Rip It Up and Start Again (44 page)

While New Order and A Certain Ratio couldn’t get enough of the Manhattan vibe, by 1983 the native New Yorkers no longer reciprocated the feeling. Downtown’s hitherto Anglophile hipsters mounted an anti-Limey backlash. The
East Village Eye
started a column called “The Real American Underground,” celebrating the resurgence of groups influenced by rockabilly, blues, zydeco, and other roots music. Former No Waver Kristian Hoffman of the rockabilly-styled Swinging Madisons urged music fans to “demand more for your entertainment dollar than a bunch of tone-deaf Englishmen telling you what you ought to like,” and declared that “the future is not in style anymore.” Synths and drum machines were out, guitars were in again. Some turned to the hardcore punk scene, while the more arty types such as Sonic Youth and Swans moved to resurrect No Wave.

Very early on, Sonic Youth showed evidence of Anglophilia and PiL damage (their early drummer Richard Edson also played with 99 Records’s resident Pigbag wannabes, Konk). But by 1983’s
Confusion Is Sex,
Sonic Youth raised the banner of noxious noise, waging war against sterile machine funk. Guitarist Thurston Moore had already staged the first battle cry of the resistance with his Noise Fest of June 1981 at the White Columns art gallery in SoHo. Stretched across nine evenings, the entertainment included performances by the earliest incarnation of Sonic Youth, future SY guitarist Lee Ranaldo’s band Avoidance Behavior, Glenn Branca, and long-running No Wave outfit Ut. “It was a watermark event because it took place at a time when the No Wave was gone and nobody knew each other,” Moore recalled in 1985. Not everyone who attended was so thrilled. For Luc Sante, “much of the Noise Fest stuff seemed arid and theoretical and unsexy. It was heavily identified with a certain strain that had to do with Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, and came out of the Kitchen—very arty, sort of academic, and definitely not funky.” Nonetheless, the No Wave redux of Sonic Youth and Swans represented the immediate future for New York. In the mideighties, the city’s arty bands backed away from black influences and dance floor imperatives and instead drew on an almost totally white canon of avant-garde noise makers.

Like No Wave before it, the mutant disco moment had thrived on the back-and-forth between the rock scene and the art world. Ironically, what brought the era to a close was the explosion of the downtown art scene, which definitively eclipsed music as a career option for many of the city’s Renaissance men and women. New art galleries sprang up all over the Lower East Side, showcasing nontraditional art of all kinds, from graffiti to video art to Kenny Scharf–style kitschedelic sculptures made from found objects and consumer detritus. The most famous of the new spaces was the FUN Gallery, which opened in 1981 and gave Scharf, Keith Haring, Futura 2000, and Jean-Michel Basquiat their first solo exhibitions. Within a few years there were literally dozens more galleries dotting an area hitherto known for its burned-out lots, boarded-up stores, and heroin-copping spots.

The precursors to the Lower East Side boom were two huge art exhibitions, 1980’s
Time Square Show,
and 1981’s
New York/New Wave. “Time Square Show
took place in an abandoned porn palace, all these graffiti artists showing together with downtown people,” recalls Richard McGuire, himself an artist as well as musician. “
New York/New Wave
was a big show at PS1 in Queens, a big museum-like alternative gallery space in an old school building. All sorts of downtown people were involved. David Byrne showed photos of overturned chairs. DNA played. There were Mapplethorpe photos and lots of photos of rock stars.”

New York/New Wave
turned Basquiat and Haring into stars. As Vincent Gallo, Basquiat’s erstwhile Gray bandmate put it acidly, “The minute Jean-Michel had a chance to move into the place he really wanted to be—the art world—he quit the band in a second.” The bubble of dilettantism that had insulated and protected all the polymath creativity of downtown suddenly burst. “There’d been an incredible mix of filmmakers, musicians, poets, all this crossbreeding of artistic practices, but at a certain moment people began specializing,” recalls Gary Indiana, himself a jack-of-all-arts in those days, involved in writing poetry and art criticism, directing plays, and playing music. “They began narrowing their field of interest to a specific thing they were going to make a career with. Reagan came in and everyone had to make money. You couldn’t be all over the map anymore.”

Another factor was a contraction of the live-music circuit, partly caused by the rise of clubs oriented around DJs rather than bands. Pat Place recalls a golden period when the Bush Tetras could play two or three times a month in New York and draw crowds between one and two thousand. “Back then, in our prime, we sometimes got paid from six to ten thousand dollars a night.” Her erstwhile boss, James Chance, also mourns the early eighties as the last time when New York “revolved around live music. Somewhere around 1984 that whole era of the mega-nightclub started up.” Rap and the electronic postdisco sounds that would eventually coalesce as “house music” were in the ascendant. Mutant disco and the arty, eclectic clubs that nurtured the style were squeezed out.

The Mudd Club had been killed by its own success. Maas had to hire doormen to deal with both the celebrities and the “bridge and tunnel” nonhipsters who wanted to get in. “I went into it as a fantasy, never expected it to make money,” he noted glumly in a 1983
East Village Eye
elegy for the Mudd. “When the Mudd did become successful, I didn’t have the restaurateur’s skills that are essential to running any kind of operation. My fantasy went out the window.”

Downtown was changing. Gentrification made its first incursions into the Lower East Side. A pivotal moment was March 1984’s Operation Pressure Point, a massive drug bust whose targets included smack-infested Avenue B, masterminded by a thrusting young U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York named Rudolph Giuliani. Then AIDS came into the picture, claiming the lives of many artists (including Keith Haring) and some musicians, too, notably Klaus Nomi, in 1983, and Ricky Wilson of the B-52’s, in 1985.

Surveying the era with a couple of decades’ hindsight, Ann Magnuson concedes, “If you look back at it just as a series of parties, it does seem rather frivolous. But if you see it as people who loved each other, who were sharing their life energies, it was a celebration. They just wanted to live to the max, every second. When AIDS started picking everybody off one by one, it became obvious to me that it was about life. Keith Haring’s paintings in particular really exemplify that energy—that radiant-baby image of his. This was not that
Bright Lights, Big City
version of New York in the eighties, stockbrokers running around doing cocaine and chasing models. This was about people who had to leave where they came from originally to come to New York, or die. Who had to create art, or die.”

IN 1980, WHEN POSTPUNK
seemed locked in a gloom-laden death trip, everything about Orange Juice felt different. The Glasgow group’s very name was refreshing—sweet, wholesome, sunshine in a glass. “None of us drank alcohol at the time,” singer/guitarist Edwyn Collins recalled many years later. “Orange Juice seemed perfect because it was what we drank at rehearsals.” The music, a scintillating shambles of Byrds and Velvets, felt like a tonic, too. Above all, their debut single, “Falling and Laughing,” released in the spring of 1980, signaled the return of unabashed romance. Renouncing postpunk’s demystification, Collins proclaimed the sacred singularity of his sweetheart: “You say there’s a thousand like you/Well maybe that’s true/I fell for you and nobody else.”

You could trace Collins’s fey, bashful voice—“the sound of lovesick schoolboys,” as one journalist put it—back to the glorious, lump-in-throat wetness of Pete Shelley. When Buzzcocks played their first dates in Scotland as part of the White Riot Tour in 1977, they had more impact on the local scene than the headlining Clash. Buzzcocks “subverted people’s ideas about what a punk group should be like,” Collins said. “I thought they were very witty, very camp.” Another White Riot Tour group that also enjoyed a disproportionate influence in Scotland was Subway Sect. Collins thrilled to the sparks and splinters flying off the Sect’s abrasive guitars. “Rob Simmons’s Fender Mustang was completely out of tune, the treble cranked up full,” he recalls. You can also hear a touch of Sect singer Vic Godard in Orange Juice’s lyrics, especially with Collins’s preference for charmingly quaint language, such as the chorus “Goodness gracious/You’re so audacious,” which he simpers archly on “In a Nutshell.”

Orange Juice talked and acted in ways that broke with both rock’s rebel swagger and postpunk’s militant solemnity. They were literate, playful, witty, camp. “Everyone used to think we were a bunch of androgynous little twits,” Collins recalled. This exaggerated wimpiness was a revolt against the Glasgow music scene’s traditional blues-rock machismo (Frankie Miller, Nazareth, Stone the Crows), but also against the hooligan menace of Scottish punks such as the Exploited. “Simply Thrilled Honey,” Orange Juice’s third single, made sensitivity subversive. Based on a real incident, it depicted Collins as a shrinking violet, the reluctant prey of a female seducer. Collins told
Sounds,
“I didn’t want to go to bed with her. I wasn’t sexually attracted to her. But, above all, I didn’t love her, and I think it’s really important to only go to bed with someone if you love them. That’s what the line ‘worldliness must keep apart from me’ means. There is such a pressure on boys to be manly. I find going to bed with somebody you don’t love disorientating.”

In “Consolation Prize,” the loveliest Orange Juice song of them all, Collins tries to woo a girl away from her boyfriend, a mean mistreater who has “crumpled up” her face in tears countless times. Collins, by contrast, makes her laugh with his “so frightfully camp” Roger McGuinn fringe. He even contemplates buying a dress if it’ll only cheer her up. “I’ll be your consolation prize,” he pleads. In the end, he’s resigned to remain unrequited. But as Orange Juice’s golden cascades of guitars propel the song toward a climactic slow-fade, Collins almost rejoices in the fact that “I’ll never be man enough for you.” He sounds exultant rather than mournful, triumphant, not defeated.

The four members of Orange Juice all came from Bearsden, a middle-class suburb of Glasgow. “I met Edwyn on a school bus,” recalls drummer Steven Daly. “James Kirk, our guitarist, was already my friend. On the bus Edwyn was reading
Melody Maker
—which was
not
the magazine to read then—and I joked, ‘You don’t read that old shit do you?’ We were all music press slaves. The first pieces on CBGB came out in 1975. We were very interested in what was going on in New York. Television and Talking Heads had figured out more viable new ideas than most British punk bands.” Indeed, when the fledgling Orange Juice put a “musicians wanted” ad in a local fanzine, the first line announced, “A New York band forming in the Bearsden area.”

As much as the CBGB bands, what unified Orange Juice was their love of an earlier New York group, the Velvet Underground. Collins would place
Live 1969
on his record player and leave it playing on repeat for hours while he puttered around his Glasgow flat.
Live 1969
’s gatefold sleeve showed Lou Reed holding a Country Gentleman guitar manufactured by Gretsch, a brand that took on a talismanic significance for Orange Juice. “We avoided the two major rock guitars, the Fender and the Gibson. Playing Gretsches was about bringing back a sixties sensibility, but still having the freneticism of punk. Nobody else used them at the time.”

The core of Orange Juice’s sound was the sparkly drive of rhythm guitar played at double the tempo of the drumbeat. The idea came half from the late-era Velvets and half from Chic. Disco was the wild card in Orange Juice’s mix. Before punk, Collins had been a regular at church hall youth dances and the Glasgow discotheque Shuffles. “The thing about us blending Chic and Velvets, it sounds really audacious on paper, but if you listen to
Live 1969,
the double-time rhythm guitar on ‘Rock and Roll’ is not a million miles apart from Nile Rodgers’s guitar playing in Chic,” says Daly. “Very clipped. Not jangly, which is the cliché journalists always applied to Orange Juice. The strings are actually being damped, so it’s more choppy than jangly.”

In 1978, a nineteen-year-old überhipster named Alan Horne witnessed a gig by Orange Juice (then known as the Nu-Sonics) and was struck by two things. The first was their cover of “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together,” an obscure Velvets song only ever captured on
Live 1969
. Cooler still, an associate of the band’s came onstage to chant the catchphrase from Chic’s recent U.K. hit “Dance Dance Dance (Yowsah Yowsah Yowsah).” Daly had already met Horne, then a botany student, when the latter came into Listen, the record shop where Daly worked. “We got talking. Alan was an interesting, overamped character.” Daly told him about the upcoming gig. After checking out the band, the abrasively opinionated Horne offered them advice, whether they wanted it or not. “He probably told us we were shit,” says Daly. “But he could see the potential.”

In particular, Horne detected star quality in Edwyn Collins. In typical abrasive fashion, though, he greeted Collins—who was dressed in Levis, motorcycle boots, and a plaid shirt—with the words “look at the fucking
wimp!
You’re John Boy Walton!” For his part, Collins’s memory of this first meeting has Horne wearing “a Harris Tweed jacket and hidden under the lapel was a little Nazi badge.” A fan of provocation for its own sake, Horne liked to flirt with Nazi symbols purely to annoy. “He wanted to come onstage with us wearing lederhosen and do ‘Springtime for Hitler’ from
The Producers,
” says Collins. “It all came out of being a glam fan—
Cabaret
’s Berlin decadence, Lou Reed having the Iron Cross shaved in his hair on the Rock and Roll Animal Tour. Nineteen seventy-eight was when Rock Against Racism and silly things like that were going on and Alan quipped, ‘I’d rather have a movement called Racism Against Rock.’ He also did a fanzine which featured crude little cartoons of Brian Superstar, his flatmate, in a Nazi uniform.”

Superstar and Horne both fit the music scene archetype of the catalyst figure who doesn’t necessarily contribute musically but who shapes opinion and serves as a custodian and transmitter of esoteric knowledge. Horne was a connoisseur of prepunk music, and had boxes of classic 45s ranging from Elektra’s psychedelic rock to Northern soul. Brian Superstar, later a member of the cult Scottish indie group the Pastels, “would hip you to things,” says Daly. “There was so little material available in those days. You literally could not find the cool records, because record companies deleted them from their catalogs. But Brian would spend the extra time and money to find the exotic rarities, like Gram Parsons, say. He also had a VCR, something almost unheard-of in 1978. We’d watch certain videos over and over, like this
History of Rock
program that showed the Byrds doing ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ A whole golden age was brought back to life by this documentary.”

All this archival arcana and period detail informed Orange Juice’s retro-eclectic approach to piecing together an identity. They’d take “jangly lead guitar lines from the more country-influenced sixties rock of [the] Byrds and Lovin’ Spoonful,” says Daly, but combine that with a touch of ’70s soul. Or they’d mismatch Subway Sect guitar scratch with a disco-style walking bassline. “It doesn’t surprise me that Steven Daly has since become a journalist, because he was the most analytical one of all of us,” says Collins. “He used to say, ‘Ooh, I like this sound on this record,’ and ‘Maybe we should take this sound from another record.’ And this was all presampling.” The same applied to the way Orange Juice constructed their image. “With Brian Superstar’s videos, you could see what the groups were
wearing,
” says Daly. Scrutinizing
The History of Rock
and the covers of their favorite albums such as
Pet Sounds,
Orange Juice came up with a mélange look that included mod-style suede jackets, horizontally striped T-shirts redolent of Warhol’s Factory, Creedence Clearwater Revival–inspired plaid shirts, raccoon hats, and plastic sandals. Strikingly different from the monochrome postpunk norm, the group’s appearance gave off intriguingly mixed signals, combining several different phases of the sixties, Americana, rock scholarship, and childhood innocence.

“Falling and Laughing” was Orange Juice’s first release, jointly financed by Alan Horne, Edwyn Collins, and OJ bassist David Mc-Clymont. Because Horne wasn’t in the band, he gradually took on the role of Orange Juice’s manager and boss of the label, which they christened Postcard. It suited his pushy personality. “Alan loved it when you’d jokingly call him Mr. Postcard,” recalls Collins. “He wanted to be the Svengali figure. He was a control freak. As well as running Postcard, he also sort of managed all the groups on the label. It was the punk managers that interested him—McLaren, Bernie Rhodes, Kay Carroll with the Fall. Alan used to say that the great thing about punk is that it’s brought in an era where the manager is as important as the group. In early punk interviews, the manager often assumed the same importance as the singer.”

Other punk-era managers operating in the provinces started labels purely as a way of getting attention for their bands. The independently released single figured as a superior form of demo tape, indicating real gumption and determination. Horne was more ambitious, though. He wanted to get Orange Juice onto the pop charts without resorting to the major-label system. Horne was one of the very first people to sense that the independent charts had become a low horizon for bands. “Music should always aim for the widest possible market,” Horne proclaimed in an early Postcard feature. “The charts are there. That’s where you need to be.” Borrowing a phrase from Dexys’ Kevin Rowland, he mocked the “brown rice independents” for their “hippy attitude” of dropping out and staying pure.

To get Postcard’s records distributed, though, Horne had to deal with Rough Trade, a label as brown-rice as they came. The relationship between the motormouthed Horne and the deceptively soft-spoken but tenacious Geoff Travis was frictional. “I really loved ‘Falling and Laughing,’” says Travis. “But I was a little disappointed by the second single ‘Blue Boy,’ and I wasn’t particularly impressed by Alan’s hustle when they came down to London looking for a distribution deal. Then I changed my mind and realized I made a mistake. I offered them a good deal, which Alan then told everybody was a deal that would bankrupt Rough Trade. But you know, Alan wanted to have an abrasive relationship with everybody because he thought he was Warhol.”

Horne knew that John Peel’s support was crucial for independent releases, especially those from outside London. But Peel had actually
been
a hippie once and his Radio One show represented everything Horne despised about the new postpunk DIY ghetto. So Horne barged his way into the BBC and berated Peel, insulting the music the DJ played as “just a
nice bore
” and warning him that Postcard was “the future and either you’ll get wise to that or you’ll look very stupid.” This intimidation tactic backfired. As Collins recalled, “That night Peel said on the air that he’d been confronted by a truculent youth from Glasgow,” adding that he was going to play “Falling and Laughing” just once and that was it.

Given how peripheral Glasgow was back then in relation to the rest of the U.K. music scene, Postcard depended on the weekly music press for exposure. “The papers were our only hope really,” says Daly. “The record industry was clueless and had to be told where to look. So who told them where to look? The music press. We thought if we send out this message in a bottle, Paul Morley at
NME
and Dave McCullough at
Sounds
will get it.”

Morley and McCullough had been the most prominent champions of Joy Division at their respective papers. In the summer of 1980, hit hard by Ian Curtis’s suicide, both writers were looking for something life affirming, a postpunk path that led away from the literally dead end of despair represented by
Closer
. The Postcard sound arrived in the nick of time. “Postpunk had dried up,” says Daly. “I liked PiL’s
Metal Box,
but it was pointing people in a bad direction. So Orange Juice was turning away from the dark side, and we were very influential on what ended up being called New Pop. We struck a nerve with the media-conscious people, the future tastemakers. We were very clever, meta-aware, and having fun with it.” Orange Juice’s sense of humor was crucial. That was why their debut single was called “Falling and Laughing.” In the song, Collins proposed a merry sense of one’s own absurdity as a salve for love’s humiliations: “What can I do but learn to laugh at myself?” Love tore you apart again and again, but in Orange Juice’s world, heartbreak always came with a side order of quips.