Bob Reuter Music Page's MySpace Blog |

OK here's what I have available to sell

The dinosaur 45 from 1978 - heavy punk attitude features punk photo label by John the mailman "It Might Be Rose" b/w "Rock and Roll Moron" - plain white sleeve $15

Bob reuter "Got Dreaming EP" features "Flashy Graphics", Jungle Fighter" Sucess in New York" and "Jungle Dub ( a blitzed out white boy punk version of dub mixed by myeslf and Domenic Schaeffer) plain white sleeve $10

Bob Reuter "This Much I Know" - first solo cd release 1995 acoustic based singer songwriter kind of stuff - features "It Dont Matter", "Second Hand Smoke" and "Ohio Blue tips" - CD $12

Kamikaze Cowboy, "Hurry Sundown" 1996 CD- $10

Bob Reuter and Kamikaze Cowboy "Down In America" features "After the Money from Mama Was Gone" - 1998 CD $12

Thee Dirty South - features both live and studio stuff done with Jason Rook at Penny Studio - songwriter gets back to rock and roll - Feautres "Top of the Dirty South", "Gothic South" CD - $12

Coming soon...

Bob Reuter's Alley Ghosts - feautring members of the rum Drum Ramblers, 7 Shot Screamers. the Vultures, and Johnny O and the Jerks - stay tuned, it's in the can!

You can contact me at reuterb@hotmail.com or here on this page - spread the word!

4:25 AM

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Thursday, July 31, 2008

bob at jam band night

So I got this spur of the moment gig last weekend at Off Broadway - and times being what they are, I grabbed it for whatever money was involved -

"It's my Job' he'd say, 'I do it for pay, and when it's all over I'd just as soon be on my way!"

Solo gigs are like a little terror for me - I mean, I been doing this shit for a long long time, three quarters of my life...and it can still freak me out - Why? I guess I must be a perfectionist of a weird sort - I'm very particular about how I sound and sometimes as the psycho acoustic blues man, Robert Pete Williams might say, sometimes the humidity or something in the air, can just wreck the tone of a performance - like maybe it rained on Wed and a plane happens to be passing over head and there's a way too many folks in the bar holding glasses of water or something and vibrations just..., I dont know, sometimes my guitar (and this aint no piece o'shit, this things a big Guild with an expensive pick-up in it) sounds...I dont know, like it's made out of sticks or plastic or something and it throws my whole performance sideways. Why? There are a host of reasons - maybe I was just dissed by some totally inappropriate and unobtainable object of my affection and I'm just woundedly sore rather than heartbroken - it gets reflected in what I'm pushing out into the atmosphere...and then there are things that just totally blind side you -things that can not be dealt with by a sane and honest man...This night in question was one of those.

I get to the club and there's like four people in the audience - I'm supposed to play at nine o'clock and it's like twenty till - I was supposed to play to play first and there's two young boys up there playing already. I ask what's going on and the guy who hired me tells me it's a band contest I'm taking part in, he gives me a ballot to vote - says the winner tonight gets to play at a big band contest at the Pageant at the end of the year or something and the whole reason I got this gig at the last minute is cause two of the bands fell through at the last minute cause he found out they weren't old enough to be in the bar or something - then at the last minute, these two kids who hadnt been old enough, begged him to let them play anyway before the contest actually starts and he let's'em.

So I go up to the bar and ask how much for a non alcoholic beer, I add that I'm playing and he says four bucks. I'm astounded. - he's already popped the cap and handed it to me, and I go, "How much is it if I aint playing'???" and he says five. I apologize and tell him I cant do it, he looks a little exasperated and pushes it back to me cause like, who the fucks gonna drink an opened non alcoholic beer, I mean who in their right mind other than me, so I tip the cat two bucks, turn around toward the stage and it hits me...These kids are playing Jam Band Crap!!! What's that mean??? It means, the one cat's wearing a blousey girl top, shorts and no shoes - his hair cascades in ringlets down to his shoulders - he's noodling the fuck out of , first electric guitar and then on a conga drum - and I mean noodling, the other kid's also wearing shorts but also sandals and a t-shirt of some kind and he's caterwauling some cosmic tunage of the dungeon and dragons variety and from the titles I am given of the other bands, and they ARE all bands playing the rest of the night, I am the only southside trash on the bill!!!

OK, everybody else playing's got a few of their own people there to see'em and I'm like the only person in the place that's there alone - I mean I got the gig the day before so nobody even knows I'm playing nor would they be likely to show up and pay a cover, regardless of how much it is (and this IS a benefit for starving people or something which means like ME!!) so who that I know's gonna pay a cover to get in and see me and three jam bands fill up an evening???!

So the cat that gave me the gig, goes up to introduce me, he's being really nice and all but he goes up there and says who I am and , these kids have no idea in hell who the fuck I am - I'm not within their universes, mine is not the kind of radio show they listen to or even know of - or worse, maybe they do, I cant tell so , fuck, I go right into a sort of anthematic sort of catchy ass folks song and I get a spattering of pity applause and I go on to the next song and the next and I'm suposed to play for forty-five minutes and I'm up there for like seven days. My shirt's sweat soaked and torn, I'm taking cuts and bruises all over my body, blood is literally squeezing out of my pours, I'm desperate!! I tell my best stage joke:

"I wrote this next song down in Nashville. I was staying at a place that was so bad...I called down to the office and I go, "Hey, I got a leak in the sink." and the guy inthe office goes, "Well, go ahead."

Dead silence. A few look blankly at me - most dont even hear me ,like I could have been dancing around twisting by nose, quacking like a duck and it would have been like I was in some other dimension...at one point I tried launching into my money finish, Son House's "Death Letter Blues" but half way through I just lost heart almost entirely. First I stopped singing in mid word, then I let the guitar part I was playing dwindle down to one note, and I'm kinda keeping the rythem but I'm jsut doin it on one note like "duh duh duh - duh duh duh - duh duh duh..." on this one mid neck "E" note and as I do it I'm kind of looking all around and as far as I can asertain, no one in the joint even notices. I let go entirely, just stopped and picked another three chord song to finish it up. As I walk off stage, the booker comes up and goes, "Bob Reuter!" Nothing. Then he tries, "Of Bob's Scratchy Records every Friday!" Still nothing. "Anybody heard of KDHX?" he says - a spattering of applause follows - I walk off stage grabbing my guitar case. I ask whoever's around, "You think I'm gonna win?

I kicker though is that the money, they divide up the door, take a cut, ostensibly for the starving poor, (what's the difference between a pizza and a local rock and roll musician? a Pizza can feed a family) and then The rest is divided up between the three bands and me - i get a whole band portion and right after my set the place began slowly filling up with hippies and other noodle geeks - hee hee! So I ask when they stop doing the door, they tell me just after midnight and I beat it on back to south Grand returning later to pick up my pay. My cut wound up being pretty good all things considered but would I voluntarliy play another jam band gig? Nah probably not.

9:19 PM

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Monday, July 28, 2008

cant stop till i punk rock

Working working working - been playing a lot lately and am working on dong a series of semi-ramshackle kitchen recordings to be released with the help of a group of younger cats, all of whom are or have been involved with Big Muddy Records here locally (the Rumdrum Ramblers, Johnny O and the Jerks, 7 Shot Screamers. Pokey LaFarge, etc...) The idea being to open up further and try to reach a whole new demographic (listen to me!!) than would normally be familiar with what I do. For my part, the infusion of new energy is exiting as all hell. The sound's probably going to be leaning more toward the more folk side of what I do but the level of energy's gonna be punk. I refuse to go into the dark night quietly - Who the fuck knows - there's some other ideas in the works as well but we're trying to just take one step at a time - More will be revealed - who the fuck knows?!! I'll be keeping you posted! - b

12:54 AM

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Saturday, July 12, 2008

no two gigs alike

So cause I dont just do one thing, I mean i play out in a a variety of different forms, solo, trio and with groups other than my own, I never have a good idea of just what any particular gig is gonna be - dont ever really know if anybody's gonna show - learned a long time ago that as long as they keep asking me back to play, I'm just gonna keep on doing it - like you better be doing it for the love of it cause this is a strange and sometimes cold world - it aint the world I grew up in when everybody just looked forward to seeing and hearing whatever cool band was gonna be playing that weekend- there's a much bigger pool of stimuli waiting to eat up yer time now days and music, I guess aint nearly so important to folks as it once was.

anyway, last week i got a gig opening and closing for a punk band called Nerve Parade - I got the gig through the lead player, Don Beasley who used to have Corbota Corbata - the reason I'm on the bill is to flesh it out - a lot of times punk bands only do like 20 or 30 minutes and we wanted to extend past the 1:30 mark to be able to pull in some of the late night revelers to fatten up our take of the bar.

So when I get there, for some reason the pick up in my acoustic guitar dont work and I was stuck, so I wound up using Don's guitar running through his big amp - got the kind of sound I could live with and did my opening set.

Well the damn strings on this thing were alike al corroded and shit (they felt like piano wire - punk rock heavy things) I wound up breaking one anyway - so I did my little set and then they played their thirty minutes...and that's another thing - back in the old days when i was playing punk with the dinosaurs back in 1978, we played four hour gigs - it's a whole different animal - you can come out and just fucking kill for twenty minutes - different attack when you're playing all night long - plus it makes you better on your instrument which gets you to a point of diminishing return when you're dealing with punk rock.

Anyway, I came back up the minute they were done - I didnt want to give anybody a chance to leave - I picked up don's guitar - at the volume at which he had it already and then I had Don crank it just a little bit louder for me - Chris of johnny O and the Jerks (now deceased) came up to sit in with me and and we just rocked the house- old school punk mixed with everything I been playing since and then a few old hits - "My Little Red Book" a song written by Burt Bacharach and covered by the 60's group, Love. The response was great - broke a string, played a little more and broke another - took it as a sign and finished the set right there - As we quit, some of the kids in the front row were kind of jumping up sort of pogo style and I began doing the same - it was very silly - it filled my heart and in the end, because these kids drank a fair bit, I would up getting paid a little bit more...well, a lot more than normal - and as John Lee would say "You gots to worry bout that money cause they aint nothin but the better later for the garbage!" and ya know what? I think that's right!

10:57 PM

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Monday, June 02, 2008

the Cough Medicine Comapny

An Interview with Bob Reuter of the Cough Medicine Company
Guitarist for a Steller, St. Louis �60s Rock Band

By: Mike Dugo, 60sGarageBands (Contributor)
2003-09-09

"Mildly well known . . . and not headliners," the Cough Medicine Company nonetheless played many of the local teen clubs in St. Louis during the 1960s. Guitarist Bob Rueter shares his recollections of his teen band with "The Lance Monthly."

[Lance Monthly] How did you first get interested in music?

Bob Reuter My sister was seven years older than I was. When I was six or seven years old in 1957, I was hearing all her records, seeing Elvis and Jerry Lee on TV, and listening to the radio while living in a lower working class neighborhood on the northside of St. Louis. We lived right on the black/white border of Fairgrounds Park, so I got a pretty good mix of cultures. There were also poor white folks moving up from Arkansas. We had street corner storefront churches every few blocks, where they rocked out pretty good; we'd hang around outside listening.

[Lance Monthly] What was your first band?

Bob Reuter My first band was called The Cartels. We had two electric guitars, an accordion player and a one-armed drummer . . . I swear I'm not making this up. Our second gig was at a Battle of the Bands downtown at Famous Barr. It was called "Search 66." We sucked bad. They had a free Pepsi give-away and when we came on, everybody ran outside for their free Pepsi. We lasted about three months.

..tr align="center">..table> [Lance Monthly] What about the Cough Medicine Company? When was that band formed?
Bob Reuter In 1966, by a school friend, Tom Chiapel and myself. Tom later gained some notoriety in being the guy who sold the pictures of Vanessa Williams (the first black Miss America) to �Penthouse Magazine,� which led to her losing her crown.
[Lance Monthly] Please detail who comprised the band, along with the instruments they played.
Bob Reuter At first we called ourselves The Group. I was on vocals and guitar; Tom Chiapel was on drums; Don Tomazi was on lead guitar; and Mike Downey was on bass and vocals at first. When Mike got kicked out of the band, I moved over to bass and we changed our name to the Cough Medicine Company.
[Lance Monthly] Where did the band typically practice?
Bob Reuter Tom lived with his parents in one of the few inhabited buildings in the middle of an industrial area across north Broadway down near the river. There was an abandoned building next door and we ran a ten-foot extension cord over from their place. We called it "The Group House." We had posters all over the walls, a black light, and a small electric heater for the winter. It was great; we played every day of the week and could go half way through the night if we wanted to.
[Lance Monthly] Did you play the typical dances, school events, and party-type gigs?
Bob Reuter We played at all those. Somehow we hooked up with some fraternities at St. Louis University and were playing frat parties on a regular basis throughout 1966 and part of �67 . . . and we were like fourteen years old! It was pretty heady stuff for us. We thought since they were college kids they'd want to hear protest songs, but all they wanted was "Louie, Louie" or anything they could drink and throw up to. It was like a seedier version of the movie �Animal House.� We'd wait until they were pretty messed up and then we'd go into what we called "a freak out," which meant some Yardbirds-type of feedback and scraping action with our volume up to ten!
We played these church dances at a place called Friedens Hall, which was right on our neighborhood. There were a lot of bad asses at those gigs and once we had to have a police escort to get us out of there okay.
[Lance Monthly] What were some of the local teen clubs you played?
Bob Reuter We Played at The Castaways, The Rainy Daze, The Chahokia Castaways and Prince Knight's Palace over in Bellville.
[Lance Monthly] How would you describe the band's sound?
Bob Reuter Well, we had these band cards that said, "The Sound of West Coast Blues." I came up with that, but right now I have no idea what it meant. I guess I just thought it sounded really hip at the time. Everybody would come up and ask what it meant.
[Lance Monthly] What bands influenced you?
Bob Reuter We were influenced by Mitch Ryder, the Young Rascals, the Yardbirds . . . blues, [and] soul [artists]. We liked to do psychedelic versions of soul songs, and we liked a lot of English groups, but felt a loyalty to other American bands.
[Lance Monthly] Did you ever have a manager?
Bob Reuter We had a manager for a while. He was a twenty-two-year-old guy named Dennis McGuinne, who put up the money for us to join the musicians union in 1967. He had a wife and two kids, so it didn't really last long. [After that] Tom Chiapel mostly acted as our manager.
[Lance Monthly] How popular locally would you say the Cough Medicine Company became?
Bob Reuter I'd say we were mildly well known. We were never headliners or anything--I guess it depended on where in the city you lived.
[Lance Monthly] What other local groups of the day were well known?
Bob Reuter The Acid Set (who became The Truth), The Good Feeling, The Poets, and The Daybreaks. We went to school with The Daybreaks. They were pretty cool, but a horn-band, so they were like, on the "other team." Part of the Daybreaks broke away and became The Deceased. The Unknown, who were older and from Belleville, later became Spur. I always liked The Public Service Blues Band. There were just a million bands around. You couldn�t swing a dead cat without hitting a good band.
[Lance Monthly] Did the Cough Medicine Company ever officially record?
Bob Reuter No.
[Lance Monthly] Did the band write any original songs?
Bob Reuter Yes.
[Lance Monthly] Why did the band break up in the '60s?
Bob Reuter Because of girlfriends and "growing up" in different directions.
[Lance Monthly] Did you join or form any bands after the Cough Medicine Company?
Bob Reuter Well, in 1970 I formed a band called Greyhound, which had two guitar players, did covers and originals, and played on a fairly regular basis. That dragged on for a couple of years and I stopped [playing] until 1977, when I reformed a group with Don Tomazi and Mike Downey, who were originally in that first band. We called ourselves The Dinosaurs and played our favorite old songs and originals, but did it with a hard rock 'n' roll feel, which came out sounding fairly punk. We developed a fairly large following and put out a 45 single.
In 1990, I formed a band called Kamikaze Cowboy, which started out wanting to be cowpunk and wandered all over the place for seven years, going through 36 members in the first four years. We put out three CDs.
[Lance Monthly] What about today? Do you perform at all?
Bob Reuter I just formed a new group called Pallookaville, which is acoustic-based, but rock and roll in its sensibilities.
[Lance Monthly] How do you best summarize your experiences with the Cough Medicine Company?
Bob Reuter It may be a time that's over, but it's still alive inside of me and shaped who I am today. Growing up in the family I did, you could make a good case that it saved my life. I think that Bob, the sixteen-year-old, would be proud of who I am today. .. -->a-->

7:45 AM

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Wednesday, May 21, 2008

This sunday, May 25

OK so maybe you heard that I coulda died but instead I got put in the hospital and they fixed my broken heart and now I'm on the mend and they say it's gonna extend my life and there ya go - well, it's a lot longer story, more involved and all but that's the jist of it. Anyway, it's been about two months on and I'm just now begining to be able to sing again and the deal is this -
Seeing as how I've been unable to work for a while now, some very kind people are putting ona benefit concert for me this coming Sunday - It's at Off Broadway and it starts at 6:oo pm - there's like five bands going to perform - the Monads, Melody Den, The Hum Drum Ramblers, The Dave Drebes players and Fire Dog - i will be sitting in with the Rum Drum Ramblers and doing a short three song set with my band, Thee Dirty South - I hope you get a chance to come by - thanks - b

7:21 AM

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Saturday, March 22, 2008

my heart aint up to it

So I’m gonna be in the hospital for a while - heart by-pass surgery - gonna probably be taking a four week break from making music - plan on having a great to story to tell by the time I get back - ya’all take care of yourselves! - b

8:45 PM

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