Copyright: 2006, Feathered Apple Records
That was 1976 and I got my first taste of punk rock!
I had to take a hard look and admit I had become a junkie just like Keith, Tibor, Babine and the rest. My wife and I flew to Bangkok where I overdosed on sleeping pills while attempting to go cold turkey. I landed in the hospital, sharing a room with an 80 year old opium addict tattooed from head to toe. I recovered surprisingly fast while Charuvan would bring me American rock ‘n’ roll magazines available in Thailand for the troops stationed in Vietnam. That’s how I got to read Creem, Rock Scene, the great Lester Bangs: They raved about a new punk scene in New York. To them, the Rolling Stones were dinosaurs, and they identified with The Flaming Groovies, The Stooges, The New York Dolls, The Velvet Underground, and The MC5. Their names were legendary already: The Ramones, Richard Hell & The Voidoids, The Heartbreakers, Television, Wayne County & The Backstreet Boys. I forgot my heroin addiction, fueled by enthusiasm and a desire to be part of all it.
We flew to Vancouver where I saw David Bowie starring in the film The Man Who Fell To Earth. That same night, I asked Charuvan to cut my hair short. Then, going on to New York, I caught Suicide by chance. They were so outrageous and minimalist, it was as if they were playing in front of a crowd of zombies in some art gallery.
Back in Geneva, I buddied up to the owners of a new underground record shop called Dr. Boogie. The owner, Leo Zouridis, sold those vinyl records with a sense of authority. For example, if you asked him for a band that he considered uncool, he’d make you feel like shit! But his face lit up when I mentioned The Flaming Groovies, and names of labels like Stiff and Chiswick Records. And at that time, my favorite record was “Blank Generation” by Richard Hell & The Voidoids. My other musical inspiration came from pub rock like that played fast by Eddie & The Hot Rods, and “Heart Of The City” by Nick Lowe. Later on, I got into “Anarchy In The U.K.” by The Sex Pistols and “Help” by The Dammed.
Leo also had drive and ambition. When the idea of putting together a band materialized, he quickly arranged the rehearsal place, the equipment, and the musicians. His friend Jean-François Piva (alias “B 52”) played bombastic bass guitar. Leo recruited Ralph Perez and Daniel Jean Renaud (“Dean Meat”) on guitars, and Christian Abdani on drums. All of these guys were good players with no attitude problems, except for Dean Meat who acted like a streetwise James Dean and played a Flying V – and too much so in the style of Hendrix for our taste at this moment in time. Still, he was a likable, flashy character.
One night, we were hanging out in this glorified club, the Backstage, which was actually the first real punk hangout: an empty cellar and the owner’s bedroom! Serge Witzig, a hustler who displayed a tacky brand of charm, slept between broken beer bottles and cigarette butts with his big-boobed secretary-looking mistress Raymonde Carlier. She was into Bowie, and she worked as a disc jockey with the help of the first punks in town, Poubelle, Dégueulon, Ordure, Zaki and other luminaries. We saw Electric Callas, a band from Lyon, one night. They played a set in the style of The Stooges that ended in a burnout. Their guitarist, Johnny Fame, was Raymonde’s brother. Later on, that big-titted DJ would create the fanzine Les Lolos De Lola, and she would front The Mo-dettes, an all-girl outfit that went to the top of the British Charts with their version of “Paint It Black.”
One night, I got lucky. A hard rock band was blasting when I entered the Backstage. The guitarist, Patrick “Mama” Mahassen was extraordinary. Later on, Mama joined Krokus. But what floored me literally was a young sexy singer. Marie-Pierre had a powerful voice that never screamed pathetically like some heavy-metal singer. She had class, fragility, and emotion. After the show, I made a beeline for her, and we hit it off instantly. She too wanted to sing in a more radical band.
Before Jean-François Piva took over on the bass, we had this guy, Pepito, filling in for two months. He was into transcendental meditation, as was I. I had picked it up as a source of relaxation and to keep from relapsing back into heroin use. Leo and one of the owners of Dr. Boogie, Gerald Frutschi, joined our meditation team. At first, we were pretty disciplined. We meditated before our daily rehearsals.
Two months later, we meditated with a lager in hand while blasting The Sex Pistols!
We got along fine. The idea was to play cutthroat rock ‘n’ roll as opposed to nonsensical hippy wanderings. We wore our hair back and wore leather jackets. We looked aggressive and arrogant.
Once we played for some festivities in the town center in Geneva. Marie-Pierre was shaking her ass, and the guys got horny. Leo’s girlfriend blew up: She climbed onstage and slapped Leo in the face before our audience! Talk about punks and losers! But that was Leo; he always got in a mess. For example, in the summer ’76, we booked ourselves into the Festival du Bois de la Bâtie, the mini, yearly Woodstock in Geneva. There were hippies everywhere, complete with joints, Afghani clothes, long smelly hair, intense feet and sandals! Then The Slam took the stage. We were nervous and rushed because the sound check was too slow and inefficient, and the crowd was too hostile. Leo blew up. He insulted the sound men. People started to boo and whistle. He told the hippies: “We’re not in Migros [Swiss supermarket chain], you buncha bums!”
We hadn’t yet played a note. We were wearing black leather and dark glasses. Leo continued to abuse one and all, and suddenly the sky went black as thousands of beer bottles came flying towards us onstage. They truly hated us! So I attempted to play a song: “I Can’t Stand Your Guts,” but Ralph and Jean-François dropped their guitars and fled backstage. Leo was furious and screamed: “Cowards, you’re fired!” More beer bottles rained down. Abdani abandoned the drum kit, so Leo fired him too. “You never liked me, anyway!” he shouted. I quit singing and ran for shelter with Marie-Pierre. Later on Leo, who by now had fired everybody, discovered that he himself had been fired from The Slam! What else? Our last concert had lasted 1 minute and 25 seconds: the epitome of punk! We never even finished the first song!
Meanwhile, in Thailand I stayed away from heroin. I wrote “Schizo Terrorist,” “Impossibilities,” “I Like To Play With Fire,” and a few others. I wanted the band to be really mean, so I dubbed it The Bastards.
We partied and drank tons of beer.
The Bastards went straight into rehearsals. Marie-Pierre had cut her locks and looked amazing with short hair, heavy makeup and black lipstick. She sang and moved more wildly than ever and drove everybody berserk. John Seilern did a brief stint with us, but it never went past three rehearsals. He had a disastrous affair with Marie-Pierre, and bad vibes followed. Ralph hated him because he was very close to Marie-Pierre, and because Ralph was also a much better musician. So John left to form Jack and the Rippers with his brother Francis, André Tièche, and Babine. They had that English pop punk sound while we stuck to the New York beatnik influence.
Ralph took over the management and kept things loud and fast. He replaced Abdani on drums with a younger, nervous cat, Didier Dana. On second guitar, Dean Meat had to go. He objected to Ralph’s ideas of minimalism, so he was replaced, again by a younger fellow, Benjamin Garcia, who swore by Dick Wagner and Lou Reed (*editors note: he swore by Steve Hunter, who used to play with Dick Wagner and Lou Reed). Dean Meat (Daniel Jean Renaud) would later move to San Francisco, play gigs with The Flamin' Groovies, and create The Kingsnakes with their drummer, Danny Mihm, after he also slipped from the Scelerates, Leo’s new band. So Ralph, Benjamin, Didier, Jean-François, Marie-Pierre and myself got on with business. Relationships in the band were relaxed. When Poubelle and the punk contingent came to rehearsals, they wanted to organize a concert. We printed a black and white poster; my brother took the picture. We looked blank, bored and menacing.
The Punks had rented a cheap joint, Le Zofage, a room that belonged to the Zofingiens, a student fraternity. No Zofingiens showed up, but surprisingly, about sixty other people did. Some of them were students of mine because I taught French to Americans at the International School during daytime! That gig kept me away from heroin (for ten years).
Poubelle and the punk contingent Johnny Roland K. lamely sold a few beers, and when the glorified curtain opened up we lashed out with “Slow Death,” “Impossibilities,” “Schizo Terrorist,” and “Shaking Street” by The MC5, “Danger,” and “Gloria.” We mixed our songs with punk covers such as “You Make Me Cream In My Jeans” by Wayne County And The Backstreet Boys. We watched the audience’s opened-mouthed reaction. The sound attack, and the speed of our playing, and the interaction between Marie-Pierre and I (tough and sexy ) seemed to work! The musicians, led by Ralph, were tight and nervous. When I sang, Marie-Pierre went backstage to sip a beer and vice-versa. It kept us hot when we next stormed the stage!
The punks did the Pogo, banging into the rest of the bewildered audience who was confronted with this new dance for the first time. But the tension built up even faster when a biker gang, the Pharaohs, moved in and immediately started hitting people with billiard sticks. They had come to destroy punk!
At one point, I saw a student of mine, the only International School punk, being carried away on a stretcher with his skull cracked open! I stopped the concert and jumped at another Pharaoh who was about to kill somebody. He turned around, slammed my head against a concrete wall, and then I saw a fist the size of a baby’s face coming at me. He never completed the punch – a bloody miracle! I jumped back on stage and we kept on playing as if nothing had happened. One by one, the Pharaohs left the hall. We thought that the disruption was part of the excitement. We ended the evening gulping beers. Punks all the way and forever: The contingent was delighted and swore revenge against the Pharaohs. Indeed, that was the first of many episodes where the two tribes would collide.
Great concerts would follow through 1978. We played the Midnight Rambler, and a journalist from the Tribune De Genève showed up. We shocked him when Charuvan, my future wife, a Thai with blonde hair, came walking in, dragging along behind her, on a leash, Dégueulon; he was on all fours and wearing a spiked dog collar! Next day, we were on the front cover with myself posed bare-chested! At this same time, new bands appeared: Jack & The Rippers, Leo and his band The Scelerates, Poubelle and The Yodler Killers, Arnold and Dr. Mengele with Teenage Girls From Auschwitz, Discolokosst, Technycolor with Leo and Fred Lazer, The Kingsnakes with Dean Meat, and Mimi Aguet and Danny Mihm from The Flaming Groovies! A scene was born, and the hippies were never seen in town again. Good riddance! We had won the battle. It was good times.
I went back to Thailand for Christmas. Blondie hit Bangkok by chance. They had just completed their first L.P. and toured Asia on their way to Japan where they were already big. I briefly met Debbie Harry, the punk Marilyn Monroe, and fell madly in love. Back in Geneva, The Bastards interrupted a rehearsal, (missing the opening by Talking Heads) to attend an early Ramones gig at the Salle Des Fête Des Eaux-Vives! Total blitzkrieg! Only fifty enlightened, blessed souls attended the concert.
The old hippie guard had one last stint when they recorded a live LP at the New Morning. They asked us, too, to pose for the picture that would go on the cover, but then they didn’t include us. We were radically different from the bands used for the album, and we had behaved arrogantly before, during and after show time.
The crowd loved it though.
The Centre De Loisirs De Carouge was another regular battlefield between punks and the Pharaohs. We opened there for our guests from Zurich, Rudolph Dietrich’s Nasal Boys, and the chicks from Kleenex. We were a tough act to follow, believe me! I had a broken knee and used crutches on stage as I did my Gene Vincent bit. And I also used the crutches to hit a few insolent daredevils in the front row.
The Zurich bands seemed very tame in terms of sound, speed, sex and anger. They seemed to subscribe to a more “arty” concept, and that’s clever in terms of durability. We were fuck all!
When invited by the T.V. channel Suisse Romande to close a variety show with a live set after a short film on the punk movement, we lashed out. I spilled a beer can over my head during “Schizo Terrorist” while Marie-Pierre mesmerized everybody with “Gloria.” Intense! Backstage, we crossed paths with Renaud, the French pseudo-poet rocker wearing a leather jacket: We spat on him. A glorious moment!
Our last gig took place in Meyrin, where all the abovementioned bands from Geneva got together to play a 45 minute set each. Such a great sense of achievement: We were all part of the same scene.
Still rock ‘n’ roll was no family entertainment: Poubelle had to run for his life with Teddy Boys on his back who wanted to kill punks!
1977. Ah well, I didn’t go to heaven after all. I formed The Rednecks with Paul Zouridis from Banzai, Babine, and Francis Seilern from Jack & The Rippers. When his brother John came back from London, we called ourselves The Zero Heroes, and I rocked until 2002 with people who had started The Thunderbirds with me in 1972! We played with Iggy Pop on stage. We did studio work with David Bowie during the recording of the Never Let Me Down album and sang choruses on “Zeroes.” A song Bowie wrote about a band, perhaps? Perhaps – it was our band!?! (Sandro Sursock)
Edited by: Carey Fleiner
Revised in April 2007. Thanks to Benjamin Garcia for info (*).
Feathered Apple Records, P.O. Box 141, 4007 Basel, Switzerland
One night, the phone rang. Anita was howling. Their latest baby, Tara, had choked on its vomit. Keith was on tour. At 5 o’clock in the morning, I rushed to the house and attempted a mouth-to-mouth when I smelt the deadly puke.
Leo named us The Slam. We had three lead singers, Marie-Pierre, Leo, and myself. We would take turns singing lead while the other two shouted background vocals. The rehearsals took place at La Praille, a former, dilapidated atomic shelter squatted by many bands. It was in such a wretched state, we had it all to ourselves. It was a rat hole that smelt like beer, piss, and cigarette butts. But it was home! And, yet, we still had to pay a rent!
Our first gig was at the New Morning, the hippies’ hangout, of all places! We made quite an impression. A lot of those “cool” scruffs were shell-shocked, but Alain Fahri, the owner, loved us. He especially he loved Marie-Pierre when she sang a gutsy rendition of Patti Smith’s “Gloria.” She floored everybody. I had written an anthem for the band called “You Ain’t Bad Enough” which slammed the hippies! Leo closed the set with a scorching “Slow Death” by The Flaming Groovies. We played fast and loud. The three singers took the lead one after the other which created an energy burst at each new song. It left us elated! We felt powerful and cocky.
The next day, Ralph, Marie-Pierre and I held a powwow in some café. I told them that I was off to spend the summer in Thailand writing songs and that, come autumn, we’d be even more radical, and set up a new band. They agreed immediately.
Back in Geneva, the scene had evolved. Now hanging out at the Midnight Rambler were young looking punks wearing black leather and safety pins. Poubelle (later a member of The Yodler Killers), Dégueulon, Ordure (later Discolokosst), Arnold (Teenage Girl From Auschwitz), and ten other bands were the nucleus of a brand new scene.
As punk became fashionable, it became more and more uniform in the looks; for example, many people wore the mohawk hairstyle. As for The Bastards, we didn’t care much about fashion. Like Johnny Rotten, I wore rockabilly jackets; sometimes, I’d use a rhinestone bracelet that belonged to Johnny Thunders as a necklace. Marie-Pierre wore a Thai police hat I had bought in Bangkok. I plastered ‘VOID’ on my skull. Punk uniforms came from England, and we looked more like New Jersey bums.
Fanzines appeared by Poubelle (Punk Genève), Leo (Super Pas Cool),(Genève Rock), Ramona from The Mo-dettes (Les Lolos De Lola) – such exciting and creative times!
I booked T.H.C. studios for a weekend, and we played six numbers live, three of them ending on up on The Bastards E.P. that only came out in 1979 after I had left the group to form The Rednecks. “Impossibilities” sung by Marie-Pierre is on the A-side, and its imperfections add to her volcanic performance. On the B-Side, I scream “Danger” and the both of us hurry-hurry-hurry on “Schizo Terrorist.” There were other tracks that were left off: “Loser,” “Apathy,” and “I Don’t Care.” All of the music and lyrics were written by yours truly and the two guitarists. So with these recordings, one can still hear The Bastards’ sound: raw, nervous, and taking no shit off anyone. That’s how it came down. 
In 1979, a punk kid, Zaki, financed the production of The Yodler Killers single. I gave him the masters to add The Bastards to his label. And because I had left the band (who had gone pop) nearly a year before this E.P. was released, it was a “posthumous” record for me.
Another highlight was opening for Robert Gordon, a rockabilly dope whose punk credibility was his debut as singer for The Tuff Darts in New York. But Link Wray was backing him on guitars and that was the big deal. Link was, and still is, looked upon as the arch rebel who had penned “Rumble” twenty years before. He descended upon us like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse! After the show, he accepted my invitation to have a late supper, and he was the ultimate gentleman with black shades, leather pants, and long killer coat. He said he enjoyed The Bastards concert.
Cover idea: Sandro Sursock, Jonas Ganz and Feathered Apple Records
Filmwork and additional artwork: Jonas Ganz
Produced and Copyright 2006: Sandro Sursock and Feathered Apple Records
Site produced October 2006 from the linernotes of THE BASTARDS "Schizo Terrorist" LP (Feathered Apple ZAK 8). Copyright for all contents: Feathered Apple Records, Basel.
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