These original Florida Flambeau news clippings from 43 years ago today represent some of the earliest media coverage devoted to Tallahassee’s then-emerging punk and underground music scene. The article is transcribed below and centers on the now-illustrious (and since demolished) O.K. Club along with the Slut Boys and The Implications. Big thanks to Donny Crenshaw for gifting these clippings to the Tallahassee Punk Archive.
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Underground
Rock: Out of the garage and into the streets
By
Steve Dollar
Photos
by Bob O’Lary
Florida
Flambeau, July 17, 1980
Illumned
only by the moon and the sparse glare of a mercury lamp, a spare, white row of
Madison St. storefronts cloak their occupants with a blanket of nondescript
obscurity. It’s a Sunday night, and while the rest of this sleepy Capital town
winds down, getting ready for the working week, something raw and electric,
sometimes frenzied threatens the evening calm like a mugger’s knife held
against a tourist’s throat. The sound of America’s garages, brimming with
(post) adolescent energy has found a home in the lengthening shadow of the Civic
Center.
Sandwiched between a weight-lifting parlor and a one-man barber shop, underground rock is making a buzz in Tallahassee.
“We didn’t want to open up a club, we just wanted something fun to do,” laughs Bill McCluskey, lead guitarist for the Slutboys and “co-founder,” along with drummer Donnie Crenshaw and guitarist Ben Wilcox, of the quasi-legendary O.K. Club.
Anxious to renew an eight-year, off-and-on musical partnership, the trio (bassist Jim Ballard joined this March) began practicing in the tiny room last fall. Crenshaw, an ex-art student, dubbed it “The O.K.” and painted a window to match the parodic theme. Before long they had a small, but enthusiastic following of friends and curiosity seekers to match it.
“Yeah, well we told a couple of people, our friends, where it was and when we played, but we didn’t expect that many to come down. All of a sudden, we’d start having these crowds,” McCluskey explains. “I guess there was some word-of-mouth.”
Shunning what they saw as a restrictive club scene, the Slutboys (the name was only a recent addition) were only playing for fun anyway, and ended up stumbling onto something unique.
For $100 a month rent, the Slutboys can play all night long if they like (and they frequently do) with the only threats to their musical well-being an occasional rowdy guest, and landlord hints at bulldozing the block once the Civic Center opens for official business.
But, with construction hampered by delays and inflation, the Center won’t be welcoming the concert-starved masses for at least a year. If the O.K. Club is leveled to make parking for Boston fans, it won’t be soon.
Inside, red parachute serves as wall covering, decorated by Crenshaw’s artwork – space ships and post-psychedelic scribbling. The amps seem to take up half the space, but there’s still enough room to dance. There hasn’t been as much excitement since Graham’s Café served up its last fried egg.
Joining the Slutboys as tenants two months ago, another band, the Implications, have been doing some much needed polishing of numerous originals penned by “mentor” Chris Craig. Craig, along with friends and fellow Illinoisans Liz Wing and Molly Kearney had been playing as a threesome, but recently added three locals to fill out the band’s sound.
Though the groups follow radically divergent styles – the Slutboys play hard rock from Stone standards to pinhead anthems, the Implications have an easier, organ-inflected sound – they’re both playing vibrant music that can be heard nowhere else, adding spice to a bland pie that relies on tried-and-true commercial crowd pleasers.
Playing together in various combinations since high school, Wilcox, Ballard, McCluskey and Crenshaw have only lately even performed publicly – with three recent gigs at the Lucky Horseshow – and two of those performances were free, with the third, 50 cent admission netted them $13 each. Obviously, there’s got to be something more.
“We all started playing in high school, that’s where we met (at Florida High and Rickards High),” explains Crenshaw, and we got back together because we really wanted to play.”
Ballard, nodded in agreement. A refugee from a brief stint as a lounge lizard, the blond, gangly bassist was fed up with what he terms “stupid music.”
“People put up with so much garbage, it’ll be interesting to see what they make of us,” Ballard chuckles.
The connection that links seminal rockers like Bo Diddley and Eddie Cochran to mid-60s stalwarts like the Animals and Kinks to the metal beat of proto-punks like Lou Reed’s Velvets, as well as latter day headbangers the Ramones, is nowhere more apparent that at the O.K. Club.
And the Slutboys pay tribute to them all – not so much by copying their favorite songs as recreating them in their own image. Shifting deftly from “God Save the Queen” to an old Kinks classic, they take what could be clashing styles and unify them in loose, raucous play, with a dash of dissonance for good taste. When they do an Iggy Pop shakedown like “Raw Power” for instance, they accelerate it. Wilcox’s iron-fisted strumming revs up those treacherous rhythms to a heart-stopping pace pierced not so much by McCluskey’s or Ballard’s often secondary vocals as by Bill’s migraine edged guitar. Using James Williamson’s needle-sharp, turn-on-the-dime style as a reference point, McCluskey’s solos can pose threats to the inner ear, cutting in like a buzzsaw to savage that delicate aural mechanism.
But it’s as enjoyable as it is amplified, and hopefully, says Wilcox, the Slutboys’ sonic wonders won’t be confined strictly to the club. “Bill and Donnie are both out of work, so we could use the money. We’re ready to start playing the circuit, but either way, we’ve always got the O.K. Club to fall back on.”
***
Two doors down, the Implications are having the sounds like one hell of a wild party. Actually the six piece group is busy rehearsing a calypso-surf number that mixes vocalist Karen Ladzinski’s exotic jungle cries with guitarist Craig’s lyrics about “apocalyptic babies.”
The combination of light, but not always carefree music, with cynical, doom-laden words is characteristic of the Implications’ style. And far from clashing with their hard-rocking neighbors, they provide a complement and encouragement.
“It’s great,” beams a sweaty Ben Wilcox, taking liberal swigs from a Coke, waiting for practice to start. “We don’t fell any competition at all, they’re completely different.”
Where the Slutboys have their roots in T-town, the core of the Implications hail from urban Illinois. Craig, Wing and Kearney began rehearsing in earnest last winter, adding new acquaintances Tom Stahl (guitar), Ladzinski and Ray Chamberlain (drums) in spring.
“We
got the idea after we saw the Talking Heads in Chicago in 1977,” Craig recalls.
“I’d been writing songs for a couple of years before that, and we’d been
talking about being a band but it was the show that really gave us the spark.”
Choosing instruments in a completely casual, arbitrary manner, Craig took up the guitar, Liz picked up the Farfisa organ and Molly began learning the bass.
The soft-spoken Kearney, a spring graduate from FSU, claims Head’s bassist Tina Weymouth as her inspiration. The most accomplished musician in the band, Kearney anchors an easy, shuffling sound otherwise buoyed by Liz’ bouncy E-Z-to-Play organ and Stahl’s Venturesome beach-blanket guitar.
With three women singers, intimations of both the B-52’s and their antecedents in the Phil Spector/Berry Gordy soul parade are not out of place. Ladzinski admits her involvement – wild, whooping vocals – was encouraged by her admiration of Kate and Cindy 52, but mainly because “it’s a lot of fun.”
Other influences are as easy to track down as a glance at their cover songs – The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” Them’s “Here Comes the Night,” and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears,” – as well as the surf and Anglicized Motown undertones of their originals, which comprise the bulk of the Imp sets.
“I guess that it’s pretty obvious that Dylan’s an influence,” Craig notes and like any well-read ex-English major, he draws on sources as diverse as Ted Hughes and the Psalmist.
But debts to Dylan are easily confirmed by Craig’s vocals. At first listen, flat, whiny tones might seem more like the braying protests of a five-year-old denied his ice-cream cone, or Joe Strummer’s toothy younger brother with a nasal complex. But if practice doesn’t make perfect, it at least improves, and after several night’s listening it is apparent that Craig’s sneer fits his lyrics hand in hand.
Craig’s visions of emotional holocaust take titles like “Blood Alley,” “Walk All Over Me,” “Dead End,” “Foreign Correspondent” and “Seems Like Love and Death,” and though they’re far from happy sing alongs, they’re not entirely dreary either.
“Yeah, we like to play around with ‘em, have fun with the words,” says Craig.
“Frozen in Your Fire,” is both a love song and tale of betrayal, one imagines Field Marshall Cinque and Tanya having a spat – seems the girls is just as fickle about subversion as she is about guys:
“I never said a word when you joined the National Front / But now that you’re a member of the Khmer Rouge / I guess I can’t have nothing more to do with you.” Unlike the Slutboys, whose fortunes are based in Tallahassee, the Imps don’t plan to stick around when they go careering.
“Basically we just came down here to meet up with Molly and get the band ready. We’d like to play (in some clubs) this fall but I don’t think we can really go anywhere around here,” Wing explains, “I just don’t think there’s a big enough audience.”
Craig concurs. “We’ll stay here about a year and then move back up north and make a go of it. But right now I wouldn’t mind just opening this place up, play here, let people come and hear us like they would any other club.”
***
The
Slutboys perform free Sunday at 3 p.m. on the Union Green as opening act for
Miami-area new wavoids the Cichlids. They’ll also be playing at the Lucky
Horseshoe August 13-16. Look for the Implications (with guests the Flaming
Ingoes) at your local bistro this fall.
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