Chip Salerno and Flippy Watson were founding members of agro-punk noisemeisters Men With Large Nostrils, Cleveland's answer to the New York Dolls . They had in fact originally been named The New York Dolls from Cleveland until a fist-fight broke out between Johnny Thunders and Mw/LN drummer Oinky Smegma (Victor Smegmen) outside CBGBs following a Rocket From The Crypt show.

Due to an unfortunate decision by their manager Don “Lucky” Pilates, the Men were put on a bill with Pittsburgh's leading progressive rock group, The Prime Directive, which at the time featured vocalist/guitarist Ian Gallanar and a young Hammond Organ wizard named Joe Pino. The pogo-and-crystal-meth-crazed crowd of the Men set fire to the hippie-stoner audience of the Directive, the police were called in and after a six hour altercation with the angry flaming mob the club was razed and The Prime Directive were escorted to the Cleveland city limits. Shortly thereafter, Men With Large Nostrils split; guitarist Van Damn (Tud van der Damp) and drummer Smegma went on to form PMS and Salerno and Watson performed as the acoustic anarchist duo !#@!!.

Meanwhile, across the state line, The Prime Directive disbanded amid rumors of a Scientology conspiracy, leaving Gallanar, Pino and drummer Bananafish (aka Jim Bananafish, aka Jim Treacher) in debt and performing for children's birthday parties as Starfleet Academy. Bananafish soon quit, moving to Australia to manage his family's ancestral sheep farm and Starfleet Academy became the folk duo SUL-µ.

In late 1979, as fate would have it, SUL-µ was performing in Akron at Fred's Tavern and following their set, wandered down the street to Fred's Other Tavern, where !#@!! were finishing their second set. The four renewed acquaintances, found themselves at the bar and casual conversation eventually drifted to the subject of Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten’s breasts - were they real or bought? A fight broke out and the police arrived to find Ian pummeling Chip and shouting “SALINE! SALINE! SALINE!” [ed. This is obviously the source of the song "Big and Salty".]

Spending that night sharing a jail cell, Ian and Chip put aside their differences and became fast friends. When Joe and Flippy arrived the next morning to post bail, Ian and Chip had already mapped out a musical plan that would become Just Hit Pause and written most of the first album, Chunks O’ Cheese (1980). This lineup would remain intact for next five years: Ian on vocals, keyboards and guitar; Chip on vocals, guitar and bass; Flippy on bass and drums; Joe on drums and keyboards. This early version of JHP served as the house band at Akron's infamous Jerkfaced Jerk Club from December 1979 until Watson’s departure in 1984. It was an intense period of development for the band as the Jerk morphed regularly to fit with whatever music was hip at the moment and JHP, as house band, were obligated to follow suit. Besides Cheese, the band released a number of singles during this period, including an early version of Clue Phone entitled Wake Up Stupid (1982), with a blistering guitar solo by legendary bluesman and future member Will "Squishy" Taylor . By 1984, they were making a reputation beyond Akron as intense showmen performing a sonically relentless show. A media-driven “rivalry” with Especially Smelly, a Detroit indo-funk noise outfit was in retrospect obviously manufactured by reporters hoping to exploit the “punk rock” scene, but did serve to establish the band much farther geographically than their LP and singles had gotten them.

1984 marks the first breakup of the band (there are many more to come over the next decade and a half) instigated by Flippy Watson’s frustration with the Gallanar/Salerno compositional machine. Both Ian and Chip were prodigious composers, sometimes writing an album’s worth of songs each between the end of one rehearsal and the start of the next. This left little room for Watson’s own creative input and in June of that year he announced he was leaving the band to form his own group with a young vocalist named Michael Bugoski [ed. That band would become Hit Play & Record Together and following its collapse, Bugoski would change his name and become Michael Bolton.] A fight ensued that resulted in assault charges filed against Chip and Ian which led to the first of several prison terms. Joe, meanwhile, put the band’s gear in storage, took a job with a venture capital firm in Pittsburgh and in his spare time began work on his first solo album: the progressive rock masterpiece Olias of Sunhillow II: The Heretic (1985).