Boys
From Nowhere
This article originally appeared in NFH #20 in the
winter of 1991.
Music is an amazing
medium for expression...there's so many ways it can be used and so many levels of
intensity it can have. There's levels not even worth thinking about, from backing for
commercials to dentist office background noise to AOR radio, all of which are empty forms
made purely for economic gain. Then you break to the independent scene where there are yet
more levels. On the first level there are bands that make music that they enjoy playing
and that you can have a good enough time listening to at a live gig, but though it may be
energetic and fun, it's still nothing with any lasting value. But at the top are bands
that really mean it and are really into it and play with an intensity that shows that they
are pouring everything they've got into it. The various versions of Mick Divven's great
band, the Boys From Nowhere, have all managed to show that he's one of those rare people
who can put together a group that burns with that kind of flame...one listen to a few of
their records will make that obvious. I put this impression to Mick in a phone
conversation, and he immediately lit up.
"Oh, well, that's
a real distinction there and I appreciate that", he said. "I would like to think
that too. That's kind of the criteria for me. I was trying to explain this to my
girlfriend this morning. There are bands that try to make a buck and bands that are trying
to glorify themselves, and then there are bands that realize that there's like this unseen
but really important chain of spiritual kind of bad attitude thing that goes back into the
fifties, and the bands that are working out of that narrow range of stuff are the ones
that I have the real feeling for, you know?"
Divven's approach
blends a sixties garage sound that will remind some people of bands like the Lyres or
Stems with a harder, nastier element that owes a debt to the Stooges or even late 70s punk
bands. It's a sound that hasn't won him or his band a lot of success in his hometown of
Youngstown, Ohio, despite the fact that Boys From Nowhere have records out in four
different countries and are generally adored everywhere anyone has heard of them. Like
fellow Ohio natives Sister Ray, the Boys From Nowhere find themselves struggling to get
gigs and draw people at home and unable to assemble a tour away from home. But Mick has an
even bigger problem than Sister Ray, because he barely has a band together behind
him...the new Boys From Nowhere album has long time drummer Johnny Bernardo on drums and a
couple hired hands to help out on guitar and bass, but since then Bernardo has left and
although Mick has been able to assemble a band to play a few local shows, he hasn't got
anything that is ready to hit the road.
"By the time I put
the artwork together for the record there was no one in the band including John. So I had
a band together since then and we played gigs, but I couldn't put up with the bass player
so there's a band now that practices but never plays any gigs with me playing bass, which
I refuse to do on stage. So we're really not playing any gigs right now. If I'd picked up
with a booking agency in the last couple of months I'd have had an extra incentive
personally and an extra bargaining chip to throw on the table when I tried to lure people
into the band. It's tough to get who you want in the band whenever the scene is the way
that it is here. You know how it is...it's not very good when you get out into the
provinces for bands trying to do original music. We're probably not one of the local
favorites here and never have been and probably never will be. It's difficult to get guys
in the band when they've never heard of the band and you don't have any big gigs coming up
and you can't promise them that they'll be making a lot of money. They go "So why
should I join the band?"."
Well, one reason is to
play with a singer as good as Divvens. He's got this ripping vocal quality...one of those
rare screamers who does it with melody and style. It doesn't sound like a bunch of
bullshit when Mick belts out a song like "My Checkered Past" or "Goin' Too
Far"...this stuff is real, tough and from the heart.
The Boys From Nowhere
have been going since about 1984. In that time, there have only been a couple of forays to
New York to expose them outside of the Youngstown area. "When we went to New York to
play these little garage fests, we kind of alienated some people", he says.
"Because we were playing MC5 and Stooges then and they really didn't like that at all
in their little Beatle glasses and Beatle boots and their ironed hair thing. But I just
like the punk element of it. We've always done a blend of the most nasty 60s punk band,
and the early 70s Detroit thing and New York Dolls, and then like the late 70s thing,
we've always done like Dead Boys or Pagans or Crime or at least a few things out of that
realm of thinking. So I don't want to get era specific, but I think you know what I mean
when I say bad attitude punk bands. I think that all of those are pretty adequate source
of ground to draw from."
"The band has
played here a lot, and it's gone in and out of fashion. I'm not going to say that we've
never had a crowd here, but it's a real transient music scene here, you know...it's a
college town. We'll get a real head of steam and have a regular crowd and then the band
will fall apart for a few months and the class of people will graduate and by the time we
start playing gigs again we find that we're trying to start all over again, you
know."
"The band goes
back and forth from being able to draw anywhere from 185 people, which would be pretty
good for us, down to the place where we've played gigs and drawn a dozen people. It's
really up and down...it's ugly here. It's certainly not the kind of thing that I guy can
count on making any steady amount of money out of. It's depressing as hell. But I guess
that's why the records turn out the way they do, because I guess if you were fat and happy
you'd make George Harrison records. You'd call in Jeff Lynne and go "Geez, I dunno.
Let's make something bouncy!". But whenever you can't get any gigs and since you're
not getting any gigs you're not meeting any girls and you're not making any money, it's
like "Boy let's put out a record and show them just how PISSED OFF we
are!"."
Wanna find out? Just
put your ears to the grooves and hear the anger, sweat and intensity! The first three Boys
From Nowhere records were singles; "Beg"/"@@@@@", "Jungle
Boy"/"1966" and "Goin' Too Far"/"I Don't Bother". All
three are a blast of garage punk with a real hard edge to them...much tougher than almost
any band you can think of in this kind of thing. Top of the stack is "Goin' Too
Far", which has a feeling like the hardest edge of the British invasion with a
terrific tune and irresistible chorus. Although the singles are getting hard to find now
and starting to command collectors prices, it was a struggle for Mick to get rid of them
all.
"I lost money on
all those 45s", he says. "Aside from the first one which I couldn't even get
anybody to take, even after we started to get press and started to get on compilations and
all that, even after we started to sell the damn things I lost money on them. You can't
sell them for as much as they cost to make. So they turned out to be collectable and I
sold them for $1.10 a piece. Aah, that's a good thing, though. I mean for the small amount
of money that I lost to have been able to launch little ugly pieces of plastic out there
into space and have them turn into something that people are willing to pay an appreciable
amount of dough for, there's a gratification that's more than proportional to what I spent
on them!"
Mick really likes 45s,
and if it were up to him that's the format he'd probably stick with. The Boys From Nowhere
recorded output has been pretty small over the years, partly because of funds but mainly
because of Mick's strict quality control. Repeatedly during our conversation he voiced
doubts that the songs he had released were good enough or whether they deserved the
reviews they got. But now there's a great lp out on Skyclad called The Bridal Album.
It was a move that Mick felt had to be made despite his preferences. But now he's not sure
even that will help. "The 45 thing doesn't garner much respect. And the album either
hasn't been out long enough or is not going to make the impact that we had hoped it was
gonna make. It's not really happening."
Get yourself a listen
to it and you'll be hard pressed to understand why it's not happening. It's a hellacious
record. The new Boys From Nowhere sound is less garagey and more punkish in a Dead Boys
sort of vein. Keyboards are gone and the songs are built around great guitar licks. But
overall there's Mick's great singing, and whether you liked the old instrumentation or the
new, it's fairly irrelevant when the vocals come in. Best of the batch is the fantastic
cover of "Rocket To Nowhere", which is probably the best song I've heard this
year. Mick's really happy with that one, too, and he spent a little time talking about it
and the single that it also appeared on.
"Craig Regale who
was a fellow here in Columbus who aspired to do a fanzine, and he did a couple issues of
it and it was kind of nice...he had the right idea. And he wanted to go a grade up and
include a record in his third issue, and I told him "I'll help you to get it
together. If you get this amount of dough together to do the pressing, I'll help you make
the phone calls, and I'll throw in our tape if the other band will throw in their tape,
and we can do the 45 for real cheap and we'll give 'em away with the magazine". And
of course the magazine never came out. I got the record together and he didn't even have a
lead on putting the third issue of the magazine together, so we just went ahead and issued
it as a free standing piece. The song that the other band did on it is by that dead guy
from Cleveland....Peter Laughner. I never really knew much about the guy. He wrote some
songs for Pere Ubu and Rocket From The Tombs. He was an important Cleveland scene guy at a
pretty important time in that scene. The other side was something that Craig dug up for
them...it's a really cool song. Our side was by this kid from Columbus named Mike Hummel,
who went under the name Mike Rep...I guess that was more "new wave" to him or
something. He had struck a deal with Moxie in the really early days, like 1975 or 1976 to
put out a 45 of two of his songs, that being one of them. Moxie allegedly did 200 copies
of the 45. That's the number that he says he KNOWS they did, in spite of the fact that the
guy probably did three or four times that and just kept the money for whatever he got out
of the rest of them. So it was a real limited issue 45 by Mike Rep and the Quotas in the
middle 70s."
"I had it around
here and the idea for the third issue of this magazine was that it would be the all-Ohio
issue, and he would rustle up some interviews with some of the 60s bands and some of the
70s bands and some of the current stuff, and then these two local bands would do Ohio
local related covers and the whole thing would be a package. And the magazine never came
about, but both of the two bands decided to pick top local covers. We've always done local
covers. That's the third one that we've waxed so far. It was a really groovy song. It had
originally been done on a cassette deck. It was really low fi. I put the intro on it and
completely rearranged it...the arrangement of it in the original rendition is pretty bad
and the fidelity of the original is really bad. I don't think there's any bass on it. It's
just kind of like a two tone drum machine and a guitar and vocals. And I took that and
rearranged it and put an intro on it and built it up into what it is. It's on the album,
too. Were you disappointed that the rest of the album wasn't that cool? That's one of the
four or five best things on the album."
Disappointed that the
rest of the album wasn't that cool? Uh, sure, Mick, and I was also really bummed out that
the first Damned album didn't have anything better than "New Rose" on it.
Starting out with a classic like "Rocket To Nowhere" is hardly grounds for
disappointment no matter what else is on the record, and if you spend a little time with
some of the other great tracks on The Bridal Album you'll quickly find it's one you
gotta keep putting on. One of my favorites, and one that shows a real fun side to the
band, is "Bring Me The Gigli Saw", which made no sense until Mick explained it,
but had a brain splitting guitar riff to make me keep up repeated attempts at
interpretation.
"Yeah, that's a
silly one", says Mick. "Ever see this Erich von Stroheim film that's called
"The Lady And The Monster"? It's based on a science fiction book called
"Donovan's Brain". It's a funny story and it's a funny movie. We drove to
Cincinnati one night on three hits of ephedrine each, Johnny Bernardo and I, and when we
came back I had this song about taking somebody's brain out of their head and keeping it
alive in a jar. And the gigli saw is actually the real surgical instrument that they use
to chop people's heads open when they do brain surgery. I didn't really know that, I
thought it was like some Hollywood thing. I saw the movie, and there's this really
dramatic moment in the movie where they're going to chop this poor guy's head open and
take his brain out for an experiment, and as the violins swell and the pretty young nurse
gasps, the doctor says: "Bring me...THE GIGLI SAW!" and I couldn't resist...it's
like yeah, that's really stupid!"
"Bring Me The
Gigli Saw" is perhaps the best example of how songs go together on the new album;
tunes built around a great guitar lick. I asked if this was something that Mick
intentionally strives for, and he replied, "I think so, as much as possible, yeah.
The dilemma for me with writing songs is trying to stay away from stuff that's been used
up. A lot of times I'll find myself messing around with something and just abandon it,
because I'll realize that I'm just pulling something out of my memory or doing something
that's really close to something that someone who is one of my icons has already done.
Some bands seem to really thrive on that, trying to regurgitate really obvious influences.
But it's not like I don't want to resemble the bands that I like the most, but I think
that it's kind of cheesy to just steal their riffs."
It seems lately that a
lot of the mid 80s garage bands have been toughening up their sound, dropping keyboards
and getting more guitar oriented. With the new lp the Boys From Nowhere sound has followed
that trend, but unlike a lot of other mid 80s garage bands, the Boys From Nowhere never
had any lack of toughness even on the first records. If you can't find the singles, you
can get most of the tracks through the three import eps. I asked Mick how these came to
be. He started by discussing the origins of the German ep Cyclone Death Machine.
"Reinhart was
doing a magazine, and I don't think he's doing it anymore...before there was Glitterhouse
the label there was Glitterhouse the magazine. He was also doing some small level of
distribution and wholesale. So he had taken so number of copies of the first couple of
45s, and when he decided to go away from the magazine and start the record label, the
first record that he did in order to generate the funds to start the record label was a
compilation The Declaration Of Fuzz. He got all his favorite 60s and 70s punk bands
to send him a track to be included in this record. None of the bands got anything for it,
which didn't really bother me because he's a pretty cool guy. I think he did really well
with the record. I know that it went into at least two printings because there are two
different colored covers of it, red and blue. Everything that he took in above the
printing and pressing costs was profit to him since he didn't have to pay any of the
bands, and that's the money that he used to start that record label."
"So he and I had a
history going back. And subsequently he kept asking me if I would put out an album on his
label...and I...when I did those eps, a German one and an Australian one and a Spanish
one, I gathered up 12 or 14 songs and I sent each of the people that I'd worked with the
same 12 or 14 songs and told them all pick your favorite 6. So all the three eps have a
couple of similar tracks and some different tracks. The Spanish one has a bunch of
unreleased stuff. His criteria was that he wanted everything on his record that hadn't
come out before. It's really hard to get. That guy fucked me over. I was supposed to get
25 free ones and he was supposed to pay me a little bit of cash and 50 records. I got 20
copies of the record and a fourth of the cash and none of the 50 copies that I was
supposed to get. And of the 20 that I had originally gotten thinking that I was going to
get 50 more, I gave most of them away and I have like three copies of that thing left. I'm
so pissed. It's on Romilar D. It's this guy named Juan Hirmida. He totally fucked me over.
I got nothing out of that...I got less back than it cost me to go in and assemble a master
tape in the studio and mail the damn thing airmail. I got a real bad feeling for that. But
the Glitterhouse thing worked out cool. I got paid for the Glitterhouse thing."
The Australian ep is
called Hired And Fired, and it was also accompanied by a 7" single of "No
Reason To Live"/"1966". Mick wasn't real happy with that, but listening to
it, I can't imagine why. "That's kind of awful. It didn't come out that good. There
were a couple of mixes of that, and somehow the better mix didn't get used and somehow it
seems to me to have gotten sped up when it got mastered, and it's kind of frenzied and out
of control, not that that's bad by any means, but it just turned into a different kind of
monster. That stuff happens all the time. But it's one of the weaker things that ever came
out."
Mick obviously feels a
degree of kinship to a lot of those mid 80s garage bands like the Fleshtones, Cynics,
Miracle Workers and the Lyres. He feels like there was a peak in good music in those years
and that maybe things are drying up some now. "I was in San Francisco when you called
before, and I saw the Fluid out there. I thought they were cool in spite of the fact that
they're on SubPop, which I don't think is cool. But there aren't a hell of a lot of cool
new bands. The Cynics new record is really good. The new Chesterfield Kings record doesn't
really do it for me. Like the time when you could go like the Lyres, and the Fleshtones
and the Del Fuegos and the Slickee Boys...it seems like in the mid 80s you could just name
a whole list of bands that within a year or so had put out records that were like the real
standard bearers of something very cool. And I don't feel it's like that any more, do
you?"
Well, I do feel there
are a lot of good bands now, although maybe there's a trend to be less garagey and tougher
and harder instead, and I pointed out how a lot of those bands had toughened up.
"Yeah, well, it's kind of like learning how to play", he replied. "Like our
band has evolved into more and more of a huge monster guitar thing as the people that I've
had access to have been better and better musicians. The album didn't have very good
musicians on it, unfortunately. But there's some new stuff that we've done since
then...we've done three or four tracks since then with some of the new guys of stuff that
I think is going to really stand up. I've got one completely done that is supposed to be a
45 either on Skyclad or on my label, Young Lion, as soon as I can finish a B side and
cover art for it. I think that one is maybe my favorite Boys From Nowhere thing so far. So
I don't know, on the one hand I'm ready to give up, and on the other hand I'm finally
learning how to write songs that I like, and I'm finally starting to have people in the
band that can really play, and it's damn confusing."
He then proceeded to
tell a funny story about the Lyres. "We made the Lyres come here and open up for us.
We played with them about four times and we knew that about once every four gigs they
played a really great gig and could smoke anyone, and about once every four gigs played an
average gig, and twice every four gigs really sucked. So they came to Columbus and we had
a gig booked, and they had a night off on a tour, and they called me and said "Can we
stay at your house?", and said, "Yeah, not only can you stay, but you can play
and I'll give you $150 to open up for us." So we made the Lyres open up for us, and
of course they played great. But that's when they still had Rick Coraccio and Paul Murphy
in the band. That was the band that made the On Fyre album...that was the good band
there."
Despite a great new
album, the future as Mick sees it doesn't look too bright for his band. "While we
were doing 7 inchers no college programmers would get serious about us and no booking
agencies would take us because we didn't have an album out. So kind of against my will
just because of the way things are I put an album out even though I really prefer 45s. And
now the scene has tightened up to the point where there aren't very many clubs or
promoters or booking agencies, and all the booking agencies seem to have established the
rosters that they're going to be working with for a while, and I just can't seem to get an
in with an agency so I can get a tour booked."
"Until I can
really get something secured with a booking agency where it looks like we're going to be
in a position to make a couple hundred bucks a night three or four nights a week, I can't
really attract people into the band who are in a position to quit their job and leave
their girlfriend and go on the road. It's hard to find guys who are willing to just go
"OK, I'll tell them I can't work this week and we'll go and I'll come back with sixty
dollars in my pocket and no job". You know exactly how it is. It's all kind of not
very cool when you're trying to do cool music instead of trying to be Poison or Bon
Jovi."
So life's not a bed of
roses when you're from Nowhere with a capital N, but hopefully Mick will persevere.
In closing, and I had
no idea how to fit this in with any kind of logical flow, there was a humorous little
exchange during our conversation that's worth passing on. One of my stock interview
questions is to ask what's the best story about the band or otherwise that might make
interesting reading. I got a fairly comical one out of Mick:
Mick: Oh, boy.
That's a pretty wide open thing. (much hemming and hawing...) Man, does it have to be band
stuff? Wow...holy moly. Geez, I wouldn't know where to start. One of the best things that
ever happened to me is that a little tiny three week old squirrel fell out of the tree in
my back yard and I found it and raised until it was big enough to turn loose again.
NFH (stunned):
Wow, that's a serious, non-band sort of thing!
Mick: Yeah, that
doesn't have anything to do with music, does it!
NFH: I think
there's a George Harrison song in there...
Much laughter.
