The following articles were originally published in the Tallahassee Democrat December 14, 1980 – 39 years ago today.
Punk comes to town
By Christopher Farrell
A woman called me recently and wanted to know the difference between punk rock and New Wave. She was writing a compare-and-contrast paper for freshman composition class, and she was confused.
No problem.
“There’s no such thing as punk anymore,” I told her, “and New Wave is whatever the big record companies want you to buy this week.”
I was wrong. I’d been looking for punk in the wrong places.
Punk rock is still around, but it has gone underground again, as it did in 1969. It’s traveling incognito, trying out different names. In Tallahassee, it calls itself the Slut Boys or the Implications.
Punk rock, believe it or not, started out as more than fodder for People magazine. More than fodder even for Rolling Stone, the People magazine of the record industry. And, revisionist histories aside, it began years before 1977, when the Sex Pistols set a sizable chunk of British youth to shredding their clothes and spitting on life.
When rock ‘n’ roll boomeranged back from England in the early ‘60s, it landed smack upside the heads of a generation of American kids who’d forgotten Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry for the likes of Pat Boone and Paul Anka. The Beatles started it all, but while the Fab Four sang dreamily of an idealistic world elsewhere, groups like the Animals and the Rolling Stones snarled and staked themselves a claim to the trash heaps of this one. Western culture was sick, but it was where they lived, and they would look for meaning – and for fun – in the rotting refuse and forbidden fruits of an older generation.
Like the spiky-haired hordes who would follow the Sex Pistols 15 years later, lots of the fans were inspired to do more than listen. At the heart of the music was the idea that you were part of a vast youth culture, not just the audience at a show. Kids picked up guitars and sat down behind drums and tried to figure out how the Kinks and the Stones and the Who made that ferocious noise. Nobody remembered Paul Anka anymore.
It didn’t take them long to learn it wasn’t terribly hard to replicate. By 1966 there were punks from Maine to Seattle, and Lester Bangs (the Village Voice columnist who gave them that name in Creem magazine) remembered that “they could make any song sound like ‘Louie, Louie’.”
Most of them are forgotten now because they only had one hit…or never had a hit at all…or never even made it out of the garage where they practiced.
Bands like the Electric Prunes (“I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night”) or The Standells (“Dirty Water”) were never meant to last much longer than it took to play their records. Punk was the aesthetic of the disposable, not the classic.
In a world that could end at the touch of a nuclear button, there wasn’t much time to create music for the ages. There wasn’t even much time to plan a better world. You could rant about the horrid state of things – because it was fun to complain, not because it would do any good – and you could glorify the quick and crass and the easy.
The Stooges never learned more than three chords because they wanted raw power, not a symphony. The Velvet Underground barely managed two chords because they thought minimalism was the proper artistic response for modern man. And the whole pack of them leapt or got shoved to the lunatic fringe of society. A world built on planning ahead and money-in-the-bank didn’t have much room for a crowd whose conception of the future encompassed maybe 15 minutes.
Then rock ‘n’ roll grew up, started calling itself rock, flirting with melodies and harmony, and even taking itself seriously. People abandoned singles in favor of albums, and suddenly one had to know how to play a guitar to be a rock ‘n’ roll star.
The lunatic fringe that was punk predictably got left outside of rock ‘n’ roll. As the ‘70s stretched on ad nauseum, plenty of rock fans got shoved out in the cold with them. They spent money on records and concerts, watched bands like the Eagles and Rod Stewart grow richer and richer and farther and farther away from their audiences.
By 1975, kids bought Led Zeppelin albums for the same reason they bought acne cream; it was a social obligation.
More and more of that year, fans sick of supporting Stewart’s love life and the Eagles’ California cool began to question that obligation. They looked back to the early punks and decided rock ‘n’ roll should be something you were part of, not just something that you bought. The music was supposed to give you something, not just take your money.
That idea, more than anything else, tied the early punk bands together. And a bar in New York called CBGBs was the place that tied them together. The most famous of a tiny number of spots in the city to give a home to the resurgent punk scene, it was so small that camaraderie between bands and fans was almost inevitable.
Groups like the Ramones, Blondie, the Patti Smith Group and Richard Hell and the Voidoids had a few other things in common. They played loudly and simply and recreated chunks of rock’s broad history onstage. Each group remembered different songs and different singers, mixed and matched influences to create distinct identities.
In 1976, the Ramones toured England, and second-generation punk went international. Great Britain, with its ailing economy and rigid class system, proved more fertile for the anger and alienation that fueled punk’s noisy music.
Within months of the Ramones’ tour, each of their song titles had been adopted as the name of a band, from Blitzkrieg Bop to Chainsaw Massacre. Hundreds of other groups emerged as well: the Lurkers, the Radiators from Space, the Damned, the Slits, the Clash and the Sex Pistols.
Fans and bands alike created a distinctive fashion: If they were outsiders, hitting a dead end in school, looking for jobs without much hope, confined by class to a way of life they never chose, they would make that clear. Hair was short and spiky, coarsely cut and died orange or blue or green. Clothes were ripped apart and then pinned back together; bondage pants, flimsy sunglasses, wraparound shades and skinny ties came into vogue.
Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious invented a punk dance – the pogo. Created for the frenetic pace and close quarters that marked punk concerts, it consisted of jumping straight up and down without refinement or relief.
The music itself was loud and fast and simple, like the punk rock of the ‘60s. But the bands, especially the British ones, set themselves in opposition to prevailing rock trends – the self importance of the stars, the gulf between performers and listeners, the boring sameness of radio rock. “No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones in 1977,” sang the Clash.
It wasn’t just the bands they attacked; punk was a frontal assault on rock ‘n’ roll. It had grown bloated; it stood in the way of establishing a real youth culture. That snotty attitude toward other bands earned the punks of the ‘70s the New Wave moniker. Like a tidal wave, they’d wipe out anything in their path.
That snotty attitude was about all that the press picked up.
Media coverage of punk focused on the violent and grotesque – beer bottles launched at the stage during concerts, gobs of spit flying between bands, and fans, kids with cheeks pierced by safety pins and drunken brawls at the tiny clubs where punks gathered.
But punks were apt to be the victims of violence, as when Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols was attacked by Teds, fans of ‘50s music. Johnny Blitz of the Dead Boys was knifed outside CBGBs. But the punks weren’t disposed to change their image much; they were too busy opposing anything they could find. During Britain’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, which marked the 25th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, punks focused on the celebration with iconoclastic glee, earning the enmity of virtually every other group in the socially-fractured country.
That couldn’t last. Though the music of early punk bands fell mostly on deaf ears, by 1979 the record industry – recognizing the declining popularity of disco – needed a marketing strategy for the ‘80s. If punk was too raw and too mean to do the job, they could steal a few elements of the sound – loud guitars, simple songs, a quick pace, even a soupcon of anger – and thus create their own New Wave.
That seemed the death knell of punk. Advertisers have made it easier to like punk – selling it as a game, a costume ball, a fad – but punks say they don’t want people to like it. They want people to be punk; to drop out, prowl around in the dustbins of the world and see what is worthwhile and vital there. Anything else is patronizing.
In 1980, the ranks of the original punks have slimmed considerably.
Blondie and the Clash cleaned themselves up and got jobs in the forefront of the record industry’s New Wave. The Damned keep trying but nobody pays much attention any more.
Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols was charged with murder and died of a drug overdose; colleague Johnny Rotten is now John Lydon and dismisses punk as a joke that got out of hand. The Ramones are still grinding away, but hundreds of other bands have simply disappeared.
But to say punk is dead ignores the whole point of the music. The base concept of having punk stars was ridiculous, because it built that same distance between fan and musician that bloated rock ‘n’ roll in the first place.
The place to look for punk is where you live, not in New York or London. And you find it in Tallahassee.
The Slut Boys are four musicians who grew up here. The Implications moved here from the Chicago area to build a band. The idea that Southern boys could play punk rock, or that Midwesterners could kindle a New Wave fire in Florida, reflects the do-it-yourself aesthetic that keeps punk potent.
By Christopher Farrell
A woman called me recently and wanted to know the difference between punk rock and New Wave. She was writing a compare-and-contrast paper for freshman composition class, and she was confused.
No problem.
“There’s no such thing as punk anymore,” I told her, “and New Wave is whatever the big record companies want you to buy this week.”
I was wrong. I’d been looking for punk in the wrong places.
Punk rock is still around, but it has gone underground again, as it did in 1969. It’s traveling incognito, trying out different names. In Tallahassee, it calls itself the Slut Boys or the Implications.
Punk rock, believe it or not, started out as more than fodder for People magazine. More than fodder even for Rolling Stone, the People magazine of the record industry. And, revisionist histories aside, it began years before 1977, when the Sex Pistols set a sizable chunk of British youth to shredding their clothes and spitting on life.
When rock ‘n’ roll boomeranged back from England in the early ‘60s, it landed smack upside the heads of a generation of American kids who’d forgotten Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry for the likes of Pat Boone and Paul Anka. The Beatles started it all, but while the Fab Four sang dreamily of an idealistic world elsewhere, groups like the Animals and the Rolling Stones snarled and staked themselves a claim to the trash heaps of this one. Western culture was sick, but it was where they lived, and they would look for meaning – and for fun – in the rotting refuse and forbidden fruits of an older generation.
Like the spiky-haired hordes who would follow the Sex Pistols 15 years later, lots of the fans were inspired to do more than listen. At the heart of the music was the idea that you were part of a vast youth culture, not just the audience at a show. Kids picked up guitars and sat down behind drums and tried to figure out how the Kinks and the Stones and the Who made that ferocious noise. Nobody remembered Paul Anka anymore.
It didn’t take them long to learn it wasn’t terribly hard to replicate. By 1966 there were punks from Maine to Seattle, and Lester Bangs (the Village Voice columnist who gave them that name in Creem magazine) remembered that “they could make any song sound like ‘Louie, Louie’.”
Most of them are forgotten now because they only had one hit…or never had a hit at all…or never even made it out of the garage where they practiced.
Bands like the Electric Prunes (“I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night”) or The Standells (“Dirty Water”) were never meant to last much longer than it took to play their records. Punk was the aesthetic of the disposable, not the classic.
In a world that could end at the touch of a nuclear button, there wasn’t much time to create music for the ages. There wasn’t even much time to plan a better world. You could rant about the horrid state of things – because it was fun to complain, not because it would do any good – and you could glorify the quick and crass and the easy.
The Stooges never learned more than three chords because they wanted raw power, not a symphony. The Velvet Underground barely managed two chords because they thought minimalism was the proper artistic response for modern man. And the whole pack of them leapt or got shoved to the lunatic fringe of society. A world built on planning ahead and money-in-the-bank didn’t have much room for a crowd whose conception of the future encompassed maybe 15 minutes.
Then rock ‘n’ roll grew up, started calling itself rock, flirting with melodies and harmony, and even taking itself seriously. People abandoned singles in favor of albums, and suddenly one had to know how to play a guitar to be a rock ‘n’ roll star.
The lunatic fringe that was punk predictably got left outside of rock ‘n’ roll. As the ‘70s stretched on ad nauseum, plenty of rock fans got shoved out in the cold with them. They spent money on records and concerts, watched bands like the Eagles and Rod Stewart grow richer and richer and farther and farther away from their audiences.
By 1975, kids bought Led Zeppelin albums for the same reason they bought acne cream; it was a social obligation.
More and more of that year, fans sick of supporting Stewart’s love life and the Eagles’ California cool began to question that obligation. They looked back to the early punks and decided rock ‘n’ roll should be something you were part of, not just something that you bought. The music was supposed to give you something, not just take your money.
That idea, more than anything else, tied the early punk bands together. And a bar in New York called CBGBs was the place that tied them together. The most famous of a tiny number of spots in the city to give a home to the resurgent punk scene, it was so small that camaraderie between bands and fans was almost inevitable.
Groups like the Ramones, Blondie, the Patti Smith Group and Richard Hell and the Voidoids had a few other things in common. They played loudly and simply and recreated chunks of rock’s broad history onstage. Each group remembered different songs and different singers, mixed and matched influences to create distinct identities.
In 1976, the Ramones toured England, and second-generation punk went international. Great Britain, with its ailing economy and rigid class system, proved more fertile for the anger and alienation that fueled punk’s noisy music.
Within months of the Ramones’ tour, each of their song titles had been adopted as the name of a band, from Blitzkrieg Bop to Chainsaw Massacre. Hundreds of other groups emerged as well: the Lurkers, the Radiators from Space, the Damned, the Slits, the Clash and the Sex Pistols.
Fans and bands alike created a distinctive fashion: If they were outsiders, hitting a dead end in school, looking for jobs without much hope, confined by class to a way of life they never chose, they would make that clear. Hair was short and spiky, coarsely cut and died orange or blue or green. Clothes were ripped apart and then pinned back together; bondage pants, flimsy sunglasses, wraparound shades and skinny ties came into vogue.
Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious invented a punk dance – the pogo. Created for the frenetic pace and close quarters that marked punk concerts, it consisted of jumping straight up and down without refinement or relief.
The music itself was loud and fast and simple, like the punk rock of the ‘60s. But the bands, especially the British ones, set themselves in opposition to prevailing rock trends – the self importance of the stars, the gulf between performers and listeners, the boring sameness of radio rock. “No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones in 1977,” sang the Clash.
It wasn’t just the bands they attacked; punk was a frontal assault on rock ‘n’ roll. It had grown bloated; it stood in the way of establishing a real youth culture. That snotty attitude toward other bands earned the punks of the ‘70s the New Wave moniker. Like a tidal wave, they’d wipe out anything in their path.
That snotty attitude was about all that the press picked up.
Media coverage of punk focused on the violent and grotesque – beer bottles launched at the stage during concerts, gobs of spit flying between bands, and fans, kids with cheeks pierced by safety pins and drunken brawls at the tiny clubs where punks gathered.
But punks were apt to be the victims of violence, as when Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols was attacked by Teds, fans of ‘50s music. Johnny Blitz of the Dead Boys was knifed outside CBGBs. But the punks weren’t disposed to change their image much; they were too busy opposing anything they could find. During Britain’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, which marked the 25th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, punks focused on the celebration with iconoclastic glee, earning the enmity of virtually every other group in the socially-fractured country.
That couldn’t last. Though the music of early punk bands fell mostly on deaf ears, by 1979 the record industry – recognizing the declining popularity of disco – needed a marketing strategy for the ‘80s. If punk was too raw and too mean to do the job, they could steal a few elements of the sound – loud guitars, simple songs, a quick pace, even a soupcon of anger – and thus create their own New Wave.
That seemed the death knell of punk. Advertisers have made it easier to like punk – selling it as a game, a costume ball, a fad – but punks say they don’t want people to like it. They want people to be punk; to drop out, prowl around in the dustbins of the world and see what is worthwhile and vital there. Anything else is patronizing.
In 1980, the ranks of the original punks have slimmed considerably.
Blondie and the Clash cleaned themselves up and got jobs in the forefront of the record industry’s New Wave. The Damned keep trying but nobody pays much attention any more.
Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols was charged with murder and died of a drug overdose; colleague Johnny Rotten is now John Lydon and dismisses punk as a joke that got out of hand. The Ramones are still grinding away, but hundreds of other bands have simply disappeared.
But to say punk is dead ignores the whole point of the music. The base concept of having punk stars was ridiculous, because it built that same distance between fan and musician that bloated rock ‘n’ roll in the first place.
The place to look for punk is where you live, not in New York or London. And you find it in Tallahassee.
The Slut Boys are four musicians who grew up here. The Implications moved here from the Chicago area to build a band. The idea that Southern boys could play punk rock, or that Midwesterners could kindle a New Wave fire in Florida, reflects the do-it-yourself aesthetic that keeps punk potent.
The Desperate Bicycles, yet another vanished English punk band, stressed that aesthetic when they made a record about how to make a record. “It was cheap,” went the chorus, “it was easy. Now you go out and do it.”
People are doing it in Tallahassee, but not all of them are making music. Just as important as the songs local New Wave bands play is the community they help to create. There are punk artists here, and punk dancers, and punk television producers, even punk journalists.
They gather at the OK Club when the Slut Boys rehears, go in packs to see the Implications, and listen to Steve Dollar’s punk broadcasts on WFSU-FM.
The Sluts and Imps, as fans call them, inspired new bands. A cadre of local feminists – realizing that if one has something that needs to be said now, punks is the way to say it – are getting a band together. An ad in the Florida Flambeau called for musicians to play “reggae-tinged funky madness.”
It all happens in spite of the punk clones in local and national punk audiences, the people John Lydon dismissed as liking the music “for all the wrong reasons, all the trendy reasons.”
At the core of Tallahassee’s New Wave are people who were punks before it was trendy, who were punks before they knew it themselves. They’ll still be punks when the rest of the world finds its next new wave.
People are doing it in Tallahassee, but not all of them are making music. Just as important as the songs local New Wave bands play is the community they help to create. There are punk artists here, and punk dancers, and punk television producers, even punk journalists.
They gather at the OK Club when the Slut Boys rehears, go in packs to see the Implications, and listen to Steve Dollar’s punk broadcasts on WFSU-FM.
The Sluts and Imps, as fans call them, inspired new bands. A cadre of local feminists – realizing that if one has something that needs to be said now, punks is the way to say it – are getting a band together. An ad in the Florida Flambeau called for musicians to play “reggae-tinged funky madness.”
It all happens in spite of the punk clones in local and national punk audiences, the people John Lydon dismissed as liking the music “for all the wrong reasons, all the trendy reasons.”
At the core of Tallahassee’s New Wave are people who were punks before it was trendy, who were punks before they knew it themselves. They’ll still be punks when the rest of the world finds its next new wave.
____________________________________
The Slut Boys whoop it up at the OK Club
By John Habich
Who are those kids playing that awful loud music? Why do they dress and dance in such strange styles?
They are the same questions that were asked about the Elvis Presley generation, the Beatle-maniacs and the disco divas. These days, they are directed at punk-rock and New Wave bands like the Slut Boys.
Jim Ballard is bass guitarist for the Slut Boys, one of Tallahassee’s best-known punk ensembles. According to Ballard, the answers to those frustrated, fogeyish queries are less fantastic than the tone of the questioners implies.
In fact, Ballard and his three fellow Slut Boys are ordinary young people who derive extraordinary enjoyment from their moonlight careers as rockers. And their severely coiffed and costumed fans dance to a different drum because it’s just plain fun.
Ballard considers the Slut Boys a punk-rock group. Their music is loud and fast, but not as bouncy as that of new wavers such as the B-62s. Ballard likes loud and fast music. He even considers punk rock “easy to listen to.”
Ballard first became enamoured of the raw, rebellious new rock style a couple of years ago when he was working at an unsatisfying job.
“Maybe there’s not much of a message (to punk rock), but you can have a good time listening to it. It makes you forget that your job is maybe not the best in the world. It’s partying music.”
It’s an old formula: strident, whoop-it-up music to salve hard times. Unlike earlier rock styles, however, punk music doesn’t rely on love and romance in the lyrics department.
“It’s hard to get sexy when you’re pogoing,” Ballard notes. He refers to the pogo, the jump-up-and-down-and-flail-your-arms dance that punkers are apt to do.
The Slut Boys’ fans – some dressed in bizarre parodies of freaky ‘50s outfits, with narrow sunglasses and novelty buttons – get excited with the frenzy of the music. Ballard says a few of them have gone so far as to bang their heads on the floor to the beat.
Still, the Slut Boys are not on punk rock’s outer limits of weirdness. Unlike early punk musicians such as the Sex Pistols, they don’t adorn their flesh with safety pins or razor blades. “I don’t have a ring through my nose, either,” Ballard says. “We’re not heavily into the visual.”
The Slut Boys’ raunchy reputation consists pretty much of their whorish name – bestowed by a female co-worker of one of the band members – and the censor’s bleep over a graphic original song lyric during a WFSU-TV broadcast.
Some of the musicians’ daytime co-workers were pretty shocked when the Slut Boys began to attract local attention, Ballard says. “But it’s no big deal to our parents or to our friends.”
Today’s Slut Boys were yesterday’s high-school chums, and they’ve been playing rock music together since then. In the early ‘70s, Ballard and lead guitarist Bill McCluskey went to Rickards, rhythm guitarist Ben Wilcox and drummer Donnie Crenshaw went to
Florida High.
They practiced – mostly Rolling Stones’ songs – for about a year at Crenshaw’s parents’ home, and they wound up with a short gig at a record store down the alley from the State Theatre.
That was in the summer of 1974. Shortly thereafter, the band was disbanded before it even got a name. The following year, Wilcox and Crenshaw took off for England. When they came back to North Florida, they formed a group called the Overedgers. They wrote a song about a Tallahassee preacher – “Reverend Boykin” – that has since been adapted by the Slut Boys.
During the last half of the ‘70s, the sound labeled as punk rock began to gather a wider audience – including the four Tallahasseeans who were to become the Slut Boys. Wilcox and Crenshaw, rejoined by McCluskey, turned their talents in the direction of the new music movement.
A year ago, the trio rented an old warehouse on Madison Street across from the new Civic Center site. The practice hall became known as the OK Club. Ballard regrouped with his three friends last March, and their band took the name of the Slut Boys.
They began playing publicly last summer, with engagements at the now-defunct Lucky Horseshoe bar, at Tommy’s Deep South Music Hall, on the Florida State University Union green, and at Smitty’s Club. The slut boys also have played at the Crash Landing, where they are booked next weekend.
“We’ve toned down a lot,” Ballard says. “We used to play all night long at the OK Club. Now we’re just really into having a good time.” Currently, they practice there three to five times a week, two hours on a bad night and as many as five hours on a good one.
Even “toned down,” the band’s practice sessions reverberate all the way around the block. Friends of the instrumentalists gather at the OK Club to listen, to pogo and to drink beer. The OK Club is the closest thing in Tallahassee to the punk and New Wave clubs that dot Manhattan.
What’s ahead for the Slut Boys? If Ballard has his way, the group will perform more original compositions. Its only original songs are “Reverend Boykin” and “Mr. Stupid.” Ballard hopes for 10 more in the repertory.
He also is interested in the possibilities of “Southern punk.”
“Iggy Pop (a renowned punk artist who performed last month at Tommy’s Deep South Music Hall) called us hicks,” Ballard said. “But being from the South might be an advantage. Maybe we can create Southern punk using our accents, the way we sing.”
Whether that happens or not, there remains a certain innate satisfaction in performing punk music in the Florida Panhandle.
“I enjoy playing,” bass guitarist Ballard says, “because when I was about 18 there were no live bands in Tallahassee that were very exciting. They were all country rock; if you didn’t square dance you were out of luck.
“There’s always been a market for loud, fast music. But until lately, there’s been nowhere here to get exposed to it.”
By John Habich
Who are those kids playing that awful loud music? Why do they dress and dance in such strange styles?
They are the same questions that were asked about the Elvis Presley generation, the Beatle-maniacs and the disco divas. These days, they are directed at punk-rock and New Wave bands like the Slut Boys.
Jim Ballard is bass guitarist for the Slut Boys, one of Tallahassee’s best-known punk ensembles. According to Ballard, the answers to those frustrated, fogeyish queries are less fantastic than the tone of the questioners implies.
In fact, Ballard and his three fellow Slut Boys are ordinary young people who derive extraordinary enjoyment from their moonlight careers as rockers. And their severely coiffed and costumed fans dance to a different drum because it’s just plain fun.
Ballard considers the Slut Boys a punk-rock group. Their music is loud and fast, but not as bouncy as that of new wavers such as the B-62s. Ballard likes loud and fast music. He even considers punk rock “easy to listen to.”
Ballard first became enamoured of the raw, rebellious new rock style a couple of years ago when he was working at an unsatisfying job.
“Maybe there’s not much of a message (to punk rock), but you can have a good time listening to it. It makes you forget that your job is maybe not the best in the world. It’s partying music.”
It’s an old formula: strident, whoop-it-up music to salve hard times. Unlike earlier rock styles, however, punk music doesn’t rely on love and romance in the lyrics department.
“It’s hard to get sexy when you’re pogoing,” Ballard notes. He refers to the pogo, the jump-up-and-down-and-flail-your-arms dance that punkers are apt to do.
The Slut Boys’ fans – some dressed in bizarre parodies of freaky ‘50s outfits, with narrow sunglasses and novelty buttons – get excited with the frenzy of the music. Ballard says a few of them have gone so far as to bang their heads on the floor to the beat.
Still, the Slut Boys are not on punk rock’s outer limits of weirdness. Unlike early punk musicians such as the Sex Pistols, they don’t adorn their flesh with safety pins or razor blades. “I don’t have a ring through my nose, either,” Ballard says. “We’re not heavily into the visual.”
The Slut Boys’ raunchy reputation consists pretty much of their whorish name – bestowed by a female co-worker of one of the band members – and the censor’s bleep over a graphic original song lyric during a WFSU-TV broadcast.
Some of the musicians’ daytime co-workers were pretty shocked when the Slut Boys began to attract local attention, Ballard says. “But it’s no big deal to our parents or to our friends.”
Today’s Slut Boys were yesterday’s high-school chums, and they’ve been playing rock music together since then. In the early ‘70s, Ballard and lead guitarist Bill McCluskey went to Rickards, rhythm guitarist Ben Wilcox and drummer Donnie Crenshaw went to
Florida High.
They practiced – mostly Rolling Stones’ songs – for about a year at Crenshaw’s parents’ home, and they wound up with a short gig at a record store down the alley from the State Theatre.
That was in the summer of 1974. Shortly thereafter, the band was disbanded before it even got a name. The following year, Wilcox and Crenshaw took off for England. When they came back to North Florida, they formed a group called the Overedgers. They wrote a song about a Tallahassee preacher – “Reverend Boykin” – that has since been adapted by the Slut Boys.
During the last half of the ‘70s, the sound labeled as punk rock began to gather a wider audience – including the four Tallahasseeans who were to become the Slut Boys. Wilcox and Crenshaw, rejoined by McCluskey, turned their talents in the direction of the new music movement.
A year ago, the trio rented an old warehouse on Madison Street across from the new Civic Center site. The practice hall became known as the OK Club. Ballard regrouped with his three friends last March, and their band took the name of the Slut Boys.
They began playing publicly last summer, with engagements at the now-defunct Lucky Horseshoe bar, at Tommy’s Deep South Music Hall, on the Florida State University Union green, and at Smitty’s Club. The slut boys also have played at the Crash Landing, where they are booked next weekend.
“We’ve toned down a lot,” Ballard says. “We used to play all night long at the OK Club. Now we’re just really into having a good time.” Currently, they practice there three to five times a week, two hours on a bad night and as many as five hours on a good one.
Even “toned down,” the band’s practice sessions reverberate all the way around the block. Friends of the instrumentalists gather at the OK Club to listen, to pogo and to drink beer. The OK Club is the closest thing in Tallahassee to the punk and New Wave clubs that dot Manhattan.
What’s ahead for the Slut Boys? If Ballard has his way, the group will perform more original compositions. Its only original songs are “Reverend Boykin” and “Mr. Stupid.” Ballard hopes for 10 more in the repertory.
He also is interested in the possibilities of “Southern punk.”
“Iggy Pop (a renowned punk artist who performed last month at Tommy’s Deep South Music Hall) called us hicks,” Ballard said. “But being from the South might be an advantage. Maybe we can create Southern punk using our accents, the way we sing.”
Whether that happens or not, there remains a certain innate satisfaction in performing punk music in the Florida Panhandle.
“I enjoy playing,” bass guitarist Ballard says, “because when I was about 18 there were no live bands in Tallahassee that were very exciting. They were all country rock; if you didn’t square dance you were out of luck.
“There’s always been a market for loud, fast music. But until lately, there’s been nowhere here to get exposed to it.”
Punk: loud, bawdy, fun
By John Habich
One day during the softly somber, nostalgic autumn of 1979 my usual introspections were brutally assaulted by a sound.
It bored through me like a dentist’s drill, and, seeing as I was not under heavy sedation, I set about to find the source and pull the plug. I ran, hands clasped over my ears, into the living room.
“What in blazes is that?” I yelled, hardly noticing that one of my four housemates was jumping up and down in an manner that suggested a Gumby doll in apoplexy.
“The B-52s,” answered his friend, who was similarly stricken.
Well, it sounded like a blitzkrieg, all right. A drum pounded a rapid meter over a shrill, staccato, electric piano and a guitar droned a mindless theme that recalled the worst incidental music of “The Outer Limits.” The vocal was rendered in a style that hybridized Schoenberg and shouting.
For someone who didn’t even like Rod McKuen, the lyrics were indigestible:
Here comes a sting ray,
There goes a manta ray.
In walked a jellyfish,
There goes a dogfish
Chased by a catfish.
In flew a sea robin,
Watch out for that piranha!
There goes a narwhal,
Here comes a bikini whale!
This tender ode was called “Rock Lobster,” I discovered by reading the back of the album cover. On the front of it was a photograph of the B-52s, one of whose female vocalists sported a Conehead-beehive hairdo, all of whose members looked very strange indeed.
I was dismayed that, of all the people I knew who might be vulnerable to such noxious noise, this New Wave had inundated my housemate, Joe. He is an exceptionally talented, classically trained pianist whose extensive record collection includes the complete discography of soprano Leontyne Price. How could somebody with such a refined pair of ears enjoy such anti-musical marauders as these B-52s?
The answer: “Fun.”
Apparently, it was possible to suspend one’s otherwise rigorous standards of taste in order to laugh at the nonsensical lyrics that poked fun at the core of the concept of meaning. Apparently, there was a whole school of rock music philosophers who theorized that a world uncertain of its ability to find meaning was seeking shelter in the certainty of meaninglessness via New Wave and punk rock.
In any case, I soon realized with certainty that New Wave and punk had grabbed hold of my household. Every other day, Joe and his friends brought home more records of the same strange strains by artists – and at the time, I used that term very loosely – with unseemly names. Devo and Blondie and Clash and the Pretenders.
As this invasion ensued, I became aware of the great importance of operant condition in the music business: Namely, people like what they hear the most of.
The weeks passed and my resistance weakened. It was like getting used to the discordant twelve-tone scale popular among serious composers during the first half of this century. First, you are outraged by the strident, unfamiliar style. Then, the more you listen, the less annoyed you become. At some magical point, your senses reach a truce with the music.
If you continue to listen, eventually patterns begin to make themselves clear, and you get a sense of the elements of the style in question. Finally, you start to enjoy picking out those patterns consciously and appreciating the idioms of that style. You have learned to think in a foreign language.
And that is what happened with me and New Wave and punk rock. The more I listened, the more I liked.
As with the Beatles and even high-voltage acid rock, New Wave picked up some unlikely aficionados outside the ranks of rebellious youth.
During a trip to an Atlanta record store with my 70-year-old friend, Elizabeth, I was astonished to hear her ask a clerk, “Excuse me, but do you have ‘Heart of Glass’ by Blondie?” The clerk expressed his own astonishment, so she blushed and added, “It’s for my grandchild.”
Her rejoinder was a bald-faced lie. Like those few hip parents of the ‘60s who bought Beatles albums, Elizabeth was open-minded to new and different styles. That’s how she got hooked on “Heart of Glass.” A true appreciator of art and popular culture, at 70 she still hadn’t reached the point most people reach at half her age, of closing herself off from everything with which she wasn’t already familiar and comfortable.
Therein lies the double-edged key to art appreciation: an open mind and frequent exposure to new form.
Whether punk rock and New Wave are musical art forms can be argued either way. As I am more concerned with the aesthetics of other musical forms, I haven’t thought deeply about the artistic status of the B-52s.
However, I have accepted it broadly enough to agree with Joe. It’s fun. It can be especially fun from the point of view of an over-the-hill fuddy-duddy who has left the ranks of anarchistic youth.
I had the gall to attend punker Iggy Pop’s recent concert at Tommy’s Deep South Music Hall with another friend of the “closer-to-30” age group. She was a quintessential cosmopolitan, who got her pink patent-leather belt and spike heels a long time ago in New York, on the first crest of New Wave. I wore what I could muster – a skinny necktie, bright red socks and novelty eyeglasses – and may have looked like the laughable man of the ‘60s who struggled to be “with it” by coordinating a Nehru jacket with wing-tips.
No matter. We jumped frenetically to the beat like Joe had done last year, doing the pogo – the mazurka of the clone age. We screamed back and forth in competition with the blaring noise. We froze our faces as much as we could within the expressionless, deadpan attitude that characterizes the contemporary punker.
To paraphrase the late John Lennon, for a few hours I let the bananas out of the closet. I reveled in the ridiculous with the gusto of a teen-ager doing a Chinese fire drill at a stoplight.
I was not a hard-core believer in any value system that might be tied to the music – militance, devolution or nihilism. I just allowed the sound and the circus surrounding it to assault my remembrance of daily trials and traumas as it had once assaulted my ears.
It was wonderful to become engulfed in the latest craze without the accompanying tensions of youthful rebellion: It was pure fun.
By John Habich
One day during the softly somber, nostalgic autumn of 1979 my usual introspections were brutally assaulted by a sound.
It bored through me like a dentist’s drill, and, seeing as I was not under heavy sedation, I set about to find the source and pull the plug. I ran, hands clasped over my ears, into the living room.
“What in blazes is that?” I yelled, hardly noticing that one of my four housemates was jumping up and down in an manner that suggested a Gumby doll in apoplexy.
“The B-52s,” answered his friend, who was similarly stricken.
Well, it sounded like a blitzkrieg, all right. A drum pounded a rapid meter over a shrill, staccato, electric piano and a guitar droned a mindless theme that recalled the worst incidental music of “The Outer Limits.” The vocal was rendered in a style that hybridized Schoenberg and shouting.
For someone who didn’t even like Rod McKuen, the lyrics were indigestible:
Here comes a sting ray,
There goes a manta ray.
In walked a jellyfish,
There goes a dogfish
Chased by a catfish.
In flew a sea robin,
Watch out for that piranha!
There goes a narwhal,
Here comes a bikini whale!
This tender ode was called “Rock Lobster,” I discovered by reading the back of the album cover. On the front of it was a photograph of the B-52s, one of whose female vocalists sported a Conehead-beehive hairdo, all of whose members looked very strange indeed.
I was dismayed that, of all the people I knew who might be vulnerable to such noxious noise, this New Wave had inundated my housemate, Joe. He is an exceptionally talented, classically trained pianist whose extensive record collection includes the complete discography of soprano Leontyne Price. How could somebody with such a refined pair of ears enjoy such anti-musical marauders as these B-52s?
The answer: “Fun.”
Apparently, it was possible to suspend one’s otherwise rigorous standards of taste in order to laugh at the nonsensical lyrics that poked fun at the core of the concept of meaning. Apparently, there was a whole school of rock music philosophers who theorized that a world uncertain of its ability to find meaning was seeking shelter in the certainty of meaninglessness via New Wave and punk rock.
In any case, I soon realized with certainty that New Wave and punk had grabbed hold of my household. Every other day, Joe and his friends brought home more records of the same strange strains by artists – and at the time, I used that term very loosely – with unseemly names. Devo and Blondie and Clash and the Pretenders.
As this invasion ensued, I became aware of the great importance of operant condition in the music business: Namely, people like what they hear the most of.
The weeks passed and my resistance weakened. It was like getting used to the discordant twelve-tone scale popular among serious composers during the first half of this century. First, you are outraged by the strident, unfamiliar style. Then, the more you listen, the less annoyed you become. At some magical point, your senses reach a truce with the music.
If you continue to listen, eventually patterns begin to make themselves clear, and you get a sense of the elements of the style in question. Finally, you start to enjoy picking out those patterns consciously and appreciating the idioms of that style. You have learned to think in a foreign language.
And that is what happened with me and New Wave and punk rock. The more I listened, the more I liked.
As with the Beatles and even high-voltage acid rock, New Wave picked up some unlikely aficionados outside the ranks of rebellious youth.
During a trip to an Atlanta record store with my 70-year-old friend, Elizabeth, I was astonished to hear her ask a clerk, “Excuse me, but do you have ‘Heart of Glass’ by Blondie?” The clerk expressed his own astonishment, so she blushed and added, “It’s for my grandchild.”
Her rejoinder was a bald-faced lie. Like those few hip parents of the ‘60s who bought Beatles albums, Elizabeth was open-minded to new and different styles. That’s how she got hooked on “Heart of Glass.” A true appreciator of art and popular culture, at 70 she still hadn’t reached the point most people reach at half her age, of closing herself off from everything with which she wasn’t already familiar and comfortable.
Therein lies the double-edged key to art appreciation: an open mind and frequent exposure to new form.
Whether punk rock and New Wave are musical art forms can be argued either way. As I am more concerned with the aesthetics of other musical forms, I haven’t thought deeply about the artistic status of the B-52s.
However, I have accepted it broadly enough to agree with Joe. It’s fun. It can be especially fun from the point of view of an over-the-hill fuddy-duddy who has left the ranks of anarchistic youth.
I had the gall to attend punker Iggy Pop’s recent concert at Tommy’s Deep South Music Hall with another friend of the “closer-to-30” age group. She was a quintessential cosmopolitan, who got her pink patent-leather belt and spike heels a long time ago in New York, on the first crest of New Wave. I wore what I could muster – a skinny necktie, bright red socks and novelty eyeglasses – and may have looked like the laughable man of the ‘60s who struggled to be “with it” by coordinating a Nehru jacket with wing-tips.
No matter. We jumped frenetically to the beat like Joe had done last year, doing the pogo – the mazurka of the clone age. We screamed back and forth in competition with the blaring noise. We froze our faces as much as we could within the expressionless, deadpan attitude that characterizes the contemporary punker.
To paraphrase the late John Lennon, for a few hours I let the bananas out of the closet. I reveled in the ridiculous with the gusto of a teen-ager doing a Chinese fire drill at a stoplight.
I was not a hard-core believer in any value system that might be tied to the music – militance, devolution or nihilism. I just allowed the sound and the circus surrounding it to assault my remembrance of daily trials and traumas as it had once assaulted my ears.
It was wonderful to become engulfed in the latest craze without the accompanying tensions of youthful rebellion: It was pure fun.
