Lucking Out (23 page)

Not that there weren’t macabre laughs to be had, even while so many on the scene seemed to wall-paint their moods a malevolent shade of black. As I wrote in the
Voice
in 1977:

The Cramps began getting noticed at CBGB’s in 1976, it being hard not to notice a rockabilly band that was a cross between the Addams Family and inmates of a juvenile detention center, its lead singer named Lux Interior and the guitarist a Batman villainess called Poison Ivy, whose mushroom-cloud wig could cushion any fall, the five of them banging out a beat that lurched from side to side like skeletons swinging their bones. “I’m Cramped” may have been the band’s personal anthem, but “Sunglasses After Dark” (about how wearing a cool pair of shades turns every night outing into an obstacle course) was the song fans adopted as their passport. The band called the Sic Fucks—whose backup singers, Tish and Snooky (the Laverne and Shirley of the East Village), dressed onstage in nuns’ cowls and Bettie Page lingerie, were the entrepreneurial founders of the St. Marks Place landmark store Manic Panic—endeared themselves with such plainly felt sentiments as “St. Louis Sucks” and “Chop Up Your Mother,” the lead singer, Russell Wolinsky, doing a hilarious running patter between numbers like some Catskills emcee, mocking punk pretenders and crusaders (he could be scathing about the Clash and their commando attitude), the scene having evolved far enough to burlesque itself. But even these laughs seemed to have been scraped off the crusty sides of the tension in the air, signs of a decadent phase.

It wasn’t until the B-52s arrived from Athens, Georgia, like a megadose of vitamin D, that genuine smiles seemed to sunrise in people’s heads unaccompanied by sarcastic critique. When they first took the stage at Max’s and CBGB’s, they were greeted by giggles and hollow whoops, the suspicion being that they were some kind of joke band, what with Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson in beehive hairdos and the lead singer, Fred Schneider, apparently ready for a luau. But when they kicked into “52 Girls,” their sound was more tight-meshed and shone like silver foil, and there were actual
harmonies
—so wondrously alien to our jackhammered ears—and when Fred rocked out during the instrumental bridges, he moved his arms and legs around until we recognized what it was: something known as
dancing.
Would marvels never cease? Patti Smith would every now and then do a Sufi twirl, if there was room, but breaking into an unembarrassed Frug seemed a violation of some local ordinance or tribal law. And when Cindy, beautiful Cindy, shouted the seemingly silly lyric “Why won’t you dance with me?/I’m not no Limburger,” her voice hoarsening into a grainy scrape of pleading, it was a needy cry so unlike the aura of invincibility that you expected from a band brandishing such upbeat Day-Glo colors and kitschy-kitschy coo. Ricky Wilson, the Bees’ guitarist and Cindy’s brother, would die of AIDS at the age of thirty-two in the mid-eighties, a victim of the devastation that extinguished so many talents of that young generation of gay men and left a permanent gray void, a lost kingdom of creative possibility, as symbolized by Ricky’s grave site in Athens, Georgia, his headstone a miniature pyramid where visitors leave flowers and trinkets.

Sophomore jinx isn’t just for baseball pitchers, and the second albums of both Patti Smith and Television got a more mottled reception than their rapturous firsts.
Radio Ethiopia
sounded like a clogged exhaust fan to some reviewers, especially its title track, ten minutes of electronic dental flossing, and the opening lines of “Pissing in a River”—“Pissing in a river/Watching it rise”—led to wiseacre remarks about the huge holding capacity of Patti’s bladder. Television’s
Adventure
had some stunners—“Glory,” “Ain’t That Nothin’,” the tidal roll of “The Dream’s Dream”—but the title song sounded like a TV-jingle sea chantey (“Adventure/I love adventure”), and
Marquee Moon
’s tight grip of tension escaping through a clenched fist was missing, the curtain-parting sense of eventfulness dissipated into too much immaculate musicianship. The critical reaction was a shower of petals compared with the welcoming from the uninitiated. When Television toured with Peter Gabriel (the founder of the group Genesis gone solo) to promote
Adventure
, they were met onstage by a hard rain of objects hurled at them from an unappreciative audience that was unappreciative before the first guitar chord was struck, that is, on ignorant principle. In theory, Gabriel fans should have come from a more refined stratum of rock enthusiast; in practice, they were just as happy as your subaverage heavy-metal fan to exercise their throwing arms. With his analytical dispassion exercised at a dreamy remove, Verlaine described to me what it was like to be under grenade attack from an assortment of bottles, cans, and small batteries. “There was no time to duck or react, because the stage lights were so bright that you couldn’t see what was being thrown until it broke through that bright screen, materializing out of nowhere, as if the darkness itself had thrown it.” He might have been an astronomer describing a shower of space debris, except that this debris was fired on purpose with his name on it.

Patti, she fell into the darkness, a black hole just waiting beyond the edge. Touring after the release of
Radio Ethiopia
, she was opening for Bob Seger in Tampa, Florida, when, during “Ain’t It Strange,” she danced herself off the stage and hit the concrete floor of the orchestra pit fifteen feet down, breaking neck vertebrae and putting herself out of commission for a year, which was preferable to some of the alternatives. A fall like that could have been fatal. During her recuperation I visited Patti at the airy apartment of Blue Öyster Cult’s Allen Lanier at One Fifth Avenue, where Patti was still getting used to swiveling around with a neck brace that seemed to hold her prisoner. She wasn’t in bad spirits, considering, but each movement involved precautionary effort that you sensed her gauging inside her head, measuring in increments, which was sobering after seeing her spirit-glide in flowy half circles around the stage before. At one point she asked me if I’d seen anything lately I liked, and I went into a rhapsody about Twyla Tharp’s dance
Push Comes to Shove
, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov at his most
Guys and Dolls
quick-cool, and after I described the stop-start vocabulary of Tharp’s choreography with a rough-sketch demonstration, Patti said, as if informing me of a little fact I might have overlooked: “I do that onstage.” A mild comment that jerked the reins of my insensitivity, snapping my mind awake to what my stupid mouth was doing: raving about erratic, eloquent, jazzy movement to someone with broken vertebrae in a neck brace having to hold herself as stiff as Elsa Lanchester in
Bride of Frankenstein.
Truth was, she
didn’t
do that onstage, even when her chakras were uncongested, but she was determined to stick up for herself, not out of false pride, but because hanging tough is what divides the long-range dedicated from the dilettantes. It wasn’t until my dumb feet were back on the sidewalk that I registered that she had used the present tense—not “I’ve done that,” but “I do that.” She hadn’t let a chasm open in her mind between Before the Fall and After. It was all one continuum, something Buddhism teaches but hardly anyone ever practices.

Although CBGB’s remained my main port of call, I hit other venues to see other bands as the underground/punk/new wave/neo-minimalist/post-punk/No Wave scene spoked off uptown and crosstown, to Danceteria and Hurrah and the Mudd Club, the latter having its own status strata and a more arty-boho attitude of enclosure than one encountered on the Bowery. (Though the rats that milled outside on the blocks adjoining White Street were, if anything, plumper and more capable of playing for the NFL.) As the bands I had first seen at CBGB’s became irregulars now that touring had become their new mistress, my own visits became more infrequent, tapering off to nil once hardcore with its boots, stubbled heads, and mosh-pit crocodile feedings seized the banner as if it were a pikestaff with a head attached. Hardcore was too hortatory and single-minded for me, a power tool with only one fast speed. But each to his own bedlam.

After an absence of many years, during which I was introduced to adulthood, I made a little pilgrimage down the Bowery, part of a reunion tour. It was around midday. Rain spattered from a pouty, gray sky that had little to recommend itself, the rainfall light enough for the drops to make contact individually, though it was clear heavier reinforcements were on the way. The Bowery had seldom looked so indifferent to itself. And yet it was a warm occasion that brought me—us—here, a trio of former alumni. I was rendezvousing with Mary Harron and Fran Pelzman, whom I had met at CBGB’s when we were young and pale and new to the show. Mary was more than pale, closer to spectral, as I discovered one afternoon when I ran into her on the street months after we had first met each other and did a double take. It was the first time I had seen her in daylight—she looked like something out of Henry James. Canadian by birth, educated in England, Mary imported a cool, accepting air of refinement to any room steeped in squalor, a probing curiosity attached to a deep appreciation for comedy that would come in handy in her role as
Punk
magazine’s touch of class. Originally a print journalist, Mary began writing and directing feature segments for the BBC’s
Late Show
, a cultural review show where we collaborated on a segment devoted to Martin Amis (during which we re-created his arrival at Oxford with a soundtrack choir of angels). When the
Late Show
and Channel 13/PBS co-produced an arts program called
Edge
, though public television being public television, whatever “edge” there was was soon filed away by the genteel overseers of caution under the Emasculation Proclamation that seemed to be PBS’s primary directive. But before the bland-down began, we managed to do funny, imaginative visual essays on Norman Mailer’s
Harlot’s Ghost
, the shock comedy of Andrew “Dice” Clay, and a never-aired visit to the luxury crypt overlooking Central Park South that was the diabolical lair of Albert Goldman, then at the height of his celebrity-defamation infamy, a mini-feature that was shot as an Expressionist horror film and never shown in the States, the corporate plug pulled on
Edge
before it could be aired. Mary went on to execute beautifully designed and comic outrages of her own as the director of
I Shot Andy Warhol
and the screen adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s
American Psycho
, in which Christian Bale’s cheekbones would be immortally etched as emblems of psychopathic yuppie evil.

Fran, who used to date Television’s Billy Ficca, went on to write a guide to Cute Guys and later married the brilliant economics writer and
Barron’s
contributor John Liscio, her life as a suburban mom sliced in two when John died of liver and kidney failure at the age of fifty-one, leaving her a widow with two children. She can be seen briefly in
Blank Generation
too, sitting at a table near the front. Fran and Mary weren’t paying a nostalgic courtesy call to CBGB’s; they were revisiting the shrine to research a possible film version of
Please Kill Me
, the oral history of punk that had become the
Paradise Lost
for those who ached for the gritty crucible they had never known, the train they had missed. (There was a young actor I thought would be perfect to play Verlaine, a guy on the TV series
Freaks and Geeks
named James Franco.) The Jungian analyst and author James Hillman once observed that some cultural moments and institutions exert an afterlife hold on the imagination through the anecdotes and incidents that accrue into a coral reef of true myth—or, as he put it in three little words, “all that lore.” All that lore is what made CBGB’s compelling long after it became a raucous shell, and what has kept the myth of the Algonquin Round Table alive, no matter how mid-range the achievements of Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, and Robert Benchley appear today, or how downright dropped-off-the-map the names of Alexander Woollcott and Heywood Broun are. Same for the Beats—they were a self-aware, self-promoting lore syndicate whose exploits still inspire hipster doofuses today, at least those who forswear irony. Lore is publicity that lasts long after there’s nothing left to publicize.

Through the front doors of CBGB’s we went, and there, sitting at his desk in the front, was bearded Hilly, as if he had not left his outpost since we had last seen him, the lone survivor of a deserted fort. The bar only hung with a contemplative weight of desolate quiet because it was early afternoon, not because it was closed for business, but we still felt a subdued piety because so many memories were held here in this living-dying museum that was once our skinny hangout. Hilly welcomed us sweetly, interrupting and then restarting a conversation with a contractor or inspector that had the Pinteresque aspect of missing parts in the dialogue that gave the bits we were hearing an occult quality, broken pieces of a ritualistic spell. We wandered around, so much as it was, but more so. The walls—they were like the drawings and inscriptions on the inside of a sacred grotto, layers upon faded layers of flyers for long-gone bands, rogue galaxies of graffiti, the Pompeian remains of the punk proletariat, so much more powerful than they appeared in photography books about CBGB’s, more charged with presence and the absence of the hundreds of hands that had contributed every indecorous dab. I descended to the bathrooms downstairs, and they were just as Dantesque as ever, the stall-less toilet resting like a debauched throne, like the only thing left after a lightning bolt had blackened everything else to cinders and char. I experienced a tender awe amid this necropolitan splendor that had managed to be
left alone
, raising itself with minor supervision, as punk itself had.