Chapter 6: The Pleased
The first time I saw Michael
Ian Black perform live was in 1987, at Al
Cibelli’s Italian restaurant in Perth
Amboy, NJ, in the basement-bar. I was a
14-year-old high school freshman, recently
entranced by the colony of Punk Rock, with
polished Doc Martens, tie-dyed jeans, a
partially shaved scalp and, if I recall,
a top-buttoned black flannel. I was a suburban,
adolescent, upper-middle-class Punk Rocker,
the kind who could hold his own in a mosh-pit
but also beat Super Mario Bros. in less
than twenty minutes. Back then, Mike had
not yet developed the triple name pseudonym
which so eerily resembles that of a presidential
assassin, he was simply known as Mike Schwartz.
Mike, as ogled by my 14-year-old
eyes, is screaming into a microphone, foreshadowing
his entertainment fame, with eyes closed,
head back, facing upward toward the Gods
of Rock, and convulsively traversing Cibelli’s
tiny wooden stage in a pair of baggy gold
pants. I don’t mean gold as in light
or bright yellow, I mean gold as in the
goose that laid the golden Haggar slacks
or ‘What’s this stuff at the
bottom of my Goldschläger?’ Above
the 14-karat trousers, a lean, t-shirt-wrapped
torso supports an ashen face and shaggy
mop of black hair. To Mike’s right,
manhandling a maroon Gibson with comparable
enthusiasm, is Jeff Grossman, my next door
neighbor. Jeff would six-string his way
through a number of almost famous high school
and college bands before eventually trading
his curly-haired mullet for a law degree
and subsequent life of courtroom justice.
Behind Jeff and slightly to his left, seated
within a sickle-shaped mass of tom-toms
and cymbals, shielded by a brunette mane
of Heavy Metal hair, flailing a pair of
wooden sticks with the Muppet-esque abandon
of Animal, is John Yursha. John would go
on to relevant fame in the dominant New
Jersey band Loose. Before their breakup
and the unfortunate death of guitarist Paul
Decolator, Loose was literally one more
handshake away from superstardom. On bass
guitar, positioned stage left, directly
in front of my seated vantage, is Ted Liscinski.
Ted is the only one of the four who will
maintain a professional music career, playing
with the likes of Mars Needs Women, the
Devics, and Sea Wolf, as well as starring
in the Broadway and movie versions of the
cult classic Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
Ted is a born rock star: talented, understated,
uninhibited, and apparently he has access
to some magical Bob Barker Juice which makes
him impervious to natural selection because
except for a long-to-short enhancement in
his flaxen hair, he appears to not have
aged a day since his 18th year. I’m
telling you, after terrorists drop a WMD
on our overzealous confederacy, Ted Liscinski
is all that will remain.
As these four individuals
assemble in 1987, ranging in age from 16
to 18, they form The Pleased.
With charred mozzarella wafting down from
the restaurant above, and apathetic golf-claps
offered between each song by the immense
crowd of 10 or 12, The Pleased, undeterred,
rattle through five original tunes, all
of which can be found on their self-titled
demo cassette.
Something changed in me that
fateful evening, straddling a diner-style
chair in the basement of an Italian eatery.
It was not just the epiphany of music, but
the possibility of musical performance,
the conceptual birth of music as a career,
of singing and guitar lessons and lyrical
poetry. These were not just some kids who
decided to start a garage band; they were
the kids from my neighborhood, with whom
I have shared countless games of Nerf football,
flashlight-tag, and garden hose water breaks.
They were the older kids that I looked up
to, whose dress and mannerisms I had copied
for years. In that moment, The Pleased represented
the solution to every problem and the answer
to every mystery I’d ever pondered.
Question: Any, Answer: The Pleased . . .
The Pleased can teach you how to start a
band, The Pleased can get girls, The Pleased
know how to be cool, The Pleased know who
shot Kennedy, The Pleased have an accurate
photo of the Loch Ness Monster, Sasquatch
is a roadie for The Pleased, The Pleased
can pat their heads and rub their tummies
at the same time. And even if some of this
fell short, I could still use the potentially
fictional medium of music to entertain my
most whimsical delusions.
More significant even than
this live performance was the sound it exposed.
Here was a group of guys reared on the same
thrashing Minor Threat and 7 Seconds albums
as I was but not themselves reproducing
that sound in a manner I had expected. It
was raw like Punk, with the musicianship
of Metal, and the melodic quality of 80’s
Pop. I would soon after here a DJ from 103.3
WPRB in Princeton call it “Alternative.”
In the late 80’s/early
90’s Alternative was the new genre.
It was a disgruntled being that crawled
out from the depths of all that was erroneous
in Punk Rock and hair-band Metal. It was
a few million teenagers screaming ‘I
can play the guitar but I don’t like
shrilly solos!’ ‘I like to be
different but I won’t shave my head
like some militant neo-Nazi!’ ‘I
can appreciate Motley Crue but I’ll
be damned if I’m wearing makeup!’
Alternative kids were not frightening to
old people. Alternative kids could play
electric and acoustic guitars. Alternative
kids could develop meaningful relationships,
be drug free, go to college, and still have
a satisfying musical outlet. Not since the
initiation of Rock n Roll had a genre so
accurately represented the sentiment of
the consumer youth. It was the music of
the suburbs, omnipresent American towns
whose unique combination of brain-scrambling
average and financial security lent themselves
well to creative expression. No more were
the days of urban, desperate, wrist-cutting
musical inspiration. Suddenly the suburbanites
realized that they were pissed and depressed
for no apparent reason, and decided to write
songs about it.
Good things started happening
during this period. Cocaine, the hotel-room-destroying
drug of Heavy Metal, faded out. Marijuana,
the Pringle-eating drug of passive jam-bands,
began its resurgence. DIY was applied to
music; bands started producing and successfully
distributing music on Indie labels, free
of the corporate leash. Record executives
began showing up at grimy, 100-capacity
venues with graffiti-tagged bathrooms. And
subsidiary deals were thrown at every band
with four members and a practice space.
It was a contradictory time, a time when
the term “Alternative” was still
illusive; a time when popular music was
underground and underground was lucrative.
The birth of Alternative was
not an insidious or backdoor affair. One
day it was just there, immaculately conceived
by a less than immaculate creator, a powerful
entity that would grow and mature with astonishing
clarity, an androgynous, chameleon-like
being whose affair with Rap would produce
a son named Hardcore, whose marriage to
Classic Rock gained a redheaded stepchild
called Grunge, and whose majority influence
would eventually replace the popular form.
For me, and my Jersey world
of suburban influence, this melodious evolution
all began with The Pleased: The high school
rendition of a drummer, an attorney, a cult
movie phenomenon, and a thespian comic in
a pair of blinding golden pants.
As golf can be traced back
to one Scottish sheep herder with a crooked
stick, as AIDS can be traced back to one
promiscuous, West African primate, as Man
can be traced back to a walking fish with
two little legs, so can Alternative music
be traced back to 1987, central Jersey,
and The Pleased.
Rock
N Roll Addiction, Chapter Five
Rock
N Roll Addiction, Chapter Four
Rock
N Roll Addiction, Chapter Three
Rock
N Roll Addiction, Chapter Two
Rock
N Roll Addiction, Chapter One
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ROCK N ROLL ADDICTION by Daniel McDermott
