By the end of 1980, after 10 years waiting for the world to catch up with them, things were looking bleak for Suicide. The pioneering New York electronic project of keyboardist Martin Rev and vocalist Alan Vega had released a sinister self-titled debut in 1977; the album was met by hostility from crowds and mocked as “puerile” by Rolling Stone. Playing on tour with Elvis Costello, the Clash, and the Cars, they’d been pelted with shoes, coins, and even knives. ZE Records had backed May 1980’s glitzier follow-up, Suicide: Alan Vega and Martin Rev, putting the duo in the expensive Power Station studios with the Cars’ Ric Ocasek on production. But the label had hoped for a dance-pop record, telling Ocasek to think of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” for reference, and Vega felt it underperformed. “I was on the way out,” he later told NME.
In fact, Vega was about to enter a new chapter. “I had always wanted to do a rockabilly record,” he claimed in the 2004 biography Suicide: No Compromise. He’d do so with his November 1980 solo debut Alan Vega, assisted by guitarist Phil Hawk, before recruiting a full band for 1981’s Collision Drive. Compared to Suicide’s groundbreaking early work, these more conventional-seeming albums are less often revisited. Sacred Bones’ new joint reissue prompts their reappraisal as complex, fascinating records that offer a better understanding of Vega himself.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Alan Vega continues Suicide’s interest in minimalist instrumentation and linear structures, but trades Rev’s avant-garde electronics for Hawk’s more digestible, Eddie Cochran-esque guitar. The easy charm of tracks like “Jukebox Babe” reveals that, despite his antagonistic persona, Vega had some commercial aspirations—he’d written the song to be a hit, breaking the French Top 10. The album’s devotion to rockabilly, name-checking its progenitor Johnnie Ray on “Jukebox Babe,” also lays bare what an important ingredient the style was to Suicide. Publicly believed for most of his life to have been born in 1948, Vega was actually 10 years older, coming of age during the ascent of Elvis Presley and Gene Vincent. Listening to Alan Vega, these rockers’ influence on his signature howls and croons becomes obvious.
But Alan Vega is deceptively weird—designed, Vega would later tell NME, to “extend the boundaries of rockabilly.” The mixed acoustic and electronic percussion, like the tinny drum machines and handclaps on “Speedway,” produces an odd texture and sense of space. Lyrically, it’s a dreamlike collage of fantasy, horror, and Americana: “Ice Drummer” drifts between a Chevy-driving werewolf and a “little drummer boy frozen by fear,” heralded by a military drumroll. There is also some of Suicide’s defining tension, from the eery “Kung Foo Cowboy” to the “burned-out maniacs holding dynamite” on “Fireball.”
The deluxe Alan Vega LP seeks to illuminate Vega’s process with demos of all songs except “Jukebox Babe.” Most are disappointingly close to the final versions, except for a striking draft of closing ballad “Lonely”: The Alan Vega version features the sinewy croon honed on Suicide tracks like “Dream Baby Dream,” but on the meandering, almost double-length demo, he sounds feeble—revealing how deliberately the man born Boruch Alan Bermowitz transformed to become rock star Alan Vega. The deluxe edition sleeve features pages from a notebook he’d used for song ideas and sketches of drum machine settings; one page outlines proposed tracks for “Ice Drummer,” envisaging male and female voices, saxophone blasts, and breaking bottles. Far more complex than the final recording, it suggests Vega had plans for less minimalist solo work—the sort he’d pursue on Collision Drive.
