This Was It!
Meet Me In the Bathroom, the documentary, is a love letter to the halcyon days of New York's rock and roll revival and the birth of Williamsburg as we know it.
Almost as vital as the music itself, a scene and a city can almost have much to do with the way music is remembered as the songs themselves. In the pre-internet days, a place could birth a musical movement that would change the world and at the start of the new millennium, New York City was the epicenter of rock and roll and spawned a scene that many are still chasing today.
Every now and then, a music scene emerged to define a time and a generation. Just as Greenwich Village gave birth to folk rock, Laurel Canyon to classic rock, Haight Ashbury to psychedelic, Studio 54 to disco, CBGB to punk, Seattle to grunge, New York (and Williamsburg, Brooklyn in particular) was the beating pulse of what would become the millennial hipster scene and revived rock and roll for what may have been the last time.
First established in Lizzy Goodman’s phenomenal book, Meet Me in the Bathroom has received the documentary treatment and is a lovely ode to what will perhaps become the last epic scene in modern music and it’s a story told with dazzling passion and fleeting innocence. From first hand accounts and incredible raw footage, we’re transported back to a changing New York, one still under the control of Rudy Giuliani and covered in pre-9/11 grime. Things are dirty, messy, and full of chaos. The perfect combination to kick-start the scene that would come to define rock and roll in the decades that followed.
Starting things off in 1999, we’re introduced to the downtown cool courtesy of Adam Green and Kimya Dawson, best known as The Moldy Peaches, who are leaders of the anti-folk scene by way of Alphabet City’s Sidewalk Cafe. Home footage allows us into their world of ramshackle musicians looking for their place in a city that many think will never see new rock bands call it home. Almost instantly, the focus shifts to a guy named Julian who is at a party with Adam. Julian is a guy doing drugs in the bathroom at a party and he looks absolutely crazy. We learn Julian is a wild character and naturally the frontman of a band called The Strokes. What comes next is a blitzkrieg of footage that highlights the early days of New York’s coolest new band who are slowly gaining traction as the hottest act in the city with a weekly residency as The Mercury Lounge. Soon they’re playing to massive crowds at festivals and gracing covers of magazine across the globe.
For the next hour and a half, the documentary highlights incredible behind the scenes footage of The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, TV on the Radio, and The Rapture as they rise from underground heroes of New York to globe-trekking rock and roll superstars. From first hand accounts, we’re given the insiders' look as to how these bands found their fame and the trauma they experienced along the way all while the world’s greatest city serves as the ultimate backdrop. It’s a brilliant nostalgia trip that looks fondly on the early days of Williamsburg’s burgeoning art scene and the songs we now know to define the decade.
There’s a heavy focus on September 11 and the impact it had on the bands and the city itself. Prior to that day, the Strokes had set out on a sold-out tour across the UK without having released their debut album, Karen O had blossomed into the next greatest front woman, and Interpol struggled to find their footing. However, after the towers fell and people left Manhattan for Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a seismic shift hit the city and nothing would ever be the same again. These moments are heavy, but help give perspective to the mood that blanketed the city and how it created space for this sound to thrive.
As rock and roll once again became cool in the aftermath of the nu-metal garbage that dominated MTV and radio at the turn of the millennium, New York once again found itself at the peak of this cultural moment, a time when it seemed like everyone was starting a band and the term hipster started to become part of the everyday vernacular. Suddenly the ironic t shirt, trucker hat, skinny jeans, and leather jacket became the quintessential wardrobe and leaders of this movement found themselves unable to escape fame.
James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem enters the scene not too long after and while everyone else was moving across the river, he was starting to dabble in drugs and come to his own conclusion about how dance music could mix with punk to create something new and original. He found that in his proteges the Rapture who exploded with their dance-punk anthem “House of Jealous Lovers,” but when an album failed to be released, they left and forced James to start a band of his own. As they say, the rest is history.
Of course, if you’re reading this, you most likely don’t need the in depth history lesson (although I’d be happy to tell it to an extreme extent), but rather, you can appreciate that without this scene happening, my blog and this email newsletter wouldn’t exist. Watching this documentary felt like something that had been made for me, personally, and reinvigorated my spirit with the songs and this city. The Strokes’ Is This It is without question the most important record in my life, the one that made me want to move to New York and relish in as much of the moment and music as possible. Without that record, OMG!NYC and my love for these bands and mew, modern music does not exist. Watching it made me feel a new connection and affinity with these songs and bands in a way I haven’t felt in a long time and served as a reminder as to what brought me here and what keeps me writing about it.
There are anecdotal moments that resonate a lot more now than they did at the time too. The look of fear on the faces of the Strokes as they grappled with fame, looked for answers to dozens of interviews, and the epic struggle that came with writing the follow-up album. Karen O makes it clear how different the experience was for her as the lone woman at the focus. The way she was treated by the press and how it tore her apart. James Murphy talks about how he didn’t care for dance music until the first time he took drugs. He was given permission by his therapist (the source of inspiration for “Someone Great”) to drop acid and when he peaked, his friends played “Tomorrow Never Knows,” a song omitted in the doc for what I assumed were licensing reasons, which altered the course of his life. However, soon after he found his way to dance music, the internet made his once extravagant and unique record collection something anyone could easily acquire in several hours vs the thirty years of music discovery he’d spent his life achieving. These were the humanizing moments that separated the rock star status from the people who suddenly found themselves as leaders of a generation and voices for those looking to be seen and heard.
While the documentary is clearly for fans, I can’t imagine anyone who isn’t interested in these bands finding anything particularly exciting or interesting. However, for those who’ve felt passionate for this time and these albums, it doesn’t get much better than this. Seeing clips of the first LCD Soundsystem and Yeah Yeah Yeah concerts was spellbinding and the reflections on old New York never grew old. Clubs of yesteryear, tales of cheap rent, and the days of hunting for new music on your own without the help of the internet were all given their moments to shine and helped to transport the audience back to theses halcyon days. Even for me, the only downside was the lack of a proper ending to wrap up the transformation of the neighborhood to the stardom these bands now hold would’ve felt more appropriate. In the book, Goodman captures the entire decade and culminates with the rise of Vampire Weekend, something totally excluded in the film, which would’ve given the story nice closure.
However, for me, seeing it now makes me feel complete. Twenty years after first catching the magic from these bands, I’ve been fortunate enough to see many of them live, and my decision to move to New York has been a guiding light in so many aspects of my life. Seeing so many of these bands rise to fame and be able to attend monumental shows has been a dream come true, but nothing could’ve prepared me for one show in particular. Earlier this summer, I attended Primavera Sound in Barcelona. A festival that featured headlining performances from bands that were pivotal to this scene, in particular The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Just before the former was slated to take the stage, a friend told me we could get backstage and watch the show. A non-sober me was in disbelief, but trusted my friend and the rest was a dream. As we stood in the wings of the stage and watched The Strokes play to a raging crowd, I had a moment of pure euphoria and disbelief. Was this real? Was I really onstage rocking out with the band that influenced me to move to New York? After a while I looked around and realized that not only was this real life, but the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were standing next to me as well. This was the moment. This was it! Decades of dreaming had led me here to live the moment of a lifetime: rocking out to a band that means the world to me while another stands beside me to cheer on their friends. I’ll never forget Karen O yelling “yeah Julian!!” between songs as long as I live and for that brief set, I stepped out of my life and into a moment straight from the story. Now, to be able to watch this documentary feels like the icing on the cake.
New York is a tough place, but it can also be one where magic happens. More than twenty years ago, that magic struck as these bands rose from the clubs of the Bowery to MTV and into my bedroom. All of these years later, the connection came full circle and my dream of moving to New York to find the scene came true (even if it was in Barcelona Spain) and now Meet Me in the Bathroom confirms that the magic around these bands was indeed true and birthed the culture of Williamsburg and the forever coolness that’s now associated with it.
Scenes like this may never exist again as the internet allows bands to be discovered anywhere, but for this moment in time, there was no place like New York and, most likely, there will never be any place like this again. This was our time, this was it, and now it’s captured in all its glory for you and all your friends.