When Joe King formed The Queers back in 1981, his band’s M.O. was crude and simple. As he remembered in one interview, the group’s existence essentially allowed him “a reason to drink beer and hopefully get laid.” Now 54, the baseball cap-clad guitarist/vocalist and his
mischievous group are still at it, stopping by Frankies Inner-City on Tuesday, February 1, for a show with The Apers and The Fight Within.
In the mid-’80s, a bit of encouragement from the right source gave the pop-punk songwriter a revamped sense of ambition. The Queers sent tapes of their early work to Joey Ramone, and when the singer of the iconic band played the University of New Hampshire, King wormed his way backstage after a show, introducing himself as “the guy from The Queers.” Ramone enthusiastically told him how much he enjoyed “Love Love Love” and “Goodbye California,” two Queers tracks that would make it onto 1990’s Grow Up. “I told [Joey’s] mom afterwards, ‘That really meant a lot to me,’” says King. “At that point, I had no selfesteem and needed vindication from Joey or someone above me. It was a wake-up moment. ‘Jesus, Joey thinks I write really good songs. Maybe I do.’” Patterning their hooky, uncomplicated sound after the Ramones, the New Hampshire-based band has built a rep out of seesawing between sardonic snottiness and doe-eyed sweetness. The same band that wrote
“Ursula Finally Has Tits” and an album called Love Songs for the Retarded is the one that used “Punk Rock Confidential”of sincerely declare, “I wanna spend my life with you / I think you’re groovy.” With a sly grin, The Queers simultaneously evoke both the Beach Boys and TheDead Boys.
Like their music, The Queers’ history has a long brazen streak. The group’s stock rose in the mid-’90s as poppunk shot into the mainstream
via Green Day, Blink-182, and others, but King has always maintained a defiantly unrefined sensibility. He never hid his revulsion for polished punk—last November’s Back to the Basement is another testament to this—and his sound boasts energy and attitude over precision.
King forthrightly admits that the fact that his band landed on Lookout! Records, the same label Green Day started on, is one of the primary reasons they were able to build a fanbase. “I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, we’re the greatest songwriters in the world’ or whatever,” says King with the self-aware bluntness that has colored The Queers’ thirty-year-long history. “We were just in the right place at the right time and we had the songs and were able to do it.”
