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Thee Throbbing Purple
Interview |
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Chris Barry sang for one of my favest bands
ever, Pillbox. He's like, one of the most under-rated rock frontmen
around, way more suave than thou; a really funny, smart lyricist, and like
his contemporaries in sadly forgotten bands like Thee Hypnotics, the
Coma-Tones, and Beasts Of Bourbon, Chris conveys more highly concentrated,
glittery soul-power in one vital gesture, or verse, than most of today's
celebrated warblers would ever dare to dream. This is his story. (-The Gen'ral) When did you first discover rock'n'roll? Earliest bands? You mentioned something about some 222's footage on Youtube...
(above 222's era Chris) In high school I started up my first garage band, Roach, and we played mostly Stones, Stooges and Lou Reed covers along with my own mega-compositions with titles like “Boredom”, “Hyper Hippie” etcetera. I played guitar and sang and we performed at parties in kid’s basements, our high school’s annual talent show and that sort of thing. Not many people liked us because I was considered “too weird”, not too mention “a homo” and all of that stuff. This was 1975, after all. Nobody in my ‘hood would have even heard of, say, Lou Reed or Iggy had it not been for me. Not up here in Montreal, that’s for sure. They were all considered unmusical, and by extension, so was I. The kids in my school, if they were into rock and roll in the first place, preferred either your standard issue Led Zeppelin, Edgar Winter, Doobie Brothers type bands, or Frank Zappa and Johnny Winter neo-blues, none of which really appealed to my sensibilities. My high school band buddies eventually all abandoned and ostracized me for digging the music I dug and tried so hard to emulate – both in style and substance. Nobody wanted to play music with me anymore and I was widely considered to be some sort of freak, which hurt my feelings a lot. It resulted in a pretty lonely existence, and very bad so far as finding girls to fuck was concerned. And then I saw Iggy in early ’77 on his The Idiot tour and everything suddenly made sense, I was totally blown away. It was the most real thing I’d ever seen. Ha, it probably ruined my life, it certainly helped shape it. I managed to form another high school band with a couple of friends and a couple sycophants and stopped playing guitar on stage and started trying to do Iggy, no doubt like a million other kids who’d witnessed the Ig not far from his prime. Ha, what else is new? The chicks in the younger grades suddenly started digging my new high school garage band, if not the music so much then at least the performance – even more so when I joined the 222s in Grade 11 and was on TV all the time. I became a minor celebrity in my school and immediate surroundings. I liked that a lot. I shot a lot of goo in a lot of exciting places and that was a very nice change from the ostracization I’d experienced for most of my life to that point.
I couldn’t put anything decent together locally after the 222’s split so I left Montreal to go to England to do some stuff with Glen Matlock, who I’d been in contact with via a local chick who’d split for London years earlier and wound up going out with Brian James from the Damned during their initial heyday. It didn’t work out with Glen at all. His band was called the Hot Club or something like that, and they were hoping that I’d be “more like Michael Jackson.” A couple of rehearsals and it was over. Another guy from that band, I think his name was James Stevenson, had played in one of the later versions of Generation X and I thought that was pretty cool, and the drummer was Mickey Most’s son. Still, they wanted a white Michael Jackson. I dunno what they were thinking, given that they’d wanted me to come over on the strength of the 222’s stuff they’d heard, which was a far fuckin’ cry from Thriller – which had just come out. I hung around London for awhile, looking to put something together with…. anyone, but didn’t have much luck. I tried to make it work with the Southern Death Cult after Ian Astbury left the band, went up to Bradford where they lived to try and fill his shoes, but that too was a disaster. I was back in London in less than two weeks. Then, I got a call from an older guy I’d befriended, Henry Padovani, who had been in the Police before they got huge and wound up playing with Wayne County as an Electric Chair instead. Ouch! He was putting a band together with Topper Headon and Pete Farndon and wanted me to be the singer. It was looking good. We had a rehearsal set up on Monday and on Sunday afternoon Henri called to tell me it was cancelled. Farndon had OD’d in his bathtub the night before. Wonderful. I’d secured a personal manager while over there, a well connected guy named Peter MacCarthy who’d managed the Stray Cats in London. Peter helped me out with my living situation for awhile, throwing me a few pounds now again with the expectation that sooner or later I’d get it together and become a profitable commodity. He eventually stopped supporting me after the projects with Glen, Henri and the Southern Death Cult all went south. I had no money, job, or anything like that and wound up living out of Victoria Station for a month or so, panhandling for food money etc. Man, did that ever suck! So boring with nothing to do and nowhere to go all day every day. While homeless I eventually heard word that CBS in New York wanted to fly me back to America after hearing some tapes I’d made with this arguable sociopath named Michael Bramon just prior to my leaving for England. It all sounded a little fishy but given my circumstances, and the fact that they were willing to pay for my flight back to America, I accepted without hesitation. It’s not like I had much going in London at the time – outside of this little solo project I’d begun with Mark Laff, a way cool Keith Moon-style drummer who’d been in Generation X a few years prior. He was one of the only decent musicians I found in England who dug the same music as I did, and actually wanted to play it, however un-trendy it had become. Everybody wanted to do Haircut 100 or Duran Duran or Sex Gang Children, shit like that, while my heart was still in the Detroit sound of the MC5 and Stooges. I was, once again, considered a retard for my musical tastes. I was very happy to leave that stupid country with all its bullshit trends and bogus scenesters. Not to mention the living out of a train station thing and the degrading hustling one needs to do when finding themselves in this sort of situation. I arrived back in Montreal in the summer of ’83 or ’84 and 39 Steps were born, essentially so the people at CBS could see a band behind the demo’s they were interested in. Once it became apparent that CBS wasn’t really all that keen on us, and that I’d pretty well been lured back to America by rich kid Bramon with his parents money, we kicked him out of the band and tried to pick up where the 222’s had left off, both the guitarist and bass player of the newly realized 39 Steps being my old buds from the original 222’s. ____________________________________________________________________________________________ Thumbnail history of 39 Steps...Did you meet Woody Allen when you appeared in his movie? |
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That record was later re-issued as “Slip into the Crowd” through RCA and did okay as well. Apparently it sold pretty well in Germany too, but if that’s true it certainly wasn’t reflected in any of my royalty statements. Whatever. What else is new? We toured with the Cult on much of their “Love” tour, thanks to my casual friendship with Ian from my London days, and eventually got around to making another album with Chris Stein from Blondie producing. Chris was great but the tracks were another thing entirely. Pretty weak, man, pretty weak, although Stein seemed to think they were all wonderful. Might have been all the methadone and steroids he was taking to both deal with his old dope issues and this horrible skin disease he was still kind of recovering from at the time. I dunno, but I thought most of the record was pretty terrible. It certainly wasn’t Chris’s fault; the guys in the band were starting to fuck up quite a bit around that time. You know how these rock’n’rollers can get. Oy vey. A few tracks, however, were salvageable and wound up on the posthumous Neon Bible album Joan Jett put out on her Blackheart label in ’93. Stein was great though, as I’ve already mentioned, the songs we recorded with him sucked largely because of the band.
(above 39 Steps) How did you meet Ratboy? Origins of Pillbox... Ratboy was in New York around ’91 or so after
getting fed up with his band Motorcycle Boy in L.A. I met him and a French
junkie pal of his named Angie at this used clothing store on East 7th
street that was sort of like a home to loser rock and roll guys. They very
generously allowed 39 Steps drummer Andre and I to live up in a loft they
had in the back of the store above the changing rooms. I used to enjoy
peeping on the chicks trying on clothes back there all the time. A very
strung out Cheetah Chrome had occupied the space immediately before us. I
thought Angie and Ratboy both looked pretty cool, or at least,
authentically rock and roll, which was a rare thing back in the heyday of
Poison and all that horrible shit. Ratboy came to see 39 Steps in our
dying days at one of our last gigs at CBGB’s and after that was
continually trying to recruit me to sing in his new band, which he was
calling TV Eye – a band name that I thought was way-stupid and later
changed to Pillbox. He even came to audition for 39 Steps at one point,
figuring he could make it work that way, but there was no way he was just
going to shut up and play what I told him to like most of the people I was
working with around then. Nothing ever came of it – although I immediately
liked Ratboy on a personal level and recognized he was a uniquely
talented, albeit arguably limited, guitarist. When 39 Steps finally called
it a day I’d come back to Montreal, 30 years old, with no money, no band,
no marketable skills to speak of, and found myself delivering pizza and
doing shitty jobs like that after a bitter former member of 39 Steps
informed my welfare officer that I had actually been living in NYC while
collecting the dole in Montreal. It really sucked. Worse, all these people
who had resented me for any minor success I’d enjoyed earlier in life
really made fun of me for becoming such a loser. And I certainly felt like
a loser. Profoundly un-happy and disappointed with what had become of my
existence, I could even have off-ed myself at the time, considered it on
several occasions, but, um, as u can see, never did. So I held it together
somewhat. And then Ratboy somehow found me in Montreal and convinced me to
come down to New York again to try and put something together. I’d really
loved his Motorcycle Boy stuff, and really, what did I have to lose? So I
started going back and forth between NYC and Montreal a couple of times a
month to rehearse with his band and do the occasional gig, eventually
moving back down there again when I began thinking that we might actually
have something special with this new group. I gave it the name Pillbox, we
had a couple of personnel changes, stole this great drummer Screamin’ Joe
Rizzo from his band The Contusions, and we were off.
(above pic: Pillbox) Describe what you remember about the other guys in Pillbox...
Ratboy: a complex character to be sure, and he could get downright ornery sometimes, but a very unique kind of guy. Great style. Both personally and as a guitarist. We worked very well together until what I can only imagine to be ego got in the way. Still, I have a lot of respect for him musically. One of the few musicians I’ve worked with over the years who I could concede an argument to and feel confident, that even if I disagreed with some musical adventure that he’d chose to embark upon, chances are the adventure at least wouldn’t be retarded. I could trust him musically, which I can’t honestly say about a lot of the people I’ve played with over the years. Yup, he was great – until things started to turn sour between us that is. Steve Mach: I loved him because he was just so fuckin’ irreverent towards everything and everybody. A capable bass player, albeit not a great one, but a decent guy who always made me laugh. For the same reasons I thought he was so great, Ratboy didn’t much like him. I dunno, maybe it was his hair, which was pretty special in an early ‘90s L.A. hard rock way, a far cry from the look Pillbox was cultivating. I gotta admit, I wasn’t all that crazy ‘bout his ‘do either, but Ratboy was far more concerned with these types of things than I was. Ah, maybe not, we were trying very hard to distance our look and sound from everyone else who was playing around at that time, so we always wanted whoever played bass for us to look – and be – cool. Too bad you didn’t play bass then, Dimitri. Although I expect you wouldn’t have settled for anything less than being the singer of Pillbox – and hey, motherfucker, that was MY gig. There had been a series of bass players prior to Mach, who had a few drug issues at the time, which didn’t sit very well with Ratboy who was always kind of anti-drug and only just tolerated my own drug taking because I could always kind of keep it together, regardless of what I was taking. ________________________________________________________________________________________ Whatever became of Lizzie Avondet? |
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I dunno, last I heard she was doing some guy
from Pussy Galore and working on putting a new, post Piss Factory band
together. No idea if it worked out. I guess not, otherwise you probably
wouldn’t be asking me whatever became of her. Highlights of your time in Pillbox, most memorable gigs, How did you guys hook up with Joan Jett? Oy Dim Star, ask me this one over the phone. Too much writing for this lazy “professional” writer. But Joan’s management team had managed 39 Steps towards the end of our career, so I’d known her for awhile by the time Pillbox started doing gigs. |
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I suppose our best gigs were up in Canada
with the Ramones – although we still had Johnny Baum on bass then, and his
replacements, both his immediate replacement, Ratboy’s French friend from
Nice via Los Angeles, Christophe, and Christophe’s replacement Steve Mach,
made the band sound infinitely better than we had with Baum. We also did a
one month residency at the Continental when the Clown Room came out, which
was always well attended, leading us to believe that we might stand a
chance of becoming the next flavor of the day in New York, which never
really happened to much of an extent. But I remember that being a positive
time in our career together as Pillbox, or um, Pillbox NYC as we became
known for some stupid legal reason. We were, I’m sure the first band to
use the name, before that Pandora’s chick did at least. Didn't you used to work for Tish & Snookie?
(above: more Pillboxes)
You know, I always kind of liked those
guys as people – until word kept filtering back to me that they’d started
trying to get us banned from any of the venues that both our bands played
at regularly. I always found that hard to fathom. I mean, come on, man,
talk about petty. I guess they saw it as a matter of squashing their only
real competition in the East Village at that time, I dunno, it never
seemed to me like Pillbox was gonna take over their scene. That said, and
sorry Jesse, but Pillbox were a million times better than D-Gen. I never
felt they had any songs to speak of, and their act seemed kinda hackneyed
to me. But at least they were playing rock and roll at a time when rock
and roll as it should be was in short supply. I think Ratboy had bigger
issues with them. I dunno, he could be pretty snotty when he wanted to be,
so perhaps he’d just offended them too many times and that’s why they
wanted to bring us down. Again, I dunno what the real situation was
between us and them. Whenever I ran into Jesse or Howie we always seemed
to get along well enough. Yeah, come to think of it, I suppose any
animosity between our bands probably had more to do with Ratboy – who I
think was infinitely frustrated that they were getting so much more
attention than us when he felt, at least, that we were the genuine article
and they just a bunch of “poseurs” with good social connections. Again, I
dunno, I listened to their first record again a couple years ago and
remember thinking it was okay – if not the masterpiece they seemed to
believe it was at the time. I remember him being considerably more
intelligent than I would have expected. He was way strung-out when I knew
him, so more often than not when we’d get together he’d be on the nod or
barely even able to get much more than a mumble out of his mouth, but on
those times when we hung and he wasn’t too fucked up, I found him to be a
smart, interesting, nice guy. Not surprisingly, I felt very sorry for what
had become of him. I kind of expected him to die at any moment. I think
everyone did. I remember when Andre from 39 Steps and I were living out of
the used clothing store on 7th street, which the owner Cliff
had so generously offered us, Cheetah would regularly stop by at all hours
to either crash or shoot up in the bathroom. Andre was always freakin’ out
over it, cuz he was concerned Cheetah would OD and die on us, and the
resulting police investigation would reveal that he was an illegal alien
and he’d get deported back to Canada. Andre was always a kind of nervous,
paranoid kind of guy. So after awhile when Cheetah would come calling
Andre would pretend we weren’t there and refuse to open the door for him.
I, however, thought he was being profoundly uncool and would always let
him in anyway, in spite of the wrath Andre would send my way as a result
of it. Anyway, he never did truly OD, although there were a couple of
genuine scares over the months, and then, after Guns and Roses recorded
his Ain’t it Fun song, he seemed to suddenly disappear. And now he’s off
dope, I think, and somewhat productive again, right? Which is truly
amazing. Outside of all the rumors that he was suffering from AIDS, which
I guess, in hindsight, weren’t true, I, along with everyone else who knew
him in those years [late 80s, early 90s] thought for sure he was getting
ready to die. I haven’t seen him in years now. It’s not like we were best
buds or nothin’ – unlike Johnny Thunders, who always treated me like we
were wonderful friends, probably mistaking me for someone else, given that
our exposure to one another had been pretty limited up until we started
running in to each other all the time in Manhattan, not long before he
croaked. I’d been casual friends with a few guys from bands like the Road
Vultures, and a lot of these guys got off on getting high with old-time
junkies like Thunders and Nolan, one musician guy, Greg, I believe his
name was, having some kind of band together with Jerry not long before his
death –when he was allegedly clean. Anyway, these guys were always
supplying the junk that Thunders et al were shooting, so maybe he thought
I was one of those guys who’d pay for all the dope for the privilege of
getting high with him – which, ha, ha, certainly was never gonna happen
with me. What? You crazy, motherfucker? Outside of the fact that I wasn’t
a junkie or keen on becoming one, being some strung out ex-rock stars’
dope patsy was certainly not in my repertoire. I could hardly afford to
feed myself at that time, let alone pay for someone else’s dope so I could
tell people Johnny Thunders and I were such great friends. I always
thought those guys were a little pathetic allowing themselves to be used
that way. Nevertheless, in hindsight I think it’s kinda cool that I got to
know Thunders a bit, regardless of what I imagine to be his relatively
mercenary reasons for associating with me. Then again, who knows? Maybe he
just liked me. Whatever. Who cares?
Um, very little actually. Other than I
remember his seeming like a nice guy. I have to say that, even though I
didn’t know him all that well [did I?] I was pained to hear of his death
and the circumstances surrounding it. I tell ya, man, that heroin thing is
fuckin’ brutal. As if anyone really needs to be told that but still… I don’t know that I did. And I don’t know
much about their ever touring with Joan after I was no longer in the band.
I’d be surprised to hear it. Pillbox would have come to Joan through me,
and I doubt she would have wanted much to do with them after they so
unceremoniously kicked me out of the band. But I dunno, maybe not. I
wasn’t on the greatest of terms with those Blackheart people by that time
either. We’d been approached by this guy - whose
name I can no longer recall – who had some early digital camera and
editing stuff and thought it would be cool to record a video with it. So
he offered to do it all for nothing. But when push came to shove he was
remarkably incompetent, even though he’d told us he’d recently graduated
from USC’s film school, so Ratboy and I took over almost entirely.
Primarily Ratboy, if I remember right. I know it was his idea to shoot
from those cool angles we ended up using. He was good with a lot of things
like that, old Gilbert Avondet, like I say, he’s a uniquely talented
individual. I think I edited it on my own with one of the guys from
Bootsauce, Sonny Greenwich Jr., whose band was also from Montreal and
shared a manager with Pillbox. I’m not sure R-boy was around for that, we
might even have done it in Montreal, I can’t quite remember anymore. In
the end I think the whole endeavor cost about $500 – and that was all in
editing – and yeah, it did get some play here and there, didn’t it? So I
guess it wound up being a decent investment. A friend of mine still has a
copy, and keeps threatening to put it up on Youtube. I hope he does, in my
humble opinion the video came out quite well, all things considered, and
the song, Holly, was always one of my favorites.
The only thing I liked about the Throbs is that they were musically coming from a similar place as I was, which was fairly uncommon in the late 80s, in the days of G’n’R and Poison and all that stuff. Like D-Generation, but even more so, I never thought they really had any songs to speak of. And I also suspected they were totally capable of slipping in to a sort of hair metal Skid Row kinda thing, but I suppose that wasn’t really fair. Still, yeah, it was encouraging to see them get that big deal with Geffen at a time when nobody was really into the type of shit they were trying to do. So I always wished them the best – even of they weren’t really all that great. But NY Loose, yeah, I dug ‘em, although I
can’t honestly say I though they were the be all and end all of
rock’n’roll. But they were certainly good, and I always thought Brigitte
would have been an amazing fuck, although I never got the impression she
entertained any similar thoughts about me. Ha, ha, the band Ratboy and I
really loved from that era were the Sisters Grimm. They were terrible, but
terribly real at the same time, and we both loved going to their gigs. I
kind of remember having them open for us on at least a few New York gigs.
I saw online that they started doing porn films together after they moved
out to L.A. Ah yes, the Sisters, what was there not to love about them? We’ve rubbed shoulders a couple of times,
but that’s about it. He was, and probably still is, good friends with
Chris and Debbie from Blondie, and I spent a lot of time staying at their
place in Chelsea when I was better friends with them. Actually, I guess it
was Chris’ place then, he and Debbie had just started going their own ways
romantically around that time. But people like Iggy, Bowie, and William
Burroughs were stopping by all the time which was pretty cool. Still, no,
I always seemed to be out of the house when the mighty Ig would stop by,
only to return to have Chris say” Ah, u just missed Iggy. Too bad, you
should meet him sometime.” But whatever. Experience has taught me that
just because you like someone’s work doesn’t mean your gonna like the
person behind it, and from what I’ve heard about Iggy on a personal level,
I dunno that we’d necessarily have hit it off. Then again, who knows?
Whatever. Life goes on.
I returned to Montreal in the
mid-nineties, deciding in the end that I truly did like it here – so long
as I could swing it to be somewhere a little warmer in the brutal winter
months. Since I wasn’t actively touring in any bands or anything, I
thought it might be fun to go to university for a bit, so I did,
post-secondary education being much more accessible to poor people here in
Canada when compared to God’s Country just south of us. So I did, and it
was what it was, and at the same time started writing for various
magazines and the like, eventually securing a column in the local arts
weekly, the Montreal Mirror. So that’s kind of what I do to earn a buck
these days, writing nonsense for a series of publications, the Mirror
being my favourite because they let me get away with almost anything.
Acrylic was just this thing I did ‘cuz I was bored and missing rock and
roll very, very much. So I wrote a bunch of songs, wound up recording
them, and people liked them very much, with this label Handsome Boy in
Toronto offering to fund and put out a full record for us. So I put
together a live band called Acrylic with my good friend and bassist Roger
Dawson, who still plays in the Throbbing Purple with me. But before
Handsome Boy could put the record out, they folded. Ha, what else is new?
Such is the story of my life. After that I just let it slide, lacking the
motivation to write or do much of anything musically for close to a
decade. Again, I started up the Throbbing Purple
because I started missing rock and roll something fierce after awhile.
Also, in recent years there’s been some modest interest in the stuff I did
with my teen punk band the 222’s and later with 39 Steps, so I figured it
might be possible that at least a handful of people might be remotely
interested in something new from me. And God knows I’m happy to oblige.
Also, there was a local label willing to put the CD out for me, so you
know, where there’s a will there’s a way. So I wrote a new record, we
recorded it, and it’s been out for almost a year now. I think it’s a
really good record, and people seem to really dig it, although it probably
hasn’t sold more than 200 copies to date. I dunno, I could be wrong on
this count but I doubt it. So we still play around every once in awhile –
although we just replaced both the guitarist and drummer a couple of
months ago and have no big upcoming plans. That said, given the
opportunity, I’d be out on the road in a heartbeat to promote it –
although I simply don’t have the motivation or tenacity to go around
trying to book tours and do all that business shit on my own anymore. And
with no one stepping up to the plate to get us a European licensing deal
or actively promote it, at least not at this very moment, I dunno if the
world outside of Montreal and Toronto will ever get the opportunity to see
us – which is kind of too bad, in that we’re a pretty decent little band,
if I do say so myself. Forgotten Rebels – although I always
liked that blond guy from 63 Monroe on a personal level, whatever the fuck
his name was. I remember he was always out with all his friends to see 39
Steps whenever we passed through his town. Teenage Head without question. I still
think they were one of the greatest bands fuckin’ ever. Certainly one of
the very best Canadian bands, along with the Ugly Ducklings and the
Haunted at their very “1-2-5” finest. When I was a kid in the 222’s they
took us on the road as they’re support act many, many times, and there
wasn’t one gig we did with them where I didn’t come back out after our set
and stand by the side of the stage in total awe of them. Really, you had
to see them in their prime. Frankie Venom was one of the most charismatic
performers I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing. And that first record
of theirs is just brilliant. To see them now, unfortunately, it might be
hard to recognize their former brilliance, they went downhill fast come
1981 or so. Hey, it happens. Surprise. I thought it was a shitty album
title when we used it. Even shittier now that I’ve had time to think about
it. I’m a sucker for the better Motorcycle Boy tracks, and have only heard a few things from Sour Jizz – although I thought it was quite good, Ratboy in particular was playing some very cool stuff. How's Ratboy? I suspect he’s doing all right. We’ve
been in contact recently for the first time in many, many years. He’s
living in Japan, working at the Swiss Embassy, and has a family and all of
that stuff. I hope to see him again sometime before one of us gets put in
to the ground. We were pretty good friends for awhile there, you know.
Ideally through Itunes – but a quick
Google search will turn it up. I imagine Amazon sells it. The label is
Sonik Chicken Shrimp, if that helps. Yeah, I suppose I’m biased but I
really think it’s a great record. And I can’t and don’t say that about
everything I’ve ever done, you know?
(above: Throbbing Purple)
What do you think? But big surprise. After all, Iggy hasn’t made a great record in what, 30 years now? But I saw them live at Little Steven’s amazing Underground Garage spectacle in New York a few years ago, and they were great – almost like seeing the Stooges. I was also surprised that the Dolls, who were on the bill as well, managed to pull it off with dignity. But again, like the Stooges reunion record, the Dolls album was a bit of dud too, no? But what do you expect? After all, both those bands have quite the legacy to uphold. Can you imagine if the Stooges had been able to do something as great as Funhouse again? I mean, that’d be quite the feat, pretty well impossible, I’d say. But it’s nice to see them finally get their due in the public consciousness, all these years after the fact, I’m sure it must be a very nice feeling for the Asheton bros, whose contributions always struck me as being criminally overlooked by so many people. And I’m sure it’s probably even nicer for them to finally have earned a couple bucks from the Stooges. Maybe Ron will finally have enough money to move out of his Mom’s place now. www.myspace.com/throbbingpurple
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-FIN-_____________________________________________________________________________________ -Dim Star. |
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When I was a little kid there used to be a cartoon
on Saturday mornings called “The Beatles”, based around some band you
might have heard of. I was probably around 4 or 5 and instantly became
obsessed with the music, kind of wanting to just become one with it. It
was infinitely more fascinating than kindergarten or Grade 1 to me. My
older sisters were listening and buying 45s of shit like “Steppin’ Stone”,
Paul Revere and the Raiders, that kind of American “garage-esque” stuff,
coupled with Canadian radio stuff like the Guess Who, the Ugly Duckling,
the Haunted, and a lot of that muck resonated with me too. As I got older,
it was the Stones, the Kinks, the Doors, the Animals, and then, in 1973,
at the beginning of Grade 7, I was introduced to Ziggy Stardust, the
Dolls, Lou Reed, the Stooges and much of what would later become the
blueprint for late ‘70s punk rock. As an inspired pre-pubescent I decided
to dress the part as best I could, given my limited imagination and even
more limited budget. I went to see the Dolls here in Montreal in late ‘74,
when I was 12. The only other gigs I’d seen up to that point were big
arena shows by people like Bowie and Alice Cooper, who I also adored.
Earlier in the day of the Dolls big Montreal appearance I’d found some
knee-high red leather stripper platform boots with a matching red purse in
the garbage while on my way to school. I went to the gig dressed as
closely as I could to the cover of the first Dolls album, figuring, since
there had been such a big hype on them, that their gig would be at an
arena-like venue, but the Dolls were pretty well finished by then, and
they played at a little club called the Showmart to about 100 people. The
friend I went with bailed on me cuz he got scared by the bikers manning
the door, but I went in alone anyway. I sure as fuck wasn’t going to miss
the Dolls, even though I was a little scared by the environment as well,
and started to feel damn self-conscious being there all decked out as a
pre-pubescent Warholian transvestite. The Dolls came on very late and I
had to leave to catch the Metro [subway] before they finished their set,
which, actually, I remember as being kind of shaky. Still, I loved them
and wanted to someday become some kind of a David Johanson, who really,
was simply the shit back then – although I suppose I don’t really need to
tell you that. Later I took a very nervous solo ride home on the bus,
expecting to either get bum-raped or the shit kicked out of me.
I survived intact though, although there’s more to the story that I’ll
spare you for now. 
By the end of 1977 a minor punk rock scene had
started up here and I hooked up with one of Montreal’s very first “punk”
bands, the 222’s, and became their singer. I was 16 and we had a single
called The First Studio Bomb b/w I Love Susan come out on our manager’s
label Rebel Records. We became quite popular locally, always able to draw
plenty of people to our gigs, and started to tour a little –although there
wasn’t much of a touring network around back then, so we never got much
further from home than NYC. In hindsight, we were a pretty good band, all
of us, except the drummer, still in our mid/late teens. The 222’s story is
in the liner notes to the newly released 222’s CD I sent you so I’ll keep
it brief here. Eventually we broke up out after making a horrendous 45 at
gunpoint for some local mobsters, who thought they could turn us into some
kind of fucked up Quebec teenybopper phenomenon through they’re, ahem,
influence, on the local radio/TV market. The record came out and became a
minor hit here, but it was, as I mentioned, simply horrendous, and our
cred was totally shot. I half-heartedly lip-synched the track a couple of
times on TV, and we continued to do our original version of the song at
gigs, but it was all a little depressing. Again, all this shit is in the
liner notes of the 222’s CD you should have or be getting any day now. We
broke up towards the end of ’81 after a good year of fighting about where
the band should be heading, those guys wanting to take an easier, more
commercial route to superstardom and me not prepared to compromise my
vision, whatever the hell it was, any more than I already had to that
point.
Nevertheless, through the Stein material, our
growing rep, and a few new songs we demo-ed we managed to score a record
deal with PolyGram. Corky Laing, the one-time drummer of Mountain, was the
A&R guy who championed us there. It lasted about six months before they
started making arrangements to drop us, complaining that we were too
difficult and uncooperative to work with. Most of their issues were with
me personally. Whatever. Corky - who later became and still is a friend of
mine - and I didn’t see eye to eye on anything. And trust me, it certainly
wasn’t me who was being the retard. But they wouldn’t let us out of our
contract for a many months after deciding they hated us and we languished
doing shitty college tours with bullshit acts like Meatloaf trying to kill
time until we were contractually free to make another record. We lost
about a year and a half while stuck on Polygram. Eventually we got out of
the deal only to go through a similar experience with Chrysalis, who also
eventually came to the conclusion that we sucked and abandoned us, wasting
a lot of our time in the process. Some three years after Slip into the
Crowd was released, we moved to New York to be closer to the management
team that had also pretty well given up on us by then. That lasted about 6
months before it became clear to even us that we were over. This was
probably around 1990 or ’91. In 1993, Joan Jett’s Blackheart team, who had
co-managed our careers towards the end of our existence, put out a
posthumous 39 Steps record called Neon Bible. It was mostly demos and
stuff leftover from our miserable period with Polygram. I still think most
of the songs that wound up on that record are pretty good, but the
production reeks of a band looking desperately for a hit. That was one of
the major problems with both Polygram and Chrysalis, they all wanted “the
hit”, no matter how lame said hit might have been. Like a dutiful soldier,
and a desperate, dirt-poor, one at that, I did my best to compromise and
deliver a “hit” my conscience could live with, but nothing I ever wrote
seemed to satisfy anyone – especially myself. Ooh, bad times, man, bad
times. That’s what the Neon Bible record sounds like to me now, as it did
at the time it finally came out. Bad, desperate times.
Most of it was recorded for free at a studio in
Island Park, Long Island, called Studioworks 2. I was supposedly managing
the place so I was able to get us in there every once in awhile on studio
down time, which more often than not meant our sessions would begin at 2am
and last until we couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer. We had a bass
player at the time, this kid named Johnny Baum, who was a D-Generation
roadie. A nice enough guy, if perhaps a little dim, when we finally got
him in the studio it was painfully clear he really couldn’t play bass for
shit. Some of the songs on that record, like What She Wants, Sinister
Urge, and Holly, were recorded from earlier sessions we’d done with our
original bassist, Christo Carrere, I think his name was. Again, a very
lovely guy, but his rock and roll sensibilities often didn’t jibe with
those of Ratboy and me, so we eventually had to replace him. Ratboy used
to say he looked like a Mexican Ian Astbury, what with his style of dress
and long black locks, and this, of course, was way unacceptable to him at
the time. Outside of the three or four tracks Christo played on, Ratboy
wound up playing bass on all the other songs – I think. Most of the
record was engineered by a guy named John Aiosa, Joan Jett’s alleged
“boyfriend” when she was out in public. A weird set-up, for sure. Those
Joan Jett people, meaning her manager Kenny Laguna, his wife Meryl et al,
could be pretty damn retarded sometimes, especially when it came to the
big “mystery” surrounding Joan’s sexuality. Let me tell you, man, it
didn’t take genius to unravel the mystery of Joan, who, when push comes to
shove, is a much better person than the people who surround her. But
that’s another story. We finished up Jimbo’s in the summer of ’93 at a
studio in Long Island City called PowerPlay with former 39 Steps
producer/engineer Glen Robinson. Glen swung us a spec deal with the owner
of the studio in exchange for the time, and recorded what was left to
record and mixed the fucker free of charge. Like everyone else involved
with Pillbox and the Jimbo’s Clown Room record, rest assured Glen nor
PowerPlay ever earned a dime from our spec deal. I listened to the Clown
Room recently for the first time in a long time. It’s a very good record.
With the possible exception of my latest The Throbbing Purple album, Let
It Writhe, it’s probably the album I’m most proud of having made. By the
way, we named it Jimbo’s Clown Room, as opposed to Jumbo’s Clown Room, the
infamous Hollywood strip joint, because that’s the name Ratboy remembered
it as, not for any legal reasons. Even after we realized that the place
was actually called Jumbo’s, we kept it as Jimbo’s anyway, because we
thought it sounded better.
Screamin’ Joe Rizzo was a very sweet guy who
somewhere down the line decided he hated me. I haven’t spoken to him since
the band kicked me out in ’94 for being “untogether” or some such
bullshit. Solid drummer though. Didn’t he end up in D-Generation or
something for awhile? Whatever. He was a good drummer though, and I have
to admit I felt very hurt to discover that after he’d looked up to me for
so long, he finally came to the conclusion that I was a piece of shit.
Still not sure why though, I don’t ever remember fucking him over on
anything. Then again, he might – or I suppose, must – have another story
to tell. 
Yeah, slapping stickers on Manic Panic hair
dye 9 hours a day for 6 bucks an hour under really shitty working
conditions. I also worked alongside Ratboy at Venus records on St-Marks
Place for awhile checking bags – a job Sammy Yaffa from Hanoi Rocks took
over from me after I quit. Yeah, Manic Panic was a way rotten gig, man,
for sure, but one of the few that was available to me in NYC, so you do
what you gotta do. Steve Mach got me the gig there. It didn’t take me long
to start dreading the job. Both Steve and I would cop dope most work days
just to relieve the boredom and drudgery of the situation. I eventually
had to quite the gig or risk becoming an addict. Just what the East
Village needed, yet another Johnny Thunders rock and roll loser drug
addict. So I quit after maybe six months and thankfully avoided the
immediate fate of so many of my peers. Pillbox was in bad shape then, I
was finding Ratboy to be impossible to work with, he was constantly
rejecting my musical ideas at that time, solely, I think, because he just
wanted to be difficult. It was very annoying, and I found his new attitude
to be totally disrespectful, which is not something I’m very good with. He
started acting as though everything good we ever did was all because of
him, which was not only un-cool, but patently untrue. With the exception
of Devil in My Bed, which I wrote alone, pretty well all of the Pillbox
tunes were a collaborative effort between us. It rarely worked out where
Ratboy would write all the music and hand a finished thing for me to work
a melody and lyrics to – although at least a couple songs on the Jimbo’s
Clown Record were conceived that way – Sinister Urge comes to mind,
probably Nowhereland as well, and What She Wants was just a simple
re-write of Motorcycle Boy’s What She Says – a song of Ratboy’s that I
positively adored and insisted we continue doing as Pillbox. As much as
Ratboy might suggest a melody to me that I may or may not have wound up
using, a lot of the riffs and musical ideas that Pillbox did came from me.
Or were Ratboys original ideas that we worked into something together. I
think Ratboy tends to forget that. At some point, towards the end of the
band’s magnificent career, Ratboy announced that from here on in he would
only play riffs that he wrote himself, and that’s all there was to it.
Apart from being unproductive, it was an impossible situation for me,
there was no way I could continue in a band with a guy who’d suddenly
decided he knew everything and had no interest in playing any of my songs,
regardless of whether they were any good or not. It also didn’t help that
Ratboy appeared to be in something of a musical slump by that time. The
last few recordings we made, which I believe you’re familiar with, bear
testimony to the weakened Pillbox sound with Ratboy playing the role of
fuehrer. While all this was going down, I got an offer to sing part-time
with this band up here in Montreal who were regularly working the Quebec
jazz/blues circuit. I took the gig and started coming back up here to sing
Howlin’ Wolf covers to retards for $100 - $150 a night. It was far from
glamorous, barking out blues standards way out in the Quebec hinterland
three or four nights a week, but a million times better than slaving away
at Manic Panic for six bucks an hour and constantly couch-surfing in
Manhattan. When shortly thereafter Ratboy and Rizzo announced that they
wanted to put Pillbox on hold for awhile while they figured out what they
were going to do with their lives, I came back to Montreal for what ended
up being a permanent basis and led a relatively painless existence as a
third rate blues singer for a couple of years, attending university in my
spare time.
Formation of THROBBING PURPLE, who's in the band, current events,
mission statement?
BRMC, the Black Lips, Turpentine
Brothers, old shit like Moby Grape, Love, the Small Faces, Roky Erickson’s
post Elevators records, and probably a ton of other stuff that I can’t
remember right now. I don’t honestly pay that close attention to newer
bands anymore. I’ve been digging up shit from the past that I’d perhaps
overlooked at one time or another. Like, I recently re-discovered the
first three Love albums and can’t believe I’d once dismissed Arthur Lee as
all hype, or just too hippy-esque fruity for me to bear. Like, what was I
thinking back then, those records are fuckin’ amazing. Downliners Sect,
there’s another band that I’ve only gotten around to listening to recently
and totally dig – not surprisingly. But worse, ha, ha, I’ve been listening
to a lot more free jazz than I certainly ever used to, and totally digging
it. Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra, and a bunch of other artists whose names I
always forget within five minutes of hearing them. Which no doubt has to
do with the fact that I’m pretty well always high when I get the urge to
do the free jazz thing. Yeah, I dunno, there’s just so much shit available
now courtesy of the internet etc. So many artists whose music I’ve always
meant to listen to but whose records I could never really afford to buy in
the past that are suddenly available to me now for nothing. Which is
great, of course. And with respect to any new bands, you know, when
something is truly great it eventually filters up to me, and I’m okay with
that. I’ve no huge desire to expend a ton of energy discovering new bands
when there’s simply so much cool shit from the 20
th century left for me to discover. Like John Jacob Niles, or
any of that roots-type shit, you know, it takes me 20 seconds to download
something like that and see if I dig it. And if I do, then great, it’s
mine. In the past it would have been a big ordeal to find and listen to
something like that, and I had other, more pressing concerns back in the
day. So now with the internet etc it’s just fuckin’ great, I’m being
exposed to so much shit now. God bless technology, man. Ha, it also allows
me to spend my winters working out of the sunny Dominican Republic, rather
than spend them cowering in my apartment, afraid to go out in to the hell
that Montreal winters will most certainly bring a man.