About
the author…
I’m Steve Gardner, the author of all the pages on
this site. I was born in 1955 in Townshend, Vermont, in the United States (barely!)
and grew up in nearby Newfane, a rural town of a few hundred people. As you can imagine,
the place was not exactly a hotbed of rock and roll, and while these days Vermont is
becoming very liberal as a result of an influx of the urban granola crowd, in my school
days the place was extremely conservative with kids getting sent home from school for
having hair long enough to touch their ears and that sort of thing.
My brother (who is two
and half years older than me) and I got our first radio around 1968, and when we
weren’t listening to Red Sox baseball games or Bruins hockey, we tuned in to top 40
AM radio out of New York, which gave us a heavy dose of Motown and bubblegum pop. Before
that I’d been only vaguely aware of rock music. I remember seeing the Beatles
on Ed Sullivan and watching their cartoon show, which I didn’t like anywhere near as
much as George of the Jungle or Rocky and Bullwinkle. Vermont was country
and western territory, so when you heard what other people were playing, you were far more
likely to hear Charlie Pride or Johnny Cash than any British Invasion or Summer of Love
songs. Our school bus driver installed an 8 track tape player in the bus and had three
tapes, the best of which was Johnny Cash's Greatest Hits, so I have all his songs branded
in my mind from early on. I hear that train a-comin'....
The first record I ever
bought was "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron" by the Royal Guardsmen. So much for hip
beginnings. Later I discovered that the Woolworth’s in Brattleboro carried these 5
packs of deleted singles for a dollar or two…I remember you could see the top record
in the pack but the rest were all pot luck…you didn’t know what you had until
you got them home and broke the shrink wrap. I used to buy lots of these and got a ton of
great Motown records plus stuff like "I Fought The Law" by the Bobby Fuller
Four, "Glad All Over" by the Dave Clark Five, "Judy In Disguise" by
John Fred and His Playboy Band, and a batch of Beach Boys songs like "Surfin’
USA" (very meaningful to a Vermonter!).
Living two miles out a
country road from a town of only a couple hundred people made it pretty hard to rely on
friends as a source of musical knowledge. My brother and I never hung out with anybody, so
I learned about bands from American Top 40 on the radio and my Woolworth’s singles
and chose what I liked without much in the way of peer pressure.
In 1971 my brother went
off to the University of Vermont and when he came back for his summer vacation he brought
the record that influenced what I like almost as much as any other…the Who’s Meaty,
Beaty Big and Bouncy. That record blew me away completely, and we played it a zillion
times.
My dad was a drummer, but
there was a huge generation gap between us…he was 50 when I was born, meaning that in
his youth he listened to the very first records ever made…he was into Dixieland jazz
and had played in swing bands in the 1920s and 1930s. When I was growing up he played in a
local marching band of farmers called the Grafton Band, and they played all the standard
Sousa marches in local parades. I wasn’t much into the music, but I thought the drums
were really cool. And when I heard Keith Moon playing with the Who, I decided I was going
to have to learn how to do this. I asked my father to show me how to do what Moon was
doing, but his jaw just fell open and he couldn’t even begin to figure it out. The
whole thing seemed mysterious beyond belief, since my dad, who was the self-acknowledged
expert, couldn’t even start.
Combined with the fact
that I’d taken piano lessons with some fossilized old dowager trying to teach me
Stephen Foster songs until I hated the sight of a keyboard, I decided that as much as I
loved music, I was never going to be able to do it. I would have to stick with being a
fan.
In the fall of 1972 it
was my turn to go off to college, and I went to the University of Massachusetts in
Amherst. In retrospect, it’s funny, because I was terrified about what I regarded as
going off to the city to go to school. Amherst had about 30,000 people when school
was in session, which was more than almost any town in Vermont. By contrast, all the
Boston kids who went there felt like they’d been exiled to Siberia. But now I was
finally immersed among people who played all kinds of different music, and I started
learning quickly about other bands.
After a couple of years,
I found that chart bands were starting to seem pretty boring. Those were bad years for
rock and roll. The burst of creativity in the sixties had ended and the supergroups
were taking over. But there were a few great ones that I still like…I’ll
never forget hearing the introductory chords to the Raspberries "Go All The Way"
blast out of the speakers for the first time. I couldn’t figure out why none of my
friends would agree that that song was one of the most exciting things they’d ever
heard. To me it said everything. And then there was the Who’s Quadrophenia
lp…that record had a pile of songs that made such perfect sense, and I played it
mercilessly. But there was a lot of really bad stuff around, too, and that seemed to be
what all my friends thought was hip…Led Zeppelin’s "Stairway To
Heaven" came out then, and all those electronic bands like ELP and Yes. I bought
those lps and listened to them, and I can’t stand them now.
In 1975 a guy in the
local record shop played me Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run lp when it first
came out. Springsteen isn’t a very hip guy for punk rock fans to listen to, but in
those days what he was doing was really different, and he played rock and roll that had
energy and heart and told some great stories to boot. One day I saw in the local papers
that Springsteen was going to play at the Springfield Civic Center. So I went to the
Ticketron outlet and bought tickets for me and my brother. The seats on the tickets were
marked A5 and A6, and when I got to the arena I figured they must be somewhere on the
side. Wrong…they were in the front row. To this day I can’t figure out how I
could get seats like that from a Ticketron. But on that night Bruce Springsteen played a
concert that showed me what a band ought to play like…he poured every ounce of energy
he had into his performance, and played his songs with a commitment that made you realize
that he would have played just as long and hard if there was nobody there at all. From
that point on, that’s what I’ve looked for in a great band. He may not have it
any more, but he sure had it then.
From Springsteen I got
into Southside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes (still one of my favorite bands), and when I
read reviews comparing Graham Parker to him, I bought Parker’s Howling Wind
and Heat Treatment lps. Now I was on the path leading to punk rock, even though it
seems a bit non-traditional compared to those who found their way in via the Stooges and
New York Dolls. Parker introduced me to the British pub rock scene, and I started reading
about bands like Dr. Feelgood, although as of yet I had never seen their records.
Most of my music reading
was in Rolling Stone magazine, which was on the decline at that point but still had some
good articles and covered some worthwhile bands. Now and then I supplemented Rolling Stone
with a copy of Creem or reviews in the Boston Phoenix. By now it was 1977 and I was
starting to hear about punk bands for the first time. The Sex Pistols were a distant and
slightly threatening rumor at this point, but Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True
came out and I snapped it up and loved it. I remember hearing about the Ramones and
thinking that with an Italian name like that they must be some kind of disco band…I
didn’t really have any idea what punk actually was. One day I was walking
through the UMass student union building and heard this incredible din
coming out of the campus pub (drinking age was 18 then, so there was an on
campus bar). It was the first time I’d heard the Ramones. I thought they sounded like the Who playing Beach Boys
covers, but it would be another couple of years before I would suddenly realize how great
they were.
In late 1977 and early
1978 new wave and punk rock records started to be available in Amherst. I bought the
Talking Heads ’77, and then the Stiffs Live Stiffs lp. And then the
Pistols lp finally came out. I remember putting it on, playing two songs, and then having
to take it off because it was just too intense. But I didn’t get rid of it…it
kept drawing me back. Every day I’d play a little more, and be partly repelled, but
partly attracted, until one day I realized that I loved every damn song on the thing and I
played it constantly. That lp marked another moment as critical as hearing my
brother’s copy of Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy. Later that winter I saw Elvis
Costello play at UMass on his first full US tour just days before he recorded the El
Mocambo show in Toronto and was blown away by the new lineup with the Attractions.
In the spring of 1978
I’d gotten my MS in Electrical Engineering at UMass and I moved to Tucson, Arizona
where I was starting graduate work towards a PhD. That summer, while I was trying to start
research work with my thesis advisor, was when I really got into punk rock in a big way. I
bought dozens of great records by bands like Eddie and the Hot Rods, the Jam, Tom Robinson
Band, the Damned, the Dead Boys, Blondie, the Vibrators, Wire, and all those. Now I was
subscribing to Trouser Press and New York Rocker and buying Zig Zag whenever I could find
it in the record shops. Those three magazines showed me what I ought to be trying
out in the way of music, and they also gave me a model for what a rock magazine ought to
be like for when I started my own.
By the end of the summer
I decided that Arizona heat was not meant for a Vermont boy and I moved to San Diego and
got a job. Compared to many cities San Diego is a musical backwater, but compared to
anyplace I’d been before it was a paradise…bands actually toured through town,
and there were several decent record stores run by people who knew music, especially Larry
and Rich at Off The Record. Only a handful of people in San Diego were aware of punk
and new wave bands, but at least there were some. I recall some great shows from my
first couple years in San Diego; the best were the Tom Robinson Band, the Undertones, the
Clash, and Graham Parker and the Rumour.
By 1980 I had a
substantial collection of punk and new wave records and that’s all I was listening
to. I’d read fanzines written by other people, and I figured I could do that as well
as anyone else. So along with two friends, Chris Chacon and Bill Ficek, I started Noise
For Heroes as a xerox fanzine. The name comes from the Damned song "Noise Noise
Noise". The zine was created by typewriter and photocopied where ever we could get it
done cheap…at first at my work, and later in local copy shops.
I'd met Chris when he ran
an ad in the Reader (our local what's on sort of paper) looking for people into these
kinds of bands. The two of us used to drive to LA once a month and go to the record
swap meets in the parking lot of the Capitol Records building. We used to be amazed
at all the guys selling bootleg lps right under the noses of all these record execs who
were always crying about bootleggers. We got tons of great records for next to
nothing there. Chris was a real vinyl hound...he'd buy anything if it was cheap.
Our experiences there led me to write the song "Vinyl Fever" which we
played in both of the bands I was in and recorded on CD with the Gamma Men...Chris and I
always laughed about how we didn't need heroin because we were addicted to vinyl and that
was a more powerful and more expensive drug by far!
After a few issues of
Noise For Heroes it became clear that our views of music were diverging. Chris was getting
into hardcore punk, which I really didn’t like (I always found this funny because
Chris used to say that you could always tell if I would like a record by whether or not
the drummer shouted 1-2-3-4 at the start of the song). Bill was going the other way into
mainstream pop, and when he submitted an article about Rick Springfield I decided I’d
had enough of writing with them and said that I was going to do the thing by myself from
now on.
The fanzine lasted until
early 1983 when the Jam split. They had been my favorite band for quite a while, and at
that point it seemed liked the music I really liked was finished. I stopped buying new
records and concentrated on finding old punk records in used bins to fill out my
collection.
In 1985 a couple of
things happened to change my direction. One was that a friend gave me a tape of the
Australian band the Lime Spiders with their first US mini-lp on it, and the second was
that I found a Celibate Rifles record in a used bin and bought it strictly because the
band’s name sounded so funny. Both these records sounded fresh and brilliant, and I
was intrigued to hear more. In 1986 I went on a vacation to New Zealand, and at a record
shop in Christchurch I asked the owner what local bands he would recommend. He said he
couldn’t say much for the locals, but had I heard these Australian records. He then
played me snippets of 45s on Citadel, Waterfront and Greasy Pop. I returned to the States
with about 30 new singles and became a convert to Australian rock and roll…my third
major turning point in music.
Up until now my spare
time outside of work was consumed with listening to music and playing basketball (maybe
that's why my first wife divorced me!). I played basketball in four or five city leagues
at a time, which took up most of the free time I had. But in 1986 luck caught up with me
and I had knee surgery that pretty much ended my ability to play sports at a serious
level. Needing something else to do, I started learning to play drums. Within 6 months I
was in a band with some friends of mine (Feeding Frenzy), and within 3 more months we
recorded a single and were out playing live, including lots of covers of Australian bands.
In 1987 I went to
Australia and spent a week seeing bands in Sydney. Once more I was blown away by rock
bands playing at the height of their powers…Died Pretty, Celibate Rifles, Happy Hate
Me Nots, feedtime, the Hard Ons, and many more; something good almost every night. Upon my
return I knew I had to tell people about these bands, so I restarted Noise For Heroes.
This time I had the benefit of a PC and word processor and I used an offset printer to
make a magazine that looked a lot more professional. Noise For Heroes became pretty well
known among the small US crowd that followed Australian bands.
By 1991 it seemed
everybody had a PC, and it was so easy to make fanzines that there were way too many of
them. Distributors no longer made any effort to push them, and so sales volumes just went
away. The last issue of Noise For Heroes sold just 400 copies, despite the fact that it is
probably the best.
In a way the timing was
fine with me, since after 22 issues the fanzine was becoming like another job. I also
wanted to try starting a record label (NKVD). And I was also starting in a new band, the
Gamma Men, and we seemed to have pretty good potential to do something worthwhile, so I
wanted to focus on that. The Gamma Men story can be found
elsewhere on these pages, so I won’t recount it here. Suffice to say that in 1996
that band also got to be tedium to keep going, so I quit and the band fell apart.
So now I’m writing
mostly for my website and also occasionally for other magazines (Foster Child and the Big
Takeover). The website is great because I can write what I want when I want to, and there
is no worry about the business aspect of the fanzine…trips to the post office or
printer, or trying to deal with deadbeat distributors who don’t pay. Write the stuff
and post it on the site that day. It’s instant gratification.
I’m
still looking for the same thing in music that I’ve looked for since the mid
70s…music that has energy, melody and guts. A great tune and a compelling lyric
delivered with conviction are about the best thing in the world, and despite all the
constant writing about the impending death of popular music, there always seem to be a few
out there who can deliver the goods. My job is to find them.
