Read a Rare Alan Vega Interview
Tags: Interview, Punk Rock, Music, Alan Vega

God!

I went down to Texas with Marty to play the famous club Emo’s. It was packed with Mexicans, cowboys, you name it. Generally, we’ll play for 45 minutes to an hour. Tops we’ll do an hour and 15 [minutes]. They kept asking for song after song. We were out there for two and a half hours, and nothing was thrown at us. In fuckin’ Texas, man! I was sure we would have gotten the arrows there. After years and years of being booed unmercifully and every object in the world has been thrown at us–you name it, it’s been thrown at us–we’re getting applause all the time. That’s the way it is. We’re still trying to be confrontational with our music, but nobody’s buying it. People are loving it. I listen to what my kid is listening to. He’s gonna turn 10, and it’s unbelievable the shit he’s getting.

Like what?

He goes through phases. It was the White Stripes for a while, which drove me completely crazy because I don’t like the band that much. I like what they’re doing intellectually, but to listen to it over and over again, can’t he graduate to something else? Now it’s Disturbed. And that goes on for months. I have to listen for months. “Shut it off already! You’re driving me crazy.”

What does punk mean today?

I don’t know what it means anymore. The first time we used that word was in 1971. We did this show in a gallery. Of course, we couldn’t get anywhere else to play. I was showing my art, my sculptures at this pretty big gallery. I asked if we could do a show there, and they agreed, which blew me away because no one else was giving us a show. We billed it as a “punk music mass.” Up until then, that word had never been used except in an article in ’69 by Lester Bangs. He did a thing in Creem magazine when Creem was basically the greatest fucking rock magazine around. He did a big piece on Iggy Pop, and the word punk was used for the first time that I’d seen it.

Where I grew up in Brooklyn, man, a punk was like a wuss, the guy who ran away from the fight. “You’re a punk. You’re a weasel. You’re nothing.” Now it has this connotation of being the tough guy thing. The revolution? Are you kidding? So I liked the word and used the term “punk music mass,” maybe inadvertently trying to turn it into something else. One day I wake up and there’s the word punk all over the place. That’s when it became meaningless to me. Somebody said that Suicide had to be the ultimate punk band because even the punks hated us. I think that hits it right on the head. I never really saw us as a punk band. They called us glitter. We’ve been called everything. It’s like country-Eastern music or New York blues music. But they did hate us. “You’re supposed to be punks, and you’re hating Suicide?”

This question is from Beth Ruder, one of our readers from St. Louis: When you sing, do the noises you make live inside you, or do you make them to cancel out something else?

Out of myself, or out of the music?

I’m assuming she means out of life or what’s around you.

I assume it does, yeah. People always used to ask me why I was so angry. I never thought of myself as being angry. But maybe I was. I don’t know. I grew up pretty much on the streets of Brooklyn. I never had a dime to my name. Everything was a struggle. Just looking around–I guess I’m a political guy in some ways–in those days it was the Vietnam War, and Nixon was in power, and Marty was a very political guy, too. We were both very upset. New York City was crumbling.

Is there anything you miss about New York in the ’70s?

I miss everything about New York in the ’70s. I’m a stranger in a strange land right now. It’s been gentrified up the asshole. Everything’s a new building all over the place. Prices are skyrocketing. People who are living in New York now, I don’t even know who they are. Sometimes I literally start crying when I walk through the streets where I used to live. I’ll start crying sometimes because I see the ghosts of all the people on the streets I used to hang out in. It was so great. Everybody knew each other. We knew the jazz guys, the rock guys, helping out if we could. If somebody got a pad, we’d all crash at one place, but you know, the cops wouldn’t bother you. That didn’t matter. Crime was rampant, which was cool. Where’s the crime now? They cleaned it up so much. Which is great for my kid.