Soundscapes NYC
The Seventies was a calamitous decade, a low point in the history of New York City. City Hall continually failed to balance budgets and turned to austerity, privatization, and sheer negligence when it came to running city services. Roads disintegrated, buildings and overpasses collapsed, garbage piled high, and crime ran rampant. The city literally crumbled under the weight of austerity.
At the same time, underground culture surged with energy, from subway graffiti to experimental theater and gay bars. Musical artists embedded in the urban fabric turned to their craft with gusto. They formed loose networks of like-minded artists who made and appreciated particular styles of music. Their world during this period at times reflected the disintegrating cityscape. At other times, their music celebrated the social constraints let loose in a time of crisis, when the city seemed to be falling apart.
Soundscapes is a podcast about how music created in New York has shaped the history of the city and how the city itself has been an incubator in which music has blossomed throughout its history. Soundscapes is a bi-weekly podcast series in which historian Ryan Donovan Purcell talks with artists, music industry professionals, and scholars about NYC music history.
About the host: Ryan Donovan Purcell is a professor of modern American History at Sarah Lawrence College while serving on the editorial board at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Soundscapes draws from his book Sounds of the City Collapsing, forthcoming with Columbia University Press.
IG: @soundscapesnyc
Tt: @soundsacpes.nyc
Gotham Center: https://www.gothamcenter.org/
Soundscapes NYC
6. Illustrating Punk
In the sixth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell talks with John Holmstrom a comic illustrator and founder of Punk magazine. In the early 1970s, Holmstrom moved from suburban Connecticut to New York City to attend the School of Visual Arts where he studied under the celebrated comic illustrator Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman creator of MAD magazine. In 1975, Holmstrom conceived the idea for Punk Magazine by collaborating with Ged Dunn and Eddie “Legs” McNeil as an independent zine to cover the local rock scene. The trio initially considered the name Teenage News, a reference to an unreleased New York Dolls track, but settled on punk which they derived from the term “punk rock” which by 1975, had crept into music journalism as a descriptor of new sounds in the rock world. Punk magazine ran 15 issues from 1976 to 1979. During that time the publication brought international attention to the local rock scene and created an association between New York rock and punk. In addition to creating Punk magazine, John Holmstrom is perhaps best known for illustrating album covers for the Ramones, including Rocket to Russia (1977) and Road to Ruin (1978). In September 2024, Holmstrom relaunched Punk magazine to cover a new generation of punk bands in New York City.
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