New York in the 1990s was off-kilter, unfiltered, and out of focus. We – artists, musicians, punks, underground dwellers – lived in neighbourhoods the police largely let police themselves, below the radar of mainstream society, carving lives out of the city’s bedrock with our bloody fists. Long before the immediate feedback loop of social media, our creative ideas bubbled in a cauldron of diversity and inspiration until they could no longer be contained.
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Matt Verta-Ray and I spent endless days into nights playing music, watching films like Zentropa, taking pictures and making films. On this hazy night, around 1995, we filled his bathtub, took turns donning the same rubber outfit, filled the bathroom with microphones and lights (dangerous much?), and took photos while singing and submerging until the rooster crowed at dawn. (This rooster was both metaphorical and literal. There were a few of them down on the old Lower East Side.)
Then we’d run electrical cords from the bases of streetlamps to power PAs and amps, playing shows in abandoned buildings. We walked the runway for underground designers in repurposed synagogues and empty churches, relics of the immigrants who had moved through the Lower East Side and Alphabet City before us, leaving their mark and culture.
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Cheap whiskey was the amuse-bouche of choice before most events. Amanda gets ready to walk in a show for designer Judi Rosen in the mid-90s. My much-loved Swinger bass was cobbled together from the discarded parts of a traditional Franken-bass (Jazzmaster neck combined with a larger P-bass body). I inherited the discards, this lovable opposite of the ideal. Matt drilled holes in it to secure the metal badge that came off an old Dodge Dart Swinger.
Downtown Manhattan is where my scene gathered in a relatively small number of blocks. Creative people from all over passed through these streets, either chasing their dreams or being chased out of their small towns for being different. Icons, future icons, and the unwashed masses of working artists drank together, recorded together, pressed lips together, and stumbled home at dawn through Tompkins Square Park.
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I’d been hired by a magazine to photograph Cristina Martinez (left) from Boss Hog. Aurelio Valle (singer of Calla) was my photo assistant. At 1am, we scurried alongside the rats on the deserted F train platform. Cristina borrowed a track worker’s orange safety vest and hung from the rafters by the tracks. Then up to St Mark’s Place in see-through heels and into this restaurant at 2am. Aurelio jumped in front of the camera before we were on to the next bar.
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Of course there were baby punks; where do you think all the new punks came from? Teething outside ABC No Rio on Ridge Street, an abandoned building turned venue and radical artists’ collective, early 90s.
Verta-Ray’s apartment on Ridge Street is where he built the studio that launched the torrid career of my band, Speedball Baby. Passing through were James Chance, Kid Congo Powers, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Eugene Hütz, Mick Collins and acres of others whose raison d’être was to create, create, create. No permission asked, nor granted. The clean, controlling, corporate world stayed far away from downtown’s gritty streets.
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After our set each night, I’d take my camera back into the crowd to photograph the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion play. Somewhere in America, mid-90s.
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My band Speedball Baby toured a lot with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion through the 90s. Left: Jon is leaning into their signature theremin here, bodies sailing over the packed crowd to the shrill, ear-piercing space age vibrations of it. Falling in, on, over, out of the crowd. Jon was carried out and deposited back. Touring with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion was half fun, half bloodsport as each night we tried to outdo each other on stage. Somewhere in America, mid-90s.
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Standing on “stage left” at CBGBs, I could feel the near miss of Todd’s passing boot as he stage-dived. It was really dark in CBs. The flash must have blinded him. Hardcore Matinee, 1990.
I lost camera lenses to swinging fists in the mosh pit at CBGBs and even managed to pour an entire 40oz (two pints) beer into my only camera body, leaving it sticky and hobbled, but continued to use it as I couldn’t afford another.
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We grabbed at each other in those days, clung together. Leaned in and pushed away, in a ceaseless, magnetic dance of attraction and repulsion. Ashley and Ron outside the Parkside Lounge on East Houston, 1996.
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Carmine still claims I stole his Triumph T-shirt. (I should have. It was cool.) On his way to our first date, a taxi hit his motorcycle on the Williamsburg Bridge. He ended up on the hood, but still showed up on time holding the paper bag of jelly beans he’d brought me as a gift. Carmine and his motorcycle appeared in Peter Lindbergh’s famous Wild at Heart shoot for Vogue magazine in 1991.
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Kid Congo Powers of the Gun Club, the Cramps, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Here, I’ve shot him in front of a plastic shower curtain with a light behind it, because that’s what I could afford at the 99-cent store. With all the swagger and the sway, in his wake, we all swooned.
I straddled worlds: sometimes, camera-wielding-observer, other times, subject – the only woman on the stage, in the van, at the police station, surviving the slings and arrows society reserves for women who refuse to comply.
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Sometimes it felt like no exit. Ron sweats from the inside of his men’s threadbare suit after a show, in one of the many “luxury” dressing rooms on our major label tour in the middle of America somewhere, 1996.
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The artists and the punks were the ones with the biggest, sloppiest hearts, if you ask me. Punks kissing on the street outside ABC No Rio on Ridge Street, an abandoned building turned venue and radical artists’ collective, early 90s.
Despite what music history, as it is written, will tell you, there was not just a small handful of female artists who mattered. Without the many who grabbed ferociously for the mic or guitar or drums when those were not being offered, we would not be hearing the powerful, unapologetic voices who control their own narrative now. Karen O. Billie Eilish. And history goes back like that, to the women who broke ground for us.
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Ashley’s vinyl couch with the mechanical tongues she attached to the arms. An artist through to the marrow in her bones, Ashley was also a farm girl who liked to dig worms out of the earth with her red-painted fingernails. Everything Ashley said, she said as stone-cold fact and it had the stink of truth on it.
In writing about this world and this long-gone time in my memoir, The Ballad of Speedball Baby, I’ve laboured over the right word choices to help the reader smell the city (spoiler: it didn’t smell good) and experience how it felt to be part of an underground movement that – while it was hard to survive it – gave meaning to the lives of those, like me, who did.
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In New York, there was a place for everybody and at least one person who was happy to see them when they got there. Floyd was a war vet who drank with us on tenement stoops. He never explained the foliage he wore every day. At Christmas, he’d strap an entire small-scale fir tree to his head.
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This is downtime during the shooting of a music video for the band the Ton Ups on the Brooklyn waterfront. Across the river are the Twin Towers still standing at the time (2000). I was one of five women whose role it was to climb into a car and plow through the band as they played in the middle of the road, sending limbs, drums, amps flying through the air.
The Ballad of Speedball Baby : A Memoir by Ali Smith is out now