Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (2 page)

Thanks are in order. First, I wish to thank David Barker for his willingness to take a chance on an unlikely candidate for inclusion in this series. Casting a cold eye on punk’s apotheosis and famously declaring that “rock and roll is for arse lickers” (a totally rock and roll thing to say), Throbbing Gristle themselves adopted an alternately arch and antagonistic stance toward the kind of mainstream musical culture that promulgates the very idea of “classic albums.” That said, beneath their cranky disdain for the complacency of the culture industry, TG were nonetheless passionate music fans themselves. Indeed, Chris Carter’s devotion to ABBA bordered upon an obsession, and Gen confided to me in an unguarded moment that he had read the 33 1/3 book about Pink Floyd. As an album about, among other things, the historical fate of albums of popular music as cynically marketed
commodities rather than High Art, it makes a certain perverse sense that
20 Jazz Funk Greats
should suffer the indignity of being critically enshrined. This series remodels the canon as an expression of individual advocacy rather than some pseudo-objective index of timeless musical values, treating records as occasions for argument rather than as fixed stars in a privileged constellation, and I contribute to it in that spirit.

This book exists because of the encouragement given and examples set by a range of people, including a number of 33 1/3 authors whose entries in the series kept standards intimidatingly high. I am also grateful to a number of individuals who helped in various ways: Jon Savage, David Tibet, Val Denham, Naut Humon, Jean-Pierre Turmel, Eric Weisbard, Vickie Bennett, Ethan Port, Simon Norris, Kim Norris, Joseph Ghosn, Stephen Thrower, Jon Leidecker, Erika Clowes, Don Bolles, Matt Sussman, Jay Lesser, Tavia Nyong’o and the creators of the blog 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Most of all, I am grateful to the members of Throbbing Gristle for speaking with me and making their archives, images and memories available. They proved to be very friendly indeed.

When a fan has the opportunity to interview people who he has idolized since adolescence, critical distance risks dissolving into a puddle of enthusiasm. Gushing piffle about Throbbing Gristle, anyone? Since TG recorded themselves and did not retain the services of external engineers or producers, I am more or less entirely reliant upon their collective memories about the immediate circumstances surrounding the creation of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
. Since this occasionally requires needling and corroboration in order to establish technically specific accounts of what was plugged into what
almost thirty years ago, some particulars have inevitably gone missing, and some of what is “remembered” may be inaccurate. As scheduling permitted, I have attempted to separate my subjects and interrogate them about each other’s remarks, and I have attempted to double-check with other members when something seemed implausible. I interviewed Chris and Cosey in person at their home in King’s Lynn, spoke with Sleazy over a Skype line to Bangkok, and talked to Gen over the phone in Manhattan, followed by an NYU conference and drunken dinner party together in New York. All parties were generous with their time, and answered my pestering follow-up emails, supplying images and corrections as needed. In the interest of flow I have tended to present their separate comments in the chronological order in which each interview occurred; as each song is discussed, the reader will usually encounter first Chris and Cosey’s remarks, then Sleazy’s and then Gen’s. I have not sought to strenuously “debunk” anything that multiple band members have confidently asserted, and have tried to give each member free rein to tell their version of events, despite the attendant dangers. This may strike the more skeptical reader as credulous folly, but I have found that Richard Cammell’s fawning description of his friend Aleister Crowley conforms closely to my own personal experience of Genesis P. Orridge in conversation: “It is certain that he had dramatised himself from his earliest years, that he had deliberately created his own daemonic legend; but so certain was he of his daemonic, his elemental origin, so sincere was he in his claim to seerdom, to the prophetic character, that his personality remained absolutely natural and unaffected” (Cammell, p. 6). That said, the members of TG have copped to deliberately misleading the public with
partial self-revelations in the past (such as in Chris Carter’s admission that the published schematics for his custom-built “Gristle-izer” contained inaccurate voltages inserted into the plans with the express purpose of throwing people off the scent and sabotaging any attempts to copy his design). Take TG’s statements at face value and you may get burned. With this caveat in mind, proceed at your own risk.

This book is dedicated to Martin Schmidt: may our mission never be terminated.

When we are young we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.

Graham Greene,
The Quiet American

I was sixteen. Visiting my aunt in Montreal, I left the tony Westmount hills where she practiced as a psychoanalyst and took the subway to a grittier neighborhood in search of punk rock records. At the time, I was head over heels about the Misfits, and soon hit paydirt with a copy of
Paranoia You Can Dance To
, a hardcore compilation on the Weird System label from Germany with a rare live version of the Misfits tune “Attitude.” Not as good as finding an original vinyl seven-inch on the Plan 9 label—I actually had vivid dreams about finding and purchasing a copy of their coveted
Cough/Cool
single—but exciting nevertheless. Clutching my prize and flipping through the alphabetized dividers in the punk section
in search of the Toy Dolls, I came to a stop at a band I had never heard of.

Throbbing Gristle.

The mockery and menace in the name appealed to me, and I thought I’d take a chance on an unknown quantity. Operating on the assumption (often all too true in the case of punk rock) that first albums are best albums, I hunted for the Throbbing Gristle record with the earliest recording date. Assuming that the store just didn’t have their first record, I settled instead for something called
The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle Recorded During the Year Ending September 3rd 1977
. It came in a clinical white sleeve, with a smudged sticker on the back that made baffling references to “research and development” and “greater capital expenditure” under the heading
MUSIC FROM THE DEATH FACTORY
. Back at Aunt Marilyn’s house, I went into the living room, put on headphones (she was napping) and silently rocked out to the Misfits’ sweaty punk rock sing-along. Then I put on Throbbing Gristle and my head split open. Locked on at high volume in my little prison of sound, I was utterly confounded by what I heard. This was not a punk rock record; this was not a rock record; this wasn’t even music. At the time, I thought that a steady diet of Die Kreuzen and Corrosion of Conformity had inured me to extreme audio, but by the end of side one, the piercing synthetic shrieks, ferociously overdriven fuzz bass and visceral low-end throb (sorry, but there is no other word for it) captured on “Slug Bait” and “Maggot Death” had given me a truly punishing headache. I never made it to side two that day. I had finally found art strong enough to cause me physical pain, and I loved it.

One year later . . .

After my first exposure to the
Second Annual Report
, I was a devotee of Throbbing Gristle, studiously absorbing the history of the band and the network of industrial music and experimental noise radiating outward from it: reading issues of
Search and Destroy
and
RE/Search
magazine for interviews with the band, and tracking down any industrial music I could find in the record shops of Louisville, Kentucky, in the mid-eighties (haphazard). The RE/Search
Industrial Culture Handbook
was the required text, and came complete with syllabi in the form of the extensive “reference” sections appended to its interviews with Throbbing Gristle and assorted pals: Cabaret Voltaire, Non, S.P.K. and Z’ev, the abject performance artist Johanna Went and the French art/theory fanzine
Sordide Sentimentale
. In the case of TG, a complete inventory of the contents of Genesis’s personal library was included. Following these copious leads, I dutifully feasted on the laundry list of subcultural touchstones that seemed to come with the territory of industrial fandom, a kind of anti-Parnassus in which Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy and Jim Jones rub shoulders with Aleister Crowley, William S. Burroughs and the Comte de Lautreamont. Even bracketing the inherent awkwardness involved in asserting one’s individuality through such twice-removed snobbery (admiration for the favorite writers of one’s favorite bands), I can’t honestly say whether my love of Throbbing Gristle triggered me to pursue the morbid and the extreme, or whether my own sulky temperament simply found an imaginary consolation in the violent scenarios and verité audio contained in TG’s work.

To some extent, the bloodlust-at-a-safe-remove of industrial geekdom just rode piggyback with the macho aggression and intensity that punk rock had already prepared me to enjoy
in controlled bursts, but there was a distinction too: compared with the squeaky kiddie pogoing of the Toy Dolls, Throbbing Gristle were colder, more refined. Industrial culture had to be sought out through deliberate research and slow archival accumulation, consumed on record and in print at a scholarly remove, while punk rock and hardcore were living, breathing scenes, entirely within reach in Louisville, Kentucky, at the time. Punk rock was something I actively participated in and strongly identified with. Punk as I saw it—and, occasionally, made it—could be vital and intense, but it could also be sloppy and laughable. Most of all, punk was fun.

According to the puritanical logic of my teenage extremist self, this was a problem. Fed up with punk’s boneheaded silliness (i.e., the Dickies), I wound up embracing industrial music and noise culture because their fearless pursuit of the ugly and unpleasant seemed to successfully embody nihilism rather than pay inconsistent lip service to it. “No Fun” was a song of complaint from the Stooges, and when the Sex Pistols covered it they ramped up the obnoxiousness and disdain, but they still, essentially, sounded like people in search of fun who were energetically bitching when it didn’t arrive. The clammy, weedy, thin, unpleasant sounds of Throbbing Gristle’s needling high-end and the dull ache inspired by their relentless low-end throb weren’t the sounds of petty gripes about “no fun,” they literally
were
no fun: after my first encounters with TG, I felt exhausted and oppressed, as if I’d inhaled antimatter. It was a bummer to listen to, but you somehow felt stronger afterward because you could take it. Perversely, in a logic that perhaps only anorexics and straight-edgers can relate to, I desired it because it was
anti-pleasure
. In the wake of this encounter, punk rock and hardcore came off as essentially just
aberrant forms of rock music, albeit faster and more distorted, and rock music was still about pleasure, about the power-chord anthem, the sing-along chorus, the shouted slogan and dancing in a circle with your friends. It was a delivery system for the comforts of belonging to a group, however ostensibly weird. By contrast, the aesthetic stance modeled by TG didn’t promise “teenage kicks all through the night” but “entertainment through pain” (the official title of
Throbbing Gristle’s Greatest Hits)
. Pain was the point.

Throbbing Gristle were both less than music and more than music at the same time. Because their work, at least circa
Second Annual Report
, consisted of spontaneously improvised noise-jams recorded in a lo-fi manner, and frequently featured random snippets of found media rather than through-composed material, it sounded crude, impulsive, too raw and undisciplined to count as “real music.” They didn’t sound to me like people who would, or could, do anything so mundane and rule-bound as practice (later I would learn that, of course, some of them did do just that). Yet their work was, paradoxically, more than music. Bristling with references to abnormal psychology, avant-garde literature and the margins of performance art, TG were low on form but high on content; each record was a virus of subcultural info animating a musical host. Everything about TG seemed to me then to be pregnant with import, a coy reference to some esoteric meaning, a possible clue hinting at a darkly significant . . . something.

For example: could it be mere coincidence that September 3rd marked the official date of the release of
Second Annual Report
and the recurrent date of issue for their yearly
Industrial Newsletter?
Coming from a cadre who called for “nothing less than a total war,” it could hardly be accidental that
September 3rd marks the anniversary of the formation of the Allied powers and the official declaration of the Second World War in 1939. The premise that Throbbing Gristle were not making anything so mundane as music, but that they were instead opening a door onto an abject reality that others kept repressed, exerted a powerful attraction for me and inspired the passionate devotion of an adolescent convert. Redolent with sinister references to cult leaders, mass crimes and control mechanisms, TG wasn’t music that let you feel any comfort in the idea of belonging; it was a scraping sound that rubbed raw your paranoid suspicion that the need to belong to anything, including a music scene, was a sign of subjection, just one more form of alienated pleasure. Having happened by accident upon the
Music from the Death Factory
, my love of Throbbing Gristle soon pushed me to discover, or create, deliberately uncomfortable situations for myself. I wanted to see the death factory for myself.

I didn’t have to look far. River Road ran along the edge of the Ohio, a throughline that connected downtown to the suburbs. Stringing together little-used parks, a waste-water treatment facility and an abandoned factory, River Road was also my daily commute from home to high school and back again. Armed with a driver’s license, a Chevy Nova and nothing much to do, my friends and I skulked around its corners and dead-ends, looking for something—anything—unusual, hoping to trespass our way out of the everyday. David Lynch’s
Blue Velvet
had promised us that beneath every tranquil American town there lurked an underbelly of perversion, and like goth nerds everywhere, we dutifully went looking. We jumped the fence surrounding the factory complex and wandered through its concrete shell, testing the echo with teenage
ape calls, but the stoner graffiti inside proved that we weren’t even pioneer tourists of decay. And then one sticky summer afternoon I found my heart’s desire.