Who are the Qubes?
July 16th, 2008The Qubes were a new-wavey rock-and-roll band based in Northern Kentucky in the early-to-mid-1980s. The band grew in two phases.
1982. Following stints in early-teen sensations Thulu (a classic-rock trio) and the Black Shoes Walking Blues Band (a blues and R&B band with a rhythm section and horn line), guitarist and lead vocalist Ritt Deitz and bassist Jim Faris teamed with Newport-based drummer Dave Purcell (lately of Cincinnati-area roots phenomenon Pike 27) to create the Qubes. These guys were all sixteen years old at this point and practiced mostly upstairs in Deitz’s Florence home next to the old YMCA. Deitz had met Purcell at a freakish right-wing youth conference their respective high schools had selected them to attend. Several days of cultish unison chanting (”Outstanding!”), in response to free-enterprise-praising slogans flashed on screens, brought Purcell and Deitz together. Embattled and desiring to mock youth conferences with loud amplifiers and serious-faced poses, they had only to whisper into the wind toward Faris’ Hopeful-Road-area neighborhood, at which point the bassist appeared almost instantaneously for the first practice, in the fall of 1982. The band played a series of Boone County High School appearances–including guest vocal appearances by Deitz’s sister Hillary and classmate Rita Egnor–before disbanding in early 1983.
1984. Phase two of the Qubes. Having spent the intervening year and a half mostly at the piano (at least publicly), Deitz began to feel an odd yearning for a return of some sort to amplified camaraderie, of the sort that required wearing clothes with collars you could wear turned up. Faris had been playing in about eighteen different bands in the Cincinnati area and had formed the Void, a new-wave local sensation playing often in Clifton clubs. The Void featured Faris on bass, schoolmate Marc Loomis on electric guitar, Matt Pine on keyboards, and Cincinnati School for the Creative and Performing Arts ringers Dave Killen (drums)and Denise Wendt (vocals). Ritt Deitz began to join the Void for guest vocal spots, joining Wendt for gel-haired Euro-fueled duets but also urging the band to try out the occasional blues number and otherwise imposing himself into the deeper harmony of the Void. Deitz joined them at a Northern-Kentucky recording session, at which they debuted his tune “Radical Kids,” featuring middle-eastern chord patterns and ska-inflected piano hammerings, and the band seemed to feel a new direction coming on.
Various Qubes were off to college-level courses of study, in and out of the area, but the band was formed, with the previous name intact. Wendt and Pine left to pursue other musical ventures (continuing down through the current day), and Deitz, Faris, Loomis and Killen began their adventure.
The summer of 1985 was the most intense period of activity, with rehearsals, recording sessions (at least three album-length recordings to four-track cassette–YOU CAN TELL BY HIS SOCKS, FOREVER CAFE and the collaborative all-star recording THE INTELLECTUAL FLAMINGOS, featuring future collaborators on Ritt Deitz’s Uvulittle Records releases, guitarist/dobroist Craig Totten and drummer Bryan Biesel). That summer’s live appearances were mostly at a now-defunct live venue in downtown Cincinnati called THE METRO. There the boys earned the nickname “The Archies of the Eighties.”
A few recording projects and live shows peppered the following months, on through mid-1986, when the bandmates had all pretty much gone their separate ways. Deitz had disappeared into his college studies at the University of Virginia (where he and Totten had formed an acoustic duo joined often by Totten’s fraternity brother Boyd Tinsley, now the Dave Matthews Band fiddler). Faris was finishing up art school and was headed for Boston with the Cincinnati-area band Bachelors of Art. Killen was studying in Boston, too, at the Berklee School of Music. Loomis was immersed in his own studies, at Indiana University and the University of Cincinnati.
NOW. The original Qubes have reconnected. Loomis lives in London, where he works in the financial sector. Faris is in Washington, DC, with his family, where he works as a graphic designer and creative director. Killen teaches video and audio production at Cincinnati State, where he commands production facilities deserving of his Qubicular project sensibilities. Deitz directs the University of Wisconsin Professional French Masters Program and lives with his family in Madison, Wisconsin, where two of his three children also play in his folk/Americana band. He records on the Uvulittle Records label (uvulittle.com), and Faris played lots of upright bass on Deitz’s 2006 Uvulittle release, AFTER THE MOUNTAINS, and also joins Deitz and his quintet at select midwest live appearances (joining them also on radio and television for the AFTER THE MOUNTAINS releases in 2006).
In preparation for their November 28th live appearance in Cincinnati (Rohs Street Cafe, following sets by Justin Lynch and Ritt Deitz and his family trio), the Qubes have begun serious talks about making an e.p.-length recording to release to the hundreds of thousands of shrieking, yearning fans who, once word gets out, are bound to choke the nation’s streets, demanding More More More More More More.
