An Upper East Side Apartment Full of Rock-and-Roll Memories

Archives: Lisa Robinson in front of her archives of very analog interviews.
Photo: Annie Schlechter

I mean, you have to understand, ”Lisa Robinson tells me. “I was on the road from the 70s to the 90s. It’s like I’m not a domestic. I did not have the time; I did not care!

She and her late husband Richard, a radio host turned music producer turned magician, rented this two bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side in 1976, and it has remained pretty much the same ever since. “We painted. We did the floors. We moved in, period, ”she says. The couple had one of those always-on-the-go New Yorks, master keyed, living together, with late nights, limousines, and private jets, which is clear from their memoir, There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll.

Robinson grew up on the Upper West Side, where “we always had music at home,” she recalls. Her “left-wing parents” weren’t interested in pop culture, but that only made her love more. Her family’s only television in the master bedroom, she says, “was treated like a forbidden fruit.”

“My mother played the piano and studied sacred Hebrew music and co-founded the Hebrew Arts School for music and dance, but they also had a lot of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, and I listened to jazz on a transistor radio. under the covers at night, and I think, There is a sexy world out there.“

And she made it her mission to find him. While still a student at Bronx Science, she would sneak into the village, where she saw Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot and Anita O’Day and Stan Getz at the Village Vanguard. She saw Little Richard and Screamin ‘Jay Hawkins at the Brooklyn Fox Theater.

Office: The second bedroom is where the Robinsons record albums are stored. During COVID, he doubled as a studio for his Sirius radio show.
Photo: Annie Schlechter

The library: The round table was found in the 90s in Woodstock, where the couple rented a house. The shelves came with them from their previous apartment. On the left, a portrait of Lisa’s parents; on the right, she is pictured with Jay-Z.
Photo: Annie Schlechter

After graduating from Syracuse University, she worked as a substitute teacher for first graders in Harlem. Then, in 1969, she met Richard Robinson, who worked the graveyard shift at WNEW-FM and had a subscribed musical column. Lisa was working a few days a week for him after his job as a teacher, until he asked her to come and work full time, which she did. Three months later, Lisa moved into her fifth-floor ground floor on Second Avenue and 74th Street, and they got married. It was also the year she began her writing career, resuming her column in the British music weekly. Record and music echo. “I told him I didn’t know how to write a column,” Robinson says. “He said, ‘If you can speak, you can write.’ “

Her nights, when she and Richard weren’t at CBGB, eventually turned into touring with rock bands – Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones – and writing for publications such as We create and New Musical Express. Richard moved from his job at Buddah Records to RCA, where he helped sign David Bowie, Lou Reed and the Kinks. In 1973, an apartment became available in his parents’ apartment building – just across the hall. She wasn’t sure this part was a good idea, but it was just $ 150 a month. It became a hangout for rock and roll writers and musicians who relished Chinese take-out at Richard’s expense account. Three years later, deciding they wanted a building with a doorman to take all the packages, tickets and albums delivered day and night, they found this two-bedroom Upper East Side. She wrote a column in New York To post in the days when everyone had to read the article or risk being misinformed, he was then hired as editor at Vanity Fair in 1999. His SiriusXM radio show, Call me with Lisa Robinson, starts this month.

The library: The landline phone (left) Lisa has had since moving in in 1976. “I never remember another phone,” she says. In one corner, a photo of Richard Robinson on the shelf and an El Morocco photo album. The silver box is inscribed; it was a gift to Lisa from John and Yoko for Christmas 1980 celebrating the Double fantasy album. Photo: Annie Schlechter.

The library: The landline phone (left) Lisa has had since moving in in 1976. “I never remember another phone,” she says. In a co … After
The library: The landline phone (left) Lisa has had since moving in in 1976. “I never remember another phone,” she says. In one corner, a photo of Richard Robinson on the shelf and an El Morocco photo album. The silver box is inscribed; it was a gift to Lisa from John and Yoko for Christmas 1980 celebrating the Double fantasy album. Photo: Annie Schlechter.

His book Nobody ever asked me about girls, which released last year, documents Robinson’s interviews and friendships with female legends in the music industry, from Joni Mitchell to Beyoncé. Although she has an office across the street, this is usually where she writes. Asked about the stack of pink legal blocks in the library, Robinson attributes her obsession with Jacqueline Susann and her book Valley of the Dolls. “I heard she wrote on pink legal pads, and I thought it looked so glamorous. I don’t want yellow legal stamps; my dad was a lawyer – I’ve seen yellow legal stamps all my life. I thought, I want something different!“

The Robinsons have transformed the dining room into a library. Along one of his walls are cassette recordings of his interviews with all the famous rock and roll musicians you can think of. The room that was Richard’s office before his death in 2018 is still lined with their collection of thousands of vinyl record albums.

The two televisions in the apartment are always on. One is in the kitchen, in case Robinson needs to cook something, and the other is in the bedroom, usually with the sound turned off and tuned to basketball games or “crazy forensics shows.” And the movies: “I mean,” she said, “I think I saw The devil wears Prada 50 times. “

The couch: The sofa, which faces the fireplace, once belonged to Calvin Klein’s daughter Marci, who gave it to a mutual friend, who then passed it on to Robinson. She sent it to the upholsterer, and it lay there, restless, for years, until she found the right fabric, a playing card print at Scalamandré, to match Richard’s love. for magic tricks. Robinson never found the time to hang up his collection of photographs.
Photo: Annie Schlechter

The fireplace: “These doll heads that I brought back from London in the 1970s when I saw them in a shop window and went crazy. I collected things: I took ashtrays in hotels; I took matches in places. I collected menus and, yes, I stole an ice bucket from a room in the Savoy.
Photo: Annie Schlechter

A view from the entrance hall to the kitchen and the library / archives.
Photo: Annie Schlechter

The kitchen: A relic from the mid-1970s, all the way to the wheeled dishwasher (not shown), which attaches to the sink by a hose.
Photo: Annie Schlechter

* A version of this article appears in the February 15, 2021 issue of new York Magazine. Subscribe now!