Hitting the Beachhead and Coming on Strong: An Interview With the Fleshtones’ Peter Zaremba

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Zaremba looks back on three decades of 'super rock' and finds the landscape littered with obscure Humphrey Bogart movies, Fleetwood Mac parties, early Tom Hanks comedies, and the evolution of the 'power stance'.

By Charlotte Robinson

The Fleshtones were garage rock revivalists when garage rock wasn’t cool. Formed in NYC at the height of the punk era in the mid-‘70s, they nonetheless found an audience for their ‘60s-influenced music (they call it “super rock”) and energetic live shows, which feature choreographed moves including their trademark “power stance”. In the early ‘80s they recorded for Miles Copeland’s legendary new wave label IRS, appeared in the film Urgh! A Music War, and had two songs on the soundtrack to the popular comedy Bachelor Party, but mainstream success somehow eluded them. Most of the band’s albums, including the classic IRS efforts Roman Gods and Hexbreaker, remain out of print. Still, Peter Zaremba (vocals, harmonica, organ), Keith Streng (guitar, vocals), Bill Milhizer (drums), and Ken Fox (bass, replacing Jan Marek Pukulski) have continued making albums and spreading the real rock gospel wherever they can.

With the resurrection of garage rock in the past few years, the Fleshtones have experienced something of a renaissance. In 2003, the band dropped one of its strongest albums, Do You Swing, produced by Southern Culture on the Skids’ Rick Miller, one of the few to successfully translate the band’s live energy to tape. August 9 saw the release of the Fleshtones’ 13th studio album, Beachhead, named for an obscure Frank Lovejoy/Tony Curtis movie and featuring tracks produced by Miller and former Dirtbombs bassist Jim Diamond (White Stripes, Mooney Suzuki). Fleshtones frontman Peter Zaremba chatted with PopMatters about the new album, Detroit, George Jefferson, and the band’s signature drink, the blue whale. (For the uninitiated, take one can of frozen yellow lemonade, fill the can once with blue curaçao, then twice with vodka, and add ice. Then get very, very drunk.)

PopMatters: What’s the Beachhead movie all about? What’s the connection between the album and this movie?

Peter Zaremba: First of all, the movie’s not that good. It’s one of these things Keith and I have extrapolated upon for many, many years, even before we had the band together. We used to hang out. He lived in this house in Whitestone with his brother and his grandma, his dad would be out a lot; basically it was just him. We used to take LSD and watch movies. A lot of these movies that we watched worked their way into songs that we did. One of the first songs he ever wrote was called “Coming in Dead Stick” which wound up on that…

PM: Blast Off.

PZ: Blast Off—hey, good, I’m going to enjoy talking to you. That’s a crucial line from a kind of obscure Humphrey Bogart movie called Chain Lightning. As teenagers would do in those days—maybe still do—we used to waste a lot of time watching movies on TV late at night, very often while taking LSD or something, and that’s a key moment in this Bogart movie where he’s a test pilot and something’s wrong with the jet or something. People are yelling at him over the radio, and he goes, “I’m comin’ in…dead stick” as only he could say it. It’s such a great line. It meant that he was coming in with no power; he was just going to glide in.

But anyhow, Beachhead is a movie with Frank Lovejoy and Tony Curtis. Frank Lovejoy is believable as a hard-as-nails commando kind of guy and they’re about to go on this Japanese-held island on a secret commando-type mission and they’re going to be guided by this French planter who knows the island very well. It’s a very deadly mission; the odds of survival are next to none. It turns out that the planter is bringing his very attractive daughter along, a very beautiful woman. I don’t know if it was Frank Lovejoy who says the line or Tony Curtis, but one of them goes, “Nobody said anything about any women on this mission!” That line just floored us, just blew us out of our seats. And we talked about that movie and talked about it.

Oddly enough, this band has gotten launched on this very long, strange career—in May it’ll be 30 years. One of our old bandmates, Gordon [Spaeth, who passed away earlier this year] always used to liken what we’re doing to some kind of campaign, [an] ill-conceived military campaign of some sort. So the Beachhead thing kept coming up—hitting the beachhead, establishing a beachhead. It’s not necessarily like a beach party. [laughs] It’s not that easy, but it’s something worthwhile. Even at this point, 30 years in, we’re still trying to establish a beachhead of some sort. Sometimes that imagery popped into my head. You probably have a promo, right, so you don’t have the one with the cover?

PM: Right. I’ve seen it but I don’t have it.

PZ: We have the helmet and the guitar. It can be read a lot of different ways. At first people would say, “Oh, it’s very military.” Yeah, but it’s a guitar. We’re a rock ‘n’ roll band. So anyhow, Beachhead. You’ve got to see the movie. It will shed no light whatsoever on the record. It’s just what I said, something we had talked about and expanded upon. Neither of us has seen that movie since we were teenagers and we saw it together but yet we still talk about it. Who knows if these scenes even actually happened in the movie at this point? At this point, what we remember is better probably.

PM: Rick Miller produced your last album and some tracks on the new album, and he did such a great job. You’ve always had a great live reputation, but sometimes it’s been hard to capture that live sound. What does he do differently, that he’s able to get this really good sound on tape?

PZ: We worked with two people. Are you making a distinction between Rick’s tracks and Jim Diamond’s? Do you think the ones Jim did are less so?

PM: No, I don’t.

PZ: It’s OK. You’re a thousand miles away; I can’t get you.

PM: I’m from Michigan, so I wouldn’t put him down.

PZ: OK, cool.

PM: I don’t think there’s a difference between the tracks; it’s pretty seamless. It’s just that when Do You Swing came out, it was such a good disc.

PZ: You’re really kind.

PM: I just think he did a really great job on it.

PZ: He did do a great job. He puts us in a big room and lets us play.

PM: So it is like a live album in a way.

PZ: Right. We indulged ourselves with a few tricks, like on Do You Swing where we added very live effects that were live actually. “I’m Back Again” has a very live kind of sound to it because there’s a lot of live things going on. In most of those tracks, even though we manipulated live in the studio, it’s pretty live and he’s good at that. Like I said, he just puts us in a big room and lets us play, and he then does let us indulge ourselves in our little gimmicks that we want to do to make it sound more live. Maybe also, after years of people that know better, like yourself, they’ll say, “Hey, your records don’t sound anything like you guys.” But maybe we’re trying to get that into the records a bit more now. That was never one of our concerns, we always used to say, “Well, the live show is the live show and a record is a record. It’s two different things.” And I think that’s the attitude that comes from people who are big record collectors, or used to be, who came into music not as musicians but as record collectors. So we were always trying to create records that sounded like some of our favorite records. So we weren’t too concerned about just going in and letting it rip. We wanted to make it sound like whatever bunch of great records that we wanted to sound like. Maybe now we’re better off trying to be a little more live, get a little of that excitement in there.

PM: Why did you also decide to work with Jim Diamond? Was his approach much different than Rick Miller’s?

PZ: We’ve always wanted to work with Jim. I met him a few years ago when he was still in the Dirtbombs and I’d heard about his work. I’d heard some of his records and liked what he was doing. People would say, “Oh, there’s this guy in Detroit that’s doing some great recording, you should check him out.” And then I met him when I was hosting—I did a bunch of those Cavestomp [garage rock festival] things, and the Dirtbombs were at several of them. I was chatting with Jim and we sort of said, “Yeah, yeah, we’re going to get out there and record in your studio.” So it’s something we always had wanted to do, and we thought that maybe recording with him anyway would unleash some of our more aggressive side, our latently aggressive side, which doesn’t usually come out too much in the recording venue. And we thought it did. As a matter of fact, the recordings that we did with Jim were, sound-wise, so much more aggressive that it really took a very good old friend of ours who masters to sort of—I don’t want to say bring everything up to the same level—but to make everything equalized between the tracks. And that’s a guy named Rodney Mills who’s an old-time mastering guy who lives in Duluth, Georgia, which until recently—if I heard Duluth, Georgia, I ‘d think “Oh yeah, Rodney Mills lives in Duluth, Georgia” but I guess, not that anyone wants to hear the term ever again, but that’s the home of the Runaway Bride. Let that be the last mention of that ever. The poor girl. But that’s also the home of Rodney Mills Masterhouse. So if you need to have a record mastered, I recommend him. He’s been working in the studio since 1968, which could be bad actually, but in his case is very good. And he always gets a big chuckle out of mastering one of our records. He goes, “It sounds like you boys had a lot of fun on this record.” And these days, it’s true. The earlier records, making them, I wouldn’t call it fun, what we did. Something happened in the studio, but it wasn’t good clean fun the way making these records are.

PM: Why do you think that was, that you didn’t have as much fun recording then?

PZ: Oh, in the early ‘80s and stuff, first of all, we were all going through a sort of psychotic phase anyway, everything was very extreme. And we were usually in an adversarial role with the producer, and the whole recording technology in those days was totally ridiculous and overblown. I mean the budgets, say on Hexbreaker or Roman Gods, the budgets were astronomical. We could make ten albums; we could make 15 albums for that money. In fact, we do. And that was 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago, so that money was worth all the more. But no one thought anything of blowing all this money making records and, I don’t know. It just wasn’t fun. Nowadays, working with someone like Rick Miller or Jim is really great. It’s really great that people with groups these days don’t have to go through the early ‘80s style of production. It’s like, “OK, let’s work on the kick drum this week.” Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. You come back 12 hours later, thump, thump, thump. These people were out of their mind. It’s the excess caused by having too much money. And having all this new technology dumped in these people’s laps, and people feeling they had to use it for something, they had to use this technology for something. “We could always sample the kick drum from a Rolling Stones record.” It’s ridiculous, insane. Plus cocaine probably addled them.

PM: Yeah, the Stevie Nicks years.

PZ: The great addler. Stevie Nicks! Those guys invited us to a party once.

PM: Fleetwood Mac did?

PZ: Yes.

PM: And you didn’t go?

PZ: Actually, we did go. I think they might have thought we were somebody else. That’s my ultimate analysis. We were staying in Hollywood in those days; I think we might have been working on Hexbreaker or something, or mastering Roman Gods, and we got this invitation through some weird sources and drove way up into the Hollywood Hills and went to this party. I don’t remember meeting them there. I’m sure they were there; I wouldn’t have cared. But on the way up we were lost and we ran into the guy who played George Jefferson. Who was that actor?

PM: Sherman Hemsley.

PZ: That’s true. We ran into Sherman Hemsley. That made the night. The stars are there; it’s Hollywood.

PM: I wanted to ask you about the older stuff, because it was briefly—well, I guess Living Legend Series was briefly on CD…

PZ: Oh my God, the fact that you even know about that.

PM: I have it. I managed to get a copy.

PZ: How?

PM: I found it at a used record store, on CD.

PZ: I thought kids were scaling it off the railroad tracks or something.

PM: That stuff is so impossible to get. I’m thinking of the IRS stuff in particular, but really everything. Do you know if there are any plans to ever reissue that stuff and who has control over it now?

PZ: That whole issue brings us back to the title Beachhead. All the stuff we did on IRS is totally impossible to get. Never been reissued, no one knows about it. Again, as Gordon would say, a forgotten campaign. All the stuff we did for Ichiban is out of print, so that’s basically everything we did in the ‘90s. The stuff that Ichiban did, there was a big lawsuit and they locked up everything in a big warehouse and I have no idea what happened to that. So our records were impounded. It had nothing to do with us, absolutely nothing to do with us, except we’re the Fleshtones and things like that happen to us. IRS sold all of their rights to Capitol and they sold it to EMI and EMI is not in the least bit interested in reissuing any of our material. Now, that said, Rhino put together this big box set of Children of Nuggets, Children With Rocks in Their Heads or something, and we have two tracks on that. Somehow they negotiated with EMI for two tracks on that big collection, that I’m surprised you haven’t heard of, or maybe you have and you’re just keeping mum.

PM: I don’t think I’ve seen it.

PZ: It’s not out yet. But it’s going to be, it might be interesting actually. There’s going to be a gazillion groups on it. I’m sure like Leaving Trains, maybe early Bangles or the Unclaimed…

PM: And actually, the Bangles, their first EP was on IRS, I believe.

PZ: It certainly was. And they may or may not have thanked us on the sleeve; I’m not sure, ‘cause we were very chummy with them when they were just getting together. That was in our Hollywood years. So anyway, to get back to all this stuff, I have no idea if any of these records will ever be reissued. And needless to say, it does hurt us quit a bit. I mean, it seems like people get any garbage reissued. Good stuff, too, actually. And it helps people to have some kind of profile. Meanwhile, we’re getting more and more obscure—not exactly what we wanted. This is not a plan of ours.

PM: You’ve said in interviews that it’s not the easiest career, being in the Fleshtones. Do you guys make a living from the band, or if not, what else do you do?

PZ: We could make a very marginal living from being in the band. That said, we all do odd things to augment our income. I do some writing, oddly enough, food and travel, not music, some cultural stuff for papers and things like that. Ken is kind of like a carpenter/handy guy—a “handy guy”! Bill seems to be the one to manage to sort of float by with just doing the band stuff—maybe his winnings at the track, [laughs] on the horses or whatever. We all have to do little things, but all that said, being in the Fleshtones is a great thing, and that’s why we’re still in the Fleshtones. It’s a unique experience. It was a childhood dream for all of us to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band that had some validity. So it’s a great thing. It’s frustrating—I’ll admit it—sometimes. Sometimes I’ll get a tad—I wouldn’t say bitter—feisty [laughs] or cantankerous about what I perceive as some of the injustices that the band has endured. But you know what? We asked for it. We really did. We didn’t take the biz side of being in the band seriously at all. We came so close to fame so many times and just laughed it off because it was fun at the time and we were living our madcap existence. We felt like it was one big Marx Brothers movie or something. And that was all pretty good, and still is. It’s still fun to play. I feel like our records are getting better, at least for us. Let’s say Beachhead or Do You Swing, obviously in 2005 isn’t the revelation that hearing Roman Gods in 1981 was. That was much more of a shock for people, to hear that kind of record then, considering what was going on then.

PM: Did you manage to find an audience right away? Because it must have been strange being this kind of ‘60s-influenced band starting out in the middle of the New York punk thing. Was it an advantage that you stood out?

PZ: A big disadvantage. But we did stand out. We had a small following in New York. Much to his credit, Marty Thau recognized our talent, our boyish exuberance, and linked us right away to what he had always been involved with. He was involved with, of course, the [New York] Dolls, all this bubblegum rock ‘n’ roll, the Ramones early on, stuff like that. He saw the connection right away. Most people didn’t. It took us going to Boston to start finding an audience. Once we started going to Boston and then Washington, D.C. we started clicking with a following. By the early ‘80s we had a good following in New York but it was an uphill struggle. I mean, we had already been together five years by 1981, so for most bands that’s a long time. A lot of people just didn’t get it because it seemed too simple. It was like, “Why are you playing twist music? This sounds like old rock ‘n’ roll, blah, blah, blah. Why don’t you sound more like”—I don’t know—“Billy Idol or the British punk invasion or No New York”, you know there was that No New York?

PM: Yeah, no wave.

PZ: The no wave which was like, it was funny, fake jazz and very noisy and dissonant and painful. What can I say? It’s fun for a little while or if you’re in the mood, you know what I mean? But that wasn’t why any of us got involved in rock ‘n’ roll. There was a certain joy and exuberance and release, sensuality involved with rock ‘n’ roll that we grew up with an intense desire to be a part of. Once we started making music, that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to create all that, to get that charge. Once we started playing we realized it was really easy to get that charge, we were getting it. Plus we were aping the records that we loved, which not many other people were doing.

PM: You do a good job when you play live of covering songs from your entire career. Are there any songs you’re sick of and you will not play?

PZ: I don’t get a kick out of playing “American Beat”. So we don’t play it much. Which I guess is one of our almost hits, or would-be hits.

PM: Because it was in Bachelor Party.

PZ: It’s in Bachelor Party—the last really dopey movie that Tom Hanks made before he became a big star. If you ever hear him being interviewed, he’ll always not mention the movie by name. “Well, I made one of those horrible teen comedies. Well, I didn’t want to.” He certainly did a good job of doing many of them up to that point. That was the last really stupid teen comedy he made. It’s funny—that was during our Hollywood years, so I get to say I went to the movies with Tom Hanks. You’ve seen the movies where they’re having a screening of a movie in the movie and the stars are all there watching the screening of their movie? We were at that. We were sitting right behind Tom and we hated the movie and I think our behavior at that screening is what cost us ever having that opportunity again. And we were so promising, too. We got two songs in that film and they loved them, but I think we kind of eighty-sixed ourselves by our indifference and lack of enthusiasm for the film at that screening.

But that’s a song I don’t like playing often. Other than that, I like playing all the songs. I think they’re all fun. I’d like to be able to play more of them, actually. It’s like, if we don’t see the audience really getting into a song, we generally drop it. Now, that’s sometimes a mistake because sometimes they’re listening to the song rather than going nuts or whatever. So they might actually be enjoying the song, but we misread it. If we don’t see a good reaction, we just get rid of it. We like to keep things jumpin’.

PM: The first time I saw you guys live was in Detroit.

PZ: Probably St. Andrew’s Hall or something.

PM: It was at the Magic Stick. It must have been ten years ago. You might remember this show because it was bizarre. It was July 4 weekend, it was terrible timing, no one was in town, and there were like 15 people there.

PZ: [groans]

PM: But it was a great show, that was the thing. It was like being at a house party. It made it more fun.

PZ: I remember all those shows. Those shows I remember more than other shows, and I remember all the Magic Stick shows because they’re so nice there but the shows are all duds as far as turnout. I mean, God bless you for being there. As a result, we’d always say, “Hey, come on, let’s go, let’s have some fun with this. We’re going to play for who’s here.” And that included us. We had fun playing there. And those shows were very poorly attended. We weren’t making an impact on the Detroit scene that way.

Now, around ten years before that we were playing I think at the Falcon Club or something like that and we got there really early for sound check, like in the middle of the afternoon. We’re setting up and this sort of slightly big guy comes in, who looks slightly familiar, with a young girl. We’re thinking, “Who is this guy?” He comes up to us and introduces himself and says, “I’m Rob Tyner. Maybe you remember I was in a group called the MC5.” We said, “Yes, we certainly do. We remember.” He was with this girl Maria who ended up being the main guitarist in the Cobras and he goes, “I just want to show you guys around Detroit ‘cause a lot of people don’t like Detroit and I think it’s a really great city, so when you’re done loading your stuff in, let’s go out for the afternoon.” And he took us all around Hamtramck and stuff to all these neighborhood bars and stuff, so that’s one of my better memories of Detroit. It was very sweet of him to do that. I forget why he did that; he just showed up. Isn’t that nice? So Rob Tyner was a good guy.

PM: Where did you get the idea for your trademark “power stance”?

PZ: It was something that came from our more chaotic phase of performing, it was more like the Marx Brothers or the Dead End Kids onstage and we’d spontaneously come up with routines while we were performing. We were usually, among other things, outrageously drunk. You know, when you’re in your 20s that just gives you a lot of energy. We would just do things during shows. One of the things we used to do was just stop, especially when the audience was sort of really going and we were really building up a good head of steam. Somehow we’d all look at each other and knew that we were going to stop. And we’d just stop. And then there’d be silence and we’d look at the audience for like ten seconds and start again. One of the times that we did that, we all struck that pose. And I don’t remember which one of us called it the power stance, but then we started doing that more and more often.

For awhile we had a road manager, a very nice ex-con, good guy, but we had him so that when we struck that pose, he would come up on the stage and he would do the inspection, where he’d sort of look us all up, straighten us out a little, push us around a little, and then nod his head and give us the signal to begin again, which was a great move. After that, we had another routine where, when we stopped like that, he would come out with a—we found like some bowling trophy or cup or something—and he came out and would give me an award for some totally bogus premise, usually for working with underprivileged children or something. And I’d thank the audience, said it really meant a lot to me, and we’d start playing again.

PM: I’ve actually seen this at James Brown and Loretta Lynn shows, these weird moments where they stop in the middle of the show and someone comes onstage and gives them some award that you’ve never heard of.

PZ: I didn’t see that but this sort of unexpected thing injected into the show is very James Brown. We used to just come up with this stuff. We were on a roll for a couple of years. We had all these routines, routine six, routine seven. Did you ever watch the Bowery Boys?

PM: Not since I was little.

PZ: They had all these things where it was like, at the end they’d be in some totally tight spot and then Huntz Hall would say, “Routine six!” and they’d all start running around, there’d be a big fight, ridiculous fight scene. So we kind of dug that. So that’s where the power stance came from.

PM: Does anyone in the Fleshtones drink blue whales anymore, or is that from days gone by?

PZ: That’s from days gone by. We’ve refined our taste considerably. Although every once in awhile someone, as a treat for us, will mix them up and present us with a bucket of them. That’s kind of a teen drink, right? It’s a teen cooler, shall we say? We used to mix them up by the big trash barrelful. It was a great thing, but we’ve refined our taste—not to say I’d turn one down.

 
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