Destroy All Monsters: Jan Tumlir on motor city madness

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

DAM's trajectory from obscurity to semi-fame to grudging acceptance from an elite micropublic of New Music and art-rock aficionados could serve as a cautionary fable. For all its nihilistic bravado, DAM is, when all's said and done, a relatively conventional proposition. As Loren argues in his 1995 "Manifesto of Ignorance," "Destroy All Monsters began as an anti-rock band. Our menagerie of words, images and sounds were an attempt to thumb our noses at the circus of rock-star bullshit and musical emptiness that filled the air-waves during the early to mid-1970's." If this rhetoric now sounds familiar, it is not only because it bespeaks a pop appropriation of avant-garde attitudes but because we have heard the same sentiments expressed by the first wave of punk in the mid-to late '70s, and then repeated by the gru As a matter of fact, it is largely thanks to Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, a band that managed to span those musical moments with great critical success and little loss of credibility, that DAM's early output would ever find its way into the commercial sphere. Released on Moore's Ecstatic Peace! imprint in 1994, the three-CD collection Destroy All Monsters, 1974-1976 is an archival grab bag comprising some 210 minutes of free-form experimentalism mastered from, as Moore recalls in the April 1995 issue of Orbit, "a shoebox full of old Woolworth quality cassettes." But it is also a work of historical revisionism, an urgent attempt to set the record straight.

When Moore's art-schooled wife and bandmate Kim Gordon introduced him to Mike Kelley, the two quickly bonded over their mutual infatuation with "bad-hippie" marginalia, particularly as it applied to the Detroit/Ann Arbor-area music scene. No doubt, Kelley provided Moore with an inside line to a crucial cosmology, the patron saints of what has come to be known as indie rock--Sun Ra, Iggy & the Stooges, the MC5, and, among others (ahem), Destroy All Monsters. Spotting the latter as "the band that made 7" singles which kids like me bought and loved," Moore was surprised to discover that those records had merely been the farcical return of the original pop tragedians that were DAM.

After Kelley and Shaw left Detroit in 1976 to pursue their art careers in California, they were replaced by a pair of authentic "rock gods," Ron Asheton of the Stooges and Michael Davis of the MC5, and that's when the real trouble started. As Loren puts it, "We had given up abstraction for power.... It was a bid for fame and fortune.... Soon, DAM totally lost its direction, and became a raging fiery entity of out-of-control energies and egos." Asheton, somewhat of a rock casualty, took up the throne beside Niagara and ultimately sent Loren packing. The deposed front man spent a good part of the '80s--DAM's ostensible high-water mark, popwise, but also its aesthetic nadir--in and out of psychiatric institutions.