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and Mallchok were hangin' an' slummin' at Pirate's Cove. Dead
Boys were playing every friggin' Friday or was it Saturday nite
that July or was it August summer? Pere Ubu held court Sunday
evenings. Stiv threw his mic into the crowd and it landed at
_____'s feet. ______ unhooked it and pocketed the SM57. Stiv
reeled the mic cable back up to the stage only to find his "favorite"
57 mic ripped off. Pouty boy left the stage. Show over for Stiv,
much to his bandmates dismay. After all another mic had been
readily made available to the lad, but noooo0... Cheetah strummed
a few bars of something and we all drank minus pouty boy. Post
Script: Floyd your memory is stellar. We too were at the Dead
Boys show when Ig showed up for the finale. It was too hard
to pry ourselves away from the bar but we viewed from afar.
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Before
I describe the Dead Boys, let me wander back to the beginning
of seventies punk, for me...
Living in Providence, Rhode Island, where my two best buds were
attending Rhode Island School of Design, I was in a musical
crisis....
Sated on the overblown pomposity of "art rock" that I had been
soaked in for the last decade, I was looking for a way back
into rock & roll. Bruce Springsteen had helped; but I wasn't
real pleased with the direction he started in with Born To Run.
In the meantime, my fellow art rock friends - and the great
majority of the art students at America's most sophisticated
college of art, I might add -- had drifted now into the "fusion"
jazz that was so popular in the mid-1970s, among the "musical
sophisticates" of the time. Man, was that stuff bad. Super-over-indulgent
instrumental masturbation by a bunch of preening middle-aged
former high school marching band members who were regretting
that they had never rocked....
BUT: Something was happening. I remember reading a brief paragraph
in the Providence Journal about an incident in England, where
some guy named "Johnny Rotten" had "gobbed" at an airport and
told a journalist on television that the queen was a "f***ing
rotter." Evidently, he had a rock & roll band that was shaking
up the scene in London, home of the aging dinosaurs of the British
Invasion and their bastard stepchildren.
Well, one fine day I strolled into the local record shop, as
usual on the prowl for something new, and there it was: The
garishly colored, graphically vomitous, first record by England's
"Sex Pistols." $3.98, it was, and an hour later I had a whole
new music scene to play with.
One purchase led to another, and soon I had a growing collection
of "punk rock" records.
Live rock & roll came alive for me once again. Seeing bands
like Elvis Costello & The Attractions, the Ramones, the Clash,
the Stranglers, the Damned, Patti Smith, the Talking Heads,
the Jam, Devo, Blondie, etc. in small clubs was a joy.
And then, home for Christmas (1977? 1978?), I caught note of
a show scheduled for Christmas eve (?) at Cleveland's world-famous
(?) Agora nightclub.... A twin bill of Northern Ohio bands:
DEVO and the DEAD BOYS.
I can close my eyes and smell the sweaty, smoky, acrid stench
of a packed nightclub on a very cold night... Entering, I saw
a couple of moronic bouncers ejecting a girl from the club.
In tears, heavy mascara running every which way like a prescient
Tammy Faye Baker, she proceeded to vomit at the curb in front
of the place... Something was up here.
Devo blew the place away. Now HERE was art rock.... Dressed
in their classic flowerpot hats and industrial yellow jumpsuits,
Mark Mothersbaugh at one point sang from a playpen laid out
on the plastic-covered stage. Ah, alternative rock is alive
and well in Cleveland, thought this observer...
And then: THE DEAD BOYS. Dark, glowering, focused like a razor,
they came out and proceeded to pump through the material on
Young, Loud & Snotty. No politics, no socialism, just furious
Stooge-like energy and a sound like bombs exploding onstage.
These
weren't disaffected New York art intellectuals; no sir. These
were Cleveland boys. The only thing they were serious about
was wringing every possible watt out of their marshall stacks.
And they weren't pretty, either. Jimmy Zero looked just like
the kind of guy who every mother was terrified that her daugher
would come home with. Cigarette dangling dangerously from the
corner of his mouth. Half in, half out of the dark. Cheetah
equally menacing. Johnny "Blitz" Madansky literally thug-like....
Soon to meet the blade of a knife in his adopted hometown of
New York City... I picked up some fills that night that I would
carry into the tail end of the Backdoor Men's brief history...
And Bators. As in command of that small stage as Mick Jagger
had ever been of any stage, anywhere. At the end of the last
encore, he pulled his trick. Looping the microphone up over
a beam in the low Agora ceiling, he then wrapped its cord around
his neck and proceeded to hoist all (maybe) 120 pounds of himself
into the air. Yes, he was hanging. FOR REAL???? We can never
know, though his roadie seemed to panic and rushed to cut the
cord and bring him down.
Maybe NOT real... He had enough presence of mind to conclude
the act by dropping his drawers and thrusting his skinny a**
to the audience, balls dangling, and a schlong that was SURPRISINGLY
BIG waving between his bony knees.
This was punk, Cleveland style. Brutal, humorous, unpretentious,
apolitical.
This was John Belushi's favorite band.
Of course, both Belushi and Bators are together somewhere now,
I suppose. Most assuredly in a place that's very, very hot.
Kind of like the Agora on that winter night, almost a quarter
of a century ago.
(Anonymous) |
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I
recall seeing the Dead Boys many times in their heyday, the
bank, popshop old agora, the deadboys/devo show that ended in
a literal battle of the bands at the pirates cove. But the Deadboys
moment engraved in my brain the deepest, and I hope someone
in webland can confirm this, because I've been accused of making
it up.
Thirty years of pot smoking has taken its toll on this old brain,
but I'm sure it was at the old agora, when iggy pop joined the
dead boys on stage for an encore of search and destroy, {insert
ahahahaehe ala homer simpson] what a rock and roll moment that
was, at; the end of the song Stiv and Iggy were chanting destroy!
destroy! destroy, as they backed up against the back wall of
the agora stage , they both slid down the back wall till they
were sitting in a single white spotlight, groaning destroy...
destroy...destroy..Ig turns to Stiv and says "ya know Stiv i
wouldn't give a shit if all these people here died in there
sleep". Stiv goes "me either"> lights out. True story.
On a much lighter note although I saw the Dead Boys a lot back
than, though I only approached Stiv once, in my awe of him I
couldn't think of anything to say but could not let the moment
pass without saying something. As lame as it sounds I could
only think to say "hey man, ya know what time it is?" Stiv calmly
replied as if I was the most clueless person on earth,"punk
rockers don't wear watches." I know it was a lame question,
I can only respond by saying I've never wore a watch since then.
(Floyd) |
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Floyd,
as gone as you were, you were absolutely right! Iggy was with
Stiv Bators for The Dead Boys, Agora encore. Stan Townhouse
and I were right up in front of the stage. We heard Iggy was
performing at Pirate's Cove that night, but we went to the Agora
for the Dead Boys, instead. This dude in a featherd boa and
girlie-looking, big sunglasses comes out on stage behind Bators.
Stiv turns back to look and seemed at first like, "What the
fuck?!!!" Then realises that it was Iggy. How cool could it
be for them to sing together on The Stooges, Search and Destroy?
Way Cool!!!
(Waldo - The Baloney Heads)
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This
was at Trammps, the famous club on Chester Avenue that kept
burning down (it was also known earlier as the Viking Saloon).
Baloney Heads and Stiv Bators were hanging out there one night.
Except Bators was really hanging out when he came out of the
girls room, with a big grin on his face. He was ejected from
the club for exposing his penis.
(anonymous)
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It
wasn't until after that spectacular Dead Boys concert at the
old Agora where Stiv Bators hung himself from a ceiling crossbeam
that I realized that drummer Johnny Blitz was John Madansky,
the guy who'd sat next to me in study hall at Benedictine High
School. John was an upperclassman and I didn't know him, and
therefore had no idea of what musical projects he was involved
in after classes. But it just goes to show you that some pretty
cool stuff can come out of a
Catholic education.
(Tony Morgan) |
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