What'cha doin' downtown?

Jamming to five songs from the soundtrack of Andy Shernoff's New York City

Born in 1952 in Queens, New York, Andy Shernoff has witnessed New York City’s decades-long metamorphosis first hand—as a ‘zine writer, a Lower East Side proto-punk, an elder statesman and witness to the aught years gentrification, and, of late, as a Hudson Vally escapee peering down from above the fray.

I won’t dare to take on the merits and demerits of gentrification here, in so modest a space, yet what’s clear is that the metamorphoses of New York City in the last three or so decades has fundamentally changed the fabric of the town. “It's more about subtracting every single buck from the tourists that still flock there,” photographer Derek Ridgers has remarked about so-called urban renewal, and “the need for developers to maximize their profits from every square inch of the place means that there just aren’t any scruffy little basement clubs left. Those scruffy little basement clubs were the area’s lifeblood. Now, it’s all penthouse flats and global brands.” He added, “They destroyed the very thing that drew people there in the first place—it’s superficial sleaziness.”

In his essential book Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, Jeremiah Moss demanded of his readers, “If you take away just one thing from this book, let it be this: Hyper-gentrification and its free-market engine is neither natural nor inevitable. It is man-made, intentional, and therefore stoppable. And yet. Just as deniers of global warming insist that nothing out of the ordinary is happening to our world's climate, so deniers of hyper-gentrification say that noting out of the ordinary is happening to New York, and that its extreme transformation in the 2000s is just natural urban change.” He emphasized, “Let me be clear: I’m not talking about the weather. I'm talking about the climate, and New York's climate has been catastrophically changed.”

Lucy Sante, in a conversation with Moss that occurred a good fifteen years ago already, complained that “The city we have now is the one we deserve, the coagulation of money. I’m very pissed off because I love cities and yearn for them, and I can’t live in them now—and not just because I can’t afford to. My ideal city is more like the city (New York and Paris come to mind, but it sort of applies to all) that existed up to and including the 1930s, when different classes lived all together in the same neighborhoods, and most businesses of any sort were mom-and-pop, and people and things had a local identity.”

For many years Sante has written evocatively and mournfully about the unruly, knockabout Manhattan that she fled to as a twenty-something, enjoying the cheap rents, the nervy arts and music scenes, and the lively, graphically diverse street life. She remarked to Moss that she still dreams of a renewed New York, “[t]he sort of city where…a burglar, a banker, a taxi-driver, an academician, a modiste, and a pushcart vendor might all fetch up together in a corner banquette at the end of the night. That won’t happen again unless we have some major, catastrophic shakeup, like war (at home) or depression, and do we want either of those?” Moss wrote his follow-up book Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York during and after the early Covid era, hoping against hope that the pandemic might press a cultural reset of sorts for the city, that the prevailing monoculture might loosen up and get a little freaky again. That doesn’t appear to be happening in the ways he hoped.

14th Street, NYC, looking east

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Meanwhile, the wry Andy Shernoff has been writing rock and roll songs about his love-hate relationship with the Big Apple. Here are five of them, spanning the tumultuous years between Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump, between grimy Times Square and glittery Disney, Inc..

1.) “The Minnesota Strip,” The Dictators, Bloodbrothers (1978)

A stomping ode to a long-gone stretch of Eighth Avenue between Times Square and the Upper ‘50s, an infamous area for prostitution from the 1960s through the 1990s, where many of the teenaged sex workers arrived from the Midwest. A kind of anti-anthem, Shernoff’s song’s an uneasy blend of docudrama and lurid thrills. The song opens with a foreboding chord that guitarists Ross “The Boss” Friedman and Scott “Top Ten” Kempner milk until it’s about to perish in feedback, then Friedman’s descending riff pulls us under into the grime. The riff is killer, the riff is the song, really, a siren warning against, or anyway grimly acknowledging, our darker impulses.

The chorus’s cheery “hey hey!” and “Who’s your daddy’s little girl?” are hopefully played ironically, yet, in part because the song was written and recorded in a different era, it’s hard to hear “The Minnesota Strip” as piously condemnatory, as it’s also in touch with very real, dark urges, those that can’t be legislated or prayed away. It’s hard to imagine the song being released now in our more progressive era (he writes, wincing at Monday’s disgusting events). Anyway, the Dictators play the song live to this day, testament to its undeniable, prowling, head-banging groove as to anything else.

(Shernoff name checks the Terminal Bar, a dive across the street from the Port Authority. Filmmaker Stefan Nadelman released a documentary about the joint in 2002.)

2.) “New York, New York,” Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom, ...And You? (1990)

Shernoff wrote this bizarro world “I ♥ NY” for the Dictators, but they never tackled the song in the studio. (It first appeared in 1981 on the cassette-only Fuck ‘Em If They Can’t Take A Joke, recorded live at The Ritz in New York that year.) He exhumed his anthem about a fiery Bronx and junkies, queens, and squares for the short-lived Manitoba's Wild Kingdom who recorded the song twice, first in 1988 for the Mondo New York soundtrack and again for Wild Kingdom’s one and only album …And You?, released in 1990.

Shernoff’s whip-smart sense of humor is more directly in play here than in the murky “Minnesota Strip” (not least of which in the winking “Are you talkin’ to me?” close.) Another wail-from-the-streets siren from Ross the Boss kicks things off and the song barrels ahead like a runaway D Train, but the singer barely notices: he’s stoned in front of his TV, willing his sapped strength for “the struggle to survive,” grumbling about the city outside his window where “Everyone’s an asshole, everyone’s a creep,” where “there’s garbage in the streets.” (So many folks are hungry out there, but the singer feels helpless about that, and anyway he’s as preoccupied with his own boring dinners.) Everyone’s loud, screaming nonstop; his only refuge is to blast the Velvet Underground all day, no doubt irking his neighbors in kind: a play out of the Lester Bangs Urban Survival Guide.

The gang-hollered chorus—

I live in the city
I breathe dirty air
I ride trains with b-boys
Junkies, queens and squares

—celebrates diversity with a smirk and a hint of disgust, the close-quarters of the subway car a kind of microcosm of the apartment building, the blocks, the ‘hood, the city itself. After an unhinged guitar solo—everyone’s getting pissed off—the singer returns with a disheartening moral that’s near and dear to Shernoff: “Safely someone’s smiling / The fat man waits his turn / Soon he’ll count his money / While the south Bronx slowly burns.” Beneath Ross’s maniacal fretboard laughter the rich get richer while those who can “Get out from this stinkin’ mess to a safe suburban slum.”

3.) “Avenue A,” The Dictators, D.F.F.D. (2001)

This stirring threnody to the East Village sums up Shernoff’s bemusement at, and disgust with, the gentrification and subsequent homogenization of his beloved town. Again, Ross the Boss’s opening ascending riff sets the stage for a brief but dramatic playlet. The setting: Alphabet City at the edge of the millennium; Benny, Susie, a grey haired man, and a toothless man are our characters, spotted in and around a tattoo parlor, Tompkins Square Park, a corner bodega in front of which a Range River zips past.

The band’s dynamic playing inside of an urgent, dark-shaded arrangement make the high stakes very clear. Down on Avenue A, the grey haired man “in a tie-dyed shirt and ragged pants” points out “where the hippies used to play,” while the toothless man “with spiky hair and leather pants” who knew Stiv Bators back in the day, gestures to where “the junkies used to play.” Shernoff flirts with cliches here, for sure, the lost, inked up punk kids learning sobering stuff from wise East Village elder statesmen, but the post-Giuliani antiseptic cleanse was still biting in the early aughts, and the band’s tightly-wound playing and Shernoff’s evocative vocals renew the drama, as does the eternal bridge, with its difficult truths—“When every memory is gone, and everything you know is wrong”—leading to the song’s bitter lesson: It’s not what you do, it’s what you say, and it’s not who you know, it’s who you pay.

So it was a morality play all along.

4.) “14th Street,” The Master Plan, Maximum Respect (2009)

The Master Plan is Shernoff's on-again, off-again band with guitarist/singer Keith Streng and drummer Bill Milhizer of the Fleshtones along with guitarist and producer Paul Johnson, four East Coast mates hanging out in a garage and grinningly banging out tunes. Sporadically around since the late-90s, they’ve released three albums and a couple of singles, a motley crop of fave cover tunes and beery, made-to-order originals.

“14th Street” is the kind of fun, Bo Diddley stomp that Shernoff loves, a poke at “fancy pants” uptown slummers and at bridge-and-tunnel girls coming into the city for some weekend debauchery along the great dividing line between downtown—and everything above and beyond it. You immediately flash on Sylvain Sylvain’s like-spirited “14th Street Beat” from his 1979 solo debut, and the vibe’s similar, though here the singer’s a bit more of a gum-chewing smart aleck who thinks it’s still ok to holler out the phrase “sissy boys.” The band’s tight and excitable playing filters Happy Days naiveté with present-day snark. So everyone’s smirking, but it’s all in good fun. Everyone swings down on 14th Street.

5.) “God Damn New York,” The Dictators, The Dictators (2024)

“New York City is a recurring theme in my songs and this love/hate song on leaving NY and moving to the Hudson Valley. I never thought I would live anywhere besides my beloved NYC, but it was time for a different lifestyle.” So remarked Shernoff to Vinyl Music Writer in 2021 about this tune when it was released as a single, the first new Dictators release in over two decades. Shernoff, Ross the Boss, Kempner, and drummer Albert Bouchard (from Blue Öyster Cult) got together with the modest but welcome ambition to release homegrown singles and to hit the road when they feel like it. (Kempner plays on “God Damn New York.” He died in 2023 and was replaced by guitarist Keith Roth, who also handles lead vocals. Handsome Dick Manitoba left the band in 2008 on vexed terms.)

“God Damn New York” is vintage Dictators, from the heralding opening riff to the anthemic chorus, from a Travis Bickle reference (“Some day a rain will come / And wash away all this scum”) to somber nods to the ghosts of singing junkies. But the ripped-from-today’s-headlines lyrics makes this old song new again. Strolling the avenues of the town where he was born and raised, the singer can’t avoid the “sybaritic creeps” and the oligarchs shopping for bling, and that Range Rover along Avenue A has devolved into a limo stuffed with hooting tech titans. He’s unimpressed with the million lawyers with their million schemes and “How they cleaned up ol’ Times Square.” His party boys who used to make some noise? Long gone.

Shernoff nails the complex cultural dilemma of progress versus gentrification in the last verse, and in under fifty words, at that. The eighth notes are stirring and the riffs righteous, but the unhappiness is palpable:

Every street looks the same
’Cause every business is a chain
A devil’s bargain they can’t sustain
’Cause the hedge fund vultures sell the remains
Money talks, ethics walk
Chinese billionaires own empty lofts
Politicians fall in line
’Cause every fortune hides a crime

In a good rock and roll song, you might find yourself lost in the paradox of the joy of release in service of a line like “we never got it right.” But then a moment later you’re singing along with, and maybe even believing, the line “someday we’ll recover.” Words that lift far above the shell of a city that once was.

Honorable mention:

“Sweet Joey, The Dictators (2024)

Shernoff’s lovely tribute to Joey Ramone (1951-2001) closes down the new Dictators album.

When the misfits ruled
Forrest Hills High School
Yeah, I’m talkin’ about sweet Joey

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See also:

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Top: “Andy Shernoff, 2014.9.21 at Shindaita Fever, Tokyo, Japan” by masao nakagami via Flickr

Photo of 14th Street via Google Maps