Lawrence — Hold On to Your Dreams

Author: Tim Lawrence
Title: Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–1992
Year: 2009
Type: Academic book (Duke University Press)

Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–1992 is a biography of the composer and musician Arthur Russell by the cultural historian Tim Lawrence, published by Duke University Press in October 2009. Its publisher calls it the first biography of Russell; it rests on interviews with more than seventy people who knew him. Lawrence writes that Russell moved between new-music composition, minimalist rock and disco because he found common ground among the three. The book follows him through the venues of downtown New York, from The Loft and the Paradise Garage to the Kitchen and CBGB’s, in seven chronological chapters. Lawrence states that it is not a history of the downtown scene. The reviews the press collects are favorable. John Rockwell, in Bookforum, read it as “a first draft” of a history of the downtown performing arts as well as a life of Russell, and Ryan Dohoney wrote that it “sets a new standard for musical biography.”

Lawrence opens the preface with a late-lunch interview in May 1998 in which the DJ Steve D’Acquisto, who had coproduced records with Russell, gave him “the lowdown on Arthur Russell,” calling him “one of the great songwriters of the twentieth century” and putting him with Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter.¹ In February 2004, at Mancuso’s party for the Loft’s thirty-fourth anniversary, Lawrence met Steve Knutson, who told him that Russell was his favorite artist and who was holding archival documents on behalf of Russell’s partner, Tom Lee. In the acknowledgments Lawrence writes that Knutson “fuelled the idea of writing a biography” by inviting him into the archives in his office at Audika. Within weeks Russell was the subject of features in the New York Times and the New Yorker.¹ The preface also sets out his sources: “Unless otherwise referenced, all quotations are taken from interviews that I conducted between 1998 and 2008.”¹

In the introduction Lawrence follows Russell from the dance floors of the Loft and the Paradise Garage to the new-music stage of the Kitchen, the downtown country bars, CBGB’s and Danceteria, and the hip-hop nights at the Roxy.² Russell made demos for the Columbia Records executive John Hammond, “who believed Russell had the potential to become the next Bob Dylan.” He also cofounded Sleeping Bag Records, which Lawrence calls “one of the most influential independent labels for hip-hop and club music in the 1980s.”² Lawrence writes that Russell “recognized that the new-music compositional movement, minimalist rock, and disco/dance shared an interest in stripped-down instrumentation, trancelike repetition, and affective intensity, and so he worked between genres.” He adds that “while many of his contemporaries found his vision unconvincing, history has demonstrated he was simply ahead of his time.”²

In the preface Lawrence writes that the book, while it stresses Russell’s collaborative outlook and his roots in the downtown scene, “isn’t intended as a history of that network.” The Kitchen, he writes, is “a little more prominent than it might have been in a nonbiographical account of downtown” because Russell curated its music program for the 1974–1975 season.¹ The seven chapters run chronologically from “Formations (1951–1973)” to “Tangents (1987–1992),” and in them Russell is called Charley, Jigmé and then Arthur, “because he wanted to connect emotionally and wasn’t keen on formalities.”¹ Lawrence describes Russell’s way of working with the image of a vine that “only moved up or down if that movement helped him move sideways.”¹ Russell’s music was scarce, so, as the acknowledgments put it, “I turned to his collaborators and collectors, who supplied me with rare recordings.” He thanks Matt Wolf, whose documentary Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell he calls excellent, for “the check-ins.”¹

Duke’s description calls the book “the first biography” of Russell, says it rests on interviews with more than seventy people who knew and worked with him, and dates it to October 2009. The reviews it collects are favorable. John Rockwell, in Bookforum, wrote that Russell’s elusive presence everywhere turns the biography into “a first draft of that elusive comprehensive history of the downtown performing arts.” Ryan Dohoney, in the Journal of the Society for American Music, wrote that it “sets a new standard for musical biography,” citing its research and its focus on “seemingly minor figures.” Michaelangelo Matos, in Time Out New York, found sound its “overriding thesis—that Russell’s boundary crossing was as important as the work he made,” and Bernard Keenan, in the Quietus, called it “nothing less than justice being done.”³ Lawrence’s books on either side of it are Love Saves the Day (2004), on American dance music culture in the 1970s, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor (2016), on New York’s dance culture from 1980 to 1983.⁴

Key contributions

• The first biography of Arthur Russell, built on interviews with more than seventy people.
• Russell read as a musician who worked between new-music composition, minimalist rock and disco because he recognized what they shared.
• A biography that crosses the venues of downtown New York, from the Loft and the Paradise Garage to the Kitchen and CBGB’s, without claiming to be a history of them.

See also

• Mutant disco — the genre in which Russell’s dance records are placed