The compilation We Were Living in Cincinnati: Punk and Underground Sounds from Ohio’s Queen City (1975-1982), released in 2019, broke open a window to a technicolor mosaic of wild expression coming from the underground in the city’s small but thriving creative communities and punk scene at the forefront of a new sound.
A second edition, We Were Living in Cincinnati Vol. 2: Punk and Underground Sounds from Ohio’s Queen City (1982-1988) was released over the summer, again compiled by musician, writer and former Cincinnatian Peter Aaron. It was released by respected Chicago label HoZac Records and Cincinnati’s own Shake It Records as part of the label’s Music from Ohio series. The second installment continues the nearly cultural anthropology-like study, digging into the next decade of the freewheeling, expressive mutations of rock and roll from the minds of Cincinnati’s underground.
Though the city is known for things like the legacy of King Records, Iggy Pop’s performance at the 1970 Pop Festival with The Stooges, and a handful of bands like the Afghan Whigs and The Greenhornes, and for good reason, Aaron’s compilations focus is on a lesser-known part of the Queen City’s music history, bringing attention to the wildly expressive and varied music produced in the early years of Cincinnati’s still thriving underground music scene.
Like the first volume, the 19 tracks on Vol. 2 — along with 27 bonus tracks — come from rare cassettes and vinyl records originally released in small runs decades ago, as well as from demos and material sourced from the locals who made it. Collected by Aaron, the set presents a record of a culture as inventive as anything on sought-after collections like Soul Jazz Records’ Punk 45 series or the garage and psychedelic rock compilations, Nuggets.
Aaron became a part of that culture after arriving in Cincinnati as a teenager in the early ‘80s, soon finding his way into that world, hosting radio shows on local stations like WAIF and booking for venues like the legendary Jockey Club, Bogart’s and Murphy’s Pub, where he would book early appearances by bands like Nirvana and The Flaming Lips (who mentioned Aaron in a recent CityBeat interview). He also became the lead singer of influential Cincinnati/New York garage punk band The Chrome Cranks.
Now based in upstate New York, Aaron works as a writer and editor, DJs at local clubs and hosts the exploratory radio show Go Go Kitty on Radio Kingston between making music. With the We Were Living in Cincinnati collections, he’s exploring both his roots and the city’s punk past — and CityBeat caught up with him to talk about the new release.
CityBeat: This volume picks up around the time you moved to Cincinnati as a kid — what brought you to town and what were your impressions?
Peter Aaron: My family moved from Morris County, New Jersey, to Cincinnati in the summer of 1982, right before my senior year of high school. My dad had taken a new job at Campbell Hausfeld, a company in Harrison that makes air compressors, and my folks bought a newly-built house in Montgomery. Moving at that age is tough for most kids; that’s the time when you’re really beginning to figure out who you are and find your feet, with the big finale of high school graduation looming. I’d gotten into punk a few years earlier and, being a short bus ride away from Manhattan, was just beginning to find my way around America’s most famous mecca. Plus, I was in my first band, and we were beginning to play out and make our name on the early New Jersey/New York hardcore scene. So to be ripped away from all of that right at that time was jarring. But my dad had already started at Campbell Hausfeld before we moved, and he’d been going back and forth from New Jersey to Ohio for a few months before we actually moved, and, at one point, the rest of the family came out to visit him. He gave us a tour of Cincinnati, which included a stop at Short Vine, where we had dinner. After we ate, we walked around a bit, and we passed by Bogart’s, which was then still undergoing its 1980-1982 renovation, and Mole’s Records. Mole’s was closed for the night, but there were fliers in the windows for gigs: “Hardcore! Skank and slam with the Repellents at the Brew House!” All of a sudden, I felt a sense of calm, that things for me were going to be okay. I also picked up copies of local fanzine Obzene and WAIF’s monthly paper/programming guide, where I learned about “Handsome” Clem Carpenter’s hardcore show, “Search and Destroy,” and the station’s other punk/alternative shows.
CB: What was your experience in the Cincinnati music scene?
PA: The first local gig I went to was a WAIF benefit that summer at the station’s original studio at the Hotel Alms. AK-47 (with Jughead and Peter Sturdevant and Martin O’Connor, later of SS-20) and the Rituals (with Walter Hodge and Jimmy Davidson, later of the Libertines) played, and Bill “Billy Blank” Leist (of the Reduced and the eventual booking magnate of the Jockey Club) was selling beer from a keg. So I met a bunch of people there and was already listening to WAIF. Then I went to my first Brew House show, Toxic Reasons with Dream 286 opening up (I was still underage, so I went really early and kind of snuck in). And then Bill and his crew started booking the Jockey Club, so that became the center of everything and I just started meeting more people from there, widening the circle more and more. A large part of my outlook on life was shaped during that amazing time, in that amazing scene; I forged so many strong, tight friendships that I still have and treasure. I doubt that I would have had anything like this happen had I stayed in what was a bedroom community of New York City. Would I even still be into punk, or music and art in general? I like to think so, but it’s hard to say. But from what I can tell, more of my old friends in Jersey have moved on and took their places in the straight world. Like I often say, being a punk in Cincinnati meant more than it did if you were a punk in the New York Metro area. Being in Cincinnati, you weren’t able to easily escape suburbia and safely settle in the Big Smoke of the punk epicenter of New York, where there were already thousands of people who shared your sensibilities. In Cincinnati, you had to be all-in. You had to make your own fun. There was some occasional drama, like there is with any social scene, but I think that we all understood that as comrades, we really had to stick together. When I eventually got into booking local clubs and doing radio shows myself, on WAIF and WVXU, I already knew many of the people I would work with in those environments. So overall the experience was amazing, and I feel so blessed to have had it — and that, in a way, it’s still going on.
CB: You mention in the liner notes for the record that the idea for a compilation was brought up in a conversation years ago at Highland Coffee House.
PA: Well, sort of. I can’t remember which came first, to be honest. I definitely remember talking to Tim Schwallie of B.P.A. and the Wolverton Brothers once when he was working at the Highland and we were listening to a tape he had of some of the bands that were on the Nuggets album, and the idea of there someday being albums of the underground bands of our generation popped into my head. I asked Tim if he thought that might ever happen, and he said, “Sure, yeah, that’s what we’re doing this for.” This was before the whole alternative rock breakthrough with Nirvana and all of that happened, so by that Tim was saying that no one in any of these bands then had any expectations of actually making money from their art; they just wanted to be able to leave something behind. That was the most any of them could conceive of aspiring to. Breaking through to the mainstream wasn’t even a consideration, so the only hope was that at least people in the outside world, as it were, might find out about their existence years after the fact, when the history books, aka a new series of Nuggets-style compilations that rounded up and contextualized tracks by these then-contemporary bands, arrived. After that conversation, whenever I saw the Wolvertons play and they were about to do “Love City” (from their 1985 debut single), Tim would introduce the song as being on a future volume of Nuggets and give me a wink. But, really, I was thinking of a series with more of a national angle than a regionally specific one, kind of like what happened with the Killed By Death comps of early punk, which would start coming out a little after I’d had that talk with Tim.
CB: How did this project begin and when did you decide to start documenting Cincinnati’s punk history?
PA: I think I’d had the idea for a cassette of early Cincinnati punk stuff before then, mostly because I’d wanted to hear the bands that I’d missed out on by being a newcomer. That’s why I started tracking down the Customs, the Ed Davis Band, and Dennis the Menace singles and hitting up folks like Doug Hallett for tapes of the Dents and the guys in the Hospital Records bands for their older stuff. But, eventually, I just got really busy with booking shows and doing my radio shows, and then I moved to New York to do the Chrome Cranks as a more serious thing, so the whole idea got shelved for a long time.
CB: Who else was involved?
PA: The We Were Living in Cincinnati series came about of my own volition. It really seemed like no one else was going to do something like this, which I feel is something important, if I didn’t do it. Not long after I’d worked with HoZac Records on reissuing the first Chrome Cranks album in 2014, I was conversing on Facebook with HoZac chief Todd Novak about early Cincinnati punk obscurities and he asked if I’d be into putting together a comp of that stuff for the label. Of course, I said hell yes, that would be a dream come true, and things took off from there.
CB: How did Shake It Records and Cincinnati musicians help the project?
PA: Not long after I had begun reaching out to ex-band members about the project to gather material, James Cole from the Customs told me that Darren Blase from Shake It Records had been talking about doing something similar by putting together a Bloodstains Across Cincinnati comp for the bootleg Bloodstains series. He and I talked and I think he felt like the concept was in good hands with me and he liked the way I planned to contextualize things. And it worked out great because we were able to collaborate on it and make the comps joint releases by Hozac and Shake It, as part of the latter’s Music from Ohio series. Finding Doug Hallett’s “Cincy Wave Family Tree” in one of those early issues of Obzene when I first moved to town in 1982 was key, though. It let me know that there was this whole deep, secret history of punk/new wave that had already been going on locally and it connected me to so many of the progenitors by name. The insights of my musicological mentor Uncle Dave Lewis (Cointelpro, 11,000 Switches, Manwich, etc., etc.) have been indispensable. If anyone in Cincinnati punk—or Cincinnati music, period—deserves a monument, it’s David. Time does nothing if not reveal how important he has been to the scene as a whole, how advanced his own music and musical curation has been, and how inspirational a font of musical knowledge he continues to be. And, of course, the bands, who have been generous with lending their tracks and forthcoming with rare ephemera for the graphics, deserve the overriding credit for making the music in the first place.
CB: Both releases feel incredibly thorough — with an introductory essay, track-by-track liner notes that add history and context, original cover art, vintage flyers and photos, even a kind of “family tree” of the scene’s musicians, plus a full album’s worth of downloadable bonus songs. It’s a lot of material that makes for a truly comprehensive document of the era — could you talk about how you pulled all of that together?
PA: Thanks. We really tried to put together good packages. On the production side of things, I worked closely with Todd from HoZac and Darren from Shake It, and with Dave Eck from Lucky Mastering in Washington state and graphic designer Andrew Nelson in my current hometown of Kingston, New York. I got into the whole idea simply because I wanted to know more about the bands that appear on the first volume, and with the second volume, it was a matter of my being around when that era was happening and feeling like I had a reasonable grip on being able to tell that particular story. Big thanks to Doug Hallett for the use of his first-wave band family tree for volume 1 and the new family trees that he put together for volume 2 (the insert with the second volume has a chart that focuses on the bands that appear on the vinyl release, while the download package contains an expanded version).
CB: Did you plan to have a second volume from the start and will there be future installments?
PA: My first thought was to maybe do a double album that included the tracks on volume 1 and its bonus downloads and some that appear on volume 2, but HoZac suggested trying two volumes, which I agreed was a better idea — and that seems to have been the case. We’ll see how it goes, I guess, but, yes, I would like to do at least one more volume. This one would fold back to the era covered during volume 1. There’s some really cool, obscure material from that period that has come to light in the wake of WWLIC Vol. 1‘s release and I’d like to chronicle that stuff. That’s the period that I find most fascinating, and it’s the one that’s least documented, so I feel like it would be great to cover it. Punk rock (and its variations) is the folk music of our time, important stuff that needs to be enshrined in the system of knowledge. I love being able to put something out into the world that says, “Hey, you most likely missed it, but this is what was happening in our town. This is what we did. Check it out and see how it compares to what you were doing where you lived. And see how it led to what we’re all doing now.” For the post-1982-1988 timespan of volume 2, there’s already Ricky Adams’s Pay No Attention double album of 1990s local punk, and I believe he’s planning another volume of that series, so I feel like the more recent period is already getting good coverage.
CB: How do you feel about the music scene in the city today?
PA: Every time I come back to Cincinnati to visit, I’m blown away by how great and healthy the music scene is there now. Cincinnati will always be my real hometown and I miss it. The scene was modest but great in the 1970s and ’80s, given its size and remoteness, and the scenesters did a truly heroic job of working with what they had to work with. The infrastructure of the music scene there today is the envy of many cities twice the size of Cincinnati. It’s robust and full of great bands and home to so many incredible music venues, record stores and other amenities. But some people may not realize the degree to which that infrastructure is built on the scenes that lived and thrived right there in the ’70s and ’80s. A big part of what I hope for with the We Were Living in Cincinnati series is that those people find out about what came before them and are inspired by it enough to take the collective spirit of the Queen City’s punk pioneers into their own lives and art.
We Were Living in Cincinnati Vol. 2: Punk and Underground Sounds from Ohio’s Queen City (1982-1988) is available now online through HoZac Records, Shake It Records and at local record stores.