Alan Vega

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Alan Vega (born June 23, 1938 in Brooklyn , New York , USA as Boruch Alan Bermowitz ; † July 16, 2016 ) was the singer of the no-wave duo Suicide and has also released numerous solo albums. Vega was also active as a painter and sculptor. Alan Vega was married to Liz Lamere, who has contributed keyboards and vocals to many recordings since the 1990s. Their son Dante Vega Lamere now manages the Alan Vegas legacy with Liz Lamere.

biography

Alan Bermowitz grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. By the time he announced the 70th birthday of his recordings in 2008, Vega was widely regarded as ten years younger; the 2005 book Suicide: No Compromise names 1948 as the year of his birth and cites a 1998 interview in which Vega talks about seeing Elvis Presley as a "little kid" on the Ed Sullivan Show (1956). A 1983 Los Angeles Times article refers to him as a 35-year-old, and several other sources also cite 1948 as his date of birth. Two articles from 2009 confirmed his birth date in 1938, one in Le Monde on the Lyon exhibition and one in Rolling Stone magazine . Vega also long claimed to be Catholic because of his mother's Puerto Rican descent. Although topics of Catholicism have been important in his writing and visual arts over the years, he admitted in a 2008 interview with The Jewish Chronicle that he lied about his own religious upbringing in order to "fuel the myth".

In the mid-1960s he attended Brooklyn College, where he studied both physics and visual arts under Ad Reinhardt and Kurt Seligmann, graduating in 1967. In the 1960s, he became involved with the Art Workers' Coalition, a radical artist group that harassed museums and once barricaded the Museum of Modern Art . In 1969, funding from the New York State Council for the Arts enabled the creation of MUSEUM: A Project of Living Artists - an artist-run, 24-hour multimedia gallery on 729 Broadway in Manhattan. He called himself Alan Suicide and graduated from painting into light sculptures, many of which were made of electronic debris. He received a residency at the OK Harris Gallery in SoHo, where he continued to exhibit until 1975. Barbara Gladstone showed his work well into the 1980s.

When The Stooges performed at the New York State Pavilion in August 1969, it was a revelation for Vega. In 1966 he met Martin Reverby and became friends with him. Together they began to experiment with music and together with guitarist Paul Liebgott founded the band Suicide . The group played at the MUSEUM twice before moving to the OK Harris Gallery. He called himself "Nasty Cut" and used the terms "punk music" and "punk music mass" in pamphlets to describe their music, which he took from an article by Lester Bangs. In 1971 Paul Liebgott left the band and Mari Reverby came on drums. After Bermowitz finally settled on Alan Suicide as their working name, they began playing music venues . Suicide went on to perform and eventually gained international recognition.

In 1980 Vega released his first solo record of the same name. It defined the frantic rockabilly style he would use in his solo work for the next few years, with the song "Jukebox Babe" becoming a hit single in France. In 1985 he released the commercially viable Just a Million Dreams but was dropped from his record label after its release. The album was originally produced by Ric Ocasek as the follow-up to the critically acclaimed Saturn Strip (1983), but production switched to Chris Lord-Alge and Vega ran into trouble during the recording. The album avoided many of Vega's experimental traits in favor of power pop songs, and he later complained, "They took all of my songs and turned them into god knows what."

Vega teamed up with Martin Rev and Ric Ocasek in the late 1980s to produce and release the third Suicide album, A Way of Life (1988). Visual artist Stefan Roloff produced a music video for the song Dominic Christ, published by Wax Trax! Records and Suicide went overseas to promote the album in Paris with the song "Surrender", which was broadcast on French television. Shortly thereafter, Vega met his future wife and music partner Elizabeth Lamere while he was putting together sound experiments that would develop into his fifth solo album, Deuce Avenue (1990). Deuce Avenue marks his return to minimalist electronic music, similar to his work with Suicide, in which he combined drum machines and effects with free prose. Over the next ten years he would release several solo albums and perform with Suicide.

He was tracked down by art dealer Jeffrey Deitch in 2002 after a few of his young gallery employees raved about a suicide concert at the NYC Knitting Factory. Vega built Collision Drive, an exhibition of sculptures that combine light with found objects and crucifixes.

Vegas' tenth solo album "Station" was released in 2007 on Blast First Records and described by his colleagues as "his toughest, heaviest album in a while, all played and produced by himself". The British label Blast was founded in 2008. First Petite released a limited edition Suicide 6-CD box and monthly tribute series of 10 "vinyl EP's on the occasion of the 70th birthday of Alan Vega [18] musicians who were involved in the tribute series , including The Horrors, Lydia Lunch, Primal Scream, and Miss Kittin.

In 2009, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, France, Infinite Mercy - a large retrospective exhibition of Vega Art, curated by Mathieu Copeland. This included showing two short documentaries: Alan Vega (2000) by Christian Eudeline and Autour d'Alan Vega (Extraits) (1998) by Hugues Peyret.

In 2012, Vega suffered a stroke . That, and problems with his knees, led him to focus less on music and more on less physically demanding art like painting. He went on to live in downtown New York City.

In 2016 Vega made a small return to music by adding vocals to the song "Tangerine" on the album of the French pop veteran singer Christophe Les Vestiges du Chaos.

In 2017, Alan Vegas' last album "IT" was posthumously released on July 14th on Fader. The album was produced by Alan Vega, Liz Lamere, Perkin Barnes and Jared Artaud of the New York band The Vacant Lots. The album cover and inner sleeves featured original Vegas artwork. Two posthumous art shows "Dream Baby Dream" at the Deitch Gallery and "Keep IT Alive" at Invisible-Exports showed Alan Vegas work in New York City.

Discography

  • 1981: Alan Vega
  • 1982: Collision Drive
  • 1983: Saturn Strip
  • 1985: Just a Million Dreams
  • 1987: Suicide - A Way Of Live
  • 1990: Deuce Avenue
  • 1995: Power on to Zero Hour
  • 1995: New Raceion
  • 1996: Dujang Prang
  • 1996: Cubist Blues (with Alex Chilton and Ben Vaughn)
  • 1998: Endless (with Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen )
  • 1998: Righteous Lite ™ (with Stephen Lironi)
  • 1999: 2007
  • 2004: Resurrection River (with Pan Sonic )
  • 2007: station
  • 2017: IT

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alan Vega of Suicide Dies at 78
  2. ↑ Punk music pioneer: Alan Vega dies at the age of 78 , Der Tagesspiegel , July 17, 2016, accessed on July 18, 2016
  3. ↑ Entry Liz Lamere at Discogs
personal data
SURNAME Vega, Alan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bermowitz, Boruch Alan (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American rock singer
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York City, USA
DATE OF DEATH July 16, 2016