Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (39 page)

With its entire studio output barely long enough to fill a whole album, DNA is undoubtedly the most influential rock band in the world per minute of recorded music. As leaders of the downtown New York post-punk movement called no wave, DNA pushed the rock form to its limit by getting rid of all apparent structure and tonality. Taking its cues from the guitar deconstructions of experimental composers Rhys Chatham and
Glenn Branca
, DNA made art rock to end all art rock. And in doing so, the band – particularly the group’s bespectacled guitarist and lead squawker Arto Lindsay – paved the way for generations of noise- and free-music makers, from Sonic Youth to God Is My Co-Pilot to Blonde Redhead (named after a DNA song). And Lindsay’s nerd-savant approach to music has reverberated in the worlds of pop (working with David Byrne), world music, and electronica.

DJ Spooky (Paul Miller):

Arto Lindsay and Ikoue Mori, they’re definitely big influences. Mainly with their complete discarding of normal song structure. Arto had a really artsy, poetic side to his thing, it seemed much more idealistic and open to different stuff. Also with his Brazilian stuff, he’s working with people from radically different cultures, which a lot of the New York scene at the time would not do.

Arto Lindsay was born in Pennsylvania, but spent most of his childhood with his missionary parents in a Brazilian village. Though Lindsay had no musical experience or training, his interest in experimental art led him to New York in the mid-‘70s, where he met a group of like-minded noise-makers who were beginning to apply punk’s irreverence to the atonality of free jazz. Out of these early gatherings came a group of bands – James Chance’s Contortions,
Lydia Lunch
’s Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Mars, and DNA – and a scene that came to be known as no wave.

Lindsay initially wrote lyrics for the earliest no wave group, Mars, though he soon began to try his hand at guitar. Rather than bothering with the mundanity of learning chords or proper tuning, Arto approached his instrument as if it had never been played before and proceeded to invent an entirely new vocabulary based around rhythms and assorted manipulations. Through his associations in the downtown New York art scene, Lindsay met two other would-be musicians with a similar lack of experience and desire to experiment: Ikue Mori, a Japanese woman who attacked her drums with anarchic expressiveness, and Robin Crutchfield, a (male) sculptor and performance artist who managed to work out enough keyboard expertise (or lack of) to fit right in when the trio – who called themselves DNA – debuted in 1977, one month after forming.

In keeping with the band’s intention to push themselves at an accelerated pace, within its first year DNA released a debut single –
Little Ants
b/w
You and You
– produced by
Voidoids
’ guitarist Robert Quine (who had also “reconditioned” Lindsay’s guitar to better suit his approach). By this time,
Brian Eno
had become intrigued by the no wave scene and put together a compilation of the leading bands in the movement. No New York, as it was called, featured songs from all four of the major no wave groups, including four stand-out tracks by DNA. With Crutchfield’s simple and cohesive keyboard lines, songs like the bluesy
Egomaniac’s Kiss
were engaging and accessible; by the end of the year, though, creative differences led Crutchfield to form his own group, Dark Day.

Matthew Sweet:

I had the DNA 45, and I was into their whole anti-music thing. There’s an element in what I do that you’d never know. I probably have done more of that experimental stuff on demos. On records, the songs usually win out, but occasionally I like to do a one note song that’s really anti-melodic. And things tike DNA got me into thinking that way.

To replace Crutchfield, DNA acquired bass player Tim Wright, who’d been a founding member of Cleveland’s
Pere Ubu
. By choosing not to add another lead instrument, Lindsay and Mori removed any melodic potential from the band. In return, they got a rhythmic bassist who could hold the more formless rumblings together without overshadowing them. It was with this lineup that the band released its only extended recording, though with just six songs in under 10 minutes,
A Taste of DNA
was hardly an epic. The record’s brevity, however, was right for the music: Inspired by modern composers, far eastern folk styles, and even the Brazilian tropicalia pop Linsday had grown up on, DNA chocked so much rhythmic, tonal, and structural information into their music, it would have been exhausting to go longer than a minute and a half on any one piece.

Mark De Gli Antoni, Soul Coughing:

It was an incredible influence. I don’t think I ever did anything musically similar, but DNA’s freedom was a big deal to me. It’s more spiritual or philosophical, where just the honesty of approach is an influence. When I watch Ikue or Arto play, it’s not like you’re watching a virtuoso, but through their trust in their ability comes a super-confidence. And all the gestures have meaning. For me, DNA was a big thing as far as, “How do I carry that kind of pride when I play, and what is it that gives them the confidence?”

A Taste of...
sounded like rock put through a trash compactor, full of contorted musical ideas, clustered notes, and anemic grunts of nonsensical haikus. Yet, for all its clashing tones and rhythms, the music was joyous and playful. With DNA noise wasn’t an expression of nihilism, but of childlike freedom.

As it turned out, DNA’s lifespan – and that of the entire no wave movement – would be just as short-lived as its music. By 1982, DNA and the rest of the No New York bands had split up. Mori contributed her string playing to Mars’s final record, and has made albums of her own, while Wright played bass on the
Brian Eno
/ David Byrne album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Of the three, though, Arto Lindsay has maintained the highest profile. While DNA still existed, Lindsay had been a part of the Lounge Lizards, a “fake jazz” group led by saxophonist John Lurie. After appearing on that group’s self-titled debut, Lindsay collaborated with another Lounge Lizard (and one-time
Feelies
drummer) Anton Fier on the first Golden Palominos record. In addition, he has appeared on albums by James Chance, Mars, John Zorn, Don King (a band comprising former members of Mars and DNA, as well as Arto’s brother Duncan), Ryuichi Sakamoto, Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, and They Might Be Giants. Lindsay has also distinguished himself as a producer, of David Byrne’s early solo albums as well as top Brazilian artists such as Caetano Veloso, Tom Ze, and Marisa Monte.

Jim O’Rourke, solo / Gastr del Sol:

I’d never heard anyone play guitar like Arto Lindsay. The first time I heard him was on the first Golden Palominos record. At that time the DNA record was completely impossible to find. I think he’s a great guitar player and singer. The DNA record and the stuff on No New York is awesome. They were miles ahead of all those other bands from that period.

In the ‘80s, Lindsay and collaborator Peter Scherer made three albums of their own Brazilian-flavored music, ranging from experimental to dancey, as the Ambitious Lovers. In recent years, Lindsay has once again returned to his Brazilian roots with solo albums that feature guest appearances by
Brian Eno
, clarinetist Don Byron, DJ Spooky, and members of Blonde Redhead, Cibo Matto, and Deee-Lite.

DISCOGRAPHY

(Various Artists)
No New York
(Antilles, 1978)
; DNA contributed four songs to this
Brian Eno
-produced seminal document of the no wave movement.

A Taste of DNA
(American Clave, 1980)
; the group’s only studio release, this six-song EP, lasting less than 10 minutes, is crammed with enough musical ideas for an entire career.

DNA
(Avant [Japan], 1993)
; a live recording made at the group’s farewell show at CBGB in 1982, and released on John Zorn’s Japanese label.

SWANS

David Yow, Jesus Lizard:

Scratch Acid [Vow’s previous band] was lumped into what they called “pigfuck” music, with Swans,
Big Black
, Sonic Youth, and Butthole Surfers. I liked the name, and I was flattered that us little kids would be lumped in with that stuff... [I] met Michael Gira one night and asked him if he thought his lyrics were very funny. “No,” he very adamantly answered, offended that I would ask. And I said, ‘You mean to tell me, ‘Keep your head on the ground, push your ass up – here is your money,’ isn’t funny? How the fuck is that not funny?” The stuff I know by the Swans I think is a laugh riot. The Michael Gira / Don Rickles Christmas Special, that would be a good one, huh?

At the peak of their strength, the Swans – both sonically and lyrically – explored the extremes of brutality, torture, and power to the point where the music seemed incapable of even the slightest glimpses of light. In his commitment to plumbing the depths of ugliness, Swans leader Michael Gira showed nothing if not a focused vision. But by the time he’d retired the band, 15 years after it began, the music had moved to a place where it revealed moments of grace and beauty. One of two primary successors to the no wave movement (Sonic Youth being the other), the Swans went on to leave their mark on everything from post-rock and electronic outfits such as Low and the Young Gods (who took their name from a Swans recording) to goth-industrial groups like Nine Inch Nails.

Though Michael Gira’s first exposure to punk came while attending art school in Los Angeles in the late ‘70s, he was always a bit at odds with what he viewed as the fashion-oriented nature of the scene. To counter the deficiencies he saw in L.A.’s punk rag, Slash, Gira started his own magazine entitled No, which he filled with art and writing on favorite topics such as punk bands, pornography, and cadavers. Soon, though, he found himself drawn to New York and the city’s no wave scene. “I responded to it immediately, because the main tool it used was raw sound instead of melodic rock structures,” Gira says of the music being made by people like
Glenn Branca
and
DNA
.

By the time he arrived in New York, however, no wave was all but dead, and he found he had little in common with the early ‘80s dance-oriented scene. As he dissolved his first New York band Circus Mort and began to formulate the Swans, the closest things Gira found to kindred spirits were his former art school classmate Kim Gordon and her band, another no wave-inspired outfit called Sonic Youth. “There was no support system at all for the really brutal things we were doing or Sonic Youth was doing,” Gira says. “No one even wanted to know about us, so Sonic Youth and us sort of banded together and supported each other.”

Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth:

Michael Gira... was a funny guy, he hated everything. He was always having a good time, yet he was completely nihilistic. And neither of us had a cent, so we became really tight, and I played with him a bit when he was developing the Swans. We toured with them, playing in front of ten people at most. We just stuck together and developed side by side. The cool thing was we had different esthetics – we were positive, they were negative – we were the Beatles, they were the Stones. Also, Sonic Youth always kept aware of the flux of the underground music scene and became part of it, where the Swans sort of stuck their ground and refused to be part of anything.

With the Swans, Gira began to construct rhythms around tape loops, using two bassists (of which he was one) and sheets of guitar noise. The intention was to create the most physical and punishing music possible. Through the extreme darkness, Gira hoped to find a sort of freedom. “I wanted to experience making the sound, to crawl inside of it,” Gira explains. “It wasn’t like I was feeling angst and needed to express it, I wanted to create something, in reality, that gave me joy. The music was overwhelmingly transformative.”

The Swans – which maintained a constantly changing lineup due to Gira’s admitted tyrannicalness – investigated this kind of supremely heavy, minimalist metal through their 1982 debut EP and first album,
Filth
. 1984’s
Cop
and their
Raping a Slave
single were even more brutal. With lyrics dealing in domination, humiliation, and mutilation – and harsh, pummeling rhythms to match – Gira’s cathartic nightmare came as close as music gets to making a listener feel physically violated. The Swans’ frighteningly loud and torturous live shows, taking cues from equally punishing industrial acts like
Throbbing Gristle
and
Einstürzende Neubauten
, featured band members banging on metal and manipulating tapes.

Mark Robinson, Unrest / Air Miami:

They had these huge sheets of metal with one guy in the front whacking them, and I think they had three bass players and a drummer. The thing that really struck me about the Swans live was how everyone in the club left. Unrest did a Swans rip-off song “Kilt Whitey” that’s pretty much taken from the early Swans – the really slow, metal sounding stuff.

In 1985, a former sex worker and dedicated Swans fan named Jarboe made her way to New York from Atlanta with the intention of joining the band. Though it had been very much a boys club until then, she soon proved herself suitably tough and earned a job playing sampler. Though Jarboe’s role was minor at first, on the
Greed
and
Holy Money
albums she added a melodic and ethereal element the music had never had before. “People make the clichéd assumptions that a woman gets in the group and they become soft,” Gira says. “But that wasn’t the case at all. She was a very hard person, and she liked the brutal music. But being that she had this tremendous musical experience, I started taking advantage of it to expand. So I started incorporating her elaborate background vocals or some orchestrations she’d help with.”

By 1987, the Swans had moved a long way from their beginnings. Having become romantically involved, Jarboe and Gira embarked on a more acoustic-oriented side project called Skin, elements of which were then incorporated back into the Swans’
Children of God
record. The music had become textured and majestic – uplifting even! – with a more varied and accessible sound that fell in the territory of goth.