Write Your Idols: Thurston Moore on 'No Wave'

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CBGB AND ITS "other music" crowd may be gone, but the Bowery now hosts another — wealthier — type of consumer, the kind that might stroll down Bleecker Street sipping a latte and munching a chocolate-covered rice-crispy treat.

You know, leaving one giant Starbucks and walking directly across the street to the other giant Starbucks.

Which is fine.

But some people can't help but look back with a little bit of nostalgia for the time when the Bowery was basically one giant used-up syringe.

Back then you knew everybody on the street, because only so many people were crazy enough to live there. And in that post-apocalyptic climate, people like Lydia Lunch and James Chance made music that perfectly echoed the nihilism and desperation of the neighborhood — music that would later be named "no wave."

In their book "No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980" music writer Byron Coley and musician/writer Thurston Moore attempt to define exactly what no wave was and why it was exhilarating and important. (Moore and Coley's work follows closely on the heels of local author Marc Master's book, "No Wave.")

Moore spoke with Express about the book and his own experiences living in No Wave New York. Moore and Coley will make two local appearances on Tuesday, July 29: at Politics & Prose at 4 p.m. and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art at 7 p.m.

» EXPRESS: Why write this book now?
» MOORE: We would have done it 10 years ago but we didn't have the resources. Byron and I have mulled it around for quite a while. We had met with an editor at Abrams — the CBGB book editor — we had heard that he was going to do a no-wave book next and we thought, "We have to talk to this person and make our pitch."

We knew that everybody's take on no wave was slightly different than the next person. What exactly is it? Who is it? What things come into the picture? We really wanted to throw in very strict parameters about what no wave was and who defined it. There were a lot of bands making really interesting moves, but they weren't really part of that scene.

That we were there — that we could rely on our own eyewitness — put us in a good position to put this book together.

We also wanted to deal very directly with the photographers who were around and shot these bands and these people. We really wanted to have these photographers be as much responsible for whatever aesthetic no wave has as the musicians and the filmmakers. People like Julia Gorton, a lot of her work appears in this book. She took these photos; did the layout for records on the Lust/Unlust label. That was very important. That was really primary for us — to find the photographers who were around at the time. It's as much a book of their work as it is about no wave.

» EXPRESS: The photos in the book are all very desolate — there's nobody around. There are also a lot of quotes where Lydia Lunch is saying that the city was sort of post-apocalyptic. Was it really like that?
» MOORE: That was really the case. Everybody knew each other in the streets then. There was no media eye. Although there was an awareness of the CBGB scene; it was kind of a low-life adjunct to the Studio 54 thing — Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger and that whole nightlife.

But it really was like that down there. We all sort of lived down there. It didn't cost that much money, so you could get away with not working that much. It was a freak scene. The Bowery — where CBGB was — was skid row. It was where the winos ended up. The Hell's Angels had their bar around the corner. The government had shut the door on New York and it was cut off from any lifeline. There was a long period of time where it ... looked as if the apocalypse had already happened. It sort of did have that vibe to it.

When people like us [Coley and Moore] moved there in the '70s it had a lot to do with what was going on with Patti Smith. These bands were people my age who came in and were concurrent to what was celebrated at CBGB. A certain few of them really connected with a concept of how they were going to play and look. It wasn't a battle plan or anything — it was a certain mania.

» EXPRESS: Was there a sense that it was a scene?
» MOORE: There was, because there was really sort of an extreme attitude. You had James Chance, Lydia Lunch, Pat Place and Arto Lindsay all looking very much unlike any person's perception of what a rock star would look like — even more so than what punk was claiming was the geek-as-rock-star. Tom Verlaine had short hair. Nobody had short hair onstage playing rock music. People forget that in '75 if you walked into CBGB and watched Television, the most shocking thing was that they had short hair. You did not see that.

The [no-wave bands] started denouncing the typical punk rock — Patti Smith — as being more of the same rock 'n' roll, an extension of hippie. They were coming out saying that they hated everything. They hated music. They were coming out and playing something else. As a teenager I couldn't believe there were these people my age attacking the people who had so recently gotten rid of Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Led Zeppelin. That stuff [classic rock] was totally wiped out by Talking Heads and The Ramones. Then, all of the sudden, there was this real underground of bands doing the same thing to these guys.

I did not accept that at all at the time. I wouldn't go see these bands because I didn't have any money. If The Ramones were playing somewhere, I would save my money to go see them. But artists would allow these [no-wave] bands to play in situations outside of clubs. So I saw really early Contortions gigs, Mars gigs. Musically it was so off the map. In a way it was really difficult to process where these people were coming from. The way they looked and the fact that they were my age — 17 or 18 years old. In '78 and '77 the bands you were seeing were young, but not as young as you. I mean, Blondie was 30. But Lydia Lunch was [a teenager] and acted that way on stage.

» EXPRESS: You said that you weren't really into the no-wave bands at first. What eventually won you over?
» MOORE: Hearing the records. The first Teenage Jesus single, I had read about it. The review I read said, "This is probably the worst sounding record I've ever heard in my life." I immediately went to the record store in St. Marks Place and bought a copy. And Joey Ramone said Teenage Jesus and Suicide were the best bands in New York. This was a drummer playing one drum, a bass player playing military rhythms, and Lydia — her words were so vitriolic, so personal and dark and black. It was stark black-and-white minimalism, these super short pieces of anti-music. I thought, "Oh, my God, this is great."

But the time I wanted to see Teenage Jesus at CBGB I got sick and had to leave early.

These people were not approachable. In the punk-hardcore music scene it was all about being approachable. These guys [no-wave bands] had a sort of a fright wall in front of them. I mean, maybe I'm wrong about that, but they were just so strange looking. Most of us weren't that strange looking. I was a tall skinny geeky guy in a 99-cent jacket, walking the walk of downtown New York new wave, but I wasn't, like, going as far as these guys were.

The first time I saw James Chance play with The Contortions he was this little beady-eyed, pointy-nosed, redhead kid wearing gabardine jackets, skinny ties and white socks. He's on stage and leading a band, then going into the audience and gyrating like James Brown, and then he flies into somebody's face and smacks the person in the head. The audacity! I was playing in a band at the time with some Rhode Island School of Design people — hipper-than-thou art-school dudes. This [James Chance] was not hip; it was really fucked-up and tripped-out and psycho.

I really wanted to do a book on this history. Where did they come from? Who-met-who-met-who? And who were those bands, the no-wave bands and not other things that were happening at the time. I wanted to look at how these individuals met each other. It's somewhat disparate, but we figured it out. It was Lydia Lunch coming down from Rochester in search of the New York Dolls or James Chance coming out to play where Albert Ayler played. And those two people meeting each other — they recognized a certain artistic affinity that was based on this extreme weirdness. Recognizing a band like Mars as a sound they connected with.

Written by Express contributor Aaron Leitko

» Marc Masters does an Express 5 for essential no-wave recordings.

» J. Freedom du Lac's article on Moore and "No Wave" in The Post
» Du Lac's follow-up blog post with Moore

Photo by Andrew Kesin