Punk drunk love: In the documentary Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan, The Pogues frontman claims he was preordained for punk success. Born on Christmas Day, “God looked down on this little cottage in Ireland and said, ‘That little boy there, he’s the little boy I’m going to use to save Irish music.’” says MacGowan. Bruce Springsteen calls him a “master,” and a 30-year friendship with Johnny Depp prompted the actor to green light the project as a celebration of the punk legend’s 60th birthday and the survival of his very public struggles with addiction.
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Arts Pick: Punk the Capital
Punk from here: When her family relocated from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., in the early ’80s, Cynthia Connolly brought her camera and her passion for punk rock to the nation’s fledgling scene. Her documentation resulted in Banned in DC: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground (79-85), one of the first books on punk in the U.S. Connelly appears in a new documentary, Punk the Capital: Building a Sound Movement, which captures that transformative period, and she’ll be on hand for a post-screening discussion along with co-director James June Schneider.
Saturday 2/29. $10, 7:30pm. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, 375 Merchant Walk Sq., 326-5056.
Before Charlottesville’s first hardcore punk band played Charlottesville’s first hardcore punk show, Lackey Die bass player Danny Collins had a prediction.
“I think we’re gonna be the hottest thing that ever came out of this stinkin’ little town,” Collins said to one of his bandmates. It was 1983, and the band was about to take the stage in the basement of Muldowney’s Pub for “Slam or Scram,” a free show they had advertised on hand-drawn fliers.
“And I also think I don’t give a shit what anyone in Charlottesville thinks about it,” he added.
Whether or not Collins was serious about Lackey Die’s future as “the hottest thing that ever came out of this stinkin’ little town,” more than 35 years after the fact, it turns out there’s some truth to what he said.
Though Lackey Die was short-lived, formed in 1982 and split in 1985, its influence on Charlottesville’s punk and hardcore scene—and the various alternative and underground music scenes that sprouted from it—has been lasting. It’s an underground tide that’s ebbed and flowed, often sustained by just a few people at a time, in a city that’s hung its reputation as a “music town” on some pretty mainstream stuff.
In the mid-1970s, Lackey Die’s future drummer Larry Houchens was a teenager and into Kiss’ album Alive!. He played trombone in school, but what he really wanted was to play the drums, so he set up a bunch of poles, each with a different tone, and knocked out Peter Criss’ drum solos. A few years later, he saw the Sex Pistols on TV. “Whoa, what is this?” Houchens remembers thinking. “There was something going on there.”
And when a friend played him Dead Boys’ Young Loud and Snotty, that was it. “That music was in my soul,” he says.
At the time, there weren’t a lot of punk records out, nor were there many places to buy them. But once his grandparents bought him a three-piece drum kit, he and his friends, who had guitars and microphones, started hanging out in Houchens’ grandparents’ basement to make their own music.
“I think it was more us creating things together, learning how to play together,” says Houchens. And what came out—short, fast, loud, aggressive songs—“just happened to come out being punk rock.”
Sometimes, Houchens made entire songs on his own, in a project he called Latter Day Saints. He’d decide on a song length—say, two minutes—and drum for two minutes to a four-track cassette recorder. Then he’d blast that first tape out of a stereo while playing a bass part to it—thereby recording both to a second tape he’d popped into the recorder. He’d do it again, for a guitar part, and finally layer vocals, which he’d shout, at the top of his lungs, into a cheap microphone.
He’d get totally lost in the moment, and once, he’d been screaming “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!,” when he looked over and saw his grandfather and two of his grandfather’s friends just staring at him through the basement window. “I was no conditioned singer then,” says Houchens, laughing. “No kind of tone…to me, that was total punk.”
This must have been 1980, maybe 1981, and it’s very possible that those tapes, which Houchens recycled constantly, held the first-ever punk rock music recorded in Charlottesville.
From there, Houchens and his friends formed a few other punk bands (The Complaint Department, and later, Social Banned), mostly working on song structure, “figuring out what punk should sound like.” Then, in 1982, Houchens and three of his longtime friends—Collins, Mark Bailey, Dave “Hollis Fitch” Hollis—formed Lackey Die, named for a teacher at Albemarle High School.
“We were raw. We created from the heart,” says Houchens. Lackey Die songs, most of them barely over a minute long, commented on (and often critiqued) things like Charlottesville receiving the All-American City Award from the National Civic League, and impending nuclear holocaust (the “worthless war of idiots, just don’t know when to quit”).
It wasn’t exactly the type of music that Charlottesville music venues hosted back then, says Houchens. “Clubs wanted to make sure people were going to be drinking, so you really had to play cover songs,” he says, like Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” or a winding Allman Brothers jam. Occasionally, Bruce Olsen and The Offenders, a band that Houchens says had a “kind of punk rock thing” going, would come through town. But that was about it.
The longer Lackey Die practiced, the more the guys started thinking that they could play out, get their own scene going. So, they did.
One of the band members asked the owner of Muldowney’s Pub, a gay bar, if she’d be interested in hosting a hardcore punk show in the pub’s narrow basement on Water Street in downtown Charlottesville. She agreed, and on October 27, 1983, Lackey Die played its first show.
Just a few weeks later, on November 15, 1983, another hardcore band, The Landlords, made its debut at a battle of the bands at Plum’s Lounge, at the Holiday Inn on Route 29.
Formed in the fall of 1983 after a fortuitous meeting at WTJU, the four members of The Landlords—vocalist John Beers, guitarist Charlie Kramer, bassist Colum Leckey, and drummer Tristan Puckett—were UVA students who were drawn to punk, especially hardcore, for its intensity, its energy, how it didn’t sound like any other music that was being made. “It was fast and it was loud and it was aggressive,” says Beers.
Heavy rotation: WTJU’s place in hardcore history
While the Charlottesville scene has its own lore, the city also occupies an important point on global hardcore punk timeline: Back in 1980, WTJU DJ Aaron Margosis was the first person ever to play releases by seminal hardcore punk label Dischord Records over the air.
In 1980, Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson founded Dischord Records to release Minor Disturbance, an EP by their band The Teen Idles. The pair was inspired to start their own band, The Slinkees, which later became The Teen Idles, which eventually morphed into Minor Threat (maybe you’ve heard of them).
Margosis, himself a fan of punk and new wave music, continued following the evolution of the D.C. punk and hardcore scene after starting at UVA—and at WTJU—in fall 1979. On his show, Margosis played demo tapes by bands like The Untouchables, and at some point, he and MacKaye started exchanging letters. As soon as he got that Teen Idles record released in December 1980, “I was playing it to death on the radio,” he says, and wishing there was a hardcore scene in Charlottesville. Margosis had to wait a while, but he eventually got his wish.
Aaron Margosis, a friend of The Landlords who’d been playing hardcore punk on his WTJU show for a couple of years at this point, remembers the gig well. The Landlords signed up for this battle of the bands, knowing they’d shock their audience; “Plum’s Lounge was just not the place for this type of music,” says Margosis, who’d brought a tape recorder to capture the set for posterity. “They had the plug pulled on them before the second song even got going.”
So while Charlottesville’s first two hardcore punk bands formed independently of one another, they quickly started sharing bills at Muldowney’s, playing with other local punk bands like Beef People and Baby Opaque (who shared a house with The Landlords), and out-of-towners Death Piggy (which mutated into GWAR), Malefice, and Scream.
By 1984, hardcore punk was out of basement practice spaces and into venues and recording studios. Lackey Die visited Floodzone Studios in Richmond to lay down a demo in February 1984, and did another at Arlington’s Inner Ear Studios in March 1985. The Landlords visited Inner Ear in 1984 to record Hey! It’s A Teenage House Party, released that same year on vocalist Beers’ own label, Catch Trout. It was the first recording of Charlottesville punk music pressed to vinyl.
Read more: Fast forward: The Landlords’ first album gets a slick reissue
There was a hardcore show at Muldowney’s about once a month, usually with The Landlords and/or Lackey Die on the bill, and that frequency gave people who went to the shows and felt compelled to start their own bands enough time to form, practice, and maybe get on the bills themselves. The crowds were never huge, says Houchens, but they were consistent and they were active, pogoing and slam-dancing (i.e., moshing) when the bands were on.
“More and more people got drawn into the scene as they realized you didn’t have to be the sort of traditional notion of a great musician to start a band and play in a band” and make good music that speaks to people, says Kramer. If he wanted to play his guitar with a corn cob instead of a pick, he could. For Kramer and so many others, punk rock, and hardcore punk in particular, expanded their notion of what music could be.
Plus, young people weren’t looking for polished music, says Houchens. “They wanted an aggressive sound that they could relate to, that anyone could do.” That was a fun thing about early punk, he says: The crowd was as important as the people playing music. “There wasn’t a band playing a scene; the scene was the scene, where you went to. That was a punk scene: everybody showing up.”
For the most part, the scene was Muldowney’s, where bands played in the narrow, unfinished basement, in front of an upside-down American flag. C&O gave hardcore punk a chance once, but when an audience member’s hand went through a plate-glass window, the management decided it was too violent, says Houchens.
But as hardcore grew in stature throughout the country, Trax, a high-capacity nightclub that opened in 1982, started booking nationally known punk bands like Butthole Surfers and Dead Kennedys (for whom The Landlords opened).
The night Lackey Die was set to open for The Circle Jerks at Trax, the band broke up. Collins thought they hadn’t been practicing enough, remembers Houchens, and rather than play the show unpracticed, he quit. So did Houchens, who didn’t want to play without a bass player. Houchens didn’t stop playing music (in fact, he collaborated with Collins on many other projects, and is still a fixture on the scene), but he says he’s come to regret his choice to quit Lackey Die.
Muldowney’s closed a short while after that, and The Landlords had trouble finding local gigs. Beers and Kramer’s improvisational-experimental rock side project, Happy Flowers, signed to Homestead Records, and in what was perhaps the final nail in The Landlords’ proverbial coffin, the band failed to find a distributor for its second album, Fitzgerald’s Paris. They called it quits in 1987.
Charlottesville’s first hardcore bands were over, and the scene stalled…but really, it had only just begun.
Around the time The Landlords broke up, Angelo DeFranzo and his group of friends at Charlottesville High School were heavy into punk rock and hardcore.
They wanted to go to punk shows, to experience in real life the music they spun on their turntables. But they weren’t old enough to get in to see a band like Black Flag play Trax, and there wasn’t much going on as far as local punk shows went.
Instead, DeFranzo and his buddies, with their Doc Martens and, in a couple cases, mohawks, went to the Corner every Friday afternoon. They browsed records and fanzines at Plan 9, snagged fliers for those Trax shows they couldn’t attend but which bore the names of some of their favorite bands, and hung around the Corner Parking Lot to hear Beers and Maynard Sipe, who’d played in new wave bands and wrote a local music fanzine, Live Squid, talk about the early punk and hardcore scene.
Their stories made DeFranzo and his friends want to play music of their own. They taught themselves to play instruments (DeFranzo learned bass by ear, listening to the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks), formed bands, and practiced mostly in their parents’ basements.
One local band they could go out to see was Hedonistic Cravings, which featured Lackey Die’s Collins and, for a short time, Houchens on drums. Hedonistic Cravings was a thrash metal crossover band with serious punk and hardcore roots. DeFranzo remembers the shows as being crazy in the best kind of way, ones where he and his friends could get a good circle mosh going. He also remembers that after Hedonistic Cravings played a few shows at a place called the Back Door Café, the venue made audience members sign waivers absolving the owner of responsibility for any injuries caused by slam-dancing.
“People of many subcultures gravitated toward Hedonistic Cravings,” says DeFranzo. And the group inspired a bunch of other bands, mostly metal and punk, that started playing house shows in the 1990s.
In 1993, DeFranzo co-founded a fanzine, Filler, to help highlight and support the local scene. The objective was, “first and foremost, to support the bands we had, to spread this music that we were quite familiar with, but that a lot of people might not be aware of,” says DeFranzo, who would eventually play in bands like The Halfways, Smashcasters, and currently, XSmashcasters. Someone could go into Plan 9, buy a copy of Filler for 50 cents, and see that there were people interested in this subculture, right here in town. It helped them find their people.
While stories and music and a few not-quite-punk bands sustained the scene, many musicians say that it was sushi restaurant Tokyo Rose that saved it (this time around).
It would be difficult to overstate what Tokyo Rose did for the broadening Charlottesville punk scene when it started hosting shows in the 1990s, say the people involved.
“There would not have been a punk scene if [owner Atsushi Miura] had not been so [tolerant] and given us a venue,” says Porter Bralley, who has played in such local punk and punk-adjacent bands as The Deadbeats, The Elderly (for which Houchens played drums), Hillbilly Werewolf, and currently, 40 Boys. Miura didn’t play punk rock, says Bralley, but he made a space for it—and many other genres of music, including the local underground goth and hip-hop scenes.
Plus, many of the band members—including Bralley and his 40 Boys bandmate Tony Lechmanski—became Miura’s employees.
“It was like two separate worlds, between upstairs and downstairs,” says Lechmanski, who booked a lot of shows at the Rose, and whose hardcore band Riot Act and metal/darkwave band Bella Morte played there countless times. Upstairs, nicely dressed older folks would be eating sushi, but downstairs, in a red-walled room with low ceilings, you might see Jeff Melkerson, who fronted local punk band The Counselors, rubbing butter all over his naked body.
“It was like our CBGB,” says Bralley, recalling the legendary New York City venue that fostered the punk and new wave scene in the late 1970s. At Tokyo Rose, people would show up early and hang out in the parking lot for hours before set time, as if they were tailgating for a football game, he recalls. During one show, that he’s pretty sure was at Tokyo Rose, the drummer of Pennsylvania band The Pits, who often set his cymbals on fire, set himself on fire, too, and members of the other bands hopped on stage to extinguish the flames with their beers.
For a few years, the local punk and hardcore scene—which incorporated closely related metal, garage, and rock ‘n’ roll bands—thrived. Bralley, Lechmanski, DeFranzo, and Houchens’ bands played there regularly, and often cross-pollinated, sharing bills and band members, starting side projects and other bands.
The shows were rowdy fun, but they were rarely out of control, says Lechmanski. Bands “cared about the place…that was our home. And you don’t shit where you eat,” he says. The idea was, “no one else is letting us have shows, so if you screw this up, then you’re going to be the one complaining about how there are no shows anymore.”
And the shows were about more than the music, says Lechmanski. Subcultures like punk “are important everywhere. There’s always going to be somebody who feels left out…I think it’s important that people feel like they fit in somewhere…that those people have somewhere to go.”
Tokyo Rose wasn’t the only place hosting punk at that point, but it was at the center of what became a rather robust scene. Jeyon Falsini booked some great garage and pop punk at Atomic Burrito (now Jack Brown’s), says Lechmanski. And The Pudhaus, a Belmont practice space in an industrial-zoned warehouse, was known for holding more experimental hardcore and art punk shows before the city shut it down in 2003. Satellite Ballroom had the occasional punk show, too.
In 2004, Miura sold Tokyo Rose. When the venue closed, the punk scene seemed to go with it.
The health of any music scene depends not just on the people playing it, but the people willing to make space for it, says Bralley.
“The bigger venues [wouldn’t] book you unless you were a dreamy singer-songwriter,” he says, and at the time, he wasn’t aware of anyone having house parties. “Those days were over, because Charlottesville grew up and got…a lot more gentrified, where you’d get the cops called on you in a heartbeat” for playing loud music, he says.
“There was a time where I didn’t know if I was going to see bands like that in Charlottesville anymore.”
But this is punk we’re talking about, and it was only a matter of time before a new generation of punk and hardcore fans started their own bands and sought spaces for shows.
Sam Richardson remembers his first punk show well: His mom drove him to Outback Lodge, in Preston Plaza, so that he could see street punks Dead End Kids and The Stabones. His mom sat in the back of the venue (and got hit on by a drunk bar patron) while Richardson watched the bands, and ended up meeting people who would later become his bandmates.
More than anything, he remembers how the show made him feel: electrified.
Richardson had been into punk for a while at that point, and through his job washing dishes at Continental Divide, he met people who’d been in the local scene for some time. Those guys introduced him not just to seminal punk bands like The Screamers, The Cramps, and Poison Idea, but to the music and lore of local acts. “It was total euphoria,” he says of this period in his life, of discovering this music that came from a deep culture. “I found my passion in life, realized that nothing would ever compare to how that makes me feel.”
Richardson admired how these people–particularly Houchens–had carved out and fought to maintain spaces for their music, their mode of self-expression. He got his younger brother, Jack, and a few of their friends together to play music in the basement and, with a nod to The Landlords’ 1984 debut record, and perhaps the fact that all but one of the band members were still in high school, named themselves Teenage House Party.
And when the band played a gig of what Richardson now describes as “super sloppy, stupid, hardcore punk” at Outback Lodge, a few members of Teenage House Party decided to charge the crowd, toppling everyone standing in the front. They thrilled the older punks in the audience and pissed off the management…much as The Landlords had done at Plum’s Lounge decades earlier.
Shortly thereafter, Richardson sought to book shows for another of his hardcore bands, Shin Kick. A friend put Richardson in touch with a guy named Kirt, an older hippie who let bands (like Bralley’s surf punk band The Sheiks) practice in his Woolen Mills warehouse, where he lived in a shack he’d built in the corner.
Kirt was cool with Richardson booking all-ages, no booze shows in the warehouse, and from sometime in 2006 to summer 2009, the spot—Dust Warehouse—fostered a new punk and hardcore scene that was open to everyone. It wasn’t Tokyo Rose, but it wasn’t trying to be. Dust, with Kirt and his shack, random pallets of Utz chips lying around, and Mad Max looping on a small television alongside a bunch of rag dolls and plastic dinosaurs, was its own thing.
Local bands like Shin Kick, Total Wreck, Full Court Press, and Sucker Punch were Dust regulars, and Richardson filled out bills with regional, national, and even some international acts he’d met via fanzines, including his own, Got Myself.
It was “a great, warm punk scene, a vibrant punk scene,” says Marina Madden, who started going to shows at Dust when she was about 14, often with her older brother, Pat, who played in Total Wreck.
In summer 2009, Richardson moved to Richmond and the Dust scene fizzled out.
Madden complained to an older punk that there wasn’t any punk in Charlottesville anymore, and he told her, “You just need to make it happen. That’s the only way to have punk, is to do it yourself.” So she took matters into her own hands and started booking shows at DIY space Magnolia House, where musicians lived and hosted shows.
The first show she booked was Total Wreck and Crooked Teeth, a band Madden had seen perform a few years before in Richmond, and whose vocalist, Ericka Kingston, altered Madden’s idea of what punk could be. “I didn’t realize until then that women could do it,” Madden says. She knew of bands with women in them, but it was more of an idea, not something she’d actually seen. “It was simultaneously the scariest thing I’d ever seen and the most inspiring thing I’d ever seen. And I wanted to watch them play all the time,” she says.
Madden booked shows at Magnolia for a few years and eventually started performing in bands of her own—she’s fronted a few different hardcore bands, including Last Words, Kommunion, and Sow, and she currently plays bass in punk band Sensual World; she also plays folk music with Sweet Afton.
“It was a completely life-changing, amazing experience, to have a platform to express myself,” she says of punk music. “I learned a lot, about the things I say having impact.”
Touring has offered Madden a bit of perspective on how Charlottesville’s scene is unique. DIY culture exists everywhere, “but in a small town…it feels a little more urgent at times, especially if you’re one of five people who gives a shit about what’s going on, about the music, and making things happen,” she says. In bigger cities, the responsibility of making the music and hosting the shows doesn’t fall to just a few bands or a few people at a time, like it does in Charlottesville.
And while places like IX Art Park (where Falsini books shows) and Champion Brewing Company are hosting harder music—punk, hardcore, and metal—on occasion, it’s Sam Roberts, current steward of Magnolia House, and a few local bands that are keeping the punk and hardcore scene going right now.
Roberts got his first taste of the local scene at Dust and The Bridge, and a couple years ago he moved into Magnolia House and took over the booking efforts previously run by members of Haircut, another punk band that started in Charlottesville (and is now based in Richmond). Currently, Roberts drums in punk ‘n’ roll band Wild Rose and for hardcore band Fried Egg (Richardson is one of his bandmates), and while he opens Magnolia House up to all types of music, he tries to get a good punk and/or hardcore bill in there every couple of months or so.
There will always be people who don’t want to be into mainstream culture, and some of them gravitate toward punk, says Roberts, who speaks from experience. That audience is what motivates him. “There’s no one else bringing underground bands to town like I would like to,” he says. “I have to do it, or no one will.”
Nearly four decades after Houchens and his friends started playing punk rock in their families’ basements, and 35 years after they started playing out, the small scene they effectively started is quite healthy, and that legacy has only recently come into focus for Houchens.
He says it began to sharpen when Richardson started his own label, Feel It Records, in 2010 with a 7-inch of eight Lackey Die songs tracked during those sessions at Floodzone and Inner Ear.
It sharpened further last summer, when, two years after Richardson issued The Landlords’ previously unreleased second album, Fitzgerald’s Paris, he reissued The Landlords’ debut, Hey! It’s A Teenage House Party!, and the band reunited for a well-attended show on a hot and sweaty night in late June at Champion Brewing Company. The Landlords shared the bill with current Charlottesville bands Girl Choir (whose members include The Landlords’ Leckey and “Live Squid” writer Sipe), Wild Rose, and Fried Egg, and covered a Houchens-penned Lackey Die classic, “Never Change.”
Read more: Over hard: Punk band Fried Egg goes beyond its hardcore roots
It got even clearer just a few weeks ago, when Richardson delivered to Houchens a cassette of Fried Egg’s first full-length, Square One, a nine-track record of songs that express, much in the vein of Lackey Die songs, frustration and disenchantment with modern-day American life.
Square One sees an official release on Feel It this week, 35 years to the week that Lackey Die visited Floodzone studios to record that demo.
Houchens, who’s never stopped playing music and has wax from one of Richardson’s previous bands, Slugz, nestled among his punk classics, wasn’t at that Champion show—he didn’t hear about it in time. But it quietly thrilled him that the younger generation mingled with the older one on stage, and that The Landlords paid homage to Lackey Die.
“That’s punk rock. That is what punk rock is to me,” Houchens says, drumming out a beat on a padded stool in his Palmyra living room. “It’s not some fucking dollar sign. It’s something you spread. You play it, and let people enjoy it. It’s your local scene. That’s what it is.”
One week before the winter solstice, the weather is nasty in Charlottesville and it’s cold as fuck inside Magnolia House. The four members of hardcore punk band Fried Egg—guitarist Tyler Abernethy, bassist Sam Richardson, drummer Sam Roberts, and vocalist Erik Tsow—sit on mismatched couches and chairs in the dim living room of the DIY venue where Roberts lives and books shows. Richardson and Tsow drove in from Richmond, as they regularly do.
There’s an old piano in one corner, and a crucified Mikey Mouse, a Buddha figurine, a couple of Kermit the Frog dolls, and other miscellany on the mantle. Neat rows of show posters are taped to the robin’s-egg blue walls.
The band members crack open cans of beer and flavored seltzer and take turns leaning into the weak waft from an old space heater. Tsow blows into his hands to keep them warm.
Fried Egg shares some band lore before getting to the music. How the band started in late 2014 with Daniel Berti on guitar; how they had to cancel their first shows when Roberts broke his wrist; how Abernethy joined after Berti’s departure. The sick shows they’ve played to 15 people, 150 people. The long drives on two hours’ sleep; the fragrant one past a garlic farm; and the foul one past industrial livestock facilities.
There’s the time they kicked off a West Coast tour drinking beers on top of an inactive volcano in Portland; the time their borrowed van had a shitty radio and A/C that died in Death Valley. There was a show hosted by a guy too old to be living in his mom’s basement, where Fried Egg played to maybe 10 people, through a crap PA, and made $30…but the next night, in Washington, D.C., they met bands they’ve shared bills and music and camaraderie with ever since.
The newest Fried Egg story is about the recording of the band’s first full-length LP, Square One, to be released in the coming weeks on Richardson’s Feel It Records label.
It almost didn’t happen, they say. Or, more accurately, Square One almost didn’t exist as it does.
After recording and releasing a number of shorter projects—The Incredible Flexible Egg flexi disc, the Delirium and Back and Forth EPs pressed to 7-inch records, the Beat Session Vol. 4 cassette, and the band’s contributions to the Fried Egg Mixtape cassette—the band took nearly two years to write (and in a couple cases rewrite) enough material for a full-length record.
When it came time to put the songs to tape (yes, analog), Fried Egg sought out Montrose Recording, a Richmond studio with plenty of allure. Built and run by father and son Bruce and Adrian Olsen, Montrose has some of the best gear on the East Coast, and its credits aren’t bad, either: Bruce engineered some seminal Richmond punk records, like White Cross’ What’s Going On? LP and Graven Image’s Kicked Out Of The Scene 7-inch, and Adrian (whose recent work includes records by indie rockers Lucy Dacus and Natalie Prass) had recorded a single for garage rockers The Ar-Kaics, and Richardson dug how it sounded.
Montrose books a few months out, so Fried Egg nabbed two days in mid-September 2018 and set to playing shows and practicing their asses off; they wanted Square One to reflect the urgent energy of the band’s live performance, something that’s often difficult to achieve in a studio setting. “We were in really good shape to record” when the date came around, says Roberts.
That same weekend, Hurricane Florence was in really good shape to thrash the East Coast. Some meteorologists thought the storm might pummel Virginia, and Fried Egg considered postponing the session—located deep in northside Richmond and at the end of the gravel road, Montrose is the last building on its power line. When the power goes out, it’s out for days.
Fried Egg took a chance—the band had experienced worse on tour anyway—and it paid off. Florence slowed to heavy rain, the power stayed on, and Fried Egg laid down all nine songs on Square One in mostly first takes; Adrian mixed it the next day, with sci-fi film classics Forbidden Planet and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla playing silently in the background for a bit of what he calls “visual inspiration for the Fried Egg sound.”
“It’s not often that I get to do an all-analog tape record from start to finish in two days,” says Adrian. “The immediacy and run-and-gun nature of the process was a lot of fun, which definitely fit the spirit of the project. In general…punk records should not be overcooked experiments anyways,” he says.
“It’s really good that we didn’t cancel because I don’t know if we could have gotten the same performance ever again,” says Roberts.
The result, aptly described on the Feel It Records Bandcamp page, is “a concise and unnerving album—one that echoes the anxiety, tension, and disenchantment running rampant through modern-day America.”
Behind the cover
The back cover art for Square One “ties thematically, lyrically” to the music, says Fried Egg vocalist and lyricist Erik Tsow, who came up with the idea. Artist Jason Lee drew a nine-panel comic in which each square shows someone going through daily life, experiencing some measure of suffering. “It starts and ends in the same place,” back at square one, says Tsow, an illustration of “feeling like certain things in your life come together and others totally fall apart, feeling like you’re in the same place all the time.”
Song titles indicate a bit of what Tsow growls about: “Bite My Tongue,” “Apraxia” (loss of the ability to perform certain learned movements), “Grin and Bear.” “Lyrically, I use Fried Egg to concentrate on what frustrates me in my life,” says Tsow, and every song on Square One touches on “an inability to communicate how you feel.”
And while Fried Egg plays hardcore punk, it’s not “hardcore with a capital-H” punk, says Tsow.
After putting down straightforward hardcore roots on earlier recordings, Fried Egg branches out on Square One, letting stoner rock and noise rock—and the confident ambition captured in album cuts from experimental artists like Captain Beefheart—influence its music. It’s not what a listener might expect from hardcore punk, and that’s part of the point, a defining feature of what the band constantly refers to as the “Fried Egg vibe.”
Square One’s music, lyrics, and cover art is all “pretty intentional,” but it’s not formulaic, says Richardson. It’s not “programmed for other people” or “pandering to just our genre” in order to attain some sort of status, sell a certain number of records, or tour Europe at a loss just to say they did, he adds.
In Roberts’ opinion, a good punk band expresses a singular identity wherever and whenever it’s making music. “There are so many different times, and places, but people are always expressing their shit, their frustrations, their issues,” he says. “Or they’re just copying someone else who’s expressing their frustrations,” he quips, to laughter from his bandmates.
No one who hears Fried Egg would think it’s copying another band. “I think it comes pretty easy that we just do our own fucking thing,” says Roberts as the band members head into the other room and switch on their amps.
Square One “is our band. This is our record,” says Richardson. “This is what we’re doing, this is what we are. It’s deep in a lot of ways…it’s coming from more of a gutsy place.”
Fried Egg plays Magnolia House on January 9. The band will have cassettes of its gutsy first full-length, Square One, available for purchase.
In his early teens John Beers was “certain that punk rock sucked.” He’d seen the Ramones on television and thought all their songs sounded the same; and he thought Patti Smith singing, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” was “kind of scary.”
Heavy metal was Beers’ thing. But a few years later, he saw Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor” single in a Northern Virginia record store and, amused by the title, “had to buy it and see if it was any good.” It was great.
Dead Kennedys led Beers to the Sex Pistols and The Damned, and eventually Minor Threat, Government Issue and The Teen Idles—bands that played the short, simple, anti-establishment songs of punk rock, but faster, harder and more aggressive. Hardcore punk.
“I’d found what I had been looking for,” says Beers. Hardcore “spoke to me in a way that heavy metal, with the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll did not. The rock ‘n’ roll part? Hell, yeah. But everything else? Ehh.”
When Beers got to the University of Virginia in 1982, he started writing lyrics. A chance meeting with bassist Colum “Eddie Jetlag” Leckey at WTJU led not just to co-hosting of a hardcore punk radio show, but to a band. Leckey knew a guitarist, Charlie Kramer, and another student, Tristan Puckett, agreed to play with them on one condition: that they play fast.
“So we did,” says Beers.
In 1984, The Landlords released Hey! It’s A Teenage House Party! on Beers’ Catch Trout imprint, and Sam Richardson, a young punk musician who grew up in Charlottesville and now runs Richmond-based punk label Feel It Records, says it was likely the first local punk album to be pressed on vinyl.
The record isn’t just a piece of C’ville music history; it’s crucial to American hardcore punk history, says Richardson, which is why Feel It Records reissued the album on vinyl this month, remastered from the original tapes recorded at Inner Ear Studios and complete with a 12-page booklet, liner notes and a digital download code for 17 bonus tracks. And on June 30, all four members of The Landlords will reunite at Champion Brewing Company, the band’s first gig in more than 30 years.
In the mid-1980s, the local punk scene was small; “acoustic guitar crap” ruled most stages, says Beers. (So, not much has changed.) Muldowney’s Pub, a gay bar on Water Street, was the first venue to welcome hardcore, booking Lackey Die (widely regarded as Charlottesville’s first punk band), The Landlords, Beef People and Baby Opaque, as well as regional acts like Scream and Death Piggy (eventually morphed into GWAR).
As hardcore started to gain momentum throughout the country, the high-capacity venue Trax booked big-name acts like Butthole Surfers, Dead Kennedys, Corrosion of Conformity and Government Issue, and The Landlords opened for many of them.
They toured a bit, playing at storied New York City club CBGB (there’s a soundboard recording of that set). They wrote songs about things that pissed them off—“No Good Woman” and “I Want It” vocalize Beers’ disgust with the reasons people use to justify rape, and silly songs, mocking made-up holidays (“Every Day’s A Holiday”) and poking fun at the ridiculous, ubiquitous “woah woahs” that had taken over the punk scene (“The Scene Stole My Walkman”).
Hey! It’s A Teenage House Party! received a fair amount of acclaim in 1984, but eventually The Landlords lost steam. Beers and Kramer had a noise punk side project, Happy Flowers, that took off unexpectedly.
At the same time, Muldowney’s closed, the local hardcore scene had waned, and, in perhaps the biggest gut punch of all, The Landlords failed to find a distributor for its second album, Fitzgerald’s Paris.
In 1987, The Landlords called it quits. Beers and Kramer continued for a few years with Happy Flowers while Puckett and Leckey joined other bands. (Today, Puckett and Leckey play in Cajun punk band Jolie Fille, and in We Are Star Children and Girl Choir, respectively).
Two decades later, Richardson, who was playing and booking punk and hardcore shows at Dust Warehouse (now Firefly), heard about The Landlords and Lackey Die. He hunted down a pressing of Hey! It’s A Teenage House Party!, and eventually founded his Feel It Records label in 2010 with the release of a Lackey Die 7-inch.
Beers heard about the Lackey Die joint and “secretly hoped” Richardson would ask to release Landlords material. Richardson did just that, driving to Beers’ Atlanta home for the Hey! It’s A Teenage House Party! tapes and the ones for that unreleased second album. (Feel It released Fitzgerald’s Paris in March 2016, 30 years after it was recorded.)
Richardson is committed to preserving Virginia punk history whenever possible. “I can’t believe how much cool stuff is out there that has either been neglected, or forgotten about, or kept in somebody’s closet for years,” he says.
And the music is good, too—Richardson was “blown away” by The Landlords’ lyrics, energy, “unique aesthetic,” and the quality of the recordings.
The band is pleasantly surprised by how well the songs on both albums have stood up over time, that they’re still relevant in today’s social and political climate, for better or worse. Another revelation is how well they stuck to The Landlords’ lone rule: play fast.
“I’ve been in a training regimen to try to play that fast again” for the reunion show, says Puckett.
“I just hope I can keep up,” says Beers.
“These things are so fucking fast,” says Leckey, laughing. “I have no idea how [we] pulled it off. It must have been temporary insanity.”
Bands like The Landlords, Lackey Die, The Beef People, Scream and Death Piggy helped shape Virginia punk, but the music didn’t end with them. Here are the bands that Sam Richardson, proprietor of Virginia-based punk label Feel It Records, recommends you listen to (and go see) now.
Cement Shoes
Destruct
Slump
Sensual World
After band practice on a recent Monday evening, the three members of The Attachments lean back on couches in drummer Jack Richardson’s Belmont living room. As the day falls into dusk outside the window, they drink beers and bottled teas while a record spins punk music at a low volume in the background.
“I came out of punk retirement to start this band with these guys,” says Sam Uriss, singer and guitarist for The Attachments. “I hadn’t played any [punk] for a long time and I felt a hankering. It’s the kind of thing where, once you’re in it you don’t really get away from it. It’s kind of like the mob.”
And while The Attachments isn’t a pure punk band—it’s more 1960s garage rock and straight-up rock ‘n’ roll than anything else—punk is embedded in its backstory and ethos.
Punk music is how Richardson, Uriss and bass player Tyler Abernethy met. They all grew up in the central Virginia area and played in bands together through high school. Uriss and Abernethy were in metal-edged punk and rock ‘n’ roll band Gutter Strutter, and Uriss and Richardson in the punk, garage and hardcore-tinged Slugs.
As they talk about early shows played at DIY venues and the recordings sold from makeshift merch tables, The Attachments say it’s hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since those days, probably because they’ve never stopped playing music. “I can’t not do it,” says Richardson.
“Sanity. To maintain sanity,” Abernethy says of why he plays.
“It’s just what I do,” adds Uriss. “I ain’t never been good at painting.”
Currently, all three members of The Attachments play guitar in other bands—Richardson in hard rock/punk four-piece Wild Rose, Abernethy in Richmond/Charlottesville punk act Fried Egg, and Uriss in country-blues outfit Clay Bones—making this band different. But they think that’s part of what makes this particular combination of musicians in this particular moment so “groovy,” to borrow Abernethy’s description.
While Abernethy discovers himself as a bassist on a black 1970s devil-horned Gibson SG bass gifted to him by Uriss’ dad, Richardson is figuring out who he is as a drummer (he’s new to the instrument) and Uriss gets to write lyrics that dig a bit deeper than the songs of his youth.
“When I think about it, punk music is so much about writing about things that make you angry and piss you off, which gets a little trite to me,” says Uriss. “But you can put more nuance to it when you start to pick specific forces and subjects that you can really talk about why they drive you crazy.”
At WTJU’s Prints, Platters and Pints event at Champion Brewing Company on Sunday, the band will play its entire catalog of originals, including “Switchboard Head,” a song from its 2017 self-titled release that Uriss says is about “the idea of being a conduit for all this programming” coming at him from newspaper, television, radio and internet channels.
Something about that song inspired Abernethy, who splits music-writing duties with Uriss (the band’s singular lyricist) to write the riff and chord progression for “Spoonfed,” a four-minute track about advertising that’s something substantial to chew on, musically and lyrically. “You got what I like you know that I’ll bite and choke it right down / You know that my eyes double in size when you come around / You know that greed burns in my chest when you suggest what could be my own / So please oh please won’t you throw me a bone,” Uriss growls over reverb-drenched guitar and a restrained rhythm section full of attitude before picking up the tempo (and the urgency): “If you’re sellin’ I’m buyin’ / If I believe it ain’t lyin’ / Just show me the dotted line / Just tell me where I gotta sign.”
“Spoonfed” is “about having stuff shoved down your throat,” about taking a look around and realizing that advertising is everywhere, “a totally out-of-control and insane part of society” that we can’t avoid and that we open ourselves up to even when we’re unaware, says Uriss. “It’s so pervasive that I can’t not write songs about it.”
He initially intended to call the band The Consumers, to call attention to “the idea of constantly being sold and buying stuff, consumption,” but an Atlanta-based punk band already had the name. “The Attachments, to me, has a similar vibe,” Uriss says, one of late-night TV infomercials. He notes the direct connection between the brain and the screen.
“And then we have some love songs, too,” Uriss says to laughter from his bandmates. One of them is called “See You There”—and in yet another punk rock tradition, that of filling out your short sets with something that’ll energize the audience, the band covers The Nerves’ “Paper Dolls” and the garage rock classic “I Ain’t No Miracle Worker,” written by Annette Tucker and Nancie Nantz and released as a Brogues single.
The Attachments are committed to keeping the energy up and listeners engaged—it’s music that’s easy to latch on to, with its catchy riffs and whiffs of well-placed attitude. “This music…has [a lot of] kinetic energy” says Uriss.
“Yeah, kinetic,” agrees Abernethy. “That’s the key word.”
Luis Soler bought his first guitar for $30. It was a pawn shop find, “the worst possible guitar,” he says while nursing a pint of beer at Champion Brewing Company on Halloween eve. “Metallica,” “Slayer” and other metal band names were scratched into the guitar’s paint, says Soler, prompting throaty laughter from his Little Graves bandmates Geoff Otis (drums) and Les Whittaker (bass).
That it was a shitty guitar didn’t matter much to the teenage Soler; it wasn’t about getting good at guitar anyway. It was the 1990s, and while all of his buddies were into emulating their heroes and shredding scales and arpeggios up and down the necks of their guitars, Soler was just about making noise.
After years of playing in various bands, the guitarist for local noise-punk act Little Graves doesn’t listen to much guitar music, So, what does he listen to? “Mostly just field recordings of birds,” Otis quips.
Soler laughs and admits that Otis isn’t wrong. If Soler is spontaneously moved by the sound of a bird chirping, he’ll record it and incorporate it into a Little Graves song. Noise punk…with nature samples? Just bear with us for a moment.
Soler, Otis and Whittaker came to be Little Graves through a combination of answering Craigslist ads and chance meetings at Live Arts parties. All three gravitated toward “weird” music as teens, punk and proto-punk, metal and experimental composers, and became interested in exploring this blend of influences together.
They write songs “by committing,” says Otis—committing to a particular riff and turning it over and over, inside out and upside-down to see what they can get out of it. Usually what results is a structured song that vibrates with the spontaneous, organic chaos of the field recordings. Because Little Graves doesn’t have a vocalist delivering a lyrical message, the samples can help clue the audience in to what the band is going for.
Everyone takes the emotional, sonic journey together, but each person has his own individual experience of that journey, says Soler.
“We’re not interested in being analyzed or emotionally manipulative,” says Otis. “We want you to add your own feeling to these songs; all music should be personal in this really specific way in that the audience should be challenged to add their own meaning to it.”
“It doesn’t have to be anything, it just has to make you feel something,” Whittaker adds to slow nods of agreement from Otis and Soler as they take contemplative sips of their beers.
Another thing Little Graves isn’t particularly interested in is recording its music. “There are so many ingredients in live music that are so tied to when exactly you’re doing it that the payoff is so unique every time you play that song,” Otis says. “…when you get to play it for other people, it’s this sort of indescribable reward.”
For all of their philosophizing, the members of Little Graves have no grand illusions about the purpose of their band. “The thing is, we’re…three…dads,” says Otis, prompting giggles from Soler and Whittaker. They have jobs and families and aren’t living the rock-star lifestyle (not that they never entertained the idea). They’d rather hang out with their kids in the yard than ride all over the country in a van or record a bunch of CDs that will collect dust in a box in the closet. Local live shows, though, those they can get behind.
“When I look at a poster of a show I’ve played, I always feel good about that,” Otis says.
“I like watching people just go off at our shows,” says Whittaker.
At this point the trio wonders out loud: When did it become good show etiquette for audiences to just stand there? To stand still and not move around to the music.
“Bands want you to dance at shows. Every band,” says Otis.
“We’re not asking you to cha-cha,” Whittaker says. Just move—and be moved.
Playing music is typically more competitive when you’re younger, and not necessarily for the better, says Soler. It’s too much about having the right gear, about recording and selling albums and getting on bills at the right venues; too much about getting into a better, bigger band and hitting certain milestones of perceived success. “But now I’m doing it for me,” he says.
Plus, Soler wants his kids to know that a person isn’t defined by her job, or by his home life, but by a constellation of things connected to form one interesting, rich life.
Too often, “I think people just hang it up,” Otis says of musicians who feel they haven’t reached a certain measure of success by the time they’re in their 30s. If they’re playing shows at Charlottesville’s Magnolia House or The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative instead of, say, Sentrum Scene in Norway or Vorst Nationaal in Belgium, many may ask, “What’s the fucking point?”
“The point,” says Otis before taking another sip of beer, “is that it’s fun.”
Climbing into your mom’s minivan when you’d lied only slightly about your whereabouts for the evening, reeking of cigarettes and blaming it on your friends when it really was you who was smoking. Claiming you’d only been drinking Pepsi and then trying to figure out how to throw away the beer bottle caps you’d stuffed in the pockets of your jeans without your parents spotting them in the bathroom trash can.
These are the things the members of Wild Rose remember about their introduction to punk music.
“It was awesome, wild,” says Jack Richardson, Wild Rose’s guitarist who grew up in Charlottesville and, like vocalist Josh Phipps and drummer Sam Roberts, started going to house shows on JPA and gigs at Dust warehouse (now Firefly) when he was a teenager. Bassist Will Jarrott grew up in Washington, D.C., but says his experience was largely the same, adding that the best part was finding a community of people who were into the same music—Dead Kennedys, Thin Lizzy…none of that Creed or N*SYNC stuff—and who were playing music of their own.
Caught up in the immediately lucid energy of punk music, they all ended up in bands eventually, and about a year ago started Wild Rose. In January, the band released a five-track demo tape that, with its sped-up, often melodic hard rock, garage-influenced, proto-punk sound, is a throwback to the ’70s.
Wild Rose hasn’t been pigeonholed yet, and avoiding it shouldn’t be too tough for an act that draws as much from Black Sabbath’s heavy metal and Annihilation Time’s punk ’n’ roll as it does Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
Typically, Richardson sprouts a riff and lays it down on a 4-track cassette recorder then shares it with the rest of the band; Jarrott and Roberts write their parts and Phipps composes the lyrics. It’s important to Phipps that the lyrics accentuate a certain feeling or sound the music is giving off.
Phipps says he turns inward when he writes lyrics of “things that are so close to inexpressible, things that you feel the strongest” and writes until he finds a set of words that captures that feeling. On “Gilden Chain,” Phipps half-howls, half-squeals about wanting to feel like a living thing and how it’s tough to do when balancing expectations and responsibility with desire.
Phipps spends his days doing horticultural work, so it’s no surprise that botanical themes pop up in his lyrics. “There are a lot of allegories for life and experience to be found in living things and the way they grow,” Phipps says. “Wild Rose,” which the band considers to be a sort of theme song, is an ode to those people who stick out in society like bright red wild roses growing in a green pasture or a meadow, “the most wild and interesting thing growing [there],” Phipps says. And then there’s the Whitman influence. On “Body Electric,” Phipps references some of Whitman’s poems directly: “I breathe a body electric / I sing the song of myself / My lack of thought can be crimes but I harbor no hatred / I seek peace of mind and I seek forgiveness,” he sings.
On Saturday night, Wild Rose will play a palpably energetic set at Magnolia House, one of Charlottesville’s more resolute DIY venues. It’s hard to say for sure, but it’s likely a few teens will be there, soaking in the sound and the cigarette smoke and shoving bottle caps into their jeans as Wild Rose plants a seed of what’s to come.
Categories
Haircut’s perspective strikes a hot chord
On a recent Friday night, a bunch of punk rockers in patch- and pin- covered jean jackets, cutoff shorts and moth-eaten band T-shirts packed into the front room at Magnolia House. Some donned well-worn baseball caps, two wore dreadlocks, one wore a dangly yin-yang earring.
Charlottesville punk band Haircut had second billing on the hardcore lineup that night, and by the time the group started its fast, political set around 10:30pm, the air in the room had already ripened with the energy of fast-bobbing heads, darting limbs and damp armpits.
Haircut vocalist Juliana Viana, dressed entirely in black, clutched a microphone and dragged its long cord behind her as she paced back and forth between her bandmates and the audience. Her eyes shut tight under a furrowed brow, she sung ferociously into the microphone in English and Spanish, about consent, identity and fighting the patriarchy while punching the mic away on the cymbal crashes. Viana thrashed around so powerfully that the elastic holding her hair in a bun on top of her head gave out, and by the end of the set, she was out of breath.
Some bands make music to escape, and others make music to “empower and educate,” says drummer Daniel Russell. Haircut believes that both are necessary, but the group feels compelled to do the latter, especially in the current social and political climate.
Viana and guitarist Daniel Berti started the band unofficially in 2015; Russell and bassist Ben James joined the band about a year ago, and the first group of songs they wrote together became Criatura, a three-song EP released digitally and on cassette last December. The songs are brief, potent, opinionated and full of attitude—classic punk—and offer up an extraordinarily important perspective that’s either lacking, or too often overlooked, in Charlottesville music. We don’t have many punk bands and we don’t have many female-fronted bands of any genre—we have even fewer bands fronted by a Hispanic woman. Haircut, a punk band fronted by a Hispanic woman, is all of those.
Viana gets into that with her lyrics. “I’m speaking from a really personal part of my life, as far as my gender, my sexuality, my culture and family,” she says, and “all of that is political.” On “No,” the second track from Criatura, she sings about consent: “What don’t you understand about no? / …Why can’t you understand the word no? / Why is it that you never learn?”
The “general mood” of Haircut “is one of being outspoken and talking about these things that affect us, because [right now] doesn’t feel like a fun time, on a day-to-day basis,” says Viana. It’s not necessarily what they set out to do with the band, but it’s what feels appropriate, it’s what they think about all the time and it’s what comes out in the music and the lyrics, says Berti.
“We’re a little more
confrontational than
just playing easily
digestible music.”
Juliana Viana
Newer Haircut songs, to be released in the coming weeks, are more hardcore punk than classic punk. “I felt a pull to get faster and more aggressive, for my lyrics and the way it feels when we play shows—it just comes out more naturally,” says Viana, to resounding agreement from the rest of the band. “We’re a little more confrontational than just playing easily digestible music.”
On “Patriota,” one of the new songs that Haircut has rotated into its live set, Viana sings in Spanish about her conflicted feelings about her cultural identity: “criata en un país / que no me respeta. / Entiendo una cultura / que no me entiende a mi” (translation: “raised in a country / that doesn’t respect me. / I understand a culture / that doesn’t understand me”).
Viana’s parents are from Colombia, and they moved to Birmingham, Alabama, just before she was born. “I don’t feel the way I describe in the song all the time,” Viana says, but it’s “a feeling of wondering how different I’d be if I’d grown up in Colombia. How much of me is inherently Colombian, or Hispanic, and what does that even mean? And also feeling really tied to…American culture, because I am American, I grew up here, but at the same time, I don’t get respect from this culture that I appreciate. [It’s like] living between two worlds,” she says. “I’ve mostly come to peace with [the idea that] it’s okay to be both and embrace both. But I have moments of frustration.”
Another new track, “Work Weak,” is about how employers often feel entitled to more than the work an employee provides, entitled not just to the employee’s time and service, but to her soul. That sort of thing pisses Viana off.
Band members say music is a liberating outlet for their thoughts and feelings, and the act of sharing it—with each other and an audience—is a cathartic move. By putting these things out there, they hope that audiences will either relate to the situation, the sentiment or the sound. “We want to form a community around [the music],” one that accepts everyone, says Russell.
That sentiment is a big part of why, in addition to making music in Haircut, Berti and Viana book shows at Magnolia House, their home and a vital spot for Charlottesville’s DIY music scene that provides a platform not just for punks but for hip-hop heads, indie rockers and musicians of all genres.
People can take from Haircut what they will, Viana says; she’s just keen on saying her piece.