Publishers Weekly
05/15/2023
Journalist Rifkin’s ambitious yet uneven debut chronicles New York City’s thriving music milieus over the past 60 years. Zeroing in on Lower Manhattan, with Williamsburg, Brooklyn, idiosyncratically tacked on since it’s just “one subway stop away from the East Village,” Rifkin captures jazz in Soho and folk in Greenwich Village, and examines how those scenes affected—and often significantly changed—the “mostly working-class or industrial” neighborhoods in which they formed. In the 2000s, indie rock helped make Williamsburg “an epicenter of cutting-edge music,” hiking rent prices that drove out Puerto Rican and Dominican families. Rifkin conducted more than 100 interviews for the book, and stitches in fascinating anecdotes from the likes of Buffy Saint-Marie, Charlemagne Palestine, and Judy Collins, who describes the early spirit of Greenwich Village: “After I moved here, I immediately ran into everybody in town who wrote songs. I’d walk down the street and there would be Tom Paxton... and then he’d sing me ‘Bottle of Wine.’ ” Despite its bright moments, snarky side notes distract (“As of this book’s writing, Rudy Giuliani is tragically still alive. I wish him only the worst”), and Rifkin’s frequent laments about the type of businesses that currently occupy former music spaces becomes repetitive. This is a missed opportunity. (July)
From the Publisher
Jesse Rifkin pulls the reader along with him on this wild and deeply researched nostalgia trip through New York's vanished music scene, starting in the Greenwich Village coffeehouses in the 1950s and ending in present-day Brooklyn. This dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker loved it!”—Alice Sparberg Alexiou, author of The Devil’s Mile, The Flatiron and Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary "This Must Be the Place brilliantly weaves firsthand accounts from New York City's artists, doormen, sound techs, managers, bartenders and more into a vivid history of the city's scenes and landmarks, enlivened by a diverse array of characters and culture. Through a modern and incisive lens, Rifkin raises voices from the city's mythology, dispelling hype to uncover even wilder truths."—Ben Apatoff, author of Metallica: The $24.95 Book and Body Count (33 1/3) "This Must Be the Place swats away cheap nostalgia to deliver a vital social history of New York City, its music, and its enduring creative power across the decades. Jesse Rifkin is the perfect downtown guide – wise, incisive, generous, and quite possibly all-knowing."—Adam Chandler, author of Drive-Thru Dreams “A lively history of New York City’s many musical scenes and their settings… A pleasure—and an education—for every fan of popular music and its most important Gotham venues.” –Kirkus STARRED review "An enjoyably knowledgeable yet casual cultural reconnaissance through the glory days of New York music history."—Booklist “This nostalgia-filled, informative traversal of the eclectic scenes encapsulates the city’s meaning to and mutual benefits for the musicians and associated artists… music lovers will wax nostalgic for the passing of the various genres and relish what has been memorialized.”–Library Journal "Exhaustive in its attention to detail, This Must Be The Place: Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City is an enlightening escapade through the mean streets of the Big Apple."–Classic Pop Magazine “[A]n impressive and lovingly constructed survey of the venues—sanctioned or not—that allowed artistic communities to flourish.”—Interview
“If you’re a New Yorker (past or present), returning to streets of bygone days can be a dizzying experience — what once were memory-riddled landmarks are often reimagined into new spaces. This is especially the case for places that housed music’s most influential scenes. Author, historian, and tour guide Jesse Rifkin traipses down memory lane (literally) and, through interviews with acts like Moldy Peaches, Sonic Youth, and Suicide revisits how New York City’s landscape served as a canvas for acts to experiment, form, and flourish.”—Rolling Stone
Library Journal
07/01/2023
Music historian Rifkin presents themed chapters focusing on the musicians and performance venues in lower Manhattan from the 1950s to the present. As that area transitioned from folk and avant-garde music to jazz, punk, and beyond, Rifkin, who owns and operates Walk on the Wild Side Tours NYC, deftly introduces major players (Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, David Bowie), famous places (Washington Square Park, Village Vanguard, Max's Kansas City) and a host of supporting characters in the background, including club owners, concert promoters, the city's notorious zoning boards, and more. Some readers might find the tone to be a persistent undercurrent of simmering anger at gentrification's effects, with way too much emphasis on attendant finances, but interview excerpts with seminal figures of the various movements, contemporary photographs of the locales, and suggested listening ideas are special highlights. This nostalgia-filled, informative traversal of the eclectic scenes encapsulates the city's meaning to and mutual benefits for the musicians and associated artists. VERDICT Overall, music lovers will wax nostalgic for the passing of the various genres and relish what has been memorialized.—Barry Zaslow
SEPTEMBER 2023 - AudioFile
In this sprawling audiobook history of how real estate impacted the lower Manhattan music scene in the 1960s and beyond, a critic and tour guide chronicles the life and times of the tiny clubs where many folk singers and other musicians began their careers. The gentrification of New York City has priced those clubs out of existence, but they come alive again in these fast-moving historical anecdotes. Sean Patrick Hopkins performs the smooth writing with energy that seems just right for each scene. He keeps the action going by sounding like someone who is sharing stories nonstop in one of the clubs the author writes about. With details from the author's interviews with musicians and other figures of the era, it's a must-hear for anyone fascinated with the intersection of club music and urban change in New York. T.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-04-24
A lively history of New York City’s many musical scenes and their settings.
Some observers say that New York is dead, merely the playground of the idle rich and tourists. Nonsense, replies cultural tour guide Rifkin. It’s just that “many people feel strongly that New York’s final golden era occurred when they personally just so happened to be in their twenties, and that the city’s decline roughly coincided with them entering their mid or late thirties,” when they stopped club hopping and following bands. Rifkin covers several golden eras from the 1950s to the present. Many people and places are gone: Tom Verlaine and Joey Ramone are dead; ditto the legendary club CBGB and almost all the old Village folk clubs and No Wave hangouts. Only Yoko Ono could afford to buy one of the places where she used to do her version of jazz before she met John Lennon. The Mercer Arts Center, the former home of the New York Dolls, is now an NYU dorm, and Max’s Kansas City has housed “a succession of unspectacular delis.” But for every anti-folk, hip-hop, or hardcore locus that’s fallen to the wrecking ball, there are both remaining old places and, more important, new places with scenes that, Rifkin challenges, should not be discounted without going out every night “most nights of the week, every week, for at least a couple years”—at which point you’re qualified to complain. Drawing on oral histories by those who were around at places like the Mudd Club and Studio 54, who frequented gay discos in the 1970s and break dancing parks in the ’80s, and who made their own fun and noise, Rifkin turns in an essential chronicle of the city’s cultural history.
A pleasure—and an education—for every fan of popular music and its most important Gotham venues.
