Co-sponsored by Jefferson Market Library
Join us for a talk with the co-author of this new book on a slice of New York’s famed music history, Positively Fourth and Mercer: The Inside Story of New York’s Iconic Music Club, The Bottom Line. Award-winning music journalist Billy Altman will be in conversation with Village Preservation’s Executive Director Andrew Berman.
In 1974, when young music promoters Allan Pepper and Stanley Snadowsky opened their night club the Bottom Line in an industrial area of Greenwich Village that was all but deserted after 6 pm, no one could have foreseen either its long-term success or its impact on the musical and cultural landscape of New York City. Over the next thirty years, while trends and tastes came and went, the Bottom Line throughout its fabled history remained true to its co-founders’ profoundly simple vision: that if you presented entertainers in an intimate setting where the focus would always be on what transpired onstage, both artists and audiences would treasure the experience.
The story of the Bottom Line is the tale of childhood friends who turned their shared dream into a reality – and, through determination, hard work, and, most of all, a belief in each other, made entertainment history and memories to last a lifetime.
Billy Altman is a Grammy-nominated journalist, critic, and historian whose work covering the worlds of music, popular culture and sports has appeared over the years in such publications as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Spin, Esquire, GQ, People, Entertainment Weekly and The Village Voice. A former senior editor of Creem magazine, he was a founding curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and a consultant to the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, and most recently he served as chief scriptwriter for both the National Blues Museum in St. Louis and the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville. A recipient of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, he is a longstanding faculty member of the Humanities Department at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, where he teaches courses in rock, jazz and folk music as well as non-fiction writing. He lives in the lower Hudson Valley region of Westchester County, New York.