The impossible, irresistible person inhabiting the character of Jack Terricloth—crooning punk rocker, suave belligerent, bon vivant, self-proclaimed anarchist, and “friend to the friendless”—died this past May in his apartment in Queens, just short of his fifty-first birthday. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the character had consumed the person long before the body wore out.
“Tell me about a complicated man” begins Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Terricloth (born Peter Ventantonio, native to Bridgewater, New Jersey) was, for almost twenty-five years, the singer and fount of the punk rock group known as The World/Inferno Friendship Society. Though the conceptual framework and aesthetic were thoroughly his, I’m avoiding the term “leader” in deference to both his self-professed anarchism and his resistance to the sort of responsibility or ambition that might characterize a traditional bandleader. (He might have preferred “instigator,” or “inciter.”) What started as a rock-rejecting studio project for then-Ventantonio (or Pete V, or even Pete Five) and his high school friend Scott Hollingsworth, in the wake of the dissolution of their band Sticks & Stones, passed through a chaotic phase as a loose collective in the gentrifying Williamsburg of the late 1990s, before going through three or four waves of lineups in the twenty-first century. The charismatic magnetism of his person was the through-line. I was a member of a nine-piece version that operated between roughly 2000 and 2007. It is not much of an overstatement to say that he had more influence on my life than anyone outside my immediate family.
At his best, he was an electrifying performer. Lithe and stylish, he had a panoramic baritone, a sharp wit and sloganeering eloquence, and a fearless taste for chaos. He reveled in the fire (and, later, destruction) that came to be associated with the ferocious World/Inferno live shows. His best was more rarely seen as time passed, and as he disappeared into Johnnie Walker Black and into the Terricloth character: the high notes disappeared, and the stage persona congealed into a collection of tics and catch phrases. But he inspired first loyalty, then respect, and a kind of grudging, awestruck, melancholy affection as someone who shaped the formative years of those susceptible to his charm.
He was tall, thin, pale, and handsome, with a Roman profile and the sallow complexion of the nocturnal and the alcoholic. He bore something of a resemblance to John Barrymore—at least to the ironic self-parodist portrayed in the books of Gene Fowler—and cultivated a refined, mid-Atlantic accent found in old Hollywood but nowhere in New Jersey. His teeth were worn to needles by neglect, and the lamp oil he once used for onstage fire-breathing. He often wore red contact lenses, occasionally white pancake makeup and eyeliner. His only tattoo was the stick-and-poke initials of his teenage band Neurotic Impulse, fading over his heart. His casual-wear was a substantial fedora, a leather trench coat, a suit over a tank top, and pants belted high under his chest and tucked into the knee-high boots in which he stashed his phone. He eschewed underwear. For many years he wore a kind of leather thong knotted around his waist. He’d tied it there in his youth and intended to leave it on, maybe, forever, to ensure he wouldn’t slip into a beery pudge like everyone else: a check, his teen self reaching up through the years to rein him in, a corset and a censor. He carried a briefcase which, on tour, might only contain a pint of Jameson and a comb. He could be ostentatiously formal, calling his bandmates Mr. Hess, Ms. Be’eri; or kittenishly familiar (“Franzy”). In the dingiest squat, he would spend a diligent half hour doing operatic vocal warm-ups to the accompaniment of a battered cassette player.
His father was a municipal judge and twice an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of Bridgewater. A line from his obituary could just as easily describe his son: “Ventantonio was an impeccable dresser, always with a matching pocket square for his sport coats that were consistently pressed and perfect, and was also a lover of fine wines.” (One aspect of the father’s influence can perhaps be read into the son’s lyric “‘Never trust a man who don’t drink,’ papa told me, he said / he was talking about me at the time.” That his father’s career was as an enforcer of law and institution is almost too obviously Oedipal a detail.) The younger Ventantonio was interrogated by the Secret Service for calling his high school and quoting Suicidal Tendencies’ “I Shot Reagan” (an episode he dramatized in the song “Secret Service Freedom Fighting USA”). The rebellious child of privilege is a profile that characterizes many punk rockers, but particularly the teenage fans of World/Inferno in the peak years of the aughts: descending on Brooklyn from Westchester, Long Island, and suburban New Jersey, attracted by the promise of consequence-free hedonism. That World/Inferno has been left out of the emerging canon of aughts punk even as some of those young fans have joined the ranks of cultural media has something to do with the sui generis nature of the band: a nine-piece muso circus playing crust-punk festivals is hard to domesticate into a retrospective scene. But—as with ska, or theater camps, or leftist activism—one senses a slight embarrassment at the memory of the costumes, the sloganeering, the uncritical and unabashed idealism. We often reflexively cringe at our teenage enthusiasms. There is also the complicated balance between euphoria and danger: I suppose the Inferno scene produced, eventually, a good deal of addiction and, perhaps, sobriety. Anarchy is as destructive as it is exhilarating; some of those guide rails serve a purpose.
It often seemed that Terricloth, for all his man-out-of-time affectation, felt his teenage years as his most intense and alive. This taste for backward-looking sentiment fed some magnificently swooning ballads—“We Will Never Run Into One Another On Trains,” “Friend To The Friendless,” “Heartattack ’64”—even if it seemed, sometimes, to anticipate the loss. One got the sense, in songs like “So Long To The Circus,” of a man pre-writing elegies for his own band and friends. I’m told—I wasn’t there—that his years in New Brunswick, New Jersey in Sticks & Stones involved a still-magnetic projection of himself that was much closer to Pete: an earnest, somewhat vain young punk, a goth vampire who filed his nails to points, whose songs were melodic, emotionally raw post-punk—less broadly legible than south Jersey contemporaries like the Bouncing Souls, Vision, Lifetime, and Ted Leo’s Chisel. The Terricloth persona (indebted to the Damned’s Dave Vanian) and the elaborate mythological scaffolding around the World/Inferno band had a distancing and emotionally defensive effect, even as he returned over and over to the dream of the gang of his teenage years: partly a band, but mostly the tight-knit community around the band. The first and signature World/Inferno song claimed, “There’s so much I don’t want to remember, there’s nothing I wish would last forever,” but the rest of his catalog gave lie to the sentiment.
The early concept of World/Inferno seemed designed to preclude the possibility of this loss and betrayal by underscoring the vast, interchangeable, and anonymous nature of the collective. Early “band photos” were black-and-white stock images with their eyes obscured by red dots. The band bio was a multi-chapter fiction indebted to Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and the Giant Cat from that story (along with Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin) became a kind of band trickster figure. Ventantonio originally intended to change his nom-de-stage with each release (an early appellation, taken from a condiment package, was “Favorite Singer Who Goes With Everything,” and one could still find one or two people who called him “Favorite”), though “Jack Terricloth” eventually stuck. The name was apparently intended to be “Jack Velvet,” for the timbre of his voice, but a bandmate said, “Velvet! More like terrycloth.” He encouraged his own mythos: he liked to claim that he bled from the eyes, that he had experienced stigmata, that the hospitalization that cancelled a tour was due to a machete fight with a rival singer, rather than the too-prosaic appendicitis. (“You don’t understand,” he said. “The story is more important.”) The often- pseudonymous credits for the records were headlined “Society members active in this project include…,” which encouraged the idea not only that anyone might consider themselves a member and that the line between band proper and larger social circle was vaporous, but also that one never truly joined, or left, the Society. One was simply born, in a kind of Calvinist predestination, into the Society.
He was devoted—in theory—to a radical anarchy which could manifest as an evasive passivity if you were relying on him, for example, to make plans for the future. He delighted in scolding gaucheries and enforcing a bevy of rules of decorum and behavior. But his was a genuinely democratic impulse rare in a bandleader. Songwriting royalties, for example, were split equally between all eight, nine, ten or more “members active” in a project. Like many punk rockers, he was a Roman-tic. His commitment was to the currently unfashionable Dionysian legacy of punk, the temporary autonomous zone facilitating the revelation that responsibility is a mirage. Though he enjoyed living well, he seemed genuinely not to care about the little inconvenience of money (he went most of the twenty-first century without an obvious job), though he certainly cared about fame, or attention, or at least notoriety, and the influence that came with it. His was an idealist, self-defeating, admirable refusal to accommodate even the smallest compromises to things like entertainment lawyers and headlining bands. No one headlined over Jack; they just played later.
He had a profound rhetorical gift. The piece of stage banter I always remember first, when I am called upon to do so, happened on September 11, 2001, at a punk club in Hannover, Germany. After piecing together the events of the day from a dial-up desktop terminal and a black-and-white TV, we sat around quietly for some time before Jack suggested that perhaps we should do what we were there to do. (The next few days’ shows would be cancelled, but for the moment, the consensus on how to react had not yet solidified.) We took some MDMA and drank some wine, set up on the floor, and faced the small crowd of Germans who had shown up to see how the American band would react. Jack reached into his pocket and threw something onto the ground. “Here’s an American quarter,” he said. “It’ll be worth something someday.” It was that ability to express the historical context and scope of the moment, the complicity of capital and cultural hegemony, the transience of empire, with flippant and disdainful irony and a detached, lordly humor—all through a veil of intoxication—that distinguished his finest moments.
As often happens, the casual artistry masked the discipline it must have at some point required, so that it seemed to exude naturally from the personality rather than from any conscious exertion of craft. It frustrated some of us that so prodigious a wit and autodidact intellect, such a charismatic man of principle, lacked the ambition or discipline to expand his reach into politics or literature (he briefly dabbled in noir pitched somewhere between Hammett and Cometbus), or simply to consider the practical future of the band and the expanded platform that could come with it. But he had found in punk rock a complete fulfillment of his vision, and ennobled it by that choice. There is one model of the artist who evolves and adapts, and another that says change is corruption and compromise. As one of his early songs put it, “Joe Tennis”—the character shared his initials—“chased the one good idea he’d had his whole life.”
After his death, a mutual friend sent me a picture from 2004 of Jack and me conducting the weekly radio show he called Radio K.L.O.T.H. —pre-1950 music only—out of a loft building in Bushwick. I’m reclining in an office chair, in front of a cassette carrel and a boombox. I’m somewhat overweight, wearing a flat cap and thrift-store sport coat, arms spread, my hand on a branded cup of cheap wine, opining into a microphone on a gooseneck stand. He sits upright, alert and fragile as a meerkat, legs crossed at the knee and finger on cheek, regarding me with a look attentive, indulgent, with a hint of pity, as if I were explaining an epiphany he knew to be common or self-evident. For all the fierce unpredictability of his public presence, it is this maternal forbearance for the naively confident that I find the most retrospectively endearing.
I betrayed him, eventually, by leaving his society. Though we collaborated intermittently after that—he even signed my marriage certificate as the witness, and I was one of his pallbearers—he could never entirely forgive a defector. His finely tuned code of etiquette didn’t preclude a gleeful “fuck you, buddy.” His undiscriminating hospitality made room for impregnable grudges; if an enemy couldn’t be found, one could be invented. (It gave one, he said, a reason to get out of bed.) I wasn’t the only former band member to leave confused, exhausted, even embittered, with a feeling of exile and ostracism. He could be irritating and deeply frustrating, alternating between provocation and affection. Few, ultimately, could meet his standards, which included, as with every prophet, lifelong loyalty. His was a commitment to legacy over life: “Everyone has a favorite dead punk rocker,” he liked to say. “I hope one day to be yours.” Privately, his sentimentality could overcome his grudge: he would insult me in public and then afterwards put his arm over my shoulder and whisper, “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”
I fear emphasizing the complications of the man over the talent, and I’m aware of my own equivocal feelings. But these are true things I’ve felt since his passing. The tributes to his inspirational power—his ability to conjure, through blithe bravado, a world as he wished it was—have been easy to find in the days since his death, and I don’t imagine he would be offended by the combination of thank you and fuck you. I want to preserve something of the complexity of the man before the hagiography calcifies. I want to speak about the power of seductive friends who force you to outgrow them and who try, in various ways, to revenge themselves or reassert control; and also the feeling of watching someone you love and respect destroy himself. He ruined his voice and his quicksilver mind; only habit and vanity spared the shell of his glamour. When two close associates semi-seriously floated the idea of an exorcism of Terricloth, to bring Pete V back, he didn’t find it funny. “Nobody liked Pete V, who was sober,” he said. “People only liked me when I became Jack, and I’m not going back.”
When I saw him perform in the last few years, and when the lineup of World/Inferno’s imperial phase reunited for a one-off show in 2018, I was a little shocked at his condition—the voice limited to a Dracula register, the razor timing of the monologues dulled. You have it wrong, one of his oldest friends and collaborators told me. You have to remember, this is a path he set himself on, what he’s wanted since he was a teenager. Look at his heroes—Peter Lorre, Jeffrey Lee Pierce—elegant fuckups who stylishly spent their talent and died. If you tried to keep him from that, not only wouldn’t he thank you, but you’d have thwarted his great project: to burn as brightly as possible in a cult of personality, to become a magnificent, beautiful wreck, and finally to ascend into his rightful apotheosis in punk rock myth. We may prefer people to icons, but only icons are immortal.
Franz Nicolay is a musician and writer living in New York’s Hudson Valley. His most recent book is the novel Someone Should Pay for Your Pain. He teaches at Bard College.
