Donald Cumming

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Donald Cumming

interview by BILL POWERS
portraits by RICHARD KERN

Saved by rock and roll. DONALD CUMMING, leader of the hot new downtown New York band,  THE VIRGINS, recounts his Phoenix-like rise out of the ashes of a troubled youth into the aeries of the music business.  What will become of the virgins? In the topsy-turvy world of today’s music business,  with CD sales free-falling and technology declaring a jihad on record companies, guessing  is a fool’s game. Perhaps The Virgins will be this generation’s Velvet Underground. Or maybe they’re just a bunch of Sids looking for their Nancys. Check back in five years. Maybe downtown New York has waited patiently for so long to hear its voice projected around the world that we’d pin our hopes and dreams on anyone who dresses the part.

Here’s what we do know. In the last year alone The Virgins have featured prominently on Entourage and Gossip Girl even without having released a feature-length album. That’s now due out on Atlantic Records in the late spring. They’ve opened up for Jet, Marc Ronson, and Tokyo Police Club, and have graced the pages of Rolling Stone, who strangely enough compared their sound to Maroon 5. The Virgins actually owe more nods to The Strokes (but more working class), The Rolling Stones — listen to “Rich Girls” and “One Week of Danger” — and The Police, if only for injecting another dose of reggae into contemporary rock.

In 2006, their eponymous five-song EP swept across New York like a Malibu wildfire, largely as a promo giveaway courtesy of A-Ron and A NY Thing Store. The Virgins’ songbook is currently available for download on iTunes and can be obtained on less reputable websites trafficking in pirated music.

They’re a press-savvy lot, The Virgins. Particularly their ringleader Donald Cumming, who you might spot walking around NoLita with a dog-eared copy of Oscar Wilde’s prison diary sprouting from his back pocket. While it’s the group’s guitarist, Nick Ackerman, who seems the most formally trained, it’s Donald, and, to a lesser extent, their bass player Wade Oates, who most embody the band’s whimsy. They first met on a Ryan McGinley photo shoot in Mexico and belong to a certain bred of city kid — a little too street-smart to be so sensitive. You want to protect them because they’re so jaded, fragile, and vulnerable. Which can make for great songwriting, but often proves precarious in real life.

Last summer I watched them perform to a sold-out crowd at The Mercury Lounge. Wade, at 21 the baby of the bunch, looked every inch the Andrew McCarthy doppelganger, right down to the Wayfarers, preppy hair, and aw-shucks demeanor. Donald, on the other hand, was covered in dope sweat and had a clinical detachment that I presumed was calculated. Later I learned he’d taken one too many clonopins to calm a case of preshow jitters and has since cleaned up his act.

To know him is to judge him, I guess, but from all accounts Donald Cumming’s life to date is something of a picaresque novel awaiting a redemptive ending. Mick Jagger probably summed it up best when he said, “I don’t want to erase the past or regret it, but I don’t want to be prisoner of it either.”

Wade Oates

BILL POWERS — You grew up over your dad’s liquor store on Canal Street, right?
DONALD CUMMING — Yes. Tunnel Liquors. It’s not there anymore, but if you walk by the corner of Canal Street and Greenwich Avenue, you’ll see the store hours are still posted in the window. My father drank the business into the ground. But I have fond memories of the place. Staging action  figure battles in between the bottles. I really liked the Bacardi bottles because they had  little spiders on them.

BILL POWERS — Where did you go to school?
DONALD CUMMING — After my parents got divorced my mom and I moved to Queens, but I commuted to P.S. 41 in the West Village. After school I’d walk over to the library on Sixth Avenue and wait for her to get off work. My friends and I would sneak into the Joffrey building across the street where we would watch all the girls from school doing their ballet. We were so mesmerized — the girls you were pining over all day in class dancing around in their leotards! Then someone would notice us and kick us out. I smoked my first cigarette on the roof of that building when I was in fifth grade. I thought I was so grown up.

BILL POWERS — But you kept in touch with your father, no?
DONALD CUMMING — I would see him every other weekend. We would play meditation tapes and weird shit like that. He was always in and out of rehab. Always sending me letters.  We were really close. He was a big guy. Very masculine. When I was ten he moved to New Jersey with his boyfriend. I would spend
summers there and I remember him getting up early in the morning every day to work on his resume, but never actually going to work. At one point he explained that alcohol is the only drug that can kill you if you try to quit it without the assistance of someone. I told him that sounded like bullshit to me. But
a month later that’s exactly what happened. He quit drinking, went out to buy a pack of cigarettes, and had a seizure. He fell into a coma and died.

BILL POWERS — Was this around the time you started your first band?
DONALD CUMMING — My first band was when I was in sixth grade. We were called Overdose, and we were really into The Doors and Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses. Kind of a garage sound. My two friends played guitar and I sang. But I got jealous because they had this skill I didn’t have. So my mom got me a guitar and paid for lessons.

Nick Ackerman

BILL POWERS — What about high school?
DONALD CUMMING — We moved to Palm Coast, Florida in 1997, so my mom could live with the guy she’d been dating. I thought I was going to be hot shit with the locals because  I was from the city. The atmosphere was really  seedy and racist at the time. A lot of weird people and hostility. The kids in the high school segregated themselves. I would get up in the morning and then go back to sleep  under my bed. I dropped out in tenth grade and moved back to New York by myself.

BILL POWERS — How did you support yourself when you got back?
DONALD CUMMING — I got a job at Eureka Joe’s coffee shop on 21st Street and signed up at this alternative high school downtown. I moved in with my friend who loved going to places like Lot 61. We’d sneak in. Needless to say, I wasn’t waking up in time for school. I was a little kid, very timid, just watching, but I thought it was the tops. I remember being at Life and seeing Puff Daddy at a table with his entourage. The deejay put on his new song and they all freaked out. It was exciting. I’d go to high school the next day and tell them about it, but they all thought I was lying. So I just stopped going to school. One day I got a letter in the mail that said I hadn’t been to school for a hundred and fifty days and was therefore expelled. I was so high on quaaludes I had forgotten I even went to that school.

BILL POWERS — Tell me about hooking up with Ryan McGinely.
DONALD CUMMING — I was at Don Hill’s on a Thursday back when they did their ’80s night. Ryan and I had some friends in common. He asked me if he could take some pictures of my girlfriend and I having sex. No one had ever spoken to me like that before. After I was on the cover of his first book we wound up living together, because his roommate, Dan Colen, was away painting for the summer. I didn’t have a job but another friend of mine was running a youth center and he had room in his budget to feed underprivileged kids. So I got a $100 of free groceries a month. I would get the big box of hamburgers and we’d do barbeques.

BILL POWERS — What happened when Dan came back from his summer vacation?
DONALD CUMMING — Brain McPeck, from A.R.E. Weapons, offered me a spot in a new place in SoHo for a $100 a month. That sounded good even though I had no visible means of income. We got by on food stamps and ate Rice-A-Roni and chocolate chip cookies everyday for a year. I was writing short
stories and screenplays and picking Brain’s brain about music, and books, and movies. I’d sit in his doorway in the morning playing guitar and ask him, “Is this a song? Does this sound like a song?” One of the screenplays I wrote, the most complete of the bunch, was for a musical called Unlucky Loser, which took place in the 1920s in New York. It’s about this kid who moves to the city from a place called Prairetown. He wants to get into show business but can’t catch a break, so he decides to put on his own type of Ziegfeld Follies review and enlists all these street kids he meets. They all fall in love with him because he’s super charming. Then he falls in love with this poor showgirl who has a sick brother she’s taking care of.  But in his zeal to be successful he becomes really obnoxious and starts taking himself way too seriously. The destitute kids who he’s taken in wind up turning on him because he’s so swept up in his vision: strictly chasing money. He winds up going back to Prairetown. But it’s not that sad because he’s young and resilient and you know he’ll do something good later on.

BILL POWERS — Back then you were still known around town as Eric.
DONALD CUMMING — My dad’s name was Donald, too. I was always called Eric at home so there wouldn’t be any confusion. Plus, I didn’t think Donald was a very cool name. When I started hanging out with Kid America, he found out my first name was Donald and asked me, “Why am I calling you Eric?” From then on I was Donald. Some people thought it was a stage name, or that it was some pretentious move on my part, and were resistant to it.

Nick Ratensperger

BILL POWERS — When did you actually start The Virgins?
DONALD CUMMING — I was living on Center  Street with this friend of mine, Fat Boy, who I’d met through Kid America. Brain and  I had gotten kicked out of our apartment for not paying the rent for a year. I moved in with Fat Boy but he got grossed out because I’m a slob. We had mice so I got a cat, but it started peeing on everything. One day without telling me, he traded apartments with this kid Wade. I woke up and Wade was moving his shit into the apartment. That’s when we started the band. At that point he didn’t know how to play the guitar. Once Wade and I started playing with Nick things began to gel and the three of us became best friends.

BILL POWERS — How did the EP come about?
DONALD CUMMING — I’d been living in a kind of fantasy world of half-finished creativity for so long. I wanted to see what would happen if I tried making something that would be  finished in a few days. It also had all the elements I was interested in: music, singing, and performance. I made the demo by myself. Wade and I played together for a while and then we met Nick. Then we auditioned about forty drummers and found Erik.

BILL POWERS — What’s the new song you open your set with?
DONALD CUMMING — “Fast Times.” It’s sort of an ambiguous statement about the genre we’re working in. The lyrics are all about teenage rebellion, but are so obvious and over the top and theatrical that you’re almost removed from them. You listen to them and realize you’ve heard it all before. Magazines and TV make you crazy. Our songs are vignettes of a life that may or may not be real. There’s always a character who may redeem the protagonist. But it doesn’t have to be a woman, even if it seems that way from the lyrics.

BILL POWERS — In the song, “Fernando Pando,” there’s a line about wondering what people who’ve died think of this life as they look down at us?
DONALD CUMMING — I’ve lost a lot of friends in my life. Plus my dad. And then my babysitter  right after that. I’d like to think the view from on high is the ultimate bird’s eye view. You’re pulling the widest lens. I don’t know if that’s a rewarding experience — the biggest of big pictures or the ultimate bummer. I’d like to think it’s a serene state of consciousness.

BILL POWERS — How ambitious are you as a group? With the public’s musical tastes so fractured, can anyone be as huge as The Police or U2 anymore?
DONALD CUMMING — If we could get as big as Marky Mark got, I’d be satisfied. My expectations aren’t as starry-eyed as a lot of new bands. Marky Mark had the edginess I liked, but he still got the girls. And on top of it all, he had The Funky Bunch. You know, he made a book back at the height of his popularity. There are some great pictures of random guys with flattops and of Marky Mark in hot tubs making out with two girls at once. It’s really the best book. On the dedication page there’s a picture of him with the inscription. “I’d like to dedicate this book to my dick.” Now, that’s wonderful.