Photo by Bryan Sheffield
In a five-star review of The Damn Personals’ 2002 CD Standing Still in the USA posted on Amazon in 2008, Amazon user CypressBill wrote, “I picked this cd up a couple of years ago and am glad I did. I have heard rumours that the bass player enjoys riding the T around Boston dressed in a pickle costume, but I can neither confirm nor deny that.”
The following article is an investigation into not only this urban legend but the broader tale of The Damn Personals as recalled primarily from the viewpoints of drummer Mike Gill and singer/guitarist Ken Cook, who spoke to me over the phone from Cook’s home in Los Angeles.
In the early ‘90s, Cook and his friend Anthony Rossomando (who would be the Damn Personals’ lead guitarist) were playing together as teenagers in a Connecticut ska staple called J.C. Superska. That was how Gill, another Connecticut native in this scene, came into their orbit. (Gill would end up briefly playing for another Connecticut ska band, Johnny Too Bad and the Strikeouts, with Rossomando).
“I’d go with my best friend to these ska shows,” Gill recalls, “and I think Ken and I probably met at Studio 158 in Willimantic, Connecticut, or it could’ve been the Tune-Inn in New Haven, Connecticut. These were both venues that would do a lot of these shows back then in the ‘90s and were kind of the headquarters for all of us as teenagers… I think at one of those shows I met Ken and Anthony.”
As Cook and Rossomando’s interests drifted from ska, they began to write rock music on the side. “Anthony and I had so desperately wanted to start more of a rock band for so long that he and I had pretty much cataloged a bunch of songs over the course of like two years where… I’d bring a song to him and we’d just kind of whack away at some guitars and talk about how cool it would be when we have a cool rock band.” With different lineups, they played a show with Action Patrol at one of the UMass schools and a show at The Tune-Inn before what they consider to be the first proper Damn Personals show in June of 1998 at The Middle East, by which point Gill joined the project and they’d all resettled in Boston.
“The very first Damn Personals show ever was initially supposed to be a Johnny Too Bad and The Strikeouts show,” Gill recalls, “but we broke up so I kind of called The Middle East and I said, ‘Hey, can this new band that I have play?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ So the very first time we played was with all ska bands.”
Their performance, featuring the three of them and Jim Zavadoski (a friend from Cook’s hometown) filling the bassist role, solidified the lineup until 2003. It was impressive enough to open more doors for them immediately.
“The downstairs manager at The Middle East was watching us,” Gill says.
That manager, Jason Babbitt, suggested them to Middle East downstairs show-booker Margot Edwards for an upcoming Brian Jonestown Massacre show.
By around late 1999, they were a more established band and scraped together money to independently produce their first full length album — Driver|Driver (whose title comes from a lyric in a These Animal Men song).
“Y’know, obviously we were proud of it when it came out,” Cook recalls, “but… right after that came out we kind of had a musicianship explosion in the band where everybody suddenly was playing much better than we had been when we wrote those songs…”
Cook recalls that they used to joke, “You know, if you’d given a bunch of monkeys the entire Kinks back catalog, they would’ve eventually come up with Driver|Driver… It wasn’t the most inventive record. It had some cool stuff, but y’know…”
Gill quietly chimes in: “I don’t know, a lot of people really liked it… I still like it.”
Their influences were torn between the ‘60s and the ‘90s. Of the ‘60s they were drawn to soul and mod, and from their own time, post-hardcore and angular garage rock. Cook recalls, “I’d constantly try to write… try to rip off Edwin Starr’s ‘25 Miles to go’ soul song, but within two practices it would somehow sound like fucking Fugazi,” he jokes. “No matter how badly we were entranced by ‘60s stuff, our fingers just went more towards post-hardcore shit.”
Around the time that Driver|Driver was produced, Gill was living in Mission Hill with a friend named Chase Lisbon, who ran a merch business called Action Reaction.
“Chase, I think he was alone,” Gill recalls, “he saw these mod-looking punk hybrid guys that lived across the park from us… and Chase was a really friendly guy so he started talking to these kids, and it turned out they were this band called The Explosion…”
As it turned out, The Explosion (who would go on to become one of the most commercially successful Boston bands of the aughts) lived with someone who’d founded an indie record label called Big Wheel Recreation out of his Northeastern dorm a few years prior—Rama Mayo. “[Lisbon] met Rama,” Gill continues, “found out that Rama had this record label called Big Wheel, and Rama wanted T-shirts for all his bands made. And Chase just so happened to have gotten a huge screen-printing machine that was in our apartment… What was supposed to be our dining room in our apartment was this giant screen-printing room.
“So Rama basically started using Chase to get all the Big Wheel shirts made… Once, Rama was over making shirts with Chase, and Chase put on The Damn Personals… We’d already recorded the first record but we took like four songs off of it and made a little four-song sampler, and Chase played the four-song demo for Rama. Well, he just kind of put it on while they were making shirts, and Rama was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ Chase was like, ‘This is my roommate’s band, The Damn Personals.’ So then Rama was like, ‘Drop everything, we need to get in touch with your roommate, call him right now.’ So we wound up meeting with Rama the next night or something.”
“We had a three-record deal with Big Wheel,” he adds. “Unfortunately our label deal outlived the label.”
Of releasing Driver|Driver (which came out in 2000), Rama Mayo recalls, “They gave me some kind of art to choose from and I picked one and I designed it literally myself and we probably pressed a couple thousand of them or something.”
In October 2000, Mayo put them on a tour that included Jimmy Eat World, Hot Rod Circuit and Jebediah. It went smoother than their previous tour, during which all of their clothing was stolen from the van.
Cook recalls, “We owe [Jimmy Eat World guitarists Jim Adkins and Tom Linton] a lot because that first tour that we did with them—this is how green we were with playing and touring—they were like, about four days into the tour they’re like, ‘You guys break a lot of strings… do you ever change your strings before shows?’ We were like, ‘No, we didn’t know you were supposed to do that.’”
“The Big Wheel connection wound up thrusting us into stuff that we’d never expected would happen,” Gill says. (Of a 2001 tour with The Hives that Mayo put them on, Cook recalls: “We learned a very important lesson the first night of that tour—don’t play after The Hives.”)
On the Jimmy Eat World tour, The Damn Personals shared a bill with soon-to-be rock stars Dashboard Confessional. “Chris Carrabba,” Gill recalls, “who was one of my best friends in junior high, turned into Dashboard Confessional and wound up playing or opening one of the shows on the Jimmy Eat World tour. And I hadn’t seen him since we were like thirteen. And then two years later Dashboard is like the biggest thing in the world. I think that was one of the first Dashboard shows… The Wayne Firehouse in New Jersey.”
While Big Wheel Recreation was opening new doors for the band, The Damn Personals were simultaneously making inroads in New York’s alternative rock scene. “There were kind of two phases of the beginning of the band,” Cook says, “which was first meeting the Big Wheel guys and getting into the Boston scene, the indie rock kind of post-emo-ish whatever… And then shortly after that we also got connected with the New York garage rock scene—The Mooney Suzuki; The Strokes; Jonathan Fire Eater, who had become The Walkmen at that time. And so we had this other scene that we were very entrenched in that was in New York, completely divorced from all of our Boston connections. Two very insular groups… and we got a lot of influence from both of them, which is why, again, our music is kind of all over the fucking place sometimes,” Cook says and laughs.
Of The Strokes, Gill recalls, “We were close with The Strokes not only at the beginning of The Strokes, but prior to them even forming, they would all come to our shows in New York.”
In May 2002, The Damn Personals began a two-week recording session at a studio in a repurposed historic Colt firearm factory for their second album, Standing Still in the USA. They didn’t finish before hitting the road again to tour, so it became a protracted production, but the end result was worth it.
“I loved working with them,” Mike Deming, the prolific producer who ran the studio (Studio .45), recalls. “I remember having a great time doing the record… It was a good fit too because we had a really great amplifier room at the studio in Hartford. Lots of mint condition classic amplifiers, Marshalls and Voxes and stuff, a big SVT bass amplifier… All these things really suited their sound.” He adds, “The Damn Personals… I mean obviously, you’re listening to their record, you can tell how much style and how much soul they had. I mean, their music is I think incredible.”
Of the writing process, Cook points to the experience of touring in support of Driver|Driver as a primary inspiration.
“We were east coast kids,” Cook says. “I’d been in California a bunch, but before we’d started touring, I’d never seen fucking Nebraska,” he says with a laugh. “We had done a couple tours by then, full U.S. tours, and just came back with a broader scope of ideas for songs.”
With this record, Jen Malone, then a music publicist running Black & White PR in Boston (presently she’s the music supervisor for the TV show Atlanta and the upcoming Creed film sequel), began to represent them.
“I knew all of them from going to shows and stuff,” Malone says, “and I think it was just, they had the record, it was ready to go, and they wanted to do a big push behind it.”
Part of that bigger push she was able to give them was a feature she pitched to the biweekly magazine The Improper Bostonian for their third annual “Rock Extravaganza” music issue. A band she’d represented called Betwixt had been the cover story of the first Rock Extravaganza in 2000, and for The Damn Personals in 2002 she secured a five-page fashion spread where the band ended up posing for sultry photos in a hotel, modeling designer clothing. “That was just really funny and I don’t think it was anything that they’d ever done nor have ever done since,” Malone says with a laugh.
In mid 2003, The Damn Personals went on what would be their biggest tour. “We did a U.S. tour with [Cave In] and Piebald, and we were supposed to only go out to Chicago with them,” Cook says. “And when we got to Chicago, Piebald was flying off to Europe for their tour. And the night of the Chicago tour we’re supposed to leave to drive back to Boston the next morning, and the Cave In guys are like, ‘Hey, we need to talk to you guys. How do you guys feel about just finishing the tour out to California with us?’ And we’re like, ‘Alright, cool, let’s just call the girlfriends and tell them we won’t be home for another couple weeks.’
“We got out to LA and they’re like, ‘How do you feel about going to Europe with us?’ And we didn’t have our passports with us. I remember Cave In’s management paid for us to get new expedited passports made in Los Angeles.”
Gill adds, “They basically did everything for us to have us go on that tour with them and it was like the nicest thing anyone ever did for the band.”
With money from a beer commercial that Mark Kates—a critical A&R figure in the ‘90s alternative rock world who was then running an artist management company called Fenway Recordings—had gotten their music into, they bought plane tickets and continued the tour. (Kates was a big supporter of the band and even got their song “Better Living” into an Anna Faris movie called Southern Belles).
Unprepared for the strength of Belgian beer, The Damn Personals may have blacked out on the first night of the Europe portion of the tour, and at some point, at least one member got their butt kicked for making fun of someone’s Flemish accent.
“That whole US and then to Europe [tour] with Cave In was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life,” Cook says, though he and Gill note the difficulty of reminiscing about this several months after Cave In bassist Caleb Scofield passed away in a tragic vehicle accident.
By the end of this extensive tour, they’d written the material for another album that they were performing at shows. Unfortunately, things began to fall apart for The Damn Personals when they got back to Boston. Their longtime bassist, Jim Zavadoski, exited the band; Rossomando was increasingly asked to play for The Libertines; and their label, Big Wheel Recreation, was beginning to overextend itself. Cook says, “I used to joke—what happened to The Damn Personals? We left the van running with the keys in it and turned around and it was gone.”
They asked Mike Faulkner, a childhood friend of Gill, to move to Boston and join as the new bassist, but the obstacles mounted. Big Wheel officially folded before the end of 2004, and in late 2005, just after recording the third Damn Personals record, Rossomando moved to London to form Dirty Pretty Things with former Libertines members. The third record was never officially released.
“By the time we recorded our best record, we had kind of exhausted the patience of anybody that was gonna help us with a label at that point,” Cook says with a laugh.
With a push from the band We Are Scientists, The Damn Personals reunited for the “Ten Years of Fenway Recordings” showcase at the annual CMJ Music Marathon in 2011.
Cook recalls, “[We Are Scientists] were like, ‘We’re only gonna do a CMJ show if you do it with us.’” He and Gill talk about how good We Are Scientists are for a minute, then he adds, “It’s so corny to say, but the best friends that I’ve made were through The Damn Personals band.”
Before the call was over, Mike Faulkner texted them in response to my inquiry about the Amazon review to say that he once, on Halloween, dressed in a green spandex suit with ping pong balls fixed to it to approximate Andy Serkis’ mo-cap suit from the Lord of the Rings production.