Friends Forever – Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America

Some Interesting Things I Have Recently Received In The Mail

September 29, 2023October 9, 2023 berniebleak4 Comments

I decided to do something a little out of the ordinary with this piece and make it a “mailbag” column. I’d love to actually do a full on letters column but nobody sends them – electronically or otherwise. I barely even get comments and wonder if this format isn’t especially conducive to leaving them as I imagine most of my readers aren’t registered WordPress users.

To be one hundred percent transparent the only reason I’ve gotten these things in the mail is because I’ve ordered them or mentioned not having and wanting them. It would be cool to randomly get stuff as a surprise but I’d have to list a mailing address and I don’t have a PO Box yet. I’d happily give my address to anyone who asked, after quickly vetting that they were neither a nefarious spam-bot or ill-intentioned fellow meat bag, but that kinda ruins the whole surprise part.

Anyway this will be kind of like a review column except for the fact that nearly everything mentioned here actually came out a decent amount of time ago and at least half of it isn’t available anywhere to purchase.

The Pepsi-Cola Addict June-Allison Gibbons : Strange Attractor Press 2023

I’ve been trying to get my hands on a copy of this book since I first read Marjorie Wallace’s The Silent Twins around twenty years ago. Thankfully a biopic of the same name, while not making much of a splash theatrically, has ignited a renewed interest in the Gibbons sisters’ literary works and a reprint of Jennifer Gibbons’ Discomania is even slated for release on the same imprint later this year.

For those unfamiliar June and Jennifer Gibbons are identical twin sisters of West Indian descent who were born in Great Britain in 1963. They developed an idioglossia, or secret shared dialect, which they used to communicate with each other while refusing to speak to outsiders or even family members for the early part of their lives. Both of them began writing short novels in their teenage years which they were able to have published through correspondence with vanity presses using their income from England’s version of social security money.

After short and awkward courtships with vacationing American boys they went on a minor crime spree of petty burglaries and eventually arson. This led to them being institutionalized against their will for a decade in a hospital called Broadmoor. Jennifer died of heart failure on the very bus that was transporting them to freedom in 1993 and June has since led a fairly private life with her immediate family.

The writing could be classified as Outsider Art – a field where literature seems to sit in the uncomfortable shadow of visual and musical endeavors. Henry Darger’s impressive works on paper were always intended to accompany his written opus In the Realms of the Unreal as illustrations but while these images have been exhibited and reproduced in multiple volumes the text has not been made as accessible.

The publication of Wallace’s book in 1986, while the twins were still at Broadmoor, introduced small selections from The Pepsi-Cola Addict and other works to a large audience and created a collector’s market for the original printing of the book. The thing that always attracted me to the prose was it’s romanticisation of youth and violence in a way that reminded me of works by both S.E. Hinton and Anthony Burgess.

When you add in the fact that the young writers barely left their own bedrooms, much less visited the locales of their stories, you have imaginative works comparable to Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique.

I used to spend time on dedicated discussion boards searching for scans or pdfs of this book and making pacts with other seekers that if either of us were so lucky as to find a copy we would immediately make it digitally available. Unfortunately actual possession of this prize seemed to have a corrupting influence like Tolkien’s famous rings and every time somebody got their hands on one they’d decide to either keep it for themselves or attempt to recoup their spending with astronomically priced photocopies.

Now that the book is easily available to all and I have my own copy in hand I can report on the actual writing. When I first began reading the frequent use of awkwardly verbose synonyms for common words as well as the kaleidoscopic insertion of colors like amethyst and sorghum could be both dazzling and disorienting in turn. Now that I’m a third of the way through I scarcely notice as I am fully in the grips of the narrative and excited to follow these characters to what will no doubt be tragic conclusions.

If you enjoy any of the works I’ve thrown out comparisons to or find your interest piqued by my description it would be worth your time to secure your own copy or request that it be stocked at your local library.

I was embarrassed not to have seen this – spare yourself worse embarrassment and watch it

Friends Forever – A Documentary Film Ben Wolfisohn : Plexifilm 2003

If you read my chapters on either Fort Thunder or my adventures traveling with this band you’d most likely be surprised by the fact that I’d never actually seen this movie but nonetheless that is the reality. This film does not provide a substitution for actually experiencing one of Friends Forever’s legendary van performance’s in all it’s smoke and spark spewing glory but it does some other things remarkably well.

The first thing that struck me was how tangibly it manifested the feelings and textures of both watching and traveling for underground music in the year 2000. The size and energy of the crowds, the meditation and monotony of long drives in between and the constant waiting in an era when nobody had a cell phone and computers for e-mail were things you had to go to instead of carry with you.

I won’t spoil the exact details but there are some amusing miscommunications that remind me a bit of when I booked a Gang Wizard show in a record store and somehow managed to screw up four different details on a single flyer. Nowadays I would probably end up sharing that kind of thing with a touring artist before I even got around to making photocopies but back then it was common to receive a single ambiguous message and fill in what often proved to be incorrect particulars.

I was reading a 2005 interview with Lightning Bolt from The Wire today and Chippendale said something about the evolution of “the scene” that kind of struck a note with me. To paraphrase:

“When it started out it was just our friends and then it grew to include people in other cities that we didn’t know yet but could be our friends…”

He went on to describe how the whole thing expanded one order of magnitude larger which isn’t to say anything negative about the folks that only learned about this kind of music when it achieved wider appeal but rather that one can only have so many friends and there are palpable differences between close-knit communities and ones in a more open stitch pattern.

The Friends Forever documentary was recorded during 2000 when things were still at that “people in other cities” stage so watching it is a more intimate experience than what you might have gotten if it was recorded even a year or two later. Friends Forever never really grew beyond a certain point because of their dedication to playing in a way that venues could neither legally sanction or often even pay them for but the shows they were playing in front of did eventually get larger.

One thing I am thankful for is the glimpse this movie provides of the interior of Monkey Mania – a storied Denver, Colorado space I never had the good fortune of setting foot inside of. Once I saw the words Providence, Rhode Island on the screen I knew the movie was about to cover my first experience with the band and wondered what Wolfisohn’s camera would make of Fort Thunder.

Imagine my surprise when the on-screen text merely described the space as “a club” and showed some footage of the performance in the alley without even mentioning that the crowd was the largest shown up to that point. It made sense though – traveling with Friends Forever meant hanging out with Nate and Josh in their vehicles with their dogs and one space is the same as any other if you never go inside.

Thinking back I can’t remember either seeing a member of the band inside that night or meeting Ben but I would understand the decision to keep the focus on Friends Forever even if the cameras had wandered in.

Wolfisohn’s decision to make this film feels almost prescient when viewed in context of how common this type of documentary would become over the next twenty years and how much of a fixture documentarians would grow to be in underground spaces. There are a good number of reasons to watch it, including if you happen to be a Troma completionist, and there are a host of online buying options.

Plague TV presents Halloween Special : Cthonic Crystal Video 2023

This is one of the two featured items that any reader can actually buy right this minute with the proper count of e-beans and an acceptable drop box. I’m throwing a link on the bottom so that everybody can get theirs in time for the big spooky celebration.

Nate had marked on the dvd that because it has so much content it might be watched in several seatings but instead I popped in after watching Friends Forever. I was hungry for more in an abstract sense but also a little loopy from my nightly Ambien. I enjoyed the feeling of hanging out with a friend while they put on a sequence of short films and music – nicely in the background of the greater hang “sesh”. Being swaddled in media this way felt safe and reassuring in a way I don’t always get to experience.

A little ways in an automated AI called something like DeathAI is introduced to keep things moving. Something about this one screams “trickster” and we wind up with a bit of back and forth banter in the style of Space Ghost Coast to Coast! Without this touchstone it would be harder to draw a comparison – perhaps the Seder dinners with the ignorant, bad and other types of sons.

It stays entertaining and some interesting music and short films make in into the playlist. With my pills kicking in I didn’t get the most of everything – especially Damon Packard’s Children of the Stones but if you’re planning a casual get together of Halloween film rarity enjoyers who might enjoy both a stern and squirrelly announcer character this could be the night for you!

https://store.cave-evil.com/products/plague-tv-halloween-special

PLAGUE TV: HALLOWEEN SPECIAL

“Filtered through the light of your Envy”

Graveyard Whispers Feel The Wrath : Attention Deficit Black Arts 1998

I covered this band in the recent piece entitled The Loft Intermission and as luck would have it my words reached at least one of the pseudonymous members and my very own copy travelled steadfastly through the night on the wings of a bat to roost within my rural mailbox. You might find it difficult to secure a copy of your own and unfortunately my plans for a rough upload are on hold now that the first listen seems to have cursed the tape deck in my karaoke machine.

It is possible that the device is merely protesting and refusing to play my copy of Duran Duran’s Rio now that I’ve exposed it to true synth darkness with this clearly superior offering and will once again resume turning the moment I reintroduce Feel The Wrath.

(Stand by as I just discovered a forgotten boom box on my back porch containing a copy of Gary Numan’s I, Assassin)

On to the music – most goth bands are a bit self consciously campy but Graveyard Whispers goes for an overtly “fang in cheek” approach. A decent comparison would be fellow San Diegan industrial band Tit Wrench though this latter group doesn’t directly lampoon rivethead tropes in the same way Graveyard Whispers does goth ones. The sound is faithful with some faster aggressive songs like Death Die, Death Die, Black Hair Dye and slower selections like I’m a Moontan Child which works the short prank phone call sketches into it’s remix.

When I first slid the tape out of it’s Manila envelope packaging I thought it was a plain black cassette but closer examination revealed black on black printing. The physical production does not disappoint any more than the music when proper unholy levels are reached. I’m hard at work on an upload but in the mean time some weird collector dudes are unloading recently exhumed dead stock for as low as 80 dollars.

Or you may get a little luckier as I was and be blessed by the night for a bat to flit through your window grasping the recording in it’s formidable talons…

The Super Natural Peepshow Steve Lawrence : [unknown printer circa 1996]

I once had a conversation with my friend Tetsunori about how he used to catch wild beetles in Japan so he could trade them with his schoolmates for holographic and foil stamped trading cards. He described visiting his grandparents in the countryside and spreading out a bedsheet with honey in the center on the edge of a grassy meadow. In a kind of low-tech precursor to Pokémon schoolboys would collect living insects and even battle them against each other.

I was fascinated and asked a million questions about the different species and their relative strengths and weaknesses. At first Tetsunori tried his best to answer my queries but eventually he shouted out in exasperation:

“I don’t know man! I don’t care about fucking beetle I just wanted card!”

The broad appeal of trading cards is responsible for me getting my hands back on this artifact nearly thirty years after it was first printed in what seems like a minor miracle. When my friend Steve Lawrence first converted his oil paintings into this format to sell at the San Diego Comic Con at least one buyer acquired a set out of interest in the trading card in general. Steve has been homeless around Los Angeles for just over two decades and hasn’t been spotted by a friend or acquaintance in at least half of one but a lucky Google search led me to an eBay card-monger across the country with a set to sell.

Steve’s current circumstances are somewhat akin to the quantum puzzle of Schrödinger’s Cat – in the absence of either proof-of-life or it’s morbid opposite it makes sense to assume the best. I’ll be dedicating an entire chapter to Steve, his multiple creative pursuits and the profound influence he had on me as a budding aesthete but for now I’ll focus on his painting work and this card set.

He was a dedicated reader of Juxtapoz and closely followed the associated “lowbrow” art movement – looking back at his work now the influences of Robert Williams and Kenny Scharf are unmistakable. At the same time there is an innocence present in his canvases that hints at his earlier years spent operating a twee-pop record label called rugcore. Considering his laborious process of carefully layering oil paints until patches of color became finely detailed menageries of figures from vintage toys and his own imagination he churned out work at astonishing rate.

In the three or four years following the production of this card set he further honed his visual vocabulary on a handful of canvases that may well be lost to time. These cards are alarmingly flimsy, an issue with either their printing or the photographing of the actual paintings made nearly half of them come out too dark and I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to buy them again.

Some folks who have led lives less chaotic than mine might well still have sets in their possession but I seriously doubt this object will ever be available for purchase anywhere again.

************ BEWARE OF THE EVIL OF ********* ***************SELF PROMOTION**************

Hand tied 81/2” x 7” booklet with hand glued color plates and six song lyrics

DIVING GOD / CASTLE FREAK SOLO MUSICALS : Wicca’d World Press 2023

I made a few of these things earlier this year and sent a few to friends, a zine faire and an online shop. After doing Bleak End at Bernie’s for a while I decided to shift my approach and produce a pair of consecutive musicals in which I’d be the sole vocal performer. In each case I enlisted a group of friends to help with music.

The first is called Castle Freak and examines the period of time where the beast from Grimm’s fairytale is entirely alone. He strikes out at his lavish surroundings with boorish fury, he dreams of the day he was cursed while questioning if his true tormentor ever left his side. He seeks for the innocent maiden that might save him but worries that he will only end up dragging her down into his personal hell.

The music was recorded in New Mexico with Dain Daller, Amander Speer, Sam Giles and a couple of samples for animal and weather sounds. Staging included elaborate makeup, a platter of disrespected grapes and chicken and finally a silver plated goblet to be thrown through a mirror.

The next piece was Diving God – continuing the theme of wretched men alone in exile it features Lucifer from Paradise Lost as he is cast from heaven;

“Prayer doesn’t suit you, you who rebelled. Heaven still bleeds through the hole where you fell. This is your future this is your fate. This is your nature this is your state…

For this one I put together an improvised lounge jazz band in Chicago with Henry Glover – drums, Liam Warfield – bass, Dain Daller – Farfisa, Amanda Speer – saxophone and Jeffrey Rocketmild Jefferson on clarinet with Lucifer on vocals. After two very brief practices we were ready to perform.

Although I had undoubtedly made them this way it saddened me that these pieces would simply cease to exist after as little as one performance. I thought how I might give them new life and decided on illustrated libretto. A big inspiration was a fancy printing of Milton’s Masque of Comus. I thought about packaging them with a recording of an audio rip from spectator’s uploads but went the awkward way of printing links to the actual videos instead.

Someone suggested a QR Code while I was in the copy shop but unfortunately I didn’t think of that.

I have a few copies left of the first run of 25 that can be had for $10 ppd in US with shipping discount for multiple copies. Message berniebleak@gmail.com to claim your copy.

Ok back to The Loft and another gospel next time!

Riverside 2004 : “We’re going to be good right?”

August 29, 2023October 9, 2023 berniebleakLeave a comment

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 who later 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 met John 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:

Nothing Gets Worse Than This

Oakland 2013 : “I think the Universe was intending for that to be my meth wallet!”

August 21, 2023August 24, 2023 berniebleakLeave a comment

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 Otras Obras 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…

Providence 2008 : The Bus Part Six “She Was Totally Hot Too!”

January 27, 2023January 29, 2023 berniebleak1 Comment

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.

Next Part:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/01/28/boston-2008-the-bus-wheres-my-shoe/

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/

Thank You, We’re Occasional Detroit. This Was Our Last Show. We Just Broke Up.

January 24, 2023December 4, 2023 berniebleak2 Comments

This winter writing project went through a lot of different incarnations in my head before ending up as what it is. The question as to what this thing even is is already a ticklish one. I don’t add very many links or photos because the only way I can bring myself to write this stuff is by believing it will end up as a physically published book but the current reality is that it is almost certainly a blog. Similarly I like to refer to these pieces as an ethnography, travelogue, rock journalism, picaresque novel or anything else other than the thing that it almost certainly is: a memoir.

The earliest seed of what you are now reading came about through a desire to correct a perceived injustice in 2016 and was almost entirely unrelated to telling my own story: I wanted to tell Occasional Detroit’s story. I think the trigger was LaPorsha being offered a role she declined in a music video for the rapper Antwon. I may as well mention that the role was to do some standard “video ho” shit that she wouldn’t have accepted in a million years and the dude turned out to be a straight up rapist but the incident took on importance for completely different reasons: it made me realize that the noise-rap trend had become ubiquitous.

I’m not sure if it would have made a difference but I probably came to this realization on the tail end of the trend as opposed to whatever you would call the other end, I guess the head end? Kanye West had released his experimental influenced album Yeezus three years earlier in 2013 and both Death Grips and clipping. had been around since the turn of the decade. I had even shared a bill at The Smell with clipping. way back in 2009 but it wasn’t until this declined video offer in 2016 that I began to view things in the form of an injustice that I might be able to help correct:

I felt like the music and culture outlets of the day were presenting noise-rap as a phenomenon that had suddenly materialized out of thin air and nobody was talking about the group that had actually pioneered the genre: Occasional Detroit

I can’t pretend like I even know how to get a piece published in an art and culture outlet now but I’m pretty sure I was going about things in the wrong way then. I sent e-mail proposals to Vice, SPIN and every author that had written articles about the more popular noise-rap artists but I never heard anything back. It probably would have made more sense to just write the piece up, I had gotten in touch with Towondo and Demetrisa, and then shop it around in at least first draft form.

When I started writing these pieces back in October I had decided that I could revisit the idea of a profile or interview once I had gotten a book published or otherwise established myself as a voice on the intersection of art, music and DIY culture I have been referring to as the American Underground. I felt like we had all the time in the world. In our last messages from April of 2020 Towondo was talking about having a huge archive in his mother’s basement ranging from VHS tapes from an early tour with Wolf Eyes to Master DVDs from a public access television show they’d done in Albuquerque.

I don’t know how to copy and paste text from Facebook messages so I’m just going to drop in an image of the last message here:

I found out today that Towondo “Beyababa” Clayborn passed away in December of 2021. I must have somehow missed the news around the time it happened. I’m not including this information to satisfy anyone’s morbid curiosity but to prevent any unsavory assumptions: Towondo was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer that ultimately killed him. Deme is going by AkashaG and doing well in Phoenix, Arizona. It looks like the interview I had planned won’t be happening and the piece I had always envisioned as a profile will now be more accurately described as a tribute.

In the first decade of the 2000s a lot of different artists in the American Underground were exploring a thing I referred to as “extreme noise tour lifestyle”. The artistic values of our community were centered on experimentation, iconoclasm and transgression. People were pursuing these ideas with what they presented as music, how the members of a group were composed, their stage performances, the presentation of recordings and other merchandise as physical objects and eventually in the unconventional methods of traveling between shows.

Some examples would be Friends Forever playing outside of the actual venues in a Volkswagen Type 2, John Benson creating a bus as mobile concert venue and a band from Boise, Idaho called Monster Dudes where a father toured with his young son on drums from the time he was three years old. Occasional Detroit approached this in a way that consistently blurred the lines behind life and art and kept their contemporaries guessing how much of what they were watching was an “act”.

The American Noise scene that developed in the wake of the Seattle Grunge Explosion is generally thought of as a white and culturally middle class phenomenon but Occasional Detroit rank among the earliest artists of the movement. It’s hard to think of a more successful name in noise than Wolf Eyes whose 2004 Burned Mind album brought critical acclaim, reviews in main stream music publications and a national tour with Sonic Youth. O-D and Wolf Eyes actually started in the same town, Ypsilanti, and frequently performed and even toured together.

I don’t know a lot about the earliest days of the group and figured that instead of repeating second hand information I should just write about the incarnation I was actually familiar with: the duo of Towondo and Demetrisa. I first met and performed with them at a 2005 Festival called the Che Cafe Super Pizza Party. I was in an actual band for the first time in my life but had finagled a way to perform all three days of the Festival under different project names.

That’s another piece of the conceptual envelope pushing that everybody was concerned with in those days.

Anyway I was freestyle rapping as Gypsy Feelings and instead of an electronic beat I had a live drummer behind me, kind of doing a vaudeville comedy style thing. I’m trying to figure out who this would have been but it’s nearly impossible: nearly every band there had a drummer and I was friends with almost all of them. I was doing a piece called What’s Your Name? that centered on asking audience members this question then ad-libbing rhyming insults based on their answer. When I came to Towondo he answered with “Occasional Detroit” and kind of threw me for a loop because that’s a lot of syllables but I must have come up with something.

That quickly created some rapport, no pun intended, between us because there weren’t a lot of rappers in the scene at the time. When it was time for O-D to perform they went into a medley of rap duets, rambling freestyles and abstract sound collages. Suddenly Deme dropped to the ground and started violently convulsing while foaming at the mouth. Towondo dropped down next to her and started shaking her and calling out in what looked and sounded like genuine panic and concern. There might have been somebody in the audience that had been touring with them and knew the score but all of us locals fell for it completely – jaws on the floor as they say.

The old Alka-Seltzer tablet in the mouth trick…

I remember them disappearing for almost the entirety of the next day of the Festival and then emerging from the spacious woods behind the venue near night fall. I asked Deme where they’d been:

“I just needed some nature in my life.”

I want to shy away from any racial stereotypes, be they negative or positive ones, but I think we can all agree that when the term “free spirit” is applied to people from a broadly White American cultural background it inevitably sounds like some degree of privilege is involved but when applied to people from a broadly Black American cultural background the connotations are different. Like the difference between trying on a “freak” persona as a brief and interesting diversion on the way to a comfortable life versus fully embracing the “freak” identity with the instinctual knowledge that you will be bearing the full weight of that freak-dom.

This brings us to the next piece of the story. The main volunteers at the Che Cafe in those years lived in a Hillcrest house that also hosted parties and shows. A few of the groups from the Festival had been crashing there including Occasional Detroit but they disappeared after a week or so most likely at the first intimation of a “worn out welcome”. The kids at the house were pretty certain that they hadn’t left town completely because they had left a keyboard behind but didn’t think too much about it.

Several months later they showed back up for the keyboard and casually mentioned they’d been living between Tijuana and the Saint Vincent DePaul Homeless Shelter. At this point in my life I’ve been through a nearly identical lifestyle but in 2005 it was pretty mind blowing. When I talked to my friends about it the general sentiment was that while most noise artists aspired toward reckless abandon in their art Occasional Detroit were on a whole other level – actually living it.

I know that we kept in touch to some degree after this Festival but my next clear memories are from 2010. I can’t remember if I had hit them up before the 2010 Generation tour or if it had just been a chance encounter in Denver and unfortunately all the MySpace era messages are lost. Deme was performing solo at an all women’s festival called Tit Wrench in Rhinoceropolos and Towondo was a little salty that he wouldn’t be allowed to play. It probably didn’t help that I was invited to play the same event as an “honorary woman” due to having just had a bad show at the punk house personification of toxic masculinity.

Me and Deme played right next to each other in a loading bay. I noticed that we both used the same drum machine.

I asked Deme about her timeline and experiences in the group today so I am adding her response in order for her to be represented in her own words:

“I started playing with Occasional Detroit in 2001 & our last show was Parkview Riverside CA we tour the United State from the east coast to the west and south we still played local shows and and did lots of fundraisers I definitely feel bad about the situation told Towondo told me that he had a rare type of cancer and it was spreading through his body after he worked for the Cruise line he traveled all over the world we as Occasional Detroit will always be the best hip hop rock duo group ever to hit the noise generation I still make music and put out our old music”

We found out that they had just moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico and ended up needing a date in that general area for the return leg of our U.S. Tour. Towondo had just started working as a videographer, mostly weddings and stuff, and they were living in one of those generic apartment complexes with carpeted floors and stair cases made of cement and metal. They had just gotten an orange kitten, probably a boy.

We played in a local bar or cafe, I forget which it was, and it was one of those sparsely attended indifferent crowd situations that pop up on every national tour. Their set escalated into an argument that seemed like a performance and totally real at the exact same time. Towondo shut off the electronics and grabbed the microphone:

“Thank you, we’re Occasional Detroit. This was our last show. We just broke up.”

Now that I’ve been married for ten years I completely understand the energy. I can’t count the number of times that we’ve “broken up” and I’m sure we’ll be together for the rest of our lives. Towondo had told me that they separated in 2013 when I first hit him up about this writing project in 2016. I’m talking to Deme now and she tells me their last show was in 2006 and I’m not sure if that’s a typo but I guess it doesn’t really matter.

This piece can’t really be the thing that I conceived it as and unfortunately the interview will never happen now and this isn’t the best platform but I think the best move was to just write it. Maybe the platform will grow or it will end up on a larger one. Ultimately the noise-rap thing was a trend and what Occasional Detroit was about was always so much bigger than that. I hope that this gets to people who are interested in the genre and it’s history but you can’t make people care about things.

I never knew Towondo’s family but I hope that this gets to them and they know that what he did with Occasional Detroit mattered to people. The Noise community has gotten a lot more diverse in recent years but around the turn of the Millenium you could have counted the number of Black Women in Experimental Music on a single hand and it is absolutely overdue for Demeat, now AkashaG, to be recognized as a trailblazer and icon. I’m not sure if that box of tapes, DVDs and videos still exists in a basement somewhere but if it does whoever is taking care of it should know that there are people who are interested and want to see it.

I’ll help in any way I can.

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/

Chicago 2001 : El Rancho Orphanage Part 11 “Look, I’m Nico!”

December 3, 2022June 15, 2024 berniebleakLeave a comment

I never experienced the reality of Winter until I moved to Chicago. I’d seen a birdbath freeze solid in Arkansas and passed through dark and snowy versions of New York and New Jersey but it wasn’t a reality I had actually lived with. It must have been toward the end of 1999 and I was waiting for the Fullerton bus to go sell furniture when I touched my hair and was surprised to find it hard and sculpted. I had only ever used styling gel for a tiny second in Junior High School when I was trying to overcompensate to fit in before Grunge and Alternative kicked in and the Thrift Store clothes I had grown up in and been mercilessly teased for wearing suddenly became cool.

It took a solid minute of probing around my scalp to get to the bottom of the mystery: I had run out of the apartment with my hair still wet from a shower and it had frozen into place in that post-shampoo pompadour.

I’m just saying that a lot of the things people from colder climes know instinctually were only introduced to me through trial and error as a young adult. That if you put cold hands into neoprene gloves the only thing they’ll do is keep them cold like a thermos that can hold both chilled cocktails and warm coffee. That if you are walking along North Avenue for several miles your face will freeze into place like a setting papier-mâché mask multiple times and you’ll need to step into convenience stores and wait for it to thaw.

That the end of a year feels like the end of the world and you’ll get depressed and cry and imagine yourself in a dark landscape full of wolves and fire until it one day miraculously starts being Spring again and that doesn’t happen until way after January First.

It was probably all January: the overdose, the cops kicking our walls down and the orgy of destruction that finally forced the slumlord that all our older peers described as really nice to kick us out.

We never had a mirror in the enclosed bathroom but somewhere near the end we had a gigantic hole in the shoddily constructed wall. I was shaving for work when Dave came over and stuck his head through the gap while pointing to any little areas I might have missed on the corresponding sections of his face:

“Look, I’m Nico! I’ll be your mirror…“

The tiny little bathroom became an epicenter of destruction. Somebody had tried to hang themselves and brought down an entire section of the office building style drop ceiling. Eventually both the sink and toilet were also smashed when somebody went on a drunken rampage using one of those retractable belt divider things from the front of night clubs as a sledgehammer.

The kind with concrete on the bottom to weigh it down. It’s kind of impressive that whoever it was got up the strength to swing it like that.

This next part was captured on video with Jamie’s Hi-8 camcorder and became as popular in the last days television lounge as Justin One’s exotic pornography selections and a VHS tape full of 1980’s era regional commercials we discovered after Suzy Poling showed up and got us stoned.

John and Jamie are drinking together when John misplaces his cigarettes. When he fails to find them he starts swinging around a leftover cane or crutch from somebody’s foot injury. Jamie is egging him on:

“Where’s John’s cigarettes? Where’s John’s cigarettes?”

John hooks his weapon into the corner of a fluorescent light fixture and wrenches it from the ceiling. Jamie has just enough time to scream “they’re not in the ceiling!” before the object comes crashing onto John’s head and knocks him from his feet in a shower of sparks and the surging light of exploding illuminated fluorescent tube bulbs. Somewhere in the chaos somebody identifies the situation as a medical emergency and takes John to an Emergency Room.

He came back with staples in his scalp and I joked that he was so much of a stupid hipster that he was physically becoming a zine.

Ray, our Cosby Sweater wearing Eastern European landlord, and his maintenance guy Arturo never really “got” us but at this point things got dialed up to open contempt. We were all evicted effective more or less immediately and the hostility began to be felt at Congress Theater events. Arturo glared at anybody who had ever been seen in El Rancho while operating a popcorn machine at the Fugazi show. By August I had just walked into Ladyfest Midwest Chicago when Ray spotted me (the curse of being 6’5”) and angrily pulled me from the crowd:

“You don’t come in here! You are garbage! You pay fifteen dollars to come in? Here’s fifteen dollars to leave!”

He paid me from his own pocket and assembled the entire security staff so they would recognize me on sight. Fortunately I had lived in the building long enough to be familiar with some more esoteric stage doors and was able to slip back in to see my new favorite band: The Need. They were selling merch on the sidewalk out front to avoid having to give a cut to the venue and I was filling out my collection and probably gushing when I caught the eye of Denver’s Rainbow Sugar.

They must have recognized me from the descriptions provided by Nate and Josh from Friends Forever. The excited buzz of the conversation caught the attention of venue security and I was ordered to stand at least 500 feet from the doors on the other side of Milwaukee Avenue. My final memory from El Rancho was being accosted by Arturo while peering through the front door to see if there’d been any visible improvements. We told him we “just wanted to see what it looks like”.

“What do you mean how it looks like?”, he fired back in the inimitable tones of actual hatred.

“It looks how you left it! Just like shit! Just like you!”

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/

Providence 2000 : Fort Thunder Part 6 “Bread and Circuses; Friends and Monsters”

November 8, 2022January 18, 2023 berniebleak1 Comment

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,

a place called Fort Thunder

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