Making the Scene in the Garden State: Popular Music in New Jersey from Edison to Springsteen and Beyond

by Dewar MacLeod

Overview

Making the Scene in the Garden State explores New Jersey’s rich musical heritage through stories about the musicians, listeners and fans who came together to create sounds from across the American popular music spectrum. The book includes chapters on the beginnings of musical recording in Thomas Edison’s factories in West Orange; early recording and the invention of the Victrola at Victor Records’ Camden complex; Rudy Van Gelder’s recording studios (for Blue Note, Prestige, and other jazz labels) in Hackensack and Englewood Cliffs; Zacherley and the afterschool dance television show Disc-o-Teen, broadcast from Newark in the 1960s; Bruce Springsteen’s early years on the Jersey Shore at the Upstage Club in Asbury Park; and, the 1980s indie rock scene centered at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. Concluding with a foray into the thriving local music scenes of today, the book examines the sounds, sights and textures of the locales where New Jerseyans have gathered to rock, bop, and boogie.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813574660
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	03/13/2020
Pages:	206
Sales rank:	1,021,116
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	16 - 18 Years

About the Author

Dewar MacLeod is professor of history at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, specializing in popular culture, American Studies, and U.S. foreign policy, and the author of Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California, the first study of punk by a professional historian. He is singer/guitarist for Thee Volatiles, the best punk rock band in Montclair, New Jersey.
 

Read an Excerpt

Beyond its reputations as the suburban outpost to Manhattan, the industrial wasteland, the barren swamps and pinelands where gangsters dump their victims, propagator of the tacky and déclassé, pathway between far more interesting locales, New Jersey has been home to vital and exciting scenes of musical production and enjoyment.

New Jersey deserves its own musical history. The state has been home not simply to musicians who were born there but went off to make their fame in the bright lights of the big city. The state has fostered and grown local scenes of musical and historical import. Certainly, the location on the outskirts of major cities at the northern and southern ends has factored into New Jersey’s influence. But this book will explore the homegrown and nurtured musical production and consumption in New Jersey. This book will fill in the historical record, including some vibrant and important musical moments that have not received their due attention. But, even more than claiming historical space for these musical productions as worthy of inclusion in some sort of musical hall of fame, I am interested in the social history of how people produce and consume music. For that, the organizing conceit of this book is the concept of scenes.

I use the term “scene” to discuss a variety of types of historical groupings of people around music, “the contexts in which clusters of producers, musicians, and fans collectively share their common musical tastes and collectively distinguish themselves from others." Over the last few decades, scholars have explored, “… the production, performance, and reception of popular music. Work in the scenes perspective focuses on situations where performers, support facilities, and fans come together to collectively create music for their own enjoyment.” The term itself is malleable, even slippery, used as it is by participants, journalists, and scholars, often in very different ways.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Making Scenes 1

1 Thomas Edison and the First Recording Studio 13

2 The Victor Talking Machine Company and the Scene at Home 36

3 Jazz at the Cliffside: The Studios of Rudy Van Gelder 59

4 Transylvania Bandstand and Rockin' with the Cool Ghoul 81

5 The Upstage Club and the Asbury Park Scene 93

6 "Drums Along the Hudson": The Hoboken Sound 112

Conclusion: Making the Scene in the Twenty-First Century 131

Acknowledgments 139

Notes 141

Index 169

Editorial Reviews

"The New Jersey music stories told in these pages are often punctuated by chance occurrences, dumb luck, unexpected brilliance, and a little magic. They also give us a view into the bigger patterns of cultural and historical change that are far more than a local matter. From MacLeod's 'scenes' come bigger shifts. Read this and be reminded of the ways in which popular (and sometimes unpopular!) music and the people who make it, listen to it, and dream through it do things out there on the margins that, finally, reshape the center." 

author of Petty: The Biography - Warren Zanes

"History of Jersey music, Jersey ‘Lips,' virtual Hudson events: recommendations to pass the time" by Jim Testa
https://www.nj.com/hudson/2020/03/history-of-jersey-music-jersey-lips-virtual-hudson-events-recommendations-to-pass-the-time.html

NJ.com

"In many ways, MacLeod hits his finest notes [by] providing readers with useful miniature stories about the lives and times of Jersey Shore musicians and their audiences. Chockful of new information and helpfully resourced with the fruits of countless interviews, Making the Scene in the Garden State should enjoy a large audience both for the book’s scholarly value, as well as for its engaging anecdotes about New Jersey’s role in changing American musical culture for all time."

New Jersey Studies

"MacLeod offers a useful local cultural history that will enrich understanding of twentieth-century America for undergraduates and general-audiences alike. Meanwhile, professional scholars can add Making the Scene in the Garden State to their list of works that shine a light into the nation's unjustly overlooked corners."

Journal of American History

"Music History was Made Here" by Tom Wilk

New Jersey Monthly

"Exploring New Jersey's Musical History" by Gary Wein

NJ Stage