Peter Bell in 1994

The last interview in the December 1994 issue updated where Peter was then.

“Ten Ten got no respect in Richmond, and I always talked up the town in interviews all over the world, what a great music scene we had here, which is true. But Richmond didn’t return it in kind. I can’t complain. I got everything I wanted. I just stopped wanting things.”

In the final days of Ten Ten, even as a three-piece, “we were hot as shit. We did a concert at the Flood Zone that was broadcast on XL-102 and it’s as good as anything I’ve ever heard live. We sounded like a six piece band, no mistakes, fantastic. Our popularity never waned. But I couldn’t go back, I couldn’t switch gears. The other guys did it admirably, but I couldn’t. I felt like I had paid my dues in The Rage, and in the early days of Ten Ten. I didn’t want to pay dues anymore. It was tough.”

By 1991, he was “sunk very low. My drug use was bad. I lost everything. I didn’t have an income. I wanted to be rescued. I wanted my girlfriend to do it, but she couldn’t. I don’t know why the band couldn’t get another record deal. 

“At least I was doing less drugs. My drug dealer cut me off, and then he got busted. I didn’t have any money and couldn’t get any drugs. As soon as that happens, you lose every friend you have. They are gone so fast, it’s unbelievable.”

But one stayed. JJ Loehr was playing in a cover band with Frank Daniel of Single Bullet Theory and Surrender Dorothy and suggested they work together as BOO. “It stood for Beat Off Odyssey. Our drummer was Danny Fisher. We recorded, but it never went anywhere. I didn’t want to do covers. Others in the band felt we had to. I was drunk all the time.” BOO broke up. Peter and JJ formed another band called New West.

Don Ruzek and Lee Johnson joined New West. “We made some progress. Bruce Olsen let us record at his home studio. We played a few shows. New West could have been good. Flash came back to manage us, but it wasn’t moving fast enough for Don, so he quit. Don and Lee had a problem with my bringing Flash back in. So I brought in Shawn and Brian Collins (Letters from Earth) and we formed Orlando Furioso, playing the same songs as New West. We made some really good tapes. Shawn and Brian were good players. We were doing showcases. It could have gone places, but for various reasons, I fucked up. 

"I didn’t know what I was going to do then. A friend was opening Shockoe Bar and Grill and wanted me to book the bands. I said, great! This will be the easiest job in the world. Little did I know what a hard fucking job that is and what fucking assholes musicians are. BS&M was the epitome of everything a band should not be. The first show I booked with them, they opened with ‘Ohio’ for yuppies who weren’t even born during Kent State. Nobody embraces the views in that song less than BS&M. Who wants to hear bad covers of Crosby, Stills and Nash? But there’s an audience for it in Richmond.”

Bell says BS&M went over his head with the club owner and worked out their own deal for the door and a Grateful Dead cover band to open for them. “So that band came down, people did the worm. It was fine. We made the most money that night. BS&M made $3,800 at the door. The opening band wanted $50. I thought BS&M would pay them. They wouldn’t. The club owner wouldn’t. The house made seven grand that night, but nobody had $50 for the opening band. I ended up paying them out of my pocket, and I told them what happened.”

According to Peter, BS&M didn’t like that and told him to call them at their office the following Monday so they could explain to him what their expenses were. He refused. “Who in a band has a fucking office? Show me the expenses? They had no idea what they were going to make that night.”

Bell clashed with The Fredds as well. “When they were The Limit, they used to kiss my ass until it was clean as a whistle every fucking time Ten Ten played.” After Ten Ten broke up, former members of The Limited wanted to put together a band with him, he says, but they wanted a guarantee he wouldn’t do drugs.

“Well, I was fucked up, but I’m still ten times the musician they are. I don’t need terms dictated to me by a band who up until then, the biggest thing they had done was open for my band!”

He did like Boy O Boy, which rebranded as Fighting Gravity, ZigManZag, and AAE. He didn’t like East Coast Entertainment, which he claimed bragged about booking Ten Ten in their Yellow Pages ad even though they never got the band a single job.

“Shockoe Bar and Grill was a great place to play. We were killing the Flood Zone every night. On Edge would call, but I thought they were a cover band and never listened to their tape. I finally heard them when I was in rehab on radio night. They would turn the radio on for the fucked up junkies and On Edge was on with Eric E. Stanley. They were great! I loved them! I saw them in Roanoke and they were fantastic. They covered The Cure. I told them to play all originals, but they said people didn’t want to hear that.

“I’ve heard that all my life, that people don’t want to hear original music, but I never played covers and was in successful bands. I’ve made $300,000 playing music, just doing my own thing, fucked up or not. I didn’t play the Dead, The Cure, not even bands I liked. And I made decent money.

“A manager is crucial for any band. Even if it’s just a friend you brought along, it makes you look like a working band. You need an agent, too. Firehouse got signed, and they are one of the worst bands I ever heard. Only two guys are from Richmond. The best band now is The Good Guys. I like Bio Ritmo. I love Letters from Earth, but those guys probably hate me. Sorry, I was a drug addict. I apologize.

“I’m not a fan of Vapor Rhinos. I don’t like anybody making fun of music. I take it too seriously. Rocket 69 is a good band. Rock Koplin and Ben Lawes have never been in a bad band. I loved Joe America, but they broke up.”

After his friend sold Shockoe Bar and Grill, Peter went into rehab and came out to find his apartment cleaned out. “They put me out on the street even though I wasn’t behind on anything.” Then Mark Lewis, his bandmate from Ten Ten, invited him to New York.

“I spent the rest of the year in New York, making tapes with two English guys from The Cult, John Ashton from the Psychedelic Furs, and Mark. We called it U.S.U.K. And we didn’t suck! We worked hard. Flash was ready to work for us. We rented rehearsal space. We were hot shit. I was excited. Nobody was drinking or doing drugs. But something was always happening. The other guys kept leaving to do pick-up jobs. It was the brokest band I ever played in, and I have been in nothing but broke bands since Ten Ten. The English guys had no place to live. They stayed with girls they met. I stayed with Mark. We had to keep pushing back our debut date.”

Then Peter got custody of an infant daughter and kept her in New York. “She was 18 months old. It was a fucked up time. It was costing money to record material for a record, and I had to blow it off. Then I got an offer from Nashville.”

While he prepared to go to Nashville, his daughter’s mother decided she wanted the baby back. He moved in with his mother in Roanoke so he could commute back and forth from Nashville to custody hearings in Richmond.

“Nashville is where all the good music is now, and that’s why everybody goes there. That’s where the melody is, the lyrics. What used to be good about rock and roll is there. Sixty percent of all music sold last year was country, that’s how pervasive it is. It’s the thing, and it should be because it’s the best music. Most rap and heavy metal sucks.”

He got married in 1994, started writing songs and switched from bass to guitar. His wife was a country singer, so he got into that. “She had a band and needed a bass player, so I started sitting in.” The band went through different members and moved from folk to rock. Peter and his wife settled down in Stratford Hills where they each had a daughter to raise. Eventually they would add a son to the family.

“I’m slugging along here and it’s time to face reality, whatever the hell that is. I can play as well as anybody in this town, and I can rock harder than anybody and everyone who knows me knows that’s true. I do everything to the extreme. I don’t take anything lightly. I’m going to write some great songs, and my wife is going to sing them great, and everybody will see what a talent she is.

“So that’s where I’m at now. I want to do rock and roll. I want to go full time with something and make the sacrifices you need to make to be successful. I think I’m writing good songs, good enough for a publishing deal. I’m pushing forward. I’m back. I’m rested. I’m ready to do it the way it’s supposed to be done.”

Peter Bell on the End of Ten Ten

Part three of the Peter Bell story, originally published in November 1994

When Ten Ten’s album “Walk On” came out in 1986, Peter Bell remembers it was destroyed by the British music critics. “In England, they make a big difference, not like here. They have tons of music newspapers. People buy them every week and it’s gospel, especially the three majors, Melody Maker, NME, and Sound. They can ruin you.”

One of the criticisms was it didn't capture the raw energy of the band, that it was too polished. “Even the other members of Ten Ten bought into that. That’s a bunch of shit! Ten Ten was never raw. It was always polished. I loved that album.”

Undeterred, they toured and toured. “I got to meet all my heroes. We played with everybody that was popular at the time. Our first show with Simple Minds was an Amnesty International concert in Amsterdam for 50,000 people, the only time I had stage fright. I was dying. The stage was outside and so big. You were far away from the next person in the band. Then you’d realize it’s a whole different approach to doing the show, and I’m all about the show. I can outrock anybody in this town. So after that, I was fine. The next show was 100,000 people. The biggest was 150,000. We played with INXS. We played with The Cure, The Bangles. What a shitty band that was except for the bass player. We played with James Taylor in Munich. I got to meet Chrissie Hynde at a Lone Justice show in London. She was so nice, gave me her phone number, said call any time. I saw her two years later and she said, Why haven’t you called? That was cool.”

Bell learned to like the big shows, running around the stage and destroying hotel rooms under the tutelage of INXS. The record company kept paying to clean things up. Mark Lewis separated his room from the rest of the band. Bell was also doing “a ton of drugs,” he admits.

“On every big tour, there was one person hired to supply you with drugs, whatever you wanted. It was like that at the studio, too, when you were recording. I thought it would last forever. I used to set goals, and I reached every one, but once we got signed, I didn’t set any more goals. I fucked up. I went on autopilot. Somebody else could take care of things now. I had done what I set out to do, made a career of what I love and what I’m good at. I had done my part and didn’t want to worry about where the money went. We were selling out Radio City Music Hall in 1987. We had videos on MTV.”

The album was released in the United States. “Q-94 put it on its ratings show and it got 98 percent favorable. XL-102 did a similar thing, and then they wouldn’t play it. Q-94 had a top 40 format and had no choice. They couldn’t play it. XL-102 just wouldn’t. Our record company flipped out. They were already stunned by the bad reviews in England. What’s going on? Your hometown stations won’t play your record! We thought you were popular there!”

XL-102 told Peter nobody was calling for it, but Bell says he would call at least six times every day he was in town. So did his friends. “They just wouldn’t play it. We would listen for hours. If I ever meet Rick Maybee on the street, I’ll punch him in the face and not tell him why. People don’t want to hear local music? Who the fuck is he talking to? I call and ask for local music all the time, and so does everybody I know. I want to strangle those bastards. They have a responsibility to support local music. Every band they play was a local band at one time, trying to get somewhere. Even Roanoke, the worst music town I’ve ever seen in my life has better radio.”

In the end, Bell placed “a lot of blame on those fuckers at XL-102 for my career getting fucked up.”

The band kept putting out records. The last one, “Promises, Promises” was in 1988. “We were doing well in Europe. We stayed in great hotels until I smashed up too many of them. Chrysalis didn’t do anything to promote our last record. They printed them but wouldn’t put them out. They were so desperate to get rid of us, they offered to buy us out for $100,000. We were still being courted by other labels. I voted to stay with Chrysalis, but I was the only one. We were still touring, still making money. It was a sure thing. But the others were worried we’d lose momentum if we didn’t get on a new label right away and get a new record out. Virgin wanted us, so we had to go.”

They returned to Richmond to wait for the Virgin contract, but when it came, it required they return to England to live. “And I was over that! I didn’t want to see England again as long as I lived. It was a filthy and disgusting town. I don’t like big cities. There were tons of homeless people. We never had much money anymore and lived in a slum. I was lonely. It was depressing. We ran up huge bills calling home, flying to Paris and Amsterdam to forget about England. It rained all the time. It was cold. I hated it. I think everybody in the band did. I wasn’t going to sign that contract. Why did they care where we lived? But it was a deal breaker. We thought, okay, we’ll get more offers. Flash was working his ass off.”

Meanwhile, The Good Guys signed a management contract with Flash and went on tour in the United States with Simply Red. They were compatible and Simply Red wanted them to finish the tour with them in Europe. Flash offered to put up the backing money for the tour if The Good Guys agreed to pay it back 500 percent if they got a record deal. Bell thought it was a good deal for them. But The Good Guys consulted a New York lawyer who said it was “nuts,” Bell remembers. The negotiating went back and forth, and in the end, The Good Guys didn’t get on the plane. Simply Red got another opening act.

Bell feels it was a mistake. “Without that agreement, Flash couldn’t get the money for the tour from his backers. The papers in Europe were already excited about The Good Guys. They were running photos, advance press, more than Ten Ten ever got. They would have been signed for a ton of money, but they thought Flash was ripping them off. But nothing from nothing is nothing. It was future possible money, down the road. If they didn’t get signed, they owed Flash nothing. So they didn’t go. Look at them now, still trying eight years later. No deal.

“It’s all just play money. I wouldn’t give a shit who got the first advance money. You can always get a lawyer and break a contract later.”

Meanwhile, Ten Ten was working on songs in Richmond, waiting for the buy-out check from Chrysalis. It’s 1988. “I’m letting my bills pile up. I was a bad drug addict. I spent all my money on drugs. I bought a big house sight unseen on Elwood Avenue and Nansemond while I was in Europe and my sister, brother, and a girlfriend were living there. I moved in, too. All my investments had gone sour. The banks were knocking on the door. The police were there every night. But whenever I was in town, it was a party. The other band members kept to themselves, but I was the party guy. Everybody loved me. Everybody came over. It was drugs and beer all night, non-stop, free party house all the time.”

When the pay-off $100,000 check came, Flash called them together and said the band owed him $130,000.

Bell lost his house. He and his girlfriend moved to Shockoe Bottom. Don Ruzek left the band, but Ten Ten would still play. “We went back to the original incarnation, the original three, me, Mark Lewis and Lee Johnson, just playing around town. But I couldn’t go from playing in front of 150,000 to the Jade Elephant. The only way I could do it was to be wasted. I couldn’t even stand up. Any drug I could pump into my body before a show, I would. I hated playing so much because it was cutting into my drugging time. I never went to sound check. All I did was show up for gigs blitzed out of my mind

“To this day, I don’t see how the others did it. I couldn’t adjust. We didn’t have a road crew anymore. We had to schlep our own stuff like everybody else. I thought my days of doing that were over.”

The band pushed on for a couple of years. Bell thinks it finally ended around 1991. “I went to Florida for a vacation and they called and said I had to come back to play a show at The Library. I said I wasn’t leaving Key West to play The Library. They said I had to, to get on the plane. They didn’t believe I wouldn’t come. They went to The Library and waited. I didn’t come. That was the end of Ten Ten.”

Peter Bell on the Rise of Ten Ten

Part two of the Peter Bell story. Ten Ten rises to the almost top. Originally published in October 1994.

“Ten Ten had a following right away because The Rage fans came out to see me and The Dads fans came out to see Mark Lewis. We plugged along and started dealing with Bruce Olsen of The Offenders. He took us under his wing. He was involved in starting the recording studio at the Flood Zone, and his own record label, Generic Records. He wanted to record us.”

The scene in Richmond in the early ‘80s was exceptional. “We had The Good Guys, who were phenomenally popular. Jimi Gore (who had been in The Rage with Peter) was the most talented musician in the city. AAE got started, one of the last bands to open for The Rage. The Dads, with their jingly, jangly sound, stayed together without Mark Lewis. They still had Bryan Harvey, who would go on to House of Freaks. Mike Rodriguez and Ben Lawes had Mudd Helmut. Their followers would move on to Gwar. Their shows were down and dirty, but good.

“Then we had The Limit, Richmond’s answer to Lover Boy. They were really cute, young guys, super nice. They always came to our shows. They were such high energy, the most pop band ever, more than The Dads. There was not one hint of relevancy whatsoever, straight boy-loves-girl rock and roll. They were a joke to everybody in my band, but I thought they were professional, fun on stage, and nice as shit guys. Mark and Lee would groan their butts off.”

Most of The Limited went on to The Fredds and fell out with Peter.

“Suzy Saxon and The Anglos had their following. Single Bullet held in there until 1984 when they lost their record deal. We had bands that covered every kind of music you could want to hear. Other great bands came through town. 10,000 Maniacs played here all the time. They used to open for Ten Ten at Rockitz.”

It’s 1984 and they record with Bruce Olsen at the Flood Zone. “That album ('Ordinary Thinking') did more for our career than any of the major label records we’d do later,” Bell said. “It got reviewed in every record magazine, even Rolling Stone. When we signed the contract to make that record, we agreed that if we ever got a major label deal, Bruce would produce our record, so when we signed with Chrysalis, we had to pay him off. I think it was for 20 grand. We played the regional circuit. We had a big following in Raleigh, D.C., Savannah. We showcased in New York.”

Once again, he was making a living at music, about $250 a week. They could afford their own apartments. “You could make enough money from the door if you had a following, and we did. College radio was supportive and there were great music scenes in North Carolina and Athens, Georgia. But Richmond was the best of all. Best diversity, best musicianship. But in the other music towns, the musicians supported each other. They’d play together on the same bill, and on each other’s records. In Richmond, it was sniping on all fronts at all times. It was so competitive. Lots of people should have been signed from here, but they weren’t.”

They dropped their local manager for Harry Simmons in North Carolina who kept them touring. “We played all originals. We only had 20 songs. We’d have an opening band. People who play three or four sets a night, I admire them, but it’s not going to help your career or your attitude about music. That’s not the way to do it.”

Meanwhile, his friend JJ Loehr from Bam Bam had started a new band called Living Cities with Shawn Collins (Letters from Earth). “They were incredible, as good as Santana, but they didn’t have star power. I took them everywhere with us as our opening band, but there’s an opening band syndrome. Unless you break out of it right away, you’re stuck forever.”

About this time, MTV happened and ruined music for Bell. “It’s horrible. It required music to be visual and then homogenized the vision of it. I hated it. Then they changed the drinking age, so the club scene in Richmond collapsed. When The Police broke up, you could see the steady decline of music. People got greedy. But Ten Ten just kept getting better.”

Single Bullet Theory was falling apart. Their manager, Flash, wanted to manage Ten Ten now. He offered them a New York show Single Bullet couldn’t make and told them not to tell their manager. The New York gig was encouraging, so they filed papers to drop Harry Simmons and go with Flash. Simmons let them go in exchange for a finder’s fee if they were signed by any record label he had contacted while their manager.

“We were signed by the only label he hadn’t talked to. Flash guaranteed us a record deal in three months, but it took a year.” In 1985, they toured England with the Water Boys, arranged by the agency Wasted Talent. “They said they’d get us signed, but we had to pay them 10 percent when they did, plus we would have to pay Flash 20 percent.”

Everybody in Ten Ten is writing music, but as the group developed, “everybody’s ideas are getting squashed by Mark. And we phased out anyone else singing but Mark. Steve Fisher, the keyboard player, left because he wanted to sing. We replaced him with Don Ruzek who had been with Surrender Dorothy. Then we phased out keyboards and put him on guitar. He just slipped in and played everything perfectly. He didn’t add anything visually, but you could count on him not to fuck up. He always played great.

“We killed the Water Boys every single night. The audience was screaming for encores, and they never ask for encores in England. We went from Rockitz and the Brewery in Raleigh to slightly bigger venues in England and the papers were writing about this incredible American unsigned band every day. By the end of the tour, every major label in the world was desperate to sign us.”

They went with Chrysalis-UK even though MCA and Virgin offered more money. Chrysalis had Pat Benatar, Huey Lewis and the News, and Billy Idol. “Chrysalis really understood us,” Bell said with sarcasm. “They didn’t want us to just have good records. They wanted us to be an album-oriented band like U2, come along slowly. Hit the college radio market first. If it took three or four albums to get us established, fine. We could move at our own pace. Boy, were we morons. We were so stupid. We thought because they were small, we wouldn’t get lost. But if you don’t have a hit record, you’re out of that company, so we should have known better than to listen to those bastards.”

They signed and returned to England. Their signing bonus was a quarter of a million dollars, he said. He claims only the Mighty Lemon Drops had a higher bonus. Flash got his 20 percent, and the booking agent, Wasted Talent, got their 10 percent. Flash’s company, Flash-Ball, offered to invest the money for them so “unlike Single Bullet Theory, when we broke up, we’d have money for the rest of our lives, they told us. I was all for letting them do it. Just pay the band a salary and pay our living and travel expenses.”

Peter thinks Flash-Ball invested the money in Main Street Station, a shopping mall in the old train station in Shockoe Bottom that failed. “We’d get $5,000 bonuses once a year and $10,000 at Christmas, so it was okay by me. We got $250 a week and had no expenses. That was the same as we had always earned. We didn’t want to change our lifestyles, although they did to some degree. We had such grand plans.”

The night the money arrived, a downtown bank opened for them after hours to start checking accounts. “It was the weirdest thing, but with that much money, you got anything you wanted.” They lived in England for the next three years, their houses getting progressively cheaper as their careers spiraled downward. His relationship with Candy was over, but he says he kept his promise to give her something if he was ever signed, $5,000, half of his first bonus check. “Everybody came out of the woodwork to borrow money from me then. It was hard to explain that I didn’t actually have it. I just got a weekly paycheck.”

They recorded their first Chrysalis album, “Walk On,” in six weeks. It was produced by Stephen Smith, who worked with The Smiths. “He was a young guy and a former bass player, so he had good ideas and I listened to him. It was a great album. I was excited about it. I co-wrote one song, but I didn’t get credit for it on the jacket. I still get royalty checks for it, 40 cents a year. Everything else on the album was Mark’s.”

And so the trouble began. “We’d write a song and take it to Mark because he was the singer, but he’d change it so much, you felt like he was gutting it. If you told him to sing it the way it was written, he’d do it badly. He was a major control freak. So you’d say forget it, don’t do my song. I was with him eight years thinking he was ruining my best creative moments. If only someone would sing my songs the way I wrote them, they wouldn’t be the B-sides on the singles and not even make it on the album. I’d be so much more fulfilled.”

Flash suggested the rest of the band gang up on Mark, “but the bottom line is you can’t force your singer to do anything. They have the ultimate, final authority. I had a big problem with Mark the last few years of Ten Ten. Fairly or unfairly, he took the enjoyment of it away from me. I could not write songs with him. It wasn’t until I was writing for myself again that I got back my respect for him. Singing is the hardest fucking instrument in the world to play. I always say I’m going to be the singer in my next band, but it’s always disastrous.

“Mark was a real talent. He could play guitar on top of everything else. He did a great job with the band, and I don’t think we would have been signed without him. We had something that was greater than the sum of its parts, and individually, everyone was a great player. It was a great band, the best to come out of Richmond.”

But back home, the local press was derisive, Bell says. He remembers the late writer Alan Cumbey wrote if Ten Ten could get a major label contract, anyone who could hold a guitar should. Bell wrote him a blistering reply, reminding him of his long history in music.

“How many years had we worked to get this, not taking day jobs, nothing to divert our attention? Music is my religion. It’s something I take seriously, that’s why I don’t enjoy Gwar or Vapor Rhinos. I have a sense of humor, but you shouldn’t mix music up with sleazy, locker room type references. Music has gotten me through the bad times of my life, which have been really bad. Music should always be about lifting your spirits, transforming a moment to something higher.”

Peter Bell Remembers The Rage

Peter Bell called his friend JJ Loehr’s house in the Museum District the headquarters of the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club, and that’s where we met in August 1994 for four hours for a four-part interview. Part 1 appeared in the September 1994 issue.

Peter Bell moved from Blackstone to Richmond in 1974 when he was 14.

“I was going to be an artist. That was my lifelong ambition, to be a great painter. I went to Open High School. Then I went to the Parson School of Design for one semester, but it didn’t work out. I wasn’t ready to leave home, and I was too much in love with a girl.”

While in high school, he met Jimi Gore and Ira Marlowe. They wanted to be rock and roll stars, and they needed a bass player.

“They convinced me I would meet more girls as a musician than an artist. They didn’t have to prod me too much. I started playing when I was 16.”

The band was The Rage, “the most important band to ever come out of Richmond,” Peter said, defying the advice given to them by a musical equipment salesman to "not push the originals.”

“We never played covers. I loathe covers. I’ve been able to get through my whole career without playing covers. It was a bias built into me by Jimi and Ira. I looked up to them. They were a year older and seemed to know a lot. They were real musical snobs, so I became one, too, even though it goes against my nature. I didn’t listen to any important rock and roll then. We were anti-Southern rock, right down to Creedence. We didn’t like Bruce Springsteen and wrote off all the folk-rock stuff. I missed a lot that was happening during the ‘70s because of those guys and only discovered it years later.”

But it served a purpose, he said. “We established an identity that didn’t get diluted. We liked British glam rock like David Bowie, T Rex, Led Zeppelin, Queen. Everything that was American was unimportant.”

Ira wrote all the music for The Rage. They wore make-up on stage and Peter took a class at VCU to learn how to sew their elaborate, romantic-styled costumes.

“We played everywhere, Hard Times, Kosmos 2000 underneath where New Horizons used to be on Harrison and Broad. We became a phenomenon. Richmond music in 1975 was a void, a great darkness, horrible. It was horrible throughout the whole country, California country folk-rock, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles, Poco, just horrible pseudo country-rock, so mellow, it was sickening. That’s why punk started. And Richmond was totally out of touch. It was all Southern rock cover bands at the Back Door where Chronos Café is now. That was the place to go, just like it is now but sleazier.”

When punk broke in Britain, there was a response in Richmond in the form of Ricky and the Whiteboys and L’Amour. The Whiteboys, Peter said, were a high energy, sort of retro band fronted by a guy named Ralph.

“They were great. They started opening for Single Bullet Theory, which was a bigger, New Wave band, Richmond’s version of The Cars. We’d go to see them and rag on them because they were older than us. We thought we could do this so much better! Back in those days, the drinking age was lower, but anybody could get into a club. When I was 15, I got into clubs all the time.”

The unifying element then was Richmond Graphics on the Southside, a business run by hippie types, Peter remembers.  “All the bands had VCU art students in them. The art school was where so many fresh ideas were coming from. Richmond Graphics made posters and flyers for the bands, big, professionally screened works of art. They’re prized if you still have one. The bands rehearsed there. It was constant parties, a Flood Zone type space.”

At one of the parties, Ralph got wasted, climbed out on the roof and jumped to a tree, which was not uncommon behavior for the wasted at these parties, but he missed the tree, broke his neck, was paralyzed and died after a long hospitalization, although Peter thought it was more a case of losing his will to live than the injury.

“It was the first casualty of a real mythical figure in rock history here. It reshaped the scene because afterward, the Whiteboys and L’Amour reformed into Beex, who still play now and then. And The Rage took over the void. We started opening for Single Bullet Theory, which was the first band to get signed from this town, and we killed them every single time.”

At one important show in Blacksburg, Bullet’s manager Flash (Craig Otero) told them they couldn’t play even though they were ready. Bell says it was because radio people were in the audience and Flash didn’t want the opening act stealing Single Bullet’s thunder. The other opening band, Beex, was deemed less threatening, and they went on.

“He gave me some smarmy tale and I said fuck you. We decided never to open for anybody again after that. Our band instantly took off like you wouldn’t believe. Every hip person in town came to our shows. We had a big gay following, artsy people, kids from Open High. We played every weekend. We made $1,000 a night when it cost $2 to get into a club. It was unbelievable. We were the only game going. People were losing their minds over us. And we weren’t even as good as we thought we were. We were just learning to play our instruments.

“We had an elaborate show, costumes, sets, sort of like Gwar, but not sexually shocking, not grotesque ever, just playing the best music we could play. We thought we were like the Beatles. We hated being called New Wave.”

A regular after-show ritual for Bell was being beat up by hecklers. “I was always ready for a fight, leading with my mouth and constantly getting clocked. I was somebody in a leotard with fuchsia make-up all over. I guess I was a target.” He learned to fight.

After they played a show at the Virginia Museum, they met an album cover artist from Los Angeles who urged them to move to L.A., promising to help them. “So after two years of being the only exciting band in Richmond, the only band to lead the way stamping out Southern rock, we packed up and headed out.” It was 1980.

“We showed up at the artist guy’s house. We came as you suggested! Let’s be famous! Point us in the right direction! But he was full of shit and wouldn’t have anything to do with us. Everybody blew us off. But no matter, we were The Rage, adored by hundreds of Richmonders! How hard could it be to be adored by thousands of Californians?”

The Rage had made enough money in Richmond that they didn’t have to work day jobs, but in L.A., they did. Bell got one right away at the telephone company, and his girlfriend Candy, who had followed him to California, found work, too.

When Bell learned his brunette girlfriend was seeing someone else in the band behind his back, he vowed to hook up with the first blonde he saw, and that was Candy, wearing a leopard skin jumpsuit and walking out of a Laundromat on Harrison Street. She was from New Kent County and had just enrolled at VCU. They were together for the next six years.

“She was really beautiful and got a job in L.A. as a model, but because she was too short, 5 foot 7, there was nowhere to go with it but nude modeling.” She did all the major men’s magazines, including a Playmate of the Month which earned her $10,000. Then there was nowhere to go except sleazier magazines. Ira and Jimi were working at warehouses and hating it.

“We had to rent rehearsal space, carry our PA equipment in and out just to practice for three hours. One night we were tired and left it in the truck, and it was all stolen. We had to fight back from that, buy more stuff, and we were nobody from nowhere. The Rage did not mean jackshit out there. We played Wednesday nights at 3 a.m. in Pasadena, one of six bands on the bill. Nobody there. We couldn’t deal with it. We had been used to playing anytime we wanted with guarantees.”

Now it’s 1981 and the others are homesick, but Bell is with Candy, going to fancy sleazeball parties, doing cocaine, and he doesn’t care. Jimi is getting into ska at L.A. clubs and starts writing music. Bell’s own efforts at songwriting are “god awful,” he recalls, but Jimi comes up with a great song which Ira won’t do because it doesn’t fit with their set. So Jimi goes home to Richmond for a vacation and his brother, Harry Gore, still has his ska band, The Good Guys, that started at Open High as a cover band and had opened for The Rage. With The Rage gone, The Good Guys have become big. So has a band with Mark Lewis and Bryan Harvey called The Dads.

“They were a retro band doing Beatles-sounding stuff. Between those two, they had all The Rage followers. Single Bullet is on the road. Harry let Jimi front the band a few times, singing, and it goes well. Jimi gives them his song, ‘Fun Lover.’ It’s great. He doesn’t come back to L.A.”

Ira wants the band to liquidate their assets in L.A. and go back to Richmond to reclaim their fans and save the band. They pack up and head out, but the van breaks down in Arizona, “a real, true odyssey with a lot of soul-searching going on.”

The effort to save the band works for only a few months. By early 1982, it breaks up despite even more elaborate costuming. “My vision was Adam and the Ants. People came at first, but went back to the danceable Dads and Good Guys.” Peter finds out Ira had told Jimi not to come back to Los Angeles in order to force Peter to leave. He had been content to stay, but when Candy also returns to Richmond, Los Angeles is over.

About the ultimate break-up, Peter felt they were doing well enough, but it wasn’t like before. “Jimi wanted to get out from behind the drums and sing. Ira wanted to try New York and was blaming me for L.A.” They were back to opening for bands that had built reputations in their absence, “which made sense, but we thought it was crazy. We wanted to headline like we always had. We were so split apart, I’m sure it showed on stage.”

The band breaks up. “Ira tells me the only reason I didn’t want to break up was because there was nothing else I could do. Those words were the most motivating factor in my life.”

Candy still has money, so they go to England to connect with the British musicians she had met in the California porn scene. They meet members of Queen. Peter auditions for the new Adam Ant band, but nothing happens. They return to Richmond and buy a house in Church Hill with the money that’s left, but they don’t know how to renovate it for resale.

“Candy really loved the way Peter Headley (Vapor Rhinos) painted, so we bought one of his paintings for $400. As a musician, Peter is a really good painter. We struck up a friendship and he moved into the house as the caretaker. We were living in an apartment. I hired all my friends to work on the house, paying them way too much. Tons of musicians worked on that house.” Eventually he ran out of money and had to leave the house to Candy.

Starting over was a challenge. The Rage had been an exciting time. “I didn’t mind all the ass-whippings. It was fun getting the attention. I had learned to play when I was on top. We had the attitude and the talent, but we didn’t have the chops. We changed the music scene in Richmond because so many other bands got their start opening for The Rage.”

He advertises for musicians to form a new band. Lee Johnson, another Open High student who drums in the band Kaos with Rock Coplin, is dating Peter’s sister. She wants him in the new band. Peter meets guitarist JJ Loehr, and the three form Bam Bam, named after Lee’s dog.

“JJ can really write songs, but the band wasn’t getting any better. I didn’t appreciate his talent at the time, but he became my best friend. That band never played out. We didn’t have a good singer.”

Then Peter found Johnny Procter, “a white soul guy who worshipped Prince and James Brown, an amazing performer.” But Procter didn’t want to sing in Bam Bam, so they reformed with other musician friends as Erol Flynn.

“We wore silly outfits, which I was used to, Prince-like stuff, trench coats, tons of make-up, stuff in our hair. We did the funk thing. Duran Duran was out and I was into that. We played the 538 Club, which used to be Kosmos, Hard Times, Benny’s. Candy was our manager."

Now it’s 1983 and they are recording. Johnny, Peter and Lee are writing songs, and Candy is fighting with Johnny. “We’re getting ready to play a big show at Benny’s on Halloween. Iggy Pop is at the Mosque and everybody is going to come over to Benny’s afterward. Candy and Johnny get into a big fight and he quits on the spot. That’s the end of the band. Lee and I are out in the cold.”

About the same time, Mark Lewis of The Dads has a falling out with his band. Steve Fisher, a keyboard player, leaves Glad Core, Johnny Hott’s band. “I always wanted to play with Mark. I wanted him to be the fourth member of The Rage, and it would have made a big difference, but he got into Single Bullet Theory. We met at Lee’s house and jammed. Everybody had songs we wanted to record, so we agreed to learn each other’s songs, split the costs, and record as the sidemen for each other. We’d all leave with three-song demo tapes. So we’re jamming at my mother’s house on Hanover Street, and in no time, we learn all the songs and realize we’re a band right there. We’ve got a band. Why make tapes to find a band when we are one? We played our first show at Rockitz and got a great response.”

They thought about calling themselves Faust 19, “the worst band name ever, but we wanted a name with a number in it. We had originally gotten together on Oct. 10, so we named the band Ten Ten.”

What I Learned from Peter Bell

Peter Bell died in an auto accident in August 2015 at age 55.

To hear Peter talk in the early ‘90s, he divided women into two groups, the fuckable ones, and the others. The fuckable ones were the ones you fell in love with, the ones who ruined your life, the future bitches. The others were the Others, not that you wouldn’t also fuck them when you were drunk or stoned, but they were the friends, the fans, the ones you used for errands, loans, drug runs, places to crash, the occasional hand or blow job. They were less pretty or not pretty at all, and strangely, they tended to be friends with each other. Their devotion to Peter brought them together as a faithful team who stayed loyal to him no matter what, right to the end. The bitches came and went.

When I started my local music newspaper and it began to gain a little traction in the music community, Peter saw it as a springboard to launch himself back into the scene in a big way. He had been big before, in The Rage and Ten Ten, and both attempts at fame and fortune had fallen away after coming oh so close. The new band he was working on was a bad fit. It was folky and more acoustic. It didn’t rock. It didn’t wear cute clothes. It had no sex appeal. And again, he wasn’t the frontman. Bass players seldom are. But he could get in front on my newspaper, so I got a phone call. How would I like to tell his life story, he asked, because he had a really interesting life. He had photos. And he had opinions on the past and present local music scene that would make my newspaper a must-read.

Yes, indeed, I would like all that.

So we met at his friend’s townhouse in the Museum District. He came down the stairs, looked at me, setting up my cassette recorder and stack of tapes for what would become a four hour interview, and said, “You’re not at all what they said.”

And I knew what he meant. He had been told I was a potential “Other,” a utility girl who, because I was not fuckable and gorgeous, would fall in line as a devotee. Instead, he sensed right away I was older than him and an unforgiving mom type. I was a different type of Other, not one who would ever love or like him, but I would love his story and like his roguish reputation because it was all good copy. I was going to use him the same way he was going to use me, as a catapult for our ambitions.

The interview was the sensation I anticipated. Everywhere I went, people wanted to talk to me about it. Mostly they said Peter was full of shit, or full of himself. He had few male sympathizers or admirers. But they had thoroughly enjoyed the story of his brush with fame, because they were all hoping for the same thing. They all knew when and if it was their turn, they would handle it better than he did.

Peter tried to continue to ride that wave by reviewing CDs for me, but quickly realized he could not be part of the local music community and antagonize them at the same time by trashing their music. He was dating a girl in his band, and she didn’t like my newspaper at all, so we fell out of touch.

But not before one more odd thing happened. Two decades have passed since then, so I have forgotten the reason he came over to my Carytown apartment, which doubled as the newspaper office. He was restless and erratic, and still planning to marry his girlfriend, although his nervous chatter was almost as if he was talking himself out of it, or wanted me to talk him out of it. He was sharing intimate details about her with me, and it was making me uncomfortable. She was recuperating from a surgery, so maybe they were on a break physically. There was a weird vibe, like he was making himself available to me if I wanted (or maybe he was just talking to me like I was a mom) but I had zero interest in his love life, and stayed seated, protected by my fortress of computers and books and paper, while he buzzed around my apartment, looking at everything, chattering away and smiling. Then he went into my bathroom.

And there he stayed. And stayed. And stayed. After too much time had passed, and I still had not heard the toilet paper turn, or a toilet flush, or a sink turn on or off, or any noise at all, I was totally weirded out. What is going on in there? Is he ever coming out? Does he want me to knock on the door? Should I? Is he dead? 

No. I’m just going to sit here. I tried to pass the time working at the computer. The clock ticked. When he finally came out, without any explanation about why he was in there so freakishly long, he said goodbye and left in a hurry.

I rushed into the bathroom and tried to figure out what he found so entertaining for so long in there. There was nothing to read. I looked through my medicine cabinet to see if anything was missing, or what secrets he might have learned about me from the items I had. There were no clues. To this day, I am baffled.

So there's four mileposts I have in my life from my encounter with Peter Bell: His curious surprise that I was not what he expected, which I took as a compliment; the boost in readership of my newspaper; the mysterious visit to my apartment; and, most important, he introduced me to my future husband, who played guitar in his band at the time.

Even though we have not talked in 20 years, I think about him several times a month, every time I drive by the house he bought on the corner of Ellwood and Nansemond with his Ten Ten money. It was the perfect house for an alcoholic, he had told me, because there was a 7 Eleven right behind it. Endless cold beer and wine, any time of the day or night. It was a party house. Everyone crashed there. Everyone drank his beer and wine and used his drugs. He told hilarious stories about his so-called friends cooking up all his food, leaving him with nothing. And he hardly cared because life was one big party. And, of course, he lost the house. It’s still there. It will always be a cautionary tale to me about fame.