The dream of BOC’s ultimate masterpiece had become a reality.

The drummer’s elation was short-lived however, when it became apparent that CBS was just cashing in on the BOC name to resurrect a project that had been left for dead. Bouchard was not invited to tour with the band. BOC felt they were doing Bouchard a favor by at least getting his project out to the masses. Bouchard felt his record had been hijacked. Either way you slice it, there was no reunion.

“At first I though they made some kind of mistake and I could talk them into changing their minds,” Bouchard said. “I quickly realized that I was starting to sound
like some kind of nut or desperate person at best.”

Twice shunned by the band he founded and with his prized project pilfered, Albert Bouchard’s music career was at a crossroads. After doing some soul-searching, he took a new course of action. He scouted and produced bands for smaller labels like Roadrunner and Megaforce. He went back to college and got a BA in Music and a Masters in English. And most importantly for this story, he also started stockpiling songs he’d written with his wife.

*****

I don’t know if Deborah Frost was “born to be wild”, but when you’re born in a theater during a production of Cyrano de Bergerac, you’re definitely born to be something. Fiercely independent and uncommonly intelligent, Frost taught herself to read at the age of three and eventually skipped ahead not one, but two grades. By the time she turned 16, Frost was working in the theater, living on her own, and would have dropped out of school if it weren’t for the fact that by the time she was old enough to legally do it, she had all but graduated.

Growing up surrounded by the arts, Frost was always driven by her creativity.  But the first inkling that rock music might be her future was when Frost caught her first glimpse of the Beatles, who affected her differently than her classmates. “When I saw the Beatles,” she recalled, “I thought to myself ‘That’s what I want to do.’ When the other girls would talk about which Beatle they wanted to have as a boyfriend, I thought that was bizarre. I wanted to have a band with other girls!”

Being as determined an individual as she is, it should come as no surprise that Frost did form her own all-girl band, drumming for an outfit called Flaming Youth. Despite being “too much, too soon”, the band lived with poet Allen Ginsberg and shared the stage with the likes of the New York Dolls and pre-phenomenon KISS. (Not so coincidentally, the latter band recorded a song called “Flaming Youth” a few years later.)

In addition to loving rock and roll, Frost had always been a writer. She had written a play at the tender age of 16 and had submitted it to legendary Broadway producer/director Joseph Papp, who personally met with her to tell her she was “the voice of her generation.” (Although the play was never produced.) The marriage of rock and writing would occur when an editor from Circus magazine attended a Flaming Youth show and then went back to Ginsberg’s place to hang out with the band. After initially blowing off Frost’s interest in writing rock criticism, the editor called back the next day and offered Frost the assignments that others didn’t want.

“I loved music and I loved writing,” she said. “Coming up, the rock scene was all new. It was a different kind of writing and a personal kind of writing that was important to me. I thought that Bob Christgau (rock critic / editor of the Village Voice) was as important as Mick Jagger.”

And thus began a prolific career in rock journalism that would take her to the pinnacle of her profession. She crossed rock’s gender barrier. She jetted around the world. She got to hang out with Paul McCartney, one of the Fab Four that inspired her musical ambitions in the first place.

But her career also left her unfulfilled. “I remember walking up to a newsstand in New York City and thinking ‘I bet there is not one writer who’s in as many different magazines on this newsstand as I am. But who gives a f---? Nobody!’”

****

Bouchard and Frost met in 1984 through a common friend, punk rocker Helen Wheels. Avid body builders, Frost and Wheels worked hard at sculpting their bodies at the same New York gym. When Frost mentioned she was training for the New York Marathon, Wheels said that her drummer was also an avid runner. Frost was floored when she was told that the drummer in question was BOC’s Albert Bouchard. (The irony being that a decade earlier, Frost had declined the same position in Wheels’ band under the conceit that she was “nobody’s back-up musician.”)

Since Central Park is primarily inhabited by nocturnal musicians and other “unemployed” fringe-dwellers during the day, it was only inevitable that Frost and Bouchard began bumping into each other during training runs. Soon they began running together, and developed a very strong friendship. Two years later, they began to date. And two years after that, they were married.

They were partners not only in life and love, but also in songwriting.

****

Fueled by the disappointment of the Imaginos debacle, Bouchard was determined to make music on his terms. “I turned my energy inward and started writing more songs and learning more about the music I liked,” he said.

Frost had excelled as a writer and even as a painter, but she wanted to make music again. “I like to express myself in words, and even through art, but they don’t offer the same immediate gratification and satisfaction that music does.”

And so it was only natural the Bouchard and Frost focused on making new music. The initial concept, however, was not to form a new group. The idea was to get a publishing contract writing songs for other artists. That idea hit a snag when there seemed to be little market for off-kilter songs with strange titles like “The Brain From Terra Incognita” and “(666) The Devil Got Your Mother.”

“Nobody wanted to do our songs,” laughed Bouchard. “They were too strange; too dark. They weren’t pop.”

“We couldn’t do that Bryan Adams thing,” chuckled Frost.

“Bryan Adams is the best at that,” said Bouchard. “To make some sappy thing with the same three chords and make it cool, I don’t know how he does it. He’s the best at churning out those terrible songs that you have to love.”

“He’s so sincere, but I couldn’t do that without cracking up,” Frost continued. “’Your eyes are blue / My love is true’…I just couldn’t do it. I have to say something weird.”

The couple had plenty of weird things to say, and friends and colleagues were impressed by what they heard. At their urging, Bouchard and Frost formed their own independent label (the cleverly named Cellsum Records) and recorded an album. The Brain Surgeons’ debut, Eponymous, was released in 1994.

“It was an experiment to see if we could do it and make any money and to see if
we could get some attention in the press,” said Bouchard. “It was really just a small sample of the songs we'd made demos of. I also had a desire to make it different
from the work that I done in the past.”

The album certainly wasn’t “BOC Lite.” Eponymous was unlike anything in Bouchard’s musical past. The album hyperspaced between jangly pop, straight ahead rock, crunching metal, and quirky, funky horn-tinged numbers that almost defy description. Oh, and there was an a cappella version of “Love Potion #9” thrown in for good measure.

The original experiment called for The Brain Surgeons to be strictly a studio entity, but all of that changed when fans started clamoring for live performances. Also, the album was picked up for distribution by Ripe ‘N’ Ready Records- a deal that was contingent on the Brain Surgeons playing some live dates in support of the record.

This, of course, required a band.

****

David Hirschberg was raised in a musical family in New York City. As a child, he attended The School of Musical Education on 94th Street, where they unsuccessfully tried to teach him to play piano. (“I was too stupid for piano,” he claims.) Instead, Hirschberg picked up the clarinet and excelled at it. The School of Musical Education prided itself on grooming musicians for serious music careers in symphony orchestras, a future that did not interest Hirschberg in the least, so he left.

In middle school, Hirschberg then learned to play the tenor saxophone, but gave it up when he couldn’t afford one of his own. In high school, the naturally gifted Hirschberg learned to play the bassoon for the school orchestra. But then he gave that up too because the instrument was too expensive. ($1500 back in the 1970s!) Hirschberg then “borrowed” his sister’s guitar and taught himself how to play folk tunes and finger-picking blues numbers.

Upon receiving an alto saxophone as a birthday gift from his sister, possibly in an attempt to get her guitar back, Hirschberg became a dedicated sax man. It was his sax playing that introduced him to Bouchard who, oddly enough, started dabbling in the sax himself. The pair ended up playing sax in a local oldies band, doing James Brown tunes and the like.

When Bouchard told Hirschberg he was recording an album, the latter wanted to be involved in any way imaginable. “When Albert starting making Eponymous,” Hirschberg recalled, “I remember saying to him, ‘I don’t care if it’s a fart noise, but I want to make some kind of sound on your album.’ Albert came up with some sax parts, so whatever sax is on that album is him & me.”

Hirschberg was one of the musicians that Bouchard contacted when it came time to assemble a touring version of the Brain Surgeons. Rather than the sax, Bouchard asked Hirschberg to play bass, an instrument about which the sax man had only a fleeting knowledge.

“Al came to me and asked how I felt about playing bass,” Hirschberg said. “I said I didn’t play bass and told him to get somebody real. Then eight days before the very first gig, he said, ‘David, I asked you before, and now I’m telling you: I need you to play bass. We have ten songs and you have eight days to learn them. We need you.’”

And so Hirschberg quickly taught himself the songs and successfully performed them onstage. “We did the first show and I didn’t pee myself,” chuckled Hirschberg. “That was that. I was now a bass player. I went out and bought my own bass.”

A pair of guitar slingers rounded out the Brain Surgeons. Albert had discovered a young player named Peter Bohovesky while producing records and deemed him to be a suitable fit. And the Helen Wheels connection paid off handsomely again, as Bouchard was able to recruit former Helen Wheels Band guitarist Billy Hilfiger (yes, Tommy’s brother) to join the Brain Surgeons as well. Hilfiger had also played with Bouchard’s brother Joe in a band called The X-Brothers.

As a quintet, the Brain Surgeons took to the studio and recorded a pair of phenomenal albums. 1995’s Trepanation and 1996’s Box of Hammers saw the band take on more of a traditional rock style, sans some of the over-exuberant quirkiness that was both the strength and weakness of their debut effort. Despite a more traditional style of rock, both Trepanation and Box of Hammers took plenty of unexpected twists and turns to keep the recordings a comfortable distance from the music-by-numbers category.

Malpractise, 1997s release, was an abrupt change of pace. The album was a jarring hodge-podge of heavy cover tunes juxtaposed with acoustic numbers. Of particular interest to BOC fans was the inclusion of an acoustic version of “The Girl That Love Made Blind”, an Imaginos tune that was left off of that album.

In late 1999, the Brain Surgeons released their most ambitious album to date, the two-CD set Piece of Work. The band’s enthusiasm for the release was tempered by a sobering development. Hilfiger was diagnosed with brain cancer. His participation in the Piece of Work sessions was haphazard as he underwent treatment, and touring became a difficult proposition.

“It was hard,” said Bouchard. “We didn't want to make him leave the band just because he was sick, so we didn't want to get a replacement. That's why Deborah started learning his parts so she could cover for him when he'd mess up or if he couldn't make the gig. In 1999, we didn't play any shows because we didn't
know what would happen with him.”

Hilfiger made a few appearances with the band in 2000, the last one being in April. He died on September 15th of that year at the age of 45.

“We had many dashed hopes for his recovery,” said Bouchard. “By the time he died, we were expecting it.”

With Hilfiger’s untimely demise, the devastated Surgeons opted not to replace their departed friend. Instead, the band carried on as a trio. (Bohovesky had unexpectedly quit the band, and music in general, earlier that year.) Frost and Hirschberg both hunkered down on the guitar playing, and Frost learned the bass as well. The two of them switch off and guitar and bass duties during live shows.

Hirschberg summed it up thusly:

“We lost our two guitar guys, and they were great. But I think it’s the best thing that has happened to us in terms of our growth. We were waiting for Billy to get better, but then it became apparent he wasn’t going to be able to play anymore. We were pretty much mourning that and then Pete decided that music hadn’t been very good to him and that he needed to fix Harley Davidson motorcycles. Then all of a sudden, we hadn’t played in a year. I remember saying something to Albert that we need to think about getting someone, but in the meantime we need to start playing or no one will want to play with us now. We started playing and the trio thing just worked.”

****

The trio took the stage at Bernie’s at approximately 11:00pm.

The band kicked things off with “Name Your Monster” from their 1994 debut Eponymous. The song proved to be a suitable opener as it gave each musician a chance to announce his or her presence. Frost delivered snarling vocals and cut loose on a guitar solo, Hirschberg took advantage of the room he was given and got down on his bass, and Bouchard banged out some crowd-pleasing drum fills.

The opening number seamlessly segued into a rendition of Bouchard’s BOC staple “Cities on Flame With Rock & Roll.” With Bouchard handling vocals, Frost was free to concentrate on her guitar, matching the riffs of BOC’s Buck Dharma before eschewing Dharma’s licks in favor of a pleasing soloing style of her own.

After mistakenly thanking the people of Cincinnati (“Hey! They both start with C!”), Frost introduced “Lady of the Harbor” off of 1999’s double-album Piece of Work. “This is a song about the city I live in,” she said. “We had some problems there about a year ago. This song never made as much sense to me as it did then.”

And with that, Frost sang about the Statue of Liberty. “We’re all pilgrims in the desert / Crawling across burning sand / Waiting on delivery / From the village of the damned / Where’s the lady of the harbor / With her outstretched hand? / Do you have a dream? / Do you have a dream that you’re dreaming?”

Bouchard introduced the next song as “about a different kind of lady.” The band then launched into a rollicking version of “The Revenge of Vera Gemini” off of Blue Oyster Cult’s Agents of Fortune album. It was a bit of a surprise that Frost chose not to replicate Patti Smith’s backing vocals from the original BOC album, but the song was surprisingly unaffected by the void.

The band then took a brief break to take a photo of the crowd, as is their tradition. One of the more humorous events of the night came when Bouchard told the audience to say cheese as he aimed his camera. When the camera flash did not go off, a young woman in the crowd declared, and I’m quoting here, “it’s not cheesing!” This lead to an impromptu discussion between Frost and the audience about the band’s recent visit to the cheese-intensive state of Wisconsin.

When the band commenced playing again, it was Hirschberg’s chance to take center stage. He and Frost flip-flopped guitar and bass duties as the band performed “Niagra Falls” off of 2001’s To Helen With Love album, a tribute record to the late Helen Wheels. Hirschberg then sang lead vocals on “Elle Sol”, another Wheels tune from the tribute. The jam in the middle of the latter song was extended from its all-too-brief album version, giving Hirschberg a chance to display some of his newfound guitar prowess.

Bouchard then took the limelight as the Brain Surgeons performed an amazing version of the Blue Oyster Cult classic “Astronomy”, a song that was recently covered by Metallica on their Garage Inc album. It was a surreal sight as Bouchard broke out a tiny electric mandolin. And sang lead vocals. And played drums, working the bass drum and high-hat with his feet. To see a guy simultaneously singing, playing a lead solo on a mandolin and drumming made me wish he had a trombone too, so he would be the living embodiment of one of those cartoonish one-man-bands.

In rapid-fire succession, the band then rattled off the Imaginos tune “The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankentein’s Castle at Weisseria”, “Tattoo Vampire” and then “Medusa”, one of the finest songs in the Brain Surgeons’ catalog. The inside of Bouchard’s bass drum was illuminated to reveal a Medusa like caricature of Frost, with the likeness of Bouchard and Hirschberg being among the snakes emanating from her head.

“Godzilla” nearly brought the house down. Frost invited some attractive audience members to dance on stage, which turned out to be calculated, yet eye-pleasing diversion. With slight of hand that would make Copperfield proud, Bouchard suddenly appeared behind the drum kit wearing a big Godzilla head. The crowd screamed in delight as the Lizard King crashed and clanged and bashed and thudded his way through a show-stopping drum solo.

Seizing the momentum, the Surgeons ripped through a pair of old BOC songs, “Dominance & Submission” and “The Red & The Black.” The show finished on a quiet note, as the band delivered a sloppy, giggly, a cappella rendition of “Love Potion #9.”

The Brain Surgeons delivered a terrific show and clearly enjoyed themselves in the process. The show was a bit heavy on BOC material, but considering that most of the BOC tunes were Bouchard-penned rarities that would be indistinguishable to a casual audience, one can’t accuse the Surgeons of cashing in on their founder’s past successes. The bottom line is that a good time was had by all, on stage and off.

***

After the show, Bouchard took great delight in chatting with the fans. At one point, he signed an entire stack of old BOC records, his mouth moving just as fast, if not faster, than his Sharpie.

“I always like to hang out with the fans,” said Bouchard. “One big difference now (compared to BOC’s heyday) is that nobody gets mad at me when I do it because the other two are worse than I am!”

Sure enough, Frost quickly made friends with a 26-yeard-old music fan named Kolene. The two talked for an hour about a wide spectrum of musical topics, beer, and who knows what else.

“Hanging out with them and talking was really cool,” said Kolene. “I liked the fact that they didn't have that rock star attitude.”

Kolene had never heard of the Brain Surgeons until happening upon the show that night. The band’s performance, and their friendliness, converted her into a fan.

“The show was great,” she said. “Deborah has amazing vocal range, and the mask that Albert Bouchard wore during Godzilla was great!  This was actually one of the better shows that I have been to in this town. It was good to hear good rock 'n roll music down there. They are true people, who are in the music thing because they actually love music.”

Yes, the Brain Surgeons love music. Driving around the country in a jam-packed van, playing dive bar after dive bar is considered a chore by hungry young bands that are fighting and clawing their way up the mountain of their dreams. But when you’ve already been to the top, and you do it because you want to, rather than have to, the music is all that matters. Creating it. Sharing it. Connecting with it.

“I’ve had other bands, but it’s with this band that it is finally coming together,” said Frost. “It’s been almost 10 years as a live band and Albert and I have been writing since the 1980s, but I think it’s now finally starting to come together as a live act and as a creative outlet. It’s continually evolving, and that’s what it’s all about.”

***

EPILOGUE

A series of tragic events allowed Bouchard and BOC’s Buck Dharma to renew their once-strong friendship. When Helen Wheels unexpectedly passed away in 2000, Bouchard started organizing a tribute album and concert in her memory. Dharma, who was also a friend of Wheels, quickly hopped aboard. 2001’s “To Helen With Love” album marked the first collaboration between Dharma, Albert and Joe Bouchard in 20 years. The trio also got back together on stage for a Billy Hilfiger tribute concert.

Dharma and Bouchard are now working on a new instrumental project that will also feature sax player Crispin Cioe. “We’re planning on using a lot of the people that played instruments on To Helen With Love, like Tommy Mandel and my brother Joe,” said Bouchard. “That’s what I’m thinking. But Crispin has people he likes to play with, which is a whole other scene. And of course Buck has people he likes to play with. We’ll play it by ear, but the idea is that the three of us, Buck, Crispin and myself will be on every single track.”

The Brain Surgeons, wrapping up another successful and enjoyable summer tour, will soon be entering the studio themselves. “We’ve been working on some new tunes and are planning to go into the studio later this summer,” said Bouchard. “No release date is set yet though.”


For more information about the Brain Surgeons, visit the official Cellsum Records web site at www.cellsum.com