This is the full director’s cut of a James Murphy/LCD Soundsystem profile that ran at about half its original length back in 2007. I was happy with the way it was published, but I thought I’d put the whole thing up here now—to mark the passing of a band worth memorializing—since it includes some good early history on Murphy that I don’t feel like I’ve come across before: talk of his childhood, his art-punk past, his Bulgarian therapist, his doings with drugs, his ideas for what his art should be at the start, etc. It’s long—4,000 words—so not ideally Tumblr’d. But herewith…
Silver & Grey
The Ballad of a Pop Agnostic
By Andy Battaglia
“When I was a kid, I used to lie in front of the refrigerator and sing.” James Murphy is holding court in a West Village recording studio, remembering a primal hum. He talks to a beautiful woman in oversize ’70s sunglasses. A disco ball rests on a table. Blond wood lines the walls, lit like a Scandinavian showroom. An action-figure sits on the shelf—a Daft Punk doll glamorous in a tiny leather jacket with a silver robot head. Murphy wears a faded T-shirt and tattered canvas shoes—glamorous in a different fashion.
Talk turns to reducing distortion on a drum sound. Murphy makes weird noises with his mouth and describes a troubling tone as “mousey.” His assistant flits around with graph-paper and hands full of wires. They talk about music as a set of problems with solutions. They’re at work producing a band in town from England—here to summon the New York sound.
New York has lots of sounds, but the band on a schedule wants one in particular. They want the sound that is James Murphy’s to give: the sound of rock clubs where ears ring and recoil, of dance clubs where bodies churn under strobe lights, of lonely bedrooms where teenagers brood and dream of a New York they have reason to fear is fading. These are worlds that Murphy helped reinvent.
It’s a different world in the studio, where Murphy, a week before his 37th birthday, leans back in an Aeron chair. He’s at home with buttons to push and levels to make precise, with a charge to talk about tom-tom drums and space to survey worlds outside from a distance. He talks about the music business in one-liners that make his friends’ eyes roll: “I felt like a million bucks…in taxes!” He goes on about a Johnny Cash recording that “just crawls out of the speakers,” making monster hands to get his point across. He jokes about leaking fake MP3s on the Internet: “Here—blog this, fuckface!”
Murphy is at home in the studio where he became who he is: a magnanimous didact who moonlights as an unusual kind of rock star. Everything about him suggests he didn’t mean to become a star—and he’s not, really. He doesn’t skew as big in terms of numbers as he does in influence, either as a producer or as the leader of the band LCD Soundsystem. He still gets excited to fly “premium economy” and grows wide-eyed over a toy turntable he’s being sent for free. And he’s not so rooted in “rock,” anyway. He makes records that owe to disco and electronic music as much anything else. He’s an omnivorous fan who grew up with independent rock and later found himself, in the same room he’s in now, working with Britney Spears. She improvised vocals for seven hours in a booth in the corner, trying to draw on the sound that was Murphy’s to give. Her record company dismissed the resulting demo as “too hip,” but Britney was there, in the DFA studio in 2003 tracking a sound that germinated on the Lower East Side and went on to flood nightlife scenes in London, Barcelona, Berlin.
The band here now is different. It’s made up of a fantastically drab duo from Brighton who call themselves Prinzhorn Dance School. They’re both tall and skinny, with thin jeans and amateur skin that cowers in light so bright and gold. They’re mixing their first album and listening to James Murphy talk, which itself qualifies as an activity. Talking is a big part of what Murphy does. He’s known for the way he chides the worlds he enters into with all the charisma and command of a candidate on the stump. He chides them because he cherishes them, from the blighted punk slums he haunted in college to the licentious dance parties where Murphy, an antsy soul at 30, helped New York regain its groove.
The dance parties took place just above the studio, in what now serves as the lobby of a small office building. “We had some of the original graffiti writers, Zulu Nation kids, guys who worked in movies, smelly Brooklyn punks, old dance-music people, Rosie Perez on crutches—it was the weirdest mix of people you could ever see,” Murphy says, waxing over a makeshift dance-floor that now stands as hallowed ground in downtown lore. “I used to take two E’s, break them into quarters and put them on the corners of the two turntables, and just work my way through them as a DJ set went on. I played Donna Summer, Kraftwerk, Public Image Ltd., the Beatles, the Stooges—anything. It really felt like something was happening.”
What happened was the birth of the sound known as “disco rock.” How it happened speaks to the resurrection of art music as a social enterprise. Why it happened owes to the hum of a refrigerator, a Bulgarian therapist, a programmer on loan from London, and years of fruitless tinkering that left James Murphy ready to break.
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Murphy was not the disco type. “I remember him as a kid who always wanted to talk about Beowulf and Chaucer,” says Rob Reynolds, an old friend who met Murphy when he was at NYU. “He was like an accountant in a Division III tight end’s body with an artist’s heart and soul.”
Reynolds played a role in Dungbeetle, a self-described “fiasco” of a rock band that would later shoot out an epochal cast of characters. Reynolds went on to work as a painter in Los Angeles. Bassist Nicholas Butterworth fluttered up during the Internet boom, founding the Silicon Alley Reporter and later working as the CEO of MTVi. The group’s singer, then a hapless ghostwriter who answered to the name Sam Shit and wore a cape on stage, is now the celebrated novelist Sam Lipsyte. “I wouldn’t call it ‘singing,’” Lipsyte says. “It was more like screaming or beseeching. My musicianship wasn’t the best, but that really wasn’t the point. It all was about trying to make people feel weird.”
Then there’s Murphy, who aligned with Dungbeetle as a live sound-mixer for their “art-punk theatrical” stage shows. When he first saw Dungbeetle in action, Murphy was heading into his 20s and mired in a musical underground known for its aversion to ambition and spectacle. It was the anti-everything ’90s, an era when parochial modesty reigned. Murphy is not a particularly parochial or modest guy. He’s big and loud, with determined eyes and a laugh like something recorded on a soundstage. Murphy has called himself a “maniacal jackass” in interviews, in which he’s known to bristle and bray—often humorously but always pointedly.
Nor was he particularly parochial or modest when he moved to New York, at 19, from Princeton Junction, New Jersey. He had devoted a year after high-school to train as a serious kick-boxer, and he still speaks with pride about his teenage reputation as the weird kid who never lost a fight. He brightens as he recounts his spotless record, then looks down as he relates the juvenile mood of the city he found himself situated in.
“So much of the New York rock scene was like high school, just perpetual reaffirmations of social standing,” Murphy says. “I hate adults who fall prey to the same shit that children fall prey to. It’s disgusting. But Dungbeetle weren’t only aware of how complicated life is, they really played with it—it was their art. They were like Andy Kaufman: when Andy Kaufman performed, he was not just trying to be funny. He was playing with the notion of what it means to try to be funny, of what it means to be an audience expecting somebody to be funny. He was doing a dance and playing a game. Watching Dungbeetle was like being involved in that game.”
All involved in the game remember Murphy as a meticulous sound engineer with much invested in the grand gestures they aspired to. “James was the person turning up the volume on it all, literally and figuratively,” says Juan Maclean, a current disco-rock artist who ran in the same circles with a band called Six Finger Satellite. “He was the guy who was like, ‘Oh, you’re confused by this? This rubs you the wrong way? Well, here it is 100 times louder.’”
Murphy built his first real recording studio with Dungbeetle on a desolate block in DUMBO, when the neighborhood was full of empty warehouses and characters like a Serbian truck driver who learned to combat studio noise with his own. “He would threaten us and write pseudo-profound graffiti on the door when he got drunk or angry,” Lipsyte remembers. “Stuff like, ‘No ability to love, no capacity to forgive—take it!’ There was always a danger when we were playing that this guy would burst through from the next room with a sledgehammer.”
Murphy didn’t know it then, but he was starting on a project that would trade in more than mere memories of forgotten punk bands. Dungbeetle never amounted to much—they put out just one vinyl single and imploded before any legend could take hold—but it’s hard to imagine downtown looking and sounding the way it does now without the ideas the group seeded in James Murphy. “The thing we always tried to avoid,” says Lipsyte, “was the wink to the audience that said whatever was happening was all right, that we were all on the same team. We all had roughly the same world view, but James was actually going to do something with it.”
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Murphy prowls around upstairs from the studio he owns and operates now, safe from Serbian truck drivers and near the clutch of his beloved espresso machine. No friend of Murphy’s fails to mention his virtuoso ways with the bean; he’s said to make a cup that is all crema. The other focus of his attention is LCD Soundsystem, a project he started, in terms more organic than oblique, as a “theoretical band.” It’s what has him proofreading liner notes for a new CD in Japan. It’s the impetus for a European tour starting sooner than he cares to think about. It’s the reason he’s rehearsing a group charged with translating dance-music to the language of rock shows that Murphy grew up with.
LCD Soundsystem is now one of New York’s highest-profile bands, but it started in the shadows of the city’s storied “rock renaissance”—the tag applied, a few years ago, to the rise of groups like the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol. But while those bands fit neatly into a rock tradition that traced back to CBGB—so neatly that their skinny ties and studied sneers played like the product of a curatorial mind—LCD Soundsystem drew from a different set of stories.
“I skipped school once when I was in 7th or 8th grade and took the train to go to Bleecker Bob’s,” Murphy says, remembering a trip from Princeton Junction to the iconic Greenwich Village record store. “I asked for the Smith Brothers, and they were like, ‘There’s no Smith Brothers.’ So I asked about a song called ‘This Charming Man’ and they said”—here he adopts the universal voice of a snotty record-store clerk—“’Oh, you mean the Smiths.’ There I was—I took a train when I was 12 or 13 to buy the second Smiths single on import, before they even had an album, and some fucking asshole was making me feel like a douchebag because I didn’t know the exact name of a band that nobody else knew.”
Murphy laughs as he winces, evincing a gesture he’s made into a persona. Nothing animates Murphy more than talk about musical snobs and their arcane codes of cool. He made it one of his main subjects in LCD Soundsystem, which launched with a song, “Losing My Edge,” that worked as both a swipe against and a show of solidarity with aging aesthetes who measure their lives by the revolutions per minute of records set to spin. It was a hate song that doubled as a love song, snide yet sincere, combative but conflicted—much like Murphy himself.
It was also a disco song, which marked a rhetorical move of another kind. The James Murphy who favored “sonic annihilation” as a punk had undergone a transformation after 2000, when he learned to dance and put his energy for sniping into action. He had become a live wire who crowed, in another LCD song with a heated disco beat, “Everybody keeps on talking about it… nobody’s getting it done.”
He’s trying to get it done now with Sound of Silver, an album that stands to up Murphy’s stature. The first LCD Soundsystem album sold 235,000 copies worldwide and fortified the disco-rock sound that Murphy trafficked in. It helped land him remix commissions for the likes of the Chemical Brothers, Nine Inch Nails, Gorillaz, and Justin Timberlake, as well as a 45-minute exercise track contracted by Nike. But it’s the second album—the alternately promising and dread sophomore effort—on which LCD Soundsystem’s future rests.
Murphy is philosophical about where it all stands to go and where it all came from. At 37, with bits of grey showing in his stubble, he’s removed from the vagaries of the taste-making games he still plays. But he’s also more attuned to the stakes of those games. When Murphy talks about music, he’s not just tallying memories of diversionary pleasures or products accrued—he’s talking about a life lived with genuine faith in what songs and sounds can say.
“I always viewed myself as a prodigy-type kid who did everything before everybody else,” Murphy says, his eyes turned down in a mien different from that of his “maniacal jackass” mode. “But when I was around 26, I realized there was nothing I could do for which I would seem inappropriately young. If I made a record, I would be the right age. If I wrote a novel, I would be a young writer, but it wouldn’t be shocking. I was just thrown into the world with regular competition, with nothing against me, and it felt terrible. So I started going out again and experimenting with how to interact with humans again, instead of just staying stuck in a sort of compromised adult behavior.”
Murphy knows how much this casts him as a stock character. Part of what makes what he did afterward so resonant is the intensity of the self-deprecation and self-realization with which he did it, all in open view. “If I had to pin down one gesture that is my thing at this point,” he says, “it is to tell the truth in a way that sounds like you’re joking if you don’t explain, if you don’t say ‘I know it’s really weird, but honestly…’”
He’s talking now about his love for Ultimate Fighting Championship matches on Spike TV, but the same “thing” accounts for his embrace of music that was regarded, by those who thought to regard music, as embarrassing: disco, pop, glam-rock, dance styles that prioritize fun and functionality above all else. In the world he found himself in at 26, his move amounted to a sort of mutiny.
The move came by way of age, therapy, and Ecstasy. The age issue, he realized, he couldn’t control, and therapy he had written off until reluctantly entering a city program priced on a sliding scale. “I was a real bastard,” he says. “I was a know-it-all and didn’t want to be part of anybody’s goal in life to treat people.” His evaluation papers passed through series of unwanting hands before he was picked up by a therapist named Georg Kamen, a Bulgarian émigré who turned out to be more than the hack that Murphy expected. “He helped invent group therapy,” Murphy says. “He was friends with Werner Herzog. When he went back to Bulgaria he would have dinner with the chancellor because they were rebels together in the ’60s. He was a heavy cat, a serious dude, but he just chose to be a therapist for a bunch of New York artsy-fartsy types because he found it interesting. I was lucky enough to meet someone I couldn’t bullshit.”
A few years later, done with a band he didn’t like and through moping around like a house husband, Murphy reacquainted with the murmurs he made in front of a refrigerator starting at the age of 3. “The vent at the bottom would blow out hot air, so it was one of my favorite spots,” he says. “Any kind of complex hum I’ve always found really attractive, so I would lie there and sing these little melodies that would loop and loop. Words would start attaching themselves and then change over the years, according to what was happening in my life.”
He became aware of how integral those melodies were when he found himself, at 31, racing in a car to reach his mother, who was dying five hours away from where he found himself in New York. “There was no car stereo, so I was driving and singing to the engine, singing out loud while crying and doing the things you do,” he says. “I was basically singing a song to my mother asking her not to die yet, asking her to wait, and I realized these melodies and structures had just always been in my head, in interrelated patterns, all in the key of humming refrigerator. If somebody told me they were modified melodies from a children’s show in 1972 I would find that totally acceptable, but they just felt like DNA, like software that came on the computer.”
It was around the same time that Murphy got into dance music.
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“James kept asking what he needed to do, so we told him to get some water and maybe some chewing gum,” says Tim Goldsworthy, recounting the first time that James Murphy took Ecstasy. “He bought three packs of chewing gum but gave it all away because he was so excited. The DJ put on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’”—the Beatles song with booming drums on Revolver—“and James was there dancing with his eyes closed. Everybody formed a ring around and him and started chanting his name. James looked out and was like, ‘Yeah!!!!!’”
Goldsworthy figures into the story of James Murphy as much as anyone. They met when Goldsworthy came to New York from London in 1999 to produce a dance-music album that Murphy, out of place but happy for the work, was tapped to engineer. “Our relationship was very sit-com-esque,” Goldsworthy says. “He was the big loud American who played the drums and everything else, and I was the quiet English guy who couldn’t play anything and sat in front of a computer.” Murphy avers: “We were the least compatible people I’ve ever been around. Tim was a little snotty, from London, Mr. Cool, and I was this doctrinaire, grumpy, gregarious American punk rocker.”
They bonded over boredom with New York, which was in a dire musical and cultural state with nothing but a legacy to trade on. “This is where all the music I’d always referenced comes from: disco, punk, hip-hop,” says Goldsworthy. “I expected breakdancing on every corner. But then I came here and there was nothing going on whatsoever, just boring house clubs and expensive bottle-service places. That was why we started DFA, to try to make New York what we dreamt it should be.”
DFA is the rubric under which Murphy and Goldsworthy now work as a music-production team and run a record label whose initials—short for “Death from Above”—serve as a stamp of New York across the globe. But it all started with the parties where Rosie Perez hobbled on a dance floor next to frazzled music scenesters who barely knew how to dance.
Murphy was one of them. He became a DJ known to jump out on the floor so he could throw his fists in the air. He fed his newfound appetite for Ecstasy and anything else that would keep him charged. “My 30th birthday cake,” he laughs, “was 30 lines of coke on a Roxy Music record.” He assumed the role of an underground impresario in a scene that hadn’t existed before he figured the city could use one like it. “When we had 700 people dancing in this place, we had done everything we wanted to do,” Murphy says, looking down from what used to be the best spot to watch the disco ball spin. “I started having fun.”
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It’s early on a Saturday afternoon and Murphy is stumbling around his apartment with his wife, a model turned designer named Mandy Coon. They live in Williamsburg, in a refurbished building next to a garage adorned with orangutan graffiti. Murphy has work to do in the city, and Coon is eager for him to leave so she can finish embroidering an astronaut on a shirt for his birthday. Before he makes his exit, Murphy says goodbye to the other recent love of his life: Petunia, a French bulldog who looks like a cow and likes to lie in the sun.
Petunia was born into a big record collection. A whole wall holds shelves for vinyl, alphabetized and marked with plastic tabs for letters and artists: Human League, Jimi Hendrix, Funkadelic, Neil Young/CSNY, not to mention lots of disco and techno artists whose names raise flags among those who have similar tabs of their own.
It’s here that Murphy has settled, comparatively speaking. He doesn’t do drugs like he used to, and he’d sooner stay home with his wife and his dog than be out dancing at 5 a.m. Murphy has a tour to get in shape for, though, so he’s off. Coon sits on the couch, next to a Bauhaus chair with a homey afghan spilling over its chrome bars. She remembers how crazy Murphy used to be when he was in his party-going prime, how much he used to have to drink just to get on stage with LCD Soundsystem. “He’s an intense guy,” she laughs, “but he’s a lot calmer now.”
It turns out Murphy left to go do what he had done a few nights before—what he has taken to doing three days a week when he’s home in New York, because he can. After cataloguing all that had gotten him to where he sat, above his studio and the site where the dance parties took place, he spoke of everything he’d done since turning 30 as a project based on a theoretical what-if: what if I threw a party, what if I talked as earnestly and seriously as I could, what if I actually made singles and videos, what if I tried to make a strong second record and went for it?
“I can be staggeringly evangelical,” he laughed. “Like jujitsu: I wanted to do jujitsu, so I started a fucking school!” He pointed down to the lobby, which had been covered in blue padding from wall to wall. Murphy wanted to do jujitsu, so he bought Olympic-grade mats and got Adidas to donate uniforms—$300 gis with wraparound belts and stripes down their sides—to the secret “DFA Fight Club.” They meet at night and on weekends, as many as 16 members and supporters of hip disco-rock bands turned shoeless and grunting.
Five minutes later, Murphy was downstairs with his friends and a Brazilian trainer, rolling around on the same floor where he had danced and drugged and made New York into something more than a rock museum. His eyes opened wide as he practiced a move called the Flying Guillotine, which looks like it sounds. The trainer jumped into the fray and barked a command: “Remember,” he said, “work with what you have.”
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