Text by Julia Masi / FFanzeen, 1983 / 2021 mages from the Internet
WALTER
STEDING: Essence of an Artist [1983 Interview]
This
article was originally published in FFanzeen, issue #11, dated 1983. It was written
by Julia Masi.
Currently,
Walter Steding is a painter and actor who writes film scores and is in the
group Crazy Mary, based in New York City where he resides. This is a companion
piece to one Julia wrote in Issue #10, reprinted HERE. – RBF, 2021
His special loft on the Bowery is
littered with the canvases of his labor. Portraits of pop-culture aristocracy,
like Andy Warhol and Deborah Harry, sit on the chairs and sleep on the floor. A
painting of a bright blue chair rests against the wall. The furnishings are
sparse: a table, his synthesizer, and a clock. In the corner, he’s sectioned
off a rustic little bedroom, so neat and compact that it looks like it was
built for a movie set, furnished mostly with things he’s found in other people’s
garbage.
Simplicity is the essence of Walter Steding’s
style. His music and his art, like his loft, are uncluttered. There is a child-like
wonder in his work. Some of his paintings show cheekbones or eyes much wider
than God would mercifully bestow on anyone. And his songs and performance style
are as unpretentious as entertainment can get. Yet, there is great sophistication
in how every line, note and color is calculated to transmute his feelings.
“To be a musician and live on the Lower
East Side, there is a kind of feel about society, about the way things are. Graffiti
artists or whatever, there is always a movement that suggests how people are.
That’s always the way it is with art,” comments Walter. “The paintings come
from the same kind of thought that I live and experience what is happening. I
try to express the way things are through the music and the painting so they’re
similar in the sense that I see colors. Like green – a typical industrial
restroom color. It really doesn’t say much, but in not saying much, it says a
lot. And the same thing with my tunes. I try to keep them really simple. I work
with a really simple formula. Even though the format is simple and I only use a
few colors it’s the combination of those colors that create the music. Maybe I
just use the standard 4/4 beat, but it’s what I apply to that.
“I’m painting portraits but I’m not
painting portraits in the same way as (John Singleton) Copley (d. 1815) or any
other great portrait painter painted because they wanted to create a likeness.
I’m painting portraits in an era when photography has existed for almost 100
years. And it’s easier to take a person’s image and have that image reflected on
chemicals that separate various tones of light and create an image instantly.
Then why do a portrait? It’s much easier to take a picture. But what I am is a
portrait painter working with paints in the year 1983, and that’s what it is.
It’s me, the portrait painter. It’s not the portrait itself. The painting is insignificant
compared to the fact that I’m doing it. And by the looks of my paintings, that’s
immediately revealed.
“I try to make it look like there’s a
background. There’s no portrait there then – flash – someone is there! And they
are portraits that you can see are done after the invention of photography to
help me get a likeness, but I really work from a mental perspective or how a
person would appear.”
Actually, Walter doesn’t even need a photograph
to create a mental image of a person. He has that special kind of sensitivity that
gives you the impression that he can read a person’s face as easily as he can
read a letter. And when he reads letters, he absorbs every detail and nuance of
a person’s personality so fully that he’s able to create a convincing character
on canvas. Some of the faces in Walter’s exhibit at the Semaforte Gallery last
Spring were inspired by a box of letters that he found in the garbage. Some of
the letters date back to the early 1800s. Most of the correspondence in between
three men – Jordean, Matheson and Dent – the families who set up the Hong Kong
Shanghai Bank, the institution that, in this day, sets the standard for gold
prices in the Western world. These letters document the beginnings of our economic
system, the common market, opium/slave trade and economic crash.
It’s doubtful that anyone who has
attended Walter’s exhibit really knows exactly what Jordean, Matheson or Dent
looked like, but Walter’s images are so strong you believe that they’re
accurate.
And just in glancing around his loft
you can see what he’s learned from the letters and get a clue to his perception
of the evolution of America’s society.
“In the olden days, even though you
didn’t have any dollars, you had opportunity because you could go out West,
meet some savage Indians and give them trinkets for furs and sell them and get
cash for it. And if not cash, you could take those furs to a foreign country,
like in China, because furs became fashionable, so they could take those furs
and trade them for tea. And then they could take the tea and bring it back and
sell the tea here.
“People came to this country with
nothing, like John Jacob Astor and Steven Gerard and Vanderbilt. Individuals
who could actually go out and make a fortune.
“In today’s world, an individual can
no longer go out into the wilderness and start a trade. It’s all tied up by
those original families who have kept their money and survived the crash, ‘cause
they never had it to lose in the first, since they were the ones who were
causing the crashes. Today, for anyone to accomplish any achievement
monetarily, the only thing you can sell is a kind of software, and that’s
selling an idea that’s selling yourself. You become a famous actor. You become
a famous pop musician. You can start from nothing and make a lot of money. But
you can’t go into the world and dig up Uranium and convert it into nuclear
energy on your own. You have to have a whole team of physicists and a whole
complex of other people. The only way you can do it today, the only field, is
this kind of mental activity.”
In the not-so-distant future, Walter worries
that history will repeat itself. When he reads the daily newspapers, he often
notices how certain events are similar to situations cited in the letters. For instance,
a recent report claims that the U.S. government will be printing more money to counteract
inflation. When this situation was tried in the past, it had quickly led to an
economic crash. He feels fortunate to have found these letters and to have
learned so much from them.
“Because I have this knowledge, I see
my position as being a communicator, even through my music. My music is part of
my art. It says on my contract ‘recording artist.’ It doesn’t say ‘pop star’ or
anything like that. It says recording artist because that’s what I am. I write
all of the songs. I produced them. I carry the records on my back and take them
to the stores. And what’s in these songs is what I feel. What’s in these songs
is a kind of message. They’re not saying ‘Let’s revolt’ or anything like that.
They’re saying, ‘Let’s have compassion for one another, ‘cause we’re all in
this together.’
“That’s why I don’t want to stand up
there and create an antagonistic mood. The whole punk thing was great because
it made its statement, but now let’s definitely go on. You have to find
compassion for your audience.”
If there is any gift Walter could give
his audience, it would be “non-violence. Just getting along with each other.
There’s always a way for people to become one with their environment or nature
or whatever.
“I always try to be close with nature.
I make sure I get in the woods.” His basic philosophy of life is “not to
believe in anything except what exists. It’s not my will to believe anything.
Whenever you say, ‘I believe,’ you don’t believe. Because it’s not your will to
believe anything. It’s your position to accept what is correct. And then you leverage
your mind open for that source to come direct and without your will interfering.
“It’s when you start to think that these
ideas are your own, that’s when they stop. What I do, I don’t feel is my own
(ideas). I like to get ideas out and perpetuate. Let someone else take over.
Just set it down. I feel that there is a never-ending source. The more things
that you can express and you put out, the more ideas you will get.
“I hope I can paint now, and if I get discouraged
with the painting, I can be a writer or play music.”
Text by Julia Masi / FFanzeen, 1983 Intro by Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2015 Images from the Internet www.waltersteding.com
This article was originally published in FFanzeen, issue #10, dated 1983. It was written by Julia Masi.
Currently, Walter Steding is a painter and actor who writes film scores
and is in the group Crazy Mary, based in New York City where he resides. – RBF,
2015
On the cover of his new album, Dancing in Heaven, on Animal Records,
Walter Steding, in an oversized pair of rolled-up bluejeans with his violin in
hand, is suspended in an extracted hop, like the Pied Piper ready to dance off
a cliff, or Peter Pan flying back to Never Never Land. A confusing change of
image for those of us who think of him as the black-clad figure of the concert
stage.
Dancing in Heaven is light-years away from the Walter we once knew “wheezing and wailing”
to home-made bio feedback machines. He’s still inviting us to experience his
different reveries, but now with 11 simple, lighthearted, commercial songs, his
daydreams have become danceable.
“To me, the cover would have been
this hat,” he points to his large, black felt fedora that looks like it was designed
for a Pilgrim, “the darkest glasses you could find, and just skulls and daggers
all over the place. He holds up the cover for careful inspection. “At first I
didn’t like it; but now I do, now that everybody is telling me that they like
it. The back is the history,” he flips over the cover. ”I never have to talk
about my past again. It’s done. It’s documented,” he says of the black and
white montage that traces his career. Although he’s only been performing since
he came to new York in 1976, the photos on the back of the album read like a
Who’s Who of rock‘n’roll. He points to the center picture of himself and his manager,
artist Andy Warhol. “Andy was posing, and I said to him, ‘Well, we have to do
something. Why don’t you put your hands by your ears?’ Did he go for that in a
hurry! It looks derogatory, like, ‘Why is he doing that to Walter?’, but it was
my idea. He rests to skip over the pictures of himself in his early days as a
one-man-band, wearing electronic gadgets around his waist that looked like
Batman’s utility belt, but his past is too interesting to ignore. Even as a kid
growing up in Harmony, Pennsylvania, his background was always art. “Remember
the kid in high school who always went around and painted the twelve days of
Christmas on his windows? Well, that was me.” He temporarily put down his paint
brushes in the late ‘70s to try his hand at performance art. “Just ‘cause I saw
something happening.
“It was an era when new technologies
were being introduced to the masses, and it was a time when bio-feedback and Rolfing,
and any kind of New Age idea was really out there. But I just didn’t see any
aesthetic in it. I saw that the more that we define existence by finite terms,
the less we really see it. You can use any kind of formula you want to start defining
existence, but all you’re doing is making it real; making it physical. Unless
you put those physical symbols in some sort of aesthetic means, you’re not
really describing what’s there.”
At this time, Walter had been working
with the Mankind Research Center in Washington, D.C., and was in close contact
with the Menninger Foundation, so he knew a lot about bio-feedback. “As people
were going on and really thinking they were discovering something new, it just
was the phoniness, the unreality of it. It was new at the time as far as the
masses were concerned. I was using it as a means of expression. So instead of
working with bio-feedback as though it were something real and tangible, I
needed something to play against, so I took the bio-feedback and made it into
sound, and then used the violin on top of that.
“Working with color and working with
animal sounds, I learned a lot about how the sound would affect your brainwave
output. Not only brainwaves, but EKG, too. And Galvanic skin response. Any kind
of monitored bodily functions. I took a generator to a lake in Pennsylvania
where these spring peepers were coming up, and played a concert along with
them. That’s another reason why the violin was a good instrument, because it
didn’t have frets or finite points. So I could really deal with sounds and
sound like the noises that animals make; wolves and whales. You’ve head those whale
records and things? So I was playing along with those, but I knew what kind of
range those kinds of sound existed in. They’re all over the place. They’re not
necessarily concerned with stops and finite points. But it does develop into
patterns from that.
“And then, from that, I kind of go
into – holistic is the word – where you don’t have the stops. I could transfer
that into music because I knew a certain pattern that I’d be playing that would
follow along with the noises that the whales would make. And then I knew
instead of sliding my finger and going from one step to the other step, I could
break that into steps, so I could play a song very similar to the noises a
whale would make without actually trying to make it sound like a whale.
“You have different reveries in your
different states of consciousness. Like, if you go into the deep Delta region,
in this Delta it reverts to neuronal bursts per second. It’s actually (that)
you send out these signals, and they can really be monitored. You’re sort of
in-between Alpha and Beta, and you’re conscience and think about things, like
your motor actions, like moving your hands. That is more in the Alpha region,
and those (signals) are amplified. It’s a real minute signal. I built little
amplifiers so that I could convert the signals into sound. I did that by taking
the electrical impulse and putting it through an LED. The LED would charge a
photo-transistor, and that photo-transistor would change the rate and the pitch
of the synthesizer.
“I used a homemade synthesizer just
built for that.” He learned to make his musical equipment from scratch, “just
by reading schematics and things.” And by “working with chips,” he says
nonchalantly.
“The tools and things are out there.
You can go to an electronics store and just buy all these parts. You could buy
a clock – it’s called a clock (but) it’s not really a clock; it’s a little
chip, a timer. And they use it for everything. Not necessarily for music. Once
you understand the basic principles of how a chip works, you can apply it to anything.”
Walter chose to apply it to the violin because he felt that the “violin
epitomizes music.”
His first concerts were very short
and very avant-garde. “I thought it was art! I mean, I was doing it at art
galleries.” And even though he describes those performances as “wheezing and
wailing,” he did gain a certain respect for music, and command of his
instrument. “That’s how I started getting more and more musical, learning about
notation; different stops and points, with Western scales broken down into all
those finite points. The more I learned about that, the more I learned how I
could use it.
“I’m definitely trying to create a
mood with the notation. Certain things do create a mood. The sounds that whales
make do have an effect on the human body, even though it might not be aware of
how that sound is. Even without hearing whales, a person is still affected by
their sound. There is communication between all living things.
“I use the 4/4 beat. With the 4/4
beat, I try to find a more universal kind of sound, even though it’s relative
to the 4/4 timing. It’s kind of scaleless.
“I like to think of the violin
without any frets, and how it can transform that mood into a sound. And then I
like to transfer that into a progression. A real progression in the 4/4 format,
starting with the root note, and then going to the 4th and 5th – you know, real
traditional progressions. So it comes from a thought and I just keep working it
out until it becomes a tune.
“Right now, today, I got this line
that goes,” he sings, “Do, do, do, cha,
cha. I’ll take that line and I know how I want it to go, but I know that I
have to put it in a format where the bass can play along with it and the
keyboard player can play along with it. So, I’ll take the rhythm machine and
set it to a counter, where it counts off 4s. Then I’ll rearrange the idea that
I had in my head to fit that format. Then I’ll arrange it so that the bass can
play his full measures, do a turnaround, and come back in again. So it starts
with just an abstract idea, but then you keep going over it and over it, until
it becomes a song.
“The songs I write anyone can play. I
keep them simple. And I can make tapes where everything is separated. I don’t
even have to rehearse. I can give someone a tape of what it’s supposed to sound
like, and give them a tape of what their part is so they can listen to these
tapes and learn the part exactly. And never come to a rehearsal and (still)
play with the rest of the group. And then show up for a concert and know all their
lines. Like the bass player. I’ll give him a tape of the song, how it should
sound with everyone together, and then a separate tape of just his part. And
the same with the keyboard player and guitar. So there is no question then of
what they should do.”
Lenny Ferraro, drums; Paul Dugan,
bass; Karen Geniece, vocals and guitar; Mark Garvin, lead guitar; and Robert
Arron, sax, keyboard, vibratone and guitar, accompanied Walter on the album,
which he produced himself. “I wanted help. Really. I would have liked to have a
producer,” he says modestly as his big dark eyes widen. “At the time, Chris
(Stein, of Blondie) wasn’t feeling very well. I learned; I’m glad for the
experience. I learned ‘cause I had to. I really would have liked to have
someone professional come in and say, ‘This and that has to be done.’ It’s just
like, there are rules that you have to follow. The bass beat is on the one, and
the snare is on the two. Until I learned that, I didn’t write songs that way. I
put the snare wherever I felt like it. Someone could always tell something was
wrong with it. I could tell something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. So it
would be good to have a producer who could say, ‘Why don’t we write a harmonic
part that goes with the 4?’
“I don’t want to do something
deliberately wrong when I know it shouldn’t be that way, just because it’s been
done by so many other pioneers of electronic music and avant-garde musicians,
like Cage and Stockhausen; people who have designed instruments, like Bookla
and Moog, and all. That’s been done before.”
Right now, he can’t see himself
returning to the avant-garde, using music as an art form. “It doesn’t make much
sense for me to stay at one level and just deal with the emotion.
“The last concert I did, people liked
it. I’ll keep going in that direction.”
David Bowie Under Review – The Calm Before the Storm: 1969-1971 Executive Producer Rob Johnstone
Narrated by Thomas Arnold
Sexy Intellectual
65 minutes, 2012 Chromedreams.co.uk MVDvisual.com
David Bowie has always been an enigma to me, quite frankly. Sure, I understood what he was doing, and how he latched on to what he wanted – even if it originated with someone else – and made it his own. While I respect that, he has always felt pretty contrived to be, especially from his theatrical Ziggy period onward.
And yet, I have always found his story interesting, and have followed his career somewhat over the years. Now at age 66 with a new recording about to come out, here is a British documentary in the Chrome Dream collection that starts at the very beginning of his rise to superstardom.
Of course, the problem with this DVD is that Bowie’s career has been so carefully documented in every possible medium, there really isn’t too much here that’s pretty common knowledge to a true fan. But as someone who is unaware of the pre-Ziggy career, this is a treasure trove, especially all the interviews which are new, and the clips, many of which are rare.
Bowie (often pronounced as Bow-wee on this) started his public career apparently not as a musician, but as an activist for a bogus group he started for the protection of men with longer hair, back in 1964. This managed to get him his first televised experience, a clip of which is shown.
We follow him through his less-successful folkish-mawkish period, influenced by the likes of Anthony Newley (1999), when he was supposedly inspired by Bob Dylan (I don’t see the root). But as journalist Chris Roberts states in an included interview clip, “He’s always had a good ear for musicians and a good eye for collaborators. He always surrounded himself with useful people.” A special talent indeed, and I mean that with no hint of sarcasm.
After the release of his self-titled album, which bombed when first released, he came up with his break-out song, “Space Oddity,” a true rock gem. Then with the help of the likes of collaborators like guitarist Mick Ronson (d. 1993) he began to evolve through the likes of the LPs The Man Who Sold the World (1970) and Honky Dory (1971), and he became more flamboyant.
The tone started changing when Bowie opened for Tyrannosaurus Rex, and started adopting more of Marc Bolan’s proto-Glam style. Friendship turned into jealousy as Bowie’s career began to eclipse Bolan’s, though they stayed friendlimies for the rest of the latter’s short life (d. 1977). The birth of Ziggy Stardust’s androgyny started to click in Britain. Apparently, star-maker and producer John Peel (who is shown here in a 2004 interview, shortly before his death that same year) never really forgave Bowie for his alleged treatment of Bolan, and states so explicitly.
And where did that fashion style originate? Mostly from a of a cast of New York-based performers that showed up to act in a gender-ambiguously play called Pork, namely Cherry Vanilla (the woman who single-handedly helped introduce and break Bowie to the American audiences), the lovely Wayne (now Jayne) County, and publicity maven / photographer Leee Black Childers. Personally, I think these three should have been interviewed on this film because David Bowie may never have become David Bowie if it weren’t for this amazing trio (testify, Jimi L!). Luckily, they are at least given credit by one of the journalists who are part of the commentary.
That kind of style “borrowing” and eclipsing would not historically end there with Bowie. One needs just look at Boy George’s appropriation of bands like Hayzee Fantayzee. But I digress…
The other half of from what was Ziggy Stardust formed was the Andy Warhol Factory group, where Bowie is stated here as essentially saying that he wanted ‘“the mind of Lou Reed and the body of Iggy Pop. Ziggy Stardust was Bowie’s attempt to be that." Leee Childer’s once told one of FFanzeen’s writers in the 1980s that Bowie’s genius is knowing what to steal, and when. Very subtly, this DVD agrees.
There is a gaggle of journalists interviewed here mostly stating opinions, such as David Stubbs, Andrew Mueller, and Paolo Hewitt. As always, what fascinates me more are the people who are more intimately involved, like collaborators from the early years like Keith Christmas and Bob Solly. Shame they couldn’t get Angie Bowie, she certainly would have joyously livened up the volume on the DVD.
As always, there’s lots and lots of rare clips, both video and sound, from the entire period under discussion, including interviews with Bowie, of some of his influences (like Bolan and Donovan), and even a snippet of a telly advertisement in which he participated before his rise. Of course, all of these clips are short and incomplete; otherwise this would be five hours long.
In Chrome Dream fashion, this is a well-released and solidly-put together. It also feels a bit more even than some of the earlier histories, in that some interviewed are actually critical of the man at the center, rather than merely full of hyperbole (though some of that is here, too).
Now that I have finished this enjoyable history, I’m going to watch an alternative version with Velvet Goldmine.
Even though he probably didn’t really have anything to with the films other than being willing to publicize it by having his moniker attached, Andy Warhol apparently loved titles with one word following his name, such as Andy Warhol’s Dracula, Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, Andy Warhol’s Trash, Andy Warhol’s Flesh, and Andy Warhol’s Heat.
Most of the films had a strong amateur quality to them, which actually made them feel all the more gritty and real, rather than taking away from it. Thus is the case with the film at hand, Andy Warhol’s Bad.
The basic plot revolves around Hazel Akins, played in middle age by Carroll Baker (who sizzled up the screen with the likes of Baby Doll), a Queens, NY, cosmetologist (i.e., does electrolysis from her home) is a crime pimp. She takes orders from regular customers on transgressions upon request (e.g., the opening scene of Cyrinda Foxe trashing a lunch counter’s bathroom). She only deals with women criminals who get paid and then give her a large cut that she calls “rent.” That is until…
Enter Perry King as L.T., a grifter drifter who manages to sweet talk Hazel into letting him stay at her house until he hears from the person hiring him; the only reason she agrees is because of the large share of her cut. Y’see, Hazel is greedy. Even though a cop is hanging around (Charles McGregor, of blaxploitation and Blazing Saddles fame) asking for a name to arrest so he can look good, she won’t turn anyone in simply because of she doesn’t want to lose the commission, not because of good will.
I knew I was going to like this film from the first piece of dialog said by King. He walks into a lunch counter (yes, the same one as mentioned above) and he says, “Coffee. Light and sweet.” I haven’t heard those words since moving to Canada. For those up here who don’t now, it’s the original “double-double.”
In fact, one of the great joys of this film is the harsh Brooklyn and Queens accents, which come naturally, unlike most of what you hear in the media (e.g., CSI: NY). It’s just brutal happiness. Rosie O’Donnell, when she was much younger and doing stand-up, posited that no one would have listened to Einstein if he had a New York accent. But I digress….
Morals are a bit hard to come by with this crowd, as the range goes from casually reading other peoples mail and snipping off fingers for personal pleasure (and then putting it in someone’s mustard jar), to assaults on pets, autistic kids and infants. Oh, John Waters is not the only one holding up a Filthiest Family (albeit no one here eats dog crap). As Mary, the screechy daughter-in-law, played by the wonderful and underrated Susan Tyrrell states, “People are so sick; the more you see ‘em, the sicker they look.” Sing it, sister.
Among the strangest inhabitants of this world are real life Brooklynite siblings, Geraldine and Marie Smith, who also play sisters in the film. It’s a joy to hear them talk, whatever they’re saying. One’s a pyro who sets fire to a movie theater and the very car they just robbed as they tool around.
While Warhol isn’t in the film, his presence is still subtly felt by some of his Factory crowd appearing in the film, such as Brigid Polk (as an insaniac who orders the doggie do-in) and Kitty Bruce (Lenny’s little girl).
Considering how shrill the film is, and how vile the storyline, the picture actually holds together better over time than early Waters’ has, becoming camp in a different way: AW’s Bad is more urban gritty in a Serpico or Taxi Driver kind of way, whereas Waters’ – whose films I truly enjoy – are more suburban mythical. And, may I add as a note rather than an insult, the people here are much better actors than those who appear in the early Baltimore auteur’s work (apologies to Divine, RIP).
AW’s Bad reminded me of other low-budget films of an earlier time, such as Lady in a Cage, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and even Arch Hall Jr.’s The Sadist. It’s certainly more shocking in a humanist way, than some of the other Andy Warhol-related releases, such as Frankenstein or Dracula, and the film is certainly better directed by Jed Johnson than, say, Heat or Trash (mind you, I haven’t seen those latter two films since the ‘70s, so I’m relying on a 30-year-old memory…jeez, I’m old…).
This is not a feel good movie in any kind of way, but it is sharp, in part by the sheer will and emotion of its actors, even when they’re being cool and suave like King, or cold and calculating like Baker. But it’s the others who have a scene or two that really make the picture into the true horror show that it is. Not for the squeamish at heart, but a wondrous slice of life of the truly bad.
This is a British documentary, so you know which one of the three is getting the main focus. Okay, picture two pyramids next to each other. The one on the left is Lou Reed and the one on the right is Iggy. Balancing between them is a line connecting the two (that is Marc Bolan, mentioned often but not in detail). And finally there is the third pyramid of the “sacred” triangle, David Bowie, on top of it all. That is the vision presented here. Okay, I’m done. Naw, not really, as this is still an interesting – albeit somewhat skewed – vision of the three.
Let me quickly add here that I am totally impressed by the choice of interviews that have been selected for this doc, which is so much better than the Pearl Jam one in this series. But more on the talking heads later.
There’s no doubt that Bowie was influenced by Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, but that’s nothing new. Just listen to David Jones’ singing style around the Ziggy Stardust period, and it’s easy to see the progression from his earlier works. Personally, I’d rather listen to Reed’s take, but that’s just me, walkin’ on the wild side on a Sunday morning when comes the dawning.
There’s plenty of clips here of the Velvets; well, as much as there really is, which is limited, and taken by the Warhol crowd “artfully” (i.e., in fast speed) while in Exploding Plastic Inevitable mode (Gerard and his whip dance is often present). Bowie was still in folkie / cutsie mode when he first heard “Waitin’ for My Man,” and (rightfully) became a huge VU fan. An example given here is his “Toy Soldier,” which is such a – er – homage to “Venus in Furs,” it even quotes it in a few place, such as the line “bleed for me.” The video for the song has someone dancing with whips. And on “Black County Rock,” as explained in this doc, Bowie even imitates Bolan. MainMan publicist and photographer Leee Black Childers, who would later manage Iggy and then the Heartbreakers, states here that Bowie’s true talent is to know what to steal. In fact he said this and many of other the other bon mots he posits in a FFanzeen interview conducted by our own Nancy Foster (aka Nancy Neon) back in 1982 (reprinted here: ffanzeen.blogspot.com/2010/02/portrait-leee-black-childers.html).
Andy Warhol is shown as possibly as big an influence as the VU, and to talk about the theatrics of the Factory and its influence on Bowie are the likes of the very wound up VU biographer Victor Bockris, the fabulous aforementioned Childers (who used to have one of the coolest motorcycle jackets ever, with an image of Gene Vincent painted on its back), the equally extraordinary Jayne County, smartly dressed in bright red Little Red Riding Hood mode (she even matches the couch!), 16 Magazine publisher (early on) and Ramones manager Danny Fields, and the Psychotic Frog himself (who was also one of Andy’s superstars), Jimi LaLumia. They paint a vivid picture of Lou and Andy’s influence on not only Bowie, but music in general. But Bowie is the main focus here, and in this case almost rightfully so, as Lee, Jayne, and Jimi were all hired by the Bow-ster to work with Tony DeFries and help run his production company, MainMan. One person seriously missing from the interview call list, though, is Cherry Vanilla, which is a serious deficit.
But the person of interest for me here, interview wise, is definitely Angela Bowie. A while back I found her kind of abrasive, but I must say that my opinion has totally changed, and I now I can see her as incredibly refreshing. She holds nothing back, and will tell the most intimate details at top volume. My apologies to you, for any negative thoughts I may have had in the past. But I digress…
Other interviewees include writers Paul Tryoka and Dave Thompson, and musician John Harlsen, who was a drummer on the Bowie-produced Lou Reed first popular solo effort, Transformer (as well as being Barry Womble, of the Rutles), which included his hits “Satellite of Love” and “Walk on the Wild Side.” They all paint a very detailed portrait of Bowie, and what effect Reed and Iggy had on him, and how Bowie had affected them. Also included are some short interviews (more likely called clips) with the key artists involved, such as Bowie (from 2001 and 2007), Lou Reed (1986), Iggy (1988), and just as importantly, Mick Ronson (looking extremely frail shortly before his death in 1993). There would arguably be no Bowie to the scale he achieved without Ronson as a musical driving force (rather than an influence, like Reed and Pop), I’m convinced.
Possibly one of Warhol’s biggest influences (and he really is as big as either Lou or Iggy in the David Jones pantheon) is the idea that “You’re a Star!” and if you act like it, people will come to believe and expect it. Even before the money, there was the wardrobe, the limos, the expense accounts, and all the trappings. LaLumia states it quite well when he relates that Bowie claimed that “I’m an actor. I’m not a musician. I’m portraying a rock star.” I can’t argue with that, as I’ve always found that Lou Reed was true to what he believed, as was Iggy totally committed to what he was doing, but Bowie was posing, rather than being. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never found him to be someone I’ve looked up to musically, especially in the reality of the punk days of the Ramones and the ilk.
While Iggy’s role in the Bowie history (and vice-versa) is more commonly known, there is much less about Iggy here than either Reed or especially Warhol. Bowie famously helped Pop both get off drugs and revive his career. For me, Bowie major force was in the studio as a producer, more than a vocalist, or especially as an innovator, as he was a series of influences creatively recast. Angela probably had as much to do with Bowie’s success as did David or Ronson – or even DeFries. And I won’t even detail Cherry Vanilla’s outreach program.
The added feature to the DVD is a seven-minute documentary called “The Nico Connection,” which shows how she had touched the lives of all three musicians that are the focus of the main feature. There is a bio for each of the contributors, and it put a smile on my face to see my pals the She Wolves given a shout out by Jayne County, as they’ve worked together over the past few years.
As a last note, I would like to add that after viewing this DVD, check out The Velvet Goldmine, which will then make so much more sense.
White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day By Richie Unterberger Jawbone Press (London), 2009 367 pages, USD $29.95 ISBN: 978-1-906002-22-0 www.jawbonepress.com If it’s true that God is in the details, then White Light/White Heat must be considered some kind of scripture, especially for those Velvet Underground fans, both informed and not.
But I get ahead of myself.
Richie Unterberger has a long record of rock journalism, with a number of books, including the topics of obscure bands, the history of folk rock, and the Beatles; this is only the latest in a long line of his informative and enjoyable readings by him. WL/WH is the latest in a series of Day-By-Day tomes by different authors about various bands, such as the Byrds. I haven’t read the others, but this is certainly a good start.
Essentially the book is broken down into sections, usually in calendar headings with a date – exact if known, vague if not – but Unterberger still keeps the flow going at all times in as close to chronological order as can be expected, if not more so.
It starts with the pre-original band (Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Angus MacLise, and Nico), and brings the reader up to speed, as it were, with their history just prior to /relevant to the band, with what was happening in their lives that would influence them, or direct them, into this group of both like-minded musicians, and not (i.e., Nico). Some of the other musicians aren’t “revealed” early on, such as Maureen Tucker, until they show up in the time of the band.
Unterberger takes many sources, including previous books (such as Victor Bockris’ Transformer: The Lou Reed Story [who is of the dreaded “This is what Lou Reed was thinking when…” style] and Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon, by Richard Witts), articles, fanzines, and first hand accounts from over 100 people interviewed personally by the author. He does not just repeat the information, however, he synthesizes all of the accounts, and then clarifies whenever he can. For example, he might say that something is quoted – even by the band members - as being on a certain date, but since so-and-so was someplace else from such-and-such a time, it more likely was around this time. This thoughtful processing and evaluating makes WL/WH an invaluable resource.
It is also this progression that takes the conglomeration of old and new information that keeps it all fresh and, well, fascinating. Like oral histories, there are definitely some contradictions from the different multitude of sources, and Unterberger works it into a nice mixture that respects the source, and yet makes it innovative and new.
This is a big book in many ways, but certainly due to the importance of the subject matter in a cultural context, and the physical volume itself. I’ll start with the latter.
An oversized paperback on thick, glossy paper (it is physically heavy), with clear and often large photos and images throughout, the text is teeny-tiny serif type (7 pt?), with three columns per page. On a normal book, that would be the equivalent of three pages there to one page here. In other words, this 360-plus page book would actually be over 1,000 pages in any regular size print book. The reader is definitely getting his or her money’s worth on sheer volume alone.
Needless to say, it took me a hell of a long time to get through this book, which is a good thing, because I did not read it as much as savor it. There is a lot of detailed information to process, and to Unterberger’s credit, I never felt bored or lost interest, even after Nico, Reed and Cale left the band, their places taken up by Doug Yule and Willie Alexander, to name a few.
Who can argue that the Velvet Underground were one of the more important musical entities during their period – whether one enjoyed their music or not – on so many scenes, be it rock’n’roll, rock, avant-garde, jazz, and yes, punk. They would as easily be put in the Captain Beefheart category as, say, the Stooges. Unterberger takes their influential status in the musical strata and is hardly cowed by it, nor is he condescending, but he seems to be as objective as possible (of course, there is no such thing as true objectivity), while it is obvious he is a fan at the same time.
My long-time friend Walter Ocner is a veteran VU fan in good standing, and he recently summed up WL/WH in one word: “Brilliant.” It’s hard to argue with that.
Some additional Richie Unterberger's books, in no particular order:
The following article about Boston-based bassist Ernie Brooks was originally published in FFanzeen magazine, issue #7, in 1981. It was written by John Morace.
By the time I saw the Modern Lovers in 1977, Ernie Brooks was no longer in the band. I did see him play a couple of times backing up other musicians, but never really got to know him personally, or as an individual musical entity. He certainly has had quite the career so far, as the list below will attest, as it is only partial. – RBF, 2010
Catfish Black Bassist (1969-70) The Modern Lovers Bassist (1971-74) Elliott Murphy Bassist (1976-) David Johansen Bassist (1982) Jerry Harrison Bassist (1990) Gods and Monsters Bassist (1994-) Gary Lucas Bassist (1994-)
[The original Modern Lovers; Jonathan Richman, Ernie Brooks, David Robinson, John Felice, Jerry Harrison] FFanzeen: This is Ernie Brooks, formerly with Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, and is now with the Necessaries. Ernie Brooks: Yes, and you could also add formerly with Elliot Murphy, formerly with the Love of Life Orchestra [LOLO], and formerly with what was pretty much my own band, the Flying Hearts, which included Dave van Tiegham, currently of LOLO, Larry Salzman, who now plays guitar for Peter Allen, and Arthur Russell, who’s been making disco records. The Flying Hearts played about. We played at the Ocean Club a few times… (The Ocean Club) was on Chambers Street. It was owned by Mickey Ruskin [d. 1983]. He’s a famous New York character. He was the one who started the original Max’s (Kansas City) and made it the hang-out for everybody. The back room at Max’s in the late ‘60s was where the Velvet Underground and the rest of Warhol’s super stars used to go. Plus artists, poets, scenemakers of all descriptions. Mickey was great. He was almost a patrol of the artists and musicians, letting them run up tabs. Painters could sometimes settle their bill by giving Mickey a piece of their work to hang on the wall. He runs One University Place, but it’s not the old Max’s. Anyway, the Ocean Club had a lot of Tribeca artists and musicians hanging out, just as the whole punk-New Wave thing was starting. He used to occasionally have bands play there.
FF: So you used to hang out at Max’s. Ernie: Yeah, when I used to come down here from Boston. In fact – it was before I knew him – Jonathan (Richman) was a bus-boy at Max’s, but I think he dropped so many things on people that he got fired [laughs]. Before starting the Modern Lovers, he used to come to New York. He’d hang out with Lou Reed, sleep on his sofa, and listen to the Velvets rehearse.
FF: So he goes way back with them. Ernie: Oh, yeah. It’s interesting because in a way, Jonathan is the other side of Lou Reed’s coin. I mean, Lou was always very openly into drugs and every kind of sexuality and perversity. Jonathan’s thing was that while he borrowed a lot from Lou in terms of musical style – in his guitar playing and vocal phrasing – in his lifestyle he took an opposite course. He never touched drugs as far as I know, including alcohol and cigarettes. He was against casual sex. He put girls on pedestals and worshipped them, and met them more on the astral plane than in the flesh. It’s interesting, a stance of innocence, of purity like Jonathan’s, can seem perverse when it’s taken to an extreme as it is in some of his newer songs, the ones about how beautiful everything is and how beautiful he is. I mean, something about songs like “Ice Cream Man” bothers me. He's repressing the dark side of his nature. Why is he writing all these songs for children? In a way it’s neat, so maybe it’s just a matter of taste that I like the old songs better.
FF: When did Jonathan first get a band together? Ernie: Ah, it must have been about 1969. He started it with David Robinson as the drummer and a bass player named Rolf. Soon after, John Felice, a long-time neighbor and friend, joined as a second guitarist. He was in and out of the band for years, finally leaving to start his own group, the Real Kids. Jerry (Harrison) and I joined the group a couple of months after it started; I think it was 1971. It’s hard to remember. It was when Jerry and I were in our senior year at Harvard.
FF: How did Jerry Harrison hook up with Talking Heads? Ernie: There were the three of them, and I ran into Chris (Franz) at a place called the Local near the Bottom Line (in NYC). Mickey Ruskin ran that place, too. Well, we started talking and they were considering adding a keyboard player at that point. I was with Elliott (Murphy) and Jerry wasn’t really doing anything besides going to architecture school. So they sort of got together. That’s when he started commuting to New York to try and work it out… and jamming and it worked out, so they got together.
FF: So the Modern Lovers played around Boston. Ernie: Yeah, we used to play at all the college dances, and all the so-called mixers. We could always get a job once; then they found out what we were really like [laughs]. We had a great song called “The Mixer.” It was like “Hey girls, do you notice the smell?” Things like that. It pointed out to the people at the mixer all the ridiculous things about a mixer, which was like a lot of guys and girls standing around pretending that they were having a good time.
FF: How many songs did you have? About nine of them made it onto the Modern Lovers album. Ernie: We had lots. We recorded some stuff with Kim Fowley, which I assume is the stuff they might release. That was about another 10 songs. Plus, I have some, and David Robinson has some tapes. Two songs, “I’m Straight” and “Government Center” have been released on a Warners' discount LP called Troublemakers.
FF: How did David Robinson hook up with the Cars? Ernie: I don’t know exactly, but I do remember the bass player and Ric Ocasck were around Cambridge for a long time. I had met them before. They had a band called Milkwood, a folk-rock band. I remember when the Cars were getting together. It was funny, David said this was the last band he was ever going to join. He was so fed up, he’d been in so many bands.
FF: And it worked. Ernie: It worked; it worked incredibly. They have been one of the most successful bands in the last couple of years. Their albums are just… You see, they’ve made a perfect combination of somewhat New Wave, somewhat quirky lyrics with really simple, basic pop formulas, in terms of their hooks. They’ve taken their hooks and they’ve twisted them just enough and put in a bizarre synthesizer like here, a bizarre word or two there. It’s a perfect combination.
FF: Do you think it’s contrived, or is it just what they feel like doing? Ernie: It’s not… Yeah, I think it’s contrived. But in a good sense. I think it’s really well-crafted. I really respect it. It doesn’t move me a lot. But I love the way it sounds. It has an incredible sound.
FF: One thing about rock music that’s different from other kinds of expression is that for it to be successful it has to generate an audience to pay to support it because of all the expenses involved in touring, equipment, and albums. That, of course, has an influence on the music. Ernie: It’s always a compromise. But at least in rock’n’roll, there is something very honest about the fact that you’re doing what you’re doing; nothing else. In a certain sense, it’s very ironic because on the one hand rock’n’roll is the most commercial, most compromised of arts, and on the other it’s the most honest and has the most integrity of the modern art forms because it’s so direct. You’re there in front of your audience. Either you turn them on or you don’t; you’re not supported by state grants. You’re not kissing the ass of some humanities foundation so you can get a grant and go off into a cabin in the woods and write poetry. You’re not involved in the university system, making friends with a professor so he’ll make you a teaching assistant so you can survive to write your novel. Ya know, that’s what I like about rock’n’roll.
FF: But some people are contrary to that opinion, such as the Copeland brothers on IRS, who are distributed by AM. They say that the size of the act depends upon how much A&M likes them and not the act itself. Ernie: I think that’s partly true in the sense that a group can be hyped by a record label and the record label can put a lot of money into advertising and promotion and stuff like that, but unless the goods are there and people like it, it’s still not gonna sell. Kids can only be hyped to a certain extent. Not to say that kids always have good taste. There are some really good groups that are really big, but you can have groups like Styx and Foreigner, who I find really boring. But you understand that they are competent. Copeland, I think, likes to paint himself as the adversary of the big record labels.
FF: It think that’s very different from rock people, outside of Factory people like Andy Warhol and John Cale, who were into all kinds of art forms. Ernie: It’s true, and that’s where Jonathan’s work was really seminal, in a way, for a lot of the art-rock bands like Talking Heads. They deal with issues, artistic or literary. It opened up the concept of a rock’n’roll song as being able to deal with a whole range of issues that it never dealt with before. Of course, a lot of people did that; Dylan certainly did, and the Velvet Underground. Jonathan was just another person who helped open it up.
FF: How did John Cale get involved in producing the album? Ernie: Well, the Velvet Underground was sort of looked up to by the band. And Cale had produced albums, like the Nico album and the first Stooges album, which were really important.
FF: Or the Patti Smith album. Ernie: Yeah, but this was long before that. The first Stooges album was in ’69. Iggy’s been around for along time. He was someone who totally gave himself to an audience, even to the point of hurting himself. He’d jump into the crowd, offer his body to the crowd. He’s great; he’s one of the best.
FF: I remember reading about a Velvet’s show at Farleigh Dickinson (University) – one of their multimedia presentations – and people just freaked. They started throwing bottles at the stage. Ernie: Sure, I remember in the Modern Lovers, we played with Lee Michaels and Tower of Power in San Bernardino, in California, in this huge arena. A real redneck town. People driving their El Caminos up and down the street outside. People went crazy. There was just this angry roar from the crowd and all of a sudden this stuff started coming up on the stage; bottles, cans, all sort of trash.
FF: That must have felt great. Ernie: Yeah, right. Warner Bros. had also brought all their people out to see us, their great new group. It was great.
FF: Was that John Cale’s doing? Ernie: Yeah, he was an A&R man, and a producer for Warner’s. But that didn’t last long.
FF: Who did the record finally come out with? Not Warner’s. Ernie: Beserkley Records, a small label that has been through every conceivable distributorship. It’s run by this genial madman named Matthew Kaufman. He was the guy who wanted to manage the Lovers when the original band was still intact. And he had the idea, even back then, of starting his own label. And Jonathan always really liked this guy. After the band broke up, he started managing Jonathan and issued a Beserkley Chartbusters record with a few songs of Jonathan’s on it. Then he had the idea of putting out an album of the original Modern Lovers, which was just a demo tape we made for Warner Bros. He came to us and asked if he could buy the tapes from Warner Bros. No one else was really interested in them then, so we said OK – which I realize now was probably stupid. If we had waited and held on to them we could have made some real money off the tapes, I suppose. I’ve never gotten any royalties… When I get rich enough to afford a lawyer, I’ll sue them.
FF: How did the band break up? Ernie: Well, it was philosophical differences about the music; Jonathan wanted to go in a more acoustic direction. He started thinking that electricity was too weird… At various points he decided he didn’t want any guitar. He didn’t want anything besides voice because that was the thing that was – real. Voice came from your soul and everything else was just trappings; extra. And we wanted to keep it a real rock’n’roll band. After all, David played drums, I played electric bass and Jerry played keyboards. And that’s what we wanted to do. And so we had these big arguments about that. Ya know, we were all living in this big house, just off Sunset Boulevard. It was big with a red-tiled roof; one of those Spanish palazzos. We were out there and we were totally dependent on Warner Bros. We’d have to go down to Burbank every couple of days and get some money from them. There we were, all these hardcore Easterners in LA, and I sort of loved it in a way, but it was also disorienting and crazy. Too many beautiful mindless people out there. We were all just crammed together in this house and had nothing else to do but get on each other’s nerves. It did make me realize the importance of just being together as a band. When you have to deal with the record company, when you have to deal with the business part of rock’n’roll, you really have to be together or you can be destroyed very quickly. That was really one of the problems. If we’d had a manager that we could have trusted, that would have made a big difference. Warner Bros., already worried by what they'd heard about Jonathan’s changing musical ideas, would call our house every day to talk to him. They really freaked out when he told them, “Yeah, we’ll make a record, but when we go on tour - if we go on tour – we won’t play any of the songs on it.” As his ideas about the sound of the band changed, he also changed his mind about the songs we were recording, decided most of them weren’t valid anymore.
FF: They must have loved that. Ernie: Oh, yeah. That’s just what a record company wants to hear when it’s spending a lot of money on a band. Again, if only we had a manager at that time to mediate between ourselves, and between us and the record company.
FF: Where did the name Modern Lovers come from? Ernie: That was Jonathan’s invention. The idea was to do modern love songs. Almost all of the songs that we did, in one way or another, involve girls and are about relationships that always involved, somehow, with the modern world of suburbs, shopping centers, beltways – a bleak but often beautiful landscape. That was part of it. Also, Jonathan always had the idea of being, along with the rest of us in the band, a “modern lover,” a modern romantic believing, as the song says, “I don’t want a girl to fool around with / I don’t want someone just to ball / I want someone I care about / Or I want nothing at all” [“Someone I Care About” – Ed.]. Of course, that wasn’t a modern idea, but expressed in a rock song and combined with the image of the group, it was at least different.
FF: Did Jonathan find what he wanted? Ernie: I don’t know. Maybe he has. Maybe that’s why his new songs seem happier. This ties in with and half-contradicts what I said earlier: maybe the old adolescent pain and sexual frustration are resolved; maybe he has really exorcised the darker side of his character. Maybe I like the older songs better because I’m still adolescent at heart or maybe it’s true that repressed sexual energy sparks the best art [yawns].
FF: I notice all the songs on the first album are really simple, or repetitive. Even I can play “Roadrunner” on guitar. Ernie: Sure, it’s two chords: A and D.
FF: Why was he doing that? Ernie: Well, it was partly the fact that he picked up a guitar and didn’t know how to play it and he just started doing what he could do. And also, he believed there was a virtue in simplicity. Again, that’s certainly something the punk thing picked up on, because the whole idea, in a way, of New Wave was that technique didn’t matter. That it was the emotion and the feeling. If you did something with confidence you could do it. That’s always a part of rock’n’roll. What really mattered was the emotion, not the technique.
The following interview with musical impresario Lee Black Childers was originally published in FFanzeen magazine, issue #9, in 1983. It was conducted by Nancy Foster, credited under “NanSuzy Foster.”
Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Leee Black Childers was everywhere, but where I encountered him the most was Max’s Kansas City (introduced to me by Nancy). Before anything about the man, I must say that I so coveted his leather motorcycle jacket, which had an amazing painting of Eddie Cochran’s face on the back.
Childers has had an astonishing carreer behind the scenes to levels that have changed the scope of the music world. When he wasn’t running David Bowie’s MainMan empire, he was managing the Heartbreakers (with Johnny Thunders), or he was photographing living icons into household memories with shots that were published worldwide.
I liked Leee the first time I met him, and though he probably doesn’t remember me, well, I still want that jacket! – RBF, 2010
/www.leeeblackchilders.com/
FFanzeen: When was the first time you came to New York from down South?
Leee Black Childers: Well, I kept leaving and going back. The first time was the Summer of Love, 1967. Me and this girl from England, who was down in Kentucky – the Israeli war happened and she got all crazy and decided the world was gonna end and we’d have never seen New York, so we got on a plane and come. I arrived with eight dollars in my pocket at Kennedy Airport, didn’t know a soul in New York; a solider picked us up and took us to the “Y” and paid for our rooms and everything for a few days. He could see that we were helpless. He housed us until we made friends with someone and we moved in with him.
[Wayne County, Max's Kansas City, 1976]
FF: When and how did you connect with people like Cherry Vanilla?
Leee: Well, Cherry was back in the old underground theater days. There’s this brilliant director named Tony Engrassia who did Off-Off-Broadway shows like La Mama and New York Theater Ensemble, and the day the men landed on the moon, Jackie Curtis got married. Do you know who Jackie Curtis is?
FF: A transsexual; an Andy Warhol starlet.
Leee: Sort of. Whatever. A drag queen. She got married on a rooftop that same evening. She was supposed to marry Eric Emmerson, but he didn’t turn up, so she married someone else.
FF: A publicity stunt?
Leee: Yeah, you know, it was just a joke. And everyone was up there, so we got invited up to that, me and Wayne County. Wayne County was my roommate at the time, and at that thing up there we met Tony Engrassia and Holly Woodlawn, and all those people. So Tony invited Wayne down to start being in the plays, and I became stage manager. And that’s when Cherry Vanilla turned up for the one Wayne wrote, called World.
[Cherry Vanilla, Max's Kansas City, 1976] FF: What year was that?
Leee: ’68 or ’69; I guess ’69. Yeah, it would be ’69, because then the most successful one (play) was Pork, which went to London in 1970, with Cherry in the title role. [Laughs]
FF: Could you tell me a little bit about your work with MainMan, and how you got associated with Tony DeFries, David Bowie –
Leee: Right. That comes through Pork. I was stage managing and Cherry was in it, and Wayne County was in it, and Tony Zennetta played the Andy Warhol figure in it, and we took it to England. Cherry and I were pulling this scam at that time in England, saying that we wrote for Circus magazine. She was supposed to be the writer and I was supposed to be the photographer and, in fact, we didn’t write for them, of course, but who’s to know? We were loud Americans. They believed us, so we got into all the rock shows free.
FF: Love it!
Leee: Right, so one day I was reading this thing, and in a little garage behind a shopping center in Haberstock Hill, was David Bowie. So I say, “Oh, I read about him somewhere. He wears dresses and things. Let’s go see him.” So Cherry, and Wayne and I went to see David and, of course, David was entranced ‘cause we were doing an Andy Warhol thing. So David came to see the opening when Pork opened up and he came to see the show, I don’t know, eight or ten times. When the show closed, we came back to New York and we all said we’d keep in touch; then we hadn’t heard from David in about a year. Then Tony DeFries called up Tony Zennetta and said that David was planning his first American tour. In that year, David had become a big success in England. And so Tony said he was planning his first American tour and he didn’t want the normal sort of crew that you get – you know, a bunch of hippies and everything; he wanted us, would we be the crew? I was working at 16 Magazine at the time, Tony Zennetta was working in a photo lab, Cherry Vanilla wasn’t working at all and was deeply in debt – so of course we all said yes – of course, we’ll be MainMan – and so we were. We had no experience, which make it work out, because we were able to ask for the impossible because we didn’t know you couldn’t get it. So we’d walk into the record company or into the club where we were going to perform and make all these impossible demands, and just because we didn’t know that you couldn’t ask for things like that, we’d end up getting it. When I was in St. Louis, we were at this strange little hotel and I was on the phone with Lisa Robinson, who was in Los Angeles, ‘cause we were going to Los Angeles next. She said, “Where are you staying?” – and I forget where it was, somewhere weird – and she said, “Oh, that place is awful, you can’t stay there,” and I said “I’ve never been to Los Angeles, where should I stay?” She said the Beverly Hills Hotel, so I said, okay, and I called up RCA and I said switch our reservations to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Forty people. In the Beverly Hills Hotel. The bill there alone was, like $60,000 or something.
[Holly Woodlawn, set of "Good Night America" with Geraldo Rivera, 1975]
FF: Bless their abuse.
Leee: I didn’t know what the Beverly Hills Hotel was; RCA couldn’t say no to me, so they booked us in. I don’t know why they couldn’t. The roadies would go down to Hollywood and pick up tourists and say, “Come back to the Beverly Hills Hotel with us, you can have a complete Beverly Hills Hotel dinner for five dollars a head.” All these people would come back with them, they’d collect the five dollars, and the tourists would order anything they wanted.
FF: That’s incredible!
Leee: So these tourists would get $250 meals for five dollars. The roadies, in turn, would make fifty dollars a night, plus tips. Now, if RCA reads this, they’ll know what happened.
FF: Around ’75 or so, I joined the Wayne County Fan Club, and I was in touch with this guy named Eve Emmerson, and he said that David Bowie thwarted Wayne’s musical career by saying Wayne was an actor, rather than a singer. Was there any truth to that? Did David Bowie sort of encourage Wayne to concentrate on acting?
Leee: Yeah, a lot of people say that. Even looking back now over the years, it’s really hard to remember exactly what happened. Because those were really peculiar times. There was an incredible amount of money, which none of us had ever had before, all of it really stemming from David. Tony DeFries was such a charismatic character; everyone thought everything he said and did at the time was just perfect. We thought he was a genus. So he moved us out of this crummy apartment on the Upper West Side, where in the bathroom, when we went to the toilet, we had to open an umbrella because there was a constant leak. We moved from that into an Upper East Side duplex, with a balcony and the whole number; you know, got us video tape machines, gave us anything we wanted. We had charges at restaurants all over town; we had American Express cards and MasterCharge. And then, Tony DeFries announced to Wayne, “Now you won’t work.” ‘Cause Wayne had been playing a lot, you know. He said, “The idea is to sit. And wait. And not make you available.” In the course of that, he said, “So you wont’ be doing nothing, we’ll concentrate on some acting and we’ll make a movie and stuff like that.” It could have been David’s idea, ‘cause now we know that 90% of those brilliant ideas we thought Tony DeFries was having had really been coming from David, who was in England at that time. And so we sat. And nobody complained much. He wasn’t just doing it to Wayne, he was doing it to a girl-singer named Ava Terry, he was doing it to Dana Gillespie, he was doing it to Amanda Lear; everybody was getting huge salaries, living in style, and being told to do nothing.
FF: Where can I get a job like that?
Leee: Now there are people who say that David did that particularly to all those people to keep them out of the limelight while he, you know, did his number. And he’ll be the first to tell you he used all of those people’s ideas. Periodically, he would either visit, or the people would be sent to England and live with him for a while. He’d pick their brains and he’d get ideas for songs and concepts and everything, I mean, Tony Engrassia wrote a play named Fame a year before David Bowie wrote a song named “Fame.” And Tony spent, like, two months with David, supposedly working on a script of a play about 1984, and in the course of it, of course, he told him all about Fame and his concept, you know, of the whole idea of the destructiveness of it. Out came the song. What can you do? David would say, “Yes, I got the idea (from someone else),” but David’s great genus is knowing which ideas are the good ones. So, we sat, and Wayne couldn’t do a thing, not even acting for that matter. Every once in a while a film crew would come around and point a camera at us, at whatever we were doing. I’d love to see that film now – I don’t know where it is – ‘cause they spent thousands on it. Finally he went crazy and demanded to be allowed to play. So then they did this one show, which was Wayne County at the Trucks, which cost a fortune to put on. Which wasn’t really Wayne. Wayne would put on garbage and would dance around in the back room of some slezoid dive. Suddenly they had this theater down on West Street, that Arts Center, and Tony Engrassia staged and directed it, and they had dancers and they had lights and costumes, and it cost fortunes, and it was an all-invited audience. Nobody could get in who just wanted to play. Champagne and all kinds of stuff that costs fortunes and only the wrong people saw it; a bunch of snobs and businessmen, and people like that. And then he was told to sit again, so then he stared going crazy. Flipping out, you know. And so that’s when Tony (DeFries) said, “I don’t think we can work together,” and that was the end of the relationship. And, of course, as soon as all of the money was cut off and Wayne was back on the Upper East Side, and had to fend for himself, then everything was fine and he wasn’t crazy anymore. Before, he was out all night, taking pills like crazy. He’d come storming into the house at six in the morning with a string of the most dreadful people hanging on him. I’d be throwing them out, you know, and Wayne would be shouting, “Theah mah friends, theah mah friends.” “No, they’re not, get them out; out you go.” And as soon as he was back working for himself, well then, everything went back to normal. He was fine; puttin’ on shows for $25, making $35, and being very happy, and it was great again. It was very peculiar times and we’ll never know how much of it was Tony DeFries megalomania, how much of it was David.
FF: Tony was probably the hatchet man.
Leee: Right. [Laughs] Perhaps David meant well. Perhaps he really thought Wayne shouldn’t do anything. The other thing that’s nice is since that time – all those people got dropped at the same time, Amanda, Ava, and everybody – they’ve all gone on to great success.
FF: When and where was the first place you saw the Heartbreakers, and what was your first impression?
Leee: Well, the same thing everyone said. Actually, it was Tony Zennetta who went to see them somewhere – CBGB’s or somewhere – and I hadn’t gone. Tony went crazy, and he was on the phone with me and he said, “You can’t believe how completely destroyed these people are. If they manage to live to another set you must go.” And, of course, that’s what everyone then said, and everyone still does. “Catch them before they die.” A thousand shows later, they’re out-living everybody; they’ll out-live us all. It was very macabre, but that’s what I went for at first, to see how physically destroyed – Johnny (Thunders) and Jerry (Nolan) were old friends of mine and I wanted to see what sort of shape they’d fallen into. But then, of course, I really liked the music. It really, immediately, got me. “Blank Generation,” I thought was brilliant. I remember once, at CBGB’s – Cherry Vanilla had this boyfriend named Michael Linder who was a radio talk show type person, and he did reviews and things. Very, very straight: Brooks Brothers suits and this naturally blond hair cut perfectly and all. Clean fingernails and the whole number. So she brought him down to CBGB’s. They were sitting sort of at the back, and the music was going on, but they couldn’t really see anything, and he liked the music. So then, I was so gun-ho on it at the time. I gave him the speech about this music is the future of rock’n’roll and it’s finally getting rid of guitar solos and all this Eric Clapton shit, and I went on and on an on, and I got him real excited, and he said, “Oh, do you think I could talk to one of the Heartbreakers?” And I said, “Sure, sure, I’ll go get one.” So the set was over and I got Richard Hell and brought him and set him down, and then Cherry and I both realized what we’d done. Here was this perfectly groomed person talking to Richard Hell. His (Hell) lips were all cracked and chapped and he had scabs on his face, and his hair was cut in all different directions and he was dirty and his clothes were falling off, and one eye was closed and he was sitting there. And, of course, Richard was adoring it; he was putting it on as much as he could, to see how horrified he could get this poor man. Michael Linder was sitting as far back in the booth as you can get. It was great. I didn’t start managing (the Heartbreakers) until Richard left, unfortunately, ‘cause I adore Richard. I guess it’s just as well, though, ‘cause I hear he’s suing Sire Records and everything, saying Sire destroyed his career. If any of us look back, if anybody could get anything in edgewise as far as destroying with, Richard was doing a very good job himself.
[Billy Rath, Irving Plaza, 1978]
FF: Could you give us a few words on the personalities of each of the Heartbreakers?
Leee: Yeah. It’s funny to do it now, not working with them. Probably this is the best time to do it. Johnny (Thunders) is totally adorable. He could be a great con man if he weren’t so self-destructive, ‘cause he’s a very good con artist. But he’s too greedy, so he gets you madly in love with him – and this is anyone – everybody he meets just thinks he’s so sweet and wants to protect him. And to help him. And he is; he’s very good-hearted. But he’s greedy and so he’ll get a little bit. Someone that he could con out of $500,000, he cons him out of $500 instead, and rips him off and then ruin the relationship. He goes for the moment. He over-indulges everything, you know? When we first started recording [the album L.A.M.F. – RBF] for Track Records in England, I told these people – they were all well meaning, I guess, but they were used to the Who and everything, and you’d think they’d have known better – “When we get in the studio, it’s nothing but Coca-Colas and no drugs and not anything that’s destructive.” So they said, “Okay, Okay.” I said, “Please trust me, that’s the way it must be.” Of course, we got in the studio and Johnny said, “I don’t want any drugs or anything, I want to work, but c'mon, I gotta loosen up. How about some Scotch? Just Scotch.” And I was saying, “No, no, no,” right? The record company people, Chris Stanton, they though I was crazy. “We can’t turn him down for that,” so they went out and got him a bottle of Scotch, which he downed instantly, and then fell on the floor. First day of recording. All I could say was, “See, I told you.”
[Jerry Nolan, Johnny Thunders' Memorial, 1992]
FF: No moderation.
Leee: No moderation, which, I guess, helps make him an artist. Walter (Lure) is possibly the most talented one, creatively, in the group. I don’t want to say the most talented, but creative. Because he always had new ideas, he was already ready to try new things, and he didn’t realize, and probably still doesn’t, that he had become a really big star in England. There were as many kids imitating him and cheering for him and freaking out over him as there were for Johnny. He always acted like it was Johnny and assumed it was Johnny. I don’t think he ever really realized that if he ever went back – Johnny has since been back to England a few times. Walter’s never gone back – he’d be a big draw; he was really a big star. The kids loved him ‘cause he’s a psycho.
[Walter Lure, CBGB's, 1980]
FF: That might be what the Heroes (Walter’s group) have to do because in New York, it’s Johnny, and Walter will always be in Johnny’s shadow according to, like, the club owners and stuff, and the Heroes really get a hard time.
Leee: Really not so in England. In fact, Walter might be even more fashionable ‘cause England has gone very psycho right now. And Walter has the look and delivery to go with that. I think he’d really do well.
FF: Maybe if he gets a record deal they could send him over there. There’s this real anti-rock’n’roll backlash in New York right now. But I think the rockabilly here’ll knock that right out. That’s gonna be the pervasive thing. It seems like it’s the most healthy branch of the music right now. It’s alive.
Leee: That’s why I got into it. That’s why I was first working with Levi (Dexter), and I realized I couldn’t work with both him and Johnny. I talked to Johnny about it, and I said, this is fun for me. I enjoy every (Levi) show, I enjoy touring, and much to Johnny’s credit, he completely understood. He said, yeah, he could see that that would be much more what I would enjoy than working with him, so we parted on the best-of-friends.
FF: Levi’s like a big breath of fresh air; he’s so anti- that junkie jadedness that pervades New York.
Leee: After two years with the Heartbreakers, you can imagine what it was like to suddenly be with little sixteen and seventeen year-old kids who were saying, “Ohhh, can we really play? Can we really do a gig?? Two gigs in one night? What fun! [Laughs] With Johnny, I’d have to slap him and say you will do this show. “No, I’m not getting out of bed.” And we’d have a rough ‘n’ tumble and eventually he made every show but one in two years, which is fully to his credit, really. Because sometimes he was in no shape to, but he did. He always made it while I was working with him.
FF: What about Jerry (Nolan)?
Leee: I can’t talk about Jerry.
FF: What was your most memorable thing about working with the Heartbreakers?
Leee: Oh, well, besides them, generally, which was some experience, I guess that whole period in England when we did the Anarchy Tour [1977 – Ed.]. It came as such a surprise to us; none of us knew what was going on over there. From playing Max’s (Kansas City), it had become very routine here. Then three days later we had to run with our coats over our heads while photographers were trying to get our pictures, and keep our hotel room locked. There were people meeting us at the edge of town with pickets, turning us away, not even letting us in the town. It was such a weird experience. It didn’t know that much anti-rock’n’roll feeling – which is what it came down to – existed anymore, and there it was. It was really such a strange experience. That’s why I told everyone in New York to come to England. Cherry Vanilla sold everything in her apartment. She put a “for sale” sign on her door and sod everything – everything –to get all the money she could to come to England. She was there in a month. Wayne was there in a month. They came fast and cashed in.
FF: Where did the Heartbreakers get the best response?
Leee: Well, I guess in London. Pretty well all over England. There was a lot of hysteria in Scotland. Scottish audiences are dangerous. Liverpool, they go crazy for ‘em. They built a very, very good following in Amsterdam. It’s much more hysteria there, and in France, then they ever got in New York because half the people in the audience in New York had slept with them. Some of the glamour isn’t there, where kids in Leeds had only ever seen their pictures and heard the rumors – and suddenly there they were on stage in front of them. It was fantastic to them.
FF: They still had that aesthetic distance.
Leee: Yeah, right.
FF: Do you ever go see the Heartbreakers any more?
Leee: Do the Heartbreakers play any more?
FF: Yeah. Tony (Coiro) from the Knots plays bass because Billy Rath went to Cape Cod and became a father. He moved in with his girlfriend, Marsha. He got hepatitis in, like, December (1980), and that sort of turned his head around. He said, “Enough of that.”
Leee: He’ll probably be a lot happier. He was never really happy doing that (music).
FF: He’s supposed to be really happy getting up six in the morning and doing farm chores, and that kind of thing.
Leee: He got very self-destructive, too, but it always seemed sort of imitated, like he thought, “Oh, well, I might as well be self-destructive, too, otherwise what am I gonna do? Read a book?” So he’s probably very happy and Marsha probably is, too. Good, I’m glad. Sure, I’d go see them (the Heartbreakers). It would be a great experience.
FF: Have you seen the Heroes yet?
Leee: No, but I haven’t –
FF: Mucho upbeat. Walter’s my favorite dresser and comedian, too. What did you do between managing the Heartbreakers and managing Levi? Or was it straight to Levi?
Leee: Straight from. I was in England, and the punks / Teddys war started, and I’d see pictures of Teddy Boys in the papers and they looked awfully glamorous to me – more glamorous than the punks. So I began going in disguise to Teddy Boy shows. It would always be dark so they never knew. Although my hair was quiffed, it had an electric blue streak through it. But they never knew. So I started going and eventually the show where I met Levi the lights went on and I was about to be killed, but I met him. He just got up – it was a Shakin’ Stevens show – and did a couple of songs and I thought he was great, so I asked him to come around to the office. He didn’t have a band and didn’t know anything about starting a band, so I started working with him while I was still working with the Heartbreakers. Then all the trouble with Jerry started. That was in July, when I met Levi, and by about September, Jerry Nolan was pulling his numbers and quitting the group and then going back when Johnny would cry, “Come back for a week.” Then he’d come back if we’d pay him $1,000 a show and things like that, and I was going crazy with all that anyway. So eventually then, Jerry left. And we did whole tours with other drummers – Terry Chimes (of the Clash) and people – and then it really began getting crazy until it was clear the Heartbreakers were gonna break up. So Johnny asked if I’d continue to work with him as a solo artist, so I said yes. But by then, Levi had begun playing, too [with the Rockats – Ed.]. In fact, the very first show Levi ever did, it was the worst show you ever saw in your life. [Laughs] Johnny Thunders did the greatest thing: it was at the Royal College of Art, and Dibbs (Preston) didn’t even come on stage, you only saw a guitar cord go off-stage to nowhere for him to play; and Smutty (Smiff) wasn’t plugged in because he couldn’t play the bass at all; Levi was off-tune on nearly every song. The rhythm guitarist we had at that time jumped off-stage in the middle of the show to dance with his girlfriend – he just laid his guitar down.
FF: Oh, wonderful.
Leee: The drummer couldn’t drum. It was just awful! We were on supporting Steel Pulse, and it was a big show at the Royal College of Art, you know, and our agent had just bragged us into it. So everybody was just ready to die, and you could see Levi was just mortified. He was so terrified, he felt so horrible. So all of a sudden, Johnny got on stage – and Johnny could hardly stand up – grabbed a guitar, and he started playing, and he did this, like, Chuck Berry thing, a medley. And soon as he finished one song he’d go into the next one, and he forced Levi to sing along with him, and he forced the band to keep playing and it went for, like, twenty minutes solid. And the audience, of course, by then was going completely crazy, cheering and screaming. When they came off and were back in the dressing room, Levi said, “Oh, Johnny, thank you, thank you. You saved the show. I was horrified.” Johnny said, “I just did it to teach you one thing: it’s impossible to make a fool of yourself on stage.” It was great. We loved him for that. Levi still adores him.
FF: That is a wonderful story.
Leee: Yeah, and it was so good of him. So by then, Levi was touring a lot. We did the whole tour with Wayne County – the Eddy and Sheena Tour – all over England and Scotland, and everywhere. A lot started to happen. It was then that Johnny and I mutually realized that I was better off working with Levi.
FF: Which person or persons have you enjoyed photographing the most?
Leee: Oh, Lord! Probably the most fun I’ve had taking pictures were (of) a lot of people you probably wouldn’t know. A lot of the early drag queens and everything. They’re all dead now, or old. And also I really enjoyed a series I started and will someday finish photographing people as – I don’t want to say my favorite movie star as much as the movie star they would have been if they had been a movie star, instead of whatever they are. And that’s when I did that Wayne County session of Wayne as Thedda Bara, that picture that’s up at Max’s.
FF: Oh, yeah. When I was in the Wayne County Fan Club, they sent me that one for Christmas.
Leee: Yeah? Great! And that picture of Cherry that’s up at Max’s is Cherry Vanilla as Clara Bow. And that was fun ‘cause we’d build whole sets and create characters, and it was really fun. Some day I’ll finish the series. Do Levi as Rudolph Valentino [Laughs].
FF: If you could photograph anyone you haven’t yet, who would it be?
Leee: Who are still alive? There are a lot of people I feel very –
FF: They don’t’ have to be alive now.
Leee: ‘Cause there are a lot of people I’m really sorry I missed. Great, classic people like Tallulah Bankhead, with brilliant faces. Even when she was old and ravaged – you know, she drank spirits of ammonia for eight years. She gave up booze during the war. She swore she would never drink another drop of booze as long as Hitler was in Europe, and so she drank spirits of ammonia instead.
FF: I would imagine that wouldn’t do very much for your skin.
Leee: Right, so she was real ravaged by the time she finally died, but still amazing. I’d love to have done her. Of people that are around now, I wonder who would be really good. I can’t think. Old people still, I think. The real classics, like Estelle Winwood and James Cagney, and people like that. I’d be astounded just to be in their presence. And would like to photograph them. Other than that, probably my next favorite sort of people to photograph are completely unknown. You know, really young kids, because you can do anything with them because they’re excited at being photographed. People like Robert Redford or something; think of how many times he’s been photographed. What more can he do? But you get somebody like – another one of my favorites was a Debbie Harry session I did, you know, when she was just starting, and I don’t know if it was the very first time, but it was one of the first times she had ever been in a real studio with full lights and, you know, seamless paper backdrop, and the whole thing, so she just went bananas. She was wonderful to photograph ‘cause she was living her fantasy.
Currently living in Saskatoon (email at RBF55@msn.com for address). From 1977-88, I used to publish a print version of a music magazine in New York called FFanzeen, which dealt with the wide-ranging independent music scene. I also photographed many bands from the period (and since). Now I write this blog. And the beat goes on.
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