Lucid Culture

Sweat – The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, by Joe Bonomo

Continuum, 2007, ISBN-13 978-0-8264-2856-2, trade paper, $17.95

After all these years, the Fleshtones still need a Hexbreaker. Contemporaries of the Ramones and Sex Pistols, the legendary, Queens-born band still plays to a cult audience in small-to-midsize clubs across the country, having brushed tantalizingly with fame on innumerable occasions without really ever having achieved it. That the Fleshtones managed to survive thirty-two years is in itself a miracle, considering how badly they’ve been sabotaged, by record labels, management and most of all, themselves. If this book is to be believed, even the Stones at their most debauched are lightweights, compared with the literally lethal quantities of drugs and alcohol that were part and parcel of the Fleshtones’ existence for the better part of two decades. This is not a fawning, fanclub-style tribute: Northern Illinois University professor Bonomo’s fascinatingly detailed chronology is unsparing in its treatment of the band. All the drinking and drugging notwithstanding, the book concerns itself mostly with the music, which is a very good thing: America’s greatest garage band deserves no less.

At the height of their mid-80s popularity, the Fleshtones – singer Peter Zaremba, guitarist Keith Streng, bassist Marek Pakulski and drummer Bill Milhizer – played off a well-earned reputation as one of the world’s best live bands. Despite having come up in an era that saw garage music as retro and derivative, they left audiences dumbstruck, playing with a passion and intensity seldom matched by any band from any era. But at every turn, the band found themselve sabotaged: by thieving CBGB soundmen, who took a cut of the band’s door proceeds; inept booking agents; producers who didn’t really understand garage rock; label executives who for all their bluster always put the band on the back burner, and, most notably, by themselves, whether due to substance abuse or stubbornness. Ironically, the band’s first album, issued around the world on several labels, has never seen an official US release.

Signed to IRS just at the time the fledgling label broke through with the Go-Go’s, they became a staple of college radio and soon afterward a sensation in France, where an “instant” live album was released during an ecstatic residency at one of Paris’ premier rock clubs.  A couple of years later, Zaremba would eventually score a regular weekly gig as a host on MTV. Yet the Fleshtones never broke through to anything approaching a mass audience, perceived as either derivative or simply a party band whose audience was primarily in the clubs. Bonomo sharply deflates these myths, demonstrating how the Fleshtones (and their original bassist, Pakulski, in particular) broke new ground by bringing elements of funk, soul and other black music into garage rock. Through three decades of escapades, Zaremba comes off as a funny, cerebral, hyperkinetic polymath who’s also utterly impossible to work with; their current bassist Ken Fox presents himself as a serious, dedicated pro who also has no objection to having a good time. We don’t learn much, musically or otherwise, about the other band members, other than Streng’s impressively singlehanded victory over a nasty alcohol problem.

The detail in this book is exceptional. Bonomo carefully places each stage of the Fleshtones’ career in the context of how far afield they always were from the most popular songs of that particular era, and how their defiant un-trendiness always reinforced the view that they were a niche act rather than something that could be marketed to the mainstream. New Yorkers in particular will find innumerable little jewels in the margins here. Did you ever realize that Cosmo’s Diner up on 23rd and Second Avenue was a popular meetup place for rockers back in the 70s? Or that Fox once played as a hired gun in one of the worst New York bands of alltime, Smashed Gladys? Or that Streng was the original guitarist in the legendary Bill Popp’s shortlived punk-pop band the Popsicles? Bonomo’s casual yet vivid description of each milieu in which the band found themselves, whether the world of horrid Queens cover bands in the 70s, the early 80s new wave scene, or LA in the mid-80s before hair metal took over, is indelibly rendered and dead-on accurate.

Like its subject, this book is far from perfect. The most recent twenty years of the band’s career gets only a fraction of the space allotted to their first five, and the book starts out like the Deer Hunter: it takes a long time to get going (do we really need to be told that as teenagers, the individual members of the band preferred three-minute singles to extended art-rock suites?). For all the band’s marathon drinking, their party stories are surprisingly dull: with one exception (a delightfully successful drunken race with a police car), nothing more exciting than what you’d find on the average college freshman’s myspace page.

The book could have used a proofreader, and it reads in places as if it was edited in dribs and drabs, the later chapters being given a look-see without reference to any preceding text. As can be expected, there are plenty of errors, some of them glaring: for example, the assertion that the band didn’t know how to play In the Midnight Hour at a gig with Johnny Thunders is simply absurd. Tom Scholz didn’t record the first Boston album in a LA studio: he did it in his basement on a little homemade gadget whose patent he sold to Sony, who marketed it with great success as the Rockman. And Tainted Love isn’t a Standells song: it was originally recorded by the soul singer Gloria Jones. General readers won’t pick up on most of these glitches. This is why second editions are worth seeking out.

With the exception of two bass players, the thoughtful, articulate Robert Burke Warren, and Fox - whose reputation as a genuinely nice guy reaffirms itself here - the rest of the band remain a cipher. When Zaremba speaks, the quote is virtually always thirdhand, and sometimes decades-old. It would have been nice to hear more from Streng, one of the alltime great rock guitarists and a fine songwriter as well. And when, quite shockingly, more than one band member is cited for being against the Martin Luther King holiday (this from a group who are all passionate fans of black music!), the cognitive dissonance is casually brushed off.

Quibbles aside, this is an excellent book, essential reading for anyone interested in the history of American music. While fans of the Fleshtones and garage rock in general will find plenty to feast on here, to Bonomo’s infinite credit, he makes you want to go back and listen to all those great Fleshtones albums with fresh ears, or discover them for the first time. If this book is anything like its subject, it’ll be around for decades.