The Leonard Zelig of Punk Rock — Part V
Choose Your Own Adventure
If you are just joining us:
So, How Would You Like to Do This?
I have spent almost ten months forgetting about this, remembering, rehashing, and going over it in my own mind time and time again. I even created a simple timeline of events that, in truth, may not be entirely accurate, but that do bubble up the most notable happenings over that three year period I look back at as Ditchwitch. And, here’s another thing that drives me a little insane; over 3 years playing in this band, I never knew if we were Ditch Witch, DitchWitch, or Ditch Witch. C’est la vie, I suppose, with two different t-shirts and two different spellings, it’s difficult to know for sure.
Working with the superstition of things happening in threes, there are three ways we could tackle this. As I write this, I am not entirely sure which is the most logical, but each will give me some guidance to make sure I stick to the timeline.
- By bass — there were three primary basses played during my time. Pete’s Ibanez (don’t know the model), a rode hard, put away wet, and made to look like it once belonged to Eddie Van Halen, Rickenbacker 4001 (heretofore known as “banana neck”), and finally the Guild X-702 shorty, now in the capable hands of Mr. Marshall after a caseless street exchange at the height of the recent pandemia. Sprinkle this with the occasional and always welcomed use of Pete’s Gibson Thunderbird, and we have a path.
- By rehearsal space — the early days on 30th street, giving way to the Passaic shithole, to Cuando over in Alphabet City, and finally to Hoboken, where we were shacked up with some of the East Coast SST bands.
- By drummer — probably the most logical, but also the weirdest and the saddest. I guess, just like with drummers, this theme sort of keeps its own time, so maybe let’s just let that take care of itself.
How about this, I will just by-line it as we go and we can take it from there. I love it when I answer my own question, and at the same time, make others feel like they might have choice.
30th Street | Winter 1987 | Ibanez
So, there it was, there we were. First meeting in a kind of shitty old rehearsal studio on 30th Street somewhere between 7th and 9th Avenues. Mark the year. At the time these spaces popped up out of the real estate that was even to shitty for the garment and textile companies. There were a few nice ones, like Ultrasound, but this one had no redeeming qualities. The gear was probably fine, but the room was dank and dark, and it just had wrong place/wrong time stamped all over it. But for a few weeks that Winter we made it home to see if this thing would work.
Pete had riffs that he could turn into songs, things maybe he had kicking around in his head for a while, that were now coming out unfettered as this was musically his show. Four-Way had lyrics. His lyrics matched the surroundings. They were all New York, all Alphabet City with the first being about his home block of 2nd Street, and the second, about watching an old man on his block in state of active decay every day called “Lifeless”. After a month or so, and maybe 6 or 8 meetings, we probably had 3 or 4 solid songs. What got written/worked out in those initial meetings were the songs that would eventually make it onto the DitchWitch demo tape — more on that later.
The music was fast, loud, aggressive, but it wasn’t what I would call punk, hardcore, or metal. There was something I absolutely loved about it. It was unapologetic. It didn't’ mince. It was gritty, it was street, and while it reminded me of a number of things, it couldn’t conjure an image of any one specific thing.
There were times I thought it sounded a little like the “Let There Be Rock” AC/DC album, times that it sounded like what I thought the New York Dolls or the Sweet would have sounded like if they had happened 10–12 years later, and with a much more cynical and pessimistic outlook.
I will stop the comparisons there, because the more of that you do, the cheaper it all gets. What I loved most about it is that I hadn’t really heard anyone else doing exactly what we were doing. But my world was small, and in trying to keep up with Mike Maurer, I was proving how small it was.
Mike was an incredible drummer. A bit older than us (and I was younger than Pete and Tom by four years I think), he had seen a lot, done a lot, played in all kinds of bands, but was, from what I could tell, a hardcore original. From Virginia, he made his way to California, and became part of Bad Posture in San Francisco. But he was a better drummer than what Bad Posture did.
An important aside here — I listened to the Bad Posture records maybe once or twice. I didn’t like it. Sue me. From what I could tell they made their bones playing fast, singing about heroin, and having a 7 foot singer, who, I might add, was now more or less “my problem”. They were ok. I wasn’t sure what the big deal was but that was not something you said in that room, at that time, where guys that had done infinitely more than you were remembering the good old days of getting in the van and going on town to town tours for 6 months. My obvious lack of street cred in this area caused me some difficulty and conflict along the way, so I mostly just stuck to following whatever Pete and Tom did, and, as I mentioned (pre-tangent), trying to keep up with Mike’s incredible fills and capabilities. He was the first really good drummer I had ever played with. It was like being a rookie catcher thrown into the bullpen with Phil Niekro — a hall of fame knuckleballer who kept you guessing.
Rounding this out, it’s fair to say that Pete had his own sound but that he was somehow able to composite a lot of flair he learned from Johnny Thunders, Fast Eddie, Keith Richards, and others into something he made uniquely his. The last time I saw Pete, he told me who he was playing with and I asked “what’s it like?”. His reply was simply, “you know what I’m good at…” — nuff said, I understood immediately.
Tom brought a bit of the metal edge to the whole thing. He liked to play those bright shiny Jackson’s that are commonly associated with the word “shred” and it was a pretty good complement as it provided some depth to the overall sound that we might have had a tough time getting with one guitar.
Four-Way — well -where do I start, except to maybe pickup where I left off on Bad Posture. I will give Bad Posture this; whatever they were doing, Four-Way was good at. When he tried to be a cabaret chanteuse it wasn’t quite his jam. On the inside cover of the demo, he is listed as “Throat”. Perfect, because I am not sure “Singer” or even “Vocals” would have covered whatever it was. Heresy to say then, probably heresy to say now, but I was not a fan. I felt like for as animated as he made the shows, and as powerful as the vocals were, that somehow it threw everything else off. Amazing showmanship, and again, an absolute force, but there was something missing.
Which brings us back to me — my first time playing bass again in a year or two, and now playing on a foreign object that Pete was good enough to lend me until I could pull enough dough together to get my own. We were starting to pay for the space by the month, and so that cost money, and I was working part time while going to school. The other guys were working full time and while money was tight for everyone, I was having a tough enough time with my car insurance, so buying a new bass was a few months off. Four-Way gave me continual shit about how I wasn’t playing my own instrument. His nagging and my Catholic shame made that situation at times pretty intolerable, making it a little tougher to concentrate on improving. Pete was able to lend me the bass with a road case that he used during his Samhain days. A giant, heavy, anvil case that I would schlep onto the Staten Island Ferry, uptown to NYIT, downtown to practice, over to NYU to stay at my buddy Karl’s dorm when it was too late to go home, etc…It made life interesting for that semester as we wound into the Spring.
Learning how to keep up with Mike and figure out how to also keep up with the fast guitar riffs was a real challenge. Along the way I would try to ad-lib stuff in and Pete would give me the yes/no head nods when it was working or when it was too much. I was no Nick Marden at this point, but I was surviving and for whatever reason they kept me around as we decided to make the move to a rehearsal space in Passaic, New Jersey.
Passaic, NJ | Spring/Summer 1987 | Ibanez / Rickenbacker
Sometime that Spring — remember, I am spitballing here — we moved into a 2nd floor walkup rehearsal space in Passaic. Right across from the Capitol Theater. This back and forth across the Hudson became a recurring theme for the next couple of years. Pete and Tom would grow weary of paying countless tolls to get in and out of Manhattan, Four-Way and Mike would get tired of public transportation to and from New Jersey, and I would go wherever our shit was.
The drive to Passaic was 45–50 minutes on a good day from The Rock. On a bad day it could take close to 90 minutes. There were no Google Maps, so the best you had was 1010 WINS to tell you which way to go, and usually the traffic on the tens was at least an hour behind its usefulness.
The thing about being in your own space, is you need your own gear. So I had to make a quick buy of a bass amp that would keep up with the power that Pete and Tom had. The would both play 2–4x10 cabinets (Marshall and Laney respectively), and so it was LOUD. I put my hands on the first thing I could afford a Kustom with tuck and roll Naugahyde and it sounded absolutely terrible but it was loud enough.
Mike didn’t have a drum kit, but somehow Pete did. A set of pink Premiere’s that were rumored to have once belonged to Jerry Nolan. A little bit like we were throwing the Ark of the Covenant into the U-Haul every time we took that kit somewhere but it was enough to get us started. Four-Way brought in a four channel PA that was good enough for what we were doing and we were off an running.
During that time, me and my self-respect made our way to 48th Street to We Buy Guitars. I was ready for my third or perhaps fourth insulting encounter with the two geniuses behind the counter, who seemed to love yanking my crank more than anyone else that came in there. Walking into We Buy, for me, was like coming upon the two French guys in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Relentless tauntings, finally settling on calling me “Mr. Wiseguy” — I never understood that.
Gathering up the six stringed assets I had to trade, as well as some cash, I found a Rickenbacker 4001 that looked like it might have seen better days, but was somehow in my price range. Ahh yes, the Rick, the muse of Lemmy, Geddy Lee, and those other guys (fill in your own, why should I do all the work here?). Maybe, someday, I would play like they do. Except in this case, someone pulled a Van Halen on it and it had that ridiculous swatch pattern all over it in Black and White. If memory serves me, Pete helped me paint it, but it was never quite right. Keeping it in tune was a challenge, the bridge set the strings too high, and the neck had a warp to it that got Pete calling it “banana neck” for the entire time that I had it. Rode hard, put away wet, it would become my primary bass for the next few months, until it became intolerable.
So how do I remember that we were in Passaic in the Summer of 87? A few things to go on. As I was often co-opted into bringing Four-Way and Mike back to the city “on my way” to Staten Island, we were passing the Meadowlands. The traffic on Route 3 was brutal as there was a Grateful Dead show. Mike made a joke about there being nothing to see in New Jersey but “the Dead and scab football” — you’ve been time capsuled. Also — there was zero ventilation in the space, and so Summer in Passaic in a foam insulated EZ Bake oven is a memorable, albeit, not good look.
A somehow brighter and cheerier shithole than the one on 30th Street, this place had a charm all it’s own. If you leaned back against a wall, the combination of the foam soundproofing and your sweat meant that you were bringing pieces of the soundproofing home on your person. I get itchy just thinking about it.
Over the next few weeks as we settled in, I made my way up the steps with a hot cup of coffee in hand. As I opened the door, I heard Mike shout “I knew I smelled a shitty bass player”. Here we go.
We continued to refine what was created on 30th Street and Pete kept bringing new ones. We were building a solid set list.
Passaic, NJ | Summer 1987 | Rickenbacker
Things were coming together and we were nearly ready for our first gig. A friend of Four-Way’s “Jack-O” ran a place down in Brighton on the Jersey Shore called the Brighton Bar. It was a great place, and a place that we would get the right kind of crowd. The bands that played there were almost all regulars to the place and the area, and some were our kind of bands. Loud, obnoxious, aggressive. Maybe not sounding like us, but the zeitgeist was there. Jack-O by all accounts was a good guy and took good care of us. A U=Haul trailer was rented and attached to Tom’s Ford Bronco. We loaded the gear in Passaic the night before (probably a Thursday), and figured out a late afternoon meeting time in Brighton.
Four-Way had made his own way down there, and so I had Mike take the Ferry to Staten Island, where I picked him and a friend of his up and drove them down to Brighton. Along the drive, Mike kept saying “down the shore” in the worst Jersey accent he could come up with and laughing repeatedly. It was funny the first thirty times. Eager to join in, the gal that he brough along kept her faced perched into the front seat, leading me to believe that if I stopped short she would be first through the Exit 105 toll booth.
On arrival, I dropped Mike at Jack-O’s house nearby and met Pete and Tom and we loaded in. Mike joined a little later and assembled the drum kit and we ran through a few things for a soundcheck.
Alicia and a few of my friends had met us down there for the show, and right after sound check we got a surprise visit from either the local cops or the New Jersey State Troopers. I was carded and was told to wait outside the Brighton until it was time for us to go on. I wasn’t stoked about it, but I was able to laugh it off and make the best of it. I had people to hang out with outside, so it wasn’t the worst thing. Around the front, standing at the front door with Pete, someone came by and asked us what we sounded like. Pete asked “have you ever been near Newark airport the night before Thanksgiving?”
The guy smiled and said “Yes!”
Pete replied “Just like that!”
We played the show, and upon finishing, someone walked up to us and said that they loved us but that we were so loud it made their teeth hurt. It was the best feedback we could have gotten.
After a quick stop at a post-show party at Jack-O’s house, I was followed at close range to the edge of town by the Brighton police. They tailed me to the edge of whatever the next town was at exactly 25 miles per hour.
NEXT UP: Recording a Demo, Winter in Alphabet City, The Meaning of Life Part VII, Dash.
