Tag: International Noise Conference

Columbia Missouri 2008 : “Wait, That Isn’t a Quarter Cup Yet!”

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I’m really struggling to piece together and line up some events from 2008/2009 but it was an insanely busy time for me. The way my memory super power works is that I can usually pull up details and vignettes from anything that attracted my attention and made an impression but that almost never includes calendars – I’m not even entirely sure what day it is today.

The thing that kills me is that I did keep a detailed diary during this period for the only time in my life because my roommate Stephany Colunga gave me one from her job at American Girl for Christmas at the end of 2007. Of course I’ve long since lost it along with every other physical object I used to own but not before a friend in the Bay Area turned it into a zine and made a handful of copies.

His room now sits unoccupied at The Purple Haus with the exception of all his stuff and an ongoing dispute with his former housemates prevents anyone from even looking inside. Of course I don’t know for sure that a copy is even in there but the tantalizing possibility that one could be will continue to torture me until I get a definitive statement one way or the other.

The situation reminds me a bit of something that happened when I moved back to San Diego after 9/11. I was using heroin with a friend named Daniel and decided to lend him my entire collection of Fort Thunder adjacent zines and mini-comics – the drug would still trigger states of intense emotional openness and generosity at this early stage of my use.

Not long after he lost his housing situation and put everything, including my comics, into a storage unit. I would beg him to either take the time to dig them out or drive me there so I could do it myself every time I’d run into him but it never seemed to be a good time. Finally, two or three years later, he lapsed on his storage fees and the unit was auctioned off to someone who most likely threw it all away.

He offered to reimburse me financially but I didn’t see any point as everything in there had been literally irreplaceable and held the kind of conditional and subjective value which is best kept insulated from money as far as humanly possible.

Anyway enough of all that. Here are some sections of timeline I can be absolutely sure of:

  • I bought a used Boss Dr Groove drum machine from Rand Sevilla that he had used in his band Carpet of Sexy while passing through Chicago after the Living Hell tour in June of 2008.
  • After the Santa Monica GLOW festival on July 22, 2008 I went on a short West Coast tour using counterfeit Greyhound passes with Rebekah Clendening and Cole Miller from Vortal Curb where we played a mix of songs from me and Bekah’s defunct rap group Chew on This and what would later be called Bleak End at Bernie’s.
  • The first solo Bleak End at Bernie’s shows were in Australia on a trip that lasted at least until my birthday on August 23, 2008.
  • I was around Los Angeles for the first Mojave Rave on July 11, 2009 and in Berlin the night Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009.

I know that somewhere mixed in there I went on tour with the band CAVE but no matter how hard I try to concatenate this onto established dates I end up with weird discrepancies. I know that I played Bleak End at Bernie’s sets at one or two of the shows but I also remember jumping off a tour to ride buses and trains to California with the girl I call Leg when Bleak End shouldn’t have existed yet.

Maybe I’m mixing some details up or there were two different tours I rode along for part of but I’m just going to round the whole thing to somewhere in 2008.

CAVE are a psychedelic kraut-rock band from Chicago that get lumped into a thing called the “Columbia Diaspora” as the core members come from Columbia, Missouri. I tried poking around their Wikipedia page for details that might help me pin down specifics and found some amusing misinformation.

I wasn’t able to follow that [2] hyperlink

Rotten Milk has been using his moniker for long before he started playing with CAVE and he definitely isn’t 49. This reminded me of an incident one or two days after I started riding with the band where Cooper had me answer all of a local reporter’s interview questions specifically because I wasn’t in the band and knew next to nothing about it. With that in mind I realized that media coverage isn’t likely to yield any reliable or useful information.

In the Winter of 2007 I had just gotten back to Chicago from living on The Miss Rockaway Armada and brought the cat Night Beaver to the apartment I shared with Stephany. I was supposed to be sticking around town, especially because I’d just brought home a pet, but every time I left for “just a couple days” I’d wind up gone for weeks. The first time was probably November of 2007 when I rode along for a Minneapolis show and then stuck around through Texas and New Orleans.

I’ve got a lot of memories from Columbia, Missouri so it would make sense for them to be spread over two different trips. In one of them I got blacked out drunk in the house we were staying at and decided it would be funny to keep “accidentally” walking into the room some people were having sex in. The next day Cooper said he saw me and Zach McLuckie engaged in an “Eskimo Fight” – essentially taking turns punching each other as hard in the head as possible.

Neither of us remembered doing this or how it might have started the following morning. I’ve got a pretty hard head and plenty of stories about getting punched or having chairs broken over it without suffering too much damage. It’s possible now that I think about it that this would have been my first visit to Iowa City and not Columbia at all – I think both Jeff Witscher and Brandon “NIMBY” were there.

This next bit is definitely Columbia but once again I drank until patches of my memory disappeared. This time I met a couple of girls at a bar or liquor store and went home with them. Although the part I’m missing is how I ended up back at their apartment, Occam’s Razor would suggest some degree of flirtation and sexual interest was involved.

I came around in the middle of the following performance but first I need to fill in some background. I had performed with Rotten Milk at the International Noise Conference in Miami early in 2008 and traveled with him for some shows before and after. We brought Lisers with us to a Florida house with a tandem bicycle where she accidentally burned a tiny hole in a plastic measuring cup with hot oil while making the popular egg and bread breakfast called “toad in the holes”.

Since then I’d been wearing the ruined cup around my neck with a ball chain. I also had several large bags of Jelly Belly brand jelly beans in my shoulder bag. Stephany had been given them by her father, possibly for Christmas, and wasn’t particularly interested in eating them so she gave them to me instead.

I was doing a bit: I went into the kitchen of the girls’ apartment and announced I was going to cook a recipe that called for one quarter cup of jelly beans. That was the denomination of measuring cup I was wearing around my neck. I proceeded to pour the jellybeans into the cup where they instantly tumbled out through the hole in the bottom and onto the floor.

Much like the earlier incident of pretending to “accidentally” walk in on the people having sex this might have been more amusing to the people around me if I wasn’t in the mindset that it could only get funnier with repetition. I was probably carrying something in the neighborhood of six pounds of jelly beans and I was tenaciously committed to the bit. After the first bag the girls started demanding that I stop but I would not be deterred:

“Wait, that isn’t a quarter cup yet!”

Once every jelly bean that I was carrying had found its way through the cup and onto their floor they weren’t particularly interested in having me in their house any more. They demanded I leave but I only reassured them that I would “after later” before crawling under a table and falling asleep. The next morning I let myself out and somehow found my way back to where everybody in CAVE was staying.

Columbia is essentially a small town so Cooper was curious as to whose house I’d just come from but I was still just drunk enough to have no idea what direction I’d even walked from.

I’ve been chatting with Rotten Milk tonight and consequently throwing my entire timeline into question but it isn’t really relevant to the details that make these stories amusing. At the very least I can say that I went on tour with CAVE in November of 2007 and some of these memories are undoubtedly from then.

The interesting thing to me about traveling with CAVE was that as much as I’d hung out with bands I’d never experienced the kind of archetypical masculine “tour van” energy which is usually thought of as characterizing both underground and mainstream rock music. Although it wasn’t by conscious design nearly all of my favorite bands had included female members and, with the exception of a gentle teddy bear type guest bassist at one show, I’d exclusively collaborated with women in my two rap groups.

The closest thing would have been Arab On Radar but I’d only really ridden with them for some Southern California shows and a day at Venice Beach back in 2000. Friends Forever was all guys but didn’t have the same kind of vibe due to the members essentially caravanning in separate vehicles rather than being packed together.

Actually I remember Friends Forever bassist Josh Taylor and keyboard player Jason cracking a few awkward “gay” jokes because me and drummer Nate Hayden always slept in each other’s arms in the covered bed of his pickup truck with his dogs. Nothing was afoot however – we simply shared the kind of easygoing masculine lumber camp camaraderie that reliably turns sexual in William S. Burroughs novels but in certain real life situations, such as this one, does not.

On the CAVE van energy: I’m struggling a little bit with how to describe this without it being taken the wrong way and I just decided not to worry about it. A van full of dudes makes fart jokes and talks about getting laid in a running tally that becomes competitive as the number of cities increases – it’s fine to think it’s gross as there are definitely gross things about it. I also thought it was fascinating and compelling in a way; like I was participating in a masculine ritual that stretches all the way back to Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones.

I realize that now I’m making it sound like vans full of touring women can’t make fart jokes or keep tally of who get’s laid when obviously they can and do. There’s just a certain flavor of undiluted testosterone and as an indoor kid turned theater kid turned gender non-conforming punk kid I never really had a chance to get acquainted with it.

Although I’m describing all of this with a detached anthropologist’s tone I was absolutely participating and contributing to this reality while it was happening. There was an “odd man out” who functioned as a kind of counterpoint to the general flow of energy in the van but it wasn’t me. It was Adam.

Adam Roberts has been in a lot of Columbia, Missouri bands. I don’t see him mentioned on the CAVE Wikipedia page but as far as I know he was a founding member. When I searched around I saw they had a song named after him but it was probably a kind of tribute from after he left the band. Him and Rotten Milk aren’t in the band anymore.

Adam had a kind of long suffering irritable “mother hen” energy that stuck out in contrast to the general laid back party vibes. He’s the only keyboard player I’ve ever known to tour with a specialized collapsible bench seat. He wasn’t much of a drinker and didn’t seem to share his band mates penchant for marijuana.

I’d say he had the sharpest sense of humor in the van, loaded with bitchiness and sarcasm, but you had to sit close to catch it as his jokes were more often than not delivered just under his breath. When a police officer called Rotten Milk back to his patrol car during a traffic stop Adam drily pantomimed a road side execution:

“You forgot your… kapow!!”

I never played or jammed with the band or even spent too much focus listening to their live sets but I could tell that Adam’s contributions sounded more like organ than piano and were collectively regarded as indispensable. I think the “odd couple” aspects of the social situation were also understood and enjoyed by everyone. I have no way to know but I’d be inclined to suspect his departure was triggered by health issues, general life stuff or any other explanation that doesn’t rest on it all being the way everyone interacted with each other.

On to more of the shows. Rotten Milk had a thing about The Replay Lounge in Lawrence, Kansas that goes like this – in inclement weather there is no place the smoking youth of Lawrence would rather be than the gaslamp heated patio at Replay. Hordes of college students will happily pay cover to drink and smoke the night away in toasty comfort – some of them might even decide to forgo smoking long enough to step inside and watch a song or two.

This feels of only peripheral importance when the entertainer’s contract is written in such a way that the Lion’s share of the door moneys go directly to the artist regardless of whether anybody was actually in the room watching at all — and perhaps a percentage of liquor sales on top. Rotten would often wax ecstatic about how the right cold night at The Replay could pull a national tour from running at a loss to being completely covered and even paying out per diems in a single night.

Spirits were high as this had turned into just such an evening and this most likely colored responses toward the pair of characters the universe had chosen to bring our way. First up was, I believe, Dr. Matthew who found us either inside a record store or just on the street somewhere. The Doctor was essentially a self promoter but painted through with an overpowering stripe of cryptotheological vaingloriousness. He would always offer a brief glimpse into his compositions in this heavy handed way:

“Hello, I’m Doctor Matthew and I’d like to share with you some of the greatest living music that the Lord Jesus Christ has seen fit to manifest through me – if you’re ready!”

I doubt I’ve done it perfect justice but do feel that I captured the general tone. Lawrence is a University town so he may well have been using the honorific Professor as opposed to Doctor. We would have been ecstatic to take him up on his offer but he carried neither instruments nor recordings and had the squirrely energy of someone you should not allow to touch your guitar under any circumstance.

The negotiations suddenly took an unexpected twist. Professor Matthew had removed the option of a recital from the table and was simply looking to buy. God had evidently taken notice of Rex McMurty and concluded that Rex was the only possible percussionist for the Prof’s continued endeavors. While God sees and hears all Matthew had not, failing to take in the group’s egalitarian structure, but he put his faith in his deity and began offering Cooper generous quantities of cash to “buy his drummer”.

This was an untenable offer for two main reasons: 1) Rex enjoyed playing in CAVE and saw himself as an equal partner by virtue of his contributions – a view that was shared by his companions. 2) CAVE was not particularly structured like a slave plantation and there was neither precedent nor protocol to begin selling members off to outside interests. We distanced ourselves from Professor Matthew without ever learning if he had either the chops or Cha-Ching! he’d been hinting at – leaving us only to speculate.

The next proposition unfortunately managed to hit the band in one of their weak spots – right in the drugs. It came from a townie who I’ll call Daniel who did come see the show. Daniel had just gone through a messy breakup and didn’t want to spend the night alone in his apartment. He also mentioned having copious amounts of marijuana and hashish.

Within a couple of exchanges he proved himself to be a deeply unpleasant person to talk to:

“My girlfriend just left me but I’ve got this new twenty year old I’ve been fucking the shit out of!”

Nonetheless the decision was made to take him up on his offer. Along with the promises of a stoner’s cornucopia it seems possible that he also represented the only option for a free crash spot in Lawrence. His apartment had a fairly fancy and modern, for the time, kitchen area with the brushed steel refrigerator and polished granite countertops. Unfortunately besides that it was bleak inside. Plain Pantone #f0ead6 eggshell walls without so much as a single picture, book or even magazine in sight.

I had a tendency to be the last person awake on this tour which often led to whoever we were hanging out with confiding their life story to me. Daniel’s was about as fascinating as you’d imagine. He’d been following The String Cheese Incident on tour until he got left in Lawrence and decided to remain in the college town and work his way up to becoming a mid level drug dealer. The realities of a university aged population allowed him to leverage his limited life experience advantageously against the people he was selling drugs to and having sex with.

Truly inspirational stuff.

Before going to bed he asked us to make sure to wake him up in the morning because he’d gotten a bunch of eggs and stuff for breakfast. I don’t remember it being discussed in so much as a whisper when we cooked, ate in silence and then tiptoed out the door the next morning. Everybody was already on the same page.

I’m trying to double check my memory and I’m pretty sure this trip was the first time I ever set foot in Texas. As many times as I’d traveled between Chicago and California all of my rides and buses must have taken a more Northern route. Anyway I thought Cooper was exaggerating when he insisted that everybody finish any marijuana they might have on them and throw their pipes and papers out the window before we crossed over the state line.

He wasn’t.

We hadn’t even been in Texas for fifteen minutes when we got pulled over and a red faced good old boy dramatically threw open the sliding door on the side of the van. He made a big show of sniffing the air like a witch looking for children in a fairytale before he drawled out:

“When’s the last time you boys got high?”

Slag was in the driver’s seat so he ended up playing point guy to most of the questions:

“We don’t get high sir.”

The cop laughed incredulously:

“Y’all don’t get high? You wouldn’t lie to me would you? You were raised better’n that weren’t you?”

At each pause everybody chimed back with a subdued chorus of “No Sirs” like petulant schoolchildren. He scoffed a second time:

“Y’all are a band ain’t you? What kind of band don’t get high? What kind of music you even play?”

Cooper answered this one:

“Rock and roll sir.”

I would learn a couple of years later when touring with Generation that this was the only acceptable answer – Classic Rock if you wanted to be really careful. After the role play had run its course and the cops had determined that nobody had been stupid enough to leave marijuana where they might actually find it they flipped a switch and became genuinely friendly. They even told us about a shortcut to get into Austin while avoiding traffic so we wouldn’t be late for sound check.

Another reason that I think I must have ridden with CAVE on two separate tours is that they definitely played Emo’s this first time around but I also remember a show in a smaller place with flames on the side that kind of looked like San Diego’s Casbah. An old friend of the band was working at Emo’s and he got mad when we didn’t leave the door to the green room open:

“Hey you guys can’t be sniffing drugs in here!”

This turned out to be projection. I was once again the last person awake and talking when he offered me some cocaine much later in the night. This may well be the first time I turned down free hard drugs in my adult life but a small line just as I was about to try to fall asleep didn’t sound especially appealing.

We must have gone to Austin two separate times because there wouldn’t have been a full day to meet up with Nick from El Rancho on this first tour. The guys in CAVE waited around Nick’s mom’s wine bar while me and him took buses to the other side of town to meet his heroin dealer. The way Rotten Milk described it was that I did a standup routine where I came out of the bathroom nearly too high to even stand without falling and proceeded to obliviously tell awful jokes nobody thought were funny for nearly an hour.

Nick’s mom pretended not to notice like she always does. I wonder if she remembered my name from when I left syringes all over the apartment she was renting for Nick in the Chicago neighborhood Boy’s Town way back in 2001. It is a pretty distinctive name.

The main thing I’m having trouble resolving with the time line is Bleak End at Bernie’s. I think I remember jumping the bill with this project at at least one show but I didn’t even own a drum machine yet for the 2007 tour and the project didn’t exist under that name until the Autumn of 2008. Most of the time on the tours I was just hanging out without trying to perform.

There was a town where we had an extra day and heard about a grunge themed party so we quickly practiced a version of Hole’s Violet where I did vocals. We called the band Uncle Grunge. The party had a cardboard cutout of Seattle’s space needle against the wall and everybody wore flannels. I think it might have been in Milwaukee or Minneapolis.

The reason I feel so confident about this is because of my fan from Houston. I had one “pure fan” in the sense that she didn’t already know me socially before getting into the Bleak End stuff. If you’ve ever watched the Flight of the Conchords show she kind of reminds me of the fan character from that. This would have been at the space called Notsuoh.

Notsuoh reminded me a bit of the kind of artist spaces that mostly got destroyed and evicted in the early 2000’s on waves of gentrification and urban development. Even though it’s in downtown Houston it’s most likely been able to hold onto its space because of the profitable licensed bar on the ground floor. Buying the building during the blighted nineties and possible links to organized crime wouldn’t have hurt either. The owner showed us unused spaces in the upstairs filled with old store fixtures and giant sign letters and that sort of thing. We all ended up sleeping on the roof.

I saw that it’s still open on the internet but I haven’t been back in the last fifteen years to see if the upstairs portions still look like that.

There was supposed to be a show at a space in Monterrey, Mexico called El Garaje but after crossing into Nuevo Laredo CAVE opted not to go as they were borrowing a friend’s van and couldn’t get temporary insurance. I was severely tempted to try to catch a bus down myself but chickened out because I neither knew my way around Mexico and it’s intercity bus system nor had upgraded my Spanish to the conversational level yet.

Although I was never actually booked at the Monterrey show and would have been trying to jump the bill I consider this the first of a series of unsuccessful attempts to play in Mexico. The next one happened in 2012 when I only found out that I’d be able to get onto a Mexico City show after I’d already flown to Cancún. Even now I’ve only ever managed to play Tijuana.

On the 2007 tour we went to New Orleans for what was my first visit to the city since a Greyhound trip in 2000. The Katrina damage was still fresh and there were MPs on the street instead of normal police. I can’t remember if the CAVE show got broken up by these Military Police or if this was a story I’d heard about a Warhammer 48k show that had happened a year or so earlier.

I most likely jumped off the tour in New Orleans and spent a few days with some Columbia Diaspora girls nicknamed the “flavor wasting hoes”, because they had thrown away a bunch of universally admired kitchen spices, before making myself a counterfeit Greyhound pass to return to Chicago. New Orleans was one of the last large cities where you could reliably use one of those without worrying about anybody recognizing the fraud.

I remember the lady at the ticket desk had self-cutting scars covering her arms from the wrists to the insides of her elbows. You don’t see something like that and worry that you’re about to get caught up on anything. She clearly had her own demons to battle so why should she care about the authenticity of my pass?

Los Angeles 2008 : “You can play all the wrong notes. Just play them on time”

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[photo credit: Tod Seelie]

The last piece I put up was my hundredth post on here so I wanted to do something special to commemorate one hundred posts. One idea I had was to take an event that someone else I knew had almost as clear a memory of as I did and have them write up their own recollections of the night/show/party whatever and then post both of our recollections together but do it double blind so neither of us could read the other person’s memories before typing up our own.

I still think this is a great idea – if anyone has strong recollections of something I haven’t covered yet and would like to try this give me a shout.

My other idea was to go back and rewrite the introductory piece about going to see The Make-Up in 1999. It might not even be clear to my newer readers that this was the introductory piece but it was the first thing I wrote since BAD FISH several years ago and the device I used to kick off this entire Winter writing project. I was messing with the dates for a bit as a quick hack to put the pieces in the order I wanted but I decided to stop doing that. A friend and mentor whose advice and constructive criticism was instrumental in building both my confidence and momentum at the beginning of this voyage had always said that it was the weakest piece, and it had already gone through a couple of rewrites, so I always figured it would need some adjusting.

When I went back and actually read it again I was struck with how much my voice has evolved and changed over these hundred entries and I found myself mystified and baffled by my earlier overly ornamentative style. Attacking this piece as an editor would feel like I was pulling the legs off of some kind of fragile insect – they say that to write and edit effectively one must “kill your darlings” but as far as I could tell it was already dead. Much like I did with BAD FISH, I opted to leave it pinned to the page as a specimen and curiosity.

I fixed a couple of obvious grammatical errors and adjusted the year but I mostly left it in the form it was originally written in. To measure anything you need a starting point and that piece will serve as origin on the graph of my literary attainment. There is one small detail that needs addressing however – in that piece I made an absurdly empty promise to deliver these various tableaux as a background character. The truth is that I was never a fly on the wall but always a fly in the ointment and the only way to deliver these accounts is the way they happened – with me conspicuously buzzing right in the center of things.

The last bit of business I want to take this moment to deal with is the title – Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America. Barkev had introduced me to a book called Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America by a Spaniard named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca who became stranded on a failed expedition in 1527 and spent the next eight years living and traveling among indigenous groups who, for the most part, had never seen another European.

The book reads a bit like an ethnography, a bit like a travelogue and a bit like a picaresque novel. When I made the decision that I would be writing up my experiences and stories with what I’ve been referring to as Underground America it seemed like the perfect reference and organizing principle. An entire hidden landscape that pulsed beneath the surface but to it’s architects, initiates and participants the most vital thing in the world. Even in the ‘90s when the term “alternative” was on every music executive’s tongue it lay beneath the trends – the alternative to alternative.

With all of that out of the way I’d like to jump right into telling a story. 2007 to 2008 was an absurdly busy year for me. In Winter I was part of the crew that was laboring to get The Garden of Bling river-worthy while most hands were abandoning the Miss Rockaway Armada project and dismantling the other crafts. To deal with the Lower Mississippi we needed a higher power outboard motor but we would also need to attach a larger transom to the disintegrating plywood of the raft to use one.

Luckily we met one of the archetypical junk sculptor welders found in every post-industrial city living off of Cherokee Street in Saint Louis who was happy to help us and let us use all his fancy tools. He was just about meticulous enough to be a serial killer – he only wore jeans and plaid flannels, he only drank Jimmy Buffet Landshark beer and he only ate stews and chilis he’d made with venison he hunted himself and kept in a big rectangular freezer. I’m going to take a wild guess that he probably killed it all during bow season.

Everything we did was fueled by Sparks which was still available in the highly caffeinated version. Me and Alexis had already bought used wetsuits to go into the freezing water and try to replace the plywood bottom that had been scraped off in successive beachings. I might have explained this before but I’ll explain it again: the rafts didn’t have anything like an airtight hull. They floated on pontoons that were essentially plywood boxes stuffed with styrofoam.

With the bottom missing my favorite analogy was a bowl full of cheerios turned upside down in a bathtub. In this analogy just pretend like the cheerios can’t get soggy – their natural buoyancy keeps the bowl afloat and the edges of the bowl keep the cheerios trapped underneath. If the bowl is rocked by waves or wakes a few of the cheerios drift free. The wakes of passing barges were a constant reality on this section of the Mississippi so chunks of styrofoam, the allegorical cheerios in this situation, were starting to fill the water and litter the beach.

We had a name for our efforts to replace the bottom while floating, The Garden of Bling Dive Team, but we didn’t have much progress or material success. We were trying to drive lag bolts into the two inch edges of 2 x 8s but with the lumber completely water logged and the necessity of driving the bolts upward underwater while being rocked by constant wakes we weren’t really getting anywhere.

We did the same thing for our efforts to install the transom – we took pictures for an imaginary metal band called Transom. I wrote a song about the fact that I always had to retrieve dropped tools from the water because I had a wetsuit and I was the tallest:

“Why does metal always sink?

Why’s the River fucking stink?

Holy Shit I’m in the drink again!”

By November none of it was working and I decided to take the cat we’d found, Night Beaver, and go back to Chicago. I wasn’t gone long when I heard that Harrison had broken his back doing a triple flip off of the nearby train bridge while wearing a wetsuit. This might sound serious but he pretty much bounced back from it without issue. This is the thing with Harrison – he’s constantly reckless but when it comes time for life altering injuries or serious consequences it slides off him like mercury and lands on the people around him.

Usually women.

Because it was 2007 and we were underneath a major train bridge agents from the Department of Homeland Security were constantly coming by and expressing how much they’d love it if we were gone. The raft was registered however and we qualified as a “vessel in distress” so they couldn’t make us leave. Boat and water law is different from normal law or even weird Mexico and Louisiana law – when I think about it I picture a yellowed scroll with decaying edges and a red wax seal.

Anyway everything’s legal when nobody’s looking. With everybody off the raft at the same time to check on Harrison in the hospital it was easy for somebody to set it on fire. I’m not necessarily saying it was DHS that did it but they did want us to disappear. Scrappers used to come down to that river bank to burn the insulation off of copper wires so the scrapyard would give them a better rate. Maybe they burned the Bling.

Alexis and I used to talk about burning it once we realized that it wasn’t going to be earning the Coast Guard’s approval for safe navigation or making it down the river. I was mainly upset that somebody had beaten us to it.

So 2008 came around. I was probably in Chicago for New Year’s Eve. Maybe it was the party at Heaven Gallery or somewhere close to it where I fell and chipped my front tooth on the ice outside. There was a phenomenon at this party we referred to as “Frat-Bro Valhalla”. The way the space was set up there was a special balcony or mezzanine full of frat-bros that seemed to be looking down on the rest of us. I couldn’t figure out how they had gotten to that spot or if it was all the same party or anything else.

I got drunk and fell and chipped my tooth on the ice outside.

I made it down to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras and then to Miami for the International Noise Conference and a couple months later onto The Bus for the Living Hell tour. Out to California for the Living Hell reunion and then to Australia with my sisters. I played the first two Bleak End at Bernie’s shows in Brisbane and Sydney. Sydney is a beautiful city but freezing cold during Australia’s Winter which happens to be Summer in the United States.

The skies are full of sulfur crested cockatoos in the daytime and flying foxes at night. Leg had asked me to bring her back a cockatoo feather. After watching a fairly awful modernized production of Don Giovanni at the Sydney Opera House, it featured playboy bunnies and simulated fellatio, I spent the rest of the night walking the Botanical Gardens. At dawn I found it – a perfect white feather with just a trace of bright banana yellow along it’s edge.

It seemed too important to entrust to International Mail and Leg had moved up to Portland. It was getting harder to use the counterfeit Greyhound passes. I’m not sure if they changed something in their computers or the station agents were just catching on to us but it was getting to a point where the stations in big cities would turn me away and I’d have to try all the little satellite stations until one worked.

I stopped trying to use them in 2008. I’m sure a lot of people threw in the towel even earlier and some must have dragged it on even longer. It feels unlikely but I’d love to hear that somebody is making it work in 2023.

Anyway I accidentally got ahead of myself a little bit because I thought that the quick West Coast tour with counterfeit Greyhound passes happened when I came back from Australia but I checked a date and it would have had to have been before.

I bought my Boss Dr. Groove drum machine from Rand in Chicago at the end of the bus tour – I used to joke that it used to have a bit of a drinking problem because it would have drinks spilled on it and get knocked off of tables every time Carpet of Sexy played. When I first started writing on it only a few of the buttons would stick but it eventually stopped working altogether.

Bekah had been the other founding member of our rap group Chew on This and had just moved out to Los Angeles. I had only written a couple of Bleak End songs so we played mixed sets with half Bleak End and half Chew on This material. I have no idea what we billed it as but the shows were probably too last minute for us to be on fliers anyway. Cole from Deep Jew came along and played a second keyboard.

The detail that fixed the dates for me is that we went to GLOW – a public arts rave on and around the Santa Monica Pier. We weren’t playing this event but we were carrying all of our gear with us and I had one of the bigger keyboards tucked under my arm. Someone yelled out the window of a passing van that I looked like Bob Marley which was a little confusing as I was tall, white, wearing heavy eye makeup, didn’t have dreadlocks and was carrying an instrument I didn’t think he was particularly known for.

I guess it was an example of “out-group homogeneity” – to some people the entire diverse landscape of performed music must seem like the same thing.

I had a friend from the rafts named Jaci who lived down the street from the pier, I’ve written a little bit about her sister Jacki who happens to be in this chapter’s photo, and we stashed all the gear at the apartment she shared with her mom. Then I gave everybody acid which turned out to not be the best idea. Cole and I were old hands with the stuff but the girls were fairly, if not completely, new to it. I probably should have split a single hit between Jaci and Bekah but you live and learn as they say.

The plan was simple: spend the night having fun tripping at the public arts rave and catch a bus toward the Greyhound first thing in the morning to travel on to San Francisco and our next show. The moment the drugs kicked in both Jaci and Bekah freaked out and ran off so me and Cole ended up in damage control mode – too busy tracking them down and making sure they were ok to even notice that we were tripping ourselves. I do faintly remember a tiny bit of light shows and dancing but most of the night was spent searching and worrying.

We found Bekah sitting in the shadows underneath the pier, like among the pylons right when the sand hits the water. She was staring off into space and it took quite a while before she was ready to speak. Finally she offered this small glimpse of her internal world at that moment:

“Filas… They’re cool, right?”

I agreed that they were indeed very cool shoes and we spent most of the night on the sand and in the shadows. Carl Cheng’s Santa Monica Art Tool was on display – a giant concrete roller that leaves behind a topographical map of the city in the sand. In function it was quite similar to the cylindrical seals made of lapis lazuli and other precious stones in Ancient Mesopotamia. They rolled across clay envelopes leaving behind decorative scenes that doubled as proof that the contents hadn’t been tampered with.

The night had been planned to coincide with a grunion run and it may have also been a Full Moon. Me and Cole were splashing around in the tide looking for the fish, who seemed to have missed the memo, and he made some kind of joke about the grunions arriving as spectators to see the crowds of oddly dressed people assembled on the beach. The concept set off an avalanche of questions in my head about what it would like if the participants in any kind of sub-cultural spectacle were outnumbered by the spectators, or even worse if only spectators showed up.

The question only seems to have become more poignant in the intervening years as live shows have become seas of recording phones and cameras and documentation seems to have superseded experience as a primary motivation. It was very much on my mind when I finally made it to the Folsom Street Fair after years of hearing about wanton displays of BDSM-themed role play. It felt like everyone was there to gawk but nobody was there to be the spectacle.

I’ve also seen the other side of this equation being thrown out of balance when I went to SXSW in 2011. Obviously people show up to the festival just to watch bands but for the small shows I was playing it was nothing but artists hoping to be seen and noticed. The way I figured the only point to playing these shows was rolling the dice to see if you would end up forming a relationship with the band that played directly before or after you. Nobody else was going to see you – everybody had booked five or more shows a day and had to leave the moment they could take their gear down.

Just like my first story about The Make-Up I feel like the Underground is most vital when everybody is acting as both participant and spectator and the line between the two isn’t particularly distinct. I’m sure there are places where this still is happening and it makes sense that I’m not immediately privy to them. I’m forty-two years old and I live on a mountain in the middle of nowhere but I still have faith in the youth.

Back to the story we had found Bekah but we wouldn’t be able to play our next show without our instruments. We weren’t able to get Jaci on the phone during the night and now it was going direct to voicemail. I found out later that she had thrown her phone away in a momentary paranoid freak out. Google had one of it’s offices just down the street from her house and her and Jacki had a running joke where they would approach the receptionist with inane requests:

“Ahem… Naked pictures of Angelina Jolie please.”

In 2008 the special cars that drove around capturing images for Google Street View were still a common and conspicuous sight, this is when they had the special cameras on the roof that looked like soccer balls. There seemed to always be a lot of them in her section of Santa Monica – maybe the Google offices included a special garage that they were coming and going from. Anyway she was frustrated that none of the calls seemed to be going through and she thought the “Google Gang” was stalking her so she threw her phone into some bushes somewhere.

We didn’t know all of this but we knew we needed our instruments so the only thing to try was walking to her house and seeing if she was there. As we walked away from the Pier a group of cyclists started heckling us for being pedestrians. I tried to argue that walking had roughly the same ecological impact as biking but Cole came up with the following joke:

“Oh yeah? Why do you think they call it a carbon footprint?”

Two blocks later we passed the same group loading all of these bikes into a pair of oversized vans. For all of their bluster cycling was evidently only a thing they did to cover the short mile between the party and easy to find parking spaces.

We knocked on Jaci’s door and after startling her mother’s creepy roommate we learned what had happened and were able to retrieve our keyboards. The longer lasting consequence was that Jaci and Jackie’s mother went from thinking I was an excellent chaperone and influence on her daughters to thinking that I was a very bad one. Not that it would matter much – neither Jaci or Jacki would be living with her for very much longer.

We caught the bus toward the Greyhound in accordance with the itinerary I had mapped out to get us to the San Francisco generator show in time to perform. An old wino who was evidently an experienced musician noticed our keyboards and offered this timeless advice:

“You can play all the wrong notes. Every note the wrong note. Just play them on time.”

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Miami 2008 : The Bus Part Five “Hey Man, Thanks For Coming Through On The Broccoli”

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I don’t really resonate with the identity of “acid dealer” but for the duration of the Conference that’s what I was. The sheet of acid I had just bought needed to make enough money for me to buy another one so that I could continue to pursue my recent hobby of being a totally ridiculous acid head. In a round about way this temporary occupation would be responsible for generating the name of my future solo project.

I have always disliked the proposition that people who are about to consume psychedelic drugs should be shielded from any negative or unpleasant suggestions out of fear that it might trigger a “bad trip”. It seemed to me that the current emotional landscape of the would-be consumer’s life would be more responsible for shaping their experience than whether or not somebody said “boo”.

For this reason I had taken a mechanical pencil and drawn little sad faces, grave stones, mushroom clouds and other ominous icons on the individual doses of either a previous or later sheet. This time around the blotter was only plain white paper but I made sure to reassure any prospective buyers that they were in for a bad time. Somebody asked me if it was going to be fun:

“Fun? Fuck no! I’ve been taking this shit all weekend and I’m crying blood! This shit is negative weekend! This shit is Bleak End at Bernie’s!”

When it came out of my mouth I wouldn’t have guessed that it would become the moniker of a future singer-songwriter solo project and the source of my only version of the punk name. I just knew that it was a little pun and a clump of phonemes that I liked the heft of in the hand of my mind – like a rock that you would select for attempting to skip on water. If I had to do it over again I would maybe use the name for a song or album but not for an identity defining music thing. It’s a bit too bad-quirky and pop-culture-referencey like Break Dancing Ronald Reagan or Robin Williams On Fire.

If I could go back in time and change it I would probably go with something heavy and esoteric like Lacrimae Rerum or offensive and edgelordy like Human Shit. It’s not like I hate it or anything, it is my name after all and I already lucked out with a killer name from my family of origin. I’m just saying in the best of all possible worlds I’d probably have gone with something better.

If I’m going to be getting into ideal worlds I did always wish that somebody with a label had approached me about releasing music – or reissuing now that the whole thing has been mothballed. I never saw it first hand but I heard that some kids performed once or twice as Bleak End at Bernie’s Two so there is that thing they say about imitation and flattery and obviously there’s some truth to that. I’m human and it’s only natural to want more – out of all the drugs the brain rewards itself with when outside circumstances trigger specific emotions I’d rank validation among the most elusive.

Anyway that was a bit of a tangent: I was selling drugs at a noise music festival. I had been kind of feeling this Dickensian Besprizornye style energy in the mode of sort of leaning against a wall and impudently eating an apple and of course there was just the thing about being on the road and needing to eat to stay alive but I had been eating a lot of raw fruits and vegetables. I definitely shopped for these with an eye toward accessorizing and because I was wearing some cream colored women’s corduroys and a kind of Jordache looking sporty green top from Rainbow I ended up buying a parsnip and bunch of rapini or broccoli rabe.

For me acid very much makes me feel like an art director looking at my own life from the outside and admiring the composition and color palette. I remember climbing the ladder onto the bus’s roof with the parsnip in the back pocket of the aforementioned pants and thinking the entire ensemble looked pleasantly Fraggle Rock. The rapini became my kind of drug dealer machismo totem as I vacantly grazed on it to kind of ominously loiter as I stared right through my slightly nervous customers – kind of like a toothpick or cigarette for a central casting television show hustler character.

I’d stare off into the distance as I dug into my pocket for the drugs and casually offered bites of the cruciferous greens that the buyers universally accepted to seem “with it”. I don’t mean that I was selling drugs to my friends like this – for them I just did it normal. This was a character I was putting on for the randoms, deliberately campy and extremely self conscious.

This brings us to the pull quote. I had stepped inside of Churchill’s but not all the way in where the performances happen, I was standing near the ATM by the door and talking to Vanessa. A business casual looking guy that I had evidently sold drugs to was heading outside and leaned in close to say some generic outlaw association banter and slyly wink:

“Hey man, thanks for coming through with the broccoli!”

What I’m trying to get as is that you will sometimes hear this kind of outlaw association banter and it sounds too ridiculous to be real. Like code words and what not exist but if the swagger game is lacking you start wondering what the deal is. Tough talk surrounding something as mundane as framing a porch. Sly looks and handshakes for jobs that are legal and generate honest tax forms. This is how the broccoli bit sounded, corny really.

Most of my acid head phase was done in approximately once weekly weekend warrior mode with two major exceptions: when I rode freight trains with Alexis and Jacki to Mardi Gras I had the remains of a sheet where the doses were slightly too small to be effective. We decided to play a game where we would take one square on the hour every hour until they were gone. Most people are probably familiar with the feeling of drinking heavily while sitting down and not realizing how intoxicated you had become until suddenly trying to stand up.

This train ride was similar in that it didn’t seem like we were tripping that hard while the landscape was rushing by us at full speed but when the train would stop and side out we would suddenly realize that inanimate objects weren’t willing to sit in one place. Everything appeared to be creeping or flowing toward the train. The second binge was at this International Noise Conference. Me and Rage just continued to take it the moment it felt like the effects might be subsiding for the entire weekend.

A large part of our dynamic was that kind of art director thing: the way we looked together. A good reference point would be the famous X-Force cover where Polaris is posing on the much larger character Strong Guy. I’m certainly not muscular but I am quite tall and with a tiny woman hanging from my shoulders we looked like something out of a comic book. We started to layer and fuse our distinctive and disparate styles: she put on my leather vest and I ended up in some of her delicate lacey underthings.

I don’t remember where it came from but Rage ended up with a brightly colored toy revolver that seldom left her hand. I have a vivid memory of us wandering the back streets of Little Haiti on the dawn of the second or third day. The older men of the neighborhood were quietly playing acoustic guitars and accordions on their porches, the younger men on the corners tensed when they first noticed the gun but visibly softened upon taking in the entire picture. They offered discrete nods as we passed on by – almost imperceptible but unequivocal in the message of “we mean you no harm”.

I think I was looking for mangos and avocados. They had been everywhere in Florida but were slightly harder to find in this particular neighborhood. I ended up in a Botanica where dried fish were slowly smoldering at the threshold as an offering to the lwa. I bought some Lanman & Kemp Florida Water – a scent that would come to define the indelible stink of magic on the next few years of my life. I had read a little bit about Vodou and asked the proprietor if there might be an hounfour in the neighborhood:

“Not here. Haiti only.”

It wasn’t the kind of acid that prevents you from sleeping but the unrelenting heat of the weekend made it feel like we might as well have not been. There was a certain frantic and desperate energy to the Churchill’s parking lot that intensified it’s effects: from both the drug addled locals and the sleep deprived Conference attendees. Unrelenting sunlight on aggressively grey and medium sized jagged rocks of gravel. It felt like your head was exploding.

Somebody had rented a motel room around the corner so me and Rage drifted over to check out the scene. There was nothing relaxing about it. It was an echo of the energy of the bus, parking lot and Conference: too many people in too small of a space and the demanding auras of piles of clothing and music equipment. The fence was covered with brown anoles urgently flashing bright yellow dewlaps. Also Broke-Bus Brooke was there and there is zero chill within a ten foot radius of that person ever. She ended up harnessing that quality in a later series of deeply uncomfortable performances as Are You My Mother?”

We decided to ditch the collectivist spirit and sneak off for a bit of decadent self care: we went out to sushi. Under the soothing effects of secrecy and air conditioning we ordered a giant platter of sashimi that arrived on a bed of shaved ice. If I had been a zoo animal in those years my diet probably would have been mangoes, rapini and raw salmon. Like the scent of Florida Water these things felt refreshing and most likely restocked some of the vitamins that the constant diet of drugs had been depleting.

We returned to the chaos of the International Noise Conference.

Next Part:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/01/27/providence-2008-the-bus-she-was-totally-hot-too/

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Southern Florida 2008 : The Bus Part Four “There’s A Quarterback In Every Huddle”

berniebleak1 Comment

Last bus chapter I was talking about South Beach but I think I need to dial back a little bit and talk about the Publix between Orlando and Miami. John Benson was the primary architect behind both bus incarnations but he wasn’t always the driver. Almost as often, for both the INC trip and the later Living Hell tour, Upper Dave was the one behind the wheel. He looked good there and had the necessary temperament for maneuvering a vehicle of it’s size: one of the reasons I thought it was hilarious when the comparably nervous and high strung Griffin from Sewn Leather started driving a miniature RV.

Anyway this would have been the reason that some of the other members of Living Hell stole a sign from Wendy’s that said “Dave’s Way” and displayed it in the tiny window usually reserved for route information.

Let’s talk about stealing: it was ordinary for the bus to attract negative police attention just for looking weird and being full of freaks but on this occasion a crime actually was committed, albeit minor. I’ve had enough experience at this point to have the shoplifting conversation before walking into a major grocery chain in mixed company on tour and I’m about to lay out the reasons.

It’s always cheese and it’s always a bigger headache for the companions of the actual shoplifter than it is for the shoplifter themselves. Cheese is a cherished food of early adulthood: high in protein and requiring no preparation it often leads to punk house arguments and creates a universal shiver of excitement when found in a dumpster because it brings life and flavor to the thing there’s always too much of: bread.

It isn’t really important who stole the cheese but because I remember let’s share a chuckle at this person’s expense anyway. It was James: then playing with Lazy Magnet and later in a band called Evil Spirits with the members of Taboo. I haven’t heard anything about James in a few years, hopefully this is just because he’s been living quietly but well and not because somebody is about to let me in on some bad news. James stole cheese from Publix and Publix called the police and the police sat us all down on the side of the bus to be detained and lectured.

There are a lot of reasons why the following encounter felt like we were an errant Kindergarten class that had wandered away from a teacher on a field trip and I’m about to list all of them. The first one was that the cops were going to try to explain elementary ethics to us as if we were toddlers and actually simply did not understand:

“How would you like it if I stole your food? You’ve got food in that bag right there, what if I just took it?”

It was disappointing that they didn’t segue from this into a complete primer on the nuances of corporate personhood. An explanation as to why Publix was the equivalent of a friend and ally when it was time to not steal food from them but would magically transform into an LLC the moment a cleaning product gave their employees cancer or a new location’s construction threatened an endangered species. Give a Publix a fish and it eats for a day…

The next reason was that this stern lecture was interrupted by a Publix employee who was bringing us jars of peanut butter and jelly, a loaf of bread and a twelve pack of root beer. She seemed to understand that we had simply missed snack time and would return to being polite members of society the minute we’d had a PBJ and nap and all of this was seriously eroding the cop’s assertion that we needed to reflect on the error of our ways.

The next reason was that the “time out” they had us sitting in was completely unfair and arbitrary. John Orlando had bought a submarine sandwich from Publix and even had the receipt to prove it. What he didn’t have was a full set of teeth to eat it with and our temporary stewards had forbidden him from going onto the bus to retrieve his partial denture. He said that he wanted to obey their rules but was hungry and he and I came up with a novel compromise. Because he couldn’t retrieve his teeth I would use my teeth to chew up bites of his sandwich for him and spit them into his mouth like a mother bird.

This is especially funny to me because I’ve now lost all of my teeth and have to wear a full set of dentures while I imagine John is probably back to a healthy complete set as he’s no doubt replaced the partial with implants by now. Anyway John got to eat his sandwich without breaking the rule about going back on board the bus but the cops really didn’t like the way he was eating it:

“Stop it! You’re making a scene!”

We all thought that detaining a bus full of weirdos and making them sit in time out in a Publix parking lot was making more of a scene but what could we say? According to the social contract it is the cops who are the arbiters of proper behavior and not the bus full of freaks. The biggest reason that the scenario felt like we were a rogue troupe of grade schoolers is that the cops were only looking for a proper authority figure among us to release us into the recognizance of:

“Look I know you say you’re all artists and everybody’s equal but there’s a quarterback in every huddle. Who’s the Alpha?”

We suggested that they throw a raw steak over our heads and waited to see which of us got it. Eventually somebody was able to call John Benson who had been briefly traveling in a separate car and his full beard and fatherly demeanor seemed to satisfy the peace officers. Maybe it was the subtle shifts in everybody’s body language the moment he arrived: they’d found the Alpha. He was given a stern warning to prevent us from straying or stealing cheese in the future and we were allowed to continue onward to Miami and the International Noise Conference.

The topic of who exactly was the Alpha ended up being discussed with much interest for the entirety of the Conference. Clearly John Benson was the bus-Alpha and Rat Bastard was both the INC and Laundry Room Squelcher-Alpha but we all felt like there was room for other Alphas. Austin from Right Arm Severed was briefly dubbed the taco-Alpha when he left the bus around two in the morning one night with the promise to buy everybody tacos but this status was revoked when he returned having only bought crack from the guy who had been trying to sell everyone a gay porn DVD.

Nobody suggested it at the time but I’d like to retroactively nominate Aaron Hibbs of Sword Heaven as the artistic Alpha of the Conference. Aaron was an almost Ned Flanders-like figure in the American Noise landscape of 2008: he oozed positivity, was good at everything he attempted and of course he had the mustache. I had first met Aaron a year or so earlier when I passed through Skylab in the romantic company of one of his exes and can report that he was nothing but cordial under the circumstances.

His main project with Mark Van Fleet was certainly among the most anticipated of the Conference combining power electronics style noise with both Industrial which would become a bit of a trend in the next few years and a solid performance gimmick which never goes out of style. On this particular year he had also brought a high concept “joke” project: Rage Against The Cage – an a-capella grunge band. Hibbs and company belted out compositions of “uh’s”, “oh-no’s” and other Vedder-isms to the amusement of everybody who was in on the joke.

I realize that this is all making me sound like a super-fan with a mouth full of dick and to some extent this is probably true, Aaron was my inspiration to get into endurance hula hooping a few years later, but I also haven’t actually listened to any of the Sword Heaven records. I really am trying to identify the most hyped creative force of the Conference regardless of my personal tastes. If I was going to talk about the single most anticipated and best received performance it would probably be Justice Yeldham’s bloody mouth-on-glass presentation but Lucas wasn’t presenting different projects every single day of the Conference.

This brings us back to the afternoon at South Beach where a good portion of the crowd was on acid and the beach front condos said “You Deserve To Live Here”. Aaron was standing in the busy intersection in front of these condos and casually tossing water balloons into the air over his shoulder. When they inevitably came back down onto fancy sport’s cars and open convertibles the angry motorists were deflated when they saw the balloons hadn’t been thrown with a specific target in mind.

Or maybe it was just that he was clearly surrounded by comrades who would have backed him up in the event of a conflict. Either way nobody said anything.

I’m not sure if the bit with the balloons was supposed to be part of the following Noumena performance but the main part was on the actual beach. I looked up the meaning of that word in anticipation of writing this piece but it’s a little hard to either explain or understand. Basically while phenomena are things that are known to exist based on our sensory perceptions noumena are that which exists independently of them. I guess you could say that unless you were actually in Miami in 2008 to see or hear the various things I am writing about for yourself all of them are noumena.

The performance centered around a hollow hemisphere made of plaster that was about six feet in diameter. I’d imagine that this performance was at least partially inspired by Matthew Barney due to the focus on body movement and athleticism. I am going to be referring to the cast plaster sculpture as the cup for the sake of brevity. Aaron floated the cup onto the ocean’s surface where he performed an assortment of handstands and other balance exercises on it’s rim. Things concluded with him crawling out of the ocean with the cup on his back like the shell of a sea turtle.

Maybe there was a sonic element to the performance centered on jazz balloon, it seems likely but I can’t remember for sure and I didn’t see a video of the set when I searched for five seconds.

Anyway a lot of people on the bus were feeling burnt out on cop interactions, especially as they were tripping on acid, and thought that the ocean might offer an avenue of escape based on the presumption that the cop is a land animal. This turned out not to be the case. I know that Capricorn is the name for sea-goat but I don’t know what you would call a sea-pig. I only know that they were there, riding jet skis and blowing whistles, and swimming toward deeper water was a bad way to try to get away from them as it was one of the behaviors they were evidently charged to prevent.

It wasn’t a sea-cop but rather a form of transitional sand-cop that saw the Noumena performance as a thing that was in need of policing. I guess you could say that I was the talk-to-cops-while-on-acid-Alpha, when the familiar question of who was in charge was posed everybody instinctually pointed to me. That was fine. I really liked talking to cops on acid in 2008.

The cop wanted to know if we would be leaving and I reassured him that we would eventually need food that wasn’t sand and water that wasn’t salt and would therefore be going somewhere else. There was something else weighing on the cop’s mind but he didn’t quite know how to put it into words. He pointed to the cup:

“And you’ll be taking your…?”

“Our cup? Yes, we like our cup. We’ll be definitely taking the cup.”

I guess I was the Alpha for this brief window of time because the cop took this cursory exchange as due diligence and proceeded to leave us alone.

Next Part:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/01/26/miami-2008-the-bus-hey-man-thanks-for-coming-through-on-the-broccoli/

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New York 2008 : The Bus Part Two “We Know When We’re Not Wanted”

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The engine troubles that had required the overnight at a Cummins in the small town in West Virginia had not been resolved. In fact we had to stop in another small town in West Virginia where heavy rains had created a temporary chocolate river of muddy water to perform what was essentially a “magical oil change”. As one of the vocalists in Living Hell I had created a character called Deacon Peafowl who was kind of like a revival preacher for the kind of Ceremonial Magic championed by the Order of the Golden Dawn.

I had also been carrying a mummified squirrel in a little red fringed suede purse that had been discovered directly under the bus’s engine the moment it was moved from the backyard spot in Tampa, Florida it had been occupying since the International Noise Conference. There was a running joke that this squirrel had cursed us with it’s dying breath, calling out “nuts to you guys!” as it stiffened with rigor mortis beneath it’s future haunting ground. This joke had seemed innocent enough when just moving the bus from the backyard had caused a valve for the grease tank to snap off and flooded a suburban cul-de-sac with rancid French Fry oil made only more pungent from months of stagnating.

By the time we got to the chocolate river there had been enough mechanical troubles to elevate this idea from joke to valid concern and cast serious doubts as to the wisdom of continuing to carry our own version of the Ancient Mariner’s albatross. It was time to jettison the squirrel and having found ourselves in a near-biblical flood the decided-upon method would be “Viking Funeral”. A small oil can was cut open to serve as boat and a few small tokens were placed along it’s passenger either as offerings or “bad pennies” to be disposed of.

We had been kind of toying with the idea that Living Hell was the evangelical musical wing of an obscure religious cult in different ways: both through vague wording in the mis-information pamphlets I had produced and in the messages within my lyrics and Rain’s spoken word segments. Now that we were making a singing procession to a river bank and reverently lighting a deceased rodent on fire to watch it disappear beneath the swirling waters the lines had been blurred as to whether this was performance, parody or earnest spiritual practice. There is an Igbo expression I am fond of that I read in an essay by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe:

“Let us perform the sacrifice and so leave the blame on the doorstep of the Gods.”

It seemed to have actually had the desired effect – for one or two hundred miles at least. The journey between the chocolate river and New York City was actually devoid of major mechanical issues to the best of my recollection. This changed dramatically on the threshold of that metropolis: the moment we moved to enter through some kind of turnpike or toll-way the bus began violently ejecting hot grease from somewhere it shouldn’t have been that was nearly the same color as the magical river. The attendant quickly closed our lane and asked us to just move along as soon as physically possible without worrying about the toll.

We joked that it would have been a good method for avoiding tolls and tariffs in the future had it not been a portent of serious issues that actually desperately needed fixing.

I can’t remember if we had one or two days in New York before our show at Secret Project Robot but I do remember what the most exciting thing to do in town was. The Whitney Biennial had been a must-see event since the 2002 iteration had given an entire room over to costumes, sculpture, projections and music from the Fort Thunder collective FORCEFIELD. I’ve been to so many of these at this point that I’m almost certain to misplace specific pieces except for the one clear detail that Olaf Breuning’s first home video was on display and everybody was buzzing about it.

I had been wearing a six inch long dagger in a leather scabbard at my waist for the entire tour at this point and had totally forgotten that New York City actually has specific laws against that sort of thing. It was incorporated into the performances as athame with specific lyrics blending the concepts of metal, fire and magical intention:

“Cut the wick, light the spark!

Be the candle, pierce the dark!”

One of the security guards approached me and discreetly pointed to the prohibited weapon:

“That’s a real knife?”

I answered in a completely neutral tone that carefully skirted the division between a clear yes or no:

“Well it’s a dagger.”

Apparently this was the correct answer, he held up the palms of his hands in a conciliatory gesture as he assured me:

“I won’t say nothin’.”

Eventually everybody made their way to Williamsburg for the late afternoon show at Secret Project Robot. I remember hearing that some photos and a review from this show ended up in the Village Voice but this writing project has been unfortunately teaching me that alternative weeklies don’t generally bother with comprehensive online archives. Here’s what I do remember: this was my first time running into my San Diego friend Raul de Nieves in his incarnation as a successful New York artist. There was a group show up on the inside of the space that included a small room painted completely black with an oppressive doom metal soundtrack.

I ended up eating acid again which makes me think it might have been almost a week after the small town in West Virginia with the Cummins but then I lay my memories out and remember that I also ate it to walk the Freedom Trail in Boston and go to a dinner party in Liberty, Maine and there’s just no way all of these things were a week apart. I was just eating a lot of acid. With such frequent use it would seem like I would have been developing a tolerance and experiencing diminishing returns but I clearly remember it being potent each of these times so it would either have been really good or I was just to the left of the “overdoing” it line.

This was the only time on the tour that I had taken it just before one of our performances but that’s not too crazy of an undertaking in the dilettante-ish lead vocalist role. We played with one group that had elaborately sculpted costume heads that looked like the figures on totem poles and another group in costumes that played drums with smoke machines and strobe lights. We played with a band that Ned Meiners had at the time called Gold Dust that was probably my first time meeting him. It was maybe a power trio and I really liked it and tried to convince them to just get on the bus and come with us but Ned said he had to work:

“But your job probably sucks and your band is really, really good. This is probably the best band you’ll ever be in.”

I can’t seem to find any recorded music or evidence of this band existing online but I still stand by what I said. CCR Headcleaner certainly had it’s moments but by 2008 I had been to a lot of shows and seen a lot of bands and wouldn’t have gotten this worked up if they weren’t actually great. From 18 to 20 I was probably getting this excited about one or two bands at every show I went to but by 2008 it was one or two bands an entire U.S. Tour.

The show was over and we were packing up to get out of town before it was even dark. Now that the crowds had dispersed and nobody was playing loud music anymore a couple of cops decided that it would be the perfect time to show up and harass us. They were asking really stupid questions about what we were up to as we were clearly doing everything in our power to stop being in their jurisdiction as soon as humanly possible and picking up discarded half empty beers from the ground and asking who they belonged to as if anybody would actually be stupid enough to say:

“Oh, that’s mine. Please write me a citation for an open container.”

This whole time Kloot, a lab-chow mix that Upper Dave travelled with, was losing his shit and barking his head off because he hated people in uniforms. It wasn’t just cops, he also had a deep antipathy for firemen and UPS drivers. For most of the tour this only served to make our frequent police encounters more tense and exhausting but this time around it was actually helpful:

“Ok, we get it. We know when we’re not wanted.”

They got back into their car and left. It was kind of like when an ATM spits out an extra twenty or a hawk swoops down to grab a rat from a crowded street: nobody could quite believe it had just actually happened. It occurred to all of us that if they actually knew when they weren’t wanted it would have to be something they were nearly constantly aware of and it also seemed deeply out of character as most cops nearly always act like they’re God’s Gift to people whose lives are about to get shittier and more complicated.

By now it was dark and we were driving out of New York City. As we were passing under an expressway we either got stuck at a long light or some minor issue needed adjustment or somebody needed to consult a map. I only know that we sat there for a minute and a German girl was staring at our bus in wonder and I hopped off to talk to her. She said that it looked like the train from a German children’s fantasy book called Jim Knopf. She was visibly enchanted, I mean to the extent that her eyes literally sparkled. I fell in love with her a little bit and the entire situation and New York City and us existing like something out of a fairytale for her that suddenly materialized out of the night and would disappear just as quickly.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t know anything about her and would never see her again, it was that the romance of the entire encounter was contingent on those two details.

We parked in a town called Orange, New Jersey at the newly branded September 11th Memorial Scenic Overlook. Everybody was going to sleep but that was out of the question for me. Fortunately the rest stop featured several acres of sprawling forest. I didn’t have a flash light so I walked in the dark until I could see in it. I came across a deer that I must have been upwind of or it was really into grazing or I just walk really quietly. Probably a little bit of all three. Regardless it didn’t notice me until I was almost close enough to touch it and it screamed in horror and ran off into the woods.

I had never heard a deer scream before this point and it isn’t something that I’ve had an opportunity to hear again since. I don’t really know how to describe the sound except to say that it sounded really frightened. One of my cats actually tried to intimidate a deer fairly recently but he didn’t frighten her at all. She stomped her hooves at him and put him in his place so she could go back to eating the grapes in the compost pile.

I walked through the woods until the light started to come and I could finally truly see what the woods I had been walking in for hours actually looked like. At the time I thought it was the most beautiful forest I had ever seen but I wouldn’t say that now. The woods that I own and live in and am the steward of are definitely the most beautiful. I didn’t totally realize this until I had written it all down but it sounds like the LSD had definitely put me in a state where I was falling for Ned’s band and some woods in New Jersey and a German girl that I only met for about thirty seconds. It wasn’t always like that for me but clearly it was this night.

Just before I was finally ready to fall asleep I came across a single, gigantic morel growing under a tree within view of the path. A lot of people I know are afraid of eating wild mushrooms but that isn’t the case for me: morels, boletes and chicken of the woods don’t really look like anything dangerous. There actually is a toxic mushroom they call false morel but it doesn’t convincingly look like the real thing. It must have been at least eight inches tall. I brought it back onto the bus and fell asleep dreaming of cooking it the next time we ended up having access to a kitchen. I slept for two solid days.

When I woke up I found out that somebody thought it smelled rotten and had thrown it away.

Next Part:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/01/23/miami-2008-the-bus-you-deserve-to-live-here/

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