Before the internet came along, some songs were regional hits.
This usually happened when a local band released their own record and got it to nearby radio stations.
Some of these songs were very good, even great, but indie labels didn’t have the wherewithal to promote their records nationwide.
Nowadays musicians don’t need a label.
They can post their music to websites like Soundcloud or Bandcamp.
Songs can become popular among a subset of people, however it’s no longer a regional hit geographically, it’s regional by website.
One pre-internet minor hit wasn’t known in just one region around the band’s hometown.
It was played in several cities across the United States, and those cities weren’t necessarily near each other: New York, San Francisco, Cleveland, and more.
For me, it was on WBCN, the big Rock station in Boston, though it was on the college radio stations there, too.
It was completely unknown in other areas. I’ve mentioned it to people over the years and most have no idea what I’m talking about.
That’s unusual. How does that happen without the internet?
I can’t find the exact date of its release, but it was sometime in 1980. Homegrown DIY record labels don’t always keep track of that sort of thing.
We knew nothing at all about the band or the song at the time.
It just showed up on the radio. For the longest time, there was no information about it on the web either, but I’ve now been able to piece together some of the story.
Only 1000 copies were made. There were ten pressings of 100 each, and there were two different sleeves.
The first few hundred were in a plain white paper sleeve with a rubber stamp of a sweater in red ink, because the homegrown DIY record label was called Red Sweater Records.
The rest were in a cover with a badly reproduced photo of a bearded man with a saxophone, a woman dancing, and a bass player in the background.
It seems to be taken at a live performance and the woman could be the singer, but no details were given.
The band was from Anchorage.
Maggie Johnson wrote the words. Her sister, Louise, spoke/sang them. The vocals sound double tracked, or maybe the sisters sang together. Louise was the youngest of six siblings. Maggie was the oldest, and they were twelve years apart.
Another sister, Ellen, drew the sweater that would become the rubber stamp. The three of them and their sister, Sara, had a band called The Blond Bitches From Hell.
Maggie’s husband, John Firmin, wrote the music and played sax.
He had spent a year as a construction worker on the Alaskan Pipeline before going to the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, NY to study improvisation. One of his instructors was Jack DeJohnette, the Jazz drummer who often played with Keith Jarrett.
When singer/guitarist David Bromberg asked the school for someone who could play both sax and clarinet, DeJohnette recommended John.
Bromberg was based in San Francisco. John left the school, and he and Maggie lived in the Bay area for a while. He toured with Bromberg and she took a job as Maria Muldaur’s road manager and personal assistant.
John knew about the growing popularity of Punk and New Wave and wanted to be part of it. His idea was to do Punk with horns. He came up with a song called “Bad Girls In Love” that he thought would be a hit, but he needed a B-side.
Around Christmas 1979, both Bromberg and Muldaur were done touring for the year, so John and Maggie went back to Anchorage to see their families.
Maggie’s sisters were in their teens by then. Louise was 17 and sang in various groups around Anchorage, mostly Top 40 cover bands, but she said yes when John asked if he’d sing in his Punk band.
At a rehearsal, John and another guy engaged in some locker room talk. Maggie rolled her eyes and said what would become the line of their new song:
“Guys are not proud, they’ll stick it anywhere.”
John loved it and started to write a song around it but Maggie told him he had the woman’s point of view all wrong and wrote the rest herself.
She wasn’t happy with the somewhat misogynist lyrics of “Bad Girls In Love” either.
It’s not really surprising that they divorced a few years later.
Both songs were recorded in a makeshift studio in a downtown Anchorage fur store.
The set up was in an empty vault in the basement.
The weird solo that sounds like a recorder is a soprano sax triple tracked. John wanted to try that as an experiment.
While touring with Bromberg, both sides of the 45 were added to the pre-concert music.
John would give copies to radio and club DJs in whatever cities they played.
This (Finally!) explains why it was popular in some cities but completely unknown in others.
“Bad Girls In Love” wasn’t the hit he hoped for, but the DJs discovered the B-side.
The legendary DJ Oedipus in Boston got a copy.
And I think it was Dave Herman who started playing it in New York.
Dr. Demento featured it on his weekly syndicated show.
John Peel in London loved it, and it was in the famous box of his 142 favorite records at the time of his death.
When they sold out of the last pressing, they ordered another 100 copies. Eventually, “Bad Girls In Love” became the B-side.
They played shows in Anchorage and the Bay area, but flying everyone back and forth was expensive.
Clubs across the country, like CBGBs in New York, offered them gigs, but not enough money to make the trip possible. John made his living playing with Bromberg and others, but that left the rest of the band stuck in San Francisco without income for days and weeks.
They recorded another record called “Fake I.D.” — with the aforementioned “Bad Girls In Love” as the B-side.
But the situation was untenable and they broke up in 1982.
Most everyone returned to Alaska.
The various players from Anchorage or San Francisco — who were in and out of the band as time and circumstance allowed — went back to playing the music they always had. In the Anchorage scene, that meant playing Top 40, Blues, Jazz, Rock, and even Cajun or Reggae. The military presence in Alaska brings influences from all over.
Louise went to college, became a mother and substitute teacher, and taught downhill skiing.
Maggie wrote about pop music for the Anchorage Daily News and then the Anchorage Times.
John had an accident that left him with a spinal cord injury. He had to work hard to regain his strength and dexterity. His recovery inspired him to start the Johnny Nocturne Band, a horn-centric Jazz outfit, in 1989.
He continued playing until his death in 2021 at the age of 74.
Details are still hard to come by so some of this may not be true.
Or maybe all of it.
Or maybe none of it.
It doesn’t really matter.
It’s just a fun record.
So, this is for anyone else who listened to WBCN, WNEW and college radio in 1980. Some of you will remember this one. Some will never have heard it before.
Fair warning, it’s a little rude. And I love it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “Guys Are Not Proud” by The Anemic Boyfriends:
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I love it when I hear about a song that was so popular in some places and nonexistent in others… thanks so much for uncovering the tales of this track. It definitely has that 1980-81 vibe.
Great song and great work in bringing the details to life. Never heard of The Anemic Boyfriends or this song. They deserved better on the basis of Guys Are Not Proud but at least they’re getting a little moment in the sun now.
I guess David Bromberg never played in Leeds.
Reading the description, I was imagining something with a little more edge. This is pure Dr. Demento level novelty — not that there’s anything wrong with that.
You’re exactly right, it’s not Punk like the Ramones or Sex Pistols, it’s punk like Blondie or Devo. I think I used the word “novelty” in the first draft but lost it somehow.
I’d never heard the song, but it was a fascinating journey into how a song from a band from Anchorage found its way onto various, seemingly random college rock stations. And it’s a good song on its own merit. Calling it a novelty song doesn’t do it justice in my view.
This shit is WILD – what a crazy song. Love it!