Tag: Lightning Bolt

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

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

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Maybe I’m totally wrong about this but I imagine that there are some readers who are mostly here for the underground art and music stuff and just kind of roll their eyes through the drug sections or scan ahead until I start talking about a show again. And then of course there would be readers who just want to hear about crazy drug stories and just kind of feel like:

“Why the fuck would I want to read about some lame ass band that broke up in less than a year? Get on to the sniffing, smoking and shooting!”

Then of course there would be the third type of reader that absolutely lives for the content that focuses on these separate but connected worlds like a rarely available but absolutely delicious version of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. I could be drastically underestimating how rare this kind of reader is. Books about the earliest days of Punk like Please Kill Me are absolutely full of bands and drugs and clearly have a broad audience but I feel like that’s a little different only because all of those bands have gone on to be at least moderately well known.

I was thinking about something kind of like this when I was just recently having a conversation with AT from Attitude Problem at the Blog Cabin Reunion that just went down in New Mexico. I had discovered since writing the Fort Thunder chapters that both AT and Jeremy Harris from Lazy Magnet had been playing in USAISAMONSTER at the show that happened on my twentieth birthday. I remember that the band was five different people but for whatever reason I had only really talked and vibed with Tom and Colin.

While I’m on this topic I should also mention that I recently remembered that the band Mastodon played the same show. They were a still fairly underground group at this stage as opposed to the mainstream metal juggernaut that they are today and didn’t seem particularly out of place. I might as well mention that a group called Duct Tape Union also played – I don’t know anything about them except that they were probably local.

Anyway meeting AT and Jeremy many years later I never realized that we had all actually met at Fort Thunder way back in August of 2000. So I was talking to AT about what was exciting and attractive about Fort Thunder and I brought up this thing that Mat Brinkman said in an interview in The Comics Journal – basically that people who are into noise records are mostly not that into comics and people that are into comics are mostly never into noise records.

I know it’s not completely never as the thing that first drew me to Fort Thunder was discovering some of Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale’s mini-comics and then what cemented my need to actually go there was separately discovering the music of Lightning Bolt and Forcefield. I think my earliest exposure to the Fort Thunder comics world was a booklet called Coober Skeber Marvel Benefit Issue that was handed out free at the 1997 San Diego Comic-Con as a joke about Marvel declaring bankruptcy.

All of this is probably extremely interesting to a certain subset of people but I’ve already spent way too long in random asides so I’ll leave it as yes the bankruptcy was real, Chippendale had a Daredevil comic in it and beyond that you’ll have to look stuff up yourself. The worlds of underground music and comic books remain connected. While at the party I got to read a newer comic from Anya Davidson of Coughs called MNSTRFCKR

Image via Anya Davidson’s Whatever We Call Twitter Now

I also got to see a bunch of experimental music and take a lot of drugs. Yay comics! Yay noise music! Yay drugs! – anyway on to the actual story.

In early November of 2013 me and LaPorsha were living at my mom’s house in San Diego. We had been subletting somebody’s apartment in Koreatown but got sick of the constant hustle to come up with rent money and didn’t think living in Los Angeles was really worth it. I had just ridden down with Griffin from Sewn Leather for a show he was playing at Otras Obras in Tijuana.

I’ve already written at length in other places about the things that would eventually inspire us to move down to Tijuana ourselves but this was the period of time when we were going down a lot for shows and art openings but hadn’t actually lived down there ourselves yet. You could say it was our “honeymoon phase” with Tijuana.

I had been down enough to have contacts to set up a show when my friends from Moira Scar hit me up about playing Tijuana with their project V.E.X. It looks like Gmail has deleted the messages but I’m pretty sure I tried Otras Obras first and when that didn’t work out I was able to set it up with Mustache which shared the exact same back patio anyway. The date they needed was November Second which just so happened to be Dia de Los Muertos.

For those unfamiliar with the holiday there are actually two days of the dead. November First is for those who died as children and November Second is observed for those who died as adults. This should clear things up for anybody confused about the date. I billed the show as a “Cempasuchil Social” – the Spanish name for the marigold flowers used in Dia de Los Muertos observances and an acquaintance from the Tijuana artist community named Zophie Felina made a flyer for it.

Like most shows it didn’t really turn out the way I had pictured it. I was hoping that the locals who were interested in coming out would have just had things like marigolds and sugar skulls lying around and would maybe bring some along to decorate the place. I can see in retrospect how that was an unreasonable expectation. Dia de Los Muertos is a very traditional, family oriented holiday and deciding to go out to a goth show to see some American bands is kind of the opposite of that.

If I had already been living in Tijuana I could have made a lot of that happen myself. As it was I rode down with V.E.X. at more or less standard load in time. It no doubt would have helped things to have an actual local act on the bill but for whatever reason that didn’t happen. It might have been that the venue only wanted three bands and Little Debbie was already attached to the bill. Maybe I just didn’t try to find one.

Anyway it was a perfectly fine modestly attended rock show.

I don’t think I would have been on any drugs this night. At this point in time I was still primarily using pain pills and by the time we had driven to the venue all of the pharmacies that sell that kind of thing would have been closed. There was a homeless junkie kid I knew down there who made his living walking between all the popular downtown bars and selling assorted snacks and pre rolled joints of the shittiest weed imaginable.

I do remember a particularly dramatic moment in the night when he was lying in the actual gutter injecting himself with heroin. All of the bars knew all about his drug use and never would have permitted him to set a foot inside their bathrooms. That was most likely his best choice to have enough streetlight to see by while still using the edges of parked vehicles to stay out of sight of passing law enforcement.

So obviously it wasn’t the kind of social situation where I could just disappear with that guy to go get high for a minute. In fact I never copped with him at any point even after making the move over the border. I ended up independently discovering a trap house in a notorious neighborhood called Coahuila that this dude had heard of but said he would never go to because of how sketchy and dangerous it was.

I’m not saying this as a flex but as observation on how it can feel like there are two different sets of rules for natives and foreigners when it comes to this kind of stuff. I eventually met a few other American junkies while crossing back and forth over the border who said they frequented the same trap house so it’s not like I was particularly tough or badass for going over there.

As long as I’m on the topic I might as well mention another observation I made a few months later when I was living in Tijuana. After the trip to Northern California to look for trim work that this story will culminate it LaPorsha made a batch of weed cookies to try to sell in the United States. We accidentally brought them over the border with us and although they hadn’t attracted the attention of Mexico’s drug sniffing dogs it seemed unwise to take the same chances with their American counterparts.

We weren’t interested in eating them ourselves so the only option was to sell them off in Tijuana at a much lower price. This brought me to the kind of punk and reggae themed bars that were popular with teenagers but I wouldn’t have normally frequented. In these places I noticed that openly smoking black tar heroin seemed to be viewed as socially acceptable – this certainly wasn’t the case with the older, hipper crowd I hung around. The hardest opiate any of them openly used was tramadol.

I can’t help but wonder what’s become of the Tijuana drug scene since the cartels have switched out fentanyl for tar. It’s nice to think that they would continue to grow poppies to supply their own people but considering both the cost and labor involved and general Mexican attitudes toward drug users it doesn’t seem especially likely. It’s probably at least as hellish as things have gotten on this side of the border.

Even if friends had offered to let all the bands and entourage crash down in Tijuana the middle of the night is the only opportunity to drive back into the United States without hours of waiting so the only real option was to drive right back to my mother’s house. As soon as Roxy got back over the border one of our friends that had ridden along, a girl from Los Angeles named Ariel, started demanding that we find a 24 hour fast food drive through.

Nobody was especially sympathetic as food is everywhere in Tijuana. Not just street taco stands, there’s a straight up Burger King a couple of blocks away from the venue we were staying at. Also all kinds of clearly sanitary packaged foods like chips and cookies in every corner store and probably even the bar we played at. The dude shooting up in the gutter had sealed bags of Funyuns even.

Ariel said that she didn’t “trust” any of the food in Mexico. Roxy was way too tired from a full day of driving and wasn’t about to stop anywhere. Ariel had a full on tantrum – like actual crying. I don’t know what she did when we got back to my mom’s house. I guess either ate something there or just went to sleep.

Anyway her tantrum was a big part of why we wrote a “passive aggressive” invitation to our wedding in Mexico the next year. We didn’t want to deal with people who were afraid of the food or whatever else down there. My siblings said that message was the reason they didn’t come to the wedding. It was probably for the best.

We were sticking around San Diego for a couple more days because we had a show that Monday at The Void. That Sunday we spent the day checking out the different Thrift Stores around Spring Valley. When I’d been growing up there hadn’t been any in short walking distance from my parent’s house but now there were a couple of big ones.

I was walking through the parking lot of the one that used to be a small movie theater when I saw a yellow box of American Spirits on the asphalt. I always kicked cigarette boxes when I saw them – you can feel in an instant the difference between an empty one and a not so empty one. A not empty one might have cigarettes in it, which I did smoke in those days, or even money as people occasionally use them as wallets.

This one happened to contain a moderately sized baggie that was bulging at the edges with methamphetamine.

The feeling of this discovery reminded me of finding a five dollar bill in an Emeryville ball pit my first year of college – I instantly felt like it must have represented a far greater loss for whoever dropped it than it did a gain for me. In the ball pit this would have presumably been a young child. This time around it had to have been somebody who liked meth enough to buy a sizable quantity of it.

I don’t particularly like methamphetamine.

I had bought a sizable quantity of it at one point in time, three and a half grams or an eighth of an ounce, for the express purpose of smuggling it to Chicago with a counterfeit Greyhound pass and selling it at a profit. I have sniffed, smoked and injected the drug more times than I can count off hand but have probably declined offers of it an even greater number of times. To the best of my recollection I’ve never bought any quantity of it for personal use.

I never actually weighed the bag of meth I found but it was probably either 3.5 or 1.75 grams – an eighth or a sixteenth or “teener” which is a unit of measurement I’ve only seen used with methamphetamine. The shards were completely transparent and mostly on the smaller side although there were larger pieces. Based on my limited experience I’d classify it as mid-tier methamphetamine.

Middle-Shelf in the parlance of bar and now budtending.

Still I had found free drugs and in a respectable quantity. If you discount drugs that I’d previously bought and then misplaced it was probably the most drugs I’d ever found. It was undeniably a “come up” and I wanted to at least exchange it for something else of value – probably money. Not that differently than I would have expected if I had found a rare fossil or gold or gems.

One thing that did make it different was that I found it at least one night before me and LaPorsha were going to catch a ride up to the Bay Area with Roxy and Lulu to continue North and look for trim work. I can’t seem to remember if I found it the morning of our show at The Void but it seems like that show would have been an unsurpassable opportunity to try to find somebody who might want to buy it from me. Maybe we stuck around one extra day after that before leaving town.

What I can say for sure is there was a night at my mother’s house where I had the meth and also had a bag of clean syringes. I had the syringes because I had recently run into the woman from the piece called White Tiger’s House who used to sell me Vicodin. The whole situation at White Tiger’s House had imploded and she’d become homeless and was living near the closest shopping center. She told me she was diabetic, gave me the syringes and took me by another person’s camp she thought might be able to help me find heroin.

That hadn’t worked out. She also didn’t have any Vicodin at that point in time. She told me that she’d be getting a couple of bottles in the near future and would give me one of them if I could find her a tent.

Things hadn’t worked out for me to come across my preferred drugs for a little while. I’d been mostly messing with pain pills but my first love was injecting cocaine and heroin. I’d injected meth before but only one or two points at a time and I’d never noticed a recognizable rush.

I thought if I did a bigger shot of meth it would give me something comparable to the rush from injecting cocaine. At the same time I knew this wouldn’t happen. It was kind of like this moment years ago when my friends Steve and Badger asked this guy named Antonio to bring them drugs and when he asked what kind they answered “water soluble”.

Obviously the process of injecting drugs is an addiction in and of itself.

If I had to guess I’d probably say I did between .3 and .6 grams in a single shot. Without a scale and actual knowledge of how much the bag contained to begin with it’s nearly impossible to know. I wouldn’t describe the immediate sensation as a “rush” but I guess it’s all relative to whether you like the way something feels or not. Inhaling a blast of crack would probably feel pretty fucked up if it wasn’t something you were in the mood for or particularly liked.

At the risk of sounding inanely repetitive I don’t particularly like meth.

I did feel something immediately but it was pretty much dizziness, nausea and panic with no sense of euphoria or pleasure. I spent most of the night in a bathtub experimenting with soaking in either very hot or very cold water but neither felt especially better. I desperately felt like I needed to urinate but couldn’t seem to make it happen. I consider myself lucky that it didn’t result in some kind of permanent organ damage.

Most people in the house didn’t have any idea what was going on. Meth isn’t one of those drugs where you can just be like:

“Hey I found a bag of this on the ground! Does everybody wanna do some?”

Cocaine is. In fact I’ve done that exact thing with cocaine I found on the ground. There’s a story about it up here somewhere – I think the one called Play Something Slow and Sexy. Polite society is generally either down to do some or at least not offended by the offer.

But I digress…

There was at least one girl in the house who liked meth. A friend of LaPorsha’s named Tina of all things. She has a “scene name” that she’s better known by. I guess I could add it in later if she wants to be easily recognized.

Anyway she had lost her wallet shortly before I found the meth. Maybe in Mexico or maybe even in Spring Valley. Now that I think about it she might have noticed it was missing at that very thrift store and the reason that I found the cigarette box was that I was helping her search for it. That would explain this next part a little better.

I happily gave her some of the meth. About the amount a casual user would take to be high on meth for a single night. She expressed to LaPorsha however that she felt like I should have given her all of the meth:

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

I do understand where she was coming from in an “every cloud has a silver lining” kind of way. She had just experienced significant misfortune so she was most deserving of significant good fortune. Maybe I even specifically found it because of her loss. Still like a home run ball at a baseball game I was the one that caught it regardless of how bad a day the kid sitting next to me might have been having.

It would have been nice if she’d offered to buy it from me for significantly less than current market value. She had just lost a decent chunk of cash (and for all I know a much smaller quantity of meth) in her wallet but she always could have offered a future electronic transfer of some agreed upon amount. That would have been a win-win for everybody.

Maybe I was being unreasonable. Tina, if you’re reading this now and I had a Time Machine I’d totally just give it to you and call it a day. It certainly didn’t do me any good.

I did feel a little bit guilty about keeping it a secret from Roxy and Lulu that I was transporting drugs in their van. Still from a legal standpoint Roxy having no knowledge of it’s existence was the best possible outcome if it was going to be there anyway. In the unlikely event that we were pulled over she would have no reason to behave nervously and raise suspicion and if it were somehow discovered I could easily claim ownership and probably be the only one arrested.

I had hidden it pretty well.

This is actually the moment that I consider to be the most entertaining in this story and the reason I decided to type it up in the first place. I had hidden the meth inside of a Worlds of Wonder Talking Mother Goose and Hector. Man I really just want to write that again.

The meth was inside of a Worlds of Wonder Talking Mother Goose and Hector.

For the unfamiliar Worlds of Wonder was the company that created and marketed Teddy Ruxpin. Their main innovation was to use the left and right channels of an audio cassette to combine a story with instructions for simple animatronics. You only hear the channel with the bear’s voice coming out of the toy but the opposite channel is full of weird sounding noises that tell the motors in the mouth and eyes when to move.

Teddy Ruxpin was eventually supplemented by a caterpillar named Grubby. While only Teddy Ruxpin can play cassettes Grubby also speaks and moves his eyes and mouth by way of a special eighth inch cable between the two toys. Anyone familiar with audio work will notice that the plug on this eighth inch cable is slightly longer than the usual one on headphones and aux cables.

That extra little bit is for the robotics stuff.

When they created the Talking Mother Goose toy they decided to use the same technique from Grubby to add a small duck looking character called Hector to talk along. The main book he works with is called The Ugly Duckling so it’s possible that he is actually intended to be a very young swan. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m not as knowledgeable about all the Worlds of Wonder lore as I’d like to be.

Since moving down to San Diego my main source of income had been buying vintage toys at yard sales, swap meets and thrift stores and then reselling them on eBay. I had gotten especially lucky with one big yard sale by my mom’s house but I was also at the point where I could look over a box of random toys and recognize obscure monsters from The Real Ghostbusters line and that sort of thing.

The same yard sale had netted me a Teddy Ruxpin and Grubby but I had already sold those off along with nearly everything else I’d accumulated. For the rarer stuff I always seemed to get the most money from an auction as opposed to a fixed price and offers and it just worked out that our ride with Roxy and Lulu coincided with a day left on this last auction.

Here is the video I made to assure potential buyers that the two toys were functioning properly:

Deep Worlds of Wonder fans will notice that this is the later version of Talking Mother Goose where the head does not move from side to side. You will also see me and LaPorsha’s first cat Catrick wearing the blue leather harness that we found for him in Tijuana. He was actually fairly used to traveling and even going to parties but we decided to leave him with my mother when we went to look for trim jobs.

An interesting and unexpected coincidence was that the woman from White Tiger’s house called me the exact moment we were pulling onto the freeway toward the Bay Area to tell me that she’d gotten the Vicodin and see if I possibly found a tent for her. I wish I had found one for her, mostly because she was older and had health problems but there was too much other stuff going on with the shows and everything and me and LaPorsha didn’t have our own vehicle yet.

Now that I think about it she used to ask me if I could help her find anything for “energy” or to “stay up” when I’d come by White Tiger’s house to buy pills from her so she probably would have been down to trade the Vicodin for the bag of meth instead. The idea didn’t even cross my mind at the time.

We stopped very briefly in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles because Roxy and Lulu wanted to go to a Farmer’s Market. I wanted to try to unload the meth but didn’t have any ideas as to what part of that neighborhood to go to or anything. I bought some tacos for me and LaPorsha and while I was waiting there was a standard issue but slightly on the softer side looking cholo guy waiting across for me.

I asked him if he fucked with meth and he said he did. I gave him a tiny bit to try in the bathroom but he only had around ten dollars on him. I gave him what seemed like twenty dollars worth but showed him how much I had and told him I was trying to get rid of it cheap if he could call anyone that might be interested.

He seemed like he was in a similar situation to me in that basically every person in his life wasn’t cool with this particular drug and he had to keep it a secret from everyone around him. The difference was that he did actually like using it while I do not. There wasn’t anybody he could call.

We continued on to Oakland and Roxy and Lulu dropped us off at Tuna Town. I really like those kids and would love to hang out with them again under better circumstances. The secret I was keeping and constant nervousness around the possibility of getting pulled over detracted from what should have been a really chill ride up a boring chunk of 5.

Maybe they’ll need a show between the Bay and Portland and decide not to do the coastal thing – that would be really cool.

So now there was no longer the lingering fear of complicating other people’s lives or getting them in trouble but I still felt like I had to get rid of it before making the trek to marijuana land. If I knew then what I know now, that half those weed farmers are tweakers and it’s worth more farther from big cities, I would have just brought it along but we didn’t feel like it would be a good look or reputation while searching for trim work for the first time.

Me and LaPorsha tried hitting up a few people but everybody said they didn’t know anybody that fucked with it which is completely understandable. I don’t currently know anybody that fucks with it – at least not very well.

I decided to try walking toward the triangular park on San Pablo because the last time I lived in Oakland I had a decent amount of success finding pain pills there. LaPorsha decided to come with me, probably because she was worried something might happen to me. We walked until I saw a guy who looked like he fucked with hard drugs sitting on the bus stop in front of that closed down 24 hour burger spot that used to take forever to make your food at night.

Maybe some other Oakland people remember this spot. I’m talking about the one that was directly across from Ghost Town Gallery where I recorded my live album called Nothing Happened. The spot was really tiny and might have had one of those San Pablo Giant Burger signs. No inside seating, just a take out window.

The deal with that place was that it was owned by a brother and sister and was essentially two different restaurants as she ran it during the day and he ran it at night. In the daytime it was pretty normal and reliable – it didn’t get too busy and the lady was very talkative and finished your food in a reasonable amount of time.

At night it was always insanely busy and the brother was always too stoned to function.

I’m talking about circa 2009 or so. It was the only possible 24 hour food spot in that part of Oakland and there was usually a decent sized line of punks leaving punk shows and super dressed up hood guys who must have been coming from a popular nightclub in the area I don’t know about. Actually good hamburgers take a long time to cook to begin with but this was amplified and exacerbated by how cartoonishly out of his head on marijuana the guy cooking the burgers and taking the orders was.

A regular hamburger took at least an hour and at the end of the hour he might have just forgotten about you and you need to order it again or cut your losses and go to sleep. I remember one night when he announced that somebody’s cheeseburger was ready and all the guys in line had ordered regular hamburgers but they started offering him double or even triple the price just to be able to get something that was actually ready. He didn’t let anybody buy it because he was worried that the actual person who ordered the cheeseburger might come back which still hadn’t happened by the time I got whatever I ordered an hour or so later.

Anyway the place went out of business not too long after and different restaurants opened in the same spot but never lasted long. I haven’t been to Oakland in a while so maybe there’s a successful business in there again. At the time of this story it was vacant.

I sat next to the guy at the bus stop and asked him if he fucked with meth or knew people that did. He said he was interested but I needed to wait for a minute so he could get well. He had a pill bottle with some black tar heroin and was adding powdered milk with a folded lottery ticket. The bottle had a couple of pennies in it for weight and he shook it to combine the two substances.

This was my first time ever seeing tar heroin prepared for insufflation in this way. I had used dope around San Francisco in the early 2000s but I was shooting it and so were the people I had been using with. A couple years earlier at Apgar some guys on the block had said that they could get me powdered heroin but it had to be made in a blender. I always pictured some kind of sophisticated machinery and never would have imagined it was just the simple household items in front of me.

After trying this one time I decided that I got a better high from doing a cold water extraction on twenty dollars worth of Vicodin and didn’t ask the neighborhood guys to score me heroin or “hop” again. I’d imagine that sounds hard to believe to a lot of people – in my earliest years of heroin use I assumed that prescription pain pills would be so weak in comparison that I wouldn’t even feel them. Of course that isn’t true and Oakland always seemed to have especially shitty heroin – even weaker than Portland although the second city is much farther from the Mexican border.

I waited for the bus stop guy to use the same folded lottery ticket to shovel several heaping piles of the powder he’d just created into his nose. He had the same constant sniffle of everybody who habitually consumes tar in this way. He asked me if I wanted any heroin or cocaine but I told him that I was only interested in money.

I hadn’t put a specific number on how much I thought the bag of methamphetamine I had found might be worth before this point but in the moment I decided on sixty dollars. Looking at the number now it doesn’t even seem worth the risk of traveling in a vehicle with it from San Diego to Oakland but that’s drugs. You take outsized risks that are never worth the money.

He counted out sixty dollars and handed it to me so I handed him the bag of meth. He crushed a small amount of it and sniffed it then immediately said that it didn’t burn and seemed to be weak. I hadn’t sniffed any of it myself but knew it was moderately potent from injecting it. That wasn’t the point anyway. He was working his way up to ripping me off.

He then said that the bag was small and looked like less than a gram which was definitely not true. I wasn’t as familiar with sizes and quantities back then but it had to be around two grams give or take. I told him if he didn’t like it he could give it back to me and I’d give him back his money. He said he was keeping the meth and repeated the demand for me to give back the money.

LaPorsha had been standing behind the bus stop and waiting. I stood up and said that if he was determined to keep the drugs we evidently had a deal and we started walking down San Pablo in the opposite direction of Tuna Town. He jumped on his bike and started riding on my heels repeatedly demanding the money back.

I don’t know what I would have done or what would have happened if I’d been alone but with LaPorsha with me I didn’t want to take the risk of him doing anything to her and just gave him the money back. By myself I probably would have tried to run somewhere a bike couldn’t follow but who knows how that would have even worked out. I also wouldn’t have wanted to lead him back to Tuna Town.

He was heavier set than I was but I wasn’t particularly afraid of him. I just wasn’t interested in fighting him over sixty dollars. Mostly I just picked the wrong guy – he was a sniffly dusty annoying motherfucker; not worth having anything to do with. My situational awareness was off.

Years later when we were homeless junkies in Oakland I never would have gotten ripped off by someone like him but that’s not some huge flex. It’s better to get ripped off by someone like him and not be a homeless junkie. Mostly they were just two different times in my life. It’s not like I’ve got huge regrets on either end.

From the moment I found it the bag of meth was a… I don’t know what to call it. It seems like there should be some reference in folklore like a monkey paw or albatross but nothing seems to exactly fit what I have in mind. Something that seems like a boon when you find it but ends up being a burden until you finally get rid of it.

I’d say bad penny but who gets excited about finding a penny? Maybe bad twenty would be more appropriate. Or just bad moderately sized bag of stigmatized hard drugs you don’t especially like using…

The Talking Mother Goose and Hector sold to somebody in Germany which shouldn’t be that surprising if you’ve ever sold Worlds of Wonder talking storybook toys on the internet. The buyer eventually sent me pictures of damage where I knew the pieces of the mouth or whatever it was could just snap back together but I had to give them a partial refund. That’s kind of on me – I should have done a better job packing the toys and adding reinforcement and padding around their heads.

This story is working out to end on a bit of a bummer note and while that can be cool I’m not really in the mood for it. So I’ll end it like this:

While we were still staying at Tuna Town I was walking back there one night by myself when I came across a tiny baby opossum sitting in the center of the roof of a parked car. The car was under a tree so presumably it had fallen or climbed down. When it saw me it tried to run to the different edges of the car’s roof but I would stand at those edges so it would retreat back to the center of the roof and I could keep looking at it.

I wanted to go get LaPorsha and bring her back to show her but I knew that as soon as I was out of sight it would climb off of the car and back into the tree. That was probably for the best. At a different point in my life I might have tried to catch it in my hands but there was no need for that.

There will be other baby opossums to show LaPorsha…

Los Angeles 2000 : “It’s Where Jay Leno Lives”

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The music scene for mid ‘90s to early 2000’s San Diego is pretty legendary but for the most part I had been out of the loop on what was going on in my home town. I went to a lot of ska and punk shows in High School and occasionally came across something more interesting like the time I saw Los Kagados at a very early incarnation of the Voz Alta space near 16th and C. I heard a lot of the members went on to form Run For Your Fucking Life but the main thing I remember is that the singer was double jointed and contorting his arms and wrists at odd angles with an almost Iggy Pop-like stage presence. One of them had just gotten a colorful neck tattoo of a pair of dragons or something like that – it was so fresh that the skin was visibly raised and puffy.

These details stick out in more focus than any of the ska shows I went to at Soma or the World Beat Center for some reason. Maybe it was just the feeling of being downtown and in an alternative art space instead of a more curated all ages club – this could have been anywhere from 1996 to 1998. I guess they were a hardcore band, a lot of my friends at school talked about hardcore but I didn’t know anything about it and wasn’t particularly interested. For whatever reason I was really into ‘80s New Wave at the time, the stuff that was more synth heavy and classified as “New Romantic”. There was a lot of it in the record bins of Thrift Stores which helped.

My other chance encounter with the more remembered music scene of the time was that I somehow ended up at a space on Union and Beech and saw Tristeza. I don’t know what genre I would have classified it as at the time but I definitely liked it and bought the first seven inch, the one that was printed with gold foil on heavy black paper, when I saw it at Off the Record. At this point I had bought some CDs from local ska bands but this was my first time getting small label seven inches with Art object style presentation until I ended up at the Fireside Bowl in Chicago later that same Summer.

I went to Union and Beech at least one other time when Francois and I had missed the last bus back toward East County and spent the night wandering the streets downtown. The space was hosting a rave and we snuck in to get off the streets but spent most of the night sleeping in a closet instead of dancing. When it was getting toward dawn we realized that we had been sleeping next to a gorilla mask and one of us took off our shirt and ran out of the closet to dance around for a minute with the mask on. Oddly I can’t seem to remember which one of us it had been – maybe we both did it and took turns.

By the time we drove back to San Diego in the early Summer of 2000 I had gotten a lot more experience navigating music scenes. For my year at SFSU there was a surprisingly robust music community centering on shows in our Student Union and both twee and J-pop; bolstered by the high number of trendy Japanese exchange students. The kid who set them up was in a band called Wussom*Pow! that recorded a Strawberry Switchblade cover and helped me sneak into shows at bars like Edinburgh Castle. My first forays into bars were spent staring in fascination as cigarette smoke slowly drifted against a backdrop of dark velvet curtains and twinkling white Christmas lights – I didn’t drink yet.

I tried to convince Michael from Wussom*Pow! to set up a show for Tristeza in the student Union. I don’t even know if they were actually touring or looking – I just really dug that first 7 inch. I described the music as “emo” because some band members had black hair and that’s what I’d heard the social scene called but he said it was “space rock”. The show never happened to the best of my memory.

I was beyond clueless about the bulk of underground music then. I remember seeing a flyer on campus advertising a Melvins show that would have been small and intimate but I had no clue who that was even though Little Four had talked up The Thrones from a live set at Locust House and I was eager to see it.

Actually there was a show in the SFSU student Union where Thrones was supposed to play but Michael took Joe off the bill out of fear it would be “too loud”. They were on tour with The Rapture who you most likely saw on the flyer at the top of this piece and will pop back up in just a minute. The singer/guitarist (or was it bassist?) was jumping onto tables while playing and the Japanese girls in the audience would shriek and run a few feet away in a combination of surprise and delight.

I thought the most striking thing about the San Diego scene at that time was that Tristeza had a 7 inch that played at 33 RPM while The Locust released a twelve inch that played at 45. I felt the duality of how this went again convention in both directions said something poignant about what was happening in my home town but at the time I became more interested in other city’s music scenes.

After house sitting for a punk TA from one of my Physics classes in a Mission district apartment I spent most of the Summer of 1999 in San Diego before driving out to Chicago with Francois. San Diego music, especially The Locust, was intensely popular in the Midwest by this point but we knew next to nothing about it. We wouldn’t have known anything at all if we hadn’t convinced Little Four to move up to the Bay Area with us and gained access to the record collection she had curated from living behind and going to shows at the “Locust House” on 24th and E.

The scene around the Fireside Bowl in Chicago that year was primarily hardcore and math rock but also a lot of the theatrical experimental stuff that was coming out on the SKiN GRAFT label. I finally started to get into the hardcore most of my contemporaries were so fascinated with but the artier stuff was my real fascination. The two styles generally peacefully coexisted and informed and fed into each other but I do remember one situation when they came into direct conflict.

The band Black Dice was passing through town and a big group of people went up to Milwaukee because they were playing a basement show. I don’t think they were ever really a traditional hardcore band but their earliest stuff was closer to sounding like it and their first seven inch was on Gravity Records which was generally known as a hardcore label. I did a little bit of digging and figured out this show was in May of 2000 at a place called Bremen House.

I actually didn’t know that the band had a reputation for being physically confrontational and attacking their audience and breaking other people’s equipment but all of that would have played a factor in what ended up happening because I just read a different account that said people at the show were already planning on fighting them. From what I saw they were just playing unconventional and noisy music like lots of guitar feedback and drumming in odd time signatures when a bunch of straight edge hardcore guys assaulted them for “not being hardcore”. I’ve always thought of the incidence as “genre violence” – purely instigated by a band not playing in an expected and dogmatic style.

The main reason I think this is that one of the attackers was literally yelling “this isn’t hardcore” or “this isn’t what hardcore’s about” or something along those lines. The frustration was palpable when somebody in the band yelled back:

“We never said it was!”

The other account I read said that the singer threw beer on a straight edge guy but the way I remember it he was just pacing and thrashing around with an open tall can in his hand so that small amounts might have splashed onto people. The thing I have the clearest mental image of is dudes just running up on the bassist and guitar player and throwing punches at them while they tried to defend themselves as best as possible while being encumbered by their instruments. A lot of their equipment ended up getting broken and their attackers slashed the tires on their tour van as a parting gift.

I overheard somebody from either Black Dice or The Rapture, the band they were touring with, react to this final surprise with a touch of weary dark humor:

“You’d think that if they didn’t want us here so much they wouldn’t make it so hard for us to leave…”

I’ll throw the link I found underneath here so you can read and judge for yourself but even though I was there I don’t think I know enough to say if what happened in Milwaukee was just straight edge hardcore guys being typical violent assholes or a case of chaotic and destructive energy catching up with the people who had been irresponsibly pumping it out into the world. Maybe it was some of both. It’s interesting that the street was called Bremen as the Grimm Brothers fairytale called The Bremen Town Musicians is basically about a group of animals who have outlived their usefulness spontaneously turning into a noise band.

https://know-wave.com/black-dice/

One thing that I didn’t realize at the time was that Eric Copeland from the band had been part of an earlier project I really liked called The Ninjas that put out a couple of records on a label called Black Bean and Placenta Tape Club. It sounded like twee pop combined with uncharacteristically aggressive distorted guitars. I only mention this because I haven’t had the records for years or been able to find them uploaded on the internet anywhere in case somebody reading this might have them and a way to put them up somewhere.

San Diego in 2000 had a surplus of really good bands that seemed to have all formed over the past couple of years. I hadn’t actually seen either Three Mile Pilot or The Shortwave Channel but the core members of both groups were now playing as The Blackheart Procession and Camera Obscura respectively. One of the best bands to see live was the instrumental organ heavy doom metal outfit Tarantula Hawk who often had body modification enthusiast Eddie Castro suspending himself from hooks pierced through his skin and illuminated by a projection of black and white static. I wasn’t twenty one yet and every bouncer in town knew who I was so I spent a lot of shows standing just outside the door to listen and peeking inside of places like The Turquoise Room at the long defunct Aztec Bowl.

This story begins with an all ages Blackheart Procession show about halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles at the Koo’s Cafe in Santa Ana. Lightning Bolt would be playing at The Smell either the next day or the one after that so I got a ride up with the plan of trying to find kids at the show who would be returning to Los Angeles instead of returning with my ride to San Diego. I had gotten pretty confident with approaching strangers to ask for things like rides but the best I found was a couple kids who lived in Burbank. They both offered the same nonsensical explanation when I asked what part of LA that was:

“It’s where Jay Leno lives…”

They didn’t have the kind of parents that would be receptive to unexpected overnight guests so it was up to me to figure out a spot to sleep until public transit resumed in the morning. The neighborhood was the kind with large expensive ranch style houses, or whatever you call the style with stucco and adobe roofs and lots of little wrought iron railings, that also had thick hedges between them so they thought I might be able to hide underneath somebody’s bushes.

I laid out underneath one experimentally but immediately felt conspicuous and almost guaranteed to experience police harassment if I didn’t find something a little more discreet and less residential. Walking toward the traffic lights eventually brought me to a strip mall and a doughnut shop with the kind of locked roof access ladder you can climb by wedging your foot between the metal and the building. When I got to the top I could see that the roof was covered with the big chunked and sharp edged gravel that blankets accessible roofs and forsaken landscaping across Los Angeles.

If I had to spend a night in this sort of setting now I would locate a dumpster for cardboard, and probably just stay next to it, but I was a lot younger and less experienced. I did find a newspaper machine with free Auto Trader booklets to give me something to prevent having to sleep with my face right against the gravel. I’m sure a lot of people would struggle to fall asleep in this kind of environment but I’ve always enjoyed the rough urban camping – no sooner had I stretched out then I was waking up to the harsh glare of sunlight in my eyes and the unmistakable smell of fresh doughnuts and coffee.

I shimmied back down the ladder and came inside to be the first customer of the day. Wall length mirrors seem like an odd decor choice for the type of business that primarily serves the homeless and the sleep deprived but it did give me the opportunity to notice that I had a few lines of newsprint smudged across my cheek in the reverse of how the letters appeared on the page. I wonder if the man behind the cash register realized where I had just come from or if he would have even cared – I certainly wasn’t staying.

My next destination was an apartment my friend Tim shared with some other graduates of the USC film program near Hollywood and Highland. When I stepped off my final bus a pair of bright red sunglasses sat on the plastic bench like they were waiting for me to herald my arrival in Tinseltown. It’s not that deep – I was twenty years old, I put them on my face and walked to my friend’s apartment and knocked on the door and fell back asleep on his couch.

I had scarcely drifted back off when I found myself suddenly and violently woken back up by police yelling and pointing guns and putting everybody in handcuffs. I was probably the only person there who had absolutely no idea what any of it was about but it didn’t take them very long to find the objects and person they were looking for and leave the less immediately culpable among us to explain what was going on to each other.

I’ve mentioned in other places that Tim’s graduating class was the last year that the USC film program would be done using Super 8 and chemical developing processes before making the switch to various digital video mediums. One of his roommates had rationalized to himself that school equipment like cameras, editors and projectors was about to fall into disuse and it would be essentially harmless to appropriate it and even arguably beneficial as it would allow the equipment to continue to be used for its designed purpose.

I don’t know all the details but it must have been easy enough to falsify whatever logs were used in checking out this equipment to obfuscate the identity of whoever had ended up in possession of it. After a few months had gone by with no sign that anybody was looking the assumption was most likely made that nothing would be missed and he put a couple of things up on eBay. By modern standards this is an obvious rookie mistake but in early 2000 the entire concept of cybercrimes was relatively new and most people wouldn’t have immediately realized that anything done online is immediately and easily traceable.

Considering the kinds of things I would be getting into and people I would be hanging out with by the end of the year it’s interesting that my first experiences with many aspects of the criminal Justice system were with a friend I’d generally think of as being on the “straight” side of things. We spent the day driving around and running errands related to the morning’s sudden development.

Our first stop was a seedy bail bondsman’s office on the second floor of the parking lot strip mall that divides Chinatown and Pueblo Los Angeles. I’d gotten into plenty of petty offenses like trespassing, vandalism and even theft of things like a whale skeleton and motorized bumper boat – but so far had never actually gotten charged or caught. Downtown San Diego was full of businesses like the one we visited, and I often spent stranded nights wandering streets where their neon signs were the only things open for business, but I had never really thought about actually needing their services.

Tim was essentially guiltless himself and clearly enjoying playing the role of a character in a crime movie. There was one other friend who also had film equipment from the school and didn’t seem to have been raided by the police yet. Tim gave him a call to warn him to get rid of it but first he drove to a building on Wilshire with a loud outdoor fountain “in case anybody was trying to record his voice”. I seriously doubt that he honestly believed that this level of precaution was necessary but the cloak and dagger intrigue was fun for playing make believe.

Once all that was finished Tim took me to sneak into Universal Studios Hollywood by way of the soundstages in its backlot. He had an ID badge to get past the guard booth from his production work and instructed me to make up a common name for somebody I was supposed to be visiting. I think I went with “John Elliot” – I could see over the guard’s shoulder when he typed this into the computer that the only thing it needed to verify was if someone with this name had worked there ever.

They’ve probably beefed up security protocols since then.

From the backlot it was very easy to slip under a guardrail and get in line for the Jurassic Park ride. Thankfully the ET Adventure dark ride was still open and I got to see the bright psychedelic section with animatronic living flowers that is supposed to represent the titular character’s home planet. At the beginning of the ride they have all the passengers type their names into a computer so ET can offer personalized thanks at the conclusion.

I was curious how the computerized speech module might interpret my unique name after hearing it butchered by substitute teachers throughout my school career. It’s spelled “Ossian” but pronounced “ah-shin” and nobody’s ever gotten it on a first try. The tiny brown alien waved as we drifted toward the exit; addressing each person in turn:

“Thanks Walter and Deborah and Timmy and…”

The figure went silent and abruptly stopped moving. Maybe there was a module in place to prevent the figure from vocalizing profanities in a family park and it scanned the first three letters as an attempt to get it to say “ass”. Whatever the cause I found it amusing that the beloved character chose to make no attempt to address me whatsoever.

Emboldened by the ease we’d had in gaining access to the amusement park Tim went from stage to stage searching for an unattended golf cart. Once we had one he took me on a ride flying off curbs and doing loops around the courthouse square set used in Back to the Future. When the evening came on I needed to get downtown for the Lightning Bolt show.

This may well have been the first time that I ever went to The Smell. I knew that it was around Third and Main and when Tim dropped me on the corner in his little convertible Datsun I could already hear Lightning Bolt playing but I didn’t know exactly where I was supposed to go. It took a minute of running around before I realized that the entrance was in the alley and ran inside. They were playing in the corner of the room away from the stage – the space was huge and mostly empty; in less than a year Ride the Skies would come out and they’d be exploding with popularity.

At this point I’d already exchanged at least a couple of letters with Brian Chippendale. I’d been trying to order some Maggots mini comics and the Zone cassette that accompanies their first album. I got the tape but never got the comics – he apologized and gave me a copy of the Conan Tour Seven Inch instead. It was barely a couple days since I caught the ride up to Santa Ana from San Diego and now I was about to head back down.

I’ve talked a lot about how incredibly quickly everything was happening that year but it’s fun to lay things out on a comparative timeline. The Milwaukee show where Black Dice was attacked was at the beginning of May. I didn’t realize how closely they and Lightning Bolt were related yet but I might not have even heard Lightning Bolt yet either. My first show as Spidermammal with Deerhoof was a couple weeks later and then we were moving back to San Diego.

I don’t know when this Lightning Bolt show at The Smell was but I’m going to guess some time in June. Not long after Deerhoof came through the same venue and played with xbxrx. By July I was back in Chicago running into xbxrx playing with Missing Tooth from the Spidermammal show. In August I was living at Fort Thunder, got to read all of Chippendale’s comic notebooks and set up a show for xbxrx that wouldn’t be happening until I’d already left town.

All of this is just dates and band names but the point was that everybody was constantly on tour or traveling and writing each other letters and this loose grouping of what you’d call noise rock bands were crossing each other’s paths and playing together and a few of them were about to become hugely commercially successful. There isn’t any microgenre or -core or -wave name for the thing that was going on but it was definitely a certain kind of energy and the clock was ticking until 9/11 and everything changing.

After the Lightning Bolt show I walked across Skid Row to the Greyhound station for what was probably the first time and I wouldn’t have had any idea that I was about to be traveling to Fort Thunder and Providence and meeting some people that would make it so I probably spent as much time riding Greyhounds over the next two years as I did living in actual houses. I only knew that something exciting was happening and I didn’t care how far I had to travel or where I had to sleep as long as I could be there and be a part of it.

I couldn’t have known that this world had a looming expiration date but the way I was moving you’d almost think I did.

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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Los Angeles 2009 : “It’s OK, Woods Already Played. Is there any chance either of you might have an extra pair of pants?”

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I’ve been really wracking my brain and I can’t seem to figure out how I ended up with the cassette copy of the Woods album At Rear House. I know for a fact that I have never seen the band live but I did look up the label Fuck It Tapes and I was definitely at shows for a lot of the artists releasing music on the imprint around the same time. Somebody might have been selling it along with their own tapes and records or maybe I picked it up as a distro situation when I did a big mail order from Not Not Fun or maybe somebody just gave it to me.

I only know that it became one of my favorite tapes from the first time I played it, the kind of tape that you just flip back over to the first side after the second side ends and keep doing this until when you finally do get into the mood to put something else on you wouldn’t even know how many times you had actually looped it.

I went to the ArthurFest in 2005 to see Yoko Ono, Earth and SUNN O))) but the “freak folk” phenomenon of the mid aughts had been largely a dud for me. I ended up in Providence for a Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom show at AS220 and felt nothing but second hand embarrassment. He felt like an uninspired Marc Bolan clone in imminent danger of eating his microphone; she seemed to be putting too much effort into coming off as fey or ethereal to actually do so. A creepy social climber with Rod Stewart hair from the El Rancho days was their road manager.

They ended things with a “family style” Rusted Root cover. I’d imagine this all sounds glorious to at least one of my readers but it just wasn’t my cup of San Pedro…

The Woods album was the rare kind of singer-songwriter work in the folk/acoustic vein that grips me. The styles are quite different but in terms of effect the closest thing would probably be the Palace Brothers album Days in the Wake. I have mentioned before that I view the acoustic guitar as somewhat unsavory by nature – my prejudice toward the instrument can only be offset by heroic virtuosity or an aptitude for writing “hooks”.

However I got my hands on the tape the period of time where it became a constant soundtrack was on board The Miss Rockaway Armada and more specifically The Garden of Bling. After most of the other project members had thrown in the towel and retreated to other realities the collection of catchy tunes accompanied our increasingly desperate attempts to rend our vessel River worthy in the face of the approaching winter.

A combination of the elements, the constant wakes of passing barges, successive beachings and the slipshod quality of the initial construction were beginning to take their toll. We transferred responsibility onto an aquatic mammal frequently spotted near the raft with the added fiction that it was secretly aided by one of our number; altering the lyrics to one of the Woods songs to reflect this:

“Night Beaver, Night Beaver, Where did you come from?

As I sit you are awful quiet now, when will you be gone?

And I’ve seen it now, you left your tooth marks on the bow, who helped you? Jacki! Who helped you? Jacki!”

One day while my ex-fiancée I’ve been referring to as Rocky was visiting we were driving near the Chain-of-Rocks Bridge when Harrison spotted a tiny kitten that some monstrous sadist had abandoned on one of those circular patches of grass enclosed by a Freeway on-ramp. The poor little thing was so hungry she was trying to catch and eat butterflies. Me and Harrison caught her by throwing a sweater on top of her and I started wearing it with her tucked inside until all the feral was out of her.

I named her Night Beaver and she became a member of our crew and my traveling companion until my hectic itinerary made it clear she would be better off living with Stephany, my room-mate in Chicago at the time. This arrangement was clearly the best thing for her as they live together still. It would have been Autumn of 2007 when we rescued her making her a little older than fifteen years old now. I talked to Stephany on the phone for the first time in forever recently and she briefly put me on speaker.

Night Beaver seemed happy to hear my voice again.

In early September of 2009 I had moved back to San Diego to help my father with end-of-life care. On September 5th I had ended up in Los Angeles and heard that Woods would be playing at an event called Fuck Yeah Fest. This was the first year that the festival grew large enough to require the move to Los Angeles Historic State Park near Chinatown and the only time I was interested in attending as a spectator. In later years when it moved to Exposition Park I would end up working at it on my birthday a couple of times for a pizza company called Spicy Pie.

I was hanging out with Rocky and another female friend I’ll call Snake and the three of us decided to try to sneak in to see Woods. Rocky actually found parking somewhere in Chinatown and we walked down through the Metro Station to sniff out a point of ingress. I had been to Coachella one time but the headliners were bands like Radiohead and The Cure – this was my first time seeing hordes of overly excited millennials thronging to watch bands I had always thought of as “underground” in a festival setting.

It was somewhat disorienting watching what happened when there was too much youthful enthusiasm in one place. Lightning Bolt, who were essentially headlining the festival, offer a simple way to demonstrate this. They had always preferred forgoing stages and setting up in the middle of the crowd but when thousands of kids all want to be the ones standing right there this sort of thing is simply no longer safe or practical.

The thing that always sticks with me was the kid who had just bought a pair of tiny red-eared sliders. We dressed and carried ourselves like cooler, older kids so he was super excited to show them to us:

“This one is called Slime and this one is called Fuck Yeah!”

The acute knowledge that both of these creatures would be dead by the end of the day was palpably painful – the weight of wisdom. You can’t just explain that to somebody in this situation where there is a visceral need to have anything to stick out, distinguish one’s self and appear more interesting. I mean similar turtles are sold and die in Chinatown every single day but I never thought it was something I would see in what I thought of as my community. Maybe I just sound like a condescending, pretentious asshole.

It was getting close to the time that Woods was supposed to perform so we quickly climbed over a fence and attempted to disappear into the crowd. This plan failed for two reasons: we were dressed for the opposite of anonymity and I had ripped the seat of my pants, a bright turquoise pair of Gloria Vanderbilts, while scaling the pokey barrier. Security was, quite literally, on my ass.

We were plucked from the crowd and escorted to the outside of a trailer while the festival’s authority figures most likely had a pow-wow concerning the exact method of ejecting us. You would think that people would have been sneaking in in a similar manner all day but the way that they handled us made it feel like the situation was unprecedented. Maybe we were just the only ones that had gotten caught.

The security trailer happened to be right next to the trailer where the bands checked in or did something else official and we immediately ran into the Brians of Lightning Bolt. Chippendale was surprised to see me:

“Oh! I didn’t know that you were playing this festival too!”

“I’m not. We just got caught trying to sneak in and they’re kicking us out.”

He quickly conferred with Gibson and a person I didn’t recognize who was most likely there in an official capacity then informed our gaoler that they intended to make us their guests. Authority is a drug that certain types of people seem incapable of ever getting enough of:

“Unfortunately they’ve already demonstrated a disregard for the rules of the festival by trying to sneak in so there’s no way they can be allowed to be here.”

I reassured him that we were content with our current relationship with impending consequences:

“It’s OK, Woods already played. Is there any chance either of you might have an extra pair of pants?”

I will always love Lightning Bolt and have seen them play at least two times since the events of this story but my enthusiasm has not sustained itself at the level of when I was twenty years old and they were my favorite band in the world. I imagine that both of the Brians, to at least some degree, have gone through a similar experience with their band. In 2009 I was most excited about their work as a printmaker and animator respectively. On that particular day while I absolutely would have stuck around and most likely had a wonderful time during their set I was most excited to see Woods.

Major Festivals are just all around weird experiences anyway. The next year I would end up performing at a Michigan Festival where Kool Kieth was set to perform the entirety of his Dr. Octagon album but ended up leaving before his set because the environment was making my tour-mates uncomfortable. That record was really important to me the year it had been released but the experience of watching a band at a major festival is comparable to having a drunken friend call you and hold up their cell phone at a concert across the country.

My brother actually did call me drunk and hold up his phone from a big U2 concert was. I became oddly obsessed with a cassette of The Joshua Tree around 2009 when I lived at Apgar but besides that I was never too interested in the band. I kind of remember the song that was playing through the phone though – it was about as exciting as watching anybody at Coachella.

Neither of the Brians had any extra pants.

All of the bands that happened to come by during the absurd amount of time that was spent deciding how to kick us out ended up being friends, or at least friendly acquaintances, of mine. I went through more or less the same routine with vetoed guest-listing and a futile plea for replacement pants with the members of Eat Skull and Japanther. In retrospect I probably should have just walked around outside until I recognized somebody who could get us in but it wasn’t the best thought out plan.

I was really in a situation with the pants though. They had been skin-tight and I wasn’t wearing any underwear. It wasn’t a little tear either, the whole back was as open as a New Orleans Liquor Store. I think Snake or Rocky eventually gave me some kind of scarf or extra shirt I was able to crudely tie over the offending area.

It was an especially hot day and as the process was taking forever I started asking for some water. The Security Guard said that I was in no position to ask for anything but I countered that we would become an even bigger headache for them under the effects of dehydration or heat exhaustion. I didn’t think to mention the Geneva Convention.

He angrily handed us a couple of bottles.

Finally a decision was passed down concerning which of the exits we were going to be walked to and cut loose from. This involved walking across a large expanse of the Park that was not being used for the Festival. The vegetation was sparse and more or less typical of Southern California: mugwort, anise, datura and Hopi Tobacco. There were a few rows of corn that appeared to be off season.

Up until this year I had managed to resist ever getting a cell phone but my parents felt that I would be more helpful to them if I started to carry one. My dad had given me an older one of his, it was whatever you call the kind that’s even smaller and cheaper than a flip phone. It had one of those little leather holsters with the clear plastic that clips onto your waist. It was the kind of cell phone that somebody would have gotten if they were already used to carrying a pager.

Anyway after the long wait and the long walk across the field I noticed that this cell phone had fallen out of it’s holster somewhere along the way. The way I look at it there are two possibilities: either the Security Guard had spent so much time in our company he was starting to enjoy it or he had learned enough about me to realize that I wouldn’t stop being a problem until we found my cell phone.

Either way he walked me back through the field and we found the thing. It materialized on the ground the way that things do when you’ve accidentally dropped them and you know that you’re about to retrace your steps and find them again. I feel like I can tell the difference the moment that I realize I’ve dropped something – like I can feel whether it’s gone gone or just waiting to snap back into existence when my eyes scan over it’s new location.

Once I retrieved the cell phone we were finally ready to go on with our lives and put the Festival behind us or at least it’s 2009 iteration. I can’t remember for sure but I think I bought myself some other pants at the Chinatown store that sells irregular pieces and samples from the many sweatshops of the garment district. I would be heading back down to San Diego where it would turn out that my father only had days to live. I’m not sure where Rocky or Snake would end up going next.

I’ve still never seen Woods live but I would very much like to. I don’t have that tape anymore but every now and again I listen to it online again. I checked out some of their other stuff but none of it hit me in quite the same way.

I’d like to think that I will never again have reason to set foot in another Major Festival for the rest of my life but at the same time I’m pretty fond of surprises.

If I’m ever in a band famous enough to headline I’ll make sure to always carry a couple extra pairs of pants with me.

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Providence 2000 : Fort Thunder Part 1 “A Millennial Mecca”

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The dense walls of trees on either side of the highway had been reaching upward and bending inward until they met in a living arch of the darkest green that isn’t black. Beneath this tableaux the road had merged with the cloudless sky in a black tunnel where the stars and lights appeared to be rushing toward me like the voids of space in an interstellar flight simulator video game. Directly ahead of us was a bulky orange shape resembling a futuristic spacecraft that had been designed to mimic a firefly. Every couple of seconds it emitted a crystalline, tinkling sound and released three pairs of flickering wisps in opposing diagonal formations that slowly dissipated into the surrounding air.

Everyone else in the car had fallen asleep. I looked over at my friend Dave who had been quietly driving through the night and smiled.

“It’s beautiful”

Some of my readers will have no doubt guessed, correctly, that this confusing depiction is evidence of my having finally taken leave of the persistent straight edge. An early summer in San Diego had introduced me to the mind altering potential of several over the counter drugs and the boredom of a lengthy road trip had caused me to stretch experimentation to excess. Every place we stopped for gas just so happened to be within eyeshot of the welcoming illuminated letters of an all night pharmacy and just shy of my 20th birthday I had become an experienced shoplifter. A truly accurate audit would be impossible due to the ensuing oblivion but I can say with certainty that I had at least ingested a bottle of Dayquil, a tube of Dramamine, a package of ephedrine and multiple packages of Coricidin.

It should go without saying that I do not endorse the consumption of such dangerous quantities of any of these drugs much less all of them together.

It was, without a doubt, the most intense and terrifying psychedelic experience of my life.

With that explanation out of the way it is time to address a matter that should be of even greater interest to many of my readers: our destination. Fort Thunder had been a mysterious name that seemed to manifest on every piece of art that excited me in multiple genres. While experimental music was a more recent love, comic books had been essential for about as long as I could remember. In fact it had frustrated me throughout my adolescence that while peeling back the covers of a Jack Kirby comic book could nearly always reliably transport me to the fantastic worlds there depicted the most exciting record covers led only to mere Rock Music.

Music had finally started to open up in High School. While I happily skanked along with my cohort and followed friends to the odd punk show the most satisfying discoveries came from spelunking the mountains of vinyl in Second Hand Shops and Used Record Stores. My High School’s library had fortunately discarded an obsolete edition of The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records and my parent’s garage had offered up a portable turntable called the Disc-O-Kid. With these two totems in tow I never had to be disappointed by misleading cover art again. If a record piqued my interest I could both read about the artist and listen to the actual music before making the final purchase.

As a budding aesthete with next to nothing in the way of pocket money these advantages were indispensable. While most of my favorite discoveries were pulled from unsorted dollar bins one specific entry in my guidebook pushed me to do the unthinkable. The passage on The Residents was so beguiling that I happily parted with an entire twenty dollars for the chance to bring home a record I hadn’t even listened to.

I have written elsewhere about the midnight cities of my dreams, geometry defying vistas pulled subconsciously from Dr. Seuss and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. From the moment I set eyes on The Tunes of Two Cities the cover art by Poor Know Graphics looked like it had been pulled directly from these landscapes. Back in my bedroom the impossible happened, the music also sounded like it had been pulled from an untouchable nightmare. Disinterested fatuous cocktail jazz traded tracks with the terrified cries of subterranean synthesizers until the disparate styles somehow absorbed and synthesized one another.

Back in the world of comic books I had abandoned the colorful ecosystem of ‘80s Marvel for the offerings of DC’s “mature audiences” Vertigo line. Eventually this curated content began to feel passé and I dove into the world of Black & White Independents, often once again in unsorted dollar bins. By 1999 the only thing I really liked was Jon Lewis’s Ghost Ship and Spectacles. One day I walked into a comic shop and my eye caught a tiny screen printed mini called Bolol Belittle. Mat Brinkman’s wordless pages of tiny creatures crawling through an uncaring world ignited that same feeling of somehow staring into a waking dream.

On the music front I had discovered a Japanese inflected twee-pop scene centered around the San Francisco State University Student Union. The Monotract concert back in Chicago had also introduced me to a Champaign, Illinois project called Busytoby that in turn led to a synth duo called Mathlete and In a Lighthouse Cassettes, the first of many tape labels. Soon I was making diverse orders from The Blackbean and Placenta Tape Club while a holiday trip to San Diego had brought home a new housemate, Lil Four, whose tastes tended more toward “extreme” and “hard” music. I happened to read the Load Records insert on a Men’s Recovery Project album and was captivated by the description of a band called Lightning Bolt.

Fast forward through dropping out of college, a year in Chicago and my concert with Deerhoof and I was back in San Diego for the first half of a Summer. Frequent visits to The Fireside Bowl had resulted in the unnatural luck of catching the 1999 Japanese New Music Festival and a set from Ruins. Newly obsessed with stripped down bass and drum duos I started collecting albums from godheadSilo. Then a flip through a 50 cent bin of Seven Inches at the Hillcrest location of Off The Record turned up a familiar name: the Lightning Bolt/Forcefield split.

This tiny record had everything. The raw, frenzied sounds of drums and bass swimming through waves of distorted static with tortured, guttural vocals. Forcefield’s pod of scurrying synthesizers hearkening back to the distant dimensions of The Residents. A tactile screen printed cover that looked and felt like my new favorite mini comics.

I had the type of vintage cabinet record player that automatically cued up the edge of a preloaded record the moment it was powered on. All summer long the light switch in my bedroom fired up the Lightning Bolt side of the single and looped it until I went out again.

I couldn’t get enough of it.

At San Diego Comic Con I hunted for more of Mat Brinkman’s minis but everybody was buzzing about this older comp called the Coober Skeber Marvel Benefit Issue. I was blown away by the winding, claustrophobic panels of Brian Chippendale’s ink heavy Daredevil tribute. Somewhere deep in a copy of The Comic’s Journal I read the phrase “Fort Thunder Attack Flotilla” and realized the first half sounded familiar.

I realized that the exact same people who made my favorite new music in the world were making my favorite new comic books in the world. It all came from the same place and that place had a name and that name sounded exciting.

Flipping through a friend’s copy of The Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal magazine I found a blurb about costumed wrestling matches and apocalyptic welded bike gangs. All that stuff was happening at Fort Thunder too. On a very early version of a new thing called the internet I discovered that Fort Thunder had a website and that website had a phone number.

I decided to just call it up and ask if I could come live there and somebody (it turned out to be Jim Drain) picked up the phone on the other end and said one of the most powerful words I had ever heard in my life:

“Yes”

I was going to quite literally make a pilgrimage to the seat of the beating heart of my generation’s American Underground.

I was going to Fort Thunder.

Next part here:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2022/11/12/providence-2000-fort-thunder-part-2-no-soap/

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

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I can’t remember the exact dates but I think I was at the Fort for the last 3 weeks of August. I think I remember a quote from Mat Brinkman a few years later about how the people interested in comix were generally far less enthusiastic about noise bands and vice versa. While this is no doubt generally true I can say with absolute certainty that the Venn Diagram had at least a small sliver of overlap.

I lived there.

Being in Providence offered many opportunities to examine and collect artifacts from both of these circles. However while the comic book can be said to be most alive in the physical object the music side of things reached an apogee in the fleeting temporal spectacle called performance. I had heard stories about the legendary 1997 concert where Dan from Landed had set himself on fire and FORCEFIELD had basted the audience in the deadly vapors of an idling moped.

To me this legend was as vital as the infamous murders and church burnings surrounding the early ‘90s Norwegian Black Metal scene. Much like the celebrated happenings where John Cage gave recitals on burning pianos the artist on heroic quest to explore the boundaries of creation inevitably explored the dissident and iconoclastic power of destruction. Performances like the one I just described marked the geometrical asymptotes of this destructive impulse, briefly glimpsed through the Overton Window of the passing vehicle of convention.

While Fort Thunder was absolutely buzzing with the energies of creation my visit barely coincided with the species of bacchanal I was hoping to participate in. While Brian Chippendale returned toward the end of my holiday Lightning Bolt was on effective hiatus while Brian Gibson was attempting to relocate to NYC. Chippendale graciously allowed me to sate my prodigious appetite on his claustrophobic comic diaries but a home field repeat of the live set I had barely caught in Los Angeles was not forthcoming. Similarly while Dan St. Jacques was briefly present in all his gorilla chested glory I would not be catching any sets from Landed or the raucous Olneyville Sound System.

I visited Ben McOsker at the crowded apartment home of essential Providence imprint Load Records. He offered me a bulk rate on all the records I wanted and I filled the holes in my collection while discovering some new favorites. Astoveboat would become the soundtrack to a hazy few weeks in the following summer when I read Moby Dick, took meth and angrily fantasized about killing Gods and whales. He told me to grab the Scissorgirls 10 inch but I declined. He told me I’d regret it.

He was right.

I was making a mistake that was prevalent in the experimental music circles of the day. I failed to appreciate the creative powers of the feminine. In the years to come nearly all of my musical collaborations would be with women but at this point I was still young and stupid.

Raphael Lyon was filling the unenviable yet essential stations of House Mom and spokesperson but it was Leif Goldberg who most graciously took me under his wing. I remember spending hours in his room while he showed me screen printed comics, impressive flip books and an experimental film made from cross sections of colorful marbled clay. The creativity in the air was infectious; I spent days at Jim Drain’s desk making assorted items of construction paper collage: an unfortunately never finished wordless comic about a fantasy wizard, a copy of a He-Man tableaux as a gift for Drain and black and white prehistoric scenes in the vein of Mary Fleener that made it into the following issue of Paper Rodeo, albeit out of order. [author’s note: if anybody might have a copy of this issue and could send an image I’d be most grateful. It was the Fall 2000 issue with the Ben Jones cover. The piece is reproduced quite small and features skeletal apes and dinosaurs]

Goldberg showed me around the screen printing studio while he put together an impressive issue of the Monster anthology and posters for an upcoming Fort Thunder concert to be held on the eve of my 20th birthday. He took me on his bike rides to wheat paste these posters around town which came in extremely handy when it was time for me to put up flyers for the upcoming xbxrx concert I had ended up organizing. I practiced on the roof with a green and blue toy guitar with preloaded rhythms and chords produced by plucking tiny metal wires but somehow never got up the gumption to ask if I could jump the bill.

I had no problem asking complete strangers if I could cross the country and live in their home but struck a hidden vein of adolescent shyness when it was time to ask to perform inside of it.

Show Night finally came around and I got to see the Fort come to life in concert mode. Peter Fuller set up an espresso stand that I later donated the bottles from my raft to and shipped a kilo of Italian beans when I started working for a Sicilian sociopath in Chicago. The show was opened by Duct Tape Union and another project I seem to have forgotten the name of. Colin Langenus from USAISAMONSTER had been obliviously sleeping until minutes before their set then quickly brushed his teeth and took the stage, earning him the affectionate nickname Sleepy Tooth. While their live set was amazing the truly life changing consequence of meeting this band was an initiation into the illicit fellowship of the counterfeit Greyhound Ameripass.

They also introduced me to my aforementioned friend from Benefit Street who would become a lingering crush for the remainder of my visit and several years to follow.

Finally the crowd was ushered into an alley behind the building for a last performance. Friends Forever offered the exact type of heretical live show I had been so fervently pining for. They were my first introduction to what I would call the “extreme noise tour lifestyle”, shunning brick and mortar venues to blast their infectious tunes from the inside of their actual tour van and accentuated with smoke machines, lasers and fireworks. I danced with abandon as the midnight hour ushered in my 20’s. Nate Hayden and I bonded over a shared enthusiasm for Coricidin and he gave me a cassette of recordings he had created under this unhealthy influence: Wizard 333. One of the tracks was entitled Fungi from Yuggoth which boosted my enthusiasm substantially.

While my floating exploits on the Woonasquatucket were still to come this night was undoubtedly the climax of my days at Fort Thunder. Much like the 1998 The Makeup concert of the introductory chapter this night felt like an initiation ceremony in which I was inducted into the secret society of the Underground. Big changes were on the horizon as I left my teenage self behind and began the adventure of adulthood. In a little more than a year Fort Thunder would become a memory and the naive innocence of ‘90s subculture would be forever shattered on a day called 9/11

The night before my departure brought a rare instance of the type of fellowship that is only brought about by shared consumption of alcohol. While I had spent the entire summer exploring the psychedelic potential of various over-the-counter medications I could count my experiences with alcoholic inebriation on a single hand. I drank the entire bottle of Brass Monkey that had been gifted to me during my maiden voyage and became embarrassingly drunk.

Dan St Jacques was front and center for this excursion in his trademark straw hat that looked like it had been stolen from a donkey. A rag tag crew on tall bikes, choppers and other monstrosities set out to explore the city and raid a popular bread dumpster. I fell on my head, cursed St. Jacques for snagging the only olive loaf and generally made a fool of myself until it was time to climb into Jim Drain’s bed for the final time.

I woke early the next morning and left a note for my absent host, contributed a pittance toward his outstanding rent debt and trudged across Federal Hill for the final time until I reached my bus to Chicago.

I spent the next twenty years hunting for regional undergrounds with the same type of creative Zeitgeist as Fort Thunder and turn of the century Providence. I lived in Chicago, Oakland, Los Angeles, Tijuana, Portland, New Orleans and San Diego. I visited Baltimore, NYC, Philadelphia, Berlin, Oslo, Panama, rural Maine and countless others. While every one of these destinations pulsed with currents of authentic underground energy the closest I would ever feel to my days at the Fort would be my time on a fleet of junk rafts, touring on a city bus turned concert venue and participating in a small but magical occurrence known as the Mojave Rave.

I dedicate these stories to the one’s who were there but more importantly to the kids who would never have the opportunity. For all the ones who only heard the name Fort Thunder in reverent whispers when it had already become as unreachable as Avalon or Tir Na Nog I humbly hold out my hand.

Climb into my eyes, my ears and my memories; I’ll take you on an adventure to a magical world that lives on forever in the eternal optimism of youth,

a place called Fort Thunder

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