An anthology stuffed with previously unreleased material can feel like an entree made of kitchen scraps, but Arthur Russell’s involvement changes matters: After all, the vast majority of his wide-ranging oeuvre has only emerged in the years since his death from AIDS in 1992, at the age of 40. It’s incredible what passed for castoffs in the late 1970s. During the brief window with which they were active, the Necessaries—composed of Russell, Jesse Chamberlain (the Red Crayola), Randy Gun (Love of Life Orchestra), Ed Tomney (Rage to Live), and Ernie Brooks (the Modern Lovers)—may have been held back by his well-documented perfectionism, but the material clearly didn’t suffer from it. Over this 37-song compilation, the band draws a blueprint for the next decade-plus of guitar music, offering a jagged and prescient vision of rock’s scope and possibilities.
The Necessaries’ work makes you wonder: What the hell was wrong with record labels in the golden age of radio? To shelve something this vital for so many years feels not just galling but daft. These are, mostly, rock songs so tight and winsome they’re difficult to pry apart, each band member’s individual talents augmented by the magic of the supergroup. Russell’s vocals vacillate between the ethereal and the earthbound, a cosmic voyager tethered by the sharp hiss of Chamberlain’s cymbals and Brooks’ revving bassline. Yet the Necessaries—championed by John Cale, who produced their debut single in 1979—bounced from label to label, and their touring schedule kept them from completing their debut album. While they were out on the road, and without their knowledge, Sire Records released the unfinished material as 1981’s Big Sky, which the band withdrew and replaced with 1982’s more polished Event Horizon, the group’s final release. This omnibus includes that full LP plus more than two dozen previously unreleased studio recordings that span from 1978 until 1982.
What might feel most uncanny about Completely Necessary is the way the anthology anticipates waves of music that would follow in their wake. “More Real,” the album’s opener, is a guitar song that sounds like the Replacements, made just before that band’s major releases, with a bassline that takes over like bodily possession. “The World Is Loud,” the album’s 37th and final track, is immaculate—an instrumental that could easily morph into a Pavement song—yet very nearly never made it out of the archives. From Wire to Prefab Sprout, the Necessaries foreshadow what’s to come like the ghosts of Christmas future clad in leather jackets. Kurt Cobain would’ve loved “The Exterminator,” with its menacing guitars and distortion, its conflation of violence and Twinkies.
But the band was also borrowing widely from the material of the moment. Instrumental “Sahara” incorporates disco and Morricone-style western motifs, while “State-of-the-Art” sounds like a riff on Gary Numan’s “Cars,” which came out in August 1979 (a year or so before Big Sky). “Paceways” is a tight, sanguine analog to the Cars’ 1978 single “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and even its alternate version feels worthy of inclusion, stripped down to leave the song’s mechanics on full view, like a purring engine with the hood removed.
You can sense the frisson of the city in the work of this dyed-in-the-wool downtown outfit. The nervy, fuzzed-out cacophony of the Ramones informs “Law and Order,” and “Jerry Leaves the Small Town” (a rambling monologue akin to Russell’s horny solo piece “What It’s Like”) could slide easily between two Jim Carroll songs. Many of these cuts would be right at home at CBGB, soundtracking the chaos of a brawl. “Like No Other” is a sprawling survey of metropolises, among them Newark and Managua, that ultimately climaxes with Russell’s declaration of love to New York City: “This is my home.”
Not everything on Completely Necessary is made of such sublime stuff, including some tracks from Event Horizon. “AEIOU” sounds like a decaffeinated Blondie song, and “Europe,” though vaguely Ween-ish, never fully commits to its own camp. But those are momentary distractions. The snap of Chamberlain’s drums on a song like “Back to You,” which splits the difference between post-punk reggae and proto-New Order, zaps you back to their masterclass to marvel at the brushstrokes.
“The group has no niche, it doesn’t fit in anywhere,” Chamberlain told Melody Maker in 1980. “We just state the facts about life in America, like the Clash did about England, but we’re not so heavy about it.” And it’s true: The Necessaries sound like America, or a slice of it—vivacity and hustle, leaving the cornfields behind to fill a tiny room with people and noise. It’s a story as old as New York City itself: a collection of misfits fashioning something new and marvelous, transcending material realities, dragging the rest of us towards the horizon.
