New York Voices; 403; Bigtown Groove

Rock. Radio. And. See what. New York is music you your inspires music and New York changes every kind of music that hits the streets. Songwriters from every musical genre have captured aspects of the city in their music and whenever music and the city intermingle some. New York Voices is made possible by the members of 13 additional funding provided by Michael Martin and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Additional

funding for big town grew provided by PC Richardson appliances electronics and computers are Microtel a T-Mobile master agent Con Edison on it. New York Lottery educating leaders of tomorrow and the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University Come grow with us. We'll. Stop. Calling. For. Justice New York's neighborhoods each give distinctive flavor to the city. They have also flavor the music of every generation. So the Harlem Renaissance made one hundred and twenty fifth street and it sounds world renowned Greenwich Village folk music reinvent itself and Robert Zimmerman's invent Bob Dylan

downtown. Lou Reed invited us to take a walk on the wild side and the Bowery grit CBG gay pope its distinctive new york accent. No matter what zip code you hail from New York City has always been. Musical. Legends. Gotta. Love. You. Jazz was born in New Orleans but he grew up in Harlem with his migration of African-Americans from the South Harlem provided

more opportunities more stages. And more freedom. Than. Any other city in. Harlem fostered one of the greatest scenes of cultural expression in the city's history. And at the center of Harlem's Renaissance was Duke Ellington and his pocket. To travel to Harlem. Was to enter a different way. And in 1939 when Duke Ellington told me. How to get up to. That short journey made musical history. Take the train and was the theme music. And it's been it for the longest time. You're going to love that song. Tremendously.

Think what would take the A-Train. You have a lot of relationship to your first train the subway train is in New York and he has the train horns but the truck is with the street and the saxophone. Duke Ellington when he was giving Billy Strayhorn directions as to. How to get to Harlem Billy was from Pittsburgh. He didn't know very much about me. So how do I get to where you live. The train is going from. Downtown to Harlem. It's inviting people from anywhere from New York. Up into Duke Ellington's enclave. His own label and his own cultural. I'm. A middle western You know I grew up in a

church going family and it was not infrequent that we heard sermons delivered about the demons of jazz. So to say that I had an interest in jazz was not exactly the best thing to say around my elders. And then I heard you come to this orchestra and I got to see him in films. I thought well if you're going to play for. A good reason why a lot of African-Americans came here and especially specifically there was a little bit more of racial freedom as opposed to other places in the country. I think in Harlem at that time it was the center of the migration from the south to the north. Now you have a huge influx of black people from all over the South in the intelligentsia in the audience all in one place. You know we're still very segregated.

In the cotton and things like that. There were a lot of people working on it codified a rule experience making it become national at one time. It's. A board Bolam was jumping all over the place. Really there's so many books. Every night there was a crowd I was heaven. I mean I thought we were the people whose records I had heard people on the radio people I'd seen in the movies we all the living in the US. The freedom that this city often. And upward mobility also to black musicians is quite unlike what they could have in New Orleans or in St. Louis or even Chicago Chicago for instance is a blue collar.

Laborer but what brought musicians theatres. They think of working the Harlem Renaissance literary scene was drawing the Black musicians and the black artists to lead to this city. When I came to New York that was growing up. I mean my first job the three deuces I was playing with Ben Webster opposite the autumn trio. I mean come on us this is the man that I had worshipped all of my life. I'm listening to him play every night and learning so much just just just for being in the same room with you. I mean this was a big deal for me. Yes it was quite different from any any other place I'd ever been. Uptown was the province of the Afro-American people come up town in clubs open all hours of the night. Musicians always working. And also colorful characters. Not so much just the city is the nature of the people themselves would have

when the society of people move to really country would have a church people move to hipsters what happens when. It's. All one person. So all these different facets of one thing. Yes it's always the music of New York City amidst music that spontaneity music of unexpected meetings it's all language music that is individuals expressing themselves to each other finding a way to talk together. This is perfect for New York City which is a melting pot or maybe the stupid. Things don't melt and become one. But people are able to maintain their. Individuality. That slavery with their ideas. So that's what jazz is about then. And it didn't. And then. I. Go

in that. 1950s the sounds of the standards began fading away and all across the country teenagers and rock and roll was sharing their first day throughout the five boroughs just belted out four part harmonies on subway platforms and in high school and along with the echoes that bounced off those tiles that came a distinctively Doo-Wops. Ball. That's 1956. Going to St. Elmo's church with my girlfriend Audrey the dance. And we get in there and the boys are on one side of the room and the girls are on the other side. Then they swaggered over to one of the girls and they get a dance it was a slow dance and then the monsignor would come around and he put his hand between the both of you and say make room for the Holy Ghost.

Boem BOEM BOEM BOEM BOEM BOEM. Tova fifty's popular music with generally something for adults. It was even the Sinatras who appealed to Bobby socks and music made by adults. But suddenly in the 50s music could be made by teenagers as well. Young people had their own music gentling were they listening to them. They the audience for that they could make. Do as another style of New York music that combines those central qualities I think of everything that's great about New York which is there's a kind of rawness to it and there's a kind of poetry to it a kind of desire to soar above the grittiness of what your life is you know that kind of aspirations a big part of what New York music is about you. So the world starts getting me down just as you want me to do.

We used to emulate songs that were being played on the radio you know at the time and we used to go practice and go right down the street where we could start singing them all. Oh. And that they were good times back then a lot of innocence. You went down the subway station you sang the crowds of people would come around. And that was a form of entertainment a harmless entertainment. And it was a wonderful thing it gave us a lot of gratification and it got a lot of you know want to the neighborhoods and month to month. The man. At the center of the music industry had hundreds of small labels that had the Brill building it had 16:50 Broadway where you had

just dozens and dozens of record labels and a kid could walk in and just say hey I sing. I think the opportunity to do something with your music was much greater as it was with rap years later in the film tin pan alley before and. That even was to a large extent with Broadway and for the golden age pop radio of the 30s and 40s. This is the birth place. This was the hot seat on where the music really started developing. You know when something happens on a big scale like this we're talking about lots of people. It grows and grows and someday eventually it reaches nobody's ears and an office pin alley. Or somebody's father or somebody is after your kids. And they're here. And so you know. But I did try. Frank you are one of the teenagers. They all started this way or started the streets the dub's the cleft tones the channels.

These are all street singers once in a while too when you try to give no thought. To making those Someone else may be every corner in Brooklyn had a group song on a corner most of them used to sing on the subways because that's where you get the best education in the world wants to know why who the black groups were the ones who really really came out with this first. Yes. The boardwalk I hopped on right five key. And we heard that stuff and we just weren't good enough to sing the way they sang the harmonies that we wish that they were singing. So we just like kind of simplified it. It would be like the Brooklyn slang. Well. Right. This is the Brooklyn singing. So we did it last time we did our style. To music that came from the city. That was us. There was no mistaking. The attitude of New York. When you hear the roughness that comes through when a

song is. One to a I'm walking down the street telling Dionne I'm the kid you know here's that is don't mess with me. I'm in New York. And down we are down one day. And in New York. Just as jazz musicians sort of creative freedom in Harlem folk singers in the 1940s and 50s found their own neighborhood downtown and soon the sound of guitars could be heard everywhere on the streets of Greenwich Village. At the center of the early village stone was a Despeaux refugee from Oklahoma named Woody Guthrie. His honest songwriting to the

best singers to New York City and helped to create the genre we now call folk music. Woody actually wrote some of his most famous songs in New York and a lot of people don't realize actually that he wrote this land is your land on 43rd Street and Sixth Avenue. This Land is Your Land and this land is my land. California your land. The redwoods far in. The Gulf Stream waters. This land was made you and me he had started it. A year or so earlier scribble down a little chorus or something on a piece of paper but it wasn't until he came to a boarding house on Sixth Avenue that he actually sat down and wrote the complete lyrics of the song. I spent four years in the Army. Never was like home. And

I got down to Greenwich Village thought I'd never go. But I'm looking. I'm looking for a home. Well first time I saw this bedroom there was just one bed and a chair next time I saw this bedroom. There was a guy sleeping there I'm looking for a home. You walked down the street in the village and you could feel the electricity. Someone would pass. He was like rolling your foot in a rug. Some would personally feel that click. They will work it has something to affect. Conversation always began with what are you working on. It was a tremendous tremendous push to go. In. New sounds new voices and the freedom. To find them so. Long on the. Story. My man you had all these directors and filmmakers working out of the city.

Hans Eissler and Bertolt Brecht come in the 30s and 40s bringing this you know Berlin cabaret political Cabaret to New York. So you have this huge immigrant population. It's not just about oh it's so great. You can have a falafel on one street and a pizza on the next and a canoe on the boulevard. Well that's true but they also bring the politics and people would go to Washington Square Park and stand on a soapbox and say today they know what happened in the news. We're going to organize every union every political party it was just a really juicy place to live. Songs from all over the world came to this city collected in Greenwich Village and then they were changed and recook and the different kinds of fennel and condiments were put in and they came out to touch by this marvelous excitement in Greenwich Village. We would do a show for instance said one of the venues in the village and we'd be sitting backstage talking before we went on and we talking about playing songs

back and forth and changing our way of singing. I would sing a train song that would go with running down the track at 80 miles an hour when they broke into a scream. And so on. I know I'd be sitting for a long time with Leadbelly and introducing programs and traveling around with them and soon I'd be singing. B C double x y z z in the cupboard. Can't see me in the hen. The same is true. I get a little lot for the heads up stairs on my road. To go rock. There was something like that before I met Leadbelly. It was not in my background it was not in my. It wasn't in my fingers and my my my vocal chords but a little while talking with him I wanted to sound like Bob Dylan intended to be Woody Guthrie one of the funny experiences I had in our house is on the weekends a lot of young folk singers would come to our house and they're

all in jeans and they're all in work boots and they're all in flannel shirts and leather jackets. Then one day a guy shows up and he's really 30 and I'm thinking this guy is a real bum. And he says it's Woody Guthrie. I said no. And I was 10 or 11 years old and closed the door. Well he was very persistent very dirty. Meanwhile Arlo comes to the door and he's about 14 at the time and he sees this guitar strung across this kid's body back and he says you play man and a guy says Yeah just come on let's you know let's play. Well thank God for music history that he did because it was stolen from the night in the wild west of the town. I love the best but I've seen some ups and downs from McKamey into New York to. People going down at the Grand. Buildings going up to the sky.

When you hear you know a song like talk in New York. That's what you're hearing you're hearing that full discovery of something new. Maybe back in the old days people went out and discovered the West. You know in the 20th century people discover new york. DAY know you sit and wonder why babe. You mean you don't buy now. For Bob Dylan and the people closest to him. Being in New York in the early 60s MIT being part of something that they felt could change the world. I took this album cover as a reference because I realized what it was becoming it was becoming an icon of his that's the right word it was becoming a symbol of that generation of that time and also being associated with it. Oh you're the girl on the cover of so it became something that

I was embarrassed about it felt awkward about to face it head on and give it some backstory. This is called record time protest time and it was an event full time event filled time leading up to and out of the release of this album in May 1963. Talk made music and music made talk and action was already in the making with civil rights marches marches against the bomb and the beats had already cracked the rigid morality of the 50s. So we were ready to roll. It was my personal story but it became history because history is personal. New York influence on Bob Dylan is definitely he became himself. In New York City he definitely became himself. He could test all these ways of being and evolving to himself. He imitated assimilated and that Greenwich Village in that time was the place he came to because of its history of Bohemia.

This is where artists and writers when that village symbolically in New York City larger scale. Is a place where you go to if you know you don't belong in the little town you grew up in. New York was full of kids from areas that they thought would dull as was pointed out by somebody wrote a song. What do you do when you're white and middle class. The answer is you do what Bob Dylan did. You make up stories about where you come from and sing your songs as if that's where you really are from. I'm Oscar Brand and I'm here at WNYC New York. Bob Dylan will be singing at the Carnegie chapel. That should be a very eventful occasion. Bob was born in Duluth Minnesota. But Bob you weren't raised to be where you were. I was raised in Gallup New Mexico and you get many songs there. Lot cowboy songs Indian songs carnival songs

vaudeville kind of stuff. Where did you get your songs from people in the car. What he said was surprising to me because it was different from what I gathered from his background. He was Bobby Zimmerman one of the kids who are remaking themselves at that time and using folk music as the clay. They played themselves off the statue themselves up until somebody got what they were using was music. You got to you see you. When I was. Still. I strongly suspect that like other white collar successful areas are like other fertile cultural Crescence the seeds of the religious destruction plan and its success. On the other side the. Way you. Doing himself had really

largely left the village scene by 64 so he was bigger than that. He wasn't you know walking down Bleecker Street with his guitar and he was playing Carnegie Hall and he was thinking about going electric and changing things around him that way people wanted him to stay and write only this and see all that and that's very constricting anybody in the arts in any field. You have to keep on moving. You. Know. Lou. You know. Dylan was able to just like everyone else like all of us. Soak in all of this stuff the politics the food the style the idea of what is outrageous how far can we go what's our center what do we hold on to all these questions are constantly in discussion in New York and they even to this day there's still clubs out there. You'll always find a mike and you'll always find an audience. As Bob Dylan was leaving West Street behind time to change

a whole new looks and pop artist Andy Warhol created a new center for the art that is downtown studio called the factory and the Velvet Underground led by a long island native Lou Reed became their house band. Their music became a documentary of New York's darker side. First time I heard the Velvet Underground. I was amazed. I actually was on Psilocybe and at the time and strangely I'm waiting for the band was played on the radio. And it was one of those things like this possibly be what I think it is. Sits. Down waiting for the man it is an incredible Velvet's song just because nobody was writing lyrics

like that at the time. I mean it was about traveling up to Harlem to meet your drug connection to a cop heroin. It just was a real slice of New York life. You. See. The sound of Lou Reed's voice you know just that is so much the sound of a new yorker and the sound of that pounding piano that John Callas playing is something that just sounds like the clang of New York streets. So I was I was amazed it was a revelation and it was just I've got to find out more about whatever that was. I. See. What I like about Lou Reed as a songwriter is at his best. He really paints a clear picture of whatever it is he's experienced and he takes you right in there with him and he's not afraid. He doesn't mince words. He's just right there in your face. The. Day that I wrote Luke I had been listening to Lou Reed's Berlin album and Luke has a song

about child abuse which is a very hard thing to write about. You see. Me. Just don't ask me naturally if you listen to the Berlin album it's filled with all this domestic violence and drug use. And so there's sort of a direct connect the dots between the Berlin album and that song louca which most people don't perceive and most people don't when think of it that way. That's in fact. Who I had been listening to a in a in many ways was the height of the summer of love everywhere else there was a sense of hideousness and bright colors and LSD and nature and these were things that didn't necessarily mix all that well with New York City. And that's what the Velvet Underground put into the pot in.

I mean there's always been the dark side of the New York scene and were talking about before the sexual revolution made everything available everywhere where you do have. On the Bowery these mysterious dens of inequity and sex and drugs and so were all the people who would know the Velvet Underground music were actually part of these dark walls. To. Did you see when the Velvets first ventured to the west coast people thought they had this evil vibe about them because they weren't you know happy flower children or whatever. If you live in New York you're a little bit more of a realist than that. I think on some some here I mean California's a very easygoing culture. New York is not an easygoing culture so people's tendency here is to get a little bit hard about certain things.

I mean they're new yorkers and they're they're mean spirited. And they're frank. And love stinks and nice things. But you know let's holler about it and let's make some sound rather. Well we're living it and doing it. See. NEW YORK At that time has now just become the center of the art world international. It had previously been town. And in the 60s there was a big global shift. I'm sorry the factory was sort of a combination of an artist yea Andy Warhol doing his painting and a film studio making his films plus a music rehearsal studio with the velvet underground

and it was a multimedia artist's studio the you think of all the art rock bands that tended to be artists or too busy to be producing art and then you have like the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol did the first cover for them. It's pretty astonishing when you think about it the Velvet Underground speaks so authentically what the New York cultural integration scene where it takes everything together and so this is the very top and best of everything. It's very beautiful. I'm telling you about authentic art of rock and. Go. Oh. Oh.

Oh. By the mid-1970s the city was at a low point and the idealism of the 1960s had spun into a post-Vietnam apathy out of the Lower East Side. One of Manhattan's poorest neighborhoods came when you said that reflected the tone. Of voice was heard in part and eventually a home girl band from the Forest Hills Queens emerged as the leaders of the pop. Punk rock came about at a time in which the city was really in very bad shape. In the mid 70s was the time of the Ford to City Drop Dead headline about the president you know not being willing to assist New York. There was a sense the city was going to go bankrupt. And in the way that New York always seems to they turn all of that into an opportunity.

Everybody had left New York. We had the cheapest rents in the country. I was hearing about people getting for real apartments for $30 a month over an avenue D because nobody wanted to live there. It was a dangerous place to live. But this is good for art. See. That time if you want to see the TVs on the Bowery it was skid row. You know it wasn't a place where there were know million dollar car. It was it was a seedy and exciting place. When that started playing between. It was a kind of downtown scene people Bo 14st didn't really know about it. Now these kids look back and say wow I wish I could have been there when the Ramones were there when Patti Smith was there and they would say. And so I was walking around. It developed very much as a local scene and there were a lot of local scenes back then and in different towns.

But the New York one kind of like everything in New York was more powerful and got more attention. That period in time the late 70s in New York was one of the most incredible and still in some ways undiscovered in time times of New York music history. Everyone was being swept up in this musical way that was happening. You know I started hearing these new records that were coming out like TV's first record and talking heads first record or the Ramones first record and it was just it just had that spark again that made it into. Bands like the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and the MC 5. These bands were all as far as I could tell trying to be as good as it could be. The difference in the 1970s the punk movement was that we saw that we didn't

necessarily have to try to be as good as bringing in unusual or outrageous new concepts. It was more important than actual whether somebody could play the instruments exceptionally well. None of the seeming Jaymes bands made it because they had connections they all made it because they worked hard and they loved the music. You got to have that attitude take over the world be the greatest and this is an attitude this is a new York attitude. Well I first met the Ramones when I was in college asking for information and went out there and hang out on the roof of a building in Forest Hills and took some pictures there and walking down the street and going in the subway and the famous shot of them sitting on the subway train to put guitar in a shopping bag because that's all they had for a guitar case back then.

And then standing in front of CDs and then playing at club that then maybe the genes were rip because they were old and they couldn't afford a new pin. They didn't do that as a style that's what bands looked like back then. I went to see the Ramones the first time to CD G-ds and it totally blew me away. They said it was only 20 minutes long so I spent twice as much time on the subway to get to see jeebies as I didn't sing the Ramones but it was so great. For the first time I saw a band that didn't play not only didn't play a drum solo they didn't play a guitar solo it totally was like wow this is the future. I just saw the future if they just incredibly fast said they must have played 12 songs in 16 minutes and that number it was like What the hell was that like I never seen a band play so

fast and so intensely every time we played it at some point it became a famous rock star came in. Linda Ron stood up and she came in with two or three people and we made room for her fairly near the stage you know fairly close up and. She was here about two minutes. And we have. I think my daughter has a picture of her fleeing out the door. It was not what she expected. It was not her kind of thing. It must be something about living here that makes you want to celebrate. What an amazing feeling when you hung out assuming she believes that this is the center of the world and that years from now people were going to care that you hung out there and that the bands were all going to go on to bigger and better things.

After you lived in New York for some time. In a way kind of. Trapped see. There. Is something you wish dark about. Because I see New York City as a laboratory. So I didn't have a laboratory experiment thing. I did an experiment. There's always a risk involved. So New York City artists are artists that are willing to take chances and sometimes lose. When you look outside at the Bowery now with the condos coming up and the luxury buildings and there's this sense that this is not an Urban Frontier anymore as it was when the Ramones first walked on this stage I think it's really nice to have a place called

Joey Ramone place so you can stand here and remember what happened in a time and a space that's not so far away and yet is out there amongst all of you. So. Now in New York City has Charlie Parker Grace Hermano Herald Square to go and Boulevard. Jack Horner went away. Jerry Lewis was Jackie Robinson Park. Now Joe you were home. In the late 1970s the Bronx stir as the central incubator of a new city. In an area plagued by

gang violence. COOPER The father of hip hop music would emerge to provide inner city kids with an alternative to gangs. In the process lay the groundwork for a multibillion dollar rap industry. In 1970 677 gangs were pretty rampant and the ball rolls in New York City. So that time was a special time because the people felt the need to put together some some kind of. Activity for the youth. We were 12 13 years old. We couldn't get in clubs and discos and dance. But we had this energy we needed to get off. So we needed an alternative to disco which was hip hop. It prob wasn't a commodity and it was just something that people would pay to go see and buy. And we did just take our system you know our turntables and little amps and

speakers and go outside in the park and set up and play. We got our electricity from the light poles of light pole right here a little box on there. If you dig around inside you'll find a little plug you get an adapter screw it and then plug right up and there's your electricity. I. Give parties outside to give back and all fall. I clean the park up. And the kids clean the park up and it's clean. Are you going to play out right outside. And I tell them. Any discrepancy any problems start me started from the first record. I'm on plugging this goal because they're not going to set this set me up for your battle ground. B.J. called her the undisputed father of hip hop music. You know he played the segments all the records known as the great beats

the break with the climactic part of the song and it was taken from many different genres of music. I smoke cigarettes and sometimes think that the past for the record to go by some people is to wait for some particular part in the music to get into it. And do their own status. I observe that. So one night I said you know what. I'm going to go to the yoke of the record. I want to go to the dog groove though the get off part the break part and then the time to me Tim bought a record called Bombo rock and their record came on. That whole place does it with a continuous concussion. But. It was gross. It was it was out when we were just turning. You know what I mean. Growing into a groove. We were to become. So it's a time of discovery a time of looking around trying to find

yourself and find out where you fit out here. That's why hip hop just grabbed everybody at the top just like this is. You know I mean it's new you can call this. Mine. In 1982. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released the message bringing a social consciousness to the shows and changing the music. What. Makes me wonder how are we going. When I heard the message I just thought that it was such a powerful record. On one hand it was a great piece of hip hop dance music but the lyrics and the music and instrumentation orchestration everything about it was so sort of found when.

People just don't take that noise to them. But I just I got no rats in the front room roaches in the back junkies in the alley with a baseball bat. These were real things people dealt with. If you turn the lights off in the kitchen and stayed away for two hours even if your kitchen was impeccably clean you turn the light on. There was millions of roaches all over your sink you know you're still scrounging scouring for food. During my family asking me why when I'm not home got a double digit If I can't take the train to the job this it's like. Well you listen to a song like the message you know you get a sense of New York has a kind of inferno and that is an element of what it is here. You know you find yourself in the wrong situation you find yourself the wrong side of the economic line you know it's not a pretty place to be close close.

It's not like what you do when it's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder. How I. Keep. From going on how I keep. From going on. It's really a song of strength about keep moving in the face of great obstacles but in reality this is what the Bronx is really all about. Something like you'd never heard it before it was talking about social issues and suddenly hey wait a minute this isn't just a party. Certainly encourage people like Harris one who came along not long thereafter to. To say you know I can combine rap music with this kind of message that I've got going around in my head. And so it would certainly have told someone like

Harris one that he has opportunities that he could get this recorded that he could get this on the radio that that people would listen to this. What I started man is about to happen and it is the way to make some money. And it's a way for my young kid from Bow Wow to the criss cross. To have their whole lives set up. Before them go to college. This is the best thing about a black man in the neighborhood in New York especially in the urban areas. You got a new energy running around here and it can be channeled negatively or can be channeled positively and hip hop provided that for a lot of people in New York and that's why on so so so big and so widely. Spread.

And every musical genre this city has produced masterpieces and every new yorker has that special song that captures the song. New York City New York New. York. I don't think any new yorker can truly be a new yorker unless they like New York New York the Frank Sinatra version. I think there's a sense in which that sums up so much of the kind of swagger and pride and strangely of some of the vulnerability of the city as well. Back in the New Yorker as freely as everybody's favorite song. I think that I like that song because it kind of sums up a lot of the New York attitude is not just about New York being a city that's open all the time but it's about cruising Broadway new limousine and being back in the big time. It just sounds like the big time sounds like

success. See it's so close to you on the subway. Cause I've thought about what my favorite New York song is and it's a song which almost no one has ever heard of cold and rain is done by a group called the Bonneville. It's a song about a guy who sees a girl on a subway train. I. Guess. I'll call you. My. Day. To me that just so evocative of New York. You're on the subway with this great looking woman you don't know anything about her but you're just so taken with her that you go home and write a song about her. My favorite song about New York is really a piece in this. Piece composed by Duke Ellington is called Tom Perriello. So you played more and more with him as you go on you know that he has today call this a

response all along. Paul Paul on the bubble Bowl them. They just hauled him all over the television. Mr. Milo there's this one lyric that I love where Tom singing about New York and he says Broadway looks so medieval. And that's one of the amazing things about New York is how it changes you know New York in a snowstorm looks like you're in the 19th century you know New York when it's foggy and misty looks like you know you're in some bizarre medieval fantasy land. One of my favorite songs is the Boxer by Paul Simon. She is leading.

In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter but as Trey has carried the reminder of every glove that led him into he cried. And. We. Both. To. Go home. It's peaceful. That's gone. And. They. Don't bother me up on the roof dates from the early 60s but I think the most wonderful usage of it was at the concert for heroes after September 11. A month after that James Taylor did a version of up on the roof and I thought that was a wonderful idea because basically what he was doing at a time when being

high up and a building was sort of the most horrifying notion to anybody. He brought back a song that was you know in a memory of the event that completely reinvented the notion of being on a CD. I have a favorite song. Of what is that no one's ever heard and it's called My Name is New York. And I think it's probably like maybe five people on the planet that know that it was written. My name is New York has been struck by the winds froze up and blistered then struck down again. I've been struck by the rich folks been struck by my bum's been struck by the mansions and struck by my slums. I might Boyle I might blow I might shake to the ground I might smoke and tremble and blaze all around but no matter how low nor how high up by fall my name is New York and that's all I've been called. By. This is. My.

Game. Just recently I was listening to a Bob Dylan song called Just like Tom Cruise which. I hadn't heard in a while. I just you know at a point having forgetable said a weariness. He just kind of says. On. DVD. There's an element of you know when New York is your home. You know it really can feel like a small town or could feel that welcoming. Something that's very tender about the city and that's an element that. You know gets reflected in the music about it that's why I'm. Living in New York means being alive. It really does. To say one single song is my favorite of one man it's my favorite composer. It's almost impossible too many good things to choose from. The great big city. Rocker.

Peter tight. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha ha ha ha. Ha. It's not. True. Who. Will go to Coney. I need to know the. Honor Roll. Through Central Park will scroll. Well that. Is. Still. So so. Loud. Maybe. They will see. Maybe. We. Will. Only. See. Cities will never support. The dream. Of a boy and God. Will turn.

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