History

Detailed History
Band Members Through the Ages

Detailed History
..... by Jason Friend

Deena started out banging her head against her crib and by the time she was six was singing and sounding out songs at the piano. She studied piano, played percussion in the junior high school combo, and played in a Balinese gamelon ensemble and a Ghanain drumming group at college.

Jon grew up around music. His father, a Julliard-trained oboist, wrote music for movies and television (scores to the early movies of Stanley Kubrick, background music for Star Trek and Gilligan’s Island episodes, the score to Roots); his mother sang (with his father) in folk ensembles. His brother Joshua is an avante garde composer in Brooklyn. With a cherry red no-name bass, and a vox amp (with wheels) Jon played in a Monkees cover band with neighborhood kids at age 10. He later played in folk-rock duo in high school with a singer-songwriter friend, Mike Sternberg. He studied some jazz guitar in college.

Jon and Deena met in their freshman dorm at Brown Univeristy, and first performed on campus, doing folk and jazz standards acoustically, two voices accompanied by Jon on guitar.

Where the Name "Cucumbers" Came From

Jon started playing rock music again when he found college friends (Wes Moore and Dave Rabiner) doing private lipsynch performances of the Ziggy Stardust album in their dorm room over Wayland Arch; Jon drummed on a desk. They called the “band” the Wayland Wailers. When the three met after graduating and found themselves wanting to make music with no copy of David Bowie on hand, Jon suggested they make up their own songs. He played guitar, Wes drummed on books and called out song titles, and Dave (the only one of the three who never took a creative writing class in school) sang lyrics he made up off the top of his head. They wrote six songs that night, including “Cucumbers,” which came about when Dave said, “Give me a topic.” Wes said, “Abortion.” Dave said, “Too serious.” Wes said, “Cucumbers.” Dave said, “OK.” The Wailers “gigged” several more times, writing songs each time, including Hoboken Halloween, which the Cucumbers played live for a short time. (Wes is a playwright in San Francisco, Dave is a psychology professor at Duke).

Jon and Deena first played rock music together when Mike Sternberg visited them in Somerville, MA. Jon and Mike started to jam, and Deena didn’t want to sit around watching so she picked up a guitar. They taped some of the result. A friend invited them to a party that night and rather than stop playing they took their guitars and performed at the party. Aside from a few TV broadcast guitar lessons Deena took in junior high school, this was her first day playing guitar. Studying the jam tapes, Jon made note of a chord progression he’d played, and a riff that Deena had played over it. A few weeks later, Jon saw a few lines typed on a page in Deena’s manual typewriter; he sang Deena’s lyrics over the chords he’d found on the tape, and their first song, My Boyfriend, was written.

Their third song came a few weeks later, when Jon picked up a guitar, started strumming a C# major chord and said to Deena, “Come on, let’s write a song.” She said, “What should I sing?” He produced an envelope he’d rescued from the trash that had some notes she'd written. She sang one side of the envelope, then the other, and they had “Susie’s Getting Married.”

In the fall of 1980 Jon and Deena gave up their jobs and apartment and went to Europe with two cheap, sturdy guitars, beginning their trip in Leningrad, where Jon’s brother was working for the US government. They made their way to southern Europe where they played on the street for several months, writing songs and meeting other street musicians. They decided that when they returned they’d move to New York City, buy electric guitars and start a band.

Hoboken, USA

They moved to Hoboken in May, 1981, because 1) when they parked Deena’s car in Chelsea they were careless with the parking signs (Boston being a much more liberal place in that regard) and their car was towed and 2) Deena’s sister Ann, an artist, lived over Ricco’s on Washington St. They had no idea there was a music scene there, but soon stumbled across Maxwell’s, where they played their first gig as a threesome, with Tom Dugan on drums, at a benefit for local literary magazine Ferro-Botanica, in November 1981. They played the song Cucumbers that night, and a friend, Kevin Streiter, (co-founder of Hoboken second-wave band Love Henry), told them, “You guys were really great, but do yourselves a favor and never play that song Cucumbers again.” They heeded his advice.

Al Houghton, a college friend of Jon and Deena’s (and the founder and owner of Dubway Studios in Manhattan) joined on bass, and the band played gigs at every dive they could find in New York and New Jersey. The first official gig as a foursome was at Maxwell’s, opening for the Individuals, a Hoboken mainstay of the time fronted by Glenn Morrow (founder and owner of Bar None Records). The first actual gig, however, was three days earlier at the Show Place, a go-go bar in Dover, New Jersey where they opened for a metal cover band called Redeye, whose singer asked them after the show, “We like to get red-eyed, do you like to get pickled?”

The Fake Doom Years

Al left to form his own band and Nels Johnson, of the defunct Delphobics, answered the Cucumbers' Village Voice ad. At his audition he wrote the bass line to Flies (which appeared more than ten years later on Where We Sleep Tonight) but when the band asked him to join, he insisted he wasn’t good enough. Incredulous, they persisted and Nels finally relented. Nels and Delphobics bandmate Steve Neighoff had formed Fake Doom Records to put out their own records, and wanted to continue the label putting out some other music. They decided to start with the Cucumbers. Through a friend of Nels’, the band met David Young, an English guitarist who had spent several years in LA and New York as a sound man, guitarist, songwriter and engineer, and was interested in producing. His first production project was their first EP, recorded at Skyline Studios, where Dave was a house engineer, in the middle of the night. Engineering his first released recording was Roger Moutenot (producer of Yo La Tengo, engineer and mixer for Lou Reed, Roseanne Cash, Paula Cole and many others). The band finished recording at about 4 am, only to find that Steve Neighoff had used the soda machine in the lounge, which sent an electric jolt through the still new studio, putting a loud gash of noise in the middle of one song. The band had to wake Nels, who was sound asleep in the control room, but rallied to finish one more take. When the band finally went to breakfast, Nels, born in Marquette, MI, near Canada, began for the first (and last) time, speaking Canadian, repeating over and over, “Pretty fuckin’ nice, eh?”

Before the record was released, Tommy Dugan quit the band (gave no reason, just stopped returning calls…the band still wonders about that) and through the Village Voice (again) found drummer Yuergen Renner, born in Weil-am-Rhine, Germany, on the French-Swiss border, who came to New York in 1980 to play American rock. He was soon in six bands, but eventually left all but the Cukes. The Fake Doom EP, with a cover by sister Ann’s then-husband Frank Bosco, came out in late 1983. It was something of a critical success – all the New York critics seemed taken with Deena slinging licks on her Fender mustang in her cocktail dresses, most of which she bought at an estate sale in Newark. The EP also received a good deal of college radio play, enabling the band to begin playing out of town. Washington, DC’s popular alternative radio station, WHFS drew crowds to shows at the 9:30 club in DC and the 8X10 club in Baltimore. A bit later, WHTG on the Jersey shore drew crowds at the Green Parrott in Neptune, NJ. Maxwell's remained the home base.

Vanned Vegetables

Nels, a homebody by nature, quit when the band began to travel too much, thanks to the indy rock booking agent of the 80s, Venture Bookings in New York. The band found Charles Brian Hargrove, who was playing in Ice Nine, a New York band that had been the last of the six bands that Yeurgen quit. Brian joined just in time to record Who Betrays Me…and Other Happier Songs, the band’s first album (all 26 minutes of it), on Fake Doom, which featured on its cover a painting by Deena’s grandmother of her native Poland. After the spring 1985 release came more short tours and good reviews, but Brian took off for a band that seemed headed for bigger things—they had a manager, for one. (The Cucumbers have never had a manager, a fact that they often regret when talking on the phone from their dayjobs). Needing a bass player in a hurry, the Cukes turned again to their farm club, Ice Nine, and took guitarist John Williams, who had played a little bass and didn’t mind switching. (Jon later met Ice Nine leader Barry Smith and apologized). Two weeks later they recorded their minor key version of Otis Blackwell’s (OK, and Elvis Presley’s) All Shook Up, whose arrangement had been the brainchild of first-Cucumbers Tom and Nels. The band played in a battle of the bands in New Jersey then set off for the south, and on arriving at Ziggy's in Winston-Salem, NC, found they’d won a battle of the bands, thanks in part to John's girlfriend Ann Bertelsen's clever use of speed redail on her phone during the call-in part of the contest. Their soundman at the outdoor stage at Ziggy’s that night was Dan Griffen, who later became the band’s road manager and also produced the 2004 film 200 Cadillacs, whose soundtrack included All Shook Up and the Cucumbers’ own Blue Cadillac. The crowd was one of the largest the band had played for, and since John was so new, they only had material for about 40 minutes. They repeated most of it, and no one appeared to mind. A few weeks after that tour, Jon and Deena were married at Deena’s parents house in South Orange, NJ. Performing at the wedding were Steve Neighoff, Mike Sternberg, and Jon's father and brother Joshua.

After Fake Doom released All Shook Up in spring 1986, with a cover painting by Hoboken artist Tim Daly, the label exploded like some Spinal Tap drummer, and the band began peddling a demo tape they made with studio time they’d won in that battle of the bands. Profile Records, flush with cash from Run DMC, decided to expand into indy rock, and A&R man Gary Pini called Jon at his proofreading job at One Park Avenue in New York, interrupting what was an otherwise quiet day on the job. A contract was signed, and the label agreed to the band’s demand to record again with Dave Young producing, this time in London, where Dave had returned to manage a recording studio in Kentish Town. The band took an (unheated) flat nearby in the winter of 1986-87, and recorded an album they wanted to call Fractured Fairy Tales but the name had been used before and so they went the eponymous way.

My Boyfriend

When they sent in the near finished tracks, Profile noticed for the first time that the song My Boyfriend, which they asked the band to rerecord, included a sexually ambiguous moment when Jon sang the second verse, repeating the same words of the first verse (and the last verse) -- about the boyfriend. This had been something of an accident, coming about because Deena had written only one verse, but it was quite popular with critics (“a send-up of pansexual chic,” said the Village Voice). The Cucumbers, however, decided it was time for a second verse and wrote one, although in retrospect it might have been better to stay with pansexual chic.

The song and video (that cost as much as the entire album budget) broke into the commercial media a bit (they know that My Boyfriend aired on Christmas Day, 1987, at about 3 pm because many many people apparently supplement their yule log with a little MTV and reported the video sighting). Some commercial stations played My Boyfriend. There was a People magazine write up with photo (live in Iowa City), a review in Rolling Stone. There was a winter tour through the south, Midwest and Northeast (the Holiday on Ice tour) and a summer tour (the Vanned Vegetables tour). John Williams performed several miraculous van repairs. Jurgen, without being familiar with the song, played a rather unexpected series of solos to Wipe Out in front of a raging drunk crowd in Auburn, AL after Auburn prevailed in the Auburn-Georgia football game. Biggest crowd (expressly for the Cucumbers): about 600 in Atlanta (Jon hyperventilated singing Tiger in a single breath and briefly blacked out on stage); most hardy crowd: about 60 in Portland, ME who snowshoed and skied through two feet of snow to get to the Tree Café; most hospitable crowd: Amelia’s in Iowa City, where several U of I students brought their Cucumber party (complete with cucumber sandwiches) on the stage.

In 1988, the band expanded to include two horn players, Brett Ollerenshaw (sax) and Steve Foreman (trumpet) and a keyboardist/percussionist, Bill Weisbach. The 7-piece Cucumbers played several local shows, including one at the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank, NJ, the night the Cucumbers picked up the NJ Music Award for best upcoming national band. The big band recorded a few songs at Skyline with Rogert Moutenot and Knut Bohn producing.

The Profile album sold well by Fake Doom standards, but not by commercial standards, and while Profile while wasn’t interesting in putting out another album, they did let the band out of their contract in early 1989. By now, Venture Bookings was no more. Soon, Deena and Jon were expecting a baby, and with the band losing steam, John quit, but not before they recorded 10 songs in two days at Mixolydian Studios in Boonton, NJ, mostly live, about half with horns. This was September 1989. Deena was 8 months pregnant; on one song (Something Dangerous) she overdubbed banjo in a denim maternity dress, looking like some long-lost country cousin.

Then Came Kurt!

Auditions for John’s replacement had begun in the summer of ’89. One of those auditioning was an acquaintance of John’s who (they found out later) had long been interested in playing with the Cucumbers; and when John mentioned he was quitting, he called the band. Kurt Wrobel, with a music degree from Montclair State, was doing studio work and playing in several bands. He arrived in the Jersey City industrial basement that held the Cucumbers’ rehearsal space with a Gibson Thunderbird, an enormous bass that made an enormous sound, especially when played with Kurt’s enormous energy. Jon, Deena and Yuergen agreed that he was just too much, and began playing with someone else, but found they kept talking about Kurt and smiling every time they did so. They soon called Kurt to tell him they’d changed their minds, and see if he was still interested. He was and the new foursome played a few shows before Deena and Jon’s first son was born.

Sporadic gigs, and some modest attempts to shop their unreleased material eventually petered out, especially when Deena got pregnant again. Family life took over. Deena met Alice Genese (bassist for Gut Bank, Sexpod, and other bands) at Church Square Park in Hoboken, where they both were watching their toddler sons run around. They decided to form "Over the Moon," a rock band for children, and began playing matinee shows at rock clubs including Maxwell’s and the Knitting Factory. Yuergen officially quit in 1992. The Cucumbers seemed on the way out. .

In 1993, Jon got a call from Ray McKenzie, a New Jersey musician and Wall Street currency trader, who, with John Williams, was thinking of starting a label. Ray was a Cucumbers fan, and when John told him about the unreleased material, he called the remnant Cucumbers and asked if they were interested in reforming and releasing that material. When he got an indifferent response, Ray asked if they minded if he played the material for some people at the CMJ music convention in New York that summer. Without the band knowing, he booked them a showcase gig and told them about it a few weeks before the date. Jon and Deena put together a short set on two acoustic guitars, and that was all it took; a contract was signed with Ray’s label Zero Hour; Kurt was still available, despite having formed am art-thrash metal band, Vas Defrens. Drummer auditions turned up an old Fake Doom labelmate, Dave Ross of the Gyros. As the band began performing again, Jon and Deena did home studio versions of five songs to add to the material in the can; Where We Sleep Tonight was released in 1994. Ray flew the band to several cities around the county (Miami, Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco), the band drove to several more, and they began rebuilding a following. They recorded a follow up album in 1996-7.

Hard times befell Zero Hour, and since the band could not tour enough to sell sufficient numbers, Ray reluctantly decided not to release the album, but he did give the band the master tapes, even paying for a mastering session so they could readily release it elsewhere. At their next show in New York, a semi-acoustic performance at the Sidewalk Café, they met Linus Gelber, who had recently started Home Office Records. He’d enjoyed Where We Sleep Tonight, and with months another deal was done, and the Cucumbers released Total Vegetility in 1999.

And Introducing Steve Villano

Demands of family life kept touring to a minimum, and again band momentum waned. Dave left to go back to school and play with Barbecue Bob and the Spareribs. Songs were being written, but gigs, as an acoustic trio, were rare. The next Cucumber angel arrived in the form of Tom Lucas, who worked a few cubicle rows from Jon at a publishing company in a suburban New Jersey office park. Tom, a South Orange musician, ran a recording studio in his basement, and, a long-time Cucumbers fan, offered the band some recording time for the fun of it. By 2001, they had decided to make an album, with Tom co-producing. They took their time, and by the time it was done two years later, the Cucumbers had been through two more drummers. EdNo had joined in late 1999 and recorded many tracks with Tom and the band. EdNo left and Kurt set about auditioning drummers himself. After screening several phone calls from a surprising array of personalities, he found Steve Villano. A Teaneck native, Steve started playing professionally in the early 90s to pay his way through school in southern New Jersey, playing in Atlantic City casinos with disco and rock bands. After a ten-year interlude as a tanker truck driver, he returned to music, touring with hard rock band So So Human, and playing gigs with singsongwriters, swing bands, jingle houses, etc. Steve recorded the final sessions for All Things to You.

When it came time to mix the album, a call went out to Roger Moutenot, who had had a hand in most Cucumbers releases in one form or another. He mixed the album at his new studio in Nashville, TN, and he and his partner in Fictitious Records, Michael Davis, decided they would like to release the album. This brings us to spring 2004.

Band Members Through the Ages

These were/are Cucumbers:

2002-2004
Deena Shoshkes
Jon Fried
Kurt Wrobel
Steve Villano
Recorded part of All Things to You (2003)

2000-2002
Deena Shoshkes
Jon Fried
Kurt Wobel
EdNo
Recorded part of All Things to You (2001-2)

1994-1999
Deena Shoshkes
Jon Fried
Kurt Wrobel
Dave “LG” Ross
Recorded Total Vegetility (1996-7)

1992-1994
Deena
Jon
Completed Where We Sleep Tonight (1994)

1989-1991
Deena Shoshkes
Jon Fried
Kurt Wrobel
Jürgen Renner

1985-1989
Deena Shoshkes
Jon Fried
Jürgen Renner
John Williams
(and sometimes Brett Ollernshaw, Steve Foreman & Bill Weisbach)
Recorded Where We Sleep Tonight (partial, 1989), The Cucumbers (1987), All Shook Up 12” (1986)

1984-1985
Deena Shoshkes
Jon Fried
Jürgen Renner
Charles Brian Hargrove
Recorded Who Betrays Me…and Other Happier Songs (1984)

1983-1984
Deena Shoshkes
Jon Fried
Jürgen Renner
Nels Johnson

1981-1983
Deena Shoshkes
Jon Fried
Tom Dugan
Nels Johnson
Recorded Fresh Cucumbers EP (1983)

1981
Deena Shoshkes
Jon Fried
Tom Dugan
Al Houghton