In 2000 the band is playing as vitally as ever, not making much money, and still fueled by their basement desire to get people dancing and having fun. All four band members live within blocks of each other in Brooklyn. Guitarist Keith Streng is the only original Queens housemate left in the band; co-founder Marek Pakulski left in 1987, replaced by Ken Fox two and a half years later. Singer and harmonica player extraordinare Peter Zaremba came over one afternoon, joined in with the band, and never left. One day in 1980, Streng and Pakulski, eating lunch at the Stage Restaurant on Second Avenue near St. Marks, complained loudly about their need for a steady drummer. In a classic hustle, Bill Milhizer overheard, introduced himself, and has been a Fleshtone ever since.
"We’re all just really good friends," Streng said in July on the roof of his apartment on Bedford Avenue where The Fleshtones were gathered for an impromptu photo shoot orchestrated by Keith’s wife, Anne, "and we love to make rock and roll together." As the band variously posed against the Manhattan skyline, the Strengs’ six and-a-half year old daughter Nascha ran delightedly underfoot, careful to avoid the muck and the tar. The band was hoping to get a good photo for their new CD "Solid Gold Sound," out in early 2001, but the mid-summer light was fading fast.
The Fleshtones were once considered outcasts in the fabled CBGB’s scene of the late Seventies. A second-generation band after The Ramones and Blondie, they missed the club’s vault into national limelight, but with their spirited blend of Fifties rhythm and blues, Sixties garage rock, and timeless joie de vivre they never really fit in on the Bowery anyway. "They called us a ‘mindless twist band,’" remembered Streng of some critics and fellow bands back then. "Our punk rock was different from their punk rock." They found a more comfortable home a little further north at Max’s Kansas City, where they played regularly, and at Club 57, a small Polish League-turned-dancefloor on St. Mark’s where the band charged a buck a beer and where their fans could dance, dance, dance. "Nobody danced back then,” recalled Miriam Linna of Norton Records, herself a regular on the East Side scene. “The Fleshtones just wanted everyone to get up and move."
Eventually, impresario Marty Thau signed them to Red Star Records, which promptly folded before a full-length Fleshtones album was released. "Plus," remembered Streng with a wry fondness for the band’s dubious luck, "the recording studio burned down with our masters in it, so the album you hear now is sourced from unfinished tapes." (Thau denies that the studio ever went down in flames.) Undaunted, The Fleshtones won a "Battle of the Bands" at NYU, gigged in the city and up and down the East coast, and wowed fans with their memorable entrances and even more memorable exits, which usually involved a band-led conga line out the door of the club. I.R.S Records signed them in 1980, and the band enjoyed roughly five years as "the next big thing." Zaremba landed a monthly spot on MTV hosting "The Cutting Edge," the raw and lively precursor to "120 Minutes," but lack of commercial success, internal creative differences, and time caught up with the band. Convinced that The Fleshtones weren’t going to break big, I.R.S. dropped them. When Pakulski quit, many fans thought that the band was finished.
But they’ve soldiered on, and they never really went away. "Solid Gold Sound" will be the band’s fifteenth release, and younger fans respond as fervently as the older fans, some of whom have drifted away over the years. Up on the roof in Brooklyn, Anne Streng managed to shoot one roll of film. As the sun retreated rapidly behind the Empire State Building, she gamely packed her camera and gathered up her daughter. The four Fleshtones left the roof discussing rehearsals, dinner plans, and an upcoming mini-tour in the South, enduring uncooperative daylight like it’s any other bump in a long rock and roll story.