Early Music/First Band

By the end of 1978, I started to buy Punk Rock records every weekend. There was a small bookstore in downtown Ipswich that had a record section tucked in the corner. I eagerly thumbed through them every Saturday, hoping my fingers would find some great new release. In weeks past I'd found "Rocket to Russia" by the Ramones, "Black and White" by the Stranglers, and "Give "em enough rope" by the Clash. I started to get all scientific about the process like an old man betting on the horses. I would pick up Trouser Press at the newspaper store and examine the record review section, weighing my next purchase. The kind woman at the counter would take a piece of paper with one or two L.P.s scribbled down, to see if she could order them from some mysterious source in the big city. By early summer, I would mow some extra lawns in orded to increase my buying power. I think I was still the only Punk Rock fan in Ipswich. Inspired by the music I was listening to ( I must have played the Dead Boys "We have come for your children" at least 4 times a day that summer), i decided to start writing some more songs. I had hatched a few tunes the previous year while in Miami, but they were pretty lame ("Friday night at CBGBs" for instance). I had a guitar and knew a few more chords, so I gave it a another shot.

This was the summer that, reeling from my first real heartbreak, I decided to stay in my room, smoke alot of pot, and become a real Punk. Johnny Thunders and Joe Strummer were my guitar heroes, and I thought with some practice, I could play as well as them. That July, my Grandparents bought me an early birthday present, a Marlboro amp. I turned up the overdrive to 10, and wrote my first new song "Get it together" (a decade later, it would get new lyrics and title courtesy of Yukki Gipe and become "Dead Wrong", a Bullet LaVolta song). I kept at it and tried to make an album's worth of material. Eventually, I had a set of songs:

The beat / School daze / Get it together / Love or lust / Don't hang on too long / Follow daddy's footsteps (recorded and released on a c.d. by French band the Real Cool Killers 15 years later!) / Younger point of view / Teenage lament / you never come through /

Now I needed to start a band.

I had "jammed" with the Norris brothers last winter. We set up some gear in the art class room at Ipswich Jr. High, and screwed around for a couple of hours. Mark played drums pretty well, and his brother John was learning how to play guitar. The two of us plugged into his amp and played a few cover songs that we knew in common. I showed them "Born to lose" by Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers and "I'm in love with your Mom" by Vom. They'd never heard music like this and didn't know what to make of it at first. One thing for sure, it was easier to do this stuff than try to figure out a Led Zeppelin song. We had some fun, but didn't get together again for the rest of the year. I decided to give Mark a call and see what he and John were up to. I told him I had a guitar amp and had written some songs of my own. He spoke to his brother and we made plans to get together the next day.

I got over there the next afternoon and was pleasantly surprised to discover that they had their own practice space in the back of their house. Their Mother was a artist and had an addition built to the back of the home. Mark and John had taken a room upstairs and been playing music on and off all summer long. It was just a bare space with a couple of posters hanging on the wall. We messed around with a few more covers and I noticed that they had gotten alot better on their respective instruments. We took a break and then I started showing them some of my originals. The first up was "The beat", which was an instrumental, kind of a shabby, under-developed "Moby Dick" rip-off. An inauspicious start for a Punk Rock band. We played it a few times, but Mark wasn't too keen on playing the drum solo everytime around. We put that aside, and I showed them "Get it together". This one they liked. Mrs. Norris made us some sandwiches and we took another break. After lunch I suggested that we sneak out back to the woods and smoke a "little herb". It was Johns first time and he got results right away. We headed back to rock out, and played "Get it together" a half dozen more times, until it sounded like a real band playing a badass song. Now we needed a name to go along with it. We started writing shit down, mostly pathetic, un-original stuff. Two names stood out: "Clockwork Orange" and "Iron Cross". We took a vote and sided with "Iron Cross".

We proceeded to learn a 40 minute set that fall. I hadn't come up with anymore originals, so we peppered the set with a few cover songs ( "Clock strikes twelve", "Born to lose"), and decided to find ourselves a gig. We asked Mrs. Norris if she could arrange a teen dance at the church the Norris family attended, and surprisingly enough, they said yes. I made up a flyer with skulls and a pot leaf, and we plastered them around town. I showed up at their house the day of the gig in my stage clothes ( a cub scout shirt and Levi's covered with red paint) while Mark and John wore matching polyester suits. About 50 kids showed up and we plowed through our set. I thanked the audience after every song with vocal inflections I picked up from "Kiss Alive II". We were scrappy and out of tune half the time, but we had lost our virginity. After the gig, some girl on the high school steering committee told us she wanted to set up a "concert" at Ipswich High school.

I floated around a few rehearsal tapes through the school the next couple of weeks to build a buzz. We didn't have a cassette duplication deck, so each tape was individually recorded. I made another poster, this time with a drawing of the Fabulous furry Freak Brothers on it. We made some adjustments to our stage clothes, this time going for a "biker" look. John had a fake animal skin vest, and I painted my guitar camouflage. We wore these outfits while we practiced. A couple weeks before the gig, we met Pat Leonard, when he approached us and asked if we needed some lights. Like Macgyver, he built a complete light show out of practically nothing, scoring some industrial-size spaghetti sauce cans from the school cafeteria to hold the bulbs, and making the control panel out of wood. He had a real talent with his hands.

To be continued.... 5-12-2008