Suicide’s Alan Vega was one of rock’s greatest antagonists

Suicide was supposed to headline the upcoming Desert Daze festival in Joshua Tree. The fest was going to be the NYC duo’s first L.A.-area show in 16 years.

The billing almost didn’t seem real, in part because Suicide had long become one of those bands, like the Velvet Underground, whose influence and lore far outpaced the number of people who had actually seen the act in its ‘70s prime – the shows with the swinging motorcycle chains, bloody faces and axes thrown at band members onstage.

After singer Alan Vega died over the weekend at 78, that show will have to go on without Suicide (Desert Daze organizers say they are plotting a tribute). But pop music – including electronic, punk, and anything else with a mean streak – is now left without one of its only true antagonists.

Suicide were already old guys when the band showed up on the New York scene in the early ‘70s – Vega, nee Alan Bermowitz, was born in 1938. But right away, Suicide’s music and presence was like something from a failed future.

Unlike peers such as Kraftwerk, which used nascent electronic instruments to imagine a smooth, orderly future, or Giorgio Moroder, who used synthesizers to create a dancefloor utopia, Suicide sounded like Elvis Presley if he’d never made it into Sun Studio and instead wound up in “Taxi Driver.”

Suicide was perhaps the first popular band to use the phrase “punk music,” at a time when the darker connotations of that word were way out front. But as a scene codified around the term, Suicide had already blown up the ship. Rev’s pedal-shredded, organ-drum-machine setup was like nothing else at the time. But Vega channeled the old rockabilly ghosts as he strutted and yelped into the void.

The band, especially its 1977 studio debut, still shocks for the brutality of its worldview. “Frankie Teardrop” was like a blues parable without God to hope for: parenthood as living death, city life as mind-breaking panic. Album kickoff “Ghost Rider” still makes almost all the rock and roll that came after it feel like a wholesome night of cotton candy at the fair — lots of hippie bands sang things like “America’s killing its youth,” but Vega made you feel the blood on your hands.

But there are reasons that Bruce Springsteen still covers “Dream Baby Dream” (and you should read the Boss’ own tribute to Vega). Vega, for all the legends around his hyper-violent live sets, could wrangle something beautiful and durable from his band’s tangle of live wires. Ballads like “Cheree” and “Dream Baby Dream” are all the prettier and sadder for having emerged from such a savage act.

Pop culture doesn’t want bands like Suicide anymore.

Even our rebels, our most radical and visionary artists attuned to the desperation of contemporary America, still have to put on a televisable and sellable spectacle. Suicide didn’t just express hurt, the band appeared to want to inflict hurt. Listen to “23 Minutes Over Brussels,” the band’s famed 1978 live bootleg from its opening gig with Elvis Costello, and you’ll hear an act whose very oxygen came from being hated.

Suicide never retired, and the band’s influence was widely acknowledged as early as Soft Cell and as late as M.I.A. But in a year when pop music has lost more heroes than maybe ever, it also lost one of its greatest anti-hero. That was worth a bike chain to the face back then, and it’s worth fondly remembering now.