Rip It Up and Start Again (34 page)

Whether it was of extraterrestrial origin or not, Chrome’s music certainly sounded aberrant. “One of the first things people noticed was Chrome sounds like a paranoid acid trip,” says Creed. He explains that the punk edge to their reinvented acid rock came from grasping that “the reality of the psychedelic experience isn’t love and peace, it’s
insanity
. If you actually took LSD and listened to our records, the trip would get so whacked-out you’d start laughing. Funny-scary, we called it. The bad trip would turn into a good trip, because you’d already
been
to the most negative part of the universe.”

The group Flipper set their controls for precisely this pitch-black void at the core of the cosmos. Surfing the music’s tidal wave of rubble and dregs, singers Bruce Lose and Will Shatter delivered lines such as “Ever wish the human race didn’t exist?” and “Feel so empty feel so old/Just waiting to feel the death like cold” with a strange exuberance. Flipper stared into the abyss only to hock a lugie into it.

Of all San Francisco’s postpunk groups, Flipper were the most punk, to the point of almost belonging to the hardcore scene. But their music was a little too dirgy to fit comfortably with that movement’s “loud fast rules” dogma. Musically, they had more in common with Public Image Ltd’s abstraction than the Dead Kennedys’ anthems. PiL and Flipper both aimed for a kind of visceral vanguard music, radical but not rarefied or pretentious. “We want to experiment with the music without being an art band,” Will Shatter told punk zine
Maximumrocknroll
. Like PiL, Flipper loved disco and funkateers like Rick James. “Sex Bomb,” Flipper’s big crowd-pleaser, was steeped in funk. In Flipper, the juggernaut basslines (played alternately by Lose and Shatter) served as melody-riffs, freeing up the guitarist to shower acid rain on the listener’s head. Like Keith Levene, guitarist Ted Falconi rarely played riffs or distinct power chords, just churned up distorted drone tones and writhing whorls of feedback.

Flipper actually secured the main support slot at PiL’s Bay Area show, a prestige gig given that Lydon’s band were at their absolute zenith as postpunk icons in May 1980. “I saw Bruce Lose at the PiL press conference in San Francisco that May,” says Joe Carducci, who coproduced the band’s debut single. “When they threw it open to questions from the audience, Bruce kept yelling, ‘What do you think of Flipper?’ The question was ignored! Bruce was just pranking it, but he
was
obsessed with Johnny Rotten.”

For all their sonic affinities with PiL, though, Flipper weren’t nearly as precious about what they did as Lydon’s lot. Their attitude is captured in the slogan “Flipper suffered for their art, now it’s your turn,” and in Falconi’s immortal quip “Flipper doesn’t want audiences with good taste, Flipper wants audiences that taste good.” Live, Flipper managed to combine frat party riotousness and audience confrontation. Lose remembers an occasion shortly after the birth of his son when he lugged three weeks’ worth of soiled diapers to a gig and pelted the audience. “The audience tended to throw them right back at the band. Our drummer, Steve DePace, got a dirty diaper in the face. The band thanked me a lot for that bright idea!”

“We tried to convey the irreverence and silliness Flipper projected onstage when we pulled together the live album
Public Flipper Limited,
” says Steve Tupper, who released the group’s records on his Frisco-based indie, Subterranean. Humor permeated even the most nihilistic Flipper songs such as “Nothing” and “Life Is Cheap.” “It was kind of extremely optimistic and extremely bleak at the same time,” says Tupper, pointing to the ambiguity of Will Shatter’s line “Life is the only thing worth living for,” which is delivered in a voice pitched exactly midway between cynical derision (at the sentiment’s fatuity) and desperate belief.

Flipper may have evolved into a sort of National Lampoon version of PiL, but originally they were founded by Ricky Williams, the singer of the Sleepers, a band some people regard as America’s own Joy Division. In his book
Rock and the Pop Narcotic,
Carducci described them as “what Joy Division might have developed into had they the balls.” Today he waxes fondly about the Sleepers’ “slow, minor-chord Gothic songs” and the “narcotic, spectral, jawdropping beauty” of guitarist Michael Belfer’s playing. Vocalist Williams was a mentally volatile, dysfunctional character, though. He gave Flipper its name, which was inspired by his finding a shark-ravaged dolphin on the beach while tripping on acid. But soon the rest of Flipper—hardly models of stability themselves—kicked him out and replaced him with Bruce Lose.

“In the early days, Flipper’s music was so abstract, a lot of people thought they were just improvising,” says Carducci. “Flipper’s the reason I bought a tape recorder. I taped all their early gigs because they were so evanescent at the start, you’d go, ‘Wow, that was a great gig but I can’t even remember any of it.’ And I don’t do any drugs!” This same impulse to document something vital but fleeting inspired Steve Tupper to found Subterranean. “There were all these bands in the San Francisco area and they weren’t getting recorded,” he recalls. “There was just one label really, 415, and they were doing New Wave pop stuff. The first Subterranean release was the
SF Underground
seven-inch EP with four different bands, including Flipper. The other three were all more conventional, straight-ahead punk. Flipper really stood out because they were totally different from anybody else in town.”

Tupper was an underground-culture veteran with a pedigree in late-sixties protest and community activism, including SDS campaigns against the Vietnam War, the Diggers, the People’s Park in Berkeley, organizing a 1970 citywide rent strike, and food co-ops. But he was never very involved in the musical side of the counterculture until punk took off in San Francisco. Tupper participated in New Youth—an “alternative nonprofit production company,” he says, designed to create places for bands to play that weren’t dependent on commercial club promoters—and helped to set up a local chapter of Rock Against Racism. Subterranean documented loads of local punk bands as well as San Francisco’s experimental fringe. Flipper, Factrix, Z’ev, and local synthpunk outfit Nervous Gender all appeared on
Live at Target,
a four-band live compilation that is the San Francisco counterpart to
No New York
.

Of all Subterranean’s groups, Flipper had the greatest impact. Released in 1981,
Generic
rocked like a wild party on the rim of the void, and 1984’s
Gone Fishin’
pushed Flipper’s bass-grinding dirgepunk into more experimental zones. Stark and hypnotic, “The Lights, the Sound, the Rhythm, the Noise” is a kissing cousin to Joy Division’s “Transmission,” while the celestial maelstrom of “You Nought Me” swirls with Sun Ra keyboards, multitracked vocals, and pitch-bent sounds, like a demonic kaleidoscope where all the colors are shades of black. “When we were making
Gone Fishin’,
one evening nobody showed up but me,” recalls Lose. “So I laid down a huge number of extra tracks of sounds—fifty vocal tracks, piano work, percussion, clavinet, phasing effects. The next day, the guys flipped out and they were like, ‘We’ve got to take twenty-five of these voices out.’ But it was a lot of fun making that record.” By the closing track, “One by One,” Flipper sound like they’re smashing their way through the planet’s crust. “Will’s beating up his bass and trying to sound like the low rumbling surf, Ted is playing the psalm of the ocean, Steve’s drums are the waves crashing, and me, I’m singing the body of water,” says Lose, misty-eyed and mystical.

By 1985, though, the pace of Flipper’s hedonism was wearing the band down. Lose describes himself and Will Shatter as “polymorphic drug users, doing anything and everything.” Within a few years of
Gone Fishin’,
Shatter died from a heroin overdose and Flipper disintegrated. “Drugs did most of the San Francisco bands in quickly,” says Carducci. According to Helios Creed, drugs were also a factor in the breakup of Chrome. “Damon got introduced to heroin and I got introduced to speed. He became more introverted and agoraphobic, and I got the opposite. I was like, ‘This ain’t no good, I’ve got to put a band together and go tour.’”

San Francisco changed in the early eighties. The “belle epoque” Blaine L. Reininger wrote about began to fade. The dual assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk tolled the death knell for a whole era of liberalism. “Moscone was a Kennedy-like figure and Milk was the country’s first openly gay elected representative,” says Steve Brown. “It was a heavy blow. There was a very dark period after those killings. The energy was very heavy and negative. When the killer, this ex-cop Dan White, got off with such a light sentence based on his defense as being a family man under a lot of stress, there was an incredible outburst from the normally reserved gay community. A huge riot, dozens of burning police cars.” In the eighties, under new mayor Dianne Feinstein, the city’s boho-friendly downtown was torn up for redevelopment. Speculators moved in and brand-new office buildings went up. By this point, Tuxedomoon were feeling the pull of Europe, where they found themselves treated like artists, playing professional theaters with proper dressing rooms. According to Brown, “We were touring Europe during the 1980 elections and Blaine joked to interviewers that if Reagan was elected we weren’t going back to America. And essentially this is what happened.”

Those who stayed in San Francisco found the music scene contracting and becoming less receptive to experimentation. Hardcore punk, based more in the suburbs, began to dominate. “San Francisco doesn’t really have an equivalent to Orange County or Long Beach, the strongholds of hardcore in Southern California,” says Tupper. “But as you go down the peninsula towards San Jose, or over the Berkeley hills to places like Walnut Creek, the sensibility does get more hardcore. And when hardcore took over, it was mostly a deterioration, less about people trying to do something different, more just trying to fit into a trend.” Says Lose, “In the early days, it wasn’t necessary for bands to play fast and loud. One night, you might see Factrix, Nervous Gender, and the Avengers on the same bill, three extremely different acts. But by the early eighties you’d go to a hardcore show and what you’d see is three hard-core bands.” According to Bond Bergland, “The really serious experimental people moved to New York.” After Factrix ground to a halt, Bergland quit San Francisco, eventually settling on the Lower East Side, where he formed the postindustrial cosmic rock outfit Saqqara Dogs.

Joe Carducci fondly remembers the late-seventies San Francisco scene as “real vital, a place people could get an audience, right up to the end of 1981.” The downside was a certain dilettantism. “There’s something about San Francisco that encourages you to fold your band up and do a side project or dabble around with somebody else.” Another problem with bohemian paradises is that they can breed their own odd kind of parochialism, Carducci argues. “Except for Dead Kennedys and Flipper, those bands didn’t take it out on the road. A lot of them felt, I think, that they were
way
ahead of the rest of the country.”

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD’S
big year was 1979. Virgin, still convinced that John Lydon was their hottest property, allowed the group to treat expensive, top-of-the-line studios as their sound laboratories and playpens. After PiL’s shaky debut, the music was really starting to come together, culminating at year’s end in the classic
Metal Box
. Morale in the PiL camp was high. Indeed, most of the band even lived together as one happy family
chez
Lydon.

Just before embarking on the ill-fated Sex Pistols tour of America, Lydon had shrewdly used his slim earnings to buy a home. Forty-five Gunter Grove was a Victorian terrace house at the scuzzy end of Chelsea. “John had the top part of the house,” says Keith Levene. “I had the bottom, and Dave Crowe lived in this bit you had to walk through to get upstairs.” Only Wobble kept his distance, preferring to stay with his parents in East London.

Gunter Grove became a major hangout for postpunk luminaries such as the Slits and Don Letts. The fridge was always well stocked with lager, various illicit substances floated around, and Lydon’s massive speakers in the communal upstairs living room pounded out a bass-booming reggae soundtrack. Still partially in the mind-set of summer 1977, when he was Public Enemy Number One, Lydon holed up and held court to a retinue of hangers-on and cronies. “I love visitors,” he once said. “They are here for my amusement.”

It wasn’t all cozy laughs in the House of Lydon, though. Cannabis and speed were the main drugs, but heroin was creeping in with some of the coterie. Justifying Lydon’s persecution complex, Gunter Grove was regularly subjected to raids by the local drug squad. One such visit in February 1979 took place at 6:00
A
.
M
. Ironically, for once the usually amphetamine-fiending, up-past-dawn members of PiL had gone to bed at a reasonable hour. So the police smashed down the front door, then searched the house, ripping open Lydon’s mattress and pulling up the bedroom floorboards. Although they found nothing, Lydon was taken to the local police station and had to walk home in his pajamas.

Another shadow over the Lydon household was death. In 1979, Lydon lost both his mother (to cancer) and his estranged best friend, Sid Vicious (to heroin). Witnessing his mother, the great source of strength and encouragement in his life, slowly slipping away inspired Lydon’s lyrics to the single “Death Disco,” the first PiL release since their debut album. On the single, Wobble’s hard-funk bassline pushes forward like fear rising in your gorge. Levene generates a staggering amount of sound using just a single guitar, simultaneously torturing the classical-kitsch melody of “Swan Lake,” hacking out rhythm chords that feel like blade touching bone, and scattering a microtonal scree of harmonics. Searing through this swarming anguish, Lydon exorcises his grief like Yoko Ono at her most primal-screamed graphic: “Seeing in your eyes…Silence in your eyes…Final in a fade…Flowers rotting
dead
.”

Released in June 1979, “Death Disco” remains arguably the most radical single ever to penetrate the U.K. Top 20. When PiL appeared on
Top of the Pops,
the presenter looked ashen faced as he introduced the group and reluctantly uttered the song title. Wobble sat in a dentist’s chair through the whole performance. “Everyone else lined up to get made beautiful, but I just asked the BBC makeup people to have my teeth blacked out, so I could do a big smile at the camera with my front teeth missing.”

Inviting the Grim Reaper to the pop party was one kind of subversion. Just as radical, in its own way, was pairing the word “death” with “disco,” a form of music still despised by most of PiL’s audience. The twelve-inch included two disco-style versions, the “
¹
?
²
Mix” and the “Megga Mix.” In interviews, Lydon declared that disco (and the Raincoats) was the only contemporary music he liked, while Wobble enthused that disco was “very
useful,
practical music.”

PiL’s next single, “Memories,” pursued the dance direction even more intently with its brisk bass, hissing hi-hat, crisp snares, and disco-style breakdowns, in which the sound strips down and the intensity ratchets up several notches. Only Levene’s glassy shrouds of Arabic-sounding guitar and Lydon’s antinostalgia invective are at odds with the dance floor imperative. Baying like a cross between a banshee and a mountain goat, Lydon rails against some nameless fool still living in the past. At the time, critics speculated that Lydon’s target was the spate of nostalgia that had dominated U.K. pop culture in 1979 in the form of the mod and ska revivals. But when he sneers, “This person’s had enough of useless memories,” it feels like Lydon is talking about his own need to sever ties to the past, be it memories of his loved ones or tangled regrets about his years in the Pistols.

“Memories” failed to make the Top 40 on its October 1979 release, but it did whip up fierce anticipation for PiL’s second album. A big chunk of what would become
Metal Box
had already been recorded back in May, with the rest completed sporadically during the summer. Drummer Richard Dudanski departed halfway through the process, so Levene and Wobble did the drumming on several tracks. Martin Atkins, who went on to become PiL’s longest-enduring drummer, was recruited when the album was virtually finished. He received a summons to the studio in the form of an inconsiderate 3:00
A
.
M
. phone call. “When I got to Townhouse [studio], someone says, ‘There’s the drum kit, make something up,’” Atkins recalls. “Wobble and I wrote ‘Bad Baby’ off the top of our head. What you hear on
Metal Box
is literally that first five minutes of us playing together for the first time. Within half an hour of meeting everybody, I was on the record.” As you might imagine, this wasn’t necessarily the best way for a band to operate. Indeed, “Bad Baby” is the only real blemish on what otherwise stands as not just PiL’s masterpiece, but postpunk’s absolute crowning triumph.

Metal Box
is a peculiar blend of real-time spontaneity and obsessive postproduction. Many songs were recorded in one or two takes, and a few were written as they were being played, but it all truly came together during the mix, informed by PiL’s passion for dub and disco.
Metal Box,
Levene declared, was an exercise in “finding out what mixing was, a crash course in production.” What’s striking about the record is how PiL assimilated both the dread feel of roots reggae and the dub aesthetic of subtraction (stripping out instruments, using empty space), without ever resorting to obviously dubby production effects like reverb and echo.

The album starts with “Albatross,” ten minutes of pitiless bass pressure from Wobble, over which Levene scythes the air and Lydon sings like he’s being crushed between two giant slabs of rock. “Albatross” is “Public Image” turned inside out, Lydon’s confidence that he can outrun his past curdling into despair. “Memories” and “Death Disco” follow, the latter retitled “Swan Lake” and now ending in a locked groove, Lydon’s grief and horror frozen for eternity, like Munch’s
The Scream
.

After the surging urgency of the two singles comes the slow suspension and numb trance of “Poptones.” Gyrating around Wobble’s deep, probing bassline, Levene’s guitar scatters a wake of harmonic sparks that merge with the lustrous halo of cymbal spray. Talking about his “circular, jangly,” almost psychedelic playing on “Poptones,” Levene compared its repetitiveness to staring at a white wall. “If you look at it for a second, you’ll see a white wall…. If you keep looking at it for five minutes, you’ll see different colors, different patterns in front of your eyes, especially if you don’t blink. And your ears don’t blink.” Rising to the occasion, Lydon matches the music’s sinister grace with one of his most quietly unsettling lyrics. Sketched in oblique, fractured images, it’s the account of someone who’s been abducted, driven into the woods, and raped. “Hindsight does me no good” intones the victim, bitterly recalling the reassuring “poptones” playing on the car’s cassette player. It’s left unclear whether the song is being sung by a corpse (one lyric says, “You left a hole in the back of my head”) or if the victim escaped and is now cowering and shivering in the wet foliage (another refers to “standing naked in this back of the woods”). “John’s lyric was so evocative and partly it came from us recording at the Manor and driving through the forest near the studio,” says Wobble. On “Poptones,” as with other
Metal Box
songs, Lydon’s delivery meshes with Levene’s guitar in a weird, modal place somewhere between Celtic and Arabic. “When someone can’t sing you get these natural voice tones,” explains Wobble. “So PiL’s music was based more around overtones and subharmonics, rather than harmony per se. The Beach Boys we were not! PiL actually had more in common with music from Lapland or China.”

“Poptones” whooshes straight into the Northern Ireland–inspired terror ride of “Careering,” on which Levene abandoned the guitar for ominously hovering and swooping electronic sound-shapes created on the Prophet 5, an early and expensive form of polyphonic synth. Then comes “No Birds Do Sing,” PiL’s finest recording, as far as Levene is concerned. Wobble and Dudanski set up a foundation-shaking groove, over which Lydon intones another scalpel-sharp lyric, this time dissecting suburbia’s “layered mass of subtle props,” the serene narcosis of its “bland, planned idle luxury.” Levene’s guitar emits an eerie, metallic foam that’s simultaneously entrancing and insidious. The instrumental that follows, “Graveyard,” is disco music for a skeleton’s ball. It really sounds like dem bones doing the shake, rattle, ’n’ roll. After that,
Metal Box
briefly loses its way with the underdeveloped “The Suit” and “Bad Baby,” then recovers dramatically with the last three songs: the psychodisco of “Socialist,” all dry, processed drums and synth blips; the thug-funk stampede of “Chant,” Lydon ranting about street violence and wet-liberal
Guardian
readers; and the unexpected Satie-esque poignancy of “Radio 4,” with its sighing synths and gently sobbing bass.

In honor of reggae and disco’s twelve-inch aesthetic, and to ensure the highest possible sound quality, PiL insisted on releasing the album as three 45 rpm records, rather than on a single 33 rpm disc. “We were celebrating the idea of twelve-inch singles, prereleases, slates,” says Levene. “With that format, you got a better bass sound.” The idea of putting the three discs inside a matte gray film canister came from Dennis Morris, Lydon’s photographer friend.
Metal Box
’s striking packaging was possibly PiL’s most impressive feat in terms of breaking with standard rock procedures. It effectively deconstructed the notion of “the album,” encouraging people to listen to the tracks in any order. “The idea is that you definitely don’t play it from side one to side six,” Wobble explained. “You just put on one song or two and leave it at that.”

The unusual packaging also appealed to PiL for reasons of sheer malicious perversity. Three unsleeved discs snugly crammed into the circular canister and separated only by circles of paper were hard to remove without scratching the vinyl. “We were turned on by the idea that it would be difficult to open the can and get the records out,” admits Levene. This prank cost PiL dearly. “Virgin called us for a meeting and said, ‘Look, if you want to do it in a tin, it’s going to cost sixty-six thousand pounds extra. We can only do this if you give us a third of your advance back.’”

Released shortly before Christmas 1979,
Metal Box
was almost universally garlanded with praise. One measure of its colossal stature was that
NME
put John Lydon on the cover of its November 24 issue, but with no interview inside, just a full-page review of
Metal Box
. The timing was perfect. The second half of 1979 saw postpunk reaching its peak of popularity, with epochal festivals such as September’s Futurama, one night of which was headlined by PiL.

Postpunk was cresting creatively, and accordingly basked in a glorious, if short-lived, consensus of admiration from critics and fans alike. In
NME
’s Christmas issue, the writers’ Top Five Albums of 1979 listed Talking Heads’
Fear of Music
at number one and
Metal Box
at number two, followed by Joy Division’s
Unknown Pleasures,
the Jam’s
Setting Sons,
and Gang of Four’s
Entertainment!
Delayed release dates and transatlantic time lag meant that postpunk’s approval rating peaked in the United States the following year, when PiL and Talking Heads (with
Remain in Light
) made the top five of the
Village Voice
’s annual nationwide poll of critics.

By definition, though, peaks precede plummets. Indeed, there’s a sense in which musical golden ages engineer their own endings. Records such as
Metal Box
and
Unknown Pleasures,
by dint of their very originality, ensure that they’ll be copied by lesser groups whose imaginations have been overpowered. In pop, every wave of innovation inevitably installs a host of new clichés and conventions. In the wake of PiL and Joy Division, a new underground of gloomy groups such as the Sound and Killing Joke emerged. By its second incarnation in 1980, Futurama was mocked as an angst rock version of the U.K. heavy-metal festival at Castle Donington, its grim flocks of overcoat-clad boys as uniform as the denim hordes that followed Iron Maiden.

Paradoxically, the clone army also put huge pressure on the pioneers to keep moving to new frontiers. PiL started 1980 with huge advantages. They still had Virgin’s support. Despite its experimentalism and high retail price,
Metal Box
had done well commercially, selling out the 50,000-copy limited-edition canister format by February, after which it was re-pressed as a conventional double album called
Second Edition
. But as the year proceeded, the challenge of surpassing their own landmark record seemed to paralyze PiL.