Some Came Running

I Remember Anton Fier

I remember my campus friend Bob in 1978 or so expressing fake annoyance when telling me of drummer Anton Fier's imminent move from Cleveland to New York, where he would join the Haledon, N.J. band The Feelies. "I guess he heard somewhere that I had a pool at my house," Bob said. By which, I believe, Bob meant his parents' house. "And he said 'Well I'm going to be spending a lot of time at Bob's place then.'" I don't think that actually occurred. 

I remember seeing Anton Fier and John Zorn sitting around Soho Music Gallery, where Anton had a day gig, talking about Charlie Parker and ignoring customers such as myself. 

I remember Anton and Bill Laswell looking at a big photo book about Sergio Leone at a table at Maxwell's once.

I remember several Feelies shows where they began implementing the policy of finishing  their set with the extremely frantic "Raised Eyebrows," which ended with high-speed drum fills and cymbal clashes embellishing the incredibly hurried beat, and then IMMEDIATELY launching into "Crazy Rhythms," and seeing Anton, red-faced, between the closing of "Eyebrows" and guitarist Glenn Mercer's downbeat signal for "Crazy" looking at Glenn with pleading eyes, as if to say "please don't make me do this." 

I remember Anton being rather put out on discovering that, on the first pressing jackets of the album Crazy Rhythms, he was credited as "Tony Fisher." (Stan Demeski remembers it was "Andy Fisher" and I reckon he is correct.)

I remember drinking with Anton at Maxwell's and making some kind of stupid joke about why was Greg Tate giving himself a byline after a Marvel Comics character. "'Iron Man' is the name of an Eric Dolphy number, you idiot," he said in an indulgent tone, and I went "Oh yeah, sure, knew that all along." 

I remember going to Anton's apartment to interview him for Musician magazine, my first and only feature for the magazine. I couldn't believe he had to slog his kit to a fifth-floor walkup after every gig. During the interview, which would be about, among other things, the first Golden Palominos album, I remember Anton saying of his label head, "Jean Karakos is a dog. He's a dog rat bastard, the lowest of the low. And I give you permission to put that in your interview."

When the interview came out, he was pretty pleased with it. "I didn't put in that stuff about Karakos," I pointed out. "That was  a good call," he said. 

I remember Anton coming off the Rockit tour with Herbie Hancock and expressing befuddlement. "I don't understand how you can be such a genuinely devoted Buddhist and do all that cocaine." I told Anton that Buddhism was one of those religions that kind of let you do, and wish for, whatever you liked, which is probably why it was so attractive to so many.

I remember when the second Palominos album, Visions of Excess, came out, and the dual dedication to John Bonham and Jim Gordon raised eyebrows, as did the back cover shot of an already soused Anton mid-cocktail-sip, probably snapped at Maxwell's. "I don't care," he said to me apropos all that. "I'm not going to live to be thirty-five." He lived to be sixty-six, but he's still survived by...Jim Gordon. 

I remember sitting in a studio in the dead of night somewhere in Manhattan for about five or six hours while Anton and another musician and a recording engineer tinkered with the opening snare hit on "Something Becomes Nothing," the opening track of the third Golden Palominos album. Just. The. Opening. Snare. Hit. I thought I would lose my mind. Everyone else seemed fine. If cocaine was present at this occasion, I was not offered any.

I remember interviewing Anton at his new apartment, on Eldridge Street, for a Spin feature on the Palominos and their aforementioned album, on which not a single snare hit would be anything less than perfect. (I heard later that Anton abandoned the mix and sent the tapes to Japan for a $250,000 remix.) Peter Blegvad was in attendance, and Anton brought a couple of bottles of "Chinese wine" as a social lubricant, and it worked rather well. Anton upbraided Peter for marrying up, so to speak. He called me "college boy." ("It's a STATE SCHOOL," I protested.) It was the first and last interview I conducted in which all the parties were literally horizontal by the time the tape ran out. I never found out what the fuck that "Chinese wine" was.

I remember Anton asking me to write the press release for A Dead Horse, the fourth Palominos album. That wasn't really my thing but you try saying no to Anton. I did my bit, and I was to present him with hard copy at the Bottom Line, after his debut as the drummer in the Bob Mould trio, with Tony Maimone. It was a pretty great show, I thought. Anton didn't. "BAND MEETING" he bellowed coming off stage, leading Mould and Maimone to the dressing room. I don't remember what happened after that. 

I remember walking into Rebel Rebel Records some time in the spring of 1997, when I had just started on the staff at Premiere magazine. Anton was hanging around the back. I excitedly told him about my new gig, and when I was done, said, "What are you up to?" He extended his hands, palms up. He was as assistant manager there. 

The last time I saw him was in Hoboken, a long time ago, where he came out to see a Yung Wu gig in a park. He had a crew cut and wore a dark gray overcoat. "Oh I see you're going full Fenster," Dave Weckerman said to him.

I remember he was always the most exciting drummer to see and hear. I remember that he turned me on to Han Bennink. From mutual friend (and key Palomino) Syd Straw's Facebook page I learn that he is now dead, age 66.  

Deb

So I guess it was in the middle of autumn in 1979 that my friend Bob told me that he had a date with this pretty interesting freshman girl at New York University, and that I ought to take her out some time myself. I didn’t quite understand why, if this girl was so interesting, that Bob wanted to fob her off on me, but eventually I figured it out. It had nothing to do with her.

Debra was from Orefield, Pennsylvania, and she bunked at Weinstein Hall, which was one of only three dormitories at NYU back then. She had a lot of gumption to make that move, but she took to the city pretty well. I had been visiting Manhattan for a couple of years, mainly to see bands, but Debra was the person from whom I learned more of the day-to-day life in New York.

We went to a lot of movies. I think our first date was to see Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun. Knowing precisely nothing of post-World War II Germany, there was a lot of it we didn’t get, but it still made a strong impression, and taught us not to use gas stoves to light cigarettes.

This was back when the current IFC Center, which now has like, what, seven houses, was a single-screen theater called the Waverly. We saw a midnight show of Eraserhead there, and afterwards she said to me, “That reminds me, I have to do my laundry.”

She was kind of eccentric. She mainly dressed in black pleated skirts and white blouses, with a black Danskin beneath. For a long time it was kind of a uniform. Once as a joke (or was it?) she smashed a Perrier bottle, put the shards in a candy dish, and poured Jujubes on top of the shards, and put the dish on a coffee table. When she was a teenager in Orefield she had a schnauzer that she named Gandalf. She used to make sheets of stationery from the wrappings of Wrigley chewing gum and write enigmatic, sometimes petulant and sometimes passionate love letters on them. Once when we were stoned she watched me playing Pac-Man and when I ate the big dot that turned all my pursuers blue, she said plaintively, “Look how unhappy they are.”

So this was what you’d call a formative relationship, and one in which we were as shitty to each other as we were crazy about each other, as is not uncommon in one’s late teens/early twenties.

I remember the black mittens her mother had made for her, which she wore on our winter walks from Weinstein Hall to Chinatown, where she fiended after any dish that had snow peas in it. I didn’t take her for a nice dinner on Valentine’s Day 1980; instead we went to Irving Plaza to see The Feelies, with the Bush Tetras and DNA opening. This was the Tetras’ second show (we were under the impression at the time that it was a debut, but that had happened a few days prior) and also the DNA show where a naked woman stumbled on to the stage from the wings and bassist Tim Wright just spider-walked around her while Arto Lindsay howled and skronked and Ikue Mori didn’t even look up from her drum kit. During the Feelies’ set Glenn Mercer broke a string during the solo to “Moscow Night” and Debra and I both gasped and then marveled how he transposed it to a string above and completed the sentence, so to speak.

This was a time before film and music tastes began to be perceived as somehow gender-segregated, so I was hardly surprised that Debra liked The Contortions, The Buzzcocks, and The Psychedelic Furs. Okay she also had Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, which I couldn’t stand and which I got an earful of on the Jersey side, too, as it was a favorite of my college paper colleague Sue Merchant, later Susan Walsh. Down the hall from her at Weinstein was a guy named Andy, a sweet, soft-spoken, Velvet Underground worshipping, alarmingly thin fellow with lanky hair who once convinced Debra to sing “Femme Fatale” with him backing her on guitar. (Andy Bienan, as it happens, who later was to cowrite Boys Don’t Cry with Kimberley Peirce, and who now teaches screenwriting at Columbia, and is lately a good friend I don’t see often enough.)

We broke up around May of 1980, after which followed like maybe a whole year of on-off, which was not uncommon at this time. I remember coming into town on Election Day that year, and for some reason we went on a movie marathon. We started uptown with Godard’s Sauve Qui Peut, which ruled. Then she said to me “I’ve never seen a porno movie. Let’s see a porno movie.” So we went to some truly gnarly dive on Eighth Avenue and saw a terribly undistinguished triple-XXX movie of the pimply-derriere variety, which was weird. Then we went down to Anthology and saw a very faded print of Dreyer’s Vampyr with burned-in Swedish subtitles, which was maybe the only way you could see it back in the day. It was an amazing day in some respects, but I also remember having a splitting headache at the end of it.

She moved to D.C. around 1982, after which we only stayed intermittently in touch. She became, among other things, a mom, and some time after that found happiness in a midlife marriage. (As I, too, have done.) We reconnected via Facebook, as one does, or as one did, and exchanged cordial notes. A couple of weeks ago I learned that she had gone into hospice, suffering from lung cancer. She couldn’t speak, so I sent her a card telling her how much our time had meant to me, and she sent a note back. A little after that, while I was in Venice, she died, age 61. I was lucky to have known her.

Debra Pearl Buhay-Hockenberry-Salsi, 1961-2022. Photo used by permission.