Cavern

Like everything the band played, Cavern grew out of a group jam, McGuire said. At Radio City they recorded a long, shapeless version of about twelve minutes, which Don Hünerberg cut down with a razor blade until the tape lay in piles on the floor. McGuire's bassline toggles between A and C, and Principato thinks McGuire found it boring for having only two notes. Pitchfork heard a hitched, self-fading line no trained player would write. Bahlman mixed it over and over, giving acetates to his brother Bill, a West Village DJ, to see which parts a crowd answered.

The refrain, slip in and out of phenomenon, was meant to sum up life, Principato said, as a mix of inspired, effortless movement and ordinary, sometimes futile effort. He had been reading Rimbaud, Whitman, Zola and Dreiser and wanted his words to convey form more than meaning. Bahlman got it onto WBLS and WKTU, and it played at the Roxy, the Paradise Garage, the Fun House, Danceteria and Club Zanzibar.

White Lines

Sugar Hill's house band replayed it for White Lines (Don't Don't Do It), with Doug Wimbish on bass and Keith LeBlanc playing Hartley's pattern, and Melle Mel turned the refrain into something like a phenomenon. The writing credit went to Melle Mel and Sylvia Robinson. Principato first heard it when an acquaintance at a free concert in Tompkins Square Park told him it sounded like Liquid Liquid. White Lines reached seven in the UK in 1984. 99 sued and won, and after Duran Duran's 1995 cover the band gained a third of its publishing.

Afterlife

Stylus ranked Cavern 49th among the greatest basslines. Spike Lee used it in 25th Hour, and it ran in a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra advertisement. It turns up in DJ mixes by Grandmaster Flash and Large Professor and on compilations such as Disco Not Disco and Post Punk 01, and Robert Walter's 20th Congress recorded an instrumental medley of White Lines and Cavern. The reunited band played it with The Roots on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in April 2010, and again at LCD Soundsystem's Madison Square Garden farewell in 2011.