In the Fried Archives: James Chance
From 2003: Pills, Thrills, and being terrified of the late no wave legend at the House of Usher
James Chance passed away earlier this week. Back in early 2003, Ryan Pitchfork asked me to go interview him at his apartment in the purgatory that is the Upper West Side on the occasion of a long-overdue CD box set. As a rather recent Brooklyn transplant, I got nosebleeds if I ever went north of the L and I was slightly bewildered to be this far uptown. (Hilariously, I’m now miles uptown of wherever this apartment was and I might deem it “too far down” these days.)
I was totally intimidated by the thought of talking to James Chance. His legend and his penchant for unexpected violence preceded him. Weirder still, I had never heard his legend-making tracks on No New York. Seems funny to say it now, but it was nigh on impossible to come across such a document of New York’s no wave scene down in South Texas.
A few things that still linger in my memory about this lone encounter with the legendary antagonist. His girlfriend offered me a silver tray featuring a rainbow of different-colored pills (I declined). Only as I walked away from his apartment did it it occur to me that I should have had him sign my copies of his albums (something I rectified for most interviews going forward). And I was obviously under the sway of Nick Tosches at the time, my intro on the piece linking him as a stylist in the tradition of Jimmie Rodgers and Jerry Lee Lewis.
In all my subsequent years of interviewing artists of different levels of fame and notoriety, James Chance was the most terrified. Not terrifying, terrified. He was barely holding himself together, he was so nervous during the interview. I distinctly recall a bodily awareness to sit all the way back in my chair, leaning away from him, to make my body language come off as un-threatening as possible. It did little to ease the tension. Chance rubbed his eyes with a fury equal to that of his earliest live shows. For most of the interview, I was afraid he might gouge his own eyeball out from all the frantic rubbing. Interview below:
“Welcome to the House of Usher,” James Chance’s girlfriend says as she gestures me into their West Side apartment. Stalagmites of books jag up from the gold carpet, and records still line many of the walls; at a little keyboard is a fakebook opened to Monk’s “I Mean You” and “In Walked Bud”, which is James Chance in a nutshell. A nutshell big enough to include the squawk ’n' squiggle souls of Ornette Coleman, Fela Kuti, Big Jay McNeely and the slithering white soul of Iggy's Stooges and the Young Rascals to boot; it yielded a piquant, shrubby and poisonous tree that bore the bitter black berries of No Wave. Chance is a stylist extraordinaire, in the tradition of a Jimmie Rodgers, Jerry Lee Lewis, or Iggy Pop, moving across color lines with an odd nervous energy that can hardly be pent up, whether on-stage or in-person.
How did the box set end up on Tiger Style after all these years of your records being out of print?
Well, how it all got started was last summer I recorded a new version of “Contort Yourself” for a French label; it was supposed to come out on a twelve inch single over there which hasn’t actually been released yet, but I did it with the guitarist and drummer from this band, Speedball Baby. And it was the guitarist that introduced me to the people over at Tiger Style. It doesn’t have No New York on it; that was the first record I ever did; my songs on that were the first ones I ever did. We weren’t able to get those, so it’s the four albums I did after that. Most of them –all but one– were for the ZE label.
What were your feelings about recording No New York with Brian Eno?
As a producer, all he did was take us to the studio and had us set up. It was just recorded totally live in the studio, it wasn’t like he did any production at all. It could have just been called No Production, you know-- no one was thrilled with how it was recorded.
How did he first approach you about it?
James: All the so-called “No Wave” bands, I mean, that label didn’t even exist then, but there was a loft in SoHo called Artist’s Space that did a festival of all those bands that ended up on the No New York album and a bunch of other ones. This was around 1978. For a week we all played there, all the bands that would wind up on the record, plus Theoretical Girls, Terminal, Tone Death, some others, and he just came to these shows, slumming it. That’s where he got the idea, I guess. I knew him before that, through my manager, Anya Phillips, who was also my girlfriend. She had had an affair with him way back when. It was a fairly famous gig, because it was the gig where I attacked Robert Christgau. People always bring that up.
I’m sure we all still appreciate that.
Just you writers. Every writer who brings it up says how glad they are that I attacked him.
Let’s talk about your upbringing and early music. You were brought up Catholic, right?
Yeah, I was born in Milwaukee. I had a pretty typical middle class family. Both of my parents were working in education and I was kind of an…I learned to read at the age of three and I was a very quiet kid. Just stayed by myself and read a lot.
Your music lessons came by way of the nuns at the church?
Oh God! What I got out of that whole experience was almost like, it almost turned me against music. It was sooo boring, it was just reading music. My background is kinda different from a lot of other people in rock bands, just from the fact that I could read music. I didn’t have the normal thing of being in a garage band; I was just used to play piano by myself. After the nuns, I took lessons from an older guy in a music store, who taught me how to play standard tunes and a little bit of jazz. I didn’t really get the idea of improvising at that age.
Around the same time, I started to listen to rock’n roll, which was around 1965. That was the high point of rock’n roll, it was just such great music then, like the Rolling Stones and the Animals. Also more garage bands like ? and the Mysterians, the Young Rascals, a lot of white soul. They would have these CYO dances, Catholic Youth Organization affairs, but it was still great. It was these huge gyms full of a thousand kids, and they knew all these cover songs. They knew every song by the Young Rascals! And then a little later after that, around 1968, I discovered jazz, after the hippie era started.
What kind of Black music did you come across growing up?
Well the stuff that was on the radio in the sixties: Motown, James Brown, not too much Stax/Volt stuff. I wasn’t that into it…Actually, I heard all that stuff, but I was more into the white stuff that was influenced by black stuff. English bands like the Animals, the Yardbirds, Spencer Davis Group, also white soul like the Young Rascals, Mitch Ryder. That grabbed me a lot more when I was thirteen years old. At that time, all the black stuff was played on Top 40 radio too. You heard all kinds of stuff, some stuff like softer soul like Barbara Mason I used to like, or “That’s Life” by Frank Sinatra. It was all on the radio.
What kind of jazz were you getting into at the time?
John Coltrane was the first one. I got into the real avant-garde stuff like Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, but also Monk, Mingus, Charlie Parker, the real classic bebop. Monk probably made the greatest impression on me at the time. I just started trying to play piano just by myself, and learned a few Monk tunes. I developed this style sort of a cross between him and Cecil Taylor.
Did you find it difficult to pick up their style? Especially someone like Monk.
No. Not really. I really just heard music in a different way and had a real affinity for it. I just learned some songs off of sheet music. No one would teach me at first, so I developed my own approach. I just threw away the chord changes and started playing these open chord voicings with the left hand and going from there. I started going to this music conservatory in Milwaukee but no one there could really related to my piano playing, they were teaching a very conservative style of playing. There was a real gulf between me and the teachers and the rest of the students there-- only one or two could play with me. I never really wanted to learn to play normal jazz piano and learn all the "cocktail" tunes. I like playing those sorts of tunes, but not in the normal style, like learning all those voicings, and doing typical accompaniment. That’s why I switched to sax, so I didn’t have to worry about being in the rhythm section anymore.
Around that same time you started playing in a rock band as well?
It wasn’t my band, but I was in this band called Death. It was a real Stooges/ Velvet Underground band. It started out being all covers of Stooges songs, and then progressed into our own material. There was a piano player in that band that was like a cross between John Cale and Cecil Taylor who was really excellent. The singer of that band was over six feet tall and had all this silver glitter in his hair and on his face. It was right at the height of glam-rock, but it was at the wrong place at the wrong time. If it had been a few years on, the band would have probably made it.
It must have been tough coming out of Milwaukee.
Yeah, the people there at the shows just didn’t comprehend it. Especially because some of the gigs we did were high school and graduation kinds of parties. Actually the singer, who was a close friend of mine, ended up killing himself. That was one of the things that pushed me into leaving Milwaukee for good. I still had a free jazz band there though.
Did you get to see some of those bands when they came through, such as the Stooges?
Yeah. I saw the Stooges a couple of times. I saw them at this festival out in some field in Wisconsin, it was the Funhouse band. Incredible, Iggy writhing across the stage, jumping into the audience. People like Lou Reed would come through too. I was really into Sun Ra too, and used to drive down to Chicago a lot to see him play.
When did you head to New York?
I moved to New York the last week of 1975.
What was going on then?
Oh man, there was so much going on. CBGB’s scene was just getting started and there was still a real thriving jazz scene happening at the time. When I moved here, my real ambition was to make it as a jazz musician, but when I got here, I realized that wasn’t going to happen. I just didn’t fit into the jazz scene at all. My whole attitude, my own personal style and everything was more out of rock’n roll. Plus, there was just so much competition-- there were so many people that could technically play the saxophone much better than me.
Were you studying with David Murray at this time?
Yeah, but it was just a few months. It was a funny thing, because the first lesson I took from him, one of the first things he said to me was “You’re gonna be a rock 'n' roll guy, you’re gonna be a rock ’n' roll star. You’re not going to be a jazz musician.” And at the time I didn’t believe him.
And lo and behold! I guess this was still the age of the jazz loft scene?
That whole loft jazz thing was still going on then. I put together a little group and did some gigs and stuff. I never really got anywhere with it. I was even doing audience confrontation back then at the jazz gigs too, which freaked people out!
I’ve been to a couple shows here myself, and I’m sure it hasn’t changed much in twenty-five years.
Yeah! Especially in these lofts, all these people just sitting on the floor. One of them you actually had to take your shoes off and just sit there.
You were also associated with the Black Artist Guild out of St. Louis at that time?
That was one of the first gigs I went to when I moved down here. They had this theatre on Third Street and Avenue C where some of them were living, like Joseph Bowie, and Charles ‘Bobo’ Shaw. It was basically their group and then they would have these other guys come up and play, guys out of St. Louis like Luther Thomas. They played there once a week. Actually, how I got to meet ‘Bobo’ Shaw was when I used to play in Washington Park, when I was between places to live. And I’m out there, playing one of his songs, and he walked by and heard me playing it. Later he asked me to transcribe some of his songs off of this album of his so that he could send them in to get published, like for BMI. I played a little with him and Joseph Bowie. I tried to go in and play a lot of jam sessions too. Some people, some of these guys, I almost got in physical fights with.
I know that at the start of the 1970s, there was a heavy black militancy to some of the spots, to where you couldn’t even attend if you were white.
There was a certain racial tension, definitely. Some black guys were really against white musicians, but just a few of them. But I myself didn’t like the attitude of the white musicians. A lot of them to me were just slavishly trying to act black and talk black and it was just kinda ridiculous.
So what happened between leaving the jazz scene and starting up the Contortions?
What you have to understand is that at the same time I was doing loft gigs I was also hanging out at CB’s and Max’s [Kansas City] too. I was already in the two worlds. My first girlfriend, who I met after I had been here for a month, was the drummer for Mars. Nancy. Actually, I had only been here a week, and I met her at a New Year’s Eve gig of the Ramones and the Heartbreakers. So she was also an artist that lived down in Tribeca, so she started taking me out to all these artist bars down there and I started hanging out with some people on that scene.
At one point you were living with Lydia Lunch as well?
we had met before at CBGB’s and then one day she just knocked on my door and we ended up living together for a year, although she wasn’t really my girlfriend. She had all these little songs she had written, some of these Teenage Jesus songs. I helped her along and that was sort of my first thing on the rock scene.
What else was happening?
Well, there were all those bands like Television, Talking Heads, Heartbreakers, and they were all playing for bigger audiences. They were all getting signed right around the same time.
Most of the future “No Wave” players saw all that and then started their own things in reaction to that?
Yeah, we liked those bands, but I think me and most of the other people from the so-called other “No Wave” bands…well, everyone in the media thought they were so fresh at the time, but to us they were kind of conservative. In the end, those bands were just doing really good rock. The thing that was good about them was that each band had their own concept and was unique unto themselves. It wasn’t like the English punk scene, where it was really all imitation. You know, the Ramones, really, and everyone had their own individual sense of style and they were really interested in putting together a band that was a whole package. The whole style of it was just as important as the music.
So I liked that idea, but there wasn’t anyone doing anything new to me: A) there was very little that was influenced by any black music which was to me was the kind of music that I was into, and B) there wasn’t anyone doing anything that was really musically radical. They were basically using typical chord changes, and I wasn’t interested in that at all. Simple rock and roll chord changes, I didn’t want to do that.
How did you first form the Contortions?
Well, Lydia kicked me out of Teenage Jesus after awhile. She had this severe, minimalistic sound in mind, and after a while, the sax wasn’t minimal enough, so she wanted it out of there. So I just decided I would put together something of my own that would throw in all the music that I liked, and try to find something that would appeal to the audience at CBGB’s or Max’s, to basically a white rock audience. By that time, I had really been into James Brown for awhile. He had this one record, Super Bad, which has this really free sax solos. It’s one of his funkiest records and then it has these really free sax solos over it. It’s a guy named Robert McCollough playing them. They’re real Albert Ayler-ish sax solos, almost Sun Ra-ish. I sorta took that as the basic principle but I threw out the chord changes instead.
There is this tonal center, it’s not like my music is atonal, but instead of chord changes I wrote a part for each instrument, starting from the bass and building it up from there. Interlocking rhythmic melodies. It’s very structured. Songs are actually all written out in charts, although most of the people I was working with then didn’t read music at all; each instrument has a written part but they were free to interpret it. One thing from the No Wave bands that influenced me was the slide guitar sound that Mars and DNA were using.
Another aspect of putting together the early band was that you looked for people that looked like someone you would want in your band. And if they couldn’t play an instrument, you would try to find something for them to play. That was how I found Pat Place and Adele Bertei, because Adele was basically a singer, but she had never played keyboard before. Pat might have played in one other band, but she hadn’t been playing for very long at all. It actually took me awhile to finally decide that I was going to be the singer. For the early part of the Contortions, I had some girl singers; one was the girlfriend of Alan Vega, she had a little homemade synthesizer. None of that worked out, so I decided, well, if Richard Hell could sing then I could sing.
Your confrontation of the audience became a huge part of the Contortions’ appeal back then. I seem to hear about that more than the music itself.
The confrontation thing came about…it wasn’t a planned thing, but I had always wanted a theatrical aspect to it, though. That was one of the things that I objected to with jazz: it was a lot of people that didn’t make any attempt to do anything interesting on stage. They would just turn their backs to the audience or whatever.
The Contortions first gig was December of 1977 at Max’s, but it wasn’t the No New York band, I had a Japanese rhythm section. The bass player, Reck, was also in Teenage Jesus. They went back to Japan soon after and became Friction, which became well known there. James Nares was playing this plastic kid’s guitar. Pat and Adele too; that was a much more “No Wave” sounding band. That only lasted two months though.
After that I got Jody Harris and Donnie Christensen from this band called the Screws. They were this sort of an R&B and soul band that used to play in Tribeca, and I used to sit in with them. George Scott was strictly a rock bass player and not that accomplished. I basically taught him his parts note by note, as he never played any funky bass before he joined the Contortions.
It was one of those first gigs that I did with that rhythm section that has some notoriety to it. We used to do all these artsy type things. It was this benefit for an art magazine, X Magazine, and it was held in some loft-type space. There was no stage, and all these people were just sitting on the floor, which is the one thing that infuriates me. So I just decided I was going to go out and there and make them…stand up at least. So I waded out into the audience and started grabbing people, pulling them up on their feet, and making them get up; some of them wouldn’t budge, and I got a little forceful, so that’s how the whole thing started.
Did it get out of control for you?
Well, yeah. Did you read the article in the Village Voice this week? That was one of the wilder gigs. The band wasn’t that crazy about it, it started getting a lot of publicity, that aspect of it. People started coming just for that. I didn’t ever do it outside of New York, but it got to be a choreographed routine, where I would do it on the beat. I would jump into the audience and slap someone on two and then I would get back onto the stage on three, and then back and forth…it only lasted a few months at its height, that routine. I was getting tired of it, the surprise of it was gone and people just expected it.
It just became a shtick?
Well, violence is a form of expression. I was just trying…people in New York are so cool you know? The audience, these people…I didn’t see any other way to get a reaction out of them cuz they were so determined not to react. I just felt, that I had to do this in order to break through their defenses. Also, it was fun. I got a big kick out of provoking people, I don’t deny that. It got to a point where I could see some sort of legal consequences that I didn’t want to deal with. It was getting to where it would be like you said, a shtick. And then this one guy slugged me and knocked me out [points to his right eye] with a ring on or something, and I kinda realized that he could have seriously hurt me. I decided to cool it. That was about the time I got signed to ZE, as the Contortions, as well as being asked to put out a disco record. He just said, “Do a disco album. Here’s the money.” So I got more serious.
Were you familiar with the disco movement?
Of course, you couldn’t help but be familiar with it. It was so huge, it was everywhere. That was the height of disco, you couldn’t not hear it. I went to the Paradise Garage a couple of times. Actually, we played as the Contortions once, we did a show with Richard Hell, Contortions, and Teenage Jesus. We had this huge confrontation with the owners. They didn’t want to pay us because no one showed up. They brought all these menacing black muscle bouncer guys, and at one point they were closing in on me. So I broke a beer bottle and slashed my face with it cuz I wanted them to think I was so crazy that they would leave me alone. Which they did.
A lot of rock people had a knee-jerk hatred of disco, which I never really shared. There were things I liked about it, although there was a lot that I hated too. It was so bleached out and whitened, but I could see that it was taking the real funk rhythms and really straightening them out, submitting them to this tyrannical beat. I liked the idea of this hypnotic music that would literally put people into a trance. I thought that was cool.
Did the Contortions songs start to expand as well as a result?
The original Contortions songs were never longer than three minutes. But later on, my later bands, we played longer, because I started letting my people play solos. Another guy I got into around that time that had a big influence on me was Fela Kuti. Flaming Demonics songs are sort of my attempt to write in his style.
What were the reactions of this very obvious trait of your music, which is you being a white man doing Black music?
A lot of people took songs like “Almost Black,” which were meant to be playful, and people took it real seriously. They failed to see the humor in it, I mean, yeah, it’s black humor, but it is humor.
I keep thinking of the Nick Tosches’ book, Where Dead Voices Gather [about minstrel singer Emmett Miller and the vague, shadowy lines between white and black performers at the turn of the century, each borrowing ideas from the other] in relation to you and what you were up to…
Yeah, it’s a great book. He’s one of my favorite writers. It made sense to me. If you are a white person doing black music, you have to come to terms with it, confront it in some way. You can just be an imitator, which a lot of white people do, or you can try to find something original in it. If you’re going to do that, you…have to accept your whiteness instead of just...a lot of those loft-jazz musicians just rejected their idea of being white and tried to be as black as possible, which didn’t ring true at all. It just made them look silly. They didn’t garner respect from black people for being like that. So I decided it would be much better to flaunt being white, which made much more of a statement at the time. Probably still does…
Was it better received then?
At that time in New York, there was a lot of racial tension in the air. A lot of the Black kind of street-type people had a very hostile attitude at that time towards any and all whites. You couldn’t miss it, it was very obvious. When I was in Milwaukee, I actually lived in the middle of the ghetto for a while. I used to sit in at these Black after-hours’ clubs, these hardcore places. Pimps would be passed out on the table after snorting coke all night and drinking whiskey, gambling and backgammon. I used to also hang out at this stripper bar, where almost all the dancers were Black, and I would hang out with these strippers a lot and their boyfriends and they were all pretty free and easy. I got along with them pretty well. It was no big deal that I was white.
But when I came to New York, there was much more of a racial separation here. There were a lot of people on the rock scene that were pretty racist too, they were throwing the word “n***er” around. I took a lot of shit from some people for bringing in Black music, much less liking it.
Were you ever accepted in the Black community?
No, not really. I never had much of a Black audience. There are Black people that like my music, but they were the more bohemian types. I never really broke through to a real R&B sort of audience. Although if they do hear it, they can hear where it’s coming from. I always felt that white people were my main focus. It’s not really a Black tradition that I’m going for, it’s the whole tradition of show business, of being an entertainer that I aim for really.
People like Jackie Wilson or Frank Sinatra. I really into Johnny Ray, who did the song “Cry” – he was the first white performer that was influenced by Blacks that broke through to a mass audience. There’s a whole show business thing that’s really been lost, and that’s what I identify with these days. More than the whole alternative rock scene, I have very little interest in it. I don’t listen to hardly any new music made in the last quarter-century.
What’s the last show you saw?
Little Jimmy Scott, probably. I don’t really go out much anymore.