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| Jean-Michel Basquiat in Sara Driver’s Boom For Real: The Late Teenage Years Of Jean-Michel Basquiat |
In the first instalment with author, critic and artist Lucy Sante we touch on transitioning and two of the documentaries she has been interviewed for - Andrew Rossi’s The Andy Warhol Diaries and Sara Driver’s Boom For Real: The Late Teenage Years Of Jean-Michel Basquiat. William Burroughs and crime novels, Whit Stillman and Steiff animals, writing lyrics for The Del-Byzanteens led us to music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman.
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| Lucy Sante with Anne-Katrin Titze and Ed Bahlman: “99 Records was the most perfect single-model representation of the zeitgeist in my youth.” |
From there we go back in time to Ed producing and mastering Bush Tetras’ iconic Two Many Creeps (99-02), Lucy’s memories of 99 and her friendships with Pat Place and Cynthia Sley (Bush Tetras), Richard McGuire (of Liquid Liquid, 99-07 EP, 99-09 EP, 99-11 EP), and the late inventive photographer Barbara Ess (of Y Pants, 99-03 EP7); going to see X-Ray Spex with Jim Jarmusch; living in the same building as Allen Ginsberg and Denise Mercedes; Dennis Bovell and Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, and being turned on to the Sex Pistols by Lux Interior (of The Cramps) when they both worked at the Strand Book Store in 1977.
From Upstate New York, Lucy Sante joined us on Zoom for an in-depth conversation.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Hello! Good to meet you!
Lucy Sante: Hi, good to meet you!
AKT: I love your background - lots of books.
LS: I know! For certain kinds of Zooms I have to move upstairs because it’s too much for people. I joked that it’s a pre-paid background, but this is my basement office, where it’s much cooler than it is upstairs, for one thing.
AKT: Are you Upstate?
LS: I’m in Kingston, New York.
AKT: You said you just came back from Portugal, how was it with Europe in a heat wave? [The conversation took place in late July]
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| Lucy Sante: “I saw X-Ray Spex the one time they played at CBGBs.” |
LS: But Portugal was not! Temperatures reached a max of about 75 every day; it was beautiful. I was in Porto.
AKT: I love Sintra. It has this wonderful garden that was visited by Lord Byron and since then falls in and out of disrepair.
LS: I went to Sintra years ago.
AKT: We never met before this Zoom, but I saw you in a number of documentaries, Andrew Rossi’s Andy Warhol Diaries for example. Why are you putting your hand in front of your face?
LS: Oh, you know, because I did that interview and completely forgot about it. Usually when I do a documentary I completely forget about it. I don’t see 90% of them. That one - I did it and six months later I was transitioning. By the time it came out, I had been transitioning for a year and suddenly, you know, the Ghost of Christmas Past was on the screen! And I almost fainted. It was horrifying!
AKT: You are barefoot and in shorts! You commented in the series how Andy Warhol represented gayness in the Sixties and if there had been a picture in the dictionary it would have been of Andy Warhol. You also said in the Rossi documentary how Warhol was “conscious of being unattractive.” I was struck by that phrasing.
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| Lucy Sante: “I was living on 101st Street with Jim Jarmusch and we walked all the way down to CBs to see that show.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
LS: It might not be central to everybody’s experience, but in his case was very important because he went on to surround himself with beautiful people. And, you know, among the first films he made were The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys (1964) and The 13 Most Beautiful Women (1964). And he wore this wig and it’s a theme that is constant in his life.
AKT: I never thought of Andy Warhol as unattractive.
LS: But he did.
AKT: Right, he did. I thought the word “conscious” in a way fixes it, as something that immovably stayed with him. By the way, do you have any relation to Barbie?
LS: I had no relation to dolls at all. I was strictly all about stuffed animals.
AKT: Did you have Steiff?
LS: I had many Steiff animals. My grandmother bought me literally dozens of Steiff animals.
AKT: Which ones did you have? I also had tons! Do you still have them?
LS: I still have quite a few, yeah. And the ones I don’t have are probably in my ex-wife’s attic. I have a lion and a lioness and a fox on my dresser top in my bedroom. I had a polar bear, a reindeer, a tiger - I had many, many animals.
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| Boom For Real: The Late Teenage Years Of Jean-Michel Basquiat poster |
AKT: They are the best. I have mine in a cedar chest in the room you see behind me.
LS: That’s probably a good idea. Did you ever see these photographs - I have a friend in Paris who has put out a book of these photographs of the men who dressed up in Steiff polar bear costumes and went from town to town selling Fanta in Germany in the thirties when Germany banned Coca-Cola?
AKT: No! Tell me more!
LS: These costumes kept up and they were still using them in the Sixties. So you have thirty years of these bear costumes. And sometimes in the Thirties you’d see them with a mayor and the mayor is wearing a top hat and the bear is wearing a top hat.
AKT: Wow, those animals last! Mine look the same way they did in my childhood. What’s the name of the director of Barcelona?
LS: Whit Stillman?
AKT: Yes, I brought my big Steiff owl to meet with Whit Stillman because in his film Metropolitan, one of the characters has a little Steiff owlet that is abandoned on Park Avenue. So I came with my owl to the interview and Whit Stillman was jealous, because he only had the small one. All very silly!
LS: Ha!
AKT: Sara Driver’s Boom for Real was another film I saw you in. You mention that your writing overlapped with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s because you were both reading William Burroughs and crime novels at the time!
LS: That was the zeitgeist, yeah. Even as we were going to Ed’s record store for the records. 99 Records was the most perfect single-model representation of the zeitgeist in my youth. I mean, it seems like every band that he put out on record were people in my immediate social circle. It was our hometown.
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| Lucy Sante to Ed Bahlman: “I think the last time we saw one another, I bought a copy of Pure Rankin by Horace Andy from you!” |
AKT: I think I read somewhere that you wrote lyrics for Del-Byzanteens?
LS: Yes.
AKT: Can you quote some lyrics for me?
LS: No! Ha! Well, okay, there’s one: The title track of their album Lies to Live By - and I wrote the words for the title track. The refrain is: “If I only have one life, let me live it as a lie” which plays on a Clairol commercial from the Seventies that goes: “if I only have one life, let me live it as a blonde.”
Then I wrote another song for them. I have a memoir coming out about my transition, etc, it’s coming out in February, and I devote a whole section to that song called Girls’ Imagination, because now in retrospect I realize it was entirely about gender and transitioning and all that and I was not consciously aware of it at the time. Now it’s glaringly obvious.
AKT: I think Ed is ready, after this beautiful endorsement by you, to join us.
Ed Bahlman: Hello!
LS: Hello Ed, how are you?
EB: Very good to see you, Lucy!
LS: Very good to see you! I think the last time we saw one another, I bought a copy of Pure Rankin by Horace Andy from you! I don’t know why I have that exact memory printed in my brain, but there you go.
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| Whit Stillman with Anne-Katrin Titze's Steiff Owl Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
LS: Ha!
EB: But I wanted to get the dub in because people like David Byrne would come in, Ric Ocasek. He was taking anything that was on cassette.
LS: You were the house label for all my friends. To this day I’m friends with Pat and Cynthia from Bush Tetras and Richard from Liquid Liquid. I was very close to Barbara Ess. Until her untimely death. We were colleagues at Bard College. Your label was just like the neighbourhood label of all the labels. It was very very important to us.
EB: I’ve been mute all these decades and not talking about anything. I was even contacted by a National Arts reporter from The Washington Post; he came out to our place and left his card. Very strange, I didn’t know what he was doing.
AKT: It felt a bit too stalkerish.
LS: Yeah.
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| Anne-Katrin Titze's Steiff animals in the cedar chest Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
EB: A lot of that has been going on because I’ve been quiet. So when Dennis Bovell - remember him?
LS: Yes, I do!
EB: Slits producer, Island Records and all of that. When he was coming to BAM for a screening of Babylon, the 1980 movie, I said, this is my time, I’m going to come out, so to speak. So I told Anne-Katrin who was going to meet Dennis and the star [Brindsley Forde] of the film at BAM, that I’m going to come along and reintroduce myself in the music world. Anne-Katrin did a feature with me and Dennis Bovell on the film. And then Small Axe came out, Steve McQueen’s series.
LS: Oh, my god, I watched that five times!
EB: Brilliant, Dennis worked on that. He’s even in one of the house party scenes. As you said, the zeitgeist. I thought the whole thing would just disappear, the 1980s, late Seventies - everything would just go away. And it didn’t.
LS: Because the people don’t go away.
EB: I started to get worried when people like Pete Shelley, singer of Buzzcocks, died. A lot of people also disappearing.
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| Liquid Liquid Cavern 99 Records (99-11 EP), produced and mastered by Ed Bahlman Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
LS: We’re all pensioners now. Speaking of associations - We Are All Prostitutes - Mark Stewart just died. But We Are All Pensioners Now could be the next big record.
EB: “Everyone has their price.” The way 99 started had nothing to do with Glenn. Laura Kennedy came in saying hey Ed, there’s these English labels who want us to go and make demo tapes. This is after they had already performed a few times. I said that’s ridiculous. So I talked to Gina [Franklyn] and said: “Would it be okay to start a record label out of the store?” And she said “Go for it!” And then Glenn must have heard something and came around and said “Hey Ed, why don’t you start a record label?” You know how Glenn is, he had his ear to the ground.
LS: Sure.
EB: It was really Bush Tetra’s Too Many Creeps that spurred me on to do it when they couldn’t get anything on their own.
LS: You know, literally the first time I turned on MTV, I got the video of Too Many Creeps. And I thought, wow, this is going to be great! And then I never saw it again or anything much like it on MTV.
EB: They only showed it once?
LS: I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t watch MTV 24/7 but it was not in regular rotation.
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| Ed Bahlman’s 99 distributed the B-52’s first single Rock Lobster to Europe Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
EB: Having a record store also, I knew all the distributors. When the B-52's came in with Rock Lobster, I was able to sell it to Europe. Hundreds of copies overseas when nobody knew who they were. That helped a lot too.
LS: Wow, that was a big payday, I’m sure.
EB: Yeah and the British bands couldn’t get a show at Hurrah if they didn’t have their single at 99. Ruth Polsky and they all came in.
LS: Ah, Ruth!
EB: What else do you remember about 99?
LS: I remember its location. I remember that it was a few steps down from the street, I believe. I went into your store at least two or three times a week. And now I think too - wait, wasn’t there also clothing being sold there? Well, in the head I was in in those days, I didn’t even look at the clothing, I just went straight for the records. And you were friendly and approachable in a way that not every record store owner was. Like I said before, basically in your store I knew I could buy anything and I would like it. Because we were operating on the same wavelength. Which was of course the zeitgeist.
As I was telling Anne-Katrin, I have a memoir coming out in February. I remember I worked at the Strand Book Store for three years and one of my colleagues briefly in 1977 was Lux Interior [of The Cramps].
EB: Oh!
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| Bush Tetras Too Many Creeps 99 Records (99-02), produced and mastered by Ed Bahlman Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
LS: He was the first person to play me the Sex Pistols. Because where else would I have heard them? They weren’t on the radio, right?
EB: Right, they were banned on BBC.
LS: And they were not being played here at all.
EB: I met all those guys early on at the Speakeasy in London. Did you know Denise Mercedes?
LS: Yes I did! I lived downstairs from her. I lived in that building with Allen Ginsberg.
EB: I was at JFK at five in the morning trying to get one of those inexpensive TWA round-trip tickets and she showed up. That’s how we met. She was being flown over to audition as a guitar player for Rat Scabies when The Damned broke up. They had the audition at Speakeasy, that’s where I met Ari Up and Poly Styrene.
LS: Wow!
EB: Falcon Stuart, did you know him?
LS: No.
EB: He managed X-Ray Spex.
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| Ed Bahlman's 99 Records label Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
LS: I saw X-Ray Spex the one time they played at CBGBs.
EB: Exactly.That was great.
LS: I was living on 101st Street with Jim Jarmusch and we walked all the way down to CBs to see that show.
EB: Allen Ginsberg - I was over at the apartment many times through Denise Mercedes because Anne Gustavsson, the bass player, she was living there at the time with Peter Orlovsky and Ginsberg.
LS: Patrick Mack, who was their singer and their manager, were the first two people I knew who died of AIDS in like ’83. Very early.
Coming up - Lucy Sante on coming from Belgium, surviving school in Manhattan, dandyism, and the unattractive prospect of masculinity; her book Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation And The Promise of Water for New York City, and Nancy Buirski’s Desperate Souls, Dark City And The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy.
