Left For Dead Records recently reissued what had become an underground classic in Punk music, a handful of songs known as Drive My Car, from the New York-based teen band Nastyfacts. The songs had appeared on compilations occasionally, but primarily circulated as bootlegs throughout the 40 years since they were recorded during the inception of Punk. The viny has sold out multiple times already, attesting to interest in these songs. Nastyfacts had a substantial live performance existence in New York, and even played CBGBs despite the extreme youth of the band members in comparison to other acts, and some of that energy comes through loud and clear on Drive My Car.
At the time, and even more so in hindsight, the band was unusual in being fronted by the artist then known as Cheryl Boyze, a queer person of color. Now known as KB Boyce (they/them/he), the artist continued to build a full musical life across multiple genres, and since 2008 has run an inclusive Production company in the Bay Area as well as staying active as a performer. I spoke with KB Boyce about the genesis of Nastyfacts and their original music, and the ways in which that experience drove Boyce’s desire to build the communities they lacked in their youth.
Hannah Means-Shannon: Looking at the work you’ve done over the years, which includes Blues, I get the sense that music genres, for you, are pretty open and permeable.
KB Boyce: Right. I absolutely, simply love music. I think music is universal. I was blessed that my mom and dad were musicians and they supported me in what I was doing. When I was a teenager, I was playing Punk Rock, which had to be the craziest thing to them. It was 1978, and Punk was just beginning. No one knew what that was about at all, but my mom completely to the point where she would come to shows at CBGBs. It was a little old Black lady sitting at a table in CBGBs! She’s an angel.
HMS: That is so cool. Talking to anyone who was working with Punk that early in time, I can see how difficult it is to explain to people now how strange and varied the music was.
KB Boyce: [Laughs] Yes! It was a very different time back in those days. Punk was not codified the way it is now. Anything that was a little bit outside the norm was considered Punk. So Nastyfacts would get booked with bands like ESG, which we considered Punk in that day. But they are very much a Funk band. It was only the very beginnings of things and it was a whole different world.
HMS: Punk seemed very regional back then, tied to particular cities and areas, without a lot of communication between hubs for a while, so it was probably helpful that you were in New York City.
KB Boyce: Yes, and we were babies. We were not able to tour back then. We had to get our parents to drive us to shows. I was 15 and 16, and I was the oldest one in the band.
HMS: Was the highest goal of the band just to have gigs and play in front of other people? Or was there thinking beyond that?
KB Boyce: I guess so. We were just having a ball. We weren’t really goal-oriented. We were just living in that moment. We were a band, but actually we were a cover band at first. We had some slightly older teenage friends who had started playing in clubs. We asked, “How do you play in night clubs? We want to do that!” They said [using a funny, judgement voice] “First you’ve got to write your own songs!” [Laughs]
We didn’t realize at first that they were dissing us. We just thought, “Cool, okay! Thanks!” So we went off to write our own songs, then we got signed, and the rest just happened. We were very lucky kids, in the right places at the right moments, and we were able to somewhat play our instruments. We were way too young to really have a focus on what we wanted, though. We were just happy to be there in that moment, speaking for myself.
Being a young Black person in the Rock scene was challenging for me. There was just not a lot of Black Punks, and let alone Black queer people. I didn’t know any others at all. I basically just tried to navigate my way through life. It was crazy. On top of all that, being in New York is insane no matter how you slice it. That point in your life, you’re just trying to figure out who you are and trying to make it work.
HMS: When you were doing cover songs, were you taking songs and changing them, the way Punk music often did later, or were you just trying to mimic those songs?
KB Boyce: We were not exactly trying to make the songs our own, we were literally trying to play KISS songs, and Queen, and Bowie, just the things we were listening to that the kids at the parties that we were playing would want to dance to. It was more about learning how to play our instruments, literally trying to sound like those songs. That wasn’t easy for us. Then, we started trying to write original songs. Eventually, after about a year of trying to write our own songs, we started writing better songs and got attention.
HMS: Were there other original songs that you wrote aside from the ones that have survived on Drive My Car?
KB Boyce: Yes! We were doing all original songs. All of our full sets were original. The songs that got put out on the record were all my songs, but I wasn’t the only one writing songs in Nastyfacts. My songs just tended to catch peoples’ attention, so I got lucky.
HMS: Is it strange for you to revisit the songs after so much time has passed? In some ways, you must feel like a different person now.
KB Boyce: It’s very strange to sit here, 40 years later, and talk about my first band. It’s odd for me. In about 1981, I was heading off to college, and Punk kind of died. A New Wave happened, a lot of corporate stuff happened. We all thought Punk Rock was dead and I kind of moved on with my life and forgot about Nastyfacts until I was in my 40s. I was then made aware that Nastyfacts had a bit of a shelf life that I had no clue about. I got a MySpace message from a young Black man saying, “Are you really the ex-lead singer of Nastyfacts? Because if you are, you changed my life.”
It turned out to be this guy, Brontez Purnell, who is now a pretty well-known writer, musician, dancer, and is in the queer community. He’s been in numerous bands and toured. Now he’s a dear friend of mine. He made me aware that I was Afro-Punk OG and I had no idea!
HMS: Some of the songs were being put on compilations here and there, right?
KB Boyce: Yes, and I didn’t know. I just found out through another interview recently the John Peel had been pushing for Nastyfacts in England, to get us played over there. I just didn’t know. I’m humbled and honored. It’s pretty trippy.
HMS: How did this reissue come about with Left For Dead Records?
KB Boyce: I’m not sure of all the connections, but they’ve been incredibly supportive. I’ve been doing interviews and things, which probably should have happened back in the day for Nastyfacts, but it’s great that it’s happening now.
HMS: The vinyl has really flown off the shelf, so speak.
KB Boyce: Yes, and that happened with the first and second pressing. It has now been released again. I also didn’t know that all those bootlegs used to happen.
HMS: Do you think in terms of impact? Now that this music is available yet again, it’s potentially something that can continue to impact people.
KB Boyce: I don’t think about that kind of thing. It tends to suddenly hit me that this has happened, that we’ve had some kind of influence on folks. When you’re trying to write songs, you’re just in the moment trying to do things. But I do realize now that just as bands influenced my life and changed me, perhaps Nastyfacts had that effect on other folks.
We got to open for the Bad Brains when I was 16, and they changed my life. Seeing a band of Black guys playing Punk in the way that they were playing it blew my mind. They were so tight and had so much energy. It gave me the feeling, “I can do this! It is okay!” It turns out that for a lot of the queer Punk kids, I had that effect on them. For one thing, I was androgynous, but as for my voice, some folks couldn’t tell if I was male or female, apparently. That had a big effect on queer youth, and especially queer Punks of color. As you mentioned about being a different person, I have now transitioned. I consider myself trans-masculine. I knew I was queer back in the day, but I didn’t have the words for who I was a person.
Now, as an adult, I have physically transitioned, and I still consider myself androgynous, but I use the pronouns they, them, and he. I am a different person, but I’m not that different. I’m the adult version of that little queer kid with a firmer grip on who I am in the world. I am a lot more confident about who I am as a person. Back then, everything was super-confusing, and being Black and queer was not a happy spot to be in back in 1978 and 1979. It was challenging to be a confident person, and Punk Rock really gave me confidence. It really did save my life in a lot of ways.
HMS: This is a very personal question, so feel free not to answer it, but back then did you feel like you had to keep your sense of difference to yourself and try to make it less obvious to the world?
KB Boyce: It is a personal question, but I don’t mind answering. I felt like there was no way for me to hide who I was, and that was part of the issue. I knew that I was queer. I knew that I was different. I liked being androgynous and I knew that that confused people. That was upsetting to me, but I didn’t see any way around it. The late 70s and 80s were not really a time when queer folks were coming out and being loud and proud about it, and yet I decided to call myself queer because I didn’t identify as a lesbian. I didn’t identify as a lesbian because I didn’t really identify as a girl. I was in-between.
There wasn’t really a way to hide it, so I tried to navigate being who I was. It was definitely challenging. I didn’t really start being able to find queer community until I moved to the Bay Area. When I was using the term queer back in those days, it was still a derogatory term, so people in the LGBT community didn’t like me saying I was queer. I was literally on my own. I took what I got, and what I got were other freaks who were Punks, who were not necessarily Black.
HMS: Thank you for commenting on that. I think it’s really helpful for people to hear your perspective.
KB Boyce: I’m absolutely a proud and out trans-masculine being and with the times that we are in, with all the trans-phobia and homophobia, I’m happy to be a voice for my community. In 2008, along with my ex-wife, I found an all-queer and artists of color Production company, Queer Rebel Productions. I was building the community that I wished I had when I was a kid. I’m running this organization with a team of folks to this day. It’s about a lot of grant writing and stuff that I’m not that fond of doing, but I think it’s super-important to build community, especially for queer and trans artists of color. I want to create a platform where we can get our art out there to the world and get paid for it.
I’ve been playing in bands and staying on top of being a working musician, but I am also trying to be a part of the community and help us. Another thing is that everyone in the band I play in, the Homobiles, is all trans. We are all out, we are all proud of it, and we’re all fixtures in the community. We just added another multi-instrumentalist in the band. What the four of us bring to the community is a proud, out, and loud group of trans musicians. We’re semi-political, though we’re also known as the Bay Area’s premier party band. [Laughs] But we all have a lot to say and we’re happily doing that.
