Whine Fest at the End of Three Years Doing the Paper

This article appeared in the November 1996 edition of the Richmond Music Journal. Italics reference new background info that is probably long forgotten. Slightly edited because I am a better writer now then I was then. 

  Three years of publishing behind us, and now begins the fourth year, and guess what…we’re still not taken seriously! 

   There’s one little, tight, intractable knot of music scene insiders who are never going to forgive us for not being one of them doing this, and/or not covering their agenda exclusively – but the majority of the paper’s readership don’t even know who these people are. 

    Part of the problem is the people who are most persistent about launching a viable music scene cannot see beyond Laurel Street (a reference to the Oregon Hill crowd that sat in the Laurel Street bars all night) or will not admit that there is something worth listening to other than what they’re doing. We’ve been guilty of that, too. We haven’t attracted any writers interested in classical music, hip hop, blues, jazz, R&B, or even the Grace Street scene. 

    I suspect every year I’ll see “the official paper of the Richmond music scene” suddenly come into existence before Route One South (a citywide music festival that lasted only two or three years where all the clubs in the city hosted a night of three or four different bands – we tried to be South by Southwest but failed) and disappear immediately after. This year’s official paper’s “special music issue” consisted of one article on how cool the ‘80s punk music scene was. Other papers work on the principle that any unknown touring band from out of town is of more interest than a local band. Add an article on skateboarding, surfing or roller blading, and that’s the formula for local music newspapers. It’s a lot of work to do even a half-assed paper, and it makes no money and gets less thanks. 

   It requires just being into it. It’s like the musicians I know who work in restaurants all their lives, washing dishes or cooking because all they really want to do is play unbookable jazz fusion and they can’t make a living doing that. I understand. Newspapers are my jazz fusion. I’ve had seven different unrelated day jobs since I started the paper and need another one now. 

    The other thing about longevity in a single topic newspaper is burn-out. After three years of going out four nights a week or more, week after week, year after year, you’ve seen it all. You write about a band once and if nothing dramatic happens with them, there’s nothing left to say. Bands ask when am I going to come see them again? Or I came to a show, but a new review didn’t appear in the next paper. What do you write after you’ve written it all? You get new eyes, that’s what. This year I actively sought new writers to recover ground we’ve already covered and find new bands. The results were mixed. One ad produced six volunteers, all of them wanting press passes to see Neurosis at the Biograph, a band that took an ad out to promote their show and CD and paid me in tickets. A month later, I still haven’t received a write-up from any of those people. Not one! But we keep trying. 

   Some writers made extraordinary efforts. John Church makes long distance calls at his own expense to get press passes to touring acts so he’s in the photo pool at the front of the stage. Killer Montone, even after moving to Tennessee, continued to review local music. I’d mail him a bag full of tapes and get them back a week later with thoughtful, well-written evaluations attached. I also owe a gratitude to the big three: Richmond Music Center, Don Warner Music and Metro Sound Company, independently owned instrument dealers who gave me a piece of their advertising budget to wage war against each other, with intermittent sniper fire from Backstage, Second Street Guitar and A Major Music. (Sam Ash and Guitar Center came to town during the last years of the paper and wiped them all out except for Metro Sound, and they did no local advertising.) 

   Moondance has been a reliably supportive venue from the beginning, matching their commitment to local music. Lost Sock, a laundromat, advertised a long time. In Your Ear was the first recording outlet to run a series of ads. I can always depend on Friedman’s Loan Office (a pawn shop where musicians worked), the Red Light Inn (topless bar) or Absolute Art tattoo parlor to buy a small ad if I came by and asked. Plan 9 often placed an ad even though they had their own publication. The band High Roller made us a regular part of their promotional budget when they launched. (They had day jobs.) It wasn’t easy to convince bands we were as good as a free telephone pole for getting the word out. 

    For all the businesses that made it possible to print the paper, there were a few who made it a nightmare. A club called Dakota’s still owes me $40 and were rude about it. Another Shockoe Bottom club owed me $7.50 for the smallest ad, and it took me three months of dropping in on them to collect it. Still, I was encouraged by a devoted core of readers somewhere. I could tell by the way the message line would start ringing around the time the paper was due out, checking for my recorded greeting confirming the new issue was on the street. And I could tell by the way the comments and complaints started pouring in during the 48 hours after the paper came out. It was being picked up right away, read and evaluated, condemned and adored with equal fervor. And the haters were the first ones to grab them up, eager to hate it every month. 

    Every anniversary of the paper, I write how ungrateful the music scene is, how incredibly helpful some writers and advertisers have been, how crazy and amusing our readers are, and how my personal disasters make me wonder how long I will be able to keep this up. (The “personal disaster” that eventually caused me to end the paper was I got married and got a full-time day job on a weekly community paper). In 1996, I was beaten and robbed in Shockoe Bottom in front of the train station, which left me still reluctant, a year later, to be on the street trying to get home after midnight. So many bands persisted on going on stage at 12:30 a.m. to a third of the audience they could have had at 10:30, just to say they “headlined.” The summer of ’96, I was hit by a car crossing the street in Carytown. Virginia is a contributary negligence state, so there was no settlement since I wasn’t in the crosswalk. With my arm in a cast, I was not a suitable front desk person for the personal injury attorney I was working for (her practice depended on convincing people to stay out of work as long as possible to increase the settlement, as her 33 percent), so I lost that job and its medical insurance and went through a long, financially devastating period of unemployment. (On the upside, I had to ask the man I had only been dating a few months if he would move in with me and cover the rent – he had a job – and he did, and five years later, we were married.)

I ended the article hoping that in November 1997, I would write another one. (And I did.) And hoping Eddie Van Halen would let David Lee Roth back in the band. (He did, briefly).

Elegy for a Printer -- How Newspapers Used to Be Made

I donated my HP Laserjet 2100M to the Swift Creek Mill Playhouse office in Colonial Heights in 2009. A young man carried it out of my car, up the stairs and left it on a table in the hallway. I said a few final words to it, hoping it would have a nice life and stay busy in the theater world.

Yes, I felt bad about leaving my printer. We had been through a lot together.

I bought it in 1997 for $800 from CompUSA. It was a huge purchase for me because I didn't have a job at the time. My hobby, the Richmond Music Journal, a monthly newspaper I pasted up in my dining room, was almost as time-consuming as a real job and had expenses that were barely covered by the advertising money I raised.

I originally created the newspaper on a Apple Classic II and a Stylewriter II printer, printing out columns of justified type, headlines and cutlines, cutting them out with a razor blade and a ruler, coating the backs with a glue stick and pasting them onto blue-lined sheets of card stock in a newspaper page design. This was the same way the daily newspaper was created between the eras of hot type and computers. I had been a paste-up girl for about a decade at the Richmond Times-Dispatch and News Leader, assembling pages like a puzzle while old, cranky newspapermen acted inappropriately. When a story was too long to fit its diagrammed space and needed a part cut out, you called out, "I need a bite!" to get an editor's attention to come tell you which part you could cut out.

Papers took preplanning back then. You had to diagram them out as precisely as you could because once you had your photos screened, you were inflexible to change anything. I had to have all my art and photography together in advance, crops marked with a grease pencil, and take them downtown to a very small business that did photo screens. I had to know what size I wanted the photo to be in advance. The screen guy would rephotograph the cropped part of my photos and blow them up or shrink them to the requested size, and give the screened photos back to me in big sheets called veloxes. If you looked at the velox with a magnifying glass, you could see each photo was actually a series of dots. Those dots were your resolution and what made your black and white photos have all the necessary shades of gray; otherwise, without a screen all dark areas of a photo reproduced as black. Many of the free street newspapers of the 1980s and 1990s didn't know this, and that's why their art always looked like it came off a pre-computer era fax machine.

Color photos was even more complicated, involving color separations, and was something I never

learned and couldn't afford to do anyway.

I was paying the screen guy anywhere from $75 to $200 a month, depending on how many photos I had, so between the screen guy and the Ashland Herald Progress that actually printed the whole newspaper, my profit margin was very small.

Enter the HP Laserjet 2100M. This printer not only produced sharper text than the Stylewriter, it could do 1200 resolution. If I printed out a grayscale photo on it, it would have enough dots in it to look like the photo. All I had to do was cut it out and paste it down, just like I was doing with the text. I could pay for it in four to six months if I stopped using the screen guy downtown. It was my first big business decision, after the decision to start the paper itself.

I still feel bad about the screen guy because the Free Press and I were his last regular clients and he was on the brink of being an unnecessary business.

So for the next couple of years, I rolled along with the cut and paste, free to resize my photos myself, and then switched to doing the paper on QuarkXPress and printing it out in two big chunks, the top of the page and the bottom. By 2002 or so, my printer in Ashland was telling me, after I did the whole paper in QuarkXPress, to just convert the whole thing to a .pdf and bring it to him on a disc. No more glue sticks or razor blades, and no more need for a desktop printer. It wasn't long after that when I didn't even have to bring the disc anymore. I just uploaded the file to Ashland. And it wasn't long after that before I decided why bother to pay the printer all the money anyway, just upload the file to a website and let people look at it that way. And it wasn't long after that before the website itself became the paper. And then I quit it altogether because I had found a day-job and a boyfriend; I wasn't going out every night chasing bands.

So for its last decade with me, the big old printer just made copies of emails and manuals. It became more and more difficult to connect it to newer computers. I had to buy a converter box to run an ethernet cable through it when USB became all the style. With the Apple operating system Snow Leopard, there was no longer any support for printers requiring AppleTalk, and I had to network it to an older Mac to even use it.

I'm not sure if Swift Creek ever figured out how to get it to work with PCs. That printer was a partner and a companion as I taught myself everything I know today about publishing and print production. I was sorry to see it go, but by the end, there were seven other printers in the house and it was just crazy to have so many.

That printer is also the star of one of my most popular video on YouTube with almost 38,000 views.

The Origin Story

Ray Bonis of the Cabell Library archives at Virginia Commonwealth University wanted some background information as the library prepares to put all the Journals online. He asked a few questions. I gave a few very long answers. He said he couldn't include all of it on the library website. I said, but I can include all of it on my blog!

I found the post you did about the history of the Richmond Music Journal. That was helpful but I have a few questions for you.  I know you graduated from VCU with a BS in journalism in 1973. Any other schooling?

No. When desktop publishing started and computers replaced typewriters in offices around 1989, I bought books and taught myself. College really didn’t help me at all. I would have been better off just getting a job doing anything at a newspaper out of high school. Then I would have been a few years ahead of Watergate because that made reporter an impossible job to get. Before Watergate, it was a lousy job, low pay, worse hours. Nobody wanted it.

You were the editor of the Commonwealth Times (VCU's campus newspaper) for at least one semester and that you were a frequent contributor to Richmond publications in the 1980s and 1990s including Style Weekly. What other work have you done or were you always a freelance writer? Always in Richmond?

I was an editor of the Commonwealth Times my sophomore year. The last thing I did as editor was take my issue to the printer downtown. The next morning I went into labor and had a baby. From that point on, I was an evening college and summer school student and did not live on campus or participate in any extracurriculars or internships.

I was a book reviewer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch for 17 years. My topics were women’s issues, feminism, women’s lib, and Hollywood celebrities. I really learned how to write by taking note of how my reviews were edited and writing them to suit. Ann Lloyd Merriman was my mentor there. I was a paste-up girl at the paper, and asked her if I could do it, and she gave me the opportunity because women’s lib was a thing and she didn’t have any women reviewers. That ended when the Sunday book review page was discontinued. It paid nothing. You kept the book.

I left being an administrative assistant at the Associated Press to be editor of a cable television weekly called Tube. This was in the early 1980s when cable was new and exciting. The magazine was financially mismanaged and went out of business pretty quick.

I was a frequent contributor of back page essays to Style Weekly during the ‘80s, ‘90s and early ‘00s. Rozanne Epps was my mentor there until she died. The essays were often reprinted in similar weeklies in Charlottesville, Harrisonburg, Virginia Beach, and Jacksonville, Florida. An alt-weekly syndicate picked them up and I used to find them online all over the country, but payment never seemed to reach me. I had one cover story for Style about the National Enquirer sending a team to Richmond to spy on former Miss America Gretchen Carlson having an affair with a married channel 8 news anchor. I got that gig because my brother worked at the National Enquirer at the time and arranged for me to ride along as a guide the week they were in town. Between the fee from the Enquirer and the alternative weekly checks, that was the most money I ever made writing.

I freelanced for a variety of local street papers in the late 1980s and early 1990s when desktop publishing on Mac computers became a thing, including Night Moves, New Age for Seniors, For Kids’ Sake, and Livewire. I was a restaurant critic for a year on Night Moves until the owners got angry that I was too critical. They paid little to nothing.

I was editor of the Mechanicsville Local from 1999-2001. They paid me $5,000 less than they had the male editors before me. Maybe even less than that. I was also the only reporter, did the layout every week, wrote the editorials, edited the letters and calendar, and took some of the photos. I shared a photographer and sports writer with the Goochland paper.

And I did my own paper, the Richmond Music Journal, for 11 years.

Why start the Richmond Music Journal? When you started it how long did you think it might last?

1. I was aggravated by the financial mismanagement of all the free papers. Also, I knew you couldn’t do a paper people would look forward to reading if you lived in fear of losing an advertiser and only ran positive stories. You had to be willing to make some people angry. It was a time in my life when I had nothing, so I had nothing to lose, and could risk it all.

2. I fell in love with a guy who was editing an alt-paper, but he didn’t love me. When his paper failed, I thought I could stay in touch with him by starting one myself and he could write for me. It didn’t work. I picked local music as the topic because he was a musician, and I wanted to focus on just one area of local entertainment --- not try to cover it all as other papers tried and failed. I figured it’d be easier to sell advertising that way if I could deliver a targeted readership. I actually know nothing about music. I approached it like anthropologist Margaret Mead going to Samoa. I was going to write about the hopes, dreams and lifestyles of struggling musicians.

I thought it would last until I got a full-time job and then I wouldn’t need it and wouldn’t have time for it, and even then, thanks to a few other people who took over the writing and a few advertisers who continued to hang in, it lasted four more years, but I don’t think it was the best four years. The paper kept getting smaller. I had a boyfriend who was a musician, and I had to excuse myself from reviewing his bands, then all his friends’ bands, and then put up with accusations of favoritism anyway, so I had to step away from the writing. I became a cat lady, but no one wants to read about cats, even though I wrote a whole book about the mental illness of being a cat lady and put it up on Amazon.

The RMJ documents the music scene in Richmond from 1993 to 2005. What do you think was the most significant Richmond music history events from that time period (certainly there were a large number of venues for people to play and LOTS of bands)?

It was an era of transition from desperately wanting record label deals as the only route to success and recording to making and selling your own cassettes to making and selling your own CDs. The technology changed so drastically. Dave Matthews Band overshadowed the scene – they played the Flood Zone every Wednesday -- and influenced many – more than Gwar, which was a gimmick art school band. More like an interactive play than music. 

There was a constant tension between being a good band that played covers and got all the bookings and made serious money and an original band that had to struggle because people weren’t familiar with the music, but had a remote shot at becoming national stars. It was between being successful as Dave Matthews or being successful as Boy O Boy/Fighting Gravity, which never broke out of the college circuit. Or being successful as The Fredds, which had no shot at all at a record deal because they just played covers, but they made the most money locally and got all the high-profile, top dollar bookings.

Two hubs supported the scene, Grace Street and Shockoe Bottom, making it extremely easy to take in three to five bands a night going from club to club on foot. And this was seven nights a week. Where is the scene now? I don’t even know.

How in the world did you cover all that you did? Could you do this full time and make money or was it an issue by issue basis?

I went out almost every night from around 9 pm to 2 a.m., photographing and reviewing bands. Because the scene was so compacted into two areas, I could get a lot done. I’d watch a set and move on, often circling back because some clubs booked three bands a night. Once the paper was well known – which happened fast – the doormen would just wave me in. I never paid a cover, which made me very mobile. I did band interviews in the early evening or during the day.

I had part-time jobs throughout, in call centers or through temp agencies, any kind of job. I qualified for food stamps twice. I ran up a lot of credit card debt for living expenses and car repairs that took 20 years (literally) to pay off, but the paper always paid for itself. That budget was separate and I never borrowed or went into debt for it. It was issue by issue. The only time the paper ever paid my rent ($350 a month to live above a store in Carytown) was one summer when I had a lot of full page ads from music stores and music shows at the Classic Amphitheatre at Richmond International Raceway and the Landmark Theatre (I even got free tickets to see Marilyn Manson). A full page ad was only $100. The back cover was $120. I priced them low so they’d be easy to sell since I’m not a good salesman. An 8th of a page was $12.50, and even then, sometimes I had to wait at the bar for an hour to get someone to come out from the back and pay me. It wasn’t easy collecting the money, and I think being an older woman actually helped there. They had pity on me. So I was never going to make any real money. My printer, the Ashland Herald Progress, got it all.

Did you have any paid staff? Were most of the images by you? Why did you stop?

No, I never had staff. I had contributors. I paid them $5 an article. And usually they could get into clubs for free or could get press passes to get into bigger shows. I sold the ads. I paid the bills. I drove the paper to all the distribution points. I did the layout. I designed ads if they didn't have one. I learned how to do a lot of things that eventually got me real work later on, jobs that had pensions and health insurance.

Most of the local band photography is mine. I put photo credits on all the photos, so you can tell. Some old-timers from the ‘70s and ‘80s music scene gave me photos of the local bands that were big back then. Readers enjoyed seeing the old photos. 

I shot black and white film stock on a small compact Nikon with a tiny flash that I could fit in my purse. That was important because there was often a no-photography rule for touring shows, so I had to be sneaky and then outrun the bouncers. Imagine having a no photography rule now in this age of cell phones. It’s amazing how well the photos came out. Black and white film is so crisp and pristine. The photos of national acts were mostly taken by a Chesterfield policeman named John Church who liked to take photos at major music shows and he got in free because of the paper. If you had a photo pass, you would be put up front for the first three songs of a show. Then the camera had to be put away. (The lead singer or star guitarist would do something to change their costume, like take a hat or a scarf or a jacket off, after the first three songs, so if you published a photo of them taken later on in the show, past the first-three-song limit, the promoter would immediately know you had violated the rules.) John got backstage a lot, too, and would get photos of famous musicians holding up the paper. 

I digitized the best photos and put them on the Richmond Music Journal Facebook group page where I guess they'll live forever, but I didn’t keep all the negatives. It was too much. I went through so many rolls of film a week. There were just shoeboxes full of them.

I stopped doing the paper because I had to take time away from my day job – once I got one -- to pick up the paper in Ashland. It was too much work driving it all around town to the music stores, only to discover when I got there that another paper was on top of mine in my rack and my papers weren’t being seen.

Also, Guitar Center and Sam Ash Music came to town, and that wiped out a lot of the little music stores and some of my advertising base since I didn't know how to get ads from the big guys.

Everything was going to the Internet by then, so I decided instead of paying to print it and driving all over town, I would just upload the pages. That would save me time and money. I wouldn’t even need to sell ads anymore. So the paper continued online for another year or so after it ceased publishing, but the web page was never that popular (that I could tell) and I lost interest in updating it. It was no longer my writing anyway, and with no advertising coming in, I couldn’t pay the other writers. The scene I knew had faded away as we all aged out of it, and I wasn’t interested in the young bands coming up. So it eventually shrunk down to just a blog about what happened to the old guys that used to be. They started dying off. Lots of obituaries in this blog.

And in the end, I really just loved doing newspapers. Any kind of newspaper. I only wanted to work on a newspaper you held in your hands and turned the pages. And that's gone.

Twenty Years Ago in Shockoe Bottom

It seemed like an easy assignment. Saturday night. Leave at 10 p.m. Go to Shockoe Bottom. Pop in the Main Street Grill and see Spike the Dog. Pop in Moondance, see Lil’ Ronnie and the Bluebeats, reportedly recording a live CD on the premises, then finish up at Memphis with Bio Ritmo.
  
Shockoe Bottom Problem #1. We get pulled by the police even before we get there, and he wasn’t as much concerned about the illegal turn on red we made then whether we were sober. “I’m not drunk, I’m just happy,” I plea bargained and it worked because even the police know how rare that is. It also helps to be wearing a stupid hat, a black derby with a big gold foil flower on it.

Shockoe Bottom Problem #2. Park the car. Is this a bus stop? Are the buses still running? Can you park in a bus stop?

Shockoe Bottom Problem #3. Two zillion boys roaming around and all of them are either wearing baseball hats THE CORRECT WAY or they’re not wearing baseball hats at all, which can only mean, DORKS AND YUPPIES.

Shockoe Bottom Problem #4. No place to sit, no place to stand, lines to get in everywhere. Main Street Grill doesn’t even have a bar stool available, so we don’t see Spike the Dog.

Shockoe Bottom Problem #5. Don’t plan to eat a late dinner in the Bottom on Saturday night. You won’t find a table. They are all being held by drinkers for the rest of the night. We skipped Moondance because it was hopelessly packed. We couldn’t find a table at Chetti’s Cow and Clam. Dr. Hector and the Groove Injectors were playing at the Farmer’s Market Inn, so the prospects of a table there were poor. Awful Arthur’s was packed, so we finally found one of those high, round tables where your legs dangle at None Such Place. There are no bands playing there. We get salads, wine and coffee. Then on to Memphis where there is a line down the sidewalk.

I am ready to surrender and give up this night as a hopeless wash, but we spot Vapor Rhino Dean Owen, and where Dean is, can Peter Headley be far behind? These two are like the Batman and Robin of The Scene. No matter where you are, no matter what you’re doing, if you are on The Scene and suddenly in distress, Dean and Peter are there. There must be some kind of Scene Signal that goes into the night sky. We have a conference. Peter goes to Bio Ritmo guy Jim Thomson at the door. There’s a negotiation, strings are pulled. While we are thanking Peter and inquiring if there is anything we can pull of his in return, Dean suddenly disappears without a word — as he often does — and Peter, realizing that he is suddenly Dean-less, goes running after him. And so BatDean and Robin of The Scene disappear into the night, once again having kept The Scene safe for truth, justice and newspaper reporting.

Inside we find we don’t want to be inside. It is a total body crush, asparagus in a can. We have to push, shove, pinch and elbow our way to the balcony. There are lines to get into the bathroom like it’s Disney World. In the balcony we meet an information systems major with some very inadequate lines for meeting girls. To Kami, who is loading up her camera for a totally futile effort to get a band photo, he says, “Are you going to take pictures?”

What does it look like?

He asks me if the gold foil flower on my hat is “real.”

You mean real foil?

Then he drops a cigarette ash on my hand and apologizes profusely, hoping it didn’t “burn the hair" off my hand.

What?! Is my hand that hairy that a cigarette ash will turn me into a flaming fireball? Now I am desperately signaling Kami to get us out of here because I must have turned into Gorilla Woman. I have furry paws. I asked this boy where he is from.

“Dinwiddie.”

Ah, well, that explains it. Up here in the big city, they grow hairless women, at least from the wrist down anyway. Seeing Bio Ritmo is impossible from this birdcage and Kami is ready to split. For a tiny thing, she does a linebacker job of kicking, thrusting, shoving, and slamming a path through the crowd, but when we get to the door we hit a massive bottleneck. At Memphis, the band plays right by the front door, so everyone who has a cool spot near the band is going to defend their cool spot to the death, and they think shovers and pushers behind them trying to get out are really trying to take over their cool spot. We just want OUT!!!!!

It is no doubt really good for the band to have this kind of crowd, especially if they are getting the door, or a cut of the door, but what possible fun can it be for the audience? You’re sucking buttons all night. 

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.”