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented, all at once, from one block to the next, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another. Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the city's infrastructure was collapsing; but rent was cheap, and the possibilities for musical exploration were limitless. Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is the first book to tell the full story of the era's music scenes and the phenomenal and surprising ways they intersected. From New Year's Day 1973 to New Year's Eve 1977, the book moves panoramically from post-Dylan Greenwich Village, to the arson-scarred South Bronx barrios where salsa and hip-hop were created, to the Lower Manhattan lofts where jazz and classical music were reimagined, to ramshackle clubs like CBGB and the Gallery, where rock and dance music were hot-wired for a new generation. As they remade the music, the musicians at the center of the book invented themselves: Willie Colon and the Fania All-Stars renting Yankee Stadium to take salsa to the masses, New Jersey locals Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith claiming the jungle land of Manhattan as their own, Grandmaster Flash transforming the turntable into a musical instrument, and David Byrne and Talking Heads proving that rock music ain't no foolin' around. Will Hermes was there--venturing from his native Queens to the small, dark rooms where the revolution was taking place--and in Love Goes to Buildings on Fire he captures the creativity, drive, and full-out lust for life of the great New York musicians of those years, who knew that the music they were making would change the world.

Will Hermes is a Rolling Stone senior critic and a regular contributor to NPR's All Things Considered. His writing has also been published in the New York Times, the Village Voice, and other publications. SPIN: 20 Years of Alternative Music (2005) was coedited by him.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780374533540
ISBN 10	0374533547
Title	Love Goes to Buildings on Fire
Author	Will Hermes
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Year published	2012-09-04
Number of pages	392
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.