Founded in New York City in 1977, the Rousers drew inspiration from the New York Dolls and the Ramones as well as from such immortal 1950s rockers as twangy guitar hero Duane Eddy. They were underdocumented in their prime, but that has changed with a new release on Left for Dead Records. 1979 Sire Session features demos recorded for Sire Records in the label’s basement studio on New York’s Upper West Side and captures the band in its original lineup of vocalist Jeff Buckland, rhythm guitarist Bill Dickson, bassist John Hannah, lead guitarist Tom Milmore, and drummer Jerid O’Connell.
Produced by Ed Stasium, then fresh from work with the Ramones and Talking Heads, the sessions showcased the Rousers’ mix of sharp pop instincts and punk-era drive. The original tapes ended up stored in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s Sire archives for more than four decades.
Left for Dead Records founder James Reynolds, who first issued the Rousers’ 1981 single “Party Boy” b/w “Don’t Let the Band Stop Playing” on his Jimboco imprint, oversaw the recovery and restoration of the tapes with new mixes by Bob Stander and Stasium himself. The result is both a time capsule and a revelation: thirteen tracks that combine youthful urgency with a striking level of craft.
In the following conversation, Dickson reflects on the rediscovery of the 1979 recordings, the Rousers’ early ambitions and the sense of fun and camaraderie that fueled their music. Decades later, Rousers 1979 Sire Session stands as proof of just how good and how ready the band truly was.
How did this release come about? Had there ever been any previous efforts to release this recording?
Bill Dickson: Well, as you know, it was recorded in 1979. We’d done this thing, and for whatever reason, it wasn’t put out at the time. It never occurred to us to release it ourselves. If we considered it, we must have dismissed the idea. Gerald O’Connell was in touch with someone at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who had a live cassette of us at Max’s in their collection. In the process, he discovered that the original eight-track tapes of the Sire demo also existed and were in the Hall of Fame’s archives.
So he set about getting them transferred to digital files, and I believe he reached out to Jim Reynolds, who had released a single by The Rousers back around 1980 or ’81, to see if he might be interested in putting it out. I don’t know exactly what their discussions were or how they arrived at the idea of “Hey, that’s a great idea,” but they did. The two of them were really the main people behind making it happen.
Did anything stand out when you listened to this for the first time in years, maybe in relation to things you’ve done since then? What were your thoughts when you heard it?
Bill Dickson: The giddiness of it surprised me a little bit. Some of the stuff is quite fast, very uptempo, and there was just this sort of frantic dedication to doing it. You’re all in. You’re trying to play as well as you can, but you’re also just frigging rocking out, having fun. And that really comes across. We were a pretty accurate band; we practiced a lot and wanted to sound good and be good.
Hearing these performances after so many years, it’s shocking how good some of it is. It’s like, “Oh, that was a pretty good song right there.” Some of them we knew were good songs. I’ve played a few of them for 50 years in various iterations of The Rousers, but to hear us so early, with that confidence and sense of fun, it’s really something. You can hear that we wanted to get somewhere.
Some of the songs in particular—“Be My Girl,” for example—are just beautiful little pop songs. Jeff Buckland was a good songwriter. And the fact that we were already doing songs like “Party Boy,” that was one we had big hopes for. It was a popular favorite, and we recorded it over and over again, to no fucking use. But we put some good songs in there.
Was anything kind of tailored particularly to Sire, perhaps based on previous feedback from them?
Bill Dickson: I’m going to say no. At the time, I think we actually had some misgivings about Sire, in terms of whether they were good enough for The Rousers, not whether The Rousers were good enough for Sire. As I said, we had a lot of confidence then. We thought we were a damn good band and were going to go somewhere.
We were obviously excited and pleased that Sire had shown any interest. Bands were getting signed, and we ended up doing a lot of different demos for various record companies. It didn’t lead anywhere, except giving us some experience and helping us learn how to record. But it was exciting to be involved. Ed was a known guy, and it was very flattering to get in there.
I’m curious how close you may have gotten to landing a major label deal at the time. Were there others that expressed serious interest?
Bill Dickson: You’d go to these showcases, and the dudes in the satin baseball jackets would be there. You’d have heard their names. Typically, we’d give a shitty performance at those. I don’t know if it was nerves or what, but that’s my recollection.
We had a business manager then, a guy named Bert Padell. He was super famous, handled Alice Cooper’s money and a lot of others. A woman we knew had introduced us to him. It was a big name to have on your side, and we thought, “Oh, this will be super helpful.”
We had done something for, I think, Epic Records or someone like that. Unbeknownst to us, they’d made an offer to Bert—or to the lawyer involved—for an EP. I don’t know if it was supposed to be released in England, but it was rejected out of hand as “not worthy of The Rousers.”
We never did demos for RCA, A&M, or whoever. You wanted that vinyl; that’s what made you a real band in a way. You could be popular in front of whoever, but you wanted that record. So that was frustrating.
Do you ever think about how you might have approached it differently if you were emerging today, given how much the industry has changed and how labels have less importance?
Bill Dickson: Well, I’m sorry we never got picked up by any label, independent or major or whatever. That’s why I have to say it’s very touching that Left for Dead Records, the aptly named Left for Dead Records, took an interest and said, “There’s something worthy here.”
We probably should’ve done something with this a long time ago, but we didn’t want to run a record company or put out our own records. We didn’t have the money for it, for starters. We didn’t have the knowledge. And I think there’s also that desire for validation. You want someone else to spend their money because they believe they can make money off you.
Could you fill me in a bit about the history of the band since then?
Bill Dickson: In the early eighties, we recorded a Christmas single. I believe it was meant to go along with “Party Boy” and “Don’t Let the Band Stop Playing.” Not long after that, things started to change. We had two managers at the time, and they somehow convinced us that what needed to be done was to replace the rhythm section.
Jared and John had to go. Even though we’d grown up with these guys—they were our friends from Connecticut—we had this sort of careerist mindset. We wanted to make it, and when these dudes said, “You won’t make it if you don’t do this,” other people might’ve said, “Well, fuck you, then we won’t make it.” Unfortunately, our attitude was, “Let’s try it.”
So we played with that lineup for two or three years. Sal Capozucca and Brett Wilder replaced them on drums and bass, and we kept that version of The Rousers going for a while. Then that lineup broke up. I joined up with Brett, the bass player, and we got together with Philippe from The Senders to form a band called The Backbones. It was like a white R&B group—pretty entertaining, super fun, and we had a great time.
Tom and Sal got together and started doing some dance-rock kind of music, I think, for a while. Tom never paid much attention to what bands he was in; he had two or three going at once.
Eventually, we all came back together as a band called The Mockingbirds, which had a keyboard player. By that point, Brett would sort of come and go as a bass player. When he was out, I stopped playing guitar and took up bass. By the time the second iteration of The Rousers broke up, that was it for Jeff Buckland. We didn’t work with him again.
So we had The Backbones with me and Brett, and then Tom and Sal came in for The Mockingbirds, which, again, had that keyboard player. I loved that sound. We did songs like “We Ain’t Got Nothing Yet” by the Blues Magoos, great organ sounds, and it was fun to write with that in mind. We got some good results. But after a while, when you didn’t want the keyboard sound and you still had a keyboard player, it became clear the mood was shifting toward a different kind of music.
Then we had another iteration called The Shambles, with some different people. Eventually Brett went his own way, and we ended up as a trio for—I’d say ten, maybe fifteen years—a long time. We made some good music during that period. It sort of concentrated everyone’s parts, and I enjoyed getting to be the singer. I’d been a singer in high school, and it’s more fun to sing your own songs.
At times, I’d get frustrated writing a song one way and then hearing Jeff’s take on it. It just didn’t appeal to me as much. In fact, toward the end of the second version of The Rousers, I was singing a couple of songs, and Tom was singing some too. It was an interesting band at that time.
Yeah. Are there any plans to do any type of performances around this album?
Bill Dickson: That’s a very entertaining question. It seems extremely unlikely, so much so that I don’t think anybody has even sent out any feelers like, “Hey, do you guys want to get the band back together and support the record?” I think the general expectation has been that it’s not going to happen.
I think it’d be fun, but everybody lives in different places. John Hannah’s in Texas, and Jeff has been only sparingly involved with the project. So I personally wouldn’t be against it, but it just seems extremely unlikely.
Thinking back to the original incarnation of the band, it seems you performed with a lot of interesting people. Did any particular gigs stand out in your mind?
Bill Dickson: I’m going to say no. That might sound odd, but we just played a lot of fun shows. We did a New Year’s Eve gig opening for Robert Gordon, and after midnight we got to jam with David Johansen, Chris Spedding, and a few others.
There’d be times like that when some cool stuff happened, but mostly it was just a lot of playing. I don’t recall too many times where we played and didn’t have a good time.
Left for Dead also released the Comateens, who, when I interviewed them, mentioned that you came up with their band name. Do you remember the story behind that?
Bill Dickson: Oh yeah. I also came up with the name for Ramona’s other band, Dizzy and the Romalars. I just enjoyed coming up with band names. I had a whole list of idiotic country band names like Hank Plank and whatever.
But yeah, the Comateens were like a sister band to us. Two members of that band were dating members of our band, so they were literally a sister band. It was kind of fun. I think they looked at us and went, “Fuck, anybody can do this.” And not without success. The Comateens did pretty well. They had an interesting approach to music. But yeah, making up band names is fun. That’s how The Praise Jockeys and some of these other idiot names came about.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Bill Dickson: I’d just like to say I’m very excited that this thing got made, and that I had the chance to work with Bob Stander. He did a lot of recording for latter-day Rousers and The Praise Jockeys, et cetera. We worked with him on the mix for this record, and he worked really hard on it.
A lot of the tracks came in at the wrong pitch. How that happened, I don’t know, but he had to adjust them. Something might be in F instead of E, that sort of thing. He understood the sounds really well—what was there and how to make it feel like it did back then, but tweaked for our ears today.
The sounds are there. Ed got what he needed to get. And the one Ed mixed, “Bumblebee Rock,” is a fucking great little track. Again, this frantic bullshit—it’s fun to be young, it turns out.
I’m just super excited it’s coming out, and I hope people enjoy it, and know to go to LeftForDeadRecords.com.
Order 1979 Sire Session from rousers.bandcamp.com. For more info on the band, visit therousers.com.
