All bands eventually break up. Sometimes it’s due to a change in priorities, a move city, a new job… Sometimes members start families that they need to support, leaving no time left in the day between work and other obligations for the pursuit of art. Sometimes bands break up because the members get too old to keep up with them. Sometimes a death is what seals the group’s fate.
The reasons are legion, but the trajectory is the same. Whether you’re the Rolling Stones, or a pair of siblings who start recording in their shared bedroom and only ever release music to Bandcamp, it’s immaterial, every band has its final performance. But with the archival nature of recordings, and through the testimony and adoration of fans, the disbanding of a musical group isn’t necessarily its final chapter. As I think anyone who has gone through a Smiths or Joy Division phase can tacitly confirm, a band’s longevity can never be determined by the length of their fuse, but by how brightly they burn.
Somewhat like the aforementioned maudlin phenoms, Carnival Crash was a short-lived but well-remembered post-punk group, whose legacy is cemented as much by what its respective members did after the break-up, as the music they produced during the band’s lifespan. Carnival Crash was comprised of bassist and vocalist John Griffin, guitarist Norman Westberg, and drummer and vocalist Ivan Nahem, and formed when the three members met in New York City at the dawn of the ’80s, eventually forming a necessary throughline from the conceptual rock of the ’70s, to the harsher, more sardonic punk of the ’80s.
The germ of the Carnival Crash migrated with Ivan as he moved East from San Francisco with his brother Andrew. Ivan had played in a new wave band called The Situations on the West Coast, but in looking for a new artistic outlet, formed the group Crop with his brother and relocated to New York. When Crop was transplanted to NYC, artistic differences within the group became irreconcilable, eventually caused Ivan to leave and the band to change their name to Live Skull. With Crop in the rearview mirror, Ivan sought out like-minded scoundrels who would be willing to take the quickly mutating aggression of that period’s punk scene in an artier direction, and once John and Norman were on board, the rest was history …
Literally, Carnival Crash gigged for a short while before imploding during a recording session. After the split, Ivan would reunite with his brother Andrew to form the abrasive post-punk and hardcore band Ritual Tension, along with Michael Shockley and Marc Sloan, and Norman would move on to become a permanent member of Swans.
But yet, somehow, Carnival Crash persisted. Not as a live band, of course, they were thoroughly broken up by the time any of their recordings saw the light of day, but as a connecting sinew binding together the proto-punk and punk scenes of the late ’70s to the noise scene of the ’80s. You can hear Carnival Crash attempting to metabolize the cabaret blues of early avant-garde groups like Captain Beefheart into a dark strain of steely art-punk on “The Fool,” and the guitar work on “Edge of the Night” feels like the spiritual antecedent of the sputter-schism riffs Thurston Moore used as the mortar for so many Sonic Youth cuts.
The influence of Carnival Crash is palpable in the period following their demise, even if few can place a finger on the cold pulse that runs like an icy stream through the darker strains of post-punk that emerged in the ’80s and divine its name or the origins of its headwaters.
Many of Carnival Crash’s surviving recordings have been compiled into a single collection now out via Obelisk Records, titled It Is A Happy Man. Because we are such punk history nerds over at New Noise we really couldn’t pass up the opportunity to chat with Ivan about the legacy of his formative and transitional group and get the scoop on how this new Carnival Crash collection came to be.
You can stream the entirety of It Is A Happy Man, as well as read our interview with Ivan, below:
The following conversation was conducted via email on January 9, 2021. Its transcript has been edited for the sake of clarity.
How have you been doing during the pandemic? How do you occupy your time?
Thanks for asking. It’s been most difficult in terms of seeing the conditions of so many people deteriorate. So many people suffering, the sheer amount of homeless people in our neighborhood is getting to be staggering, such a heart-wrenching bummer. And to see this country falter so badly with no leadership…
Certainly, the worst year for me personally was a while back when my son died, but to witness so much public devastation this past year is difficult. I’ve known one person, a friend of my brother, who is on the verge of death from Covid-related complications. Personally, I’m ok, my wife Helen is ok, she’s able to walk to her work and she keeps safe.
I’m naturally pretty solitary so that part hasn’t been too onerous. These days I get to work on my nearly completed new album and my writing, and I take long walks, mostly in Calvary, the local cemetery — there aren’t any big parks around here.
How did this collection end up being revived?
I was away from music, except for a couple of projects, for many years. Some years ago this guy, noise artist Gregg Bielski in Pittsburgh, started a Ritual Tension page on Facebook, and we got to be friends. He asked me to do some poetry over some soundscapes he’d made, and that led to me making The Kiss, a collaborative work. I called the group(ing) ex—>tension.
Around the same time, I re-discovered an analog 2” tape of the masters of the Noise NY sessions and some even funkier earlier demo tapes. We had to have them converted. My brother Andrew (former Ritual Tension guitarist) and I took the digital files to Michael Jung — engineer and guitar player with Alice Donut and Um — and we mixed. Michael had a lot of fine ideas and those sessions were fun. And then I got Jim Reynolds involved — we’ve worked together for years and he wanted to put this [It Is A Happy Man] out on his Obelisk Label.
Why did you decide to release this album in such a bummer year, or was that the point?
Well, no, the Carnival Crash [album] was in the can by mid-2019, so it had nothing to do with the particular year. Ritual Tension recorded It’s Just the Apocalypse, It’s Not the End in 2019, released this year 2020 by Arguably Records—shoutout to my boys Michael Shockley and Mac Sloan—and the title and some of the songs seem prescient, but there wasn’t any kind of intent like that. But you know the past few years have been so dark yet enlivening. We were actually planning a Carnival Crash/Ritual Tension record release party, with solo Norman Westberg, and Ritual Tension and 0-13, Mark C’s band, but that didn’t happen. I don’t know if it’ll happen if/when the pandemic abates, but I hope so.
How well have you stayed in touch with the other members of the band over the years?
That’s a bit tough to answer. The band break-up was a bit traumatic. Then after I left Swans I didn’t see much of Norman, and we all went our separate ways for many years. When I started to get this project going I got back in touch with everyone. Norman and I hung out a few times, I went over to his place, and we met at bars, and I went to his gigs. I’m recruiting him for the album I’m doing now. I went to stay a night with John Griffin, he lives upstate by the Delaware River. I talk with him on the phone occasionally. He is a fucking genius. And I’ve had some pleasant email exchanges with James.
Do you think of what you do as punk? Do you feel like that phrase means anything in 2020? Did it ever mean anything?
I think, me personally, I’ve always had trouble truly slotting into any kind of label, though that’s sort of just an artist cliché. I was in the proto-punk and punk scenes in both NY and SF in the 70s, but the first band I joined, The Situations, was kind of like a punk B-52’s, so we never played punk rock strictly speaking, although we had gigs where kids slam danced. We actually had a couple, Eric and Snit, who go-go danced for us and went on to go-go stripper dancing careers in Asia.
I left that band and formed Crop with my brother Andrew and Mark C and Tom Paine, who later became Live Skull, and we played around San Francisco, but we would have considered ourselves more post-punk by that time. Carnival Crash and Ritual Tension were sort of post-punk. I actually warmed a little to the label “art core” because we kind of combined elements of art-rock and the hardcore mentality, but again, the labels just fail. As to what it means now, I couldn’t tell ya. I mean, I taught yoga for over a decade—I have a shaved head still, as I’ve done since ‘79, but I don’t think people look at me like I’m a punk.
We never wore spiked hair or spiked jackets back then anyway. I follow some people on Instagram who are contemporary punks, but that’s an amusement. I would say that for me punk rock’s best virtues were its acceptance of personal weirdness and any sort of idiosyncrasy, the attitude—if not reality—of a blissful fucking embrace of negativity and bad news, plus the strength of an outsider community—of course, all those remain virtues if you can sustain them.
What was the transition from punk to no wave like back in ’80s? Did people see it as a separate scene?
Yeah in several ways no wave grew from punk. Some of the proto-punk classics like “We Will Fall” and “Sister Ray” took it in that direction. But it was all cohabiting in that period, the attitude was similar. I visited NYC in the late 70s and on the same trip saw DNA at some auditorium at NYU and Ramones at Max’s Kansas City. The no wave people were more artsy, for lack of a better word. Artsy can be cool, don’t get me wrong. The East Coast scene seemed more white, too.
What was your experience of New York like in the early ’80s as opposed to now?
Well, first, I was younger by about 40 years. In some ways, I’m in better shape now. Anyway, regarding New York, I was born in Manhattan, the family moved to San Francisco’s East Bay when I was 4. I “grew up” in Berkeley. But I’ve always loved the New York area code. I came to live there for a few years in the mid-70s, and then seriously moved there in 1980. I’ve been here ever since, except for a few years in Ireland.
Recently I was thinking about how unfazed I was by the craziness of this place in the ’80s, but I guess it’s so deep in me. I lived in a bunch of crazy places in the East Village but I couldn’t get enough of it. It felt like coming home. I lived in Hoboken in the mid-to-late ’80s and ’90s. Now we’re in Woodside in Queens. I guess it’s love/hate, and we’re always talking about moving, but we’re here now, and yeah, I love certain aspects of this location.
Do you think that period of the city is overly romanticized? Or, was there really something special happening there a the end of the ’70s?
At the end of the ’70s, I was still in San Francisco, playing in The Situations, and that was phenomenally special. I’ve never experienced before or since such solidarity in a scene. It probably wasn’t all that real, but before all the tourists began coming, the scene around Mabuhay and Deaf Club were so dope, you can’t imagine. The Mutants, The Offs, The Sleepers, On the Rag, Search & Destroy—all fabulous.
Then I came east with Mark C and Tom Paine, not literally, I drove across the States with a girlfriend. We got apartments around town, I got a place out in Bay Ridge near where John lived. The early ’80s in New York was a special time, yeah, but there was also a lot of disappointment and insanity. I’ve always managed to be pretty upbeat though, and I loved the adventures. Like I can remember a night where Norman and I were roaming around the meatpacking district getting thoroughly demented on Jack Daniels and throwing bottles up in the air to hear them crash on the cobblestones. That was living high for us.
What can you tell us how these recordings came into existence?
Well, the last four songs on the album are the earliest, and the engineering the most primitive. Norman worked stock at a trendy punk clothing outfit called Shady Character, which was owned by a member of The Nails, and George and Dave Kaufman were in that band. They’d set up a recording studio in their Manhattan loft, so we went over and recorded. I think it went pretty fast, just came in and laid it down. They did it on a four-track TEAC and bounced tracks, which you did then. Then we booked into Noise NY, a real sixteen-track studio, and did four or five tracks there, but in the middle of it something kinda went wrong, and the band was over. I released two of the songs as a single by Ivan X, so it didn’t get lost. I brought in Tom Paine on bass on “Edge of Night” because John had quit.
How did you happen upon the title It Is A Happy Man?
It’s this brilliant Ralph Kramden line from the Jackie Gleason show (The Honeymooners). It’s worth watching the clip! It’s like an early parody of self-help bullshit. In fact, that line was one of my few additions to the song “The Fool.” It’s a pretty good line I think: “…it is a happy man who grins, so I’m grinnin’… like a fool!” Anyway, no one objected to the title when I proposed it a few years ago.
Are there any Carnival Crash tracks that are still in the vault?
Well, they’d be pretty far in. I have some stuff on cassette tapes. John might have some stuff that some of the rest of them did after the band broke up. I only had the tapes from the two sessions we did together.
Which of these tracks were the most fun to perform back in the day?
It’s funny, thinking about this, two songs came to mind but neither are on the record. We did a cover of Alice Cooper’s “Halo of Flies” when I was the drummer, and we played it uptown at Trax and I had a drum solo and pulled it off, the only time in my life I ever did that. Fucking hell! And it’s a very orchestral song, but it was our encore and it turned out great and we were elated. And then we did this really weird hypnotic song at some club in New Rochelle and the audience was so rapt. It was like we cast a spell on them, it was really cool, but you hadda be there. Of course, the Carnival Crash song that was closest to my heart was “Edge of Night.” It still speaks to me and I think it’s a well-written song. From a more objective or fanlike viewpoint, my favorite would be “Nostalgia”—I love Norman’s guitar, and John’s lyrics and singing always move me.
What were some of your favorite Carnival Crash shows? Where did you play, and who did you play with? What made them memorable?
We were really starting at the bottom, just playing the bottom line clubs like A7, we played parties and some kind of a weird art show in Williamsburg, maybe? I think one time we got on stage at 2 am at A7, but we rocked it! We got a couple of more upscale gigs by opening for The Nails. I’ve played on bills with interesting, lovely people from Bootsy Collins to The Cramps, but not with Carnival Crash, we were short-lived.
We know who you were listening to and influenced by during the making of this album, but who are you listen to and inspired by now? What makes these artists appeal to you / jump out from the crowd?
Well, I’d be curious to know who you believe we were listening to [Editor’s Note: Carnival Crash’s influences have been identified elsewhere as being Wire, Bush Tetras, Alice Cooper, and Captain Beefheart, among others], but to turn our gaze to the present… I don’t have enough time to listen to a lot of new stuff, in terms of rock music. We saw Tropical Fuck Storm a couple of times in the last few years, and they were coming here again but got nixed by Covid. They are fantastic live. I like Kills Birds—the singer is so smart, she reminds me of both Patti and Exene … I love that Public Enemy is back, their latest is brilliant as usual. And then Norman and I were both blown away by a suite of songs by John Griffin, which is unreleased. I know Norm said he was listening to it all the time last time I saw him. You can find some of his stuff on The Griffin Morrissey Catastrophy. I’d also mention Female Genius, a band my friend Marnie Jaffe is in—I saw them last year and they were really inspirational. You might know Marnie from her work with Live Skull. And Live Skull’s latest albums, the latest is Dangerous Visions, real good stuff.
These days I’m doing this bizarre ambient shit, so I’ll just add that my main influences there are really early Brian Eno, Biosphere, Tim Hecker, Stars of the Lid. And I’m also engaged with some noise artists like Gregg Bielski Echo Lightwave Unspeakable and Gene A Arcidiacono-Santiago.
John Griffin once said to me, “You and I meet somewhere between Rimbaud and the East River.” That remains true. What stands out is apparent, it appears before you and speaks to you. John and I fancied ourselves, badass poet troubadours — well I did anyway! — with words and voices that matched up and Norman and James spoke so clearly through their instruments.
Where did you like to see live music near you?
Mostly those clubs in Brooklyn like say Hank’s Saloon, and some in the East Village like Berlin.
What are you looking forward to the most when/if things get back to normal? What are you looking forward to the least?
If things are back to normal, I’d like to eat inside a restaurant. I’d like to talk to people without a mask on. I’d like to go back to those clubs mentioned above, and around the world. I’d even go see the Mets play. I’d love to be in a yoga class again.
What I’m least looking forward to is the division and violence that the Trump monster has unleashed in this world, the clashes between races and creeds, the confrontations with evil motherfuckers, not to mention the devastation climate change will be causing. We have some bold and challenging times ahead.
Any additional knowledge you’d like to drop on our readers?
Yeah. Your questions have been dead on, but a few more things I’d like to say. I grew up loving music so much, but because of a few incidents, I believed I was tone-deaf. So I became a poet. When punk rock came along and I saw the Off’s drummer on ‘luuds, I thought, I could at least do that. Punk was my entry into music and I am forever grateful.
It was a fascinating moment, and a moment was all it was. But I’m glad we have a testament to that time. When I brought the first tracks to Norman he said it made him happy to hear that stuff. Me too. I was untrained and winging it as a singer, but I was carried by these three other utterly incredible musicians, who all have my eternal respect. And my brother Andrew and Michael Jung’s contribution to the remixing was also stellar.
About a year or so ago Gregg Bielski suggested I make a “yoga album” and it’s a fun idea to take my peculiar sensibility into the realm of more superficially tranquil music. Not that I can achieve tranquillity in this music, but that’s the direction. Collaborators besides Gregg will include my brother Andrew, Jon Fried (The Cucumbers) and Norman Westberg. It’ll be released as MY BOOTS ARE MUDDY ALREADY by Ivan Nahem + ex—>tension. Check onaboutnow.com to stay current. I’m really having fun with it. It should be out early next year. Shameless self-promo, yep. Okay then. Peace.
Photos courtesy of Obelisk Records.
Get a copy of It Is A Happy Man from Obelisk Records here.
