On October 30, 1975, the New York Daily News printed the most famous headline in its history: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The previous day, President Gerald Ford had delivered a speech at the National Press Club in Washington on the looming bankruptcy of New York City. In the speech, Ford publicly denied the near-bankrupt New York City a federal bailout. The next morning, the streets of Manhattan were littered with the incendiary headline. 

It has been fifty years since the publication of the headline, which presents an opportunity to reconsider this historical period. In this special edition episode, host Ryan Purcell talks with Benjamin Holtzman, Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College (CUNY), about the soundtracks behind New York’s fiscal crisis. Holtzman is the author of The Long Crisis: New York and the Path to Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2023), a volume that returns to this turbulent period to explore the origins and implications of the diminished faith in government as capable of solving public problems. In the wake of the fiscal crisis of 1975, Holtzman argues, local people and officials rebuilt the city from the ground up, creating a system that would both exacerbate old racial and economic inequalities and produce new ones that continue to shape metropolitan areas today.

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In the tenth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell expands upon previous episodes to consider the various musical styles that emerged in New York City during the Seventies alongside punk rock. In dialogue with music critic Will Hermes, author of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), and Lou Reed: King of New York (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023) we contextualize cultural creators in the city during the decade who spurred a tide of experimental music including hip-hop, salsa, techno, and new styles of jazz within the context of New York City’s fiscal crisis.

Will Hermes is a senior critic for Rolling Stone and a longtime contributor to NPR’s “All Things Considered.” His work turns up periodically in The New York Times; he has also written for Spin, Slate, Salon, The Believer, the Village Voice, City Pages, The Windy City Times, and other publications. He co-edited SPIN: 20 Years of Alternative Music (Crown/Three Rivers, 2006) with Sia Michel, and his work has appeared in the Da Capo Best Music Writing series.

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In the ninth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell traces the trans-Atlantic movement of artists associated with punk culture in New York and London. In conversation with British cultural historian Matt Worley, we follow New York-based artists like Jayne (née Wayne) County, Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, and others to the U.K. where they embedded themselves in a growing music-based subculture. As the punk aesthetic expanded internationally it diversified in form incorporating elements of fashion, literature, and cinema like Derek Jarman’s apocalyptic masterpiece JUBILEE (1978). 

Matt Worley is a Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading and author of numerous books that cover modern British history with a special focus on music and the British Labor movement. His book No Future: Punk, Politics and British Your Culture, 1976-1984 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) explores the evolution of punk as a fashion, a musical form, an attitude, and an overall aesthetic. Setting punk culture against a backdrop of social fragmentation, violence, high unemployment, and socio-economic change, Worley recaptures punk's anarchic force as a medium through which the frustrated and the disaffected could reject, revolt, and re-invent.

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In the eighth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell talks with music history professor Steve Waksman about the social and stylistic transformation of the New York rock scene during the mid-1970s. The introduction of new bands clashed with the old guard, culminating with a violent altercation between artists in CBGB in March 1976. 

In 2024, Waksman accepted the Leverhulme International Professorship in Music in the Department of Media, Humanities, and the Arts at the University of Huddersfield (UK) where for the next five years he will conduct a comprehensive study of how music and culture have developed since the invention of sound amplification. Waksman is the former Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music and American Studies at Smith College, and the author of numerous books on music history including Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999), This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009), and Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé (Oxford University Press, 2022). 

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Bruce Springsteen was keenly aware and excited by the sounds of the CBGBs scene during the Seventies. With his own bands, the Boss performed in the same venues associated with punk rock and ultimately wrote songs for Patti Smith and the Ramones. Yet Springsteen’s sound has remained distinct from punk rock as it emanated from New York. In the seventh episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell talks with Bruce Springsteen biographer Jim Cullen and Melissa Ziobro the head curator of the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music at Monmouth University about Springsteen’s complicated relationship with punk rock in 1970s New York. As an NJ native, the Boss was a so-called “Bridge-and-Tunnel-Boy” but that socio-cultural infrastructure worked both ways. By the end of the Seventies, Springsteen did not need to travel to New York to engage with the punk sound. Punk culture was traveling to Asbury Park, NJ. 

Jim Cullen is a historian of American popular culture and has taught at several colleges and universities, including Harvard, Brown, and Sarah Lawrence College. He was a longtime faculty member and History Department chair at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York before moving to the recently founded Greenwich Country Day School in 2020. Cullen is the author of multiple award-winning book books on music including Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (Harper Collins, 1997). His latest book, Bridge and Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Metropolitan Sound of the American Century (Rutgers University, 2023), compares the musical careers of Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen. 

Melissa Ziobro is a Professor of Public History at Monmouth University where she is currently the Head Curator for the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music. Former editor of New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Ziobro is deeply committed to documenting New Jersey history with the broader context of the American story. She curated a traveling exhibition called Music America: Iconic Objects from America’s Music History which is now on display at the Grammy Museum in Mississippi and is expected to return to Monmouth University for the opening of the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music in Spring 2026. 

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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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In the fifth episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with British music critic Jon Savage about how LGBTQ resistance shaped American popular music from the 1950s to the 1980s. Savage discusses the curious and queer roots of the word punk stretching back to the time of Shakespeare when it was used to connote ambiguous and transgressive gender and sexuality. Those meanings carried through to the 1970s though their origins may have been obscured by popular culture. 

Jon Savage is the award-winning author of England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1991) and Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1875-1945 (2007) and his latest book, The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture, 1955-1979 (2024). He is the writer of the award-winning film documentaries The Brian Epstein Story (1988) and Joy Division (2007), as well as the feature film Teenage (2013). His compilations include Meridian 1970 (Heavenly/EMI 2005) and Queer Noises: From the Closet to the Charts, 1961-1976 (Trikont 2006). 

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In the fourth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell and music historian Jesse Rifkin tour a constellation of seedy bars and venues in the 1970s that nurtured bands during the early days of punk rock. These spaces include well-known clubs like CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City and lesser-known haunts like the Mercer Arts Center and Mother’s that shed light on hidden meanings behind punk rock. These stories illuminate echoes of the trans liberation struggle, and how punk rock embodied the sounds of the city collapsing in a literal sense.  

Jesse Rifkin is the owner and operator of Walk on the Wild Side Tours NYC, a music history walking tour company in New York City, and consults as a pop music historian for the Association for Cultural Equity. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveller, and Vice among other venues. Before his work as a historian, he spent twelve years touring the country as a working musician, playing at CBGB, Lincoln Center, and venues of every size and shape in between. In 2023, Rifkin published his debut book, This Must be the Place: Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City (Harper Collins, 2023). 

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When singer Debbie Harry helped form Blondie in 1974 she developed a unique stage persona to front the band. Though she may have appeared to fans as a hyper-femme caricature, Harry recalls her role as androgynous or "transexual" in her 2019 memoir Face It. In the third episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with Cornell University professor of music Judith Peraino, and  University of Iowa cultural studies professor Kembrew McLeod about the stylistic and social forces that shaped gender-bending bands like Blondie and others in the early “punk” scene in 1970s New York. 

Judith Peraino is the author of multiple publications on rock music and constructions of gender. This includes We’re Having Much More Fun: Punk Archives for the Present from CBGB to Gilman and Beyond (Cornell University Press, 2025) co-edited with Tom McEnaney, professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkley. 

McLeod is a cultural critic and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of Parallel Lines in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 Series (2016) and the critically acclaimed history The Downtown Pop Underground: New York City and the Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, DIY Filmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock ’N’ Roll Glitter Queens Who Revolutionized Culture. (Abrams Press, 2018) 

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In the second episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with Tony Zanetta. In the late 1960s, Zanetta worked in Off-Off-Broadway theater and ultimately landed a role playing the Andy Warhol character in Pork, an absurdist play based on Warhol’s phone recordings. Zanetta followed the cast to London where he befriended David Bowie who subsequently appointed him president of his management company, Main Man, and Bowie’s direct point of contact in America for the Ziggy Stardust tour (1972).

With his involvement with Bowie, Zanetta was responsible for developing acts under the Main Man umbrella. This included a proto-punk band called Queen Elizabeth fronted by Jayne (formerly Wayne) County. With Bowie’s financial backing, Zanetta produced a gender-bending spectacle of drag, sex, and rock ’n’ roll: Wayne County at the Trucks! (1974). It may be the most spectacular rock show you have never heard of … till now.

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