The dense walls of trees on either side of the highway had been reaching upward and bending inward until they met in a living arch of the darkest green that isn’t black. Beneath this tableaux the road had merged with the cloudless sky in a black tunnel where the stars and lights appeared to be rushing toward me like the voids of space in an interstellar flight simulator video game. Directly ahead of us was a bulky orange shape resembling a futuristic spacecraft that had been designed to mimic a firefly. Every couple of seconds it emitted a crystalline, tinkling sound and released three pairs of flickering wisps in opposing diagonal formations that slowly dissipated into the surrounding air.
Everyone else in the car had fallen asleep. I looked over at my friend Dave who had been quietly driving through the night and smiled.
“It’s beautiful”
Some of my readers will have no doubt guessed, correctly, that this confusing depiction is evidence of my having finally taken leave of the persistent straight edge. An early summer in San Diego had introduced me to the mind altering potential of several over the counter drugs and the boredom of a lengthy road trip had caused me to stretch experimentation to excess. Every place we stopped for gas just so happened to be within eyeshot of the welcoming illuminated letters of an all night pharmacy and just shy of my 20th birthday I had become an experienced shoplifter. A truly accurate audit would be impossible due to the ensuing oblivion but I can say with certainty that I had at least ingested a bottle of Dayquil, a tube of Dramamine, a package of ephedrine and multiple packages of Coricidin.
It should go without saying that I do not endorse the consumption of such dangerous quantities of any of these drugs much less all of them together.
It was, without a doubt, the most intense and terrifying psychedelic experience of my life.
With that explanation out of the way it is time to address a matter that should be of even greater interest to many of my readers: our destination. Fort Thunder had been a mysterious name that seemed to manifest on every piece of art that excited me in multiple genres. While experimental music was a more recent love, comic books had been essential for about as long as I could remember. In fact it had frustrated me throughout my adolescence that while peeling back the covers of a Jack Kirby comic book could nearly always reliably transport me to the fantastic worlds there depicted the most exciting record covers led only to mere Rock Music.
Music had finally started to open up in High School. While I happily skanked along with my cohort and followed friends to the odd punk show the most satisfying discoveries came from spelunking the mountains of vinyl in Second Hand Shops and Used Record Stores. My High School’s library had fortunately discarded an obsolete edition of The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records and my parent’s garage had offered up a portable turntable called the Disc-O-Kid. With these two totems in tow I never had to be disappointed by misleading cover art again. If a record piqued my interest I could both read about the artist and listen to the actual music before making the final purchase.
As a budding aesthete with next to nothing in the way of pocket money these advantages were indispensable. While most of my favorite discoveries were pulled from unsorted dollar bins one specific entry in my guidebook pushed me to do the unthinkable. The passage on The Residents was so beguiling that I happily parted with an entire twenty dollars for the chance to bring home a record I hadn’t even listened to.
I have written elsewhere about the midnight cities of my dreams, geometry defying vistas pulled subconsciously from Dr. Seuss and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. From the moment I set eyes on The Tunes of Two Cities the cover art by Poor Know Graphics looked like it had been pulled directly from these landscapes. Back in my bedroom the impossible happened, the music also sounded like it had been pulled from an untouchable nightmare. Disinterested fatuous cocktail jazz traded tracks with the terrified cries of subterranean synthesizers until the disparate styles somehow absorbed and synthesized one another.
Back in the world of comic books I had abandoned the colorful ecosystem of ‘80s Marvel for the offerings of DC’s “mature audiences” Vertigo line. Eventually this curated content began to feel passé and I dove into the world of Black & White Independents, often once again in unsorted dollar bins. By 1999 the only thing I really liked was Jon Lewis’s Ghost Ship and Spectacles. One day I walked into a comic shop and my eye caught a tiny screen printed mini called Bolol Belittle. Mat Brinkman’s wordless pages of tiny creatures crawling through an uncaring world ignited that same feeling of somehow staring into a waking dream.
On the music front I had discovered a Japanese inflected twee-pop scene centered around the San Francisco State University Student Union. The Monotract concert back in Chicago had also introduced me to a Champaign, Illinois project called Busytoby that in turn led to a synth duo called Mathlete and In a Lighthouse Cassettes, the first of many tape labels. Soon I was making diverse orders from The Blackbean and Placenta Tape Club while a holiday trip to San Diego had brought home a new housemate, Lil Four, whose tastes tended more toward “extreme” and “hard” music. I happened to read the Load Records insert on a Men’s Recovery Project album and was captivated by the description of a band called Lightning Bolt.
Fast forward through dropping out of college, a year in Chicago and my concert with Deerhoof and I was back in San Diego for the first half of a Summer. Frequent visits to The Fireside Bowl had resulted in the unnatural luck of catching the 1999 Japanese New Music Festival and a set from Ruins. Newly obsessed with stripped down bass and drum duos I started collecting albums from godheadSilo. Then a flip through a 50 cent bin of Seven Inches at the Hillcrest location of Off The Record turned up a familiar name: the Lightning Bolt/Forcefield split.
This tiny record had everything. The raw, frenzied sounds of drums and bass swimming through waves of distorted static with tortured, guttural vocals. Forcefield’s pod of scurrying synthesizers hearkening back to the distant dimensions of The Residents. A tactile screen printed cover that looked and felt like my new favorite mini comics.
I had the type of vintage cabinet record player that automatically cued up the edge of a preloaded record the moment it was powered on. All summer long the light switch in my bedroom fired up the Lightning Bolt side of the single and looped it until I went out again.
I couldn’t get enough of it.
At San Diego Comic Con I hunted for more of Mat Brinkman’s minis but everybody was buzzing about this older comp called the Coober Skeber Marvel Benefit Issue. I was blown away by the winding, claustrophobic panels of Brian Chippendale’s ink heavy Daredevil tribute. Somewhere deep in a copy of The Comic’s Journal I read the phrase “Fort Thunder Attack Flotilla” and realized the first half sounded familiar.
I realized that the exact same people who made my favorite new music in the world were making my favorite new comic books in the world. It all came from the same place and that place had a name and that name sounded exciting.
Flipping through a friend’s copy of The Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal magazine I found a blurb about costumed wrestling matches and apocalyptic welded bike gangs. All that stuff was happening at Fort Thunder too. On a very early version of a new thing called the internet I discovered that Fort Thunder had a website and that website had a phone number.
I decided to just call it up and ask if I could come live there and somebody (it turned out to be Jim Drain) picked up the phone on the other end and said one of the most powerful words I had ever heard in my life:
“Yes”
I was going to quite literally make a pilgrimage to the seat of the beating heart of my generation’s American Underground.
I was going to Fort Thunder.
Next part here:
https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2022/11/12/providence-2000-fort-thunder-part-2-no-soap/
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 