ROY EDROSO

Part Three: A Sign in the Sculpture Garden

Once we had decided to proceed, drummer or no, it only remained for us to get gigs. For an unknown band comprised, for all the world knew, of aging losers, our best chances were among the local, low-rent performance spaces where junior-grade sonic youth yowled and gibbered nightly. Our first booking was in the last slot on a Saturday night at Neither/Nor, a bookstore and illicit club on Sixth Street between Avenues C and D.

Neither/Nor was owned by a moneyed young aesthete (as were most of the alt-rock spaces east of Avenue A then), but effectively managed by an unflappable black hustler known only as Billy Sleaze. Billy never opened his eyes more than halfway, nor smiled more than enough to show grudging approval, and he practiced similar energy conservation techniques in his management of the acts that tumbled through the venue. He told the players where to put their amps and then languidly patrolled the perimeter, sometimes shaking his head at the shrill foolishness onstage. But he had expressed mild appreciation for the professionalism of the Deadbeats when we had played Neither/Nor in that guise, and he was almost friendly when we lugged our pathetic, cumbersome gear through the door.

"Here, man," he said to John, "take my card."

The card was homemade and bore a photo of an black penis entering a white, puckered anus.

"Guess he likes us," I said.

We spent the run-up to the performance drinking tall Budweisers and criticizing the "opening" acts. One of these had wheeled into Neither/Nor a gigantic rack of digital effects, resembling those steel units in which trays of food are stored in industrial kitchens. The resulting fashionable audio mush displeased me.

"Whatta buncha Fruity Pebbles bullshit," I observed. "Sounds like the Thompson Twins."

"You know," said Dave, "underneath all the effects they sound pretty good."

"Fuck," I said.

As showtime approached, we reiterated to one another our game plan: Keep your ears open. Play whatever feels right. Don't stop until they make you stop.

At our appointed hour, we dragged the gear into position and, witnessed by six or seven friends and perhaps a dozen strangers, lurched into a set of horrible, grinding noise and novelty vocals.

The first song was "Jambalaya," reduced to two chords connected by harsh, violent slurs along the bottom string of the bass. Dave bashed the kit on the two and the four as if submitting the heads to a stress test. John played guitar gibberish loosely related to the key. I bellowed the lyrics like a damned soul, but I was inaudible. We had instantaneously maxed out the sound system. Then John and I hit our fuzz boxes. A few people got up with their fingers in their ears and left. After ten minutes, we somehow contrived to bring the sound levels down, so that our ambient feedback squeals could be savored by the crowd.

"HEY!" someone screamed. "SHUT UP!"

John and I hit our fuzz boxes again.

Billy Sleaze walked onto the stage and stared at us. We stopped playing.

"Are we too loud?" John asked.

"Yeah," said Billy.

We switched instruments and launched, sotto voce, into "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone":

Now you made your mark on society
You're using all the tricks you used on the Manson Family
You're reading all those agriculture magazines
You're cuttin' out my heart and now you're hacking out my spleen

Then John and Dave hit their fuzz boxes.

Most of the remaining crowd walked out. Billy waved his arms from the wings. He was saying something, but we couldn't hear him over the noise. We segued into a version of "Rubber Biscuit" called "Rubber Bullets" (Another kind of bullet is a ricochet bullet! / That's when it bounce off the wall and you hope you don't get hit! / If you do, you get paralyzed! Hey wanna hey wanna hey wanna).

The remaining patrons laughed convulsively.

We switched instruments again and played "Bang Bang" by Jaques Brel--I still don't know how that happened--and we had turned this into "Louie Louie" (with John and I playing in entirely different keys) when Billy pulled the plug on the sound system.

"If y'all insist on playing loud," Billy yelled, "the Man will be here."

"Wellubbaysyaaabaa," I said.

The other bands congratulated Dave, who had managed some identifiable rock leads during his tenure on guitar, and avoided John and myself. I made a mental note: Have to do something about Dave.

Billy refused to pay us.

Enormously pleased with ourselves, we booked other shows in nearby shitholes. The reaction was uniformly negative. No one invited us back. One club owner screamed, "YOU SHOULD DIE!" Our friends thought we had lost our minds. We thought they were right, but we didn't see what that had to do with anything.

Our rehearsals became even louder and more aggressive. Other bands sharing the space would come in during our rehearsals to fetch their equipment, and ask, as our din subsided, what the fuck we were doing. "Playing rock and roll," we would reply. The intruders would then ask for some of our beer. "No," we would reply.

But things were different at No Se No. This, faithful readers of this saga may recall, was the Lower East Side sinkhole where my previous collaborator Rik had suffered a smashed jaw. This venue was now fully under the control of a combine of degenerate artists known as the Rivington School. These madmen had achieved a certain fame within art circles with their spare, primal graffiti art. Their main exemplars were a tall, nearly pre-verbal fellow with no hair who went by the name of Fa-Q (pronounced "fuck you") and a sodden college boy called Squid. Like Keith Haring without the positivism, they had come to prominence by festooning walls and public bathrooms with magic-marker scrawls and getting people to write about it. From this they had managed European tours, gallery shows, and enough money to stay perpetually drunk. We marveled at their success.

The ringleader was a mysterious old-timer named Cowboy Ray. Ray had a little money from his involvement with some '60s band that had produced one or two hits. No one could say for sure which band that was, as Ray was a cowboy in both dress and taciturn, unrevealing manner. He used this wherewithal to fund the club and the hijinks of the Rivington kids. One night as we took our leisure in the Rivington sculpture garden--actually a vacant lot adjacent to No Se No and strewn with rubble, which was only marginally distinguishable from the "found object" constructions of the School's artists--Dave said to Ray, as his youthful charges smashed beer bottles against a nearby brickfront, "This is a great place. We'd really like to perform here."

Ray--thumbs in belt-loops--replied, "Hey, man. You're performing right now."

When we gave our first performance there, No Se No had moved from its original space to the concrete basement below--mainly, I assume, to insulate the numbing volume of the performances from the neighbors. The place stank of mildew and beer and sweat, and the audience was comprised mainly of feral children--precursors of the tribal youth that were just beginning to make their home in Tompkins Square Park. They had few tattoos, and no visible piercings. This was 1986. Skateboards and lip rings had not yet come into fashion. Neither marketing campaign nor media blitz had encouraged them to take to these streets. They had come out of deep need, and were now wordlessly smiling in a dank basement, unhinged by various combinations of drugs, alcohol, and sorrow transformed into raw animal spirits.

They liked us immediately. One wiry boy grabbed me by the shoulders as I was setting up my equipment, and began to roar in my face. His breath smelled like rubbing alcohol. Instinctively I grabbed his shoulders and roared back, and the boy, delighted, hugged me tightly and jumped frenetically up and down, bearing me along. Hey, I thought, I hope the chicks are like this.

I didn't get laid, but our performance was a joy from ignition to re-entry. We could barely see each other in the gloom, but our sound caromed off the concrete in a way that was pleasing to us, and no one told us we were playing too loud; in fact, people tried to turn our amps up--which we resisted, lest our frail equipment explode, but by night's end everything was maxed out, and we were swept up in the savage force of pure, spiked sound.

Eventually even the simple songs we had constructed lost their shape, and we were playing only rhythms--violent, stampeding rhythms, punctuated by yowls more akin to prehistoric ring shouts than to popular music, even the punk stuff that was then popular. The feral youth fell swiftly into sync with us, and procured hunks of scrap-metal--probably from the School's welding facility--to beat violently against the walls and floors of the space. By the time we finished, our nerves were scraped raw by scrap-metal and screaming amplification. Now we smelled of beer and sweat and mildew, and didn't mind a bit.

We emerged from the basement to take the air in the sculpture garden. We found an ambulance parked there, lights flashing. A bum had apparently crawled into the morass and, as we were playing, died.

Dave was properly disturbed. He thought it was some kind of a sign. John and I were more sanguine. Horrible as it may seem, we felt it was a sign, too--one that meant we ought to keep going.

To be continued.