By early 1976 New York City's CBGB and Max's Kansas City rock venues had become the mecca of punk rock activity in America. To visualize what its setting was like I've taken the liberty to excerpt a few words from CBGB.com:

The Bowery was a drab, ugly and unsavory place. But it was good enough for rock and rollers. The people who frequented CBGB didn't seem to mind staggering drunks and stepping over a few bodies. Having a rock club under a flop house does have its advantages; the rent was cheap and most of our neighbors dressed worse than our rock and roll customers.

Bands like the Dead Boys, Mink De Ville, Alex Chilton, Pere Ubu, Contortions with James Chance, Robert Gordon, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Lydia Lunch and Brian Setzer's Bloodless Pharaohs eventually secured recording contracts when the record labels finally realized something major was developing.

By early 1977 a stunning diversity of music could be heard, ranging in style from the arty minimalism of the Talking Heads to the basic three chord ethic of the Ramones to the poetic consciousness of Patti Smith to the pre-Madonna innocence and romance of Blondie to the futuristic and stunningly perverse confrontational art rock psychodrama of Suicide.

This was the climate the day I opened my doors as Red Star Records, arguably America's first post-hippie independent Punk / New Wave label. Facing me was the task of convincing America's kids that New York's music rebellion could cross over the Hudson and reach out to the kids in Iowa, too. Not an easy task. Would Manhattan's Punk microcosmic sensitivity to its generation's malcontents translate and reach America's numbed down arena band audience of unconscious teenage numbskulls?

Enter Suicide, Red Star's first signing in June 1977. Picture a blend of psychosis and sentimentality wrapped up in minimalist drones, menacing vocals, mad scat lines, heavily echoed screams and screeches, incoherent mumbles topped with a dash of sugary crooning thrown in for good measure and there you have it - the "primal duo" as they were affectionately dubbed.

Born and raised in New York City (Vega, Brooklyn — The Rev, Bronx), Suicide was part of the performing arts scene in New York in the early-to-mid-'70s New York Dolls era. The Rev's spooky keyboard washes of dissonant sound coupled with vocalist Alan Vega's ranting neo-beat lyrics was uncompromising and confrontational and inspired love or hate - there was no in-between.

Utilizing only a 1950's rhythm machine and a cheap Farfisa keyboard, Vega's voice expressed his schizoid neo - Presley paranoid sci-fi vision of contemporary street life and The Rev, with his funky leather boy junkie looks intact, pounding out his relentless and alluring mix of digital electronic recycled jazz / '50s funk - junk noise, unpredictable Latin rhythms and electro dance lines - were considered too real for the major label market research MBA's.