Burning Up

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