St. Louis New Wave Nostalgia
My Bands:
Clubs:
Random Access Posters:
The Strikers
Also known as the 5 O'Clock News and The News. Steve Tamsky, drums and vocals, Mike Wineke bass and some vocals, and Dan Wool, guitar and vocals.
Arguably the best punk band of their time. They had a staccato, abrasive style that was great to jerk around to. They wrote catchy, memorable songs. They were good musicians.
Watching Dan Wool slash away at his guitar, leaping through the air with awkward punk lack of pretension, I often thought he looked like a wild dog at the end of a chain, snarling out his lyrics with fierce punk conviction.
Of all the people in the New Wave Scene in St. Louis of the early 80s, these guys are still closest to me, though, oddly enough, they all live in San Francisco.
They had a song that always stuck in my head. I kept thinking about it over the years, worrying over it like a dog with a bone. It was called Original Crowd, and it seemed to be about the wave of punks right before us, and in a larger sense, about the way waves of cool always point backward to a hipper, more pure hipness as you go farther and farther back into the innocence of days before our own corrupt and indsicriminate times.