It all started a long time ago...
Ed Gein died on July 26, 1984. To commemorate the great loss to society I took a white t-shirt and a black Sharpie(tm) and inscribed the words "Ed Gein Fan Club" on the front. I wore that shirt everywhere.
At school one day a friend asked me if that was my band.
"Yeah, of course it is!" I replied. I had thought about putting together a band at some point, and thanks to this forgotten friend I decided to dub it "The Ed Gein Fan Club".
All I needed were some songs, some people to play the songs, and a place to rehearse said songs.
No problem...
I started dating Emma Rotgut, and one of the things she told me on our first date (seeing the Dead Kennedys, which she slept thru) was that she kinda played bass. The next day I gave her my bass and told her she was in my band.
I called up an ex-girlfriend, An(gie) Archy because she bashed out noise on her step-dad's drum kit. I told her she was now the drummer in my band. She said "cool, we can practice in my basement". I said "cool".
Then I called up an old friend from Jr. High who went by the name of Nails Johnson. He had a guitar and an amp. I told him he was in my band and to meet at An Archy's house the next Saturday.
"Cool", he said.
We had out first practice and it sucked.
None of us knew how to play at all, except An(gie) who kind of knew how to keep a slow beat on the skins. After 6 hours of bashing out an excruciatingly slow version of Black Flag's version of "Louie Louie" we called it a day.
And made plans to get together the next weekend.
We were'nt any better the next weekend, but we did write our first original song after An(gie) started playing some fucked up surfer beat and Nails faked his way thru a chord progression that was nothing more than "Wipeout" played backwards. Emma followed Nails' guitar line and I spewed out a tale of an afternoon spent at the beach, and all of the wonders to be seen there. Camel Toe, dead fish, big tits, white foamy shit at the shoreline. With the genius and originality that was the Ed Gein Fan Club we decided to call this song "The Beach Song".
Emma and I had been telling (badgering) Randy Elvis from No Life Music about the band. He was our first fan without ever hearing us. He gave us the encouragement to keep working at it to get the band off the ground.
He wouldn't have been so kind if he had actually heard what we sounded like!
At the next practice, our 3rd, we wrote another song (which I can't remember right now, I'll have to dig thru the vast Plainfield Archives(tm) to see if I can come up with the song), played The Beach Song about 47 times, and our old standard Louie x2. Nails had brought along a friend of his, and if I remember correctly this guy jammed with us as well.
We had the bright idea of calling up Randy Elvis on the phone and giving him a private performance of his favorite band. I dialed the number for No Life and got him on the line. I hit record on the boombox we were recording with (we recorded several of these early rehearsals for the good of mankind) and An(gie) counted off. We launched into our 3 song set. When we were done I grabbed the receiver only to head a dial tone.
I knew Randy Elvis would be sorely disappointed when he finally heard us... (he used the excuse that he was really busy at work and didn't have the time to listen to us)
The next day Nails called me up and said he was retiring from the rock and roll lifestyle, it was just too intense for him.
The ED GEIN FAN CLUB was far from over. In fact this was the first of what was to become an on-going scenario within the band, that of replacing members who lost the vision, the faith, the drive to be in the only REAL punk band in Minneapolis.
I think
After X-mas break Emma cornered me in the lunch room at school and said that there was some new mohawk kid in her class. She talked to this new kid Tom, and he claimed to play guitar. She told him of our search for a guitar player and he agreed to come down to jam with us.
Tom met us at An Archy's house the next weekend sporting a brand new Les Paul and Fender Twin Reverb. "Rich fag" I thought to myself, but who cared, the Ed Gein Fan Club was back on track. Tom also taught us the Eddie Cochran/Sid Vicious opus "C'Mon Everybody", which was immediately added to the growing repertoire.
At one of these rehearsals we recorded our first release, "The Ed Gein Fan Club: Music For Killing Children". C'Mon Everybody was on side A, complete with sound effects of orchestras warming up and a chainsaw, and uproarious applause at the end of the song, The B-side contained "The Beach Song" and our version of Black Flag's version of The Kingsmen's version of Richard Berry's "Louie Louie"
12 copies were made at an exact cost of nothing (I simply recorded over some old data tapes my dad had sitting next to his computer and I ran the sleeves off on the photocopier at the place I was working), and sold for $2.00 each exclusively to NON-punk rockers. Why the fuck did we want to preach to the converted? The only exception was our old friend Randy Elvis.
Randy did us good by listing it in his Top Ten for the month in the No Life Newsletter. So did Ryan, the manager of the store. Then Randy did us a better solid by listing it in his Best Of The Year list, just ahead of Iron Fist's Crucify Me tape!
Tom lasted 3 or 4 rehearsals, when he realized that his ideas about Punk Rock were vastly different from my ideas about punk rock. He then got An(gie) smoking pot and dropping acid (HIPPY drugs!) with a little bit of bed-bobbing in there as well, thus creating a rift within the ranks of the Fan Club.
In what was to become the norm rather than the exception, I had to replace the guitar player and the drummer.
I decided to follow the Punk Rock credo...
that of "D.I.M.", or Do It Myself. In the spring of 1985 (2 months after Tom and An(gie) bailed on me and my rock and roll dream) I took a crash course in electric guitar at the local Schimtt Music Center. If I couldn't keep a guitar player I'd learn the fuckin' thing myself!
I learned how to play a power chord and a pentatonic scale. That's all that was needed for punk rock so I was ready to rock out with my cock out.
Whilst this was going on Emma and I had told her brother, Fatt Matt, about needing a drummer. Jokingly he stated that if we got him a drum kit he'd play. He had never even touched a pair of drumsticks in his life, but this was punk rock, you didn't need to know how to play.
We scrounged up a drum kit the next day.
The only problem with this proposed line-up was that I couldn't sing and play guitar at the same time. This was rectified with the recruitment of Yermom as the new singer. Yermom had played drums in various metal bands. Yermom assumed that we were gonna have Yermom play drums, but I told Yermom that we already had a drummer. We kept Fatt Matt hitting things even though Yermom was a much better beater. Because I was no longer singing, I decided that this would NOT be called The Ed Gein Fan Club. With the newly-christianed line up, Snotty and the Boogars, we stormed into my parent's garage and proceeded to piss off all the neighbors by writing a new song. Since it was the first song that I wrote on guitar, the first song that Yermom sang, and the first song of Snotty and the Boogars, Yermom named it "The First Song".
Snotty and the Boogars lasted 3 rehearsals. I kicked Yermom out after Yermom missed a practice because Yermom was sleeping.
I was still taking the shitty money-grubbing Schmitt guitar rip-off lessons, and there I met not one but two new guitar players...
Sex Pistols and Clash fans Otto and Hugo Chevelesky.
THE ED GEIN FAN CLUB WAS NOW
almost a force to be reckoned with. I had talked Otto (or was it Hugo? I could never remember who was who) into coming down to a rehearsal in my garage, and he brought Hugo (see above aside) with him. Otto didn't want to join the band but Hugo did, so we rocked out on The Beach Song, The First Song, Louie Louie, C'Mon Everybody, and a new song I had written about some fake friends of mine called "Y.F.S." or "You Fucking Slut".
After a hard afternoon's rocking the other Chevelesky couldn't hold back any more. The next practice saw both Otto and Hugo holding rock sticks.
The neighbors, all of whom had it in for me, complained to my folks that their dogs were going deaf and that we needed to find another place to rock. Otto came to the rescue, saying that his mom owned an abandoned house that for some reason still had the electricity hooked up to it. No heat, but juice at least. It was mid-February in Minnesota, where the high temp of the day was a balmy -4 below. We got to the house after a tumultuous bus ride and loaded all our gear into the living room of the empty house. Fatt Matt checked the flue of the fireplace, deemed it somewhat safe, and proceeded to bust up cupboards and doors to stoke a fire. Soon we had a roaring blaze going and the rock was flowing.
Whilst at "The Ol' Gein Farm" as we named the house (well, actually I just named it that right now) we worked on new songs like "Pig Fucker", "No More Wheels", "Hey Headbanger" as well as covers of "The Great Rock and Roll Swindle" by the Sex Pistols, and the Clash-ified version of "I Fought The Law". We still sucked to Jah's high heaven, sloppy as shit, slow as hell, but that was the idea in the back of my head, even though I hadn't realized it yet. I wanted the Ed Gein Fan Club to be the ultimate punk band, the idea that ANYONE can do it, all you need is the balls to actually DO IT. It was the idea of attitude over ability. Who cared if you couldn't tune your guitar? If you had the guts to get up on a stage then that's all that mattered. It's something that I still fervently believe in to this day.
The Ol' Gein Farm lasted about 2 months, then we were booted out and the Man took it over and turned it into a HUD home. Once again the search was on for a suitable home for my rock and roll dreams. Finally Emma and Fatt Matt's folks said we could use their basement when they weren't around so the gear was moved once again.
By now it was November of 1985. We still sucked musically, but with some fine-tuned finagling I got us our first gig. It was gonna be at someone's house for Yermom's 19th birthday. Only problem was that in the past few months The Ed Gein Fan Club had somehow made a few enemies. Maybe it was my loud mouth that got us in trouble, maybe it was the name of the band, or the fact that I was proclaiming to all within ear shot that The Ed Gein Fan Club was the best fucking band ever and every other band ever created sucked ass in our presence. Because of this, The Ed Gein Fan Club's debut to the world was actually played under the name The Cheveleski Fun Time Family Show Band to avoid getting our asses kicked by those who hadn't seen the Fan Club light.
Before we played Yermom had the bright idea of taping the set for it's historical value, which I must admit was a brilliant idea. However, Yermom is such a fucking moron that Yermom placed the boombox right under the snare drum. You can kind of hear what's going on, but mostly all you hear is snare.
Now, keep in mind that Emma and I were strictly sober people. We were NOT straight-edge, as we didn't preach it, but we made damn sure to avoid drunks and rope heads. We thought them all to be stupid sub-human slime. Fatt Matt and the Chevaleskis were know to pop a beer once in a great while, but were far from being drunk at any point in this great story.
We played all of the songs we knew (except for The Beach Song, which Fatt Matt couldn't play): No More Wheels, Pig Fucker, Y.F.S., the Great Rock and Roll Swindle, I Fought The Law, the Batman Theme, C'Mon Everybody, and probably a few more that will remain nameless.
GODDAMN DID WE SUCK!!!!!!!!!!
But it was beautiful! The fucking drunk-ass headbangers and stoned hippy dirtbags that were assembled didn't have any idea what was hitting them. Insults were hurled to and from the "stage", we ran thru our set and high-tailed it out of there after telling everyone to fuck off and that they were fucking morons.
With the world now exposed to The ED GEIN FAN CLUB
we decided that it was time to preserve our unique take on rock and roll by recording a demo/record.
We booked 3 hours into a studio that was owned by a friend of some old hippie I knew. It was to be on my 18th birthday (for all you rock geeks out there it was the same day that Phil Lynott died - coincidence? I think not!) We had saved about $200 to pay for the session and we were hoping to record and mix as many songs as time and our meager savings permitted. We all showed up at the studio door and waited for the hippie's friend to show up.
Then we waited some more.
After 3 hours in the freezing winter weather we all said "fuck it" and went home.
So much for recording our genius for posterity. Fucking hippies. And people wonder why I hate them?!?
At school the next week I was talking to a friend of mine who worked the stage crew. He said that we were welcome to come in after school and record live to the 2 track reel to reel they had backstage. We brought our gear in on the appointed day and ran thru a couple songs to get the levels right. Luckily tape was rolling for these tests, as when we went to record the first "real" song, Y.F.S, the teacher who was in charge of the stage area heard the lyrics and promptly kicked us out, saying that he couldn't believe that we thought we could get away with "that filth" on school property!
Around this same time there was another cat in a few of my classes who was starting out as a rapper. His hip-hop name was Kid Delight and we would spend valuable class time discussing the pros and cons of Sure SM58 microphones and Peavey vs. Crate PA speakers. A few years later Kid Delight gained fame as MC Skat Kat from the Paula Abdul song "Opposites Attract".
The rest of the school year was spent rehearsing at various locations that would agree to let us practice, that is until they actually HEARD us, then their offers were politely rescinded.
In the summer Emma and I graduated and moved to St. Cloud so I could go to school. Far from it being the end of The Ed Gein Fan Club, I deputized a friend, Squeaky, to take my place.
Emma and I lived in St Cloud for 3 weeks. Whilst there I don't think the Ollie-less Fan Club ever practiced.
When Emma and I moved back I immediately reasserted my position in the band, but with a slight line-up change. Emma was now singing and I was playing bass. We thrashed thru our meager set, and set up a time to rent a 4 track cassette machine. We recorded a tape's worth of joyful noise at Pete's Bunker, a buddy's basement when his folks left for the weekend. They made him promise not to have a party, they didn't say anything about recording an album!
After the Pete's Bunker tape was recorded the band fell apart. Otto, Hugo, and Fatt Matt all had to go back to school, Emma decided she wanted to fuck someone other than me, and I joined another band.
I WAS SICK and tired of relying on other people to make my rock and roll dreams come true. Three years and 7 members later and I had almost nothing to show for it.
I took a year off from music to try to reformulate my attack. As 1987 turned into 1988 I joined an established punk rock band called Iron Fist. That lasted until 1990 when I quit.
I got a job driving a courier van. I drove the van for 3 years until I got laid off. Thanks to the great state of Minnesota I was able to turn that lay-off into 2 years re-training at a local vo-tech school. I dove head first into the video class I was taking thanks to our liberal government, but something was still missing. I just couldn't quite put my finger on it.
Fed up with rock and roll but still wanting to annoy people from a stage, I decided to start a noise band with myself and 3 guitars. No strings on 2 of the guitars, just feedback. A show was set up for this under the name Clinical Psychosis. A week before showtime 2 people decided to take over the band and turn it into a crappy disco goth band.
I was well-pissed off by this and decided that the ghost of Ollie Stench needed to be resurrected.
I started prowling the bowels of the city looking for the right members for the new version of the Ed Gein Fan Club. To give it a bit more priority, a gig was set up in the Seventh Street Entry for January 1991.
The first recruit was one-time member Yermom. Yermom was found drunk in a corner somewhere, and after Yermom was given a shower and a pint of Night Train Yermom was forced to bash skins. The Ed Gein Fan Club finally had something we had always been lacking; a real drummer. To be fair, both An(gie) Archy and Fatt Matt had progressed quite far from their humble beginnings in The Fan Club, but neither could be considered virtuosos.
Johnny Dirtbag was next. No one knows where he came from, some say a Cuban refugee. Doesn't matter as Johnny Dirtbag barely rates in the story.
Skippy Friendly was the last person to be roped into the fold. Skippy was a closet record label guy who harbored secret fantasies of rock stardom. I gave him my bass a week before the show. It was the first time he had ever touched an instrument. 3 days before the gig I asked Skippy if he had been practicing at all. "No, but I've been jumping around with it a lot" was his reply. "Great, I knew you were the right man for the job".
Now remember here, that the idea of the Ed Gein Fan Club was that ANYBODY could do it REGARDLESS of talent, or lack thereof. We practiced thrice for the show in the basement of a local record store. We were to blow people's minds with the dulcet strains of YFS (You fucking Slut), Hey Headbanger, an improved noise jam called Turston Moore is a Closet Homosexual, the Peter Gunn Theme, and Fuck The 60's.
The show went off without a hitch, aside from Johnny Dirtbag not wanting to show up. After I bitched the little fucker out for 45 minutes on the phone he was at the club 15 minutes later.
We rocked hard, alienating about 70% of the audience, the remaining 30% understanding completely where we were coming from. A drunk and stoned hippy even got up on stage after YFS to sing with us. He had never seen us before, nor we him, but in the true spirit of the EGFC we gave him his 3 minutes of fame. We also got many compliments from the headlining band, some out-of-town pop punk ensemble with some kind of pedigree.
Then the band all quit on me, like so many times before.
And as usual the night didn't end quietly. After loading our gear into the back of my 1981 Dodge Omni hatchback my girlfriend at the time, Polly Purebread, and I got stuck behind a taxi cab that just sat there for 3 turns of the stoplight. When the light turned green for the fourth time I laid on the horn. The cab didn't move and the light turned red again. Upon the fifth change from red to green I laid on the horn again, whipped around the cab and flipped the driver off. He immediately gave chase and I spent the next 20 minutes trying to ditch an irate cabbie.
The chase finally ended with me pulling into the parking lot of a police station with Polly Purebread screaming at me for being such a dumbshit. The cab was right behind us and the driver followed me in to the precinct office. The cabbie was yelling the entire time while I calmly and collectively told my side of the story. Both our licenses were checked out and I was sent home. The cabbie was sent to jail for operating a cab with an expired license.
And then Ollie Stench met 2 people who were sent to resurrect the smoldering corpse of the Ed Gein Fan Club.
In 1996 I was introduced to bass playing Muncie refugee Ian Rans. I made Ian have a religious convergence and renamed him John 3:16. John 3:16 was 10 years younger than me, but he fully understood the concept of the band. With his constant urging I began the search for a drummer and a guitar player. I was playing guitar myself, but I wanted another one to fill out the sound.
A few weeks later I was eating a late-night dinner in a greasy Mexi joint when I heard one of the waitresses yelling at the cook. The cook came out and sat down with me. I had never seen him before, but when he told me his name was Johnny Dirtbag Jr. I knew the Gods of Punk were smiling up at me. I asked if he happened to play guitar, to which he replied "I wouldn't be Johnny Dirtbag Jr. if I didn't play guitar, would I?"
How could I argue with that logic?
Now we only needed a drummer.
Unfortunately it was Yermom who showed up.
I got us a gig in someone's basement for a Friday in February 1997. It was billed as the "13th Anniversary Show". With a date for the gig set I decided that it might be time to show the new guys the old tunes. In true Fan Club form, though, our schedules never matched up, and the 3 rehearsals we had were never attended by all members at the same time. But who cares? It wouldn't be the Ed Gein Fan Club if we were as tight as, say, Aerosmith, so fuck it.
The gig was phenomenal. The 13th Anniversary Show packed the place out (OK, so it only held like 50 people). The crowd hated/loved us. They had a great/horrible time boogieing down to YFS, Pig Fucker, Hey Headbanger, Prom Night Fuck, and Fuck the 60's.
After the gig the band DIDN'T quit, but for some reason we couldn't get another gig.
Just when people thought music couldn't get any worse the Ed Gein Fan Club was enticed out of the darkness for a show that could not be turned down.
A gig in honor of the 68th Anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. The only problem was that once again the band was without a lead guitar player. I now claimed that I could play and sing well enough that the band could successfully perform as a punk rock power trio. John 3:16 nixed the idea and the search was on for guitar player #7. Lo and behold, Ollie ran into a man(?) who introduced him(?)self as Johnny Dirtbag III. Fortunately Johnny Dirtbag III introduced him(?)self to Ollie 2 hours before stage time. Plenty of time to learn the set, drink 1/2 bottle of the gratis Jim Beam and share in some controlled substances that the other bands on the bill were partaking in.
Crowd response was such that plans were bantered about (and then promptly dismissed) for more Ed Gein Fan Club gigs in the year 2001.
ALL GOOD THINGS MUST COME TO AN END...
Thankfully the ED GEIN FAN CLUB is not a good thing. In April of 2002 The ED GEIN FAN CLUB decided to enter the studio to lay down some tracks. Some of these songs have been smouldering unrecorded for 18 years and the time had finally come to record them for posterity.
Finally reduced to the punk rock power trio I had always envisioned, myself, John 3:16 and Yermom cut 9 songs in 2 days at Yermom's closet studio in St Paul, MN. The result was quite underwhelming:
More gigs were planned as the monster that I created that summer day in 1984 cannot and will not be silenced.
The joke just keeps getting more and more funny as the years drag on.
AND SO IT CAME TO PASS that 2002/2003 would prove to be the year of the Ed Gein Fan Club. Several shows, the bands first appearance on vinyl, press and radio coverage... it seemed nothing could stop the leviathan that the EGFC had become.
It started with the re-recording of "I Like The Cops [Dub Version]" for the 3xlp, 2xcd Twin City punk compilation "No Hold Back, All Attack"
We recorded this once again in yermom's closet and proved to be the last thing yermom ever recorded on tape. After this yermom was cajoled into buying a computer for recording purposes and yermom has not looked back since. A year later John 3:16 and I did some further cajoling and convinced yermom that 2003 was finally the right time to record the follow-up to the classic album "Original Punk Rock Since 1984".
Over the course of 4 weekends tracks were laid down, much beer was consumed (by the mid-90's I had seen the light and started to imbibe in the fire water, but I still have yet to smoke rope or do any other drug), and yermom produced the masterpiece "Blow Your Scene".
After a year trying to shill it out to labels it languished unreleased in my desk drawer. But take my word for it, it kicks ass.
The Ed Gein Fan Club was featured in an off-the-cuff Pulse Magazine interview in which Ms. Chelsea extolled the virtues of the EGFC in an effort to promote our appearance with cross-over sellout hardcore "legends" Dirty Rotten Imbeciles.
It was funny, but I had heard after the show that DRI thought we were mean just because I dedicated our song "Your Band Sucks" to all those bands who felt they had to change their style to keep relevant with "the kids". I never mentioned any band by name, but for some reason they felt like I was singling them out, and they called us mean. This coming from a band who had a record called "Violent Pacification".
And we played a bunch of shows that a few people witnessed.
SO SOME SHIT HAPPENED but even more shit didn't happen. There was this thing that Al Gore invented called the internet that all the kids were raving about. A few years later there was a site on the internet called myspace where all the cool kids hung out. Ollie, being at the forefront of technology, made a myspace page for the Ed Gein Fan Club. Thousands upon thousands friend requests came pouring in, only to be disappointed that we were not affiliated with that crap metal band Ed Gein. Ollie made it well know and was not shy in his berating such requests. Surprisingly, the myspace page was given the heave ho and nuked by Tom. Ollie created another page, and within 2 weeks it was yanked as well. Ollie, smelling a rat, waited a few months and created EGFC #3 on myspace, which was ceremoniously taken off-line citing "copyright infringement". Now, since there was nothing that wasn't created by EGFC that seemed a wee bit "interesting", but the band let it slide. It was quite a feather in the collective cap to say that myspace politely declined to host The Ed Gein Fan Club. In mid-2007 EGFC myspace #4 was launched, and as of January 2014 it is still up.
Another development in these wilderness years was the inclusion of The Ed Gein Fan Club in Erik Johnson's documentary film "The Middle Of Nowhere". This film is a snapshot with ample history to back it up of the long-running Twin Cities punk rock scene.
EGFC played a show for the debut screening of the movie, but yermom "forgot" about the gig. Having kept the audience at Minneapolis College Of Art & Design waiting long enough, audience member Ben Crew was pulled from his seat and placed behind the drum kit. Having never practiced with the Fan Club and not being at all familiar with the material at hand it proved to be a typical shambolic EGFC performance.
We also contributed a track to the Killdozer tribute 2xCD "We Will Bury You" as released by Crustacean and Ismist Records. Featuring Tom Hazelmeyer of Halo Of Flies and one-time member of Killdozer on lead guitar, and expertly recorded by EGFC drummer Billy "yermom" Fisk.
And the biggest news of all, in late 2007 a kid with a mohawk approached Ollie at the bar. He said "My name is Johnny Dirtbag III Jr, perhaps you've heard of me?" to which Ollie Replied "What the fuck took you so long?"
And now, 30 years later, The Ed Gein Fan Club is still chugging along.The band (featuring guest drummer Moth R. Superior) was featured on a half-hour cable access program that was doing a series on various musical styles. EGFC was brought in as an example of the punk rock.
In addition, a documentary on the band is in the works, and a few new songs may or may not be written, recorded and/or performed live.
Just like Jaws, when you think it's safe to go back in the punk rock club...
