When Rocket From The Tombs & Devo shook punk's 2nd state ...
Jul 6, 2019 23:31:53 GMT
cryptoflovecraft, DrKrippen, and 2 more like this
Post by petrolino on Jul 6, 2019 23:31:53 GMT
Punk Rumblings in Cleveland & Akron
The Ohio Blizzard of 1978
'Amphetamine' - Peter Laughner & Friends
Rocket From The Tombs
'So Cold' - Rocket From The Tombs
"They were together for a matter of months, never recorded an album and played to only a few hundred people. Why then were Rocket from the Tombs hailed as “the original legendary underground rock band”? That’s what the critic Lester Bangs called the American proto-punks, who were perhaps the most self-destructive group ever to smash a six-string on stage.
RFTT formed in Cleveland, Ohio on 16 June 1974, an unlikely assembly of music journalists, club owners and amateur musicians. They also rocked harder and louder than most of their more acclaimed successors could ever have dreamed of. RFTT have acquired a cult international status out of all proportion to the amount of music they made and the length of their lifespan. They existed for little more than a year, with their “classic” lineup – Crocus Behemoth (the nom de plume of David Thomas), Peter Laughner, Cheetah Chrome (Gene O’Connor), Johnny “Madman” Madansky and Craig Bell – lasting just eight months. Only word of mouth, a furious trafficking of bootlegs and the reputations forged by the groups formed when RFTT split made their afterlife possible.
As Thomas said, “Rocket from the Tombs was always doomed. Everything from Cleveland was doomed. Rocket from the Tombs is totally inconsequential and irrelevant. Pere Ubu is totally inconsequential and irrelevant. That is the power of Cleveland. Embrace, my brothers, the utter futility of ambition and desire. Your only reward is a genuine shot at being the best. The caveat is that no one but your brothers will ever know it. That’s the deal we agreed to.”
In the mid-70s, Cleveland’s underground scene was dominated by cover bands, and RFTT were rather more than odd men out, with their songs about Jimmy Doolittle’s bombing raid on Tokyo, the awfulness of life, and Laughner’s bleak confessional Ain’t It Fun (“Ain’t it fun when you get so high, well, that you just can’t come”). There were covers – the Stooges, the Velvet Underground – but “this was one of the sticking points in the original band,” Thomas told the Village Voice in 2011. “I hated covers. Peter loved covers.”
Eventually, in February 1975, they succeeded in convincing a friend at the local radio station WMMS to broadcast a tape of their demos. The response from listeners was huge, and at their next gig they had their biggest audience ever. In July, they secured an opening slot for Television and Patti Smith at Cleveland’s Piccadilly club. RFTT’s chaotic existence was already in doubt by then, thanks largely to Thomas’s onstage volatility and Laughner’s increasing drug use (which, combined with alcohol abuse, led to his death from pancreatitis in 1977, at the age of 24). The Piccadilly show merely exacerbated the problem. O’Connor and Bell fought in the dressing room, and two other members dropped acid before going on. During the opening song, Sonic Reducer, O’Connor toppled over backwards. He carried on, playing on his back, and “not missing a note”, he later claimed. The show was a disaster, and resulted in a huge dust-up afterwards. Television guitarist Richard Lloyd said after the show: “We were walking around after soundcheck saying, ‘That’s one scary group!’ And I was saying to myself, ‘I want to be in that band.’” (He would get his wish many years later, joining a reunited version of the group in 2003, in place of Laughner.)
A farewell Rockets show was organised for early August 1975 at the Viking Saloon, but the show was even more disastrous than the one a month earlier. Halfway through, O’Connor invited a friend on stage to sing, much to Thomas’s annoyance. He stormed off, and Laughner quickly followed suit after yet another fight broke out on stage. By the end of the gig, only Bell was left, playing on his own. He put down his bass, and that was the end of Rocket from the Tombs. A whimper of a finish for a band that produced such an almighty sound."
RFTT formed in Cleveland, Ohio on 16 June 1974, an unlikely assembly of music journalists, club owners and amateur musicians. They also rocked harder and louder than most of their more acclaimed successors could ever have dreamed of. RFTT have acquired a cult international status out of all proportion to the amount of music they made and the length of their lifespan. They existed for little more than a year, with their “classic” lineup – Crocus Behemoth (the nom de plume of David Thomas), Peter Laughner, Cheetah Chrome (Gene O’Connor), Johnny “Madman” Madansky and Craig Bell – lasting just eight months. Only word of mouth, a furious trafficking of bootlegs and the reputations forged by the groups formed when RFTT split made their afterlife possible.
As Thomas said, “Rocket from the Tombs was always doomed. Everything from Cleveland was doomed. Rocket from the Tombs is totally inconsequential and irrelevant. Pere Ubu is totally inconsequential and irrelevant. That is the power of Cleveland. Embrace, my brothers, the utter futility of ambition and desire. Your only reward is a genuine shot at being the best. The caveat is that no one but your brothers will ever know it. That’s the deal we agreed to.”
In the mid-70s, Cleveland’s underground scene was dominated by cover bands, and RFTT were rather more than odd men out, with their songs about Jimmy Doolittle’s bombing raid on Tokyo, the awfulness of life, and Laughner’s bleak confessional Ain’t It Fun (“Ain’t it fun when you get so high, well, that you just can’t come”). There were covers – the Stooges, the Velvet Underground – but “this was one of the sticking points in the original band,” Thomas told the Village Voice in 2011. “I hated covers. Peter loved covers.”
Eventually, in February 1975, they succeeded in convincing a friend at the local radio station WMMS to broadcast a tape of their demos. The response from listeners was huge, and at their next gig they had their biggest audience ever. In July, they secured an opening slot for Television and Patti Smith at Cleveland’s Piccadilly club. RFTT’s chaotic existence was already in doubt by then, thanks largely to Thomas’s onstage volatility and Laughner’s increasing drug use (which, combined with alcohol abuse, led to his death from pancreatitis in 1977, at the age of 24). The Piccadilly show merely exacerbated the problem. O’Connor and Bell fought in the dressing room, and two other members dropped acid before going on. During the opening song, Sonic Reducer, O’Connor toppled over backwards. He carried on, playing on his back, and “not missing a note”, he later claimed. The show was a disaster, and resulted in a huge dust-up afterwards. Television guitarist Richard Lloyd said after the show: “We were walking around after soundcheck saying, ‘That’s one scary group!’ And I was saying to myself, ‘I want to be in that band.’” (He would get his wish many years later, joining a reunited version of the group in 2003, in place of Laughner.)
A farewell Rockets show was organised for early August 1975 at the Viking Saloon, but the show was even more disastrous than the one a month earlier. Halfway through, O’Connor invited a friend on stage to sing, much to Thomas’s annoyance. He stormed off, and Laughner quickly followed suit after yet another fight broke out on stage. By the end of the gig, only Bell was left, playing on his own. He put down his bass, and that was the end of Rocket from the Tombs. A whimper of a finish for a band that produced such an almighty sound."
- Alex Flood, The Guardian
"Anyone up on their history of punk rock has heard of them, but relatively few have actually heard the music they made. And this is one of the main reasons Rocket from the Tombs is one of the most mythologized bands ever. Active for less than a year-- from winter 1974 to late summer '75-- RFTT released only one single during its brief lifespan, but its legacy was magnified by the two bands that sprung from its ashes: the scuzzy Dead Boys and arty, Beefheartian new wavers Pere Ubu.
Ubu's Dave Thomas (who performed under the name Crocus Behemoth) started the band, later adding future Dead Boys Gene O'Connor (aka Cheetah Chrome) and John Madansky (aka Johnny Blitz).
Ubu's Dave Thomas (who performed under the name Crocus Behemoth) started the band, later adding future Dead Boys Gene O'Connor (aka Cheetah Chrome) and John Madansky (aka Johnny Blitz).
But the man most responsible for the band's mythic stature is Peter Laughner, a hard-living, Lou Reed-worshipping music journalist who wrote for the Lester Bangs-edited Creem magazine. He was also a promising songwriter (over the years his songs have been covered by Mission of Burma and Guns n' Roses, among many others) and a searing guitarist of Tom Verlaine-caliber. In fact, he was being groomed to replace Richard Lloyd in Television when he died of pancreatitis in 1977; years of constant drug abuse had simply worn out his body. And we all know what an untimely death means for an artist mythic stature, and as Laugher's rep grew so did that of RFTT. Of course, it didn't hurt that Pere Ubu released a series of excellent albums in the late seventies and early eighties.
A lot of the discussion surrounding RFTT focuses on their milieu. I wasn't there, so I can't say I have firsthand knowledge, but my impressions, based on what I've read and heard, is that Cleveland in 1974 was an industrial wasteland and a cultural desert, all mangled metal and shattered glass sprawled upon the rusty shores of a lake that was so polluted it periodically caught fire. Just ask anyone who was there at the time-- they're almost proud of how shitty it was. And Rocket from the Tombs perfectly embodied the bleakness of the city. Perhaps no other rock band has embodied (and thus, made commented upon) its surroundings better. It's something more akin to early 90s gansta rap than anything seen in rock."
- Jason Nickey, Pitchfork
"Neil Giraldo is a Clevelander through-and-through. Which explains why he is so nervous about his Indians World Series anthem "Liftin' the Curse of the Rock.''
"When I came up with that title,'' said Giraldo, calling Wednesday morning, the day after the Tribe's 9-3 loss in Game 6, from Miami, Florida, where he and wife Pat Benatar have a series of gigs, "I thought wouldn't it be great to write that song? "And then yesterday, when they started losing, I thought, 'I hope I didn't put a curse on the curse!'' he exclaimed. The fear scared the - well, you can guess - out of him, Giraldo said, laughing.
The song, rousing and rollicking, and told from the vantage point of a couple of Cleveland Italian kids who idolized fellow Italian Rocky Colavito, cites the curse that reportedly arose when the Rock was traded to Detroit in 1960 for Harvey Kuenn. Best of all, it was recorded by Giraldo and his old Cleveland band mates Frank Amato, Gary Jones and Rod Psyka in Thrills and Company, the group he was in before leaving for New York 1977 to join Rick Derringer's band.
"When I came up with that title,'' said Giraldo, calling Wednesday morning, the day after the Tribe's 9-3 loss in Game 6, from Miami, Florida, where he and wife Pat Benatar have a series of gigs, "I thought wouldn't it be great to write that song? "And then yesterday, when they started losing, I thought, 'I hope I didn't put a curse on the curse!'' he exclaimed. The fear scared the - well, you can guess - out of him, Giraldo said, laughing.
The song, rousing and rollicking, and told from the vantage point of a couple of Cleveland Italian kids who idolized fellow Italian Rocky Colavito, cites the curse that reportedly arose when the Rock was traded to Detroit in 1960 for Harvey Kuenn. Best of all, it was recorded by Giraldo and his old Cleveland band mates Frank Amato, Gary Jones and Rod Psyka in Thrills and Company, the group he was in before leaving for New York 1977 to join Rick Derringer's band.
"It was a great little band, but we never made it,'' Giraldo said. "We went to California, tried, came back and failed. For years and years, I felt like I needed to do something for them to help them. They stayed in Cleveland, had to get their day jobs, and I always felt like I wanted to give back.''"
- Chuck Yarborough, The Plain Dealer
Youngstown, 1970
Electric Eels
The Arena in Cleveland, 1972
Mirrors
Dixie Electric Disco, Parma, 1977
Pere Ubu
Carnival performers in Ohio, 1979
Dead Boys
'Heart Of Darkness' - Pere Ubu / 'Son Of Sam' - Dead Boys
..
Devo
Devo performing at Kent State University, 1973
"On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd of unarmed Kent State University students protesting the US military bombing of Cambodia. An art student named Gerald Casale was there among the chaos, running to escape the miasma of tear gas and bullets as two of his friends, Alison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, succumbed to gunshots from an M-1 rifle. The incident, which left a total of four dead and nine injured, would go down in history as a cultural loss of innocence, a particularly harrowing example of American political and social unrest during the Vietnam War. It also marked the birth of Devo, the band and multi-disciplinary project that Casale would start with a cast of friends impacted by the shooting in the months that followed.
“In the spring of 1970, I was what might be described as a smart, politically aware hippie,” Casale, who was drafted but obtained a medical deferment, would later tell Noisey. “May 4, 1970 changed all of that in the nanosecond of gunfire. I was traumatized beyond description. It probably qualified as a nervous breakdown. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!!"
With campus shut down until the fall and nowhere to go, Casale and friends would decamp to the Akron home of Mark Mothersbaugh, a part-time Kent State art student whose graffiti art had caught Casale’s attention. Parsing through the aftermath, the pair began collaborating, drawing on Dada and other Interwar art movements to create bizarro, disconcerting takes on agitprop posters, 50s ad graphics, and religious pamphlets. They also started playing music—Casale on bass, Mothersbaugh vocalizing over an early Moog synth—hoping to capture the sound of things falling apart.
Even before the shootings, Casale says he’d felt American society regressing. He even had a name for the phenomenon—“devolution,” or “devo” for short—an art and literature concept he’d conceived with classmate and poet Bob Lewis, who also played in the band for a brief stint. It was a response, Casale says, to the failed promise of utopian progress peddled by post-WWII politicians and consumer culture. But what began as an in-joke, fodder for late night discussions and Casale’s graduate work as an art student, took on a new gravity and urgency in the wake of the Kent State shootings.
“When they shot and killed people for protesting, we were like, ‘Wow, I guess you can’t really change things like that, because if it gets too real they’re going to stop you,’” Mothersbaugh writes in the forward to Devo: The Brand / Devo Unmasked, a new double book and retrospective penned with Casale featuring never-before-seen photos, artwork, and revelations from their personal archives. “So how do you change things? Subversion: that’s how. Who does it best? Madison Avenue; they get people to buy things that are bad for them every day...That’s what we wanted to do, use subversion to sell people things that they don’t know they want.”
Though Devo’s synth-heavy sound and driving hooks often see the band billed as a New Wave act, the group occupies a more singular place in pop music’s trajectory, fusing the radical electronic experimentation of Kraftwerk and Bob Moog with punk’s wiry intensity. Some tracks, like “Whip It” and “Beautiful World,” were pop Trojan horses, with their deadpan critiques of American conformity and consumerism subverting infectious riffs and rhythms. The band’s deconstructed 1978 rendition of The Rolling Stone’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” was less a cover than a “correction,” as the band described it, bewildering Mick Jagger and television audiences alike with its clanking, mechanical samples and Mothersbaugh’s arhythmic yelps.
As Devo settled into a five person act—rounded out by Alan Myers on drums and two Bobs (Bob Mothersbaugh, Mark’s brother, on guitar, and Bob Casale, Gerald’s brother, on rhythm guitar and keyboard)—it started earning attention beyond its core Midwestern fanbase. Co-opting the logic of advertising, they laid the template for the multimedia emphasis that’s de rigeur for musical artists today, with theatrical live shows, narrative music videos, custom merchandise, substantive talking points, wild costumes, and branding, branding, branding. Still, Devo continued to lampoon everything from sex to religion to the corporate culture supporting the band itself, eventually earning the band the censorship of MTV, the scorn of the press, and, according the group, the ire of its record label, Warner Brothers."
“In the spring of 1970, I was what might be described as a smart, politically aware hippie,” Casale, who was drafted but obtained a medical deferment, would later tell Noisey. “May 4, 1970 changed all of that in the nanosecond of gunfire. I was traumatized beyond description. It probably qualified as a nervous breakdown. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!!"
With campus shut down until the fall and nowhere to go, Casale and friends would decamp to the Akron home of Mark Mothersbaugh, a part-time Kent State art student whose graffiti art had caught Casale’s attention. Parsing through the aftermath, the pair began collaborating, drawing on Dada and other Interwar art movements to create bizarro, disconcerting takes on agitprop posters, 50s ad graphics, and religious pamphlets. They also started playing music—Casale on bass, Mothersbaugh vocalizing over an early Moog synth—hoping to capture the sound of things falling apart.
Even before the shootings, Casale says he’d felt American society regressing. He even had a name for the phenomenon—“devolution,” or “devo” for short—an art and literature concept he’d conceived with classmate and poet Bob Lewis, who also played in the band for a brief stint. It was a response, Casale says, to the failed promise of utopian progress peddled by post-WWII politicians and consumer culture. But what began as an in-joke, fodder for late night discussions and Casale’s graduate work as an art student, took on a new gravity and urgency in the wake of the Kent State shootings.
“When they shot and killed people for protesting, we were like, ‘Wow, I guess you can’t really change things like that, because if it gets too real they’re going to stop you,’” Mothersbaugh writes in the forward to Devo: The Brand / Devo Unmasked, a new double book and retrospective penned with Casale featuring never-before-seen photos, artwork, and revelations from their personal archives. “So how do you change things? Subversion: that’s how. Who does it best? Madison Avenue; they get people to buy things that are bad for them every day...That’s what we wanted to do, use subversion to sell people things that they don’t know they want.”
Though Devo’s synth-heavy sound and driving hooks often see the band billed as a New Wave act, the group occupies a more singular place in pop music’s trajectory, fusing the radical electronic experimentation of Kraftwerk and Bob Moog with punk’s wiry intensity. Some tracks, like “Whip It” and “Beautiful World,” were pop Trojan horses, with their deadpan critiques of American conformity and consumerism subverting infectious riffs and rhythms. The band’s deconstructed 1978 rendition of The Rolling Stone’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” was less a cover than a “correction,” as the band described it, bewildering Mick Jagger and television audiences alike with its clanking, mechanical samples and Mothersbaugh’s arhythmic yelps.
As Devo settled into a five person act—rounded out by Alan Myers on drums and two Bobs (Bob Mothersbaugh, Mark’s brother, on guitar, and Bob Casale, Gerald’s brother, on rhythm guitar and keyboard)—it started earning attention beyond its core Midwestern fanbase. Co-opting the logic of advertising, they laid the template for the multimedia emphasis that’s de rigeur for musical artists today, with theatrical live shows, narrative music videos, custom merchandise, substantive talking points, wild costumes, and branding, branding, branding. Still, Devo continued to lampoon everything from sex to religion to the corporate culture supporting the band itself, eventually earning the band the censorship of MTV, the scorn of the press, and, according the group, the ire of its record label, Warner Brothers."
- Andrea Dominick, VICE
"My younger brother Jim (Mothersbaugh) was the first drummer in Devo. We thought we were an art movement. We thought we were going to spread the good news of things falling apart and comment on what we saw as evidence of the unnatural state of humans on the planet, and the devolved activities of human beings. We were looking for sounds because we were already kinda bored with rock & roll, which was popular music, but we didn’t want to be a band anyhow. We wanted to be more like a theater group.
Jim found a love in electronics, and I asked him to help me figure out how to get V-2 rockets and mortar blasts and ray guns and hypnotic kicking noises and factory sounds. He built a drum kit – I can’t say that it was the first electronic drum kit, I’m sure there were probably other people experimenting with that stuff – but he built a full kit. He had a day job at a muffler shop and he built it out of tailpipes that were bent into the shape of a framework that he could mount practice drum heads on that were just little, flat, rubbery things that you could play and they wouldn’t make a sound. He got a full set of those and then attached acoustic guitar pickups to it and then ran those into the things that guitar players would run their guitar into, like fuzz tones and Echoplexes and wah-wah pedals and ring modulators.
It was the most incredible sound. If you listen to Devo recordings from that era, like our first film The Truth About De-Evolution, you get an idea of what it was like when it was tamed in a recording studio, but when we played on stage he was like a monster. An electronic, outer-space caveman or something. It was pretty amazing."
Jim found a love in electronics, and I asked him to help me figure out how to get V-2 rockets and mortar blasts and ray guns and hypnotic kicking noises and factory sounds. He built a drum kit – I can’t say that it was the first electronic drum kit, I’m sure there were probably other people experimenting with that stuff – but he built a full kit. He had a day job at a muffler shop and he built it out of tailpipes that were bent into the shape of a framework that he could mount practice drum heads on that were just little, flat, rubbery things that you could play and they wouldn’t make a sound. He got a full set of those and then attached acoustic guitar pickups to it and then ran those into the things that guitar players would run their guitar into, like fuzz tones and Echoplexes and wah-wah pedals and ring modulators.
It was the most incredible sound. If you listen to Devo recordings from that era, like our first film The Truth About De-Evolution, you get an idea of what it was like when it was tamed in a recording studio, but when we played on stage he was like a monster. An electronic, outer-space caveman or something. It was pretty amazing."
- Mark Mothersbaugh, Red Bull Music Academy
"I'm from Akron (Ohio) and I've always been a music nut. Even by the time I was four or five, I had Gene Autry records. My parents were pretty interested in music, had some pretty interesting Brazilian music with guitars doing a G7/C7 over and over again- that was always my favorite sound in the world. I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early '50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience. Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.
I was 12 in '55 when rock and roll hit. It just completely transformed me. I was getting into Frank Sinatra before that. But when that hit, it was all over. It was raw. The first rock record I bought was Frankie Lyman and the Teenager's 'Why Do Fools Fall In Love?' The sax solo in the middle was completely inappropriate- it almost sounds like Albert Ayler. But it was lyrical. That was my obsession. I really feel fortunate to have been around then because there have been good and bad years in rock but the best years were '55 to early '61. I got to see Buddy Holly and everybody else.
I took guitar lessons in '58. To find someone to teach you to play rock and roll then was rough. I had to figure it out on my own. A friend showed me an E chord and I figured it out from there. I got an electric guitar (Fender Stratocaster) and a Tremolux Amp in 1961 and that was the turning point in my life. I really idolized Ritchie Valens and saw that he had a Stratocaster so I had to have one. The Tremolux had a vibrato built in. I spent the whole summer of '61 teaching myself to play off the first Ventures album.
I played all through college (Indiana in 1961) but by the time I got there, rock and roll was starting to get pretty sad: Bobby Vinton, Fabian. That drove me into blues. I had a radio program where I played heavy blues with John Lee Hooker, Lightning Hopkins and that kind of thing. Generally, my band played Link Wray, the Ventures, some Duane Eddy just because it was easy to play (though I hated him).
After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz. I started off with the really funky stuff like Ramsey Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Burrell. By '65, I worked myself into hearing a little better and I was up to Jimmy Raney. I had a pretty good ear for it but I've never been able to play it. Compared to rock, it takes a lot of intellect and training to hear that kind of stuff. But Bill Evans' 'Portrait In Jazz' has the same effect on me as a John Lee Hooker record. Then I got into the avant-garde stuff that was just happening then. Ascension and Mediations by Coltrane. I saw him a couple of times around then. I was trying very hard to understand this stuff. A turning point for me was in 1966 when I was in San Francisco. I saw him with Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali. I'm trying to analyze this stuff and figure it out. I'm in the front row and all of a sudden, these two horns are right in my face. I said 'yes, I understand this.' I understood it emotionally. I was trying to analyze it too much. It was just like Howlin' Wolf. Once you arrive at the point that you understand it, the emotional factor is darker than some of the saddest blues stuff. Something I'd recommend to everyone is Lester Young The Alladin Sessions. There's a ballad he does, 'These Foolish Things.' The feeling is resignation beyond sadness, self-pity. That has affected my playing. But I don't have the discipline to play jazz myself. At the time though, I was stupid enough to think I could be a jazz musician.
By the time I went to college, the handwriting was on the wall. The Kingston Trio had come out in '58 and you had Hootenanny shows on TV. That's how it stayed until the English invasion hit. Me and my friends still liked rock and roll. The English groups were a phenomenon for 11-year-old girls- it was like a joke. By the mid-60's, I got into the Rolling Stones and saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and thought 'they can actually play and sing.' The Stones were nasty and ugly and doing songs I was familiar with.
By '65, I was in law school (St. Louis) just out of inertia. I knew that I didn't want to go to Vietnam. I had a band in St. Louis. By then, things that influenced me were the first Stones albums, the first Byrds albums, later the Velvet Underground. When I first heard the V.U. though, I thought it was the worst thing I ever heard- they couldn't play, the guy was trying to sing like Highway 61 Revisted, the drummer had a physical disability. A year later, a friend played me 'Waiting For My Man' over and over and I became a total fanatic. They must have had 20 fans on the face of the earth. The Andy Warhol thing worked for them, otherwise, they would have been on ESP Disk. They were known as a death-rock band."
I was 12 in '55 when rock and roll hit. It just completely transformed me. I was getting into Frank Sinatra before that. But when that hit, it was all over. It was raw. The first rock record I bought was Frankie Lyman and the Teenager's 'Why Do Fools Fall In Love?' The sax solo in the middle was completely inappropriate- it almost sounds like Albert Ayler. But it was lyrical. That was my obsession. I really feel fortunate to have been around then because there have been good and bad years in rock but the best years were '55 to early '61. I got to see Buddy Holly and everybody else.
I took guitar lessons in '58. To find someone to teach you to play rock and roll then was rough. I had to figure it out on my own. A friend showed me an E chord and I figured it out from there. I got an electric guitar (Fender Stratocaster) and a Tremolux Amp in 1961 and that was the turning point in my life. I really idolized Ritchie Valens and saw that he had a Stratocaster so I had to have one. The Tremolux had a vibrato built in. I spent the whole summer of '61 teaching myself to play off the first Ventures album.
I played all through college (Indiana in 1961) but by the time I got there, rock and roll was starting to get pretty sad: Bobby Vinton, Fabian. That drove me into blues. I had a radio program where I played heavy blues with John Lee Hooker, Lightning Hopkins and that kind of thing. Generally, my band played Link Wray, the Ventures, some Duane Eddy just because it was easy to play (though I hated him).
After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz. I started off with the really funky stuff like Ramsey Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Burrell. By '65, I worked myself into hearing a little better and I was up to Jimmy Raney. I had a pretty good ear for it but I've never been able to play it. Compared to rock, it takes a lot of intellect and training to hear that kind of stuff. But Bill Evans' 'Portrait In Jazz' has the same effect on me as a John Lee Hooker record. Then I got into the avant-garde stuff that was just happening then. Ascension and Mediations by Coltrane. I saw him a couple of times around then. I was trying very hard to understand this stuff. A turning point for me was in 1966 when I was in San Francisco. I saw him with Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali. I'm trying to analyze this stuff and figure it out. I'm in the front row and all of a sudden, these two horns are right in my face. I said 'yes, I understand this.' I understood it emotionally. I was trying to analyze it too much. It was just like Howlin' Wolf. Once you arrive at the point that you understand it, the emotional factor is darker than some of the saddest blues stuff. Something I'd recommend to everyone is Lester Young The Alladin Sessions. There's a ballad he does, 'These Foolish Things.' The feeling is resignation beyond sadness, self-pity. That has affected my playing. But I don't have the discipline to play jazz myself. At the time though, I was stupid enough to think I could be a jazz musician.
By the time I went to college, the handwriting was on the wall. The Kingston Trio had come out in '58 and you had Hootenanny shows on TV. That's how it stayed until the English invasion hit. Me and my friends still liked rock and roll. The English groups were a phenomenon for 11-year-old girls- it was like a joke. By the mid-60's, I got into the Rolling Stones and saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and thought 'they can actually play and sing.' The Stones were nasty and ugly and doing songs I was familiar with.
By '65, I was in law school (St. Louis) just out of inertia. I knew that I didn't want to go to Vietnam. I had a band in St. Louis. By then, things that influenced me were the first Stones albums, the first Byrds albums, later the Velvet Underground. When I first heard the V.U. though, I thought it was the worst thing I ever heard- they couldn't play, the guy was trying to sing like Highway 61 Revisted, the drummer had a physical disability. A year later, a friend played me 'Waiting For My Man' over and over and I became a total fanatic. They must have had 20 fans on the face of the earth. The Andy Warhol thing worked for them, otherwise, they would have been on ESP Disk. They were known as a death-rock band."
- Robert Quine, Perfect Sound Forever
Teamsters strike in Akron, 1970
Lux Interior
Columbus, 1973
Chrissie Hynde
Tornado strikes Xenia, 1974
Rachel Sweet
Ohio River in 1977
The Waitresses
Devo perform 'Gut Feeling / Slap Your Mammy' in 1977
