The
Vacant Lot
This article originally appeared in NFH #21 in
the winter of 1991.
New York band The
Vacant Lot are still fairly much an unknown commodity, but that's bound to start
changing pretty soon as they begin to get some records out and people outside of
the city get a chance to hear their fabulous brand of punk rock flavored power pop.
The Vacant Lot favor the energetic side of punk and the melodic side of sixties
garage pop and blend them together in a way that produces the kind of tunes that
stick in your head all day if you play their stuff once in the morning. The best
indication where they're coming from perhaps comes from the fact that they cover
the Real Kids' great "All Kindsa Girls" and play it a little faster than
the original while hanging onto the same feeling of melody.
Or, if you haven't
heard the Real Kids (can it be?) then compare them to the Devil Dogs. The Vacant
Lot are musically in the same borough as the Dogs, but lyrically they're less kinky
and sexist. Not surprising, since two of them, guitar player and singer Peter
Ciccone and drummer Paul Corio both were in the earlier incarnation of the Devil
Dogs, which went by the name of the Rat Bastards. Since the musical values of the
Vacant Lot are so obviously similar to those of the Devil Dogs, why did the Rat
Bastards split up during the recording sessions that eventually became the great
first Devil Dogs lp?
"Well, we just
weren't getting along", says Peter. "That's basically what it comes down
to. We were in doing that album and me and Paul just didn't really agree with some
of their lyrics. We had all between us agreed to smooth things out, but it never
got smoothed out, so I just bailed and Paul bailed too. Paul helped them finish it
up, but then he left. I wasn't happy with the way that record was sounding, either.
It's got a good raw sound, but I wanted to put a little more into the production
rather than just going in and doing everything live."
After the demise of
the Rat Bastards, Peter hooked up with lead guitar player Jess Mitro to get the
Vacant Lot rolling. It took them about six months to get into playing shape,
picking up bass player Brett Wilder and then getting Paul back on drums. Paul had
left the Devil Dogs right after the lp was finished, but he's got a good career as
an illustrator going and for a time was putting all his efforts into that. With
this line up they've been going since the spring of 1990.
They first came to my
attention when a friend sent me a tape of rough mixes of stuff they'd recorded for
a possible new lp. They had previously recorded one song for a Brian Wilson tribute
album, but this is the first time they've really been in charge of producing a
whole record themselves. Finishing it off has been slowed down by the fact that Peter has
torn ligaments in his hand suffered during a fall while playing with his dog of all
things. He can't do any guitar overdubs because of this, but they have managed to
knock out one single from the sessions, the great "She Gotta Leave",
which is reviewed herein, and they've got another coming soon with "Almost
Summer" and "Cyclone". They're finding mixing to be a tedious process;
although the studio isn't far from Peter's house it still seems to take forever.
"It seems like studios always have really funny monitors in them. We'll go for
hours and it sounds really hot and we'll bring it home and it sounds like shit on a
regular stereo. Some days we're just so fried by the end of it that we just ride
the board really hot and everything starts to sizzle", he says. But a newer
version of the rough mixes that Peter sent me shows something really great starting
to take shape. The songs are definitely there, and I think it's going to be a
fantastic record. It's easy to see how four or five singles could come from what
they've done so far. This is good, because that's exactly how Peter sees things
shaping up.
"We're going to
try to get as many singles out in as many different countries as we can", he
says. "I really like singles a lot more than albums. Albums I like, but
singles are just so much more fun. We have them on a bunch of jukeboxes around
town. It's always cool to be hanging around in a bar and all of a sudden hear your
song. We've just been sending feelers out now, but I sent a letter to the Record
Runner guy in Spain and we'd sent some stuff to Long Gone John. There's a guy Bulb
who was running the Crypt mail order for a while and he's sending out a lot of stuff
for us. I think he sent it to Dog Meat, too and to Bruce at Augogo. I just got a message
from Bulb that both of those guys were interested, but I haven't been able to get
back to him and see what the deal is."
As for an lp,
"We're working on it. We're talking with all these people. I've talked to Skyclad;
Dave at Skyclad is a good friend. And Emergo...I talked to them a little. We're
just kind of waiting to see right now. We talked to the guy in Japan who put out
the Devil Dogs and the Raunch Hands CDs. We're just going to try to see what kind
of deals we can get."
In their hometown of
New York, Peter finds the club scene to be a mixture of blessings. "There's no
place that's really great", he says. "The Continental Divide is pretty
good. We played there last night with the Voodoo Dolls. CBGBs is always real good,
too, as long as you can get on a good bill there, which sometimes can be difficult.
They were having a lot of problems with hardcore bands there, like people getting
killed at hardcore matinees. So they pretty much stopped that. There's this bunch
of Puerto Rican skinhead guys who all have guns and stuff. They shot a friend
of mine in the face...they're really nasty. So most of the clubs are steering away
from that stuff because it's such a problem."
"There's just
not too many people to play with around here. In town we do all right; we have a
lot of friends and we play with the A-Bones and stuff, but every time we go out of
town we very rarely get paired up with anybody who's at all compatible with us.
Mostly the Voodoo Dolls up in Boston and Providence."
"Here we split
our shows up by two weeks. Every place that's worth playing around here is pretty
close together. In Brooklyn there's one place to play and it really stinks. The
best place in Jersey is Maxwells, and that's ten minutes away from Manhattan. Most
of the places to play are like below 14th street in like a three square mile block,
so if you play any one of those you've got to pretty much lay off for a couple of
weeks. So it gets kind of tough."
"We did one
pretty weird show two weeks ago. We played at the Palladium in New York. It's like
the disco palace of New York pretty much. That was kind of strange; we're playing
on the stage and all of a sudden they're turning on smoke machines and stuff. We're
just standing up there trying to figure out what the hell was going on. But it was
pretty neat getting to play with the Dictators."
Despite New York's
reputation as more of an art-oriented rock and roll town, Peter sees the response
for more gut level rock and roll bands to be on the rise. "It's getting there.
We're definitely pulling in like 200 people a show usually and there's starting to
be a few bands...there's a couple of punk bands now that are like young
kids...there's a band called the Deviators who are really good. They're just
starting out, but I think that in another year or two they're going to be doing
really well. And there's a band called the Radics that we know that are really good
too; they're local guys and just have a 45 out."
The Vacant Lot only
occasionally plays outside of New York, so the rest of the world knows little of
what's waiting for them. There've been forays up to New England; shows in Maine,
Boston and Providence and they will have been to Washington and Philadelphia by the
end of June. It's tough getting to other cities, and they usually end up losing a
couple hundred bucks each time they do it. "Playing in small clubs people
don't want to give you more than a couple hundred dollars guarantee, and when
you've got to eat and pay for some place to stay it goes fast. We're all like about
27 or 28, and we're really tired of sleeping on people's floors and stuff, so we
go to a motel to stay and we'd like to try to make some money. We're hopefully
in the fall going to go to Europe; that's what we're really looking forward
to."
So what's there to be
looking forward to when the Vacant Lot finally do get their lp out? Well, there's
"Hard Hard Time", a blasting piece of punk pop with a soaring chorus and
a guitar solo that'll pick you up out of any dumps you could possibly have
descended into. Then there's the full on "Miss You Baby", with some
rollicking boogie bass scales driving it along. "You Were On My Mind", while
still unmistakably rocking, is more wistful sounding with it's woah-oh backing
vocals. "Sooner Or Later" has a great stop/start bit and it's another
killer tune. "I Won't Say I'm Sorry" is a song John Felice would have
been proud to write...brilliant tune, great lyrics, and unavoidable hooks. That
same goes for "Nothing More Or Less". "Take Anymore" is a powerhouse
of big chords and a catchy repeat chorus with another blazing solo in the middle.
Then there's the unbelievable cover of the Dictators "Loyola" which I
think is the best thing they've done...a power pop masterpiece using every trick in
the book. Then there's the two tracks for the next single; "Almost
Summer" the classic waiting for school to end song written like they wrote 'em
in the 60s but with the punch of great punk songs, and "Cyclone", the
song that shows up the band's New York roots best with its lyrics about spending
the summer at Coney Island riding the Cyclone rollercoaster. The songs are
consistently short and to the point (a long one might pass two minutes), but
they're fast, powerful and catchy without fail. It's all fantastic stuff.
Given that the story
behind the split from the Devil Dogs was due largely to disagreements over the
sexist nature of the lyrics, I found it odd that the first Vacant Lot single had a
sleeve with these photos that had been apparently arranged of the band playing
amidst hordes of undulating and scantily clad women. I asked Peter about this, and
it turns out that this wasn't something they set up just for the sleeve photo at
all.
"Yeah",
says Peter, "that was an actual show. The cool radio station out here is WFMU
from Upsala College. One of the djs whose name is Wild Girl...every year she has a
big show at the Freak House at Coney Island on the boardwalk. Her big thing is
go-go girls, so she has like 30 go-go girls and has a couple of bands play. We did
this last summer, and that was pretty intense. It's in this little tin roofed
building right on the boardwalk of Coney Island. Coney Island is a really strange
place at night. You get a little nervous there sometimes, because you might be the
only kind of normal person around. So this night they have this big thing and
300 people show up. It's basically like everybody you know at Coney Island at 12
midnight. It's pretty wild. So we played that with the A-Bones. It's really neat;
we got a cool video tape out of it, too, with tons of girls with hardly anything on
gyrating around while we played."
"We're trying to
finagle our way into playing the one this year, too. It's a real big event; a lot
of the papers around here cover it in little news items. That's one of the big
shows every year."
So now you've had
your advance warning; be looking for those Vacant Lot records and you won't be
disappointed. Guaranteed.
