The Downtown Pop Underground

August 27, 2018
In this astute cultural history, McLeod, a communications professor at University of Iowa, documents the remarkable artistic ferment in lower Manhattan during the 1960s and ’70s. Even as white flight and a collapsing industrial base pushed the city toward ruin, McLeod writes, the chaotic depopulation opened creative spaces for bohemians and long-marginalized social groups. Fueled by a newly assertive LGBTQ community and the broader counterculture, experimental artists reconfigured popular genres and older avant-garde traditions with stunning results. Highlighting transformative artists—Andy Warhol, Hibiscus, Harry Koutoukas, Ed Sanders, and others—and their intertwined milieus, McLeod provides a panoramic scan of a revolutionary era. Assiduously tracing the ebb and flow of influence and individuals among theater (La MaMa’s founder Ellen Stewart), music (John Cage), and film (Shirley Clarke, who co-founded the Film-Makers Cooperative), McLeod depicts a freedom birthed by a DIY aesthetic, technological advance, and cheap rents. He pays tribute to CBGB and the musicians who performed there (Patti Smith, Blondie, and New York Dolls among them), and the most illuminating sections document an Off-Off Broadway where outré figures such as Hibiscus, Stewart, and Jackie Curtis challenged gender norms and performance traditions in ways that resonate through pop culture today. This is a fascinating look at a long-gone New York City art scene.

October 1, 2018

Countless stories of singers, actors, and writers moving to New York City to find success are interwoven into the fabric of America. The creativity bursting from the city's out-of-the-way places, however, is even more fascinating than Broadway or the Guggenheim. These are the places that would become the growing medium for whole new artistic forms. The scope of this book from McLeod (communications studies, Univ. of Iowa; Pranksters) is, at first, broad, examining varied but intertwining artistic movements from the mid-20th century, primarily in Manhattan neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village, SoHo, and the East Village. It then takes readers from the mid-1950s to well into the 1970s, covering developments in art, folk, rock and classical music, poetry and writing, journalism, theater, performance art, and more, along with icons such as Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, and David Johansen. The author covers plenty of ground smoothly and organically, immersing readers in this exciting period. VERDICT For those interested in 20th-century American art, music, and literary history.--Brett Rohlwing, Milwaukee P.L.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2018
A glimpse into one of New York City's greatest underground cultural epochs.While much has been written about Greenwich Village and the folk music movement of the 1960s, the parallel and explosive elements of New York's larger underground cultural revolution have been comparatively neglected, along with its offspring: the 1970s renaissance that rippled through the seedier downtown boroughs. McLeod (Communications Studies/Univ. of Iowa; Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World, 2014, etc.) aims to showcase those myriad underground scenes, encapsulating two decades of evolution in this concise historical montage. Impressively, the author transforms an encyclopedic trove of factoids and compresses it into a tight, appealingly written chronicle. "While sorting through stacks of archival research and over a million transcribed words from my interviews," writes the author, "I gravitated to those who straddle multiple mediums and art forms." McLeod pries open the intersected scenes of the most pivotal players: "Andy Warhol, a key connector figure," along with playwright H.M. Koutoukas, indie filmmaker Shirley Clarke, punk-poet Patti Smith, "trashy bleach-blonde" Debbie Harry, free speech icon and Fugs frontman Ed Sanders, "DIY theater impresario Ellen Stewart," and "the gender-fluid performer" Hibiscus. Listing his primary focus as "experimentation, hybridity, and border-crossing," McLeod's mission was to examine this group of artists and their broad social networks and downtown environs (complete with maps), detailing the coalescence of the underground as its influence bled into the greater landscape of mainstream culture. In this literal who's who of scenesters, McLeod highlights dozens of both well-known and obscure artists, including John Cage, the Ramones, Nico, Paul Morrissey, Andrei Codrescu, Paul Krassner, and many more. Other terrain includes the birth of punk, the burgeoning indie press, the germination of hip-hop, and the avant-garde film movement and off-off-Broadway along with the landmarks of this epicenter--Caffe Cino, Cafè La MaMa, the Chelsea Hotel, Max's Kansas City, CBGB, etc.A vivid, electric tale certain to evoke nostalgia for underground veterans and spark interest for newcomers. A good complement to Will Hermes' Love Goes to Buildings on Fire.

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Starred review from October 15, 2018
In this excellent study of the artists, poets, musicians, playwrights, filmmakers, and countless nonconformists who settled in downtown Manhattan in the 1960s and early 1970s, McLeod offers up a fascinating slice of New York history during a turbulent and violent era while weaving together various strands of cultural life. Alternative theater, coffeehouse culture, and punks, among others, applied a do-it-yourself attitude to creating their own type of community. Patti Smith, Sam Shepard, Andy Warhol and the Factory crowd, and Debbie Harry are some of the famous artists McLeod profiles, along with the tales of such important venues as Caffe Cino, the Living Theatre, Judson Poets' Theatre, Eighth Street Bookshop, and La MaMa. But McLeod also recognizes the not-as-well-known experimental musicians, activists, writers, dancers, filmmakers, videographers, theatrical performers, and visual artists who contributed to the zeitgeist as adventurous residents of a floundering and decaying New York trying to keep their heads above water. By developing new modes of independent distribution, writes McLeod, these artists anticipated the ways that people now use social media and other online platforms. In the process, they helped transform popular culture on national and global scales. An important addition to the cultural history of New York and America.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)