The Early Days
The Fibonaccis formed from a series of haphazard experiments in Los Angeles in the winter of 1980. Originally called SmellBrain, it served as a sort of musical raree show for Hollywood art punkers. Ron Stringer, Magie Song, and I had found a way to use the Yamaha Portasound keyboard I’d bought on a trip with Magie to Tokyo in 1980. Joe Berardi, our drummer and percussionist, joined the following year, and bassist Tom Corey joined in 1983.
Stringer and I had first met each other in 1978 at Brendon Mullen’s second punk rock venue The Other Masque, an echoey cavern near the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine. That first night I had hung a potato around my neck in homage to Devo, and Ron Stringer approached me in the middle of a loud set by the punk group Fear. “You know," he yelled in my ear, "who Lee Ving looks like?" I hadn't a clue. "Leo Gorcey!” He followed with a dozen other allusions to film star lookalikes in the punk world. We visited his bleak, nearly empty apartment where a giant record collection loomed in the shadows and a bare light bulb hung over a card table in the center of the room. Ron's father, Ronny Graham, a comedian and crony of Mel Brooks—best known for his Tonight Show appearances in the sixties and his role as Mr. Dirt in Mobil gasoline commercials—had helped Ron get an audition for a job for The Newlywed Game. Strewn on the card table were 3x5 cards with joke lines for the show. At the time, there was a general edginess to Stringer that caught Magie and me off guard. This was the period when all of Los Angeles was on edge about the Hillside Strangler, still on the loose. At home we speculated about the lonely apartment and the light bulb and wondered if Stringer could be the Hillside Strangler.
We all spent the next few months listening to jazz, new wave, anarchist punk bands like Crass, and neo-classically influenced rock fusion groups like Art Bears.
Lost New Wave Weekend
Stringer was a big city boy from New Jersey who’d grown up in a show business family, been to prep school, spent time in New York city trolling R&B clubs, and smoked DMT with the drummer from the Left Banke. I was a suburban tyro from Stockton who skipped Altamont in favor of organic gardening at home. It was the era in L.A. rock history covered by author and Masque Club impresario Brendan Mullen in his book Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs. During our outings, Ron carried a whiskey flask around in his inner coat pocket for furtive swigs, and I eventually followed suit. We would charge out of our apartments each weekend to see bands at neglected beer joints, surrounded by loud punk-rock women who all seemed to be on the verge of throwing up. One night I followed Ron to the Tropicana Motel on a rumor that a well-known English band was having a party, but it turned out to be a lot of cadaverous Brits yelling across the pool about whose band “sucked” more. In those days, we tiptoed on the periphery, loitering and eavesdropping on Darby Crash, Belinda Carlisle, John Doe and Exene, painter and ex-Warhol Factory member Mary Woronov. For variety, we weren’t averse to hanging out on the bourgie side of town—Main Street Santa Monica’s fern bars helped us nurture illusions of going home with tanned secretaries.
We both had jobs as Compton’s encyclopedia salesmen, futilely assigned to poor neighborhoods to sell a pricey set of bound books to single mothers whose credit ratings ultimately disqualified them. Part of our script was to tell parents, “These are the only books your children will need for the rest of their lives.” My day job was substitute teaching in the far-flung high schools around Los Angeles. John Lennon was killed around this time, and as you scanned the teachers' lounges, all you could see were shell-shocked boomers. The 70’s were over.
Musical Arguments
After an incubation period of listening and thinking about music, the band started playing at home. I would bang around on my grandmother’s upright piano, and Ron would bring his first-ever electric guitar, a cheap pawnshop Aspen, and a small, tinny amp. I tended to play very busy parts, so he used to tell me, “You’re playing everything—there's nothing left for me to do." I found it difficult to thin them out, so in frustration, he developed a musical language of antipathy and counterpoint in order to drive a wedge through my baroque (small “b”) piano stylings. A certain style was born.
When the first opportunity came, we started performing at parties sans vocals. We went on to perform as the trio SmellBrain at Janet Cunningham’s C.A.S.H. club in Hollywood, with Magie singing and reciting from hand-written lyric sheets. The crowd was equally non-plussed and wryly amused. A performance artist friend, Priscilla B, invited us to accompany her at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go. However, an hour before the gig, Ron had an attack of stage fright. “This is the Whiskey-a-Go-Go,” he protested. “Every famous rock act in history has played here. I saw the Doors here. We have no business going on that hallowed stage.” We carefully reasoned with him that we could exist in the same universe as the Doors and he acquiesced.
Perhaps that’s a good place to end this origin story. From that point forward, everything was the familiar rising and falling arc of a band—a gradual prelude to the musical legacy we’ve now put up for grabs on all the streaming platforms and Bandcamp.
