Lucking Out (22 page)

(I once attended a party hosted by Rockwell in his loft to welcome Greil Marcus on a visit to Manhattan. Marcus, the author of
Mystery Train
and the future annotator of all things Dylanesque and Elvisiana, was based in California and considered the super-cerebral prince regent of the West to Christgau’s East Coast suzerainty. He had the gritted zeal of a Marxist rhetorician with a deep-sea diver’s quest for buried cosmology and gnostic scraps of “the old, weird America,” wielding a different set of academic/analytical equipment from the majority of us ditchdiggers. In retrospect, the fact that I was invited to such a soiree marked an unofficial induction into the ranks of the fraternal order of rock critics, a sign that I wasn’t considered just another freelancer dressing up the set. It wasn’t only rock writers invited either. A
Village Voice
editor was engaged in such intense nebbishy flirtation with a
New York Times
writer, a petite, vibrant blonde who looked as if she were always up for a game of volleyball, that he came over to us and nervously said, “I mean, suppose something happens tonight, suppose we go back to my place, or her place—I don’t know, I mean, she writes for the
Times
,” italicizing the last word aloud. He was reassured that he would be able to acquit himself—“It’s not as if you’re going to bed with the building.” He nodded, though you could see he was still mentally nibbling on the daunting task ahead like a squirrel working a nut. It was the age of
Annie Hall
and everyone played his or her part.)

But at some point the shock of the new wore off until bigger shocks were needed to keep everything twitching. Punk was an after-dark pursuit, but the darkness doubled, to quote a Television lyric, and acquired a taste of blood in its mouth and the oral archery of letting fly with saliva and phlegm. The array of spit tricks that came to be associated with punk were a British import, Talking Heads and other New York bands returning from their first English tours full of battle tales about being saliva-bombed in a relentless bukkake while onstage; as I recall, Tina Weymouth was a favorite rain target of punk gobbers, being spat on cited as a welcoming gesture of acceptance, like the Hells Angels pissing on an inductee’s jeans as part of the initiation ceremony, then making him put them on. Coming offstage night after night and removing a dripping coat of spittle with a dry towel didn’t foster a sense of belonging, however, no matter how favorable the subsequent reviews. Pogoing, too, was an English import, an indoor exercise perfect for tight spots, turning the pogoer into a hopping human exclamation mark. (Whereas disco demanded tons of hip room under the dome to set Dionysian centrifugal forces into motion.) Pogoing was compared to the hopping of the Masai, but the Masai hopped in unison, at least in the African documentaries and dubious colonial-war movie footage I had seen, whereas this indoor bouncing was closer to Whac-a-Mole with shaven and Mohawked heads popping up through the holes.

The droogier members of the English punk scene and the rock journalists who critically ransacked their way through the columns of
New Musical Express
(
NME
, as it was better known, a homonym for “enemy,” as the Sex Pistols reminded us in “Anarchy in the U.K.”) and Xeroxed fanzines with names like
Sniffin’ Glue
and ransom-note layouts found much of the New York punk scene de-balled with artiness, affectation, and rhyming couplets, unwilling to wage militia battle against the deadwood holding insurrectionary energies down. While David Byrne seemed to be knitting a cardigan with his acoustic guitar and Tom Verlaine conducted a séance with the French Symbolist poets in some automobile graveyard, English punk bands such as the Damned had songs titled “Stab Your Back,” and another band with a heavy rep was called the Stranglers, as if it had no need of sharp implements to inflict harm. None of the CBGB’s punk bands were politically, militantly barricades-smashing like the Clash, a band Patti was the first to clue me in on and who seemed to have scoped out the field of fire for themselves. Unlike the Sex Pistols, whose cobra attack and anarchist cry, thrilling as it was, seemed too obvious a wicked potion whipped up in the manager-impresario Malcolm McLaren’s Dada lab. A brilliant magpie with a knack for extracting the most delectable, usable bits, McLaren played his protégés and the press like a cross between Dickens’s Fagin and Diaghilev, an exploiter capable of producing exaltation, although the corrosive charisma of Johnny Rotten—who always looked a little jaundiced around the gills—and the nose-bloodied insensibility of the bassist Sid Vicious proved more than even McLaren’s mesmerist power could handle.

As English punk bands snatched the imaginations of New York rock fans by the scruffy balls and snub-nosed tits, the New York scene began to sling the drool around like sloppy seconds, and bands such as the Dead Boys became the house sensations. They were not subtle, the Dead Boys, jingling with Nazi regalia and flying a snot rag as their pirate flag, but they made for good copy and oodles of after-dinner conversation, taking romance for a spin with such numbers as “Caught with the Meat in Your Mouth” and “Flame Thrower Love.” While their black leather look may have been borrowed from the Ramones (with Joey’s blessing—he noodged them to move to New York), their stage exploits were more Iggy Pop–ish, each set a roller-coaster ride on a pain-pleasure sine wave. Pain was represented by the lead singer, Stiv Bators, looping the mike cord around his neck into a noose and hanging himself from the stage’s light rig, his urchin feet dangling, like a suicide artist. Pleasure was articulated by the occasional blow job that Bators received onstage, the apple-bobbing of the young female volunteer sometimes simulated (judging by the overactive head action), sometimes not. I seldom threaded myself far enough up front and to the side to get a decent viewing angle to render a decisive verdict. Gary Valentine, bass player for Blondie, singled out the servicing of Bators’s dangler onstage at CBGB’s as the sign that “brain rot” had infiltrated the scene, attracting audiences addicted to sick tricks. The Dead Boys weren’t the only sick tricksters out there, but they showed more variety and panache in their slapstick, such as lapping up a lick of their own vomit from the stage floor, blowing their noses into slices of bologna and then eating them (this was the guitarist Cheetah Chrome’s showstopper), and, on one renowned occasion, pissing into the safety helmet of the previously mentioned bartender-bouncer Merv, a highly educated man who subscribed to the
Times Literary Supplement
and with whom I used to chew the fat about Kingsley Amis and Frank Kermode between sets. We both agreed that Kermode’s critical style could do with a dash of pepper. It was never clear to me how his hard hat ended up in Bators’s hands as a portable urinal, though it was difficult to believe Merv would have volunteered it as a prop. He was a tolerant man who had witnessed much behind the bar, but he was not an accomplice to shenanigans.

The Dead Boys didn’t revert to mild-mannered personas when they were out in civilian daylight. In that they were consistent. I once saw Cheetah Chrome drop his cheetah-spotted pants in the middle of St. Marks Place, pivot, and moon someone walking toward him—his way of saying hi. Walking in the same direction at that moment was Karen Allen, the freckled delight with the root-beer voice from
Animal House
and the original Indiana Jones. So she got mooned too. Chrome probably wasn’t aware Allen was sharing the same sidewalk as the friend he was hailing, but had he known, he might have dropped his drawers even sooner. He was, in his own fashion, a true vaudevillian.

So when the news came that the U.K.’s the Damned would be performing at CBGB’s on a double bill with the Dead Boys, grisly anticipation gleamed from every Dracula fang. The Damned and the Dead—their very names told you they belonged together, competing for Gothic supremacy like rival biker gangs fighting over bragging rights over whose ass is hairier. (Such a contrast to the weekends when Television and Talking Heads double billed, more akin to watching twin rocket launchings set after set, each arc higher than the last.) The Damned were the odds-on favorite to triumph in this steel-cage Black Mass. They had been around longer and proven themselves in London and the rugged vomitoria of the English provinces, and with a drummer called Rat Scabies, it was clear they weren’t angling for debutantes, like Roxy Music, but trawling the Céline sewers. (Everyone eagerly awaited the
New York Times
, given its formal style, reviewing the band and keeping an institutional straight face as it referred to “Mr. Scabies.”) The Damned also had a guitarist named Captain Sensible, whose name was a welcome whimsical stroke, like the fabulous ID of the lead singer of X-Ray Spex, Poly Styrene, the defiant, unbarricaded voice of the girl-power punk anthem “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!,” each hoarse syllable hurled upward from the dungeon floor. The Damned were more a glued-together assemblage of shock tactics: Scabies’s drums came hard down the tracks, and Dave Vanian’s vocals nailed the staccato rush of “Neat Neat Neat” and “New Rose” like a rivet gun. Vanian wasn’t a slurrer, unlike so many punk slingers. But the Dead Boys were newer, rawer, maybe a trifle leaner and hungrier, with home-court advantage. They had less to lose from this contest, more to gain.

And yet lose they did, not for lack of trying. Quite the opposite. They threw themselves into every song as if it might be their last (a reasonable assumption, given Stiv Bators’s predilection for playing hangman’s noose), and the Damned matched them in depraved dynamism, their dueling sets heading for a draw with no clear victor until Dave Vanian outfoxed everybody. He announced that the Damned’s next set would be a tribute to boredom, and he performed not onstage with his bandmates but lounging at a table below, singing between bites of take-out pizza. It was a brilliant theatrical stroke, topping whatever tattered mischief the Dead Boys could do by adopting the pose of a slumming dandy who needn’t bother demonstrating his superiority to these nouveau pretenders—rather than exert himself, he’d simply sit back and enjoy his own show, with a nice snack. By unilaterally disarming, Vanian converted the contest into a punk parody of patrician put-on—so British, so Peter Cook, so disdainfully droll. Not that any of this inspired the Dead Boys to question their tactics and hang a Brechtian frame around their trash pickups, but neither did it alter the mise-en-scène in New York as much as it did elsewhere.

It was on the other coast that the darkness went monochromatic and transgressive with a vengeance. Rival bands and factions in the New York scene did little more than exchange the sorts of half sneers and scowls indistinguishable from the dirty looks thrown around at the average book party uptown, back when they still had book parties that didn’t look like Goodwill drives. But in Los Angeles in the punk seventies, the posturing ill will was enough to carve up a new Black Dahlia. “There’s something unsubtle in the LA psyche,” Valentine observes in
New York Rocker.
“Maybe it’s the perpetual sunshine, or maybe it’s living in a bunch of suburbs looking for a city. But the New York cool of Patti Smith, Television and Richard Hell didn’t take. Safety pins, leather, chains and vomit—the whole UK thing—did.” Once again the Damned were the ambassadors of this dystopian swan dive. As Valentine writes:

Three months later a new club opened on Cherokee Avenue called the Masque (presumably an homage to Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”), where this converted basement rehearsal studio became a punk rec room—or perhaps wreck room is more apt. “Its house rules were ‘excess, excess, excess.’ Graffiti blared FAGS IS NOT COOL and KILL ALL HIPPIES. Dress code demanded swastikas.” By the time Blondie was playing the New York punk clubs again after months of touring, blight had set in. “The Dead Boys and the Damned had made an impact, and the audience at CBs and Max’s was mostly headbanging weekend punks, tumbling in from Long Island and Jersey. Excess and stupidity seemed on tap, and the whole scene started to take on a depressingly incestuous character.” The trash-compactor smart-dumb of the Ramones was one thing—their lyrics, set to an engine roar, drew upon a drive-in double-feature schlock force that once doodled inside the skulls of so many gifted, stunted young male American misfits—but this was the real item, with nowhere to go but further down.

So, when Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious took turns dying dismal deaths, she by a knife driven below her navel presumably by a zonked-out Sid in their first-floor room at the Hotel Chelsea, he by a heroin overdose following his release from Rikers Island, his ashes later scattered over her grave, it was only the Weegee garishness of the crime scenes that impressed. Their suicide-by-any-other-name obituary notices were already typed into their needle tracks. The final pressing of the self-destruction button was a foregone conclusion, Sid and Nancy leaning blearily on each other as they left CBGB’s at night as if prematurely leading their own funeral procession, a pair of effigies. In a different decade, their lust for attention might have ensured their survival, a glimmer of self-interest staying his hand and diluting the heroin: the two of them pulling up just shy of death and entering rehab to co-star in a reality series upon their release from Dr. Drew’s custody. But then they wouldn’t have lived on in squalid legend, documentary makers three decades later still raising the question, “Who killed Nancy?,” as if she were the victim in the punk pulp novel James Ellroy never got around to writing, with Sid the fall guy, a patsy held suspended by a single puppet string until that, too, snapped.