During the 3rd year of the band (which existed from 1983-87, and to which I’d recently recruited three high school students who, along with our longtime guitarist, Joel RL Phelps, would go on to greater renown as Silkworm) a sudden “venue blight” occurred in Missoula for a number of tedious reasons, meaning that—in order for the band to play AT ALL—I was reduced to cajoling a reluctant parochial school principal and paying said school and two off-duty police officers somewhere in the neighborhood of $350 in order to rent its gymnasium for single NIGHT.
This at a time when a very nice downtown apartment such as the one I resided in for my last two years in town (located within easy walking distance of The University of Montana, which I then attended) went for $200 per MONTH, fully furnished and with all utilities included!
We also had to provide our own P.A. system, which brought the overall tally for the night to $450. On the other hand, Ein Heit was fortunate in that there was then very little of interest for high school or college students to do in Missoula during the winter (its population was then around 35K, in STARK contrast to the thriving ca. 2019 mountain metropolis of 90K-plus!), so getting approximately 200 folks to attend was certainly feasible, if not something we could entirely count on!
Anyhow, despite the weather turning foggy and very cold on this particular night, we must have drawn 153 or so PAYING customers (at $3 per head; we played three 45-minute sets), since I remember the “gross” at the door that night being $455, meaning that after expenses there was less than a DOLLAR apiece for the members of the band (John Kappes, Joel Phelps, myself, Tim Midyett, Andy Cohen, Ben Koostra, and Matt Crowley)!
I’ve sometimes been asked why Ein Heit didn’t release a single or LP during its four-year run. Aside from the fact that there were no local studios, labels, ‘zines, non-hostile clubs, or (eventually) venues of ANY kind in which to perform, there were the simple economics and sheer isolation of living where we did, 500 miles from Seattle and 1200 from Minneapolis.
Mercifully, once Silkworm relocated to Seattle (several years after John K. and I had relocated to Westchester County, NY and Northern Virginia, respectively, there was eventually a viable path toward making records and touring. They had an exemplary career in many ways, though a very challenging one, and ended in tragedy in 2005, with the death of their one-of-a-kind drummer, Michael Dahlquist, who’d also become Ein Heit’s drummer for the album we finally released in 1997 and the Seattle reunion concert we held in 1998.
Ein Heit played around twenty shows during its existence, two of which were in Bozeman, MT, one of which was in Moscow, ID (all three of those out-of-town gigs occurred during the first half of 1986).
For many years I’ve half-joked that Ein Heit was “The Rocket from the Tombs of The Eighties”, and like that doomed, ca. 1974-75 Cleveland, OH aggregation which eventually bequeathed Pere Ubu, The Dead Boys, and Peter Laughner to the world, we left no artifacts behind us from our time together and were seen live by no more than a few hundred persons.
Anyhow, seeing this photo (taken by our good friend Ross Best, whose visual documentation of that time was and is invaluable!) never fails to elicit thoughts like those above. This time I’ve simply decided to share them more widely….
– Tom Kipp
