The Public Servants was originally Shelley Hirsch (voice), Phillip Johnston (soprano, alto saxophones), Dave Sewelson (alto, baritone saxophones), Bill Horvitz (guitar), Dave Hofstra (bass), Steve Moses (drums). Richard Dworkin later replaced Steve Moses on drums.
Other musicians who occasionally played with The Public Servants were John Zorn (alto saxophone), Wayne Horvitz (keyboards) and J.A. Deane (trombone). Led by Johnston, who wrote most of the music, the band was centered around Hirsch’s unique vocal style, prodigious virtuosity and sheer weirdness.
The band was together from 1980-1982 and played quite prolifically in New York at venues including CBGB, Hurrah, Danceteria, the Mudd Club, and TR-3, often in quite high-profile bills with bands like The Slits, DNA, ROVA and Bill Laswell’s Material. Our only formal release was a self-released ‘single’ 45RPM record – “Jungle Hotel” b/w “A Mistake, in 1980.
How did we fit in? We didn’t. We were kind of anomalous yet connected in some ways to various very diverse scenes–that’s the kind of time it was. We were a little bit Punk Funk, a little bit No Wave, a little bit Kitchen Minimalism and a little bit Free Jazz. A specific combination of noise, groove, bebop, obscure puns and surrealistic swing–fronted by a vocalist who combined Brooklyn working class sass and beat poetry with Yma Sumac virtuosity. We fit in nowhere, but also everywhere, and we worked a lot–there were a lot of places to work then, from rock clubs to art performance spaces.
Shelley Hirsch went on to become one of the most unique and admired (and versatile) New Music improvising vocalists in the Downtown scene, with a major career in Europe as well as the US. Johnston; Sewelson, Hofstra and Dworkin went on to feature in The Microscopic Septet, and later (minus Hofstra) in Fast ‘N’ Bulbous. Bill Horvitz had a long career as a guitarist across a wide variety of genres.
Decades passed.
In the mid 2010s, we began to discuss and make plans for a ‘reunion’ gig. By this time, Horvitz lived in California and I in Sydney, Australia. But slowly over a couple of years, I (OK, I, Johnston, am going to switch to first person here) began to reconstruct the music and have a couple of occasional rehearsals when I was in New York. Then, Bill unexpectedly was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and very soon tragically passed away in early 2015. We dropped the idea of a reunion for a while but have now come back to it. All the other original members are still involved.
While the band never did any serious professional recording during its original existence, we used to occasionally record demo tapes in a rehearsal studio in the West Village owned by engineer Vito Ray, called Raze Studios. Through a set of circumstances that I’ll skip over here, I became aware of some of the unmixed 4-track tapes still surviving in Vito’s holiday house storage, and I have re-mixed them, with the aid of Necks (the Australian band) engineer Tim Whitten.
I am looking to issue the first Public Servants recording, along with these re-mixed demo tapes, as the only full-length portrait of the Public Servants repertoire, hopefully to coincide with a reunion concert of the band in New York.
The recording will be a historical document – now 45 years old, with most of the material being released for the first time. While the band is not widely known beyond New York, it had/has a tenacious cult following, and coupled with the subsequent careers of its members, hopefully will enjoy considerable good will and interest.
You can listen to the two tracks from the 45rpm single int heir remastered form: