Rip It Up and Start Again (22 page)

By the spring of 1981, the tensions within TG caused by Tutti’s breaking up with P-Orridge made the band unworkable. P-Orridge also felt that the group had outlived its usefulness. Throbbing Gristle, he believed, had moved beyond the agrarian blues roots of rock and created a new kind of music (or antimusic) appropriate to postindustrial society. The next step, he told a radio interviewer, was “to go beyond into where man meets space. I don’t mean cosmic like Tangerine Dream, I mean inside the head.” The very fact that TG had built up a substantial audience that accepted what they did (by
Heathen Earth,
Industrial Records’s turnover had reached the point where it was one of the largest independents in the U.K.) was a sign it was time to move on.

Virtually from scratch, TG had constructed a new genre, an entire subcultural field, partly composed of peer groups (like minds already pursuing a similar path, such as Cabaret Voltaire, Non, SPK, Z’ev, Clock DVA, some of whom released records on Industrial) and partly of outfits directly catalyzed by TG (not just in the U.K. but in places as far afield as Yugoslavia, Australia, and Japan). The remarkable thing about Throbbing Gristle’s legacy is that they almost single-handedly created one of the most enduring and densely populated fields of postpunk music, despite having a rather disdainful attitude toward music per se. TG’s music, in a sense, was best understood as a delivery system for their ideas, a hangover from COUM’s previous existence in the world of conceptual art. TG knew exactly what they were doing and told the listeners in meticulous, hyperarticulate detail. Indeed, if one took TG’s stance literally—the music as a means to an end, a vehicle for the transmission of information—there was a sense in which one might as well skip the records and just read the eloquent interviews with the disarmingly pleasant P-Orridge.

BY THE TIME TG ANNOUNCED
that “the mission is terminated,” P-Orridge had come to feel that industrial was turning into a distinctly unsavory scene. If that was true, though, it was largely TG’s fault for propagating the notion that the extremes of human existence are somehow more real or artistically valid than the middling areas. For P-Orridge, the most blatant example of a group who’d “misunderstood” TG was Whitehouse, an outfit he abhorred. The subtle distinction between the two groups was a thin line—between a neutral or ambivalent
presentation
of horror, atrocity, cruelty, and an unambiguous and blatant reveling in evil—easily crossed by many industrial fans and musicians.

In the liner notes to Whitehouse’s debut album,
Birthdeath Experience,
leader William Bennett promised that “this is the most brutal and extreme music of all time.” Whitehouse used a Wasp synth to generate noxious noise and recorded everything in the red zone for maximum distortion. They disregarded rhythm, melody, and structure, severing all ties to any previous musical genres and in the process spawning an “ears are wounds” microgenre of industrial later called “power electronics.” Bennett’s goal was to “cut to pure human states,” which in his mind meant violence and sexual violation, conveyed in tuneful ditties such as “I’m Coming Up Your Ass” and “Cock Dominant.” The name Whitehouse came from the porn mag
Whitehouse
(itself cheekily named after a famous matronly antiporn crusader), but Bennett’s group actually preferred ultra-hard-core “specialist” publications such as
Tit Pulp
and
Shitfun,
both of which inspired songs of the same name. Other favorite topics were fascism and serial killers.

When Bennett talked of his “vision of a bludgeoning, tyrannical sound,” the words caught the flavor of his entire worldview. An expert on the Marquis de Sade, he’d probably have concurred with the virulent antihumanism of Minister Saint-Fond from
Juliette,
who dreamed of establishing a neofeudal system that treated an entire class of people as animals. “I affirm that the fundamental, profoundest, and keenest penchant in man is incontestably to enchain his fellow creatures and to tyrannize them with all his might,” declared de Sade via Saint-Fond. “A bent for destruction, cruelty, and oppression is the first which Nature graves in our heart.” At their live “aktions” (a nod to the Vienna Aktionists), Bennett would scream things such as “It’s your right to kill, it’s your fucking nature” and, after roughly fifteen minutes of skull-splitting noise, crowd ruckus, flying bottles, and bloodshed, the police would usually arrive and pull the plugs.

Playing with Whitehouse at some of their early aktions was a character named Steve Stapleton, who was moonlighting from his own group, Nurse with Wound. The latter made a de Sade–inspired album in collaboration with Whitehouse called
The 150 Murderous Passions
. Most of the time, though, Nurse with Wound’s music was more playful. Indeed, Stapleton rejects the term “industrial” altogether, claiming NWW only got pigeonholed as such because their first album’s cover featured bondage-and-fetish imagery from the magazine
Latex and Leather Special
. But the group’s postrock approach to abstract noise sculptures and found-sound collages does make their music fit loosely into the industrial category, even if the content does not.

If NWW had a spiritual avatar, it wasn’t de Sade but another French writer, Lautréamont, author of the 1868 Gothic prose poem
Maldoror
. NWW’s 1979 debut,
Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella,
took its title from one of Lautréamont’s deliberately absurd similes, whose dream-logic incongruity led to his being embraced by the surrealists as an illustrious precursor.
Chance Meeting
gleaned a five-question-mark rating in
Sounds
rather than the usual five stars, because reviewer John Gill wasn’t totally sure whether its seemingly arbitrary concatenations of noise constituted pure genius or sheer nonsense.

Musically, Stapleton’s prime crush was Krautrock. He actually lived in Germany for a while, working as a roadie for minor
kosmische
bands such as Kraan. A legendarily vast and esoteric list of experimental music, ranging from free improv through Europrog to
musique concrète,
was included on
Chance Meeting
’s sleeve. If that album sounded a bit shapeless (it was recorded in six hours by a bunch of semimusicians who’d never played together previously), by 1982’s
Homotopy to Marie
Stapleton had developed a genuinely idiosyncratic way of organizing noise, using the studio as an instrument to create darkly enchanting soundscapes as gorgeously grotesque as a Quay Brothers animation.

One thing most post-TG industrialists shared was a resolutely Nordic approach to rhythm. At best this meant metronomic pulse-grooves in the Moroder mold. At worst it meant clunky and portentous march beats. A few industrial bands embraced contemporary black dance music, though, and two of the best, Sheffield’s Clock DVA and London’s 23 Skidoo, were TG protégés. Clock DVA was Adi Newton’s band after he got kicked out of the Future. After an initial phase of abstract sound experiments using tape loops and cut-ups, Clock DVA released
White Souls in Black Suits
through Industrial. Culled from fifteen hours of improvisation, the album was an attempt, says Newton, “to record that moment when intuitive magick occurs, what the surrealists describe as pure psychic automatism.” The funk influence—James Brown, the Pop Group—kicked in with DVA’s second album,
Thirst
. “That’s what we’re after—more edgy, nervous energy sort of funk stuff, body music that flinches you and makes you move,” Newton told
Melody Maker
.

All scowling basslines and moody, sick-inside saxophone,
Thirst
was released in 1981 on Fetish, a label set up by Rod Pearce, a TG fan who put out Gristle’s final single. Fetish also released records by 23 Skidoo. Drawing on a handful of black precursors (the cocaine-spiked voodoo funk of Miles Davis’s
On the Corner
, the Last Poets’ fire-and-brimstone oratory, Fela Kuti’s hard-trance polyrhythms), Skidoo conceived of funk as a sinister energy, an active metaphor for Control, groove as trap and treadmill. Their 1981 mini-LP
Seven Songs
topped the indie charts and still sounds bloodcurdlingly intense. It opens with “Kundalini,” a malevolent tumble of hand percussion, guitar feedback, and guttural chants. On “Vegas El Bandito,” seething slap bass and brittle-nerved rhythm jostle with lost-in-endless-fog trumpet (an industrial motif invented by Cosey Fanni Tutti, who played cornet on several TG tracks). Best of all is “Porno Bass,” in which industrial finally makes a long overdue antifascist statement. Bass drones reverberate in cavernous murk, through which drifts the aristocratic voice of loathsome Hitler groupie Unity Mitford, taken from a radio interview. Dropped into the middle of an album that’s thrillingly steeped in trance rhythms and black funk, Mitford’s railing against pop music’s “senseless reiteration” as “the sign of a degenerating race” is implicitly exposed as Aryan paranoia.

23 Skidoo’s Alex Turnbull says that although they owed a lot to TG practically (P-Orridge let them rehearse at the Death Factory) and intellectually, they were more inspired musically by intensely rhythmic groups such as A Certain Ratio. Throbbing Gristle severed itself completely from the music of the African diaspora: jazz, R&B, funk, reggae. Skidoo allowed black America into industrial. They let the rest of the world in, too. Fans of Can’s “Ethnological Forgeries” series and Holger Czukay’s panglobal borrowings, Skidoo played the first WOMAD world music festival in July 1982, composing a special set that combined ethnic trance rhythms with a barrage of urban
musique concrète
. “Instead of using pleasant ‘world music’ sounds, we used city noises, gas canisters, explosions,” says Turnbull. “A third of the crowd fled immediately, but the ones that stayed were like, ‘Wow, that was absolutely unexpected!’”

Part of the WOMAD set made up side one of their next album,
The Culling Is Coming
. Side two’s chime-fest of tuned gongs indicated a drift eastward toward the music of Bali. After an expedition to Indonesia, 23 Skidoo recorded 1984’s
Urban Gamelan
. The vibe is a sort of humid disquiet—imagine
Apocalypse Now: The Day After
. By this point, Skidoo were interested less in Gristle-style extreme noise terror and more in the idea of using repetition to gently induce “a kind of trance, that idea of reaching ecstasy through the music.” Coincidentally, around this time, a drug called Ecstasy was making its first appearances in the industrial scene.

23 Skidoo and Clock DVA were atypical TG offspring. The vast majority of second-wave industrialists favored either abstract noisescapes or metronomic Teutonica. Deeper into the eighties, Gristle’s spawn became ever more legion: Lustmord, Nocturnal Emissions, Death in June, In the Nursery, à;grumh…, Controlled Bleeding, Laibach, Skinny Puppy, Severed Heads, Front 242, Last Few Days,:zoviet*france:, Merzbow, and the list goes on. Most shared their progenitor’s antirock (even antimusic) bias and content-laden, concept-driven slant. Just like the Velvet Underground (one of the only groups TG acknowledged as an influence) it sometimes seems as though everybody who heard Throbbing Gristle started their own band.

AROUND THE SAME TIME
Throbbing Gristle embarked upon their antimusic mission, a movement of bands similarly dedicated to razing rock history and starting from Year Zero was emerging in downtown New York. Dubbed No Wave, these groups—Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, DNA—wanted to create from a tabula rasa mind-set in which all the accepted notions and rules of musicality had been expunged.

As with Throbbing Gristle and the other U.K. industrialists, the primary spur for the No Wave groups was their contempt for punk rock’s traditionalism. One of the first articles on the CBGB scene, represented by bands like the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, Blondie, the Heartbreakers, et al., pinpointed the way punk couched itself as a
return
to something lost. Written in 1975 by James Wolcott and headlined
A CONSERVATIVE IMPULSE IN THE NEW ROCK UNDERGROUND
, the
Village Voice
feature celebrated the scene based around CBGB and Max’s Kansas City for creating a feeling of local community in opposition to a mainstream rock culture that had now degenerated into just another branch of showbiz, with its own aristocracy of untouchably remote stars. But the musical translation of this egalitarian impulse involved ditching the entirety of the 1970s so far—not just the pomposity and pretension, but the ambition and experimentalism too—and
going back
. “Punk is just real good basic rock & roll…real basic fifties and early sixties rock,” declared no less an authority than Nancy Spungen.

How different were the Ramones’ leather jackets and cult of all things teenage from the fifties revivalism in America’s pop mainstream, things like
Grease
and
Happy Days
? The Ramones’ bracing blast of speed and minimalism served its purpose in showing up the flabby, flaccid indulgence of mid-1970s rock, but within two albums the band had exhausted their point. Elsewhere, the Heartbreakers’ refried Chuck Berry was barely more advanced than British pub rock—Dr. Feelgood on an IV drip of smack rather than lager. Even the scene’s most adventurous band, Television, drew heavily on late-sixties music, their quicksilver dual-guitar interplay steeped in the West Coast acid rock of the Byrds, Country Joe and the Fish, and the Grateful Dead.

The No Wave groups, in contrast, defined radicalism not as a return to roots but as
deracination
. They were united less by a common sound than by this shared determination to sever all connections with the past. Musically, they ranged from Teenage Jesus and the Jerks’ stentorian dirges to Contortions’ jazz-scarred thrash funk, from Mars’ guitar-flagellating cacophony to DNA’s dislocated grooves. Scour the history of rock and you’ll find only a handful of precedents for what the No Wavers did: Velvet Underground at their least songful and most punishingly abstract noise oriented; Lou Reed’s
Metal Machine Music;
Yoko Ono’s primal screech and John Lennon’s guitar gougings for the Plastic Ono Band; the avant-blues convulsions of Captain Beefheart. But crucially, the No Wave groups
acted
as if they had no ancestors at all. In stark contrast to the U.K. industrial outfits, the No Wave bands staged their revolt against rock tradition using the standard rock instrumentation of guitar, bass, and drums. Occasionally they leavened this restricted arsenal with horns or keyboards, but they were always basic sixties-style organs, never synthesizers. Curiously, it was as though the No Wavers felt that the electronic route to making a postrock noise was
too easy
. It was more challenging, and perhaps more
threatening,
too, to use rock’s own tools against itself. Which is why No Wave music irresistibly invites metaphors of dismemberment, desecration, and “defiling rock’s corpse.”

Ironically, a traditional blues and country technique, slide guitar, provided No Wave with some of its most disconcertingly novel noises. As used by three female guitarists—Connie Burg in Mars, Lydia Lunch in Teenage Jesus, and Pat Place in Contortions—slide offered musical novices the quickest way to generate startling sounds. It wasn’t necessary to learn how to hold down chord shapes on the guitar strings. “Who wanted chords, all these progressions that had been used to death in rock?” jeers Teenage Jesus’ front woman, Lydia Lunch, No Wave’s raven-haired queen. “I’d use a knife, a beer bottle…. Glass gave the best sound. To this day I still don’t know a single chord on the guitar.”

As well as shunning electronics, the No Wave bands never really embraced the sound-warping possibilities of the recording studio. It was in small clubs at overwhelming volume that No Wave was most effective. The handful of studio recordings that survive the scene (most of them originally made by Charles Ball and released on his New York independent label Lust/Unlust) are like footnotes to the live experience. Along with the sheer sonic assault, No Wave shows often involved physical aggression as well. James Chance, bandleader and singer/saxophonist in Contortions, turned gigs into happenings by attacking the audience—jostling, slapping, legendarily grabbing a girl by the hair at one show and biting another woman “on the tit” (or so he claimed in an interview).

“James was like a Jackson Pollock painting, such an explosive personality,” says Adele Bertei, Contortions’ keyboard player. “And he had a strong masochistic streak. So he’d jump into the crowd and start kissing some girl. The boyfriend would push him off and a fistfight would ensue. Our bassist George Scott and me would leap offstage and get into the melee. Then we’d all get back onto the stage with blood running down our faces—James being the worse for wear always because he’d get the brunt of it, plus he’s so tiny.” Partly sensationalist, calculated to procure the band notoriety and press attention, these tactics were also impelled by the perennial avant-garde urge to physically shatter the performer/audience barrier, to turn a spectacle into a
situation
. It worked. The shows started to sell out. “A big part of it was the art crowd,” says Pat Place. “The violence plus the noise element made our shows something like performance art combined with music.”

Pat Place was a typical No Waver, an artist who’d come to New York looking to have a career in the downtown art world only to be drawn toward the underground rock scene. Fresh out of art school in Chicago, where she’d studied painting and sculpture, she arrived in New York hoping to become some kind of conceptual artist. “Performance art was the hot thing at that point,” she recalls. It was also a breeding ground for No Wavers. DNA’s Arto Lindsay and Robin Crutchfield, and Mark Cunningham of Mars, all came from experimental theater or performance art backgrounds. Along with several other future No Wave luminaries, Cunningham and Lindsay attended Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. “Like other small progressive colleges of the early 70s, it was putting into practice recent ideas from the 1960s like free-form studies, so it was perfect for self-expression and a magnet for freaks and misfits from around the country,” recalls Cunningham. “I met Arto the first day I was there and we ditched our assigned roommates and moved in together.”

New York beckoned as the home of all things conceptual and multimedia, the world capital of aesthetic border crossing and “total art.” All the avant-garde ideas of the sixties, from Fluxus to the Vienna Aktionists, says Lindsay, “had filtered down to us kids in the early seventies. There was a youthful thing of seeing how far you could push anything.” Lindsay’s hero was the poet turned performance artist Vito Acconci. “Especially his piece
Seed Bed,
where he built a false floor under a gallery. He lay under that floor for a few hours every day and there was a sign on the wall saying, ‘The artist is under the floor listening to you, fantasizing and masturbating while you’re in the gallery’!” Lindsay also admired extremists such as Chris Burden and Hermann Nitsch, who staged ritualistic, blood-soaked feats of endurance and abjection.

Artists gravitated to New York’s underground rock scene partly because there seemed to be more possibilities for making something happen there in the art world, where the market was depressed and the gallery circuit tough for young painters to break into. But even successful artists such as Robert Longo played in bands. Punk had restored rock’s status as the heat-generating power spot of modern culture. It made the downtown milieu of SoHo’s art spaces, home to multimedia installations, performance art, and concerts by minimalist composers, seem pallid and genteel. Although some “real” musicians participated in No Wave (Chance, for example, was conservatory educated), most had no previous involvement in rock beyond listening. Typically their primary vocation was film or poetry or the visual arts. Coming to music from other areas, they had a slightly distanced approach, which enabled them to grapple with their instruments (often chosen arbitrarily) as foreign objects, tools to be misused or reinvented.

Although they predated both No Wave and punk by several years, Suicide was in many ways the archetype of New York’s collision of art and rock. Singer Alan Vega was a sculptor who used electric lights and ready-mades (Catholic kitsch trinkets, plastic toys, porno cards, celebrity photos) to create trash-culture shrines from some postcataclysmic America of the near future. In the late sixties, he joined the Art Workers Coalition, a militant socialist group that once barricaded the Museum of Modern Art. He then became a linchpin of the Project of Living Artists, an anarchic workshop/performance space in SoHo. Vega worked at the Project by day and lived there illegally by night. It was there that he met free-jazz musician Martin Rev and formed Suicide.

The band emerged out of endless free-form jamming. “Suicide was like the big bang of the universe,” Vega says. “Chaos, then after a while the gases began to form little balls that became the galaxies. Same with us, except the gases began to form little songs, first ‘Cheree,’ then ‘Ghost Rider.’” A unique sound developed. Vega’s half-spoken, half-sung incantations resembled a cross between rockabilly and method acting; Rev generated pittering pulses from a beat-up electronic keyboard and crude but hypnotic beats using a cruddy drum machine originally designed for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Vega’s lyrics reveal a Warhol/Lichtenstein–like attraction to the two-dimensional pulp fictions and larger-than-real-life icons of American mass culture. Suicide’s name itself came from “Satan Suicide,” an issue of Vega’s favorite comic book,
Ghost Rider
. Like a sci-fi Elvis, Vega’s voice was swathed in eerie reverb and delay effects that harked back to the echo on Presley’s voice circa
The Sun Sessions
while simultaneously evoking the vapor trails of a rocket ship. Deliberately simple, his lyrics risked corn and trusted in the timeless power of cliché.

As infamous as they were infrequent, Suicide’s shows worked as supercolliders in which ideas from minimalism, auto-destructive art, living theater, and pop art clashed. You could see Suicide’s confrontational shows and physical altercations with the audience (who sometimes responded in kind—“Knives, axes, I got hit one time in the eye with a wrench!” says Vega) as performance art, but Vega actually got the idea from Iggy Pop. In 1970, he went to see the Stooges, supporting MC5, at the New York State Pavilion. “Iggy’s flying into the audience, then he’s back onstage, cutting himself up with drumsticks, bleeding. The whole set lasted, like, twenty minutes. And whoever was in the sound booth put on one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos immediately afterward, instead of the usual rock ’n’ roll, and that was perfect, because what we had just seen was great art. For the first time in my life the audience and the stage merged into one. It became this environmental thing. And that showed me you didn’t have to do static artworks, you could create situations.”

Suicide were the godfathers of No Wave, almost literally. Lydia Lunch, arriving in Manhattan as a sixteen-year-old runaway from upstate New York, was “kind of adopted by Martin Rev, who had a son who was older than me. Marty looked after me, gave me vitamins. What better parents could you have than Suicide? They were my first friends in New York.” James Chance likewise felt filial toward Suicide. “First day in New York, straight outta Milwaukee, James approached us,” says Vega. Chance recognized a kinship in Suicide’s audience-assaulting urge to smash the fourth wall, while Vega dug Chance’s Sinatraesque cool onstage and thought Chance “was going to be a superstar.”

By the time the No Wavers started arriving in New York, the heartland of bohemia had shifted from SoHo (the area of western downtown Manhattan that’s immediately below Houston Street) to the even cheaper Lower East Side (in those days, a much larger area of eastern downtown than it is today, running from Fourteenth Street down past Houston Street to the edge of Chinatown). Today, traces of the Lower East Side’s former scuzz peek out here and there amidst the gentrification that resulted in part of the area being renamed the East Village. But in the midseventies, there was not a boutique or trendy restaurant in sight. A patchwork of burned-out buildings and vacant, garbage-strewn lots, the neighborhood looked like a war zone. Most “regular” folk had fled to the suburbs, leaving the area to bums, bohos, junkies, and the ethnic poor. Unable to rent out all their rooms and unwilling to sell because property values had plummeted, landlords increasingly resorted to insurance scams. They’d set fire to their buildings, or let services deteriorate to the point where the tenants burned down their own tenements in order to get rehoused by the city. In 1978 alone there were 354 suspicious fires in the Lower East Side.

For those prepared to live somewhere that looked almost as bombed-out as Beirut, and where heroin was easier to buy than groceries, the Lower East Side was paradise. “I had a place on Second Street between Avenues A and B that cost about a hundred ten dollars a month,” says James Chance. A homeless Lydia Lunch came by one night and ended up staying at the fifth-floor walk-up apartment for almost a year. Connie Burg, Mark Cunningham, and Arto Lindsay all lived on Tenth Street and Avenue B, across from the only substantial patch of greenery in the whole Lower East Side, Tompkins Square Park. “It was really dangerous,” recalls Burg. “I saw someone shot almost every day, dead bodies just left in the park.” Downtown was almost unpoliced: The city let the neighborhood fester.