(February 1992)
By GREGG KIRK
It was 4 p.m. on a cold Sunday afternoon when I pulled up to the vacant warehouse where the Wilmington band known as the Rubber Uglies rehearses.

I came prepared to do an interview of the group with not much more than a portable tape recorder and a blank tape, fully expecting the process to be a grisly affair where ridiculous amounts of beer would be consumed, and important things would have a tendency to get lost or broken… or worse. I figured it would be a good idea to travel light, but nothing could have prepared me for the freakish chain of events that was about to unfold.

I opened the steel side door to the warehouse and followed the sound of blaring, wah-wah-effected guitars, bass, and drums. After ascending a flight of metal stairs, I found the Uglies putting the finishing touches on a song they had tentatively titled “Factory Worker.” The din was so thunderous that no one noticed as I entered.

After a few awkward moments, lead singer Troy Tatman, who was swilling a beer and staring at the ceiling with a peculiar look on his face, noticed me and walked over to clap me on the shoulder. The rest of the members looked up from their instruments and the noise trailed off.

Admittedly, I have had several brushes with the band before, and I have even had the misfortune of being present at a few of their alcohol endurance tests, so I consider myself fairly familiar with the group’s members. But as we all shook hands and exchanged greetings, I could tell something was a bit queer that afternoon.

“What kind of questions are you gonna ask us?” Tatman suddenly blurted out. “You know, we’re not like other bands… Other bands don’t CARRY GUNS!”

He groped in an empty guitar case and pulled out a handgun about the size of my arm. He plunged his hand in his pocket and revealed a long bullet, which he dropped into the gun’s empty chamber. His hands were shaking violently and his breathing came in irregular gasps, but he managed to spin the chamber, put the barrel to his temple and pull the trigger. When the hammer clicked with no report, he doubled over with laughter. His whole body convulsed in paroxysms, and long strings of drool streamed from his mouth onto the hardwood floor. No one even looked up or acted as if this behavior was unusual in any way.

Suddenly Tatman wheeled around on his heels and pointed the weapon at a male blow-up doll the band had tied to a support beam in the middle of the huge room. He hunkered down in a police stance and pulled the trigger. This time, the gun let out a deafening roar, ripping a hole the size of a dinner plate in the area of the doll’s crotch. The rest of the band burst into laughter and whoops of encouragement. Tatman fell on his side and began to vomit in between fits of laughter.

It took a while for the group to collect itself after this little episode, and I helped myself to a beer and sat on a monitor speaker while they put away their instruments and helped Tatman to his feet.
“Don’t worry about the puke,” instructed Tatman as he leaned heavily on bassist Kevin Cheeseman’s arm. “The dogs’ll take care of it in the morning.”

I was beginning to feel nervous and uncomfortable, and I was worried about letting it show to the rest of the band. I had never seen them this way before, and I was particularly nervous about the combination of alcohol and firearms. Tatman seemed to sense this and he staggered over to me with the pistol dangling absent-mindedly in his hand.

“Don’t worry,” he sniffed. “We’re not drunk or anything. We’ve just taken these experimental horse drugs my wife stole from work. You see, she works at a racetrack, and they’ve been having trouble with a couple of horses getting spooked and hurting themselves.”

His eyes widened, his head fell against his shoulder, and then he jerked it back up again.
“Those damn horses will rip their own teeth out when they get frightened,” he slurred. “They give them these drugs to calm them down, but nobody really knows how they react in humans. We found out they kind of act differently in everybody.”

He chuckled to himself and pointed to guitarist Mark Stallard, whose eyes were bulging wildly from his head. Stallard had been scratching a spot on his thigh just above the knee the whole time I had been there. At this point, he had worn a hole through his jeans, and his leg was beginning to bleed slightly.
“Whattya say, guys?” rhythm guitarist Phil Young bellowed as he pulled an enormous hunting knife from his guitar case and waved it madly. “Time to get some beer money?”

The rest of the group gave a collective whoop, and Tatman turned to me, scratching his head with the barrel of the gun and said, “Now if I remember right, you like beer, don’t you?”

I had a sick feeling about what their idea was about getting money so I offered to spring for more beer. They would hear nothing of it, and before I could protest, Young made for the door but stopped dead in his tracks. He stood motionless for a few moments and his extremities began to quiver uncontrollably. Within seconds, his whole body was wracked with spasms and he toppled to the floor. He lay face down, writhing and making sickening snorting and gagging sounds. A few seconds later, it was all over and the guitarist got up, wiped himself off, and continued toward the door.

“Damn!” laughed Cheeseman, slapping his legs. “He’s been doing that every 15 minutes!”
The four musicians exited the warehouse very loudly, leaving Tatman and me to finish off the remainder of a case of beer. The lead singer was losing his muscle control, so I had to help him form his hand in the shape of a “C” so he could hold a can of beer. From time to time, his jaw would go slack, and I’d have to punch him between his shoulder blades to keep him from swallowing his tongue, but aside from these short interruptions, he gave me a coherent accounting of the true history of the band.

He was in the middle of telling me a story of how he had a tooth knocked out by Cal Ripken Jr. during a high school soccer match, when we heard the unmistakable sound of metal grinding on cement out in the parking lot. This was followed by whoops and shouts – the boys had returned.

We poked our heads out of one of the windows to see the rhythm section of the Uglies spilling out of a dilapidated white van. Each of them was waving fistfuls of cash and bags of potato chips. They saw us in the window and started shouting things that could have either been entreaties or curses, I couldn’t tell, but Tatman seemed to understand them.

“Let’s go,” he shouted. “They’re hungry. I think they want to get something to eat.”
He grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me to the stairs where he stumbled on the first step, fell down half the flight, and then miraculously caught himself at the bottom. I followed him out to the parking lot, and Stallard opened the side door of the van to let us in.

What was inside was not a pretty sight. Potts was lying on his side in a sitting position. All of his muscles had gone rigid, and he seemed paralyzed except for an occasional twitch in his face. Young had started drooling uncontrollably and had fouled his pants. He was wagging his head and laughing quietly to himself. Stallard had torn a hole in his other pant leg and was also worrying a spot on his neck that was looking painfully chafed.
Cheeseman seemed the most coherent of the group until he fired the van’s engine. As soon as he put the truck into gear, his head began to bob and weave outrageously as if it were on a swivel. We careened down the road at about 35 m.p.h., bouncing from median strip to curb, at times straying off the road and running over lawn ornaments and shrubbery in peoples’ yards.

Somehow we made it to a pub in New Castle, DE known as the Rebel Cork. We were accosted at the door by a bouncer, and he and Young got in a heated discussion, apparently about the guitarist’s leather jacket. The conversation ended abruptly when Young revealed his hunting knife and made a few demonstrative movements toward the guy’s crotch.

We all spilled onto a table and ordered pitchers of beer and cheese fries. The group was loud and unruly, and I was sure we would be forcibly removed by the local police. The last thing I remember was Tatman looking at me suddenly with a serious look on his face and saying, “You’re not gonna print any of this are you? If you do, we’ll break your leg some time.”

I recall telling him that this was journalism after all, and anything was fair game. Not long afterward, I felt a sharp blow to the back of my head and everything went black…

I woke up the next day with a powerful ache in my neck. I found a partially unraveled cassette tape in my pocket, and after swallowing several Ibuprofen, I popped it in my deck. This is what I heard:

BS: So you guys met here in ’87 at the Rebel Cork?
Young: Oh god! I hate this place.
Cheeseman: I met an urchin hanging at the bar. (To Tatman) Remember, we sat here all night flipping quarters until I hit you in the eye. Remember? I felt bad.
BS: So you figured you’d get in a band together…
Tatman: (with an affected British accent) I think we should start a band, eh? Shouldn’t we?
Cheeseman: We went in the studio and recorded two songs, and I said, “Let’s put a band together.” And he wouldn’t do it. So I bugged him for about three months.
BS: How did you become the Rubber Uglies?
Cheeseman: When we started out, we were the Grateful Rubber Uglies because we sounded like the Grateful Dead for about six months.
BS: What was that all about?
Cheesman: I don’t know. At the time we were pretty mellow, but then my girlfriend left me two days before Christmas. I wrote “The Christmas Bitch Blues,” and ever since then I’ve been out of control. Tanqueray will do that to you.
Tatman: For a while we were looking for a guitarist, and one day Phil called up and said, “Well, hey, I’d like to play.” (laughs)
Young: Yeah, these assholes didn’t even ask me.
Cheeseman: We put an ad up, didn’t ask Phil, and he came to see us play!
Young: But when I joined the band, all hell broke loose.
Cheeseman: We did our first gig at the Buggy Tavern opening for Garry Cogdell. We played for a while and then added Big Daddy (Mark Stallard) about six months ago. We added him for stability and to take the guitar out of Troy’s hands!
Young: Actually, it was after Troy threw his guitar against the wall at the Barn Door. It was never in tune again.
Cheeseman: We had to do something…
BS: Didn’t you guys get voted “Band of the Year” or something in the Wilmington News Journal in January?
Cheeseman: Yeah, (writer) Donna Brown likes us. She comes out to see us.
BS: You’ve gotten a lot of good press. Has this affected your gigs in a positive way?
Tatman: We owe a lot to the people who come out to see us. That’s why we’re taking time off after this month to get a whole new album of material to record and stuff down their throats next time. Anybody gets tired of hearing the same crap over and over again. We love everyone around Wilmington, but we’re trying to expand, obviously. We haven’t gotten it together yet to get out on the road, which we’re in the process of doing. We want to spread the circumference of our following.
BS: What do you plan to do with the new cassette you’re releasing this month?
Tatman: We’re going to send out stuff and try to find a producer and see how much it costs to hire a professional producer. I mean, the people we’ve worked with have been great, but the Rubber Uglies are not producers. We want someone to help us make a statement and get everything right.
BS: So what would be your idea of success?
Tatman: When you could put on your tax returns “professional musician.” And that’s what you do for a living. You don’t have to get up in the morning or set your clocks or anything (Everyone else moans or laughs).
Cheeseman: I want to date Cindy Crawford.

On a more serious note: The day we conducted the interview with the Rubber Uglies, guitarist Mark Stallard left early because of a headache he had been experiencing for several days. A few days later, he underwent six hours of surgery to remove a small cyst found on his brain. On behalf of the band and staff of this magazine, we all wish Mark a speedy and uncomplicated recovery.

Sources close to the guitarist intimate that he may actually be able to play at this month’s showcase scheduled for Sat., Feb 22 at Feasel’s Café on 2nd and Market Sts. In Wilmington, DE.