THE RATTLERS Strike! (1981)

© Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 1981/2022
Images from the Internet unless indicated

The New York trio, The Rattlers (1979-88), were known more for family connections than the band, which was a shame. I saw them play a number of times, and between the high kicks were some kick-ass tunes. They rose from the ashes of Birdland, which included Lester Bangs on vocals. I saw Birdland open for the Ramones once at My Father’s Place, in Roslyn, New York. When they clipped their Bangs, they became The Rattlers.

This interview was published in FFanzeen, No 7, dated 1981.

The Rattlers Strike!

Why is the New York press ignoring The Rattlers, one of the outstanding bands on the East Coast today?

Nearly all their press clippings are due to their appearing with famous relatives or from out-of-town papers. Matty Quick, the band’s drummer and driving force of this power trio, explains it this way: “We’re so far underground. We don’t have any records except that one disc [“On the Beach” b/w “Livin’ Alone, released in 1980 on Ratso Records – RBF, 1981]. We don’t have any singles out there for them to buy, so it’s really hard. It’s hard to fill a club. When kids don’t have an opportunity to hear your records over the radio, they’re not going to come out. You go to a club and there’s two-three hundred kids instead of a thousand, you know, it’s sort of like a vicious circle. You gotta have vinyl to get to them. It’s not that we do so bad with our audiences, it’s just that they don’t know who we are yet.”

“And that’s because we don’t get much press,” guitarist Mitch Leigh picks up, “which brings us back to the original problem – why don’t we get press? We stayed in Chicago and we got press. We got press in Boston. And we got minor press in New York City, like The Villager. Where can be get press in New York other than The Village Voice and New York Rocker? The New York press hasn’t written about us in a year.” Matty claims that “The Voice wrote about us when we broke up Birdland [two years earlier – RBF, 1981]. We were the “band that broke up.” And it was only to kiss Lester’s ass.”

The lack of a record is what seems to be hurting The Rattlers the most right now, but “the press is really discouraging any form of building here in New York,” states the ever-moving Mitch, with his graceful spread-eagled jumps in the air on stage, and high kicks that bring his feel level with his head. “God, you gotta ask yourself, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ These papers aren’t writing about us. Then people won’t come to see you. I wouldn’t expect a paper like The New York Post to write on us. I’d expect an underground paper to, because we’re an underground band.”

Mitch/Mickey Leigh
(ffoto by Robert Barry Francos)

But what press they’ve gotten has been favorable. They’ve had their picture in People, and been briefly mentioned in The New York Post, The New York Daily News, and Billboard, but that was due to relatives rather than themselves. They were almost completely ignored, sort of a “Here’s so-and-so. Oh, and those guys are The Rattlers. Now more on so-and-so.” Not the sort of thunderous types they could use to push their career.

The lesser-known papers have written about The Rattlers, as Chicago’s Prairie Sun (by excellent rock’n’roll writer Moira McCormick) and Boston’s What’s New, but they have focused on their performances or their records, and have written nothing on the personal side of the group. Matty said, “Boston is really incredible the way they support the bands up there. And in Chicago, all the major press, like The Village Voice (equivalent) of Chicago, liked this band we played with. They were one of the ‘good bands in Chicago.’ They sucked. They were like the Knack.” Mitch pitched in, “But still, they got support. Local support. We go to Boston, and they play our tapes on the radio. They play our record on FM stations.”

“WBCN [Boston] was the first major radio station to play our record,” chimed in Dave Merrill, who leaps in the air come close to rivaling Mitch’s, but whose bass playing is hardly rivaled by anyone. Matty finished the point by commenting that, “The reason they don’t give us more airplay is because we’re not a Boston band, and they like to help their bands. Like, when they can slip us in, they do, but they always try to slip in a hometown band. The attitude is, like, ‘Let’s promote our own’.”

With all this lack of local publicity, you would think that the audience would not be there. Wrong. The audience is there and vocal in their own way. “Dancing is the best reaction you can get,” Matty claims. “In New York, you get the least amount of dancing. We go to some towns, and all of a sudden the whole floor is full of people dancing. That, to me, is the biggest turn-on, when they’re out there having that kind of fun, rather than just watching. In New York, everybody just stands there. Whatever the reason, they’re afraid to react. They don’t react, whatever the situation is. Dancing really gets me off. I think we do best when people dance.” Here, that tends to be a problem because, as Mitch puts it, “In New York, they’re the coolest. Everybody is too cool to dance or show any kind of emotion, bad or good.”

“We do like the guys in the front who bounce on the tables when we finish (at Max’s Kansas City),” Matty defends. “We like them.”

Dave Merrill
(ffoto by Robert Barry Francos)

And so, the tale continues. And what of their management, FBI [Frontier Booking International, run by Ian Copeland, brother of The Police’s Stuart – RBF, 1981]? Mitch explains, “We’re not very high on their priority list right now.”

So, it’s back to the problem of press, or lack of it. But what of the papers here in town, such as the one’s they mentioned? “You wouldn’t think that papers like that would have so much sway in the biggest city in the fuckin’ world. They dismiss us. Is it something to be ashamed of that we want to make records for people? They put us down because of that,” complains Matty.

Mitch goes on to say, “They don’t like us at all. They said that we can’t sing, and we have no good songs. They didn’t say that in their paper, but that’s what they said to somebody who called up and said, ‘How come you don’t write about The Rattlers?’ That’s what they tell people over the phone.” Dave concludes, “They have shit taste, anyway.”

But the gigs go on, and The Rattlers build in popularity. Having such little press, however, means they get “stuck” at a lot of gigs, such as when they opened for David Johansen at the Fast Lane in New Jersey. Their total take for the night was $50. But they look at it almost humorously, as Mitch explains that, “We got to see a bunch of slugs outside the dressing room. There was an alley right by the dressing room.” Matty added, “It was the highlight of the night. We peed on them to see if the salt content of our urine would dissolve them, but all they did was steam and crawl away.” But Dave retorted, “You would be steamin’ too, if somebody pissed on you.”

With their word-of-mouth popularity spreading, it’s only a matter of time now before the band breaks the New York press. They have toured with a few big groups and have a possible upcoming tour with 999. Only time will tell when the headlines read, “The Rattlers.”

After some changes in the line-up, the band members would move on. Mitch [aka Mickey] would be in bands like STOP, Sibling Rivalry and Harry Slash, but it would be his autobiography, I Slept With Joey Ramone that would put him into the press. Dave would move on to more experimental, electronic music for a while, including being in a band that played on one of the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethons in the 1980s. Recently, he has been with a straight-ahead rock’n’roll band called HEAP. As for what happened to Matty, I’m not sure.

Clean Cut DIRTY LOOKS [1981]

Text by Julia Masi / FFanzeen fanzine, 1981

Introduction text © Robert Barry Francos/FFanzeen, 2019

Images from the Internet

This interview was originally printed in FFanzeen, issue #7, dated 1981, by Julia Masi. The band ended up with two LPs, Dirty Looks (1980) and Turn It Up (1981). Note that this band should not be confused with the San Francisco-based heavy metal band with the same name that came afterwards. – Robert Barry Francos, 2019.

 

Marco Sin, Patrick Barnes, Peter Parker

It wasn’t long ago, two years to be precise, that Dirty Looks was living in relative obscurity in the sometimes forgotten borough of Staten Island, New York. Patrick Barnes wrote songs and played the guitar by himself, while he managed a health food store. The daily boredom that he experienced has served as a source of inspiration for his songs. A naturally optimistic person, Patrick tries to take the negative aspects of life and sing about them in a humorous light. With a repertoire of compositions like, “Take a Life” and “Drop That Tan,” he set out to form a band.

Patrick enlisted the aid of Peter Parker, a drummer posing as a longshoreman. Most people ask Peter how a longshoreman got into rock’n’roll, but Peter asks back, “How did rock’n’roll get into a longshoreman? The music was always in me.” He displays his affection for other bands on the lapels of a white leather motorcycle jacket that sports an impressive collection of buttons and enameled badges. Peter joined his first band, Black Horizon, when he was nine years old, playing covers of pop tunes – and he hasn’t put his drumsticks down since.

Marco Sin [aka Marcus Weissmann, d. 1995 – RBF, 2019], the brown-eyed bassman, completes the trio. Always determined to find a place in the spotlight, Marco looked upon his temporary day jobs “operating computers for rich corporations” as “something to keep the hands busy and the mind free for daydreaming.” But the daydreams became reality almost overnight as Dirty Looks started playing clubs in the New York area. Within a few months they had legions of fans and a contract with Stiff/Epic Records. They flew to England to record their first album, Dirty Looks. It received rave reviews on both sided of the Atlantic when it was released last Spring.

In the Fall, they jumped on the Stiff coach and embarked on their first major tour of the United States and Europe. At the Ritz, during December of 1980, on the last night of the “Son of Stiff” tour, they sat around the dressing room and talked about what it was like to get their first taste of international stardom.

“Paris might’ve been our best gig,” Patrick speculated, “and a great audience at the same time. Spain and Portugal were a lot of fun, but they were huge places. We played at sports arenas; kind of, like, indoor soccer places. And there was so much echo, whether we were playing tight or not, or we were out of tune, we wouldn’t know and neither would anybody else. We had a good time, but Paris was more like a place like (the Ritz).” He looked around, “Very similar to La Palace. They didn’t know anything about us ‘cause the record hadn’t been released there. And that’s a real good feeling when you totally win over the crowd. They don’t have any preconceived notions. At least they don’t have any positive ones. They haven’t been, kind of, told what to like, and they have to just decide on their own.

“It’s always exciting for us in New York, ‘cause it’s our home town. But in most of the big cities, sometimes you really have to win them over ‘cause they’re so jaded. They get to see everything.

“The worst reaction is nothing; that kind of boredom where people say, ‘Hmmmm,’ and they’re just thinking about us and not there to have a good time. To me, the idea is just let go and go crazy.

“We had bad press in England. They hate American rock’n’roll bands; they think we’re slick and shallow. Things turned around after we toured. One paper that was the most vicious against us actually had pretty much of a turn-around review. But when you’re right there, in England, it’s kind of weird. They really don’t get the right impression.

“They knew about us in Spain and Portugal. We’re on the radio a lot in Portugal. More people knew about us there than any place since we left New York.”

The crowds in Europe were larger than the band was used to at home. On the average, they were playing to three or four thousand kids per show. “They’re really enthusiastic. They’re not quite so,” he leans back in his chair and fakes a yawn, ‘Oh, another Stiff tour.’ They go crazy. It’s great. They’re,” he sits up straight, his body shaking slightly and his hands waving in the air, “’Another Stiff tour! Alright!’ A lot of times it’s like that in the States, in the smaller towns. And in Ireland and Scotland, they were enthusiastic. Whenever you play small smaller towns, you get that real feeling of excitement.

“In Milan, it was funny,” Peter noted, “Whether they like you or not they’ll toss things at you. They toss these 100 lire coins. They’re about the size of a half dollar. I must’ve gotten hit by about twenty of them,” he mimed dodging the coins, “in the back of my head. I got hit by a Coke can on the back of my wrist. Thank God it was an empty Coke can. They had this huge sack of pamphlets, about this size,” he demonstrated with his hands about six inches apart. “And they just tossed them all at Marco. They just went like bumpf, all over him. By the time we left the stage it was covered with paper.” He continued to describe how the band was bombarded with a fleet of paper airplanes. “Their paper airplanes aren’t ordinary paper airplanes where you just fold ‘em up and that’s it. They really get into building them. They rip the little corners for the wind and everything else like that. And when they threw them,” he shakes his head and smiles in admiration, “boy, those suckers flew!”

“They stone bands there,” Patrick added. They throw little rocks. We were the last band on in Italy because we were the most known. And if they like you, they throw even more things. By the time we got on it was really ridiculous. The stage was this high,” he lifted his hand about a foot-and-a-half above the table, “with paper. It was filmed for Italian television and we were cursing out the audience. We thought, ‘This isn’t gonna be able to be used,’ but the Italian television people loved it. They’re really nice.

“Also, about 1,500 people pay for tickets, then certain people liberate the hall. They open the doors and let in another 1,000 people so it’s like, 3,500 people when 2,000 of them just broke in.”

The band really seems to love being on the road. “It’s lots of fun just being paid to go out and see the world. It’s a great job,” Marco boasts. And they only cited two real problems about the tour: getting their laundry done and finding good food. Patrick adheres to a vegetarian diet that posed a few problems in Germany and at roadside diners.

“A lot of people think rock’n’roll is just a lot of fun,” but according to Peter, “It’s like a regular job. We have to get up early, and we get to bed late.” And travelling by coach didn’t make it any easier. “You fall asleep standing, holding onto the railing. You train your body to sleep in any uncomfortable position you could ever possibly think of.”

“But I don’t mind,” Patrick interrupted. “It’s really fun. Other jobs where I had to get up really early, it was like – " he lowers his eyes, leans his head back and thumps down in the chair, letting out a deep sigh. “I don’t really mind getting up early when it’s just to get the bus to drive to Paris. I can handle it. I can sleep on the bus,” he snaps his fingers, “like that. You learn to when you have to.”

“What I liked,” remembered Marco, “was the fact that wherever we went, whatever new country it was, you know people were coming to see a show, coming to listen to some rock’n’roll and to have a good time, and that language or whatever didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered except the fact that it was a rock’n’roll show. It was good. I can’t wait to go to Australia, Japan and South America. I’ve never been there.”