Above/below: front/back of the ‘Cheree’ Red Star/Bronze UK picture sleeve.

Above/below: Red Star/Bronze UK promo 1977/Demon UK promo reissue 1986

Listen: Cheree / Suicide
Cheree

Occasionally some courageous soul challenges Suicide as pioneers, claiming Silver Apples or Beaver & Krause soldiered through the unexplored industrial wild, wild west before them. Not to take anything away from either, but seriously folks. No one has ever combined menace and grace like Alan Vega and Marty Rev. Not then, not now.

Upon release in ’77, two copies of Suicide’s debut album came into the record shop I worked for. Needing nothing more than one look at the sleeve while checking in that distributor’s shipment, I decided then and there neither were finding their way to the racks. Instead, both came home with me that night, and immediately the second copy went into Howard Thompson’s pile, readying it for mailing off to London as part of our ongoing record exchange pact. Eventually signing Suicide to Bronze UK, Howard also had the guts to issue ‘Cheree’ as a 7″ A side.

Turns out the band were completely accepting of the hostility which awaited them at every stop of their first British tour, supporting both Elvis Costello & The Attractions then The Clash on that initial visit. Much attention has been focused through the years on the violent reactions Suicide successfully provoked, having everything, including an axe, hurdled at them during their sets.

Howard and Bronze, as undeterred as the band, pressed up the now very rare promo only live album, loosely known as 23 MINUTES IN BRUSSELS from two of those nights, complete with the cold blooded hatred the unsuspecting audience spewed, almost as powerfully relentless as Suicide themselves. Almost, being the key word.

Simply one of the greatest live albums ever recorded, additionally, it’s a glaring artifact of how transparent and mainstream media driven many punk audiences really were in ’78 and therein lay the proof.

No surprise that, other than John Peel, BBC Radio 1 wouldn’t touch ‘Cheree’. Bless them. Probably the last thing Suicide needed then or ever, was a hit single. Instead, they’ve graduated to higher forms of life just fine without one.

Above: Jukebox Tab signed by Alan Vega

Listen: Dream Baby Dream / Suicide 13 Dream Baby Dream.mp3

Wedensday was Alan Vega’s birthday. He’d kill me if he knew I was letting on, but Vega never goes online, so no worries. Having said that, he and his partner in Suicide, Marty Rev, always were, and still are, sonically light years ahead of the rest of the planet. Have you ever seen Suicide live? They are more powerful than ever. Do not waste the rest of your life. See them ASAP. Search youtube and check them out performing ‘Dream Baby Dream’ on The Midnight Special, making awesome TV back in ’79. Thanks Bruce Springsteen for rightfully honoring Suicide and performing this at concerts. Apparently his respect for Alan and Marty goes way back. Good one.

Above: Jukebox Tab signed by Alan Vega

Listen: Movement / LCD Soundsystem LCDMovement.mp3

2004 was the year when ‘Movement’ turned some sort of corner between me and LCD. I had remembered ‘Losing My Edge’ from ’01, really loved it for a minute, but was mostly annoyed that I didn’t have the 7″. Turns out I did, as it was recently rescued from one of the never ending ‘Need To Be Filed’ boxes.

But ‘Movement’ was my first real favorite by James and his posse. Good and noisy, a bit tuneless, beautiful chaos, as The Psychedelic Furs were once described. Always did appreciate those occasional Mark E. Smith vocal moments too.

Listen: Daft Punk Is Playing At My House / LCD Soundsystem LCDDaftPunk.mp3

If ‘Daft Punk Is Playing At My House’ had been LCD Soundsystem’s debut, I’d have been worried. Well not really, but they should’ve been. As it turns out, the band were five years into their career, so the apparent novelty was absolutely tolerable. Let’s face it – the idea is good, it’s fun. I still play it often.

James Murphy gives Suicide props on stage, mentioning both Alan and Marty’s genius. Pretty accurate so far, and then he throws in a Scott Walker shout out. If the band weren’t so good live and established, I’d be suspicious of it being politically correct name checking to gain traction. My belief is it’s not. An honorable man, that James Murphy certainly appears to be, and one I’d invite over to play singles if the moment ever presented itself.

Listen: Wipeout Beat / Alan Vega
Wipeout

1983, the year before Howard Thompson offered me my first real job doing A&R for Elektra, I was finishing an electrical engineering degree at RIT in Rochester. I was part of a popular local punk band and apparently a good candidate to anchor a two hour weekly show on the town’s AOR station. The program was called ‘Import/Export’. The point being to play all the very happening music the college and underground kids were devouring and giving the station a touch of needed cred, as well as allowing them to sell spots to local clubs promoting those bands as they passed through town, and charging the labels for some time buys on these releases without really having to play this uncommercial music during the earlier hours, when people actually listened. I was thrilled and should have appreciated it more, as no one has ever offered me a similar opportunity since.

When visiting town last year, I gave the station a listen. It’s an interesting, but sad, time warp, still playing ‘Iron Man’, Styx, J. Geils Band, things I can’t even remember now that dropped my jaw when they came on, a playlist that recently put some of the employees responsible for this programming out of jobs. Oh well, they stifled music culture for long enough. My show, hidden at midnight on Tuesdays. was hosted jointly by Roger McCall, a more wonderful person you just will never meet.

Roger and I would play ‘Wipeout Beat’ weekly for months. Like Marianne Faithfull’s ‘The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan’, it constantly gets overlooked when the press sites early music that helped start electronica and dance are sighted. Produced by Ric Ocasek, as was Alan’s band, Suicide’s ‘Dream Baby Dream’, Roger and I would not answer the constantly ringing request lines as we blared this on 11, a high point of the evening for us always.

When I joined Elektra a year later, Howard and Michael Alago, who signed Alan to the label, introduced me to him and we became amazingly close friends quickly, closing Danceteria almost nightly with booker Ruth Polsky, visiting UK bands like Sisters Of Mercy, The Smiths or New Order, Joey Ramone, Arturo Vega, Mickey Leigh, Monte Melnick, Marina Lutz, Duane Sherwood, a then, unibrowed, Madonna, and of course Howard and Micheal.

With Marty Rev, his other half in Suicide, you can save yourself a lot of time and money by seeing one of their very occasional New York shows. You won’t need to spend either much time or money on going out again. They are so powerful, it’s almost unbelievable. How the likes of Beyonce etc. aren’t lining up to get Marty’s beats onto their new recordings is shocking. Why acts get out of bed in the morning trying to compete with Suicide is quite baffling to me.

Unfortunately, the reality is that a few years back, Roger was cruelly and needlessly murdered. His killers are still unfound. Given that he worked at the station I refer to above, WCMF, for something like 30 years, I heard he may have been the longest employed DJ at any US rock radio station, I’m shocked that, despite the large voice and influence WCMF had in that market, they didn’t use it to bring any attention or help to finding the people who did this, not stopping until justice was served. But no, only more archaic music numbly being broadcast as though nothing had happened.