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When I started at Florence Reizenstein Middle School in the fall of 1980, I already knew a lot of the kids in my classes from my time at East Hills Elementary where I began my Public School education.
But there were several other K through 5 schools feeding into Reizenstein, and so my social world evolved…
I have already mentioned meeting Thom Reynolds there in chapter 2, but there were quite a few other people that crossed my path at that institution.
First of all, there was Chris Garver, whose brother Adrian I knew since the third grade from the "Scholars Program" at Regent Square School. "Age" was a cool older kid who had been nice enough to mentor me a bit in those early days. Then around the seventh grade, I got to know his younger brother Chris from riding the school bus together.
We bonded over our interest in music and underground comics. He was a fan of Richard Corben's fantastic pen and ink and airbrush artwork. Many folks are familiar with Corben's bald-headed, musclebound character, Den, who was featured in the animated movie, Heavy Metal. But Corben was one of the vital talents pushing the comic medium with his self-published “underground” work under the Fantagor banner. Chris also had a very detailed drawing style that was somewhat rigid but meticulous. I was always trying to convince him to "loosen up" so he could draw like my comic book art heroes, but Chris stuck with his approach. I simply couldn't figure out what he could POSSIBLY DO with his painstaking line work. In case you don't know, he became a highly respected, internationally renowned tattoo artist and unlikely reality TV star from shows like Miami Ink and Inkmaster.
But in those early days, he was just a part of our East End crew of misfit punks.
There was a hilarious kid from El Salvador, Luis Alvarado, who always seemed to be on the same page as Thom and me, listening to metal and punk. The three of us used to goof around at lunch time making each other laugh.
There was another cut-up, Tony Collucci, who was a total character and hard rock fanatic who loved to talk about Kiss or any of the other bands we were obsessed with in the early ‘80’s.
Both of those guys kept us laughing and stoked our passion for music.
Some of the most important and enduring friendships I made during that time were with a couple of kids who lived less than a mile from the house that I grew up in. Their names were Neil Grant and Greg Gawlas.
I honestly can't remember exactly how we first became friends, but we rode the same school bus and liked some of the same music, so I suppose it was inevitable.
One early spring day, the three of us decided to walk home instead of taking the bus. It could've been that we were doing something extracurricular after school, or maybe we were just fucking around and missed it. Either way, we were walking down Penn avenue when we approached a traffic light at the intersection of Dallas and Penn. There was a School Crossing Guard, an older woman, but not quite elderly.
Someone's mom, or more likely, grandma.
The sun was shining, but it had snowed earlier in the day. Although it was gradually melting, there was still PLENTY of sopping wet snow on the ground. Being ramped-up kids, we had been lobbing the icy stuff around during our walk home. Neil suddenly announced, "Watch this..." as we approached the crossing guard at that intersection...
The guard was in the middle of Penn Avenue directing traffic with her back to us, and from BEHIND HIS BACK, Neil casually lobbed a snowball in her direction.
To the surprise of us all, this seemingly-haphazardly-tossed-snowball had somehow locked in on the crossing guard's head!
She paused in the middle of the street, raised her right arm with her palm flat in the "Stop!" gesture, holding a whistle to her mouth with her left hand.
As she blew the whistle and the traffic came to a halt, she turned back towards us.
RIGHT AS THE SNOWBALL WAS COMING IN.
It hit her outstretched right hand first, but was barely stalled.
Then, it smashed into her eyeball.
Neil and Greg laughed and took off running, but I just kept on walking.
I thought, “I didn't do anything, I'm not going to run like I'm guilty...”
The guard came at me with icy snow clinging to her eyebrow and demanded to know who the boys who ran were.
I explained that I barely knew them.
We just rode the same bus and were walking together because we had missed the ride home.
And with that, I proceeded to saunter on down Penn Avenue.
Moments later, a 70's muscle car screeched to a halt along side me.
Two thirty-something's with Lemmy-esque facial hair had apparently witnessed the incident.
One jumped out of the car and started demanding that I get in.
I refused, but they were persistent.
I suppose that I had watched too many cop shows as a kid, so their authoritarian bluster eventually wore me down and they drove me back to the crossing guard.
I tried my hardest to stick to my "barely know them story", but they all kept pressuring me with an intimidating demeanor, demanding the name of the kid who threw the snowball.
Still, I stayed quiet.
So they upped the ante, saying they had contacted the school and they were telling my parents, the three of them working in concert to break me.
Then finally one of them used the dreaded threat that I would be suspended!
The pressure was too much for my seventh-grade will, and so I CRACKED.
"I don't know, I think his name is NEIL!" I said, desperately trying to appease them without giving up his last name.
And that was it. I was a SNITCH.
I suppose that was all they needed to finger the culprit.
We all caught a bit of pre-teen drama over it, but it was NOTHING compared to the shit I caught for snitching.
Neil has NEVER let me live it down.
STILL.
The funniest part is, we didn't know it then, but we were all on the same trajectory, and it led us to the underground music scene.
While George and I were dreaming up Necropolis, Neil and Greg were developing their own band, along with another kid from Wilkinsburg High School named Brian Cummings.
They would call it called Shape of Rage, inspired by the title of a book featured in the classic David Cronenberg movie, The Brood.
Even though it seemed they couldn't quite get a solid line up together, they had certainly been working at it for some time...
They had original tunes written, and had also jammed with a bunch of area punks anxious to make some noise, like drummer Greg Mairs who they had introduced me and George to.
We were all racing to see who was going to put their money where their mouth was and make their dream band a reality...
Chris Garver was an aspiring bass player, like his brother Adrian who was in a band called The Urge.
Another neighborhood punk, Guy Asper had a band AMA (Against Medical Advice).
← Chris Garver's art adorned a flyer for AMA's Banana debut.
In the end, most of our buddies in the "east end skate crew" (as we dubbed them on our first demo's "thanks list") were at the Banana when Necropolis debuted in November of 1985.
But line-up woes kept us from gigging again until the fall of 1986.
While the band was in a holding pattern, we were still busily trying to gather people into the underground music scene that had become our focus.
This is when we started the Warhammer fanzine. George and I also wanted to start booking the bands we were connecting with. And book them somewhere we wouldn't have to deal with scared or exploitative promoters or venue owners. With zero actual knowledge of the promotional business, we naively decided a company name and letterhead would make us appear “professional”, so we created Iron Horse Productions as a catch-all front for our promotional endeavors.
We cooked up a show in the “caffetorium” of my former middle school, Reizenstein. It was to feature a few area bands that we had seen at City Limits, Scepter and Heathen, who covered some thrash metal in their sets along with some heavy originals.
And at the last minute, wanting to include punk on the bill, we added a new band, Circus Of Death, to the show. Alan Peters, who was in Flak with George, was the bass player, and another friend, Will Shepler (who grew up across the street from Jon Dawson) was their drummer. So it was a “keep it in the family” opportunity.
We didn't know anything about hiring a Live Sound Engineer to bring the PA equipment and mix the live sound. So we bused to our favorite music store, Pianos N Stuff, and we rented a HUGE PA system. We did this even though we had no way to actually pick it up from their store in far away Blawnox and get it back to Wilkinsburg where would would need to hold it in George's third floor apartment until our Sunday show at Reizenstein.
Looking back, I'm amazed that we even rented it, considering the fact that we had no realistic plan to haul it around, but that's how we did shit back then. We just made up our minds and then by hook or by crook, we would find a way. Luckily our friend Dave Martin was able to borrow his dad's SUV, or WHO FUCKING KNOWS how we would have ever gotten it to the gig and back to the store!
Coincidentally, the Saturday night before our show, Shape of Rage's singer Brian Cummings had a party in his vacationing parents basement, so we brought our rented PA down for a dry run.
[ ← PHOTO: Mike Sukel, Jon Dawson & Brian Cummings at the basement party]
It was a great night with lots of locals jamming including a bunch of our friends doing assorted cover tunes. I remember singing on a Metallica song as instruments were being passed around, along with assorted drinks and substances... I think the whole thing ended abruptly as the chaos and noise were a bit too much for the neighbors.
But we had a BLAST!
In the end, it was just another excuse for us all to indulge our passion for playing the new and exciting music we were all into, as the lines between the hardcore punk and thrash metal genres were blurring more than ever before. "Crossover" as it was known then, was basically metal-infused hardcore, and we were all finding the common ground.
Of course, our show the next day at Reizenstein was a disaster. It drew less than 100 kids, not nearly what we'd hoped. But more importantly, we miscalculated how tempting it was for young rebels to be in a school building (an alma mater of some attendees) without any authority figures present. There was significant mischief, including swastikas scuffed onto the walls of the school's halls with combat boot soles. We had a major chore ahead of us cleaning up the mess.
Needless to say, we learned a LOT and lost BIG on that debacle.
1986 was the summer that Screaming Outlash played at Shady Skates which lead directly to the new and improved Necropolis line-up that fall.
Shape of Rage was still evolving in the practice room with the core of Brian Cummings on vocals, Neil Grant on Bass and Greg Gawlas on guitar. But a vacancy behind the drum kit kept the band grounded.
Eventually, Chris Emerson joined them on drums, doing double duty for Necropolis and S.O.R., a natural fit as we all spent so much time hanging out together.
By the following summer, Shape of Rage and Necropolis were both playing at Shady Skates on the same bill. And a soundboard recording of that June 7th, 1987 gig was in constant rotation in my walkman that fall. It allowed me to really appreciate their songwriting. We were partying and sharing music and underground culture constantly. The result was an ongoing brotherhood of collaboration and friendship that lasted right up until the end of Necropolis, and beyond.
[ ^ Neil Grant and Chris Emerson at City Limits 1987 ^ ]
In fact, one weekend in early 1988, my sister-in-law took a vacation and allowed me to keep an eye on her house. When the boys in Shape Of Rage found out, they decided to rent a four track and finally commit some of their original material to tape. The only problem was, Neil and Brian had a falling out with Greg.
A solution was proposed: Jon Dawson would play on the recording.
The gear was loaded into the basement of the house on Marlboro avenue in Wilkinsburg, just a few doors up from the house party where Necropolis played live for the first time a few years earlier. Having had some experience running the recorder, I was enlisted to "engineer", and even Adrian Garver came around to advise.
The recording process went like this: Neil and Brian would teach Jon a song and then we would record it. Arrangements were written on the spot, as some of the tunes were still loose ideas that hadn't been fully-formed.
Dawson seemed to thrive in this pressure-cooker environment. He contributed many melodies, licks and solos which seemed to really “flesh out” Brian and Neil's catchy tunes.
Not being an actual member of the band, Jon wanted to use a pseudonym for the session.
He had an envelope follower pedal named “Doctor Q” that he liked to use,
so he created the moniker of “Dr. Johnny Q” for the session.
Tracking went fairly quickly, and a focus on creativity over style dominated the process. As a result, there were some amazingly fortuitous contributions from all sectors.
When it came time to record vocals, Brian proved his versatility and talent, oscillating from fierce growls to near-crooning vocals with ease. Another thing about Brian was his generosity and love of collaboration, which manifested in almost everything he did.
It was largely just he and I in the basement while the vocals were being recorded.
Some of the newer tunes didn't have lyrics yet, and Brian invited me to contribute.
I helped with some words for the song "Cheap Beer" and some others. Then he invited me to sing with him as well. You can hear us "duet" a good bit on “Budweiser” and more, including the title track. I remember Todd Porter asking if the the deep bellow at the end of the song “Shut Up” was me, but it was just Brian showing his tremendous stylistic range. Evidence of the fact that he could've sung every part himself, but again, he just seemed to enjoy getting everyone involved.
Inevitably, he invited anyone present in the house to sing "gang vocals" to help bolster hooks and choruses like the anthemic “woah-oh's” on the mostly instrumental “3 O'clock High”, those of us who did had a blast.
It was a whirlwind weekend of fun and creativity.
The end result was a genre-bending, skate-rock “masterpiece” entitled “Cheap Beer”.
← The tape insert featured a great interpretation of the band's mascot, Bob Severely, as drawn by Thom Reynolds.
I drew the flyer with the couple holding the can of Cheap Beer. →
A number of copies were sold and spread around the area, with the fun sing-along aesthetic of the tunes appealing to listeners of all genres.
Another thing to mention about Brian was his presence of mind to bring a camera around to gigs and parties in that era, capturing footage of the colorful characters and events of those times.
He was enrolled at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and had access to video cameras and editing equipment which he put to great use documenting the scene and creating videos for Shape of Rage and others. He has an amazing archive of this work on his Youtube channel, and here are a few videos he made for songs from the Shape of Rage demo.
Eventually, Brian, Neil and Chris would reunite with Greg Gawlas and together they played a number of fun and memorable gigs as Shape of Rage, many times sharing a bill with Necropolis.
Neil, Greg and Brian were 3 more brothers of our family, always supporting, celebrating, surviving and evolving with the rest of the clan until both Necropolis and Shape of Rage “ended” at the Sonic Temple on August 10, 1989.
A fitting conclusion as both groups seemed to have “run their course”.
Although shortly thereafter, from their ashes came a new band called 210.
But that's another story…
Spahr Schmitt
Below is a video for “Cheap Beer” that was produced after the demo was recorded. A new version was done in an actual studio, and “Dr. Q” donned his surgical mask once again to contribute guitar parts. The video was shot at Neil's apartment and many Pittsburgh underground scenesters participated in the epic mayhem…