LIKE GOLD DOWN A SEWER, PART TWO.

CORROSION OF CONFORMITY IN THE SUMMER OF 1983 AT TURNER STREET HERE IN RALEIGH.


MORE ORIGINS

JEFF JUNG: My family moved to Kernersville, NC, when I was 8 years old, from Racine, Wisconsin. I had a pretty standard suburban upbringing - upper middle class, divorced parents, good schools, etc... I ended up in Raleigh when I graduated high school, and enrolled at NC State.

JON WURSTER: I may be disqualified from this because I was not really a part of the scene per say.  I moved here (Winston-Salem actually) in '86.  I went to a ton of HC shows in Philly in the early and mid 80s. I think I told you my old band Psychotic Norman was supposed to play with SS and the other band you were out with in Stamford on your ill-fated tour.  We played and you could actually hear the yawning from the punkers.

SARA BELL: I was born in Virginia on the Fort Belvoir Army Base.  When I was one we moved to Cleveland where my parents were from and after seven years and their divorce my mom remarried and we moved down here, first to the little town of Hillsborough and then to Raleigh. We lived out in the country for most of my childhood after Cleveland so I had a city life for a while and then a country life, which was good for the imagination and sense of escape.  In Junior High we moved more into town, and in 1985 I was a senior at Broughton.  I guess by that time I had been hanging out a bit, going to shows. 

SEAN LIVINGSTONE: I was born in Raleigh, NC and grew up in “North Raleigh” about three blocks Away from Quail Corners. It was light years from downtown/Hillsborough Street. I was first made aware of punk/ hardcore when my mom’s club, “The Pier” was being featured on Night Flight. I was in 5th grade and was allowed to stay up late to see the broadcast. This changed my life. I was into Grandmaster Flash, Sugarhill Gang, Lynard Skynard and Molly Hatchet- definitely confused. The show before the “broadcast” had bands that were dangerous- later to realize it was Flag and other L.A. stuff. I was hooked, as well as worried what my friends would think of my new interests.

PAUL GALLANT: My family moved to Raleigh from Canada when I was 5 years old, so I'll go ahead and skip up to the eighties. I first got into punk soon after my older brother (Daniel Gallant) started getting into it. The first bands that I really got into where Dead Kennedy’s, Descendents, and D.O.A. The first hardcore band I ever went to see was "Bloodbath". It was Steve Shelton's (Confessor) first band, (I think). That was the first time I saw "slam dancing" Although it seemed like everybody in Raleigh called it "thrashing". So that’s what I still call it to this day. After that show my life was changed forever, I was hooked.

STEVE AKIN: I grew up as a university kid. My Dad is a professor, so I was born in Atlanta but then at the age of two we moved to Ann Arbor Michigan, home of the University of Michigan where my Dad got his PHD, it was also home of the MC5 and the Stooges both of which I saw as a child but don't remember.
Next we moved to Madison, Wisconsin where my dad did his post-Doc. We lived there for my first and second grades. Then my Dad got his firsT and last professorship at UNC-Chapel Hill. I've been here ever since.

BRIAN GENTRY: I came to Raleigh from outside of Statesville, NC, between Charlotte and Winston-Salem.  I wasn't even in the sprawling megalopolis of Statesville; I was in the country nearby.  My first contact with punk rock came through my brother, who was a DJ at UNC Greensboro in the early 80's.He had always been deeply into music and got exposed to all kinds of stuff at the station.  He sent me a tape with the Dead Kennedy's song "Terminal Preppie" on it and it blew me away.  After that I got a hold of a magazine
somewhere that had a review of new wave and punk rock bands and I read about them (it was some dumb magazine like Cream).  I went to a nearby mall and bought Dead Kennedy's, Sex Pistols, Black Flag, etc. albums, anything I could find.  I was the only person I knew who had even heard of this music and I ate it up.  I was the only "punk rock" person in my entire rural high school of 800 people, though really I looked like a sort of new wave/glam rock/metal guy, very cheesy with parachute pants and everything.  But no one knew the difference.  It is very easy to stick out in a place like that.

LEJUENE: Leo, and I were born in Raleigh, and our parents let us do what we wanted, and we got into KISS, then The SEXPISTOLS, and the rest is history. It was during the early 80's we got into punk rock music. The bands that did it for us were DOA, BAD BRAINS, to name a few. The local bands we enjoyed were bands like COC, Honor Role, Ugly Americans, and Unicef. We like the politics of the songs, and heavy rhythms of metal, and catchy riffs.

JON WURSTER: I was born and raised in the Mennonite farming town of Harleysville, PA.  I started playing drums in bands when I was 14 or so --mainly new wave/punk stuff: Ramones/Plasmatics/Fripp(!).  I hung around the guys in the Dead Milkmen when I was 16-17.  They were just starting out (‘83) and we would go to shows in Philly pretty much every weekend at the various halls promoters would rent out. I guess I was just attracted to the energy of the music and the fact that it was being written and performed by young people.  Not to sound like a fuddy duddy but it really was a "scene" back then. It was absolutely unimaginable that a hardcore/punk band could get a major label record deal and as a result I think you had a lot of bands just doing their thing without trying to "make it."

CHRIS SCHNIEDER: New York kind of sucked. Upstate New York-and having been fully immerged in the hardcore culture and living in a small town and not having very many friends, I of course became a tape trader and pen pal, and sent away for a lot of fanzines and whatnot. Fritz and I worked together in a grocery store at the third shift late at night. And every night Fritz would get the newspapers and he would look for places that he wanted to take his vacation at. And for some reason, People’s Express had a twenty-nine dollar round trip to Raleigh, North Carolina. Some fanzines were sent away for, from Raleigh and one of them happened to be Straight On! By Scott Williams. We had heard a bunch of records that we liked from down there like C.O.C., Subculture, Ugly Americans, the “No Core” tape, stuff like that, & Fritz decided that he was going to go to Raleigh on his vacation. And then there is Fritz’s story of how he walked into Deejays and walked up to Scott Williams thinking he would look like someone who would know Scott Williams, & asked him if he knew who Scott Williams was. Scott of course, thought he was a police officer or something.
And uh..Fritz stayed down here and he liked it, and he said he was moving here. So I said that I would go with him. And that is how we ended up here May 17, 1986.

5/15/86 Thursday 4:03 am, A&P, Bedford, New York. By Chris Schneider

I just stole this notebook to use as a journal. If they, the A&P whoevers, decide to check my bag in the morning, well fuck; I’ll have been caught. It’s my last night. Fritz’s too. Right now I am on lunch, which has lasted form 2:45 a.m. to 4.05 a.m. (right now) Lunch will end at 4:30 a.m. Working nights sure has sucked bad. Real bad. Sometime this weekend I’ll be moving to Raleigh, N.C. I was going to write that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go or not, but right now I’m sure. Sure as hell glad to be out of here real bad.
The car Fritz and I bought together is the only thing that can get in our way. If that happens, I’ll still quit. Well, I’ve almost filled up one page. It’s about 4:19 a.m.
4:26 a.m. I just decided to note that Fritz just finished reading. The other two guys are sleeping. My Walkman mangles my ears with Saint Vitus. Some dick leaves the “Now Serving” digital counter at “69” every time he closes the store. Cars go by every once in awhile. Are they going to work? Coming home from work? Who knows? I’m going home to a house that won’t be my home very much longer.

BILL DALY: I moved to North Carolina from the Washington DC area in 1983 because it was cheaper for me to go to school in Raleigh then it was in the DC area. I went to college in Charlotte for two years before coming to Raleigh. The only thing I knew about the Raleigh music scene was that hardcore/punk bands sometimes would go through there playing shows due to the fact there was some hardcore bands there. I knew the names Corrosion Of Conformity and Ugly Americans but I had not heard either band. The only music I knew about in Raleigh was by the Connells, Bad Checks and others through a tape I had come across called More Mondo. Someone at a Radio broadcast convention had handed it to me in DC in the winter of 1985.Before I moved to Raleigh to go to school, some friends had told me that it was a little better then Charlotte. But it still was a redneck conservative town that was really still entrenched in classic and southern rock and recently seemed to be embracing hair metal in a big way. One friend said Raleigh was like entering a time warp of the early 1970's. I found out soon enough upon getting here. I went to the Brewery several times the first month I was living here. I had heard of it when I was in Charlotte because Husker Du had played there. Back then, they used to have a fair amount of punk shows. But a large amount of the people who went to the shows and hung around the Brewery were not really into the music. And they definitely were not into the musical approach and attitude of punk. They were there for social reasons (cheap beer drinking, socializing and hanging out etc. I remember hearing a lot of people talking and usually the conversations were about bands like Rush, Iron Maiden and the Motley Crue. I had gone to see Rush and Iron Maiden play shows in 1980-81. I thought they were okay. But they did not make me want to go and buy all of their albums. I was never into the Motley Crue at all.



STEVE AKIN: I was always into powerful music and the whole anti-authority thing in rock and roll. I grew up loving Kiss and the Who and the Stones and when punk rock really hit, I paid attention. I liked all the punk bands I heard and I went to London in 1976 and heard about the Sex Pistols, so I was already on the look out for that kind of stuff, then in Junior High School I discovered WXYC and that was a huge influence on me. They played lots of english punk and new wave. I still didn't know about the US stuff and it didn't really hit until later anyway. But because of WXYC and also Saturday Night live and other late night TV shows, I started discovering all these bands. I loved the Pistols, Devo, the Clash, and Elvis Costello. Those were my favorites for a couple of years and then the whole English thing really hit when I was in high school and we had the ska bands like the Specials and Echo and the Bunnymen and U2's first album came out. That was in about 1981. Soon after that Nickolodeon starte showing music videos and MTV was launched. So I was really into the Clash, they turned out to be my favorite. And they were totally punk and political and had great songs. So I was a clash die hard for a couple of years but I went to the English Beat in probably fall of '82 at Duke with Billy Barefoot and we met Reed he had a mowhawk, and Billy had been buying all the bands we called LA punk at the time. But Reed told us it wasn't just LA it was nationwide and it was called Hardcore Punk. So he and anther friend of mine Lor Gould who was in Connecticut (he played bass for FVK and A Number of Things at one time) told us about Minor Threat and Bad Brains and Reed told us about all the Raleigh bands and so then we started going to all the shows at Turner Street and PC Goodtimes and Fridays in Greensboro. We started going to all the shows Fall of '82 and Spring of '83. Me Billy and Marvin.

BRIAN GENTRY: I had never seen a live show in a club until I came to Raleigh.  My first show was Black Flag (Slip It In tour), Saccharine Trust and C.O.C.  Incompletely blew me away and I was hooked.  I had more fun than I had ever had in my life.  After that, for a period of several years, I saw every show I possibly could.  Sometimes I would go to the Brewery as many as 5times a week.  I would see college rock bands, punk rock shows, new wavebands, anything.
LEJUENE: We were always outsiders to the black community at school, except for the brothers, they were cool they thought we were strange, but cool. We did not have much flack from the scene at all but as some people get older they started getting superiority issues, what do you expect. America was founded on hate, and racism, so we did not care. You can't change people you can only change yourself, so who cares if some dumb- dumb can't figure out that racism is wrong.
SARA BELL: I always say that my introduction to punk rock came as a result of all the hardcore boys having fallen in love with my friends Cynthia and Katherine Killough, who were twins, when we were in about the 10th grade.  Their parents were really cool and would seemed to allow all kinds of entering and exiting from windows late at night, so we would sneak off to Sadlacks and Turner Street parties and the Culture Club and Brewery and the Ash Avenue House, wherever the party was.  I remember meeting you then, I don't know if it was your first trip here or not, but I seem to remember you at one Ash Avenue party or another.  I remember you saying you had met COC on tour and they invited you out, and I just thought it so amazing how they served as the ambassadors of Raleigh, so many people seemed to arrive on the doorstep of that house from all over and all because they had taken to the road.


SEAN LIVINGSTONE: Going to shows-I got into a lot of trouble. “Hey, I’m going out to ride my bike until 10 o’clock on a Sunday evening”. Eighth grade genius at work. Suicidal, COC, Ugly Americans, it was well worth losing my freedoms one by one. I was heavy into Rudimentary Peni, Die Kreuzen, Venom, VOID, Flag, Motorhead (Tom White made fun of me once because I was wearing a Mötörhead shirt). Local bands- it was totally COC. They had it all- fast, a fucked up van, Mike Dean’s brutal delivery, and Reed knew my mom hated them. They were it.

JEFF JUNG: I think my first brush with it was seeing the Ramones on Sha-Na-Na's TV show. But I can't really say there was one event that led me to it. I mean, I'd see the Ramones here, someone would play some Circle Jerks there, I'd read about the Dead Kennedy's there... it just sort of grew over time, in the middle of a bunch of other interests. I was never really "punk rock" anyway... I would probably have been considered more of a "new wave" kid (though that doesn't really fit, either... I thought a lot of new wave really sucked). Given the choice between the Sex Pistols and Public Image Limited, though, I'd go with PiL, while still appreciating the Sex Pistols.

PAUL GALLANT: I was to young to get a job or drive, so getting new music or going to shows Downtown was going to be a bit of a challenge. Lucky for me there was an independent record store up the street from my house (school kids records). Me and my friends (Sean Livingstone, Tom Dubis) starting hanging out there. We quickly got to know everybody that worked there. Soon they started letting us do odd jobs around the store in trade for store credit. I soon started to get a good collection of my own records. (We got to pick out the best stuff before it got put on the shelves). Every week or so Reed from COC would come in the store to hang up the flyer for an upcoming show. He was pretty nice to us considering how young and annoying we were. He would let us ride around in the COC van with him (Which made us think that we were the coolest people ever).

SARA BELL: In the mid eighties what I listened to was probably pretty unrelated for the most part to the shows I was seeing, although I did love the Minutemen obsessively and listened to all their records, and was turned on by bands like the Meat Puppets and the Pixies from seeing them live.  I was devoted to Patti Smith.  And Ethan introduced me to lots of great music, the Fall and seventies punk like Television and the more obscure side of that scene in New York that I wasn't aware of.  We would hang out in his room late at night listening to Husker Du and Flipper and we sat on the floor and cut out the paper doll van and band from the cover of that record Gone Fishin, I remember that.  Matt Matthews led me to the Raincoats back then too. Public Image and Joy Division Cocteau Twins and Jesus and Mary Chain and Echo and the Bunnymen, though I didn't really listen to much other British stuff from that era (not counting the old folkie stuff). Eisturzende Neubaten, I liked them.  Jeb would make me tapes of really weird experimental composers like Conlon Nancarrow, who we looked up in the phone book on a trip to Mexico City once and went to visit at his house.  (He was very gracious under the circumstances and gave us iced tea).  I liked a few of the Athens bands like Pylon and B-52s.  Local bands, I really loved Zen Frisbee and Erectus Monotone and Black Girls.  There's too many to mention!  But it's always good soup, you know. 

STEVE AKIN: That summer of '83 turned out to be the big breakout time. There was Turnerstock with COC and No Labels and it was Johnny Quest's first show and the dude from Youth Brigade were on that tour that they made the movie about and they were there, and Circle Jerks played a couple of times and The Dead Kennedys show was huge and Black Flag had some big shows and it was obviuos that Hardcore was here and it was big, but not huge. We were our own subculture and we all went to every show and it was the same people and we knew each other. So that spring of '83 is actually when Mavin and I started A Number of Things and he bought a drum set and two of our other friends bought a bass and we practiced some. Then we recorded Louie Louie at the beginning of the summer, it was about all we could play decently. Me and the bass player and guitar player went to Europe for the summer.

JON WURSTER: I moved down to NC join a roots rock band called The Right Profile in early 1986.  Kinda weird going from my Philly band Psychotic Norman (very heavy Minutemen/Fall/Damned damage) to a group whose main influence was The Band.  Why they let me in I'll never know! We were based out of Winston-Salem and we had an extremely ill fated record deal with Arista. I can't say there were many hardcore bands I absolutely loved.  Like today, I like certain tunes by certain bands without really being into their whole oeuvre. I would say Government Issue, trio-era COC, Iron Cross, Ruin (Philly) and Minor Threat were the best live bands I saw.  I also liked JFA, DOA, Bad Brains, Die Kruezen, Void and the Nip Drivers. I really loved Husker Du and The Minutemen but I would not really call either of them hardcore (discounting the first two Huskers LPs!).

MARK WEDDINGTON: The first hardcore show I went to in '85 was a gig with Subculture, Bloodbath, COC and Neon Christ. It was in a church basement in a predominantly black neighborhood in Durham, and in an effort to reach out to the locals; several kids were let in for free. At the end of the night, some of those kids tried to steal COC's equipment. When Reed & Mike attempted to stop them, they were both stabbed in the stomach. Luckily for me, I was only15 so I had to leave at midnight before that happened (and before Neon Christ even played).



LEJUENE: Leo, and I were chased home by some rednecks that were heading from some State foot ball game, and they threw a can of tobacco spit in our hair, and screamed "Oh my God black punks!"

SARA BELL: My ultimate influence before after and since has always been folk music and since I was becoming really taken with the banjo I devoured any kind of old time mountain music record I could get my hands on, and Eastern European folk music and stuff like that.  Old female blues musicians from the '30s and '40s.  I remember Dave Pirner saying once that punk rock really was just folk music, and that's true.  Three chords and your own experiences, that's all there is to it. 

BRIAN GENTRY: I thought the Raleigh scene was great. I had been hoping to find something like that for several years, and I knew it had to exist in Raleigh. I was as happy as a pig in shit to be able to go to shows, thrash, meet people, hang out, etc. Seeing so many punk rock types was fantastic, as I had only seen them before in magazines and suddenly they were real. People were not afraid to dress up and be different. I remember that there weren’t a whole lot of fashion punk types. People were pretty creative and had a lot of variety. Not too many had bought expensive punk rock uniforms in stores. Some folks looked completely normal, some didn’t. It didn’t seem to matter. So many great bands came through in 1984-86, the years I caught that really seemed the best..

BILL DALY: The all ages shows were similar to the regular shows in that most of the people came and did not even know who was playing. It was a place to go in Raleigh on Sundays for high school kids. I used to ask a lot of people about what bands they were into. Most of the time the answer I got was Van Halen, 70's classic rock and new hair metal bands that were being played on the North Carolina State radio station WKNC. Also most people around Raleigh I spoke with, thought even poppier alternative acts like U2 and REM and Elvis Costello did not rock enough and were weird. At that time, even those two bands were still somewhat below the mainstream radar.

SARA BELL : I never felt any sort of prejudice musically from the men I was friends with and played with back then.  I always felt very encouraged, or I wouldn't be playing now, because I was also really really insecure.  But Jeb especially is the most wonderful and welcoming musician, and I hold him responsible for dragging me out of my room (where I had locked myself trying to learn how to play a banjo someone had given me-Oh yeah!  It used to belong to Shauna from White Zombie!) and getting me to play and putting the little noodlings I did on tape.  That was the genesis of the Angels, from my side anyway.  I think the male dominated punk scene wielded its power in other more subtle ways.  I didn't notice these things then at all, but of course in hindsight I see that there was a dangerous side to the androgynous ethic that pervaded.  It was appealing to people like me who felt really uncomfortable with typical traditional girl culture, and of course I was always really drawn to the maleness of rock and probably identified with it more, but it also made it harder to figure out my own sexual identity in it.  I'm talking specifically about that early-mid eighties hardcore scene, this all seemed to vanish as new generations of cool riot girls who did not grow up in quite the same sexually fucked up period of the '70s that we did emerged to deliver a few quick chops and turn it on its ass.

JEFF JUNG: I suppose first I should mention I'm horrible with dates... so I apologize if I inadvertantly mention something past '89... There were lots of great shows, as well. I couldn't even begin to list them all. Seeing the Butthole Surfers for the first time definitely stood out. Melvins at the Turning Point, of course. A roadtrip to DC to see Foetus and Cop Shoot Cop. I'm still annoyed I never managed to catch Einsturzende Neubauten until the '90's, I think. I know my first few attempts to see them, something always fell through. Oh, and Iggy Pop at the Rialto...

THE FALLOUT SHELTER

The Fallout Shelter put on its second show the night I had moved here. After missing my ride from the airport to move into my new home at Ashe Ave, I took a cab into the city & was dropped off at the street address. From then I ended up at the Fallout Shelter, a basement club off of West Street near downtown that would end up putting on a lot of Raleigh’s shows for close to a solid two to three years period. Little did I know that this place would end up being my second home for awhile, as there was three, sometimes four shows a week-anything went & anybody could play there eventually. National acts like Saccharine Trust, SNFU, Government Issue, Scratch Acid & god knows who else would play. Every local band played there constantly, & it stayed that way for a long time. The shows were booked for the most part, by Karen Mason. The club was owned by one Steve Guth, who if memory serves me correctly, wasn’t very thrilled by the crowd that showed up for these shows-how Karen could continually work around this situation was amazing when you consider the onslaught of live music that the club hosted.

Eventually, Karen & Steve parted ways. There wasn’t too much happening for a while but with the new booking done by Jennifer Heap toward the ending of the eighties, the next couple of years proved to be equally as important as the previous ones. Bands of that era like Superchunk, Polvo, Motocaster and even C.O.C. played there. Eventually the Fallout Shelter turned into a gay bar. I went there one time & it was weird. I kind of forget about how much fucking time I sent down there. Everyone did. It was cool.

ETHAN SMITH: That place was fucking great, it was really cool. I got a lot of weird memories there. I remember seeing S.N.F.U. there and it was snowing outside. The singer kept talking about Alzheimer’s and aluminum cans and for some reason that really stuck in my head. And people like No Means No, Die Kruezen and Killdozer would play there and stay with us when I was living with Reed. Saccharine Trust played there, I used to see this band called 86 at the Culture Club and the Fallout Shelter. 86 had Mac McNeiley in it from the Jesus Lizard. It was the band he was in before that, and they were a really really good band who are definitely worth mentioning in this. They played here at least once a month.

SEAN LIVINGSTONE: As for the Fallout Shelter- they ruined themselves, I ruined myself.

LEJEUNE: The Fallout Shelter was where every one grew up, and had good, and bad experiences. I loved it. I miss it now because cool clubs, and good music are fading out. I don't have good stories but lets just say, I had great times, well one story, which I don't want to offend any one, but the scene of some one's hair on fire at the Jesus Lizard show was quite memorable, Aqua Net is truly flammable!!

JEFF JUNG: I loved the Fallout Shelter... for all it's faults, it did have a LOT of different music go through there. I loved that I could see Scratch Acid one night, then Birdsongs of the Mesozoic the next. I think my favorite memory was the Eunuchs of Industry... it was insane. But I saw Brian G. mentioned that night already (the night of tons of incense, midgets, and goose-stepping rednecks), so won't rehash it here. But I appreciated the pure, unadulterated, and complete sensory overload.

MARK WEDDINGTON: The Fallout Shelter in Raleigh was always great for really fucked up shows. Sitting outside one show with my friends, some guy came up and said confidently and quite seriously, "I've got this place wired, man." We asked him what he meant. "With explosives. I can blow this whole place up with just one button." Needless to say, the club is still standing.

RICHARD BUTNER: It's funny that a bar owned by a soundman would be this tiny cinderblock bunker with practically no acoustical baffling, nothing to dampen the harshness.  I'm surprised that we're all not deaf from playing in that space.  I was really glad it existed, of course. In some ways it was the perfect size for local bands or for obscure national bands.  It didn't take too many people to fill it up.  I remember playing there one time with and/or and we ended up covering "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and the decent-sized crowd were all dancing and I looked out and was just so pleased that Jeb and I and the other guys in the band were causing our friends to dance around by making noises with our guitars.  I guess it helped that we were covering the Stooges.


BRIAN GENTRY: Wow, I spent a lot of time at the Fallout Shelter. I think the first thing that comes to mind is seeing Scratch Acid. Since the stage was only about four inches high, the singer was right in your face, and the strobe light made the whole thing really freaky. Suddenly he would be right on top of you going nuts, and then he was gone.
I remember seeing Youth Of Today and going nuts when “X On My Hand” came on. I remember when Agnostic Front and GBH played and I got hit really hard in the “mosh pit”, so hard that it spun me around and knocked me to the floor. I was basically knocked out, and I was bleeding from my nose all over my face and shirt. It was a moment of punk rock glory. I remember opening for a band that I don’t remember (the only Fallout Shelter Beatless show that we did, I believe.). They were an industrial band with a dwarf in a medieval style tunic for a lead singer and a guy with a “white power” sticker on his guitar. They lit these huge sticks of incense that filled the place with acrid smoke and shined a light projector into everyone’s eyes. Then the guys from Psychodrama showed up and started sig heiling.

The sheer volume of shows that this club had back then was amazing. I could walk down the street from my house almost any given night & see a show. Everyone went there all of the time. Even if you didn’t want to go inside, there was almost always a group of people hanging out outside of the club, so you could just shoot the shit with various people. And I did see a lot of amazing bands there, from this period & even later, in the early nineties reign of the Fallout Shelter. It is a much missed place, but more then the club, it sort of represents the time period of Raleigh back then very well.

SARA BELL: Hmm. I do remember Steve Guth pulling a gun one night.  That wasn't exactly humorous and might have heralded the Fallout Shelter's demise.  I bought my first legal beer there come to think of it.  It was so totally great to have a place to go see bands when you weren't old enough to drink.  People weren't so uptight about that then, so you could fraternize with the hedonists though you weren't legally allowed to participate.

MARK WEDDINGTON: Honor Role played the Fallout many times. On one packed-house occasion, a huge muscle bound mohawked punk straight out of Mad Max got up on stage, grabbed the mike stand from a bemused Bob Schick and proceeded to intone drunkenly "Fuck you...fuck you...fuck you..." into the mike for the remainder of the song.

CHRIS SCHNIEDER: I really liked the Fallout Shelter, it was a great place. Where else could you go and usually get in even if you didn’t have any money? I saw a lot of great shows there, including Honor Role and all of the local bands. There was a lot of stuff happening there and it was a cozy little club. The outside street scene was always pretty happening, even if you didn’t get in the show or have any money or got there too late after you had been washing dishes up the street. I didn’t see a lot of strictly hardcore bands there except for maybe Subculture or someone like that. I saw the Flaming Lips on the “Omigod..” tour amongst five other people. I saw a lot of cool bands that no one knew about or no one went to see like Kilslug or Nice Strong Arm.

JON WURSTER: I went to the Fallout Shelter a few times in the late 80s.  I used to go to more shows at the Brewery (Circle Jerks/COC/Johnny Thunders/Soul Asylum/Damen).  But this was around 86-87. Most of my hardcore days were spent in Philly. I can't say I found the Fallout Shelter to be a very enjoyable place

BILL DALY: My favorite place to play in Raleigh was the Fallout Shelter. It was this really small space in the basement of a building in downtown Raleigh. Someone once told me it used to be a real fallout shelter. It was always really funny to me at the time to hear the owner Steve Guth to say he did not allow punk bands to play there. Oddly enough, I would say that in the years of 1987-89 about half the bands that played at the Fallout Shelter were somewhat hardcore or punk influenced bands. I even saw a band you were in play there in 1987. The singer sang an unforgettable version of "I Wanna Be Your Dog". To this day whenever I hear that song I still think of him flailing around the stage and see that "Mortica looking girl" Karen Mason gawking at him.

MARK WEDDINGTON: At an Antiseen show at the same place, the same huge punk approached a geeky-looking thirty something who was videotaping the show with a large professional video camera. Without explanation or warning, the punk picked the cameraman off his feet, carried him across the room, and put him in the trashcan, camera and all.


UGLY AMERCIANS


SAM HICKS: Hey, let's not forget about that Simon Bob guy I mentioned earlier. Upon moving to Durham, he started the Ugly Americans with Danny Hooligan, Chris Eubank and Jon McClain (not to be confused with the Austin Texas band of the same name). These guys were a great combo and the good word soon spread. When they began to frequently play out, the between city gig trading quickly grew to include Durham. Of course, the only place to play in Durham was St. John's Cultural Center, which was "a church basement in the ghetto," but Simon Bob was quite the scene builder and organized several popular Hardcore shows featuring tons of up-and-coming talent. Graphic artists and musicians had worked in these scenes together since Joy Cook made Th' Cigaretz cover and Errol Englebrecht did C.O.C.'s Eye For An Eye cover. Simon Bob also made a name for himself by doing artwork for his own band, as well as Subculture, C.O.C. and even the Dead Kennedys. The Ugly Americans released their first LP The Dream Turns Sour on their own Discipline Records label ('84) to much scene acclaim. They played all over and soon found they were the second crossover band (C.O.C. was first) to be signed to Metal Blade Records with their Who's Been Sleeping In My Bed (Death-004/72082-1) LP, released in 1985. The Ugly Americans are a highly regarded group who've separated and gotten back together for 'reunion' shows on and off throughout the subsequent years.

The Ugly Americans came out of Durham towards the end of ’83. Simon Bob Sinister and Danny Hooley had met a couple guys who worked at a local record store, Chris Eubanks and Dan Adams. Very quickly the new band wrote a lot of songs and started to play out. The band’s first album, “The Dream Turns Sour”, was a mixed bag of politically motivated hardcore with a lot of deviations involved. It was okay, but better things were to come. The Ugly Americans and their singer Simon Bob were also local promoters of punk shows in Durham and Raleigh. Along with Reed Mullin, they contributed a lot to what was going on in those days. At the end of 1984 the band soon had the services of Jon McClain as the new drummer, and the band got much better. All of this culminated with their second release, the “In My Bed” mini album issued on Death Records out of Los Angeles. This arrangement was no doubt influenced by connections Simon Bob had with the members of COC. Recorded in Los Angeles with “Animosity” producer Bill Metoyer, it was a much-improved recording, easily the Ugly Americans highest point.


STEVE AKIN: I was in the Record Bar at Northgate mall in Durham and they had all this great hardcore shit, and I bought some and the guy working there asked me about it and I told him I had my own hardcore punk band and he said so did he and they were called the Ugly Americans and they were playing a show in a few weeks, their first show actually at the duke coffeehouse. I said we wanted to play our first show there too and we did and tons of Durham and Chapel Hill people came and all the normal Raleigh people and COC played because there were so many people there. The rest I guess is history.

CHRIS EUBANKS: There’s a bunch of little things that you could point at.... there was a radio station at Duke at the time. It was not WXDU when I was there at first. It was an AM station WDUK, but I knew some people who were DJ's there, and so that plays a role. And I became a DJ there when WXDU started in `83. I was exposed to some stuff that was going on through that means. I met some folks and started a group with them in `83, and so got a chance to go see some shows and be a part of some shows then and in `84.

RICHARD BUTNER: Later on when my pal Simon Bob started Ugly Americans, I was really into that, and glad to see them pushing boundaries, whether it was by using a cello, or by writing songs about how much you love your mom.

CHRIS EUBANKS: I think that there was a lot of stuff going on all over the place, and perhaps the stuff in the big cities just got better documented. There were a lot of people who were doing a lot of things in the Triangle area. There were certainly a lot of bands, and people who put on shows and who put out zines and stuff like that. I don't know if it was an unusually large amount. It didn't seem that way, I guess because it seemed like there were people everywhere doing it. It was exciting, yeah.

After a few years of touring and another release, the “Philadelphia Freedom” single, the band soon called it a day in early 1986. Simon Bob became C.O.C.’s new singer.

CHRIS EUBANKS: We toured nationally, I guess twice. To the extent that we went all the way out to the West Coast. I guess makes it a national tour. But, we could have done that without the second record, I think, because of the fact that there was a support network for that kind of thing then. If it was a punk rock group-if it was active politically, or playing one of the styles within the broad range of stuff that was considered to be punk at the time, which was really pretty inclusive-then there were a lot of people who would help out, in terms of setting up shows, putting the band up; folks who did zines and would write about the groups and do interviews and stuff like that. It didn't seem to be terribly hard to book tours at the time. Cause, you know they weren't all at nightclubs. They were wherever. People who rent halls, or there would be shows at people's houses...stuff like that. I guess that that still goes on today, but it doesn't seem quite as much. It was `86, and it just really seemed like things were not progressing anymore. So we decided to call it quits. Simon Bob went on to sing for Corrosion of Conformity for a couple of years. And we all went our separate ways, more or less.