Michael Heath

Mike Heath Michael Layne Heath January 6, 2019 San Francisco, CA. 0:00:00 to 1:00:54 ________________________________________________________________________ 0:00:00 Davis: Today is January 6th, 2019. My name is John Davis. I’m the Performing Arts Metadata Archivist at the University of Maryland. Today, I’m speaking with Michael Heath. Heath: Shall I introduce myself? Davis: Yes, please. Heath: All right. Hello. My name is Michael Layne Heath. I am a writer, poet, musician, citizen journalist, and in a previous lifetime, was a minor character in the ensuing drama of the Washington D.C. alternative music community of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Davis: All right. Well done. So just getting started, you can tell from the first issue of Vintage Violence you have already a pretty deep fascination with rock and roll, and the kind of rock and roll that wasn’t readily listenable, if you will. I don’t know how much you were hearing... Heath: Or available. Or accessible. Davis: Right. So it kind of makes sense to me that something like punk would also wind up on your radar. But can you tell me a bit about how you got into punk? Heath: Well, I was always an inquisitive kid as far as culture and especially music, and was very much into—thirsty for new experiences aesthetically. You couldn't hear a lot of the stuff that I was interested in, that I had read about in magazines, on the radio in the mid-‘70s, although there was an excellent show on WINX called Heavy Metal Thunder. Davis: Skip Groff. Heath: Run by Skip—Skip Nelson... Davis: Right. [laugh] Mike Heath Heath: ...aka Groff. Davis: Mmhmm. [laugh] 2 Mike Heath Heath: Future ruler of Yesterday & Today Records and Limp Records. Played the kind of stuff that I wanted to hear, or that I would read about in mags like Creem, Hit Parader. Hit Parader was really such a gateway. And Creem. In the case of Hit Parader, there was a time where Lisa and Richard Robinson were the editors, and they brought in all these amazing writers like Lenny Kaye, and even people like then- Wayne-now-Jayne County, and Richard Hell, to write for them. And Lisa was very much into what was going on in New York at the time, and was avid and very vocal and literate about what was going on in ’74, ’75, ’76 in New York. And then Rock Scene was kind of a hipper version of 16 magazine. It was all photos, and you would see, like—they would have these features like, “The Ramones Do Laundry” [laugh] or “Debbie and Chris go get a slice of pizza” [laugh] or something like that. 0:03:05 And so that also fed into it. And also in Rock Scene was the first time I read [Patti Smith]—I had heard about her a year before in Rolling Stone magazine, and they used to have a New York column, and they reviewed a gig that Patti Smith did with Lenny Kaye when it was just her and Lenny called the Rock n’ Rimbaud event at this gay disco called Le Jardin. And the one memory of that, aside from the photos, which were striking—“she read her songs and sang her poems.” [laugh] And so I was—“Hmm. I’m going to keep that...” So I kept that on my radar. And then I found a copy of Rock Scene the next year, and it had a feature that she did about Television, which was the first time I had ever heard of them. And it had the famous photo of the four of them with Richard Hell with his hair up like this, holding a little portable TV. And they just looked—it just looked so—you know, so different from—even just to look at it looked so different from what I was hearing on the radio, most of what I was hearing on the radio. And then as far as Creem, I was of course a big fan of Lester [Bangs]’s, and in the spring/summer of ’76, they reprinted Neil Spencer’s first bit of press about the Sex Pistols from New Musical Express—NME. And it had photos, and I was reading it, and [Steve Jones] said, “We're not into music. We're into chaos.” And I was saying, “Oh! They cover The Who and Small Faces and The Stooges?” And I was, like, “Hmm.” Because I was already a fan of all those bands -- The Stooges, particularly. 3 Mike Heath And then the Ramones also were on my radar from Lisa Robinson’s writing about them in Hit Parader. And there were two consecutive reviews that I remember coming out within, like, a week of each other in D.C. One was Howard Wuelfing writing for some free paper saying, “This music is like a hydrogen bomb dropped on Herman’s Hermits.” [laugh] And then concurrently with that was this guy Richard Harrington [of the Washington Post] who was the—just—uch!—don’t get me started about Richard Harrington! But he also reviewed the Ramones record and he said, “It is empty music for empty minds.” And I said, “Oh! [snaps fingers] I’ve got to go out and get it now!” [laugh] And I did. I didn’t really get it at first, but I appreciated it. And in fact, one of my oldest friends—we were in a high school band together, and we still see each other when I’m back East—a guy named Sam Biskin. Amazing guitar player, and is a guitar teacher in Frederick, Maryland, now. 0:06:11 We were in high school together. It was my senior year. I loaned him a copy of the first Ramones album on a Friday, and then the following Monday, we came into class, he handed it back to me, and his first words were, “It’s great, but where are the guitar solos?” [laugh] Davis: [laugh] Heath: So I was already hip to all of that, and then started college, University of Maryland at College Park, Fall of ’76, and discovered in the little shop that they have in the student union, a newsstand, where they had two-week-old copies of Melody Maker. And I’m trying to think—yeah. The first issue actually I saw of Melody Maker there was the famous cover of the Pistols caught in a fistfight onstage [laugh] or caught in a fistfight in the audience at the Nashville Rooms in London. And it was, “Oh, those guys. Hmm. Let me check this out.” And then a later issue reviewed the 100 Club Punk Festival in London. Caroline Coon was very, very much into that scene and very articulate about it and made it sound really, really fascinating and attractive. And she was also writing that it’s not just music; it’s also fashion. Or anti-fashion in the case of, you know, Malcolm and Vivienne and Don Letts and the guy who ran Boy [John Krivine]. 4 Mike Heath But then there was also fanzines, in particular Sniffin’ Glue. And about an issue or two after that, I started picking them up, and I also found them in a record store—they were also two weeks old— called Aura Sounde, right on Route 1, there in College Park. Davis: Orr [sic] Sound? Heath: Two words—A-U-R-A, capital-S-O-U-N-D-E. [laugh] And they had a lot of—plus, it was great. They also had, like—they would have like import records. And the record co-op at the University of Maryland was also amazing for their selection of import albums at the time. Davis: And that was in the [Adele Stamp Student] Union? Heath: Yeah, basement of the Student Union. So anyway, at either Aura Sounde or the Student Union newsstand, I picked up a copy of Melody Maker. And they used to have a regular feature called “Eight Days a Week,” where they’d have a particular person from the music—either from the biz itself or as an artist, recount eight days in their life, journal style. 0:09:10 Ian Dury did one. The great poet Ivor Cutler did one. Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ PR guy. Danny Fields. But then I picked up this one issue—I would find all that out later—but this one particular issue they had featured Mark Perry—Mark P., from Sniffin’ Glue. And I read it, and it just sounded—again, it was very fascinating to me. And I had done a music column for my high school paper—Paint Branch High School in Burtonsville, Maryland—when I was a kid, and reviewed a lot of out-there stuff, at least for then. I reviewed the first New York Dolls album, Dictators, Here Come the Warm Jets, things like that. It was called RPM—very original title. [laugh] And so I had kind of chops as far as [being] a writer, and as far as covering music. And so reading about Sniffin’ Glue inspired me. You were going to ask something? Davis: Were you able to obtain copies of Sniffin’ Glue? Heath: Not until—I had a friend—well, I wanted to play music, too, around this time, and I put a classified ad—WGTB used to run a classified ad thing, like, twice a day, whether it was for getting rides in or out of D.C. or also musicians looking for each other.

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