“If you can remember anything about the ’60s,” the musician Paul Kantner (among others) said, “you weren’t really there.” In “Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011” ($26.99), Lizzy Goodman chronicles another gauzy decade in an evocative and gossipy oral history that’s over 600 pages.
Not only was Ms. Goodman there (she worked as a waitress in the same restaurant as Nick Valensi, the lead guitarist for the Strokes), but as our revelatory tour guide, she shrewdly jogged the memories of her protagonists.
Covering the mid-1990s through 2011, Ms.