Elvis Costello and the Cars. We didn’t really sound like any of that, but we played around Atlanta, mostly at a club called the Bistro, a converted house in Midtown. We got some demos played on a college radio station. We had a singer who played violin, and that sort of put us in another shoe box. We liked prog, we liked pop, we liked rock, but we were still a little fresh to really have a go at anything. There was a band called the Producers, and we wanted to be like them. We weren’t.
Punk rock was, among other things, a reaction to the overinflated ambition of prog rock, and the attitude of do-it-yourself-and-see-what-happens was gathering steam. Suddenly, you didn’t need wigs and boots and shiny suits. That was now pretentious, unless you were Devo. It was a necessary move, at least for bands and fans, to make music that was more immediate and accessible. You wore your regular clothes, not “stage gear,” and you just played music, raw and in your face. When the Sex Pistols came to play Atlanta, most people thought they were just a joke, me included. I would have rather seen Brand X than the Sex Pistols.
My friends Max Koshewa and Ken Schenck were now playing in a band called Lobetan, and a bunch of us would go to see them at a bar called Hedgen’s. They were kind of slowing down as a band, so Max, Ken, and I started a band called 86. This band was kind of different; most of our songs came from extended jam sessions that we always recorded, then listened to later to find any hidden surprises we could turn into songs. It worked well for us; as we kept passing things through our bodies, ideas kept passing through our heads too.
After a while, we got tired of practicing in this girl Glenda’s place, so Max and I rented a house. We could rehearse there, barbecue, throw a good-sized party, or just hang out. There was always someone coming or going, mostly musicians. There was usually some kind of jamming happening, and people would trade off playing different instruments. A musical session might start at one or two in the afternoon on a Saturday and end around the same time the next day. We started to get into a lot of head music: Eno’s ambient songs, Jon Hassell, and heavy doses of Roxy Music to balance it all out. 86 toured whenever and wherever we could, starting in the Southeast and gradually working our way around the country.
The Athens scene was starting to blow up, and the B-52’s, Pylon, and R.E.M. were getting some real attention. The North Carolina thing was starting to happen as well, with Winston-Salem acts like Mitch Easter and his band Let’s Active, and the dB’s. It was a good time for music in the region. Clubs were springing up to support all these bands, and soon bigger punk bands started to tour in our part of the country. We listened to things like the Cure, Joy Division, Siouxie and the Banshees, Echo and the Bunnymen, Wall of Voodoo, the Fleshtones, and Comsat Angels.
For a while I did radio promotion for Fundamental Records in Covington, Georgia. I was moving records around their sweatbox of a building, and loving it. My boss, Gary Held, said we should start a band. He was going to play drums, so I said, “Let me play bass,” even though what I did was more like play some notes on a bass. The band was called Phantom 309. John Forbes played guitar, and scraped his vocal cords over the microphone. We played around Atlanta, and had a few regional shows. We recorded in Nashville with Jon Langford, and Edward Gorey even let us use his artwork for the cover. These were fun times, but the future was about to come knocking on my telephone.
I met David Yow and David Sims while touring with 86 in Austin. I talked with David Yow about doing something someday. We traded phone numbers and then time passed. I got a call from him saying they were putting together a full-time band that would tour and eventually go to Europe. Would I like to come up to Chicago and try out? Well, I was playing bass in Phantom 309, but I’m not a bass player. This was a chance to play drums again, and I really liked what David sent me to listen to. It turned out to be Pure, on cassette. I figured I could lay down some drums to this music. After the smoke cleared and I had been accepted as the drummer, everything just fell into place.
MAC McNEILLY
Mac used the entire kit in a compositional sense rather than simply playing beats and fills. He could build momentum and tension in a song by an additive process, as in the stripped-down opening beat of “Gladiator,” followed by increased activity on the floor tom leading into the chorus. On “Lady Shoes,” he matches the steady stream of sixteenth notes coming from the guitar, again on the floor tom, before erupting into a snare volley that cuts at the very last split-second into an outburst of cymbals and chordal mayhem. “Glamorous” shows glorious restraint (a virtue often overlooked by musicians), with a sparse rimshot beat leading into a full-on hi-hat bump-and-grind when things open up. Slow songs like “Then Comes Dudley” and “Monkey Trick” showcase a mature stylist who’s not afraid to leave space between notes, and then fill the space with motion when the time is right. I’ve jammed with some otherwise really good drummers who couldn’t play slow and steady!
Songs like “If You Had Lips” and “The Associate” reveal an affinity for swing, while tunes like “Killer McHann,” “Dancing Naked Ladies,” and “Whirl” show an ease with odd timings. But it’s in the straightforward hard rock of songs like “Boilermaker,” “Puss,” and “Blue Shot” that he cuts loose and lets go the most. I remember reading a quote from Jimmy Page in an old Led Zeppelin songbook where he was talking about John Bonham. He said something like, “When he gets into a trip, he takes the audience with him.” I think that’s a pretty good summation of our Macca.
DUANE DENISON
The first musical instrument I ever bought was a Fender Squier electric guitar. I got it at Strait Music on Lamar Boulevard in Austin, a few doors down from the original Whole Foods. I learned a few chords and tried to figure out songs from a Clash songbook I picked up somewhere. I started out planning to be a guitarist. In 1981, while I was in high school, my friends Nathan and Clay started a punk band. Clay was already playing guitar and they didn’t want a second guitarist, but they said I could join them if I played bass. I desperately wanted to be in a band, any band, so I went to Guitar Resurrection. Not knowing anything about basses, and being poor, my plan was to buy the best-looking one I could find for $250 or less. The Memphis had a nice, classic look to it and was exactly $250, including the case. I bought it and rehearsed with Nathan and Clay exactly one time before they kicked me out and got another bass player.
The Memphis was a Japanese copy of a Fender Jazz Bass. Memphis was a subsidiary of Yamaha that made very nice copies of American guitars. In fact, their copies of Gibson electric guitars were so faithful that Gibson sued them, which eventually prompted Yamaha to shut the company down. It’s hard to find the Memphis Jazz copies. The bass player in Harvey Milk has one. I know of a guy in Iowa that has three. It’s still my main bass, over thirty years later.
In 1982, David Yow and I were living in a house at 51st Street and Avenue H. My favorite Austin band at the time was Jerryskids (not to be confused with the more famous Boston hardcore band, Jerry’s Kids), who had recently broken up. The drummer and one of the guitar players called David Yow and asked if he wanted to
