One From The ❤️
by Wrongtom
“The city may be man’s most significant creation, but as we know, living in one has its price. The endless onslaught on the senses often results in either immunity or collapse.”
Milton Glaser, Art Is Work.
Milton Glaser was in a cab on his way to his studio when he scrawled 4 glyphs in red pencil on a scrap of paper. He’d been hired by the state of New York to work alongside advertising agency Wells Rich Green in an effort to entice tourists into their faltering city. William Doyle headed up the project.
Glaser, a Bronx-born, Manhattan dwelling graphic designer, had already delivered a logo: two simple black pill-shaped blocks, “I LOVE” in the first, “NEW YORK” the second; a statement which the agency came up with after interviewing various out-of-towners about their views on NY. The design was accepted and the logo was ready to print.
With the scrap of paper in hand, Glaser phoned Doyle “I’ve had a second thought.” Doyle insisted it was too late “we don’t want second thoughts.” Luckily Glaser convinced him to take a look at his taxi sketch. The result is now omnipresent.
The heart became a verb, the city reduced to an acronym, and Glaser soon shifted the letters 2 x 2, subconsciously influenced by Robert Indiana’s pop art piece LOVE; something which New York was desperately in need of by 1977.
Doyle’s commission followed a succession of devastating events and poor planning choices leaving the city on the brink of bankruptcy. Slums festered in the wake of white flight. President Ford refused a federal bailout. Mayor Beame slashed the workforce. Crime went up. Rubbish piled up. David “Son Of Sam” Berkowicz was on a cross-town killing spree, and still at large. In a letter to Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin, Berkowicz wrote “Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood…”
Hell, even demented serial killers knew New York desperately needed a makeover.
But in the mire, a community of marginalised artists made their home amongst burned out buildings and rat-infested neighbourhoods. Experimental musicians and avant garde playwrights staged shows attended almost exclusively by fellow artists and no-good punks.
Back in February, Suicide were supporting The Ramones at CBGBs, except The Ramones were stuck on the road somewhere out on Long Island. The venue’s owner Hilly Kristal, an ardent Suicide detractor, reluctantly ordered them back on stage to buy some time, but angry rock n roll purists had already endured 30 minutes of their low-wave electronic noise, and they looked ready to fight. Alan Vega brandished a knife, slicing his own face before launching into their blood-drenched second set.
Suicide would soon head into the studio to record their debut LP, joining the likes of their absent headliners on wax alongside fellow downtowners Blondie and Richard Hell. Another of their ilk, Talking Heads, released their debut single that month. ‘Love → To Buildings On Fire’ represents a lighter, almost dichotomous take on the city’s punk sound, at once soulful and accessible, yet surrealist and abstruse. David Byrne reimagines the crumbling buildings of their neighbourhood as individuals in and out of love. The arrow in the title predicts the semiotic reduction of Glaser’s logo.
It’s worth noting that an early pre-Heads performance saw Byrne cut himself shaving on stage before playing a violin with blood pouring down his face. Whether wielding a blade as an artistic statement or as a defense, both Byrne and Vega were products of their environment. A world where even performing a pop song could be a violent act.
Later that month another violinist Laurie Anderson loaded a jukebox with a stack of 7”s. The performance artist recorded and pressed 24 singles for a show at Holly Solomon Gallery where you could flip through her tracks, some of which approximated pop, others were visceral sheets of noise. On ‘New York Social Scene’ Anderson pastiches her evasive circle of artists. “Hi, how are you?” they all inquire before making their excuses. “It’s not like it was in the 60s, those were the days, there’s just no money around now, it’s a jungle out there so just keep working” a gallery owner counsels her before the phone rings and she repeats the same mantra to another client. It’s a reminder of Anderson’s overlooked prowess as one of New York’s great comedians.
My favourite from these 7”s is ‘It’s Not The Bullet Which Kills You (It’s The Hole)’ a quasi-Cajun reggae number dedicated to artist Chris Burden, who, for his 1971 piece ‘Shoot’ enlisted his friend Bruce Dunlap to shoot him in the arm with a rifle. If you weren’t already numb to the sound of gunshots outside your cockroach infested apartment, you could now enjoy them in the comfort of an arts space.
The truth is, living/working conditions were improving downtown, thanks in part to a couple of enterprising artists who began renovating loft spaces a few years prior. Philip was a taxi driver and struggling composer when he met Kathryn, a painter studying at the Whitney. The pair went into business. He plumbed whilst she sanded. They’d sell them on to artists and musicians for a small profit.
By 1977 Philip was entering the studio to record his previous year’s stage show Einstein On The Beach, and Kathryn, on the recommendation of friend of a friend Andy Warhol, turned her attention to film. She’d bag an oscar in 2008 for The Hurt Locker. Perhaps the loft-jazz scene might not have happened without the help of the director of Point Break, and vice versa.
Whilst the free-jazz movement blossomed in the lofts, beneath the streets another change was in flux. Graffiti was widespread, there wasn’t a clean subway car in town to paint on. Many artists thought it was over, but then came “the buff”. Mayor Beame had somehow drummed up $20 million to cleanse the city of it’s gutter gallery. As Jeff Chang describes in Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop “The buff not only left the cars an aesthetically dull color, it was harmful; hundreds of workers became sick and one man died of long-term exposure.”
Death aside, and with the chancers gone, the kings of the scene suddenly had new canvases to work with. Blade, Caine 1, Dondi, Lee and Seen all worked on fresh whole-cars in the wake of the buff. New York looked more vibrant than ever.
Another iridescent splash across the city’s grubby canvas happened at a former CBS soundstage on 54th Street, just on the cusp of Hell’s Kitchen. The club was supposed to be the brainchild of model Uva Harden and gallery owner Frank Lloyd, until Lloyd found himself in the thick of a legal dispute with the estate of Mark Rothko. Enter Steve Rubell and Ian Schrader who launched it as Studio 54 in April, becoming synonymous with extravagant celebrities and disco excess almost overnight.
Studio 54 became the destination, attracting a certain kind of tourist, desperate to get in and rub shoulders with the likes of Bowie, Jagger, Liza Minelli and Grace Jones. The latter transitioned that year from model to chanteuse with her debut LP ‘Portfolio’ in September, soon after adorning the cover of New York, a magazine only recently acquired from Glaser by Rupert Murdoch. Meanwhile Minelli released the titular theme from Scorsese’s New York, New York to little fanfare in June, the film flopped too. It would be three years until Sinatra made it the Big Apple’s anthem.
The last straw for the mayor came in July when lightning struck two different power stations plunging the city into darkness amidst a punishing heatwave. Thousands of buildings were set ablaze. Broadway was wrecked. In Crown Heights, production halted on Richard Donner’s Superman as looters ran riot. By morning the blackout had cost the city at least $300 million. Glaser’s much needed logo debuted the following day.
The ad campaign focussed on Broadway, hoping to entice bus-loads of tourists to brave the city streets for a show like Annie, or Hair, or Dracula which starred Frank Langella as the bloodthirsty Count. This particular adaptation was set in Purley in Surrey, England of all places.
Back to the Bronx, and hip hop had been suffering too. The kids who’d packed out the park jams and rec rooms a few years prior were all grown up and hitting the discoteque. DJs who rose up after Kool Herc, like Jazzy Jay and Grand Wizard Theodore found themselves playing to dwindling dancefloors. Herc himself, having thrown the now legendary first hip hop jam back in ’73, stepped out of the game after being stabbed at one of his parties.
Hip hop would have to enter the clubs to survive, the MCs would soon become the stars, and thanks to entrepreneurs like Fab 5 Freddy, it’d find new allies amongst the punks downtown.
Talking Heads released their debut LP ’77 in September. Album opener ‘Uh Oh, Love Comes To Town’ may have been recorded in April but could easily be a response to Glaser’s ubiquitous logo. “Love, love is simple as one two three” Byrne croons over a riff almost definitely borrowed from Scottish soul boys Average White Band. It’s the bare bones of punk-funk, a sound which would define New York at the turn of the 80s as post-punks and hip-hoppers hit the dance floors together.
’77 also featured the group’s first hit ‘Psycho Killer’ which was written in their early days but became the unofficial theme for a city gripped by the Son Of Sam. Berkowitcz was arrested in August and awaiting trial. When ‘Psycho Killer’ dropped on 7” in December it was the swan song for a hell of a year.
Suicide’s debut LP hit the shops around the same time. It’s claustrophobic electro-billy dub-scapes somehow captured the sound of a city on the brink. An agitated Vega ululates his way through the record, outlining New York like a murder victim on a bloody sidewalk, especially on ‘Frankie Teardrop’, a 10 minute opus in which it’s protagonist finally cracks and shoots his wife and baby.
Glaser was busy working on an album himself. Philip Glass had completed Einstein On The Beach which was slated for release in the new year. Glaser supplied a literal painting and a font with a slanting crossbar; lettering he deemed interesting enough to design as an entire alphabet which he’d return to on occasion. He’d already delivered the label’s Tomato logo earlier in the year; another minimal image which seems to conjure the ❤ and the Big Apple in unison.
Less simple was the 10 car train which Lee and his Graffiti crew Fabulous Five painted. It debuted on December 12th on the IRT, it’s message “Merry Christmas To New York” made its journey from the Bronx to Brooklyn for the rest of the festive season and into 1978 before finally getting buffed the following summer.
New years in NY in ’77 is now almost a myth. I couldn’t tell you what Glaser was up to, but Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were on their way to Studio 54 as guests of Grace Jones, one of the few stars who’d shown up that night; she’d been booked for a PA. The place was teeming with the great unwashed, yet Rodgers and Edwards were struggling to get in. The pair had recently hit the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with their single ‘Dance Dance Dance (Yowsah Yowsah Yowsah)’ a mainstay on the club’s playlist, but that meant nothing to the doorman at 54’s back entrance.
Inexplicably, in their attempt to gain entry, the Chic boys adopted Ms Jones’ curious accent — “it’s the strangest thing ever… a pot pourri” Rodgers claimed at the CT Forum in 2016 — and the exasperated doorman simply told them to “fuck off!”
You know the rest of this story, everyone knows it by now, but it’s worth considering the resulting jam session in the context of the city, and the year they’d all endured. They returned in a rage to Rodgers’ apartment and began to bash out an aggressive funk-rock riff with jagged guitar chops knifing through the rhythm. ‘Le Freak’ would soon morph into a slick disco classic, and one of their most enduring hits, but as the duo jammed that night, it’s easy to imagine their original cries of “AAAAAAAAH FUCK OFF!” as a city-wide chant when the clocks struck midnight in a NY desperate for ❤.
Bibliography:
Milton Glaser — Art Is Work
Jeff Chang — Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
David Bowman — This Must Be The Place
Will Hermes — Love Goes To Buildings On Fire
Susan Dudley Gold — Katheryn Bigelow
Martha Cooper & Henry Chalfant — Subway Art
