Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments reunite to pay tribute to late guitarist Bob Petric

When guitarist Bob Petric died in April 2021, Ron House figured he would never again perform with Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments.

“Absolutely not. I mean, I thought it was impossible,” House said in a mid-March phone interview. “I know a lot of great guitarists, and they each have their own unique abilities, but they don’t have Bob’s specific ability, so I never thought it would happen.”

But over the last few years, a variety of factors colluded to reunite the surviving members of the thunderous, raw-nerve Columbus punk rock crew, who will perform together at Natalie’s Grandview on Saturday, March 22, as part of the 22nd anniversary concert for the Clintonville shop Lost Weekend Records, joined by Big Fat Head, Tim Easton, and Nick Tolford and Company, among others. House said the initial seed was planted when he and TJSA members Philip Park and Ted Hattemer teamed with ex-Nervosas guitarist Mickey Mocnik to play a trio of songs at Park’s 60th birthday at Cafe Bourbon Street in 2022. A 2024 reunion of House’s previous band, Great Plains, then whet the musician’s appetite for larger shows, fueled further by what he described as a pronounced internal shift.

“I changed my attitude, because in a way, I needed [the music], and I know Ted and Phil feel the same,” House said. “There’s something about death where it doesn’t go away, but maybe at some point it doesn’t loom as large. And I think that might be part of the shift. But also, we don’t have anything in our lives like the Slave Apartments, and we needed what we could get out of the Slave Apartments without Bob. And how’s this for a grandiose statement? I don’t think Columbus can live without the Slave Apartments.”

Before TJSA reunited to bash out a few songs at Bourbon Street, the members joined with Mocnik for a single, harried rehearsal. This time around, House said the musicians are taking the gig “far more seriously” in comparison, which in TJSA speak means they’ve now gathered for a trio of practices.

“There are a lot of things that make it more serious than a regular reunion show, obviously, since we have a guitarist who is gone, and who was a major part of the band’s sound,” said House. “And also, the way times are – and I know we’re not going to do anything to get rid of Trump onstage – but it seems like everything is more serious these days. Even drinking beer is more serious, right?”

Contrast this with the band’s first show, which took place sporadically at Stache’s in June 1989 when the musicians jumped onstage on a night no opener had been scheduled. “It basically started as a fuck-off band,” said House, who was joined for that first gig by Petric, bassist Keith Baker and drummer Elliot Dicks. “It was like we’d dropped onstage and never played together.”

At the time, House had recently parted with his previous band, Great Plains, and he said he wanted to pursue a “simpler, harder sound” with his next project, crediting Petric’s approach on guitar with lending TJSA the visceral punch first heard on its 1995 debut, Bait and Switch (released via Rick Rubin’s Onion Records imprint), and later refined on Straight to Video, from 1997, and No Old Guy Lo-Fi Cry in 2000. 

In a Columbus Alive remembrance published shortly after Petric’s death, author and Anyway Records founder Bela Koe-Krompecher described the guitarist’s sound as a melding of “Eddie Van Halen and Richard Lloyd with the blue-collar work ethic of Strongsville, Ohio.” This perspective was echoed by House, who shared that he came to Van Halen three to four years after the band debuted, and whose music on first listen caused him to think, “God, this guy sounds like Bob Petric.”

“I’m pretty sure Bob was ripping a lot of his solos on the fly, but he was really good at knowing where to land,” said Mocnik, who was introduced to the music of TJSA by Nervosas drummer Nick Schuld. “You have to play these songs at 100, because that’s how Bob played them live, and that’s how he played them while recording. Every time I practice one of these songs, I’m playing as hard as I can. According to the band, he would take his anger out on the guitar, and you can hear that. He was fierce, and he was a great technical player.”

Rather than attempting to replicate all of Petric’s guitar parts, Mocnik said she’s been focused on capturing the general structure of the songs, aiming to highlight certain passages “that might feel familiar to people” while also putting her own imprint on things. “I have mixed emotions about [the show], and I think we all do,” Mocnik said. “It’s exciting to get to play with one of my favorite bands, and not a lot of people get to do that. But it’s also sad, because Bob is gone, and we’re never going to see or hear him play guitar again.”

Following the release of TJSA’s final album in 2000, House continued to shed musical skins, evolving in unpredictable ways with projects such as Psandwich and Counter Intuits, a duo with Jared Phillips of Times New Viking, in addition to performing solo and acoustic, as he did just last week in Philadelphia. “After that third [TJSA] album, I was just ready to do something different,” said House, who found himself returning to those early TJSA records with renewed frequency in the wake of Petric’s death, describing these listening sessions as one means of “having him back from the grave.” 

“I know this sounds strange to say, but we broke up in 1999 or 2000 and then we didn’t play together for two years before we started doing quote-unquote ‘reunion’ shows, where we wouldn’t do new songs but we would do our best songs,” said House, whose continued pursuit of music is anchored at least in part in the way it helps him to better grasp the larger world around him, as well as his place within it. “And I think those were my favorite shows, because it removed any kind of extreme ambition and really made us concentrate on what we could do, which was to play these songs. And that’s something I still really like to do, which is why we’re doing it here again.”