Lizzy Goodman, _Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, 2001-2011_

THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS at the end of Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of the New York music scene at the turn of the 21st century require five pages but somehow fail to mention Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me, an oral history of the New York music scene of the 1970s, even though Goodman sticks fairly closely to the template laid down by the predecessor volume. (Whoever wrote the jacket flap copy for the hardback gives McNeil and McCain their due, I’m glad to report.)

Meet Me in the Bathroom, like Please Kill Me, focuses on pioneering bands playing in tiny, unhygienic, and usually short-lived clubs, then suddenly getting a few white-hot months of global attention, then having a few decades of trying to understand exactly what the hell happened. As was the case with the archetypal New York band, Velvet Underground, the bands that learned from the pioneers often had much longer and more lucrative careers than the pioneers themselves (Television as opposed to U2 in the 1970s, the Strokes as opposed to the Arctic Monkeys in the ‘00s). 

Along the way,, there are a lot of parties, a lot of sex, a lot of drugs. James Williamson’s role in Please KIll Me as opiate-evangelizing Prince of Darkness is reprised in Meet Me in the Bathroom by Ryan Adams.

So, a not entirely original book, but illuminating. I hadn’t realized that the Brooklyn and Manhattan wings of the explosion saw themselves as quite distinct, for instance, or that dance club culture contributed as significantly as it did (lots of good material here from James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).

It would be nice to have a book like this on every now-legendary scene. It must take an enormous amount of work: figuring out who to talk to, getting them to talk to you, transcribing everything, then the arduous work of collating and organizing into a coherent story. Stories of scenes would inevitably sound a lot alike—the grubby, unlikely beginnings, the early tremors, the explosion, the drawn-out dispersal and entropy—but having the eloquent little ground-level-view stories always makes a difference.