Teenage Jesus & the Jerks

Teenage Jesus and the Jerks
Jim Sclavunos and Lydia Lunch performing with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks in 2008
Background information
Also known as	Teenage Jesus & the Jerks
Origin	New York, United States
Genres	No wave
Years active	1976–1979, 2008
Labels	Migraine, ZE, Celluloid
Associated acts	8 Eyed Spy, Beirut Slump, Lydia Lunch, James Chance and the Contortions
Past members	Lydia Lunch James Chance Reck Bradley Field Gordon Stevenson Jim Sclavunos

Teenage Jesus and the Jerks were an influential American no wave band, based in New York City, who formed part of the city's no wave movement.

Lydia Lunch met saxophonist James Chance at CBGB and moved into his two-room apartment. She started to combine her poetry with acoustic guitar and was spurred to start a band after seeing one of Mars' earlier performances. Lunch found guitarist Reck at CBGB and recruited him as a drummer, later moving him to bass. They formed a band called the Scabs and briefly added Jody Harris to their lineup. Lunch knew Bradley Field through Miriam Linna and convinced him to join in early 1977.

The band put together a ten-minute set of very short songs. It released only a handful of singles.

Featured on the seminal No New York LP, a showcase of the early no wave scene, compiled and produced by Brian Eno, the group left behind little more than a dozen complete recorded songs. Most of the surviving titles were collected on the eighteen-minute career retrospective compilation Everything, released in 1995 through Atavistic Records. However, other studio versions of several songs exist, alongside a few live recordings.

The group disbanded at the end of 1979, only reuniting briefly in 2008 for a small number of performances with former bassist Jim Sclavunos on drums and Thurston Moore on bass guitar.

In his book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984, Simon Reynolds identifies Teenage Jesus and the Jerks as an exercise in rock sacrilege:

Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and their comrade bands Mars, Contortions and DNA, defined radicalism not as a return to roots but as deracination. Curiously, the no wave groups staged their revolt against rock tradition by using the standard rock format of guitars, bass and drums. It was as if they felt the easy electronic route to making post-rock noise was too easy. Instead, they used rock's tools against itself. Which is why no wave music irresistibly invites metaphors of dismemberment, desecration, defiling rock's corpse.