ALAN VEGA: LIFE AFTER SUICIDE

ALAN VEGA: LIFE AFTER SUICIDE

by

Roy Trakin

Once upon a time, in the early ’70s, long before currently voguish “new music” outfits like Soft Cell, Yaz and Human League, there was Suicide. Two zany bohos literally off the Lower East Side streets, one a demented, classically trained keyboardist named Martin Rev(erby), the other, his equally wacky sidekick, a chain-smoking, fast-talking Jew from Brooklyn, who took the moniker Alan Vega partly to sound Puerto Rican and partly in tribute to the Nevada mecca of glitz and gambling. The electronic duo purveyed a sound unlike anything you’d ever heard, with Rev’s earsplitting foghorn blasts of organ (ic) feedback set against a thudding rhythm machine— now a common instrument, then an anomaly used only by bar mitzvah or cha-cha bands. Fronting this maelstrom was a singular singer, dressed in leather and chains, goading the audience into confrontation by letting out a blood-curdling scream, slapping his face with a microphone or diving to the floor like one of his main inspirations, Iggy Pop. That was Suicide ’71, contemporaries of the New York Dolls, Eric Emerson and the Harlots of 42nd Street. It is now over a decade later...

“Suicide is still 10 years ahead of its time,” insists Alan Vega, now 34 and sitting opposite me in my midtown loft. After close to a decade of public abuse and miscomprehension, Vega’s luck is starting to change. He’s got a brand-new solo album, Saturn Strip, his third, but first on a major label, Elektra.

“Suicide could have been a commercial thing,” continues Vega, with a straight face. “The name might have hurt. But Rev and I disagreed on where the snare drum should be. He insisted on playing it in between the beats, like in jazz, while I wanted it to be right on the vocal, like in disco. He’s stubborn that way, but I respect him. It’s the artist in him. Suicide was a democracy; if we both didn’t agree on something, it wasn’t done. But being part of a democracy trip in music just doesn’t work. That’s why I give the orders now.”

“Suicide is stitt 10 years ahead of its time."

Suicide took a hiatus after close to 10 years and two albums, with Vega embarking on a solo career. At first, Alan hooked up with a single guitarist, Phil Hawk, to produce the stark, minimal rockabilly twang of his first solo album, a logical extension of Suicide’s roots sensibility. On Collision Drive, his second, also self-produced, LP, Alan used a very middling bar band’ honing his craft as a rock singer, learning to adapt to other musicians, no matter how ordinary.

“I wanted to make where I was coming from that much clearer,” he explains. “My roots. Now, I want to expand on that. I’m trying to fuse Suicide with that traditional rock ’n’ roll. My new album represents what I think music will be like. It’s going to the future through the past.”

If Suicide didn’t have masses of fans, those admirers they did boast included fellow musicians who were rabidly loyal. One of the band’s most ardent followers was the Cars’ Ric Ocasek, who was quick to tell the press of his respect for Suicide. He even produced their second LP. Take a listen to “Shoo Be Doo” from the Cars’ Candy-O album to hear keyboardist Greg Hawkes’s tribute to Martin Rev’s work while Ocasek’s own recent solo effort shows how much he’s been influenced by Vega’s tough vocal style, part Lou Reed, part Elvis Presley, part Jim Morrison-by-way-of-Iggy.

In fact, Ocasek also produced Vega’s most recent solo album, Saturn Strip. Indeed, the collaboration between commercial “suicide” Vega and Mr. Hook Ocasek might seem a trifle odd, but Alan dismisses the thought the two have little in common except mutual admiration.

“Ric has had a tough life,” he claims. “I think his music’s been underestimated. There’s a lot of pain there. The Cars are underrated. They’re like the basketball player who scores 40 points and you don’t notice he’s there. The music is much more difficult than you think it is. It’s made to look easy, but the changes are complex. I even think Ocasek’s poetry can be great at times.”

Vega relates how Ocasek surprised him with a set of songs he’d written with other members of the Cars and (Chicago two-man synthesizer band) Ministry. “Ric just handed me the cassette and said, ‘Write words,’” says Alan admiringly. But why did Vega use Ocasek to produce after handling those chores himself on his first two solo records?

“It’s very hard to produce your own stuff,” he says. “You can’t keep your objectivity. What can you do? Ask the engineer if our vocals are all right? You’ve got to judge those things for yourself. It’s like looking in the mirror every day and spotting each pimple on your face. When I go in to work with Ric, I have all the confidence in the world in him.”

So, Alan Vega is a 34-year-old rookie after 10 years scuffling in the minor leagues of music, with his first honest-to-goodness major label LP, a fact that’sbeen driven home to him by a few visits to the home office.

“I’ve realized you can’t make a work of art alone anymore,” he says. “It takes the engineer, the producer, the promotion people, the publicists, the critics. I was dragged off to the boardroom one day. I didn’t know places like that still existed. I sat around with 20 of them, floating questions back and forth about marketing, promotion and sales. It was crazy, but I pulled it off. They’re good people. They like me and I like them. They know this record’s gonna take some time. It’s at least a six month project. I just want to sell 50,000 here in America and another couple hundred thousand in Europe, so they get their investment back and I can make another record. At least, I hope they’re thinking like that.”

Vega’s current status has managed to alienate some of his closest friends, too, who accuse him of “selling out.” Alan remarks how others envy his success because it makes their own failures even more glaring.

“The saddest people in the world are the ones with talent who don’t use it,” he says. “Because they lack either drive, tenacity, strength or endurance. People who see the ends so clearly, they don’t go through the steps to get there. Because they don’t realize the work itself is the thing. The ends are never what you think they’re gong to be anyway. A piece of art directs you to areas you never even conceive of at the start. Which is what happened on Saturn Strip. I had absolutely no idea what would happen. I walked in with just four songs and a cover (Hot Chocolate’s ‘Every One’s A Winner’) and Ric gave me four more. And I said, let’s see where it goes, man. Let it take us, let’s have a ball and see where we land afterwards. And then we’ll deal with life after that. I think Ric and I both needed this at this particular moment in our lives. We needed to break from someplace where we were stuck and to get to another place altogether. It’s like Graque and Picasso. Both of us are artists. Even though he has millions and I have zero.”

Will we ever see Suicide again?

Vega is sardonic, if tentatively optimistic on that point. “When I went out on my solo trip, it pissed me off that suddenly there were Suicide fans all over the place. Where were they when we were out there? Now, they have us neatly boxed in history. If Suicide ever did come back, believe me, it would start all over again...

“But Ric would like to make a record with Suicide. We want to use this drummer from Ministry, Stephen George [who Robert Plant raves about] without telling Rev. Ultimately, though, it’s up to Marty. I’m trying to bring that Suicide aspect back to my own work. My solo trip has been, in a way, trying to illuminate what Suicide was all about.”

Make no mistake about it. Like Vega himself, Suicide was a life-affirming proposition, though an improbable one. To true believers, Suicide represented triumph against Sisyphian odds, victory in defeat, catharsis through psychodrama; Rev and Vega were saints in the city, cool on the outside, vulnerable on the inside, a pair of existential stooges coming out the other side of “The Wall.”

Like his seminal band, Alan Vega is smart. He may have spent a misbegotten youth, but it was all for the sake of art, as Chris Burden or even his idol Iggy might say. The odd couple of Rev/Vega has given way to an even more curious combo that promises to reap artistic as well as commercial dividends: the cool-hard steel-trap intellect of the Cars’ mentor and the clown prince of shockabilly. Stay tuned for the 21st century. Alan Vega has survived Suicide and lived to tell about it.