Ken Shimamoto Interrogates...
TEXAS PUNK LEGENDS THE NERVEBREAKERS

I moved to Dallas in '78 at the urging of my ex-drummer from college, who'd seen the Sex Pistols at the Longhorn Ballroom and told me they sucked, but that a local band called the Nervebreakers opened and was great. I wound up working at Peaches Records & Tapes at Cole and Fitzhugh with Nervebreakers' lead guitarist Mike Haskins and saw plenty of Nervebreakers shows over the next couple of years, including when they played the Palladium on Northwest Highway, opening for the Clash and John Cale (on different nights), and Tootsie's on White Settlement Road in Fort Worth with the Fort Worth Cats.

With frontman Thom "Tex" Edwards hanging from the mic stand in a state of bug-eyed mock dementia and Barry in his Army helmet and pistol belt -- unlike the snotnoses in NYC's Shrapnel and Austin's D-Day, Barry had actually served in Korea in the early '70s -- the Nervebreakers were never less than fun and exciting to watch. Beyond that, they could really play and wrote great songs, too. Their enduring classic, "My Girlfriend Is a Rock," was originally released on their 1978 Politics EP and subsequently re-recorded in 1980, just before the wheels came off the NBs. (In 2005, Dallas teen punks Spector 45 covered the song as "My Girlfriend's In Iraq.")

Toward the ass-end of the '90s, when I was working at RadioShack corporate headquarters and writing about music for a handful of websites, I got an email from ex-NBs bassist Bob Childress, who was working in the IT department across Taylor Street. One thing led to another, and the next thing you know, I was meeting Bob at a gig by the Punk Rock Dinosaurs, including his former bandmates Mike and Barry. I did this interview with them at an Ethiopian restaurant on Lemmon Avenue and it originally appeared on The First Church of Holy Rock and Roll website. I've since edited it for readability.

Barry: Mike and I have always been in bands. He always tries to get people he can fail with, people who are going to be real losers. We didn't know each other until we got to high school, and there was no musician's clique at that time. So Mike and I and Len Savage would stand out in front of the library and talk about records and music. Then people started standing near us and waving at their friends, and that became like the hippie clique for Irving High School, and they kind of shoved us down the hall.

Mike: This is about '68, '69. There weren't that many musicians. The Southern Distributor were based in Irving, and they were the leading sock-hop band.

Barry: They all had matching Nehru jackets. We had a light show. I ran lights for them. We had blob projectors, the whole thing.

Mike: Stevie Ray Vaughan played guitar for them for about a year. Very, very young kid.

Barry: Stevie had a deviated septum and when he blew smoke out his nose, it came out straight on one side. It was real cool. "Steve! Blow smoke out your nose!" His big thing back then was it was Stevie Vaughan, it wasn't Ray. But it's like, "I'm Stevie Vaughan, my brother's in Texas." "Yeah, so what? They play blues." Jimmie was his claim to fame back then. He was like 16.

Mike: We'd play YMCA dances and shit like that, basically British Invasion type stuff: Kinks, Stones, Yardbirds. So my band was going to play at the YMCA. As we were doing our sound check, the drummer takes his drumstick and puts it through both snare drum heads and says, "I'm sick of this! I'm out of here!" Then the other guitarist goes, "I'm with him!" and leaves too, so it's me and the bass player – who joined the day before, by the way. I knew Barry had talent, especially at that time on drums and vocals, so he walked in and said, "What's going on?" We explained the situation: "It's kind of screwed up, we're supposed to start playing in a couple of hours and our band just kind of fell apart, we don't know what the hell we're doing." He said, "It's no big deal. I can play drums. I can sing." "Yeah? OK, what the heck."

Another buddy came along and said, "What are you guys doing?" "Well, we're about to play this gig." "Let me go home and get my guitar!" Gets on his bicycle, goes home and gets his guitar, comes back and plugs in. So we basically faked it through the gig and did really great, it was amazing. People loved us! Go figure. So then after that I said, "This guy Barry is an entertaining kind of guy, can sing real good, and play drums."

Barry: I also looked like Magilla Gorilla. [Mike] had a very, very deep personal deal about deciding whether or not he wanted me as a best friend. Everybody would look at us and it was like the odd couple anyway, 'cause Mike was like longhaired, skinny...looked British Invasion, and I was like a football player.

Mike ruined me music-wise for most everything. I remember being in high school and when we started hanging out together pretty much and going to the Plymouth Park Music Center, watching Mike try to find Mott the Hoople, and this guy's going "Martha Who? I guess I can order it for you." Mike just knew and read about all these bands I never woulda stumbled upon on my own.

Mike: There were some interesting DJs here in town. Ron Chapman, who went on to fame as an easy-listening guru, at that time was real wild in his programming. So whenever the new Yardbirds single came out, the new Kinks single, this guy was on it, he'd play it a few times, and if it was a hit, great, and if it wasn't, he'd move on to the next thing. So if you're listening to the radio and hear something cool, you head straight to the record store! You don't wait for it to be a hit, if something catches your ear. If I heard the new Who single or the new Yardbirds single...yeah! Where's the record store? Start bugging the guy!

Barry: My brother was five years older, so he started getting me [into the Cellar], and then they just didn't card anymore. I used to go in there at 4 o'clock in the morning, drinkin'...16 years old. Calling Mike at home, going "Hey man, Johnny Winter's here!"

Mike: I'm laying in bed, it's about midnight or something, about to doze off asleep, and there's this banging on my window...and I'm on the second floor of my house...going "What the hell?" Open up the window and he goes, "Hey! Johnny Winter's playing down at the Cellar! Come on!" And I'm saying, "Hey, I'm kind of busy." About to go to sleep.

Barry: I went back and watched Johnny Winter. The strippers had like a 2-foot runway in front of the band, so the chicks were dancing in front of the band. Really great house equipment. Back then it was like Fenders. They had all this stuff you could just plug into. It was after hours. Johnny showed up after his show, it was like 2 in the morning, with his whole band, and wanted to play. So they played till like 6am.

Mike: All the cool bands played there. They played from 9pm to 6am. They had the equipment all set up, so the band would walk on with their guitars, play a set, unplug their guitars, walk off, the next band would walk on with their guitars. Five minutes later, the next band's playing! And all the waitresses wore panties and bras while they were waitressing, and they took turns dancing on the runway, but also, they would encourage amateurs, which could be a good thing, could be a bad thing.

Barry: Forandus came shortly thereafter... Jim Skinner, Mike, me, Rob Thacker, and Bruce Norris...incredible, huge drummer. Most fun in the world, I loved that guy.

Mike: About '69, yeah.

Barry: We wrote some interesting stuff, but basically were a Black Sabbath cover band.

Mike: [When the] first two Sabbath albums came out, we were big on that. But the other guys were really big on it. That's kind of why we came to a parting of the ways eventually. That's what they wanted to do, be heavy metal. We were like, "That's okay, but...we got other things to do."

Barry: [ZZ Top manager] Bill Ham came over to watch us practice and said, "I'm looking for a band to dress in country-western kind of clothes and play heavy metal to back up ZZ Top. I've got ZZ Top on the road and I need somebody to open for them." We said, "We're a Black Sabbath cover band! We're not doing that crap!" So he went and got Family Dog, Kim Davis' band, and changed their name to Point Blank.

Mike: While [Barry] was in the Army [1971-1973], I met Carl Giesecke, the drummer, and hit it off with him and started playing with him and some guys. We were actually doing what later became "progressive country," but we were also doing David Bowie, so we sorta had this mixed Stones/David Bowie/country thing going, which was okay for bars. The strange thing was we did all right, but eventually had a parting of the ways because some of the other guys were saying, "Well, we really want to do country and play in bars," and I went, "I don't think that's what I really want to do." I didn't know what I was doing, but what I really wanted to do was have the Nervebreakers. That's when I met Thom Edwards – Tex -- in a record store. We were in the record biz. He worked in a store and I worked for a distributor.

Barry: The thing with Thom Edwards: He's a personality. He can't sing! He can vaguely aim at the notes, but he can't hit one to save his life. It took me years to see what he is. The whole time I was in the Nervebreakers, I could kind of see the charisma, but he's going, "Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!" and jumping around. What was up with this guy? Me, I've got a three-octave range, and it's real natural, just God-gift, but I can sing really well, and it irks me...he can't sing, but it just works. The whole thing comes down to, I never had style. Thom was all style and very little talent...but style's really, really important. It took me years to realize that.

Mike: So Tex was working there, and I'd actually talked to him a few times, 'cause it was the hangout for record nuts in town. We got to talking this one time and the Raspberries album had just come out. We were standing there talking, and Tex goes, "What do you think of the Raspberries?" 'Cause their image was this totally bubblegum kind of image. I said, "I think they're pretty cool," and he went, "Yeah, I think they are, too." So I think that was where we sort of recognized that we both had our own taste. And I said, "Tex, Tom...have you ever sung in a band before? You want to try out for mine?" He said, "Sure." So he came over, and it was me and Carl and a bass player, and Tom. At that time, we were doing Mott the Hoople, Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, T. Rex, David Bowie. It was '72, I guess...'73. He was familiar with all the material that we were doing, so he could just jump in and start jamming on it. I thought he really had a charisma of some kind, and he was an interesting character.

Barry: And I'm in Korea trying to learn to play guitar! At the time I still played bass, I'd been playing bass for three or four years. Well, Mike writes me a letter in Korea and says, "I've been thinking about guitar playing and stuff, and I think it'd be kind of cool if we both played guitar and it was kind of competitive and built off of that, so why don't you start learning how to play guitar?" "Okay." So I went out and bought five guitars.

Mike: We had a band called Diamonds Are Forever, from the movie of course, and I had a cat named Diamonds. We were doing the same kind of thing, T. Rex, Alice Cooper, Stones, David Bowie kind of stuff, and we did that for awhile. It was pretty cool. And around that time, the New York Dolls' first album came out, and we really felt like the Dolls kind of stole our thunder! "That's what we're doing!"

Barry: [When the Dolls played Dallas with the Werewolves] I was still in the Army. I showed up with short hair, green eye makeup, earring, no shirt, no shoes, and one of those...you go to the Korean tailors... short-cut suits made up. This one was brown corduroy. You could feel all the people staring at you. And all of a sudden, I felt all the attention shift off of me and somebody punches me in the arm and it's Thom Edwards, and he's got like yellow satin pants, a white satin shirt with musical notes all over it, and a shag weird long haircut. He's taken an Esquire magazine and removed all the ads that he thought were pertinent for whatever reason and written in red Marks-a-Lot "blood" or "dead" on them, and just pinned them all over his clothes. So he's even weirder looking than me and I went, "Oh, good!"

Mike wanted to show me his new band, and we go right over to Cole and Avondale. The first time I'm seeing Mike's new project, I walk into their practice and here's Thom, slamming himself in the face with a mic while rolling around on the ground, and I'm thinking, "Hmm."

I started this band called A-Bomb. I was in VZ, just going to junior college, and I had this great idea for a showband called A-Bomb. I had written all original music, it was going to be pretty much like Kiss was, except after the Holocaust. Kiss meets [H.R.] Giger, y'know? So it was going to be show rock, that's what I wanted to do; I was a theater major. Well, those guys [A-Bomb] were all just wussin' around, couldn't get 'em off their ass, and at that point Mr. Nervous Breakdown - Mike, [keyboardist] Walter Brock, Thom Edwards, [bassist] Jean-Pierre Thompson and Carl [Giesecke] - they had this art-rock band going, real heady, way out there, Velvet Underground-like.

Mike: KCHU was the local public access radio station...KNON is kind of the inheritor of the KCHU license. KCHU came on the air in 1975. The first time it came on the air on Saturday night, I turned it on and these guys were playing this wild music, "Wow! This is great! What's this?" Out of the blue, there's this great station. So I called up and said, "What are you guys doin'? What's the story?" Turned out this guy Clarke Blacker was the DJ and I started working with him, and then Bob came in later and we all started working on DJ-type stuff together. Carl, our drummer, was a classical music DJ and Walter, our keyboard player, became the program director of the station. As a matter of fact, that's when he left the band, because he got so busy being program director.

Barry: So we had this big meeting, we went to the Taco Inn at the corner of O'Connor and Pioneer, eating burritos and talking about whether I should join the band. I went, "I just don't know if I can get along with this guy," meaning Thom, "because he's nuts." And he's going, "Believe me, I feel the same way about you." "Yeah, OK, I understand." We're just being forward and up-front and stuff. I said, "OK, I'll give it a shot." I showed up at practice that night with my '53 Fender Esquire and my Sound City stack 8x12, with these guys who had been really... not loud. All of a sudden, things changed in Mr. Nervous Breakdown. Oh, gawd! Mr. Nervous Breakdown played at the Hot Spot Foosball Parlor.

Mike: Gigs are where you find 'em.

Barry: That's why I can't stand when these kids complain, "We can't find gigs!" Dude, make gigs. We did. But I went up there and Bruce Springsteen Born To Run had just come out, and I had a full beard at the time, and they're playing foosball, we start playing "Born To Run," I've got the same guitar Bruce does, so I come in playing rhythm and [does a credible imitation of Springsteen vocalismo]...I did my best Bruce Springsteen for about a verse, and then Thom comes running from the audience with this fuchsia tuxedo-looking thing and a multicolored Afro wig, comes running from the audience with this keychain or something, plays like he's stabbing me in the chest, I'd already put in a blood pack, so I hit this blood pack and it spurts blood on the audience, crawled down on the floor and just lay down for the rest of the set.

Mike: Left to our own devices, Thom and Carl and I were more pseudo-intellectual kind of guys, off in a cerebral direction of some sort, although we were Stooges and Troggs fans, we understood that, but when Barry came into the band, Tom or I might have had an idea and said, "Here's this idea," and Barry would say, "Oh yeah? Check this out!" Make it simple and direct. "Yeah! It's cool." I think we were a good team because of that.

Barry: It was so much five guys who are completely different, going in completely different directions, staying together because of who knows why, and it worked really well. They were very much more knowledgeable about a much larger scope of music than I was. And I remember coming in going, "I've got a song I want to do, it's really cool, a rockin' song," and they're goin' "What?" And I said, "That We Five song, 'You Were On My Mind' - you remember that?" And they're like, "Yeah." "Let's do that!" And they're like, "That song is wimpy, dude," and I said, "No, man, it rocks!" and the way I played it for them, they said, "Well, yeah, that's rockin'?" And they went "Do you remember the original?" And I said, "Yeah, it sounds just like this!" My rock-out quotient was a lot lower back then, apparently.

Bob: I remember when we started playing that in the Nervebreakers and we went back to the original and kept going, "That must not be the right version!"

Mike: So our bass player at that time, Pierre, had been with us a couple of years, and he got frustrated. We weren't making any money. Basically I think he just got frustrated because we weren't hitting the big time, and he'd been struggling with us for a year or two, so it was kind of understandable. So he quit and I knew that Clarke would make the ultimate manager of a rock band, 'cause he was real aggressive. When he wanted something, he went and got it, which I thought was kind of cool. So Clarke had a great personality, but he wouldn't manage a band; he wanted to be in a band. And we needed a bass player, so he was it. He also brought along his buddy who became our sound man: Colin "1967" Pringle, who's a whole story unto himself. Colin was the engineer at the station, a licensed engineer for KCHU, and he was a real talented sound-engineer kind of guy. Clarke was an okay bass player, but his main function was that he was an aggressive manager. If we thought something was a good idea, he would just go bug somebody to death until they let him do it.

Barry: He had no shame, he had total tenacity, and everything rolled off his back like water off a duck. You could say, "You're an asshole!" and he would say, "Okay, but do you really think we could do something about this?" He was just great!

Mike: So we heard about the Ramones, and later the Sex Pistols, it was the same situation, we heard they were coming to town, and we just sat down, "This is a show we need to be playing," and Clarke would just find out who to talk to and bug 'em to death.

Barry: He called Stone City Attractions, the local promoter of the show, and said, "Yeah, we've got a band, we want to open for the Sex Pistols," and went, "Uhhh, this is being handled by Stone City out of New York" or whatever and he goes, "Okay, what's their number?" So he called New York, and they went, "Fine. An opening act. Cool." The Sex Pistols got paid 500 bucks for that show; we got paid nothin'

Mike: But we knew they were important gigs, valuable gigs for us, for exposure. And they were. It turned out to be, if most people remember us, they remember the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Police...those are the gigs most people remember that we played. They don't remember the hundreds of club gigs that we played in the meantime!

Barry: My favorite [NBs show] was probably opening for the Ramones at the Electric Ballroom. I showed up in my Army helmet, my pistol belt, shredded clothes and it's a "Zoo Free Sunday," KZEW, 99 cent longnecks and this is our first time on a big stage, so we're going, "Hot damn, big stage!" Mike is 400 yards that way, I'm 400 yards this way, can't hear nothin', it was ridiculous, we didn't know where the other ones were. This place fills up and it's all cowboy hats. These people are into progressive country, because they were listening to KZEW, progressive country, for this Ramones show.

Mike: They just came to this show 'cause it was a free show.

Barry: They can't have known who the Ramones were! Man, they hated us! Now, the first two rows was every punk rocker in Dallas, which was about 20 or 30 people. That's including everybody. We get out there and the first two rows are just like leather jacket punk rock people from everywhere. And back then, it was very scary...you could get killed very easily. People would kill you for looking that weird. You couldn't pierce nothin' back then. We'd meet each other and it'd be back-to-back, "How you doin'?" just to make sure nobody was going to shoot you. They loved us in the front, and then third row back, it just got progressively worse until they'd like to have killed us if they could get close enough to the stage. And I remember Thom going, "Stop it!" Through all the songs you'd hear boos and hisses, just yelling and screaming and throwing bottles. And he goes, "Thank you! I just want to tell you, no matter how much you hate us, it just can't compare to how much we detest you."

Mike: "That'll win 'em over!" And between songs, Thom says something like, "Hey, is there anyone here who listens to KZEW?" And of course the whole audience goes, "Yeeeaaahhh!!!" And he says, "Well, I think you're a bunch of fucking idiots!" And they're like, "Kill that motherfucker!"

Barry: All these punk rockers...I don't even know where these guys came from, are going,
"C'mere, c'mere, c'mere...give me a guitar pick, please." They're a quarter, dude. Buy your own! Everybody assumed we were from New York, and at the sound check, the Ramones didn't know where we were from. Johnny and Joey were there going, "Where you guys from? Really?" Yeah. [After] we did our sound check, they liked us. They were talking to Buddy Magazine and the guy said, "Don't you think your music will be a little incongruous here?" and Johnny said, "Well, man, you've got punk rock bands here. What about the Nervebreakers and the Werewolves?"

Mike: They were good, but at the risk of sounding totally arrogant (like I AM, of course), I really thought going into the gig that we were much better. But they were the Ramones. They were obviously influential and real strong.

Bob: The Sex Pistols gig was the last gig that Clarke played, and there was a little debate
about whether I should step in at that time or not, since he had done all the work and stuff like that. We thought it'd be a pretty rotten trick.

Mike: He said, "Maybe you need to find somebody else on bass and I'll be the manager." "Okay!"

Bob: I was in Fannie Ann's when Clarke told the band that he was going to quit, and I said, "Hmmm, I could probably play bass, it wouldn't be too hard." So I started learning all the songs -- 'cause I was taping them every night anyway -- on guitar, and then I kind of approached Mike and said, "If I went and bought a bass" -- which was a big investment for me -- "is there any chance...?" It was kind of out of left field, and you could kind of sense that he was going, "Uhhh..." But I kept on learning on the guitar and finally I broke down and bought some bass, and at the Manhattan Clearinghouse or something like that, Clarke was late or something, so I just said, "Well, I've learned some of these songs, so I'll go through the rehearsal or the sound check stuff." So I played for the sound check and Barry went, "We should get this guy!"

Mike: Clarke was our manager, and he was also our bass player, and essentially through my record biz connections, we started getting a lot of interest, because punk rock was just starting to be the thing. This was in '77. So we were starting to get contacted by a lot of record companies that were interested, and Clarke really felt like he was out of his depth as a manager. He said, "I can't deal with a record company. I can handle it on a local level, but we need help." I said, "Okay, let's find help then."

We looked around and we hooked up with a management company -- Incorsel Management. Bill Ware and Steve Corey. They were lawyers, entertainment company lawyers. They did stuff for the Eagles. They were pretty good on the legal end; we didn't realize that they were incompetent on the management end, but they had a big office, and they were all lawyers and stuff. So we went to them and made an appointment and went to their office, and said, "Here's our deal, we're a punk rock band and we've got record companies calling us, and we need help, someone to represent us." I think their attitude was, "These guys are idiots." So we said, "No, we're really serious." So they started checking around on us, calling up record companies, "You know anything about what is this Nervebreakers thing?" And everyone's saying, "Yeah! The Nervebreakers. We want 'em!" So I think the dollar signs went on in their eyes and they were thinking, "All we have to do is sign these guys up, negotiate a contract, and we'll take our cut, walk away with a bunch of money for doing no work." So for our sins, we signed with 'em, and it really didn't work out -- they had no idea, it was probably the biggest career mistake we made. At that time, I think if Clarke and I had just handled it ourselves, we would have done fine, we would have had a major label deal. But Clarke especially felt like he needed help.

Barry: Pretty much those guys [Incorsel] just scared everybody away.

Mike: Because they were such idiots, they just blew the connections that we had, and didn't make any new ones, either. They had no faith in our music and had no respect for us. That's the lesson -- don't sign with anyone who has no respect for you! They just thought we were a meal ticket, and since we didn't turn out to be a big immediate meal ticket, they wanted us to start playing lots of club gigs, which they started booking us for, because they could take a cut of the money and have a steady flow of income if we were out there playing every night, which is what they wanted. So we started playing a lot of club gigs, which was really kind of destructive, I think, to our art. On the upside, it made us tough and tight, playing four sets a night, but we really blew a lot of our energy playing club gigs.

Barry: It's totally demeaning. At Fannie Ann's, many times we'd sit out in the audience, because the entire audience would be onstage singing. There was nobody there, because they knew if they came back next Tuesday, we'd be there.

Mike: So we were getting kind of bored with the whole situation, and kind of losing interest, for whatever reason. Well, one of the things we would do to liven things up is announce that we were breaking up. And we'd say, "Okay, November 20th is our last gig." So we were breaking up and we had this gig, and it was our last gig, quote unquote, and we were playing at Fannie Ann's, and Bob had been with us a short time on bass, and this guy comes up, Tom Ordon, and says, "Hey, you mind if I tape your set?" Sure. "Y'know, I'm thinking about starting a record company, and I'm really sorry you guys are breaking up, 'cause I'd really like to put out a record." Really! "Well, we were going to break up because we got disheartened, but we've got such positive support from our fans that we've kind of decided to stick it out, y'know?"

Barry: This "huge fan base" he's talking about is this little glowing guy with blonde hair and he's sitting dead center at Fannie Ann's, alone, with a tape deck. You could see his big grin...just sitting there, recording us, all the time.

Mike: So we say, "Maybe we could reconsider that breaking-up thing." So we got to talking to Tom Ordon, and we said, "Well, as a matter of fact, we just got through doing this demo tape, four songs, and if you're interested in putting it out as a record..." He says, "Yeah! I am interested." That was the Politics EP. Also, at the same time, we were going through this incompetent management, so we said, "Well, you know, we're going to try and get out of our management contract," which we did, and so at the same time we got out of that contract, Tom Ordon came into our picture and he started helping out with management (as well as being our record company). So for awhile, Clarke and Tom were handling management, which could have been a great team, because Clarke is like this really aggressive, never-take- no-for-an-answer type guy, and Tom Ordon's really easygoing, nice, sweet guy. So you think, "This could work out...could be a great team." Unfortunately what really happened is they just butted heads all the time and hated each other, so it didn't really work out very well. But Tom wound up being a pretty good deal. He was in San Francisco in the '60s and had a lot of music connections there that helped us out a lot, as far as our California business went.

Barry: ["My Girlfriend Is A Rock" came] out of the blue! Carl the drummer was a percussionist for the Dallas and Irving Symphonies at the same time he was in the Nervebreakers. He came in with a song to this little rehearsal and said, "What do you think of this?" He gave me the melody line, which was just like opera. And I went, "Man, this is a rock song. These are great words, but this is a rock song." "What do you mean?" I rewrote the music along the lines of the opera, and it worked out. Of course when it came time to fill in that credit for getting that copyright, my name was conspicuously absent! And he said, "Well, I wrote it." And I went, "Oh yeah. We'll see about your next one...you'll be writing your next one by yourself." And you see he's had this long row of hits since!

Bob: Carl had written the song in one hour or something like that. He just kind of blurted out the lyrics. He was kind of singing, and Barry was playing stuff, and Carl was going, "Yeah! That's it!" That's what Carl was claiming -- that Barry was interpreting what he was thinking!

Barry: Before he thought it!

Mike: My understanding of "My Girlfriend Is a Rock" was different, because when I got to the rehearsal, I walked in and they said, "Hey, we got this new song" and immediately, I said, "That's a hit!" They were thinking it was just a joke. I went, "It's a joke, but it's great!"

Bob: I remember saying, "If we break a string, we can play it, 'cause it's just a funny song." It was the only song Clarke didn't care about on the [Politics] EP. He started out saying, "Well, if you want that on there, go ahead; do anything you want with it. I don't really care about that song." One of the secrets is I play bass on that one, but I don't play bass on the other ones. Everyone in the band was a better bass player than me!

Mike: As soon as [Barry] played it, I thought, "There's no doubt, you nailed the bass part." I played bass on the "Are We Too Late For the Trend?" compilation LP cuts "I Love Your Neurosis" and "So Sorry." Also, I had to dub the bass onto the Roky Erickson & the Nervebreakers LP [Roky Erickson & the Nervebreakers Live Dallas 1979, New Rose/Fan Club]. These were all needed to solve strictly technical problems; Bob's original performances were fine.

Barry: We were a lot like Josie & the Pussycats anyway. I did all the background vocals, and we'd all play the bass parts, and Mike would do all the guitar parts, anything serious. I could crunch chords, but I can't play guitar. So we had this little band of guys that were pretty cool-looking guys. Together we'd get it done; we wouldn't get anybody outside the band to do it.

Bob: When we backed up Roky Erickson, they learned the harmony guitar parts to "Bermuda." They played that live just great. And Roky was kind of goin', "Oh!"

Mike: We started playing the Palladium, this real nice club. The nicest gig on Earth -- nice place, nice crowd, nice people, we actually got paid money and everything! Whenever they had a New Wave or punk act or whatever come in, which was pretty often, you'd see either us or Kenny & the Kasuals opening. So they'd had a gig booked for Graham Parker, and we were going to open for him, but he cancelled a couple of weeks in advance, and so the booking agent called Tom and said, "Hey, I've got an open date. Can you come up with something interesting to do on that date?" And Tom, from his San Francisco days, was friends with Roky's manager, so he called Craig and said, "What's Roky doing?" He's not doing anything, he's just sitting in Austin. At that time, he didn't have an album out. He'd recorded some stuff, just demo tape-type stuff, which became an album later, but he had no record deal. "Do you think he might be interested in doing a gig?" "Give him a call."

So Tom Ordon calls Roky: "Hey, Roky, you want to play June 23rd [1979] in Dallas?" "Sure."

"Okay, cool. We can pay you three hundred bucks." "Sure."

"We'll send you a bus ticket." "Sure."

"The Nervebreakers will be your backup band." "Sure."

You start to notice the pattern.

So he sent us a tape. "Can you send us a tape of songs you want to do?" "Sure." He sent us his demo tape, which later became his first album, and so we got Tom Ordon, for purposes of rehearsal, to do the Roky singing parts, and learned all of the songs. We busted ass, two or three weeks, every night, practicing and learning these songs. We had 'em nailed pretty good. Came the day of the show, we had never actually talked to Roky Erickson, or met him or anything, but we had some photos of him, his press photos. And his press photos basically looked like he was pretty cool -- leather cap, nicely coiffed hair, clean-shaven, pretty sharp looking guy. So we're sitting there at the Palladium, we've got our equipment set up, waiting for him to show up for the sound check. And this street person comes walking in the back door, like a Charles Manson kind of guy with a beard and long hair, looks like he's been living in a box on the Interstate, and we're going, "It can't be him...it must be him...okay. Hey Roky, how's it going?" "YEAH!"

"Cool, c'mon in." "YEAH! YEAH!"

"Listen, I'm glad you showed up just now, because our roadie Pope is about to go to 7-Eleven to get some drinks. You want a drink?" "YEAH!"

"What do you want, a Coke?" "YEAH! YEAH!"

"Well no, actually, we're going to have Nehi Peach drinks. How would you like that?" "YEAH!"

I started to get a little nervous. Then Carl walks up and goes, "Hey, listen, Roky, we were
listening to your demo tape and we were trying to learn this one song, but we're having trouble telling what key it's in because of the speed of the tape. What key is that song in?" [Blank stare] Total silence. And we're going, "Oh, shit." I said, "It's in A minor, right, Roky?" "YEAH! YEAH!"

Barry: We strap on this "The Paul" -- Tom Ordon's guitar -- and turn it on. "Well, what do you want to play?" "I dunno."

"How about 'Bermuda'?" "YEAH! YEAH!" We start playing, and he turns to me and goes, "What's the third chord?" "You wrote it, Roky." He goes, "I know!" "Okay, it goes like this." So I showed him how to play it.

Mike: But once the music got going, he was there. He knew the words when the music started playing.

Barry: He unplugged his guitar twice and didn't know. I'm going over there and he's going, "Thank you, thank you," trying to do his patter while I'm trying to plug him back in, "This next song is..." We started doing "Wind and More," and the Nervebreakers above all else was a good, solid, tight-ass rock band. Could play anything. And we had that shit nailed. We did "Wind and More," and there were like 250 people at that show.

Mike: It was a good turnout. At the sound check, we were kind of concerned about the fact that he didn't seem to be communicating at the same level as the rest of us, but after we played a song or two, it started to sound pretty good. We're going, "Hey! This is cool." And then he unplugs his guitar and goes, "I'm going to go take a rest now." And we're going, "Roky, shouldn't we try the rest of the songs before the concert?" And he's like, "Uh, it'll be okay. I'll see ya later. I've met you. You're nice guys. It'll be fine."

It turned out fine. I didn't find out until later that he'd just gotten out of the mental hospital [in Rusk, Texas]. We played a couple of other gigs, and from our point of view, the music was good. We were all total Roky fans, but living with him on an ongoing basis got real old, and after doing that a few times, Roky said, "Hey, this is great. Let's go on the road." No, no, no. "We love your music, but no, we're not going out on the road with you." So we said, "You know, we have these friends in Austin. They have a great band; they're called the Explosives. You really oughta hook up with them."

Barry: There was a point where I was going to drive Tom Ordon crazy. It took me a long time, too, to wipe that smile off his face. I'd say stuff like, "So, where are we playing?" "[Name of club]." "Where is it?" "I don't know." "What time are we playing?" "I don't know?" "Don't you think a manager should know that kind of stuff?" Never let up on him. Poor boy.

Mike: [On tour in Arizona,] Thom was being a real prima donna. We'd been driving for a couple of days and we got to our first gig, so we were a little bit cranky after sitting in the back of a van for two days. I think we started unloading the truck and tempers were a little bit ragged, and I go, "Thom, why are you sitting over there in the club having a beer?" Thom said, "Well, I don't know, I think I sprained my back a little bit, I don't think I should be unloading equipment." I think that was it. I think Barry was going to kick his ass.

Barry: I didn't, though.

Mike: You didn't! I think the rest of us were kind of thinking, "You know, you shouldn't kick his ass, but really, we think his ass needs to be kicked." Mixed feelings about it.

Bob: And we've got this whole tour in front of us, and here it is the first gig and the band's breaking up! That's it!

Barry: Everybody on the road thought that the roadies were the band and we were the roadies, because we all looked normal and they were all punked out! That happened at home, too -- we'd be playing at Mother Blues and they didn't want to let Bob in, even with a guitar, because he didn't look cool enough to be in the band.

Mike: We did real well in Sacramento and San Francisco.

Bob: Mabuhay Gardens. Boz Scaggs came.

Barry: He tried to steal Carl.

Mike: That's right, he tried to steal our drummer.

Bob: The Mabuhay, that might have been the best, in a certain way, because it was in the heart of kind of like the punk scene, and all the people were sitting there looking at us, then they got closer and started spitting on us, and that's when I knew we had won 'em over. We knew that if they didn't do anything, that was an insult. So when they started throwing stuff at us and spitting on us, I said, "Oh, okay."

Barry: I reacted a little differently...I poured my pitcher on a guy's head.

Mike: The L.A. part of it didn't go so well because Bay Area Magazine was promoting the tour, and they had no presence in L.A.

Bob: We played the Starwood with...John Hiatt?

Mike: We were headlining...on a Tuesday night! There are four other bands on the bill, we go on at 2 in the morning, and there's nobody there! "Wow, being the headliner on Wednesday morning is really cool."

Barry: It's a weird thing, the way history looks at things. The real important historical
bands, if you look at the media, were just nothin' in reality. Amazing. Bobby Soxx [from the Teenage Queers]...whoo! Big news! This guy shows up in a shag haircut and granny glasses trying to sing a Sex Pistols song. This guy had nothing new to say at all. The Vomit Pigs were the real punk rock. The Toys were way glam. Snakes On Everything. The Scuds were kind of cool. The whole idea is that this guy had leukemia and he was going to die, and his last request was that he wanted to be in a punk band. So all of his relatives got together and said, "Oh, okay..."

The Nervebreakers were a separate thing. The rest of the scene was kind of going on under us. Those guys looked at us like we needed to be toppled. "Ahh, those assholes." Until they got to know us. The bands would all talk bad about us and what arrogant assholes we were, and then they'd meet us and go, "You guys are pretty nice!" This band Control, I lent them my PA, and came and tuned their guitars for them when their parents were in the audience.

The Dot Vaeth Group was probably the closest. And I'd already started making T-shirts, and I made one, "If you like peanut butter, you'll love the Dot Vaeth Group," because I'd heard that their bass player had done his hair up in chunky peanut butter when they played at this club, and I thought, "That's great!"

At the Manhattan Clearinghouse, we come walking up with our girlfriends, "Ho hum, another gig, another night." "Y'know, the Dot Vaeth Group's opening for us tonight." "Oh, yeah, maybe we'll catch some of their stuff." So there's four or five of us walking up the street, and we're about half a block away when we hear them stop, the song's over, "Thank you, good night!" So nobody looks at anybody, we go, "Fuck!" and we're running down the street, running up the stairs going, "MORE! MORE!" And then we're just too full of ourselves, "Yeah, y'all were very interesting." Gawd, we wanted to hear that band! And they were pretty interesting. But that little scene just went without us. You look back at what people remember or what got listened to on records and stuff -- it wasn't us, because we were doing our own stuff and everybody assumed that we didn't need any help. As if we didn't need to be part of it, because we were just up there by ourselves.

Mike: Our first [recording] session was like six tunes with Clarke on bass, then we did "Politics" with Bob, and "Hijack the Radio" with Bob. All at the same studio, High Grove, and Russell Berger was the guy who was engineering those sessions. He's now gone on to quite a bit of fame as a studio designer. He really didn't understand what we were doing, and he was kind of a mellow dude. This was back in the '70s, and with the best will in the world, he was trying to make us sound like Loggins & Messina or something. So he really didn't get it, but he was a nice guy, and after we did the "Hijack" thing, I was talking to him and we were trying to decide what to do next, which direction to go as far as recording. So I said, "Well, Russell, how do you think the last sessions went?" and he said, "Pretty good." I said, "Well, if there was something you could change, what would you do to improve what we're doing?" and he said, "I think I'd try to make it a little bit cleaner." Wrong answer! All right, he's outta here.

Now, okay, we've got to do something else. We needed to be raunchier. We did this ESR thing [Are We Too Late for the Trend LP, 1979], which was too raunchy. I actually engineered that session, and I had no idea what I was doing. As a result, it was okay, but it wasn't a step forward. So Thom knew this guy Phil York, who's a real legend, he's worked with Willie Nelson and all these Texas music legends, a real nice guy with a depth of knowledge about engineering. Thom called him up and said, "Hey, would you be interested in working with the Nervebreakers?" He said, "I dunno." Thom said, "Well, we're playing this gig," we were playing at DJ's, and he came down and checked out a few songs and says, "YEAH!" Later I found out he said, "I never heard anything like that!" His background was totally country, he had no idea, he was from another planet. But, "This is cool." He's excited. So he really helped us. He engineered the sessions at Autumn, real nice studio. So the engineering was great; mostly live in the studio, a few overdubs, but mostly live. Bob on bass, except for one or two songs where Barry played bass.

Barry: And the Kooda Chorale! Sixteen tracks of me singing by myself! "Do it again, a third up. Do it again, a fifth up. Do it again." "What are you doing?" "It's the Kooda Chorale. You'll love it."

Mike: At that point, we finished recording, finished mixing, and I was going through a lot of changes. I think it was a postpartum kind of thing. I'd spent the last five years working on this music, and that was the result. In retrospect, I think I was kind of depressed, actually, I didn't have direction, I didn't know what to do, I was frustrated, I think there were too many egos, between me, Barry, and Thom. Any two of us could work together, but as three...it was creative tension, but it was tension. So basically I quit, and so did Bob at the same time.

Bob: I didn't want to quit, because I recognized, being a fan, that the chemistry or the magic of the band and the people together and all that kind of stuff was more than the sum of its parts, and I couldn't really afford to do the tour, I'd used up all my vacation and stuff, I was about to be fired! But when Mike quit, that opened the door, because Superman's Girlfriend had broken up, and Paul Quigg and James Flory we knew were buddies and they could just step right in. They weren't doing anything.

Mike: Thom came to me and said, "What are we going to do? I know you're leaving, what can we do?" I said, "Well, you're going to keep the band going, right?" And he said, "I don't know! What can I do?" And I said, "Get Paul and James on bass and guitar!" And he said, "Oh! Okay." See, I didn't know 'em personally, so I wasn't recommending them as personalities, I was just recommending them as musicians.

Barry: We had already booked the New York tour. It was poorly planned, and when we got up to New York, it was really awful!

Mike: All the times we played were great. There were some off nights, but man, every time we played was great. I loved playing with these guys! That was cool!

Barry: For me, playing was always the best of times, and studio was always the most antagonistic of times. There was a weird hierarchy in the band. It was actually Mike and Thom's band, and I was just a surfer. I pretty much got to play on the waves a lot. A lot of times, say the Russell Berger stuff, I remember going into the control room and listening to the nine dissenting opinions.

Bob: The other best thing was when we'd start improvising, like in the middle of "The End" or "Waiting for the Man," where we'd go in different directions each night and we didn't know where we were going. We just kind of looked at each other and we started doing something that we didn't do last night.

Barry: We were hacking through a jungle, a lot of times.