Even by the standards of New York’s filthy and fertile late-’70s punk scene, Suicide dove into danger and lived on the edge. 

With a stark, icy sound consisting of Martin Rev’s droning synths and Alan Vega’s voice (a nauseated croon invoking a hell-world Bryan Ferry, a perverse, distorted caricature of glammed-up lounge-singer cool), Suicide was among the first acts to describe themselves using the word “punk,” which they borrowed from the critic Lester Bangs (who ended up shit-talking them for being too negative). Their gigs sometimes devolved into riots, as captured on “23 Minutes Over Brussels.” They also chose the name “Suicide.”

Their heyday was short-lived, but they’re remembered for the propulsive nihilism of “Ghost Rider,” the oddball proto-new-wave slow jams “Cheree” and “Dream Baby Dream,” and “Frankie Teardrop,” a brutal ten-minute murder ballad that gets my vote for the scariest rock song on wax.

Over a skittering, minimalist, numbingly repetitive synth track, Vega tells the story of a young factory worker crushed by the world. He’s broke. He’s facing eviction. He can’t provide for his wife and kid, so – spoilers ahead – he gets a gun and kills them, then himself, which is punctuated with Vega’s harrowing scream. It’s not the only rock song that plays like a miniature horror film, but it has to be one of the most effective.

Shock-horror tropes appeared in the work of Black Sabbath, along with their lesser imitators, and were essential to the personal-branding exercises of Alice Cooper. As the ‘80s wore on and Tipper Gore entered the conversation, lots of metal bands, from London to the Sunset Strip, invoked guts and gore to make a point or simply get attention. Many punks, most notably Glenn Danzig, are heart-on-sleeve horror fanatics, as are a few rappers (Gravediggaz, Geto Boys, and other early-’90s gangsta-adjacent acts, especially). Before becoming the music world’s resident spiritual advisor, Nick Cave punctuated his work with some outrageous gore.

So “Frankie Teardrop” isn’t alone, but it is unique in the canon. I’ve tried to think of a horror-flavored song that is more deeply upsetting – the first and twenty-sixth time I heard it –  and I’ve come up empty-handed.

The first time I heard it, I was riding around with my high school buddy Jason in his beaten-up Dodge Charger. Jason was a Depeche Mode fanatic who’d started looking for something similar but stronger, and he wanted me to hear something. It was late at night, on the backroads of Western North Carolina. I was already terrified most of the time. When I heard that scream, I laughed out loud, a reflex that may have kept me from shitting myself.

What makes “Frankie Teardrop” so enduringly scary is that it’s so relatable, at least until the killings start. Postwar prosperity was on the wane, along with the dream of upward mobility. Poverty does horrible things to our brains, and the sort of self-loathing precarity that drove Frankie over the edge has only become more common. If it didn’t end in violence, it could almost be a nightmare variation on “Born in the USA” or “Allentown.” What it is is disturbing, horrific, hilarious, cathartic, and real as hell.

In 2013, radio host Tom Scharpling introduced “The Frankie Teardrop Challenge,” in which listeners exposed themselves to “Frankie Teardrop” in the most terrifying situations they could think of and called in to report. In 2022, it would work almost anywhere.

A few years ago, after decades of struggling with poverty and addiction, my friend Jason died, having never lived outside WNC. I still grieve for his midnight-black sense of humor, his batshit mixed tapes, and his habit of bringing life-changing cultural artifacts like “Frankie Teardrop” into my life. Happy Halloween, friend. I hope you and the late Alan Vega are pals.

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