chapter seventeen “TAKE ALL THAT JUNK AND USE IT”
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF LIZZIE HARRISI SPEAKING AT THE 2003 NEW YORKER FESTIVAL, ABOUT HOW OPAL & NEV BECAME HER FIRST MUSIC-BIZ CLIENTS:
I mean, weren’t they just so great-looking? I know that sounds crazy in the context, but I looked at Marion’s picture of the two of them and thought, Wow, how in the world did this happen? Opal was dark dark dark and Nev was pale pale pale, and they were being physical with each other in a way that felt intimate, sorta taboo and sexy and dangerous, you know? Like rock and roll is supposed to be. Actually, you know what that picture always reminds me of? Those Benetton ads they were doing in the eighties, where they find all these weird and tribal-looking people who live on completely different landmasses [audience murmurs in recognition]—you know, one’s from Africa and the other’s from Iceland, and then they stick them together in the shot. Or I guess it’s more accurate to say the Benetton ads reminded me of that picture. Very influential. First thing I ever saw that was like it.
And then as a sidebar [in the December 1971 “The Year in Pictures” issue of Life], the magazine ran a capsule review of Polychrome, which was remarkable for the fact that the album had been out for over a year already. But the critic was gushing, talking about its urgency, its uniqueness, his songwriting, her spirit…. It was like this total package sitting in their laps, except there was no quote from either of them anywhere, no news about the next project. And I asked myself, “What are they doing? This is a gift!”
Long story short: I drafted this wild proposal to come and take over [Rivington Records’] public relations and clean up the mess they had going. I sent it via certified mail from “L. Harris,” and I think they assumed I was a man, because of the look on these guys’ faces when I showed up at the label, surprise surprise. [Audience laughter] But at that point they were on the brink of total ruin and didn’t have much to lose—nobody wanted to touch them! The first advice I gave, after telling them to get Opal & Nev in the studio ASAP to make a new record, was “Drop the Bond Brothers,” because they were assholes who I thought would drag everybody down and only get into worse trouble later on—I’d heard some disgusting stories having to do with a couple of them demeaning women. They said, “Drop the Bonds, are you crazy?” I told them, “Do that for me, and in three weeks I’ll get Opal & Nev on national TV for you.”
And three weeks later, right on time, I got them booked on Cavett. [Smiling]
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT FROM OPAL & NEV’S FIRST TELEVSION INTERVIEW, THE DICK CAVETT SHOW, APRIL 4, 1972, FOLLOWING THEIR DEBUT PERFORMANCE OF “WHO’S THE NIGGER NOW?”:II
Dick Cavett, to Opal, motioning toward the thickly padded hips and posterior underneath her tight red dress: Have you heard my seats are that uncomfortable?
[Titters from the audience]
Opal Jewel: Oh, I just make it a point to be comfortable wherever I go. I call my outfits my armor. This one is my Black woman power suit. You dig it?
Cavett: Well, ahh… I’d say the two of you make an eye-catching pair. [Waving his hand over Opal’s wig] Look at these spikes.
Nev: I’d say we’ve got extraordinarily good imaginations.
Cavett: And on the note of imagination, the new song you just played for us, the song from this new record… [Holding up the cover of Things We’ve Seen] I’m sure the folks at home, ah, will be talking about it.
Nev: Uh-oh, oh no, prepare the space rockets!
Opal, smiling: What about the song would you like to discuss?
Cavett: I just wonder, ah, if people might regard it as violent. They might say that word you use is offensive.
Nev: The character in the song, the racist man is offensive. He’s a villain who says it first, and then our heroine gets her revenge and she says it back to him and flips the tables, you see?
Opal, to Nev: You’re not explaining this right. [Audience laughs]
Nev: What? All right, then, you have a go.
Opal: That word does have an offensive history. And yet many evil-hearted people in this country still use it all the time. It was used against a Black American named James Curtis the Third on the night of Rivington Showcase. It was used against us too, just a few minutes before that woman took our picture.
Cavett: I see. Someone called you that, and someone called Nev that as well?
Nev: I was trying to help her out, trying to protect her from being injured, and I’m told that as they assaulted me they called me a very nasty name.
Cavett: You were told?
Nev: I go a bit fuzzy in the head. Tends to be my natural state. [Audience laughs]
Opal: He was called a nigger lover, Dick, which I guess was supposed to make me the nigger. And they called our drummer a nigger and beat him to death, as I assume you’ve read about by now.
Cavett: How do you feel saying that word, Opal? It seems to just roll off your tongue.
Opal: Well, of course I have a problem with the word nigger, depending on the context. If you say it or he [pointing to Nev] says it, that’s you trying to put me in my place, trying to remind me you’re on top and I’m on the bottom. It’s menacing, it’s a weapon. When I say it, that’s just me interpreting and mirroring back what’s already been spat on me without my say-so. It’s a word that the people in power here dump on people like me, but they don’t realize that sometimes people like me take all that junk and use it.
Nev: We wanted to create a character who is assumed to be powerless, but is shown to be very powerful indeed as the song goes on.
Cavett: Do you think that violence makes someone powerful?
Opal: Of course it does.
Unknown audience member, off camera: Outrageous!
Cavett: Thank you, sir, let’s hear them speak.
Opal: Get real—if violence didn’t lead to power, there would be no wars. We’d just be loving each other up. But we don’t do that, do we? We bomb villages full of children across the world, and—
Nev: In fact, you might’ve heard a song from our first album about that. We hope to come back and play it for you sometime soon, it’s—
[Crosstalk]
Opal: —use violent words as a way to intimidate other peoples.
Cavett: What would you say to those who argue you’re actively advocating for violence in this song? That this is a “kill whitey” message that goes against the doctrine of Dr. King?
Opal: Dick, I certainly don’t have to tell you how my brother Martin met his end.
Jane Fonda, from her spot down the couch: What I find interesting is that we’re focusing now on the violence that’s done against the man in the song. We’re not talking at all about the violence he commits against the woman in the first place, the casual and awful violence he commits against her body.
Opal: Ain’t that the truth, Jane? And the other thing we need to address is that this is, specifically, a Black woman. Historically, the Black woman has been subject to this kind of violence because to a lot of very foolish people in this country, there’s nothing lower than us. But guess what? Don’t underestimate our spirit, baby, because we’ll surprise you every time. [Winks]
GLORIA STEINEM, FEMINIST ORGANIZER AND JOURNALIST:
I’d watched Jane’s interview earlier in the show and had snapped off the TV, but then I got a call from my friend [the lawyer and Black feminist] Flo Kennedy, and she said, “Are you seeing what I’m seeing on Cavett?” When I turned it back on, there was Opal Jewel, blasting through this revenge fantasy against the racist who’d raped this heroine she embodied. It was extraordinary. Not because the content itself was shocking to me—we know that every two minutes a woman is assaulted in this country, and we know that racism still exists—but because we weren’t seeing that familiar trope of the damsel in distress. Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood wasn’t going out to avenge this woman. She has agency, she handles herself, and that message was incredibly provocative.
At the time the team and I had just launched Ms., and the next morning I called to arrange an interview with Opal for our next issue. That ended up being a little profile, the first time we worked with her.
QUENTIN TARANTINO, IN A 2012 PRESS JUNKET INTERVIEW PROMOTING DJANGO UNCHAINED:
“Who’s the Nigger Now?”—how great was that record? Yeah, I watched that clip on YouTube a lot while writing this movie. I mean, you listen to the song alone and you get a full revenge opus, starring a badass vigilante Black chick. You can see it, right? Like, a young, sexy Pam Grier type pulling out the knife all gangsta? “Who’s the nigger now, bitch?” [Making stabbing motions] And she guts him like a fish right on top of her… total bloody mayhem. At one point I was hoping to work the song into the soundtrack, maybe for one of the Broomhilda scenes, but sonically it didn’t mesh with the rest of the tunes. Still, incredible song.
JANELLE MONÁE, SINGER AND ACTRESS:
I loved the way she played with character, with those alter egos who seemed to take over her body when she was onstage. The older I get and the more I try to evolve as an artist, the more I appreciate what it must have taken emotionally, especially back in those days, for her to channel her anger and pain. And then she’d sit on the couch and do the interview and be cool and smart as hell. That’s that Black girl magic right there.
QUESTLOVE, DRUMMER, DJ, ENTREPRENEUR:
In my DJ sets I used to do this thing where I’d go back and forth between James Brown’s scream on “The Payback” and Opal Jewel’s on “Who’s the Nigger Now?” I thought I was pretty clever till the dance floor let me know I was fucking up the vibe. [Laughs] No disrespect to Opal, I love her—that song is just not an easy groove.
HENRY ROLLINS, PUNK LEGEND, ACTOR, AUTHOR, ACTIVIST:
Keep in mind that when The Cavett Song happened we were still a while away from the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, my band… and here was this revolutionary Black woman screaming her face off and rocking spikes. So in my opinion, anyone who doesn’t acknowledge Opal Jewel as a pioneer of punk is a racist and a sexist, and they can do me the favor of fucking right off.
TOM MORELLO, GUITARIST, RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, AUDIOSLAVE:
I was seven years old and up past my bedtime watching Opal & Nev perform on TV, and I had my nose pressed up to the screen even though they were scaring the shit out of me. [Laughs] I mean that in the best possible way—in the way something can both excite you and intimidate you and you can’t say why because you’re only a kid and you don’t know what the grown-ups are talking about; you only know that you’ve never seen or felt anything like it before. Opal was an incredible performer—she scorched my hair completely off. But not for nothing, so was Nev. Next time you watch it, check out his hands—how easy he is with the guitar the entire time she’s losing her mind.
That appearance on Cavett popped Opal & Nev out of the limited frame of Marion Jacobie’s photograph and into three complicated dimensions. When it was released one week later, Things We’ve Seen sold better than even Lizzie Harris had likely expected, especially considering its standout song could not be played on radio (“Better Living on Mercury,” featuring Nev’s lead vocal, and “Sister Stacked,”III featuring Opal’s, were sent as singles instead). The album entered the middle portion of the Billboard 200 chart and crept slowly up, up, up over the next four weeks, peaking at No. 45 (between Alice Cooper’s Killer and the self-titled comedy debut by Cheech & Chong). Polychrome got another residual sales boost too, signaling that Opal & Nev had potential to be more than just a fifteen-minute curiosity.
OPAL JEWEL:
I was never driven by money, but there were some nice moments having to do with it. Got my mama that house in the suburbs she wanted. And Pearl, she was thoroughly pissed about “Sister Stacked,” but she wasn’t too mad at the dough—I paid for her wedding and the honeymoon too.
This was also around the time I started investing in you. [On how that arrangement came to be] Your mama didn’t talk to you about that, huh? Well, there’s not much to tell, at least on my end. After I got my first big check, I mailed a cut over to Jimmy’s old place, along with a handwritten note to Corinne saying, If you ever need anything, don’t hesitate. I thought she’d rip up the damn check; she actually didn’t cash it for months. Then when she finally did, I got a letter back. One typewritten sentence to say she was taking you to Philly, with the new address underneath. So I sent a fresh check there—I figured she could use help with the moving expenses. I sent her more every once in a while. That went on for a few years, and then one day I got a thick envelope with a bunch of brochures from different private schools. I didn’t understand till I saw they had tuition schedules your mother had taken the time to highlight. I thought, Oh, okay, I guess we doing this now. [Laughs] But never, ever did your mother ask me directly for money. You know how she is. Real classy like that.
With his first taste of success, Nev finally moved out of the Hizes’ apartment in the summer of 1972. He rented a bright blue house in the West Village and made one of the bedrooms a studio where he and Opal could write and rehearse. It wasn’t long, Virgil recalled, before Opal’s effects slowly began to migrate downtown.
VIRGIL LAFLEUR, SHOWING ME A PHOTO HE TOOK OF HIS FRIENDS IN THE KITCHEN OF THE WEST VILLAGE HOUSE, OPAL HOLDING A JOINT TO NEV’S MOUTH, HER FINGERS GRAZING HIS LIPS:
They were always finding excuses to touch. Mad has accused me of being a hopeless romantic, and perhaps there is truth to that. But there is a reason that I brought her to him, after the sadness with your papa. They had a special alliance, if you will. And it is my belief that in the best times they delighted each other, and lifted each other up.
OPAL JEWEL:
I had more space in the West Village house than at Miss Ernestine’s. It was easy to spread out, because neither of us had much furniture. We had a television and one of those rattan circle chairs with the big orange pillow inside. We had stacked-up throw pillows in the bedrooms. And I had a whole bathroom to myself, where I could set up my makeup palettes and cosmetics however I wanted them. Sometimes if we were taking a break from working, we’d cook dinner—I had to get creative because we had never shopped for anything like a colander; we had one big pot. When I made my macaroni and cheese I’d have to drain the noodles by holding the pot lid so the water came out slow and clean when I tipped it over. I never let Nev do that part because he didn’t have any patience, he’d be tipping the thing too fast and the noodles would fall out into the sink.
When the weather turned colder we’d sit in that one rattan chair together, wrapped up in a blanket I’d brought from uptown, and we’d eat and drink wine and just talk. People always used to comment on how different the two of us were, but a lot of that was optics. Me and Nev had real soul connections—funny stories about growing up, the hilarious things you do to make your way through this world as an outsider. But behind that there was some heaviness too. Me never knowing my daddy, him losing his mother like he did… Anyway, what I’m saying is we both had some loneliness, some confusion, some dark feelings we were working out at the time. Sometimes we worked that stuff out in healthy ways—in the performance, in rehearsals, in talking about the future—and sometimes we looked for relief in places that weren’t so healthy. Ah, hell, I’m not talking about that. What I mean is, I’d started to notice him gobbling those painkillers, and me, well, I probably overindulged in the things that made me feel better—the weed and the wine, the pieces for my wardrobe. With those things and each other, I guess, we were trying to hang on through the craziest ride.
Soon Opal & Nev could pack the same New York City rock clubs that had once turned them away. Their shows—part rock concert, part performance art—attracted everyone from Lou Reed to Lauren Hutton, Candy Darling to Carlos Santana. They also drew a cult of flamboyant unknowns who identified with something in the duo’s music, and would come to call themselves “Mercurials.”IV
FROM “THE OPAL & NEV EXPERIENCE,” AURAL, DECEMBER 1972
By Scott Dorchester
Looking like a holiday gift in a red dress with gold buttons down the bodice, Opal Jewel first enters the stage hopping on a pogo stick, barefoot. Her pageboy wig and the flouncy skirt of her dress catch the air with every jump, expanding and collapsing in what seems like slow motion. She bounces over wires and around amps, matching the drummer’s relentless rhythm. Once she reaches the mic stand at the center of the stage, she kicks away the pogo stick so that it flies behind her. In an astonishing bit of choreography timed to a dramatic pause in the music, Nev manages to catch it.
“Who’s ready?” she shouts into the mic, and launches into the staccato phrasing of “Red-Handed,” backed by Nev’s wailing guitar. I’m not a girl that can be caught / I’m not the girl who can be bought…. The spotlight follows her as she runs and jumps and vamps, and when she reaches Nev she illuminates his corner of the stage momentarily. He leans toward her and winks, already sweating through his gold slim-cut suit, and then she’s off again.
For fifty blistering minutes, Opal & Nev wear this audience out. They wear me out, anyway. Yes, there are welcome breaks from the bombast, when the music slows into something more melodic and the spotlight hits Nev. It’s just enough time for Opal to catch her breath and for Nev to introduce snippets of new songs it seems he’s still working out, like a comedian nervously testing new material—but in almost no time, just as these tunes begin to settle into their sweet charms, the music revs again to its relentless pitch.
So it’s much to my surprise when the knockout of the night, both musically and aesthetically, turns out to be the loudest: the show’s encore, “Who’s the N_____ Now?” Through my television screen, it had seemed quick and dirty, designed purely for shock. But the song transforms in front of an appreciative audience who is ready for it—who knows not only every word but also, magically, the rules around who is allowed to sing the operative one. Among those allowed is the compelling young black girl jumping beside me, whose spiked Afro hairdo, an homage to the one Opal wore on Cavett, has wilted inside this hot little club. No matter, though; she screams her love as Opal strolls the stage in the spectacular outfit she’d changed into during the break: a black coatdress with an absurdly high collar, and a cocktail hat clinging miraculously to the side of her whistle-clean head. The hat, I notice, is blooming not with flowers or feathers, but with a clutch of plastic black-power fists. And the compelling girl beside me is singing along with her heroine from some guttural place: When he holds you down, you fuck him up / Slip the knife from its sheath, that’s how / When he calls you a nigger, you look up and smile / Say, “Who’s the nigger now?”
OPAL JEWEL:
The more we played around town, the more fans would show up [outside the West Village house], like this Pied Piper thing. Late in the mornings I’d go downstairs to get some cereal or whatever, and right outside the glass panels there’d be fans in full costume. They’d dress up like the characters in the songs and just hang out—push flowers through the mail slot, poems and drawings they’d done, flyers for protests and rallies they were going to. It could get intense sometimes. Like the night we found this group of young girls who’d managed to sneak into the back garden—we couldn’t see how they’d got back there. Nev was freaked and ready to call the pigs. I said, “Calm down, they’re only young girls with crushes.” And he said, “Young girls with crushes—sounds a lot like the Manson Family to me.” [Laughs]
But you had to learn how to separate the threat from the love, or else you’d go crazy. And to me, the fans like that weren’t ever the ones who were scary. If I could see you with my own two eyes, I wasn’t afraid of you. What was scary to me was all the things we couldn’t see, couldn’t control. Paranoia was usually more Nev’s speed, but the thought did cross my mind that whatever we were doing, the feds could be watching, listening in. A loudmouthed Black woman and her foreign-national friend, are you kidding?
Yet Opal & Nev, at least early on, seemed to welcome any opportunity to amplify their fame. And as with The Photo, the national media were fascinated by their image.
VIRGIL LAFLEUR:
Word of us did reach Grace Mirabella, and Mad was invited to participate in a shoot. Perhaps this was not as fashion-forward or as exciting as the era helmed by the incomparable Ms. Vreeland, but still, this was American Vogue! The end product was a full-page portrait of Mad in a color-block frock [designed by up-and-coming Black designer Stephen Burrows]. I still disagree that this dress was The One—I’d found the shell for that magnificent coat she wore in her shows at a vintage store and improved it with the collar—but at least they let us use the wig. I’d trimmed it so that every strand behaved like an arrow pointing toward the angles of her face…. [Sighs] Mad did ask that the photographer take some portraits of us together, me posed at her pumps with my barber’s shears. I never knew what happened to those.
OPAL JEWEL:
Vietnam, Roe v. Wade, and ooh, those bullets that George Wallace caughtV… The press loved coming to me with all kinds of questions back in those days, because they knew I would tell it like it is. A reporter once called me a quote machine, and I took that as a compliment. Because it was unusual for somebody like me, not only a young woman but a young Black woman, to get a voice in the conversation.
PARTIAL TRANSRCRIPT FROM “THE INCENDIARY OPAL & NEV,” 60 MINUTES, JANUARY 21, 1973
Nev Charles, smoking a cigarette and seated next to Opal Jewel in the kitchen of the West Village house: It’s dangerous, yeah, to make art that has people stepping back and thinking critically about the world and the institutions and the orders that we’ve allowed to have control over us. Someone’s always going to be upset; someone’s always going to feel implicated. Do you know that people, farmers guilty over the poor ways they treated their workers, they burned even the work of John Steinbeck? Steinbeck! Imagine! The Grapes of bloody Wrath! So yeah, some people out there do hate us and hate our records. But I suppose that’s the price, you know, of telling upsetting truths, as writers and artists are meant to do.
Mike Wallace, off camera: Talk about that price you’re paying.
Nev Charles: Oh, well. [To Opal] I hear clicks on the phone sometimes; do you?
Opal Jewel: Death threats. We get death threats mailed to our label, to this house.
Mike Wallace: Do you feel afraid that violence and danger follow you?
Opal Jewel: I’m Black and living in the United States of America. Violence and danger surround me always. At least Hoover’s going cold in the grave.VI That’s one goon down.
Mike Wallace, smiling tensely: Are you nervous about the sentiment you might be stirring, saying incendiary things like that? Or that the content of some of this music you perform is fueling more animosity toward you?
Opal Jewel: There’s too much work to do in this revolution and too many people to wake up. Too much to fight. Nobody has time to get waylaid by fear.
Mike Wallace: But I looked at the schedule for this tour you’re planning, and I have to ask you, Opal—why not put Southern cities on it, the places that might benefit from hearing your messages and music the most? Why no Memphis, no Dallas, no Birmingham, Alabama?
Nev Charles: We’ve got a tour manager now who handles the bookings.
Mike Wallace: And if you aren’t afraid, then why, in the cities where you do perform, are you using members of the Black Panther Party—
Opal Jewel: Hold up, hold up, I got—
Mike Wallace: —as personal security?
Opal Jewel: —I got a better question for you. Why are you so deeply invested in proving I’m scared? Does a Black person showing they’re scared make you feel safer? I suggest you sit back and interrogate that.
I. Elizabeth “Lizzie” Harris started her career working in Hollywood, but in 1972 she fast-tracked by moving to New York and exploring unique opportunities in music. In previous interviews she has said that she spotted “something cinematic” in Opal & Nev, and that, like Bob Hize before her, she approached Howie Kelly at a do-or-die moment with a risky idea to realign and rebuild his roster. Her proposal involved a personal cash investment in the label (part of an inheritance from her late father, a movie studio exec), and after successfully steering Rivington through its post-riot crisis, Harris served as the label’s executive vice president of marketing and promotions for twenty-three years. When Kelly named his son Mark as his successor in 1995, Harris left Rivington Records and launched an independent firm, L. Harris & Associates, which today specializes in celebrity PR and management and counts Nev Charles as a banner client. She declined to be formally interviewed for this book.
II. For the live performance on Cavett’s show, with “nigger” uncensored but the lyric “fuck him up” replaced with “mess him up,” Opal Jewel pulls out two red bandannas from her stuffed bra and ties them around Nev Charles’s eyes and mouth as he plays the guitar. While he is blindfolded and gagged, Opal pushes Nev into a chair, writhes and stomps behind him, and at various points enacts upon his body a series of caresses, slaps, and hair tugs.
III. In keeping with many of the songs on Things We’ve Seen, including “Who’s the Nigger Now?,” the lyrics to “Sister Stacked” were written by Nev Charles but based on an idea by Opal Jewel. “Sister Stacked” told the story of a big-chested Sunday school teacher led astray by her church’s minister.
IV. After the Things We’ve Seen song “Better Living on Mercury,” about two misfits blasting off into outer space.
V. The Alabama governor and infamous segregationist had run as a third-party presidential candidate in 1968, winning five Southern states and 10 million votes. He was running for the Democratic nomination in ’72 when he was shot on May 15 while campaigning in Maryland. The shooting paralyzed Wallace from the waist down and killed his presidential hopes. “Did you expect me to squeeze out some tears?” Opal Jewel asked a reporter for the Associated Press, before riffing on Wallace’s most notorious quote: “Sorry to say I’m fresh out now, fresh out tomorrow, fresh out forever.”
VI. After decades of targeting Black activists, influential celebrities, suspected communists, and his own critics through illegal methods (like violent raids and wiretapping), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover died of a heart attack on May 2, 1972.