Featured Essay: Zero Boys

by Bob Cook

If you’re lucky, at a young, impressionable age you’ll listen to an album that will change your life. If you’re luckier, those around you will respond with complete befuddlement.

I say this because of my experience with “Vicious Circle,” the 1982 release of the Zero Boys. It only took hearing the opening notes of the album to know something, I don’t know what, changed in me.

It’s hard to classify the response of everyone I played it for as I ran from house to house demanding my friends drop what they were doing and here “Vicious Circle” RIGHT NOW. It wasn’t hate, it wasn’t misunderstanding. It was just the same tilted-head look your dog gives you when it’s trying to figure out what’s going on.

I’ll presume most of you reading this have no idea what I’m talking about. “Vicious Circle,” is ostensibly a hardcore album, 12 rapid-fire, 1- and 2-minute songs played fast and loud. The Zero Boys were from Indianapolis, not known as a hardcore (or just about any genre of music) center of buzz. But before I get into what “Vicious Circle” sounds like and its impact, I’ll share how I first heard them.

Settling a music debate on Walkman Day

It’s spring 1985, and I’m sitting in the back of Mr. Seal’s chemistry class, engaged in a passionate (read, yelling) musical debate with my classmates. As I recall, it centered on my love of The Psychedelic Furs, with the debate being everybody telling me how much they sucked.

As it happens, because it was a Spirit Week, for one day Carmel (Ind.) High School lifted its ban on students wearing Walkmans. That made it possible for Lou Silverman, later an all-Big Ten wrestler at Indiana and a longtime high school wrestling coach, who had not said a word during our discussion, to spin around, hold up a cassette, and being truly sick of our shit loudly declare:

“NOW THIS IS REAL MUSIC!”

I popped his cassette into my Walkman. I was immediately mesmerized. I asked who it was. He said, the Zero Boys. I asked to borrow the tape. He said yes. I don’t recall anyone else in Mr. Seal’s chemistry class listening to it. I may not have let them. As far as I was concerned, the debate was over.

After school, as I ran to my friend’s houses for their quizzical replies, I knew nothing except this was the Zero Boys. I didn’t even know the album was “Vicious Circle.” I didn’t know yet they were local. I didn’t know they’d already broken up. And I didn’t know they’d become a musical shibboleth for bands like Blake Babies, the Lemonheads and the Hives, who later covered them or bonded over them.

Who are these guys?

The Zero Boys formed in Indianapolis in 1981, coalescing on a lineup of teenaged Paul Mahern (vocals) and three musicians in their mid-20s (old for hardcore at the time): Mark Cutsinger (drums), Terry “Hollywood” Howe (guitar) and David “Tufty” Clough (bass, and the only one not from Indiana – until age 13 he lived in Liverpool). They played wherever they could in Indianapolis and the nearby college town of Bloomington.

The band members loved punk, but given what you normally heard in Indianapolis, they were more steeped in what would become classic rock. Mahern was not far from having paid to see Linda Ronstadt at Market Square Arena. And physically and spiritually removed from any hardcore scene, there was no one telling them how to sound.

So they were loud and fast, but also melodic. And they could swing! A big part of that was Tufty’s bass, which often sounded like the lead instrument, pulsing and running yet also locked in with Cutsinger’s drumming, while Howe provided guitar noise and real, classic rock solos. If you want to hear the difference Tufty makes, listen to their signature song, “Livin’ in the 80s,” from “Vicious Circle,” and then listen to it with another bassist on an earlier EP. Which one makes you want to bounce on the floor?

And thanks to Mahern, they sounded great. Mahern, who grew up to become a producer and engineer, co-produced “Vicious Circle” and made sure, even on a low budget, you could hear every part distinctly, unusual for hardcore albums. 

Diving into an Uncanny Valley

The Zero Boys were hardcore, but not hardcore. Some hardcore fans thought they were weak. But I wasn’t coming into it as a hardcore fan, not that I didn’t come to like some of it later. Hearing Zero Boys didn’t make me throw out my Genesis records (both eras). 

Even now, I can’t explain why I reacted so viscerally. The best explanation I can come up with, 40 years later, is that this was a band not totally of a genre from a place not totally of cultural respect with a reaction not totally of love or hate that musically locked into how I felt about my place in the world.

I wasn’t an outcast, but I wasn’t in. I was an adoptee, my family moved a lot, and I was promoted early so I was two years younger than everyone in my class. It appears I wasn’t looking for rebellion. I was looking for someone to explain my life in my own Uncanny Valley. The lyrics to “Outta Style” explain how the Zero Boys changed my life and made me realize it’s OK that I’ll always be a little to the outside on social circles:

All my friends they reject me

And my mom don’t understand me

Now that I’ve gone and changed

Now that I’ve gone outta style

The vinyl version I own is from a 1987 re-issue, as the band, minus Howe (because of personal issues that culminated in death by overdose in 2001), had the first of its many reunions. (I saw a 1987 show at the Ramada Indy East, where the marquee said: “Toxic Reasons/Zero Boys/Fish Buffet $5.95.” Alas, the last one wasn’t a band.) I’ve had the pleasure of bringing my oldest son to one of their shows, where he got to meet Tufty. The Zero Boys have put out additional albums into their dotage.

But nothing, from any band, will beat that first moment on my Walkman in Mr. Seal’s chemistry class. I wish you all that experience.

Bob Cook lives in the Chicago area. He formerly wrote the long-running youth sports blog, Your Kid’s Not Going Pro. He also, for a time, covered the revival and legacy of 1970s and 1980s local music for Nuvo in Indianapolis. You can find him on BlueSky sharing photos, news and occasional jokes about historical markers at Historical Marker Ahead (@historicalmarker).