"Students on the Go"
You can find a party about midnight
“Students on the Go” seems like such a simple — maybe overly simplistic — pop song. But it was a difficult, cloyingly caustic, social commentary piece I wrote about my early experience as a student at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Bob and I recorded the tune with our band, PZB, at Agency Recording Studios in Cleveland in August of 1980.
I may have written the piece as early as autumn, 1975, reporting my observations as a freshman new to the world of a small, private liberal arts college.
Don’t get me wrong — I love Denison, I love the people I met there, I love the subtle ways it changed the trajectory of my life. It gave me hope after a miserable upbringing in a dead-end blue collar industrial Cleveland suburb.
I saw that potential immediately. That’s why I couldn’t understand the mentality of all the ultra-rich preppie kids from the East Coast blowing off classes to party, zipping across campus in shiny new Beamers, and hosting endless bacchanals at all hours in frat house houses that made Animal House look lame and tame by comparison. Denison knew how to party.
I was no saint, but damnit, I never missed a class because I knew to the dollar how much each minute of every class cost in my tuition bill. I worked in the library shelving government documents and in the dining hall kitchen washing dishes to defray that bill. Only 10 percent of the student body was on financial aid.
One day, trudging to the dining hall to report for work, a huge drift of obviously buzzed prepsters walking in the opposite direction bounced past me in a giddy blur of Lacoste and Topsiders, and the lyrics for “Students” rolled over me all at once. I hurriedly jotted them down in a spiral bound notebook.
I don’t remember when or how Bob and I started playing the tune with a live band. I know we played it at Denison dances, where we did three hours of cover tunes and one set of original music, as a rule of thumb. We evolved the band from our high school days into a 4-piece — two guitars, bass and drums. Paul Zahuranec played bass — he went to a Catholic boy’s high school with Bob. Ken Cali played lead guitar — he was a piano player I met as a kid, and was a year behind me in the public school system in Garfield Heights, Ohio. Ken was a Pete Townsend acolyte and I taught him how to play the basics on guitar so he could learn Who licks. He quickly overtook me and totally smoked me on lead playing. Wisely, I stepped back from my overblown high school ego to play rhythm.
Bob and I developed this back-and-forth, call and response vocal approach to singing. “Students” is an early example — I’d sing a line, then Bob would sing a line. We’d toggle back and forth that way until we hit the chorus or a bridge when we’d do a two-part harmony. We used this vocal approach throughout our recording avocation, all the way through the Boho Zen project.
I modeled the structure of the song after Cheap Trick’s hit, “Surrender,” down to the modulation up a half-step at the end of the tune. I figured the best way to learn how to write songs was to emulate the stuff that was out there charting. So, “Students” is an oblique tip of the hat.
It was one of five tunes we recorded that summer. 1980 was a time when home video was just emerging as a viable consumer technology. I wanted to shoot the recording sessions for posterity, but renting a video camera was too expensive. So we rented a Super 8mm camera instead and shot a few silent reels of film and two sound reels. Super 8 sound film was more expensive to buy and to process, so, of course, I cheaped out and bought just the two reels.
One of the sound reels was lost in processing. Still kicking myself over that. Also kicking myself over my idiotic idea to do the opening and closing bits loading and unloading our gear as frame-by-frame fast-motion animation sequences. Just dumb.
I only recently took the raw film, which I had long ago transferred to VHS by the long-gone Fotomat processing chain, and edited it down to a (mostly) watchable 7 minute video, incorporating the one surviving reel of sync-sound that captured us doing backing tracks for one of the five tunes, and vocal tracks for another.
Our Agency Recording engineer, John Nebe, sent us on our way with a very 1980-sounding mix. What else? I never felt the mix captured the rowdy DNA of the band — we had a Replacements vibe without knowing about the Replacements. John asked if we wanted to take the tape master, a massive 20-pound metal spool with a mile of 2” audio tape wound on it. He said Agency would be glad to house it in its in-house library at no charge, otherwise. I elected to take the master home instead. A few years later, Agency burned to the ground.
We played a few more gigs before fizzling out, most notably, a Coffee Break Concert for WMMS, which was the premier rock FM station in Cleveland. Springsteen played the Coffee Break Concert. So did U2. INXS. John Mellencamp. The Coffee Break Concert was broadcast live from the stage of the old Cleveland Agora, which was downstairs from Agency Recording. Agency handled all the radio sound for the live show.
We got the gig in February 1981 because I had the cojones to finagle a meeting with WMMS’ program director, Denny Sanders, and play him our Agency demo. WMMS had sponsored a battle of the bands contest we entered. The winning band got 100 free hours of recording at Agency. We came nowhere near winning, but we got the consolation prize every entrant probably got — a BOGO offer to record there — buy one hour of recording time, get one free. I convinced Denny Sanders to meet with me to hear “…what WMMS’ money subsidized.” He listened politely, and said, “Great, but can you guys play that stuff live?” Magically, I produced a cassette of a recent frat party show we’d played at Denison as proof. He listened again, shook my hand and sent me on my way.
I figured I’d never hear from him again.
But on Valentine’s Day week 1981, Denny called me. Artful Dodger was scheduled to play that week’s Coffee Break Concert — but they were stuck in a blizzard in Detroit and couldn’t get out. (They had a bit of a hit with a track called “Think Think” in 1976).
We hadn’t played together in months. But with one day’s rehearsal, we found ourselves on the Agora stage playing to a full house, and simulcast live on WMMS to boot. The engineer handling the radio sound for the show? Our man, John Nebe.
We opened with “Students.” The live version we performed that day was much truer to the raw spirit of the song the Agency mix didn’t quite deliver:
Eighteen years later, Bob and I took the 2” master to Clockwerke, a studio in Rocky River, to remix the tunes and hopefully kick a little more life into the tracks. But with an indifferent engineer who was really more interested in producing ad spots for agencies than working with rock ‘n roll tunes, the results weren’t much different than the original mix.
A full *43 years* after we wrapped up recording the “Students” EP, I found an ad in Tape Op magazine for a studio that could digitize our old 2” reel-to-reel master and give it a proper, rowdy re-mix. I had to do it.
So hats off to Sean Kerns, an amazing engineer, and his studio, SRK Audio, for rescuing our mix — and in fact, rescuing an aging 2” magnetic tape that may have simply disintegrated like old nitrate film in the moving box where the master recording we cranked out as hopeful 23-year-old musicians languished silently for decades in a dark corner of our bedroom closet.
NEXT TIME: “Amazing Trains of the World.” Here’s a preview:
“Students on the Go”
© 1980 Howard Fencl