Yes New York:
Music and visual culture
From No Wave to the Velvet Underground
(A version of this essay appeared in b Magazine)
***
I have been waiting for this book since I was 10 years old, and now here it is: literary and photographic evidence of the loose scene known as “no wave”, an improvised mess of artists, musicians and nefarious individuals in late-1970s New York. I say loose because most of the bands involved wouldn’t have called it a scene. There hasn’t been such interest in it since 1978, when Brian Eno produced Mars, DNA, Lydia Lunch and James Chance and the Contortions for his No New York compilation, causing a rift between the bands he chose, and those he didn’t: Branca was out, Lunch was in, and each band had a different take on what constituted the scene. We take it for granted that music from many of these acts is now available. I was frequently embarrassed in record shops in the early 90s, when those older than me had no idea who I was talking about. Just incanting the names of the bands is enough to excite: Theoretical Girls, Dead Boys, Static, The Gynecologists.
No Wave. Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980, edited by Thurston Moore, co-authored by the music critic Byron Coley, is printed horizontally, with a hardboard-cover, and features documentary images of the bands and scenesters involved in the early years of no wave. It gives glamour to the grittiness of CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City, and recalls the beautiful trash of Andy Warhol’s films of The Velvet Underground.
This book shows how inspiration, art and ideas are earth-rooted things that begin with real people in real circumstances, who, by luck and financial impoverishment, would live in “a tenement railroad apartment or a deserted storefront window or a raw loft”; from here they would invent their own worlds to live in.
One such inspiration was Glenn Branca, the composer and guitarist who enrolled Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo as apprentices in his ensemble. As the musician Christine Hahn says: “His style influenced many others at the time… big bold text, cut-off words, no images, text as image. Very cool and very different from the lurid slasher/baroque style of early punk design. I think his design conveyed the idea of music very well. Kind of what happens at the point where minimalism meets neo-expressionism.”
A chronic Branca fan, I have taken perverse pleasure in beginning DJ sets with Branca’s Lesson No 1; perverse in the sense that from this “disco sucks” environment comes perfect dance music: bass through a chorus pedal; guitars that chime and rise and fall; pounding minimal drums that get louder and louder and more earthy and urgent. The song contains, in a pure form, many of the best elements of art rock: loud, minimal repetition that disguises the blur between structure and improvisation in order to induce a feeling of transcendence.
To think, I narrowly missed out on purchasing one of Branca’s battered guitars. A lousy graduate student I knew bought it for $50 in a New York pawn shop, not knowing the back was signed by Branca. When she saw his name scratched into the paintwork, she thought she’d give it away to a friend. I would have paid at least £50.
No Wave also features some less traditional style (perhaps anti-style) icons. Lydia Lunch still inspires interest and irritation. As I helped her off the stage at the Union Car Park gig, in Southwark in 2008, it struck me that – in spite of her love for all things trash – she can be quite regal. There is a photo here of her 1978 Lunch calendar, where she models trashy clothes with equally trashy names: Zebra Bra, P.I.G.A.L.L.E. Teddy, Net Hose Made in Japan, Lady Marlene Bra, Full Slip Fatal Charm.
James Chance perhaps took fashion the most seriously, with his velvet-collared London coat, black tie, high-waisters and his Billy Fury hair. There is a photograph of Lizzy Mercier Descloux banging a drum, looking and dancing like Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks. There are also photos of a wonderfully youthful Rhys Chatham.
And then there is Alan Vega. Alongside Branca, Suicide were the one act everyone agrees is central to the scene in No Wave, and everyone who saw them were changed and changed utterly. No one was prepared for music driven by a 1950s “rhythm machine”, a broken Farfisa and half-spoken, half-sung vocals that could reverb into shouts and snarls at any moment. The influences were Elvis, Roy Orbison, free jazz, minimalism and drone music. Bruce Springsteen is the most famous fan of Suicide, popularising Dream Baby Dream by playing a version on the road. Indeed, Suicide have come a long way, but then they were always an American band, acknowledging the dream and the nightmare between Ghostrider, the motorcycle hero, and Rocket USA, the real threat of annihilation in the Cold War. It was something of a natural progression that they were down to the last couple of acts for the Super Bowl: we could have had Dream Baby Dream between KFC adverts and bouts of futuristic rugby.
There are two photos of Vega here, in black cords and a tuxedo jacket slung off his shoulder (with Marty Rev looking on, from behind a Farfisa, in his giant bug sunglasses). Vega is also seen in cowboy boots, sprawled on the floor of a loft (perhaps where the First Rehearsal Tapes were recorded – or just a loft).
For the ultimate experience, I would recommend reading No Wave. Post-Punk. while listening to Suicide: Live 1977-1978 (Blast First Petite). My favourite cut, and the one which seems to radiate the energy spoken of by the contributors to No Wave, is from Max’s Kansas City, 13th of January 1977. “Has anyone got a knife?” Vega asks in the silence after Ghostrider (the song Lou Reed wishes he wrote). Thurston Moore might well have been among the other New York no-wavers in the audience, but to fulfill the wish of the evangelical, screaming, ex-performance artist on stage would have indeed been self-annihilation.
13 years earlier, self-sacrifice was on the mind of Cher after seeing the Velvet Underground live, when Warhol took his Exploding Plastic Inevitable art show out west to the Sunset Strip. Hey Cher, what did you think of the Velvets? “It will replace nothing – except maybe suicide.” How fortunate, then, that Cher believed in life after seeing a Velvets gig, and gave her opinion of it to an LA reporter. Among other walkouts, we can add Frank Sinatra.
Cher’s reaction is framed in a newspaper clipping, one gem among the treasure trove in The Velvet Underground: New York Art, published by Rizzoli, a coffee-table book and archive (some things collected, some things new) for fans, musicologists and anyone with an interest in photography, design or the 1960s. The editor, Johan Kugelberg, has brought together rare archival documents from the whole span of the Velvets’ career. Kugelberg proves his Velveteen credentials in an online interview: he claims that not a week of his life has passed by without him listening to a song by the Velvet Underground.
For fans, this is essential reading – not least because of the humour of the interviews. Talking about the project pre-publication, Reed was characteristically laconic, saying to Maureen Tucker: “This is going to be a very expensive book. We’re going to be a coffee-table book, Mo.” I do not usually buy coffee-table books, but the Velvets mean everything: the subheading of the book, New York Art, places emphasis on the importance of the Velvet Underground not only to music, but to American culture and counterculture, to visual art, and to a way of living.
I heard them on the radio even before I heard the Beatles, and so the Velvets were, in a sense, my Beatles. I got in a fight at school for suggesting that the Velvets had more of an impact on modern music than The Beatles. The bloke I was fighting with had never even heard The White Album, which I had just received for my 16th birthday (and which I adored). Everyone just went along with everyone else and never thought for themselves. The Velvets were a way to liberation. I used to go to church on Sunday Morning; now I listen to the Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning.
Among the images here, posters of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable stand beside the slides he used for his projections. There are notes, letters and Reed’s musical notation for Heroin. There are photographs of the Velvets performing as a band in an underground film (Lou, Sterling and John naked to the waist and smeared in paint, Maureen dressed as a mourning bride and banging her tambourine). Rare photographs offer a narrative to recordings of the infamous gigs: a basketball net over the heads of the band when they played the Gymnasium, from where the excellent bootleg appeared a year or so ago; a candle-lit table at the annual dinner for the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry, and the band playing live, wearing the obligatory black sunglasses. There is a fortune-cookie prize Nico once had stuck to her fridge door; tellingly for our beloved androgynous chanteuse, it reads: “You are the centre of every group’s attention.”
Is anyone else interested to know what Nico stuck to her fridge in the late 60s? Snapshots of Nico show that she was more beautiful than we can imagine – despite one newspaper heckle that likens her, bitchily, to Mick Jagger with blonde hair. She was a fallen icon who spent the 1970s and 80s taking heroin with her son and living, at one time, with John Cooper Clark, and in Manchester. Lest we forget, this is the singer who took acting lessons in the same class as Marilyn Monroe, and at the age of 17 had a cameo in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.
Columbia initially rejected the Velvets’ debut. Tom Wilson (who produced Sun Ra and Bob Dylan) jumped ship from Columbia to the MGM-owned Verve Records, and re-recorded three tracks, Waiting for My Man, Heroin, and Venus in Furs.
Verve would have released the album, but there were packaging problems with the Warhol banana. As you can see in this book, Warhol wanted the cover of each LP to come with a peelable yellow banana sticker: under that, if the reader/listener followed the instructions to “PEEL SLOWLY AND SEE”, they would uncover a bright pink banana. One double-page image shows the evolution of this cover, and then we have the sarcastic press release from Verve records: “BANANAS ARE IN SEASON.” After the hype around Warhol, Edie Sedgwick (the real muse behind Femme Fatale) and Nico, the Velvets could have been huge. They were even on TV. This is when everyone pipes in and says that, while not many people bought records by the Velvets, everyone who did started a band. No Good Vibrations, no Sergeant Pepper, yes VU.
The book is fairly divided between image, text and image. I love the academic presentation of the timeline, the added comments and quotes interspersed with dates. The glaring omission is John Cale, who did not contribute to the book. The timeline shows that when Reed was reading James Joyce at Syracuse College, and before he began jamming with Morrison, Cale was performing an all-day version of Erik Satie’s late piece, Vexations, and playing with La Monte Young and Tony Conrad at night. Such is the insight offered into the Velvets’ influences, a band that in turn inspired so many great New York bands, including Suicide and Sonic Youth, and who preside spiritually over all the bands who play All Tomorrow's Parties. Kugelberg faithfully situates all moments in historical time, so we get what we’ve always wanted: help to re-imagine what it was like back then, not for nostalgia, not to pastiche great art, but to enhance our listening pleasure and improve the quality of our lives.
***
Reading list
Johan Kugelberg (editor), The Velvet Underground: New York Art (Rizzoli, 2009)
Thurston Moore and Byron Coley, No Wave. Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (Abrams Image, 2008)
***
Play list
1 Lesson No 1 – Glenn Branca
2 Max’s Kansas City, 13th January, 1977 – Suicide
3 Sunday Morning – The Velvet Underground
4 Burning Spear – Sonic Youth
5 Blonde Redhead – DNA
6 Larousse Baron Bic – Rosa Yemen
7 Tough Guy – Suicide
8 Computer Dating – Theoretical Girls
9 Guitar Trio (1977) – Rhys Chatham
10 Almost Black – James Chance and the Blacks
11 3E – Mars
12 I’m Not a Young Man Anymore (live at the Gymnasium) – The Velvet Underground
13 Run Run Run (live at the Gymnasium) – The Velvet Underground
14 Sister Ray – The Velvet Underground
Music and visual culture
From No Wave to the Velvet Underground
(A version of this essay appeared in b Magazine)
***
I have been waiting for this book since I was 10 years old, and now here it is: literary and photographic evidence of the loose scene known as “no wave”, an improvised mess of artists, musicians and nefarious individuals in late-1970s New York. I say loose because most of the bands involved wouldn’t have called it a scene. There hasn’t been such interest in it since 1978, when Brian Eno produced Mars, DNA, Lydia Lunch and James Chance and the Contortions for his No New York compilation, causing a rift between the bands he chose, and those he didn’t: Branca was out, Lunch was in, and each band had a different take on what constituted the scene. We take it for granted that music from many of these acts is now available. I was frequently embarrassed in record shops in the early 90s, when those older than me had no idea who I was talking about. Just incanting the names of the bands is enough to excite: Theoretical Girls, Dead Boys, Static, The Gynecologists.
No Wave. Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980, edited by Thurston Moore, co-authored by the music critic Byron Coley, is printed horizontally, with a hardboard-cover, and features documentary images of the bands and scenesters involved in the early years of no wave. It gives glamour to the grittiness of CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City, and recalls the beautiful trash of Andy Warhol’s films of The Velvet Underground.
This book shows how inspiration, art and ideas are earth-rooted things that begin with real people in real circumstances, who, by luck and financial impoverishment, would live in “a tenement railroad apartment or a deserted storefront window or a raw loft”; from here they would invent their own worlds to live in.
One such inspiration was Glenn Branca, the composer and guitarist who enrolled Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo as apprentices in his ensemble. As the musician Christine Hahn says: “His style influenced many others at the time… big bold text, cut-off words, no images, text as image. Very cool and very different from the lurid slasher/baroque style of early punk design. I think his design conveyed the idea of music very well. Kind of what happens at the point where minimalism meets neo-expressionism.”
A chronic Branca fan, I have taken perverse pleasure in beginning DJ sets with Branca’s Lesson No 1; perverse in the sense that from this “disco sucks” environment comes perfect dance music: bass through a chorus pedal; guitars that chime and rise and fall; pounding minimal drums that get louder and louder and more earthy and urgent. The song contains, in a pure form, many of the best elements of art rock: loud, minimal repetition that disguises the blur between structure and improvisation in order to induce a feeling of transcendence.
To think, I narrowly missed out on purchasing one of Branca’s battered guitars. A lousy graduate student I knew bought it for $50 in a New York pawn shop, not knowing the back was signed by Branca. When she saw his name scratched into the paintwork, she thought she’d give it away to a friend. I would have paid at least £50.
No Wave also features some less traditional style (perhaps anti-style) icons. Lydia Lunch still inspires interest and irritation. As I helped her off the stage at the Union Car Park gig, in Southwark in 2008, it struck me that – in spite of her love for all things trash – she can be quite regal. There is a photo here of her 1978 Lunch calendar, where she models trashy clothes with equally trashy names: Zebra Bra, P.I.G.A.L.L.E. Teddy, Net Hose Made in Japan, Lady Marlene Bra, Full Slip Fatal Charm.
James Chance perhaps took fashion the most seriously, with his velvet-collared London coat, black tie, high-waisters and his Billy Fury hair. There is a photograph of Lizzy Mercier Descloux banging a drum, looking and dancing like Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks. There are also photos of a wonderfully youthful Rhys Chatham.
And then there is Alan Vega. Alongside Branca, Suicide were the one act everyone agrees is central to the scene in No Wave, and everyone who saw them were changed and changed utterly. No one was prepared for music driven by a 1950s “rhythm machine”, a broken Farfisa and half-spoken, half-sung vocals that could reverb into shouts and snarls at any moment. The influences were Elvis, Roy Orbison, free jazz, minimalism and drone music. Bruce Springsteen is the most famous fan of Suicide, popularising Dream Baby Dream by playing a version on the road. Indeed, Suicide have come a long way, but then they were always an American band, acknowledging the dream and the nightmare between Ghostrider, the motorcycle hero, and Rocket USA, the real threat of annihilation in the Cold War. It was something of a natural progression that they were down to the last couple of acts for the Super Bowl: we could have had Dream Baby Dream between KFC adverts and bouts of futuristic rugby.
There are two photos of Vega here, in black cords and a tuxedo jacket slung off his shoulder (with Marty Rev looking on, from behind a Farfisa, in his giant bug sunglasses). Vega is also seen in cowboy boots, sprawled on the floor of a loft (perhaps where the First Rehearsal Tapes were recorded – or just a loft).
For the ultimate experience, I would recommend reading No Wave. Post-Punk. while listening to Suicide: Live 1977-1978 (Blast First Petite). My favourite cut, and the one which seems to radiate the energy spoken of by the contributors to No Wave, is from Max’s Kansas City, 13th of January 1977. “Has anyone got a knife?” Vega asks in the silence after Ghostrider (the song Lou Reed wishes he wrote). Thurston Moore might well have been among the other New York no-wavers in the audience, but to fulfill the wish of the evangelical, screaming, ex-performance artist on stage would have indeed been self-annihilation.
13 years earlier, self-sacrifice was on the mind of Cher after seeing the Velvet Underground live, when Warhol took his Exploding Plastic Inevitable art show out west to the Sunset Strip. Hey Cher, what did you think of the Velvets? “It will replace nothing – except maybe suicide.” How fortunate, then, that Cher believed in life after seeing a Velvets gig, and gave her opinion of it to an LA reporter. Among other walkouts, we can add Frank Sinatra.
Cher’s reaction is framed in a newspaper clipping, one gem among the treasure trove in The Velvet Underground: New York Art, published by Rizzoli, a coffee-table book and archive (some things collected, some things new) for fans, musicologists and anyone with an interest in photography, design or the 1960s. The editor, Johan Kugelberg, has brought together rare archival documents from the whole span of the Velvets’ career. Kugelberg proves his Velveteen credentials in an online interview: he claims that not a week of his life has passed by without him listening to a song by the Velvet Underground.
For fans, this is essential reading – not least because of the humour of the interviews. Talking about the project pre-publication, Reed was characteristically laconic, saying to Maureen Tucker: “This is going to be a very expensive book. We’re going to be a coffee-table book, Mo.” I do not usually buy coffee-table books, but the Velvets mean everything: the subheading of the book, New York Art, places emphasis on the importance of the Velvet Underground not only to music, but to American culture and counterculture, to visual art, and to a way of living.
I heard them on the radio even before I heard the Beatles, and so the Velvets were, in a sense, my Beatles. I got in a fight at school for suggesting that the Velvets had more of an impact on modern music than The Beatles. The bloke I was fighting with had never even heard The White Album, which I had just received for my 16th birthday (and which I adored). Everyone just went along with everyone else and never thought for themselves. The Velvets were a way to liberation. I used to go to church on Sunday Morning; now I listen to the Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning.
Among the images here, posters of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable stand beside the slides he used for his projections. There are notes, letters and Reed’s musical notation for Heroin. There are photographs of the Velvets performing as a band in an underground film (Lou, Sterling and John naked to the waist and smeared in paint, Maureen dressed as a mourning bride and banging her tambourine). Rare photographs offer a narrative to recordings of the infamous gigs: a basketball net over the heads of the band when they played the Gymnasium, from where the excellent bootleg appeared a year or so ago; a candle-lit table at the annual dinner for the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry, and the band playing live, wearing the obligatory black sunglasses. There is a fortune-cookie prize Nico once had stuck to her fridge door; tellingly for our beloved androgynous chanteuse, it reads: “You are the centre of every group’s attention.”
Is anyone else interested to know what Nico stuck to her fridge in the late 60s? Snapshots of Nico show that she was more beautiful than we can imagine – despite one newspaper heckle that likens her, bitchily, to Mick Jagger with blonde hair. She was a fallen icon who spent the 1970s and 80s taking heroin with her son and living, at one time, with John Cooper Clark, and in Manchester. Lest we forget, this is the singer who took acting lessons in the same class as Marilyn Monroe, and at the age of 17 had a cameo in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.
Columbia initially rejected the Velvets’ debut. Tom Wilson (who produced Sun Ra and Bob Dylan) jumped ship from Columbia to the MGM-owned Verve Records, and re-recorded three tracks, Waiting for My Man, Heroin, and Venus in Furs.
Verve would have released the album, but there were packaging problems with the Warhol banana. As you can see in this book, Warhol wanted the cover of each LP to come with a peelable yellow banana sticker: under that, if the reader/listener followed the instructions to “PEEL SLOWLY AND SEE”, they would uncover a bright pink banana. One double-page image shows the evolution of this cover, and then we have the sarcastic press release from Verve records: “BANANAS ARE IN SEASON.” After the hype around Warhol, Edie Sedgwick (the real muse behind Femme Fatale) and Nico, the Velvets could have been huge. They were even on TV. This is when everyone pipes in and says that, while not many people bought records by the Velvets, everyone who did started a band. No Good Vibrations, no Sergeant Pepper, yes VU.
The book is fairly divided between image, text and image. I love the academic presentation of the timeline, the added comments and quotes interspersed with dates. The glaring omission is John Cale, who did not contribute to the book. The timeline shows that when Reed was reading James Joyce at Syracuse College, and before he began jamming with Morrison, Cale was performing an all-day version of Erik Satie’s late piece, Vexations, and playing with La Monte Young and Tony Conrad at night. Such is the insight offered into the Velvets’ influences, a band that in turn inspired so many great New York bands, including Suicide and Sonic Youth, and who preside spiritually over all the bands who play All Tomorrow's Parties. Kugelberg faithfully situates all moments in historical time, so we get what we’ve always wanted: help to re-imagine what it was like back then, not for nostalgia, not to pastiche great art, but to enhance our listening pleasure and improve the quality of our lives.
***
Reading list
Johan Kugelberg (editor), The Velvet Underground: New York Art (Rizzoli, 2009)
Thurston Moore and Byron Coley, No Wave. Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (Abrams Image, 2008)
***
Play list
1 Lesson No 1 – Glenn Branca
2 Max’s Kansas City, 13th January, 1977 – Suicide
3 Sunday Morning – The Velvet Underground
4 Burning Spear – Sonic Youth
5 Blonde Redhead – DNA
6 Larousse Baron Bic – Rosa Yemen
7 Tough Guy – Suicide
8 Computer Dating – Theoretical Girls
9 Guitar Trio (1977) – Rhys Chatham
10 Almost Black – James Chance and the Blacks
11 3E – Mars
12 I’m Not a Young Man Anymore (live at the Gymnasium) – The Velvet Underground
13 Run Run Run (live at the Gymnasium) – The Velvet Underground
14 Sister Ray – The Velvet Underground