GONE, (SPEEDBALL) BABY, GONE

GONE, (SPEEDBALL) BABY, GONE

In the ’90s, NYC rock ’n’ roll was a different kind of grunge(y)

"But nothing really happened in the ’90s in the New York music scene, did it?”

I’m being interviewed by a young slip of a thing about my memoir The Ballad of Speedball Baby, which is all about that caustic, thrilling, sharp-edged, and—yes, I’ll say it—influential era. About the frenetic, jangled chaos and the wild fun of it and my navigating it all as a woman. And my interviewer has begun our conversation with those words, which will soon become scratched, indelibly, onto the walls of my innermost sense of self.

Her baffling blind spot for an entire decade after Blondie but before Yeah Yeah Yeahs— when indie labels like PCP, Sympathy for the Record Industry, Matador, and In the Red catapulted bands into kids’ bedrooms all over the world, like Def Jam was doing for hip-hop, or Sumo Records for garage house—leaves me a curious mix of pissed off and bummed out.

After our interview, I'll fall down online rabbit holes about those supposed “lost years,” reading blather about how the next musical generation—championed by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and the Strokes—brought a much-needed musical renaissance to a barren, culture-starved town.

’90s New York was a city wedged in between its ruination in the ’70s and ’80s, and the much-maligned “cleaning up" it was undergoing at the hands of cartoonish bad guy Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who waged a merciless war against—amongst many things we valued—live music. The city was a hard place to live in, but we still managed to find ways to exist below the radar, making art inside our hidey-holes while the wealth of the city’s new, more “desirable” residents swelled around us. It was also a pre-9/11 world, and we couldn’t realize how untouchable we still felt and how that would soon change forever. The music scene that brought on that next wave in the 2000s was born out of all of this, but the tone of it was undeniably different. Dare I say, more optimistic?

My band, Speedball Baby, had been laying waste to the city for years, on and off stages at CBGB, Coney Island High, the Cooler, Continental Divide, and Brownie’s. Along with a handful of other detonative bands that sprang from punk and nestled between niche obscurity and credible notoriety, we handdelivered, worldwide, a particular brand of madness that could only have incubated on those tense, restless downtown streets.

In the ’90s: Blondie and Iggy Pop still turned local clubs inside out; the Toilet Boys had taken over the asylum at Don Hill’s; Theo Kogan—the perfect hybrid of female drag queen and babysitter on acid—led the Lunachicks into battle against misogyny; Stephin Merritt scribbled and scratched away at what would become his seminal 69 Love Songs at Dick’s Bar on Second Avenue; and years after a notorious physical onstage altercation that saw Jayne County singing, “Wash me in the blood of rock and roll,” after (arguably winning) a punch-up with Dictators alpha-male singer Dick Manitoba, both were still firm fixtures at CBGB—the former with her bouffant held high, the latter with two middle fingers raised in perpetuity.

In other words, there was a hell of a lot going on.

After quelling the apoplectic, rapid blinking that comes with my tamped-down fury, I eventually tell my interviewer that the good news is there’s a world of exciting music for her to discover, made largely by a fairly small cluster of artists moving in and out of each other’s lives, bands, and beds, mostly within a cramped but vibrant downtown. Artists who bled out creating what is now waiting for her—for you—to explore.

I start to tell her—with the gravitas of a war veteran sharing stories they know no one else will ever really understand—about Speedball Baby, the Gunga Din, Elysian Fields, Jonathan Fire *Eater, the Delta 72, the Moldy Peaches, Black Flies, Starkist, the Vacant Lot, White Hassle... Not just about what these bands sounded like, but what the world felt like because they were in it.

Some of us toyed with fame more than others. Winona Ryder got us all hot and bothered when she flawlessly aped Jon Spencer for the Blues Explosion’s “Talk About the Blues” video, and Chan Marshall still did the rounds of small clubs, progressively expanding into the unstoppable force we know as Cat Power.

In a pre-internet era, when being given some of the very limited space on the pages of Alternatiue Press, NME, and Melody Maker was as precious as finding a gold nugget in your prospecting pan, lots of us had multipage spreads, making us arguably a going concern rather than a forest tree falling, unobserved.

But the music industry was in a mad scramble to find the next Nirvana at the time. I know that because Speedball Baby got caught up in that bloodsport and ended up signed to a major label, MCA, before everything, predictably, imploded. I’m thinking Seattle stole New York’s ’90s thunder—sucked up all the oxygen in the room—and maybe by the time we punched our way back into the party, the flavor of the city, and the music it produced, had changed.

I first noticed this different tone one night at the Mercury Lounge in 2000, playing with Yeah Yeah Yeahs at one of their first shows. They were undeniably good, but no one I knew had yet predicted they’d be one of the biggest bands to come out of New York in decades.

Karen O inched toward me in the narrow space by the bar after the show. Musical generations, like dog years, don’t come in clusters of decades, but in scant handfuls. After having been hazed into mine by established royalty— James Chance, Kid Congo, Lydia Lunch, Dee Pop, Jim Thirwell, Exene Cervenka, and Lenny Kaye, to name a few—I felt like something of a “grande dame” in the underground alternative punk scene. And here was Karen, a younger, talented woman new to it. So, hoping to welcome her in, I smiled from my barstool—and couldn’t quite understand why, as I did, the closer she got to me, the more she seemed to shrink away, wide-eyed.

We’d been particularly aggressive on stage that night, leaning over the crowd, each crash of the cymbal a call to action against impermanence and timidity. Plus, before the show, I’d blacked out my front teeth with eyeliner for a “Pippi Longstocking hobo-chic” look, and the liner was, at that point, half drunk off. And I was more than half drunk, and as wrung out and wet as a used sponge. By contrast to my stage persona (all the bands I knew vacillated between aloof and ruinous), Karen’s had chipped gleefully away at the fourth wall with a pearly white smile and fists that punched the air like a child who’s just discovered a little thing called joy.

In reality, she may not have even noticed my melted-crayon horror grimace directed at her. She may have been drunk too. Or thinking about...I don’t know, a pastrami sandwich from Katz’s down the block. But what I felt that night remains true: A changing of the guard was happening. And after the sting of being on the downslope of that change wore off, I thought, That’s as it should be.