Boys Keep Swinging

by Jake Shears

  A bar in Williamsburg opened up called Luxx and became a trendy place to go on the weekends. It was a medium-size joint with a long bar on one side and a sticky carpeted stage on the end. Next to the DJ booth was a go-go cage. The place was bursting with so many cool kids, their fabulousness almost canceling each other’s out. On Saturday night was a party called Berliniamsburg that DJs Larry Tee and Spencer Product had started. The music was electro, abrasive and homemade, the kinds of tracks that people had started making in their own apartments. It was all flat kick drums and bored-sounding girls, lamenting the death of clubs, of fame.

  “I mean—they don’t want us dancing in the city, so we had to take it all the way out to Brooklyn,” Larry said one night, flapping his hands as we talked outside the boys’ room. He was good at sound bites, a master of spin: You could hear him saying it in the exact same way to three hundred other people. “The police’ll just shut the parties down. At least here we have a spot where were not going to be bothered.”

  Berliniamsburg was tongue-in-chic, stylish to the extreme: Looks were layered on top of looks. Amanda Lepore (self-named “the most famous transsexual in the world”) and Sophia Lamar (maybe not so much) were ever-present, presiding over their respective crews of young guys willing to do their bidding. They were like misfit gender-fucked sororities, the members worshipping their chosen club star, wearing lifted designer gear, or T-shirts they’d screen-printed themselves that read SOPHIA’S BOYS.

  The party was so successful that Larry and Spencer started throwing more nights. Mutants was on Fridays. At one point I think they had four nights a week going on at the same club. There were performances, most of them electro acts that didn’t need too much setting up. No one was playing any live instruments, but we still referred to them as bands.

  Everybody had their own theme songs, regional micro-hits that only we knew. Larry had protégés, a pack of vampy girls called W.I.T., which stood for Whatever It Takes, with a fistful of catchy songs that Larry had written and produced for them. They were all feathered hair, Studio 54 dresses, a bemused affect. Melissa Burns, the obvious leader of the three, had perfected an air of stoned dislocation, a charming remove. The tunes were pure bedroom bubblegum and since they were Larry’s band, he had them performing almost every week, insistent that the songs would catch on.

  Spencer Product had his own act, Prance. He was petite guy, mustachioed, blowing onto the stage in dramatic purple outfits. He made his own grimy covers of Prince songs but altered the lyrics slightly. “Contra Pussy” was one of my personal favorites. Avenue D, two easygoing girls from the East Village in lots of gold jewelry, rapped filthy over electro beats. Their big song was “Do I Look Like a Slut?” Larry produced that one too. Everyone wanted to get up on that stage.

  My friend and momentary boyfriend Joe Corcoran had his band, Hungry Wives. There were four members. Three of them played synths and one person sang, rotating positions throughout the set. They even had their own clothes designer: Andy Salzer, who ran a label called Yoko Devereaux. Sometimes they dressed in white with inverted collars, almost like dentists. Grainy projections of Gothic imagery behind them were synced to the music. It was fitting: The music was creepy, but had a sense of humor. “It’s Over” was their big song. A lament on the death of New York club life:

  The Palladium is now a dorm, sweetie

  The scene is dead, honey, Twilo was sold on eBay.

  Joe was the mastermind of the group, and I fell for his strong nose and crinkly eyes. He wrote reviews for dot-com sites that needed content, and minded a stuffy antique furniture shop on Lafayette. Music was his real passion, however, and you could hear the gloom and sarcasm from his personality in the songs. Hungry Wives was his baby, and anytime he wasn’t doing his day job, he could be found on the simple music rig in his bedroom, a Nord synth in front of a Mac. One of the best Hungry Wives songs was called “I Can’t Find My Friends” and was based on some (apparently) true story about the bouncers at Twilo throwing overdosing club patrons into a broom closet, leaving them to die. It was hilarious.

  These were all the local small-timers, inspired by the electro stars that were making it big—well, at least it seemed that way to us: Peaches, Le Tigre, Chicks on Speed, Fischerspooner. We would go see their shows in mammoth rooms with real crowds. Their CDs were for sale in Other Music or at the Virgin Megastore. When it came to the bands coming out of Luxx, everyone was just passing around their own bootlegs. A lot of times, your stereo couldn’t even read them.

  The place wasn’t primarily queer; it was just weird, rowdy pansexual fun. There were no red ropes, and I never knew of anyone who was turned away. This wasn’t an exclusive fantasy. If you had the wherewithal, you could record your own songs on just about any device and elbow your way onto the stage. And if you played your song a few times, people might actually start remembering it. Maybe they’d request it at the DJ booth.

  At the beginning of October, someone asked me if they could link me up with some BBC crew from the UK. They were in New York shooting what life was like in the immediate aftermath of the towers falling. I called Larry and asked him if it was okay and, open to any kind of exposure, he said yes. So this film crew came into Luxx one Saturday and started filming us, interviewing people. It was strange suddenly for this moment to be on display in front of camera lights. But no one seemed opposed to being filmed. People didn’t give a shit—the world felt like it was crumbling. There was now a crack in the earth that we all had witnessed with our own eyes. Niceties, modesty, and morality had stopped mattering. It felt odd, though, while I watched one of the queens do a spin on the stripper pole while the crew filmed. I wondered if we were just pretending to be having more fun in that moment than we actually were. Whether or not our exuberance was a performance, an outward denial of our sadness, there was no doubt that our surroundings and circumstances were prompting us to be creative. Every song made was inspiring somebody else to make one more. I guess that’s how a scene happens.

  SPENCER PRODUCT ASKED ME IF I would do a go-go number before he performed one night at Spa, a large club off Union Square that was hopping on Thursday nights. The night was called Ultra and was hosted by Eric Conrad, a sunglasses-clad fabulist that had started the gay staple Beige party at B Bar. Eric loved telling tall tales about various celebrities, pretending Liza or Madonna or Britney were on their way, just stuck in traffic. You’d laugh and forget about it, and then one of them would actually show up.

  Many from the Luxx crowd would come and boogie on the souped-up dance floor or get drunk in a futuristic lounge room with banquettes. Any given week there’d be garish combinations of people drinking rivers of champagne: Jocelyn Wildenstein, Boy George, Richie Rich.

  The thought of just taking my clothes off and dancing on a box wasn’t as exciting anymore. I’d still been doing it for some spare cash, but I felt like my act had become stale, to myself at least. Grinding my ass for tips had run its course. When I brainstormed, the best thing I could come up with was maybe I could be a singing go-go dancer. It hadn’t dawned on me yet that I might turn Scissor Sisters into a real project. The Slipper Room had just been a one-off. Besides, I couldn’t imagine Scott getting up onstage with me at a club like Spa. He was a computer nerd, not a flashy ham.

  Spencer told me that the theme for his performance and for the night was “Electro Yoga.” I had no idea what that meant, but I nodded and said it sounded fascinating. I was just flattered that Spencer wanted me to perform with him. It was an opportunity, at least, so I asked Scott if he’d help me with an original song for whatever number I was going to do.

  I was strolling in the West Village days later and a melody popped into my head. New ideas were often coming to me in my daydreams. Electro yoga . . . electro aerobics . . . Perhaps, Electrobix? It made zero sense, but something about it sounded good. I called my home phone number and left the tune and some lyrics on my voice-mail.

  The next day Scott and I wrote “Electrobix.” We still hadn’
t figured out how to make anything that sounded remotely fleshed-out, so I would bring in some CDs I’d been listening to, and we would sample a few bars from a song, lay additional beats on it, and write melodies on top. That day, we sampled the beat of Bryan Ferry’s “The Chosen One” off the Boys and Girls album and overlaid some basic synths on top.

  Not that any of it made much sense with the title. But the imagery from the song described how I felt about my body growing up. Some of lyrics were sloppy, but the chorus worked:

  You gotta pump your body

  If you wanna be a hottie

  You better like to party

  If you gonna pump that body.

  Sometimes I have a difficult time speaking about things that I really care about without getting choked up, especially if it’s to more than one person. I’m a total crier. Even when I’m simply excited my eyes can well up with tears. This is often really embarrassing, and why I have a mild fear of public speaking. If I’m writing something that has a deep meaning to me, when I listen back and get a lump in my throat, that’s how I know I’ve made something real. As silly as “Electrobix” was, it was still about my lingering insecurities.

  The “Electrobix” performance at Spa felt off. The crowd was supportive, but when I exited the stage, the number left a bad taste in my mouth. My look was terrible. I had worn an off-the-shoulder black blouse and some leggings. But the worst of it was the plain, short bobbed wig I had decided on. I guess I felt like I needed an asymmetrical haircut like everybody else was wearing, so I placed it on my head sideways. Hell if I knew what I was trying to do. Self-styling has never been one of my talents.

  I didn’t enjoy singing by myself, either. Even though Scott was in the crowd watching, I felt too vulnerable up there alone, singing along to nothing but a prerecorded track. Afterward, he gave me one of his half hugs, patted me on the back, and told me it was fine, but I knew that whatever I was doing up there, I didn’t want to do it by myself.

  So I convinced Scott we should start playing together wherever we could: at the Slipper Room, on the bar at the Cock, even at friends’ birthday parties. We were writing about a song a week, and once we got a keeper, I would find us someplace to perform it. We were a long way from being able to get up onstage at Luxx, but every weekend, I was there, watching the shows and knowing I could do something just as good if not better.

  My friend Mark Tusk was around a lot during this time. A disheveled stoner in his late thirties, he lived on Seventh Street in the East Village. A few years back he had been a producer on the Hedwig and the Angry Inch movie for New Line, but at this point he was mostly taking photos of nightlife and just hanging out in his apartment, where he’d play me soul records from the ’60s and ’70s. He always had a camera in hand and would show up, even when Scott and I were singing “Step Aside for the Man” to a mostly empty room at one in the morning at the Cock.

  I had asked him what he thought we should do next one night. “Bringing in some female energy would be great,” he told me. “It’ll broaden the vibe of your performance. You’ve got to figure out how to pull an audience in.”

  I was high at a birthday party for Joe Corcoran, and Scott and I volunteered to perform “Electrobix.” Around midnight, when the party got full, we dimmed the lights and loaded the cavernous room with fog. Scott and I took off our shirts and sang the song into a cheap microphone, over a house stereo. I can’t remember how I convinced him to do it, but my shirt usually came off onstage because I didn’t have anything particularly cool to wear.

  I’d dropped a hit of ecstasy earlier and felt giddy. High from the pill and performance, I felt the room begin to spin, a blur of friends’ faces, cute guys wearing black, European girls in denim dresses and mullet hairdos. I remember it seemed that though most people had a day job, everyone around us had their fingers in something creative, whether it was clothing design or making music. It wasn’t just a bunch of dilettantes, either—everyone lived there for a reason. We all wanted to impress our ideas on one another.

  “Scott.” I put my arm around his neck. Not one for physical affection or engaging in lascivious activities, he gave me a suspicious sideways glance. I’m sure he knew exactly what I was up to from the size of my pupils. But he still put up with me when I got wild. “I think we should ask that Ana Matronic to join Scissor Sisters,” I said.

  “Like, right now?” he said.

  “Why not? She’s right over there!”

  “Well, because your eyes are both going different directions.”

  “Your eyes always go in different directions.” It was true, Scott was a little wall-eyed. It was cute.

  “Go ask her,” he said.

  She was dancing when I approached. We’d been hanging around each other more recently: She was hilarious, outgoing, but I didn’t know her very well. Her delivery onstage was cutting, and she was innovative with her numbers. They were mostly drag and could have a conceptual bent that reminded me of a combination of Beverly D’Angelo and Ann Magnuson. But my favorite thing about her was that Ana seemed like she already had a history and was an actual grown-up.

  It was late and we were trashed, but she screamed and threw her arms around my neck. “Oh my God, fuck yes!” We danced together in circles. Scissor Sisters was now a threesome. No one else remembers it this way, and I could be wrong. But that’s how I remember it. That night, as we spun around to the cranked electro, fucked-up and happy, we had no idea what we were in for.

  MY PARENTS SOLD THE PLACE on San Juan Island and moved to a modest farm in Bristol, Virginia, so my mom could be closer to my ailing grandmother. The farm had horse stables, fields, and a strange Suburban Gothic house on a picturesque hillside. Mom could now visit my mamaw in her new convalescent center a few times a week. And my father, who had recently gained a fascination for race horses, loved having a new shop to tinker and learn saddlemaking in.

  On my first visit down there I was charmed by the farm’s beauty but horrified by the surroundings. It felt like nothing but freeway off-ramps leading to the Golden Corrals, TGI Fridays, and Olive Gardens littering the landscape. There wasn’t a bookstore for at least thirty miles, and compared to the island, I found the area to be unspectacular in every way.

  When I went down to visit my folks, the boredom came in handy. A lack of stimulation can make it easier to pluck ideas out of the air without distraction. Sometimes I sang not even knowing I was doing it. At Christmas in 2001, I was in my parents’ horse barn, kicking hay and just wandering around daydreaming. But in one moment I realized I was singing “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd in my falsetto. It occurred to me that some kind of an electro disco cover of the song could be interesting to try.

  When Scott and I laid “Comfortably Numb” down in the studio, we sampled a beat from some random sound library, and put a bass line down on the keys. The first versions of the song were wonky. When I recorded my vocals in our makeshift sound booth, which was just some plywood nailed up as a separator covered in egg-crate foam, we didn’t know how to listen at the same time to the other vocal tracks that we had recorded. So I had to harmonize with my own imagination. I laid it down and then we’d go back and listen to all the vocals together, surprised how the harmonies overlapped. Later I realized that the song always sounded like it was speeding up or slowing down because the drum loop was imperfect. The whole song is a tiny bit out of time, but nobody has ever noticed.

  Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller were visiting from Seattle and staying with me in my East Village apartment when I played Terry the first few demos that I had. He listened to a couple songs and looked at me with all seriousness. “Jason, you’ve got to get a new vocalist. You sound awful.”

  Anderson expressed a similar sentiment. He was a great supporter, but one night as he was walking me home, probably listening to me spin my music wheels, he said, “You realize you’re going to have to get a real job, right?”

  I lied to the manager of Leshko’s when he asked me if I had ever wai
ted tables before. It seemed easy enough. The schedule gave me time to work on any articles I was writing or go over to Scott’s and make music. Leshko’s was a diner on the corner of Seventh Street and Avenue A, right beside Tompkins Square Park. Next door there was an old ragtag shop with this ancient, toothless man who made pistachio frozen yogurt with rainbow sprinkles on top. The yogurt was an electric green color and tasted like chemicals, but fuck me if it wasn’t delicious.

  There were a lot of junkies around, and we weren’t supposed to let them in to use the restroom. I was really bad at this, always telling some strung-out chick: “Okay, just this one time.” But then on one of the night shifts, the waitstaff ended up with a stiff in the john.

  I would forget to put people’s orders in, distracted by the action. But then Martin Pousson, the tattooed bartender, would make strong cocktails that I’d slip any unhappy customers for free. Usually if I messed up it wasn’t that big of a deal. But once, some guy during a busy weekend shift took his pork chop on the end of his fork, shook it in front of my face, and said: “You can go tell the chef to go stick this under his shoe and step on it and it would taste better than this shit.”

  The Strokes’ studio was down the street, so I would always wait on Nick Valensi and his girlfriend. When famous people were around, it was uncanny that they were there in front of you but also everywhere else. I wanted to have that omnipresence, too, be able to occupy multiple spaces at once.