chaos and COUTURE

Lots of Couture.  Very little Chaos.   There was a lot said about this exhibit at the MET before it even opened.  The costume gala was dedicated to it. There were very few in attendance that got the memo. Madonna did wear her Tartan.  

Bricolage (Garbage Bag Clothing)

Without Vivian Westwood and her shops, there would have been no chaos at all.  Granted, as Deborah Harry said, these clothes were old when they wore them.  They recycled and reused.  Nothing survived.  Something had to, but if it did, the curators didn’t find it.  They recreated the bathroom at CBGB’s (which looked much cleaner than I remember it) but couldn’t get their hands on one of Joey Ramone’s leather jackets?  (Not enough chaos in a leather jacket?) They couldn’t exhibit photos of Deborah Harry in all her garbage bag glory?  She was genius at making anything look good on her.  I saw Blondie several times in the 1970’s and she was the coolest person on the planet.  Nobody came close. Except for a magnet in the gift shop, there wasn’t any representation of her.  There is a whole runway (it does look like a runway) of clothes constructed of garbage bags, but they were all done recently, none worn by Ms Harry.  They totally ignored Siouxsie Sioux. 

Moth Eaten Chanel

The London punks were way more colorful than those in NY and that’s basically what commandeers the chaos part of the show.  Tartan prints and lots of T Shirts with writing and pop culture images compromise Westwood’s contribution.   What looks like a moth eaten Chanel suit is donned by the model in the exhibit posters. In person, the outfit looks plain stupid.  It was dated this year, which might mean it was created especially for the  MET.

Only one Stephen Sprouse piece exhibited?  Granted his first collection didn’t come out until 1983/84, which by that time Punk was evolving into New Wave and the look was evolving from what it had been in 1976.   Sprouse was a big influence on the pop, fashion and the music scene. His first runway show was at the Ritz, a downtown nightclub now Webster Hall and it was set to the music of Siouxsie and the Banshees.  Andy Warhol was a fan and Keith Haring became a collaborator. 

I had great expectations for the exhibit, which were lessened by friends who had seen the show prior to my viewing.  It didn’t meet the lowered expectations. It was a disappointment.   The video is so large and grainy that you’d have to be a football field away to actually see it.  Did we really need to see video footage of a shirtless Sid Vicious? No clothes, but he was wearing the padlock around his neck and the gallery was labeled hardware. It's a stretch.   I can’t recall who was quoted, but he said that Sid could not remove it, because he lost the key. Now that is punk. 

Hardware + The Shirtless Sid

Punk:  Chaos to Couture is at the MET until August 14th. 

The Life Of A Very Clean Tramp

--> I love a racket.  I love it when it seems like a group is slipping in and out of phase, when something lags and then slides into a pocket, like hitting the number on a roulette wheel, a clatter, like the sound of the Johnny Burnette trio, like galloping horses’ hooves.  It’s like a baby learning how to walk, or a little bird just barely avoiding a crash to the dirt, or two kids losing their virginity.  It’s awkward but it’s riveting and uplifting and funny.  In a way it’s the aural representation of that feeling the makes the first time people feel the possibilities of rock and roll music in themselves the benchmark of hope and freedom and euphoria.

               -Richard Hell  from I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp

It’s important to know what excited Richard Hell. It leads to a clearer picture of his life until age 34, as he lays it out in his autobiography.   He followed that quote by saying he and friend/fellow Television bandmate Tom Verlaine disagreed on how they wanted their music to sound. According to Hell, he was exhilarated after the band’s first performance.  Verlaine was not.  It was the end of Television for Hell before it really even began.  This is a pattern that would follow him throughout his music career.  

Richard Hell’s influence on both music and culture is understated.  I mentioned I was reading his book, I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp and only 1 of the 20 people I spoke to had a passing knowledge of him. A handful of them were my partners in crime in frequenting the NY clubs mentioned in the book.  We lived these times and Hell still didn’t register with them.  It’s not a name you would forget.  He was the first to have choppy spiky hair, wear torn closes, paint words on them and use the safety pin as a fashion accessory.  He performed with abandon. 

I never paid much attention to Television or Richard Hell.  I knew the song Blank Generation.  I was into bands with tight songs mixed with pop sensibilities.  Even the anarchy of the Sex Pistols could fit in with that description, although I wasn’t a big fan of them either.  I love Blondie and the Ramones, both of which Hell has distain for.  He mentions that Chris Stein (Blondie) and Dee Dee Ramone auditioned for Television but didn’t make the cut.  While Dee Dee had his problems, I think both fared better with their respective bands. 

The writing is erratic, but so was his life.  He was a heroin addict who kept journals.  Without the journals how would he be able to describe in such detail all of his sexual conquests breasts?  (There are many references.)

His childhood was unremarkable. He grew up in Kentucky. It’s not a charmed life, but it certainly isn’t the broken home of a truant which he later became.  His father dies at an early age.  At sixteen, he and best friend Tom Miller (later re-christened Verlaine) have their Thelma and Louise moment by fleeing home and driving a car as far as Alabama where they get picked up by the cops.  They were heading to Florida.  Shortly after that Richard earns enough money to come to New York City. His mother agreed to let him go at 17.  His early tales of a grizzly Lower East Side are accurate and intriguing.  He has many menial jobs, but it was possible to live off of next to nothing those days in the city.  The book then starts to read like many a candied musician memoir:  lots of drugs, lots of sex, record company screws artist.  (Somehow Keith Richard’s book didn’t fall into that trap.)

His description of drug addition has become the norm for these autobiographies:

Addiction is lonely.  It starts as pure pleasure, and the degeneration, in a few quick years, into a form of monumental compulsive-obsessive condition is actually more psychological than physical.  One the drug use has replaced everything else, life become purely a lie, since in order to keep any self-respect, the junkie has to delude himself that use is by choice.

Richard doesn’t stick with anything that isn’t solitary.  He can’t hold on to jobs, he moves from one band to the next.  He didn’t hang around long enough with either Television or The Heartbreakers.  When both bands released their debut albums, he was long gone. 

It makes sense that he eventually settled in a career that is solitary:  a writer.  

Probably most overlooked was how smart he was about marketing his bands early in his career.  He went to the owner of the newly opened CBGB’s and asked for and got a Sunday night residency. He knew the importance of having people know where to see the band and being able to see them on a regular basis.  He created posters for specific shows using band photographs as well as eye-catching graphics and text.   He gave a performance. 

There are passages that are so ripe with description that you can see the scene play out in your head.  They are also very humorous.  In describing the girls in his neighborhood:

They were a skittish herd of scaled-down giraffe girls with pretty, flat kitty-cat faces.  I liked all of them.  We were going to drive into the country out by Versailles, where another of the giraffe girls lived on a horse farm. It’s those moments that make reading about his early childhood so rewarding. 

His tale stops cold at age 34, which is when he decided to get out of music.  He has since dipped his toes back in on several occasions, including a stint with the band Dim Stars.  Life in New York in the 70’s and early 80’s was raw, gritty and oh so much fun. 

CBGB's Went To The Dogs

Binky Phillips of the band The Planets, wrote a loving ode to playing CBGB's at SonicBoomers.com. His band opened for the Ramones and Television, which were probably the biggest draws for the club in it's early years. Apparently Hilly Kristal, the owner, used to make burgers and chili, which Binky thought were good until he saw Hilly's dogs deposits on the kitchen floor. Needless to say, shortly after that CBGB's stopped serving food.