This Must Be the Place

May 15, 2023
Journalist Rifkin’s ambitious yet uneven debut chronicles New York City’s thriving music milieus over the past 60 years. Zeroing in on Lower Manhattan, with Williamsburg, Brooklyn, idiosyncratically tacked on since it’s just “one subway stop away from the East Village,” Rifkin captures jazz in Soho and folk in Greenwich Village, and examines how those scenes affected—and often significantly changed—the “mostly working-class or industrial” neighborhoods in which they formed. In the 2000s, indie rock helped make Williamsburg “an epicenter of cutting-edge music,” hiking rent prices that drove out Puerto Rican and Dominican families. Rifkin conducted more than 100 interviews for the book, and stitches in fascinating anecdotes from the likes of Buffy Saint-Marie, Charlemagne Palestine, and Judy Collins, who describes the early spirit of Greenwich Village: “After I moved here, I immediately ran into everybody in town who wrote songs. I’d walk down the street and there would be Tom Paxton... and then he’d sing me ‘Bottle of Wine.’ ” Despite its bright moments, snarky side notes distract (“As of this book’s writing, Rudy Giuliani is tragically still alive. I wish him only the worst”), and Rifkin’s frequent laments about the type of businesses that currently occupy former music spaces becomes repetitive. This is a missed opportunity.

June 1, 2023
Is New York "over"? Has New York closed itself off to everyone but the wealthy? Can young artists still make it in the city that never sleeps? Music historian Rifkin is a realist--he knows the number of music venues in the city have dwindled considerably in recent years--and yet he remains a cautious optimist. With an eye to the future, he looks to the past, chronicling rising rents and 60 years' worth of music, from Tom Paxton to Television, Sonic Youth to Beck, to name some of the more well-known figures. He covers the Greenwich Village folk scene, the "loft" jazz scene in Soho and Tribeca, glam rock, the early days of punk, the eclectic music club CBGB, no wave, disco, early hip-hop, and the so-called antifolk scene, among other musical genres and venues. He includes many interviews with musicians who are still around to reminisce about the good ol' days, and each chapter provides a helpful suggested listening list. An enjoyably knowledgeable yet casual cultural reconnaissance through the glory days of New York music history.

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July 1, 2023

Music historian Rifkin presents themed chapters focusing on the musicians and performance venues in lower Manhattan from the 1950s to the present. As that area transitioned from folk and avant-garde music to jazz, punk, and beyond, Rifkin, who owns and operates Walk on the Wild Side Tours NYC, deftly introduces major players (Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, David Bowie), famous places (Washington Square Park, Village Vanguard, Max's Kansas City) and a host of supporting characters in the background, including club owners, concert promoters, the city's notorious zoning boards, and more. Some readers might find the tone to be a persistent undercurrent of simmering anger at gentrification's effects, with way too much emphasis on attendant finances, but interview excerpts with seminal figures of the various movements, contemporary photographs of the locales, and suggested listening ideas are special highlights. This nostalgia-filled, informative traversal of the eclectic scenes encapsulates the city's meaning to and mutual benefits for the musicians and associated artists. VERDICT Overall, music lovers will wax nostalgic for the passing of the various genres and relish what has been memorialized.--Barry Zaslow

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2023
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.

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