"...so, you're not playing live?"
PZB's 1980 EP Hits College Radio
It’s an amazing audio document from deep in my recording vault (a shelf under my TV). All you have to do is click a link, and BOOM! It’s 1980-ish (or ‘81-ish). It’s as close to time travel as you get, and I have to take you there.
Sometime between August 1980 and February 1981, Ken Cali, our lead guitarist in PZB, wrangled an on-air interview at his college radio station to promote our one-and-only EP, our lone studio effort. We had just wrapped recording five original tracks in August 1980 at Agency Recording Studios, and now Ken was doing a tell-all on WCSB-FM, the student-run radio station at Cleveland State University.
It was a half-hour show called “In-Town Sound” hosted by a student deejay who identified herself as “Cindy Tausch,” (I’m guessing at the spelling here — apologies if I shanked it, Cindy!) who seems endlessly nonplussed at the fact that we were a studio band with no immediate plans to play live gigs.
One click gets you back there:
Once Cindy gets over the fact that PZB is a studio project (takes awhile), she runs through each song’s origin with Ken. She digs into each band member’s role, perhaps mining for dirt.
Ken’s answers are matter-of-fact. No hyperbole. No bullshit. He bats away Cindy’s attempts to get him to speak for other band members.
What we do get is an interesting moment frozen in time after the five tracks are recorded, and before PZB’s live performance on the WMMS-FM Coffeebreak Concert in February 1981.
The gig was only a slim possibility when Ken did this radio interview. I was busy with a telephone and in-person PR pressure campaign bamboozling Denny Sanders, WMMS’ program director, into giving us a slot on the Coffeebreak Concert, a weekly live simulcast that had featured luminaries on their way to superstardom — acts like U2, Bryan Adams, John Cougar Mellencamp, Warren Zevon and Cindi Lauper.
Ken Cali’s radio interview hints at more PZB recordings (there weren’t any) and a “film project” (I rented a Super-8mm film camera to shoot some studio footage — it took the invention of Adobe Premiere and 40+ years for me to edit them into some shambly semblance of continuity), and ends with Cindy Tausch again lamenting the fact that she could not see the band play a live gig. She hints she wouldn’t mind an invitation to attend one of our rehearsals.
A couple months later, during Valentine’s Day week 1981, Denny Sanders unexpectedly called me after I’d doggedly pitched him our demo. The band Artful Dodger was scheduled to play that week’s Coffeebreak Concert — but they were stuck in a blizzard in Detroit and couldn’t get out. Could we fill in? The show was set for February 11, 1981 — which was just a few days away. Sanders claimed the station had 700,000 listeners in Northeast Ohio. Five hundred souls (give or take) attended the concerts in-person at the Agora. We had not rehearsed together in months, but of course I told Sanders we’d do the gig.
I cannot thank Cindy Tausch enough. She was the only deejay out there who gave our EP a chance (I’ve included links to the full studio EP below). What a wild and crazy thing it was to hear (and crank) our tunes on the radio.
Thanks again, Cindy, and I hope you got to see us at the Agora.
PZB 1981 EP
Students on the Go (Fencl)
Cheatin’ and Lyin’ (Cali)
Lovely Lady (Cali/Walker)
G-I-R-L-S (Fencl)
I Just Go Wild (Fencl)
(All tracks re-mixed in 2023 from the Agency Recording 2” master with the help of the fabulous SRK Audio)
“Cheatin’ and Lyin” © 1981 Ken Cali
“Lovely Lady” © 1981 Ken Cali/Robert Walker
“Students on the Go,” “G-I-R-L-S,” “I Just Go Wild” © 1981 Howard Fencl