BOB CUTLER: Confessions of a Kansas/Midwest Hardcore Punk

Confessions of a Kansas/Midwest Hardcore Punk
Interview by Jack Partain, Part 1
(August 2023)

Originally published in:

From afar, the history of punk rock can look like a fireworks display on a hot summer night. It is full of loud and violent explosions that streak through the night sky and detonate with an awesome, yet beautiful force before fading away into nothingness as drunk on-lookers and bleary eyed children cheer in the crowd below. It is dangerous for those who get too close – Sid Vicious, Darby Crash, Johnny Thunders, and countless others all individuals who lived their lives like missiles and hurled their bodies into the vast, wide open space before immolating themselves with a glorious bang. For those who do venture close to the danger, we are expected to, if not emulate or admire such self-sacrifices, we should at least revere and honor them as beautiful, poetic, and, for lack of a better term, true to the nihilistic spirit of the music we love.

But what about the people whose stories do not end with a bang? For every Darby and Sid there are a couple of dozen guys who lugged their gear around, struggled to make their band sound good behind a soundboard, replaced their microphones, or rented the venue for the show. Those are the guys with the real stories, the good stories. Hell, they’re probably the ones who told Darby or Sid about all of the crazy shit they did the next day because Darby or Sid were too drunk or high to remember. They are the guys who set up the fireworks show. The ones who showed up early, dragged in all of the gear, arranged everything perfectly, and then lit the fuse for the big, chaotic, disaster of a display in the first place.

Bob Cutler is one of those guys. He has lived a life in punk rock since the late 1970’s. He has worn many different hats in that time. He’s been everything from a shithead punk kid begging for admission to shows to a show promoter himself. He has played in his own bands, and run a soundboard for almost every van full of dirty and starved mohawked lunatics that rolled through the lonely cornfields of Kansas looking for a place to play a show. He has toured the world with some of the most legendary punk rock bands. He even ran for sheriff once, and got some votes, but we might not have time to get into that.

PSF: When and how did you get into punk rock?

BC: Well, I always say I didn’t discover punk rock, it discovered me. I’ve always been a weirdo, for all of the typical reasons. I had a lot of problems in school, could never keep up. In my fifth grade year my mother sent me off to see a shrink. Around here there was a real stigma attached to that and no one was supposed to know about it. The next day I go into school and, of course, all of the kids are calling me “Shrink” and “Couch.” I don’t know how they found out, but they did and once you get that label, that stigma just sticks so all the way through high school I was “Crazy Cutler.” Luckily by then, punk rock had discovered me.

In March of 1978, I was standing in a convenience store in Topeka, KS. I had given myself this weird haircut across the front of my face because I didn’t like my hair in my eyes. It looked like half a Ramones sort of thing and half a weird spike thing. And I had this big green officers trench coat on that had huge pockets, so it was great for shoplifting. I’m standing in this gas station, it was called Kwik Shop, playing pinball and this guy comes in and I forget what he said to me, but he made some sort of comment about me. And my gut reaction was to tell him to ‘fuck off’ right away. I thought we were gonna get into a fight but instead he started laughing. Then the guy says to me “I know what you are! You’re one of those punker rockers.” And I’m confused so he takes me over to the magazine rack and he pulls out the March 1978 Penthouse magazine and inside is a big story about punk rockers in New York City. And I was transfixed. I immediately shoplifted the magazine and read the article over and over again. And I was like ‘yeah, I’m a punk, I agree with all of these anti-social, anti-establishment thing.’ I was hooked.

The music I listened to at the time was heavier guitar sounds like Rush, Black Sabbath, stuff like that. And since I lived in Kansas, I had to listen to Kansas, there was no escaping it. I loved heavy distorted guitars and always wished the songs were faster. But by coincidence, some friends of mine had gotten a job at World Records, which was this small but really cool record store in Topeka. They got a job organizing records or something like that. And in Topeka, you couldn’t get access to everything but World Records and another store called Mother Earth had some things. My friends would bring punk rock records home from work, and we’d listen to them but I couldn’t afford my own copies or cassettes to record them on. So I would go to the local university library where they would have recorded lectures on tapes for students to check out. I would steal the tapes and go to my friends’ houses and say ‘Hey record Rocket to Russia or the new Stiff Little Fingers for me!’ So I was probably responsible for a lot of really stupid college kids.

I had this completely different set of friends that were just kind of hillbilly drunk car guys. Kinda greaser redneck types. And they would go to Kansas City and buy records just for the covers. And they introduced me to the Dead Kennedys, the first Dead Boys record. Stuff like that. So I was getting turned on to punk rock by these two different sources that weren’t typically punk rock.

PSF: So that’s how it started. What was it like being a punk in the Midwest at that time?

BC: In those years 1978-85 it really was rough and dangerous to be into punk. I remember rednecks and jocks jumping out of cars, chasing me down the street screaming ‘you punk rock faggot I’ll yank that mohawk off your head! Also, anytime the cops saw me walking down the street, they would stop and hassle me, tell me I matched the description of a ‘suspected burglar in the area’, whatever excuse they could come up with. I got pushed around by the cops and sometimes they’d handcuff me and drag me downtown, only to let me go an hour later.

But a friend of mine met some older guys who were in a punk band in town called Abuse. I think they met through World Records. Abuse lived in a place called The Coffee House in a loft apartment downtown that they lived and practiced in. We would skip school and go down there and make them buy us beer and hang out. I started following those guys around. I don’t know how annoyed they got with me, but they put up with me.

At the time, Topeka actually had a pretty decent punk scene and a good live music scene in general. There were several bars and other places to play and bands like Abuse, The Tunes, The Brats, The Iguanas would play at all of them. And people actually went to those shows. I would go down as a 14 or 15 year old kid and I would ask the band or the sound guys if I could carry their gear into the bar in exchange for free entry. And they would say ‘fuck yeah!’ you know, free labor. Eventually, everybody got so used to seeing me so they didn’t question it.

I’ve always been interested in electronic stuff and loud sounding things. So I would watch the sound guys how they plugged everything together and how it worked, I asked a million questions and that’s basically how I learned to do sound. A lot of the sound guys around town were just drunks. They’d start out the show fairly sober but sometimes by the end of the show, they’d be passed out on the board, drooling, with the faders pushed up. I’d have to run over, pull them off the board, get the feedback to stop and figure out how to run a mixing board. Eventually, I started to do sound for a living.

PSF: How about on a more personal level? How did you feel about growing up where you did and in the punk scene?

BC: I knew I was gay early on, probably in the second or third grade. I knew that I liked boys more than girls. But I also knew that most people around me felt that queers are sick and dirty perverts who deserve to be beaten. This was actively taught in school when they showed movies like Boys Beware, which portrayed all homosexual men as predators. My parents were pretty liberal, but they did drive confusion into me. Basically, I was taught that it was okay for other men to be gay but not me.

I hid being gay as best I could through junior high but I went through high school scared to death that people might find out. And there was plenty to be afraid of. Homophobia and violence towards gays were pervasive then. Guys who were just a little effeminate, not necessarily gay just a bit girly would be beaten in hallways. In junior high, I got to know a few other guys who seemed to enjoy other guys, and there was a loose collection of us. Some of us never even spoke to each other unless we were meeting up in our various hiding places around town.

In the punk rock scene back in the early days, it was weird. There were plenty of queers, lesbians, and gay men around and for the most part, it seemed like no one really cared. It even seemed a little hip to be fruity.The guys from Abuse certainly didn’t care. They showed me this place downtown called The Lambda Lounge. it was a gay bar and it was an exotic and strange world in that dank bar. That place had no problem with a young kid like me being in there. And I wasn’t the only high school aged kid in there. It seemed like they understood that there was a real need for the young guys to have a place to go, and it wasn’t just to service the older men, though that did happen too.

I certainly wasn’t the only gay kid in or around the Topeka punk scene. There were others, mostly deeply closeted. The queer punks had this informal sort of secret society and we’d hook up in secret around town. There didn’t seem to be as much homophobia in those days. Then AIDS came along and put an end to a lot of the fun. For me, it was just as I was starting to figure out out. And then the punk rock scene itself changed and the older guys moved away to places like New York or Hollywood to pursue music careers. Or they died. And this younger group of “punks” started to come up that weren’t nearly as cool. They were definitely more homophobic and racist. I didn’t come out officially until much later and it was even worse then.

PSF: And it was around this time that you started your own band The Klusterfux.

BC: I played in a couple of other bands before that like The Radiators- we didn’t know that name was already taken. Another one was The Blame, which was more of a theoretical band. We never played live. I was also in The Joe Matic Band with Brian Khan. Everyone had their little Matic name and eventually we had the whole family. Brian was Joe Matic and there was Trau Matic, Problem Matic That’s where I got my nickname Otto Matic, which some people still call me today. We hung out at the Matic Mansion. I would pound out Black Flag style stuff about nuclear disasters and the Civil Defense Department, stuff like that.

The Klusterfux were formed in 1983 with me, Brian McGuire, and Bill Volmut. Eventually we brought my brother John, who is a very talented serious musician, in to play guitar. We invented the term “hard slop,” we were the town’s premier Hard Slop band because we weren’t really hardcore, and we were pretty sloppy, so we called ourselves Hard Slop. Brian, who was a great guitarist, was more into Alice Cooper and The Who. I was into the Sex Pistols and The Clash and Mark was into all sorts of stuff. We would do weird, fucked-up covers and originals. We had a song about the Challenger space shuttle explosion. We played songs that poked fun of people and things.

In the early 1980’s, it really was still a very club or bar based scene. The guys from Abuse and all of those early bands played at clubs, it was more bar oriented. We couldn’t get a show to save our lives back then. And, of course, we sucked. But we told ourselves, ‘that’s the whole point of it!’ Be a horrible band and fuck up every gig we get. But you can’t bitch too loud that no one is giving you a gig when you’re going out of your way to suck.

At the time, there were a couple of competing forces in the Topeka punk scene. There was a group of younger kds that came up after my group, and they had their own bands and their own places to play. They had a place called The Boneyard, which was an outdoor place north of the city where they had built a skate ramp, and they had bands play. I don’t know why they called it The Boneyard. In a lot of ways, it was a pretty cool place. But a lot of them had the attitude that if you’re not a skater, you’re not cool. I was not a skater. I tried. I just didn’t have the athletic ability. But I had a PA system that I had taken out a $2500 loan to buy, and they would hire me to do sound because I only charged fifty bucks. They wouldn’t let my band play, of course, even though I would ask, but they would hire me to do sound and I’d say yes. And, of course, my money would disappear at the end of the night and I’d have to chase it between this guy and this other guy. Finally, I’d give up and go home. A week later, they would call me back.

Part of me was genuinely trying to support the scene, wanting the shows to happen, and things to develop, and wanting to be part of it. The money was really secondary.

The cops generally left everyone alone at The Boneyard. I don’t have an immediate memory of the shows being broken up because it was outside of the city. So unless something stupid happened on the highway that it was near, the sheriff didn’t bother us. But the shows we put on, where The Klusterfux played, were pretty much house parties inside the city, and the cops would always show up. Every time I would do a show, the cops would show up and fuck with me, beat me up, whatever. We’d have bands come over and play. I lived in a place called The Garf House, it was on Garfield Ave. The Iguanas played, The Socio-Pathetics played. The Klusterfux was a four piece at the time, and we played there or at Brian McGuire’s house on Quincy.

Later our guitarist Brian McGuire killed the woman he was with. I’m not sure if they were actually legally married or not, but he was upset because she was moving out. In a way, I believe that he didn’t mean to kill her. But he always said ‘It’s hard to convince a jury that you didn’t mean to kill someone when you have a gun aimed at them and you pulled the trigger.’ He was diagnosed with something along the lines of schizophrenia, I’m not sure what the actual diagnosis was. We were all like “Oh, holy fuck.” We were really freaked out about it, but we continued as a three-piece.

Eventually, we brought Tom Kelly into the band in 1987 or 1988 and went back to a four piece. We’re still together. We are too lazy to break-up.

PSF: So at this point you’re playing in a band, doing sound at shows. You had a zine too, right?

BC: Yeah, it was called Sour Notes. It didn’t come out that often. Usually, by the time I managed to get an issue out, it was six or eight months old so it wasn’t really news. Back in the early ’80’s, I had a huge pen pal list. This was before the internet and cell phones. I got most of my address out of the back of Maximum Rock N Roll. I put my own ads in there as well.

It was mainly about trading cassette tapes. Mix tapes traded with someone you weren’t trying to fuck? How weird! It’s almost like it was about the music! And we traded fanzines. And that was half of the reason I started the Sour Notes fanzine. So you would have something to trade and to try to elevate our little scene into a higher level of awareness globally. I had pen pals all over the world. With some of them, we just wrote back and forth about our lives. “Dear diary” type stuff. Others sent artwork or submissions for the zine, and then cassette tapes of local bands.

PSF: You also started bringing bands into the city. Big bands like Black Flag and D.O.A. Tell me about that.

BC: I’d been a big Black Flag Fan for a while and would drive to Kansas City to see them at places like The Fool Killer or The VFW Hall.

PSF: VFW Halls seemed to be strangely important to the development of punk rock for some reason.

BC: Yeah, especially in Kansas City. Everywhere else too. Back then, especially in Kansas City, it was one of the only halls you could rent that would allow shows like that regularly. You really had to dig around to find a place that would let you do a show. The minute you would mention punk rock, the owner thought you were saying ‘we’re gonna come through and rape your sons and your daughters and kill your grandma, is that ok?’ You’d have your grizzled old vets sitting in the club downstairs drinking every night and they could make a couple of hundred bucks renting the hall and the punks would come in and buy a whole bunch of liquor. There were a lot of people who promoted shows there. Both Misfits and Samhain played there about two or three years apart. There was one show, I think it was a Minor Threat show but I’m not sure, where someone broke into the display cabinets and took all of the Nazi memorabilia from the display. The show was shut down and further shows were cancelled. There was a major manhunt in the scene to find it. They finally found it. And the venue let them do more shows.

Kansas City was great back in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. There was a place called The Fool Killer and it was right behind the Grand Emporium. I would go to the Fool Killer to see a show and sneak in the back door of The Grand Emporium and see Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or someone like that, just legendary stuff every night.

PSF: Ok, back to Black Flag in Topeka.

BC: The first sort of national band I brought in was in like 1984 and I think it was Angst, an old SST band. We did it in the basement of the old Domme Dance Theatre. We did a bunch of local shows. There were a bunch of shows that almost happened. We had Husker Du set up and ready to go but they broke up before the tour.

Topeka had a pretty decent punk rock scene back in the early 1980’s and I wanted to try and build on that. I was running around with Jamie McCoy from the Iguanas and we were friends with promoters in Kansas City and they thought that booking shows in Topeka, which was only about one hundred miles away, would help strengthen their position for touring bands. So they encouraged us when I asked them how to do it and they hooked us up with phone numbers for booking agents. At the time for Black Flag it was Chuck Dukowski, I think but I could be wrong.

When we booked Black Flag, we booked the show and didn’t have a venue, I left the venue as TBA on the contract. I searched for a few places that were really expensive and then I actually asked the VFW in Topeka. They were cool with me renting it but when I said I was going to have bands play they said ‘Oh, what kind of band? Like Tommy Dorsey?” And when I said ‘Um, no, like rock bands,’ they threw me out. I didn’t even say punk rock.

When I talked to Dukowski about it he told me that in his experience it is best to just tell them straight up, up front what you want to do. I ended up renting a place called the PBG Hall, a Hispanic community center in East Topeka, which was in a neighborhood with a bad reputation. I was really just going down the Yellow Pages asking everyone. The owners were kinda difficult. But they gave it to me for $250 bucks a night. This was 1985. We set up the show for the day after the Kansas City show.

The show was actually pretty good. About 150-200 people showed up. There’s never enough people at a show, you know, for the promoter. Black Flag was great. The lineup was Black Flag, Tom Troccoli’s Dog, and SWA. You can see Topeka in some of the Joe Cole videos.

PSF: You brought them back the next year, right?

BC: Yeah, they called me back the next year. D.O.A. had come through a month after Black Flag and played at the PBG Hall and that show went really well and the owners of the venue tried to double the rent in the middle of the show so that bridge was burned. They thought I was making money hand over fist, which just wasn’t reality. So for the next Black Flag show, I rented out the National Guard Armory building in town. They had had rock shows there before and it was a huge space the size of a basketball court. On that tour, Black Flag had booked shows everywhere in the Midwest. They had booked St Louis, Columbia, Missouri, Kansas City, Lawrence, Kansas, Topeka, Wichita, Omaha, Lincoln, pretty much every city with more than fifty people it seemed. I had a Friday night show and only about one hundred people showed. More people went to the show in Lawrence, Kansas, about twenty miles away, than the Topeka show.

But that wasn’t the only drama. I printed up tickets for the show and some of the record stores around town were selling them for me. But I had been letting a few local bands practice in my basement and this girl ended up stealing a big stack of them and selling them around town. I found out about it. The legitimate tickets had serial numbers stamped on the back. When I found out about it the girl blamed it on her ex-boyfriend. On the night of the show the people that showed up at the show, with stolen tickets tended to be parents that were bringing their kids to the show.

That show didn’t do so well. Like I said, it was in a huge cavernous place and there was only about one hundred people there. Black Flag brought their own PA system, which was huge and really, really loud. There was a side building in that complex that was an arsenal and held all of the guns and ammunition for the National Guard and the sound set off the alarms. All of a sudden cops come storming in, telling me that they are shutting the show down because the seismic alarms to the arsenal had been set off. I was like ‘Well, go turn them off.’ But they came up with the idea that I had set up this show so I could break into the building and steal weapons. It was so full of shit. The cops said they wanted to come into the show and look around and I made them buy tickets to get it, and they did. A few of the cops came back after they got off to check out the show.

BOB CUTLER

Confessions of a Kansas/Midwest Hardcore Punk
Interview by Jack Partain, Part 2
(October 2023)

Punk rock happened in thousands of places throughout the world and it developed differently in each place. In the Midwest, the most legendary hive of punk rock culture was The Outhouse, a cinder block building in the middle of a cornfield five miles east of Lawrence, Kansas that hosted shows from 1985-1997. In a recent documentary about the place, Henry Rollins said: “Could a venue like The Outhouse exist in Brooklyn, New York? No. Could it exist in Manhattan? Could it exist in downtown Washington DC? Or Boston, Massachusetts? No. No, No. And no.”

Bob Cutler was at ground zero for just about everything that went down at The Outhouse. He attended many shows there in its early days, played there with a couple of bands, ran a soundboard for countless bands, booked shows there, and even cleaned the toilets. And he was one of only a handful of people allowed to use the hidden telephone there. Here are a small portion of his memories from those days.see Part 1 of the Cutler interview

PSF: You meet some pretty interesting people when you run in punk rock circles, don’t you?

BC: Yeah. I used to buy weed from Bob Berdella, the famous “Butcher of Kansas City.” I used to hang out at this house in Kansas City where my friend Jeff lived which was right down the street from Berdella’s house. Jeff was sort of a “scene king” kind of guy there were always a bunch of punks hanging out at his place, one of those kind of houses. After shows, I’d usually end up there and someone would go ‘Hey, man, we need some weed.’ And somebody would say ‘Go over to Bob’s house up the street.’ Then someone would say ‘Hey Cutler, you go! He’s your type, ha ha ha!’ But, see I knew him from his oddities shop at the Westport Flea Market, Bob’s Bizarre Bazaar. That shop of his was always a must stop place when we would come to shows in Kansas City. The first time I went to his place to buy weed, someone else took me there and Berdella acted really upset that we were there. He seemed paranoid and annoyed. I think he recognized us from the shop and thought we were there to buy bone earrings or something like that. When he found out we were there to buy drugs, he softened a little. I went a few steps into his house and it was kind of a hoarder house, boxes of crap everywhere. He even apologized for the mess. And it smelled like like musty old books and antiques, piss, and a wisp of sour rotting flesh, like pork gone bad. He always dressed like he thought people in New York at Studio 54 dressed, silk shirts and stuff like that. There were a couple of times, maybe twice, that he said something along the lines of ‘why don’t you hang out for a little while I’ve got some better stuff in here.’ It did seem like there might have been an overture or two to hang out. But he was a creepy old guy and I was never all that into pot anyway. And then we see on television one day that he had been torturing, murdering, and dismembering men in his house for years. I’ve always wondered if someone was being tortured while I was there because he would keep his victims for long periods of time, weeks and stuff.

PSF: It was around this time that you moved to Lawrence, KS where the University of Kansas is located. There was a pretty good music scene there, right?

BC: Yeah, there were a few clubs and lots of house shows and things like that. I was at the famous party where Phil, I can’t remember his last name right now, the photographer, got his camera smashed by the cops. At the time, the cops in Lawrence were using these real gestapo like tactics in the neighborhood known as the student ghetto. A lot of it had to do with local real estate politics. All of these yuppies would move away after college and make a bunch of money, then come back to town and buy houses in the student ghetto and bitch about kids throwing beer cans in their yard. The head of the police at the time absolutely hated alternative culture. He hated punk rock, and didn’t care for hippies either. And he was more than happy to send his stormtroopers to smash up parties. I played a house party once and the cops came in and smashed things up and tried to confiscate my guitar. One night we were at a party on Tennessee street. Me and a couple of guys are standing there watching the band Brompton’s Cocktail, a local punk band. And that band had a policy, when the cops come in, do not stop playing until they actually touch someone. And, of course, the cops come in and start hassling people and messing with the band and this photographer takes a picture of the cops grabbing the band. And I think what happened was the flash from the camera really got to one cop and he got pissed off. And then he started grabbing the camera and arguing with the people at the party. They started destroying this guy’s camera. Then, as we were all going downstairs to leave the cops kicked someone down the stairs and we all tumbled down the stairs. Outside there are cop cars lined up and down the street with lights flashing. And then it damn near turned into a riot. People were picking up bottles, breaking windshields, vandalizing police cars.

PSF: This was around the time you started working at The Outhouse, the legendary punk rock venue in the middle of a corn field outside of Lawrence, KS, right?

BC: Yes.

PSF: Tell me about the place.

BC: It was just a cinder block bare bones buiding in the middle of a cornfield. I think it was a tractor barn, that’s what it was built as. The inside was covered in spray paint. There was a rule – no spray paint outside but it was covered inside with satanic graffiti. Bands would drive from hours away and still have to drive four miles outside of town to a field to get there. They’d would get there and say “we thought this was a prank” or “we thought we were getting set up to get robbed.” In the beginning, there was no stage, bands set up on the floor and by the end of the show, everyone would be knee-deep in beer cans.

PSF: You, and a few others guys, did the sound there for years. How many bands do you think you worked with?

BC: Oh, I can’t even estimate.

PSF: What shows did you see that were particularly memorable?

BC: It’s really not fair to break them up into favorites. Almost all of the shows were great. And some bands are just great everywhere. D.O.A. and Toxic Reasons, those shows were legendary. I really liked Tupelo Chain Sex, the played there three times. Rollins Band was always great.

The place was so stripped down and bare bones, it really was just like the bands, just stripped down, bare bones rock and roll. Raw energy, raw emotion. The Outhouse encapsulated that, you know, it was just a shack out in the cornfield. We could be as loud as we want, there really weren’t any neighbors. GWAR played there a couple of times and I remember the bass player saying something like ‘You know out here we don’t have to worry about scrubbing the walls and stuff.’ No jukeboxes, not pinball machines. It was always a DIY thing.

PSF: Did you work the Nirvana show?

BC: I don’t think I did do the sound for that one but I was there. I wasn’t impressed by them, just wasn’t my kind of punk rock. The guys were nice but Kurt kinda seemed like a whiny hippy more than anything. There weren’t many people there, well under 100. There was a little buzz going around about Sub Pop and the grunge movement but it wasn’t enough to make a ton of people come out. The headliner was 24-7 Spyz, a metal band. Kurt went on their tour bus and took a shit in its bathroom, which is a huge no-no as bus bathrooms are notoriously not poop friendly. It was a total noob move. I remember thinking this is the first and last time we’ll ever see this Nirvana band. Joke’s on me I guess. Wish I had a nickle for every person who says that they were at that show now.

PSF: What exactly was your role at The Outhouse?

BC: The job of soundman at The Outhouse apparently included being a plumber. And a maintenance guy. And a building systems management guy. And a gardener. And a horticulturist. And a roofer. And a carpenter. At The Outhouse, the position I kind of put myself into was like a greens keeper or manager. I had the lease on the building for a little while and brought bands like Rollins Band through. And then a group called the Four Horsemen took over for a little bit. I went on a couple of monthes long tour and when I came back the place was kinda trashed and people hadn’t been paid and stuff. Some bands had been stiffed.

PSF: Can I ask a quick question that might be uncomfortable?

BC: Yeah, go ahead.

PSF: How common was that, bands getting stiffed, I mean. Not necessarily at your shows or at The Outhouse, but in your experience in general.

BC: It happened, and it happened at The Outhouse too. I never stiffed a band. Bill Rich, who did the early shows at The Outhouse never stiffed a band. It depended on the promoter. I got real mad at promoters because bands would drive five hundred miles and not make anything. But sometimes people just didn’t come to the shows and there simply wasn’t any money. And according to punk rock morals and values, the band that drove the furthest and has to go the furthest gets the lions share of the money.

A lot of the time it wasn’t getting stiffed so much as saying ‘OK, you’re guarantee was five hundred but I’ve only got two fifty or three hundred.’ I did that with D.O.A. a time or two, but they knew I was honest and just didn’t have the money so they cut me a deal. I learned a lot later when I toured with D.O.A., especially from Joe ‘Shithead’ Keithley. He knew how to pick his battles. I mean, are you really gonna start a fight with people that just don’t have the money. You know we’d be all like ‘we can’t take that Joe, that guy fucked us over.’ But Joe would say, ‘no, what’s that gonna get us? It’s not gonna get us the money. If anything it’s gonna get us thrown in jail. Or get our fingers broken and we have to play the next night.’ But he knew he could also look at the club’s calendar and go ‘oh, look at all of these other bands that we’re friends with playing here next month. I could make a phone call and cancel a lot of your shows.’ Not saying he ever actually did that but promoters knew he could and that went a long way.

PSF: Ok, back to The Outhouse.

BC: Anyway, I got back from being on tour and the place was in disarray. And I had a key to the place and an agreement with the guy who owned the place that I would go out there and open the place up for the other events that went on there. There were a whole lot of other thing that went on there that the punk scene never knew about. Frat parties, stuff like that. These frat boys would pay $500 bucks a night to listen to a DJ play the same music that was being played there live on other nights but they would never go out there.

The Outhouse had a cistern that ran underground for a bathroom. We’d have to drive a 500 gallon cistern into town multiple times to fill it up for shows. And, of course, it had a leak in it so the water would run out over the course of a weekend. And there was a pump next to the bathroom that you had to use to prime the pump to get running water and the sinks would work. So many people complain that the bathrooms never worked at The Outhouse. Actually, the bathrooms worked most of the time, I made sure of it.

And then there is the toilet. People would shove all kinds of things down that toilet. Broken bottles, broken glass, tampons. I had to scoop stuff out with a shovel or a stick. Other times, I had to reach in with a big rubber glove that I kept out there. Once, I shoved my hand down in there and a hypodermic needle went up under my fingernail and probably an inch into my finger. I pulled my hand out and there is a needle just dangling from my finger. It had who knows what in it and it had been festering in this bacteria stew for who knows how long. I yank it out of my finger and then, of course, the promoter pops his head in and says ‘Hey, you almost done, man, we gotta get the doors open.’ And I’m like ‘FUCK YOU!’

So I wrapped my finger up and got the first band going. But I’m getting more and more worried about my finger so I got my buddy Josh to cover me on sound for the first band and I went in town to the emergency room. They gave me a big shot of antibiotics, and a tetnus shot, and cleaned it off as best they could. Luckily, it didn’t get infected. It turned black and swelled but got better.

PSF: The Outhouse is one of those places where anything could happen, but not everything did. I heard for years about a particularly wild GG Allin show at The Outhouse. Were you there?

BC: GG Allin never played The Outhouse. He was booked there twice and no-showed both times. The first time he had actually been injured at another show a week before he was supposed to be in Lawrence and had some sort of blood infection or something like that. The second time, what I heard was that GG actually showed up at The Outhouse earlier in the day, in the afternoon. When he got there, he realized how isolated it was and that there was basically only one way in and out of the area. Which meant that there was no easy escape route if the crowd turned on them and chased them away. So they left. Supposedly, The Outhouse is the only venue GG Allin was too afraid to play.

But the audience was not to be denied. Both times, the opening bands played and I did sound for both shows. There were huge fights both times GG didn’t show, not because he didn’t show but because I think the people were just hyped up for gore and violence.

PSF: But a lot of wild things did happen at The Outhouse and some of the most legendary stories occurred when music wasn’t even playing. Were you there when the drunk, naked redneck tried to shoot the place up?

BC: Well, there is a documentary about the place that is available online to watch and it tells part of the story. But here’s the full story. The Melvins were playing that night, but they weren’t there yet. Me and my buddy Josh are on site, hauling things in, getting the PA set up and everything at about two in the afternoon. And the bands started showing up, and they all like ‘oh great this place is a shack,’ and they’re all bummed. We try to reassure them- ‘just wait until everyone shows up, it’ll be great.’ I’m standing there talking to the promoter about the PA system. I see this red pickup truck roll up and slow way down in front of The Outhouse, and then he kinda speeds off. I had a gut feeling that he might be trouble. Then he comes back by a few minutes later and I tell the promoter maybe we should call the sheriff and ask him to just buzz by and see what this guy is up to. But we also don’t want the cops coming out to The Outhouse. But then the guy comes back fifteen minutes later, he comes back by driving really fast. We’d definitely caught this guys eye.

At this point, there’s like twenty people outside. Suddenly the guy shows back up, pulls into the parking lot and leaves. Then he pulls up across the street. Leaves again. Then he comes back flying down the road and he slams on his brakes, goes into the ditch across the street. He drives through the corn field, drives back towards the Outhouse, hits the ditch again and goes into the air Dukes of Hazard style before coming back in the parking lot and slamming on his brakes and coming to a stop. We’re all like ‘whoa, what’s going on.’ So we walk over to the truck, and the promoter says ‘Hey man, the gates don’t open until six, so you’re gonna have to come back later.’ I’m looking at the guy and he’s a rather large man and… he’s not wearing any clothes. I did find out later that he was wearing a red thong but he looked nude. And there are vodka bottles all over his truck. He’s talking but he’s not making any sense. It sounds like he’s asking for someone to either beat him off or beat him up. He gets out of the truck and waddles into The Outhouse and goes into the bathroom and locks the door and stays in there for a while to the point that we think he passed out. So we pound on the door, trying to wake him up. And he comes out, waddles back to his truck, giving everyone the evil eye. He gets in his truck and guns it, rams into a van, then starts chasing this crowd of punk rockers in his truck through the parking lot. So I go to call the cops. A lot of people didn’t know but there was a phone hidden in the Outhouse and that was by design. We didn’t want them to know about it or it would have been broken.

So I call 911 and I tell them where we are and what’s going on – there is a drunk naked man driving around the parking lot. And the dispatcher says ‘and this is at the outhouse? what is the emergency?’ Like ‘isn’t that what you guys do out there? What do you want us to do about it?’ And she’s asking for his tag number and for a description of the truck and all this and then I hear someone say: “He’s got a gun!” And I hear some shots and he’s driving and shooting out the window up in the air. And then the dispatcher asks me ‘what kind of gun?’ like I’m supposed to run out and get the serial number or something. So everybody comes running into The Outhouse and the truck comes crashing into the doorway of the building. People started picking up pieces of rock and cinder blocks and advancing on the guy, throwing them at his windshield. The guy manages to free his truck and take off and head towards town and then the dispatcher decides it’s an emergency and sends the sheriff. He finally gets arrested after driving into another ditch. I’m still on the phone and they are asking me for a description. I tell them that he is a 350 pound naked white man driving in a red pickup. They ask for more details, of course, and I say “How many 350 pound naked men do you think are driving around the county right now?”

A bunch of us went to his court date. He told the court that he was just minding his own business, driving past the Outhouse when a bunch of punk rockers flagged him down, made him pull into the parking lot, stripped him of his clothes, and tried to sodomize him. We all just sat there laughing in the courtroom and the judge had to pound his gavel and clear the court room.

PSF:And you played The Outhouse too?

BC: The first time my band The Klusterfux played The Outhouse was kind of by chance. I’d been asking Bill Rich, the guy who promoted all of the shows, and he would always say “oh, just give me a demo tape” or come up with some excuse. We got our first gig at The Outhouse when D.O.A. played. There were three bands on the bill D.O.A., Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers, and I think this band called Sand in the Face. One of them didn’t show. I knew D.O.A. from before when I had done their shows in Topeka so I was just sitting around in their bus talking. It sounds glamorous but it was just an old school bus. I’m sitting there with Joe Shithead and the guys and I am bitching and whining about how they would never hire my band to play at The Outhouse. So Joe says “hold on a second” and gets up. I think he’s getting up to go pee. But he went up and talked to the promoter, Bill Rich, and comes back and says “Ok, you got a gig, you’re opening.” They let us borrow everything right down the drumsticks and guitar picks. We got on stage and I have to admit I had a good amount of stage fright that day. We were terrible but it did show the guys at The Outhouse that we could play a set. And we started getting shows there.

BOB CUTLER

Slackjaw, gay backlash, major label blues and more
Interview by Jack Partain, Part 3
(December 2023)

By the late 1980’s, Bob Cutler had been well entrenched in the Kansas and Missouri punk scenes for over a decade. He had been active in bringing bands like Black Flag and D.O.A. to sleepy towns in Kansas, had played shows and house parties that are now considered legendary with his band The Klusterfux, and began working nearly full time at The Outhouse, the most legendary music venue between Chicago and Denver.

Around 1989, he formed the band Slackjaw, an extremely heavy hardcore punk band, in Lawrence, KS. As the band grew, the music industry changed. Grunge slowly began to seep out of Seattle and into the mainstream and then, seemingly without warning, exploded into the national spotlight. Record company executives fanned out across the country looking to sign the next Nirvana or Pearl Jam, and Lawrence became a focal point. Several bands in Lawrence landed major label deals and countless others signed with large indie labels. Slackjaw quickly gained a reputation as one of the best and most serious bands emerging from the Midwest. And then, all of sudden, and in a way that is at once somehow completely inexplicable and totally predictable, everything fell apart.See Part 1 of the Bob Cutler interview and see Part 2 of the Cutler interview

PSF: Okay, so I wanted to ask you one more question about The Outhouse before we move on. There was this thing about people stealing Doc Marten’s off of people’s feet at The Outhouse, wasn’t there? It came up in the documentary and I hear about it a lot, even though I don’t know if it is something peculiar to The Outhouse. I don’t remember hearing about that being a thing really anywhere else, but I could be wrong. It was called getting your “laces cut” or something like that?

BC: Maybe it was called that. Or just getting mugged for your Docs by some idiot bullies. One thing that I’m kind of ashamed of looking back is that we didn’t really see some of these skinheads (and punks) for what they really were: bullies. And why we didn’t do something about it?

The leader of the local skinhead crew had read somewhere about the act of taking peoples Docs as a way to make sure that ONLY the anointed and approved Skinheads had Doc Martins, not the posers.The skinhead purists thought they were entitled to taking Docs away from people who they didn’t approve of having them. Usually by claiming that the person was a “Nazi.” It happened a few times. It never happened to me. One time, this big dumb bald oaf walked up to me and put his foot up next to mine as if he was measuring to see if my Docs would fit him. This was like a weird warning ritual they did. So I said “Oh, you want my Docs? Go ahead and take them, I can afford to go out and buy a new pair but if you working class pride guys can’t then I guess you need the charity.” I let him know that my Docs would not be worth the trouble.

PSF: Living in Lawrence for all of those years, did you ever run into Lawrence’s most famous resident, William Burroughs?

BC: Yeah, William Burroughs lived in Lawrence. I had read Junkie and Queer in high school. One of my queer mentors, Jamie Mercury Future, had lent me copies and told me that I HAD to read them. I was stunned by them because i had never seen any gay literature that was not just porn. Some of the things Burroughs was saying about sexuality were mind expanding.

I had heard that William was living in Lawrence since the early 1980’s. The word got around about his shopping habits, they were the worst kept secret in Lawrence. I met him in a Dillon’s grocery store at 19th & Massachusetts Avenue. I saw him there several times but most of the time people left him alone. I finally got up the nerve to approach him and I walked up to him and said “you’re William Burroughs,” and he said “I knew that.” On Thursdays, he would go to the Town Crier bookstore downtown and pick up all of the gun magazines he liked to read. He loved guns. Sometimes, I’d go up to him there pick up a gun magazine and try to talk to him about guns.

He lived in a little red house at 19th and Barker in Lawrence. I knew James Grauerholz, his friend and caretaker, a bit because he had a small recording studio in his house which was just around the corner. I’d have to go and borrow William’s barbecue grill a lot because there wasn’t one at the recording studio and bands always wanted to grill hamburgers while recording for some reason. So I’d go over and get the grill and he and I would talk a little and I’d pet his cats. He was always nice. But there are stories about him answering the door with a gun sometimes, and those are true. Once Grauerholz called me up because there were some kids, barely out of high school idiots who were going over to William’s house, knocking on the door, and waving a bag of dope in front of the window. They were trying to tempt the High Priest of Heroin into getting high with them. James wanted me to find out who the kids were. When he told me about them, he described the van they were driving. I’d seen it around town and I knew exactly which one he was talking about. So I found them at a little bar downtown called The Replay and I told them to leave William alone. Of course, they said, you know, “who the fuck are you?” I said “I’m a fiend of the family, and William is not interested in your adolescent crap.” Stuff like that happend a lot.

But a lot of cool people would come through to visit William. People like Iggy Pop. Kurt Cobain came that one time shortly before he died. It was always kept on the down low. There is a story about U2 coming by one day and William not knowing who they were.

One day I went in to this bar/coffee shop downtown called The Bourgeois Pig and I walk in and get a coffee. There is a booth kind of by the door and there is an old man sitting there but there is an empty seat. So I ask if I can sit there and he says OK. I end up talking to the guy for probably half and hour and he keeps asking me where all of the queer college students hang out. And I tell him where the cruising grounds are, the Campinile area of the University of Kansas campus and Riverfront Park in Lawrence. I don’t want to tell him, “you know, listen, man, it’s probably a waste of your time because you’re, you know old.” Then Grauerholz walks in and sees us sitting there. He walks over and goes “Oh, hey Bob, I see you’ve met Allen Ginsberg.” He was in town for a big Burroughs symposium at the university.

PSF: Around what time, did you form the band Slackjaw?

BC: It was around 1989-1990. I was in The Klusterfux but I was getting frustrated because I wanted to play something more hardcore and the ‘Fux were “hard slop.” I knew this guy named Josh Brewer who was playing in a band called Risk of Contamination. He was a good solid bass player, and we just started jamming and working up songs. But everything was going in five different directions from Dead Kennedy’s to Slayer to all over the place.

Now, at this time, I was sort of coming out of the closet. Working on sort of coming out of the closet. And I had an idea for a, for lack of a better term, queer-core band. I wanted to express all of my homosexuality through hardcore music, and make a lot of political statements. I talked to Josh, and we had added Aaron Mersman, neither of whom are gay as far as I know, but they were cool with it. We worked on some names starting off with things like Fist Fuck and Iron Fist before it came down to two: Lowbrow and Slackjaw. I liked the image of getting hit in the face and being left slackjawed so we went with that.

So Josh was on bass and Aaron was on drums and I was singing and playing guitar, which I wasn’t very good at. It does take talent and skill to do that. I mean, I’m hanging on for dear life, playing guitar in the first place! And we would take the Black Flag approach to practice, we would drill. Just play through the songs over and over again at different speeds trying to essentially build muscle memory. We played like that for almost a year. Our very first show was at the Paradise Cafe, a restaurant in downtown Lawrence that we all worked at. We played the Christmas party in 1989, and wore hazmat suits.

That was really, really different from what Slackjaw eventually became. In a small scene like that it’s hard to tell sometimes whether people are coming to your shows because they like your music or because you are winning a popularity contest.The Klusterfux were still together and when we would play shows. I would beg to get Slackjaw on the bill for four or five songs. And I started to notice that people were really liking what we were doing, so we got our foot in the door. At the time, Josh and I were doing sound for a lot of shows at the Outhouse. By like 1990, we were doing about 90% of the shows there.

PSF: And that helped you get gigs?

BC: Everybody knows that the music industry is all about who you know. But a little secret about the music industry, especially at that level, is that a lot of promoters really don’t spend that much time looking for new music. They don’t really have the time for that. So they don’t really know who is out there, what bands are coming up. They aren’t calling people about opening shows a lot because they are busy. But the bands that do want to work are calling constantly trying to get on gigs and sometimes, getting a gig is just as simple as “Oh, ok, you’re the first ones who called so you’re on.”

I was still promoting shows at this time so I know. I did an SNFU show at the Outhouse once, the last SNFU show in Lawrence. I had a good relationship with Chi Pig. Before the show, I found a group of punk rock fundamentalists tearing down fliers for the show. And at the show, I’m standing in the parking lot and I get confronted by this kid demanding to know “why isn’t my band opening this show?” And I said, “Well, I didn’t know you wanted to open the show. Why didn’t you call me or ask me?” That kid went off on me, screaming and yelling, about how I’m some capitalist pig and how I was fucking the whole scene up and my band was a corporate sell-out. I wanted to smack the kid, but I didn’t. Punk rock fundamentalists are just as bad as fundamentalist Christians.

Slackjaw had an advantage because Josh and I would be working the shows from the soundboard. Or doing other handyman work around the venues and for promoters. We would see the schedule months in advance and could get on those shows before anyone else. The bottom line is that Josh and I were at the Outhouse and The Bottleneck or wherever, humping gear, standing behind a board, cleaning toilets, or whatever, and doing it for very, very cheap. Other sound guys looked at me like I was an idiot for how little I charged. But, you know, if we hadn’t been so flexible about things, especially getting paid, a lot of those Outhouse shows, a lot of legendary shows, wouldn’t have happened. They couldn’t have. I mean, the promoters couldn’t call up bigger and better sound companies and ask them to come out and do sound and maybe get paid. No, those sound guys would say “yeah, we’ll do it for four hundred bucks or go fuck yourself.”

So our effort was reciprocated by promoters letting our band open up shows. And we got a lot of big shows. It’s still rewarding today when people see me and say “Hey! I remember Slackjaw! You guys were great! I saw you with Bad Religion, or Prong, or Rollins Band or packing the Outhouse.” I never know how to react when that happens, but I appreciate it. But there was a lot of jealousy among other bands. We actually developed a crowd, we started drawing. And we were good. Our entire life at that time was Slackjaw. We drilled, practiced four days a week and were always loading gear and stuff like that. We were out at venues every night schmoozing and trying to meet other bands.

PSF: You were still a three piece at the time?

BC: Yes, but we were looking for a singer after about the first year. I came to terms with the fact that I just couldn’t sing and play guitar at the same time. We wanted agggressive, Henry Rollins type vocalist. I knew a guy, he was the former vocalist of the band Two Car Garage. He started getting people to come to me and petition me to let him sing, and some of the people were pretty influential to me. He talked to Josh, and he got to my little brother, John, who is a truly talented musician and is in The Klusterfux with me. At the time I kept wondering, “why he doesn’t just come to me himself.” But I actually knew why he wouldn’t.

PSF: Is this the story about how you came out of the closet? I feel like it is intertwined with Slackjaw in a lot of ways.

BC: They sort of meld together and you can try to unbraid them if you want. A lot of gay people when they come out they come out big, you know. Because you feel like you gotta take on the world. And you start to really feel the homophobia that you feared. A certain amount of your friends are gonna come and try to stuff you back in to the closet. A lot of my friends thought it was a prank. Different friends got really upset about it.

I didn’t come out big. One day in like 1989, 1990, I was sitting on the porch of a bar just off campus of the University of Kansas called The Crossing with a couple of friends, the guy asking to be our singer and another guy. There was a guy at the bar making googley eyes at me, you know. And my friends were sitting there saying “faggot” this and “faggot” that. I had not come out of the closet yet, I was struggling with it, but I honestly thought that everybody knew or at least had a pretty good idea. Or just didn’t care. So me and this guy, I think his name was Dan, are talking and flirting, doing the dance of a pick up at a bar. It’s exactly the same as it is for straight people. And we get up to leave and go to my Volkswagen, which was spray painted with crazy stuff, to go somewhere. Out of nowhere, the guys I was hanging out with, my “friends,” come running up to the car and yell “hey man, if you leave with this guy everybody is gonna think you’re a fag!”

I’m like, sarcastically, ‘Oh my god, no!” Or I said something else smart ass. My “friends” were just spitting mad and continued making other homophobic comments, just spouting off a bunch of the most vile homophoic crap. Dan looks at me and he says “Do you know these people?” And I have to turn to him and say “Uh, yeah, they’re, um, my friends.”

Anyway, we leave and do our thing. Like I said, at the time, I was between houses waiting for a room to open up in a house. So I was crashing at the apartment of two of those guys from the bar, my “friends,” one of them the guy asking to be the singer. So when I’m done I go back to the apartment. I knock on the door to be let in. And I hear someone whisper “its that faggot. Don’t let him in.” It’s not just that I’m staying there, my stuff is in there too. The next day they did the same chickenshit stuff, wouldn’t open the door. Finally I said just let me get my stuff, and eventually they did. But they had pissed in my laundry. And they had taped up handwritten signs all around the apartment that said things like “No AIDS carrying homeless fags allowed,” stuff like that.

PSF: Wow. That’s uh, pretty wretched.

BC: I sure found out who my real friends were. I had been out for years, just not around the punk scene. I had two sets of friends, other gay kids, and we always joked about being in a secret society, which we really were. We kept each others’ secrets. I wasn’t the only punk scene gay guy in that little club.

I didn’t officially come out. It just sort of happened. I didn’t really hide being gay and I was shocked that anyone was surprised when they found out. One night, I was at a party in the student ghetto and this guy was there and we’d been making goo-goo eyes at each other for months, just awkwardly sort of flirting. We started chatting and I noticed on the other side of the room some friends of mine, even a couple of guys from my band. They were just glaring at us, making jokes under their breath, calling us faggots, stuff like that. Then a beer can comes flying and hits near where we are standing. He knew who the guys were, knew they were my “friends,” and he just said, “You wanna get out of here?”

I said “absolutely,” and we left. Behind us we hear all of the usual jokes and stuff like that and I’m apologizing and all that. We get into my car and sit there for a few minutes trying to figure out where we could go have our biblically-condemned relations. Behind us, I see these idiots, again my friends, getting into another car. So I start the car and drive off and these idiots proceed to follow us all through town. I didn’t know where to go so I just sped off towards The Outhouse. I put some space between us by taking advantage of a red light but I knew they were still behind us. So when I got to The Outhouse I hurried and unlocked the gate, parked around the back, and “locked” the gate, which meant just putting a chain over a big wooden post. Then we sat in the car and watched at the idiots pulled up and looked for us but they couldn’t see us hidden in the weeds behind the building. Eventually they left and, since I had a key to the building, we went on in. There’s no way to know for sure but I’d bet that I easily have the recordfor most sex on the Outhouse stage.

But I was used to it, the harassment, before it even started. I remember playing on-stage at The Outhouse and this shithead “friend” of mine was standing in the shadows in the back, screaming “Die of AIDS faggot!” and throwing bottles at me throughout the show. After the show, I found the air had let out of my tires on my car and someone had written “faggot” in the dust in my window. There were more than a few people who really wanted me to know that being gay was not going to be tolerated. I was certainly not the only Queer punk in that scene, there were plenty of us out there and some were fairly obvious about being ‘Out.’ But a lot of them stopped going out to shows, and a lot of that had to do with this wave of homophobia and hostility that seemed to follow me coming out.

Later, I always felt a little part of myself die when I’d be on tour or I’d be somewhere where I couldn’t just be out. Where I had to keep a lid on that part of me and just keep it hidden. I hated myself for backing down and sliding back into the closet in certain situations. I think every gay person knows that ugly feeling. But I also know that for all of the toxic masculinity and machismo bullshit that people exhibited when I came out, not one of them would have had the balls to be out and gay.

PSF: But Slackjaw did become very popular at the time. You guys released four seven inch’s and played shows all throughout the midwest.

BC: There were a lot of good times. I met a lot of great people and made some great connections that served me well throughout my career. This was very much in spite of the efforts and intentions of other members. We played some great shows and had a great time on stage. We could have gone so much further, but when all band members are not on the same page, or have their own agendas, going further isn’t going to happen. And it’s pointless to try.

For me personally, I would be on stage and look out at these frat boys and skinhead types and all of the toxic masculinity tough guy bullshit and I realized that these weren’t people that I would hang around with. They were boring at best and chest thumping violent jackasses at worst. I didn’t feel like I had much in common with the people that came to see us. But it was like a drug addiction: it was hard to put it down when something seemed to be working.

PSF: Do you want to talk about the breakup?

BC: Okay. We did let the former singer of Two Car Garage join as the singer. And, surprisingly, it worked. We sounded really good. And we continued to develop a following. We did release four seven inches, so 28 inches of vinyl. But it was a huge mistake on my part for a lot of different reasons.

I had decided to run for local office at the time too, the Lawrence City Commission, and I got a lot of local press for it. So, naturally, people said I did it to promote the band. I didn’t. There was a local politician engaged in some real shady shit like getting the city snow plows to plow the parking lots of businesses he owned for free, scummy shit like that, and that’s one of the reasons I ran. Also, I wanted to be an out member of city government. But people did say I did it for publicity for the band. Whatever.

Anyway, I got a lot of attention at the time because of that, and certain members of the band, not all of them, got very jealous of that attention. And then we won an invitation to South By South West through a battle of the bands that was hosted by a local music paper called The Note.

At the time, people thought if you went to South By South West you were going to get signed. That was SXSW’s reputation. I watched them build that reputation. SXSW had given a bunch of music publications around the country a chance to send a local band to SXSW. From what I understand, they suggested that there be a battle of the bands but it wasn’t required or anything. It was 1995 or 1996. There were several rounds for the competition and it was at The Bottleneck. And we won and were pretty psyched. We thought, “alright, first week of March we’re going to drive to Austin and participate in a bigger battle of the bands.”

It would have been good for us. No matter what. But I’m not we were really smart enough to really make it worth our effort.

PSF: Sounds like a lot of bands going to SXSW in 1995-1996.

BC: You have to make sure you’re playing in front of the right people at the right time. You have to be at the right venues. So much about it is cut and dry. But going down there was gonna be a good deal for us. But we broke up about two weeks before we were supposed to go. Josh and I got in the band’s can one night after leaving a party and we realized that some of the gear was missing. Certain people in the van had taken their stuff out of the van. We had a big meeting and certain people in the band decided to quit.

PSF: You’re kidding me.

BC: Some people suggested it was fear of success. That was not on my part. I was ready to go live in a van for the next five years and be on tour. A lot of my friends were either really happy for me or really hated me for winning that contest. There was a lot of jealousy, which was compounded by the weird jealousy and friction that was already present around town. Even certain people in the band didn’t seem that overjoyed by the fact that we won. That is just my impression.

After the big breakup, Josh and I went down to the offices of The Note and met with the editor and talked with him about it. We said we wanted to try to replace the members who had left. And he said, “you know, a lot of people were pulling for you guys.” He told us that he could have picked anybody he wanted from the beginning, that he didn’t have to do the contest. And he decided to send someone else. I’ve always wondered why didn’t they just decide to wait a couple of weeks to quit.

BOB CUTLER

Post-Slawjaw, D.O.A. encounters and club battles/hockey games
Interview by Jack Partain, Part 4
(February 2024)

By the mid-1990’s, Bob Cutler’s life was at a crossroads. The Outhouse, the legendary Lawrence, Kansas punk rock venue he had been working at for nearly a decade was in decline and would soon close its doors to live music forever (it is now a strip-club). The hardcore band he had built, Slackjaw, had risen above the fold in the alternative rock scene in the Midwest before dying a premature death on the road to South By Southwest. But he was still a young man, and had well-over a dozen years’ experience as a sound man. Like so many lives in the music industry, his fortunes would change with just one call.See previous editions of the Bob Cutler interview:
Part 1Part 2Part 3

PSF: So after Slackjaw breaks up, you’re still doing sound around Lawrence and Kansas City, but you’re kinda floundering, right?

BC: The Klusterfux were still together. We played a few gigs but everyone sort of had other things going on and the idea of rebuilding Slackjaw wasn’t going to happen. The whole time I was in Slackjaw I had been getting offers from other bands to go on tour with them as a sound guy or roadie because they’d seen me at The Outhouse doing sound. People saw that I was adept at working in a chaotic environment with sub-standard equipment. I’d always turned everything down because I was committed to Slackjaw. During this time, I’d been seeing Chi Pig and he had been flying into town to hang out.

PSF: You are talking about Mr Chi Pig, otherwise known as Ken Chin, the singer for SNFU, the Vancouver band, yes?

BC: Yes.

PSF: And by “seeing,” you mean seeing romantically, correct? Just to be clear.

BC: Yes. Apparently he liked me.

PSF: He’s a pretty interesting guy, one of the most electric performers I’ve ever seen. How did you guys meet?

BC: We met at The Outhouse the first time SNFU came through, I don’t remember what year. He was pretty stand-offish then. Because he was so active and wild on-stage, he had this elaborate pre-show ritual that involved a lot of stretches and weird calisthenics and that’s what he spent most of his time doing before shows. You know, someone once said that with an SNFU show, half of the show occurs four feet in the air, so his pre-show thing was quite elaborate. Little did I know, as he was doing it, he was also staring at my ass the whole time. And I was staring at his. It is weird how he aged. He stayed eighteen forever. In his thirties, he had the body of a twenty year old. I read once that after Abraham Lincoln died, the doctors who did the autopsy said that even though his face had become rough and leathery he had the body of a very young man. That was probably true of Chi, as well.

I didn’t really talk to him until the second time they played The Outhouse. And a couple of years after that he read an interview I’d done in Maximum Rock n’ Roll about Slackjaw. Chi told his manager to put me on the guest list for a show SNFU was doing in Kansas City at this small coffee shop that did all-ages shows called The Daily Grind. We kinda hooked up there. When the tour was over, he immediately took a flight back to Kansas and got a hotel room and we hung out for a couple of weeks. And I would visit him in Vancouver where he lived and, of course, I already knew the guys in D.O.A., so I sort of fit right in.

PSF: What was he like?

BC: He never made a big deal about being gay publicly. His physical attraction to me was a big part of our relationship. He was into big, beefy, hairy, trucker-like guys and it felt good to be objectified. He had a very different outlook on life. I’m a Kansas cornfield boy. We are the children of the scorn here. I’d been around the block, of course, but it was different with someone who was more worldly. He was from another planet. He was an incredible artist. Always working on three or four different things at once, fliers for shows or album covers. He used to carry composition notebooks, you know, like the ones you used to use in school, and he’d take them on tour with him. I’ve got three composition books that he sent to me that are full of love letters and drawings. They are also full of journals and souvenirs from his tours, stickers and tour passes, stuff like that. I thought they were amazing. I never really did anything like that because when you’re younger and gay, you never really want to leave a great deal of evidence.

Living with him in Vancouver a lot of the time it was just a stream of consciousness of his ideas constantly. He was always creating. He would buy toys at thrift stores, bring them home, and rearrange them, draw tattoos on them, stuff like that. And those would end up in art shows. One of our favorite things to do was watch the Teletubbies and other kids shows and we would make up conspiracy theories about them, try to dissect them to see how they are brainwashing kids, which they do. We both chain-smoked at the time, and the walls were covered with this incredible sap.

PSF: And this is when you got hooked up with D.O.A.?

BC: Yeah, D.O.A. was looking for a new sound guy. And Chi reminds Joe Keithley about me and tells him that I’m not really doing anything right now. In reality, I was actually at a pretty low point. Not suicidal or anything but just down. The band I’d been living and breathing for five years had fallen to shit. And former band members were running around town trying to destroy me professionally. I was just in a low place.

One night, I’m standing in the Replay Lounge, a longtime punk bar in downtown Lawrence, Kansas, and the bartender walks up to me and tells me that there is someone on the phone for me. The bar phone. And I’m like, “uh, someone is calling me here?” Whatever. So, I go answer the phone and this voice “Hey, Bob. It’s Joe Shithead from D.O.A..” And I’m like, who is this really, you know? And he goes “No Bob, it’s me. I called your house and they said we don’t know where he is, he’s probably at the Replay.”

Anyway, it really is Joe Shithead and he tells me that they’re looking for a sound guy for a tour for two months. He says we can meet in Texas at a gig with Nomeansno. And he says if it works out there’s a European tour after that. He’s like, you wanna do it? I very meekly utter “yes.” I was just amazed that they would think of me. I mean, out of all of the punk rock sound guys in North America they call old hillbilly Bob up in Kansas. Who knows if it would have happened without Chi Pig?

One thing about Joe, and all of the truly great ones, is that he remembers people and he remembers names. The great ones remember everyone. It is one of their super powers. When we would travel around, everywhere we’d go, he’d know people. We’d end up in Bumfuck, Idaho and he’d know ten people from when D.O.A. passed through ten years ago. So and so did a fanzine, another guy let them crash at his house, etc., etc. It really was amazing and I’m sure it helped me too.

PSF: So you got the D.O.A. gig. What happens next?

BC: I took a red eye flight from Kansas City to Dallas. For some reason, I’d been awake for like forty eight hours or more. I think it was the timing and excitement, a mix of things. I take a taxi over to the venue, and by this point, I’m exhausted and hungry and just wiped out when I get to the venue. And I’m early.

PSF: Looks like it was the Orbit Room in Dallas, Texas according to what I could find online. April 26, 1996.

BC: That sounds right. Anyway, they let me into the venue when I told them who I was and I go backstage and fall asleep. Eventually, the band shows up and Joe Keithley wakes me up, asking me if I’m alright. I guess I was all pale and sweaty and disoriented from the trip but later they told me that I looked so bad that they were worried I was a junkie. So I didn’t make the best first impression.

That night was D.O.A. with Nomeansno and a local opener. D.O.A. played second. They and Nomeansno traded off headlining. Before the show, Jello Biafra showed up, as he would from time to time. Sometimes when Jello showed, he and D.O.A. would get together and do a jam session, which they did that night in the form of a twenty-seven-minute version of “Full Metal Jackoff” off of Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors, the record that Jello and D.O.A. did together. It’s this huge wall of sound. There’s like five guitarists and four bass players. It is wild. So my first day, I end up doing sound for D.O.A., Nomeansno, and Jello Biafra all at the same time. And the place is going crazy. It was a trial by fire.

We continued eastward, played some pretty memorable places. Emo’s in Austin and the Butthole Surfers were in attendance. I recognized them from their legendary Halloween 1985 show at the VFW in Kansas City, which was wild. At the White Rabbit in San Antonio, a bunch of Oprah skins showed up and started a bunch of shit, cars getting tires slashed.

PSF: Oprah skins?

BC: Yeah, Oprah skins were kids that saw the Oprah and Geraldo shows on skinheads and immediately went into the bathroom and shaved their heads.

PSF: Ok, makes sense.

BC: Anyway, we do the two-month tour through the East coast. We did not play CBGB this time. We played Tramps. But the tour ends and I joined up to roadie for my brother John Cutler’s band Tenderloin, who were from Lawrence/Kansas City. They were touring with Reverend Horton Heat. I ended up being the driver and merch guy. So I started going back through a lot of the venues I’d just gone through and I’d kinda get recognized. There were a lot of guys like that that you’d see playing in a band one month and then humping gear for another band the next month and then two months later, you’d see them again filling some other role with some other band. That was the gig.

PSF: Merch guy, huh? Sounds simple, but that’s actually a pretty important part of the tour.

BC: Yeah, it’s how the band makes extra money. I was fully capable of doing sound for Tenderloin but they needed someone they could trust to sell the stuff.

PSF: Merch sales have become a hot button issue lately with bands arguing about venues charging a percentage of merch sales at gigs. Did you guys ever run into that stuff?

BC: Some places did it at the time, especially with the headliners. I see it from both sides. You know bands say “without us, you wouldn’t have had a crowd.” Promoters say “without the venue, you wouldn’t have a place to play.” It’s a big circular argument and it sucks.

I didn’t charge anyone to sell merch at shows. Not at The Outhouse or anywhere else. I did co-promote a Rollins Band show at Liberty Hall in Lawrence once and the other guy charged them 30 percent on merch without me knowing. Another promoter came up to me a day or two later and told me about it. It pissed me off and I confronted him but there really wasn’t anything I could do about it. I confronted the dude a week or two later but what was I going to do, pick him up, turn him upside down and shake the coins out of his pocket? It wasn’t worth it.

PSF: What goes into doing sound for a band like D.O.A.? And why would a band want to bring their own sound guy as opposed to just using the house guys?

BC: At that level and with those kind of bands, a lot of it is how quick can you think on your feet amid chaos. I mean if the band is playing and you see something get kicked over or something going wrong, can you dive into that crowd, which is usually a big pit, without disturbing anything? Or exacerbating a potentially chaotic situation. Of course, it is important to have a guy with you that knows all of your gear and your instruments. And a guy who knows all of your records and knows how you want to sound live, which is not always how you sound on record.

You gotta be able to get along with territorial house sound guys too. I did that too, sometimes, got territorial about everything. It’s my gear, my equipment. I learned pretty quickly to try and get along with these guys as much as possible. A lot of guys never learn that lesson. I always went in with a big smile and tried to be as respectful as possible so that by the time sound check arrived, they’d let me in and we’d be fine. I’ve been on both sides and was able to recognize things about my behavior that I could correct. I know I pissed some people off on both sides, it is unavoidable. Like when a band tells you they want to turn the house speakers around and point them at the band and you have to tell them “no, that’s stupid, we’re not doing that.” That’s part of the gig. There’s always gonna be some weird thing going on and you have to keep an open mind and you do learn that you can learn things along the way.

PSF: I did want to ask about the D.O.A. Street Hockey Team.

BC: We called it Sockey. D.O.A. always toured with hockey gear in the back of the truck. This was for a couple of different reasons. I mean, sometimes you’d get into a heavy situation and they would come in handy. But also, being on tour is not all glitz and glamour. Sometimes, you roll into town at one and the venue doesn’t open until six. So D.O.A. are Canadian and it’s just in their blood. They just naturally throw something on the ground and start chasing it with sticks. When we did the Social Chaos Tour in 1999 there were like nineteen bands and most of them formed teams and we all played against each other. I remember Bad Religion had a team, SNFU had a team.

On another tour, we did a club in Austin and it had a huge dance floor area, I think it was an old country music bar. Some of the fans brought roller skates to the show and a hockey game broke out during the set. D.O.A. even stopped playing and joined in.

PSF: You ended up going to Europe with D.O.A. in, like, 1996, right?

BC: Yes I toured with D.O.A. for seven years. We went to Europe numerous times.

PSF: OK, tell me about the first time.

BC: It was in 1996, I think. Joe called me up and said something like “things went really well on that tour do you want to go to Europe with us?” I said yes, of course. My first job was to go out ahead of everyone else, get a van, and pick them up from the airport in London. But I flew into Hamburg, Germany. I met this guy named Goliath. Pronounced Go-Lee-Ath. And the name does not do him justice. He’s this huge, seven foot tall, pierced up, tatted up, 400 pound guy… that is the nicest guy in the world. His job is he rents out vans to bands and has a warehouse full of gear for bands to rent while touring the old country. D.O.A. owned some equipment that was stored there for when they would tour and to rent out to other bands when they went to Europe.

Anyway, I fly in and I don’t speak a bit of German. I speak redneck Kansan, that’s it. I speak a little Texan and a little Canadian, but nothing else. And I am supposed to pick up this van and drive from Hamburg to Amsterdam to Calais, France, take a ferry over the English channel, and drive to Heathrow airport in London. What could go wrong, right?

Goliath picks me up in this big van, drives me to the Autobahn, gives me the keys, and tells me: “Take Autobahn to Amsterdam and turn left.” Then he gets on a bicycle and pedals away. The Kansas idiot in me gets in the van, immediately pops a cassette of Molly Hatchet’s “Flirtin’ With Disaster” in the stereo, and pulls right into the passing lane of the Autobahn where I continue to drive for several miles while getting bombarded with insults and whatever the German version of flipping someone off is.

Eventually, I pick up two hitchhikers, two Polish university kids on holiday headed to Amsterdam. They don’t speak great English but ask me if I mind if they smoke pot in the van. I say “No, I don’t have a problem,” but they take it as me saying “no, they can’t.” So it was uncomfortable. When we get to Amsterdam, I’m looking for the address to where I am supposed to connect, where I’m supposed to stay for the night. I go into this place to find a phone, make some calls, figure everything out, and when I come out, the van is gone. Of course. The police tell me more than likely the van has been stolen but that I should make sure that it hasn’t been towed by the parking police. They give me the address to the parking police and me and the hitchhikers spend four hours trying to find the place. When we get there, they claim not to have the van but I see it in their lot on the security cameras. I have to pay five hundred gilders to get the van out. D.O.A. had given me money to pay for things. Later Joe forgave the debt and told me that he had given me extra cash because he knew I was going to fuck something up.

PSF: But you did eventually make it to London, right?

BC: Yes, and I fucked it up there too. I drove for hours in London and couldn’t find the place. I was supposed to meet Jon Active, who was squatting in Hackney Downs, these towers in London that were closed down public housing. I call him on the phone and he tells me to call a cab and follow it to where he is. So I do that. I get there, park the van, get my stuff, and go to meet Jon. I have a bottle of Coca Cola with me. I get to his part of the place, knock on the door, and he opens it and immediately says “what is that?” pointing to the Coke bottle in my hand. I’m like “it’s a Coke, sorry I didn’t bring extra.” But he makes me go outside of the building and throw it away. I think he held a grudge about it.

PSF: What happens next?

BC: I pick up the band in London and then I have to drive them to Poznan, Poland for the first show. We get there and the show is in the courtyard of this historic building where Hitler had given a speech. The PA was wired together in a way that I really didn’t understand but the Polish sound guys, the local guys spoke a little English so we were able to communicate a bit. The talk-back mic was wired in a way that every time I touch it, I got a shock. I told them something is wrong and they kept insisting nothing is wrong. So I picked up the mic and showed them that I was being shocked. And the guy said, “oh, don’t worry, I can hold it for you.” So he picks up the mic and holds it while getting shocked and he looks at me like “I can take it, what kind of pussy are you?”

Now, there were all of these fourteen year old, thirteen year old kids that had showed up early and they are standing around, sitting on the steps of the stage drinking huge bottles of vodka. We get done with the soundcheck and they run all of these kids out so they can bring them back in and charge them to get in. I’m walking from the board to the stage for some reason and something catches my eye under the stage and it is a billy club. Then I look over and see a table leg with tape wrapped around one end. Then see a knife, and a baseball bat, all of these weapons that are stashed all over the place. Next thing I know, I’m carrying an arsenal of makeshift weapons into the band area backstage. Joe says, “Wow, Bob, are you getting ready for a war?”

We ask the promoters and they tell us that all of the kids that showed up early are the younger siblings of the local skinhead and punk gangs and that their job is to bring in the weapons and hide them in advance of the show in case something, you know, goes down at the show.

PSF: You’re kidding me.

BC: No. We go out and do a sweep of the whole place and find a bunch of other weapons. I start getting worried. But, you know, we got a show to do. The opener was a Russian band that had a skinhead following but insisted that they were not skinheads. And I understood, I played in a band that had a lot of fans that I simply didn’t like. But this place starts filling up with people and they separate. On one side is the skinheads, and on the other is the anarchist punks. And there’s like 1,500 people there. And when the music starts, they just charge towards each other.

You see these wimpy, scrawny, no balls metalheads talk about their super tough wall of death pits that break out at metal shows but this was nothing like that. This was full of dudes with scars on their heads from things like this. There’s a thousand giant, ugly dudes swarming all over each other. The first band has to stop several times to break-up fights that are starting inside of this riot. Then D.O.A. comes on and it gets worse. I’m still getting the shit shocked out of every time I touch the mixing board and this enormous riot breaks out, everyone is just going at it. We finish the set and I have to fight my way to the van. I got hit in the head walking through the crowd. We had to have security watch the van and help us load everything into it.

Nomeansno plays next and then the shit really broke out. Someone had called the cops and they show up in a couple of big armored school bus things. The cops are covered in riot gear and they walk into the center of the crowd two by two and turn back to back in this giant line that goes through the crowd. Then someone blows a whistle or something and the cops just start beating the crap out of the people that were there. It was like the seas being parted. The cops are beating people, throwing them around, arresting them, and throwing them into these buses just indiscriminately. So there are more fights breaking out in the buses. There were riots in the buses. As far as I know, no one died.

I talked to the promoters afterwards and basically said, “yes, we know it’s a problem, but what are we to do? We need the money. And it’s not as bad as soccer games.” When we left, we got pulled over by the Polish police and essentially were shaken down for cash over some insurance thing.

PSF: Where else did you play?

BC: We played a lot of squats. We played at Forte Prenestino in Rome which is this huge historic building filled with anarchist shops, a recording studio, everything. They had to fight the cops to gain ownership of the place and the funny thing is that they painted murals on the walls of the battles, like ancient people would do, you know. It was hilarious. There was one where a guy is hanging his butt over a wall and he’s pooping on the cops. I loved that one.

BOB CUTLER

Final chapter of Midwest punk tales
Interview by Jack Partain, Part 5
(April 2024)

In the late 1990’s, Bob Cutler moved from the cornfields of Kansas to the idyllic environs of Vancouver, British Columbia. He had made a name for himself working as the regular sound engineer for hardcore punk legends D.O.A. for numerous years, touring Europe, Canada, and the US several times. He also worked for bands like Patti Smith Group and Front Line Assembly among others. But the music industry can be an incredibly fickle master and world events would soon change the way the business was done and stack stress on an already tenuous situation.See previous editions of the Bob Cutler interview:
Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4

PSF: Ok, one more time. Any good Outhouse memories pop into your head lately?

BC: Did I tell you about the time Girls Against Boys played The Outhouse and one person showed up?

PSF: No. Shit, one person?

BC: That had to be the smallest show at the Outhouse. At that point Girls Against Boys was pretty hot, but only one person showed up. When the band pulled in it was raining and the promoter had this bad habit of cancelling shows if the weather was bad. And then he would disappear and tell us not to give his number to the band. Well I would always give the number out and the bands would call and bitch him out. Then he would yell at me and I’d be like ‘look motherfucker, you’re the one who did this!’ Anyway, Girls Against Boys played to just one guy. I think they did it just so they could say that they played the infamous Outhouse. The promoter did eventually show up and the one guy that showed up, he had paid, and the promoter gave him his money back. I was, you know, super impressed by that, how magnanimous of him to give the guy his five bucks back.

A similar thing happened at a Dr Know show at the Outhouse. It was in February or March in Kansas. And we get bad weather sometimes. Especially during that season, ice storms can be common. The day of this Dr Know show, there’s an ice storm and the promoter tries to cancel the show at the last minute because he figures no one is going to show. And I’m like, ‘you can’t do that.’ So it was kind of left in my lap to get everything going. It was not the original Dr Know with Brandon Cruz. I was in a band called Horror Porn and we were opening the show. We were a kind of a shock rock, angry band. We had a couple of guys on stage with us holding pitbulls on chains. Our singer was Billy Christ and he was wild on-stage, real aggressive and screaming. Billy was the kind of guy that a lot of people say ‘the first time I met that guy, we got into a fist fight.’ Anyway, so we drew about a dozen, two dozen people, and there’s some other people there for Dr Know- small crowd but not a disappointment. A lot of those shows at the Outhouse, and at a lot of punk rock venues like that had less than fifty people there, And I’m talking about legendary shows that everyone seems to remember.

Anyway, so Horror Porn plays and then Dr Know goes on. While Dr Know is playing, Billy Christ goes outside and he has a stencil that he made for Horror Porn because Billy was an expert vandal. So he takes this stencil and spray paints Horror Porn on the side of the Dr Know tour van. And then, of course, he takes off, which was typical of him to start a bunch of shit and leave.

So when the show ends, Dr Know goes out to their van and they right away see ‘Horror Porn’ spray painted on the side of their vehicle. They quickly realize this is not a good thing to drive across the country with and they are really pissed off. They turn to me and I’m like ‘look I was inside, I don’t know what happened.’ And they go ‘well, you are in that fucking band.’ They did not care. I thought I was going to get my ass royally kicked. So they grab me and shove me up against the side of the van and, remember this is in the middle of an ice storm, the ice cracked. The paint was only on the ice that had formed on the outside of the van. So they use my body to scrub the side of the van and get all of the paint off. A few of them still wanted to kick my ass. But since the original promoter had screwed everyone and took off, I still had all of the money from the show. They backed off because they realized that I hadn’t paid them yet. I gave them a hundred bucks, some of which was probably my own money, and they left.

PSF: I know that what happens on the road stays on the road but you’ve mentioned a great story about touring with Vice Squad in Texas a few times. Will you tell it to me?

BC: I was living in Vancouver and I would do sound at clubs there. Joe Keithley (from D.O.A.) would always help me out and hook me up with other things so I could get some cash between D.O.A. tours. And he’d get me other traveling jobs between tours. In 2000, he hooked me up with Vice Squad, who did the big Social Chaos tour in 1999 with a bunch of punk bands. Vice Squad are British and were touring America and wanted someone that didn’t need a work visa in the States. I met them at LAX and they had rented a minivan, they had little amps and everything. About twenty minutes out of LAX I get pulled over for driving in the wrong lane. Vice Squad starts asking me if I know what I’m doing, and I’m like, ‘look it’s LAX, it’s chaos. Nobody knows what they are doing.’

We played Fitzgerald’s in Houston on my birthday, May 4th. It was an old roadhouse sort of place. And there was a massive storm that day. It set a record for rain in an hour that day, like 28 inches in a hour or something. Cars were floating down the street and shit. After the show Houston is flooded and no one can leave. They have to lock everyone in the venue and everyone has to stay inside. I’m the tour manager and I decide to claim the dressing room as my place to sleep because there are couches in there. But, of course, that’s where the after party has to happen.

The next day we are trying to leave but we have to drive a weird route all around Houston to get to our next gig in San Antonio. At one point we ran into a Budweiser truck that was run aground and was being looted by people. We have to make up time so we get out of Houston and start down the highway to San Antonio and, of course, I get pulled over for speeding. The cop tells me that I was doing 150 miles per hour and says he has to arrest me.

PSF: What is that scene like with a hardcore punk band like Vice Squad getting pulled over in Texas of all places?

BC: We lucked out. The cop pulls me out of the van and is interrogating me. He’s asking if anyone is having a medical emergency. Then, ‘who are you, what are you doing, where are you going?’ And I say ‘I’m Bob Cutler. We’re going to San Antonio. We are a touring band. We’re late for a gig.’ He asks what the name of the band is. I say ‘Vice Squad.’ And he goes, ‘you mean the old punk rock band?’ And I say, ‘uh, yeah, you know them?’ He’s like, ‘yeah! I remember Vice Squad!’ The cop was an old punk rocker. He knew who Vice Squad was. He was like ‘I had the Punk and Disorderly comp they were on when I was a kid.’ Everybody had that compilation. He talked to the band and asked them where they were from, made sure the story checked out. I gave him a couple of T-shirts and CD’s and he reminded me how serious the offense was but he only wrote the ticket for doing 85 miles an hour so it wasn’t a felony or whatever. It was still a pretty big ticket and the band did not split the cost with me.

PSF: So you had been on several tours throughout the US, Canada, and Europe with bands like D.O.A. and Vice Squad but then things began to sort of peter out. Why? BC: Well, it was after 9/11. A few things happened. My mother got sick and I had to come back to Kansas for a little bit. I was living in a warehouse in Vancouver at the time but I came back to Topeka and was there when 9/11 and the anthrax attacks happened. That put a lot of bands on edge. Also, the Bush administration’s response to those things made people scared to tour through the US, especially radical punk rock people with weird haircuts and political ideas. I had things lined up nicely to get through the fall and winter professionally, leading to the next D.O.A. tour. I had a run down the West coast with a punk band and then a full US tour with Front Line Assembly, whom I had toured with before. The punk band cancelled first. Then the Front Line Assembly tour fell through pretty much the night before the tour started.

So there I was in Vancouver. I never had a work permit but I did have a bunch of under the table jobs lined up that I had always done but they were all tied to the music industry. And a lot of those things started disappearing with bands not touring and other circumstances. So I’m there with no income for the next couple of months and I think to myself, ‘well, if I don’t eat, drink, smoke, or breath for the next couple of months I will be OK.’ And then I got fired by D.O.A. over email. There was no incident or anything. D.O.A. has a reputation for cleaning house every couple of years and I had survived six or seven of those. It felt like a ‘well, after so long of touring in a van with somebody smelling their farts you just gotta move on eventually’ sort of thing. No hard feelings.

However, I will say that I do not feel like I was officially fired by D.O.A.. At the D.O.A. house when someone got fired they would always do the same thing. Dave Gregg would put the theme song from The Good the Bad and The Ugly on the stereo and the firing would commence. I sat through several of those sessions. That didn’t happen with me, so I feel like my being dismissed was not official. For the record.

PSF: Okay, so now you are stuck back in Topeka, where you came from. And it is post 9/11. And Topeka’s most famous residents, the Westboro Baptist Church, are there and begin ramping up their operations, moving from simply protesting about homosexuals to protesting at the funerals of soldiers and saying that 9/11 happened because of America’s acceptance of homosexuality, things like that. But you had actually been protesting against Westboro and the family of Fred Phelps for some time, right?

BC: Yeah, see, everybody knows the Westboro Baptist Church for picketing the funerals of soldiers. That’s when the nation got really pissed at them. But it all began with them protesting on the street corner in like 1990 or 1991 at 10th and Gage in Topeka about supposed homosexual activity in the bathrooms at Gage Park which is this small, centrally located park in Topeka. I heard about it through the news and the grapevine pretty much right away and started organizing counter protests. The Westboro people would line up on one side of the street and we would show up with a bunch of punks and weirdos and line up on the other side of the street and we would yell back and forth and wave our signs around. I’m not gonna name names or say which side was responsible because a lot of the people involved are lawyers, but I saw people attacked in those days with signs.

Also, the cops would come through our picket lines, which would sometimes bring about 100 or more people, and videotape who was protesting in a way to get evidence of ‘known homosexuals.’ They didn’t do that to the other side. A lot of the people protesting with us were not homosexual. A good number were just punk kids who were like ‘oh, there’s this cool political protest thing going on, I wanna be involved.’

Once the funeral protesting started it became a big patriotic thing and other people started getting involved. None of these people gave a shit about Westboro or the Phelps clan when they were just protesting about homosexuals. They didn’t care about signs that said “god hates fags” or “fags deserve AIDS.” I’m sure most of them are wearing MAGA hats these days. And it became more organized. There were a lot of people involved and the protests were larger. One day while I was at a protest, I said something like ‘Wow, I wish there were this many people cared when they were protesting about gays.’ Someone turned to me and said “Well, if it weren’t for you faggots, we wouldn’t have to be doing this.” That was the attitude of a lot of people involved, and I feel like it was the attitude on a larger scale as well.

PSF: Yeah, I always kind of felt that people in Topeka especially felt it was distasteful that Westboro was talking about their homophobia but didn’t disagree with their homophobia. They just didn’t want to see it on the street, their own hypocrisy on display. It wasn’t the homophobia they were mad about, it was the protesting.

BC: Right. When Westboro was just picketing the funerals of people who died of AIDS, which they did, these people did not give a shit. The attitude was ‘so what? What do you expect if you’re gonna be gay.’ I brought this up to the “leaders” of the “local gay community” and they essentially said ‘don’t be a troublemaker.’ I feel like a lot of people thought that they could build political careers out of this group. It was called Unity Boulevard. At the time, I was trying to set up a non-profit so I could open a venue in Topeka. I had a guy who was going to give me a building as a tax thing, and I was trying to hook up with these local groups to help get the project going. But everywhere I went, it was the same story: ‘oh, we’ve heard about you, Mr Cutler.’ There was more harassment too. I got doxxed in an online chat forum for a local newspaper that was a real cesspool and people would start calling my employers bitching about me. My house and car got vandalized because my info got released. Real crummy stuff.

PSF: Tell me about your career in radio.

BC: Ok, so before I quit drinking, we would go out to parties and stuff in Lawrence, me and my good friend Jamie McCoy from the Topeka punk band The Iguanas. And we would always get separated. So we started telling each other, if we get separated, at the end of the night meet up at KJHK, which is the student-run alternative radio station at the University of Kansas. We were in bands and worked at the venues, and KJHK was deeply involved in the local music and punk scene, so we knew the DJs there. Jamie would always wander off with some chick and I’d continue partying, so I would wander up to the KJHK studios where they had a couch and I would pass out there.

PSF: I know KJHK, I worked there when I was in college. It was in a little cottage off campus, sort of in the woods almost.

BC: Yeah, so when I would get there I would lay down on the couch and the DJ, who we were friends with, would go on air and say ‘Jamie McCoy, you have won a prize at the radio station. Please come and pick up your prize from the station.’ He knew that we were always listening. Everyone listened to KJHK. If Jamie waited too long they would broadcast me snoring on air. Then one day, he didn’t show up to get me and I woke up in the middle of a staff meeting. Everyone was nice. They offered me coffee. But they also put an end to my crashing there.

Later, I started a pirate radio station in my house after I moved back to Topeka after 9/11. There was a movement for it at the time, a lot of stations were popping up. The thinking was that if the FCC won’t license a station under 100 watts then they have no jurisdiction over stations under 100 watts. It makes sense to me but doesn’t to the federal government. Go figure. Anyway, I built the FM exciter and transmitter myself and bought antennae and power amp and set everything up. You can get on-air for around 500 bucks, it’s surprisingly not that expensive. I had Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins record promos for me. I called it KAOS radio. It was either that or KUNT. I got away with it for about a year. Had the antenna on top of my house. I made stickers and fliers for KAOS. It was interesting because I had to try and promote the whole thing while being secret about doing it. So I would go to events and stuff and ask people, ‘hey, have you heard about this punk rock radio thing in Topeka called KAOS?’ And people would be like ‘Oh, no, that sounds great.’ And I would say ‘yeah, I found this flier the other day.’ I had to try and get people to listen without letting them know that I was the one doing it.

Then one day I’m asleep in my room and my idiot brother hears a knock on the door. It’s the FCC and they want to talk to me. So he brings them to my room, two agents. They wake me up and say ‘we need to talk about your little radio station.’ I stand up and I’ve got a case of, um, morning wood, the agents are looking away. I say, ‘oh, I’m sorry, I’m just adjusting my antennae.’

They were not amused. I stood up and they asked me about my radio activities and I couldn’t really deny it with all of the flashing lights and equipment around me. Apparently, some local station had claimed that I was broadcasting on their frequency, which I was not, and had complained. They only respond when they get complaints like that. But I had heard all sorts of horror stories about what they can do. They can not only confiscate all of your radio equipment but all of the things that are connected to your equipment. They told me to stop and left.

PSF: I wanted to ask you about two things that are only sort of tangentially related to music. Suicide and sobriety.

BC: OK. Good topics. They are kind of related.

PSF: I feel like they’ve just been on the periphery of the conversation, sort of peeking in every once in a while and we’ve walked away from them. How long have you been sober?

BC: Thirty-five years, as of New Years Eve 2023.

PSF: Why did you sober up?

BC: Really, I was killing myself one way or another. Either deliberately or subconsciously. By the time I quit, I was drinking three fifths of whisky and a case of beer a night. My brain was just soaking in alcohol. When you do that you get wet brain and you just do really stupid, risk taking stuff. One night I went up to Hashinger Hall on the campus at KU. It was the creative people dorm, where all the artists lived. I tried to start a fight with basically everybody there and ended up getting chased by the cops all over campus. Just dumb , obnoxious shit. I had been to treatment in 1987 or 1988 but then they just shoved me in an old hospital, separated me from my friends, and pounded me with Alcoholics Anonymous stuff. So, pretty much the same way it is today. It didn’t help, but I’m not going to shit on it. I stayed sober for like a week and a half after that. When I got out I would hang out with the same people and they’d be like ‘oh, we got a joint let’s smoke it.’ I’d say ‘no man, I’m sober now.’ And then someone would say ‘you never had a problem with weed, you were an alcohol and acid guy.’ And I’d say ‘yeah, you’re right, I never had a problem with weed.’ Next thing I know, I’m climbing the side of the Empire State Building with a bottle of whiskey.

That saying that you have to give up your playgrounds, playmates, and playthings, is pretty true. It was painful when I quit. A lot of my friends just dropped me. ‘Bob doesn’t party anymore? Fuck him.’ All of a sudden I’m left alone. And then, of course, like anything else in the stupid scene, anything you do will start rumors. So the rumor became that I was a narc. Like ‘we can’t do drugs around Bob now because he’s a snitch.’ It was pure stupidity but it was painful. A lot of people that I thought were real friends were not. Our only real connection was drinking and drugs.

PSF: You quit in your early 20’s?

BC: Yeah, it was at the New Years Eve show at The Outhouse in 1989. My band, The Klusterfux, were playing. Ultraman and I think DI too. There was a big bottle of Gatorade mixed with LSD going around the place. I had decided to stop drinking earlier that night. At the stroke of midnight, I raised a bottle of Kentucky Deluxe whisky to my mouth, chugged it, and smashed it on the ground. No one took me seriously. But I haven’t had a drop since. I had come to the conclusion that I was going to kill myself or someone was going to kill me if I didn’t stop. I took a cold and honest stare at my life and decided that I didn’t want to die.

PSF: But you have attempted suicide before, right?

BC: Yes, there have been a couple of weird attempts. I tried once when I was about eight years old. Another time when I was in my mid-twenties. The extension cord broke. It was based around depression and whatever other mental illnesses I had at the time that no one really talked about.

PSF: Did getting sober help?

BC: It helped to keep from acting on those impulses. You know, suicide can come in many forms. I tallied it up a few years ago and I’ve known over forty people that have gone from suicidal acts. I include people who’ve died in drunk driving wrecks that were suicidal acts.

PSF: The punk or goth or metal scenes present themselves to be very accepting and open arms to everyone. Like we’re all special people sort of coming together.

BC: Yeah, that’s what we tell ourselves.

PSF: But sometimes within that scene it seems like they’re really not that accepting, that they kind of close themselves off and it can be especially cruel when that happens. It heightens the alienation of already alienated people. Do you ever feel like these things become sort of secrets for the scene or whatever? Like they happen and then they just disappear?

BC: Well, people love to talk about them. It depends on who it is.

PSF: They talk about them or they gossip about them?

BC: Well, it’s a fine line.

PSF: I think it’s a blurry line. People like to talk about the salacious details but not about the actual circumstances.

BC: Yeah, like ‘oh, cool, we had a real punk rock suicide in the scene!’

PSF: You know, this is a five part story. We’ve been talking for almost a year. There was a mishap back in the summer of 2023 where my phone fried and I lost nine hours of audio and we basically had to start over. But I really feel like we’ve only covered about 20% of the story. How do you suggest we end this?

BC: I had a stroke a few years ago and I don’t want that to be the exclamation point at the end of my story. ‘Bob had a stroke and died. The end.’ I really feel like I’ve come to a new understanding of life, that I’m fighting back with a new appreciation of life. It’s ironic that I’m feeling less and less depressed these days. I hardly ever have suicidal thoughts anymore, when it used to be very common. You know thinking ‘eh, I could go to work today or I could go hang myself’ was a common way for me to think for a long time and I’m not really like that anymore. There is a lot to live for. I have a lot to live for. If anything, so I can go vote in a few more elections. And The Klusterfux are still together, we’re playing shows and kicking ass. Right now, I am making a guitar strap for Joe Keithley from D.O.A. because his birthday is next week. He is turning 96. But really, he doesn’t look a day over 95 and a half.