In the early 1980s, ominous figures began appearing on the streets of New York City. Black paint in the shape of bodies was smeared on walls and sidewalks: Shadowmen. Richard Hambleton’s guerilla art campaign emphasized the noir-ish aspect of life in lower Manhattan, capturing the public’s imagination while also providing a few jump-scares to keep pedestrians on their toes. Romantic but terrifying: That was life in the City That Never Sleeps, and that was why Bag People were drawn to it.
The story of Bag People begins in the 1970s, in the windy boulevards of Chicago. High school friends Carolyn Master, Diane Wlezien, and Gaylene Goodreau were bit by the rock ‘n’ roll bug and, after graduating, started a band called Lois Lain. As Los Angeles’s early punk scene was gaining notoriety, Lois Lain felt the westward pull and decamped for California’s sunnier climes in 1978. Although Lois Lain’s sojourn in L.A. only lasted for about a year, the band found themselves in a few memorable situations; in addition to auditioning for Kim Fowley, they performed at the Whisky a Go Go in a bid to play the band in Foxes (1980), a film starring Jodie Foster. Despite their brushes with Hollywood (and in Fowley, one of its most notorious predators), Lois Lain packed it in and scattered to the wind. A few years later, the core trio was back in Chicago, with Goodreau playing guitar and singing in proto-goth post-punkers DA! But Goodreau was restless and set about forming a new group with her former bandmates, with Master on guitar and Wlezien on vocals. As the band began to coalesce during 1982, they held auditions for a bassist. In walked a young man named Algis Kizys, who had recently left a band called Problem Dogs (featuring future L7 drummer Demetra Plakas).
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“I was going around Chicago to see bands play, and I only saw one band that I would ever want to be with,” Kizys says, “this band called Bag People. But they had a bass player already. I kept on seeing bands, but the only band [I cared about] was Bag People. Then I saw this cryptic ad [seeking a bass player] in the Chicago Reader that didn’t say the name of the band or what they were doing. I was like, ‘That’s very interesting. I bet you it’s Bag People.’ I called the number and this girl answered and I said, ‘Hi, I’m responding to the ad,’ and we talked a little bit. I said, ‘By the way, this isn’t Bag People, is it?’ She’s like, ‘How the fuck did you know that?’ So we set up an audition and there was this other guy in front of me, so he went in first to play with them.” After that bassist left, Kizys cranked up his rig and instantly gelled with the group, cementing his place in Bag People. In retrospect, this was a Sliding Doors moment for the Chicago rock scene—the bass player who tried out immediately before Kizys was a skinny guy with a guitar strap-belt named Steve Albini. After locking down drummer Peter Elwyn, Bag People started gigging around the Windy City, playing legendary punk haunts like Exit and O’Banion’s. But the Big Apple was calling, and Bag People answered.
After Wlezien was accepted at Parsons School of Design to study painting, Bag People descended on the city in the fall of 1982. Most of them moved into a 2500 square foot loft in Brooklyn at DeKalb and Broadway, where they befriended their downstairs neighbors in the band Health Hen, with whom they would soon share bills at East Village hardcore mecca A7. After building out their loft, Bag People had not only a place to live but a place to play, so they set about honing their vicious, pounding rock music. Inspired by punk, No Wave, and heavy ‘70s rock, the quintet hammered out new songs and experimented with how far they could take their urban blues rock while each member figured out how to survive in their new home. Bag People started playing shows and found common ground with a new scene that came crawling out of lower Manhattan made up of noisy and forbidding bands like Swans, Sonic Youth, Live Skull, Circle X, and Rat At Rat R. During those early days in the Bushwick loft, Bag People kept a fresh tape in the boombox, constantly recording as they worked on new material.
One of those tapes got taken to Wharton Tiers’s studio and put through some processing to make it suitable for Bag People’s only vinyl offering, a self-released 7-inch single. The record didn’t make it far past downtown’s narrow borders, but there was a copy at one of the band’s favorite haunts. “For a while, it was on the jukebox at [notorious East Village dive] Mars Bar,” Kizys says. There was no better environment than the grubby, lived-in Mars Bar to enjoy songs like the lurching “Lark’s Vomit” and the manic, grinding “Instrumental” on which Wlezien harangues the microphone like a street preacher.
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Of “Blessed Ignorance,” Wlezien recalls, “That song almost didn’t get on there because we couldn’t find a good enough recording. I said, ‘Let’s find a way to work with it.’ Al tweaked it enough and I said, ‘I’ll pay you each one dollar if we get this song on the album.’” That was four dollars well spent, as the track reveals the heavy ‘70s rock heart beating beneath Bag People’s leather jacket exterior. Like a package tossed off a moving truck, “UPS” has an incredible thud to it, while “Long Way Back” looks to the road ahead and makes peace with the toil required to traverse it. “What’s What” sounds like a knife fight outside of a bodega, and “Don’t Make Me,” recorded live at CBGB’s, perfectly captures the thrilling but dangerous downtown mise-en-scène. At the time, Wlezien was living right down the street from the infamous Alphabet City venue the SIN (Safety In Numbers) Club, which held legendary early gigs with the cream of the city’s underground bands.
Bag People’s last show was in June 1984 in Washington, D.C. opening for Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds on their first American tour. By the time the band made it back to New York, they were finished. And there Bag People rested; but the persons responsible for the tumult fanned out into the New York scene and beyond. Kizys joined Swans and played on classic records like A Screw, Children of God, and Soundtracks for the Blind. Master became obsessed with zydeco music. “I wanted to play zydeco, so I decided to hitchhike down to Louisiana, all by myself—which was the craziest thing I’ve done in my entire life.” Then she made her way back to Los Angeles to check out the rock scene and ended up auditioning for an up-and-coming band called Jane’s Addiction. “I answered an ad in the L.A. Reader. I played them the Bag People single and their faces were just like [Master screws up her face into a look of mock horror]—it was pretty funny.” Elwyn moved out of New York, while Goudreau played in the hard-rocking Bloodsister.
Wlezien moved back to Chicago, but kept in touch, which helped shape the next phase in the Bag People saga. Master returned to New York and started Of Cabbages And Kings, roping in Kizys and then Wlezien, who collaborated with the band via mailed cassettes and lyrics sent back and forth. For drums, the former Bag People recruited one of New York’s hardest hitters: Ted Parsons, who was playing in Swans and Prong. Taking a line from a Lewis Carroll poem for their name, Of Cabbages And Kings elevated Bag People’s grimy rock into baroque, gothic structures of grand design, a sort of metropolitan death rock. In addition to Parsons, Of Cabbages And Kings employed a slew of New York’s best drummers, including Vinnie Signorelli (Unsane, Swans) and Rich Hutchins (Live Skull), before breaking up in 1992. They put out three LPs, the last two on Los Angeles label Triple XXX, who, ironically for Master, released Jane’s Addiction’s debut. During this time, Master was a resolute member of Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra, regularly traveling to Europe and around the U.S. for over a decade. Along with Swans, Kizys also played in Branca’s ensemble and even did some time in Martin Atkins’s Pigface.
For many years, the members of Bag People thought that the practice tapes had been lost, but it was discovered that Elwyn still had them safely in an old box in Massachusetts. After the tapes were secured came the digitizing process, track selection, and a round of audio clean-up. The result is a time capsule that captures the grungy aspects of life in mid-1980s New York City, an era often romanticized by 21st century digital natives. This period was almost entirely analog, as evidenced by a box of cassette tapes containing raw, unfettered rock music made by a group of inspired transplants. The music is evocative of a New York that now mostly lives in the memory of those who lived it. It may have taken four decades, but Bag People have finally emerged from the shadows.
