Infinite Dreams, the Life of Alan Vega by Laura Davis-Chanin and Liz Lamere
Laura graduated in the late seventies. While she was a student at Friends, she was a drummer for a group called the Student Teachers that played regularly at CBGB. Her experience in that world is recorded in a book I read and reported about on this site a few years ago. Now she has collaborated with Liz Lamere, the widow of Suicide’s Alan Vega, on an in-depth biography of Alan, from his childhood as a brilliant kid in Brooklyn to his death.
His childhood and youth are at odds with the iconoclastic performer he became. At first, he seemed destined to become a renowned astrophysicist. Then he began to excel in the world of painting and sculpture. Even as he shone in these divergent areas, there was another hidden identity that awaited discovery.
The experience of seeing Iggy Pop altered his life. The performance he witnessed was revolutionary. Iggy Pop brough a new mayhem to the stage, cursing the audience and harming himself. This new definition of energy reached Alan. He saw a new future for himself. You may have guessed that this is not my kind of music. However, because of this book I checked out Suicide on YouTube. I can only say that Vega is amazing. He sounds like Elvis reincarnated in a circle of chaos. One of Suicide’s early successes, Frankie Teardrop, packs a wallop in the tradition of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Richard Cory.
The authors enrich this work with a multitude of photographs and tributes from his many collaborators and admirers. The foreword is by Bruce Springsteen. Though Vega had an on-stage persona that could bring out the worst in audience – in the early days he would leave the stage covered in spit –his colleagues cannot say enough about how kind, generous, and deferential he was off-stage. Alan Vega was driven to break new ground. In this way, he seems the very definition of an artist.
