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Shop nowLove Goes to Buildings on Fire
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Learn morePunk 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 Colón 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 senior critic for Rolling Stone and a longtime contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered. His work also appears in the New York Times, the Village Voice, and elsewhere. He was coeditor of SPIN: 20 Years of Alternative Music (2005).
Adam Verner is a stage, film, television, and voice actor and an Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator. He holds a BS in theater arts from Bradley University and an MFA from Chicago College of the Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.
Reviews
“Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is an almost perfect portrait of New York music culture: specific yet comprehensive, enthusiastic yet objective, and as informed as it is personal. The four-page section of what (seemingly) every interesting person in NYC was doing on the night of the ’77 blackout could have been a book unto itself.”
“Meticulously researched and engaging.”
“Revelatory.”
“A detailed time-machine trip that zooms in on everyone from the New York Dolls to Steve Reich.”
“Practically every paragraph about music here is also about something else just as fascinating—race, city planning, ambition, drugs, hairdos. Braiding intricate research with his own teenage memories, Hermes has a bird’s eye view of a great city and has his ear to the ground.”
“By simply putting things in chronological order, Will Hermes shows just how astonishing New York City’s music was in the 1970s. But he does more than that: he brings depth and discernment and an eye for odd detail, making his book an essential work of cultural history.”
“A must-read for any music lover, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire will no doubt inspire nostalgia in readers who lived through the era and make those who didn’t wish they had.”
“A fascinating book that covers not only the new rock music of the day but looks back at New York between 1973 and the end of 1977, a time when hip-hop was being birthed, salsa was finding its voice, the avant-garde scene was being heard, and the new loft jazz scene was being born.”
“As fun and insightful as that other 1970s NYC classic, Jonathan Mahler’s Bronx Is Burning.”
“I thought there was nothing left to say about the seventies NYC music scene, but Hermes puts it all together—punk, salsa, jazz, hip-hop, disco—into a portrait of a city in ferment, with new bubbles of innovation popping up all over.”
“[Hermes] does an expert turn here in his book about the music scene in 1970s New York, moving between musical genres and the human worlds they contained with the light-headed excitement of a bright grad student who’s transferring from one subway line to another.”
“There’s no mistaking that this book will have a special appeal for people who were exposed to this music when it was developing—mostly those living in New York in the mid-70s—but Hermes does what a good writer does. He makes the rest of us (this writer included) wish we’d been there.”
“Hermes reminds us forcefully and refreshingly in this breathtaking, panoramic portrait of five years of that decade that music in New York City was alive, flourishing, and kicking out the jams.”
“A fantastic journey through New York’s 1970s underground music scene.”
“Music geeks will be well pleased, as no detail is left out of this meticulous day-by-day rendering…Seasoned narrator Adam Verner’s enthusiastic baritone jibes with the encyclopedic sweep of the text.”
“[Hermes] writes with scene-setting observational detail and provides contextual background to events and social movements taking place throughout New York as well as biographical observations from his own youth growing up in the city at that time…A well-written entry for the reader (and listener) to explore the musical styles and people of a fascinating era.”
“Hermes’ attitude, sharp ear, and smart big-picture view turn what could have been a small book into something special. A hip, clever, informative look at an unjustifiably dismissed musical era that will have readers scouring iTunes for the perfect accompanying soundtrack.”
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