Miscellaneous - No Wave Part 4

  by Jon Rogers

published: 20 / 7 / 2011

intro

Jon Rogers in the fourth and final part of his No Wave series examines Glenn Branca's band DNA and the long-term impact of the short-lived, but influential movement

Glenn Branca was from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and a theatre graduate of Emerson College in Boston and founder of the city's Bastard Theatre. The Theoretical Girls liked to play places like the Kitchen, because of its art crowd, whereas DNA deliberately avoided such places because of the arty types. James Chance once declared: "I hate art. It makes me sick... SoHo should be blown off the fucking map, along with all its artsy assholes." Arto Lindsay from DNA saw the Kitchen as being "for people who'd read about events in the 'New York Times'. The audience would be sitting down and they'd accept anything you presented them with. It was more exciting for us to play to a crowd that were drinking and trying to pick somebody up, and try to wrest their attention away from that." Branca though had a lot in common with the more obvious no wave acts. His band the Theoretical Girls just wanted to try "every possible idea that came to our minds. We really didn't care what the audience thought." A stance similar to that taken by Lunch and Chance. DNA's Lindsay and Robin Crutchfield as well as Mark Cunningham from Mars all had a theatrical or performance art background with Cunningham and Lindsay moving in together whilst they studied at Eckerd College in St Petersburg, Florida. Whilst there Lindsay had become interested in the work of performance artist Vito Acconci as well as people like performance/installation artist Chris Burden and multimedia artist Hermann Nitsch. "People were so afraid of New York," Branca told David Browne for his book 'Goodbye 20th Century: Sonic Youth and the Rise of the Alternative Nation'. "When I told people I was moving, they said, 'Are you out of your fucking mind?' But we needed to be there. It was the last place left. For punk rock and new music and experimental performance art, it was the only place to come. There was nowhere else." Finding himself in a city of kindred spirits soon theatre took a backseat to music and he teamed up with keyboardist and songwriter Jeffrey Lohn to form the Theoretical Girls. While he had been intent on pursuing his theatrical interests he had also started playing the guitar when he was about 15, forming a band at school called the Crystal Ship playing covers by the likes of the Rolling Stones and the Doors as well as the Turtles' 'You Baby'. Even during his theatrical days he remained interested in music, usually writing violent songs to accompany his productions which he dubbed "music theatre". This wasn't to be confused with the likes of 'South Pacific' or 'Oklahoma!' but due to the fact that the actors would also play instruments. Branca was especially interested in experimental drama. As he told Alec Foege in his book 'Confusion is Next: The Sonic Youth Story': "To me, people like Beckett and Pinter and Ionesco were straight. The kind of theatre I was doing was on the far, deepest edge." His theatrical productions would invariably be a mixture of Dadaism, performance art and both rock and experimental music. "One of the plays," Branca told Foege. "would start off with an attack on the audience, in which the actors would create a kind of vocal piece that would be intended to intimidate and offend the audience in the most extreme possible way you could imagine. The actor would be asking, 'Why the fuck did you bother to come here? This is garbage. You're garbage.' Of course, it was a little more poetic than that." Although he had had an initial interest in rock music as a teenager and had been inspired to move to New York by the likes of Patti Smith and Richard Hell, Branca was now getting bored of the typical 70’s rock fare and developing more of an interest in the work of 'serious' modern composers, in particular Krzysztof Penderecki and Olivier Messiaen as well as Karlheinz Stockhausen. "Part of the reason I came to New York was because the punk thing was so cool," Branca told Foege. "Although Boston definitely had its own scene, it was nothing like what was going on here." He moved to New York in 1976 with $900 in an attempt to further his theatrical career. As Branca explained in the documentary film 'Kill Your Idols': "I came [to New York City] to do theatre. And I was in the process of actually setting up a whole theatre situation with a friend of mine named Jeff Lohn. He had a loft in SoHo. We were painting the place black, and at one point I just couldn't help myself and I decided I just wanted to start a fucking band. It got to the point where basically we kinda decided that we can, we're on a stage in front of an audience we can basically use. This band is our theatre group so to speak. That - that was Theoretical Girls." Along with Lohn and Branca, joining up were Wharton Tiers on drums, who would later build a name for himself as a producer, and Margaret DeWys (who would go on to have a successful career as a classical composer) on bass and keyboards. The band would last barely a year and only ever released one single, 'You Got Me', in 1978 on their own Theoretical Records, with 'U.S. Millie' on the flip. A performance artist friend Dan Graham invited the group to open for his performance at Franklin Furnace, a downtown theatre space and the band set about writing and rehearsing some songs in three weeks. The early band songs are pretty standard punk songs and nothing special but soon enough they began to test the genre's limits. "Theoretical Girls was truly an experimental band," claims Branca. "Because every song was different. We were just trying every possible idea that came to our minds. We really didn't care at all what the fucking audience thought. And all of a sudden we had this incredible audience that was coming from the art world." While the band had a set-up along the lines of a traditional four-piece rock group it was determined to play any kind of non-blues based music they could think of, often playing differently for different pieces. "One of many ideas I had," remembered Branca, "was to do a piece with a lot of guitars using unusual guitar tunings." In 'Confusion is Next', Branca describes the band as playing "Expressionist rock music" adding: "I don't think it's coincidental that the first visual-art scene of the 80s that exploded really big was so-called Neo-Expressionism." It was that kind of statement that detractors of no wave would pick up on. It's self-conscious artiness. Although the band stood slightly apart from the more obvious no wave bands they had a lot in common with the likes of Mars and DNA. They had been inspired by the first wave of punk bands but also had a love of composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Songs were invariably short, sharp and to the point with a sparse, unsettling, jarring rhythm that was brutal and abrasive. Limiting no wave to the four acts that appeared on 'No New York' the genre, effectively, died pretty quickly, because as Branca put it: "There was so much interest that everybody who ever had even thought about playing guitar decided to start a band." No wave was really something of an acquired taste. It emphasised the energy and anarchic spirit of punk but rejected the formulaic rhythms of rock 'n' roll and the inevitable predictable chord changes and the lyrical and musical structures. Its musicians explored the outer limits of atonality and noise within the confides of the typical rock band set-up. It was - and is - difficult music to listen to, being hard on the ears for most audiences. It flourished briefly for a short time but remained a strictly minority attraction, limited to finding an audience in arts centres and in-the-know clubs. The no wave bands were like some Roman candle going off, all heat and eye-catching sparkles but iyt was all over pretty quickly. Even the Theoretical Girls only lasted just over a year before Branca was inspired to form the Static, which featured his then girlfriend Barbara Ess on bass and Christine Hahn on drums. From Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon's account of one of their shows in 'Artforum' in January 1983 were even more confrontational than the Theoretical Girls. The first wave of bands while they had left their mark had very little to show for it with bands like Theoretical Girls and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks only releasing little more than a single or two to show for their efforts. For Lunch as she said in ‘From the Velvets to the Voidoids’ , the no wave bands simply "self-destructed." "They were all so concise in the music, the delivery, the point and they just ended. It wasn't a premature death. It was an immediate and accurate one. They didn't extend the boundaries of their short lives." For Mars' Mark Cunningham the scene was effectively over at the end of 1978 when 'No New York' came out: "Max's closed and CB's was becoming more of a mega-rock club. We didn't feel we had a place anymore." New clubs like Hurrah's and the Mudd Club had more of an emphasis on DJs, and the music scene in New York was getting interested in dance music. Chance continued playing in one form or other but problems with drug addiction, record companies and his girlfriend Anya Philips' terminal cancer effectively put pay to any sort of long-term career. A coda to the band's history though saw the band reform out of nowhere to play two live shows in New York in February 2001. Lunch has continued a very idiosyncratic music career. She almost took on a sweetness for her first solo album 'Queen of Siam', formed an out-and-out goodtime rock 'n' roll band, Eight Eyed Spy, and went about covering Creedence Clearwater Revival as well as Bo Diddley. Despite the scene's brevity it had a lasting effect on many bands. The likes of the Birthday Party, the Pop Group and US hardcore progenitors Big Black whose leader Steve Albini still sees the Contortions' track 'Flip Your Face' from 'No New York' as his favourite ever song all owe a debt of gratitude. Perhaps the most obvious connection is with the acclaimed Sonic Youth and who grew out of the SoHo loft scene. The Flucts, in the second wave of no wave bands, contained one guitarist called Lee Ranaldo while a similar no wave band the Coachmen featured one Thurston Moore (the band had once played on the same bill as the Static). Both would feature playing in Branca's several line-ups of his electric guitar symphonies and recordings like 'The Ascension'. The band have also teamed up with Lydia Lunch for their single 'Death Valley '69' which appeared on the album 'Bad Moon Rising'. The song, meant as an ironic 'tribute' to the infamous Charles Manson and his Family, evolved out of a riff the band had tossed about in rehearsals but had dismissed as too much of a "goofy" seventies rock throwback with echoes of Steppenwolf for it to be taken too seriously. Then Moore and Lunch came up with some lyrics: "Thurston and I wrote it on a bus going up to Spanish Harlem," remembers Lunch. Moore wrote the chorus and Lunch the verses. Returning the compliment in 1984 on Lunch's album 'In Limbo' where he played bass and co-wrote 'I Wish... I Wish', 'Friday Afternoon'. '1,000 Lies' and 'What Did You Do'. Moore also pops up on her 1988 album 'Honeymoon in Red' where he plays guitar on 'So Your Heart' and 'Three Kings'. The same year the pair also released a collaboration 'The Crumb'. Lunch would also be a guest at the wedding of Kim Gordon and Moore in summer of 1984. Lunch's connections with members of the Birthday Party would go further than the band's stylistic debt of gratitude. She would team up with guitarist Rowland S Howard in 1982 for a cover of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra's 1968 hit 'Some Velvet Morning'. No wave also had an impact on New York's dance scene, despite its avowed atonal stance. Hailing from the South Bronx ESG - originally called Emerald, Sapphire and Gold) comprised the four Scroggins sisters and their cousin Tito Libran. Their music mixed in dub, chant, hip-hop and beats as well as funk. Attached to the same label - 99 Records - as ESG were quartet Liquid Liquid who played a minimalist funk that was popular in New York City in 1981. Their debut eponymous album, released that year, profiled repetitive electro beats with Latin-American percussion, epitomised in songs like 'Optimo' and 'Cavern'. Other dance-based bands, while having very little in common with the original no wave acts, introduced a dissonance into their music and bands like Konk, the Bloods and Science.

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