Miscellaneous - No Wave Part 1

  by Jon Rogers

published: 26 / 6 / 2011

intro

In the first part of a four part series, on New York's late 1970's confrontational No Wave movement, Jon Rogers examines the impact of two of its most principle bands, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and DNA

The term 'no wave' seems to have to have its origins in cinema and in particular the French director Jean-Luc Godard with his gnomic assertion that "there are no new waves, only the ocean." Pivotal member of the movement Lydia Lunch seems to have made a reference to "the no wave" in a magazine interview in an attempt to unite those bands who gave a nihilistic finger to new wave's perkiness. They were united by a penchant for lyrics that dwelt on physical and psychic torment and music that was inspired by punk - many of its practitioners were avowed 'non-musicians' - and took an uncompromising musical stance that embraced the experimental and avant-garde as well as free jazz, atonal funk and white noise and dissonant art. Critic Roy Trakin is generally credited with coining the term, a name meant to convey both the new directions and the negation implied by the music's clangourous style. It took the raw power of punk and its confrontational stance but rejected its use of a traditional rock 'n' roll format - verse/chorus/verse. The original New York punk groups of 1975-1977, like Television, the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie and Patti Smith, who had been centred around the CBGB's club in the Bowery were by 1978 running out of steam. For all their rebellious posturing and statements at the start had, by now, become rather stale and reactionary. James Wolcott, in his article 'A Conservative Impulse in the New Rock Underground' for the 'Village Voice' celebrated the opposition those bands had created against the mainstream rock culture, promoting an egalitarian stance but now had fallen into exactly the same thing they had attacked originally. Those punk bands had developed its own sense of rock aristocracy and its stars were seen as being remote and untouchable. Musically too punk was reactionary rather than revolutionary - basically just 1950’s and early 60’s Chuck Berry rock with attitude and volume. Just how far were bands like the Ramones - with their jeans, T-shirts and black leather jacket, the archetypal image of the rebel without a cause - removed from the 50’s nostalgia of mainstream TV shows like 'Happy Days' and the hit movie 'Grease'? Television's guitarist and leader Tom Verlaine was hailed as a guitar hero in much the same way as Eric Clapton had been idolised in his 1960’s prime. And his band's style, with its twin guitar interplay, drew heavily on the West Coast rock of the 60’s, with bands like The Byrds and the Grateful Dead. Punk was, in some respects, a return to rock music's rock 'n' roll roots rather than something new and innovative. It had been effective in destroying the overweight dinosaur 70’s rock music had become but what had been the vanguard at the time was now the rearguard picking up on what had gone before, rather than attempting anything new. For the artists that were involved with no wave their style was more a fresh, new approach, in effect a year zero, rather than picking over the carcass of rock from yesteryear for fresh inspiration. Admittedly though no wave did have its ancestors, although they drew from more than just the strict diet of rock. Most obviously there was the Velvet Underground at their most abrasive - more 'I Heard Her Call My Name' and 'European Son' than 'Pale Blue Eyes'. There was the dissonance of Yoko Ono and John Lennon's primal scream recordings, and the apparent mayhem and discord of Captain Beefheart's 'Trout Mask Replica'. Not to mention the lack of melody found in free jazz exponents like Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler and the experimentation of modern composers. The godfathers of the entire scene were, however, the electro-punk duo Suicide who fused the notions of performance art and rock years before the no wave crowd picked up on it. The band's live gigs would take on an infamous quality, often collapsing into physical violence or rioting. The band's members Alan Vega and Martin Rev would berate and heckle the audience and the audience, in turn, would threaten and attack the band. Still the no wave bands couldn't quite entirely throw off the trappings of the conventional rock bands. All of the most important bands - DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and the Contortions - all used the standard rock set-up of guitar, bass, drums to negate that set-up as if they were attacking rock from within using the very tools against itself. Admittedly with musicians such as James Chance other instruments were used such as saxophone and keyboards but the basic set-up of these bands was essentially a rock one. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks singer Lydia Lunch (née Lydia Anne Koch on 2 June 1959) moved to New York in 1976 aged 16 and was taken under the wing of Rev: "[I was] kind of adopted by Martin Rev, who had a son who was older than me," Lunch told 'Rip It Up and Start Again'. "Marty looked after me, gave me vitamins. What better parents could you have than Suicide. They were my first friends in New York. Oh, the early Suicide shows, what fucking beauty." Initially Lunch was a cocktail waitress to make ends meet and hung around CBGB’s just as the likes of Blondie, Television, Talking Heads and the Ramones - the very bands that had inspired her to move to the Big Apple - were effectively moving on out of the Bowery club. It was there that she met her future collaborator, the free jazz musician James Chance (né Siegfried, born 20 April 1953 in Milwaukee). "The way I met Lydia was she was dancing by herself in the aisle at CBGB's to the Dead Boys," Chance related to Clinton Heylin. "And I just went up to her and started talking to her. She'd just come here from Rochester. She showed me this thing she had written - this long prose poem - and it was really good [...] One night my doorbell rang and it was Lydia. She needed a place to stay. So we lived together for a year. But she wasn't my girlfriend. She had a whole list of people in bands that she wanted to fuck, and she went down the list. I think she got all of them. She was very aggressive. Anyway, she started playing me these songs. She couldn't play any chords, she would just band out this atonal accompaniment to the vocals. I think most people would have said, 'forget it.' But I actually encouraged her." Lunch was, effectively, the typical punk musician: lacked even the most basic of musical techniques ("To this day, I still don't know a single chord on the guitar"), had been inspired by the US underground musicians and desperate to be heard, if only to convey her angst. She'd also become disillusioned with the very musicians that had inspired her to move to New York. She told Simon Reynolds in 'Rip it Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-84': "The whole goal was to kill your idols, as Sonic Youth later put it. Everything which had influenced me up to that point I found too traditional - whether it was Patti Smith, the Stooges, Lou Reed's 'Berlin'. It was fine and good for its moment, but I felt there had to be something more radical. It's got to be disembowelled." Lunch though saw herself as the antithesis of punk and something she had little in common with. She told 'Perfect Sound Forever': "I always thought I was anti-punk. I got lumped in with punk because I wore black and I dyed my hair. I thought punk was lousy Chuck Berry music amped up to play triple fast. I didn't like the chord structure, or that they used chords. I thought it was really too much orientated towards fashion. A lot of the groups in New York were diversifying more and trying to find a new genre - groups like Mars or DNA or the Contortions. I think that scene was very anti-punk. When I think of punk I think of the Sex Pistols and The Clash. But those are rock bands." Jim Sclavunos, who was a drummer in Red Transistor and would later join Lunch in Teenage Jesus and the Jerks as bassist, was also sceptical of punk saying: "We all [the no wave crowd] pretty much held punk in contempt. For its self-satisfaction, for its self-indulgence and various nostalgic trends. It just seemed like a very easy scene for a bunch of losers. And we were determined to be bigger losers, I guess." Along with help from Chance, Lunch gained further encouragement by going to see the New York's avant-garde group Mars. "They were so dissonant, so obviously insane," Lunch told Heylin. "There were no compromises or concessions to anything that had existed previously. They were truly creating from their own torture." The quartet, not to be confused with the UK dance outfit MARRS, was led by Sumner Crane with China Burg (née Constance Burg), Nancy Arlen and Mark Cunningham, and had started out as a "quirky rock group" according to Burg but then dropped "all the conventions of rock 'n' roll music". Conventional notions of tempo and tonality were soon jettisoned with the band becoming more interested in having a flexible notion of guitar tuning (or de-tuning) in the same song and getting the instrument to produce unusual tones and noises, other than simply using the strings. Second guitarist Crane often created noise by using the guitar jack on his instrument and the mouthpiece of a trumpet. With songs like '11,000 Volts', 'Hairwaves' and 'Helen Fordsdale' they rampaged through cacophonous songs with utterly no regard for melody or the need for any formal musical training. In a blaze of white heat and noise the band burned furiously and no doubt made the confrontational Lunch look positively tame and restrained. Mars were, in a small field of extremes, perhaps the most extreme. Burg's and Crane's vocals had a psychotic mania to them which screeched over a wild guitar thrash and cacophonous drums. After appearing on the 'No New York' compilation and releasing their one and only single '3E' the band imploded but posthumously released 'The Mars EP' in 1980 which Lester Bangs described in the 'Village Voice' as being "beyond lyrics, often beyond discernible instrumentation psychotic noise." Such a musical stance gained its detractors too with Burg telling Reynolds: "The girlfriend of Stiv Bators from The Dead Boys threw a chair at me at one show. We were always accused of being 'arty and empty'. A critic wrote that about us, which we turned into the song 'RTMT'." Soon enough Chance and Lunch were teaming up to make their own music and form Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. "It was almost as if my job was to dispute the 'alternative' that had already been established," Lunch told Heylin. "Although the groups that had originally made me want to go to New York - and which originally had made me run away at 16 to go and investigate - attracted me there, I wanted to create something that would completely divorce myself from that, break away and shoot forward." While Lunch was still enamoured and inspired by the city of New York and the bands that had drawn her there she still wanted to distance herself from that scene. "[New York] was glorious. It was a mass insane asylum," she told 'Perfect Sound Forever'. "Obviously, I went there for a creative outlet and for the stuff that was coming out of there. I didn't go there to embrace what existed. My whole theory was to stick a thorn in every side that had come before me. I still found that a lot of things I was drawn to didn't go far enough, or were still too based in tradition." Lunch was the main driving force behind the band, according to Chance: "It was totally Lydia's concept." And Lunch was a dictatorial leader, telling Reynolds: "In rehearsals I would literally beat them with coat hangers if they made any mistakes at a gig. We rehearsed ad nauseam and were pretty fucking tight. It's pretty fascist sounding and I was the fucking dictator." "All I did," said Chance to Heylin, "was come up with a saxophone part, and go along with what was going on. I used to sing on one song - 'Jaded' - that was my big moment. But Lydia had this thing of wanting the music to be really severe and stripped down." Soon enough Bradley Fields was recruited to be what could be loosely called the drummer, only playing a snare drum and cymbal. Fields had been introduced to Lunch and Chance through the band the Cramps, who shared rehearsal space with Mars and the still forming Teenage Jesus. Fields had the requisite interest in 'noise'. The music was certainly stripped down. Never mind that Fields couldn't even play the most rudimentary of drum 'kits', Lunch wasn't deterred by not being able to play the guitar nor sing in any conventional sense, which was in effect a one-note wail. "I like my own note," she once joked. "What's wrong with the note I have?" The band's gigs were also unconventional, typically lasting around 10 minutes. Although when the band had some songs lasting less than a minute, you could run through quite a few songs in that time. The initial line-up was completed by a Japanese bassist simply known as Reck. 'The Closet' perhaps epitomises the band the most. Chance's shrieking saxophone over a primitive thud is matched by Lunch's atonal, nihilistic wail: "Suburban wealth and middle class well being All it did was strip my feelings Personality down the drain Take a bullet to my eyes Blow them out and see if I die." Lunch wanted a violent, confrontational edge to the sound the band was making, saying in 1979: "You punched people on the head with the sound. The audience is either going to say, "Urgh," and leave quickly, or they're going to be masochistic and want to be punched again." Even Bangs wasn't really sure of what to make of them, writing in his article 'A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise' for the 'Village Voice' in 1981 he said of the band: "Guys in my sixth-grade neighbourhood used to entertain themselves by tying the head of a cat to one hot-rod fender and its tail to another and driving the cars apart slowly, which sounded a lot like part of this [the band's eponymous EP, released in 1980]. Unless it's for Catholic school beatings by nuns, nostalgia doesn't account for Lydia's passionate 'Baby Doll' wailing. If you only want to try one, make it this - nothing more deathly shrill has ever been recorded." By the summer of 1977 Teenage Jesus were playing the downtown clubs, usually with Mars, and became focused around Max's Kansas City where Peter Crowley booked the bands and often Suicide could be found playing. That move of venue was telling. With the new wave and punk bands likes Blondie and Television their live venue of choice had been CBGB’s run by Hilly Kristal but bands like Teenage Jesus had their sights set elsewhere in Max's, once the resident hangout of artists Andy Warhol and his Factory crowd. While the likes of Lunch had originally inspired by those CBGB’s bands in reality Teenage Jesus had, stylistically, much more in common with the likes of Rocket from the Tombs, Devo and Pere Ubu who hailed from Cleveland. As if reinforcing the point Pere Ubu took up a residency at Max's in April 1976 and Devo followed on in July 1977. Also starting to build a reputation at the same time were DNA, formed by Arto Lindsay and performance artist Robin Crutchfield (who played keyboards), Lindsay being friends with Mars and had witnessed the band start to make their mark. "I wanted to do something really extreme," Lindsay told 'Perfect Sound Forever'. I thought that was the route to success, which didn't turn out to be true. I very consciously wanted to do something that was very different from Mars, because we were all very close. They were more of a Velvets/Roxy Music sounding band so I wanted to do something that was very angular, involving a lot of starting and stopping. The opposite of what they did." Recruited as a drummer was the Japanese woman Ikue Mori, who not only couldn't speak English but couldn't play the drums either. Lindsay and Crutchfield would communicate with her using "diagram and gesture", according to 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." Influenced by recordings of Brazilian drum beats Lindsay gave her and by classical Japanese music, Mori created her own unique style of drumming. Over a very rudimentary beat the gaunt figure of a bespectacled Lindsay would claw violently at his detuned 12-string Danelectro guitar as if possessed by some frenzied spirit: "It was sculptural as opposed to painterly, shapes that poked out at you, rather than a surface." His singing wasn't that conventional either, more barking, grunts and growling. "Sometimes it was an extension of the sheer feeling aspect of the blues," Lindsay told Reynolds. "Or like singing in languages you don't understand, like Indian. In Florida, I'd been in this student-directed theatre group, and we done [sic] exercises in using the voice in nine different ways, like 'OK let's improvise for half an hour, don't make it human but don't make it mechanical either.’" Lindsay's lyrics were more a vocal or language exercise rather than the more traditional expression of some emotion or feeling. The band started to formulate a distinct sound, removing songs of any conventional verse/chorus format while Crutchfield hammered out an electro-synth pulse. Lindsay said in 'From the Velvets to the Voidoids: a Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World': "Robin wanted it more pop, more structured in the sense you know where every little thing is gonna be. I'm interested in ideas of structure that are just as obvious to the ear, but not so much like arithmetic." Soon enough Crutchfield was on his way out - going on to form Dark Day - while former Pere Ubu member Tim Wright joined up as bassist. Lindsay and Wright had a similar musical vision - to go beyond traditional rock 'n' roll structures in search of something less rigid and more spontaneous. "Both Tim and I both play very melodically," Lindsay said. "We're not anti-melody. There's just more to music than rock 'n' roll." That line-up of the band lasted three years but only resulted in the band releasing one single - 'You & You' - and a 10-minute EP - 'A Taste of DNA'. Although their music appeared to the listener as being abstract and spontaneous it was, in fact, highly rehearsed and thought out beforehand and discussed right down to the tiny details. The band members saw themselves as being part of "one giant instrument" or as "if a rat got loose inside a computer". Red Transistor - with the future Bad Seeds member Jim Sclavunos on drums - were also starting to make an impact with their on-stage antics. "These guys claimed they were from outer space," remembered Sclavunos. "They had me play drums while they executed various manoeuvres on their instruments. Rudolph Grey used to take a power drill and drill into his guitar right next to the pickups. And Von Lmo would destroy my drums with a chain saw and a fireman's axe while I was playing them." All the bands were all too willing to distance themselves from punk and rock 'n' roll. Chance told the 'New York Rocker' in 1978: "I don't identify with any kind of group, or anything like rock and roll. That's just another example of maudlin sentimentality - people having this big love affair with rock and roll. I have nothing to do with rock and roll." The original line-up of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks was short-lived as Chance and Lunch parted company. Joining Lunch was Sclavunos on bass and Bradley Field on drums. Sclavunos wouldn't last long either and would be replaced by the film-maker Gordon Stevenson. The band would release their debut single 'Orphans' in 1978 followed a year later by 'Baby Doll' and a mini-album, Pink, and 12-inch EP. The band came to an end in 1980 when Lunch moved on to the less aggressive Beirut Slump.

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