Infinite Dreams

April 29, 2024
Music writer Davis-Chanin (The Girl in the Back) and musician Lamere provide an immersive biography of the latter’s late husband, Suicide frontman and multimedia artist Alan Vega, who died in 2016. Born in 1938 New York City to Jewish parents, Vega began studying and creating visual art in college. In 1970, an “inflammatory, anarchic, and inspirational” Iggy and the Stooges performance inspired him to broaden his artistic horizons by mixing “visual, music, sound, performance” elements in “light sculptures” that featured wire and New York City street detritus, and by collaborating with Martin Rev, with whom he formed Suicide. Reviled by most audiences—they were “so punk even the punks hated them”—Suicide was beloved by artists for their loose, avant-garde style and Vega’s raw, mesmerizing performances (he “used to wear knives and punch his own face,” recalls Arthur “Killer” Kane). Included are long interviews with Elvis Costello and other artists who knew and worked with Vega, as well as more intimate remembrances from Lamere, who recalls the adoption of their son in 1999 and the steady decline of Vega’s health due to congestive heart failure. It’s a captivating portrait of a key figure in the 1970s and ’80s punk scene.