Rip It Up and Start Again (42 page)

Using money from his father’s business, Steve Maas sponsored a club that was less like a discotheque or rock venue than a bohemian salon and performance art space. “In the rock business, you need a very strong brand identity, but the Mudd was the complete opposite of that,” Maas says. “We had this incredibly diversified program. One day we’d do some avant-garde composer and the next it would be the Plasmatics.” Upstairs, the Mudd even had a late-night art gallery featuring shows by downtown artists. “Robert Christgau described the Mudd as the citadel of dilettantism,” laughs Maas.

Before focusing on the Mudd, Maas was something of a dilettante himself, flitting from studying philosophy and art history to autodidactically undertaking explorations of anthropology to dabbling with avant-garde filmmaking. When punk rolled around, Maas threw himself into documenting the scene almost like an ethnomusicologist, shooting 16 mm footage of bands such as the Dead Boys. He then attempted to make a documentary with Diego Cortez and Anya Philips, No Wave scenesters who first broached the idea of starting a “punk discotheque” as downtown’s riposte to Studio 54. Maas launched the club in the only area he could afford, an industrial zone of Chinatown where virtually no one lived. Following the anti–Studio 54 concept, the Mudd’s decor was spartan and glitz-free. Instead of a velvet rope out front, it famously had a metal chain. Maas used the cheapest materials he could find at the discount stores on Canal Street and decorated the bar with air maps. “I had a pilot’s license and I took all these maps and coated them with plastic.”

The Mudd Club’s equivalent to Ann Magnuson was a magnetic blond beauty called Tina L’Hotsky who organized many of the most celebrated theme nights. L’Hotsky’s tour de force was the
Rock ’n’ Roll Funeral,
a tribute to dead stars such as Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, and Jim Morrison. Maas paid for real hearses, coffins, and floral wreathes. “I’m not sure Steve made that much money from the Mudd in the end because he would spend more on parties than he could ever make back,” says writer Gary Indiana, in those days a Mudd mainstay who infamously organized a benefit for
himself
at the club.

Another lavishly appointed theme night was the
Soul Party,
a massive installation organized by Michael Holman, a friend of Basquiat’s. “Upstairs we had a soul kitchen with all this food from Sylvia’s Kitchen, black-eyed peas and candied yams. In the back was a pimp’s bedroom with plastic love beads, mirrored ceilings, and a giant bed with orange fur pile. We had a beauty parlor with hairdryer chairs from a Brooklyn parlor. Downstairs I was deejaying, playing all this late-sixties/early-seventies funk music that most people at the Mudd had never heard.”

Holman and Basquiat were both in an art noise outfit called Gray. Although No Wave was fading and the more groovy sounds of punk funk and mutant disco were taking over, artists still believed that rock music was the hot spot of the culture, not to mention the quickest route to finding fame, fortune, and artistic impact. So future filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, for instance, fronted a moody, atmospheric outfit called the Del/Byzanteens, while actor/director Vincent Gallo was briefly a member of Gray and made ethereal lo-fi sound collages on his own. As for Basquiat, he was starting to get media attention for the omnipresent SAMO graffiti he did with Al Diaz, but he also felt the pull of music.

Gray is virtually undocumented in terms of recordings, the sole exception being the lengthy instrumental “Drum Mode,” which was resurrected on the 2002 compilation
Anti NY.
It’s a shame, because “Drum Mode,” all stealthy, twilight-zone percussion and weird noise tendrils, suggests that Gray were a remarkable group. Recalling his postpunk dabblings for the
New York Times,
Basquiat talked about being inspired by John Cage and the idea of “music that isn’t really music. We were trying to be incomplete, abrasive, oddly beautiful.” According to Holman, Gray evolved into “a sound-noise thing, like you were in a factory and the machines would turn themselves on and try to make music when the humans went home.” Basquiat himself played “a fucked-up little toy synth with colored keys through some effects boxes,” recalls Richard McGuire of the legendary punk-funk band Liquid Liquid, who shared a few bills with Gray.

Gray’s most celebrated moment occurred at the Mudd Club in 1979. “I decided I wanted to do this crazy geodesic dome,” recalls Holman. “I went to the Bronx and rented one hundred dollars’ worth of scaffolding.” Holman placed the other members of Gray—Gallo, Nick Taylor, and Wayne Clifford—so that they jutted out of the dome in disconcerting fashion. “Vince and Wayne were four feet off the ground, strapped in at forty-five-degree angles with their keyboards. Nick was so high up in the scaffolding that through the whole set all you could see was his feet. My head popped up from the surface of the stage.” After hours of preparation, Basquiat finally deigned to turn up for the sound check. “Jean doesn’t say a word, just turns around and leaves. I’m thinking: ‘Oh my God, is he coming back?’ Jean comes back in under five minutes with this crate he found in the garbage and throws it onstage. And then, like a mummy in an urnlike sarcophagus, he scrunches his body into this three-foot cube thing and stuffs the synth in with him. And he looks at me and smiles. It was like, you could spend forever making something happen and he’d blow it away with one gesture!”

After Gray faded away, Basquiat left one more faint footprint on music history with his role as producer and arranger on 1983’s “Beat Bop,” a cult classic of avant-garde hip-hop by a visionary (or possibly just deranged) MC called Rammelzee. Basquiat was a key facilitator in the three-way connection that formed between the post–No Wave scene, the SoHo art world, and the nascent hip-hop culture of the South Bronx. But it was actually Holman, in tandem with graffiti artist Fab Five Freddy, who organized the Canal Zone party of April 1979, the event that introduced graffiti to the downtown art scene. A snapshot of this glorious era of New York crosstown traffic circulated around the world in the form of Blondie’s graffiti-decorated video for the hit single “Rapture,” in which Basquiat and Fab Five Freddy make cameo appearances. The song also features Debbie Harry’s endearingly dire attempt at rapping, making her quite possibly the first white MC on the pop charts.

Border crossing and musical hybridity were the name of the game at ZE, the New York label that trailblazed the shift from No Wave’s sadomasochistic aesthetic to the more subtle subversions of mutant disco. Writer and downtown New York scenester Luc Sante succinctly and accurately defines the genre’s “potent formula” as “
anything at all
+ disco bottom.” It’s not clear who coined the term “mutant disco,” but it first appeared as the title of a celebrated 1981 compilation that introduced ZE to many listeners. In his
Mutant Disco
liner notes,
NME
’s Ian Penman hailed ZE for its genre bending and genre blending. “Most music you’re likely to find turning around a ZE label will either be edging towards an idiom of its own—if it isn’t already there—or in the process of wrecking the one you might be tempted to wrap it up in.”

Alongside the James White and the Blacks project, ZE’s first full-blown foray into mutant disco was Cristina. She was actually ZE cofounder Michael Zilkha’s girlfriend (the pair had met at the
Village Voice,
where they’d both written theater reviews), and his concept was to turn her into a sort of highbrow disco diva with urbanely witty lyrics dripping with James Chance–style dead-hearted cynicism. “Disco Clone,” Cristina’s first single, was a gorgeously orchestrated satire of the discotheque as meat market, featuring a cameo performance from Kevin Kline (then a Broadway star) as a polyester-clad Lothario. Her finest moments, though, came with a cover of Leiber and Stoller’s “Is That All There Is?” (with added lyrics about S&M and Quaaludes for extra jadedness) and the genuinely harrowing “Things Fall Apart.”

Cristina’s self-titled debut album was produced and mostly written by August Darnell, who came from outside the whole postpunk scene. As the lyricist in his brother’s group, Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, he’d tried to bring to disco the sort of sophisticated panache last seen in popular music during the forties and fifties. A fan of Hollywood musicals, Darnell saw each Savannah Band song as “a mini-screenplay.” But despite critical plaudits for their 1976 debut,
Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band,
the band never made it, partly because they had way too many clever ideas for the disco market, and partly, says Zilkha, because “it all imploded when [August’s] brother Stony went off into a drug-induced haze.” Taking full control of the reins as bandleader and front man of a new group called Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Darnell, still dreaming of getting his songs on Broadway, renovated the 1940s big-band sound for the multicultural eighties, blending sundry sultry rhythms (salsa, calypso, rhumba, reggae, funk) with witty lyrics that flashed back to a lost golden age of quality songwriting, but whose topics (like impotence, in “Mr. Softee”) had a thoroughly modern edge.

Critics on both sides of the Atlantic hailed Darnell’s resurrection of the bygone art of the torch song, as heard on a pair of Kid Creole albums released by ZE,
Off the Coast of Me
and
Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places
. They also dug his creed of “creole” music. “Creole is the combination of French and blacks in New Orleans,” Darnell explained. “I use it as a beautiful symbol of the amalgamation of different cultures musically.” Darnell told
NME
that he’d developed this notion of musical miscegenation thanks to his brother. “Blacks had their ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,’ whites had their movement of the superior race, so Stony said Mulattos should be proud of being half-breeds. They should stand on a pedestal and say, ‘Hey, I’m the best of both worlds.’”

Musically vivacious, Kid Creole’s lyrical heart was often distinctly dark, much like Was (Not Was), ZE’s other great exponent of dance music with a noir twist. Don Was and David Was (who are not actually brothers—their real names are Don Fagenson and David Weiss) cited Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco (pioneer of the Theater of the Absurd) as influences, along with the Marx Brothers. Their version of mutant disco came freighted with “postacid disillusionment,” as Zilkha put it. Originally from Detroit, the duo had participated in the whole sixties adventure, involving themselves in guerrilla theater and the White Panther movement. Written by David Was, a former rock critic, the lyrics emerged barbed and bleak, with songs such as “Out Come the Freaks” attuned to the savage ironies and grotesqueries of post-Nixon America. “Tell Me That I’m Dreaming” was a roiling funk tune that performed a cheeky cut-and-splice job on a Ronald Reagan speech, making the president confess, “Can we who man the ship of state…deny…it is somewhat out of control?” “Wheel Me Out” and “Oh, Mr. Friction” sounded like paranoid schizophrenia remixed for dance floor action. Musically, too, Was (Not Was) carried traces of late-sixties Detroit, their fusion of hard funk, hard rock, and harsh jazz recalling Funkadelic and MC5 (whose Wayne Kramer played shrieking guitar on “Wheel Me Out”). “If it sounds like we’re not slaves to a certain style, it’s because Detroit is such a style salad,” David Was explained. “We grew up on the best of black and white, you could get it any which way you liked. So we couldn’t just make a formula record, what fun would that be?”

A similar soundclash of seeming opposites resulted in the electrifying “Bustin’ Out” by Material. Before hooking up with ZE, the band—bassist Bill Laswell, synth player Michael Beinhorn, and drummer Fred Maher—had been a progressive-fusion outfit, funky but abstruse. Zilkha managed to extract the best record of Material’s lengthy career by imposing a strict concept. “With ‘Bustin’ Out,’ I wanted them to make a record with a disco beat and be as strange as they wanted on top,” he recalls. At Zilkha’s request, Material slathered squealing heavy-metal guitar all over the song’s electrodisco groove, anticipating the rock/funk fusion of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” For lyrics, the group used the prison letters of Black Panther George Jackson and got fiery-voiced R&B diva Nona Hendryx to sing the words. “Material delivered exactly what I’d wanted,” says Zilkha. “‘Bustin’ Out’ was a cynical, manufactured record. But not really—I believed that was what we
should
be making.”

Material and Was (Not Was) fit ZE’s philosophy, which was based on confusion in the etymological sense—bringing things together that were normally kept strictly separate. ZE and its bands defied rockbiz norms of predictable brand and band identity. As Penman wrote in his
Mutant Disco
sleeve notes, “at any given point any number of nameless or famous people could be involved in a Material or Was (Not Was) song.” But inevitably this led to confusion in the consumer retail sense. Apart from Kid Creole’s brief success in the U.K., none of ZE’s acts made it in the huge mainstream way Zilkha envisioned. “All of my bands were
too clever,
and it took me ages to understand that ‘clever’ isn’t necessarily it,” he says ruefully. “Truly great rock music is not clever. Don’t get me wrong, I love all my records, but they’re not elemental like Joy Division or Neil Young. I could create the illusion of elemental-ness with very loud guitars, like on ‘Wheel Me Out’ or ‘Bustin’ Out,’ but it was ultimately an illusion.”

When it came to labels that defined New York’s mutant disco scene, ZE’s only real rival was 99 Records. Equally rooted in border-crossing blends of white and black music, but less opulently produced, the 99 sound was more punk funk than mutant disco. Run by Ed Bahlman, the label began in time-honored indie fashion as an offshoot of a record store. 99 had its greatest success with records by Liquid Liquid and ESG, whose skeletal funk came to define the label, but Bahlman had a bunch of quirky lesser-knowns on the roster, too. The all-girl Y Pants played dinky music based mostly around toy piano and ukulele. One member of the trio was Barbara Ess, whose boyfriend, Glenn Branca, put out a couple of his early works via 99.