Rip It Up and Start Again (23 page)

The cheap rents allowed the No Wavers to work sporadically, if at all, dedicating themselves to their art. And to hedonism. “After-hours clubs were everywhere,” says Pat Place. Along with the clubs, the No Wavers frequented artist’s bars like Barnabus Rex and the Ocean Club where the drinks were very cheap. “I think there was one winter where I didn’t see daylight!” laughs Place. “You’d see the sunrise as you were going home and you’d go to sleep, then get up about four in the afternoon and start all over again.” Fueling this freak scene of night creatures were all kinds of drugs, from speed and pot to the downer Quaalude. “But heroin was the most appealing,” says Place, “and the most deadly.” Third Street between Avenues A and B was home to artists, No Wave musicians, and a notorious drug den known as the Toilet. As with other local cop spots, lines of customers waiting to score stretched down the sidewalk. “I almost feel like drugs were pushed down here to anesthetize us, and we all succumbed,” says Adele Bertei. “I remember a time when almost every woman I knew had a copy of William Burroughs’s
Junky
next to her bed and was shooting up.” The flood of pure Iranian heroin into the market claimed many lives, including Contortions bassist George Scott III.

Pre-AIDS and pre-Reaganism, downtown New York existed in a peculiar bubble of Weimar-like decadence, characterized by drugs, drink, and polymorphous perverse sex. The city as a whole might have been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, but the artists of the Lower East Side found ways to have a real cool time in the midst of collapse. Although they shared the apocalyptic cold war mind-set of the late seventies, the No Wavers were weirdly insulated from the political urgencies of the time. “It was much more about personal insanity than political insanity,” says Lydia Lunch. “We didn’t have someone like Mayor Giuliani breathing down our necks. It was a very loose time. There wasn’t much to fight against, except tradition, where you came from, what your parents were. It was like you’d been thrown into this adolescent adult fun fair and left to figure it out.”

In classic bohemian fashion, art replaced politics as the way to change reality. Living a nonconformist lifestyle was in itself an art. Says Bertei, “We all lived by walking into art openings, stealing all the food. Everyone gawked at us because we were almost like an exhibition of our own. My head was shorn down to about an inch, my eyebrows were shaved, I used to wear these flea-bitten Buster Keaton suits. The art scene was very conservative, in the galleries everyone would be wearing suits. In a way we were more exciting than the art that was on the walls.”

No Wave existed on the slippery cusp between art and anti-art. Lydia Lunch scorned the
A
-word, preferring to see herself as a journalist, writer, even conceptualist. “Music was just a particular tool to get across the emotional impact. If spoken word had been more readily available in the late seventies, I’d have done that.” In the cultural geography of downtown New York, No Wave’s mixed feelings about art translated into a hostile, jostling rivalry between the Lower East Side and SoHo, which only a few years earlier had been
the
area for artists to live and work, but was now becoming gentrified and speckled with galleries. “I hate Art. It makes me sick,” James Chance spat. “SoHo should be blown off the fucking map, along with all its artsy assholes.”

The two worlds collided at Artists Space, a nonprofit gallery/performance space located in the area just south of SoHo known as Tribeca. Artists Space hosted a five-day festival of New York underground rock in May 1978. The first three nights featured long-forgotten No Wave fellow-traveler groups (“They were failed painters, now they’re failed musicians,” someone in the audience quipped) but the festival climaxed over the weekend with two double bills: DNA and Contortions on Friday, and Mars and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks on Saturday. The set by Contortions was interrupted by a fight between Chance and the
Village Voice
’s chief rock critic Robert Christgau. Chance had left the stage and began to “playfully or pseudoplayfully” hit a female friend of the critic’s. Legend has it the critic beat the singer to a pulp, but Christgau downplays the incident, claiming he intervened by “basically sitting on Chance. And maybe I held him down, too. He’s a little guy!”

In the audience stood a fascinated Brian Eno. He’d arrived in New York on April 23, planning to stay for only three weeks while he worked on various projects, including the mastering of Talking Heads’ second album, which he’d produced. But, Eno told
Melody Maker
in 1980, “It turned out that I happened to be in New York during one of the most exciting months of the decade, I should think, in terms of music. It seemed like there were 500 new bands who all started that [May].” He ended up staying for another seven months, totally absorbed in the crosstown traffic between music and art.

Outwardly, Eno had little in common with No Wave’s fanatical extremists. A dilettante sensualist, English to the core, Eno pursued a much gentler form of decadence. According to Bertei, who briefly worked as his personal assistant in New York, “He’d send me out on these insane errands, give me an envelope of hundred-dollar bills and a list of what he needed that day: an Olivetti typewriter, French voile socks, magazines of bald-headed black women with huge tits.”

In another sense, No Wave could hardly have been more in tune with Eno, an art school grad who came to music with a weird mixture of technical naïveté and conceptual sophistication. This combination enabled him to approach rock from an oblique angle, reinventing instruments and dismantling structures. The No Wave scene was chock-full of mini-Enos. Talking to
Creem
in late 1978, Eno celebrated No Wave in terms that could equally be applied to applaud his own role as pop vanguardist. The city was full of “research bands,” he said, who took “deliberately extreme stances that are very interesting because they define the edges of a piece of territory.” Other bands might not choose to go that far, but “having that territory staked out is very important. It makes things easier for everyone else.”

Convinced that this experimental but ephemeral scene urgently required documentation before the moment passed, Eno proposed the idea of a No Wave compilation with himself as producer. The sessions for
No New York
bore barely a trace of the studio treatments and textural colorations for which Eno was famous. James Chance recalls the Contortions’ tracks being “done totally live in the studio, no separation between the instruments, no overdubs, just like a document.” Only Mars saw any of Eno’s legendary studio wizardry. “He was totally hands-on, using the board as an instrument,” says Mark Cunningham. “We were actually more conservative than Eno, feeling that the music’s radicalism didn’t need to be saturated in special effects.” Some of the bands voiced unhappiness with the results. But the most controversial aspect of
No New York
was the decision to limit the lineup to the four major No Wave bands—Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, and Mars, each of whom contributed four tracks—rather than reflect the full scope of the scene.

Theoretical Girls and the Gynecologists, two highly regarded bands who’d shared the Wednesday-night bill of the Artists Space festival, had been pointedly excluded because of their associations with the SoHo art scene. The Gynecologists included Rhys Chatham, an avant-classical composer and music director of the Kitchen, one of SoHo’s most important performance spaces. Theoretical Girls, meanwhile, boasted no less than two composers in its lineup, Glenn Branca and Jeffrey Lohn. After Theoretical Girls disintegrated, Branca started composing symphonies for electric guitar, to be performed by large ensembles of players at massive volume so that they stunned the audience into rapt submission. In doing so he took several leaves out of Rhys Chatham’s book (there’s some dispute over who actually invented the “guitar army” idea), but Branca also drew some inspiration from Mars, who generated a barrage of metallic cacophony by percussively pounding their guitars.

The first of the
No New York
bands to form, Mars started as “a quirky rock group,” says Connie Burg, then systematically shed “all the conventions of rock ’n’ roll music.” Unified tempo was first to go, followed swiftly by tonality. Mars explored detuning the guitar, retuning within songs, having the tuning be mobile. “Insects in upstate New York” inspired the chittering soundswarm of “Helen Forsdale,” says Burg. “We were trying to get the guitars to buzz.” Toward the end of Mars’ brief life span, second guitarist Sumner Crane—actually a skilled blues player—generated noise by manipulating the guitar jack.

Despite the post-Velvets whiteness of Mars’ torrential noise and the total absence of groove or funk, there were subliminal “African elements,” according to Mark Cunningham. “When I started detuning my bass it became very primitive and percussive.” On arriving in New York, he and roommate Arto Lindsay had ransacked the city’s record stores for ethnomusicological albums. From the 1950s onward there had been “a great boom of field recordings of native music. All kinds of African stuff and trance music were easy to find and very inspiring.” “Ecstatic trance music,” Cunningham’s term for some of this ethnological exotica, would actually be a good tag for Mars, too, although the overall emotional vibe of their music was less mystic rapture and more “the agony is the ecstasy.” Connie Burg’s and Sumner Crane’s torture-victim vocals sound deeply disturbed and genuinely perturbing. At the extreme, pieces such as “Hairwaves” resemble the debris of a shattered psyche. “Most of the falsetto is Sumner, and most of the low singing is me,” says Burg. “That juxtaposition, that gender switch, was interesting to us.” It dovetailed with one of the most striking (for 1978) aspects of Mars, its two-woman, two-man lineup, with Nancy Arlen taking on the traditionally masculine job of drumming.

Mars polarized audiences. “We had our fans and we definitely had our detractors,” laughs Burg. “The girlfriend of Stiv Bators from the Dead Boys threw a chair at me at one show. We were always accused of being ‘arty and empty.’ A critic wrote that about us, which we turned into the song ‘RTMT.’” Mars were the No Waver’s No Wave band. “I saw Mars before Teenage Jesus existed,” Lydia Lunch recalled. “I was very encouraged. They were so dissonant, so obviously insane. There were no compromises or concessions to anything that had existed previously. They were truly creating from their own torture.”

A poet who turned to music as the most readily available means of expression, Lydia Lunch was a bit like the anti–Patti Smith. Where the Rimbaud-and Dylan-worshipping Smith exalted oceanic feelings, Lunch detested music that “flows and weaves,” declaring, “it’s like drinking a glass of water…. I’d rather drink razor blades.” Lunch conceived Teenage Jesus and the Jerks as an act of cultural patricide (or matricide, in Patti’s case). “The whole goal was to kill your idols, as Sonic Youth later put it. Everything that had influenced me up to that point I found too traditional—whether it was Patti Smith, the Stooges, Lou Reed’s
Berlin
. It was fine and good for its moment, but I felt there had to be something more radical. It’s got to be
disemboweled
.”

Teenage Jesus’ music matched Lunch’s personality, by her own description “coarse, harsh, bitter…I was such a frightening person!” Drummer Bradley Field couldn’t play drums and didn’t even have a proper kit, just a single cymbal and a dysfunctional snare. “I couldn’t play guitar, but that wasn’t the point,” says Lunch. “I developed my own style, which suited the primal urgency I needed to evacuate from my system before I exploded like a miniature nuclear power plant.” Lunch’s singing was equally minimal, a piercing and piteous one-note wail. “I like my own note,” she once quipped. “What’s wrong with the note I have?” With some songs as brief as forty-one seconds, a typical Teenage Jesus performance lasted about ten minutes.

“Orphans” is probably the trio’s most well known song (largely for its couplet “No more ankles and no more toes/Little orphans running through the bloody snow”), but Teenage Jesus’ archetypal “short, fast sound stab” is “The Closet.” Field’s hammer-blow snare and Lunch’s harrowed shriek merge into a tolling death knell rhythm midway between spasm and dirge. The whole vibe runs the gamut of vaguely Teutonic
S
-words: stark, severe, strict. Lunch was a disciplinarian. She recalls “literally beating” Field and bassist Gordon Stevenson at rehearsals “with coat hangers if they’d made any mistakes at a gig. We rehearsed ad nauseam and were pretty fucking tight. It’s pretty fascist sounding, and I was the fucking dictator.” Onstage, Lunch remained rigid, disdaining to engage the audience with eye contact or banter, maintaining an unbridgeable moat of alienation between performer and spectators. James Chance was an early member of Teenage Jesus, but Lunch kicked him out for having too much contact with the audience. “I didn’t think Teenage Jesus should mingle with the audience, even if to attack them. Don’t touch those bastards, let ’em just sit there in horror!”

At the same time as she was leading Teenage Jesus, Lunch also played in Beirut Slump, a more atmospheric outfit whose reeling malaise of noise she compared to the Blob. “It oozes under doors and people either run away fast to avoid it or they like to let this gooey junk surround them.” Like Teenage Jesus, Beirut Slump was composed largely of people who’d never played music before. Filmmaker Vivienne Dick, for instance, contributed keyboards. Dick was a prime mover in the No Wave–affiliated “New Cinema” scene. Cofounded by onetime Contortions guitarist James Nares and fellow filmmakers Becky Johnston and Eric Mitchell, the New Cinema was a movie theater as well as a movement. A fifty-seat space on St. Mark’s Place with a video screen, it showed Super 8 movies that had been transferred to video, works like Nares’s
Rome ’78,
Scott and Beth B.’s
Black Box,
and Mitchell’s
Red Italy
. The New Cinema directors drew on a pool of actors that included downtown scenesters such as Patti Astor, along with just about every No Wave musician. Lunch, for instance, costarred with Pat Place in Dick’s
She Had Her Gun All Ready
. “Vivienne’s films were very primitive and psychological,” says Place. “We made this trip out to Coney Island, where I ended up murdering Lydia’s character on the Cyclone after a long series of these weird vague psychotic interactions!”