The Children Being Killed
Down at the All-Ages Club
Here’s a video of the first real band I played in, called Killing Children. Killing Children was a satirical hardcore band founded by Scott Colburn of Columbus, Indiana, during the early 80s hardcore explosion. Here we are, almost exactly 40 years ago, playing our local all-ages club, Ricky’s Canteena, a club built by kids for kids. I guess we’re all shaped by our teenage years, but this is the moment in my life when I finally realized what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be. It’s the start of something that has defined me, why I am who I am, why I do what I do.
A Dismal Existence
I had a fairly typical, mostly happy early childhood as a Bloomington faculty brat. By adolescence, however, depression crept in. During middle school years I had a very active fantasy life imagining what my future would be like, but I had a fairly grim day-to-day life defined by profound shyness and self-doubt. In my fantasy life I was some sort of rock star, adored by everyone for my uniqueness, magnetism, and musical virtuosity - virtuosity I didn’t have. I spent countless hours in the basement practicing drums, playing endless solos for throngs of imagined fans. I worked hard to keep up with my best friend Harry, who also played. We pushed each other, but Harry was always a step ahead. In my fantasy I didn’t play drums - I played lead guitar, sang lead, and wrote the songs. Although being good drummers didn’t help our status at the time, we believed it would eventually deliver us from our dismal existence.
When I show my own kids pictures of myself during this time, they ask if I was some sort of “emo kid.” I say no, that didn’t exist back then. We didn’t have the range of options kids have today, trying on costumes to adopt a persona or conform to a style of dress. We had jocks, preppies, brains, country kids, and…people who didn’t fit in. They laugh because they are smart, popular, athletic, well-adjusted kids who enjoyed middle school. There is no way we’d have been friends.
By the start of 10th grade, things began to change. My musical tastes suddenly shifted from hard rock and metal to hardcore punk, and I began to dress in the style of my favorite bands I’d seen in fanzines and on album covers. Harry and I reconnected with this kid we’d known in 6th grade band class who moved to Phoenix for the first year of high school. We’d known him as part of the popular crowd in middle school, but he’d been shunned by his friends before he moved due to his musical taste. He’d gotten into hardcore and skateboarding in Phoenix and he knew as much as we did about the bands we loved. Jeff was energetic and enthusiastic - suddenly our trio felt like a little scene.
Harry, Jeff, and I encouraged each other to go further into punk and hardcore fashion so that we no longer blended in with our classmates. The more outlandish our appearance became, the more homophobic slurs kids hurled at us in the high school halls. Some of the students, athletes and country kids, soon became openly hostile and physically violent. That galvanized our commitment, believing we were exercising some sort of non-violent protest. I’ve only been in a couple of fights in my life, but for years I took countless elbows, knees, sucker punches, and shoves into lockers. I never considered changing my style of dress.
What made me so committed to being a punk was simple: I loved the music and I wanted it to define me. I saw my first hardcore band, The Zero Boys at age 14 and it resonated with every atom of my being. I knew what I wanted to do, and to be. I wrote about it a few years ago, this is a defining moment. Harry, Jeff, and a growing number of kids felt it too.
Harry, Jeff, and I - along with a few punkish kids a couple years older than us - went to Bloomington South high school. We learned that the other high school, Bloomington North, had a thriving punk scene. We started attending their parties and quickly made a bunch of new friends. Then we really had a scene. That’s when I met Freda Boner, who became my girlfriend for the next nine years and my bandmate in Blake Babies and Antenna. It felt so good to have a tribe…even better to have a girlfriend. I no longer had any need to fantasize about what my life could someday be - it was all happening in the moment.
Once we had a larger scene of kids, and when more kids from our high school started getting into punk, bands formed. Our first band was called Dismal Existence. Harry played drums, Jeff sang, and I made my debut as a guitarist (I’d had a couple lessons and knew just enough not to embarrass myself). We played the school talent show and the sound guy - a volunteer from a local conservative church - cut my mic when I sang the lines “I am Emperor Ronald Reagan…born again with Fascist cravings” from a Dead Kennedys song. He quickly restored my mic when our Government teacher, a Black Southern woman named Constance Holland, stood up and shouted, “You can’t do that…it’s CENSORSHIP!” Then things got more serious.
By Kids, For Kids - The Birth of Ricky’s
Soon our bands started writing our own songs, aspiring to make records and play out of town. Hardcore was its own little universe, and it wasn’t all that hard to access. If you read national publications Maximum Rock n Roll and Flipside, you could learn how things worked in other scenes. Everything was regional; ever band toured at least their region. If a few hundred kids in a town were sufficiently obsessed and had some allowance or lawn mowing money, you could put on shows. My friends and I used to lie to and manipulate our parents so we could go to shows in Indianapolis. One time I busted my chin open at a Zero Boys show at a makeshift venue on a Saturday night. My mom didn’t know I’d left town, and I definitely needed stitches. I got home about 2 a.m and turned on all the lights to dramatically reveal my blood-soaked shirt and bloody face to my mom. I explained I’d been skateboarding at a half pipe and I fell into another kid’s face. She suspected I’d been in a knife fight, but accepted the skateboarding explanation. I made the following calculus: I’d rather be banned from skateboarding than punk shows. But going out of town for shows wasn’t sustainable - we needed an in-town venue.
These days downtown Bloomington is upscale, gentrified and well-preserved; but back in the 80s, like most downtown commercial areas in the Midwest, it was dilapitated, with many vacant buildings. We had a townie friend named Michael McKinney who called himself Rat Rondell who was a few years older and on his own (probably old enough to buy beer). Rat was this amazing character who had a sort of greasy 50s late night truck stop style inspired by his obsession with Kerouac and the Beats. The hardcore kids always attracted older hipsters, and we kept our guard up in case they were interested in teenage girls. Rat absolutely had an interest in the younger girls, but somehow he got a pass. Rat lived in a sort of closet on the South side of the square with no windows for fifty bucks a month.
Rat’s landlord, Rick Randolf, was a townie handy man in his thirties with a large brood of tiny kids, but to us he might as well have been 100 years old. I’m not sure exactly what his interest was in all these blighted downtown properties, but he seemingly had authority to lease whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted. Rat convinced Ricky to let a bunch of teenage punk rockers take over a storage space above a Salvation Army store to put on shows. Ricky expanded the vision to an all-ages social club for kids that he could turn into a business. Rat led a team of hardcore kids, including me, to clear out decades of junk and build out a performance space, complete with a stage, drum riser, sound booth, and a bar to serve soft drinks and snacks. Today the space is occupied by a large public parking deck on 4th Street between College Ave. and Walnut Street.
I recently asked my old friend Chris Pheifer about the early days of Ricky’s. Chris remembered the smell of the place - the musty smell of old clothes and rotting newsprint mixed with the ubiquitous clove cigarettes and sweat. Chris described the excitement of loading into a club - our club - for the first time to play a legitimate show on our terms - by kids, for kids. Having some of our favorite bands come to our town to play in our space felt amazing.
The initial model for Ricky’s was mostly having out-of-town hardcore acts headline so that we could have our own bands open. Jeff Sherman (who I believe was our high school valedictorian) figured out how to get in touch with some of our favorite touring bands and schedule their shows between major markets. We could reliably predict how many kids would pay $3 to see a touring band. We could offer a floor to crash on and a ramp to skate - plus I dunno maybe $200? That was the pitch. Some kids would drive down from Indianapolis and from towns around Southern Indiana, we knew we could get 100 kids to pay $2 or $3 - but that $4 was too much. That’s how we had bigger acts such as Seven Seconds, Samhain, and JFA. Those bands weren’t big yet - they welcomed a show in a smaller market between cities. We couldn’t believe how accessible everything in that world could be with a little work.
Rick eventually tried with limited success to turn Ricky’s into a more consistent venue, booking local bar bands and other sorts of night life entertainment. Kids didn’t come out to see those sorts of shows, even with popular bar acts. Anyone who wanted to see a cover band or blues jam would prefer to go to a bar than some makeshift kiddie club. Then as now, kids had our own culture, our own interests, our own favorite bands. We knew what would fill up the room better than the grown-ups. That’s why the only long-running all-ages venue in Bloomington, Rhino’s (which opened several years after the demise of Ricky’s) was underwritten by the United Way.1 Ricky’s served a glorious purpose for my immediate generation of teens, until we inevitably got kicked out and had to find another place. But that was another generation’s problem - our scene had everything we needed in that long-forgotten storage space.
Killing Mildred/Mildred Being Killed
Our earliest attempt at forming a punk band for the school talent show evolved into an original act called The Wurst, who did an early version of pop-punk inspired by The Descendants and Angry Samoans. Harry and I were the drummers on the scene, and The Wurst was Harry’s gig. The Wurst eventually split into two different bands, Blood Farmers and The Natives, who had their own (mostly) friendly competition for kings of the scene. I joined a band of slightly older kids called Yellow Rain, which has recently reformed with an album and numerous live performaces - check it out. At the time, however, we only played twice that anyone can remember: once at a basement party, and once at Ricky’s. Yellow Rain was a side project for a more popular band called Moto-X - at the time it wasn’t intended to be a full-time thing.
We had near consensus in our scene as to which regional band ruled, and that’s The Zero Boys from Indianapolis, still a favorite for many of us. Paul Mahern, singer of the Zero Boys, was an emerging recording engineer who released 7” singles and compilations on his own label, Affirmation Records. He documented the regional scene with a pair of compilation albums titled The Master Tape volumes 1 and 2. I owned and wore out both Master Tape albums - Volume One featured a band from nearby Columbus, Indiana called The Pattern, and Volume Two featured Killing Children. Both bands featured Scott Colburn, a kid a few years older than my crowd who started his own fanzine and label called Gravelvoice. Gravelvoice put out a 7” EP by Killing Children titled Certain Death just before Scott moved to Bloomington to attend Indiana University.
Scott put the word out around the Ricky’s scene that he wanted to put together a new Killing Children lineup in Bloomington. My recollection gets a little murky here…I believe I was a 16-year-old high school Junior when I joined the band. Scott cycled through a couple different bassists during the year or so that I played in the band, settling on Dave Fortney, a Bloomington North student with ties to Chicago and an obsession with The Misfits who also played for The Blood Farmers. Scott had shows booked all over the Midwest, and somehow my parents thought it was OK for me to get in a van with this 18-year-old college freshman and travel overnight to play punk shows in a variety of Midwestern cities.
We had such a great time on those trips. Scott was funny and irreverent, and though he loved punk rock, he made fun of everyone and everything. Scott was sort of a dad figure to Dave and me, but his brand of parenting didn’t focus on risk management. For one thing, as a rule we fed ourselves with bowls of Lucky Charms and 7 ounce bottles of Little Kings Cream Ale. That’s it - we kept a cooler in the van with beer and a quart of milk, and we made ourselves a bowl of cereal or grabbed another bottle whenever we felt like it. Charms n’ Kings. We stayed at whatever filthy punk house would have us. I remember feeling horrible whenever I returned from a weekend of shows and wondering if I really had the constitution to be in a band. I’d have slept on a hard floor in the same clothes I sweated through at the show, with two days on only consuming Lucky Charms and beer. Such a mystery.
I remember one time we drove to West Lafayette, about 2 1/2 hours away, to play an evening show at a natural foods coop with 4 or 5 bands, including Paul Maher’s side band, The Dandelion Abortion. It was the dead of winter, but we headed back after the show with Scott’s van loaded with friends. We’ve tried to reconstruct the exact personnel in the van, but everyone agrees that the driver was an older punk guy named Dave Death and that he was tripping on acid at the time. I was sitting with Freda on a bass amp loose on the metal floor of the cargo van. At least 7 of us were in the van when it hit a patch of black ice and spun uncontrollably at least 3 times, leaving us facing the wrong direction on Interstate 65. To the right of the highway was a deep ravine. I remember that moment of spinning out so well - I expected we would all die. It’s truly a miracle nobody was hurt. I think about that a lot - it’s the probably the closest we call came to being a statistic. But within a few minutes we were all laughing about it.
I don’t mean to dwell on the “different times” aspects of this story, but it is pretty remarkable. I’m so grateful to have had these experiences, even though - maybe in part because - it was so crazy, outrageous, and potentially dangerous. There’s nothing I’d have rather been doing, and I will always be grateful to Scott for bringing us into his world. We talked about recording an album, but Scott’s musical tastes evolved quickly and he lost focus. He didn’t really want to be in a hardcore band; his tastes trended towards experimental music and noise. To keep it interesting and (at least to us) funny, Scott created an alter-ego band called Killing Mildred that did a death rock spoof, complete with flashpots and a funeral procession from the back of the venue to being the performance. Scott started every performance by introducing the band: “We’re not Killing Children…we’re the CHILDREN being KILLED!” None of it was meant to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, I’d have preferred to be in a band with just about any other name.
Scott was a great mentor to me to put me on my path. He understood the underground music business: recording, distribution, gassroots advertising. He knew how to book shows and set up little tours. He moved to Seattle and - not surprisingly - became a successful audio engineer and sound designer. He’s just one of those people you knew would go on to do amazing stuff.
Legacy
I’m relieved to have survived my Killing Children experience, though I doubt it was any more dangerous than any of my early touring experiences. Only a few months passed between my last Killing Children show and the beginning of my time in Boston. I knew enough about how the underground music business worked to confidently make our own record. Hardcore gave me a sense of community and a desire to pursue music as a way of life. I had enough experience as a hardcore drummer from all those shows to join The Lemonheads on drums just before their debut album Hate Your Friends came out. I couldn’t wait to get back in the van, which took about two years from the time I left home. Everything I’ve done since then has been a natural course that is deeply rooted in DIY and community, the basic features of punk rock.
Punk gave me an identity and ambition when I desperately needed direction. Punk created a community of like-minded kids who shared my values. Punk music gave me the opportunity to dive in head first, even without the sort of virtuoso skill level that I assumed would be necessary. Watching the video from 40 years ago is wild, but it isn’t surprising. It’s exactly how I remember it. That was my fantasy turned reality, and I’ve chosen to live in the world ever since, chasing whatever that was.
My mom, who recognized how important Ricky’s was to my friends and me, served on the local United Way Board of Directors at the time. She argued that all ages venues are important for youth recreation and education and should be supported with public resources. It’s funny to think about everything we did back then, because our group of kids accomplished a great deal. I’m of the age where I’m helping my kids come up with topics for college admission and scholarship essays. If my kids did what we did, they would absolutely frame these efforts as entrepreneurship for college essays.
I was stuck in a fundamentalist religious school in the bible belt to parents who were still living in the 1950s. Your teenage years sound like The Jetsons compared to mine.