I’ve Got No Idols – Stiv Bators

(1949 – 1990)

Stiv Bators was born on 22nd of October 1949 in Youngstown, Ohio, USA. He died on 3rd of June 1990 in Paris, France at the age of 40.

Dead Boys
Stiv Bators and his friends, guitarist  Jimmy Zero and bassist  Jeff Magnum, were looking for musicians in Cleveland, Ohio in 1975. They were huge fans of  Iggy Pop and wanted to play Iggy covers and have fun. At the same time guitarist  Cheetah Chrome and drummer  Johnny Blitz had a band called  Rocket From The Tombs together with  David Thomas and  Peter Laughner (Thomas and Laughner later formed  Pere Ubu) but it was a bit too arty for Chrome and Blitz. Rocket From The Tombs broke up and Bators, Zero & Magnum met Chrome & Blitz in the summer 1975 and together they formed a new band.

Calling themselves  Frankenstein, they did their first gig that Halloween. Frankenstein did only four gigs in Cleveland and made one demo-EP titled  ”Eve Of The Dead Boys” with three songs –  ”Sonic Reducer”,  ”High Tension Wire”  and “Down In Flames”. It was hard to find gigs in Cleveland’s conservative clubs and they broke up frustrated after three months.

The Dead Boys were known as a really wild live-act. They abandoned all artistic pretensions, their motto was:  ”Fuck art, let’s rock!”. They also reflected the frustrated feelings of kids in those days. The kids followed the band because they were something fresh in the American music scene, they looked new and sounded new.

Often overlooked in chronicles of the New York punk scene, the Dead Boys were one of the most controversial bands playing at CBGB’s between 1976 and 1979. They were part of the American punk rock scene together with the bands like  The Ramones,  Johnny Thunders And The Heartbreakers and  Television. Having absorbed what had already happened in England ( The Sex Pistols and  The Damned) and the USA ( the Stooges), the Dead Boys took it a dozen steps further, uncovering new levels of violence, nihilism, masochism and vulgarity. Their gigs were brash, aggressive, threatening and, above all, outrageously provocative. Their legacy is perhaps summarized by the much-covered punk anthem,  ”Sonic Reducer”.

Solo career - “Disconnected” album
After Dead Boys fell apart in March 1979, Stiv did a few demos in Cleveland with  Frank Secich (ex- Blue Ash guitarist) – a guy who he grew up with in Youngstown – and in April 1979 they moved to Los Angeles. Stiv’s main reason for moving to L.A. was to get rid off his image as the Dead Boys front man. He wanted to be respected as a singer and musician and he had a strong vision of the music he wanted to make next.

In L.A. Stiv met  Greg Shaw who was – and still is – the leader of Bomp Records. Seeking to escape from the punk stereotype into more challenging music, Stiv signed to Bomp Records largely because of Bomp’s powerpop image (with which he was in complete accord), giving the label some of its most enduringly groovy sounds.

At one night in January 1980 Stiv had a spontaneous jam session at Paradise Studios with  Kim Fowley (ex- Runaways),  Jimmy Pursey (ex-lead singer of  Sham 69) and other local musicians. They recorded three songs –  ”L.A. L.A.” (which was a rewriting of  Richard Berry’s  ”Louie, Louie”),  ”Tropicana Blues” and  ”Factory Boy”. Those songs were left unreleased until Bomp Record released them on  ”L.A. L.A.” collection in 1992. That session was the first time when Stiv and Pursey met and they immediately found out that they had a lot in common. That connection led one year later to the fact that Pursey called Stiv to England where he joined  The Wanderers and made one great album with them.

The rest of the year 1980 was devoted to writing and recording the album  ”Disconnected” which was produced by Thom Wilson. Just like the single, the album departed from Dead Boys’ sonic attack. It is a tremendous album of melodic rock tunes. Playing down his outrageous side, Stiv’s first solo record maintains an dynamic punk persona while replacing garage-punk with thoughtful music that owes power pop a sizable debt.

Stiv had definitely found a new direction for his music with Secich. His band on that album included Frank Secich (bass),  David Quinton (drums) and  Georgie Harrison (guitar) and with that line-up they did some gigs in L.A.  ”Disconnected” was the only official solo album Stiv ever completed.

The Wanderers
After the release of  ”Disconnected” Stiv quit the band and moved to England where he formed  The Wanderers with ex- Sham 69 guys  Dave Parson and Dave Treganna.

They did two singles and one fine  ”Only Lovers Left Alive” album. Although it was undertaken as a Sham 69 record (with Stiv replacing singer  Jimmy Pursey), contracts prevented it to be released under the Sham 69 name and that’s one reason for the fact that the album attracted almost no attention. The Wanderers didn’t get the recognition they should have had and their singles and the album are very hard to find nowadays.

The Lords Of The New Church
After  The Wanderers broke up in 1981, Stiv formed The Lords Of The New Church with  Dave Treganna on bass,  Brian James on guitar (ex- Damned) and Nick Turner on drums (ex- Barracudas). At the very beginning the band was called  The Damned Dead Sham Band with Stiv on vocals, James on guitar, Treganna on bass and  Rat Scabies (from the Damned) on drums. The did an one-off gig in Clarendon, London in 1980. Later, Scabies was replaced by Turner. The Lords combined 1970′s punk with 1980′s apocalyptics to create an original sound. With the Lords Stiv finally got the well-earned success in Europe and also in the US.

Lords made three albums. The first one was self-titled as  ”Lords Of The New Church” (released in 1982) and it has an intense dark power with songs like  ”New Church”,  ”Russian Roulette” and  ”Open Your Eyes”. In 1983 The Lords released their second LP entitled  ”Is Nothing Sacred?”. The best known songs from that album are  ”Dance With Me”,  ”Black Girl/White Girl” and a cover version of  Grass Roots’ venerable  ”Live For Today”. The last studio album  ”The Method To Our Madness” (released in 1984) is maybe the most popular Lords record with the songs like  ”Murder Style”, the title song  ”Method To My Madness” (featuring a funny spoken interjection by Illegal Records owner  Miles Copeland) and a great ballad  ”When Blood Runs Cold”.

Stiv had very wild gigs also with The Lords and once he almost died on stage. Since the times of Dead Boys he used to “hang” himself by climbing up to the lightstand of the stage and tie the microphone wire around his neck.. He was small and light so he could easily hold himself up with the other hand, but to the audience it seemed that he was hanging on the “rope”. Once on a Lords gig in 1983 his hand was sweaty and it slipped from the stand and the microphone wire tightened around his neck. One of the roadies noticed that everything wasn’t alright when Stiv started to turn blue. The roadies went to get him back down on stage and he was sent to a hospital where, after regaining consciousness, he was informed that he had been clinically dead for a couple of minutes.Stiv was a little disappointed because he couldn’t remember what it felt like to be dead. In later interviews he would be quoted as wondering: ” Once you’ve actually died on stage…, I mean, how do you top that?”

The Lords Of The New Church broke up in 1988. Stiv had hurt his back very badly in Spain by jumping off the stage and was resting at his home in France. The rest of the Lords guys put an ad in the newspaper as an anonymous band looking for a lead singer for a one off gig – of course they hadn’t told Stiv. But Stiv had a way of knowing everything and he found out about that devious little plan by his so called friends. He called the band and told them he would do the gig in England but played dumb about the ad. They played the show and during the encore Stiv said to microphone “Hey Brian, who’s the new lead singer for The Lords Of The New Church?” “You are Stiv, right?” answered James. “No. Sorry. I’m not. You’re fired. And so are you. And you. You’re all fired! Bye!” That was the end of  The Lords Of The New Church.

The Last Years
Stiv lived his last years in Paris, France. He did gigs with The Lords but after the band broke up in 1988 he moved temporarily to New York and formed a new solo band, did a live album called  ”Live At The Limelight” and came back to Europe.

Stiv went back to Paris and a local record company, Bondage Records put up the money for a recording session in Paris, in order for Stiv to put down some demo tracks and to record his second solo album. The songs the band was working on included some of Stiv’s finest stuff like  ”Magyk”,  ”Yesterdays (Will Find You)”,  ”Nobody”,  ”Two Hearts” and a Dee Dee Ramone composition  ”Poison Heart”.

Sadly the new Stiv Bator never saw the daylight because of Stiv’s accidental and premature death. Those unfinished sessions were not meant to be released but nevertheless Bondage Records put out a CD in 1996.

In June 1990, while standing on a sidewalk in Paris, Stiv was hit by a car. He walked away from the accident, but later died in his sleep at home. – COURTESY OF MARKKU & StivBators.com

To see archives of ‘I Got No Idols’ go here.

Selected Albums

• Killer Lords

  

  Killer Lords – Lords of the New Church

• Young, Loud and Snotty

  

  Young, Loud and Snotty – Dead Boys

• Disconnected

  

  Disconnected – Stiv Bators

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