Flashback: Waxing Poetics - The Oral History (Part 1 of 2)
[This post originally appeared on News, Reviews & Interviews (R.I.P.) on December 27, 2012.]
I wouldn’t dare offend my numerous friends in the Hampton Roads musicians community by suggesting that any one band was or is more popular than another, but I at least feel comfortable saying that Waxing Poetics were the first local band that ever captured my attention. It helped immeasurably, of course, that they were also the first local band I ever heard played on the radio, which was a relatively unheard-of phenomenon back in the day, but it was mind-blowing to me that these were guys who lived in the area and, yes, actually had day jobs in the area once in awhile!
If you frequent this site with any regularity, then you probably know how this story goes: I pitched the idea of doing a piece on the Dec. 30th Poetics’ reunion show – with Left Wing Fascists opening up, no less! – to Pulse Magazine, and my editor gave me the go-ahead. It seemed like it might be fun to travel the oral-history route, so I contacted all of the former members of the band that I could find, not to mention one of the band’s former producers (thank you, Peter Holsapple, for helping me get on the phone with Mike Mills), and the results were outstanding. They were also downright epic, so there was never any way it was all going to fit in Pulse.
Here’s the piece as it appeared in Pulse. It’s pretty great, if I do say so myself. But if you loved the Poetics as much as I did, then I think you’ll find this extended version even better…
Waxing Poetics: The Not-So-Secret Origin
Paul Johnson, a.k.a. Paul Tiers (lead guitar, vocals): David Middleton and I were in a band called The Probe when he was 15 and I was 17. They existed prior to me being in the band, and I bugged the crap out of ‘em, to the point of them letting me join.
David Middleton (lead vocals, guitar): We were young, we were underage, but it was legal – although I don’t know if it still is – for us to perform in nightclubs. Even if the nightclubs sold alcohol, there was a law about…something having to do with how minors could be in the club as long as they were the entertainment. Which is surprisingly liberal for Virginia! We were so young, we were thinking, “Let’s look into the legalities of us being in these clubs,” but it was legal, as long as we were the entertainment…and as long as we weren’t caught drinking.
Paul Johnson: We were mostly a cover band.
David Middleton: We did lots of post-punk, the Clash, the Buzzcocks, the Vibrators, a lot of late ‘70s / early ‘80s Stiff Records stuff, ska, stuff like that. We did have a couple of original tunes, though, one of which was “If You Knew Sushi,” which later on ended up on the Hermitage album.
The Probe parted ways sometime in the middle of ’82, and Paul skipped off to Arizona or New Mexico to work on an oil rig or something like that. He was always up to something bizarre. And I thought I’d never see him again, so I went about my merry way. I was still in high school, but meanwhile I played around with a couple of different bands and different musicians around town. Nothing really serious, nothing that went anywhere, but I kept busy with music. And then I got a call from Paul one night late in 1983, probably October or November, and he was back in town and he was putting together a new band.
Sean Hennessy (bass, vocals, 1983-1989): Paul and I had been friends for a long time, went to elementary school together, and he and I got together with Billy, but…I can’t remember how Paul met Billy.
Paul Johnson: I met Billy by default at a party that I was trying to leave. An angry redneck who’d been ejected from the party wouldn’t let anyone leave, and he had a huge knife, so I was, like, “Well, I guess I’m not leaving yet!” So I went down to the basement to get some more beer, and I told the guy who owned the house, “Hey, you’ve got a guy with a knife in your front yard, and he won’t let anybody leave!” Then I went over to the keg, and there was Billy. We hadn’t talked earlier, but thanks to that redneck, we met, and we ended up exchanging phone numbers. Isn’t that great? We met because of a knife-wielding maniac.
Bill Shearin (drums, percussion): Yeah, the guy with the knife tried to stab my car! But, hey, better to attack the metal of my hood than us, right?
Sean Hennessy: We actually had tried a few other people out before Dave joined us. We had Marty Jones, who’s now with Marty Jones and the Pork Boilin’ Poor Boys out in Colorado, and he sang with us for awhile. He was with C.J. and the PhDs and Nick and the Razors in Norfolk.
Paul Johnson: Dave told me he would never again do music, that it was fun but that it wasn’t his calling and that he probably wouldn’t ever put any energy into it ever again. But after going through a number of singers that didn’t seem to fit what we were trying to do, I said, “You know, he was a great singer and a fun guy to work with and an interesting guitar player. Let’s give him a call and just see if he wants to do it.” And he picked up the phone and said, “Yes, I’d love to do it,” to my surprise.
David Middleton: Sean lived in a house with a roommate, and they had a little rehearsal space in their attic, and they invited me out there to hear what they were doing and see if I wanted to sing, but I already had made up my mind that I wanted to do this. I mean, a chance to be in a band with Paul again was definitely a thrilling option. That, and the opportunity to be a singer as opposed to just a guitarist, which is kind of what I was doing in other groups. So even without hearing them, I really wanted to do it. But I went out there and I heard them. There were a couple of original pieces that Paul had that didn’t have any lyrics or anything, so they were doing a lot of cover material, but it was, like, Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen…and they did “Radio Free Europe,” by R.E.M., which was a new song at that time, and that kind of hit me. I was, like, “Wow, okay, this is a good sound. We could definitely do something in the context of this sound.”
Sean Hennessy: Paul and I have sort of a raunch ‘n’ roll background. He likes a lot of that. The Stones and the New York Dolls. I definitely had influence from the modern rock of the time – the Psychedelic Furs, the Cure – and I was a big Iggy and the Stooges fan. And David at the time was an Elvis Costello and R.E.M. fan, but he really runs the gamut when it comes to music. So our musical interests were pretty varied.
David Middleton: Our first gigs were just backyard barbeques, setting up in a friend’s home or something and having beer and inviting friends over, but then in early ’84, that was when we started kind of getting our name out professionally, and we started playing clubs like Dominic’s and Cogan’s and places like that.
Paul Johnson: But then Billy didn’t show up to our first gig! ‘Cause he’d gotten some job working for a chemical company where he had to go sleep in a trailer or something and watch these nuclear places. Something weird, anyway. It was some job where he had to wear a helmet, I know that.
Bill Shearin: It just happened at a time when, y’know, I’d gone to college and then I got a job offer, so I tried that out for awhile. It was a job that kind of had me sequestered all over the country, working for a water purification company…and, believe me, it wasn’t even as glamorous as it doesn’t sound
Paul Johnson: We never fully understood what he did, but it paid pretty well, and he didn’t see much hope for these guys who practiced in an attic, and…I don’t think he thought we were gonna do anything! So he goes, “Well, I’ve got this job where I get paid really good money to sleep in a trailer and travel around!” So we booked this gig and he didn’t show up, so we were, like, “Fuck this guy!” So Chris Hite was, like, “You guys are doing some interesting music, I’ll do this.” So Chris ended up in the band.
Chris Hite (percussion, drums, 1983-1985): I only played with the band for about a year and a half. Bill was a much better drummer than I was at the time, and although he didn’t sing, his drumming was more solid.
Paul Johnson: There were some…disagreements with Chris.
Chris Hite: If I remember correctly, I was being kind of a dick at the time and didn’t get along all that well with Sean. I love Paul and David and I always will, but Sean I had some issues with.
Paul Johnson: There were just differences, mainly with David and Chris and the creative vision of the band, and if I was gonna listen to one of them, I was thinking, “Well, I think I’ll listen to David. I’d love to work with Chris, too, but…” So I took David’s side on that one.
Chris Hite: Paul is spot on. I guess I did have some issues with the musical direction. But what did I know? I had just come from playing in a New Wave cover band, and the stuff I was getting into was a bit weirder.
Paul Johnson: Billy had come back and we forgave him, so he started working for us as a drum roadie. And then when Chris and David weren’t meshing, Billy was there, and he was a great drummer, and he was the right guy for the job, definitely. Billy got off easy, though, because he saw these losers in an attic and went, “I’ll go get a real job,” and then the losers in the attic got a following, and he said, “Oh, okay, maybe these guys have got something that I didn’t really see the first time around!”
Chris Hite: it was logical for them to him back and give me the boot. They wanted a tighter drummer…and I was more like the drummer in Crazy Horse!
Bill Shearin: I wasn’t really gone that long. I just felt like I needed to try having a real job, and that was the time for it, but it didn’t take me long to realize that what I really wanted to do is jump into music head first. And after all these years, I wouldn’t change anything, because to get the life experiences I’ve gotten from being in the band has just been incredibly cool. I mean, to experience whatever degree of success we had, it’s just been the coolest thing in my life.
The First Single
David Middleton: We felt that going from playing live to entering the studio was a natural progression. You know, naturally, all of the groups that we grew up listening to made records. Paul and I at one point even kind of started chomping at the bit, and I remember a time when he and I were driving around town, just kind of talking, and saying, “Okay, if we don’t have a record out by this time next year, we’re just busting it up.”
So much of being in a band is sitting around and waiting. Getting your name out and waiting for things to happen, waiting for sound check, waiting for the club to open, and this and that. And weeks go by without a gig. Especially back then. Of course, I sound like an old man, but without the internet and things like that constantly putting your name out there, you had to play gigs, you had to put up flyers, you had to really keep your name out there to get anything going.
So there was a time when we were playing and playing, doing three sets a night, seven nights a week, which is why we started thinking, “If by this time next year we don’t have an album out, that’s it. I’m gonna go and drive a truck or something.” So it was just a natural progression and something that we all kind of all felt compelled to do.
Sean Hennessy: You know, it’s funny, but I don’t remember that being the experience. It just seemed very organic to me. We just seemed to go from just wanting to get together to play to “wouldn’t it be fun to play out live?” And everything sort of just seemed to lead to the next step.
Paul Johnson: To record the single for “Hermitage” and “Return,” we went to a guy named Ira White’s studio somewhere in Ocean View, and he had a garage…I think it was a four-track or an eight-track studio. It might’ve been eight. And we did that live, except for the vocals. It was just the guitar, bass, and drums, but I think we went back and David did the vocals separately. That was Chris Hite on that, along with Sean, myself, and David. And that was our very first time ever recording, other than, like, cassettes during rehearsal or whatever. So the music was done as you hear it, and then the vocals were overdubbed, but I don’t think there were any other overdubs on it.
Chris Hite: The recordings of “Hermitage” and “Return” weren’t bad considering what they were. And the energy in the band was certainly good.
David Middleton: Before it became a single, before we released it as a 45, we got the tapes to Carol Taylor, and she played them as reel-to-reel tapes on the air on FM-99, which was absolutely marvelous. That increased our draw in the clubs by at least 100 people that night alone that she played it. And it was kind of like that scene in that movie That Thing You Do! where the kids hear their song on the radio for the first time. We were tuning in to the radio for the night that Carol played it, and we were all jumping up and down while it was playing and everything.
Enter Carol Taylor
David Middleton: Carol Taylor was introduced to us through Rickey Wright, who was a friend of ours from back in the Probe days.
Sean Hennessy: Rickey Wright. Oh, what a great guy.
David Middleton: Rickey was one of those people who I knew, if Paul and I had a band, at minimum we would have an audience of three people: Rickey, Angie Bailey, and Randy Holmes. They were the three people who really followed The Probe around a lot, so I knew that, if we did this, at minimum we’d at least have those three people. And all three of those people were in the clubs from the very first night that we started playing as the Poetics.
So Rickey had been hanging around us for a long time, and he became friends with Carol…I’m not exactly sure how they met, but at one point he said, “You know what? I’m going to bring Carol Taylor down to see you at Dominic’s.” We were familiar with her on FM-99, and we’d been listening to her because she was playing good music, and…I was deathly afraid. I thought, “Oh, no! Oh, God! She’s gonna come in, and she’s gonna see probably our worst show, and she’s gonna walk right out!” You know, I really thought that it was just gonna be a horrible scene. But he did. He brought her down to Dominic’s, he sat right up front with her on the barstools, and it, um, honestly was one of our worst shows ever.
We had amps breaking down. It was a Murphy’s Law, where everything that could possibly go wrong did, and it was one of those nights where I was just, like, “Oh, God…” I was up there on this little stage that’s no higher than the floor, and I was thinking, “Oh, man, she is gonna turn around and walk right out!” But she didn’t. She stayed around, and we started talking after the show, and there was just definitely a connection. There definitely was. She liked us a lot, she thought we were really good…I guess she understood what we were about. I mean, years later, I now know that, her seeing us for the first time, she was probably thinking, “Oh, wow, finally: a real band!”
Sean Hennessy: I certainly think Carol was a great influence on us, and she seemed to take a liking to us right away, but…I don’t remember the first time I met her. You know, I’m sure what David said could’ve happened, though. We sure had some good shows and some bad shows. I mean, I think that our strength was as a performing band even more so than the recording at the time. We were playing out 14, 15 days a month and rehearsing on our off days, so we were playing a lot and we were pretty tight – generally! – as a performing band. Not that we didn’t have our off nights. And sometimes if it is a big show, if David knew or we knew that Carol was going to be there, we may have had a case of nerves. It happens.
Paul Johnson: I don’t remember it that way, either! I remember Angie Bailey told Carol about us, and I remember talking to Carol afterwards, and…I was indifferent to whether it was a good show or not. I just remember doing the show, Carol was there, and…we had already started a local following, but I do have to attribute whatever regional or wherever success – if you want to call it that – to Carol’s hard work. I mean, she really did put us in the right places in front of the right people, and anything past our local following, I attribute it a lot to her input.
David Middleton: After Carol played our single on the radio, she became more and more interested in us as she started hanging out with us, and then one night she proposed the idea of her managing us. And from that moment on, we were a team, but, honestly, I thought that she was much older than she was. I really thought that she was in her thirties or something. But it turned out that she was only 20 at the time. She was only a couple of years older than me! So to find that out later, I was kind of shocked. I assumed that she was much older than she was just because of her incredible knowledge of music and just the way she carried herself.
Jeff Bailey (bass, 1989-1991): Carol was fun. She was a lot of fun. You could joke with her, and it was just fun hanging around her. She was good at protecting us from other stuff. If there was something going on, if there was some sort of business deal or some sort of problem with a club owner or a booking situation, she was really good at saying, “Okay, you guys just go and have fun, I’ll take care of this.” And then she call out the goon squad. I mean, not really, but you know what I mean. It was fun being around her, and she was open to a whole bunch of suggestions. She loved the music we were working on, and it was easy to impress her. We’d play something, and she’d go, “Wow, that was great!” So, yeah, it was fun working with her, and I don’t think it ever stopped being fun.
Bill Shearin: Carol’s knowledge and expertise and how much hard work she did as far as getting us out there…I mean, her legacy is a pretty cool one, in my opinion.
Meet Mike Mills: The Recording of Hermitage
David Middleton: In 1985, R.E.M. at that point were not yet untouchable. They weren’t Rock & Roll Hall of Famers or major-label artists just yet. They were still on I.R.S. Records, and they were still very accessible. R.E.M. is still very much that way, actually. I mean, they’ve always remained accessible. But Mills was one of those people…well, you know, Carol had interviewed him several times and talked to him and hung out with him, and she had seen R.E.M. many times, and she was one of the first people to get their records played on commercial rock radio. So Carol was important to their career.
Mike Mills (R.E.M. bassist, producer of Hermitage): Carol worked at WNOR, and she was a very cool, fun, kind and knowledgeable person. Just fun to be around. And she loved indie rock…which, of course, didn’t have that name at the time. But, yeah, so through her, I guess, is how the Poetics and I got hooked up.
David Middleton: On several occasions I had seen R.E.M. live, and I had met Mike and talked to him a little bit, and one night Angie Bailey and I actually snuck backstage at one of their shows in Charlotte and just started talking to him. And he remembered us from seeing us a few months earlier, and I told him about the band, and he said, “Send me a tape!” And we did, of course.
Mike Mills: Yeah, he did. And the tape sounded pretty good, as I recall. Carolina was basically our second home for many, many months. The first place we ever played outside the state of Georgia was Chapel Hill, and for the longest time North Carolina basically paid for my food and rent, because we’d go up there and play either Chapel Hill or Raleigh, at the Pier, or Charlotte or Greensboro. We’d go up there one weekend and play two of those cities, then we’d come back up two weeks later and play two different ones, and that would just basically take care of our bills for the longest time.
David Middleton: In ’85, the Poetics went down to Athens, Georgia, and played at the 40 Watt Club with the Kilkenny Cats on one of our little tours down south, and he was there, along with a few other people that we knew, and…it was just something where he kind of kept tabs on us, and we’d play around and run into each other. Then in late ’85, around Christmastime, I believe, R.E.M. were playing at Chrysler Hall in Norfolk, with the Minutemen, and we of course weren’t able to be there, because we were setting up and playing our first set at the King’s Head Inn that night. But after the R.E.M. show, Carol brought Mike down to the King’s Head Inn, where he famously got up and jammed with us and hung out with us after the show.
Mike Mills: King’s Head Inn! That’s right, because we didn’t get to Norfolk that many times. Yeah, I remember that. But I don’t remember what song we did. I just remember that they were good guys and good musicians, and I liked the direction they had musically, and…I’ve never been dying to produce bands, but they asked me, and I thought that we could work together well, both personally and musically. So I said, “Why not?”
David Middleton: At that point, he said, “Look, R.E.M., we’re taking our first vacation next March, so why don’t you book some time at Mitch Easter’s Drive-In? Let’s coordinate, and I’ll meet you guys down there, and let’s record something. Let’s record an album!” I mean, it kind of just happened organically. And we took him up on it…by which I mean we were jumping up and down like little jumping beans!
Mike Mills: They, uh, got a pretty raw producer, let’s just say that. I had some ideas about what I liked, but I was certainly no Steve Lillywhite in there.
Bill Shearin: I remember one time after a session I said, “Mike, I don’t get it. Why on earth would you be producing an album for us?” I mean, R.E.M. was getting ready to start on Lifes Rich Pageant. But he was, like, “Well, y’know, I just drove up here and…I figured it’d be fun.” And it really was. It was fun to hang out with him. And the same with Mitch.
Mike Mills: You know, working with Mitch…it’s always good to have that sort of built-in support system, when you’ve got a good studio and a good engineer and you know you can rely on them. It makes everything go so much more smoothly, especially for someone who’s relatively new at it. It was one of my first production gigs, if not my very first, so you lean heavily on your engineer at that point.
David Middleton: Mike was wonderful. He’s just a lovely, fun guy to be with. Very creative, with a great energy, and…he was fantastic. It was a lot of laughs. We had a lot of fun. And in between songs, we’d have little jam sessions with him on keyboards and things like that. You know, it was very loose, very creative, and very fun. We had a song called “Jimmy Carter’s Head” that was supposed to be the very opening song of the album, but we never could get a good recording of it. Like, every time we tried it, it just didn’t have the groove we wanted. It’s now available on iTunes, though, as a bonus track when you buy the Hermitage album.
Bill Shearin: We had a really fun time. And with that being kind of our first real experience recording an album…I dunno, there are so many people now who work in studios, and so many people record in home studios, but back then it was a much different experience, because you could tell that they had the savvy. It wasn’t just some guys hooking up equipment in their garage. Mitch was already working with Let’s Active, and of course he’d already worked with R.E.M. I was pretty impressed by the fact that it was so low-key. They called it Drive-In Studios for a reason.
Paul Johnson: I wouldn’t say Mike had a lot to do with the sound of the album, but he kind of had some creative input there, and he was a great presence. You know, we were amateurs in the studio. We were a live band that had done minimal recording, and R.E.M. had made – and so had Mitch – cool-sounding, successful records. He was a good guy to work with. He came up with some cool ideas. We sort of had an R.E.M.-ish sound on that record, obviously, but he said, “You know, you guys should try doing something with a harder sound.”
Sean Hennessy: Mike’s a great musician, and for me as a bass player to have him come in and comment on stuff and help with the sound, that was incredible. But, you know, at that point, we were in our late teens and early twenties, and…it felt normal and natural. I don’t think we were too overwhelmed by it. It was just kind of…cool. And Carol knew them, so it was like hanging out with some new friends. It worked out really well. And having him play on “Return” was kind of cool, with his Floyd Kramer style keyboard riffs in there. That was cool.
Mike Mills: Yep. Yep, that’s about my one style. That’s what I’ve got. But, yeah, I remember that they had one called…man, I really should’ve done some research, because the titles probably would’ve stimulated me, but I specifically remember one called “Mrs. Dance’s Skeleton” that was really good. So, yeah, they had good tunes, and I liked them. I didn’t really have to do much with them. I filled in some spots that needed some more musical things going on, trying to give it some texture and melody where it needed it. But there wasn’t all that much to do. They were pretty well formed at that point.
Paul Johnson: You know, it’s funny: I pulled out Hermitage last night on vinyl, and…I didn’t do a lot of writing on the first record, certainly not as much as I did later, but I will say that Hermitage sounds like a record, not just a recording. There’s a difference to me. Most of it comes together well, and the tones are good. Mitch really has a good ear. And the parts were layered well. We were working with professionals. And we did that record really quickly, too. There were only really a few days that we were in there recording, and then we came back to do a few overdubs where we realized that parts were needed to make the songs a little more interesting. But the whole thing was recorded in only a few days.
David Middleton: It definitely didn’t hurt to have Mike and Mitch’s names on the album. You know, some critics balked at it. They were, like, “Oh, even Mike Mills and Mitch Easter can’t save this pile of crap.” You know, there were those people.
Mike Mills: Hey, listen, there’ll always be haters, y’know? Some people just can’t be pleased.
David Middleton: But all in all, you know what? It’s really just a matter of…we wanted to put out something that represented how we felt at the time. We wanted to release something that was from our hearts, that was good. And I think it was also kind of important for us to go with…Norfolk is not a city that’s known for its music, so I think it was kind of important for us to travel a little bit further south, to areas that were a little bit more known for music, and get guys whose names could actually mean something. And that definitely helped us to get heard a little more outside of our area, yeah, absolutely.
“Sushi” on Sunday Night
David Middleton: It was nice to get the video for “If You Knew Sushi” on 120 Minutes, because you got to be on MTV, but you got to be on there with stuff like the Blasters and X and Throwing Muses and all these oddball but good groups that were going on in the ‘80s, and not sandwiched between “(Let’s Get) Physical” and whatever the latest Diane Warren-penned Heart song was. So, yeah, that was a thrill. And it was very fun making that little video, and it was a treat to see it on TV in the summer of ’87.
Sean Hennessy: I used to watch 120 Minutes on a regular basis, when MTV actually showed videos, so that was a great experience, just being able to see it. It was one of those I-didn’t-quite-believe-it moments, because we didn’t set out and say, “You know what? We’re gonna have an MTV video! This is the game plan.” We didn’t have a business plan or a structure here. It just sort of happened. It was, like, “Wouldn’t it be cool to do a video?” And then, “Wouldn’t it be cool if it got on MTV? Wouldn’t that be fun?” And then to actually have it happen was pretty special. Time slowed down for that moment.
Bill Shearin: Oh, yeah, that was a lot of fun. Of course, Matt Pinfield wasn’t around then. It was still kind of fledgling show. But I was very excited. I remember we had a little party…like we needed a reason for one, right?
David Middleton: I know that INXS did a video where they were kind of aping Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” but I wasn’t sure if theirs came out first or if it was ours. Either way, it would’ve only been a short period of time between them, but I’m not sure exactly when theirs came out. After ours premiered, I remember seeing theirs, but…well, either way, Bob Dylan beat us all. We just did an ape-like take on it, using lyrics from other people’s songs. It can be difficult (recognizing the lyrics), because we used a lot of classic rock, but we also used a lot of songs from that period, so there were things like Let’s Active and Del Fuegos lyrics, and some people today might not know those. And then I think some of them aren’t even lyrics. Like, one of them is just a line from the inner sleeve of a Rolling Stones album! But, yeah, that was a blast to make. We figured if you’re gonna make a video, it either should be the band performing live or something completely fun, because a lot of people were making videos trying to be very serious, and we just didn’t feel like doing that.
Paul Johnson: I was so broke, and I was living in this house that had once been a devil-worship house with this girl named Eileen and her pit bulls. We were just friends, but I was paying her $100 a month, because we were touring, and all the money went to the road manager and the roadies and the rehearsal place and the van and the equipment, so I was literally eating Ramen noodles with broken up pieces of cheese in ‘em because I was so fricking broke. And then I look up…and there’s my ass on “120 Minutes.” And I’m, like, “Hey, cool, I’m on MTV!” And in later years, I taught guitar in Brooklyn, and I actually teach guitar here in Warrenton, but these kids would come and they’d go, “How come you were on MTV and you’re not rich?” And I said, “Lemme tell ya something, kid: this is how it really works.”