In 1978 Adele Bertei — musician, writer, actor, no wave enfant terrible — had her book-in-progress taken from her in an East Village sublet. Encouraged by friend Kathy Acker, she had started writing about her traumatic past in Cleveland, a city she had escaped the year before. Two months late on her rent after travel abroad, her possessions were thrown out by a vindictive lessor. “The first few chapters of the novel, my typewriter, rare photos of my mother, all the books I’d collected, gone.”
We’ll never know how a 23-year old Bertei would have described her youthful adversities and transformations. Fortunately, she’s been belatedly fulfilling Acker’s advice in the current decade. I ate up her first book, 2020’s Peter and the Wolves, about her last years in Cleveland living with Peter Laughner (which I quote in a recent post on northeastern Ohio). Bertei’s latest book, No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped The Scene, brings her autobiographical project to an exciting denouement, fortified with the hard-earned self-awareness and sober hindsight gained in the intervening years.
Permit me a trip down memory lane, from the time before you could access any recording in the world with the right search term.
I first heard Adele Bertei in 1984 on Thomas Dolby’s “Hyperactive,” where her high-voltage squeak elevated the track with verve and soul. In the 90s I found a Japanese import CD of the then-rare 1978 no wave compilation No New York. The reputations of Lydia Lunch and Arto Lindsay had preceded my introductions to their respective bands, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks and DNA, but the Contortions knocked me out with their slashing, itchy groove and the manic shouts and saxophone bleats of frontman James Chance. For my money, the highlight of No New York is the Contortions’ version of James Brown’s “I Can’t Stand Myself,” which transcends the archival significance of the compilation’s other featured bands (also including the mysterious Mars) who may never have intended their bracing recordings to endure past their desperate moment. And there in the Contortions band photos was Adele Bertei, credited with the Acetone organ.
From a music blog in the early 2000s I discovered the Bloods, Bertei’s short-lived band (who recorded one independent 7-inch single) and learned more about her musical place in New York’s late 70s no wave movement. Finally, the 2008 photo book No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York 1976-1980 (compiled by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley) revealed Bertei in her visual glory — 5’0”, gender fluid, a queer artful dodger cribbing Patti Smith’s Horses look to play in the apocalyptic ruins of downtown NYC. Or, as Bertei quotes James Chance:
Hey, you look like a little pimp. Do you wanna join my band?
Bertei was not long for the Contortions: her recorded contributions consist of those four No New York tracks, bonus live tracks added to their 1979 debut album Buy, and a spoken cameo on that same year’s Off White by Chance’s new ensemble James White & the Blacks. Nor for that matter were her fellow Contortions, who were effectively forced out by Anya Phillips, Chance’s girlfriend and manager (previously Bertei’s friend and, briefly, lover). Wasting no time, guitarist Pat Place started her own band, Bush Tetras, while the remaining members formed the Raybeats. Bassist George Scott III overdosed on heroin in August 1980, and a brain tumor took Phillips the following year. Chance would continue performing and periodically recording, but his legendary band would come and go from music history like a firecracker.
No New York is not primarily a book about the Contortions, no matter how juicy Bertei’s memories of the band are. (From one parenthetical aside about James Chance: “I wondered whether he had some type of autistic spectrum disorder, like Asperger’s. He could never look anyone in the eye for more than a brief second.”) Someone else can make the case that the Contortions were the greatest no wave band, but certainly they were an emblematic one.
“No wave” was the name given to artists in late 1970s/early 1980s music, film, literature, and visual art who came to New York — usually from elsewhere, occasionally from the outer boroughs — drawn by the social revolts and artistic emancipations of punk. Almost immediately, they became dissatisfied with punk: its back-to-the-basics dogmatism, its “bad boy” sex and gender orthodoxies, its opportunism (caricatured, perhaps unfairly, as its evolution into new wave), and its seeming disinterest for its relevance for other genres and other media. In dialectical fashion, no wave artists looked to negate the negation — to artistically overthrow the rigid sounds and aesthetics established by punk’s initial revolt — in order to arrive at something that felt more genuine to a city abandoned at the time by capital, the federal government, many middle-class white middle residents, the norms of civil security, and the veneer of bourgeois moralism.
This was all a little more complex on the ground. For one reason, no wave was largely simultaneous with NYC punk rock, at least once the latter started getting attention. CBGB punk icons like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and Suicide show up in No New York as inspirations to no wave (perhaps relatedly, their artistic output wasn’t confined to music). Even Joey Ramone’s “girlishness” in voice and appearance subverted, in appealing ways for Bertei, the leather-jacket cartoon that the Ramones bequeathed to punk.
For another reason, no wave had its own baggage, much of it shared with punk: the short distance between bohemian ethos and drugs, anti-social behavior, and death; the subcultural respect given to some artists that masked their ethical lapses and human damage; the sexism, racism, and homophobia that popped up in various expressions and modes of aesthetic revolt. If these contradictions reveal themselves with the benefit of hindsight and intersectional analysis, in late 1970 NYC they made for a messy, often dangerous, and undeniably thrilling time to find oneself as an artist.
This is the terrain that Adele Bertei’s No New York surveys. Chronicling the years between her 1977 arrival in NYC and her 1983 stab at underground dancefloor greatness, “Build Me A Bridge” (produced by Thomas Dolby), the book centers her experiences across several art forms, day jobs, and relationships to convey the youthful flush of artistic becoming.
For many readers, this narrative format will draw comparisons to Patti Smith’s Just Kids. I sense that Bertei would humbly reject the literary stature given to her greatest inspiration, frequently mentioned if only once observed in No New York. In any case, the contrasts between the two books are welcome. Bertei is an engaging and frequently funny writer, whose economic prose has none of the O. Henry-esque sentimentality that I associate with Just Kids, least of all in her self-depictions. Her stories are shadowed by struggles with alcoholism and other substances — a legacy of her troubled Ohio childhood that, she argues, many of the characters could recognize in their own backgrounds.
If necessarily a subjective and partial account of no wave, No New York makes important contributions to the retrospective understanding of the movement nonetheless. The subtitle indicates her prime objective: to document the many women and queer artists and participants in and around no wave. Visual artist Kiki Smith, writer Kathy Acker, musician Lizzy Mercier, filmmaker Lizzie Borden, actress Honey, musician and artist Jamie Nares, writer and fellow Strand Books employee Lucy Sante, so many others — the list is long and graphically diagrammed at least once in No New York. Bertei recounts European excursions that in turn trace broader connections to no wave; among them, a romance with Lesley Woods serves to rescue the latter’s band Au Pairs from dreary, male-centric histories of British postpunk.
Importantly, Bertei recalls the aesthetic values that illuminate the fleeting nature of the work, collaborations, and lives that comprise no wave’s legacy — the Contortions being Exhibit A.
Pat Place and I shared an androgynous sensibility in style and stance. We were not each other’s type, were too similar. I assumed she was gay, but we didn’t want to commodify ourselves. Identity politics, its obsessions and adherence to labelling never crossed our minds. Fluidity and the right to change and morph into whatever and whomever we wanted to be was intrinsic to the nature of so many in the downtown scene…
So much was happening daily and every night, and in such a short period of time, that the idea of sitting still to make work was nigh impossible and felt oppressive. Other tributaries of creative (and carnal) pursuits were constantly calling, and I followed, never considering that the making of sharp, enduring work requires discipline. Discipline as a daily habit felt restrictive and limiting, a shutting-down of the imagination.
The upside to Bertei’s lack of discipline is that her eye on the scene was all over the place. Here she’s purchasing pornography for Brian Eno as his assistant while he was producing Talking Heads and No New York. There she’s reporting for New York Rocker on the Nova Convention, an artistic calling of the tribes to honor William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Then she’s acting for and collaborating in New York-based films, some of them basically exploitation fare but others (like Borden’s Born in Flames) earning a place in the annals of independent film.
To its credit, No New York doesn’t lose steam when the final chapters move the setting beyond quintessential works and milieus associated with no wave. And it is the definitive book about the Bloods, the first all-female rock band of out lesbians in NYC (or likely anywhere) whose fusion of funk, post-punk, and soul previews the emancipatory sounds that would soon materialize on the city’s underground dancefloors. Even as her credentials in artistic and sexual transgression graduated Bertei to the status of bandleader, the Bloods quickly collapsed out of no wave’s contradictions (e.g., substance abuse, intersectional frictions).
Dusting herself off, Bertei began eking out a career as a solo artist, only to face obstacles that women would face throughout the 1980s: chickenshit major labels, exploitative contracts, and an industry unwilling to make room for more than one artistically independent woman. In 1983, that space was allotted to the emerging Madonna, who Bertei portrays as a cultural vampire haunting New York’s underground. After “Build Me A Bridge,” her 1983 single for Geffen Records, Bertei would have to wait five years to record her debut solo album.
No New York ends on a dispiriting note as Bertei’s alcoholism undermines her artistic resolve, while the looming AIDS epidemic multiplies the human casualties she witnessed. Bertei’s story would go on, of course —perhaps material for a future memoir — but the book gives little hint of the paths out of no wave’s final negations. This may be a story that others have lived and should tell. In the context of continuing fascination with no wave New York, the unflinching depictions and retrospective grace that Bertei gives her departed friends and younger self are their own reward.