Doors 4pm, Music 8:30pm

NEW MATH!

“For New Math, love is about throwing egg”

By Jeff Spevak

“Roy Stein had heard that Rochester's hot rock band of the moment, New Math, was looking for a drummer.

“So I went down to see them at the Penny Arcade during the week, like Tuesday or Wednesday night,” he says. “The place was packed. And I loved it. Because it was basically, you know, straight-ahead rock and roll at a time when prog rock, Kansas, you know, Styx, those kinds of bands, ruled."

This was the tail end of the 1970s. There were so many people there that were "part of the scene." Safety pins in their cheeks. Mohawks. A lot of pretty women.

“I just said, ‘I gotta play with this band, they are amazing,” says Stein.

Soon, he was returning to the Penny Arcade as New Math’s new drummer. The audience threw eggs at the band, and the bar employees wore “Punk Sucks” T-shirts. “I was funny,” says Stein. “But it wasn’t funny.” Not for a band that wanted to be taken seriously.

Yet even at that early stage in its career, New Math was being taken seriously. Not everyone had been throwing eggs at that show. And the audience wasn’t throwing eggs at the band in New York City, where New Math was landing gigs at the punk clubs.

The Sex Pistols were still resonating, but there was room for New Math, living that 'do-it-yourself' ethic of the era.

Now, archaeologists have uncovered what’s left of that scene from some 40 or more years ago. The hand-drawn posters. And tapes that had been stashed away in basements all this time. A careful sifting through this debris reveals once-forgotten music released on New Math’s new CD: Die Trying & Other Hot Sounds (1971-1983).

“A lot of it I hadn’t heard in well over 20 years,” Stein says of this music. “Some of them were never released, and some of them are our best songs.”
”…..A handful of musicians have been a part of the band. Paul Dodd, now the drummer with Margaret Explosion. Lead singer Kevin Patrick, who is passing on the opportunity to re-create the band he created with bassist Gary Trainer. But Trainer, Stein, guitarist Chris Yockel and keyboardist Mark Schwarz have said what the hell, they’ll give it a try anyway.

And, about that lead singer. Rock bands generally need one. Derek Sapienza, who has been with a few Rochester bands over the last two dozen years, signed on for the job in March. It’s a generational bridge, as he says he first heard about New Math when he was a high school kid growing up in Spencerport.

But he is not immune to the same desperate yearnings of his ancient punk ancestors.

“When a new genre explodes,” Sapienza says, “and everything’s new, and there’s this huge, wide spectrum of ideas that’s suddenly unleashed into the world, that’s what’s exciting, and is what appeals to me. And I think it still comes across pretty clearly.”

Sapienza admires the excitement of the music, the scene. The intelligence of the songs. “There’s depth to them,” he says, “that I think is pretty timeless.”

The timelessness is captured on decades of vinyl. Patrick and Trainer were enthusiastic record collectors, trading among themselves, and with a producer they’d met from Island Records, Howard Thompson. “Sex Pistols, and all that stuff,” says Trainer. They sensed that a new wave was coming in.

“By 1977, we had decided that we wanted to be in the middle of this one,” he continues. “And not have, like, the first wave, The Kinks and all that, that passed us by. And we weren’t gonna have that happen with this one. So we started a band, just so we would be in the middle of The Ramones, Patti Smith. All the New York bands that were coming out, a lot of the English bands that were coming out.”

It wasn’t easy. Bands were expected to play three sets. Bands needed a manager. Bands were supposed to have their own equipment. “And we lied on all of it,” says Trainer.

Yet New Math was convincing enough that they opened for The Damned and The Ramones. They toured with The Pretenders (and that band’s lead singer, Chrissie Hynde). “She was magnificent, the band was a wreck,” says Stein. "She and the drummer were great, but she wanted to kill the bass player and the guitarist. She was seething.”

Punk and rock relationships often dance around the third rail; the one that carries the electricity on a subway line. New Math’s relationship with an Andrews Street club, Scorgie’s, grew out of Patrick asking the owner, Don Scorgie, if he could plug some of his 45 RPM record collection into the club’s juke box. “So people started hanging out there,” says Trainer.

And then someone asked Scorgie about outfitting the downstairs with equipment so bands could play. He did so, “and the whole scene gradually moved to Scorgie’s,” says Trainer. Local bands, particularly New Math, played there, along with national bands such as Gun Club, The Psychedelic Furs, Marianne Faithful, the Go-Gos and The Cramps, whose lead singer, Lux Interior, legendarily sang while clinging to a ceiling rafter while fans tore off his trousers. Don Scorgie is also known for having thrown Elvis Costello out of the club after Costello had played a show at the Auditorium Theater.

“Don Scorgie was a tough, tough Irishman,” says Stein. “We used to joke that he opened Scorgie’s just so he could beat people up.”

A band has to be tough to survive this environment. Die Trying, Trainer says, “cost us every dime we made to make those recordings.” New Math would show up at the recording studio, after the bands with money had gone home for the day, and work from midnight to 8 a.m.

“We fought hard, and those recordings came out pretty good, actually,” says Trainer.

A few labels released New Math music. The 1981 EP "They Walk Among Us." The band’s 1984 album "Gardens" included a track, “Live Under Will,” that was on the soundtrack to the film "The Return of the Living Dead."

Yet, for a couple of decades, with the exception of a few one-off benefit shows, New Math went unheard. Band members played punk houses, homes around the city that were weekend parties with a live-band soundtrack. Patrick took jobs working music industry jobs with Electra and Island Records, and managing the electronic duo Matt and Kim. Some of New Math reformed as The Jet Black Berries, and later, The Atomic Swindlers.

Meanwhile, the songs of Die Trying sat in a basement. “It was kind of like a community project to get all this back together,” says Stein. “This band was long gone, for us. I hadn’t seen some of the guys in years. To us, it’s all just ancient history.”

“It was kind of like a community project to get all this back together,” says Stein. “This band was long gone, for us. I hadn’t seen some of the guys in years. To us, it’s all just ancient history.”

Then, an email arrived from Nashville. New Math may have given up on the music, but Propeller Sound Recordings, an intriguing indie label, had heard, and perhaps even remembered, New Math. And wanted to give the music a shot. It released "Die Trying,” and is releasing the single, “Living on Borrowed Time” on Friday, August 15, 2025.

“For somebody to invest their money in your work because they believe in it, there’s no words,” says Trainer. He compares such actions to the patrons of Beethoven; a professional reward he mockingly calls “great, before you die.”

Yet it is undeniably some tiny measure of overnight success after four decades. A scene reflected in the darkened windows of the long-closed Scorgie’s. A scene that perhaps started with the punk crowd that christened New Math with a shower of dozens of eggs at The Penny Arcade. They were onto something. Something visceral, a rite of passage that is rarely seen today.

“I couldn’t believe anybody would care enough,” says Stein. “Now, people just turn you off if they don’t like you.”
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