Author, professor, and musician Dewar MacLeod will explore New Jersey’s rich musical heritage through stories about the musicians, listeners and fans who came together to create sounds from across the American popular music spectrum in his presentation: Making the Scene in the Garden State.  The program is based on his book Making the Scene in the Garden State: Popular Music in New Jersey from Edison to Springsteen and Beyond, which has chapters on the beginnings of musical recording in Thomas Edison’s factories in West Orange; early recording and the invention of the Victrola at Victor Records’ Camden complex; Rudy Van Gelder’s recording studios (for Blue Note, Prestige, and other jazz labels) in Hackensack and Englewood Cliffs; Zacherley and the afterschool dance television show Disc-o-Teen, broadcast from Newark in the 1960s; Bruce Springsteen’s early years on the Jersey Shore at the Upstage Club in Asbury Park; the 1980s indie rock scene centered at Maxwell’s in Hoboken; and a look into the thriving local music scenes of today.  The program, like the book, examines the sounds, sights and textures of the locales where New Jerseyans have gathered to rock, bop, and boogie.

Dewar MacLeod is professor of history at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, specializing in popular culture, American Studies, and U.S. foreign policy, and the author of Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California, the first study of punk by a professional historian. He is singer/guitarist for the punk rock band of Montclair, New Jersey, Thee Volatiles.