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sinceileftyoublog · 6 months ago

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Liz Lamere on Alan Vega and Her Solo Career: Whatever Happens, Happens

Liz Lamere; photo by Jasmine Hirst

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Liz Lamere's got a story to tell, and one that won't end any time soon. The former Wall Street lawyer and boxer and current singer-songwriter is also the widow and former creative partner of the late, great Alan Vega, the visual artist and vocalist of landmark proto-punk duo Suicide. Since Vega's death in 2016, Lamere has, in conjunction with Jared Artaud of post-punk act The Vacant Lots, worked to bring to light a wealth of unreleased material from Vega's vault.

After the release of 2017's It, the final album Vega recorded before he died, Lamere and Artaud discovered the material that would constitute the 2021 release Mutator. In 2022, they unearthed the songs that would be released this past May as Insurrection (In The Red). It hasn't been until now, however, where there's been a simultaneous awakening of all things Vega. In addition to Insurrection, Artaud co-curated "Cesspool Saints", an exhibition of Vega's fine art works, which opened two months ago at Laurent Godin's Gallery in Paris. Lamere, meanwhile, co-wrote Vega's biography with Laura Davis-Chanin, entitled Infamous Dreams: The Life of Alan Vega (Backbeat Books). (The foreword? By none other than Bruce Springsteen.) With a rich collection of songs waiting for ears--material that Lamere and Vega recorded and Vega meticulously documented between actually released Vega solo albums throughout the 90s and 2000s--it's become clear that Vega's backlog rivals of those like Prince and Arthur Russell, full of albums that are contextualized by what was recorded before and after them but that stand alone as cohesive statements.

Lamere; photo by Jasmine Hirst

At the same time as everything Vega-related, Lamere has finally found not just the time but the will to release her own solo records, an artistic career that Vega always encouraged but never was able to witness. Her songs are certainly different than Vega's in terms of subject matter and aesthetic, but Lamere credits Vega's approach to music-making--be spontaneous and fearless and realize that nothing is a mistake--for informing her artistic process. She started working on her debut, Keep It Alive, during COVID lockdown, and finished the album in mere weeks. Her follow-up, One Never Knows (In The Red), released last month, took a little bit longer to make, understandably when Lamere was working on Vega's biography and Insurrection all at the same time. Thankfully, Lamere was able to separate the entities, another thing she took from Vega. "It wasn't too difficult to compartmentalize because I wore so many different hats and did so many different things, like Alan," Lamere said over the phone last month. "Alan could be hyper-focused on visual art, and then hyper-focused on music and sound. They might be different sides of the same coin, but whatever he was focused on, he was so in the moment and heavily focused on that creation."

To really understand Vega's perspective on art and life, you have to go far back into the oft-ignored details that inspired Lamere to start writing his biography. Vega was, infamously, 10 years older than everyone thought; various articles incorrectly referred to 1948 as his birth year rather than 1938, confirmed when the 70th birthday release of his recordings was announced in 2008. The parents of the man born Alan Bermowitz were Jewish immigrants. His first wife, Mariette Bermowitz (née Birencwajg), is a Holocaust survivor from Belgium; they met attending Brooklyn College. Lamere credits such a close familial proximity to persecution as a reason for the trauma Vega felt, and also why he chose to not use his birth name as his stage name. But such closeness was also why Vega chose to sing about difficult topics in his music. "Alan was always hypersensitive to any type of oppression or challenging situations," Lamere said. "He had tremendous empathy. He wasn't doom and gloom but more readily shining a light." Out of college, Vega worked for the Welfare Department, eventually quitting because he felt the menial work he was tasked with doing didn't allow him to make a true difference in the lives of the poor. But the experience helped him understand how to secure funding when working with the Art Workers' Coalition, and from the New York State Council on the Arts to help found 24-hour artist-run multimedia gallery MUSEUM: A Project of Living Artists.

Alan Vega; photo by Walter Robinson

Vega possessed the ability to apply what he learned from one effort to another, and his mind was well-rounded. He actually enrolled in Brooklyn College not for art, but for astrophysics, having received a scholarship as a result of his building his own telescope(!) But one day, the head of the Art Department witnessed Vega sketching portrait drawings in the cafeteria and immediately recognized Vega's artistic brilliance and convinced him to study art. (Vega's portrait drawings appear in the video for Lamere's "King City Ghost".) Vega ended up studying with legendary artists like Kurt Seligmann and Ad Reinhardt. When substitute teaching a class for Reinhardt during his senior year, Vega assigned students a self-portrait to be turned in the next class, but instead of collecting them, he told the students to rip them up. "When he was telling me the story," said Lamere, "He said, 'You should have seen the look on these kids' faces!'" But Vega viewed art as, in the words of Lamere, "coming from a pure place of expression," not of preciousness, and one worthy of consuming your life. Vega met Martin Rev and formed Suicide in 1970, garnering notice for their wild live shows throughout the New York punk scene. After they released their self-titled debut in 1977, they toured with The Clash, an infamous time during which the crowd, unable to understand the Suicide's artistic vision, would throw switchblades at the band. "Alan was willing to be...out there front and center and put his life on the line, literally," Lamere said. "He believed so strongly that what [Suicide was] doing was breaking new ground and important in its own right."

Vega had been releasing solo albums for a decade before Lamere came in the picture; he met her while making 1990's Deuce Avenue, the record that returned to the beloved electronic minimalism of Suicide. Though the actual release of solo albums was sporadic, he and Lamere never stopped making music. "When we were in the studio together all those years, I was very much the type of person thinking about releasing albums, whereas Alan wasn't structured in that way," Lamere said. "His thought was, 'We're going into the studio to create sound, and whatever happens, happens...' Part of his process was he would just keep moving forward. Unless I said, 'Hit stop,' so we could put out an album of what we'd been working on right at [that] moment in time, he would keep evolving and moving forward on new material." Vega constantly wrote poetry in his notebooks, often using what he wrote for ad-libbed song lyrics; Lamere was actively involved in mixing their recordings. At the same time, Vega was a staunch documenter. He would burn a CD of what he and Lamere had worked on in the studio and note down changes he thought they needed to make to each song. Even the titles of the songs from Mutator and Insurrection came from his notebooks.

Insurrection artwork design by Michael Handis

The extent to which, upon being done with a song or an album, Vega moved on, proved to be extreme, and would have ripple effects on Lamere's solo career. The two, along with French director Marc Hurtado, would tour Europe after recording a solo album and perform the unreleased songs they'd recorded. ("The Europeans have heard a lot of this stuff before," joked Lamere about Mutator and Insurrection.) For the songs that had been released, Vega would rely on Lamere to feed him lines so that he could give the audience at least something recognizable. "I would be chanting little phrases, he would hear that, and he would riff on it, and the audience would be happy even though the lyrics [were] mostly completely different," Lamere said. "I learned to 'sing' because Alan never wanted to rehearse anything...I kind of learned a little bit how to project my voice." Meanwhile, upon hearing it for the first time, Vega didn't even remember "Nike Soldier", a track long-time engineer Perkin Barnes had digitized and Lamere chose for a split single with The Vacant Lots in 2014. Lamere's the opposite. "When we first started mixing [Insurrection], I could literally remember and envision the days in the studio I was laying down [those riffs]." But the ultimate story comes from when Springsteen, touring Devils & Dust, invited Vega to one of his shows, as he had been covering Suicide classic "Dream Baby Dream" during the encore. "[Vega] literally was sitting with Jesse [Malin], they're waiting for the show to start, and on the PA comes the song 'Dujang Prang' that he and I had done in 1995," Lamere said. "Alan turns to Jesse and says, 'This is really good, do you know who this is?' Jesse said, 'Alan, that's your song.' That's classic Alan: been there, done that, don't wanna hear it."

It was during the release of The Vacant Lots split single where Vega gave Artaud and Lamere his blessing to unearth songs from the vault. The single happened when Artaud reached out to Vega, sharing The Vacant Lots' cover of Vega's "No More Christmas Blues". The two men became fast friends, as Artaud, living in Brooklyn Heights a subway stop away from Vega and Lamere in Lower Manhattan, often visited. "Jared would come over here and sit and talk to Alan for hours about everything," Lamere said. "He had listened to every piece of music that Alan had pretty much ever done. He understood Alan's philosophy of creation and the minimalism and the existential philosophers that Alan had studied." As for Lamere, Vega knew that her approach to producing his music was intuitive. "After Alan heard 'Nike Soldier', I said, 'Alan, you have no idea how much material is in the computer in the studio of what we've done over the years,'" Lamere said. "He said, 'I know. Once I'm gone, you should feel free to put it out because I trust your judgement. You've worked with me for so long, you're my co-producer.' I could go in and make these tracks sound completely different. But I make what Alan would want. He's still so present with us because he had such a strong influence on us. It's part of our DNA. That's the reality."

Lamere; photo by Jasmine Hirst

Insurrection was recorded in the late 90s, and you can hear its influence on the material that would make up 1999's 2007. The album is a snapshot of an era for Vega, New York City, and the world at large. Dante, Vega and Lamere's child, was about to be born, so Vega's mind was occupied with the post-Gulf War, pre-9/11 state of a city and country rife with racism and capitalistic rot. (The mention of 9/11 is not teleological; Vega literally had premonitions of a terror attack in New York City.) Songs like "Sewer" and "Invasion" sport thumping, propulsive beats and clattering, machine-like percussion, the most messed-up club songs you've ever heard, Vega chanting like a street urchin. The presciently titled "Murder One" and "Genocide" are circular, droning, and forward-lurching. The instrumentation is perfect for Vega's mantras and pleas to "Make a new reality!' Lamere's One Never Knows, though a personal album whose singles' videos feature Lamere sort of half-boxing, half-dancing, a callback to her earlier career, echoes Vega's idealistic spirit. "Don't destroy the dream tonight," she sings on the dystopian "If Only", an almost 50-year-later spiritual sibling to Suicide's best known song.

One Never Knows, like Keep It Alive, was engineered by Dante at their Dujang Prang home studio, where Alan held his sculptures. Before the pandemic, Dante had been working with hip-hop artists, but as they weren't coming in during lockdown, Lamere asked him to help her with her solo debut. Dante sang in The Choir of Trinity Wall Street for 10 years and purportedly has perfect pitch, whereas Lamere is not formally trained. "He wants to help other people with their vision," Lamere said of her son. "I do say to him once in a while, because I run a lot of sounds through the keyboard, 'What key is this?'...He knows I like dissonance, so he says, 'If you like it, it works.'" Lamere's taking a key from Vega and not wanting to get technical any time soon. "I'm sure Miles Davis had his pick of brilliant musicians to work with, but Alan used to say, 'Miles Davis liked working with people who weren't necessarily formally trained.' They didn't say, 'You're not supposed to do that,' or, 'This is what you're supposed to do here, this chord progression.' No! It's none of that. There are no rules," Lamere said.

Lamere; photo by Jasmine Hirst

Lamere's planning on taking the same approach to her recording as playing live, but with a little bit of her boxing knowledge thrown in. "When I was performing with Alan, I was always playing effects machines in the background. It's a whole different animal carrying the show front and center," she said. "For me, it's like getting in the ring sparring. You have to be hyper-focused. The adrenaline kicks in. It's a great feeling...It scares the shit out of me ahead of time. In the moment, I absolutely love it. Alan was the same way. He wouldn't even be thinking about getting on stage, but as soon as he did, he kind of embraced it."

As always, her musical endeavors will constitute at least some work with the Vega vault. For one, according to Lamere, there are about 4 or 5 albums worth of material from the 8 years between the release of 2007 and Station alone, from when they were first raising Dante, as well as even more from after Station, despite Vega suffering a stroke in 2012. "I love the opportunity for people to hear what I'm doing and discover what Alan did and is continuing to do," Lamere said. "I love the fact that he's still influencing people from beyond."

One Never Knows artwork: Jasmine Hirst

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