If you are anywhere close to my age and consider yourself, as I do, a “scene historian” in any capacity I know of one special trick by which you can force yourself to feel something: important, useless, conscripted, powerless, misguided, etc. i don’t know enough about you to tell you which emotion will be triggered – only that I can promise with near certainty that one will manifest.
Ok, here’s the trick – consider the New York Time’s Bestseller Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. Next consider that this milestone in rock journalism as oral history was published in 1996 and the roots of “punk”, according to the text, began to seriously gel with The Stooges and MC5 around 1970-ish. I’m not here to get pedantic or start any arguments about who wore glitter or pushed members of the audience first but rather put things in a temporal perspective: approximately a quarter of a century separates the first stirrings of proto-punk from the appearance of Please Kill Me on bookstore shelves around the world.
If, like me, you were traveling the country around the turn of the millennium to drink in the myriad ways that the worlds of underground art and music positively oozed raw creative energy you know that 1) things were just as vital as the punk scene lionized in Please Kill Me and 2) another 25 years later we’ve reached the perfect moment for a similar all-encompassing document as younger generations of kids, led to the tunes by music blogs, file sharing and algorithms, want all the mythology they can get their hands on.
The largest hurdle is the “umbrella problem” or, in simpler terms what to call it all. “Punk’” was the perfect word for a time and place, no matter how disparate various music under the banner may appear, and with the addition of “chain” and “egg” qualifiers many still claim punk with an “if it ain’t broke why fix it?” philosophy. The total cannibalization of the early nineties Seattle scene by A&R zombies screaming “grunge!” instead of “brains!” has left some reasonable reservations towards Greeks bearing gifts in the form of hyped up new genre names.
The last serious effort of this kind I remember seeing was Electroclash! and it predictably fell on its face. The new trend of constantly naming microgenres – Witchhouse, Sea Punk, Vaguewave, etc. feels more like a self referential joke than a serious marketing attempt – not to say it can’t sell records. I’d still like a catchy name that combines the tolerance for total artistic experimentation with the DIY ethos that colors the most compelling music of this era but may have to satisfy myself with something as simple as “noise rock”.
Anyway we’ve waded impressively far into this review without even a mention of the literary work that inspired it so now’s a good time to mention that Schneider characterizes Arab on Radar as “No Wave” – a more experimental and unapologetically art-inflected movement that predates punk. It is also important to look at Arab on Radar within the diverse experimental music landscape of Providence, Rhode Island. As a San Diegan I met my fair share of underground residents who idolized my hometown due to The Locust and other hardcore acts but in my own case I felt a special magnetism toward Providence.
If I’m going to be super technical things started for me with The Talking Heads, although they weren’t technically a RISD band, but Shepard Fairey would be a less tenuous starting point. By 1994 he’d moved to San Diego and assembled a powerful street team from my friends and acquaintances in the graffiti subculture. His Obey Giant stickers also began showing the influence of Russian Constructivism and as a dedicated fan I filled detailed notebooks with examples of every new design and color way – catalogued meticulously by location and date of collection.
The moment that turned Providence into a borderline religious pilgrimage destination came when I finally discovered that my favorite hand silk-screened mini comix and noise rock records were all pouring from a shared art space in a former mill called Fort Thunder. I called their phone, got permission from Jim Drain to move in and spent a month narrowly avoiding subjecting the FORCEFIELD performance costumes to my compulsive bed wetting before spending my twentieth birthday at a formative noise show.
I already knew the Arab on Radar guys before this. I saw them in at least two different colors of Dickie’s and hopped in their van earlier that year to ride along to Venice Beach. As a lifelong Californian it was a bit of culture shock watching pasty New-Englanders rub sunblock (I never touch the stuff) above denim cut-offs and buying matching Ray-Ban’s.
Let me put things a different way: every time friends have dragged me to an East Coast beach with grassy dunes and chilling breezes I feel a certain pressure to pretend to enjoy myself despite every single thing about the water, sand and general ambiance feeling “wrong”. Maybe some of the AoR crew were feeling the same and missing their flimsy wooden fences, salt grass and American beach grass.
Shifting back to music the only word for myself at these earlier stages was “fan”. I’ve read of near empty Fireside shows and hostile fans but can tell you with certainty that me and the Belden House crew brought the energy and enthusiasm at every show from 1999 to 2001. 21 and up was a different matter – I might have even gotten a roomie’s ID cut in half attempting to see the guys at The Empty Bottle.
One of my favorite bits was when Schneider placed the aluminum headstock of his Kramer, or other electric guitar with a strong neck, on the floor and swung forward in an arc with his stomach resting against the lower body. Total annihilation of rock instruments and proletariat bodies was the order of the day, not to mention conventional song structures, and I did my part by running at the old bowler’s benches and causing a complete flip when I threw my shoulder into the “ass groove” and launched my ankles skyward.
Besides buying Repopulation Program, You’reSoaking In It! and any other compilation I could find for Load or Providence I scooped up a vinyl copy of Rough Day at the Orifice. Along with the menacing high pitched guitars and frantic, confessional vocals I loved the pink sleeve design on brown cardboard and the tiny bits of hair Mat Brinkman had mixed in the printing ink. It almost looked like Andy Warhol’s prints with glitter or diamonds if the light hit things right.
Schneider talks about not signing with Load in the book and I do wonder how such a move could have panned out for them. Skin Graft, and then later 31G, seemed to be giving their all but would a local label have been able to give more support? As many great bands were on Load but nobody ever sold quite like Lightning Bolt, questions about relative sizes of fish and ponds are reasonable – there’s no easy answer.
It was always a riot throwing Rough Day on the family turntable and hearing my father read out the title in his Arkansas farm boy drawl. You wouldn’t be missing the pun or double entendre if he had anything to say about it – and he always did. Although I may have once and simply forgotten I really do regret not seeing the band with Andrea. I’ve played in only a couple of bands without women and it’s not something I’m looking to repeat.
The energy changes and I’m just not at home in a “guy van”.
My father, himself a complex discharge from the navy for insubordination, also got a real kick out of reading out the dirty song titles and lyrics. I went to Mr. Pottymouth’s poetry reading at Quimby’s and never felt too offended by the subject matter. When Joey Karam from The Locust started Le Shok with that one explicit record cover it always felt like they were low key biting AoR’s schtick – in a way that wasn’t especially shocking.
Maybe Eric Paul, aka Mr. Pottymouth, would cringe at the comparison but in recent years I’ve always thought of his former stage persona as a living avatar of Quagmire from Family Guy. (in terms of repressed New England sexuality, not his poetry skills). I actually wanted to talk about the working class and, for want of a better word, “townie” aspects of Arab on Radar. Schneider makes it clear that he and his band mates came up around Federal Hill, had family members connected to former mayor Cianci’s “Old Providence” and never quite fit in with the RISD and Brown students.
From my view across the country I never saw things looking too cliquey but there were clear cultural delineations between bands: On the “townie” side sits Sub-Pop signed Six Finger Satellite, Arab on Radar, Dungbeetle, Landed, Olneyville Sound System, White Mice, Curmudgeon Clique, perhaps 25 Suaves and assorted J./Jon von Ryan projects. On the art school side we start with Les Savy Fav, then Black Dice, Mudboy, Lightning Bolt, FORCEFIELD, Lazy Magnet, Kites, SHV, Russian Tsarlag and more recently Human Beast.
I don’t know enough about the early lounge/exotica movement to place anyone and even my favorite Providence folk duo, The Iditarod, is as much of a mystery in this regard as Amoebic Ensemble. It’s hard to know every tiny detail about a city you only slept in for three weeks – even if you’re as big of a nerd as I am. The class struggle bits are not to talk shit but instead an overly simplified attempt to pick Arab on Radar apart and see what made them tick.
The death of the trades, the entitled attitudes of art school kids and a constant feeling of “impostor syndrome” in the world of experimental music could account for some of the shoulder chips but not all of them. If Schneider is to be believed good old fashioned sexual frustration filled the balance. Even with a national roadmap to the finest purveyors of extreme European pornography and a religiously followed rotation as to who cranks the hog in what order when in hotel bathrooms it seems like nothing could effectively stem the pressure.
Imagine bailing out a sinking boat but the boat is full of mayonnaise that pours down the leg of some terrycloth shorts and you start to get an idea. Sometimes the simple act of release takes on the dimensions of a Herculean Labour. In these sections Schneider starts to almost read like Peter Sotos and it’s entertaining enough. In contrast to the old saying that “an army travels on its stomach”, Arab on Radar appear to have done so on their nutsacks.
Despite the constant urges Jeff and his band mates behaved respectfully to any female artists, promoters and traveling mates they accompanied except for one exception. TheNeed was an experimental metal band from Olympia, WA who happened to be lesbians and something caused Jeff to view them as a band “that put identity above music” and even blame them for the disappearance of free thought in the music underground.
Perhaps being a little younger, growing up in California instead of New England and identifying as a feminist my whole life shifted my views on lots of this stuff. I never once considered The Need an overtly political or identity centered band. They were a shredding guitar band with innovative upright drum parts and vocal melodies and the fact that I wouldn’t get attacked for my colorful eye makeup watching The Need but would seeing death metal heavyweights Nile (ironically if you know how ancient pharaohs wore makeup) was simply a bonus.
It sounds like someone from AoR was defacing The Needs’s posters when touring ahead of them and a small verbal altercation ensued. For those that didn’t tour in 99/2000 posters in a venue was all the promo you had unless a weekly ran an ad or blurb. Schneider is a therapist now so maybe he’s made some progress on this.
Most ironic is that while complaining that The Need were “political” and “pushed identity”, Arab on Radar did the exact same thing in a different way. As a working class band in a scene dominated by art school kids their plumber style uniforms were a statement of class struggle and a clear message that they held more in common with the workers stocking green rooms with band’s rider cheese and veggie plates than the entitled would-be “rock stars” throwing this shit out the window.
Enough of that. Let’s break this rock music autobiography down in terms of what the public expects in books of this type:
1) SEX – all the frustrated masturbation you could dream of. One band member suffers family loss and drowns the emotions in all kinds of women. I thought it odd that Schneider hints at every member dallying with a fifteen year old girl but himself – did he abstain or is he being discrete for his wife’s sake? Glass houses and all… Some band business conducted in peep shows and strip clubs is vividly described.
2) DRUGS – mostly absent. Plenty of weed is smoked and sometimes it fucks with guitar playing. If the hard stuff shows up I blinked and missed it. Probably for the best – the last thing the kids need is another Please Kill Me telling them they can’t be authentic punks unless they pick up a needle but if you only read rock bios for dope and coke stories this ain’t for you. Someone trips and has a bad time in Dunkin’ Donuts.
3) ROCK N’ ROLL (aka FIGHTING) – According to the book these guys grew up rough and the move to cerebral art rock didn’t slow them down any. Best section for this stuff is definitely an early Marilyn Manson gig in Rhode Island. Disgruntled fans learn how far the opening band (AoR) can be pushed. Not too far it turns out. I seem to have forgotten a knuckle duster or two – more surprises for you when you read it!
Finally, should you read this book? Absolutely! While primarily focused on his own band Jeff clearly cares quite a lot about music and documents 94 – 02 Providence, and the national underground circuit, perfectly. His views on squat houses (and their watered down spaghetti) are hilarious and it’s definitely a fun day or two of reading with no lags. Plenty of super funny random anecdotes out of left field.
The biggest tragedy of the turn of the millennium underground is that everything was being documented on early websites and hosting services like Angelfire. That’s all gone now and lost to the ether. If a service is free you’re the product and our burgeoning scene stopped being profitable for our digital “hosts” a long time ago. Something to remember when entrusting our content to Facebook, X, Instagram and my own reliance on WordPress. Shit, I really need to make a backup.
Anyway it’s a minor miracle that Jeff remembered as much as he did, took the time to write it up and even created a printing house for himself and other voices. These kinds of efforts need to be lauded and supported.
They’re all we have and when Instagram, Facebook and others eventually shutter their virtual doors Psychiatric Tissues will still be a physical book with no wi-fi or web hosting required.
That said, if you are a close AoR fan left lost and angry from the divorce and want to know why Mommy and Daddy don’t love each other no more this is not the book for you. Something ego – Something substance problem – all super vague. Fans closer to the 2002 breakup and failed 2010 reunion might see more in these passages than I could. Eric, the singer’s, testimony might be more detailed but less believable. Couldn’t say.
I prefer to remember how things were that last night I saw them on Oops! Tour in 2002. Knitting Factory in Hollywood! Tried to bring my insane homeless friend but se said it sounded “really annoying!” Arab slayed! Bolt slayed! Locust slayed! Hella’s not really my jam.
It’s coming up on, if today isn’t actually the exact date of, the one year anniversary of me starting this writing project. Unfortunately I obfuscated the dates of the first handful of pieces in an attempt to impose chronological order without having to pay WordPress for a table of contents plug-in. The site is as messy as ever but this will be the 135th post with total all time views inching toward 21k from viewers around the world.
Running the numbers that works out to one new post every 2.7 days which doesn’t seem too shabby but I’ll leave the judgements as to where this output sits on the quality/quantity continuum to others.
I’m no closer to my original goal of publishing a book unless you count having at least several books worth of unsorted material. What I view as the largest stumbling block remains stubbornly in place – what I intended to be an ethnography of underground culture is looking more and more like a memoir. As my only tool of documentation has been my own memories I’ve found it next to impossible to nudge myself out of the viewfinder of the camera of my mind’s eye.
As the character Chester Kent says in Guy Maddin’s criminally under-appreciated film The Saddest Music in the World:
“I’d say you qualify as the star of your own life.”
For any readers who share my concerns you’ll be relieved to hear that the central focus of this chapter is a nexus of culture where I never set foot at all. To get there you will need to accompany me for a text version of a now popular genre of YouTube video: an internet rabbit hole research detective story. The trail began when one of my earliest pieces dredged up a fragment of memory from an old acquaintance and intermittent mentor.
I’ve brought up Martin Bilben and his art space Plasticratic one or two times in passing but for this piece a closer gaze is appropriate. I forget what first brought me to his home and workshop but the most likely explanation would be that he hosted a group show that included some of Steve Lawrence’s paintings. At Fourth and Laurel it was just close enough to San Diego High School to come around during an open campus lunch or after school.
He was best known for making colorful lamps with a retro futurist aesthetic but my primary attraction was to the hoard of audiovisual gadgetry he’d assembled. Although I don’t remember ever seeing a performance he collected electric organs and used them to create music roughly comparable to Mr Quintron from New Orleans and Providence’s John Von Ryan.
The fact that he tangentially figured into my experience with The Make-Up that I chose to highlight as origin story caused me to reach back out after decades when beginning this project. Without his encouragement, advice and occasional proofreading in those first weeks it is unlikely that these writings would have persevered to their present stage.
I will link the piece that triggered his recollection here but the relevant passage involved nearly dying to a booby trap as me and Francois were breaking into the shuttered California Theater to paint graffiti.
We had gotten into a routine of chatting after I posted each new chapter, then a daily occurrence, and our conversation that night included this unassuming element:
San Diego has something of a reputation for cults – the world famous Heaven’s Gate mass suicides, UNARIUS and a chapter of Psychic TV adjacent Temple ov Psychick Youth are a few of the more famous examples. I hadn’t heard of anything like what Marty was describing though and the idea of an entire cult squatting the same derelict structure seemed fascinating. I tried to tease out more details or suggest that maybe he was thinking of the Jyoti Bihanga group on Adams Avenue but everything led to a dead end.
Here is a picture of Sri Chimnoy from Jyoti Bihanga lifting the FDNY
My next move was to go to Reddit. On r/sandiego I posted the scant details I had to see if anyone could fill in the the blanks. While I didn’t get anything concrete one commenter both reaffirmed Marty’s story and added new tantalizing details.
Thanks to u/satanic-frijoles for this vital clue
I now knew that not only was a yoga cult of some kind occupying a large downtown space, it was also filled with cutting edge computers and animation software. Amigas were of special interest to me as I grew up with a Commodore 64 and would drool over the box art of Amiga releases while renting software for my older computer at a La Mesa shop called The Commodore Connection. It looked light years ahead of the graphics on my friend’s Nintendos.
Unfortunately the comment also emphasized what was ultimately a red herring. The repetition of C Street kept my focus on The California Theater and the squatters that had inhabited it. The guy who chased us out and rigged up the fire escape had been playing a computer game the first time Francois and I tiptoed past his open apartment.
As unlikely as it now sounds I had convinced myself that the person I’ve dubbed “The Ogre of the California” once led a cult and attracted a gaggle of young attractive female followers. As is so often the case the truth proved to be far stranger than the fiction.
Without new leads and with other stories asserting themselves in my memory the mystery found it’s way to one of my back burners. I shifted focus to Fort Thunder, El Rancho and 134 other chapters worth of recollections but never quite gave up the chase. San Diego is full of intriguing legends: the story that finding all three troll bridges in a single night (there are only two of them) would cause an actual troll to materialize; the existence of a community of miniature houses built for actual dwarves and others I can’t think of at the moment.
Something about this story about a cult in an abandoned theater told me that it had to be based on a truth and when I found that truth it would justify however much time it took me to find it. In a strange way I could feel this story pulling to me, like the invisible forces created by a powerful magnet, even though I had never seen or experienced it’s elements in a physical form.
Things didn’t really change for close to a year. Every now and then something would remind me of this story and I’d start poking into it again. I found a blog called Hidden San Diego that had a piece on the California Theater. It had a lot of great pictures of the interior and some vague sentences and comments about squatters but nothing that sounded like either a cult or whatever I was looking for.
A little over a week ago an unrelated Reddit post pointed me toward a documentary on the San Diego music scene called It’s Gonna Blow!. This got me thinking about everything I had missed out on from a combination of youth and questionable taste. Crash Worship sat at the top of this list – even at a time when my favorite book was the issue of Re/Search with Burroughs, Gysin and Throbbing Gristle and my favorite movie was Tetsuo: The Iron Man I somehow thought a Crash Worship show sounded like a “stupid hippy drum circle” and simply didn’t go.
With that fresh in my mind I stumbled across an interview with Alaura O’Dell – better known to fans of Industrial Music as Paula P-Orridge. I had actually managed to see Throbbing Gristle on their very last tour but some details in the interview reminded me that Temple ov Psychick Youth at least had members, if not an entire cell, in San Diego.
To be clear I never thought that the mysterious theater cult was actually TOPY but I did figure there might be enough crossover to get some solid leads on whatever I was searching for. I joined a Facebook group that used the acronym TOPI – my first assumption had been that the final I was adopted to distance themselves from Genesis Breyer P-Orridge but the opposite was actually true. Genesis had chosen TOPI after splitting with the first incarnation of TOPY but regardless of final vowel the group claims no affiliation or association with Gen’s controversial legacy.
A lead seemed to materialize but the person was actually thinking of an old church by Pokez where members of Crash Worship had lived.
At this point I thought to message a friend who still lives in San Diego. He had some interesting tidbits of information: a pornographic film most likely shot in San Diego by Sleazy and Monte Cazzaza included on a VHS called Psychic TV First Transmission; the as-yet-unconfirmed sculpture of a beetle outside The Natural History Museum with a Psychic Cross imprinted in it’s back (I’d appreciate a photo of this if accurate and someone can take one)
All roads seemed to be leading back to Crash Worship so I joined another Facebookgroup and posted there. I got some interested comments and compliments on my other writings but that was it. I decided to start writing anyone from San Diego that was older than me and involved in the Industrial scene. A message to Bob Barley from Tit Wrench and Vinyl Communications is most likely languishing in his requests folder as we aren’t Facebook friends.
That’s when I started getting replies back from John Goff.
I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that John had played in Crash Worship although it was something I knew. I had been a fan of Physics in my teenage years, I was a science geek and originally majored in it, and got to see them in Chicago in 1999. I had met John a good handful of times and even exchanged some messages ten years ago when I misremembered the name of his Wizards of War project with his brother as Bishops of Battle after watching the 1983 film Nightmares.
John said he knew exactly what I was talking about and sent me my own Reddit post from a year earlier. I started to feel a bit like a snake swallowing it’s own tail, like the only evidence for what I was searching for were my own digital footprints and Marty’s hazy memories were only the result of, in his own words “a vial of lsd, gallon of ghb, and a steady supply of tj pharms”.
Just as I was starting to give up hope John blew the whole thing open.
The building was never a Theater but a four story structure at Sixth and Broadway called at various times The Loft, The Hypnoloft, The Dildo Dave Loft and finally The World Evolution Loft.
The cult was a Sufi based group founded in Colorado called Circle of Friends which is almost impossible to Google unless you add in the pseudonym of it’s leader Murshid Van Merlin.
He dropped in this next link with the simple message:
Since that first click the information and stories have been pouring in. From roughly 1992 to 2000 this building was home to more than I could possibly imagine: a truly shady sounding yoga cult, legendary parties in multiple genres of music, the world’s first computer edited magazine and the world’s first amateur video pornography studio, the biggest producers in West Coast underground rave culture and even the most infamous party in San Diego Comic-Con History with appearances from Roger Corman and Glen Danzig.
It seems ironic that the same year this place ended I travelled all the way to the other side of the country to see Fort Thunder while all of this was happening right under my nose and I wasn’t there for any of it. I’ve been collecting stories for the past few days and expect to keep hearing new things for some time to come.
Like the title of Henry Rollins’ 1994 memoir, my first and strongest inspiration was not to pick up any instrument but simply to Get in the Van. Before playing my first live show as Spidermammal I was already going to shows early for bands like Monotract – as much to hang out as it was to ask for help sneaking into the over 21 venues I wasn’t otherwise old enough to get into. Even for the Spidermammal show while I had been composing music and yearned to present it to a live audience the more urgent reasoning was as a pretense to hang out with my favorite band at the time Deerhoof.
In some part this must stem from the role of The Farm in my family mythology. My parents had met each other because of their individual decisions to simply show up at this commune so it only made sense that I would similarly show up once I thought I’d found the cultural and artistic pulse of my own generation. Another factor, somewhat paradoxically, was social awkwardness: after moving to the Bay Area with a couple friends to attend SFSU we failed so completely in making friends with our immediate peer group that we instead began seeking out our idols in underground comix and experimental music.
Symbolically speaking Fort Thunder was the ultimate van: a nexus of the most vital things happening in both the aforementioned music and comix but also the concept of the alternate living space, or punk house, as a form of expression in itself. Things might have wound up very differently if Fort Thunder hadn’t listed their phone number on their earliest web page or Jim Drain hadn’t picked that phone up when I decided to call it or if he hadn’t said “yes” when I asked point blank if I could show up and temporarily live there.
As serendipity would have it all these things did happen and my time at Fort Thunder brought me into contact with Friends Forever.
Even as I was going through a specific obsession with drum and bass duos like Lightning Bolt, godheadSilo and eventually Japan’s Ruins it was easy to overlook the fact that Friends Forever had the same lineup. Part of this was that their music, while incorporating the sludgy metal some of these other groups were known for, also subverted expectations by steering the riffage into exuberant, triumphant marches.
More importantly the overwhelming aspects of the entire live experience served to overshadow the underlying instrumental minimalism. First and foremost the show took place spilling out the side doors of a Volkswagen Type 2 “hippy bus”. This was unprecedented enough at the turn of the millennium but on top of that the music was supplemented by a light show, lasers, smoke machines, bubbles and eventually fireworks and custom inflatables.
I kept in contact with the band, primarily the drummer Nate Hayden who I bonded with over a shared interest in the OTC psychedelic Coricidin, but I wouldn’t cross paths with them again and literally “get in the van” until after returning to California in the wake of 9/11. Friends Forever essentially toured constantly from their beginnings around 1998 until their breakup in early 2005 but I think it was some time in 2002 that I was finally able to meet back up.
I did pass through Denver at least once before that but I didn’t know any way to get in touch with them or that their house was called Monkey Mania. I spent at least one long layover wandering around downtown and asking the teenage runaways and assorted scumbags that assembled on a grassy hill next to a bank if they’d heard of them.
Nobody had.
They had been the subject of a 2001 documentary film of the same name directed by Ben Wolfisohn. The indie documentary space was nowhere near as crowded in that year as it is now and this movie seemed to both reach a larger audience than and bolster the popularity of the band itself. Some of these memories are difficult for me to pin in place but I’m almost certain that a few of them happened before they were joined by a third member: keyboardist Jason or Rudy Bloody.
After briefly glancing at the discogs page it looks like he already was recording with them by that year. I’m ready to be incorrect about a lot of these details but the way that I remember it this first batch of memories happened when it was still just Nate and Josh. At the beginning I wasn’t literally riding in the van but rather following along the tour like it was The Grateful Dead.
My good friend Josh Harper had just gotten a very old car from his grandmother that he called Grandma and I was staying with him at his parents’ Culver City house with our friends Dain and Vanessa. Inspired by a San Diego tradition called Chicken Burrito Madness we were doing a lot of shoplifting, mostly liquor, and nonstop drinking. After catching Friends Forever somewhere in Los Angeles I drunkenly decided to steal a bunch of metallic fabric markers from a Party City on our drive to the Bay Area.
To my future embarrassment I used these to leave some sloppy tags around the inside of Josh’s car that lasted until Grandma eventually died many years later. One of the first places we visited was Berkeley’s People’s Park where an excess of quality shirts in the free clothing bin inspired us to use the markers to make some unofficial Friends Forever merchandise. The one that I remember featured Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: I added marijuana leaves, pills and syringes between his outstretched, gloves hands along with the band name.
Friends Forever were playing that night outside of a San Francisco bar, possibly Kimo’s, so we met back up and presented them with the garments intending for them to be extra merchandise. These shirts became the inspiration for a track called Ossian’s Shirts on one of their final unreleased recordings – once again throwing my entire timeline into question. Regardless, I remember this as the point where I began to ride along with the band.
Nate usually controlled the different aspects of the light show at the same time that he was playing drums but for a couple of shows I was offered a “stage tech” position. I took it seriously – I made sure to only add one new element per song so each one would feel like a revelation. First it was only flashing lights and fog machine, then lasers appeared on the second song and bubbles debuted on the third so the set could end with a mix of all these things.
I don’t know if this was more entertaining for the crowd but I always get bored watching bands like Caroliner if they reveal all of their visual and staging tricks right at the beginning of the set.
The first show I rode along to was at a warehouse space somewhere in San Francisco’s SOMA district. I’d been fascinated with the neighborhood since my year of college in 1998 when me and Francois would walk it’s streets to find pieces by big graffiti artists like Twist and copies of Iggy Scam’s Turd Filled Donut. I remember being taken with the space they performed outside of but unfortunately my only clear memory is a girl at the show leveraging my apparent closeness to Nate to ask if he was romantically available.
I don’t think I knew how to answer.
The next day the show was at a warehouse space near the intersection of Grand and Broadway in Oakland called Grandma’s House. This must have been around the time I met Rob Enbom – Friends Forever was probably playing a few shows or even touring with a band he was in called Vholtz. At that point gentrification had barely touched this part of Oakland and the neighborhood felt chaotic and dangerous in a way that was diminished in later years. Things felt especially tense as we drove in through a sliding gate in the alley through a cloud of hostile and openly aggressive stares from the locals.
I’m not sure exactly how this happened but somehow I had gotten my hand on some syringes and powdered cocaine. The most likely explanation is that I briefly separated from the band in San Francisco and met up with friends who were also IV drug users. Either in person or by mail Nate had given me a copy of a tape he made called Airick Heater : Poison Addict from a period in his life when he had similar interests.
[Author’s Note: I’ve been mistaken all these years in assuming Airick Heater was a pseudonym of Nate’s. Airick Heater is the name of another Denver artist wholater moved to Portland and had a club night called Blowpony. While extant copies of this particular tape will still show overt references to IV cocaine use in the liner notes any other inferences are far from definitive.]
I was pretty tactless about that sort of thing in my early twenties and I thought he might still be into it. He definitely wasn’t. Whenever they were on tour the members of Friends Forever were perpetually sober which makes a lot of sense when you consider that nearly all of their sets ended with the police arriving and they needed to be ready to drive away at a moment’s notice.
He wasn’t judgmental about the fact that I was doing it but he was nervous about how the rest of the band or our hosts would react to the same information so I decided to take it to the inside bathroom instead of trying to hit in the van. I stepped out rushing to the sound of wild free jazz saxophones – most likely a set by the band Hospitals.
Friends Forever toured extremely slowly, mostly because the Volkswagen could never go above 60 mph, so they never spent the night where they played if there was a big drive ahead of them. I stuck around Grandma’s House while they drove on into the night. The main thing I remembered about the place was a huge orange and white parachute on the wall and a neighboring unit that had been turned into an impromptu swimming pool.
The next morning I walked up Grand Avenue with Rob so that he could catch a bus to his job at Rasputin Records and I could take a Greyhound back toward San Diego. I discreetly slipped the capped syringe from my pocket to a covered trash can as we walked.
In an odd coincidence my future friends and sometimes collaborators Complicated Horse Emergency Research moved into Grandma’s House when everybody was moving out and renamed the space Count Dracula Africa. They recorded videos in the space of microwaves full of animal skulls and light bulbs. Running the microwave causes the lightbulbs to briefly illuminate in what looks like a random order.
When I met back up with Friends Forever the following year they had just released the album Killball on the Providence experimental label Load Records. Dedicated to the Denver Broncos this album imagines a futuristic form of ultraviolet football and was probably their most successful and widely distributed release. Jason was definitely part of the touring lineup at this point.
Some thematic additions to the live show included using a fan to blow up some tarps that were sewn together and spray painted with their logo and throwing nerf footballs into the crowd with ropes tied around them. The ropes meant that the footballs could be pulled back and thrown over and over. The first show was a small festival in Hollywood in front of that domed movie theater by Amoeba Records.
I wish I could remember the name of the festival. Some other groups playing included the psychedelic folk act The Winter Flowers and Sam McPheeters hardcore supergroup Wrangler Brutes. Whoever organized the show helped Friends Forever drive their van into a part of the courtyard that wouldn’t ordinarily be accessible to vehicles. The night was intended to culminate in a screening of a rare original print of the Penelope Spheeris film The Decline of Western Civilization Part Three.
There were supposed to be a few moderately famous people there for the screening. I remember hearing that one of the footballs from the Friends Forever performance hit Kevin Nealon, the guy that used to do the fake news on Saturday Night Live, and he was pretty pissed about it. The real kicker to the night was that somebody stole the movie from the theater lobby and they had to cancel the screening at the last second.
When feature films still came in two octagonal metal cases for the 35 mm reels it wasn’t that uncommon to leave them sitting in the lobby underneath the projection booth. The things were heavy and you had to carry them up some narrow stairs to get to the projector. Plus the person whose job it was to carry them into the lobby and the person whose job it was to carry them up to the projector were usually two different people.
Anyway this was probably one of the first times that a thief had decided to target this specific vulnerability and make it a problem. Oddly enough I can’t seem to find any media coverage of this night although I’m moderately sure my specific details are correct. This was also one of the early times that I crossed paths with my future friend Ryan Riehle but failed to remember him.
While we were in Los Angeles we stopped by a house that might have been where Ben Wolfisohn lived and definitely some other guys who worked in the special effects industry. I know Nate had moved out to LA to try to do the same thing previously so maybe it was friends from that time and totally unconnected to the guy that made the documentary. Someone I talked to said he was working on a movie called Dead Birds – he described it as “kids go into a haunted house and get turned into weird monsters by ghosts”.
Or something like that.
I suggested that for the kid who gets turned into a monster they could make a body suit so an actor get’s on all fours but it looks like he’s bending over backwards like with his face upside down and his arms and legs twisted around the wrong way. I figured you could have a sequence where somebody’s body is getting bent like that and then when they run around at normal “all fours” speed but it looks like they’re bent the wrong way it’ll look creepy.
I know a movie called Dead Birds did come out but I’ve never looked to see if they used the idea or not. Maybe it had even already been done – I don’t keep up with all the creature effects in all the horror movies. I was just kind of the type of person who always thought I had really good ideas for fields I didn’t even work in.
The energy had been a little weird between me and Jason because I had known Nate and Josh for a couple years but didn’t really know him – or maybe it’s all in my head. The thing that happened was that we had gone by a health food store with bulk bins and me and Nate had bought some granola and I didn’t know at the time but Jason bought some granola too.
So we were chilling at these movie people’s house and what turned out to be Jason’s granola was on the arm rest of a futon and he was eating some. I thought it was the other granola so I was reaching in and eating some too. Every time I did that Jason would twist the bag closed but I just kept obliviously untwisting it and reaching back in for more granola.
This happened a lot of times, at least three, until Jason finally said:
“Hey, I’m not trying to be a dick or anything but I bought this for me!”
That’s when I realized the mixup and apologized. After Los Angeles we drove to some small town on the way to wherever was next – it might have been Riverside. It was Jason’s birthday and the movie Freddie vs Jason had just come out so we went to a movie theater to watch it. After that we all went on this hike up a mountain but it was really dark and we didn’t have flashlights. At least we had a couple of dogs with us so as long as we stayed close to them we could be reasonably sure we wouldn’t stumble off the edge of a cliff because dogs can see better in the dark.
Instead of everybody riding in the van Nate drove separately in a pickup truck with both of the dogs. The way that Friends Forever tour they basically never crash where the shows happen they just keep driving and sleep in the vehicles. I rode with Nate and we’d share the bed in the back of the truck which was comfortable enough except that I’m not really used to sleeping with dogs too. Josh and Jason made jokes about us being gay.
The next year when I met back up with Friends Forever it was the only time I set up a show for them at Scolari’s Office in San Diego. They were touring with Hale Zukas that was a band with Rob Enbom and some other Grandma’s House guys and also the first time I metJohn Benson. I had booked this local band I thought would be a good match called Electrocrypt that played what I called “psychedelic biker fuzz”.
The band was centered on this older couple of a German prog-rock style drummer with big white poofy hair and this goth granny lady that played a tiny keyboard on a little table with a Rolodex that had all the song chords and some kind of Halloween decoration like a fake spider. The other two members were a bit younger – a guitar player that always wore a leather vest that said Dead Boys, The Damned and his own band name in white out and the singer was like a hair metal guy.
I really dug Electrocrypt’s sound but they didn’t seem to be too popular with the rest of the San Diego scene around my age. They still played a lot. I did all the correspondence with Klaudia, the keyboard player, and she would fill the bottom of every e-mail with internet 2.0 style animated gifs of pumpkins, ghosts and black cats.
I randomly decided to look them back up last December and saw that she’d passed away.
Hale Zukas was named after a paraplegic man that John Benson worked with in his job called Easy Does It centered on power wheelchairs and disability transport. He was just getting into converting diesel vehicles to run on veggie oil and they toured in an ambulance that had been decommissioned after helping in the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks. It would always flip people out at shows because they’d assume that somebody had been injured and the show was probably cancelled.
Anyway there is a clear line from touring with Friends Forever and the work John Benson would go on to do with The Bus from the Living Hell tour and Larry Bus. Their unconventional style of playing out of their own van instead of inside the concert venues obviously inspired the idea of creating a vehicle as concert venue. Beyond that the overall touring energy – last minute shows, being unconcerned with making money and camping out in nature between performances carried over.
Ironically I think this night have been the only time I ever saw Friends Forever play inside instead of doing the van thing. There was already some static with Scolari’s over Hale Zukas wanting to bring in their own PA so maybe they decided it would just be better to streamline things. Friends Forever did play on the curb outside this same bar in either late 2002 or early 2003 though because I just saw it in the Friends Forever Documentary 2 that came out on VHS on Animal Disguise Records.
It also clearly didn’t bother the venue because you can see the popular bartender who used to breathe fire to amuse patrons happily dancing with their inflatable. I forget his name but he died of heart disease not long after. I’m in the same video wearing a skirt I made out of colorful tapestries.
Everybody stayed over at my parent’s house which eventually led to John Benson bringing my mother a power wheelchair when she started to have mobility issues from multiple sclerosis. I think Friends Forever stayed over too. The picture up there is the Hale Zukas ambulance and me walking on some stilts that had been in my yard for as long as I can remember.
The next show was at the Pixel Palace in Riverside and I rode along with my girlfriend at the time. It was Erin Allen’s spot but I’ll do the search engines a favor and not write out his band name from that era. The main thing I remember from this show was a ridiculous drunk couple.
Both of them kept talking to me all night about how much they liked doing cocaine so after several hours of this I was like “fine, let’s do some” and we all went into the bathroom and just stood around for a minute. When I finally asked “where’s the cocaine?” they said “I thought you had it!” That wasn’t the ridiculous part though.
A few hours later I was peeing in the bathroom when the girl ran in and closed the door behind her. She gave me an intense look and said:
“You have a girlfriend right? I have a boyfriend! We’re gonna be good… right?”
I told her I didn’t care what she did but I was going to finish pissing and get out of the bathroom. Despite all this we gave them tickets to go see The Cure or maybe it was Morrissey. My girlfriend had won them on the radio but for some reason we couldn’t go. I forget the specifics but we worked at a lot of events like Warped Tour and OzzFest.
Friends Forever and Hale Zukas drove toward their next spot after the show but we stayed over to catch a bus back to San Diego. Erin Allen’s girlfriend walked us to the bus station the next day. She pointed out this building that was supposed to have animatronics of Catholic Friars chasing Native Americans. After a bit of research I’m pretty sure this must have been a clock at The Mission Inn.
This detail might be out of order but my last memory of Friends Forever is a show they played outside a big theater with Sonic Youth and Erase Errata. One of Brian Miller’s projects was also on the bill but I forget which one. The thing that stuck with me was that while Sonic Youth had specifically asked them to play the venue couldn’t get the proper permits so they played outside anyway and were quickly chased away by police.
The bands that played inside were not only paid well but also given hotel rooms. I remember hanging out in somebody’s room that night and feeling like the whole thing was a bit of an injustice and that Thurston should have used his leverage to get them a better deal. Of course I don’t see it that way now.
The reality was that Friends Forever wouldn’t have had it any other way.
The thing about touring is that there’s always bad nights and disappointments. Shows that get cancelled or nobody shows up or everyone stands outside while you play or you don’t make enough money or your equipment breaks or somebody gets arrested. For Friends Forever at least half these things were certainties and even if some of the other things happened it never seemed to get them down.
It was like by self sabotaging and painting themselves into a corner they had made themselves immune to disappointment. The bar was already set so low that no amount of bad luck could possibly compete. You can see it clearly reflected in the name of the label that they used to self release almost all of their recordings:
Maybe I’m totally wrong about this but I imagine that there are some readers who are mostly here for the underground art and music stuff and just kind of roll their eyes through the drug sections or scan ahead until I start talking about a show again. And then of course there would be readers who just want to hear about crazy drug stories and just kind of feel like:
“Why the fuck would I want to read about some lame ass band that broke up in less than a year? Get on to the sniffing, smoking and shooting!”
Then of course there would be the third type of reader that absolutely lives for the content that focuses on these separate but connected worlds like a rarely available but absolutely delicious version of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. I could be drastically underestimating how rare this kind of reader is. Books about the earliest days of Punk like Please Kill Me are absolutely full of bands and drugs and clearly have a broad audience but I feel like that’s a little different only because all of those bands have gone on to be at least moderately well known.
I was thinking about something kind of like this when I was just recently having a conversation with AT from Attitude Problem at the Blog Cabin Reunion that just went down in New Mexico. I had discovered since writing the Fort Thunder chapters that both AT and Jeremy Harris from Lazy Magnet had been playing in USAISAMONSTER at the show that happened on my twentieth birthday. I remember that the band was five different people but for whatever reason I had only really talked and vibed with Tom and Colin.
While I’m on this topic I should also mention that I recently remembered that the band Mastodon played the same show. They were a still fairly underground group at this stage as opposed to the mainstream metal juggernaut that they are today and didn’t seem particularly out of place. I might as well mention that a group called Duct Tape Union also played – I don’t know anything about them except that they were probably local.
Anyway meeting AT and Jeremy many years later I never realized that we had all actually met at Fort Thunder way back in August of 2000. So I was talking to AT about what was exciting and attractive about Fort Thunder and I brought up this thing that Mat Brinkman said in an interview in The Comics Journal – basically that people who are into noise records are mostly not that into comics and people that are into comics are mostly never into noise records.
I know it’s not completely never as the thing that first drew me to Fort Thunder was discovering some of Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale’s mini-comics and then what cemented my need to actually go there was separately discovering the music of Lightning Bolt and Forcefield. I think my earliest exposure to the Fort Thunder comics world was a booklet called Coober Skeber Marvel Benefit Issue that was handed out free at the 1997 San Diego Comic-Con as a joke about Marvel declaring bankruptcy.
All of this is probably extremely interesting to a certain subset of people but I’ve already spent way too long in random asides so I’ll leave it as yes the bankruptcy was real, Chippendale had a Daredevil comic in it and beyond that you’ll have to look stuff up yourself. The worlds of underground music and comic books remain connected. While at the party I got to read a newer comic from Anya Davidson of Coughs called MNSTRFCKR
Image via Anya Davidson’s Whatever We Call Twitter Now
I also got to see a bunch of experimental music and take a lot of drugs. Yay comics! Yay noise music! Yay drugs! – anyway on to the actual story.
In early November of 2013 me and LaPorsha were living at my mom’s house in San Diego. We had been subletting somebody’s apartment in Koreatown but got sick of the constant hustle to come up with rent money and didn’t think living in Los Angeles was really worth it. I had just ridden down with Griffin from Sewn Leather for a show he was playing at OtrasObras in Tijuana.
I’ve already written at length in other places about the things that would eventually inspire us to move down to Tijuana ourselves but this was the period of time when we were going down a lot for shows and art openings but hadn’t actually lived down there ourselves yet. You could say it was our “honeymoon phase” with Tijuana.
I had been down enough to have contacts to set up a show when my friends from Moira Scar hit me up about playing Tijuana with their project V.E.X. It looks like Gmail has deleted the messages but I’m pretty sure I tried Otras Obras first and when that didn’t work out I was able to set it up with Mustache which shared the exact same back patio anyway. The date they needed was November Second which just so happened to be Dia de Los Muertos.
For those unfamiliar with the holiday there are actually two days of the dead. November First is for those who died as children and November Second is observed for those who died as adults. This should clear things up for anybody confused about the date. I billed the show as a “Cempasuchil Social” – the Spanish name for the marigold flowers used in Dia de Los Muertos observances and an acquaintance from the Tijuana artist community named Zophie Felina made a flyer for it.
Like most shows it didn’t really turn out the way I had pictured it. I was hoping that the locals who were interested in coming out would have just had things like marigolds and sugar skulls lying around and would maybe bring some along to decorate the place. I can see in retrospect how that was an unreasonable expectation. Dia de Los Muertos is a very traditional, family oriented holiday and deciding to go out to a goth show to see some American bands is kind of the opposite of that.
If I had already been living in Tijuana I could have made a lot of that happen myself. As it was I rode down with V.E.X. at more or less standard load in time. It no doubt would have helped things to have an actual local act on the bill but for whatever reason that didn’t happen. It might have been that the venue only wanted three bands and Little Debbie was already attached to the bill. Maybe I just didn’t try to find one.
Anyway it was a perfectly fine modestly attended rock show.
I don’t think I would have been on any drugs this night. At this point in time I was still primarily using pain pills and by the time we had driven to the venue all of the pharmacies that sell that kind of thing would have been closed. There was a homeless junkie kid I knew down there who made his living walking between all the popular downtown bars and selling assorted snacks and pre rolled joints of the shittiest weed imaginable.
I do remember a particularly dramatic moment in the night when he was lying in the actual gutter injecting himself with heroin. All of the bars knew all about his drug use and never would have permitted him to set a foot inside their bathrooms. That was most likely his best choice to have enough streetlight to see by while still using the edges of parked vehicles to stay out of sight of passing law enforcement.
So obviously it wasn’t the kind of social situation where I could just disappear with that guy to go get high for a minute. In fact I never copped with him at any point even after making the move over the border. I ended up independently discovering a trap house in a notorious neighborhood called Coahuila that this dude had heard of but said he would never go to because of how sketchy and dangerous it was.
I’m not saying this as a flex but as observation on how it can feel like there are two different sets of rules for natives and foreigners when it comes to this kind of stuff. I eventually met a few other American junkies while crossing back and forth over the border who said they frequented the same trap house so it’s not like I was particularly tough or badass for going over there.
As long as I’m on the topic I might as well mention another observation I made a few months later when I was living in Tijuana. After the trip to Northern California to look for trim work that this story will culminate it LaPorsha made a batch of weed cookies to try to sell in the United States. We accidentally brought them over the border with us and although they hadn’t attracted the attention of Mexico’s drug sniffing dogs it seemed unwise to take the same chances with their American counterparts.
We weren’t interested in eating them ourselves so the only option was to sell them off in Tijuana at a much lower price. This brought me to the kind of punk and reggae themed bars that were popular with teenagers but I wouldn’t have normally frequented. In these places I noticed that openly smoking black tar heroin seemed to be viewed as socially acceptable – this certainly wasn’t the case with the older, hipper crowd I hung around. The hardest opiate any of them openly used was tramadol.
I can’t help but wonder what’s become of the Tijuana drug scene since the cartels have switched out fentanyl for tar. It’s nice to think that they would continue to grow poppies to supply their own people but considering both the cost and labor involved and general Mexican attitudes toward drug users it doesn’t seem especially likely. It’s probably at least as hellish as things have gotten on this side of the border.
Even if friends had offered to let all the bands and entourage crash down in Tijuana the middle of the night is the only opportunity to drive back into the United States without hours of waiting so the only real option was to drive right back to my mother’s house. As soon as Roxy got back over the border one of our friends that had ridden along, a girl from Los Angeles named Ariel, started demanding that we find a 24 hour fast food drive through.
Nobody was especially sympathetic as food is everywhere in Tijuana. Not just street taco stands, there’s a straight up Burger King a couple of blocks away from the venue we were staying at. Also all kinds of clearly sanitary packaged foods like chips and cookies in every corner store and probably even the bar we played at. The dude shooting up in the gutter had sealed bags of Funyuns even.
Ariel said that she didn’t “trust” any of the food in Mexico. Roxy was way too tired from a full day of driving and wasn’t about to stop anywhere. Ariel had a full on tantrum – like actual crying. I don’t know what she did when we got back to my mom’s house. I guess either ate something there or just went to sleep.
Anyway her tantrum was a big part of why we wrote a “passive aggressive” invitation to our wedding in Mexico the next year. We didn’t want to deal with people who were afraid of the food or whatever else down there. My siblings said that message was the reason they didn’t come to the wedding. It was probably for the best.
We were sticking around San Diego for a couple more days because we had a show that Monday at The Void. That Sunday we spent the day checking out the different Thrift Stores around Spring Valley. When I’d been growing up there hadn’t been any in short walking distance from my parent’s house but now there were a couple of big ones.
I was walking through the parking lot of the one that used to be a small movie theater when I saw a yellow box of American Spirits on the asphalt. I always kicked cigarette boxes when I saw them – you can feel in an instant the difference between an empty one and a not so empty one. A not empty one might have cigarettes in it, which I did smoke in those days, or even money as people occasionally use them as wallets.
This one happened to contain a moderately sized baggie that was bulging at the edges with methamphetamine.
The feeling of this discovery reminded me of finding a five dollar bill in an Emeryville ball pit my first year of college – I instantly felt like it must have represented a far greater loss for whoever dropped it than it did a gain for me. In the ball pit this would have presumably been a young child. This time around it had to have been somebody who liked meth enough to buy a sizable quantity of it.
I don’t particularly like methamphetamine.
I had bought a sizable quantity of it at one point in time, three and a half grams or an eighth of an ounce, for the express purpose of smuggling it to Chicago with a counterfeit Greyhound pass and selling it at a profit. I have sniffed, smoked and injected the drug more times than I can count off hand but have probably declined offers of it an even greater number of times. To the best of my recollection I’ve never bought any quantity of it for personal use.
I never actually weighed the bag of meth I found but it was probably either 3.5 or 1.75 grams – an eighth or a sixteenth or “teener” which is a unit of measurement I’ve only seen used with methamphetamine. The shards were completely transparent and mostly on the smaller side although there were larger pieces. Based on my limited experience I’d classify it as mid-tier methamphetamine.
Middle-Shelf in the parlance of bar and now budtending.
Still I had found free drugs and in a respectable quantity. If you discount drugs that I’d previously bought and then misplaced it was probably the most drugs I’d ever found. It was undeniably a “come up” and I wanted to at least exchange it for something else of value – probably money. Not that differently than I would have expected if I had found a rare fossil or gold or gems.
One thing that did make it different was that I found it at least one night before me and LaPorsha were going to catch a ride up to the Bay Area with Roxy and Lulu to continue North and look for trim work. I can’t seem to remember if I found it the morning of our show at The Void but it seems like that show would have been an unsurpassable opportunity to try to find somebody who might want to buy it from me. Maybe we stuck around one extra day after that before leaving town.
What I can say for sure is there was a night at my mother’s house where I had the meth and also had a bag of clean syringes. I had the syringes because I had recently run into the woman from the piece called White Tiger’s House who used to sell me Vicodin. The whole situation at White Tiger’s House had imploded and she’d become homeless and was living near the closest shopping center. She told me she was diabetic, gave me the syringes and took me by another person’s camp she thought might be able to help me find heroin.
That hadn’t worked out. She also didn’t have any Vicodin at that point in time. She told me that she’d be getting a couple of bottles in the near future and would give me one of them if I could find her a tent.
Things hadn’t worked out for me to come across my preferred drugs for a little while. I’d been mostly messing with pain pills but my first love was injecting cocaine and heroin. I’d injected meth before but only one or two points at a time and I’d never noticed a recognizable rush.
I thought if I did a bigger shot of meth it would give me something comparable to the rush from injecting cocaine. At the same time I knew this wouldn’t happen. It was kind of like this moment years ago when my friends Steve and Badger asked this guy named Antonio to bring them drugs and when he asked what kind they answered “water soluble”.
Obviously the process of injecting drugs is an addiction in and of itself.
If I had to guess I’d probably say I did between .3 and .6 grams in a single shot. Without a scale and actual knowledge of how much the bag contained to begin with it’s nearly impossible to know. I wouldn’t describe the immediate sensation as a “rush” but I guess it’s all relative to whether you like the way something feels or not. Inhaling a blast of crack would probably feel pretty fucked up if it wasn’t something you were in the mood for or particularly liked.
At the risk of sounding inanely repetitive I don’t particularly like meth.
I did feel something immediately but it was pretty much dizziness, nausea and panic with no sense of euphoria or pleasure. I spent most of the night in a bathtub experimenting with soaking in either very hot or very cold water but neither felt especially better. I desperately felt like I needed to urinate but couldn’t seem to make it happen. I consider myself lucky that it didn’t result in some kind of permanent organ damage.
Most people in the house didn’t have any idea what was going on. Meth isn’t one of those drugs where you can just be like:
“Hey I found a bag of this on the ground! Does everybody wanna do some?”
Cocaine is. In fact I’ve done that exact thing with cocaine I found on the ground. There’s a story about it up here somewhere – I think the one called Play Something Slow and Sexy. Polite society is generally either down to do some or at least not offended by the offer.
But I digress…
There was at least one girl in the house who liked meth. A friend of LaPorsha’s named Tina of all things. She has a “scene name” that she’s better known by. I guess I could add it in later if she wants to be easily recognized.
Anyway she had lost her wallet shortly before I found the meth. Maybe in Mexico or maybe even in Spring Valley. Now that I think about it she might have noticed it was missing at that very thrift store and the reason that I found the cigarette box was that I was helping her search for it. That would explain this next part a little better.
I happily gave her some of the meth. About the amount a casual user would take to be high on meth for a single night. She expressed to LaPorsha however that she felt like I should have given her all of the meth:
“I think that the Universe was intending for that to be my meth wallet!”
I do understand where she was coming from in an “every cloud has a silver lining” kind of way. She had just experienced significant misfortune so she was most deserving of significant good fortune. Maybe I even specifically found it because of her loss. Still like a home run ball at a baseball game I was the one that caught it regardless of how bad a day the kid sitting next to me might have been having.
It would have been nice if she’d offered to buy it from me for significantly less than current market value. She had just lost a decent chunk of cash (and for all I know a much smaller quantity of meth) in her wallet but she always could have offered a future electronic transfer of some agreed upon amount. That would have been a win-win for everybody.
Maybe I was being unreasonable. Tina, if you’re reading this now and I had a Time Machine I’d totally just give it to you and call it a day. It certainly didn’t do me any good.
I did feel a little bit guilty about keeping it a secret from Roxy and Lulu that I was transporting drugs in their van. Still from a legal standpoint Roxy having no knowledge of it’s existence was the best possible outcome if it was going to be there anyway. In the unlikely event that we were pulled over she would have no reason to behave nervously and raise suspicion and if it were somehow discovered I could easily claim ownership and probably be the only one arrested.
I had hidden it pretty well.
This is actually the moment that I consider to be the most entertaining in this story and the reason I decided to type it up in the first place. I had hidden the meth inside of a Worlds of Wonder Talking Mother Goose and Hector. Man I really just want to write that again.
The meth was inside of a Worlds of Wonder Talking Mother Goose and Hector.
For the unfamiliar Worlds of Wonder was the company that created and marketed Teddy Ruxpin. Their main innovation was to use the left and right channels of an audio cassette to combine a story with instructions for simple animatronics. You only hear the channel with the bear’s voice coming out of the toy but the opposite channel is full of weird sounding noises that tell the motors in the mouth and eyes when to move.
Teddy Ruxpin was eventually supplemented by a caterpillar named Grubby. While only Teddy Ruxpin can play cassettes Grubby also speaks and moves his eyes and mouth by way of a special eighth inch cable between the two toys. Anyone familiar with audio work will notice that the plug on this eighth inch cable is slightly longer than the usual one on headphones and aux cables.
That extra little bit is for the robotics stuff.
When they created the Talking Mother Goose toy they decided to use the same technique from Grubby to add a small duck looking character called Hector to talk along. The main book he works with is called The Ugly Duckling so it’s possible that he is actually intended to be a very young swan. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m not as knowledgeable about all the Worlds of Wonder lore as I’d like to be.
Since moving down to San Diego my main source of income had been buying vintage toys at yard sales, swap meets and thrift stores and then reselling them on eBay. I had gotten especially lucky with one big yard sale by my mom’s house but I was also at the point where I could look over a box of random toys and recognize obscure monsters from The Real Ghostbusters line and that sort of thing.
The same yard sale had netted me a Teddy Ruxpin and Grubby but I had already sold those off along with nearly everything else I’d accumulated. For the rarer stuff I always seemed to get the most money from an auction as opposed to a fixed price and offers and it just worked out that our ride with Roxy and Lulu coincided with a day left on this last auction.
Here is the video I made to assure potential buyers that the two toys were functioning properly:
Deep Worlds of Wonder fans will notice that this is the later version of Talking Mother Goose where the head does not move from side to side. You will also see me and LaPorsha’s first cat Catrick wearing the blue leather harness that we found for him in Tijuana. He was actually fairly used to traveling and even going to parties but we decided to leave him with my mother when we went to look for trim jobs.
An interesting and unexpected coincidence was that the woman from White Tiger’s house called me the exact moment we were pulling onto the freeway toward the Bay Area to tell me that she’d gotten the Vicodin and see if I possibly found a tent for her. I wish I had found one for her, mostly because she was older and had health problems but there was too much other stuff going on with the shows and everything and me and LaPorsha didn’t have our own vehicle yet.
Now that I think about it she used to ask me if I could help her find anything for “energy” or to “stay up” when I’d come by White Tiger’s house to buy pills from her so she probably would have been down to trade the Vicodin for the bag of meth instead. The idea didn’t even cross my mind at the time.
We stopped very briefly in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles because Roxy and Lulu wanted to go to a Farmer’s Market. I wanted to try to unload the meth but didn’t have any ideas as to what part of that neighborhood to go to or anything. I bought some tacos for me and LaPorsha and while I was waiting there was a standard issue but slightly on the softer side looking cholo guy waiting across for me.
I asked him if he fucked with meth and he said he did. I gave him a tiny bit to try in the bathroom but he only had around ten dollars on him. I gave him what seemed like twenty dollars worth but showed him how much I had and told him I was trying to get rid of it cheap if he could call anyone that might be interested.
He seemed like he was in a similar situation to me in that basically every person in his life wasn’t cool with this particular drug and he had to keep it a secret from everyone around him. The difference was that he did actually like using it while I do not. There wasn’t anybody he could call.
We continued on to Oakland and Roxy and Lulu dropped us off at Tuna Town. I really like those kids and would love to hang out with them again under better circumstances. The secret I was keeping and constant nervousness around the possibility of getting pulled over detracted from what should have been a really chill ride up a boring chunk of 5.
Maybe they’ll need a show between the Bay and Portland and decide not to do the coastal thing – that would be really cool.
So now there was no longer the lingering fear of complicating other people’s lives or getting them in trouble but I still felt like I had to get rid of it before making the trek to marijuana land. If I knew then what I know now, that half those weed farmers are tweakers and it’s worth more farther from big cities, I would have just brought it along but we didn’t feel like it would be a good look or reputation while searching for trim work for the first time.
Me and LaPorsha tried hitting up a few people but everybody said they didn’t know anybody that fucked with it which is completely understandable. I don’t currently know anybody that fucks with it – at least not very well.
I decided to try walking toward the triangular park on San Pablo because the last time I lived in Oakland I had a decent amount of success finding pain pills there. LaPorsha decided to come with me, probably because she was worried something might happen to me. We walked until I saw a guy who looked like he fucked with hard drugs sitting on the bus stop in front of that closed down 24 hour burger spot that used to take forever to make your food at night.
Maybe some other Oakland people remember this spot. I’m talking about the one that was directly across from Ghost Town Gallery where I recorded my live album called Nothing Happened. The spot was really tiny and might have had one of those San Pablo Giant Burger signs. No inside seating, just a take out window.
The deal with that place was that it was owned by a brother and sister and was essentially two different restaurants as she ran it during the day and he ran it at night. In the daytime it was pretty normal and reliable – it didn’t get too busy and the lady was very talkative and finished your food in a reasonable amount of time.
At night it was always insanely busy and the brother was always too stoned to function.
I’m talking about circa 2009 or so. It was the only possible 24 hour food spot in that part of Oakland and there was usually a decent sized line of punks leaving punk shows and super dressed up hood guys who must have been coming from a popular nightclub in the area I don’t know about. Actually good hamburgers take a long time to cook to begin with but this was amplified and exacerbated by how cartoonishly out of his head on marijuana the guy cooking the burgers and taking the orders was.
A regular hamburger took at least an hour and at the end of the hour he might have just forgotten about you and you need to order it again or cut your losses and go to sleep. I remember one night when he announced that somebody’s cheeseburger was ready and all the guys in line had ordered regular hamburgers but they started offering him double or even triple the price just to be able to get something that was actually ready. He didn’t let anybody buy it because he was worried that the actual person who ordered the cheeseburger might come back which still hadn’t happened by the time I got whatever I ordered an hour or so later.
Anyway the place went out of business not too long after and different restaurants opened in the same spot but never lasted long. I haven’t been to Oakland in a while so maybe there’s a successful business in there again. At the time of this story it was vacant.
I sat next to the guy at the bus stop and asked him if he fucked with meth or knew people that did. He said he was interested but I needed to wait for a minute so he could get well. He had a pill bottle with some black tar heroin and was adding powdered milk with a folded lottery ticket. The bottle had a couple of pennies in it for weight and he shook it to combine the two substances.
This was my first time ever seeing tar heroin prepared for insufflation in this way. I had used dope around San Francisco in the early 2000s but I was shooting it and so were the people I had been using with. A couple years earlier at Apgar some guys on the block had said that they could get me powdered heroin but it had to be made in a blender. I always pictured some kind of sophisticated machinery and never would have imagined it was just the simple household items in front of me.
After trying this one time I decided that I got a better high from doing a cold water extraction on twenty dollars worth of Vicodin and didn’t ask the neighborhood guys to score me heroin or “hop” again. I’d imagine that sounds hard to believe to a lot of people – in my earliest years of heroin use I assumed that prescription pain pills would be so weak in comparison that I wouldn’t even feel them. Of course that isn’t true and Oakland always seemed to have especially shitty heroin – even weaker than Portland although the second city is much farther from the Mexican border.
I waited for the bus stop guy to use the same folded lottery ticket to shovel several heaping piles of the powder he’d just created into his nose. He had the same constant sniffle of everybody who habitually consumes tar in this way. He asked me if I wanted any heroin or cocaine but I told him that I was only interested in money.
I hadn’t put a specific number on how much I thought the bag of methamphetamine I had found might be worth before this point but in the moment I decided on sixty dollars. Looking at the number now it doesn’t even seem worth the risk of traveling in a vehicle with it from San Diego to Oakland but that’s drugs. You take outsized risks that are never worth the money.
He counted out sixty dollars and handed it to me so I handed him the bag of meth. He crushed a small amount of it and sniffed it then immediately said that it didn’t burn and seemed to be weak. I hadn’t sniffed any of it myself but knew it was moderately potent from injecting it. That wasn’t the point anyway. He was working his way up to ripping me off.
He then said that the bag was small and looked like less than a gram which was definitely not true. I wasn’t as familiar with sizes and quantities back then but it had to be around two grams give or take. I told him if he didn’t like it he could give it back to me and I’d give him back his money. He said he was keeping the meth and repeated the demand for me to give back the money.
LaPorsha had been standing behind the bus stop and waiting. I stood up and said that if he was determined to keep the drugs we evidently had a deal and we started walking down San Pablo in the opposite direction of Tuna Town. He jumped on his bike and started riding on my heels repeatedly demanding the money back.
I don’t know what I would have done or what would have happened if I’d been alone but with LaPorsha with me I didn’t want to take the risk of him doing anything to her and just gave him the money back. By myself I probably would have tried to run somewhere a bike couldn’t follow but who knows how that would have even worked out. I also wouldn’t have wanted to lead him back to Tuna Town.
He was heavier set than I was but I wasn’t particularly afraid of him. I just wasn’t interested in fighting him over sixty dollars. Mostly I just picked the wrong guy – he was a sniffly dusty annoying motherfucker; not worth having anything to do with. My situational awareness was off.
Years later when we were homeless junkies in Oakland I never would have gotten ripped off by someone like him but that’s not some huge flex. It’s better to get ripped off by someone like him and not be a homeless junkie. Mostly they were just two different times in my life. It’s not like I’ve got huge regrets on either end.
From the moment I found it the bag of meth was a… I don’t know what to call it. It seems like there should be some reference in folklore like a monkey paw or albatross but nothing seems to exactly fit what I have in mind. Something that seems like a boon when you find it but ends up being a burden until you finally get rid of it.
I’d say bad penny but who gets excited about finding a penny? Maybe bad twenty would be more appropriate. Or just bad moderately sized bag of stigmatized hard drugs you don’t especially like using…
The Talking Mother Goose and Hector sold to somebody in Germany which shouldn’t be that surprising if you’ve ever sold Worlds of Wonder talking storybook toys on the internet. The buyer eventually sent me pictures of damage where I knew the pieces of the mouth or whatever it was could just snap back together but I had to give them a partial refund. That’s kind of on me – I should have done a better job packing the toys and adding reinforcement and padding around their heads.
This story is working out to end on a bit of a bummer note and while that can be cool I’m not really in the mood for it. So I’ll end it like this:
While we were still staying at Tuna Town I was walking back there one night by myself when I came across a tiny baby opossum sitting in the center of the roof of a parked car. The car was under a tree so presumably it had fallen or climbed down. When it saw me it tried to run to the different edges of the car’s roof but I would stand at those edges so it would retreat back to the center of the roof and I could keep looking at it.
I wanted to go get LaPorsha and bring her back to show her but I knew that as soon as I was out of sight it would climb off of the car and back into the tree. That was probably for the best. At a different point in my life I might have tried to catch it in my hands but there was no need for that.
There will be other baby opossums to show LaPorsha…
The music scene for mid ‘90s to early 2000’s San Diego is pretty legendary but for the most part I had been out of the loop on what was going on in my home town. I went to a lot of ska and punk shows in High School and occasionally came across something more interesting like the time I saw Los Kagados at a very early incarnation of the Voz Alta space near 16th and C. I heard a lot of the members went on to form Run For Your Fucking Life but the main thing I remember is that the singer was double jointed and contorting his arms and wrists at odd angles with an almost Iggy Pop-like stage presence. One of them had just gotten a colorful neck tattoo of a pair of dragons or something like that – it was so fresh that the skin was visibly raised and puffy.
These details stick out in more focus than any of the ska shows I went to at Soma or the World Beat Center for some reason. Maybe it was just the feeling of being downtown and in an alternative art space instead of a more curated all ages club – this could have been anywhere from 1996 to 1998. I guess they were a hardcore band, a lot of my friends at school talked about hardcore but I didn’t know anything about it and wasn’t particularly interested. For whatever reason I was really into ‘80s New Wave at the time, the stuff that was more synth heavy and classified as “New Romantic”. There was a lot of it in the record bins of Thrift Stores which helped.
My other chance encounter with the more remembered music scene of the time was that I somehow ended up at a space on Union and Beech and saw Tristeza. I don’t know what genre I would have classified it as at the time but I definitely liked it and bought the first seven inch, the one that was printed with gold foil on heavy black paper, when I saw it at Off the Record. At this point I had bought some CDs from local ska bands but this was my first time getting small label seven inches with Art object style presentation until I ended up at the Fireside Bowl in Chicago later that same Summer.
I went to Union and Beech at least one other time when Francois and I had missed the last bus back toward East County and spent the night wandering the streets downtown. The space was hosting a rave and we snuck in to get off the streets but spent most of the night sleeping in a closet instead of dancing. When it was getting toward dawn we realized that we had been sleeping next to a gorilla mask and one of us took off our shirt and ran out of the closet to dance around for a minute with the mask on. Oddly I can’t seem to remember which one of us it had been – maybe we both did it and took turns.
By the time we drove back to San Diego in the early Summer of 2000 I had gotten a lot more experience navigating music scenes. For my year at SFSU there was a surprisingly robust music community centering on shows in our Student Union and both twee and J-pop; bolstered by the high number of trendy Japanese exchange students. The kid who set them up was in a band called Wussom*Pow! that recorded a Strawberry Switchblade cover and helped me sneak into shows at bars like Edinburgh Castle. My first forays into bars were spent staring in fascination as cigarette smoke slowly drifted against a backdrop of dark velvet curtains and twinkling white Christmas lights – I didn’t drink yet.
I tried to convince Michael from Wussom*Pow! to set up a show for Tristeza in the student Union. I don’t even know if they were actually touring or looking – I just really dug that first 7 inch. I described the music as “emo” because some band members had black hair and that’s what I’d heard the social scene called but he said it was “space rock”. The show never happened to the best of my memory.
I was beyond clueless about the bulk of underground music then. I remember seeing a flyer on campus advertising a Melvins show that would have been small and intimate but I had no clue who that was even though Little Four had talked up The Thrones from a live set at Locust House and I was eager to see it.
Actually there was a show in the SFSU student Union where Thrones was supposed to play but Michael took Joe off the bill out of fear it would be “too loud”. They were on tour with The Rapture who you most likely saw on the flyer at the top of this piece and will pop back up in just a minute. The singer/guitarist (or was it bassist?) was jumping onto tables while playing and the Japanese girls in the audience would shriek and run a few feet away in a combination of surprise and delight.
I thought the most striking thing about the San Diego scene at that time was that Tristeza had a 7 inch that played at 33 RPM while The Locust released a twelve inch that played at 45. I felt the duality of how this went again convention in both directions said something poignant about what was happening in my home town but at the time I became more interested in other city’s music scenes.
After house sitting for a punk TA from one of my Physics classes in a Mission district apartment I spent most of the Summer of 1999 in San Diego before driving out to Chicago with Francois. San Diego music, especially The Locust, was intensely popular in the Midwest by this point but we knew next to nothing about it. We wouldn’t have known anything at all if we hadn’t convinced Little Four to move up to the Bay Area with us and gained access to the record collection she had curated from living behind and going to shows at the “Locust House” on 24th and E.
The scene around the Fireside Bowl in Chicago that year was primarily hardcore and math rock but also a lot of the theatrical experimental stuff that was coming out on the SKiN GRAFT label. I finally started to get into the hardcore most of my contemporaries were so fascinated with but the artier stuff was my real fascination. The two styles generally peacefully coexisted and informed and fed into each other but I do remember one situation when they came into direct conflict.
The band Black Dice was passing through town and a big group of people went up to Milwaukee because they were playing a basement show. I don’t think they were ever really a traditional hardcore band but their earliest stuff was closer to sounding like it and their first seven inch was on Gravity Records which was generally known as a hardcore label. I did a little bit of digging and figured out this show was in May of 2000 at a place called Bremen House.
I actually didn’t know that the band had a reputation for being physically confrontational and attacking their audience and breaking other people’s equipment but all of that would have played a factor in what ended up happening because I just read a different account that said people at the show were already planning on fighting them. From what I saw they were just playing unconventional and noisy music like lots of guitar feedback and drumming in odd time signatures when a bunch of straight edge hardcore guys assaulted them for “not being hardcore”. I’ve always thought of the incidence as “genre violence” – purely instigated by a band not playing in an expected and dogmatic style.
The main reason I think this is that one of the attackers was literally yelling “this isn’t hardcore” or “this isn’t what hardcore’s about” or something along those lines. The frustration was palpable when somebody in the band yelled back:
“We never said it was!”
The other account I read said that the singer threw beer on a straight edge guy but the way I remember it he was just pacing and thrashing around with an open tall can in his hand so that small amounts might have splashed onto people. The thing I have the clearest mental image of is dudes just running up on the bassist and guitar player and throwing punches at them while they tried to defend themselves as best as possible while being encumbered by their instruments. A lot of their equipment ended up getting broken and their attackers slashed the tires on their tour van as a parting gift.
I overheard somebody from either Black Dice or The Rapture, the band they were touring with, react to this final surprise with a touch of weary dark humor:
“You’d think that if they didn’t want us here so much they wouldn’t make it so hard for us to leave…”
I’ll throw the link I found underneath here so you can read and judge for yourself but even though I was there I don’t think I know enough to say if what happened in Milwaukee was just straight edge hardcore guys being typical violent assholes or a case of chaotic and destructive energy catching up with the people who had been irresponsibly pumping it out into the world. Maybe it was some of both. It’s interesting that the street was called Bremen as the Grimm Brothers fairytale called The Bremen Town Musicians is basically about a group of animals who have outlived their usefulness spontaneously turning into a noise band.
One thing that I didn’t realize at the time was that Eric Copeland from the band had been part of an earlier project I really liked called The Ninjas that put out a couple of records on a label called BlackBean and Placenta Tape Club. It sounded like twee pop combined with uncharacteristically aggressive distorted guitars. I only mention this because I haven’t had the records for years or been able to find them uploaded on the internet anywhere in case somebody reading this might have them and a way to put them up somewhere.
San Diego in 2000 had a surplus of really good bands that seemed to have all formed over the past couple of years. I hadn’t actually seen either Three Mile Pilot or The Shortwave Channel but the core members of both groups were now playing as The Blackheart Procession and Camera Obscura respectively. One of the best bands to see live was the instrumental organ heavy doom metal outfit Tarantula Hawk who often had body modification enthusiast Eddie Castro suspending himself from hooks pierced through his skin and illuminated by a projection of black and white static. I wasn’t twenty one yet and every bouncer in town knew who I was so I spent a lot of shows standing just outside the door to listen and peeking inside of places like The Turquoise Room at the long defunct Aztec Bowl.
This story begins with an all ages Blackheart Procession show about halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles at the Koo’s Cafe in Santa Ana. Lightning Bolt would be playing at The Smell either the next day or the one after that so I got a ride up with the plan of trying to find kids at the show who would be returning to Los Angeles instead of returning with my ride to San Diego. I had gotten pretty confident with approaching strangers to ask for things like rides but the best I found was a couple kids who lived in Burbank. They both offered the same nonsensical explanation when I asked what part of LA that was:
“It’s where Jay Leno lives…”
They didn’t have the kind of parents that would be receptive to unexpected overnight guests so it was up to me to figure out a spot to sleep until public transit resumed in the morning. The neighborhood was the kind with large expensive ranch style houses, or whatever you call the style with stucco and adobe roofs and lots of little wrought iron railings, that also had thick hedges between them so they thought I might be able to hide underneath somebody’s bushes.
I laid out underneath one experimentally but immediately felt conspicuous and almost guaranteed to experience police harassment if I didn’t find something a little more discreet and less residential. Walking toward the traffic lights eventually brought me to a strip mall and a doughnut shop with the kind of locked roof access ladder you can climb by wedging your foot between the metal and the building. When I got to the top I could see that the roof was covered with the big chunked and sharp edged gravel that blankets accessible roofs and forsaken landscaping across Los Angeles.
If I had to spend a night in this sort of setting now I would locate a dumpster for cardboard, and probably just stay next to it, but I was a lot younger and less experienced. I did find a newspaper machine with free Auto Trader booklets to give me something to prevent having to sleep with my face right against the gravel. I’m sure a lot of people would struggle to fall asleep in this kind of environment but I’ve always enjoyed the rough urban camping – no sooner had I stretched out then I was waking up to the harsh glare of sunlight in my eyes and the unmistakable smell of fresh doughnuts and coffee.
I shimmied back down the ladder and came inside to be the first customer of the day. Wall length mirrors seem like an odd decor choice for the type of business that primarily serves the homeless and the sleep deprived but it did give me the opportunity to notice that I had a few lines of newsprint smudged across my cheek in the reverse of how the letters appeared on the page. I wonder if the man behind the cash register realized where I had just come from or if he would have even cared – I certainly wasn’t staying.
My next destination was an apartment my friend Tim shared with some other graduates of the USC film program near Hollywood and Highland. When I stepped off my final bus a pair of bright red sunglasses sat on the plastic bench like they were waiting for me to herald my arrival in Tinseltown. It’s not that deep – I was twenty years old, I put them on my face and walked to my friend’s apartment and knocked on the door and fell back asleep on his couch.
I had scarcely drifted back off when I found myself suddenly and violently woken back up by police yelling and pointing guns and putting everybody in handcuffs. I was probably the only person there who had absolutely no idea what any of it was about but it didn’t take them very long to find the objects and person they were looking for and leave the less immediately culpable among us to explain what was going on to each other.
I’ve mentioned in other places that Tim’s graduating class was the last year that the USC film program would be done using Super 8 and chemical developing processes before making the switch to various digital video mediums. One of his roommates had rationalized to himself that school equipment like cameras, editors and projectors was about to fall into disuse and it would be essentially harmless to appropriate it and even arguably beneficial as it would allow the equipment to continue to be used for its designed purpose.
I don’t know all the details but it must have been easy enough to falsify whatever logs were used in checking out this equipment to obfuscate the identity of whoever had ended up in possession of it. After a few months had gone by with no sign that anybody was looking the assumption was most likely made that nothing would be missed and he put a couple of things up on eBay. By modern standards this is an obvious rookie mistake but in early 2000 the entire concept of cybercrimes was relatively new and most people wouldn’t have immediately realized that anything done online is immediately and easily traceable.
Considering the kinds of things I would be getting into and people I would be hanging out with by the end of the year it’s interesting that my first experiences with many aspects of the criminal Justice system were with a friend I’d generally think of as being on the “straight” side of things. We spent the day driving around and running errands related to the morning’s sudden development.
Our first stop was a seedy bail bondsman’s office on the second floor of the parking lot strip mall that divides Chinatown and Pueblo Los Angeles. I’d gotten into plenty of petty offenses like trespassing, vandalism and even theft of things like a whale skeleton and motorized bumper boat – but so far had never actually gotten charged or caught. Downtown San Diego was full of businesses like the one we visited, and I often spent stranded nights wandering streets where their neon signs were the only things open for business, but I had never really thought about actually needing their services.
Tim was essentially guiltless himself and clearly enjoying playing the role of a character in a crime movie. There was one other friend who also had film equipment from the school and didn’t seem to have been raided by the police yet. Tim gave him a call to warn him to get rid of it but first he drove to a building on Wilshire with a loud outdoor fountain “in case anybody was trying to record his voice”. I seriously doubt that he honestly believed that this level of precaution was necessary but the cloak and dagger intrigue was fun for playing make believe.
Once all that was finished Tim took me to sneak into Universal Studios Hollywood by way of the soundstages in its backlot. He had an ID badge to get past the guard booth from his production work and instructed me to make up a common name for somebody I was supposed to be visiting. I think I went with “John Elliot” – I could see over the guard’s shoulder when he typed this into the computer that the only thing it needed to verify was if someone with this name had worked there ever.
They’ve probably beefed up security protocols since then.
From the backlot it was very easy to slip under a guardrail and get in line for the Jurassic Park ride. Thankfully the ET Adventure dark ride was still open and I got to see the bright psychedelic section with animatronic living flowers that is supposed to represent the titular character’s home planet. At the beginning of the ride they have all the passengers type their names into a computer so ET can offer personalized thanks at the conclusion.
I was curious how the computerized speech module might interpret my unique name after hearing it butchered by substitute teachers throughout my school career. It’s spelled “Ossian” but pronounced “ah-shin” and nobody’s ever gotten it on a first try. The tiny brown alien waved as we drifted toward the exit; addressing each person in turn:
“Thanks Walter and Deborah and Timmy and…”
The figure went silent and abruptly stopped moving. Maybe there was a module in place to prevent the figure from vocalizing profanities in a family park and it scanned the first three letters as an attempt to get it to say “ass”. Whatever the cause I found it amusing that the beloved character chose to make no attempt to address me whatsoever.
Emboldened by the ease we’d had in gaining access to the amusement park Tim went from stage to stage searching for an unattended golf cart. Once we had one he took me on a ride flying off curbs and doing loops around the courthouse square set used in Back to the Future. When the evening came on I needed to get downtown for the Lightning Bolt show.
This may well have been the first time that I ever went to The Smell. I knew that it was around Third and Main and when Tim dropped me on the corner in his little convertible Datsun I could already hear Lightning Bolt playing but I didn’t know exactly where I was supposed to go. It took a minute of running around before I realized that the entrance was in the alley and ran inside. They were playing in the corner of the room away from the stage – the space was huge and mostly empty; in less than a year Ride the Skies would come out and they’d be exploding with popularity.
At this point I’d already exchanged at least a couple of letters with Brian Chippendale. I’d been trying to order some Maggots mini comics and the Zone cassette that accompanies their first album. I got the tape but never got the comics – he apologized and gave me a copy of the Conan Tour Seven Inch instead. It was barely a couple days since I caught the ride up to Santa Ana from San Diego and now I was about to head back down.
I’ve talked a lot about how incredibly quickly everything was happening that year but it’s fun to lay things out on a comparative timeline. The Milwaukee show where Black Dice was attacked was at the beginning of May. I didn’t realize how closely they and Lightning Bolt were related yet but I might not have even heard Lightning Bolt yet either. My first show as Spidermammal with Deerhoof was a couple weeks later and then we were moving back to San Diego.
I don’t know when this Lightning Bolt show at The Smell was but I’m going to guess some time in June. Not long after Deerhoof came through the same venue and played with xbxrx. By July I was back in Chicago running into xbxrx playing with Missing Tooth from the Spidermammal show. In August I was living at Fort Thunder, got to read all of Chippendale’s comic notebooks and set up a show for xbxrx that wouldn’t be happening until I’d already left town.
All of this is just dates and band names but the point was that everybody was constantly on tour or traveling and writing each other letters and this loose grouping of what you’d call noise rock bands were crossing each other’s paths and playing together and a few of them were about to become hugely commercially successful. There isn’t any microgenre or -core or -wave name for the thing that was going on but it was definitely a certain kind of energy and the clock was ticking until 9/11 and everything changing.
After the Lightning Bolt show I walked across Skid Row to the Greyhound station for what was probably the first time and I wouldn’t have had any idea that I was about to be traveling to Fort Thunder and Providence and meeting some people that would make it so I probably spent as much time riding Greyhounds over the next two years as I did living in actual houses. I only knew that something exciting was happening and I didn’t care how far I had to travel or where I had to sleep as long as I could be there and be a part of it.
I couldn’t have known that this world had a looming expiration date but the way I was moving you’d almost think I did.
I’ve been touching on a handful of different parties, observances and festivals here – mostly aligned with experimental music on some level. You’ve got BitchPork, Voices of the Valley, Burning Fleshtival, International Noise Conference, The Wheel and Babylon Bazaar in Maine and of course the Mojave Raves. Then there is Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the Mummer’s Parade in Philadelphia and celebrating New Year’s Eve in Slab City – the only one of these that blurs the line between calendar holidays and alternative music festivals.
For me and most of my friends from San Diego there was another annual observance that had almost nothing to do with underground music but played a more formative role in nearly all of our lives: The San Diego Comic Con.
It took me much longer to get into Rock and Roll, or any aggressive music, but comic books were exciting for as far back as I remember seeing them. I wasn’t interested in my older brother and his friends’ hair metal records but any comics they might have had were a different story. It must have been at least 1992 when I stumbled onto an issue of the Frank Miller reboot of Rust but I couldn’t have been older than third grade when I found a copy of Marvel’s promotional monthly Marvel Age with a picture of the mid ‘80s X-Men team.
Before this point I would pick out back issues of Power Pack and The Eternals on trips to the comic shop but once I saw the tiny picture of Nightcrawler I was obsessed. I think it was the visual style of the whole team at this point but something about his design and costume really spoke to me even if though I initially thought he was holding a whip when I saw his tail. I think I just had a thing for big, puffy shoulders but not in a football player or Rob Liefeld Cable sense – I liked his unconventional silhouette and leaner gymnast’s build.
When I did the thing in third grade that I think a lot of kids do, meeting up with the other comic nerds and designing endless costumed heroes and villains, I created a team called The Blue Dudes where everybody looked like Nightcrawler with blue skin, yellow eyes and pointed ears. This piece would probably get boring if I spent the entire time listing my favorite comics but besides older The Uncanny X-Men issues my favorite thing to get was a book called Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Update ‘89 – it was an illustrated encyclopedia with full page pictures of all the characters and background information on them in alphabetical order.
The first time I got to go to Comic Con was in 1992 when I was twelve years old. My dad took me for a single day with my best friend Jason. I remember the year because the freebie items were still really good in the early ‘90s and they were giving out tons of stuff to promote the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula – comic books, posters, pins, trading cards and probably some other stuff I don’t remember.
The band Green Jellö also had a booth that year – it was set up like a cool punk house living room with couches and upholstered armchairs pointed at a big TV playing a loop of their music videos. It was probably the most popular thing in the convention with our demographic, eleven to fifteen year old boys, though I didn’t see many adults taking interest. They were handing out free cassettes of their songs and considering the track Shitman had the word “shit” in it and House Me Teenage Rave was full of simulated sex sounds it all seemed badass to us.
I might have paid one more year but it seems just as likely that by 1993 I was hooked up with the programming office to start volunteering. My sister found the connections for this at her Performing Arts High School – we would get a free four day pass for helping out with the different events in the upstairs conference rooms. The only thing I really remember is delivering a bunch of pencils to a figure drawing lesson that the guy who made Lady Rawhide was giving. There wasn’t a model or anything – it was a lesson on drawing unrealistic female bodies from your own imagination.
I do remember a story that my sister and some other volunteers were helping with a Steven Seagal panel and he made them all leave the room while he changed his shirt. They complained about how ridiculous this was considering how often he is shirtless onscreen but he was probably just a little out of shape between movies and didn’t want anyone to see.
The next few years were really the golden age of the San Diego Comic Con, it had gotten big enough to feel like you were living in a temporary city that was only populated by other comic book geeks but it wasn’t so big as to be overcrowded and unmanageable yet. It was also still mainly about comic books instead of television shows and movies because there wasn’t as much superhero/sci-fi/fantasy stuff being made in those years. Every year a few movies were being heavily promoted but nothing like it is now.
We were all into staying at or around the con for the entirety of all four days. On Friday and Saturday the screening rooms that showed anime and old shows and movies were open until three in the morning and there was a big room on top of the Hyatt called the Hospitality Suite where they put out free sodas, chips and candy. There was a decent amount of night time programming like the Masquerade, the Eisner Awards and a big dance party but we also just loved running around downtown San Diego.
The Gaslamp Quarter revitalization had started but there was still plenty of urban blight and the center city could be nearly deserted at night. That was how we liked it – we would explore empty buildings and sneak into parts of the Convention Center and surrounding hotels that we weren’t supposed to be in. My favorite spot was opening an access door to a section of the ventilation system from the mezzanine. If you’ve ever been in the San Diego Convention Center this was just on the other side of the big blue tubes that stick out of the wall in the main hall.
I would always dream up pranks like getting a box of bouncy balls and throwing them over the main hall from the giant tubes but never actually did any of them. At fifteen years old just sneaking into all these secret nooks and crannies felt devious enough. I would bring friends from my High School and show them around all of these little spots when the Convention wasn’t happening also. Once me and my friend Brandi from The Singles managed to get inside between events and spend a few minutes roller skating the giant empty concrete slab of the main hall before somebody kicked us out.
On top of all this the late ‘90s was just a great time for comic books. There was a little bit of a “black and white explosion” going on but it felt more creative and less formulaic than the one that had followed the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Slave Labor Graphics was booming – Evan Dorkin’s Milk and Cheese had hints of the third wave ska culture we were all into, Jhonen Vasquez was just starting his goth classic Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and I got super obsessed with this comic Hairbat that never got a second issue.
Francois was making an independent fanzine called The Comics Review and I got to tag along with him while he interviewed Paul Pope from THB and Stan Sakai from Usagi Yojimbo. Wendy and Richard Pini were reprinting all of their hard to find Elfquest books and had just started up Warp Graphics that eventually spread the franchise too thin but it started out strong. Vertigo was still putting out stuff we liked and Sam Keith’s The Maxx was a cartoon on MTV and we were teenagers and lots of cool comics were coming out – Bone, Stray Bullets, Beanworld, I could list things off all day.
I used to bring a white t-shirt and embroidery hoop to the Con and get all my favorite artists to sign and draw sketches on it. The hoop allowed me to pull the fabric taut in small sections at a time so it was almost as easy to draw on as a flat piece of paper. In the year that Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean were promoting the book Mr. Punch, Neil drew a quick portrait of the titular character that he seemed to think came out a lot better than his drawings usually did. Looking at other sketches of his online I’m inclined to agree but my mother washed the shirt behind my back and he was the only person that neglected to use a waterproof marker.
It’s possible that I made it to every single Comic Con from 1992 to 2006 but I remember 2002 as a year of big changes. I had always attended the festival as a straight edge teenage geek but this was my first time in full partying drinking and hard drugs mode. Me and all my friends had a tradition of gravitating toward the big “C” outside the Convention Center when we were looking for people to hang out with. This is where this picture would have been taken but it isn’t from 2002 – it might be 2003 or 2004.
I am holding a plastic pineapple which despite being completely obvious allowed me to constantly drink in public without attracting any negative attention.
I didn’t get into it until I moved back in 2001 but another thing that went through a “golden era” in late ‘90s San Diego was street drugs. Methamphetamine hadn’t become as ubiquitous as it is now, although there was plenty of it around, and all the Mexican heroin dealers still sold tiny bags of near pure cocaine for shooting speedballs. For those readers who haven’t tried it an intravenous shot of cocaine delivers an intense euphoric rush where time seems to stop for a moment then all sounds take on a metallic echo like they were being processed through a flange pedal.
I wouldn’t recommend it and I’ll most likely never do it again but it was a ton of fun in my early twenties. Especially coming from Chicago where the only thing available was crack and I had to cook it down with lemon juice, having constant access to cocaine so pure it would dissolve the moment it touched water and you could taste it in the back of your throat like silver was certainly an experience.
I would have either made myself a counterfeit pass or asked people that were leaving if I could have theirs – this actually was a solid method of getting one in the early aughts but the last time I tried around 2014 or so it was nearly impossible. Anyway I spent at least as much time chasing down drugs and alcohol as I did at the actual convention this year if not more.
The thing about injecting cocaine, with or without heroin, is that it makes you really want to inject more cocaine soon afterwards so I would have been spending a lot of time in the bathrooms. This is what I clearly remember: arriving early one day and riding the escalators to the upper floors to slam a speedball in a toilet stall. Still rushing I wander into a panel for the new Muppet movie Kermit’s Swamp Years and pop open a tall can of Steel Reserve. The first sip, combined with lingering nausea from the intravenous cocaine, causes me to rush over to the trash can and loudly vomit into it.
I get kicked out of the Muppet panel.
Over the years a list of “must see” panels and presentations started to grow as people from our friend group showed each other their favorite bits of scheduled programming. One of these was called Starship Smackdown and it was basically a fantasy league tournament for imaginary dogfights between space crafts from a range of sci-fi books, shows, comic books and movies. A rotating cast of moderators wrote the names on a dry erase board and presided over a group discussion of who would win each matchup until there was a single champion.
To give a very general idea it would be stuff like the Winnebago from Space Balls going head to head with the actual Millennium Falcoln from Star Wars.
Another popular one was called the Klingon Lifestyles Presentation – a group of cosplayers that created a community theater troupe around the fictional Star Trek race. The sci-fi and fantasy landscape was especially lacking in diverse characters at the turn of the millennium but Klingons offered a way for Black and mixed race fans to depict a group of characters that were faithful to the source material. They wore the costumes and forehead prosthetics of the version that started with Star Trek: The Next Generation and created a fictional ship for all these scenes to play out on called the VSS Stranglehold.
On this particular year I would have been fairly drunk and fucked up on drugs by the time this performance was happening. I noticed a couple of young teenage girls in full Klingon getup and made a crude joke:
“Check out the Klingon jailbait!”
One of the older cast members, quite likely an uncle or even father, pointed his blaster pistol at me in what seemed like genuine anger:
“Watch your tongue you Terran Dog!”
I was impressed by his ability to chastise me without ever breaking character.
I’ve mostly been writing about getting drunk and high and being an asshole but there was definitely a lot going on with comics this year that was exciting as well. A lot of the Fort Thunder artists wouldn’t be published on anything with an ISBN number for a couple more years but there was a lot more awareness of their work and screen printed mini comics, posters and calendars were starting to pop up in places like the Giant Robot booth. Highwater Books had been publishing stuff from some Fort-adjacent artists with more of a twee style: Ron Regé Jr., James Kochalka and Jordan Crane.
I’m not 100% sure but I think 2002 was the year that Paper Rad sent out the “peace envelope”. I don’t know if there is an official name for this object but it was a folio size Manila envelope that was spray painted with stencils of hearts and peace signs and probably some other things I forget. It was filled with a selection of zines and mini comics in a wide variety of sizes and colors – stuff from the members of Paper Rad, Dearraindrop and I think CF and Keith Waters, though I might be wrong on those last two.
As far as I know these weren’t available for sale anywhere but had been sent out with a friend in the underground comics scene to be passed out to mutual acquaintances. I know that I got mine when I passed by a booth like Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly and somebody recognized me and grabbed me one from under the counter – not that there would have been any popular demand for their work at this point. As always if anybody reading knows anything more about the object I’m referring to I’d love to hear it.
The most exciting new discovery for me at the 2002 Comic Con was definitely Junko Mizuno and her Cinderella paper back. Her drawing style is generally referred to as “gothic kawaii” but beyond the dark and erotic elements my favorite part was the way her work synthesized the aesthetics of vintage Sanrio, Strawberry Shortcake and the entire spectrum of consumer goods that were marketed to adolescent girls in the ‘70s and ‘80s. In a rare situation the English language release of Cinderella is actually more definitive than the original Japanese one because Mizuno got to have greater control of the colors and printing style – she went for newsprint and four color process for a vintage Western comic book feel.
I was going through a bit of an obsession with the aesthetics of cuteness myself – collecting all of the vintage Lisa Frank gear I could find and hunting for pink and purple apparel with images of unicorns. It’s been crazy watching the proliferation of unicorns and rainbows on every product imaginable in the last few years because in 2002 that kind of stuff was not easy to find.
My outfit for that year’s Comic Con was a white hospital gown layered with a reproduced unicorn tapestry, brightly colored scraps of tie dye and hand sewn prayer flags in a psychedelic style. My friend Joy had given me a single arm guard from a Rainbow Brite costume and I safety pinned on some of the plastic jewelry that came with the same Glitterator that had filled me with anti-Christmas angst as an adolescent.
The things that made Comic Con exciting in the early aughts were a little different from the things that made it exciting in the ‘90s and every year it felt a bit more commercial and mainstream. The last time I went was with LaPorsha in 2014 or so. It was a lot harder to bum passes and the Convention Center had not only been expanded but a special section was added with promotional inflatable funhouses for Adult Swim and The Smurfs movie. We had a good time and ran into Jesse Camp but a lot of the old magic seemed to be gone.
Still I was surprised to learn that things like the Klingon Lifestyles Presentation are still happening every year. It wouldn’t be this one but some year in July I just might make it down to San Diego to check it out again.
If I ever make it look for me under the big “C” where the cars pass in front of the Convention Center.
When I was handed the diploma that formally ended my academic obligations in San Diego I started running and never looked back. The only thing was that I was running in circles. We were standing on the football field that had been built for the World Fair style event called the Panama-California Exposition that also birthed the museums of Balboa Park that had been used in Citizen Kane. I don’t know the exact size of a High School Football lap but I’m pretty sure I did six of them.
I wasn’t particularly interested in going to college at that point but I was absolutely ready to get out of San Diego. Ironically my home town was the same kind of Youth Culture Mecca for kids as far flung as Chicago and Japan that Providence and Fort Thunder would become for me. I didn’t know anything about The Locust or any of the Gravity Records bands at this point outside of one of my Junior High crushes living on the same block ofGolden Hills and once mentioning that the corner house was filled with “rockstar” looking guys.
I didn’t have any particular attraction to the San Francisco Bay Area either, my Physics Teacher just knew somebody in admissions at SFSU and called in a favor as I had missed the application deadline. Francois and I had been essentially friend married ever since his mother wanted to leave the country before his earlier graduation and had asked my parents if he could just come live at my house. In this sense my childhood bedroom in my parents home was essentially my “first punk house” as it was where I began living with friends and collaboratively building custom realities.
Once I had a specific destination Francois was unquestionably going to be tagging along and also brought along his previous best friend Jonas and eventually a fourth friend Chris Pearce. Another friend’s mother knew somebody who ran a kind of guest house near the UC Berkeley campus and happened to have a vacancy in a single basement room. It was decided that the three of us would share the room as a stopgap measure until we found something more permanent.
Our new landlord Wally was a portly man with a white beard who spent most of his days lounging in a hammock and eating watermelons, he was so fond of the fruit that he had bought a small watermelon patch. I never thought of it at the time but he basically looked like Santa Claus on an extended tropical vacation. Francois and I had started to experiment with baking in the basement kitchen and one day offered him some of a pineapple upside down cake:
“Oh that sounds really good but I probably shouldn’t, I just ate three entire watermelons.”
Because there was a surplus of watermelons we unsuccessfully tried to use them to barter access to the pledge week fraternity parties surrounding the nearby campus. Everybody thought we were joking, asked us if it was a special watermelon (it wasn’t) and generally wanted nothing to do with us. We made it into some of the co-ops but defensively rotated our social awkwardness into often confrontational pretensions. At an easy going hippy party I commandeered the bass from the living room jam band and played the one riff from Black Sabbath’s Iron Man until they kicked us out.
I didn’t drink, Francois didn’t drink much and Chris and Jonas were more natural at social functions but couldn’t escape the gravitational pull of mine and Francois’s aggressive asshole energy. We spent all our time trying to go to parties and meet people but at the same time did everything we could to push everybody away. In retrospect it seems frustratingly obvious like driving onto the freeway in the wrong direction but at the time I literally didn’t know any better.
Wally took stock of the situation, realized we weren’t going anywhere and found somebody to pawn us off on. I don’t have a full list of the professions that Mark was a miserable failure at but it definitely included landlord, home restorer and most likely contractor. I’ve been trying to pin point the exact location of the house we moved into but too much of the neighborhood has changed: it has either become a loft building or a parking lot for Berkeley Bowl West and was tucked into the side streets just north and west of Ashby and San Pablo.
The house had formerly served as an artisanal workshop for constructing traditional Japanese shoji screens and for this reason had them on all of the windows along with other picturesque minor improvements from these former tenants. I never saw any records as to how long ago this had been but the house had fallen into extreme disrepair in the interim. The south side was bordered by a tow yard for abandoned or illegally parked cars.
It wasn’t so much a bad neighborhood at that time as it was an empty one.
We still really wanted to make friends and continued to act like we didn’t want anybody to be friends with us. The best way to describe it was that we were feral: we invented strange, violently sadistic games and wandered the neighborhood looking for abandoned buildings to break into or broken things to break more. We could walk down the train tracks to the earliest version of the Emeryville Shopping Center and scam our way into movies by calling the theater and pretending to be a manager from another branch calling in tickets for his employees. Under this deception Francois casually inquired whether the screenings of the Eddie Murphy and Martin Short film Life were too crowded:
“Don’t worry about it. I’d rather have an employee coming to watch it than some thug anyway!”
This level of casual racism was par for the course in cities like Oakland and Chicago in the last few years before September 11th. It hasn’t exactly changed but people like movie theater managers have become less brazenly open about it. At the time such sentiments were barely considered problematic.
The one method that worked for getting friends was going down to San Diego and retrieving them. While visiting for a holiday we ran into Lil Four while she was working at an obnoxious cigar cafe. I had met her before when a girl at my high school brought her as a triple date to a school dance while she was in a skinhead phase. She complained that her bosses were assholes so we suggested she quit her job and come to live in the Bay Area with us. She agreed.
At this point in time Lil Four was clued into the San Diego Spock-Rock scene – mostly referred to as emo. She introduced me to The Makeup, The Thrones and in a roundabout way even Lightning Bolt because I first read about them in a Load Records insert that came with her Men’s Recovery Project record. She and I would go into San Francisco and hang around the Muddy Waters coffee shop hoping to meet people who looked. cool and fashionable. She developed a crush on this beautiful boy named Rex who was in a band called The Audience so we would awkwardly and obviously stalk him around the Mission but never actually saw his band.
Lil Four clicked naturally into our almost ritualistic system of defensive meanness. She eventually did find a boyfriend at a 924 Gilman show, a punk rock boy with bright pink hair named Gabe, and she would bring him home for me and Francois to bully. The house had a dart board when we moved in but we eschewed the traditional method of playing in favor of running around the house and throwing them at each other.
This was the kind of thing we called a “game” but now that I’m actually writing it down it really wasn’t. We were just throwing tiny pointed projectiles at each other in the hope that it would break the skin and cause the other person to feel pain and bleed. We all got hit a few times in the hand, shoulder and back area but miraculously nobody lost an eye or took a dart to the spine and ended up paralyzed.
The nearby Berkeley Marina was home to a frisbee golf course and one day we found a forgotten frisbee and brought it home. The game we built around couldn’t have been further from the mellow pot smoker’s sport if we had gone for that on purpose. Our street never had a single car so we stood around it in a loose circle. Each person would toss the frisbee toward the next person in the circle who would attempt to hit it out of the air with an axe. If they succeeded they would pass the axe and then toss the frisbee to the next person.
If you missed the frisbee all of the other players would run up and punch you.
I was going to segue from that description into an explanation of how we specifically used this game to abuse Gabe but I feel like I need to stop here and say something about all this. I’ve never actually written any of this down, I’ve told these stories a few times over the years and looked back at them while browsing the memory pile but this is the first time I’ve actually held these recollections at enough of an arm’s length to allow my more mature eyes to actually focus on them.
Generally when I write about my past self I can to some degree identify with my prior actions and motivations – at least to the degree where even if something was irrational I can say “I understand why I felt and behaved like that”. This is the first time that I’ve found myself in complete and utter disbelief. Like let’s say I spent an entire night desperately trying to inject an increasingly bloody shot of cocaine. I’d hope that I wouldn’t find myself doing the same thing now but at least I understand that I was trying to get an intravenous cocaine rush.
This is the first time that having finally written the shit down I really do need to take a moment to say “what in the fuck was wrong with us?” Why would we look at a frisbee and think of this unwieldy and wantonly cruel game out of all the things in the world? There was only one axe, half the play time was spent walking over to pass the axe along. I haven’t even got into the ways that we weaponized this game against Gabe.
For the people who actually lived in the house we would toss the frisbee to each other so that we could more or less actually hit it. Occasionally we missed and would get punched but for the most part it was a friendly game of frisbee tossing and axe hitting. Once Gabe was in the circle we would give him one awkward toss after another so that we could all punch him, over and over. I realize that it probably sounds like this entire game was invented as an elaborate excuse to punch Gabe but it wasn’t. We had played it without him and hardly anybody ever got punched.
So the bigger question is once we did play the game as a pretext for punching Gabe why did he continue to play with us? Why did Lil Four start dating and presumably having sex with this guy if she was only going to be an accessory to her housemates abusing him over and over? I remember Francois getting frustrated with Gabe’s bike always being right inside the entrance to the house so one day he took it and threw it into the bushes. Gabe complained that Francois was being an asshole and Lil Four got angry and yelled at him:
“Hey! Don’t say that about my roommate!”
A simple explanation would be that Francois and I were acting out of sexual frustration and I’m going to add a couple details that would seem to support that theory but I don’t actually think that that was the case. Francois was really into painting at the time: he painted nude female figures representing the four seasons on the four walls of his room. He painted an image of Lil Four’s breasts on a skateboard surrounded by passionflowers. They were very nice breasts, it was a very appealing painting.
Before Gabe was in the picture Lil Four and I had ended up sleep cuddling on a single occasion. I can’t remember what the reason behind this was, maybe Lil Four invited me to come sleep cuddle because she wanted to sleep cuddle. Anyway I was working a lot of hours at Metro Publishing at the time. I spent a lot of time with copy machines – flipping through the pages of books and copying them one at a time while my hips were held tight against the machine and I could feel it’s vibrations as it made each successive copy.
When Lil Four and I sleep cuddled I had a dream that her body was a copy machine and for lack of a better word I groped her. It wasn’t that big of a deal – we just decided not to try sleep cuddling again. It’s not like I would get a hard-on at work while I was holding my hips against the copy machines, I’m just trying to explain that there was something vaguely erotic about copy machines to me at the time.
All of this is going to fly in the face of the next point that I am going to make which is this: there is no chance that either Francois or me wanted to fuck Lil Four on any level at that point in time. We viewed each other like siblings, however strange and complex our relationships were this fact and essential separation was true. Maybe deep in my dream I wanted to fuck the abstract idea of a copy machine but I didn’t want to fuck Lil Four. Maybe in his constant painting Francois wanted to fuck an abstract and idealized concept of the female nude but he didn’t want to fuck Lil Four.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that if one or all of us had been abusing Gabe out of a misplaced sense of sexual frustration then it would have been abstracted sexual frustration. This is the most I have ever written about sex in any of these pieces and the only reason that I feel comfortable doing it is that the things that I’m writing about aren’t really sex at all. We used the frisbee-axe game as an elaborate pretense to keep punching Gabe, he continued to come over and play the game to get punched and Lil Four essentially gaslit him that all of this behavior was appropriate and normal.
Socially we were all behaving like a feral kitten that needs to be fed and protected but hisses, scratches and bites anything that attempts to feed and protect it. Or rather me, Francois and Lil Four were behaving like that. Gabe was behaving like the baby monkeys in the experiment that cling to a fake mother made of barbed wire because it’s the only way to get fed.
I intended to write a lot more about the house and our other awkward attempts to make friends in this piece but I ended up getting sidetracked by my intense, visceral reaction to our past behavior. Anyway we hated our weird pathetic landlord Mark and we told him no when he tried to raise our rent and one day he tore our roof off because he found some cheap laborers to help him and then didn’t put a new one on and it started to rain.
He kept a bunch of rotting scrap lumber in the backyard and would come fuck around with it with the heavy equipment vehicle called a Bobcat and just generally pretend that he was going to improve something he owned instead of just watching it get shittier and more broken. We locked him out of the backyard and he called the police on us and the police came and told us that if we were his tenants he wasn’t allowed to come there without giving us at least twenty four hour notice.
He used to come knock on the back door to complain that we smashed everything with an axe or that we wouldn’t let him raise our rent or he had just been digging through our trash and wanted to chastise us for throwing something away. When the whole thing had mostly run it’s course Chris painted the words “DIE MARK” in big black letters on the side of the house and the very next day I heard a familiar knock on the back door:
“What is the meaning of Die Mark?”
I took German in High School. You can probably imagine exactly what I told him.
I never learned to ride a bicycle as a child. I have vague memories of circling my family’s cul-de-sac on one with training wheels that must have belonged to someone else. My parents took me to Toys R Us to get one of my own but I told them I would rather have a coloring book. They laughed and explained that the price of the second one of those things was so trivial compared to the first that I could just have both. I told them that I’d just take the coloring book.
I did have a childhood best friend but he shared my indifference toward bicycle riding although I think he did own one and probably knew how to ride it. We were into skateboarding but in a way that bore more resemblance to sledding than the craze that was exciting our contemporaries. We carried the skateboards under our arms to increasingly steep hills around our neighborhood and sat down on them to ride to the bottom. I can’t remember ever standing on it and kicking the ground for momentum – it was like we didn’t know this method of riding a skateboard even existed.
The first person to try to teach me how to ride a bicycle as a young adult was a Spock-Rocker named Paul. The story about this guy was that his life’s ambition was to get a girlfriend and move to Portland. Once he got to Portland the relationships would end up not working out so he would move back to San Diego to find another girlfriend. I don’t know why he never tried to meet new girls in Portland. It could be that he was looking for specific qualities: Spock hair, star tattoo, lei pants and Tredair UK shoes – but it seems like there would have been just as many girls like that in the Portland of 1998 as there were in San Diego.
I never heard if it finally worked out for him and he built the perfect partnered up Portland life of his dreams or if he adjusted his expectations or found new and different ambitions. I’d like to think that he is currently in some stage of the same cycle: either preparing to move back to Portland having just met someone or preparing to return to San Diego after another breakup. There’s no chance it’s true though, I can’t remember who had told me this story about him but it seems likely that it was an exaggeration to begin with. Maybe it was the other Paul.
If the thing they say about learning to ride a bicycle is true, that once you learn you never forget, then Paul never actually taught me how to ride one. He definitely tried: I remember going down a single block of Golden Hills several times. Later that same summer I was finally taught for real by Brandi’s boyfriend Ben on the California block of North Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. Every time I attempted to ride one later I already knew how.
The point is that sometimes it takes doing something or learning to do something several times before it actually sinks in. I did eventually have the kind of best friend bicycle riding summer that countless television shows and movies have told me is supposed to happen in early adolescence but it wasn’t until 2012 in Los Angeles with my friend Ryan Riehle. I met Ryan Riehle on the Living Hell bus tour when he set up a show for us at a Boston studio for artists with disabilities he was working at called Outside the Lines.
The only thing is that I had actually met Ryan multiple times before this show but it hadn’t actually worked insofar as I didn’t actually remember. I still don’t remember even though I can remember lots of other little details about the shows and parties that we evidently met at. We talked about it again today, reminiscing over shared details like the theft of a rare original print of the Penelope Spheeris film The Decline of Western Civilization Part III, but when it gets to the moment when we would have met there is only a blank spot in my memory.
Ryan lived in an old house in Allston with cramped staircases that led to long, narrow hallways that divided the upper floors into individual bedrooms. On my return visits to Providence I had passed through parts of Atlantic Mills, Boy’s Town, and another space in the same building that I forget the name of but showed up with a dance troupe called Club Lyfestile. Anyway Ryan’s house was the first space in larger New England I had stepped into that had the same hardwood and screen printed posters feel as all of those Providence spaces.
This guy named Keith Waters lived there, I had seen some little comics he had drawn here and there about tiny anthropomorphic talking airplanes. He said he didn’t draw comics much anymore. There was a gigantic iguana named Azrael in the bay window that barely moved and almost looked like a stone carving under it’s red light. Ryan would be climbing aboard the bus to accompany us up to Maine and that would become something of a pattern every time I returned to the house in Allston. It was the pregame Maine spot.
So at Outside The Lines I was finally meeting Ryan in the way where it’s like riding a bike and you never forget. I had been inside of a place that did the same sort of thing as OTL called Creativity Explored in San Francisco where I saw issues of a mini comic called Whipper Snapper Nerd that I really liked. At Outside The Lines the thing that jumped out was these hand made t-shirts with different Gods drawn on in colored sharpies. I can’t remember the artist’s name. I got one that said Disgusting God.
Sometimes on this tour we didn’t actually feel like doing a Living Hell set and would just make up a different band. In Providence we had played as an improvised punk band called Max Capacity – I can’t remember 100% if I sang for that one too but it seems likely as the main reason for me becoming the singer was that nobody else wanted to do it. At Outside The Lines we created a band with a rotating group of the artists that worked there called Wednesday Surprise.
I can’t remember if this happened instead of or in addition to a Living Hell set but I do remember that it came together in a very casual and natural way – the OTL artists saw the instruments and wanted to try playing with them and then we were making up songs. We went through a long gestural number called Where’s My Shoe? that had it’s genesis in one of my shoes getting misplaced in the general chaos of a combined living and performance space on wheels.
It wasn’t the case with the Outside The Lines artists that nobody else ever wanted to be on vocals. I moved over to bass for a little while. I had heard that a couple of the OTL artists had been in a relationship but it hadn’t ended up working out. One of them was on the microphone while his former partner played the drums. He was singing in the quietest voice you could imagine, absolutely exuding frustration and loneliness for anyone close enough to the speaker to actually hear it.
I was going to put it into pull out quotes but there isn’t really much point to it: I still love you, I miss you, that sort of thing. It wasn’t so much the words as the way he was singing them.
He stared at the ground and seemed to feel like his words were falling off the edge of the earth the moment they left his mouth, drifting into the depths of space, never to know gravity again.
By the time of the Living Hell tour I was starting to get used to documentarians as a new fixture of whatever you call it when transportation, performance and audience participation coalesced into whatever the specific thing was. I don’t think I was actually with Friends Forever while their documentary was being filmed but I at least rode along for a social call with the aforementioned documentarian. The most conspicuous example was a pair of German documentarians that had arrived on the Mississippi River Junk Raft project I spent time on the previous summer called The Miss Rockaway Armada – they did the thing where one of them holds a boom mic that visually screams “documentary crew” to anybody that might be looking.
To a certain degree it can probably be said that the best documentarians are outsiders in relation to their subjects. I’d imagine most of my readers would at least be aware of the true crime streaming miniseries called The Staircase that played out as a cautionary tale against documentarians over identifying with the people on the other side of the lens. We expect them to be a little older, a little square and to be dressed in cargo shorts and vests in different shades of khaki. These things are somewhat comforting in that they reinforce boundaries that actually do feel important and we expect to exist.
When I came up with the nickname “the stooge” for our documentarian I wasn’t trying to be especially mean-spirited or exclusionary. It was a riff on the character referred to as the bond company stooge in the then recent Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between that director’s films, my generation’s tendency to self-mythologize and the steady commodification of anything resembling a hipster trope. In a lot of cases the assignment of a nickname is a harbinger of the outsider’s acceptance into a group as it means they are both seen and referred to in a way that unites it’s subject with the larger group against newcomers.
There isn’t one perfect way for a documentarian to collect footage or interact with their subjects but there is no mistaking the sensation that it is being done wrong. One thing that should certainly be addressed is that throughout the loose organic process of deciding who would be in Living Hell or coming on the tour the prospect of a documentary film wasn’t actually discussed. The bus functioned a lot like a collective punk house in that things were decided by group consensus and there was a tendency to assume nearly anything was fine until somebody expressed that it wasn’t. My point is that there were people among us who wouldn’t have been comfortable with even a near perfect documentarian.
I can empathize with the feeling that cool things are happening in front of you and need to be captured by any means necessary but ultimately I’m here to tell you about what it felt like to be on one side of the camera as opposed to the other one. These were the little things that made us uncomfortable: being asked to repeat an action that was just performed but wouldn’t have naturally been repeated. attracting more negative attention when sneaking behind restaurants and stealing used vegetable oil out of the used vegetable oil trash can. being constantly asked little questions and just generally feeling that the camera was less of a fly on the wall and more of a fly in your ear.
All of this would have been fine and natural steps in the mutual acclimatization process if most of us didn’t feel like we were repeatedly voicing concerns only to feel like nothing was actually changing. We also felt like even if all of us accepted the necessity of the documentation process and everything it entailed the same could not be said for all of the people in the various cities we visited who decided to come to our shows. Insofar as the camera represented an invasive gaze we didn’t want to feel responsible for subjecting friends and strangers to that same invasive gaze.
There was a galvanizing moment when growing reservations shifted decisively to the entire situation being simply untenable. I can’t remember what city or show this was at, which is probably for the best, but as I often do I remember what was said in precise detail. I’m not trying to imply that the following stupid statement defines the person on the other side of that camera. We’ve all said stupid things when trying to fit in. They approached me and Rain:
“Hey, this girl just walked into my shot and took a piss without noticing my camera! She was totally hot too!”
Before this moment we had been discussing the numerous smaller uneasinesses but had been trying to shoulder them for the sake of the resulting document. John Benson had been pouring heroic amounts of energy and material resources into keeping the bus rolling for years at this point and the prospect of a documentary film backed by a major music magazine felt like too big of an opportunity to pass up. The preceding revelation was a deal breaker: the most charitable way of saying it is that it wasn’t a cultural fit.
I can’t remember why this had happened but our paths diverged and then reconnected in Providence, Rhode Island. A conversation was had to the effect that filming and traveling together would not continue. I remember watching the documentarian calmly walking away down the single exit street that the bus had parked on for the show. They seemed to take it well. The short documentary did come out. I’m glad it exists. I imagine if you could peek under the hood of nearly any documentary film in existence you would see some of the same things: discomfort that segues into schism, compromise or some combination of the two.
The show was outside of a venue called Mars Gas Chamber. Jeremy Harris had made a large sign from a stop sign or something to direct people to where the party was that said something along the lines of “Oakland Acid Bus”. I thought that I had met Jeremy for the first time earlier that year at INC but ended up learning in the course of these stories that he was actually playing in USAISAMONSTER when they played Fort Thunder during my 2000 pilgrimage. We share a lot of friends and acquaintances but have settled into a kind of convivial mutual indifference.
I told him that it didn’t feel quite right to have the word “acid” sitting there as descriptor. I’ve been talking about the stuff non-stop for the last three chapters or so but at this particular moment in time it felt incongruous to me, not just for me but for the bus in general. Like it was too reductive when used to describe what we were about. I don’t remember Jeremy’s exact words here but I’ll do my best to paraphrase:
“That makes sense. I used to think that you weren’t that cool of a person and it was because of acid.”
That little exchange didn’t really bother me, I’m used to people thinking I’m an asshole so something like “I used to think you’re an asshole” doesn’t even track. It took me a long time to figure out I was nearsighted and I still don’t wear my glasses as much as I probably should so I constantly look like I’m narrowing my eyes at everyone in disapproval. Anyway I want to get back to not liking how it said the word “acid” on the show sign.
It’s uncomfortable seeing yourself the way that other people see you. The human voice sounds significantly different traveling through air than it does when carried to the inner ear by bone. When someone talks as much as I do people say “they love the sound of their own voice” but I don’t. Nobody does. Those of us who make recordings and frequently speak or sing through amplification have to try to make peace with it but it still sounds wrong almost every single time.
This is all to say of course it was uncomfortable to become part of the subject of a documentary and it will be uncomfortable for the person who made that documentary if they read my descriptions of what it was like to be there when they were making it. I think it can probably feel like I’m just stirring shit or being a sanctimonious prick when I write about this sort of thing and while I don’t think I’m exactly doing either of those things I did make a conscious choice to just stop thinking about how any of this might make anybody feel.
Way back in the Fort Thunder section I referred to USAISAMONSTER’s performance as “amazing” but the reality is I don’t remember much about what they sounded like that night. I remember Colin waking up and brushing his teeth right before they played and how excited they were about the counterfeit greyhound scam and riding with them after the show to the Silver Top Diner with a girl I had a little crush on and accidentally leaving these brown rubber monster gloves with fake fur on the back in their van.
If I feel bad about anything it’s for using a shallow, vapid adjective like “amazing”. There’s really no excuse for it: It was disrespectful to them, it was disrespectful to you my readers and I’m going to make a sincere effort to simply not do that sort of thing again.
The engine troubles that had required the overnight at a Cummins in the small town in West Virginia had not been resolved. In fact we had to stop in another small town in West Virginia where heavy rains had created a temporary chocolate river of muddy water to perform what was essentially a “magical oil change”. As one of the vocalists in Living Hell I had created a character called Deacon Peafowl who was kind of like a revival preacher for the kind of Ceremonial Magic championed by the Order of the Golden Dawn.
I had also been carrying a mummified squirrel in a little red fringed suede purse that had been discovered directly under the bus’s engine the moment it was moved from the backyard spot in Tampa, Florida it had been occupying since the International Noise Conference. There was a running joke that this squirrel had cursed us with it’s dying breath, calling out “nuts to you guys!” as it stiffened with rigor mortis beneath it’s future haunting ground. This joke had seemed innocent enough when just moving the bus from the backyard had caused a valve for the grease tank to snap off and flooded a suburban cul-de-sac with rancid French Fry oil made only more pungent from months of stagnating.
By the time we got to the chocolate river there had been enough mechanical troubles to elevate this idea from joke to valid concern and cast serious doubts as to the wisdom of continuing to carry our own version of the Ancient Mariner’s albatross. It was time to jettison the squirrel and having found ourselves in a near-biblical flood the decided-upon method would be “Viking Funeral”. A small oil can was cut open to serve as boat and a few small tokens were placed along it’s passenger either as offerings or “bad pennies” to be disposed of.
We had been kind of toying with the idea that Living Hell was the evangelical musical wing of an obscure religious cult in different ways: both through vague wording in the mis-information pamphlets I had produced and in the messages within my lyrics and Rain’s spoken word segments. Now that we were making a singing procession to a river bank and reverently lighting a deceased rodent on fire to watch it disappear beneath the swirling waters the lines had been blurred as to whether this was performance, parody or earnest spiritual practice. There is an Igbo expression I am fond of that I read in an essay by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe:
“Let us perform the sacrifice and so leave the blame on the doorstep of the Gods.”
It seemed to have actually had the desired effect – for one or two hundred miles at least. The journey between the chocolate river and New York City was actually devoid of major mechanical issues to the best of my recollection. This changed dramatically on the threshold of that metropolis: the moment we moved to enter through some kind of turnpike or toll-way the bus began violently ejecting hot grease from somewhere it shouldn’t have been that was nearly the same color as the magical river. The attendant quickly closed our lane and asked us to just move along as soon as physically possible without worrying about the toll.
We joked that it would have been a good method for avoiding tolls and tariffs in the future had it not been a portent of serious issues that actually desperately needed fixing.
I can’t remember if we had one or two days in New York before our show at Secret Project Robot but I do remember what the most exciting thing to do in town was. The Whitney Biennial had been a must-see event since the 2002 iteration had given an entire room over to costumes, sculpture, projections and music from the Fort Thunder collective FORCEFIELD. I’ve been to so many of these at this point that I’m almost certain to misplace specific pieces except for the one clear detail that Olaf Breuning’s first home video was on display and everybody was buzzing about it.
I had been wearing a six inch long dagger in a leather scabbard at my waist for the entire tour at this point and had totally forgotten that New York City actually has specific laws against that sort of thing. It was incorporated into the performances as athame with specific lyrics blending the concepts of metal, fire and magical intention:
“Cut the wick, light the spark!
Be the candle, pierce the dark!”
One of the security guards approached me and discreetly pointed to the prohibited weapon:
“That’s a real knife?”
I answered in a completely neutral tone that carefully skirted the division between a clear yes or no:
“Well it’s a dagger.”
Apparently this was the correct answer, he held up the palms of his hands in a conciliatory gesture as he assured me:
“I won’t say nothin’.”
Eventually everybody made their way to Williamsburg for the late afternoon show at Secret Project Robot. I remember hearing that some photos and a review from this show ended up in the Village Voice but this writing project has been unfortunately teaching me that alternative weeklies don’t generally bother with comprehensive online archives. Here’s what I do remember: this was my first time running into my San Diego friend Raul de Nieves in his incarnation as a successful New York artist. There was a group show up on the inside of the space that included a small room painted completely black with an oppressive doom metal soundtrack.
I ended up eating acid again which makes me think it might have been almost a week after the small town in West Virginia with the Cummins but then I lay my memories out and remember that I also ate it to walk the Freedom Trail in Boston and go to a dinner party in Liberty, Maine and there’s just no way all of these things were a week apart. I was just eating a lot of acid. With such frequent use it would seem like I would have been developing a tolerance and experiencing diminishing returns but I clearly remember it being potent each of these times so it would either have been really good or I was just to the left of the “overdoing” it line.
This was the only time on the tour that I had taken it just before one of our performances but that’s not too crazy of an undertaking in the dilettante-ish lead vocalist role. We played with one group that had elaborately sculpted costume heads that looked like the figures on totem poles and another group in costumes that played drums with smoke machines and strobe lights. We played with a band that Ned Meiners had at the time called Gold Dust that was probably my first time meeting him. It was maybe a power trio and I really liked it and tried to convince them to just get on the bus and come with us but Ned said he had to work:
“But your job probably sucks and your band is really, really good. This is probably the best band you’ll ever be in.”
I can’t seem to find any recorded music or evidence of this band existing online but I still stand by what I said. CCR Headcleaner certainly had it’s moments but by 2008 I had been to a lot of shows and seen a lot of bands and wouldn’t have gotten this worked up if they weren’t actually great. From 18 to 20 I was probably getting this excited about one or two bands at every show I went to but by 2008 it was one or two bands an entire U.S. Tour.
The show was over and we were packing up to get out of town before it was even dark. Now that the crowds had dispersed and nobody was playing loud music anymore a couple of cops decided that it would be the perfect time to show up and harass us. They were asking really stupid questions about what we were up to as we were clearly doing everything in our power to stop being in their jurisdiction as soon as humanly possible and picking up discarded half empty beers from the ground and asking who they belonged to as if anybody would actually be stupid enough to say:
“Oh, that’s mine. Please write me a citation for an open container.”
This whole time Kloot, a lab-chow mix that Upper Dave travelled with, was losing his shit and barking his head off because he hated people in uniforms. It wasn’t just cops, he also had a deep antipathy for firemen and UPS drivers. For most of the tour this only served to make our frequent police encounters more tense and exhausting but this time around it was actually helpful:
“Ok, we get it. We know when we’re not wanted.”
They got back into their car and left. It was kind of like when an ATM spits out an extra twenty or a hawk swoops down to grab a rat from a crowded street: nobody could quite believe it had just actually happened. It occurred to all of us that if they actually knew when they weren’t wanted it would have to be something they were nearly constantly aware of and it also seemed deeply out of character as most cops nearly always act like they’re God’s Gift to people whose lives are about to get shittier and more complicated.
By now it was dark and we were driving out of New York City. As we were passing under an expressway we either got stuck at a long light or some minor issue needed adjustment or somebody needed to consult a map. I only know that we sat there for a minute and a German girl was staring at our bus in wonder and I hopped off to talk to her. She said that it looked like the train from a German children’s fantasy book called Jim Knopf. She was visibly enchanted, I mean to the extent that her eyes literally sparkled. I fell in love with her a little bit and the entire situation and New York City and us existing like something out of a fairytale for her that suddenly materialized out of the night and would disappear just as quickly.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t know anything about her and would never see her again, it was that the romance of the entire encounter was contingent on those two details.
We parked in a town called Orange, New Jersey at the newly branded September 11th Memorial Scenic Overlook. Everybody was going to sleep but that was out of the question for me. Fortunately the rest stop featured several acres of sprawling forest. I didn’t have a flash light so I walked in the dark until I could see in it. I came across a deer that I must have been upwind of or it was really into grazing or I just walk really quietly. Probably a little bit of all three. Regardless it didn’t notice me until I was almost close enough to touch it and it screamed in horror and ran off into the woods.
I had never heard a deer scream before this point and it isn’t something that I’ve had an opportunity to hear again since. I don’t really know how to describe the sound except to say that it sounded really frightened. One of my cats actually tried to intimidate a deer fairly recently but he didn’t frighten her at all. She stomped her hooves at him and put him in his place so she could go back to eating the grapes in the compost pile.
I walked through the woods until the light started to come and I could finally truly see what the woods I had been walking in for hours actually looked like. At the time I thought it was the most beautiful forest I had ever seen but I wouldn’t say that now. The woods that I own and live in and am the steward of are definitely the most beautiful. I didn’t totally realize this until I had written it all down but it sounds like the LSD had definitely put me in a state where I was falling for Ned’s band and some woods in New Jersey and a German girl that I only met for about thirty seconds. It wasn’t always like that for me but clearly it was this night.
Just before I was finally ready to fall asleep I came across a single, gigantic morel growing under a tree within view of the path. A lot of people I know are afraid of eating wild mushrooms but that isn’t the case for me: morels, boletes and chicken of the woods don’t really look like anything dangerous. There actually is a toxic mushroom they call false morel but it doesn’t convincingly look like the real thing. It must have been at least eight inches tall. I brought it back onto the bus and fell asleep dreaming of cooking it the next time we ended up having access to a kitchen. I slept for two solid days.
When I woke up I found out that somebody thought it smelled rotten and had thrown it away.
Living back in San Diego I ended up in a long term relationship with a New England type pedigree girl. She was from Cape Cod and into stuff like Diesel Jeans and making Cosmopolitans, probably the closest I’ve ever been to dating a “normie”. She lived in the same Mission Valley apartments as the woman that Andy Panda was seeing – still is actually but she might have moved by now. She was really good at getting jobs as a “brand ambassador” so I got to experience that world in all it’s weirdness. Operate an Oxygen Bar to promote Trojan Condoms at OzzFest, that sort of thing.
We made a trip to the East Coast together so I got to see Cape Cod through the eyes of a local: hear people talk about how some tunnel wasn’t finished yet, go to a bar somebody in The Pixies owned, hear the way people said words like Hyannis. We stayed at her Grandpa’s house and one morning a newborn bat had fallen from wherever they were nesting to just in front of the front door and died. It looked like an emaciated human infant swaddled in a blanket of it’s own skin.
Her Grandpa asked me if I was much of a fisherman.
Her dad was renting a summer house on Martha’s Vineyard so we went out there too. If you’ve never been it’s almost difficult to believe how patrician things like pictures of lighthouses and dried out starfish and sea shells can be. In San Diego these are the trappings of Ocean Beach which was still pretty run down and hippyish when I was growing up but for New England white people they might as well be gold chains. Everybody wore The Black Dog T-Shirts and the ladies were buzzing about this kind of straw hat that Hillary Clinton had just made popular.
The rental was on a part of the island called Gay Head near Michael J. Fox’s house. We spent a day messing around on a secluded beach because there wasn’t much privacy in the rental. This big orange dog-tick came marching across the sand to make things unpleasant for us. They don’t squish easy so I threw it as far as I could but our body heat just brought it back. I found a rock to smash it on and a smaller rock to smash it with – it’s body split perfectly into top and bottom pieces like the two sides of a hollow plastic action figure. I would have almost thought it was two ticks stuck together if the two halves didn’t stiffen up and die the moment they were separated.
Everybody was talking about Lyme Disease.
The trip hadn’t been planned around it or anything but we were fortunate enough to be in New York for a Dearraindrop opening at Deitch Projects called Riddle of the Sphinx. I had seen some Dearraindrop stuff in Paper Rodeo and there was one batch of zines that them and Paper Rad had put out together. The two collectives were almost uncanny analogues of each other: a charismatic careerist with a quiet overshadowed girlfriend and her sort of wunderkind younger brother that seemed to make slightly better stuff than the main guy.
I never knew too much about it but I heard vague whispers of a “beef” between the two groups. It was almost a theme within the Fort Thunder adjacent art landscape for a little while. Everybody was inspiring each other and working in various groups and collectives – when an idea gained traction it could be a little Rocky defining exactly whose idea it was. I actually asked Jacob Ciocci about the “beef” a few years later:
“We squashed it.”
This was the beginning of my storied history with admiring Jeffrey Deitch’s taste while carrying a mild aversion for his overall persona. He has definitely amplified and fostered a lot of artists that seem to benefit from the platform over the years. I wouldn’t say anything as dramatic as “necessary evil” but “necessary ickiness” about sums it up. A party at his Los Feliz mansion had me retreating into a closet to escape the atmosphere then immediately emerging to find out who was responsible for the Boschian embossed works I found hanging there.
It was Raqib Shaw.
At the Dearraindrop show I made an especially cringey faux pas. Billy Grant had left his prescription of Adderall on a table next to some pita chips and orange juice and because much of the group’s work is drug related I assumed they were supposed to be “refreshments”. In an overcompensatory attempt to seem “cool” I swallowed three of them. Of course that hadn’t been the intention behind leaving them on the table at all and he actually needed them and it was a problem for him that I’d taken them. They were 50 milligram extended release capsules.
I don’t actually even like stimulants that much.
I’m a bit of a talker under normal brain chemistry conditions so in this state I was an absolute menace. I was overly enthusiastic and oblivious to basic social cues and Joe Grillo had to ask me repeatedly to back up and give him some personal space while I was talking at him about god knows what. The commune I was born on had a specific idiom for this kind of behavior:
“Into the juice.”
The group Slow Jams who seem to have disappeared from the internet were performing at an after party somewhere with a piece that utilized a trampoline and I was jumping on their trampoline and generally practicing bad audience etiquette. Even without an absurd dose of Adderall I was a bit much for a big chunk of my twenties. I was always trying to get on the mic and freestyle rap and while this behavior is appropriate in some settings like freestyle rap battles and acceptable in other settings like shows and parties where people want me to rap it is almost nearly as often a total pain in the ass.
It was that moment with the harmonica at that first Make-Up show in 1998, I was shamelessly addicted to the thrill of the borrowed spotlight.
About a year later I would end up in a rap group of my own joining a motley San Diego outfit called Sex Affection and helping reimagine it as Hood Rich. Spending time on the other side of things where you bring the gear and write the songs gave me some much needed perspective but I would credit one particular rapper with showing me a hard boundary. I can’t remember where and when I first saw MC Subzero Permafrost but I remember exactly what she said when I tried to get on her microphone:
“When I was coming up I was taught to get my own mic and never let anybody else use it.”
Sometimes hearing “no” can be as transformative as hearing “yes”. I appreciate everyone who was accommodating in my early years but Wendy’s honest refusal was what I needed to grow and mature as an artist. I got my own microphone, a cheesy but iconic Shure 55 because I liked how it looked in a DJ Scooter video. I haven’t considered myself a rapper for several years although some might disagree with how they would classify the Bleak End stuff.
I’m pretty sure I’ll get back into it.
This feels short so I’ll throw in some extra details from the 2004 trip. We went to Providence and it was going through one of those extremely populist public sculpture series of the early 2000’s that arose after the success of Chicago’s Cows on Parade. In this case they were Mr. Potato Heads. There was one that looked like Edgar Allen Poe and an especially inspiring one in front of the mall that looked like an ATM with money coming out of it’s mouth. There’s actually a story about that mall from the 2000 Fort Thunder trip that didn’t make it into those chapters. I was holding the door open for a group of whatever New England calls “Valley Girls”. One turned to me as they entered and announced in a cheery tone:
“Thanks! We were just about to say something really rude about you!”
I’d rank it pretty high among all the variations I’ve gotten on “hey weird guy you look weird” over the years. Back in 2004 we went to see Devendra Banhart at AS220 and I wasn’t thrilled with it. I’ve written about this elsewhere and this installment has enough snark, directed both inwardly and outwardly, as it is. More memorable was the hotel we ended up staying at when I didn’t run in to anyone we could try to stay with. The Sportsman’s Lodge was the perfect setting for what we were getting into: sex and heroin.
Boston and Allston were the final ports of call. We ate at a popular vegan pizza place that I never miss a chance to mention was later rebranded as TJ Scallywaggles. The jaunty backstory printed on the wall reminded me a bit of the Ben & Jerry’s mythos as written by Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil. We had other business in the neighborhood. New England was getting dope from her sketchy Russian friends. One seemed to be a prostitute and the other suggested rich boy whose mother handmade him shirts with cute pictures of apples on them – quite trend forward with the oilily’s and such to come.
While we were waiting a large wind picked up. A very young mouse was attempting to cross the street but being harried by the winds. An errant gust would send him rolling backward with his comically oversized feet flipping over his head. Still he recollected himself, soldiered on and reached his side in style.
If this little mouse serves as any allegory, avatar or simulacrum of anything else in this chapter please let me know. I’d certainly like to believe it could but more specific details elude me. It was in fact very cute.
We went to a Neil Young tribute in a Brooklyn Park. Cat Power did Needle and the Damage Done. We were happy to be there, happy to come home and I was unhappy to extend the relationship.
I’ve been really wracking my brain and I can’t seem to figure out how I ended up with the cassette copy of the Woods album At Rear House. I know for a fact that I have never seen the band live but I did look up the label Fuck It Tapes and I was definitely at shows for a lot of the artists releasing music on the imprint around the same time. Somebody might have been selling it along with their own tapes and records or maybe I picked it up as a distro situation when I did a big mail order from Not Not Fun or maybe somebody just gave it to me.
I only know that it became one of my favorite tapes from the first time I played it, the kind of tape that you just flip back over to the first side after the second side ends and keep doing this until when you finally do get into the mood to put something else on you wouldn’t even know how many times you had actually looped it.
I went to the ArthurFest in 2005 to see Yoko Ono, Earth and SUNN O))) but the “freak folk” phenomenon of the mid aughts had been largely a dud for me. I ended up in Providence for a Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom show at AS220 and felt nothing but second hand embarrassment. He felt like an uninspired Marc Bolan clone in imminent danger of eating his microphone; she seemed to be putting too much effort into coming off as fey or ethereal to actually do so. A creepy social climber with Rod Stewart hair from the El Rancho days was their road manager.
They ended things with a “family style” Rusted Root cover. I’d imagine this all sounds glorious to at least one of my readers but it just wasn’t my cup of San Pedro…
The Woods album was the rare kind of singer-songwriter work in the folk/acoustic vein that grips me. The styles are quite different but in terms of effect the closest thing would probably be the Palace Brothers album Days in the Wake. I have mentioned before that I view the acoustic guitar as somewhat unsavory by nature – my prejudice toward the instrument can only be offset by heroic virtuosity or an aptitude for writing “hooks”.
However I got my hands on the tape the period of time where it became a constant soundtrack was on board The Miss Rockaway Armada and more specifically The Garden of Bling. After most of the other project members had thrown in the towel and retreated to other realities the collection of catchy tunes accompanied our increasingly desperate attempts to rend our vessel River worthy in the face of the approaching winter.
A combination of the elements, the constant wakes of passing barges, successive beachings and the slipshod quality of the initial construction were beginning to take their toll. We transferred responsibility onto an aquatic mammal frequently spotted near the raft with the added fiction that it was secretly aided by one of our number; altering the lyrics to one of the Woods songs to reflect this:
“Night Beaver, Night Beaver, Where did you come from?
As I sit you are awful quiet now, when will you be gone?
And I’ve seen it now, you left your tooth marks on the bow, who helped you? Jacki! Who helped you? Jacki!”
One day while my ex-fiancée I’ve been referring to as Rocky was visiting we were driving near the Chain-of-Rocks Bridge when Harrison spotted a tiny kitten that some monstrous sadist had abandoned on one of those circular patches of grass enclosed by a Freeway on-ramp. The poor little thing was so hungry she was trying to catch and eat butterflies. Me and Harrison caught her by throwing a sweater on top of her and I started wearing it with her tucked inside until all the feral was out of her.
I named her Night Beaver and she became a member of our crew and my traveling companion until my hectic itinerary made it clear she would be better off living with Stephany, my room-mate in Chicago at the time. This arrangement was clearly the best thing for her as they live together still. It would have been Autumn of 2007 when we rescued her making her a little older than fifteen years old now. I talked to Stephany on the phone for the first time in forever recently and she briefly put me on speaker.
Night Beaver seemed happy to hear my voice again.
In early September of 2009 I had moved back to San Diego to help my father with end-of-life care. On September 5th I had ended up in Los Angeles and heard that Woods would be playing at an event called Fuck Yeah Fest. This was the first year that the festival grew large enough to require the move to Los Angeles Historic State Park near Chinatown and the only time I was interested in attending as a spectator. In later years when it moved to Exposition Park I would end up working at it on my birthday a couple of times for a pizza company called Spicy Pie.
I was hanging out with Rocky and another female friend I’ll call Snake and the three of us decided to try to sneak in to see Woods. Rocky actually found parking somewhere in Chinatown and we walked down through the Metro Station to sniff out a point of ingress. I had been to Coachella one time but the headliners were bands like Radiohead and The Cure – this was my first time seeing hordes of overly excited millennials thronging to watch bands I had always thought of as “underground” in a festival setting.
It was somewhat disorienting watching what happened when there was too much youthful enthusiasm in one place. Lightning Bolt, who were essentially headlining the festival, offer a simple way to demonstrate this. They had always preferred forgoing stages and setting up in the middle of the crowd but when thousands of kids all want to be the ones standing right there this sort of thing is simply no longer safe or practical.
The thing that always sticks with me was the kid who had just bought a pair of tiny red-eared sliders. We dressed and carried ourselves like cooler, older kids so he was super excited to show them to us:
“This one is called Slime and this one is called Fuck Yeah!”
The acute knowledge that both of these creatures would be dead by the end of the day was palpably painful – the weight of wisdom. You can’t just explain that to somebody in this situation where there is a visceral need to have anything to stick out, distinguish one’s self and appear more interesting. I mean similar turtles are sold and die in Chinatown every single day but I never thought it was something I would see in what I thought of as my community. Maybe I just sound like a condescending, pretentious asshole.
It was getting close to the time that Woods was supposed to perform so we quickly climbed over a fence and attempted to disappear into the crowd. This plan failed for two reasons: we were dressed for the opposite of anonymity and I had ripped the seat of my pants, a bright turquoise pair of Gloria Vanderbilts, while scaling the pokey barrier. Security was, quite literally, on my ass.
We were plucked from the crowd and escorted to the outside of a trailer while the festival’s authority figures most likely had a pow-wow concerning the exact method of ejecting us. You would think that people would have been sneaking in in a similar manner all day but the way that they handled us made it feel like the situation was unprecedented. Maybe we were just the only ones that had gotten caught.
The security trailer happened to be right next to the trailer where the bands checked in or did something else official and we immediately ran into the Brians of Lightning Bolt. Chippendale was surprised to see me:
“Oh! I didn’t know that you were playing this festival too!”
“I’m not. We just got caught trying to sneak in and they’re kicking us out.”
He quickly conferred with Gibson and a person I didn’t recognize who was most likely there in an official capacity then informed our gaoler that they intended to make us their guests. Authority is a drug that certain types of people seem incapable of ever getting enough of:
“Unfortunately they’ve already demonstrated a disregard for the rules of the festival by trying to sneak in so there’s no way they can be allowed to be here.”
I reassured him that we were content with our current relationship with impending consequences:
“It’s OK, Woods already played. Is there any chance either of you might have an extra pair of pants?”
I will always love Lightning Bolt and have seen them play at least two times since the events of this story but my enthusiasm has not sustained itself at the level of when I was twenty years old and they were my favorite band in the world. I imagine that both of the Brians, to at least some degree, have gone through a similar experience with their band. In 2009 I was most excited about their work as a printmaker and animator respectively. On that particular day while I absolutely would have stuck around and most likely had a wonderful time during their set I was most excited to see Woods.
Major Festivals are just all around weird experiences anyway. The next year I would end up performing at a Michigan Festival where Kool Kieth was set to perform the entirety of his Dr. Octagon album but ended up leaving before his set because the environment was making my tour-mates uncomfortable. That record was really important to me the year it had been released but the experience of watching a band at a major festival is comparable to having a drunken friend call you and hold up their cell phone at a concert across the country.
My brother actually did call me drunk and hold up his phone from a big U2 concert was. I became oddly obsessed with a cassette of The Joshua Tree around 2009 when I lived at Apgar but besides that I was never too interested in the band. I kind of remember the song that was playing through the phone though – it was about as exciting as watching anybody at Coachella.
Neither of the Brians had any extra pants.
All of the bands that happened to come by during the absurd amount of time that was spent deciding how to kick us out ended up being friends, or at least friendly acquaintances, of mine. I went through more or less the same routine with vetoed guest-listing and a futile plea for replacement pants with the members of Eat Skull and Japanther. In retrospect I probably should have just walked around outside until I recognized somebody who could get us in but it wasn’t the best thought out plan.
I was really in a situation with the pants though. They had been skin-tight and I wasn’t wearing any underwear. It wasn’t a little tear either, the whole back was as open as a New Orleans Liquor Store. I think Snake or Rocky eventually gave me some kind of scarf or extra shirt I was able to crudely tie over the offending area.
It was an especially hot day and as the process was taking forever I started asking for some water. The Security Guard said that I was in no position to ask for anything but I countered that we would become an even bigger headache for them under the effects of dehydration or heat exhaustion. I didn’t think to mention the Geneva Convention.
He angrily handed us a couple of bottles.
Finally a decision was passed down concerning which of the exits we were going to be walked to and cut loose from. This involved walking across a large expanse of the Park that was not being used for the Festival. The vegetation was sparse and more or less typical of Southern California: mugwort, anise, datura and Hopi Tobacco. There were a few rows of corn that appeared to be off season.
Up until this year I had managed to resist ever getting a cell phone but my parents felt that I would be more helpful to them if I started to carry one. My dad had given me an older one of his, it was whatever you call the kind that’s even smaller and cheaper than a flip phone. It had one of those little leather holsters with the clear plastic that clips onto your waist. It was the kind of cell phone that somebody would have gotten if they were already used to carrying a pager.
Anyway after the long wait and the long walk across the field I noticed that this cell phone had fallen out of it’s holster somewhere along the way. The way I look at it there are two possibilities: either the Security Guard had spent so much time in our company he was starting to enjoy it or he had learned enough about me to realize that I wouldn’t stop being a problem until we found my cell phone.
Either way he walked me back through the field and we found the thing. It materialized on the ground the way that things do when you’ve accidentally dropped them and you know that you’re about to retrace your steps and find them again. I feel like I can tell the difference the moment that I realize I’ve dropped something – like I can feel whether it’s gone gone or just waiting to snap back into existence when my eyes scan over it’s new location.
Once I retrieved the cell phone we were finally ready to go on with our lives and put the Festival behind us or at least it’s 2009 iteration. I can’t remember for sure but I think I bought myself some other pants at the Chinatown store that sells irregular pieces and samples from the many sweatshops of the garment district. I would be heading back down to San Diego where it would turn out that my father only had days to live. I’m not sure where Rocky or Snake would end up going next.
I’ve still never seen Woods live but I would very much like to. I don’t have that tape anymore but every now and again I listen to it online again. I checked out some of their other stuff but none of it hit me in quite the same way.
I’d like to think that I will never again have reason to set foot in another Major Festival for the rest of my life but at the same time I’m pretty fond of surprises.
If I’m ever in a band famous enough to headline I’ll make sure to always carry a couple extra pairs of pants with me.
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 can’t remember the exact dates but I think I was at the Fort for the last 3 weeks of August. I think I remember a quote from Mat Brinkman a few years later about how the people interested in comix were generally far less enthusiastic about noise bands and vice versa. While this is no doubt generally true I can say with absolute certainty that the Venn Diagram had at least a small sliver of overlap.
I lived there.
Being in Providence offered many opportunities to examine and collect artifacts from both of these circles. However while the comic book can be said to be most alive in the physical object the music side of things reached an apogee in the fleeting temporal spectacle called performance. I had heard stories about the legendary 1997 concert where Dan from Landed had set himself on fire and FORCEFIELD had basted the audience in the deadly vapors of an idling moped.
To me this legend was as vital as the infamous murders and church burnings surrounding the early ‘90s Norwegian Black Metal scene. Much like the celebrated happenings where John Cage gave recitals on burning pianos the artist on heroic quest to explore the boundaries of creation inevitably explored the dissident and iconoclastic power of destruction. Performances like the one I just described marked the geometrical asymptotes of this destructive impulse, briefly glimpsed through the Overton Window of the passing vehicle of convention.
While Fort Thunder was absolutely buzzing with the energies of creation my visit barely coincided with the species of bacchanal I was hoping to participate in. While Brian Chippendale returned toward the end of my holiday Lightning Bolt was on effective hiatus while Brian Gibson was attempting to relocate to NYC. Chippendale graciously allowed me to sate my prodigious appetite on his claustrophobic comic diaries but a home field repeat of the live set I had barely caught in Los Angeles was not forthcoming. Similarly while Dan St. Jacques was briefly present in all his gorilla chested glory I would not be catching any sets from Landed or the raucous Olneyville Sound System.
I visited Ben McOsker at the crowded apartment home of essential Providence imprint Load Records. He offered me a bulk rate on all the records I wanted and I filled the holes in my collection while discovering some new favorites. Astoveboat would become the soundtrack to a hazy few weeks in the following summer when I read Moby Dick, took meth and angrily fantasized about killing Gods and whales. He told me to grab the Scissorgirls 10 inch but I declined. He told me I’d regret it.
He was right.
I was making a mistake that was prevalent in the experimental music circles of the day. I failed to appreciate the creative powers of the feminine. In the years to come nearly all of my musical collaborations would be with women but at this point I was still young and stupid.
Raphael Lyon was filling the unenviable yet essential stations of House Mom and spokesperson but it was Leif Goldberg who most graciously took me under his wing. I remember spending hours in his room while he showed me screen printed comics, impressive flip books and an experimental film made from cross sections of colorful marbled clay. The creativity in the air was infectious; I spent days at Jim Drain’s desk making assorted items of construction paper collage: an unfortunately never finished wordless comic about a fantasy wizard, a copy of a He-Man tableaux as a gift for Drain and black and white prehistoric scenes in the vein of Mary Fleener that made it into the following issue of Paper Rodeo, albeit out of order. [author’s note: if anybody might have a copy of this issue and could send an image I’d be most grateful. It was the Fall 2000 issue with the Ben Jones cover. The piece is reproduced quite small and features skeletal apes and dinosaurs]
Goldberg showed me around the screen printing studio while he put together an impressive issue of the Monster anthology and posters for an upcoming Fort Thunder concert to be held on the eve of my 20th birthday. He took me on his bike rides to wheat paste these posters around town which came in extremely handy when it was time for me to put up flyers for the upcoming xbxrx concert I had ended up organizing. I practiced on the roof with a green and blue toy guitar with preloaded rhythms and chords produced by plucking tiny metal wires but somehow never got up the gumption to ask if I could jump the bill.
I had no problem asking complete strangers if I could cross the country and live in their home but struck a hidden vein of adolescent shyness when it was time to ask to perform inside of it.
Show Night finally came around and I got to see the Fort come to life in concert mode. Peter Fuller set up an espresso stand that I later donated the bottles from my raft to and shipped a kilo of Italian beans when I started working for a Sicilian sociopath in Chicago. The show was opened by Duct Tape Union and another project I seem to have forgotten the name of. Colin Langenus from USAISAMONSTER had been obliviously sleeping until minutes before their set then quickly brushed his teeth and took the stage, earning him the affectionate nickname Sleepy Tooth. While their live set was amazing the truly life changing consequence of meeting this band was an initiation into the illicit fellowship of the counterfeit Greyhound Ameripass.
They also introduced me to my aforementioned friend from Benefit Street who would become a lingering crush for the remainder of my visit and several years to follow.
Finally the crowd was ushered into an alley behind the building for a last performance. Friends Forever offered the exact type of heretical live show I had been so fervently pining for. They were my first introduction to what I would call the “extreme noise tour lifestyle”, shunning brick and mortar venues to blast their infectious tunes from the inside of their actual tour van and accentuated with smoke machines, lasers and fireworks. I danced with abandon as the midnight hour ushered in my 20’s. Nate Hayden and I bonded over a shared enthusiasm for Coricidin and he gave me a cassette of recordings he had created under this unhealthy influence: Wizard 333. One of the tracks was entitled Fungi from Yuggoth which boosted my enthusiasm substantially.
While my floating exploits on the Woonasquatucket were still to come this night was undoubtedly the climax of my days at Fort Thunder. Much like the 1998 The Makeup concert of the introductory chapter this night felt like an initiation ceremony in which I was inducted into the secret society of the Underground. Big changes were on the horizon as I left my teenage self behind and began the adventure of adulthood. In a little more than a year Fort Thunder would become a memory and the naive innocence of ‘90s subculture would be forever shattered on a day called 9/11
The night before my departure brought a rare instance of the type of fellowship that is only brought about by shared consumption of alcohol. While I had spent the entire summer exploring the psychedelic potential of various over-the-counter medications I could count my experiences with alcoholic inebriation on a single hand. I drank the entire bottle of Brass Monkey that had been gifted to me during my maiden voyage and became embarrassingly drunk.
Dan St Jacques was front and center for this excursion in his trademark straw hat that looked like it had been stolen from a donkey. A rag tag crew on tall bikes, choppers and other monstrosities set out to explore the city and raid a popular bread dumpster. I fell on my head, cursed St. Jacques for snagging the only olive loaf and generally made a fool of myself until it was time to climb into Jim Drain’s bed for the final time.
I woke early the next morning and left a note for my absent host, contributed a pittance toward his outstanding rent debt and trudged across Federal Hill for the final time until I reached my bus to Chicago.
I spent the next twenty years hunting for regional undergrounds with the same type of creative Zeitgeist as Fort Thunder and turn of the century Providence. I lived in Chicago, Oakland, Los Angeles, Tijuana, Portland, New Orleans and San Diego. I visited Baltimore, NYC, Philadelphia, Berlin, Oslo, Panama, rural Maine and countless others. While every one of these destinations pulsed with currents of authentic underground energy the closest I would ever feel to my days at the Fort would be my time on a fleet of junk rafts, touring on a city bus turned concert venue and participating in a small but magical occurrence known as the Mojave Rave.
I dedicate these stories to the one’s who were there but more importantly to the kids who would never have the opportunity. For all the ones who only heard the name Fort Thunder in reverent whispers when it had already become as unreachable as Avalon or Tir Na Nog I humbly hold out my hand.
Climb into my eyes, my ears and my memories; I’ll take you on an adventure to a magical world that lives on forever in the eternal optimism of youth,
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 