Laurie Anderson, in liner notes to the re-release of her debut album Big Science (Nonesuch), reminisces about New York in the seventies: "It was communal, democratic, and experimental, with almost no boundaries between art forms.... It seemed like everyone I knew was working on an opera. You'd walk down the street, 'How's your opera? Mine's going OK.'... New York was dark, dangerous, and poor. Unlike now, there was no money in the contemporary art world, although occasionally the rich Italian collector Count Panza would drive through town looking for art for his collection, and artists would get on the phone — 'Count Panza's on Houston going east!' And we'd run out and try to flag him down. We knew we had to get out somehow."
