Lucking Out - James Wolcott [81]
Punk, new wave, the underground scene, whatever handle was hung on what was happening downtown, it wasn’t about hot-wiring the body, setting it into centrifugal motion under a flashing dome of lights with the bass thump rising from the floor like the heartbeat of a fertility god. When audiences stood at CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, or some unspecified fire-hazard club, it was usually to see better, and when they did instruct themselves to move, it was primarily back and forth from the waist, a metronomic trance that was a cross between an assenting nod and a Hasidic Jew shuckling as he reads the Talmud. Even Blondie—who would score a commercial success denied the Ramones and Television with a disco-inflected album whose diamond-etched production delineated the pop tunefulness of songs the band had muddled through for years onstage, like the cast of Gilligan’s Island trying to build a boat—didn’t unhinge their fans’ hips and get them dancing, no surprise given that Blondie’s phosphorescent chanteuse, Debbie Harry, teetering in high heels and flickering in and out of phase like a TV screen on the blink, couldn’t get a groove going long enough for the other Mouseketeers to follow. It didn’t help that her boyfriend and Blondie guitarist, Chris Stein, would sometimes sing harmony not by joining her at her mike but by hollering into her ear, which would throw off anyone’s equilibrium. Whether Stein did this because he was being thoughtless or deliberately obnoxious, I was never sure, but this was a prankster who hit balls, so I tilted toward the latter interpretation.
What you wore mattered more than how you moved, and what you wore didn’t matter much at first, until fetishism gained a steel toehold. Just as I never went hippie during the sixties (tie-dye doesn’t look good on anybody, the one fashion dictum I hold absolute), I never went punk, sparing myself incalculable embarrassment in the future of photos surfacing on the mocking Internet showing me decked out like Jimmy Ramone, Boy Reporter, with my notepad flipped out, ready for action. Although I did buy a long brown leather overcoat with an almost military cut that had one friend concerned that it looked a little German officer corps, something retrieved from the Moscow retreat. I showed the label that marked it as American made from the sixties, but she still thought it might make people think of Field Marshal Rommel. To soften any such impression, I repaired a sleeve on the coat that was threatening to drop off like a severed arm with a ring of large pink diaper pins, which I thought was a nice punk touch (since safety pins were now all the piercing rage, stuck through fabric and flesh as if the two were interchangeable), with the baby pinkness adding a note of put-on, an anti-punk punk statement. It was without much in the way of using my brain that I wore this thrift-shop pink-diaper-pinned brown leather overcoat to my first meeting with William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, who, with a brown-egg composure as impossible to crinkle as a Zen master’s, helped me out of it and hung it on the coat stand without a single comment or flicker of surmise, as if it were just another outer garment worn to ward off cold. As he led me into his office, I noticed a rip in the brown sofa that looked like a knife gash, itself a rather punk touch. I asked