timlawrence.info

My biography of the downtown musician Arthur Russell has gone into production with Duke University Press and will be published in the autumn of 2009. Developed around exhaustive interviews with Russell's closest collaborators, friends and family, and including eight-seven photos, many of them rare, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92 traces Russell's life from his anonymous childhood in Oskaloosa, Iowa, to his extraordinary spell in New York City. Striving for a level of sonic mobility that matched his winding walks and unpredictable tape selections, Russell wrote and recorded folk, pop, new wave, dance and orchestral music while composing songs for the cello, all in a rush of scene-hopping simultaneity that carried him through many of downtown's most vital spaces. Disco at the Loft, the Gallery and the Paradise Garage; new music at the Kitchen and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation; country at Sobossek's and the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club; new wave and experimental pop at CBGB's and Danceteria; hip hop and electro at the Roxy; poetry at St. Mark's; salsa on the streets of the East Village -- skipping between these sounds and scenes with the nonchalant ease of a kid playing hopscotch, Russell embodied the creative mayhem of an era in which parties shimmered with energy and gigs brimmed with intent. Hold On to Your Dreams provides the first detailed analysis of Russell's groundbreaking contribution to one of the most manically productive periods in New York's music history.


More information to follow.