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.”