Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 17

THURSDAY, AlIC. 30, 1979 iUsblirl) )0Stia2CftC A mm I i I Punk Rock Party Ends With Blues Our Towne By Joe Browne Most of them hail from the Oakland area, and all of them complain about the lark of performing outlets ever since the shutdown of the unofficial "punk club" called Phase Three in Swissvale last month. For a time, many New Wave groups in town performed there, but now it's just "a strip joint," says'a disgusted Bobby Porter. "A lot of musicians are losing their places to play," Porter declares. "It's a fact that places to play in Pittsburgh have alwajs been owned or controlled by a few people j-the Decade, for instance.

And hey, thaCs okay, I'm no saint myself. But it's now to the point where they're squeezing people out.J Porter's interest in punk problems is nq self motivated. The group in which he Young Lust, has already established itself tp some extent despite its name, not as a punk band but as "a straight rhythm anjl blues trip." Joe Soap confirms that Young Lust has been trying to help local punkeip find places to perform. "There's a lot of rock bands in this city -t there's one on almost every corner," say Porter, a black ex-Marine, "but Pittsburgh never really had a music scene for its rock musicians. What's going to happen is what happened to jazz all our best jazz musl cians left town.

It's going to look like Albu querque around here." Porter relates a highly negative expr ience at a popular Oakland music bar wherte Young Lust performed in June. Agreements were ignored and the group was blatantly exploited, he says. "It's amazing, a town this big with so few clubs. And contracts mean nothing to these people. A lot of guys aren't gonna have a chance to play at all, because it's all tied up.

If you want to get a bar for one night, yott have to pay off so many people not just the Mob, but the LCB and the musicians' um and everybody else that it's a real squeezl. action. These guys just need a place to playl man." Unanswered Prayer In any hospital you'll see priests and ministers and rabbis visiting the sick and the hurt, bringing encouragement, consolation and hope. being human, they must sometimes grow tired. Most are overloaded with spiritual and temporal tasks.

They may even sometimes wonder if they're really helping. This letter from a mother may, in its own way, reassure and strengthen them, troubling as it may be. The woman's husband was in a hospital. Her small daughter told a clergyman about it "She made two requests first, 'Pray for my dad, he is so sick' and second, 'Please visit him in the "Each day she went to her dad's hospital room and the first thing she asked was, 'Did he come Her dad would say, 'No, dear. Perhaps The days turned into weeks, the weeks into months.

Always the same question, 'Did be come Always the same answer, 'Perhaps "Tomorrow never came. Her dad died. What heartbreak for a child. I pray that no clergyman ever again will fail to respond to a child's cry for help." The mother is forgiving. She is grateful to all those ministers, rabbis and priests who forget about the building fund and the stained glass windows and the next church payment to go visit the sick.

They know you can always get another building or another window. It (t A By BARRY PARIS Pmt-Gcttt Staff Wrttw They were feeling punk, all right. But for the wrong reason. The late Sid Vicious would not have been pleased by the bloodless Battle of 637 Gettysburg, a Point Breeze side street and scene of the latest in a continuing series of semi-underground concerts along punk-rock lines. As parties go, last Saturday night's was not feverish.

On the contrary, it was rather modest a low-key, if high-decibel, house party with live music. Things broke up at a decent hour, around 1:15 in the morning. Actually, things broke up at exactly 1:15, immediately upon the arrival of a vanload of Pittsburgh's finest, committed to the restoration of tranquillity. But more on this later, after a little deep background. Pittsburgh punk-rockers who prefer the more general and dignified term Wave" are currently forced by the acute shortage of club outlets to perform their music at private weekend gatherings in the homes of punk enthusiasts such as Bob Getz and Dave Albrecht, hosts Saturday night at the above Gettysburg address.

"House-party concerts" of nature, it turns out, have been taking place without fanfare in Pittsburgh almost every weekend since January, according to a New Wave musician who goes by the name of Joe Soap and who has held a few punk soirees of his own in Oakland Soap knows whereof he speaks. It was he and his band, Targets, whose set was unceremoniously interrupted on Gettysburg Street. Targets was the third local band to jam Saturday night, following No Shelter and The Boat People, before a capacity crowd of between 50 and 75 perspiring guests, mingling well in fashionably pugnacious punk evening attire. A thorough inspection by this reporter earlier in the evening conducted strictly on behalf of the public's Right to Know had failed to turn up anything stronger than beer on the premises, at least visibly, but then it's not what you know, it's whom you know. In any event, the place appeared righteously clean and so no panic ensued when, as if on cue, the police materialized.

The men in blue headed straight for the electrical outlet and, without a hint of moral qualms, pulled the plug on Targets, much to the chagrin of band and listeners alike. Whereupon the mood turned temporarily ugly and a spontaneous chant of "Sieg heil!" arose, continuing for four or five minutes of vintage-'60s, cop-induced outrage. that sieg-heil thing started and they caught the hostility of the crowd, it looked like things were gonna get rough," said eyewitness Bobby Porter, a prime mover in the local band, Young Lust. "But after a while, everybody kinda backed off." No messy brutality. No arrests.

The police said they were responding to complaints about the noise. Huffy but orderly, folks dispersed. A short while later, co-host Albrecht is discovered sitting in silence on his porch, watch- ing the last stragglers exit as the big black cubes of sound equipment are hauled out onto a waiting truck. Albrecht is philosophical -no, downright mellow about the turn of events. "I thought they were pretty lenient, actually, letting us play till 1:15," he mused.

"And they were pretty cool when they got here. No yelling or anything." He shrugged his shoulders. "I mean, this is a residential neighborhood families and everything." A few final sympathetic farewells are extended to him by departing punks, now cast adrift into the night displaced guests in search of a new party and then someone says to him, admiringly, "You don't seem to be very upset about it, Dave." Albrecht's bespectacled face takes on an expression of whimsy and disdain. "I'm not very upset about it," he replies. Joe Soap's reaction, on the other hand, is less whimsical, equally restrained, but considerably more suspicious.

"When we started out, the cops came a lot," Soap says. "They were pretty cool Saturday night whether it was because you and the photographer were there, I don't know. Usually they're very, very aggressive. One night in March at a party in Oakland, they arrested six people. "So this is kind of normal practice, and we just try to keep playing as long as we can until they pull the plug.

We've had this happen while we were playing in houses with a booming disco just up the street, and yet those places don't seem to have the same problem." Why is punk squelched while disco drones? "People hear the word 'punk' and they think, Those dirty kids there's got to be something wrong with this. They're up to no But really, it's a misleading term for the music. I consider it rock 'n' roll. People just dig original music and come to hear it." The bands they come to hear r- in addition to the three veterans of Gettysburg are all young local groups whose music for the most part has New Wave, punkish roots. Among them are ThcShikes, The Cardboards, The.

Shut-ins, The Reelies, The Dark, The Puke, and an all-female band called Cringe. Meanwhile, until they get such a Pittsburgh's punkier New Wave rock musicians are having to settle for the house-party circuit, similar to such circuits in L.A.: Philly and New York. Undaunted by the Gettysburg experience of last weekend, the boys of Shakes and Cardboards will join with the girls of Cringe Saturday night for an on-the- Helpful Reminder A friend just back from North Dakota tells me that Ft. Lincoln near Bismarck is being renovated. That's where General Custer and his troops stayed before the disastrous battle with Sitting Bull's warriors at Little Big Horn River.

Near the fort is a sign: "Stay where Custer should have stayed!" rebound house-party concert at an undcf standably undisclosed residence in uaklan' "We'll start pretty early, around 8:30 or 9g informs Joe Soap, clearly a punk with spunB "We want to try to get in as many bands we can before the police come." Bleacher Buffs Frank Sproule and Chuck Airhart say there never were any bleacher seats the chair type in Forbes Field. There were planks. Now, hold it. They're thinking of the left field bleachers. The right field bleachers did have chair-type seats.

Faced with a shortage of clubs in which to play, punk rock enthusiasts perform their music in private residences. Musician Joe Soap, top left, was among those playing in Point Breeze last weekend. At left, police, regular visitors at the parties, arrive at 1:15. Mike Sallows is at the mike, below. Photos by Albert French School Thought Joe Karr: "A lot of the colleges that are teaching our kids to be successful are going broke!" So are the kids' Towne Topics Angie Mosticone, one of the nicest, is in Mercy Hospital Joe (Ponzi) Petrooe, in Divine Providence Hospital, is working on a new "beat toe horses" system all lost a good friend when John (Mickey) McMahon died Joe Francis, English instructor at California State College, is studying Italian and the Italians in Rome Diane Dngina is home from Ocean City, N.J.

and ready to return to her easel Fifty happy years for Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Geyer, 50 for Mr. and Mrs. Ethel Loag, 49 for Mr.

and Mrs. Russell Lee, 50 for Mr. and Mrs. Clark Scherger, 45 for Mr. and Mrs.

Lionel Bethune, 44 for Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lkhalk, 34 for Mr. and Mrs. Dick Dwyer and 30 for Mr.

and Mrs. Paul Browne Birthday best to Sberri Burns, David Murray, Diane Batemaa and Katy Kowalski Good guy Hank Biedrzycki. LAST WORD II productivity is the answer to our economic problems, why ire food prices so high? a Ji With id It's a Hoax Art Buchwald Discovering Newfangled Methods for Saving Energy "Tabasco does have a kick to it," I ad milieu. ft contains alcohol. He devised a method of taking the perfume out of it through a cranking process, and what's left can be burned in a car." A Tuesday feature about a young man's scheme to change the way we tell time said that Christopher Krysinski was a 26-year-old New Yorker who was willing to invest $50,000 of his considerable wealth to launch sociological studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

Krysinski, actually a 20-year-old Philadelphian and not at all well-heeled, admitted yesterday that he lied and set up a network of conspiring friends to help him convince people of his authenticity. He says, though, that he is sincere about wanting to revise time-telling in the manner described with the help of the University of Pittsburgh. But spokesman for the university, after discovering that Krysinski had lied consistently about his background, said the school will have nothing to do with him. The youth said he pulled what be calls "a hoax" because be thought the university would not take him seriously because of his age and because he enjoys tricking people. ft "You bet your sweet life it does.

Hei told Tom Brokaw all the oil companies' know about it, but won't use it becauW they're afraid it will cut into their prflH 'When will they start "Great." I said, making it?" its. Yesterday Carbuncle called a gaum asphalt roads in America we should be self-sufficient by 1989, and we can tell Iran to go to hell." "I knew they'd come up with-something. Wait a minute! If they dig up all the asphalt roads in the United States there will be nothing for the cars to drive on." "Exactly! That's where the big conservation savings will come. He's just ap- Elied for a grant from the Department of Inergy," "To continue his research?" "No, for bail money. They arrested, him for digging up astretch of U.S.

High- Every time you pick up the newspapers you read of some newfangled thing that is going to save us from the oil crisis. One day it's methane made from garbage, the next day it's hot springs underneath Montana then it's ocean waves that can be tamed, and then there are, of energy-producing windmill, I can't keep up with all of it, but Carbuncle can and does. i A month ago he told me, you hear they have a new synthetic fuel that can save a million barrels of oil a day?" "No," I said. "What is it?" "After-shave lotion. Some professor at MTT rtiwnvroH that lotion I didn't hear from Carbuncle for a week.

Then he called me excitedly on the phone. "There is a man in New Jersey who has perfected a system to make coal out of gold." "It sounds like the answer," I said. A few days later the phone rang again. Carbuncle said, "You been, watching "There a guy on the today show who runs his car on Tabasco, sauce. He says he mixes three gallons of Tabasco with one gallon otap-lead, and a tank of fuel lietq him nnh "Right now the price is too high.

A pint of Faberge after-shave will cost you $25, but if the OPEC countries keep raising their rates the price will soon be competitive." i A few days later he came Wk. "Well, it's all over for the Arabs. A geologist in Colorado has just developed a method of squeezing oil out of asphalt roads. He was able to get one quart crude out of "The energy crisis is over. A 14-year-oW boy scout in Pasadena rubbed two stick together and managed to get a fire ouUl it.

The National Academy of Science dih plicated the experiment and it work? "Yeh, but what do you burn after ue fire gets started? 1 asked. Carbuncle replied, "Furniture. It's cheannnw than heating. oil.".