Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever - Will Hermes.epub

“Can literature change your life? Yes, I know it can, because this is the second time it’s happened to me. The first time came when I wrote my first book; this resulted in a job as an author, a profound change, considering I had been hitherto unemployable. And then, twenty years later, along came Will Hermes, who cost me (and arguably owes me) several hundred pounds on iTunes and ruptured my relationship with guitars. So, you know. Kudos to the power of books.”
—Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity and About A Boy, in The Believer

“[A] prodigious work of contemporary music history, unearthing material from a wide array of sources…to tell the story, or better, stories, of what was arguably the most rangy, inventive and influential period of music making in the city’s (and the nation’s) life.”
—New York Times Book Review

“A panoramic nonfiction account of the bursting 1970s music scene in New York City.” GRADE: A
—Entertainment Weekly

“A must-read for any music lover.”
—Boston Globe

“Imaginative, poetic, and frequently humorous…As important a volume for music lovers as Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life.”
—Pop Matters (Best Non-Fiction of 2011)

“Practically every paragraph about music here is also about something else just as fascinating—race, city planning, ambition, drugs, hair-dos. Braiding intricate research with his own teenage memories, Hermes has a bird’s eye view of a great city, and has his ear to the ground.”
—Sarah Vowell, This American Life, author of Unfamiliar Fishes and Wordy Shipmates

“A fantastic journey through New York’s 1970s underground music scene.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“[Hermes's] sympathy and affection for artists fighting to make their way from the margins to the center and for an era stuck between the parentheses of history comes through on every page.”
—New York Times (daily edition)

“Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is an almost perfect portrait of New York music culture: specific yet comprehensive, enthusiastic yet objective, and as informed as it is personal. The four-page section of what (seemingly) every interesting person in NYC was doing on the night of the ‘77 blackout could have been a book unto itself.”
—Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Eating The Dinosaur

Although the 1970s appeared to be a musical wasteland (remember Debby Boone?), senior Rolling Stone critic Hermes reminds us forcefully and refreshingly in this breathtaking, panoramic portrait of five years (1973–1977) of that decade that music in New York City was alive, flourishing, and kicking out the jams.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Hermes’s attitude, sharp ear and smart big-picture view turn what could have been a small book into something special. A hip, clever, informative look at an unjustifiably dismissed musical era that will have readers scouring iTunes for the perfect accompanying soundtrack.”
—Kirkus Review

“A steeped-in-the-culture history.”
—New York Magazine

“Love Goes to Bldgs on Fire by @WilliamHermes is as fun & insightful as that other 1970s NYC classic, Jonathan Mahler’s Bronx is Burning.”
—Hugo Lindgren (New York Times Magazine) via Twitter

“Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is a symphonic history of music, and an evocative portrait of a New York long gone”
—The Daily Beast

“By simply putting things in chronological order, Will Hermes shows just how astonishing New York City’s music was in the 1970s. But he does more than that: he brings depth and discernment and an eye for odd detail, making his book an essential work of cultural history.”
—Luc Sante, author of Low Life and Kill All Your Darlings

“[A] meticulously researched and engaging book on New York’s music culture of the mid-1970s… a sweeping cultural history of the city’s music-makers of all stripes during a time when ‘artists were breaking music apart and rebuilding it for a new era.’ Love Goes to Buildings on Fire offers up a cyclorama of everything from salsa and art rock to the births of hip-hop and punk.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Calls to mind Jonathan Mahler’s great snapshot of the city circa 1977 in “The Bronx Is Burning”…. [a] love letter to a time and place.”
—Huffington Post

“Immensely readable, informative and, most of all, fun, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, reminds us where we came from and not incidentally, why New York remains a hub of creative production.”
—Paper Magazine

“Steers a steady course between shop talk and ecstatic elegy.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Love Goes To Buildings On Fire melds uptown and down, high and low, and gay and straight cultures to capture the city’s ­cacophony at its wildest, loudest and most enduring.”
—New York Daily News

“What Hermes, a senior writer for Rolling Stone and an NPR contributor, captures so well is the burbling creative energy that gripped the city… [Love Goes to Buildings on Fire] is a big-hearted and inclusive embrace.”
—B&N Review

“I have to tell you [Love Goes to Buildings on Fire] is sort of mind-boggling — an incredibly scenic and detailed history of the music made in New York over a few years in the 70s. (It’s one of the first things I’ve read that gives you an acute sense of all these musicians really walking the same streets on the same days — the sense that Willie Colon might have been packing up after a downtown gig while Patti Smith, just two blocks away, was coming home from the studio, the night before a legendary block party up in the Bronx…) It’s a tremendous thing to have put together…”
—Nitsuh Abebe (New York Magazine, Pitchfork) on his Tumblr site, a grammar