SAUCERS - What We Did [USA punk, power pop 1978-80] 2002 Grand Theft Audio GTA053

I met Malcolm Marsden, Malcolm Doak and Mark Mulcahy and we formed Saucers in late 1977. We found a rehearsal space in an old building off downtown New Haven where we started practicing and writing songs. This went on almost daily for months until one day a couple of guys walking by heard us playing and stopped in to check us out. Tom Hearn and his friend Legs McNeil, of Punk Magazine fame, liked what they heard and offered us our first gig at a strip mall bar along the Long Island Sound shore in Devon, CT. We played with a band they were helping out known as The Survivors (later The Stratford Survivors) who had on drums a young Mike "Mad Mike" Czekaj (who later on gained fame with The Fuzztones). Thus we were off! After awhile more bands playing original music and non-Top-40 covers started either forming or coming out of their spaces and we started doing off nights in a few local clubs, such as The Oxford Ale House, that would let us in, usually on a Monday or Wednesday night. Most of the scene at the time was Top 40 cover and 'tribute' bands. Then we found a bar down by the Yale University campus that became Ron's Place; from 1978–'81, it was the scene of an extraordinary explosion of original music in the city and surrounding region of Southern CT that has lasted to this day. The Poodle Boys, Disturbance, Hot Bodies, Stratford Survivors, Scout House, Subdueds, Baby Strange and many others appeared both on Ron's stage and on the original 13-song LP I put out in 1982 (It Happened But Nobody Noticed) and the CD re-master I made in 2006 (It Happened But Nobody Noticed/Temp Supplementarie with another 13 bands from that era); the recordings are a testament to the diversity and incredible talent that exists there. 

It wasn't long before Saucers looked to record, and in 1978 booked an evening at Trod Nossel Studio in Wallingford, CT with noted engineer Richard Robinson at the controls. We recorded six songs, "Final Solution," "Muckraker," "Annie," "Frustration," "Slow Down," and "Orpheus," a song written by Malcolm Marsden. Only "Muckraker" was released initially, when it appeared on It Happened But Nobody Noticed. Saucers were playing more shows in New Haven and Devon and were looking to expand further. We ventured to NYC to play CBGBs as well as looking to Boston, Providence, and elsewhere.

Saucers returned to Trod Nossel, and Mr. Robinson, in the spring of 1979, this time with a two-guitar lineup as Malcolm Doak was replaced by guitarist Seth Tiven. Six more songs were recorded, "Muckraker" and "Frustration" (again), along with new songs, "Roadmaster" and "I Didn't Get It," as well as two compositions by Malcolm," Take A Chance" and "What We Do." Unlike the previous recordings, three of these became Saucers' first single, "What We Do/Muckraker/I Didn't Get It," which was self-released in 1979 (ORMI 5098).

I wrote both songs on the second single, "A Certain Kind of Shy/She’s Alright," but Mark sang the A side. It was Mark's lead singing debut, and a seismic shift in his career trajectory (he would later form Miracle Legion). There is very little video footage of Saucers, save for a promo video and some short clips for performances at Toad's Place in New Haven as well as Saucers' home stage at Ron's Place. In 2000, Jim Tennyson contacted me and suggested I get in touch with Grand Theft Audio Records in Los Angeles as they had issued some recordings from other defunct CT bands and might be interested in Saucers. Brian at GTA was interested and I took the master tapes I had been carrying around for 20 years to a local Indianapolis studio to have them digitized and remixed. The result was the CD What We Did (GTA 053), released in 2002. This release contained all of the studio recordings of Saucers and a live cut, "Why Me," recorded at The Cupboard as the soundtrack for the above mentioned video made by Monica Thompson the summer of 1980. 

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