NIHILISTIC

The act of capturing audio onto a playable medium has fascinated me since my father – who had a penchant for salvaging cast-offs – lugged home a disc-based recorder. I can no longer visualize the machine (Wilcox-Gay Recordio? Dictaphone? Some other brand?) but recall the blue mylar flexidiscs slipped into a front-facing slot and the attached microphone passed around the dining room table. An evening’s entertainment consisted of the family singing songs, telling jokes, sharing stories and making random noises. The thrill came later with replay of what’d been memorialized and the smiling, laughing and groaning over what you’d committed to posterity.

Soon, a hefty metal Wollensak reel-to-reel recorder stuffed with tubes and central to my burgeoning interest in both rock & roll and guitar (it had a 1/4” input, just right for plugging in and playing along) replaced the disc recorder. THAT eventually made way for a Panasonic “shoebox” cassette recorder (the one I snuck into my first concert, ELP at Nassau Coliseum, inspired by Rerun’s bootlegging of the Doobies). When I could afford one, I bought a Realistic brand portable cassette recorder from the Sunrise Mall Radio Shack. Toting it everywhere, I got in the habit of leveling up whenever recording gear got more compact and sophisticated. Prior to the advent of flash-based recorders (like my Marantz PMD661MKIII and SoundDevices MixPre3), the ne plus ultra for me was a Sony MiniDisc machine. Or series of them. The rise of the MiniDisc format roughly coincided with my time as an Audio Engineer at NPR’s New York Bureau. Whenever NPR’s Engineering Department in Washington, DC decided to replace an earlier generation of MiniDisc machines with the latest, I’d glom a cast-off (thanks, Dad!) for myself. I no longer own any of the portables (should’ve kept one!) but a decade ago I scored a Sony MiniDisc component deck (meant for use with your home stereo) on EBay, to digitize the flotilla of Aerial View MiniDiscs crowding our office shelves. “Digitize” is a misnomer here as it usually means converting an analog format to a digital one. But MiniDiscs are a native digital format, recording zeroes and ones onto an optical disc similar to a CD. What I was actually doing was dubbing digitally in real time into my Mac. As I slowly began to plow through my MiniDisc stash, I wondered if there was a faster way and stumbled on ElectronWMD, a software developed by the MiniDisc community to allow NetMD (an early digital transfer protocol pioneered by Sony) machines to communicate via USB with my Mac. So I went back on EBay and bought a cheap NetMD portable. What once took 74 minutes to dub a SP (Standard Play length recording) in real time now takes 15 minutes with ElectronWMD. Over the past month I’ve made real progress on what is, admittedly, still a fuck-ton of MiniDiscs.

What does all this preamble have to do with the Nihilistics, Chris? is what you’re wondering, right? Well, Aerial View shows weren’t the only MiniDisc recordings I made (and, truthfully, those airchecks weren’t made with any of my machines but the rack-mount recorders at WFMU): I’ve been finding all sorts of field and other recordings, including what’s featured here. First, backstory…

Back in 2002 word got to me via Ron about two NY Thrash cassette 20th Anniversary Reunion shows planned for a June weekend at CBGB. Nihilistics would be on the first night’s bill, along with Adrenalin OD, Even Worse and KRAUT (the 2nd night featured those last two again, plus False Prophets and The Mob. Beastie Boys – also on the NY Thrash cassette – were far too huge by then to show up and I’m not sure why Bad Brains, Heart Attack and The Undead weren’t part). It’d been 13 years since I’d played with the Nihilistics, now consisting of sole original member Ron (singer), Ajax (guitar), Carl (drums) and a bass player whose name is lost to me. Original member and main songwriter Mike Nicolosi was still around but his rocky relationship with Ron was in its off-again phase and who knows what Troy (original drummer) was up to? I hemmed and hawed about taking part in the reunion, eventually deciding What the hell? and getting together for rehearsals in Manhattan. On a MiniDisc recording of a June 19, 2002 rehearsal Ron talks about how difficult it’d become to deal with Mike due to his excessive drinking. The drummer Carl elaborates:

This was my thing: Unpack my drums from my house, put ‘em in my car, bring ‘em to the show, set ‘em up, Mike would get drunk, get into a fight. Unpack my drums, put ‘em back in my car, drive home. I couldn’t take him. I couldn’t take Mike at all. And you know what? He wasn’t too bad when he was straight.

On the rare occasions I’d get on the phone with Mike he’d blame their acrimonious split on Ron’s Svengali act, claiming he’d foolishly succumbed to Ron’s dangling of drugs and women and agreed to indulge their emerging Judas Priest infatuation by backing Ron’s attempt to add a lead guitarist (his brother) to the band, AKA the inciting incident that had me exiting stage left. The truth was somewhere in the middle. Mike was a mean, abusive drunk often in no shape to play come showtime: Ron wanted the band to make money, which meant a more commercial sound. By 1985 I’d had enough and left the band. After being rear-ended by a Checker cab in Long Island City, I took the proceeds ($6,000) from a successful lawsuit against the cab company and moved out of my mother’s house on Lawn Guyland to New Jersey, effectively ending any thought of a return to the Nihilistics.

Soon after I settled in the Garden State I began my radio career at WFMU while also playing guitar, writing songs and releasing records with Missing Foundation. There was no contact with my former bandmates until our ill-fated 1989 reassembling. After that disaster, I gave up on the idea of ever working with Ron, Mike and Troy again. But Ron has always been a good salesman, being charming, shameless and mostly full of shit, and he made a good case for my taking part in the NY Thrash reunion. The current lineup would play four or five numbers, then I’d get up and join them for another four or five. Mostly, the pitch to take part boiled down to It’ll be fun and you’ll get to see some of your old friends. That latter part may have been true but the former? Not so much.

First, I was in the odd position of having to relearn songs I’d help write from the guitarist who replaced me. Second, I’m not sure there was more than one janky rehearsal. Third, it was hot as balls June 21, 2001 and CBGB was not known for its airflow, having never been acquainted with an air conditioner, ventilation system or, hell, box fan in a window. The place was also packed, generating yet more body heat. Fourth, the between-song banter consisted of pimply puerile pubescent “humor” of a stripe Ron had long indulged, as if the only lesson he carried away from “Sex Pistols” was “sex.” Far from being shocking, the constant berating of the audience, requests for blowjobs, casual homophobia and scatological stunts reduced the Nihilistics to a bad joke. Which we never were. When I’ve interviewed contemporaries about the band in its heyday, asking which single word summed us up, they all said the same thing: “Menacing.” We were scary in our intensity and absolute serious in our intent. Other bands and the audience were afraid of us. Not on June 21, 2001, when you can clearly hear someone at CBGB shout Go back to Long Island!

Fuck me.

So how did I end up with this video, the only one to feature me playing with my old band (even if two of them are absent)? Because of MiniDiscs. The other audio I found from the NY Thrash reunion was AOD’s set, also recorded directly from the mixing board and into my Sony MiniDisc recorder. When I dubbed it, I reached out to Paul from AOD, asking if he wanted the audio. He put me in touch with their informal archivist and I asked if he’d swap for any Nihilistics material he had. He offered up the NY Thrash video f…

For 30 years I was involved with legendary New Jersey freeform radio station WFMU, mostly hosting my phone-in talkshow Aerial View (which is still around and can be heard Friday nights, 6 pm Eastern Time, on thehoundnyc.com). I’ve slowly been digitizing hundreds of Aerial View airchecks on cassette, DAT (Digital Audio Tape) and MiniDisc and recently stumbled on the one I’m highlighting here: a conversation with my father, Mario Tsakis (RIP). I’m posting it on NIHILISTIC because there’s a lengthy passage concerning the Nihilistics and what my dad thought of the band and my so-called music career. How I managed to talk my father (below, with me in his antiques store “Memories” circa 1987) into joining me on air is lost to time but he was, apparently, game and hung in there for almost the entire show. I’d love to tell you we had the type of cordial father/son relationship you hear on this aircheck but I’d be lying. I’ve written about “My Old Man” (that’s the title of this show because he hated that phrase, BTW) here previously but a refresher: he was more-or-less absent from my life even before my parents divorced when I was 11 or 12. After that, I rarely saw him. He also gave off a near-constant whiff of disapproval, unable or unwilling to accept me as I was (fat, flailing, lost until I discovered guitar). “Unconditional Love” was not a concept he endorsed. Though we reconciled in later years, due to my outreach, it wasn’t to last. When he died, suddenly, of a heart attack, we were not on speaking terms. We’d fallen out a year earlier when he called to yell and scream at me about supposedly tricking him into giving my wife and I wedding gift money to add to a down payment on our house. Ultimately, he’d sent half of what he promised, then–in a move that left us stunned–tried to claw back even that from the grave, claiming it was a “loan.” If my sister hadn’t been executrix of his will we might’ve been forced to pay back his estate. Of the many ingredients that led to my playing hardcore, my dad and our terrible relationship was paramount.

Pictured above is my Dubbing Station, placed in our small home office within arm’s length of the massive tanker desk I picked up years ago cheap. While working on one project or another I’ll often multitask by digitizing a few of the cassettes, minidiscs and DATs stashed on shelves and in metal cabinets nearby. The audio is sent out of a Denon cassette deck, Sony MiniDisc machine or Marantz Portable DAT machine into a Sound Devices USBPre2. Then the zeroes and ones travel via USB to Audio Hijack on our iMac, with final editing and cleanup done on Adobe Audition. I’ve been trying to reduce the approximately metric ton of physical media I’ve accumulated over the decades but it’s a slog, leavened only by the occasional discovery of something I didn’t know I had. Like this 1989 Nihilistics rehearsal. I’ve written about my last gasp with the original lineup: we got back together in 1989 and recorded five songs for a new LP before Mike reverted to form and became a mean drunk. This is another rehearsal from that same time-frame. I’ll apologize in advance for the shitty PA causing the vocals to get lost under a layer of sludge. Songs include:

* Working Class

* Just For Me

* My Creed

* Misanthrope

* Pal O’Mine

* Fate

* Antisocial

* Poor Show

* Mister 9 to 5

* My Life

* Black Sheep

There’s a whole bunch more Nihilistics audio to be discovered in my stash, so stick with me as they’re unearthed. And if you haven’t yet, sign up for my OTHER newsletter, See You Next Tue!

Hey Chris, 

Greatly enjoy your tales of the Nihilistic’s and the trials and tribulations of a working band and your ultimate escape from L.I. Anyway, like many dozens of disaffected L.I. suburbanites back in the day, I was a Nihilistics fan. Anyway, I would occasionally bring my Walkman to shows and record, which leads to the point of this email. I recorded your missing video show from My Fathers Place, quality of the recording is not half bad, not board feed of course, but very listenable. A digital copy is available to you if you have an interest. 

Further, I also have a very short but interesting tale of a random interaction with Mike in 1984. You want to hear?

Let me know 

Mike Smollen

Back on March 12, 2021 on my show Aerial View I interviewed legendary music journalist (The Big Takeover), musician (Even Worse) and friend Jack Rabid. I’m repurposing the show here as a NIHILISTIC Pod because I can!

On August 18 of this year I visited my long-time friend Jeff Maschi at his place in Milltown, NJ (that’s us, above) and recorded this conversation. Jeff spills on any number of Nihilistic-adjacent topics. Salute!

The first NIHILISTIC Pod included audio of a call to a friend to tell him about Mike Nicolosi threatening my life over the phone. This was on the heels of Mike trying to choke me to death circa 1999 or 2000. I just found ANOTHER call to ANOTHER friend covering the same territory. Listen and shudder.

This NIHILISTIC Pod features an interview first heard on my talk show Aerial View March 19, 2021. Tony Rettman, author of NYHC: New York Hardcore 1980 – 1990, was my guest and I turned the tables on him. Tony had interviewed me at length for the book (there’s an entire chapter on the Nihilistics) and now it was his turn in the hot seat. We cover a wide range of subjects, so enjoy.

Note: I’m using Substack’s new automated transcript feature for the first time. Let me know what you think.

This NIHILISTIC Pod features edited audio from an episode of my talk show Aerial View titled Reminiscing. Originally heard over WFMU-FM in 1991 (and not since because the air check runs forty-five minutes and Aerial View is sixty minutes long), it’s the first time I discussed the Nihilistics publicly since the disastrous 1989 “reunion”. Listen for a phone call from Terre T. of Cherry Blossom Clinic fame.

The part that sticks in my mind more than any other is this: we're crawling over the Manhattan bridge, on the outer roadway, there's a light drizle and I'm looking at the buildings far below, wondering "Who the hell lives in there?" I remember feeling under the weather, a cold coming on, and wishing the damn gig was already behind me. It was November 11, 1984 and The Nihilistics were due at CBGB – pictured above, Mike Nicolosi (RIP) on Red Hagstrom Bass, me on “Debbie Gibson” and wearing a blonde wig (don’t ask) – for yet another of our Sunday matinee shows. We seemed to play one every month. Today we'd be headlining, with SS Decontrol, Gang Green and a few others supporting. I sat in the back, on the passenger side, glumly staring out the window, wondering if Mike was really prepared to go through with the newly-announced plan to add Ron's brother on lead guitar. I had nothing him but wondered why I was being asked to split guitar duties at this point in our history. Mike didn't really talk to me all the way into the city. I could tell he was still pissed at me for telling him I wasn't interested in playing second banana. I had always pictured the Nihilistics as a foursome and thought we were just fine the way things were. I forget who else was in Mike's Buick. Was it Al and Abby in the backseat with me? And who was that in front, alongside Mike? Sandy? Wendy? Christine?

Soon enough we were maing the right turn on Bowery and after a few more minutes were double-parked in front of CB's. The Nihilistics had come far from our start in my mother's basement. We were surrounded by well-wishers and fans, eager to help us unload our gear. Mike loved the attention, and loved playng to the crowd. No matter how angry I got with him I always admired his sense of humor and his ability to write great songs. And CBs was always my favorite place to play for many reasons: its history, the dressing rooms with all the graffiti on the walls, the great sound system, the wild scene out front, the easy parking nearby and the fact that no one from the club interfered. You came in, you sound-checked, you waited your turn, you played and you got paid. That was that. No one pulled any shit on you, no one got in your face or said “You can’t do that.” We were generally treated as adults and it was expected we wouldn’t shit where we eat. And we didn’t. The Nihilistics may have encouraged some mindless violence in our day but we never fucked with Hilly or CB’s.

Which brings me back to November 11 and our final CB’s show. The Nihilistics, as a band, didn’t believe in much and we certainly didn’t buy into the agenda the bands from Boston were pushing. To us, they were stupid “party bands” there to “rock the house” and have a good time. Our agenda was more complex: we were looking to spread some truth (or what we felt was truth) and provide a catharsis through our brutal, dark music. And on my agenda was this item: don’t break any strings (I rarely, if ever, had a back-up guitar). When it came time for us to go on, Mike could barely contain his rage at the bands from Boston. He put on a "stoner asshole" accent and mocked their skateboarding and desire to get laid. He also made reference to it being the end of the Nihilistics, addressing one of our biggest fans, Steve Manny, upfront in the crowd. That’s also future Sheer Terror frontman Paul Bearer’s voice just before Touch Me, doing the bit about Dustin Hoffman.

I don't remember if we played any shows after that one but within two years I was living in New Jersey and the Nihilistics carried on without me, something I hadn't imagined and found hard to believe. But being in the band changed me fundamentally. If I look closely I can find a thread running back to that first time in my mother's basement, banging out songs with Mike, seeking a reaction, trying to be heard. I'm still trying.

Here’s the track listing:

* My Creed

* Pal O Mine

* Mr 9 to 5

* Badge of Shame

* Touch Me

* Youre To Blame

* Low Life

* Working Class

* Death And Taxes

* The Truth

* Combat Stance

* Fate

* Big Fun

* Poor Show

* Anti Social (Restarted after it falls apart)

* Hang Out

See a contemporaneous review of the show in Wendy Eager’s fanzine Guillotine (page 13) at the Internet Archive. And remember: Tell your friends, enemies and frenemies to subscribe and spread the word.