SUICIDE: HOT FOOTING THROUGH EDGE CITY

SUICIDE: HOT FOOTING THROUGH EDGE CITY

FEATURES

Toby Goldstein

The atmosphere at most performances of Suicide is not unlike that which I imagine permeates a power plant in the midst of a nuclear accident. White knuckled and feathery-brained, people think quickly about finding the nearest exit door and heading someplace nonpolluted to detoxify. “We’ve been known to empty places out of a couple of hundred people in three minutes,” grins Suicide’s peppery vocalist, Alan Vega. He and his sidekick, instrumentalist Martin Rev, have almost completed their first decade as New York’s group-you-love-to-hate, and are highly amused to watch the times attempt, but never quite suceed, at catching up with them.

Given the spit-drenched, safety pin skewered shows of punk’s early years, when the fans pummeled each other into sodden pulp and loved it, Suicide’s explosiveness makes primeval sense. Vega has adapted the self-absorption of one of his idols, Iggy Pop, into a gutteral dialogue with the crowd. He rants, he shrieks, he batters the microphone on his head and throws it off the stage. He jumps in people’s laps. All the while, like a silent witness to murder, Rev keeps a steady hypnotic pulse moving bn his rhythm machine and keyboards. You are correct to assume they wear black, and leather., and dark glasses.

“I always feel I’m the real person up there,” says Vega, looking far less sinister sitting in the ZE Records office. “That’s the way I’d like to be walking around the streets. People might hate us, but they’ll admit we live up to our name. It’s a heavy name. We could have called ourselves Homicide or Genocide, Fuck or Shit, and we’d get it through. But Suicide.. .everybody’s doing it in their own way. They’re saying, hey, I’m 'sitting here smoking a cigarette which I know is gonna kill me. People are running around too fast, eating wrong, drinking. What is it—the things that are bad for you, you like.” Ric Ocasek calls the Suicide effect “super-reality.”

Ocasek and the Cars can take credit for bringing the seemingly diabolical duo into national consciousness, and in superimposing a thin veneer of mass appeal over their extremism, at least on record. At various times, at the Cars’ insistence, Suicide opened gigs for the wheely ones, proving they were as adept at dodging hurled objects in stadiums as in clubs. When the Cars hosted Midnight Special, Suicide debuted on network TV, as Marty and Alan, floating on a gauze wrap of colored smoke, performed “Dream Baby Dream,” which Ocasek produced. Ric’s involvement with Suicide culminated in his production of the group’s latest ZE/Antilles album, recorded at New York’s Power Station last year.

Ocasek’s reasons for working and admiring Suicide are familiar to those of us who’ve heen putting up with years of abuse from the duo’s many detractors. Ric and Alan share a devotion to Iggy, the Velvet Underground and rockabilly (the latter being especially evident on Vega’s ZE/PVC solo album). More lastingly, they all have a _ well-honed sense of the absurd and enjoy teetering on the cutting edge of creativity.

Says Ocasek, “I first heard ‘Ghost Rider’ and ‘Rocket U.S.A.’ on a jukebox at The Rat. Then they played at The Rat, I saw ’em, and I was scared. I mean, I thought Alan was real believableFrom that time, I wanted to do a record with them.

“I couldn’t see them being supressed, no matter what they did. It’s not that what they were doing wasn’t good. It was so good, it went over many people’s heads. To watch Alan’s face and the contrast between him and Marty—with just a little bit of equipment, they still did this amazing theatrical show that came from the heart. It was untouched territory.” As the threesome mixed Suicide’s album in the small hours of the morning, the ambience was unmistakeably one of people working in harmony, a state that is not normally part of Vega and Rev’s relationship with outsiders.

The concept of Suicide grew out of Marty and Alan’s separate but compatible visions, Marty an introspective, long-time musician (who has also recorded a solo album, on Infidelity Records), Alan, a sculptor who was equal parts conceptual artist and rock ’n’ roll rebel. Says Rev, a soft-spoken, self-contained individual, “when I met Alan, I really had had my fill of groups. I was playing by myself for six hours a day, studying all these high-flown crazy kind of techniques. The material I was doing was getting to a stage where not many people would want to do it anyway.

“Onstage, something gets into me— blood starts to flow differently. It used to happen to me when I played gigs as a kid, 12 or 13 years old. We’d be doing these straight dance' tunes, but they wouldn’t come out that way. People would be flying around the room dancing and then they’d come over to me and say, what the hell was that? The music sets the pace for the theater.

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“Alan came to it from a fresh place. His performance came through right away.” Vega, a fast-talking feisty ethnic blend whose tough background helped from the gruff immediacy of his stage persona, summarizes his upbringing. “I started out in Brooklyn and worked my way up—to living in Harlem for a while.

“There was never any exact precedent for us—maybe Iggy, or Artaud, the Living Theatre, things like that. It was free. We didn’t really have any songs—it was me and Marty creating, like making a painting in your home. We were the abstract expressionists onstage, and what came out was that moment, that energy. We knew, somewhere, where the boundary line was..

Adds Marty, “we didn’t decide to go onstage and play this grossly electronic music that people were either gonna throw things at you or walk out or hold their ears. If that’s your means of expression, it forces you to perform it. It pushes you out onstage—a band like this, we have to perform live. Vou know what comes out sounds good, it just needs to be developed and honed a little more so it’s not just a pure expression of disgust. I know a lot of people are amazed to think we have roots.”

When Suicide played their first gigs, taking their name as a gift from a strung-out acquaintance, they occupied a small room in the legendary Mercer Arts Center, an oasis of experimentation in the midst of the early ’70’s mellow mainstream. Unfortunately, the lads “Punk Masses,” often performed on Sunday, Good Friday, Easter, Christmas, were a little bit too outre for the glittery fans of the band who played in the big room across the hall: the New York Dolls

Marty remembers, “the Dolls would be in one room with a throng of enthusiasm and we’d be playing in the next room, and the juxtaposition was just insanity. They were the band of that time, and then here was Suicide. People who came to see us would wear black. (Fashion note: That was the era of gold lame and platform boots) We wouldn’t have any trouble clearing an entire room.”

As ofrier performers began recreating Iggy of the Velvets in new, expanded images, Suicide’s curiousity value increased. They were one of the Ramones’ favorite opening acts, released an album on Red Star (re-released on Jem in 1980) that was abrupt and painful in its emotional wallop, and caused riots when they toured Europe supporting Elvis Costello and the Clash. A live LP, recorded in Brussels, ends with the tumult of mass destruction of the' stage and theater seats. These guys slice the nerves! As Vega sees it, “the first reaction to a new thing is fear. Maybe that’s what keeps people alive. We never do anything violent to our audiences, but in this creation, we’re also creating the environment. Sound, light, theater—it’s a conglomeration.”

Perhaps a shrink would choose to view Suicide concerts as case studies in mania, paranoia, and other delicacies the human condition is heir to. A culture maven might see them as a metaphor for the chilly starkness of society. I think they’re damned clever, more challenging than the latest in-crowd funk-junk-punk-fusions, and that with new songs like “Jukebox Baby,” Alan Vega may yet achieve his ambition to become a 25th century Elvis Presley. They think they’re very funny.

The reaper who leads the dance of death in all those plague-era woodcuts probably conducted his souls to the tune of some ancestral Suicide. Alan Vega smiles as he charts the band’s passage “from comic book characters to real life.” Marty Rev challenged the definitions of “musician” or “artist” by appearing on Suicide gigs and in an avant-garde space called The Kitchen, playing cassette tapes of his parts, instead of his keyboards. The fans understood it, and appreciated the technological hilarity . The sniffy types rejected it, and said he was lazy. Maybe he was.

“We once played in front of an all-black audience—the black mafia,” recalls Alan. “The place had palm trees. This was back when we were really insane. We’ve made madness into an art form and it’s in control, but before, we were outta control.

“This crowd, they saw the humor in us immediately, cause it’s just what they deal with in their daily life. They saw what they see in the street every day that they find funny. We’re street clowns.

“It’s not made easy for us. You gotta fight every day. This is very subtle, but once you get it, it’s obvious, and funny as hell. And people who get it come to our gigs and laugh their asses off. It’s like Lenny Bruce—so much would go by, but then you’d understand. Me and Marty are a bunch of clowns. Would we be doing this if we weren’t?” W