Prior to last summer, very little had been written about the mysterious no wave music and art movement that flourished in New York City’s underground during the latter half of the 1970s. Paula Court’s book, “New York Noise: Art and Music from the New York Underground: 1978-1988,” published in August 2007, provided no wave fans with many photographs from the era (as well as a pictorial history of what happened afterwards), but little in the way of narrative. Earlier this year, Marc Masters’ excellent “No Wave” book was published by Black Dog (read Rick’s interview with Marc here-ed) and music fans finally had a handy resource that examined the movement from an in-depth, historical perspective––hell, the book even gave fans an entire chapter on the simultaneous no wave film movement.

What more could fans possibly want?

The answer: “No Wave. Post-Punk Underground. New York. 1975-1980,” written by legendary Sonic Youth vocalist/guitarist Thurston Moore and venerable music critic Byron Coley––two guys who were living in New York at the time and saw many of these events unfold as they happened. In addition to the insider’s perspective the authors bring themselves, the book offers an “oral history” of the movement via all-new interviews with principal players (including Brian Eno, one central no wave figure not interviewed for Masters’ book) as well as 150 of some of the most striking photographs from the era––most of which were previously unpublished.

Today, Moore and Coley will be in Washington signing copies of their new book at Politics and Prose at 4pm, followed by a lecture on the no wave movement and book signing session at the Corcoran Art Gallery at 7 pm. For Part One of BYT’s special two-part feature on this new book, co-author Byron Coley was kind enough to field a few questions…

BYT: First off, thanks for taking the time to answer some questions for BYT! I was wondering if you could talk a little about how you came to know Thurston? If I understand correctly, you guys were both in NYC during the no wave movement––did you know each other back then?

BC: Yes, Thurston and I were both in and about NYC during the no wave era, but we didn’t meet until later. He was in The Coachmen (Thurston’s first band), living in a loft way downtown. I was living in the “New York Rocker” offices, on the eastern edge of Chelsea. It seems likely that we were in a bunch of the same places at the same time, but neither of us was much of a scenester in the late ‘70s. We were just fanboys, more or less, even though we were both involved in various aspects of the scene-itself. And the no wave crowd seemed especially off-putting at the time. They had a kind of fashion awareness that was totally foreign to boobs like us, and they projected a very “difficult” image. It was funny, going back through this material, to see what babies everyone was at the time, but it didn’t feel like that when you were standing in millennium.

Thurston and I didn’t meet until the early ‘80s, after I had moved to L.A. He had started “Killer,” (a fanzine) and would write and send me material for a magazine I was editing then called “Take It.” We were pen pals for a while, then he came out West with Kim Gordon for a trip and came to visit at the record store where I worked. We were both total record scum, so we hit it off pretty well.

BYT: Obviously you were there at the time, but what is it about no wave that you still find compelling today? Why collaborate with Thurston on a book about it?

BC: Well, Thurston and I had always really loved the whole no wave scene. Weirdly, it was more after the records started coming out that I came to grips with it, but I had seen all the bands at the time, since I deejayed once in a while and had press credential that got me into almost any show. When Thurston and I started hanging out, he was just meeting up with Lydia Lunch and working with her. I’d known Lydia pretty well for years, and we started talking about doing something about the no wave bands, but we could never find anyone who was particularly interested. It was something that remained interesting through the years, and we were always keen on finding live tapes or fliers and things like that. The idea of doing a specific document came up every once in a while, but the subject matter was so arcane that we could never find anyone who was interested in publishing it.

Then, a couple of years ago, we were at Abrams (publishing company), pitching book ideas to an editor we knew there. She mentioned that Tamar Brazis, the editor who had done the CBGB book, had seen some no wave era photos and was thinking of putting something together on that era. We set up a meeting tout de suite, and did homework for a week, making lists and histories and family trees and discographies. We went in and met Tamar and just kind of bombarded her. I think maybe she’d been imagining a sort of “Downtown ‘81” style project originally, but we got pretty insane about how it should be a book just about the very insular no wave bands, blah blah blah. We wore her down. And she went along with the idea.

I think the fact that Thurston had been involved in the “Kill Your Idols” film project, and was adamant about making the focus tighter, was something that resonated with her. Of course, that film made a case for the continuing influence of the no wave bands, whether consciously on not, on a new generation of groups. Certainly, the term was being brunted about by a lot by people who didn’t really seem to grasp its essence.

The music and the bands that created the original noise were pretty amazing. They came and went fast for the most part, but they left documentary evidence that remains fresh and actually sounds better with every passing year. Once we knew there was a possibility that a big publisher might be interested in this as a project, we were pretty relentless.

Photos: Julia Gorton

BYT: I’m assuming when you guys commenced work on the book that everyone involved was unaware there would be another book coming out on this subject (“No Wave” by Marc Masters) as well as a third book (“New York Noise: Art and Music from the New York Underground 1978-88”) that covers a slightly later and longer period of NYC’s underground music and art scene. Was there much back-and-forth to ensure the three books didn’t cover too much of the same material or use the same photos?

BC: No, not at all. I think we probably had our pitch finished before any of those others, but I don’t know what the exact timeline was. We heard about the Paula Court book, but figured that would be mostly pictures, probably focusing on the downtown/disco mix. Then we heard about Marc’s book, but figured that he would be focusing on critical thinking about the scene and analysis of what it meant and stuff like that, probably using secondary sources. Our book was already going to be visuals-heavy, due to the nature of the publisher, but we decided to try and find as many previously unpublished photos as possible, and also to do all new interviews, not using anything that had been previously published. Our theory was that if we took that approach, it would almost certainly assure that the books didn’t overlap much. We tried to refrain from editorializing, and just laid out the facts as closely as we could reconstruct them, relying heavily on new first person commentary. In the course of this we recorded a lot of interviews and transcribed over 300,000 words of useful material. Only a fraction was utilized, but it was necessary to do, and allowed the three books to be complimentary rather than competitive, or at least I think so.

BYT: I agree. I was struck by how each book offers readers something different. For example, your book provides much more of a “view from the trenches” from writers who saw it happen firsthand––quotes from principal players are interspersed with personal recollections from the authors—was this always your intention of how to structure the narrative?

BC: Well, the fact that there were other books in the works did shape the narrative’s trajectory, and I think it was for the best. It felt better to let people tell their own stories. And I think it helped to convey the personalities involved a bit better than we might have otherwise. I mean, these people were pretty funny. And that’s something that has been
lost in analysis over the years. If you imagine everyone involved was dour and solemn, you miss a crucial element. Hopefully, we got that across. How intentional it was is tough to say. We had so much material to draw from––it was really a matter of deciding which story we wanted to tell. I’m pretty happy with our selections.

BYT: Another defining characteristic of your book is that there are no chapters. You and Thurston take full advantage of not having to break down the movement into separate sections––the book is constantly moving back and forth between the bands, artists and other key players in describing how the movement took shape. The interrelationships are underscored by the family tree at the start of the book. Prior to working on the book, did you know how closely connected everyone in the scene was?

BC: Well, we never wanted chapters, since the whole thing happened so fast, and overlapped in so many ways. It seems as though it might be easier to make the narrative understandable if we could structure the book that way, introducing just a few new characters at a time. I’m not sure if it worked or seems too busy, but I feel as though we were successful in getting most of the cogent points in.There were a couple of surprises––the fact that Jody Harris was in both The Screws and a pre-Mars combo, stuff like that. But we knew about most of the connections, just because we both had known a lot of the people involved for a long time. I mean, Lydia is my son’s godmother. Thurston had booked a lot of these people to play at the Noise Fest at White Columns back in ‘81. We were both geeks for old rock mags and fanzines, so the big surprises were things like realizing how many bands Jim Sclavunos had been in (besides Sonic Youth). I mean, he was in Information, Red Transistor, Teenage Jesus, The No Group, The Gynecologists and Beirut Slump. He was Mr. No Wave!

BYT: One of the things I noticed first about the book was the iconic quality of many of the photos. Stephanie Chernikowski’s shot of James Chance on page 14 and Laura Levine’s photos of the second incarnation of DNA on page 32 and 33 are just a couple of brilliant examples. The photographs arguably deserve as much attention as the music.

BC: It’s true. Stephanie and Laura and Julia Gorton and David Godlis and lots of the other photographers who were around NYC then, shooting everything, were great visual artists. This was not always easy to appreciate at the time, because so much of their work was printed on grainy newsprint. It’s really pleasing to see their shots printed beautifully on good stock. It raises the images to a whole new level. And it was cool, because many of the people we contacted were people that Thurston and I had known for years, and they were really excited that someone was interested in seeing some of these more obscure sessions. Some of the pictures had never even been printed apart from contact sheets. We looked at thousands of images, and it was always tough to try and decide which ones to use. There were lots of fantastic ones that didn’t make the cut for whatever reason. But yeah, the book is as much a tribute to the photographers as the musicians.

BYT: How difficult was it to find and procure the use of the photographs? What kind of feelings did you have seeing them as you worked on the book?

BC: We knew who had been around and active at the time. There were some people we tried to track down without success, but many of them were people I had worked with at “New York Rocker” and others were people who had done Sonic Youth photos over the years, so it was pretty easy to make contact and to let them know exactly what we were after. Looking through the pictures was great. It was like looking at pics of friends from 30 years ago––shocking to think how sophisto everyone seemed at the time (laugh). Some people have commented that it must have been an exercise in nostalgia, but this group of people is not really nostalgia-oriented. The only thing anybody seemed to be wistful about was the price of rent back in those days.

BYT: In learning more about no wave, one of the things that surprised me was how large a role that women had in driving the movement. Why do you think this was the case? Also, do you think the movement warrants an examination from feminist scholars?

BC: Yeah, it’s a very interesting aspect. I think the integration of the first band on the scene––Mars––was extremely important. Then, the fact that the first musician to really take up the challenge of Mars was a woman––Lydia Lunch––a singularly powerful figure, even as a teen, was equally important. But it gets even more interesting when you add some of the women whose presence onstage was very androgynous and non-obvious (Adele Bertei and Pat Place, especially) and others who came from the sexually-charged “Fiorucci punk” scene (Anya Phillips, Terry Sellers and the like). The scene is very small, but I think it would lend itself to varieties of feminist analysis.

BYT: I’m sure you and Thurston culled countless anecdotes from principal players and from your own memories that ended up not being included in the book––any favorite stories left on the proverbial cutting room floor that you’d care to share?

BC: My favorite stories that didn’t make it were the ones that we pulled because they were a little controversial and distracting––sex stories, drug stories and the like. Some of them were funny as hell, but as soon as you relate any of them somebody gets bugged and starts complaining, and we really wanted to keep the focus on the music. The very best one was told by Miriam Linna and involved Lydia Lunch, ketchup, Tampax and a sub-let. ‘nuff said.

BYT: Did you ever consider extending the book’s time period beyond 1980? There were so many interesting bands that were clearly carrying the torch, such as The Del-Byzanteens and Ike Yard.

BC: Not really. Some of this is difficult to explain in a way that really makes sense, but it would have been pretty obvious at the time. It had to do with what clubs the bands played at, what they were doing before the bands you mention, how interested they were in playing rock-qua-rock, and whatnot. Some of these decisions seem arbitrary, I’m sure. But the fact is that no wave pretty much ended with the final Teenage Jesus tour of Europe. We decided that the absolute final nail in the coffin was the two night series of shows in support of “John Gavanti” at the Kitchen, but I don’t think we ever got too explicit about that. The bands you refer to were no-wave-influenced rather than no-wave-proper, at least as we defined it. The only bands that really played no wave music after “our” cut-off point were Information, Ut and DNA. You could make cases for a couple of other bands, like Hi Sherriffs of Blue, Chain Gang and Mofungo, but the timing works against them. Ut just make the cut-off. This is something we discussed quite a bit, and our decision was to compress the germane bands to the smallest possible grouping. To me, it makes things clearer and more easy to grasp as history (rather than a continuum).

photo: Julia Gorton

BYT: When people talk about the lasting impact of no wave they often mention Sonic Youth’s longevity for obvious reasons. In your view, are there any bands in today’s underground scene that are sort of the spiritual heirs of no wave?

BC: There are many bands in the contemporary underground who mine various bits of no wave’s language. This ranges from bands like Total Shutdown to The British Painter, Martin Creed, who just put out a great no wave sounding single. The stuff exists. It’s up to people to decide what stuff they choose to mine. But people who call Sonic Youth “no wave” are not necessarily on the money. I have wondered myself, for a long time, whether Sonic Youth were the last no wave band or the first scum rock band. And I tend to think the latter was the case. The whole Sin Club/Pyramid scene was not no wave. It was something else. And as much as bands like Sonic Youth, Swans, Live Skull, Rat at Rat R, Bag People and so on may have been informed by no wave’s sound, it was a functionally new generation of bands. And there was actually a mini-generation separating them from the no wave groups, comprised of the rock bands that emerged from no wave––8 Eyed Spy, The Raybeats, Bush Tetras, The Bloods, Flaming Demonics, Lounge Lizards, Don King, etc.

BYT: Thanks again for the interview! I’m very much looking forward to your lecture at the Corcoran.

BC: Alright. See you there.

Thurston Moore and Byron Coley: No Wave
Tuesday, July 29, 7 p.m.
Members $18, Public $22
Corcoran Gallery of Art
http://www.myspace.com/nowavethebook

Stay tuned for Part 2 of “Revisiting the Alluring Mystery of No Wave,” for BYT’s interview with Thurston Moore!

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