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Author chronicles 'best band you never heard of'
November 4, 2007
BY MIKE DANAHEY STAFF WRITER
Hope to die before you get old. Better to burn out than fade away. It's all about the Benjamins.
Joe Bonomo knows a band that shows just how ridiculous those rock 'n' roll cliches are, a band that defines success on its own terms. Bonomo, an English instructor at Northern Illinois University, chronicles that raucous act in Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America's Garage Band (Continuum Books).
"They love doing what they do. They enjoy bringing or creating believers out of the stubborn dozens. They've been laughed at more than lauded, to be honest about it, and it's been embarrassing for them at times, but there is a fierce stubbornness about them," said Bonomo.
That the band, like most, never made it big, makes his book a necessary read for anyone starting up an act, Bonomo said.
While the members now have day jobs, they still believe there is something timeless and eternal about being in a band, no matter how old you are. They also believe that if they stop playing, they would stop existing. At the same time, the band sees itself as a tonic for staid America and is serious about not being serious, Bonomo noted.
The Fleshtones have been together since the mid-1970s, playing their own Bacchanal brand of rhythm & blues based rock. While no album or song has charted higher than No. 174 (with the 1982 album Roman Gods ), they have not had an inactive year since forming, Bonomo said, and the group still does a couple of hundred shows a year.
The Fleshtones' debut performance was in 1976 at the legendary CBGB in New York's seedy Bowery. The club launched many a career, including the Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads. But Bonomo said the Fleshtones' sound, which the band calls "super rock," never really fit in with the punk and new wave of the day.
The Fleshtones were and are more of a dance band into then-out-of-fashion '50s and '60s music. The band actually had quite a following in the New York area and along the East Coast before being signed to IRS Records (one-time label of REM and the Go-Gos, among others).
Bonomo first saw the Fleshtones at a club in Washington, D.C., in 1983 and fell for the act from the get-go.
"They blew me away. Their energy was other-worldly, a different force, really. Their R&B-based rock was fun and funny. They were a tight band, and when they hit the stage the party began," he recalled.
In the late 1990s, the band's perseverance struck a chord with Bonomo, and from 2000 through 2004 Bonomo headed to New York each summer to interview Fleshtones members and others tied to the tale. In 2001, he hit the road with the group for a 25th anniversary tour of the Rust Belt, which was insightful and anything but glamorous.
"I learned of the concessions and compromises they made to still play. After 25 years, they were still sleeping on floors, or two to a bed, or on apartment floors. And I wondered, how many bands would still do this after all these years," said Bonomo, who also provided the liner notes for the recent European release, Vindicated: A Tribute To The Fleshtones. While the band has toned down its partying over the years, members still succumbed to the stereotypical excesses of rock 'n' roll life. And saxophone player Gordon Spaeth, who battled drugs, booze and depression, took his own life in 2005.
Getting his book about the Fleshtones to press was in ways a similar experience to the band's, meaning it took more than a bit of wherewithal to get it published.
"Their story was not quite cult enough to be sexy," said Bonomo. But Fleshtones front man Peter Zaremba told him to take a page from the tale, follow his passion and stick to getting the work to print.
The author also has a book of "prose sketches" called Installations that will be out next year.
And he's been commissioned by Continuum Books to write a book at one of the original rock 'n' roll bad boy mess-ups, Jerry Lee Lewis.
"It's about what they call his Wilderness Years, the period in the early-1960s," said Bonomo. That's the stage when Lewis' career bottomed out, due in part to changing tastes, plus the fact he had been married to his 13-year-old cousin.
Yet it also was a time when Lewis recorded Live at the Star Club, Hamburg, which many critics call a seminal live album. The book will ask the question of how did he get here. And in ways it parallels the lessons of The Fleshtones, noted Bonomo. Unfortunately, Lewis won't talk to him for the project.
