That first Consumers gig, the one at the cowboy bar

I wish like hell I could remember the name of the cowboy bar where I booked the Consumers first show. I can see it pretty extraordinarily clearly in my mind's eye, I can see that one guy's body flying though the air as I stood by the front door, I can see him landing against that pickup truck's rear wheel with his neck all crumpled in and under, and I can seem him laying there twitching. I just can't remember the name of the damn place.

It was over on the southwest corner of Seventh Avenue and Camelback Road, and it had a little parking lot in the front, but you entered from the rear. Which was not to say that it was anything like a gay cowboy bar — my bet is there wasn't any such a thing in all of Arizona in them days, buckaroo, and you probably would've got your ass whipped (the old-fashioned regulation way) for even just suggesting any such a thang. But one of the things that intrigues me is that it was sometime in the most ridiculously hot part of the summer of 1977 that we did this, and it was six months or so later that the Sex Pistols tour of the US visited such spots as Randy's Rodeo in San Antonio, and the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas. I think the point is that we just knew. The information was in the music and the culture and the moment. We knew that we wanted it to be more confrontation than concert. We just couldn't know how it would play out.

October 26, 1977 — the day after the Zoo show

"No further ado: What's Happening In Phoenix. Well, uh, you know . . . not much. Patti Smith was at the Celebrity Theatre last November and managed to alienate the 51 per cent of the audience who came to see the opening act, Bruce Springsteen's buddy, Southside Johnny . . . Lou Reed was here not long after and threatened to hit someone in the first row with his mike stand . . . Iggy was scheduled to be here November 11 or 12 or 13 (I forget which) with a Mr. D. Bowie playing keyboards in his band but apparently no one in town took up the option, so . . .

Yeah, well, have to admit it; until the aforementioned Evening At The Zoo [which was actually the second Consumers show], Phoenix New Wave fanatics have had to make the considerable journey overland to Los Angeles if they wanted to be the latest with the greatest or something similar. The opportunities have been great, though were one willing and able to make the trip. I personally know a person who saw The Damned's now-historic, near-legendary appearance there (it gets closer to being mythic every day) as well as The Jam, (an interesting English trio who wear suits and ties and reportedly like the Queen) DEVO, The Weirdos, Blondie, The Avengers, all sorts of interesting people.

But then again I'm supposed to be telling you reasons why you should want to stay in Phoenix so that you can pick up this paper so that the advertisers will know you're there so that the fine folks who run this thing will see fit to pay me twice as much next time so's I can . . . Anyway, suddenly there are all kinds of reasons for you to do all of the above — Phoenix is on the verge of, on the very brink of having a burgeoning New Wave scene of its very own — and you'll have to admit that would make things much easier than going to LA, not to mention New York or London.

Certainly the stellar attraction of Phoenix' New Wave . . . uh, scene? Community? Eruption? (I keep thinking of all the Neat comparisons I could be drawing between "Arizona's Ocean, Big Surf" and the local New Wave) . . . stellar attractions around here are The Consumers. I guess the way most of us became aware of their existence was through the posters they so thoughtfully plastered through much of the known city. Apparently they're diligent little devils — the posters all seem to have different embellishments and alterations.

". . . Song titles are extremely important since I don't have thge space to type out the lyrics and I don't really know them anyway and even though I could hum some of the songs for you now, you couldn't hear them anyway, so, as I pointed out only moments ago, titles are extremely important. Included in The Consumers semi-vast repertoire are such gems as "Media Ogre" (Clue! Say it six times fast), "Anti Anti Anti," "Concerned Citizen," and "Chuck Ives." Plus lots more. While I hate to show favoritism in situations like these, it should be pointed out that The Consumers far outstrip The Liars when it comes to song quantity. When it comes to quality . . . well, if you'd only been there last night, you could have judged for yourself. If you'd only been there...

All of which is not to say that The Liars's songs have deficient titles or anything. How're ya gonna top "Just Like Your Mom," "Bionic Girl" or "Enema Gift"? Nope can't say The Liars are lacking when it comes to song titles — nor names neither. Sacreligious as it may seem, the bassist repeatedly assured me that his name is Don Bolles, that Bill Close is the drummer and that the guy on guitar and vocals is John E. Precious. . .

While I'm at it, The Consumers are aka Billy Rocket, guitars; Spiro "Lowball" Keats, vocals and stuff; Tom Tomm, drums; Bill Fold, bass; and Pam Simp, guitars. . . and as to Browbeat, once again, it supposedly is out but I don't know anybody who's got one or knows where to get one or anything about it, so that pretty much wraps that up. Oh yeah. The bassist for The Liars — I'm not going to name him again — you know what it is and I don't want to get blamed for it; direct all complaints in his direction — said to be sure and mention that they don't want nothin' to do with the New Wave. "We're Permanent Wave," says he.

excerpt from New Times, October 26, 1977

(We actually picked up copies of this after we left the Zoo, as it had just hit the street that very night.)

Tales of Topographic Posters

Gosh, kids, it occurs to me — here's a way to help you understand.

See that Consumers poster up top? The one that we posted up everywhere, all over Phoenix and Tempe and Scottsdale, Arizona? Where it was all so clean and pristine that it would stick out like a sore throbbing fuckin' thumb, because there was nothing going on that wasn't so mainstream that it would ever occur to anyone to put a flyer on a telephone pole near a record store, much less on a record store window? Because it wouldn't have looked right. Because record store windows had posters, official posters, from official promoters, who let you know when the big Peter Frampton/Ted Nugent/Rick Derringer concert extravaganaza was due to hover over town and then move on....what the hell was a flyer? Only losers would make up their own flyers, right? And they'd at least try and make it look decent. Or if not decent, then at least as much like the cover of a Yes album as possible, depending on if they had a sister who could draw stuff with her set of pastels....

Browbeat

So a guy doing research on punk in Phoenix announces that I "claim that he and David Wiley from the Consumers created the world's first xerox-copied punk fanzine called Browbeat in June 1977."

Uh, no.

First of all, ahem (meaningful, throat-clearing pause): I don't "claim" nothin', ese. I am a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool, old-school reporter type, and back in the days when there used to be journalism, they used to take us way deep back into the interior under-bowels of the Temple Of Truth and make us swear a deadly irrevocable oath to tell the truth, such as it was. And fool that I was, I believed it, and have practiced it like a religion. Or a bad habit.

But that's kind of beside the point. Browbeat was, to my knowledge, the first xerox-punk fanzine in the United States. It was David and me and Greg (whose last name I just cannot remember, and haven't for a million years, though I can describe his face and glasses and crummy slump-block apartment over on 48th and McDowell. And Sharon Ehle too. Debbie Dub/Durham was gonna be a part of it, but I think she was out of town that spring and summer.) We were totally ripping off (that's Seventies Amer-Arizonian argot for "inspired by") Sniffin' Glue from England. We had copies of those in hand, probably from even their first issue, maybe. (Which is extraordinary, of course, because who knows how many copies they ever xeroxed, but this whole thing was extraordinary.) And when I say "we," I mean David. Because hip as I was — and let's face it — I wasn't hip like that. Not, surely, definitely, totally, when it came to English stuff. I was kind of pointedly and aggressively and intentionally and actively unhip in that direction. Because from that direction, as far as I had been concerned for years and years and years, had plodded forth the dreaded Progressive Rock: Genesis. Gong. Gentle Giant. Geez!

Anyway, so as far as I'm concerned, Sniffin' Glue was the first and foremost. There were all manner of somewhat sort of similar things, sci-fi fanzines and such. John Holmstrom had definitely done Punk in New York, and we'd seen it, but Punk didn't really make us very nuts, frankly. (Sorry, Legs.) (Hey, man, you owe me money.) Sniffin' Glue did — it even made me nuts, and I was a big ol' anglophobic Anglophobe. There was, or would soon enough be, the amazing and often brilliant Slash from Los Angeles, and the often amazing and sometimes brilliant and generally ultra-thorough Search & Destroy from San Francisco. There was, eventually, New York Rocker (Hey, Andy — where ya't?). And before that, in the present tense, and much more importantly, at least in this moment, there was Rock Scene. From New York. Which was clearly some kind of hilarious clip-job scam, cooked up by Richard Robinson and/or Lisa Robinson, who were a couple or a former couple, and rock writers and/or former rock writers, or a couple of former whatevers from New York City, which was millions of miles away, which was no closer than London and only a little farther away than LA. Rock Scene was devoted, primarily, to Kiss and to Aerosmith and to Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin press conferences and flash-photo after-parties with shrimp and champagne and former New York Dolls and photo opportunities. Rock Scene was one big fat skinny photo opportunity clip-job, but you could buy it on the newsstands of Phoenix, Arizona as readily than you could get Rolling Stone (which was becoming ever more useless) and more certainly than Creem, which might show up at the Circle K some months and some months it might not. (Later in life I'd learn the ways of mobbed-up magazine distribution, and the steady appearance of Rock Scene versus Creem would crystal-clear sense. But Rock Scene, in its ridiculous and obvious lame-nosity, kept showing crappy pictures, usually shot by Leee Black Childers, of Patti Smith and The Ramones and Richard Hell and, soon enough, Rat Scabies and Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer and Dee Generate. You didn't feel like they were getting their share of shrimp and champagne, but what the hell? You were in Phoenix, and they weren't sharing any with you, either.

I sympathize with the post-post-post-post-punk historians' dilemma. They don't seem to get it, and you can't blame 'em.

BUT: HOWEVER: TOO DAMN BAD: TOUGH SHIT: It's the historian's dilemma. And dharma duty. And privilege. You gotta make it pop up 3-D. Gotta bring it back alive ("It's ALIVE!!!) They, you, we live in a different world. They were born into a different world. They teach their kids Clash songs, for God's sake, just like creepy baby-boomers taught their kids Beatle songs, because its, like...whoa! ....eternally true and good and righteous and all, man. Because it's the verities. When the Clash started putting their own kids singing Clash songs on Clash records, they were suggesting, ironically and childishly, that it was all history now, ancient history, that it had gone archaic and folkloric and ancient and anachronistic. With the smell of mildew, with moths and maggots and decrepitude. They felt old. They wondered: What Next? Where do we go from here? How do we go out of here?

I guess it's not possible for These Darn Wet-Behind-The-Ears Whippersnapper Punk Kid Historians to even imagine how different that world was. They think, inevitably, swear to God, in terms of "the punk scene." Because there certainly became a punk scene in Phoenix, but by then it was dead. (Sort of, except for the ones who were inventing it, risking it, playing really bad guitar but feeling it.) (They played really bad guitar, by the way.) (Not the Consumers, who were never less than astonishingly, fiercely, ferociously great.) It was punk, certainly. Made by people who by then knew how to dress punk, and play punk music, and be punk. It was dead by then. It may have even been more actual fun then, and fun is never to be dismissed. Never.

But danger is different. It wasn't the same. Nothing ever is, is it?

Browbeat grew out of boredom. Browbeat was something that occurred just in case The Consumers didn't. There was a Consumers flier, a full-page, in every copy of Browbeat (I don't remember how many copies we printed but it was something like 200, 250, 300 — it wouldn't have been anywhere near as many as 500, and I was paying the xerox bill, 'cause I had a job) (what did xeroxes cost in 1977? Can the contemporary historian comprehend a world with no Kinko's? I can't imagine I had more than like $50 bucks in all of life to piss away — and we knew we were pissing it away — but there was no gig listed on the flier. We'd done the fliers (and put them up all over town, all over Phoenix and Tempe and Scottsdale, at a time when there literally weren't fliers up for anything, nothing, nuthin', whether rock'n'roll or rodeo or Park'N'Swap) just to create a what would now be called a buzz, but would then have been considered a problem. Or litter.

Actually, this is where a Phoenix punk rock historian might actually catch a clue. Last time I was in what we might dignify up by calling "downtown Phoenix," (which is now an active lie and an oxymoron in the same moment) they had created these airtight little poster kiosk things. They were these Pillars Of Salt/Plexiglass Officially-Approved Things with tight little tough little locking mechanisms on 'em. If you were a proper Patron Of The Arts, with a proper Poster Of The Arts, and the Proper Permission Of The Kiosk Commissariat Of The Arts Commission, well, then, presumably somebody from the City Of Phoenix, way down the kachina-pole, probably A City Of Phoenix Mexican Employee, had been entrusted with las llaves. So you could put up a poster. Not you, loser, yourself, actually, but the properly-employed C.O.P. Mexican Poster Kiosk Commission Sub-Commissar Employee.

In fact, this is where a contemporary Phoenix Punk Historian could maybe dig around a bit and discover themselves tumbling down the good ol' fresh new ancient archaic rabbit-hole. Apparently — and maybe I'll go back and check — a couple years ago there was a move on to save or preserve good ol' Patriot Park, in (ahem) downtown Phoenix, as a bit of free space, as a bit of (and there's a funny-ass word in the context of "downtown" Phoenix: Heritage) as a bit of "heritage." (Here's another knee-slapper; what's left of the Dresden-esque bombsite that once was a place, the part that's not called "Heritage Square," spent much of the last decade being declared "Copper Square," but that's basically over now, done, finis, kaputt, and they've decided to rename it: it's now the All-New "Downtown Phoenix!" ) And it's funny, but I can't help but think of Patriot Park, as many times as I ended up skating across and through there on my way with mi vatos en route to this or that parking garage (which even then was pretty much what was even then left of "downtown," and which even now may be the last best hope for "Phoenix," once and former city/place, as a sort of paved-over skatepark . . well, anyway, I can't help but think about Patriot Park, that proudly-mounted jackalope-abortion trophy, that un-echoing abomination created as a proudly prominent non-place to replace what had once been a place, and the fact that Paul Cutler, genius guitar-deconstructing dude, co-creator of The Consumers (he'd hate that, probably; 'cause it's s'posed to be ":Consumers," if we keep the properly rigorous rigid rigor in place), Mr. I'll Personally Bring Dada to Phoenix Personally Myself, created an event, a "situation," a "happening" (oooh! he'd totally hate that one!), a "protest," a "performance art piece" there, there, there, there in the the most perfectly formed piece of what was left of Phoenix and what was to be, prophetically, all that Phoenix could ever, was ever going to become. Patriot Park.

Me, I thought he was just being a pretentious arty-ass pain-in-the-ass weirdo.

He who laughs last, laughs best. Or loudest. Or most cynically. He who locates the least park-like park in the center of Phoenix-Dresden wins the bowling trophy.

(Meanwhile, so little is left of downtown Phoenix's bombsite that there has actually been a movement to "save" Patriot's Square Park.) (Swear to God.) ( It failed, of course.) (It will now be part of something called the CityScape Development Project.) (Or, as we used to call it, Phoenix.)

KDIL Blues Licks

But wait! Hold everything! Stop the presses! Hold the phone!

How could I have forgotten? There's no question that David and Greg (I'm'na remember Greg's last name before we're done; not Greg Jones of the Consumers, though) and me created Browbeat in direct imitation/competition with Sniffin' Glue... but first, way before us and, really, more important, if only because it was first and even less anchored to any apparent existing reality, was KDIL Blues Licks.

I first spotted it on the floor near the door of the used record store. This, this method, this system, this way, was to become the time-honored method of xerox-fanzines, was to become the folkloric way, but as far as Phoenix, Arizona goes, this was the time we ought to honor. These were the trailblazing pioneers. KDIL Blues Licks! Man, was that thing ugly!

Man, was it ever ugly and stupid-looking! (As powerful and trouble-making and epoch-stirring as it was, there ought to have been a nice 8 1/2 x 11 inch dent in the concrete floor. There may well be. I wouldn't bet against it.) It looked like they couldn't even figure out how to work the xerox machine. It looked like they didn't have a clue about what they were doing. It didn't look sexy and slick and psychedelic and smooth and special and sharp and sensational and tasteful and ironic and hip — everything was getting really hip right about then, and this just looked lame. It was SO lame!

It was laying there, in a small crummy pile too small and crummy to be declared a stack, by the glass door of wee tiny li'l Bullfrog Records at Seventh Avenue and Camelback . . . let's see — Northeast corner, next to the little parking lot, a minuscule storefront barnacled onto what was probably a drugstore or a print shop or something every bit as useful and proper. (The cowboy bar where I booked the Consumers to play their very first show ever was catty-corner across the street, rear entry, gravel parking lot to help facilitate the spills'n'thrills that made cowboy bars such a gravel-grinding-in-your face drunken parking lot experience more nights than not. Peel out, dude!

Bullfrog Records was owned and operated by Butch, this genial lank-haired hippie guy with coke-bottle wire-frame glasses. It wasn't just a Used Records store (in fact, that side of things is probably defined by my own broke-ass sensibility), it was mainly an "import store." Which, in those days, meant mostly horrifying British prog-rock bullshit and a schmattering of German prog-rock Stierscheiz, which is them frontier days were pretty much impossible to find, and certainly in Phoenix F. Arizona. Bill Drummond (who enters our story right about NOW) had done a Drummond-esque mural on the slumpblock wall by the parking lot, and then it had spilled over onto the glass window front of the joint. I don't remember what it was, but it probably had to do with bullfrogs and, possibly, canals, and, knowing Drummond, outer space.

If you weren't careful, you'd probably run into Drummond at Bullfrog, and he'd probably be fondling Gong records about pothead pixies and their flying UFO teacups or some such post-hippe twaddle, and if you made the mistake of saying "Uh, hi....", the next thing you knew, Bill was rattling away in his Buzz-Click Robot voice about all kinds of stuff.

(A complete and entire generation away, the Beastie Boys would create a magazine of their own ('cause they had crashed and destroyed so many SPIN parties before they got famous that while we loved 'em and all, we may have loved 'em too well, and weren't willing to devote each and every issue to 'em, much to their dismay and disdain and all... ), so they started their own, Grand Royal, which was kind of genius, which was more than kind of genius, and within the pages of what I think was like their second issue (nationally distributed! probably internationally too!) they defined and defiled and designated and delineated the term for the hairdo that Bill Drummond (the Phoenix one, not the KLF one — he came later) and Peter Gabrield were rockin' : The Mullet.)

Drummond was practically always there, in his drippy prog-rock mullet, and his white-on-white outfits, with maybe a few colorful Jackson Pollock drips in all the beaming colors Jackson Pollock would have avoided like the colorful plague, and with his ever-present, ever-active, ever-busy sketchbook, and his little Rapidograph pens, which he continually and obsessively sketched in all the while he continually and obsessively talked to you, and when he was done sketching and you looked — well, you had apparently not been standing around in the cramped quarters of a used record store on Seventh Ave and Camelback in Phoenix, but had been chillin' in the aft-deck of some StarTrek space-lounge, and you were looking bullfroggy and bug-eyed and mullet-ified, like everbody else.

Drummond hadn't done the hippie-esque mural on the front windows at Oasis Records, halfway down the block, opposite side of the street, towards Central Avenue — "It's all San Andreas' fault," it said, and there was a cosmic hippie dude with headphones being all psychedelic and stuff — but he was pretty much always there too, because it was where also where KCAC was. KCAC was, however briefly, the most extraordinary thing in Phoenix in some ways — certainly if you weren't into the part of Phoenix that was cowboys and rodeo belt buckles and and Buck Owens' KNIX. (And unless you consider the absurdly tiny R&B station KCAC replaced, serving all seventeen black folks in Phoenix, and Johnny D and me.) KCAC had been this secret little AM station somewhere around the middle of the transistor dial, and it had been assembled and created and imagined by a visionary. And because KCAC was so genuinely glorious, well, it defined the very empty airspace where KDIL belonged. Which had so little to do with being glorious.

And KDIL Blues Licks....(because hardly anybody ever could catch KDIL on the air, which includes the FCC, and the FBI, who didn't have much else to do in Phoenix, given the distinct lack of Communists)

Debbie Dub, Al Simon, Clear Bob, Charlie Monoxide, Sharon Ehle

Debbie Dub was there. (I think she was supposed to contribute to Browbeat, but it didn't happen. She did contribute to Slash, though the current archive doesn't mention her. (Let's see, I remember for a fact she did a review of Althea and Donna's "Uptown Top Ranking," among other things... somebody'll eventually find that issue somewhere, and post it on the internet, and there she'll be...though my memory is she did stuff for a couple few issues. Hey, Debbie, you were always a great gal, and I hope you're alive and well and glorious.

Al Simon was there. Al was a genuinely great guy, really a special person, and he was absolutely part of it all. Genial as hell, a good photographer who often did something great, and just one of those people who everybody actually likes. Which was a big deal, really, because we weren't actually going out of our way, most of us, to be very damn likeable. Plus, notably, he was black, one of 17 or so black folks in Phoenix (well, one of about six or seven who lived north of Indian School Road and south of Sunnyslope, definitely. Al was totally there, and I hope he's still here. Totally.

Hey, and I just heard from Clear Bob! Dang!

A Letter From Mikey

This one, I think, I'll hold off on until I speak to Mikey, and see if he cares to have his letter to me about Wiley, circa about '83, printed. More later, maybe. Depends, I guess.