MATT BARRETT’S TALES FROM THE ROCK N ROLL CRYPT: Episode 9
THE OTHER DADS
The name of our group came from a drawing Lee Gildersleeve had made. It was 4 middle aged guys playing guitars, bass and drums. The drummer was bald, fat and sweating like he was mowing the lawn. Everyone was a caricature of what we though of back then as old people.(how we look now)Underneath Lee had written The Dads. It was a cool name. We liked
it. So we stole it.
Our first out of town show was in Washington DC, opening for our friends The Fabulous Knobs, at a place called Desperados, on M Street in Georgetown. When we got to DC and parked the car we felt like the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, or an episode of The Monkees. We were young, happy and exuberant. We were The Dads coming to DC on our way to conquering the world. The first thing we see is a band with battery powered amplifiers, playing the same kind of jangly pop as us, on a street corner. “You guys are great!” we told them. “What are you called?”
“We’re the Dads!” They said.
What!? We’re the Dads!”
WTF? Who knew there were other Dads? This was 1980. Before google. Before computers. The only way you would know some band in another town had the same name as you was if they became famous first, or you got a cease and desist letter from a lawyer because they were smart enough to make their band name legal while you thought your band name was so cool that nobody could have thought of it but you. (Or in our case Lee Gildersleeve.)
It kind of sucked the wind out of our sails. We told them we were playing that night at Desperados and we would put them on the guest list. “That will definitely freak out the door guy.” Said one of their Dads.
“Haha. Cool. We’ll see you there!”
But they didn’t come. The other Dads were so comfortable with their identity they didn’t even give a shit what the Chapel Hill Dads sounded like.
Fast forward an entire year. An eternity in band time. We were still the Dads. No other Dads had made it into the big time but we had a photo and a paragraph in NY Rocker which in our minds pretty much settled it. We were The Dads and all the others better start shopping for new names.
“Hey guys. I got us a gig in Richmond!” Said Zoe, our bass player. He was the last guy in the band you would expect to book a show. He lived to play music. But he hated bands. He thought they were all terrible. Even good ones. He never went to clubs either so he never heard any. So of course he was hired to book bands at The Station. And somehow that led to him booking us at some club in Richmond.
So the day of the show we got in the car and headed up I85. A few miles out of town he said. “Oh, by the way we are not playing as the Dads tonight. I booked us as Matt Barrett and the Ruse.”
“WHAT!!!???” We all shouted in unison.
“Yeah. There already is a band called the Dads in Richmond.”
“The only chance we have of anybody coming to this show tonight is that they may be curious about what the Chapel Hill Dads sound like. The worst case scenario is that at least one or two members of the Richmond Dads are curious enough to come and check us out.” we explained to him.
“Don’t worry. The guy said he’s gonna promote it heavily”. Zoe replied. But before we even left the state of North Carolina we knew the show was doomed. And the heavy promotion consisted of a sign on the door that said TONIGHT: MATT BARRETT & THE RUSE written in magic marker.
That night there were 3 people at our show. All friends of ours who had driven down from DC. We played our songs for them and then brought our friend Chuck Katsirubas on stage and he sang his favorite Stooges songs while we backed him. Then we drove home in a snow storm. It took about 8 hours and the whole experience was pretty deflating.
So the Chapel Hill Dads broke up in 1982. And the Richmond Dads? They were a little more successful, playing the east coast college circuit until 1985 and even recording an album on CBS. Bryan Harvey put out several albums as part of a duo called House of Freaks and another group called Gutterball. From here the story becomes a tragedy. He and his family were murdered in 2006 in what was called The Richmond Spree Murders. In 2015 the remaining Dads released their second album, originally recorded in the 80s, which they called Redemption (they hated their original studio album) and did a show to promote it and as a memorial to Harvey and other members who passed away, less violently I assume.
I listened to the handful of videos of the Dads available now on YouTube while I wrote this. They sounded like the Dads. They sounded like us. Like I knew they would.