Oral histories work brilliantly at encapsulating complex music scenes (for example: Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk), with one proviso – you’ve got to marshal a veritable army of interviewees who’re not only prepared to talk, but also to gossip, muse, digress, ramble, even bitch and fume, to build the most accurate picture.
Set against a backdrop that encompasses 9/11, the collapse of the old-style music industry, the gentrification of New York, and an emergent social media, journalist Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom more than fulfils this brief. She features not only an impressive array of key musical players from in and around the early 00s’ New York-flavoured guitar explosion (the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the White Stripes, Interpol, Ryan Adams, LCD Soundsystem, the Moldy Peaches, Vampire Weekend, Kings of Leon, the Killers), but also record labels, nightclubs, DJs, artists, journalists, managers and music executives, fleshing out and contextualising the fast-evolving milieu.
What emerges is a rock’n’roll cautionary tale about the perils of starting a musical scene that you can’t finish. Pretty much the house band of the book are the Strokes – moneyed college kids (singer Julian Casablancas’s father, John, founded the Elite model agency), whose knowingly retro, downtown cool (whiffing of the Velvet Underground, Ramones, Television and the Stooges) debut album, Is This It, lit a fire beyond NYC, engulfing the global cultural landscape. When the Strokes imploded and took a break (they’re still together), it was thanks to the time-honoured combination of drink, drugs, infighting, exhaustion, a backlash and what appears to have been an extended bout of outright sulking when bands such as the Killers and Kings of Leon outdid them by committing the cardinal sin of being more commercial.
Indeed, there are moments – not just confined to the Strokes – when MMITB starts reading like a literary aftershow party of resentment, recriminations, finger-pointing, mud-slinging and regrets – which is fantastic and exactly what you want from such a book. As a former music journalist myself, it certainly came as no surprise to keep discovering levels of self-absorption and self-aggrandisement that threatened to dwarf the Empire State Building.
However, MMITB is also beautifully paced, vivid, informative and compelling. The Strokes and many other recurrent contributors, including Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O and LCD’s James Murphy, should be commended for their honesty and humour, as should Goodman for managing to wangle coherence, momentum and a kind of magic from this monster of a story. MMITB emerges as a book primarily built on passion, love and homage – a drawled rock’n’roll sonnet to the music, the bands, the city, the scene, the triumphs, the screw-ups, and, of course, “the moment”.
• Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011 by Lizzy Goodman is published by Faber (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
