Why Swans Whipped Sheet Metal and Licked CBGB’s Floor to Make ‘Filth’
When Michael Gira moved to New York, he was sick of L.A. punk. He had lived through the surge of ’77, but by the end of the decade, he says “its initial liberating violence was mitigated by the kind of fashion aspect and the way people would play the same three chords in slightly different variations.” So he moved to New York City and brought together a group of like-minded high-volume pugilists and named it Swans.
Although the band’s initial release, 1982’s Swans EP, built off of the city’s dying no-wave scene, the ensemble came into its own with its debut full-length, Filth, the following year. Full of lumbering rhythms created by two bassists, two drummers, one guitar, a whipped metal table and some suffocating tape loops, the record is primal art rock at its most vitriolic, anticipating industrial, sludge and noise-rock in one fell thump. More threatening, Gira intermittently snarls imperatives about power – “Flex your muscles!” “Take control and keep it!” “Don’t talk until you’re spoken to!” – in a way that made Henry Rollins sound like Olivia Newton-John at the time, as the band dismantled rock to its most threadbare essentials.
Now Gira is issuing a deluxe version of Filth, a definitive three-CD account of Swans at their most bloodthirsty. In addition to the original album, it contains live recordings from CBGB and Berlin, studio outtakes and the original Swans EP. It’s the first in a series of reissues Gira is releasing (next up will be White Light From the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life), while he and the current Swans lineup ramps up to recording a new album in September.
Gira recently spoke to Rolling Stone on a tour stop in Belgium, in the midst of a European tour where the band is test-driving new material, to reminisce on Swans’ filthy origins.
What was your intention with Swans originally?
It was just people strangling sound out of their instruments without any kind of explicit musical skills, per se.
You complain about punk bands doing three-chord riffs, but a lot of the songs on Filth are just one lunging chord.
Well, it seemed like cheating to go on to a second chord, so we didn’t. We came upon that sound just by playing. I had started playing bass, and I was dissatisfied with playing bass lines pretty quickly and I started making these chords that I would slam, and they just make these chunks of sound. We made rhythms around that, and we had tape loops that we would use that would come in and out with the use of a volume pedal. So we didn’t play to a rhythm: it was kind of a roar that would come in by pushing the volume pedal down in time with the music.
What was life like for you around the time of Filth?
Really hard. I didn’t have any money. I was doing construction work of the lower order, like demolition and some sheet-rocking and some plastering, stuccoing, any kind of grunt work. But I worked really hard, so I made good money. But you’d make some money and then it’d be gone and you’d have to find more work. It was all just kind of difficult. New York was replete with interesting music and art at the time, so that was good, but the city itself was in the throes of decay. The neighborhood where I lived – I lived on 6th Street and Avenue B – was mostly abandoned buildings, gunfire every night; machine-gun fire, in fact. Some buildings were just piles of rubble. Other buildings taken over by dope dealers and were mainly places to sell heroin. Lots of crime. It was a much different city than what it is now.