Suicide: No Guitar, No Mercy

Alan Vega and Martin Rev made a record in 1977 with a drum machine and a synthesizer — no guitarist, no bassist, no drummer — and most audiences who heard it wanted it to stop. Crowds threw bottles at them; Vega and Rev kept playing. The record sold poorly, did not chart, and went nowhere on release. Over the following decades, Soft Cell built a career on its template, Nick Cave cited it as a root document, and Bruce Springsteen performed its closing track on tour for two years running before recording a studio version in 2014. Suicide was right the whole time.

Two Men

Vega, a sculptor from Brooklyn, and Rev, trained in jazz piano, met in New York around 1969 and spent years developing their sound before recording it. The band had no fixed lineup beyond the two of them. Rev programmed and played the machines. Vega sang, prowled the stage, and provoked audiences who had come expecting punk rock and got something they had no category for.

The debut was recorded in New York and produced by Craig Leon, who had produced the Ramones' first album the year before. The Ramones had stripped rock toward its minimum; Suicide stripped further still. Where the Ramones kept guitars, chords, and a drummer, Suicide had Rev's synthesizer, a beat box, and Vega's voice. The record runs thirty-three minutes. Nothing on it sounds like anything else released in 1977.

What Rev Built

Rev's approach to the drum machine was not mimicry. He did not program it to approximate a drummer. He programmed it to do what a drummer could not — lock a pattern without variance, without personality, without the inconsistencies that make live drumming breathe. "Ghost Rider" opens the album on a pulse that does not waver from the first bar to the last, runs four minutes, and admits no change. The pulse is the whole event.

The synthesizer lines Rev builds over the pulse are not melodies in any chord-based sense but tones held and released, figures that circle rather than resolve. The sound owes more to drone traditions of avant-garde composition than to rock, but Rev arrived at it through rock hardware, in a rock context, on a rock stage. The result belongs to no existing genre, which is one reason audiences in 1977 did not know what to do with it.

Frankie Teardrop

"Frankie Teardrop" runs ten minutes and twenty-five seconds and tells the story of a factory worker who cannot pay his rent, kills his infant and his wife, and then kills himself. Vega narrates in a flat voice, then screams. The screams are not released tension — they sit embedded in the track the way a detail sits in a Carver story, without context, without relief, without the music shifting to acknowledge that something has happened. The beat and the synthesizer continue, and the screams do not disturb either.

The track makes the listener responsible for the horror because the music refuses to carry it. Rev's machine does not crescendo, does not swell, does not signal that what Vega describes is significant. The significance rests entirely on the listener. Rev did not borrow the technique — Vega and Rev invented it in a room in New York in 1977, and no one has replicated it with the same conviction since.

What the Audiences Did

Suicide opened for the Clash on a 1978 European tour. In Brussels, the audience rioted for twenty-three minutes, threw objects at the stage, and attacked Vega. Vega did not stop playing. The Clash were a guitar band with songs, structure, and recognizable punk conventions. Suicide gave audiences none of those anchors. People who felt cheated expressed it physically.

The same thing happened at American shows throughout the late 1970s. The hostility was not random. Audiences were responding to a quality the record and the live performances shared — refusal. Suicide did not offer release. The music did not build to a peak and ease off. "Frankie Teardrop" does not resolve. "Dream Baby Dream" loops its two chords for five minutes without arriving anywhere. The audience wanted the music to do something for them, and the music declined.

Dream Baby Dream

Springsteen performed "Dream Baby Dream" as an encore on his 2005 Devils & Dust solo tour, playing it on a harmonica, alone at the microphone, the two-chord Rev loop replaced by his own breath. Springsteen returned to the song on subsequent tours and released a studio recording in 2014. In interviews, he named Suicide as an influence and named Vega as a singer who did something with a voice that rock had not done before.²

The gap between the Brussels riot in 1978 and Springsteen performing the same material to arenas in 2005 is the gap between a record being right and a record being recognized as right. Twenty-seven years is not long compared to some records. The distance is the whole argument.

What Came After

Soft Cell's Marc Almond has named Vega as a formative influence. "Tainted Love," the record that made Soft Cell, is a cover of a Northern Soul track filtered through the same drum machine aesthetic Suicide had established. Nick Cave's early records with the Birthday Party work in the same territory of locked rhythm and voice as confrontation rather than performance. The Jesus and Mary Chain buried their melodies in noise the way Suicide buried Frankie's story in an unvarying pulse. Trent Reznor and James Murphy have both named the record. The industrial lineage of the 1980s starts here or close to it.

None of these artists sound like Suicide, which is the measure of how far the influence traveled. A root document does not produce copies — it produces directions, and the directions diverge until the source is invisible. Suicide is inside a large portion of the music made in the forty years after its release, invisible in the way that origins become invisible once the thing they started outgrows them.