THIS MUST BE THE PLACE

A lively history of New York City’s many musical scenes and their settings.

Some observers say that New York is dead, merely the playground of the idle rich and tourists. Nonsense, replies cultural tour guide Rifkin. It’s just that “many people feel strongly that New York’s final golden era occurred when they personally just so happened to be in their twenties, and that the city’s decline roughly coincided with them entering their mid or late thirties,” when they stopped club hopping and following bands. Rifkin covers several golden eras from the 1950s to the present. Many people and places are gone: Tom Verlaine and Joey Ramone are dead; ditto the legendary club CBGB and almost all the old Village folk clubs and No Wave hangouts. Only Yoko Ono could afford to buy one of the places where she used to do her version of jazz before she met John Lennon. The Mercer Arts Center, the former home of the New York Dolls, is now an NYU dorm, and Max’s Kansas City has housed “a succession of unspectacular delis.” But for every anti-folk, hip-hop, or hardcore locus that’s fallen to the wrecking ball, there are both remaining old places and, more important, new places with scenes that, Rifkin challenges, should not be discounted without going out every night “most nights of the week, every week, for at least a couple years”—at which point you’re qualified to complain. Drawing on oral histories by those who were around at places like the Mudd Club and Studio 54, who frequented gay discos in the 1970s and break dancing parks in the ’80s, and who made their own fun and noise, Rifkin turns in an essential chronicle of the city’s cultural history.

A pleasure—and an education—for every fan of popular music and its most important Gotham venues.