Eddie Flowers on the Gizmos’ fanzine roots
Proto-punk legends the Gizmos co-headline this weekend’s Atlanta Mess-Around.
The term proto-punk conjures up images of teens raised in 1970s suburbia, relocating to the nearest major city to form a band with like-minded misfits. Eddie Flowers’ story deviates from that script. His path to rock ‘n’ roll infamy took him over 600 miles north of his Jackson, Alabama hometown to sing on his fanzine friends’ recording project, the Gizmos. Forty years later, the core of the band’s original lineup (Flowers, Kenne Highland, Ted Niemiec, and Rich Coffee) is a sought-after act for festival promoters and perhaps the strongest drawing card for this year’s Mess-Around. In advance of his first ever trip to Atlanta, Flowers talked about the origins of the Gizmos and his brief run as a Creative Loafing music scribe.
How did you know the rest of the guys, being in Alabama?
It was all through fanzines. I met Kenne Highland in 1974. Bob Richert, who still runs Gulcher Records and put out all the Gizmos stuff, he and Kenny drove down to Alabama and picked me up and took me back up there. We hung out, and I went with Kenne to Chicago and stuff. I went back the following year in ’75, and we did the first issue of Gulcher magazine. Then in ’76 was the Gizmos. It was something Bob Richert wanted to do before Kenne went into the Marines. It was all pretty weird.
Were you already in a band in Alabama before you hooked up with those guys?
I wasn’t. I was a rock writer strictly. When Kenne was offered by Bob to do the record, he started recruiting people to be on it. He asked me if I wanted to be on the record, and I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ That was the beginning of my musical career, such as it is. I had one song idea, which was ‘Mean Screen’ from the first E.P. The original song was from my fanzine and was written by this guy called Scott Duhamel.
Was Kenne a writer too? Is that how you bonded with him?
Kenne and I started writing around the same time in around ’72. He actually did a fanzine in upstate New York where he grew up in high school called Rock On that got out to a lot of the people who lived out there. It got written about by Greg Shaw and people like that. That’s how I met Kenne; writing to him for an issue of his fanzine. Then we met Bob Reicher who ran Gulcher because he had a fanzine called Beyond Our Control. I never really had my own fanzine back then, but I wrote for a lot of people from ’72 on.
Was your musical diet back then Alice Cooper, the Flamin’ Groovies, and stuff like that?
It’s pretty broad, but we were focused on a lot of the stuff you’d think like the Stooges, MC5, the Flamin’ Groovies, and early heavy metal like Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult. Kenne and I also were into rockabilly and ’50s rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t think the others were. But you know, we were rock writers. We were into the history of the music from when we were kids. Really, we were just obsessive record collector type guys. So we brought a lot into it. That’s what made the Gizmos special. We had those usual punk influences everyone did, but we had a lot of other stuff.
What were the others into, besides Detroit rock ’ n’ roll?
Rich Coffee had a band in northern Indiana, and they were the core of the guys playing music. Those guys were totally into mainstream music like ELP and Yes and stuff like that. Again, it sounded different without us intending it to. A lot of the punk bands that followed had kind of a strict aesthetic sound. One of the things I didn’t like about punk rock once it happened was it kind of stripped away a lot of those things on purpose. I didn’t like it because I liked those elements of rock music. It stripped out the blues, guitar solos, and things like that. On the first EP that’s what we were all about because it’s what rock music was at that point.
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Plus you guys weren’t afraid to write funny songs.
A lot of Kenne’s songs weren’t what he thought of as funny. He was obsessed with teen sex and stuff, and a lot of them were autobiographical. He had a lot of songs like that. Then he met Ted Niemiec, and he had that song “Muff Diver” so that was another dirty song or whatever you want to call it. Bob Richert picked out the Kenne songs that were sort of in that vein. Kenne had a lot of songs, so it could have gone in a different direction really.
The lineup you’re with now is the original, right?
The four people out front are the original four guys who were out front in the first place. Then we have a new rhythm section.
When did you get back together for this run? Was it 2014 when you did the WFMU appearance and played Goner Fest?
It was summer 2014. We did nine or 10 shows spread out that year.
That’s five times as many as you’d played with the Gizmos, since the original lineup only performed live twice.
For me, it was 100 percent. For those two shows that happened in 1977, I was sick and didn’t do those. Twenty-fourteen was my first Gizmos shows (laughs). Pretty funny.
One last thing, you mentioned in an email when we were setting this interview up that you’ve actually written for Creative Loafing…
I did. I remembered it as soon as I saw that name. In ’73 or ’74 I wrote a review of the last Godz LP. It wasn’t too great. They’d learned to play their instruments too well. It was one of the first things I got paid for. I probably got paid 10 or 15 bucks.