Tony Fletcher - All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77

I was halfway through my first two-hour interview with the guitarist, producer, songwriter, journalist, and author Lenny Kaye, about as educated and enthusiastic a student and participant of the New York City music scene as anyone could ask to meet. We had reached the point in our conversation where we were talking about the New York Dolls and why, despite their considerable influence over both the short and the long term, they had imploded so quickly, barely making it through two albums.

New York is a city thats not going to tell you no, said Kaye, which I thought to be perhaps the most perceptiveand oddly poeticsingle sentence I had heard during thousands of hours spent discussing my subject matter over a five-year period. Its only you who can tell you when you have to go home and go to bed. So unless you have a great sense of personal responsibility, you can get lost here. He was only partly alluding to the various problems that brought the New York Dolls to their knees, which is why he went on, Its not just the usual sex and drugs, etc. You can be so swamped by the amount of cultural material. Where does your art end? How do you define this ? Are you going off on some wacky side road? All of these things come into play.

Indeed they do. When I set off on the idea of writing a musical history of New York City, I envisioned a book that would start with the vaudeville impresario Tony Pastor and trace the birth of the American music business to the back rooms of the German and Irish beer halls along the lower Boweryhome of the original b-boysin the years directly after the Civil War. By the time I had sold the idea to a publisher, half my initial research appeared to have been thrown out the window, and we had settled on a book that would begin eighty years later, after World War II, and end at the present dayin a New York City whose music scene, I felt then (and still believe now), had been rejuvenated by a fresh influx of musicians and entrepreneurs in the aftermath of that great New York tragedy, 9/11.

And about halfway through the process of actually writing it, I realized I had almost split the difference. All Hopped Up and Ready to Go starts in 1927, in the midst of the Jazz Age. It ends in 1977, a year marked in New York by the blackout, Son of Sam, a heated mayoral election, the opening of Studio 54, Paradise Garage, and Disco Fever, and the release of debut or second albums by the Ramones, Blondie, Television, Talking Heads, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, and Suicide.

Why those fifty years? Well, both start and end dates are major musical peaks, and the period in between covers the vast middle of the twentieth century, a period of explosion in popular music unlike any other. Besides, to delve back much farther than 1927 would necessitate recounting the birth of jazz itself, a subject so deep, so wide, and so well covered that I prefer to consider it already told. To travel much later than 1977, especially allowing for the growth of hip-hop from so-called novelty to predominant musical format, would have involved so much more detail that it would have demanded another book.

Indeed, there already is another book. Its lying in bits and bytes on my hard drive. I admit that, per Kayes comment, I found myself absolutely swamped by the amount of cultural material available while researching this project, and I freely confess that I headed off on many a wacky side road. New York is a city of vast wonder, and so much information is embedded and entwined in its short history that its all too easy to pull the writers equivalent of a club kids all-nighter, and binge on the excessive possibilities.

But its all part of the process of getting to the heart of the story, that of the many musical genres that have emerged from the New York streets. Music scenes have always fascinated me. And I have always believed that those scenes arise not out of vacuums but out of a specific set of social and economic (and of course musical) circumstances. Those that I write about in this bookfrom Cubop to hip-hop, from disco to punkwere very much a product of New York City. They could not, and did not, happen anywhere else, at any other time.