Utter Trash--Mike Hudson

Pagan Priest

An interview with Mike Hudson of The Pagans

By Bob Ignizio

Mike Hudson was born on Groundhog’s Day, 1956. His early years were spent in the Collinwood area of Cleveland, but eventually moved to the more suburban environs of Wickliffe. And it was in the basement of the Wickliffe home of Mike’s parents that the punk rock monster known as The Pagans would ultimately be born in 1976. Until their first break-up in 1979, the band consisted of Mike Hudson – vocals, Brian Hudson – drums, Mike “Tommy Gunn” Metoff – guitar, and Tim Allee – bass. After a few years off, the two Mikes resurrected the band with a new line-up that included Robert Conn on bass, Chas Smith on keyboards, and Bobby Richey on drums. Mike also worked with Paul Marotta in The Styrenes, and most recently released his first album of solo material, ‘Unmedicated’, on Cleveland’s own Sonic Swirl Records. The Pagans occasionally play the odd one off reunion show, but for the most part Mike now focuses on his job as Editor in Chief of The Niagra Falls Reporter.

Utter Trash: What things that were specific to Cleveland made an impact on you growing up?
Mike Hudson: The Indians just because they lost so much. If they came in third place, we’d celebrate. Ghoulardi was supposed to be a kid’s show, but he’d say things like, “You know how to play poker? You get a girl and you just poke her.” He was way out there, that’s why parents were always complaining. The Mayor at the time, Ralph Perk, was out campaigning for votes at this factory and got too close to a guy who was using a blowtorch and his hair caught on fire because he had so much hairspray in it. Mrs. Perk was asked by Betty Ford to come to a dinner at The White House for the wives of big city Republican mayors, and she said no because that was her bowling night. Alan Douglas would come on after the British Invasion show on the radio, and he’d have on lesbians, neo Nazis, people like that. And I was just a little kid, 11 or 12 years old, listening to this stuff. You had the burning river, and every night on Johnny Carson the last place prize was a trip to Cleveland. It was just a goofy kind of place to live.

UT: So how’d you get started playing in bands? What were your musical influences?
MH: My brother Brian and I both started playing music at around the same time, although he was a couple years younger than me. We had a friend, Lou Kolar, who was taking guitar lessons, and Chas Smith on farfisa.

The Velvet Underground was a big influence. The New York Dolls, Roxy Music, and even the Stooges, the technical level of their music was way beyond what we could do at the time. The Velvets wasn’t. If you knew even the slightest bit about anything, you could bang out a pretty good version of “White Light/White Heat” or “Sweet Jane”. I think that had a lot to do with it.

The first time I played out was with my 1974 band, The Mad Staggers, and it was at the Painesville YMCA with Denny Carelton’s band. They’d play a set and then we’d play the break, then they’d play another set. The first time didn’t go so well, so the second time I had taken a bunch of placidyls. And before the show even started I just collapsed on stage. The YMCA was horrified and banned us from ever playing again, and banned Denny’s band from ever playing again. So that was our first big gig, and it was also our first big break up. I think it was 1975 when we started playing again.

We couldn’t play that many bars because we were mostly too young to even get into bars. We played mostly on the teen dance circuit. We had a regular thing at this Church, a Saturday night dance thing in Shaker Heights. We didn’t play out a lot, but for kids it was a lot.

UT: What did your parents think?
MH: My parents, it was a big pain in the ass for them, let’s face it. All those years practicing in their basement, up until 1979. The neighbors would complain. And my parents didn’t bitch, but they still always thought it was a symptom of what was wrong with us. I think it’s kind of funny for them now that we have what little recognition we do. They think, “Well I was part of that.”

UT: And eventually you moved on to gigs at biker bars. Were you just dong covers then, or did you have some originals?
MH: We did Velvets, we did Stones, we did originals, we did Elvis. Just stuff we liked. None of those originals ever made it into the Pagans. I don’t even have tapes, and I know we made tapes.

UT: So how did you decide to become an originals band and morph into The Pagans?
MH: All the Pagan’s stuff started with me and Tim Allee in the basement. Tim would come up with riffs and I’d write lyrics, or we’d go back and forth. Like with “I Juvenile”, there’s only one verse and it had no cadence to it. And I just gave it to him and said, “You’ll never be able to write a song to that.” And he came back with something the next day. And there was just a sensibility, I wouldn’t even say it was an originals band. We always did a lot of covers.

In a lot of ways I was freaked when I heard the Pistol’s tapes, which ended up on their second album, because they were doing a lot of the same covers we were. We both did “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone”, “Roadrunner”, stuff like that. Even now, we still do covers. We’re going to be doing a show in Chicago, and we’re talking about doing [Roky Erikson’s] “I Walked With a Zombie.”

UT: Any one song in particular that really sums up what the Pagans were about?
MH: All that early stuff, like “Not Now No Way”, “I Juvenile”, “Dead End America”.

UT: What do you remember about your first gig as The Pagans?
MH: Our first gig was July 7, 1977. I only remember that because it’s 7/7/77. It was at The Looking Glass, and it was The Nerves from L.A., Pere Ubu, The Styrenes, and The Rubber City Rebels. It wasn’t really very well attended, and of course, the Ubu crowd didn’t drink. They were like intellectuals, and they drank tea.

The Nerves were real cool. Their first single was “Hangin’ on the Telephone”, they wrote it. Blondie later had the big hit with it. But the Nerves were one of the first bands that was just touring the country by themselves. They had this station wagon with all their gear and boxes of their single, and posters. They were just going from town to town, and they’d wear these three piece Pierre Cardin suits, ties and stuff. They were a three piece band and they were just great. And Ubu at this time, Peter had just died, so they had his guitar on stage and an empty mike.

UT: Was Ubu supportive of you and the newer bands coming up?
MH: (long pause). I always got along really well with Tony Maimone (laughs). See, those guys looked at themselves as artists, and we were a bunch of juvenile delinquents. We stole cars and stuff like that. But the thing I liked about the seventies was you’d have these diverse line-ups. It was great. If you had four bands on the bill, you saw four really different bands. Which was cool, I thought. I think the only thing that really bound us together was that we weren’t popular (laughs).

UT: How did you get along with your brother Brian in the band?
MH: We fought like cats and dogs, much to the horror of the other band members. Looking back on it, I don’t regret it. That’s just how it was. We were both alcoholics. It was a completely dysfunctional family.

UT: I understand you originally intended to just drop off your first single at the Salvation Army?
MH: That was the plan. We figured who would buy them? It was Denny Carelton who hooked us up with this Queen City Records, this pressing plant down in Cincinnati. You could press 200 records for 200 bucks. I had gotten my first job in the newspaper business, Brian was working, and we thought we weren’t going to be doing this anymore.

Around this time I started seeing ads for this Drome records. It had the two busses heading to “Nowhere” and “Boredom” from the back of the Sex Pistols single. So we decided to go check it out and that’s when we started with Johnny Dromette. Johnny agreed to distribute the single and became our manager. So I quit my job at the newspaper.

UT: So if it hadn’t been for Dromette and seeing that ad, the Pagans probably would have broken up, right?
MH: Oh absolutely, absolutely. No doubt about it. And of course being with Dromette gave us the chance to play with all these other people. That’s when Cleveland really started developing a scene.

UT: Were you able then to start make a living off of just music?
MH: No, never. But we did okay. None of us had jobs. Through all the years, ever since 1977, I don’t think I ever made more than $20,000 off the Pagans altogether.

UT: Cleveland has always had this “east side”/”west side” thing going on. Did that come into play with the music scene as well?
MH: Oh yeah, that was a huge thing, and not just in bands. If you were from the east side, you didn’t go to the west side, and vice versa. In fact, about 5 years ago I was on tour. We had played Chicago and St. Louis and were coming through Cleveland on our way back, and we stopped off to see Paul Marotta’s mother, Irene Styrene they called her. I had these two kids with me, and I told them watch this, I’m gonna’ say one thing to her. So I said, “Irene what are you doing out here. You oughta move to the east side.” And she said, “All the n*****s are on the east side.” These kids just cracked up. But that’s how we were all brought up. And all the Pollocks live on the west side. That was a big thing with Ghoulardi: Parma, white socks. I don’t know how it is now, but that was a big thing as far back as I can remember and up until I left.

When we first started playing in Lakewood it was a big fucking deal because none of us knew how to get there. Johnny had booked us at this club over on Detroit called The Real World, it’s the Phantasy Nite Club now. And that’s really when we started doing good. The scene was getting bigger. That’s also when things started going bad for us. Drugs was part of it, but also we started thinking this was a big fucking deal. When we started out we had no egos, you’re playing for twenty-five bucks, so what’s there to argue about?

UT: How did the local press treat you?
MH: The Plain Dealer, The Scene, The Agora, none of them really supported the local punk bands. Anastasia Pantsios would write things like, “Ah, this punk rock thing is never gonna’ catch on,” or, “Well maybe people will start dressing like punk rockers, but the music won’t catch on.” Jane Scott was better than any of them. But you had to kind of cultivate Jane, which I never bothered to do.

UT: Did you thinking about getting a record deal at this time, maybe moving to New York or LA like The Dead Boys and Devo?
MH: Absolutely not. We didn’t want any part of that, to be on a major label. I always loved Cleveland. I never wanted to go to New York or LA. I still love Cleveland. I’m in Niagra Falls right now, so that’s like the far eastern basin of Lake Erie. Before that I spent a lot of years in Erie Pennsylvania, which is on Lake Erie. I like the whole history of the area, I like the people, I really feel comfortable.

UT: Why did the Pagans break up at the height of their success?
MH: I’d blame it mostly on coke. The other thing is we had been out doing all these big shows, touring with the B-52s and things like that. And to do that and then we came back to Cleveland and we’re back doing another show at The Pirate’s Cove for 50 people. That kind of grated on everybody. But like I said, it was mostly the coke.

You get a pile of coke and you’re like, “here, have some, have some” to everybody. Then when it’s gone you’re yelling at all these people for taking your coke (laughs). The last straw was we were supposed to open for Richard Hell at The Pirate’s Cove. Hell cancelled, and it had been in the papers that he cancelled. Ricky at the Cove called us up and was saying, “C’mon, play” so we did as a favor to him. Since it had already been in the papers that it was cancelled, people thought the whole thing was cancelled. So there wasn’t anybody there except just people off the street who were there to drink. On the way back from the gig we just broke up.

UT: What did you do after the break up?
MH: I co founded Terminal Records with [Pagans guitarist] Mick Metoff. Drome had folded, Mustard had folded, Hearthan had folded, so there was really no record label in Cleveland at the time. So we started Terminal not so much with an eye towards putting out our stuff, but there was still a lot going on, a lot of talented people. We put out the ‘Cleveland Confidential’ compilation, and started playing around as Les Raving Sounds.

UT: Les Raving Sounds eventually led to the new version of The Pagans. Why wasn’t your brother involved?
MH: Brian was embarrassed that he’d been in the first band, plus he was living in New York at the time. I called him up and said I was putting the band back together and he said, “Why?” So anyway I heard this drummer Bobby Richey on the Cleveland Confidential record with a band called The Offbeats. He was just 15 years old. I always said Brian hit the drums harder than anybody, and Bobby hit ‘em faster than anybody. The second Pagans only played out of town maybe once, whereas the first Pagans played out of town as much as possible.

UT: Other than there being keyboards in the new version of the Pagans, what was the biggest difference between the two groups?
MH: The Pink Album Pagans was just a quantum leap in musicianship. Because I was playing rhythm guitar and we had keyboards allowed Mick to do a lot more stuff on guitar. Bill was a good bass player. But it was more of a bar band. We played the Agora and other clubs downtown.

We were still of course living the rock n roll lifestyle except now it was worse since none of us had any money (laughs). But ultimately I lucked out. A lot of my good friends, and of course my son and my brother, are dead. I’ve probably got as many friends in the graveyard as I do alive.

UT: Does it really just boil down to luck, or was there a point where you said to yourself, “This is destructive. I’ve got to get my shit together?”
MH: I still don’t have my shit together (laughs).