Return of the Spurn.

About a month ago I suggested that my younger dog, Nipper, had gotten to spurning breakfast so often that he could have been part of one of those mid-sixties groups that had maybe one hit -- Nipper and the Spurners! And he has continued to spurn periodically since I posted on the topic.

Well, longtime friend and never-commenter Mr. Philbin demanded a fake history of this fake band. And at Your Daily Dose of Vitamin Fred, we live to oblige.

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The Spurners were formed in 1963 in the proud city of Paterson, following a sound now known in legend as Jerseybeat. Johnny Nipper (born Johann Hinklegosser Maximilian von Ulm) formed the band, originally known as Nipper and the Spurners. "We were too poor to be a garage band," he told MTV's Beat the Music in 1993. "More like a garbage band. We practiced in an abandoned bowling alley, running extension cords to Mrs. O'Reilly's patio. We were formed on the premise that everything was stupid and we were spurning it."

The Spurners became fast favorites of large and grumpy crowds of teenagers throughout the state of New Jersey. They released their own single by pressing the 45s onto old X-ray film from autopsies. The songs, "I Kibble You Not" and "Denial Aisle," got the attention of music promoters in New York, and the band began to get gigs in the big city. At that time the group name was shortened to The Spurners, which fit better on marquees.

Moonbat Records signed the group in 1965, and "Kibble" reached #52 on the charts by December of that year. Their first full album, No, was commercially successful but not a hit. Songs like "Go Away (Stay Away)," "Ain't Too Proud to Shun," and "Rainy Day Spurnin'" did get some radio play.

Other songs included "This Dog Won't Hunt or Anything
Else" and "All You Need Is Shove"

The Spurners might have had a better career, but they turned down many opportunities. They refused to do an Asian tour, saying they'd heard bad things about the food. They chose not to appear on television's American Bandstand when they found out the host was not Dick Bark, as they'd thought. And when a rising young Jerseyite tried to join the group in the late sixties, they told him no, that he was a lousy singer, and Bruce was a funny name.

Still, they managed to keep recording, releasing many more tracks, such as "Put a Little Shun in Your Heart" (1969), "One Nope Over the Line" (1970), "Can Get (and Have Had) Enough of Your Love" (1974), "No No No No No No No No Song" (1975), then, in a change of gears, "Disco Inspurno (Spurn Baby Spurn)" (1976) and "I Just Want to Stop, Period" (1978). Their last song to chart, from the 1981 record Too Much Is More Than Enough, was "Spurnin' for You," which got to #99. After that, the group was tired of the whole business. Charges of plagiarism, which the band refused to answer, had dogged them for years. At last the legal troubles and personal difficulties got to be too much, and after two decades the Spurners began to spurn one another.

At different times, members have toured solo, using the Spurner name. Others, like drummer Hank "Hot" Doggerel, toured on their own into the late 1990s, in his case with the group Juncyard Dawgz, while bassist Fredo Poodelski started a group called the Nix.

But that was about it for the Spurners, who never tried to reunite and never gave interviews after 1993. As rock historian Stiiv Johnson wrote in his memoir, Pop Stars I Have Seen Vomit, "So dedicated were they to the fine arts of spurning, shunning, rejection, and negativity, it's actually amazing that they managed to form a band in the first place, let alone continue for almost twenty years."