Quick Take
- Narration: Adam Verner handles the book’s rapid scene-switching with practiced ease, maintaining separate energies for the South Bronx hip-hop chapters and the Lower Manhattan loft jazz sections without overplaying any of them.
- Themes: Urban decay as creative catalyst, genre collision and cross-pollination, New York City as a contained musical universe
- Mood: Dense, panoramic, and propulsive, like standing at an intersection where five parades are passing simultaneously
- Verdict: An encyclopedic and personal account of the most musically fertile five years in New York City history, though the rapid scene-switching requires an attentive listener.
A musician friend recommended this book to me years ago with a warning that I would immediately want to buy an enormous amount of music as a result of reading it. He was right. I came back to the audiobook version on a winter weekend when I had thirteen hours I could spend in motion, and I spent most of Saturday and Sunday walking around with Adam Verner in my ears and my sense of what New York City was in the mid-1970s being permanently revised.
The book covers New Year’s Day 1973 to New Year’s Eve 1977, and the choice of endpoints is precise. Hermes is not just demarcating a convenient five-year window: he is identifying the specific span during which punk rock, hip-hop, disco, salsa, minimalist composition, and loft jazz all emerged and began to recognize each other in ways that changed what music could be. The claim that this was happening all at once, all in the same city, with musicians who knew and borrowed from each other, is the book’s central argument, and Hermes proves it not through assertion but through accumulated, specific detail.
The Geography of Musical Revolution
What distinguishes this book from other histories of the period is its physical specificity. Hermes moves from post-Dylan Greenwich Village to the arson-scarred South Bronx barrios where salsa and hip-hop were taking shape, to the lower Manhattan lofts where jazz and classical composition were being reimagined, to the ramshackle clubs CBGB and the Gallery where rock and dance music were being rebuilt for a new generation. These are not abstract locations. Hermes grew up in Queens and was making these journeys himself during the period he is describing, which gives the book an autobiographical undercurrent that prevents it from feeling like scholarship alone.
Willie Colon and the Fania All-Stars renting Yankee Stadium to take salsa to the masses is the kind of detail that makes you stop walking and stand on the sidewalk for a moment. Grandmaster Flash transforming the turntable into a musical instrument is described with the same weight. The proximity of these two revolutions, geographically and temporally, is what the book insists on, and the insistence is convincing.
When the Jumping Around Is the Point
One reviewer acknowledges initial frustration with the book’s rapid movement between subjects, then describes a shift: as the book develops, the pacing begins to feel like the material itself. New York in 1973-1977 was not organized into neat chapters, and a book that gave each scene its own contained section would misrepresent the cross-contamination that was the period’s essential quality. Hermes frequently drops a scene at a moment of maximum interest and picks up another one, which creates a genuine sense of a city where everything is happening at once and you cannot watch it all but you know it is all there.
Reviewers who loved it consistently describe it as “extremely thorough” and as something that makes you want to understand both the music and the New York of those years. One compares the experience to Nick Hornby’s enthusiastic recommendation, noting the warning that readers would buy a lot of music as a result. That warning holds for listeners too.
Springsteen, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, and What the List Leaves Out
The book’s cast is remarkable: Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith claiming Manhattan as New Jersey outsiders, David Byrne and Talking Heads arriving to prove that rock music was capable of more than it seemed. But what the book genuinely understands is that these figures, the ones whose names have survived most clearly into the historical record, were not the whole story of those five years. The Fania All-Stars, the loft jazz musicians playing for audiences of thirty in lower Manhattan warehouses, the pioneers of breakbeat culture in the South Bronx: these are given equal weight, and that egalitarianism is what makes the book’s argument about New York as a single musical laboratory convincing rather than hyperbolic.
At thirteen hours, this is a demanding listen, but the demands it makes are rewarding ones. Adam Verner’s narration manages the book’s structural complexity with skill, shifting energy between scenes without losing the connective thread that holds them together. This is music history at the scale the subject demands.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the book focus primarily on punk and rock, or does it give equal weight to hip-hop, salsa, and jazz?
Equal weight is central to the book’s argument. Hermes insists that the mid-1970s New York music scene was defined by the simultaneous emergence and cross-pollination of punk, hip-hop, salsa, disco, minimalist composition, and loft jazz, all in proximity to each other. Prioritizing one would undermine the thesis.
One reviewer mentioned the book jumps around quite a bit, is this a structural problem or an intentional choice?
The same reviewer who flagged this describes the frustration dissolving as the book develops, noting that the rapid scene-switching ends up feeling like the material itself. The pace mirrors the actual simultaneity of the creative explosion Hermes is documenting. Listeners who prefer linear narrative may need to adjust to the approach.
Does Will Hermes’s personal experience of the period, he grew up in Queens and attended these scenes, change how the history is told?
Yes, significantly. Several passages move into first-person recollection, and the sense of a historian who was physically present in the locations he is describing gives the book an experiential warmth that purely archival music history typically lacks.
Is this a book for music specialists, or accessible to a general listener interested in the period?
Reviewers describe it as accessible to anyone interested in music history or New York City, not just specialists. One reviewer bought it after a herniated disc recovery on Nick Hornby’s recommendation, with no specialist background, and found it both thorough and enormously pleasurable.
