How Hank Hoffman Caught New Waven

During a show in July 1980 by the local new wave band Disturbance, Hank Hoffman — musician, recording collector, and now proprietor of Best Video Film & Cultural Center — recorded the sound of what could have been a shooting. It was at Ron’s Place, which was on the corner of Park and Chapel. In the recording, you can hear guitarist and vocalist Marc Puttock apologizing for the delay. ​“We’re glad to be with you now,” he says.

Then someone interrupts. ​“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Get down! Everybody get out of the way. Just get down and out of the way. I’m telling you, get down, he’s got a gun!”

There are a few seconds of frightened chatter. Then finally someone says, ​“it’s only rock ​‘n’ roll.” There’s a moment of decompression.

“It’s all right, come on, let’s play some rock ​‘n’ roll. Everybody back up front!” a voice says into the microphone. ​“Come on!” And a few moments later, Puttock makes a joke about the Republican convention happening at the time, which nominated Ronald Reagan.

“I see they don’t want gun control,” he says. ​“I certainly do.”

“I didn’t actually see the guy with the gun,” Hoffman said on WNHH’s ​“Northern Remedy.” ​“But the way Ron’s Place was situated, the front door just opened up into the room, and as you looked into the room, the stage was on the left, and the audience was on the right. So everybody’s ducking down.”

Hoffman, his cassette recorder still rolling, was ​“on the floor with these two friends … and I’m literally thinking at the time, ​‘This is going to be a headline in the New Haven Register, ​‘30-Hour Hostage Siege at Punk Rock Club.’ But it was all over in a matter of moments. The bouncer, Sal, had an iron bar, a steel bar for some reason. He bashed the guy on the head, and he went away and no shots were fired.”

New Waven

Hoffman was a collector even then, not only of New Haven’s music scene as he found it, but of the one that preceded it.

He first came across, for example, ​“Going All the Way” by the Squires on a collection called Pebbles, Vol. 1: Original Artyfacts from The First Punk Era in 1978, when he’d fallen into punk. He’d already started playing. And he’d already opened his ears to the music around him, and started recording.

“Going All the Way” had come out as a 45 on Atco Records in 1966. It appeared on the playlist for a volume 2 of the 1972 compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965 – 1968, but the second volume wasn’t released (until much later). For over a decade, the song dropped out of sight.

“And then as punk rock came around in the mid-‘70s, people started looking back,” Hoffman said. ​“And punk rock, for me, opened up all sorts of secret histories, and one of the secret histories was of the incredible variety of rock ​‘n’ roll music being made in the 1960s by teen bands throughout the country.”

Hoffman thought ​“Going All the Way” was ​“a great song, just a perfect two-and-a-half-minute — if that — pop song. Later it turned out, it was a band from Bristol, Connecticut.”

Hoffman dug deeper. He learned that the band was originally called the Rogues. They got their record deal for a single and were renamed the Squires ​“because that sounded British.” They played for a couple years and then broke up.

“There’s a bunch of recordings,” Hoffman said. ​“I have a friend who actually saw them live around 1966 and said they were incredible.”

By the time Hoffman found the Squires, he was a 22-year-old just out of William and Mary College and two years into the punk scene. ​“I had a friend — and fortunately he’s the bass player in my band — Randy Stone, who knew someone who was into Punk magazine,” Hoffman said. In 1976, when the Ramones released their first album, ​“I came home from college my junior year and Randy has Punk magazine and there’s all this underground. There was no internet back then. It was all word of mouth and obscure magazines and fanzines to hear about this stuff.” They read about the Ramones and Blondie, dispatches from the scene in New York City. They saw the first Ramones concert in New Haven at the Arcadia Ballroom in July 1976. Hoffman loved it. He went all in.

“I had a great record purge of the late 1970s where I got rid of all my classic rock and replaced it with punk and reggae,” Hoffman said with a smile. ​“Of course in the past ten years I’ve re-bought all that remastered stuff on CD.”

At the same time, he found punk to be very ​“self-conscious,” as he put it, ​“about its place in the culture,” while also being into ​“aggressive self-expression. I was liberal-left, and to hear the type of things you’d be hearing on punk records on a record was very exciting to me.”

Hoffman was taken with punk’s DIY aesthetic. It inspired him to pick up a guitar. It inspired him to start paying attention not only to national-level record releases, but to local music. And it brought him to Ron’s Place with a cassette recorder. With that recorder and his insatiable curiosity, Hoffman would become part of a secret history of his own.

On The Record

Hoffman got a job that let him move to New Haven in 1980, and he settled into a loft at Daggett Street. The Ramones played at Toad’s. There was the Oxford Ale House on Whitney Avenue. The Arcadia Ballroom became the Great American Music Hall. But Ron’s Place was the ​“key club” for the punk scene. ​“I was there in the summer of 1980 probably 3 or 4 nights a week. Every band was different,” Hoffman said. Punk may have had a ​“signature sound,” but ​“every band had their own personal take on it. that was one of the things that was really great about the early punk rock scene in Connecticut. It was more an idea of raw, underground, personal, individual rock ​‘n’ roll, than a particular cookie-cutter way of playing.”

When Hoffman first went into Ron’s Place, ​“I immediately felt like I’d walked into a private club, as if you’d walked into the Ancient Order of Hibernians hall. But at the same time, I felt like ​‘I belong here. This is fine.” From 1979 until 1981, Ron’s Place had music seven nights a week, almost all local bands.

“It was mostly people who lived in town — musicians, people who were into this underground music,” Hoffman said. ​“It was people who were searching out something.”

And the drinking age was still eighteen. ​“Some nights it’d be packed, and people would be dancing, and there was encouragement to just do it…. I had a record that I’d made with my punk band on the jukebox there and I felt like I’d made it. I might as well be on the Ed Sullivan Show.”

Hoffman first met Richard Brown — with whom he’s now in the band Happy Ending — at Ron’s Place. Hoffman had come out at the request of his friends in a band called Radio Reptiles. They said Hoffman should hear the other band on the bill, Tin Can Cow. ​“It was a duo of Richard and Steve Chillemi projecting slides of roadkill while Richard would play atonal sax and Steve was declaiming abstract beat poetry…. This was at Ron’s Place, the house of punk, but it somehow fit in that environment. There was this artsy influence in the scene that allowed for that, and going off the beaten path, and being different.” Part of this, Hoffman said, was thanks to Oasis d’Neon, an underground magazine put together by Ernst Weber, which reported on the New Haven arts scene, and influenced it, too.

Hoffman also started recording in earnest, as bands proliferated. Dozens of shows became hundreds, at Ron’s and elsewhere. One of the bands to make an impression on Hoffman was The Saucers — Craig Bell and Mark Mulcahy — who opened for John Cale in June 1979. ​“I just decided to record two or three songs in their set, and thought ​‘this is really good stuff.’”

Bell and Mulcahy had national-level ambitions and made recordings of their own. Bell had played in seminal punk band Rocket from the Tombs, and Mulcahy later went on to front Miracle Legion and, from that, spawn a solo career. Tom Hearn emerged out of the New Haven punk scene and later formed the now long-running rockabilly band Big Fat Combo. Another band Hoffman captured to tape were the Furors — duo Derek Holcomb and Tom Dans, who a few decades and seven albums later have become local legends, to the point where in 2013 a number of New Haven bands gathered together to record a tribute album to them.

But some of the bands closest to Hoffman’s heart never made an album. ​“There have been bands that I’ve run into that say, ​‘yeah, we never recorded anything,’ and I go, ​‘I’ve got a recording of you,’” Hoffman said. ​“In fact, maybe most of the recordings I have are bands that never went into studios.”

“Disturbance were my favorite,” Hoffman said. The band initially had two songwriters, Marc Puttock and Tom Hosier, who both played guitar. Multi-instrumentalist Katherine Blossom joined them as a songwriter and bass player after the band’s initial bassist, Bud Lyon, left. Mark Becker anchored the proceedings on drums.

“So they had three really excellent songwriters,” Hoffman said, ​“and their stuff was short songs — two-and-a-half minutes, three minutes — sort of New Wave, but really smart type of pop. A thin sound, not a loud sound. Quirky guitar parts. Mark Puttock was from England and had bleached-blond hair combed back … and then Tom Hosier was from Waterbury. He looked like a math nerd with short hair and big glasses, a tall gangly guy who’d been involved in underground comics when he was in high school … I just saw them over and over again and tried to record them every time I saw them.”

They were out to entertain, to move the feet and the mind. Their musical references ranged from Motown to surf rock, ​“but they had their own type of song,” Hoffman said.

The Next Wave

Ron’s Place is long gone from Chapel and Park. The Oxford Ale House is gone, too. Most of the bands have disbanded. In 2009, filmmakers J.L. Sonic and Eric Schrader made a documentary called It Happened But Nobody Noticed about New Haven’s punk and New Wave scene, in which Hoffman appeared as an interview subject.

But people did notice. Miracle Legion reunited for a tour that brought them to College Street Music Hall. Mark Mulcahy recently performed at Lyric Hall to a reverent audience in support of his latest solo album. Hosier died in 2013 after a long illness, and the members of Disturbance flew from states and continents away for a memorial show to him in October of that year. His old friends took the stage with the band members to fill in for Hosier’s vocals the best they could.

You can still see clips of a Disturbance performance; they prowl the stage and play their angular rock with utter confidence. They look committed and hungry. Someone is painting dinosaurs in the background.

And Hoffman is still recording. He captures most of the performances that happen at Best Video, where he usually hosts the shows. His cassette recorder died a long time ago; he uses a Zoom portable digital recorder now. And maybe the sound of New Haven has changed, but the spirit hasn’t. There’s a line from the late 1970s to the present, bound together by the same ethos. It’s still fun. It’s still experimental. It’s still brainy. And it’s still weird, full of aggressive self-expression.

Click on the file above for the full interview with Hank Hoffman on WNHH’s ​“Northern Remedy.”