30 years earlier…

I met John McGrath at Holy Cross High School in Flushing, New York in Queens in 1981 or 1982. He sat next to me in the study hall and I used to call him The Grapes of McGrath. Well, I thought it was funny.

He listened to some pretty terrible music, if memory serves. We started hanging out and I forced him to listen to some “alternative music.” I think “C’mon Eileen” and WLIR had something to do with him coming from the dark side, I shit you not. 

Soon after he took me to my first arena rock show (The Police’s Ghost in the Machine’s tour at Nassau Coliseum. Still an amazing album and it was an impressive concert).

In high school I had been listening to WNYU (New York University), WRHU (Hofstra University), WFUV (Fordham University), and occasionally WFDU (Fairleigh Dickinson University), if the winds were blowing in the right direction from New Jersey to Queens.

From these radio stations I learned about Gang of Four, Pylon, The Bush Tetras, The Feelies, Romeo Void, APB, Delta 5, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, The Gun Club, ESG, Mission of Burma, Au Pairs, R.E.M., The Replacements, The Meat Puppets, The dBs, The Minutemen, Heaven 17, Blancmange, The Cure, Bad Brains, Killing Joke, The Embarrassment, Flipper, Dead Kennedy’s, and eventually, yes, Duran Duran, Yaz(oo), and Depeche Mode. I think I leaned about X and The Violent Femmes from reviews in Rolling Stone. 

At 16 I started to go see live music in Manhattan. I once saw Sonic Youth/Live Skull and UT at Folk City in a single bill at Todd’s “Music for Dozens” series. Thanks, Folk City folks for not checking for IDs. Had I known that, I would have been coming at 14.

My diet became post-punk, punk, backwards to Patti Smith Group, Television, New York Dolls, Suicide, Iggy & The Stooges, and Velvet Underground and everything else that everyone else was re-discovering. (Have you heard Los Saicos from Peru in 1964? I think they invented punk rock.)

My mom got me guitar lessons on Main Street, Flushing, which was a kind thing for her to do. I mostly wanted to quickly learn how to play like Richard Thompson, but that wasn’t happening as fast as I had hoped, but I wrote some songs and got the itch to be in a band. 

I very much believed that music that was coming from downtown NYC, Hoboken, New Jersey to Athens, Georgia was happening because of feeling of “anyone can do it,” and so I wanted to see what that sounded like if I did. 

I kept bugging John McGrath to get a bass and eventually he succumbed. His music taste had vastly improved and by then he was out buying me on indie rock records. I was cheap and taped them all. 

One summer while in Hampton Bays (it was the “middle class” Hampton then), at a house party someone put R.E.M.’s “Reckoning” on a boom box in the window.

Now, the Hamptons for us was basically 48 hours of beer, dancing, beer, and party music from the 1960s and 70s. It was great fun, but the idea someone there was listening to R.E.M. blew my mind and I ran around yelling, “Who put this on?” In jeans and leather jacket (and I believe military boots…in the Hamptons) was John McLoughlin, ironically from the same area in Queens as McGrath and me. This John drummed and wanted to drum more and was always fun to hang out with and go see live shows with. Look, we found a cool, very good drummer!

We started playing some of my earliest, really terrible songs. But I kept writing them and we kept practicing them and pretty soon we had a decent group of songs. I was a good rhythm guitarist, but we thought a second guitar would sound really good. Many, many auditions later, we met John Rice, who was from Wantagh on Long Island. We liked him anyway. 

We played all over Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island, and a bit of New Jersey and Connecticut. We went south a few times and played in the Carolinas and Georgia and Tennessee. We coulda been huge in Knoxville. 

We were listening to The Replacements, The Ramones, The New York Dolls, R.E.M., Uncle Tupelo, Jason & The Scorchers, Husker Du, Public Enemy, U2, Pixies, Tom Waits, Prince, Sinead O’Connor, Big Black, Warren Zevon, Fugazi, The Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, The Go-Betweens, Madonna, Peter Gabriel, Yo La Tengo, Pavement, Talking Heads, and lots more. 

We recorded some rough demos and then met Rich Grula. Rich was playing bass with Glenn Morrow (of The Individuals—a favorite of mine from the Maxwell’s contingent) in new band called Rage to Live. Rich offered to produce some songs with us. We recorded them over a handful of dates at Water Music in Hoboken, which was hosting many favorites there at the time. Their web site says The Feelies, Yo La Tengo, the dB’s, Joe Jackson’s band, The Waitresses and Freedy Johnston, Marshall Crenshaw, Matthew Sweet, Bob Mould, Mitch Easter, Kevin Salem, Overkill and many more. Whoa.

Rich was very gracious and generous with his time both with these and subsequent recordings. We thank him for that.

The resulting EP, “That and a Quarter” was a variation on a story from my mother. When she graduated high school in Queens as a valedictorian her father replied, “That and a nickel will get you on the subway.” It was 1948. They were different times. 

We printed a few hundred copies, did our own outreach to college radio, to indie publications. We played a few brief tours of the south, some to actual people.

In NYC we played CBGB’s, Brownie’s, Downtown Beirut, King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut, Lauterbach’s, Lismar Lounge, Nightingale’s, The Pool Bar, The Pyramid, The Right Track Inn, The Space at Chase, Tramps, even Maxwell’s in Hoboken once.

Later, Rich also recorded a kind of live album we did without an audience at the Right Track Inn.

John Rice left the band in 1990 for his wife Carole and son Nicholas because he is a good and caring man. We were sorry he couldn’t continue, but we are proud of him for stepping up and being a very good husband and dad. 

We played with a few other guitarists, Marc Silvert included, who you will hear on “Mad” and “A Happy Man,” before we returned to trio form and recorded a handful of new songs with Tim O’Heir at Fort Apache. Fort Apache also had a prestigious list of past bands including Pixies, Radiohead, Superdrag, Come, Big Dipper, Juliana Hatfield, Throwing Muses, Belly, Tanya Donelly, Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, The Lemonheads, Volcano Suns, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Elliott Smith, Eleventh Dream Day, The Connells, The Specials, Blake Babies, Weezer, Yo La Tengo, Evan Dando, Warren Zevon, Uncle Tupelo, Morphine, and many more.

I think we were finally finding our sound, but then it all just came to an end. We loved playing live and were getting good at it. But in my naivety I thought we’d get interest from a label. We tried, but New York is not an easy place to get attention (shocking, I know) and I guess we felt we weren’t getting anywhere fast. 

We got compared to a few bands the most: R.E.M., The Ramones, The Replacements. We were all fans of all of them, and lots more punk stuff, too. We had a wide array of tastes, but I’d say most of it was meant to be played pretty loud. 

I had four older siblings with very diverse tastes: Michael played Steely Dan, The Grateful Dead, and Talking Heads. Maureen played James Taylor, Carly Simon, and Jim Croce. Joseph played Yes, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, and Elton John. John played The Beatles, The Monkees, and Paul Revere and the Raiders. My cousin Thomas turned me on to The Clash, B-52s, Talking Heads, Black Uhuru, The Ramones, and Neil Young. I discovered Blondie by myself. I hear bits and princes of some of all of them in Falling Stairs, too. 

I loved disco (I admit it. I was, and am, gay after all) and when that started getting terrible I went through high school with a steady diet of X, Gang of Four, Pylon, The Clash and Patti Smith. Listening back to these songs now, I hear some of the above. 

Although raised Catholic, I left that ship by college and I think I was mostly raised by the morals of bands like The Clash or R.E.M., who put forth this idea of doing things their own way without outside interference. They also influenced me to pay attention to politics and social issues and learn some actual history.

The way I wrote lyrics was always by bringing together interesting lines I’d written down, of words that devolved from just practicing a song with the band and making sounds. 

Listening to these songs again for the first time in a long while, I realize the lyrics don’t always sound connected, but as I listen I hear the story that’s behind each one. They’re not easy to get at, but they are there. At the time I admired Paul Westerburg of The Replacements, Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum, and Peter Holsapple of the dBs. I’m never really as linear as any of them and I don’t pretend to be anywhere as good, but they were the goal. 

I think our thing was big loud rock songs with droney guitars and a lot of energy. We all liked punk and some pop and it was our version of those things together. I also hear my own fascinations with the guitar work of J. Mascis, Chris Whitley, Peter Buck, and John Fahey’s drone guitar. 

The name? When you arrived at Holy Cross High School there was a flight of stairs going up and a flight of stairs going down. And when it was wet, students were falling down the stairs. It was that simple. Later, when I read Peter Buck making fun of band names, he said R.E.M. didn’t want to be “The Flushing Toilets.” Given our origins in Flushing, Queens, it would have been a great name for us. 

I think back now and wonder if I wanted to be famous. Maybe, but I mostly loved playing music and seeing music and listening to music. The last of these hasn’t stopped, and as I get older my tastes keep fluttering to jazz and classical and experimental and international and whatever else just sounds new to me, something I haven’t heard before. 

As Tim O’Heir put it, the Falling Stairs album is, “A snapshot of pre-computer indie rock.” I think that’s a good way of thinking about it.

In the band we were brothers and learned a lot about the world together. After all these many years it’s interesting to listen to the music and look at the photographs of us from that period.

For the first time, I can say I’m now actually proud of it all.

-Charlie, Jamaica Plain, MA , June 2023