LITA 134 - Ze Records

LITA 134
She blew into the Lower East Side
New York in 1978–an elfin painter, poet, muse, and musician, dressed like a decadent,
free-spirited poet of the 19th century… with no immediate ambition to be a punk rock or
No Wave star, just the urge that always drove her, to play on new frontiers, accumulate
experiences like jewelry. Lizzy was drawn like so many by the prospect of freedom held
out by the rackety, rickety, organic poly-arts whirlpool of New York’s Lower East Side…
where the subways never stopped and bodegas never closed, so unlike stuffy old Paris,
Lizzy’s hometown. Below 14th Street, days bled into nights and dawns of wandering the
streets of Soho and the Lower East Side, dipping and diving into bars, after-hours clubs,
S&M and drag dives, punk rock joints like CBGB’s… restlessly roaming among grimy
tenements and dusty storefronts that artists could still seize for laboratories… where
junkies thought they were geniuses and sometimes (rarely) actually were. Lizzy came
to Manhattan to find her voice and instead discovered that she contained many. She
could be a dazzling firefly that would fitfully flicker from bloom to bloom, genre to genre,
passion to passion, committing herself only to engaging intensely with every moment
like her hero, the poet Arthur Rimbaud.
“Rimbaud was part of punk’s French connection, and Lizzy adopted his image. He
was the ultimate punk. His words were dark and anarchic, radical and subversive,
against any structure and logical obedience of any kind. He was lashing out at everything in the same way we found in punk culture,” explains the bass player and producer
Bill Laswell, who was prominent in the downtown avant-garde when Lizzy first circulated in New York.
With vocals in French and English by Lizzy and Patti Smith, Laswell’s production of
“Morning High” is included here. Their spin on Rimbaud’s “Morning of Drunkenness”
was recorded in 1995 as part of Laswell’s project, Hashisheen: The End of Law, inspired
Photo by Edo
by mystic sagas of 11th Century Persia. Quite rightly for these manipulators of disconnection, both singers and one time roommates sent in their recordings separately, and
Laswell conjoined them in the studio, the two tongues jostling and slipping round one
another in a digital embrace.
“I saw Lizzy around at places like CBGB’s in the punk time, particularly after the
Ramones first came out, when there was the weirder stuff like James Chance, DNA,
and Richard Hell. You definitely noticed her. She was very enthusiastic, funny, and
pretty laid back,” Laswell recalls.
Initially, it was Lizzy’s looks and style that made the French transplant an underground icon. It wasn’t till later in the 1980s that American style began to embrace color,
and no one around had Lizzy’s vivid, sophisticated dash. Among the acres of basic
black, blue jeans, and t-shirts, she was an anomaly.
Press Color was produced by Bob Blank at his disco-matic downtown studio, Blank
Tapes. “Lizzy was extremely stylish, more than the crowd you saw on the scene,” Blank
says. “She was more underground.”
Though entrepreneur and producer Michel Esteban was her first manager/lover
and they moved to New York together, Lizzy’s romantic passions often coincided
with and helped to shape her musical career. The men in her life had to act civilized
and co-exist in a (usually placid) state of truce. Another of her loves and creative
partners was New York musician and artist Seth Tillett. “Yes, she was a siren,” he
says. “Men crashed on those rocks.” Tillett also first spotted Lizzy in New York’s
demi-monde, at a concert by her then boyfriend, poet and musician Richard Hell.
“Her eyes and eyebrows were incredible, she had this gigantic head of silver hair,
she was wearing skintight harlequin checkerboard pants, and she was the most
amazing thing I had ever seen.” His initial chat-up failed, but proximity did the work.
Photo by Michel Esteban
In the incestuous LES they met again at a launderette. Romance bubbled, despite the
ever-present Michel and Richard Hell.
For Hell, too, Lizzy was a muse; he based his novel Go Now’s love interest on her. In
his biography, I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp (Ecco Books), Hell devotes a chapter
to Lizzy, then, near the book’s end, circles back to their final meeting in the early 1980s.
She tries to save him from heroin addiction, they even get engaged to be married, but he
betrays her in a way that still haunts him. Yet theirs was a grand passion, and he conjures
her vividly: “an intellectual sex-kitten chanteuse adventuress little girl.” “I wasn’t really
conscious of her music career, and I believe she took it pretty casually too,” he writes. “It
was primarily another means of getting her to tropical seas around the world.”
Whether Lizzy was truly as dismissive of her music as Hell, cool was part of her
arsenal and maybe her shield from the world and herself.
So Seth became Lizzy’s romantic escape, and they were mutual muses during the
recording of Press Color. The couple enjoyed escapades like jumping into a fountain in
Paris, frolicking in the waterwork’s mechanism and getting arrested. Lizzy talked them
out of it. Seth’s photo of an unmade-up, tousle-haired Lizzy just waking up in bed, illuminated by the lightbox they’d been viewing slides on as they went to sleep, became
one of her defining images.
“I was more serious about visual art then than music. But all the artists were going
into music and giving the finger to the art world,” Seth laughs. “Musicians were chosen
because they could not play instruments. You had to be an amateur to be in a band. If
you had chops, you were out.”
This scrappy aesthetic was the perfect climate for an artist like Lizzy, hovering
between possibilities in music, art, poetry and film–she appears in director Amos Poe’s
Photo by Michel Esteban
Blank Generation (1975). The times dictated music as her immediate path. Call Lizzy a
dilettante, but she flashed her individual glimmer in each medium.
Later, in the affluent early 1980s, Lizzy and Michel would be able to breeze into a
record company and announce her urge to record in Soweto, or Brazil, and somehow
enchant a budget out of the executives just as she had fascinated artists and producers
before. But only once did Lizzy’s music coincide with mainstream pop success, on
“Where Have The Gazelles Gone?” from her third album, 1984’s Zulu Rock, produced
by Michel and another of Lizzy’s great loves, British producer Adam Kidron. After her
1988 album, Suspense, her industry currency was spent. Lizzy’s fractured whimsy,
involving free-spending on intriguing musical experiments, fell out of favor. The record
business had moved on to more polished pop, and bean counters had begun to control
the maverick record men who could sign checks from their gut. Lizzy retreated from
the big cities, moved to Corsica, and painted. She died of cancer in 2004, aged 48.
But this release of Press Color, Lizzy’s first album, finds her at the cusp of committing
herself to music and captures the sketchy, spontaneous spirit of the times. Producer Bob
Blank remembers, “I first met Lizzy with her producer, Michel Esteban, at the beginning of
the whole No Wave scene. I was just putting together my studio, Blank Tapes. The builders
had to stop hammering the sheetrock when we did the take on “Fire” (Lizzy’s version of The
Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s 1968 scorcher). She was just this very, very shy kid. They
were so cool that I didn’t realize for a while that they were an item, but she was his protégé.”
In fact, Lizzy and Michel’s relationship had the delicate, respectful intimacy that
we can call an “understanding.” They were not a traditional pair by the time they
moved together to New York, firstly to a loft with columns on Lafayette Street that they
shared with Patti Smith. The couple’s closeness had moved beyond typical conventions; Michel, her first mentor, remained her companion till the end of her life.
Photo by Seth Tillet
Their rapport dated back to Lizzy’s students years in Les Halles, a quartier that was
just gentrifying from gritty functionality as a food market to hip boutiques. Lizzy was
raised by her loving working-class aunt and uncle, a worker at the Renault factory, at
11 Rue des Halles, not knowing her father and pretty much abandoned by her mother.
Seth Tillett often stayed with Lizzy’s family in their small apartment. “Lizzy was a
poet in the sense that she took every element of her life as part of the story she had to
tell as opposed to wishing she were otherwise,” he explains. “She never said, ‘I wish I
knew Mother better.’ Instead, she would wryly say, ‘Look at Maman’s picture in those
glasses, she looks pretty cool…’ Lizzy was such a self-creation. She never tried to
change creating her reality.” Esteban agrees: “She was a child of the universe.”
In 1974, Michel’s boutique Harry Cover, facing Lizzy’s apartment, at number 12 Rue
des Halles, sold bootleg punk T-shirts, fanzines, and 45s. His piratical retail flair made
Harry Cover into Punk Central for the burgeoning rebel movement in a town that revered
BCBG (bon chic, bon genre), good taste–above all.
“I saw this girl on the balcony opposite the boutique, very beautiful and mysterious. Her aura intrigued me. She was a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and used
to ride her bicycle past the store,” Michel recalls tenderly. “I left a note on her bicycle
asking her to meet me at the store. She did. When we met, she wore long cotton
robes, very romantic. I helped to fashion her image; I liked girls with short hair, and I
used a cutter on her hair one day. There was a difference between the girl I met and
the personality she became,” he remembers. When Michel published Lizzy’s 1977
book of poetry, Desiderata, illustrated by Patti Smith and with contributions from
Richard Hell, he encouraged her to become a hyphenate and add her father’s name,
Descloux, to her mother’s Mercier; the hope was that somehow he would discover his
musical daughter’s existence.
Photo by Michel Esteban
Visiting America in the early 1970s to seek the roots of his inspirations, Esteban fell in
with what became the CBGB’s crowd–Television, Blondie, Patti Smith, et al. At one point,
before moving to New York, he and Lizzy made a magazine, Rock News–an initiative that
helped smooth their way into Manhattan.
The Velvet Underground’s John Cale had a label, Spy, together with Michael Zilkha, an
artistically attuned British investor and entrepreneur. After they released a track Michel
had produced, Esteban and Zilkha set up their own label, ZE, combining their initials.
Lizzy was one of the first artists on a lively roster that would grow to include Zilkha’s
girlfriend, Cristina, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, James Chance and the Contortions,
Lydia Lunch, and Was (Not Was). Lizzy founded her first duo, Rosa Yemen, with Michel’s
brother Didier, aka D.J. Banes, who moved from Paris to join them. The name Rosa
Yemen was a non-specific nod to rebellious spirits from Rosa Luxembourg to European
anarchists like Red Brigade and Baader-Meinhof gang. The frenetic tracks are brutally
brief and capture something of Lizzy’s electric, eclectic curiosity. While Lizzy’s delivery
often sounds detached, almost absentminded, on Rosa Yemen’s darker tracks like
“Herpes Simplex,” she conveys real panic and desperation.
“Lizzy was incredibly intuitive and cool. I felt most strongly about Rosa Yemen. Those
tracks were skankier, dirtier, sexier,” Michael Zilkha recalls. “They had a great sense of
rhythm, space, and dynamic; untutored and completely wild. The tracks don’t have a
rhythmic base, which was the premise of ZE at the time.”
As Lizzy’s first solo foray, they recorded “Fire.” Explains Zilkha, “It was an attempt to
ally punk sensibility with disco, because the two were very factionalized.”
When the time came to record Press Color, Lizzy and Michel’s approach to recording
mirrored the wild intensity of her performances at downtown arts space, The Kitchen.
It was as if all the impressions of Manhattan that Lizzy had been tuning into from Les
Halles, the alluring maelstrom of creativity that buzzed below 14th Street, was a feast
of stimulation for Lizzy, a glorious spread of possibilities. The raw construction of Blank
Tapes studio was a fine environment, a metaphor for Lizzy and Michel, who were
constructing Lizzy’s new musical persona.
Michel remembers, “We worked 24 hours, and at night, very fast. Often we would
sleep in the studio. The recording took two weeks. Nothing was pre-written. There was
no rehearsal. It was a bit improvisational. Blank Tapes had an interesting ambiance;
musicians played on each other’s tracks. If a percussion player was working in the
studio next door, he would come in and do something with us. It was tres live.”
But poor command of English contributed to keeping Lizzy somewhat isolated from
the scene. Recalls Bob Blank, “There was a language barrier. None of us spoke French,
and that’s all she spoke. Lizzy never had to struggle for studio costs. She was very
pleasant, and her sound was light-hearted. Everyone liked her. But they would have
loved it if she had been darker.”
Yet the very hesitation and playfulness of Lizzy’s loose approach came to define
the tantalizing, ADD charm of her music. Willfully, Lizzy rampages through her short
sharp tracks like different worlds seen through a strobe… as if she was hacking her
way through New York’s concrete jungle of musical information, armed only with her
wit, intuition, and cool. But in those No Wave New York days, anything went and the
wilder the better.
So the album’s mood slips and slides from track to track, dreamlike. Mutant funk and
garbled angular yelps punctuate the brisk guitar on “Wawa,” a mutant deconstructed
disco groove typical of ZE’s sensibility… impressionistic, casually constructed tracks
like “Jim on the Move” and “Torso Corso” have Lizzy’s voice rippling lightly over a harsh
clash of bass and screeching keyboards. The laconic reggae of “No Golden Throat” is
thrown off-kilter by mumbling background voices and Lizzy’s brittle, atonal guitaring.
Throughout, Lizzy declaims, recites, and intones her lyrics with insolent abandon. The
overall impact is like running through the maze of Lizzy’s effervescent mind.
Press Color is a scattershot fireworks display of vivid images and textures, like fragments from the opiated mind of her revered Rimbaud. It did not sell well. But it won
Lizzy a global cadre of fans who appreciated her dizzy spirit.
It’s easy, even glib, to interpret Lizzy’s progress from working with first one mentor,
then another soulmate, with no break inbetween, as a search for a father figure. A few
months before her death, Esteban recalls, Lizzy finally did meet her own father. He had
never known of her existence.
More than most female artists, the music of freewheeling Lizzy Mercier Descloux
would be made with men who were mad about her, ready to change careers, move
countries just to be with her. They thought they were guiding Lizzy in new directions—
and were in turn wrenched every which way by her capricious creativity. But none
of them could totally control Mercier Descloux’s restless, firefly artistry, as her five
albums in this reissue series attest.
“ Pourquoi vivre terre, quand le reste du ciel s’ultramarine
et rien ne sert rien sauf le désir “ Cape Desire. LMD
“ Why live down on earth when the sky is so vast and
so blue and all is pointless but desire “ Cape Desire. LMD
Previously unpublished photo by Seth Tillet
1. FIRE
2. TORSO CORSO
3. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
4. NO GOLDEN THROAT
5. JIM ON THE MOVE
6. WAWA
7. TUMOUR
8. AYA MOOD
Tracks 1-8 originally released as ZE Records ZEA 33004, 1979
9. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2.0
10. ROSA VERTOV
11. DECRYPTED
12. HERPES SIMPLEX
13. LAROUSSE BARON BIC
14. TSO XIN YU YIN
15. NINA CON UN TERCER OJO
16. BIRDY NUM-NUM
17. HARD-BOILED BABE
18. MORNING HIGH
Tracks 9, 16-18 originally released as ZE Records ZEREC.CD03 & ZEREC.LP02, 2003.
Tracks 10-15 originally released as ZE Records
12003, 1979
RECORDED AT BLANK TAPES, NEW YORK CITY, FEBRUARY 1979
ENGINEERED BY BOB BLANK & JOE ARLOTTA
EXECUTIVE PRODUCED BY MICHEL ESTEBAN
PRODUCED AND MIXED BY BANES / MERCIER DESCLOUX / ELIASSON
‘FIRE’ MIXED BY SAVARESE
COVER PHOTO BY SETH TILLET
PRODUCED FOR RERELEASE: PATRICK M CCARTHY AND MATT SULLIVAN
RERELEASE EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: MATT SULLIVAN AND JOSH WRIGHT
PROJECT MANAGER: PATRICK M CCARTHY
PROJECT ASSISTANCE & PROOFREADING: LYDIA HYSLOP
LINER NOTES: VIVIEN GOLDMAN
RERELEASE DESIGN: HENRY H. OWINGS, CHUNKLET GRAPHIC CONTROL
TAPE TRANSFERRING & REMASTERING: JOHN BALDWIN,
JOHN BALDWIN MASTERING
PHOTOS & ARCHIVAL MATERIAL COURTESY OF MICHEL ESTEBAN
RICHARD HELL QUOTES TAKEN FROM
I DREAMED I WAS A VERY CLEAN TRAMP: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (ECCO BOOKS).
USED BY PERMISSION.
THANK YOU: JACKIE ALLEN, MORGAN CHOSNYK, MICHEL ESTEBAN,
LEN ENDERS, JEANNINE HAYNES, YOSUKE KITAZAWA, MATT KOLHEDE,
WILL LAWRENCE, JESS ROTTER, AARON SAINZ, JACK SILLS,
HILARY STAFF, LEE THELEN, PAT THOMAS, BRAD TILBE, JON TRENEFF,
SETH WARREN, AND MICHAEL WELLS