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Jul 23, 2023

5 songs that inspired Meet Me In The Bathroom author Lizzy Goodman

Lizzy Goodman wrote the book on 2000s indie rock in New York City. Literally. Released in 2017, Meet Me In The Bathroom is an oral history of NYC's music scene at the turn of the millennium. It's a

Lizzy Goodman wrote the book on 2000s indie rock in New York City. Literally.

Released in 2017, Meet Me In The Bathroom is an oral history of NYC's music scene at the turn of the millennium.

It's a thrilling page-turner covering an explosive era set off by The Strokes and takes in decade-defining groups Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem and the DFA label, The White Stripes, Kings of Leon, TV On The Radio, The Killers, Vampire Weekend and many others.

In the last year, it's been adapted into a feature-length documentary, executive produced by Goodman and directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace. They're the filmmakers behind Shut Up and Play The Hits, the concert film that captured LCD Soundsystem's then-farewell concert at Madison Square Garden in 2011

Serendipitously, that same event prompted Goodman to begin writing her epic tome.

"When The Strokes headlined Madison Square Garden for the first time and there was [LCD] in the same week, I went to both of those and went 'Hang on, this feels like some sort of bookend…'," the author tells Zan Rowe for Take 5.

"What just happened for the past 10 years? That was sort of what I ended up feeling. 'Wait, are we done with something?'"

From definitive early days with The Strokes to the power of Karen O fronting Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Meet Me In The Bathroom author catapults you into the NYC of the 2000s.

Goodman was at the epicentre of the New York City indie scene, though as she emphasises, she didn't really know it at the time.

"One of the themes of the book and film is, you don't know you're living through a quote-unquote 'scene'," she says. "Especially in the beginning. You're hoping that might happen…"

"I always say New York is a metaphor – the place is real but the idea of 'moving to the big city, bright lights' is universal. It could be whatever that means to you… this idea of a place where you're going to find like-minded people."

That sense of community and camaraderie comes across in both versions of Meet Me In The Bathroom.

"We were all a bunch of weirdos," Goodman says.

"All of these people, even the guys in The Strokes… Never really suffering for attention but they were also outsiders. The Moldy Peaches were The Strokes' favourite band. That's who they wanted to tour with.

"That was the common theme…. There was a sense of mutual oddness, outsiderness, having come from somewhere else, not quite fitting in wherever you came from."

Goodman gives us a Take 5 crammed with juicy details, speaking about how writing her oral history was like a pinball machine, the joy of seeing her tome translate to the big screen, and in hand-picking five songs from the scene.

So where do you begin when selecting the soundtrack from such a fertile period? The choice is overwhelming.

That's precisely why Lizzy wound the clock back a little… to what soundtracked her journey to the Big Apple.

"I was listening to so much Pixies the first summer that I moved to New York City… when I first met the guys in The Strokes," she says

Goodman grew up on rural farm outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

"Not near some cool big city where interesting bands would come to town.

"I saw Bush and Goo Goo Dolls and No Doubt, that was my first show ever at the big stadium where they also hold the rodeos."

In 1998, she left to attend college in Philadelphia. Though a few hours' drive from her ultimate destination, she still saw NYC bands touring Philly's local venues.

"I was getting into all kinds of cool indie rock that I'd missed when I was in high school," she says.

"Other bands of that time that really meant the most to me was The Realistics, Longwave, artists whom certainly never broke at the level The Strokes did. But that's who I saw at bars in Philly, like the Khyber Pass. It was very small, it felt very intimate."

Goodman eventually moved to New York's Lower East Side "the first summer after my freshman year". Rather than line up an internship, or follow through on her law degree, she slept on the pull-out couch in her grandparents' old apartment.

"I was listening to The Clash, wandering around the Village, looking for a job. I ended up working at a restaurant with [Strokes guitarist] Nick Valensi and that's how I first me the guys in The Strokes, well before they would get a record deal or anything like that. They were just other kids who liked the Pixies."

"So, that was my trajectory. I was in New York but I wasn't living there full time until after I graduated, which was the summer of 2022. And of course by then, things were really kicking off but there was still a lot to come…"

"Before Is This It came out. Before everything. What did I play from that time? This was that song!" Goodman says.

Released on 29 January 2001, via UK label Rough Trade, The Strokes' debut EP The Modern Age sparked a titanic bidding war and kickstarted the band's fortunes.

Goodman says her reaction hearing it the first time was, "'Holy shit, this got made!' It just felt dangerous and exciting.

"It's so good the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and it feels like if I expose myself to too much of this… some door is going to open that I can't anticipate, and I won't be able to come back.

"That's how your early exposure to real rock'n'roll feels, and that's what it felt like for me. This is the song that brings that feeling back."

On July 30, 2001, Australia became the first country in the world to hear 'Is This It'.

Goodman also vividly remembers the first time she saw The Strokes perform.

"Yeah, totally. It was in Philly, and they were opening for Doves. Playing at this basically condemned pseudo-venue – this old dancehall… I'd never been in there before, never went after. There were 10 people there."

She recalls Nick Valensi coming out after they'd played and joining Lizzy and her friend to watch Doves, and remarking: 'You guys, they have people who carry their gear! What? No way!'

"The baby steps towards rock stardom," Goodman says. "To imagine such a world [was] so exciting. I remember that show was great, they were always great. I saw them a lot in those early years.

"It was very cool to have the music that you were falling in love with… to know that the people making that work were not that different from you. I mean, they're also geniuses, it turns out they're way different from me but it didn't feel that way then. It felt like your friends were making this music that was blowing your mind."

"Curveball, right?" Goodman mocks of the breakthrough 1993 single for British band James.

So, what does 'Laid' have to do with NYC music? She explains it was the "#1 signature track" of one of the scene's eminent DJs, Ultragrrrl aka Sarah Lewitinn.

"My best friend and roommate during the chaos of what we'll now call the Meet Me In The Bathroom world," Goodman adds. "She's a renaissance woman."

Lewitinn was a blogger turned former editor at SPIN magazine, as well as an A&R rep and later label head whose bona fides include "discovering and helping get signed The Killers, My Chemical Romance and Stellastarr* [the latter two whom she briefly managed], among others.

"She's also a really well-known DJ [and] whenever she would play 'Laid' by James, the crowd would just go crazy.

"I can picture it, I can feel it, I can smell the vodka.

"I can put my body back in the space of it being two in the morning at the Dark Room. Sarah's spinning — she's played Interpol, she's played Stellastarr* — and then she really wants to make everybody go crazy. That's what will come on."

"Yeah Yeah Yeahs really meant and still mean the absolute world to me in terms of doors they opened up for me creatively and inspiration-wise," Goodman gushes.

"There's no way to overstate what seeing Karen O on stage meant to me on a totally personal level and many other people I shared this with."

'Our Time' is one of the band's earliest recordings, from their 2001 self-titled, five-track release.

"That EP is so dirty-sounding [and] rough," Goodman notes.

"It's completely unpolished in every way and it has the sound of possibility and youth. All the things you want to hear in that period of your life."

"['Our Time'] has that insouciance, that sense of community. 'What I'm doing up here… It's for all of us'. I still get chills when I think about it."

She has a lot of great memories of the art-punk trio but the power of seeing Karen O unleash on stage, in a scene dominated by men, remains as potent as ever.

"I couldn't believe what I was seeing. All the stuff that you're carrying around in your 20s and teens, as a young adult person trying to make your way in the world at that time…

"'What am I going to be? Who am I going to become? What's the right path? How do I become a full person and take responsibility for something like an adult life without losing everything that means anything to me?'

"To get to see this woman on stage… It felt like it unlocked something in my own self. 'This is possible, look at her, look at what she's doing'.

"It seemed like she was just attracting lightning every time she stepped on stage. And it really did, it made things feel possible that didn't feel possible.

"['Our Time' was] kind of a mantra of a song, and it still is. I still feel when I want to reconnect with a sense of unbridled innocence, naïve chutzpah, that's what I think about.

"I was so unburdened by anything other than the fantasy of what could happen and so was she. That's really the sound of that moment."

'PDA' marked the beginning of what would become Interpol's signature sound: dark, moody post-punk threatening to swallow up Paul Banks as the frontman's foghorn voice cries out amid an angular web of counterpart guitars and rhythms.

"Sarah gets all the credit for Interpol," Goodman notes, bringing us pack to her dear friend Ultragrrrl.

"She was obsessed with them. They were her favourite band in this world forever."

"For me, I knew the Strokes guys. I loved The Strokes."

But, when she and Sarah moved in together, all she'd hear about was Interpol.

"'You have to see them! You have to see them!' And I eventually did and was totally blown away.

"'PDA' is a really great song. Whenever I play it I just think about that particular period of time — standing on our rooftop with Sarah on Rivington Street in the summer. Hot, sweaty, happy. Just the best."

As both the book and film of Meet In The Bathroom chronicle, Interpol's success wasn't immediate.

They were desperate to 'make it' but had to toil for four years before they got signed to the revered indie label Matador for their seminal 2002 debut album Turn On The Bright Lights.

"Their trajectory is really interesting because they worked for a long time before they hit. And when they hit it was very fast," notes the author.

"Just a lot of real work and doggedness on their part to stick it out and make it work. Eventually, of course, it all worked out and they're still making incredible records.

"Those early years of struggle bonded them and galvanised them and created the language of the band as a kind of culture that endures to this day."

The popularity of Turn On The Bright Lights in the wake of the success of Is This It also prompted "this hilarious Interpol vs Strokes false dichotomy," Goodman remembers.

"People would run around downtown being like, 'Are you on Team Strokes or Team Interpol?' To quote my dear now departed friend [music journalist] Mark Spitz: the joke of course, is it was not Team Strokes or Team Interpol, it was Team Strokes and Interpol versus, like, Hoobastank," Goodman laughs.

"Everyone in bars that are next to each other with almost the exact same record collections being like 'Well, I like The Strokes better than Interpol'.

"That's how you know you've kind of won already; all these people arguing about these two great bands that we were blessed to have that early."

"There is no beginning, middle, and end," Goodman says of her book and film.

"It's all these people's stories, all great New York stories, all great coming of age stories that have to do with a scene as opposed to a specific individual."

She tirelessly edited the more than 200 interviews into an oral history that "uniquely allows you the ability to give everyone their voice, and in hopes, have a collective sense of the emotional truth of the time rather than a literal truth rendered.

"I think of it as a pinball machine. You're all in there in this mess together and everyone's experience looks different and feels different – and has common themes and bangs up against somebody else's experience, and that influences that person… So the truth of what happened is multi-layered and has multiple narrators."

She was also drawn to the format thanks to one of her all-time favourite reads.

"Basically, I really wanted to make [1996 punk tome] Please Kill Me for my generation. It's a bible for a certain type of malcontent rock and culture fan, New York City story addict. It's great, dishy, heartfelt…"

Please Kill Me is an oral history of New York punk in the 1970s, written by Roderick Edward 'Legs' McNeil and Gillian McCain, covering the iconic CBGB and Factory scenes and icons like Ramones, Blondie, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Television.

"All these incredible artists from a period of time in New York really, when I was moving there, the last great era of what we're trying to describe here," Goodman says.

"This alchemic coming together of young artists wanting to make something of themselves and tossing themselves into the pinball machine, so to speak.

"That book, metaphorically and literally, I carried it under my arm as I moved to the East Coast… trying to get to New York. 'If I get there something like [Please Kill Me] will happen to me'.

"One of the things I would say to artists who were maybe a little on the fence about talking to me is: 'Hey, I'm trying to make Please Kill Me for my generation'. 'Okay, well I can't turn that down'."

The author says one of her major breakthroughs in wrangling such a wide scope – covering countless bands and events between 2001 and 2011 – was "in realising that the main character, so to speak, was the city itself."

"Because it's not The Strokes' story, it's not Interpol's or James Murphy's, it's no one band or person's story as crucial as they all are," she says.

"What I finally concluded was 'Oh, it's the story of the city during this time'. All these kids are a part of a cast of characters telling a story about a particular place and time through the portal of their own experience and through the sound of these bands.

"The note card I had on my bulletin board that summed this up was: 'Never stray too far from the bar'. This is about New York and New York at that time was about being at the bar.

"So, all these, what I thought of as big think cultural themes – gentrification, the changing generational identity around technology, the effect of the Bush v Gore decision in 2000, the invention of Napster – all these things are really important, but they have to come in through essentially, the bar. Through the story of these people living in the way that we live."

The book lends itself to a documentary. Reading the multiple perspectives, you can picture the various talking heads spinning their sides of the same yarns and milestones.

This new rockumentary charts the rise of The Strokes, LCD Soundsystem, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol and more in early 00s New York.

That's not how the film turned out, though.

"The idea of a bunch of forty-something rock stars sitting in nice clothes behind a black backdrop talking about 9/11 was absolutely not [what we wanted]," Goodman says.

"It really has to feel like it felt to live, which was my intention with the book. That's the integrity and the heart of it."

British filmmakers Southern and Lovelace shared the same vision "without me mentioning any of that."

The screen version of Meet Me In The Bathroom immerses you in grainy archival footage of a baby-faced Julian Casablancas, early Yeah Yeah Yeahs performances, and – in one hilarious sequence – James Murphy vibing in a club as he recounts his first exposure to ecstasy.

Goodman says the production wanted "as much archive as possible. It turned out to be 100 percent archive film, which is unheard of and incredible that they pulled that of."

Did she ever imagine her book could or would be a film?

"Absolutely not… The first text I got about these guys being interested, I just laughed. 'Okay, sure'.

"The book was a nightmare, it took so long," she chuckles.

"From proposal to publication, it was seven years. It was brutal. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. If I had known I probably wouldn't have done it. I'm glad I didn't know…

"But of course I'm thrilled. Honestly all the words are not good enough: Exciting, thrilling, gratifying. It makes me giddy to see this film come to life.

"I never get jaded about it, it's so crazy to me still that people love the book the way they've loved it. And even now, to have it opening in cinemas in Australia!? It's exciting."

Meet Me In The Bathroom (the film) is available to buy digitally now.

Meet Me In The Bathroom (the book) is out now.