Girl in a Band

16

COMPARED TO THE PEOPLE I saw every day in New York, I was a mess—my wardrobe a hodgepodge of thrift-shop styles, boho symbols mixed with conventional ones. A few years earlier, in conjunction with getting my driver’s license, I’d also gotten my first pair of glasses, and to make them look less conventional and dreary, I bought a pair of flip-up sunglass lenses. Myopia could at least look good, plus I couldn’t afford to buy contact lenses.

One night I accompanied a friend to Veselka, an all-night Polish restaurant on the corner of Saint Mark’s and Second Avenue. Somehow my friend was personally acquainted with the Senders, a popular 1970s New York band best known for their “rock-and-roll” style and Frankie Avalon greaser appearance. Johnny Thunders, who was a member of the New York Dolls, was hanging out with the Senders that night, which meant that by default I was hanging out with Johnny Thunders.

You would think it would have been the coolest night of my life, but it wasn’t. To me, a white, middle-class Southern California girl, Johnny Thunders was just a tired junkie. My friend and I were sitting in a booth in between the Senders and Johnny Thunders when Johnny started tossing sugar across the table at his friends. Pissed off, I yelled at him for getting sugar in my eggs. Johnny fixed with me an entitled, druggie, rock-and-roll look and called me “Four Eyes.” It was funny in some respects, but also a night that reinforced my feeling that I could never attain any degree of coolness or style in New York. Johnny Thunders and people like him were breaking all the rules and the rest of us were condemned to watch.

I’d remained friends with Dan Graham, and whenever Dan went to Europe, he let me stay in his railroad tenement apartment at 84 Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side. The apartment was a long, arrow-shaped space crammed foot-to-ceiling with books and LPs, the walls covered with artworks, including two Jo Baer paintings, a Robert Mangold, and one of Gerhard Richter’s beautiful “gray paintings” that looked like the texture of an old wall. Gerhard was the fiancé of a German artist named Isa Genzken, and somewhere along the line Dan introduced the three of us.

It was a typical Dan intro: “Kim’s a Taurus, Isa, and you’re a Sagittarius, and you’re not supposed to get along, but her moon is in Libra so you might find that . . . ,” or words to that effect. Back then, Isa was doing a residency in New York. One of her “things” was photographing people’s ears and turning them into large-scale photos, so naturally she took a picture of mine. Ten minutes later she and I were taking photos of each other. Isa, always deliberate, went first. Perched before a typewriter in the dark blue gallery, I wore a light-blue button-down shirt with a white collar, a black dance skirt, tights, and black rubber riding boots. Isa and I both assumed the same pose—a profile with the blue wall behind us. Isa was statuesque and way more photogenic than I felt in my plain clothes.

Gerhard and Isa Genzken were married by the time Sonic Youth toured Germany a few years later. Thurston and I paid them a visit in Köln. In Gerhard’s studio there, I remember looking at all his candle paintings. They were lovely, especially their scale, tiny, as if you could palm one, slide it into a large purse, and vanish into the night. Gerhard was always extremely polite, but his English was awkward and he was skeptical of anything—any trend, any movement—that aligned with popular culture, specifically the newer, less conceptual generation of painters like Jörg Immendorff and Julian Schnabel. By the late eighties, the art world had blown up into a huge financial enterprise, with many jostling at the top. Immendorff once asked us to play at his birthday party, and I remember Isa’s being all for it and Gerhard’s being strongly against.

If it weren’t for Isa and Dan, I’m sure Gerhard would never have let us use one of his candle paintings for the cover of Daydream Nation. We were still thinking in vinyl terms back then, and the painting was the perfect scale for a record cover, a Duchamp ready-made, almost, to enter the mainstream.

Later during her marriage, things began falling apart for Isa. A few years after we met, Isa began creating tiny architectural sculptures with the goal of placing one on top of the Philip Johnson–designed AT&T building. It was a great but of course unrealistic idea. Having read that Philip Johnson ate lunch regularly at the Four Seasons, Isa called me one day to ask if I would go with her there and wait for Johnson outside, which I did; I had no idea what else to do or how else to help her. She was clearly going through a manic phase and was feeling vulnerable and lonely. Naturally, the management didn’t let us in, and Johnson wasn’t even there that day. The last time I saw Isa, Sonic Youth was in the middle of a sound check at CBGB. She showed up out of the blue and began yelling—really yelling—at us. I never saw her again.

From the moment I arrived in New York, Dan was my shepherd, my emcee and guide to the downtown New York City art and rock-and-roll scene. Through Dan, I discovered Tier 3, the No Wave club at the corner of West Broadway and White Street in Tribeca, and Franklin Furnace, the arts organization then and now devoted to anything avant-garde. Dan was friends with Jeffrey Lohn and Glenn Branca, members of one of the original No Wave bands, Theoretical Girls, who released precisely one single, “You Got Me.” At night, Dan would go to No Wave shows and record the bands with a huge stereo cassette player, all the while tossing in comments and narrations that trickled up through the final live mix.

Dan also introduced me to his best friend, Dara Birnbaum, the video and installation artist. Dara was smart, verbal, and slightly intimidating, a living symbol of the new fast-talking New York style I was just getting used to, and that made me, a California girl, feel slurred in comparison. Never mind, because I was eager to learn, and I did, too, just from being around Dara and some of Dan’s other artist friends.

A lot of CalArts and Rhode Island School of Design grads came to New York around this time. Art was happening in the city, and being surrounded by peers made these artists feel less like outsiders. Dan was always telling me and Vicki Alexander (a transplanted Canadian artist friend), “You guys should have a group.” Initially, Vicki and I were going to do it together, but I decided to do it by myself and started Design Office. For me, Design Office was a means to do things without having a gallery. The idea was to conduct a sort of intervention in a private space, such as someone’s home, that reflected something about that person. Dan was a willing guinea pig in letting me alter his apartment. Eventually I did a show at White Columns, the nonprofit public and independently founded art space, which at the time was located on the far western end of Spring Street, near Varick, across from the Ear Inn—today it’s moved to the West Village. For the show I brought chairs in from different people’s homes and made the office look less like a community-oriented space and more like a dining room. The show was called Furniture Arranged for the Home or Office.

In the meantime, I was going out a lot at night. One of the biggest appeals of seeing and hearing No Wave bands in downtown New York was how purposefully abandoned and abstract the music sounded. In a way it was the purest, most free thing I’d ever heard—much different than the punk rock of the seventies and the free jazz of the sixties, more expressionistic, and beyond, well, anything. In contrast, punk rock felt tongue-in-cheek, in air quotes screaming, “We’re playing at destroying corporate rock.” No Wave music was, and is, more like “No, we’re really destroying rock.” Its sheer freedom and blazing-ness made me think, I can do that.

As a term coined by people tired of the media’s habit of defining any scene or genre in some cheap, easy shorthand, No Wave took in everything from film to video art to underground music. But that also made it undefinable. Basically it was anti-Wave, which is why strictly speaking No Wave can’t even properly be called a movement at all and shouldn’t even have a name. It was also a direct response to the “New Wave” trend in music, e.g. more commercial, melodic, danceable punk—Blondie, the Police, Talking Heads—which was seen by a lot of people as a lame sellout. A lot of the members of the No Wave scene were artists by training who had come to New York and fallen into music as a side project. Glenn Branca of Theoretical Girls, for example, came out of the theater, and guitar theorist and composer Rhys Chatham had studied music with La Monte Young and Philip Glass. Even though Sonic Youth is associated with it, it would be wrong to call us No Wave. We didn’t sound No Wave. We just built something out of it.

I was a 1960s teenager, too young to be a hippie but brushed by whatever rebellion and amped-up freedom there was in the air. Art had always given me direction, a way forward, even when I sometimes felt I was floating. But when I saw and heard No Wave bands, some equation in my head and body pieced together instantly. A phantom thing had been missing from my life and here it was, finally, unconventional, personal but at the same time not, and confrontational. What’s more, every No Wave gig felt precarious, a rush, a cheek-burn, since you knew the band onstage could break up at any moment.

More than once Dan Graham had told me it wasn’t enough to be an artist in a studio, because the next obvious step was a gallery, and then what? No, he said, artists have a responsibility to contribute to a bigger, more daring cultural dialogue. “Kim, you should write something,” Dan suggested, adding that if I wasn’t preparing for or exhibiting a show, then writing was the next-best way to get my brain out into the larger New York art community. At the time Dan himself was writing articles about girl groups, like the Slits, and going around making authoritative declarations about feminism. Like most guys, he was just a big fan of female sexuality. “You’re going out to see things,” he added, “and you’re obviously getting something out of it—so you have to give something back.”

I’d never written a word, but I took Dan’s advice. I decided to write about men, and how they interact onstage with one another and bond by playing music.

I remember staring endlessly at the books lining the walls of my dad’s study as a little girl. I didn’t know what a sociologist did, but the books had titles like Men and Their Work. What did that even mean? Obviously, men—and boys—spent time, most of it in fact, engaged in an activity known as work. Keller, for example, had his rock collection, Erector set, and assorted other boy-passions. Whereas whatever I made up or imagined in my own head lacked that builder’s significance or invention, and the train set I presumed would someday magically appear must have died on the tracks on its way to me. Looking back, I was clearly devaluing what women did. How had that happened? Was it just that my parents placed higher expectations on Keller as the firstborn? Did I ask for, and in return get back, a little smile rather than any attention?

Guys playing music. I loved music. I wanted to push up close to whatever it was men felt when they were together onstage—to try to ink in that invisible thing. It wasn’t sexual, but it wasn’t unsexual either. Distance mattered in male friendships. One on one, men often had little to say to one another. They found some closeness by focusing on a third thing that wasn’t them: music, video games, golf, women. Male friendships were triangular in shape, and that allowed two men some version of intimacy. In retrospect, that’s why I joined a band, so I could be inside that male dynamic, not staring in through a closed window but looking out.

The piece I wrote, “Trash Drugs and Male Bonding,” was published in the first issue of a new magazine called Real Life. It was a good issue to be in, and I got a lot of positive feedback and felt suddenly as though I had an identity in the downtown community. That essay topic unlocked the next thirty years of my life. By writing about men locking into one another onstage, I indirectly pushed myself inside the triangle, and whatever doubts I had about pursuing a career in art commingled to create a forward wave of momentum, noise, and motion. It was also my way of rebelling—writing about men when it would be more natural to write about women. It was a conscious faux-intellectual premise I could indulge in, and a nod to the work that Dan, my mentor, was doing. The next, clear-cut step was to actually begin playing music.