Sick Ones: Brad Kent & Randy Rampage
Brad & Randy’s bands: Sergeant Nick Penis, Sick Ones, .45’s, Ground Zero.
The partnership of Brad Kent and Randy Rampage goes back to the days of Victorian Pork in early 1978 when they first met and played together. Back then, Randy was a drummer. When Joey Shithead was forming DOA he convinced Randy to switch to bass. The original DOA was a trio, but Brad Kent joined on guitar in July 1978. Around the same time, Brad and Randy co-founded Vancouver’s premiere “fuck band,” Sergeant Nick Penis & His Brass Ball Battallion. Sgt Nick was chiefly a vehicle for bandmembers to perform classic punk and seventies rock covers with a rotating cast of friends. After Brad left DOA near the end of 1978, he and Randy kept the tradition going into the early 1980s.
During 1979, Brad Kent and Zippy Pinhead spent most of the time in California (playing with the Avengers and Dils, respectively). Whenever they were in the same city together, Brad, Zippy and Randy started playing shows together as The Sick Ones, often with guest performers. Brad Kent also started a serious project in L.A., The 45s, featuring singer Heather Haley from Vancouver’s The Zellots. DOA split up temporarily in January 1980 and regrouped without Rampage, who promptly joined the 45s. They played up and down the west coast, but in spring 1980 Randy rejoined DOA, and the 45s were history.
In late 1981 Brad was back in Vancouver, and he and Randy began performing again as the Sick Ones. By early 1982, Randy was out of DOA for good (until 2001, anyway), and he began recording what would become the Randy Rampage 12-inch EP. In 1982, Brad and Randy took another serious stab at original music: Ground Zero was one of the first “crossover” bands to meld punk sensibilities with hard rock/heavy metal. They gigged relentlessly, but stability and a record deal eluded them. In the late 1980’s Brad joined Vancouver’s Death Sentence, while Randy Rampage joined local metallers Annihilator as lead vocalist. In the early 1990’s Brad and Randy reunited for one more stab at a music career with Fake It Big Time.
Today, if you’re very lucky, you might still be able to catch the Sick Ones on stage in a downtown pub doing what comes naturally.
Les sez: In a scene of kids trying to look tough, Rampage and Kent (whose surname was predictably changed for his nom de punk) were the baddest of the bad boys. Rampage had the style that all punk aspired to: bleached blonde spikes, tattoos, leather, bandanas, plus the fiery stage moves that added so much his bands’ shows. Kent was an ace guitar player, but always seemed merely a providential twist of fate away from walking naked as a streetperson. For them, it was a matter of being a star in your own right, and stardom, or notoriety, would follow. Together they cut a swathe of drugs, rock’n’roll and sex, likely unequalled in the chronicles of Vancouver punk, and lived to be rogues and roués.
