Rip It Up and Start Again

by Simon Reynolds

  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.

  The cheap rents allowed the No Wavers to work sporadically, if a
t 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 chitter
ing 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.