Meet Me in the Bathroom

Lizzy Goodman

• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062233127
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR and GQ

Joining the ranks of the classics Please Kill Me, Our Band Could Be Your Life, and Can't Stop Won't Stop, an intriguing oral history of the post-9/11 decline of the old-guard music industry and rebirth of the New York rock scene, led by a group of iconoclastic rock bands.

In the second half of the twentieth-century New York was the source of new sounds, including the Greenwich Village folk scene, punk and new wave, and hip-hop. But as the end of the millennium neared, cutting-edge bands began emerging from Seattle, Austin, and London, pushing New York further from the epicenter. The behemoth music industry, too, found itself in free fall, under siege from technology. Then 9/11/2001 plunged the country into a state of uncertainty and war—and a dozen New York City bands that had been honing their sound and style in relative obscurity suddenly became symbols of glamour for a young, web-savvy, forward-looking generation in need of an anthem.

Meet Me in the Bathroom charts the transformation of the New York music scene in the first decade of the 2000s, the bands behind it—including The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, and Vampire Weekend—and the cultural forces that shaped it, from the Internet to a booming real estate market that forced artists out of the Lower East Side to Williamsburg. Drawing on 200 original interviews with James Murphy, Julian Casablancas, Karen O, Ezra Koenig, and many others musicians, artists, journalists, bloggers, photographers, managers, music executives, groupies, models, movie stars, and DJs who lived through this explosive time, journalist Lizzy Goodman offers a fascinating portrait of a time and a place that gave birth to a new era in modern rock-and-roll.

PART I

NOSTALGIA FOR AN HOUR AGO

1

“THE PLACE WHERE ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN”

CONOR MCNICHOLAS: Everybody is living through their own golden age, but you only realize it afterward, so start living it now.

CHRIS TOMSON: It involves a single decade, a single city.

LUKE JENNER: Everyone has a fantasy about New York.

DAVE SITEK: The idea of moving to New York to make it is a really potent thing. It’s a narcotic.

WALTER DURKACZ: New York has always been the ultimate dream for people—Shangri-la, Atlantis, whatever. It’s the place where you think anything can happen.

CARL SWANSON: It’s this place you go to escape America and have your own semi-utopic ideal.

JIMI GOODWIN: We wrote a song called “New York.” It was about New York as an idea. A place where anything is possible, a place where you can find complete artistic freedom. We wrote that song on a fucking Scottish island in the middle of nowhere, before we’d ever been to the city; that’s how powerful it is.

SIMON REYNOLDS: New York seemed like a city that was at the very edge of everything and on the point of collapse. It was like a raw jungle and the ultimate in decadence and artistry at the same time. In England, New York seemed impossibly far away.

ANGUS ANDREW: And it was nasty. That was important, that things were dirty. It wasn’t about a sense of living in New York for a music scene that we wanted to join, it was more of a geographic thing, and sort of a challenge, too.

JALEEL BUNTON: You’d go around the world and you’d have respect because you are from New York. “Oh, you’re from New York?” People who don’t live in New York bow down to this mythic thing. Because you needed to have a certain courage to live here. Your exposure to everyone was full blast. If you could thrive in this little petri dish of intense humanity, that deserved a bit of honor.

NIC OFFER: Everyone is here to do something. They’re here because they’re smart, and they were able to cast off the chains of their small town.

CARL SWANSON: You were the weird kid, and you come to New York to meet up with people who are also indigestible to mass culture. You learn from the junkies, the drag queens, and all the other people, people who are themselves.

CHRISTIAN JOY: Growing up, everyone was always talking about how scary and evil New York was, which made me want to go even more.

CARL SWANSON: If you were in your right mind and could sociologically find comfort in the rest of the country, you would not live here. That’s part of the appeal.

CHRISTIAN JOY: I think about places like Portland and Chicago, which are really nice, and it’s great to go to those places and they’re beautiful and the food is great, but I don’t know . . . it’s almost too easy.

LUKE JENNER: This is a city of immigrants, you know? The Statue of Liberty is a real concept. Same thing with L.A. or London or any other big city. I mean, Paris: Picasso is not from Paris. Like, Madonna is from the Midwest. Every classic New York artist is not from here.

JALEEL BUNTON: People move to New York to become famous. Think of the legacy—Madonna, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, everybody moved to New York to become famous. The list goes on forever and ever and ever. It’s the move-to-get-famous place.

KAREN O: New York was Blondie, Patti Smith, Ramones, Television . . .

MATT BERNINGER: It was Woody Allen’s Manhattan, to me.

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER: I got sucked in through movies more than music. I was really obsessed with Martin Scorsese by the time I was fourteen. I had the fantasy that he was my father and my boyfriend. I don’t know why. He’s way too short. But that shaped my myth of New York.

RYAN ADAMS: I remember seeing New York in black and white films. Growing up, we watched a lot of old movies and I saw a lot of skylines. I also read a lot of comic books, and I thought that Gotham was New York City. I had it in my mind that I belonged there from a pretty early age. There were lots of cliché small-town-boy-wants-to-move-to-the-big-city-and-do-his-thing kind of things about me moving here, but I’m not embarrassed about any of it. That’s how it works. That’s how it should be.

ALISON MOSSHART: When I was fifteen or sixteen I took the Greyhound from Florida to New York with a girlfriend. We didn’t have any money. We had nowhere to stay. We had, like, backpacks. Both of us were art students and the plan was we were just going to walk the streets all night, find somewhere to sleep, and make art. After like a day and a half, we were starving, like, “Oh my god I would just kill for a fucking cucumber!” But it was great because we did walk the streets all night! And we did find all sorts of crazy trash and weird things people threw away to make art out of. We filled journals and books. I mean, we did so much in three or four days. And we ended up finding a place to sleep and we ended up finding a shower and we ended up getting fed at some point. And it was beautiful.

KAREN O: My thing about New York was just to be around cute, cool guys. There were no boys at my high school that were even close. This was fantasy land where those kinds of guys existed.

MATT BERNINGER: I took the train to New York from Cincinnati, the first time I came here, and coming out of Penn Station into the city was just a total Wizard of Oz moment. It always kind of stayed that way.

JACK WHITE: The first time I came to New York was on a Greyhound bus and I stayed at a hostel at age seventeen. New York is confusing to me. I love the Velvet Underground’s take, and Woody Allen’s grainy Manhattan, the New York City of the seventies. That town can have hundreds of personalities—not the people, the town itself. I like it better from afar, but I’m always thankful it exists.

2

NEW YORK BANDS AREN’T COOL

MARC MARON: The fantasy of New York in the nineties was really built on the carcass of seventies New York. That is when the city was really broke and there was something really raw and weird going on. That scene that happened in the 1970s where art and music and the avant-garde all started to mesh, post–the Factory, the era of renegade culture that created punk, was long gone. Done. You’re twice removed from the Factory. Twice removed from the original CBGB’s. Everyone was really posturing.

MOBY: Seventies New York was the New York that inspired “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Shattered” and the Sex Pistols song “New York.” It was such an artistic magnet and inspiration because anybody could afford to live there, and it was so dangerous and dirty.

DEAN WAREHAM: You could drink in the city back then, too. Even as young as fifteen or sixteen you could walk to a deli—I mean, the drinking age was eighteen but nobody really cared—you could buy beer and you could go to CBGB’s.

ETHAN JOHNS: New York in the seventies was like some kind of weird postapocalyptic movie. There was a real sense of apprehension on the streets, almost out of control, almost anarchistic. A bit of a free-for-all, really, heightened sense of danger around every corner but a really vibrant place.

JESSE MALIN: New York was scary then. It looked like Taxi Driver, those scenes, lights and hookers; the hookers looked like rock stars.

MOBY: By the eighties it was almost like people outdid themselves to be more eclectic and more idiosyncratic. You’d go to see the Bad Brains, and the DJ beforehand was playing reggae and hip-hop and country-western. That eclecticism was really—it was very exciting, you didn’t want to just identify with one style of music or one way of dressing. And the people that came out of that, like Rick Rubin and the Beastie Boys, Jean-Michel Basquiat, myself, to an extent, are all really weird and eclectic, even Madonna.

DEAN WAREHAM: I saw the Ramones. I saw B-52s before they blew up. The Clash. Elvis Costello. Blondie. I saw a lot of great music, but by the time I was playing in bands myself, New York was not such a good place to be for a band.

ROB SHEFFIELD: In the nineties, living in New York or L.A. was kind of a sucker move if you were a band. People were paying attention to music and caring about it, the way they care about TV or food now. There was just so much energy and attention focused on music, there was a sense that your town was just as connected as any other town. The last thing anyone would have done was move to New York to make it as a musician.

MARC SPITZ: You could play on Bleecker Street for tourists or Nightingale’s if you were a jam band. If you were a cool rock band, you were lucky if you got to play for beer or cab fare at a party in one of the big lofts in Williamsburg or even further out in bumfuck Brooklyn. There’d be a keg and a bunch of like-minded poseurs in black and no record label scouts. Just postgrad drunks s...