Dream Baby Dream Suicide by Kris Needs

Author:Kris Needs [Needs, Kris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78323-535-3
Publisher: Music Sales Limited
Published: 2015-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

After Suicide’s jukebox single had placed them in the firmament of downtown’s burgeoning scene, their presence was consolidated by a first major press interview, which appeared in the second issue of New York Rocker, the monthly broadsheet started that January by former Blondie manager Alan Betrock (Suicide would rarely be acknowledged by the recently launched Punk magazine). By that time, I was writing for Zigzag, the original UK fanzine started by Pete Frame in 1969, which inspired a legion of titles created by fans who assumed, rather than hoped, that their readership was as crazy about the music as they were, and felt under-served by the traditional rock press. Pete got me to write about the new punk bands, which he felt wielded a similar untamed energy to the unfettered rock’n’roll which electrified his own teenage years in the fifties. Inevitably, he attracted like-minds from around the world, such as the mighty Greg Shaw of Bomp!, and Betrock when he started The Rock Marketplace in 1973. Soon I would be covering the UK’s own punk movement for New York Rocker but, in May 1976, was intrigued to encounter the name Suicide again, nearly four years after Roy Hollingworth’s Melody Maker review.

It appeared that Suicide were still very much alive and kicking. In the New York Rocker piece Lisa Jane Persky described the “sexual sadomasochistic rock” which had “a devastating effect on everyone left in its wake”. It’s good, myth-creating stuff, setting a lifelong precedent as Alan is called on to recount the missiles hurled at him, including punches, cigarettes, bottles and chairs, and he talks about a girl who spent a whole Suicide set smashing her head against the wall before collapsing in a pool of blood. Alan came to check she was okay, then sang to her on the floor, but she got up and ran into the wall again. He compared the days of Suicide clearing rooms to their now growing audiences. This was also the first time Alan revealed his affection for New York City and its inhabitants. From now on, he would regularly expound about his city as it changed around him. These days, as he recently told me, Alan is quite disappointed about the paucity of raw materials for his art to be found on today’s clean streets.

Now Suicide needed to get their own art on record. They had recorded demos including ‘Rocket USA’, ‘Keep Your Dreams’ and ‘Ghost Rider’. The latter was Alan’s self-described “apocalyptic vision of the future”, inspired by his love of the Marvel Comics phantom motorcyclist. It’s probably the song most associated with Suicide. “I was totally into Ghost Rider in those days,” he recalls. “Ghost Rider was my man.”

The image of the eternally damned ghost rider steering his red-eyed phantom cattle herd through the thunder-stricken clouds was first conjured in the song, ‘(Ghost) Riders In The Sky: A Cowboy Legend’, written by country artist Stan Jones in 1948. The following year saw the tune strafe charts and radio in a stream of cover versions by names such as Vaughn Monroe and Roy Rogers.

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