Posted on 21-5-2002

New New Rock
By JON PARELES, NY Times 19 May 2002

JOEY RAMONE, who died of lymphoma last year, might have been tickled to
know he has simultaneous birthday parties tonight.

One, where bands will compete to appear on the B-side of a Joey Ramone
tribute single, is at CBGB, the Bowery dive that was founded in 1973 and
soon nurtured the Ramones, punk-rock and a circle of disparate but
influential New York rockers including Television, Patti Smith, Blondie and
Talking Heads.

Meanwhile, the Joey Ramone Birthday Bash, a benefit for lymphoma research
with Ronnie Spector and many others performing, takes place four blocks
downtown at the Bowery Ballroom, a 1990's arrival that's just one of the
places where a New York rock resurgence is gathering momentum.

The Strokes (who are already too popular for clubs), the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,
the Walkmen, Oneida, Ex Models, the Rapture and a dozen other bands are
seizing and stretching the legacy of CBGB in its heyday: rock that's smart,
skeletal and recklessly ambitious, eager to provide an antidote to
synthetic pop and self-important mainstream rock. The first words on Radio
4's new album, "Gotham," are, "New electric sounds rattle underground."

New York City has hardly been silent since the late 1970's, not with
hip-hop, hardcore and any number of individual breakthroughs: Sonic Youth,
Moby, Marc Anthony, Alicia Keys. Yet the current New York rock renaissance,
with bands spanning the spectrum from arty to party music, strongly echoes
and parallels an era that many of the new prime movers never saw.

"I've been waiting for something to happen for most of my life," said Karen
O, 23, the singer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. "What's cool now is that there
are so many different avenues of music coming up. People are making music
that they don't care if people like, and people are making music to rock
out to. People are willing to experiment. We're all trying to build on
something that was leveled."

Once again, individualistic music is being pounded out in clubs on the
Lower East Side (and in its newer annex, Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where
high rents have driven many musicians and artists). And once again,
musicians are discovering the power of pithy minimalism coupled with
repetition, muscle and noise, strategies long identified with New York City.

"It was only when we left New York that people kept saying it sounds like
New York," said Julian Casablancas of the Strokes, whose lean,
disillusioned songs virtually sum up guitar-driven New York rock from the
Velvet Underground onward. "I wasn't going for a specific New York thing. I
was just trying to make good music. For me it's a lot more about substance
over style."

There was little evidence of a nascent style in 1973, when Hilly Kristal
took over a Bowery club under a flophouse and named it Country Bluegrass
Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers (CBGB and OMFUG). He
started booking local rock bands with a crucial proviso: they could play
only their own material. "They kept coming out of the woodwork," Mr.
Kristal said. CBGB quickly filled a void left by the (literal) collapse of
the Mercer Arts Center, where the New York Dolls had played, and the
closing of Max's Kansas City, where glam-rock had held sway.

The bands that converged on CBGB (and later the reopened Max's) rejected
the blandly professional pop, overblown guitar jams and elaborate
progressive rock they were hearing on the radio. But instead of attempting
some kind of revival, they reconfigured old rock virtues into music that
had not been heard before.

Self-consciousness was crucial to the bands at CBGB. Though the music often
seemed simple, it was primitivist, not primitive. "We knew that what we
were doing was revolutionary," said Tommy Erdelyi, better known as Tommy
Ramone, the Ramones' first drummer. "We were connoisseurs of rock's history
and where it should go. We wanted to bring back short songs, pop melodies,
things like that. But I think we were the first group to consciously use
the fact that we weren't virtuosos, to realize that this was an advantage.
We stripped down a lot of things and just put in the gist of what was needed."

At CBGB, that determination to purge inessentials led not just to the
Ramones' definitive punk rock but to music as multifarious as Television's
jazzy, elastic drones and jams, Patti Smith's incantatory poetry merged
with garage rock, Talking Heads' clean-lined bubblegum funk, Blondie's
radically deflected girl-group rock, DNA's atonal jolts, Richard Hell and
the Voidoids' gnashing guitars, and the relentless, confrontational
organ-and-drum-machine songs of Suicide. In the mid-1970's, none of it
seemed headed for the Top 40 anytime soon.

But New York was in a recession then, and the living was cheap, if not
easy. David Byrne recently recalled that the three original Talking Heads
shared a Chrystie Street loft for $300 a month. So there was far less
commercial pressure on musicians. Bands like the Patti Smith Group and
Blondie woodshedded at CBGB, playing four sets a night for weekend after
weekend. And in 1975, Mr. Kristal seized media interest with a festival of
what he called the top 40 unsigned bands in New York — actually, about 70
of them. What had been downtown entertainment was suddenly seen as a
movement, and it would go on to seed do-it-yourself rock worldwide.

Decades later, independent rock has a firmly established infrastructure:
clubs, college radio stations and coverage from both ingroup fanzines and a
mainstream determined to detect the latest thing immediately. Yet for a few
years, New York's rock resurgence hid in plain earshot, amid a glut of
grunge, hardcore, rap-rock and punk-pop. The new rock has also kept its
distance from heavy metal, roots-rock and self-pitying collegiate rock. As
it renounces bombast and decoration, it inevitably harks back to the first
salvo of CBGB's rock.

This time around, there is a hint of a revival, the same nostalgia that's
driving other bands to rediscover early synthesizers and write so-called
electroclash tunes. But unlike most electroclash bands, the rockers are
twisting together their sources, not simply imitating them. And this time,
while New York is the music's stronghold, there are already like-minded
bands elsewhere, like the White Stripes and the Von Bondies in Detroit.

"What's really refreshing to me about this scene, so to speak, is that it
does have a sense of history," said Mike Stuto, the co-owner and booker of
Brownies on the Lower East Side. "It does understand the 30 years of
history that have led up to its being, as well as the 20 years before that."

The music can be as sparse and vociferous as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with Ms.
O sending out put-downs and come-ons with a sharp giggle over short,
splintered lines for guitar and drums. It can be as frenetic as the
scrabbling guitar patterns of the Ex Models, as haggard as the woozy moans
of the Walkmen, as troubled as the wary anthems of Longwave. Or it can be
as barbed as the dissonant rebel yelps of the Panthers, as choppy as the
punk-funk variations of the Rapture or Radio 4, as cantankerous as the
improvisations of Black Dice and as inexorable as the overloaded, pulsating
ostinatos of Oneida.

Alongside countless other hopefuls, these bands have played around unpaid
or low-paying neighborhood clubs, downtown and in Brooklyn. Soon, midsize
club bookers like Ryan Gentles (now the Strokes' manager) at the Mercury
Lounge and Mr. Stuto at Brownies were presenting full nights of what Mr.
Gentles dubbed "the new sound of New York," on posters for one quadruple bill.

But in the late 1990's the music business was seeking hits elsewhere. "The
lack of major-label interest in underground rock enabled the music to be
itself for a little while," Mr. Stuto said. "Because there isn't the
attention, people do it from the heart. And because they're not trying to
create hit records, they're trying to express themselves and make great
music."

Now the bands have been noticed, perhaps with increased urgency since Sept.
11 focused the world's attention on New York. With the Strokes on a major
label and record-company scouts swarming around the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,
Longwave and others, Mr. Stuto said he expected carpetbaggers and
opportunists to move in on the scene soon. (He is closing the music room at
Brownies in August. "Why not go out on top?" he said. The closing could
shift some of the new bands back to CBGB.)

"Right now," said Mr. Casablancas of the Strokes, "in the grand scheme of
the music business, we're all relatively small. The music is slowly
surfacing, but I don't know how successful we're all going to be in the
future."

Yet with various gradations of New York irony, the new bands are already
singing manifestos. "It's our time, sweet baby, to break on through," Karen
O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs sings as she sprinkles beer on her adoring club
audiences. "It's our time to be hated."

Shahin Motia of the Ex Models cackles, "Rock 'n' roll can't be made no
more," amid skewed, hurtling guitar chords that prove him completely wrong.

Rock was moribund in the mid-1970's, too, when Joey Ramone and his band
decided to get back to basics. His best birthday present is to have New
York kick-start the music one more time.