A Word or Two about "Downtown Bands"

880. NEW YORK DOLLS, "Personality Crisis"
Produced by David Krebs, Steve Leber, Paul Nelson & Sylvain Sylvain; written by David Johansen & Johnny Thunders
1973 Did not make pop charts

881. LIVING COLOUR, "Cult Of Personality "
Produced by Mick Jagger & Ed Stasium; written by Living Colour
Epic 68611 1989 Billboard: # 13

"Downtown bands"--I've used the phrase at least once, and I probably should explain it before I get too much further. As far as I can tell, the phrase is specific to New York City. Bands that played Providence, for example, would never be referred to in that way, because in Providence a small club like Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel is in the same part of town as a big indoor arena like The Dunk. Both venues are "downtown," so the phrase is meaningless there. In New York, though, especially back when the Nokia was still a huge movie theatre called the Loews Astor Plaza and Bond's was only intermittently open, the big shows were in midtown, usually at the Garden, and the small clubs were all "downtown."

As my namechecks would suggest, the phrase's peak usage was probably limited in time as well, mostly to the 70s and 80s, maybe a little into the 90s. It reflects, not just a geogaphical or demographic distinction, but a cultural one as well: a two-tiered vision of the local music scene, not quite an avant garde, more of an ersatz bohemia, centered most famously around CBGBs but also around other Village venues like Kenny's Castaways or even a little further north to the late, lamented Max's Kansas City. There was a certain reverse snob appeal to these venues, the idea being that the smaller the club was, the better (or more "authentic" the show) would be. In point of fact, quite a number of acts that later played arenas started out in clubs like this, but if you wanted bragging rights among the cool kids, you had to say you saw those bands in a small club first.

Did downtown bands actually sound any different, though? I don't know. Here are tracks from two exemplary downtown bands, both off their first albums, and the only telling aspect of their sound is how clean it isn't. Instruments and vocals are falling all over each other here. There's no real attempt to separate out each element so that we can hear the lyrics and parts distinctly. It's more like listening to Louis Armstrong playing fills in King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band than listening to the carefully crafted (if still improvisational) sonic architecture of the Hot 5s and 7s.

Indeed, one could argue that the downtown rock scene was to New York in the 1970s and 1980s what transplanted New Orleans jazz was to Chicago in the 1920s. More precisely, if we can move beyond Armstrong, downtown bands were to both New York and popular music in the 1970s what bebop combos were in the 1940s: an escape valve for an artform that had moved from cult to mainstream in too short a time for its diehard fans to fully absorb the shock. This is no knock on the mainstream pop forms of those eras--as you can probably tell, I'm very fond of arena rock and I'm as likely to listen to swing as I am to bebop--but rock was going through an identity crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, just as jazz was in the 1940s and 1950s. In both cases, the two-tiered performance system allowed the connoisseurs a listening space of their own, even if some of us still liked sampling both kinds of performance.

If this means, however, that around about 2020 some restaurants are going to start serving "punk brunch" on Sundays . . . well, that's where I draw the line.