Bob Recine

Steve Olson: Where are you from?
Bob Recine: Born in New York City. Both of my parents were from Rome. God rest both of their souls.
SO: How was it going to school in New York City?
BR: Growing up in New York in the ’60s, I already had some kind of sixth sense about people and culture. Everybody I knew had older brothers, like I did, and we always got our musical ears and information from them. We were sponges for things we took interest in or things we marveled at, things that we aspired to.

Of course I was a rebel to any kind of direction. I always felt like I wanted in a sense to be an adventurer. I always wanted to walk on the wrong side of the tracks.

When you talk about school, I think about these characters that are a part of my DNA, my makeup. Characters like Gino Bracco, who owned one of the first bicycles I saw. I must’ve been eight years old, in 1966, and I would see these cats come down the street with their bikes spray-painted. These were the days before stickers. What we used to do is cut magazines of hooker headers and all the drag-racing things and Scotch-tape them on our bikes. Gino Bracco was the guy who not only had this amazing bicycle, but under his banana seat he stashed porno books, ’cause Gino was about four years older than us. He was probably 13 or 14 already, with a full beard. Mad, mad character. First guy to bring marijuana and things like that into our lives.

Anywhere you grow up there’s a mish-mash of characters that fascinate you—at least I can only speak for myself—and I’ve always been fascinated by personalities that are more realistic, or in a sense more instinctual. I played drums my whole life, and one of my biggest inspirations…when I was so little, I remember watching the famous street drummer of New York City, who I befriended many years after and blew my chance to do a documentary on him.
SO: Not the dude in Taxi Driver?
BR: The guy in Taxi Driver. That’s Gene [Palma]. Gene was also an amazing man visually. I remember being struck by him in so many ways. I believed that he had this beautiful talent that he was willing to sacrifice his life for. It just seemed that that was his quest, that was who he was in this life, and once you get those kind of characters, any town where I would be staying, I would pick up on them for sure. It’s not where you are; I think it’s who you are.
SO: They build you of what’s available.
BR: Just to give you an example of how crisp my memory was and how quite the same it still is, I can remember walking down the street and for the first time seeing one of the kids in the neighborhood with an earring. And I remember looking at that and being thunderstruck. Like, how…liberal. Or…I don’t know what the word is, but just outrageous or insulting or beautiful. It boils down to that I’m struck by instinctual honesty.

There was a very famous motorcycle gang in the early ’60s in New York City called The Grateful Dead, and they were these amazing characters that once or twice a year would be arrested and end up in the New York Post. And society looked at them as animals! These were the days when tattoos were tattoos and bikers were bikers, not the commodities they’ve become in modern day. A perfect example is, in the punk days I never thought that I’d see a 60-year-old woman walking down Fifth Avenue wearing a motorcycle jacket. So...“Viva la beautiful world,” is all I can say.

I always find that people seem to be fascinated about a life in New York City. New York is the best place in the world if you want to “do,” and probably the worst place in the world if you just want to “be.” I’m the typical New Yorker: I can’t wait three minutes for anything. You live at a kind of futuristic speed. New York’s not the most beautiful place I’ve been to, but the people make the place here.
SO: Beauty is only skin deep.
BR: Yeah, New York reminds me of this big, old king that’s got food all over his beard and he can do as he wishes and he still gets all the girls. [Laughs] Because it’s about something else.

Downtown there was the German streets, Italian streets, Irish streets, so it’s a very different scene than it is now. It’s a very different moral-shaper. There was a distinction, not like the “campus” atmosphere that I sense now. Before, it was more about the people. Today it’s more about how people are positioned, meaning people are so easily talked into things, like the Internet and alternate lifestyle. That’s a good thing, but everybody has the choice to make a real life. I remember holding my father’s hand on Canal Street at a very young age and having this weird epiphany. I would look at a man, I guess at four or five or six years old, and see some kind of society-instilled donkey. [Laughs] I knew that I wanted to be something that nobody else was.

SO: What was the deal with the drums?
BR: My father was a musician. So ever since I could remember, I remember music in the house, instruments in the house, being shown music to say, “Do you see it? Do you feel it?”
SO: And when did you start playing with bands?
BR: I think in 1976…1977, punk rock was already over for me, because I was there from when it was born and understood and watched friends of mine like The New York Dolls, prior to anybody calling anything “punk.” I mean, “punk” was just a term for a punk. Hence the most amazing attraction to that scene at the time, because it was such a realistic, perfectly timed thing. Punk has been around for thousands of years, but when it happened in modern music, I was at the pinnacle of being a musician on the scene

I started a lot of bands. One that might be familiar to people is a band called No Music, which was a project that I started with a guy named Joe Diaz, who happens to be one of the fantastic talents of the speed metal and punk scenes since that time. I created a lot of musicians of his ilk into guitar players, into performance artists. I thought that was the beauty of punk, that I finally got a chance to bring all my characters to life on stage. I always looked at this kid like, “If this kid was up on the stage playing the bass like
Sid Vicious, the whole world would drop dead!”

Being a musician my whole life, I understood the difference between when the body listens to Mozart and when the body listens to punk rock. When we went to 47 beats per second at one point in punk-rock music, people didn’t really understand that the only thing to do would be to run into the wall, you see. It was accident music. It was finally an amazing moment to see music, in a sense, promoting destruction. As I’ve always said, when you’re into something, if you have a passion about something, you eventually reach a point where it’s only the abstract that has any energy, or milk, for you. Even in my profession as a so-called hairdresser, how many times can I do the same thing before I understand that I’m performing a job, as opposed to making something? So I’ve always been of the nature that I need to progress forward.

Watching motorcycle gangs, watching the mafia in the street, and gangsters—I never really had aspirations to be anything like that, but I must admit I used that energy in a positive way. I saw what it meant to grab somebody by the throat, and I always felt that I wanted to do that either with music or my artwork.
SO: But did you think that the music, that movement of punk, was your generation’s music?
BR: That’s the problem with people looking for genre. I think that the only way to find something of your own is to believe in it. Right now people seem to be so content with revival. After having lived through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, there was no talk of, “Let’s do something very ’60s,” or ’50s, for that matter. If you drove a car from the ’50s it was either because that was something you could afford or it was something that was easy to manipulate into a hotrod.

I’m saying people need to be a little bit more believing in themselves. When I wanted to learn about esoteric bands, when I wanted to find out about happenings nobody knew about, I had to go out there and do my homework, and in that process of digging was my life. And maybe some people think it’s great to have everything at your fingertips, but I don’t think anybody’s quite focused on what that costs you as a person—to find a possible identity in your own genre. That’s where the genre lies: in the strife, in the struggle, in the true interest, not in the interests of being able to sit anywhere and tap your finger. I’m a doer.