Adele Bertei (No New York, Contortions, the Bloods)

When I was working on This Must Be the Place and sending out hundreds of emails to people I wanted to interview, one of the more common rejections I received was “Sorry, I’m working on my own memoir and need to save my stories for it.” In most cases, it was obvious that those books were never going to be finished, let alone published, but so it goes.

The one exception was Adele Bertei. I’d hoped to interview her about her tenure as a keyboard player in the Contortions, who were part of the late ‘70s no wave scene that merged punk’s energy with avant-garde noise and an art school sensibility. Adele’s a gifted writer who had previously published a memoir, Peter and the Wolves, about her early punk years in Cleveland and her friendship with Pere Ubu guitarist Peter Laughner. So when she turned me down with the explanation that she was working on a book about her no wave years, I couldn’t wait to read it.

In the interim, Bertei published books about Sinead O’Connor and Labelle, as well as a roman-a-clef about growing up queer. But at long last, the promised memoir exists: Bertei’s No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene, was published at the end of March. I’ve been hard at work on my next book, so I only just got around to finishing it.

And look, I read a lot of these NYC musician/scenester memoirs out of a sense of professional responsibility. Most of them are ok, some are actually pretty good. So when I tell you that No New York is a Genuinely Phenomenal Book and you should read it even if you’ve never heard a note of the music, hopefully that carries some weight.

No New York takes its title from a seminal no wave compilation produced by Brian Eno (Bertei was his personal assistant), on which the Contortions appear alongside Mars, DNA, and Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. But No New York doesn’t confine itself too strictly to the no wave era. Bertei also talks about her post-Contortions years, first as frontwoman for the Bloods (widely acknowledged as the first rock band consisting entirely of out lesbians), and later as a singer of delightful dance and pop songs that were a far cry from her no wave past.

I finally got to interview Bertei over Zoom last month.

I’ll start off with a question that’s always really mystified me: Why do you think such a significant percentage of people in the Downtown scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s came from Ohio?1

That’s a good question. Cleveland had a very limited audience for the kind of work a lot of us were doing, the kind of music we were doing, the filmmaking, etc. And everybody was moving to New York at that moment, which was on par economically with Cleveland. I mean, you could get an apartment for $75-100 bucks a month, and it was New York as opposed to Cleveland. It was also spurred on by bands like Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell and a whole host of other bands that were playing in New York at the time, and we wanted to be part of that.

Cleveland was kind of similar to Manchester in England in that way, a dying industrial city with a lot of ghosts. There was just something very haunted about Cleveland at that moment, and it still is. If you drive around downtown in the flats, there are so many old factory buildings that are demolished and abandoned, like the ghosts of the industrial revolution are hanging around down there. That feeling was very prominent in the music of Pere Ubu.

What motivated you to write this particular book now? Because it’s certainly not your first book. It’s not your first memoir. What about this era spoke to you at this moment?

I can point to two things that inspired me. One of them is how far up the ass of capitalism and consumerism we are right now with art. We were working against all of that. Nobody was working to be famous or make tons of money or be commodified or sold to or labeled. We were really working against genre and gender, and that freedom is so essential to good art. If you start playing to the crowd, or you’re playing for money, the art’s going to suck. You have to play to your inner and your inner inner life, your inner demons, your inners. That authenticity is just the bedrock of good art.

So there was that, but then also, I loved the books that Thurston Moore and Byron Coley put out, and Marc Masters, and they did pay a lot of attention to the women. But that history has never been framed from a woman’s point of view, and how important all the women were to that scene.

It does seem like a uniquely female-driven scene. Of course there was Riot Grrl later and other scenes like that. But for a scene that’s not explicitly oriented around the female experience, no wave seems uniquely woman-led to a degree where I can’t really think of anything comparable.

It was pretty incredible in that way. The women felt so free in that scene, it almost inspired the guys more. It was like, if the girls are gonna do this, we’d better step up. There was a good balance between the men and the women. Sometimes sexism came up, but we ignored it. We weren’t going to allow men to straitjacket our imaginations or silence us.

I think punk in general was just so important for women to finally express their rage and frustration of being second-class citizens and the oppression, etc. In no wave, which was different for women as opposed to punk, we weren’t just doing music. We were making films, we were writing, we were doing theater, performance art, all of that, and cross-collaborating.

You’re talking about no wave and punk as discrete entities, and retrospectively they get treated as different communities in different eras. But was there such a firm demarcation at the time?

It wasn’t firm, and it wasn’t labeled. But we were a rebellion against the three chord progressions of punk rock, and we were taking more from the more ecstatic, agitprop, mystical poetry of people like Patti Smith. Her band was very garage-y, but her presentation as an artist was beyond anything anybody had ever seen.

At the same time, you were all playing at CB’s and Max’s, and it seems like there were bands like Suicide or the Cramps that at least had some social overlap.

There were definitely overlaps. But at the same time, I see Suicide as the the granddaddy of no wave. Because when you really think about it, they were doing…I mean, [Contortions frontman] James Chance was totally inspired by Alan Vega. It was noise and it was provocation and it was physical theater. Alan, you didn’t know if he was going to jump into the crowd and bite your head off. It was so exciting, like breaking the wall of what is acceptable between stage and audience. Suicide really did that for the first time, in a very Antonin Artaud kind of way.

On the subject of discrete entities and demarcations, it would seem to me that there were two communities within the larger no wave scene: the No New York bands that were mostly based around the East Village and Lower East Side, and the Soho scene with folks like Glen Branca, Ut, Y Pants, and Rhys Chatham.

I never really thought that much about that demarcation. There were women involved in those bands too. I think the demarcation became more profound when we did No New York, because Eno didn’t choose any of those bands to be on that record. He basically chose the bands that he felt were more intriguing and more theatrical, and that were doing something a little bit more astonishing.

That became a rift between the Soho bands and the Lower East Side and East Village bands, because really, when you listen to Theoretical Girls or Y Pants or some of those bands, they were very similar to what DNA or Mars were doing. I think there was a little bit of animosity there on the part of people like Glenn Branca, who was probably the most curmudgeonly guy I ever met in the Downtown scene.

That’s really saying something.

There were a lot of curmudgeonly guys!

The four bands that got chosen for No New York are also just the four bands from the last two days of that Artists Space festival.2 So was it that Eno was making the choices so deliberately about vibe, or were those just the four bands that he saw?

No, he was there every night. I don’t know why he chose the ones he chose. My speculation is the things I said. We were the most exciting to him for some reason. Also, this is just a guess, but Jeffrey Lohn and Glenn Branca, some of the guys in the scene, had this anti-capitalist, anti-commercial, anti-commodification [attitude]. If they would see somebody who was vaguely famous, the hostility would just [go] off and the curmudgeonly “I’m better than you” attitude would come out. Maybe Eno got turned off by that?

That Artists’ Space festival is retrospectively really significant, but at the time, did it feel like any sort of turning point for the scene?

Other than having all of those bands that had a similar sensibility grouped together, none of us thought there would be any importance placed on it. We knew we were doing something exciting, but we never thought we were going to go down in the history books, that this legacy was going to live on forever and people were going to be endlessly fascinated by it. Which they kind of are, which is bizarre!

That seems like another clear demarcation too between no wave and punk. Those first wave CBGB bands pretty explicitly wanted to be successful.

And they were mostly very pop. Even the Ramones, as punk as they were, were pop punk. I loved the Ramones, but they weren’t making noise. They weren’t disassembling funk, jazz, rock and roll, garage rock, and throwing it into a garbage can and shaking it up and throwing it back, which is what we were intent on doing: making a crazy junkyard patchwork, a brutalist melange of noise.

I loved reading about your experience as Brian Eno’s personal assistant, with him making you go out and buy porn for him.

[laughs] Everybody wants to know about Brian Eno’s porn!

There’s that famous interview with Chrissie Hynde, where he talks all about it.

Oh, he’ll talk very openly about it.

But I didn’t realize he was having other people go out and acquire it on his behalf.

I always thought of that as a test, like, “How’s she going to react to this?” This was decades before #metoo. He never did it in a provocative way where I felt sexually harassed at all, it was just a [shopping] list, and you go out and get all the stuff on the list. He would laugh, because I would show up with all the goods. He was really great. He never never harassed me in any way. He was always kind and really funny and gentle and open, not arrogant at all. Very personable.

Did that impact your experience making No New York, where the guy that’s producing is also your employer?

No, not really. I think I had left his employ by the time we recorded, because I was going to Europe a lot at that point. But yeah, that was really exciting. It was the first time the Contortions had gone into the studio. Brian just kept the tapes rolling while we would warm up, and that’s how the song “I Can’t Stand Myself” ended up being recorded. That was our warmup song. We hadn’t played it before, but we knew the song. He just had the tape rolling. I remember we were so excited playing it, and he walked in and was just astonished. He goes, “I just recorded that!”

I love that recording specifically because it’s almost like a Rosetta Stone for no wave, at least if you know the James Brown original.

We were all listening to James Brown and Fela Kuti, and those influences really seeped into some of the Contortions’ work.

It was interesting for me to read that you were simultaneously really into soul, and harboring a desire to sing that kind of music while you were in the Contortions.

It was not a popular thing to have that kind of voice in no wave! I remember John Lurie saying to me, “So, what are you going to do, sing the blues?” with a really snide kind of attitude.

And then he, of course, sang the blues.

And I said, “Well, what are you going to do? Play jazz?” It was just silliness. But no wave wasn’t about singing, so it was hard for me at that point to do any solo work in that specific scene.

But that’s also a time where there’s a lot of music in the city—I’m thinking of what was going on concurrently at clubs like the Paradise Garage or Better Days—that was oriented around dance music with soulful vocals, especially female vocals. Did you dip your toe into that world at all?

Not until the early ‘80s. After I left the Bloods, I started singing and getting signed to labels and things. There weren’t a lot of Black musicians in that scene, but there did start to be a crossover with the jazz-funk players and the hip-hop people that started to happen in the ‘80s. But Nona Hendryx had a really cool band called Zero Cool, where she had this brilliant singing voice that was very R&B influenced, but her band was total no wave noise.

There was that infamous Contortions show at the Paradise Garage.3

Oh God. I write about that show in the book. That was a crazy show. Nobody showed up. It was us opening for Richard Hell, and the [club’s] managers didn’t want to pay us. Blood was spilled that night. It was actually a very traumatizing event.

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Was there a club that felt especially like the home base during that time, either for the scene or for you specifically?

Not really. In the early days with the Contortions, we really enjoyed Max’s Kansas City. It wasn’t the biggest stage, but there was something about the room and the lighting and just the atmosphere of it. CB’s was great too, but there was something about Max’s that I preferred.

On the street level of Max’s, they had a VIP back room where the Warhol set would be hanging out, and sometimes the bouncer who would allow people in and out of that section would let a few of us in. We were so antagonistic towards the Warhol crowd. We would throw spitballs at them and throw things at them, and they’d be like, “Those dirty punks!”

As Max’s started to wind down and the Mudd Club started coming up, the Mudd Club was great too. I enjoyed seeing a lot of shows there, but it was a great place to dance, and the DJs were fantastic. Johnny Dynell, Anita Sarko…so many great people were spinning, and it was the hangout. I probably spent five nights a week dancing at that place at a certain point in my life. It was really a fun spot.

I’m curious about the way that DJ culture just kind of suddenly and subtly infiltrates this post-punk world. Was that something that seemed notable at the time, or was it just like a natural evolution?

Well, for no wave, I think it was a natural evolution because we were all listening to danceable music: James Brown, Funkadelic, Dyke and the Blazers. That’s the progression that James went into with James White and the Blacks. But also, it was happening with bands like Talking Heads; some of their tracks, like “I Zimbra,” were genius for the dance floor. So there was that crossover.

Dancing was really important to a lot of us at that moment, and that also transitioned into the gay scene when AIDS started to happen, where dance music became really important. That’s when the Paradise Garage really took off. It was a way for people in the queer community to celebrate each other at a very dark, very frightening time, but also to live for the people we knew who were dying or or who had passed, because that’s what they would have wanted us to do. So dance music became very important, and then I transitioned into making dance music as a solo artist.

Do you see the Bloods as a continuation of the no wave scene, or was it something else?

I think we were more of a rock ‘n’ roll band, to tell you the truth. We had elements of funk. We’re always slotted into the Liquid Liquid/ESG kind of thing because we were doing very funky music. But if you want to see what we were really like, there’s some footage on YouTube from this festival we did in Berlin. To me, that really shows how good the band was, how we really could have done well together had we hung in there.

We’d open for Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers or Richard Hell. We were kind of a garage band in the beginning, so we did fit with a lot of that music. But we also played a lot with bands like the Au Pairs or the Passions if they came over to New York. It’s funny, because it wasn’t the men in the punk or no wave scene Downtown that discriminated against us. It was trying to get a record deal, which we wanted because we felt like we deserved it. We were an all women’s band, and we could play, but nobody would touch us because we were so outwardly queer.

I’m curious as well about the transition from the Bloods to your solo work. Was that the natural next step on your trajectory, or a decisive shift where you wanted to try something different?

It was kind of a progression. The bass player in the Bloods, Brenda Alderman, was such a brilliant funk bass player and such a brilliant musician. When the Bloods broke up, we stuck together writing songs. I was doing solo shows with backing tapes, and an A&R man from Geffen saw a couple of the shows and offered me a demo deal. I was really excited, because these were songs that Brenda and I were working on. We demoed them, and they were quite funky. They signed me on the strength of the demos, and I was being managed at the time by Jane Friedman, who has Howl Arts, and she was Patti Smith’s manager.

As soon as the ink was dry on the contract, they wanted me to get rid of Brenda and Jane, so they separated me from all of my support networks and said, “Okay, now we’re going to hook you up with Peter Frampton’s manager and David Bowie’s manager, and you’re going to write with Paul Simon.”

It all started to go south pretty quickly. The guy that signed me to Geffen did introduce me to Thomas Dolby, and I really liked Thomas. We got along quite well. I had written a song with the keyboard player of Chic, Raymond Jones, who was a brilliant guy, and Thomas produced it. He then fell out with my record company because of a remix, and things went from there.

It was one obstacle after another. They didn’t want me to be authentically gay. Nobody was out of the closet at that point! I had to watch what I wrote about. So all of the wonderful freedoms and authenticities I was able to embrace in no wave and punk and with the Bloods, it was all taken away from me and controlled, and I couldn’t handle it.

I finally had to leave the music business because it was really hard. It was fun for a while. It was fun writing songs. I had a publishing deal and would write songs for Sheena Easton and Pointer Sisters, and wrote with Matthew Sweet. As that was all ending, I got a job singing background vocals for Tears for Fears on the Sowing the Seeds of Love tour, which was fantastic because it gave me enough money to go to therapy twice a week for a year! But it was also [nice] not having the responsibility of being a front person, and being able to enjoy performing for 60,000 people without having to do the interviews.

When did you actually end up moving out of New York?

I think it was ‘93 when I moved to LA. New York had gotten so expensive, and like an idiot, I gave up an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen to move somewhere else, and then just one thing after another. When I moved here in ‘93, I could get a huge one bedroom for $700, whereas in New York at that point, it was already $2,000. In ‘93!

When you come back now, do you see any remnants of what used to be?

No. I still have good friends there, and I love to visit, but only in very short spurts. It’s changed so much, and it’s just like a big money tent. It’s almost too busy for me now. When I walk down Second Avenue in the East Village, it’s like playing dodgeball with people because it’s so crowded, and that’s upsetting to me.

It’s wild to imagine just how empty the area was.

That was one of the draws of it. It felt like a ghost town, and we were just taking it over. It was our town to do whatever we wanted with, and that felt magical. It was like a weird dystopian fairy tale.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.

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