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No-Wave Origins Stretch To Eckerd College

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By CURTIS ROSS

cross@tampatrib.com

Published: October 5, 2008

"No Wave: Post-punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980," by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley (Abrams Image, $24.95)

No Wave, the confrontational and cacophonous music that combined punk rock immediacy with modern art sensibilities, may have lived its entire short life in the southern half of Manhattan. But its origins stretch to our backyard, specifically St. Petersburg's Eckerd College.

Eckerd grads Mark Cunningham and Arto Lindsay, along with fellow student Connie Burg, left Pinellas Country for New York City after graduation in 1974. Circumstances were favorable for creative types willing to live in near-squalor: The city's various art scenes were flourishing while its financial state hovered over the toilet. Lofts and spaces went for a pittance in pre-gentrification lower Manhattan, and these pioneers from the Sunshine State soon were in the forefront of what came to be known as No Wave.

Cunningham was involved in theater, Lindsay was a writer and Burg was schooled in dance. It was endemic of No Wave that the three wound up founding two of the genre's most memorable bands, Mars (Burg and Cunningham) and DNA (Lindsay). Cross-pollination was in, musical virtuosity wasn't.

Of course, punk rock, in its infancy at the time, also emphasized imagination over technique. But where even the early Ramones worked in traditional verse-chorus song structures, and Television could actually play (save for first bassist Richard Hell), No Wave raised amateurism to high art status.

Lindsay rarely played notes or chords, instead raking his strings to create a racket that was either cathartic or excruciating, depending on your perspective. James Chance, who fronted No Wave mainstays The Contortions, would make his saxophone squeal like a wounded animal, while Von LMO incorporated power tools into its sound.

No Wave has few recorded relics. The essential No Wave compilation, 1978's "No New York," is long out of print, although recordings by Mars, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, The Contortions and composer Glenn Branca's Theoretical Girls are available for those willing to search.

It's a shame, if not surprising, that the book "No Wave," doesn't have a companion CD. Even so, the book does an excellent job of creating the scene that readers can practically feel, smell and, yes, hear.

Authors Byron Coley and Thurston Moore mostly let the participants speak, interrupting only for necessary scene-setting and exposition. Both were peripheral members of the scene, Coley as a writer and sometime musician, Moore as a member of one of Glenn Branca's guitar orchestras. Moore's band, Sonic Youth, formed in the early '80s, took elements of No Wave and fashioned them into something more commercial, but only just so.

Of course, any commercial impact was more than No Wave had. Other than minimal coverage in the music press, it barely made a noise outside the city. But as with so many come-and-gone scenes, it's now a touchstone - as a name to drop, if not a sound on which to draw - for younger bands eager to drip with cool.

The music, the people, the time and perhaps most of all the city of New York, in all its late-'70s decay, all come across vividly in "No Wave," appropriate since only this specific convergence could have fostered music this intensely defiant.

Curtis Ross is the Tribune's music critic.

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