No Trend - Biography
By Oliver Hall
Ashton, Maryland’s No Trend presented itself as a band of outsiders mocking DC’s dogmatic hardcore scene. Like contemporaries Flipper and Fear, No Trend sought to annoy, provoke, bum-out, and satirize its punk audience. The fliers that the band circulated in 1982 to announce its existence read, “No Trend, No Scene, No Movement.” Singer Jeff Mentges was No Trend’s leader and sole consistent member over the band’s six-year career; all of No Trend’s varied albums share Mentges’s misanthropy, which often takes the form of imagined situations coldly narrated in sociological terms.
Mentges, bassist Bob Strasser, and drummer Michael Salkind played with 12-year-old guitarist Brad Pumphrey (“the only person in the group who could really play,” according to Salkind’s liner notes for The Early Months [1995 Teenbeat]) as The Aborted in 1981. The first of No Trend’s numerous versions featured guitarist Frank Price, who is generally credited as the member most responsible for the band’s early sound. According to Salkind, No Trend made its debut at Baltimore’s Marble Bar on Christmas Eve of 1982. Promoter Steven Blush, who would later write American Hardcore: A Tribal History (published by Feral House in 2001), remembers Mentges pestering him to let No Trend open for Public Image Ltd and Minor Threat in late 1982. “They hated everyone and everything,” Blush writes. Blush bought a 1976 Ford ambulance in 1983 and subsequently “organized and endured three national No Trend tours.” No Trend toured with Dead Kennedys and opened for Hüsker Dü and Butthole Surfers, among other popular underground bands of the time. When No Trend opened for T.S.O.L. in the DC area, Mentges placed blinding lights on the stage that shone into the crowd, making the band impossible to see and the stage impossible to look at. No Trend’s lineup changed often; Blush reckons that during his involvement with the band between 1983 and 1985, Mentges went through 10 band members.
Funded by Blush, No Trend released the EP Teen Love (1983 No Trend) in 7” and 12” versions in 1982, Too Many Humans….. (1984 No Trend) in 1984, and A Dozen Dead Roses (1985 No Trend), featuring Lydia Lunch, in 1985. Lunch, the formidable singer and guitarist of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks fame, released two No Trend records on her Widowspeak label: her 1985 collaboration with the band, the Heart of Darkness (1985 Widowspeak) 12” EP, and 1986’s When Death Won’t Solve Your Problems (1986 Widowspeak).
Mentges’ anguished cry and cold eye are the only links to No Trend’s oeuvre on Tritonian Nash – Vegas Polyester Complex (1987 Touch and Go), the 1987 album which adds horns, steel guitar, bells, and all sorts of insane chops-playing to No Trend’s music. No Trend’s last album, More (2001 Morphius Archives), recorded in 1987, was “deemed too weird for release by the venerated Touch and Go Records,” according to Jordan N. Mamone of the New York Press, and was later released by Morphius Archives in 2001. The band was unable to interest a record label and broke up in 1988. Original guitarist Frank Price committed suicide in 1989. The following year, Mentges directed Of Flesh and Blood, a feature film based on the life of porn actor John Holmes.
