Never Said We Were Music Tee

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New York was a different place when Alan Vega – born Boruch Alan Bermowitz – left his wife and factory job in the late 60s to become part of a new artistic enclave gestating in the industrial wasteland of Manhattan’s SoHo District. He became janitor-director at the Project Of Living Artists, a spacious Broadway loft where artists, musicians, poets, radical political groups and street crazies could hang out and express themselves. Vega himself built light sculptures out of abandoned TV sets, fluorescent tube lights, subway lamps and street junk.

His early stage performances set the template for what was to come. Joined by a sculptor-turned-guitarist named Paul Liebgott, Vega manipulated tape recordings, tortured electronic circuits and set off wind-up monkey drummers. But it was the arrival of Martin Reverby, of free jazz ensemble Reverend B, that helped take things to a new level. When Reverend B played the Project Of Living Artists in early 1970, Vega was captivated, and joined the band onstage to bang a tambourine.

Vega and Reverby – who would rechristen himself Marty Rev – bonded over a mutual desire to create the loudest, most confrontational musical statement at a time when the anger, protest and invention of the 1960s was giving way to complacency. The name they gave to their new endeavour was inspired by the jazz musicians sitting around the Project shooting smack: Suicide. It was perfect for the times.

Suicide’s first gig was at the Project in November 1970. Soon they were promoted as ‘Punk Music’, which came from a review of the Stooges’ Fun House by Lester Bangs. The band had also given themselves punk-presaging aliases: Alan was Nasty Cut, Rev was Marty Maniac, Paul was Cool P. “We had no formula with Suicide,” says Rev. “We didn’t start with a beat or instrumentation, but we were going to find it through chiselling out this total mass of sound.” 

Suicide’s reputation began to spread. Vega was invited to meet his literary hero, poet Allen Ginsberg, only to be attacked by the beat generation figurehead. “All of a sudden he goes, ‘How could you use that word, ‘suicide’?’ and starts to attack me. I was like, ‘Holy shit, I’m being attacked by Mr Beatnik here!’ Suicide then was so literal, and the reality was death.” The reception afforded Suicide’s live performances is always held up as evidence of the innate conservatism of punk, or at least punk audiences.

Far from being a brave new musical dawn in which rules vanished out of the window and anything went, punks couldn’t cope with anything that deviated too far from a well-worn blueprint, even the band who might well have been the first to describe themselves as punk: the flyers for a 1971 Suicide gig proclaimed it a “Punk Music Mass”. But in fairness, Suicide were provoking that kind of reaction long before punk. In the early 70s, they played alongside the New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Centre: “There was a party scene in their room and our room was like a death scene,” said Vega.