Style Makes the Band

ArtForum, Oct, 1999 by Glenn O'Brien

"All music is experimental." - Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk

When it comes to starting a new wave, it takes an East Village. I don't know how long the funky east end of Greenwich Village has been a bohemian enclave and avant-garde hub, but going back to Charlie Parker, jazz at Slug's, the beats, and the immortal Fugs is good enough for me.

When I discovered the East Village, at the outset of the '70s, it was the funkiest place I'd been. It was a neighborhood that looked like it had a love hangover and lysergic acid indigestion. The '60s were wearing off and something was afoot, on platforms. You can tell from the cover of the first New York Dolls album, weird boys in makeup, glitter - a look halfway between drag queen and junkie thug. They were the prophets, a decade early for the waves made by the collision of art and rock 'n' roll.

In the late '70s, the East Village was home to most of the young artists and musicians in New York. Minimal employment or clever unemployment could secure a Manhattan address, and the East Village, as an immigrant neighborhood of long standing, provided the necessities of life and fine Ukrainian cuisine on a frayed shoestring budget. Everything and everybody necessary to overthrow the corporate art and music status quo was within walking distance.

Max's Kansas City, uptown by EV standards between Seventeenth and Eighteenth on Park Avenue South, was hikable, and in the '70s, artists could live on the free hors d'oeuvres Mickey Ruskin provided at "happy hour." The upstairs room provided a venue for new music, introducing to New York bands as diverse as the Wailers and the B-52's. In the middle of the decade, the gruff but agreeable Hilly Kristal opened CBGB, officially CBGB OMFUG, hoping to live up to the initials - Country, Bluegrass, Blues & Other Music For Uplifting Gourmandizers. But before that dream had a chance, the place was discovered by Televison, one of the first bands to be classified later (and somewhat unfortunately) as New Wave. Pretty soon it was home to young reckless bands such as the Stilettoes (the core of Blondie), Suicide, Wayne County (Jayne County after the sex change), the Dead Boys, the Cramps, Mink de Ville, the Sic F*cks, the Marbles, the Miamis, the Mumps, the Fleshtones, the Fast, the Erasers, the Dictators, and I'm just getting warmed up.

New Wave, as I recall, was a term coined by the advertising department at Sire Records, home of the Talking Heads and other new New York bands. Resonating with the Nouvelle Vague of film-making, it was a more respectable label than punk, which may have derived from Punk, the magazine that covered the downtown-CBGB-Max's scene. There was no difference between punk and New Wave, and any band that considered themselves part of one or the other was generally pitied and ignored.

New Wave was still new when No Wave arrived. This aggressively sham movement was an ironic reaction to New Wave hype and would-be commercialism. No Wave was rude, self-mystifying, and cultivated an aura of existential remove, aesthetic aggression, and glamorous doom. Associated with this brief flash were bands like DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and the Contortions. (Some of their music is available on an album produced by Brian Eno titled No New York and released by Antilles Records.) "No Wave" might have been taken from Jean-Luc Godard's remark, "There are no new waves, there is only the ocean"; what all these bands had in common was, basically, they had nothing in common with other bands, or musically, with each other. They did have a scene, a kind of free-floating community that included visual artists, performance artists, and con artists.

The thing that is amazing today is that almost all the bands on the scene were original and inventive. Everybody had their own style (and later everybody had their own imitator). For the first time women were included, not just as singers, or backup singers, but as boys in the band. Some of the groups were genre altering. James Chance and the Contortions was a sort of fusion of Ornette Coleman free jazz and James Brown/P-Funk. A similar combo, Defunkt, was led by Joe Bowie, brother of Lester and sometime collaborator with Chance. Both bands mixed up arty kids with jazz and funk vets to achieve a new groove synthesis.

Mars, which featured artist Nancy Arlen and guitarist Sumner Crane, was a pioneer of the art school of avant rock that culminated (?) in Sonic Youth - the power and noise of rock 'n' roll combined with the aesthetic values of modernist art. Lydia Lunch was a postfeminist long before postfeminism, combining blues, jazz, lounge ennui, and pissed-off attitude. Lydia was an artist to the core, and although she might have had a "career," she chose to do exactly what she wanted, in Teenage Jesus, in her later bands, in side projects (such as Harry Crews with Kim Gordon), and in her spoken-word performances and writing.

The Lounge Lizards were kind of a bebop-revisited-with-guitar band, although their founder, John Lurie, made a mistake early on in calling the band "fake jazz," which was enough to fool a lot of the jazz community into thinking they were goofing on jazz. They weren't. They were reviving it with energy and wit. The downtown music scene was very involved with the artistic edge of jazz. There was a lot of interest in Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra, who since the '40s had defined the outer reaches of jazz, shared the same venues as the Lizards and the Contortions. (The Lounge Lizards are celebrating their twentieth anniversary this year. They can no longer be construed as bebop revisited or fake anything, but are a remarkable, large jazz ensemble playing Lurie's compositions, which echo Africa, klezmer, Blue Note, Barry White, and Unified Field Theory.)