Love Goes to Buildings on Fire 1973 WILD SIDE WALKING This is the era where everybody creates. --Patti Smith1     A n hour after midnight on January 1, 1973, Ernie Brooks was barreling down I-95 toward the city in his mother''s Volvo. His band, the Modern Lovers, had been booked for a New Year''s Eve show at the Mercer Arts Center. The New York Dolls were headlining. But his van died outside New Haven. So he hitched to his parents'' house in New Canaan, got the family car, drove back to the van, jammed guitars and microphones into the Volvo, and drove like hell. The Mercer was packed. There were teenage girls in miniskirts and garish makeup.

There were guys in miniskirts and garish makeup. A woman wore a dress that had been cut into pieces and reassembled with safety pins. The Modern Lovers went on at around 3:30 a.m., plugging into the Dolls'' amplifiers. As a rule, they wore T-shirts and jeans, but for this gig their leader, Jonathan Richman, had bought a white dress shirt. During "Hospital," a love song as raw as a skinned knee, he ripped the shirt off. A girl standing beside the stage bent to pick up a stray button as a souvenir.

The Dolls went on just before dawn. The lead singer, David Johansen, wore a white blouse, tight white pants, and white platform heels. He swigged from a bottle of Miller, flipped back his hair, and introduced a song called "Trash." The band was sloppy--the bassist, who was wearing a yellow plastic tutu, could barely play--but thrilling. And the song sounded amazing, like some ''50s rock ''n'' roll gem retooled for a more jaded age. There were lots of artists in the crowd that night; actors, dancers, musicians. Truman Capote was there. So was Richard Meyers, a poet who was beginning to play bass and write songs.

He was impressed.   The Village Voice announced an "Invent the ''70s" contest in its January 4 issue. "If you know what the ''70s are, or have any inkling where they''re going," read the item, "write to [us] and any feasible answers will be printed." The ''70s had an identity crisis from the get-go. Richard Milhous Nixon was inaugurated to a second presidential term on January 20, 1973; thousands of troops remained in Vietnam. If a change was gonna come, as Sam Cooke had predicted, it was running way late. You can hear this stasis in the music. Listen to the Grateful Dead''s Europe ''72 , released just before the New Year.

It''s the ''60s caught in amber, the Dead''s prickly psychedelia smoothed out in a mix that reduces the audience''s tripping howl to a distant murmur. But the Dead were living the ''70s. Their hard-partying singer/ harpman/organist Pigpen was so sick from years of alcohol abuse that he could barely sing. He played some keyboards on Europe ''72 , that''s all, and on March 8 he joined his pal Janis Joplin in rock-star heaven. The Dead''s first show after his death was a week later at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. They played mostly with their backs to the crowd, facing one another in a mourners'' circle.2 As for the Voice ''s "Invent the ''70s" contest, there were no winners.   Meredith Monk wrapped a wineglass in foam rubber and newspaper and tucked it into an old 45 carrying case marked FRAGILE.

She had a concert that night, January 11--her biggest to date, a coming-out party of sorts--and besides her remarkable voice, the glass would be her only instrument. Monk, a thirty-year-old composer, singer, dancer, and multimedia artist, had rented Town Hall, a 1,500-seat theater on West Forty-third Street built by the League for Political Education, a bunch of monied idealists who''d fought hard for women''s suffrage. In 1921, the year it opened, Margaret Sanger was hauled offstage and arrested for daring tospeak to an audience of men and women about birth control. In ''35, the great American contralto Marian Anderson gave her first New York recital there; in June ''45, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker pretty much debuted bebop to the world there. Through the ''70s, it remained accessible to artists who most promoters wouldn''t touch. Dressed entirely in white, her hair pulled back into tight braids, Monk walked downstairs from her new loft space on West Broadway ($400 a month, a stretch for her) and caught the uptown IRT at Franklin Street. Monk performed Our Lady of Late that night, her wordless vocals dancing over a drone created by rubbing her finger around the rim of the wineglass. Sometimes she mirrored the drone perfectly, making micro-tonal shifts in her voice so it rippled like a banner in the wind.

She purled out gorgeous, haunted, lowing melodies; sighed breathlessly in rhythm; applied severe vibrato to frightened babbling; bleated vowels and phonemes into unintelligible, sometimes hilarious chants. Her friend Collin Walcott, a multi-instrumentalist with an interest in world music, occasionally tapped out rhythms on another wineglass. Periodically, Monk sipped water from her own glass to alter its pitch. A couple of days later she got a review in The New York Times , her first. John Rockwell called her "an incontestable virtuoso" and the concert "an extraordinarily consoling, meditative experience" that he heard as "a compendium of womanly experience, from birth to girlhood to motherhood to shamanistic ecstasy to grief to old age to death."3 It amazed her that the aesthetically conservative Times reviewed it. Even more amazingly, the writer seemed to get it.   That Sunday afternoon, the twenty-five-year-old Laurie Anderson lay on Coney Island beach with the chill of the New Year swirling in the salt air.

Her turtleneck was pulled up to her nose, her watchman''s cap pulled down over her eyes. She was trying to sleep--perchance, to dream. It was a performance art piece sans audience, to be documented by snapshots and diary entries, part of what she called her "Institutional Dream Series." The work was not entirely successful. Sleeping outside the women''s bathroom in the Schermerhorn Library at Columbia University (where she''d recently earned an MFA in sculpture), she managed to dream thatthe library was "an open-air market" and that all the shelves were stocked with produce. She dreamed of "a bright white desert" in a boat berth at the South Street Seaport, and had her camera confiscated while trying to sleep on a bench in night court at 100 Centre Street, where, for some reason, she couldn''t dream.4 Dreaming would play a major role in Anderson''s creative life. But at the moment, she was just an ambitious midwestern art-school kid with a viola, wanting New York City to shape her subconscious.

As with many, it did.   About twenty-five miles down the coast from where Anderson slept in the sand was Asbury Park, a kindred seaside town in New Jersey where Bruce Springsteen, age twenty-three, a small, skinny dude with a scrubby beard, had been living in an apartment over a drugstore. But he''d been evicted, and his buddy Big Danny Gallagher was letting him crash on his living room floor. Springsteen wasn''t around that Sunday; he was wrapping up a seven-day, fourteen-set run opening for David Bromberg at Paul''s Mall, a jazz and blues club in Boston. Some of the ads misbilled him as "Rick Springsteen." But that was nothing new, and Bromberg, being a gentleman, let him play nearly eighty minutes per set, way more than most headliners would allow. Things were going great; unbelievable, really. He''d done his first-ever live radio performance that week at the local WBCN-FM.

And his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J ., had been released by Columbia just over a week ago. Last spring, he''d ridden the bus into the Port Authority Bus Terminal with his acoustic guitar to audition for John Hammond, the producer who had gotten Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, and Aretha Franklin their record deals. Springsteen''s manager, Mike Appel, an Irish-Catholic-Jewish hustler from Flushing, had wrangled it. And the singer-songwriter did well, impressing Hammond so much, the label don helped arrange a last-minute showcase for him that night at the Gaslight Café on Bleecker Street. Hammond wanted to see him in situ. He also wanted him back the next day to record demos at the CBS studios on West Fifty-second Street.

There were maybe eight people in the Gaslight audience that Wednesday night, but like most any room in the city, it was full ofghosts. Originally located in the basement of 116 MacDougal, where it helped spawn the Greenwich Village folk explosion (it was the site of a widely bootlegged 1962 Dylan performance), the club had recently moved into the basement of 152 Bleecker, formerly the Café au Go Go, where Lenny Bruce was arrested in 1964, and where the Dead had their first New York gig. Springsteen played originals: "Growin'' Up," "It''s Hard to Be a Saint in the City," "Arabian Nights." Hammond was wowed yet again. In the studio the next day, the desire in Springsteen''s voice was so aching, coiled, breathless, it was like he was about to explode, or pass out. In the first line of "Mary, Queen of Arkansas," he sang tenderly, "It''s not too early for dreamin''." Hammond thought that one was a bit melodramatic. But he was sold.

Springsteen signed a contract in the summer; deducting the money they needed for recording costs, he and Appel got to celebrate with an advance of $25,000.5 Hammond was convinced that the singer-songwriter''s future was as a solo acoustic act. Springsteen liked playing the lone.