My first awareness of Ian Curtis was not through the music of Joy Division. The singer caught my attention as an almost mythical figure on a dorm-room poster. He was among a regular roster of sainted figures who adorned the walls of college roommates, house party houses and record store windows along State Street in Madison. Alongside Jim Morrison, shirtless and in a Christ pose, or Robert Smith, silhouetted in spiky hair with guitar slung from shoulder, they enjoyed ubiquity around campus. But Curtis was different, probably because Joy Division was different. They never hit it big, for reasons that will become clear shortly, and therefore were amorphous to me. Curtis was this mysterious guy on a poster, a ghostly suggestion of a rock star, clinging to a microphone over the words “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” There was something deeper and darker there than even Morrissey, the ’80s goth poster child (pun intended) for despair and self-pity. Something about that Joy Division poster seemed very wrong. Very wrong, indeed. My friends told me Curtis had hung himself. It’s true, he did, in May 1980, ending Joy Division’s ascent and launching the band’s surviving members into the stratosphere of college radio as New Order. Ian Curtis is one of those rare pop culture figures, like Jim Morrison, whose death has become an inseparable element of his life story.
Curtis has been on my mind since I ran across the “Lost Notes” podcast delving into notable albums from 1980. He’s the subject of his own episode, but his story also lurks in the background of Hanif Abdurraqib’s wonderfully detailed segment intertwining the seemingly disparate rock personalities of Darby Crash and John Lennon.
We all know Lennon’s story. There isn’t much to add, other than to note that 1980 was the year of Lennon’s return to the music business after five years away. But who was Darby Crash? I wasn’t familiar with him, and while his band the Germs rang a bell, by Abdurraqib’s description, I can guess their style. Brash, combative and hell-bent on self-destruction. Think Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols. Or going back a bit earlier, Iggy Pop. While I’ve always appreciated punk rock as a much-needed reset on the bombastic overindulgence associated with the likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, what the Germs were doing wasn’t really about music. Like many young rockers, they channeled anger. But unlike earlier musical manifestations of wild youth rebellion such as the Who, they weren’t concerned with how that anger sounded. In fact, the more discordant, the better. Throbbing drums at pulse-racing tempos. Power chords indistinguishable through the maximum distortion. Guttural screams into the microphone that, when intelligible, ran along themes of “I hate everything” or an f-bomb variant on that sentiment.
This was Darby Crash’s specialty. His job wasn’t so much singer as a ringmaster, engaging the audience in taunts, inviting their abuse and then inflicting abuse on himself. Perhaps it served as a cathartic experience, a way for performer and audience to briefly unleash a collective rage simmering amid the cultural and economic malaise of the late 1970s. Or maybe it was simply entertainment, a diversion from the drudgery of daily life. But it subsisted on violent undercurrents and a particularly sociopathic sensibility that even acts like Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper or Black Sabbath wouldn’t engage. It wasn’t music. It was spectacle. You didn’t go to a Germs show to hear them jam out killer tunes. You went to see what Darby Crash would do next.
What he did next, as the band began to inevitably burn out, was plan the grandest of exits. Heavily addicted to drugs to cope with the physical abuse he put himself through on stage, Crash decided, after one last reunion show, to overdose on heroin. He would go out in a blaze of glory, another in a long line of gone-too-soon rock heroes that adorned the walls of college dorm rooms.
But fate had other plans. On Dec. 7, 1980, Darby Crash carried out his OD. The next day, John Lennon was shot dead in New York. It was a singular historic event that dominated the news for weeks and months to come as fans across genres and generations mourned the ex-Beatle’s passing. Darby Crash was relegated to relative obscurity, his life and death lost to history save a few diehard punk fans.
Timing is everything. If Bill Gates or Steve Jobs had been born 100 years earlier, they’d likely have lived out their lives as nobodies. And without the Civil War, Ulysses Grant would’ve amounted to little more than a failed merchant.
Ian Curtis didn’t plan his death for any particular effect. He suffered from epilepsy, and seizures were a constant and often dangerous disruption in his life. That his condition added to the spectacle that, as with the Germs, seemed to excite fans soured him on the idea of stardom. He was depressed, in pain and wanted out. By pure circumstance, Curtis’ death brought him the adulation and rock immortality that eluded Darby Crash. That it never particularly interested him only enhanced the appeal of the reluctant hero, or anti-hero, who caught my eye from a dorm room wall.
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