• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I gradually learned that in spite of their pose, the hard-cores hadn’t just sprung up from the earth fully formed. I’d assumed that drummer Mickey Nelson was the only member who used his real name until I learned he had played bass in a surf group called The Nelsons, one of the last of the first wave of Akron new wave bands and a fairly popular draw a year or so earlier. Like The Ramones, The Nelsons all used the same last name on stage. Mickey’s real last name was Hurray—which sounded more like a made-up name to me than Nelson. Tommy had been in The Bursting Brains, probably northeast Ohio’s first hardcore band. Jimi Imij had played in The V-Nervz, an early punk (though not hardcore) outfit, but was more well known for being one of the people who hung out with German avantgarde musician Klaus Nomi when he’d briefly relocated to Akron to pick up on the scene there in the late ‘70s. (Klaus was back in West Germany at that point, though a bit later he was one of the first celebrities to die of AIDS—which gave Jimi quite a scare.)

I ended up with a punk name too, by the way. I was Brad No Sweat, since I was the only one who didn’t work up a sweat on stage. I guess all punk names can’t be cool. These days, though, I’m just as unlikely to go by No Sweat as by my other fake name, Odo, which I received when I was ordained as a Buddhist priest. My experience with Terry sorta soured me on the whole “spiritual name” thing, so everyone pretty much calls me “Brad” (or in the case of my Japanese friends, Buraddo-san).

The punk scene continued to grow in Akron for about two years. Aside from Zero Defex, notable bands included Starvation Army, The Urban Mutants, and The Agitated. Cleveland bands like The Offbeats, The Guns, and The Dark came down to Akron for gigs too. Zero Defex even got as far afield as exotic Detroit and Toledo. We made the trips in a rusted-out old Dodge van dense-packed with as many guitars, amps, drums, and punk rockers as physically possible. I remember me and Fraser Suicyde, the singer of Starvation Army, getting paranoid about the way the exhaust was flowing into the cab of the van and finding a large rust hole on the side, through which we took turns trying to suck in some comparatively cleaner air. On one of these trips the driver, Andy, brought along a used love doll he’d found in a Dumpster™—every time a car got close to us, Fraser and I crouched down out of view, lifted the love doll up to the back window and made her wave. Boy did we know how to have a good time!

THINGS STARTED TO GO BAD for Zero Defex about a year later when we got a gig in Dover, Ohio, even more of a back-woods town than Wadsworth—something I’d have scarcely thought possible. While Wadsworth was a fairly conservative burg populated by businessmen who worked in Akron and their families, the proverbial “nice place to raise your kids,” Dover was a true Deliverance-style rural hell-hole full of rednecks in dirty flannel shirts who drove mud-encrusted pickup trucks. Yet somehow a kind of new wave scene had emerged at a bar down there with the unlikely name of The Spanish Ballroom. A band called Johnny Clampett and the Walkers, who played new wave versions of ’50s and ’60s tunes, had established themselves there and used to bring other slightly more adventurous bands from Akron and Kent down to support them. Someone had convinced the bar’s owners that hardcore punk might be worth a try, so Zero Defex and Starvation Army, Akron’s two most popular hardcore bands (meaning we could maybe draw crowds of twenty people on a good night), got booked down there on an off night.

From the moment when we first set foot in that joint, we knew this was not a punk rock crowd. There were about fifteen people inside, most of them slumped listlessly over the long red bar. A dozen or so tables stood empty in the middle of the room. There wasn’t a skinhead or even a Sid Vicious–style razor-cut in sight. No leather jackets, no striped shirts, no skinny ties. These were hardcore people all right—hardcore bikers, truck