Lene Lovich

It was just getting dark when Christian and I hopped on the train. The weather was really starting to get nice, and those dreadful grey months of Windy City winter were starting to feel like some bad dream that I was finally waking up from. Christian and I chatted excitedly during the ride. We complained about the idiots who lived on our hall, speculated about the upcoming assassin game between us and the eleventh floor, and marveled at the irritatingly unfunny absurdity of that day’s Nancy cartoon. It was Thursday night and we both had classes in the morning, but neither of us cared. In a couple of hours, in a small club in the shadow of Wrigley Field, Lene Lovich would take the stage.

Christian had saved my life. If it wasn’t for his sanity, my own would’ve gone AWOL and I would’ve tried to fly away home off the top of the large hotel that had been purchased by the University of Chicago and converted into a dorm. One day, while I was sitting glumly alone in my room and looking out the window, Christian came over to visit. He and I had run into each other a few times (being on the same hall) and he and Martha were the only two who I trusted to watch me rehearse my dance solo, but we never really sat down and talked. He seemed cooler than most of my other hall mates (not much of a recommendation, granted) and I don’t know what prompted him to come a’calling, but I’m glad he did. I was in pretty dire straits, facing another semester in hell with no possibility of parole, and I had just finished a tape collage about my feelings doing time at the U of C. It was a totem, the kind of creative expression that meant so much to me and so much to my friends back in the real world and so little to the soulless zombies of this forsaken ice planet. Sensing that I could trust Christian with this too, I played it for him. It was more than me playing him a little something that I had put together, though, it was really me throwing a life-line out to him. Fortunately, he grabbed onto it and pulled me in, and from that day on, we started spending a lot more time together.

We walked from the station to the club. It was a beautiful night, the kind that makes you glad to be alive, and we were young (and dumb and full of...) and the whole world was spread out before us. As much as I don’t miss the deadlock of winter that the northern Midwest offered, it did give you a wonderful feeling of rebirth when spring finally came, something that never really happens in a climate in which the only way to tell the seasons apart is to check the news and see whether Malibu is on fire or whether it’s sliding into the ocean. There was a small cluster of people gathered around the entrance and we got in line.

There is a theory that when your body or mind really needs something, that something will appear, whether it’s biological (I suddenly got uncontrollable urges for cottage cheese and orange juice about a month after I moved to NYC) or psychological (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance appeared out of nowhere at just the point in my life when I needed it the most). Apparently, during the spring of my junior year in high school, I needed some new music in a serious way. I had relatively recently waded into the waters of popular music and had found a tiny niche of orchestral electronic music that spoke directly to me, but most of the rock idiom left me kind of cold. I had discovered a few groups on my own that made me think there was more out there than what dripped out of my radio (Oingo Boingo, Ultravox, Nina Hagen), but the process of finding these bands was very hit-or-miss. Suddenly, that spring of 1981, music poured out of the cosmos into my arms. A guest dance teacher at the Interlochen Arts Academy showed up with impeccable taste in unusual modern music and turned me on to many of what soon became my favorite groups (Kraftwerk, Orchestral Manouevers in the Dark, Brian Eno & David Byrne). One day, while taking a shortcut through the girl’s dorm, I ran into an acquaintance who suddenly and without provocation ran into her room and returned with a stack of records for me to listen to, including Visage and Teardrop Explodes. Two weeks later, for no apparent reason, another girl that I only marginally knew came up and handed me an album, said I could keep it, and walked away. The album cover featured a strange black and white photograph of a robust-looking woman in a dark pea coat with her hands folded over her chest. On the back, more pictures of her in provocative poses – hands over her heart, peering into a crystal ball, communing with some mysterious bald-headed figure. Her name was Lene Lovich, and the album was called Stateless.

Lene Lovich and her partner, Les Chappell, came from Detroit, but they came from Detroit by way of Pluto. He was young and bald (in an era when that was far from cool) and she had long Medusa-like snakes of thick braids sprouting from her head. She looked and sounded vaguely Slavic and forged an entirely new type of identity for a female singer fronting a rock band. She wasn’t sexy like Debbie Harry of Blondie. She didn’t rock like Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. She wasn’t scary like Nina Hagen or Patti Smith. But she had an astonishingly powerful voice and a provocative presence and fearlessly followed her own muse, even when it took her far from any recognizable landmarks (or public or critical acceptance). She hiccuped and growled and yodeled her way through quirky songs about alienation and love (although love, in her hands, sounded more like a curse than a blessing), and, to top it off, she played the saxophone. She was unlike anything I, or anybody else, had ever seen. In 1979, she was signed to legendary new wave indie label Stiff Records (“if it ain’t Stiff, it ain’t worth a fuck” was one of their memorable slogans) and her first album, Stateless, was released.

Stateless is a glorious record and helped show that anything was possible in this brave new wave. If there was room for a powerfully strange alien yodeling her way through airless versions of old Tommy James songs, there was room for everybody. In fact, her version of his bubblegum classic, I Think We’re Alone Now, gives it a creepy edge that’s entirely missing from the frothy original. In his hands, the song sounds like what it ostensibly is, the yearning of young lovers to spend some intimate time alone (a la the Beach Boys’ Wouldn’t It Be Nice). In her hands, it sounds dark and foreboding, like something a rapist whispers to his victim. Even the opening track, with the reassuring title Home, turns out to be more about the seething underbelly of domestic bliss than the shiny happy surface: