Saturday, 13 August 2005

25 Years Of Defiance: What does Punk Mean to you?
Mood:  mischievious
Now Playing: I got into Punk when...
Topic: Tell us YOUR Story!
I was 16 years old in 1977 when I was listening to my local college radio station, WKKL West Barnstable, MA.. when a clueless DJ played a song by "some, umm group, umm called The RA-MOAN-ACE. The song was "Teenage Labotomy". I had grown up on a steady diet of Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, David Bowie, The Who, The Sweet etc.. Here was something that was 1)Completely NEW Sounding 2)Fast and Energetic 3)FUNNY and sarcastic with a meaning that, although was extreme, I could still relate to it. After this I went to my local record store and scoured the cut-out bins where you could find great lp's for as cheap as .99 Cents! I'd been reading about Punk in really only two magazines, Creem and Trouser Press. It was from those two tremendously influential mags that I knew what punk was about I'd just never heard it. That was about to change in a HUGE way! I remember buying The Saints, The French Import of NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS, the first THREE (!!) RAMONES lp's, 2 STRANGLERS, DMZ, THE REAL KIDS, The first 2 DAMNED lp's on COLORED VINYL!, TUFF DARTS, THE DEAD BOYS-Young Loud & Snotty (One of my all-time favorites!), The first DEVO, the first two JAM Lp's etc... I'd spent about $300 on that first visit and I wasn't dissappointed with ANYTHING I'd purchased. I'd found a place where I belonged. As all the bands I'd ben listening to you had either broken up or had mellowed themselves into obscurity for me, here had come a crazily energetic, counterculture, underground musical force that I immediately felt I could align myself with! I picked up the Do-It-Yourself attitude pervading Punk and within the next 6 months I, Clif Croce (soon to become Clif Hanger) teamed up with my childhood pal, Rob Rosenthal (soon to become Rob Decradle) and decided we were going to start a Punk band of our own. Rob bought a $10 amp and a $15 guitar at a yard sale and he quickly learned how to play to an open tuned "E". I had picked up a $10 microphone from Radio Shack and plugged it into the guitar amp while rob would be playing, and we began to write our own songs, after quickly being able to play THE RAMONES songs on our own. Sometime in late 1978 we'd started our band and we called it THE FREEZE. In 1979, we'd begun to play at local parties, always ready to run from the pumped up Jocks who would chase us in droves, throwing bottles and fists at us whenever they could. One day Rob played me a song he'd just written, it was straight up Ramones. I tried to think up something snotty and funny like THE RAMONES had on almost every song they'd put out! I came up with this refrain first... "I Hate Tourist's, Tourist's SUCK It's only their daughter's I wanna Fuck" Everyone that it was hilarious so I wrote the rest of the lyrics for it. Our high school, drug dealing manager liked the song so much he decided he'd put up the money to record and press 2000 copies of a single for it. Before we could get the cover's made for it our manager's money ran out. So we stole our way into our highschool's art department and made away with enough construction paper and ink to Hand-cut and paste down 200 pink covers for the single which we'd backed with a "New Wave" sounding synth based simpleton of a song titled "Don't Forget Me Tommy". Today that song's just ans afterthought. Out of the blue we began to sell the I HATE TOURIST'S 45. Soon we had to sneak back into our High School's art department for more supplies. This time we'd taken enough orange construction paper to make another 300 sleeves. The 500 total sleeves were all we were ever able to steal or afford to make for the 45. The remaining 1500 were given away as promo copies or just drunkenly thrown into the crowds at our live shows for free. Little did I know that 25 years later those very singles would be selling for $500 and up on Ebay. Even the ones without sleeves are commanding over $100! Still as broke as I was back then I was forced to sell off every last copy of the I HATE TOURIST'S I had. Man it was tough to part with the ONE test pressing there was. It was signed by all the original players on it and it brought in almost $600 in auction! I remember how the release of this single almost never happened. Rob's father heard the "Foul Language" that "Littered" the song and contacted a Cape-based Christian organization that had been successful in banning other "objectional materials", and they got involved with us trying to "keep rubbish off the streets." We were warned by them that we'd be taken to court for "Disturbing The Peace" or some such nonsense. We dared them to! When they realized they had no legal leg to stand on they got desperate and offered to buy the whole pressing off of us with the intent to destroy them. This interested us slightly as we thought we could get them to pay us more than it had actually cost to press it and therefore make enough money to press even more the second time around. Rob's father had somehow gotten a copy of the recording and pressing costs and had given those figures to the Christian group so they only offered us the "actual costs". We declined the offer and went ahead and had them made advertising the fact that it had already offended the Bible Belt types. I was a DJ at the same college station, WKKL, which I had originally heard THE RAMONES on and began playing our single. It took less than a week for me to be "releived of my Disc Jockeying Duties" by a hemmoroid headed station manager. The only local record store at the time had to carry the single "behind the counter" as if it was Hustler magazine. This "Frobidden Fruit" aspect now tightly attached to the song only helped it's sales. We couldn't believe it when one day a friend called us and told us he'd heard a bleeped out version of I HATE TOURIST'S played on Boston's biggest FM radio station WBCN. The song became a novelty "hit" that summer on Boston radio; "Cape Cod kids singing a profanity laden song about hating tourist's" was too funny a premise for Boston radio to ignore. Our being played regularly on WBCN led to our being signed to Boston's biggest underground record label, Modern Method, which was owned by the two people who also owned Boston's biggest underground record store, Newbury Comics, which today is one of New England's largest "Alternative Based" Record store chains. Our signing with Modern Method, which was a direct outgrowth of our unsuspected success from the I HATE TOURIST'S 45 led directly to our inclusion on and recording the title song for what was to be Boston Hardcore's most famous mucical mark on the map; the THIS IS BOSTON, NOT LA compilation album and the recording of our first two full length studio albums; LAND OF THE LOST and RABID REACTON... The rest is, as they say, history! Clif Hanger THE FREEZE 8/13/2005 Rabidreaction@adelphia.net

Posted by thefreezestory at 9:34 PM EDT

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