Book Review: Wifredo and Helena: My Life with Wifredo Lam 1939-1950 by Helena Benitez

Wifredo and Helena:

My Life with Wifredo Lam 1939-1950

by Helena Benitez

      If you’ve been to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City then you’ve seen Wilfredo Lam’s painting The Jungle. It’s a work of Surrealism, depicting four figures interweaving with bamboo and leafy vegetation. The figures have bodily features that are sharply angular and round simultaneously. Their faces resemble African masks of indeterminate origin, or at least they do for those not knowledgeable about African art. The figures emerge out of the jungle background like creatures coming out of a dream, threatening and enticing at the same time. The rhythmic but disorienting painting makes it impossible to find any place of visual rest.

Wifredo Lam is Cuba’s most famous visual artist. During the decade of World War II, he and his wife Helena lived together, bouncing from Europe to the Caribbean to the United States while involving themselves in the social scene of the most prominent avant-garde artists of the era. Helena Lam, who has since changed her name to Helena Benitez, recounts the most prominent memories of those times in her memoirs Wifredo and Helena: My Life with Wifredo Lam 1939 – 1950.

Wifredo Lam was a tall man with a striking appearance. Being an ethnic mixture of Spanish, African, and Chinese ancestry, he was an embodiment of the three dominant immigrant groups of Cuba. In photographs you can see how those physical features contrast and interact with each other in his complex face. As such, he was truly a man who lived between worlds, a theme that defined the meaning of his paintings throughout his career.

Helena was an attractive German woman with a undying curiosity and a fascination with fortune telling and the occult despite her scientific background and career as a medical biologist.

The two of them met in France just before the German invasion of World War II. They spent most of their time in Marseilles then set sail, with a contingent of other Surrealist artists, for the Caribbean island of Martinique. Eventually they moved on to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, finally settling in Cuba as refugees once they got their papers in order.

The course of Wifredo Lam’s development as an artist depended on the place he was living in and the people he knew at the time. His early works were informed by Cubism and his friendship with Pablo Picasso. After Picasso introduced him to Andre Breton, his art matured as he pursed the theories of Surrealism while developing his own visual idiom. Breton and Lam developed a strong friendship throughout their travels and their mutual interest in non-Western art which the Surrealists believed opened doorways into the dreamworld and the unconscious.

After returning to his homeland of Cuba, Wifredo Lam began incorporating elements of the African-diaspora religions of Palo, Abakua, Vodou, and Santeria into his paintings. He added another layer into his art when he began studying the Eastern philosophies of Taoism, Confucianism, and the I Ching.

Helena was all in on the adventure. She developed a good relationship with Lam’s family, was endlessly fascinated with the natural landscapes of the Caribbean islands, and took great interest in the ceremonies the couple attended. She fit in easily with the small circle of artists in Havana and maintained a fascination for Wifredo Lam’s art which peaked in intensity and innovation during their marriage.

In frustration with the perceived cultural backwardness of Havana and Cuba in general, the couple set off for New York City where many of the famous European Modernists had settled as refugees from the war. The art scene was changing at that time because a new breed of young Americans wanted to prove their worth in the world of Modernism. The old avant-garde art movements were receding and the new wave of Abstract Expressionists were taking over. The Lams naturally fell in with this crowd, but sadly Wifredo’s immigration papers weren’t obtainable and he returned to Cuba. Helena stayed behind, advancing her career in the medical field, and stone cold dumped him like a pair of old socks. This last detail is jarring considering the upbeat tone running through the rest of the book.

Throughout these memoirs, Helena Benitez emphasizes the high points in her marriage to Wifredo Lam. As such, it mostly reads like a pleasant diversion. There is a lot of name dropping when it comes to encounters with famous artists. There are nice descriptions of Caribbean travel and the lifestyle of Cuba. The observations of her husband are light, though and without a lot of depth. Taken at face value, you might think that their marriage was almost nothing but bliss. But like so many artists, she mentions he had a manic depressive temperament and was far from being a faithful husband. Other melancholy aspects include the time she spent in a prison camp during the German occupation of France and the days leading up to Arshile Gorky’s suicide. But Helena Benitez mostly keeps the negative sides of her marriage a secret. Maybe it’s for reasons of privacy. Maybe she just wants to remember the best times. In any case, these memoirs won’t entirely satisfy anyone who wants a complete biography of Wifredo Lam.

Taken as it is, Wifredo and Helena is a good introduction to one of the most fascinating, unique, and underrated artists of the Modernist movement. Of especial value are the high quality reproductions of Lam’s works and rare photographs, some of which are not available to the public anywhere else. Let’s hope that somebody somebody writes a full biography and critical evaluation of this painter and he gets the post mortem recognition he deserves.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind by Chuck Barris

Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind:

  

An Unauthorized Autobiography

by Chuck Barris

      If you were around in the 1970s, you might remember a television program called The Gong Show. Maybe you remember it even if you don’t want to. It was a variety show and a talent contest for people with no talent and often no taste either. They had a celebrity panel of three judges who had to endure an entire performance. If the people on stage were intolerably bad, one of the judges would bang a gong to end it. The performers were immediately disqualified. There were very few contestants who ever made it through a whole set. But it was all in tne name of fun and it WAS fun at least for certain people. In my eight year old brain it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. My mother didn’t agree, but then again she never liked The Three Stooges either. That made it all the more exciting. The producer and host of the show was an awkward little guy who wore a hat with its brim pulled down over his eyes. His name was Chuck Barris and after The Gong Show got canceled after three years, he wrote an autobiography in which he claimed to secretly be a hitman for the CIA. It was called Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Autobiography. Yes, that’s right, this autobiography is unauthorized. You’ve heard of an unauthorized biography, but an unauthorized autobiography? That title itself should be a recognizable indication that something is a little off about this book.

In the opening chapter, Barris is going off on an assignment to rub someone out in New York City. He puts on a fake beard and moustache to hide his identity. As he sits in a coffee shop eating breakfast, a woman recognizes him as a celebrity and strikes up a conversation. She easily sees through his disguise and offers him a blowjob, free of charge no less. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the story and I’m not talking about the blowjob part. Barris, as an author, intends to deceive his audience, but he also sets the audience up to see through his deception the same way the fan in the restaurant does.

And there is deception all the way through the book. If you’re prone to playing drinking games I have one to propose. Read this book and every time Barris gets himself out of a tight fix through deception or outright lies, take a shot of your favorite venom. You probably won’t make it through 20 or 30 pages before the room is spinning like a tilt-a-whirl amusement park ride or you are lying on the bathroom floor because it’s convenient to be next to the toilet so you don’t have to stumble too far the next time you hurl your hamburger dinner. Next time you’ll remember to go easy on the hot sauce. A case in point is where Barris has a problem with guests on a game show using less than acceptable language during live filming. He hires an actor to pretend he’s a government agent from the FCC and to lecture the guests before each show about the legal consequences of broadcasting obscenity on TV. Problem solved. The contestants clean up their act and almost everything else goes right. Well, maybe not everything.

Chuck Barris says very little about his childhood as a Jewish kid in Philadelphia, an interesting omission for an autobiography. He does write about how he failed with the female students he chased after during college If he’s luckless in love, he’s luckier in his career. He doesn’t have a smooth ride there either, but eventually he pitches the idea for a game show to a television producer and things begin to fall into place. Some people might remember The Dating Game, where a single woman would interview three male contestants hidden from her view and then choose the one who best suits her desire for a date. Barris would go on to produce another hit game show called The Newlywed Game in which newly married couples would be quizzed on how well they knew their partners. Of course it was the 70s so a lot of the questions were loaded with sexual innuendos. More importantly, the contestants often had IQ’s that were lower than the average yearly temperature of Boston. It is lowbrow entertainment in its finest form. These shows were popular because Barris had his finger on the pulse of American pop culture in the 1970s. And that wasn’t such a good thing.

But no matter how successful Barris’s career as a TV producer is, something always goes wrong. For example, on an early set of The Dating Game, he tries to change up the show’s formula by having three chimpanzees sitting in the chairs reserved for the bachelor contestants. Off stage actors would answer the questions asked by the bachelorette with the joke being the expected shock on her face when she gets introduced to the three representatives of the hominid taxonomic family. The filming is a bit of a disaster because one of the apes plays with his genitals while the one next to him begins dismantling the chair he is sitting in and throwing its pieces into the audience. The passages about Barris’s TV shows are full of hilarious anecdotes like this.

Another side of his autobiography is the perpetual flux of his failing love life. There is no shortage of groupies, but none of them are appealing as people. When he meets women he is attracted to, the relationships always fail. There are two women who float in and out of the narrative. One is Penny Pacino, a redhead who spends a lot of her life pursuing him as a husband. The other is Patricia Watson, a commanding officer in the CIA.

Barris gets tapped to work undercover as an assassin by the world’s most notorious intelligence agency. He gets assigned to work under Jim Byrd, his senior officer, mentor, and friend. Together they spend time drinking, talking about life in the agency, planning assassinations, and carrying them out. Barris goes on assignment in Mexico City, London, Paris, and New York all for the purpose of permanently ending the careers of rival spies. Later he gets tracked down for a revenge killing by a KGB agent and the whole story climaxes when they learn there is a mole in the upper ranks of the CIA, one who is responsible for the death of Jim Byrd. An interesting piece of foreshadowing occurs when Barris accidentally tells someone where Jim Byrd will be during a sabbatical. Loose lips sink ships as the World War II navy propaganda posters used to say, warning sailors not to give details to friendly strangers while on shore leave. What Barris says about Jim Byrd has deadly consequences.

So how should you interpret this unauthorized autobiography? Start by accepting that almost everything in it is fiction. While Barris’s career as a businessman and game show producer are verifiable, most of the rest of it isn’t. There are obvious clues that his employment in the CIA is fake. He does things that an effective intelligence agency would never allow like having meetings with other operatives in bars and restaurants where company planning is discussed openly or assassinating people in crowded public areas like the plaza in front of a museum in Mexico City or a busy shopping street in Paris. The idea of sending a recognizable public figure on these missions is absurd as well. Other clues are more subtle, like how he meets with the man who assassinated Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende by gunshot. Only, in reality, Allende died after falling out a window. Was he pushed or was it an accident? It doesn’t matter here. What matters is that he didn’t die of a bullet wound. When it comes to the CIA story, Barris is just spinning a yarn to see what he can get away with. He seems to be dropping hints, winking at you, and elbowing you in the ribs throughout the whole book to see if you are in on the joke. Like the fake facial hair he wears in the opening chapter, he expects you to be perceptive enough to see through his disguise. If you don’t, that’s your problem.

A quick biographical check on Chuck Barris reveals something else. During the two decades this book takes place, spanning 1960 to 1980, he was married twice, something which is never mentioned in this autobiography. He did marry a redhead but her name wasn’t Penny Pacino, as stated in the story, and he didn’t marry her until ten years after this book was published. So the story of his frustrated love life and eventual marriage to Penny can’t be taken any more seriously than the CIA story.

Despite all his trickery, Barris does confront us with an ironic truth that can be found in his personality. Throughout the book, he privately struggles with depression, issues of self-worth, and a low self esteem. Despite his success in television, he is haunted by a dark shadow since nothing ever goes as planned even when things are working out for the best. The entertainment establishment isn’t accepting of him either, thinking of him as a troublemaker and an annoyance. His game shows work on the premise that people are happy to make fools of themselves in public if it means they get a chance to be on TV. Barris has an enormous contempt for his game show contestants and for a lot of his audience as well. The Gong Show, in all its trashiness, can be seen as a middle finger in the face of the industry that tolerated him as long as he made money for them, but scathingly put him down behind his back. This book reveals Barris as being pummeled into depression by the negativity that goes with fame and being hailed as the King of Schlock. He is like a successful CEO who looks in the mirror and sees Charlie Brown staring back. In the midst of all the fiction, Barris reveals a candid portrayal of the most sensitive parts of his mind, an irony that goes far in making this project work on a literary level. You get a sense of how a man riddled with anxiety reacts to others by being cranky, condescending, and snarky. The story about being a CIA assassin can thereby be read as a compensation fantasy where he gets lauded by the agency for being successful and in control of his assignments. Besides, the other agents are suave, courageous, intelligent, and urbane. They aren’t like the nitwits Barris has to work with in television or the fans of his game shows, the kinds of people who laugh at jokes about people farting while 69ing. While he wanted to be proud of his life, he had some misgivings. After all, his legacy is that he initiated a long string of TV shows where ordinary people act like idiots for entertainment stretching from The Morton Downey Show, Geraldo, The Jerry Springer Show, and Fear Factor onwards into the abysmal slime pit of reality shows that amount to little more than junk food for the mind.

When read as a straight up work of fiction, Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind is worth your time. It’s a combination of autobiographical realism and a traditional spy thriller complete with plot hooks, plot twists, and a surprise ending. Then it’s held together with the psychological insights of a quality character study with Chuck Barris playing the protagonist’s role as Chuck Barris. And if you’re not convinced that it’s all fiction, keep in mind that in 1982, the year of publication, the author is on record saying that this book is fiction when he appeared on TV talk shows to promote it. Some people believe that Barris really was a CIA assassin. Some have accused him of being mentally ill and delusional. Still others have claimed this book is a hoax. I think they are all wrong. This book is more like a prank and it’s a pretty enjoyable one if you approach it from the right angle.

 

Book Review: Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 3 by Jerry A. Lang

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 3

by Jerry A. Lang

      Volume one of Jerry A. Lang’s Black Heart Fades Blue tells the story of his less than ideal childhood and teenage years up to the point where he formed his legendary hardcore punk band Poison Idea. Volume two tells the story of Jerry A.’s rise and fall as the band tours around America and Europe. He plummets into the black hole of alcoholism and heroin addiction in what has to be one of the most depressing accounts of the junky lifestyle ever written. Volume three is a much welcomed new chapter in Jerry A. Lang’s life and the final installment of his autobiography.

This volume starts where volume two left off. Jerry A. spends his time at the home of his friend and bandmate Tom “Pig Champion” Roberts, the genius guitarist of Poison Idea, whose place has turned into a shooting gallery. Their lives are no longer defined by music and they have sunk into an almost vegetative state that involves little more than scoring and shooting junk. Then the worst happens when Tom gets increasingly more ill and dies in bed. I wish he had written his own memoirs considering his encyclopedic knowledge of music, his odd sense of humor, and the war he fought against his own personal demons. His side of the Poison Idea story would have been just as interesting.

While this isn’t the end of Poison Idea, it is the end of Jerry A.’s nightmare lifestyle. He does what any good man would do at this point; he kicks his habit, cleans up his life, and takes control over his self-destructive habits. Personal responsibility is a large part of it all.

The rest of the book is a collection of odds and ends. Jerry A. writes about touring in Japan and his friendship with Adam Parfrey, the publisher of Feral House books and the man who inspired him to write this autobiography. The rest is mostly thoughts, meditations, reminiscences, regrets, hopes, and attempts at making sense of out of the world and his own life. He really puts the previous two volumes into perspective. These are the thoughts of a man who knows he screwed up and wants to change himself for the better while he still has the chance. Finally he says that this autobiography is meant to be an apology to anyone he has hurt. Then he admits it was also meant as a suicide note. But Jerry A. Lang is still alive today so it all ends on a high note and an optimistic view of the future. While I don’t think love can save the world, and I’m not sure anything can at this point, I do know that love can save an individual person. Maybe that’s all we can hope for.

This third volume is really just a coda to the other previous books. It’s mostly just scraps of information more than actual storytelling. It’s not as hard hitting as everything that came previously. But stories of rebirth and redemption rarely ever are. The most exciting book in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is Inferno where the author takes a journey into Hell. Purgatorio is good but less exciting. Paradiso is downright boring. While it is good that Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment redeems himself at the end, it is his senseless crime that is the truly exciting part of the novel. But maybe these comparisons aren’t fair since Jerry A.’s memoirs are not fiction. This shit really happened to him so his renewed passion for life as he gets on in years is all that much more meaningful.

Instead of ending with a final thought on volume three of these memoirs, it makes more sense to end with what I think of Black Heart Fades Blue as a whole. Jerry A. Lang has had a unique life both charmed and cursed. He has taken everything he has done to an extreme and traveled a fine line between ecstatic freedom and hell. He tells his story precisely and this is a work of sharp self-analysis. Most people could not live the life he lived. Most of them would die. I myself know a few too many people who didn’t make it. Of the few who survive, there are few of them who could write such insightful memoirs and then move on to a better life. Even so, a lot of people were attracted to the punk lifestyle because they were maladapted to mainstream society. I’m sure a lot of them will find something to relate to in these books even if they were fortunate enough to avoid the heroin trap. Let’s just hope that Jerry A. puts as much energy into his newfound life as he did into his addictions and his music. If he does he’s got it made. Best of luck to you, Jerry. Poison Idea still reigns as the Kings of Punk. 

 

Book Review: Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 2 by Jerry A. Lang

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 2

by Jerry A. Lang

      It was the fall of 1990, less than a month after I had caught a Butthole Surfers show at the notorious Lyric Theater on 42^nd St. in Manhattan. (I suppose the Danceteria didn’t invite them back, haha) Poison Idea was playing in a small club with a two foot high stage that was so narrow that the gargantuan band members barely fit on it. These guys were said to collectively weigh over a ton at one point. I stood in the front, two feet away from Tom “Pig Champion” Roberts whose guitar looked tiny in his massive arms. Jerry A. was on his best behavior although his fire breathing act probably singed a few locks off some spiky haired members of the audience. He was giving high fives in the crowd so I reached out and he shook my hand; it was like shaking hands with a grizzly bear. There is no sense in describing the music but a Poison Idea concert was like being in the middle of a cyclone of fire. It was ferocious, nihilistic rage to the extreme and it felt so goddamn good. There is a strand of the punk counter culture that starts with Iggy Pop and The Stooges, connects them to Johnny Thunders and the Dead Boys, The Germs, and GG Allin; Poison Idead sits comfortably in that lineage. I hate to get mystical sounding about it, but there is a transcendental state of ecstasy that can be achieved by abandoning all caution, spinning wildly out of control.

In the first volume of Jerry A. Lang’s autobiography Black Heart Fades Blue he tells us about his troubled childhood and teenage years, the time when he moved to Portland, Oregon and got involved in the punk and underground music scene. He also tells us about his precocious encounters with drugs, alcohol, sex, and violence. Volume two picks up where that left off. As Poison Idea’s popularity grew, so did their good and bad times, and so did their reputation as being a problem child of the music industry. But this book isn’t about the band so much as it about Jerry A. It’s not that he denies the importance of the other people in his life; it’s just that he knows their version of events won’t match his and he doesn’t want to speak for them. So he makes sure that we know that this is how he sees his life as only he can and leaves it at that.

The story isn’t anything unique. Most rock bands follow the same path of putting out records, building a following, partying to an excessive degree, and then going into decline as their drug habits take over. The most unique thing about Jerry A.’s story is how high he got and low he sank. Jerry A.’s intentions were to pick up where Darby Crash, lead singer of The Germs, left off. That meant pushing all limitations in terms of lifestyle and music well beyond what anybody had done previously. One of the songs on Poison Idea’s War All the Time LP was called “Romantic Self Destruction.” The catch here is that Jerry A. was not only physically bigger and stronger than most other rock stars, but he was also made of sturdier material than most other people. On top of that he had a complex personality, a strong mind, and a surprising awareness of morality and social justice that helped him navigate through the scummiest of the scum pits in the world. Those finer aspects of his mind included appreciation for art and literature, a wide ranging taste in music, a love of nature, a curiosity about the world and its variety of cultures, a willingness to defend outsiders and misfits, a respect for women’s rights, and an anti-bigotry stance on issues of race and gender issues. Sounds like one great guy.

Not so fast. As Jerry A.’s life spun out of control, mostly because of drugs, alcohol, and violence, those refined attitudes receded into the background. But they never entirely disappeared and that is the key to understanding where this autobiography is going.

As Poison Idea toured America, Europe, and Japan, the band was having a non-stop party. Jerry A. loved drinking; he could chug a whole quart of whisky without taking a breath. But on top of that he, and other band members too, got hooked on heroin. Drugs and alcohol are fun until they aren’t. They went from being a band that used drugs to drug users who had a band to support their habits. Things took a nasty turn for the worse. The combination of drunkenness, heroin withdrawal, and diabetes resulted in some disgusting injuries and illness and a couple near death experiences resulting from overdoses. Jerry A. tried to clean up with Alcoholics Anonymous and methadone and has some interesting things to say about what a sleazy grift those clinics and therapy groups are. To support himself, he got a job as a professional jizz mopper in a porn store. Then just when you think he had hit rock bottom, he sinks even lower as the methadone doesn’t help and he turns to stealing and ripping off drug dealers to get his fixes. Jerry A., along with Pig Champion, end up homeless at one point. As far as stories about junkies go, there isn’t anything too unique about these events. It’s just that the story is told with the same intensity and power that Jerry A. put into his music. This is the kind of harrowing literature that makes you feel like you’ve been kicked in the balls with a steel toed boot. As far as accounts of heroin addiction go, this autobiography is in league with William S. Burroughs and Jim Carroll. It’s tempting to say it might even surpass the works of those authors in terms of their impact on the reader.

This subject matter may be too much for some to handle. The abrasive details are described in a smooth, easy going writing style though. The writing itself is not challenging although there are some flaws. Jerry A. sometimes repeats information as if he forgot that he has already told us some of his stories before; this is no big deal though because he doesn’t dwell on these details for so long that it ruins the narrative. Some of the sequencing can be a little disordered too. In one chapter he’s homeless, in the next he’s living in an apartment. At the beginning of a chapter he goes to the methadone clinic and then he shoots up heroin a few paragraphs later. It’s like he wrote everything down in the order that he remembered it rather than putting into an organized timeline. Also, his unwillingness to write about people he was close to leaves some huge gaps in the story, but he has his reasons for doing this and as a reader, we have to understand where he’s coming from.

None of those flaws are bad enough to make this unworthy of reading. What Jerry A. does get right is what matters most. This isn’t a work of self-aggrandizement nor is it a work of self-pity. It is neither a work of self-celebration nor is it a work of self-hatred. He obviously regrets a lot of what he did, but he writes in such a calm and detached manner that presents us with nothing but the facts, or at least the facts as he understands them to be. This is a work of self-evaluation, like a surgeon who removed a tumor from his own body and then studies it under a microscope as objectively as he possibly can. This is the kind of book a complete fuck up would write when they decide to turn their life around and make themselves into something better. There is an undercurrent of self-respect here and an attempt to reclaim some sense of dignity after surviving a hurricane of self abuse.

Watching somebody self destruct isn’t pleasant. You shouldn’t expect it to be. You wouldn’t read a book like this for simple entertainment though. Black Heart Fades Blue tell Poison Idea fans a lot of what they need to know if they ever wondered where this band was coming from. Jerry A.’s childhood was nothing to envy. We see how he grew up without parental guidance or restraint, had some intense experiences at a young age, and then spent his life in reckless abandonment, seeking out any experience more intense than the last. Or maybe he was trying to numb the pain with heroin and alcohol then trying to undo the numbness with sex, violence, and music, an eternally repeating cycle that fed addictions of all kinds. You can feel sorry for his bad childhood if you choose, though I don’t think he wants that. One thing is certain: if he hadn’t grown up the way he did we might never have been blessed with one of the greatest hardcore punk bands that ever existed, if not THE best. Poison Idea named their first LP Kings of Punk and they earned their right to that title. And if you think that’s all there is to this story, than remember that hitting rock bottom always offers the opportunity for redemption. Be sure to read volume three of these memoirs for that part of the story if you haven’t already. 

 

Book Review: Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 1 by Jerry A. Lang

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 1

by Jerry A. Lang

      This review is dedicated to the memory of D.H., the biggest Poison Idea fan I’ve ever known. I miss you, brother.

By the late 1980s, hardcore punk was starting to run out of steam. People were bored with three cord thrash so both bands and audiences began branching out into other styles that were punk adjacent. Punk/metal crossover was growing in popularity especially because thrash metal was making inroads into the mainstream. Around that time Poison Idea released their first full length lp Kings of Punk. The cover had a picture of lead singer Jerry A. after carving the band’s name into his chest with a razor. Poison Idea weren’t a crossover band, but they had a definite metal tinge to their sound that was harder, more brutal, and distinctive due to the better than average musicianship and outright sincerity in their expression of rage. While typical hardcore punk was falling out of favor, Poison Idea took the style to a whole new level. It had enough power to propel the band through more than a decade of touring and recording. The music was an overload of anger and some punks wondered just where exactly these guys were coming from. Now Jerry A. Lang has published a three volume autobiography called Bacl Heart Fades Blue and of course the first volume is all about his childhood.

Jerry A.’s parents were a couple of rednecks who had him when they were seventeen years old. Soon after, they had two more kids, one daughter and a younger brother. Then they split up. Jerry A. was bounced back and forth between the two parents, each taking care of him for about a year at a time. His father lived in Eugene, Oregon and his mother lived in West Bumfuck Montana. Though he had a deep love for the natural surroundings there, especially the rivers and forests, his mother was an alcoholic who went through a long string of loser boyfriends and the local cowboys bullied Jerry A. to no end. Eugene was a little nicer even though his father was a complete asshole. In Eugene Jerry A. discovered rock music, looked up to the local hippies, and started using drugs and alcohol before the age of ten. Back in Montana, he was also involved in troublemaking and that is where he learned how to fight. Rock music had always been an important part of his life, but when he discovered the Ramones and Sex Pistols, he knew he had found a key part of his identity, a part that would stay with him until the end. Throughout his childhood, he suffered from any kind of abuse or neglect imaginable. And yet he had an undying curiosity about the world and a touch of intellectualism that kept him going.

At the start of his teenage years, Jerry A. moved to Portland and got involved with the underground music scene. He sometimes played with the avant gardist noise band Smegma. This was in the transition period between first and second wave punk which combined political anger with nihilism in its lyrics and attitude. Darby Crash had died of a heroin overdose and the music was getting stripped down, more basic, and faster. Bikers like to chop their Harleys, removing all the unnecessary pieces to make them lighter for the sake of going faster; punks did the same thing with rock and roll, eliminating all the extras to emphasize the most basic elements that were played at maximum speed and volume. Portland, at that time, was a shithole of a city, nothing like the gentrified hipster haven it is now. So Jerry A. put together his own hardcore punk combo that took on the guitarist from another band called The Imperialist Pigs. That morbidly obese, record collecting, cocaine dealing guitarist was Tom “Pig Champion” Roberts, a man who later proved himself to be the premier genius guitarist of second wave punk rock. Some would say his style and ability surpassed other hardcore legends like East Bay Ray and Greg Ginn. Poison Idea was born and their music was simultaneously rough and smooth, chaotic and neat, and its anger was infectious to any punk who felt like they were being screwed over in life. With their growing popularity, Jerry A. drank heavily, did drugs like speed and cocaine, had lots of sex, and got involved in a lot of street fights. It was just the typical trajectory of an up and coming rock star. But despite his thuggish ways, he always had a taste for Leftist politics and social justice causes. As the band evolved, Jerry A. sank into a whirlwind of self-destruction and it was all so much fun.

This first volume ends around the time that Poison Idea’s classic album Kings of Punk came out. Like the music of punk, the writing is fast paced, direct, and to the point. It isn’t overly descriptive, but it is descriptive enough for the reader to see everything that is going on. Jerry A. tells his story with a clarity of self-perception that is unique. This is the kind of insight you gain when you are older and have looked back over your life with analytical eyes, trying to make sense of it all. Part of what is interesting is how he tells his story with the detached objectivity of a journalist. Despite how rotten his childhood was, he doesn’t indulge in self-pity and he doesn’t even express much anger at the unfairness of the life he was born into. This kind of calm self-reporting is what you get from a mature man who has made peace with that infuriating part of himself. Judging by what happens in the second volume of these memoirs, you can tell he really struggled to make sense of his life. Jerry A. doesn’t sound like he’s full of himself either; he doesn’t brag about being a survivor of a rotten childhood. If it had been up to him he obviously would have chosen a better upbringing, but he had the wits to stay alive and sometimes even benefit from his situation. He just doesn’t stand around shouting about how great he is for not ending up dead or in jail. He saves the shouting for his music.

If there is anything to criticize here, it is that some potentially interesting things were left out. Jerry A. doesn’t say much about how he actually met Tom Roberts and the other band members. He doesn’t say much about his siblings either, but to be fair, he does explain that he doesn’t want to tell other people’s stories for them, especially when they don’t have the opportunity or the desire to share their side of it all with the public. Most significantly, Jerry A. doesn’t say much about Poison Idea’s earlier records. He does talk about the Pick Your Kings ep and says a little about Kings of Punk, but he doesn’t even mention the Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes ep. It would have been interesting to hear what it was like to work with Pushead, the artist who did album covers for The Misfits and Metallica and put out Kings of Punk on his own Pusmort record label.

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 1 is a good, solid start to the autobiography of Jerry A. Lang. It makes Poison Idea less enigmatic and gives good insight into the source of the author’s anger as well as his impish sense of humor. If you think volume one is fascinating enough, you might as well get ready to read volume two. Beware though. What comes next in this series is a nasty and soul crushing story that might leave you with a touch of PTSD if you aren’t ready for it.

 

Book Review

20th Century Boy:

Notebooks Of the Seventies

by Duncan Hannah

I don’t ordinarily dumpster dive for reading materials, but when I looked into a recycling bin outside a grocery store and saw a bunch of copies of this one, I thought I’d better check it out. Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy is a memoir from the 1970s art and music scene, mostly taking place in New York City. That much alone was enough to pique my interest and after opening it and leafing through a few pages, I saw it had photographs of Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, the Talking Heads, Andy Warhol, and a few other notables of the underground scene. I knew I was in territory that was both familiar and interesting.

Artist and sometimes actor Duncan Hannah kept journals from his high school years and through his twenties. He extracted the most interesting bits and put them together for this collection which captures the feel of aimless bohemian living at the margins of the art world. The first thing that caught my attention is his writing style. Hannah writes in short, no-frills sentences that recall the simplistic prose of Hemingway. I find Hemingway to be a bore though. Hannah largely succeeds in writing this way. He writes with a flow and consistency that I always found absent that other writer’s style. Reading Hemingway is like trying to drive a car with the emergency brake on; reading Duncan Hannah is like zipping in and out of fast-moving traffic on a finely tuned motorcycle.

Then the content is something else. The author starts this book as a teenager in Minneapolis just when the sexual revolution begins to blossom. He sleeps around with a lot of girls, does a lot of drugs and alcohol, plays in a band, and has ambitions to become an artist, all while his parents fret over the possibility of him becoming a permanent screw-up. He becomes an art student at Bard college located in downstate New York, continuing on a similar course until he finally winds up in Greenwich Village where he continues his studies.

One night at a concert, he catches the attention of Danny Fields, the rock band manager who signed The Doors, MC5, and The Stooges to Elektra records. Hannah is a good-looking boy with a sense of fashion and the two hit it off immediately. Danny Fields introduces him to a lot of rock stars and artists and Hannah easily adapts to the in-crowd at Max’s Kansas City among other places.

One of the exciting things about this book is all the rock concerts and related parties the author goes to. Most of this involves the proto-punk and glam scene of the early 1970s. He sees some of the earliest performances of Patti Smith and Television. He probably also sees more New York Dolls shows than anybody else in history. He even gets to meet Iggy Pop backstage and then watches him come on stage with The Stooges too loaded to stand up, let along sing. Iggy falls on the drum set then falls off the stage before they carry him out on a stretcher, leaving the band to play an all-instrumental set to the audience’s disappointment.

Then there is the sex, the drugs, and the parties. Hannah snorts up what must be most of the cocaine in Peru and a huge cargo of whatever came out of Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia too then tempers his highs with gallons of liquor so that, aside from being popular, he also earns a reputation for being a hardcore lush. This never stops him from getting laid though. Despite going through life being alcoholically challenged, he still manages to get it up with women and maintain long-term relationships. Duncan Hannah gets more ass than a toilet seat. And then there are the men. You see, Hannah is a cute, androgynous prick-tease so he gets hit on by every gay man who can’t keep his hands to himself, but since he is straight, he always disappoints them and one even gets violent when rejected. Overall, it’s a wild and exciting life, one that most people never get to live let along survive. In the latter half of the book, he is much more engaged with his art.

A typical day for Duncan Hannah goes like this. “I woke up at 11:30 AM with a poisonous hangover, not sure if I slept through one night or two. I went down to the corner where I saw Patti Smith hanging out so we got some breakfast. I did some coke, spent a couple hours painting then went to visit a gallery uptown. I took my girlfriend out to dinner where Tom Verlaine and three members of Blondie were sitting at nearby tables. We all got drunk then I had sex with my girlfriend in the bathroom. I went off to watch a French movie starring Alain Delon, headed uptown to a Roxy Music show, said hi to Johnny Thunders in the concert hall, and got invited to party where I tried to talk to David Bowie and Andy Warhol. I smoked a joint with Jim Jarmusch, did a few lines of coke and a hit of acid and ended up in bed with some girl who smelled bad but had a nice body. Anita Pallenberg came in and told us to get out of her bed and Mick Jagger stepped on my toes as I made my way out the door. I hope I can sell some paintings tomorrow.”

This is the kind of book that could suffer from redundancy, but it moves along at such a fast pace that it never slows down or gets dull. The copious amounts of name-dropping can be a little annoying at first; it’s like listening to some nobody trying to impress others by talking about all the important people they know, but Hannah’s encounters with this legendary crowd are persistently interesting and he does have some good conversations and experiences with them. Besides, he fits in with them and never sounds fake or pretentious.

While I am not a huge fan of Duncan Hannah’s paintings, I find 20th Century Boy to be a fascinating chronicle of New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s, probably the best decade the city has ever seen for its exploding music scene and dynamic social life. It was a time when New York was still affordable, fun, and stylish, a time when the greatest social asset one could have was simply to be an interesting person. New York, and America in general, just aren’t like that anymore. As a document of glam, punk, the drug culture, the Sexual Revolution, old New York, and the lives of starving artists, this book can’t be beat.