Julia Gorton & Rick Brown: Beat It!

"It’s this DIY thing that we did without money, without knowledge, without a clear idea of what we were doing....But we were pretty determined. We just did it."

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In the mid-’70s, just as the first wave of NYC punk was reaching its apotheosis, high school sweethearts Rick Brown and Julia Gorton fled their native Delaware for Downtown colleges (NYU and Parsons, respectively). Enamored with buzzy local bands like Talking Heads and the Dead Boys, and inspired by the early British punk zine Sniffin’ Glue, they decided to produced one of their own: Beat It!

And my goodness, isn’t that a perfect name? It nails the gleeful brattiness that made so much of early punk compelling, as it simultaneously commands the reader to relocate, flagellate, rub one out, and keep rhythmic time. Like Sniffin’ Glue, it’s a tribute to the Ramones.

Beat It!’s brief run coincided with the emergence of no wave, to which Gorton’s and Brown’s own creative development is inextricably linked. Gorton’s unique visual sensibility - a lo-fi, noirish glamor - was a perfect match for no wave’s combination of musical naivety and studied cool, leading her to collaborate extensively with musicians in the scene. Brown, who’d had little musical training, was galvanized by no wave’s rejection of instrumental prowess and formed the band Blinding Headache. He went on to become an inventive and highly-regarded percussionist in several bands including Information, Fish & Roses, Run On, and 75 Dollar Bill.

47 years after Beat It’s initial publication, Gorton and Brown have compiled all four issues, additional archival materials, and retrospective essays into a newly available anthology, which I highly recommend. In conjunction with the book’s publication, we spoke over Zoom earlier this month.

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When you were both growing up in Delaware, how much awareness did you have of what was happening in the city in terms of music and art? 

Rick Brown: I saw Hit Parade or Circus magazine covering the New York Dolls, but my image of New York wasn't a lot about music really. It was really the Big City. I visited New York with my dad when I was in elementary school to come to the World's Fair. We stayed in Weehawken at Lee Konitz’s apartment. He wasn't friends with Lee as much as he was with Tavia Mladinich, Lee's girlfriend and later wife. She had been a high school friend of my father's. I saw the city from Weehawken, and that was a big thing for me.

Julia Gorton: In my mind, the city was The Odd Couple and Family Affair. I had this whole idea of elevator buildings and butlers [and] architecture that wasn't a ranch house in Delaware.

Since Rick left Delaware a year before me, he was able to explore those things that we were reading about in Circus and Rock Scene: the Dolls, Patti Smith, Iggy.

After arriving in the city, how long did it take you to find the nascent punk scene and CB’s?

RB: Not long, for me. I lived in the Brittany dorm on 10th and Broadway; me and Dave Sutter, who lived across the hall, were both interested in jazz. One of us saw that Don Cherry was playing at the Five Spot that night, so on my first night living in the dorm, I went and saw Don Cherry. Soon after, I went to Max's [Kansas City] and saw Television there. Soon after that, I saw Patti Smith at this dance studio on 14th street. Those three happened really quick, probably in September and October of ‘75.

With Television and Patti, did you know what you were going to see, or was it just chance?

RB: I didn't know their music, [but] I was reading about them in the Voice. But it's funny, I’ve realized that walking up to Max’s from my dorm, I passed by Broadway Charlie's, this bar on Broadway around 12th Street where the Unholy Modal Rounders played. I'm regretting that I missed out on this whole freak folk, weirdo scene that I now would be really interested in, but I was ignoring it in favor of punk rock at the time. 

JG: The year I was still in high school after Rick went off to college, he would turn me on to stuff. So by the time I graduated, in the yearbook where you write a little thing about yourself, I wrote, “Talking Heads, Television, (something, something), color Xerox.” I was in so much anticipation, waiting to get up there and do these fun things my boyfriend was doing.

When I got to New York, it took me a long time to acclimate [to the geography], so I just followed Rick around and trusted that he knew what he was doing, and we went to all these great places together. [Looking back,] the thing that I'm amazed by is how diverse the music scene was. Even in those clubs, there was a lot of variety.

How long was it between your being introduced to this community, to documenting it with the zine?

RB: It wasn't until the beginning of ‘77, I think, that we actually started doing this. There’s a collage thing Julia made from a Polaroid of Richard Hell that she gave to Terry Ork, that I think predates Beat It! It was made from this fan perspective that we both had - you know, “Here's this cool thing I made of Richard. Can you show it to him?”

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JG: Terry worked at Cinemabelia, which was next to the door I went in to go to Parsons. I photocopied my Polaroids and made a little book with some stationary rings I got from Woolworths on 14th Street, and I went in, walked to the back, and gave it to him. I don't know if I said anything, I probably just ran out. He was really enamored of it. I look at it now and the pictures are not that good, but I guess the initiative was enough.

RB: That turned into Terry wanting her to take pictures of Alex Chilton. I don't remember if we already had an issue out…

JG: I don't think so. When I look at these color Xerox things that I made, the images are all Polaroid-based, so it was definitely the year before I had darkroom access. You have these archival archeological digs in your own work, looking for clues - like, [the book] has the clue on the cover [where it says] 1977. So if it has a rubber stamp, Rick was getting those while he worked at Hart Publishing. So it's from early ‘77, I’d guess, that we made the first issue happen.

By that point, did you see yourselves as being very much a part of this community that you're documenting, or was it still an outsider/fan perspective thing?

RB: We were trying to get in. It was really, how can we contribute in some way? We weren't playing music, and we wanted to be part of it. It became clear that doing something like [a zine] would get you to be part of it. 

JG: We had different skills. Rick had all the savvy and musical knowledge that he’d built through years of listening to records and going to gigs. He had skills with writing, talking with people, and record reviews. The only skills I had [for interviewing] were asking pretty straightforward questions and having a tape recorder, because I’d won [one in] a sewing contest in Delaware. Rick was really the editor, and I think of myself as the photo/art director. It meshed really well.

Did you see Beat It! as primarily being in communication with people that you knew, or with strangers? Or were you not even thinking about what the audience was going to be? 

RB: I figured there were other people like us who were interested in the music. Honestly, I was hoping that Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, Patti Smith would read the thing too. And it worked - not on that level, those people never talked to me, but thanks to Julia making that connection to Terry Ork and then getting hired to work on the Alex Chilton performances that were about to happen at the Ocean Club…

JG: I took a couple good Polaroids of Alex at Terry's loft in Chinatown, and I took some rehearsal space pictures. I had a camera by then, but they're terrible pictures. I didn't know what I was doing with the camera, and they're very bland. It's a shame.

RB: Nevertheless, you made that connection with Terry and then Alex. They weren't interested in my opinions about music or my writing, but because of Julia getting in there, I tagged along and met [the dB’s guitarist] Chris Stamey. Chris is somebody whose music I love, a long time friend who I'm still in touch with, and who I played with briefly. I made that connection through this.

I was struck by how the first issue was primarily image-based, with a lot of pages that are just photos and graphics. As you go on, the issues become increasingly text-based. Was that a deliberate decision, or were you just becoming more confident about writing? 

RB: For me, the first one was all about the pictures and the images, but to put something else in, I ended up writing some stuff. Julia's praise of my awareness of the music world is exaggerated. I listened to music and had broad interests, but in terms of writing, it's pretty lame in its opinions. Anytime I'm stating any knowledge, it’s straight out of NME or Sounds. If I was writing about the Damned, I was learning about them from these other sources. I was definitely influenced by people like Lester Bangs and [Robert] Christgau and others who were much smarter and better writers. I don't like to exaggerate what I was contributing here, and especially in that first one, there's not a lot of text. I ramped it up for the next one.

JG: I would say you underestimate [your contributions]. How many other people back then were doing this and writing like you were writing? There were people that were writing professionally, but on our level… I didn't know the word “zine,” I only knew the word “fanzine,” and this really was a fanzine. We were fans, and we wanted to share our enthusiasm and pure joy at the music with people like us. We got a little more professional, or we’d try to think more about how to jam pack it full of stuff. But I always liked your writing, Rick, and your reviews. They're really straightforward, the language is not fussy, and they've got a lot of feeling to them.

I didn't know what I was doing, so it was like, cut and paste and glue and, Oh, the pictures are too big. There's no room for Rick to write anything, so let's just go to another page. Recently, Rick pulled some stuff out from his storage archives that I’d forgotten, where I’d roughly laid things out and sent them to him with an indication of where to write and how much space he had. And then he wrote everything out by hand.

As a document, it's really beautiful. It’s this DIY thing that we did without money, without knowledge, without a clear idea of what we were doing. When I look back at it, I think, How did we do that? Like, how did we pay for that? And I know we both had schoolwork and stuff. But we were pretty determined. We just did it. It was very natural. 

We started to bring in some of our friends who were talented photographers, or who could help cover some of the stuff that we might not get to. Robert Sietsema, there’s a bunch of his photos in, I think, issue four.¹

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In issue two, there are a bunch of live reviews of New York bands performing in Delaware. Was that just a matter of being stuck at home for summer break?

JG: Yeah, I'm stuck at home for summer break. Rick is in New York still, because he has an apartment. I'm at home with mom, and my friend Paul was home and had a car, so we [went to shows]. We were underage for drinking in Delaware, but we went in with fake Beat It! press cards that we made and saw the Dead Boys and the Dictators. But I did miss Summer of Sam and the blackout, which made me so sad. 

Rick, do you want to talk about No Magazine² at all?

RB: I didn't have much to do with No Magazine…

JG: But in terms of inspiration or…

RB: They weren't an inspiration, they were our competition!

JG: Oh yeah, that's right. [laughs] But we really liked them!

RB: I met those guys at the Dead Boys show at [NYU’s] Weinstein Hall, during that same early ‘77 period. They were these guys who we’d see at shows, and for some reason, we decided to actually talk with them that night. No Magazine, from the get go, were much more Dadaist, kind of intellectual, but really funny. They were older and had some perspective on things. [No co-founder] Chris Nelson’s still a very close friend.

JG: I remember the first time I saw Chris. I looked at everybody through the frame of fandom, and I’d think, There's that No Magazine guy. I don't know if I can talk to him, but I can take a picture. I was shyer than Rick, so I have the pictures, but he has the experience of getting to know everybody.

Talking about No segues into one of the things that I think makes this book so interesting: It’s an on the ground document of no wave emerging out of punk and becoming its own scene. Was it something that, in the moment, you recognized as something new? Or was it just, this is the same punk scene and here are the new bands?

RB: In the fourth issue, there's a little opinion piece that I wrote that has an indicator of the answer. It's complaining about the Cramps, who were quoted in some magazine as saying, “New York used to be cool, but now it's all these arty bands taking over.” That just made me roll my eyes. I love Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and the Dictators, you know? 

On the other hand, I did recognize the no wave bands… And I'm kind of a purist, so to me, no wave is those four bands [Contortions, Mars, DNA, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, who all appear on the Brian Eno-produced No New York compilation] and very few other things. I know that's ridiculous, because it did extend outside of those bands, but there's something [about them] that signaled a real shift of intention. 

Some of the [earlier bands], like Television, they couldn't give a fuck about connecting with the audience - they were there to do their music. A lot of the other New York punk groups had some of that, but they also had this thing about style where their look was pushed at least as high as the music. I'm not saying that they weren't making great music, but at the same time, [they were] valuing that and connecting with an audience. Those are the things that no wave pushed against.

JG: Unless they were in the audience kicking people in the head, like James Chance.

RB: Sure, he was literally connecting with his audience.

JG:  There were bands like the Marbles, the Shirts, and Tuff Darts that were more traditional rock ‘n’ roll bands. And then I think about Teenage Jesus - Bradley [Field] had, as I recall, one drum. It was brutal, it was noisy, it was un-melodic. I didn't find it challenging, but I think a lot of people found it challenging to listen to.

RB: To me, the no wave bands were inspiring in the same way as Pere Ubu. It was people who had ideas about making music that weren't based around getting good on your instrument. Even if they did, because a lot of them did, it wasn't where they were coming from. Mars were definitely influenced by the Velvet Underground, but they had other ideas. DNA, who knows where that comes from? I don't know what the antecedents of that music are.

JG: Rick, can you talk about how you’d play in the basement of Brittany Hall, and the clangy piece of metal you used? I think that's a really interesting origin story of how you start at something as a novice, or just a fan. 

RB: I met [Blinding Headache bandmates] Willie Klein, who was my roommate at NYU, and then Jim Posner, who I worked with at the publishing company that Julia referenced earlier. They were kind of stoner dudes, but they both played guitar, and they were willing to get together and jam. I don't know why they put up with me, or whether I was pushing them to do stuff. But we went into the basement of the dorm, and I don't know if I even had a drumstick, but there was an old, rusty boiler in that basement room that I would hit to play these rough rhythms.

The thing that made that click for me was seeing Pere Ubu: David Thomas, who didn't look like your normal rock frontman, was playing some big piece of metal that he was banging on. I took that as an inspiration, just using stuff that you had around. You didn't have to have a fancy guitar or a special bongo. In 75 Dollar Bill now, I play a plywood crate that’s a recreation of a thing I found on the street.

The fourth issue is largely devoted to No New York. There's interviews with all four of the bands, and Julia’s incredible photo of Brian Eno having his mind blown by James Chance. But did it feel in that moment like a pivotal or monumental thing?

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JG: That picture is, I think, one of my best photos. When you see Brian Eno show up…he was a music god to us, or at least to me. This was a big deal for those bands. I don't know if they were that happy with the recording, but it certainly cemented them together and presented them to the world in that way.

RB: I don't think I saw it as a giant break, because we had already gone through that with punk. Punk wasn't a giant break either; the Sex Pistols were playing Chuck Berry songs sped up. I recognized that the no wave bands were pushing against something, but I didn't think music was going to be completely changed from now on or anything. And I was right not to think that! [laughs]

How has it felt revisiting this thing that you made when you were both so young?

RB: Some of the writing is pretty embarrassing. I'm not horrified by my opinions by any means, there's some reasonable thought there. But there are things that we chose to cover that I think are dumb.

JG: But people sent us free records! Occasionally, it was like, We have a free record, I think we should review it. Like, oh my god, we're a thing.

But I look at stuff now and I'm like, That's a great layout, Julia. Then I look at other stuff and I'm like, What happened there? 

RB: When I was writing this stuff, I was not expecting it to be read even a year later. It really was [about] what's happening right now.

What inspired you to put this book together now?

JG: I didn't really think about reprinting it until people started buying it on the secondary market, who were wanting to scan it and release all of it for free. I thought, Wait a minute, no. Let's do this. Then Rick got involved, and he did a lot of writing and pulled stuff out.

Andrea Feldman, our copy editor, was saying something about how, reading through it, you can see things popping up as they're happening. Reading these in a sequential manner gives you an idea of how they fit together, at least for us. There's a lot of stuff we didn't cover, but it doesn't mean that we didn't like it or think it was worth covering. It's probably just that we ran out of time or money. But I think it’s representative of what our going out lives were like.

The DIY aesthetic, which didn't even have a name then, was just, What's around? What can I pull off of this shelf and throw together? Looking at Beat It!, you'll see things Rick's drawn by hand, and things I cut out of my dad's Chemical Engineering Weekly magazines. We had access to certain things and limited funds.

Access is something that you have to believe that you have, and not let it be a roadblock. You decide, I want to play [music] in the basement and bang on that thing, and you do it, and it leads to something. Rick and I cobbled together a start to our professional lives through this thing that we [made] together. There's an authentic thing we both have, that built out of what we did then and how we did it, that still carries through our work. That feeling [of], I don't need permission, I don't need money, I just need to do it. I'm really happy with where we both ended up. We both still have the thing we do that we love, and I'm really proud of this book that represents that.

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This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, brevity, and context.

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Purchase the Beat It! anthology directly from Julia, and be sure check out the other similarly-themed publications and apparel in her store

Listen to Rick’s Beat It!-era music with Blinding Headache and Information here, his recent work with 75 Dollar Bill here, and several of his other projects here

Follow Julia and Rick on Instagram

Order a signed copy of my book This Must Be the Place here

Book a walking tour here

And of course, if you haven’t already…

1. Sietsema went on to become a highly regarded restaurant critic for the Village Voice and Eater.

2. A zine by Philip Dray and Chris Nelson, who’d join Brown in the band Information, and Jim Sclavunos, who’d go on to play with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Sonic Youth, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, among others. No Magazine is one of several sources credited with coining the term “no wave.”