The act of capturing audio onto a playable medium has fascinated me since my father – who had a penchant for salvaging cast-offs – lugged home a disc-based recorder. I can no longer visualize the machine (Wilcox-Gay Recordio? Dictaphone? Some other brand?) but recall the blue mylar flexidiscs slipped into a front-facing slot and the attached microphone passed around the dining room table. An evening’s entertainment consisted of the family singing songs, telling jokes, sharing stories and making random noises. The thrill came later with replay of what’d been memorialized and the smiling, laughing and groaning over what you’d committed to posterity.
Soon, a hefty metal Wollensak reel-to-reel recorder stuffed with tubes and central to my burgeoning interest in both rock & roll and guitar (it had a 1/4” input, just right for plugging in and playing along) replaced the disc recorder. THAT eventually made way for a Panasonic “shoebox” cassette recorder (the one I snuck into my first concert, ELP at Nassau Coliseum, inspired by Rerun’s bootlegging of the Doobies). When I could afford one, I bought a Realistic brand portable cassette recorder from the Sunrise Mall Radio Shack. Toting it everywhere, I got in the habit of leveling up whenever recording gear got more compact and sophisticated. Prior to the advent of flash-based recorders (like my Marantz PMD661MKIII and SoundDevices MixPre3), the ne plus ultra for me was a Sony MiniDisc machine. Or series of them. The rise of the MiniDisc format roughly coincided with my time as an Audio Engineer at NPR’s New York Bureau. Whenever NPR’s Engineering Department in Washington, DC decided to replace an earlier generation of MiniDisc machines with the latest, I’d glom a cast-off (thanks, Dad!) for myself. I no longer own any of the portables (should’ve kept one!) but a decade ago I scored a Sony MiniDisc component deck (meant for use with your home stereo) on EBay, to digitize the flotilla of Aerial View MiniDiscs crowding our office shelves. “Digitize” is a misnomer here as it usually means converting an analog format to a digital one. But MiniDiscs are a native digital format, recording zeroes and ones onto an optical disc similar to a CD. What I was actually doing was dubbing digitally in real time into my Mac. As I slowly began to plow through my MiniDisc stash, I wondered if there was a faster way and stumbled on ElectronWMD, a software developed by the MiniDisc community to allow NetMD (an early digital transfer protocol pioneered by Sony) machines to communicate via USB with my Mac. So I went back on EBay and bought a cheap NetMD portable. What once took 74 minutes to dub a SP (Standard Play length recording) in real time now takes 15 minutes with ElectronWMD. Over the past month I’ve made real progress on what is, admittedly, still a fuck-ton of MiniDiscs.
What does all this preamble have to do with the Nihilistics, Chris? is what you’re wondering, right? Well, Aerial View shows weren’t the only MiniDisc recordings I made (and, truthfully, those airchecks weren’t made with any of my machines but the rack-mount recorders at WFMU): I’ve been finding all sorts of field and other recordings, including what’s featured here. First, backstory…
Back in 2002 word got to me via Ron about two NY Thrash cassette 20th Anniversary Reunion shows planned for a June weekend at CBGB. Nihilistics would be on the first night’s bill, along with Adrenalin OD, Even Worse and KRAUT (the 2nd night featured those last two again, plus False Prophets and The Mob. Beastie Boys – also on the NY Thrash cassette – were far too huge by then to show up and I’m not sure why Bad Brains, Heart Attack and The Undead weren’t part). It’d been 13 years since I’d played with the Nihilistics, now consisting of sole original member Ron (singer), Ajax (guitar), Carl (drums) and a bass player whose name is lost to me. Original member and main songwriter Mike Nicolosi was still around but his rocky relationship with Ron was in its off-again phase and who knows what Troy (original drummer) was up to? I hemmed and hawed about taking part in the reunion, eventually deciding What the hell? and getting together for rehearsals in Manhattan. On a MiniDisc recording of a June 19, 2002 rehearsal Ron talks about how difficult it’d become to deal with Mike due to his excessive drinking. The drummer Carl elaborates:
This was my thing: Unpack my drums from my house, put ‘em in my car, bring ‘em to the show, set ‘em up, Mike would get drunk, get into a fight. Unpack my drums, put ‘em back in my car, drive home. I couldn’t take him. I couldn’t take Mike at all. And you know what? He wasn’t too bad when he was straight.
On the rare occasions I’d get on the phone with Mike he’d blame their acrimonious split on Ron’s Svengali act, claiming he’d foolishly succumbed to Ron’s dangling of drugs and women and agreed to indulge their emerging Judas Priest infatuation by backing Ron’s attempt to add a lead guitarist (his brother) to the band, AKA the inciting incident that had me exiting stage left. The truth was somewhere in the middle. Mike was a mean, abusive drunk often in no shape to play come showtime: Ron wanted the band to make money, which meant a more commercial sound. By 1985 I’d had enough and left the band. After being rear-ended by a Checker cab in Long Island City, I took the proceeds ($6,000) from a successful lawsuit against the cab company and moved out of my mother’s house on Lawn Guyland to New Jersey, effectively ending any thought of a return to the Nihilistics.
Soon after I settled in the Garden State I began my radio career at WFMU while also playing guitar, writing songs and releasing records with Missing Foundation. There was no contact with my former bandmates until our ill-fated 1989 reassembling. After that disaster, I gave up on the idea of ever working with Ron, Mike and Troy again. But Ron has always been a good salesman, being charming, shameless and mostly full of shit, and he made a good case for my taking part in the NY Thrash reunion. The current lineup would play four or five numbers, then I’d get up and join them for another four or five. Mostly, the pitch to take part boiled down to It’ll be fun and you’ll get to see some of your old friends. That latter part may have been true but the former? Not so much.
First, I was in the odd position of having to relearn songs I’d help write from the guitarist who replaced me. Second, I’m not sure there was more than one janky rehearsal. Third, it was hot as balls June 21, 2001 and CBGB was not known for its airflow, having never been acquainted with an air conditioner, ventilation system or, hell, box fan in a window. The place was also packed, generating yet more body heat. Fourth, the between-song banter consisted of pimply puerile pubescent “humor” of a stripe Ron had long indulged, as if the only lesson he carried away from “Sex Pistols” was “sex.” Far from being shocking, the constant berating of the audience, requests for blowjobs, casual homophobia and scatological stunts reduced the Nihilistics to a bad joke. Which we never were. When I’ve interviewed contemporaries about the band in its heyday, asking which single word summed us up, they all said the same thing: “Menacing.” We were scary in our intensity and absolute serious in our intent. Other bands and the audience were afraid of us. Not on June 21, 2001, when you can clearly hear someone at CBGB shout Go back to Long Island!
Fuck me.
So how did I end up with this video, the only one to feature me playing with my old band (even if two of them are absent)? Because of MiniDiscs. The other audio I found from the NY Thrash reunion was AOD’s set, also recorded directly from the mixing board and into my Sony MiniDisc recorder. When I dubbed it, I reached out to Paul from AOD, asking if he wanted the audio. He put me in touch with their informal archivist and I asked if he’d swap for any Nihilistics material he had. He offered up the NY Thrash video footage (all the bands were filmed that night, most are on YouTube). I’ve been meaning to mate my MiniDisc audio with the fairly crappy video for nearly a year but finally got around to it a few days ago. I debated whether to present only my portion of the set but decided to bring you the full version (the audio version starts one song prior to the video – someone hit “Record” late on the camera, I guess). Please note: there’s plenty here to offend, including the title and content of the then “latest” Nihilistics single, more evidence of the band’s lurch to the right after my time (to me, few things make less sense than MAGA punk rockers, but we ARE living in the Upside Down, so maybe Nihilistics, if still around, will play Trump’s 3rd Inauguration Ball).
This video is an admittedly poor substitute for what Nihilistics must’ve looked like between 1981 and 1985 and I remain hopeful such footage someday emerges (if you know of any, please don’t hesitate to contact me: chris@nihilisticbook.com). For now, we have to make due with me in an ill-fitting Mermaid Parade STAFF T-shirt (it was 9 days later, June 30, and I once again emceed) and ill-advised goatee, trying to capture a bit of the old magic and landing far short.
