In the summer of 1985, after returning from living in San Francisco, I ran into Jacqui D’accardi and we started rehearsing some of my songs. I knew Jacqui from about 1980 and she had a perfect pitch voice that sounded a bit like Ronnie Spector. .She also had a quintessential NYC sense of humor , was a great flirt and she looked great in a little black dress that she always seemed to be wearing.

We played Folk City in February 1986 with Ross Owens playing some guitar and harmonica and in the spring after playing 'Speakeasy' a band began to take shape.
The song '12th Gate' was recorded here.

Bonnie Burns, a wonderfully talented singer and songwriter had just come back from living and playing the streets of Europe --and Belgium in particular --and wanted to sing someone else’s songs and stop playing guitar.I thought she was crazy. She was the most talented singer I had met and I thought she could have ridden the wave of female singer songwriters that was emerging at the time. (listen to Ophelia and you might get it)

But she was not interested.

So, first we played Jay Byrd’s Snap Cafe at the Speakeasy where Fred Kuhn was the evening’s pagan host and later we got gigs from Justin Devereaux. From this scene I met up again with Steve Witt, Paul Clements,,Norma Jean, and Tom Napoli whom I used to spend Monday evenings with from 1979-82.
On Monday nights all of us would move from one hootenany or open mic to another. At one point, perhaps this was about 1980, there was Folk City, the Dugout, Mills Tavern and the Bitter End.

At the Snap Cafe we met many others including Bill Ring, Peter Pasco ,Constance Taylor, David Indian, Rae Monroe and Michael America as well as passing Jack Hardy ,Rod McDonald, Suzanne Vega, Cliff Eberhardt and Lach.

Two groups evolved out of this scene.

One was the acoustically oriented,harmony driven, and comically twisted Fallen Angels; also called the Drag Queens and maybe some other names.

The other was the electric band sound of the Atomic Bomb Babies - named after the song I wrote of the same name.

Fallen Angels,obviously, played the folk clubs , and our best gigs, perhaps, occurred at the Iron Horse in Northampton, Mass.
(You can listen to Triptych which was recorded live right there and then)

Some of those songs have been preserved on the Fallen Angels recording.

The Atomic Bomb Babies played CBGB’s,Wetlands, Lauterbachs, McGovern’s as well as other places, too, that are long gone.

Both of the groups shared the same personnel; Bonnie Burns, Jacqui Daccardi and Eddie Watkins, Mike Vega and Edward Bridge.
Bass players came and went and included Ira Levy, Jesse Simpson, Jon Rogers and Kimberly Jean and David Ruderman.

John Pendley occassionally played the keyboards.

For a few weeks, before he helped form the Klezmatics, David Licht played drums with us.

Both groups played around from 1986 to 1992 and then tapered off when I started spending more and more time in Europe where I was enjoying myself more and more playing the streets and clubs.

I went to Europe at Bonnie Burns suggestion in the summer, I believe, of 1989, where she joined me for a few weeks, playing the streets of Antwerp, Munich, Berlin and the famed Melkweg club in Amsterdam.

For what happened after read 'about Ken Post' >>>