The Lords Of The New Church

It’s like a scene from a Lisa Robinson rock novel, here at Swingo’s Hotel in downtown Cleveland. The lobby’s a baroque mishmash of fake 18th-century furniture and ultramodern light fixtures, an overachiever jumble of styles dedicated to some misguided notion of class. But authentic rockstar legends lie just beyond (mostly above) this glitzy lobby; Swingo’s has been the traditional stopping-place of all the Lisa R.-class biggies when they’ve played Cleveland. The Stones had a whole floor here, Led Zep topped old Rubberlips & Co. by wrecking their entire suite, etc. etc. Yeah, the ’70s and those pamperedsuperstar indulgences seem positively ancient here in the rock recession, don’t they? •

Lowered expectations or not, Swingos still knows how to roll out\the red carpet for the new-age rockers who find their way here, and hometown boys rightfully get top billing. “Welcome Stiv *Bator And The Lords Of The New Church,” proclaim the little movable' letters on the desk’s message board, but just below that (in the same little white letters) are announcements of meetings of the Rotary Club and the American Society Of Women Accountants, scheduled to take place at Swingo’s simultaneously with the Lords’ descent bn the hotel. Punk rock’s come home to roost.

Teresa and I are waiting on one of Swingos’ pompous couches, for the celeb at the top of the message board to come downstairs, and we perk up whenever the matronly desk clerk coos sweetly and reverently into her phone, “Mrrr. Bator, there’s a call...” (Yeah, try saying that three times real fast, lady, he wasn’t no Dead Boy for nothing.)

a It’s like a scene from a Lisa Robinson novel. w

As it happens,11 last saw Mr. Bator in another legendary American hotel, one just as determinedly ugly, if more profound and comfy in its unstylishness, Manhattan’s notorious Chelsea. 1 had gone up to N.Y.C. in October of 1978 to do an interview with Cleveland’s favorite vermin sons, The Dead Boys, then at the very apex of their existence (see Feb, ’79 CREEM for all the gory details), and I concluded my two-day sojourn with the D. Boys by parting with lead snarler Stiv and his then-surname Bators, and his thengirlfriend Cynthia Ross (of the ‘B’ Girls) , in ^ one of the Chelsea’s gloomy corridors.

Despite my boundless print enthusiasm ^ for .the Dead Boys, veritable young, i domestic Rolling Stones in their crude-bylyrical rock ’n’ roll energy, the group succumbed to massive biz pressures and internal frictions, and brdke up in 1979. They re-formed with various lineups 1 (always including at least two or three of the original Dead Boys) over the next year or so, and popped out of their self-prophesied graves for live dates all over the > country.

In the meantime, in 1980, Stiv Bators had released the only solo album to emerge from the erstwhile Dead Boys, his Disconnected, on Bomp! Records. Where the Dead Boys’ two Sire LPs had been well-grounded in the raticous punk of their times, Disconnected revealed a new, highly popified Stiv Bators, all exuberant and accessible and ready to take on mod power-popsters everywhere with his Vox guitars and Beatle cheeriness.

I figured that Bators’ overnight transformation had at least something to do with his new label, where mid-’60s fetishism is a kind of corporate cult religion, but I7also remembered my quick impressions of the respective Dead Boys from the 1978 , interview: Stiv Bators, Jimmy Zero, and Jeff Magnum seemed to be middle class, boys dressed u]p in the punk necessities of v their time (Bators the most successfully so) , while Cheetah Chrome and Johnny Blitz seemed to be birthright punks, guys from deterministic backgrounds where being a punk wasn’t an alternative but an inescapable fateM one which just happened to coincide with rock ’n’ roll fashion in 1977-78. I liked the bright pop energy of Disconnected, but I got as hysterically purist as any English writer, and decided that the organically punk Cheetah Chrome was the rightful heir to the Dead Boys tradition.

But when Stiv now-he’s-Bator resurfaced in 1982, as vocalist-songwriter of the London-based, neo-psychedelic Lords Of The New Church, my interest revived. Bator had recruited a kind of punk-refugees anti-supergroup in England, making Lords of guitarist Brian James (from the Damned), bassist Dave Tregunna (from Sham 69), and drummer Nicky Turner (from the Barracudas). And despite the preponderance of English personnel, the Lords’ I.R.S. debut album had come out sounding ais American & rotten-applepie as anything by the Dead Boys, thanks of course to Stiv Bator’s lyrics and snarly, somewhat Alice Cooperish vocals.

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Interestingly, manfy of the songs on The Lords Of The New Church are protest pieces, closer to Barry McGuire in their everything-and-the-kitchen-sink cataloguing of modern evils, than they are to Bob Dylan and his abstract apocalypses, but. Bator’s messages are righteous and unequivocal. He and the Lords Score on (nuclear war (“Apocalypso”), militarism, subliminal conditioning (“Open Vour Eyes”), and Stiv’s own pet parochialschooled obsession, corruption of the Catholic Church (“Holy War,” a bitter satire of the Pope), among other worthy evils. And yet all the songs are such pure pop in their craft and hookiness, so fatally catchy, that their “messages” don’t seem overly ponderous. Content and expression are so well blended throughout thqt The Lords Of The New Church can accomplish some wholesale-but-upfront conditioning of their own if songs like “Open Your Eyes” get all the airplay they deserve.

Back at Swingo’s lobby, the Ohio-born prodigy Stiv Bator suddenly appears, and . he’s still something of a Dead Boy, but a much more stylized example of the species: straightleg black leather pants, black sweatshirt, dyed black hair, shaded. He has his right arm in a sling, and explains that Dead Boyism has caught up with his body; in the old days he had a nasty habit of throwing himself off the stage, a la his idol Iggy Pop, and he often landed realhard on his elbows and forearms. Sometimes he noticed swelling in his arms after these human missile forays, but as the swelling would always eventually subside, hey, it’s better for your arms than banging a spike into ’em, isn’t it? *

But when Bator consulted a doctor recently, he learned that his arms were engorged with blood from dozens of old internal hemorrhages. The doc began draining the accumulated blood from Stiv’s arms (Keith Richards chuckles from high above), and warned him to give his extremities a long rest from Dead Boyish performance antics if he wants to retain use of ’em. So Bator scrapped much of the Lords’ U.S. tour, except of course for the ever-essential New York and Cleveland dates.

We chat about Stiv’s achirig limbs a few minutes, and then he excuses himself, “to go back up to my room to get shaved and cleaned up.” Aha! Dead Boyism crashes into the ’80s; when I saw this guy back in ’78, he would have sneaked off to grow body hair, rather than shave the stuff off!

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Soon we’re back in our car, zooming through the Cleveland rush hour to haul the freshly-shaved Stiv Bator and his road manager, Chris Lamson, to Channel 5, for Stiv’s Live On 5 interview. As we enter the studio, Stiv gives me the good word that he’s about to become the interviewee of Don Webster. “A bit of fock ’n’ roll trivia,” sez Stiv, as Webster hosted the Clevelandbased, nationally-syndicated Upbeat television show in the late ’60s, and helped showcase dozens of teenpunk and teendelic bands of the time. But Teresa and I became even bigger antifans of Don Webster in the late ’70s, when he hosted the weekly Ohio Lottery Show, a half-hour State-giveaway game show. We got so frustrated and jaded in our efforts to win the big payoff (best ticket we ever had was worth $20),' We started getting into the idiotic show for its own sake, especially to watch Don Webster try to draw signs of life out of the more comatose of the finalist contestants.

All of a sudden The Man himself walks onto the set, and Ohmigod it is Don Webster, neatly sprayed graying hair, TV makeup, plaid sports coat, trim slacks and loafers, he’s Ohio’s answer to Dick Clark (if we ever needed one). However, it also appears that all those years Don spent patiently prodding Ohio’s richest mental defectives through the Lottery’s parlor, games may have taken something out of him, as the teleprompter the studio technicians have ready to roll now says, “Hi, I’m Don Webster.” You mean he doesn’t know? A long-time watcher like me could really fill him in on his identity crisis.

Don Webster gets his name out correctly as Live On 5 begins, and after a brief piece on urban reneyval, Webster’s ready to leap right into today’s most colorful topic: “Back '> in the ’60s a punk was nothing more than an unruly kid...” In the monitor, Stiv Bator’s all slouched limbs and black leather, as he sits beside Don, and Stiv has his old Dead Boy media-outrage timing still down so perfectly that exactly on the stroke of “unruly kid,” a huge bubble of pink gum balloons from somewhere beneath his inscrutable shades, to be transmitted via the miracle of live TV into family rooms all over Greater Cleveland.

A snatch of the “Open Your Eyes” video flashes by on the monitor, and then Don Webster challenges Stiv: “What is the punk message?” Stiv responds quietly and patiently, with beyond-Dead Boy diction and erudition, that his songs, like “Open Your Eyes,” carry the message that people should wake up to the evils of militarism, unemployment, racism, and subliminal conditioning all around them. Webster seems a bit threatened by Bator’s combination of global moral concerns inside black leather trousers. “Sticking pins in your earS and so forth, that’s not what it’s about now?” queries Webster, brightly. Bator once more quietly explains how bad things have gotten for the workers and the kids these days.

Don Webster seems personally insulted that anything at all could be wrong out in the Channel 5 viewing area he’s served so faithfully and he gets his dander up. “I take offense at the idea of media control, nothing I ask you is dictated to me...” Stiv just sits back and lets Don rage, almost like a PUNK in his sputtering anger. All too soon Stiv Bator’s moment on camera is over with, and under cover of a commercial, Don Webster huffs off the set, to get ready for his next story, hopefully less controversial, about “a man who was frozen alive in 1930...”

Later that evening, over at the jammed Agora, Teresa and I notice that a rather substantial number of the fans in attendance claim a proprietary interest in headliner Stiv Bator. One guy near us is telling people he “knew Stiv back when he got his start.” while a woman behind us is rather wistfully recalling those halcyon days when Stiv always wanted to dance with h@r at the Joker club. There’s an electric sense in the Agora that, although The Lords Of The New Church aren’t quite at the top of the charts yet, Stiv Bator had both married English and formed a hot British rock band, and if that ain’t Escaping Cleveland!, these fans don’t know what is.

Live here at the Agora, The Lords Of The New Church are on their own with their power trio + Stiv basic black lineup, no keyboard fills or other studio goodies on hand here, and their sound is as ferocious and driven as that Dead Boys punk band I may have mentioned above. This is the last show of the abbreviated tour, and for Stiv Bator it’ll be Up early in the A.M. to do a -local radio interview, then on to N. Y. to do the Uncle Floyd Show, and then the next day a jet back to London for a good long time of resting his ravaged > limbs. Stiv explains the problem with his “gimp arm” to his hometown fans, and warned them to expect some restraint, but the only apparent compromise of his traditional brain-banging style is that he grips the mikestand in his teeth rather than his hands, to fling it around the stage.

In a while even that’s not enough for the revved-up Bfitor, his arm’s out of its protective sling, he’s carrying the heavy cross of the mikestand on his shoulders to dramatize “Holy War.” At one point Bator even lets the people at the foot of the stage pull him out into the crowd, like Iggyesque. days of yore. A terrifed Chris Lamson rushed onstage, to remind the heedless Bator that I.R.S. has never had real good chart success with amputees, but Stiv looks okay, he scrambles back up on stage, and snots out another song above the frantic guitar thrash.

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Backstage afterwards, a whole gang of the Clevelanders who knew-Stiv-whencrowd around the subdued Bator, to ask for autograph after autograph from his world-weary arm. Stiv remains a nice punk guy for everybody no matter how much his flippers ache, and a minute later I discover exactly why the notorious Stiv Bator has such suspiciously good breeding. For I’m introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Bator, Stiv’s parents (Waitaminute, you mealn he wasn’t spontaneously generated fom oil scum floating on the Cuyahoga River,'as the Dead Boys legend had it?!?), a very pleasant, middle class, Polish-American couple. Mr. Stiv Bator Sr. is grinning hugely, he’s proud almost to the point of bursting of his namesake son’% achievements out in the punk-junk-it’s-still-rock ’n’ roll-to-me world.

Mr. Bator tells me that he was worried when Stiv got dragged into the audience tonight—“They were people I know, it was okay,” sez Stiv—but he’s sure Stiv will enjoy good health from npw on, “Thanks to her,” and he beams even more proudly at Stiv’s new wife Anastasia, all glamourous leggy Carnaby St. in her red berei, blonde hair,,, and her identically black & white-striped minidress and tights.

Stiv Bator stands there in his leathers and his shades, between his Youngstown parents and his London wife, and he looks a bit sheepish at being caught, not with the meat in his mouth, as some ancient Dead Boys song had if, but with the nuclear family we never suspected. What’s punk rock coming to these days?