Wednesday June 09, 2004

BLANKER GENERATION. I'm sure there's more than one reason why the death of Robert Quine bothers me this much.

I didn't know the guy, but I would often see him around the East Village back in the 70s and early 80s. He was usually wearing The Uniform: motorcycle jacket, frayed black jeans, and Keds. His minor variation was a nearly bald pate and thick, black-framed glasses. (He also had a splay-footed, schlubby walk, not unlike that of Robert Ludlam, whom I also often saw walking those streets.)

I saw him play with the Voidoids twice: once opening for Patti Smith at CBGB-2, Hilly's ill-fated concert venue on 2nd Avenue (it's now the Orpheum, where I believe Stomp is still playing); once at the Paradise Garage disco, in a rare "new wave" night at which Teenage Jesus & The Jerks opened and drove everyone but me and about a dozen other freaks out of the room. "We're gonna play one more song because we're so great!" yelled Lydia Lunch.

Those of us on that particular fringe thought Lunch was harsh and interesting, but I don't think many of us would have made a case for her as a musician. But Quine actually praised Lunch's guitar playing; in fact, he produced a record for her and played on a few others. Quine had been to the Berkeley School of Music, and he was digging this chick that basically just beat on the strings.

I guess he knew, though, that technique was only worth having if it produced something worth listening to. If it was brilliant but produced something dead, it wasn't as good as something that was brutal but produced something alive. Richard Hell recalls:

Though Bob, of all the “punk” musicians, was the most musically sophisticated (unless you count [Tom] Verlaine who’d come in pretty close), as much so as anybody who ever played in a rock and roll band in fact, he still belonged beyond a doubt to the genre if you want to discuss that issue, by virtue of his anger and his musical values. He wasn’t interested in virtuosity but in feeling and invention.

Maybe that's why the news is especially sad to me. So much of what comes off the musical assembly line these days sounds like a late edition of what has come before -- usually a few months before. It seems nearly every band in America got the blink-182 guitar effects box several Christmases ago; I expect many of them are tired of it, but just can't bring themselves to put it away. It isn't really any easier to be derivative than it is to be original, but originality is a loss-leader and what you invite by indulging it is the heartbreak of rejection. For young people especially, that's a tough one.

It seems amazing then to contemplate that Quine and his mates actually courted rejection, producing something that seemed out of sync with what was considered "good" at the time. To a large extent, they won their battle -- now they're accepted as pioneers. But what equivalent to them now exists? I don't just mean something good -- a higher-class, more "rockin'" version of the same old -- I mean something wild.

I expect some kid somewhere is doing something like that. I just hope we'll get to hear him, or her. And I certainly hope he or she reaches a happier end than Quine.
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