Section The Pittsburgh Press Sunday, July 26, 1981 Lively Arts Theaters ..1-6 Presstige Events 4 Books & Music ..7-9 Travel 10-14 6 7 t 10 II btaf-S-IPunk Rock Bands And Their Fans Are Pretty Tame Here By GARY BRADFORD Scene: Around 10:30 on a Friday Bight at the Electric Banana on Bigelow Boulevard in Oakland. Its a tiny, cramped bar. The "stage" is part of the floor. The . Five, one the city's premier punk rock bands, is charging through its first set of the evening. n EAD SINGER Reed ("my last 1 1 name doesn't matter") is try-U ing to liven the few spectators, but they are more interested in drinking and listening to the band's throbbing, bass and drum-heavy sounds than dancing to it. The public, which often thinks "freaks'1 with purple crewcuts and razor blades through their nostrils are the only ones attracted to the loud, abrasive rock 'n' roll known as punk, would be surprised to see this polite, blue-jeaned, early-evening gathering. Reed short, thii and dressed In a billowing white shirt, tight black pants and boots snarls at the audience, bnt bo one will dance. . Is this really a punk bar? Aside from a few girls with scraggly, "spike" hairdos, most of the listen ers would seem to be more at home in college hangouts like Peter's Pub or the wooden Keg. Even Johnny Zarra, the Banana's owner, appears out of place. With his shaved head, Jimmy Cagney-ish voice and white-on-white clothes, he should be more comfortable in an Atlantic City casino than where he is. But he isn't. "I think the punk movement is going pretty strong here," he said. sThe music took me a while to get used to, but now I like it. Mine was the first joint to advertise punk exclusively." BUT WHERE are the boys and girls with green and orange hair and ' safety pins or other ornaments through their noses? Where's the savage "slam-dancing" of the Los Angeles punk clubs, where dancers collide at top speed on the dance floor and crash into bystanders. "That's becoming like a thing of the past," Zarra said. "It never really caught on here, anyway. Most of the kids I see are well-read college students. A lot of them are from Carnegie-Mellon." In the mid-1960s, the Banana (then the Spot Light) showcased go-go dancers. Then it became a black-oriented disco. But now it's home to punk or "new wave" groups like the Cardboards, Carsickness, Mission of Burma and The Five. Their music is rhythmic, laced with electronics with ironic, sometimes obscene, often improvised lyrics. "We like things to be strong. Reed said. "It's hard to put a handle on anything, but we like to sound mean and aggressive and get a reaction. "I'd rather have somebody hate us than be totally numb with us." While the audience remains numb and "cool" during The Five's first set, it's time to find out where punk in Pittsburgh started ... THE PUNK MOVEMENT in general grew out of the discontent of British lower-middle-class youth during the mid-'70s. Musicians like the Sex Pistols and The Jam played harsh, "primitive" music with "anti-love" lyrics to bring back an energy they felt was lacking in mainstream rock music. Wt 4 Ha V -V if fr ," - i l ;i$Y ' '"I 1 mm The waitings of Reed of The Five get a reaction from punk rock fans at the Electric Banana in Oakland. "We like to be mean and aggressive," says Reed, but the punk rock scene here is tame compared to Los Angeles and New York. Punk, which some critics say actually began with glitter-drenched American bands like Alice Cooper and the New York Dolls, filtered to America and caught on in New York and Los Angeles. Smaller cities, such as Pittsburgh and Cleveland, developed grassroots bands and audiences. W.T. Koltek, who calls himself the first local disc jockey (at WYEP-FM in Oakland) to play English and New York punk music, said the punk movement surfaced here about three years ago. 1 "Pittsburgh has never had an indigenous music scene, unlike Cleveland," he said. "It has always been a matter of bands playing the top 40 hits. But around 1978, the New York and English punk bands got the attention of some Pittsburgh kids who felt they could do the same type of music." Phase Three, a Swissvale nightclub, was the rallying point for the new wave. Reed, 26, a Brooklyn native and now leader of The Five, first hung out there and later booked acts at the club after "sobering up" and dropping out of Carnegie-Mellon University. "Phase Tlu$e gave people a place to congregate and meet one another," he said. "I was hooked up with a group called the Apes of God. But none of the local bands could play at Phase Three, so that's why I insinuated myself there and was able to book acts that I wanted, to give them some legitimacy." But, Reed said, the owners eventually shied away from the bands he brought in and turned the club into a "strip joint" The place later burned down. The punk bands found few places to play outside Of private parties. "We'd get busted by the cops every week and sometimes thrown in jail," Reed said. THE EARLY BANDS included the Shut-Ins, the Cuts and the Puke, who eventually appeared on local TV, Koltek said. "The Puke was the definitive embodiment of punk," he said. "Pat D. Hearse, Barney Scum on guitars and Bill Board on bass drum really took it as a joke and a sort of way to get back at the kids who gave them a hard time in high school. "They did songs like, 'I Want to Kidnap a French Industrialist' and 'When I Get Bored, I Play One Chord ("I play one note to get your goat").' A lot of the early appeal of punk was that you didn't have to be a good musician, as long as you could bash away. "It was a very cohesive thing at one time and the bands all knew each other, which may be because of the party nature of the thing. It was more a question of energy, rather than musicianship. Now, the Cardboards, Carsickness and The Five "wm ' WISH th xt ' ' 40-: yy.: "fcWftS I'&l s ' tfM"'S Vv Press Photos by John Heller Kim Troiani of Mt. Lebanon is the lead singer for The Five, one of several punk rock groups making a ripple in Pittsburgh's music scene. When the public thinks of punk rock, it has an image of purple crewcuts and obnoxious behavior, but in Pittsburgh, the fans have mostly been polite and blue-jeaned. have developed into quite good players." Good players or not, punk groups still find it difficult to survive financially In Pittsburgh. Reed, who said he's "unemployable," lives above an art gallery with some fellow band members. In his bedroom cluttered with empty liquor bottles, heaps of clothing, musical instruments a cassette tape of The Five's movie soundtrack plays loudly. "The film is called 'Knifepoint' and it's a Grade B, trash remake of 'Los Olvidados.' It was made locally by Rich Morocco and has lots of blood." Reed is always scrounging for gigs or trying to set up recording sessions for The Five. Other than the Banana and Charlie's 10 Cents Bar in Swissvale, there are no local clubs that consistently book punk bands. Or "independents," as Reed prefers to call them. "Punk, like rockabilly, is an easy genre term to me," he said. "Calling The Five, Black Flag, Mission of Burma and Spandau Ballet all punk is like looking at every item in this room and calling it 'Fred.' Punk is a catch-all phrase. "1 DON'T THINK there was ever any real punk movement here. It was just a new attitude. The common ground is that it's a grass roots thing involving independent record labels ... "People realize they can put out a single on their own and promote and manage their own gigs. You can actually now get gigs playing your own stuff, where before it was impossible to get one if you weren't a Top 40 cover band." The Five has privately recorded a 43 rpm single and Carsickness has an album out, but Reed feels the city's conservative atmosphere may be a hindrance to the growth of "independent" music. "I don't think Pittsburgh is low-class or blue-collar, but I do think it's ignorant, xenophobic and scared of anything different. It's traditionally years behind anywhere else . . . (Continued on Page E-5.)