I started college at The University Of Minnesota in the fall of 1974. Chris went out east to finish his degree at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. I'm not sure what Dave was doing. I ended up living in a rented house at 1 27th Avenue S.E. on the east bank of the Mississippi River with a group of kids I'd gone to High School with including Linda Hultquist, Chris's girlfriend. Through her, I'd hear news of what Chris was up to and at the holidays I would see a bit of both Chris and Dave.

College was an eye opening experience for me in that it was the first time I'd tried studying since about the 6th Grade. I was doing well, but I didn't have any direction or sense of purpose and by the end of that first year, I decided to leave college and study electronics at a local vocational school (the Dunwoody Institute or the "Inwoody Duncetitute" as Dave called it), with the idea of getting into recording technology. I was still looking for something to do in music.


Stripped Down And Shoved Into High Gear

In early fall of 1975 I was summoned to Utopia House and a proposition was put forth... Would I be interested in forming a group with Chris and Dave for the express purpose of making a little money and having a lot of fun? For maximum earning potential, we would keep it down to a three piece. I was leery of that idea at first, but Chris assured me that Dave and his double bass drum kit would make up for any lack of rhythm instruments. He turned out to be quite right. More for the opportunity to spend time with Chris and Dave than any excitement about our musical prospects, I agreed to join.

Chris really had it together at this point. He had recently returned from Hampshire College where he had graduated by writing a rock opera for his senior thesis (The Lepidopera based on Kafka's Metamorphosis). One of the songs, Mosquito Crucifixion, I particularly liked. I started pestering him to do it with our band (something I still do all these years later when we get together to play, he's always reluctant) and he finally agreed. From the get go Chris really gave us a leg up, he played great, he sang great and he was bringing in original material.

Dave was indeed the perfect drummer for a three-piece band. He was thoroughly schooled in the Ginger Baker / Mitch Mitchell style of playing, and with that double bass drum (he could do rolls on them), he kept up a cacophony that more than compensated for any lack of other instruments.

I spent a lot of time listening to The Who's album Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy (a collection of their early singles) that year. It really came in handy when I found out there would only be three of us in the combo. Most of what I played in the beginning was my attempt (again) to try and emulate John Entwistle, the Who's bass player. Those early Who singles like I Can't Explain and My Generation were a real revelation.

Chris and Dave had already come up with the name The Suicide Commandos (taken from an old Aldo Rey war movie). They were both conceptual thinkers and were immediately planning our live presentation. They came up with the phrase "stripped down and shoved into high gear" to describe our sound. Although we didn't own a PA system (and in those days clubs didn't provide one), we had Linda's brother Chuck build us a set of lights that Linda would operate while we played. Along with a metal horn, painted with flames, that Chris perched on top of his Traynor amplifier, this was the beginning of our stage presentation. For the time being, our PA consisted of three mikes plugged into an extra Twin Reverb that Chris owned. It would have to do.

The first song we learned was Waiting for The Bus by ZZ Top, followed by Born To Be Wild by Steppenwolf and Something Else by Eddie Cochran (a song The New York Dolls had played at the Minnesota State Fair in the summer of 1974). Chris and Dave already knew a lot of songs together and many of these found their way onto our set list. They did a lot of unison singing in those days, which really cracked me up. Carol, Six Days On The Road, and The Hunter (version learned from the Outsideinside album by Blue Cheer, check out that inside cover!) are three songs that come to mind. There was something about the way they sang that made you feel like they were in character and that they were the only ones who could keep a straight face. It was something... I was very happy when I started to feel on the inside of their humor. There was an awful lot of laughing involved with being in that band, laughing until you were about to pee your pants.

The Commandos' first gigs were at a new music bar in the basement of The Roaring Twenties strip club on Fifth street in Minneapolis. We went down one afternoon in the late summer of 1975 and auditioned for the club's owner and manager XXX. He hired us to play a series of weekends in September. The deal was that we would play for one third of whatever was in the two cash registers at the end of the night. I would actually follow him from register to register and settle up on the spot.


It wasn't too bad! We would take in about $150/night- an amount that was easily divisible by three. In those days we played four forty five minute sets. Each would start on the hour. Typically, we would do most of our cover material early in the night ("Baby You Can Drive My Car", "Love is the Drug" and "Once bitten Twice Shy" were typical selections) and move into our original material as the patrons became more lubricated. The Blitz's stage area was illuminated by black lights that would show who in the audience was drinking gin and tonics- any drink that had soda in it glowed a light aquamarine.


The first few night we had only our Minnetonka and Hopkins friends there, but within a few weeks an element of Minneapolis' "cognoscenti" (including music writers Andy Schwartz and Tim Holmes) were coming down to get down in that seedy basement. They were soon joined by guys playing in other bands that wanted to check us out. Before long we were getting a hundred or more people in a night- a lot for that little room. There was plenty of time to practice our stage patter on them.



I was trying to see if I could play guitar and do yo-yo tricks at the same time. I remember my orange Duncan Imperial looked pretty good under the black lights, but yo-yoing and Punk rocking turned out to be mutually exclusive.


We were also visited by representatives of Minneapolis' musicians union who explained to us that if we didn't join the union they would be compelled to smash our gear. Looking quite ridiculous in over-sized trench coats we ignored them and they eventually went away. (I think we were the first band to stand up to them. Before long no one had to be in the union to play downtown.) When we recorded for Phonogram we did join the union, but that would be a few years later.


This was before the New York or London Punk Scenes happened so nobody was yet sporting any Punk regalia. The uniform of our early fans was very much like our own- we were more or less inspired by The New York Dolls and wore a lot of glittery stuff, ripped blue jeans and tennis shoes. I had a pair of mirrored (prescription) sunglasses that I liked to wear, but it was hard to find my guitar pick if I dropped it in the semi-darkness.

So, after our van was stolen from in front of Max's Kansas City, we cancelled the remainder of the tour (Cleveland with Pere Ubu) and made our individual ways back to Minneapolis. By bus, by rental car, (to bring back what was left of our equipment), and for the lucky few, by plane.

We began to wait.

Our Punk Rock long distance budget meant we waited to hear from the NYPD 'til we could wait no more and began to call them.
"Did you find our van yet?"
"Huh? How'm I spose ta know 'bout yer van, ya know how many cars git stole in New York City?"

We waited to collect from our insurance company, who assured us that most stolen vehicles are eventually recovered, so there would be no insurance settlement until some vague date in the future.

Periodic calls from the band to the insurance company ensued.

Several difficult, vanless months later, a call to the insurance company was finally met with a different response. A check would be issued in a week to
cover the stolen van.

Coincidentally, that same day in the mail, came a notice from the NYPD that our van had been recovered.

Recovered the day after it had been stolen, while we were all still in New York.

The bureaucracy of a NYPD impound lot grinds slowly.

The expected insurance payment now became a plane ticket for one of us to fly to NYC, get her repaired and drive her back.

The van was in my name, so I was the one who got to sing "I'll retrieve our vehicle" (to the tune of I Believe in Miracles)

I met the insurance agent at the airport. (I guess he wanted to be sure I got on the plane instead of cashing in the ticket) and did get on the plane and get to NYC in time to see our pals the Dead Boys at CBGB. (Getting in free for being a Suicide Commando. Gee I love bein' a big time punk rock star!)

Hey Everybody,

A couple of years ago, The Suicide Commandos were asked by the University of Minnesota Press to write a memoir about our days as a punk band in Minnesota. Chris, Dave and I did a little writing and until we get around to finishing it, I thought I'd post some excerpts on our blog.

Best,

Steve




Shock/Attack/She

My name is Steve Almaas and from 1975 to 1978 I was the bass player and one of the singer/songwriters in the punk rock trio The Suicide Commandos. This is my side of the story of how a band from the western suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota got in on the ground floor of the punk rock movement. I will write of my fortuitous meeting with Dave Ahl and Chris Osgood and then attempt to retrace our musical steps to our first gig at CBGB's in May of 1976.
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By the summer of 1978, the Suicide Commandos were about to break up and as far as I was concerned, Punk Rock was finished. New Wave was the term being bandied about for everything from Elvis Costello and The Cars to The Cure, PIL, and the Talking Heads. I suppose an allusion to the French cinematic movement was appropriate for at least the "artier" proponents of this music, but the Commandos never had art school pretensions and our tenure as rulers of our roost was about to be over.

The Commandos returned to Minneapolis that summer from a short tour of the West Coast to find that The Suburbs were now the top draw at The Longhorn, the local new music Mecca. Although the Suburbs were our good friends, I don't think any of us particularly liked this new development. And it was dawning on us that perhaps the Commandos had accomplished what we'd set out to do and now it was time to move on. We'd toyed with adding a keyboard player and Chris had brought in what was perhaps our finest song, Complicated Fun (I hear a lot of our dilemma in that song). Still, the sense was there that we'd peaked and it was time to get out while the getting was good. When I told Chris and Dave that I wanted to leave the band and move to New York, neither could offer a compelling reason to keep things going.

So in November of 1978 the Suicide Commandos played their last official shows together, captured for posterity as The Commandos Commit Suicide Dance Concerts. To this day when I hear the opening triumvirate of Shock Appeal, Attacking The Beat and She or "Shock/Attack/She" as Dave used to write on the set lists; a smile comes to my face. The Suicide Commandos were punk rock. We were punk the way The Ramones, the Sex Pistols and The Dead Boys were punk. Class of 1976. I hear a shared sensibility in the music and I'm sure we had a lot of the same influences. When I hear The Ramones doing Let's Dance by Chris Montez, the Sex Pistols doing (I'm not your) Stepping Stone by The Monkees or The Dead Boys doing Little Girl by The Syndicate Of Sound I hear those groups going to the same well for inspiration that The Suicide Commandos drew from. Everybody was into The New York Dolls and 60's garage rock (Lenny Kaye's Nuggets compilation was a must have LP) I believe it was the rock writer Lester Bangs who coined the term "punk rock" to describe the 60's garage bands in the first place. By 1975, in New York, in London, in Cleveland, and yes, in Minneapolis a sort of parallel musical development was taking place that came to be called punk rock. At the time we didn't know it was happening anywhere else, but in Minneapolis it started something like this...


Utopia House

I first met Chris Osgood and Dave Ahl while I was still going to high school. They were both graduates of Minnetonka High (a nearby school) and I was finishing my senior year at Charles A. Lindbergh High in the Hopkins school district. Chris and Dave were two years older than me and, at seventeen, two years seems like a lot. They both lived on their own. Dave had dyed blue hair, wore a leather jacket, drove a van and had been to England. Chris had a beard, wore a beret and wire rim glasses, and worked as a youth counselor.


Chris was dating a girl from my school and he and Dave used to come over to visit and eat the 35-cent school lunches. Those were the days of "hippie high school", where you didn't really need to go to class to pass. There was plenty of time to hang out.


Chris and Dave lived pretty close to my school in a dilapidated farm house they had christened Utopia House. They lived there with another friend; a good blues guitar player named Danny Anderson who was also dating one of the girls in my crowd. It wasn't long before we all ended up at parties over at Utopia House. There was no toilet or running water and the boys would shower and whatnot at the tennis club across the field from the house (I believe the owners of the tennis club were their landlords). On party nights the bushes out back took a real beating.


It was at one of these parties that I first saw Chris and Dave play. They had set up their equipment in the big field next to the house and jammed for what seemed like hours on this song they had learned off a kids science record. The lyrics started "the sun is a mass of incandescent gas a ......." They were funny and cool at the same time, a harbinger of things to come.

The Bird Is The Word

I was one of those kids who became obsessed with pop music and pop groups from the moment I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, although my first exposure to a rock combo came the year before when I was in the first grade. My teacher, Mrs. Winslow, had a son in the group The Trashmen (she wore a Trashmen sweatshirt when we went on field trips) and that was the year their song Surfin' Bird (later covered by The Ramones and The Cramps) was a national hit. It seemed pretty cool to me that you could know or even be related to someone who had a song on the radio.


From 1964 on, my ear was glued to a transistor radio. I was obsessed with the British Invasion Groups, the American garage and folk-rock groups, and Bob Dylan. I got my first guitar for my twelfth birthday (August 5th, 1968) and started putting on shows in my basement (with best friend Bruce Allen, later of The Suburbs), as soon as I knew enough chords (3) to play a song. That fall, Bruce and I hooked up with another guitar player and drummer from our junior high and started our first proper band.


We rehearsed in drummer Dave Sylvester's basement. His parents lived in an ultra modern house in the well to do Sherwood Forrest section of Minnetonka. Dave's older brother Paul also had a band that rehearsed in the basement. We got to use some of their equipment and we learned quite a few songs off of them. They were into The Flaming Groovies, Sweetheart Of The Rodeo era Byrds, Kink Kronikles era Kinks; as well as the requisite Creem and Jimi Hendrix. Paul had a homemade "stereo chair" in his room and was musically quite generous to his younger brother and his friends. Paul's crowd included the kid with the longest hair in school. His name was Peter Jesperson and I remember being terrified of him. We were to meet again later.


The first song our combo learned was For Your Love by The Yardbirds, followed closely by Hey Joe (both the fast Stillroven version and the slower Jimi Hendrix version), Pictures Of Matchstick Men by Status Quo, You Keep Me Hanging On (Vanilla Fudge version) and just about every Rolling Stones song we could think of (the Got Live If You Want It version of Under My Thumb was a real showstopper for us). Beatles songs were just plain out of our league chord-wise and if we did attempt one, it would be something like Rocky Raccoon or Obla Di Obla Da, songs not really suitable for a basement rave up.


As the 60's turned into the 70's, things got confusing both as a listener and a player. The three-minute single of the British Invasion/Top 40/AM Pop gave way to the extended album tracks of FM Rock ala The Allman Brothers and King Crimson. Ironically, some of the most concise songwriting I heard at that time was from The Grateful Dead, a band known for their extended "acid jams", on their Workingman's Dead and American Beauty albums. By this time I had switched to bass guitar and was trying to learn to play by listening to Whipping Post or some John Entwistle bass part from Quadrophenia. It wasn't very satisfying and without being well versed in Stax/Volt or much soul music at all for that matter (I was surprised in later years to find out how many soul hits hadn't got a lot of air play in Minneapolis, at least on the stations I was listening to), I couldn't really get a handle on where they were coming from with all that jamming. There wasn't much there for the novice to sink his teeth into and learn from. I picked up the most from listening to the blues albums of Paul Butterfield, Canned Heat (especially that record they made with John Lee Hooker), BB King and the local blues bands like the original 4-piece Lamont Cranston and Aces, Straights and Shuffles (with Kim Wilson later of The Fabulous Thunderbirds on Harmonica).


By twelfth grade, the basement band I had been in more or less all through Junior High and High School had dissolved. After going through our Yardbirds / Stones phase, our Fleetwood Mac / Flaming Groovies / J. Geils Band phase and our Allman Brothers phase we had done about all we could do and had called it a day. I tried getting together with other musicians that year, but nothing really clicked. I knew I wanted to do something in music, but I had no idea what.



Oh Well

The first time I went over to Utopia House (in the spring of 1974), I remember two albums sitting out on the coffee table, Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges and the first New York Dolls album. I learned later that Chris and Dave had been into the Stooges since 1969 when they saw them on a "Motor City" bill with The MC5 and The Amboy Dukes. I knew Iggy had some connection to David Bowie and that both The Stooges and The New York Dolls were part of the whole glitter rock scene. There was a small group of kids at school that were into Mott The Hoople, Slade, Alice Cooper and David Bowie. I liked a lot of those records, but did not care for the glam look. I was sporting more of a Grateful Dead / New Riders Of The Purple Sage style at the time with long hair tied in a ponytail, cowboy shirts, jeans and cowboy boots. Oh well...


I remember listening to the New York Dolls album and Raw Power and not being particularly impressed with the sound of either. Not as good as Schools Out or Bang A Gong I thought at the time. I learned to appreciate them both a lot more later when I started trying to write songs myself.



Retsnom

The summer after high school I went over to Utopia House and jammed with Chris and Dave a couple of times. Not much happened musically but I quickly became enthralled with them as people. They were quick, witty and extremely bright. They had obviously known each other a long time and spoke in a series of in-jokes, puns and references, all of which I found very entertaining. I remember going over to Utopia House one time and they were sitting around with a tape recorder, recording words into it backwards and then playing the backwards results backwards so that you heard them forwards. It was pretty hilarious (to this day it sticks in my mind that "retsnom" is monster backwards). It was then I learned that Dave could repeat any full sentence you gave him backwards. One of his many talents.


One time I went over there to play and there was a woman with them named Carol Flag, who informed me I'd have to dress up in an insect suit if I wanted to be in the new group they were forming. That project never really got off the ground.

To be continued...

Chris' story

I remember very clearly when I decided it would be fun to be a pop musician. It was 1964 (?). I was in fourth grade and the Beatles were making their second appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. That Sunday night as our family sat down to dinner I had made my plans to see them on TV. My folks were not crazy about the Beatles and were especially not crazy about interupting dinner to watch anything on TV.

With this in mind I had turned on the TV downstairs ( a big old black and white console) before dinner. In those days televisions took a long time to wam up and I knew I would only have a couple of minutes, so I had turned the set on and then turned the brightness knob all the way down so it looked like the TV was off. I had also changed the channel to CBS. This had to be done with a pair of pliers that lived on top of the TV and were dedicated to this job- our channel knob had been broken for a few years.

I knew that the Beatles would be playing right before the end of the show, so I excused myself from the table at about five minutes to eight and slid downstairs to the waiting TV. There they were playing "Please Please Me". (?) It was great. I was able to watch the song and get back to the dinner table undetected. Besides liking the music, I couldn't help but notice that the girls in the studio audience liked it too. In fact, they liked it VERY MUCH. That's when I decided that's what I would like to do!

I had studied piano until the spring of that year when it came time for me to play at my piano teacher's student recital. My piece was Taichovsky's "Peter and the Wolf". It was hard! The theme required that the player's left hand do a part that was out of time with the melody of the right hand. About a week before the recital I asked my mom if could be excused from playing at the recital- it was just too hard for me to get it. My mom refused and said that I would be fine. However, after hearing my rendition of the piece, she agreed that maybe I should not do it in public. I will always be grateful for her wisdom.

A couple of years later mom gave dad a Harmony acoustic guitar for Christmas. He never picked it up, but I did. (The guitar is a polyphonic instrument where the right and left hand play in time with each other!) I took lessons for a few years but became tired of playing songs out of the Mel Bay instruction books and began to teach myself how to pick out songs by ear from the radio. I would wait patiently by my transistor until "I Can See For Miles" by the Who or "Hungry" by Paul Revere and Raiders came on and then frantically try and play along, gleaning as much as I could before the song was over, to be repeated a few hours- or days- later. Eventually I was able to buy the singles and LPs and work them out on my little mono record player. (I still have my mono LP of "Sargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".)

I met Dave Ahl when my family moved to Excelsior, Minnesota in 1965. Before that we had lived in Wayzata and I was friends with Steve and Chan Poling. Steve's little brother Chan would eventually move back to Minnesota and form The Suburbs. We would sit in their basement and play Beatles and Rolling Stones 45s and read Mad magazine. We were also very into Ratfink and Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. One day we created an "electric" guitar by connecting their portable record player (which had an electrical short and gave you a jolt whenever you touched it) to the bridge of an acoustic guitar with a coat hanger- shocking!

In sixth grade Dave and I were both into music and skateboarding. He had a treehouse and I would sleep over on weekends and we would read "Valley of the Dolls" and smoke menthol cigarettes- very fun. He had begun playing drums and had a cool blue sparkle Slingerland drum kit. Our standard garb of the time were collarless "surfer" shirts, cut-off jeans (white Levis if possible) and Jack Purcell "bumper" tennis shoes. By Junior High School we were taking the bus downtown to visit Wallace of Minneapolis and the Out of Sight shop at Daytons- a couple of "boutiques" that sold Hippie regalia and posters from the Fillmore East and West.

In 1967 my folks gave me a Kalamazoo solid body electric guitar and a ten watt practice amp for Christmas. I was in heaven! It was red with a white pickguard and I felt really cool whenever I put it on. It also had a "vibrato bar" that allowed you to bend notes by altering the pitch at the bridge- just like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

By this time our junior high sleep-overs would include staying up and tuning in Tony Glover's "Underground" show that came on at midnight on Friday nights on KDWB. This was a Top 40 station that for some wonderful reason allowed Tony to come on and turn the rest of us on to the new "Psychedelic" music being made by Jimi Hendrix, Cream, The Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape. It was cool!

Tony "Little Sun" Glover was the harp player in the Minneapolis folk trio Koerner, Ray & Glover. Along with Dave "Snaker" Ray and "Spider" John Koerner, Tony created some of the most influential folk recordings of the Sixties. He was also a critic for Rolling Stone and had access to lots of great music. We would stay glued to the radio for his shows, drinking it all in and looking for the records he played at Musicland and the Rexall drugstore. One of our favorite albums of the time was by a band called Blue Cheer from San Francisco. I remember staring at the inside photo of the album jacket at the stacks of Marshall amplifiers, Leigh Stevens cool Gibson SG and fringe leather jacket and drummer Paul Whaley's double kick drum kit. My favorite bands- Cream, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Blue Cheer were power trios- three people making a lot of noise.

By the end of eighth grade I was in a band with Dave and another guitar player named Tom Ayre. (This band went by many names including The Psychedelic Manure Spreaders and the Chanhassen Chipmunks.) Tom had a Gibson 335 with double-coil Humbucking pickups. I would switch guitars with Tom to play the lead parts because his guitar was louder! For a few months I seriously considered switching to bass because we needed one in the band. Happily (because I am a terrible bass player) Tom became more interested in sports and began missing practices with us to practice with the football team. About this time a neighbor kid that went to Blake School bought a bass (a really cool Gibson EB0) and replaced Tom in the band. Henry Neils lived across the road from me and he had a barn with an upstairs room that we could practice in, which was handy. He also had the requisite long hair, and was very mechanically inclined. After we started playing regularly this lead to a series of mishaps with band
vehicles that ran or almost ran. We were late to a lot of gigs. Henry had a long-haired pal that also went to Blake named John King. He was a great guitar player and would jam with us a lot. Both he and Henry suffered from a spine condition called "scoliosis" that they had to wear back braces to correct. I can still remember seeing those two braces parked outside the upstairs barn door when I arrived at practice. When those braces were off it meant that we were going to rock.

The Head Blues Band played our first gig at Minnetonka West Junior High at one of the Friday night dances in November 1968. Dave and I were in ninth grade. I was so nervous my guitar pick kept slipping out of my sweaty fingers, but our little trio persevered and we had a lot of fun. I had a new '68 SG with double-coil pick-ups and an American Flag decal I had applied, and was playing through a Boss Tone fuzz box into a Fender Twin Reverb. It was cool. Speaking of style, a defining moment came for me that same year. I was on the student council and we were able to abolish the dress code at West Junior High. I remember being happy to be able to wear my Apache scarf, deer skin vest and bell-bottomed jeans without fear of detention!

Around this time I got up my nerve and called Schon and Marsh Productions to see if we could get gigs through them. Schon and Marsh and a few other booking agencies were how underage (and bar age) bands got gigs in those days. There was a booming business to do playing at High School dances, private parties, bowling alleys and the old dancehalls that dotted the Minnesota and Iowa hinterland. Marsh Etelstein of Marsh Productions had a meeting with us and we were excited about the possibility of becoming a Marsh band because he owned and booked a teen dance place called The Purple Barn in nearby Eden Prairie that we thought would be fun to play. Marsh was a character. He had long, coiffed blonde hair and a blonde beard. He looked like our idea of what a manager should look like.

At the time there was plenty of professional wrestling on TV thanks to local wrestlers Vern Gagne, The Crusher, Mad Dog Vashon and Baron Von Rashke of the AWA (American Wrestling Association), so we knew what managers looked like! All Star Wrestling would be broadcast from the Lake Calhoun studios of WTCN on Saturday afternoons and good-guy wrestler Verne Gagne would advertise his vitamin suppliment "Gera Speed". About this time Cowboy Bill Watts lived in our neighborhood and the other wrestlers would come over to his house to practice on tumbling mats laid out in the basement, or, when it was warm, in the yard. Us kids would all ride over to watch the local TV stars come and go. We knew by then that since mortal wrestling enemies practiced their moves and holds together before a match that a certain "suspension of disbelief" was necessary to enjoy professional wrestling.

Randy Levy, a gangly twenty-year old from Schon Productions actually came out to hear a practice and told us that if we learned "Midnight Hour" and "Heat Wave" we could be on his roster of bands. Since we never heard from Marsh we decided to go with Randy who immediately started to get us gigs. We played all kinds of places. It was the era of the baby boomers coming of driving age and there were plenty of "youth centers"and "teen drop-in centers" (usually in church basements or municipal buildings) that held dances on Friday and Saturday nights.

I remember that we got booked for a gig at a youth center the same night that Jimi Hendrix was going to be playing at the Civic Center in St. Paul. I wound up selling my ticket to Frank Zetzman- the guitar player in Blue Mist, my reasoning being I could see Jimi the next time he came to town, but how often would I get a chance to play a paying gig? (Jimi never came to town again and I have gotten to play a few paying gigs since then.) At the same time I sold my ticket to Frank I made an arrangement to use his gear for the youth center show. It was typical for us junior high bands to share our amplifiers, so whenever anybody got a gig they would be playing out of the combined output of my Fender Twin, Frank's Bandmaster, and whatever other amplifiers we could hook together and stack up. It sounded bad but looked great! In those days my amplifier played many more shows than I did.

One show that I DID see that year was The Doors at the Minneapolis Auditorium. It was great- Jim Morrison had recently been busted for indecent exposure at a show in Miami so there were cops everywhere, and the afor-mentioned Tony Glover came out and played "Little Red Rooster" and a few other blues numbers with the band. That was the first time I smelled so much marijuana smoke in a big room- I had smelled it before in cars a lot, but never on that grand a scale. Dave and I had the great good fortune to see the Bonzo Dog Band open for Steve Miller at the Guthrie that same year. The Bonzos blew my mind and certainly have influenced my aesthetic ever since. They were a sort of English Mothers of Invention that were absolutely hilarious- theatrical and daring, but very musically inovative as well. Clever. I still love those records.

By the time we were in tenth grade the Head Blues Band was playing almost every weekend. It really helped that Henry was a year older than Dave and I and had a driver's license! We would load up his dad's station wagon, the three of us would pile into the front seat and off we would go to places like The Blazer in Nisswa, MN (which later burned down) and University of Minnesota frat parties. I fondly remember a "body painting" party thrown by one of the University Frat houses- it was an enjoyable eye-opener for us high school kids!

1970 was a wild year at Minnetonka High School. We would organize school strikes to protest things like doorless boy's bathrooms. (School administrators had taken the doors off so they could get the jump on cigarette and pot smokers.) Bomb threats were also a regular part of the school routine. After a bomb threat had been called in the school would close for the day and everyone was set free. Most of the bomb threats were traced to the telephone in the high school's cafeteria.

The clever seniors and juniors were publishing a counter-culture cartoon/newspaper ("Throckmorton") that mocked the high school administrators. Whenever we struck the school, the administrators would run around with cameras trying to photograph the ringleaders. A particularly memorable issue had Mr. Bromenshenckle waving a camera and chortling "I've got your face- now you'll fry!" One issue allegedly had liquid LSD dried on the nose of a character on the cover. (I watched a few people chew and swallow that part of the cover, but noted no unusual effects.) Being a sophomore, I was one of the younger organizers of the strikes and protests and I spent a fair amount of time in the pricipals office either outlining our demands or getting dressed down for something. Happily, all of these hijinks lead the administration to create a couple of innovative programs for us.

School Within a School (SWAS) was an optional program for bright students who were not interested in the regular curriculum or in a grade point average. We could do what we wanted to do after we had outlined a study plan with our teacher/advisors. In order to receive a diploma we only had to demonstrate a state-required proficiency in English and History. This program began in our junior year and Dave and I immediately signed on. We were followed shortly by Henry and John King who had gotten expelled from private Blake School for refusing to cut their hair.

Mini School was another alternative program designed to keep kids in school who otherwise were at risk of dropping out. Most of these kids did not have the same grade point averages that we SWAS students had had, but they shared our distain of authority and our enthusiasm for everything countercultural. Because we had a lot of unstructured time on and off campus we all became fast friends and were regarded as Hippies by the rest of the student body.

In fact we were called "Freaks". We, in turn, referred to the straight students as "Jocks" and distained their boring normalcy. From time to time there were scuffles between these groups, but since we had all grown up together there was a certain amount of mutual respect that in fact exists to this day.

John King and I decided that we would spend part of our new-found independence studying music theory and composition at MacPhail Music School in Minneapolis. By this time we both had our licenses so we took turns driving one mom or the other's station wagon downtown on Mondays to study with Mary Carroll Hanson, a strict old-school Music Theory educator that proudly traced her educator-student lineage all the way back to Mozart! Our text was The Study of Fugue by Alfred Mann. John and I spent many happy hours cooking up themes and counterthemes, learning the intricate mechanisms of Baroque composition- certainly more fun than hanging around Minnetonka High. We would laugh and look forward to the lunch break each day which always meant a trip to the local downtown diner "The Pot Pie" where we would each have a tuna salad sandwich and a glass of Seven-Up. ($1.75 plus tip.) On the way back to class we would take a moment to let the air out of the tires of some cars parked in the lot
across the street. We were careful to deflate only the right front and left rear tire, or vice-versa, and would try and time our departure from MacPhail so that we could enjoy the sight of our selected cars wobbling out of the parking lot.

Of course all of us were making a lot of new friends. SWAS had an enrollment of about 80 students and Mini School about the same, so there were a lot of fun people hanging around. One of them was a girl named Carol Flaig. Carol was an extrovert with a wickedly funny sense of humor and a burning desire to join our band, which she did. She became lead singer of the newly renamed Sue Veneer and the Mementos in the spring of 1971 and became a big part of our on-going adventures. Carol and I became fast friends and spent many happy hours hitchhiking to Minneapolis to visit the used clothing store Rag Stock on the North Side or various record stores downtown or along Lake Street. A particularly memorable adventure found the two of us on top of a rampart that had been constructed across Washington Avenue to protest the bombing of Cambodia. (We had immediately hitchhiked to the University of Minnesota to join the protest when we heard about it on the radio that morning.) We had a nice
visit with Senator Eugene McCarthy and got teargassed about an hour later.

(I found out years later that SWAS and Mini School were designed to cull the miscreants from the herd so the rest of the student body could actually study.)

Dave's older brother John was a real estate developer who's company had bought a huge mansion and many acres of property lakeshore property in Deephaven, an exclusive suburb on the shores of Lake Minnetonka. He offered to let Dave live in Chimo (the name of the mansion) and caretake the property that was to be subdivided and developed the next summer. The house was huge, with many enormous rooms, huge fireplaces, a beautiful swimming beach and lots of outbuildings for Henry to fill with cars that didn't start. Chimo immediately became our practice headquarters and the scene of countless parties and jam sessions.

That year we spent a lot of time with musicians from Minneapolis' Blues scene who heard about Chimo parties and made their way to us. Pat and Larry Hayes of The Lamont Cranston Band and Rico XXX of the Lake Street Stink Band were hanging out, as was XXX the great acoustic slide guitarist. These guys had grown up in Hamel and Wayzata and knew their way around the neighborhood. Pat and Larry shared the boathouse at the Wayzata Yacht Club, which was Cranston HQ at the time. I learned a lot of blues riffs and post-Hippie philosophy from these guys at all-night jams that happened at Chimo on the weekends.

We would regularly sneak into the Cabooze to see Lamont Cranston or into "Dime Beer Nights" (Tuesdays) at the Triangle Bar on the West Bank to see Roy Alstead's Mill City Band- an incredible psychedelic three piece Blues band. Roy's riffing on his Gibson SG plugged into a XXX head (as a pre-amp) plugged into a Fender Twin was so cool it would make my hair stand on end. Larry Hayes and guitar-ace brothers Bobo and Charlie Bingham inspired me to spend many hours figuring out Freddy King and Albert King guitar solos. We were lucky to be able to open a few shows for these great players who were my heroes and role models.

Other bands had formed out of SWAS and Mini School at Minnetonka High School and were busy playing around the city and state as well. Boingy Baxter's Brigadeers, The Daisy Dillman Band- blah, blah, blah.

That fall we would leave our gear set up at Chimo so we could go straight from school to practice. Of course everybody knew where our gear was and one day we came to practice and discovered that a lot of our stuff had been stolen! (It never occured to us that we had to be careful about who knew were our stuff was.) We lost my guitar, some drum cymbals and hardware and our microphones. To make matters worse, the thieves came back the next day and stole my Twin Reverb amp!

My stuff was insured under my parent's homeowners policy at the the time. They had a $250 deductible and since the robberies happened on two different days it meant a $250 deductible for each loss. I could afford to replace my guitar or my amp, but not both. I chose to replace the Twin Reverb and played for the next eight months on my back-up guitar- a red '63 Epiphone with one single coil pick-up in the bridge position. I had traded a piece of carpeting with Henry to get it. I would have that guitar around in case I broke a string during a show. If I felt like banging a guitar directly on the stage (or anything else) this was the guitar that took the punishment. (I had already smashed two strap holders all the way into the guitar doing this.) After losing the SG I replaced the tuning pegs on the Epiphone with some nice servicable Grovers and learned to love its idiosyncratic sound. In fact, that peculiar sounding guitar would influence my sound forever after. I was listening to a
lot of Muddy Waters at the time and on those Chess recordings he played a Les Paul with single coil pickups. The sound was thinner, but cool. Blah, blah, blah.

One winter night of our senior year, the Mementos got a gig playing a bowling alley in Pierz, MN a small town near Little Falls, about two hours out of town. At the end of the night Henry realized he had lost the keys to his dad' station wagon. The owners of the bowling alley gave the four of us one blanket that we shared until the following morning when a locksmith came and helped us start the car.

The Suicide Commandos, like Devo or Rocket From The Crypt, were a protopunk band that no one paid attention to until the Pistols and the Buzzcocks hit. Well, maybe people in their Minneapolis hometown did, but a band with this much raw energy shouldn't (still) be only a local legend. The Suicide Commandos formed in 1974 in the aforementioned city, kickstarting Twin/Tone records and the entire Twin Cities scene in the process. They self-immolated in '79, leaving behind two singles, an album and a live farewell concert recording.

What's so frustrating about their obscurity isn't that they're any more original or distinctive than the Buzzcocks, the Damned, the Vibrators or any other punk band with ridiculously fast songs. That's a judgement call–but I will say they got there first. What's frustrating is that they're out of print in a genre that consistently produces new fans buying the same old records. There's no reason some punk poser in Oregon somewhere shouldn't be able to pick this record up and sport a homemade Suicide Commandos patch a week later–they could easily take the place of Stiff Little Fingers for one of the bazillion young pseud-punkers out there. Which would actually be great, because the Commandos, unlike most of their contemporaries, actually had a rather subtle sense of humor (how many other punk bands put Monkees covers on their album?). And a phenomenal drummer did they have in Dave Ahl. If more thirteen year old drummers ripped off Dave Ahl than Travis Barker, there'd be more Fugazi's and fewer Boxcar Racers in the world. Does that make sense?

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