THE GROCERIES

The Groceries were Rich Lather (née Richard Auguste Morse), Greg Frey, Andy Gomory, Mike Steelman, and Max Crandal. A Princeton band that wasn't truly considered part of the NB scene, they had their share of gigs in the Hub City. And as the house band at Trenton's City Gardens (R.I.P.), they had a good thing going in the early 1980s. Highly adept musicians, the Groceries typically wrote satirical songs with a sound that conjured up the spare and ironic post-punk of 1978-81 (which is to say, before Steve Lillywhite mucked up everything with echo and reverb). This was "college rock" about as far from punk as the musical spectrum allows; their detractors just saw a band with permanently raised eyebrows. But it was difficult to bypass their talent and resources: Groceries' recordings had possibly the best engineering of any area band of the time. Paul Devlin has a representative video on his Rockin' Brunswick site.

Appropriately spare too is this flyer, detailed with the minimalist renderings, geometric shapes, and angled objects that in aggregate we understand to mean "new wave."

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