As the tale goes, Kurt Loder was back in Ocean City, NJ - the real Ocean City, ahem - where he basically grew up, but now found himself post-college, post-some military, post-his introduction to journalism. He took a job with the magazine, Good Times, as a music columnist. It was 1976.
Of course he’s going into the city. NYC is “the city” in the tri-state area, just like Ocean City is what I mean when I say Ocean City. I’m looking at you, Mary-land.
CBGBs, Max’s, etc. Shows where there’s more people on stage than in the audience sometimes. But he’s in love with what’s happening and, A. I can’t blame him, but B. it’s gotta be hard, without the social proof, without clear validation, to know how special it is in the moment, right?
The Ramones in that era are folklore to me, but he watched the whole arc rise up. And this is before all the MTV stuff and reasons I know Kurt Loder as Kurt Loder, so when he starts telling Questlove stories about this I’m all sorts of hooked in for all sorts of reasons (not the least of which being me, a decade and a half later, hanging out in a trailer park near Ocean City listening to so many of these bands on repeat).
It’s worth quoting it with some lite edits:
Questlove: "So, you were aware in real time that, okay, this is a revolutionary moment that I'm witnessing."
Loder: "Yeah, I think so. I mean, I spent a lot of time at CBGB's and Max's. It was like if you go to CBGB's, you see bands that were like bar bands, but they had original material."
Questlove: "Uh-huh."
Loder: "So, I love bar bands. I think they're great generally. But these were people who came out of bars, but they were playing original material. It was like magic. Bands you would not know about today. They're forgotten now and they had a couple of good tunes at least."
This idea, that bar bands, who weren’t special but cobbled together a few songs who could get a room to care feels extra important to me. There’s personal reasons not worth getting farther into here, but the notion that regular people, who would otherwise be regular patrons of these places, were doing something magical.
Think about your corner bar. The one with a jukebox, or the radio, or a crappy acoustic duo doing lame versions of hits from whatever era. What Loder’s describing is the antidote to that. Same form, different function. Regular people - who would otherwise just be patrons of these places - getting up and doing something original for the room and the room responding.
I know it still happens. I am a believer, genuinely, that it’s always happening somewhere and you just have to look for it. But there’s something about Loder being there right at that time and understanding it this way that feels really important to me.
Magic isn’t in public memory or social proof. You have the audacity to get up on stage in front of whoever is around and make them feel something. There’s a chosen few who go on the reshape culture IF there’s enough there, there. But for everyone else, in that microcosm of an economy of a scene, what counts is that people feel like they can step up, crank out a few good tunes, and participate in putting on a show for their peers.
