(originally appeared in The Uncommon Sense, May, 2007, Issue 44)
Mondo Cane, Rugby Mothers, The Need, Power on Hold, Junbug Spade, Worrystone, Medulla Oblongata, the Guilty Bystanders, From Beyond, Feast of Saints, Smiling Sacrifice...if you’re not of a certain age and didn’t spend a lot of time hanging out at hall shows in the late 80s and early 90s, these names may not mean much to you. To the people that were there, however, that list is an honor roll of bands that created a genuine feeling of excitement for the local alternative music underground.
It was a time of great anxiety for a formerly-thriving manufacturing center, as GM pulled out of the city in an abrupt and devastating act of economic coitus interruptus. As often happens when things get bad, though, creativity thrived, and bands sprung up across the area like mushrooms. A cohesive scene needs support to come together and Flint was lucky enough to have WFBE-FM and Comcast’s public access channel. Both outlets sported a program called Take No Prisoners.
The radio show was hosted by a pair of loose cannons that also happened to be hardcore music freaks: Jim McDonald and the infamous future author of Rivethead, one Ben Hamper. The television program came about when Jerry Humphrey, a fan of the radio show that had become Ben’s new co-host after Jim left, met up with Comcast employee Steve Hester and discovered they had a common interest in supporting the burgeoning local underground music scene.
I can’t really recall the actual chain of events—I was busy with the book and on a lot of prescription downers at the time. I remember Jerry talking it up, but being sorta skeptical about the whole deal...until, one day, the red light blinked on and someone said, “talk.” Our roles became quickly defined. Steve handled the production and politics. Jerry handled the music and the venues. I handled the stupidity & bartending. —Ben Hamper
Ah, but what great and classic stupidity it was…a perfectly anarchic reflection of the unpretentious Flint scene. TNP TV looked like a bunch of stoned wackos turned loose with cameras, but in the best possible way. This looseness was deliberate, recalls Humphrey:
A philosophy we developed early on was to make the show appear to be out-of-control but to be technically as good as we could make it. A lot of work went into TNP TV and I think it shows.
The show eventually ground to a halt and the 3/4” master tapes were kept in storage by Hester for the next decade or so. Transferring the tapes to a digital format had long been discussed, but as Humphrey recalls, “it’s a lot of work, very time-consuming and nobody wanted to do it.”
Enter a guy named Aaron Stengel.
Not only has Stengel, a Flint Central graduate and veteran of several Flint bands, taken on the enormous task of digitizing the entire archive of TNP TV shows, but he also is in the process of putting together a website called www.takenoprisoners.info. This online archive, including “many hours of free archival audio, video, photo and text files documenting the underground Flint scene of the 1980s to the mid-1990s” (as Stengel put it on a MySpace message board), will go live at midnight, Saturday, December 22. Much of the material that will be linked to on the website is already posted on archive.org and Google video. You can find links to the MP3s and videos, including several episodes of TNP TV, at the "Flint Freaks" community on MySpace.