THIS IS THE ONE
O
By Tom Lanham
photo by John Swab
ddsmakers could never correctly
assess it. Fortune tellers could
never predict it. And even the
shrewdest talent scout this side of Col.
Tom Parker could never pinpoint with any
historical accuracy exactly where, when, or
how tomorrow’s Next Big Thing would be
arriving in the music world. Rock stars —
however carefully cultivated they might be
— just seem to fall to Earth in their own
time, burst onto the scene albeit unexpectedly,
and sometimes disappear in an equally-surprising
puff of smoke. Only in retrospect,
by retracing their carefully choreographed
career steps, is it possible to clearly
chart the trajectories of such luminaries,
from Elvis Presley to David Bowie, Kurt
Cobain, and even visionary trailblazers
like Andrew W.K., R.E.M., and The Jesus
and Mary Chain. Then, what looks like
fleeting ephemera starts to make concrete
sense, and the layman listener can see that
it wasn’t all smoke and mirrors after all —
said act truly worked hard at becoming the
Next Big Thing. Which, of course, is not to
discount this equation’s magic element.
Magic is what makes the whole star system
work, and what makes it so perpetually
appealing.
So we’ll start with an Official
Proclamation here, and work our way
backward: Sam Quartin, who fronts a fiery
little New York garage-punk quartet called
The Bobby Lees, while also moonlighting
as an in-demand film actress — is The Next
Big Thing for 2020. No Nostradamus prognostication
involved, really. It’s already
happened — we’re just delivering the necessary
memo to hit ‘Play’ on her band’s
new sophomore album Skin Suit, produced
in high lo-fi style by none other than Jon
Spencer of Blues Explosion renown, is to
time-warp back to 1977 at exhilarating
speed. From the first crunchy power
22 illinoisentertainer.com september 2020
chords of its “Move” opener, an alternately
howling/growling/muttering Quartin
stakes her claim as a genuinely commanding
— and altogether unique — stage and
studio presence. And think back to the
punk-heralding late ‘70s — could anyone
only a few years earlier have foreseen idiosyncratic,
scene-shaping performers such
as David Byrne, Patti Smith, Chrissie
Hynde, or The Ramones? She even brings
it full Sire Records circle with a lumbering
cover of Richard Hell’s signature punk
anthem “Blank Generation,” which
breathes just as much trashy fire as the
original — no mean feat. And a searing
cover of Bo Diddly’s “I’m a Man” cements
her iconoclastic penchant.
Backed by three young retro-minded
rockers (bassist Kendall Wind, guitarist
Nick Casa, and drummer Macky
Bowman), Quartin, 25, lets her voice twist,
shape-shift, and often violently shudder
across their sinewy, scratchy riffs, as on the
chugging “Coin,” a pell-mell “Guttermilk”
the fly-buzzing “Redroom,” and a regulation
CBGB’s-ish anthem drive, wherein she
snarlingly declares “They say I shouldn’t
drive when I’m feeling slightly suicidal/
Looking for telephone poles…come and
ride with me.” And she sounds just mentally
unbalanced enough to make that a
life-or-death proposition. Few of the 13
tunes clock in over three minutes, and
some, like the 2:49-length “Russell,” combine
machine-gun rhythms with Quartin
shifting into a spoken-word mode, which
still manages to sound ominous in its
stream-of-consciousness coda: “Man I feel
really fucking sick…I read what you told
me to read, it’s not working…I’m on my
hands and knees, and I’m about to cut off
my fuckin’ skinsuit.” Which is another big
part of her allure — that sense of decadent
danger hanging over every track, an
unmistakable feeling that, like Lou Reed,
Iggy Pop, and David Johansen before her,
she’s not just whistling “Dixie” here. This
former outsider has lived it, every last
razor-sharp word of what she sings.
But the last person in the world who
could have foreseen her submersion in the
entertainment industry was Quartin herself.
Given her outrageous persona, one
could imagine her as the sparkplug theatre
kid in school, with an ardent stage mother
in the wings, perhaps. That image immediately
gets her laughing. “No, no, nooo! It
was the exact opposite!” she clarifies. “My
dad was in New Jersey, and my mom was
in New York City, and I went between the
two places. And I always wanted to sing
and perform, but I had a really intense fear
of doing anything in front of anybody. So I
just didn’t do anything, until I was older
and I had a psychotic episode. And after
that, I had the courage to start doing shit in
front of people. And that’s when I put the
band together.” In casual conversation, the
brutally-honest singer has a habit of making
surreal declarative statements like this,
the kind that sets your head spinning and
demands further investigation. And no
problem, she says — she’s happy to tell all.
What kind of psychotic episode?
Quartin sighs, resignedly. “I still have no
idea what exactly it was, but it was intense,
and it lasted around nine months,” she
recalls. “But it was great, too. I mean, it
was horrible when it was happening, but it
was like a growth thing because afterward,
I just started doing shit that had always
scared me, like writing music and playing
music live, that kind of thing. And I’d had
a really bad drinking problem since I was
13, and by the time I was in my late teens I
was a serious alcoholic and hanging out
with just a weird group of people, and I
stopped sleeping and eating and taking
care of myself, and I left my home. I went
insane, basically, for a year, and my mom
had even picked out a mental institution
that she was going to send me to, but she
wanted to wait and see if it would pass.”
Somehow, she managed to stop drinking,
and within a few weeks, all of her hallucinations,
both visual and auditory, vanished.
“And I’ve been sober ever since, for
about five years now,” she notes proudly.
“But a lot of my writing definitely comes
from that period, when I was learning
what is — and isn’t — real. But then again,
who knows, really?”
What did Quartin think she saw back
then? The list is long, she admits, starting
with the most terrifying — watching her
whole body disappear, her corporeal form
scatter like pixels and float away. Then
there were the invading aliens she was certain
were coming, War of the Worlds style.
And to this day, it’s sometimes difficult,
even in 20/20 hindsight, for her to differentiate
fact from fiction. “But now, with a
few years behind me, it’s not scary anymore.
And now I’m kind of grateful to
have had such a weird experience because
I was able to live through it, I didn’t die
during it. And I certainly could have — I
got in vans with people I didn’t know, I got
left in the desert, tons of weird shit happened.
And somehow, I was always okay.
It was like something was watching out for
me.”
In those riotous days, the rebel didn’t
believe in a higher power, or some sort of
benevolent spirit guiding her along the
way. She does now. “When all that was
going on, I thought I had been given the
keys to the universe,” she says. “But after I
got sober, I started believing, and my higher
power changes all the time.” In the
woodsy area of Woodstock, NY where she
continues on page 26