Art After Midnight
by Steven Hager
copyright 2012 by Steven Hager
Published by Steven Hager at Smashwords
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4659-9828-6
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Introduction
When life gets unacceptably grim, people make fun of it. At least that’s what happened in France during the Reign of Terror when a bizarre subculture known as Les Incroyables (“The Incredibles”) appeared. Although barely remembered today, Les Incroyables were famous for an eccentric style of dress (which parodied the excesses of the deposed aristocracy), short, unkempt hairstyles (“Hair á la Victime”) and a fondness for wrapping scarfs and bandages around their necks.
In the late ’70s, life was almost equally distressing. The first generation to grow up under the specter of nuclear annihilation angrily came of age in an era of diminishing expectations. It was in this atmosphere that a rock club called CBGB opened in New York’s East Village. The local music scene began undergoing a renaissance and a group of unknown artists moved into the neighborhood. Although they sprang from varied backgrounds, the artists shared a collective media-drenched consciousness, the heritage of the suburban teenager. In the ’60s, this pampered upbringing was frequently a source of guilt, but in the ’70s, it was dissected and rearranged, and eventually regurgitated into new forms. CBGB launched the punk movement, and it’s no coincidence that many of the early punks looked like survivors from a nuclear holocaust.
Although routinely scorned by the press, the punks gave vivid reality to anxieties that had become submerged in the national psyche. Then Ronald Reagan was elected President on a hard-line, anti-Communist campaign. The election provoked an outbreak of doomsday fever across the country. For those who felt the world situation was getting increasingly hopeless, throwing a party seemed like an appropriate response. It was so appropriate, in fact, that it turned into a four-year-long binge that a lot of people attended: punk rockers, hip hoppers, new wavers, performance artists, fashion designers and drag queens. When it was over, the East Village had changed forever. Underground ideas became marketable commodities, blatant careerism was in fashion, and young painters began to be treated like emerging rock stars.
CBGB & OMFUG25
“Punks started as an attitude that celebrated American culture and the teenager as the Master Race. Punks were not asexual, faggot, hippie, bloodsucking ignorant scum as the media would have you believe.” —Legs McNeil, The Punk Manifesto
Tom Miller and Richard Lloyd, two aspiring, unemployed rock guitarists, were walking home through the East Village one afternoon in 1975 when they passed an anonymous bar on the corner of Bleecker and Bowery and decided to stop in for a drink. They entered a long, windowless room with a bar on one side, a stage on the other and a pool table in the back. The walls were peeling; the floor was littered with broken glass. The bar stools were filled with winos. Miller and Lloyd took an immediate interest in the stage, which didn’t seem to be in current use, even though it had a PA system. At the time it was difficult for struggling rock bands to find a place to perform. The Mercer Arts Center, a conglomerate of theaters and performance spaces that launched the New York Dolls and several other recent bands, had been condemned after a neighboring hotel collapsed. That left only Club 82, a hangout for transvestites and glitter bands at Second Avenue and East Fourth Street, and Max’s Kansas City, the original home of the Velvet Underground. The rock scene seemed to be dying and bands were getting desperate for new venues. Under the circumstances, even a seedy bar on Skid Row seemed appealing.
Miller approached the bartender. “We’re in a band,” he said, “and we’d like to play here.”
“What kind of music do you play?” asked the bartender.
“Well,” said Miller, “whatta ya like?”
“Irish folk music.”
“Yeah, we play that,” lied Miller.
On the basis of this conversation, the band Television got its second gig in New York and the owner of the bar, Hilly Kristal, decided to rename his establishment in the hope of attracting a more upscale clientele. A burly ex-farm boy from New Jersey, Kristal was unsure what sort of music he should feature, so he picked a name designed to cover a lot of territory: Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers. Later on, he mercifully shortened it to CBGB & OMFUG.
Not too many people were coming down to the East Village in those days. Overrun by heroin addicts and drug dealers in the mid-’60s, the neighborhood was scarred by endless rows of abandoned tenement buildings—many of which had been torched and gutted, and were now functioning as “shooting galleries.” The European immigrants and bohemians who had previously lent the community an Old World aura had been displaced by impoverished blacks and Hispanics. It was a dangerous place for white kids from the suburbs to be hanging out, but it also had the cheapest apartments in the city—which made it a haven for starving rock musicians, many of whom began congregating at CBGB.
A year earlier, Miller had formed a group called the Neon Boys with a friend from high school named Richard Meyers, who was now Television’s bass player. Both had adopted stage names. Miller was calling himself “Verlaine,” after a French symbolist poet, but Meyers wanted something a little more sinister and settled on the last name “Hell.”
Television began playing CBGB on a weekly basis and was soon joined at the club by several other bands, including Patti Smith, Blondie and the Ramones. Although all four bands were distinctively different in sound and appearance, there were some connections between them. For example, Television opened each show with a rowdy rendition of “Fire Engine” by the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, a psychedelic garage band from Texas whose popularity peaked around 1967. Hundreds of garage bands had emerged across the country in the mid-’60s, and even though they experienced only a fleeting moment of success, their amateur enthusiasm was exerting a strong influence on the music of the ’70s. In 1971, Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith’s lead guitarist and a former rock journalist with a master’s degree in American history, compiled an album for Elektra records that documented the emergence of this genre. Titled Nuggets, Kaye’s record included songs by the Seeds, the Standells, the Shadows of Night and other seminal bands of the period.
“The garage bands were really naïve and innocent and just wanted to be a part of rock’n’roll so badly,” says Kaye. “They were more at home practicing for a teen dance than going out on national tour.”
By the time Nuggets appeared, bands had already begun self-consciously imitating the garage sound, which, in the true spirit of rock, rejected musical virtuosity in favor of raw teenage emotion and fuzzy guitar solos. (According to Kaye, the first of these revivalist groups was a California band called the Droogs. A few years later, another garage revivalist band called the Fleshtones formed in the East Village.) “A lot of interest in the garage bands grew out of the rock fanzine movement of the early seventies,” says Kaye. “A whole cult developed around the groups.” Creem magazine, a leading promoter of the music, named it “punk rock” and identified the MC5, Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls as true standard bearers of the garage sensibility.
It was, however, only the beginning for punk rock, and the garage bands represented only one component of an emerging aesthetic that worshiped the sleazy underbelly of American consumer culture. ’50s baby-boomers who had grown up on a diet of comic books, Mad magazine, science fiction novels, illegal drugs, grade-B horror films and Saturday morning cartoon shows suddenly decided they much preferred The Gong Show to Masterpiece Theater, an attitude that had found early champions at Creem, especially in writer Lester Bangs. However, the sensibility didn’t fully mature until 1975, when a new magazine centered around the CBGB scene appeared, a magazine appropriately titled Punk.
Punk magazine was founded by a 22-year-old graduate of the School of Visual Arts (SVA) named John Holmstrom, who was born and raised in a typical middle-class suburb in Cheshire, Connecticut. Among Holmstrom’s early influences were Spiderman comics, Creem and the rock band Alice Cooper. While at SVA, he studied with Harvey Kurtzman, one of the principal architects behind Mad Comics (which later evolved into Mad magazine), and began drawing an autobiographical cartoon strip called “Joe.”
“The East Village was really dead in those days,” says Holmstrom. “The junkies had taken over. The talk on the street was that the city was going to tear down the whole neighborhood.” After graduating, Holmstrom moved back to Cheshire, where he met Legs McNeil, an old friend from high school who convinced him to return to New York and start a magazine.
They rented a storefront on 30th Street and 10th Avenue and went to work. McNeil invented the magazine’s name and became its “resident punk.” “We were going to CBGB all through the summer of 1975 and after I saw the Ramones, I was convinced something was happening,” says Holmstrom.
Punk found its perfect incarnation in four guys from Queens, all in their early twenties, who dressed in black motorcycle jackets (a throwback to Marlon Brando’s look in The Wild One), frayed jeans and long, shaggy haircuts. Outspokenly anti-hippie, the band reveled in American trash culture and parodied right-wing sensibilities so effectively many rock critics labeled them as fascists. Their music was short, fast and loud. Performances rarely lasted more than 20 minutes. Song lyrics discussed such matters as glue-sniffing and the band’s favorite film (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).
Although dismissed by many as a one-joke band, the Ramones (along with Patti Smith and a few others) were consciously trying to resuscitate rock music, which had been virtually obliterated by the success of such laid-back groups as the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt. Naturally, they considered the mechanical, manufactured sound of disco (then the most popular music in New York) even more offensive.
The first issue of Punk appeared on January 1, 1976, with Lou Reed on the cover. Inside was an essay on Brando, who was acknowledged as the original punk. Page two contained a strident editorial: “Death to Disco Shit. Long live the Rock! Kill yourself. Jump off a fuckin’ cliff. Drive nails into your head. Become a robot and join the staff at Disneyland. OD. Anything. Just don’t listen to discoshit. I’ve seen the canned crap take real live people and turn them into dogs! And vice versa. The epitome of all that’s wrong with Western Civilization is disco.”
Although the first issue contained several standard interviews and essays, as well as a number of comic strips, the entire text, interviews and all, was lettered by hand, like a comic book. The Ramones were featured in the centerfold spread. “We love bubble gum [music] and hard rock, especially Elvis Presley,” said Tommy Ramone. “I like comic books,” added Dee Dee Ramone, “especially anything with swastikas in it, like Enemy Ace, which is very hard to get.” In order to better define his magazine’s sensibility, Holmstrom began listing important influences in the “Top 99,” a parody of the record charts found in most rock magazines. The column was left open for just about anything, including current trends, TV shows and movies, and readers were encouraged to mail in suggestions. The Ramones (Holmstrom’s favorite band) held an unwavering grip on the number-one slot for several years, but other frequent entries included: Lester Bangs, Dead Boys, Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets, LSD, Sex, Batman, Blondie, Alan Suicide, vodka, The Gong Show, Iggy Pop, Soupy Sales, The Flintstones, The Three Stooges, Richard Hell, William Burroughs and Budweiser.
Needless to say, Punk magazine came as something of a shock to many East Village residents, a number of whom were aging hippies. “In the early days there were never more than twenty people at CBGB,” recalls Roberta Bayley, who worked the door and later became a photographer for Punk magazine. “The night Patti Smith played was the big night we made three hundred dollars, which seemed like a lot of money.”
A groupie scene quickly developed at the club, and many of the arrivals were refugees from earlier scenes—Max’s, Mercer Arts Center, Club 82. “We knew glitter wasn’t what we were supposed to be doing anymore,” says Animal X, a freelance clothes designer. “But many of us were still into glamour and a lot of girls were having this problem, to find something glamorous but still tough. I used to wear a lot of leopard and ’50s things. I never finished the edges and I’d tear them sometimes. I called it the just- been-raped look. I went out a couple of times with live cockroaches glued to my ears instead of earrings. We made things out of bones, animal heads. The idea was to shock people.”
Several of the regulars, including Animal X and Anya Phillips, began go-go dancing and stripping at Times Square porno clubs to support their musician boyfriends. Phillips, a short, plump Taiwanese girl began dressing in black leather and studs, a look that had been pioneered by the Velvet Underground 10 years earlier. S&M attire gradually became more popular at the club. “Anya gave the impression of being a frivolous person,” says Bayley. “She dressed really outrageously and seemed like a hanger-on. But she began having great tea parties for women at her apartment and I discovered she was really very talented at designing clothes.”
“A lot of women didn’t like Anya because she was manipulative,” says Animal X. “Anya was a user, but she always gave something in return. She encouraged people to do things. I also remember she really liked LSD. One time after she took it, she crawled out of her apartment, crawled downstairs, hailed a cab, crawled into the cab and asked the driver to take her to Cuba.”
In 1976, Richard Hell left Television and formed a group called the Heartbreakers with two former members of the New York Dolls. Within a few months, an enterprising clothing boutique owner from England named Malcolm McLaren (who had briefly managed the Dolls and had been hanging around CBGB) invited Hell to front a band he was forming. Hell declined the offer and McLaren returned to England and hired Johnny “Rotten” Lydon instead. After the Heartbreakers broke up, Hell formed the Voidoids and wrote a song to sum up the spirit of the times. America had previously given birth to the lost, Beat and love generations and was now slipping into an economic depression. The country had never really recovered from losing its first war and having its President resign in disgrace. With the idealism of the ’60s fading into the background, “The Blank Generation” struck Hell as an appropriate title for a punk rock anthem.
“It was an assertion of the formless, inarticulate anger of ignored youth,” says Hell, who adds: “I also wanted to get rich and get laid.”
Amos Poe, an Israeli-born freelance photographer, became friends with Ivan Kral, a guitarist in the Patti Smith Group, and together they made a pair of 16mm films on life at CBGB. The first was called Night Lunch and the second The Blank Generation, after Hell’s song. Out of synch, often out of focus, poorly edited and practically unintelligible, The Blank Generation nevertheless became a cult classic, probably because it was the only documentation available on the early days at the club. In July 1977, Tish and Snookie Bellamo, two sisters from the Bronx, opened Manic Panic on St. Marks Place, New York’s first punk rock store. Within a few months, several other punk boutiques opened in the area. The music world, meanwhile, was gearing up for the coming punk rock explosion. Signed by Sire Records, the Ramones quickly put out an album and toured England, where they came to the attention of several British bar bands who had been keeping a close eye on developments in New York. (Patti Smith, who had already released a record and toured extensively in both Europe and the United States, later told reporters she felt like Paul Revere, traveling through the countryside shouting at kids to wake up.)
After English youth discovered Punk magazine, several similar English fanzines appeared, the most popular of which was titled Sniffin’ Glue. In less than a year, England virtually co-opted the punk rock movement, a development that was not really surprising considering that unemployment, immigration and festering social problems had created a large, disaffected teenage population in that country. Since they had less to lose, British youth were more willing to adopt a lifestyle initially viewed as too negative and extreme by many American teenagers. Much of the success of English punk rock can also be credited to the uncanny media manipulations of McLaren, creator of the Sex Pistols. Fashion was an essential component of punk and no one exploited its symbolic power with more skill than McLaren, who was operating a London boutique called Sex, a store that sold many items inspired by the owner’s frequent trips to CBGB. Although nihilism was rampant in both branches of punk, the English bands tended to be more sophisticated about politics. Drinking was a far more popular topic at CBGB.
Meanwhile, events were stirring in the SoHo art district, located only a few blocks southwest of CBGB. Although the two neighborhoods were in close proximity, they were miles apart in aesthetics. This would soon change. In 1975, the art scene, like the music scene, was desperately in need of an overhaul. Painting had been pronounced dead and most dealers had shut their doors to new artists, turning their galleries into nearly impenetrable fortresses. As is often the case in such close-knit communities, the work was growing stale and tired. Minimalism, the foremost sensibility of the ’60s, had been exhausted and was followed by a proliferation of mini-movements: earth art, body art, conceptual art, video art, feminist art, decorative art, fetish art and many others. Although some critics applauded this pluralism, others were clearly disappointed by a lack of enthusiasm pervading much of the work. In the mid-’70s, however, a new generation of artists emerged, one that was working on live performance instead of painting, and many critics felt their work showed considerable promise.
In 1975, the first comprehensive exhibit of this new work was organized by Edit deAk, an Albanian refugee, art critic and co-founder of Art Rite, an influential art magazine published between 1972 and 1978. Held at Artists Space, the show was titled Person into Persona. Because the genre didn’t have a generally recognized title, deAk spent three days trying to write a press release for the event. “I finally settled on the word ‘performance,’” she says. “Laurie Anderson was a very important pioneer. Her piece in the show was an extended metaphor for water. She was wearing ice skates on a block of ice, which timed the length of the performance, and she already had a voice-distortion device, but a very primitive one. Before Laurie, performance was being done by these tough guys, like Vito Acconci. It was ‘hate me, hate me.’ Laurie completely reversed that—she was a suction cup for love.” The shows were held in the early evening and afterward everyone went to Barney’s, a tiny bar in TriBeCa.
Although the English already had a long history of art students turning into rock stars (an exhaustive list that includes members of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Roxy Music), it wasn’t until the mid-’70s that the idea seemed to take hold in New York. In 1976, three graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design performed at the Kitchen, an alternative space that was cultivating the new performance artists. The trio called themselves Talking Heads (a television term for news and talk programs). However, since rock music was still offensive to many in the art world, a catalogue published by the Kitchen explained the group’s appearance in rather delicate terms: “Talking Heads is a group of performance artists whose medium is rock and roll music and the pursuant ‘band’ organization and visual presentation. The original music and lyrics are structured within the commercial accessibility of rock and roll sound and contemporary popular language. Described as a cross between Ralph Nader, Lou Reed and Tony Perkins, lead singer David Byrne dresses like the proletariat everyman and relies on Chris Frantz and Martina Weymouth to complete their anti-individualist stance as a group concept.”
“When I came to New York I guess I was very naïve,” Byrne later told a reporter for Art News. “I expected the art world to be very pure and noble. I was repulsed by what I saw people putting themselves through, the hustling to try to get anywhere. My natural reaction was to move into a world that had no pretense of nobility. Since I’d always fooled around with a guitar, I formed a rock band. When Talking Heads took off, I didn’t have any more time for my art projects. I guess I consider the band my art project, although I hate to put any kind of label on it. Using the word ‘art’ tends to scare people off.”
Since the members of Talking Heads weren’t entirely comfortable with the art world, they migrated over to CBGB. No one knew it at the time, but they were forging a path from SoHo to the East Village which would soon be trod by many others. Once at CBGB, the group toned down its art-student rhetoric considerably. Unlike the Ramones, they didn’t attract flocks of groupies, but the audience seemed to enjoy seeing a band dressed in Oxford shirts and chinos that sang songs about life in the middle class. Byrne’s tortured stage persona reminded some of a suburban nerd gone mad, and the group’s best song from the period had a title guaranteed to appeal to the punk sensibility in anyone: “Psycho Killer.” (In writing the lyrics, Byrne may have been influenced by one of the greatest garage songs of all time, “Psycho” by the Sonics.) “Talking Heads jerry-built their own version of Top Forty bubble gum—absurd, exuberantly naïve little anthems to perseverance and confusion, mixed in with covers such as the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s “1, 2, 3 Red Light,” wrote music critic Tom Carson. “It was weirdly liberating.”
Although some artists were switching over to rock, others were searching for new ways to raise money. Grant-raising became a major preoccupation for many. In 1977, Michael McClard, Alan Moore, James Nares and Robin Winters founded Collaborative Projects (Colab), correctly assuming they would have less difficulty obtaining grants if they applied collectively.
Membership quickly swelled to several dozen. Diego Cortez, an early member, looks back on the era with regret. “As far as I’m concerned they should stop all funding for the arts,” says Cortez bitterly. “Look who gets the money: the professional art administrators! I hate the whole Colab aesthetic. They were fake radicals. There was a new aesthetic coming but they missed it. So did Laurie Anderson. These people were straddling the seventies. I abandoned ship. I gave up ten years of art training and my whole career in the art business and started hanging out at CBGB.”
A handful of Colab members joined Cortez at the club, including Nares, a performance artist and painter who had recently moved to New York from England. “I’d been starving for music my first couple of years in New York,” says Nares. “But when I went to CBGB I got really excited about music again. I got into the whole thing very quickly—dying my hair red one week and shaving it off the next. We consciously stood against what was happening in SoHo.” Cortez introduced Nares to another refugee from the TriBeCa scene, a saxophone player named James Siegfried, who had been prowling around the fringes of SoHo wearing a prominent scowl of disapproval and a full-length leather coat. Seigfried soon changed his name to James Chance and formed a band called the Contortions.
In 1977, both Nares and Chance moved into tenement apartments on East Third Street, which was rapidly becoming the center of a new scene. Tina Lhotsky, John Lurie, David McDermott, Eric Mitchell and Patti Astor were among those who had recently moved onto the block. “We were all jamming together, playing music and working on each other’s Super 8 films,” says Nares. When the Contortions played Max’s Kansas City that summer, Chance surprised his band members by sauntering into the audience and punching a few people. It wasn’t an entirely original gesture—Iggy Pop had done it several years earlier—but it made for a great show.
Due in part to Chance’s well-publicized stage antics, the Contortions quickly became a known attraction in the neighborhood. One night at CBGB, Chance met his future manager and lover, Anya Phillips. “Anya was the single most important spirit and inventor of half the things that went down in those days,” says deAk. “She was very influential for Deborah Harry [of Blondie], who definitely needed to punk out. Anya had the troops with her, the wild girls from the Midwest: Lydia Lunch, Pat Place, Adele Bertei. Third Street was where it was glued and blasted, even before it went to CBGB. When I think of those holy short moments when art happens—I think of that Third Street moment.”
Meanwhile, the national media was relentlessly attacking and ridiculing the punk movement. Sire Records, the company that had signed many of the original groups from CBGB, began an aggressive campaign to replace the word “punk” with a less threatening term: “New Wave.” However, just as this was happening, the film Saturday Night Fever was released. The movie launched disco as the most popular music in America, and suddenly punk- bashing became a popular sport for out-of-town teenagers visiting the East Village. “A lot of people told us to change our name,” says Holmstrom. “They said the punk thing was over. The amount of anti-punk sentiment was incredible. There was a rumor that President Carter said, ‘stop this punk thing’ during a jazz festival on the White House lawn.”
Despite these problems, Holmstrom brought out a special issue titled “Mutant Monster Beach Party,” which many consider his masterpiece. The entire issue was devoted to a parody of beach party and monster movies in the form of a film script written by Holmstrom, McNeil and Joey Ramone. The cast included the Ramones, Deborah Harry, Andy Warhol, Anya Phillips, John Cale, Lester Bangs, David Johansen, Edith Massey and many others, all of whom agreed to be photographed acting out scenes from the script. “People like it now, but the issue died on the stands,” says Holmstrom. Punk lost its publisher and was on the verge of collapse. With the end of publication in sight, Holmstrom responded in his next issue with one of his funniest cartoon strips—”Disco Maniac,” Punk’s answer to Saturday Night Fever. The strip showed the interior of a disco (patterned after Studio 54) filled with bald-headed men dressed in jogging shorts, running shoes and muscle T-shirts. The issue also included a review of CBGB, which had lost favor with the magazine’s staff. “This shithole sucks,” wrote the reviewer. “It’s been going downhill since it opened to rock. Now most people who go there are hippies, fags and heroin addicts trying to get their name in the papers.”
The review was really an attack on the club’s second generation of bands, a group billing itself as “No Wave.” Led by the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars and DNA, the No Wave groups were the most experimental rock bands to appear since the Velvet Underground. With songs like “I Don’t Want to Be Happy,” and “Contort Yourself,” Chance began fusing the angry energy of punk rock with the minimalist funk of James Brown. He played howling, free-form saxophone solos and often gave electrifying performances.
No Wave was far too grating and dissonant to find a wide audience, despite the fact that the bands were taken seriously in some quarters of the art world. In 1978, deAk invited six No Wave bands to perform at Artists Space, an event that had a profound impact on artists and musicians who had not yet acknowledged the importance of punk. Soon afterward, many people began looking for signs of punk in the art world. They didn’t have to look far. In April 1978, the first punk art exhibit was held in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Washington Project for the Arts and organized by Marc Miller and Bettie Ringma with the assistance of Alice Denney.
“It was just supposed to be a collaboration between Punk magazine and us with some photographs by Marcia Resnick taken at CBGB,” says Miller. “But the show got immense press coverage. All these artists suddenly wanted to get involved and the project kept escalating. A lot of people from New York came down to the opening.” A catalogue for the show addressed such issues as, “Does punk art exist, and if so, how serious is it?”, a question which was posed to such diverse artists as Neke Carson, John Holmstrom, Steven Kramer, Tina Lhostky, Tom Otterness, Alan Vega and Andy Warhol. The more intelligent answers sidestepped the issue entirely. When told that he invented punk art, Warhol replied, “No, we just knew a few drag queens.”
“The punks were totally anti-art,” recalls Cortez. “When Anya Phillips would introduce me to her friends at CBGB as an artist from SoHo, they would turn the other way.” However, in the next three years these barriers would crumble. The most significant artists of the next generation would emerge from the clubs instead of the galleries—Jean-Michel Basquiat from the Mudd Club, and Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf from Club 57.
NEW WAVE VAUDEVILLE
At David McDermott’s tenement building on Avenue C there is no telephone, no electricity and very little in the way of modern conveniences. Although the apartment is cluttered with antique furniture, stuffed animals, photographs and assorted memorabilia, it’s difficult to find a single object produced after 1920. The Victrola phonograph which sits in one corner dates from 1903. The walking stick with the solid gold handle mounted on the wall dates from 1880. In fact, the newest thing in the apartment—with the exception of McDermott himself—seems to be the Victorian revival wallpaper, which dates from the mid-1930s. It is April 28, 1985, and McDermott and his companion Peter McGough have just held their first painting exhibit at the Massimo Audiello Gallery. The paintings were executed on antique canvas and dated from 1884. Although the dates vary, all paintings made by McDermott and McGough are predated, usually something close to the turn of the century but occasionally as far off as A.D. 200. They think of themselves as time travelers.
McDermott enters the room and sits on a couch. He carries himself elegantly on a thin, wiry frame and his hair is greased and parted in the center. His long neck protrudes from an antique robe. Although he was a member of the original Third Street crowd, McDermott looks as if he’d be more comfortable in the pages of a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald than hanging around a punk rock club. Nevertheless, he made his debut in the downtown scene in 1978, with an appearance in the New Wave Vaudeville show. That same year he starred in several underground films, including Rome 78 and The Long Island Four. He is high-strung and excitable and speaks in a squeaky soprano voice.
“My opening number in New Wave Vaudeville had an Egyptian theme,” he recalls while pouring a cup of tea. “It was a commercial attempt to cash in on the King Tut exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. We were trying to be commercial then because we were sick of being poor. Everyone in the East Village was starving. Punk didn’t work because the mechanism for failure was built into it.”
Although McDermott admits New Wave Vaudeville was underappreciated and underfinanced (lasting only four performances with no one getting paid), he also believes it contributed to a shift away from the hardcore punk sensibility toward one that was considerably less destructive. It accomplished this by combining elements of pop culture, futurism, revivalism and gay cabaret, and by bringing together a wide range of performers, some of whom had only recently arrived in New York. Even more important, a few months after the show closed, the producers (Tom Scully and Susan Hannaford) teamed up with the director (Ann Magnuson) and organized Club 57, which continued exploring this aesthetic and eventually helped launch a number of important artistic careers.
McDermott was born in 1951 in Hollywood, California. He is the son of a Yugoslavian-Jewish father who survived a Nazi concentration camp and an upper-middle-class mother with roots in the Old South. The marriage dissolved soon after his birth and McDermott’s mother moved with him back to New Jersey, remarried and settled in Teaneck. At an early age, McDermott developed a fascination for Nazi memorabilia. After high school, he enrolled at Syracuse University, where he developed a passion for collecting antiques. Around 1970, McDermott joined a campaign to keep nuclear reactors out of the Hudson River Valley, painting posters that depicted farmers tilling their fi elds with a mushroom cloud looming in the background. He was living in a small house in the country without electricity and offered to host a press conference for the cause. In preparation for this event, he put a large sign by the road that read, RURAL DE-ELECTRIFICATION PROGRAM, 1928. “I was interested in the effect of tossing an old year into something to throw people off,” he explains. Later in the day, he played “You’re Driving Me Crazy” by Rudy Vallee on his wind-up Victrola. Inspired by repeated listenings to the song, he yanked down the power line to his house. “I just wanted to see the pristine beauty of the little house sitting in the middle of the land without this wire going into it,” he says. “Little did I know the electricity ran like Chinese Christmas lights into my house and then back again to the next farm. Here I thought I was living like an Amish person, when actually there was this electricity radiating at the corner of my house.”
By ripping down the line, McDermott had unwittingly disconnected the power for an entire township. Before long the neighbors began arriving.
“They came on foot, on horses, on tractors,” says McDermott. “Then the police came. Even the liberals I was working with were mad at me. They said I was destroying their plan to stop nuclear power.” Fortunately, the police took pity on him and dropped the charges.
While McDermott was enrolled at Syracuse an artist from New York named Richard Merkin visited the school. Merkin was a dapper dresser who wore starched collars and a bowler hat and smoked cigarettes custom-made in Turkey. “He personified what I wanted to be,” says McDermott. “I had already established a little society in Syracuse, but Merkin convinced me to move to New York. ‘You can be the greatest eccentric of Syracuse,’ he said, ‘and no one will ever hear of you in Utica.’ It struck me as absolutely true, so I began putting everything into moving to New York.”
He arrived in 1974 and immediately tried to join the New York art scene. Unfortunately, this task proved more difficult than he’d anticipated. “There were already too many painters coming to New York,” he says. “There weren’t enough art patrons to go around.” To solve this dilemma, McDermott renovated a brownstone apartment on West 82nd Street, filled it with imitation Old Master paintings (which he painted himself) and began posing as a wealthy patron of the arts, although he was earning less than $100 a week as a messenger boy.
Duncan Hannah, a handsome young painter who had recently arrived from Minneapolis to attend the Parsons School of Design, toured the apartment and was so seduced by McDermott’s illusion of wealth that he asked McDermott what his father did for a living. “I thought it was very rude to ask something like that,” recalls McDermott, “so I told him my father was president of Chase Manhattan Bank.” McDermott became Hannah’s patron and gave him his first art show at the apartment, printing up invitations and altering full-dress tails for him to wear. According to the invitation, the event was staged in 1952, the year of Hannah’s birth.
“After the opening, Duncan told some people I was a cheapskate,” says McDermott. “He said my champagne wasn’t good enough.” Appalled by these charges, McDermott decided to abandon his illusionary estate and move to the East Village.
“When I first came to New York, no one cared about painting,” says Hannah. “Everyone was trying to get into record company parties. The entourage from the back room at Max’s Kansas City held the keys to the city and glitter rock was the big thing.” After Hannah graduated from Parsons, he began hanging out at CBGB, where he met the Talking Heads. One night, Warhol came to see the group perform and Hannah and the band were invited to be photographed at Warhol’s Factory. “I met David Hockney at a bookstore and we became best friends for five days,” says Hannah. “He came to see my work, which was kind of flashy collages, very zeitgeist and trendy. He said nothing, smoked a cigar and drank tea.
There was a huge painting on the wall by Steven Kramer, who’d been in a band with me in Minneapolis. It was a portrait of Don Rickles with a knife in his head. Hockney couldn’t understand how I could live with such a terrible image. He invited me to an opening and I brought Steven along. When I introduced them, Steven stabbed Hockney in the chest with a fake knife. Hockney was terrified and recoiled in horror.”
That summer Hannah began conducting an informal salon for artists at his apartment in the West Village. “It was pretty wild,” says Min Thometz, who was 17 and had just arrived in New York from Minneapolis. “We used to go there every day and drink. Duncan had pictures of himself with Warhol and Hockney on the wall. He also had a poster of Jean-Paul Belmondo. At night we’d go to the East Village to play pool at this seedy place called the Hollywood Bar. Now it’s called Nightbirds. It was full of pimps and junkies and whores. Everyone wanted to be an artist but no one was making any money. Steven Kramer was a real strong personality. He was so reckless and funny. He was making these viewing boxes. You’d look inside and see a tiny theater filled with mice. He made one with a cat chained to the stage and when you pressed a button, the cat would move like King Kong, while all the mice jumped up and down. David McDermott tried to convince me that electricity was going to be obsolete in the future. I thought he was mad.”
“We were just a group of like-minded people with a lot of time on our hands,” explains Hannah. “I’d fallen in love with the Beat Generation and was drinking a lot. Steven was recognized as the primitive genius of the group. He was sort of inarticulate, so he’d express himself through absurd actions, some of which involved much risk to his life and limb. His lifestyle was chaotic, so you had no idea where his work came from. The boxes were such elegant curiosities, beautifully crafted and finished with wallpaper.”
Hannah, as it turned out, was working on a fantasy life almost as complex as McDermott’s: he worshiped Belmondo and often seemed to think he was a gangster living in Paris in the ’50s. “I went to a Contortions gig at Max’s and Amos Poe came up and asked me if I wanted to be in a movie,” says Hannah. “I told him I wasn’t an actor, but he said it didn’t matter. I figured it was a five-minute movie, so I asked him how long it was. He said it was a feature. I asked him when he planned to start shooting and he said in two weeks. I asked him when I could see the script and he said he hadn’t written it yet.”
Poe eventually decided to film a camp remake of Godard’s Breathless with Hannah playing the role of Belmondo. Deborah Harry agreed to play a supporting role. Poe needed more actors and put a casting notice in the Village Voice, which was answered by Patti Titchener and Eric Mitchell, two budding actors who were studying at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio.
Titchener had already changed her name to Patti Astor. Since Breathless was itself a camp takeoff on Hollywood gangster movies, Poe’s film, Unmade Beds, was almost absurdly removed from its original source material. “It may have started as camp,” deAk would say later of the entire scene. “But soon everything became extended into a double take, a triple take.” “We shot the movie in thirteen days,” says Hannah. “Every morning, Amos would give me a bottle of wine so I could get into character. The dialogue was pasted on the walls and there were many long silences as the actors searched for their cue cards. It gave the film an even greater existential flair.”
Because he’d directed The Blank Generation, the first punk rock film, Poe was already something of a father figure for the Third Street crowd. He found an apartment on the block and held a birthday party for his wife, Sarah Charlesworth. “It was a boring party because they were all smoking marijuana,” recalls McDermott. “I got to lecturing. I was interested in organizing society and getting all our friends to function as a group. I did my impersonation of the vocal refrain over the decades, demonstrating how people’s mannerisms and vocal styles had changed.” McDermott lectured and sang for over two hours until he got hoarse and had to stop. Several people were impressed with the marathon performance, including a friend of Poe’s named Tom Scully, who had recently graduated from SVA. Scully asked McDermott for his phone number.
“Tom began calling me and making overtures about coming to a meeting at his house to talk about a play or a show or something,” recalls McDermott. “I wasn’t going to go, but at the last minute I changed my mind based on the fact I might get something to eat.”
Scully assembled quite a collection of eccentrics for his meeting, but none stranger than McDermott, who had abandoned his role as an art patron and was now frequently posing as a 1930s woman living in a tenement slum. He dressed in period clothes, washed his dresses by hand and held elaborate tea parties for his friends, many of whom assumed he had lost his mind. “I would just cook and clean and iron clothes all the time,” says McDermott. “Many of my friends rejected me and said I was being stupid.” “He called himself Edith,” recalls Hannah. “It was almost too peculiar. You could never figure out if it was just some sort of conceptual stunt. If that was the case, then David was certainly the most extreme performance artist of his generation.” However, since Edith seldom ventured outside her apartment, McDermott appeared at the meeting dressed in a cotton suit, knickers and straw hat.
“Tom’s idea was to do something really low, some art thing involving drag queens in a basement,” says McDermott. “But I gave great speeches and convinced them to do something more ambitious. By this time, the term ‘New Wave’ was completely passé but we decided to pretend to be the New Wave just to get publicity.”
After reading a book on Tony Pastor, the legendary king of vaudeville, Scully decided to revive the vaudeville spirit of the old East Village. “It seemed like all these kids were hanging around waiting for something to happen,” says Scully. “Nothing was going on. There were still freaks and hippies in the East Village.” Like everyone else, Scully felt something was needed to define the growing energy everyone felt in the air. After several meetings with a variety of friends, Scully and his girlfriend Susan Hannaford appointed Ann Magnuson, a former theater student from West Virginia, to direct the show.
Flyers announcing auditions were plastered on St. Marks Place. “There was a big controversy over the word ‘punk’ at the time because it had such negative connotations,” recalls Hannaford-Rose (who has since married), “but I guess we were looking for punk acts. The flyer appealed to ‘Nazis, emotional cripples’ and any other stupid thing we could think of. We got a lot of strange responses. Just about anyone could be in it, as long as their act was under five minutes. Ann worked with them to keep it theatrical.”
Legitimate theaters proved far too expensive for their limited budget, so finding the right venue for the show was not easy. “One day we saw a flyer for Made in the USA, which is the title of a very obscure Godard film we’d been trying to rent,” says Hannaford-Rose. “We went to see if it was really the film, but it turned out to be some terrible band.” The trip was not a total loss, however, for the band was playing at a Polish veterans club called Irving Plaza, a squat, unimpressive four-story building on the corner of 15th Street and Irving Place. After ascending a marble staircase decorated with neo-classical motifs, they entered a large ballroom with a pair of crystal chandeliers. It was obviously the perfect environment for their show. Until recently, the club had been empty—the Polish veterans had long since moved away. “We immediately went to the management to discuss renting the hall,” says Hannaford-Rose. “Suddenly this fellow Stanley got in the way and told us if we wanted to do anything there, he’d have to have a cut of it.”
An affable man who spoke English with a halting accent, Stanley Stryhaski had emigrated to America from Poland in 1972 and was working as the superintendent of the Holy Cross Polish National Church on St. Marks Place. In 1973 he had organized a Saturday night social club in the church’s basement, complete with a cash bar and polka band. Unfortunately, the program was not a success. “The Polish people who make money move to New Jersey,” explains Stryhaski. “The poor ones who stay here—I’m sorry to talk like this, but it’s true—they drank too much and weren’t too high-class. I had too many problems with them.”
Strangely enough, Stryhaski found the local teenagers much better behaved. In fact, his devotion to punk rockers soon became legendary in the neighborhood. “So many bands came to see me and said, we’ll play for free, just let us play here. So I let four bands play one night. It was snowing and I thought nobody would come. But the basement was packed! Punks, mostly. The punks were better behaved than anyone in America. We just didn’t understand them. Then I went to Irving Plaza and they gave me use of the hall for very little money. I had an agreement that only I could do American shows there.” An uneasy meeting was held between Stryhaski and Scully and it was decided that Stryhaski would get the gate receipts.
A week before the show was scheduled to open, the producers decided to stage a publicity stunt. Dressed in outlandish outfits, Magnuson, McDermott and two others drove around the city in a Volkswagen convertible. McDermott shouted at passing strangers through a megaphone. As the car drove down the Bowery, McDermott began directing his comments to itinerant men on street corners. “You’ve been to the top!” he shouted. “You’ve made your millions and now you’ve fallen into the gutter! Well, hope is nigh… come to New Wave Vaudeville!” As the car stopped for a red light at the corner of Bowery and Houston, the driver noticed a man with a gun chasing the car. Without waiting for the light to change, he roared through the intersection. Oblivious to the incident, McDermott continued shouting through his megaphone. “We called the newspapers and told them there was going to be a punk rock riot in front of Manic Panic,” says Magnuson. Actually, there was only a fire-eater, who was part of the show, but the press failed to attend anyway, with the exception of Michael Shore from the Soho Weekly News, who took one look at the sparse crowd and was heard to comment, “So this is the punk rock riot?”
Despite a lack of pre-opening publicity, nothing would deter McDermott’s boundless enthusiasm. On opening night he rented a 1952 Rolls-Royce limousine and instructed Scully to obtain a giant searchlight for the purpose of drawing a crowd to the front of the theater. For nearly three hours McDermott drove around the city, excitedly preparing for his grand arrival. “I had free passes to the show in my pocket because I didn’t want to seem uncharitable as I broke through the crowds,” he recalls.
“When we drove up to the theater, the marquee lights were off. The street was empty. I stepped onto the sidewalk and for the sake of my friends inside the car shouted, ‘Thank you! Thank you! It’s a pleasure to be here!’ A bum came along and I handed him a ticket.” McDermott stomped off to his dressing room in a foul mood. Shortly before 8 P.M., McDermott peeked through the curtains and was grateful to find a modest crowd had gathered for the show. He took a seat in a rickety sedan chair and was hoisted onto the shoulders of four slaves dressed in loincloths. He was wearing a gold helmet and gold skirt. Aside from a mantle of Chiclets gum around his neck, he was barechested. In his hands were two scepters—ancient symbols for the upper and lower Nile. As the triumphant soundtrack from The Egyptian (a 1954 Hollywood epic starring Victor Mature) came blasting through the sound system, the litter slowly crossed the stage, passing in front of a gigantic backdrop of a Camel cigarette package.
The audience applauded as McDermott dismounted his throne by stepping on the back of one of his litter-bearers. He waved a scepter at Kristian Hoffman, his piano accompanist, who responded with the opening bars of “King of the Nile,” a song Hoffman had written for the occasion.
“They call me pharaoh,” warbled McDermott in a trilling falsetto. “All the hieroglyphics… say that I’m terrifi c… just look me up in the Book of the Dead.” Midway through the song, McDermott lifted his skirt and began pounding his feet on the stage. He had no training in dance, but he was wearing authentic 1920s tap shoes.
Dressed like a B- movie starlet, Donna Destri soon arrived with a placard announcing the first act. There were over 30 to follow, spanning every conceivable gamut of performance. Beanie the singing dog and the stripper who performed with a dancing bird were among the two most popular routines. Other favorites included: Man Parrish and Lance Loud, who sang a song as the Sparkelletos; Animal X, who came onstage smashing a pink guitar (a routine which later became her trademark); George Elliot, Page Wood, Jamie Kaufman and Ralf Mann, who came out with briefcases stuffed with foam guitars and performed a bizarre number called “Businessmen in Space”; and the Bellamo sisters, who sang the mystery date song, which was accompanied by a raffle in which members of the audience could win dates with two unnamed downtown celebrities. “I think everyone knew James Chance and Lydia Lunch were the dates,” says Tish Bellamo. “When the girl who won Chance came up to claim him, he either bit her or hit her. She screamed and said she was going to sue.” There were two intermissions, during which they showed trailers for films like Planet of the Apes to the accompaniment of Jimi Hendrix records. McDermott, who insisted on performing without the aid of amplification, was understandably horrified. “Acid rock!” he gasps. “I don’t know what could have been on their minds!”