INTERVIEW: SPIKE IN VAIN

Spike In Vain perform at Oberlin College in the Spring of 1984. Photo courtesy of Scat Records.

As we’ve all learned from the back of cereal boxes, there were many units in the early ’80s inspired by the attainable autonomy provided by the American Hardcore scene that quickly grew jaded once the sound and vibe codified into one sloppy ball of stringency and blurry thrash beats.

Shaker Heights, Ohio’s Spike In Vain are one of the finer examples of this cultural phenomenon to my feeble little mind. Sealed copies of their sole full-length from 1984 Disease is Relative were pretty easy to find on the east coast in the late 80s and early 90s and due to this, the record gained a minuscule cult of admirers among myself and a small crew of fellow collector losers. At first, Spike In Vain seemed easy to cram into a corner with No Trend, Flipper, Scornflakes, and the other non-hardcore-bands-who-played-hardcore-shows groups. But unlike the records by those bands, Disease is Relative seemed to become harder to understand the more you listened to it. It’s for this reason it still intrigues me to this day. What that says about me as a person, I’d rather not get into. But it’s got to say something about Spike In Vain and that one missive of abnormal sounds they sent out into the world thirty-seven years ago.

Spike in Vain member Robert Griffin will be re-issuing Disease is Relative on his long-running Scat label along with releasing the band’s never-before-released second album, Death Drives A Cadillac on April 30th. He was kind enough to let me call him one Thursday afternoon and ask a lot of annoying questions. Wudda sport!

Sandpaper Lullaby: Are you ready to talk about a lot of stuff you never thought anyone else would care about? 
Robert Griffin: Sure, sounds like a good time!

What are the roots of Spike In Vain? 
I want to say I joined the band in the fall of 1982. The others had been playing very loosely for about a year. Someone would have a riff and they’d jam on it for four or five minutes and that’d be a song. The drummer, Bruce Allen, on Disease is Relative was actually playing guitar at first and Andrew and Chris Marec would swap between instruments and vocals. Everyone was rotating around doing different things. That version of the band was called The Blanks. Not spelled out! Just: THE ____. The original drummer decided he didn’t want to do it anymore and I had met Andrew at high school the previous spring and one thing led to another and I was in the band. That’s when things got more together with the band. I was 15. Bruce moved to the drums, and we three took care of everything else.

Prior to you joining the band, what were the Marecs and their friends into musically? Were they aware of this experimental punk thing that happened a few years prior with Pere Ubu? 
I think they were just going for entertaining themselves at that point. To give you an idea, the track “E.K.G” is one of the songs from before I joined and initially they were trying to play a Talking Heads' "Crosseyed and Painless" song and it came out like that because they couldn’t quite pull it off. I threw in the "live or die" riff just to break things up here and there, and suggested a more dynamic arrangement. They were aware of Pere Ubu, but I don’t know if they were necessarily fans. They just knew they were a weird band from around here. 

As far as what they were into specifically, Chris connected with David Bowie on a deep level when he was young. He felt like an outsider as a kid, and Bowie articulated that. So that also led him to Lou Reed and the Velvets, the Stooges, Mott, Eno, and everything he had a hand in - I remember Chris even had the Portsmouth Synfonia LPs. Most of the Marecs' records just sat outside the jackets - a pile of records, and a bunch of jackets behind. I would single out that they also had a copy of the No New York comp, and I'm sure that left a deep impression on Chris and Andrew of what was possible in music, that there really were no boundaries.

Andrew was the younger brother, so he was ok with all that, especially the Stooges, but he was also into shit like P-Funk and the DC gogo scene, so that's how that angle appeared in our music. Our drummer Bruce was into prog, especially King Crimson, and generally into anything intelligent, ambitious, and well-conceived. Our next drummer Scott had hugely wide-ranging tastes and wound up in the band because he was so enthusiastic about what we were doing. He played drums in Ragged Bags, that's how we met. He understood us in Beefheart terms like if the Captain had a Hardcore band, it would be us. As for me, I was into hardcore and darker post-punk stuff but also proggy and more experimental music like Art Bears, Chrome, SPK, MX-80.

So are you trying to tell me they were just a bunch of weird guys making music in a basement? 
Yes, that was basically it! It was ancillary to partying in the Marecs’ basement. 

Did you joining the band move them into the realm of playing out as well as being part of the Hardcore Punk scene evolving in Ohio? 
It did, for sure, but I would trace it back further to the previous spring of ‘82. I was in another band called The Dark who was more of a straight-forward Hardcore band, but we still had a very chromatic type of sound. Andrew Marec and I had been in classes together for a while. He was a year above me, but we had two classes together and figured out, “That’s the other weirdo!” 

We started talking about music and I told him my band was playing a show downtown. The club we were playing in was pretty lax on checking IDs, so I told him he could probably get in. He came down to see The Dark and he brought the whole Spike In Vain crew. Their take was The Dark wasn’t very good, but if you can get a show, then we could do that too. It never occurred to them. 

That’s what makes that early era of American Hardcore so interesting. Besides the people who wanted to establish some ‘harder-than-you’ doctrine, it attracted the weirdo bands who couldn’t play the local New Wave club or the cover-band circuit. How was Spike In Vain taken initially on the Cleveland Hardcore scene? 
There’s a video on YouTube of us playing “God On Drugs” at our very first show. We weren’t called Spike In Vain yet. We were called God On Drugs. You see a little pit tries to form, but the music isn’t quite fast enough. They’re playing along, but it’s not the same amount of enthusiasm we saw for other bands on the bill. But because it was such a small scene, and there were so few shows, we were able to be a part of it. At that point, most of the shows were going on in Akron or Kent; just random hall shows someone would book. It wasn’t until ‘83 there was any kind of regular punk shows in Cleveland. 

Besides The Guns, who were the other bands that were on the Ohio Hardcore scene at the time? 
When we first started playing, ODFX were the kings. 

God Damn it, I love that band!
It’s a shame the recordings are so shitty, because live they were like (long pause) God!!! (laughs)

My older brother had the PEACE compilation and I would play their track on there, “Drop The A-Bomb On Me” over and over on his stereo when he was at work. Just picking up the needle and finding the start groove for that eleven-second-long song. and playing it over and over. One morning, my sister said at breakfast: “Could you stop playing that song. I had a dream last night that an atomic bomb landed on the house.” 
Their drummer played standing up, did you know that? 

No! Now you just blew my mind with that tidbit!
They were so intense and primitive, and we all thought they were going to be the ones to break out from our whole crew. The only one who could play was the bass player. They reduced the genre down to its most fundamental, primitive, seething, and burning parts. They were so physical that it was crazy. 

What are the other bands you would say were in the mix for this scene forming? 
Starvation Army in their Hardcore version. Most of the bands were from Kent and Akron bands. Everything was so spread out. You had a band like the Offbeats who were from Mentor which is an hour from downtown Cleveland. Everything came together wherever we could make it happen. 

Do you remember the band Positive Violence that is on The New Hope compilation? 
The main dude in the band was Tim Dunbar. He was a transplant from San Diego. He turned up to a show one day in spikes and dyed yellow hair and he’s slamming Southern California style with intent to injure. That didn’t fly in our nice little Midwestern Hardcore scene we had going on. It hadn’t gotten violent yet. It did as it got bigger, though. He was asked to take off his spikes and he complied. He wanted to have a band and it came together, but they didn’t play out that much. I think Tim had to move back to California at some point. I don’t think they were around for even a year. 

How was the Cleveland scene taken from out-of-town bands when they’d roll through? 
Just another place really, unless something crazy happened. Out-of-town bands played regularly in Akron in '82 but it wasn't until '83 that there were regular spots to play in Cleveland. We did a show with the Meat Puppets on their very first tour, but we also played with Cause For Alarm, NJF, the Crucifucks, Husker Du, and tons of other bands when they came through. I remember when Flipper played Cleveland in ‘83. It was a big show but there was also all this punk rock judgment being cast at them for being fuck-ups, but others were into it. Those first years from ‘81 to ‘83 were pretty chill. Most of the bands were standard Hardcore, but we were a part of it. As they saw us more and could make sense of the songs, they got into it. Once the album came out, the reaction was, “Oh! That’s what you were doing! I couldn’t understand it before!” 

But as far as any reaction from out-of-town bands I don't recall anyone being really into our thing or scene specifically so much as, "Hey, cool scene guys, it was fun." Later on in noise rock days, I think Cleveland shows freaked out-of-town bands out more. Things would get particularly unhinged at Jesus Lizard shows, for instance. In a lot of ways, that scene really connected with people locally - those shows were beyond unhinged and it freaked traveling bands out that people would get so crazy.

Your mention of Flipper flips a switch in my head. Most people would throw Spike In Vain in with them or No Trend; these bands who would troll the harder-than-you types. Would you put the band in that category? And if so, was the antagonism organic or pre-conceived? 
It was both. There was an ongoing effort to challenge ourselves musically and how fucked up we could make things. With Chris Marec, that came naturally. He never took lessons, but he had these long fingers, played guitar all the time, and came out with the weirdest, craziest shit. When we presented something extreme at practice, it was embraced. Almost every time we practiced, someone had a new song to work out and I don’t recall any instance of anyone in the band ever turning down the ideas. It was always accepted and we would arrange it communally. But live, we usually got a positive reaction; especially later on. But after coming up in that scene,  I felt antagonism towards the audience at all times. When I was singing, I was the one who would crawl under tables and bite people on the legs. I got off on that. It was total freedom. 

We opened for the Dead Kennedys at this big movie theater here. This was the summer after our album came out and Jello requested us to open for them. We were playing right before them. This was one of those shows where all these kids who had heard about punk rock came out. 500 people showed up to see the Dead Kennedys and we had never seen one of these motherfuckers ever before at a show. They thought they could only like certain things and behave in a certain way. So, our first thought was, “What songs will this crowd hate the most?” We went through all our songs and picked all the slowest ones or the ones that were country-ish or bluesy. I also decided to drop acid before the show for some reason. It was just coming on as we started to play. 

Chris wheeled me out on this stage pulley dolly they had. I wore this really long grey skirt I borrowed from our manager. I went out with that just on and bare feet. We started with a really slow version of The Stooges’ “Gimme Danger” and people are starting to throw shit. So I ask the crowd, “DO YOU WANNA HEAR SOMETHING FAST?” and I got a huge roar. And of course, we went into the slowest song we had. We kept fucking with them and it was glorious! When we came off stage, Jello said, “Nice set. I don’t think country and western is your forte!” We felt we made it because we disappointed Jello Biafra. We must be doing something right!

When did the band decide they were ready to record Disease Is Relative? 
I think we assumed we were ready to record by day one. But I was 15 when I was in The Dark. Our bassist and drummer were 13 and our manager was Mike Hudson from the Pagans. So as much as he and his crew scared the shit out of me for the most part, I learned to put out my own records from them. So, I just figured we should do that ourselves. Our friend Scott Lasch loved the band and came into a small inheritance. He wanted to start a record label with it and was into helping us put out an album, and that lit a fire under me. I bought a bunch of fundraising candy bars and we sold them at shows or at school. All you had to do was carry the box around and people gave you money for the chocolate. Between that and gig money we were able to come up with almost half the money to put the album out, and Scott did the rest of the legwork. 

Where did you record the album? 
It was a studio called The Island, in the basement of a guy's house out in the woods of a suburb south of Cleveland. A lot of the recordings for The New Hope compilation were done there. He was a witchy dude with really long, straight hair that was super quiet and had a black cat named Wizard.  He had ceremonial daggers and shit like that all around. But he had a well-equipped basement studio that only charged fifteen dollars an hour. 

What was the reaction to the record once it came out? 
It was positive with pockets of extreme interest in places like Philadelphia, Raleigh, and Charlottesville. Your Flesh fanzine and Peter Davis in Minneapolis were super into it, too. But I’m sure there were reviews out there that wrote us off as arty punk. We pressed 1000 records and somehow sold 75% of them - that was well beyond our expectations. We just never capitalized on that bit of initial interest. No follow-up LP and pretty limited touring. Of course, the follow-up would probably have alienated the few fans we'd managed to get if it had been released at the time.

Was there any co-mingling with other Midwest bands like Negative Approach?
Negative Approach for sure. They played a benefit for The New Hope compilation and refused to take gas money. That was a hall show in South Euclid and I think it's from the same show on YouTube. There was a McDonalds next to the hall and people were going over there to pee or get a soda throughout the show. It was also a hangout for a lot of kids from the local high school who were freaking out about all the punk rockers next door. Eventually, someone went over there and got hassled and next thing you know, forty or fifty skinheads ran over there and terrified those kids enough that they got in their Cameros and left. I felt like I was on the cover of that first SS Decontrol record! 

But though these bands played around Northeast Ohio, there wasn't a lot of reciprocity. No like, “Hey! Come play in Detroit or wherever”. Then again, none of us asked and few of our bands had driver licenses let alone a van. It wasn't until '85 we played much outside Ohio, but even then, it wasn't a result of playing with bands from other places, it was calling people up and trying to work something out. I remember John Sinclair helped our manager Hazel out with a show for us in Michigan, but beyond that, I don't recall any scene brotherhood of swapping gigs or that kind of shit. 

Way more co-mingling happened with other Northeast Ohio bands, especially Ragged Bags and Numbskull, two bands I still really like. Many bills shared with those two. We were all very different, yet the same. It was a bit of a free-for-all in '85 as people stretched beyond hardcore, all kinds of bands played together, then things grew more segregated again as time went on. 

When did the band break up?
We went for about two years after the album came out. We split in December of 1985. I quit the band, dumped my girlfriend, moved to a new apartment, and lost my job in the space of 24 hours. Scott Pickering was pretty much done too, so Andrew and Chris didn't try to keep the band going after we split.

What is the story behind this ‘lost’ second album you are also releasing, Death Drives A Cadillac?
That is actually our second attempt at a second album. We started recording almost immediately after Disease Is Relative came out but when it became apparent Chris Bruce wanted to leave the band, we put out what we had so far on a tape with some extra live tracks to fill it out and decided to start over again. What has just been released is the proper album. We spent a lot of time recording it and Scott Laschspent a lot of money on it, but he ended up spending his own nest egg on a whole bunch of the recordings, us, the Guns, and Riot Architecture. Once they were all done there wasn't any money left to put out the records. Maybe not the best planning, We were now stuck. We shopped the record around and Rabid Cat in Texas seemed like a possibility, but they didn’t have the money either. Homestead was another possibility that never worked out. 

What were the reasons for breaking up?
It was my fault. I was 19 and really fucking impatient. I wish I was old enough to notice Andrew was dealing with serious depression at the time. He got bummed out when the second record never came out, so I suggested we record a single in the meantime, but he wasn’t interested. I’d talk about playing shows and he would just say no. Things came to a head when I booked a show in Kent and I called Andrew to ask when he wanted to head down there. He didn’t remember agreeing to do the show and didn’t want to do it. Since he was “Fuck It” and I decided to say “Fuck It” too. I didn’t have the patience for it anymore. So, soon after the drummer Scott Pickering and I started Prisonshake. The recording time I booked to record a Spike in Vain 45 became the recording session for the first Prisonshake demo. 

Do you want to talk about the members of the band that are not with us anymore? 
I never got an official cause of death on Andrew, but that was in 2017. His brother Chris died in 2013. He had a heart attack in the parking lot of a liquor store after years of heavy drinking. He could have been saved, but he fell down in between cars and no one saw him. I've never met another person with his level of idiosyncrasy and talent - musically, visually, literarily - amazing but admittedly fucking bizarre individual. I've often regretted that I didn't think to try to collaborate with him again in my later years. 

How do you feel about Spike In Vain in 2021? 
I’m super proud of it. It was the most fun I had playing in a band. Wrestling with some of those difficult audiences, going crazy on stage, and making people uncomfortable made me happy and I never had that experience in any other band again. And being in the midst of multiple genres being born was amazing. The vibe was I’m a freak and you’re a freak and we’re all in this together.

Pre-order Death is Relative and Death Drives A Cadillac at Scat Records.

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