This took me a very long time to read, and I mean that in the best possible way. This is a book where you can choose to skim lightly over the material and still get a lot out of it, or pick and choose the sections that interest you most and get a lot out of that too. But I recommend spending the time to read the whole thing, because it’s so very worth it. I mean..even the footnotes make for exceptional reading!

Rifkin is a delight to spend time with. It isn’t just that he knows the material so well. It’s that how much he loves this stuff comes through so well, and that really resonates with me, a reader who really loves this stuff too. For what it’s worth I consider myself pretty well educated on the history of music in New York City, and there was still a TON in this book that was brand new to me. Plus, Rifkin is both terrific at the kind of pacing that makes for great narrative nonfiction and deft at deploying a truly excellent sense of humor.

He also gives tours, and after reading this I cannot wait to try one. This book is an absolute gem and a must read for music lovers, history buffs, and those who enjoy a little bit of both.

You’ve probably heard stories like this about your own urban adolescence: pioneering artists draw attention to a neglected inner-city neighborhood, long enough for gentrification to seep in and drive out the very demographic that put it on the map. This has happened time and again in New York City, and Jesse Rifkin, who runs Walk on the Wild Side Tours NYC and thus knows the city and its music like the back of his iPod, has taken a meticulously researched yet conversational tone with This Must Be the Place. Rifkin takes issue with the time-worn claim that “New York Is Over” made by disaffected types of every generation; every New York generation has its own scene, if you know where to find it and dig deep enough. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be bitter about.

The book’s subtitle Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City gets at the bitterness, which lightly simmers through some chapters and turns scathing in others. The book starts with the Greenwich Village folk scene built around open mics and, before too long, Bob Dylan, and even if you’ve read about this or other scenes, Rifkin, through research and interviews with original participants, offers fresh insight. For one, he doesn’t treat gentrification necessarily as a moustache-twirling bad guy. “These artists are neither totally naïve, nor villains plotting to pave paradise and put up a Duane Reade.” In fact, a chapter that covers the scene that grew around CBGB is particularly candid about the myths that have surrounded it.

The book’s title, taken from the Talking Heads favorite, does come from the CBGB scene, but it’s appropriate too that it comes from the time after the band had made it to the big time (and the silent parenthetical “Naïve Melody” tells part of the story too). Like many of the brief histories Rifkin tells here, CBGB is the story of an arts scene that grew around a downtown neighborhood nobody wanted to go to; a neighborhood where dozens of now legendary musicians lived within walking distance of signature venues. The buzz soon lured like-minded artists to move in while rents were cheap; but the flip side of this is that the existing neighborhood residents lived there not by choice but because that was all they had.

Furthermore, in this time of rampant anti-landlord sentiment, Rifkin urges us to remember: “CBGB’s landlord was—and I really can’t stress this enough—a homeless shelter.” The Bowery Residents Committee has been frequently painted as the bad guy here, but, as Rifkin points out, as much joy that the club’s musical graduates have given to the world, isn’t housing maybe more important? One wonders how Rifkin handles attendees on his walking tours that trot out the usual gripes about selling out and artistic integrity. He’s clear-eyed about the club’s long decline into irrelevance, and admits that he was one of the many who wore a club T-shirt before he ever set foot in the space. In a juicy footnote, he talks back to nay-sayers: “I was sixteen. What the fuck do you want from me? I went there eventually. My shitty band even played there. Jesus Christ, calm down.”

That aside gives you an idea of Rifkin’s tone, filled with the attitude you expect and want from a New York City tour guide. That’s one example of many, and that tone might ring more strongly for this scene because of its high profile in the city’s musical lore. Rifkin for the most part concentrates on scenes that emerged below 14th street, with exceptions, including the ‘70s dance club scene. The author grants that this scene, which included the fabled Paradise Garage, is more thoroughly documented in Tim Lawrence’s essential book Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979. But even then, Rifkin gets more into the scene’s aftermath than Lawrence did, soberly charting the decline to star DJ Larry Levan.

If This Must Be the Place flags at all, it’s in the last chapter on the scene that grew around Williamsburg, at a time when the bridge-and-tunnel traffic exclusively went in the other direction. But it wasn’t too long before the artists who fled Manhattan for more affordable Brooklyn couldn’t even afford that.

If, Rifkin argues, New York isn’t ever completely over, there’s a kind of environment that’s long gone, and it seems characteristic of the greater culture, as social media increasingly pulls us apart instead of bringing us together. Rifkin writes, “Without the regular cross-pollination of disparate scenes in a comfortable, informal setting where artists regularly hang out, something is lost. Scenes become more insular, more stratified, and less adventurous. Everybody just ends up hanging around other people who like all the same stuff they do. Where’s the fun in that?

Couldn’t get into the book not my type of book. Tried to read several times didn’t hold my interest. Other readers may enjoy the book

This Must Be the Place brilliantly weaves firsthand accounts from New York City's artists, doormen, soundmen, managers, bartenders and more into a vivid history of the city's scenes and landmarks, enlivened by a diverse array of characters and culture. Through a modern and incisive lens, Rifkin raises voices from the city's mythology, dispelling hype to uncover even wilder truths.