by Richard Hell
We became good friends and I’d go over to his dark little studio apartment on St. Mark’s Place and we’d listen to records and he’d shake us icy martinis.
His huge record collection contained mostly fifties rock and roll, as well as blues and R & B from their classic eras. There was also plenty of jazz, the most well represented being Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, along with all of Albert Ayler’s recordings, and multiple disks by many other favorites, such as Bill Evans, Charlie Christian, Lee Konitz, Lester Young, and Lenny Tristano. He had multiple bootleg records of unreleased material by each of his favorite musicians too. He was much less interested in later, post-Beatles rock and roll, except for a few important exceptions like the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, along with some pet favorites like the Byrds (Roger McGuinn), and Jeff Beck and some Hendrix, and other guitar soloists, like Roy Buchanan and J. J. Cale and Harvey Mandel. And then he had countless albums that were not classifiable except that they were appreciated by Bob. The main thing though was that he didn’t like nearly as much rock and roll or R & B that was made after the fifties as he liked the original gut-bucket and heartfelt stuff. He loved Jimmy Reed and Link Wray, Ike Turner, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley, Ritchie Valens and Buddy Holly and Little Richard.
Our tastes matched almost perfectly, except that he was so much more knowledgeable than me and he had practically no interest in Bob Dylan, or reggae, or much in country music except for Hank Williams (though he adored roots rockabilly), or, later, any modern “punk” bands at all (he did get off on some original sixties garage/punk, like, say, the Chocolate Watch Band, which he’d seen live, and the 13th Floor Elevators’ first album). I myself didn’t actually listen to punk music, like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, for pleasure, but I liked and respected their albums, while he didn’t. The aversion to reggae was especially mysterious, since that music is so wacky and homemade, the way Bob liked recordings, and Bob liked a lot of New Orleans rock and roll, and reggae comes out of a New Orleans beat. I think maybe these gaps of his came from his being guitar or solo oriented, which reggae and Dylan and country music and punk aren’t. When I pressed him about it, he’d just be a wiseass. He was a fanatic for what grabbed him though. He had many many albums that he kept because of a single track, often a single twenty-five-second solo, or for only a single musician, like James Burton on Ricky Nelson tunes, John McVie’s bass playing on Fleetwood Mac records, Joe Osborne’s bass on even the worst cornball pop, or Grant Green’s guitar on a lot of pretty trashy material.
By early 1976, when I was getting fed up with the Heartbreakers, I was feeling Bob out about my situation, and he was becoming fumblingly, modestly thrilled that he might conceivably get invited to join an interesting band. Eventually he played me a few tapes of his college groups doing covers of Chuck Berry and the Byrds and the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground, and that’s what decided it. It was obvious he could do anything on guitar I’d dream of asking him to. As it turned out, he’d do a lot I didn’t have the wherewithal to dream of yet.
Quine was an angry guy and the anger came from his being maltreated and dismissed by morons and thugs and tight-assed social conservatives, including his parents, for his whole life. His family was well-off and educated but straight. He never had anything nice to say about them. He’d been traumatized by the way he’d been a favorite object of maliciousness at boarding school, according to him. Doubtless that helped develop his cynical, taunting sense of humor. He grumbled about how his aged mother wasn’t dying fast enough, or he’d sucker you into saying something out of politeness that he’d then mock you for, laughingly. At the same time he was humble. It was a point of honor with him not to claim more achievement than he’d attained and to always acknowledge the talents of others.
Quine was an angry guy
While he had a lot of interests outside of music, too, music came first by a huge margin. (Though he had no interest in classical music. When I discovered Beethoven’s late piano sonatas, which sounded as wild and inspired as great jazz improvisations to me, I made a tape of them for him, and it left him cold.) He liked good writing. His favorite writers were Nabokov and Burroughs. He had Olympia Press first editions of both Lolita and Naked Lunch. He liked movies, especially dark and crude ones. He was both a big Sam Fuller fan and a Three Stooges fan. We bonded over Hugo Haas, a pet favorite film director of mine. Quine was the only guy I’d ever met who was into Haas, or even aware of him. And when Bob was interested in material, he not only learned everything about it but collected every example he could. He always collected—books, videotapes and then DVDs, albums and CDs of course, and guitars. He bought guitars every year of his life starting as a teenager and he kept them immaculate. When he died he had upward of a hundred, almost all Fenders.
Quine was a misanthrope. He thought people were shits and cretins. His favorite words were probably “moron,” “cretin,” and “horrible.” He couldn’t suffer fools. (Unless they knew something about music and they kissed his ass. He was that needy. And unfortunately he more and more needed and found suppliers of that ass-kissing the older and more dissipated he got, and it got more and more harmful to his health.) But he did worship the musicians he admired, and he was a generous friend, though he had periods of rejecting nearly every friend he ever had, and he didn’t have a high opinion of himself either. He was tense. He always had to resort to some chemical relief for that tension, whether booze or Valium or, finally, relatively late, heroin. He went to a shrink for most of his adulthood. (It always surprised me when he mentioned he was doing that. I would have thought he was too private and too proud to go to a shrink. He was too private and too proud to go to AA or NA when he was desperate to give up heroin.)
He walked like an R. Crumb character, with his shoulders slumped, looking oppressed, though also cold and fierce, if half-spooked. He almost always wore dark glasses (prescription), along with his rumpled cheap button-down shirt, innocuous sports coat, jeans, and generic Oxford shoes. He had a plain, anonymous, small-featured face that aged well. He didn’t want to be noticed. I confronted him about that once. I asked him if he’d ever had a car, and when he said yes, I said I bet that it was either brown or gray. “It was brown!”
Despite all Bob’s pride and bitterness, he was, in relation to me, primarily grateful and admiring, and he aimed to please. Initially, he was practically a dog. Getting plunged into the CBGB band scene must have been hard for him, if gratifying. It was the heart of rock and roll in the world at the moment, while also filthy dirty and sick, the way he liked it, while, on the other hand, he had no reputation and there were plenty of people at CBGB happy to insult or snub him. He also had to try to satisfy me when I had a hard time expressing what I wanted from him as a guitar player. I would insist on messing with his appearance as well. I made him grow stubble on his face and wear torn-up clothes.
I think Quine was the best rock and roll guitar soloist ever. He found a way to mix art with emotion that put him ahead of everyone. It’s sad that he made so few recordings. His best playing was with me, and we made fewer than three albums’ worth of material. There haven’t really been many interesting guitar soloists in rock and roll. Mickey Baker, James Burton, Grady Martin, Link Wray, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, maybe Jimmy Page, maybe Chuck Berry (he and Keith Richards and Pete Townshend are really rhythm players), maybe Tom Verlaine and Richard Thompson, and Quine. I don’t know. (I’m leaving out blues musicians too.) No one has had the combination of creativity and feeling that Quine did. Most of the great rock and roll guitarists stand out for their wildness and momentum and humor, and that’s plenty. It’s suitable for the material. Quine brought feeling to the mix.
I’ve played with a lot of exceptional guitarists, but the thing I’ve noticed about nearly all of them compared to Quine is the gap between skillful creative brilliance and genius. Quine was a genius guitar player. He assumed as fundamental the qualities that were the highest aspirations of most soloists, and he wou
ld then depart from that platform into previously unknown areas of emotion and musical inspiration. He was a complicated, volatile, sensitive, very smart person who humbly channeled everything he was and knew into his guitar playing. It was axiomatic with him that emotion was the content created by the language of the musical instrument and the genre of the composition. Yes, he liked noise too, and subverting convention. That was the reveling, defiant, purely sound-oriented, unsentimental artist in him. And the antisocial one. But ultimately it was the depth of feeling, not any pioneering explorations or any technical facility or any kind of academic sophistication, that set him apart, just as was true of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker.
I’ve seen over the years how a person sometimes absorbs bits of behavior from friends—speech mannerisms or gestures. It can be eerie to recognize it in yourself after the friend has died. There was a thing Bob would do. Instead of smiling, he would just stretch his lips across his teeth in a cursory sign for “smile.” His eyes wouldn’t change at all, just his mouth for a moment. It was actually friendly—a signal that he was not unwilling to expend the energy to give a little reassurance. I catch myself doing that now and feel switched with Quine for a second.
Just when I’d left the Heartbreakers, before I’d formed a new band, I was approached about a management production deal by Marty Thau. Marty’s main claim to fame was that he’d discovered, in his terms, and comanaged the Dolls prior to Malcolm’s brief last-ditch attempt to save the band. Thau thought of himself as a hipster, though he looked like a thug and didn’t mind exploiting that resemblance in order to intimidate when he could. He’d entered a partnership with Richard Gottehrer in a production company called Instant Records, to sign a young band or two. A production company functions to present a record label with a package that includes a record producer and often a band/artist’s management as well as the musician(s). Gottehrer was a producer, former member of the sixties punk/garage band the Strangeloves (“Night Time” and “I Want Candy” — undeniably great cuts of their type), and original cofounder of Sire Records with Seymour Stein. He’d recently departed Sire. Marty was Instant’s talent scout, and Gottehrer its businessman and record producer. Gottehrer was a tall, skinny, bulb-nosed, frizzy-haired guy who seemed good-natured, though aloof. He was all business. It was Marty who represented Instant to me at the beginning, though by the time I accepted Instant’s proposal that we sign with Sire Records, he was out of the picture. Instant became solely Gottehrer. But originally Thau did the talking, as if he were the A & R guy. He wanted to hang out with me and smoke weed or snort cocaine.
Like most unsigned young musicians, I knew nothing about the record business. I was not only naïve but deluded. My idea of the recording artist’s life came from A Hard Day’s Night and Don’t Look Back. I expected to travel in limousines for protection from screaming girls. It’s not that I felt entitled or power-hungry (though, as much as I was affronted by rock royalty, I definitely wanted both lustful fans and people committed to carrying out my ideas otherwise), but that I assumed that the girls and cars just automatically accompanied record contracts. I didn’t think about it. I was already making more money than I ever had before and also had more girls. And many people wanted to interview me. And I was full of ideas. It seemed like there was no limit to where it could all lead.
I was twenty-six by this time but it had been only three years since I’d first tried to play a bass and write a song, and I had first played in public less than a year after starting to learn. I was a high school dropout and relatively unworldly. Gottehrer and Thau were each about ten years older than me, and they were businessmen with long histories of scuffling (Thau) and hustling (Gottehrer) to profit from securing percentages of bands’ earnings. Even Gottehrer’s Strangeloves were nothing but a business project. The band hadn’t actually existed, but was just whipped up as press releases to cash in on teen trends (kind of like Theresa Stern!). Strangeloves records were written and produced by a three-man production team that included Gottehrer but were played by hired studio musicians. The Strangeloves’ public bio was a pure fabrication that presented them as brothers from Australian sheep-farm country. “I Want Candy” was a Bo Diddley riff with new bubble-gum-punk words and a dumbed-down production (like “Blank Generation” in relation to the “Beat Generation” novelty number, but kind of reversed in quality-switch!).
Thau similarly hacked bubble-gum music, but more as a salesman, for the teen-trash label Buddah (sic), before he started focusing on trying to profit from the New York underground scene, beginning with the Dolls. Both these biz scramblers came out of the tradition of Brill Building teen-music manufacture and the independent-label exploitation of starry-eyed young musicians.
I don’t remember Gottehrer ever mentioning to me his former partnership with Seymour Stein of Sire. I found out about that later. In early 1976, just as I was forming the Voidoids but before we’d begun rehearsing, Instant offered me a deal in which they’d finance my band’s demo tape and pay me $100 a week and a lesser amount to each of the other band members. Once the tape was complete, they’d have four months to get me a contract for an LP. In return for these services and investments, Instant would get approximately 50 percent of all record royalties paid the band by our future label. (My contract with Instant would pay me 7 percent of our first album’s cover price as artist’s royalties because we expected the record company deal would pay 14 percent of the cover price, meaning a fifty-fifty split between Gottehrer and me. As it worked out the Sire deal paid 12 percent, so Gottehrer got 5/12ths, which is 42 percent. This is still more than I was paid, since half my 7 percent went to my band. In other words, I earned 3.5 percent artist’s royalties for the album, while Gotteherer earned 5 percent.) Instant would recoup all their investment (our salaries and the cost of the demo production) from off the top—the advance—of whatever record deal they could get us. I would have approval of any such prospective deal.
I didn’t have any management or legal advice when considering this offer. It sounded OK to me. I figured how could I lose, given that Instant only had a few months to find me a deal or our agreement would expire, and I had approval of the terms of any proposed deal? On the other hand, Gottehrer got nearly half of the band’s record royalties and I think the chances are pretty good that he knew all along that Sire, the label he’d cofounded with his friend Seymour, was pretty much a sure thing for us (in the previous months Sire had signed the Ramones and the Talking Heads, and would soon sign the Dead Boys). He even ended up sharing with Seymour Stein half the publishing royalties he was due, by my contract with Instant, from all the songs I wrote that are on my Sire album, Blank Generation. Since song-composition (as opposed to performance/recording artist’s) royalties are divided equally between the writers and the publishers, that means that the pair of them were and are paid a combined total of 25 percent of the songs’ royalties, for the entire life of the songs’ copyrights.
Granted, all this is pretty typical, if unfair. I was innocent and ignorant, but at the same time, it’s true that the most important thing to me was to make the record. The record business gangsters know this about young groups. I felt that as long as my basic needs were provided for, I was OK, knowing that all of these papers I was signing were limited in their duration anyway. They covered only the first few records and I figured I’d bring out a new record every year indefinitely.
The important thing was to get started. I didn’t fully grasp that practically every cent invested in me by Gottehrer or the record company was an advance to me against future record royalties. None of the studio expenses or our salaries, etc., were finally paid by the record company; instead they were all recouped by the company from my share (as opposed to their share) of record royalties before I was paid any money in royalties. (It took something like seventeen years for me to get an artist’s royalty check, apart from my original advance, from Sire.) This got pretty ironic. Sire switched distributors while I was recording my album, so they had to pos
tpone its release for a few months. I was indignant and insisted that they compensate me for the delay by allowing me back in the studio to see if I could improve the performances of a few songs. I felt like a pretty important person when they agreed. But in fact I was the one paying for it anyway! (And God knows where the charges for studio time actually went.)
It’s all normal capitalism. From Instant/Sire’s point of view, they were gambling in the area of $50,000 on an album. If the album didn’t earn anything, they were out that investment. They were going to do everything they could to be sure that the albums that did make money paid them big. But Thau (with whom I’d have further business dealings on my second album) and Gottehrer weren’t really straight with me, by my lights. Eventually, twenty or thirty years later, I pursued them both with lawyers, going so far as to appear before a judge against Gottehrer, and was able to even the score fairly well, get some of my fair portion back. I don’t respect or like either of them. They are typical of the record business—and the record business, notoriously, is one of the sleaziest there is. (Fredric Dannen, acclaimed investigative journalist of the business world, who’d also written about the mobster-dominated Teamsters Union, described the music business, in his book Hit Men, as the least ethical he’d ever seen.)