Documentarian Andrea Prevignano speaks with No Wave Pioneer DAVID RAT about Old School New York, Drag Queens, Dope, Decadence and the Decay of Art for Punk Globe Magazine.

When did you arrive in New York?

Honestly, I don´t remember..bits and pieces come back to me occasionally…must have been1980-ish…was about a year before the HIV crisis hit hard…When all my friends started dying…I held their hands and wiped the sweat from their brows while they wasted away to nothing…The East Village in the 80´s was exciting… A new renaissance period… But it wasn´t all fun and games.. I ended up with a seemingly un-kickable Heroin addiction… And a graveyard for a rolodex…

What were your expectations? I wanted to go to college but was told by my Blue Collar parents “Get a Scholarship” (Really Mom? I´m a drummer.. Typically they don´t give scholarships to drummers), a high school diploma is paramount to being “over qualified”.. Went to my Grandmother for advice.. Her Brother Gordon Malie was the original drummer for the Lawrence Welk Orchestra… She told me” You have to get the hell out of here if you want to be a musician” So I kissed her goodbye…left my alcoholic wife and headed to the Lower East Side… A few months later I was Dating a Warhol protégé visual artist, and reading about myself in the Village Voice... So I would say my expectations were far exceeded…

What were your first impressions?

Well, like I said…I arrived before the HIV crisis hit…So I was like a kid in a candy store…Everybody fucked everybody that year…It was the new summer of love… A new Bohemia… Everybody was an artist … The amount of creative energy was so thick in the air you could cut it with a knife…Every night was a gig, an art opening, or just sitting on a stoop on St. Marks Place smoking/shooting dope and watching the human theater unfold on the street was wonderful… So many beautiful outcasts… All together in a 14 square block ghetto…sharing ideas, inspiring each other..helping each other survive… Many went on to have successful forays into the art world… But for me it was the bag ladies and mentally ill street poets, babbling blissful abstract visions that were so incredible.. …

Emilio, an old Italian man who did enough purple mescaline to kill an army would engage you in fascinating conversations about philosophy and physics… Julius the dog man, who although homeless and hungry… Never let one of his seven dogs go unfed… Ray from the candy store who always had a smile and a “Hallo Brother” for everyone… We lived on his gigantic Ice coffee´s.. His is one of the only real old school businesses left on Ave. A… Also Stanley and Tom from “Stanley´s…Who,.. No matter how dirty or grimy, never turned a hungry homeless person away… I´ve often wondered how many lives he saved with his oatmeal on cold winter mornings…

Philippe the French photographer who had parties everyday on his rooftop on Ave. B… He had a pet rabbit who ran free on the roof and to this day I can still hear him calling “RA-BEET! RA-BEET! … These are the people who need to be immortalized… These were the true artists…the fragile…the unsung..

What did you listen to in that period?

Joni Mitchell… I was obsessed with Joni Mitchell… I was and still am all about contrast, I look for Garbage among the Flowers and Flowers among the Garbage.. Sure I was the drummer for one of the more popular savage art terrorist no wave (whatever) noise bands in New York… Part of the unholy triumvirate of Sonic Youth, Swans and Rat At Rat R..Opening for the Dead Boys, Buzzcocks,, Dead Kennedy´s etc… But anyone that really knew me knew they could find me at home… With a joint, a bag of dope, a typewriter, and my Joni Mitchell albums…

Where did you live in NYC?

Everywhere, on every single block between Broadway and Ave. D…. 14th street and Houston… That was the thing… we all lived together… no one could afford their own apartment, you always had roommates and you always moved around a lot… The neighborhood was rapidly being gentrified… The artists were gradually pushed out of Manhattan to the surrounding boroughs.. I believe Bushwick, Brooklyn is where they mostly reside now… But it´s getting to the point where you need a trust fund to live there too… I am disgusted with, and have abandoned the blood thirsty war mongering United State´s all together… But as the hillbillies say…”That there New York ain´t part of the U.S.A” so if I ever do set foot on North American soil again… I would go back to Ray´s and have one last Ice Coffee…

Had you an extra job aside from your musical activities?

We all did…we never managed or even tried to make a living off our Art… We supported it… Mainly because my band Rat At Rat R refused to play ball,so to speak.. I painted and remodeled apartments around Thompkins Square Park, Other members did graphic art at Rolling Stone and other mags…. We saved every penny from every gig we ever played and spent it in the Studio… Self funding our own albums… We never sucked up to the fat cats and wealthy “patrons of the arts” as many of our colleagues did… We were too proud and highly ethical… To a fault perhaps but to this day I am very proud of what we accomplished with very little help from anyone…

Was the cost of living high?

At that time no… But poor is poor and we were ridiculously so… Mostly from trying to pay rent, eat and support a Heroin Habit the size of Utah (to quote Jerry Stahl)… But it became more and more difficult as the years went by, the speculators moved in… Our neighborhood became trendy… And the rents went sky high but we did have a thing called rent control… Which was so odd… I worked in Apartments where one old polish man had lived for 30 years in 7 rooms filled with newspapers and cats, paying $75 a month… And one flight up the same apartment, was filled with NYU students paying $1500 a month… A crazy phenomenon… Anyway..like most Rock and Roll quasi-celebs I (shamefully so) lived off my various girlfriends… What do you call a drummer without a girlfriend? Homeless…

Were you already into music? (previous bands)

There was a Prequel to Rat At Rat R called XZV-9… I was 17 when I joined and our first gig was opening for Lydia and Teenage Jesus at the Artemis club in Philadelphia… We were supposed to open for Sid Vicious at his first appearance after being let out of prison… But we all know the rest of that story anyway what an amazing experience and rite of passage into all things art… I´ll never forget Sclavunos, tall and wirey legs spread wide… Bass slung low… He had a red t-shirt on that said “LEVITATION”… Lydia shrieking with half her hair chopped off… Bradley beating on one drum like Moe Tucker on Crystal Meth… They played for 11 and ½ minutes exactly… Beth B (my future girlfriend) showed an early cinema of transgression film “D.O.A” between sets… My mind was blown..Never been the same since…

Had you musical training?

Yes thanx to my uncle and the most understanding parents in the world I was classically trained from the age of 9 or so… I received my first (marching) snare drum when I was 5 ..I strapped that sucker on and marched around our little town (population 300)… I think my parents got me lessons because they figured if I was gonna drive the entire town crazy.. I may as well learn to play the god-forsaken thing…

You often claim you were “Raised by Drag Queens” what part did the drag community play in your early days in New York…

I´m technically straight…although I did have a relationship with superstar post-op artist Greer Lankton… But I fell in with the gay community through my job at the infamous “Pyramid club” the birthplace of Ru-Paul, Lady Bunny, Lypsyncha, Ethyl Eichelberger, Baby Gregor, Hattie Hathaway etc.. iI was the Drag Community who took me off the streets… Gave me a job and couches to sleep on… They were and still are family to me. To this day I probably have campaigned more for Gay Rights than most gay people.. Anyone who says the F word around me in a hateful way better call 911 because I swear they will leave in an ambulance… One thing that was so amazing is along with me stage managing , working the door etc.… We also hired the local skinheads which were amazing human beings, Jimmy Gestapo (Murphy's Law) , Ray Beez … It was just a job to them protecting our performers and clientele… No insecurity or homophobia… Just doing their job and doing it well…it´s a shame Skinheads get profiled as racists whatever… Many of them are into acceptance and unity… Society´s tendency to profile is fucked..

Where did you rehearse?

In the early days… My dad´s wood shop (again my parents were the best in the world) Later in NYC, we paid by the hour to rehearse in grimy rehearsal studios… Another example of us paying to support our art.. There was a place called the Music Building in the mid 30´s where pretty much everyone jammed… Madonna apparently lived there for a while in between apartments…

Were you in contact with other bands of the NY scene?

Sure, Rat At Rat R were part of the big three while other notable bands like ritual tension, live skull, etc. skirted around the edges vying for position… One thing I was always proud of is we were (within reason) always polite to everyone… As aggro as we were on stage… We were kind to everyone offstage wish some of these other artists would have extended us the same courtesy…. I booked two nightclubs, The Pyramid (again fully owned and operated by Drag Queens) and I had a weekly night I curated at Danceteria… Sometimes I was a little brash with some of the bands who wanted to play there… But man, I got 500 tapes a week to listen to… If your bands name was “life in a blender” or “rude buddha” sorry I just didn´t have time to devote to anything so seemingly ridiculous…

Once Lydia Lunch told me that cheap rents and de-gentrification of Lower East Side in late 70's/early 80's are the reason of the success of the no wave phenomenon. What do you think about this? Did something change in the late 80's? Which was the situation?

I think anything Lydia says is pure gospel… She wrote the (Satanic) Bible as far as I´m concerned.. I have been in love with her since we met…sure…NYC at that time was inexpensive and I was drawn there because at the time it was all we had… If you wanted to be an artist that´s where you went… CBGB´s could make or break you… Luckily we were fortunate enough to win Hilly´s favor and headlined there more times than I can remember… Now (as Patti says) The Internet is the new CBGB´s and New York is just not a place for artists anymore… I live in Brazil.. We are lucky we can make art from anywhere now…Was the No-Wave phenomenon successful? I suppose on some level it is being rediscovered by a new generation… It´s fun getting fan mail from young kids… It´s nice to live long enough to see your music come back in style (so to speak)… In the late 80´s we started to get pushed out of our beloved neighborhood towards the East River… I think some of the unity started to disappear at that point … Sadly, If you ask me what made the No Wave movement (if not) successful… But at least interesting… They were a bunch of young artists who had no idea how to play musical instruments but were brave enough to get up on stage and do it anyway… Rat At Rat R approached dissonance and atonality from a different angle… We knew how to play our instruments very well… Maybe this was part of our downfall…hmmmmm…

NYC's crime rates in the 80's are the highest of the last 50 years. Did you feel the city was unsafe? Do you think that this fact reverberated on yours or other band's music in that period?

It was unsafe if you were stupid… Even being a shot out junkie I had enough sense to not walk around looking up at the tall buildings…Or deny someone a cigarette if I had one to spare… I lived all over that town… Spanish Harlem, Hell´s Kitchen… I never had a problem… Maybe it was luck?… Or as the doorman at Studio 54 once remarked “I knew how to carry myself” I dunno…a little bit of kindness goes a long way.. I met friends in Spanish Harlem… Was kind and considerate to them…and a week later I´d be sitting in gang members living room´s drinking banana milkshakes and playing with their kids… Despite many a language barrier… To a degree the drug dealers kept us safe… They didn´t want the police nosing around putting their business at risk because some pussy decided to snatch a purse…The Hells Angels block on East 3rd street was the safest block in New York… For that very reason….Honestly, as I believe is the case today… I always felt I had more to fear from the cops than the “criminals”…

The "Noise rock" category was obviously a simplification, but beyond a doubt the inclination to use high volumes, dissonance, feedback, atypical percussion was/is common to many bands. Do you feel comfortable with that term?

You Know , I do…And I´ll explain why… Every atom of matter in the Universe, of every grade of density, has a fixed rate of vibration… In fact the only way we can conceive of matter is through vibration… Vibration is Sound and sound is Noise… And if Noise is Music then is it such a far stretch to believe that the entire Universe and everything in it is “Music”? I would like to think so… It gives me hope of course again Rat At Rat R arrived at the exploration of “Noise” music very differently then the other two bands we are so frequently associated with… We worshiped at the altar of Robert Fripp and were led to our experimental nature by him… One of the most accomplished musicians in the world…The others were led by Glenn Branca.. A genius to be sure a man with a vision who has created some extremely incredible art… But couldn´t play a guitar to save his life…FIRST we learned the rules…THEN we broke them.. That is what I believe set us apart from the pack…

Did you feel part of a scene, a musical family in that period?

At first, but it dissipated rapidly through an unfortunate article in the Voice mainly… Robert Christgau in the early days had a hard on for Sonic Youth and slammed them in their “Confusion is Sex” record review… Unfortunately he went on to rave us, which through no fault of ours caused a rift between us, them and the Swans… This sparked the “I killed Christgau with my big fucking dick” tantrum… So I just focused on the fans… I remember some kids coming all the way from Colorado to see us at CBGB´s… They kept saying “ I can´t believe we´re standing here talking to David Rat!”… These were the people I gave my time and attention to….anyway, it´s all water under the bridge now… Thurston´s solo album released last year is some of the most beautiful music I have ever heard…”Benediction” was my wife and I´s wedding song… And he sent me a lovely message when my son was born… I was genuinely sad when they broke up the end of an era so to speak… Although I´m excited to see what CoCo has up her sleeve…The Swans new album (now that they are past their Jefferson Airplane Period) is fucking Brilliant… And seriously inspiring to me…

Which NY venues hosted these kinds of bands in those years? What was your fee?

We started at the S.I.N club… It stood for “Safety in Numbers” because supposedly it was dangerous to go there alone… I never thought so… It was there we fell in with Sonic Youth and Swans was a historic time… And I have some very fond memories… In some ways I felt we arrived a decade too late… I would have loved to have played Max´s Kansas City, Hurrah´s, The Mudd Club… But after S.I.N we graduated to CBGB´s, The Ritz, Danceteria , Maxwells and my favourite venue “The Peppermint Lounge”.. It was there we opened for the Minutemen, Flipper, Husker Du etc.… Jim Fouratt was an incredible visionary... He payed us the most I believe.. ($800) when we finally headlined the Pep but man the money was of little consequence to us… It only enabled us to create more art… For me it was the glorious artists we got to share stages with…Nick Cave, The Dead Boys, The Buzzcocks, The Dead Kennedy´s, Lydia Lunch, The Beastie Boys, even Nirvana (although I was in Rehab at the time and couldn´t participate).. On my own in other projects I played with Bo Diddley, Motorhead, and even got to accompany Alan Ginsberg shortly before his death (this was the highlight of my personal career) and more than made up for me missing the Nirvana gig…1000 times more…

Do you remember your first gig?

In my mind my first gig will always be in 1978 with Teenage Jesus… But I´m thinking the first show that I played under the name Rat At Rat R must have been at the S.I.N club… I do remember one show that a guy name Mike Rage hired us for in Harrisburg,Pa… Not sure if we were Rat At Rat R or XZV-9 at that point… But it was crazy… We hadn´t played together for a year…and just got up on stage and did it…Every other band on the bill was Hardcore Punk… In spiky soapy Mohawks (among them White Flag, Cruci-Fucks etc.) They had NO idea what to make of our noisy improvisation and we weren’t well received… Until someone in the crowd said “Flipper” They sound like Flipper!… From that point on we broke through the bars of the genre police and the kids dug us I think….

What are you doing now?

I´m an Author, an English teacher in Brazil and still a Recording Artist… My recently released memoir “Happy Ending” is getting good reviews and selling well.. I wrote it as an alternative to Suicide, plain and simple… It was either write or put a bullet in my head… It has a lot of my miserable journey through heroin addiction chronicled… But it´s also hopeful if you read between the lines be sure to remove all sharp objects from the room though.. It´s available at the link below… The title was supposed to be a play on words as in “Happy that Life Is Ending” but it´s transcended into a different meaning now..also I´ve just been signed to Dromedary Records a small but well respected label with a 20 year history… My new album ”The United Hates” is in the can… Recorded in one day in Buenos Aries for $100 (How punk rock can you get?). It´s slated for worldwide release summer of this year on Vinyl… You can Download the free single also at the link below…

Is it true you accept no money for your Literature or Music? How can this be possible?

I am the only Nativo Americano English teacher in my small town in Brazil…So I can command a more than adequate salary…I had to ask myself when I began to rekindle my career “What is the purpose of Art anyway?” It´s a search for truth and the truth is we are all fucked!… So in January I did a fundraiser for “Songs after Sandy” to help the hurricane victims, donating %100 of my proceeds…The foundation has assembled a collection of exclusive material including many rock icons including Bob Weir, Jeff Lynne, Dave Stewart, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and (god knows why?) myself.. It can also be purchased at the link below…In February I organized a fundraising event call “Authors for Animals”again %100 of my proceeds going to a no kill rescue org. This month it is “authors for Oxfam” and on and on until my liver rots away… Yes I fully intend to be the “Harry Chapin/Peter Green of Art terrorism” I´ll not dirty my Art with your money… If we don´t wise up, pull together, stop hating and killing each other, and each do what we can within our means…we can kiss this all but failed experiment called “The Human Race” Goodbye….. So on that note, Goodbye

Download my Free Single “Dancing with the Starv-ing” at: www.Dromedary-Records.com

Order “Happy Ending” in E-book or Paperback at: www.Open-Bks.com

Find out more about the Songs after Sandy Foundation at: www.SongsafterSandy.com

Punk Globe would like to to thank Antonia and David for the informative and very interesting interview......