Hopefully, Maybe: Meet Me in the Bathroom by Lizzie Goodman

I just finished Lizzie Goodman's "Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, 2001-2011". It's a fantastic (if discombobulating) read, told by music journalist Lizzie Goodman, piecing together interviews from hundreds of journalists and musicians and hangers-on that were there at the time.

It's difficult to make progress on - I kept a finger at the front of the book, where all the personae are named - but once you get going, it's a fascinating read. I haven't talked about many books on this gemlog, but I think it might be telling that the last one I remember discussing in depth, Marlowe Granados' "Happy Hour", also takes place in New York City. There's probably a reason for that. The romance of the city, the possibilities, that eclipse the romance and possibilities of our own workaday lives. I live in a large city, an ordinary city, a city that nobody is going to wax romantic over. If you play in a band here, you're not going to get discovered, not really. The romance of New York in the 2000s (and to a lesser extent now) is the same as the romance of Seattle in the 1990s: the possibility of something new and hot and only just starting to cool. The jagged edges of rock music, young people playing in shitty clubs, aware that they're on the cusp of something, hopefully, maybe.

I stumbled across the book on the recommendation of some blog or other; at 600+ pages, it's not a quick read, either. But I became engrossed by it, the way in which these musicians were not only there and full of want, but very much in the right place, right time. Bands from Red Deer, from Sarnia, from Gander don't make it big. Maybe the chance is non-zero now, deep in the internet age. But in the age before Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster, the chance was zero.

You had to be there, and I wasn't. I fiddled with guitar a bit in my teens, but didn't have a purpose, and it didn't take. I took it up for real in my 20s, but never played in a band: I had friends where I grew up who played in bands and tried to make a go at it, but when they were doing that I was long gone, a whole province away, out of sight, out of mind. I tried to start a band with my partner and a couple of our friends; we rehearsed a couple of times, but the other couple mostly fought over who got to play drums, and we went exactly nowhere. We never found our footing. I was writing songs and hoping we could play them. That is to say, it was my dream, not theirs. One of the few regrets of my life has been living what I guess you could call a quiet, staid life. If you looked at me, you'd say it suited me, and you're not wrong. But there's a part of me that's always wished I could've played in smoky, shitty bars with old friends, played originals, been creative in that very particular way.

Goodman's book talks about the old New York of the 70s - CBGB, The Ramones, Blondie, etc - and the gap, the lack of rock that followed until a new wave of bands blew up in the late 90s and early 2000s. Some of these (Interpol, The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs) you've probably heard of. Others (The Moldy Peaches, Jonathan Fire*Eater) I'd never heard of. But one of the throughlines that Goodman is careful to quietly emphasize is the ambition and want - of Julian Casablancas, Brandon Flowers, Jack White, and others. Success is preparation and ambition and opportunity but also an incredible amount of luck. What gets termed garage rock wouldn't have taken off the same way in the 80s, or in a (forgive me for this term) lesser city. New York is central to the popular consciousness in a way that no other city is, except for maybe Paris, or London. But neither of those cities matter in the same way, with regards to popular music. My friends who tried to make a go of it had a fatal flaw: they were doing it in a small city of a couple hundred thousand people, driving a good hundred miles to the nearest and similarly unimportant city, Toronto days away to the east, New York ditto. Where you are matters. Music doesn't exist in a vacuum. Musicians have influences and passions, but where they play, who they play to, maybe matters more.

Goodman lays this out, piecing things together to also talk about the clubs and their owners and the sorts of people they were playing to. Not just young people, not just casual music fans, but also to nascent bloggers in the early internet age, who were helping shape trends and set tastes in the half-decade before social media. There's also the requisite gossipy partying talk - how The Strokes were all-in, The Killers far more reserved - but the strength of the book is how Goodman shapes our understanding of the scene and its global impact from direct interviews with the people who were there.

I mentioned earlier a certain sadness about what I was never able to. I think this is probably pretty common around men my age with artistic inclinations. The beast lurking in the background was, for me as for so many others, the mortgage, the bills, the girl, the need for a steady income which music, back then, could never provide (and never mind now). Reading the book, I felt again that absence, the feeling of something that never was, knocking against my ribs. Wrong place, right time. I remember hearing about these bands, listening to them, not finding much in their songs that I really liked (outside of The White Stripes). That's good: I could've made something else, something new and exiting and different. But I wasn't there. And I was busy: finishing school, dropping out of my last degree, making a life elsewhere. Some part of me wanting what they had. But I was so far removed. As with almost everyone else in the history of the world, fame was never an option. I never had a chance. The flame gone before I ever picked up a guitar.