deniz tek

one of my wife's fave spins since i met her has been do the pop: the australian garage-rock sound 1976-87, a compilation of obscure-but-great bands like radio birdman, the saints, the new christs, the celibate rifles, died pretty, the lime spiders, the screaming tribesmen, and on and on. she actually lived in australia for awhile a few yrs back, but hadn't been aware of any of this music. when i first stumbled onto this stuff around '97, it was like discovering an alternate america where all the music i usedta take shit for liking from the guys at the hipi rekkid store where i worked as a teen -- the mc5, the stooges, alice cooper, the velvet underground, the nuggets-era garage punk stuff -- was revered instead of reviled and muy influential.

a convincing argument could be made that they guy who started that whole oz rock ball rolling was deniz tek, a gtr-slinging native of ann arbor, michigan, who gives the lie to poor old f. scott fitzgerald's line of bullshit about there being no second acts in american lives.

picture this: kid grows up in ann arbor, a kick-back collegetown about as far from detroit as, oh, denton is from the fort, listening to the high-energy detroit jams of the mc5, stooges, and like that. goes to australia to attend medical school and starts a band called radio birdman, an intense, uncompromising outfit shrouded in heavy mystique. they essentially create their own scene after being banned from every venue in sydney. inevitably, they blow apart -- on tour, in europe -- with the members making their way back to oz to lick their wounds and form other bands. after finishing med school/internship/residency, deniz joins the u.s. navy as a flight surgeon, spends the next 10 years with marine corps aviation units, and gets checked out behind the controls of pretty much every jet in the inventory. he was at miramar when they were filming top gun there and the filmmakers appropriated his callsign ("iceman") for the val kilmer character, prompting his friend mark sisto to write a letter to rolling stone, informing them that "val kilmer is no deniz tek."

deniz didn't give up playing while he was in the service, either. while in the philippines on one westpac deployment, he played gtr with a band called dust and the rotorheads. dust peterson was a marine helicopter pilot who wound up playing bass on the first album deniz made after he got out of the navy; the drummer on the session was scott asheton from the stooges. deniz once sent me a pic of dust in the '91 gulf war, where he had a coupla hundred republican guards surrender to his chopper, which had a radio birdman logo painted on its nose. after the navy, deniz moved his family to billings, montana, where he worked as an emergency room surgeon while releasing a steady stream of records and touring a couple of times every year. once, on tour in italy, his drummer got an abscess on his leg and deniz operated on it in the van, with a penknife. in 1996, radio birdman reformed for the first of several reunion tours. then last year, deniz and his family moved back to australia and birdman got back together in earnest.

i had interviewed deniz for a fanzine years ago but didn't meet him in person until april 2002, when he came to the states to play a bunch of east coast dates with scott morgan's powertrane. on several of the dates, they were joined by deniz' friend, ex-stooge ron asheton. a few days after that, deniz got to play new york city for the first time.

"you gonna make it?" he asked me in the run-up to the tour.

"pretty busy with work and stuff," i said. "prolly have to wait until next time."

his reply: "how many next times do you think there are going to be?"

point taken. i flew up to philly and hooked up with my buddy geoff, who drove to cleveland (where we saw the show at the beachland ballroom, a real nice old slovak hall on the edge of town) and ann arbor (where we caught the performance at the blind pig -- a block away from the bridge where scott asheton peeled the top off the stooges' equipment van back in '71 -- that geoff wound up releasing on his real o mind label as ann arbor revival meeting). the buzz from those shows was strong enough to sustain me through the ignominy of getting shitcanned from my job a coupla weeks later.

in ann arbor, deniz' younger brother, who'd never seen him perform before, was amazed at the size and fanaticism of the crowd. "oh, this is nothing," den's wife angie assured him. "in australia, birdman would have a thousand people giving the 'yeah, hup' salute when they played 'new race.'" i couldn't make it to the show at the warsaw in new york, but i was happy to hear that there were 800 paying customers on hand for deniz' debut there.

a few months after that, i went down to houston to watch deniz record a track for a compilation cd at sugarhill studios with engineer and former birdman soundguy andy "mort" bradley. he brought with him a beautiful custom-made gtr and showed admirable intensity and focus, putting the track together with a coupla local musos he'd never met before in a couple of hours. then again, he's been pulling bands and records together on the fly for years.

again, fuck scott fitzgerald. by now, dr. tek is into his third or fourth act. the thing i dig most about him, though, is the way his unusual career trajectory proves that playing music and doing other meaningful work are not mutually exclusive.