i used to shiver in the wings

title: The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk
author: Steven Lee Beeber
other shit: 2006, Chicago Review Press. 232 pages + source notes & index.
site: jewpunk.com
rating: 4/5 safety pins
soundtrack: posted here

I finished this book way back in November, and I’m just getting around to reviewing it now for a host of reasons. My first excuse is that I loaned it to an out-of-state friend the day I finished it, and didn’t get it back till February. And then I wasn’t writing many book reviews, so much as I was working on my own book. (How’s that going? You may have noticed the increase in posts! It is safe to assume that if I am yammering away on my blog, I am probably not hammering away on the book. (See what I did there?)) I’ve thought about this book a lot since then, though, and that is possibly the best recommendation I can give it. It’s not a book you read quickly and forget about; it sticks with you.

I read it at the same time I read Please Kill Me, and that’s actually something I think everyone should do. Or, if you are not someone who reads multiple books at once, you should read these close together. They complement one another extremely well. That one’s the oral history, the dirt and the gossip and who’s fucking whom in which bathroom while on what drugs; this one is the background, the influences, the history and the culture that made that other book possible.

Beeber’s thesis, stated in the intro, is:

Punk is Jewish. Not Judaic. Jewish, the reflection of a culture that’s three millennia old now. It reeks of humor and irony and preoccupations with Nazism. It’s all about outsiders who are “one of us” in the shtetl of New York. It’s about nervous energy, the same nervous energy that has characterized jews from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob through the Hasids to the plays of David Mamet. Punks, like Jews, self-consciously identify with the sick and twisted, what Hitler referred to as “the decadent.” Punk’s home is the home of the Jews — New York, especially downtown Lower East Side/East Village New York, the birthplace of this new music known for its populist vibe, its revolutionary attitudes, its promotion of do-it-yourself like some sort of anarchist mantra.

It’s not just that so many in the music, as well as so many in the audience, happen to be Jewish, among them Lou Reed, Joey and Tommy Ramone, the Dictators, Richard Hell, Malcolm McLaren, Lenny Kaye, Genya Ravan, Chris Stein, Jonathan Richman, and Helen Wheels. Punk reflects the whole Jewish history of oppression and uncertainty, flight and wandering, belonging and not belonging, always being divided, being both in and out, good and bad, part and apart. The shpilkes, the nervous energy, of punk is Jewish. That shpilkes, the “Heebie Jeebies” of Little Richard’s song, captures exactly what was happening in the Bowery as that first generation to come of age after the Holocaust made its mark on poplar music at a little Jewish-owned and -run club called CBGB.

Of course, people can — and do — go back and forth ad infinitum about where punk rock started: New York or London, New York or London. I don’t really care; that part of it isn’t particularly interesting to me, and it’s not like there’s ever going to be a definitive answer. But let’s just pretend that we’ve decided that the answer is New York, that American acts like the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and the MC5 were the progenitors of punk, that the Clash and the Pistols came from us and not the other way around.

Given that, I find Beeber’s Punk-Is-Jewish argument completely persuasive, especially considering I am in no way qualified to judge. As a non-Jew, I can’t say, “oh, well, Alan Vega doesn’t seem very Jewish to me! This book is bad and you should feel bad!” Come on, what the hell do I know about (a) Alan Vega, or (b) being Jewish? Yeah, exactly. But here’s what I’ve got: It’s not about a handful of people no one’s heard of; it’s a lot of big names, both in and out of the spotlight, and although Beeber focuses on the Jews, he doesn’t do so the exclusion of everyone else. You don’t come away thinking the early NYC punk scene was only Jews, which can be a risk with a book like this one. So you’ve got this book about the history of a movement, about many of the people who were pivotal to that movement, and about what they had in common. And it was quite a lot.

I really learned a lot from this book. I wasn’t surprised that there were Jewish punks — there are Jewish musicians of every other kind, and punks come from many backgrounds — but I hadn’t realized how many Jews were involved in the early days, or how pivotal they were, or what the stories were behind many of the stories. As far as I can tell, not many people did — the book has a lot of anecdotes about the author tracking people down who didn’t much want to talk to him, who would neither confirm nor deny their Jewishness, who had no idea there were so many others like them.

It’s a fairly academic text (my copy has a giant USED sticker on the back of the type you find on books at college bookstores), and there are a few places Beeber was trying too hard to be a ~writer~. At the beginning of one chapter, he takes several pages to try to enticingly set a scene, lovingly describing who’s on stage at CB’s, how the scene is doing, what Seymour Stein is up to, on and on and on, and meanwhile there is this dude on stage with his back to the audience. And it’s like, for fuck’s sake, WHO IS IT. JUST TELL ME. Months later, and I get frustrated thinking about it.

Still, despite the occasional misstep, I found the writing to be smooth and entertaining; it definitely wasn’t one of those books where I read three pages and then had to read comics for a week until my brain recovered. I mostly appreciated that it offered a different perspective on punk history. As you may have gathered, I’ve read a lot of books about punk rock, and it’s totally awesome whenever one brings something new to the table: a new perspective, a new way of telling the same stories, anything. Beeber does a good job of slotting the punks into the better-known pantheon of smartass Jewish entertainers — he starts with Lenny Bruce — and branching out into John Zorn’s dissonant art and then back around to the Beastie Boys, who, if you will recall, started as a shitty hardcore band. But these days, I don’t know, they’re just three emcees and they’re on the go; Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego.

Verdict: Essential reading for music nerds.

Soundtrack: over here
Also: Thanks to jgro for giving this the once-over.