ANTIETAM

No Fun, the first punk rock band in Louisville, Kentucky, lasted 1.5 seasons. Beginning in the spring of 1978, the band played seven shows—each an event—and the sum of which was, if not cataclysmic, at least a catalyst to the scene that would follow. Others were thinking along the same lines—No Fun took it public first.

 

Members were: Bruce Witsiepe, guitar and vocals; Tony Pinotti, vocals and guitar; Tara Key, guitar and vocals; Skip Koebberman, bass; Dean Thomas, drums. Soon after the start, Skip turned his chair over to Cardy Bledsoe. Gigs were at the Louisville School of Art (the incubation chamber for the band as all members attended or taught there), an opening on Main Street for local artist Jan Arnow (where Bruce ground a graven image of his belt buckle into the back of a borrowed gold top Les Paul), the Cloisters, Robert Nedelkoff's barn, the Galt House at 2nd and Main, The Zanzibar, and a free-for-all at the Vogue Theater where we opened for a midnight showing of Fritz the Cat and an audience made up of a quorum of 1970s stoners. But that crowd was peppered with an unwitting, but staunch platoon of most of the classic members of the coalescing Louisville punk scene.

 

At the end of the summer, Dean Thomas moved to the West Coast and eventually surfacd on the Merv Griffin Show as the drummer for Levi and the Rockats, Cardy Bledsoe left banddom, and Bruce and Tony moved to New York on a trajectory leading to life as Circle X. Tara stayed home and pouted until the Babylon Dance Band asked her to join.

 

One of the best No Fun moments... when we were practicing in the sculpture studio at LSA and an Anchorage policeman strolled in the door and stood... and stood... and stood as we all avoided ending the song we were playing to save ourselves from the imagined dialogue we were about to have with the law about noise, intoxicants or other misbehavior. When we finally quit, he said "Who says cops can't like Lou Reed?"! And he smiled and walked away.