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By Root 854 0

rig, his urchin feet dangling, like a suicide artist. Pleasure was articulated by the occasional blow job that Bators received onstage, the apple-bobbing of the young female volunteer sometimes simulated (judging by the overactive head action), sometimes not. I seldom threaded myself far enough up front and to the side to get a decent viewing angle to render a decisive verdict. Gary Valentine, bass player for Blondie, singled out the servicing of Bators’s dangler onstage at CBGB’s as the sign that “brain rot” had infiltrated the scene, attracting audiences addicted to sick tricks. The Dead Boys weren’t the only sick tricksters out there, but they showed more variety and panache in their slapstick, such as lapping up a lick of their own vomit from the stage floor, blowing their noses into slices of bologna and then eating them (this was the guitarist Cheetah Chrome’s showstopper), and, on one renowned occasion, pissing into the safety helmet of the previously mentioned bartender-bouncer Merv, a highly educated man who subscribed to the Times Literary Supplement and with whom I used to chew the fat about Kingsley Amis and Frank Kermode between sets. We both agreed that Kermode’s critical style could do with a dash of pepper. It was never clear to me how his hard hat ended up in Bators’s hands as a portable urinal, though it was difficult to believe Merv would have volunteered it as a prop. He was a tolerant man who had witnessed much behind the bar, but he was not an accomplice to shenanigans.

The Dead Boys didn’t revert to mild-mannered personas when they were out in civilian daylight. In that they were consistent. I once saw Cheetah Chrome drop his cheetah-spotted pants in the middle of St. Marks Place, pivot, and moon someone walking toward him—his way of saying hi. Walking in the same direction at that moment was Karen Allen, the freckled delight with the root-beer voice from Animal House and the original Indiana Jones. So she got mooned too. Chrome probably wasn’t aware Allen was sharing the same sidewalk as the friend he was hailing, but had he known, he might have dropped his drawers even sooner. He was, in his own fashion, a true vaudevillian.

So when the news came that the U.K.’s the Damned would be performing at CBGB’s on a double bill with the Dead Boys, grisly anticipation gleamed from every Dracula fang. The Damned and the Dead—their very names told you they belonged together, competing for Gothic supremacy like rival biker gangs fighting over bragging rights over whose ass is hairier. (Such a contrast to the weekends when Television and Talking Heads double billed, more akin to watching twin rocket launchings set after set, each arc higher than the last.) The Damned were the odds-on favorite to triumph in this steel-cage Black Mass. They had been around longer and proven themselves in London and the rugged vomitoria of the English provinces, and with a drummer called Rat Scabies, it was clear they weren’t angling for debutantes, like Roxy Music, but trawling the Céline sewers. (Everyone eagerly awaited the New York Times, given its formal style, reviewing the band and keeping an institutional straight face as it referred to “Mr. Scabies.”) The Damned also had a guitarist named Captain Sensible, whose name was a welcome whimsical stroke, like the fabulous ID of the lead singer of X-Ray Spex, Poly Styrene, the defiant, unbarricaded voice of the girl-power punk anthem “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!,” each hoarse syllable hurled upward from the dungeon floor. The Damned were more a glued-together assemblage of shock tactics: Scabies’s drums came hard down the tracks, and Dave Vanian’s vocals nailed the staccato rush of “Neat Neat Neat” and “New Rose” like a rivet gun. Vanian wasn’t a slurrer, unlike so many punk slingers. But the Dead Boys were newer, rawer, maybe a trifle leaner and hungrier, with home-court advantage. They had less to lose from this contest, more to gain.

And yet lose they did, not for lack of trying. Quite the opposite. They threw themselves into every song as if it might be their last (a reasonable