Much of my writing for Melody Maker, The Village Voice, and other publications in 1979-1984 is now available at Rock's Back Pages, the excellent online compendium run by Barney Hoskyns and Tony Keys, see http://www.rocksbackpages.com/

I have decided to put up a little of the music I used to perform a long time ago on this site.  Here's the first bit, a two-song performance at the Dalton School in April 1979, with part of my old band Crowd:  myself on guitar and vocals, Philip Ruhl, my partner in crime, on bass, and our former lead guitarist Doug Vargas, returning from Berklee School of Music to sit in on drums.  We called ourselves The Stripes, one of a series of last hurrahs for a band founded in 1973, when we were very young.  The first song is "Heat," one of our rave-ups, the second one by Ian Dury is all too familiar for anyone who lived through that period.  Happy days!  

Here's our last public performance, a reunited Crowd again at the Dalton School, at the end of 1979.  It's back to a version of the full band:  me on guitar and vocals, Doug Vargas on guitar, Philip Ruhl on bass, and our former lead singer, Fred Groover, on most excellent harp, plus a pick-up drummer we got via a Voice ad named "Bill" (who really made us sound good).  We began with another of our best originals, "Down and Out" (I wrote it on East Sixth Street in the fall of 1975, when I was sharing an unreconstructed railroad flat with our original drummer, Darrell Jenks), then "Heat" again, then, er, "Miss You."  More pandering, I suppose.  It's odd to me, perhaps fitting, that by the end we had come full circle back to what used to be called "blues rock." 

All the way back then, early 1974, when we were a trio, and some of us (me, evidently) could barely play at all.  Down in my dad's basement.   I suppose this is one of the origin points for what was latterly called the "U.S. new wave," meaning people like us out in the hinterlands, Lewisburg PA, who really hated the music around us and harkened back to something simpler, better, harder.  For us, however much we revered the older Stones, it was easier to figure out how to actually play a song by copping the early Who.  Thus this, one of our first songs, "Boris the Spider."   Guitar/voice--VG; bass--Ruhl, drums, the real stand-out, rolling around the kit very much like Moon, Darrell Jenks.  

Here's our first recording session, at northeast PA's main public radio station, WVIA.  A wonderful guy named George Graham had then, and still has as far as I know, a program called "Homegrown Music," where he invites musicians from around the state to record themselves professionally, and then plays the results on the air.  Doug Vargas wrote to him in late 1976, when Doug and our new drummer Paul Lacotta were still high school seniors and I was at a college in NJ, and Fred and Phil were living in Lewisburg.  I'd begun writing songs and we were taking ourselves seriously (!), as fitting into this thing called "New Wave." In fact, George Graham called us "Pennsylvania's first New Wave band," which we appreciated a great deal.  This was recorded in late January or early February 1977, at the same time as our first-ever paying gig--at Max's Kansas City, secured by our new manager, Danny Heaps (my old schoolmate from Dalton).  Shortly after this, at Danny's urging, we all either dropped out or graduated or whatever, and moved to New York, to try and make it big.  Happy days.
The two songs are:
"Monument" (about a girl, what a shock, written by me), with Fred Groover/vocals, Ruhl/bass, Gosse/guitar, Vargas/electric piano, Lacotta/drums.
"Never Seen" (a creep singing about himself, lyrics by Groover/Gosse, music by Gosse but really by all), same as above but Vargas now on lead.