How Palm Coast’s Rugrat Group and The Ned Brought a ‘Do It Together’ Vibe to the Local Music Scene

The “rugrat punk” band The Ned had been together about a year, conjuring such songs as “Whoa Bro,” a song with a rather stormy septic title and “Worse Than Hitler” (about the bad taste of cough drops), when singer-guitarist Trace George was approached during his senior year at Flagler-Palm Coast High School.

“This tall skinny kid asked me if I’m in The Ned,” George says of that day in 2015. “This was the first time I’ve ever been approached about my band, and I’m just thinking ‘Wow, someone knows my band.’ I tell him ‘Yeah, I’m in The Ned.’ And he goes ‘I’m in a band too, and we’re going to be better than you!’ At that moment, I was just like ‘Oh well, I hate you.’ ”

George laughs at the memory. If he and his bandmates – drummer-singer-guitarist Joe Gardella, singer-guitarist Ashton Kuehne and singer-bassist Aaron Bowser – are about anything, it’s the exact opposite of competitiveness.

When The Ned “started off as a high school after-school hobby” circa 2014, George says, he and his Ned mates didn’t know of any other bands in the Palm Coast area. As for The Ned themselves, Gardella confesses they “didn’t know what tuning a guitar meant” and their fledgling efforts were little more than “making a lot of noise” in the garage of his father’s home in the P section of Palm Coast.

They heard about a band called Kings Canvas and decided to check out their gig at Devoted Tattoo Studio in Palm Coast.

“We were thinking it was some kids about to play their first show, but these guys were talented as fuck!” Gardella says. “These guys had been playing for years. They were great musicians. They put out a great album. Amazing.”

Since that day, The Ned not only have learned to tune their guitars and write songs, but they also have released three CDs, played gigs from Bunnell to New York City, launched Rugrat Records (their own DIY — do it yourself – label) and have purposefully morphed their label into Rugrat Music Group – a “full-service music community for the independent artist” that lists 21 area music makers under the “Rugrat Family” roster on its website, rugratrecords.com.

Justyn Perry, who wrote the riff to the first-ever Ned song on trombone before deciding he wanted to work with the band behind the scenes rather than onstage, recalls the impact the quartet had.

“One of the greatest things after The Ned started to form and more people heard them was seeing other bands who said, ‘We started a band because we saw The Ned do it,’ ” says Perry, who handles PR and booking for the group.

Among the inspired was Marissa LiCausi, Joe’s girlfriend and the bassist for the all-girl band Flora LiCrame, part of the Rugrat family.

“I never thought I would play an instrument ever,” LiCausi says. “I never thought I could but seeing how much fun they had, I’m like ‘Of course I can do it!’ And now here I am playing bass and singing in my own band for a year now. It gave us so much inspiration. Now I have an outlet and now I make my own songs and we make our own stuff. It’s awesome.”

“Everybody was sort of doing their own thing — there was not a music scene,” says Artie “Papa Ned” Gardella, Joe’s father, of the early days of The Ned. When he’s not running the business he founded, Synergy Senior Fitness, the Yonkers, N.Y., native handles management and other duties for The Ned and Rugrat. His garage serves as Rugrat central, where the band rehearses and records amid its walls plastered with graffiti, posters of Ozzy Osborne and a pot-smoking green alien, and other punkish flotsam and jetsam.

The band logo that Joe Gardella mindlessly created on his bass drum years ago – a child-like image of a square face with X-shaped eyes, spikey hair and a straight line for a mouth – peeks out amid the graffiti like some punk-rock version of Where’s Waldo.

“Rugrat became the engine behind the Ned, solving very practical ways to get their music heard,” Papa Ned says. “We expanded to doing that for other bands too. Sort of our motto is providing DIT help – do-it-together help — for the DIY artist.”

Rugratrecords.com unabashedly proclaims “Rugrat Records is not the antiquated and broken label model which amounted to money-sucking leeches who record, own, control and live off of artists’ works, giving the artist a small percentage at best!”

The website lists such free services as album reviews, interviews, podcasts “and other avenues of social media” to “help musicians get their music heard.” The site also includes links to the websites and other social media of Rugrat’s artist roster, including The Ned’s site at listentothened.com.

That “get heard” part extends to the Flagler County area’s live music scene, where bars and restaurants that host live music frequently prefer artists who regurgitate Lynyrd Skynyrd and Jimmy Buffet songs to bands that play original music. That’s especially true if it’s a band such as The Ned, whose sonic earworms include the furious screamer “Paint the Dog,” the dirge-like, violin-accented “Cum-Fort-Able,” the schizophrenic “Jesus Ice Cream Sandwich” and the surprisingly poppy, summery “CowSpider/TurtleClam” from their latest album, “The Sound of Purple.” (A link to the video of the latter song is here.)

It’s such a sonic palette that led the band to coin the term “rugrat punk” to describe their genre of music, with a nod to the “Rugrats” children’s animated TV show.

“We formed a genre that has the punk attitude to it, has a grungy attitude to it, and definitely has a metal aspect to it because we like to go hard,” Joe Gardella says. “So it seemed like everything swept under the rug. And ‘Rugrats’ of course is a nostalgic show for all of us. It’s something we watched.”

The TV show “is kids having fun and running around causing mayhem,” Perry says. “The rugrat term was just so fitting.”

Joe Gardella casually confesses The Ned have “played multiple shows just for the bartender” during three tours up the East Coast to the Big Apple, where one of the barkeeps told them “What do you expect – nobody’s heard of your band in New York City.”

To navigate around the dearth of original music-friendly local venues, Rugrat held its inaugural, rain-shortened, multi-artist Rugstock music festival this spring on the grounds of Broken Step Studio in Bunnell. Rugrat also frequently hosts stages during the DeLand Original Music Festival and DeLandapaloosa, with eight to 10 bands performing over the course of 10 hours.

The Ned and Rugrat also will participate in Flo.Wav Fest III, a multi-band music and arts festival to be held beginning at noon Aug. 10 on the outdoor stage of the Palm Coast Arts Foundation, 1500 Central Ave., Palm Coast. The event is hosted by flo.wav, a poppy trip-hop duo from Flagler Beach who are part of the Rugrat family. Admission is $10. More information is online at flowavmusic.com.

The Ned also play frequently at Sarbez!, a St. Augustine bar and grilled cheese restaurant (not kidding) that welcomes bands who play songs about Jesus ice cream sandwiches.

Yes, sometimes the bands get paid. At their last Sarbez! gig, “the door racked in 300 bucks,” Joe Gardella says. “Three bands, we got 100 bucks each — that was ridiculous. We’ve been paid $100 before but we’re still at a point where we’re handed $100 and we’re ecstatic. We were like ‘Holy cow, that goes to our album. That goes to our merchandise.’ ”

And, if push comes to shove, The Ned will perform in Papa Ned’s garage, with up to 60 fans squeezing inside and “more outside trying to take a breath because it gets so hot in here,” Perry says.

The Rugrat website also lists such flat fee-based services as recording, music production and merchandizing production, and such percentage fee-based services as electronic press kits, “online presence management,” “radio play procurement,” tour booking and more.

“So you’re still going to do it yourself but we’re going to help you with things,” Papa Ned says. “We’re not going to own you or own your music. It’s getting bands to have opportunities to have another platform to be heard.”

“The second you say, ‘OK, I got this,’ then you’re on your own,” Joe Gardella says. “There’s no contract.”

Perry drops a very un-punk rocker word in discussing the workings and aims of Rugrat: “Hosting those stages at those festivals is a very good way for us to get the brand even further out there,” he says.

Brand? That’s not very rock ’n’ roll.

“Exactly,” he says. “There is an aspect of what we’re trying to do that eventually has to reach beyond the punk rocker attitude. But that doesn’t change the motivation.”

That motivation doesn’t seem much removed, if at all, from the founding of The Ned during their days at Flagler-Palm Coast High School five years ago (although Joe Gardella and George have been friends since pre-K).

“Since the dawn of time my father was a musician so I’ve always had a guitar and keyboards around,” Joe Gardella says. “I’m very privileged and blessed to have had that initially, and I think that should be a staple in every kid’s life.

“To have music is a beautiful outlet because as a kid you want to say ‘Fuck school!’ and come home and go ‘Aagggghh,’ ” he adds, breaking into a scream like a rabid choking rottweiler. “You want to just go wild on music and make obnoxious cacophony in your room, you know.

“Then I wanted to bring my friends in on that. I learned how to record with a microphone from Rock Band (the video game), so I plugged it into the computer, opened up Audacity (a free downloadable recording program) and just recorded everything. I was like ‘Oh my God, we can do this ourselves.’ I would do drums and guitar but not good. I didn’t know what tuning a guitar meant. I just knew if you put distortion on it, it would make a lot of noise.”

“There was a lot of noise going on,” Papa Ned says. “And one day the noise turned into a song.”

As reflected in Joe Gardella’s excited comment about the economic algorithms of small-town rock ’n’ roll, earning a hundred bucks for a night’s work, split between four band members, is good money. But in the economics of the real world, each of The Ned have to go back to their day jobs.

Joe Gardella works at Mystic Clothing in Bunnell, a “mom-and-pop shop that gets product from Cambodia and distributes it to Amazon,” he says. George is a dishwasher at Lagerheads Bar and Grill in Ormond Beach. Perry works at a local Race Trac gas station.

LiCausi, of the band Flora LiCrame, is an administrative assistant for a financial firm and a kindergarten teacher at a daycare.

While those day jobs serve mammon, The Ned and Rugrat serve a higher god.

“I think truly at the end of the day we all agree that when we’re in the car together and driving back from a gig, we have the best time of our lives,” Joe Gardella says. “We laugh, we talk about stupid stuff and we just have fun together. For The Ned, that’s the key — we are still having fun.”

— Rick de Yampert for FlaglerLive