Kris Needs - Dream Baby Dream Suicide

Copyright 2015 Omnibus Press
This edition 2015 Omnibus Press
(A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

EISBN: 978-1-78323-535-3

Cover designed by Fresh Lemon
Picture research by Kris Needs

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For Helen and Mari

By Lydia Lunch

T o come full circle, like the noose we attempted to cut free of by severing the connective tissue from a life we were forced into living, and a life that felt like it was living us, we turned the beating around and struck back and attacked; not only the enemy within, but the ever present enemy surround with sound.

We used music as an assaultive weapon that furthered the divide between those who were built for abuse because, not only could we take it, and not only could we fucking dish it out but, like a hysterical manifestation of preverted/perverted archetypes, we were created to fully inhabit it. We bore the burden in our bloodline of all of historys misguided lovers, hate fuckers, witches, wretches and wastrel minstrels who troubadoured through the trenches in search of other extreme outsiders that even a coven was too restrictive to contain.

There are certain tribes that stand completely outside of everything and everyone else. In that isolation there is a sense of freedom, desolation and longing.

This was not a caterwaul for the collective, but a personal exorcism of the most gloriously murderous romantics, whose blood longed for blood as our bones were broken and shattered once more, as if fated upon the breaking wheel.

Where what has been done shall be done and done again until you sever the chains and decode the secret language which reverses the repetition of the endless cycle from which only an agonized scream of merciless negation into the darkest and most lonely of all those dark and lonely nights might actually rip a new black hole into your personal cosmos. And when upon hitting that most excruciating and soul shattering, god-forsaking pitiless howl, can the soul truly be set free to reclaim and reconfigure the damage already done to our battered psyches which bear the pain of all mans inhumanity done in the name of a terribly addictive love, an unquenchable greed or an obsessive and forever unsatisfied lust.

Suicide all this and the inverse too. How fucking beautiful.

True contrarians. For as terrifying as they could be on Frankie Teardrop, Harlem, etc, they also composed outlandishly tender psycho-saccharine love songs like Sweetheart, Dream Baby Dream and Cheree; psychobilly grindcore Jukebox Baby, Johnny, Ghost Rider; driving, post-trance ranters I Dont Know and half a dozen other genre-defying reconfigurations which would help me to define my own coming musical schizophrenia.

I met Suicide in 1976 at Maxs Kansas City. I crawled out of my bedroom window in Rochester, New York, jumped on a Greyhound bus and ended up staying in a loft that Lenny Bruces daughter Kitty had just evacuated in Chelsea. I went to New York searching for like-minded miscreants whose sense of true romance meant blood-soaked sheets and long slow screams that would shatter what remained of the night I never wanted to end. Suicide was the first show I saw, Alan and Marty were the first people I met (other than the flock of hippies I connived into taking me in) and to a violent 17-year-old hate-fuelled art terrorist in training, their performance was one of the most inspiring events of my life. Suicide. I thank you.

T he idea for this book was planted around five years ago when I was trying to get a CD-book series called Watch The Closing Doors: A History Of New Yorks Musical Melting Pot off the ground. My humble plan was to tell, decade by decade, the history of New York through its music, giving the vanishing city an eternal monument before it totally became a corporate rich kids playground. It was also something of a love letter to the city which had so grabbed me at an early age that I ended up moving there in the eighties, and it still refused to let go after Id left. Now that Id stopped traversing New Yorks streets amid pivotal times from the inside, I could look retrospectively at its broader history from the outside, fired by a more scholarly self-education which could only reach fulfilment through doing such a project.

Id also been doing another CD-book series called Dirty Water: The Birth Of Punk Attitude, which sought to uncover the earliest manifestations of the punk spirit which, I always maintain, didnt just happen one day in a bums bar on the Bowery, but went back to blues and bebop. Suicide had pride of place on the punk sets and would have had on the New York series if it had got as far as the seventies. (Although reactions to Watch The Closing Doors were unusually positive, the plug got pulled on the project for the simple reason the music cost too much for the independent Year Zero label to license.)

I first met and became friends with Marty Rev and Alan Vega amid the violent chaos of the 1978 Clash tour, which was followed by various encounters over the years, including a marathon interview for a film about them that never happened in 2007. When I was doing the New York compilation, Rev came on board as a kind of technical adviser and the coolest embodiment of New Yorks multi-hued musical heritage you could wish to meet. He had grown up with doo-wop and rhythm and blues, before elevating his teenage soul with jazz, and cutting his musical teeth with the movements fearless trailblazers. He still lives on the same East Village street he moved to in the early seventies, and from where he continues to forge his electronic masterpieces. Crucially, the first volume of Watch The Closing Doors, which covered the years 1945 to 1959, got Martys seal of approval. He called it a major work of total uniqueness and scholarship. Im sure its the first and definitely the only one of such depth and breadth of knowledge. The clincher came when he called its accompanying hard-back book an important historical volume and suggested the notes from this and the future releases be printed together in major book form.

Although the series stalled, the book idea remained a personal obsession, which grew when I noticed just how often Suicide are marginalised in so many accounts purporting to document the citys punk history or the broader movements they pioneered. When the original New York project started looking too colossal to even comprehend pursuing, I told Marty I must be mad to even be considering it. No, the best things come from madness like that, he said. Thats actually sanity.