The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Alan Vega is finding the drilling and hammering going on in the lobby of the Holiday Inn on London’s Old Street difficult to deal with. “I can’t get away from this shit,” he says. “I’ve been surrounded by noise all my life… living in New York City.”

He’s sitting slouched low in a neutral-toned chair, his weathered features at odds with the environment and builder’s MDF bustle. The same goes for Martin Rev, sitting next to him, resplendent in darkened shades.

But the noise? Suicide are here, after all, to talk about the reissue of their eponymous debut album, a record that was so punk it made punks - the three-chord, remedial sort - furious upon its first release. No guitars? No drums? Just the processed noise of electronic cicadas on a night where something unpleasant is going down, vocals like a disturbed Elvis impersonator about to be dismembered down the knackers yard. Suicide is an album that opens with the pulsing robotic rockabilly of ‘Ghostrider’ and ends with the descending, funereal tones of ‘Che’ and its blank pessimism: “The whole world lied / Said he was a saint / But I know he ain’t.” It’s a record that delights in contrast and perversity. In ‘Rocket USA’, the organ refrain is at its most jaunty as Vega sings, “It’s doomsday, doomsday…” And that’s without the bleak, simple dissection of blue collar life that is ‘Frankie Teardrop’. The last words of the album are “hooray hooray”, ‘sung’ deadpan, blank, as if “hooray” has become “the horror, the horror” of Colonel Kurtz’ final whisper.

It would be seven years after Suicide’s birth in 1970 that these songs would see the light of day. The duo arrived as far from their New York contemporaries (the failed hippy movement or the scene of coquettish dilettantes who hung around Andy Warhol’s Factory) as they would be from the punks when they emerged five years later to spit and slam around CBGBs.

Suicide’s is a story shaped by Rev and Vega’s experience of New York in the late sixties and early seventies. Vega says, with palpable sadness in his voice, “Now I’m a stranger in my own strange land,” for New York back then might have been edgy and lawless, but it was creatively fertile. “That downtown area… we used to wander out at night and it was all industrial,” he says. “We felt as if we owned the city. The cops wouldn’t bother us… it’s never been like that since. It was a wonderful time - that’s why that great New York scene evolved, because of that freedom. There was something happening.”

This is no blind romanticism and nostalgia, the kind of hazy yearning for a mythical, boho Lower East Side that The Strokes supposedly evoked a few years back. Martin Rev is brutally honest about how hard it was to survive as an artist in New York back then. “It was a struggle, it was a great struggle,” he says, firmly. “But what you’re struggling with also depends on your age. You look back and think it was hard, but it’s hard today too. Most anybody who’s doing anything that’s tangential to the mainstream of life, which art is, struggles. The mainstream of life is get up, go to work, make your living, constantly closer to the money. Art is like, you get up, you’re creating, you’re studying. It’s like being in a monastery, but not having the monastery to support you…”

“It’s the worst in the world, yeah,” Vega agrees. “We were pretty much homeless in that period.”
Until, that is, Vega and a bunch of artists friends managed to hoodwink the New York State Council of the Arts into giving them dollar to set up the Project of Living Artists in a then run-down loft at the wrong end of Broadway. “Thank God that was going,” says Vega. “The place was allowed to be open 24 hours a day for artists to use as they wanted - any art in general. We had some tap dancers come in because they considered themselves to be artists, and we were, ‘Okay, that’s cool.’ A friend of mine gave me a sleeping bag, it was so cold - there was no heat at night, and the wind was coming down Broadway and in the windows, man. It was unbelievable. That sleeping bag saved my ass.”

When he wasn’t huddled against the New York winter cold, Vega spent his time at the Project of Living Artists honing his visual art, which was starting to gain kudos in the downtown gallery scene. But he felt out of place in the art world and, more importantly, had something entirely new to aim for.

“I knew my life had changed,” says Vega of the time when he first heard Iggy Pop. “I knew I could keep going this way as an artist and I’ll probably end up being nothing - an old fish before I turned 30. Or I go this way because there’s a new avenue, a new art - it wasn’t just about music, it was a new art. The line between performer and audience had completely evaporated, it was like an Artaud piece, man. So I knew I had to go that way.”

But Vega understood that to embark on music as his new, chosen art form would be a struggle. “I was basically a shy guy,” he says, “and the last place I ever thought I’d find myself would be on a stage, much less singing. I couldn’t sing. The challenge was: how am I going to start this? It was like starting from infancy again. There weren’t any musicians in my life, you know? I knew I had to do something, but there was no light at the end of that tunnel. I don’t think there was a tunnel to go through to get to that place.”

Meeting Martin Rev changed all that. “Marty walked in out of nowhere. I was fooling around with electronics and Marty sat down with a couple of pencils and start tapping on the floor. This went on for a while and he wouldn’t talk. He was a very strange looking guy with a big afro and a ratty blue turtleneck sweater, straight out of music school at NYU…”

“I didn’t go to NYU,” Rev interjects. “I wasn’t at school at that point. At night I’d go downtown and wander around the streets - it was cold, so I thought, ‘Let me check it [Project of Living Artists] out. And I saw Alan on the floor, playing guitar, so I started to tap in time. I might not have had my drumsticks…”
“Pencils! Friggin’ pencils.”

With these initial scribbles, it was going to take a long time for the seven tracks that make up Suicide to emerge. As Martin Rev explains, they were up against it: “The realities and the necessities of the environment forges what you’re doing. We couldn’t afford rehearsal spaces and big bands. We looked for another way of doing it ourselves… it all comes out of necessity.”

So those early experiments consisted of banging around with pencils, drumsticks, industrial springs, whatever came to hand. But from this cacophony songs started to take shape? “It started becoming a little band when we weren’t trying to become a band,” says Rev. “We started doing that and then we thought, ‘Well, why not do a gig?”

While waiting for Suicide in the hotel lobby a long-time Suicide associate showed me an original poster for a Suicide concert from 1971. On it was written the unexpected fanfare: “Suicide playing punk music.” Martin Rev explains how they were ahead of the game: “We always created those posters for gigs, and at one point Alan said, ‘Hey, I read this thing by Lester Bangs and he’s called Iggy punk music,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds great,’ so we started using that. Then four or five years later, journalists started to come to a lot of groups at CBGBs, and started calling it ‘punk’. Then, all of a sudden, Punk magazine came out. I don’t know where they got it from - maybe they’d read Lester too and seen what we did, or maybe it was in the air. Yet we’d dropped it by then; we did a few gigs with those posters and then we changed.”

These early Suicide shows were low-key affairs, attended by their peers and once, they claim, Miles Davis. Needless to say, harsh drones and an Artaud-inspired approach of antagonising the audience didn’t exactly inspire devotion. However, the duo still held hopes of taking their music to wider audiences by releasing an LP, something that, in those times, was extremely difficult to do without being picked up by a label.

“I think it was 1971, maybe even ’70… we played one of our earliest gigs in New York at Café Au Go Go,” says Rev. “It was a rock club, very much of the sixties, and it closed about six months later. I remember we soundchecked and went and had a coffee or something. We were walking back to the club and we had this feeling that we were going to get discovered tonight. Because it was Au Go Go’s, it had that name to it.” He laughs. “It was six or seven years later that we finally got a record in the jukebox.”

Being hustlers right off the street, Alan Vega and Martin Rev fought back against the indifference of New York’s promoters and used their nous to fight for shows that went far beyond blasting past-it fans of sixties rock with coruscating electronic noise. Vega used his contacts in the art world to get Suicide a show at the OK Harris Gallery, owned and run by Ivan C. Karp. Karp was a leading light in the pop art movement, and the man who kick-started the careers of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Vega: “That was the gallery I was showing in. So I asked him one day: ‘Reckon we can do a show?’”

Martin Rev takes up the tale: “When we came in I had my drumsticks and my belt with this hat, and Ivan said something later about the way we looked…”

Vega: “I looked pretty crazy…”

Rev: “…so he turned to his assistant and said, ‘Make out fliers, make out cards, send them out - you’ve got the space.’ That’s the way Ivan was.”

Although Rev says that first foray into the high-end New York art scene was “an incredible show, a total theatre experience”, there was a huge tension between Suicide and the remnants of the Pop Art/Factory scene, which they saw as a world apart from their downtown, street existence.

“For me personally it was involved with an effete, elitist money thing that wasn’t my background,” he says. “I couldn’t be part of - it was the mainstream, the establishment. It was rich, it was decadent, and therefore it wasn’t saying anything about my life. Pop Art was already an elite thing - paintings were going for thousands and thousands of dollars - it was making art out of corporate icons. So I knew it wasn’t my scene and I knew I wasn’t going to be part of their scene. I was struggling, and that scene wasn’t reflecting the real issues - the street issues that I was having to deal with. Pop Art had made it - there was tremendous amounts of money there.”

“It was Vietnam blood money, man,” Vega says vehemently. “People getting wealthy on fucking Vietnam. The same people buying all the art. It’s blood money, baby, it’s all about blood money.”

If he’s angry today, it’s not hard to imagine the intensity that went into ‘Frankie Teardrop’, the ten-minute horror documentary that is the highlight of their debut album. Opening with panicking heartbeat beats and an ominous hiss, Vega narrates the life of a factory worker who breaks down and shoots his wife and infant child before turning the gun on himself. “Frankie” is present in every line, delivered via a wobbling croon, each death announced by a sharp howl… and then: “Frankie’s lying in hell… we’re all Frankies… we’re all lying in hell…” And Vega screams one of the most harrowing screams ever committed to tape.

“The song reflects the whole working class experience - those things that Pop Art wasn’t addressing,” says Rev. “It was beautiful art that was escapist.”

But if their background and views meant that they didn’t get on with the art crowd (the feeling was mutual - Suicide were frequently denied entry to some of the clubs where the Warhol crowd would hang out for being too “scuzzy”), they didn’t exactly have an easy time among the rock or emerging punk fraternity either. “The thing about Suicide is we knocked off about five sacred cows at one time,” says Rev, with a hint of pride. “It wasn’t just the name, it wasn’t just what we did onstage… the fact that we were two guys, that’s a sacred cow, then we had no guitars, no drums, so we’re hitting it on three or four levels. Then there’s the theatre of what we did and how we did it - there was nothing there for them to hold on to. You need familiarity to feel comfortable, so most bands give them something so they can say, ‘At least there’s guitars, I can relate to that.’ Here was nothing to relate to except the strength of what we were doing. We could have been two guys, totally crazy, who came in off the street and had never played an instrument before who are now going to stand onstage, make noise and threaten the hell out of you. Two fucking homeless winos. People saw right away - as soon as it started - that we were serious guys. They didn’t know whether we were crazy, but it was strong. Whether it was nuts or not, they didn’t know, but it was strong.”

It still sounds strong to this day. They might be heading off after this interview to be given a lifetime achievement award courtesy of Mojo magazine, but for Suicide nothing has changed. They’ve got older, so things like drills and a hotel CD player that insists on playing Red Hot Chili Peppers have become an irritation, but at core these two veterans have hardly changed since 1970; still spoiling for the fight to get their work out there. “I don’t own an island yet, man,” Vega insists. “I don’t own a car, and I don’t want one. We’re not interested in these superficial trappings - we just have what we have and that’s enough. We don’t need carpet on the floor or rings on our fingers, shit like that. Bling, as they say. We’re not bling guys. We don’t need anything. What am I going to do with a Mojo award?”

Martin Rev: “Show it to your landlord…”

Alan Vega: “…it might look good on the wall, but essentially things haven’t really changed for us that much. It’s still day-to-day.”

Martin Rev: “The struggle is still there.”

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