Rip It Up and Start Again

by Simon Reynolds

  When it came to the city’s actual rock scene, though, the years immediately prior to punk had the feel of an aftermath—washed-up hippies wandering around wondering, What the fuck happened, man? Live music almost disappeared as disco took over, with rock clubs getting converted into discotheques, where only records were played (disco acts rarely performed live). “If you were in a band at that time, the only way you could get work was by playing other people’s songs,” says Joseph Jacobs, bassist of Factrix, San Francisco’s premier industrial band.

  When punk arrived, San Francisco was one of the first cities in America to embrace it. The scene centered around a handful of hangouts, including Café Flor, the Deaf Club, the Mabuhay, and Temple Beautiful. Flor was the nerve center for all kinds of artists, musicians, and performers. Located in the sleazy Mission District, the Deaf Club was “an authentic club for the deaf where you ordered beer in sign language and where presumably the patrons didn’t mind the music because they couldn’t hear it,” says Tuxedomoon’s Steve Brown. “I guess they liked the vibrating floorboards!” Surrounded by strip clubs, the Filipino restaurant Mabuhay hosted punk-rock gigs every night, while Temple Beautiful was an abandoned synagogue next door to cult leader Jim Jones’s temple. “They’d put a generator outside Temple Beautiful and just wire the electricity in for the night of the show,” recalls Principle.

  The San Francisco scene was a hospitable environment for experimental outfits, many of who, though they might have been initially inspired by punk’s confrontational attitude, quickly moved into more expansive or esoteric musical terrain than the more orthodox local punks such as the Avengers and the Dead Kennedys. If San Francisco became America’s number two postpunk city after New York, in large part this was because local audiences had a high tolerance for pretentiousness. “Sure, there was a lot of bad performance art, but that’s okay, better that it was allowed,” says Factrix guitarist Bond Bergland. “And San Francisco people were very allowing!” The city became home to a scene that, even more than No Wave Manhattan, explored the possibilities of mixed-media spectacle, a tendency shaped partly by the living legacy of the city’s gay radical theater groups (such as the Angels of Light) and partly by the “total art” ideas emanating from the city’s Art Institute.

  Steve Brown, for instance, came out of sixties underground theater. Blaine L. Reininger had been exploring the idea of fusing music, writing, and theater into “unified field art” since the late sixties. Factrix, meanwhile, weren’t so much art damaged as Artaud damaged. “We were trying to bring the Theatre of Cruelty to the rock stage,” says Bergland. “It was really about confrontation, pushing people over the edge, something you’d seen at full steam with the Living Theater in the 1960s. The hippie thing was culturally played down during punk, but it was still the clear revolutionary predecessor.” This postsixties radical-theater sensibility was shared by Factrix’s contemporaries and collaborators, extreme performance artists such as Monte Cazazza and Joanna Went. Mark Pauline staged auto-destructive spectacles involving robots under the name Survival Research Laboratories, while Z’ev, a late-sixties veteran, earned renown for his ritualistic performances involving metal-bashing percussion.

  Cinema was massively influential, too. Repertory theaters such as the Strand and the Embassy played a mix of classic movies, obscure foreign films, and cheap horror flicks. Inspired by Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Factrix talked of wanting to take “a razor to the mind’s eye.” Says Bergland, “Everybody in San Francisco during that period was heavily inspired by film.” The Residents, the weirdest Bay Area band of the entire era, actually tried to make their own modern surrealist movie, Vileness Fats. It was intended to be the world’s first fourteen-hour musical/comedy/romance set in a world of one-armed midgets, but eventually had to be abandoned. The Residents had more success with shorter films, producing a series of pioneering promo videos around specific songs. Their live performances had a theatrical bent as well, involving elaborate stage sets and costumes, including the famous giant masks that transformed each Resident’s head into a monstrous eyeball.

  In 1978, when the Residents first started to become widely known, they were often mentioned in the same breath as Pere Ubu and Devo, partly because of a shared vibe of quirked-out grotesquerie, and partly because both Devo and the Residents released sacrilegious covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” as singles within a few months of each other. In the aftermath of punk, freaks such as the Residents reached an audience they’d otherwise never have found. But the group had actually been around for nearly a decade before punk. Originally from Louisiana, they migrated to California in the late sixties hoping to catch the high tide of psychedelia but arriving only in time to witness its ebbing. “The Residents sprang…from the fact that Psychedelia dead-ended,” declared Hardy Fox of Cryptic Corporation, the organization that looked after the Residents’ affairs. “The people who were doing experiments in that direction stopped when they had barely scratched the surface.”

  The Residents wanted to take psychedelia further. Being nonmusicians, they felt, was the only way to guarantee truly free creativity. “Before they started doing the Residents, they had never played,” Homer Flynn of Cryptic Corporation has said. “By teaching themselves, they felt it was a good path towards originality.” Their music’s wonderfully angular melodies and jerky rhythms seemed unprecedented, but the Residents did have musical influences. They were just unrecognizable simply because, as Flynn pointed out, “the Residents weren’t capable of rendering them that faithfully.”

  Perhaps that’s why Warner Brothers rejected them. In 1971 the group, then nameless, sent off demo tapes to the label’s Harve Halverstadt, who’d worked with their hero Captain Beefheart. Because they’d provided only a return address, the tapes were sent back addressed to “Residents, 20 Sycamore St., San Francisco.” Now christened with a name but lacking an outlet for their music, the Residents set up their own independent label, Ralph Records. The Residents’ do-it-yourself impulse went much further than even Rough Trade’s. Their goal was complete cultural autonomy. Their warehouse headquarters on San Francisco’s Grove Street contained a recording studio, offices for Cryptic Corporation and Ralph Records, a darkroom, a graphics studio for designing their own record sleeves, and a huge soundstage for making films and videos.

  A couple of years before Public Image Ltd, the Residents trailblazed the pop-group-as-corporation stance, but with a twist: The group itself remained completely anonymous and faceless, and dealings with the outside world were mediated via the Cryptic Corporation. As a result, the question “Who are the Residents?” stirred much speculation. One persistent rumor maintained that the Residents were actually the postbreakup Beatles rejoining in secret for neo-Dada mischief making. This probably stems from the fact that early on the group toyed with calling themselves the New Beatles, while the cover of their 1973 debut, Meet the Residents, was modeled on Meet the Beatles, but with the portraits of the Fab Four grotesquely defaced. To the Residents, the Beatles symbolized everything good and everything bad about pop, the mind-expanding potential of studio-based psychedelia versus pop’s tyrannical, mind-controlling ubiquity (Lennon’s “We’re bigger than Jesus”). In 1976 the Residents released The Third Reich ’n’ Roll, a darkly comic satire of pop as totalitarianism. American Bandstand host Dick Clark was depicted on the front cover dressed as Hitler. Inside, the side-long “Swastikas on Parade” offered a medley of defiled sixties pop hits overlaid with World War II sound effects of air raid sirens and dive-bombing Stukas. All these conflicted feelings about pop, the sixties, and the Beatles came together on the Residents’ 1977 single “Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life,” which featured “samples” of the Fab Four’s wilder moments woven into an eerie audio collage. At various points you hear Lennon singing “don’t believe in Beatles” (from his first solo album) and issuing a wan apology to their global audience (“Please everybody, if we haven’t done what we could have done, we’ve tried”).


  After a flurry of releases in 1977 and 1978, Cryptic Corporation announced the imminent release of the band’s grand masterwork. A sonic recreation of the world of Inuit Eskimo tribes, Eskimo would also serve as a tribute-cum-elegy to the Inuit’s vanishing folkways—you know, slaughtering superfluous newborn girls, putting the old folks out to die of hypothermia, that sort of thing. After six weeks of small ads in the music press that steadily whipped up intrigue, Cryptic Corporation abruptly announced the record’s suspension from the Ralph release schedule, because the Residents had gone AWOL and run off with the master tapes.

  In a separate statement, the Residents declared they’d split from Cryptic Corporation and would never let “those bloodsuckers” have Eskimo. Their managers retorted with the claim that the group had gone mad from being “cooped up” in the studio for too long making the album. “Towards the end they were already being difficult and acting oddly—working all night and communicating only with strange cries when we, the Cryptic officers, were around,” Jay Clem claimed. “Then they locked us out altogether when they were working, and when I tried to reason with them they filled the reception area…with wicker baskets full of ice and sometimes fish from the bay wharf.” This whole falling-out between Cryptic Corporation and the Residents was, of course, totally staged, a miniature masterpiece of disinformation and hype. Although to this day the pretense is studiously maintained that Cryptic Corporation and the Residents are separate entities, at some point the truth seeped out. The Residents and their “representatives” were in fact one and the same.

  When the “rift” was healed and Eskimo finally got released in the autumn of 1979, the record was deservedly hailed as a masterpiece, and it sold over a hundred thousand copies worldwide, a staggering achievement for a record so unsettling. Evoking the alien experiences of life on the polar ice cap—walrus hunts conducted in disorienting white-out conditions, “Arctic hysteria” induced by the sensory deprivation of the long winter darkness—Eskimo seemed to make the temperature in your room plummet.

  The Residents then swerved from Eskimo’s listener-challenging experimentalism to the surprising accessibility of 1980’s The Commercial Album. It wasn’t called that because of any crossover ambitions but because each piece was only one minute long, closer to the duration of a TV commercial than a pop song. The Residents’ rationale for this condensed approach was persuasive. Given that most pop songs contain a verse and chorus repeated three times within three minutes, trimming the length down to sixty seconds automatically jettisons a substantial amount of sheer redundancy. The Commercial Album distills the quintessence of exquisite weirdness and macabre whimsy that is the Residents music into forty jingles as intricate and succinct as Japanese calligraphy.

  Ralph’s other great release of 1980 was Tuxedomoon’s debut album, Half-Mute, a lost masterpiece of synthpop noir. Tuxedomoon began as an offshoot of the Angels of Light, “a ‘family’ of dedicated artists who sang, danced, painted, and sewed for the Free Theatre,” says singer/multi-instrumentalist Steve Brown. “I was lucky to be part of the Angels. I fell for a bearded transvestite in the show and moved in with him at the Angels’ commune. Gay or bi men and women who were themselves works of art, extravagant in dress and behavior, disciples of Artaud and Wilde and Julian Beck [of the Living Theater]…we lived together in a big Victorian house…pooled all our disability checks each month, ate communally…and used the rest of the funds to produce lavish theatrical productions—never charging a dime to the public. This is what theater was meant to be, a Dionysian rite of lights and music and chaos and eros.”

  Despite these sixties roots, Tuxedomoon’s music looked toward the electronic eighties. Blaine L. Reininger and Brown originally met after enrolling in an electronic-music class at San Francisco’s City College, where each was blown away by the other’s end-of-semester performance. “Blaine’s effort was a full-blown ‘total art’ spectacle,” says Brown. “He sang and danced in a white smock, with a balloon headdress, backdropped by projected Super 8 films.” For his own piece, Brown set up a tape loop system as diagrammed on the back of Brian Eno’s Discreet Music, into which he played washes of string sounds using a Polymoog synth.

  To help him with this school project, Brown had called on the technical skill of fellow Angel of Light member Tommy Tadlock. The great lost catalyst figure of San Francisco postpunk, Tadlock became Tuxe-domoon’s mentor/guru/technician/manager and later worked with Factrix, too, building bizarre sound-generating gizmos. When Reininger and Brown joined forces, they started rehearsing at Tadlock’s Upper Market Street house. “There, we all cranked out our weirdness together into something called Tuxedomoon,” recalls Brown. Tadlock played a crucial role as an “audio systems designer.” Blaine “played both electronic violin and guitar onstage, and Tommy designed ‘Treatment Mountain’ for him—a plywood pyramid displaying junction boxes or compressors or effects he had designed and built as well as an Echoplex.”

  Tuxedomoon developed a style based partly on whatever instruments were handy (Reininger’s violin, Brown’s saxophone, Tadlock’s Polymoog synth) and partly on prohibitions. “The only rule was the tacit understanding that anything that sounded like anyone else was taboo,” says Brown. They were just starting when punk arrived, and although hearing “God Save the Queen” initially encouraged them, Tuxedomoon soon felt that punk had “ossified into a puritan dogma of guitars, bass, and drums and screaming vocalist,” says Brown. “When Blaine and I first started performing in public—a violin, a sax, a synth and a tape recorder—the crowd threw beer bottles and screamed, ‘Where’s the drummer?!’”

  Gradually, Tuxedomoon expanded, not by taking on a drummer, but recruiting underground radio activist Peter Principle as bassist and incorporating performance artist Winston Tong and projections from filmmaker Bruce Geduldig into their live shows. Principle recalls an unstoppable flow of creativity: “Every three or four weeks we’d have a gig booked and say, ‘Let’s write a whole new show.’” The concerts grew ever more multileveled and visually arresting. “I can think of shows we did using tapes, live instruments, professional painted sets hanging onstage, a female chorus, Bruce’s film projections,” marvels Brown. Tong’s contribution would often take the uncanny form of dolls manipulated so that they appeared to be magically alive.

  Around 1980, a lot of people had started talking up cabaret as an alternative model to the rock gig. Organizations like Cabaret Futura in London, groups like Kid Creole and the Coconuts, even synthpop idol Gary Numan, all looked back to prerock ideas of showbiz, while simultaneously glancing sideways to performance art and multimedia. Entertainment that was costumed, scripted, and choreographed, that didn’t hide its artifice but reveled in it, began to seem more honest than rock’s faux spontaneity. Tuxedomoon arrived at just the right moment to tap into this shift. “Other San Francisco performers like Joanna Went used props and audience interaction, but in a shock-oriented way, whereas we had a feeling for the cabaret thing,” says Principle. “That’s why we did wear tuxedoes in punk-rock clubs like the Mabuhay, like it was a dinner theater. And we had this concept of ‘loungezak’—Muzak made for existentially angsted New Wave people.”

  Tuxedomoon even called their publishing company Angst Music. On songs such as “What Use?” and “7 Years,” cold electronics, shudders of violin, and lugubrious saxophone conjured an atmosphere of languid melancholy. From the Scream with a View EP to the second album, Desire, themes of anomie and modernity recurred. “Holiday for Plywood,” for instance, is about consumer paranoia and dream-home heartache: “You daren’t sit on the sofa/The plastic makes you sweat/The bathroom’s done in mirror tiles/The toaster wants your blood.”

  Tuxedomoon’s aura of jaded elegance always seemed somehow European, and it was overseas that the group had their greatest impact. On the rare occasions that the group ventured into Middle America, they didn’t exactly get a warm reception. “In the American music scene at that time there was an attitude about authenticity,” says Principle.
“Programmed rhythm was a foreign concept in America back then, and there was a lot of hostility toward drum machines.”

  “TUXEDOMOON WERE KIND OF MENTORS to us,” says Joseph Jacobs of Factrix. “Not musically, but in the sense of, ‘You can actually do this—be in a band with no drummer and have audiences.’ When we started Factrix, we didn’t even talk about having a drummer. We knew we wanted to do something different, so we removed one of the key components of rhythm and blues.”

  Excited by PiL’s and Throbbing Gristle’s adventures in sonic mutation, Factrix built their own modified instruments (“glaxobass,” “radioguitar,” “amputated bass”) with Tommy Tadlock’s assistance. They also experimented with bizarre protosynths called Optigans that Tadlock had acquired. “‘Optigan’ stood for optical organ,” says Bond Bergland. “They were instruments for the family to play songs on, with the songs stored on these clear plastic acetates, which the Optigan read through some kind of light-reading device.” Factrix quickly realized that “you could put the acetates in upside down and backward, play them the wrong way. That was what was really inspiring to us at the time, ‘Let’s see what happens if we do this wrong.’”

  Factrix tried anything and everything that wasn’t standard rock instrumentation—whistling tea kettles, an inexpensive early sequencer called the Mutron—“but really the main instrument was Joseph’s tape recorder,” says Bergland. Along with technology, Factrix were equally interested in premodern and non-Western sounds, ethnic instruments like the doumbek and saz. “Even the drum machine rhythms were trying to mimic African drumming in a very loose way, inspired by field recordings,” Bergland explains. “This was years before ‘world music’ existed. My thinking was, ‘If something sticks around for thousands of years, it probably has some meaning, something real about it.’” In this fascination for ecstatic ritual music, Factrix were a couple of steps ahead of Throbbing Gristle.