By this point in my life I'd already seen the Fleshtones at least a half dozen times. Weekly, I would flip through the City Paper and the Post to find the ad for 9.30 and check if they were coming (because they almost never played anywhere else when they were in town). Just a couple of years prior there had been a club in Baltimore called the Column (I believe), and the Fleshtones used to play there on a Friday, and then come roaring into D.C. the next morning or day to hang out and then play 9.30. ("It was great, those old days," I remember Bill Milhizer saying around the time in a Baltimore fanzine). Those were also the days of "Fleshtone Weekends" at the 9.30: gigs on both Friday and Saturday nights. You had your pick of a rocking weekend night (or two). Something in me would start trembling when the Fleshtones came into town, something palpable and vital that reminded me of the very indecipherable and probably untranslatable reasons why I started listening to rock & roll in the first place. When I saw and heard the Fleshtones on stage, I say and heard and felt rock & roll personified.

From inside out. These weren't posers like a lot of other bands I was into seeing at the time (the Lyres excepted, on most nights): Fuzztones; Vipers; Outta Place; Three O'clock; blah blah, and a host of local groups trying to re-enact 1966, as if 1984 wasn't relevant, or even occurring. 1984 was relevant because rock & roll was still being played (although you had to look hard) and was still pumping through the veins of enough people so that when the Fleshtones came into town it mattered. No wonder the prime, most recognizable sound in the Fleshtones is the drum beat: these guys live inside the American beat, then come out to dress and eat and live a life, forever imprinted.

So tonight it was The Next Fleshtones Show and I was happy and excited and ready. Gary, Rob and I left a little earlier than the rest to get to the club and get tickets. Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House and Old Executive Building. On the way we blasted Hexbreaker! in the tape deck and tried to figure out the lyrics: it's a nude disco, baby?? As we passed the famous (and, sadly, no longer standing) Old Ebbitt's Grill on E Street we recognized a silhouette in the door: Keith Streng glancing down the street. And was that a Powerstance?

A little buzzed and certainly having fun, I swung the car over a lane. I didn't know what I wanted to do; I thought we'd just yell out the window, say "hey!" and drive on. Well, Gary chimed in that we ought to at least offer him a ride to the club (which was a couple of blocks away). We pulled up, and Rob - by far the most gregarious of the three of us - jumped out of the car before I had even stopped it, and ran straight up to Keith. Rob cuts a tall, imposing figure, and Keith must have had no idea what was happening, some strange car screeching up and a stranger hopping out and running toward you in the middle of the night...

What was Keith's response - a shudder? An involuntary lurch for protection? No. A huge grin - bigger than ours - an enthusiastic "greeting" to Rob that floored us. Keith immediately headed for our car before Rob even offered him a ride, and hopped into the back seat next to Gary. Within seconds, Keith Streng was in my backseat and I was driving him to the show. He took a listen to the tape (at that moment playing "BRAINSTORM," I recall) wrinkled his face and joked: "Ugh, I don't want to hear that!" I turned down the tape and the four of us exchanged drunken- fan-small-talk and before I knew it we were at the club.

"Thanks, guys," Keith said as he hopped out. "Hey, you know you're on the guest list..."

THESE KIND OF FLESHTONE MEMORIES MAKE ME GLAD NOT ONLY TO HAVE DISCOVERED THE band back in late 1983, but to realize now that the guys are still at it, still doing what they do. But after a few years of seeing them I know: they had to play, and have to play. As long as there's rock & roll churning in the bone marrow, as long as Peter Zaremba avoids decapitation from low-ceiling bar fans...

The description of my older brother's first Fleshtones show planted the seeds of Super Rock in me. That night my older brother was a here-nor-there Fleshtones fan; he left converted. The Fleshtones were playing with the Gang of Four at the University of Maryland, in College Park. I thought that was a bit of a curious bill - I had records by both bands but listening to one rarely inspired the playing of another; Socialist punk- funk versus rock & roll - but, after all, New Wave was still relatively new in 1982/3, even though the fracturing amongst radio-decreed genres was quickly to become an unfortunate phenomena. In the summer of 1984 Marek Pakulski, in sadly prophetic terms, complained to the Los Angeles Times: "Our biggest problem is that these so-called new wave (radio) stations don't consider us to fit in their 'free and open' format. We don't have that Duran Duran look and sound and therefore we're not in vogue. The college stations are our biggest supporters." And, so, the Fleshtones were mighty popular on college campuses, stuffed with students none too preoccupied with "look" and "sound" and "in vogue." The strangeness of the billing merely reflected the diversity of taste in a college audience.

No question who was opening up for whom at this college gig, at any rate. The Gang of Four were the "important" band, the Message band. The Fleshtones were good-time partiers, adept - to paraphrase Ira Robbins' misleading description of the band - at putting a lot of thought into being mindless. Retro, predictable, goofy. Yet as my brother's story unravelled, I knew where the real import lie, the real rock & roll...

It seems the Fleshtones went on and played a great show, spirited and just- beyond-explanation. As the gig was rising to its anthemic close, Zaremba allegedly jumped onto the Gang of Four's considerable (and, one guesses, considerably expensive) speaker stacks, and started duck-walking and shimmying and dancing and hollering. The crowd loved it and responded as usual, but something bothered the Gang's roadies and sound- men, who tried desperately to put an end to this spontaneity by catching any Fleshtones eye and giving a none-too-subtle, across-the-throat "cut" signal.

No Fleshtone responded, or noticed. And within seconds the sound was off, the lights were on, rock & roll choked into oblivion, and Zaremba was alone on the stacks. The band grumbled, echoing the larger anger buzzing from the confused if titillated crowd, and slowly left the stage. Somehow - and suddenly - the Gang of Four's to-hell-with-poverty call to arms, their reaching-hand to the lower, undemocratized throngs, failed, and looked miserably calculated, insincere.

Well, the crowd dissipated slowly towards the winding beer lines and bathrooms and dorm rooms, the energy of the evening soothed and flattened. My brother ended up leaving Richie Coliseum before the Gang of Four even got on stage, and he and his friends ended up at the McDonald's on Route 1, a good mile or so from the Coliseum. There was no real reason he should have noticed the five Fleshtones standing there, calmly in line - after all, they were regular guys ordering regular burgers and Cokes. But there was something about the tension my brother had just left and the utter normalcy of the scene he had walked into at McDonald's. Of course - anybody who's going to jump on speaker stacks and goof on James Brown in front of hundreds of people is going to eat here, and barely take note of the great irony of being booted off a rock & roll stage for making rock & roll.

The Fleshtones were digging into their pockets for change; it's maybe an hour after the gig was truncated. "Hey, man," my brother hesitantly offered to Zaremba. "What a drag. What just happened..."

And the fact that my brother barely remembers what Zaremba said, that he only remembers the tone of the response - it was casual, off-the-cuff, and completely unfazed - that is the essence of the Fleshtones. Tone over what it is that is being said; feeling over elocution. Sooner or later, all great rock & roll dispenses with rhetoric and lets the body do the talking. The sight of the Fleshtones, who moments ago made rock & roll a living presence in the indefinable (and only) way that it is done, standing in line shoulder- to-shoulder with drunk fraternity boys and all style of young person, utterly unrecognized - that was the body doing the talking. No official protest from the band, no wrangling with management over contract-and-pay: let's grab a burger and see if we can do this again somewhere...

Rock and roll lives in the real world, the day-to-day, and so do the Fleshtones.

AND TO THIS DAY, I HAVE BEEN HOOKED. I LEAVE EACH FLESHTONES SHOW TRULY REVITALIZED. Somehow, and some way, the Fleshtones continually make what they do new, and surprising. I've seen the band dozens of times: I know when the final third of the show begins; I know they snake through the crowd to get to, or leave from, the stage; I know more or less when "Hexbreaker" will begin; I know the band will end up sooner or later in the crowd or out in the alley; and yet - each time it happens, each time the parts coalesce into the greasy whole, I lose myself in my own knowledge of the habit, and am immersed again in fresh mania. Bill Milhizer explained it to Rolling Stone in 1983: "Super rock is taking the best, most exciting elements of rock & roll and exaggerating them and amplifying them beyond proportion, with no apology whatsoever." It must be a mixture of love and dedication and humor that allows for a nightly exaggeration and a nightly amplification. When the ingredients are there, all the band simply has to do is give in to the transformation.

There have been many memories: Zaremba wandering off the stage, snaking his way through the crowd at the Bayou Club, and then disappearing, as the band trails off the last disoriented notes of "Vindicators;" me and a friend sharing the mike with Zaremba during the last sweaty verse of "All Around the World," at one of the many 9:30 gigs; Gordon Spaeth throwing his sax down in disgust mid-way through a show and storming off the stage, never to return; Keith's see-thru guitar; the stirring cool of the original "Leather Kings" glam-like instrumental, played as the Fleshtones arrive on stage; the last notes of "The Last Time" echoing out onto F Street at two in the morning on an August night; Bill Milhizer's utterly ashen face at a rare, afternoon, all-ages matinee at the old Club Roxy in D.C. following a late gig in Baltimore, and his rejuvenated, sweaty face at the end of the two hours; Peter and Gordon hip-dancing to "Panic;" Robert Warren's American flag jeans; the "pile-on" on top of Fred Smith's poor body at the corner of the stage a the 8X10 Club in Baltimore; hearing the satisfying roar of "Whatever Makes You Happy" through the door at Stache's Club in Columbus, Ohio as I arrive, having missed the band play for a few years, noting with happiness the chemistry between Ken Fox and the band...

Recently, Peter Zaremba remarked to New York magazine: "Sometimes I say, 'Lord, how long can this go on?'"