Rip It Up and Start Again (24 page)

Lo-fi and low budget, New Cinema flicks got made with astonishing speed. In some cases, they were scripted, filmed, and premiered within a week. Breaking with the ruling avant-garde cinema aesthetic of Stan Brakhage–style abstraction, the New Cinema directors preferred narrative film, harking back to the earlier sixties underground of Warhol and Jack Smith along with B-movie genre films from the 1950s, all pulp plots and ultraviolent thrills. Those involved in No Wave and New Cinema alike felt a mixture of appalled fascination and envious admiration toward all exponents of antisocial or pathological behavior. Murderers, terrorists, and cult leaders such as Jim Jones all possessed a ruthless will to power and an unflinching capacity to translate thought into deed. James Chance crystallized the attitude when he declared: “I can’t stand liberals. They’re so stupid and wishy-washy and their whole philosophy is so half-assed. They’re not extreme and I only like people who are extreme.”

Chance himself fused three great American musical extremists—Iggy Pop, James Brown, and Albert Ayler—into his tiny, scrawny frame. Before coming to New York, he’d done a three-year stint at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music and played in a Stooges-influenced rock band called Death. Arriving in Manhattan, he’d tried to make a name for himself in the loft jazz scene, but wasn’t exactly warmly embraced. His punk attitude chafed against the late-sixties mind-set of the predominantly black jazz milieu. One ensemble he played in, called Flaming Youth, had a gig at Environ, a space that was a dance studio by day. When it was Chance’s turn to solo, he leaped in midair, skidded across the polished wood floor, and blasted his alto sax in a girl’s face. “I totally freaked out the audience,” he recalls. The critic Robert Palmer wrote a scathing review of the band, mentioning a certain saxophonist who was closer to a “contortionist act” than a musician. Unwittingly, Palmer had christened Chance’s next project.

As for the James Brown influence, Chance pinpoints a single track as the founding musical text for Contortions, 1970’s “Super Bad, Parts 1 and 2.” “What really got me into JB was the sax solos on that single—real out-there playing like you’d get on an Ayler or Sun Ra record.” Combining Brown’s regal showmanship with Iggy’s kamikaze theatrics, Chance invented punk funk. Hopped up on death drive and artificial energy, Contortions’ music was riddled with tics and jerks, a prickly, irritable sound, like a speed freak scratching at hallucinatory bugs under the skin. Imagine funk’s low-down, life-affirming energy trapped and turned against itself. Soul, denied an outlet, becomes cystlike. Rhythmically and lyrically, James Brown songs like “Sex Machine” and “I Got Ants in My Pants” pointed toward a racked ecstasy of painful pleasure that was almost dehumanizing. Picking up on these hints, Chance imagined funk as voodoo possession and cold-fever delirium, the perfect vehicle for exploring themes of addiction, sexual bondage, and morbid obsession.

As a James Brown–style bandleader, Chance exerted total control over Contortions. “When it first started, no one else had ever played their instruments before,” he recalled. “People who can’t play have more fresh ideas. I looked for people I could teach to play.” The two women were recruited simply because they looked cool. Place was tall and androgynous with cropped blond hair. Chance describes Bertei as “this pint-size girl who came on like some kind of lesbian pimp.” A Clevelander who’d lived in a reformatory for troubled teenage girls, Bertei “approached the keyboards like I play a conga drum,” she told the
East Village Eye
. “Which was real percussive, slapping the keys in clusters. Sometimes I’d beat them with my fists or elbows. Once I jumped up on the keyboards at a particularly frenzied gig and I kinda danced on them, which fucked the keyboard up.” Place remembers the “complete cacophony” of Contortions’ first gig: “At the end I had two strings left on my guitar and it was completely blood splattered. I didn’t know how to strum the guitar and it just ripped the skin right off my fingers.”

Early on, Contortions played
fast,
such that their funk could pass for punk. Ultimately, this would be one reason for the band’s combusting. “Live, James would insist on counting everything, and he’d always double the time,” drummer Don Christensen told
Melody Maker
. “One time he counted it out so fast we couldn’t play it,” added second guitarist Jody Harris. “He couldn’t just relax and let the music get into any kind of groove. He had to have absolute control over the sound.” But this paroxysmic intensity went down well with the CBGB and Max’s Kansas City audience. Musically, Contortions were more accessible than the other No Wave bands. “My songs were always in a key, they had some kind of tonal center,” says Chance. “But I didn’t have chord structures. I constructed the songs out of interlocking parts played by each instrument, an idea I more or less got from James Brown.” Chance’s ulcerous alto sax, meanwhile, could be heard “levitating above the fray” of tightly meshed rhythmic cogs “like snake charming gone terribly wrong,” as Glenn O’Brien, one of No Wave’s journalistic supporters, put it.

DNA had a similar approach, except their parts slotted together like the pieces of some faultily designed three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. “Skeletal, stop-start, lots of silences,” as Arto Lindsay put it, the songs often seemed to disassemble themselves in front of your ears. Lindsay had a twelve-string Danelectro guitar but instead of using it in the obvious way—for melodic, folky arpeggios and fingerpicking—he played it as a rhythm instrument, chipping out a scrabble of texture shards, like scrambled Chic. “It was sculptural as opposed to painterly, shapes that poked out at you, rather than a surface.” DNA were a trio of rootless cosmopolitans. Lindsay grew up in Brazil with his missionary parents. Keyboard player Robin Crutchfield was a gay misfit who performed surreal street theater pieces. Drummer Ikue Mori was Japanese, and as complete a novice at her instrument as she was with the English language. “Communicating with Ikue, a lot of it was diagram and gesture,” says Crutchfield. “Arto might have to act out in charade what he wanted to do, shuffling and shaking his arms to a certain beat or gesturing for a pause or tempo change.” Lindsay gave Mori a record of Brazilian drumbeats, which she tried to imitate while bringing in elements of Japanese court music, “the kind of thing that has real rhythmic authority,” he says, “but you can’t exactly work out what the rhythm
is
.” As a result, Mori developed a totally idiosyncratic approach to drumming. No less disorienting, Lindsay’s “singing” consisted of animalistic barks and growls, flubbed vocal smears and shamanic grunts. “Sometimes it was an extension of the sheer feeling aspect of the blues,” he says. “Or like singing in languages you don’t understand, like Indian. In Florida, I’d been in this student-directed theater group, and we’d done exercises in using the voice in nine different ways, like, ‘Okay let’s improvise for half an hour, don’t make it human but don’t make it mechanical either.’”

Early DNA is incredibly abstruse, but when Crutchfield (who’d been playing keyboards sculpturally, according to visual patterns of clustered keys) quit in 1978, DNA acquired more of a groove with the arrival of bassist Tim Wright, formerly of Pere Ubu. “DNA doesn’t get much credit for this, but we were very funky,” says Lindsay. In some ways the group’s closest kin weren’t the other No Wavers but black New York musicians like Prime Time (Ornette Coleman’s band) and James “Blood” Ulmer, who translated Coleman’s theories into scorching, tempestuous punk funk that wowed the mostly white audiences at New Wave discos like Hurrah’s. At the same time, there was nothing really jazzy about DNA. Because it came across so abstract and self-deconstructing, people assumed their music was totally improvised, but DNA actually rehearsed everything down to the smallest gear shift. Everything was intensely premeditated and discussed, from the overall band’s style (early on they theorized about DNA sounding like “one giant instrument” or “if a rat got loose inside a computer”) to the internal mechanisms of a specific piece to the song lyrics. Lindsay approached the words as language exercises rather than stories or emotional expression. He’d set himself the task, say, of depicting “a sex act observed from the bridge of a nose.”

Overlapping with DNA, Lindsay played in the Lounge Lizards, an ensemble explicitly based around the idea of punk jazz. Formed by his friend John Lurie, a New Cinema filmmaker and an actor in performance pieces at the Squat Theatre, the Lounge Lizards’ retro panache of sharp suits and pompadour coifs owed a lot to James Chance’s image. “Lurie used to more or less follow me around in the street,” sniggers Chance. “When I first met him he didn’t look so dapper at all.” Originally called the Power Tools, Lurie’s group played its first gig dressed in suits. “The girls went nuts for it,” says Lindsay. “We were instant sex symbols.” Not bad going for Arto, considering that his normal apparel, “lived-in pants and secondhand-looking sweaters, simple button-down shirts and horn-rimmed glasses, made the guys from Devo look stylin’,” according to Crutchfield. After changing their name to the Lounge Lizards, the group developed a sound and shtick that Lurie flippantly described as “fake jazz” in an early interview. The quip stuck and became a millstone, infuriating the earnest custodians of the loft jazz scene and making the Lizards seem like mere trivial pastiche. “John spent many years trying to overcome that term, but it was actually appropriate,” says Lindsay. “We were playing jazzlike rhythms and melody lines, but none of the musicians were then capable of soloing over the changes, which is the essence of real jazz.” The Lounge Lizards did get to make their debut album with Miles Davis’s producer Teo Macero at Black Rock, a CBS studio on Fifty-seventh Street where many jazz greats had recorded. Still, most jazz aficionados continued to believe “they were punks taking the piss out of jazz,” says Glenn O’Brien. “Which wasn’t true.”

In “The White Noise Supremacists,” a controversial
Village Voice
essay published in April 1979, Lester Bangs pointed out the uncomfortable connections between the near total absence of black musicians on the CBGB scene, punk’s penchant for using racist language (all part of its antiliberal, we-hate-everybody-equally attitude), and the perilous ambiguity of punk’s flirtations with Nazi imagery. Factor in the sheer unswinging whiteness of punk rock and most New Wave music, and you had a situation where, for the first time since before the 1920s hot-jazz era, white bohemians were disengaged from black culture. Not only that, but some of them were
proud
of this disengagement. Just a week before the Bangs essay, the
Village Voice
profiled Legs McNeil of
Punk
magazine. Writer Marc Jacobson discussed how McNeil and his cohorts consciously rejected the whole notion of the hipster as “white negro” and dedicated themselves to celebrating all things teenage, suburban, and Caucasian. Years later, McNeil candidly discussed this segregationist aspect of punk in an interview with Jon Savage: “We were all white: there were no black people involved with this. In the sixties hippies always wanted to be black. We were going, ‘fuck the Blues, fuck the black experience.’” McNeil believed that disco was the putrid sonic progeny of an unholy union of blacks and gays.
Punk
’s debut issue, in January 1976, began with a rabid mission statement: “Death to Disco Shit. Long live the Rock! I’ve seen the canned crap take real live people and turn them into dogs! The epitome of all that’s wrong with Western civilization is disco.”

Unaware of its gay underground origins, most punks saw disco as the mass-produced, mechanistic sound of escapism and complacency, uptown Muzak with a beat for the moneyed and glamour struck. “There was the disco culture up at Studio 54 and then there was us,” says Adele Bertei. “When it came to disco, we were like these vicious little misanthropes with Tourette’s syndrome. You’d get a torrent of expletives.” In the context of 1978, with CBGB types treating disco as both pariah and tyrant (it dominated the radio, ultimately taking over the only station in the city that played New Wave), just about the vilest act of cultural treason imaginable was a punk band going disco. Which is precisely what James Chance did.

The idea originated with Michael Zilkha, a young entrepreneur who cofounded the New York record label ZE. Zilkha came from an extremely genteel background (his family was incredibly wealthy, he’d grown up in England where he attended top private schools), but he was totally infatuated with No Wave’s extremism. Seeing real star potential in James Chance and Lydia Lunch, he approached the Contortions’ singer with a proposition: ZE would release a “proper” Contortions album simultaneously with a disco version of the James Chance experience. “Michael said, ‘It doesn’t have to be a
commercial
disco record, just do whatever
your
idea of disco is. Here’s ten thousand dollars,’” recalls Chance.

The sheer conceptual shock value of becoming a disco turncoat and fucking with everybody’s heads grabbed Chance’s imagination. By January 1979 he was telling
SoHo Weekly News,
“I’ve always been interested in disco. I mean, disco is
disgusting,
but there’s something in it that’s always interested me—
monotony
. It’s sort of jungle music, but whitened and perverted. On this album I’m trying to restore it to what it
could
be. Really primitive.” Suddenly the idea of going commercial and sounding “slick” appealed to him. “I’m not interested in being a starving artist,” Chance declared. Fuck art, he was first and foremost “a businessman.” For an infamous feature published in the
East Village Eye,
Chance and lover/manager Anya Phillips each penned a short but fulsome celebration of selling out. “Anyone with any semblance of a brain should know by now that it’s time to forget about all this outdated, cornball ‘new/no wave’ drivel,” sneered Chance. “Anyone who stays on the Lower East Side will become the inevitable victim of provincial mind rot…. So dislocate yourself. Get slick, move uptown and get trancin’ with some superadioactive disco voodoo funk.” Phillips boasted about how she’d groomed and styled Chance and set him on the road to fame and fortune. “Money bought us a first class ticket out of the Lower East Side pisshole. It’s not my problem you’re all waiting to leave on standby.”