11 Dec The Road Crew – Part Four

As we rejoin the Road Crew for installment Numero Quatro the Cretins prepare to hit the stage for a club gig in lovely Wichita, Kansas. Beano searches for the perfect snare drum sound, the Goof and Ink reminisce about the lovely dumps they’ve played, and the convoluted back story of the Cretins is at last revealed. Love it or hate it, keep those cards and letters coming in, Gentle Reader(s)—unless they’re ‘cease and desist’ letters, in which case please contact my solicitors at the firm of Dewey Cheatham & Howe. Thank you.

Part Four

The illustrious venue for this, our gig of an early summer Wichita evening, was saddled with the mystifying and unfortunate name of Croaker’s. The big illuminated sign out front featured a green cartoon frog wearing a golden crown. It was the generic sort of music and dance club that one found clinging to the margins of second and third-tier cities around the country, struggling to be hip and laboring (with limited success, a surfeit of ferns be damned) to maintain a veneer of classiness. Albuquerque certainly had its share as well. Like most such places, Croaker’s was located in a nondescript strip mall on a commercial thoroughfare in a large single-story rectangular space that had probably once been home to an auto parts franchise or an arts & crafts emporium.

Croaker’s had a fairly proper raised stage centered at the far end of the main room, a rather shabby dressing/storage room to the back of that, and a house sound system that at least appeared like it should be sufficient to our purposes. The dance floor—one raised portion of which was constructed from translucent plexiglass and lit from below, ala Saturday Night Fever—was outfitted with motorized disco lighting across its expanse but the stage lighting was practically nonexistent. There were a handful of floods with colored gels taped over them and the lighting board was more of a lighting box—a crude wooden object obviously slapped together in someone’s garage, spray painted black, with a couple of useless round rheostats but no faders and a lot of on/off switches. Vinnie was disgusted, as he often was, muttering to himself and shaking his head as he dragged an aluminum step ladder around the stage to aim the lights as we set up the gear.

‘Whaddya say, Ink?’ said the Goof as I was lining up the Marshalls. ‘Where ya figure this joint rates on the great Dump-o-Meter?’

‘Not so bad,’ I said. ‘Two and a half. Maybe three, max.’

‘Oooh—feeling generous of spirit today I see. But come on, dude—Croaker’s?’ The Goof mimed sticking a finger down his throat and made retching sounds.

‘Yeah, but we’ve played worse. Way worse, actually. I mean, Woody’s fer crissakes! That place is a total hell-hole!’

‘Yeah, yeah, but Woody’s is back home, so that doesn’t count.’

‘Okay, how about that place in Cruces—the Hitchin’ Post?’

‘You didn’t like the Hitchin’ Post? C’mon Ink, the Post was AWESOME!’

‘It was a dump, Goof—a straight up DUMP! Perhaps that cocktail waitress you hooked up with is coloring your recollection a bit.’

‘Ahhh yes, dear sweet Charlene—whatta doll! I should send her a postcard—remind me when we get to some town worthy of a postcard.’

‘I think it was Marlene, actually.’

‘Marlene, Charlene, Darlene—whatever. Definitely worthy of a 13-cent investment.’

Croaker’s was the kind of small/medium size gig where I occasionally took over the sound board from the in-house guy but that was at least partially reliant upon the flexibility of the in-house guy—if there was one. Some of them couldn’t care less and were more than content to point out a few quirks of the PA system and the board and then go home for a few hours or fuck off at the bar for the rest of the evening. Others were way more prickly and couldn’t bear to have anyone else touching their holy mic stands or their precious platinum-plated knobs and faders or twiddling with their allegedly perfect EQ settings. With a minimal crew such as ours these scenarios always presented a bit of a trade-off: I knew the band and the band’s repertoire, but the house guys knew their systems. Of course the Goof always preferred to have me onstage.

I usually jumped at the opportunity to mix sound for the band but what I didn’t like was the unpredictability of the PA systems we encountered on the road. Some of them were straightforward, professionally assembled brand name systems of relatively recent vintage, in which case I felt pretty confident manning the controls. Others were weird conglomerations of components that had been cobbled together across the years from hand-me-downs and pawn shop parts, the mixing consoles wired up in obscure ways by nightclub-dwelling Dr. Frankenstein mad scientist sorts. Such systems were a total minefield and I strongly preferred leaving these to the hands of those intimately familiar with their myriad idiosyncrasies.

On the occasions when there was no in-house sound guy on hand Vinnie would be pressed into duty to lurk in the wings in case of onstage emergencies while I ran the mixing board. Whatever lighting there was would just have to take care of itself. It would probably take Vinnie 45 minutes to change a guitar string if his life depended on it, but he could at least hand the Goof the backup Strat and handle Shoe duties should the #1 Bassman decide to start acting out. I had tried to instruct him in the proper range of velocity with which to wield the Shoe, but I didn’t really trust anyone other than myself with such a specialized task. Vinnie considered activities such as beating guitar amplifiers with footwear as beneath his exalted status as illumination artiste, so it was a no-other-viable-options type scenario.

Croaker’s house sound guy was an easy-going 30-something named Nick and he didn’t seem to care much one way or the other as to who handled the board. We stood side by side as the band ran through the sound check and I set the levels while Nick tweaked the twin graphic EQs mounted in the rack to the left of the board. We got the reverb settings on the vocal mics where the Goof liked them, tweaked the monitor mix while the band signaled up or down from the stage. Like most of these smaller gigs there was no separate system for the stage mix and everything was controlled by sub outs from the main board. Things had fallen into place quickly and when the band finished their usual four song warmup I went over to the stage to check in with the Goof.

‘How’s it sound out there?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ I said, ‘kinda boomy with no one here. It’ll be good once we get the crowd in.’

‘IF we get a crowd in. Supposedly we’ve been getting some airplay, so we’ll see. How about the sound guy… Vic?’

‘Nick,’ I said. ‘He’s totally fine. You want me onstage or on the mix tonight?’

‘Why don’t you hang at the board for a couple of songs and if everything seems cool come back to the stage. I haven’t broken a string in a while and I think tonight might be the night. What is the price of freedom, Grasshopper?’

‘Eternal vigilance, Goof.’

‘Correct, my son!’

Rob, as usual, had been perfectly happy with what he was hearing and went off to see if he could find a house phone somewhere to mooch a call back home to his girl or his parents.

Beano, as usual, wanted to tweak the sound of his snare some more. This was a core tenet of his ‘I Am A Rock Star’ canon: Don’t come off as being too easy going with outsiders—the whole nit-picking perfectionist thing. He felt duty-bound to rake the venue staff over the coals a bit, if only as a matter of principle.

He sat behind the kit and whacked away at his snare, talking back and forth with Nick at the board.

‘Roll a bit off the high end, please.’

Whack whack whack

‘Actually, bring the highs back where they were and roll the mids down a little.’

Whack whack whack

‘Sounds a bit thin now, bring the mids back up…’

Whack whack whack

‘Was that the high mids or low mids?’

(Nick: ‘I only have one midrange on this board, not high mids and low mids.’)

‘Really? Ohhhkay… wow. Well, I think we’re getting a bit of ring around 400k…’

Whack whack whack

I didn’t think Beano even knew what 400k meant—I suspected it was just something he had picked up somewhere along the line in order to sound technologically sophisticated.

The whacking went on for several minutes with Nick doing his best to be patient and accommodating.

‘Hey, Ink,’ Beano said into the mic, ‘Come up and run through the kit for me—I want to listen to it from the house.’

I was standing next to the sound board riser and Nick leaned down and whispered ‘Is he always like this?’

I gave him a look of weary exasperation and walked over to the stage.

Given the layout of the place and the rather rudimentary stage amenities it was readily apparent that live music was not Croaker’s primary focus. It was a dance club, first and foremost, so the gigs were scheduled relatively early in the evening. In such situations it was always a possibility that our gig might present an unwelcome intrusion for the local dance floor enthusiasts. The notion had been discussed briefly during the sound check and it was decided that our two sets should be calibrated to emphasize the songs with the more dance-friendly tempos. If that strategy seemed to be eliciting a good response from the audience the Goof would cue Rob and Beano to vamp the instrumental sections out longer than usual. The Cretins didn’t play dance music, per se, but we aimed to please… at least in theory. One way or the other, it was always better to look out in the audience and see people actually moving around instead of just standing there gawping.

Gawping: Not good. Booing and giving us the finger: Worse. Booing, giving us the finger and throwing things: Gig over.

After the sound check a couple of DJs who claimed to have been pumping up the Cretins on the local New Wave-y-friendly FM rock radio station presented themselves backstage to bask in our mutual celebrity. The plan was that they would go onstage to introduce the band, hype their station and throw t-shirts and bumper stickers to the slavering crowd. These would be their t-shirts and bumper stickers, not Cretins t-shirts or bumper stickers. We didn’t actually possess any band t-shirts other than the ones on our own backs, and I wasn’t even considered worthy to possess one of those.

What precious little promo merch the Cretins had was to be parsed carefully with an eye towards producing either favorable publicity with someone actually in a position to provide it, or, on the rare occasion, eliciting favorable attention from whatever susceptible young females as should ill-advisedly wander into the band’s sphere of influence.

We had absolutely zero Cretins-branded tote bags, coffee mugs, water bottles, tea towels, beer koozies, hoodies, baseball caps, onesies for the tykes, ear trumpets, brass knuckles or whatever to flog to the masses. Our pathetic stash of Cretins goodies was limited to a box or two of promo vinyl and a handful of band buttons.

The Cretins’ vinyl output was limited yet somewhat complicated due to the band’s rather volatile history. The Cretins had recorded one full-length album about two years previous when the band—initially a quartet with two guitarist/vocalists—had gone through a period of turbulence and tumult and had emerged from the scrum as a Goof-less trio. This was the big scary skeleton in the band’s collective closet that everyone pointedly did their best to avoid addressing.

The Goof had founded the Cretins in 1977 as trio named Nouveau. Matt DeLonge had joined as a second guitarist and vocalist in ‘78 and, in a bow to the burgeoning punk movement, the band rechristened themselves the Cretins shortly thereafter. The original bass player, Scotto, had been replaced by Rob in 1979, but Scotto remained a close associate and occasional musical collaborator of the Goof’s and mine. Matt DeLonge was an excellent counterpoint to the Goof, artistically if not temperamentally. His guitar style was very precise and articulate and contrasted well with the Goof’s wilder, more emotive approach. Together, they presented a truly formidable combination of six-string virtuosity, unmatched by any other group on the scene. Matt and the Goof were both able to handle complex time signatures and intricate intermeshing guitar parts and they pushed one another to write strange, lyrically surreal songs that defied easy categorization. They were both good singers and, with Beano—then still a runty kid in his mid-teens—executed seamless three-part vocal harmonies that gave some of the songs a pop-ish gloss.

The four-piece Cretins slashed and burned away for a couple of years, solidifying their position on the scene and generating a lot of local buzz. They were a strange but compelling band and they accrued a dedicated following that attended every local gig, religiously. Decades later, people still spoke in awed tones of the four-piece incarnation of the Cretins as the best band that the Albuquerque scene had ever produced.

Precious little documentation existed of the quartet’s short-lived heyday—just a handful of radio station studio tracks taped during a live broadcast and some wildly energetic concert recordings—but this modest sampling was sufficient to demonstrate the band’s  berserk flair and jackhammer approach to complex material.

I had only seen the Cretins play once as a quartet and they had both impressed and confused me. I held quality musicianship in high regard and the Cretins were certainly accomplished players, but I just couldn’t quite figure out what it was that they were trying to do.

They wore wacky outfits (I recall Matt decked out in an oversized bow tie, a brocaded lime green polyester sport coat, baggy checkerboard pants with suspenders, and saddle shoes) and their performances regularly incorporated Dada-esque performance art antics. One song featured an instrumental interlude augmented by the amplified sound of the Goof smashing crockery in a box with a hammer. At the gig I attended the Goof and Matt broke flea market black velvet paintings of Elvis and the Pope over each other’s heads and wore them for the duration of the set. The songs were intricate with knotty guitar parts and complex polyrhythms and the band was very loud and quite intense with hammering high energy tempos.

Despite a variety of nods toward a punky sensibility the Cretins were definitely not punks—they were way too artsy fartsy and technically adept for the boots and braces crowd. Nonetheless, Albuquerque’s aspiring punk rockers took them to heart and did their best to thrash about at Cretins gigs in the approved manner that they had read about in Creem or Rolling Stone or had seen demonstrated on Quincy.

The band’s friends, a fair number of whom were—gasp!—hippies, were well-represented at Cretins gigs and the result was a mixed bag of longhairs, shorthairs, hipsters and hippie holdouts. The truth of the matter was that both the Goof and Matt had, at one point, been—gasp!—hippies themselves. If accused of such a transgression they probably would have denied it but there existed conclusive photographic documentation of this regrettable lapse in judgement. Having seen the evidence, I knew the horrible truth.

The Goof had met Tammy Sutherland in 1977 in a period during which he was employed as a salesman and detailer at a used car lot on East Central. He married her the following year and the two of them set up house somewhere in the Northeast Heights. She was a diminutive West Texas girl from Muleshoe with permed blonde hair, sharp features and oversized rimless glasses. I never quite understood what the great attraction was. By my reckoning, dozens of girls showed up at virtually every Cretins gig that were at least as pretty and stylish as Tammy, but then I had never really talked to her beyond ‘Hello’ and only clapped eyeballs on the woman a handful of times. She might have been a world class gymnast, spoken five languages and held a doctorate in theoretical nuclear physics for all I knew.

Whatever the particulars of Tammy’s mysterious charms, it transpired that their appeal was not restricted solely to the Goof. Matt DeLonge soon became enamored with Tammy and the feeling turned out to be mutual. Tammy eventually became disenchanted with the Goof’s various spousal deficiencies, unpredictable mood swings and wild man ways. Come 1979 an affair had ensued between Matt and Tammy and not too long thereafter the Goof had become aware of this indiscretion. Harsh recriminations were exchanged betwixt and between all parties concerned, followed by fisticuffs between Matt and the Goof. The Goof’s fisticuffs were augmented with the thicker portion of a pool cue. Dismay and ballyhoo all around. Tammy initiated divorce proceedings and, despite being the ostensible aggrieved party, the Goof ended up getting booted from both his marital home and from the band of which he was the founding member.

Home-wrecker though he may have been, Matt was undoubtedly the more stable option for the band when it came down to an either/or decision between him and the Goof. After a few rehearsals it was determined that Matt could hold his own as sole guitarist and lead vocalist and the Cretins continued on as a trio.

It had been around this time that Sonny Ulrich had arrived on the scene with his wealth (the source of which was the subject of much conjecture), ambition, and semi-imaginary management/record company Recording Empire Americana in tow. Smelling opportunity, he had signed the the three-piece version of the Cretins to a recording and management contract.

With a combination of pre-existing and newly composed material in hand, Beano, Rob and Matt hunkered down in a small recording studio in a dusty, semi-derelict village south of Santa Fe to produce the group’s eponymous debut LP. The result was a mixed bag. There were three or four strong songs on the record, a few unremarkable ones, and a couple of quirky, quasi-comic tracks that seemed bafflingly out of place on an album by a band that otherwise skewed towards hard-driving but melodic alt-rock. The production dynamics were strangely flat, as if the album had been recorded inside of a closet stuffed with down comforters. The playing and singing were certainly strong enough but nothing on the album really jumped out of the grooves, demanding the airwaves and compulsive repeat listenings.

The album had elicited a handful of brief mentions from national music publications but the overall response was muted—perplexed, perhaps. The recording’s unexpressive sonic architecture and the band’s lack of a clearly defined aesthetic were cited as inhibiting factors.

A year later the Goof-less Cretins followed up the LP with a four-song promotional EP that was distributed to radio stations and the record industry. Once again, the response was… subdued. The collective shrug it elicited along with growing internal friction over the band’s direction resulted in Matt’s decision to leave the group.

This opened the door for the reinstatement of the Goof, who had been playing around town in the interim with his own well-regarded band—a venture in which I was heavily complicit. He had been busily composing songs during his exile and he brought this material with him upon his return to the fold. The Goof signed on with Sonny Ulrich and with the prodigal son back in his rightful place the Cretins forged ahead once again, now as a Matt-less three-piece combo.

Some of the songs from the Cretins album and the EP had remained in the reconstituted trio’s set lists but the Goof was less than enthusiastic about much of the recorded material. He claimed to have written several of the songs on the debut album—the ones that the band still played—even though he had not been credited as a composer. Not surprisingly, he was also unenthusiastic about handing out copies of the two records as well as the band’s promo button: All of them featured the unsmiling black & white mugs of Beano, Rob and Matt (apparently, the directive from Sonny for the photo sessions had been to ‘Look SERIOUS!’).

Nary a Goof visage to be found on any of the merch.

Presented with a copy of the LP or EP or a band button, those unaware of the Cretins’ complicated back story would inevitably scrutinize the three faces and inquire of the Goof ‘Which one is you?’

Never a welcome question.