Chapter 9: Take A Chance On Me
In which I pay tribute to the recently departed James Chance and share my re-edit of 'Roving Eye' by The Contortions.
Hello, and sorry once again for my lack of updates here. It’s been a month of missed deadlines and a backlog of remixing, with an unwelcome visit from that old spectre called Covid in the midst of my chaos.
I wrote a couple of long articles in this time. The first is a deep-dive into the origins and legacy of Dawn Penn’s ‘You Don’t Love Me (No No No)’ which turned 30 this month, sort of. Read about it over at The Quietus. The second takes a look at the ever-evolving career of no wave adjascent electro oddities Ike Yard and their various off-shoots. I’m still waiting for the latter to be published via Bandcamp Daily, but there will be accompanying Dubstack related posts as soon as that goes live.
Those both kept me up late, feverishly tapping away at my keyboard way beyond the witching hour in the hope of meeting deadlines, but fortunately I’m back on top of things, and ready to share a stack of new tracks, dubs, mixtapes, and interviews over the next few weeks starting with my entirely unofficial re-edit/remix of The Contortions which I’d been considering for years, and finally got round to after hearing of James Chance’s untimely passing earlier this month.
My relationship with Chance’s music began somewhat by accident when I was given A Christmas Record sometime in the mid 80s. I loved ‘Christmas Wrapping’ by The Waitresses, and soon fell for the morose disco jingle of Christina’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ but I had no idea what to make of ‘Christmas With Satan’ by some apparent weirdo named James White, and I don’t think I really paid him much mind again until sometime in the 90s when I took a punt on a crackly copy of James White’s Flaming Demonics, drawn in by the huge quiff on the cover and the promise of a version of ‘Caravan’, not to mention track titles like ‘I Danced With A Zombie’ which appealled to my unwholesome thing for crappy old B-horrors. It didn’t disappoint.
I probably forgot about him once again until no wave became a buzzword in the early 00s. One afternoon while having a dig through the musty shelves on the long-closed Langley Records halfway between here and nowhere, in a cavernous space in West Molesy, I stumbled upon another copy of Flaming Demonics and Sax Maniac by James White & The Blacks. The reliably disdainful Mr Langley grumbled something about my apparent poor choices then took a fiver for each album, and sent me packing as he put some flabby old dad-rock on the record deck to somehow purge the place of these atonal jazz demons. I never looked back.
If you’re unfamiliar with Chance’s oeuvre, I’ve penned a few thoughts about his unusual career (and full subscribers can grab my ‘Roving Eye’ remix at the bottom)…
“From New York City, the dictator of disco-sophisto, the king of ultrasoul…” so proclaimed Anya Phillips on stage at an unidentified club in Rotterdam in June 1980. The drums roll, and then — *crack* — we’re smacked in the face with a frantic reimagining of Michael Jackson’s ‘Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough’.
Listening back to this Contortions gig — immortalized on tape and released as Soul Exorcism Redux — it’s curious to imagine how James Chance ever fitted with Lydia Lunch’s proto-gothic noise in the early incarnation of Teenage Jesus & The Jerks. It’s also hard to grasp how NYC’s loft-jazz scene might’ve reacted to Chance’s anxious sax spasms, or again how the no wave scene received his mutated approximations of a JBs-esque soul review once he’d set up The Contortions.
Luckily there’s a few glimpses of Chance’s turn in Teenage Jesus & The Jerks via some early live recordings and a 1977 studio session before Lunch amicably ousted him. “Teenage Jesus was very cold, and James was very hot, so he was encouraged to go elsewhere” Lunch admits in Marc Master’s No Wave book, “I knew pretty quickly that James had something else in him.”
And that something turned out to be the caustic punk-funk of The Contortions who formed in late 1977, though it was the following spring when they really launched into action when Chance, already known for his confrontational nature, began attacking members of the audience at a benefit party for X Magazine. A couple of months later, in May, The Contortions were one of 10 bands who appeared at a week-long festival at Artists Space in TriBeCa. Brian Eno was in town, putting the finishing touches to Talking Heads’ 2nd LP at Mediasound, but spent the week checking out the frenetic racket of what was soon dubbed no-wave.
A compilation was pitched to Island Records who funded recording sessions for all 10 bands on the bill, but only 4 wound up in the studio. Such was the self destructive and contrary nature of no-wave, some had already broken up, and other’s didn’t bother to come to the No New York sessions. Fortunately, The Contortions were one of the four who siezed the opportunity — DNA, Mars, and Chance’s former cohorts Teenage Jesus & The Jerks were the other 3 — and laid down four tracks live in the studio, with Eno keeping his production to the bare minimum, hoping to capture exactly what he’d heard at Artists Space.
Released in November ‘78 on Island’s Anitilles imprint, No New York divided listeners and critics, particularly The Contortions whose four feral funk tracks open the LP. In December, John Rockwell caught the band at Max’s Kansas City. Reviewing the show in the New York Times, he described their music as “abrupt and disjunct” and perhaps notably “Jazzish”.
Disco wasn’t a major concern for Chance at the time, he dismissed it as a pop music which he thought simplified or even whitened the syncopated rhythms of funk and soul, but when Michael Zilkha offered him $10,000 to make a disco album for ZE Records in ‘79, Chance embraced the opportunity, elasticating disco’s rigid kick drums and hi-hats with his own jagged verve. “I’d never have done that if Michael Zilkha hadn’t asked me to” Chance admitted to Pete Silverton in a 1979 piece for Sounds. “I mean, why not?” he continued, “I’m getting paid, so, fuck it.”
A lot rests on that offhand “fuck it”. The dalliance of disco and punk wasn’t new, of course. Blondie first demo’d ‘Heart Of Glass’ back in ‘75 as the Hues Corporation inspired ‘Once I Had A Love’, while Talking Heads pilfered Average White Band for ‘Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town’ which opened their debut LP ‘77. ZE themselves were already in the pupal stage of their mutant-disco hybrid when Zilkha coughed up $10k for a Contortions disco record, but instead, Chance donned a dinner jacket, renamed himself James White, his band became The Blacks, and disco-punk had it’s first underground anthem in ‘Contort Yourself’; a record which preempted the punk-funk of post-no New York, with the likes of Konk, Liquid Liquid and ESG leading the way for the DFA to reignite the flame at the turn of the 21st centrury. Innumerable bands have waved the disco-punk flag in the wake of LCD Soundsystem, while labels like Strut and Soul Jazz have released meticulously compiled comps which remain both esoterically satisfying for the casual musicologist, and perfectly presentable for the kind of Nathan Barleys lampooned in ‘Losing My Edge’.
Following the tumultuous sessions which led to James White & The Blacks’ Off White album, Chance gathered the remaining Contortions to record their own album, (mostly) ditching the disco for his favoured brand of jagged funk, though a monstruous rework of ‘Contort Yourself’ was included in the set, and ZE released Buy soon after Off White. Which leads us to my re-edit of ‘Roving Eye’ from the Buy album.
I picked this track a few years back when Tom Robinson invited me onto his old BBC 6 show to spend an hour discussing and playing tracks from the ZE catalogue, and while most would probably have expected me to include ‘Contort Yourself’, I’ve always had a soft spot for the JB’s style groove here where Chance’s screams and yelps aren’t far flung from James Brown’s signature ululations. I loved the original but the switch in tempo has always confused dancefloors, so I took a razor to it, extending the intro and breakdown, then attacked it with a barrage of percussion and a few blasts of tape echo here and there.
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