Steven Lee Beeber on a Very Important Subject.

What you'll read below is an extended 12" remix of a review I wrote for SOMAreview.com, a magazine that features articles on religion and American culture. The book in question is Steven Lee Beeber's Heebie Jeebies at CBGB's. I'd've thought this book would've gotten a lot more attention than it did, but maybe I'm biased. Anyway: I, Miss Edie, and my husband are getting geared up for hosting a Passover seder, and in the spirit of getting ready to cook a vast amount of food for an awful lot of people, I offer my readers this review.
Incidentally, I'm reading Marge Piercy's book about Passover this week. Maybe I'll offer commentary on that one of these days. In the meantime: gabba gabba hey.

I was so excited The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s that when I got home I was too jittery to read it. I had to email five people about it before I could open the damn thing.
I am too young to’ve gone to CBGB’s in its heyday. I was too lazy to go in the 80s, when I was old enough to pretend to be old enough to go; and in the 90s, when I was legitimately old enough to go, I just didn’t care. So, ok, I’ve never been to CBGB’s. (And now, of course, it’s gone.) However, I have invested large amount of money, time, and shelf space to items that were born there. Records of CBGB bands form the backbone of my record collection, and there’s a significant span of books about punk. Also, for half my life I’ve worn a silver locket holding a picture of Joey Ramone. Every day, including my wedding day.
Every computer I’ve ever owned has had a hard drive named Joey.

Part of my love for early punk was flavored by learning that many of the band members were Jewish. I was unsurprised but thrilled when I discovered that Joey was a Jew. When I looked at the backs of albums and read the players’ names, I grinned when I saw names I identified as Jewish. Bad attitude; noise; music; show biz, of a sort: it was easy to imagine Jewish kids of a certain stripe getting very into this.
One of the touchstones of punk literature is the biography of Nancy Spungen, Deborah Spungen’s And I Don’t Want to Live This Life. Nancy’s mother describes how her troubled Nancy, who should have been a Nice Jewish Girl, turned into the Nancy who got maybe too into it, and wound up dead at the hands of Sid Vicious. A lot of people have read this book, justifiably fascinated by (one version of) Nancy’s story – but I would bet a dollar that the people who thrilled to it most, and who’ve re-read it the most (I think I stand at 10 times) are nice Jewish girls. Anyone who has official survey information on this should please contact me.
Over the years I’ve tried to organize thoughts about this Jewish/punk connection but I’ve only scored vague ideas and total incoherence. The few times I’d tried to talk about this with anyone, my musings were dismissed as kind of silly. It’s the sort of thing that if you brought it up with a goyische punk fan, they’d probably think you were just obsessing, reading too much into things… but I wasn’t. And God bless Beeber for explaining it.
Jews have always been involved in pop music; I can’t think of a genre of American music, with possible exception of C&W, where Jews have not been major performers (as opposed to producers, engineers, writers, or composers). So to assume a Jewish-punk connection isn’t folly. But it took someone like Beeber to map the connection clearly, and this book does just that.
The early punks’ motivation is pretty clear: They wanted to make music, scrub disco from the airwaves, and horrify the general public. (I’m simplifying radically.) So, in regard to the Jewish kids: Let’s just say that this crowd was not made up of nice boys like those twins I went to high school with who both went to Ivy League colleges and then both went to medical school; such naches! No, these kids were not interested in naches. Fuck naches.
They took stage names (a time-honored showbiz tradition; and some of these people had already had one or two names before they adopted noms de punk, anyhow). They wore clothes fit for criminals or lunatics. They wrote songs that sounded criminal or lunatic (sometimes both), and were also often hilariously funny. Then they went out in public like this, and I’m sure their mothers had apoplexy. But what can you do: A movement was born.

Steven Lee Beeber explores this scene exuberantly: he’s obviously a serious fan who thought about this unexplored facet of punk and decided to run with it. While there’s tons of books about punk, none address it from this particular angle. So I give Beeber credit for seeing the gap and deciding to fill it. It can’t have been easy. Some of his subjects are dead; many are notoriously averse to giving interviews. And yet he produced a lucid, nicely paced book. He starts with a discussion of Lenny Bruce, takes the reader through Lou Reed 101, and then goes to the heart of the matter.
Lenny Bruce wasn’t a musician, of course, but there’s a clear connection between punk and Bruce. It seems obvious to me that many punk musicians were inspired by Lenny Bruce, and not just in their choice of recreational drugs. It makes sense that the book opens with Bruce. Almost quaintly, the chapter closes with a neat tidbit that was new to me (this book is filled with such small joys): that Lenny Bruce’s daughter, Kitty, had a band (The Great Must Ache) that played at CBGB’s in the late ‘70s. Who knew?
From Lenny Bruce, we move to “the Punk Zeyde,” Lou Reed. Anyone who doesn’t already know that Lou is Jewish hasn’t been paying attention, but Beeber discusses how Reed’s Jewishness affected his work. (Reed got his start working in a Brill Building-like songwriting factory – a very Jewish line of work -- and, of course, at Syracuse studied under the Jewish writer Delmore Schwartz. Both of these elements prove influential in obvious and less-obvious ways.) Beeber offers insight to the Nico/Reed relationship; he discusses anti-Semitism in the Factory scene; and then guides us through the rest of the Velvet Underground’s lifespan and into Lou Reed’s long and considerable solo career.
The musical spawn of Lou Reed – the crowd that moved from Max’s Kansas City to CBGB’s – form the heart of the book. From Danny Fields (a player in the music industry who shepherded bands, most notably the Ramones, to recording contracts by introducing them to Seymour Stein at Sire Records) to Alan Vega and Martin Rev of Suicide, to Jonathan Richman (who apparently had an epiphany on a trip to Israel that inspired him to start his band), we see Beeber’s thesis fleshed out. The book begins to jell, and get seriously interesting, with the chapter on Lenny Kaye. Kaye is smart, thoughtful, and obviously comfortable talking with Beeber. (Many of the people you would hope to read interviews with refused to be involved in this book, particularly Richard Hell, who ends up getting a considerable chunk of speculative analysis anyhow.) Kaye describes himself as “a scholar of the Talmud of rock’n’roll,” a phrase that will doubtless annoy a lot of people but charmed the socks off me. For those who find rock and roll music in whatever form to be life-saving, cathartic, and seriously inspirational, the phrase may ring entirely true. Kaye, I think, assumes that Beeber’s readers will be those kind of people, and his dialogue with Beeber speaks to them.
Kaye also is the first interviewee to bring to the front of the stage the connection between lefty politics and punk. It’s obvious that Lenny Bruce was a lefty. But what exactly was it that made early punk left-wing? Well, it turns out that a lot of the nice Jewish kids who became punk rockers were the offspring of good old-fashioned Jewish pinkos of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Hilly Kristal, founder of CBGB’s, grew up on a famous Jewish communal farm, the Jersey Homestead. Lenny Kaye was part of SDS. See? When you know stuff like that, it all makes sense.
Steven Lee Beeber is good at nutshelling certain aspects of Jewish life in post-WWII America -- such as parents’ aspirations for their children, or varying reactions to the question of assimilation -- and how these things relate to punk. One funny thing the reader realizes is that many of these young Jews were, essentially, trained to become the founders of punk – at least it seems that way in retrospect. It’s like perverse training-in-reverse. Tommy Ramone, whose parents barely escaped the Holocaust, came to America in the 1950s, and his life as a punk is clearly defined by his feeling that he had to create a new self to live safely in America. You look at the Zeyde Lou Reed -- the child of an accountant who could not possibly have followed in his father’s footsteps (would you want Lou Reed to do your taxes?) and then you look at Chris Stein of Blondie. His dad was a union organizer who met Stein’s mother at a communist meeting. He got into collecting Nazi memorabilia (an oddly common hobby for American Jews of a certain stripe); he crossed paths with Debbie Harry; and he ended up being Chris Stein, a quiet four-eyed, brown-eyed hero with the perfect shiksa girl standing next to him.

Beeber addresses head-on the frequent use of Nazi imagery in punk. Often the image of the Nazi is a source of humor, but this wasn’t always the case. Sometimes using the swastika and other Nazi-associated images was just about shock value, but it wasn’t as simple as that. Discussing Malcolm McLaren, who got the Sex Pistols going in London, and who I would never have guessed was Jewish, Beeber describes differences between being Jewish in New York, being Jewish in London, and being Jewish in America in general. McLaren’s experiences in these different spheres are emblematic and significant. Growing up Jewish in post-war London would be of course very different from growing up Jewish in New York City. Beeber doesn’t dwell on anti-Semitism, but he discusses it when his interviews exposed it, and his conversations (or significant lack thereof) offer Beeber the chance to write slyly on the matter.
The book ends with a discussion of the mainstreaming of punk and the current “downtown” music scene in New York. I couldn’t help feeling a little dissatisfied. I really wished there had been interviews with Joey Ramone (who presumably died before the interviewing process began). But one thing nagged at me most:
In the Lenny Kaye chapter, Beeber discusses the Christian imagery in Patti Smith’s lyrics. Re-reading that chapter, it dawned on me that in the course of reading this book, I never saw something that I really expected to see, the sentence or two that describes this feeling:
Every time I hear that line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” I smile. It’s in the intonation, I guess; it’s hair-raising. From time to time I’ve wondered if Jews feel that line differently, more viscerally, than gentile listeners do. I’d’ve thought that Beeber would have brought this up, but he doesn’t. But this is a small complaint. Overwhelmingly, I felt that Beeber covered his subject admirably, and, equally significantly, it clued me in to pieces of the punk family tree that had somehow escaped my attention before. Basically, this book is worth the cover price for the bar mitzvah photos alone – and for the actual text, we should all give thanks. This is a book that should sit proudly on my shelf right next to And I Don’t Want to Live This Life.