MP3: My Mysterious Death (Turn It Up)

The more your hear about the origin of Old Columbus bands, the more you realize how many of them formed accidentally, the result of spontaneity and serendipity. Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments was one such band. On a night about 20 years ago, soon after the dissolution of Ron House’s previous band, Great Plains, a band playing Stache’s ended early.

The story could have ended right there. Everyone at the bar could have just continued to get drunk and/or gone home. Instead, though, House and Girly Machine guitarist Bob Petric hopped on stage with some friends, borrowed the idle guitars and amps and started jamming on blues riffs. “We just kind of jumped up out of sheer boredom,” Petric said when I interviewed him last year. But something clicked, and they decided to do it again. And again. (Sound familiar?)

“It was kind of a fuck-off band for a couple of years where we just got together and jammed,” House said last summer. “The Columbus scene was really taking off—like the New Bomb Turks, Gaunt. So I didn’t have to do very much, just shout and scream and people would notice us locally. The whole scene was a more brutal, punkier scene. There was enough things going on that all we had to do was just go out and play and things would happen for us.”

That’s probably not giving the band quite enough credit, especially House’s lyrics and snotty delivery and Petric’s axe-wielding. But things did happen, like eventually signing to Onion, a subsidiary of Rick Rubin’s American Recordings, to release Bait & Switch.

“Johan Kugelberg was looking to sign bands for [Onion],” House said. “He asked three other bands and they all turned him down so he asked us.”

“The fact that Rick Rubin read my name on the liner notes — that, to me, is sufficient grounds for satisfaction,” Petric said. “When Johan put out the record, he was more of a little kid about it than we were. I remember Johan calling me up, saying, ‘Hey, Bob, the second time this week I walked into Rick’s office and he was laying on the couch listening to the Slave Apartments record, man.’ To me, that’s like having Johnny Cash make dinner for you or something.”

Petric also looked back fondly on the time TJSA spent on the road with Guided by Voices. “Being able to go on tour with GBV for three weeks, that was like vacation,” he said. “There was a positive but gentle-hearted competition between us and GBV. Bob [Pollard] was just effusively praiseful of the Slave Apartments. He really liked us. He said nice things about my guitar playing, too. I remember one time in Seattle, Bob got a kick out of the fact that Ron and me and Craig Dunson and Ted [Hattemer], we all huddled up and did this chant, ‘Beat GBV! Beat GBV!’ Bob Pollard came up and was just laughing his ass off, saying, “That’s why you guys rule!” He ended up singing ‘Cheater’s Heaven’ with us.”

A jam at Stache’s. A fertile scene. A big Swede with art-rock tastes running part of a major label. It’s an unlikely series of events, but one we’ll gladly celebrate this Friday at Ace of Cups, when TJSA plays Bait & Switch in its entirety —- something that’s never been done, and likely never will be done again.

See you there.

Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Bill Fox, P. Blackk, Zero Star, Sundown and DJ Detox will play Friday, Feb. 3, at Ace of Cups. Note: That’s a lot of bands, so this will start earlier than most shows. Be sure to get there by 10pm to see Bill Fox.

We’re just over a week away from the Ohio Film+Music Festival, which means we’re just over a week away from bands like RJD2/Icebird, the New Bomb Turks, Heartless Bastards, Cloud Nothings and others, plus films like never-before-seen Jim Jarmusch shorts featuring Tom Waits, 4192: The Crowning of the Hit King and Eric Mahoney’s North Dixie Drive.

So, in anticipation, we’re giving away two tickets to the Friday, Oct. 7 New Bomb Turks / Heartless Bastards / Cloud Nothings / R.Ring (featuring Kelley Deal) show at Skully’s and two film tickets to the Ohio Doc Double Feature, The Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant shown with North Dixie Drive (Saturday, Oct. 8 at 3:55pm). Just send an email to contestdonewaiting@gmail.com with the subject OFMF by next Wednesday (10/5).

Ticketing details for all events at OFMF.

The Ohio Film + Music Festival is a brand-new “curated, 4-day film and music event, exhibiting Ohio native directors, bands and musicians,” and the first round of confirmations alone is reason enough to get excited. So far the inaugural lineup looks like this:

Bands:
Heartless Bastards
RJD2
Blueprint
New Bomb Turks
Main St. Gospel
Cloud Nothings
R. Ring (feat. Kelley Deal)
Buffalo Killers
Eye

Films:
The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (Steven Bognar + Julia Reichert)
True Nature (Patrick Steele)
Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch)
4,192: The Crowning of the Hit King (Terry Lukemire)
45365 (Ross Bros)
Deadbeat At Dawn (Jim Van Bebber)
North Dixie Drive (Eric Mahoney)
Double-Stop (Roger + Gerald Sindell)
Outside In (Todd Volkmer)

Eric Mahoney and Mr. Scott Johnson promise additional lineup announcements, ticket info and more details soon. Keep up with OFMF on Facebook and Twitter.

I grew up on rap so my knowledge of Gaunt is from osmosis. I’m not an expert.

Yeah, but you said you grew up with Nick Shuld?

Yeah, I like that guy now. But at the time he was a year older and seemed snooty. So when he joined Gaunt, it was another reason to hate on him.

Was he with Beano?

Yeah. They were fun. When did you join Gaunt?

I was the bass player. Basically, Jeff and Eric …  Jeff Regesnburger, the drummer. Eric Barth was the bassist.  They did a European Tour in 94; say from October to December.  Then quit.

Nick and I joined in January.

What were you doing before then?

Musically or in my life?

Various things..

Nothing really. I had graduated from college  in 92. I went to Boston to try to go Medical School.

I was dating a woman, and Jim Weber called me. He was the first guitarist in Gaunt, before Jovan.   And said, “the Turks are going to Europe, do you want to do merch?”. This was in 94 too. I said, “yeah, sure.” I was in Europe simultaneously with the Turks when Gaunt was over there. They had 6 or 7 shows that overlapped.

How long were you in Gaunt?

Two and a half years. I was on two albums, Yeah Me Too, and Kryptonite.

What made you decide to put this show together?

This was Jim Weber’s idea. It might have had something to do with the Gibson Brothers, the Turks and Scrawl doing the parking lot blow-out show. Maybe feeling a little bit nostalgic for that. Jerry died January 10th.  2001. There was enough distance from that date for most of the guys. And we would always get together at Jerry’s on the 1st of the year for a party at his house. So the past 10 years, Sam Brown, and Jim Weber would have a Euchere party at their house. Thats what we do.

For this one, Sam Brown is having people over that are playing before the show and then we are all gonna pile in cars and go over to Bourbon Street.

Where were you when you heard the news that Mr. Wick had passed?

I’m sorry..

uhmm..uhh

Oh, when he died. I was in archictecture school. I was in graduate school for archictecture and for some reason that night I was at my mother’s house in Newark. An ex-girlfriend called me at my mother’s house January 10th. He died January 10th, at say , 2:00 in the morning.

I got a call the next night from this ex-girlfriend from New York, she asked “Did you hear Jerry died?”.

I said, “I had no idea.”

I hopped in a car and went to Larry’s Bar. So everyone kind of convened at Larry’s. And uhm, that was that.

So everyone went to Larrys to drink and talk. Was there a funeral?

The funeral was a few days later. The funeral was in Parma, Ohio. Bettina, who runs Thrill Jockey  came in. Who Gaunt put there first two or three albums out actually. There was actually something in Parma. And then I think we came back, and there was another memorial at Larry’s. At some point at the next month or so there was a show at Little Brothers.

Uhmm…so.. Mr. Wick liked to play Euchere?

He would always play Euchere at Larry’s. He lived above Larrys for I don’t know how long. We had all lived together Jim Weber, Jerry Wick, myself on 19th Avenue from like 91-92. After that Jerry moved above Larry’s until he got his house on the NorthEast Side. We would go to Larry’s all the time. We would go up after Larry’s and listen to music at his apartment.

Who all is playing the show? (Note show already happened)

The Ferals. Lara Yarzac was 19. She just adored Jerry, I think.  They had a really good friendship. Then the Slave Apartments. Red Rubber Nose, Jim Weber.  basically the original line-up minus Jerry plus me.  Uh. Necropolis.  Uh. Jerry Decicca is gonna play a few songs. Delicious Pizza,  who is Sam Brown and his ex-wife, and Nick Schuld. I think thats it?

What about I hate Gaunt?

What?

Oh, This is Why Gaunt Sucks, which is the New Bomb Turks.

You said alot of these band names are taken from inside jokes?

Jerry one-liners. The Slave Apartments are called the Cocaine Sniffing Slave Apartments.

Jerry’s side project were always called Cocaine Sniffing Prime. Because of the John Richmond Modern Lover’s song, there is a line.

Red Rubber Nose. Jerry got really mad once in Boston. I think it was one night when the Turks were playing with Gaunt. I could be wrong about this. He basically said..I don’t know the exact story. But he basically got pissed off and asked ‘where is my red rubber nose’, implying that he was a clown. And everyone thought he was clown. And no one took him seriously, as a musician.

Delicious Pizza, Jerry would get these little catch phrases. And say them over and over. Delicious Pizza was one of them.

And This Is Why Gaunt Sucks was another..the band might have flubbed a song. Jerry had a tirade, and yelled, ‘this is why Gaunt sucks.’

So I was going through stuff on the internet. I was reading the obitruary. And Eric Davidson was quoted, “”Jerry would want to talk about Studs Terkel and Nietzsche for eight hours in a van, which is OK for some people, but not for most,” Davidson said. “Even though he might have not finished any Studs Terkel book ever, he at least knew those first three chapters well.” Saying Jerry had an undergrad intellectual…

I kind of remember that. I don’t think that was fair. I can understand, this sort of superficial reference in “Kryptonite” for example of the Superman was probably sophmoric on Jerry’s part. But at the same time, he had probably read the books, and understood the concept more than your average college student that is taking a philosophy course , and reads There Spoke Zarathursta.

I didn’t take it for an insult. I just took it a way to describe how Mr. Wick talked.

He was a thinker and he talked. A lot of times, he talked without thinking. And so. He never got into too much trouble. He was one of those people that were very loud, boistorious, and would be really set in his ideas. And the more he drank, the more he would be set in them.And willing to argue. And tell you that you were wrong. And sometimes that was very fun. Other times it got to the point you were thinking, you are too drunk to talk.

Say a 19 year-old kid is reading this interview…How would you like Mr. Wick to percieved? Now that you have had 10 years to reflect on his abscence..

10 years and a 19 year old comes along and reads donewaiting, uhm.. I think there are 5 albums, 1 ep. I would want them to know he was a prolific song-writer and half of the stuff never got released. There are some real gems in that. I think Nick Schuld posted some of them online. A lot of single as well.

They should listen to it. It is really good pop. There is some stuff that you kind of scratch your head, especially the early stuff. Some of the early stuff it good too.

And then maybe that 19 year-old would get into writing music.

Jerry had a fanzine called Cornhole.

Named after the beanbag game?

Cornhole, I think because I was talking to my parents about it in 1992, is just an asshole. And I think where he got it, ‘it’s your cornhole’.

So yeah, he wanted to be thought of as an intellectual.

How long did he put Cornhole out for?

You would have to ask Ron House. I would say two years. You probably never knew Sam Yesh?

Nah.

He was kind of a noise guy that probably suffered from some sort of Psychotic delusions. He would interview people like that. There were interesting interviews.

What are some favorite memories you have?

Like bands we played with or

It is a big question. Anything.

There are stories like the first show I played with Gaunt, I think was Mudhoney at Bogarts in Cincinnati.  Previously, I had  played in one tribute band that played in front of  20 people.

There were probably 900 people to see Mudhoney. That was fun.

Did have some words for you before you went out?

No. He was like, ‘lets just go. play.’

There was one time in San Francisco where we had mistakenly got gas in the van. Nick Schuld was driving. He was a bad driver at the time; he might be a great driver now.  And so Jerry got out without us knowing at the gas station, and we left him there. Probably drive an hour so that was funny. We had to turn around. We got in a wreck. And then we went and picked him up.

You got in a wreck?

Yeah, Got in a wreck.

Sounds like an episode of Seinfeld.

We got into a wreck. It was literally a pig in a burlap bag in the back of the truck that we hit.

Did you guys exchange information?

It was a small town. It would like if you had something happen to you in Mt. Vernon. So we just drove it into town, and filed a police report. The van was insured. We always rented our van. It was insured.

It was definately our fault. By our fault, I mean Nick’s.

I was talking to Adam Elliott of Times New Viking. I asked him about if the different generations of punk rock hang out with each other, in say San Francisco. For instance, you go out and see Adam talking to Ron House. He said it was a very Columbus specific thing. People of different generations stay in proximity of each other. I don’t know what my question is..

I  think the question would be, how was it fifteen years-ago?

Gaunt was never that big. They were kind of big in Boston. They could drive to Boston or New York, maybe and have a hundred people at the shows. We were never as big as Times New Viking.

We would kind of just go to New York. Most of had friends from college, say in New York. Jovan had a friend name J.T. Olson..Now I think about it, it was an extension of Columbus. People that had been in Columbus, that had been in bands in the 80′s. It kind of migrated from New York to Boston or Austin, Texas or San Francisco. Those places, it would be kind of like a reunion or catching up with old friends. It is an interesting thought.

That is the advantage of Columbus that people don’t think of. It is what makes Ohio State football functional on a bigger scale because the alumini is so huge, that everyone wants OSU to play in their bowlgame because they know people will come out. I think on a smaller scale, that is something that can work for rock music.

It is nice parrallel. I hadn’t thought about it like that.

Our city is built around a university. We don’t have a waterway

I think the thing that Columbus has, that other cities don’t..Let say there is band like Fifteen year-ago like Gaunt was playing in Atlanta. I don’t think 1) they would get together and do a tribute show. And 2) Have the bands that are in Atlanta now, the younger bands come out and support it. And understand where they came from.

Gaunt. Jerry was a huge Jim Shepard, and Ron House fan. I don’t have a lot of data to support that theory but I would’nt be suprised.

The one exception would be Guided By Voices, because, well, they are Guided By Voices.

That is kind of special

It is.

Photos by Jay Brown; copyright 2010 jfotoman

MP3: Assorted tracks from Cowtown EP, 45s, etc. (mediafire archive courtesy Minimum Tillage Farming)
MP3: Walk

A little while before I moved to Columbus in the summer of 1988 I discovered the glorious phenomenon that is the used record shop, so one of the first things I did when I got here was to scan the yellow pages for all the locals. At the time, cds still seemed neat and lotsa previously hard-to-find (for me at least, in small-town Virginia) stuff was showing up on that most durable of physical formats (*ahem*), so I took my giant Bekins box of tapes to Used Kids and wandered upstairs soon after with loot in hand to “little Mag’s” – the relatively short-lived cousin of the still-thriving shop now calling the Short North home – since Used Kids was still strictly analog. (Well, maybe they had a few discs in a magazine rack by the door – but they woulda prolly been a little to the current/good/hip/obscure side of the Misfits and Lemonheads ones I was jazzed about.) Little Mag’s was cool, trafficked mostly in t-shirts, and closed pretty soon after.

Fortunately this fate didn’t befall Used Kids (tho’ I did buy a t-shirt there once), and in the following months I started going down to the shop whenever I could find a ride or felt sufficiently over-enthusiastic enough to ride my skateboard from the suburbs and back. One day I bought a My Bloody Valentine tape and the guy behind the counter mentioned how good the upcoming show at the Ohio Union Ballroom was gonna be. I think I averted my eyes and barely mumble-nodded in agreement on my way out the door – for I was not always the obnoxiously assertive lug you all now recognize – but after the show I grabbed the fellow and yelled over the ringing in my ears how indeed it WAS quite the revelation. He grinned and said the last song was on their best record and had I heard it? I said no and he said he’d tape it for me; thus, my introduction to the illustrious Ron House.

Not too long after that I walked into the shop and Ron said he’d held aside a record for me (knowing my affinity for whatever you wanna call the British stuff from those days) that co-employee Bela had put out; he said one of the bands on the record was from Columbus but had locked onto that noisy-yet-sorta-feminine anglo-aesthetic in their own way. The record – the Cowtown E.P. Vol. 1 – was co-released by Anyway Stuff (Bela’s brand-spankin’-new partnership with Jerry Wick, another Used Kids then-employee) and Craig Regala’s scene-defining Datapanik. The other songs on the record are killer (one Jerry wrote for Marcy Mays to sing with Scrawl but then kept for his own band Gaunt, a remixed “Negotiate Nothing” from Jim Shepard’s V-3, and a truncated teaser of “Shell” from the mighty Greenhorn – my fave band to see in town and subjects of this very column not long ago), but the tune to which Ron was referring – “Walk” by Belreve – bowled me straight over! Four chords (total!) that seemed completely made up by the guitar player, a gorgeous vocal melody three-quarters buried by the cacophony, HUGE drums and the growliest bass this side of Motorhead, the most ineptly perfect rock’n'roll party guitar solo, lyrics that’d kick any teenage mind’s ass (“Seems much too long since I saw you last; say your heart is broken – it makes me wanna laugh”), a wonderful inability to make it ten seconds past the two-minute mark…indeed, the tune stands perfectly alongside all that’s good about the post-C86/pre-shoegaze-ubiquity era in England (the first few Lush and Ride singles, Tse Tse Fly, Strawberry Story – basically after the jangle turned to crunch and before everything became overly somnambulic), but goes it a good stretch better with the shrugged shoulders inherent in all midwest underground endeavors (you are not going to make it, so leave the fact that yer bummed about 1) that, and 2) the fact that, therefore, you go to some stupid job all day underneath feigned indifference about the apparent level of professionalism/quality necessary to convince most anyone that you actually even exist), an infectious joie de vivre and a bitter – yet sometimes giddy – sense of humor, and an inherent understanding of unhinged, backroom rock’n'roll (from Don and Dewey right thru to songwriter/guitar player Matt’s other combo, the New Bomb Turks) providing a backbone that’s sorely missed in some of their predecessors and contemporaries…and all this prior to like-minders like the Swirlies and Henry’s Dress getting their vans outta the
garage!

Now I’m oftentimes fine with a buncha dudes sellin’ their fantasies to ya over buckets o’ swill and under lighting that runs the gamut from dim to broken, but in my not-so-humble-opinion it ain’t gonna go that next level unless there’s a lady or two in the room. And in Belreve, two-thirds of the room was ladies: Liz on bass and Jenny on drums. I think Jenny was just learning (from the same book as Jeff R. from Gaunt, as the joke went) and I have no idea whether Liz played with anyone prior, but man these three were made for each other. Live they were a locked groove; no huge Marshall stacks, no Ampeg refrigerators – no need. Liz’s bass was a rumbling wire picking out aspects of those odd chords of Matt’s, accentuating this or that tone, so definite through the shifting fuzz; Jenny’s drumming is still some of the most solid I’ve ever seen. Sometimes she’d slam the kick and snare at the same time, providing something almost dance-influenced and post-punk, while others she’d leave a little space and then pick it back up the next go-round, like a flattened-out Ronettes. Onstage they were unassuming to the point of stealth, but once those couple intro bars of guitar gave over into that armhair-raising shock-moment where the whole band crackled to instantaneous electrical life…well, forget those nights where ya had to get real bored to listen to the band.

I didn’t get to see ‘em too many times, and they weren’t around too long – a year or three in the early ’90s. One freezing Anyway Fest evening in the perfect old Stache’s building sticks way out, tho’. I convinced my friend Yvonne that this was the thing to do – having no car, I had to – but after a few hours of not much happening, including the firing up of the room’s heater (guess it wasn’t worth it to waste $$ on the ten or twelve of us in attendance), she remained unconvinced. “Just stick it out a little bit longer,” I begged. “I promise you’ll thank me.” I think they’ve used looks like she gave me to unhinge the jaws of prospective stoolies in the interrogation room. Anyhow, something like Appalachian Death Ride gave way to Waybald and she started to look at me a different way, and finally – and this is nearing the one o’clock mark – Matt wandered onstage and over to the mic. “We’re just gonna play a coupla songs and you can go, we promise. We’re tired and have to work in the morning too.” Maybe they played for twenty minutes, but Yvonne wasn’t mad anymore.

All the sweet and all the sad, those juxtapositions that move your chemicals around when they’re revealed to you by only the most wonderfully devastating songs that reverberate to your own personal waves – Belreve is inside ‘em. They’re the very stuff those are made of, the barbed and bright innards that shift into muddy untouchability… those moments that knock you to your knees are stretched into whole songs, that vague and nervous feeling that only holds for seconds suspended for the whole time they’re on. Whole lines go by feeling like a single word – tho’ one you don’t quite understand despite the fact that it connects – and vice versa. And – unlike a whole mess of bands in this town – their records aren’t a pale version of their reality or something to be appreciated in a different way somewhere alongside. They’re honest moments, real and right and affecting and necessary, not little sample bubbles or reflections but true microcosms, the clean, pure aspects strident thru the grime of the amps and four-tracks and no matter how beat up your copies are. I miss that band, and I encourage you to glean what you can from what you can find. They were a very special and very rare thing.

New Bomb Turks

Gibson Bros

Scrawl

For folks not in Columbus or just not able to attend the Parking Lot Blowout (Gibson Bros, Scrawl, Turks) on Saturday, the tech-savvy people at the Columbus Music Co-Op will have a live stream going from 3-10pm here.

And as we mentioned previously, Eric Davidson of the New Bomb Turks will be reading from his new book, We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, on Friday night at the Wexner Center (deets). At noon on Friday, the Wex is also going to stream a conversation with Davidson and fellow Turk Matt Reber here. (“The two musicians will discuss the Columbus scene, past and present,” says the Wex.)

Editor’s note: “Overlooked in Ohio” is a feature in which we ask an Ohio-based artist/music enthusiast to tell us about a band or bands from the state of Ohio (past or present) that deserve some love. Our fifth installment comes courtesy of Eric Davidson — New Bomb Turks singer, rock scribe and now real-deal author. His new book We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001 is out now. He’ll read from it in Columbus at the Wexner Center on July 9, the night before the Turks take the stage with the Gibson Bros (featured in the book) at the Parking Lot Blowout. (Full Davidson bio at bottom.)

MP3: Prisonshake – It’s A Ron Kinda World (1991, from 7″ on Estrus; original lineup)

MP3: Prisonshake – Irene (1993, from The Roaring Third)

Now I dig that this section of the Donewaiting landscape is meant to extol the virtues of a criminally forgotten Ohio-based band. So to quickly hit that aim, Prisonshake were great, and you should find their records. I just spent two years of my life digging up info on and extolling the virtues of something like 80-90 “forgotten” bands for my just-released first book, We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001. Though it’s a hefty tome (350+ pages), there was still TONS of stuff that I had to cut out, and that sadly included a section featuring Prisonshake, but more pointedly Prisonshake and Scat Records leader, Robert Griffin (above).

In the late 1980s, I saw Griffin sling his guitar with Prisonshake a few times before walking into my Parmatown Mall coffee shop job one day and finding him hired as my manager. This ruled, as over the course of a summer, Griffin proceeded to school me on Ethiopian blends and the Easter Monkeys. With two mixtapes (that I still have) and numerous conversations, I got a grad class in Cleveland ugh-rock history. Prisonshake created some of the better records in Clevo underground rock history, which is definitely saying something. But Griffin also went on to release loads of cool records through his label Scat, including introducing the world to Guided By Voices. As such, here’s a portion of my book that got cut (well, a wee little made it into the tome), with Griffin giving a feral dog’s eye view of Cleveland, OH gutter rock, circa late 1970s-90s:

Scat Records, now based in St. Louis, was started in Cleveland in 1989 by Robert Griffin, mainly as a way to release Prisonshake records. Griffin’s amazing musical taste and attention to packaging hovered at a lofty height from the early Prisonshake productions through the early Guided By Voices albums he later released. But should you be lucky enough to scrounge up some Prisonshake records, don’t expect scrunchy, scratchy, minute-long indie rock. Griffins’ slightly varying lineups—anchored by him and singer Doug Enkler—boiled a Faces-styled barroom ribald with Enkler’s teen start in trashcore bands the Offbeats and Squelch and Griffin’s pre-Prisonshake art-core band Spike in Vain, an equal to contemporaries Big Black and Scratch Acid.

Around the time when the ‘80s and ‘90s did the baton hand-off, Griffin produced a literate, S&M-bent fanzine called Scat Seven that included a 7” record. And his band habits stretch back to 1979 when, still in his early teens, Griffin headed Cleveland’s earliest hardcore bands, the Decapitators, and later the Dark.

“A good part of the Decapitators’ sets were Electric Eels, Pagans, and Dead Boys covers,” says Griffin. “Judging by how many bands used to cover ‘Agitated,’ we weren’t the only ones who’d learned to play at the feet of nobodies. Bear in mind that the majority of the Eels’ and Pagans’ recordings had not even been released yet. Age was a problem into getting gigs, not that there were many to be had, even though we were being managed by Mike Hudson of the Pagans and Terminal Records. The message we got was that we’d arrived too late for the party. The Drome (legendary Cleveland new wave record shop that birthed the label of the same name) had closed, many of the movers and shakers had moved away, mostly to NYC, and the Kneecappers were getting reggae-fied on some songs. So we and a lot of other Cle punk/hardcore bands, wound up playing mostly in Kent or Akron in 1982. Many great shows and times were had, but that was all about hardcore, DIY, and a much more political thing. Once the Lakefront in Cleveland started booking punk bands, there was a bit of a split, with the Cle contingent being more about getting wasted in the parking lot and scamming your way into the bar for free. The reality was more complex than that, but this was how a lot of people viewed it then.

“It’s important not to underestimate the atmosphere of Cleveland in those days. So much of it was empty, abandoned, or destroyed. One developed a root understanding of what inertia can do. Lots of us spent many joyful hours exploring abandoned warehouses in the Flats (the sooty industrial wasteland right on the Lake Erie shore) and elsewhere. These places were rarely guarded, only occasionally locked. It was like entering another world. Mike Mellen’s photos on old Pere Ubu jackets capture it perfectly. I think back on it and the whole thing seems like a setting for a Philip K. Dick novel.

“But from 1890 to 1970, Cleveland was among the ten most populous cities in the U.S. Then it emptied out, bigtime. All the tycoons of industry (Carnegie, Rockefeller, others) that had made Cleveland their home left behind museums, libraries, concert halls. In addition to several universities, there was also the late Cooper School of Art, as well as the Cleveland Institute of Art and Cleveland Institute of Music. There was all this infrastructure. It wasn’t hard to find out about interesting things or ideas in Cleveland, but it was hard to get anyone to care about it. Cleveland had all the trappings of a major metropolitan city, but a factory-worker mindset.

“But it’s also the case that there were always freaks going their own way outside of that infrastructure. People in bands also participated in happenings at the Cleveland Public Theatre (vaudeville, performance art), there was Junkstock (bands and poets performing all day in a junkyard) and always a few fly-by-night places where weird shit went down. You could get away with just about anything—just don’t expect anyone to pat you on the back for it.

“I was always reminded of the scene’s insignificance while growing up, just in everyday ways. You went to the ‘import’ section to buy Pere Ubu albums, even if they were domestic pressings, never mind them being a local band! I went to a pretty massive high school, but no one there had even heard of the Dead Boys, even though they were on a major label. Pere Ubu was off to Europe all the time it seemed, but in Cleveland they barely scraped the public’s consciousness. The Electric Eels’ first 45 came out four years after they broke up, and on a British label! It doesn’t give you much hope of making an impact. It’s easier to say it’s hopeless. We traveled a good bit actually, four U.S. tours…. But I suppose the thinking would be along the lines of, hey if you’re going to fail at least you won’t look stupid for it, because it wasn’t like you were trying to be successful….

“[Eventually], there were a lot more bands and wider distribution capability. Everybody who played hardcore in 1984 was playing something else the next year and continued to grow over time. Peoples’ tastes had always been pretty broad (why did so many people have SPK’s Leichenschrei album?), but it didn’t manifest until people really got tired of thrashing… and got a little better at their instruments. By the time Prisonshake started playing regularly in 1987, it wasn’t a punk scene, but more a general underground rock scene, even though it still had a lot of the same people at its core. It was still a party scene too, especially in the summers. There were softball games every Sunday down in [a corner of] the Flats. Dinking away the previous night’s hangover sometimes took precedent over fielding balls or being ready to hit.

“Over time, people were gathering at more and more places and it was less often about music. By the early ‘90s, the scene was bigger, it became more spread out in terms of locales; but it was also more watered-down. That us-against-the-world perspective was withering. And of course more of the bands sucked than ever before. I see Nirvana’s success as the critical strike against rock-based underground music, after which all the strains further calcified into little genre fiefdoms, with a mostly castrated “indie rock” floating on top, with that strain declining in quality to the lame new wave rehash we have today.

“Looking back, it’s more obvious that it had something to do with reconciling the punk rock experience with the older rock that people grew up on or were just discovering or reconsidering, then taking that somewhere of your own…. I think a lot of the people who came up in the hardcore era learned the lesson pretty well—fuck society, be yourself, write your own ticket.

“Originators are usually more interesting and wide-ranging than the genres they subsequently inspire or fortify. The mid-to-late 80s were a good time because these nowhere bands were going off in so many directions at once that it took a while for the genre tags to show up. I don’t think a genre could go unnamed for more than a week in the internet age. So you could consider music more on its own merits for a little longer than today, because as soon as there’s a name for it, assumptions follow.”

10 Great Older Cleveland 45s That Aren’t By The Pagans, Electric Eels, or Pere Ubu – by Robert Griffin

Neptune’s Car – “Baking Bread”/”Lucky Charms” (Koolie)
The Chronics – “Test Tube Baby” / “Calling All Cardinals” (Nuclear)
X-X – “A” / “You’re Full of Shit” (Drome)
Modern Art Studio – “Dear Dad” +3 (Mid-America Sound)
Polystyrene Jazz Band – “Drano in Your Veins” / “Circus Highlights” (Mustard)
Wild Giraffes – “New Era” / “Dreams Don’t Last” (Neck)
Clocks – “Tick Tock Man” / “Confidentially, Renee” (Terminal)
Defnics – “51%” “Hello from Berlin” (Terminal)
Starvation Army – New Way to Burn EP (St. Valentine)
New Salem Witch Hunters – “Falling” / “I Wanna Be Your Lover” (St. Valentine)

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ERIC DAVIDSON first got paid 10 bucks for a Lou Reed record review in 1989. Then made nearly 100 times that as singer for longtime Columbus, OH punk band, New Bomb Turks, releasing van-loads of noise and touring all over the globe; keeping the freelance writing gigs going in between for Alternative Press, Village Voice, Seattle Stranger, Cleveland Scene, Agitreader.com, and many others. And after three years as Associate Editor at CMJ, he’s recently released his first book We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001 (Backbeat Books). He currently resides in Brooklyn, NY, but his heart is flopping around the floor of a dive somewhere in Cleveland…

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Prisonshake photo courtesy nextbestrecords.com, from a show at the Summit in Columbus in 2008

Handsome gentleman, frenetic front man and now, published author, Eric Davidson of the New Bomb Turks has put together a bunch of cool ass shit about a bunch of cool ass bands.

A description of the book in his words via an interview he did with Chunklet

It’s a bunch of pages bound by glue and shit. But seriously folks, it’s basically a rundown of that strata of trash punk bands and their indie labels from the 1990s (mostly, with some late-80s antecedents) who were neither swept up by the “alternative rock boom” or the Green Day/Offspring neo-punk trend; nor were all-out noise fringe-sters. Just hard-working rock’n'roll bands that basically took their re-lit on fire sounds from 50s/60s raw roots, 70s punk, and kind of eye-rolled the leftover macho hardcore dogmatics. Ended up getting sideways validation when that “neo-garage” trend of the early 2000s finally hit (White Stripes, Hives, Strokes, Jet, Donnas, etc.). And loads of my pals and I in said strata noticed that the major mag press for that trend was either only mentioning the old blues and classic rock these new bands liked, or treated it like a fad — when bands like Dwarves, Supersuckers, Mummies, Devil Dogs, Oblivians, NBT, Bassholes, Jon Spencer, Gories, Cynics, Didjits, Billy Childish and many many others were doing the updated raw roots garage thing for about a decade; many still doing it. And with bands in this tome — like the Mummies, NBT, Oblivians, Gories, Rip Offs and others — reuniting of late, it’s become apparent that these bands have had a slow-boiling influence for newer bands like Black Lips, King Khan & BBQ Show, Jay Reatard, Vivian Girls, Human Eye, Times New Viking, and many more…

Yes, there’s basically a Death of a Salesman “Attention must be paid” vibe; and my band, New Bomb Turks, is in it a bunch. But it’s not a memoir or whatever. In the end, it’s mostly just loads of wild stories and insider low-rung music biz myth-busting (and around 100 rare fliers/pix/ephemera) that I think would make a great read for any music fan, even if you don’t think the Sons of Hercules are underrated.

Eric will be doing a reading/q&a session on July 9th at the Wexner Center and on the following day he will be rocking faces and shakin booties with The New Bomb Turks at the fifth annual Parking Lot Blowout with the likes of Scrawl and Gibson Bros.

Buy it here or wherever better books are sold and get a twenty song MP3 download, free with every copy.