Death Of Samantha - L’art-rock al napalm

Of Serbian origin, John Petkovic found himself in Cleveland, Ohio, inevitably forced to reckon with the city's most vital living legend: Pere Ubu, the band that in the Seventies had turned garage rock into avant-garde material, the stuff of expressionist theatre, an exercise in self-flagellation and, at the same time, in the liberation of a subconscious that, as the years went by, increasingly came to identify with that of an entire nation. Cleveland in the early Eighties still wore that battered, ravaged face that had inspired Thomas & co.'s band to craft masterpieces of the calibre of "The Modern Dance" or "New Picnic Time".

It was precisely while racking his brain over records of such stature that, in the middle of 1983, amid the incendiary fires of hardcore, Petkovic, between one odd job and another, pieced together his most famous creation, naming it Death Of Samantha after a song by Yoko Ono. The line-up: Doug Gillard on lead guitar, David James on bass and piano (also lending a hand with vocals when the occasion called for it), Steve Eierdam (better known as Steve-O, one of the most colourful musical characters of the era) on drums and, of course, John Petkovic on vocals and rhythm guitar.

As the script dictates, the band began cutting its teeth in the city's venues, even returning to the very places where Papa Ubu had claimed his first victims... They were the favoured sons, certainly. But they had smoothed off the edges, drawing closer to the full-bodied, thunderous rock of the Seventies.

In 1985, on St. Valentines Records (the duo's own label), came their first official single, "Amphetamine/Simple As That", with a rather sinister warning on the cover: "If you look at yourself too long in the mirror, you'll see a monkey"... As if to say, a nod to man's bestial roots and an invitation to read into their music a "primitivist" undercurrent of meaning... a stance taken towards the subject matter itself, turning it into a mutant body, subject to the stylistic-musical regression (in "garage" terms) that the fathers had pulled off so sublimely that the sons were forced to change direction; for obvious reasons, we might add. Take "Amphetamine" itself as a yardstick: you find Pere Ubu in there, their iconoclastic charge, but you can't help noticing a certain mocking irony, often verging on the sick and blasphemous. You'd call it glamorous, if the term didn't seem slightly out of place (though how out of place, really, considering that with his next band, Cobra Verde, Petkovic would push his glam inflections even further?). But the fate of sons is to pay the price in full. And so the ghosts of late-Seventies Cleveland return. And it's a return in grand style, as the second single, "Porn In The Usa" – which includes "Coca Cola & Licorice" and "Listen To The Mockingbird" – lays out and declares. Full confirmation soon followed. Death Of Samantha are what Pere Ubu might have become had they one day decided to shuffle the deck and look towards a certain strain of American college (pop-)rock. But things aren't quite so simple, to be honest. Because the music on Strungout On Jargon, their 1986 full-length debut released by Homestead, also brushes up against the stripped-down, gut-punch hymnal quality of the best Clash and the "existentialist" exuberance of Stooges, Voidoids, Patti Smith Group, etc. But you have to dig beneath the folds. You can't stay on the surface. Because on the surface you only find flashes of rock'n'roll, even if of the finest kind. But underneath, convulsing, there's much more at work.

Here, then, is the fearsome power already latent in "Coca Cola & Licorice", an orgy of garage perversions erupting one after another with ever-greater intensity, Petkovic's clarinet (!) recalling master Thomas's none-too-gentle forays into the musette. And after all, the very instrumental weave is unmistakably Pere-Ubu-esque, beyond any denial. Thus the bass throbs crooked and funky, while the two guitars' relentless distortions recall Tom Herman's near-noise ravings, before the final collapse seals the kinship beyond doubt.

In "Simple As That" you find the Athens kids pounding out tons of joy through peerless rock'n'roll progressions amid trilling guitar trails, reiterating an inner drama, chirping as if tossed into a cauldron of Feelies and Big Star, with a voice that's furious, howling, caught up in rambling streams of warped consciousness. And yet composed, almost folded in on itself, solitary. The dimension of youth, bordering on deceit and the end. Exuberance and a subtle despair...

"Bed Fire" sits on the same coordinates, but staggering, weakened by a killing anxiety. "Ham & Eggs 99c", on the other hand, could come straight out of the Television catalogue, ready as it is to flaunt a harmonic blend that sounds almost "subliminal" when you consider that, at bottom, it's a full-blown amphetamine delirium worthy of Tragic Mulatto's macabre bacchanals. In "Conviction", by contrast, an aura of magic returns: overlapping, coupling chords seal a heart-embracing folk-rock swoon. The drumming seals one embrace after another, along with everything else. The tone turns menacing again on "Grapeland": folk-rock once more, but of the apocalypse. Or its own apocalypse.

With "Sexual Dreaming" (later covered in a shamelessly punk key by the New Bomb Turks) comes a railroad boogie dripping with bloody Stoogesian wounds, fleetingly citing the velvet underground. "Turquoise Hand", in its relentless rhythmic retaliation and its whirling emotional ascent, delights in toying with punk-blues, abandoning it to the fate of a dazed rockabilly.

Introduced by the usual gleaming chords, "Couldn't Forget 'bout That" finally offers up a kind of ballad that coagulates the record's entire emotional and musical arsenal, sublimating their sound into something definitively unique and unrepeatable: the rhythmic weave, syncopated and inventive, a worthy heir to Pere Ubu's Maimone/Krauss duo (though the Beefheart-ian ones of "New Picnic Time"), the poppy fragrances (along an imaginary line running from the Byrds all the way to the college-pop of Rem, Pylon, Smithereens and the like), and Petkovic's half-sung, half-declaimed vocals, now dramatically hysterical, now solemnly romantic (ideally linking Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop and above all the exceptional Chuck Ivey – sneer, irony, psychic chasms – former leader and voice of Debris). A finale of almost new-age guitar excess, this time reaching straight for the sky, after John's infernal, priceless ranting.

With this flawless masterpiece – which, needless to say, sold very little, next to nothing – Death Of Samantha earned a place of honour in the American alternative scene. The live, single-take recording – which, as the liner notes point out, took just six hours – heightens its emotional depth and musical impact. You genuinely get the sense of witnessing a live performance, with songs following one another without ever losing an ounce of inspiration, because, at bottom and to be perfectly honest, what Petkovic stages is a theatre of the absurd, in which everything scenic lives off a collage effect that never feels scattered: the fundamental building blocks of his musical style, in fact, take shape as a "dramatised" parody of a decade or so of "art-rock". Pere Ubu (the napalm of rock artistry) and others have already been mentioned above. What matters now is reviving the debts Death Of Samantha owe to the glam rampages of the exuberant, radical proto-wave of the essential and thoroughly forgotten Debris (whose grotesque atmospheres and hallucinated tones on their sole masterpiece-album – "Static Disposal", anno domini 1976 – cannot go unmentioned); and then what of the "garage" primitivism, rooted in freak-utopian ideals, of Simply Saucer? And of certain motorik-psychedelic sparks? In short: the Cleveland band's sound is unique, precisely in how multi-faceted it is.

The tour that followed the album's release brought out another hugely important element of the saga. The Death Of Samantha concerts still carry, for those who were there, an aura of mystery and legend. Steve Albini declared himself a sworn enemy of the Cleveland outfit, since, in his view, they were more focused on the "choreographic" side of performance than on anything strictly instrumental or musical. What's certain is that Petkovic (who would often set his arms on fire while singing, or spit liquorice from his mouth, and so on) & co. didn't do much to prove good old Steve wrong. And what to make of Steve-O, who liked to arrive onstage dressed as a titillating female version of Elvis (!), or carried in on a coffin? A spectacle, certainly... Between a "destabilising" cover of Warren Zevon's "Werewolves Of London", the hard rock cream of "The Set Up (Of Madama Sosostris)", the nod to their roots in "Blood And Shaving Cream", the post-nuclear hysteria of "Yellow Fever" and the sinister tones of the instrumental "American Horoscope And The Bad Prescription" (complete with tape manipulations), the EP Laughing In The Face Of A Dead Man (1986), while easing off the throttle somewhat, helped keep attention on the band alive.

After appearing with "Blood And Shaving Cream" on the Homestead-curated compilation "The Wailing Ultimate" (1987), and the departure of David James (replaced by Dave Swanson), 1988 brought the band's definitive artistic consecration. A record of absolute cohesion, Where The Women Wear The Glory And The Men Wear The Pants (1988) is, in fact, their most rock-driven and most famous album together, and, for some, their artistic peak. The record represents the full maturation of a sound that, on Strungout On Jargon and the EP that followed, still showed traces of instability, attributable, however, to its experimental bent (of which "American Horoscope And The Bad Prescription" marks the high point).

The opening "Harlequin Tragedy" unleashes a visceral, granite-hard, wonderfully hymn-like rock. The riffs and triangulations of the two guitars (which can't help citing the guitar-heroes of the psychedelic era at every turn) collide with the bass's tectonic tremors, each doing its part – alongside the dry, cutting drumming – to hammer away in perfect art-punk style, but more creatively incisive than the period's average, as the finale, for crossed guitars and honky-tonk piano alone, amply proves. Still powerful and furious, on "Good Friday" the band allows itself, midway through, the luxury of a superb instrumental digression, easing the tension that marks the song's beginning and end: the guitars whisper thin, distorted drones against one another, the bass vibrates in a metallic background echo, before, with a nervous jolt, Petkovic's voice rings out the charge with a killer's sneer, half-sung, half spoken-word invective.

"Sylvia Plath" – a cover of a Peter Laughner song – is the most moving moment of the bunch. From a suicidal musician to a suicidal poet: the thin thread is an emotion that catches in the throat, a wonder made of delicate arpeggios and fading strings, underscoring the impenetrable yet intensely "true" drama of a ballad that, in an endless circling motion, whispers to the soul the meaning of its shattering into a thousand delicate shards of poetry, like these lines that say everything the music had already, irrevocably, evoked:

Sto imparando la pace, da me quietamente posando

How the light falls on these white walls, this bed, these hands.

(Sylvia Plath, “Tulips”).

Enhanced by a brief touch of English horn and a psychedelic-vibrations interlude, “Lucky Dog (Lost My Pride)” moves with a martial, broken gait. Punk frenzy, rockabilly-style, whirling in circular dance, returns to win converts on “Monkey Face”, while “Savior City” fuses Clash (urban flavor and anthemic fragrances), r'n'b horns and acid glissandos. A chameleonic apotheosis of Petkovic's vocals, of the lysergic, muscular guitar sound, of a rhythm section perfectly at ease building frenetic, precious arrangements, this is the record on which Death Of Samantha become classics. A sound that glides along a treadmill of fragments past and present, renewing and personalizing disparate influences thanks to a striking rapport, evident, if further proof were needed, in the "calculated" vehemence of “Staring Through It Now”. “That’s All That Matters”, on the other hand, is a tiptoeing ballad that reveals, en passant, Petkovic's debt to Laughner's lyrically aching existentialism. Closing the album is “Blood Creek”: a perfect seal on their style.

Having thus perfected this style and scaled back its experimental impact, the band ventures into the folds of their final record, Come All Ye Faithless (1989), with the intent of revisiting their body of work from a more claustrophobic and unsettled perspective. Yet, despite this being, in terms of popularity (relatively speaking...), a fruitful period, the band ends up producing a sound burdened with a suffered, inextricable unease. The Beefheart-esque clarinet that pokes out of the gallop of “Roses Rejoice” ideally joins the two extremes of their inspiration with narcotic overtones. Still, even though the aggressive, street-level rock of “Geisha Girl” and the calmer “Looking For A Face” echo the fiery climate of the previous record, it's abundantly clear that everything has taken on less terrifying, more calculated contours. Pulling its punches, their music stakes its own classicism on a bet of normalization that it can no longer win, except when viewed from a broader perspective, projected toward the near future. And so “Rosenberg Summer” luxuriates in a fluid unfolding of romantic ballad filigrees, clinging to psycho-melodic guitar bridges and baleful cello trails. Petkovic's crooning betrays a certain artificiality, but remains, in essence, a masterful example of viscerally creative singing. The blues of “Now It’s Your Turn (To Be A Martyr)” and the hard rock aftertaste of “Machine Language” are followed by the psycho-drama of “Oh, Laughter”, a long "dark" digression before the purified Clash of “New Soldier, New Sailor”. The music box of “Nostalgically Yours” introduces another long psychological excursus: “Come To Me”, without doubt the most daring and inspired track of the whole batch, as well as the band's final testament. A ritual marked by a martial rhythm, with sudden peaks and equally whirling drops. It feels like a synthesis of Nick Cave's blues and Jim Morrison's musical theater. The drunken variation on the theme of “Happy Birthday To You” in “Amnesia” only heightens the record's sense of estrangement, which, ultimately, proves to be anything but negligible and indeed deserves close attention, especially given that Cobra Verde would go on to continue down this road, albeit with the obvious, necessary shortcuts.

In the meantime, once you've tracked down the records mentioned above, you'll have no trouble agreeing that Death Of Samantha represented one of the finest, most exciting and creative experiences of Eighties rock.

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