Pittsburgh legends Carsickness and The Cynics hook up for the first time
If you were part of the Pittsburgh music scene back in the early ’80s, you may remember some crazy nights with Carsickness and The Cynics together at the Electric Banana or another Oakland venue.
But your memory would be tricking you because those nights never happened.
Carsickness and The Cynics — two of Pittsburgh’s greatest bands — never played together.
They’ll make up for that this weekend when they share a Black Friday bill at the Thunderbird Music Hall in Lawrenceville with Infidels.
Carsickness frontman Karl Mullen says he and Cynics guitarist Gregg Kostelich were asked about their history together during a recent podcast, and came up blank.
“And then we talked about who was punk and I was saying, ‘Well, we really weren’t a punk band and Gregg was saying, ‘We really weren’t either. We were into this retro garage thing.’ But everything was lumped together. We were all lumped under this umbrella.
“In hindsight, what was interesting about all the bands at that time was that they were all different. There was only one Cardboards, one Carsickness, one Five, and it was all different and it was highly original.”
Mullen, who came to Pittsburgh from his native Ireland as a 20-year-old in 1976, was one of Pittsburgh’s original punk rockers, starting with The Cuts (so named because Kinko’s wouldn’t print it with an “n”). Under the pseudonym of Joe Soap, he went on form Carsickness, an avant-garde post-punk band with keyboardists Steve Sciulli and Archie “Hans” Werner, bassist Chris Koenigsberg and drummer Dennis Childers. Carsickness combined slashing punk with free jazz, noise and prog in a manner that teetered between beautiful, thrilling and abrasive.
Carsickness, along with The Five, kicked open the doors of the Electric Banana, a disco club, in March 1980 for the burgeoning punk/underground scene. (The Banana would go on to host the likes of Black Flag, Husker Du and Sonic Youth.)
Kostelich arrived on the scene in the band Prototype and in 1983 formed The Cynics, a band that took off with the addition of wild frontman Michael Kastelic (The Wake, 24 Minutes, 96 Tears) two years later. It released its debut album, “Blue Train Station,” in 1986.
By then, Carsickness — having released its final album, “Sharpen Up for Duty” in 1982 — was winding down, on its way to evolving into the folk-punk outfit Ploughman’s Lunch. Mullen left Pittsburgh in 2004 to work for World Cafe in Philadelphia and for the past decade-plus has been making music and teaching art in Massachusetts.
In 2017, Carsickness reunited here for the first time since disbanding for the exhibit “Non-Punk Pittsburgh” and the release of the 17-song compilation “Carsickness: 1979-1982,” with liner notes by Michael Chabon, on Kostelich’s North Sidebased Get Hip Records.
Nearly 40 years after their formation, The Cynics, who recently returned from a European tour, maintain their status as one of the world’s great garage-rock revival bands. The current lineup will feature Kostelich and Kastelic with their Spanish rhythm section, Angel Kaplan and Pablo Gonzalez
On Friday, Carsickness will consist of Mullen, Sciulli and Childers, with longtime saxophonist Don Roehlich, bassist Paul Michael Ferraro and guitarist Rich Hirsch.
“I think we’re better in general,” Mullen says. “I think we all play better. We’ve got better gear, better guitars, better amps. I think I sing better. We’ve got a couple of new songs we’ve written which I think are good. We’ve got two new people playing with us who are great. It’s just been fun.
“It’s like, oh my God, you wrote the songs in your twenties and I’ll be 69 on November 26th, and I’m still singing some of those songs — well, most of them.”
They’ve been uncovering the challenges of replicating that music during rehearsals.
“The funny thing is, we have to listen to the records,” Mullen says. “And I’m like, I have nooo idea what that chord is. Because we made it all up! I’m like, ‘What the heck is that?’ It took like 25 minutes to go, ‘Oh, it’s that!’ You wouldn’t do that now because it’s kind of a wrong chord. And Dennis is like, ‘I can’t play fast.’ And then, of course, he did.”
The show is at 8 p.m. Friday at Thunderbird with The Infidels. Tickets are $20; thunderbirdmusichall.com.