©This story is property of The CyBurr, the online version of The Burr, Kent State’s student magazine. Spring 2004.

Tree City Rebels

Forget New York. There was a time when Kent was colorful and punk was king. Take a trip back to the city’s musical renaissance.

Story by Steve Panovich

Walking past 319 East Summit Street in 2004, it’s impossible to tell that only ten years earlier the unassuming rental was a makeshift punk house. Sometimes called the “Spy House” after former art punk tenants Harriet the Spy, from 1993 to 1996, the house at 319 East Summit was an all-ages haven, filled with postmodern artwork, thrift store kitsch and half working amplifiers.

“It was dilapidated. Cat hair, lots of litter boxes,” says Cory Race, drummer of Party of Helicopters. “Beer spilled everywhere. Totally loud. The weirdest stuff I’ve ever seen. They had a velvet painting of Hulk Hogan and a Jolly Green Giant on their roof. One year, they decorated their house with Christmas lights to make it look like it was on fire.”

“319 East Summit—The Summit Street House, that was the first place,” says Ryan Brannon, bassist for Party of Helicopters. Ten years ago, Brannon was a sophomore at Kent Roosevelt when he started going to punk house shows. “They would put up mattresses over the windows, and we’d get to see a lot of interesting bands play in the living room. Consequently everybody would drink beer, have a good time and check out some cool bands.”

Since the ‘70s, Kent has been a tour stop for many national acts, as well as hometown to some popular bands. Devo shot one of their early videos in the Kent State Governance Chambers. Chrissie Hynde was walking across campus on May 4, 1970.

The Ramones made a tour stop at the old Shark Club in 1985, present-day site of Screwy Louie’s. Since then, artists from Black Flag to Fugazi have performed in Kent. But in the early 1990’s, an explosion of art and music blossomed from our side streets and houses of students. Throughout the next decade, over 40 bands formed, over 70 albums were produced, and hundreds of live shows were performed. Countless cheap t-shirts, stickers, buttons and ‘zines were made independently. By the mid 1990’s, Kent, Ohio had an actual music scene.

Starting with Sockeye

In 1992, Sockeye had already become the first noticeable band of Kent’s underground.

“Everyone would go to Sockeye shows, just to see what they would do,” says Derek Erdman, lead singer for bass heavy punk band The Kill City Babies and an English major of Kent State at the time, “They were the forefathers of the scene.”

With songs such as “Barf on a Globe,” “Pizza with Ulysses S. Grant on it” and cassette-only releases such as “Your Mother Downey Junior,” Sockeye became one of those rare bands to fuse sophistication with toilet humor.

Their lyrics, not to mention the music, were one big joke on themselves, society and their fans. Unfortunately, most of the more colorful Sockeye lyrics are unsuitable for publication, but a song such as “Wang Boutonnière” displays their mix of non-sequitur lyrics that would invade the Kent aesthetic for years to come, emphatically stating, “You’ve got a wang for a boutonnière! You’ve got a boutonnière…It’s your dork!”

Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of Sockeye’s history is that by 1995 some of the former members were educating America’s youth.

“By 1995 they were all done with school and teaching,” Joel McAdams, former singer/guitarist for Harriet the Spy says, “that was sort of the tail end of Sockeye. They would play in the basement of Mama Joe’s [on the corner of College and Willow streets] or at the Mantis.”

Cory Race of Party of Helicopters gives his favorite examples of Sockeye’s influence. “What do we do with the Drunken Sailor? by Party of Helicopters. Cum Stomache by Harriet the Spy. Those are classics. Can’t say a lot of them,” Race says. “The prospective album title for “New” Terror Class was ‘Cures for Lesbianism and Other Miracles’. To think that came from someone’s brain who I know just amazes me.”

Then there were the bizarre side projects such as the Mecha Mankees.

“They were half man, half monkey, half robot.” Race says. “That’s 150 percent.”

The creative process of Kent bands is unique to the area, as well.

“The song is never about what the title is.” Race says. “That’s sort of a Kent trademark. Not much has changed there.”

Derek Erdman of Kill City babies confirms. “There were always the best titles and band names. I don’t know if it had something to do with being from Kent, but how could a band like Sockeye come from Kent?”

Punk Pranksters

Around 1993, a gaggle of cynical intellectuals from all around northeast Ohio were convening at the Art Building, creating frenzied artwork and freaking out kids in the student center. Of the multitude of bands forming, The Kill City Babies, Armstrong’s Secret Nine and Harriet the Spy all played various pranks on themselves and others.

“We all tried to one up each other,” Joel McAdams says with a smirk.

A popular prank was spilling food all over themselves in the student center, McAdams says. “Ken [Myer, Armstrong’s Secret Nine] was really good at it because he would get up, look terrified and embarrassed and walk away really quickly.”

Of all the hi-jinx, Ken Myer of Armstrong’s Secret Nine seemed to be the most creative prankster. “Ken was doing wacky, super funny stuff, super creative—like awesome graffiti,” says Derek Erdman of his former band mate, “You know that James Gang record where they took that picture by the waterfall? He did these murals on the wall right by the railroad tracks of like, fried eggs and rabbits. It looked like graffiti but it was ridiculous graffiti. He was a super good artist.”

Aside from being a talented, if mischievous artist, Ken Myer was also the most daring of his friends. “Ken had a thing called the ‘Naked Club’ where he would take all of his clothes off, then go down to the female floors in the dorms and just walk into people’s rooms,” Erdman says. “He would sit on their bed and not say anything at all. They’d be like ‘Whoa! College!’”

Myer and Erdman’s band the Kill City babies, went on to perform in the oddest of places—including Wright Hall. “It was finals week and everyone’s buckled down in Kent,” Erdman says, “The dorm staff announced, ‘This Tuesday from 8 to 8:15, we’re going to make as much noise as possible! Everyone let off some steam!’ So we set up in a dorm room, closed the door and at eight we started playing.” The show lasted about a song and a half before security cleared everything out.

After that, Erdman wasn’t exactly simpatico with his dorm mates. “The football team lived on my floor,” Erdman says, “They hated my guts. But they did get me into the Chronic by Dr. Dre.”

But Erdman and his cronies split off to become even more daring, sometimes even breaking the law. “We were way more deviant than Ken; we used to break into stuff. I’m surprised we lasted as long as we did,” Erdman says, “When we were up late at the radio station, we knew when they would deliver the donuts to the Teleproduction staff. We would just wait until they came and take the donuts.”

Riding the ‘Blue Shark’

After forming and getting recognition regionally, hometown bands such as Harriet the Spy, Kill the Hippies and Velocipede, as well as the independent Kent label Donut Friends began networking with touring bands. The punk houses in Kent became a frequent stop in an underground network of touring punk bands from all over the country.

“Those bands tapped into this resource that we now use,” says Ryan Brannon of Party of Helicopters, “It was the ability to go on tour using a different approach than say, a professional rock band—not getting a manager, not getting the things that are necessary to make it your job, but just doing it because it’s awesome. Like, ‘Here’s a number, call this kid in Cincinnati, he’ll set you up a show’ or ‘I know a guy in Knoxville. He’ll hook you up.’ Everybody gets numbers and gets to know each other. Consequently, we’ve made friends across the country.”

Life on the road wasn’t always easy for the bands, though.

“The very first tour Harriet the Spy went on,” McAdams says, “we did in a car following this band Grain. We just drove in a car. It was literally a week and a half. It was kind of a disaster. We played maybe one or two good shows, but it was so much fun that we pretty much all got addicted to it and wanted to keep doing it.”

The largest portion of the touring came when Party of Helicopters’ Jamie Stillman bought a blue 1990 Dodge van, nicknamed the “Blue Shark.”

“The Blue Shark somehow lasted five years,” McAdams says, “The Party of Helicopters went on their first tours in it. Harriet the Spy would tour every summer for at least a month and usually do a winter and a spring break tour. I know that at the end we figured out Harriet the Spy played over 500 shows.” Portland, Ore. became the final resting place of The Blue Shark in 2001, housing a vagrant, McAdams says.

The Kent sound

There is something at once obscure yet identifiable about the argued “Kent Sound” – a mix of furiously loud, distorted guitars, odd-timed drums and distorted, riff-heavy bass.

“Its definitely bizarre,” Cory Race says. “It’s avant-garde, but there seems to be a definite pop structure and a lot of riffs. You could call it angular. Or skronky.”

The similarity of styles in different bands may have been due to the fact that Kent is so small. “The scene was very tight and incestuous. Bands shared members, but it was always good.” Race says. “It was always something new. Kind of borrowed from the bigger underground scene, but brought to us backwoods hicks who didn’t necessarily have the Dischord discography.”

The bands seemed to have a snobbish quality because of their adept skills at ineptitude. “The music was almost too weird to leave Kent, to get attention.” Race says. “It was a weird, incestuous family of bands with weird music tastes. But we always seemed to have something on most bands.”

Even Race is confused by the unique style of Kent punk bands. “Its so weird considering where we’re from, it sort of fueled the music. Considering it’s a totally boring, small Midwestern town.”

The bands created sophisticated, forward-thinking music and record-cover art that could almost be called avant-garde. “The bands were really in tune with what was going at the time,” Derek Erdman of Kill City Babies says, “listening to a whole lot of Fugazi and sort of emulating that. The music they made grew out of that. It was even better than that stuff, in a way.”

The musical influences of Kent bands were often genres apart from each other. “We were influenced by bands like the Smiths, but also early hardcore.” Joel McAdams says. Perhaps the purposely-inept nature of the music was cause for their avant-garde nature. “We never quite did it correctly,” McAdams says, laughing, “It was always a little bit wrong.”

“The thing about all those bands was that they got things done,” says Erdman of his cronies, who worked fervently in their spare time to record and tour. “There was a lot less talk and a lot more doing.”

“It was the notion that we really liked the ‘do-it-yourself’ punk ideals but we didn’t want to play straightforward music,” McAdams says. “We were kind of just a bunch of arty nerds.”

Even nerds need to rock out, and the intense volume of the Kent bands’ live shows were proof of that. “You couldn’t hear anything at all,” Cory Race says. “It was so loud.” The aura of the house shows would cause members of the hipster audience to stand completely still. “It was ridiculous how loud the bands were. It was like the audience was standing there, looking at a piece of live art. They would be thinking too deeply about it when it was just archaic noise. It was ironic to see people so in control when it sounded so out of control.”

Of the different punk bands from Kent, many agree that their most unifying quality was the sheer avalanches of volume. “One thing about those bands is that they were always ridiculously loud,” Derek Erdman says. “Each member of Kill City Babies had two (amplifier) cabinets and at one point there were like, five basses in the band.”

Many of the bands broke up as members graduated from Kent State or moved out of town. But the noise the bands created is one thing that will not be forgotten. “It’s too loud to remember the last show,” McAdams says of his final days with Harriet the Spy, smiling. “We were all too loud.”

E-mail: spanovic@kent.edu