THE STIMULATORS
" Back in the days when Max’s and CBGBs were the undisputed headquarters for the world-wide punk rock movement, Denise Mercedes formed her first band.
Named after a Kiss song, “Flaming Youth” – never made it out of the garage because Denise took off to London to see the two sevens clash first hand. And she played around England with Rat Scabies, who was out on parole from the Damned, in a band which never settled on a name and then Rat rejoined the Doomed, so Denise, intent on forming a band that would be in the same class as the best she had seen in England, returned to New York.
With the sounds of Motorhead, The Damned, The Electric Chairs, The Clash, Sham 69 and a whole bunch of less famous bands still ringing in her ears, she joined forces with lower east side poet Patrick “Kansas City” Mack and began knocking out the first of many Mercedes/Mack auto-motive rockers, like “Waiting for the Crazy House Rock”, “I’m a Cradle Robber Baby –rockin’ in the cradle with you…”, “Loud Rules? Fast Rules?.. What Rules?!?!”
And they began gigging with a series of drummers and bass players including Jerry Nolan (N.Y. Dolls and Heartbreakers), Bob Wire, Anne Gustavsson, Johnny Blitz (Dead Boys) and finally 11 year old boy wonder, Harley Flanagan, drums, and lower east side artist, “fashion plate”, and excellent musician, Nick Marden, bass.
The Stims played their first three gigs at a new wave dive, appropriately named Rock Bottom, in May and June 1978. Their fourth gig found them featured on a bill with Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Senders, Teenage Jesus and The Jerks, The Contortions, at the fashionable Paradise Garage. From there, the Stims graduated to New York’s mainline clubs and developed a huge, very young crowd, reminiscent of earlier Stooges’ crowds, at Ungano’s and Max’s Kansas City.
Back in New York in 1981, after a 1980 Tour of Ireland, the Stimulators were just in time to witness and mid-wife the birth of N.Y. Hardcore, a style which focused on the Loud Fast aspect of the Stims, the Damned and some of the new California slam bands. But the Stimulators are more than just Loud Fast Fools and are fully aware that there’s not too big an audience for a band that can only do one thing.
That doesn’t mean a band must attempt progression, for digression and aggression, expansion and indiscretion, inversion and introversion, perversion and resurrection are all more applicable to Rock and Roll than mere progression. Stimulation is what Rock and Roll is all about. The revolution is in the beat. No one who feels freedom in Rock and Roll will ever be a willing slave to anybody’s shitstem."
– PETER CROWLEY
Talent Director, “Max’s Kansas City”
"Nick Marden" by Robert Maplethorpe
New
STIMULATORS music 2020
released by Mercedes and Marden
Get it HERE!
