Party Pauper: Alan Vega: Post-Punk Provocateur

Alan Vega live at Volksbuhne in Berlin, 4/23/07, originally uploaded by samulj.

Last year, I sort of happened into an interview with Alan Vega of Suicide. The interview became one of my favorites, one of those that was actually hard to write because it meant cutting up pieces of a very exciting transcript. You can read the article below.

Alan Vega: Post-Punk Provocateur

By: Liz Ohanesian

Published: November, 2007, The Rockit

Everything changed for Alan Vega sometime during the summer of 1978. He and Martin Rev had just finished "the tour from hell" opening for the Clash in the U.K. and returned to the country as headliners. They made it to Edinburgh, where Suicide was booked to play a "huge disco room" to a crowd of roughly 1000 people. The club was dark and the stage was low to the ground. Suicide played with the ferocity for which it was known and, somewhere around the fourth song of the set, something happened. Vega detected motion. He turned to his partner and said "Watch out, Marty, because here it comes. They're starting to move."

Vega prepared himself for the deluge of foreign objects he had anticipated would be thrown at the stage. Bottles, knives, these were the things that were often heaved at "the band that everyone loved to hate." Vega and Rev had been playing around New York to varying degrees of notoriety for a few years at this point and were used to this. The scene in Edinburgh, however, was different. Vega looked up at the oversized disco ball hanging from the ceiling with its light refracting throughout the club and noticed that people were dancing.

"I think we're finished," Vega said to Rev.

Vega recalls that he wondered what he would do next. He wanted to "cause riots and do all this confrontational stuff" and people were dancing like they actually enjoyed the set. For the rest of the tour, Suicide's post-show dressing rooms were packed with young people "crushed up against the wall in the corner." Things had changed for the band.

"From a guerilla warfare provocateur to an entertainer overnight," Vega says of that pivotal moment in his career.

Almost 30 years have passed since that fateful tour and, since then, Vega has become something of a legend, both for his work as half of Suicide and as a solo artist. On his latest solo effort, Station, released by Mute Records last summer, the sculptor and musician continues to craft a sound of visceral beauty. Vega claims that this is one of the best albums he has created and, as a listener, it is hard to disagree with those sentiments. The follow-up to his 1999 album, coincidentally titled 2007, Station is classic Vega, with its repetitive phrases building up around sharp waves of noise and pummeling rhythms. Here, though, the ferocity of his voice and the complete havoc depicted in his lyrics are perhaps more relevant than ever.

"It's just the thing with this war, it just kept going on and on and on and on and it feels like it's never going to end," says Vega.

"How can you let go of something like that?" he asks. "It's just everywhere. It's everything."

Compounding the cloud of war that hangs over Station is the fact that Vega is now the father of a young son.

"Now, I'm not just caring for myself, I'm caring for my boy," he says. "It's made me crazier in a sense. Now I really care. In a way, I never cared before. That's what started really scaring me. That's why I couldn't stop doing this thing."

And so, songs like "Freedom's Smashed" and "Devastated" are not simply about the war in Iraq, but about all war, including those the future holds.

Vega acknowledges, though, that music does help him find some semblance of hope in the mire.

"That's probably why I do it," he says, although he adds that, with the passage of time, it has become more difficult for him to find hope in the music.

"I'm not sure if it's because I'm getting old and I've seen so much of my life and wondered if it's ever going to change," he says.

Station was recorded over the course of five years in the same studio that he has been using since 1987, and Vega took care not to rush the process. Throughout the time period, the album evolved into different shapes before settling into its permanent form.

"It takes over," says Vega of the artistic process. "It's like something from outer space or something from out of my hands, something larger than me…you become a puppet of your own thing."

In letting his art consume him, Vega has gone on to influence three generations of musicians and seems quite comfortable with his place in the post-punk pantheon.

"The first time I saw Iggy Pop, I was like, 'Holy shit!' My life changed right before my eyes," he admits. "I'm forever grateful for that, so when kids tell me [about changing their lives], it's great. It's the greatest compliment in a way. It's what you live for. Money can't buy that."

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