history / burned down days

The Furs Come to NYC

by Roger Morris, 2000

9:25 and I'm still alive. Internal tension is running high. Standing onstage in the Mudd Club, NYC, 1980. Staring at a steel roll up garage door two feet in front of my face. The stage curtain. Listening to, feeling bottles and glasses smashing against the other side. They know we are here, they can hear us tuning the guitars. A song comes over the P.A., forgotten what, but we know it's our cue to showtime. We look at each other, the way people would in a plunging aircraft. Through the dry ice fog, lights and strobes, snapshot grainy faces of green, purple and red behind this iron curtain. The song ends, the door begins to rise. We hear Vince count us in, "India" at 10 to the nth watts, and the sheer force of the music stops anything they throw at us from finding a target. So it seems.

Yeah, it really did happen. Don't remember much about the rest of the show, we all survived. The first time we played in America. Audience and band tightly focused on that rising garage door, revealing each other. We were seeing America for the first time and America was seeing us for the first time.

Leaving the air conditioning of the airport was the first tip off that things were going to be different here. Mid August, very hot, very humid. Drive into town, the Gramercy Park Hotel. No A/C in the room, the janitor seems used to moving them around. 200 rooms, 150 working air conditioners. Tim and I go for an exploratory walk, soon head for a bar and some ice cold ones. Richard joins us, we play pool. We don't know exactly where to start with this new place, there are so many options. Feeling around the edges, tapping the walls. Well, we did get started, most of us would emigrate here and marry American girls. Back at the hotel, meet John and Duncan, then off to the sound check. The club is calm, people doing their jobs. No pre-echo of the night ahead.

Crazed as that audience was, I would see one even more riled up later on. Sometime during our second tour of America, the scheduled support band didn't show up. Tim, me, Duncan, the sound engineer, the lighting guy and the drum roadie went onstage, heavily disguised. None of us played our usual instruments; I think I had the bass, not such a stretch, but the sound guy played the sax, and Duncan was on drums. We called ourselves the Dead Gumbies. Our musical theme was about the bond that exists between man and beast. The bond that dare not speak its name. "Donkey Love", owing its' melody line to the Supremes' hit "Baby Love". "When a Man Loves A Donkey". You get the idea. Unfortunately, so did the audience, and they were not amused. We had seen indifference from the dance floor before, we had seen extreme enthusiasm - see above - but never this level of hostility. Maybe we touched a nerve in some of them. Later, returning to that stage as a Fur and not a Gumby, playing to the people who an hour before had wanted our blood. The disguises were good, we weren't recognised.

If anyone reading this was at the Mudd Club for that show, I'd be very interested in hearing their version of that nights' doings.