“I can’t think of anything better than spending 30 years doing something you love with three of your best friends,” says Peter Detmold.
For more than three decades, he’s done precisely that, as one-fourth of regional cult legends and tenacious true believers The Reducers. During that time, the resilient quartet has consistently resisted the fickle turns of popular taste, the transient whims of musical fashion, and even the temptations of the music-industry buzz that briefly threatened to turn them into the Next Big Thing. Instead, they’ve continued to make infectious, personally charged rock ‘n’ roll on their own uncompromising terms.
“There’s a lot you can do with two guitars, bass and drums,” asserts Hugh Birdsall, Detmold’s longstanding bandmate and fellow singer/guitarist/songwriter.
The Reducers’ history is a powerful testament to rock ‘n’ roll’s power to transcend and inspire, for those who create it as well as for those who consume it. These four working-class underdogs from New London, Connecticut—Birdsall, Detmold, bassist/vocalist Steve Kaika and drummer Tom Trombley—have spent most of their adult lives building a potent body of recordings and a far-reaching reputation as a scrappy, riveting live act that effortlessly affirms rock ‘n’ roll’s vibrant promise on a regular basis.
The eight albums that The Reducers have released over the years have charted the band’s evolution from punk-inspired smartasses to thoughtful craftsmen, without sacrificing the musical and personal edge that originally marked them as a special band. In that time, they’ve become a hometown institution with a fiercely loyal regional fan base, briefly flirted with mainstream acclaim, and earned a place in the hearts of listeners around the world who’ve been fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of the band’s effortlessly accessible output. What the band’s records share in common is the ace songwriting of Birdsall and Detmold, whose unfailingly catchy tunes incorporate a witty, heartfelt lyrical sensibility that’s laced with barbed humor and humanistic insight.
Then and now, The Reducers embody the same fannish enthusiasm that first asserted itself in the late 1970s, when teenaged pals Birdsall and Detmold bonded over their mutual affinity for the punk and new wave sounds that were emerging from New York and London at the time. They indulged their love for the new music with a ten-day visit to London during the musically volatile summer of 1977, during which the pair witnessed historic performances by the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Jam. The music’s raw energy and do-it-yourself spirit provided a focus for the duo’s own budding musical energies, and their passion for the music was further fueled by their frequent treks into Manhattan to pick up the latest British import releases, and to check out the city’s booming punk scene.
“Those experiences were huge for us,” Birdsall notes. “They made us realize that we didn’t have to be virtuoso musicians to play out in clubs. All of those early punk songs were easy to learn, so we could actually learn lots of complete songs. And we started to learn about arranging songs so that we could play them, without having to achieve note-for-note perfection. It also made us realize that we’d have to write our own songs if we wanted to be a real band.”
“The biggest lesson that punk rock taught us was ‘You can do it,’” Detmold adds. “I’d been going to see bands for years and years, but when I’d see the Who or Thin Lizzy or Queen or the Allman Brothers, it felt like there was no way that I could ever manage something like that. But then when I began seeing shows by the likes of the Ramones and the Clash and the Jam and the Sex Pistols, it felt like it was within my grasp, and that it was something that we could do.”
Another touchstone for the soon-to-be-Reducers was the ’70s school of earthy, rootsy British pub-rock bands, e.g. Ducks Deluxe, Rockpile and Dr. Feelgood. As Detmold recalls, “I got into the whole pub rock thing after I found the first Ducks Deluxe album in a cutout bin at my local record store. I bought it because I was intrigued by the cover photo; those four guys looked like a band, but nothing like the bands I was used to. The whole idea of bands that played in bars for a drinking crowd appealed to us, because it further stripped away the pretense that there was something unattainable about being in a rock ‘n’ roll band.”
Incited to get serious about launching their own band, Birdsall and Detmold soon roped in bassist Steve Kaika and drummer Tom Trombley. At the time, Kaika and Trombley were gainfully employed as the rhythm section of the popular local country-rock outfit the Bob Bridgeman Band, but were persuaded to sign on. Armed with a growing list of original compositions and an eclectic array of cover tunes, The Reducers began playing out in New London and various New England college towns, developing an enthusiastic fan following.
In the summer of 1980, The Reducers entered a small local studio to cut their first single, “Out of Step”/”No Ambition,” which they released on their own homespun Rave On label. The landmark disc (original copies of which now fetch princely sums on ebay) was a perfect encapsulation of the band’s hard-working underdog appeal. Despite a lack of promotional resources, the single gained numerous positive reviews and helped to spread The Reducers’ reputation outside of their home region, even as the foursome’s local popularity was helping to inspire a scene of new bands to coalesce around them at home.
The Reducers’ public profile was raised further when the band’s self-titled debut LP, recorded on the cheap and live in the studio, was released in 1984, with all four members sharing vocal duties and songwriting credits. Despite its lo-fi sonics, the album’s urgent performances and winsome, unpretentious songcraft struck a chord with critics and college-radio DJs.
The Reducers’ second longplayer Let’s Go!, released in early 1985, was even better received, breaking into the Top 10 on the alternative charts. Let’s Go!’s anthemic title song broke out as a college-radio hit, ending up on Epic Records’ compilation album Epic Presents the Unsigned and being named Single of the Year by the influential college radio trade journal CMJ, which also anointed The Reducers as 1985′s Best Unsigned Band. Those honors, combined with some grueling national touring and a widely-read rave by Robert Christgau in New York’s Village Voice, helped to set off a national buzz that attracted the interest of several major labels.
At the time, The Reducers were in the vanguard of a historic wave of iconoclastic, independently minded young bands rising across the United States. “When we first started putting out albums in the early ’80s, we’d find them in record store bins right in front of R.E.M. and the Replacements, and it was obvious that we were part of a movement away from the bloated arena-rock thing,” explains Detmold. “I saw both of those bands, and lots of others, in small clubs in front of small crowds, and I realized that we were all working different variations of a similar idea.”
“We felt like we were part of something,” adds Birdsall, “but we also felt like we were on the periphery of it, on the outside looking in. To me, it’s miraculous that we ever even got close to the music business. It was more the work of others, who heard something in us that they thought might be marketable, than it was any ambitions on our part.”
But while such contemporaries as R.E.M., the Replacements and the Smithereens went on to major-label status, the big deal that many predicted for The Reducers failed to materialize. Rather than turn bitter, the band simply continued to make music. A third album, 1985′s Cruise to Nowhere, was quickly written and recorded between amidst touring commitments. But the strain of constant roadwork had begun to wear on the band, and they soon retreated from national touring. Despite their absence from the national spotlight, The Reducers continued gigging locally and writing vital new material, sustained by their hometown fans and by their own belief in the music.
The Reducers made their belated CD debut in 1991 with the 29-song retrospective Redux, which gathered most of the band’s vinyl output into one handy package. In addition to belatedly dragging the band into the digital age, the collection launched a wave of renewed interest in the band. 1995′s Shinola, their first album of new material in a decade, covered some impressive new creative ground, while maintaining the qualities that had originally endeared the band to its admirers.
In 2000, the band responded to years of fan requests for a live Reducers album by assembling the rough-and-ready Fistfight At Ocean Beach, a limited-edition CD-R release available only as a premium for donations to WCNI, the non-profit local radio station where Birdsall and Detmold have served as DJs almost continuously since 1979, carefully avoiding self-promotion and sharing their favorite old and new rock ‘n’ roll tunes with listeners.
A more formal live CD, 2003′s Old Cons, found The Reducers celebrating their 25th anniversary with a career-spanning on-stage retrospective that documented the band’s intensity and versatility, as well as their longstanding love for early rock ‘n’ roll, vintage soul, British Invasion pop and ’70s punk and new wave. Their 25th anniversary also coincided with the mayor of New London’s official proclamation of August 23, 2003 as Reducers Day, and with the premiere of the career-spanning documentary The Reducers: America’s Best Unsigned Band, which won critical acclaim for its compelling retelling of the group’s unlikely journey.
The following year, a request from a group of Japanese Reducers fans—who had already bought out the backlog of vinyl LP stock that had been gathering dust in Peter’s basement—resulted in the band’s first-ever overseas tour, a ten-day run of rapturously received shows in Japan.
Such acknowledgements demonstrated how these humble outsiders had ended up as unlikely rock ‘n’ roll heroes. The title and musical contents of The Reducers’ 2008 studio effort Guitars, Bass and Drums underlined how The Reducers’ unpretentious musical agenda remains as compelling as ever. “Guitars, Bass and Drums sounds to me like what we wanted to sound like 30 years ago,” Birdsall says.
While household-name status has managed to elude them, The Reducers nonetheless occupy a special place in the hearts of their fans—not just those who still turn out in droves for the band’s gigs in and around New London, but for the others across America and around the world, who’ve been touched along the way by their music.
“I’ve heard from people in Germany, France, Spain and Japan,” says Birdsall. “We seem to be their favorite secret band, whose record they put on at parties and their friends go ‘Hey who’s that?’ I kind of like having that status. In a way, it’s even better than being really popular.”
Having entered their fourth decade, The Reducers continue to keep the faith, bonded together by their love for the music and for each other. “It was never about money or fame,” states Birdsall. “It was always about the music, and the camaraderie, and getting people to dance, and having cool vintage equipment. And while at this point in my life I don’t see the romance in touring the country in a van, playing rock ‘n’ roll in a hot, sweaty club is still just a little bit of heaven to me.”
“None of us ever had any delusions about getting rich off of this band,” Detmold adds. “When we started, we were full of piss and vinegar and just wanted to show what we could do. We were four friends with a common vision, and our goals were to play around our area, maybe play New York City and Boston and maybe make a few 45s, and make a name for ourselves. That turned into something much bigger, and we had more success than we could have ever imagined, and it’s continued much longer than any of us would have guessed. Now I guess the motivation is to keep doing it, and to do it as well as, or better than, we used to.”
“We still get together every week to rehearse and write songs every week, whether we have a gig coming up or not,” Birdsall points out. “I think that in a lot of respects, the band hasn’t changed that much. We’re still learning about music in public, still discovering about melody, harmony, rhythm, and the things that someone with limited technical ability can do on a guitar, a bass or a set of drums. The thing that originally made us obsess about pop music when we were kids is still the thing drives us today.”