Style Makes the Band

ArtForum, Oct, 1999 by Glenn O'Brien

Arto Lindsay was another key figure on the scene, playing his detuned twelve-string Dan Electro guitar with an arrhythmic fury that recalled Coltrane's "sheets of sound." Arto played in the Lounge Lizards and sang and played with DNA, a cubist power trio with noncymbalic drummer Ikue Mori, organist Robin Crutchfield, and later the eccentric and wildly inventive bassist Tim Wright.

Many visual artists were involved in bands in the late '70s and early '80s. Jean-Michel Basquiat was in a band that started out being called Test Pattern, then became Gray. Basquiat, Michael Holman, Wayne Clifford, Nick Taylor, and Vincent Gallo made music that sounded like art. Basquiat knew something about jazz, and Gray had a sensibility indebted to electric-period Miles Davis, but the basis of their aesthetic was simply the fun of fooling around. In an era before sampling, they played with prerecorded tapes and sound effects, and they approached traditional instruments creatively. I remember that they got an incredible sound by pulling adhesive tape off the head of a snare drum.

Another Fun Gallery artist, Steven Kramer, was a wild accordionist who led a band called the Wallets, while James Nares played with an outfit called the Rotating Power Tools, with John Lurie and filmmakers Eric Mitchell and Seth Tillet. Walter Steding, a painter who worked as Andy Warhol's assistant at the time, was a solo act who often opened for Blondie. He played amplified violin and a synthesizer belt that he built himself, and he wore goggles that strobed in time with the music. Suicide, one of the most powerful bands on the scene, was a duo, with Martin Rev on electronics and Alan Vega on vocals. Vega was and is a sculptor who often collaborated with Edit deAk on Art Rite, the most important unknown art magazine of the time. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch was in an odd, popular band called the Del-Byzanteens, described by John Lurie as "sort of halfway between Kraftwerk and R & B." A few years later artist David Wojnarowicz was part of a band called 3 Teens Kill 4. They played the Pyramid Club regularly and developed quite a following, with unique stylings of summer-camp songs and Rufus and Chaka Khan covers. Like Basquiat, Wojnarowicz used cassette tapes to produce ambient sound effects and his band had a fondness for toy instruments.

Other artists and art-world figures included: Frank Schroeder and Taro Suzuki (Youth in Asia); Barbara Ess (Y Pants); Dan Cameron (Infra Dig, which he describes as "thrash bubblegum"); and David Humphries (Details at II). Keiko Bonk was the singer for His Master's Voice, a popular East Village band that included the Patti Smith Group's Jay Dee Daugherty on drums. Keiko, who looked and sounded great, even threatened to be a commercial success for a while, but then seemed to prefer to remain an artist rather than make the transition to pop commodity.

There were any number of extraordinary performers on the scene. A guy named Zev, a very odd and intensely athletic man, did musical performances that consisted entirely of twirling large pieces of metal through the air, producing exotic rhythmic whirs. Rudolph Gray created architectural walls of noise on guitar. David Van Tieghem, the drummer for Peter Gordon's modernist art/pop/jazz band, the Love of Life Orchestra, did an amazing musical act involving a tableful of toys. Boris Policeband performed weird songs with violin and distortion, while slightly to the west of the East Village, in ol' Tribeca, Charlemagne Palestine performed long, intricate twelve-tone piano pieces. Later, Copernicus, performing astral-projection free music in the Sun Ra tradition, was a fixture on the East Village scene.