Stephen Trask, Composer and Lyricist of HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH

The first time I see Tits of Clay, the house band for Broadway musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, they are playing Mercury Lounge on the Lower East Side. It’s a familiar scene. Girls in leather jackets nurse plastic cups of Brooklyn Lager. There’s a guy with turquoise hair on guitar. The band is honoring Lou Reed on the first anniversary of his death, and before they deftly tear through covers of songs from Transformer, Stephen Trask, who wrote the music and lyrics for Hedwig, hops onstage to say Kaddish and light a Jack O’Lantern with Reed’s face carved into its orange flesh.

The next time I see the band, they are onstage at the Belasco Theatre, going by another moniker: The Angry Inch. It also feels familiar. The business-casual clad crowd is sipping cocktails from spill-proof cups and perusing the Playbill from plush theater seating. But the guitarist still has turquoise hair, and as the band rocks its way through Hedwig, the ferocious musical about a transgender East German rock singer, it’s clear these musicians are special. They thrive in gritty venues and Broadway theaters alike. The music bridges the gap between glam rock and musical theater, each guitar riff a nod to “strange rock and rollers” and Broadway belters alike.

A gifted rock musician and composer, Trask began working on Hedwig in the ‘90s, when he was playing guitar in the house band at SqueezeBox!, a weekly party at the dive bar Don Hill’s. SqueezeBox! was one of the only places in early-Giuliani NYC where you could find punk kids and drag queens dancing together to Devo and Richard Hell songs. Trask and John Cameron Mitchell used the party as an incubator for Hedwig, performing drag renditions of rock songs to suss out the characters and relationships in their show.

“We originally started writing a story about a Tommy Gnosis character based on John’s life,” Trask told me at the kitchen table of his Brooklyn brownstone, worlds away from Don Hill’s. Tommy is Hedwig’s former beau in the show. “But the Tommy character was not terribly interesting to us, so John started telling me stories of his life. He told me this story about a German babysitter who was a divorcee living in a trailer and turning tricks, and I was like, ‘That is a great story. Let’s do this as a drag character and get a booking.’”

While many drag performers simply lip synced pop anthems, the queens at SqueezeBox! belted out spirited rock and roll covers. With Mitchell’s Hedwig fronting Trask’s band, the duo began to bring her story to life, one Bowie tune at a time.

“There was one finished song for the Tommy character, and we had a booking in two months, so we just learned a bunch of songs by artists like Yoko Ono and Wreckless Eric and changed the lyrics to those songs,” Trask said. “It was just a nightclub routine, but these characters had to feel like real, living people, and we wanted to create workshop-type situations to get them out. All the drag shows were cover songs, but as we slowly started developing the story and honing it, we were like, ‘Now we need original songs.’”

The drag shows at Don Hill’s evolved into a wildly successful off-Broadway musical, starring Mitchell as Hedwig and Trask’s band as The Angry Inch. A film version of the musical came out in 2001, and last spring, more than a decade after the original off-Broadway production opened in 1998, Hedwig opened on Broadway starring Neil Patrick Harris. Andrew Rannells and Michael C. Hall took subsequent turns as the show’s star, but on January 21, Mitchell once again stepped into Hedwig’s platform heels to reprise the role he created.

Through every iteration, rock remains imprinted on Hedwig’s DNA. The early shows at Don Hill’s reverberate in Trask’s score. It is face-melting at times, roaring guitar and driving beats rivaling Guns N’ Roses. Songs like “Wicked Little Town” and “The Origin of Love” skew the other way, channeling the tenderness and nuance of Fleetwood Mac. When the time came to assemble the artists who would perform the music of Hedwig on Broadway, Trask didn’t hold auditions. He cobbled together The Angry Inch the way you’d put together a real rock band: by calling up old friends, songwriting partners, session musicians, and punks.

“It was more like, I’ve got friends who play these instruments. Nail them down. Who’s our rockstar guitar player? And oh, I’ve gotta convince my reluctant friend to move to New York from Kentucky.”

Once assembled, Trask set about refining the band’s sound. They booked extracurricular gigs at Rockwood Music Hall and Mercury Lounge, billing themselves as Tits of Clay (the name references Hedwig’s prosthetic boobs in the show), and got used to playing together.

“I gave them a list of songs that influenced me when I was writing the score, just things I listened to, and I gave it to them as a set list and said, ‘Let’s learn this stuff and start doing some shows,’” Trask said. “By the time they were learning my music and getting ready to play the Hedwig score, they were kind of a working band. They had a sound that was developed outside of the context of my songs, and it was a sound that was defined by playing songs like ‘Uncontrollable Urge’ and ‘Blank Generation.’”

Trask put the cast through an equally comprehensive musical boot camp. When Harris signed on to play Hedwig, Trask immersed him in the sounds of the show. “I sent him videos of The Clash performing, of Lene Lovich, of The Ramones. I sent him some Fugazi, I sent him Devo, I sent him Iggy Pop videos, anyone who had really great body language onstage. It was fun for me too, because I got to find those videos again.”

For those who didn’t live it, Trask has invented a sort of “Hedwig immersion therapy,” a way to condense years of life experience and pop culture into a powerful research tool for his artists.Trask’s expertise, of course, stems from the fact that he did live it. Hedwig is fictional, but just as Trask’s music was shaped by years of playing in rock bands, the show’s ethos is derived from the reality of living as a starving artist and trying to make it when the whole world seems to be doing its best to make sure you don’t succeed.

“When I wrote ‘Midnight Radio,’ the show’s closing number, we’d been slogging it out in clubs in New York for a long time. I’d watched a lot of my friends become rock stars, but I’d play gigs and come home to find that my utilities had been turned off. Personally, I was like four months from leaving New York. I literally had a deadline, and it was coming due. But every night, we would do that song, and I would think about my other friends, very specific friends of mine, who were still doing it. They were out there painting or sculpting or making music or taking pictures, whatever sort of expression gave their life meaning, and in my mind, the transmission on the midnight radio was beaming across the city, down into their homes, connecting me to them all.”

Rain tapped at the pane of Trask’s kitchen window as he elaborated. “Hedwig’s realizing she doesn’t have to perform in a stadium for ten or twenty thousand people to be worthwhile. She knows she can write a great song, and she’s fine with that, because she can create meaning and beauty in her world. She’s saying, ‘Look at all these other people who are happy creating the texture and colors of the world around us. Everyone’s life is a collection of all the right and wrong decisions they’ve made, everyone is valuable, we are all together, and we are alright. That’s life, and now I’m going to walk offstage wearing nothing.’”

Hedwig is a story about survival. Throughout the show, Hedwig is repeatedly stripped of the things she holds dear. She loses her home, her mother, both the gender she had and the gender she was going to have, her husband, and ultimately the rock star persona and the music she created for Tommy Gnosis. The show is her quest for wholeness and completion, which seems epitomized and derailed by her breakup with Tommy. By the time she takes the stage for “Midnight Radio,” sans wig and stripped nearly bare, we understand that Hedwig, standing before us “in the divide between East and West, slavery and freedom, man and woman,” can be her own other half. She has her music, and nobody can tear that down.

A version of this article originally appeared on Brightest Young Things.

#hedwig and the angry inch #stephen trask