Five Questions for Tony Fletcher On His Book All Hopped Up and Ready to Go

All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music From the Streets of New York 1927-1977 is a labor of love, over 400 pages of wonderful stories on the likes of Tito Puente, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and the Ramones, as well as lesser knowns whose recollections help bring the cast of characters to life. Written by veteran rock journalist Tony Fletcher, the book not only covers those vibrant years but also looks beyond the tales to what makes New York the epicenter of musical movements that went from the streets to the national charts. I would definitely include All Hopped Up on my top 10 list this year -- if I made one. I emailed him five questions and here's what he said.    


David Hershkovits: All Hopped Up and Ready to Go covers 50 years of New York music history spanning Afro-Cuban jazz, bebop, doo wop, folk rock, acid rock, disco, punk and hip hop. (Did I leave anything out?). Which has the best stories? Which is your musical favorite?    
Tony Fletcher: Don't forget Rhythm and Blues, rock'n'roll, the pre-rock folk scene and the glitter scene. All these scenes have great stories and it's a little difficult choosing one over the other. The story about Chano Pozo's death in chapter two is quite something (precursors of the worst days of rap?), but then so is the story about the Almanac Singers living in a commune in Greenwich Village (precursors of hardcore political punk?). I would say that I enjoyed researching the earlier periods of the book because I learned so much about them in the process. That was true all the way up to the vocal group scene (they were known at the time as rhythm and blues or rock'n'roll groups but were subsequently renamed "doo wop" by those who should know better). There's an innocence and beauty to the way an entire city of teens aspired to sing for their supper. (Or at least to attract the opposite sex.)  Still, which is my musical favorite? People would assume I'm most closely attached to the CBGBs scene, and I admit that it is the one I know best. But I came out of this experience as a real aficionado of Afro-Cuban music, a great fan of the mambo, and with a genuine love for the 1960s equivalent of the CBs punk scene: the Fugs, the Godz, David Peel and the Lower East Side, and the Holy Modal Rounders.      DH: Why is your book subtitled "Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77." What is the relationship between "the streets" and "the music." 
TF: It's my firm belief that nothing happens in a vacuum and that music scenes emerge as a result of the social-economic conditions of the time. Every scene that I write about came about not because of the activities of major record labels but because of what happened on the street level. In the case of the vocal groups and hip-hop, these scenes were emphatically a product of the streets. But even when the correlation isn't quite so obvious, the new music scenes were still a result of what was happening on a very underground level -- in small clubs, loft parties, and on independent record labels. Typically they were the product of a specific neighborhood too: I put together Google maps as I researched each chapter and it was amazing to see the concentration of activities in such a small area. (e.g., the Blondie/Talking Heads/Ramones lofts on the Lower East Side, the jazz clubs of Harlem in the late 1920s, or the lofts of lower Broadway that hosted the original disco parties.) You can access these maps (and accompanying MP3 playlists) from the All Hopped Up section of my website: http://www.ijamming.net/?cat=44       


DH: As you researched the book, what was your most surprising discovery? 
TF: Overall, the extent to which the early days of a music scene turned out to have taken place that much earlier than even a scenester might have imagined. For example, I traced the folk revival of the 1960s back to the late 1940s. The mambo was already massive in New York City in 1949, well before Perez Prado and "Mambo #5." Disco, though not under that name (very few movements went by the name later attributed to them) was a vibrant New York City scene five years before Saturday Night Fever and Studio 54. (And it's important to note that it was a largely black, Puerto Rican and gay movement, rather than the heterosexual Caucasian scene portrayed in Saturday Night Fever.) Hip-hop was gaining ground at much the same time as disco: the parties were in full swing by 1975. And Suicide were calling their music "punk" back in 1972. More specifically, I sometimes forget that it isn't common knowledge that Dee Dee Ramone worked as a male hustler on "53rd and 3rd," that Lou Reed received electric shock therapy as a teenager. Or that Woody Guthrie wrote "This Land Is Your Land" in a Times Square hotel room, and that the first commercial use of the term rock'n'roll was not in Cleveland but in New York.       

DH: Will New York continue to be a destination for creatives? 
TF: I believe so, even though many people living in the City today insist otherwise. People were bemoaning that Greenwich Village was not what it used to be at the start of the 20th Century. The first riot took place in Tompkins Square Park almost as soon as it was dedicated, in the 1850s. The "folk riot" in Washington Square Park of 1961 was a direct result of NYU and other real estate interests trying to clear the park of what they considered undesirable elements. Right now, the epicenter of creativity has largely moved from Manhattan to the fringes of Brooklyn, largely because of the cost of rent in New York, and yet I'm not certain it was ever any different. When I spoke to members of the punk groups of the Lower East Side, they may love to reminisce about their "$150 monthly lofts" (usually absent heat and/or hot water!), but they also freely admit that it's not like they had the money to afford a $300 loft. They got by on the least they could spend and otherwise concentrated on their art. There will always be people willing to do that, even if they are currently to be found in previously undesirable neighborhoods like  Bushwick, and New York will continue to provide an energy that will welcome such people. You just have to know where to look.    

DH: Who was on your wish list of people to interview that you couldn't get, both dead and alive. And why? 
TF: Several people died during the course of my research, before I could talk to them (Ahmet Ertegun, Ray Barretto, Gene Pitney), and several more have died since I interviewed them (Erik Darling, Jerry Wexler, Warren Suttles to name but three). What I have learned from years of researching music history is that for every one person who is guarded and defensive and difficult to get hold of, there are at least two or three people who are open and warm and readily available, and who don't value their own contributions higher than those of the scene that they created. I'd sooner concentrate on the positive energy of those people than the negative energy of those who wouldn't talk. Thankfully, in a city like New York, tracing 50 years of musical history, there was no shortage of people to talk to!     


Fletcher reads on Dec. 10 at the Brooklyn Public Library (at 7 p.m. with Alan Vega) and on Dec. 16 at the Cake Shop (with Robert Lopez and Rachel Simon).