This post was inspired by the most random thing – a quote from President Jimmy Carter, that being..
If you have a voice and an instrument, you are welcome in my home.
A lovely sentiment, right? My friend Frank Coleman posted that on Facebook, and I … being a cheeky fucker … responded with the video below, appended with the legend, “Mr. President, there’s a Mr. Branca here to see you!?...”
I’ve posted that particular video here a number of times, and it always makes me smile. I mean, yeah, sure, on a superficial level, it seems entirely absurd – watching the late Glenn Branca take a battered, long-suffering six-string to task like a man positively on fire in the name of untethered experimental noise ain’t exactly everyone’s cup o’ concrete, but there’s also something so completely beautiful about it.
As a musician, Branca could be a polarizing figure, although I’m fairly sure he felt more alignment with avant-garde conceptual artists than with comparatively conventional musicians. As I mentioned back on this post, I came to own a couple of his records by way of a big crate of LP’s undeservingly bequeathed to me by this hepcat named Arthur who was courting my mother, back in the mid-`80s (he claimed, at the time, that he was “going digital,” and had evolved beyond vinyl, or some ridiculous bullshit like that, and I happily obliged that evolution). It was a gift – albeit with an agenda – that I’d assuredly done nothing to genuinely deserve.
But while I immediately pounced on Arthur’s former copies of beloved albums by Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Fall, SWANS and Public Image Ltd., these oddball records like The Ascension and Lesson No. 1 by this enigmatic Branca figure were just, for lack of a better word, … confusing. I mean, they were certainly compelling, given the sheer expanse of enveloping sound they packed, but a wall of detuned electric guitars playing movements like an orchestra was invariably too heady a horse pill for me to digest, given my stubborn affinity for more traditional rock. I wouldn’t grow to truly appreciate Branca’s music for several years, largely prompted by name-drops and accolades from folks like Sonic Youth and David Bowie.
I think I genuinely decided to give his stuff another shake when I saw a few interviews with the man. I mean, not only was he this strangely hirsute, unshaven, and irascible badass, but he was also completely hilarious (his moments in Don Letts’ “Punk: Attitude” and the otherwise truly abortive “documentary” on No Wave, “Kill Yr Idols” are snide comedy gold). Like his contemporaries like James Chance, Suicide and Lydia Lunch, as well as obvious acolytes like Michael Gira and the late Steve Albini, Glenn Branca suffered no fools, made no compromises, and gave absolutely zero fucks.
I soon learned that, prior to recording and releasing the records I’d come to own via “Going Digital” Arthur, Branca had been part of the whole No Wave phenomenon, given his membership in a band called Theoretical Girls. I’d first become intrigued by the music of the deliberately user-hostile No Wave scene from reading about it, but actually tracking down the records, at the time (this was the mid-`80s, let’s remember) was no small feat. Fate fleetingly smiled on me, however, when I happened upon a long-neglected copy of No New York, arguably the quintessential primer on all things No Wave, curated and “produced” by self-appointed No Wave ambassador Brian Eno, while I was deejaying at my college radio station. Being that the station in question largely accommodated the stridently unwavering listening habits of classic rock retrophiles hopelessly addicted to a steady diet of the Allman Brothers, Joni Mitchell, and the Grateful Dead, it was safe to assume no one was going to miss the LP if I “borrowed” it in perpetuity. Sure enough, when I played its opening track on the air, that night – that being “Dish It Out” by the Contortions, featuring a positively splenetic explosion of saxophone insanity courtesy of James Chance – I believe listeners called in with death threats.
But Branca’s band, Theoretical Girls, didn’t make it onto No New York. Allegedly, Eno’s choice of who made the cut unwittingly drove a wedge into the No Wave community, given that inclusion on the record seemed to establish a sort of tenuous hierarchy. Given that Theoretical Girls were SoHo-based and not Lower East Siders like most of the other bands (in retrospect, a kind of ridiculous distinction, given their geographical proximity), Theoretical Girls were arguably even perceived as outsiders by the outsiders.
For the longest time, the only song I’d ever heard by Theoretical Girls – who also included Jeff Lohn, Wharton Tiers and Margaret Dewys – was a fittingly discordant number called “You Got Me.” Contrary to what one might assume given such a comparatively banal song title, “You Got Me” is not a romantic testament of any kind, but rather a frenzied admission of homicidal mania (“I’m really scared when I kill in my dreams”) that kicks off with a series of staccato bursts before settling into a pounding, jackhammer rhythm flanked by chugging guitars, jittery keyboards and Branca’s anxious bark. Suffice to say, it ain’t yacht rock, but hear it for yourself…
Being one side of a 7” single, the only official, self-issued release by the Theoretical Girls during their brief existence, “You Got Me” went onto be included on myriad punk, post-punk and no wave compilations, over the years, including great ones by Atavistic and Soul Jazz. I don’t think I even heard the flipside of the single, “U.S. Millie,” until more recently, and it is somewhat surprisingly nothing like its counterpart, largely abandoning Branca’s murderous guitar skronk for some stiff-backed, tinny keyboard doodling under Jeff Lohn’s bizarre poetry and a martial rhythm. Hear it for yourself…
In any case, other bits and pieces documenting the brief, noisy existence of the Theoretical Girls surfaced over time, not least Ericka Beckman’s 2010 documentary, “135 Grand Street New York 1979,” which featured footage of Branca & Co. (also in the guise of Branca & Lohn’s pre-Theoretical Girls band, The Static) playing in a cramped little space in – wait for it – 135 Grand Street. Here’s a tantalizing bit of that now. I believe the footage was first intended as part of a German television program…
Ever since first seeing that footage, I’d always meant to seek out more. I can’t remember when I first spied that clip of solo Glenn going bonkers in black n’ white at the top of this post, but I remember being struck that said explosive performance also happened on Grand Street, albeit a few blocks further to the west. I decided to go back to the scenes of the crimes.
The space at 135 Grand from Beckman’s documentary is today a concern called R. Swiader, a business that describes itself as a “gender-optional, Made in New York clothing line from designer Raf Swiader. It is his vision of a future when everybody feels at home in in their body, starting with their clothes.” If the R. Swiader folks are even remotely aware – let alone if they’d even care – that their space once played host to the racket-raising likes of Messrs. Branca, Lohn, Tiers, etc., they're not interested in discussing it, and there's no mention of it on their website.
The space that played host to Branca’s solo freakout, meanwhile, was at Jeffrey Lohn’s old storefront loft at 33 Grand Street. Lohn would allegedly use the loft as a performance space and invite other neighborhood envelope-pushers like Laurie Anderson and Tim Wright to hang out, watch stuff and be cool. About a decade later, that space would be re-imagined as a bar called Naked Lunch with a William S. Burroughs theme. It was hard to miss their signature metallic cockroach sculpture that hung on the corner of the building at the southwest intersection of Thompson and Grand.
Like all genuinely cool stuff in New York City, Naked Lunch closed in 2013, and was slated to become a more cloyingly chic endeavor (in keeping with the then-devolving character of Soho of the era) called the Regent Cocktail Club, but instead morphed into yet another transient-looking delicatessen. The metallic roach stuck around for several years before mysteriously vanishing during COVID.
Here in 2024, once again, the Theoretical Girls are an element from the past, mourned predominantly by a dwindling nation of record collectors and pedantic music nerds (although original editions of the “U.S. Millie”/”You Got Me” single are asking $150-$200 on eBay). I am unfortunately unfamiliar with the circumstances of the band’s dissolution, but certain sources have made vague suggestions about “external pressures and internal politics.” Make of that what you will.
Branca, of course, went on to cultivate a revered career as an avant-garde composer, continuing to make music until his death in 2016 from throat cancer. Jeff Lohn continues his pursuits in conceptual art and composition, but largely demurred from the public eye. Somewhat ironically, Wikipedia says that he's since moved from SoHo to the East Village. Keyboardist Margaret De Wys devotes her life to being a composer and sound-installation artist and her works have been performed in prestigious venues like MoMa and the Whitney Museum. She apparently lives between Upstate New York and Southeast Nigeria. Drummer Wharton Tiers went onto become a respected musician, audio engineer and producer, performing both as a solo artist and with Laurie Anderson, as well as producing albums by Sonic Youth, Das Damen, Helmet, Dinosaur Jr., White Zombie, Quicksand, Unrest, and Gumball, among many others. As a special note to this stupid blog, it should be noted that Tiers engineered Headkick Facsimile, the debut EP by my beloved Cop Shoot Cop.
In the ensuing years since Theoretical Girls’ fleeting tenure, there have been two distinct compilations devoted to them, strangely divvied up – like their lone 7” single – between Branca’s music and Lohn’s music, almost like they’re two different entities. Personally speaking, I find it hard not to project some hint of acrimony between Branca and Lohn as the reasons behind this arrangement. Regardless, Songs: `77-`79 on Atavistic covers Glenn Branca’s material, with eight suitably bracing tracks by both Theoretical Girls and The Static. Jeff Lohn’s take, meanwhile, is represented on Acute Records' Theoretical Record, a comparatively sprawling collection of tracks. For those who don’t like to get their hands dirty tracking down the physical manifestations of music, I should note that you can find both collections on Spotify. Of the two, only Theoretical Record can be found on Bandcamp. Being the dweeb that I am, I had to have physical copies of both.
While the sound quality on each of these releases bounces between varying degrees of what audiophiles would probably consider entirely untenable, I find both discs to be really exciting, and way more accessible than I’d been expecting, striking a compelling balance between bare-bones punk sneer and art-damaged downtown weirdness. Unsurprisingly, Branca’s tracks tend to be less conventional and more cacophonously pugnacious, but that was kinda his shtick. This is not to say Lohn’s songs aren’t equally challenging (Lohn’s instrumental diversion “Polytonal” is just as headache-inducing as Branca’s “Fuck Yourself”), but when Theoretical Girls lock in together and play as a cohesive unit, like on “Don’t Let Me Stop You,” “Lovin’ in the Red,” “No More Sex” and their Ramones-baiting titular theme, “Theoretical Girls – Live,” the end results can totally hold their own.
To walk up and down Grand Street today, though, with this music in my headphones, it’s hard to reconcile that it all happened here.
CODA: Having fleetingly bribed my approval via an avalanche of post-punk vinyl, “Go-Digital” Arthur did indeed end up briefly dating my mother, but I believe he may have harbored an affinity for certain stimulants that my mother just wasn’t down with, and their short-lived fling fizzled out. Mercifully, he never asked for his records back, although I strenuously doubt that he was ever able to fully replicate his collection on compact disc. I believe he has since passed away.
Recent Comments