After Spidermammal I didn’t actually have a band or project again until Sex Affection. Or at least nothing that ever made it as far as either finishing a recording or playing a show. Here are some of the things that didn’t make it: at El Rancho and The Red House me and Nick Buxton did a lot of planning to start a “8-Bit Metal” band called Dragon Warrior based on the U.S. Release of the first Dragon Quest game. This didn’t mean that we would use synthesizers with actual 8-Bit style sound chips but toy guitars, pots and pans for drums and an actual bass because I had one.
We had all the stuff and I even had a four track in those days but we were either too busy being on drugs or too afraid of failure to get around to actually doing it – probably a combination of the two. The imaginary or at least unfinished songs were Dost Thou Love Me? / But Thou Must!, an instrumental power chord bass thing I still know how to play called Imperial Scrolls of Honor and this one I wrote a few lyrics for called The Metal Slime Hath Taken Thee By Surprise!:
“In mortal combat this, first strike shall not be thine!
The honor-less amoeba hath struck thee from behind!”
Some point after I moved back to San Diego me and my older sister Sarah started working on this thing called The Pointy Reckonings – a reference to a threat that Winona Ryder’s character Abigail makes in The Crucible. I must have either written some parts on bass or used our home’s piano and some music software to create at least sketches of the background music – maybe a bit of all of it. We made songs about the vengeful spirits of drowned girls and mocked outsiders with demon familiars: I’ve Got Dark Things To Do My Bidding.
I remember the couple of songs we were working on being pretty okay but I never even recorded any of it on my four track.
Sex Affection started in San Diego in either 2004 or 2005 with a lot of regulars from the bar and party circuit with an emphasis on Gelato Vero employees. I didn’t make it to all of the shows before I became a full time member but I want to say that in it’s earliest incarnations it was an Art Rock band. I did see a performance in the back room of The Casbah that incorporated a maypole on one of the room’s pillars. Some of the songs were starting to include rapping parts and because I was already trying to grab a mic and start rapping at nearly half the shows I went to I was invited in as an additional rapper.
I came on board in a very transitional time where most of the original members were getting bored of and departing the project. Greta left, Jessica left, I’m not 100% sure if Kevin had ever been a member but if he had – he left. This left Mike Bova, Raquel and now me. Most likely a lot of songs were dropped from the set list at this time because the members who sang or played them weren’t there anymore. There must have been more than one song on the earliest shows I played but I only remember the “shady” song.
The song had been written as a way for the various members of Sex Affection to trash talk their exes. I might be wrong about Jessica trashing on Naked Mike in the original version but it for sure had bits of Raquel trashing on Mikey and Bova trashing on Kate. The first little bit of rap I had written for the band was a little couplet at the end of the Kate section:
“And if I were your boss and if I paid your wage
I’d take all your money and lock you in a cage
And then I’d fire you!”
In the standard incestuousness of a small to medium sized city’s underground music scene Kate and Mikey from the checklist of exes ended up in a relationship with each other. Then Mike Bova and Kate hooked back up and started seeing each other again. I didn’t necessarily know this at the time but this involved some pretty blatant cheating on the parts of both Kate and Mike Bova.
I don’t have the same moral outrage around cheating that most of my peers and contemporaries seem to. The thing I always say is that I’m a huge believer in serial monogamy, people leaving relationships where they aren’t happy and pursuing relationships where they will be. I’ve known plenty of stable, healthy and mutually fulfilling partnerships that began as one or both of the partners “cheating”.
I just learned that Raquel and Mikey are seeing each other again and engaged to be married and I’m sure that all of the things they’ve learned about themselves and what they want in a relationship from all of the different relationship experiences they’ve had over the past ten years can only make them better partners to each other. The thing I do get puritanical about is dishonesty. While I don’t see “cheating” as an inherently evil act I do look at lying about it and hiding it that way unless there is some kind of standing agreement between the two partners concerning discretion.
The main moral outrage is 2005 was, for me at least, that Bova had started seeing Kate again but continued to perform the song that trash talked her at our live shows as if nothing had changed. I can’t remember if he was even doing vocals on the song by that point but the fact remained that it was a song expressly written in part to denigrate his then girlfriend and with full knowledge of that fact he stepped onto a stage to perform it multiple times without a single caveat or qualifier.
Of course this wasn’t the only reason for what me and Raquel then did. The Sex Affection we inherited had a thin oeuvre of scraps of songs that had been written or improvised by the revolving door of former members and Raquel and I were feeling like we wanted to write more, practice more and just generally get more serious about where we were going to go with it. For Bova it was still a party band, an excuse to goof off and get some free drinks at Scolari’s Office, and he wasn’t particularly interested in moving past that.
So we met up in secret and rewrote all the lyrics to that particular song to shit talk Bova and inform him that we were kicking him out of the band. He was our friend and this was a super immature and petty thing for us to do. At the very least we should have been transparent with him about how we were feeling and let him in on the joke so he could decide for himself if he wanted to play the final show with the modified version of the song with us or not.
Now that I’m thinking about it, it would even have been cool if he was given the opportunity to prepare some lyrics shit talking us and I realize that this could be a great tradition for bands that are breaking up or changing members. Kind of like wedding vows, except that it’s totally the opposite thing, all the members could prepare special lyrics about all of the different things they hate about each other and being in a band together to share for the first time in front of an audience at their “farewell show”.
This kind of reminds me of a song called “We’re Sick of Music and We Hate Each Other” by The In/Humanity where the lyrics end with “fuck you” followed by all of the band members’ names.
Anyway that’s not what we did at all. I don’t think we even invited Bova to practice and then came up with this plan because we were angry he didn’t show or anything like that that would make it seem even slightly more innocent on our parts. We straight up schemed. I remember exchanging phone numbers with Raquel because even though we’d known each other socially for years we had never had any particular reason to call each other before this point.
I went over to her apartment for what would turn out to be the first of many writing sessions and practices and by the time we were taking the stage at our next Scolari’s show we were the only two people in the room who knew what was coming.
This brings us to the pull quote. The little couplet that I had originally written for the trash talk song had caught on as a viral vocal hook among our friends and the other band members. People liked it. They thought it was funny. At this last show Mike Bova was pretty much just playing guitar (unless it was bass, it was always bass later) but he grabbed one of the microphones to announce the next tune:
“This song is about getting fired!”
Me and Raquel shot each other the kind of look you can imagine this particular circumstance demanded and then we went into it. This isn’t the kind of prank that would be particularly effective if we had been a screamo band but we had been moving firmly toward our later sound of ‘80s style mid-tempo clearly enunciated rapping. You could tell from their reactions that our friends in the audience were understanding every word.
Mike Bova didn’t actually seem to. I will say in his defense that the Scolari’s sound system was fairly rudimentary with a mixing board right on stage so bands could do their own sound and either no monitors or not very good ones. Still it basically seemed like he wasn’t really listening. He went to the bar to grab a drink after the song, like he basically did after every song, and somebody over there explained what had just happened to him and he just never came back on stage.
He did seem to take it really well. My friend Andy Robillard had told me a story a few years earlier about learning that he had gotten kicked out of GoGoGo Airheart the moment he heard them start playing with a different drummer at a show that he had thought he was going to be playing. It sounded like a very unpleasant experience for him but I also think getting kicked out of bands is a more emotionally charged experience for drummers in general – most drummers I know in successful but not percussion-centric bands seem to live with the threat constantly hanging over their heads like the Sword of Damocles.
I’m not sure how I would have felt or reacted if I had been in Mike Bova’s shoes that night but that’s kind of the thing: me and Raquel had been too busy thinking about how clever and right we thought we were to think about how it was going to make him feel. We were never close friends but me and Mike Bova always got along pretty well – both before and after this incident.
There’s way too much to be said about Scolari’s Office – the neighborhood bar that became the home to San Diego’s underground and experimental music scene for most of the aughts, and Hood Ri¢h – the rap group that Raquel and I created after deciding that we had changed so much from the Sex Affection days that the name should change as well, for me to attempt to encapsulate either one of these things in the space left over at the end of this chapter.
Instead I’ll toss in the thing that Weasel Walter said the first time we played as Sex Affection at the Che Cafe. He would have been playing with xbxrx at the time but I knew him from frequenting Chicago’s Fireside Bowl as early as 1999 when he would have been doing The Flying Luttenbachers and other projects. Anyway I was excited to tell him that I was going to also be playing the show but he’d seen us load in:
“Yeah, I noticed the pro gear and attitude.”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 