Post by Fuggle on Jul 11, 2004 16:23:40 GMT -5
RIOT At The RITZ, NYC, Fri 15 May 1981
ROLLING STONE
"Random Notes"
June 25, 1981
"You're what I call a passive audience," said John Lydon of Public Image Ltd. at the outset of their impromptu gig last month at the Ritz (where they replaced an indisposed Bow Wow Wow.) Minutes later bottles were whizzing through the air, a chair was flung from the balcony, and the group was hustled offstage by security in a melee that left several persons injured, considerable property damage, and plenty of ill will all around. The reason for the fracas was PiL's insistence on playing behind the club's videoscreen and performing to the packed house via simultaneous broadcast: "live video," as guitarist Keith Levene dubbed it. But the audience—many of whom waited hours in a downpour for tickets—was not amused by the projected concert, which musically consisted of bleepy dub fragments punctuated by occasional drum bursts, nor by the interspliced (and utterly inane) pre-recorded PiL video material. Lusty booing began and bottles started to fly. As objects continued to pelt the stage ("You're not throwing enough," Lydon taunted), the crowd down front got their licks in by yanking the floor sheet out from under the group, dragging instruments and amplifiers with it. While Lydon chanted, "New York, New York, it's a helluva town," a furious Levene appeared in front of the screen to berate the crowd and was tackled by a roadie seconds before an attempted Heineken lobotomy. The band then fled the maelstrom.
"They were an angry mob, and that's that," explained a surprisingly unsneering Lydon at a press conference two days later. A more combatative Levene, looking like a charmless Artful Dodger, placed full blame on the audience and declared he was "satisfied" with the concert. "I have to be ... it was that intense. The impact was immaculate." Some were reminded of the lyrics to the band's first song: "Public Image, you got what you wanted."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Infamous Public Image Ltd. Riot Show
The Ritz, Fri 15 May 1981
from an Insider
Ed Caraballo (July 1997)
IN THE BEGINNING...
This all started when I met the members of Public Image because a friend of mine, Lisa Yapp (who's a producer for CNN now), was doing a cable show around '79. It was a gossip show where she did interviews. It was a syndicated show and she did the club scene. The show was called DIRT and she did her interviews in a garbage can. I was the director of her cable show and I thought I was hot shit even though I was only 18 at the time. One day, she did an interview with Keith Levene. They weren't really promoting anything. They moved to New York in May '81. Keith and John (Lydon) decided that punk and rock were dead so they weren't going to do any more performing and they weren't going to be a band anymore. They were going to be a company- that was the concept of Public Image Limited as they explained it to me. Jeanette (Lee), who wasn't a musician at all, was in the band as kind of a performance artist. They planned to use John's vocal talents and Keith's guitar and editing talents. He was doing sampling back then which was pretty new, like on Flowers of Romance with those celtic, tribal sounds. They rented this loft on West 18th Street, looking to form this company to do soundtracks and make videos. Remember that this was before MTV started out.
They wanted to hook up with someone who was invovled with video and computers. Lisa talked me up and Keith said 'I wanna meet this guy.' So we met when she was taping her interview with him. We became good friends and somehow I started hanging out with Keith and Jeanette. Actually, Keith and John were starting to have a lot of fights then. They were starting to get on the out's with each other. It was creative things and Keith had a pretty bad 'habit.' They split up about a year after I was on the scene.
I was just a star-struck kid then. It was like winning a music contest where you get to hang out with the rock band. They were on Warner Brothers and they always seemed to be getting paid in cash. Keith always seemed to have this big wad of cash with him that he didn't know exactly what to do with. So I became their tour guide to New York and their buddy and their play mate. We would drive around in my beat-up '73 Plymouth Satellite. Keith would wave around his money so flagrantly sometimes that I just grabbed it once and threw it out the window in the Holland Tunnel. He yelled at me so I had to stop and go get it.
We were in a little dream-land. I started taking Super-8 movies and I owned a broadcast camera package that was state-of-the-art at the time. I started filming their lives. John is a very intense guy. He liked me and he liked my sense of humor but to him to I was 'Keith's guy.' I always seemed to be going out with Keith and Jeanette so we seemed to him like a little faction. He was a little bit paranoid about us and it wasn't until later that he and I got along. After about a month of hanging out, Keith said to me 'you should be in the band.' I told him that I wasn't a musician, just a video guy. Then I decided 'OK, whatever.' Keith actually made me a full member of the band.
THE SET-UP
So one day, we're up at Warner Brothers at Rockefeller Center. We'd go up there like spoiled brats. Whenever we'd come in, there'd be a whole staff of people and we'd walk in and demands drinks (John never came with us up there). It was really cool for me, being a high school drop-out from the Bronx. So we were there playing pool one day and one of the publicists gets a call from someone who wants to talk to Keith or John. We're deep in this game of pool and Keith said 'What do you want!' It was the Ritz calling, this big popular venue then. It was their first or second anniversary and they had Bow Wow Wow scheduled to perform. At the last minute, they cancelled after they spend all this money promoting the show. They were hoping that PIL would be able to fill in at the last minute. Keith said 'fuck off! We're not interested!' I was excited though because the Ritz was the first video club in New York- they had this 40-foot wide screen with high intensity video projection. I said 'Wait Keith- they have all this fabulous video equipment there and we could do this really cool performance art thing.' He said 'yeah?' So we went down to check it out.
I'm very proud of this actually. I came up with this concept for the band where they would play live behind this huge screen. You would never actually see the band straight on. What we did was we used this whole row of parcans, high-intensity lights, really low. So these lights would shine the band's silhouette against the video screen. We could alternate that with a live camera that was shooting the band behind the stage and we would project this image on the screen. Jerry Branch, who ran the Ritz, was negiotating with us (he looked like a mafioso). Somebody said 'we're going to pay you $8,000 for the Friday and Saturday show.' I don't know why but I said 'no, that's not enough- we want $12,000.' It was like a surreal game but they said OK.
We made our intentions clear to them. Keith told them 'Rock and roll is fucking dead. We're not a band, we're a company. We're here to do performance art. This is going to be a show.' We told them to promote the show that way. They didn't do this though. They immediately went on the air with these radio stations and spent a lot of money promoting it. The Ritz was really exciting because PIL really hadn't done live shows for a while. John still had his core audience carrying over from the Sex Pistols and that was the primary audience for PIL. Both shows immediately sold out.
So we had to go to work really quickly. I had this footage and I had to use their editting equipment to put everything together. They gave me full access to all of their equipment. The video screen was on an electric motor that could be raised and lowered. We found a huge white tarp in their basement. Another crazy idea of mine was to make the precenium (the stage) this big white thing and where we'd put this tarp on the stage to drap over into the audience and it would be all white and pure looking.
We found this session drummer for the show in the Bowery (Sam Ulano). He was this really cool, old guy who did blues. He met him in a bar and asked him if he wanted to play the gig. Keith took out his bankroll and slipped him a couple of hundred bucks. So we just told him to be there Friday. It was kind of organic and haphazard, the way that the whole thing came together. So we took his drum kit and all the rest of the instruments on the stage behind the screen. To keep and hold the tarp in place so it didn't fall into the audience, we weighed it down with all of the instruments. The screen was controlled back in the video control booth where I would be.
So we quickly used the editting system to put together the Super-8 footage I had. It was pictures of PIL taking helicopters rides and John in a hotel room getting obsessed with cable TV (he pretty much never left the hotel when I knew him). It was odd the way I was learning from Keith. Even though Keith was kind of lacadaisical, to him it was still a performance. That was just his style. Almost like a jazz vibe. Everything was improvisational, just taking and using whatever was there. The concept of the show was that it was like a mask. PIL would have this show playing behind the video and you could never actually get to see them live.
ROLLING STONE
"Random Notes"
June 25, 1981
"You're what I call a passive audience," said John Lydon of Public Image Ltd. at the outset of their impromptu gig last month at the Ritz (where they replaced an indisposed Bow Wow Wow.) Minutes later bottles were whizzing through the air, a chair was flung from the balcony, and the group was hustled offstage by security in a melee that left several persons injured, considerable property damage, and plenty of ill will all around. The reason for the fracas was PiL's insistence on playing behind the club's videoscreen and performing to the packed house via simultaneous broadcast: "live video," as guitarist Keith Levene dubbed it. But the audience—many of whom waited hours in a downpour for tickets—was not amused by the projected concert, which musically consisted of bleepy dub fragments punctuated by occasional drum bursts, nor by the interspliced (and utterly inane) pre-recorded PiL video material. Lusty booing began and bottles started to fly. As objects continued to pelt the stage ("You're not throwing enough," Lydon taunted), the crowd down front got their licks in by yanking the floor sheet out from under the group, dragging instruments and amplifiers with it. While Lydon chanted, "New York, New York, it's a helluva town," a furious Levene appeared in front of the screen to berate the crowd and was tackled by a roadie seconds before an attempted Heineken lobotomy. The band then fled the maelstrom.
"They were an angry mob, and that's that," explained a surprisingly unsneering Lydon at a press conference two days later. A more combatative Levene, looking like a charmless Artful Dodger, placed full blame on the audience and declared he was "satisfied" with the concert. "I have to be ... it was that intense. The impact was immaculate." Some were reminded of the lyrics to the band's first song: "Public Image, you got what you wanted."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Infamous Public Image Ltd. Riot Show
The Ritz, Fri 15 May 1981
from an Insider
Ed Caraballo (July 1997)
IN THE BEGINNING...
This all started when I met the members of Public Image because a friend of mine, Lisa Yapp (who's a producer for CNN now), was doing a cable show around '79. It was a gossip show where she did interviews. It was a syndicated show and she did the club scene. The show was called DIRT and she did her interviews in a garbage can. I was the director of her cable show and I thought I was hot shit even though I was only 18 at the time. One day, she did an interview with Keith Levene. They weren't really promoting anything. They moved to New York in May '81. Keith and John (Lydon) decided that punk and rock were dead so they weren't going to do any more performing and they weren't going to be a band anymore. They were going to be a company- that was the concept of Public Image Limited as they explained it to me. Jeanette (Lee), who wasn't a musician at all, was in the band as kind of a performance artist. They planned to use John's vocal talents and Keith's guitar and editing talents. He was doing sampling back then which was pretty new, like on Flowers of Romance with those celtic, tribal sounds. They rented this loft on West 18th Street, looking to form this company to do soundtracks and make videos. Remember that this was before MTV started out.
They wanted to hook up with someone who was invovled with video and computers. Lisa talked me up and Keith said 'I wanna meet this guy.' So we met when she was taping her interview with him. We became good friends and somehow I started hanging out with Keith and Jeanette. Actually, Keith and John were starting to have a lot of fights then. They were starting to get on the out's with each other. It was creative things and Keith had a pretty bad 'habit.' They split up about a year after I was on the scene.
I was just a star-struck kid then. It was like winning a music contest where you get to hang out with the rock band. They were on Warner Brothers and they always seemed to be getting paid in cash. Keith always seemed to have this big wad of cash with him that he didn't know exactly what to do with. So I became their tour guide to New York and their buddy and their play mate. We would drive around in my beat-up '73 Plymouth Satellite. Keith would wave around his money so flagrantly sometimes that I just grabbed it once and threw it out the window in the Holland Tunnel. He yelled at me so I had to stop and go get it.
We were in a little dream-land. I started taking Super-8 movies and I owned a broadcast camera package that was state-of-the-art at the time. I started filming their lives. John is a very intense guy. He liked me and he liked my sense of humor but to him to I was 'Keith's guy.' I always seemed to be going out with Keith and Jeanette so we seemed to him like a little faction. He was a little bit paranoid about us and it wasn't until later that he and I got along. After about a month of hanging out, Keith said to me 'you should be in the band.' I told him that I wasn't a musician, just a video guy. Then I decided 'OK, whatever.' Keith actually made me a full member of the band.
THE SET-UP
So one day, we're up at Warner Brothers at Rockefeller Center. We'd go up there like spoiled brats. Whenever we'd come in, there'd be a whole staff of people and we'd walk in and demands drinks (John never came with us up there). It was really cool for me, being a high school drop-out from the Bronx. So we were there playing pool one day and one of the publicists gets a call from someone who wants to talk to Keith or John. We're deep in this game of pool and Keith said 'What do you want!' It was the Ritz calling, this big popular venue then. It was their first or second anniversary and they had Bow Wow Wow scheduled to perform. At the last minute, they cancelled after they spend all this money promoting the show. They were hoping that PIL would be able to fill in at the last minute. Keith said 'fuck off! We're not interested!' I was excited though because the Ritz was the first video club in New York- they had this 40-foot wide screen with high intensity video projection. I said 'Wait Keith- they have all this fabulous video equipment there and we could do this really cool performance art thing.' He said 'yeah?' So we went down to check it out.
I'm very proud of this actually. I came up with this concept for the band where they would play live behind this huge screen. You would never actually see the band straight on. What we did was we used this whole row of parcans, high-intensity lights, really low. So these lights would shine the band's silhouette against the video screen. We could alternate that with a live camera that was shooting the band behind the stage and we would project this image on the screen. Jerry Branch, who ran the Ritz, was negiotating with us (he looked like a mafioso). Somebody said 'we're going to pay you $8,000 for the Friday and Saturday show.' I don't know why but I said 'no, that's not enough- we want $12,000.' It was like a surreal game but they said OK.
We made our intentions clear to them. Keith told them 'Rock and roll is fucking dead. We're not a band, we're a company. We're here to do performance art. This is going to be a show.' We told them to promote the show that way. They didn't do this though. They immediately went on the air with these radio stations and spent a lot of money promoting it. The Ritz was really exciting because PIL really hadn't done live shows for a while. John still had his core audience carrying over from the Sex Pistols and that was the primary audience for PIL. Both shows immediately sold out.
So we had to go to work really quickly. I had this footage and I had to use their editting equipment to put everything together. They gave me full access to all of their equipment. The video screen was on an electric motor that could be raised and lowered. We found a huge white tarp in their basement. Another crazy idea of mine was to make the precenium (the stage) this big white thing and where we'd put this tarp on the stage to drap over into the audience and it would be all white and pure looking.
We found this session drummer for the show in the Bowery (Sam Ulano). He was this really cool, old guy who did blues. He met him in a bar and asked him if he wanted to play the gig. Keith took out his bankroll and slipped him a couple of hundred bucks. So we just told him to be there Friday. It was kind of organic and haphazard, the way that the whole thing came together. So we took his drum kit and all the rest of the instruments on the stage behind the screen. To keep and hold the tarp in place so it didn't fall into the audience, we weighed it down with all of the instruments. The screen was controlled back in the video control booth where I would be.
So we quickly used the editting system to put together the Super-8 footage I had. It was pictures of PIL taking helicopters rides and John in a hotel room getting obsessed with cable TV (he pretty much never left the hotel when I knew him). It was odd the way I was learning from Keith. Even though Keith was kind of lacadaisical, to him it was still a performance. That was just his style. Almost like a jazz vibe. Everything was improvisational, just taking and using whatever was there. The concept of the show was that it was like a mask. PIL would have this show playing behind the video and you could never actually get to see them live.