LUCY SANTE

Maybe the People Would Be the Times, 2020, Verse Chorus Press

Lucy Sante is a writer, critic, and artist. Born in Verviers, Belgium, she migrated with her family to the United States in the early 1960s. She attended high school in Manhattan and in the 1970s she had a stint as a student at Columbia University. A denizen of the 1970s and 80s downtown New York underground music and art worlds, she wrote lyrics for some of the songs by the No Wave band The Del-Byzanteens (with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch on vocals and keyboards), clerked at the Strand bookstore, saw several early performances by Patti Smith, and generally carved out her place in the dilapidated yet artistically fruitful milieu of the city.

In 1991 she published Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, a thorough chronicle of New York’s 1800s and early 1900s underclasses, hustlers, and gangsters. Her most recent book is the essay collection Maybe the People Would Be the Times. In this interview, she discusses a few of the collection’s more music-oriented essays.

Interview by Tyler Nesler

You write about music from a much more personal point of view rather than from a stance of criticism. What do you think is a particular challenge in conveying the personal emotions or impressions of an auditory art form using words on a page?

Well, I tried to be a rock critic, when I was fourteen - fifteen years old. Rolling Stone in those days (1968-70) actually ran a house ad soliciting reviews, and I kept sending them in (trying like an idiot to disguise myself as an adult), they kept liking them and saying they'd run in the next issue, then they kept sending them back with a rejection slip. They wore me down to the point where I gave up on trying to write about music (until Chuck Eddy dragged me out of my hole a few times in the 90s at the Village Voice). And now I'm really happy I didn't end up with a career as a rock critic! I love writing about music, but it seems to only really work when I'm writing about music I've known about for decades and that has seeped into my bone marrow. (Also note that of the eight pieces in the [new collection’s] "music" section, only three, maybe three and a half — the half being "Twelve Sides" — are primarily about music). Anyway, back when I was trying to be a music critic I wrote in rock-crit lingo; I can't imagine why it took me so long to figure out that what I really wanted to do was write about what music sounds like and what it makes me feel, not some bullshit about influences and careers. 

In your essay "Maybe the People Would Be the Times," you write, "Almost everything of interest in New York City lies in some degree of proximity to music." This perfectly highlights your early days in the city and how the discovery of music was such a catalyst to forging an identity, not just for yourself but for so many others in your orbit.

These discoveries were both social and personal, but now that not only most record stores have vanished, thanks to the pandemic there isn't even the possibility of discovering new music in live settings. Now that finding new music has been relegated almost entirely to the insular realm of digital algorithmic suggestions, what do you think has been lost socially and soulfully from music?

I have to confess that it's hard for me to answer your questions about the present day because I'm so far out of the loop — have been for thirty-five years. For one thing I'm no longer part of a listening (among other activities) community — the "invisible telegram." So I can't know what it's like to find things out these days — I can guess at social media, but I know there are many youth platforms out there of which I know nothing.

Anyway, the social aspect of music, the way it rode through the streets in the 60s and 70s, began its end with the Walkman, which rose to power beginning about 1982. Boomboxes dug in for a few years but eventually succumbed. Soon, not only couldn't you hear music in the streets, you also couldn't associate people with sounds. The middle-aged Ukrainian guy on St. Mark's Place blasting outlaw country on his boombox was very real, a regular presence in the streets. The music burnished his aura, which also included appearing kind of pissed off and wearing a regulation 1962 crew cut.

Also I should say that while seeing live music became crucial to me, there was a pretty long time when I was too young to see any. And some of it you couldn't even hear easily. As of 1969, WFMU was playing the Mothers of Invention and the MC5, but to hear the Velvet Underground I had to buy their record, as a pig in a poke (it was White Light White Heat out of the $1.99 bin and no, I never started a band). With my very limited funds, most of the time I could only imagine what the music sounded like. Some of it I didn't end up actually hearing until decades later — some not until the "sharity" period of the internet, circa 2004-2010, when seemingly everything ever recorded was available for free downloading (and my guesses were often correct!). I’m not on Spotify, but any commercial entity that has attempted to get a bead on my tastes or interests (Amazon, eBay, YouTube, ad nauseam) has always failed by a country mile.

Both the essays "E.S.P" and "Maybe the People Would Be the Times" carry the reader along through a discovery of specific musicians and songs (many of them lesser-known) that were intimately connected to your personal experience and the experiences of those you knew during that time.

It took me quite a while to get through both of these essays because I kept looking up each song mentioned (to the point where I compiled as many of them as possible into a playlist in the order they are mentioned – and I see that I am not the only one to have done this). Have you ever considered giving a live reading of these essays accompanied by the music mentioned throughout? It could almost be a type of theatrical/solo show.

I've thought a lot about that. I do prefer the idea that readers have to imagine what the song sounds like as they read. They can hear it later. In general, after a few long-ago experiments, I've found that I prefer to read without a competing musical soundtrack, of any kind. I'm no Patti Smith. (My spirit animal for readings is actually James Mason).

Speaking of Patti Smith, in "Mother Courage," you recount her inimitable skills at weaving poetry to punk and rock and your fascination at watching her early performances. Why do you think she is such a natural at this whereas it can be a dicey approach for so many others? It is something unique to her demeanor, presentation, or is it a quality that’s difficult to pin down in any direct way?

Patti had energy, humor, a complete lack of sanctimony, a direct connection with the audience, a band playing in her head even when she was unaccompanied onstage, and the surprisingly enduring bashful extroversion of someone who had been goaded by her friends into reluctantly getting up there but then had rapidly found her feet. It was often hard to tell whether something she uttered was previously scripted or just made up on the spot. She began with the attitude and then found the words — began with the body and then went to the mind. She was alive.

And why do you think of James Mason as your spirit animal for readings?

I was becoming more conscious of the act of reading in public — that it couldn't be just a droning recitation off a piece of paper. And yet what I wrote wasn't really suited for anything flamboyant or theatrical. So how to bring drama to the reading while thus restricted? James Mason showed me how: Slow down. Enunciate, but musically. Make very soft emphases reverberate. At all times keep a question in the back of your throat. James Mason is a sexy role model for those of a saturnine disposition.

Low Life, 1991, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

"Maybe the People Would Be the Times" and "E.S.P." also connect to your June 2003 Afterword written for your 1991 book Low Life - Lures and Snares of Old New York. In the Afterword, you recount the lives of you and your friends in the wiped out and haunted New York of the 70s ("We felt as though we were living in the aftermath of some cataclysm we hadn't quite witnessed, some war that had taken place while we were asleep or away for the weekend.").

2020 pandemic New York (especially Manhattan) now has a similarly eerie emptied out feeling, though the streets are cleaner than the 70s, and the buildings are intact. But many of the rich have fled, and the corporate chains that have taken over so much city real estate over the last twenty years are shuttering their Manhattan locations for good. At the moment the city seems to be going through a similar 1970s-style radical emptying and reshuffling. What do you think this pandemic bodes for near-future New York? Could the city become more open again to poorer artists and adventurers, or do you think it's now in a position that is much more unprecedented and uncharted?

Many people have asked me that question. There are too many unknowns in the package. New Yorkers in the 1970s were overwhelmingly renters; the landlords were often elderly individuals, who could make deals or burn down the building. Real estate is a whole other thing now, controlled by wraithlike entities. The really really sad thing is that the victims of the pandemic were the small enterprises; the corporations may have had to close some franchises, but they're far from hurting. The 1970s felt like an end — to my eyes a pleasantly woozy kind of end — but now, post-Trump and eventually post-vaccine, everybody (non-MAGA) will be itching for a renewal of hope, or at least a bigger paycheck. The corporations are ready to exploit that. In NYC real estate the silicon goblins are already on the case.

"There are no media to cover our scene — TV and radio and newspapers and magazines all equally indifferent — but we know everything anyway because we are all plugged into the great invisible telegraph of youth...We are in the heart of the great city, and yet our scene is a little village..." you write in "Maybe the People Would Be the Times." But these days there is some form of media to cover every possible "scene" via the internet. Specialized creative communities are atomized physically but connected digitally.

Do you think that if you were a young man now, would you have thrived and forged an idiosyncratic identity in the same manner that you experienced in the 70s? What is your sense of the vitality of specialized digital communities compared to organically formed ones tied to location?

My purview here is extremely limited. I've been a member of an online community for almost fourteen years, and yeah, for at least the first five years or so it vibrated terrifically, and I made enduring friendships and learned many things. But that's the only one I know, and it was formed organically rather than by specialized interest. I'm not a joiner by nature, and I'm old and alienated and cranky, and I tend to avoid people working the same row of garbage cans as me. So no, maybe.

In your essay "12 Sides," you imagine elaborate lives and scenarios for the possible owners of used vinyl singles you've collected over the years. Do you think that it would ever be possible to surmise equally rich personas from something like an anonymous digital playlist, or do you think there essentially needs to be something tangible and physical to really flesh out a character who may be associated with the recording?

A wholly anonymous Spotify post could still convey a profile. It would be very much like the experience of listening to the mixtapes your friends would get from other friends you'd never met. I was always remote-psychoanalyzing people that way.

Maybe the People Would Be the Times is available now.

Tyler Nesler is a New York City-based freelance writer and the Founder and Managing Editor of INTERLOCUTOR Magazine.