SMART PILLS
'70's punk from CBGB's to Kansas-Missouri
Interview by Jack Partain, Part 1
(October 2024)
The way we talk about the early days of punk is very prim and proper, very uniform and concise, like it's the fucking American Civil War or something. The dust has already settled, the blood has already been shed, and everything worth documenting has already been documented. In fact, the way we talk about the history of punk rock is, well, not very punk rock. There are still thousands of stories out there that haven't been told, and might not ever be told. Even I have two or three really good stories about growing up around a small punk scene that I'm sure you guys would love to hear. And I am not, by any stretch of anyone's imagination, even vaguely punk rock.
But Vince Conrad is. He was there in the mid-1970's for the early explosion in New York City. He played in numerous bands that played all of the legendary clubs: Max's, CBGB's, Club 81 and everywhere else. Later, when he left New York and moved to the Midwest with his band Smart Pills, he and his bandmates essentially ignited punk rock in the area of Eastern Kansas and Western Missouri, and a vibrant and incredibly creative scene would develop and thrive throughout the area that still continues to this day. I started talking to him on the phone a few months ago and he was kind enough to grant an interview.
PSF: Okay, let's just start at the beginning. Where are you from?
VC: I am originally from Dayton, Ohio. I lived there until I was about 8 or 9 years old. Parents are divorced. Moved briefly to a suburb of Dayton and then to Tucson, Arizona. I went to military school in California for three years. Then went to boarding school in Chicago for about a year. Came back to Dayton for high school, I played in some bands there before moving to New York.
PSF: What bands were you in while you were in Dayton? Anything of note?
VC: Not really, just cover bands with friends. I started playing guitar in 1966 and played in little dance bands in boarding school. I also played in little bands in high school that mainly played at parties where there were drugs and girls. But I did meet people in Dayton that I formed bands with later. I met Ian Talcroft and Billy Rey that I would go with to New York to play in a band called Sweet Star.
PSF: Okay, so let's move on to New York then. Why did you go to there? Is that a stupid question?
VC: It was in 1975. By the time I went to New York, I had been writing my own material for several years. And at that time in the Midwest, there were two avenues for rock bands. One was you could play in a cover band, play five sets a night, five nights a week, playing other people's material. And you could make pretty good money. Bands got paid reasonably well for that. Or you could play your own stuff and try to get a record deal. But most clubs in the Midwest would not allow that at the time. They would not allow you to play original material. And that is what my friends and I wanted to do. But, as far as getting a record deal goes, there wasn't anyone in Dayton who could sign you anyway. Talent was scouted in larger places like New York or Los Angeles. My friends Ian and Bill formed a band to try and get a record deal called Sweet Star in October 1975 and we all decided to move to New York.
PSF: So you move to New York. What happens next?
VC: Ian had been up there in the summer of 1975 and had been playing in a band called Somebody Good. They played a bunch of shows but he wanted to do his own band and so he came back to Dayton to put a band together and work up new songs. Ian and I went up originally to New York by ourselves and got a room at the Chelsea Hotel on the 9th floor. We moved in all our equipment, amps, guitars and PA through the lobby of the Chelesa and up the tiny elevator. After moving in, we went out for something to eat. There were a lot of junkies in New York and when we returned, someone had climbed the fire escape and stolen our guitars. There I was, my first day in New York and my only guitar had been ripped off and I had no money left to buy another one. Afterwards, Stanley Bard, owner of the Chelsea, gave us a room on the first floor with no windows. Bill came up and moved in about a week later. We had a single bed. Ian and Bonnie, Ian's girlfriend who moved in, slept on the mattress and Bill and I slept on the box springs. Bonnie worked at Baskin & Robins and would get back at midnight with ice cream, which was about all I had to eat for a week or two.
PSF: Okay, here is something I've always wondered. And this might sound daft. But how did you know to go to the Chelsea Hotel when you got to New York? I read books and watch documentaries and everyone is just like "I got to New York and got a room at the Chelsea" but I don't really understand how that happened, how everyone just sort of knew where to go right away. I mean, I have the internet today and I'm sure I couldn't find the "coolest" hotel in New York. I would be stuck at a Holiday Inn.
VC: Yeah, I get it. We were lucky because Ian had been up there already. And he knew where to go. I mean, The Chelsea had been around for about 100 years and was already famous in the artist community. I'd never heard about it at that point but that is where Ian wanted to get a room. Because New York was so densely populated but still very small geographically, the music community was just so much more familiar than somewhere like Los Angeles, which is more spread out. I remember the Chelsea as being so eclectic. It was always bustling with strange and interesting people. There were paintings hanging all over in the lobby by artists who gave their artwork to Stanley in lieu of rent. There were a lot of local musicians coming and going through the Chelsea, as well as established artists. It was a great place to meet and get to know other musicians. I remember Mark Bell (Marky Ramone) came to our room and hung out when he first joined the Ramones. Neon Leon (The Rainbow Express) was a regular and lent us a guitar. Phil Ochs used to sit in the lobby, very drunk and just stare at people coming in and out. One night, I passed Frank Zappa in the lobby. It seemed like everyone had some connection to the Chelsea Hotel.
PSF: So you are in a band called Sweet Star in New York, living in the Chelsea. Go on.
VC: It took a while for things to get going. We had no money. Even though we had been writing songs, the band just kind of stagnated. I had been dating a girl who was a waitress in Dayton, and she wanted to come to New York. When she got there we got our own room in the Chelsea. And we would go out a lot, you know. We went to Max's Kansas City one night and that is how I met Git Smart, who would become the guitarist for Smart Pills. Git was my age, twenty, and also from the Midwest. He tried to pick up my girlfriend at Max's who turned down his advances but she decided to introduce us. Git and I really hit it off and unbeknownst at the time, we began a life-long friendship. Git was squatting with Richie Rich (Richie Katz) of the Aliens and others on 200 Street in an apartment owned by the city. Git had already auditioned for Piper (Billy Squire's band) and was waiting to hear if he got the job. If not, he was going to play with the Aliens. Git gave my number to Richie, who called me for an audition with the Aliens. I ended up joining the Aliens, playing shows at Max's and CBGB's from late 1975 to Summer 1977.
PSF: So I guess I should ask how easy it was to meet people in 'the business' or whatever at that time? I mean you hear all of these stories about crazy shit that Iggy Pop or David Bowie or whoever did at Max's or CBGB's but at the same time, it sounds like there are record deals being signed just a few tables over.
VC: Oh it was really easy. Journalists, photographers and record people went to Max's and CBGB's all the time. All the musicians I knew were also going to Max's, CBGB's and other clubs routinely, either to hang out or play.
PSF: Any crazy stories from hanging out at Max's?
VC: There was a band called the Rippers, who's lead singer was Zacks, a friend of a friend in New York. The Rippers were playing one night at Max's and Zacks had an actual scalpel on stage and was cutting up stuff. Morgan Fisher, from Mott The Hoople, came up to sit in on the keyboards. Morgan was wearing this fancy tweed suit and hat and I guess thought it would be cool to just come up and sit in. Zacks went over to him and cut off the pocket flap on his suit, which was hilarious. Morgan got really pissed off and smashed the keyboard against the wall and walked off. The Rippers kept playing, walking out on the tables and throwing dollar bills at everyone. Unfortunately, the bass player backed up on Zack's scalpel later in the show and had to go to the hospital after the show. That was the first night I met Zacks, who later shared a house with Ian Talcroft and me in Dayton when we were in American Bad Taste.
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PSF: So how did you support yourself at the time?
VC: Well, that was a little tricky. I went to New York with $100 on a Friday. By Sunday, it was gone. I remember being hungry on that Sunday and not having enough money to eat. The Chelsea is on 23rd street between 7th and 8th avenues. I went up 7th avenue and knocked on every door, just asking for a job all the way to 60th street. Completely inexperienced, no education. Just asking for a job because I was starving. Then, I did the same thing walking back down Broadway. By the end of the day, I had two jobs. One was at a furrier as a delivery boy. The other was with a dry cleaner. I took the delivery job and made like $75 a week. Bill took the dry cleaner job and then my girlfriend worked as a waitress in the Carnegie Hall restaurant on 56th street and we were able to support ourselves.
PSF: Just to clarify for people who might not be familiar, what the hell is a furrier?
VC: Ha ha! Yeah, it might need some clarification. He sold fur coats. It was a retail store located in the Carnegie Hall building on 56th street. In New York, you had the whole supply chain right there in the city. There were businesses that bought pelts, guys that would tailor the pelts, businesses that would sew in the lining, etcetera, all the way down the line. Most of the fur businesses were located around 30th street. I made deliveries about three times a day from the retail store to and from the fur market, to install a lining or pick up a coat, etc.
Interesting story about replacing my guitar that was stolen from the Chelsea. In those days, the subway was fifty cents. Sam Weinberg, my boss, would give me subway fare for the deliveries, which ended up being about $3 a day. I used to pocket the subway fare for food and run to and from the fur market. I saved as much of my $75 a week for a guitar as I could and was able to get a 1967 ES 335 in six weeks. I think there are still photos of me with the Aliens playing that red 335.
PSF: Okay, but you're still in a band at the time, right?
VC: Yeah, I was in the Aliens. That was the band I played in most at the time. We played at CBGB's and Max's. That was my first real band doing original material in New York. I wrote all of the songs and Richie wrote all of the lyrics. Git Smart had written a couple of songs while he was living with Richie and waiting for Piper and Billy Squier to get back to him. He was kind of in limbo. He was supposed to be the other guitar player in the Aliens if it didn't work out with Piper. He was living with Richie up on 200 Street. We had a drummer and a bass player from Long Island. Git did eventually get the job with Piper, and we started auditioning guitar players, a lead guitar player, and we formed Renata (played with Isis and Kongress). It was kind of a crazy band. Everyone in the band had very different perspectives on music. There were jazz influences, glam, punk, straight ahead rock. Our bass player was into synthesizer and electronic music. We all influenced the songs differently.
Our drummer Steve had a pretty good situation. He was kind of nuts. He was also a guitar player and a singer, but he was living with a guy on the East side who was a recording engineer and he had access to all of this recording equipment. Steve was a writer as well. So it was an interesting group. Richie and I would write the songs and it would have a solid chord structural chord progression, you know, verse chorus, verse chorus, etcetera. But it kinda worked. We had played CBGB's enough that we were gonna be on the second CBGB live record on Atlantic Records. We recorded two songs, signed the contracts. But then the band broke up. When Hilly found out that we broke up, they pulled us off and put more Mink Deville on the record. I later released those songs on the Aliens debut record through Vince Conrad Productions, my independent label. The VCP website is the only place you can buy or hear the Aliens record.
PSF: Why did the Aliens break up?
VC: It was basically just musical differences. Me and the drummer Lon Rozelle decided to just do something different, something more cohesive. He was living in Brooklyn, and I was living with Richie up on Dyckman and 200 Street in New York and we had a two bedroom apartment there that was basically owned by the city and we were just squatting. Lots of people lived there but nobody paid rent. Then I moved to Park Slope in Brooklyn into a room in this industrial structure where Lon and his wife and other people were living. Lon and I began auditioning bass and guitar players and we found a guy named John Derio, he goes by Cody Lee now. He worked at SIR, Studio Instrument Rentals, on 54th Street which was where all of the signed bands rehearsed. We would go there in the middle of the night when no one had time booked and rehearse. We formed a band with a few other guys and we were initially called The Police. We played at CBGB's and Max's as The Police. This was, before The Police with Sting was known in the U.S. After the show at CBGB's, a friend named Dear France told us 'oh, you know, I just got back from England and I saw this band called The Police, and I thought that that is who you guys were!" Shortly thereafter The Police broke in the U.S. and our band changed its name to Falcon Eddie. I left Falcon Eddie a short time later due to artistic differences.
So I was looking for another band. In late 1977, I moved out of Brooklyn and got a flat on 22nd Street between 8th and 9th avenue in this merchant marine flop house. By this time, punk was in full swing in NYC and everyone was done with industry manufactured rock. For the last two years, Git had been playing with Billy Squier and Piper and was professionally managed by Aucoin Management and Sean Delaney. Piper had already released two records on A&M records and toured with KISS in the U.S. and Japan and other signed acts. Aucoin provided Git with an apartment in Greenwich Village, health insurance and a salary. Git and I had remained friends, and we would always hang out when he was back in town. Git was very aware of the Max's and CBGB's punk rock scene and came to see the Aliens and Falcon Eddis play in the clubs. By the end of 1977, I remember from my conversations with Git that he thought the New York and English punk scenes were new and innovative and he had become disillusioned with Piper artistically and the whole industry manufactured rock scene in general.
When Git left Piper late in 1977, he was wearing a leather jacket and had cut his hair short. He joined Lon and Falcon Eddie for a short time and played a few shows with them at Max's and CBGB's. Due to artistic differences, Git left Falcon Eddie and called me up in early 1978. Both of us wanted to put together a punk band. The whole punk thing included a new look, a different attitude and a completely different way of playing. Instead of being serious about everything and lengthy solos, it was all about having fun, three chord songs and back to basics. Git and I both loved the early Beatles and the 1950's rockers, so we wore black leather jackets, torn clothes and cowboy boots. The whole thing was very satirical, if it was bad, it was good. Bill and I even played instruments in the Smart Pills we had not played previously in bands.
In early 1978, Git was looking for a place to live and Aucoin was after him to give back the guitars they bought him for Piper. A couple of late 1950's Gibsons. Aucoin was trying to recoup the Piper costs and were taking back everyone's instruments. I told Git about my place on 22nd Street and he moved in with the guitars. They never found him. I can't remember when Billy moved in, before or after, but that was the beginning of the Smart Pills.
PSF: So did you form, like, specifically to be a punk rock band? Like everybody sat down and said "okay, we are going to form a punk rock band."
VC: Yes. Everybody wanted to play punk rock. That was definitely our intent. None of us had any money. We were completely consumed by the New York and English punk bands and pretty much made fun of everything else.
For Billy and me, it had been very rough living in New York for the last two years. To rehearse, you had to rent rehearsal space. Back then, it was only ten or fifteen dollars per hour for time at a rehearsal space but even that was a struggle most of the time. We could write the songs while sitting around in our rooms on 22nd Street, but we couldn't rehearse with drums. I remember "Yankee Doodle Boy," "No Pictures of Dad" and "What Did You Expect" were all written at this time.
PSF: Did Smart Pills play live in New York?
VC: We only played one show in New York at an afterhours club. I think we only had two songs written at that point and we did covers as well.
Money was always a problem. It was hard, it was rough. We were all hungry. And Git was no longer able to handle the lifestyle we were all living. So he came to us one day and said he was going to go back to Kansas, where he is from. He said his parents lived there and we could go there and use it as a base as opposed to New York.
I thought that it was a cool idea because when the Sex Pistols came and toured the States, they didn't play New York. They went straight to the Midwest and the South. Everyone in New York, we just had to read about it. And the Midwest was illiterate to punk rock at that point. It hadn't gotten there yet. And I thought, "okay, we can probably eat a lot better there," you know. So we agreed to go to Kansas and finish writing the songs and put the band together. Git left first in the Summer of 1978, then Bill went, and I left New York last in November 1978. I went and spent Christmas that year, 1978, with my grandmother in Ohio, and in January of 1979, I took a bus to Topeka, Kansas. We lived in Git's parents' house, in their basement rec room, for a few months. We were pretty wild and young. We went out every night, got drunk. We got into a few bar fights. I came back one night with blood all over my shirt and his dad sort of freaked out. And it wasn't long after we got there that we got a loft downtown. We were working on new material the whole time.
PSF: So you are a band of punk rockers in Topeka in 1979. I assume you are the only ones.
VC: Yeah, there were no others.
PSF: But you are there to write material and play gigs. How long does it take you to get shows?
VC: Well, the cool thing about where we were living is it was downtown, and it is a capital city, so everyone there works for the state government, which is located downtown. And that place just shut down after five o'clock. There was no one around. So we rented an upstairs office building for $100 a month downtown and could practice and write material all night and no one would complain. I remember we slept on mattresses in the different office spaces and rehearsed in the secretarial area. We joined the Topeka YMCA and used to work out and take showers there, because there was no one around! Our first gigs were at a place called DeNick's on March 2nd & 3rd. That was in March of 1979. We ended up getting a residency at a place called Off the Wall Hall (authors note: Off the Wall Hall became The Bottleneck) in Lawrence, KS, which was a cooler town. There was a place down the street that we always wanted to get into but they wouldn't let us, I can't remember the name.
PSF: Was it the Lawrence Opera House? (Lawrence Opera House now known as Liberty Hall)
VC: Yeah! It was. You're right.
PSF: I guess you guys were pretty lucky coming to Topeka because it is so close to Lawrence, which is a college town with an active music scene, and you had a receptive audience there.
VC: You're absolutely right. At our first show, at DeNick's in Topeka, a guitar teacher put his business card on Git's amplifier to suggest that he come to him for lessons. People just didn't get that you were playing down. That's what punk rock was about. The music had gotten so "sophisticated." You had to sound like Queen or Electric Light Orchestra or Yes or even Kansas. And it wasn't rock and roll. And everyone just wanted to go back to fun, simple music that everyone could play. And another thing- punk allowed people to play things that they had never played before. I had never played bass before Smart Pills, Bill had never played drums. But we did it and it was fun. We were all good musicians. Git was a very, very accomplished guitar player, but he was playing down because it was fun. And people didn't get that. If you listen to "I Got a Dick" or "Pway Y," you can hear his ability. We also used to speed up the covers super-fast, which I thought was hilarious. But by the time people were coming around and starting to get it in Kansas, we were gone.
