Rip It Up and Start Again (41 page)

Even more striking than its musical content, though, was
Your Cassette Pet
’s radical format. A cassette-only release midway in length between an EP and an album, it retailed at only two pounds and came in a flip-top carton similar to a cigarette pack. McLaren wanted music to become much more disposable, something kids casually picked up at the corner store as they breezed through on roller skates, mere software to pop into their portable cassette players and boom boxes. Traditional record shops, already ailing because of falling sales, would disappear, McLaren believed. EMI liked the idea of the cassette-only release for different reasons, ones that actually subverted McLaren’s subversive intentions. At the time, many years before tape-to-tape dubbing became widely available, cassettes were actually harder to copy than vinyl records. But a fatal flaw ruined the marketing plan.
Cassette Pet
’s tape sound quality was too poor for radio DJs to play, while the EP-or-album ambiguity confused many record stores and meant that
Cassette Pet
failed to penetrate the Top 40.

Subsequent singles such as “W.O.R.K.” and “Prince of Darkness”—both released on conventional vinyl—fared no better, and McLaren grew despondent. In the early Bow Wow Wow interviews, he’d argued that kids were famished for ideas. But no one was taking the bait. Gradually, it became apparent to everybody but McLaren that the thing holding back Bow Wow Wow from success was the overbearing presence of their manager. Pop fans recoiled from the pungent odor of hype and the endless publicity stunts. The fact that
The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle
finally reached cinema screens around this time only exacerbated the impression of McLaren as über-Svengali.

McLaren had conned himself into believing his own retroactive myth of punk as a meticulously planned swindle. He imagined that he could dream up a subculture from scratch and the kids would simply fall in line. McLaren often pontificated in interviews about how punk had liberated kids’ energy. But any flesh-and-blood youngsters who fell into his clutches were deceived and dominated. If they showed any signs of independent thought or unwillingness to sacrifice themselves on behalf of his ideas, they were discarded.

McLaren firmly believed in the “great man” theory of history, the idea that through sheer will the visionary genius can transform everything. This conception of change as a top-down process, with revolutionary ideas handed down from above, was profoundly antidemocratic and opposed to some of punk’s core impulses, such as the do-it-yourself ethos. It also misrepresented McLaren’s role and the real nature of his genius. During the whole Pistols adventure, McLaren actually operated as an improviser more than someone who had everything premeditated in detail. McLaren himself talked of his forte as being a
mis
manager, someone who at crucial moments simply wasn’t there.

For their part, the Sex Pistols were more than mere cannon fodder for General McLaren’s stratagems. As individuals they had substance, character, and their own ideas. Rotten, obviously, but also Steve Jones. A former petty thief, Jones’s ability to not give a fuck (or give several “fucks” when required, as on the Bill Grundy TV show) contributed to the Pistols’ volatile aura of chaos. In contrast, Bow Wow Wow were clearly marionettes twitching at McLaren’s beck. Their early interviews featured McLaren doing most of the talking, and when you did hear from the group, they parroted the managerial line: “we’re not synthetic and gray,” “don’t grocer it up.” They couldn’t lend McLaren’s script any conviction or life. “Malcolm once said to me,
lamented
to me really, ‘This lot don’t seem to know what to do,’” recalls Vermorel. “Meaning that the Pistols always
did
. They were
naturally
delinquent.”

Anybody with a real spark was sharp enough to wriggle out of McLaren’s clutches. Boy George, for instance, briefly joined Bow Wow Wow, after McLaren convinced him that he should be a performer. Until then he’d been a sort of “it boy” on the New Romantic scene, a widely photographed poseur in clubs. Given the name Lieutenant Lush—a character from the
Mile High Club
script—George appeared with Bow Wow Wow at a famous gig at the Rainbow, a venue McLaren filled with carousels and carnival rides to enhance the band’s play-power image. Although he could see George’s star quality, McLaren’s main aim was making Annabella feel threatened and disposable in order to keep her in line. Eventually, George was kicked out of the band. “I got really pissed off and first of all I just wanted revenge,” he told
NME
. Initially the plan was to rip off Bow Wow Wow’s shtick and “be exactly like them but better.” Then he decided to build something of his own, resulting in Culture Club.

McLaren’s contrived controversies kept backfiring. Desperate to stir up some buzz for Bow Wow Wow’s debut album, he designed its cover as a simulation of
Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,
the 1863 Édouard Manet painting denounced as “indecent” by Napoleon III for its image of a naked woman surrounded by fully clothed men. Annabella posed nude (under duress, she later confessed), but because she was still just under sixteen, her mother managed to stop the cover from being used. Another blow for McLaren came with the commercial failure of “Chihuahua,” which was simultaneously Bow Wow Wow’s most seductive single to date and their manager’s most blatantly cynical gambit. Mouthing McLaren’s words to a bittersweet Blondie-like melody, Annabella sang about being a “rock ’n’ roll puppet,” confessing, “I can’t dance and I can’t sing/I can’t do anything,” and warning, “I’m a horrible idiot/So don’t fall in love with me.” One could mount a defense of “Chihuahua” as a sly deconstruction of the pop industry’s machinery of starlust and fantasy. But if one considers McLaren’s genuine antifeminism, his real-world treatment of Annabella as meat (chicken, in fact), and the way he ventriloquized those humiliating words through Annabella’s own lips, “Chihuahua” leaves a sour aftertaste.

Bow Wow Wow finally scored their U.K. pop breakthrough in early 1982 with “Go Wild in the Country,” an antiurban fantasy featuring risqué lines about swinging naked from the trees and romping in fields “where snakes in the grass are absolutely free.” With cassette piracy long discarded, Bow Wow Wow’s new concept was getting back to nature, as in the hyperventilated album title
See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah! City All Over, Go Ape Crazy
. “Go Wild” exhorted youth to spurn McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken and go “hunting and fishing.” On the sultry bossa nova “Hello Hello Daddy, I’ll Sacrifice You,” Annabella played the role of devouring earth mother as a coquette with a knife behind her back. The sweetly crooned lines about Woman being “more body than soul and more soul than mind” were vintage McLaren misogyny cobbled together from Lévi-Strauss, Jung, and
The Golden Bough
.

Despite McLaren’s often questionable lyrics,
See Jungle!
was charming and witty and altogether captivating, a pop masterpiece. Musically, the group had achieved a uniquely ravishing sonic identity. Naturally, this was
precisely
the moment McLaren finally lost all interest in Bow Wow Wow. According to Vermorel, the sixties art school milieu he and McLaren came up through regarded music as a lesser art form and held pop in especially low regard. McLaren always insisted—and still does, despite all evidence to the contrary—that the Pistols couldn’t play and that punk had never been about the music. “Christ, if people bought the records for the music, this thing would have died a death long ago,” he quipped in 1977.

By the time Bow Wow Wow scored their second U.K. Top 10 hit and American breakthrough with “I Want Candy,” an exciting but vacuous remake of an old sixties bubblegum tune, McLaren had pretty much ceased managing the band. Bow Wow Wow, he finally understood, could never become popular on a mass-cultural level because of the inauthenticity gap, the fact that his ideas were being ventriloquized through a teenage girl. “Annabella wasn’t me, so when it came to singing a song like ‘W.O.R.K.,’ it was very difficult for her to hold that up,” he told
NME
in November 1982. But McLaren hadn’t given up on pop as an arena for mischief making and mayhem. On the contrary, he’d just decided to give up on implementing his plans through surrogates such as Johnny Rotten or Annabella Lwin. Instead, it was finally time for McLaren to step up to the microphone himself. Curiously, though, he wouldn’t sing into that mic, he’d
rap
. Well, kinda. The bizarre story of how Malcolm McLaren—a Jewish-Scottish ex-Svengali with no sense of rhythm—journeyed to the Bronx and not long after became the first white British MC to make the pop charts is something we’ll return to.

WHEN MALCOLM MCLAREN VENTURED
deep into the Bronx to watch Afrika Bambaataa deejay in the summer of 1981, New York was at the height of the “mutant disco” phase—a glorious period of cultural miscegenation in which ideas from punk and funk, the downtown art scene and the far-uptown hip-hop scene, collided and cross-fertilized. Paralleling New Pop’s relationship with postpunk, mutant disco was at once an extension and a reversal of No Wave. It further developed the twisted funk impulse of DNA and Contortions into full-on danceability, but it also replaced No Wave’s aura of self-flagellating nihilism with a more hedonistic, playful sensibility.

No Wave had many things going for it, but “fun” wasn’t one of them. Entertainment, as most people define it, was not on the agenda. Instead, Lydia Lunch and James Chance staged a theater of cruelty, assaulting the audience with extreme noise, even physically brutalizing them now and then. At No Wave’s absolute height circa mid-1978, however, a group arrived on the New York scene with a vision about as far removed from Chance and Lunch’s “let the bad times roll” stance as you could imagine. From Athens, Georgia, the B-52’s were an almost instant sensation. At one of their earliest Manhattan shows, the group came onstage wearing 1950s girdles and beehive wigs (purple in the case of drummer Keith Strickland). After every chorus of the first song, they held a laugh box to the microphone. “They were the only band around with a sense of humor,” recalled scenester Animal X, who attended this show, in the downtown New York history
Art After Midnight
.

The B-52’s’ spirit was pure affirmation. Rejecting both punk and No Wave, Cindy Wilson—one of the group’s three vocalists—declared “I’m sick and tired of negative.” Heretically, in the New York context of the day, the B-52’s were a party band, their whole raison d’être being to get the audience to get down. No Wave had dabbled in funk, but in a curiously ungroovy way; Contortions’ and DNA’s fractured rhythms were more suited to having a fit than doing the frug. Mostly, the downtown hipsters just stood there, honing their blank gazes of affectless cool. “We’d get up in Max’s Kansas City and say, ‘OK, this is a dance song,’ and everybody’d be up there in their black leather coats just watching,” recalled B-52’s’ vocalist Fred Schneider of the group’s earliest shows, before their infectious music had fully thawed the vibe. “They were enjoying it, but it wasn’t cool to dance. Lord knows
we
didn’t look too cool.”

The fact that the B-52’s were two-fifths female and three-fifths gay male gave their music a giggly, giddy, and diva-fabulous vibe that was totally different from No Wave (a prime example of “heterosexual modernism” at its most punishingly po-faced). On songs such as “Dance This Mess Around” and “52 Girls,” the sheer soul-roar blast of Kate Pierson’s and Cindy Wilson’s vocals created a kind of “camp sublime” effect, simultaneously schlocky and strangely ominous. “I’ll give you fish, I’ll give you candy,” pleads Wilson on “Give Me Back My Man,” lending the ludicrous lines a searing conviction. Schneider’s scrawny, squeaky voice, meanwhile, made for a neat contrast with the belting bombast of the bouffant she-B’s.

Tuneful, boppy, and videogenic thanks to their “pop art meets John Waters” image, the B-52’s were a homegrown counterpart to the Human League, albeit synth-free. It actually took the B-52’s over a decade to truly crack MTV (with 1989’s massive hit “Love Shack”), but they ought to have been sparring alongside the Limey likes of Culture Club right from the start. One reason they didn’t make it straightaway was that underneath the campy surface the B-52’s’ sound was stark and spiky, a tough dance groove midway between James Brown’s minimal Afro-funk and the Leeds agit-funk of Gang of Four and Delta5. When imports of the
Damaged Goods
EP and
Entertainment!
reached Athens, the sound struck a chord with the local art school bands (Athens being a university town, like Leeds). “
Entertainment!
was the soundtrack to every party in Athens before New York and L.A. found out about it,” former Athens art student Michael Stipe claimed. The B-52’s’ “Party Out of Bounds” is a kissing cousin of “At Home He Feels Like a Tourist,” all splintered rhythm guitar and unyielding bass pumping at exactly the intersection between rock and funk.

In every other respect, the B-52’s couldn’t have been further from
Entertainment!
’s seriousness. Their songs were largely inspired
by
entertainment, being suffused with that B-movie-fetishizing “Mondo” sensibility later canonized by the
Incredibly Strange Movies
books, and drawing inspiration from sixties dance crazes, comics and animated cartoons, and pulp sci-fi. Hence tunes such as “Planet Claire” and the marvelously goofy subaquatic fantasia of “Rock Lobster.” The latter was the band’s debut single in early 1978 via the Atlanta-based independent label DB Recs. It was rereleased in the summer of 1979 after the group signed to Island, and became a modest hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

Although Pierson and Schneider were originally from New Jersey, the B-52’s were shaped by the unique combination of liberal artsiness and down-home Southern laid-back vibe that characterized Athens. The band’s retro-kitsch image was hatched in the town’s numerous thrift stores and yard sales. “You could buy a shirt for twenty-five cents,” recalls Maureen McGinley, the band’s manager in the early days. “What a lot of guys did is buy a week’s worth of shirts, all clean and pressed, on hangers, and wear ’em for a week, then take them back to the thrift store. It was cheaper than doing laundry.”

The B-52’s played their debut gig at a party in Athens on Valentine’s Day 1977. House parties thrown by students were the center of Athens’s music scene, otherwise very sleepy in terms of nightlife. “We had to make our own entertainment,” recalls McGinley. “When we threw parties I would hide my good pots and pans, because anything that was left out was going to be used as a drum before the night was over! The Athens scene was all about dancing. People didn’t stand around talking and making snide remarks. If an Athens band played and nobody danced,
they never played again
.”

Athens represented a more warmhearted and small-scale version of the art/music synergy going on in downtown New York. “Music was the least of it,” says McGinley. “There were people painting, writing, doing all kinds of things. When people came to the music they came to it usually through some other medium. Fred was a poet, for instance. As for Keith Strickland and Ricky Wilson, the guitarist, their
life
was their art. I had known Keith and Ricky since they were in high school. I vividly remember seeing them walking to school with lipstick on and their hair all done, holding hands. I was just like, ‘Oh these boys, they are not gonna make it.’ Because in Georgia back then, it was not at all cool to be gay. So we kind of all stayed together, in and out of each other’s house. It was a tightly knit group, and that came from not being accepted by the larger community.”

This extended family included Pylon, a bunch of art students who initially formed a band as a conceptualist jape—“a temporary-art idea,” as singer Vanessa Ellison explains. “We thought it would be fun to start a band, get written up in
New York Rocker,
then break up.” It all went pretty much according to plan—apart from the breaking up bit. No Wave journalist Glenn O’Brien rave-reviewed Pylon when they performed in New York, opening for Gang of Four, and praised the wiry dance rock of their first single, “Cool,” declaring that “they sound like they eat dub for breakfast.” Before they knew it, Pylon had a career on their hands, in no small part due to the support of their buddies, the B-52’s, who got them bookings at New York’s hot New Wave dance club Hurrah’s and even wangled Pylon onto the bill when the B-52’s supported Paul Simon in Central Park.

If the B-52’s had a spiritual second home in New York, it was at a place called Club 57, which was closer to a kooky arts lab than a nightclub. Indeed, the people behind Club 57—performance artists Ann Magnuson and John Sex, and painters Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring—have been described as a gang of B-52’s groupies. “We went to all [their] shows and gave the band presents,” Scharf recalled in an
East Village Eye
interview, adding that Keith Haring “gave them plastic fruit once and they
loved
it.” The sensibility that united the B-52’s and the Club 57 clique was an ironic affection for American pop culture at its most grotesquely phony or over-the-top: majorettes and cheerleading troupes, Miss America, Liberace, pajama parties, beach movies, and the campy, misguided, B-movie/Las Vegas phases of Elvis Presley’s career.

Club 57 began as a spin-off of an event called the New Wave Vaudeville, whose cast of freaks included Klaus Nomi, briefly famous for his opera-meets-Kabuki performances. Taking up residence in the basement of a Polish church at 57 St. Marks Place, the club initially showed horror B movies such as
The Blob
. But soon the 57 crew started hosting elaborately designed theme parties that distilled a whole new sensibility from elements of pop art, drag, the trash aesthetic, and performance art. “I would create a set, a soundtrack, and a framework for people to come in and be their own characters, costume themselves,” says Ann Magnuson of theme nights such as
Name That Noise: Punk Rock Game Show; Lady Wrestling: Battle to the Death; Salute to NASA
(complete with simulated space flight); and
Brix Deluxe Barbecue Patio Partying.
“Once we started doing themes, I’d be going to thrift stores almost every day, getting costumes and props. There was also a lot of stuff on the street you could pick up, like refrigerator boxes. So we’d drag all this stuff back to the club and create, say, a Jamaican shantytown and make a putt-putt miniature golf course through it and play reggae. It was a conceptual art piece that you could be involved in.”

Scharf designed the Club 57 logo, a TV set with the word “fun” underneath the channel control dial. “I really saw Club 57 as an exorcism of Americana,” says Magnuson. “Because there were only three network channels of TV at that time, you watched all these old movies, and you’d pick up the sensibilities of vaudeville, the Marx Brothers, the
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,
horror films. All that stuff informed the art.” Beneath the camp delight, though, was a semiserious impulse to use mass culture’s tatty ephemera as a prism through which to view America’s political unconscious. As Kate Pierson from the B-52’s put it, “Without being too pretentious, you can look at a K-mart Shopping Center as a modern cultural museum and learn something from what’s there and what that means.”

Although music was just a small part of Club 57’s mix, the club did produce its own house band, an approximate equivalent to the B-52’s, in the all-girl ensemble Pulsallama. Formed as an offshoot of the Ladies Auxiliary of the Lower East Side (Magnuson’s parody of the Junior League), Pulsallama debuted at a slumber party theme night, hitting everything from cowbells and beer bottles to pots and pans. “The thing about Pulsallama was that it was just an anti-band,” Ann Magnuson recalled, describing it as a parody of the hipster fad for tribal rhythms exemplified by bands like Bow Wow Wow. Pulsallama might have been a joke group, but few serious postpunkers made a record as strange and wonderful as their 1982 debut single, “The Devil Lives in My Husband’s Body,” a rolling and tumbling cavalcade of gamelan-style percussion, topped with a hilarious voice-over from a housewife whose seemingly possessed hubby has started making alarming bestial noises in the basement. “Our friends can’t come over anymore!” she wails.

Fueled by acid, mushrooms, and poppers, Club 57’s vibe was kitschedelic. It helped pave the way for the mainstreaming of camp and Mondo aesthetics that took place in the nineties and included Deelite, Nick at Night,
Mystery Science Theater 3000,
and the crossover success of John Waters’s films and Tim Burton movies like
Ed Wood
and the lamentable
Mars Attacks!
The Club 57 ethos was playful in both the childlike and theatrical senses of the word “play.” Artifice was celebrated and gender was treated as performative rather than innate.

Not everyone warmed to Magnuson and crew’s gleeful trashing of cool, though. “Esthetically I really hated Club 57,” downtown Renaissance man Jean-Michel Basquiat declared. “I thought it was silly. All this old and bad shit. I’d rather see something old and good.” Magnuson attributes the dis to Basquiat’s sense of competition with fellow artists Scharf and Haring. Basquiat was also associated with the Mudd Club, 57’s big rival during this period.

In some ways the two clubs had a lot in common. The Mudd’s founder, Steve Maas, threw lavishly styled theme parties, too, and there was also a connection with the B-52’s, whom Maas says were the first band to ever play at Mudd. Fred Schneider even helped organize a cheesy Hawaiian tiki theme night. Despite the overlap, though, the two clubs soon developed totally different vibes. Magnuson characterizes it as a difference in emotional temperature—57 was “groovy,” the Mudd “cool.” In many ways the Mudd was the continuation of James Chance–style No Wave decadence (indeed, Anya Philips, Chance’s manager/lover, was involved in the Mudd’s conception before she had a falling-out with Maas). In
Art After Midnight,
the description of the Mudd’s atmosphere by scenester Carmel Johnson-Schmidt resembles a Contortions lyric brought to life. According to Johnson-Schmidt, it felt like “everything was false, that nothing mattered, and that nothing was going to last. People gave up on planning things. It was all for that moment, that night. People barely even fucked.” Instead of hallucinogens, the drugs of choice at the Mudd were alcohol, downers such as Quaaludes, and, for some, heroin.