James White and the Blacks live, 1980, with Debbie Harry

James Chance, photo by Edo Bertoglio, 1980

Here's some cool live footage - James White and the Blacks live in 1980, with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein (Blondie) guesting.

James White, or James Chance as he was previously known, dropped out of music school in Wisconsin and moved to New York on the last week of 1975. 

James Chance: “I first came to New York on December 27th 1975. I’d been playing sax in Milwaukee, with a band called Death. Walls of feedback. Total incomprehension. I read in The Village Voice there was all this free-type loft jazz happening in Soho, plus little ads for ‘Ramones’ and ‘Television’, and what the hell is a ‘CBGBs’?

"That first night there was a concert with Lester Bowie on Avenue C and Third. I knew nothing about that neighbourhood. I started walking east on Bleecker. There’s CBGBs! Then all of a sudden there’s all these buildings falling down, burned out, vacant lots full of debris, bricks and stones everywhere. Somehow it didn't feel dangerous. In Milwaukee I’d walk around, fantasising about blowing people’s heads off. Here, I’m looking at garbage piled six feet high and I feel at home. I felt like I fit in.” (Mojo interview, 2017)

His first band in New York was helmed by Lydia Lunch, called Teenage Jesus and The Jerks.

Chance: "I met Lydia Lunch at CBGB’s. She was dancing — and no one danced there. In the Midwest everybody danced, and I missed that. I thought it was really stupid that everyone in New York was more concerned with looking cool. She was dancing in the aisles, so I introduced myself. She’d just come down from Rochester and she showed me this long prose poem she’d written. I was really impressed with it. 

"By that time I had an apartment on 2nd Street between A and B. It cost about $110 a month. I think it’d been a drug den because it was all boarded up. One day she knocked on my door and said she needed a place to stay. So we lived together for a year or more. It wasn’t like a boyfriend-girlfriend thing. She got some old beat-up guitar and started showing me her songs. I encouraged her. 

"So I ended up being in Teenage Jesus for most of ’77. Then she kicked me out because she wanted it to be even more minimal than it already was." (Purple mag interview, 2011)

He went on to form his own band, Contortions, later James Chance and the Contortions, in 1978. 

He met Anya Phillips, who he described as a real presence on the scene - they become couple. 

Chance: "I watched her from afar and a couple times I tried to talk to her and got slapped down, completely. Lydia hated Anya. She’d plot against her, saying, like, 'Let’s do this and let’s do that to Anya!' And then Anya met a German filmmaker and she went to Germany for a while, and when she came back I was doing the early gigs with The Contortions. 

"That X magazine benefit was the first one she came to and the first time I went into the audience attacking people. I sort of worked my way to the back of the audience. She was there sitting in a chair. I saw her and thought, 'Should I attack her? No, better not.' But she came up to me afterward and we started hanging out, and somehow she decided to be Teenage Jesus’s manager. That was a real disaster. I don’t think Lydia ever did one thing that Anya suggested. Lydia did whatever she wanted, so it didn’t last long. Then Anya decided to manage The Contortions, who she didn’t like at all."

The Contortions featured on the seminal no wave compilation 'No New York' produced by Brian Eno, although Chance described it as more of a field document, noting Eno got the bands to set up and play live, which was the extent of his 'producing'. 

They recorded their debut album 'Buy' for Ze Records in 1979, featuring their wonderfully angular jagged funk, most notably on the song 'Contort yourself'. That same year, one of the bosses at Ze Records asked James to make a disco album.

Chance: "When we did the Off White album Michael Zilkha, we had a contract with him for the Contortions, we were about to do the Buy album and he said, 'I have another thing in mind. I’m going to give you a budget, and I want you to do a disco album.' Something for $10,000, which wasn’t too bad for an idea as off-the-wall as that. But he didn’t elaborate on it more than that. He just said, 'I want it to be your idea of disco,' and he left it at that.

"He didn’t come to the sessions; he just left it to me to figure out what I was going to do that had some relationship to disco. You couldn’t help to listen to disco then. It was omnipresent. You didn’t have to go to disco clubs, you would hear it in a cab, you would hear it in the stores… you would hear it everywhere.

"So I thought I’d make a disco version of “Contort Yourself.” There was an earlier version that was faster. So what happened was we went to a black disco in St. Paul and somehow convinced the DJ to play it, and people were just completely baffled, and I realized it was too fast for disco. At that time my tempo was influenced by punk rock, so everything was really fast.

"Anyway, Michael decided we needed a new version that was more like disco, so he called August Darnell [aka Kid Creole], who was one of his artists, and he just literally slowed the track down mechanically, and he wrote a new guitar part and put that himself and put background vocals and claps. I wasn’t even there, he just did all that himself, and I just went in and did a new vocal ... I liked it. So it wasn’t really collaboration. He added his own take without consulting me. Which was fine with me! I don’t really collaborate with people too much in terms with sitting down and writing a song." (Vice, Sept 2015 interview)

Ze Records decided to do a festive album in 1981 titled 'A Christmas Record', getting acts on the label to write their own Christmas songs, with NYC via Akron Ohio's The Waitresses delivering an oddball hit 'Christmas Wrapping', alongside Was Not Was, Kid Creole, Suicide, and Material with Nona Hendryx. Chance contributed a tune to the 1982 re-release,  the delightfully named 'Christmas with Satan'. 

After the Contortions' album came out, the band fell apart and Chance recruited a new lineup including musicians from the downtown jazz scene, including Lester Bowie’s younger brother Joseph, who later started the band Defunkt.

Chance: “Punks hated jazz. The first black faces in No Wave were in my band. We became the top live draw in New York, Anya was going to manage the Mudd Club, but then she had a huge feud with the co-owner. 

"Then our Ze Records relationship got destroyed because [label boss] Michael Zilkha hired someone who took a personal grudge against us. We started recording for Chris Stein’s label [Animal Records], then Anya got sick. Then Blondie broke up and Chrysalis dropped Chris’ label. I called my agent one day and there was no agent.” (Mojo interview, 2017) Anya Phillips died of cancer in 1981. 

Chance was keen on covering James Brown with his bands, which is probably why they are doing 'I Feel Good' in this live clip from 1980....

In this next clip, Debbie Harry is singing Chic's 'Good Times'. Her and Stein took Chic's Nile Rogers uptown to a rap show in 1979 and Rogers heard the DJs playing 'his' song. Except it had people talking over it. And that's how he discovered that Sugarhill Records had borrowed Chic's tune for 'Rapper's Delight', and not asked him for permission. He later came to an agreement to get a songwriting credit on it for him and his musical partner Bernard Edwards.