Love Goes to Buildings on Fire—Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever
By Will Hermes (2011, Faber & Faber)
Considering the amount of attitude, punk elitism, creative prioritizing and idle boasting that’s stuffed into its pages, this is not an offensive book. Yes, it’s by a Rolling Stone “Senior Critic” who subscribes to many of that magazine’s quaint habits and values, that sense of validating some acts as crucial while others can simply languish.

But this book’s chronological, historical, minutiae-minded style keeps it free from what I’ve always detested in Rolling Stone: the premature anointing of certain mainstream, mostly white, rock gods right out of the gate while overlooking others, equally deserving, until they’ve achieved a million-selling record and are unignorable.

If you’d read Rolling Stone, or most music magazines, during the years that this book chronicles—1973 through 1977—you’d find an absolute cluelessness, in many cases a willful ignorance, as to what factions and genres in the recording industry would wreak the greatest changes. Will Hermes doesn’t base his narrative on contemporary coverage and reviews, wisely realizing that very little of it had value. He injects his own thoughts as someone whirled into the maelstrom as a young and impressionable music journalist. But mostly he just lays out raw data: who met who when, and how they came to start a band. The anecdotes live briefly, then the names can fade and not be heard again until hundreds of pages later, with no warning or annotation. (Thankfully, the book has an index, footnotes, a discography and even a filmography.)
As if to make up for the fact that few at the time were realizing how many musical movements were being born or reborn in a single city in such a short time, Hermes parcels them out evenly and democratically. Punk, yes, and Springsteen’s stadium bar rock, but also the minimalist movement and the birth of East Coast hip-hop. If anyone is shortchanged, it’s the superstars of the time, those who made the cover of Rolling Stone throughout the ‘70s: Fleetwood Mac, for instance, gets a single mention, and that’s a backhanded comment about the band’s cocaine use. Tom Petty’s sole appearance is due to his purloining the name Heartbreakers for his back-up band, a blow to Johnny Thunders.
It plays like a culturally diverse 20th century soap opera, the characters crossing paths in ways which can seem forced or fanciful. Landmarks like CBGB’s or the gay cruising corner of 53rd and 3rd start seeming like theater backdrops.
There is a cascade these days of memoirs and histories concerning the early years of punk, new wave, neo-classical, hip-hop, rap and other musical scenes.
This one has context, detail, purpose, even suspense. It’s the Russian novel of the musical revolution.