See You 'Round Downtown!

Kembrew McLeod's "The Downtown Pop Underground"

[The following review originally appeared in the Enoch Pratt Free Library's "Pratt Chat" blog.]

“When you're alone and life is making you lonely/You can always go downtown
When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry/Seems to help, I know, downtown
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?” - Petula Clark, “Downtown” (1965)

Until the recent Black Lives Matter protests brought the masses to the streets, followed by the phased reopening of businesses and institutions as states eased up on lockdown restrictions, the coronavirus pandemic and accompanying home-quarantine pretty much turned most American cities’ downtowns into ghost towns. Not so in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s, when downtown Manhattan was the hub for revolutionary cultural shifts in music, theater, art and filmmaking. In Kembrew McLeod’s The Downtown Pop Underground (2018) - now available for you to read in Hoopla ebook format or reserve for curbside pickup using your library card -  the author takes readers on a detailed tour of Manhattan during this era and shows “how deeply interconnected all the alternative worlds and personalities were that flourished in the basement theaters, dive bars, concert halls, and dingy tenements within one square mile of each other.”

The Downtown Pop Underground focuses on eight people who were central to the “downtown arts scene” between 1958 and 1976. While now-familiar names like Andy Warhol, Patti Smith and Debbie Harry went on to become icons,  there were others - like Caffe Cino/La MaMa experimental theatre director-playwright Harry Koutoukas; poet-author-activist-publisher Ed Sanders (founder of The Fugs musical group); Off-Off-Off Broadway theatre impressario Ellen Stewart; experimental filmmaker Shirley Clarke (The Connection, The Cool World); and psychedelic flower-power performance artist Hibiscus (founder of San Francisco’s gender-bending musical theater troupe The Cockettes, whose ranks once included our own John Waters movie star Divine and who are the subject of Bill Weber and David Weissman’s acclaimed documentary The Cockettes, which you can stream for free through Kanopy using your library card) - who also helped to reshape popular culture in significant ways.

Yes, those were the artistic Eight of Weight, but McLeod’s broad scope covers many more personalities whose lives thrived along the fringes of the downtown scene, if only tangentially. People like Fluxus art movement pioneers Yoko Ono and Al Hansen (pop musician Beck’s avante-garde artist dad); underground filmmaker Jack Smith and Jonas Mekas; experimental filmmaker and American folk music archivist Harry Smith; urban activist Jane Jacobs (The Life and Death of Great American Cities); poets Allen Ginsburg and Andrei Codrescu (the Romanian immigrant who later became a fixture of Baltimore’s 1990s poetry scene as a staff writer at the City Paper before moving to the West Coast, where he lived in a commune with Cockettes founder Hibiscus); underground diva Divine and Warhol protege Edie Sedgwick; performance artist Carolee Schneemann (Meatjoy); avant-garde composer John Cage; fashion designer Betsey Johnson (she made the Velvet Underground’s stage outfits and later married John Cage); television and music personality Lance Loud (An American Family); off-off-off Broadway playwright Tom Eyen (Women Behind Bars, Dreamgirls), avant-garde jazz musician Ornette Coleman; influential music mag publishers John Homstrom (Punk magazine) and Alan Betrock (New York Rocker); and, of course, all the punk rockers - Iggy Pop, David Johanson, Johnny Thunders, DeeDee Ramone, Jayne County, Blondie and Alan Vega. Even Jackson Browne gets a mention. Yes, before this laidback Southern California singer-songwriter rode a wave of popularity in the 1970s, he passed through Max’s Kansas City, where he hooked up with the Velvet Underground’s Nico, who recorded three of his songs on her solo debut.

It’s a lot of ground to cover, not only of people but of landmarks (the Caffe Cino, Cafè La MaMa, the Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, Warhol’s Factory ) and cultural shifts (the birth of punk and its spiritual cousin hip-hop, the avant-garde film movement, off-off-Broadway, and the rise of indie publishing that would eventually lead to the Zine revolution of the 1990s).

The great achievement of The Downtown Pop Underground is the way McLeod weaves all these disparate personalities and institutions together and shows how they not only created a collective “scene” but spawned future ones, if only in spirit. Baby Boomers like myself can enjoy the book for its nostalgia, while today’s generation can hopefully have their interest sparked enough to be a part of something similar. After all, the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, and everyone involved in the downtown pop underground played an important part. As Petula Clark in her 1965 hit, “Things’ll be great when you’re downtown, no finer place for sure. Downtown, everything’s waiting for you.” Hopefully, the wait will soon be over and we can get back to enjoying our vibrant downtown scenes.

"Love Goes To Buildings On Fire" by Will Hermes

If you find your interest piqued by the subject of McLeod’s book, you might also want to check out Will Hermes’ Love Goes To Buildings On Fire, which looks at New York City in the 1970s, when cheap rents and a burgeoning artistic community spawned a music revolution that created thriving punk, experimental, hip-hop, disco and salsa scenes.