Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (36 page)

DJ Spooky:

All these rappers read that stuff. People think hip-hop artists don’t read. They do read, but they read books outside the normal zone. They’d much rather read Iceberg Slim than Ernest Hemingway. Everyone’s going to read something that speaks to their own experiences more.

As Beck’s novels moved further away from his personal experiences – such as with
Death Wish
, an attempt to write about the Italian mafia – they were less successful. Though he’d long been criticized by groups such as the Black Panthers for glorifying his victimization of black women, by the mid-‘70s his own personal guilt and his mother’s disappointment weighed heavily upon him (which he reveals in his collection of essays
The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim
). His sole recording, 1976’s
Reflections
, contrasts his brutal pimp stories with
Mama Debt
, a son’s final plea for forgiveness. Beck began doing lecture tours at colleges – some of which had begun teaching his works as part of the “rogue novel” tradition – and speaking more directly about the emptiness and destructiveness of criminality. He also became something of an activist in the black community. From that period until his death in 1992, at age 74, Iceberg Slim lived a quiet life. Bob, as he was known to friends, married and had four kids. He continued to speak at schools and occasionally write from his home in Los Angeles. By the time he died, his works had sold over 6 million copies, and his legacy of ghetto horror stories was fast becoming the dominant flavor in hip-hop music.

Ice-T:

Later in my life, I turned back to his works and realized that although he was a pimp, he had become a writer. It was a revelation, because nobody tells you when you’re young that being a criminal or a pimp or a gangster can lead to anything positive. But because of him, I decided that although I was on the street doing wrong, I could take this experience and turn it into something else, possibly something constructive... Like him, I wanted to be somebody who didn’t just die there out on the streets. I wanted to be able to document some of my experiences, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do in my music for the past decade. I took my rap name in tribute to him, and I’ve never regretted it. [from his introduction to
Pimp
(Payback Press UK, 1996)]

DISCOGRAPHY

Reflections
(Infinite Zero, 1994)
; a collection of four spoken word poems, covering Slim’s usual subjects, set to jazz backing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pimp: The Story of My Life
(Holloway Publishing, 1967)
; Slim’s autobiography that introduced him as a bard of street life. (Note: Ice-T’s introduction is available only in the British edition published by
Canongate / Payback Press
.)

Trick Baby: The Story of a White Negro
(Holloway Publishing, 1967)
; about a light-skinned black hustler, later made into a movie (note: Ice-T’s introduction is available only in the British edition published by
Canongate / Payback Press
).

Long White Con – The Biggest Score of His Life!
(Holloway Publishing)
; a sequel to Trick Baby.

The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim: Robert Beck’s Real Story
(Holloway Publishing)
; a collection of essays in which Beck reveals guilt and remorse for the life he’s led.

Mama Black Widow: A Story of the South’s Black Underworld
(Holloway Publishing)
; about a black homosexual in the South.

Airtight Willie & Me: The Story of Six Incredible Players
(Holloway Publishing)
; a collection of short stories.

Death Wish: A Story of the Mafia
(Holloway Publishing)
; Beck’s attempt to stretch out, this is a largely unsuccessful portrayal of life in the Italian mafia.

The Game for Squares
; Beck’s final work, still unpublished.

Doom Fox
; another previously unpublished work that is being made available for the first time in 1998.

NEW YORK ROCKERS

Any city that can claim to be a world capital in the areas of art, literature, theater, fashion, and media inevitably attracts creative people, even if (especially if!) they are outside of the mainstream. In the U.S., in this century, New York is such a city. And, as home to the country’s most-read magazines and newspapers, New York always has plenty of music critics around to take notice of and champion the local scene when necessary.

The gritty, romantic feel of New York has been a magnet for rock artists for a long time. Musicians in the city didn’t have to invent punk, it was always just part of the attitude. Though it wasn’t the first band to exude New Yorkness, the Velvet Underground is a good starting point in the story of the city’s underground rock. Closely tied to the downtown art scene surrounding Andy Warhol, the Velvets were dark and dirty and amphetamine-paced back when most bands were singing about sunshine and flowers and psychedelic hallucinations. What’s more, they started a tradition for New York bands that produced a string of important developments in rock over the next three decades.

In the early ‘70s, the remnants of the Warhol/Velvets crowd emerged as a new glam scene, with brash, cross-dressing, hard-rocking bands like the New York Dolls and Wayne County. While remaining outsiders, Suicide mingled with these acts at the Mercer Arts Center and later emerged as the most musically significant of the lot. By the mid-‘70s, a larger scene based around clubs like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City had set punk culture in motion. Though acts like Talking Heads, Blondie, and the Ramones went on to more mainstream success, Television was most central to the scene’s beginnings, while its spin-off band, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, left the clearest legacy for the punk rock we know today.

By the late ‘70s, the CBGB scene was so crowded and overhyped that the Feelies, a Velvets-inspired post-punk band, took refuge across the river and spawned an important rock scene in Hoboken, New Jersey. Back in downtown New York, a collection of art-punk groups deconstructed rock dynamics to create an entirely new musical movement dubbed no wave. Bands such as DNA, perhaps the most significant of the no wave groups, were way ahead of their time, so far that only recently has no wave started to emerge in the mainstream consciousness as an important precursor to the skronkier post-rock creations of the ‘90s.

While all of the original no wave groups had disappeared by the early ‘80s, a few underground New York bands carried on the tradition. Though Sonic Youth would bring post-no wave styles closest to mainstream popularity, the Swans also developed an influential sound as a no wave successor. And as those bands pushed the boundaries of punk-based music, a second movement ran concurrently in some of the same New York clubs. Impacted not only by punk, but also by the funk and disco sounds that were giving birth to hip-hop, early ‘80s minimalist funk bands such as
Liquid Liquid
and
ESG
were bridging the separated music worlds of uptown and downtown, with arty and adventurous sounds you could also dance to (for that story, see the next chapter).

It’s important not to overstate the role New York bands played in the development of modern rock music. Key contributions also arose out of Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, D.C., San Francisco, Boston, Washington State, even rural Louisiana. In fact, independent music’s greatest accomplishment in past decades is the development of a network through which good music can be discovered no matter where it originates. Still, for any number of reasons, New York remains ground zero for influential underground American music.

SUICIDE

Martin Rev, Suicide:

Not only did we not have guitars, but no drums either. That was the reason we had the kind of reaction we did. Those were the two sacred cows of rock music. No one used drum machines in bands at the time. And then we had two people. And our name. It was threatening the status quo.

Suicide were making rock music that sounded like punk and new wave before those genres had a name. Their highly aggressive and noisy beginnings prefigured industrial and post-punk’s unorthodox sound and instrumentation. By their first record, Suicide was an edgy synth-pop duo that anticipated (and outdid) keyboard twosomes from Soft Cell to Tears for Fears, and bands including Depeche Mode (who’ve been known to play Suicide records before concerts) and the Cars (who wrote the song “Shoo-Be-Do” as a tribute to Suicide).

Suicide was quintessentially New York: gritty and neon-lit, smart and aggressive, alternately cold-eyed and intensely emotional, a mix of punk, doo-wop, electronic avant-garde, and rockabilly. They arose in the no-man’s-land between the ‘60s downtown New York scene of the Velvet Underground and the mid-‘70s punk scene surrounding clubs like CBGB. In 1970 Alan Vega, a Puerto Rican Jewish artist from Brooklyn, was creating neon junk sculptures and experimenting with guerrilla theater at the Project of Living Artists, an art center in the Village that he had co-founded. There he met Martin Rev, a trained pianist from the Bronx whose free-jazz band, Reverend B, played at the Project. Vega, who’d been hugely inspired seeing Iggy Pop’s stage antics and hearing the
Silver Apples
’ electronic pop music, convinced Rev to quit free jazz and form a new band with him.

Along with a guitarist they called Cool P, Vega and Rev – renamed Alan Suicide and Marty Suicide – formed Suicide. Though Rev initially played drums, he soon settled on Wurlitzer organ as his primary instrument. Alan added bits of trumpet, but mostly served as the mad ranting vocalist and frontman. After Cool P and a short-lived drummer named Mari left, Suicide became a duo. “We were both trying to make something happen in a very uncompromising way,” Rev says of the partnership. “I think we kind of played off each other. Alan, having very little music background, gave me the room to focus things musically. And he had a little more life experience, and brought the Iggy-inspired side that I wasn’t into.”

Early gigs were more a combination of manic performance art and experimental sound than rock show. Vega, dressed in leather and swinging a bike chain, would menace the audience while yelling street poetry over Rev’s formless keyboard noise. Many simply considered them a spectacle and took little notice of the music, but by 1971 Suicide was already calling what they did “punk.” “I had gone through the free jazz thing, and it seemed the rock world was the only place left with undiscovered territory,” Rev says. “It was interesting to do free music, but with feedback and electronics and using the voice as a free instrument – all of which was not really acceptable in jazz.”

Nick Cave:

Suicide probably influenced me more than any contemporary rock band in the end. My vocal style – even my lyric writing to a certain extent in the early days – was influenced by Alan Vega’s. And the way the music was put together, too. Like [Cave’s song] “The Mercy Seat” begins with this percussive bass rhythm sound, like Suicide’s
Harlem
. So I know in many ways Suicide were directly influencing our music.

By 1972, a new music scene – with acts like the New York Dolls and Wayne County – had begun to coalesce around the Mercer Arts Center and Max’s Kansas City. While Suicide occasionally performed at these venues, their dark, confrontational style was clearly in opposition to these escapist glam groups. They remained outsiders and soon their reputation as an unruly live act made it difficult for them to get gigs. During the next few years, while the Mercer collapsed and Max’s closed, Suicide laid low and continued developing material. When the duo reemerged with a more cohesive set of songs in 1975, Max’s had reopened and CBGB began to emerge as a focal point for the music scene.

Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth:

Suicide was the first band I saw in New York. We used to come into the city as teenagers to go to Max’s. I thought Suicide was going to be another rock and roll, Kiss-type band, and that was not the case. They were in their most “accost-the-audience” period. Alan Vega had an old lady’s wig and fake scars on his face, and he was crying on stage, singing
Cheree
. He’d walk on the tables and tie his mic cord around people’s necks and pour drinks over people’s faces, and lick people on the mouth, and break glass and poke it into his chest. We were like, “My God, let’s get the hell out of here!” They were such an enigma, because they were so unique and had developed their thing prior to the whole scene, somewhat in a void.

Vega now sang actual songs, while Rev backed him on keyboard and an early $30 drum machine. Though Suicide were still outsiders, the new punk scene of bands like
Television
and Patti Smith clearly had more in common with the group. “We weren’t really embraced as part of the punk scene,” Rev says. “But because we were already there and our attitude was so punk, we started to get a certain amount of acceptance. At least not total confusion.”

Finally, in 1977 former New York Dolls manager Marty Thau heard Suicide on the jukebox at Max’s and offered to put out a Suicide album on his new Red Star label. Made in one weekend, the band’s self-titled debut built songs on repetitive low-fi keyboard drones and mechanical beats. Vega sneered gritty lyrics of love (
Cheree
), nuclear terror (
Rocket USA
), and working-class frustration (the 10-minute
Frankie Teardrop
) with a mix of punk intensity and showman croon. Suicide was to become a founding document of the next decade’s synth-based new wave music.