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You won’t necessarily have heard of Adele Bertei: she was a member of experimental jazz-punk band the Contortions from 1977 and recorded the pop-house single Build Me a Bridge. But her memoir is an essential slice of New York’s bohemian pizza pie, and works in part because she is a relative unknown, not weighed down by her own cultural baggage.
Following a troubled, itinerant upbringing, she arrives in Manhattan in 1977 to find a city on its knees. The big apple was in the red, both literally (fires were a regular occurrence) and monetarily (there was a municipal debt crisis). But pre-Aids and post-Warhol’s avant garde grip, it was also a place that was creatively open.
Searching for her artistic self, Bertei throws herself into the alternative scene, and as she zigzags into future counter-culture icons, her writing recalls the hip, young gunslinger era of the NME: Joey Ramone “resembled an anorexic hermaphrodite, replete with sex appeal”; Alan Vega from Suicide is “Al Pacino dolled up as a gay hustler on 53rd and Third”. She starts hanging out with infamous music critic Lester Bangs and Pere Ubu member Peter Laughner, and her writing nails the deadly dichotomy of their pain and non-stop drinking and drug taking. They are “acutely sensitive to the beauty and terror of life and time,” she writes, “constantly reaching for a blanket of numb to dull the sting of the night.”
Bertei’s own creative awakening comes via the “no wave” music scene that eventually birthed Sonic Youth, which she describes as being like “Dada brutalism” and a “negation of every way that had come before”. Intrigued (and repelled) by the sounds she hears, she joins the Contortions on keyboards. Band leader James Chance is a provocateur who would sometimes leap out and slap audience members. Revered A&R man Clive Davis (who signed Janis Joplin and Aretha Franklin) comes to see them and bolts after one discordant song.
But the challenging nature of the music was an expression of a darker collective reality. “I looked around the club at the kids like me,” Bertei writes, “we all seemed so young, vital curious and cocky … life had already beaten the hell out of us and now, we were beating back.” Bertei’s own childhood was shadowed by her stepfather’s physical abuse and mother’s schizophrenia. “We all tended to operate on automatic when it came to dealing with … past hurts, ramming any pain down into the deep,” she writes.
Bertei shows how femaleness and queerness were still barriers to entry. Although things were slowly changing (the no wave scene featured many bands with female members), the sexism and homophobia of the music industry was undeniable (“Gayness and the appearance of gayness was verboten”). She rejects femininity, developing a persona – a “tough boy gamine with an attitude” – which at every turn is questioned. “Musiking girls were not supposed to be outspoken or wild like our rock and roll brothers,” she writes. Through relationships with photographer Nan Goldin and designer Anya Phillips she attempts to expand her personal parameters, only to have any revelations squelched by drink and drugs. “Emotional intimacy terrified me,” she writes, “I was afraid I’d be discovered as the broken hearted, unloved girl lurking inside my skin.”
Eventually, the spread of heroin, emergence of Aids and gentrification conspired to kill no wave (“artists not savvy or moneyed enough to buy properties were forced out”). And if the energy of a wildfire burns through the beginning of the book, it loses spark as the focus shifts. Post no wave, Bertei is no longer at the heart of the action, merely a witness to subsequent cultural moments. A series of near misses and almost-weres (she has a screen test for cult classic Times Square but doesn’t get cast; is briefly in competition with Madonna with her first solo single; works as a personal assistant for Brian Eno but doesn’t make music with him) mean the memoir fades out slowly – just like the scenes she lived through. Regardless, her vivid, visceral account is essential reading for anyone with even a passing interest in alternative music.
