It was, and remains, a stark contrast to their carefully coiffed contemporaries. He didn’t aim to look cool he just was cool. And if there’s a benefit to getting older, it’s the exponential rate at which you stop giving a fuck. He was well into his thirties by the time Suicide was playing their first shows. I think that has something to do with Vega’s age when all this started to happen. This sound was coming out of them no matter what. Suicide didn’t care if you liked them or loved them. Punk and metal encourage aggression, but we all go away friends at the end of the night. But since Suicide unleashed their 1977 debut album, that kind of feeling has been sorely lacking in the rock and pop landscape. The folks that were scaring the hell out of America’s parents with their hips and leather clothes and lascivious tunes. You’ll find that same sense of danger and mystery and sensuality in the work of many of the folks that influenced Vega: Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley, Link Wray. And so Suicide often had foreign objects thrown their way or stirred up a chaotic near-riot like the one documented on the infamous “23 Minutes In Brussels” recording.
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Some people didn’t know how to reckon with the relentless drive of “Ghost Rider,” the horror of “Frankie Teardrop,” or the melting beauty of “Dream Baby Dream” and “Cheree.” The static pulse of this music fused together by Martin Rev and given life by Vega turned some souls inside out. Powerful art can have a powerful effect, which Suicide kept seeing at their shows over and over again. Jumped right up and ran right into the wall.
Then she got up and she went at it again. I was singing to her on the floor and she just looked…she was bleeding all over the place, she’d split her head. Then she just started smashing her head against the wall and I tried to stop her. She got drunk and she was dancing and she got crazier and crazier as the gig progressed. Here’s Vega describing to New York Rocker writer Lisa Jane Persky about what happened at an early gig by his band Suicide: The effect was terrifying and capable of changing the entire mood of a room. He glowered at the audience and yelled at them when he wasn’t groaning and shouting and wailing through his songs of existential terror and blushing romance, backed up by an unholy racket of cheap drum machine beats and even cheaper synthesizer melodies. Especially when he was onstage, with a microphone in one hand and occasionally an eight-foot chain from a motorcycle in the other.