Punk’s rooted, regional, and defiantly local identities made scenes like Louisville punk essential and life-affirming during the violently conformist Reagan years.
This history of Louisville punk begins forty years ago, when Louisville-based new wave band Poor Girls self-released their first and only LP, titled, unsurprisingly, Poor Girls.[1] They formed in 1982 and took the album with them to Philadelphia three years later, looking for a break. They played shows, they were great, they opened for Big Black, Electric Guitars, U.K. Subs, Violent Femmes—but that was as far as it went. Poor Girls recorded another set of sessions in 1986 but broke up soon afterwards, playing one reunion show in 1994.
Although you’d never know it from searching online, in 1999, local label ear X-tacy released a 29-song CD collecting the cassette, LP, and Philly sessions. The Louisville scene during those years was indisputably special—it gave rise to postpunk icons Slint and Antietam, alt-country fixtures Freakwater, and a bunch of other punk, hardcore, postpunk, and indie rock bands and artists. The Louisville punk scene was absolutely typical of the counterculture music and art fermenting in non-coastal cities around the US.
Don’t get me wrong: despite their brief odyssey to Philly, Poor Girls never really went anywhere; they’re at the heart of this history of Louisville punk because they’re at the heart of my history of Louisville punk. Because that’s how punk works, or did work, back then. Its rooted, regional, and defiantly local identities are what made this music and these scenes so essential and life-affirming during the Reagan years, in which it furiously fought for its existence and independence. As guitarist and Antietam co-founder Tara Key remembered, “the music we made was not out of response to something and somewhere else, it was solely about where we were, who we were, and could have only been made right there and then.”
My favorite Poor Girls song is probably “Downtown” (sorry, it’s not online), not just because I loved dancing to it, but for how it sits midway between the pop universality of the Petulia Clark namesake (with which it otherwise has nothing in common) and the punk particularity that, in Louisville, “downtown” was as much a state of mind and an aspiration as a physical location. Yes, on a historic but rundown stretch of Main Street there was The Windmill, which did a weekly new wave night for a few months before it shuttered, and for a while a vacant building on the next block (now redeveloped as Whiskey Row) that hosted shows on its ground floor and squatters (including my oldest sister Sarah) on the floor above. There was The Beat Club, a couple of blocks away on South Third, in a former strip club, which would host teenage bands despite the legal conundrum.
The original and most enduring fixture in downtown Louisville, and the one that would eventually host all-ages punk shows on weekends—many if not most of the folks in the scene were underage—was Tewligans, a former biker bar on Bardstown Road a couple of miles southeast of the actual “downtown”. Bought by Doyle and Mary Guhy in 1981, over these years Tewligans hosted pretty much every local punk band capable of getting on stage, along with then-emerging national and regional acts including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, Yo La Tengo, Jonathan Richman, R.E.M., Guadalcanal Diary, Fugazi, Rollins Band, and Cincinnati’s Afghan Whigs. That’s quite a list, although it should be noted that “no out-of-town band played at one of our clubs until 1980.”
A veteran of the scene sums up the moment well: “Let’s face it: Louisville is always an unlikely place for anything avant-garde or for a movement in its early phases.” Yet that very unlikeliness was essential to the birth of punk movements all over the middle of the country from the late 1970s through to the ’90s. As Antietam’s Tom Carson mused in his 1980 cover story about Louisville punk in the Village Voice, “the regional new wave bands” were “the artistic product of a postwar suburban culture … the first to identify themselves explicitly with that culture, and also to see it self-consciously as a thing apart, and themselves as an alternative to the aesthetic models handed down from outside.” In contrast to “punk’s initial urban bohemianism antecedents,” this music combined “a fringe-group status and middle-class identity in audience and performers alike.”
A Place for the “Weirdos”, Closeted Teens, and Rebellious Women
These primarily suburban origins also meant that Louisville’s punk scene was mostly white and mostly middle-class; however, that segregation was incidental rather than ideological; the scene was “open to everybody.” In her interview in the invaluable “Louisville Underground Music Archive Oral Histories Collection,” photographer, freelance writer, and editor Erica Rucker remembers being one of the only Black kids in the early 1990s (she also notes that Tim Ruth—guitarist for Evergreen, Cinderblock, Slint, and others—was biracial).
That was a different experience from the metal scene. “When we first went to a punk show [at Tewligans] … immediately people were very accepting … We just really found a sort of weird community … We were freaks of nature at the time, which we were ok, we were fine with.”
James “Chip” Nold, lead vocalist for the Babylon Dance Band (1978-83) and now a local writer, maintains that “Louisville punk rolled through the city’s internal checkpoints, bringing together kids from the East [more affluent] and South [more working-class] ends alike, in a creative collision that in some ways hasn’t stopped yet.”
“Downtown” reminds us, as Rucker does, that far from rejecting punk’s “urban bohemianism”, these local new wave scenes craved it, recognized that it was impossibly out of reach, and instead resolved to play harder, faster, weirder, and mostly for their friends. To quote local journalist Steve Driesler on discovering Endtables in 1981: “Louisville is a place where you have to make your own fun.”
“Collision of thots on re-route, like a swarm of bees,” sings Kenny O. to Ricky Lee’s driving bass lead and Chuk’s dissonant, angular, guitar fills on Poor Girls’ opener, “I’m gonna go for the good times, rather than for thoughts that rhyme, rather than for thoughts of rhyme. They use tradition for a model, the future is the past … until your friends find out.”[2]
When Kenny sang that “downtown, everything is marvelous,” he was not thinking of Clark’s London bustle, cinemas, bright lights, and “gentle bossa nova” in a candlelit club; if anything like that had ever existed in Louisville, it had long since moved out to the suburban malls. Ricky Lee had grown up in Crothersville, Indiana (where he attended the same high school as John Mellencamp, whom he briefly replaced in the long-running southern Indiana R&B band Crape Soul).
When Ricky Lee and lifelong friend Kenny O. Williams, who was gay, together conceived of their “artistic tribal collective”, the band’s name referred to a joke about the singer, whose good looks, bohemian style, and intense performances attracted attention from everyone in the audience. The band’s name was also a knowing comment on the Louisville scene they saw around them. “Downtown” was not only an escape from the stultifying conformity of Cold-War suburban culture; it was especially a promise of anonymity, acceptance, and temporary escape for self-proclaimed “weirdos”, closeted teens, and rebellious women.
Louisville’s scene remains striking in the number of female members—from Tara Key, Cathy Irwin, Janet Bean, Tari Barr, and many others in the early days to Tara Jane O’Neill and many others in the 1990s—as well as LGBTQ musicians, notably gender-fluid performer Steve “Chili” Rigot (Endtables, 1069, Skull of Glee, and other bands), and a good number of musicians and friends, especially in the early years, who were able to be out and be themselves. Beyond this scene, they often found themselves in the closet back home with their families and straighter friends.
As Endtables guitarist Alex Durig relates, “And we were giving each other permission and a platform to do something that would just for some reason he needed to do. He [Rigot] needed to scream out that I’m a 12-year-old girl and nobody gets me. … I’ve never been in such a gay scene before. I mean, where I knew so many people who were and I was, I mean, it was an aspect of it.”
Rigot, Nold suggests, was “one of those figures who becomes a symbol to other people. He had the build of a pro football lineman and the manner of a ’40s starlet. In performance, he would alternate drag with something more singular. (For a show on Main Street he covered himself in red paint.) He was an ardent reader of radical feminist literature — I remember him talking about ‘The Redstockings Manifesto.’ I don’t think Jeffersonville [in southern Louisville] was an especially congenial place for him to grow up.”
Louisville Punk’s Boundary-Pushing Scene
Image excerpted from the cover of Bold Beginnings
A lot of rock fashion was gender-fluid or androgynous (at least visually) in those days, from 1970s glam to British new-wave pop to hair metal. There weren’t any music videos to speak of yet, but you could see this fashion in the NME (which several of the musicians subscribed to). The local scene, of necessity, was DIY; there was nowhere simply to find punk regalia like there was in the big cities. Cathy Irwin remembers, “You had to just put something together with duct tape or – and I’m just really so happy that I ever got to hang out with Steve Rigot because he really just had such a sense of style, a sense of how to make something fabulous out of a garbage bag.”
However accepting the scene may have been, it was certainly not friction-free—Your Food guitarist John Bailey recalls interviewing flamboyant vocalist and guitarist Ricky Feather (Blinders, Bodeco) for a ’zine that made a lot of people angry because, “he named the names of people who were not straight, who – anybody who knew them knew weren’t straight but they were not publicly out of the closet. I guess they got mad at him.” The fluidity is there in the music, too: listen to the way the lead vocalist shouts themselves hoarse, stuttering out “S – H – He – She,” introducing the sloppy garage sound of No Fun’s “She” (1978).
The scene, like the taste, the reporting, and the history to come, was always affective and relational. “That was the main thing when we were in high school,” relates Squirrel Bait guitarist David Grubbs, “—that everybody else was pouring their soul into what they did, and you’d better be doing the same.” This is why the canonical readily coexisted with the ephemeral, and our relationship to both was so deeply personal.
The top-ten list in issue #5 of Maurice and Kinghorse vocalist Rat’s (Sean Garrison) hand-drawn ’zine Born to Lose shouts out 1984 hardcore instant classics Zen Arcade(Hüsker Dü) and Double Nickels on the Dime (Minutemen), and “any old Beatles record”, before it wraps up with “The Nearest Door” from Squirrel Bait’s 1984 second demo, a self-released cassette. In the same way, a key neighborhood in my heart will always belong to The Clash (US version), I Just Can’t Stop It, The Specials, Entertainment!, Wild Gift, The Del-Byzanteens, and … Poor Girls. Some of these choices may be more “defensible” than others in retrospect, but the paths we take to get there have never been fully rational, nor should they be where music is concerned.
It may have had an outsized impact, but Carson’s Voice cover story began just this way, by chance, from a personal connection. “I didn’t go to Louisville with any idea of writing about it,” he eventually confesses in the article. “Chip Nold, the lead singer in the Babylons, was my best friend in college.” Carson had moved to New York after graduating from Princeton; Nold had returned to Louisville, and Carson was visiting him. Not everyone stayed, of course.
Circle X, formed from members of ur-bands No Fun and I-Holes, had already moved to New York in 1978; one member who did stay was guitarist Tara Key, joining the BDB. A few years later, that band had splintered too, when Key and her husband, BDB bassist Tim Harris, moved to Hoboken to start Antietam, soon to be joined by Wolf Knapp, bassist from Your Food, which had lasted just long enough to self-release their debut LP, Poke It with a Stick (1983; reissued by Drag City in 2018).
Drag City, likely because Stephen Driesler was in the Louisville scene from 1981 and friends with Rigot, also released an Endtables retrospective (2010) and White Glove Test: Louisville Punk Flyers 1978-1994 (2015), which takes its title from an Endtables song. As Exene Cervenka and X put it on Wild Gift: “It’s who you know / It’s who you know.” No doubt, the lines hit differently in L.A. than in Louisville.
A lot of that above paragraph is secondhand history to me, though—who they knew. Sarah singles out the BDB as one of a handful of “visceral memories” of shows back then. I remember the BDB as a pretty good band whose set at 111 Main Street I impatiently waited to finish so that I could hear Poor Girls, who were playing next. How much of that preference was musical and how much was because Ricky Lee, the Poor Girls’ bass player, songwriter, and artist-in-residence, was also Sarah’s husband, I couldn’t have said then and certainly can’t say four decades later; I still love their music and I still miss Ricky Lee.
I knew Wolf a bit, too, but only as the reserved guy whom I sometimes hung out with because I was friends with John Bailey, another one who stayed in Louisville, where he now works as a graphic designer. I did not. Like Grubbs, who would become a professor at Brooklyn College, I left town for school and never moved back. (Unlike Grubbs, who has appeared on more than 200 commercial recordings and released his 15th solo album last February, I have never recorded a thing.)
Chip Nold, on the other hand, back temporarily after graduating, was one of the few local punk aficionados who had experienced New York’s epicenter firsthand. He remembers being so impressed by No Fun that he decided to stay put, founding the BDB in 1978 with childhood friends Harris and Marc Zakem. Key would join them a couple of months later.
Schooled in Louisville Punk
Like many bands, the Louisville ones typically started from school friendships; in Louisville, they were sparked by progressive arts education, at the downtown public alternative Brown School and at the Louisville School of Art (LSA), a small, quirky counterculture haven which occupied an old insurance company building (now landmarked) in the suburban village of Anchorage between 1968 and 1983. Wolf, Alec and Cathy Irwin, Janet Bean, and, later, Will Oldham and Peter Searcy (Squirrel Bait), along with Brian MacMahan and Britt Walford of Squirrel Bait & Slint all went to Brown; others, like John Bailey and myself, hung out with the Brown School kids because they were cool, artsy, alternative, friendly—and downtown.
A former student commented on the number of alumni involved in indie rock bands, “Brown School was a casual, creative place, and I think it took root in the students.” Irwin puts it more bluntly, “It was basically a hippie school. It was where people sent their weird children. You wouldn’t send your normal kid there at the time. It was like self-selecting for freaks on the part of the parents. Even the teachers were there because they wanted to do something different in the classroom.”
I went to school a few blocks from Brown, at the brand-new St. Francis (SFHS) in an old YMCA building, also progressive, but private, smaller, and straighter, if still pretty casual and creative, as Louisville schools went. SFHS was an expansion of the K-8 St. Francis way out of town in Goshen, the open-plan “hippie school” that I attended with my three sisters, along with Alec and Cathy Irwin (my middle sister Cathy’s best friend back then).
During my years at SFHS (1977-81), I just missed overlapping with Will Oldham’s older brother Ned, who would later form the rock group The Anomoanon; bassist Ethan Buckley, a founding member of Slint (he left in 1987 after disagreement with Steve Albini over the sound of Tweez, their first album) and, in 1989, King Kong; and guitarist Dave Pajo, another founding member of Slint, who would later play in Tortoise and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, among many others.
How cool were these schools? The year after I graduated, a group of students and Bob Foshee, an English teacher at SFHS, created the “MEZ (monthly entertainment extravaganza),” which, for a brief period of time, promoted shows at the school. Among the bands featured in 1982 was Languid and Flaccid, middle-school kids from Brown, including 11-year-old Walford, MacMahan, Ned Oldham, Stephanie Carta, and Paul Catlett. “The older punks,” one story goes, “collapsed in fits of laughter when Britt and Brian’s dads carried in their amps and set them up on stage.”
It’s similar to a story Irwin tells about her mom and her first band’s name: “she run into Will Oldham’s mother in the grocery store and Will Oldham’s mother said, like, ‘Oh, I hear your children are Dickbrains.’ And then my mom said, ‘I can call them that, but I don’t really want anybody else to.’ So that was much later, I mean Will – because Ned was in the – Languid and Flaccid so that’s why – our moms knew each other anyway but that was like why they were talking about whose child was a Dickbrain. Because her son was in a band called Languid and Flaccid.”
That’s the sort of community we grew up in in Louisville back then, and that’s how all these bands appeared and (more or less) flourished. It wasn’t just Brown and St. Francis, but they were the weirdest, the vanguard, you could say.
There was a mix of age groups ranging from pre-teens through teens to a few 20-somethings. As Nold recollected in 2017 of the early BDB shows, “The kids who became the Dickbrains — Alec and Cathy Irwin, Charles Schultz, Doug Maxson — started showing up with a group of friends in 1979. Most of them were Brown School students, even more shyly intellectual in manner than the Dance Band. (That’s why their name, which some people hated, was so beautiful.)” They were also a lot more open to teenagers who were, as Durig put it, “out of the mainstream”. To quote Rigot’s lyrics to Endtables’ “The Defectors” (1979): “Pledge allegiance to any country that will accept me.”
Louisville Punk’s Resistance to Violent Conformity
If you didn’t live through it, it’s difficult to fully grasp how violently conformist mainstream society was during the era of Louisville punk, and how difficult it was to find alternative communities in the pre-Internet days. Some of us had ‘weird’ parents; some of us had tolerant parents; most of us had neither. Think the Trump administration’s Project 2025 without any readily accessible alternative spaces to assemble or means of resistance, and you’ll begin to understand the passion, anger, and joy that went into bands and scenes like Louisville’s.
Many of us yearned for what we imagined the hippie days to have been, even while fully realizing that world had long since vanished, if it had ever really existed at all. Lucy Sante, a New York-based writer, cultural critic, and lyricist for no-wave band the Del-Byzanteens, and nine years older than me, perfectly captures this feeling in her 2024 memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name.
“I’m profoundly nostalgic for the analog era, but even more my nostalgia is for the time before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ushered in the present sociopathic moral culture, devoted to the destruction of community and the devaluation of human beings, which grew all-pervasive with the coming of the digital era.”[3]
Louisville punk straddled this moment in all its technological, cultural, and political ramifications. We didn’t think about it that way, naturally; but it’s there in songs like Your Food’s “Here” (1983)—“You know I’m waiting / And I didn’t know how / all my promise / could turn into ground / and away it wash”—or Squirrel Bait’s “Hammering So Hard,” off their first EP (1985)—“Yeah, what’s the use if you don’t want it? / Said, what’s the use if you won’t take it? / Sixteen years of a sixteen-year life / Dragged across a rusty loud knife.” Punk promised a new way to reject the new mainstream, furiously locked into the present moment.
The Louisville School of Art was across the tracks from the rambling old house I grew up in; art students, and for a few years, the charming young director Bruce Yenawine and his family, lodged with us.
Ricky Lee, whose primary calling was art, studied there and recalled playing a few shows with No Fun. Art school in the 1970s both freed up would-be bands from the constraints of pop-rock forms and provided them a language and a framework for music as performance art. John Bailey, who also studied at LSA, recalls concluding that, “maybe if people that really didn’t know how to play their instruments picked them up, something more interesting would happen than Carry On My Wayward Son or something like that.”
In their official bio of the time, Poor Girls described themselves as “artists who are also musicians”. Kenny O. is “a vocalist who adapts poetry to music”; guitarist Chuk Baxter cites “his Xerox art technique” alongside his guitar chops. Ricky Lee mentions his role as “poor girls’ prime conceptual parent” and that he “is an accomplished artist, as well as a gifted painter” before going on to mention the bass guitar he played so ferociously.
None of it would have worked without the pent-up, alienated fury endemic to anyone who had grown up out of place in middle America in the 1960s and ’70s. Quite simply, it was no fun, as the name of the first Louisville punk band sums it up; “Take evasive measures,” urges one of their three surviving recordings. No fun, that is, except maybe for your friends and the music. Playing that music, without needing to be professional, and being able to do just about anything on stage—that was (mostly) fun.
According to the brief history of No Fun on Antietam’s webpage: “Beginning in the spring of 1978, the band played seven shows—each an event—and the sum of which was, if not cataclysmic, at least a catalyst to the scene that would follow. Others were thinking along the same lines—No Fun took it public first.”
They were followed in quick succession in 1978 by the I-Holes, Circle X (Wm. Bruce Witsiepe and Tony Pinotti from No Fun plus Rik Letendre and Dave Letendre from the I-Holes), Endtables (Rigot, Nold), the Blinders (Ricky Feathers, Sandy ‘Fret Hondo’ Campbell, and Matthew ‘Wink’ O’Bannon), and others. As Harris put it in a 2024 interview with long-running local alternative newspaper, LEO (short for “Louisville Eccentric Observer”), “For this interview, I jotted down the names of bands from that time, like the Dickbrains, Malignant Growth, Your Food, all early comrades on through Squirrel Bait, Kinghorse, Slint and Rodan. But when I got to 40 bands, I thought STOP! I better not name names – it’s just impossible not to leave somebody out. … There were so many good, interesting bands from Louisville.”
Louisville Punk: Ground Zero
Image excerpted from the cover of Bold Beginnings
The epicenter of Louisville punk, and of anything alternative in the city during this period, was lower Bardstown Road, a couple of miles southeast of downtown. It had always been a cultural hub. When I was a kid, that stretch was lined with coin and stamp collecting shops. By the 1970s, those had closed, replaced by what survived in Louisville of the hippie counterculture, along with independent and used bookstores, used and new record stores (Karma & Pyramid, especially), head shops, and lots of clubs, including Tewligans, without which most of this wouldn’t have happened.
According to John Timmons, who worked at Karma and some other record stores, founded iconic local record store and label ear X-tacy, and played for a couple of years in pop-new-wave band Jil Thorp & the Beat Boys, “I remember talking to them about having live music in the bar. And I believe we were one of the first bands to play there, if not the first.” Tewligans hosted Louisville punk from 1981 until 1996, far longer than any of the bands managed to survive.
I was fond of Jil Thorp & the Beat Boys. I saw them live, and still have a homemade cassette of their sole album, Libido Beat (1981), because they had a fabulous cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Play with Fire.” Although they played once or twice with No Fun and the BDB, Timmons concedes “it was more of a pop band, so we were not taken very seriously, even though it was a popular band,” a reminder that there was not only crossover but also a firm line between the punks and the many other pop and rock bands also playing in Louisville back then. Open to a point, in other words, looking back, Bailey concludes that, “I would have no patience for myself if I at 19 walked through this door and started going off about what kind of music sucks and what doesn’t. But at that point, if I heard—.” His interviewer, Chip Nold, nods in agreement.
The nerve center of coolness in the early days was 1069 Bardstown Road, literally a couple of doors down from Tewligans, and fondly known as “the punk rock house”. I only ever got as far as the external, back stairs. I met John there once because one of his housemates was selling her collection of Daevid Allen & Gong LPs to raise (presumably band-related) money, and he knew that I was a fan. Sarah had turned me onto them in the mid-’70s and had recruited me to help make sandwiches for the band when they played UofL’s Red Barn in 1979 as a benefit for the Paddlewheel Alliance, a local antinuclear group.
Given John’s impatience with poor musical taste, who knows what he thought of mine—or perhaps obscure French-Canterbury trippy prog was obscure enough to get a free pass, given the cooler tastes we did share? 1069 was a rundown rental next to an Arby’s (later a Taco Bell, now a Chipotle), home to LSA students Tari Barr, Sandy Campbell (Blinders), the rest of The Dickbrains (Alec & Cathy Irwin, Charles Schultz, Doug Maxson), and at least four bands rotating in the designated practice room. “The central thing about it was the magnet,” according to Maxson. “I mean, that was the coolest thing because I didn’t have to ever go anywhere because people were always coming over.”
1069 lasted about five years, from the end of the ’70s until the 1984 Super Bowl, at which point Key and Harris had already decamped to Hoboken, breaking up the BDB, and Wolf and Michael O’Bannon (Wink’s brother, Tari’s soon-to-be-husband, member of the Blinders, and many others) were getting ready to follow, as Your Food was also breaking up. For whatever reason, they trashed the house, and that was the end of that.
Poor Girls were also on the periphery of this scene, sharing shows with most of the bands at one point or another; they were a bit older and had different priorities. John Bailey mentions them in his long conversation with Chip Nold, and certainly Your Food and Poor Girls shared a postpunk propensity for “bands where the bass lines seemed to be driving the melody, and the guitar line seemed to be sort of dancing around that,” whereas the earlier bands were mostly playing straight-ahead punk, with a lot of energy and varying degrees of proficiency.
“I feel somewhat emotional and close my eyes, and dream foreign thots, the future is so far away”: Ricky Lee’s lyrics capture both the feeling of physical isolation in a city like Louisville and the urgent need for time to move faster, into something else. “foreign thots” channels the sheer excitement over difference brought by the discovery of punk, new wave, and postpunk, and by the recovery of unknown pasts lost in a culture of scarcity. I remember hunting old and new records on trips to Chicago and San Francisco, while avidly exchanging LPs for copying to cassette.
Chip Nold recalls buying British imports on trips to New York. Doug Maxson recalls an unexpected find in a mall during a trip to visit family in southcentral Bowling Green, Kentucky’s tiny yet third largest city: “It had this record store and I found like crazy stuff in there. It seemed like at 1069 I was a hero for a while because I found that it was a double album import of just the best of the Velvet Underground. … It’s always like four sides of – and in it was hard to find a Velvet Underground record.”
The serendipitous and unpredictable nature of such searches and exchanges also meant that unlikely finds might take pride of place over (in retrospect) obvious touchstones that at the time proved unobtainable. I still know PiL’s mediocre Flowers of Romance a whole lot better than their monumental first two releases because, well, that’s the one I had been able to track down in a record store in Philadelphia. “Also, I remember down there,” continues Maxson’s recollection, “and found this amazing like another important double album of the best of the Troggs.”
Although listening to Endtables, BDB, Dickbrains, or Squirrel Bait, you might suspect they had grown up on nothing but Sex Pistols, early Clash, and maybe some old garage rock, and that Your Food and Poor Girls were living on a strict diet of Gang of Four and PiL, nothing could be further from the truth. Ricky Lee was a huge fan of David Bowie and Lou Reed, and like many others had always loved the Beatles; not surprisingly, he leaned towards Lennon, especially the emotionally intense, more experimental early solo work, as can be heard on Poor Girls’s lone ballad, “Insatiable”, which Ricky Lee dedicated to “a friend of mine who should have been one of the Beatles” at their 1994 Tewligans reunion show.
Despite his expressed distaste for reggae (“I would just rather slit my throat than listen to reggae,” he recollected of a spoof he and Wolf did as members of the short-lived “side project” Big Ben and the Liberty Bells). John Bailey had lent me his treasured copy of Catch a Fire to tape (maybe it was just to get in return a listen to my Chicago copy of Loaded and my SF-scored Paris 1919?).
Louisville Punk Was WAKY
Any Louisville kid born in the early 1960s had grown up on WAKY (pronounced, inevitably, “wacky”), the city’s first top-40 rock ‘n’ roll radio station, which “represented a cultural earthquake and … held sway over Louisville’s airwaves until the rise of FM.” With hyperactive DJs living up to the call letters, WAKY’s mix of music baked into my brain both an advanced education in mainstream Motown, British Invasion, psychedelic pop, soul, and R&B and an intimately familiar knowledge of just how enduringly awful the other ¾ of the pop charts was.
FM radio didn’t emerge until the early ’70s, when WLRS introduced us to prog, heavy metal, southern rock, Beatles, and Stones tracks deemed unfit for top-forty airplay, and everything now called classic rock. They also played epic tracks uncut, sponsored concerts, periodically highlighted local bands, and would schedule entire albums (both recent classics and new releases) for taping directly off the radio. Here, too, you had to put up with loads of dreck in order to hear the gems. The furthest they would wade into punk or new wave would be the Police. (I still remember some DJ introducing “Roxanne” in 1978 as an unprecedented novelty we’d need to stretch our ears to deal with.)
WLRS introduced us to CSNY, the Band (I don’t remember any Dylan, but there must have been a few), Bowie, Traffic, the Who, Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, and slick American prog units like Kansas and Styx. We’d work to wean ourselves from all this when we discovered punk, ska, new wave, and postpunk through nonradio airwaves.
If you listen carefully, you can hear everywhere the seldom-voiced struggle between the radio tastes we couldn’t avoid, the ones we variously picked up from older siblings, musical parents, or other fortuitous connections, and the ones we actively chose and aspired to. Thus, when Chip Nold asks Tara Key in 2017, “So what, just musically what, how did you get to punk rock? I mean, because there were just precursors to punk rock in 1972 and ’73 and ’74, right?” she answers candidly and only a bit defensively:
“Yeah, I mean it’s funny. I mean I wasn’t aware of and – OK, I mean, I was really into pop radio up until the late 60s. I didn’t really go Beatle – psychedelic Beatles, Stones nuts, I mean, my Stones education was a little later – it was right before punk rock. I mean I frankly went – the first big passion was Bowie and I mean something about Bowie hit me pretty – I mean I – I’m trying to think. … I’m aware of Neil Young but it’s funny, it’s just like Bowie was it and then, like, understand, too, I was a very good girl. So the idea of Bowie and gender questions and the wild life – that was an eye opener for me, too. So this window opens – and, you know, I mean I’m still a good girl in comparison. But it’s just like, so that window opens and I see all these possibilities and everything. So then we progress a little further. And so then I had an older friend who educated me in the world of Stones and Neil Young.”
This arbitrariness of taste crystallizes in the fight over the record player in the common room at St. Francis High School. It must have been late 1979 or 1980. The B-52s were at the heart of the battle, and I remember my side being flipped when I met Jane Terrell and the other Brown School kids who needed to learn how cool it was, and soon understood, in fact, that I loved it rather than hating it. “It’s just so ridiculous to form an opinion about somebody about what kind of music they like,” remembers John. “And of course that’s all I did.”
There really wasn’t a middle ground back then, except, in hindsight, in the distinct networks in our brains dedicated to music memory that continued to process and respond to all of it all together and somehow make sense of it in the music we played and heard, no matter our ideologies or professed tastes. It is thus a genuine pleasure to encounter figures on the scene like virtuoso guitarist Wink O’Bannon, who knew, loved, and could play in just about every genre. Not that he was easy about it—listen to Cathy Irwin on her short-lived experience with Wink in the band that she really did and he really did not want to call Bunny Butthole.
“Maybe,” she concludes in retrospect, tongue-in-cheek, “maybe Wink just got disgusted with everybody and went off to find some people that were easier to control. Which I think he would freely admit that the cast of characters in Skull of Glee – he just found them basically because he thought they were malleable, which was really a weird – I mean, he was completely wrong, obviously.”
I didn’t know Wink and only know of his taste from the selection on the 2021 memorial release His Majesty’s Request, but it ranges beautifully across the spectrum, all covers: ’60s pop psychedelia (Donovan, Tommy James, Beatles, George Harrison), Mingus (“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” courtesy of Wolf), punk (NY Dolls, Ramones, Clash) & postpunk (Gang of Four, Joy Division). I think back to all the misplaced hoopla about the Dead (“Shakedown Street”) or the Stones (“Miss You”) going disco, the Velvets (Loaded) selling out, or the Clash (London Calling, Sandinista) abandoning their punk roots, and wonder what we were thinking.
In addition to its delightful reminder of all the different musics we actually loved, the roster on His Majesty’s Request also shouts out the range of talents and the myriad different paths taken by those talents since the early years of Louisville punk: Antietam is the backing band throughout, and different tracks feature Catherine Irwin, Will Oldham, Tari O’Bannon, Anna Krippenstapel, Rick Rizzo, Sue Garner, James McNew, Louisville band Juanita, Wolf Knapp, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley (no, not Louisvillians, just longtime friends of Antietam), David Grubbs, Todd Brashear, Doug McCombs, Janet Bean, James Fennelly, and Chip Nold.
That delight is also bittersweet in the absence of so many artists from those years who are no longer with us. The Louisville Underground oral history project seems to have been prompted by the deaths of Steve Rigot and Michael Dwyer. Ricky Lee passed away in 1998. That’s only scratching the surface. Still Louisville, somehow, remains as small a town as ever.
Writing this piece, I stumbled on a six-minute video on local ABC-TV affiliate WHAS-11 of affable former Poor Girls and current the Char guitarist Chuck Baxter hyping a “Tewligans reunion” at the old 1047 Bardstown location, in 2019. The video opens and closes with a snippet of “I Just Wanna Go Pelvic” from the band’s 1984 cassette No Rhythm Dancing, not to mention featuring a snapshot of Chuk getting his moment of fame in a photo with Andy Warhol.
I’ll never know if it’s only my generation, but there’s something about those years that just refuses to die. The words and music of Poor Girls from “Feeling #1” still resonate: “drumbeats pounding to an unfamiliar note / my sense of direction is on the blink / i scream out loud now, i’ve seen it all.” You’ll just have to take my word for it, because I can’t imagine anyone who still has a copy being willing to part with it. Although you might talk me into a taping exchange.
[1] Thanks to Sarah Pike, Tom Miron, Deborah Cohen, and Chuck Baxter for sharing information and memories with me, and to Sarah and Chuck for permission to reproduce some of Ricky’s / Poor Girls’ art.
[2] Note on Poor Girls lyrics: their artistic roots and bohemianism are well in evidence in the rejection of typographical conformity in naming, spelling, and capitalization.
[3] Sante, Lucy. I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition. Penguin. January 2025.