Music Book Review: Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene: 1973-1992 by Tim Lawrence

Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene: 1973-1992

by Tim Lawrence (Music 780.92 Rus)

 

Midwestern native and musical maverick Charles Arthur Russell, better known as Arthur Russell to his fans, didn’t release a lot of material during his all too short lifetime, but his work has received a lot of posthumous attention in recent years, particularly with the excellent “Iowa Dream” album released last year. Here at the Polley Music Library, we have the definitive biography on Arthur Russell’s unique music, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene: 1973-1992 by Tim Lawrence, published in 2009.

 

The book doesn’t spend much time on Russell’s early years, where he grew up in Oskaloosa, Iowa, and then spent some of his high school years in Iowa City. Instead, it spends the vast majority of its time on his tenure in New York City, which extended from 1973 until his death in 1992, during which he was a part of the vital “downtown scene.” He still had some affection for his Midwestern roots, though, occasionally returning home to visit family, and naming a few tunes after Midwestern memories, like “Corn” and “Iowa Dream.”

 

For most of his career, he was an excellent example of the unique musicians who came up in New York’s 80s downtown scene. Of particular interest in that era, many composers thought of themselves more as composer-performers, an extension of the kinds of work one saw from minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass who ran and performed in their own working ensembles. In the downtown scene, many such composer-performers collaborated with one another to realize compositions of various sizes and scales.

 

There was also lots of cross-genre music happening. Particularly in the late 70s and early 80s, this was the time and place where new forms of dance and experimental music were coming out of the clubs in New York, and rap music was new to the airwaves. For a few glorious years, all kinds of music intermingled both on dance floors and sometimes among performers who found themselves working in myriad new directions with their music. Arthur Russell, whose formal background was initially as a cello player, found himself moving freely between pop and avant-garde musical worlds, producing dance singles, writing folk and pop songs, and practically inventing a new genre of ambient art-rock with his electronically-manipulated cello and voice album “World of Echo” from 1986.

 

Toward the end of the book, Lawrence addresses the impact of the AIDS epidemic on New York’s music and club scenes, as well as on Arthur Russell personally. Russell’s health suffered from the disease over the last few years of his life, and he worked at a frantic pace to complete as much music as he could. He may have left us far too soon, but he devoted his final years to producing recordings that still continue to be released 30 years later.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try New York Noise: Radical Jewish Music and the Downtown Scene by Tamar Barzel, or Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 by Tim Lawrence.]

[ official Hold On to Your Dreams page on the official Tim Lawrence web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

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