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Bedtime For Bonzo: The Ugliest Band In America, best viewed from a distance

Back in 1980, the Ramones submitted their three-chord punk-crunching to producer Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. The result was their best-selling album, End of the Century. In Do You Remember Rock N Roll Radio? they asked if anyone was willing to fight to introduce progressive sounds to commercial radio.
Not in Detroit. The stifling atmosphere of early '80's radio was as tightly-controlled as the Soviet Union. This was the era of album-oriented rock: endless reruns of tired 70's rockers like Led Zeppelin and The Steve Miller Band. There was Top-40: aging bubble gum artists like Dan Fogelberg and Olivia Newton John. And this, the home of MC5.

Thankfully, there was a muscial force ready to bust out. Punk, ska, new wave, and progressive rock bands of all kinds were looking for a place to be heard. Isolated radio stations like KROQ in Los Angeles and WLIR in New York, actually played this stuff. It was the, er, alternative kids were looking for to the music of their parents.

We didn't know it at the time, but WSDP was occasionally a part of a new underground music movement. My journey into the realm began in England in 1980 when I discovered The Clash and London Calling. Loaded with genius, this album lit the way for the entire post-punk movement. Joe Strummer's punk attitude was modified by Mick Jones' affinity for everything from reggae to rockabilly. It was labeled the greatest album of the decade by "Rolling Stone" magazine, and #3 on the CMJ list.
The biggest hit on London Calling, Train In Vain, is actually one of the limpest performances on the album. Much more powerful tracks include Clampdown--a call to resist conformity--Spanish Bombs, the title cut, The Card Cheat, and Revolution Rock.

Earlier albums by the Clash were purely punk, drawing from the energy generated by the Sex Pistols. Bursting bright as a crashing display of fireworks, the Pistols managed to release exactly one album--crammed with fast, simple rock music tinged with rage. Never Mind The Bullocks, Here's The Sex Pistols exploded in a time of unemployment, race riots, the Cold War and British royalty. The Pistols took it out on the royals in "God Save The Queen." And they took it out on the record company that wouldn't release their aborted first album, in a hilarious song called EMI.
By the time of Capital Radio One, the Pistols were long gone. Rotten was rotting and Vicious was Lydon, with PIL. But their echoes could be felt everywhere.

The Clash play my birthday party

The punk movement exploded in America. Taking their inspiration from the Velvet Underground and MC5, The Dead Kennedys featured Jello Biafra's razor sharp lyrics and East Bay Ray's guitars, which defined hardcore.
"Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables"? Are you kidding? This was hilarious-- and tough.
But the consensus was the band's name was offensive, so we called them the "DK's." Their politics were offensive to a broad spectrum of people, including even the left-wing supporters of Jerry Brown in California Uber Alles. And lyrical sarcasm reached its zenith with Holiday In Cambodia.

And then there was X. The unusual vocal wailings of Exene Cervenka and John Doe fronted the rockabilly guitars of Billy Zoom and gunfire drumming of DJ Bonebrake. X personified Punk because of how they explored the seamy side of life-- even if it sometimes was as universal as life's lost loves.
We thought it was truly cool that Ray Manzarek produced their albums and actually performed on a cover of Soul Kitchen.
On Capital Radio One, we played as many songs (like Johnny Hit and Run Pauline) from their first album "Los Angeles" as from the latest release, "Wild Gift" (Beyond and Back).

Johnny, Steve, Sid, and Paul wait for the quilting bee to start

Nice boys in matching outfits

X marks their spot

Post-punk bands also covered a lot of issues. In 1979 a 16 year old girl named Brenda Spencer (L) became the first school sniper, killing two adults and wounding eight kids at an elementary school in San Diego. She used her Christmas present: a rifle with a scope. She had asked for a radio. When asked why she did it, Spencer's answer was simply: "I don't like Mondays." The Boomtown Rats then asked why, and registered their biggest hit ever (R). Many US radio stations refused to play the song, though, for fear of appearing to profit from the tragedy.

We weren't supposed to play any of this music either, by the way. And not because of the issues. The WSDP catalog of albums was rather slim, ranging from Santana to Supertramp- and not much in between. I simply couldn't stomach playing REO Speedwagon during my show, so I smuggled in my own albums. Any time Mr. Cardinal came down the hall they quickly disappeared.
One of the groups most certainly NOT on the approved list was The Pretenders. James Honeyman Scott, Pete Farndon, and Martin Chambers-

- fronted by the sultry sulkiness of Chrissie Hynde-- was one tough band that poured it on from start to finish. Their first album and the first side of their second--from The Wait to Stop Your Sobbing to Message of Love and The Adultress--is about the coolest compilation of rock ever recorded by one band.
Yet the Pretenders forced me to swallow the most bitter pill of my young life when Honeyman-Scott died of a drug overdose. His eulogy was the band's biggest hit, Back on the Chain Gang.

Play this music LOUD

Addressing such human loneliness was The Police. Before they became stadium-filling megastars, they told stories through their music: sometimes light-hearted but often striking a deeper chord, such as Message In A Bottle.
Before "Synchronicity," The Police matched reggae rhythms with catchy guitar chords. It was a raw sound that wasn't what anybody in a place like Detroit was used to; but their melodies drove them to commercial success that forced the radio Politburo to take notice.

Inspector Gadget would have been jealous

But they weren't the only ones affected by the sounds of the Caribbean. The Second Wave of Jamaican Ska swept over Britain in the late 70's and early 80's. Bands like Madness and The Selector fused ska with punk, forging the race-conscious Two Tone Movement. The hitmakers were The Beat, unfortunately known in the U.S. as The English Beat. They scored big all over the world with Save It For Later, but possibly more representative was a more gritty Mirror In The Bathroom, about coping with a drug habit.

The acknowledged leaders of Ska's Second Wave, however, were The Specials. Jerry Dammers launched the movement, the band, and a color-coordinated record label (2Tone). The Specials scored on their first album--produced by Elvis Costello--with Concrete Jungle. Dammers wasn't afraid to acknowledge Two Tone's roots with covers like one from First Wave pioneer Dandy Livingstone, A Message To You, Rudy.

The Specials play my high school graduation party

A musician who appreciated Ska while usually performing outside it was Elvis Costello. Gritty, angry, articulate, Costello used his music to vent. But he hit his stride when matched with The Attractions. Sporting the consumate New Wave look (skinny ties, tennis shoes, etc), Costello and The Attractions surfed the New Wave image while producing dark, articulate, and often controversial music. Complementing The Clash, Costello sang about "career opportunities" in Her Majesty's Armed Forces in Oliver's Army.
Just as potent (and to me just as poignant) was Costello's precision assault on commercial radio (which wouldn't play his music until it became so popular on college radio that they had to). In Radio, Radio: "And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools / Trying to anaesthestise the way that you feel." It turns out the perfect anesthestic to Detroit radio was Costello himself.

His Aim Was True

Other bands acknowledged their punk influences while drawing their music from mainstream sources. The band name "Squeeze," for example, was derived from punk godfathers The Velvet Underground--and incidentally, VU co-founder John Cale produced Squeeze's first album.
But Squeeze became something much different when band members found their own voice. The terrific songwriting team of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook produced New Wave power pop classics that featured clever lyrics and novel musical changes. "Argybargy" was one of the few current releases in WSDP's miniature collection...but it was just as ignored there as other radio stations.
This was a quintessential British band (references to London's Clapham Junction and a '60's film of the same name in Up The Junction left me and most Americans scratching their heads). It was no surprise Squeeze scored a string of hits in the U.K. In Detroit, however, you were as likely to hear Squeeze on the radio as a broadcast of the Lions winning the Super Bowl. As a result, the soundtrack of our high school days was left sadly shortchanged.

Fresh Squeeze on "Top of The Pops," 1980

Many groups were exploring the fringe of life in a carefree way that was revolutionary in its own right. The strict conformity of subdivisions and school was shattered by the beehive hairdos and wacky lyrics ("Has anybody seen/A dog died dark green?") of the B-52's. They were campy and kitschy. While we never heard them on commercial radio, they were played at every dance party.
They had two albums under the belt by the time my show hit the air, and songs like Private Idaho were staples. Eventually, the B-52's laid a claim to the most commercially successful New Wave group, but never lost that off-kilter freaky edge that made them so appealing to people who thirsted for a legitimate alternative to Big Country or Toto.

Before death and beehives

Its funny to me now to listen to '80's format radio stations that are obviously programmed by people who weren't around in the early '80's. Two Hit Wonders like Greg Kihn and The Tubes are always represented on playlists with the wrong song, their second hit, the "I'm a big superstar song," rather than their breakthrough hit.
Other well-known songs have a personal hold on me: The Motels Only The Lonely throws me back to memorable times at a certain friend's lake cottage. Queen & David Bowie's Under Pressure and The Romantics' What I Like About You were among those we sang along with--live on the air--during my show.

Just as committed to their own outrageous image, groups like Devo and Adam and the Ants; and more obscurely: Tenpole Tudor. Eddie Tudor was a direct descendent of the royal Tudor line, and his music celebrated the ancient prowess of the English realm. Too bad Tudor couldn't sing. This wasn't a garage band; it was a castle band. After a few too many pints. But the music, like Wunderbar and Swords of a Thousand Men, was raucous and fun.

Tenpole Tudor ready for battle

Further overseas, The Church was at the forefront of the New Wave in Australia. Their first album "Of Skins and Heart" was a smashing success Down Under. The swirling guitars and introspective lyrics ring true in a song called "The Unguarded Moment," about the need to give in to heartbreak... so it doesn't drive us crazy.

Worship Here: Australians with instruments

Closer to Plymouth, bands like The Knack defined the image of The New Wave in America, even after My Sharona overshadowed more interesting stuff like Good Girls Don't. More representative musically, however, may have been Blondie. They explored an eclectic array of sounds while giving us the post-punk New Wave anti-establishment attitude; a new look with their skinny neckties and tennis shoes; and blissfully, took us an important step past disco--while drummer Clem Burke kept us moving with that Big Dance Beat.
By the time of my Capital Radio One show, Blondie had already descended to recording movie soundtracks (Call Me) and releasing "The Best of Blondie" but I preferred to remember the break-through days of "Dreaming" and "One Way or Another."

Blondie Dressing Down CBGB's

One singer we wished we knew more about was Lili-Marlene Premilovich--who was born in The Motor City, but moved to England as a young teenager. She became "Lene Lovich" and a big hit in the UK, Lucky Number. MTV showed it from time to time, if only to fill all those long gaps when they played that guitar-driven bridge music, with Saturn 5 rockets lifting off and a girl applying a chainsaw to her television. Lovich applied a kind of chainsaw attitude to pop music.

Because commercial radio refused to recognize any form of alternative music, we learned about bands like The Talking Heads, Gang of Four, or The Cramps only through word of mouth. And so it took awhile for me to become familiar with their music. Friends like Joe Boland or Bret Julyk would bring albums up to the station during my show and we'd find something interesting to put on the air.

Lene Lovich's Lucky Number was, uh, um...

Another band I stumbled across was The Psychedelic Furs. The Furs owed much of their sound to David Bowie and Richard Butler certainly owed a debt to John Lydon... of the Sex Pistols. Their droning horns also recalled the psychedelic era.
Although I loved all of "Talk Talk Talk," their most popular song from that album eventually inspired a film by the same name: Pretty In Pink. For that, the Furs re-recorded this song, and the second version is the one that gets airplay on the "80's" stations. I also loved Run and Run from the "Forever Now" album.

But not in my day.
   Reflecting back, in a way I'm angry... angry at the trained monkeys (and their masters) who ran commercial radio in Detroit when I was in school. They deprived us of so much. So much really quality music that should have been part of the soundtrack of our high school lives... and was denied us. Instead, we were force-fed Billy Squier and Foreigner.
   Now, of course, everything has changed. Honeyman and Strummer and Ricky Wilson--and Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee Ramone are dead, unbelieveably. Ironically, their music gets much more airplay today than it did when they released it.
   So I'm even more proud than ever to have been associated with some of the earliest stirrings of what came to be known as the "alternative" music format... and a radio station that--sometimes against its will--provided an outlet that was sorely needed.

Considering the bloated, awful, corporate, sewer-hole that is now MTV, the cable network did eventually force change on local radio. Although we never heard The Pretenders or A Flock of Seagulls on the radio, we sure saw them on MTV.
Bands with a new sound like The Human League and The Go Go's finally started earning some airplay on commercial stations by 1982. It wouldn't be long before Modern English and U2 and even the Clash broke through to some major radio airplay.

So you want to go back to how it all started, eh? The "Alternative Music" thing, I mean. That form of music that's now so mainstream, calling it "Alternative" is a bit ridiculous.
Yeah, I was there, sort of. Saw a few shows, but never played in a band, rarely visited a nightclub. We had no decent record store in town-- had to go to Mickey Rat's in Ann Arbor for that. But for a short time in 1982, I had a radio show on a small FM station in Plymouth, Michigan. In a reference to the Clash, I called it "Capital Radio One." Aside from my being the Worst DJ In The History of WSDP, it was notable only for the groundbreaking music.

Capital Radio One
The Dave Snyder Radio Show, 1982