The Plastic Device were a bunch of guys from Huntington, Long Island, NY: keyboard player Chris Xefos, guitarist Dave Wise, drummer Dave Ramirez, guitarist Mike Morgoni, vocalist Stephen Hunking, and bassist Dan Cuddy.

Boys, really. These guys were boys, high schoolers at the outset of their brief, blazing career. Boys who, to varying
degrees, didn’t quite fit in with their prevailing cultural milieu. Okay, dorks. These boys were dorks. Dweebs and misfits, who reveled in their outsider status. Initially inspired by the likes of Devo, 2 Tone Records, and Zippy the Pinhead; sci-fi movies, trashy TV reruns, and comic books, they absorbed the suburban wasteland that surrounded them and spit it back out in spasmodic, hyper-caffeinated nuggets, sometimes verging on hardcore punk tempos, but minus the anger of hardcore. The Plastic Device weren’t angry. They were demented, and their earliest recordings buzzed with the screams and laughter of a pizza party gone seriously off the rails. These dorks were pretty cool.

At first, they were mainly a cover band, and very much a new wave cover band, unleashing mostly non-hit favorites on a hostile school Battle of the Bands audience, and, for the handsome sum of “free food and fifty bucks,” the living-room, basement, and backyard house parties of their art-nerdiest classmates. Securing a recurring booking at the Tommy Tucker Cocktail Lounge, adjacent to the local Howard Johnson’s (a none-more-Plastic-Device venue), they were forced to supersize their repertoire to fill three sets, adding basically every three-chord bar-band standard they could muster: “Twist and Shout,” “Shout,” “Louie, Louie,” “Wooly Bully,” “The Twist,”
ad nauseam, up to and including Flipper’s “Sex Bomb,” all given a patented Device treatment.

But there were always original songs in the mix, and eventually the lads amassed enough of them to record a few at a modest local 8-track studio. In the DIY spirit of the times, they ran off multiple cassette copies and brought them to
One Way Records, the friendly local bastion of rock counterculture, which specialized in used vinyl classics and UK imports. The group’s cheapo manifesto, Free Food and Fifty Bucks, looped them in to a small underground scene of offbeat acts
centered around a nightclub called Sparks.
(Always the iconoclasts, The Device was banned
from the club for a while after pelting an audience
with individually wrapped slices of American cheese.)

Ever restless (hyperactive, even), The Plastic Device even took its act on the road, most successfully at The Dive, midtown epicenter of the NYC garage rock revival, and upstate in Fredonia, NY, a college town where Dave Ramirez wielded his influence at the
student radio station to garner the group airplay and a cult following.

Concurrently, Chris Xefos obtained a 4-track Portastudio and began chronicling the band’s evolution as the music took a slightly more measured and melodic turn with the addition of virtuoso Dave Wise on guitar (fresh from the Mick Taylor role in local Rolling Stones copyists The Hot Rocks). Sixties garage rock compilations like Nuggets and Pebbles became an audible influence, along with sounds redolent of latter-day bands like The Damned and The Fleshtones. Goofball surrealism that tweaked generic psychedelic tropes (“I’m just a yeti growing mushrooms in Tibetan snow”) was wed to a noticeable lyrical preoccupation with problematic relationships and unrequited attraction to “girls.” Could it be that the boys were growing up?

Well, yes, they were. And deciding it was time to put away childish things, the group
folded at the end of the summer of 1984, packing
it in as their junior member headed off to
college. The Plastic Device died young and left a weird-looking corpse. Most of them went on to devote their lives to rock and roll to some
degree, although Mike Morgoni had a bit more sense. They reunited almost immediately, then didn’t do so again for thirty years.

Here, then, are some fruits of their collective labor:
E Pluribus Plastic!