San Diego 2000 The Loft intermission : “Exactly how many sex cults are we talking about?”

The plot thickens.

When I first starting asking around in the Crash Worship group I heard an unfamiliar name in some of the comments – Zendik Farm. In the context it seemed like maybe this was another name for the apartments in an old church by Pokez where JXL and some other folks in the band’s orbit had lived. For the initiated you most likely already know what’s coming.

O oracle and miracle of modern technology I combined the relevant phrases in the search bar of the world’s foremost search engine and out comes a colorful video:

Cool, I thought, an all day festival and live album with some familiar and unfamiliar names. Crash Worship check. Night Soil Man check (a new favorite of mine that sounds a little like Comus). I was nerding out and clicking around on discogs, as one does, when I came to the name Arol Wulf. Expecting a band I next ended up on the entry for Wulf Zendik and from there an unexpected hop to a Wikipedia page.

Holy shit! Exactly how many sex cults are we talking about?

If you’re in a live band you’ve probably played at least one or two shows for either dodgy promoters or as benefits for questionable businesses. PlywoodStock seemed to be an all day festival organized in the name of old fashioned Manson family brainwashing and coercive sex trafficking. I’ve heard a handful of things about Murshid and Circle of Friends over the last few days ranging from “flirty fishing” to “high end yoga escort service” but I was not prepared for what I was about to read on Zendik Farms.

For a sleepy and moderately sized military town San Diego has more than it’s fair share of cult and commune activity, I listed a modest handful in the last installment but you can add to that tendrils of Miracle of Love, The Church of Scientology, International Society of Krishna Consciousness and even a sizable contingent from the commune I was born on: a place In Tennessee called simply The Farm. To be entirely honest some of the things I read about Zendik Farms seemed unpleasantly familiar.

Life on The Farm wasn’t always idyllic as evidenced by the major exodus in the early Eighties that included my family. I found a FAQ from a former Zendik resident that echoed many of the grievances I heard from my parents and their friend circle: poor standard of living, malnutrition, lack of education and a clear hierarchy in what was supposed to be an egalitarian community.

https://emeraldimajia.livejournal.com/149140.html

On the other hand the title of this woman’s memoir is Mating in Captivity. While there was definitely social pressure at The Farm for men and women to pair up they weren’t told who they had to sleep with or expected to endure scrutiny into their sex lives the way this woman describes at Zendik. My mother certainly didn’t have to ask permission and get examined with a speculum every time she was intimate with my father.

Both communities could be stiflingly heteronormative.

I heard of gays at The Farm either living closeted or trying to force themselves into the more expected lifestyle only to realize their true tendencies would not disappear after years of marriage and children. I don’t know if Zendik created similar experiences but Wulf’s writings seem to have been overtly homophobic in a way I never saw in Stephen Gaskin’s (founder of The Farm)

I actually wonder about the possibility of some cross pollination between the two. I had a pair of childhood playmates, sisters named Jasmine and Jade, whose mother moved them out to Jacumba around the time Zendik Farms was in the area. I’d heard something about them having troubled adult lives and wonder if they might have been drawn in by Arol Wulf’s charismatic nature.

The larger coincidence is that Zendik Farms and Circle of Friends both had property in the same small town of Boulevard. I wonder if Murshid and Wulf or Arol ever met or how such a meeting would have gone. The timelines don’t perfectly line up though – while the Zendik’s were decamping to Austin by 1991 Circle of Friends seemed to arrive from Colorado around the same time.

It seems possible that Zendik Farms could have even sold their compound to Murshid and Circle of Friends or the specific owner of the land could have shifted loyalties between the two. For now it remains an amusing hypothetical as I need to return my focus back to the Underground Music.

Chris Squire of Crash Worship, Tit Wrench, Battalion of Saints, Heroin and a million other legendary bands kindly provided the above photo and some corroborating details:

I might have been overstating things when I described PlywoodStock as using the participants music for sinister purposes. While visitors no doubt got the standard invitation to join this 1988 festival sounds like a mostly innocent opportunity to cut loose, drop acid and rock out far from the eyes of SDPD and Vice squads. Squire definitely cited “frying at four AM and being a WRECK” as an explanation of why his band didn’t make it to the compilation cassette.

Also performing but failing to make an impression on the keen commercial instincts of the Zendik compilationist was a band called Monsters of Rhythm.

The thing that stuck out to me immediately was the clearly diverse lineup of Daddy Long Leggs while San Diego rock was predomimantly white. I found a Reader profile where the band talked about choosing to create a mix of funk, rock, punk and metal instead of emulating the far more popular ska trend at the time. This, and the slightly earlier lifecycle, would explain why I never saw them share the stage when two-tone legends like The Specials came to play at the second SOMA near Old Town.

https://www.sandiegoreader.com/bands/daddy-long-leggs/

Members of this group combined with Pull Toys from the same festival to form Casbah legends Creedle and keyboardist Robert Walter now tours with Roger Waters lineup of Pink Floyd.

Moving along – when John Goff first sent me the links to the articles on The Loft’s impending eviction it caught my eye that the post was dated 5/5/2000. I was a bit of a sticker head in High School, cataloguing each new variant and color way of Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant stickers in a special notebook, and I remembered seeing cryptic stickers with the message “ACHTUNG 5/5/2000”.

This turned out to be an early ambient/noise/industrial project of Travis Ryan who is now best known as the vocalist of Cattle Decapitation. The name is based on a prophecy from the Mayan Calendar that the world would end on this date – possibly related to a rare alignment of the outer planets. That was especially interesting to me as I went to Palenque on 12/21/2012 for festivities around the end of the twelfth baktun of the same Calendar that was also widely prophesised to mark the end of the world.

While neither date brought about any particular apocalypse the first of them did mark the beginning of the end for The Loft. It is also interesting how numerologically significant and symmetrical both dates appear in the Gregorian Calendar as they were derived from an entirely different system.

I also thought I had seen the name on some kind of compilation CD which turned out to be In Formation: A Tribute To Throbbing Gristle which Ryan coordinated and released on his Attention Deficit Recordings label. I did have a copy of this CD and used to listen to it fairly frequently but can’t remember if it was given to me by John Goff in San Diego or by Deerhoof when we played together in Chicago.

https://www.discogs.com/master/53481-Various-In-Formation-A-Tribute-To-Throbbing-Gristle

A couple of interesting details on the artists: I was listening to a lot of Integrity that year after finding a pile of the …And For Those Who Still Fear Tomorrow records at a Maxwell Street creative reuse in Chicago. I literally couldn’t give them away to my hardcore friends at the time but I’d imagine they’d be worth a decent stack of cash if I still had them (there were like 30 on black vinyl). Anyway the point is I was listening to the TG tribute at the same time but had no idea Lockweld and Psywarfare were Integrity adjacent projects.

I also had a few Spacewürm records I’d picked up in discount bins but had no idea of the connection with Kid606 which I listened to a ton of soon after. There was no discogs in those days – I got this kind of information in bits and pieces from conversations with other encyclopedic music nerds. Thanks to the site I now know that Travis was also behind one of my favorite local bands Graveyard Whispers.

Goth was huge in San Diego at the time. I tried to go to Club Soil at the World Beat with an older friend but was denied entry because I wasn’t even 18. My mother had somehow convinced me that goths, or mods as she used the terms interchangeably, painted their faces white with a certain brand of Bag Balm she had in a crinkly old aluminum tube. There must be a kernel of truth in there somewhere but it looked and smelled ridiculous.

That was my only teenage foray into goth fashion paired with an oversized white button up and black leggings. I stood around the alley and listened to Vampire The Masquerade LARPers talk about drinking each other’s blood and witnessed the arrival of a high status scenester named Vlad dressed in Renaissance looking red velvet. I ended up drinking coffee at Denny’s then sleeping in the upstairs portion of Gelato Vero until the trolleys and buses started back up.

Anyway back to Graveyard Whispers – they were a goth parody band. I saw them at either Empire Club or Xanth depending on who owned it that year with my friend’s band Hide and go Freak. The members rode up on chopper bicycles with revving motorcycle sounds through the PA and all immediately lit clove cigarettes. As the set progressed the singer, Rozz’d “Stewart” Williams, was strapped up and hung upside down on some kind of BDSM apparatus.

I need to amend a couple of details now that clearer recollections have found their way to me from a certain horse’s mouth. The show I saw most likely predated Ryan’s involvement and the “BDSM apparatus” was simple exercise equipment. The bit was a buildup to a visual punchline of suddenly revealing ostentatiously sparkly pants under the vocalist’s somber black attire but this was either adopted later or didn’t have quite the “punch” they’d envisioned in a room full of smoke machine fog.

I’ve also learned that their were plans to do a “colonial goth” set involving George Washington (but goth – perhaps George Xymoxington?) outfits and an entrance on a rowboat. This was scrapped with the dissolution of the parent band – Upsilon Acrux. The plan seems almost prophetic with the present popularity of various goth “microgenres” such as the impressive niche Leafar Seyer and Prayers have carved out with cholo-goth.

It was a real hoot and a memory I’ve cherished often through the years. Apparently they released a tape but resellers are asking exorbitant amounts online due to Cattle Decapitation’s well deserved fame. It would be nice if somebody had one and felt like throwing the tracks up somewhere.

Back to John Goff – I thought it was strange that I never spent any time in The Way Out Sound record store if it was next door to Plasticratic. Thankfully Chris Woo came through to solve the mystery for me. According to this clipping it didn’t open until October of 1998 and I had gotten my diploma and run to Chicago then Oakland by that time.

As is common for intermissions this one will be something of a variety show. Turning back to the “No Roof Action” piece when I first learned that The Loft was at Sixth and Broadway I thought that it might be the same building as the Street Art Gallery show from that piece. It turns out I was extremely close. Here is the excerpt:

While I pride myself on the detailed nature of my memory the reality is that like anyone else’s it is entirely fallible. I am about to reveal the identity of “Featured Artist” in detail but first I need to correct myself on two points. First he picked up the hammer in self defense rather than over a name dispute. That argument was actually over the tag name of one of his friends and verbal intimidation was more than sufficient.

Second he may or may not have hit anybody with it but he was provoked, threatened and largely outnumbered. Some goons from a rival tag crew had shown up and were trashing the gallery and attacking him. Shepard Fairey would likely remember more specifics.

I am talking about Lance De Los Reyes who created his largest body of work as RAMBO but was writing CHIE at the time of this incident. I was recently reminded of Lance when I saw his cameo in a Safdie Brothers film coincidentally called Daddy Longlegs only to learn that he had tragically passed away.

At this early stage he made images of insect cocoons on scraps of rusted metal and other found object refuse that were displayed on the walls of Pokez before making the jump into Galleries. He had named this show Modest Behavior because Shepard had just introduced him to Modest Mouse and it was directly behind The Loft at 1027 Sixth Avenue.

This opening was about a month after the article about The Loft’s eviction and most likely after the legendary party era there had been over for at least a year. The other artist I really remember from the opening was Grimey aka Bhagavan or “Bugs”. He was good friends with Harmony Korine and the two of them got matching hand tattoos of his trident or pitchfork tag. I thought he might have gotten his name from Circle of Friends but it turned out to be a Hare Krishna thing.

He was very inspired by Norwegian Black Metal and made an entire installation in a recessed part of the space – a darkened area with candles and an atmospheric evil sounding soundtrack. I always think about how ahead of his time he was when I see environmental works from artists like Neckface and hope he is doing well. I was tagging WORM then as a kind of metal logo with a pentagram in the O and a lower case R as a candle so I felt a bit of artistic kinship.

Me and Francois had a bit of “fame” in the moment due to our highly visible pieces on the California Theater. When Lance learned our “street” identities he was impressed enough to invite us onto the roof and generously offered a pair of desirable paint spots. The show was in the building with the big glass “SPORTS CARDS” sign but we jumped over to the next roof to get at two pieces of wall.

Francois’ skills were well beyond mine so he got the cream colored spot visible from Broadway for a JUMP piece while I whiffed whatever I did on the grey wall invisible from this angle. In the course of the night we quickly went from elation at the connections we were making to dismay at the possible consequences of accidentally covering somebody or any other transgression. We quickly gave up painting.

When I started working at my alma mater San Diego High in 2003 or so I picked it back up as a way to connect with my students. I swapped out paint cans for streakers and shoe polish but my bigger focus at the time was on battle rapping and it’s covered in other chapters. I must have painted once or twice with Nick Feather – another friend that we lost far too young to an epidemic that’s only getting worse.

I could have never tracked down these exact details without the hard work of Eric Elms. Eric worked on Shepard’s street team at the same time as Lance and also used to do poster art under the name ADORN. I would always laugh to see the ones with giant pictures of Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock on electric boxes as the prevailing trend in youth fashion and music of the moment was called “Spock Rock” after the boxy black haircuts.

He now does a mix of fine art, design work and the considerable overlap between the two and occasionally uses the name ELMS. You can find his work at:

https://partnersandothers.com/

I will close this intermission with some thoughts from the as-yet-unidentified admin of The Loft at Sixth & Broadway Facebook group. While it doesn’t identify 9/11 as the official end of the era it does reflect many of my own thoughts of San Diego at the time, and it’s Downtown 81 vibe, as well as the “American Underground” as a whole. This is understandable as the developers were very much present and palpable and even if you’re living under it you simply can’t see the shadow of something that’s in the future.

If you could we’d have a word like “foreshadowing” or something…

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San Diego 1994 The Loft Part Two : “The Gospel According to Steve Pagan”