The Wankers/Love Puffs:
the complete recordings

Belgium 1984-5

 

I'm not gonna lie: there's no way anyone can call this music anything but bad, or regard the amateur playing and borderline objectionable lyrics as much more than a source of good laughs for the now 40-year-olds participants, and of potential embarrassment to their kids. But the Wankers and Love Puffs -- I'll get the relationship between the two names in a bit -- do have these distinctions:
  • Most definitively, we were the first garage band in my Belgian ville of Soignies. Certainly my poor neighbors had no precedent to make sense of the god-awful racket emanating from my house.
  • Through little choice of our own, we kids found ourselves in a country where few of us could drive or speak the local language well. Teenage expression was relegated to sanctioned hang-outs (the burger joint Sunny's, the teen center, the Bon Marché store) and traditional American school pastimes (sports, drama club, etc.), all of which seemed slightly absurd and contrived when placed in an international military base during the Cold War. In this setting, the Wankers made something out of nothing, giving voice to teenage boredom and creativity undeterred by a lack of skill or even instruments. In short, we were punk rock. Maybe some kids at SHAPE American High School did something like this before we did, but damn if I ever knew about it.
  • Some of this music still sounds crazy! In the beginning, all we had was a guitar, a cheap keyboard with a built-in rhythm box (a.k.a. the boompa-chicka machine), a microphone, one drum, a trombone, flowerpots and anything else in the garage to bang on. We'd write lyrics during school or just make them up on the spot. Songs? Who needs 'em! That made for a high miss-to-hit ratio, but when the Wankers hit -- where and how often, I'll leave up to you -- it still sounds great. (Yet bad and embarrassing simultaneously.)

Below is the story of the Wankers and Love Puffs as I remember it, plus a brief track-by-track commentary on our old recordings. I've digitized these recordings from some old cassettes into mp3s that all former bandmates (and anyone else adventurous enough) can download and enjoy. Mine is certainly not the only perspective on the band, nor the most reliable, so please add your own.

 

HOW IT BEGAN
My dad was transferred to SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, for those who don't know) and moved the family to Belgium in the summer of 1983, before my sophomore year in high school. There I made a bunch of friends, including Derek Strauss, Dan Mauz and Jerry Dauteuil. We all had good times and shared a love of music; I can still picture us listening, dancing, and air-guitaring along to albums like Gang of Four's first album and Wall of Voodoo's Call of the West at Dan's house that year.
Somehow the idea of having a jam session came about, and we convened in what I think was the spring of 1984 at Jerry's garage with a guitar, a little keyboard, someone's trumpet, a microphone, and a tape deck. Derek knew how to play (or, at least he had a guitar guitar), so he played that while Dan took the synth and I got the horn. Jerry didn't do much as I recall except bang on something -- maybe a drum, maybe not. I brought some lyrics titled "Shake My Whammy Bar," so I got vocal duties. In one afternoon, we recorded 3-4 tracks, of which I only have a recording of one of them left. Nothing could have been rehearsed more than twice -- at least I think so, because the "NO!" on this recording that Jerry screams when it's his turn to take a drum solo is not the "NO!" of genuine shock and embarrassment that I recall the first time we played this. The other "songs" were even more free-form, just each of us improvising and joking at each other's expense. Dan graduated and Derek moved back to the States that summer, while Jerry withdrew from the idea of playing music. It could have been the end of story, but for me the seed had been planted.
Am I correct in thinking that the Wankers' name was first kicked around with this first line-up? Certainly it was too good for me to have come up with by myself. A derogatory British term for masturbator, "Wankers" neatly got across our self-ridicule and lack of seriousness, our nod to British culture (from which came most of our record collections at that time), and our juvenile attempt to be outrageous.
The first line-up. Clockwise from left:
Derek Strauss, Dan Mauz, Len Nevarez, Jerry Dauteuil.

 

 

LOVE PUFFS
The next line-up came together around me, Robby Dzur, Mike Levy, and Richard Arseneault, who brought the all-important boompa-chicka machine. Over fall 1984, we regularly played in my damp garage. Various others joined for a number of sessions: Brian Fuller on trombone, jack-of-all-trades Park Guthrie, and Deidre Housley & Beth Diehl as vocalists.
Typically, these songs came together when someone brought some lyrics; otherwise, they were improvised on the spot. I would come up with a riff or chord sequence and synchronize it to the rhythm patterns provided by Richard's boompa-chicka machine. Others would grab any musical or other noise-making instrument (seriously, listen for the flowerpots) and play along in whatever way they felt. Songs without the boompa-chicka machine could be a seriously unstructured affair.
As you'll hear, Beth & Deidre called themselves the Wankettes, which suggests how we still thought of the band as the Wankers. However, a few months into the new line-up, it finally occurred to us that the Wankers might be too impolite a name. There were British people stationed at SHAPE, for one thing! I recall some talk of getting a write-up in the yearbook if only we had a less indecent name. How quickly we sold out for the promise of publicity! From this was born the Love Puffs -- or just "Love Puffs," without "the," which made this ironically soft name seem even more self-important and absurd. By the end of the semester, when it became apparent that the yearbook write-up wasn't going to materialize, we switched back to the Wankers. Not long after, this line-up was over.
In the garage. Left to right:
Len Nevarez, Richard Arseneault, Robby Dzur.
Missing from these photos: Mike Levy!

 

Guitar and boompa-chicka machine:
the foundation of most Love Puffs songs.

 

The Wankettes:
Beth Diehl (left) and Deidre Housley.

 

Park Guthrie.
Sorry, I have no pictures of Brian Fuller.

 

 

THE WANKERS
By New Year 1985, Robby moved back to the States, much to our dismay. Not long after, we took in Scott Hunt, who brought something new to the band: a drumkit. And he could play, too! Suddenly we resembled a genuine rock band: me on guitar and vocals, Scott on drums, Mike and Richard rotating on bass guitar and later second guitar. For some reason, we began playing almost exclusively songs by two of our favorite bands, the Ramones and the Cramps. There was no master plan to be a cover band; it was just that their songs were in the key of E, which was about all our musical abilities could handle at the time. As I later learned, the Ramones and Cramps covers we played were largely covers of other performers; thus in retrospect, I like to think we were participating in a venerable tradition of garage rock. More likely, few of our classmates recognized anything from our repertoire, so we were a "real" band as far as we were concerned.
This final line-up got out of the garage and played three gigs, I think. The first was outside Peter Tavernise's house in Mont Garni. There was a gig at the teen center; I recall that Jerry Reif videoetaped that performance, and that we took to the stage as an obscure Sisters of Mercy b-side ("Phantom") played -- how cool! And there was a gig somewhere else; I don't remember where, but I remember I wore a "punk" t-shirt that Scott and I had ripped up and wrote band names on. (Oof!) Joe Wallace tells me he did the sound at one of these gigs. We had a blast that semester, and I fantasized us developing into something even more real. And then I moved in the summer of 1985, and that was the end of the Wankers so far as I know.

When the devil came to see me...
Left to right: Len Nevarez, Scott Hunt, Richard Arseneault, Mike Levy.

 

Richard laughs at Len for not memorizing the lyrics.

 

This must be the last Wankers show, because
it's the two-guitar line-up, and Len has finally memorized the lyrics.

 

 

THE RECORDINGS
In digitizing these recordings to mp3, I tried to tweak with the sound, but they remain very low fidelity. We usually recorded by all playing in front of one microphone plugged directly into a cassette recorder, so it sounds like 4-6 people fighting for the mid-range levels on the EQ. Add in a few generations of cassette dubbing, and this is what you get: the hiss is quite loud, and the vocals frequently sound distorted, particularly on the Love Puffs recordings. Why we never learned to step back from the microphone when we sang, I don't know. The Wankers recordings from Mont Garni were taken from a videocassette, recorded on someone's fancy videorecorder (it must have been new expensive technology back then) with an external microphone. At some point midway in the taping, someone figured out they should shield the microphone; the wind muffling disappears, and suddenly the guitar sounds different. All of these technical audio issues escaped us at the time, needless to say.

 

Love Puffs, The History of Rock & Roll Made Redundant In 90 Minutes
1. Shake My Whammy Bar
This is the sole remaining recording from the original session with Derek, Dan, Jerry and myself, included here with the Love Puffs simply because it was on my Love Puffs cassette. My attempt, not the last, at double innuendo: a whammy bar is, among other things, the tremolo arm on a guitar. I clearly wrote these lyrics under the influence of the Violent Femme's "Gimme The Car."

 

2. I Want My Dada
Here's the classic Love Puffs format: a rockabilly riff (we were listening to a lot of psychobilly at the time), the boompa-chicka machine cranked to 11, and Robby's lyrics.

 

3. College Night
Write what you know, they say, and so I brought some lyrics in about the college fair we attended at the American high school in Brussels. Brian Fuller sings lead vocals here.

 

4. I Miss You
Thank God for the Wankettes. Their B-52s-inspired backing vocals and, well, their estrogen provided an important counterweight to the male geekiness that the rest of us brought to the table.

 

5. Mr. Happy
I don't think my satirical lyrics were aimed at any popular jock in particular.

 

6. Bluesy Rock & Roll Song
This wince-worthy recording demonstrates how I have no intuitive feel whatsoever when it comes to singing the blues. Please, skip this and move on to the next track.

 

7. Meat Between The Buns
Now, Mike: he knew how to write a double entendre. But for the most part, this is a first-person depiction of his wage-slave job at Sunny's.

 

8. Belgian Weekend
The band finally tries to play the same tune, not all that successfully. I brought in some lyrics about being an outsider to American high school culture and looking to the host country for escape. That said, I don't recall ever dancing with the cows.

 

9. Pain Is My Girlfriend
These lyrics may have been mine, and I may have written them around the time Sarah Dodd dumped me at the homecoming dance. But the Henry Rollins-esque poetry here more likely indicates that someone had just gotten Black Flag's "My War" cassette for Christmas.

 

10. Communism Is No Fun
Living on a European military base in the 1980s, you develop strong feelings about the Cold War. Instead of articulating them as hardcore-punk political protest, we opted for a Burroughs-style recital of western propaganda.

 

11. The People Song
Chalk up the un-P.C. sentiments in this song to the boredom of teenagers who were intelligent enough to recall newsworthy details about Daniel Ortega or John DeLorean but who were ill-served by their education's failure to provide a critical framework with which to interpret the news. Yeah, that's my story, and I'm sticking with it.

 

12. When Doves Cry
At the beginning of fall 1984, Deidre was the first person I knew to have Prince's "Purple Rain," and within weeks this song was massive. We destroyed that song, and thankfully Deidre and Beth got into the spirit; their interpretation of what it sounds like when doves cry (around 2:19) remains a Love Puffs high point.

 

13. Frustration
I keep waiting for a song to burst out of this exercise in guitar feedback (Gang of Four's "Anthrax," anyone?), but it never does. Frustrating, huh?

 

14. Let Me Be Your Effigy
I brought in this phrase and let the band have at it. Robby and Deidre sound particularly inspired here.

 

15. I Look Like Ronald Reagan
If it's not apparent by now, Robby was a one-of-a-kind singer totally in sync with the experimental, post-punk aesthetic of the times. I was in awe of his creativity, and thought for sure he would go on to be a rockstar.

 

16. Drinking Is Healthy
Richard, Park and Mike join Robby for 10 minutes of truly inspired lyrical improvisation. I still laugh out loud when I hear Park blurt out, "My name is Sergeant Joe Shit-the-Rag-Man!"

 

17. We Wear Grandmas' Coats
From what is I think the last recording session. By now the Puffs know what they're doing; we just press the record button and let it roll without a plan.

 

18. Blue & White Tennis Shoes
The Love Puffs are firing on all pistons here. This track is a keeper.

 

19. Come Back Jonee
A pair of covers revealing some obvious influences, starting with Devo. I croon like Bill Murray's lounge singer, while Richard just sounds hesitant.

 

20. Once In A Lifetime
Park's vocals makes you forget David Byrne's version. Almost.

 

21. Band Introductions
Fun with a dub cassette recorder circa 1984.

 

 

The Wankers, Live At Mont Garni
1. Let's Dance
That point midway where the band slows down? I'm turning the lyric sheet on the music stand. That's right, I was so lame I couldn't play, sing and remember the words at the same.

 

2. When The Devil Came To See Me
These were the days of "Shout at the Devil," remember? Richard held the videocamera for most of the gig but came on-stage to deliver this memorable vocal.

 

3. She Said
In my dreams I wished I knew a sex-crazed woman like the one related in this song. Still, there's no denying the genius of that chorus: "OOOH! Eee, ah, ahh..."

 

4. Goo Goo Muck
This could have been our pop single, I always thought.

 

5. New Kind Of Kick
For the record, I had never partaken of any illegal narcotic substance at this point in my life. Richard wisely shouts"NO!" when I ask the crowd if anyone wants a guitar solo.

 

6. Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue
This never inspired the audience sing-along we hoped it would, did it?

 

7. Sex Beat
Savor the irony of a virginal 16-year-old boy singing the Gun Club lyric "We can fuck forever/But you'll never get my soul." I think I even held back on the f-word the first time that lyric comes up.

 

8. The People Song
What's this, an original song?! I added a shout-out to Ms. Pinsky, our chemistry teacher.

 

9. Domino
One of my favorite Wankers moments appears in the chorus here, when Scott backs up my vocals: "GET OUT OF THE WAY!!"

 

10. Warm-Up
A bonus track from a rehearsal session. "You're on drugs!" Scott announces.

 

11. Let's Dance (Sludge Mix)
I always thought of this song as the Wankers' anthem, especially with the added lyrics from "Shake My Whammy Bar" bringing it full circle to the beginning. The reverb on this mix, by the way, is insane.

 

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