Underground greats

Our dozen cult heroes of rock and roll

by the Phoenix editors

Sure, the superstars get all the attention. But rock is a genre full of cult heroes -- artists who sometimes mean as much to us as old friends, whose work can change the way we think about music, or even our lives.

Right away you'll be able to think of a dozen crucial cult heroes for every name we have here. This list isn't the last word. We defined "cult" heroes as significant artists, often with a strong following, who have nonetheless failed to crack the mainstream. "Cult" goes with "underground" in that way -- alternative to, or subversive of, the dominant or mainstream culture.

Even people we thought of as cult, as underground, as not Celine Dion, didn't always make the list. Patti Smith is an underground artist who achieved mass popularity. We considered an artist's influence as a factor -- and then disregarded it. (Our thinking: Television's guitar sound is everywhere, but Diamanda Galás's influence begins and ends with Diamanda Galás.) We were attracted to artists who have sustained the devotion of a core audience that nonetheless has failed to translate into the big numbers. Yet, somehow, Robyn Hitchcock and Richard Thompson didn't make the final tally. Iggy and the Stooges went too. Lydia Lunch, we decided, has had a sporadic career since her days with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks but is impossible to ignore. Only two of our four panelists could speak with any authority about Can, but they seemed willing to draw blood over the issue. Something cultish there, for sure. The Velvet Underground, though, are definitive. Long dead, they live on in Lou Reed and John Cale and Maureen Tucker, in bloated reissues, and in all the bands who steal from them. Only a thousand people ever saw the Velvets, the old alterna-rock bromide goes, and they all started bands. The cult artist comes in from the margins -- an ugly duckling, a longshot. And something sticks.

-- Jon Garelick
Music Editor

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BIG STAR

With the help of the Replacements' 1987 "Alex Chilton," history now holds that Big Star kept the flame of pure, Beatles-inspired pop alive singlehandedly during the early '70s. That's an exaggeration, of course. Chilton and original writing partner Chris Bell were by no means the only like-minded songwriters around at the time. In fact, the Beatles had been broken up for only a year when Big Star's #1 Record was released, in 1971.

Yet there are a number of reasons why Big Star now have more cachet than other early-'70s popsters (Badfinger, Todd Rundgren, Dwight Twilley). First, their records didn't sell at the time, a failure that gives them Velvets-like underdog appeal. Second, Chilton was among the first to work a subversive street sense into his pop, sneaking lines like "I wish we had a joint so bad" and "Don't need to talk to my shrink" into otherwise sunny tunes. Third, the third Big Star album, Sister Lovers (actually a Chilton solo album released under their name), was a slice of beautiful misery more of a piece with Lou Reed's Berlin or Neil Young's Tonight's the Night than with the Beatles. And finally, the material was timeless. Nowadays the ever-cranky Chilton -- who publicly disses the band's legend when he's not touring with a re-formed version -- is about the only one denying Big Star's greatness.

-- Brett Milano

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CAN

Cerebral krautrockers with a deep appreciation for the hypnotic power of the almighty groove, Can emerged in 1969 to take avant-rock in a completely different direction from the Velvet Underground. Can's idea of "Sister Ray" was more mantra-minimalism than Lou Reed's street-corner mugging, though both knew how to spell Karlheinz Stockhausen. (Well, John Cale and Can's Holger Czukay did.) Up through the late '70s, Czukay (who later teamed up with U2's Edge for a mid-'80s side project) and his band laid the groundwork for the ethno-funk new wave of Talking Heads, the hypno-drone pop of Stereolab, and sampledelic world musicologists ranging from hippie techno heads like the Orb to trip-hoppers like Portishead to cultural imperialists like Dead Can Dance and Deep Forest. And for all of those reasons, not to mention that their best songs are too long for radio, they've remained one of those bands a hell of a lot more people have heard about than have actually heard.

-- Matt Ashare

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CAPTAIN BEEFHEART

"Rather than I wanna hold your hand/I wanna swallow you whole." That line (from 1970's "Lick My Decals Off, Baby") might be the only explicit Beatles reference in the Beefheart oeuvre, and it's typical of the Captain's method. He turned rock-and-roll convention inside out, swallowed it whole, and spat it out as . . . what? Countless avant-rockists claim him as an influence, but who really sounds like him? Bedrock blues, surrealistic poetic lyrics, dissonant guitars and bass in lurching unison rhythms, song structures that follow a spontaneous action-painting logic -- there are pieces of Beefheart (a/k/a Don Van Vliet) in Pere Ubu, Sonic Youth, the Pixies (whom former Beefheart Magic Band member Eric Drew Feldman would later join), even Beck and the Folk Implosion. His hero was Ornette Coleman, and like Ornette, the Captain was both lionized as a genius and vilified as a jive-ass. Fifteen years after he stopped recording, Captain Beefheart remains an original.

-- Jon Garelick

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NICK CAVE

"I am a crooked man, and I've walked a crooked mile," Aussie misanthropist Nick Cave hawed on the Bad Seeds' Your Funeral . . . My Trial (Mute, 1986). He is, and he has -- his brawling, malignant baritone and theatrically literate gutter-noir storytelling first brought a chilling voice to the tempestuous postpunk squalor of the Birthday Party (Henry Rollins's 2.13.68 has reissued the band's catalogue and is readying its second volume of Cave's lyrics, poems, and one-act plays). With the Bad Seeds he rearranged the blues and proto-rock -- this culminated in The Firstborn Is Dead (Mute, 1985) and its literary companion of sorts, Cave's Biblical novel And the Ass Saw the Angel -- before mutating into a smoky, Armageddon-cabaret stylist. And though his work has seesawed unpredictably, encompassing everything from the rakish folkisms of Murder Ballads to soundtrack work (Ghosts . . . of the Civil Dead, To Have and To Hold), it's his unyielding obsession with the profanity of the sacred (and vice versa) that's kept discriminating ghouls coming back for more.

-- Carly Carioli

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JAD FAIR/HALF JAPANESE

In a career that's now spanned two decades, Jad Fair has proved that, if nothing else, it's possible for one man to write, record, and release a steady stream of material without ever learning -- even accidentally -- how to play guitar or sing. That distinction has made Fair and the constantly shifting members of Half Japanese leaders of indie rock's savant-garde pack, a group for which one must be willing to wade through hours of malformed nonsense to find a minute or two of spastic bliss. With his geeky glasses, skinny build, and nasal voice, Fair is Revenge of the Nerds put to music, or at least to skronking noise with a ramshackle beat. He pioneered lo-fi recording as an aesthetic as opposed to a necessity, and -- for better and worse -- helped inspire a generation or two of indie-rockers to revel in the artful virtues of artlessness (cf. Mecca Normal, the Vaselines, Beat Happening, Lois Maffeo, and the entire K Records roster). If the Dust Brothers had been around to produce him 10 years ago, he might have been Beck. It's probably just as well that they weren't.

-- Matt Ashare

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DIAMANDA GALÁS

Fuck Celine Dion. This New York City-based singer is North America's most distinctive female voice. Raised in a musical family, Galás first found her own identity as a musician playing jazz keyboards in the avant company of masters like David Murray and Butch Morris. But she found her true voice when she literally found her voice -- a three-and-a-half-octave instrument of power, grace, and desperate aching fear. Galás has worked with everything from R&B standards to opera, applying her gravel-to-ether range to an aesthetic that exudes dark spirituality. On compelling '90s albums like The Singer, Plague Mass, and Vena Cava (all on Mute), she's used her music as a laser to cut through the bullshit and prejudices that surround the AIDS epidemic, employing such techniques as German schrei singing and improvisation to conjure a world of desperation, madness, and celebration. If this all seems a bit esoteric, consider: Galás made her Carnegie Hall debut last Halloween to a nearly sold-out house. And her 1994 CD The Sporting Life was a collaboration with Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones.

-- Ted Drozdowski

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LYDIA LUNCH

The queen of New York City's early-'80s "no-wave" anti-pop scene, Lydia Lunch mapped her future with the punk-spirited band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, writing songs that were grinding, angular, abrasively noisy, and spine-snappingly abrupt. In short, it was great, nasty music that took the piss out of everything from sex to religion. And her gritty work became emblematic of what people expected -- and to a certain extent, still expect -- from the downtown Manhattan live-art scene. Although her notoriety has ebbed and flowed, Lunch has continued to do provocative work with collaborators like X's Exene Cervenka (volumes and recordings of poetry) and sound-collage craftsman Jim "Foetus" Thirwell, and she's continued a solo career as a ranting champion of life's raw, prickly side. She's also appeared in underground films, including graphic pornography. Her latest CD, Honeymoon in Red (Atavistic), finds Lunch in perfect form, caterwauling about dominance, crime, fucking, and the essence of human evil over soundscapes conjured by Thirwell, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, Martin Bisi, and Blondie's Chris Stein.

-- Ted Drozdowski

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PERE UBU

Maybe this Cleveland band have always been too smart for their own good. Why else would one of the most daring groups to emerge from American punk never break through? From their earliest singles 20 years ago, Pere Ubu -- led by capital "A" artist David Thomas, a visionary singer, poet, writer, and vocalist -- have combined the energy and attack of the Ramones with the hook-driven instincts of the Beach Boys, throwing in sonic inclinations sprung from the likes of Stockhausen and Eric Dolphy. All these qualities have been intact since their classic indie-rock singles like "Non-Alignment Pact" and "Final Solution," right up to their last album, 1995's magnificent Ray Gun Suitcase (Tim/Kerr). Pere Ubu disband often, but whenever Thomas sounds the call, his creative compadres still reassemble -- and the results are often brilliant. For that reason, they remain the blueprint for intelligent, modern art rock.

-- Ted Drozdowski

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JONATHAN RICHMAN (AND THE MODERN LOVERS)

Jonathan Richman was a guy who wanted a girlfriend so bad that he practically started punk rock just to get one. True, punk didn't begin with his early-'70s band the Modern Lovers: the Stooges and MC5 both got there first, as did Richman's heroes the Velvet Underground. But Richman threw all pretensions aside and wrote about the things that really mattered -- cars, girls and a whole lot of teenage frustration (classic couplet: "Some people try to pick up girls and get called assholes/This never happened to Pablo Picasso"). Just when rock was starting to get cosmic, the Modern Lovers offered an antidote.

A new generation of punks took notice a few years later, with the Sex Pistols stepping in to cover "Roadrunner." By then Richman was on a different wavelength altogether. Swearing off punk and shouting down requests for his oldies, he began writing whimsical ditties about Gumby, grocery stores, and chewing-gum wrappers, making a case for the importance of each. For years he refused to do "Pablo Picasso," because he played a family show and wouldn't say "asshole" on stage (though he finally relented at the Brattle Theatre last month). Concentrating more on love songs these days, Richman remains an unspoiled romantic and rock's best poster boy for sustained adolescence -- still in love with the modern world after all these years.

-- Brett Milano

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TELEVISION

Television made only one essential album, but oh what an album it is. Like the Velvet Underground, who a decade earlier had created something frighteningly new out of rock's most basic ingredients, 1977's Marquee Moon reimagined the rock guitar solo as the brainy poet's emotional tool much in the same way that Richard Thompson did on 1982's Shoot Out the Lights. Heavy-metal guitarists have always used the six-string to express what words cannot, but they were rarely ever saying very much to begin with -- not that there's anything wrong with that. Television's Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd were NYC art punks channeling existential bliss and dread through their Stratocasters with the full weight of punk nihilism resting on shoulders tensed in an unassuming anti-rock shrug. They never again equaled the majesty of "Venus de Milo," but they've inspired plenty of others to give it a shot.

-- Matt Ashare

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VELVET UNDERGROUND

In a 1979 essay, NYC rock critic Ellen Willis asserted that the Velvet Underground "were the first important rock-and-roll artists who had no real chance of attracting a mass audience" -- which is just another way of saying that they were rock's first cult band. It would be hard to find a group whose initial sales figures were so grossly out of proportion to their cultural impact. Hell, I could probably name a different Velvets-inspired band for every dozen units the VU moved between 1967 and 1970, and a distinct subgenre for each of their four studio albums. The street-toughened persona Lou Reed affected for '67's "I'm Waiting for the Man" and the primal beat Moe Tucker gave it paved the way for NYC punk poets like Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine a decade later. The tortured squeal of John Cale's viola violating Nico's frigid delivery on "All Tomorrow's Parties" prefigured goth, not to mention art-damaged noise-rockers like Sonic Youth. And the folky strum-and-drone from the guitars of Reed and Sterling Morrisson on "What Goes On" provided a blueprint for the Feelies, Luna, and the country of New Zealand.

-- Matt Ashare

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JOHN ZORN

The massive Zorn discography grows by the minute. He's done Ornette Coleman jazz straight up with a heavy-reverb rock-and-roll twist (Spy vs. Spy) and as "radical Jewish culture" (Masada). He's offered similarly idiosyncratic takes on hardcore rock (Painkiller), Cage-ian "chance operation" collages (Cobra), film music, and modern classical chamber skronk. He's collaborated with Albert Collins and the Kronos String Quartet and Mike Patton. He's more schooled than most rock musicians have a need to be, and more obnoxious than any musician oughta have a right to be. But if music is still the open sky Sonny Rollins once called it, then Zorn's lighting the bonfires on the horizon.

-- Jon Garelick