Meet Me in the Bathroom Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011

Thanks also to PR powerhouse Katie Steinberg, a crucial addition to the Meet Me team, as well as to Susan Amster, who took a book in which rock stars talk about making their own crack and made it legally publishable.

JAMES MURPHY: “Scene” was never a dirty word. “Scene” was a good word pre-hipster. A scene was what you were proud of. We were trying to build a scene. At the same time we were myth building, we were scene building. Now it seems grotesque. But before universal hipster-ism, that was what you were proud of—where you were from, your family. As a kid you were defined by what you listened to. These days, everyone strives to be the surprise. But everyone is striving to be the surprise in the exact same way. “Oh, you have a unicycle and antlers and a wax recorder? Surprise!”

MOBY: Now you could reach your audience more directly. In the eighties and nineties, there were five outlets—there was Spin, Rolling Stone, MTV, VH1, and alternative rock radio—and if you didn’t have the support of those five things, your label was going to drop you and no one would hear your records. Suddenly, with the Internet, people could reach people directly, bypass the gatekeepers, and have almost, in a weird way, a more authentic experience. The art was more authentic and the relationship the artists had with the audience was more authentic. Personally, I think very much the Internet has benefited music, because there’s less profit motive, so I think that people have no incentive to compromise. 

ALEX WAGNER: I absolutely think that those were moments of national trauma for generations that moved through it, and generations that just kind of heard about it. It’s a triptych: the election, 9/11, and then the invasion of Iraq. I don’t think you can underestimate how much that has changed the internal and external landscape of American identity.

JOE LEVY: What people love about New York is what they hate about New York: it’s constantly changing. So it was always better before, whenever “before” was—basically whenever the person talking was twenty-two.

JAMES MURPHY: Tyler was there for film, so we went to some crazy film party where people were putting out baguettes of cocaine.

JULIAN CASABLANCAS: Gordon just had the right ingredients for us. We tried to do the same songs with other people and they sounded totally stale. Gordon is the king of understanding abstract information. You’d get further by saying, “Could you make it sound more yellow?” than you could saying, “Take out the bottom end,” or something. He’d get it. RYAN GENTLES: Gordon is such a great interpreter of musicians. Julian won’t say, “That hi-hat is too trebly, turn the bass up or the treble down.” He’ll say, “I need the hi-hat to sound like the rich guy who hangs out at the party and doesn’t talk to girls, waits for them to come and talk to him,” and Gordon is like, “Okay.” That’s almost verbatim how I’ve heard him describe a hi-hat sound. “It’s too much like the way a sleeping bum smells on a Friday night when he’s had too much booze; I don’t want it to smell like that, gussy it up and shave him. That’s the snare drum sound I want.” He talks in analogies like that and Gordon understands them.

WARREN FISCHER: It sounds ridiculous at this point, but being able to e-mail people on a daily basis was a habit that was very new in 1998 and 1999. These were the embryonic stages of web press or record labels having websites. The Internet facilitated our presence internationally. It connected microscopic but like-minded themes from different places. Suddenly it’s not Chicago, it’s not Seattle, it’s not New York, it’s not Brooklyn, it’s not Miami, it’s not Chapel Hill, it’s just a sound.

JAMES MURPHY: I'd already seen David at Marcus and Dom's party. He wanted to do a basement thing underground after making the record, so we just went. There were just a bunch of people, though we hadn't quite gelled as a crew as yet. We were not yet the DFA wrecking crew. I'd just go and listen. TIM GOLDSWORTHY: But then it happened. I guess James probably got clearance from his therapist that he should do some ecstasy, because he was big into that. Three-times-a-week therapy since he was like six or something. So one weekend James decides that he can do it and he buys about twenty packs of Juicy Fruit because he's heard or read somewhere that you chew a lot of gum when you're high. Within the first half hour he's so excited that he's handed out his chewing gum to everybody in the club, so now there's a whole nightclub full of people chewing Juicy Fruit. MARCUS LAMBKIN: That's classic James, to get prepared for something. To get all kitted out and have everything ready. JAMES MURPHY: I was like, Sure, I'll try one." I was just going to try it to try it, but then it was the greatest thing ever! It was fucking awesome and I was dancing and I was happy and I had a revelation: This is actually me. I was fully me. I was dancing and I was fully conscious. I wasn't sloppy. I wasn't drunk. I was alert and I was aware that I really enjoyed dancing. "This is me dancing. This isn't the drugs dancing. This is the drugs stopping myself from stopping myself from dancing."

TIM GOLDSWORTHY: Around '88, we had a big revolution in the UK. DOMINIQUE KEEGAN: The Summer of Love. TIM GOLDSWORTHY: In '87 I was wearing all black trying to look like I was in the Velvet Underground, and then it was suddenly about ec-stasy: shaved head, all of us out in the field, dancing. SIMON REYNOLDS: It was initially based around imported music from America- Chicago, Detroit, and New York house music, and techno. But very quickly people started making very homegrown British music. And in England the vibe was determined by ecstasy. So there was a lot of breaking down of gender barriers, sexual barriers, racial barriers, a lot of idealism. People would go along to these parties and raves, not expecting it to have such a strong impact on their life, but it wasn't anything like the typical clubbing. Clubbing in the eighties had been sort of cool oriented, cold and posy. This was people losing it in a mass way, a collective high, dancing all night. Especially the events that were illegal and unlicensed in barns or warehouses; those events had a tremendous electric atmosphere of anarchy. So people embraced that idea of clubbing all weekend without sleep, having that high, and then crashing. You couldn't wait until the next week. You got locked into this lifestyle of raving. After you had that experience, it was quite hard to go back to seeing a band onstage. TIM GOLDSWORTHY: Electronica--horrible thing but that's what I'm going to call it-was starting to take in Britain. You were seeing people like my first band, Unkle, going from selling a few twelve- inches to suddenly selling a lot and touring and doing festivals and becoming proper ands. SIMON REYNOLDS: It was about beat and sound culture in Britain. Massive Attack was one of the main Bristol groups, and their whole strategy was they were like record nerds. They took these obscure soul, jazz records, and some post-punk ones as well, and they would take the best bits of them and create new music out of their record collection. That was the big thing. That is where Tim Goldsworthy comes from, the beat scholar and sample scholar. It was a generation of smoking weed, taking other drugs, and being very sensitized to all of sound, the textures of sound, sound that could create intense pleasure and pictures in your mind. A psychedelic dance culture.

PAUL MAROON: He came out of the seventies and early eighties New York disco scene. He's just from another land, really. He's a character out of a Martin Scorsese movie. If you ever see a man driving a seventies Cadillac backing up down Canal Street trying to get a parking space, it's him. That's my memory of him. Just backing down four blocks. I think he went to jail for parking tickets. That's not easy to do.

DAVE BURTON: Everybody drank at the Mars Bar. DENNIS CAHLO: Wow, that place was disgusting. ANDREW VANWYNGARDEN: The first time I went to New York as an adult, we went to Mars Bar and were drinking shots of tequila in little plastic cups. I really liked that disgusting place. TUNDE ADEBIMPE: I got electrocuted at Mars Bar.

PAUL MAROON: Sarah Lawrence was not a college. It was like going to very, very out-of-control bar. I don't know anyone who actually graduated from there.

After that summer, I went back to college, studied romantic poetry, and wrote a thesis on the Iliad. Nick dropped out and played SNL. It was a time that felt dizzying, though it turned out to be the calm be- fore the many storms of the new millennium. September 11. Then came the frenetic remaking of New York, and all the weird new phenomena of the rising twenty-first century: the Internet, the iPod, Facebook and Twitter, the colonization of Brooklyn. In the late nineties, in the couple-year period before all these changes really began, the music scene in New York had a giddy feel to it. We sensed something important had been unleashed, even if it was unfathomable that anyone besides us would ever care. The city felt both expansive and intimate - forgotten by everyone else, it seemed to belong only to us, to the drugs, to the music, to the other kids doing drugs and worshiping music. The Strokes and their immediate cohorts, mostly forgotten bands you will read about here like the Mooney Suzuki and Jonathan Fire"Eater, as well as ones you likely know, like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Sound-system, the Killers, and Kings of Leon, were the soundtrack to that fragile era. But it also wasn't really about bands. We didn't even think of them as bands, exactly. Real bands were professional rock stars, Pearl Jam or Oasis. The Strokes and their like were co-conspirators, comrades in the pursuit of "youth and abandon," the shorthand a few friends and I used to describe those nights that started as Tuesdays and ended up as Jim Jarmusch movies: vodka sodas and pizza and dress-up at someone's house, followed by drinks at whatever bar we had a friend working at that night, followed by Interpol with ten other people at some dank after-hours club with moldy carpeting, followed by disco fries at the diner, followed by wearing last night's makeup to ten A.M. class.