LITA 134 SHE BLEW INTO THE LOWER EAST SIDE New York in 1978–an elfin painter, poet, muse, and musician, dressed like a decadent, free-spirited poet of the 19th century… with no immediate ambition to be a punk rock or No Wave star, just the urge that always drove her, to play on new frontiers, accumulate experiences like jewelry. Lizzy was drawn like so many by the prospect of freedom held out by the rackety, rickety, organic poly-arts whirlpool of New York’s Lower East Side… where the subways never stopped and bodegas never closed, so unlike stuffy old Paris, Lizzy’s hometown. Below 14th Street, days bled into nights and dawns of wandering the streets of Soho and the Lower East Side, dipping and diving into bars, after-hours clubs, S&M and drag dives, punk rock joints like CBGB’s… restlessly roaming among grimy tenements and dusty storefronts that artists could still seize for laboratories… where junkies thought they were geniuses and sometimes (rarely) actually were. Lizzy came to Manhattan to find her voice and instead discovered that she contained many. She could be a dazzling firefly that would fitfully flicker from bloom to bloom, genre to genre, passion to passion, committing herself only to engaging intensely with every moment like her hero, the poet Arthur Rimbaud. “Rimbaud was part of punk’s French connection, and Lizzy adopted his image. He was the ultimate punk. His words were dark and anarchic, radical and subversive, against any structure and logical obedience of any kind. He was lashing out at every- thing in the same way we found in punk culture,” explains the bass player and producer Bill Laswell, who was prominent in the downtown avant-garde when Lizzy first circu- lated in New York. With vocals in French and English by Lizzy and Patti Smith, Laswell’s production of “Morning High” is included here. Their spin on Rimbaud’s “Morning of Drunkenness” was recorded in 1995 as part of Laswell’s project, Hashisheen: The End of Law, inspired PHOTO BY EDO by mystic sagas of 11th Century Persia. Quite rightly for these manipulators of discon- nection, both singers and one time roommates sent in their recordings separately, and Laswell conjoined them in the studio, the two tongues jostling and slipping round one another in a digital embrace. “I saw Lizzy around at places like CBGB’s in the punk time, particularly after the Ramones first came out, when there was the weirder stuff like James Chance, DNA, and Richard Hell. You definitely noticed her. She was very enthusiastic, funny, and pretty laid back,” Laswell recalls. Initially, it was Lizzy’s looks and style that made the French transplant an under- ground icon. It wasn’t till later in the 1980s that American style began to embrace color, and no one around had Lizzy’s vivid, sophisticated dash. Among the acres of basic black, blue jeans, and t-shirts, she was an anomaly. Press Color was produced by Bob Blank at his disco-matic downtown studio, Blank Tapes. “Lizzy was extremely stylish, more than the crowd you saw on the scene,” Blank says. “She was more underground.” Though entrepreneur and producer Michel Esteban was her first manager/lover and they moved to New York together, Lizzy’s romantic passions often coincided with and helped to shape her musical career. The men in her life had to act civilized and co-exist in a (usually placid) state of truce. Another of her loves and creative partners was New York musician and artist Seth Tillett. “Yes, she was a siren,” he says. “Men crashed on those rocks.” Tillett also first spotted Lizzy in New York’s demi-monde, at a concert by her then boyfriend, poet and musician Richard Hell. “Her eyes and eyebrows were incredible, she had this gigantic head of silver hair, she was wearing skintight harlequin checkerboard pants, and she was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.” His initial chat-up failed, but proximity did the work. PHOTO BY MICHEL ESTEBAN In the incestuous LES they met again at a launderette. Romance bubbled, despite the ever-present Michel and Richard Hell. For Hell, too, Lizzy was a muse; he based his novel Go Now’s love interest on her. In his biography, I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp (Ecco Books), Hell devotes a chapter to Lizzy, then, near the book’s end, circles back to their final meeting in the early 1980s. She tries to save him from heroin addiction, they even get engaged to be married, but he betrays her in a way that still haunts him. Yet theirs was a grand passion, and he conjures her vividly: “an intellectual sex-kitten chanteuse adventuress little girl.” “I wasn’t really conscious of her music career, and I believe she took it pretty casually too,” he writes. “It was primarily another means of getting her to tropical seas around the world.” Whether Lizzy was truly as dismissive of her music as Hell, cool was part of her arsenal and maybe her shield from the world and herself. So Seth became Lizzy’s romantic escape, and they were mutual muses during the recording of Press Color. The couple enjoyed escapades like jumping into a fountain in Paris, frolicking in the waterwork’s mechanism and getting arrested. Lizzy talked them out of it. Seth’s photo of an unmade-up, tousle-haired Lizzy just waking up in bed, illu- minated by the lightbox they’d been viewing slides on as they went to sleep, became one of her defining images. “I was more serious about visual art then than music. But all the artists were going into music and giving the finger to the art world,” Seth laughs. “Musicians were chosen because they could not play instruments. You had to be an amateur to be in a band. If you had chops, you were out.” This scrappy aesthetic was the perfect climate for an artist like Lizzy, hovering between possibilities in music, art, poetry and film–she appears in director Amos Poe’s PHOTO BY MICHEL ESTEBAN Blank Generation (1975). The times dictated music as her immediate path. Call Lizzy a dilettante, but she flashed her individual glimmer in each medium. Later, in the affluent early 1980s, Lizzy and Michel would be able to breeze into a record company and announce her urge to record in Soweto, or Brazil, and somehow enchant a budget out of the executives just as she had fascinated artists and producers before. But only once did Lizzy’s music coincide with mainstream pop success, on “Where Have The Gazelles Gone?” from her third album, 1984’s Zulu Rock, produced by Michel and another of Lizzy’s great loves, British producer Adam Kidron. After her 1988 album, Suspense, her industry currency was spent. Lizzy’s fractured whimsy, involving free-spending on intriguing musical experiments, fell out of favor. The record business had moved on to more polished pop, and bean counters had begun to control the maverick record men who could sign checks from their gut. Lizzy retreated from the big cities, moved to Corsica, and painted. She died of cancer in 2004, aged 48. But this release of Press Color, Lizzy’s first album, finds her at the cusp of committing herself to music and captures the sketchy, spontaneous spirit of the times. Producer Bob Blank remembers, “I first met Lizzy with her producer, Michel Esteban, at the beginning of the whole No Wave scene. I was just putting together my studio, Blank Tapes. The builders had to stop hammering the sheetrock when we did the take on “Fire” (Lizzy’s version of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s 1968 scorcher). She was just this very, very shy kid. They were so cool that I didn’t realize for a while that they were an item, but she was his protégé.” In fact, Lizzy and Michel’s relationship had the delicate, respectful intimacy that we can call an “understanding.” They were not a traditional pair by the time they moved together to New York, firstly to a loft with columns on Lafayette Street that they shared with Patti Smith. The couple’s closeness had moved beyond typical conven- tions; Michel, her first mentor, remained her companion till the end of her life. PHOTO BY SETH TILLET Their rapport dated back to Lizzy’s students years in Les Halles, a quartier that was just gentrifying from gritty functionality as a food market to hip boutiques. Lizzy was raised by her loving working-class aunt and uncle, a worker at the Renault factory, at 11 Rue des Halles, not knowing her father and pretty much abandoned by her mother. Seth Tillett often stayed with Lizzy’s family in their small apartment. “Lizzy was a poet in the sense that she took every element of her life as part of the story she had to tell as opposed to wishing she were otherwise,” he explains. “She never said, ‘I wish I knew Mother better.’ Instead, she would wryly say, ‘Look at Maman’s picture in those glasses, she looks pretty cool…’ Lizzy was such a self-creation. She never tried to change creating her reality.” Esteban agrees: “She was a child of the universe.” In 1974, Michel’s boutique Harry Cover, facing Lizzy’s apartment, at number 12 Rue des Halles, sold bootleg punk T-shirts, fanzines, and 45s. His piratical retail flair made Harry Cover into Punk Central for the burgeoning rebel movement in a town that revered BCBG (bon chic, bon genre), good taste–above all.