Rip It Up and Start Again (33 page)

Despite these sixties roots, Tuxedomoon’s music looked toward the electronic eighties. Blaine L. Reininger and Brown originally met after enrolling in an electronic-music class at San Francisco’s City College, where each was blown away by the other’s end-of-semester performance. “Blaine’s effort was a full-blown ‘total art’ spectacle,” says Brown. “He sang and danced in a white smock, with a balloon headdress, backdropped by projected Super 8 films.” For his own piece, Brown set up a tape loop system as diagrammed on the back of Brian Eno’s
Discreet Music,
into which he played washes of string sounds using a Polymoog synth.

To help him with this school project, Brown had called on the technical skill of fellow Angel of Light member Tommy Tadlock. The great lost catalyst figure of San Francisco postpunk, Tadlock became Tuxe-domoon’s mentor/guru/technician/manager and later worked with Factrix, too, building bizarre sound-generating gizmos. When Reininger and Brown joined forces, they started rehearsing at Tadlock’s Upper Market Street house. “There, we all cranked out our weirdness together into something called Tuxedomoon,” recalls Brown. Tadlock played a crucial role as an “audio systems designer.” Blaine “played both electronic violin and guitar onstage, and Tommy designed ‘Treatment Mountain’ for him—a plywood pyramid displaying junction boxes or compressors or effects he had designed and built as well as an Echoplex.”

Tuxedomoon developed a style based partly on whatever instruments were handy (Reininger’s violin, Brown’s saxophone, Tadlock’s Polymoog synth) and partly on prohibitions. “The only rule was the tacit understanding that anything that sounded like anyone else was taboo,” says Brown. They were just starting when punk arrived, and although hearing “God Save the Queen” initially encouraged them, Tuxedomoon soon felt that punk had “ossified into a puritan dogma of guitars, bass, and drums and screaming vocalist,” says Brown. “When Blaine and I first started performing in public—a violin, a sax, a synth and a tape recorder—the crowd threw beer bottles and screamed, ‘Where’s the drummer?!’”

Gradually, Tuxedomoon expanded, not by taking on a drummer, but recruiting underground radio activist Peter Principle as bassist and incorporating performance artist Winston Tong and projections from filmmaker Bruce Geduldig into their live shows. Principle recalls an unstoppable flow of creativity: “Every three or four weeks we’d have a gig booked and say, ‘Let’s write a whole new show.’” The concerts grew ever more multileveled and visually arresting. “I can think of shows we did using tapes, live instruments, professional painted sets hanging onstage, a female chorus, Bruce’s film projections,” marvels Brown. Tong’s contribution would often take the uncanny form of dolls manipulated so that they appeared to be magically alive.

Around 1980, a lot of people had started talking up cabaret as an alternative model to the rock gig. Organizations like Cabaret Futura in London, groups like Kid Creole and the Coconuts, even synthpop idol Gary Numan, all looked back to prerock ideas of showbiz, while simultaneously glancing sideways to performance art and multimedia. Entertainment that was costumed, scripted, and choreographed, that didn’t hide its artifice but
reveled
in it, began to seem more honest than rock’s faux spontaneity. Tuxedomoon arrived at just the right moment to tap into this shift. “Other San Francisco performers like Joanna Went used props and audience interaction, but in a shock-oriented way, whereas we had a feeling for the cabaret thing,” says Principle. “That’s why we did wear tuxedoes in punk-rock clubs like the Mabuhay, like it was a dinner theater. And we had this concept of ‘loungezak’—Muzak made for existentially angsted New Wave people.”

Tuxedomoon even called their publishing company Angst Music. On songs such as “What Use?” and “7 Years,” cold electronics, shudders of violin, and lugubrious saxophone conjured an atmosphere of languid melancholy. From the
Scream with a View
EP to the second album,
Desire,
themes of anomie and modernity recurred. “Holiday for Plywood,” for instance, is about consumer paranoia and dream-home heartache: “You daren’t sit on the sofa/The plastic makes you sweat/The bathroom’s done in mirror tiles/The toaster wants your blood.”

Tuxedomoon’s aura of jaded elegance always seemed somehow European, and it was overseas that the group had their greatest impact. On the rare occasions that the group ventured into Middle America, they didn’t exactly get a warm reception. “In the American music scene at that time there was an attitude about authenticity,” says Principle. “Programmed rhythm was a foreign concept in America back then, and there was a lot of hostility toward drum machines.”

“TUXEDOMOON WERE KIND OF MENTORS
to us,” says Joseph Jacobs of Factrix. “Not musically, but in the sense of, ‘You can actually do this—be in a band with no drummer and have audiences.’ When we started Factrix, we didn’t even talk about having a drummer. We knew we wanted to do something different, so we removed one of the key components of rhythm and blues.”

Excited by PiL’s and Throbbing Gristle’s adventures in sonic mutation, Factrix built their own modified instruments (“glaxobass,” “radioguitar,” “amputated bass”) with Tommy Tadlock’s assistance. They also experimented with bizarre protosynths called Optigans that Tadlock had acquired. “‘Optigan’ stood for optical organ,” says Bond Bergland. “They were instruments for the family to play songs on, with the songs stored on these clear plastic acetates, which the Optigan read through some kind of light-reading device.” Factrix quickly realized that “you could put the acetates in upside down and backward, play them the wrong way. That was what was really inspiring to us at the time, ‘Let’s see what happens if we do this
wrong
.’”

Factrix tried anything and everything that wasn’t standard rock instrumentation—whistling tea kettles, an inexpensive early sequencer called the Mutron—“but really the main instrument was Joseph’s tape recorder,” says Bergland. Along with technology, Factrix were equally interested in premodern and non-Western sounds, ethnic instruments like the
doumbek
and
saz
. “Even the drum machine rhythms were trying to mimic African drumming in a very loose way, inspired by field recordings,” Bergland explains. “This was years before ‘world music’ existed. My thinking was, ‘If something sticks around for thousands of years, it probably has some meaning, something real about it.’” In this fascination for ecstatic ritual music, Factrix were a couple of steps ahead of Throbbing Gristle.

With its picturesque hills and quaint cable cars, its foggy bay and idyllic Golden Gate Park, San Francisco doesn’t immediately seem like an “industrial” city. Yet the downtown area south of Market Street was full of inexpensive lofts formerly used for light manufacturing, and the “industrial element” of repurposing these spaces for artistic activity was “a big part of San Francisco culture,” says Jacobs. San Francisco ranked alongside Sheffield and London as a bastion of industrial music, too. Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle performed to huge crowds in San Francisco. TG even played their last gig at Kezar Pavilion in 1981.

The city was home to the unofficial fifth member of TG, Monte Cazazza, a performance artist and renegade researcher of all things aberrant and unwholesome. He describes himself as an “outcast historian, a cultural mortician.” Cazazza, Factrix, and Mark Pauline from Survival Research Laboratories formed “a little scene,” according to Bergland. Together they staged a series of mixed-media extravaganzas that left audiences reeling. Instead of playing punk clubs like Mabuhay, Bergland says, “we wanted to make spectacles so people were aware this was an unusual event. The first one we did together was at the Kezar Pavilion. Monte made a big stainless-steel swastika spinning on an axis, handcuffed himself to it, and hung upside down.”

Mark Pauline wasn’t a musician but a sort of crackpot inventor who staged apocalyptic battles between robots he’d constructed. An alumnus of Eckerd College in Florida alongside DNA’s Arto Lindsay and Mars’ Mark Cunningham, Pauline participated in San Francisco’s first Punk Art Show in 1978 and made his debut solo performance with
Machine Sex
the following year. “When Survival Research Laboratories threw an event, it really was a spectacle,” says Jacobs. “It was like seeing a live movie. There was always this edgy element of danger because these machines were crude. Things would explode when they shouldn’t, or wouldn’t explode when they should!”

The most infamous multimedia shockfest staged by SRL, Cazazza, and Factrix—June 1981’s
Night of the Succubus
—involved Pauline making artificially animated animal corpses like the “rabot,” fashioned from metal, electrical wire, and rotting bunny. “We got all these meat parts and sewed them onto this robot,” Pauline recalled. “We used pig feet, pig hide, and a cow’s head and bolted it onto this little feller. It had a motor on it, and when you turned the motor on, it would just vibrate and shake like he was sick, like he maybe had a fever.” Christened Piggly Wiggly, the grotesque chimera could also turn its head and move its arms. “The last song of the night, we did a twenty-minute version of ‘Helter Skelter’ from
The White Album,
and it sounded like the soundtrack to World War Three,” recalls Bergland. “Mark had made these air guns out of eight-foot pipes, and he’d taken all these eighteen-inch steel bolts and sharpened them to a razor point. And they were shooting these darts at incredible velocity over the heads of the audience into Piggly Wiggly, who was being pulled over the audience’s head on a tether. After Piggly was full of darts, Joseph drilled out all his teeth, so the whole place was filled with cow-teeth dust. A few people got freaked out. For us it was just superdeep, darkest black humor.”

Factrix were engrossed by all things morbid and extreme. But there was also an otherwordly impulse in their music, a psychedelic yearning to jettison language and escape time, to “scramble thought patterns, break up the syntax,” as singer and lyricist Cole Palme put it. Bergland’s guitar was blatantly trippy, billowing up in gaseous arabesques that placed him in the tradition of West Coast acid rock and
kosmische
Krautrockers like Manuel Göttsching. “I don’t so much recall that we were tripping when we were making the music so much as we were tripping when we were performing,” chuckles Jacobs. Friends who “wanted to ensure an interesting musical experience for themselves” would ply the band with magic mushrooms. “Drugs weren’t really informing our sonic experiments on a daily basis, though,” says Bergland, citing both poverty and “a strong work ethic” as reasons. “The mystical part of Factrix was the same as Coltrane or any musician who’s trying to get to the place where the music is free. The sounds, they really did have a life of their own. We were really just following the sounds. We were disciples of feedback.”

“Disciples of feedback” would also be a good description of the band Chrome, who were tagged “industrial” but really were much closer to Throbbing Gristle’s original self-description as “post-psychedelic trash.” The band’s musical genius, Helios Creed—an LSD-gobbling Hendrix fiend who’d migrated from his native Hawaii to San Francisco just a little too late for psychedelia’s golden age—developed a guitar sound that was “acid” in both the corrosive and hallucinogenic senses of the word. It also sounded metallic, not in the sense of the heavy-metal genre so much as in the way that it conjured visions of twisted and torn car flesh.

The band was actually started by Damon Edge, who graduated from CalArts in Los Angeles, where he’d studied with Allen Kaprow, best known for pioneering “happenings” in the sixties. While at CalArts, Edge also dabbled in avant-garde composition, conducting tape experiments and making what he called “not quite right music,” some of which ended up on porn movie soundtracks. Chrome’s debut,
The Visitation,
was recorded in 1976, before Creed joined the band, and sounded like a belated West Coast trip band somewhere in the vicinity of Santana and Hot Tuna. When Creed arrived in 1977 to add his harshly treated guitar to Edge’s synth and science-fiction lyrics, Chrome made a quantum leap. They went from psychedelic Johnny-come-latelies to “making music for 1995,” as Edge put it.

A turning point in this process came when Creed heard
Never Mind the Bollocks
for the first time at Edge’s house. “I didn’t know what to think at first, but the more we listened to it, the more we got behind it. So we decided, ‘Wow, let’s be a
punk
band. Let’s cut our hair!’ Then Damon played me these whacked-out tape loops he’d made in art school and I was like, ‘Man, this is the best shit you’ve done. Let’s mix our punk shit with your weird acid shit. And let’s call ourselves ‘acid punk.’”

In punk DIY style, Chrome released their own records, but only out of necessity. After being rejected by local indie label Beserkley, Edge borrowed money from his wealthy parents and started his own label, Siren, in order to release 1978’s
Alien Soundtracks
(the first Chrome album with Creed). “All the early copies, the first three hundred or so, were pressed up by hand with a crank,” recalls Creed. “That was the cheapest way you could get records manufactured. And we glued the covers together ourselves.”
Alien Soundtracks
and its 1979 sequel,
Half Machine Lip Moves,
made Chrome cult figures, especially in Germany and the U.K.

Chrome called their sound “acid punk,” but “cyberpunk” would do just as nicely (indeed, one of the band members went by the name John L. Cyborg). It’s easy to imagine Chrome classics such as “Chromosome Damage,” “All Data Lost,” and “Abstract Nympho” as the cold-rush soundtrack for
Neuromancer,
the 1985 genre-defining cyberpunk novel by William Gibson, who a few years earlier actually wrote a short story entitled “Burning Chrome.” Edge and Creed were both science-fiction fanatics. But Creed says that the pair’s inspirations came more from movies than books, and leaned toward the space fantasy end of things, albeit with an apocalyptic slant. “When I was in Hawaii I saw a UFO hovering right over my head. That really influenced me. Me and Damon had all these theories about how you could be channeled by aliens. They could make music through you that wasn’t normal.”