[Earlier this year, our mysterious New York liaison Agent Double Oh No interviewed Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO. Now, he sits down with punk rock veteran Sonny Vincent. Click beyond the cut for the full, exclusive interview!]
Saintly Sonny Vincent on the cover of his Resistor 7″.
On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence –
through a curious transposition peculiar to our times –
it is innocence that is called to justify itself.
– Albert Camus*
In the 21st Century punk rock may seem a faint yelp from a remote and even somewhat quaint age when people could find solidarity in a hairdo. Please consider that there really are Punks, people who have lived the fiercely wild and ill-advised life of the rock’n’roll rebel and have paid the price. As even Eddie Cochran knew, when you fight the law, you rarely win. It doesn’t take courage to be a well-adjusted “winner” in a society bent upon its own destruction. True courage is the courage to lose. As Coilhouse is dedicated to exploring what it means for a culture to be truly alternative, it made perfect sense to track down an archetypal punk – someone whose life mirrors the reckless, passionate, uncompromising music he has made – and talk about a life lived on the limen between freedom and captivity. If you dare to win, then dare to lose.
You won’t read about Sonny Vincent in the pages of Please Kill Me because he was too bitched out from kicking cigarettes to talk on the phone when Legs McNeil called him. It’s like this: Sonny stood in the maternity ward when punk was born, was forcibly estranged from the infant, and has spent much of the next thirty years watching it grow up from the outside. Of the more than 40 songs Sonny recorded in the 1970s, he only released a 7″ single, “Time is Mine“ bw “Together,” whose true irony lay in that its author would do time, hard time, and be forever cursed to live out of sync with the times whose ethos he personifies.
Like the relationship of one of Antonio Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals” to actual socialism, without characters like Sonny, punk would’ve been just a ripped t-shirt with some words scribbled on it. In short, Sonny has been too busy living punk to be a punk rock star, although nearly all of its actual stars have paid him the ultimate homage by playing on his records. Yes, that’s right, members of punk’s most influential bands – The Velvet Underground, Sex Pistols, The Stooges, the MC5, New York Dolls, Television, The Heartbreakers, The Voidoids, The Damned, The Dead Boys, Black Flag, The Replacements, Half Japanese, Sonic Youth, Rocket from the Crypt, Devil Dogs, and the Bellrays – have recorded with Sonny, and many have backed him on tour. Despite the respect of such rarefied peers, Sonny is literally unheard of among most fans of punk. He’s like a step-dad whose kid will never know him no matter what he does.
Sonny in a photo booth in Times Square, NYC. 1975.
Sonny’s story must be told before Hollywood ruins it by casting some pretty boy star from E.R. instead of an ex-con who knows the role from the inside. (Surely, Sonny could put you in touch with a lot of talented people who just need a break in life.) Sonny’s life and antics are more than legend – they are real. This is as true a story as you get in an age when it can be so hard to keep track of the truth. Remember: Johnny Cash never did hard time and he didn’t shoot anyone in Reno or anywhere else.
Sonny Vincent sung and slung a guitar in the Testors, who, from ‘76 to ‘79, played Max’s Kansas City and CBGB with acts like the Cramps and toured with the Dead Boys. Even before “punk” meant “rock,” Sonny was in and out of homes for bad kids, committed to mental wards, and was forcibly impressed into a tour of duty in Vietnam courtesy of the U.S. Marine Corp by his abusive Foster Parents. Since punk entered his life, Sonny’s been arrested in at least four different countries, episodically imprisoned, deported from Canada three times, and he’s fathered eight kids from five women. This cat has not lived nine lives – he’s lived a thousand. And he’s not done yet.
This is the first interview I’ve seen where Sonny actually tells us what happened and how it went down. In person and on the phone, Sonny comes across as meek, even a bit shy, about his life – like a dog that’s been beaten too much. Most of all, he’s cautious. So I assured him that, having done the crime and served the time, he may as well live to tell the tale. For much of it, he’s contrite. His is a cautionary tale of an artist rebelling with and without cause, and losing on both sides of Benjamin Franklin’s bourgeois Law of Relativity – both time and money have been lost.
(Full interview with Sonny Vincent under the cut.)
