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Early Pittsburgh punk band Little Wretches release album recorded in 2001
Friday, August 21, 2020 2:54 p.m.
PATRICK VARINE | TRIBUNE-REVIEW
When Robert Wagner got into the music business, he didn’t know how to hook up a microphone. He hadn’t even been to a live concert.
But he knew it was something he wanted to continue for the rest of his life.
“I know some of these people are going get more airplay than we get, but I will be doing this until the day I die,” said Wagner, 60, lead singer for The Little Wretches, once a member of Pittsburgh’s early punk scene in the late 1970s.
Wagner, who grew up in Castle Shannon, recently released a long-shelved album the band recorded in 2001, “Undesirables & Anarchists,” that includes new tunes and songs from an old Little Wretches cassette called “Born with a Gift.”
Wagner got his start when he and college friend John Creighton formed a group called No Shelter and released a single, “Brooks Robinson’s Camp,” that Wagner described as “John’s refrain and then verses that were basically transcribed from a guy who was a homeless veteran, probably schizophrenic.”
Spending late nights at the 24-hour coffee shops near the University of Pittsburgh campus in the early ‘80s, Wagner absorbed stories and conversations from “the outcasts and oddballs that have been my community,” he said, winding his way toward several decades of crafting melodic, driving tunes and working-class lyrics as No Shelter evolved into The Little Wretches.
“I would always tell people we’re a working-class band,” Wagner said. “And I love Bruce Springsteen, but I hate that Tom Joad stuff. When I say we’re a working-class band, I mean we have families, we have kids. We’re not in a position of being able to go out on tour, sleeping on floors.”
Wagner’s initial dream was to be signed to a major label, “but by the middle period, no one’s going to invest in you if you can’t make a full-time sacrifice,” he said. “And no one in the band could do that.”
That hasn’t stopped Wagner from writing material, and his potent socio-political subject matter is just as relevant today as it was in 2001, evidenced by the lines of the album’s opener, “Silence”:
“I didn’t want to speak what I couldn’t take back/But I couldn’t say nothing, not after that/So I waited for the right words, they never came/And the hard, hard truth is I watched in shame/Silence has made a liar out of me.”
“It’s not like we were anticipating the great divide in America in 2020,” Wagner said. “But I do kind of feel like the album might be right for now.”
These days, Wagner lives in Perkiomenville outside Philadelphia, where he works as a teacher for at-risk children at New Life Youth and Family Services. He still plays original material at solo acoustic shows. But the way he sees it, the covid-19 pandemic has leveled the musical playing field, and an album The Little Wretches weren’t able to properly promote in 2001 can be a bridge to new fans today.
“No one’s touring,” he said. “I have as much access to the audience as anyone else. And I have a body of work that people can get into.”
Hear “Undesirables & Anarchists,” and another Little Wretches project Wagner recently released to streaming services, 1996’s “When It Snows,” on Spotify.
Patrick Varine is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Patrick at 724-850-2862, pvarine@triblive.com or via Twitter .