Midwest is Best - V
Last night was a game changer for me. Sitting with a friend in a rockabilly bar, the Zero Boys came on the jukebox. Not only did someone love this obscure 80’s punk band as much as me, but they were on a PUBLIC jukebox. I had a musical awakening—Chicago is a huge city with a rich musical history and I waste so much of my time going to the same venues every week to hear the same DJs and run into the same people.
The Zero Boys were a hardcore punk quartet from Indianapolis, Indiana active in the early 1980’s (with a short reunion in the early 1990’s). In a musical climate where hardcore and punk were ruled by the Coasts, Vocalist Paul Mahern, bassist David “Tufty” Clough, drummer Mark Cutsinger and guitarist Vess Ruhtenberg are often considered one of the first groups in their genre to hail from the Midwest. The Zero Boys paired hardcore’s benchmark loud and fast instrumentation with the vocal melodies and intelligent choruses more often found in the punk genre. The music of the Zero Boys appealed to fans favoring the driving buzzsaw guitars of hardcore and the fans who just wanted to Blitzkreig Bop their heads. While the Zero Boys played their fair share of gigs in venues like Indianapolis’s Pizza Haven, it only a took a couple years before The Zero Boys were sharing the bill with such seminal acts as Minor Threat and The Dead Kennedys, setting the bar for the Midwest as a scene to watch.Vicious Circle, released in 1982, is widely known as the seminal Zero Boys album, but they did release quite a few lesser known projects around the same time. History of Cassette is probably my favorite Zero Boys work and as the title alludes, was released only on cassette tape. The Zero Boys went on to make two additional albums in 1991 and 1993. Recently Bloomington, Indiana based record label Secretly Canadian collected and remastered much of the original Zero Boys material and compiled it into a retrospective album titled History Of. I highly recommend History Of as a primer for all things Zero Boys.
I hope the point of this post is clear. Get out of your comfort zone. Explore the music scene of your city. Everything that is good doesn’t have to be glossy, packed or at the best venue in town. Big ups to the Zero Boys and every other band who’s ever played their shows in a Pizza Haven.
Check out their live show above and a few of my favorite Zero Boys tracks below as well as the album art for History of Cassette.
photo via KBD Records
Zero Boys - Civilization’s Dying (192 kbps)
Zero Boys - Trying Harder (224 kbps)
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Awesome band! I’m glad I heard about them, I’ll have to look for more of their stuff. My brother’s a big old-school punk fan too, I’m sure he’ll want to check them out.
You download those mp3s from kbd? I ask cause it said kbdrecords.com in the comments for ‘Trying Harder’. Amazing site that is. Never been heres before now but looking good.
Roc: I actually didn’t get the tracks from kbd, but I did get the artwork for The History of Cassette from kbd. It’s definitely a great site, and now I’m reminded that I forgot to give them an image credit.