This is about how I became a punk rocker. Although I don’t really like the term “punk rocker”. A lot of people don’t understand what punk rock is. It really doesn’t have anything to do with a musical style. I mean, Public Enemy is punk rock. Good Charlotte is not.
Anyway, I always hung around with a bunch of guys who were into music. We liked what’s now called classic rock, some of it might have been considered heavy metal back then, stuff like Zeppelin, Sabbath, The Who, and Alice Cooper. We started smoking weed when we were pretty young, maybe sixth or seventh grade. My friend George’s sister, Evelyn was in high school and she would get it for us. Evelyn had a boyfriend who was a total fuckin’ stoner, crazy long hair, maybe a mustache. We looked up to this goof. He was taking Evelyn to see Rush at the Aragon. He got us tickets and we took the “L” down there from Skokie. Max Webster and Cheap Trick opened the show. We laughed at Cheap Trick. Who the fuck were these guys with that ridiculous looking guitarist and that fat slob on drums?
Later the next summer Van Halen was the big thing. We played the shit out of that first record. My friend Dave had an older brother, Eddie. We hated Eddie and he hated us. We all thought Eddie was a weird kid. Sometimes we sneaked into his room and stole his pot. Dave had to go to Hebrew school. Fuckin’ Eddie didn’t attend temple. When Dave asked his dad why not, he said, “Eddie is a different type of Jewish boy.” The summer we were cranking “Jamie’s Cryin’” and “Runnin’ With The Devil”, Eddie had picked up this record by a band called the Sex Pistols. We thought it sucked. We mocked that shitty band and Eddie mercilessly.
When we got to high school our bad habits intensified. My parents sent me to Catholic school to keep me away from my cretinous friends. It didn’t really work. I got a job as a busboy at Cas & Lou’s restaurant. I quickly got promoted to cook. All the guys I was working with in the kitchen were older, some in their twenties. They would take me drinking with them after work. Now I had new cretinous friends who were old enough to buy booze.
My friend, Willie had begun to play guitar. He had an old acoustic but he didn’t know very much. A girl named Laura Vogel lived around the corner from me and she played the guitar. She taught Willie a few chords and he showed me and another friend, John Ortega. I think John is a brain surgeon now. Around the same time we met this guy, Tom who worked at A&P with another friend of ours. He was way into music and had gone to a lot of concerts. We hit it off right away. He always had on a black concert t-shirt for bands like UFO and Pat Travers. He eventually earned the nickname “Travers” because of one of those t-shirts.
Tom was a drummer. He lived in Rogers Park across from the drum shop owned by Barrett Deems and helped out around the store on occasion in exchange for lessons. Deems had played with Louis Armstrong and had once been considered the world’s fastest drummer. He supposedly played so fast at a gig in South America that it caused a riot. Tom played nothing like him.
We started getting together in John or Willie’s basement and playing simple covers. Stuff like “Good Lovin’” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”. One day we wrote an “original” that was just a basic blues shuffle. In the lyrics, I played the part of an old man with a much younger girlfriend who he couldn’t keep up with in the bedroom. It was called “65 Year Old Heart”. I wish I had a version of it on tape. It was fucking ridiculous. I was doing my idea of an imitation of an old black guy from Mississippi. But I quickly abandoned that. It just didn’t feel sincere. I decided that for better or for worse- and it was probably worse- I was gonna “sing” in my own voice. None of this Mick Jagger minstrelsy bullshit. And no English accents either. To this day I hate when American singers affect English accents. It’s something that has kept me from liking Green Day and Guided By Voices more.
Outside of
Who’s Next (Teenage Wasteland, maaaan), I was never that much of a Who fan. But this kid who was in my homeroom and my Spanish class named Bob Hague was an absolute Who fanatic. He talked about them all the time. I somehow lost my book for Spanish class and the teacher, Terry Ehardt, who was a pretty cool guy, let me look on with Hague for the rest of the year without replacing my book. Hague convinced me that the Who were worth further exploration. I became a little consumed with the band myself, especially the early stuff. I played the fuckin’ grooves off
Meaty, Beaty, Big, and Bouncy.
Our band didn’t have a name yet. Our friends simply referred to us as “the band” (lower case). We would get some guy in his twenties to cop beer for us at the Buy-Low on Howard Street and go down in the basement to jam. A guy Tom knew from Sullivan High School, Steve Hendrix started hanging around and would bring speed on occasion. We would be jumping around like crazy. Willie and I became obsessed with “I Can’t Explain”. We played it constantly. We played it faster than the Who. We were becoming a punk band and we didn’t even know it.
I was tired of messing around with blues scales and I thought I would try to write something more like “I Can’t Explain”. That’s how “Julia Child” came about. Willie loved it and one day he started the song off with the harmonics. It made it seem quirkier and I really liked that.
https://soundcloud.com/joe-orr-road-rod/julia-childI also wrote a song called “Jack the Ripper”. Even in her early teens my sister was fascinated by mass murderers and serial killers. My mom used to joke that we should all sleep with one eye open because we might be living with Lizzie Borden. My sister had a lot of books about these maniacs. I must have read one about Jack the Ripper that inspired me to write the song. Eventually the lyrics focused on one of his victims, an East End prostitute named Long Liz Stride. At the time I was crazy in love with a tall girl named Liz who was dating some douchebag. The song came to be about my frustrations and feelings about her. Who knows how the mind of a fifteen year old boy works. These would come to be the songs the Maggots were built around, but at the time we were just trying to blow off some aggression and make our friends laugh. We never thought about playing an actual live show.
I had saved up the money I didn’t spend on records and the spring after I turned sixteen I bought a ’76 Toyota Celica. We would drive around getting high and yelling shit out the windows at people. This ultimately led to my arrest in Schaumburg with an open bottle of vodka in the car. Afterward, I wrote D.U.I. on my acoustic guitar. It got electrified, louder, and faster and would become a staple of our live set. In fact, it even carried over to Hazardous Youth. [EDIT: I just listened to the song and I realized it was a '69 Nova that I bought from my co-worker at the restaurant, Hugo, that we got busted in on Plum Grove Road (
Stereo's blastin', my Nova's unwound/That Schaumburg cop just shut me down). At the time, I think I wanted an American muscle car and the Toyota didn't exactly fit the bill. I think Hugo sold it to me for $600 and let me pay in installments.]
https://soundcloud.com/joe-orr-road-rod/the-maggots-duihttps://soundcloud.com/joe-orr-road-rod ... outh-d-u-iAround this time there were a few punk bands starting up in Evanston, the Seismic Waves, the Bloody Nails, among others. These guys would play shows at the Hemenway Church on Chicago and Main. One Friday we decided to go to one. That’s where I saw Articles of Faith for the first time. That show changed my life. I always had the idea about playing in a band, but I just couldn’t really play. Punk rock freed me from those thoughts. I was never going to play like an English rock star, but maybe I could play like one of those Dagos in AoF. Probably not, but we didn’t need to be even that good. There were lots of bands on the scene that weren’t. You just had to have intensity and something to say. All of a sudden it was like, “Hey, we can do this!” When we got back to the basement, we wouldn’t be playing the blues anymore.
Suddenly I understood what Eddie was doing listening to
Never Mind The Bollocks a few summers earlier. I had started going to Record City to buy albums every Friday when I got paid. That’s where I met Eric Brockman. He was this little dude with a spiky haircut. I had no idea at the time that he was in a band, but we would talk about music and the newest records that had come in. At first I had been in there looking for bootlegs or the latest classic rock type stuff. Now I gravitated to the punk section. Eric suggested I buy
Flex Your Head. I liked the power, but it wasn’t really my thing just yet. There really weren’t any melodies. I started to buy records if I thought they had a cool cover. That’s how I ended up discovering Doggystyle. And Reagan Youth.
Then one day I went in and saw
Sorry Ma and I knew it had to be a great record. I took it home and played the whole thing. It was a revelation. It had the power of those punk bands from D.C. and L.A. but there were melodies and classic rock song structures. I was in love.
I realized that I could relate a lot better to some working class kid banging an E chord over and over and singing about shit that I was going through than I could to some millionaire living in a castle and flying on his own private jet, but I still liked bands like Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. The audience at these punk shows made a big display of mocking the stuff that was popular on FM radio. The whole idea of a “rock star” was ridiculed. That first time I saw Articles of Faith, Joe Scuderi played the riff to “Dazed and Confused” and the crowd all bowed to him in a show of making fun of the big English rock stars. I didn’t feel that way. I loved Jimmy Page. I vowed that when we got out of the basement (and it didn’t take us long) we wouldn’t have that attitude. But we walked a fine line. The skinheads and punk rockers thought we were making fun of these songs, but we had a sincere love for them. Most people would say Hazardous Youth was a better band than the Maggots. We could certainly play a lot better from a technical standpoint. But when I listen back to this stuff, the Maggots were the real deal. Sixteen and seventeen year olds slashin’ and burnin’. We weren’t fuckin’ poseurs.
https://soundcloud.com/joe-orr-road-rod ... -were-herehttps://soundcloud.com/joe-orr-road-rod ... lotta-love
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