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An Interview with Mike "Tommy Gunn" Metoff (Capinch Zine - April/2004)
When I was a kid I played the trombone in the school orchestra. I was not very good at it and after five years I quit music and played baseball instead. My cousin Nick Knox turned me on to rock and roll and gave me several of his old 45 records from the 60s. I was seventeen (1974-75) when I bought my first guitar and joined a neighborhood band. We played at some garage parties and an audition for a middle school dance. We did not get the gig and my poor guitar playing was to blame. They kicked me out of the band as I couldn’t play the mainstream Top 40 songs in their set. At this time my cousin Nick was playing in a band called the Electric Eels. When I heard their tape I realized, “ You don’t have to be good to play this stuff”. So I started my own band called the Transducerz. We played alot of pre-punk, Iggy, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, N.Y. Dolls, and early Ramones and Dictators songs along with some 60s garage covers. In 1976-77 we played at a roller skaking rink, a Halloween dance at the Jewish Community Center, and the high school “Battle of the Bands”. Titch Erod was the bass player in this band. Soon I auditioned for another band called the Wild Giraffes. They too, were not impressed with my guitar playing skills but told me that they knew of a band that I might fit in with. A few days later they introduced me to the Pagans. The following night I was onstage with the Pagans in Youngstown Ohio opening for the Dead Boys. That was the night that Tommy Gunn was born. What was the musical atmosphere like in Cleveland at that time? Copy bands. Like the first band I was thrown out of. They were satisfied to play the hit songs and make money playing in the large clubs. Local FM rock radio had become very aware of the idea of rock music as a corporate industry. The musicians and disc jockeys all wanted to become millionaires. But there was also a cool underground scene going on. Nick was a part of that with the Electric Eels. There was also Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys, the Styrenes, Peter Laughner and the bands from Akron like Devo and the Bizarros. Then there was the Drome record store where Cle magazine and the first Pagans records originated from. You could find out all about the cool records and fanzines from New York or London and to hell with all of those filthy rich rock stars. It was like our own form of revolution. Those were great times as I remember. Tell us something about the audition for the Pagans. Did they ask you to play chromatic variations to Bach's scales or Charlie Parker's stuff? Ha ha! No, nothing like that at all. In fact I’m not sure we actually played anything. I seem to remember sitting around Mike Hudson’s house for a few hours drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Then they said, “OK, see you tomorrow”. They were desperately in need of someone to play the Youngstown gig. So they finally got to hear me play 24 hours later on stage in front of 1000 people. Oh, it sounded just awful. We really stunk the place up. The amazing thing is they called me back two weeks later to play another gig in Ann Arbor, Michigan with Destroy All Monsters. Like I said before, they were really desperate. After another bad gig we decided it might be a good idea to practice once in a while. Then all of a sudden we were in a big time recording studio with Johnny Dromette. Things happend fast in those days.
Yeah, we looked really cool bumping into the walls. We were in the dark in more ways than one. We couldn’t properly tune our guitars yet here we were in a studio where they made hit records. We went back in there several months later and recorded four more songs with David “Crocus” Thomas from Pere Ubu as the producer. The first time we had no producer. How were the Hudson brothers? How did they seem to you when you saw them the first time? Crazy guys. Really intense. They used to drink and fight a lot but we were all very much like a family. There was a lot of loyalty there. Brian died a long time ago but Mike and I have remained very close friends to this day. Tell us about what happened during a Pagans gig at that time. What about the audience? Is there some show that you still like to remember? Most of the time there was hostility. People throwing beer bottles and stuff. There wasn’t much of an audience for punk in those days. Sometimes we would open for an established group like the Ramones or the B52s and that usually went OK. Other times we played in biker bars and were lucky to get out alive. How did the Pagans songs come about? Mike Hudson and Tim Allee wrote most of the early material. Dennis Carlton, another early member, wrote ‘Boy Can I Dance Good’. My first co-write was the music for the song ‘Real World’. I didn’t get involved in much songwriting until the Pink Album in 1982.
How
much time was spent to record them in the studio? Not much time. We didn’t have a lot of money and what money we did have was often misspent. What about the Pagans album never published? Well, like I said we blew all our money and never finished the album sessions that we started in late 1979. We went to play gigs in New York and when we got back we broke up the band. There was a lot of tension between the band members and with our manager at the time. A lot of in fighting....and drugs. The unfinished recordings appear on many of our later releases. Rough mixes with scratch vocals, no lead guitar. It was a real mess. What about those days in N.Y.? And what about N.Y. punk-R’n’R scene? I wouldn’t know much about that. We didn’t play there until late 1979. We played an audition night at CBGB where we met Lenny Kaye. A few nights later we played Max’s Kansas City and met Jerry Nolan. John Cale was there too. Our early gigs in New York did not go well. The New York scene was kind of ‘arty’ and we were nothing new to them. We would always break up the band after playing New York. We didn’t have a good gig there until 1987 when we played there on a reunion tour. By then we were a nostalgia act. Did you feel you could become as famous as the Ramones or Dead Boys at the time? At first we thought we had a chance. Then we got to New York. That woke us up real fast. What about the Johhny Dromette situation? Friendship or business? Both. We had great times with Johnny. He’s very creative and a fun person to be around. Unfortunately, sometimes business gets in the way of friendship. We weren’t the easiest people in the world to work with. Did you have a great following in Cleveland? I read that when any music biz rock band was in town you played free at the Drome in the same day and the people crowded in the street… We once did an in-store appearance at the Drome with the Patti Smith Group. I’m sure the crowd was there to see them, not us. Again, the comparison. They arrived in a limousine. We showed up in an old beat up Plymouth Fury. What about the war on Scene Magazine? Was it all in fun or were you really pissed at them? The media people in Cleveland hated us, we hated them back. End of story. What did you you feel the night you broke up the band? We actually broke up the band three times. It didn’t all happen in one night We just stopped calling each other and going to practice. Being in the Pagans could often be an intense situation and we eventually needed a break from it all.
L.R.S. was a side project while I was in the Clocks. A friend came up with the name which referred to the title of a French rockabilly record called the Ravin’ Sound. I had just changed my stage name after learning that ‘Tommy Gunn’ had also been used by another rock guitarist, an entertainment promoter, an evangelist, a professional boxer, and a porn star. So for a brief time I became Les Raving. Mike Hudson and I had put together a jam session one day with some friends and relatives. We got stoned, somone rolled the tape and we played a few songs. Later on we started the Terminal label and began putting out other bands records. So we thought, “Hey, let’s put this stuff out too.....Why? Because WE CAN!” It seemed like a good idea at the time. Did I mention that we were stoned? Therefore the Clocks was the first band born after Pagans broke up… How was the band born?
The
Clocks came about very quickly. It was at the end of 1979. Titch Erod and I
were roomates in an east side trailer park. We had started jamming with Dave
DeLuca of the Chronics. We were listening to alot of old records, garage,
surf, rockabilly, R&B stuff. The idea was to do a project with more of a
garagelike sound. Maybe I got a little tired of getting hit with beer
bottles at the punk gigs. The three of us booked a session at a friends
attic studio, the Pigeon’s Roost. A temporary drummer, Lonnie Pavis was used
for the session. We did four songs, Ticktockman, Confidentially Renee, Alone
in Flat B, and Bust Out. After one gig, Lonnie was replaced by Arne Klein.
We put out the Ticktockman b/w Confidentially Renee single on the newly
formed Terminal Records with Mike Hudson’s help. The single got really good
reviews. We started playing out alot. At the end of 1980 we added Chas Smith
on keyboards. What was the audience’s atmosphere like during a Clocks’gig? Did they dance? Oh yeah. And a lot more girls were in the audience this time. With the Pagans it was mostly angry guys throwing things at the band. How did the band break up?
Very
much the same way the Pagans broke up. We were in the recording studio
trying to finish an album, we ran out of money, and after two years we got
sick of being around each other. About a year after the break up, a local
record store manager invested some money to have the tapes mixed. The later
sessions were combined with the earlier recordings to complete an album. The
retro cuts from 1980 and the more techno sounding stuff from 81’ made for a
very disjointed album. It was released in 1983 under the name Radio Alarm
Clocks as another major label group from England had used the name ‘Clocks’.
Despite the weird sound, the record received favorable mention in some of
the music industry trade magazines and got a fair amount of college radio
airplay. After about a year, I reunited with Titch Erod and Chas Smith for a
short-lived project called Venus Envy which was basically a Clocks spin-off
with more of a psychedelic/glam/garage look and sound.
What do you think about the Clocks album? Only weird or…? Inconsistent. Like I said the tracks don’t really fit together all that well. A little heavy on the synth-pop in the later cuts. Also, too much filler material. Live cuts from a college radio broadcast that sound like shit. The name change was confusing as well. I don’t think the Clocks had enough material for a decent album. Maybe we should have done an E.P. instead. What did you do after the Clocks broke-up?
Back to
the Pagans. In 1982 Hudson and I reformed the band with Chas Smith, Robert
Conn, and Bob Richey. We did some shows supporting the Ramones and Lords of
the New Church, returned to New York and CBGBs, then made some basement
recordings which were assembled into what would become the Pink Album. All
of this in about eight months. It was right after we broke up again in the
summer of 1983 that I got called to Los Angeles to join the Cramps.
Before talkin’ about Cramps I was wonderin’ a little more about this brief -but important - Pagans’ interlude. The Pink Album is one of my favorite albums ever…a masterpiece… Thanks. The Pink Album is the only record where I wrote the majority of the music. Mike Hudson wrote all of the lyrics. The record pretty much sums up all of the material that we wrote together in the early eighties. ‘Cry 816’ and ‘Angela’ were originally done with Les Raving Sounds. ‘Give Til It Hurts’ is a re-write of a Clocks song. We also re-did some earlier songs and, much like with the Clocks LP, added live filler material. Also, like the Clocks record, the album was pieced together almost as an afterthought. The immortal Jim Jones mastered the album. We recorded it in various basements using equipment that was less than sophisticated. This time we couldn’t run out of money because we didn’t spend any! The Crypt Records reissue adds even more crummy sounding live material along with some of the unfinished tracks from the aborted 1979 album. Damn, Why didn’t we think of that! Remarkably, nearly 20 years after we recorded it, the Pink Album...Plus went to #18 on Rolling Stone’s ‘On the Edge’ chart. Sometimes I wish we had invested more and been more careful in recording it but, then again, that’s not the way we did things.
Well, Kid Congo had left the band after ‘Smell of Female’ was released and someone was needed to go on tour. My cousin and rock and roll mentor Nick Knox was their longtime drummer. Both the Pagans and Clocks had opened shows for the Cramps so we were somewhat acquainted. Anyway, I got the call and for a short time I became Ike Knox. I arrived in L.A. on the same day the Three Stooges got their star on Hollywood Blvd. Maybe that was some kind of omen. The touring was wild, very rockstar, especially in Europe. Major interviews, TV shows, four star hotels, and big concert halls. Like nothing I’ve ever done before or since. Of course, it didn’t last long. I had a difficult time with commitment in those days.....ya know? Looking back, I’m not so sure I fit in all that well with what they were doing, the lifestyle and everything. After all I’m pretty much just a dumb guitar playing slob from Ohio. The British press were definitely convinced that I didn’t belong. Oh well, live and learn. To hell with any music business press! Weren’t you up to it or were you simply tired?
Yeah,
to hell with all those damn interveiwers! Ha ha...Can’t please everyone.
Maybe I was just lazy. I wasn’t very good at managing my personal life back
then.
What did you do back in Cleveland? Did you form some new band? Man, after all that I didn’t know what to do with myself. I mean, how do you follow up an act like that. So I just kept on rocking. In the mid eighties I did some recording in Memphis with Tav Falco, jammed onstage with the Gun Club, auditioned in New York with a group called the Backbones, and played bass with the Detroit surfabilly trio Snake Out on two tours in the South. I also appeared, along with Bryan Gregory, as a zombie extra in the George Romero film ‘Day of the Dead’ which was shot in Pittsburgh. Finally upon landing back in Cleveland I hooked up with Dead Boys guitarist Cheetah Chrome. He was living a few blocks from me and we were drinking at the same downtown bar. We ended up starting a band called the Ghetto Dogs. We managed to play a handful of gigs and record an E.P. while in between Pagans and Dead Boys reunion tours in the late eighties. The Pagans reunited, went back into the studio for a couple of singles, and recorded a live album in Minneapolis. I also took a job in a record store and another job as a DJ in a strip club in the flats. Gotta pay the rent somehow.
After the Buried Alive collection came out we got a fair amount of national press. We were now headlining in major cities around the East and Midwest. The billing was always ‘classic punk from the 70s’. Bands like the Meatmen, Angry Samoans, and the Creamers were covering our songs. Up and coming bands like the Lemonheads and Soul Asylum were opening for us on the road. Musically, we all had our chops down as a result of having played in various bands for so many years. By this time we knew our way around a studio so the singles came out pretty good. Our live shows were unpredictable however. One night we’d be hot, the next would be a drunken debacle. After a few more years we decided we’d had enough. Our record label, based in Minneapolis, seemed more interested in promoting their local bands than us. Then the unauthorized records started coming out. In November 1989 we played our last show, opening for the Buzzcocks. In thirteen years we had come full circle. From opening act to headliner and back to opening act. Time for another break up. I guess we really meant it this time as we stayed broken up for another fourteen years.
Did
you do another reunion after this last break up?
No. A couple of years ago Mike Hudson and I appeared at a local benefit show with Chas Smith and Al McGinty, the drummer from Wild Giraffes. It was billed as the Pagans but it wasn’t really. The real band with Tim Allee and Bobby Richey will be reunited on August 9, 2003 on the main stage at the Rock Hall. Should be interesting, if we all live that long. ha ha. What do you think about the Pagans thing after all these years? The most important band in your life? Absolutely. I’ve been involved with the band on and off for over 25 years. All of the other bands, with the exception of the Clocks, lasted only a few months. Sometimes I think that had I quit playing in bands in 1980, it wouldn’t have made much difference. Come back to our story… I’ll never believe you ended your musical activity after the Pagans broke up in the late 80s. One of the first thing that comes to my mind is your collaboration with Jeff Dahl in the early 90 s as Mothefucker 666. What about it? How was that started? Cheetah introduced me to Jeff Dahl in 1990 when we all played at Stiv Bators’memorial benefit. Two years later Jeff invited me out west to do a project. He put together a band with Alan Clark and Keith Teligman from the Lazy Cowgirls, we did some shows in California, and cut a single. In 1995 Get Hip Records offered us an album deal. The record dates for the ‘MF666’ and ‘Live, the Godlike Power of the Pagans’ LPs are the only times that I set out to do an album and recorded it all in one shot. All of the other albums were pieced together from various dates, long afterwards....... with lots of cereal filler. I can’t take a whole lot of credit for MF666 though. Jeff organized it, named it, and wrote most of the material. He’s one of the really good guys and has an incredible amount of energy and enthusiasm for this stuff. Me, on the other hand, I haven’t played much since. Surely you continued to listenin’ to music… How did your musical taste change from the early times to now? What about your current listenings? I haven’t kept up with current bands since my record store years in the 80s. Sometimes I’ll listen to early punk. I also dig vintage sounds like 60s garage, delta blues and hard bop jazz. During the 90s I visited Jamaica and was way into reggae for a while...until I quit smoking pot. Heh heh. Did you ever think you’d become the guitar player of one of best punk bands ever? What are you doing now? No, I didn’t really plan on any of this. I mainly took up the guitar to impress girls. When I finally got married twelve years ago, I pretty much stopped playing it. No more rehearsals and lugging equipment around. No more bad records. Now I work in a printing factory and all I think about is quitting my job and going back on the road. Ha ha ha....not really. Have you been in touch with the other guys during these years? Only the ones that are still living. I don’t know why…but Dead End America was resounding in my mind on Sept.11th. How did you feel that horrific day? Fear or rage? What is your own opinion about the current U.S. society and government’s policy?
I’m not
sure how a song that glorifies terrorists of the 1970s would play these
days. 9/11 changed the world in much the same way Hiroshima did. A new age
of ass tightening fear. About politics, Mike Hudson calls me one of the
most ‘apolitical’ guys he knows. Elvis Presley put it best when asked his
opinion on the Vietnam War, “Maam, I’m only an entertainer.” What are the all-time records you could never do without? Well, just to name a few, the Stooges ‘Funhouse’, Rolling Stones ‘Exile on Main Street’ or ‘Out of Our Heads’, the first Ramones and Clash albums, MC5 ‘Kick Out the Jams’, Lenny Kaye’s original ‘Nuggets’ collection, any Velvet Underground, Johnny Thunders ‘So Alone’, Flamin Groovies ‘Teenage Head’, T Rex ‘The Slider’, Jimmy Cliff ‘The Harder They Come’, Sonny Rollins ‘Freedom Suite’, the ‘Ventures In Space’, any Sun rockabilly collection, and all kinds of other stuff from Hendrix to John Lee Hooker to Link Wray. A last word about punk and R’n’R to our readers? Punk? They said it would never last but it’s still around.....it’s almost respectable. Is that a good thing? I dunno, maybe not. Twenty five years ago we couldn’t buy a gig in this town. Now they’ve got a temporary exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame called ‘The Music of Ohio’. My guitar is in a glass case, hanging right in front of Chrissie Hynde’s red leather. Long overdue respect or just another dinosaur in a museum? I tell you though, it’s an awesome feeling, knowing that every day, hundreds of people walk by it and say to themselves, “Who the fuck was Tommy Gunn?”
DISCOGRAPHY
PAGANS Street where nobody lives / What's This Shit Called Love 7" (Drome DR 1) 1978 re-issued in 1987 by Treehouse rds Not Now No Way / I Juvenile 7" (Drome DR 5) 1979 re-issued in 1987 by Treehouse rds Dead End America / Little Black Egg 7" (Drome DR 7) re-issued in 1987 by Treehouse rds Michael Hudson's Cleveland Confidential EP 7"comp (Terminal –non numerato) 1980 The Pink Album LP (Terminal TERM - 7) 1983 re-issued in 1988 by Treehouse rds Buried Alive LP (Treehouse 002) 1986 Live: The Godlike Power of the Pagans LP (Treehouse 004) 1987 Dead End America '87 / Secret Agent Man 7" (Treehouse 003) 1987 Don't Leave Me Alone / Real World 7" (Bonafide 7004) 1988 (Us And) All Our Friends Are So Messed Up / Heart of Stone 7" (Treehouse PR 01) 1988 Scumbait EP 7"comp (Treehouse 019) 1989 Her Name Was Jane / I Do 7" (Treehouse 021) 1990 Street Where Nobody Lives LP/CD/Tape (Resonance/Semaphore, US-8908-1, Holland-8921) 1989 Family Fare 12" (Glitterhaus, Germany, 0089) 1990 Everybody Hates You CDcomp (Crypt, Germany, CR 38, EFA 11575) 1994 Pirate's Cove 9/24/79 LP (Thermionic 001) 1996 Live Roadkill LP (Sonic Swirl) 1998 Shit Street LP/CD (Crypt, Crypt-090) 2001 Pink Album Plus LP/CD (Crypt, Crypt-091 ) 2001 The CLOCKS Ticktock man/Confidential Renee (7” - 1980 Terminal) Clevelend Confidential (7" e.p. - compilation - 1980 Terminal -Time is on my side) Wake me when it’s over (LP - 1983 After Hours) Time is on my side (7" e.p. - 2004 Shake Your Ass/Archives #1) The CRAMPS Surfin' The Dark - (bootleg Germany). The Most Exalted Potentates Of Trash - (bootleg U.S.). You Betta Duck - (bootleg U.K.). Smell Of San Diego EP - (bootleg Austrailia) VIDEO: CRAMPS: Live At Perkins Palace 1984 - 1997 (Vengeance) MOTHERFUCKER 666
She's outta the scene/Dead Flowers 7" (Get Hip) 1996
CHEETAH CHROME & THE GHETTO DOGS Les RAVING SOUNDS Les Raving Sounds EP - 7" (Terminal) 1981 VENUS ENVY Space Rock EP 7" (Herb Jackson) 1985 |
Well…was Les Raving Sounds born just as the Pagans broke up or were they
already a side project? Tell us about this band…what about its music, issues
and members?
The Farfisa organ sounded great on the garage covers we were
playing. However, more and more synthesizer was being used on the original
songs. The bands overall sound became less “garage” and more “new wave”.
Probably because of this, we became one of the top local club acts in the
summer of 1981. That was a great time. We got our picture in Rock Scene
magazine and had one of the best shows ever opening for Iggy Pop at the
Cleveland Agora. But, of course, the good times were short lived.
