Yet when considering what must be the most fertile period for pop music, the sixties, the New York City scene is often little more than a sidebar. While what was happening in London, Los Angeles, Detroit, and San Fransisco is often portrayed as downright mythic, what was happening on the East Coast islands seems quaint and scattered, at least when you've finished swapping legends about Lou Reed and Nico. And Dylan doesn't quite count as he was actually from Hibbing, Minnesota, and his New York City phase was just one of many.
But there was a lot happening in my home state a decade before I gobbled my first spoonful of Gerber. Simon & Garfunkel and The Lovin' Spoonful became the six faces of sixties folk rock. The Ronettes and The Shangri-Las were the definitive girl groups, and The Young Rascals were the definitive blue-eyed soul group. Doo-Wopper Dion, singer-songwriter Laura Nyro, garage rockers The Blues Magoos, psychedelic rockers Vanilla Fudge, and too-smart-for-bubblegum poppers The Cyrkle were all born from New York soil, and don't even get me started on the writers pouring out of the Brill Building or whatever brownstone Leiber and Stoller were holed-up in.
There's so much pop ground to cover, that you can't blame Mitchell Cohen for getting a little over exited in his Wake Me, Shake Me: New York City, the '60s & the Pop Youthquake. There's a breathless quality to the book, as if a starving man has been set loose on an all-you-can-eat buffet. At times, it hard to see the big picture as Mitchell darts through all the very different shops there are to visit on the sixties NYC pop market. Because there often isn't a lot to bind these artists together, the storytelling feels disjointed at first. After all, while the British bands could be glibly defined by their beat and psychedelic whimsy, and the LA ones by their garage-psych sneer, and the Detroit acts by their soulful polish, and the San Fran ones by their soporific long-windedness, there wasn't too much binding the pop of the boroughs (and Long Island, homeland of me and the Rascals!) together.
Stick with Mitchell, and a story starts to form, as the Spoonful, Rascals, and Dylan snake through the tale, making their marks felt in profound local and international ways, and early-sixties genres like doo-wop and girl groups fall by the wayside. Conversely, matters outside of New York shape its local scene, from the British Invasion to West Coast acid experimentation to Batmania rumble New York.
Mitchell also personalizes the story by very occasionally popping up in the story as a young fan and subtly shaping the storytelling with his humor, political pov, and insights. I particularly loved his take on the dynamic between Mary Weiss and the rest of the Shangri-Las. I do wish he'd spent more time with my personal favorite New York band of the era, The Left Banke, but I guess there was already enough to cover without thoroughly detailing the East Coast chamber pop scene too.
