Anderson Indiana’s Repellents came together in November of 1981 after a particularly fun and inspiring night out at Crazy Al’s, a restaurant and bar in the Broadripple section of Indianapolis, Indiana. The show featured Dayton, Ohio’s Toxic Reasons and Indy’s own Zero Boys. Guitarist Lumpy and singer Dave Jr. had recently split off from their last band, X-Spurtz. The “manager” from that band, drummer Yukki Gipe, along with his girlfriend, a recent Cincinnati, Ohio transplant, ...  read more

Anderson Indiana’s Repellents came together in November of 1981 after a particularly fun and inspiring night out at Crazy Al’s, a restaurant and bar in the Broadripple section of Indianapolis, Indiana. The show featured Dayton, Ohio’s Toxic Reasons and Indy’s own Zero Boys. Guitarist Lumpy and singer Dave Jr. had recently split off from their last band, X-Spurtz. The “manager” from that band, drummer Yukki Gipe, along with his girlfriend, a recent Cincinnati, Ohio transplant, Jakki, took up bass duties, completing the line up. X-Spurtz broke up because their drummer, Kirby, was going off to college and their other guitarist, Ansel, didn’t like playing out much and didn’t really care for the more gritty and speedy direction punk was taking at that point. Lumpy and Dave Jr. wanted to play more, and were generally energized, after X-Spurtz recently played shows with both Zero Boys and another Indy band, Last Four [5] Digits. Yukki was pretty fired up to give drums a shot, because he’d recently come to the conclusion that desire was more important than ability, and Jakki had recently bought a bass guitar and moved in with Yukki in Anderson. She took to it quickly (the bass, that is, not Anderson) . Anderson, Indiana is about 30 miles north of Indianapolis and much smaller. It’s known throughout that area of as a bit of a hick-town, but there were some free spirits running around that got into Punk Rock pretty early on. Dave (Schlabach) Jr. and Lumpy (Gary Bullock) had started Anderson’s first punk band, The Geeks, in 1977. Lumpy: “The Geeks formed within months of the release of the first Ramones LP. The original two guys were Kenny Reeves and me - we heard the record and said 'we can do that or something like that'. I had an acoustic guitar but couldn't play it - originally I'd wanted to play bass, but Kenny had actually played bass, so I took up guitar. We went to the pawn shop and bought some cheap gear, christened Kenny's garage 'The Pork Duke Cue Club' and started up. Kenny knew a lot of people and brought in Kirby Bernard [drums] and Smitty [guitar]. We heard about a kid on the south side who liked punk rock; we went to a party at a farm and there he was, about 17 years old, belting out Damned and Sex Pistols songs over a 500-watt MacIntosh stereo. This guy was Dave Junior. Smitty played a short time and vanished - Kirby brought in Chet Green [a.k.a. Ted Urgent] on guitar.” Dave says, “This is how I remember it...I was listening to Black Sabbath, Alex Harvey, Mott the Hoople, Roxy Music, N.Y. Dolls. It was 1976. I had just gotten my driver's license. I had a '74 Chevy van with a killer stereo. I met Kenny Reeves thru Mike Moore, and then met Lumpy through Kenny Reeves. We were hangin' out before Never Mind The Bollocks was even released. Then in '77, all that music just came out at once. Lumpy worked at the record store...so he was all over everything as soon as it came out...and as a result I heard everything from Dead Boys to Sex Pistols, within the space of a month or so. Making the transition from Alice Cooper to Johnny Rotten was easy enough. In the Generators we covered songs by both artists! At some point that late summer we went to see that band Zeus (local hard rock cover band). Yeah, you remember Zeus. After the show, we went cruising in the country in Kenny's Jeep, listening to Black Sabbath's "Master of Reality" album. I made the remark to Lumpy that I thought that singer for Zeus was much too timid and not near aggressive enough. I envisioned a good front man to be as aggressive as Dick the Bruiser (old school, big time wrestler, very popular in Indiana at the time), and not prance about like a little girl...” Lumpy: “The Geeks continued through 1979-80, with another drummer whose name was Brad [Campbell]. At that point, I had met Ansel Creamer through my boss at the record store. He also played guitar and liked weird music. The X-Spurtz formed in 1980 with Dave Jr, Ansel, Kirby, me and a country rock bassist we recruited named Gary Tuttle. We rehearsed in Middletown, Indiana at Ansel's house. Yukki was our manager.” After The Geeks broke up, Kenny and Brad started a short-lived punk band called Ovals, with Kurt (Yukki) singing and his buddy, Jonee Quest on guitar. They never got out of the garage and didn’t last long. Yukki: “After I graduated from high school in 1978, I had decided I was going to buy a Punk Rock album. I’d been hearing about it, and The Sex Pistols had toured earlier in the year and really got my curiosity going. I ended up buying the Pistols album and just, basically, flipped over it. After that I was on a tear to buy all the Punk Rock I could get my hands on. I went to a Zeus gig, outdoors in Pendleton...I was sort of roadying for them. I met some girl there and we played frisbee. We were talking about music and I mentioned that I’d been listening to The Sex Pistols. She didn’t skip a beat! She said, ‘Oh, my brother listens to Punk Rock all the time. He loves The Damned, Generation X, Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The Vibrators...’ I couldn’t believe it! That was Cyndi Schlabach, Dave’s sister. I got her phone number, and called up her brother, who arranged to come and pick me up on Saturday. He was going to take me to his friend “Gary’s” house. Dave picked me up in a black Monza (I think it was...) With a killer stereo. He cranked up Gen X’s first album and we tore over to Gary’s. Gary (Lumpy), of course, had tons of great stuff. He played me all kinds of shit I’d never heard before. Tons of punk. This is a day that actually changed the course of my life. I also ended up dating Dave’s sister for a couple of years. By the time the X-Spurtz had broken up I had already sort of infiltrated them. I (more or less) “managed” them, getting them a couple of paying gig in Indianapolis opening for the Zero Boys and the Last Four (5) Digits. Hell, I already went to all of their practices anyway, to hang out, drink beer and listen to them play. So when they split up it wasn’t much of a stretch to try to get something together with Dave and Gary. I wanted to play drums, and I was ready. Dave had some crappy, mis-matched drums. We didn’t have a seat or a kick pedal, but Kirby loaned his to us.” Different members of the Anderson crew started going to shows in Cincinnati sometimes, to a club called Bogart’s, that had some of the bigger punk and new wave bands play. Yukki went with his friend, Terry Starr to see the Stranglers and, after the show, a local girl they met showed them a hotel to crash in. This was Jackie Isaacs. After meeting the two guys, she started dating Terry, and coming to Anderson on weekends to hang out. Yukki was also hanging around a lot. Eventually, Terry moved to Cincinnati to be closer to Jackie. Jackie would still come to Anderson to hang out with Yukki, and, by proxy, Lumpy and Dave. Yukki and Jackie (Jakki) soon moved in together, when they’d decided to form The Repellents, into a little house that seemed out of the way, set back off of the street probably 50 yards. They moved there so the band would have a place to practice. Once, while they were playing, they all looked up to see a very, very disgruntled landlord and landlady (very straight, very God-fearing) standing at the door of the room they practiced in, scowling. They were going to have to move, and find another place to practice. Dave Jr. : “My Father owned a company called S&S Truck Parts. We needed a place to practice, so we utilized the diesel engine repair shop as the practice pad. I can still remember Yukki’s drums interwoven with giant camshafts and other engine parts.” The Repellents started in Nov. 1981 and had their first (real) gig playing at Crazy Al’s on January 6th, 1982. They’d previously played at a party, to test the waters, and found that they could at least hold it together for what would pass as a set. The Indianapolis scene was welcoming to these amiable, if ramshackle, enthusiastic bunch of punks. Yukki had met Indianapolis’ Marvin P. Goldstein back in 1979, in line for a Blondie show. Marvin invited Yukki down to Indianapolis to a party where some bands were going to be playing. Yukki and Jonee Quest made the trek down, and one of the bands that played were really young and featured a rhythm section of two brothers, Bam Bam, on drums and Spliff, on bass. The singer was a young kid named Paul Mahern. While in line for the Blondie show, Marvin had also introduced Yukki to a Brit ex-pat, named Tufty, that played guitar in a band called Latex Novelties. Of course, Paul and Tufty would end up, later, in Zero Boys together. By the time The Repellents got together, The Zero Boys were anxious to have other bands around to join in the scene, and helped out right away, especially Paul. He made arrangements to try to record them almost right away, on a 4-track tape machine. At that point, Yukki could barely play, but most importantly, The Repellents were writing songs. Lumpy was a prolific lyric writer, and was always coming up with wild, weird, funny, stupid, disturbing, sick, twisted songs that he would scrawl on 3" x 5" note cards. They would be laying in stacks all over every horizontal surface. All Dave Jr. Had to do was find a card and start shouting. Dave, also, had plenty to say, and he would come up with things to sing as well. Yukki even came up with some lyrics. Jakki developed a quirky bass part that morphed into the song Freak Show, maybe the first song she and Yukki played together. All in all, it was a creative, inspired time for the scene in general and the band specifically. Jakki: “About Dave Repellent Jr.; Dave Jr. NEVER sang the same lyrics twice! And that made it fun for me, ‘cause I never knew what was coming, but I knew it was going to be funny.” In the meantime, Zero Boys had gotten it together to start recording their first album, and Yukki told Paul that he had a drawing to show them, wondering if they might want to use it for the album cover. The band liked the picture and they ended up using it for the cover of their classic album Vicious Circle. The Repellents were initially influenced by the first wave of British punk bands and The Ramones, and The Saints but they were pretty voracious listeners, and when The Germs album, GI, came out, that really pushed them toward what they wanted to be; faster, louder and more intense. You can hear the influence, along with Dead Kennedy’s and Bad Brains. Even so, The Repellents never really were a Hardcore band, in the truest sense, their punk just got faster, but not really thrashy. But, they also mixed it up with some stranger, less easily categorized numbers, like My Motel and Freak Show. Technorama was a topical, but funny, reaction to Reaganomics effect in Indiana, “tell me what fun is watching T.V./when I don’t have nothing to eat!”. There were, of course, political, finger-pointing songs, too, and the names Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan were prime punk rock targets of the day. Then there is A.F.C. (Anderson Fur Co.), a song with a shout-along, fist-pumping chorus, that seems intended to rally the punks for a charge, but is in actuality an ode to a local Anderson, well, fur shop. Mark and Arlene Perlman owned The Anderson Fur Co. And advertised on local television. It might have been one of the only things Anderson was known for, outside of the city. The commercials starred Arlene herself, posing in various fur coats, looking for all the world like our own little city version of Jackie Onassis! Mark and Arlene heard about the song (I think they were tipped off by Indianapolis punk promoter and Zero Boys manager Bill Levin) and came to see The Repellents play at Caesars Pub in Indianapolis, bringing along their press photographer to capture them on stage with our heroes. Dave Jr. rolled on the stage accordingly, not taming any of his antics in the least. The Repellents played out quite a bit and got tighter as they pushed the music to be faster. Paul Mahern, being ambitious, embarked on assembling a compilation of hardcore bands from across the country, but also deciding to use it as an opportunity to focus some attention on Indiana and Midwestern bands. He asked the Repellents to be a part of it, and set about arranging some recording time. They were booked into Mr. Science’s studio, of Dow Jones & the Industrials renown, in Lafayette, Indiana. From the session only “Livin’ Like An Animal” was used for the compilation. Plans were [semi] made to put out a 4 song 7" e.p. later, that never materialized. The compilation was soon released, bearing the name The Master Tape. Even though Yukki was known to Paul as a visual artist, so was Lumpy, as he’d done the drawing of Nimrod on the label of the Vicious Circle l.p. When the time came to develop a cover for the Master Tape, Paul asked Lumpy to do it. If you look closely at the cover of the album, one of the hands holding the tape has a wound on it. This is a picture of a cut Lumpy got on his hand at a Repellents show in a Cincinnati club called Shipley’s, opening for Zero Boys. Dave Jr.: “Remember Shipleys? That night was the Cincinnati show which featured the Repellents and Zero Boys on the same bill. I invited the entire audience up on stage to close out the show with “A.F.C.” That resulted in a riot and the ensuing pandemonium was punk rock chaos at its finest. 175 kids fighting for the microphones to sing along added fuel to the slam dancing fire...it was beautiful. If you recall the Jockey Club was Clem Carpenter's idea..it started because there was not enough room in the Brew House for the crowds the Repellents generated.” Jakki, having been a Cincinnati resident, had connections within the scene there, and it gave the Repellents a leg up on getting out of town, and establishing themselves outside of Indiana. It was only 3 hours away, but, culturally, it was a lot more developed, and had a decent college radio station, WAIF, 88.3 FM, that played punk rock. One D.J. in particular, “Handsome” Clem Carpenter, would prove instrumental in the Repellents story and the history of punk rock in the Midwest. The Repellents had started out in Cincinnati by getting a gig at a place called The Brew House. They got their pals The Slammies (who were also featured on The Master Tape) to come with them and they charged a dollar at the door. It was more than well attended, as at least two hundred punk- hungry little slammers showed up to the tiny bar. At only one dollar a head, the bands had over $300.00 to split up at the end of the night. The Repellents played one more show at the Brew House, with Lawrence Kansas’s Get Smart!, and then it was decided a new, larger venue would have to be pursued to contain the potential crowds for future Cincinnati Repellents gigs. Handsome Clem found a large club just over the bridge from Cincinnati and he threw his hat in the ring to book the place. As it turned out The Repellents played about the 7th show at The Jockey Club, in Newport, Kentucky, on Halloween night, 1982. Time rolled on, gigs were played, The Repellents had a hellish week-long stint playing at The Royal Calgarian Hotel in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The details of which are too frightening to mention. As The Repellents got better, Paul Mahern put together another recording session with John Helms, the engineer for Vicious Circle, at a studio called Gnome Park. Here The Repellents were to record some songs for the follow-up comp that Paul was putting together called Master Tape II (fittingly, a double album this time). The Master Tape II came out with a cover drawn collaboratively by Lumpy and Yukki. The Repellents songs included on that record were My Motel, New Image and Lash Out! New Image was written back in X-Spurtz days in response to the local band, Zeus changing their name and image to a more marketable “new wave” style. It works in the larger context as well because bands all over the world were doing the same thing: “stupid suits and skinny ties/ hide your past with a pack of lies/ we say ‘fuck you’ hard rock guys/ become the punks you once despised...New image for you!”. Shortly after the recording session, Jakki decided to move back home to Cincinnati, and the Repellents hung on, waiting for the right person to fill the void. That person came in the form of Julie Huffaker, an Indianapolis girl that had played in Last Four (5) Digits. She was totally enthusiastic, a great bass player and didn’t mind the 30 mile commute. The Repellents started practicing in Lumpy’s basement and got their tightest yet, culminating in a huge gig opening up for Circle Jerks in Indianapolis at the Sherwood Country Club for a crowd of about 400. When the Master Tape II came out there was a picture of Julie on the liner notes, even though Jakki had played on the recordings. Sadly, things didn’t last much longer for the band and they fizzled out in 1983, rather than crashing and burning, or playing some last big farewell show, or something. The break up wasn’t acrimonious or ugly, which was good because Lumpy, Dave and Yukki would reconvene a few years later with a couple of Slammies to form The Primates. But that’s another story...


Read more: http://www.myspace.com/therrepellents#ixzz0tE0848m6

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