This is it: the final resting place for
The Gutless Meanies
a vaguely punkish band that played out of Swarthmore College in 1984-1987 and was an occasional participant in the Philadelphia scene of that era.
This is it: the final resting place forThe Gutless Meaniesa vaguely punkish band that played out of Swarthmore College in 1984-1987 and was an occasional participant in the Philadelphia scene of that era.
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September, 2006:
Why in god's name have I bothered? In 2002, something possessed me to write down my memories of my college band and compile a couple of CDs worth of material in digital form from old band tapes. It was perhaps the realization the tapes were going to go belly up soon enough, maybe a nostalgia trip. There was a lot of awful crap to listen to, but to my surprise, some of the songs and playing sounded decent 15 years later. I dubbed our one good concert that made it entirely onto tape (hifi twotrack recording from the crowd, next to the keg) recorded on September 26, 1986, on Parrish Lawn, and I called it Thank God It's Friday; and from the rest of the noisy lofi tapes I culled a sort of dissective cross-section of other incarnations of the band and some pre-and post-history of music made by various band members outside of the band and put it into a CD called Gutlessmeania. I sent a copy to Russ Marcus who sent me back some photos and comments, I made a master copy of the CDs... and forgot about it.
Then in August 2006 I went to Kansas to see the reunion gigs of the Embarrassment, which were outstanding. I went to two of the shows with David Cateforis, who was in the band for a semester, and he asked me if I had any old Meanies tapes. Well, hell, I did, I'd just forgotten to send them around.
Here they are, David!
I've got links to photoshop files below if you want to print out jewel case inserts and CD labels for the two collections. You can listen to the tunes on-line or option-click and save them to your hard drive and import them into iTunes or your favorite MP3 player. If you want to burn the CDs, the track order is below; each is about an hour. I've got a few decent extra cuts here as "bonus" cuts that didn't quite fit on the CDs, not necessarily worth of preservation, but there you go. Enjoy if you must.
I've also copied in the "liner notes" I wrote for the TGIF CD and my strangely long "brief" history of the band. Who knows, maybe we'll get some airtime on WSRN!
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MP3 files for the Gutless Meanies "Album" Thank God It's Friday: Live September 26, 1986:
Mr. Taxpayer, Metamorphosis - Hurchalla/Wall; Political Song - Hurchalla/Sass/Wall; Dar Harat, Copywrite Dub, Landlocked, Color Purple, Baby Baby Baby..., Nancy Skank, Tiny Feet - Wall; Businessman - Cateforis; Let's Serf Wall/Marcus; Generic Surf Song, Apartheid Socks - Wall/Marcus/Currie/Lorber/Cateforis. If I were reviewing this for WSRN, I'd star "Baby Baby Baby...", "Tiny Feet", "Landlocked", and "Metamorphosis"...with a "NFP" note for a bunch of the others. |
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MP3 files for the Gutless Meanies "Album" Gutlessmeania 1984-1987:
4 - March 1986 at WSRN (Wall, Marcus, Cateforis, Lorber) 5 - April 2 1986 at the Swat Live Aid Concert, Sharples Hall (Wall, Marcus, Cateforis, Lorber) 6 - November 2 1985 at the club (Hurchalla v/d, Wall g, Marcus b - our "power trio" incarnation) 7 - May 1984 at Hallowell basement (George on vocals, with Tim Mitchell on drums and Gary von Koln on guitar, Wall on bass) 8, 9 - our "farewell" gig at the club, April 1987 - things fall apart a bit... 10, 11 - recorded May 1984 in Lang Music Hall - Matt Dinkel, vocals on "Swarthmore Swivel"; Tim Short, drums; David Cateforis, guitar; Matt Wall, bass and vocals on "Swarthmore's Burning" 12 - recorded at Potsdam College, New York, summer 1983, David Cateforis on guitar and vocal 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 - recorded either in Lang or the WSRN office in late 1986 or early 1987. Annalise Buonanno: vocals; A. Scott Currie: guitar/sax; Russell Marcus: bass; Andrew Fortune: guitar; Dave Barnes: drums. 13, 15, 16, 17 by Currie/Marcus. |
"Liner Notes" for TGIF, from 2002:
TGIF wasn't our best gig. Nor was it by any means our worst.Our best gig was sometime in February 1987 when it all came briefly and gloriously: the crowd danced at the club that night, we played great, everybody had a good time and there was that feeling of nirvana that creeps up your forehead and covers the lobes of your brain when rock music hits every neuron in both brain and butt.
Our worst gigs -- we had many tied for last, notably when I didn't know how to play, we didn't have a good drummer, nobody came and/or nobody danced.
Our last gig, in April 1987, had a bit of both sublime and awful in it. We started out hot, and things started happening. We couldn't keep in tune, I kept breaking guitar strings, the crowd fell flat. It wasn't a farewell gig I'd want to remember my college band by.
The TGIF gig, though, was notable for a few reasons. It was our first gig with Scott Currie in the band, and marked the beginning of the seven-month period when we were our best. Scott brought a lot of fun to the band, with his sax as well as his axe. Russ and I had been playing together in various guises since the first day of his freshman year, when we'd played Buzzcocks tunes together at an orientation jam session. But finally having a good drummer in Sam Lorber made the band gel in early 1986, along with the short but sweet segment in the band's history when David Cateforis played lead and sang with me, that taught me a lot of technical details I hadn't glommed onto hithertofore. We practiced hard during the first weeks of school that year, before homework and life caught up with us, so we were surprisingly tight for a new-lineup. We were also loose, and played a lot of covers, a lot more than we typically did.
The gig itself was outdoors, on the front porch of the newly-renovated monstrosity of a gutting of an old building now known as Tarble in Clothier. The TGIF beer blast had been a staple of the old Tarble, and this particular TGIF was the debut for the new student center. We originally wanted to play on the little second-story balcony overlooking the front lawn of Parrish, but the lack of power and a way of getting the drum kit up there put the kaibosh on that idea. But, we had lots of kegs of free beer, a captive audience on a nice day (check out those shorts), and a good groove. How much more can you want from a gig?
One other unique feature of this gig: it's one of the few we have a decent tape of all the way through, and the only one for which we have photos. The former we owed to John Irvine, visiting for the weekend and operating my boombox with some clue. The latter were taken by Margaret Hawley, for an article than ended up in the Phoenix.
Strange things happened during the two hours we played that day. The new turf in front of Tarble hadn't taken yet, so the crowd was roped off away from us by about forty feet. We were sternly warned by a humorless college official to "keep off the grass or else". At the same time, the Board of Mangers was in session right behind us. In one surreal moment Eugene Lang himself stepped in front of the group, walking across the grass, of course, holding his ears with his hands, looking like he was choking on a rotten pickle. The Parrish fire alarm went off. But nothing went wrong with us, really.
We started off with our chestnut, Mr. Taxpayer, one of the only true collaborations between George Hurchalla and myself. The lyrics were about a guy who used to call up George's mother, a county official in Florida, complaining about this and that but only identifying himself as "Mr. Taxpayer." He stopped calling one day, never to ring again, leading George to pen the lyric in his remembrance.
Dar Harat was from my trying-to-be-hardcore period. The lyrics were an anti-terrorism, anti-force majeure rant that might be more topical today than ever. ('Dar Harat' was the name of a terrorist organization in the Spiderman daily comic strip.)
Apartheid Socks was a joke song about the trivility of college political activism that was basically just a practice jam Russ and I did now and again but which we ended up working into most gigs as a lightener.
Political Song dates back to the hardcore period, and was intended as a signature song by George, who wrote the lyrics. Geoff Sass did the riff and I ended up trimming it a little.
I was obssessed with Wire for a long time, and Ex-Lion Tamer was the one cover George, Russ, and I had agreed was cool enough to violate our original "no covers" rule. (Derivative was OK, of course.)
This gig, in part because Scott was new, we did a lot of covers: including Club Med Sucks, from the first Camper van Beethoven album, with a song fragment I'd been diddling with as an intro.
We then bleed into Scott doing vocals on the venerable My Sharona. George and I were originally really into the Ramones no-rest-between-songs concept, and we still planned a lot of short segues in our set lists. The ten-minute-plus ska-dirge of Copywrite Dub with the Modern Lovers' Road Runner might have been the nadir of selectivity, but 'Dub' was Sam Lorber's favorite original of ours, so we kept it in. It was a long and ccnfused rant I wrote about the 'Copywrite Police' and home taping, an issue that looks tame in the post-Napster digital era.
Metamorphosis was a George lyric I put to a tune I'd previously written in our HŸsker Du-worshipping days; it was at times a really hot tune and one I'd've liked to put down on vinyl at some point.
The Generic Surf Song was really a riff on the Peter Gunn theme, but we liked playing with it, and here Scott's sax is prominently featured.
My all-time favorite Meanies tune, of course, was Landlocked, written in the course of an awful summer trapped in Swarthmore in 1984. Still has a good hook.
Businessman was penned by David Cateforis, but I liked it so much I stole it from him (with permission) for the Meanies.
Baby Baby Baby... might have been the best song I wrote during that period, perhaps not coincidentally because there were no lyrics and hence no singing. The joke didn't overwhelm the rockin', as with many of my other songs.
Fast Cars, again featuring Scott on vocals, reflected our common love of the Buzzcocks.
The Nancy Skank was another jam song in the reggae-slow/hardcore-fast vein popular in the Philly Scene of that time, that might have run its course by the time we did this gig - my ravings about Nancy Reagan and her cultural leadership (I had an incredible collection of Nanciana clippings during college.)
Tiny Feet owes a lot musically to my obsession with The Embarrassment and had some of my better political lyrics, about ignoring big problems for little ones. Despite its derivativeness it's still one of my favorite songs the band did and one we managed to rock out on fairly consistently.
Let's Serf was the only song Russ and I collaborated on, oddly enough; his riff, my lyrics. Among my regrets of those days was that Russ and I never collaborated much on the music. I like this a lot, and I liked the other stuff he and Scott did. One of the problems with Tiny Feet was that I used the wah-wah bar on the guitar so much it tended to throw my axe way out of tune, and it was too far off on this tune to do my usual solo, so I just let Scott wail on the sax for three minutes (to reasonable effect).
And finally our show-stopper, the crowd-pleasing cover of My Girl (aka Michael) in slow-fast-slow-fast style popular in the Philly hardcore punk scene in those days. This was the one song people consistently actually called out for. Footnote: I spoke with somebody from the "old days" of the Philly scene (one of the Dead Milkmen) in 2005 and that was the one song he remembered. Go figure. -- Matt Wall August 2002 / September 2006
Gutlessmeania is a culling from various tapes from concerts, band practices, and other bands related in some way to the Meanies. The first set of tunes show the Meanies at various stages (some of them embarrassing); the better tunes are the first five cuts. The second set are some representative and/or amusing cuts from related bands.
The Meanies files:Krokus is another joke song that Russ and David and Sam and I used as an opener from time to time. The origin: my friend Ray Davis had told me a story about an interview he'd read in Creem magazine with Krokus, the German metal band. The interviewer thought Krokus was a dumb name, but the guy in the band he was interviewing insisted it was a good name because it was easy to chant during encores, etcetera. So the joke was: this was our song with a big rock and roll ending -- but nothing else. I liked playing this one right before Apartheid Socks, another song parotting and parodying people who liked to chant things. This and Baby... (another joke-on-rock song) and Businessman were from a club gig in late April of 1986, another pretty decent tape in the vault, among our last gigs with David Cateforis and probably among our best.
We recorded band practice a lot, largely so I could keep track of how we were doing, but I ended up taping over and over the same tapes a lot. "Politically Landlocked" is a snippet from one practice in spring of '86 at the WSRN offices, with no mikes hooked up.
You get a really nice taste of what David brought to the band in Tiny Feet (circumstances described below in the history of the band) at the Swat Live Aid concert; can you say Guitar Hero? I thought you could.
Political Song/Landlocked/Mr. Taxpayer I included for an honest look at the state of the band during George's drumming -- everything starts out fine but the vocals and drums drift away from the guitar and bass fast, giving the whole thing a sort of disjointed feel, as if we were playing two records at different speeds.
New Year's Eve is the George original we played until he left the band, this one from our very first incarnation, fairly typical of the drone sound we had (and I like George's vocals on this one -- shows what he could do when not distracted by playing the drums).
Mr. Taxpayer and Metamorphosis are from our last gig in April 1987 (as is the bonus fragment of Nancy Skank below -- a gig which started out well and ended very flatly, these latter songs being towards the end, in large part due to my falling apart on stage literally (guitar breaking under my fingers) and figuratively. I like these two cuts though as typical of some of the banter Russ and I had on stage.
Other Bands:
Matt Dinkel (where are you Matt?) was a transfer student (he'd been doing something like Naval Architecture somewhere in Rhode Island, as I recall) who constantly remarked on the incestuous nature of Swarthmore relationships. The Matt Dinkel All-Star Blues Band was a one-shot put together for the Breakfast Dance in 1984 (at which the Gutless Meanies also played -- see the history of the band below) so Matt D. could sing his composition "Swarthmore Swivel." We didn't get a good recording in Sharples so broke into the Lang chorus rehearsal hall during Senior week to record this version. We then jammed - doing the staple "Louie Louie" (unrehearsed) with Matt D. on vocals and a version of the Meanies' "Swarthmore's Burning" (music by the Clash, lyrics by me) with me on vocals -- again totally unrehearsed! -- and a long meandering jam "Swarthmore Blues" with David C. on vocals. These latter tunes are throwaways but 'Swivel' might still have some relevance to campus life (I consider it a high probability.)
The Flipp! was David's "summer" band with a couple of guys he grew up with, some of whom went on to become the core of the Gigolo Aunts, who put out several excellent records in the early 90s and who lingered on for quite some time. The original version of "Businessman" is included here for contrast to the Meanies' multiple versions, and I think as a document it shows nicely the sensibility David brought to the band during his stint on lead guitar. I dig the cover of "And I Love Her" here, too.
Minstrel was Scott and Russ' other band, a pretty decently jazzirifickafunky one, with Annalise Buonnano (now Curtin) on vocals, Andrew Fortune on guitar, and the ubiquitous Dave Barnes on drums. Mingus' "Haitian Fight Song" was the signature song I always remembered, the originals by Scott and Russ are pretty good too. Good fidelity on these recordings.
The Mayors weren't really related to the Meanies except by intermarriage of band members' band members, as it were, but we played on the same bill with them a lot, and I had some of their stuff on the back of a Meanies tape so decided to throw it in. Mark Rozzo, lately of the excellent band Champale, was the guitarist, with Andy Swift on bass, Sam Harris on vocals, and (again) Dave Barnes on drums. My recollection of them was they did mostly covers but played quite hotly and in the fashonable neo-psychedelic strain of the era; I always had a good time dancing to them and drinking beer, as long as they played after us and not before us. I may try to get some more Mayors' stuff up here eventually, but as of this revision I'm sending the original tapes off to Mark.
MIA but should be here: a version of the Stomping Yobbos "Trenton Local" since George and I had collaborated on that originally as a Meanies song. My tape has gone missing somewhere...this is the band George put together post-Meanies; I missed its later incarnations because I'd graduated by then, but I saw an amusing few gigs.
Meanies songs that never made it to tape and/or out of rehearsal:
(Well, truth to tell, I've actually got recordings of most of these someplace but nothing worth listening to ever again, either due to low fidelity or just low quality, period.)We had a whole set of covers done by the first incarnation of the band until George left, described in the band history below. Towards the end, as I note in the band history, I had a lot of new material that we ended up doing only occasionally or in rehearsal and just never worked in permanently into the set due to increasingly diminished practice time (the usual spring semester/finals problems for a college band.) From memory, since we don't have tapes: "False Dawn", a Husker-inspired song that really shredded nicely but which had really self-indulgent depressive lyrics - I did this one solo, guitar only, during a set-break...a cover of "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)" which I occasionally did solo, punk-style (just change the emphasis to "if I had a hammer...") and which I vaguely recall we did a couple of times live..."Judy's Turn to Cry", intended as our gender-bending update of the Leslie Gore classic...a cover of my friend Ray Davis' song "The Hustler", by his band The Continental Op (a Bryn Mawr/Haveford band of a generation before ours), which had a great, dramatic song structure (never got that one out of rehearsal)...."CPR" which I thought was a great song, among my best originals, that had a rather baroque song structure written under the influence of the Electric Love Muffin and Ruin - we tried this once or twice but tanked it because it was too complicated...a cover of "Joe McCarthy's Ghost" with Scott on vocals, usually a band break (two or three of us would play it while others attended to business) -- Russ and I were under heavy influence of the Minutemen in '84-'85...and I had another dozen or so intended for the Meanies written down and/or on tape as demos that we never got around to doing, the tapes for which I'm going to try to burn or discard before I have to listen to myself sing on them ever again.
We also, on one occasion, managed to use the "March of the Meanies" -- penned by George Martin and on the soundtrack side of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine album (the film of which was also the inspiration for my stage name, Maxwell B. ("Blue") Meany) -- as intro music over the PA before breaking into "Krokus".
What follows is the history of the band I wrote in 2002 with a few updates in 2006.
Swarthmore Burned: A Brief History of a College Band
Arson flames and false alarms. The bookends for my college band, the Gutless Meanies.
About three weeks into my freshman year at Swarthmore College, in September 1983, Tarble Hall burned to the ground in a spectacular blaze. My dorm room, on the corner of the third floor of Willets, was as close as you could come to the fire: the heat on the window glass in our room actually woke me up before the first alarm was sounded. The embers from the fire nearly set Parrish Hall, the college's oldest and most iconic building, on fire. Everybody was up and focussed on one event like no other time during my college days.
In retrospect this might have been the most viscerally thrilling moment of my college days. The Tarble fire also created the conditions that shaped the Gutless Meanies.
Old Tarble, as it came to be known in lesser, later days, was a comfortable, spacious, relaxing pit of a place. Tarble Rats were the slacking denizens of the place who ate cheesesteaks and fries from the greasy snack bar, drank beer at the (free) TGIF parties Friday afternoons, and sucked on coffee from comfy chairs morning, noon, and night, textbook in hand. You could play pool or foosball for money, and there were pinball machines and even a couple of the brand-new thing, video games: all 200 feet downhill from the library. What more did you need for college life? Tarble Rats might not have been typical of Swarthmore, but as a control rod they helped keep the social fission under control by injecting just a touch of cool into the whole thing. I was an aspiring Tarble Rat that fall of '83.
Tarble's laid back profile was perhaps the deciding factor in my decision to come to Swarthmore. I'd known of Swarthmore's reputation as a nerd-heaven pressure cooker, and it bothered me to the degree that I wanted to be able to have some fun in college. I happened to take a tour of Swat on a Friday, and hit Tarble at TGIF time. I was promptly given beer (at the age of 16), and ended up dancing the night away at the Rat to punk and new-wave records until 2 a.m. when the beer and my stamina finally gave out. Hell, I thought, the place can't be that bad if it's got that kind of attitude.
Old Tarbs had three important features for the musically-inclined. First, that was where off-campus bands came to play in the big hall: perfect for dancing, decent acoustics considering it had formerly been the college library. The Plimsouls had opened up the '83 season a couple of weeks before the fire: the gig was a blast. Second, Tarbles had the Rat, the little basement club where campus bands played on weekends, where you could get more free beer, and pretty much the only thing that passed for a musical scene outside the WSRN studios. Finally Tarbs had lots and lots of small rooms tucked away on the second-floor balcony, some used for student offices, but some reserved for bands to lock away their equipment. They were perfect places to jam, perfect places to have sex. Natural cubbyholes for musicians.
The fire wrecked all that, and I don't think it was ever quite replaced at Swat. There were temporary measures: an old fraternity building, which came to be called The New Club (and later, when I visited in 2001, I'd found had been finally shut down and was being called "The Old Club" at the time), was converted into a pretty-lame temporary student center, too small, underequipped, and far away from the center of things to get up to the old critical mass. But it got the Old Tarbles' managers budget, and bands from off-campus and on got paying gigs there, and it became the home for 90 percent of the Gutless Meanies' gigs.
That fall of 1983 was awful for me. I'd been out of school, effectively, for almost two years, and had no real clue about how to study, learn, and generally succeed at the college level; thanks to Pass-Fail you'd never know it but I came close to flunking out across the board. I hated dorm life. The lack of Tarble was depressing: there was nothing to do on campus, so I headed off-campus to Philly a lot to get away from the dorms, which was not conducive to helping my academics up. I had three tortured relationships that fall in the fine Swarthmore style and was trying to extricate myself from an even worse one from Ohio days that had followed me five hundred miles against my will. To put the spike in the coffin, I was called up to active military duty for a week in October, which nearly killed me and gave me a large dose of I-don't-give-a-fuck cynicism that carried me through four years of music-making and school. Pretty much only the debt I'd already run up kept me in school. The fire was the beginning of the incineration of the image I'd been creating of college for the past eighteen months.
The fire also probably got me into the Gutless Meanies.
I'd played bass in a really, really bad punk band the year I lived in Akron, called The Primitives (along with about three dozen other bands before and after also named The Primitives, if you want to get an idea about our level of originality) that had exactly two gigs, both at a hole called The Dale, both of which ended up in my getting stitches (once due to a member of the audience, the second time due to my being hit in the head with my own bass by the guitarist in the band.) I sucked, couldn't really play, and the band sucked. But I liked that feeling of playing live, more than my musical talent supported, and wanted to play again in college. The Tarble fire had put most bands out of business, in no small part because the majority of band equipment on campus got burned out. Practice space became a problem: it had to be stolen during odd hours in dorm basements to the objections of the inhabitants. So I went bandless that fall, learning the ropes at WSRN and doing a lot of taping.
The temporary attempts to replace the functions of Tarble lead to some odd re-uses of space. For an abortive few weeks in early 1984, organized college parties were held in the lobby of the Lang Music hall (until the damage got to be too much for the music department). I remember the last of these parties very well, in part because it was about the only happy moment I had in my fourth twisted relationship of the year, but mostly because it was where I met the incredible, creative, arhythymic, and semi-sociopathic if not quite insane, George Hurchalla, the Alternative Oyster.
I noticed immediately upon arriving at Lang and filling my beer cup that the music was about five cuts above the ordinary mix. It was eclectic, loud, and had a few hardcore songs sprinkled in. It was when "Charlie Don't Surf" was playing that I finally sought out the tunemaster, who turned out to be George. I'd probably have met him eventually, but it was the displacement of the old Tarble social schedule that had produced ad hoc events like the Lang party and put George in my path that night.
How I'd missed meeting him it beyond me. I listened to his show with the late lamented Bugs on WSRN, pretty much the only hardcore show on at the time (I myself was very new to the genre; the Dead Kennedys was about as extreme as I got before getting to college) and called in requests from time to time. And it's not like George was hard to miss: six foot eight, thin, usually skin-headed, and prone to dressing in sandals and shorts in the dead of winter. But I'd missed a formal introduction until that party at Lang. We had a short but solid conversation about music, and I got called away back to my last happy date with #4, and that was that.
But I now knew George, and took to swapping records for taping with him. He had a great indie Americore collection, and I had a ton of English imports. I guess you could say that was the genesis of the band in a nutshell. But George didn't mention wanting to be in a band, and there were no signs of his playing anything. And I was focussing on not flunking out that semester, and just diddled on my gigantic Oliver amp with my bass from time to time when it didn't annoy the rest of the dorm too much.
Then in late February I saw a sign posted in Parrish: something to the effect of 'Gutless Meanies hardcore punk band forming, needs bass, guitar, and drummer.' Underneath was George's name and dorm extension. I called: we jammed a little in George's Danowell dorm room, my playing bass riffs and George talking about his concept for the band.
That, also in a nutshell, was the band under George's aegis. He'd picked a name first, thought about the concept a lot next, wrote a few lyrics, and continued to think about the concept a lot after talking about the concept a lot. Then he got some other musicians to complete the concept. Nevertheless it was instantly obvious he was a great front-man: you didn't have to be able to sing in a punk band, and he was very visually interesting and full of vinegar and humor.
George had somehow recruited an unlikely mix of three musicians that spring. There was myself; a drumming high school kid from off-campus who only went by the name of 'Colt' who wanted to play Police covers; and Gary Von Koln, an actual member of the despised DU fraternity and a Reagan Republican who just happened to like playing three-chord punk on his guitar (and he was decent). That was our first lineup.
We practiced a dozen times or so in Wharton basement and Danowell lounge (again, due to the shortage of space caused by the Tarble fire), usually being kicked out by an angry RA. Our repertoire was a ton of covers selected individually by each member of the band, plus three originals that were mostly two notes and George's lyrics. The covers were: "God Save the Queen", "Submission", "Suspect Device", and TSOL's "Code Blue" (George); "Louie Louie", "John Wayne was a Nazi" (MDC), "Deny" (the Clash), a version of "London's Burning" with lyrics I wrote about the Tarble fire we called "Swarthmore's Burning", and "Psycho Killer" with me on vocals (mine); "Rebel Rebel" (Gary); and "Message in a Bottle", for Colt, a song on which George refused to participate but which we did to mollify Colt.
The originals were a song called "Maniac Thrash", which was just a jam riff with George ranting; "New Year's Eve" (not to be confused with the U2 song, about which George was ignorant until I apprised him otherwise), about some kind of dark epiphany George had on a December 31st, a two-note thrash dub; and "Mr. Taxpayer's Secret". This last song was based on lyrics by George, about a guy who persistently called George's mother (who was a county official in Florida) complaining about the conduct of government but only identifying himself as "Mr. Taxpayer." (His 'secret' was that he disappeared without a trace.) Musically it was the only collaboration George and I ended up doing: he had an idea he sort of hummed, and I turned it into notes and "pop-ified" it. It stayed in the Gutless corpus until the last gig.
We had one gig with this lineup, at the Breakfast Dance of 1984 in late April. The Breakfast Dance was one of those whacky college ideas -- get up really early to party instead of staying up late -- that probably dated to the Jazz Age at Swarthmore and died shortly after our appearance. The audience was sparse and sleepy. (I don't claim credit for killing it: it died of terminal boringeness on its own.) We did three or four songs -- at least "New Year's Eve", "Louie Louie", and "Submission", possibly "Code Blue" or "Pyscho Killer" -- and literally had the plug pulled on us. We got booed, thinly, and considering how bad we were for a while, it's a miracle we weren't booed ever again. That was the last time I saw Colt, who just stopped showing up to practice.
We did a second gig that spring, at an impromptu Danowell basement party during finals, with Tim Mitchell subbing on drums for the MIA Colt. There's a tape of this, and "New Year's Eve" on the Gutlessmeania CD is from this half-practice, half-party. I remember this as the most fun I had with this lineup, even though the drumming was Mo Tuckeresque (Tim hadn't picked up a drumstick before that day, so I'd call his performance quite passable, especially when contrasted to that of our next drummer), but that might have been because I got laid at the end of the party, finally fulfilling my expectations about the rock and roll life.
(I once talked to the great Dick Dale after a gig in Pittsburgh in 1996, and asked him why he was still playing out in his 60s. Dick's answer was: "To get laid. That's the only reason to be in a rock band. Don't believe any other answer. ROCK AND ROLL IS ABOUT SEX AND NOTHING ELSE." Incidental to that, I asked Dick, wasn't he married? He said "You think my old lady, who is young and extremely hot, would lay me if I wasn't in a rock band?" I swear to god this is a true story. I wrote it down word for word right after it happened so I wouldn't forget. I just wish I'd known this when I was trying to write such intellectually precious songs. Given that most of us ex-Meanies have married well above ourselves, I'd have to call the band a smashing success measured by the Dick Dale theory of rock.)
That summer I worked for the Astronomy department and lived with Tim Mitchell. I regret to say we did not make good housemates, and were at each other's throats pretty much all the time we weren't drinking. (Finishing a case of Yuengling returnables was our peace-making exercise.) The summer was so boring and lacked stimulus to such a degree that I ended up spending most of my free time practicing my guitar to the point of near-competency, and writing songs. Boredom, the mother of punk bands. The song that survived from this summer was "Landlocked", pretty much about the frustrations of life in the burbs, and probably still my favorite Gutless Meanies song. My concept at the time was to marry the Beach Boys' harmonies (I was listening to a LOT of Beach Boys that summer, perhaps out of a sense of wistful longing for an ocean) with punkcore, and with various diversions, that was what I personally was aiming at for most of the Gutless Meanies' existence.
That fall George and I roomed together in Mertz, then known as a jocks' dorm because of its convenience to the fieldhouse and practice fields. I'm sure we must've stood out like nobody's business in that lot. We had an undersized corner room on the top floor, and our equipment got crammed into it during the frequent periods when we had no practice space. George was the perfect roommate: he had an excellent and complimentary record collection, he had a car he was willing to lend, he had similar circadian rhythyms, and he was willing to leave the room when I wanted to entertain but never asked me to do the same. We had fun.
At the beginning of the fall, George had recruited Geoff Sass to be the guitarist. We had no drummer, a typical problem, and George nominated himself for the job. We practiced a few times under that lineup, and Geoff and George collaborated on "Political Song" (modified slightly later, but also essentially the same for the rest of the history of the band) as a signature song. George's concept then as ever was to make fun of the pseudo-intellectual pretension of the bands and college people around him; how it escaped our attention that we were among the most pseudo-intellectually pretentious people around is beyond me. Geoff was a real depressive, sour, dress-in-black type, so we mixed like oil and oil, which is to say not at all. (Nevertheless, I admired his output of various forms over the years, and today still own his self-portrait which I bought for $25 from the senior student art show in 1987.) I can't remember exactly when Geoff left, but it was fast, and he went on to be in the power punk trio The Cruel Mechanics with Jim Ryan. (Jim also worked with Tim and me at the observatory in the summer of 1984; in one of those bizarre coincidences, he showed up playing the stand-up bass in the jazz trio that was hired, unbeknonst to him, for David Cateforis' wedding five years later. He's now a philosophy professor in Canada.) The Mechanics played at a lot of gigs with us in the next year, at The Club and the Pearson art gallery and the Gryphon on Parrish fifth and once at Abe's Steak House in Philly.
That August, though, was the meeting that in my opinion started the "real" Gutless Meanies (or, as my wife once put it succinctly, the "fat" Meanies -- musically and corpuscularly -- in contrast to the George-era "thin" Meanies). As part of freshman orientation in August of '84, there was a scheduled jam session for the musicians in the incoming freshman class to get to know one another. There I met Russ Marcus, bassist extraordinaire, playing the riff from the Buzzcocks' "Boredom", and it was love at first sight.
(Incidentally, Dave Barnes, who was a serious musician even before he got to Swat, was at this orientation; he's since made a name for himself doing more serious performance work. He was in a bunch of bands at Swarthmore, occasionally in the Cruel Mechanics and as the regular drummer for the Mayors, even though he was the hottest guitar player on campus. Also among this group at the freshman jam was Andy Swift, who was an extremely good bassist who also played with the Mayors on campus: Andy had played in high school with J. Mascis and Lou Barlow, who of course became better known in Dinosaur and Sebadoh, darlings among pop--indy bands. Andy also, coincidentally, went to high school with my wife, and guested once or twice with the Meanies on stage; he later went off to New Orleans to study and play jazz seriously.)
I should start out by pointing out I'd known about Russ' existence before he ever arrived. There was a newspaper story about college admissions the previous April that had followed Russ around the day he got into Swat that Tim Mitchell spotted on the news office bulletin board. We made a copy of it, and Tim had it on his door that spring with a bullseye around Russ' name (he'd underlined the passages about Russ' collection of skinny ties -- we'd mistook him for a New Wave poseur). He was going to be our mark for special torture the next fall: too enthusiastic about a place with which were were unhappy.
So it could be that Russ dodged a bullet by displaying himself to be the intelligent, funny, musically-cool, and ever so slightly fucked-up-in-an-interesting-way guy that he was in the fall of '84 before I could put two and two together and tag him as the newspaper geek. I am grateful to the punk rock gods that they didn't let my buttheaded assoholic tendency to pre-judge get in the way of making happen a great friendship, one I hope continues until I die.
I've got so many Russ stories it's difficult to even start, lest I know not when to stop. Russ and I, at the time we met, had record collections that I'd say overlapped by at least 50%; ever since then, we've been on the same musical page even from a distance and even with years intervening and middle-aged unhipness encroaching. We shared a lot of personal moments, bad and good. Of the incarnations and permutations of the Meanies, Russ and I played together the longest, and you can't play that much music with somebody without a supra-conscious and permanent bonding taking place.
I can't remember precisely how Russ came into the band, but it was pretty quickly and very naturally, and I moved from bass to guitar since Russ outclassed me by a mile on the bass. Failing to find the drummer, we stuck with George in that role on top of his lead vocals. Russ and I spent a lot of time playing riffs together - I learned a lot about how guitar chord structures fit into basslines - and George spent a lot of time on wardrobe, logistics, and getting us gigs.
We started playing out in October and had a handful of gigs that fall, mostly at The Club, then still in the old frat building below Clothier and near Sharples. We were awful. The problem was that George just didn't have what one would call a natural sense of rhythym: the cuts from a gig in November of 1985 on Gutlessmeania give one a sense of what the band was like then. George had such a magnetic stage presence, though, that I suspect we were far more entertaining than the evidence of this recording might suggest. We still played some punk covers, but had mixed in more originals, and my recollection is we could put together a set list about a dozen songs long. It occasionally, very very occasionally, came together.
There's a video of a gig from this period, taken by George's brother Jim. I hesitate to think it's still out there. George, being ever the entrepreneur, also had remixed some band practices into eight-track reel to reel tapes with the idea of getting a demo tape out so we could gig out in the world. I still have copies of the reel to reels, but having no way of playing them back, they sit on my shelf. My recollection is that we didn't sound very good musically on the tapes, although it was much higher fidelity than anything we ever did.
I dropped out of school at the end of the fall 1984 semester, moved into Philly and got a job. The band kept on, though: George I think finally came to the realization he had no business near an instrument, and we cajoled John Irvine into the band. John couldn't play drums very well -- he was more a stringed instrument guy -- and didn't take the band too seriously at the time (we could've learned a lesson from him) but he was still much better than George. Using the same basic 12-song setlist, we practiced that spring, and played a few acceptable gigs. Much to my regret no tape seems to have survived from that period. John would occasionally (at least twice) play his trumpet for a song. (I later realized, all too late, that one of my secret subconscious desires with the band was to have a horn section.) Our primary document from this period is a set of posed, kind of affected band photos we took in ML to send around with our demo tape.
We never did play out off-campus much, which was probably a good thing insofar as graduating is concerned. Despite occasional pretensions or ambitions otherwise, we were a college band. But the scene in Philly was an important part in our bandlife, and it extended out to Swarthmore on many occasions in the guise of club gigs for off-campus bands. George and I also went to lots and lots and lots of off-campus gigs during 1983-85 thanks to his having a car; when I was living in Philly I went out three or four times a week. The venue of choice was the CE Center, a community center in Powell Village near U Penn, as well as Abe's Steak House, the fraternities at Penn, The Love Club at Broad and South (see the Dead Milkmen's "Nutrition") and the mainstream clubs. (There's a live Government Issue album recorded at the CE Center, and you can clearly hear George and me singing into the mike during one chorus when their singer offered, as was the hardcore DIY custom, the audience the mike.)
We got to know the Philly skacore scene very well then. It was an interesting, positive scene for a while, before skinhead violence, drugs, and the usual crap scuttled it in 1986-87. Our favorites were the Electric Love Muffin, clearly destined for greatness, and the Dead Milkmen, who of course went on to a ten-year career as a joke band and are the only notable long-term survivor of the scene. The Gutless Meanies opened for both these bands -- we got them work at Swarthmore, too -- and on one occasion, they each opened for us. More typically bands would just pile on a long card and play in no particular order. We were also chummy with The Fabulous Fondas, who played clean fender-sound weirdo pop tunes and whose frontman Rocco Socco sold me pot on more than one occasion; Five Story Fall, a half-ska, half-punk band; Homo Picnic, the best pure hardcore band around; and Ruin, an ultracore band allgedly into buddhism that put out two very, very loud albums. We occasionally also hung out more uneasily with the mainline punk bands from Ardmore. George was also friendly with the only native Delaware County thrash band of the time, Nobody's Favorite.
Another eccentricity of the Swat college music scene in those days was that we had to go to Haverford for the "major" off-campus acts. After an acoustic disaster or two at Lang and Clothier (not to mention A Flock of Seagulls at the Fieldhouse), for a while the student activity budget allocated to bringing bands at the mid-level -- regular labels and a name, but above the level of the Philly off-campus band and thus more expensive -- got transferred over into an ill-conceived 'Tri-College Concert Committee'. This meant, in effect, all the musical events were at Founders' Hall at Haverford. It was lame, in that only a few dozen Swatties bothered to make the long trip up there in the days before the Blue Route cut the travel time by two-thirds. But the people who went made the party Swarthmore's own: the front rows in front of the stage was virtually an All-Swarthmore thing. (Much to my amusement, in 1991-94, when I was again living in Swarthmore and working for the college's computer center and DJing once again at WSRN, I'd occasionally go to concerts at Haverford and found things had not changed a bit -- the front row was all Swatties. My theory is that WSRN has made Swarthmore a much more attractive place for the musically-inclined, compared to Haverford's low-wattage part-time station.) At the Haverford gigs we saw the Del Fuegos, where I met one of my heroes, Brent Geissman, late of the Embarrassment, and also the Raybeats, which gave me the life-changing revelation that surf music was not actually dead.
We went further afield a bit as well: into Trenton to see Kraut and HŸsker Du, up to New York from time to time (including one trip to see another ex-Swarthmore band, Life in a Blender), once down to Virginia to see a hardcore bill. George and I met Ian Mackaye at one of these road trip gigs, though I can't remember exactly when. George knew more people in more scenes than any of us, or at least people knew him (hard to forget him once you've met him), which made it easy to find places to crash and generally get along pretty well when I tagged along on his frequent trips.
That year living in Philly was an important one for me. I practiced all the time on my own, and did a lot of songwriting. I got my head together, I kept a relationship together the entire year (one that is still going today), figured out why it was I wanted to be in college in the first place, and generally grew up quite a bit. I came back to school in the fall of '85, and the next phase of the Gutless Meanies began with the departure of George.
George was and is a world traveler, and his interests at that time took him down to Australia, where he robbed houses and surfed his board into a US Destroyer in Sydney harbor. His strange mix of social consciousness and sociopathic indifference to individuals would've made a great band in some alternative universe, but his interests and DIY philosophy probably naturally precluded any great musical strides forward.
When he left, Russ and I wanted to keep playing together, and we ended up just sticking with the Gutless Meanies name for reasons that are obscure to me but which probably boiled down to it was as good a name as any and we were used to it. We did play on George's reputation some on occasion: we advertised one gig as "not featuring" (in small type) "THE RETURN OF GEORGE HURCHALLA" (large type), and we had people calling for George all night. Props to you, George.
At some point while George was in Australia it stopped being his band and became Russ' and mine; he didn't want to rejoin anyway when he came back (with a somewhat more brutish and extreme aesthetic in tow), but you can occasionally hear him shouting from the crowd during some of our later gigs. He went on to form the Swat band The Stomping Yobbos (among his bandmates there was Dennis Murphy, who still plays out with some family and an ex-Swattie or two in Philly in The Knife and Fork Band, which is an excellent group. I love their CDs). Some of the songs George and I had been working on, notably 'Trenton Local', showed up on Yobbos tapes.
John Irvine flunked out around then, in late 1985, and moved back to Maryland after playing abortively in a kind of neo-mod band in Philly. He ended up with the best rock and roll resume of any of us. He joined the latter line-ups of the Hated, a very accomplished and tortured sounding post-core band that had a large following on the east coast and put out several excellent albums. He then founded the Jennifers, a sublime pop band which still gigs out. Both bands were much, much, much better than the Gutless Meanies and I listen to them a lot more than Meanies' recordings, by a long shot. In any event, we were again without a drummer.
So in the spring of '86 we recruited two important band members who took us musically from what I'd call the crappy conceptual Gutless Meanies period (from 1984 through 1985) into the Gutless Meanies who sounded decent period (from 1986 through the last gig in April 1987).
First was Sam Lorber on drums. Sam was (and is) a real, classically-trained musician and composer (he now teaches music at the university level) and played sax, but we managed to convince him to play drums for us. It was his first rock band, and the early gigs sometimes show it. But you can't put that good a musician in a band and not make it sound much, much better. Sam didn't party with the rest of us, he didn't have the love of punk we had, he didn't even know most of the songs we were copping consciously or not, but he did make the band into a real band. He was an enthusiastic participant and in the latter days of the band started collaborating actively on the song structure. He took over musical direction, true to conducting form, of the performances, and you can hear the differences immediately in the surviving band tapes.
Second was my friend David Cateforis, who joined in the spring of 1986 as lead guitarist (I moved to rhythym guitar). David was also a superb musician, a very good guitarist and a former bassist with The Flipp! (one of whose members, Dave Gibbs, went on to be part of the excellent indie band The Gigolo Aunts). He also had a great pop sensibility. The combination of hot lead playing, background vocals, and the poppier approach gave us a great sound that spring. David was in his senior year at the time, largely done with his academic work, and the relaxation and release shows through in the tapes from this period. He had fun, and so did we. (Sounding good and having people dance to your music helps a lot.) He was the only guy ever in the band who could sing: his backing vocals helped my feebler efforts a lot. I learned almost all of my advanced guitar from him, not a little about song structure, and began to learn how to sing while he was in the band.
I'd met David early in my Freshman year. He lived on Parrish fourth, and was at WSRN a lot. His tastes and mine coincided on the poppier end of the indy spectrum, and we also did a lot of record exchanging for taping. As it turned out, David was also an Art History student, and we spent a lot of time over the years in class together and on art field trips. He had an intellectual sense of aesthetics but a heart of pure pop, and became a very influential person in my life. We'd played together in jam sessions (notably the Matt Dinkel All-Star Blues Band, a band brought together purely to perform "The Swarthmore Swivel" at various senior parties in 1984) but David hadn't the time for a band until that spring of the senior year. I will say he embraced the concept of the band whole-heartedly and extended it to the realm of, as I put it earlier, competence, and then some, musically.
We'd actually copped the Cateforis-penned popcore anthem "(I Don't Wanna Be a) Businessman", with only minor changes, from him in 1984 and added it to our setlist, and David had helped me out with the many rough edges of my own songwriting more or less continuously, save for the one semester he was in France. So it's fair to say he was a part of the band both before and after he actually played in it.
With three strong musicians in the band now in Russ, Sam, and David, practices worked. With only one songwriter/primadonna left in me, most of the ego battles disappeared. We weren't perfect but we were on our way. We also had a permanent practice space at WSRN, since Russ and I were now both board members (and I was the station manager, a position Russ assumed after I graduated from Swat.) It's amazing how regular practice and good musicians can improve a band.
We played out frequently that spring, and a bunch of tapes survive. One notable appearance was likely the one where we played to the largest number of people, the Live Aid concert at Sharples. The Bob Geldof Live Aid concert had taken place the previous year, with one of the venues being the old JFK Stadium in Philly. A series of copycat benefit concerts followed, among which was the Swat Live Aid show put on by the local Oxfam club. We had a hot seven or eight song set; the good playing more than made up for the bad acoustics. On the version of "Tiny Feet" on the Gutlessmeania CD, you can hear me ranting about how having a stupid concert wasn't going to solve anything. Ever the twerp, however accurate I was in my observations.
June and graduation came, and David left the band to go on to grad school. Enter the inimitable Scott Currie. Scott and Russ had gone to high school together and had played together in a band back in the days. Scott transferred into Swat for his junior year, although I'd met him the previous year when he was visiting Russ. He was too cool for school: he played the sax, among other things, looked more like a rock star than any of us, and by god, had lived in New York City. He brought his Danelectro lyre guitar in for rhythym, could play it well, and brought out the sax for tunes on occasion. He loved doing the shows, sang some songs and generally made the band even more fun (and thank god less serious) than it had been. We did a lot of covers early on with Scott and a lot of jamming, something we hadn't done much before. It made us a better group, and the Thank God It's Friday concert shows it.
Our very first gig with Scott was the TGIF party to inaugurate the Tarble-in-Clother ("TIC") social center on September 26, 1986, which is the only full-length show we ever got on tape and the basis for our "Thank God It's Friday" CD. The last in a horrible series of decisions about replacing Tarble was to build a building-within-a-building with the insurance money. The resulting monstrosity ruined Old Clothier and provided a really crappy student center. It was overcompartmentalized, and had the feel of an intellectual design without concern for how people actually used buildings. Among the mistakes made was a perfectly horrible "concert" area (Suzanne Vega played there that year and told me it was the worst place she'd ever played, including the street), which, fortunately for us, was not yet ready for the "opening" of the center.
Our original plan for this gig was to play on the balcony overlooking the lawn. I must've gotten the idea from a Frankie and Annette beach movie or something. Not only was it hard if not impossible to get all our equipment on the balcony, there was no power up there. It's a good thing, since the acoustic projection would've been horrible.
We instead played on the concrete sidewalk right in front of the main front door. The grass had been newly-laid down in front of us, and we had been sternly and humourlessly warned not to let anybody dance on it. So the crowd, which was a very good one attracted by the free beer (and which slowly disappeared to go off to dinner), danced on Parrish beach on the west side. We were loose, having fun, it was early in the academic year, everybody was in a good mood, we had a lot of friends there, virtually everybody danced. At one point the entire board of managers walked in front of us, on the way to a meeting -- across the forbidden grass, of course -- and my most sublime moment in the band took place, wherein I annoyed Gene Lang to the point of sticking his fingers in his ears. The lack of connection between management and the students was never quite so ironically plain as at that moment when he walked towards the monstrosity the Tarble fire had wrought on student life. You can hear me sardonically singing "Keep off the grass!" at the end of "Tiny Feet" on TGIF -- that's when Gene Lang walked right in front of us.)
As if to add an acoustic punchline to the whole affair, the Parrish fire alarm went off during our last three songs. After the Tarble fire, new fire alarms had been installed in Parrish when the administration realized what a death trap the place was as a dorm (students have since been removed entirely from the place). The alarms didn't work well, and were easily set off by the legions of ants that made the place home (they walked over optical sensors). As a frequent user of Parrish (I basically lived with my girlfriend in the East during her senior year) I can attest to the rather large number of times we were roused in our underwear at three a.m. for a false alarm. It made you jumpy: that there had been, in fact, a horrific fire on campus within memory made it worse.
We played through the alarm, and I think we sounded pretty good.
We continued to practice and play that fall, and I had a spate of new songs. But we began to run out of practice time in the spring, in part because I was studying for senior exams, and we incorporated almost no new material. So the TGIF gig is a decent record of what a typical gig was like. We played out all during the spring of 1987, and I remember at least one really fantastic gig in February of that year at the club. Lots of people came, they danced, we played very, very well, nothing went wrong with the equipment, I was at the peak of my abilities. No tape exists, so I may be romanticizing a memory. But I do think we had a couple of moments of perfection in there.
A tape does exist for our last gig ever, in late April of 1987. It wasn't a great gig. Things went wrong: broken strings, odd starts and stops, weird problems. But it started out well, and we had fun for a time. I was kind of fucked up that night: my on-again off-again relationship with the woman who would become my wife was in a strange state, as was another relationship I had going on, and I was very much in the dark as to what I'd be doing in another month after graduation, where, and with whom. Russ had something similar going on in his life. And the Band was sort of hanging in the air. I'd saved enough money to get just enough studio time to record four songs and for a production budget of 500 7 inches, but it was unclear that we could get the band together that summer to cut it. The gig went south when my guitar strings broke and I ended up playing on five, being out of a replacement, and had an argument backstage (backstage was a little room well in front of the stage and upstairs) with a would-be paramour while trying to find another string.
At the end of the night Scott and Russ and I got really stoned and went out to Denny's, as we often did over the years. I had pancakes in honor of the Alternative Oyster. I stumbled into bed and was awakened at 7 am by my landlord, who reminded me that I was due to take the GREs at 8. I took them (passing out in the middle on one section) and did far better than I could've had I been conscious enough to think about them. The band was done.
As these things happen, the decision was made for us by happenstance. The band never did break up, it just faded out pretty quickly. Sam got deathly ill with some sort of intestinal problem that required surgery, and we had to cancel out on our last few planned gigs in May. Scott turned to that succubus, Jazz; Russ pursued other interests; I picked up my faux sheepskin and moved to Boston to be with the love of my life and got a square job in the computer industry.
The irony, which is not lost on me, is that I became a Businessman (until my company finally went bankrupt in late 2005), and while I don't have a house in the suburbs and a mortgage to pay, as our song went, I've been close enough. When I was working at Swarthmore some years later and my wife was teaching there, I went to a commencement speech by a person whose name I never did get or at least don't remember. It was one of those awful Swarthmore commencements where, I swear, every speaker, from the President to the student speaker and every invited speaker, basically presented prescriptivist holistic solutions for saving the world. Except for this one speaker, who gave me a bit of activist wisdom I never did get in four years plus as an undergrad. His comment was: if you want to change the world, create a job. Give somebody work. You can take a fancy college education and go work in a welfare office, but you'll probably do more good for people in general if you can be literally productive. Maybe the best thing I ever got out out Swat; but the DIY attitude you need in small business came from punk rock.
The four other most important members of the band -- are all (ore were) college professors! Two in music (Sam and Scott), one in Philosophy (Russ), one in Art History (David). Sam is a working classical saxophonist. (I note that, astonishingly, Sam has not included the Gutless Meanies in his music credits in his bio. Go figure!!) John, again in one of those bizarre twists, not only became the most accomplished rock musician of the lot of us, he's got the most socially-conscious occupation, working for the State of Maryland in social services. George's Aunt became Attorney General -- yes, Janet Reno is George's Aunt -- and I spent the eight years of the Clinton administration waiting for a headline involving "Reno's Nephew Arrested". Didn't happen, fortunately enough for us all. George has remained ever the peripatetic raconteur, becoming a decent occasional professional photographer, and an author of books in eclectic subject matter. You can see George's work at his website at http://www.spotximages.com. Check out his book about 80s punk, strangely taking its title from a song by the (decidedly British) Jam and oddly reminiscent of all those hippies 'weren't those 1960s bands great' nostalgists we used to make fun of. To each generation its own muse of history. (I note with bemusement in 2006 that George's mailing address is still his parents' house. That is so punk rock, baby!)
Musically, by latest accounts everybody still plays. I've largely been diddling on surf guitar since then (I did the surf "drive time" show on WRCT Pittsburgh for several years in the late 90s), but recently learned to play the piano. (I've finally realized why the notes are related to one another: what I could have done with that knowledge in 1985.)
Coda: During the last year I lived in Philly, in 1994, I was going to grad school in Philly but still living in Swarthmore. I was awakened in the middle of the night by the godawfully loud area fire alarm used to alert the volunteer fire department. Our rented house was right on the railroad tracks across from the playing fields. I stuck my head out the window and saw -- smoke coming from campus! I went up to discover the remnants of the butt end of Old Tarble in flames, another arson. The last useful bits of the building were gutted and it was later demolished.
Thus the Tarble fires bookended my relationship with Swarthmore College. My wife and I moved away from the benighted town of Swarthmore at the end of the following school year, and I did my last show on WSRN (at least to date) in the spring of 1995. I went to my last show at the Old Club that spring, a great gig with Small 23 and the local Swat band Meringue, which included, of course, the program director from WSRN. The "Old" Club and the "Older" Club were both gone shortly thereafter. WSRN continues very much in the same vein (David Cateforis and I visited it for Kaori Kitao's farewell festschrift in 2001; the rewiring job I supervised in 1986 was finally coming apart, but the old broadcast board was still there, as was the gentle anarchy that reigned as the station's organizing principle) and it made me think as long as WSRN exists, it will continue to produce some DIY cool little bands on campus. Probably nothing big will ever come out of the place, but as long as that kind of music culture survives, of which my college band the Gutless Meanies was a small interlude, it will remain a place with just enough of a touch of cool to stay vibrant. Until the day when they stop having college bands at Swarthmore.
Then you can put a match to the place as far as I'm concerned.
- Matt Wall / Monterey, CA / August 2002 (updated September 2006)
First off, every damn hardcore band on the planet had a logo. This was a consequence of the iconic Black Flag four bars, I think, which was far cooler than the band actually was, but also a sort of group decision by bands in the hardcore community to brand themselves. I'm not sure it was a good idea or not. So George and I experimented with logos a lot at a few points in the band's early tenure (when we probably should have been learning to play better), although we never ended up using a single logo consistently in band flyers, etc. we did settle on a basic concept.
I played around with the "no right turn" sign as the basis for a logo for some time. The idea was to make a sort of iconic political statement and a joke at the same time; the right turn the country was taking was to Reaganism, of course, and in a way making that kind of statement was a way of saying something that wasn't just anarchy (and the A with a the circle through it -- although I admit we fiddled with one logo that had the A in "Meanies" depicted thusly.) In retrospect, saying "let's stay the way we are" -- no right turn -- even implicitly was actually conservative and defending a system of liberal political values in the classic sense. I myself wasn't so much for anarchy as for good government when it came right down to it. In that regard, this was much more my own ethos of the time and not really representative of anybody else's (particularly George's). Hence it made kind of a bad logo idea.
There was also a neo-mod streak in the band, in part due to John Irvine's influence but also because I personally was keenly into the Jam and its predecessors (the Who and cousins) and bands like LA's Untouchables (not the punk band of the same name, the ska-crossover band). (John still rides Vespas, cooly enough.) I also liked the sleeve design for Buzzcocks' records and the neoconstructivist visual language a lot of the new wave bands used.
So I hit upon the idea of using the "No Right Turn" sign as a sort of basic building block to make a bigger logo. The resulting logo was supposed to be redolent of several things. First, it was an homage to the Dead Kennedys "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" logo. It was supposed to be iconic of a slam dancer, sort of like the Descendents' logo, indicating motion. The modness comes from the use of the highway sign motif. And we used good old contrasting red and black as basic colors.
The first version of this we used I got the comment from somebody (memory wants to tell me it was Ann Wright, the director of the Club and provider of many gigs to us) "Um...does this mean you're for or against Nazis?" There was a certain visual ambiguity to it in black and white that is somewhat alleviated with red and black. We used red magic marker to emphasize the international "no" sign on the flyers that one time we used the logo, I think.
In any event, this never got too far away from concept, in large part because we just weren't doing any promotion outside the Swarthmore campus.
The files below are copies of the logo I've just stashed here to archive. This is not the "original" logo, which took about a week on a Mac Plus to generate and then we could only print it out in black and white on flyers (and, I think, George made up one t-shirt at one point.) I've reproduced it here via about 15 minutes of Photoshop time as I remember we originally intended it, and it looks 100 times better than the one we produced in 1985.
The basic logo (no text): Large | Medium | Small | Tiny
The extended logo (with text): Large | Medium | Small | Tiny
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Somewhere, too, is a folder with band flyers and some set lists which I'll scan in for completeness. Someday.
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