Welfare Cheats to Treatment Bound

 

The official Welfare Cheats guitar

When i was a kid, me and some of my good friends started a band called Welfare Cheats. We couldn't really play at all (well, our guitar player could play), but the rest of us had no clue. Except we were punk fucking rock.

It was in response to reagan (back than of course, everything was). I was selling my hepatitis tainted  blood (until they caught on) for beer money and stealing student funds from our school to buy more beer. Some of this beer was used to put out the fire in my engine when my ('68 Plymouth Fury) car blew up driving home from a Minutemen / Husker Du show during a snowstorm.

Our music can best be described as a bass,  2 guitars, and a broken down drum set all tuned to different keys (because we didn't know how to tune them) and noise that would make Sonic Youth vomit.  Hey, Punk Fucking Rawk.

We never quite got any gigs, but our graffiti was in every club in NYC- from CBGB's to the Dive to the Peppermint Lounge to severe damage we did at Danceteria and an especially particularly heinous nite at Limelite- where we did things that I still can't admit in print to doing. We even got written up in various local rock newspapers.

I miss those guys- we did more with attitude and energy than any band ever- considering we never got any real gigs.

But, it did get some of us knee deep in females a few times and into alot of shows for free. It's too bad we were never able to get our shit together and do something - we certainly had some connections from our friends in local NYHC bands like ISM.

Maybe that's why I'm still chasing this stuff. I got a new band (Post Caterwaul Of Sound) in the works... and the direction of the band is definitely looking "old school"- (influences of the Ramones/Clash/Misfits/Dead Boys/Replacements/Johnny Thunders/Stooges, MC5) rather than the "shock hard rock" of my previous band. It will be nice to sing songs that I am not ashamed of the lyrics for.

But the day's still young... we'll see what happens.