TERRIFYING THRIFTY ALIEN LOOKS

TERRIFYING THRIFTY ALIEN LOOKS

DUSTY FINGERS

Skip the easy listen and just say No New York

Jerry A. Lang

I can’t remember what I was doing or where I was when I heard about No New York, the compilation album bringing together four of NYC’s biggest, newest, and best “no wave” bands. There'd never been anything like this record—and I seriously don’t think there’s been a record like it since, either. I bought it in a leap of faith at a little record shop in Portland, Ore., that future SST guy Joe Carducci ran around 1978 or early ’79.

It was a total turning point in my life. I was 15 years old and living in my mother’s garage. I thought I was no longer a child—I had seen and lived through enough and was getting ready to jump into adulthood with no work ethic or coping skills. I was old enough to run from the nightmare but young enough that the state said I couldn’t. I had to stay in that garage. I gave it another year until I had no choice: I had to leave, no questions about it.

I couldn’t have found a better record for the soundtrack of my terror and confusion. That day in the record shop I took a chance on this compilation album. Was it the strange, “Alien”-looking sleeve? That there was no real information about what it was

about? Was it that it said “Produced by Brian Eno" on the back? I am not sure, but something seemed to be calling me. The record was a domestic release so it was reasonably priced, and a compilation, with four bands, is a good deal for your dollar. I may not remember why I bought it, but I do remember how I felt when I put it on.

I thought I understood punk rock.

“My rules,” “I wanna be me,” “autonomy,” all those buzzy ft catchphrases. It did not preft pare me for No New York. ft The indescribable wave of fright when I put it on—I have never been as scared of music before or since as I was the first time I heard this. I “got” the Ramones, I could relate:

“We accept you, one of us.” Would I want to be accepted by these people? I had absolutely no idea what this was, so how could I? Composer Arnold Schoenberg said of music, “I feel air from another planet." This was from another universe, sounds from some undiscovered, reverberating dark ceremony, possibly conjuring ghosts. I honestly had to take the record off and catch my breath at first; it physically frightened me. Kid Congo Powers’ autobiography talks about visiting New York in the late ’70s and some of the bands he saw. He mentions seeing the No New York bands and called them scary. Have you ever seen Kid Congo when he played in the Cramps? He’s calling THESE guys scary?

The musicians even LOOKED intimidating. The back of the record sleeve had photos of the band members, and they seemed more like old photos from Auschwitz or mug shots from an insane asylum taken years ago. Now that I think about it, maybe that was where the fascination came from. When I was a young child, my mother was locked in a sanitarium for alcoholism. This is what they used to do to alcoholics and, years before that, prostitutes—basically insane asylums. I went to visit her once and couldn’t handle seeing her in the dormitory, so I cut loose and walked around by myself, just a little kid walking around the nuthouse. I walked outside to the gazebo on the lawn and caught some graffiti scribbled on the walls: “I LIKE TO FEEL THE VEINS IN YOUR NECK.” It took me a couple seconds to realize what I was reading when I heard someone behind me cough. I damn near jumped out of my skin, turned around, and came face-to-face with the spitting image of an extra from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He was wearing a white hospital smock, with a halo of unfiltered tobacco smoke around his rat’s-nest hair and coal-black eyes staring straight through me; he was smiling.

If that sanitarium and that fright I felt were music, this album was it. I know about judging a book by its cover, okay? I was in a band with a bunch of large people and we would get reviews and the reviewers would not say a word about the music, just write about how fat we all were. But this music was terrifying, and the pictures of the people playing the music looked equally terrifying.

I MAY NOT REMEMBER WHY I BOUGHT IT, BUT I DO REMEMBER HOW I FELT WHEN I PUT IT ON.

The first band, Contortions, featuring James Chance, was frantic, disjointed funk punk. They also seemed to be living the Johnny Thunders "one track mind" lifestyle (a Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers song professing their love of smack). Pretty creepy and cool to a young kid. I don’t know if James Chance or the Contortions were on that slippery slope (years later I heard things), but that’s how it felt at the time, like “I’m chasing the dragon.” Plus that whole downtown no wave cinema scene and the Basquiat art scene—I’m going out on a limb, but I think yes, smack. I could almost dance to Contortions, but the next band, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks—that’s when the walls started creaking. I’ve never heard anything like this before: adults having a breakdown and throwing a tantrum while vomiting razor-sharp poetry. During my tumultuous childhood I had encountered children screaming for safety, but this was something else. Forget rubbernecking at the car crash— this was the equivalent of deathbed confessions by a serial killer.

When I flipped the record over, the next band was called Mars. This is when the ghosts started to materialize and where I felt like I was falling down a hole, like a giant inward explosion. The last band on the record was DNA, and like Suicide or Pere Ubu, they were way too good and too ahead of their time. DNA were the most accessible band on the record but still decades away from ever being played on the radio (like that’s what qualifies music as great). I’d eventually follow the work of band members Robin Crutchfield and Arto Lindsay, who would make years of brilliant music. What did the actual music sound like? Fast, jazz, punk, exciting, free-form expression, less is more, freedom.

This album made such an impression that I sold the leather jacket my girlfriend stole for me and started dressing like how I thought a "lounge lizard" should look. Early heroin chic? This was my new identity and who I was until the first wave of Los Angeles hardcore, when Middle Class and Black Flag started happening—I started wearing leather again and threw away my skinny tie. But by hanging out on the hipster side of the street, I started listening to Joy Division and the Fall and quoting Rimbaud. The New York music scene was absolutely on fire, and I could feel it through this record. Everyone should hear it at least once in their lifetime.

Speaking of L.A., Dangerhouse Records issued a rebuttal to No New York that compiled L.A.’s best heavy hitters (the antithesis to No New York, if you will) and called it Yes L.A. L.A. punks have always had a Day-Glo smart-alecky attitude. Yes L.A. was a one-sided silk-screened picture disc. Fancy packaging, but I'm still going with New York. The L.A. record had the Bags, the Alleycats, Black Randy and the Metrosquad, X, and the Germs. They are all amazing bands, and put up against almost anything else, they’d blow them out of the water. I love the Germs, but compared with Teenage Jesus, it really didn’t come close.

I felt like I definitely needed a new drug, and No New York was happy to oblige. Los Angeles had some really great cutting-edge bands—the Screamers, most of the LAFMS bands—but No New York paved the way for what we got years later with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, and Sonic Youth. You can connect the dots on the six degrees of separation and see all the No New York influences on these bands. But let me tell you a couple or three things: If I know anything, I know what a classic record is, and this, my friend, is one. Making a record that will make someone feel something—anything—other than indifference, even if it’s hate, is still an accomplishment. And No New York really made me feel SOMETHING. Terrified.