Standing Over By The Record Machine: Freaks’ Heavy Orange Rock Lives!
New double-album reprises the abbreviated oeuvre of late ‘80s NYC punk/glam/garage/hard rock mix-and-matchers, featuring future D Generation backbone Howie Pyro.
FREAKS – Still In Sensurround (Orange Productions) 2xLP
Something was happening in New York’s Lower East Side in the years 1986-1989. It was the same thing happening in Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, London – pretty much all over the world. A new generation of musicians bred on late ‘60/early ‘70s hard rock embraced the punk that seemed all but dead at that point, and did not seem to see why they should throw away their Black Sabbath and Blue Cheer albums, now that they’d purchased Black Flag and Damned albums. Most of the time, it manifested itself in all the hallmarks of the Seattle bands: Tempos that dipped to half the Ramones’ chosen ramalama speed, ownership of Tim Warren’s Back From The Grave garage-exhumation comps, and a reliance on ye olde Super Fuzzes and/or Big Muff. If the music became sludge, so be it. Which is why much of it became known as “grunge” – that term sounded like proper rock ‘n’ roll onomatopoeia, here.
Many of these bands wished to touch the same ecstatic musical highs as those who trod the boards at Detroit’s fabled Grande Ballroom. As Howie Pyro told me in 1988, “If the MC5 could play extended jams, why can’t we?”
“We” were Freaks, a four-piece band who strode across the L.E.S. in the late ‘80s like they were The Original Grunge Band. Which they might have been, easily. Except they were a lot more colorful than most of what acquired that name. Especially considering that their color was orange.
Freaks: Clockwise from bottom left — Andrea Kusten, Howie Pyro, Eric Eckley, and John Fay. (Pic: Greck Porkorsky)
In their lifetime, Freaks – Pyro on bass, his wife Andrea “The Big Mama Freak” Kusten on vocals and rhythm guitar, her cousin Eric “Cousin Eck” Eckley on drums, and John Fay on lead guitar and vocals – had a discography that was only five releases full. There were two EPs, a single, a demo cassette, an appearance on the Every Band Has A Shonen Knife Who Loves Them tribute album, and one LP, In Sensurround. This freshly-issued collection is the whole damned kit-n-kaboodle on two limited edition orange (natch!) vinyl records – Freaks: Still In Sensurround.
Freaks’ individual parts had pedigrees in old school punk and the early ‘80s garage revival that could fill a few books. Pyro (born Howard Kusten on June 28, 1960) was the Johnny Thunders-lookalike bassist in The Blessed, the snotty teens who served as the Max’s Kansas City houseband in the late ‘70s, and had the very adult Walter Lure as an occasional member. The former Andrea Matthews drummed for Nuggets worshippers The Outta Place, and Fay abused a fuzzbox in fellow NYC garage-istas The Tryfles.
“I immediately phoned my cousin, Eric Eckley, the best drummer I knew, to round out the project,” Andrea writes in her liner notes. “Cousin Eck and I had grown up jamming on Kiss covers and quirky originals. I knew I had the right guy for the job.”
She further notes how “fragmented” NYC rock was when she and Pyro began the band: “There was punk and doom, art rock, a burgeoning hair metal scene, the aforementioned ‘60s psych clique, etc.” She doesn’t mention the Sonic Youth/Swans/Pussy Galore/Honeymoon Killers noise tumult also shattering ears at the time. But she does add they felt like ”outcasts,” wishing to blur all boundaries since they fit nowhere. Preferring “the roaring thud of the hard rock groups of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s,” Freaks became a sorta Orange Cheer, practicing a stripped-down blast that could mutate into feedback-ridden jamming. It at times resembled Kiss, at times the MC5. It had a healthy obsession with B-movie kitsch, especially the Pippi Longstocking films arriving for kids matinees in the U.S. from Sweden through the ‘70s, poorly-dubbed English, red pigtails and all. Their lysergically-fueled fixation with the fourth movie in the series, Pippi On The Run, resulted in a cassette-only rock opera, Heavy Orange Pippi Skelter.
And it was all (save Pyro’s bass) amplified by the same Orange amps as every band appearing on the German rock TV show Beat Club, the source of many of the clips MTV used to air as “Closet Classics.” Plus Eckley used Andrea’s “rare 1970 Ludwig Mod Orange kit complete with an added 13” tom covered in flaming monster fur.”
Hence, Heavy Orange Rock.
Fay worked tirelessly to remaster these tapes – old cassettes, plus the In Sensurround masters Andrea recovered from long-defunct label Resonance Records. Honestly, everything sounds better than memory serves. It’s all appropriately LOUD(!!!), the guitars’ Orange overdrive cutting through in more detail. What is really apparent is what a great bassist Pyro was. His tone is thick and fat, he rides the rhythms nicely, and he has all the melodic inventiveness of a Paul McCartney or James Jamerson. That bass playing is really the heart of Freaks’ sound, and it fills every nook and cranny. You sink into it like an overstuffed sofa cushion.
From there the next impression is the lyrics, which can range from druggy flights of fancy (Fay’s “Green Silver”) to comic book-inspired outsider lunacy (Andrea’s “Me Am Bizarro”). A personal favorite is “(Livin’ In A) Warzone,” which captures the pressure-cooker angst of daily NYC life at the time accurately: “There’s shootin’ in the subways/Stabbin’ in the streets/I’m afraid to say ‘hello’ to people that I meet.” The city, at that point, felt like it was under heavy manners. This tune captures the mood accurately, with the right amount of dread.
The second odds-n-sods disc is chock full of all the rockin’ extra-LP mayhem that spilled from the rest of their discography. For one thing, it’s a joy to again hear the live takes of their covers of protopunk classics “Do It!” by The Pink Fairies and the MC5’s immortal “Lookin’ At You.” There was no way the Howie Pyro who was in The Blessed could stay submerged under his Satanic Jesus look of the time for long. He soon echoed his teenage self in D Generation, not long after Freaks broke up. But that’s another story.
It’s wonderful to see Still In Sensurround emerge three decades later. Especially knowing its origins: Andrea was offered the tapes the same week her husband Howie Pyro went into the hospital for a liver transplant that saved his life. (They never divorced, despite ending the relationship at roughly the same time the band split up) As she writes in the liner notes, “Originally, every single penny from the sale of this record was earmarked to go to the Howie Pyro Medical Fund. But alas, Howie died of COVID pneumonia on May 4, 2022 after the successful organ transplant.” Still In Sensurround is “lovingly dedicated to the memory of Howie Pyro.” Order your copy Rough Trade mail order at https://www.roughtrade.com/us/product/freaks/still-in-sensurround.
____________________
The next chapter of Pyro’s life changed the shape of downtown NYC rock ‘n’ roll, plus a few more remote corners of the world. With singer Jesse Malin, co-guitarists Danny Sage and Richard Bacchus and drummer Michael Wildwood, D Generation brought even more color and excitement in an age of grunge grown dour and depressive. They reignited punk rock fury, crossbreeding it with New York Dolls-style glam and bright shiny rock ala Cheap Trick and Aerosmith. Soon, they became the sound of the Lower East Side. Their Green Door parties enlivened the town at Yardbirds manager Giorgio Gomelski’s loft, Pyro manning the turntables with precision and wit. They went on to co-found one of the city’s greatest venues, Coney Island High, a classic international palace of sweat and funk, where all manner of beautiful debauchery was going on in the unlit corners. Until Mayor Adolph Giulinazi’s lifestyle police decided to get involved.
D Generation’s three ‘90s albums were like an international clarion call, though only select few tuned in to their signal. Certainly, I can personally testify to coming home from a press junket I spent in NYC as Columbia Records launched their second album, No Lunch. I walked into a Hormones rehearsal in black stretch jeans and creepers I’d purchased at Trash & Vaudeville, a little eyeliner smeared over my lids. I announced our sets would now be 30 minutes long, paced in sprints of five back-to-back songs --BAM! BAM! BAM! D Gen was a reason I moved to NYC when The Hormones broke up. How was I to know D Gen were about to become history themselves?
After eight years, it was over. Pyro went on to be Danzig’s bassist for a spell, among other projects, eventually becoming known for hosting the weekly Intoxica radio program over Luxuria Radio online. Malin had the highest profile of any of them, touring relentlessly behind excellent solo albums such as the Ryan Adams-produced The Fine Art Of Self-Destruction. He was also behind the city’s finest rock ‘n’ roll bar, Niagra, in the old location of ‘80s hardcore landmark A7. On June 14th, Rolling Stone ran a story about Malin suffering a rare spinal stroke during a dinner with friends commemorating the one-year anniversary of Pyro’s passing. He is currently wheelchair-bound, immobilized from the waist down. He is nevertheless determined to walk and dance again. A campaign is currently set up through the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund on his behalf. Every tax-deductible cent raised goes to Malin’s care. Donations can be made here. He has tirelessly worked for his community, both locally and on behalf of the international musical community. It’s time we give back to him.
#timstegall #timnapalmstegall #timnapalmstegallsubstack #punkjournalism #standingoverbytherecordmachine #freaks #recordreview #stillinsensurround #nycrock #lateeighties #heavyorangerock #OGgrunge #howiepyro #theblessed #dgeneration #andreamatthewskusten #thebigmamafreak #theouttaplace #johnfay #thetryfles #ericeckley #cousineck #jessemalin #punkrock #punk #subscribe #fivedollarsmonthly #fiftydollarsannually #upgradeyourfreesubscription #bestwaytosupport