WRECKLESS ERIC, PART TWO

On March 3, 2017, I had the rare and precious honor of being Wreckless Eric's opening act at a show at Will's Pub in Orlando, Florida. It was a great experience to share the stage with a musician who has influenced me and my own music so deeply.

Sometimes I think there's not enough love in Orlando for the legends who matter most. I thought the show would sell out, but Will's would wind up barely half full for this one. A shame, especially since this is the guy who wrote "Whole Wide World." And lo and behold, there he was, Wreckless Eric himself, shaking my hand with a very firm and steady grip and welcoming me to his show. 'Twas a very strange feeling to be face to face with him again, particularly since I was his opening act this time, and naturally I felt humbled and shy in his presence most of the evening, though we did talk a fair amount and got to chat about mutual friends at WFMU, and even about that great Stiff sax man, Davey Payne.

Opening for Eric felt even more strange. Especially so when midway through my set, Eric suddenly wandered in fresh from his pre-show supper. I don't know how I managed to soldier on with the man himself in my audience, and didn't quite know what to do at the moment he walked in --- so in a bit of an attempt to impress him, I actually covered one of his more obscure numbers, "Waxworks," a move some in his fan base would later take into question when his humorous online remarks about it were taken a bit too seriously. But the man himself was okay with my little tribute -- "You got more of the chords right that I would have!" quoth Eric. Fueled by the situation at hand and the fact that we were playing my favorite stage in Orlando, Will's Pub, I somehow actually managed to play a good set, which was recorded and will be released as a live tape soon.

And then, of course, there was Eric.

Again, as with the first time I saw him 27 years earlier, just him and his acoustic and electric guitars. And though he's in his early 60s now, age hasn't mellowed him one bit, in fact he's even more fierce and cyncial now than he was in '78. He joked at length about Florida's turnpike and its abundance of pro-life billborards, and began "Reconnez Cherie" with some insight into how the song was written. He didn't play much from the Stiff days, doing only "Cherie," "Walking on the Surface of the Moon" (great to hear that one without the silly "Star Trek" effects!) and of course "Whole Wide World" with the crowd respectfully not singing along TOO loudly. There were songs from his excellent new album "AmERICa," and surprising experimental noise breaks which echoed the vibe of his very strange "Bungalow Hi" album and wouldn't have sounded out of place at the International Noise Conference in Miami. It was a different and even somewhat darker show than the one he'd played the first time I'd seen him, but seeing as how Eric and I are both aging now, there was that sense of mature wisdom this time that I found easy to relate to. Mark this show down next to the July '90 show as one of the best I've ever seen... and maybe the best I've ever played as well.

Eric was ever the gentleman to me and everyone throughout the night, chatting with all of us and signing my album and posing for a photo with me. And according to my collaborator and friend Joshua Rogers who was watching my merch table, Eric even stopped by there to pick up a copy of my cassette single. Pretty wild to think he owns one now! It was a once in a lifetime experience both to open for Wreckless Eric and to see him come through Orlando, and a lot of local people I know really oughta kick themselves for having missed this. It was truly one to remember, and one for the ages.

Thank you so much for playing, Eric. And thanks to Rich Evans for booking the show, and Alex Goldman for a great job with the sound, and Josh for doing his Broken Machine Films visuals during my set, and Rod Leith and Dave Scott Schwartzman for moral support. I couldn't have done it without you guys!

WRECKLESS ERIC, PART ONE

Once upon a time, in the land of the Sex Pistols, there lived a little label called Stiff Records. This label was like no other before it. It was a true original both in its overall presentation and in the music it chose to release. I first heard of it one fine day in late 1977 on a visit to my favorite record store of all time, Sam Goody's at the Garden State Plaza shopping mall in Paramus, New Jersey, a ten-minute drive from my house. This store not only provided me with many of the first punk rock records I would own, but would soon become a full-on sanctuary from the difficult world I was growing up in. A true eccentric suburban outcast was I, facing opposition from all sides, especially the kids at my school. I had hardly any friends back then, nor did I care to have any. All that changed, however, when some of the workers at this record store began to take note of my frequent appearances in the store's import section. Their curiosity about me soon baffled them to the point where some of them began reaching out to me when I'd visit. What exactly did a skinny little tween like me want with such mature-minded music?

These beautiful, beautiful people soon found out I was the only son of a cosmetics dealer at Bamberger's, the department store adjacent to Sam Goody's. And no sooner did they determine that my interest in all things punk and progressive was real than they became my very first real friends. Two of them, a lovely pair of ladies named Diane Walsh and Carol Tatarian, would eventually offer to take me out on one of their frequent visits to Greenwich Village in NYC, where Bleecker Bob's and many other seminal punk rock stores had sprung up in the wake of the '70s punk explosion. Thus began a series of punk field trips over the course of the next two years from which I gained much of my early knowledge of the area. Diane and Carol, along with pretty much the entire Goody's staff, embraced li'l me and my taste in music with nothing but love, warmth and compassion, and to this day sentimental tears still form in my eyes whenever I think of them. They may have almost literally saved my life back then, and I am eternally indebted to them for it.

But anyway, back to Stiff Records. The first Stiff artist I heard was Elvis Costello. My first listen to "Watching the Detectives" was a game-changer. That was all I had to hear -- I was a Stiff fan for life. And not long after, the folks at Goody's began to notice my resemblance to the new Elvis and quickly coined the nickname "Little Elvis," a moniker that would ultimately stick with me beyond Goody's borders and remain throughout my high school years. Which brings me to Spring Recess, 1978. On that Easter week, Mom let me pick out an album as a present, and on the strength of Elvis' appearance on it, I chose "Stiffs Live." As the name implied, it was a collection of Stiff artists performing live. Preceding Elvis in the album's track sequence was another artist I had not heard of before that day. And just like my first experience the previous Christmas with yet another Stiff artist, the Damned, I had no idea what I was in for, nor was I the least bit prepared for how it was about to impact me.

Smack dab in the middle of side one of "Stiffs Live," after two raucous cuts by Nick Lowe, the strangest dude I had ever heard on a record album in my life up till then suddenly burst forth from my speakers. His voice was like sandpaper and gravel, he seemed to know only two chords on his guitar, and he and all the members of the band backing him sounded drunk as skunks. All at once this album began to sound like a different record entirely -- ragged, sloppy, totally oddball, and just plain sludgey. I was completely confused and baffled, almost aghast in fact. How on earth did this mess wind up getting pressed onto the same record as Elvis Costello, let alone get signed in the first place? I am not lying when I say I didn't get it at first. In fact, I wasn't even sure I wanted to hear it a second time. Oh, but somehow I couldn't resist going back to those two tracks and doing just that -- and that's when it got to me. That's when I heard the sheer, utter brilliance and defiance and complete disregard for all tradition that lay deep within this hot mess of music. And that, my friends, was my formal introduction to the man who called himself Wreckless Eric.

I never thought a short, scrawny little cat like me could ever wind up playing his own music until I heard another short and scrawny cat from England doing just that. After hearing Wreckless Eric, my perspective changed forever. If he could do it, I reasoned, then so the fuck could I! I sent my mom back to Goody's to fetch me his first album, pressed on lovely blue vinyl. It was a tad more produced than his live tracks, of course, yet it still sounded no less odd and ragged and raw, all in the best way possible. But bubbling underneath the surface were some of the greatest pop sensibilities ever displayed by a punk rocker. To this day Eric's debut remains one of my all-time favorite albums, and the single biggest inspiration on my own musical aesthetic. It contains everything from his biggest hits "Whole Wide World" and "Reconnez Cherie" to the eerie "Waxworks," the brash "Rough Kids," and even an uncredited cover of the Benny Hill theme, to my ears the best version ever, powered by the insane saxophone of Davey Payne of another Stiff fave of mine, Ian Dury and the Blockheads (Davey, where are you now?). It's a punk masterpiece for sure, but far more than that, its oddness was what really endeared me to it. It was a record which surely would make all my schoolmates throw up their hands in disbelief and lack of understanding if they ever heard it, but which I myself somehow understood almost entirely. Which, in turn, made me feel like Eric was MY music hero and no one else's, and that sense of exclusivity surely added to his charm.

It took awhile for me to get up to speed on trying to play music myself. Initially I tried to sing in the same crazed, gravel voice as Eric, but ended up sounding like, well, a 13-year-old American kid trying to imitate him, and very badly so at that. I soon realized that I was definitely not Wreckless Eric, nor would I ever actually become him not matter how hard I tried. I finally realized, though, that it was still possible for me to be Eric somehow -- if I just borrowed whichever parts of his vibe fit in alongside my own equally twisted personality and outlook, and combined the two accordingly. An American Eric of sorts, if you will. Eventually I concocted my own persona, which I initially named Ray Zinnbrann, and that's when the pieces started to fit and I was able to put together an image and musical style that conceded to Eric's in some ways, but was ultimately my very own creation.

I freely admit to being a bit disappointed by the two albums which followed that monumental debut. I wouldn't blame it on Eric himself, to be fair. His songwriting was maturing quickly and in a very good way. But "The Wonderful World Of Wreckless Eric" still stands in my mind as one of the most grossly misproduced albums of all time. Its songs, like "Walking on the Surface of the Moon," "Veronica" and especially "Take the Cash" were very good, but would have been a hell of a lot better had they not been thoroughly vomited on by producer Pete Solley. To this very day I fantasize about sending out a lynch mob after the guy for his crimes against Eric, which include placing "Star Trek" sounds on "Moon" and adding chalkboard-screechy '50s-style female backing vocalists to "The Final Taxi." The "Hit And Miss Judy" EP was a fine return to form, but album three, "Big Smash" suffered a bit too, this time from Stiff's insistence on forcing Eric to collaborate with other writers, as if his work needed song doctors.

I do admit I let Eric fall off my radar after that. But he wouldn't elude it for too long. I still played his old records and sometimes wondered whatever might have happened to him after he left Stiff. I didn't have to wonder for too long, though. For in the summer of 1990, Wreckless Eric suddenly reappeared both when and where I would never have expected him -- at a music bar in the East Village called the Spiral. And one hot, sweaty July night, in the basement of that bar, he held me and an audience of fellow Eric admirers completely in the palm of his hand for almost two full hours.

When he walked onstage with just himself and a guitar and no band, I felt my heart skip a beat. "Fuck me, he's playing solo! How great is this gonna be?" I thought. Well, here's how great it was: the very first two songs he played were "Semaphore Signals" and "Reconnez Cherie." The very two songs he did on "Stiffs Live," the songs I didn't know what the fuck to make of when I first heard them 12 years earlier. Time froze, and stayed that way for quite awhile. So began my long, wondrous, magical journey through Ericland.

He told stories. He told jokes. And yes, he played songs on an old British Hofner guitar. All the hits, and some great new ones too. A particular highlight was my finally getting to hear "The Final Taxi" performed without those goddamn female backing screechers, in a new arrangement which finally brought its message home at last. And let me tell you, only Wreckless Eric can break a string, take almost ten minutes to fix it, and still not waste a single second of the audience's time. His stories were enchanting, his jokes were side-splittingly funny, and his slow, deep Cockney drawl could haunt you forever. And he still looked and sounded like Eric after all those years. For me the night was magic. I stayed out till 3 and joined a small group of revelers afterward whom Eric was kind enough to stick around and and entertain in the green room afterward. Just an unbelievable and unforgettable night in every respect, and one of the best shows I've ever witnessed.

(An interesting footnote: just a few months after that show, I saw a terrific and sadly short-lived all-girl band called the Shams perform at the Knitting Factory. One of the members of that band was a nice lady I'd met at WFMU a few years earlier named Amy Rigby. She's now Eric's wife. Quite an interesting parallel, eh?)

Fast forward to 2015. I'm now in Orlando, Florida, making a bit of a local splash with my somewhat Wreckless-inspired songs. My friend Dan of local comrades Yogurt Smoothness hits me up. "Yo, Ray, I've been wondering, have you ever heard of this guy named Wreckless Eric? I just got turned on to him and his music reminds me a bit of yours." WHOA. I aways knew I'd been a bit influenced by him, but I never knew just how deep a mark he made on me till then. I soon find out that many of my new Florida friends, most of whom weren't even born when "Whole Wide World" first dropped, are hip to him as well. And one fine day in this very year of 2017, a fine young local promoter named Rich Evans steps up to the plate and books Wreckless Eric into Will's Pub on March 3rd for his very first Orlando appearance, ever. The thought occurs to me -- does he need an opening act? I admit to being a bit bold in recording a cover of "Waxworks," posting it to Facebook, and publicly suggesting I might be the man. Rich, bless his heart, listens and agrees accordingly. And the next thing I know, I have a big, BIG date with destiny.


TO BE CONTINUED...

LO-FI ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE 1986-1990

I've already written plenty about the significance of cassette culture in my life on this blog in light of the recent tape revival. Hopefully some of you have learned something so far. Now sit back while I finally tell my favorite tape culture tale of all... one which burst out of its shell (so to speak) and into the streets.

The story begins with one homemade cassette demo and one meeting with William Berger. It was February 1986 and he'd just started a new radio program on WFMU called Lo-Fi, a half-hour show consisting entirely of home-recorded music submitted by listeners to his regular program. Bill was not the first WFMU DJ to play listener submissions on the station's airwaves. I'd been submitting my own tapes to the likes of Pat Duncan and Irwin Chusid for two years by the time Lo-Fi was launched. But Bill was the first DJ to shine a spotlight on the phenomenon of locally produced cassette recordings, and five minutes into the premiere episode I knew immediately I wanted in.

As fate would have it I went to the station's studios one Thursday night to visit Pat and Irwin, and lo and behold, Bill was there too. Wasting no time, I immediately introduced myself to him and found he was already aware of my existence. And it just so happened that earlier that day I'd been doing some recording in my basement, a fuzzy cover version of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn," and had brought the tape along with me to listen to in my car.  Bill was sold on it from the very first notes and immediately copied the new track onto one of his own cassettes. The next night, he began Lo-Fi with my cover of "Autobahn," then immediately came on mic and said he was originally planning to close the show with my number, but had ultimately decided it was too good to make listeners wait that long to hear it. Somehow I knew right there and then that Bill would become a friend for life. I'm confident I wasn't the only one who would come to feel that way about him in the months that followed.

Over the course of the next two years, the seeds for a wild and truly wonderful scene were planted largely through the Lo-Fi program. Bill had a very keen ear for talent and soon his show was regularly spotlighting the likes of select fellow home-tapers like Phoaming Edison, Particle Steve, Schooly Descartes, Jolly Ramey, Jet Screamer, the Modern Day Carpetbaggers, Bill's fellow DJ and dear friend Terry Folger, and Azalia Snail. Those first three acts also performed collectively as Fly Ashtray, and the last of these fine folks was the one who ultimately pitched the idea to Bill of a live "Lo-Fi Night" featuring performances by many of the show's talents. By that time Bill, Terry and I had all done our share of snooping and scouting around the east side, and were more than ready to give the idea a go.

The night of February 10, 1988, at a dive on First Avenue known as the Lismar Lounge, was one of the most memorable nights in the lives of every last person involved in it, myself included, and as far as I'm concerned, the official start of The Scene. Bill and Terry opened the show as Bad Jack and the Rope Trick, playing the Lo-Fi Theme as their first number, and Jet Screamer and all of Fly Ashtray's side projects did their thing, as did Jolly Ramey, the wonderful duo of Madi and Steve winning me over instantly both as musicians and friends. Somewhere in the midst of all this, I donned a gold-lame vest my mother had sewn for me, and bravely took the stage myself not knowing how my performance would play out. I ended up playing the cheesy Bobby Sherman and Peter Frampton covers that were my forte back then to a crowd of fellow Lo-Fi-ers who responded with nothing short of sheer adoration from start to finish. In the course of that night at the Lismar, many new friendships were forged and many mutual admiration societies came full circle. It was the kind of magic night you just knew would become the birth of something special.

A week or two later I went to see Fly Ashtray at Maxwell's in Hoboken, NJ, and the band members instantly took to making me feel like a superstar. I admit I was a bit slower in feeling the same admiration for Fly Ashtray's music that they felt for mine, as I was, quite frankly, unimpressed with their first single "The Day I Turned Into Jim Morrison." But my fondness for the music of their various side projects convinced me that their work as a collective unit would soon grow on me. Which it sure did, to the point where their debut album "Clumps Takes A Ride" instantly became, and still remains to this day, one of my all-time favorite records not only from The Scene but all of rock & roll in general. James Kavoussi, a.k.a. Phoaming Edison, in addition to being a core member of Fly Ashtray, also ran the 16-track Toxic Shock recording studio on lower Broadway just off Houston Street, and James and Mike Anzalone a.k.a. Particle Steve, were soon jamming with none other than Bill Berger himself in another band they christened Uncle Wiggly. This band came into its own very quickly, led by the charge that was Bill's incredible guitar work, notable for its inventiveness as well as the fact that he played a right-handed vintage Telecaster left-handed without reversing the strings, Dick Dale-style.

Meanwhile, Jet Screamer and I had become fast friends and were soon playing shared bills together up and down the Lower East Side, meeting a transplanted San Franciscan calling herself Jennifer Blowdryer at the first of these shows, which had been booked by John S. Hall of King Missile, a few years (and lineups) before their big hit "Detachable Penis." Ms. Blowdryer quickly booked Jet and myself into the legendary east side artist's space ABC No Rio, on Memorial Day Weekend 1988. Neither of us knew until we showed up to play that she had also booked a third act that night, an all-girl trio we'd never heard of before. I did my thing, Jet did his, and then... the Gamma Rays took over. We were totally unprepared for what happened next: by the time Sari, Julie and Lisa were finished, every heart in the place had melted into one big collective puddle on the floor. They were that good. So good, in fact, that when word got around they were playing a private party later that same night, we all followed them over there, and swooned over them in unison a second time.

And so the summer of 1988 came and went, much too slowly and traumatically for some. (I'll just say I was, thankfully, not in town the night of the Tompkins Square Park riot and move quite forward from there.) Labor Day Weekend, apart from feeling like a positively relieving end to that dark summer, was notable for not one, but two firsts, beginning with the inaugural edition of Wildgirl's Go-Go-Rama in Coney Island, the first of many, and a much smaller affair than the Go-Go-Ramas which followed. It was Wildgirl's idea to have me open the show with a short set, but neither she nor I gave any thought to the possibility that a team of teenage local wiseacres would show up expecting sleaze and react with extreme displeasure when I strutted onstage instead. I braved these hecklers for 20 minutes and then made way for the dancers, most of whom were friends and fellow scenesters, and all of whom my detractors didn't like either. It was still a fun night, though.

The following Monday saw the other historical event of that Labor Day Weekend, the live debut of the Gamma Rays' newly annexed rhythm section as part of Wigstock in Tompkins Square Park, consisting of a Japanese drummer named Osamu... and a glamorous, bass and cello playing virtuoso named Ursula. It wasn't long before she became, most unquestionably, the band's heartthrob, and I know for a fact I wasn't the only guy in The Scene with a big-time crush on her. The addition of Ursula proved the band's turning point, the move which took their sound and style to the heights the original trio's performances had promised, and beyond. Osamu, who also did some session work with Jolly Ramey, soon vanished (into thin air, or back to Japan?), whereupon the girls replaced him with another, more ferocious drummer (also of Oriental descent) named Genji, and with that move, the girls officially became a live powerhouse. Soon I was going to every Gamma Rays gig there was and screaming out "GAMMA RAYS RULE!" loudly between songs for all to hear. And indeed, they did.

By now, with all of the abovementioned bands and artists involved, we definitely had a scene going, one with boundless creativity and talent behind it, and for me the icing on the cake came in the autumn of 1988 when it was suggested that Jet Screamer and I might make for a good musical partnership. With a November gig with the Gamma Rays looming, we decided to jam together a couple of times and found they were right. Thusly, that gig became the first live performance of Living Guitars, coming at the end of our usual solo sets with just four songs and three rehearsals holding it together. It went well enough that we decided to keep it going, and did so for almost a year and a half. I tossed out the Frampton and Bobby Sherman covers and moved in a more serious artistic direction at that point, and to this day I remain very proud of the music I made with Jet, some of the best stuff either of us ever did.

And so, 1988 ended and 1989 -- in my view, the banner year for The Scene -- began. It was a time when we all truly lived for our weekends together. And it was all too easy to forget by this point that this thing we called ours had all started with a weekly cassette culture radio show hosted by a bright DJ with sharp instincts as to which pieces fit together. Now it had a life of its own, practically independent of Lo-Fi and now even including a few artists who had never submitted a single tape to the show. Besides the Gamma Rays, this latter subdivision also included their friend Skinny Vinny, whom Jennifer Blowdryer was fond of referring to as "The Electric Black Donovan," and who played one of the best live shows I ever saw when he opened for Fly Ashtray at the Pyramid Club in Jume 1988. He also released a great self-produced single in '89 called "Open Heart Love," with its immortal chorus "Open your hearts and nostrils to love."

I was now a WFMU DJ myself, doing sporadic late night fill-ins and playing all the local bands on every show I did, with impassioned pleas urging listeners to support The Scene. I was also hanging out regularly on Saturday evenings before shows with Madi and Steve of Jolly Ramey, taking in her rock & roll fashion tips and his love of "Sinatra Saturdays" on WOR radio. Meanwhile, Bill Berger kept on playing our music on his show, bringing bands in to play live and and jamming with James and Mike in Uncle Wiggly. And he helped start yet another band with another contributor to Lo-Fi, this time acting as drummer for a lovely Virginia-bred gal named Linda Hagood, who made her own charming music under the name of Smack Dab. We played gigs at CBGB, ABC No Rio, the Pyramid and the Lismar Lounge, to name a few, but our favorite place to play was the Lizard's Tail, a loft space run by two very lovely European immigrants, Terry Dineen and Jean Francois and located in south Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in what was then a very seedy area of town.

The comraderie between all of us manifested itself not only in the sharing of gigs, but in the things that happened at these gigs: Terry Folger rewrote "Bennie and the Jets" as "Ray Zinnbrann and Jet" and played it at ABC as a tribute to Living Guitars. Uncle Wiggly named a bouncy instrumental tune of theirs "Living Guitars" as well, and once played a set consisting entirely of cleverly-arranged interpretations of songs by the other bands in The Scene. Bill ended a solo performance by inviting me up to duet with him on an acapella version of Gene Pitney's "Town Without Pity." Terry secured fill-in slots on WFMU and then invited us all to come to the station and play live on the air. He soon formed a band called Van Gelder, with two childhood friends, and debuted it live on WFMU on July 4, 1989. I became their drummer by accident and managed to stick around for about a month and a half and another gig. Man, there was all sorts of fun to be had.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, someone did the math and figured out that if 14 bands threw in 200 bucks each, we could release a vinyl LP compilation. James gave us all free studio time at his Toxic Shock studio and we recorded in the summer and early fall of '89. With tracks by Fly Ashtray, Uncle Wiggly, Living Guitars, the Gamma Rays, Jolly Ramey, Smack Dab and many others, The Phoaming Edison Tapes was finally released in the spring of 1990. Despite our best efforts, it sank without a trace, garnering just two reviews, one in New York Press, one in Option, both negative. Stray copies of this comp can be found on Discogs and Ebay; it's worth picking up and treasuring as the one definitive document of the times I've just described.

The Scene was never quite the same again after the album came out. Its failure to gain attention wasn't the only factor. By then, drugs and internal conflicts were taking their toll on our brotherly and sisterly bonds, and with the breakup of Living Guitars I drifted off into other artistic circles and underground music scenes. It was a sad and all-too-quick end to an all-too-short peak period for us. But the times we all had together were some of the absolute happiest times of my life. It all started with a few cassettes... and became a real live scene. Y'know, kinda like what tapes are starting these days.

BILLY SYNDROME, 1963-2017

photos by andre grossman

I write this piece with a very heavy heart for many reasons. Already this year sucks worse than last year for me, and the ongoing onslaught of rock and roll passages has really hit too close to home this time.

William Ogilvie passed away on January 11th, 2017, aged 53. To many of you reading these words, he was known as Billy Syndrome. To say this man was the consummate rock and roll renegade is an extreme understatement. If the story of his life were written in book form, it would be one of the juiciest reads in rock history, believe me. Over the course of his life, Billy would both create and witness rock history. His first band, a hardcore punk group called the Pricks, featured a man by the name of Rick Rubin on guitar. The same year they formed, 1981, Billy witnessed the infamous Public Image Ltd. "riot show" at the Ritz -- just one of literally thousands of concerts he attended over the years. By the mid '80s he'd caught the home recording bug, forming Porcelain God with his best friend James Sherry, a/k/a Evil Jim Friendly, and by 1987 the two of them were tearing up the lower east side of NYC together.

It was in mid-1988 that Billy first appeared on my radar. At that time, the antifolk scene was forming, comprised of a group of young, like-minded folks forging a new sound fusing '60s folk with modern punk. Banned from famous westside folk clubs like Cafe Wha and Folk City for being too raw, they found the less sophisticated east side far more welcoming and set up shop there. Many of them were, in my honest opinion, not much better than the more polished modern folk acts uptown, though I did eventually come to appreciate the likes of Roger Manning and Paleface and a few others. But Billy Syndrome completely transcended the very definition of antifolk the very second he first walked through its door. No one brought more punky swagger to it than him, and when I first stumbled across him at an antifolk fest in July '88, his performance stood out like a sore thumb accordingly. I took immediate note of him and vowed to investigate him further.

A few months later I dropped by the studios of WFMU radio and my dear pal William Berger was waiting for me excitedly. He had a new song cued up that he just couldn't wait to play for me. It was "Have You Seen The Cows," from a compilation of antifolk acts called "White Trash." And the artist was none other than Billy Syndrome. What a watershed moment it was! Totally unlike anything we'd ever heard before, it sounded like some slice of alien hardcore beamed down from Mars, led by those raving lunatic vocals of Billy's I'd soon grow quite fond of. Even as one who was used to strange music by then, this was heavy stuff to me.

Needless to say, I started attending Syndrome gigs whenever I could after that. In the process I found an even newer scene forming in a seedy little Brooklyn neighborhood called Williamsburg. Its hub was a loft turned performance space in a shady part of the 'hood called the Lizard's Tail, run by a European immigrant husband-and-wife artistic duo named Terry Dineen and Jean Francois. Berger and I caught a solo performance of Billy's there one weekend and quickly found he was even more out there onstage than he was on vinyl. Well, the next thing I knew, my own musical duo, Living Guitars, were booked to open for Billy the next time he played there! I was quite humbled to say the least. That night, Billy watched our entire set with rapt attention, then approached us as we walked offstage and said, "You guys were really great, man. You want some acid?" I politely declined his offer, but my partner Jet accepted, which caused me a bit of worry a couple of hours later when he and I found ourselves at a rooftop party after the show. I still remember keeping a very close eye on Jet the rest of the night, in case he suddenly thought he was Superman!

Billy and I were now officially a mutual admiration society, and over time it would turn into a full-fledged friendship. It really wasn't until about late '91 or so that I started to really get to know him personally. By then I was doing quite a bit of hanging out in Williamsburg, first at the Lizard's Tail, then at a bar on the East River waterfront called the Right Bank, which would quicky take over as Billy's home away from home when the Tail closed in '90. Billy's motto at that time was "You either know or you don't." This motto perfectly applied to early '90s Williamsburg, at that time still a seedy neighborhood in the best of gritty NYC traditions, untouched by the hand of gentrification. Artists and bands held illegal punk concerts and "acid house" techno raves in the abandoned warehouses on the waterfront and sometimes right on the waterfront itself, and Billy and his friends were a big part of that scene. And only those truly in the know at the time knew what was happening in Williamsburg, unlike every Tom, Dick and Harry today.

I moved in with Evil Jim for awhile in late '91 and Billy lived right across Fort Greene Park from us, visiting regularly. It was then that our friendship really took hold, over many evenings of beers, bowls, and listening to and raving about music. Billy absorbed popular culture llke a sponge, holding the Grateful Dead, Public Enemy, and the Ramones in equally high regard, and was always buying the cool new albums the day they came out and giving me verbal reviews of each one. One day I went to visit him and he played me something I'd never heard before, a live version of "Listen to the Band" by the Monkees that ended in an extended noise jam, and I almost died. Billy knew lots of things I didn't and delighted in sharing them. In '93, we went on a tour of the midwest together as bandmates in the Thundering Lizards, and when we heard the phrase "finders keepers" from somewhere or other one day, we both immediately started singing the obscure Beach Boys song of the same name. We were both eccentric to the core, and he was a true kindred spirit.

Shortly after he and Evil Jim finally settled in Williamsburg, Billy launched his own record label, Slutfish. This label's primary purpose was to release records by, you guessed it, Billy Syndrome. I don't know where the hell he found the money to do it (he sometimes claimed it was because he'd put himself on a diet consisting almost entirely of Kraft Dinner and cheap beer), but for awhile in the mid-90s it seemed like he had a new single out every time you turned around. Often on colored vinyl, always pressed in the smallest of quantities, and distributed almost exclusively around Williamsburg by Billy himself, those Slutfish sides are all rarer than your average Misfits singles today. He also released several vinyl albums and full-length CDs under his own name and with projects like the JFK Jr. Royal Airforce and Mummies of the Insane. They reveal a wealth of indescribable insanities of every stripe, rolling punk, psych, folk, r&b, hiphop, and noise into one big fat blunt and topping it off with his unhinged persona and otherworldly world vision.

At his best, in songs like "Fish in the Rain" and "No Power," he was so catchy he had you singing along. Sometimes, admittedly, he could be indulgent and downright unlistenable. But he was always interesting no matter what he was doing. This hit-or-miss quality applied to Billy's live shows as well, but even at his worst, you couldn't take your eyes off him onstage. To me he was the single most unsung outsider music legend there ever was. (Irwin Chusid, please take note.) Billy was also a very talented artist as well as musician, doing all the artwork for his releases himself, and I still have fond memories of laughing till I cried binge-reading the entire series of issues of his ultra-rare mid-80s underground comic book Puss The Cat, perhaps the funniest comic book series I've ever read in my life. (Seriously, someone needs to get them online in PDF form. Now.)

When the internet became part of our lives, Billy and I took to communicating via AOL Instant Messenger, and in the later years of our friendship we had dozens of long, insane online chats, some of which I still have the printed transcripts of. He was always hilarious and down to earth and happy to share his thoughts about current cultural and world events. We still saw each other sporadically at shows until I first moved to Florida in the summer of 2004. The following summer I went back home for a month, visiting as many friends as I could. I saw Billy three times that month, in the audience at a partial reunion of the MC5 in Central Park, and onstage as a member of Brian Wilson Shock Treatment and JFK Jr. Royal Airforce, those last two in the final week of my stay. We enjoyed some quality time together which I would ultimately be very thankful for. It would also be the last time I would see him in full health.

Not long after my return to Florida from that month back in NYC in late August '05, I received word that Billy had suffered a stroke just five days after I'd last seen him. He was in a coma for two weeks, eventually being transferred from Mount Sinai to the Park Terrace Care Center in Queens after regaining consciousness. The general lack of online info about Billy was frustrating as fuck, and ultimately led me back to NYC a couple months later to check up on him. I wound up moving back home for awhile the following year, in part to monitor Billy's progress and take it upon myself to create the online coverage on him no one else seemed willing to bother with. I began a series of news updates on the original version of this blog I'd spun off from my now-defunct Myspace profile, which attracted the attention of the publisher of the short lived antifolk fanzine Urban Folk, for whom I ultimately wrote a piece on Billy's plight, fleshed out with quotes from emails he had sent me about his condition.

Things were never the same for Billy after his stroke. He was paralyzed on one side, wheelchair-bound, and living on a meager disability pittance. The first time I visited him in the hospital I understood about every third word he said. He eventually regained his speech, though, and before long it became clear there was another big thing his stroke hadn't robbed him of -- his incredible personality and outlook on life. Once out of rehab, he had many caring friends willing to make sure he was back in the loop, wheeling him to Hawkwind and Brian Wilson concerts within weeks of his discharge. He still managed the occasional live appearance, and did a good job for awhile of continuing to keep in touch with me, though in the last couple of years of his life I began to hear less and less from him and began to worry more and more about him. Billy was not one to make others suffer through his pain and I truly believe only he himself knew the full extent of the pain he was in, because his persona never failed him. It could reasonably be argued that his misfortune only made him more determined to be who he was. Sadly, that determination could only carry him so far, but the fact that he survived another 11 years and 4 months is testament to his not wanting to give up the fight.

The story I have just told only scratches the surface of Billy Syndrome's life and what it was like to know him. He was truly one of the nicest guys I've ever known in my life, and perhaps even number one in that respect. Billy was humble, modest, wickedly funny, deeply spiritual, philosophical, positive, and just plain cool. Music was his religion from cradle to grave. He lived his life fearlessly and unapologetically, truly believing in his vision every step of the way, even post-stroke. On top of all that, he was the truest of New Yorkers, never leaving his city and even remaining in Williamsburg as it changed all around him. When I wrote about him for Urban Folk, I was quick to note that antifolk music was already firmly in the hands of the next generation, and made damn sure those newbies got the point in the course of one simple sentence which summed it all up in a nutshell: "Billy Syndrome was antifolk long before you were, and has taken its very definition to extremes you never will." Indeed I think that says it all.

Bill Ogilvie was a friend of mine. I consider myself truly fortunate that he was a part of my world. I know he is in a much more cosmic place now, and I take comfort in that and all of the amazing and incredible music he gave us. Thank you, Billy, for everything and more. See you on the other side, brother.

(Please feel free to share your memories of Billy Syndrome in the comments!)