Invoke the inaugural class of mid-`70’s New York punk bands, and the usual names will probably immediately pop up — The Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, The Dictators, The Dead Boys, Mink DeVille, etc. But, it should be remembered, that for every band that managed to vault themselves into that elite class of established household names, there were droves of other bands who — regardless of their merit — seem forever designated with the status of second tier, ancillary and/or also-ran. For whatever reason, bands like The Shirts, The Mumps and The Speedies — to name just three — graced the same stages of CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, but are rarely name-checked with the frequency of their contemporaries cited above. Those are the breaks, I guess.
Another of those outfits who were arguably saddled with second-tier status was a combo called the Tuff Darts. Originally fronted by vocalist Robert Gordon, the Tuff Darts were more of a retro-reverent rock’n’roll band than the more celebrated CBGB regulars, largely due to Gordon’s rockabilly leanings. Though they were fleetingly captured on Live at CBGB, a compilation of seemingly random bands who frequented that now-fabled hole in the wall, Gordon split the ranks for a solo career before the Tuff Darts could release their proper debut album on visionary Seymour Stein's Sire Records. Gordon was replaced by by a character named Tommy Frenzy, who arguably leant proceedings a bit more of a punkier edge.
Personally speaking, I didn’t hear the Tuff Darts until way after the fact. I’d probably thumbed by their one and only album in the racks of any number of record stores. For whatever reason, I always seemed to confuse them with British band The Toy Dolls.
But the Tuff Darts finally got my attention, at one point, when I learned that John, the most reasonable gent behind the counter at Bleecker Bob’s during its tenure on West 3rd Street, was a former member. Full name John DeSalvo, John had been the bass player of the Tuff Darts about a decade or so before my friend Rob and I had become Bleecker Bob’s regulars. We’d adopted the habit of referring to John as “Ringo at the Register,” albeit not to his face, given an arguably similar physiognomy to the fabled Fab. Unlike famously abusive proprietor “Bleecker” Bob Plotnik, John was a markedly even-keel (and super knowledgeable) source of intel, ready to assist and answer any dumb questions we might have sprang on him. It was John who sold us the Now We Are Six ep by infantile noise duo, The Happy Flowers, charitably describing the 7” single as “… kind of not music.” We loved John.
Not everybody loved John, though. Pompous blowhard and self-proclaimed “Dean of Rock Critics” Robert Christgau (who I’ve lambasted before) gave the Tuff Darts album a C (it was Christgau who came up with the “hey, let’s give letter grades to other people’s music” system), saying…
Maybe Robert Gordon left this band to escape resident sickie John DeSalvo, one of those guys who sounds like he deserves to get fixed by the knife-wielding lesbians he has nightmares about. The only way to make their record more depressing would be to add a hologram of Gordon's replacement, Tommy Frenzy, whose slick blond hair and metal teeth now set the band's android-delinquent "image." Then again, you could take away Jeff Salen's guitar.
I can’t say I can credibly cite the exact lyric Christgau is alluding to (although it might be his interpretation of “Slash”), but suffice to say, much like their peers in the Ramones, their British counterparts in the Stranglers and their West Coast contemporaries in FEAR, the Tuff Darts entirely amplified a deliberately outrageous and black-humored aesthetic in their songs. I mean, if you’re taking compositions like “(Your Love is Like) Nuclear Waste,” “She’s Dead” and, God help you, “Phone Booth Man” at face value, you’ve really got to get out more often. That Christgau was so humorlessly taken aback by John’s lyrics is surprising, given his alleged fandom for the Ramones (the lyrics to da brudders’ “Beat on the Brat” and “53rd & Third” are certainly no less violent, tasteless and ostensibly offensive than anything you’d find in the Tuff Darts’ small discography). As such, one wonders how Christgau felt about, say, “I Love the Dead” by Alice Cooper from just a few years before (answer: he found it “tolerable”). And as long as we’re decrying tastelessness, it should be remembered what Christgau wrote about Wendy O. Williams in 1982, which was just as shamelessly misogynistic as any of this stuff, but I digress.
To be fair, markedly superior (to my mind) writer Ira Robbins wasn’t much kinder to the Tuff Darts in the Trouser Press assessment, but what'cha gonna do?
While the Tuff Darts might have gone out of their way to be “shocking” in a lyrical context, the music contained on that first album is a good deal more conventional, basically concentrating on burly-but-melodic power pop. Some of it wouldn’t have sounded at all out of place played alongside early Kiss records like Dressed to Kill, although I’m sure that assessment would make John wince. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, no one makes music like the kind found on Tuff Darts! anymore. Listening to it through the prism of 2024, it sounds very much of its era (which is a much kinder way of saying “it’s dated”), but for the predisposed, it’s still pretty entertaining.
As I understand it, the band broke up shortly after the release of the record for reasons that I am not privy to, but I’m sure they’re not very surprising. I have no idea when John started working at Bleecker Bob’s, but he was certainly there when I first started shopping in the West 3rd Street iteration in the early `80s.
In later years, the Tommy Frenzy-fronted iteration of the band reformed. Robert Gordon never returned to the ranks of the Tuff Darts, having cultivated a successful career as a rockabilly singer. In 2007, the reunited Tuff Darts actually released a new record, entitled You Can’t Keep a Good Band Down, although it was released only in Japan. Sadly, founding guitarist Jeff Salen died of a heart attack at the young age of 55 the very next year. The band reconvened again, circa 2011 – with John, again, but I’m not sure how long that lasted.
From that point forward, the Tuff Darts trail goes kind of cold, apart from a few re-releases.
I don’t honestly know what John DeSalvo is up to these days. His longtime stint at Bleecker Bob’s came to a close 11 years ago this month, when the shop shut its doors in April of 2013. You can see him all over this video commemorating that sad milestone.
I gather John still works in the vintage vinyl trade. The picture on the right was snapped by former Cramps drummer Miriam Linna, presumably at a record fair at some point in 2018. Hopefully, he’s doing alright.
The world lost a second former Tuff Dart in 2022, when Robert Gordon passed away at age 75.
The New York City of the Tuff Darts era continues to (d)evolve from what it was during their existence. The bars and clubs they drank and played in like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, among several lesser-celebrated others, are all long gone. The record stores that sold their music are mostly gone (although I did find a lovely re-released edition on 180-gram audiophile vinyl at Generation Records, not that I bought it … I still have my shitty CD version from a few years back). The rock rags that wrote about them are all long out of business. The neighborhoods they formerly stalked are now gentrified and largely unrecognizable.
Well, maybe not totally unrecognizable. The photo of the band at the top of this post was snapped by Blondie’s Christ Stein, who shared it on his Facebook page. That’s John on the far left with his had on the top of the car.
I took one look at this shot and immediately knew the spot. They’re standing in Abe Lebewohl Park in front of St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery on 2nd Avenue and East 10th Street.
Here’s that spot today.
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