Martin Rev and Suicide
A chance encounter in cold NY bohemia lit the fuse; 45 years later they said so long in London.
HELLO EARLY 1970
I’d done an audition [with his group Reverend B] for London Records in New York. We didn’t get signed. It was around the corner from Museum [AKA the Project Of Living Artists on Broadway], where I’d played one gig with Reverend B. It was kind of winter out, so I thought, Maybe I’ll see if anybody’s at the Museum. Usually those kind of buildings close and you can’t get in, but I tried and sure enough, the elevator went up and I could hear random feedback noises growing more and more strong.
It was a loft space, about 1,000 square feet, with freshly painted white walls and shiny wood floors. I walked in and I saw someone stooped over with a 2-track recorder, trying to make it feed back, and a guitarist playing noise guitar. At some point I found a couple of large industrial spring-like things, and like, drummed [with them]. We did that for about half an hour and when they finished Alan [Vega, singer] must have gotten up and turned around and we met.
Soon after that we’d find ourselves in the Museum at night, sometimes with a couple of other artists. He and I were always the last to go. Alan was already a very dedicated artist. He was going through a heavy transition – he’d left his home life and he was living at the Museum. Soon we just kind of figured we’d put something together ourselves.
Everything took a little time to develop. The first gigs, I was playing drums. Paul [Liebegott], who we called Cool P, he was playing total noise guitar. Alan would blow a free trumpet and scream into the mike. They were just wall of sound, electronically generated, not really songs. Alan started to write lyrics – Mephedrine Mary, Junkie Jesus – and maybe about six months into it, I thought, Let me bring down my Wurlitzer electric keyboard. Soon after he started concentrating on the mike. I was still looking for a way in which this could work in terms of rock’n’roll, my native music, and one night in one of these little practice cubicles with like a Steinway upright piano at New York University – again, you could just walk right in – I started playing two notes way down on the bottom, and as soon as I did, I knew that was it. The earliest [songs] were Rocket USA and Ghost Rider.
Alan read a lot of comic books and got a lot of ideas from them. I got to the Museum one night, he said, “Hey, what do you think about this name Suicide?” I said, “Perfect!” He’d been reading a comic book called Satan’s Suicide and some anonymous person, probably getting high, said, “Man, just call it Suicide.” Whoever that was, takes credit.
GOODBYE
We came from absolutely no reception at all, except usually an antagonistic one. The whole thing was just an adventure in nowhere land, as far as anything commercial went. But we never split up. We had periods where we were very inactive and we concentrated more on solo things. Then time would go by and we’d be brought together again. In the mid ’80s [manager] Marty [Thau] felt we should go back to Europe because people were talking about us. It happened again in the ’90s and the 2000s. Every time there was a new like scene/trend, like Soft Cell or electroclash, apparently, they were talking about us. There was a demand.
The last time I saw Alan was the last gig we did, at the Barbican in London [on July 9, 2015]. We did solo sets, and then we did a Suicide set. Henry Rollins jumped in on Ghost Rider and several people wanted to do Dream Baby Dream with us at the end. It was received really well. I saw Alan when he got into his car when we left that night. We said goodbye, just very briefly, and went our own way.
We had two prospective festivals coming up in summer 2016, one in Joshua Tree and one in Sweden. The most we’d ever been paid. Alan just didn’t make it that far. He passed [on July 16, 2016], and that was how it ended.
I’m not saying it doesn’t stay with me, but the reality for me is creating stuff. You got to do this every day, man. Wake up, go back to that shit I was working on yesterday, because every day is a new blank canvas.
Martin Rev’s The Sum Of Our Wounds (Cassette Recordings 1973-1985) is out now on Bureau B.
“I could hear random feedback noises growing more and more strong.” MARTIN REV