Rock: New York City 1970s Overview

In the early 1970s the city of New York lapsed into bankruptcy, and the music business completed its move west, centring on Los Angeles. When New York City’s musical resurgence occurred at the end of the decade, it owed little to the tradition of craftsmanship in songwriting, engineering, and session musicianship that had characterized the city’s popular music in the pre-Beatles era. Rather, it was a product of the city’s reputation as the centre of the world and a place where the thrills outweighed the danger. As the middle class fled the city, people from all over the globe took its place, and a new generation shaped New York City’s music in its own cosmopolitan image.

On one hand, there was the romantic junkie cool of the new wave; on the other, the pre-AIDS hedonism of disco. It was an era best symbolized by Saturday Night Fever (1977). Fittingly, the film was a true mongrel. Set not in fashionable Manhattan but in more prosaic Brooklyn, it was produced by an Australian (Robert Stigwood) from a story by a Northern Irish–Lithuanian Jew (Nik Cohn) with music recorded in Miami and France by Britons who had grown up in Australia (the Bee Gees).