RUBBER CITY REBELS MOTOR THRU MIDWEST WITHOUT A SPARE

Halloween's just not what it used to be, not like it was my day' nohow. And how 'bout Akron-extracted rock groups? How have they survived the nation's brash U-turn into the tight-lipped 80's? Well, 'Que sera, sera,' as fellow Akron rocker Rachel Sweet put it, when she got her first period.

Just a couple years back, when the hyper-Akronian Devo ;came through Cincinnati on their inaugural tour, on Beggar's Night-minus-two-and-counting, both Devo and their relentless fans graced the city with those trademark vinyl jumpsuits, in honor of the joyously spooky season. Now I admit that dressing Up like Devo (even when you already are the real Devo) is about as terminally dumbbell as cheering on Mr. Bill's weekly dismemberment, but on the other hand, when the alternative's the usual Great Midwestern 'sackcloth and jeans' (in Bangs' famous phrase), then yellow vinyl works just fine.

Now old October 29 has come 'round the Queen City again, and as Tetesa and I sit in the lounge of our burg's spanking new punk cjliscp, The Pit, chatting up the timeless rock biz with Rod Firestone, lead singer of the Rubber City Rebels, the latest L.A.-based Akron band to come home to try to reconquer Ohio, there's nary a costume in sight.

Or are' there? Rod's pointy chip and bushy hair provide him great basics for a character-joker's mug, Rod's face could be the one that launched a thousand situation comedies. 'But Nnnnnyo!' as Rod himself puts it, in the Rebels' 'Child Eaters.' Tonight Rod's eschewed yellow vinyl or whatever turns you on, in favor of businesslike attire, sleek grey leather jacket! and trim jeans. And Rod's eyes, in which I'd hoped to read Sid Vicious'. latest press releases from the hereafter, are hidden by the smoked lenses of his almost unbearably fashionable scarlet-framed glasses.

Rod's talking an impeccable power-pop aesthetic tonight, too. The last time I saw Mr. Firestone was when I went out to Hollywood last winter to do that Knack story, and both Rod and I were following Doug Fieger around the MCA Whitney studios like a couple of power-pop dogs, hungry for any table scraps of overnight success the head Knackster cared to toss us. Now I can almost hear Fieger's voice coming out of Rod's mouth: 'I don't expect this tour to sell that many records. But it'll get us known to the kids, and they're who count, okay? That's what's so beautiful about Los Angeles, the Starwood has no age limit and the really young teenagers can | get in and see us, then they go out and buy | our records, and eventually the radio'll | have to play the records the kids really u want, okay?'

Right, Rod. My prescription for national rock 'n' roll health, exactly, but the problem is that I knew (or knew of) you in a past life, when the Rubber City Rebels were committed punks (as in Sex Pistols), were as outrageously punky as anything the Buckeye State's spawned, this side of Cleveland's ever-lovin' Dead Boys.

See, the Bizarros came down here from Akron in the spring of 1977, to play Cincinnati's first (artd only) Punk Rock Festival, at Bogart's, and slipped me a copy of their debut LP, on Akron's Clone label, a brash, funky disc featuring five cuts of the Bizarros' earnest Velveeta-Underground homage on Side A, and five snarling slabs of metallic punk by the then-unknown Rubber City Rebels on the flip.

The Rebels leaped off that album like a batty mutation outta the Midwest Hell, as though Brownsville Station had been whisked away on a flying saucer by the Martian/Limey (same diff, to us) Pistols, and reprogrammed to rip and render their stuffy Akrbn-Canton corridor with their snotty songs—'Brdin Job' ('Got a headache in my pants') was one of the more romantic titles in the Rebels' initial repertoire.

Plus those Rubber City Rebels had ersatz, punk-poetic names a la the Dead Boys: 'Stix Pelten' on drums, 'Pete Sake' on keyboards, 'Buzz Click' on guitars, .and one 'Rod Bent' on the vocals. As I stare into the black smokiness of Rod Firestone's glasses tonight, I seem to recall that the Rod Bent represented in those grainy photos on the 1977 album also had a sarcastic chin and fuck-you hair. Coulda fooled me, okay? But as I stare longer, the images on the dual Rods clash and merge, and as with Cheap Trick's Bun E. Carlos/Brad Carlson, after a while I'm not sure which name is the real affectation, so to speak.

Rod Firestone could be who he claims to be tonight, and thus potentially a blacksheep scion of the Akron Firestone Tire fortune, or maybe he really is Rod Bent, after all, and thus equally well-fixed in the scion dept., as the sole heir of the famed Akron Bents and their millions (family made it reel big manufacturing rubber garments for fetishists, just after WWII, when Akron was really a toddlin' town.) Can't forget that the body of the original Booji Boy, who launched Devo, was never found. I just don't know.

To hear Bent-Firestone t.ell it now, he's always been as all-American as...as, well, apple rock 'n' roll a la mode. 'I grew up in Hudson, between Akron and Kent. It was mostly farm land then. The first rock 'n' roll record I can remember hearing was 'Purple People Eater.' The first rock 'n' roll record I bought without Mom's help was 'Purple Haze.' When I moved down to Akron in the early 70's, it was like I was living in The City for the first time. For awhile I was renting a $98-a-month apartment in a building owned by [Devo's] Mark Mothersbaugh's dad, Mark managed the place, every morningJ'd wake up to the smell of burning rubber [Aha, the real Akronite punk deviance comes in herel], it was Mark down in the basement making these hundreds of rubber stamps of pictures he'd cut out of old magazines.'

When Rod reels off his favorite bands of the early 70's—the Stooges, MC5, Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople, Brownsville Station, even early Aerosmith ('They had incredible punk energy in those days') — the list is so early-70's-CREEM-partylineperfect that I can almost visualize the polemic figure of Lester Bangs hulking over and advising Rod as he stacked up the LPs on his cheap portable stereo, in his $98 Chez Mothersbaugh flat.

Rod claims that his early Rtfbber City Rebels set out tp play heavy metal, in emulation of their favorite groups, and that the 'punk' aspects of their sound were more along the lines of that critical-concept punkitude us CREEM writers were always yapping about in those days. More than that a simultaneous breakout of the organic, new-era punk that flared up in London and new York in 1976. Besides, the local kids liked punk (In Akron?!?), so the Rebels played it.

The Rebels were house band at Akron's legendary Crypt (cf. the cover of the 1977 album) at the time, and Rod even managed the club for awhile, an experience that tended to line up his loyalties for the continuing art-vs.-commerciality rock 'n' roll debates. 'The biggest problem wp had at the Crypt was when Devo would play there, and their fans—all these art-school types from Kent State, okay?—would sneak bottles of prune juice in, under their coats, and we couldn't sell enough drinks to pay the electric bill.'

Their vitals blaze with the solid-fuel thrust of reconstituted prunes helpfully supplied by their reverently insular fans, Devo were just a few months away from dumping the totally satisfying aural load of Are We Not Men? on an expectant universe, but the Rubber City Rebels' home town had become Constipation City. Punk just wasn't catching on in Akron in 1977 (say what?), so at the end of that year the Rebels moved out to sunny L.A..

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The group's chronology becomes a bit hazy (smoggy?) at this point; Pete Sake and Stix Pelten disappeared, as did Rod's peculiar 'Bent', and the 'k' in Buzz Clic's surname, but not before a certain 'D. Damage' had joined the group long enough to contribute a song fragment or two. Rod and Buzz and whoever began playing the Starwood like fiends, to an enthusiastic coterie of SoCal teens who felt that the Rubber City Rebels were just about the hottest Midwestern heavy metal band they'd ever heard, out there under their lush Christine-McVie's-Bush palms.

The only other comparably loud rockers in L.A. at the time (per'RQd) were the Sunset Bombers, and the mutual-admiration society these isolated metal-machinist groups formed quickly led to mate-swapping: the Rebels acquired Bomber drummer Brandon Matheson, while the S.B.s' Doug Fieger regrouped with some more displaced rockers to form the FM-plaqueattacking Knack, and the rest is history. (More so for the Knack than for the Rebels by now, some wags would say.)

Anyhow, bassist Johnny Bethesda soon cast his lot witfr the final-format Rubber Gty Rebels, who kept diligently packing the comfy Starwood, as they meanwhile watched the spectacle of the Knack making it bigger than big in the 1979-model U.SJ, a phenomenon I believe I've alluded to in these pages previously. One of Doug Fieger's final acts of beneflcience upon inheriting the earth granted, to him and the Knack by America's grateful teens was to convince his label, Capitol, to sign the still-thrashing Rubber City Rebels.

So now it's late 1980 as I sit here in The Pit, systematically interrogating stylish po,wer-popster Rod Firestone about his past punk connections. Maybe he's not the backyard-vulcanized Johnny Rotten I once banked upon him becoming, but the Rubber City Rebels album released earlier this fall is 'really all reet,' as Richard Meltzer (who also migrated to L.A. to try to get signed to Capitol, 'cause that was Mrs. Miller's label) used to sau,

Rubber City Rebels resurrects the band's 'Rubber City Rebels' theme, and the perversely ecological 'Child Eaters,' from the Clone LP, but presents them as much better-produced, louder, flashier snot-outs, more like they probably sounded live in '77. (Even if the election-year-conscious Firestone did change 'get an abortion' to 'get rid of the little brat,'.' in the new 'Child Eaters.' Plus great newer stuff like the resuscitation of 'Bluer Than Blue,' all of 'em done up in a uniquely Midwestern punk-metal fusion, complete with Clic/ Firestone jack-it-up guitar interplay reminiscent of those guys Perry and Whitford, in that Boston band Aerosmith, that used to come around Ohio in '73-'74. Remember them?

x The Pit's nowhere near capacity as Rod Firestone departs to dress for the stage, but he's still as pop-philosophical as yer average Doug Fieger: 'we played for ten people in Tut's in Chicago last night, but they loved it. The guy who manages the club told us the kids just won't come out on weeknights after it gets cold. Okay?' Okay as she'll ever be, Rod.

And that goes for Cincinnati, too. The thrift-store, junk-clothing punksters who enlivened The Pit during the summer are conspicuously absent tonight, replaced by a hardy cool-season adventurers in their sleeveless, bulbously-functional down jhckets, or their fine wool blazer, as the back-inblack Rubber City Rebels take the amplifierbanked stage.

The Rebels open with 'Somebody's Gonna Get (Their Head Kicked In Tonight),' same as the album, and then run » down the loud-rock basics of 'Born Dead,' 'Young And Dumb,' and 'Lonely Fool.' Songs of no weighty matter, and what if they did?, performed no frills, no showmanship, other than just playing hard & fast, same as the Midwest punks of yore. Shadeless now, Firestone rolls his eyes with the yahoo glee of Brownsville's Cub Koda, and jacks off his wonderful, snottier than snotty vocals.

The Rubber City Rebels are only a few hours away from the promised land (they play Akron's Civic Theatre . tomorrow evening), and their excitable-boys pizazz is starting to show through. but their ostensible Ohio siblings here in The Pit are only perfunctory in their dancing and applause. 'C'mon, what the hell's going on here?' shouts Firestone. (Who incidently has the best, most comprehensible between-songs diction I've ever heard from any rock singer ; certain Limeys could take speech lessons from Rod, if they really want us to know which friggin' album their concert selections come from.)

Johnny Bethesda takes the bass solo that introduces 'Child , Eaters,' while Rod combs out his fangs to work himself info the proper dramatic mood of this concept piece. Even after he throws in the local 'King's Island!' as a pleasure spot the tieddown mcfm in the song might miss going to, the kids mostly aren't responding. 'I can dance better 'n you guys!' challenges Rod (insert spastic stroll.) 'Anybody wants kiss the tire [on Brandon Matheson's bass drum]?'

By the time the Rubber City Rebels close out their set, with a dee-stroy (early—70's CREEM word) cover of the Dead Boys' 'Sonic Reducer' ('I'll be ten feet talllll, and you'll be nothing at alllH' sneers Firestone), Teresa has to ask the waitress for an I-wanna-be-your-doggie-bag, so she can scrape my melted remains off the flqor, and get 'em safely home. Yet the huddled dowh-jacket crew still aren't moved (and/ or moving.) Guess Ohio still ain't a proper home to these Rebels, hope nobody tries to smuggle prune juice into their Akron gig tomorrow night & gets the fans hitting the shit again .

So maybe it's back to the Starwood drawing board for these Rebels without a country, maybe not. What? Rod Firestone worry? Not a chance! As he told me earlier this evening: 'The talk in L.A. is that if Reagan gets elected, it'll be great for the music business, record sales'll pick up, all the club bands'll get signed and make the charts, okay?' Check, Rod, the first part of that monstrous IF has already come true as I write this, now it's up to you to deliver your Rubber City Rebels to the new frontier of the Top 40, where you guys belong. OKAY?!?_.■ #