uncovering the underground: Ladbroke Grove
As someone who’s been seeking out underground rock music for over 25 years, punk rock really fucked me up. Specifically, the punk rock dogma I internalized by reading the English music weekly New Musical Express religiously between 1983-85. Punk rock in England was largely over in these years, unless you were talking about groups like...
out of the valley of the dolls
Since we’re talking about Legs McNeil and Gilliam McCain’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, one of the most colorful quotes in a book chock full of them comes from Peter Jordan, the oft-forgotten replacement for bassist Arthur Kane in the New York Dolls. Jordan describes the 1971-74 milieu in which Kane fell...
please skill me: the growing credentialism of NYC’s rock underground
Using an admittedly unscientific sample of 38 indie-rock groups from Brooklyn, I poked around the bands’ Wikipedia pages and their underlying sources to look for any members’ college affiliations. In no time at all [update: and with further information from my sources; see below], I found information for 26 groups. Even if we assume the remaining...