The Encyclopedia of New York Pop Music

“I made up a character named Soph—it was an homage more than an impersonation. There were other women working at the time who did what she did: Mae West, in her way, who sang and told stories, and Belle Barth and Frances Faye and Rusty Warren. The character I made up was a little bit of a tribute to those kind of bighearted broads who sang and told stories. They were very risqué. I wanted to be able to tell their jokes, but some of them were so appalling. I felt that if I took credit for them I would be diminished in some way, so I made up a persona that I could hide behind. And people recognized her as a kind of iconic character from their own childhoods. Those performers had been on television. They had been in the public consciousness. Their parents brought home those records—in brown paper wrappers, you know? It was a part of their growing up. It was very Jewish, and very Catskills-y.� —Bette Midler Photo: 2002/Daily News, L.P. (New York)

Watch Your Step was the first musical comedy fully scored by Irving Berlin, the archetypal New York City songwriter. It was also, you might say, the first New York City musical. Of course, there had been countless shows staged in the city before; Broadway had been synonymous with musical theater since the 1830s. But with Watch Your Step, Berlin sought not only to write New York songs but to represent the city sonically: to make music that sounded like the clangorous, cacophonous metropolis of 1914.    He did it with rhythm. The songwriter’s monster 1911 hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band� established ragtime as America’s pop-music lingua franca and earned Berlin the title of “Ragtime King.� Watch Your Step, accordingly, was billed as a “syncopated musical,� a show that brought the rhythms—the racket—that had ignited dance halls across the country to the august Broadway stage. A critic in the New York Dramatic Mirror called Watch Your Step “the noisiest affair I have ever attended�; the New York World praised the show for introducing “cow bells, tin pans, squawkers, rattles, and other election-night musical instruments into the modern dance orchestra.� The score showcased Berlin’s range: There were love ballads, minstrel-show numbers, comic novelty songs, and, of course, a lot of dance music. At the center of it all was the superstar husband-and-wife team of Vernon and Irene Castle, who gentrified saucy dance steps like the Grizzly Bear and the Turkey Trot for mainstream consumption. The show was a smash, launching Berlin’s Broadway career, which would continue into the 1960s. It was also, in its polite way, a generational gauntlet—notice served that American popular music had arrived to lay waste to fusty old-world sounds. The blowout Act II finale, “Ragtime Opera Medley,� drove the point home: “Aida / We’re gonna chop up your meter / We’re getting tired of you and so / Here’s where we’re going to / Hurdy-gurdy Mister Verdi.� —J.R. Photo: © Corbis. All Rights Reserved.

When George Gershwin first popped up on Tin Pan Alley, he instantly stood out. The songwriters’ row was full of grizzled street-smart types. Gershwin, who often collaborated with his older lyricist brother Ira, had street-kid bona fides, but his piano chops were, in Alley parlance, “high-class�; his musical knowledge encompassed the usual pop ditties but also Beethoven and Chopin and Liszt. Then came “Rhapsody in Blue.� Gershwin, just 25 at the time, was commissioned to write a piece for piano and jazz band. The result was a culture crash the likes of which had never been heard before, elevating American vernacular blues and jazz into the rarefied realm of European orchestral music—or was it bringing classical music down to earthier territory? No matter: “Rhapsody in Blue� was beautiful and thrilling; from its first moments—the famous opening clarion call, a wailing, wavering, trombonelike glissando played on a clarinet—it obliterated the outdated high-low distinctions.  —J.R. Photo: 2011 Getty Images

In 1938, composer Harold Arlen and lyricist Edgar “Yip� Harburg were asked to write a score for a movie musical based on L. Frank Baum’s children’s classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). The songwriters were seasoned pros; Arlen was Tin Pan Alley’s foremost pop-blues composer, Harburg the wit behind “April in Paris� and the classic Great Depression lament “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?� But this was a tricky assignment. Baum’s book was a strange, sprawling fantasy about a Kansas farm girl who travels to a magical land. Critics had often read it as a Gilded Age political allegory; Baum had always insisted it was a fairy tale. The dramatis personae included talking lions and scarecrows, witches, flying monkeys, and little people. What kind of music could a couple of Jewish Tin Pan Alley pros come up with for this mishegoss?   The answer, it turned out, was one of the greatest—possibly the greatest—pop songs of all time. Seven decades later, the movie’s centerpiece, “Over the Rainbow,� remains the essence of pop-ballad splendor. With its cresting rainbow-arc melody and startling octave leaps, Arlen’s tune feels both magical and inevitable. Harburg’s lyric—“Somewhere over the rainbow / Way up high / There’s a land that I heard of / Once in a lullaby�—is a feat of artful artlessness, an expression of yearning that works both in context, as the interior monologue of Dorothy from Kansas, and for everyone, for all audiences. Years later, recalling the struggle to write the song, Harburg praised Arlen’s flair for the dramatic. “One person is born with a sense of dramaturgy, another not … It’s got to be something that moves an audience, either to laughter or to tears.� —J.R.   Photo: 2004 Getty Images

New York has had its share of illustrious house bands—the Roots on Jimmy Fallon’s show, the Velvet Underground at the Factory, Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic—but no musical residency holds a candle to Duke Ellington’s three-year run at the Cotton Club, from late 1927 to early 1931. The city was at the height of its interwar heyday: The skyline was shooting up, along with flappers’ hemlines; bons mots were flying across the Algonquin Round Table; and home runs were sailing off the bats of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig into the original Yankee Stadium’s bleachers. But it was the music made by Ellington and his orchestra at the Cotton Club in Harlem that best captured the beauty and ferment of that Roaring Twenties apotheosis. The Cotton Club was founded as a magnet for slummers, showcasing entertainment by black musicians and dancers for a strictly whites-only crowd. Ellington was hired to give those white thrill-seekers what they came for—exotic “jungle music�—but from the first note his orchestra played, in its December 4, 1927, revue, it offered something else: “Creole Love Call,� “Black and Tan Fantasy,� and other deathless songs that transmuted African-­American experience into symphonic music as rich as any this country has ever produced. —J.R.  Photo: Time & Life Pictures

His dust-bowl wanderings fueled his music, but New York City was where he felt most at home: “I walked along, the day just leaving out over the tops of the tall buildings, and sifting through the old scarred chimneys sticking up. Thank the good Lord, everybody, everything ain’t all slicked up, and starched and imitation. Thank God, everybody ain’t afraid. Afraid in the skyscrapers, and afraid in the red-tape offices, and afraid in the tick of the little machine that never explodes, stock-market tickers, that scare how many to death, ticking off deaths, marriages, and divorces, friends and enemies; tickers connected and plugged in like jukeboxes, playing the false and corny lies that are sung in the wild canyons of Wall Street.� —Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory Photo: Eric Schaal/Time Life Pictures

“It was the beginning of what’s happened later on to Elvis Presley and the Beatles as it is today and the Rolling Stones. It was phenomenal. The biggest fan club in the world was outside the Paramount Theater, people waiting for hours and hours in the street just to have a glimpse of Sinatra. In those days, it was so inhuman for the artists to do seven shows a day, that’s how popular Sinatra became. I was pretty frightened because Perry Como [chose me as] a summer replacement. I had a million-selling record at the beginning of my career, but I still had a lot to learn. So I was pretty frightened, and so I went and took a chance and met Sinatra backstage and he was nice enough to have me up to his dressing room, and he said, “What’s the matter kid?� I said, “Well, I’m very nervous performing.� And he gave me great advice. He said, “Don’t worry about that. The public senses if you’re nervous. They’ll even support you even more, and you’ll find out it’s one of the best things that could ever happen.� And sure enough, it really relaxed me for the rest of my life. From that day on, we became great friends.� —Tony Bennett Photo: Ike Vern/Time & Life Pictures

The musical universe, says Mike Stoller, was contained in a white building on Broadway. When Jerry Leiber and I moved to New York in ’57, we’d had a number of hits already—“Hound Dog,� “Kansas City,� “Searchin’, � and “Young Blood,� which was a million-seller single. We didn’t have an office at first, and in 1961 we moved to the Brill Building. It was between two eating establishments: the Turf, where the walls were covered with sheet music from the early ’40s and ’50s; on the other side was Jack Dempsey’s restaurant—the better-heeled and gamblers would have lunches there. The Turf was a hangout for a lot of musicians. If someone needed a bass player to do a demo, they could run over to the Turf and see who was there. Almost every floor of Brill was inhabited by music publishers, songwriters, bandleaders, talent agents. There were guys on the street who used the phone booth as an office. They’d give out the phone number, and would stand outside waiting for a phone call, trying to scare others away from using the phone. Next to us on the ninth floor was the office of Irving Caesar. Irving was in his late 60s; he wrote “Swanee� with George Gershwin, and “Tea for Two.� He’d be in early in the morning, and then we’d see him on his way to the track. Seemed many people in the music business were gamblers. Bobby Darin moved in when he moved out. Johnny Marx was in the building, who wrote “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.� I guess every December he made enough to pay for a year’s rent. People would come up to the 11th floor and work their way down the staircase knocking on every door, trying to sell a song. The restrooms on the landings were used by a lot of R&B groups to rehearse, because the tile walls made a good echo. There were a lot of very good writers circulating who either had a publisher in the building or came from Don Kirshner’s office at 1650 Broadway, like Carole King and Gerry Goffin and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. We often worked with Doc Pomus and his writing partner, Morty Shuman. Otis Blackwell, a wonderful writer who wrote “Don’t Be Cruel.� And of course Burt Bacharach, who was working with Bob Hilliard—in fact we made one of their first hits, “(Don’t Go) Please Stay� by the Drifters, which we produced. Barry and Cynthia, Carole and Gerry were also around. And of course Phil Spector, who had been a protégé of Jerry’s and mine. He was arrogant, and also talented. He put his arms around everything and claimed they were his. Unfortunately, he went on to take credit for everything Jerry and I did, including records we produced before he ever got to New York.

The Fugs, led by Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, made protest an ecstatic, sarcastic comedy (“Kill for Peace� was their hit), bridging the gap between Beats and hippies, creating a template later followed by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. At the Bridge Theater, at 4 St. Marks Place, on August 7, 1965, a little more than a week after Lyndon Johnson sent 50,000 more troops to Vietnam, the Fugs held a “Night of Napalm.� After their set, in what they termed the “new Fug spaghetti death,� they pelted each other and their audience with spaghetti. “I spotted Andy Warhol in the front row,� Sanders once wrote. “It appeared that he was wearing a leather tie—then blap! I got him full face with a glop of spaghetti.� —J.H.  

Not two years earlier, after a vicious bout of hepatitis, she’d been told she had only a few years to live and would never sing again. But on Sunday evening, April 23, 1961, Judy Garland, in good voice, moderate trim, and excellent spirits, performed for two hours at Carnegie Hall, the country’s most prestigious concert venue, bringing to bear on some two dozen songs all the entertainment know-how she’d acquired in 30 years of performing. A triumph, it was also, for her and for old-line pop entertainment, a last gasp (sometimes literally); three years later, the Beatles arrived on Ed Sullivan. Their sway over an audience would be different: diffuse and literally barricaded. Garland’s, as you can see in ­photos of the event—the men reaching up to grab her and she reaching down just as happily to be grabbed—was direct, seemingly personal, informed by her self-deprecating chatter about her hair and weight and also by their immense, inchoate gratitude. Which is why, despite astounding lung-splitters like “Swanee,� and “San Francisco� and ­“Chicago,� the concert’s highlights were the quiet ballads—“You’re Nearer,� “Do It Again�—in which her voice, unprotected by its brass armor, is a marvel of longing, phrasing, and making do with what you’ve got. “Do it again,� indeed; the live recording, which sometimes seems as if it’s half applause, has never been out of print. —Jesse Green Photo: © Joshua Greene

“Dave Van Ronk was loud and big and funny and laughed like a sailor. You could hear him a half-block away. He could also get angry and belligerent, but he had a huge generosity that just flew out of him. When I was working on my debut album, he told me that I didn’t give a fuck about folk music, which I thought was not really fair because I did. And I do. One of my first gigs was performing with Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall. I knew his work, I knew a lot of folk music. I knew Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston, I knew their work—that’s how I taught myself to play guitar. It’s the stuff I used to sing to the kids I babysat for. I loved it, but I wasn’t going to stay there forever. Van Ronk was particularly kind in the beginning, when I was 20, 21. By the time I was 25, I’d been around for five years and didn’t get a chance to make up with him. We weren’t close, but we were friendly. But I didn’t hold anything against him. It was at a birthday party for him, and I didn’t stay.� —Suzanne Vega Photo: 1963 AP

At Shea in 1965, there were too many girls. “At Shea, we were in Jerry Schatzberg’s Bentley. [Ronette] Nedra’s then-boyfriend, Scott, looked like Paul McCartney, and Schatzberg looked like one of the Beatles—he had the long hair too—so when people saw us, they said, “There are the Ronettes! And there are two Beatles!� And they ran. We had to hurry up and close our doors. They started shaking the car back and forth. I said, “Jerry, we’re going to die here. We’re going to die!� Luckily, Bentleys are strong. I said, “Jerry, just put your foot on the gas and go!� But we couldn’t even move! Later, we took the Beatles up to Spanish Harlem, to Sherman’s BBQ. John Lennon had called me: “Ronnie, we’re prisoners here at the Plaza.� So I went down there and I snuck them out. At Sherman’s, no one paid them any attention! No one looked up from their plates! All people cared about was the jukebox and their ribs. They loved not being recognized. They loved not being screamed at.� —Ronnie Spector

“At my West Side Story audition, I sort of entertained him, because I sang “My Man’s Gone Now� from Porgy and Bess, and that, coming from my mouth and my vocal ability, was really pretty funny to him. When he did teach me the songs, he just made me do things and allowed me to realize there were things I could do I never dreamed I could. At that time, dancers really thought dancers dance and singers sing. I was brave to even go audition, because we just never thought we could get anything out of our throats—it all came through our feet. I was just hoping I wouldn’t throw up all over his piano! I remember putting my hands behind my back, I was shaking so much. You have to have people like Leonard Bernstein to teach you, to coach you, to give you that confidence. His adjectives were big and colorful. He did everything 200 percent, and you learn from that—you mimic that. It was like Technicolor. I mean, he was very sexy too. Please! He was handsome, and those eyes just sparkled—you’d do anything for him. Hit a high C—I would’ve done it. I’ll never forget when we were doing “Tonight.� Lenny was in the pit—he was conducting us, and he had more energy than all of us put together. He was pulling it out of us—and all of a sudden he disappeared. He was so energized that he fell through the chair! He just went straight through it.� —Chita Rivera

Preparing for her first Broadway star turn, Streisand explained to Jerome Weidman, the writer of I Can Get It for You Wholesale, why she’d changed her name. “I hapna love Brooklyn, but it’s like the name Barbara. Every day with the third “a� in the middle, you could go out of your mind. I mean, what are we here for? Every day the same thing? No change? No variety? Why get born? Every day the same thing, you might as well be dead. I’ve had 19 years of “Barbara� with three a’s and all my life born in Brooklyn. Enough is enough. Don’t you understand that?� Photo: Harry Benson/2014 Getty Images

Richard Hell on why the genius of Lou Reed, John Cale, et al. has never been surpassed. In my opinion the Velvet Underground are the best rock-and-roll band in history. I’m still shocked and awed to rediscover this every time I listen to them. I can hardly contain myself. Just this moment, I played “Temptation Inside Your Heart� (recorded in 1968, unreleased until the VU compilation), for instance, and there are worlds in it. By many pop-music standards their recordings are ridiculous, but the recordings expose those standards as ignorant and inane.   I can’t deny it took me many ignorant and inane years to realize how good they are. I first heard their ­rec­ords when I was 17 or 18 and the band was actually playing in dark places in my neighborhood, but I never went to see them. They sounded to me like an incompetent Bob Dylan imitation. (This is the only thing that makes me think it might be worthwhile to live forever—the way one’s perceptions change across time. Then again, that can be exhausting, its own kind of monotony.) For a while back then—the late ’60s—I was hanging in the art world, where everybody seemed to dote on the Velvets, and I could only understand it as a kind of arty weak-­mindedness of painters. Even when I started paying more attention to music a few years later and came to love them, they seemed like a sidebar. Now, after all these years, they’re the most dependable, inexhaustible music of all.   It almost makes me forgive Lou Reed for being such a shit. I never met the guy, but I’ve heard a lot of firsthand stories and read interviews. He wasn’t nice. He must have known how good he was. When I think about it, of course he did, and it was not only what made the music possible but what made him mean—he resented the various failures of proper respect for himself, because he knew he was right. Whatever. But it’s a similar thing that accounts for the supremacy of the band. The Velvet Underground is rock and roll without any niceties, without anything but rock and roll. There are no concessions to people’s needs for flattery and safety and polish. It is pure rock and roll and comes from absolute confidence. That doesn’t mean it’s ugly or ­cruel—there’s a lot of empathy and oceans of beauty in the Velvet ­Underground. It’s just that it operates on the certainty that rock and roll is enough; it’s everything.   I expect that a lot of how this came about for the band was that they were middle-class kids who had the values of avant-garde artists. Also that Lou Reed was psychotic. They didn’t aim to please. “Always leave them wanting less,� their mentor Andy Warhol advised. (How wack is that? That, on top of everything else they did right, they had Andy Warhol?) The band’s origins were in La Monte Young and John Cage (thanks largely to John Cale) and Ornette Coleman as much as in their love for Bo Diddley and Phil Spector and cheap rock and roll. (I have to name Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker and Doug Yule, too. The group has never been surpassed.) Reed also brought a literary sophistication that was as disdainful of frills and concessions as his musical sensibility. His lyrics are the most genuinely poetic since Robert Johnson, and his delivery as seemingly throwaway as the band’s musical style feels. He does have that in common with Dylan: The vocals are so casual and sarcastic they hardly seem like singing at all. It’s nothing but rock and roll. Photo: Nat Finkelstein

If you happen to find yourself on Soho’s western fringe, on King Street between Varick and Hudson, you may notice a building on the south side of the block, a former parking garage that these days houses a Verizon communications facility. Then again, the building might not catch your eye at all. A long, low-slung pile of drab grayish-brown brick, it has never looked like much—not even in 1977. Back then, 84 King Street was home to the greatest nightclub in New York, and in the world; it was the epicenter of disco, the incubator of house, the cauldron in which more or less all of the dance-music culture that has followed in the decades since was cooked up. Which is to say: It was the domain of DJ Larry Levan.   Impresario Michael Brody opened the Paradise Garage in 1977. Fun was the mission of the club—but Brody was serious about fun. The Garage cultivated an exclusive, largely gay clientele and served no alcohol or food; he installed a gargantuan, state-of-the-art sound system, with walloping subwoofers, and placed the DJ at the center of the action. The Garage was, in other words, the model for the megaclubs that have followed, laying emphasis on music and dancing.   In Levan, who began his decadelong Saturday-night run at the club in 1977, Brody found the right priest for his temple. Levan was wizardly and innovative. His epic DJ sets mixed disco and soul and rock; he experimented with synthesizers and drum machines, weaving the disparate music into an eclectic, beatific flow. A commenter on discomusic.com recalled the effect of Levan’s music. “I was a helpless puppet being wildly manipulated by a mad puppeteer,� he wrote. “I became one with the music and the experience, and I have never been the same since.� —J.R.  Photo: photo by ©Tina Paul 1987/©Tina Paul 1987

On how a Studio 54 doorman inadvertently helped write a disco smash. “Grace Jones expressed interest in having me and Bernard Edwards possibly write and produce her next album. Obviously we knew her music and we knew who she was, but we had never spoken to Grace Jones. On the phone she had this very bizarre vocal affectation; when you hear her speaking voice it’s so over-the-top. We just thought she was putting on this voice for us as part of her code message on how to get into Studio 54. So she says, “Tell them you’re personal friends of Miss Grace Jones� [in a faux-Austrian accent]. So we knock on the door and say [in the same accent], “We are personal friends of Meees Graaaysss Jones,� and the guy slams the door in our faces and tells us to fuck off. And we say, “No no no no. Seriously, seriously, seriously,� and we try and get it better. “Weeee’re personal friends of Meeeesss Graaaaysss Jones.� We sounded like Bela Lugosi. He slammed the door in our faces again and told us to fuck off. So we realized that wasn’t going to work. We bought a couple of bottles of Champagne, which we used to call rock-and-roll mouthwash in those days—Dom Pérignon—because we were doing okay, and we just started jamming on a groove. And we were like, “Aww, fuck off!� ’cuz that’s what the guy told us to do. “Fuck Studio 54!� It was sounding great. And then Bernard, in his infinite wisdom, said, “My man, you know this shit is happenin’, right?� And I was like, “How are we gonna get ‘fuck off’ on the radio? No way.� And he’s like, “No, man, I’m telling you, this is really good.� So we changed it to “Freak Off.� And me being true to my hippie roots, the acid head in me, came back, said [in a California-dude affect], “You know, like, how about, man, we call it ‘Freak Out’?� Bernard was like, “What does that mean?� And I was like, “You know, when you drop a tab of acid, man, and things go bad.� And he’s like, “What the fuck?� So immediately I pulled myself together and was like, “No, man, you know when you go to a club and you’re freakin’ out on the dance floor.� And Bernard said something incredible, he said, “Plus my kids are doing that new dance called the ‘Freak.’ � And I went, “That new dance called the ‘Freak’? Right, Goddamn!� So we made it about being in Studio 54 dancing this new dance. Later, I practically lived in Studio 54.� Photo: Michael Norcia/© Corbis. All Rights Reserved.

“We used to rehearse in this bicycle store up on the West Side, Columbus and 82nd. The guy used to rent bicycles in the summer, and then we would go in and rehearse during the wintertime. There was a welfare hotel across the street, and we played their holiday show, and that was probably our first performance. So much of the Dolls, it’s like a crazy mishmash. Somebody would have a loft, and we would end up with 50 people there and the police coming. We were kind of pioneers in a sense. We used to have to go into bars or places and convince people that they should have a band. Once we started playing there, it opened it up to a lot of other bands. That’s what happened at the Mercer Arts Center. Suicide started playing there. Great band. The Modern Lovers as well. We were very much comrades. Nobody really articulated it, but we were trying to get a scene going. The East Village at that time was a hotbed of avant-garde everything. The high heels were easy. There was a shoemaker on Second Avenue who used to take the heel off and put in a steel shank so it was kind of indestructible. You could play basketball in them. We would put lipstick on when we were onstage. We didn’t think of it as drag. We were just trying to be what we thought somebody in a great rock band should look like.   At the time, so much of the music that was popular at the Fillmore was kind of like shoegazing, you know? There were so many bands that didn’t do anything, they just stood there and played. We wanted to put the Little Richard jolt back into rock and roll. It wasn’t like we had any kind of ultimate goal or anything. It’s funny, you read a snapshot of history of the Dolls, and it’ll say, “Oh, the Dolls played, but they failed to reach a mass appeal.� This “failed to reach a mass appeal� is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Like that’s the end-all of everything. Which is what the current culture is predicated on. Financial success defines artistic success. But I think the success of an artist is to be inspirational.� —David Johansen Photo: P. Felix/2006 Getty Images

“I’d look at various DJs of that time era, and the way that they were transitioning, I found them to be bumpy. It wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t clean. What was going on inside my head was, How am I going to control this drum solo and make it seamless? Eventually I figured out that in order to control the audio source, the vinyl, a lot of these DJs were using the tone arm. So now I started studying turntables, how they work. I came up with what I call torque theory: When you turn the turntable on, I would lightly rest my hand on the platter to see if the motor had enough muscle to be able to handle me moving my wrist back and forth over the vinyl. Many turntables failed. But there was a little-­known company called Technics, and they had this ugly turntable in the window called SL-120, and they were $75 apiece.   Then I had to figure out, “How can I hear the signal of the source in my ear before you can hear it?� So that’s when I created this peek-a-boo system. The peek-a-boo system consisted of a single-pole double-throw switch in a center position, to split the two signals. So when you click it to the left, I could hear the left turntable. Two clicks to the right, I could hear the right turntable. So now I was able to take these songs that had these teeny-tiny drum solos and just make them seamless. I would mark the record with a grease pencil or a crayon, where the break lived, and all the intersecting points. So when I wanted to repeat a break all I had to do is watch how many times the intersecting line passed the tone arm. If it passed four times until it went to the wack part, all I had to do was just rewind it backward and count.    The crowning achievement for me was that I had to do what all DJs wouldn’t do—physically put my hand on the record. My theory was, everything should be controlled via the vinyl, the fingertips. DJs used to treat vinyl like children! They would wipe the record down, and they would very carefully slide it back in the jacket. Me? I was just pulling the record out of the jacket and making it dirty! It had crayon marks all over it! But that was a way that I could execute what was going on inside my head. I came up with a science, you know, with the touch of my hand on a record. I came up with a science that almost the whole world does.� Photo: David Corio

Hip-hop’s origin story in 1970s New York City is a loop of fable, fact, and circumstance (see Robert Moses’s divisive Cross Bronx Expressway). But Jamaican transplant Clive “DJ Kool Herc� Campbell has been championed, and has championed himself, as the key originator, though Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation demur. The West Bronx high-rise 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where Herc (short for “Hercules,� a nod to his burly frame) threw parties in the small first-floor rec room, has been dubbed hip-hop’s birthplace. But let’s be honest, no one person could’ve birthed hip-hop’s crazy quilt of styles and rituals. What Herc did was throw the best parties—the loudest, sweatiest, most undeniable. His jams (in parks and elsewhere, featuring his oversize “Herculord� sound system and rapper Coke La Rock) were a refuge from street gangs and silk-shirt disco, but they were historic for how Herc dug into the percussive, fiercely funky “breaks� often found on records by James Brown and more exotic obscurities (English rockers Babe Ruth, the Incredible Bongo Band). He’d shift from break to break in different songs, a routine he called the “Merry-Go-Round,� pushing B-boys into a dancing frenzy and laying hip-hop’s rhythmic groundwork. The rest, like so much, remains history’s ongoing mystery.  —Charles Aaron

Talking Heads’ Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth on the Ramones and Talking Heads. Our first show was opening for the Ramones at CBGB in the fall of 1974. We had been going to CBGB from pretty much the first night we moved to New York. The first weekend I went, Patti Smith performed. I went back the following weekend, and the Ramones played. The Ramones were in their formative stages, and they would stop and argue with each other in the middle of a song. Johnny would say, “Okay, stop, stop. Something’s not right. Let’s play ‘I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement.’ � And Dee Dee would say, “No, Johnny! I don’t wanna play ‘I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement’!� To my way of thinking, it was really advanced artistically, even though a lot of people said that they were moronic.   Tina: “The one who always took authority was Johnny, because Johnny had gone to military school, and he had, let us say, a very stern father. Totally conservative. Republican …�   Chris: “I would say reactionary. But anyway, when it came time for us to make our debut, our audition at CBGB, I spoke to Hilly Kristal about it: ‘Hilly, we have a band …’ He recognized me from being a regular patron there, and I said, ‘We have a band, and I think we’re ready to do a show here.’ And he said, ‘Well, I could put you on with the Ramones.’ Someone asked Johnny, ‘Is it okay if the Talking Heads open for you?� and Johnny said, “Oh yeah, they’re going to suck, so it’s no problem. They can open for us.’�   Tina: “A few years later, in the spring of ’77, we went on tour to Europe with them.�   Chris: “It wasn’t a regular rock-and-roll tour bus, with bunks and everything; it was just like a tourist bus, with seats. So the Ramones would sit in their assigned seats, and we would sit pretty much wherever we wanted, and we would change seats from time to time, which really upset Johnny because he liked everybody to be in the same seat each day. And one of the famous episodes was the first show we went to: We went straight from the plane to the sound check in Zurich, Switzerland, and it was a nice theater and it had a restaurant connected to it, and we were allowed to have dinner at the restaurant. So we went down there and they started us off with a beautiful salad, nice, leafy green lettuce, and Johnny said, ‘What the fuck is this?!’� [Laughs]   Tina: “He wanted iceberg lettuce. He would hate kale. He would hate everything like that.� Photo: Roberta Bayley

“John lived right across the hall from me. I used to hear him play through the wall. As a matter of fact, I heard him writing “Imagine� through the wall. Mmmm, yes I did. Whoever sits down and plays the piano in that room, it usually comes trailing through the wall. I was in the studio with him on a couple of occasions; it was like a special thing that I didn’t take for granted. I was so nervous. I was going, I’m going to sing with John Lennon, whoo! And that’s what it was like being this close to him, hearing him write songs through the wall. In the case of “Imagine,� I know that was him, because, like yourself, I know that song now. But I didn’t know it when I heard it. I couldn’t hear, “Imagine there’s no heaven …� I couldn’t understand the words that well. But I could make out the melody and the little chords. And when I heard the full song, I was just completely overwhelmed.� —Roberta Flack Photo: 2005 Getty Images

At the Bottom Line in 1974, the stakes were high, as his introduction to “Kitty’s Back� reveals: “Before I came in tonight, somebody sent me this box, this long box, and I opened it up and in there was this knife—remember that, boys? It was covered with blood. There was a little letter explaining that this was an approximation of … of how my blood would look on that knife if I wasn’t good tonight, because … Kitty’s back!�

“I bleached my hair and I started getting a lot of street noise about it. And we had been trying to think of a good name that would be commercial and easy to understand, and one day I was walking along Houston Street, Chris Stein was living on First Avenue, and somebody yelled, “Blondie!� out the window, and I said, “Oh! Gee, that’s an easy name to remember.�   Then Chris and I got a loft at 266 Bowery, right down the street from CBGB. It was a pretty strange building. It had once been a sweatshop, maybe a doll factory. On the ground floor, the street floor, was a liquor store, where all the Bowery bums would get their Night Train. We thought it was haunted.   Record labels weren’t running out to sign the next hot babe. They were looking for, you know, cute guys. It made me feel like they were really stupid and missing the point. It probably made me feel more aggressive. And sometimes it probably made me more frustrated. I think it was a time of aggression, in a way. People were struggling so much at that point. And it was sort of like staring out into the void. As much as you wanted to think that you were going to be a huge rock star, nobody was really; it wasn’t really making a dent in anyone’s income. It was strictly determination and that kind of aggression.� —Debbie Harry

“Do the Right Thing takes place on the hottest day of the summer. And one thing about New York City is that there’s always one song that becomes the song of the summer—coming out of people’s cars, it’s coming out of people’s windows, it’s coming out the boom box, back then. So I wanted to have a song like that, an anthem. And automatically I thought of Public Enemy. There was no one else making that type of music, their lyrical content, the militancy. Here’s the thing that a lot of people don’t know—“Fight the Power� was not the first song that was submitted to me. No. The first song was a good song, but it wasn’t really what I wanted. By that time, we had a cut, so I showed him the film. And Chuck got it. He sat in the front and I was sitting in the back while he watched it, and he loved it. They were hyped. I mean, they had never seen a film like this before, dealing with issues like that before. And let’s remember, 1989, New York City was a very racially polarized city. You got Koch, you got Howard Beach. Things were tense. And they understood exactly the tone, the message, and what this film was saying. And once I showed him the film, they murdered it. Chuck D and the Bomb Squad came back with “Fight the Power.�   They came back with this gem, and I lost my mind. [Laughs] I was jumping up and down, like I had stuck my finger in an electric socket. Because I knew that this song would propel the film.� —Spike Lee Photo: Lisa Haun

By 1986, one of New York City’s most epochal structures was a grimy relic. Built for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens’s Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, the Unisphere had fallen victim to budget cuts—its geyser fountains, which once gave the illusion that the 900,000-pound, 12-story-high, stainless-steel model of the Earth was floating above the ground, were dry. Speckled by litter and graffiti, it wasn’t even a storied skateboarding spot yet. Once symbolizing the city’s, and America’s, expansive ingenuity at the height of the Space Age, the Unisphere instead spotlighted our petty dysfunction.   But when Def Jam Recordings co-founder Rick Rubin envisioned the gatefold art of the Beastie Boys’ ’86 debut album, Licensed to Ill, he had only one setting in mind. “Rick and Russell [Simmons, Rubin’s Def Jam partner] had this idea of the Beasties as a ‘Let’s take over the world’ kind of thing,� explains Sunny Bak, who took the iconic photo of the Boys posing in front of the silver orb.   A New Yorker who attended the ’64 World’s Fair as a child, Bak remembered the “Globitron� (as it was later known) in all its original splendor. She was also a part of the Beasties’ circle—they frequented her studio on 18th and Broadway, which was used as the site of the “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)� video. “I practically had to move because of the sour smell; I couldn’t get the whipped cream out of my carpet,� she now says wryly. In case you’re wondering, Bak contends that she never visualized fans rolling joints on her handiwork. There’s been a lot of chatter over the years that the Beasties were “typical New York kids.� Maybe in some idealized sense, but it’s more that they were gifted boho interlocutors who were adept at playing a variety of kids, real or imagined, while their music cannily exploited the myth of the city as a free-floating cultural playground. —C.A. 

The appearance of Ol’ Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan at a Hammerstein Ballroom gig in November 2000 was not supposed to happen. Long considered the Ringo figure of the collective’s 36-plus chambers of doom, gloom, and genius, ODB had not performed with the group for some time. This owed to his rather uneasy mental state—asked how he was doing, the former Russell Jones often replied simply, “Haldol,� the name of the antipsychotic he was on—as well as his persistent run-ins with the law. ODB was on the lam as his Wu-Tang brethren, GZA, RZA, Ghostface Killah, Method Man, Raekwon, and the rest, prepared to perform their most recent album, The W, at the Hammerstein. This sticking point did not, however, keep ODB from arriving in the middle of the show to perform both “Shimmy Shimmy Ya� and “Wu Tang Ain’t Nothing ta F’ Wit� to vast acclaim before managing to vanish once more.  Alas, ODB was soon apprehended, in the parking lot of a Philly McDonald’s after causing a commotion while signing autographs. —M.J.  Photo: Bob Berg/1997 Bob Berg

Who’s the biggest pop star in New York City right now? Don’t answer too quickly, you might be forgetting Anthony “Romeo� Santos, the self-­proclaimed (and universally acknowledged) king of new bachata, the hip-hop-R&B-influenced gloss on the Dominican Republic’s national pop style. Santos, a Bronx-born-and-bred singer of Dominican and Puerto Rican extraction, has been the genre’s biggest star for over a decade, churning out a seemingly unstoppable torrent of Latin radio hits, first with his old band, Aventura, and since 2011 as a solo artist. Santos’s latest, Formula, Vol. 2, was released in February and, as usual, it’s a juggernaut, topping the Latin album charts, producing two No. 1 singles, and spurring Santos to his first headlining date at the big building in his home borough, Yankee Stadium. Formula, Vol. 2 may also be Santos’s best record: a plush display case for his shimmering falsetto, one of the sweetest sounds in any pop genre, and one of the most seductive. They call the guy Romeo for a reason. —J.R.  Photo: John Parra/2013 John Parra

Ezra Koenig on how to dress a vampire. “Christmas break of senior year, I started to get this idea: It’d be cool to start, like, a preppy band. That’s kind of all the original idea was. The thing is, my family is very un-preppy. My dad grew up in public housing in the Bronx. Which, to be fair, is not unlike how Ralph ­Lauren grew up, but that said, he didn’t get into preppy clothes. So I grew up in a very not-preppy household, but the town I grew up in, especially in the ’80s, had a reputation for being a preppy town. So when I was growing up, the standard cool kid at my high school was somebody who’d listen to the Dave Matthews Band and wear a North Face fleece and a hemp necklace and khaki pants, you know, kind of a weird corruption of preppy stuff. But as I started going to thrift stores and rummage sales at the churches in town, I started finding old Lacoste and Polo stuff, legitimately from ’80s preppy people, whose parents were probably getting rid of it, and it sparked something in me. There was something about the clothes that I found funny, but also compelling. And around the same time, I got a copy of The Official Preppy Handbook at a yard sale in my town. So all this kind of ’80s-preppy shit that people were trying to get rid of in the late ’90s, I was there, buying it for 50 cents. That was a big part of my education.   I got the sense of humor, but it’s a very modern sense of humor, like the way today so many of us love and hate everything. Like, if you look at the relationships people have, especially young ­people, to some of the things they like, and it’s kind of cool, people can be very happily like, Oh, I’m obsessed with that horrible thing, and it doesn’t seem like the fact that they’re calling it horrible or that they’re obsessed with it is all that strange anymore. Or the fact that you love something, but you also kind of hate it. There’s ­something about the humor of The Official Preppy Handbook, you can’t pretend to have ironic distance when you know that much about something. You’re very embedded in it.� Photo: Mick Hutson/2008 Mick Hutson

Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ arrival in 2003 was not exactly stealthy: They erupted onto the scene, very loudly and showily. The band gave the early-aughts New York rock revival something it needed badly: a female star. Karen O is a born rock star; on the group’s debut album, Fever to Tell, she was electric, singing about sex and nightlife and other bohemian preoccupations with a bewitching mixture of hipster froideur and hopeless romanticism. The latter came to the surface, grandly, in “Maps,� a power ballad sturdy enough to be paid the ultimate compliment by pop songwriter wizards Max Martin and Dr. Luke. (They reportedly, uh, borrowed from “Maps� in the Kelly Clarkson smash “Since U Been Gone.�) Yeah Yeah Yeahs had another major weapon: guitarist Nick Zinner, a sly six-string whiz. The result: Brooklyn rock that was, lo and behold, original, extending the legacy of the city’s ’70s and ’80s punk and post-punk heroes, rather than straining to reenact it. —J.R.   Photo: Ross Gilmore

Four years and two platinum albums ago, Nicki Minaj sat in a greenroom in a pink beehive wig and a baby-blue T-shirt, talking to a film crew for My Time Now, an hourlong special that appeared on MTV in late November 2010—just days after Minaj’s debut album, Pink Friday, hit stores. Then 27 years old, the rapper from Jamaica, Queens, by way of Trinidad and Tobago, had just been asked to do a favor for an unnamed rapper, and she was angry. The issue, she said, had to do with “egos getting in the way. But when I have an ego, I’m a bitch. So I’ll be that.�   In the monologue that follows, Minaj delivers what is essentially a saucier Lean In, a succinct manifesto on the double standards against successful female artists in the music industry. She compares herself to Lil Wayne, her mentor and label mate—and a man, she argues, who can make any kind of professional demand and get away with it: “When I’m assertive, I’m a bitch. When a man is assertive, he’s a boss.� If she shows up for a photo shoot with “a $50 clothes budget and some sliced pickles on a motherfuckin’ board,� her reputation takes a hit. The kicker she delivers is near fable by now: “Had I accepted the pickle juice,� she says, and then pauses for effect, “I would be drinking pickle juice right now.�   It’s classically Minaj: brutal and mocking, with a slight smile under the profanity, and an analogy so absurd it works. Four years have passed, and she’s still off the pickle juice.   “Why isn’t there a female rapper turned mogul?� Minaj wondered then. “I don’t know why women haven’t done it; I just know I want to be the first woman to do it. And I will be.� She looks away from the camera to apply eye makeup. “Don’t use this footage, please. It’s just gonna make me look stupid.� But four years later, it’s fresher than ever. —Emma Carmichael

At an East Village café, Adam Green remembers taking a chance: “I was 17 years old, living in the city alone, writing songs, and kind of wandering around … I was playing on the subway platforms, and I started going to the open mike at Sidewalk Café. I told the booker I had a band … and could we play a show? And Kimya [Dawson] and the guys came down here in a van painted like a peach. I don’t know, it was funny.�