 Third-Rate Reprobates | |
|---|---|
| Origins | Dayton, Ohio, United States |
| Genres | Pop Punk, Nu Metal |
| Years Active | 1990 – 1999 |
| Members | Crash Cross (Drums), Timmy Richards (Bass Guitar), Dan Lochlan (Keyboard), and Lincoln Antonio (Lead Vocals and Guitar). |
Third-Rate Reprobates
Early Life
The Third-Rate Reprobates hailed from Dayton, Ohio and all attended the Paul Revere High School during the late 80s and early 90s. The group consisted of four members, Crash Cross, Timmy Richards, Dan Lochlan, and Lincoln Antonio. Crash and Timmy’s families were American through and through, while Dan’s family were Scottish, and Lincoln’s of Italian descent. Crash, Timmy ,and Lincoln were as thick as thieves in middle school, and their friendship lasted through to high school too. Within a few years of attending, Dan joined the school as his family had just moved to the area from Scotland for his father’s military service.
They all got on well and Dan fitted in perfectly with them. They shared a love of misdemeanour and bad behaviour much to their teacher’s annoyance. If they weren’t being nuisances in class, they would be bunking off school entirely to spend their days at the local mall or at the skate park. None of them were particularly academic, so school was a massive chore for them.
During the last few years of school, it became pretty obvious that their prospects were slipping away from them, so this was the point that they decided to make it big as a pop punk band to “stick it to the man”. Each of them had tinkered around with instruments as kids and were soon bunking off from class to spend time in the school’s music room. Their teacher’s actively encouraged them to spend more time in the music room too. They could see that it was only thing that would keep them at school during the day so took the opportunity to encourage them in something more worthwhile.
History
School Days
It was one of their teacher’s that offered them the opportunity to play in front of their year at a pep rally. It was thought that the more they would practise the less time they could get up to misbehaviour. They were right, as the boys finally took something at school seriously and practise for three solid weeks before the big performance. They later told Grunge Garage Magazine that they collectively knew this was their last chance saloon to make anything of themselves before leaving school and so they took the opportunity.
The gig at the pep rally consisted of three songs that they had written as a special assignment in their English lessons. The band started with the song The Jock and the Dweeb to everyone’s delight. The other kids loved the song and took the band to heart straight away. Their second song Freshman Trim also went down a storm with their classmates. It was all going so well and showed the group that they might have a chance with their music. But sadly the atmosphere changed during their final song, The Kids Need Help! As part of the song, the lyrics talk all about their school days and how school is pointless in the grand scheme of things and encouraged their fellow students to bunk off and enjoy their childhood. The crowd loved it and started a small mosh pit at the front of the bleachers. As you can imagine, the teachers were less than impressed, so much so that their maths teacher, Mr. Greaves, pulled all the cables from their amps prompting a sudden silence. According to the band’s mythos, the teacher shouted ” I’m gonna shut you up you no good reprobates,” while yanking the cords, and that’s where the band’s name came from.
If this stunt by the faculty sought to stop the band and their ideas from spreading, they were sadly mistaken. Word soon got around the school that there was this great, cool new band had started and the whole student body wanted to have a look. They had been banned from ever performing at the school again so they needed other places for people to hear their new sound. This resulted in the band doing small impromptu gig in the parks and skateparks around the school grounds. Most events took place after school, but cheekily the boys also arranged a few during school hours with some students bunking off to enjoy the pop punk concerts. This became a real issue for the school as many classes were only half full during a daytime concert. They took the hard decision to expel the four reprobates in the final semester of 1990 and ban all students from leaving during school hours otherwise they would meet the same fate. All band merch was also banned from the premises with heavy punishments given to any student wearing one of their t-shirts. Like most occurrences when schools ban something, it only increased the band’s street cred amongst kids at the school promoting their gigs to have more and more people attending.
Local Legends
Being expelled from school gave the band two dilemmas. They now didn’t need to bother with classes as that was their last year of high school anyway, but they no longer had nothing to fall back on. Music had to be their one and only priority. Thankfully for the four of them, their notoriety had spread around the local area to other schools and colleges. It wasn’t just Paul Revere High School students turning up to their gigs, almost every school in their local area brought large groups along. It was at this time that they decided to try and perform a gig every week at a new venue in Dayton and surrounding areas. No location was off limits as long as it could hold enough people. They used plenty of skateparks first of all which gave them plenty of space to enjoy themselves. Other places included abandoned buildings, parks, and even the local fairground which did get a bit hectic when the band thought it would be a good idea to try and ride the ferris wheel on the outside. They were later banned from that location too.
During this time they had a small repertoire which was getting boring for them to play every week, so they took the opportunity to try and write more songs to try and collate an album. They drew on their time at school, their hatred of the suburbia they grew up in, and the everyday challenges of kids with nothing to do. Their melancholy lyrics paired with the raging guitar and vocals resonated with the other disillusioned youth in the area. With more gigs came more publicity with local student papers and newsletters writing about the band. One young reporter marvelled at the maturity of the lyrics considering the band’s age and their well known issues at school.
It was in 1991 that the band sought to make things official by creating their first album, Stark Raving Sad. They scraped together a bit of money for some half decent microphones and set about recording their debut album from their garage. The album was filled with the songs they had been performing for the first year of the band. An impromptu studio was set up in Dan’s family garage with a few amps dotted here and there to get their sound loud enough for their old Sony tape recorder to hear it. After weeks of messing around they finally had a master album recorded to cassette that they were proud of.
It was now time to get the albums out and about. They bought as many 90 minute tapes that they could to record onto. It took a good few weeks for poor Lincoln to rerecord the master tape to the new bootleg tapes with his dual cassette boom box. at the end of every gig they would prop up a table to sell their tapes and t-shirts. Eventually, almost every young person in Dayton had either bought a copy of their album or had duplicated one for themselves. They also sent some cassette to big wigs in the industry. It was now time for the other schools in the district to suffer the same fate as Paul Revere High School. The school kids were taking the lyrics to heart and bunking off and misbehaving at school. There was a countywide edict banning all Third-Rate Reprobates merchandise and music from the schools as a panic occurred through the local governing body.
1992 was looking to go a similar way to the year before until the band got an unexpected phone call from Andrew Reef, one of the talent scouts from the Dekaf Records US office. He had been in his office listening to a few of the albums he had been sent. He was an old school mogul and only really focused on pop music at the time. It was while listening to the Third-Rate Reprobate’s debut album that his son, Lenny, walked into his office. Andrew didn’t think much of the anarchist style of singing and thought the music was too heavy for the buying public. Thankfully, Lenny knew otherwise. He had heard of the band at school, but this was the first time he had heard their music properly and he quickly became a huge fan. His dad was surprised at this reaction to the music and asked his son all about pop punk. After a bit of nagging from his son and some market research too, Andrew phone the four boys up to offer them a record deal with Dekaf Records. As part of the deal Dekaf would remaster their first album and rerelease it to the entire country and also fund the creation of their follow up album. So with the record company’s backing, Scraping the Barrel was released in the latter part of 1992.
The second album stuck with the same themes of their first one as they knew their target market of school kids and college students were lapping up their lyrics and taking them to heart. With both albums now being available nationwide it allowed the group to do their first tour between different states. Although their music was a sensation in Ohio, other neighbouring states wanted a piece of the action too. Hundreds of fans saw the band throughout the tour bringing more and more fans and more and more trouble for local venues and schools. They were finding that schools on the tour route were banning their music and merch before they had even played their concert nearby. All that did was pique the student’s interest and make them want to see the band even more.
Big Boots
The two albums plus their successful tour brought them plenty of praise and critical acclaim amongst the right press and magazines for pop punk. The band’s gamble had paid off and they were starting to earn a pretty penny every time they played a concert. It took two years before the band were up for creating another album, they were having too much fun touring. They had a massive 72 hour song writing session with the choice tracks being put on their third album, Sidewalk Slackers, in 1994. It was another smash hit amongst the disaffected youth of the United States. Their universal themes of hating school, wanting to have fun, and apathy towards authority even spread across the Atlantic finding success in the UK too. It also meant they could go on another tour to cash in their newly found fame.
It was Lincoln’s suggestion that their 1994 tour followed the Oregon Trail. He wasn’t much of a history fan, but he did enjoy playing the video game while at school. The others thought it was a stupid idea and that’s exactly why they agreed to it. So throughout the year, after some dates in Ohio and the east coast of the States, they arranged tour dates along the original path of the Oregon Trail. For these gigs they even went as far as dressing as cowboys; hats, chaps, boots, and all. Obviously their sound was totally different to country music, but they thought it might help their cause with the rural locals on their trip. In the end, most adults from the area thought they were making fun of cowboys and all boycotted the events. The local kids loved it though and word went through schools and colleges bringing in thousands more TRR fans. The stunt was so random and unprecedented that it got them plenty of column inches in local music mags and newspapers.
The Third-Rate Reprobates were really hitting the big time. Their music videos were being played on national TV, alt rock radio stations were playing their tracks, and they were even getting on the covers of magazines. With this new exposure, came even more plaudits and money for the group. After another two years of touring with their third album, they were really raking in the money with ticket, music, and merch sales. That’s why in 1996 their fourth album was titled Toe Rags to Riches.
The whole album was basically a massive show of their new found wealth. They had been poor students without any prospects when the band first started and now they were national stars making a small fortune. As if they weren’t going to flex on those who didn’t have any faith in them. You would think that their fans would find this new show of wealth egregious but they lapped it up. It was mostly done in a tongue in cheek way that was so over the top ostentatious that people knew they must have been joking. Their name on the album was even changed to Third-Rate Reprobate$ to fit their new style.
To go along with their new album the band also created a brand new website. Back in 1996 this was pretty revolutionary and proved that although the band acted stupid and lazy, they were really on the pulse of new innovations. The new site contained tour dates, early images of the band, biographies of the members, and even early music downloads. They knew all about their albums being duplicated back in their early days and how it got their name out there, so giving fans a few free songs on their website made sense to try out. It was also a great platform for budding writer Timmy to write a small blog documenting the band’s time on the road. The site only led to more and more coverage of the group and a better connection with the fans.
Controversy
With the fourth album going great guns now too, it led to another two years of touring. To show off their new wealth they arrived at every gig in a large Rolls Royce. They still toured together on a bus but transferred to the classic car just before getting to the venue to keep up the illusion. The registration number, TRR 1 also added to the allure. The tour took them to every state in the United States plus dates in the UK and Canada. They truly had become worldwide pop punk stars.
While on the road the band came up with another whole album’s worth of songs. They released these song as the album, Mr. Greaves in 1998. Yes, named after their old teacher Mr. Greaves. The man who had unplugged their amps back at Paul Revere High some 8 years before. Along with the album, the band paid for a whole new music suite at their old high school and dedicated it to their now infamous teacher. As you imagine the old teacher didn’t take well to the ridicule he was receiving due to the album’s name and he set out to stop the band’s antics once and for all. He filed a lawsuit against the group asking them to change the name of the album and pay him a sum of $750,000 in damages. Ironically for the band, when they turned up at court to fight the case they didn’t dress in their now customary suits, they returned back to their old baggy clothing. They wanted the jury to side with them. They recounted the original story of Mr. Greaves and the pep rally and argued that the track was in homage to him and that he could make money off the publicity. Amazingly the jury took the band’s side and no settlements needed to be paid.
This wasn’t the last of Mr. Greaves or the last of the band’s controversy. The band had always made fun of the United States and that’s why they resonated with the youth of the country, but they took it a bit too far in the eyes of some. They were invited to play at a college football stadium in Texas and were asked to sing the national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner, to the crowd before the big game. Them being them, they decided to have a bit of fun with Lincoln belching the lyrics and the rest of the band making stupid faces during the rendition. This really didn’t go down well with the crowd. They all starting booing and throwing whatever they could at the band. They quickly finished up and scarpered from the pitch not to be seen again in those parts.
The police were often busy around the visiting dates of the group. Fans would often daub graffiti of the band’s logo on houses and shops before they arrived to play. This led to some mayors banning the group from even performing in their town. The band had to tell their fans via their website to stop doing this as it was stopping them playing at many of their tour dates. Instead the group told them to bring any old, boring, run of the mill vinyl records to the gigs. They would then collect them up before the gig to destroy them in a kind of art piece during the show. Even though fans were no longer painting the street walls, local parents were now finding that some of their favourite albums were disappearing. It’s reported one youngster stole his dad’s whole Phil Collins vinyl collection to throw into the dumpster.
Enough was enough amongst parents and teachers, in the southern states especially, and a group was found named Parents Against Pop Punk or PAPP for short. And guess who was one of its founders? Mr. Greaves. The group campaigned against the group appearing at any publicly owned venue by phoning up mayors and council members to tell them about the public disorder that the band causes. Local TV were now running hit pieces on the band with conservative commentators calling them a route to degeneration and crime. Mr Greaves himself appeared on a self-funded national television advert advocating against the band, the spread of their “ghastly” music, and the declining moral standard they were encouraging. After all this media, many parent were outright banning their kids from attending TRR concerts going as far as ripping up their tickets and destroying their albums.
Decline and Split
Initially the band were not that effected by their continued bad coverage. As the saying goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity. It took a few months before the audience numbers started to drop. The moral panic started by Mr Greaves and continued by a hungry media was finally taking its toll. In defiance the band launched what would turn out to be their final album, Grow Up, in 1999. It was their most angry album they had ever put out. Their previous releases had all had a tinge of fun and playfulness to their rule breaking ways, but this album was a lot more vengeful. They hated the way that they had been wrongly portrayed in the media as public enemy number one. Especially considering that there were so many other bands who were much worse and got less flack from the media. The album had plenty more to say about Mr. Greaves and the PAPP too.
Sadly, the new album only helped perpetuate the hatred they were receiving from parents and teachers alike. Maybe this was the beginning of the end for the group. They had always relied on younger people to listen to and enjoy their music, and as some grew up and others were banned their fans dwindled. Perhaps Mr Greaves would win.
The band eventually split up in November 1999 after a long and gruelling nine years performing. None of them had had much time for relationships or family during the time and they had grown to resent that fact. The final nail in the coffin came with a heated debate between the group. Timmy and Dan were convinced that the often talked about Millennium Bug would cause widespread chaos and pandemonium, while the other two, Lincoln and Crash, thought they were being incredibly stupid. This silly argument really got incredibly out of hand with them all parting ways, with Timmy and Dan preparing for their upcoming apocalypse. Ironically, the band didn’t last until 2000 to know what the result would be. It was an incredibly stupid end to a notoriously anarchic band.
Discography
Toe Rags to Riches (1996)
Mr. Greaves (1998)
Grow Up (1999)
What Happened Next?
The band had an amazingly eventful career for young men in their early 20s. They had toured the world and become public pariahs in the media. But at the end of the day, their determination and grit to prove all the doubters wrong ultimately made them the band they became. After leaving school you can imagine that their families thought that they were going to be layabouts and and a menace to society, but thankfully they put their energy into creating one the greatest pop punk groups of the 90s. They also made plenty of money along the way that set them up for the rest of their lives. Their decision to bunk off school had paid off for them.
Lincoln made occasional public appearances throughout the 00’s. He would go onto host the show, Pop Punk Past, a show that documented the rise of the genre and showcased new acts. Outside of music, he used some of his money to start a pizzeria back in his home town of Dayton. It was an immediate success and led him to win many local food awards. He also uses it as a venue for up and coming bands to practise and perform to his patrons. What goes better than punk pop and pizza?
Crash had no more ambitions after leaving the group. He has been married on three occasions over the last 20 years with 7 children between them. He knew he could live very comfortably just on the royalty cheques he received so he didn’t bother with much else. If he is in need for a quick payday for a particularly expensive holiday he would make guest drum appearances on other artist’s tracks.
Dan moved back to Scotland after the band was all over. With plenty of practise designing for the group, he became a graphic designer and illustrator from his home in Inverness. He would go on to work with Dekaf Records UK with new releases and new album covers. Some of the most iconic cover designs of the early 00’s UK pop punk scene were designed by Dan.
Timmy stuck with music and tried to have a solo career in the early 00s. He signed to Dekaf Records but after a couple of albums it was obvious that trends were changing and he was no longer flavour of the month. Pop punk needed to be from a group, a solo star could no produce the roar energy that was needed. By the 2010’s he became a manager for an indie band in Scotland and has been promoting them ever since.
The group have met up occasionally over the last 20 years for one-off gigs with thousands attending. Most are old fans who have grown up, but a new wave of youngsters have grown to love the band. Thankfully the gigs are a bit more low key than they used to be. They didn’t need any more national scandals. As the years go by, the Third-Rate Reprobates’s contribution to pop punk gets recognised more and more. Their lyrics, music, and antics gave plenty of people happy memories from their childhoods in the 90s. A time when school didn’t matter and all they wanted to do was have a bit of fun.