NON: Logo #323

1980 was a banner year for logos. Roughly the same time Boyd Rice adapted the wolfsangle for his Industrial noise act NON, the following musicians were also developing, drawing, and detourning symbols that would become their own logos:

7Seconds
45 Grave
Adam and the Ants
Anti-Nowhere League
Bad Manners
Bad Religion
The Beat
Circle Jerks
Circle One
Conflict
Devo
Die Tödliche Doris
The Effigies
Einstürzende Neubauten
Hüsker Dü
Ill Will
Inner City Unit
Instagon
Iron Maiden
Judas Priest
Laibach
Men Without Hats
Klaus Nomi
Reagan Youth
Sisters of Mercy
Stray Cats
This Heat
White Spirit

I like lists. Think of all the collective creative brainwaves that energized the world thirty years ago, making it a better and more interesting place - terminal obscurity notwithstanding. "Iconoclast," Larry Wessel's documentary on Rice, premiered this past August to a packed house in L.A. at the New Beverly Cinema. It was overlong - in much the same way that chocoholics sometimes overindulge - and filled with the Boyd Rice legends that have been re-told through the years, entertaining though they always are. There was scant mention of Rice's longtime companion Lisa Carver throughout the film - the overall effect of which is a bit like the Old Testament written without mention of Moses. I'll always have time for Boyd's many different noises; in the '90s, he wasn't replying to many people who wrote to him in his Colorado sanctum sanctorum. He did, however, take the time to send me an impressive nastygram because I'd pissed him off with a postcard the contents of which neither of us can recall now. Now with Peter Christopherson from Throbbing Gristle having passed into the Great and Eminently Deserved Beyond, we should cherish our Industrial forefathers more than we already do (yes, Male Rape Group, too).

God doesn't just make rainbows. He makes spitting cobras, too.