Inimitable post punk insurgents The John Cale produced '79 Model Citizens EP is finally available again, and with it comes unheard live recordings from Max’s & Hurrah! "Model Citizens, attacking their instruments with poetic yet strangely ironic frenzy, reflect the frightened, scattered, painful (yet edge-of-ecstatic) world of the moment." (NY Rocker) This short lived vanguard outfit now gets its due on red vinyl, with an insert featuring liner notes from Tim Page.
There were four Model Citizens – Steve Alexander, Eugenie Diserio, Tomek Lamprecht and Gloria Richards. Like so many dedicated New Yorkers, they had all come from away – Poland (Tomek), Oregon and Japan (Gloria), West Texas (Steve) and what sometimes seemed the most thoroughly distanced place of all, the comfortable New York suburbs (Eugenie). They were young, bright, beautiful, and hungry; they were (and remain) very good at their multifarious endeavors, whether painting, fashion design, graphics, conceptual art, environmental exploration, writing or simply christening something Art and then making it worthy of the term. By 1978, they were friends, matriculants at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Fine Arts, and living together in a loft building just above 125th Street in West Harlem.
Model Citizens was conceived as a collective art project not only to make rock music but to be about rock music as well.
The music was dissonant, aggressive and succinct. A song might start with a standard boogie-woogie riff only to be drowned immediately in a chaos of percussive rat-tat-tats, carnival organ, electric violin, mallet instruments, and anxious stabs to the guts of the guitars. There were no solos, no jam sessions and, while there was hard lyricism aplenty in Model Citizens songs, you had to seek it out, as you did in the city itself.
John Cale produced a Model Citizens EP for his short-lived label Spy Records: until now, it has never been rereleased. An album on Warner Brothers was said to be underway. But it never happened and suddenly the band was no more. There were the usual reasons – personal tensions, diverging ambitions, that youthful need to blow everything up now and then – but there was also a sense that the work called “Model Citizens” was complete and everybody was on to other things.
More than 40 years later, you hold its legacy in your hands. Put it on and turn it up.
