“I hate it.” Wes Kidd has spent nearly a year in limbo. He’s been sitting on a record he’s proud of. The album is Triple Fast Action’s swaggery and punchy Broadcaster. In it Kidd’s guileless lyrics and snappy hooks and the quartet’s versatile and powerful attack marry to create a worthy postpunk successor to the meld of hard rock and pop that marked the greatest records by Cheap Trick. So why isn’t it out? It was essentially finished last March, but mixing hassles delayed things for months. Then Capitol got hung up on the release of some archival material from an entirely different Fab Four. The record was pushed back to March of this year, and then to the first week of April. Is Triple Fast Action getting the big Capitol brush-off?
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“Absolutely not,” says Capitol veep Phil Costello. Costello, head of the giant label’s promotions department, saw the band in Chicago two Novembers ago. “I freaked when I saw them,” he says. He brought a tape to big cheese Gary Gersh, the onetime Geffen A and R exec who’d recently taken over the Capitol presidency. Gersh signed the band personally. “If you push back a record’s release date, it doesn’t mean that you’re trying to bury it,” Costello says. “It means that you care about it. Otherwise you wouldn’t move it; you’d just let it get run over. The record is a huge priority here.”
Like Billy Corgan and Material Issue’s Jim Ellison, Kidd and Triple Fast drummer Brian St. Clair grew up in the western suburbs on the usual musical diet: heavy metal, hard rock, punk. And Cheap Trick. “I waited for seven hours to see them at ChicagoFest,” Kidd says of the Rockford band’s famous Navy Pier performance in 1981. “My umbrella is in a video of the show. It was the first time I ever saw a joint. The guy behind me offered us some, but I was too scared to try it.” As a teen he networked with other punks in nearby cities. While still in high school he and St. Clair released an ambitious punk-rock single with a band called Political Justice?, marked by the head-over-heels vocals of Spud Boy. A few years later, Kidd was asked to join Rights of the Accused, the quintessential Chicago teen punk band. But his parents said no. “So for a year I told them I was going to go study at Denny’s and drove into the city to practice.”
