08 - Red Bull Music Academy Daily

DAILY NOTE
TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2013
8 22
of
SQUEEZEBOX!
GAY ROCK 'N' ROLL IN '90S New York
NICK CATCHDUBS, JERSEY BOY / MELVIN VAN PEEBLES INVENTS RAP / DEITCH PROJECTS
THE DAILY NOTE
LAST NIGHT
One of our great hopes with the Daily Note
is that we’ll be able to provide a Rashomonesque story of New York’s artistic history.
From illicit house clubs to hip-hop’s artworld crossover to that special brand of
extinct record store that acted as Cheers for
the musically minded, the sheer number of
stories to tell is a gift… or a curse, depending
on where you’re standing. We are, of course,
firmly on the gift side, and if you’re reading
this, it’s a pretty safe bet that you are too.
So here we are. We’ve got an oral
history of SqueezeBox!, the drag party
that birthed Misshapes, Hedwig and the
Angry Inch, and about a billion other likeminded nightclubs, plays, films, and radical
performances. If you’re looking for a
window into a corner of New York’s secret
late-period counterculture, this is it.
Today’s issue also features Melvin Van
Peebles going through his fascinating life
story in a single page, the story behind
the Danceteria logo, and Nick Catchdubs
(of Fool’s Gold) writing about his musical
education from a New Jersey vantage
point. Little by little, we’re filling in more
pieces of the puzzle.
MASTHEAD
Editor in Chief Piotr Orlov
Copy Chief Jane Lerner
Senior Editor Sam Hockley-Smith
Senior Writer/Editor Vivian Host
Contributing Editor Shawn Reynaldo
Staff Writer Olivia Graham
Editorial Coordinator Alex Naidus
Creative Director Justin Thomas Kay
for Doubleday & Cartwright
Art Director Christopher Sabatini
Production Designer Suzan Choy
Photo Editor Lorenna Gomez-Sanchez
Staff Photographer Anthony Blasko
All-Seeing Eye Torsten Schmidt
2
Clockwise from top:
Hands in the air at
the Flying Lotus show;
photo by Dan Wilton.
Ken Scott discussing
Ziggy Stardust at the
New Museum; photo by
Anthony Blasko. FlyLo
hard at work; photo by
Christelle De Castro.
ABOUT Red bull music academy
Contributors
Nick Catchdubs
Adrienne Day
Laura Forde
Bob Gruen
Tina Paul
Tricia Romano
Nick Sylvester
Cover Photo Tina Paul
DJ Miss Guy at SqueezeBox!, Don Hill’s, 1994
The content of Daily Note does not
necessarily represent the opinions of
Red Bull or Doubleday & Cartwright.
The Red Bull Music Academy celebrates
creative pioneers and presents fearless new
talent. Now we’re in New York City.
The Red Bull Music Academy is a worldtraveling series of music workshops and
festivals: a platform for those who make a
difference in today’s musical landscape.
This year we’re bringing together two
groups of selected participants — producers,
vocalists, DJs, instrumentalists and
musical mavericks from around the world — in
New York City. For two weeks, each group
will hear lectures by musical luminaries,
work together on tracks, and perform in the
city’s best clubs and music halls. Imagine
a place that’s equal parts science lab,
the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and
Kraftwerk’s home studio. Throw in a
touch of downtown New York circa 1981, a
sprinkle of Prince Jammy’s mixing board,
and Bob Moog’s synthesizer collection
all in a 22nd-century remix and you’re
halfway there.
The Academy began back in 1998 and has
been traversing the globe since, traveling
to Berlin, Cape Town, São Paulo, Barcelona,
London, Toronto, and many other places.
Interested? Applications for the 2014 Red
Bull Music Academy open early next year.
3
FROM THE ACADEMY
UPFRONT
“Recording is perfecting a moment—performing is
creating one.”—Erykah Badu, April 30, 2013
TONIGHT
Glasslands
MYKKI
BLANCO
Participants
getting
creative in
the studio.
Photos by Dan
Wilton and
Christelle De
Castro
Le1f
Laurel Halo
Venus-X
Riddim
nation
L
aunched in late 2008, Que Bajo?! occupies a unique position in
the landscape of New York nightlife. Run by Uproot Andy and
Geko Jones, the night is ostensibly a Latin party, though its
musical offerings are anything but traditional. Folding in bits
of dancehall, African rhythms, and modern electronic sounds, Que
Bajo?! is a place where the lines between the First and Third Worlds are
blurred under the banner of a loud, sweaty, and undeniably fun dance
party. The crew will be strutting its stuff this Thursday, May 9 at Roseland, at the Red Bull Music Academy Culture Clash—where it faces stiff
competition from Just Blaze & Young Guru, Trouble & Bass, and Federation Sound—but ahead of that, we asked the Que Bajo?! cofounders to
tell us about five tracks that inspired their party and represent its ethos.
El General
“Te Ves Buena”
Hailing from Panama, El General’s
Spanish versions of Jamaican
dancehall reggae tunes laid the
groundwork for what would become
reggaeton in Puerto Rico, dembow
in the Dominican Republic, and the
wide adoption of the dembow rhythm
in Latin America and beyond. So
much of what we play at Que Bajo?!
traces its roots back to El General, and we still play his original
songs today.
Los Gaiteros de San
Jacinto
“La Vaina Ya Se Formó”
Folkloric Afro-Latin music is one
of the strongest influences on
the Que Bajo?! sound, especially
Colombian folk from the Caribbean
Plugged in
Behind the scenes
with the Red Bull Music
Academy Studio Team.
Red Bull Music Academy’s studios are
kitted out with a virtual dreamscape of
gear: Moogs galore! Modular synth heaven! To help the Academy’s participants
navigate this collection of mind-blowing
equipment is an all-star crew of musicians that includes producers Patrick
Pulsinger, Morgan Geist, and Flying Lotus. We asked Studio Team members Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet), Todd Osborn,
and Stephen Bruner (aka Thundercat)
about what gear turns them on, what’s
been happening in the Academy studios,
and how the participants are handling
these once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.
4
Kieran Hebden:
Todd Osborn:
Thundercat:
Most of the participants I’ve encountered
are way more proficient than me on the
equipment. It transpired very quickly
that there was nothing much that I could
show any of them about recording or using a computer.
I don’t care about gear. These days I
work on a laptop and nothing else at all.
Everybody I know who gets really into
equipment stops playing music—they just
play with equipment, especially synthesizers—people collect those things and don’t
make records.
The whole dynamic at the Academy
is that there are no mentors or teachers,
and the participants are not students in
any way. It’s more that everyone here is
totally on the same level, nobody schooling anybody—everyone is just sharing information.
I’m showing the participants how stuff
works. Mostly basic modular synth stuff,
like the big Moog. There are five or six oscillators on it, so when a participant starts
playing with it and it’s a mess of noise, I
tell them to narrow it down to just one
oscillator. That’s good because they figure
out it’s not like a plug-in—you have to figure out how synthesis works. Then they
can apply it to plug-ins and all the things
they’re going to be working with, because
most of them aren’t going to go and buy a
huge modular synth, but it helps in understanding why the other stuff is formed the
way it is.
The participants mess with the equipment and then they always revert back to
the things they know. People get hindered
by thinking, “If I only had this thing I
could do so much more.” Here it’s all open
to them and then they say, “Oh, I didn’t really need that after all. I can do good stuff
with what I’ve always used.” It takes away
the mystique of gear you can’t afford.
I got to use the Moogerfoogers. I realized
those are some of the best pedals I’ve ever
worked with. Obviously someone was
drunk there and they meant to say “motherfuckers.” That is some real country-friedass shit. I’ve never been one to play with
pedals a lot—the couple pedals that I’ve
had would get stolen, just straight up. I
used to carry an old Mu-Tron [Phasor] II
around with me—it’s literally carrying an
antique, something that is really coveted.
If you blink, someone’s going to say, “Oh,
sorry, I thought it was mine.” After I lost a
couple of those I stopped bringing so many
pedals with me. But using those Moog pedals, I love them. I was onstage with them
last night [at the Flying Lotus show at Terminal 5] and I was just losing my mind.
We’ve been down in the studio talking
trash and going crazy. Now I’m just looking to have an orgy in the studio and maybe sacrifice a child—that will make the
experience complete. [Laughs.]
Webster Hall
Four Tet
& Special
Guests
Before starting Que Bajo?! we were
both residents of the Dutty Artz
crew’s New York Tropical party,
which featured large portions
of grime and dubstep courtesy of
Matt Shadetek and DJ Rupture. Both
of us were also closely following the evolution of London’s
electronic music scene, which was
so furiously innovative at the
time, seemingly spitting out new
sounds.
One winner.
subgenres every week. “Eskimo” is
simply an essential tune by one of
the most influential producers in
that scene, and his influence on
Que Bajo?! is especially evident
in the way Andy used synths in his
early productions.
Los Pibes Chorros
“Cumbia Villera”
Cumbia has traveled all over the
world by now, but one of the most
unique and lasting variants is
cumbia villera from Argentina. Los
Pibes Chorros’ keytar melodies
were begging to be combined with
the synth bass of our favorite
electronic music, and served as
the essential inspiration for
Andy’s “Brooklyn Cumbia,” another
early Que Bajo?! staple.
Prince Nico Mbarga
“Aki Special”
The popular music of ’60s and ’70s
Africa, which borrowed heavily
from Latin and Caribbean music,
was always another big part of Que
Bajo?!. This Nigerian highlife
tune was remixed on Uproot Andy’s
very first mixtape and the original is also a classic on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, where it is
known as “El Akien” and is one of
the foundational tunes for what
became champeta, another sound
that is often heard at the party.
Get down,
get down
09
Dark Disco @ 88 Palace
Metro Area
Gerd Janson
Bok Bok
L-Vis 1990
MAY
10
Invite Only
MISTER
Saturday
Night VS.
Dope Jams
MAY
19
Deep Space @ Cielo
First Ever
Live DJ Set
At Daily Note we’ve
paid a lot of mind
to house and techno,
but they’re certainly
not the only genres
that can fill up
the dancefloor. We
asked a few Red Bull
Music Academy 2013
participants about
their favorite vintage
dancefloor cuts.
08
Culture MAY
Clash
Four New York
Giorgio
Moroder
Participants on
their favorite disco
and records.
MAY
Roseland Ballroom
Wiley
“Eskimo”
07
UPCOMING
EVENTS
The DJs behind Que Bajo?! detail a few
of the rhythms that first inspired their
global soundclash.
coast, which has given birth to
cumbia and so many other important
rhythms. This tune is one that we
were familiar with early on, but
only when we went to the actual
Carnaval de Barranquilla did we
realize how much of a Carnival anthem it really is. Since then, the
Uproot Andy edit has become a Que
Bajo?! classic as well.
MAY
MAY
20
Tammany Hall
JAMESZOO
OCTO OCTA
ALE HOP
Den Bosch, Netherlands
Brooklyn, NY
Lima, Peru
“Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The
Bottle’ feels like disco/
boogie to me. It really
swings and the vocals are
amazing.”
jameszoo.com
“Dr. York’s ‘You Can’t
Hide’ is probably my
favorite record that was
produced in Brooklyn.
It’s on ruby-red vinyl
and was written by a guy
who decamped to Georgia to
start a cult based around
ancient Egypt. While he
isn’t really a good guy,
the record is still dope—
it has constant panting
over the entire tune.”
soundcloud.com/octoocta
“My favorite disco record
would be ‘Bad Girls’ by
Donna Summer. I love her
fusion of disco, rock
riffs, and synthesizers—
it was more electronic
and dance than other
disco bands.”
lasamigasdenadie.bandcamp.com
Brenmar
Nick Hook
Sinjin Hawke
More
MAY
21
Knitting Factory
DRUM MAJORS
Mannie Fresh
Boi-1da
Young Chop
DJ Mustard
More
MAY
22
RECORDED LIVE
FOR RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY RADIO
TUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM
5
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Q&A
Melvin
Van Peebles
Renaissance man, revolutionary, storyteller, shit-talker.
PHOTO Lander larrañaga
melvin van peebles:
I’ll tell you my life story in five minutes.
I was born in Chicago, a child prodigy, and I finished college
when I was 20 years old. But to finish college, because my
parents were poor, I took a course. I didn’t know what it was,
but it meant I was an officer in the Air Force. So when I was 20
I was flying jets. I did that for a number of years, then I lived
in Mexico where [my son] Mario was born. Then I lived in
San Francisco and fell in love with cinema. I wrote a book and
someone got on my cable car—he was a grip man, you know,
who used to pull the cable cars, a big metal piece and so forth.
The guy said, “You know your book is just like a movie.” So I
said, “Shit, I’ll go into the movies!” In those days, Hollywood
wouldn’t take a black person to work, so I was discouraged
and went to Holland, where I was getting a PhD—I’m an astronomer and mathematician also—and while I was there the
French Cinematheque saw my work and said I was a genius.
Finally somebody who understands me! So I went to Paris and
made my first feature there, and little by little I learned to
speak French. But there’s one little thing: I didn’t have any
music. I couldn’t afford anyone, so I numbered all the keys on
the piano because I couldn’t read or write music, then I played
it and wrote the score. Then I made another movie later called
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and that began taking off.
At that time, what we call the black revolution was going on
in America, but the music was not revolutionary. It was still
blues or just straight jazz—none of it talked about what was
really going on. Since I couldn’t sing I just talked about what
was going on myself, and this became hip-hop and rap, and
that’s the story.
So out of the maybe 25 professions you mastered—and I’m
just guessing here, I may have missed some—the common
thread is storytelling, narratives. Were you a good storyteller at school? Well, I was always full of shit, if that’s what
you mean. We call that storytelling elsewhere. I’m very political
and you have to keep your audience interested to tell the story.
When I won the festival in San Francisco with my first French
feature, I had no money and went back to New York, where I
was living on a park bench. The first night, I heard this noise
and it was people singing up to their women in the Women’s
House of Detention. At this women’s prison, people couldn’t yell
out, but their loved ones could yell up. The women would blink
some kind of light so their people would know it was them. So I
thought, “Wow, this would make a great song.” I composed this
song: “Hey, fourth floor, sugar, that your light? Make some kind
of sign so I know it’s you.” The people would open their hearts
6
up to their loved ones. It was wonderful, it was poignant, but
no one was capturing this. So I started capturing these sorts of
stories and put them into an album and that was the beginning
of lyrics saying something once more. Vocals in the early ’60s
were simply accompaniments to music, sort of “Hey baby, bapdo-da.” I wanted to tell a story, so I brought the orchestrations
down; that way I could tell a story.
Another time I was sitting in a little restaurant and someone
went by, and everyone said, “Hey, look at that!” But I turned
around too late, she’d gone. But that gave me an idea for a story, which we call “Catch That on the Corner”—the story of a
blind guy who fell in love. He’s asking his buddy to describe
the girl he’s in love with. Turns out his girl isn’t a girl at all, but
his buddy doesn’t know how to tell him that. “Hey baby, what’s
that on the corner?” He’s talking to his buddy. Somehow, A&M
Records took my music and the Last Poets started doing it, Gil
Scott-Heron started telling stories again. Not just, “I’ll meet you
at the bar in five minutes,” but stories.
I wanted to do political work, and then that evolved into
rap. What I tried to do, and what’s now happening, [was use]
the events of everyday life of us in the ghetto. It changed everything. Not only was it about something, it made money. At
that juncture, the doors that were closed to [Big Daddy] Kane,
LL Cool J, and everyone opened because the American dollar
says if you can make money, then you can say whatever you
want to say.
There’s a quote of yours saying that whatever you do,
whatever cause you’re fighting, it’s important that the big
boys win if you win. Can you elaborate on that? The trick
is, you figure out a way to do something you want to do, but
if it can make money, they will carry the message. The people
were so hungry to hear themselves, to see their thoughts—ones
that sometimes they didn’t even know they were carrying—that
when I projected that, they bought it.
There’s something pretty intricate about what you just
said, which is essential for anyone who ever tried to convey a message in any form of storytelling. You sit there
with a blank piece of paper, thinking you have nothing to
say, but I can talk about everyday things because that’s my
everyday life. What you do is say, “How can I put it in a form
that will get to, maybe not every audience, but my audience?”
We talk about blaxploitation—all of that came from one of my
films, Sweetback. Now I have to go to the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, they’re giving me a huge restoration of my
film, which is a huge honor. But when that film came out, only
two theaters in the entire United States would show it; not two
cities, two theaters. But I knew my audience it and was so successful that then, of course, everyone else took the film. The
worst thing is when you do something for others and they don’t
like it anyway. Then you’re fucked.
When you say your politics are to win, who do you win
against? Whoever’s fucking with me.
That’s pretty straightforward. It’s not complicated. I was on
a bandstand once with Patti LaBelle and someone in the audience was giving me a hard time. So I jumped off the stage. They
assume that because you are who you are, they can say things
they wouldn’t say in a bar or wherever and you’ve got to take it.
No, no. First rule is: don’t write a check with your mouth that
your ass can’t cash. I had nothing to lose. Nothing to lose.
Modest as you are, you were also the first black trader
on Wall Street. This was another first. You’ve done a lot
throughout your career, but I guess the Wall Street thing
is a special one. Hmm. What happened was, I lost a bet. I was
sitting with some very, very rich friends and the guy was talking
and I could do the numbers in my head. He said, “You can do
that?” And he got the calculator out and realized I was right.
One of the guys sitting with us, who was particularly Machiavellian—a big marker on Wall Street and a troublemaker, too—being so big, he got me a job trading on Wall Street.
How did you find it? It was quite interesting. As an artist,
you write something and you’re never sure you’ve made it, but
on Wall Street, if you’ve made a bad trade, by the evening you
know. I could trade zillions of dollars all day, but I never made a
mistake. No, that’s not true. I made mistakes. Many of the people working Wall Street were minorities, but they never got to
the position I was in. So if I made a mistake, they would protect
me—therefore I ended up never making a mistake.
Part of the American dream is getting all those riches. So
how did you resist the temptation of staying there? I got
laid anyway. I got girls. What the fuck do I need Wall Street
for?
Interviewed by Torsten Schmidt at Red Bull Music
Academy Barcelona 2008. For the full Q&A, head to
redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures.
7
feature
Miss Guy onstage
at Don Hill’s,
1995.
Opposite: The
SqueezeBox! crowd
goes wild, 1995.
Words Tricia Romano
PHOTO GRAPH Y Tina paul
the year was 1994. Rudy Giuliani had just been
elected mayor of New York. It was before the city was
gripped by terror, before Times Square was recast
as a Disneyfied playground for tourists, before models and bottles infiltrated, soured, and sterilized its
clubs. After four years of Mayor David Dinkins’ meager one-term run, New York City still had its gritty
and dangerous parts, with many pockets of Manhattan not yet gentrified to the teeth. Williamsburg was
a Polish/Hispanic/Hasidic neighborhood; “hipster”
was not a pejorative description for every kid from
New Jersey wearing tight black jeans; and the Meatpacking District still had actual meat-packers.
How SqueezeBox! changed the sound of
New York clubs—gay and straight.
8
9
feature
nd the gay club scene, though not
yet as iconic as in its ’80s heyday,
was starting to coalesce into something that could claim a spot in
New York’s rich nightlife history. As
techno became de rigueur in
Brooklyn warehouses, muscle
queens danced all night in big
Chelsea superclubs, and Michael
Alig led club kids on dystopian drug binges at Limelight, another music subculture emerged downtown in Tribeca, on the
far edges of the west side of Manhattan at a tiny, divey rock club
called Don Hill’s.
Bored with the options for gay men and women, rock ’n’ roll
fashion designer Michael Schmidt teamed up with Pat Briggs of
the industrial band Psychotica, drag queen Misstress Formika,
and DJ Miss Guy to create SqueezeBox!, one of New York City’s
last great parties.
SqueezeBox! gave gay (and straight) revelers a different kind
of outlet. Every Friday, pretty boys, glam girls, rough rockers, and
cool celebs converged upon Don Hill’s, wearing their dirty, filthy,
punk-rock best. The party birthed bands, revolutionized the
drag scene, and served as a hothouse for Hedwig and the Angry
Inch, which went on to become an off-Broadway hit and a big
Hollywood movie.
The darkest days of the AIDS epidemic had passed, but the
gay community remained on edge, remembering lost friends at
the mercy of the caustic and careless mayor Edward Koch. They
didn’t have a friend in Rudolph Giuliani, either, who upon taking office instituted a veritable war against nightlife, wielding
an early-century cabaret law to close clubs down at will.
But SqueezeBox survived. And long after it ended, the club’s influence was clear not only in quintessential pansexual New York parties like Motherfucker, Misshapes, and Berliniamsburg, but in
the rock revival and electroclash movements that
would soon rule over Manhattan and Brooklyn.
This is the story of SqueezeBox!.
feature
him around and we’d met a few times and I thought he was
great and funny as hell and I loved him.
Schmidt: As soon as I saw [Formika] perform, I said “This is
the one, this is a star.” So I asked her if she would be the hostess
and she could sing with a band every week. Well, she had never
sung before.
Misstress Formika (drag performer and host of SqueezeBox!): I said that I’m not a trained singer and to be honest with
you I’ve only sang twice in my life and that was in high school
for school plays. But I’m willing to give it a shot.
Miss Guy: Formika was… if he wasn’t feeling confident, he was
faking it and no one would have ever known. He was an automatic star. He’s one of the best.
Schmidt: [Opening night] was on April 15 of 1994. It was really
scary. Because you don’t know how all of those things are going
to be responded to. You don’t know if people are going to show
up. But we had the Lunachicks play. All the elements were in
place. I knew it could work, but you don’t ever know if people
are going to pick up on your vision or not. So you kinda lay it
out there and see. And people went wild.
Thomas Onorato (doorman for SqueezeBox!, Misshapes,
and Motherfucker): You couldn’t lip-synch, you had to perform with a live band—which at the time [was] revolutionary.
Larry Tee (DJ, founder of the club night Berliniamsburg,
and creator of the Electroclash Festival): SqueezeBox! was
for those who did not feel comfortable in the Sound Factory
or Roxy. It really was the alternative to that big room, cha cha,
tribal nonsense, brain-numbing, washing-machine stuff at the
end of the ’90s. SqueezeBox! was the perfect antidote.
Schmidt: There had been a club in the late ’80s called Rock
and Roll Fag Bar, run by my friend Dean Johnson, which was
amazing and great and much needed and fairly short-lived. It
was incredibly fun, although they didn’t have live bands. No
gay clubs ever had live bands. I was sick of seeing drag queens
lip-synching. So I thought, “What if we put a rock ’n’ roll band,
a punk band together, and we have queens singing? That’ll be
the show.”
DJ Miss Guy (SqueezeBox! resident and singer of the Toilet Boys): Michael asked me who I thought should be the drag
MC and my two choices were either [Lady] Bunny or Misstress
Formika. I didn’t know Formika well at that point but I’d seen
10
Left: Miss Guy and
the Toilet Boys, Don
Hill’s, 1998.
you can get all those people
in a scene and in a whole
world where everyone’s got
a like-minded attitude and
is not necessarily wholly
gay, that’s something. Then
you have a real party
that actually means
something, because
it’s not just one thing
or another. It’s actu-
Right: (L-R) Patrick
Briggs (Torment),
Evan Dando, Billie Joe
Armstrong, Misstress
Formika, and Courtney
Love, Don Hill’s, 1994.
Photo by Bob Gruen
Michael T: It brought drag to a different area than before. We
had drag that was not necessarily pretty, and drag that was singing live and singing rock with live musicians, and drag that was
being performed to a mixed audience and not just a gay male
audience. In that sense it gave a lot of performers—legendary
people like Joey Arias, Sherry Vine—a platform.
Formika: The queens in New York were definitely ruling. We
were ruling so much in New York for the drag scene that queens
like Justin Bond and Jackie Beat moved here. Everybody wanted
to be a New York drag queen.
Larry Tee: If it’s kind of gay,
assholes don’t want to hang
out there. It’s asshole repellent. Bottle service [types],
they don’t want to hang out
with some faggots.
Schmidt: [At SqueezeBox!]
we had a sign at the door
that said “This is a gay rock
’n’ roll club, if you can’t handle us, fuck off.” So from
the get-go it was made very
clear to anybody that came
that we were not going to
put up with any bullshit
from anybody.
Left: Misstress Formika at SqueezeBox!, 1994.
Right: Patrick Briggs and Michael Schmidt, 1995.
old-school punk rock to a Brigitte Bardot
song, or he would play the Cramps into
Led Zeppelin and Buddy Holly—it just
wasn’t done back then.
- Michael Schmidt
Mitchell: Very quickly Steve Trask said, “You can practice being
a fake rock star,” which I was writing about, “and do a gig here,
but you have to do it in drag.” He said I couldn’t do male characters. I had to do what was originally a supporting character of
Hedwig. Because it was really about
Tommy the boyfriend, who was the
son of the general, as I was. And then
the supporting character was sort of
thrust into the spotlight because it
was a drag club and I had to do it in
drag. So in a way SqueezeBox! forced
Hedwig out of me like a toothpaste
tube. It was just so scary. I had never
sung in a band. I had never been in
drag. So my first gig there was just,
you know, full-on giving birth.
Mitchell: You know, glitter, glitter,
glitter.
ally more than just sexuality. It’s an attitude. It’s a
philosophy.
“John
Waters
called
it the
greatest
club in
America.”
Schmidt: [John] asked me if he could perform a theater piece
that he was workshopping with the band. I said, “Well, I guess so,
but you have to know this is real life for these people. You have
to show a great amount of respect to these queens who perform
here on a regular basis. If you’re gonna work this out, make it
real, make it your own.” And he did.
Formika: Oh, it was great. It went
over really well, the first performance. I was like, “Wow, they love
that.”
Schmidt: I put a whole sort of package together. Miss Guy, the
DJ, was my roommate and he was one of the best DJs I knew.
He had a very eclectic collection of music. He would go from
Schmidt: We had all the best drag queens in town, they all
performed with the band.
Michael Schmidt (co-promoter of SqueezeBox!): In 1994 I had a friend named Patrick Briggs,
who had been a friend of mine for ten years and
was managing a bar called Don Hill’s, a rock ’n’
roll bar. He called me up one day. I make clothing
for entertainers—I didn’t really do clubs at that
time, and I had never done a club before. He said,
“We’re running this club and we want to do a gay
night. Would you be interested in maybe putting
something together and promoting it?” I said no.
It wasn’t really on my radar of things I would conceivably want to do, but after thinking about it for
a while, I thought that would be an opportunity to
create the very club we all complained didn’t exist.
Michael T (DJ and co-promoter of the club
night Motherfucker): With me and with certain gay people that are similar to me, you’re sort
of in this purgatory state where you go to a lot of
straight clubs. Sometimes I’ll go to gay clubs and
have a good time. But there’d definitely be something missing from gay clubs. All you would hear is
house music, all you would see is Chelsea boys, all
you would see is the typical drag number, which could sometimes
be phenomenal and other times be whatever. It was bland. It was
something that I didn’t fully connect with, nor did I want to.
Formika: The first year it was really difficult to get queens to
come and sing. I had Lina there and Candis [Cayne] there—all
these people that don’t really sing. I would convince them and
say, “No, you can do it. If I can do it, you can do it.” They would
come in and they would turn it out, you know? I would sit there
all afternoon from like three in the afternoon till seven or eight
at night the day of the show. I would listen to the queens and
talk to the bands and say, “They can’t sing it that fast, slow it
down.” We would take punk songs and make them into ballads;
we would take ballads and make them into punk songs. However we needed to re-orchestrate the songs so the queens sounded
good, that’s how we did the songs.
Miss Guy: I’d only been DJing six
months when we started SqueezeBox!. I used to play the Plasmatics and the place would be
packed and going wild. I had never seen a party where that
happened before or since. I really went all over the place
and it worked. It was a time where there was no Internet really, and no digital music, so in those days you went
to hear a DJ and you went to hear their collection. Now
people can Shazam what the DJ is playing and buy it on
their phone.
Formika: In my 20 years in nightlife, I always found that the
best parties that last the longest and are the most legendary
are those that start off with just a group of friends, and their
friends, having a good time. A slow build is the way to go about
that. Any party that starts off with a bang has nowhere to go but
down. We had nowhere to go but up.
Michael T: They would open around 9pm. They had a few
opening bands, which led to a headliner, which then led to the
late-night show. So it was kinda between the headliner and
the late-night show when the dance version of the party would
really begin to percolate.
Onorato: SqueezeBox! was one of the parties in the larger
scene where people actually danced on the dancefloor. Where
it wasn’t a mosh pit and it wasn’t people just hanging around
waiting for a band.
Miss Guy: I think after that you had gay bars in the East Village
playing rock. More rock DJs coming around in that world, whereas before there really weren’t any.
Larry Tee: Motherfucker and SqueezeBox! were definitely kissing cousins because they shared a lot of the same talent. Misshapes was their gay grandson who did not want anything to do
with them. They were more likely to be in Helmut Lang than
Michael Schmidt.
Michael T: The two biggest influences for Motherfucker were
SqueezeBox! and Green Door, which was happening around the
same time. Green Door was the straight version of SqueezeBox!,
but it was totally East Village, total rock ’n’ roll. It was definitely shooting for a Max’s Kansas City vibe. There were clearly gay people, and there were straight people, and then there
were people you weren’t sure about. And there was just that
energy—a certain type of energy that’s created that cannot be
pre-programmed or falsified.
Jake Shears (lead singer of the Scissor Sisters): [SqueezeBox!] had a wild mix of women, gay guys, people that were
transgender, drag queens. It was a queer crowd. It wasn’t
necessarily just a gay crowd. That’s the magic combination. If
Formika: We were always
very outspoken. Misshapes
was just an outfit party.
They’re fun and great for what they are, but they had no substance. If things were going on in the city that were wrong,
people at SqueezeBox! were informed. We had a few protests
against Mayor Giuliani.
Schmidt: SqueezeBox! is a response to really two things. The
AIDS crisis had really taken all of the talent out of the city. It
demolished the scene. It needed to be rebuilt from the ground
up. And there was also the need to bring the straight and the
gay communities back together because there was a lot of alienation there.
John Cameron Mitchell (creator of Hedwig and the Angry
Inch): It was the club that I had always been waiting for my
whole life. I could just barely tolerate the music in most gay
places until that point. But in terms of a full-on queer rock ’n’
roll place that was performance-based but also a place where,
you know, you could slam with cute boys without fear of breaking their hair—that was the place to go. You know, it was kinda
scary. You never knew what was gonna happen. It was like punk
rock just got invented by gay people at that point. There was
always the Buzzcocks and Jayne County and everything. So it
was from heaven.
Miss Guy: I remember John was hanging out there. We were
introduced because he was good friends with the guitarist of the
SqueezeBox! band, Steve Trask.
Schmidt: And then we started to get
all kinds of crazy people coming in
and wanting to perform. I had been friends for a long time, because of my work in entertainment, with a number of performers.
Deborah Harry was a very big supporter of ours from the beginning. She performed with the band and with Misstress Formika. Nina Hagen came, and Lene Lovich came, Joan Jett, Marilyn
Manson, all of those people would come and perform with the
band. You just never knew what was going to happen.
Formika: At one point I’m downstairs with Courtney Love, the
whole band from Green Day, we’re all drunk, and we’re all getting
tattooed in the basement. I have a star tattoo on the bone on
my hand and so does Billie from Green Day. Courtney didn’t get
a tattoo that night, she just hung out with us and like 15 other
people from SqueezeBox!. We all got tattooed that night at four
in the morning.
Larry Tee: It was astounding because every time I went there, I
would see somebody like Blondie or Courtney Love. It was definitely rock-star base for that time. It was like the place.
Michael T: You didn’t remember who was there because you
were fucked up!
Larry Tee: If you wanted to do coke, you went to SqueezeBox!. If you wanted to do ketamine or ecstasy, you went to the
Sound Factory.
Schmidt: It started to snowball. You’d be standing there and
you turn to your right and there would be Calvin Klein, you’d
turn to your left and there’d be John F. Kennedy Jr., standing
and talking to some drag queen or some little punk kid. It was
amazing. It was an incredible mix of the high and the low. John
Waters called it the greatest club in America.
Formika: So many things came out of it. The Toilet Boys came
out of it, Hedwig came out of SqueezeBox!—it definitely started
singing careers for a lot of the queens. Of course, Psychotica, Pat
Briggs’ band, they had a big whirl from SqueezeBox!.
Schmidt: It was nuts. The capacity was 150. It was really
tiny—it was a hole in the wall. The bathrooms were horrible.
It was a mess, but it was great. It was down and dirty and
that’s what you wanted in a rock ’n’ roll bar. You don’t want
something slick and polished with table service if you’re gonna
cater to this kind of crowd. You want something real—and we
gave it to ’em.
Formika: SqueezeBox! was, definitely, in my 20 years, the most
decadent party that I’ve ever worked at.
Miss Guy: I think that people realized that it was special. I
certainly did.
11
COLUMNS
Columns
Deitch
Projects
A column on
the gear and
processes that inform
the music we make.
Plenty of musicians play guitars through
effects pedals—but until hearing the Brooklyn
noise duo YVETTE, I had never seen a musician use the guitar merely as a sound source to
“play” the pedals. (The band was actually the
impetus for GODMODE, my small record label.)
I spoke with Noah Kardos-Fein, the singer
and guitarist of YVETTE, about his unusual
strategies and sounds.
RBMA: Can you describe your current pedal rig?
LO G OS
The origins of
iconic images from
NYC's musical history
explained.
“I saw new wave’s return to the ’50s and
’60s aesthetic as an absurdity that only Devo’s
theory of ‘de-evolution’ could explain,” says
Rudolf Piper, who together with partner
Jim Fouratt founded Danceteria, one of the
city’s most famous nightclubs of the 1980s.
Fouratt said at the time, “We deliberately try
to present serious music in a ‘vulgar’ format,
to use the original connotation of the word.”
Stumped as to what to call their vulgar
new venture, Piper, Fouratt, and David
King recall passing the Garment Center’s
liveliest lunchspot, Dubrow’s Cafeteria,
when lightning struck not far from the club’s
original location at 252 West 37 th Street.
Fouratt exclaimed: “That’s it! Danceteria!”
The club’s dance-punk eclecticism defined
the early ’80s: DJs like Bill Bahlman, Johnny
Dynell, Anita Sarko, and Mark Kamins mixed
post-punk with disco, hip-hop with electro.
Two years later, the multistory club moved to
its most famous location, 30 West 21st Street,
where newcomers like Madonna opened for
the likes of Manchester’s A Certain Ratio
(in 1982). Art Attack Wednesdays featured
highbrow artists such as Philip Glass and
Diamanda Galas. The third floor included a
12
video lounge and a restaurant. “It’s all about
mixing up these different kinds of people.”
Fouratt told The New York Times.
King, a British graphic designer best known
for creating the logo of the anarchist punk
band Crass, had been working in London for
ten years before moving to New York in 1977.
By day he drew illustrations for Psychology
Today, covers for Penguin Books, and
Christmas cards for MoMA. By night, he was
in a punk band called Arsenal.
Inspired by an old photo of a White Castle
waitress in a book about American cafeterias,
King created the image of the Danceteria Lady.
A zig-zagging eighth note covering her eyes gave
the logo its new-wave edge: “I had always been
fascinated with the use of a black rectangle to
supposedly obscure the identity of alleged
miscreants in the tabloid press,” King recalls.
Kaufmann Bold, a whimsical connecting script,
reinforced the campy Americana feeling. King
extended the crossbar of the t to bisect the dot
on the i—a nice finishing touch.
“We had several prototypes, most of them
based on the drawings of Serge Clerc from
Paris,” Piper recalls, “but ultimately this one
-Laura forde
hit the mark.”
Noah Kardos-Fein: I use a combination of
effects: octave, distortion/overdrive, multiple
resonance filter (MuRF), a couple different ring
modulators, quite a few different pitch shifters
and pitch shift/delays, a few different digital
and analog delays, tremolo, reverb, and looping. These are all attached to a custom-made
pedal board and road case, which is big enough
to fit a small person. RBMA: How would you say you play differently from other guitarists?
NKF: There’s a mutual relationship between
my guitar and my pedals, whereas for most
[other musicians] I think the pedals are slaves
to the guitar. I often use my guitar to play my
pedals. Certain notes played on the guitar will
generate specific dissonant noises in the ring
modulator, for instance. Then I use other pedals to help color that sound. RBMA: How does your pedal rig affect your
songwriting?
NKF: Most of our ideas for songs start with
happy accidents, where I’m mindlessly running
my fingers against the strings while a certain
effect is on, and it generates an interesting
sound or riff. I have this whole palette of different colored paints in front of me and I only
begin to see patterns or images emerge on the
canvas once I’ve started to aimlessly run my
brush along it. RBMA: Do any of your pedals have good stories behind them? NKF: One of the weirder pedals I use is a
DigiTech XP-300 Space Station. I was on a lunch
break at work one day and wandered into a guitar shop nearby, and I stopped in to look at the
pedals for sale. The XP-300 is this big, gold, ugly
thing from the late ’80s and I was vaguely familiar with it because of its reputation for being
rare and making weird sounds. I ended up grabbing it because the effects sounded so strange,
but the icing on the cake was that the pedal had
belonged to Robert Quine. It came with a certificate of authenticity and everything. Quine
played with Richard Hell, Lou Reed, Brian Eno,
and Material. When Quine died his estate sold
off his gear. I like to think that in some strange
way, maybe I’m channeling him and the kind of
New York Noise approach to new music that he
helped make famous.
Many New York-engendered art movements
have chance origin stories, but the Soho-based Deitch
Projects came from a very different and deliberate process. In 1996, Jeffrey Deitch, a Harvard Business School
graduate and highly successful art dealer and advisor,
established a gallery in Soho which he quickly populated
with the kind of ebullient and irrational art that in the
late ’90s came to characterize New York’s edgy downtown milieu. The city’s art market had suffered a depression for some years before going gangbusters around ’97,
and Deitch was the godfather and patron of that scene.
The work Deitch favored, as Calvin Tomkins put it in
a 2007 feature for The New Yorker, was by artists whose
“creative output was indistinguishable from their lives.”
This often made for a heady brew of performance art
paired with exuberant, theatrical music, featuring the
likes of electroclash/DIY/punk artists like Chicks on
Speed and Fischerspooner. “I see [the gallery] as a platform for creative community,” Deitch told Tomkins. “The
extension of life into art and art into life... post-gay, postblack, post-feminist [in] orientation.” Whether or not Deitch achieved those goals is subject
to debate, but there’s no question he took a chance on
work that few others at the time would touch. In 2006,
he lent his space to artists Dash Snow and Dan Colen for
one of their “Hamster Nest” installations, where Snow
and Colen filled the gallery with shredded phone books
and broken wine bottles, invited around 30 friends, and
ingested copious amounts of drugs to fuel—among other
less salubrious activities—writing on the walls. Another
installation, by the Austrian Gelitin collective, featured
dinner for a few hundred guests with naked men urinating over the repast into one another’s hats. As Casey
Spooner of Fischerspooner says of their Deitch performances, “CNN covered it. Bianca Jagger sat on the stage
in a white suit. Jeff Koons came backstage and gushed
over it. The fire department shut us down, which [MoMA
PS1 director] Klaus Biesenbach declared ‘the death of
Soho.’ It was ridiculous and amazing.”
In 2010, Deitch was offered the directorship of the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, closing up
his multiple gallery locations when he moved out west.
But his impact on New York’s creative spheres is implicit
in much of the work that’s currently celebrated in some
of the city’s most august institutions. -Adrienne Day
Top
5…
New York City
Clubs of the ’80s
PRESENTED BY
In the two decades that Time Out NY’s
nightlife section has been cruising the
club scene, we’ve seen plenty of peaks
and valleys. Right now, it’s at a serious high point. Still, it’s hard to beat
those pre-gentrified days of yore. While
the ’70s bequeathed us the Loft, Paradise
Garage, and Studio 54, the ’80s certainly
had its own share of pioneering parties.
LANDMARKS
THE BRONX
The places, spaces,
and monuments of
NYC's musical past,
present, and future.
past featured landmarks
1 max neuhaus’ “times square”
2 The Thing Secondhand Store
3 The loft
4 Marcy Hotel
5 Andy Warhol’s Factory
6 Queensbridge Houses
7 Record Mart
1
7
6
5
5
7
QUEENS
5
2
3
MANHATTAN
4
What: Deitch Projects
Where: 18 Wooster
Street; 76 Grand
Street; 90 N. 11th
Street, Brooklyn;
4-40 44th Dr., Queens When: 1996-2010
Why: Boundarybreaking art gallery/
performance space
STATEN ISLAND
BROOKLYN
1 2 3 4 5
Mudd Club
This divey, multifloor
hangout ran from ’78
through ’83. But with
its genre-ignorant
soundtrack, art-damaged clientele, and
embrace of anything
that smacked of the new
and the weird, the club
perfectly captured the
city’s fin de siècle
feel at the time.
The Pyramid Club
In an era when much of
New York’s gay-performance scene was centered around lip-synching imitations of Babs
and Cher, the East
Village’s Pyramid was a
revelation: its onstage
shows merged dragqueen over-the-topness
with a transgressive,
sometimes-eloquent,
often-touching vision
of gay utopia, with a
set list as likely to
include Einstürzende
Neubauten as Sylvester.
Danceteria
This hallowed hall ran
at various addresses from 1979 till the
early ’90s, though when
people say Danceteria, they’re usually
referring to its West
21st Street, ’82 to’86
period. It was home to
the recently deceased
DJ Mark Kamins, and the
spot was the cultural
center for the freakier
end of NYC’s nightlife
spectrum.
Roxy
It began life as a
roller disco; it ended
its run as a circuit-club mecca for
Chelsea boys. Somewhere
in the middle, the
Roxy brought the South
Bronx’s bourgeoning
hip-hop scene south to
mingle with downtown’s
hungry-for-somethingnew hedonists. It
worked: the club was
packed with a gorgeous
jumble of revelers,
and remains one of the
major milestones in
hip-hop culture.
Area
At Area you’d find
upscale gallery patrons partying alongside smackhead painters from the LES. But
its ever-changing,
themed installations
were “as elaborate as
anything in the Museum of Natural History,” according to one
of its DJs, Johnny
Dynell. They were total extravaganzas.
-Nick sylvester
13
NEw york story
garden
state
of mind
A New York DJ/producer
rides for his Jersey roots.
photos courtesy of nick catchdubs
WORDS nick catchdubs
todd terry said house is a feeling. As far as I’m concerned, that feeling will
always be a school-bus seat slapped in 4/4 time with high-pitched chants of “It’s
Time for the Percolator,” “The Witch Doctor,” and the thoroughly sixth-grade-inappropriate “I’ll Beat That Bitch with a Bat” shouted over the top. Many years before I
would ever hear dance music in a nightclub, I experienced it, thanks to the wonders
of minimally supervised public-school transportation and older siblings with “Follow Me” on cassette.
I’ve lived my entire adult life in the boroughs of New York City. My record label,
Fool’s Gold, was founded in Brooklyn. But I am a son of New Jersey. And as a result
of that geographical fact, all of my formative musical experiences are inherently
Jersey ones—yellow bus untz untz untz and beyond.
I was way too young to appreciate Skid Row and Bon Jovi’s hairspray heyday.
Instead I spent countless hours listening to wonderfully terrible local metal and
hardcore bands shred on 89.5 FM (“Seton Hall’s Pirate Radio”), then flicking the
dial to the right and freaking out with alllll kinds of weirdos on 91.1 WFMU. By the
time Midtown and My Chemical Romance brought pop-punk glory to the Garden
State, I had already moved to NYC for college. But at least I could say I had the Outsidaz and Lords of the Underground! And everyone else on the New Jersey Drive
soundtrack. There’s something special about rapping along to Redman’s “Brick
City” shout-outs when you’re actually in Newark. Driving past all the motels from
Naughty by Nature’s OPP video along Routes 1 and 9 is far less special, though still
kinda fun. (Word to the Loop Inn.)
These rosy musical memories don’t just center around homegrown heroes. Red
Hot Chili Peppers ruled the entire planet for a particular stretch of the early ’90s,
though I’ll always associate them with the Woodbridge Mall Sam Goody, and certain
maxi-singles that may or may not have been liberated from the aforementioned
establishment in the front pocket of a pullover Starter jacket. I probably shouldn’t
worry about statutes of limitations on preteen misdemeanors when none of those
chains even exist anymore. But the Garden State Arts Center is still standing! Long
before they sold the naming rights to PNC Bank, I begged my parents for months
to see a show, any show, at the Arts Center, and got my wish when a Soul Asylum/
Jayhawks/Matthew Sweet hat trick of uncoolness became my first concert ever.
My wonder years probably weren’t all that different from most music-obsessed
children growing up anywhere else in the country with access to a cable box. Yet
there is a myth in popular culture that everyone in New Jersey somehow wants to
escape the accursed Fuggeddaboutitlandia that raised them at the first possible
chance. My state isn’t the Sopranos. (When I watch old episodes I just get really
hungry and remember that I should probably call my parents.) All the Bruce Springsteen songs about cars and desperation and what-not never really applied to my life.
At no point in my personal musical genealogy did I ever feel like I was missing out
on something across the river.
But I get it. I live in New York now because I want to (and on a purely professional level, I have to), not because I fled New Jersey. I understand the chipon-shoulder mindset though. I probably carry more than a little of that dogged
sense of pride than I will actually admit. I definitely will continue to defend
the genius of the first Wyclef solo album to anyone within earshot. (It’s the Carnival! Anything can happen!) When it’s all said and done, I would love nothing more than to have my face carved into a Garden State Rushmore somewhere in the Watchung Mountains, right next to Todd Edwards, the Artifacts,
and the Aly-Us guys who wrote “Follow Me,” to the sound of a kickdrum somewhere in Linden while dreaming of a place where we can all be free-ee-eeah.
Nick Catchdubs is a DJ/producer, co-owner of the Fool’s Gold record label,
and bon vivant. Find him at catchdubs.com.
15
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236 ARTISTS. 34 NIGHTS. 8000 ANTHEMS. 1 CITY.
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