THE EARLY YEARS

I was born in Washington DC while Kennedy was president (though I don't think we met). Then, about the time I noticed there were girls who didn't notice me except when everybody noticed that I couldn't dance, I discovered guitar (it was my brother's SG). And that was it. I started playing (and I still can't dance). Then, thanks to the happy accident of living in England from 1976 to 1977, it was made apparent to me that I could be in a band so, on returning to DC in 1977 that's what happened. I got drafted into the Enzymes at a Fred Frith gig in Georgetown and that was that. It was a wonderfully anarchic environment where we were into P-Funk,the Damned, the Sex Pistols, The World Saxophone Quartet, Art Ensemble of Chicago, The Contortions, Sun Ra, Eno, Lol Coxhill, Mikey Dread, Captain Beefheart, the Clash, Patti Smith, old Batman records, gospel radio and everything was all on a kind of continuum of freedom. This is also the same breeding ground that partially forged Ian Macaye and Henry Rollins. We were lucky enough to be able to be open to draw from it all.
Not all the results were successes but we were free to have fun to be young in the world in the days before the animals had names...

The Enzymes basically had two incarnations after I joined (they were already a group): the first was the experimental no-rules "scientific beach party band" line up whose instrumentation was John Gibson on bass, Maurice on drums, David Byers and me on guitars, Stuart Crone on Sax, Richie Spaceboy and Craig Rosen on vocals, Lawrence Goodby on a unique quasi-synth of his own genius. This is the lineup that recorded the "Speedwash" sessions out at Catch-A-Buzz studios in 1978. Back then I was using my VERY FIRST ELECTRIC GUITAR (!) which was a Gibson S-1 that I bought because of the Ron Wood ad.

Then an unstoppable force of nature blew into our world in the form of the Bad Brains. EVERYTHING went up a notch after that. Not just that the music got faster but they were just SO damn good that they raised the bar for everybody and suddenly we all had to bring our A-game all the time. And this is when the next version of the Enzymes (the hardcore version) came into being. That was down to me and Byers, Gary Gabriel on bass and John Buckle on drums. I was still using the S1 but supplementing it with a Columbus (anybody remember THEM?) telecaster that I'd "liberated" from Byers and re/unfinished to look like Joe Strummer's. For some reason we were all using Acoustic amps. They were the pawnshop specials of their day. We did a session out at CAB too but I don't know where the master is. Also, somewhere there's a reel-to-reel that John Buckle's friend Adam made at Scandals the night Henry got in fight with two bouncers from another bar and Scandals got trashed.

But the Enzymes never released anything and other than Baltimore (the Marble Bar!) never got out of DC. I'll write more about DC in the early days when I can but I want to take a sec to pay respect where it's due.
When I was a young sprout guitar player obnoxiousing my way around our Nation's Capital I had the great good luck to have some really cool mentors in the forms of Marshall Keith, Kim Kane and Mark Noone from the Slickee Boys, Bryan Symmes from Radio Free Illinois and also Robert Goldstein of the Urban Verbs. I learned a lot by watching them and even more by getting to hang out. It's been thirty years coming but thanks guys.
And beyond that I want to use some space to pay tribute to my first bandmate and early friend David Byers who tragically died recently. I was lucky to have such a great friend to go pirating through music with so early and I miss him being in the world.

See the Enzymes/DC photo page HERE

After two years as a Vassar girl, I pulled up roots and moved to England; Leeds, to be precise. It was a funny place back then, stuck undecidedly in a mix of row-house classic Labour working class industrial "North" and post-industrial city of Europe. It was the early 80s (1982 actually) and the unbelievable violent malevolence of Thatcherite Britain was only beginning to be understood in its scope. In some ways it was a really terrible time. We still lived in the cold war age of Greenham Common, divided Germany, Reagan, Thatcher, the Stasi, the Red Brigades... it's also when goths started to appear.

Leeds had already exported Gang of Four and the Mekons were subducting into the Three Johns. Soft Cell were still around occasionally but it was the Sisters of Mercy who were on the ascendent with the March Violets not far behind.
...none of this really did it for me. I'd shown up in the UK with my cassettes of the Bad Brains, a bunch of New York hip hop and all the DC Go-Go I had. Amazing stuff passed through (the Bunnymen, The Psychedelic Furs, the Birthday Party, Fad Gadget etc) but I wasn't seeing anything around me that made me go "yeah, I want to do THAT!". Punk had gone kind of stale for me. It had conservativized itself and run out of music. The Goth thing just was NOT going to happen. What's a boy to do in this situation?