Forming a punk band in Minneapolis? Cool.

Forming one in 1975? REAL COOL.

Chris Osgood is known for many reasons in this scene: founder of the Suicide Commandos, teaching guitar to future rock stars, helping bands with his generous resources, and giving the best hugs in town.

Chris was a guest on air the first day The Current launched, as if to christen it with his Godfather of Punk approval. Here's our scrambled chat about the early Twin Cities punk scene, about Cyn Collins' Complicated Fun book, and tales about guitar lessons with Bob Mould, Dave Pirner and Craig Finn, to name a few.

Transcript: Mary Lucia and Chris Osgood

Use the audio player above to listen to this conversation.

Mary Lucia: Chris Osgood, here with me now is a central figure in everything happening this week … Cyn Collins's book, Complicated Fun, is really amazing because any kind of book where you are getting various people in a rock scene's recollections, there's bound to be some people that were murkier than others, and some people that just had photographic memories and stories. You read the book; which stories in this book did you go, "Did that happen?"

Chris Osgood: That's an excellent question. I'll preface my reply to that by saying, usually when I read a book like this, I'm like, "Please kill me," and those kinds of things. Everyone that's in there shows up with an axe to grind. They'll show up saying, "This is my chance to rewrite history and I'm the hero of it all so I'm going to go ahead and do that." [But] that completely didn't happen in this book. There are only two whiffs of it in the whole thing. What makes it such a fun read, even if you weren't there, I think, is how it's sequenced and how Cyn and Josh Leventhal, our editor at the Minnesota Historical Society Press, set it up in such a way that how the people talked about in it moves it along. It's not like, self-aggrandizement here…

My favorite stories are the ones that I was absolutely not involved in. They're like, NNB recording in the basement of Wax Museum. I knew that was happening, and I was going out with Chuck Olquist's sister Linda at the time, so I was pretty close to all those guys, and Cindy Blum, and Steve … really everybody was friends with everybody, but I wasn't in that basement. So I was curious about that and I was curious about all the other places I wasn't at.

ML: When you guys were talking about the formation of the Commandos, at that time, you probably did own every punk record ever that was out, because there were nine of them.

CO: Yeah, exactly; I think Steve pointed that out — you could, in fact, own every punk rock record. You go down to Oarfolkjokeopus, and it would be like, the Jam, the Damned, the Sex Pistols, this is sort of maybe before the Ramones. Then the Ramones happened, and there were the New York Dolls, and they were a big influence on us, along with the Stooges, and I met the Dolls at the State Fair, when they played in '73, I want to say. And David Johansson came out and said, "Who won the pie-eating contest?" And I saw them and, Mary, they were revelatory to me, because they were such poor players, but they were still great.

ML: Oh, they looked fantastic … Interestingly enough, when you look at a band like the New York Dolls and you've got Johnny Thunders, and some people say, "Oh we hate his style and this and that." But was it his guitar style? His pose, his attitude? His clothes? Or was it his prowess? I'm not sure.

CO: The thing I remember most about the State Fair show was that when he came out, he had a slingshot in his back pocket. And I thought, "That's cool. That's really cool." And Killer Kane, Arthur Kane, was wearing bunny boots, those big winter, and army snow bunny boots. And Jerry Nolan was wearing really stacked heels, we saw him and his girlfriend walking around the Midway. And David Johansen was David Johansen. Even then he looked like an American Mick Jagger to me. And he sort of danced around the same way. And later on, I became friendliest with Sylvain Sylvain. And I would see him every time in New York at St. Mark's place. It was like magic. And I probably ran into him five times after that. Each and every time I went back out to New York, there he was. And so we just stayed friends.

ML: We will delve a lot more into the idea of you guys deciding together ... let's make a record. But I've always wanted to ask you this, because I know that you taught guitar lessons for years and years and years, and I had asked Dave Pirner — I ask a lot of people who come in here — "Did you take lessons with Osgood?" And Pirner did. And I'm always curious, and I'm sure you've got some famous students. I'm curious, what is the one song everyone wanted to learn?

CO: Wow, what a good question. … The answer will surprise you. Let's name three for starters: Bob Mould, Dave Pirner and Craig Finn. What did they bring in? For starters, I don't remember Bob bringing in anything. First of all, Bob took lessons in my apartment before I started at Knut Koupée, so Linda, my girlfriend at the time, would hide in my closet and read books. And Bob would show up on the bus with his Flying V case. He'd take the bus over from Macalester College, I lived in the servants' quarters of the Hudson mansion on the corner of 24th and Pillsbury, I was way upstairs. And for some reason the Harringtons, the landlords, would let all of my students, or whomever, just walk right through their house up to the servants' quarters, two flights. And then we would get up there and either needle drop, or what I remember with Bob — of the three of them, just to compare those three out of hundreds — he was very workmanlike. And he wanted to become proficient. And I just remember that he gained proficiency in about four or five lessons. And he was determined to start a band. He came to the lessons with the goal, not of, "I want to figure out this Judas Priest song," or "I want to figure out this Creedence Clearwater song." It was, "I want to get into a band, what's the quickest point between these two dots?" And after the fourth or the fifth one, I was like, "Bob, you're ready to go. You can do the pieces, you know the major chords, you've got the minor chords, and you know the roots on the A string, the E string, you can play leads all over the place, you know the pentatonic scale, the major scale — knock yourself out."

And so he did — just boom! Just like that. And within five months, he and Grant, they had hooked up and invited me over to their first recording session at Macalester College in the choral room. And there's Greg set up over in one corner, and Grant is here and Bob is here, and they were just tracking. And I was like kind of pretending that I was being the producer, but I wasn't. I just was there watching them record in a choral room, but suddenly there was a band, just like that. As quick as can be. And take a look at the whole Hüsker's arc. And everything that they did was started off with those guitar lessons. And was accomplished in the same very businesslike, let's get-'er-done sort of way. Whether it's like DIY touring, putting out their own records. Even when they would like go into the studio with a producer, or other people, let's put it that way. Or signed with Karen Berg and that whole thing, there was always a method to their madness, and every move was like thought through. But it was kind of cool because Bob was my former student. And Bob still is my former student.

ML: He'll always be.

CO: This is the beauty of it. And Pirner, all of them, and by that I mean, all of them. I think about those three just because they get us gigs! [laughs]

ML: Pirner came in with his trumpet.

CO: No, he came in and he had some ideas of stuff he wanted to do. And I will give you a hint, I won't say specifically, but it's not so different from the songs that Dave has thrown into their set: covers, things like "Rhinestone Cowboy" and "Jukebox Hero" and stuff like that. The things that he does for fun, were some of the things, the kinds of things that he was originally interested in learning. So there's a clue.

ML: Well, "Sexual Healing"? Oh, wait — was it ostensibly a rock band song? An AM Radio song?

CO: In all cases we were figuring out guitar parts to songs. So "Sexual Healing" wasn't at the top of the list.

ML: Should have been. It wasn't written yet, I don't think, but yeah.

CO: That was the problem with so much of what we have come to enjoy, is that it wasn't written yet. So Pirner started writing it! (laughs). And Craig Finn, the same way. Craig really wanted to be educated about what was cool. And from time to time, I'll read things where he quotes me — and this is a weird thing to talk about, talk about a left-handed compliment or something, going around the block to compliment yourself, so I apologize in advance — but he likes to tell the story, about how he asked me what guitar he should buy. And I said, "Whatever guitar looks the coolest on you."

ML: Good answer, yeah!

CO: Sound means nothing. Whatever gives you the most confidence, that's going to be your guitar. And he also reminds me that I told him he better learn to smoke. Because smoking made you look cooler.

ML: I'm sorry, but these are two pearls of wisdom that I think any young band, I hope all you kids out there are listening. We are going to listen to the new single from Time Bomb and then we can talk about that and I'm going to throw in something else weird after this. But first we're going to listen to "Boogie's Coldest Acre." Who named this song by the way?

CO: I did. I wrote this song.

ML: How long ago did you write this song?

CO: About a year ago. All of my stuff on this record is new.

ML: So there was never anything remnant here, hanging around in your head that you couldn't have worked out years ago. This was a clean slate.

CO: The chord change that starts it out had been floating around for a while. And same with "Pool Palace Cigar." The chorus of "Pool Palace Cigar," I always wanted to get that into a song. But Steve called me up — we got the idea to do this after Tommy Erdelyi died. Steve goes, "The Ramones are gone, we're all here, and we should make a record so we should." And he goes, "Do you have any songs kicking around we could put on a Commando record?" And I said, no. But he and Dave each had one or two. And a couple had made their way into our sets. So "Milk of Human Kindness" we were playing, "Hallelujah Boys," ... we did it way back in 1999, and then it left the set for a while but it was floating around. Those guys were ahead of me.

Music Set: Suicide Commandos - "Boogie's Coldest Acre"; Suicide Commandos - "Burn It Down"

ML: That is the Suicide Commandos and that was actually recorded for us, The Current makes a record, "Burn It Down." And what sort of kismet was there at the time, Chris, that you actually knew Chuck Statler and happened to have your finger on a burning house for a video? How do the stars align for that?

CO: The stars aligned for that because we got a photographer named Matt Quast, he came down to see us at the Cedar Cultural Center. It was one of the many times we got robbed in New York, so we had to have a benefit for ourselves. And so Matt came down and he took our pictures and we befriended Matt. And then we found out that Matt worked with this filmmaker named Chuck Statler. This was before music videos were honestly really invented, but Chuck had this one — he called them "little movies" — and it was this band called Devo from Akron, Ohio, and there was this character in the band called Boogie Boy, and he was sticking a fork in the toaster. And that was Chuck Statler's first video.

His second video was us playing in front of Utopia house as it burned down. And what's that called, CGI? When you're standing in front of a screen? But actually the hot embers were falling on us, and the water from the fire department was gushing down. And Chuck said he had come down to see us by that time and liked our band, and he liked the idea of making these little movies, even though we didn't know why. And I'll tell you this, we'd got signed, our house burned down on Friday, and somehow in the same week, the house burned down, we made that movie with Chuck and we got signed to Blank Records in a matter of two or three days. After we got signed — Cliff Bernstein was the guy that signed us, from Q Prime now, him and Peter Mensch — but afterwards, we'd have this movie, and we said to Cliff, "Would you guys be interested in a movie of us playing one of our songs in front of our house as it burns down?" And Cliff said, "What would we do with that? Would we put it in film festivals?" Honestly, there wasn't a correct answer. And Chuck wanted 500 bucks. Can you imagine? So the answer was no. It didn't happen. But then MTV came along a couple years later, and the rest has happened since then.

But I found out, or I should say, that after that happened, Chuck's team coalesced and Matt became the sound person or the sync-playback person, Chuck was the videographer, or the camera person. Dale, this English guy, was the editor, and there was this other guy named John who did the grip and all of that stuff, and the four of them began to travel around the world. They Started with Elvis Costello, and who came along next? Jay Geils Band. Remember that thing with the drummer where his snare drum is filled with milk? That's like a Chuck Statler thing, if there ever was. And Chuck went on to just roll with it and really, almost invent MTV as we know it. And also the playfulness of those videos, you know?

ML: Oh, totally. And the burn it down video, too. It would appear that some of those extras, they appear in the video as if they were dragged out of a, I'm not sure what —

CO: Yes, they were dragged out of Mousey's Bar. And Chuck promised each of them two drinks if they were in his film. And they all put on a fireman's hat. And it was Chuck's voice that did the Dalmatian, "Introducing the Suicide Commandos." That's him being the voice of that Dalmatian. And that's what he did. That's how he did it.

https://youtu.be/zs_RlJ_cLv8

ML: It's legendary. YouTube it, kids! We want to talk about this, because this is fairly major, you can't be a complete slouch or have an outstanding warrant for your arrest in order to get an entire day named for you and your band as is happening this weekend with both mayors. So, you guys have clean records I assume right now. No outstandings, anyway.

CO: A lot of that stuff, the statute of limitation runs out. And people, if you do the crime, and you do the time, you more or less have a clean slate. As far as the authorities are concerned. And they don't dig that far back. If you all go back seven years, we all look pretty good.

Their Fridays, it used to be called Friday, but it's going to be Commando Day going forward. Tomorrow's the big day and the reason it's tomorrow, is that's when the record drops worldwide. And so, god bless the Twin Cities. They got with the program. I have to say, and this sounds corny and aggrandizing for our scene, but it's really a recognition of the Twin Cities and how we've got to be a part all that stuff.

If you think about it, I get goosebumps, because stuff that was happening in New York and stuff that was happening in London, was also happening here, totally unconnected to that stuff, but totally concurrent. We weren't aping those other scenes. And if you go back and if you really take a look at what was happening musically around the United States at that moment in time, for a brief shining moment, it was us.

ML: I was telling Kevin Cole, when he was in here earlier, I said, "I don't know if you view yourself this way, but I have always viewed you as a guy that has been in the right place at the right time for so many different creative things" … That's not to dispel, you don't' have a ton of talent to back it up. But you seem to be on the ground floor of everything cool that's ever happened, ever.

CO: No, no. But, there, I'm personable. So I think that's part of it. And I'm also, and this sounds so, like, stupid and dorky, sorry, it is stupid and dorky. But I'm interested in what other people are doing, too. So if I find out someone's a filmmaker and they're going to make a film, we start to talk about it. Or if I find out something else. So I think being curious is about half of it.

ML: I agree. And you've spent so much of your time, maybe you don't like this word, mentoring younger musicians. And they're clearly has to be, there had to be times when you were with someone hopeful and shiny faced and young and fresh, and you were thinking in your blackest of soul, "Oh this is never gonna happen; you need to find a different path." I'm sure you never said it because you're' too kind. But you had to have thought of, "Do you know of any other skills?"

CO: I did think that. And remember I went on the RCA, Resources and Counseling for the Arts and Springboard, and working with all kinds of self-employed creative people, and tried to get them from point A to point B. And I often had that thought privately. And Mary, over and over again, I was astonished that the person I thought was the last in the class, and the total eight ball, is the one where something happened. The timing was right for them, and they had an idea that was just right at the right time, and they ran into the right person. And again, their talent is a part of it. But hey, I saw the New York dolls and I saw how sloppy and ridiculous there were, that was the greatest show I saw that year by a mile and it just opened my eyes; it was like seeing the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, too. When Dave and I were in the ninth grade we were like, "Wow, rock and roll can be funny." And it can be fun. Let's think about that. And Dolls were fun. They were just instantly appealing, just in every way. They were a spectacle, they sounded like rock and roll, and their motivation was to enjoy themselves and to have as much fun as they could, even if it was at the audience's expense. We thought, "Hmm…"

ML: Here we go with, here's some things that probably, I'm assuming some of these things you don't want to announce publicly until you actually are at the proper place. This is going on all weekend.

ML: I have a question, when you were a part of something, sort of revolutionary, and you're sort of a founder of something, how aware were you at that time that you were on to something that later in history was going to be viewed as, "this"?

CO: Totally unaware. I'd grown up listening to Big Hits in Mid-America Volume 1 and Volume II, so the Castaways and the Mystics, and all of those bands, the Chancellors, and I'd hear them, like on KDWB and WBGY for like three months. But then they'd be gone. And so I thought that's what pop music was, and I thought the goal was you try to get a song on the radio, and as soon as you get a song on the radio, you're done.

ML: Right, and not much has changed with that, actually.

CO: Right you know more about that than I do. But, at the time, every gig we got practically, and I booked a lot of them in high school. Sue McLean hired me, and I pitched all these bands, and the last band I pitched to the high school principal, was that, "For 150 bucks you can get the Suicide Commandos. They're a three-piece, and you might like them." And the principal was always thinking about money, they didn't know anything about the style of the band or what the kids liked or anything like that. And we would go play, and then that principal would call me, because he would come and tell us to turn down. And I said, "Well, talk to the booking agency about that. We are what we are. If it's a bad fit, that's on Schon Productions." And so the principal would call me on Monday morning and I'd hold the phone way far away. And I'd go, "Was that Chris in the band that said that to you?" And he'd go, "Yeah." And I'd go, "You know what? I'm going to have a talk with him. They are never playing at your high school again." And you know what? They never played at that high school again.

But that went on, and each time we did that, some kids would go crazy. Not all of them, but some kids would go crazy and I still remember people that would say, you played at my high school in Dawson or in Owatonna — or Jim Walsh, Regina High School [in Minneapolis]. He saw us play at Regina High School and remembers it and talks about it when we got to get together with him a couple weeks ago. My point is that every time we did one of those shows, we would laugh. We got 150 bucks! And you know how we split it up in those days? Fifty bucks a guy! We're done. There's no crew, … we're just done. That's it. No handlers.

ML: This next song, this going to be a difficult question for you to answer, but I want you to tell me your favorite Curtiss A story.

CO: Oh man. There are three that occur to me in a row, bing, bing, bing. And I could tell you 20 of them and we could keep going. But the first three that I thought of, I can't tell on the radio.

ML: I figured as much.

CO: But the fourth one, I can tell. And it had to do with when we were remodeling at Twin Tone, at our offices, and there were some walls that needed to be knocked down. And Paul Stark gave Curt a sledgehammer—

ML: Good idea

CO: —and so Curt started to go at one of the walls and he succeeded in knocking down that wall, but then he went ahead and knocked down another wall he wasn't supposed to knock down. And Paul was there, he confronted him, he goes, "Curt, what happened to this wall? It's gone." And he says, "Oh yes, some kids came in here and did that."

And you must know the story about, one night he was made at Jay and Margaret, Jay's girlfriend, at the Longhorn. And Margaret was right outside the wall of where the stage is. So he started to hurl his body against the wall. And the wall started to bulge out towards Margaret in the foyer being the ticket taker ... and eventually by the end of the night there was a Curt-shaped bulge in the wall. And it was just like a cartoon. I went out and watched it. A bunch of us knew what he was doing and we went to watch it next to Margaret because I thought one of those moments he was going to come crashing through. But he never did.

ML: But his imprint as there

CO: Again it was like a cartoon. Like an outline of Chris's body in the wall

Music Set: Curtiss A - "Land of the Free"; The Suburbs - "Chemistry Set"; Gene Vincent - "Blue Jean Bop"

ML: So Chris Osgood of the Suicide Commandos has been joining me. …
It's really amazing because it just sort of feels right with the Suburbs making a record — I don't want it call it a resurgence, but with Andrea Swensson's book about the early funk, pre-Prince, Chris Riemenschneider writing a book about the history of First Avenue, I feel like we're starting a renaissance of the interest of the roots of this place musically.

CO: I think a lot of us are at a point now where we feel comfortable looking back, and we can talk about it in a different way than if you're closer to it. If you're far enough away distance-wise or age-wise, you're not quite so self-conscious about it, maybe that's part of it. I think another part of it is that Prince is gone.

ML: Yeah, there is something looming.

CO: Since he's gone, I think for all of us, there's a void. And I think people kind of consciously or subconsciously feel like, "Is there something that I can do to help fill this void?"

ML: I gotta bring this up: the night that he passed and Bob Mould was in town to play, the next night, you guys joined him on stage. How impromptu or, did you just know you had to do that or wanted to do that?

CO: Well, here's the deal. Bob was nice enough to put us on the show with him and Fury Things. And after we got on those shows, then we could afford to fly, Steve was flying in to town for those shows anyway. So that meant we could track the record with Kevin Bowe. So Steve stayed around an extra three days and we tracked after the Fury Things show. But the day before we were going to do those two shows, Friday and Saturday, Prince died. He died on a Thursday. Steve was in town, and we were rehearsing, but we couldn't rehearse. We were just too — we were crying. We were too messed up. And then we thought, "We gotta put a Prince song in our set; what's it going to be?" And we happened to choose exactly the same song that Bob chose, and we were running it at sound check and somebody comes out of Bob's dressing room, his manager, and he goes, "Bob's going to do that song." And then we're having dinner before the show, and then his manager comes back and says, "How about we all play it together at the end of the night?" And both bands had rehearsed it, and we knew it, and so we had it worked out. "When You Were Mine."

ML: Brilliant. Chris, you and, you know, we could just go on and on. … Chris Osgood, Suicide Commandos. It is truly, if mayors say it then it must be true that it is Suicide Commandos' day, weekend, week, month — let's just say that it's their year. There's fantastic things coinciding with their release, with Cyn Collins's book, Complicated Fun, the brand new record from Suicide Commandos, Time Bomb, which is phenomenal. I haven't heard one person say, "meh." Not one. It's really on point, and again, I think this is going to a really fun record for people who maybe were there in its time, people who heard about it, read about it. That's what's so cool about Minneapolis is that we are a curious people and we want to go check out things, and it doesn't matter if it happened 20 years before you were born, this is happening now. Be here now. So that's my message.

CO: That's a good message. I'll just echo that message and say that it's heartwarming and weird for me to see kids that certainly weren't born when we were playing these songs the first time around and they know all the lyrics. And they sing along to our sets. How did that happen?

ML: I never know how that happens

CO: I don't know how that happens.

ML: How do you feel about it when the singer turns the mic around to the audience. Is that just lazy and crazy or is that like, I guess I understand. I guess I'm not a big audience articulation person.

CO: To me that's self-indulgent but I will say when the Commandos were doing our last songs at the Longhorn. One of the nights, we were playing a song that Bob Wilkinson knew, so I asked him to get up and play guitar on it. And it was a song that Johnny Haga knew. The Hypstrz drummer. So Dave asked him to get up, but then somebody, another bass player got up that was playing, that grabbed a bass drum from Steve. So the three of us went back to the soundboard and watched ourselves play. So I guess that we've done it, or a version of it
But when people turn the mic around like that, it's self-indulgent to me. I don't think that's a cool thing and I'm not swept off my feet when somebody does that; it doesn't make me want to sing the song.

ML: I agree. Chris, thank you so much.

Conversation transcribed by Jackie Renzetti.

Resources

The Suicide Commandos - official site

Related

• Mary Lucia: Thanks, KC
• Rock and Roll Book Club: Cyn Collins's 'Complicated Fun'