Rip It Up and Start Again (32 page)

Not that the Peel show was nonstop silliness. Another late-night hit in 1979 was Fatal Microbes’ “Violence Grows,” on which the baleful tones of fifteen-year-old punk starlet Honey Bane survey London’s frayed social fabric during what proved to be a banner year for street violence. Noting how bus conductors had learned to keep their mouths shut when thugs refused to pay, Bane taunts the listener, “While you’re getting kicked to death in a London pedestrian subway/Don’t think passersby will help, they’ll just look the other way.” Slowdrone guitar midway between the Doors’ “The End” and the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” swirls ominously behind her. Family Fodder managed to fuse scary and silly on “Playing Golf (with My Flesh Crawling),” a macabre yet jaunty ditty sung from the point of view of a man who’s in a state of arrested putrefaction (“There’s times I feel fungus growing on me”) and wishes he could get it over with and be dead.

On the furthest edges of the John Peel universe, the do-it-yourself principle proliferated in the form of the cassette underground. Groups who thought that vinyl was too costly or too careerist released their music in tape form instead, sometimes selling it for a nominal sum, sometimes giving it away for free if you mailed them a blank tape. There were hundreds of cassette bands across the U.K., typically with absurdist/puerile names like God and the Turds, the Night the Goldfish Died, Anthrax for the People, or the Scrotum Poles. There were even a handful of cassette-only labels, such as Smellytapes and Deleted Records. The absolute kingpin of this microscene, its Rough Trade, was Fuck Off Records.

Fuck Off was run by Kif Kif, formerly of the hippie band Here and Now. He had ended up playing noise punk in his own group, the 012, whose motto was “Bad music is soul music.” Fuck Off’s catalog boasted over thirty cassettes. The label’s star act was Danny and the Dressmakers, creators of such immortal classics as “Come on Baby Lite My Shite” and “Going Down the Sperm Bank Four Quid a Wank.” But the label’s strongest conceptual statement was releasing a cacophonous cassette by the Teen Vampires, much of which consisted of an argument between the singer and bassist. Kif described it as “the worst tape I’ve ever heard.” But he felt compelled to release it “just because it was so awful.” Whether anybody actually sent off for the cassette is irrelevant. The purity of the gesture—the do-it-yourself/messthetics principle taken to the limit—stands.

“SAN FRANCISCO’S
the kook capital of the world,” Residents’ spokesman Jay Clem once observed about the city that has long rivaled New York as America’s bohemian capital, a sanctuary for artistic experiment and nonconformist living. “What this city means to me is the last stand on American ground,” Damon Edge of Chrome declared in 1979. “People who don’t fit in anywhere else come here…. There’s no place else to go in America.”

The 1950s Beat milieu of poets and writers that clustered around City Lights bookstore and the late-sixties scene of hippies and happenings focused around Haight Street and the Fillmore are both well documented. Far less attention has been paid to the third golden age of San Franciscan bohemia, based around punk rock, industrial culture, and art/music synergy in all their most outré manifestations in the late seventies and early eighties. Blaine L. Reininger, cofounder of the theatrical electronic cabaret ensemble Tuxedomoon, wrote of this era as “our own ‘Belle Epoque’…. San Francisco seemed to befull of geniuses then, and the scene which arose around places like the Mabuhay Gardens and the Deaf Club felt like Paris must have felt when people like Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin were meeting in the cafés in Montmartre. We felt possessed by some demon or god, and we went about our business in what I can only call a state of grace.”

Like New York, San Francisco in those days was a city in which it was possible to live on virtually nothing, which allowed artists to avoid full-time jobs and concentrate on their creative work. All over the city there were faded-looking Victorians, large houses that could be rented dirt cheap. “I had a fourteen-room Victorian for six hundred dollars a month which I shared with four other people,” says Tuxedomoon’s bassist Peter Principle. “You could get by because things were inexpensive and the community was supportive.”

When it came to the city’s actual rock scene, though, the years immediately prior to punk had the feel of an aftermath—washed-up hippies wandering around wondering, What the fuck
happened,
man? Live music almost disappeared as disco took over, with rock clubs getting converted into discotheques, where only records were played (disco acts rarely performed live). “If you were in a band at that time, the only way you could get work was by playing other people’s songs,” says Joseph Jacobs, bassist of Factrix, San Francisco’s premier industrial band.

When punk arrived, San Francisco was one of the first cities in America to embrace it. The scene centered around a handful of hangouts, including Café Flor, the Deaf Club, the Mabuhay, and Temple Beautiful. Flor was the nerve center for all kinds of artists, musicians, and performers. Located in the sleazy Mission District, the Deaf Club was “an authentic club for the deaf where you ordered beer in sign language and where presumably the patrons didn’t mind the music because they couldn’t hear it,” says Tuxedomoon’s Steve Brown. “I guess they liked the vibrating floorboards!” Surrounded by strip clubs, the Filipino restaurant Mabuhay hosted punk-rock gigs every night, while Temple Beautiful was an abandoned synagogue next door to cult leader Jim Jones’s temple. “They’d put a generator outside Temple Beautiful and just wire the electricity in for the night of the show,” recalls Principle.

The San Francisco scene was a hospitable environment for experimental outfits, many of who, though they might have been initially inspired by punk’s confrontational attitude, quickly moved into more expansive or esoteric musical terrain than the more orthodox local punks such as the Avengers and the Dead Kennedys. If San Francisco became America’s number two postpunk city after New York, in large part this was because local audiences had a high tolerance for pretentiousness. “Sure, there was a lot of bad performance art, but that’s okay, better that it was allowed,” says Factrix guitarist Bond Bergland. “And San Francisco people were
very
allowing!” The city became home to a scene that, even more than No Wave Manhattan, explored the possibilities of mixed-media spectacle, a tendency shaped partly by the living legacy of the city’s gay radical theater groups (such as the Angels of Light) and partly by the “total art” ideas emanating from the city’s Art Institute.

Steve Brown, for instance, came out of sixties underground theater. Blaine L. Reininger had been exploring the idea of fusing music, writing, and theater into “unified field art” since the late sixties. Factrix, meanwhile, weren’t so much art damaged as Artaud damaged. “We were trying to bring the Theatre of Cruelty to the rock stage,” says Bergland. “It was really about confrontation, pushing people over the edge, something you’d seen at full steam with the Living Theater in the 1960s. The hippie thing was culturally played down during punk, but it was still the clear revolutionary predecessor.” This postsixties radical-theater sensibility was shared by Factrix’s contemporaries and collaborators, extreme performance artists such as Monte Cazazza and Joanna Went. Mark Pauline staged auto-destructive spectacles involving robots under the name Survival Research Laboratories, while Z’ev, a late-sixties veteran, earned renown for his ritualistic performances involving metal-bashing percussion.

Cinema was massively influential, too. Repertory theaters such as the Strand and the Embassy played a mix of classic movies, obscure foreign films, and cheap horror flicks. Inspired by Luis Buñuel’s
Un Chien Andalou,
Factrix talked of wanting to take “a razor to the mind’s eye.” Says Bergland, “Everybody in San Francisco during that period was heavily inspired by film.” The Residents, the weirdest Bay Area band of the entire era, actually tried to make their own modern surrealist movie,
Vileness Fats
. It was intended to be the world’s first fourteen-hour musical/comedy/romance set in a world of one-armed midgets, but eventually had to be abandoned. The Residents had more success with shorter films, producing a series of pioneering promo videos around specific songs. Their live performances had a theatrical bent as well, involving elaborate stage sets and costumes, including the famous giant masks that transformed each Resident’s head into a monstrous eyeball.

In 1978, when the Residents first started to become widely known, they were often mentioned in the same breath as Pere Ubu and Devo, partly because of a shared vibe of quirked-out grotesquerie, and partly because both Devo and the Residents released sacrilegious covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” as singles within a few months of each other. In the aftermath of punk, freaks such as the Residents reached an audience they’d otherwise never have found. But the group had actually been around for nearly a decade before punk. Originally from Louisiana, they migrated to California in the late sixties hoping to catch the high tide of psychedelia but arriving only in time to witness its ebbing. “The Residents sprang…from the fact that Psychedelia dead-ended,” declared Hardy Fox of Cryptic Corporation, the organization that looked after the Residents’ affairs. “The people who were doing experiments in that direction stopped when they had barely scratched the surface.”

The Residents wanted to take psychedelia further. Being nonmusicians, they felt, was the only way to guarantee truly free creativity. “Before they started doing the Residents, they had never played,” Homer Flynn of Cryptic Corporation has said. “By teaching themselves, they felt it was a good path towards originality.” Their music’s wonderfully angular melodies and jerky rhythms seemed unprecedented, but the Residents
did
have musical influences. They were just unrecognizable simply because, as Flynn pointed out, “the Residents weren’t
capable
of rendering them that faithfully.”

Perhaps that’s why Warner Brothers rejected them. In 1971 the group, then nameless, sent off demo tapes to the label’s Harve Halverstadt, who’d worked with their hero Captain Beefheart. Because they’d provided only a return address, the tapes were sent back addressed to “Residents, 20 Sycamore St., San Francisco.” Now christened with a name but lacking an outlet for their music, the Residents set up their own independent label, Ralph Records. The Residents’ do-it-yourself impulse went much further than even Rough Trade’s. Their goal was complete cultural autonomy. Their warehouse headquarters on San Francisco’s Grove Street contained a recording studio, offices for Cryptic Corporation and Ralph Records, a darkroom, a graphics studio for designing their own record sleeves, and a huge soundstage for making films and videos.

A couple of years before Public Image Ltd, the Residents trailblazed the pop-group-as-corporation stance, but with a twist: The group itself remained completely anonymous and faceless, and dealings with the outside world were mediated via the Cryptic Corporation. As a result, the question “Who
are
the Residents?” stirred much speculation. One persistent rumor maintained that the Residents were actually the postbreakup Beatles rejoining in secret for neo-Dada mischief making. This probably stems from the fact that early on the group toyed with calling themselves the New Beatles, while the cover of their 1973 debut,
Meet the Residents,
was modeled on
Meet the Beatles,
but with the portraits of the Fab Four grotesquely defaced. To the Residents, the Beatles symbolized everything good
and
everything bad about pop, the mind-expanding potential of studio-based psychedelia versus pop’s tyrannical, mind-controlling ubiquity (Lennon’s “We’re bigger than Jesus”). In 1976 the Residents released
The Third Reich ’n’ Roll
, a darkly comic satire of pop as totalitarianism.
American Bandstand
host Dick Clark was depicted on the front cover dressed as Hitler. Inside, the side-long “Swastikas on Parade” offered a medley of defiled sixties pop hits overlaid with World War II sound effects of air raid sirens and dive-bombing Stukas. All these conflicted feelings about pop, the sixties, and the Beatles came together on the Residents’ 1977 single “Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life,” which featured “samples” of the Fab Four’s wilder moments woven into an eerie audio collage. At various points you hear Lennon singing “don’t believe in Beatles” (from his first solo album) and issuing a wan apology to their global audience (“Please everybody, if we haven’t done what we could have done, we’ve tried”).

After a flurry of releases in 1977 and 1978, Cryptic Corporation announced the imminent release of the band’s grand masterwork. A sonic recreation of the world of Inuit Eskimo tribes,
Eskimo
would also serve as a tribute-cum-elegy to the Inuit’s vanishing folkways—you know, slaughtering superfluous newborn girls, putting the old folks out to die of hypothermia, that sort of thing. After six weeks of small ads in the music press that steadily whipped up intrigue, Cryptic Corporation abruptly announced the record’s suspension from the Ralph release schedule, because the Residents had gone AWOL and run off with the master tapes.

In a separate statement, the Residents declared they’d split from Cryptic Corporation and would never let “those bloodsuckers” have
Eskimo
. Their managers retorted with the claim that the group had gone mad from being “cooped up” in the studio for too long making the album. “Towards the end they were already being difficult and acting oddly—working all night and communicating only with strange cries when we, the Cryptic officers, were around,” Jay Clem claimed. “Then they locked us out altogether when they were working, and when I tried to reason with them they filled the reception area…with wicker baskets full of ice and sometimes fish from the bay wharf.” This whole falling-out between Cryptic Corporation and the Residents was, of course, totally staged, a miniature masterpiece of disinformation and hype. Although to this day the pretense is studiously maintained that Cryptic Corporation and the Residents are separate entities, at some point the truth seeped out. The Residents and their “representatives” were in fact one and the same.

When the “rift” was healed and
Eskimo
finally got released in the autumn of 1979, the record was deservedly hailed as a masterpiece, and it sold over a hundred thousand copies worldwide, a staggering achievement for a record so unsettling. Evoking the alien experiences of life on the polar ice cap—walrus hunts conducted in disorienting white-out conditions, “Arctic hysteria” induced by the sensory deprivation of the long winter darkness—
Eskimo
seemed to make the temperature in your room plummet.

The Residents then swerved from
Eskimo
’s listener-challenging experimentalism to the surprising accessibility of 1980’s
The Commercial Album
. It wasn’t called that because of any crossover ambitions but because each piece was only one minute long, closer to the duration of a TV commercial than a pop song. The Residents’ rationale for this condensed approach was persuasive. Given that most pop songs contain a verse and chorus repeated three times within three minutes, trimming the length down to sixty seconds automatically jettisons a substantial amount of sheer redundancy.
The Commercial Album
distills the quintessence of exquisite weirdness and macabre whimsy that is the Residents music into forty jingles as intricate and succinct as Japanese calligraphy.

Ralph’s other great release of 1980 was Tuxedomoon’s debut album,
Half-Mute,
a lost masterpiece of synthpop noir. Tuxedomoon began as an offshoot of the Angels of Light, “a ‘family’ of dedicated artists who sang, danced, painted, and sewed for the Free Theatre,” says singer/multi-instrumentalist Steve Brown. “I was lucky to be part of the Angels. I fell for a bearded transvestite in the show and moved in with him at the Angels’ commune. Gay or bi men and women who were themselves works of art, extravagant in dress and behavior, disciples of Artaud and Wilde and Julian Beck [of the Living Theater]…we lived together in a big Victorian house…pooled all our disability checks each month, ate communally…and used the rest of the funds to produce lavish theatrical productions—never charging a dime to the public.
This
is what theater was meant to be, a Dionysian rite of lights and music and chaos and eros.”