Short-lived projects like the Del Byzanteens are often great ways of entering the archives of discarded culture. When Deleuze and Guattari first inflicted Jung’s concept of the rhizomatic nature of history on generations of college students, they were trying to suggest that you could get into history through the side door; that if you used the less stately entrance you might be exposed to a more complex, indeed more ‘Byzantine’ world of connections. The main point of entry for music scene historians into world of the Del Byzanteens is the internet factoid that their keyboard player and vocalist was film-maker Jim Jarmusch.
If you only listened to the labyrinthine garage of “Girl’s Imagination” for its ‘byzantine charms’ it might be enough; the track hits you with the feeling you get when you know you’ve found yourself some genuine old and dirty underground hit — a tune that actually got played at parties. But if you limited yourself this way, you’d miss out on other highlights of a great one time album; for example Supreme’s cover “My World is Empty Without You” or the keyboard experimentalism on “Apartment,” not to mention the 60s garage hustle of “Welcome.” Likewise if you assumed that Jarmusch is the mad genius behind all of this, just because he’s the only recognizable name, you’d be missing the eclectic influences that fed the Del Byzanteens.
As a band that only had one LP, their history was typically rhizomatic — lateral rather than deep. And as a New York band, with many connections in a tightly squeezed city of millions, we can assume this may have been more true for them than for most. Guitarist Dan Braun played with Glenn Branca and Michael Gira; the brothers Brown became film producers and horror comic archivists in later life (already in the 80s the Del Byzanteens were cultivating a horror B-Movie garage sound similar to The Cramps, also New York based). Phil Kline was to become a maverick experimental composer. The band’s sound itself was not correspondingly eclectic. Most tracks were characterized by an active pogo-ing baseline and tight straightforward drumming, with deranged honky tonk belly dancer keyboards and other curious flourishes thrown in to keep it interesting.
But it also happens for our generalizing purposes that Dan Braun’s high school band was called Spinal Root Gang, featuring none other than the protean Madonna Ciccone. In an interview with The Washington Post in the 1980s Jarmusch claimed that his free film-making was influenced by the spirit of a music scene that was DIY rather than professional. Sometimes when you turn over a stone, a scene is crawling with connections that seem to have had a lifelong influence on careers that at first seemed unique and entirely self-created.
