Tag: providence

Psychiatric Tissues – The history of iconic noise rock band Arab on Radar – By Jeff Schneider

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If you are anywhere close to my age and consider yourself, as I do, a “scene historian” in any capacity I know of one special trick by which you can force yourself to feel something: important, useless, conscripted, powerless, misguided, etc. i don’t know enough about you to tell you which emotion will be triggered – only that I can promise with near certainty that one will manifest.

Ok, here’s the trick – consider the New York Time’s Bestseller Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. Next consider that this milestone in rock journalism as oral history was published in 1996 and the roots of “punk”, according to the text, began to seriously gel with The Stooges and MC5 around 1970-ish. I’m not here to get pedantic or start any arguments about who wore glitter or pushed members of the audience first but rather put things in a temporal perspective: approximately a quarter of a century separates the first stirrings of proto-punk from the appearance of Please Kill Me on bookstore shelves around the world.

If, like me, you were traveling the country around the turn of the millennium to drink in the myriad ways that the worlds of underground art and music positively oozed raw creative energy you know that 1) things were just as vital as the punk scene lionized in Please Kill Me and 2) another 25 years later we’ve reached the perfect moment for a similar all-encompassing document as younger generations of kids, led to the tunes by music blogs, file sharing and algorithms, want all the mythology they can get their hands on.

The largest hurdle is the “umbrella problem” or, in simpler terms what to call it all. “Punk’” was the perfect word for a time and place, no matter how disparate various music under the banner may appear, and with the addition of “chain” and “egg” qualifiers many still claim punk with an “if it ain’t broke why fix it?” philosophy. The total cannibalization of the early nineties Seattle scene by A&R zombies screaming “grunge!” instead of “brains!” has left some reasonable reservations towards Greeks bearing gifts in the form of hyped up new genre names.

The last serious effort of this kind I remember seeing was Electroclash! and it predictably fell on its face. The new trend of constantly naming microgenres – Witchhouse, Sea Punk, Vaguewave, etc. feels more like a self referential joke than a serious marketing attempt – not to say it can’t sell records. I’d still like a catchy name that combines the tolerance for total artistic experimentation with the DIY ethos that colors the most compelling music of this era but may have to satisfy myself with something as simple as “noise rock”.

Anyway we’ve waded impressively far into this review without even a mention of the literary work that inspired it so now’s a good time to mention that Schneider characterizes Arab on Radar as “No Wave” – a more experimental and unapologetically art-inflected movement that predates punk. It is also important to look at Arab on Radar within the diverse experimental music landscape of Providence, Rhode Island. As a San Diegan I met my fair share of underground residents who idolized my hometown due to The Locust and other hardcore acts but in my own case I felt a special magnetism toward Providence.

If I’m going to be super technical things started for me with The Talking Heads, although they weren’t technically a RISD band, but Shepard Fairey would be a less tenuous starting point. By 1994 he’d moved to San Diego and assembled a powerful street team from my friends and acquaintances in the graffiti subculture. His Obey Giant stickers also began showing the influence of Russian Constructivism and as a dedicated fan I filled detailed notebooks with examples of every new design and color way – catalogued meticulously by location and date of collection.

The moment that turned Providence into a borderline religious pilgrimage destination came when I finally discovered that my favorite hand silk-screened mini comix and noise rock records were all pouring from a shared art space in a former mill called Fort Thunder. I called their phone, got permission from Jim Drain to move in and spent a month narrowly avoiding subjecting the FORCEFIELD performance costumes to my compulsive bed wetting before spending my twentieth birthday at a formative noise show.

I already knew the Arab on Radar guys before this. I saw them in at least two different colors of Dickie’s and hopped in their van earlier that year to ride along to Venice Beach. As a lifelong Californian it was a bit of culture shock watching pasty New-Englanders rub sunblock (I never touch the stuff) above denim cut-offs and buying matching Ray-Ban’s.

Let me put things a different way: every time friends have dragged me to an East Coast beach with grassy dunes and chilling breezes I feel a certain pressure to pretend to enjoy myself despite every single thing about the water, sand and general ambiance feeling “wrong”. Maybe some of the AoR crew were feeling the same and missing their flimsy wooden fences, salt grass and American beach grass.

Shifting back to music the only word for myself at these earlier stages was “fan”. I’ve read of near empty Fireside shows and hostile fans but can tell you with certainty that me and the Belden House crew brought the energy and enthusiasm at every show from 1999 to 2001. 21 and up was a different matter – I might have even gotten a roomie’s ID cut in half attempting to see the guys at The Empty Bottle.

One of my favorite bits was when Schneider placed the aluminum headstock of his Kramer, or other electric guitar with a strong neck, on the floor and swung forward in an arc with his stomach resting against the lower body. Total annihilation of rock instruments and proletariat bodies was the order of the day, not to mention conventional song structures, and I did my part by running at the old bowler’s benches and causing a complete flip when I threw my shoulder into the “ass groove” and launched my ankles skyward.

Besides buying Repopulation Program, You’re Soaking In It! and any other compilation I could find for Load or Providence I scooped up a vinyl copy of Rough Day at the Orifice. Along with the menacing high pitched guitars and frantic, confessional vocals I loved the pink sleeve design on brown cardboard and the tiny bits of hair Mat Brinkman had mixed in the printing ink. It almost looked like Andy Warhol’s prints with glitter or diamonds if the light hit things right.

Schneider talks about not signing with Load in the book and I do wonder how such a move could have panned out for them. Skin Graft, and then later 31G, seemed to be giving their all but would a local label have been able to give more support? As many great bands were on Load but nobody ever sold quite like Lightning Bolt, questions about relative sizes of fish and ponds are reasonable – there’s no easy answer.

It was always a riot throwing Rough Day on the family turntable and hearing my father read out the title in his Arkansas farm boy drawl. You wouldn’t be missing the pun or double entendre if he had anything to say about it – and he always did. Although I may have once and simply forgotten I really do regret not seeing the band with Andrea. I’ve played in only a couple of bands without women and it’s not something I’m looking to repeat.

The energy changes and I’m just not at home in a “guy van”.

My father, himself a complex discharge from the navy for insubordination, also got a real kick out of reading out the dirty song titles and lyrics. I went to Mr. Pottymouth’s poetry reading at Quimby’s and never felt too offended by the subject matter. When Joey Karam from The Locust started Le Shok with that one explicit record cover it always felt like they were low key biting AoR’s schtick – in a way that wasn’t especially shocking.

Maybe Eric Paul, aka Mr. Pottymouth, would cringe at the comparison but in recent years I’ve always thought of his former stage persona as a living avatar of Quagmire from Family Guy. (in terms of repressed New England sexuality, not his poetry skills). I actually wanted to talk about the working class and, for want of a better word, “townie” aspects of Arab on Radar. Schneider makes it clear that he and his band mates came up around Federal Hill, had family members connected to former mayor Cianci’s “Old Providence” and never quite fit in with the RISD and Brown students.

From my view across the country I never saw things looking too cliquey but there were clear cultural delineations between bands: On the “townie” side sits Sub-Pop signed Six Finger Satellite, Arab on Radar, Dungbeetle, Landed, Olneyville Sound System, White Mice, Curmudgeon Clique, perhaps 25 Suaves and assorted J./Jon von Ryan projects. On the art school side we start with Les Savy Fav, then Black Dice, Mudboy, Lightning Bolt, FORCEFIELD, Lazy Magnet, Kites, SHV, Russian Tsarlag and more recently Human Beast.

I don’t know enough about the early lounge/exotica movement to place anyone and even my favorite Providence folk duo, The Iditarod, is as much of a mystery in this regard as Amoebic Ensemble. It’s hard to know every tiny detail about a city you only slept in for three weeks – even if you’re as big of a nerd as I am. The class struggle bits are not to talk shit but instead an overly simplified attempt to pick Arab on Radar apart and see what made them tick.

The death of the trades, the entitled attitudes of art school kids and a constant feeling of “impostor syndrome” in the world of experimental music could account for some of the shoulder chips but not all of them. If Schneider is to be believed good old fashioned sexual frustration filled the balance. Even with a national roadmap to the finest purveyors of extreme European pornography and a religiously followed rotation as to who cranks the hog in what order when in hotel bathrooms it seems like nothing could effectively stem the pressure.

Imagine bailing out a sinking boat but the boat is full of mayonnaise that pours down the leg of some terrycloth shorts and you start to get an idea. Sometimes the simple act of release takes on the dimensions of a Herculean Labour. In these sections Schneider starts to almost read like Peter Sotos and it’s entertaining enough. In contrast to the old saying that “an army travels on its stomach”, Arab on Radar appear to have done so on their nutsacks.

Despite the constant urges Jeff and his band mates behaved respectfully to any female artists, promoters and traveling mates they accompanied except for one exception. The Need was an experimental metal band from Olympia, WA who happened to be lesbians and something caused Jeff to view them as a band “that put identity above music” and even blame them for the disappearance of free thought in the music underground.

Perhaps being a little younger, growing up in California instead of New England and identifying as a feminist my whole life shifted my views on lots of this stuff. I never once considered The Need an overtly political or identity centered band. They were a shredding guitar band with innovative upright drum parts and vocal melodies and the fact that I wouldn’t get attacked for my colorful eye makeup watching The Need but would seeing death metal heavyweights Nile (ironically if you know how ancient pharaohs wore makeup) was simply a bonus.

It sounds like someone from AoR was defacing The Needs’s posters when touring ahead of them and a small verbal altercation ensued. For those that didn’t tour in 99/2000 posters in a venue was all the promo you had unless a weekly ran an ad or blurb. Schneider is a therapist now so maybe he’s made some progress on this.

Most ironic is that while complaining that The Need were “political” and “pushed identity”, Arab on Radar did the exact same thing in a different way. As a working class band in a scene dominated by art school kids their plumber style uniforms were a statement of class struggle and a clear message that they held more in common with the workers stocking green rooms with band’s rider cheese and veggie plates than the entitled would-be “rock stars” throwing this shit out the window.

Enough of that. Let’s break this rock music autobiography down in terms of what the public expects in books of this type:

1) SEX – all the frustrated masturbation you could dream of. One band member suffers family loss and drowns the emotions in all kinds of women. I thought it odd that Schneider hints at every member dallying with a fifteen year old girl but himself – did he abstain or is he being discrete for his wife’s sake? Glass houses and all… Some band business conducted in peep shows and strip clubs is vividly described.

2) DRUGS – mostly absent. Plenty of weed is smoked and sometimes it fucks with guitar playing. If the hard stuff shows up I blinked and missed it. Probably for the best – the last thing the kids need is another Please Kill Me telling them they can’t be authentic punks unless they pick up a needle but if you only read rock bios for dope and coke stories this ain’t for you. Someone trips and has a bad time in Dunkin’ Donuts.

3) ROCK N’ ROLL (aka FIGHTING) – According to the book these guys grew up rough and the move to cerebral art rock didn’t slow them down any. Best section for this stuff is definitely an early Marilyn Manson gig in Rhode Island. Disgruntled fans learn how far the opening band (AoR) can be pushed. Not too far it turns out. I seem to have forgotten a knuckle duster or two – more surprises for you when you read it!

Finally, should you read this book? Absolutely! While primarily focused on his own band Jeff clearly cares quite a lot about music and documents 94 – 02 Providence, and the national underground circuit, perfectly. His views on squat houses (and their watered down spaghetti) are hilarious and it’s definitely a fun day or two of reading with no lags. Plenty of super funny random anecdotes out of left field.

The biggest tragedy of the turn of the millennium underground is that everything was being documented on early websites and hosting services like Angelfire. That’s all gone now and lost to the ether. If a service is free you’re the product and our burgeoning scene stopped being profitable for our digital “hosts” a long time ago. Something to remember when entrusting our content to Facebook, X, Instagram and my own reliance on WordPress. Shit, I really need to make a backup.

Anyway it’s a minor miracle that Jeff remembered as much as he did, took the time to write it up and even created a printing house for himself and other voices. These kinds of efforts need to be lauded and supported.

They’re all we have and when Instagram, Facebook and others eventually shutter their virtual doors Psychiatric Tissues will still be a physical book with no wi-fi or web hosting required.

That said, if you are a close AoR fan left lost and angry from the divorce and want to know why Mommy and Daddy don’t love each other no more this is not the book for you. Something ego – Something substance problem – all super vague. Fans closer to the 2002 breakup and failed 2010 reunion might see more in these passages than I could. Eric, the singer’s, testimony might be more detailed but less believable. Couldn’t say.

I prefer to remember how things were that last night I saw them on Oops! Tour in 2002. Knitting Factory in Hollywood! Tried to bring my insane homeless friend but se said it sounded “really annoying!” Arab slayed! Bolt slayed! Locust slayed! Hella’s not really my jam.

Anyway it was a nice note to go out on!

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Providence 2010 : “show” cancelled

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I haven’t played a huge amount of shows but I’ve played enough of them. I did two complete U.S. Tours, a few regional mini-tours and lived in towns where I played and set up shows a lot – I know that for somebody like a member of longest-running-rock-band Golden Earring that would just be a drop in the proverbial bucket but what I’m trying to say is I’m not exactly green.

Playing shows in DIY spaces is like any other thing that involves repetition and variation in that a lot of it has a sameness but the more a particular experience sticks out the more you’ll remember. You remember the really good shows, you remember the dismally awful shows, you may or may not remember a first or last show.

You remember the shows that didn’t end up happening at all.

In the very beginning of 2010 it was still winter and I was playing a few Bleak End shows around the North Eastern United States. It hadn’t been planned out like an actual tour tour although I would be doing one of those a few months later in the Summer of that same year. I think that I was on that side of the country for family stuff – my father had just died and my mother had decided that it would be a good idea to go see her mother one last time before her mother died or her multiple sclerosis worsened to the point that she couldn’t travel or she died herself.

I was out there helping with that and probably would have played at least a couple shows two birds with one stone style but something had just happened on the West Coast that led to me deciding to play a whole lot of them. If you haven’t read the two 9/11 chapters this is a head’s up that a more detailed explanation of the phenomenon I’m about to describe can be found there. At certain points in my life I’ve met people and immediately experienced a powerful sense of mutual gravity.

You could call it attraction but only with the caveat that the word is being used in it’s most fundamental and elementary sense: a force that brings things together. This time around it happened with not one person but with a pair of very small women who were both acoustic guitar centered singer songwriters. We had first crossed paths in Oakland, in the 2009 chapter An Intimate Haunting, but it wasn’t until we reconnected in Portland that the hands of fate chose to roughly and irresistibly combine us.

They had been moving through the world as a unit for some time and now a new object took form with me on one side of it and them on the other. All of that is a very big story that I will be addressing in much more detail in other chapters but here is what happened: we lived together, we travelled together and because we all played music when we travelled we played music together. We did this on the West Coast and now that we were all on the East Coast we were doing it on the East Coast.

So many things were strange: they sang quiet pretty music and I screamed over a drum machine. They were two different people and I was a single person. The Universe had manifested itself into an unambiguous voice to explain certain rules to me and I proceeded to break those rules. It was all going to play out like a fairy tale and none of it was going to work but for this chapter it is all mostly background information. It was the reason that I found myself on a longer mini-tour playing more shows around the North Eastern United States.

They weren’t with me for this particular show. I was just reminded that the three of us had played with Driphouse in Baltimore on January 2nd but for reasons that will become apparent I know that this Providence show was significantly later in the trip. It may well have been the last scheduled show of the trip before I would return to the West Coast.

I had never actually gotten to see Raccoo-oo-oon while they were still a band but I ended up with some of their releases by being really into the Not Not Fun label. I believe I have seen and even played with all the former members since the band dissolved though. In 2010 Daren Ho had a couple distinctive features he has most likely dispensed with: he only wore the color white, his front teeth were still messed up and he had the really drastic Velvet Underground type bangs. We hadn’t planned this show together but because we were both in New York we decided to take a Chinatown Bus to Providence together.

I’ve thought a bit about the similarities of this night’s walk over Federal Hill and the one I had made to Fort Thunder ten years earlier. In 2000 I was alone but dragging a heavy suitcase with a blanket over my shoulders. In 2010 I was with Daren: I was dragging a rolling suitcase and he had an unwieldy keyboard under his arm. In both situations it started to rain ever so lightly the moment I stepped off the bus and into Providence, Rhode Island.

In 2000 I was returning to Fort Thunder after showing up in the middle of the night whacked out on drugs and waking everybody up by loudly washing the dishes. I was walking there to find out if I would be permitted to stay for the next few weeks. Surprisingly enough the answer was yes. In 2010 Daren and I were walking to a show that we had every reason to believe had been booked for us at a warehouse called Mars Gas Chamber.

We were also in for a surprise.

I don’t have any memory of actually going to the door of the building or talking to a person named Weird Mike and I think I’ve figured out the reason why. The other two artists who’d been scheduled to perform, Isa Christ and Kyle Clyde, were waiting nervously in their van on the corner and stopped me and Daren before we even got to the door. Apparently when they had arrived a little earlier the aforementioned Weird Mike had acted extremely cagey upon learning that they were there to play a show and denied that shows of any kind happened anywhere in the vicinity ever.

Live music in unlicensed spaces in Providence, Rhode Island had been in a kind of “don’t ask don’t tell” place since the Great White fire of 2003. A lot of cities were having issues with Vice busts, there’s a San Diego story up here called “Think of it as One of the Rivers” on the topic, but this city in particular brought the ethos of “ask a punk” to another level. Normally this wouldn’t have been a problem because we were punks, and punks who had been booked to play a show at that, if not for one glaring error.

Our good friend Alley of SHV had decided to leave town without telling anybody that there was supposed to be a show for us. 2010 was very different from 2000 in that everybody had a cell phone and everything more or less happened through internet messages often on social media platforms but none of us were managing to get ahold of Alley. Of course none of us were 100% sure of the statement in the first sentence of this paragraph either.

As far as the traditional “five stages of grief” goes all of us were still on the very first step: denial. We told ourselves that we had simply committed a faux pas that every one of us frets about almost every time we go out – arriving too early. We told ourselves that if we simply went and killed time somewhere we would return to a show where all misunderstandings had been ironed out and perform for a particularly receptive and appreciative crowd – it was the least the Universe could do for us after the uncertainty and anxiety we’d been made to suffer.

We went to a nearby record store called Armageddon Shop just up the hill on Broadway. Dylan from Isa Christ was scanning over the flyers for upcoming shows when he suddenly became animated with renewed hope:

“Wait! There’s a flyer here for our show! It has to be happening!”

I mentioned earlier that certain details would indicate that this event happened near the end of my East Coast trip. The reason that I know that is this: I had already passed through Providence to visit the RISD Nature Lab and view the collection of small animals and animal remains with one of the aforementioned acoustic guitar girls who happened to be a RISD alumnus. While in town I had quickly printed up flyers for this future show using an image from the Takarazuka Review – a famous Japanese Theater where all the male roles are performed by women.

I had learned about the Review while spending time researching the obscure and outmoded theatrical genre known as Masque several weeks earlier at New York’s Kennedy Center Performing Arts Library. These details are irrelevant to the larger story but I’ve included them to remind myself of how different my life used to be. I used to constantly travel, spend time researching the performing arts and constantly produce flyers for my own performances and the ones I’d set up for other people.

The picture I’ve included here is not the one from the actual flyer. I’ve lost that image – if any of my readers might be in possession of the flyer from this 2010 Providence show that never actually happened then by all means please send it along. This might be the least reasonable of the various image and document requests I’ve put out there but I did make ten to twenty of the things and left them in a major record store hub of a regional music scene.

I explained all of the above details concerning the provenance of the flyer to my would-be show mates and the group’s morale sunk perceptibly. Still there was a possibility that we might return to the Mars Gas Chamber to find Alley, a show, laughs and apologies. We had to at least check. I can’t remember if I walked to the door to read the small notice in person but I remember exactly what it said:

“show” cancelled

That innocuous pair of quotation marks was the final insult to injury. As performing artists we must constantly reconcile the artistic ideals with which we dream up our onstage actions and the cold reality we then read upon the faces and actions of our spectators. It’s always better in your head – we remember the highs but live with the lows every time the thing we imagined as grandiose is proven merely mundane and even forgettable by our ever fickle audience.

What I’m trying to say is that that little pair of quotation marks was the cruelest cut of all. I’ve been to SXSW where unless you are cresting a powerful wave of hype the act of wanting to play live music for an audience is one step below begging for change on the street but still I remember those quotation marks and they haunt me. In a strange coincidence my wife has played a show inside of Mars Gas Chamber but I never actually did. Alley promised she’d make it up to me the next time around and she did: on the Summer Tour with Generation I played a memorable basement show with a surprisingly great band from New Hampshire called Brown Drown.

But all of that was in the future. In the early Winter of 2010 me, Daren, Dylan and Kyle had no recourse but to go to Whole Foods and after buying the comforting but overpriced hot foods of our individual choosing continue onto the Expressway and back to New York.

In total and utter defeat…

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

berniebleak1 Comment

By the time of the Living Hell tour I was starting to get used to documentarians as a new fixture of whatever you call it when transportation, performance and audience participation coalesced into whatever the specific thing was. I don’t think I was actually with Friends Forever while their documentary was being filmed but I at least rode along for a social call with the aforementioned documentarian. The most conspicuous example was a pair of German documentarians that had arrived on the Mississippi River Junk Raft project I spent time on the previous summer called The Miss Rockaway Armada – they did the thing where one of them holds a boom mic that visually screams “documentary crew” to anybody that might be looking.

To a certain degree it can probably be said that the best documentarians are outsiders in relation to their subjects. I’d imagine most of my readers would at least be aware of the true crime streaming miniseries called The Staircase that played out as a cautionary tale against documentarians over identifying with the people on the other side of the lens. We expect them to be a little older, a little square and to be dressed in cargo shorts and vests in different shades of khaki. These things are somewhat comforting in that they reinforce boundaries that actually do feel important and we expect to exist.

When I came up with the nickname “the stooge” for our documentarian I wasn’t trying to be especially mean-spirited or exclusionary. It was a riff on the character referred to as the bond company stooge in the then recent Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between that director’s films, my generation’s tendency to self-mythologize and the steady commodification of anything resembling a hipster trope. In a lot of cases the assignment of a nickname is a harbinger of the outsider’s acceptance into a group as it means they are both seen and referred to in a way that unites it’s subject with the larger group against newcomers.

There isn’t one perfect way for a documentarian to collect footage or interact with their subjects but there is no mistaking the sensation that it is being done wrong. One thing that should certainly be addressed is that throughout the loose organic process of deciding who would be in Living Hell or coming on the tour the prospect of a documentary film wasn’t actually discussed. The bus functioned a lot like a collective punk house in that things were decided by group consensus and there was a tendency to assume nearly anything was fine until somebody expressed that it wasn’t. My point is that there were people among us who wouldn’t have been comfortable with even a near perfect documentarian.

I can empathize with the feeling that cool things are happening in front of you and need to be captured by any means necessary but ultimately I’m here to tell you about what it felt like to be on one side of the camera as opposed to the other one. These were the little things that made us uncomfortable: being asked to repeat an action that was just performed but wouldn’t have naturally been repeated. attracting more negative attention when sneaking behind restaurants and stealing used vegetable oil out of the used vegetable oil trash can. being constantly asked little questions and just generally feeling that the camera was less of a fly on the wall and more of a fly in your ear.

All of this would have been fine and natural steps in the mutual acclimatization process if most of us didn’t feel like we were repeatedly voicing concerns only to feel like nothing was actually changing. We also felt like even if all of us accepted the necessity of the documentation process and everything it entailed the same could not be said for all of the people in the various cities we visited who decided to come to our shows. Insofar as the camera represented an invasive gaze we didn’t want to feel responsible for subjecting friends and strangers to that same invasive gaze.

There was a galvanizing moment when growing reservations shifted decisively to the entire situation being simply untenable. I can’t remember what city or show this was at, which is probably for the best, but as I often do I remember what was said in precise detail. I’m not trying to imply that the following stupid statement defines the person on the other side of that camera. We’ve all said stupid things when trying to fit in. They approached me and Rain:

“Hey, this girl just walked into my shot and took a piss without noticing my camera! She was totally hot too!”

Before this moment we had been discussing the numerous smaller uneasinesses but had been trying to shoulder them for the sake of the resulting document. John Benson had been pouring heroic amounts of energy and material resources into keeping the bus rolling for years at this point and the prospect of a documentary film backed by a major music magazine felt like too big of an opportunity to pass up. The preceding revelation was a deal breaker: the most charitable way of saying it is that it wasn’t a cultural fit.

I can’t remember why this had happened but our paths diverged and then reconnected in Providence, Rhode Island. A conversation was had to the effect that filming and traveling together would not continue. I remember watching the documentarian calmly walking away down the single exit street that the bus had parked on for the show. They seemed to take it well. The short documentary did come out. I’m glad it exists. I imagine if you could peek under the hood of nearly any documentary film in existence you would see some of the same things: discomfort that segues into schism, compromise or some combination of the two.

The show was outside of a venue called Mars Gas Chamber. Jeremy Harris had made a large sign from a stop sign or something to direct people to where the party was that said something along the lines of “Oakland Acid Bus”. I thought that I had met Jeremy for the first time earlier that year at INC but ended up learning in the course of these stories that he was actually playing in USAISAMONSTER when they played Fort Thunder during my 2000 pilgrimage. We share a lot of friends and acquaintances but have settled into a kind of convivial mutual indifference.

I told him that it didn’t feel quite right to have the word “acid” sitting there as descriptor. I’ve been talking about the stuff non-stop for the last three chapters or so but at this particular moment in time it felt incongruous to me, not just for me but for the bus in general. Like it was too reductive when used to describe what we were about. I don’t remember Jeremy’s exact words here but I’ll do my best to paraphrase:

“That makes sense. I used to think that you weren’t that cool of a person and it was because of acid.”

That little exchange didn’t really bother me, I’m used to people thinking I’m an asshole so something like “I used to think you’re an asshole” doesn’t even track. It took me a long time to figure out I was nearsighted and I still don’t wear my glasses as much as I probably should so I constantly look like I’m narrowing my eyes at everyone in disapproval. Anyway I want to get back to not liking how it said the word “acid” on the show sign.

It’s uncomfortable seeing yourself the way that other people see you. The human voice sounds significantly different traveling through air than it does when carried to the inner ear by bone. When someone talks as much as I do people say “they love the sound of their own voice” but I don’t. Nobody does. Those of us who make recordings and frequently speak or sing through amplification have to try to make peace with it but it still sounds wrong almost every single time.

This is all to say of course it was uncomfortable to become part of the subject of a documentary and it will be uncomfortable for the person who made that documentary if they read my descriptions of what it was like to be there when they were making it. I think it can probably feel like I’m just stirring shit or being a sanctimonious prick when I write about this sort of thing and while I don’t think I’m exactly doing either of those things I did make a conscious choice to just stop thinking about how any of this might make anybody feel.

Way back in the Fort Thunder section I referred to USAISAMONSTER’s performance as “amazing” but the reality is I don’t remember much about what they sounded like that night. I remember Colin waking up and brushing his teeth right before they played and how excited they were about the counterfeit greyhound scam and riding with them after the show to the Silver Top Diner with a girl I had a little crush on and accidentally leaving these brown rubber monster gloves with fake fur on the back in their van.

If I feel bad about anything it’s for using a shallow, vapid adjective like “amazing”. There’s really no excuse for it: It was disrespectful to them, it was disrespectful to you my readers and I’m going to make a sincere effort to simply not do that sort of thing again.

Next Part:

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

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

berniebleak1 Comment

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

I lived there.

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

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

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

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

He was right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a place called Fort Thunder

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