The Quincy Punx Part 1 - Inception and Birth

So I'm going to end up writing a lot about this band, and for a number of reasons. The first being it fits into all three categories that I plotted in my first post. The next, and main reason is I've been a member of the band since it's inception, and for the most part have seen it through to the end, or what will ultimately be the end. The band was created by Dave DePriest, Bob Wood, and myself straight out of high school.

 Bob and Dave are two years older than me, they were done in '88. I was of the class of '90, but I tested out for my G.E.D. in '89. We all went to Highland Park Sr. High School where I hung out with Bob occasionally, but at the time I didn't know Dave very well.

 I went to high school through the '80's. And I started my high school career heavily into hard rock bands from the 70's with an ever present touch of metal. Bands like Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Aerosmith, Zeppelin, Hendrix, The Who, the Stones, and metal bands like Motorhead, Venom, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Ozzy's new "solo" band, (I remember when "Diary"came out) throw in some '60's pop like the Doors, the Animals, the Kinks, Cream and you've got a good idea of how little I was actually exposed to that early on.
Going back to my grade school years I carried a relentless obsession with two bands.

The first album I ever bought.

The first was AC/DC. "If You Want Blood..." was the first record I ever bought. And even though my mom asked at the time "you're not just buying that for the cover, are you?"
I was.
 Some of the other boys in the neighborhood had played "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" for me so I knew I wanted that music, however when I saw that guitar jammed into the guts of Angus Young in a school boy out fit, I promptly put down the copy of "No Mean City" by Nazareth I was holding (again, for the cover, but I'd never actually heard Nazareth) and said to my mom, "yes, I want this one."

 My mom was purchasing a stack of 8-tracks, Abba (a band I've got an almost sick, Tesco Vee thing for), Elvis, the soundtrack for "Hair" and an 8 track by my other obsession, and I got this straight from her, Alice Cooper.
She's told me years later that she used to put on "Welcome To My Nightmare" and sing me to sleep with "Only Women Bleed." I was only three years old in 1975 when it came out, but I guess that's why I've always had a strange familiarity with that album.

I will end up writing a lot more about Alice throughout this bolg, but reading the entire paragraph I just deleted that trailed off from high school to my earlier years of boozing and what-not reminded me to focus on the topic at hand.

Blind Approach Restless Nights

It was about my freshman year that punk rock arrived. In the form of The Clash, Suicidal Tendencies, Black Flag, Dead Kennedy's and the fact that almost every girl I developed a thing for in those days was into Punk. Keep in mind, this was the eighties, and punk and New Wave was exploding everywhere. I suppose some of my very first exposure to Punk, or Hard-Core came from the fact that was in the same school, and class as two members of Blind Approach. Who, by the time I was in 11th grade, had put out a 7" and even toured over the summer.

 I was amazed by this. They ended up releasing 2 7"'s "Restless Nights" in '88, and "New Age" in '89. Their guitar player Matt Henderson went on to eventually play in Agnostic Front. It was through them and a couple others, namely Noah Levy who sat next to me in science class, that I was introduced to local bands like Husker Du and Urban Guerillas, who in 1982 played a dance at my alma matter and were apparently forced to stop half way through because of "inappropriate" behavior.
Noah was one of the first people I talked to in Jr. High that I didn't already know from my old elementary school. He was (and still is) a drummer and we used to talk about drums in class.
He was in a band called Blissful Discharge, who later changed their name simply to Blisscharge. I heard a lot of other kids talk about them and seen their name written on the walls of the hallways but never heard them. I was jealous that he actually HAD a drum kit. I had now been exposed to a local scene.

I became aware of "shows" at places like First Avenue and the 7th St. Entry. Up until this point I had only seen "concerts", like AC/DC at the St. Paul Civic Center or Black Sabbath at the Met. But the Punk kids and the Metal kids didn't really co-exist at my school. I don't think they disliked each other really, they just for the most part didn't mix a lot. I think the kids into Hardcore thought the metal kids were a little silly.

I had dreamed about playing in a band since I was eight years old. I started my first band by recruiting a few other self-proclaimed "scum-bags" when I was fifteen. This sad attempt at a band turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of kids, well, I guess I was the youngest of them, renting a space  to hangout in and drink and do drugs whithout the risk of getting busted by anybody. Which honestly, was something else new and fun to me at the time.

 Sadly, I was led to believe that super human chemical intake and my type of music absolutely had  to go hand in hand. And so it did for many years, but that's a whole other topic. This "band" of mine, never played the same song twice. At least not when I was in it.
 Years later I would look back on that band and loath it for what it ended up as. A pseudo-Nazi Skinhead band, devoid of any merit what so ever. Needless to say, this Jew felt a little out of place. Not only with the swastikas that began hanging on the wall as time went on, but by the lack of any interest in making music. These days I not only don't consider it a band, I just plain don't consider it.

 I was eighteen by the time I started really trying to assemble another band. Me and Bob had gotten together with our friends Andy, or Ronnie from time to time, but nothing ever came out of that but us learning how to play along with one and other to Metallica songs. But Bob was always a choice. He was at least into punk where most everyone else I knew who played, thought punk was crap. Bob got me into some really cool shit like Suicidal Tendencies and the Clash.

I never actually met Dave properly until after I was out of high school. Like I said, I didn't really know him in high school. Two years ahead of me and totally different crowds, Dave walked around Highland as one of those "spikey leather jacket" type punk rockers. Who, oddly enough to me, hung out with the majority of the "preppy" types. He didn't look very approachable. And I'm not sure either crowd thought much of me. I had a handful of pals back at that school, and we kept to our own. But there were only a few real "Punks" at Highland. They were mostly older than me, and their little brothers or sisters were my crowd.

Dave at Highland Sr.

 The first I remember hanging out with Dave, was in a garage drinking beer from a keg, and Dave was drunkenly singing Fear songs. I was just drunk enough to think it sounded great. So I told him he had to be the singer of my band. Even though just a couple of years later he would develop his own style which sounds nothing  like that of Lee Ving. Over the next couple of years me and Dave became really close. Dave got me into a lot of great punk like the Damned, X, 45 Grave, and is single handedly responsible for my deep love of Channel 3. He's the first person that ever played them for me and I became obsessed with them for a time. Right after we began hanging out a lot he gave me a CH3 comp tape he made me for my birthday. I wore the fucker out. And I still don't have all their vinyl! He also turned me on to stuff like the B-52's, Gary Numan, and "Urgh, A Music War!"

I would always meet him halfway between his house and my apartment at the video rental place, we'd get a flick, some beer, and either head to his place or mine and drink and watch cheezy '80's gore flicks, or listen to music.
That's where the Whole "Eat a Bowl of Fuck" thing came from. A bad 80's horror movie called "Night of the Demons."

I'm not sure if he knew Bob from school, or just knew of Bob. But it was Dave and I hanging out in my bedroom at my mothers apartment drinking and spinning records with our mutual, and my best friend Betsy when we came up with the name Quincy Punx. It was if to say "Take this shit about as seriously as you do those stupid punks on Quincy or CHiP's." See that was the point of this band, we were fucking with all the sensitive  P.C. types Ala Meatmen, or Fear.

 Why, because it pissed people off. And to me, that was the point. Punk for the most part had thumbed it's nose at society for over a decade, and we were just doing the same, only to punks. Saying "you are all now boarder-line hippies." And somewhere from that point it was Bob, Dave, and Me.

We ended up using the basement in Bob's parents house as a practice space and we would make boom box recordings with Dave just leaning into the mic on the boom box to hear him because we didn't have a P.A. Our first song - Beer is God.

I was at welding school at the time, 1990, and I took three things home from that experience. First was the ability to weld, heh. Pretty good to. One of the best in the class. Second, a P.A. It was student grant money that paid for our first piece of shit "Partridge Family" looking powered mixer. And two cheap speakers. And last, thats where I met Greg Martin. He told me he played the bass. So I recruited him.
Me and Greg started hanging out a lot at school, ducking out to smoke pot or go to the bar for a while, and when I played some of our crappy recordings for him, he smiled and said "fuck yeah."

So we had a bass player. For about.... three practices.


I remember showing up at school one morning and a couple of the girls I hung out with came up to me and said, "Greg is sick. Really sick" And that's it!  I mean, that's all I'd heard about it. I never was able to contact anyone about it, or find out any information for the longest time. At first we had thought he'd just ditched us. Later on I'd found out this was not the case.
I'm still not sure if he had fallen into a coma, or it was induced, but either way, he was on life support with a feeding tube, a trache (not sure about the spelling on that) and apparently he'd lost all or most of the skin on his body due to some adverse chemical reaction to what he thinks, but can't prove, was shampoo. Most of this I learned after the fact but at the time, I didn't know anything but he was "very sick."

And this is the beginning of what was to be a bit of a "revolving door" of bass players. I think second was Pete. Pete was a really cool guy we all knew just from the "partier/criminal" scene (that we were all a part of to some degree) and for a brief period we were kind of close. Pete made our first t-shirts. They were the Eat A Bowl Of Fuck shirts with a Q on the sleeve.

He'd been down for a couple of practices, we played our first ever shows with him and I think it was actually at one of our first basement shows that he decided he wasn't, well in his words, "meant to do this." I just thought he was particularly fucked up that night and was only having  a drug and/or drink induced form of temporary insanity when he stopped playing and ripped all the strings off his bass.

Quincy Punx circa 1991 (L to R) Bob, Dave, Darryl.

But he never came back. At least that's how I remember it. I can be wrong, or he could have told more to someone else. I still don't really know what happened.
So we ended up taking on Darryl, for what I think was exactly two practices and 3 basement parties. Another one of the partier/criminal types that we all grew up with and actually, he had played in my first attempt at a band. So it really wasn't too long before his whole "Hate-Core" thing became too much for a Jew and a Nigger to deal with.
 At least, that's how he wanted people to think he saw us as.

 I mean, that's the kind of thing he preached. Why would he really bother trying come off to us as our friend?
Because we knew him for so long?

 I'll never forget him asking us to plat some public access show that I think, was some sort of feeble attempt at a white people rally.  It never came about, but at the time we were like, "um. our singer is black...hello?" He went so far as to tell us that if we combed his hair straight, he would "pass for Mexican."

 Folks, I can't make this shit up. I never understood it. But then again, back in those days, I never knew why I called a lot of people my friends. Another thing you'll hear a lot about throughout this blog is that I've got awesome friends. And I do. But through the years I've made my way around a lot of scenes and a lot of crowds and after nearly 25 years of this lifestyle, I've not only had the opportunity to hold on to those that have really been friends to me, but have taken a lot of time and effort to put a good distance between a lot of people and myself.

Next through the door was Soren. I barely knew this guy for more than a couple months. He used to hold "political rallies" - or at least, that's what he called them at parks and the State Capitol and what-not.

 He called his movement the "Revolutionary Dance Party" which, was named after famous Anarchist, Emma Goldman's quote, "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution." We played a show at his parents house (now THAT'S anarchy in my book!), with Darryl, where everybody hated us. And eventually after kicking Darryl out, Soren was just there. Eventually we kicked him out as well due to the fact that at the time, we were politically, if not socially retarded and didn't care to bring all that kind of political shit into the band.

I mean shit, everybody's got an agenda. Fuck that. It was from one extreme to the other.
 He did however get us a show on the front stairs of the State Capitol for one of his "events." We couldn't have cared less about his agenda and pretty much used it as an opportunity just to say we played there. The state police that were on duty for this thing had to warn us three times about screaming the word "Fuck" over a 27000 watt (I don't really know, it was LOUD okay) P.A. system pointing directly over downtown St. Paul. "The next warning" the cop said, "and you leaving in handcuffs."

Around the time of the Capitol gig, Soren's almost next-door neighbor Jeff, had joined us. Bass player number five. Jeff was a lot older than us. We were in our early twenties, (except for me I was 19) and I wanna say he was already in his mid to late thirties. Jeff was the first real regular bass player we ever had.

He didn't really fit in with us, but he was into playing and writing songs. It was actually a nice and very welcome change for the better. We started having regular practices, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 6 p.m. 'till 10. Like fucking clockwork. It was the first time we held a schedule, wrote songs with effort, and recorded.

We rented a eight track cassette recorder, used our shitty mics, to mic up the drums and did the guitar, bass, and vocals direct.
We recorded 8 songs;
"Darby Was A Martyr"
"Heavy Metal Black-Mass Orgy Of Blood"
"Safety Pins"
"I Don't Care"
"All About You"
"High Impact Camping"
"I Like Girls (Who Wear Doc Martins)"
"We Rule"

Our buddy Davis Hooker did the recording and played bass on one of the songs, "We Rule." 6 of these songs were copied onto cassettes and packaged with some kinko's style J cards and passed out to our friends as the "Heavy Metal Black-Mass Orgy Of Blood" demo. With a mix of live songs added to it to use up more of the tape. I even cut out labels for each cassette that were photocopied on sticker paper.

 The live songs were either from a basement show, or could very well be from our first show at the 7th St. Entry back when they did "New Band Night." I know at one point we had a recording of it from the board. In fact the Entry recording was the first we ever had of us that wasn't off a boom box.

It was around this time we started playing shows to more than just a basement. Among the first places we played were the Entry, Ryan's Bar, and the Speedboat Art Gallery in St. Paul.

Okay, next up when we get to part 2,  we let Jeff go, get another new bass player, and make a record. -M