Another "warehouse neighbor" of Paragon was The Vulgar Boatmen. This was actually in a different warehouse complex further west on 441, the one where All Star 69 is now, with the 300-foot radio tower stuck in the middle of it. Here we're talking about the early, early 1980s, probably 1981. The Boatmen seemed to have a lot of people in the band in those days, and I think this was before they had made any tapes. I can't recall much about their music, but at least they didn't have to face the wrath of Paragon the way Slime did, probably because they were in a different block of warehouses on a separate circuit breaker.

The Vulgar Boatmen have put out three first rate CDs, "You and Your Sister" (1989), "Please Panic" (1992) and "Opposite Sex" (1995. Currently, only the first one is available, but it is my understanding that No Nostalgia records plans to re-release all three soon along with a compilation ablum. That would be fantastic because the Boatmen are a band with songwriting talent to burn that should have been able to ride the "alt-country" wave to stardom. For pure guitar-pop pleasure, it simply doesn't get any better. I saw them play live twice in Chicago in the early 1990s. They put on an energetic live show, and if there any bootleg tapes floating around, they'd make a great live album!

Prior to the lineup of the Vulgar Boatmen that produced "You and Your Sister" and the subsequent two albums, there was a different lineup that produced a casette called "Women and Boatmen First," in 1982. According to the notes on the casette, this lineup included Jerry Bartolomeo, Steve Cimerberg, Carey Crane, John Eder, Rick Ellis, Helen Kirklin, Robert Ray, Walter Salas-Humara, Ann Waters, and Scote Weinkle. Jim Fealy did the package for the tape. The songs on this tape include Suzanne Somers in El Salvador, Latin Love, Drink More Coffee (Waste More Time), Hook in My Lip, Everyone is Critical, Homeostasis, The King's Last Words (Before He Died), I Don't Care, Susan, This is War, and Round and Round. Robert Ray apparently is the only one from the original group that formally stayed in the band (although I believe Walter may have been involved in producing some of the albums). I believe Robert Ray is still a professor in the English Department at the University of Florida. Walter Salas-Humara has continued making music as the leader of the New York City-based The Silos, the web site of which is www.thesilos.net. Carey Crane works at the National Museum of Health & Medicine, in Washington, D.C. John Eder is a photographer based in Los Angeles who has done album covers for groups like Stone Temple Pilots and Motley Crue, as well as other types of photography.

I was an origional Vulgar Boatman, circa 1980's Gainesville. The cassette from 1982 was the first one produced, and a live show was performed at the Star Garage. Very memorable. Last heard, Gerry Bartolomeo was a math professor at Nova Southeastern University. I'm a physician in Plantation Florida with a website for cosmetic and aesthetic medicine as well. AdvancedMedicalSpa.com

I remember seeing the Boatmen a lot in the early to mid-80s. Every time was great fun. I recall them setting up a movie screen next to the stage in the Orange&Brew and running a a montage of clips from old silent movies while they played. Everybody was having a great time dancing with their shadows on the screen. They put out another tape called "All Bands on Deck" that was fantastic. My copy eventually melted in the car and by that time their first cd was out and they didn't want to sell any more of the old tapes. I never got another.

I was an original Vulgar in the lineup circa 1980. The band was founded by myself and Walter Salas-Humara, and quickly brought on board were Carey Crane, as the second singer, drummer Rick Ellis, bass player Jerry Bartolomeo and sax player Steve Cimmerberg. I was also a singer, we originally had two singers, along the lines of the Specials or the English Beat, who were hot at the time and who we really liked. Carey was a much better singer than myself, he could actually hit notes. I was just a fairly decent punk rock screamer - after every show my voice would be blown out for a few days. We first rehearsed at Rick's house, which was out in the boonies of Gainesville, so we could make lots of noise. We committed to almost all original material, except for a few covers, which were oldies like "Walkin' the Dog". We argued constantly, usually Rick and I vs. everyone else, which led to our break-up before we even played a show. However, a battle of the bands was open for competition, so we entered and found ourselves pitted against Gainesville's leading new wave cover bands of the time, the Irritations and the Riff. The load in and sound check were funny because we had no significant equipment, Walt had this tiny amp, and all the other bands had mountains of gear. The other bands got kind of rattled when they saw Steve leaning into a wall just playing crazy sax riffs like a nut, warming up for the show. They were like 'no gear, no outfits, crazy sax player, who ARE these guys?" We kicked ass at the show, but didn't win. It was sponsored by Camel cigs, and they had big fake Camel boxes all over the stage. We had been expressly told not to screw around with the boxes or say anything bad about Camel, so of course, Carey and I knocked over a bunch of boxes. The show was actually taped by one of our friends, which I still have. There is even some (unfortunately silent) film footage of the show our firend Jon Kane shot. In the midst of our craziest song "Slash Roll", someone asks whoever is taping it: "Are you taping this? This band sucks!" After the show, Carey and I went to the mens room and we're standing there, you know, going, and some redneck agriculture student is looking at us from the door, and then snaps "Fags!" and exits. We cracked up. Despite the neg reviews of a few, the crowd, admittedly heavily loaded with friends, loved us.The response was exciting enough that we stayed together for a while, going on to have many other adventures, which I will spill here later. Even though we fought a lot, being in the Boatmen was super fun and I look back on the whole experience with great great fondness.

After our Battle of the Bands appearance, the very very early Vulgar Boatmen found ourselves with a new-found desire for playing, but no place to play. We did play a party at the art school, but only because Walt owned a PA. Most of the good gigs were controlled by the conservative student government booker and the clubs were from hunger, with crappy disco Nichols Alley ruling the scene. Frats only booked cover bands like the Riff. One night, seeking to rectify this situation, Rick and I went to the infamous Melody Club, N. Central Fla.'s leading drag club. It was an old roadhouse with a sign that said "Country & Western" on the outskirts of Gainesville. They had a drag show with a Pat Benatar lookalike that David Lynch should have put in a movie. We talked to the owner, C.L., a tough old gay redneck. He hired us without even listening to us, telling us he would charge $5 each admission which was also good for all the beer you could drink. Whatever C.L.'s motives were - he kissed us both goodbye - we were ecstatic since a. it was a really cool place - great sequined stage, good PA, a lit-up dance floor like "Saturday Night Fever", b. it was our scene, that we booked ourselves and c. we knew we could pack the place. Which we did. It was a fun, weird, cross-pollinated scene. The first night was great - it was mobbed, mainly with art school kids . We played two sets and killed. The second week we got all dressed up - I wore a sleazy tux, Rick wore surgeon scrubs, Walt wore a dress and Carey dressed like Frank Sinatra. I guess we played there five weeks in a row, it was a total blast. Rick and I used to go out to collect from C.L., who was a gentle soul we had seen literally reduced to tears when Steve demanded more money. After that, Rick and I handled all the dealings with him. The club was situated right along a truck route on old 441 and often truckers would pull in in the afternoon, when we would collect, thinking it was just a roadside honky tonk to have a quick beer in. After a few minutes the truth would slowly dawn. One time we were there getting our dough when this happened and the truck driver in question was about to beat up somebody who he felt had hit on him. We were astonished to see C.L. pull out a billy club from behind the counter, and smash it on the bar repeatedly as he ran bellowing at the trucker, who fled. We even wrote a song about C.L., called "Redneck Homo" which was funny, but mercifully forgotten. Well till now anyway. Our Melody Club stint was great, but did not really enhance our standing with the bookers. Fortunately, Gainesville was starting to have more punk/new wave bands, like the Invasion, 2902 and the Roach Motel, also with no place to play, and inventing new venues. We became friends with the Bazookas, who were a punk rock band with a 13 year old drummer named Chuckie. They had hooked up a show at Catch-22, a scary redneck bar in Newberry. This was a real redneck bar, not a gay redneck bar, and we thought these real rednecks would kick our ass since they hated anything that wasn't country. But we accepted and it was actually a great show. Somebody told this one cowboy type how we had been a little worried and he said he liked it because cute girls came. "Usually I gotta look at his ugly ass on Friday night" he said, pointing to some other toothless cracker. We saved up our money and did a four song demo at Hyde and Zeke's new studio. Carey and I both had laryngitis and were constantly spraying our throats with Chloraseptic. But the demo came out well, and one of the songs, "Monkey Jungle Breakdown" got on a compilation of Florida punk/new wave bands of the time called "The Land That Time Forgot ." In the unlikely event you can ever find a copy of this, you will note that the early Boatmen sound nothing like the later Boatmen. We were much more a party act like the B-52s. We entered another Battle of the Bands, this time in Melbourne, Florida, which had some deal going that if you won you got entered in a larger battle, and eventually you could get a record contract and be on a TV show Battle of the Bands. I think there might have been an entry fee. The promoter told me we would be playing in some suave theater to 1000 people and the whole thing would be filmed. So we entered. The morning of the show, as we were rolling out in convoy, my girlfriend felt queasy. She and I were driving alone. As I got onto the on-ramp to the highway, she suddenly vomited all over herself. She had had some bad shrimp or something the night before. It was a mess. We had to evade the rest of the convoy and hose out the car. Then Rick's station wagon blew a flat and he didn't have a spare. When we finally got there, we found out the 1000 person hall was actually a sub-Holiday Inn hotel lounge and the filming was going to be done on a crap video camera with flower appliqued decals on it. After I installed my girlfriend in a room to recuperate, the rest of us got angrier about the lame show. There were maybe fifty or sixty people, not 1000. The first act was a three piece of high school kids with synthesizers that played Yes type prog rock and wore hairy caveman vests. I forget what the other one was, but they sucked too. We, on the other hand, were fantastic, definitely our best show ever, since we were so angry. Walt fell off the stage while furiously soloing, we jumped on tables, went wild, smashed holes in the acoustic ceiling, etc. Unfortunately, with my girlfriend out of action, the only other person besides the Melbourne teens and their parents who witnessed this was one of our Gainesville friends who had tagged along. He danced right in front of the stage all by himself the whole time. We lost the contest since we said "motherfucker" at one point. The promoters were scared of us and after the show we made them give us a case of beer and a room in the Holiday Inn. The caveman guys came up with the other band and said they thought we should have won. When we returned, we finally got a student government gig opening for the Raybeats, a new wave surf combo from NYC. It was a decent show, at the UF Rathskeller, but by then we decided to call it quits due to all sorts of internal friction. Robert Ray was at that show and had been in our lives for a while now, as Walt, Carey and I had taken his classes. We all thought he was a great teacher and a cool guy - he treated his students more like peers, whereas a lot of our art school instructors were more aloof. And he liked good music. I think he originally got together with Walt and some other players like Dave Glennon, a friend of Rick's and mine, and wrote some new material. No one had any objections over using the Boatmen name, which was, after all, thought up by Dave Glennon in the first place. For a while there was sort of an interim, missing link Vulgar Boatmen. This incarnation played some shows in Gainesville and put out a cassette with new songs and some old ones. It was way artier, with our friend Jim Fealy showing films behind the band. This was the beginning of the later Boatmen, which was fully realized when Robert and Dale Lawrence got their dual bands fully functional and put out "You and Your Sister". Walt, Rick and I all moved to NYC, Rick got a law degree, Walt started the Silos, and I started my career in photography. God Bless the Vulgar Boatmen!

I'd been trying to convince a record label to put out Dale Lawrence's post-Gizmos, pre-Vulgar stuff. He called himself The Satellites at the time, this was circa '84 or so. I had a tape of all those home recordings, many early workings of what would become Vulgar songs, but some friend who was stoned on pot mistakenly taped over an entire side of it, leaving me with just 4 songs. Gulcher Recs did just release an entire Gizmos collection with Interestingly one of Dale's friends, the one who got me these tapes, was also the one who turned me onto the pre-Dale Vulgars! He was at Univ of Iowa in '86 and befriended the only cool looking person in town, a purple haired girl from florida who said she had been in a band called the vulgar boatmen. My fanatical record collecting tendencies then led me to tracking down the Land that Time Forgot. I was mighty surprised to find Dale in the band a couple of years after that. By the way, if anyone has records by florida bands like The Eat or The Reactions they wanna sell, email me! Finally, I've been told the Vulgar Boatmen are playing Chicago next month.