SUICIDE @ 45

 

December 28th marks the 45th anniversary of the release of Suicide’s eponymous debut LP. It’s a singular monument to mutant electronic rock-a-billy, which would become one of the landmark albums of the emerging electronic music scene and give birth to the concept of the “synth duo”.

Prior to recording their debut, Martin Rev and Alan Vega had been slumming it in the ghetto clubs of NYC since the early 1970s. Inspired by seeing Iggy & the Stooges, Alan Vega, who was initially focused on visual arts, decided he could turn his hand to fronting a rock band with the same kind of frightening intensity as Mr. Pop. Vega, who was raised on the hip shaking hiccups of Elvis Presley, had that essence of ’50s greaser delinquent baked into his DNA.

Hooking up with keyboardist Rev, the duo were the first band on record to self-describe their music as “punk” in their hand drawn gig flyers & handbills of the early 1970s. By the time the actual “punk” scene started to bubble up around them in clubs like CBGBs, Suicide found themselves playing alongside contemporaries like the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and the rest of the NY underground scene. The difference with Suicide was that they were mostly hated by audiences, though they were deeply loved by certain musicians. People like The Cars’ Ric Ocasek would become stalwart champions for the band, helping to promote and further their career.

Their live performances were notorious for being awkward, confrontational and, on frequent occasions, threatened to break into violence. With Rev holding sternly at his keyboards, offering little beyond a disinterested sneer, Vega turned the sexual intensity of Elvis into a a fun-house mirror distortion, punctuated by psychotic screams amid lyrics that twisted rock & roll iconography into gritty street poetry. During one of these gigs, Marty Thau, who was starting up his own record label, happened to catch their act and took a liking to what he saw and heard. He ended up signing the duo as his first artists for his new label, Red Star Records.

When it came time to record the album, Vega and Rev were so well rehearsed with their material, after having played it live for 5 years, it only took four days in the studio to capture it all. The majority of the songs were basically as done on stage, though the album’s sprawling nightmare centerpiece, Frankie Teardrop, underwent a drastic lyric rewrite after Vega read a newspaper article about a factory worker who murdered his wife and child and then committed suicide. This happened during the mixing phase of production, so there is a version with the original lyrics, which was recently released on a retrospective compilation. Personally, I think Vega made the right decision. While the original has some historical interest, the story of a murderous gangster is far less emotionally triggering than the tale of a downtrodden struggling every-man who’s pushed to his limit. That’s a story that can resonate with anyone who’s struggled to make ends meet. For the production, co-producer Craig Leon had managed to get his hands on an Eventide digital delay unit to use on the vocal tracks, adding dub inspired echo effects to further enhance the alien sounds of the album and bring Vega's guttural screams into deeper resonance.

When the album was released, while it garnered some positive reviews in the UK, the US press were generally unimpressed and dismissed the LP as inconsequential or even stupid, but that shortsightedness would be exposed with time as the band were vindicated by creating one of the most revered and influential albums to come from the punk and new wave movements of the ‘70s. I remember seeing it on the shelves in my local record shop and couldn’t resist my curiosity, so I picked up my first copy sometime in 1980. It immediately blew me away with its stark simplicity and razor sharp edge. Vega’s vocals could be terrifying, mostly due to that inhuman scream he could stab into an arrangement, slicing through it like a switchblade knife. One of our favorite things to do in our senior year of high school was to go in my friends truck and blast Frankie Teardrop over his stereo in the school parking lot at night, when the other kids were parked there, hanging out with nothing to do. Hearing that scream rip across the football field was a real delight.

Since its release, Suicide has gone on to be recognized as one of the most seminal albums to come out of the NYC music scene. They were certainly one of the most unique and distinctive groups of that time. No one else had their sound as they straddled this strange netherworld between punk and electronica. They had one foot in the nostalgia of the 1950s while the other strode into our dystopian future, sounding totally modern, despite their primitive and even antiquated electronic organs & drum machines. Their minimalist approach set them on course to inspire the next generation of electronic musicians, and the effect of that barrier-breakthrough still resonates to this day.