‘Non-Punk Pittsburgh’ looks at heyday of Pittsburgh ... punk
There was no Malcolm McLaren-type in the Pittsburgh punk scene grooming bands for international stardom.
It was really just a bunch of college kids in a dying steel town going DIY and banging on some doors.
“It just happened very organically,” says drummer Dennis Childers. “We had no idea what we were doing. It’s weird to think back on it. It was a pretty cool scene that just happened out of nowhere — in Pittsburgh, of all places.”
That scene from 1979 to 1983 is the subject of “Non-Punk Pittsburgh,” a music and arts exhibit opening Friday at SPACE Gallery, curated by Mr. Childers and photographer Larry Rippel. It will consist of photographs, films, art and music and, on April 21 during the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Gallery Crawl, a reunion of the seminal Pittsburgh punk band Carsickness with the release of a long-awaited compilation album. (I volunteered some liner notes, of sorts, for the exhibit.)
It’s titled “Non-Punk,” because, Mr. Childers says in the gallery notes, “I personally feel as others do that it wasn’t a punk scene like the rest of the world was having, it was more of an explosion of creativity.”
Mr. Childers, who’s been teaching art at Pittsburgh CAPA for 25 years, says the exhibit was inevitable just based on the sheer volume of photos and posters that people have had stashed away for years. The Youngstown, Ohio, native originally came to Pittsburgh to attend the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in 1977, when a number of punk bands were just sprouting up, like The Shakes, The Shut-Ins, The Puke, The Cuts and The Cardboards. He was invited to play drums in the band, the Targets, that included Irishborn Karl Mullen, who had been in other bands and was more or less the Joe Strummer of the Pittsburgh scene.
The Targets played only two gigs, but he kept his drums in the house on Bouquet Street, and people would just show up and jam. “There was me and Karl and Steve [Sciulli] and another night Archie [‘Hans’ Werner] showed up. A week after that Chris Koenigsberg.”
With that, they had the core of the Pittsburgh legend Carsickness, formed about the time of a second oil crisis in 1979.
“At the time,” the drummer says, “there were all the cars lined up at the gas stations, not to mention there was a band called The Cars that we kinda hated. It was more political than you think.”
With a handful of brainy Carnegie Mellon University students, Carsickness was part punk fury, part progressive and avant-garde rock, making for a wonderfully odd, sometimes abrasive combination. “We were a really good jam band,” Mr. Childers says. Like most of the Pittsburgh bands, they didn’t dress like the New York Dolls or the Ramones or other famous punks.
“We wore whatever we got at Goodwill,” Mr. Childers says. “There were times when we thought, ‘Hey, let’s dress up.’ Everyone was wearing skinny ties back then. We were like, ‘I’m not wearing a skinny tie.’ ”
The punk scene flourished at house parties and places like Phase III and the Lions Walk until Mr. Mullen and Reid Paley, of the Compulsives, approached Johnny Zarra to do shows at the disco club the Electric Banana. Carsickness played the first punk show at the Banana in 1979, and the scene “exploded” with a wave of bands that would include The Rave-Ups, No Shelter, Dress Up As Natives, Actual Size, Mr. Paley’s new band The Five and a few that survive today, like A.T.S. and The Cynics.
A decade later, Anti-Flag would show up, but “Non-Punk” is focused on 1979 to 1983.
“We had a good scene that was just overlooked,” Mr. Childers says. “Nobody stopped in Pittsburgh.
Labels weren’t looking for punk bands here, and there were no McLarens or Manzareks here, so the scene was purely DIY with the bands making their own records and tapes.
“We needed something like that. We didn’t have it,” the drummer says. “I don’t know if it would have been different if we had all that, because, you know, bands get together and break up all the time.”
It was a fun, creative time, and a lot of the people involved are still making music, still friends, still living by the values they shared during that era.
“We were always working, always playing,” he says. “And we’re still really close. Everyone who was in that close-knit family is still talking, still hanging out.”