By Kevin Kinder

Charlie Maxton might have chosen another song to include in a new compilation dedicated to the post-punk scene in Kansas. 

But the music from that time is literally fragile. 

Maxton has the masters to several recordings by The Blivets, the band of his youth. They were captured on a specific kind of reel-to-reel tape that’s so notorious for falling apart that there’s a name for the condition: sticky shed syndrome. 

But he had a cassette recording of another track, “Willie Wheelchair,” which takes its title from the self-applied on-air nickname of William Heatwole, a KFDI-AM radio disc jockey whom Maxton worked with briefly. The song was originally released on The Blivets’ 1989 cassette “Margaret.”

Maxton unearthed "Willie Wheelchair” for the project “No Choice but Action: The Kansas Postpunk Revolution,” a book by Wichita State University English professors Francis X. Connor and Darren DeFrain. 

The book, published by the University Press of Kansas, was released September 29 alongside a companion compilation album released by the Kansas City-based record collective Black Site. 

Two reunion concerts celebrating the release are scheduled for later this month, The Embarrassed Men, Freedy Johnson, and The Blivets perform October 16 at Barleycorn’s in Wichita. The following night, The Embarrassed Men, Get Smart!, Truck Stop Love and Other Geese perform at The Bottleneck in Lawrence. 

The Embarrassed Men are the remnants of the seminal Kansas post-punk group The Embarrassment, the exact kind of you-should-know-more-about-them band that DeFrain and Connor sought to capture in their book. The Embarrassment were perhaps the closest to “making it,” but hardly the only Kansas band from that era to gain notoriety and capture regional and national attention. Many scenes emerged in the immediate aftermath of the punk revolution, often around college towns like Lawrence. Another nearly famous act, Get Smart!, called Lawrence home, and Wichita-based The Embarrassment played many of their shows there. The momentum bubbled over into Wichita and Kansas City, Mo., too.

DeFrain, originally from Utah, was familiar with the punk scene around his hometown college. After his academic career brought him to Wichita State, he fell into an eight-year-long research project with Connor that culminated in the book. 

As the book neared completion, he and Connor realized they were also the de facto caretakers of a treasure trove of unreleased or rarely heard songs, given that they had direct access to musicians in possession of the original recordings. They started collecting tracks and helped assemble what would become the soundtrack to their work. There was a bit of a race-against-time element involved: Not only are physical copies of these recordings falling apart, but an 18-year-old who started his first band in 1978 is now 66 years old. 

“No Choice but Action: Kansas Postpunk 1978-1994" contains 24 songs from 24 different Kansas bands of the era. It’s mostly punk-oriented, but not even the musicians agree about how to categorize their sounds. The bands provided the songs to Connor and DeFrain in whatever format they had, and from whatever moment in their career spoke to them. The Embarrassment’s contribution, “Wellsville,” was captured on a Panasonic tape recorder. By contrast, the Moving Van Gogh’s song “Machines in the Garden” was professionally recorded for an EP the band never released. 

Wichita State graduate Lucas Gill remastered the hodgepodge into a cohesive document that DeFrain said is surprisingly strong considering the physical condition of the source material. Combined with the book, it’s a testament and love letter to a scene otherwise largely undocumented except through word-of-mouth. 

And some of those stranger-than-fiction stories are true. If there’s a singular moment of legend from the timeline in question, it may be when The Embarrassment were kicked out of their previous practice space because the home — where bassist Ron Klaus was living — was going to be demolished.

They decided to play one more show there, and the concertgoers caused such destruction that it became a front-page story in The Wichita Eagle. Guitarist Bill Goffrier later memorialized the incident in a song for his post-Embarrassment band, Big Dipper. It was called, simply enough, “Ron Klaus Wrecked His House.” 

A recording from that night exists, but it was too degraded to be featured on the “No Choice But Action” album. On the recording, you can hear someone come on the PA system and ask people to stop lighting fires in the basement.  

Goffrier was a local hero to Maxton and his band, although The Embarrassment were through by the time The Blivets played their first show. The scene was still small then and mostly underground. Maxton and company played a lot of house shows, and at a list of small venues that no longer exist: The Spot on Douglas Avenue, Woody’s Backdoor near Central and Oliver, and the Coyote Club on North Broadway Street. They also played a lot at Kirby’s Beer Store, which still hosts live music.   

The Blivets last played 13 years ago for a one-off reunion show at Kirby’s. Before that, Maxton estimated that it had been 20 years since they’d all been on stage together.  

There weren’t any hard feelings that prevented them from playing, or reuniting, Maxton said. Like a lot of bands from Kansas mentioned in the new book, they gained traction but never really broke through. 

“Touring out of Wichita, Kansas, was really hard, and we sort of realized that,” he said. He moved to San Francisco, then Portland, Oregon, where he’s been for more than two decades. 

DeFrain said the first draft of the book was 900 pages, and it’s been edited down to a more manageable size. That means it’s not a true compendium of the scene — there are more stories and more bands with stories worth telling. 

“We hope that someone has eight years (of research) in them for volume two,” he said. 

For Maxton, who said he is thrilled to share the stage with The Embarrassed Men and Freedy Johnson, playing in a band was just something he and his friends did. They didn’t realize how important it all would feel 30 plus years later, and how reductive the national feelings towards music from “flyover country” would be. 

As “No Choice But Action” argues, Kansas had a thriving, influential scene that should have been bigger. 

“We didn’t realize that then, but we know that now,” Maxton said. 

The Details 

“No Choice but Action: The Kansas Postpunk Revolution” by Francis X. Conner and Darren Defrain
298 pages, $29.99

The book is available from University Press of Kansas and anywhere books are sold. You can find it in stock at many independent bookstores in Kansas. 

“No Choice but Action: Kansas Postpunk 1978-1994"
Vinyl album ($40) and digital download (name your price)

Purchase the album online, or find it at Wichita’s Spektrum Muzik, 811 W. Douglas Ave.

In celebration of the release of the book and companion LP collection “No Choice But Action” about the Kansas post-punk scene, several bands featured in the new releases will reunite for special gigs — some performing for the first time in more than a decade. The gigs take place on back-to-back nights in Wichita and Lawrence:

The Embarrassed Men, The Blivets and Freedy Johnston
7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 16, at Barleycorn’s, 608 E. Douglas Ave. in Wichita 

The Embarrassed Men, Truck Stop Love, Get Smart! and Other Geese
6 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 17, at The Bottleneck, 727 New Hampshire St. in Lawrence 

Kevin Kinder never learned to play an instrument but has written about music for more than two decades just the same. He’s a freelance writer and journalism educator. 

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