New York Stories: Will Hermes

I wrote my recent book on New York City’s mid-’70s music scenes using a strict five-year chronology: ’73 to ’77. This was partly conceptual – disco, hip hop and punk rock were invented in New York during those years, while the salsa, loft jazz and downtown composer scenes hit their creative peaks. But the framework was also practical: I wanted to build a coherent narrative arc and write a readable volume, not a doorstop reference text. Also, after years of research and interviews, I wanted to finish the damn thing already.

But in some ways, the New York scene got more exciting just after my book ends, when musical borders got more porous. The above scenes were rubbing shoulders by late ’77, but they didn’t intersect much. There were flashes: minimalist composer Rhys Chatham deciding to devote himself to electric guitars after a night at CBGB witnessing The Ramones (who bought their weed from the same dude who supplied jazz composer David Murray); cellist Arthur Russell, an art-music composer and art-pop singer-songwriter, seeing God on the dancefloor at Nicky Siano’s Gallery. There were salsa lovers who dug Kool DJ Herc’s park jams, hip hoppers weaned on son montuno, disco fans who rocked, punks who boogied, improvisers who grokked notated music and composers who dug free jazz. It took a while for these languages to really start blending.

No wave was one locus. It took its aggression and noise from both punk (notably proto-punk electro provocateurs Suicide) and the polyglot free jazz of the lofts. No wave was short-lived, if it was a scene at all (see Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s semi-oral history No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976–1980 and Marc Masters’ No Wave for the breakdown). Its key document is No New York, released in 1978 and produced by Brian Eno with the complete opposite of the billowy ambience that became his trademark. It collected tracks by four bands: DNA, James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and Mars. Its shrill attack was tough to love, but its power was undeniable.

Like out jazz, which also has a performance art element, no wave was best experienced live. James Chance (né Siegfried) was the man to see back then, and I caught his act whenever I could. He took Iggy Pop’s audience-baiting to new extremes, yelling verses, howling on his sax, then stepping offstage to slap someone who wasn’t paying attention. In what may have been Robert Christgau’s only bar brawl with a musician, the critic once jumped on Chance after the singer hit a woman he was with. Chance’s music was funky in a twisted way, which made it fun to dance to. At one point, he was offered money by the fusion-minded ZE Records to make a disco LP, and James Chance and the Contortions mutated into James White and the Blacks, a confrontational no wave soul revue.

The latter always seemed to book hometown gigs between Christmas and New Year’s in the early ’80s, and since that’s also my birthday week, I often celebrated with them. Downtown was still so seedy and druggy and scary, but you just accepted it as the human condition. When I turned 21, a bunch of us piled into a Tribeca dive bar to catch a discount buzz before a Mudd Club show. An old Latino dude (old to us, anyway – he was probably in his 30s) came over to our table and, astonishingly, offered us free cocaine. He’d bought it to share with his girlfriend, who he told us had just broken up with him, and he didn’t have the heart to snort it himself. We were dubious, but the powder was vetted, and he kept it coming for an hour or two, abstaining himself but saying it made him happy to see young people enjoying themselves. It was heartbreaking, and watching my friends jockey for position like pigs at a trough was instructive. We asked the dude to join us for the show but he declined, no doubt for the best. Chance was ferocious. We danced like crazy. No one got hit. But it was a memorable night.

Chance’s music epitomizes ’80s downtown for me: art-damaged and mad-wired, dangerous, sputteringly rhythmic, furiously alive. After Studio 54 and its offspring had defined dance clubs as corny, classist and starfucky, venues like the Mudd Club, Tier 3, Danceteria, Hurrah and The World were revelations. Hip hop came downtown, the product of its own dance music class war. Blondie connected with Fab Five Freddy. Afrika Bambaataa cut a record with Johnny Rotten, played The Ritz and did a residency at the Roxy roller disco (I recall Bam DJing a spectacular P-Funk show there in the ’80s). The South Bronx sister group ESG brought their rec-room funk to the Mudd Club, where the DJs played punk, jump blues, boogaloo, reggae, African drum jams and bubblegum pop by turns – no doubt taking cues from Bambaataa, the melting-pot master.

Our crew would dance to anything. We’d lose our shit freestyling to Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society, a harmolodic jazz-funk outfit led by Ornette Coleman’s brilliant drummer and featuring the guitar and banjo of a young Vernon Reid, who went on to form Living Colour. Defunkt, led by Joe Bowie, little brother of jazz scientist Lester Bowie, was another awesome avant-party band. Why should hot improvisation, deep dance grooves and rock muscle be so tough to resolve? These players pulled it off handsomely, even if it proved a short-lived lingua franca. It worked best live, although few labels documented it. In addition to ZE, the local 99 Records put out Latin-inflected beats, dub reggae and the debut by composer Glenn Branca. Franco/Afro/Anglo/American label Celluloid put out jams with DJs, jazzbos, rockers, rappers, West African guitarists and kora players (see the illuminating new anthology Change the Beat on Strut Records).

This polyglot spirit waxes and wanes in NYC. I was touched to see Liquid Liquid – the avant-funk outfit who recorded for 99 and was a touchstone for the Brooklyn early-2000s dance-rock bubble – open LCD Soundsystem’s farewell show at Madison Square Garden. (I was also touched to see that famous group photo of the Fania All-Stars – a couple dozen salsa dudes surrounding Celia Cruz like planets around a sun – turn up on the big screens during a montage later that night.) It’s beautiful to see doomy no wave greybeards Swans in the midst of an unlikely second act, splitting the difference between post-punk noise and minimalist drone, crushing a new generation of skulls. Bachata is the new salsa, evolving its own sphere of influence. Indie rock, jazz and notated composition are cross-breeding in some Bushwick loft as I type. And as far as I can tell, the dance music culture has never been more alive. Which is, of course, why we’re here.

A version of this article appeared in The Daily Note, a free daily newspaper distributed in New York during the 2013 Red Bull Music Academy.

Image credit: Gustavo Dao