Since 1979, New York’s Music Building has hosted thousands of bands, musicians, and artists, both famous and obscure. While the Midtown Manhattan building itself has largely flown under the radar, the music created there has made a global impact. With
69 studios and rehearsal spaces on 12 floors, what local players simply call “the building” continues to be the city’s largest sonic melting pot.
The nondescript door on Eighth Avenue is flanked by a liquor store and a cannabis dispensary, and the lobby has no directory. A cacophony of sounds fade in and out as the elevator makes its way up the building’s landings, where gear-packed rooms are a necessity as much as a design choice.
Madonna leads the long list of artists who have worked and sometimes lived in the Music Building; her signature is enshrined under Plexiglas on the top floor. In May, she paid every tenant’s rent (up to $1,999, in partnership with Bilt) to support struggling musicians, generating much love for the Queen and publicity for the building.
From 1980 through 2005, the Strokes, Billy Idol, Joey Ramone, Cyndi Lauper, Trey Anastasio, Warren Haynes, Television, Moby, Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, They Might Be Giants, David Johansen, Blondie, and Interpol all rehearsed and/or recorded there. Punk legends Agnostic Front, Fleshtones, Sick of It All, the New York Dolls, and Lunachicks also helped put the building on the map.
Nearly every New York-based club and touring musician has passed through the building’s colorful hallways, painted by Nicolas Arjona, whose rehearsal room was visited by Madonna in VH1’s 1998 documentary Madonna Rising Pt. 2 – The Music Building. Like a time capsule, the unrenovated 1927 edifice, with its sticker-plastered lobby payphone and graffiti-splattered stairways, looks virtually the same as it did in the CBGB era.
While rock and punk bands dominated its early days, the Music Building today hosts all genres and a dozen hip-hop production studios, along with Broadway players and music educators. Many flavors of rock, pop, R&B, metal, hardcore, jam-band, country, funk, reggae, electronica, rap, jazz, big-band, theatrical, Brazilian, and Latin music happily coexist and cross-pollinate here.
In the late 1970s, building founder Jack Lerner — a charismatic real estate broker with a cowboy hat who used to hold court in the lobby — had an idea, says his son, Roget Lerner, whose company owns the building: “No one had ever said, ‘I’m going to rent 69 studios direct to musicians who want to make a lot of noise.’” In just a few months, all of the rooms were rented. In the August 1981 issue of Interview, Andy Warhol told Mick Jagger that he visited the newly repurposed building: “You go absolutely crazy listening to 60 different groups. It was the most exciting thing I ever did in my life.” (In 1983, Jack Lerner opened a second building with 120 studios in Jamaica, Queens, which hosted Anthrax, Metallica, LL Cool J, and Run-DMC; that building closed in 1996 due to fire.)
Keyboardist Ricky Tepperberg, who has rehearsed in the building for 30 years with the High Times Cannabis Cup Band and backed artists from Rita Marley to Robin Thicke, first made his way to a session there in 1985. “As run-down as it seemed, I got the overwhelming sensation that I was in a very happening place,” he says. “It was rock & roll, it was punk, it was real.”
“The Music Building has been a crucial place for practicing, rehearsing, and networking,” says saxophonist and Jon Batiste band member Marcus Garrick Miller, who recently played with Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood. “It’s special to work out of a space deeply connected to New York’s legacy of musicians and recording artists who care about the craft of live music.”
Especially for drummers — including Tony “Thunder” Smith, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Alex Cohen, Madonna collaborator Stephen Bray, and even Madonna herself — the building has offered the rare opportunity to play 24/7 in Manhattan. “The building is a refuge,” says R&B drummer Eric Brown, who has toured with Lakecia Benjamin, Rachelle Ferrell, the late Grammy-winning saxophonist Casey Benjamin, and British neo-soul singer Omar. “Playing music in this creative environment is inspiring.”
Many rooms are shared by multiple bands, and a barrage of musical styles can be heard at all hours. A 1992 New York Times story entitled “Babel-on-Hudson: House of 100 Bands” duly noted that “riding the elevator is like twirling the radio dial” — and that an angry listener once “took out one of the windows” with a shotgun.
In recent years, New York’s music industry has been challenged as many venues and studios closed. But the Music Building, which will turn 50 in 2029, remains fully occupied. “It’s a one-of-a-kind institution and an important part of the city,” says Lerner, who also operates Chicago’s Music Building. “The goal is to keep it going sustainably, exactly as it is.”
Click here to read the full article.
