I SAW CARSICKNESS PLAY FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE FALL of 1980, somewhere on the campus of Carnegie-Mellon University, where I was a freshman; it might have been in the old Skibo Ballroom.
I had listened to their self-released EP about a hundred and seven times by then, and I thought their live show was very exciting. There was nothing very exciting, however, about the five guys who made up the band. They had on jeans, T-shirts, sneakers. One of them wore a cardigan sweater. A couple of the guys verged, particularly when it came to the way they wore their hair, on the unkempt, but most of them looked, frankly, a lot like CMU engineering students. None looked even remotely, in the fall of 1980, like punks. This came very much as a relief to me, I remember. I was kind of afraid of punks, or at any rate I was going to be afraid of them, I believed, if I ever actually met any. They did not have punks in the suburban Maryland town where I had grown up and bought my first Clash, Blondie, and Jam records.
I had been introduced to the music of Carsickness shortly after arriving at CMU by a dude on my dormitory hall (Donner A-Level West) who was the first, but by no means the last, ninth-level grandmaster of rock fandom I ever met. His name was John Fetkovich, but people called him Fetko. His knowledge was deep, wide, and intricately hyperlinked. He could steer you from the Velvet Underground to David Bowie to Uriah Heep to Pere Ubu to Patti Smith to Bruce Springsteen in one listening session without ever departing his zone of musical happiness. He was an engineering major, bespectacled, small of stature, and generous with his knowledge and with the contents of his record collection. He had a slot on WRCT, the campus radio station, and in time became a vigorous local champion of bands that had begun to ooze and bubble up from dark subterranean seams all over America: Hüsker Dü, X, Black Flag, the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, etc. He spoke in brief, precise declaratives, with a Jim Henson gulp in his voice, bobbing his head for emphasis. There was a certain air of Muppetry about Fetko.
“If you like punk,” he had told me, soon—like, minutes—after we first met, “you should check out Carsickness.” He bobbed his head. “They’re from here, and they’re great.”
I went out and bought the aforementioned EP—it had four songs, among them the local “hit” “Bill Wilkinson” with its radio-hostile chorus—and, as I said, I loved it. But did I like punk? And were Carsickness a punk band?
They didn’t look it, as I’ve said—no mohawks, no safety pins, not much leather in evidence—and they didn’t sound it either, apart from the vocals, and the angry politics that fueled most of the lyrics. Leader and lead singer Joe Soap (a pseudonymous Irish immigrant, it was said, whose precarious status was reflected in another song on that EP, “Illegal Alien”) often sounded a lot like Joe Strummer at his most drunken, if you know what I mean—the plaintive, heartbroken Strummer of “The Right Profile” and the final 00:30 of “Hate and War.”
Even a cursory listen to this disc, however, will yield very little in the way of the kind of blunt, buzzing, major-chord drums-bass-guitar attack, formulated by the Ramones and codified in the UK, that by 1980 had already become conventionalized as “punky,” and none of ironic-nostalgic Sha-Na-Na-meets-Artaud pastiche vibe, Warhol’s drag-queen aesthetic filtered through the New York Dolls, that characterized the sound of many of the New York punk bands. Carsickness played songs that were rhythmically complicated, sonically adventurous, and instrumentally distinctive—saxophones! guitarists who could double on keyboards!—with drummer Dennis Childers laying down tricky time signatures and the rest of the band managing very nicely, thank you, to keep up. Their songs wandered musically in and out of genres, often in the course of a single track, and the band was not afraid, now and then, in their own spiky, frustrated way, to swing. At times Carsickness seemed—to my ear, at least—to verge on jazz or even (could it be?) on prog. They made music as hyperlinked and omnivorous, as disrespectful of boundaries as the musical taste of John Fetkovich (or of any ninth-level grandmaster of rock fandom, in my experience).
In Pittsburgh, in 1980, they were playing a music that didn’t yet have—and would never really find—a name: “post-punk.”
In fact it might be argued that in their restlessness to move, musically if not politically, beyond the stupid-is-smart aesthetic of punk, Carsickness invented post-punk—in Pittsburgh. Just as Hüsker Dü and Gang of Four and Mission of Burma and Sonic Youth were busy restlessly inventing it in Minneapolis, London, Boston, and New York. Just as, a few years later, bands in Pittsburgh that were made up of post-post-punks like me and my friends, kids who loved the Birthday Party and Wire but refused to stop listening to their Black Sabbath records, would spontaneously evolve a kind of heavy, heavy music that was called—as we would in time be informed by a Seattle-obsessed national media—“grunge.” (Moral of the story of Pittsburgh rock ’n’ roll, over and over and over again: if you want musical immortality, move somewhere else.)
I didn’t know, in the fall of 1980, that there was something called “post-punk.” But I could tell—anybody could tell—that Carsickness were moving in another direction. They had pulled up stakes and struck out for some hinterland beyond the kingdom of punk. Even thirty-five (good lord!) years later, you can still hear it in the songs on this record: the sound of five young men united, for a time, by a sense of adventure. It’s the sound of my youth—and yours, whenever you were born, wherever you came of age, however you came into possession of the restlessness that is our common inheritance. (2017)