My Life in the Cutout Bins: Suicide/Suicide: Alan Vega and Martin Rev (2nd album)

The first Suicide album is downtown, all jittery speed-inflected machine rhythms and the froggy intonations of ghost of Sal Mineo contestant Alan Vega. Vega's yelps leap out of the sound field at you, as though he suddenly is much closer to you than you realized. It was an album I liked, but one I wouldn't put on in some circumstances, for example when I was alone. On vinyl, you had to steel yourself for exposure to the threatening undertone of the group, and sometimes the record frightened me.

The second Suicide album is uptown, and though the vibe and some of the drugs are the same, the characters have changed. I sometimes wonder if Vega and Martin Rev were pointing out the extent to which the rich, bored, soulless hipsters wandering about NYC at the turn of the decade were every bit as desperate and depraved as the freaks and the artists. Maybe more so.

Rev and Vega were signed to Michael Zilkha's ZE Records, itself an offshoot of the No New York scene. ZE specialized in what they referred to as fractured disco or, as in the title of one of their compilation records, Mutant Disco. Zilkha apparently saw Suicide opening for The Cars and asked to sign them. He wanted the group to produce a more dance oriented album, and he wanted Giorgio Moroder to produce it. That wasn't going to happen, and when Ric Ocasek was proffered as the producer of choice for the project, he gave the Cars frontman a copy of "I Feel Love" with the observation that this is what the group should sound like.

The first thing to understand is that Ric Ocasek's involvement was not that of a dilettante. Ocasek was interested in minimalism and in electronic music and he was a champion of what Rev and Vega were doing throughout their careers. In the words of Henry Rollins, himself a fan of the band: “It is important to note that Ric was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Suicide. Not only did he produce their second album, he continued to work with Vega and Rev over the decades going forward as a producer and tireless ally. His belief and dedication to what Suicide was doing is unimpeachable. Vega and Rev were lucky to have Ric on their side. It’s obvious Ric saw what Vega and Rev were doing was unique and worth supporting. This is completely impressive and illustrative of how cool and switched-on Ric was.”

Needless to say, Ocasek had no intention of trying to create a Giorgio Moroder production with the music of Rev and Vega. But he did want to make them sound as good as possible. Martin Rev's keyboard and sound generating setup was pitched to a minimalist aesthetic, one that even crossed the median into robotic or industrial sounds. It is by no means exaggeration to suggest that in Suicide's early work, including their first LP, there lay the seeds of industrial noise bands like Nine Inch Nails and Throbbing Gristle. In his excellent book Mars by 1980, David Stubbs describes them this way:

"One man on vocals, one man on electronics, Suicide were a crucible in which so much of America, rock'n'roll, pre-rock'n'roll, and way beyond, was burned down to a black, dense essence. Jack Kerouac. Albert Ayler. Elvis and doo-wop. Eric Dolphy. Industrial America, its chimneys gradually burning down to obsolescence as the century wore on. The New York art scene. The post-war consumer boom. Vietnam. Stockhausen and Varese. Raymond Scott and disco. Bubblegum and black tar. Suicide were a logical extreme."

Rev's keyboard stack was also based on the economic reality of the band. Suicide didn't make money, they would never make money. Ocasek recognized that Martin Rev was an inventive and creative musician, and he purchased modern synths and drum machines for Rev, not just for the duration of the recording sessions, but to keep, to play, to take out on the road. I have also read that Ocasek produced the sessions at The Power Station studio for no pay, but I can't say that I know that for a fact.

It should be noted that not everyone was in the corner of the Ocasek/Suicide partnership. When a bigger artist embraces or supports a lesser known or more experimental artist, it can be a double-edged sword. There were those, still are, who bemoan Ocasek's involvement in the duo's career, considering his influence to have damaged the band's minimalist/noise roots. Rev told Punk Globe in 2018: "I don't think Ric damaged anything at all. We chose to work with him for those directions taken and learned a lot in the process...And possibly overlooked by those critics who you refer to is that Ric made it possible for a third and fourth album when there were absolutely no other possibilities"

So the screen is much wider right off the bat when you hear the first track on Suicide’s second album, "Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne." There's your hit, Mr. Zilkha. Right away it starts with the motorik drum machine and the assembly line bass line, that feeling that we are grinding along, not going anywhere, on a treadmill of some kind. Then in comes the celeste like chimes outlining the melody and the final kicker is the back kick snare that boosts us along. Somewhere I read a description of The Cars' Panorama album as being on a treadmill but not realizing that you weren't going anywhere because of the beautiful scenery--pop melodies, quirky vocals, guitar solos, keyboard sounds. When I thought about it, I realized that all of The Cars' work is built this way. From the quirky synth burst that defines the opening of "Good Times Roll" on the debut through "It's All I Can Do" there's that weird techno treadmill element that hangs around in the background, giving the music, which is otherwise often straightforward power pop, a tension between modernism and retro pop.

There are basically a few different types of Cars songs, all of them outlined on the debut album. There are the pop songs. There are the dark songs with minor key keyboard figures. Power pop songs, and a few that don't fit neatly into any category. The second track on Suicide, "Mr. Ray" starts like one of the tracks on the debut Suicide record, dark and industrial, a danceable “Frankie Teardrop”, but it develops an overlay that is very like one of The Cars' dark minor key songs. After the first round of vocals, Rev unleashes a synth line that sounds for all the world like one of Greg Hawkes' futuristic synth flourishes on tracks like "Moving In Stereo."

On Panorama there are lots of songs that sound like Ocasek was heavily influenced by the sounds of Suicide, and the record favors keyboards over guitar for the first time. That was The Cars' least successful album to date and they quickly retreated to the same formula as before with varying degrees of success. But on their first two records The Cars were hooky enough, guitar based enough, and Roy Thomas Baker produced enough, to win over a large mainstream audience who missed all the cues that this wasn't your typical club to stadium rock band. The Boston and environs fans also hated Suicide as opening act for The Cars. They hated them much worse than George Harrison fans hated sitting through a set of Ravi Shankar, they hated Suicide to the point of threatening violence, which brings us to the duo's singer, Alan Vega.

Alan Vega's vocals are all about his vocal style, the processing of his vocals via amplification and reverb, and his ATTITUDE when delivering said vocals. The songs are about that and the insinuation, the threat in his voice, in his delivery. The way he takes the phrase, 'Harlem, Harlem, Harlem, baby' and phases it in and out like a Steve Reich tape recorder piece. It's the swagger of rockabilly, the anxiety of industrial, the aggressiveness of punk.

Vega encourages the audience's violent reactions, taunts them like a carnival barker. He reflects their ugliness and hate back on them even as he sings with angelic breathlessness to the objects of his affection, his desire. He sings a lullaby for the addict dying in the street or the average Joe who is being crushed by the oversize wheels of industry. His sincerity and depth of feeling are conveyed by his stylized takes on rockabilly and doo wop vocals. 

Vega's songwriting and performance style is heavily influenced by Iggy Pop: the chanting lines in twos or fours, the sudden yelps and yaps, the impromptu breakouts of urban poetry. But Suicide removed the emphasis on the guitar, in fact they took it away altogether. In many ways Suicide was the group who paved the way for the electronic duo, releasing this classic album on the eve of the explosion of 'bands' like Pet Shop Boys, Yazoo, Soft Cell, Eurythmics. That's not to say that these groups sound much like Suicide (or each other) but these guys had been there for a decade proving that it could be done.

But unlike many soon-to-come synthesizer based performers, Suicide thrived on live performance, where their sound was much more primitive than even their first album fully captured. I think that one of the genius things about Suicide is that they did not simply replicate the noise, chaos, and fear of their live performances on record. Instead they used the recording studio as a place to record versions of their songs that were compressed into their essence and presented in a straightforward manner. It provides an opportunity to hear Vega and Rev's contributions to the group and to appreciate the tension they can bring to bear even in a studio environment.

The album was reissued in 2000 by Mute Records along with a bonus disc of live material from 1975. It provides a handy comparison between the live performances and the studio Suicide, but in the end there's not a lot that's different except the recording studio and a larger bank of electronic sounds. The energy that the group had been generating since the dawn of the seventies continued to pulse strongly on this second album.

Another note: the reissue's cover featured a photograph of Rev and Vega rather than the original Tony Wright cover that featured a shiny bathtub drain with blood drops pooled around the edges. The original back cover featured a female leg with a fresh razor cut still bleeding. The cover didn't help make the record more popular, but it did seem to match the anxious edginess of the music within, and its whiteness made it easy to spot in the cut out bins.

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