Nurses

If offered one trip in a pop-music wayback machine, most punk fans who didn't experience the late '70s firsthand would probably choose to go to New York or London. Those two cities would be at the top of my list too, but number three would be the place were I actually did spend the period, Washington.Although D.C. punk didn't exactly produce any hitmakers between the 1976 debut of Overkill and the Slickee Boys and the paradigm-shifting 1980 arrival of Minor Threat, it was the home to such underground phenoms as Bad Brains and Half Japanese, as well as such coulda-been new wave stars as Razz and Urban Verbs. Among the many other groups whose commercial prospects were negligible was my favorite D.C. band of the era, the Nurses.Of course, impartiality is impossible when picking a favorite band from a small local scene in which you know many of the players. I met Nurses singer-songwriter-bassist Howard Wuelfing in 1976, shortly after I returned to D.C. (where I had spent most of my childhood). A New Jersey native, Wuelfing had moved to Washington the year before, after graduating from Rutgers. Although temperamentally disparate, he and I were natural allies; we were both interested in fomenting a lively local punk scene, as well as smart publications to cover it. We both contributed to several of the same local arts, music, and alternative papers, and I wrote, photographed, and did graphics work for two fanzines Howard started, Descenes and Dischords. By the end of the decade, I was supporting myself as a graphic artist at the trade journal where Howard's wife then-Tina worked (and from which Howard had been fired -- something about playing music too loud and wearing a dog collar to work).Soon after his arrival in Washington, Howard also began trying to put a band together. The first attempt that I heard foundered on the fact that its only members, Howard and Shirker-to-be Libby Hatch, both wanted to play bass. So Howard joined the short-lived art-punk quartet The Look, whose members went on to form two even artier groups, Urban Verbs and Tiny Desk Unit. Howard switched to the Slickee Boys, who had just lost their original rhythm section. He brought the lyric (written by his longtime friend Jim Testa) for the Slickees' spirit-of-'77 anthem, "Put a Bullet Through the Jukebox.''That edition of the Slickees didn't last long, however, and Howard was ready to start a band that featured his songs and his voice. The Nurses made their public debut in late 1978 at the Museum of Temporary Art Annex, one of the many alternative arts spaces then available and willing in downtown D.C. The lineup was Howard, guitarist Marc Halpern, keyboardist Sherry Dietrick, and Marc's girlfriend, Cathy Hutzell, on drums. (An earlier, work-in-progress version of the band appeared once, with Urban Verb Danny Frankel, an old friend of Marc's, as fill-in drummer.) Cathy, who had no experience as a drummer, played only briefly with the band; Sherry, who's heard on a few of these tracks, wasn't around much longer.Most of the recordings on this compilation are of the principal version of the Nurses: Howard, Marc, and drummer Harry Raab. Howard and Marc were the only constants in the band's lineup, and the Nurses ended when the sometimes sweet but often bitter Halpern died in May 1981 at age 28, from complications of a heroin overdose. Marc was a lot of trouble, but it was hard to imagine the Nurses without him.The Nurses headlined plenty of shows at smaller local venues, from noncommercial arts spaces to mainstream clubs like Columbia Station and the Childe Harold (which had been Emmylou Harris' home base just a few years before, and which hosted the D.C. debuts of both Bruce Springsteen and the Ramones). The band was never an especially marketable proposition, however. At a time when the local punk/new wave scene had cleaved between art-rock and power-pop -- with hardcore galloping up on the outside -- the Nurses didn't fit into either camp. Howard's high, thin voice, Marc's abrasive guitar, and Harry's forced beats were definitely punk, but the band's songs were sprightly and melodic. Howard liked pop, bubblegum, and soul as well as the Voidoids, the Clash, and the Pop Group. This collection includes only one of the Nurses' regular covers, the Velvets' "I Heard Her Call My Name,'' but the trio also frequently performed the Monkees' "Stepping Stone'' (not yet a harDCore anthem) and Hot Chocolate's "You Sexy Thing.''"We're just white boys making noise,'' claimed "Something to See,'' but that wasn't exactly true. Howard was a rock critic with a steady flow of free new vinyl, which he supplemented with purchases from area bargain bins and the local punk record store Yesterday & Today (where Howard worked for a while, as did at least one member of virtually every D.C. band you've ever heard of). His wide-ranging tastes shaped the Nurses' music, although not in a precious or overbearing way. While reggae, rockabilly, Krautrock, and dub infiltrated the sound of songs like "Dead Man in Trenchtown,''ÿ20"To Paris,'' "D.Y.F,'' and "Bad Mood,'' such influences didn't overwhelm the trio's anxious, bony style.If Howard was never limited by simplistic populist notions of what's allowed in rock -- "Hearts,'' after all, began by paraphrasing Nietzsche -- his more esoteric enthusiasms didn't overwhelm the band's "You Sexy Thing'' side. The studio versions of some of the later songs (especially "D.Y.F'' and "Bad Mood'') show the Nurses exploring the possibilities of the recording process, and they did record a scant album's worth of studio material, released on three singles and as tracks on sampler albums issued by Limp, the label run by Yesterday & Today owner Skip Groff. For financial and technical reasons, alas, this collection is limited to demos and live recordings.There's another reason the Nurses weren't a prime draw in Washington. As an outspoken commentator on the local scene, Howard estranged a lot of potential friends and supporters. (Marc was good at alienating people too, but he delivered his disses in person, not in print.) Howard often criticized D.C. bands with mainstream commercial aspirations or acceptance, especially the ones that didn't seem willing to use their clout to support the local scene and its less-marketable exponents. Howard, for example, supported a boycott of the Atlantis, a local club that was closely tied to the Urban Verbs. (The Verbs opened the club to punk bands, and maintained their practice space upstairs in the same building.) Emotions ran a little too high on both sides of this divide, with one result being that Verbs singer Roddy Frantz (brother of Talking Head Chris) turned up at Columbia Station one night to toss raw eggs at the Nurses while they performed. (For the record: The Atlantis failed, but reopened under new ownership as the 9:30 Club, becoming D.C.'s best-known punk venue. The Verbs made two good but commercially disastrous albums for Warner Brothers and split.)After the Nurses, Howard joined the ever-mutating Half Japanese for a time, then founded Under Heaven, which had a familiar but denser sound thanks in part to its two guitarists, Mark Jickling (of Half Japanese) and Don Zientara (best known as Dischord's favorite engineer). Howard left Washington in 1985 to become a record company publicist, a career that continues to this day.My role in the Nurses' career mostly was limited to observation, although I did some graphics for the band and am credited as the co-producer of the first single, "Hearts.'' (As I remember it, my contribution was to make a few suggestions that were politely attempted and then wisely rejected.) Careful credits readers will note, however, that I wrote the lyrics to one song, "Viola d'Amour.'' I took the assignment to write these notes because I remain a big Nurses fan, but I will admit that a secondary motivation was to preemptively acknowledge that these lyrics are really bad. My only excuse is that were written not with a literary idea, but a musical one: I had just seen Television, and imagined that I was modeling the song on the call-and-response chorus of "I Don't Care''/"Careless.'' Since I was writing the lyrics, not the music, this was really dumb. In defense of the Nurses (if not me), I will say that Marc Halpern's guitar part makes the song almost listenable. I wish he -- and the Nurses -- had survived to perform such alchemy a little longer.--Mark Jenkins