Remembering "Bad Boys" Photographer Marcia Resnick
We shared a time, a place, and a way of seeing. With Marcia Resnick's passing, another piece of it disappears.
Last week my Facebook feed was rich with tributes to the photographer Marcia Resnick, the latest fallen hero of the Downtown Scenius. Walter Robinson, Gary Indiana, David Johanson… the list keeps growing with each passing week. Some I knew well, others not at all, but we shared a time and place of beloved memory.
When Brian Eno moved to New York to produce the Talking Heads’ My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he encountered a thriving eco-system of creative geniuses in the lofts and tenements below 14th Street. He called it the Scenius – the “genius of the scene” that he found in the drug-drenched clubs, streets and alternative spaces where Bad Boys and Bad Girls splashed paint on walls and called it art; made noise they called music; acted crazy and called it performance. To capture the moment, Eno produced No New York, a live compilation album with James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (Lydia Lunch), Mars and DNA. This was Marcia Resnick’s New York.
Well, those days are over for the fading generation of the Mudd Club, Danceteria, The Roxy and the Pyramid. Facebook is our virtual downtown, where we reminisce and extend condolences. Facebook is where we go to remember GOD – the Good Old Days. What remain are memories – and memoirs – reliving the glorious nights that changed pop culture forever. May it rest in peace. Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end… But here we are typing into a box that asks “What’s on your mind, David?”
I look at FB and sure enough, there it is, on the top of my page a post from A.L. Bardach.
“In the late 1970s, we joined forces - Marcia's exquisite eye and camera, me with my tape recorder - and set out to film and record a series we called Bad Boys. There were dozens of sittings: Johnny Lydon, Kenneth Anger, Terry Southern, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Tim Hardin, Paul Morrissey, Nicholas Ray, Christopher Isherwood, John Simon, Kenneth Tynan, Larry Rivers, jewel thief Albie Baker, jockey Billy Pearson, Nicholas Roeg...well, too many to recall. It wasn't an easy collaboration - we were both trouble and had our issues (ok, she passed out with Johnny Thunders during one sitting).
“But never did I doubt Marcia's unique gifts. Her work - from her stunning Re-visions book straight through the Bad Boys and beyond - were singular images, typically served with a slice of irony or her wacky humor.”
My Marcia memories date back to the Soho News as well. We clicked after discovering our Brooklyn roots, a Mill Basin girl whose father had a print shop on Brighton Beach Avenue around the corner from where I lived. When space opened up on the back page next to the horoscope and Tom Hachtman’s Gertrude’s Follies comix, she proposed a weekly column that would consist of a photo and an extended caption that showed a surrealistic aspect of her persona. We called it “Resnick’s Believe it Or Not,” but had to change it to “Resnick’s Believe-it-or-Else” when Ripley’s came calling with a cease and desist.
Our friendship came in handy when I was assigned to write about John Belushi’s long night on the town, his drug-fueled binge before leaving New York for L.A’s. Chateau Marmont where he ODed six months later. Marcia’s photo of Belushi in a ski mask is perhaps her most famous. My hunch was confirmed in the Washington Post obituary (by Anusha Mathur) that refers to “the last studio images of John Belushi …before his fatal drug overdose in 1982” — in the very first sentence. (Though for me , nothing beats her paparazzi pic of Studio 54’s Steve Rubell embracing evil Roy Cohn, the McCarthy hearings prosecutor and consigliere to Donald Trump, both stoned out of their minds).
Of her meeting with Belushi, Resnick wrote:
In early September 1981 I spotted John Belushi in the New York after hours club AM PM. I asked him when he was going to do a photo session with me for my series Bad Boys: A Compendium of Punks, Poets and Politicians. He said, “Now”. I didn’t believe him, until upon returning home at six am I saw a limousine waiting in front of my building. I turned on the music as John and his entourage filed into my loft. I then directed John to an area lit by strobe lights and I began shooting.
John paced around like a caged animal, fidgeting incessantly. He seemed unable to sit still for my camera, uncanny for someone known for being deliberate and fluid when performing. “Where are the props?”, he queried. I first gave him sunglasses, then a scarf. He requested a beer, then a glass. After donning a black wool ski mask that he took off a nearby mannequin, he settled into a chair. Only his eyes and mouth peeked through the openings in the mask. The large, ominous and anonymous ‘executioner’ had finally reached his comfort zone.” http://www.thislongcentury.com/marcia-resnick
We met in the same Canal Street loft where her Belushi portraits were shot and she told me about the night they hung out before he flew to L.A.
Of that evening I wrote: “Belushi had been carrying a tape of Fear, the California punk band, around with him all day, and he played some of it for her on the phone. One of their songs is called ‘I Love Living in the City,’ and it goes something like this.
My house smells just like a zoo
It’s chock full of shit and puke
Cockroaches on the walls
Crabs are drawling on my balls
Oh, but I’m so clean-cut
I just want to fuck some slut.
I love living in the city
I love living in the city
Spend my whole life in the city
Where junk’s king and the air smells shitty
Belushi’s haunts included The Odeon at 4 a.m., the after hours Club AM-PM, The Nursery in the East Village and The Russian Baths on E. 10th Street where he’d sweat out the toxins before starting all over again.
Belushi greeted her with a bear hug. He looked better than she had remembered. They talked about an idea for a script that Belushi had been kicking around, something about a young man who comes from Italy to make it in New York. Everybody seemed so “hopeful” that day, she said.