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.
