Monocled Alchemist

“Grains Of Sand” taken from the 10″ EP ‘Leave Me Alone!’ | (Sundazed SEP-10-166) 2001

The Knaves | Your Stuff | Sundazed | As this eight track flashback suggests, there’s a page of history reserved especially for the Knaves, Chicago’s original rock ‘n’ roll vice squad, if for no other reason than “Leave Me Alone,” the most outrageous, in-your-face anthem of the mid-sixties garage band boom.

Unlike most garage records with their lyrical emphasis on boy-girl post-breakup teenage rage, the Knaves aimed for a more elevated target, the Establishment. And to put it mildly, they pulled no punches.

They were unconventional both in lyrics and looks. They were the quintessential long-haired juvenile delinquent rock ‘n’ roll punks.

HOWARD BERKMAN: The difference between the Knaves and everybody else is we were terribly dysfunctional juvenile delinquent kids. The other kids, like the Shadows of Knight, the Little Boy Blues, the Dirty Wurds and those guys, they had families to come home to, people patting them on the head, buying them a guitar, buying them an amp.

I was always getting tremendous, tremendous resistance. None of us were getting anything but stormy seas from our people. We were really angry.

GENE LUBIN: The one thing you could say about us as a group is that almost like a street gang, we found solace in each other. We didn’t talk about these things but the band, like a street gang for many people, became our new family

stigmatized

BERKMAN: We all felt really stigmatized by this dysfunction that was in lives. We had this tremendous following among all the kids because they could really relate to that. We weren’t trying to be anyone else.

LUBIN: We assumed a sort of Pied Pipers role with respect to our young audiences. It wasn’t about show business or Tin Pan Alley; it was about provocation, because everything was in those days . . . the civil rights movement, the war protest. I think we felt it was our civic duty to send a wake-up call though we didn’t exactly have any idea as to what that might be.

The Knaves | Your Stuff | Sundazed

BERKMAN: We were rebels without a clue.

LUBIN: I played with Howard in the Jesters in ’62 and ’63, with Steve Goodman who went on to be a well known folk singer, Around May of ’64 he called a bunch of guys together ,and that’s how the Knaves were born.

Howard Berkman was a very precocious kid. He was pretty much a prodigy. His father was a professional guitarist who had taught him at a very early age.

BERKMAN: I’ve been a working musician since I was ten. I didn’t listen to a lot of records and never had a record collection. Too busy playing guitar.

LUBIN: You’ve got to get this straight. Howard Berkman was the life and blood of the band.

The Knaves | Your Stuff | Sundazed

BERKMAN: In our band, we had two professional players, me and Lubin.
Lubin sounded like an artillery barrage. He had something like 11 cymbals and a huge set of Slingerland radio broadcaster drums with what looked like a 30-inch bass drum. We would move some air.

A lot of the punk personality of the band came from Neal (Pollack). If people say we were proto-punk, it was because of Neal’s bass playing because wasn’t a musician. He was one of my high school buddies. I taught him a couple of rudimentary Chicago style bass licks and that’s all he knew. But he flailed away and played that shit as hard as he could, like a freight train.

LUBIN: You had this combination of a virtuoso guitarist like Berkman and then a bass player who was virtually practicing on stage. You had these layers of virtuosity and primitivism, which I think, gave it a unique sound. People just didn’t know what to make of it.

BERKMAN: Neal was crazy. Neal was always getting me into fights. If some-one would push him around or throw a piece of gum at him, he would jump off the stage on them; jump right on ’em!

Because of this attitude of ours, all these burly guys would come up and offer protection for us. Nobody looked like us. We were always in a goddamned fight. Someone was always shoving one of us and the next thing they knew, we were in a brawl.

Burlesque halls

Markie (Feldman) was a tough little guy who wore a lot of Clearasil and sprayed his hair. Neal and I knew him from a clothing store where we all worked. One time he got some hairspray in his eye and had to wear a patch for a couple of weeks. He decided he liked the patch.

LUBIN: One of the things that cast the mold was that after we formed the group, our first gigs were not suburban teenage clubs. Somehow or other, we got connected with some people that got us booked in these really hard-ass places. They were practically burlesque halls.

Our first gigs were playing on Rush Street at the Bourbon a Go Go, which was a nightclub mostly for conventioneers and tourists. We played on a tiny stage with a glass cage to either side of us with a gal in each one in a bikini go go dancing. I mean it was a hard place. There were prostitutes hanging around outside.

These same people booked us into a really seedy bar in Mishawaka, Indiana where we basically played for farmers who came into town on Saturday night to get drunk. And we played at a Southside bar called the Interlude.

The Southside of town was basically the back of the old stockyards; blue collar working class communities. They didn’t understand psychedelic. These folks were still wearing crew cuts.

By the time we started playing for the teen clubs, we were a little hardened. There was nothing sweet about us.

The Knaves | Your Stuff | Sundazed

BERKMAN: We brought Johnno (Hulburt) into the band to help out in the studio when Terry Sachen, the Beach Boys‘ road manager produced our first recordings at Boulevard Studios in ’66. Johnno did all the great harmonies and played outstanding rhythm and second lead and really freed me up to do some entertaining.

LUBIN: Hulburt was a friend who came in after those tough early gigs. He came in when we started playing teen clubs but didn’t even play guitar at first. He played tambourine and did harmonies. Hulburt, who today is a superb musician in his on right, lent an air of patrician gentility to the band, like some jaded aristocrat with a dark secret.

BERKMAN: I got my initial experience as a producer at Chess, working with Ron Maio. Technically, Ron was the engineer but he was really the producer. The reason “Leave Me Alone” is a classic is because no outside producer got in the way.

Ron Malo knew what it was all about. He knew this from producing Muddy and the other Chess acts. He recognized that we had this edgy, unique style.

LUBIN: At Chess, we recorded six songs but rarely would we get onstage and perform all of them. Our focus was to do really hard-ass versions of “My Generation,” the Yardbirds, and “Paint It Black.” We tried to emulate and project the mood of the times in our music. “Leave Me Alone” is a good example of that. It was somewhere between “Get Off Of My Cloud” and punk.

BERKMAN: Neal went to Vietnam and we got Stuie. Stuart Einstein was one of my younger genius stepbrother’s brilliant friends. He stepped in and played great bass from the get-go. Stuart saved our ass.

Leave Me Alone

LUBIN: By the time “Leave Me Alone” was released in January of 1967 [as Dunwich 147 b/w “The Girl I Threw Away], the trend in radio top 40 was more towards the ‘groovy’ sound.

The Monkees were at the top of the charts. I think the song could have been a big hit if it had come out in early ’66 or maybe in 1968 after the Chicago Democratic Convention but we had disbanded by then. The timing wasn’t right.

I think “The Girl I Threw Away” could have been a great hit in 1965. We embraced so many styles but each one was either short-lived or ahead of its time in that fast-paced era. The Girl I Threw Away” and a lot of that other stuff with the tambourine was somewhere between Merseybeat and Beau Brummels. But it was very masculine.

Berkman is a little more like listening to (Eric) Burdon of the Animals. There was a raw edge to his singing. It is not so much that the Knaves were ‘the first’ punk band as it’s perhaps true that Berkman was the first ‘punk’. (Jeff Jarema)

“Your Stuff” was originally released on the B-side of the 45 rpm “Inside Outside” Dunwich D-194 (July 1967)