DOGS ON PARADE—SEXUAL CHAFING, or FRESH CANDIES
Kent, Ohio, is a constant sleepy flux, a vulture just floating, a decaying bat swept up with frayed brooms and broken dust pans. The faces are always new, but the same eyes peer from every fresh skull. The same words float from every mouth, small winged voices that swirl into terminal dervish harpy patients, drunken sing-song grunts and hacking phlegm shouts. Slack-jawed slurring from behind the couch, sleeping on the floor grates to keep warm. Debts paid in sheets and bags to the delight of everyone involved. Alcohol boot camp, learning how to walk, speak, fuck, suck, lick, kiss with one foot in the toilet and the other spinning mercilessly out of control. Learning to crawl all over again. Hundreds of innocent bodies lurching to the same slack beat, all arms and green faced churning. Certain Saturday nights the city would writhe with the electric undulation of a thousand pink worms until the flames of the streetlights drove them back into the earth to search for a cure. The Cuyahoga River, sometimes violent, sometimes serene, always a beacon to the malcontent or romantic self-destructors, or just a place where the frat boys took the sorority girls to get them in the mood for date rape or pseudo necrophilia complete with vomit and stale piss ejaculation. Dorm rooms filled with hushed copulation and embarrassed roommates. Inbred ape creatures from nearby villages staggering toward an unsuspecting victim, the killing instinct taking complete and utter control of the small brain inside the simian skull.
Kent is a small pitcher of syrup with a thousand flies, wings glued quiet, all trying to escape, some stepping on everyone around them, any-cost mercenary insects, others content and happy to suck at the sweet fate handed them. Some don’t care at all, and then there are those that will try anything to simply ENJOY themselves, no matter what, no matter how ugly the conditions. Pleasure could be equated with survival. It’s just that you sink deeper into the viscous mire and eventually drown. Self-destruction as a means, with no consideration to it being the end. A stupid mythological notion, albeit with some interesting results in the meantime.
Attic Tragedy was one of the results, clawing out of this sticky womb, onto your dinner plate and into your pants, head and feet. They understood the WHY of rock and roll music, not merely the HOW. They were free. They were the drunken bar lights in your bottle, the virginal liquid dripping from your glazed mouth onto your chest, the shudder in the thigh, a cat-tail spasm, a force of fucking nature. I’d sit there in a trance sometimes, fly-trap mouth and squid bulge eyes, thankfully oblivious to the fact that I was leaning against the wall at JB’s, a small, dirty bar in Kent that has a peculiar smell, a mystery odor that I can not equate to anything occurring in nature, where the walls are usually wet, dripping with what I pray is water.
Gradually I would be drawn to the edge of the stage where I would taunt Sam, push him, spit on his boots, anything to get him going, and there’s nothing quite like seeing Sam do the Pony. Imagine a skinny moose on two legs dancing across a frozen Ontario ice field holding a beer and microphone, baying at a particularly attractive she-moose across the way. That was Good Sam. Then there was Bad Sam, who, when displeased with someone’s attitude or actions or just for the hell of it, would resort to some form of violence, generally in the form of large objects flying through the air toward a soon-to-be mushy head. Imagine a surly Irish Wolfhound, stumbling onto the street and biting the first poor bastard who just happened to walk by. You never knew which one would show up, but as long as you ducked, it was always entertaining. The music itself always put the groove on it, no matter what, an alien concept (it seemed) to most punk-rock bands, who were usually too busy bitching and moaning to think about why the fuck they were doing what they were doing, which was supposed to be channeling their “anger,†but screaming is just sniveling when there’s no recourse. Attic Tragedy didn’t sound like a punk-rock band to me (sorry Sam), but what the fuck? They had the strength of 30 whiny hardcore bands, and they didn’t fall prey to anyone’s expectations, which is what I thought punk rock was supposed to be about anyway.
They did fall prey to one thing, though, and I don’t even like to think about this, because here was one band that had it down, that, again, understood the WHY, the gut purge, the metafuck buttshake, the dervish calls of nubile taut flesh undulations. They could ooze slugjuice or smash you with the purple feet of a crazed monk. So why is this a posthumous release, if they were so damned great? I'm asking myself that question, too. I guess it’s because they were so caught in the moment that lasting beyond the next was a crapshoot at best. It’s not as though they stopped evolving, they were always kind of shifting sideways and back, so what gives? Is it really a matter of rock and roll “ethics,†the stupid hope I die blah blah blah bullshit that has taken too many great bands and reduced them to a small fire in a wastebasket that someone quickly extinguished and forgets? Or maybe it just kind of drifted apart, hell, I don’t know, ask them. Write Sam a letter, he’d appreciate the mail. I just think they deserve more than a posthumous record with my confused musings plastered all over it, that’s all. But what the hell? Tiny electric earwigs are about to burrow paths of righteousness in your skull, the sound of Kent, Ohio, brought to a head. Pop it, love it, caress its gentle ooze, let it run down your chin. You’ll love yourself, I swear to God.
—Tim Tobias, January 1991
Tim and his band Ghost Sonata were friends of Attic Tragedy and they often shared gigs together. Tim later went on to form 4 Coyotes and Gem before taking over bass duties with Dayton, Ohio’s great Guided by Voices. Currently, he plays with Clouds Forming Crowns and Circus Devils (www.tobias-music.com). He wrote this essay for the Scat Records 10†vinyl release.
The Northeast corner of Ohio — a strange cocktail of Midwestern strip-mall sprawl, bible-belt weirdness, rustbelt blight, Amish pastoralism, old-money high culture, Eastern-European superstition, and Appalachian poverty — was the spawning ground for an explosion of avant-garde rock & roll from the mid 1970s to the early ’80s. Groundbreaking bands from that era such as Mirrors, Styrenes, Electric Eels, Rocket From the Tombs, Pere Ubu, Devo, Tin Huey, The Cramps, The Dead Boys, The Pagans, Human Switchboard, 15-60-75, Chi Pig, Unit 5, Bizarros, and Rubber City Rebels — all have their roots in the Cleveland-Akron-Kent region.
By the mid 1980s, the scene had died down a bit, but the DIY ethos persisted in pockets. In Kent — a small, quirky college town that centers around Kent State University — a vital punk-rock community continued to fill the clubs along the downtown strip each weekend.
In the summer of 1986, Attic Tragedy rose from the ashes of the much-loved group The Kleasmos when Jer Herring (guitar) and Merv Kukich (percussion) met with local musician Sam Ludwig (vocals, harp) in the attic of his old house and wrote a few songs together.
Merv soon left and was replaced by Ragged Bags refugees Diane Glaub (drums) and Rob Lightbody (bass, slide guitar), as well as newcomer Geoff Feinberg (guitar). Over the next couple of years, writing songs at a furious pace, this lineup gigged extensively in front of loyal fans in Kent (usually at the notorious J.B.’s Down), and made occasional forays into Akron and Cleveland.
In the tradition of Kent punk bands, they broke up too soon. Jer and Rob went on to national success with Dink and have since played in numerous other local outfits (Jer currently plays with Full Wave Rectifier). Rob lives in Detroit. Sam now sings and drums for the pathbreaking Lester O’Kent. Geoff gigs and records with ex-Human Switchboard frontwoman Myrna Marcarian in NYC-based Ruby on the Vine. Diane lives in San Francisco and continues to play in a million bands at once.
