Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [10]
The only good music to be found on the radio then was on the oldies stations. I began to believe that all the good rock music that could ever be made had been made by the time I got to kindergarten. But in the fall of 1978, just after I’d started eighth grade I saw DEVO on Saturday Night Live and lo, I knew the gods of rock and roll were not yet dead.
EXCEPT FOR THOSE THREE YEARS in Africa, I grew up in a town called Wadsworth, Ohio, a suburb of Akron about an hour’s drive south of Cleveland. As you might imagine, cultural trends are, shall we say, slow to hit backwaters like Wadsworth. We didn’t even have cable TV. The only place you could get records was at Ben Franklin’s Five & Ten which carried a selection of about nine different rock titles, maybe.
It wasn’t until I saw DEVO on TV that I had any inkling any good rock still existed, although I’d heard about DEVO before then. The Akron papers had been full of stories of the so-called Akron new wave rock scene. But being underage and unable to drive into the “big city,” I had no means by which to experience it for myself. The fashions certainly looked interesting—but I’d never heard the music. DEVO turned my little head around and gave me a reason to live.
And, wonder of wonders, Ben Franklin’s actually had a copy of their first LP! So I saved up my allowance and bought it—then played it until the grooves wore down. After I got my driver’s license I spent all my time and whatever cash I could scrounge searching for new wave and punk records and magazines. My friend Mike Duffy (one of about four other people in Wadsworth who were into this stuff) and I got together our own new wave band called Mmaxx. Mmaxx played a total of four gigs, consisting of two nerdy dances held by the speech and debate teams at Wadsworth High, a party at my friend Cindy Choi’s house, and one bonus gig. I remember Cindy’s dad rockin’ out to our out-of-tune covers of The Ramones and Gary Numan. He liked us so much he invited us to play at a party he was holding the following weekend for a bunch of his friends from work. That second party was an unqualified disaster—those guys did not take well to their cocktails being spoiled by our brand of noise.
But Mmaxx got one big break. I took our demo tape to the manager of The Bank, the legendary venue in Akron where all the cool new-wave groups had played. The Bank had once been a real bank: there was a giant vault inside as well as the vestiges of teller’s windows and the luxurious lobby that once lured major investors to put their money into what had been, some fifty years earlier, one of America’s fastest-growing cities. To my astonishment we got the gig. But The Bank, as it turned out, was only months away from closing its doors forever. The management had changed several times and the guy who was running the place now would take whoever he could get. Bands had fought like mad to get shows there only a year earlier, and groups who’d played The Bank had gone on to sign lucrative deals with big record labels. Not many people remember it anymore but in the late ‘70s Akron, Ohio, was considered a real hotbed of new trends in music—much like Seattle after Nirvana got big. Talent scouts from New York and Los Angeles had hung out at The Bank looking for the Next Big Thing. But that was last year. This year no one wanted to go near the place.
Alas, our big gig at The Bank was not to be. Mike and I were old men of seventeen and had liberal parents who believed our promises that, although The Bank was a bar, we wouldn’t be drinking. And it was true. Neither of us had any interest in alcohol at that point. We just wanted to rock. Our drummer, Mark, on the other hand was just a wee babe of fifteen. His parents put their foot down. Their son would not be playing drums in a bar at such a tender young age—and that was effectively