33rd And Colfax

Although my search for any and all information about Patti Smith had led me to reading about CBGB's and Max's in the pages of Rock Scene magazine, and Oarfolkjokeopus had started getting copies of another New York music paper called The New York Rocker (with artwork by transplanted Minnesota artist Duncan Hannah) covering the same turf, it was really a fortuitous meeting with Bob Wilkinson's land lady that put us in direct contact with what was happening out there.

Bob was renting the upstairs of a house on the corner of 33rd and Colfax in South Minneapolis from a single mother who worked as a schoolteacher. Her name was Dorothy Tienan and she had two daughters, Claudia and Andrea. The elder daughter, Claudia, had run away to New York with Johnny Thunders when the New York Dolls had passed through town and played The Minnesota State Fair ("Who won the pie eating contest?" was David Johansson's greeting to the crowd).

As I spent more and more time with Bob, I got to know Dorothy pretty well too. We liked each other, and later on, when I voiced a desire to move downtown, she offered to rent the basement of her house to me for $50 a month.

Claudia was living in New York City with Tommy Ramone, the drummer for The Ramones. Through the photos and letters that Claudia was sending back home to her mother, I began to get a much closer look at what was happening in New York. There were pictures and posters of Blondie, Richard Hell, Television and especially The Ramones. I remember hearing a rehearsal tape of I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend months before the first Ramones album came out.

All of these groups had a striking look, but it was the Ramones with their leather jackets, t-shirts, sneakers and jeans, that really struck a chord with me. Kind of like The Wild One, The Bowery Boys and Alex Harvey all rolled into one. Very inspirational for a young man trying to find his style.

Between all the info rolling in from the pages of Rock Scene, the New York Rocker and the cards and letters Claudia was sending, I started to sense that something big was happening out east, something that The Suicide Commandos should be a part of.

The Ramones First Album

The release of the Ramones first album in the spring of 1976 was to Punk Rock what The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show was to the British Invasion. It's ground zero, the first and in my opinion, the best. The great songwriting, the high speed playing style, the lack of guitar solos, Joey's English accent when singing, the twenty minute sets (bands everywhere, hear me! bring back the twenty minute set).... It was all there...

When Joey Ramone passed away this year, he was eulogized in Rolling Stone by many of his contemporaries and by younger musicians who were influenced by the band. I thought David Byrne's comments were very perceptive in that he brought up an often overlooked aspect of The Ramones and their music. That is, when they first came out what an art statement they seemed like. The logos, the matching clothes, they even had an art director, Arturo Vega, listed in the album credits.

It always annoyed me when I would read something about them being dumb, because it seemed obvious to me that some very clever minds were behind the creation of the band. For me their glory years were those when Tommy was the drummer and, as he was co-producer as well, I always credited him with a lot of their good ideas. Although there was humor in songs such as Beat On The Brat and Judy Is A Punk (I always liked the line about how the girl went to Frisco to join the SLA), it wasn't as cartoonish as what was to come later. The lyrics to a song like 53rd and 3rd seemed to come from their own lives as much as say, Heroin came from Lou Reed's life. I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend wouldn't have sounded out of place on a Searchers album.

To us, there was real mystery in the sound and songs on that record (something I think all great albums share). We knew it was low budget, and yet, it sounded so much better, so much more alive than anything else at the time. We hoped they were laughing with us, but we weren't really sure. In any case, The Ramones first album really solidified an idea, which in hindsight, anyway, seemed to be floating around. The Suicide Commandos had been working with the idea of "stripped down and shoved into high gear" all that previous year, but it was The Ramones first album that really pointed the way to accomplishing the goal.

I Need A Torch

Songwriting is a funny thing. Anyone can write a song. Of course not everyone can write a good song and often, it takes some embarrassing tries before you come up with something you can stand behind. That was certainly the case with me. The Ramones first album showed you could write good songs with only three of four chords and I think they were the catalysts for a lot of people to try writing their own.

I Need A Torch is an early effort of mine that I look back on fondly now. I hear a yearning in the lyrics for some sort of transcendence (ala Patti Smith on the Horses album) and I remember distinctly what went into writing it. Musically it's sort of a cross between Friday On My Mind by The Easybeats (the riff) and Half-Breed by Cher (the b-section of the verse). Lyrically the 'flaming star" part came from the Elvis Presley movie of the same name, and the "mean so much to me" part came from Free Money. Still, when Chris, Dave and I worked out an arrangement and started playing the song live, it seemed to become our own and more than the sum of its parts. That became a goal and remains so to this day...

Get On The Horn

One of the many advantages to having Chris working at Schon Productions was that he had access to a Watts Line and could call anywhere in the country (long distance rates were much higher then). For months I had been raving to Chris and Dave about CBGB's and what was going in New York City. Chris had friends out east from his college days in Amherst and I think he was hearing the same thing from some of them. When it came time for Chris's good friend Robbie Carey (of Orchidspangiafora fame) to graduate from Hampshire, a plan was hatched that would help us kill a few birds with one stone. Chris wanted to see Robbie graduate, I wanted to play CBGB's and Dorothy Tienan's daughter Andrea needed a ride to New York City. From these desires, our first foray east was planned.

Chris "got on the horn" (as he would say), called up Hilly Crystal at CBGB's and just right out asked him if we could play at his club. Hilly laughed out loud at the idea that anyone would come from as far away as Minneapolis (up until then, the furthest away had been Boston) to play there, but he said sure, we could come and play on new band night. Robbie and his friends arranged for us to get a good paying gig at a Hampshire College graduation party. With Andrea's mother offering to pay for gas if we would drop Andrea off in New York, we had the makings of a road trip.

Put The Hammer Down

Dave's van was never going to make it to New York and back, so I went to my father and asked him if we could borrow his car, a 1971 navy-blue Ford LTD. To my amazement and eternal gratitude, he said yes (my Mother probably had a lot to do with his decision). We rented a U-Haul trailer to carry the gear in, and on Thursday morning, the 27th of May 1976, we got out on Interstate 94, put the hammer down and started driving east.

The drive itself was uneventful. It takes twenty-four hours going straight through to get to New York, and taking turns driving, that's what we did. Once we were east of Chicago, I was on virgin ground, yet there wasn't much of anything to see except the flaming smokestacks of Gary, Indiana. We had a tape player in the car and I remember listening to the just released Modern Lovers album over and over. Since we were heading for New England it made a good soundtrack for the trip.

Past the stench of Gary, it was pretty much generic interstate until you saw the New York skyline. Pennsylvania seemed to go on forever and there was more than one speed trap in that state where the officers were happy to accept cash on the side of the road. It was hard to keep the speedometer at 55 mph.

The New York skyline was "just like I pictured it" and seemed all the more magical for my having been awake for over twenty-four hours. We had to drop Andrea off in the Bronx, which we did and then started out for Amherst Massachusetts and Hampshire College. We immediately got another ticket for driving on a parkway pulling a trailer. Passenger cars only! If they didn't make you pay on the spot, in those glorious days before the whole nation was connected by computer, you just threw the tickets away. We would often return home from a trip with a glove compartment full of (mostly) parking tickets.

By the time we pulled into Hampshire, we had been on the road for over thirty hours. After a short nap and something to eat, we were ready to go again. Oh to be nineteen....

Byron And Robbie

Chris's friends welcomed us with open arms. Our gig was to take place the first night we arrived there, the Friday evening before the graduation ceremony on Saturday. We set up outdoors in a commons area and wailed through a couple sets of our most potent numbers. It went really well. Two people, Byron Coley and Robbie Carey, stick out in my mind as being the most enthusiastic. They were hip to what we were trying to do and had organized this gig that had made the whole trip economically feasible.

Robbie was the man about to graduate. He composed "music concret" (sic) that involved him recording "found sounds" off television and elsewhere, and then meticulously splicing them (by hand with a razor blade and tape) into his sound collages. Later on, when Chris was an A&R man at Twin Tone, he arranged for the release of an album of Robbie's work called Orchidspangiafora. There was a bit of the Captain Beefheart about Robbie in both style and substance.

Byron was another wild man of legendary proportions. He had lost the hearing in one ear by falling off a high balcony and landing on it. Apparently he and Dave got into a drunken brawl when Dave had been out to visit Chris a year or two before. Having heard about this, we were a little leery of him. In the end, when I found out he was happy to wax prolific about his encyclopedic knowledge of underground music (and that he bore no grudge against Dave), I relaxed and actually found him to be the easiest of Chris's friends to talk to (when he wasn't drunk that is).

The last time I saw Byron at Hampshire, it was the middle of winter and the car I was riding in came up behind a pickup truck, where Byron was riding shirtless in the back. All of a sudden Byron leapt out of the truck and went running off into the woods not to be seen again that night. When I caught up with him a few years later, he had calmed down considerably.

The Choice Is Yours

New England seemed quite different from the Midwest both geographically and socially. There are no mountains in Minnesota and I had never really been around people like the students at Hampshire College. Many of the girls spoke like Katherine Hepburn, but many more of the students used what I later found to be a sort of universal college patois. What I would call the upper middle class / hippie accent. This hippie aspect of college life seemed to rankle Chris and his friends and their reactions to it were often humorous. Chris told me of a time when some of the students at the school held a protest in order to get a vegetarian line at the school lunch counter. Ever the wise acre, Chris held his own counter-protest by making a placard that read "Hitler was a vegetarian... the choice is yours" and going on an all meat counter-protest diet. After two days he was so constipated that he had to quit. The food at Hampshire College was the best food I had ever tasted at a school.


The Graduation Party

The graduation party the next night will probably be the closest I ever come to being in a Three Stooges Comedy. After watching Robbie graduate in the early afternoon, we all met and began drinking prodigiously. As the afternoon turned into evening I think it's safe to say that everyone was pretty well lit. There may have even been some "nerve pills" floating around that contributed to the general air of uninhibited bonhomie.

It gets a little fuzzy as to what exactly happened after that... The pieces I remember are: a formal reception with the parents in suits and gowns, an hors d'oeuvre table laden with cream cheese rolled into little balls and The Suicide Commandos and Co. lurching around looking for fun. It took less than a minute for us to figure out that the cream cheese balls would stick to the ceiling. From there, things truly got out of hand. I will never forget the sight of this friend (he happened to be an albino) of Chris's named Charlie taking one of the cream cheese ball hors d'oeuvres and throwing it full on into the beehive hairdo of this matronly woman in an evening gown. Her hair went over like a palm tree bending in a hurricane. I ran out of there and ended up on the ground somewhere laughing until I was crying.

We all woke up the next day happy to learn that Robbie had still graduated. I would like to apologize here and now to whoever had to clean that ceiling.

The Wayne County Benefit

We loaded everything into the trailer and with Chris's friend Josh in tow, we set out for New York City. It was Sunday; we would drop Josh at his parent's house in Long Island and then head into the city. All went well with our plan until we got to Long Island and my Dad's car broke down in front of Josh's parents house (the radiator I believe). We would have to find someone to fix the car on Monday as everything was closed on Sundays. It would be cutting things close as we were supposed to play the next night at CBGB's.

However, we weren't going to let that stop us from enjoying ourselves that night. We had read in the Village Voice that there was to be a benefit for Wayne County's legal defense fund (Wayne had cracked Handsome Dick Manitoba over the head with a mike stand after Manitoba had called him a fag while Wayne was performing onstage... Manitoba was suing) at the Manhattan Center featuring The New York Dolls among many others. I called Andrea and she was going to be there with her sister Claudia and Tommy Ramone. We arranged to meet at the show.

Josh commandeered a family vehicle and drove us all into town. Seeing New York at night was something else. Tom Verlaine described it as well as anybody ever will, and when I hear Venus from Television's Marquee Moon album I'm instantly brought back to that first night.

It was a tattoo night
Streets so bright
The world was so thin
Between my bones and skin
There stood another person
Who was a little surprised
To be face to face
With a world so alive

I felt alive. We parked the car and went inside the Manhattan Center. I found Andrea pretty quickly and she introduced us to her sister Claudia and to Tommy Ramone. Tommy was very friendly and promised to come see us at CBGB's the next night.

The show itself was a real who's who of the downtown scene. Among the acts we saw that night were The New York Dolls, The Tuff Darts with Robert Gordon, Mink Deville and most memorably Blondie. We thought Debbie Harry was Blondie, and until they put a record out, we called her Blondie. As many an impressionable young man was to discover later, she was stunningly beautiful. Later that evening, we tried to get up the courage to talk to her. I think Chris actually did. He asked if she would give him a kiss (cheeky bastard) and she replied by asking him if it was some kind of fraternity prank. That was the end of that.

Musically, Blondie was the most memorable group as well. They had a garage rock / 60's girl group thing going with that Farfisa Organ and their catchy tunes. I still remember a song called Platinum Blond that I only ever heard that night. Besides the Dolls, none of these groups had record deals yet.

Because we were with Tommy, we got to go backstage and hang out. The summer '76 issue of Rock Scene did a photo spread on the show and if you look closely at the picture of David Johansson and his girlfriend, you can see a nineteen year old Steve in the background. Quite a night...

CBGB's




After the show we spent the night with Chris's school friends in an apartment uptown in the city. We would drive back out to Long Island the next morning and deal with the car. When we finally got back out there the next day and got the car towed to a service station, we got the bad news that it wouldn't be ready until the next day. We had to figure something out fast. Nobody seemed to have a vehicle that was big enough or that could haul a trailer and our budget wouldn't allow us to rent anything. It seemed like we might have to cancel the show.

Chris got on the phone with Hilly over at CBGB's. He explained the situation in such a way, that the next thing we knew, Hilly was sending his moving van out to Long Island to pick up our gear and bring us into the city. What a guy! It must have been a humorous sight to see this giant moving van pull up in front of CBGB's and have the three of us and our two dinky amps and drum set come out of the back.

The first thing I saw when I walked inside the club was David Byrne of the Talking Heads sitting on the pool table in front of the stage, strumming an acoustic guitar. He was friendly enough and cleared out when he saw we were going to set up and sound check. Even then CBGB's had a good sound system. We were excited to play.

The show that night went just fine. No more, no less. We had a respectable turn out and we played every original song we had as well as a few covers. Tommy Ramone did show up with Claudia and Andrea. Transplanted Minneapolitans Steve Kramer, John King and Duncan Hannah were there. Chris Nelson, a friend of Andy Schwartz's, also from Minneapolis, was there with a tall, skinny, eighteen year old from Brooklyn named Jim Sclavunos. Chris played in a band with Jim, and together they put out a fanzine called No Magazine.

Chris Nelson lived with his uncle in a snazzy apartment on 44th Street and 2nd Avenue. This turned out to be a big help as he let us stay with him when we came to town. Dave's sister was living in New York at the time and she was very kind about putting us up as well. Robbie's parents housed us a few times in Peter Cooper Village and Andy hooked us up to stay in his Grandmother's apartment over the Sigmund Schwartz Funeral Home on 2nd Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets (there were these great "time of death" memo pads next to the phone). We made some good connections (and friends) on that first trip.