Simon Reynolds: The neighborhood we’re in right now, SoHo, was Suicide’s homebase back in the early ’70s. Today it’s nothing but clothes boutiques and galleries, but back in the day…

Alan Vega: Nothing but rats and roaches! You know how it goes: The artists move in and make it so people notice it’s a nice area, the rents go up, and the artists have to move out again. We moved to SoHo in 1971, when it was all factories and cheap clothing stores. Very dangerous at night: You took your life in your hands walking outside, it was pretty deserted.

We used to play music at three or 4 o’clock in the morning, all-night-long jam sessions, and sit out on the stoop at this Project of Living Artists place on Greene Street, where we lived. All of a sudden people started walking by giving us weird looks, like we didn’t belong there, and then we knew it was time to move. I moved to Tribeca, further south in Manhattan, and the same crap happened again, so I moved further down to Fulton Street, where it was great until they started building up the Sea Port. Now I’m all the way down to the Wall Street area. I’m on the tip of Manhattan after being pushed out of every place I’ve lived in this city. But I’m not going back to Brooklyn. That’s where I grew up. I left Brooklyn when I was 17.

What was this Project of Living Artists outfit you were involved with?

Around 1969-’79, artists were trying to see themselves as “art workers.” It was a socialist concept, more Trotskyist than Maoist. We wanted to get paid when they put pictures of our works in books and we started to make demands of museums; we actually barricaded the Museum of Modern Art. From there, I met a bunch of people, and we tried to form an organization. One of the people managed to get money from the New York State Council of the Arts. There was about six of us involved and we kept this space open 24 hours a day so that artists—could be a tap dancer or anybody—were able to work there. That was the Project of Living Artists. Often it was a lot of different people doing a lot of different things all at the same time, so there always had to be two or three of us present at all times. A lot of homeless people would come in, and deranged people too. We were janitors and peacekeepers at the same time.

The Project was located near New York University, at Broadway and Waverly, and that’s where Suicide started. Marty Rev came in one day. He’d just got tossed out of NYU—they asked him to play Beethoven, and he played it his way. Marty was one of the weirdest looking guys I ever saw. He just hung around, not saying a word to us, for weeks. He’d come in every night. At that time I was working with a couple of guys doing electronic music, with tapes and guitars and all kinds of stuff.

Eventually, I had to live at the Project illegally. I was saved by a friend who gave me a sleeping bag, because it was freezing in the winters, man. In the early ’70s, we were all starving. I used to eat a tuna sandwich from Blimpie every day. It cost a dollar. Marty would have a tomato and lettuce sandwich. We would get jobs here and there. I worked as an electrician, as a house painter; a friend of mine was a contractor, so I worked with him, cleaning walls. If I had done a job, maybe I’d be living on two sandwiches for a while. If I had hardly any money, I would much prefer to get drunk, because at least that way the gnawing pain of the hunger would go away and I could fall asleep. I was living on the vodka diet for a while.

But we managed to survive and make things happen. We were young and we were going to change things. This was the time of the Vietnam War and Nixon. I used to go on peace marches, went down to Washington a few times. Tear gas. Got my head whacked by the cops.

Did the socialist concepts of the Project of Living Artists lead to “Che,” that gorgeous paean to Che Guevara, on the first Suicide album?

He was a hero. More than Castro, he was the real guy. He wanted to continue the revolution. And of course the American government hunted him down in Bolivia and killed him. As much as I hate the guy, Bin Laden’s whole way of thinking is kind of like Che Guevara; for the Muslim world, he’s their Che.

Che was glamorous—a wall poster icon of radical chic.

A revolutionary pin-up.