Style Makes the Band

ArtForum, Oct, 1999 by Glenn O'Brien

Glenn Branca was probably more a SoHo than an East Village figure, but he personified the artistic ambition of the '80s downtown music scene, performing "symphonies" with a variety of combos. One of the most notable was an electric-guitar ensemble featuring a dozen or so instruments plugged into a big array of amps and generating a kind of monumental orchestral noise fury. Artists were often members of the Branca combos - including, I believe, Robert Longo, Paul McMahon, and Richard Prince - as were a bunch of interesting musicians, including Sonic Youth founder Thurston Moore, Bronco and many other performers associated with the East Village were also affiliated with the scene at the Kitchen, the artists' space then located in SoHo, which was the site of many unique performances, including an opera by Sumner Crane of Mars, based on Don Giovanni and titled John Gavanti.

Other performers used music as a pretext for something more conceptual. Ann Magnuson, queen of the Club 57 crowd and a "performance artist" who regularly regaled crowds in the East Village, organized a succession of satirical "bands," from the proto-girl power Pulsallama, to the heavy-irony metal group Vulcan Death Grip, to the hippy-dippy stylings of Bongwater. There was also a "New Wave Vaudeville" featuring a number of wacko performers, such as the retro spectacles of painter David McDermott, the androgynous opera of Klaus Nomi, and a "band" called Art (and maybe also Art-Less), which combined minimal musicianship with tongue-in-cheek extremism. Later the freak-show, amateur-night torch was taken up by Howie Montaug's Cabaret, from which emerged (or didn't) numerous mad artistes.

Many bands of mid-lower Manhattan seemed to exist solely for the sake of deconstructing the idea of the band. A pioneer "joke band" was Half Japanese, two neo-Dada artist brothers who visited New York regularly to perform their anti-rock 'n' roll routines. They generally employed a rhythm section, Workdogs (Rob Kennedy and Scott Jarvis), who also backed any number of jokey and/or strange players, including Purple Geezus (an outfit put together by Velvet Underground drummer Me Tucker and gallerist Mike Osterhout) and the Velvet Monkeys. Probably the culmination of the idea of a joke band was They Might Be Giants, who started as tiny and jokey as the rest and then sort of lived up to their name, becoming a cult favorite among real rock stars.

The East Village scene was less a movement than a nonstop festival of everything from the avant-garde to the blatantly pop. It had radical musicians who looked to John Cage, Merce Cunningham, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman, and it had the Fleshtones, arguably America's most intelligent garage band, who looked to Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. It was where Madonna came from (see the TV movie). It was a community of cultured, ambitious youth, and in the space of ten years or so it had several "generations" of performers. It was always destined to "go uptown," and a lot of it wound up dead or in Brooklyn. I remember wistfully the controversy stirred up by an interview in the East Village Eye with the late Anya Phillips, manager and mate of the notorious James Chance, who announced that she and James had moved uptown to get away from the pot-smoking hippie fans of the band Television who were taking over the East Village. Uptown, to Anya, was East Thirty-first Street. This was around the time that James transformed the Contortions into James White and the Blacks, which was a sort of free jazz-disco fusion, guaranteed to alienate all but the most alienated of the alienated.