Tag: godheadSilo

Chicago 2001 : “Lust for Life”

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I have this theory about the 1990’s. The short version is that the thing that made it such a magical time to be young in America was the convenient temporal bookending of two major geopolitical events: The Fall of The Berlin Wall in 1989 and The September 11th Terrorist Attacks in 2001. You’ve got The Cold War on one side, The War on Terror on the other and a decade and change in between when it didn’t feel like we were locked into an ideological struggle for existence with a whole other side of the planet.

Maybe it’s bullshit. Everybody idealizes the time period of their own youth and you could probably find blips on the timeline enclosing every decade in history to ascribe the same significance to. The human mind loves looking for patterns – and in many cases inventing them to stave off the intellectual phobia of randomness and chaos.

Everything looks like a face.

Every number means something.

Even without a crystal ball to tell me what was around the corner it was hard not to feel like the sand was running out in at least some kind of hourglass. It wasn’t even a year since we all started “experimenting” with heroin and we’d burned our way through two housing situations most would consider dodgy to begin with.

A former grocery store with barely functioning heat and a couple pipes in the basement’s ceiling instead of a shower.

An ancient house that needed the old glass fuses every time we overloaded a circuit and where some of us slept in a former pigeon coop.

The landlord to that last place was a constantly partying alcoholic cokehead and he still took us to court to make sure he was getting rid of us.

All of us together were getting to be too much for any sane person to rent to so we started spreading ourselves out. Nick and Janice got an apartment right on the edge of the West Side, then known as the largest open air heroin market in the world. They held on to Sebastian – the cat we’d all been living with since the El Rancho days. Sebastian had belonged to the housemate everybody called Crazy Danny and had supposedly been telling him to cut himself through psychic communication.

I don’t know what became of Crazy Danny but at some point he stopped living with us and Sebastian didn’t.

Dave and Meg and Vanessa had one over to the Ukrainian Village side of what was almost the same neighborhood. I had been drifting back and forth without worrying too much about having a room anymore. Janice was at the stage where she was transferring her growing frustration with Nick’s constant appetites for crack and heroin to whoever he was doing it with so I started spending most of my time at the other spot.

I stayed in Dave’s room, the little dude, and for a little while we seemed to be in sync about how much drugs we wanted to do and when. He went to school, I had a job and neither of us had anything close to a full time habit. Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life became our go-to soundtrack and anthem for both possible decisions: the resolve to take a night off by either drinking or staying completely sober? Lust for Life. Running in from the block with tiny bags or folded up foil and grabbing our spoons and needles? Same record, same side, same song:

“Here comes Johnny Yen again…”

Pretty much everybody used the same drugs and nobody seemed too worried about it. I don’t remember any of us getting sick or even using the word addict. The closest would have been this kid Paul who used to rap under the name MC Think. I’d heard that one of his schticks had been rapping through a harmonica but he wasn’t doing any of that stuff anymore. Picture an Eminem that never made it out of the crackhead phase.

Anyway Paul didn’t live with us – he just came around from time to time.

The last time I saw him he showed up at the Ukrainian Village apartment with an old green Schwinn cruiser he’d obviously stolen. He asked me to help him sell it – either because he’d worn out his welcome at all of the bike shops or just because I looked like less of a junkie, We went to a spot in Wicker Park and one of the employees who clearly knew what was going on gave me forty bucks for it.

When we were biking back to the West Side Paul suggested that he go to the spot by himself so it would be less “sketchy”. He showed back up an hour or two later – high out of his mind with a bullshit story:

“I got jacked man! They jumped me and took all the money…”

I’m sure this seems obvious to most readers and totally my fault for “trusting a junkie” but the thing was we all did heroin and hadn’t been acting like that. At El Rancho and the Red House if people figured out that you were going to cop nearly everyone in the house would give you ten or twenty dollars and when you got home you gave everyone what they’d paid for and ordered. We treated it the exact same way as if someone was walking to a corner store.

One time I did keep John’s money instead of giving him his drugs but this was because he owed me a couple hundred dollars from when I covered his rent once and at that point he was clearly never paying me back. He still was pretty furious about it. While the concept of “blue balls” is manipulative misogynist bullshit “blue brains” is definitely a real thing: the feeling when you’re expecting to get high only to have it not work out at the last moment.

Of course Paul wasn’t really one of us and had probably only come around to rip somebody off in the first place. I wouldn’t have made the same mistake with him again but it was a moot point as he didn’t come around after that anyway. I hope he’s still alive.

At some point Nick’s mom rented an apartment for him in Boy’s Town. She either didn’t know about his relationship with Janice or wouldn’t have approved of him living so close to the drug neighborhoods but Nick didn’t want her finding out he didn’t live there. He rented it out to these hacker/raver kids but they had to get out of town over a kidnapping charge.

I think some kid ripped them off on a big MDMA deal and they had been trying to get their money back but I never heard a ton of details. I worked in Lincoln Park so I figured I might as well get an actual place and offered to move in. I paid some monthly amount directly to Nick and was supposed to avoid interacting with the building manager as he was in contact with Nick’s mom.

The very first night I moved in I had to go to work in the morning and realized I had no idea what time it was when I plugged in my alarm clock radio. I didn’t have a cell phone or wear a watch and I hadn’t even thought about it because I’d never lived alone. I searched for different radio stations and waited for one to announce the time but it just didn’t happen.

I didn’t really know the neighborhood so I walked down Broadway hoping I might run into somebody. It must have been fairly late because the street was deserted. I started looking into the windows off all the closed businesses hoping to catch sight of a clock. I got excited when I recognized an actual clock shop from across the street and rushed over.

All the different clocks were set to different times and I had no way of knowing which, if any of them, might be accurate.

I don’t know if my anxiety about the time played a role in this but I ended up waking up to realizing I’d pissed on myself. You might have read in the Fort Thunder pieces that I had issues with bed wetting that lasted into my early twenties but became increasingly sporadic toward the end. It probably fizzled out completely when I was twenty three but around the time of this story it was about once a year.

The incident in that story was mid-2000 so this 2001 incident was most likely the next time.

I hadn’t moved my clothes in with me yet and I had fallen asleep wearing my only pair of black slacks for my cafe job. After a quick shower I searched around the apartment to see if the previous tenants had left any clothing behind. I did actually find a pair of denim JNCOs but while the waist was a decent fit the length was at least a foot and a half too short for me.

I’m 6’4”.

I’m sure I looked pretty entertaining biking out in a dress shirt with wildly flared highwaters. I went to a Unique Thrift Store that wasn’t too far out of the way and bought an extra pair of work pants. Thankfully it was next to a KFC that let me change in the bathroom and I didn’t have to walk into work like this.

I left the undersized rave pants in the trash can.

Another interesting thing I noticed when first moving to the area was this mural on the side of a public school:

“STEP ON DRUGS LIKE YOU STEP ON BUGS!”

I wondered if the schools administrators realized that they were basically instructing kids to add less expensive substances to drugs for the purpose of raising profit.

My final night in the apartment started with a big tip. Papa was in the mood to show off and we cooked one of his fans a big pasta meal with tons of wine and after dinner liqueurs. This was an isolated occurrence – Trattoria Monterotondo was usually just a coffee bar and takeout spot. When the customer tried to pay Papa told him to give me a hundred dollar tip instead.

With all that cash burning a hole in my pocket it was an almost certainty that I’d be getting high but I didn’t feel like biking all the way to the West Side and I’d never gone into Cabrini Greene alone. I ran into a very sweet young prostitute walking down North Avenue dressed in a heart motif bikini with an actual cape and asked her if she could help me score drugs without having to brave the towers. She explained that those were the only places to score and she was no more excited about the risk of stepping into one than I was so I thanked her and kept walking.

I had one of the paper schedules for the needle exchange outreach van and I saw it went to a nearby neighborhood called Uptown so I figured it must be a drug saturated area. I asked a few likely looking characters until I found an older guy who was willing to bring me with him to the spot. I might have seemed overly trusting in the earlier paragraphs of this piece but that didn’t extend to people I’d never met before. He didn’t know how to get heroin so I got a bunch of crack with the intention of shooting it up back at the apartment.

I needed to break him off some anyway so we found a secluded alley and took a couple of giant blasts from his pipe. The drug made us especially gregarious or as my new friend more eloquently stated:

“Man, I’m geekin’ like a Puerto Rican!”

Somehow the topic of conversation found it’s way to our respective relationships with our fathers which, perhaps unsurprisingly, were complicated by hard drug use in each of our cases. My sister had taken it upon herself to inform my parents when she heard I’d been using heroin and they were pretty worried considering they hadn’t seen me since getting this piece of news.

I was especially offended because she had spent her early teenage years heavily using methamphetamine but I’d never ratted her out. Most people believe in certain hard drug hierarchies so while it was disappointing it wasn’t especially surprising.

As crack is cocaine that has been combined with baking soda to raise the temperature at which it vaporizes you need to dissolve it in an acid if you want to inject it. I always used lemon juice and I had one of those squeezy plastic lemons back at the apartment. The rush is identical to what you’d get if you started with powder but the taste of lemon hits your throat through your bloodstream for a little tropical twist.

I had my bass, four track and some effect pedals so I stayed up late recording what I thought was well crafted psychedelic metal made up of layered bass tracks. When I finally got a chance to listen back to it sober it sounded like an uninspired morass but that night all the bits seemed to perfectly sync together. I wanted to put it onto a project I’d been working on called “Cocaine: the mix tape”.

The highlight was an extremely convoluted mix of a song from the Enemymine record. godheadSilo was one of my favorite groups so I desperately wanted to see Mike Kunka’s next project when they came to The Casbah. I’d been going to a lot of over 21 shows in Chicago with borrowed IDs but back in my home town of San Diego every bouncer knew exactly who I was and how old I actually was.

It didn’t help that me and Francois had brought along Andy Robillard, one of the main bouncers, the last time we’d driven to Chicago. I had to wait out by the exit while Francois went inside and recorded the set for me on my Fisher Price tape recorder. At least the sound carried through the wall pretty well being all bass – the thing that really stuck with me was when they hit the first booming note one of the other bouncers ran outside clutching his stomach.

At least I got to meet and talk to the band because before the show they were hanging out a block away watching planes land like the scene in Wayne’s World. San Diego, unlike most cities, stuck it’s airport right next to downtown and The Casbah is on the edge closest to it. Mike gave me an old godheadSilo shirt they’d never been able to sell because of how big it was – the design with a pink bunny.

The live recording came out lo-fi but in the best possible way: a throbbing buzz where you can just make out the riffs and rhythms if you know the songs. The one that was most distinguishable was Coccoon Clo3, if you know the song it’s a very catchy riff, so for the mix tape I painstakingly combined it with the studio version from their debut album the ice in me. Thankfully I had the album on vinyl instead of a CD so I spent forever syncing things up so the live and clean versions dovetailed in and out of each other sometimes even fluctuating with a sustained note.

Appropriately enough “Cocaine: the mix tape” was never finished as my buzz ran out halfway through the first side. Sadly I don’t have a copy of it or the Enemymine recording or any objects whatsoever from this time in my life. Frequently moving had already whittled down my possessions but I went through a complete reset when an RV got towed in San Leandro.

After the night of my own bass recording I had to rush out the next morning to return to work and left the apartment in pretty bad shape. That wouldn’t have been a problem if I didn’t misplace my key the next day and because of the odd arrangement the only way to get another one would have been for Nick to be the one to request it. I asked him to but he dragged his ass and a little over a week later the building manager let himself in because a package for Nick had been sitting in the hallway.

When he saw needles all over the place he called Nick’s mom and Nick was in deep shit. She didn’t know about his drug use yet and he was able to (truthfully) tell her that they weren’t his but that meant revealing that he didn’t live there and rented it to other people. Nick was pretty pissed at me over the whole thing but I was already irritated with him that he hadn’t gotten me back into the place I’d payed him for when a single phone call and bus trip could have solved both our problems.

At least I got a chance to go get my stuff.

Anyway it was all feeling a bit unsustainable. I wasn’t anything close to full on strung out but things were definitely chaotic. My whole social group needed a bit of space from each other to figure shit out. Some people left drugs behind and others went deeper into addiction. Nick and Janice broke up not long afterward.

Of course I had no idea that 9/11 and my own personal tragedies accompanying it were looming on the horizon but it was obviously some kind of twilight. I wasn’t thinking about how underground music might be about to change or how the internet would fundamentally alter the face of it but these things are always clearer looking backwards. You can’t define an era until it’s already over.

In the moment I was most aware of a growing hunger for something different.

I’ve got a lust for life…

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

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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

San Francisco 1999 : “Unwound Could Unwind That Coil”

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I just heard today that Unwound is going to start playing shows and being a band again and I’m trying to wrap my head around how exactly this makes me feel. I only saw the band once and never knew them personally but they did some time in my heart’s favorite band slot way back in 1999 when I was nineteen years old and got excited about music the way you only can when you’re still a teenager. I was on this same mountain when Francois passed on the news that Vern Rumsey had died back in the Summer of 2020.

I walked through the woods for a couple of days playing Fake Train and some Long Hind Legs and read all the things that different people wrote on the Unwound Archive about Vern and the dissolution of the band. While I didn’t actually disagree with anything that anybody else was saying I still had a distinct feeling that I should say something or write something. I didn’t know what to do with the feeling at the time but now that there’s more news and more feelings it occurs to me that I’ve built myself a little platform for saying and writing things right here.

Before Tim had come up with the idea of The Singles and convinced me to pick up a bass I hadn’t actually spent much time thinking about what sounds the different instruments in a band made. Things like horns, synthesizers and bowed strings stuck out but I had been looking at the guitar, bass and drum parts as a single seamless lump. Now that I was thinking about what a bass does and identifying as a member of Team Bass I had a newfound appreciation for bands that dispensed with the guitar entirely like godheadSilo and eventually Lightning Bolt.

I hadn’t been particularly into punk bands but now that I was trying to learn how to play an instrument the simpler songs from groups like The Ramones, The Clash and The Talking Heads were a natural starting point. Tim and I taught ourselves a couple quick covers and went onto the constant prowl for any shows or parties where we might jump on some amps for a quick minute. We got matching bellhop style jackets from a Downtown Uniform Supply Store and spent a bit more time fussing over how we’d look playing Beat On The Brat than how well we’d actually play it.

I don’t remember how we ended up on a triple date with Lil Four trying to sneak into my High School’s Senior Prom at the U.S. Grant Hotel. This memory kind of floated up out of nowhere when I thought about Tim Ford and Lil Four in the same sentence and elevates the number of school dances that Lil Four and I at least attempted to attend together to two.

However it happened Tim and I had on the matching uniform jackets and Lil Four was wearing a simple solid dress in red or black: we looked great. None of us actually had tickets but that wasn’t the reason we were turned away. We were turned away because they believed we had already been inside and nobody was allowed to go in and out. I think the policy had been made to crack down on students either bringing in or being under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

It was an entire lifetime later in November of the same year when Francois and I convinced Lil Four to move up to our house in Berkeley. She had been living behind the Locust House and buying records from all the bands that were coming through. I was about to repeat the sentiment about bands and music making a larger impression to an eighteen to twenty year old but I suddenly realized that there was also an unnaturally high number of great bands making great records in the last couple years of the last millennium.

Among Lil Four’s records was the album by Unwound called Fake Train. If Tim Ford had inadvertently taught me how to pay attention to what a bass player was doing then Vern Rumsey taught me why. After a more subdued and noisy introductory track the instrument begins pacing in hypnotic circles on the Valentine Card triptych and continues to bend and divide time in such a way that when the first side comes to an end it was impossible for us to flip the record over for an entire month. Whatever spell the bass was casting would cause us to compulsively play that first side again – over and over and over.

Unwound was my favorite band for at least a few months so I don’t want to diminish either Justin or Sara’s heroic contributions but I have to say that I was there because Vern pulled me there. I’ve never actually looked at tablature or attempted to play these songs myself but I’m pretty sure that nothing he was playing was particularly complicated. I’ve heard a decent number of great bass players over the years: Amanda Warner of MNDR was a thing to behold when playing with Mark Treise in Jealousy for example. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the quality that makes them great isn’t virtuosity or timing but something small and invisible and very close to the center of what it means to be a person.

There was no question that lots and lots of other people were seeing and feeling the thing that I am doing a poor job of describing. A band from Columbia. Missouri called Warhammer 48K were so taken with this thing that they hired Vern especially and brought him to the MidWest to be the recording engineer on their record. Everything they told me about the experience played out like all of the tired cliches about never meeting your heroes: he was always late, he didn’t seem to particularly care about their record or anything other than making sure he was constantly drunk and once he was drunk he didn’t care about anything.

This brings us to the question of what it even is that I felt like I wanted to say or write. After reading many different accounts about how Unwound fell apart because Vern couldn’t stop drinking or start caring about anything I’m not only saying the same things but adding additional incidents of the same behavior. What I am trying to say is that all of the different parts of a person come locked together in a person shaped box and there’s no way to pick and choose the parts you want while leaving out the parts you don’t.

It’s not about what a disappointment he was when the band brought him out to master their record but rather about that irreplaceable quality that made them ever even want to. I suppose that I have some empathy for a person who exhibits some sought after creative talent or power but also drinks, uses drugs or engages in other self destructive behaviors that cause the outside world to want to neatly snip the bitter from the sweet. It’s just the endless question of whether Vern could have even played bass like that if he didn’t drink too much and not care about anything and of course now he’s gone and the world will never know.

It had always been a dream of mine to hear Vern Rumsey play bass while Greg Saunier from Deerhoof played drums and I did actually know Greg back in 1999 and whenever I mentioned this he would just kind of nervously laugh presumably because he had some idea of what Vern was like to deal with as a person. In February of 1999 I went to see Unwound at the Great American Music Hall and on the way there I ran into this industrial guy named Caliban on the BART who always wore a forest green coat with a long, modified wizard hood and had some distinctive face tattoos and piercings.

We used to run into each other on public transit a lot because I was a full time student at San Francisco State University and we would always talk about music. He asked me who I was going to see and then sort of scoffed, presumably because he didn’t know who the band was, so I asked him what his favorite band was. He told me that it was Coil who I hadn’t actually heard of at the time even though I had read the Throbbing Gristle RE/SEARCH:

“Unwound could unwind that Coil!”

It was a weird empty statement of childish bravado in a pointless favorite bands pissing contest. I’m trying to think why me and this guy even always talked to each other because while he was a clearly very interesting looking industrial guy I was just a kid in a corduroy jacket. I know who Coil are now but I don’t listen to them as much as I probably should. I was talking to another Ossian in a group I made for Ossians about how there are sometimes Ossians in the same field but more successful than us and that Ossian Brown who sometimes played with Coil is a more successful industrial musician than me.

Unwound originally stopped being a band in the aftermath of the September 11th Terrorist Attacks. I like thinking about how that event forever scarred and changed the face of Underground America so having this band break up forever resonates very strongly with that but I can also empathize with wanting to try to bring back a band as good as Unwound was. There was always kind of the question of why they didn’t try with somebody else ages ago as a bass player is often considered the most replaceable in a power trio but now it’s no longer a question.

I understand that the person who will be taking over was very close to Vern and close to the band and has been in some great bands like The Melvins and Karp. I remember reading that when Vern was desperately trying to leave after September 11th he was offering to teach the bass parts to the guy in the van who was doing merch. This didn’t happen though I wonder if passing a torch would have somehow been more possible in the now remote psychic landscape of a 2001 tour van.

It looks like a lot of people are very optimistic about this reunion but right now I can’t bring myself to look or listen. I pull up a video of the first side of Fake Train. Valentine Card begins, slowly spinning in a circle the constant tones hook deep and pull me in…

“I know, I know, I know it seems so long ago

To be so stuck on a face that won’t go away

I can’t, I can’t, I can’t seem to wait for the day

I know, I know, I know it don’t matter anyway”

***********************************************

It’s been quite a while since I wrote this but there are thoughts and ideas that seem obvious now but I was somehow unable to consciously verbalize the first time around. This first bit isn’t one – I’ve just thinking been thinking about what it felt like for me to have a “favorite band” around the turn of the millennium. I’d listen to them constantly, search for every recording or interview I could find and most importantly travel halfway across the country on a counterfeit Greyhound Pass or sneak into a 21+ venue anyway I could to see them.

I’m not sure when this stopped happening for me but I remember an xbxrx show at The Che either around 2005 or 2010 where a kid had come all the way from Texas to see them. That was the moment I realized I just didn’t have favorite bands on that level anymore. Here are a few I remember having: Twisted Sister, They Might Be Giants, The Residents, The Make Up, godheadSilo, Lightning Bolt, Unwound, The Thrones, The Need and others I’m most likely forgetting in the moment.

I do still listen to new music and occasionally find stuff I really like. A couple years ago I discovered a song called A Different Age by a younger artist named Current Joys and listened to on repeat for like a month. It was similar but still not quite the same as what having a “favorite band” felt like. What came closer was when I suddenly became interested in a kickboxer named Benny “The Jet” Urquidez and watching all the videos of his fights.

I’d never been into any kind of wrestling, boxing or MMA in the past but the feeling I got watching “The Jet” slowly dominate time after time brought me the closest to that forgotten feeling I’d been in well over a decade. He’s a small guy and competes in light weight classes – in every match he takes a bit of a beating to start but seems to do it to study his opponent’s patterns and weaknesses. Once he’s got it worked out it’s like watching a skilled spider or other predator at work.

I think he’s undefeated except for a couple of weird technicalities. I know next to nothing about kickboxing but items not like I knew anything about punk rock when Unwound first got its grip on me either.

Okay here comes the more controversial part. I was recently playing Fake Train right as we were driving home up the mountain and when LaPorsha asked who it was I explained that the band had been broken up for just over twenty years but had recently started playing again although the bass player had died. That’s when it hit me:

Unwound is playing live shows again because Vern Rumsey is no longer alive.

I don’t have concrete proof from any specific statement or interview from either Sara or Justin but it really is the only thing that makes sense. Somewhere around 2010 it became a trend for All Tomorrow’s Parties and similar festivals to start courting long defunct but critically acclaimed groups to come back together for a “hell freezes over” performance or series of performances.

Of course it makes sense that Unwound is precisely the type of band that wouldn’t reunite only because somebody dangled a big bag of cash over their heads but that wasn’t the only type of reunion going down. I remember trying to convince The Centimeters to return to the stage for a Halloween show with me and Bernard Hermann and while that didn’t work out they did start playing again soon after. When The Centimeters did pick the banner back up it wasn’t about a huge payday but rather a newer legion of fans who had heard the band through file sharing and music blogs and were ready to give them some much deserved flowers.

I find it impossible to believe that nobody was either pressing for or offering to facilitate an Unwound reunion while Vern was alive so there must be some explanation why it never happened. It could have been that Vern didn’t actually want to do it or that Sara and/or Justin didn’t want to do it again with him or that they did but only if he was going to be sober for it.

There is actually an interview with Sara about all of this. I’m not going to throw a link in but it should be easy enough to find. She talks about letters written with the aid of therapists and describes alcoholism as a disease a handful of times in the course of the piece. If you want an official version look there – I’ll only be speaking very loosely from the thoughts and feelings of someone whose only connection to the band was that it spent under a year as my absolute favorite.

Earlier in this piece when I talked about Vern Rumsey not caring about anything I was oversimplifying things and unfairly exaggerating. He helped run a great label called PNMV that put out records by artists like The Thrones and Yind. He made music with other projects like Long Hind Legs, Red Rumsey and Flora v. Fauna. He played bass and helped with recording for bands like Blonde Redhead.

I wrote earlier in this piece about my friends in Warhammer 48K having an awful time bringing him out to be a recording engineer but I’ve heard of people having positive experiences working with him too. I forget the name but there was an article in San Diego City Beat about some band around a Banker’s Hill bar I also forget the name of inviting him out to play bass with them and they all seemed happy about how things were going.

It should be mentioned he was holding a bottle of Maker’s Mark in the accompanying picture.

That’s not really what I want to talk about though. I want to talk about how Unwound is only playing shows again because Vern has passed. Supposedly the other members had his blessing to play again with a replacement while he was still alive but I just can’t see that actually happening. Since I wrote this piece I’ve talked to several friends who excitedly mentioned recently seeing the band, for many of the them as their first time, and I wonder what it would feel like if I just decided to go.

Would it still feel like I was watching Unwound? Would I even want it to?

When I was singing in the hard rock band Sexting I wrote a song called Aschenputtel about the Cinderella fairy tale and how it relates to the concept of loss. Regarding the symbol of the glass slipper I saw the object’s size, an important plot point in the original story, as less important than the delicate material it was made from. To me a glass slipper is a flawless metaphor for memory itself – it holds the form of the feelings and experiences that give it meaning and in the light of nostalgia it even sparkles with a newfound beauty.

The problems begin when you pick it up from the shelf and try to put your foot inside of it. Even if it were to fit you perfectly attempting to walk in it, that is attempting to recreate a memory from an idealized past in the imperfect present, can only cause the slipper to shatter and cut into the flesh of your skin. With this limitation is it worth it to pick the slipper up from the palace steps at all?

I don’t begrudge Sara or Justin their right to bring back Unwound in the only way available to them. It was a life changing band and new fans deserve the right to experience it in a live setting just like they deserve the right to play it. I just wonder about the slipper – is it still on the stairs? Did somebody pick it up? Did somebody try to put their foot in it?

It’s a painful reality to come to terms with but who came to terms with it and when? People are complicated, music is complicated, relationships are complicated… I close my eyes and Ai can almost see a pile of broken glass sitting in a puddle of blood…

Whose blood is it?

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Chicago 2000 : The Uninspiring and Deeply Problematic Debut of Spidermammal.

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There were two things I wanted to accomplish while I was still a teenager. I wanted to lose my virginity and I wanted to grace the stage as a formally billed original artist. I remember very little about checking off the first of these boxes but I accomplished the second a scant few months before my twentieth birthday. If my band mate had wanted to boast this same accomplishment he would have been three years too early.

The path that brought me to the experimental milieux that would become my musical home had been a circuitous one. While my high school years were spent collecting Residents records and performing John Cage’s iconic 4’33 at the talent show the only concerts I was experiencing were a lot more traditional. Everything was a variation on indie rock, ska, punk or hardcore.

By senior year I was ostensibly in an actual band. My friend Tim had a shock of boyish blonde hair, an effortless smile and a sporty little Datsun convertible. He carried himself like the protagonist of a lost John Hughes movie. We had just collaborated on a series of Super 8 short films he had created as a student of the USC Film School and he decided our next project should be musical. Every decision was made in deference to image: I ended up playing bass because I was tall and he thought I would look cool with a low hanging strap.

Our friend Brandi had freckles, a blonde pixie haircut and a penchant for smart looking vintage dresses. I’m not sure if we ever decided what instrument she would have been playing but it was hardly the point. We called ourselves The Singles and took a series of promotional band photos in the spirit of Blondie’s Parallel Lines. We were doing ‘80s retro doing ‘50s retro, no matter how many layers you went down it was all pastiche.

When Brandi needed temporary roommates for her first apartment off campus from Chicago’s De Paul University it seemed like the stars had aligned for a big city Singles summer. We made the cross country trip with a middle aged High School teacher with a chronic Peter Pan Complex. He seemed more at home in our teenage friend group than he ever did in the company of his adult peers.

The expedient fiction of The Singles as a musical trio never quite survived the transplant to the harsher Chicago soil. I don’t remember Brandi ever explicitly stating that she wasn’t interested in being in the band anymore but all of the sessions were Tim and I playing with a cassette four track in our shared bedroom. We wrote songs about a Lake Michigan life guard, a big rig trucker and a truck stop waitress. Our style could best be described as pop punk due to our relatively limited musicianship.

It was nearly time to return to California and our respective colleges when we noticed a line of fashionable teens and twenty somethings snaking out of a nearby Bowling Alley. In 1998 The Fireside Bowl was still putting on shows that could truly be called eclectic. The size of the American underground meant that acts of diverse genres often wound up sharing bills. After a tasting flight of several flavors of indie rock a young trio of Venezuelan and Cuban-Americans from Miami took the stage.

The members of Monotract would go on to become some of the biggest names in American Noise Music but at this point they had barely begun their experiments in improvised music. Watching them set up their gear one could have easily assumed that the ensuing performance was going to be some species of a punk rock power trio.

It wasn’t.

How do I describe my first experience with face melting noise music to someone who has never succumbed to it’s seductive charms? It was as liberating and exhilarating as the accidental discovery at four years old that I could simply decide to piss on the floor instead of into the toilet. A phrase like “drunk with power” seems to just about sum it up. It felt like I had discovered a secret playground where anything was permissible and neither God nor parent could ever touch me.

Watching Monotract I was taken with their brazen sense of self assuredness, the palpable sexual tension between Roger Rimada and Nancy Garcia, their obvious indifference to the attitudes and expectations of their audience. For seven or so minutes they used drums, guitars and microphones in ways that I had never imagined were even possible. They were rough and they were new but they seemed like they were in perfect three way psychic communication. They were making it up as they went along but everything they did seemed correct.

As they left the stage Tim looked at me and smirked:

“We could have done better than that!”

I knew at that moment that I could no longer pretend to be in The Singles. It wasn’t that we were no longer on the same page regarding music and performance. We had found ourselves in different books.

Back in California I moved with Francois and Jonas to the Bay Area to begin my single year as a Physics Major at San Francisco State University. I had begun corresponding with some of the members of Monotract like I did with every artist that excited me in these years of youthful exuberance. I had made a few experimental recordings using a karaoke machine as an improvised four track and sent Roger a poorly recorded copy. I was still playing bass but now I was resting it against a small shiatsu massager. I mixed in scratching sounds on a 78 rpm red shellac record of frog calls and percussion from a metal bowl with a shifting puddle of water.

Monotract embarked on a second U.S. Tour that brought them to San Francisco’s Club Cocodrie. I showed up in the afternoon knowing I would somehow find them. I had an uncanny ability to cross paths with anyone I was set on seeing in those days. Once I met Brandi at the airport when the only information I had been given was the date of her arrival. I just stepped off the bus, walked toward the terminal and there she was. It unnerved her mother. The best way I can explain it is some form of psychic sense that people had before we became reliant on cell phones. There was no way to synchronize every minute movement so we simply found each other.

I ended up in a car with the members of Monotract and some of their friends from Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa. The show was 21 and up so I was depending on them to somehow sneak me into the bar. They smoked weed and did whippets while I hung out and made conversation. I hadn’t yet relinquished my straight edge.

Once inside The Cocodrie I was about to experience a performance from my new favorite band. They had been talked up by a friend in my Calculus class that I shared a passion for experimental noise with but this would be my first time actually seeing Deerhoof. I had snagged a copy of the Come See The Duck 7 inch based on his recommendation but had been mistakenly playing it at 33 rpm before I knew how Satomi’s vocals sounded.

After this show I realized my error and thereafter played it at the proper 45. This was the short lived lineup from their album Holdypaws: Greg, Satomi, Rob and Kelly. They were moving away from the raw, noisy roots of their first album and seven inch but hadn’t fully transitioned to the pop aesthetics of their most popular work.

I remember Rob hopping back and forth on the edges of his feet as he delivered slashing guitar riffs, Greg perched awkwardly on a milk crate as he pounded the edges and surfaces of his drums with splintering sticks, Kelly accentuating the pauses with twinkles of cheery synthesizer and Satomi just beginning to explore the innocent then grating vocals that would become the band’s trademark. They ended the set with an extended version of the song Data that held the entire club in breathless, enchanted silence.

I ended up back in Chicago after realizing that I wasn’t ready to be tied down with college and had started a correspondence with Greg Saunier. They were going to need an extra show in Chicago for their upcoming tour and I had gotten to know Brian Peterson from The Fireside well enough to book it. Setting up the show meant that I got to play it so it was time to put together a project.

I can’t remember how I made up the name Spidermammal but I probably just liked the way it sounded. I didn’t think that just me messing around on a bass would make for enough of a spectacle so I asked Justin if he wanted to be in a band with me. Justin was a poorly supervised ten year old who terrorized the block of Belden Avenue where me, Francois and most of our friends lived.

Now that Justin and I were in a band together I started spending more time with him to learn what he was like. He was probably putting on a bit of a show to impress his new teenage friend but he moved through the neighborhood like a chubbier take on Bart Simpson. When we passed a group of men passing around a joint he’d pipe up:

“Hey! Lemme get a hit of that weed!”

They shrugged and held it out so he yelled back “Hell No! I don’t do drugs!” then ran off laughing. Our walk next brought us to an automotive garage with the sliding metal door barely opened for airflow. He leaned down and tucked his head into the workspace. Cupping a hand around his mouth to direct and amplify his voice he yelled out “Ya Motherfucker!” then scampered off silently.

The man who had been working on a car looked around in confusion. The echo had created the illusion that the insult had come from some unseen person inside the actual building.

Sometimes Justin would come by to gripe about his troubles. After a frustrating day he’d complain:

“What I don’t understand is what’s the point of me even going to school? I gotta buy my own lunch!”

He missed his absent father and would pretend that he had a magical ring that he could use to communicate with him. He got in trouble for following a girl his age home from school, compounded by the fact that he was carrying a pocket knife. His family was from Tennessee and he’d clearly picked up some negative influences. He made racist remarks to Michelle who was Black and Janice who was Korean:

“Why do your eyes look all Ching Chong?”

This would always get him yelled at and kicked out but he eventually showed back up. On some level I must have realized that he desperately needed a positive role model and I was trying in some odd way to be one. I told him to start coming by my house after school so we could practice.

I was trying to teach myself to sing and play bass at the same time but I didn’t have a mic stand. Instead I stood and sang into the corner where two walls met figuring it wouldn’t move. Justin came striding in and laughed when he saw what I was actually doing.

“It looked like you were jerking off on the wall!”

Even though I was able to pull this off on several songs without losing time at our show the skill had atrophied by the time I tried to do it again thirteen years later. I was supposed to be doing it in a two piece band with Dalton but after a string of frustrating rehearsals we decided I would play drums and sing while Dalton took over bass in what became Dealbreaker.

Back at Spidermammal practice I gave Justin a microphone and started playing a jazzy bass riff that had actually been written by Brandi. He sang a bunch of “rotten made out of cotton” type jump rope rhymes but the boys and girls had been replaced by kids and grownups. It was the kids that were always rotten in his lyrics while the grownups were dandy and made out of candy. I’m not sure if he was dealing with some measure of self hate for being a child or was trying to impress me, a grownup.

Sometimes he would sing a version of I Believe I Can Fly that sounded more like the Seal version from Space Jam than the original. The night of our concert arrived and it was time for me and Justin to get into costume. He picked out a red crushed velvet pantsuit that belonged to Clara at Belden house and was given a long wig with bangs and some makeup. He looked like a miniature version of one of The Rolling Stones during a long haired glam era. I put on a maroon tuxedo with a big red velvet bow tie and painted my face with Black Metal style corpse paint. I hung a rubber skull with a generic ‘80s hair metal rocker wig from my bass for effect.

I hadn’t accounted for how much of a pain in the ass Justin was going to be at the show. He kept running over into the closed off bowling lanes and trying to stick his foot into the ball return machines. He convinced several bemused concertgoers to buy his autograph but some of his other antics were attracting the ire of the venue’s staff. I was excited to finally socialize as a “featured artist” but found myself constantly needing to extricate Justin from somewhere he wasn’t wanted or otherwise redirect his often destructive attention.

The other local act Missing Tooth took the stage. It was a couple of older ladies playing drums and keyboards while dressed up in sparkly outfits from the disco era. Finally Justin was sitting and watching a band with silent, unwavering attention. His legs were even neatly crossed as if he was at a public library story hour. I breathed a huge sigh of relief and took a seat next to him.

He looked at me and gasped “you can see the whole side of her boob!”, in almost reverent tones.

Many years later I would end up in a rap group with Virginia, the woman with the side boob, called Chew on This where she played drums and rapped KO d of like Sheila E. We unfortunately never recorded but we did get to play with my favorite Japanese Zeuhl band Kōenji Hyakkei when Chicago’s Cheer Accident invited us to do one of our raps during their set.

When it was time for Spidermammal to take the stage Janice pulled Justin aside for some last minute instruction:

“Now Justin make sure you don’t say any bad words or anything racist because the people here won’t like that.”

I know that she meant well but it probably wasn’t the smartest approach for this particular ten year old. I could literally see the light bulb form above his head. I managed to more or less sing into the microphone for our first song like I had practiced. Justin looked a little too excited when I handed him the microphone for his part.

I launched into the groovy, walking bassline.

“SHIT SHIT FUCK FUCK NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER!”

“SHIT SHIT FUCK FUCK NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER!”

Everybody stared at Justin with mouths agape but ultimately he was ten years old and it was an experimental noise show.

I kept the bassline going.

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