I’ve mentioned being a rapper in a few places but realistically I wasn’t much of one. The D.A.R.E. rap I wrote in fourth grade got vetoed by a fundy Christian girl’s parents and that was the end of it. It’s kind of like my dark origin story – it turned me bitter.
I did have two “party rap groups” with women in Chicago and San Diego that never went anywhere . For the San Diego one we had a cassingle ready to go on gold tapes with cheap gold chains but never made it. The band fizzled around 2005. The Chicago one happened a year or so later but also failed to record anything.
For a little while I was freestyle rapping under the name Gypsy Feelings but it was always an impromptu thing as opposed to something that was booked ahead of time on all but two occasions. Due to the hit-or-miss nature of the art form it didn’t always reach its full potential. It was a bit like trying to show off a fancy vehicle with a temperamental engine that needed lots of momentum to start and occasionally stalled out.
Ironically this was the only rap project of mine that got recorded and released. Unfortunately it wasn’t a live recording and the momentum I just referred to requires crowd energy and was impossible to generate in a studio. Erin Allen from Sister Fucker released it on a cassette split with a project called Fuck You. I wouldn’t recommend anybody go out of their way to purchase it but if somebody has it lying around I’d be curious to hear it again.
My favorite set happened in Chicago. When the band HEALTH was just starting out they had seen the party rap group at the time Hood Ri¢h and were fans of it. They hit me up about booking a San Diego show but the rap group was no longer playing and I did a project called Guest Toothbrush with Andy Brack who was then a student at the High School I was working at.
A year later I was living in Chicago and HEALTH had a show at the Bridgeport venue Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was also a homecoming show for the Chicago group Bird Names. They had played at the same San Diego house that hosted the show in the last paragraph and it just so happened that the flyer for that show was a photo taken of me at the previous one where the legend on my shirt was changed to “cash for touring bands”.
Bird Names had brought it back to show me and me and the HEALTH guys were blown away by the serendipity of it all. They also really wanted to see me rap again so I did a quick set with their drummer BJ. It was the only time I’d ever freestyle rapped with a live drummer but if I were to get back into it that’s the way I’d want to do it for both the improvised spontaneity potential and the vaudeville comic effect.
As luck would have it I’d find myself in an actual band with BJ about five years later with Kyle Mabson and Dalton – the hard rock group Sexting. There was no rap in that one, maybe things would have worked out better if we went in a rap metal direction. Instead I would lose my voice every time we played only to not even hear myself over Kyle’s guitar which he always made sure was at least twice as loud as the vocal PA.
There is a video on YouTube for the song Snow White Apple but we recorded an album’s worth of material that’s probably just sitting on Jeff Byron’s computer.
Anyway back in High School I had a mostly imaginary Jewish themed rap group with another kid at my school named Stanley Krimmerman. We called it HWA or Hebrewz With Attitude – I was Jewpac Kippur and Stanley was Synagogue Doggy Dog. I wrote all the lyrics for both of us. We wrote a fairly tame and inoffensive song about keeping kosher:
“I’m Jewpac Kippur / I’m Synagogue Doggy Dog / We’re a couple of Jews / Riding high on the hog
But we don’t eat its meat / Nah, we never touch that slop / We gotta keep it kosher / so that God’ll give us props”
Beyond that all of our stuff was edgelordish and insanely offensive. I was working on a song I only ever wrote the hook for called Zyklon B-otch:
“Zyklon B-otch why you down and out? Getting wiped by the Reich ain’t what I’m about”
That brings me to this song. I don’t remember being explicitly taught about the perpetual and recently accelerated Palestinian Genocide but between the information in History textbooks and whatever might have been on the news in 1997 it was impossible to see the Israel/Palestine situation as anything else. I recently read a post about the ongoing situation from Mykki Blanco where they talked about how responding to tragedy with intellectual nihilism is a fundamentally white response.
I won’t argue with that. Another thing that inspired me to write this was struggling with my Jewish identity and the fact that I had Zionist grandparents. What I was trying to do with this piece was express and criticize what I saw as the Zionist id by writing a piece of violent Gangsta Rap from what I saw as an untenable perspective. I’ve talked to a few Zionists in my life since this time and while I can sympathize with the fundamental sentiments in an idealized abstract sense I don’t see how anybody can look at the material results of it and the accompanying manifest destiny and not be on the side of the Palestinians.
I know that what’s done is done and Israel can not simply cease to exist but it seems like things were moving in a positive direction with Yitzhak Rabin before he was assassinated and the never ending far right regime of Netanyahu has been a nightmare – he both provided material support to Hamas to sabotage any possibility of a secular Palestinian movement and has demonstrated time and time again that he has no interest in peace.
The situation has never been as urgent as it is now. I’m under no illusions that writing this ironic and horribly offensive set of lyrics is an effective form of protest or can make a positive difference. It’s just another thing that’s been cavorting inside my head and needs to be exorcised by releasing it into the wild.
I hadn’t read The Stranger by Camus when I wrote this but I had heard the song by The Cure and that was the inspiration behind the hook and starting lyric. I don’t want to only interact with these underlying horrors from a place of irony and nihilism. I want to believe, even as measures are being taken to suppress and silence the truth in both Israel and abroad, that some day the people of Israel will take a long, stark look in the mirror and exercise their political power to end the genocide in all of its forms: displacement, othering and direct and indiscriminate state sanctioned murder.
Here it is:
“Yo! I’m standing on the beach with a gun in my hand
Camel jockey’s gonna get it if they step to the promised land
Ain’t so much for y’all to understand
‘Cept that stones don’t mark graves that we’ve left in the sand
Yo I don’t give a fuck about Camp David Accords
As long as towelhead motherfuckers die by my sword
You think you’re tough? You think you’re hardcore?
In the Middle East the Jews are the overlords
Like Bon Scott and Angus Young we do the dirty deeds
The desert is our garden and guess who’s the weeds?
We know you’re men like us cuz we know you can bleed
But progress is progress and you suckas impede
We’re gonna get away with all the blood being spilt
Cuz we’re riding on the waves of Holocaust Guilt
Gonna bury my blade down to its hilt
Cut you up to pieces like a patchwork quilt
I’m alive
You’re dead
I’m a Hebrew
Killing an Arab
I got a gat for Arafat a grave for Khomeini
Do ‘em like they us
And we Hitler ‘n Mussolini
I don’t care about Bloods, don’t give a fuck about Crips
In that piece about briefly staying at the Thousand Palms Oasis I mentioned that the main ranger woman hand a graying bowl cut that reminded me of the Concord Condor character from Tiny Toon Adventures but I neglected to add that I have a bit of a history with not really getting along with this particular archetype. I had another bowl cut and khaki lady as an Archaeology professor when I was taking classes at San Diego City College in the early 2000s.
Her name was Lynn and when I switched to SDSU I had another one for a class that was also named Lynn. I found out the two Lynns had a bit of a rivalry when we took a class trip to an archaeological site near where I had grown up in deep Spring Valley. For some reason, most likely a city/county thing, the site was split into two jurisdictions with each falling under the purview of a different Lynn.
When I mentioned the trip later to other professors in the department they were mildly surprised that both Lynns were in the same place despite the mutual antipathy. I would learn the reason why and it wasn’t for the purpose of cooperation. As we walked around both halves of the site I happened to pick up some gopher bones I saw in the dirt. Animal remains aren’t really studied in archaeology unless there is evidence tying them to ancient human activity like hunting or breeding.
Gophers are of special interest to archaeologists because of the effect they have on the Principle of Superposition – the idea that things in the ground are either more or less recent depending on which one you find on top of the other one. Gophers complicate this through a process called bioturbation: essentially mixing shit up and moving it around through their constant tunneling. It is important to know whether or not this is happening at a site but it was hardly contingent on a handful of bones less than a year old.
The ground was clearly riddled with enough gopher holes to trouble a trypophobic. Nonetheless when one Lynn discovered I was carrying these bones but had found them on the opposite side she insisted that I throw them back over the fence as they belonged to the half she was in charge of. This, then, was the reason we had gotten a two for one deal on Lynns for this particular afternoon: they didn’t trust each other, anthropology students or anybody else for that matter.
The first one of these khaki bowl cut types I came into contact with was my 9th grade Biology teacher at Bell Junior High. She had the kind of classroom that probably doesn’t exist anymore with gas lines for Bunsen burners on the raised counters and shelves and cabinets full of reference specimens in formaldehyde. Jars full of coiled up oversized centipedes and fetal mammals like cats and pigs floating with their eyes closed.
It was the only class I ever failed to pass with a D which seems like a pointless grade if the only thing differentiating it from an F is its effect on your cumulative grade point average. Anyway this only happened because of pure laziness, the material did interest me and I was even playing SimLife on my home computer that year, I just hadn’t worked out the subtleties of getting the best grade for the least effort yet.
It didn’t help matters that something about me rubbed the teacher the wrong way and vice versa. This basic pattern would persist and continue to not help with all the khaki bowls. I was just looking back over my earliest e-mails with the Thousand Palms one where she was already irritated that my e-mail address used a stage name as opposed to a legal one – she found it “unprofessional”.
Of course my mother insisted that I make up the Biology class credit that very Summer but I had two options as to how I would do this: I could either go to Summer School with kids my own age or I could take Biology 101 as part of the Summer Session at San Diego City College and then fill out paperwork to transfer the credits to San Diego High School where I’d be starting in the Fall. It was no contest – this was my first “long Summer” as my Elementary and Middle schools had been on the year-round schedule but having to take this class didn’t feel like a loss of freedom.
On the contrary the option to spend time downtown and be treated like a college student in a class full of grownups felt like the greatest freedom I’d ever known.
For the beginning of Summer my mom was dropping me off and picking me up from class. I would drift off to sleep in the backseat lulled by Willy Nelson’s soothing voice on a cassette of his recent release Across the Borderline. I just read through the track listings while checking the release date and could instantly hear each track in my head the instant I read the titles including a duet that I’d never realized was a Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush cover or that it featured Sinéad O’Connor.
The ability of things like smells and sounds to unlock chunks of forgotten memory is truly astounding. LaPorsha has been burning some incense lately that smells exactly like this magic smoke ointment I’d completely forgotten about making. I had this strange book of magic tricks when I was a kid that instructed me to burn the striking strips from matchbooks face down on aluminum foil to yield a few drops of a reddish brown oil that would make smoke rise from my fingertips as I rubbed them together.
I was also playing some older David Bowie albums like Lodger on a recent car trip when I thought to put on the eponymous album from his brief lived band Tin Machine. I remembered looking at the CD on the rack when my family first upgraded to a CD player but didn’t have any clear recollections of the music. The opening strains caused me to break out in goosebumps as recollections of exactly how it sounded on our speaker system and how it felt to be sitting inside the house’s new addition for the first time came flooding back.
The Biology class had a lab portion directly afterwards once a week. We got to do fun things like look through a microscope at samples of pond water to find microorganisms. I was totally the kind of kid that had my own microscope at home but it only had an adjustable mirror instead of built in back illumination. This meant that I could only use it in direct sunlight and the magnification didn’t go up as high. On the more powerful one in my classes lab I was the first to find an amoeba that was busily engulfing an even smaller creature.
On nearly the first day of class a younger woman started talking to me. She was married but her husband was military and shipped off somewhere – she’d just had a baby named Kian and had written his name all over the white parts of her Converse All Stars. She was clearly bored and lonely but it seems odd that she both immediately went for me and didn’t seem discouraged by the fact that I was only fourteen years old.
She’d asked to exchange phone numbers but I was awkward on the phone and randomly handed it off to Francois who happened to be sitting next to me. He clearly understood her intentions even though I was oblivious and gave her a bit of a hard time about it. She was angry about this the next time I saw her in class but when I only shrugged she gave up and stopped talking to me.
She turned her attentions to the next youngest guy in the class who I would later learn also went to San Diego High two grades ahead of me. He had alternative length brown hair while mine was to my shoulders so she might have had a type. Looking back on it now I wonder if she was deliberately picking teenagers so it would be easier to get rid of us when her husband returned or if she was looking for something she’d missed out on by getting married and pregnant too young.
Most likely a mix of both – I forget how old she said she was but remembering her face it was probably around nineteen. After that her and the other guy would always show up to class together and I started to notice that they always either both had wet hair or neither of them did. The class was early in the morning and her hair was also long and brown – in a Goldilocks array her hair would have been the longest while mine was in the middle: “just right”.
Even though I’d just failed this subject at the ninth grade level I soon stood out as a star student from my lecture participation and grades on the first couple of quizzes so I attracted a circle of adult friends eager to sit close enough to copy. There was a Chinese man who barely spoke English, a black haired older Russian named Vadim and a jovial overweight Black man.
We also started hanging out before class and on breaks so I would hear Vadim making creepy “jokes”:
“Yesterday I go to mall and see many young girl so I think excellent, excellent pet shop!”
Me and the Chinese guy never said much of anything but the Black guy gave him the reactions he wanted:
“Ahahahahaha! You’re crazy Chester! They’re gonna put you in jail! They’re gonna take you away!”
Every time the group of us stood together it would be a variation of the same joke and the same laughing response. Neither of them seemed to get bored of it – I think at least Vadim also smoked cigarettes during these moments. Toward the end of the session we took a class trip to a nature trail in Balboa Park but as I was one of the few students without a car I rode along with Vadim.
He drove a sports car and asked me if I liked Russian music. I answered that I was fond of Tchaikovsky’s Flight of the Bumblebee – I was just growing out of the phase where I only listened to Classical music and The Beatles. A year or so earlier I had gotten on the Graviton at Balboa Park and had been horrified, not by the ride’s physics, but by the modern rock soundtrack blasting out of the speakers. In the sports car Vadim laughed and put on some upbeat Slavic Eurodisco.
The class ended with a research paper and I decided to write mine on the general biology of the tuatara – an ancient New Zealand reptile that is the sole surviving species of its class, although it resembles a lizard superficially, and has a third eye hidden beneath skin on top of its brain. I got a C on it and thought my professor was accusing me of plagiarism but later learned that I wasn’t using proper college level citations.
I included a bibliography page in the back but didn’t put specific citations anywhere in the body. I didn’t know that paraphrasing a chunk of text was almost as bad as outright copying if you didn’t provide a source and it wasn’t your own research. This brought my overall grade in the class down to a B which was still a lot better than what I’d gotten before.
As the session dragged on my mom started to be later and later to pick me up and I would stand by some hedges to wait on the side of the campus. One day I looked underneath the bushes and found a little mouse hopelessly struggling against a glue trap. I was a vegetarian at that time and was horrified, still am actually, at the pointless cruelty of placing such traps outside. The mouse had already broken one of its legs trying to pull itself free.
I started laboriously and delicately working it free from the glue one limb at a time. It was difficult but after twenty or thirty minutes I finally had it detached. In the moment that I pulled free the final leg it suddenly bit me hard enough to break the skin – this was the broken one so besides the general fear of being touched by me at all it would have been in a lot of pain.
Without thinking I flung it down at the sidewalk with enough force to kill on impact.
On this particular day I must have been standing out there waiting for at least an hour. I was able to convince my parents to just give me bus fare and started walking to the same stop I would be using for all of High School and years to come. I’d never been by myself on the streets of downtown San Diego before and I began to explore what would soon become my 24 hour playground.
Not long after I would start exploring empty buildings and wandering near empty ones with Francois, Paul, Bryan Welch and other friends. In the building that sat on top of the Spreckels Theatre we saw a frosted glass door with the printed name of a private eye service like something out of a Raymond Chandler movie. This same block had sections of sidewalk where the concrete was set with squares of purple transparent glass.
Somebody had heard that there were tunnels underneath and in the daytime you could explore them by the tinted light that the glass tiles had been designed to provide. Nobody was ever able to find a way inside and I can’t say with any certainty whether these tunnels still exist or even if they ever did at all. Nonetheless I was on the threshold of Underground America.
The classes for my second semester at San Francisco State were finally going into finals and I had definitively figured out that I was not ready to be going into college. The International Baccalaureate program I’d been enrolled it for my last couple years of High School was roughly equivalent to taking college courses early and I was burnt out and needed a break. I still didn’t drink alcohol or use any drugs but I wanted to live in punk houses, travel, go to shows, explore forbidden spaces and just generally use my creative energies for my own enjoyment instead of anything the established world placed value in.
The situation in the Japanese style house we’d been living in near the Berkeley-Oakland border had progressed from rent strike to all out war with our landlord. In a way we were probably looking for structure and boundaries but the milquetoast we’d been paying rent to had demonstrated that no matter how excessive our behavior got he would never find the strength to inflict actual consequences. We had spray painted a message calling for his literal death on the side of the house and shot at him with a bow and arrow but he continued to meekly knock on our back door to beg for rent or inform us he’d been digging through our trash.
Me and Francois were the last ones left – Jonas, Chris and Little Four had already moved on because a house without a roof, phone or electricity wasn’t even worth living in for free. We held a yard sale with all the remaining appliances and furniture in the driveway but only a random truck driver showed up as our neighborhood was desolate and devoid of human life. We traded him the microwave and a black leather bean bag Chris used to sleep on for a ride with our bags to the Greyhound Station.
I don’t think it was the beginning or end of any month and we didn’t bother to tell Mark, our long suffering landlord, that we were leaving.
I’m trying to figure out why I never tried to move into The Manor myself and the best I can think of is that I’d either already arranged with Brandi to move back to Chicago with her at the end of Summer or that I’ve flubbed the timeline and this was actually the Summer of 1998 and I’d be moving up to the Bay for college soon. It’s possible that neither of those things are true and I was just broke, socially awkward and content to just hang around and occasionally sleep on an old couch that sat on an outside porch.
Like a lot of these stories the specific year isn’t especially important outside of placing these events in the years leading up to 9/11.
The Manor was a very large either Victorian or Craftsman style green house on the end of E Street in Golden Hills. The block ended on an abrupt diagonal cul-de-sac caused by the 94 Freeway and The Manor only had heavy vegetation instead of neighbors on the back and left hand sides which no doubt made it easier to have large parties where nobody complained or called the cops.
The kids who rented it were close to my age and had mostly gone to Point Loma High but I knew everybody from social stuff and shows. To the best of my recollection it was Nina Amour, Lhasa, Erica Redling, Dan Bryant, Ramon, Badger and Steve Lawrence had a little spot in the attic to paint and keep his records. I could be leaving somebody out or conversely saying someone who only hung around actually lived there – the house had a lot of bedrooms and I only ever passed through the ones that wound around to the bathroom and the ladder to the attic.
[I just got some corrections on minor details: Steve was in a nook in the living room, Badger shared the attic with Martina and Ramon did not live there.]
Steve and Badger were a package deal by that point, maybe had been for a couple of years already. I think they had both lived at the apartment above the Golden Dragon in Hillcrest where Rory had supposedly pushed a girl off the balcony. They were constantly making up bands and working on music together – Cutewood Mac and one I’ll go into detail about in a minute here called Stimulated Emissions.
I’m not sure how they had gotten the rocket motorcycle – maybe it was in the classifieds or they had just seen it sitting in somebody’s yard with a free sign but they’d brought it over and dumped it in the side yard by the driveway. Somebody had taken sheet metal and put it all around the body of a motorcycle so it looked like a missile with a rounded nose in front. Whoever made it might have gotten parts from the actual shell of an ICBM or something because everything was symmetrical and well shaped.
Of course it didn’t run at all when they got it and neither of them knew anything about working on motor bikes so it just sat out there collecting rust. Then me and Francois and Paul brought the bumper boat. We had just done The Natural Museum of California where we’d stolen the skeleton of a beached whale from one of the colleges and strung up the spinal column between two trees on the archery range in Balboa Park.
Everyone we’d shown that too thought it was really cool so we were pretty eager to find our next “prank” or “caper”. I wouldn’t have guessed that our next big thing would also be theft themed but Paul was the one who had cased things out and come up with the idea in both situations. It wasn’t like all of our stunts only centered on stealing things.
When the Republican National Convention came to San Diego in 1996 we had dressed up in old suits and sunglasses like the ones in The Beastie Boys’ Sabotage video and made cryptic protest placards based on the Eightball graphic novel called Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. Pictures of the Mr. Jones character and snatches of text like “Value Ape” and “What’s The Frequency Kenneth?”.
That last phrase has a bit of history: in 1986 a mentally ill man who thought television networks were broadcasting directly to his brain posed the question while attacking newscaster Dan Rather outside the New York studios of NBC. Along with the reference in the Eightball comics it was used as the title of an REM song around the same time in 1994. We got some newscaster attention but none of them understood the references or what to make of us.
One of them asked me if “Value Ape” was supposed to be kind of statement on “ape values” – maybe something like an earlier iteration of the “Reject Human Return to Monke” meme. Eventually I got bored and tried to sneak into the actual convention which earned me a brief detainment by the police.
Our usual entertainment was trespassing but when we did steal things it was never for any kind of profit or something’s monetary value. Paul had driven past a run down independent Family Fun Center spot in National City and figured out the bumper boats were unsecured and would be easy to get over a short fence. The plan was to try to ride it as far as possible until the fuel ran out in the open ocean.
When we were loading everything into the van Paul borrowed from his parents we accidentally spilled some of the gasoline from the motor. Paul made up a cover story that we had been flying miniature airplanes and his dad seemed to buy it – the stolen bumper boat didn’t end up on the news or anything. We tried to pilot it around Mission Bay but the momentary inversion had flooded the motor and we weren’t able to get it going again.
At the end of the night we brought the boat over to The Manor where the large ring shaped flotation segment was turned into a tire swing for the side porch. The fiberglass section ended up uselessly leaned against a wall and the motor met the same fate as the rocket bike – broken down with nobody with the know how to get it going again. Between the two vehicles and the yellowing grass in the yard I used to joke that it looked like a white trash version of Batman’s Bat Cave – a bunch of busted crime fighting tools that were only gathering dust.
I just made the connection now that the Bat Cave was underneath Wayne Manor in the comics and the house was called The Manor. The coincidence makes the whole thing a little more amusing but I’m not sure how funny any of it is a quarter of a century later. It’s funny to me at least.
Me and Dan, or Nad as Steve called him, had gone to Junior High together but this was my first time seeing his impressive record collection he’d amassed in the intervening years. I had a lot of interesting oddities from Thrift Stores, library book sales and bargain bins but I hadn’t had the knowledge or money to get into very much contemporary stuff. Dan had a ton of it and he let me spend a couple of days digging through it to make myself a mix tape.
I’d just heard of Cat Power somewhere so when I saw the Psychic Hearts 7 inch on transparent colored vinyl I was excited to throw the first side on my tape. Over countless listens it became one of my favorite songs but without either the liner notes or the internet I didn’t know any of the background information – most importantly the fact that it was a cover.
A couple of years down the line I was in New York checking out a hip basement record store on the Lower East Side when what I know now to be the original came on the sound system. It sounded overly aggressive to me compared to the understated quiet rage of the version I’d fallen in love with and without thinking I blurted out:
“Who’s the dick screwing up the Cat Power song?!”
The record didn’t screech to a stop like it does in the movies but every pair of eyes in the store, employees and customer’s alike, did whip around to fix me in a withering gaze. I got thoroughly schooled and of course I now know that the song was both written and originally recorded by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. I really like the cover art on his version of the record but I’ve still probably only heard it a couple of times.
Sonic Youth is one of those bands where while I’m aware they were hugely influential to a ton of the music I’m into I haven’t gotten around to listening to nearly any of their actual output. Another one would be Black Flag – when I think about it now the only song I actually know of there’s is TV Party. I’m not avoiding either band in an effort to seem cool or anything, I just didn’t happen to come across any of their tapes or records in the years I was listening to a lot of tapes and records.
For some reason I was attracted to their green covered experimental EP Slaapkamers met Slagroom while flipping through Dan’s records and I put a song on my tape and bought my own copy when I came across it in a Reckless Records new arrivals bin in Chicago. I just listened to it again and it instantly sounded recognizable as I’ve probably heard it more than any of the band’s other work. I’m sure they have a ton of other songs that I’d recognize if someone played them for me just from being in rooms where they were playing.
During the time that I was hanging out at The Manor Steve and Badger seemed to be taking a break from hard drugs and created a set of Stimulated Emissions songs inspired by our friend Nick Feather relapsing. Or maybe they were getting high the whole time they were writing all of it – it’s not like I would have recognized the difference as I didn’t do any of that yet. They played in the living room of The Manor and made a bunch of copies of a tape called Future of 88.
The band’s name is a reference to the word laser which is actually an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, something I knew from writing a paper on lasers in grade school, but it was also intended to share the initials for “straight edge”. The songs were short, catchy and rode the line between being a total joke and absolutely serious:
“At first I was stoked but I still wasn’t primed
Then I was primed but I still wasn’t honed
Now I’m honed and I’m gonna kick your fucking ass!”
I might be mixing up the order on those and the year in the title. It seemed like everyone had a copy of the tape for a minute but now we’ve all led chaotic lives and moved around and lost stuff and there doesn’t seem to be a copy uploaded to the internet anywhere. It went amazingly well the last time I mentioned not having the tape for a semi-jokey San Diego genre band from this era so I’ll try it again.
Anybody got a copy they wanna put up for streaming somewhere or send me? That would be cool.
Whatever year this was the Summer at The Manor was when I first met and became close with Andy Panda. Everybody called him “jailbird” at the time because he’d often wear a black and white striped prisoner costume. I thought that was cool because I had been wearing the same thing to sneak off campus after San Diego High changed it’s open campus lunch policy in my senior year.
I’d run around downtown and pretend to run and hide from cops who would gamely pretend to chase me – it was a lot of fun.
I had just graduated but Andy was still going to El Capitan High School in El Cajon. He’d been selling weed at school and was nervous because the following school year was supposed to introduce drug sniffing dogs. He also had a heavy sounding punk band called Heathen Azure with Jose and Fern.
We would spend a lot of time on the side of the house playing a simple game called “bread ball”. There was always a lot of rustic looking bread that was going stale – I think Badger was working as a delivery driver for Bread & Cie in Hillcrest and brought it home after his shifts. We’d take turns tearing it into little chunks and lobbing them in the air for the other person to hit with a plastic bat.
When it was starting to get hard and dry out it would explode in a really satisfying way. Eventually the game was moved to the side of my parent’s house and the bread was switched out for little dried up tangerines and occasional rubber bouncy balls. If you got a good swing on one of those it would disappear into the air above the cul-de-sac and most likely you wouldn’t be finding it again.
The whole thing was super simple without any attempt to keep score or add complexity with any rules beyond the joy of sending easy underhand pitches flying with a bat. I hadn’t really played games like this growing up and it was powerfully bonding in a way I hadn’t experienced before. There’s probably a lot to this that I can’t just explain with words in the place of lived experience but you should get the general idea.
I don’t really remember a lot of crazy parties at The Manor. For a couple weeks there always seemed to be a circle of suburban skater kids getting stoned in the living room. I didn’t pay much attention to it but there was a day when one of them was waxing philosophical and said:
“I wonder how many tokes are in a joint?”
Lhasa had been hanging out but she suddenly stood up in disgust and sarcastically said:
“I don’t know, I’ll go ask the owl!” before storming out of the room. Eventually they got the hint that nobody that lived there was hanging out with them anymore and took it to one of their own houses or somewhere where people were actually into an interminable smoke session.
There was the night that Adam got naked. Adam is a goth DJ who goes by Deadmatter now but at the time he was in a band called Thomas and the Tiddlywinkers. I don’t think they were playing that night – people just mentioned his band because as the naked guy he became the subject of conversation. Someone was also mentioning that he’d just come back from Europe as if that would somehow account for his behavior.
He got insanely drunk and lost all of his clothes around what must have been the bathroom as he’d managed to rip off one of the glass shower doors and was carrying it around to cover himself. He was so far gone that he hadn’t seemed to notice that it was just regular glass as opposed to frosted or printed glass and wasn’t doing anything to hide his nakedness – it just made him look more ridiculous.
Maybe if it had been fogged up like he was taking a hot shower it would have done something. He wasn’t taking a hot shower though – he was carrying around a perfectly transparent glass door that only emphasized his nakedness and drew more attention to it. Now that I think about it he was probably the first “naked guy” I saw at a party and as such he set the bar pretty high.
I saw a lot over the years and eventually ended up as the “naked guy” at the party a few times myself but nobody ever topped the bit with the glass shower door.
I hope to eventually get more information but I decided to write this up while The Loft story still has a little bit of momentum. My theory last time that typing up what I got from my conversation with Steve would possibly spur others to get in touch did pan out but not exactly the way I’d described it. Rex actually messaged me the moment I started typing the last chapter up as opposed to after I’d shared it – kind of like an invisible brain wave serendipity thing.
It seems like Rex and his partners primarily moved into the building because they needed offices for their magazine but it also doubled as a living space. Using the property as an event space for parties would have been a third concern but I doubt it was too far from anybody’s mind. What young artist would look at two floors and 10,000 square feet worth of space and not imagine throwing a rager?
Nobody’s given me an exact figure for rent but I’m sure it was relatively low. In the 1990’s Downtown San Diego was full of porn theaters, SROs and cheap hotels known as “flophouses”. The Museum of Death was still in the Gaslamp Quarter and the area toward 12th and Imperial had Sushi Performance Art and The ReinCarnation Project. Ironically the moment developers started calling this area the “East Village” roughly coincided with when a lot of it’s art spaces were being displaced by Petco Park.
[I actually just heard back about the rent and it’s pretty amazing. 600 a month for all 10,000 sq. ft. on two floors and the first six months for free. That wasn’t the initial offer but something Edhlund was able to get through renegotiation.]
Photo courtesy of now closed Owl Drug Co. Restaurant
Rex was able to tell me that the building had originally housed a location of West Coast retail and pharmacy chain Owl Drug with a third floor bowling alley and a fourth floor archery range during World War II. By the time him and his partners moved in the fourth floor had already been converted to a boxing gym. The second floor had been used as storage.
Before moving into The Loft Edhlund ran a store in North Park called The Store That Cannot Be Named. It sold underground comics, clothing, art books, spray paint caps for graffiti art and had a screen printing studio in the back. Ironically I had come across that name somewhere while digging around for clues on what I eventually found out was The Loft and assumed they literally didn’t want to mention a store’s name because of a legal or copyright dispute – I never would have guessed it was actually related to what I was searching for.
The store was on 30th Street next to legendary leather bar Wolfs and open in 1992.
The magazine was called Sin until a legal dispute over that name necessitated changing it to Hypno. I read somewhere that it was the first print magazine in the world to be entirely edited on computers and have no reason to doubt that’s true. It made such a splash that Larry Flynt Publishing began distributing it almost immediately allowing it to reach the then-vital newsstand market.
The magazine was definitely ahead of it’s time covering a mix of underground music, comic books, both fine and street art, alternative cinema and things like car clubs and club kid fashion contests. They were the first to cover Shepard Fairey and the mix of graffiti and design work he was doing with Obey Giant.Sin, which started in 1992, and Hypno were no doubt influences on The Beastie Boys’ Grand Royal magazine launched in 1993 and the art publication Juxtapoz that began in 1994.
Here’s a reproduction of a 1995 article from Fairey’s website.
A popular theme and style inspiration on the magazine and lots of art, music and comics of the ‘90s is the aesthetics of lounge/exotica music, tiki bars and Hot Rod/Kustom Kar design. I have a theory that waves in the tastes of young artists/hipsters are influenced by the die-off of older generations and the proliferation of their knick knacks in thrift stores. By the early to mid 2000s the hot thing was 1970s decor with owls and mushrooms.
Me and Francois used to play a game to kill time at San Francisco house parties called “find the owl” – it didn’t matter that we’d never met the hosts and knew nothing about them – we could always count on at least one being on display.
The Hypno guys were in cahoots with Fantagraphics and a lot of other small press comics people that were coming to San Diego for the Comic Con. When Daniel Clowes and Peter Bagge did the Hateball tour together in 1993 The Loft hosted an after party for it and put on another soirée for Comic-Con that Summer. By 1994 there was considerable buzz around repeating the tradition and planned events for Roger Corman’s film studio and Danzig’s Verotik imprint wound up being lumped in and contributing to the growing snowball.
I may have mentioned this night in passing in at least one of the previous chapters but for the sake of expediency I will attach Edhlund’s account here:
Most of the stories around this celebration center on Glen Danzig as the combination of his diminutive stature and outsized masculine bravado seem to bring something out of people. One person said he was standing on his tiptoes to take pictures with fans which might be possible but the rumor of a drunken scofflaw challenging him to an arm wrestling match seems unlikely in light of the confirmed reality that he was accompanied by an intimidating bodyguard.
I was able to find a photo of him with a bodyguard from 1990 that I selected as the featured image of this entry but have no way of knowing if it’s the same person who accompanied the singer in 1994. My more observant readers will notice that in this image he is unabashedly standing for this photo with universally taller fans and making no attempt to obscure their relative height differences.
I was curious about the earliest days in the building and how Circle of Friends came to be involved. I’ve attached a screenshot of a message below that sheds some light on the connection and what kind of work was required to create functional work and living spaces. I also read in the Union-Tribune article that the property’s actual owner briefly fell under Murshid’s influence but I don’t know if this predated the Hypno staffer’s involvement or if it was a later development.
Edhlund told me that in the year without water they could sometimes manage to get showers in the upstairs boxing gym. Another thing he clarified was that Hypno was the only business officially headquartered in The Loft and near-solely responsible for paying the rent and keeping the lights on. He broke down the relationships with some of the other entities I’d heard associated with the place.
Home Grown Video, the first major amateur pornography company, became involved because they shared a lawyer and interest in the art scene. When Lofties wanted video editing and duplication equipment for creative endeavors Home Grown bought the gear, housed it there and allowed shared use. They also hired roommates who wouldn’t have otherwise come up with rent for freelance work like scanning slides.
Edhlund described it as “symbiotic”.
Global Underground Network, the big rave promoters, was mostly Branden Powers who also called The Loft home for a while. Ideally Branden would be the next person I’d want to get in touch with for stories. Global Underground did run some things out of and hold meetings in the space and Powers also helped with raising money and organizing events like the big Comic-Con party.
John Goff had sent me a newspaper clipping that talked about a label called Lobecandy Records and someone named Gen Kiyooka. Gen evidently took over the second floor space with all the computers after Steve Pagan moved out – an era referred to as “Year 3”. He ran the space as an artist’s collective where anybody could access the equipment in exchange for paying monthly dues.
The recording studio was on the second floor and built by the Hypno guys and members of Crash Worship who lived nearby in the church next to Pokez. It was about halfway done at the time of the ‘94 Comic-Con party as Edhlund’s account mentions using the “shell” as Danzig’s Verotik stripper room. I’m not sure if Circle of Friends provided any of the recording equipment but considering the provenance of the computers and Murshid’s knack for attracting deep pocketed devotees it seems likely.
Murshid on right
On the subject of Murshid I was able to find a picture of him after lots of digging. That was mostly the result of him having a primarily pre-internet heyday as opposed to any desire for anonymity – most cult leaders want to have their face on everything. It came from the obituary of the woman who made his wedding cake, seen here on the left, but unfortunately I captured the image without bookmarking the website and can’t recall her name.
Both Steve Pagan and Rex Edhlund talked about The Loft having weekly meetings like any collective punk house. Steve mentioned somebody at these meetings complaining about the associations and collaborations with pornographers and considering Steve’s Zone Smut work and Rex’s positive associations with Home Grown it seems like this had to have been the Circle of Friends folks.
The group most likely worried that breaking bread with a porn company might limit their ability to draw in young spiritual seekers which seems especially ironic considering that every single person that’s mentioned Circle of Friends has thrown out inferences of sex trafficking.
Edhlund said he left The Loft some time in the fourth year which would work out to 1997 according to my timeline. I also read something about Hypno eventually falling prey to a hostile corporate takeover and being published as a hollow mockery of itself with one sellout traitor sticking around. I seem to have misplaced my source on that as well but I think I pretty much got the gist of it – otherwise I’ll change it.
One thing I’ve noticed from my own time living in collectives is that they can be maddeningly ineffective at ejecting their most toxic elements. A full on eviction often requires a unanimous vote and it’s often easier to move out yourself than to try to band everyone against a common enemy. After a few years the members nobody wanted to live with are the one’s in charge as it’s always possible to move in new people who won’t rock the boat.
At The Loft this was undoubtedly Circle of Friends. I’ve been marveling at the seeming improbability that I never encountered this place but I think it comes down to timing – by the time I would have been interested it was called World Evolution Loft and wasn’t particularly interesting. Of course it seems odd that nearly every one of my friends has at least one story from the place but if I’d experienced it myself there never would have been a mystery and without the mystery I never would have written any of this.
That’s pretty much where I’ll leave things. Of course I’m still interested in hearing stories and talking to folks who were actually there but things seem to be winding down and some stories are best told by the people who experienced them. I’ll leave you with one last screenshot from my conversation with Rex:
I decided to do something a little out of the ordinary with this piece and make it a “mailbag” column. I’d love to actually do a full on letters column but nobody sends them – electronically or otherwise. I barely even get comments and wonder if this format isn’t especially conducive to leaving them as I imagine most of my readers aren’t registered WordPress users.
To be one hundred percent transparent the only reason I’ve gotten these things in the mail is because I’ve ordered them or mentioned not having and wanting them. It would be cool to randomly get stuff as a surprise but I’d have to list a mailing address and I don’t have a PO Box yet. I’d happily give my address to anyone who asked, after quickly vetting that they were neither a nefarious spam-bot or ill-intentioned fellow meat bag, but that kinda ruins the whole surprise part.
Anyway this will be kind of like a review column except for the fact that nearly everything mentioned here actually came out a decent amount of time ago and at least half of it isn’t available anywhere to purchase.
Finally back in print!
The Pepsi-Cola Addict June-Allison Gibbons : Strange Attractor Press 2023
I’ve been trying to get my hands on a copy of this book since I first readMarjorie Wallace’s The Silent Twins around twenty years ago. Thankfully a biopic of the same name, while not making much of a splash theatrically, has ignited a renewed interest in the Gibbons sisters’ literary works and a reprint of Jennifer Gibbons’ Discomania is even slated for release on the same imprint later this year.
For those unfamiliar June and Jennifer Gibbons are identical twin sisters of West Indian descent who were born in Great Britain in 1963. They developed an idioglossia, or secret shared dialect, which they used to communicate with each other while refusing to speak to outsiders or even family members for the early part of their lives. Both of them began writing short novels in their teenage years which they were able to have published through correspondence with vanity presses using their income from England’s version of social security money.
After short and awkward courtships with vacationing American boys they went on a minor crime spree of petty burglaries and eventually arson. This led to them being institutionalized against their will for a decade in a hospital called Broadmoor. Jennifer died of heart failure on the very bus that was transporting them to freedom in 1993 and June has since led a fairly private life with her immediate family.
The writing could be classified as Outsider Art – a field where literature seems to sit in the uncomfortable shadow of visual and musical endeavors. Henry Darger’s impressive works on paper were always intended to accompany his written opus In the Realms of the Unreal as illustrations but while these images have been exhibited and reproduced in multiple volumes the text has not been made as accessible.
The publication of Wallace’s book in 1986, while the twins were still at Broadmoor, introduced small selections from The Pepsi-Cola Addict and other works to a large audience and created a collector’s market for the original printing of the book. The thing that always attracted me to the prose was it’s romanticisation of youth and violence in a way that reminded me of works by both S.E. Hinton and Anthony Burgess.
When you add in the fact that the young writers barely left their own bedrooms, much less visited the locales of their stories, you have imaginative works comparable to Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique.
I used to spend time on dedicated discussion boards searching for scans or pdfs of this book and making pacts with other seekers that if either of us were so lucky as to find a copy we would immediately make it digitally available. Unfortunately actual possession of this prize seemed to have a corrupting influence like Tolkien’s famous rings and every time somebody got their hands on one they’d decide to either keep it for themselves or attempt to recoup their spending with astronomically priced photocopies.
Now that the book is easily available to all and I have my own copy in hand I can report on the actual writing. When I first began reading the frequent use of awkwardly verbose synonyms for common words as well as the kaleidoscopic insertion of colors like amethyst and sorghum could be both dazzling and disorienting in turn. Now that I’m a third of the way through I scarcely notice as I am fully in the grips of the narrative and excited to follow these characters to what will no doubt be tragic conclusions.
If you enjoy any of the works I’ve thrown out comparisons to or find your interest piqued by my description it would be worth your time to secure your own copy or request that it be stocked at your local library.
I was embarrassed not to have seen this – spare yourself worse embarrassment and watch it
Friends Forever – A Documentary Film Ben Wolfisohn : Plexifilm 2003
If you read my chapters on either Fort Thunder or my adventures traveling with this band you’d most likely be surprised by the fact that I’d never actually seen this movie but nonetheless that is the reality. This film does not provide a substitution for actually experiencing one of Friends Forever’s legendary van performance’s in all it’s smoke and spark spewing glory but it does some other things remarkably well.
The first thing that struck me was how tangibly it manifested the feelings and textures of both watching and traveling for underground music in the year 2000. The size and energy of the crowds, the meditation and monotony of long drives in between and the constant waiting in an era when nobody had a cell phone and computers for e-mail were things you had to go to instead of carry with you.
I won’t spoil the exact details but there are some amusing miscommunications that remind me a bit of when I booked a Gang Wizard show in a record store and somehow managed to screw up four different details on a single flyer. Nowadays I would probably end up sharing that kind of thing with a touring artist before I even got around to making photocopies but back then it was common to receive a single ambiguous message and fill in what often proved to be incorrect particulars.
I was reading a 2005 interview with Lightning Bolt from The Wire today and Chippendale said something about the evolution of “the scene” that kind of struck a note with me. To paraphrase:
“When it started out it was just our friends and then it grew to include people in other cities that we didn’t know yet but could be our friends…”
He went on to describe how the whole thing expanded one order of magnitude larger which isn’t to say anything negative about the folks that only learned about this kind of music when it achieved wider appeal but rather that one can only have so many friends and there are palpable differences between close-knit communities and ones in a more open stitch pattern.
The Friends Forever documentary was recorded during 2000 when things were still at that “peoplein other cities” stage so watching it is a more intimate experience than what you might have gotten if it was recorded even a year or two later. Friends Forever never really grew beyond a certain point because of their dedication to playing in a way that venues could neither legally sanction or often even pay them for but the shows they were playing in front of did eventually get larger.
One thing I am thankful for is the glimpse this movie provides of the interior of Monkey Mania – a storied Denver, Colorado space I never had the good fortune of setting foot inside of. Once I saw the words Providence, Rhode Island on the screen I knew the movie was about to cover my first experience with the band and wondered what Wolfisohn’s camera would make of Fort Thunder.
Poster by Leif Goldberg
Imagine my surprise when the on-screen text merely described the space as “a club” and showed some footage of the performance in the alley without even mentioning that the crowd was the largest shown up to that point. It made sense though – traveling with Friends Forever meant hanging out with Nate and Josh in their vehicles with their dogs and one space is the same as any other if you never go inside.
Thinking back I can’t remember either seeing a member of the band inside that night or meeting Ben but I would understand the decision to keep the focus on Friends Forever even if the cameras had wandered in.
Wolfisohn’s decision to make this film feels almost prescient when viewed in context of how common this type of documentary would become over the next twenty years and how much of a fixture documentarians would grow to be in underground spaces. There are a good number of reasons to watch it, including if you happen to be a Troma completionist, and there are a host of online buying options.
Hours of Content
Plague TV presents Halloween Special : CthonicCrystal Video 2023
This is one of the two featured items that any reader can actually buy right this minute with the proper count of e-beans and an acceptable drop box. I’m throwing a link on the bottom so that everybody can get theirs in time for the big spooky celebration.
Nate had marked on the dvd that because it has so much content it might be watched in several seatings but instead I popped in after watching Friends Forever. I was hungry for more in an abstract sense but also a little loopy from my nightly Ambien. I enjoyed the feeling of hanging out with a friend while they put on a sequence of short films and music – nicely in the background of the greater hang “sesh”. Being swaddled in media this way felt safe and reassuring in a way I don’t always get to experience.
A little ways in an automated AI called something like DeathAI is introduced to keep things moving. Something about this one screams “trickster” and we wind up with a bit of back and forth banter in the style of Space Ghost Coast to Coast! Withoutthis touchstone it would be harder to draw a comparison – perhaps the Seder dinners with the ignorant, bad and other types of sons.
It stays entertaining and some interesting music and short films make in into the playlist. With my pills kicking in I didn’t get the most of everything – especially Damon Packard’s Children of the Stones but if you’re planning a casual get together of Halloween film rarity enjoyers who might enjoy both a stern and squirrelly announcer character this could be the night for you!
Graveyard Whispers Feel The Wrath : Attention Deficit Black Arts 1998
I covered this band in the recent piece entitled The Loft Intermission and as luck would have it my words reached at least one of the pseudonymous members and my very own copy travelled steadfastly through the night on the wings of a bat to roost within my rural mailbox. You might find it difficult to secure a copy of your own and unfortunately my plans for a rough upload are on hold now that the first listen seems to have cursed the tape deck in my karaoke machine.
It is possible that the device is merely protesting and refusing to play my copy of Duran Duran’s Rio now that I’ve exposed it to true synth darkness with this clearly superior offering and will once again resume turning the moment I reintroduce Feel The Wrath.
(Stand by as I just discovered a forgotten boom box on my back porch containing a copy of Gary Numan’s I, Assassin)
On to the music – most goth bands are a bit self consciously campy but Graveyard Whispers goes for an overtly “fang in cheek” approach. A decent comparison would be fellow San Diegan industrial band Tit Wrench though this latter group doesn’t directly lampoon rivethead tropes in the same way Graveyard Whispers does goth ones. The sound is faithful with some faster aggressive songs like Death Die, Death Die, Black Hair Dye and slower selections like I’m a Moontan Child which works the short prank phone call sketches into it’s remix.
When I first slid the tape out of it’s Manila envelope packaging I thought it was a plain black cassette but closer examination revealed black on black printing. The physical production does not disappoint any more than the music when proper unholy levels are reached. I’m hard at work on an upload but in the mean time some weird collector dudes are unloading recently exhumed dead stock for as low as 80 dollars.
Or you may get a little luckier as I was and be blessed by the night for a bat to flit through your window grasping the recording in it’s formidable talons…
Better Uploads Soon
The Super Natural Peepshow Steve Lawrence : [unknown printer circa 1996]
I once had a conversation with my friend Tetsunori about how he used to catch wild beetles in Japan so he could trade them with his schoolmates for holographic and foil stamped trading cards. He described visiting his grandparents in the countryside and spreading out a bedsheet with honey in the center on the edge of a grassy meadow. In a kind of low-tech precursor to Pokémon schoolboys would collect living insects and even battle them against each other.
I was fascinated and asked a million questions about the different species and their relative strengths and weaknesses. At first Tetsunori tried his best to answer my queries but eventually he shouted out in exasperation:
“I don’t know man! I don’t care about fucking beetle I just wanted card!”
The broad appeal of trading cards is responsible for me getting my hands back on this artifact nearly thirty years after it was first printed in what seems like a minor miracle. When my friend Steve Lawrence first converted his oil paintings into this format to sell at the San Diego Comic Con at least one buyer acquired a set out of interest in the trading card in general. Steve has been homeless around Los Angeles for just over two decades and hasn’t been spotted by a friend or acquaintance in at least half of one but a lucky Google search led me to an eBay card-monger across the country with a set to sell.
Steve’s current circumstances are somewhat akin to the quantum puzzle of Schrödinger’s Cat – in the absence of either proof-of-life or it’s morbid opposite it makes sense to assume the best. I’ll be dedicating an entire chapter to Steve, his multiple creative pursuits and the profound influence he had on me as a budding aesthete but for now I’ll focus on his painting work and this card set.
He was a dedicated reader of Juxtapoz and closely followed the associated “lowbrow” art movement – looking back at his work now the influences of Robert Williams and Kenny Scharf are unmistakable. At the same time there is an innocence present in his canvases that hints at his earlier years spent operating a twee-pop record label called rugcore. Considering his laborious process of carefully layering oil paints until patches of color became finely detailed menageries of figures from vintage toys and his own imagination he churned out work at astonishing rate.
In the three or four years following the production of this card set he further honed his visual vocabulary on a handful of canvases that may well be lost to time. These cards are alarmingly flimsy, an issue with either their printing or the photographing of the actual paintings made nearly half of them come out too dark and I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to buy them again.
Some folks who have led lives less chaotic than mine might well still have sets in their possession but I seriously doubt this object will ever be available for purchase anywhere again.
************ BEWARE OF THE EVIL OF ********* ***************SELF PROMOTION**************
Hand tied 81/2” x 7” booklet with hand glued color plates and six song lyrics
DIVING GOD / CASTLE FREAK SOLO MUSICALS : Wicca’d World Press 2023
I made a few of these things earlier this year and sent a few to friends, a zine faire and an online shop. After doing Bleak End at Bernie’s for a while I decided to shift my approach and produce a pair of consecutive musicals in which I’d be the sole vocal performer. In each case I enlisted a group of friends to help with music.
The first is called Castle Freak and examines the period of time where the beast from Grimm’s fairytale is entirely alone. He strikes out at his lavish surroundings with boorish fury, he dreams of the day he was cursed while questioning if his true tormentor ever left his side. He seeks for the innocent maiden that might save him but worries that he will only end up dragging her down into his personal hell.
The music was recorded in New Mexico with Dain Daller, Amander Speer, Sam Giles and a couple of samples for animal and weather sounds. Staging included elaborate makeup, a platter of disrespected grapes and chicken and finally a silver plated goblet to be thrown through a mirror.
The next piece was Diving God – continuing the theme of wretched men alone in exile it features Lucifer from Paradise Lost as he is cast from heaven;
“Prayer doesn’t suit you, you who rebelled. Heaven still bleeds through the hole where you fell. This is your future this is your fate. This is your nature this is your state…
For this one I put together an improvised lounge jazz band in Chicago with Henry Glover – drums, Liam Warfield – bass, Dain Daller – Farfisa, Amanda Speer – saxophone and Jeffrey Rocketmild Jefferson on clarinet with Lucifer on vocals. After two very brief practices we were ready to perform.
Although I had undoubtedly made them this way it saddened me that these pieces would simply cease to exist after as little as one performance. I thought how I might give them new life and decided on illustrated libretto. A big inspiration was a fancy printing of Milton’s Masque of Comus. I thought about packaging them with a recording of an audio rip from spectator’s uploads but went the awkward way of printing links to the actual videos instead.
Someone suggested a QR Code while I was in the copy shop but unfortunately I didn’t think of that.
I have a few copies left of the first run of 25 that can be had for $10 ppd in US with shipping discount for multiple copies. Message berniebleak@gmail.com to claim your copy.
[Author’s Note: I did not create this image and forget the name of the DMT website I yoinked it from. If this is your work I’m happy to either take it down or credit you]
The bits of San Diego history I’ve been exploring over the last couple chapters, both my own experiences and things before my time, have been a super fun rabbit hole and, more relevantly to what will follow, have gotten me in touch with a handful of the covered artists. This translates most importantly into an opportunity to fact check so I thought I would repeat some sentiments that I first laid out in a little site description or bio somewhere.
Mainly that until these pupal words find their way to an instar as ink on paper everything here is a work in process. On that note I want to take an unambiguous editorial stance on the entirety of these contents: if I call you an asshole assume I’m doing it with my chest out but if I said I saw you wearing faux-snakeskin boots when they were actually the real deal then by all means set me straight.
For the first of these situations it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out where I live (and I assure you I’m as useless as scolding a cat when it comes to a physical confrontation) but for the second one it’s most fastidious to either send an e-mail or message me on any of my social medias. On that note I will be amending several details of the previous entry the moment I finish typing this diatribe.
That put’s me in mind of some other bits of housekeeping I’d like to mention. I don’t often see these installments from an end-user perspective so I’m not entirely certain how many ads there are at this point or how much of a hindrance they pose to the average reader. I’m not making any money on them. I don’t pay to use this website and as the saying goes “if it’s free – you’re the product”.
I’d love to transfer everything to more copacetic surroundings but as I can’t seem to slow down the feverish pace I continue to write at I’d probably need some assistance.
Back to the question of veracity. It is of course possible, especially when wandering outside my own personal experience, that I may become purview to conflicting reports of perceivable phenomena due to a diversity of informants. In fact this very thing has happened multiple times already – mostly in the locality of who played what on a recording or fulfilled what role in the mastering or engineering booth.
I regard these as cordial disagreements between friends and for the most part try to stay out of it as I’d hate to do anything as vulgar as hazard a conjecture on the most likely explanation based only on my opinions of those involved.
On that note I am trying my hardest to avoid cliches and empty platitudes. To my eternal shame I referred to a live performance I barely remembered as “amazing” in one of my earlier pieces. I don’t want to patronize or waste anybody’s time by throwing words at things that didn’t make an impression the first time around in which case I would have had an actual adjective.
When you hear something like “he’s got a lot of heart” what is actually being communicated is that a person is poor. Rich people have hearts too but they use their resources to obscure the actual location of them, like an evil wizard in an Arthurian legend, so that it is more difficult to stab them in them.
A better thing to say might be that a particular person is vulnerable. At least that way it doesn’t sound like a half handed apology for circumstances that most likely are the result of factors present before an individual’s birth in the first place. Nobody wants to be vulnerable but some do find their way to a certain grace concerning this state of being easily wounded – and that is actually commendable.
This vulnerability is why Poverty Culture is an Honor Culture and insults will always have consequences within a certain echelon of the general public. If your reputation is the only thing you have it makes sense to fight for it and if you have everything in the world it makes sense to be unbothered about what anyone might think about you.
On that note I won’t be talking about how anyone that’s died used to “light up a room” or “give you the shirt off their back”. The ranks of those that did not make it included multiple people that I deeply did not fuck with and I won’t be disrespecting their memories by suggesting otherwise. I’ve also been in rooms that got real dark real quick and can’t pretend the cause wasn’t good friends who are now buried.
There’s a certain irony to the now popular use of the phrase “Goodnight Sweet Prince…” that should be apparent to anyone familiar with the near-nominative tract by Machiavelli.
Because I have had the experience of living in the world I am well aware that being exposed as a user of certain hard drugs, especially heroin, will greatly reduce the regard in which a person might be held by their peers. When I expose myself it should be obvious that I am leveraging the damage I am inflicting on my own reputation against the small degree this may serve to rehabilitate the reputation of junkies in general.
It isn’t actually a crime against one’s community to be a junkie in the same way it is to be a liar and a thief and despite certain unsavory stereotypes the two are not synonymous. You don’t have to be rich to be an ethical junkie you just have to have principles that do not end at the edges of your own discomfort. Of course I’m not saying that I’ve never committed either of those cardinal sins but I certainly haven’t made either one a habit.
I used to have an expression that I would use as a kind of motto:
“Nobody wanted to be a village elder”
I made it up out of a sense of revulsion I experienced when I first spent time in the underground of Iowa City. It was a reaction to the way hordes of insufferable college kids attempted to emulate the handful of broke bohemians. It seemed like “a poor place to be held in high regard”.
Anyway it doesn’t really resonate with me anymore. I’m a lot less judgmental these days and good hearted earnest lames don’t really give me the ick the way they used to. Now that I’ve effectively aged out of the range of being a prodigy, journeyman or even hack the least I can do is try to pass on what little I’ve gleaned to whoever’s next in line.
This isn’t always easy. You don’t have to be the smartest person in any given room to feel alone or isolated – you just have to think you are. Maybe it’s an occupational hazard of spending too much time as a philosopher but lately I’ve been feeling especially susceptible.
It occurs to me that if what a person had to say was “wise” or “good” it wouldn’t have to justify it’s own existence through the application of flowery language.
On the same note if foolishness, or knavery, wasn’t well articulated what use would it be to anybody at all? Who would want to listen?
I never actually made it to the Juggalo Gathering and I’m not going to pretend to be into their music but I’ve been feeling a lot more affinity with the clown as cultural archetype. I’m glad my now dead friend who I loved Will Leffleur found his way to being the top image in the Wikipedia article of the same name.
Knavel gazing aside for once I find myself without a pithy turn of phrase to encapsulate the “thing I am getting at”.
It’s in the title – these are nothing more, or less, than a few stray musings on the wisdom of knaves…
When I first starting asking around in the Crash Worship group I heard an unfamiliar name in some of the comments – Zendik Farm. In the context it seemed like maybe this was another name for the apartments in an old church by Pokez where JXL and some other folks in the band’s orbit had lived. For the initiated you most likely already know what’s coming.
O oracle and miracle of modern technology I combined the relevant phrases in the search bar of the world’s foremost search engine and out comes a colorful video:
Side B is available from the same uploader
Cool, I thought, an all day festival and live album with some familiar and unfamiliar names. Crash Worship check. Night Soil Man check (a new favorite of mine that sounds a little like Comus). I was nerding out and clicking around on discogs, as one does, when I came to the name Arol Wulf. Expecting a band I next ended up on the entry for Wulf Zendik and from there an unexpected hop to a Wikipedia page.
Holy shit! Exactly how many sex cults are we talking about?
If you’re in a live band you’ve probably played at least one or two shows for either dodgy promoters or as benefits for questionable businesses. PlywoodStock seemed to be an all day festival organized in the name of old fashioned Manson family brainwashing and coercive sex trafficking. I’ve heard a handful of things about Murshid and Circle of Friends over the last few days ranging from “flirty fishing” to “high end yoga escort service” but I was not prepared for what I was about to read on Zendik Farms.
For a sleepy and moderately sized military town San Diego has more than it’s fair share of cult and commune activity, I listed a modest handful in the last installment but you can add to that tendrils of Miracle of Love, The Church of Scientology, International Society of Krishna Consciousness and even a sizable contingent from the commune I was born on: a place In Tennessee called simply The Farm. To be entirely honest some of the things I read about Zendik Farms seemed unpleasantly familiar.
Life on The Farm wasn’t always idyllic as evidenced by the major exodus in the early Eighties that included my family. I found a FAQ from a former Zendik resident that echoed many of the grievances I heard from my parents and their friend circle: poor standard of living, malnutrition, lack of education and a clear hierarchy in what was supposed to be an egalitarian community.
On the other hand the title of this woman’s memoir is Mating in Captivity. While there was definitely social pressure at The Farm for men and women to pair up they weren’t told who they had to sleep with or expected to endure scrutiny into their sex lives the way this woman describes at Zendik. My mother certainly didn’t have to ask permission and get examined with a speculum every time she was intimate with my father.
Both communities could be stiflingly heteronormative.
I heard of gays at The Farm either living closeted or trying to force themselves into the more expected lifestyle only to realize their true tendencies would not disappear after years of marriage and children. I don’t know if Zendik created similar experiences but Wulf’s writings seem to have been overtly homophobic in a way I never saw in Stephen Gaskin’s (founder of The Farm)
I actually wonder about the possibility of some cross pollination between the two. I had a pair of childhood playmates, sisters named Jasmine and Jade, whose mother moved them out to Jacumba around the time Zendik Farms was in the area. I’d heard something about them having troubled adult lives and wonder if they might have been drawn in by Arol Wulf’s charismatic nature.
The larger coincidence is that Zendik Farms and Circle of Friends both had property in the same small town of Boulevard. I wonder if Murshid and Wulf or Arol ever met or how such a meeting would have gone. The timelines don’t perfectly line up though – while the Zendik’s were decamping to Austin by 1991 Circle of Friends seemed to arrive from Colorado around the same time.
It seems possible that Zendik Farms could have even sold their compound to Murshid and Circle of Friends or the specific owner of the land could have shifted loyalties between the two. For now it remains an amusing hypothetical as I need to return my focus back to the Underground Music.
Chris Squire of Crash Worship, Tit Wrench, Battalion of Saints, Heroin and a million other legendary bands kindly provided the above photo and some corroborating details:
Squire’s band Lectric Rek was omitted from the live album
I might have been overstating things when I described PlywoodStock as using the participants music for sinister purposes. While visitors no doubt got the standard invitation to join this 1988 festival sounds like a mostly innocent opportunity to cut loose, drop acid and rock out far from the eyes of SDPD and Vice squads. Squire definitely cited “frying at four AM and being a WRECK” as an explanation of why his band didn’t make it to the compilation cassette.
Also performing but failing to make an impression on the keen commercial instincts of the Zendik compilationist was a band called Monsters of Rhythm.
The thing that stuck out to me immediately was the clearly diverse lineup of Daddy Long Leggs while San Diego rock was predomimantly white. I found a Reader profile where the band talked about choosing to create a mix of funk, rock, punk and metal instead of emulating the far more popular ska trend at the time. This, and the slightly earlier lifecycle, would explain why I never saw them share the stage when two-tone legends like The Specials came to play at the second SOMA near Old Town.
Members of this group combined with Pull Toys from the same festival to form Casbah legends Creedle and keyboardist Robert Walter now tours with Roger Waters lineup of Pink Floyd.
Moving along – when John Goff first sent me the links to the articles on The Loft’s impending eviction it caught my eye that the post was dated 5/5/2000. I was a bit of a sticker head in High School, cataloguing each new variant and color way of Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant stickers in a special notebook, and I remembered seeing cryptic stickers with the message “ACHTUNG 5/5/2000”.
This turned out to be an early ambient/noise/industrial project of Travis Ryan who is now best known as the vocalist of Cattle Decapitation. The name is based on a prophecy from the Mayan Calendar that the world would end on this date – possibly related to a rare alignment of the outer planets. That was especially interesting to me as I went to Palenque on 12/21/2012 for festivities around the end of the twelfth baktun of the same Calendar that was also widely prophesised to mark the end of the world.
While neither date brought about any particular apocalypse the first of them did mark the beginning of the end for The Loft. It is also interesting how numerologically significant and symmetrical both dates appear in the Gregorian Calendar as they were derived from an entirely different system.
I also thought I had seen the name on some kind of compilation CD which turned out to be In Formation: A Tribute To Throbbing Gristle which Ryan coordinated and released on his Attention Deficit Recordings label. I did have a copy of this CD and used to listen to it fairly frequently but can’t remember if it was given to me by John Goff in San Diego or by Deerhoof when we played together in Chicago.
A couple of interesting details on the artists: I was listening to a lot of Integrity that year after finding a pile of the …And For Those Who Still Fear Tomorrow records at a Maxwell Street creative reuse in Chicago. I literally couldn’t give them away to my hardcore friends at the time but I’d imagine they’d be worth a decent stack of cash if I still had them (there were like 30 on black vinyl). Anyway the point is I was listening to the TG tribute at the same time but had no idea Lockweld and Psywarfare were Integrity adjacent projects.
I also had a few Spacewürm records I’d picked up in discount bins but had no idea of the connection with Kid606 which I listened to a ton of soon after. There was no discogs in those days – I got this kind of information in bits and pieces from conversations with other encyclopedic music nerds. Thanks to the site I now know that Travis was also behind one of my favorite local bands Graveyard Whispers.
Goth was huge in San Diego at the time. I tried to go to Club Soil at the World Beat with an older friend but was denied entry because I wasn’t even 18. My mother had somehow convinced me that goths, or mods as she used the terms interchangeably, painted their faces white with a certain brand of Bag Balm she had in a crinkly old aluminum tube. There must be a kernel of truth in there somewhere but it looked and smelled ridiculous.
That was my only teenage foray into goth fashion paired with an oversized white button up and black leggings. I stood around the alley and listened to Vampire The Masquerade LARPers talk about drinking each other’s blood and witnessed the arrival of a high status scenester named Vlad dressed in Renaissance looking red velvet. I ended up drinking coffee at Denny’s then sleeping in the upstairs portion of Gelato Vero until the trolleys and buses started back up.
Anyway back to Graveyard Whispers – they were a goth parody band. I saw them at either Empire Club or Xanth depending on who owned it that year with my friend’s band Hide and go Freak. The members rode up on chopper bicycles with revving motorcycle sounds through the PA and all immediately lit clove cigarettes. As the set progressed the singer, Rozz’d “Stewart” Williams, was strapped up and hung upside down on some kind of BDSM apparatus.
I need to amend a couple of details now that clearer recollections have found their way to me from a certain horse’s mouth. The show I saw most likely predated Ryan’s involvement and the “BDSM apparatus” was simple exercise equipment. The bit was a buildup to a visual punchline of suddenly revealing ostentatiously sparkly pants under the vocalist’s somber black attire but this was either adopted later or didn’t have quite the “punch” they’d envisioned in a room full of smoke machine fog.
I’ve also learned that their were plans to do a “colonial goth” set involving George Washington (but goth – perhaps George Xymoxington?) outfits and an entrance on a rowboat. This was scrapped with the dissolution of the parent band – Upsilon Acrux. The plan seems almost prophetic with the present popularity of various goth “microgenres” such as the impressive niche Leafar Seyer and Prayers have carved out with cholo-goth.
It was a real hoot and a memory I’ve cherished often through the years. Apparently they released a tape but resellers are asking exorbitant amounts online due to Cattle Decapitation’s well deserved fame. It would be nice if somebody had one and felt like throwing the tracks up somewhere.
Back to John Goff – I thought it was strange that I never spent any time in The Way Out Sound record store if it was next door to Plasticratic. Thankfully Chris Woo came through to solve the mystery for me. According to this clipping it didn’t open until October of 1998 and I had gotten my diploma and run to Chicago then Oakland by that time.
If the quality translates you can even zoom and read this
As is common for intermissions this one will be something of a variety show. Turning back to the “No Roof Action” piece when I first learned that The Loft was at Sixth and Broadway I thought that it might be the same building as the Street Art Gallery show from that piece. It turns out I was extremely close. Here is the excerpt:
There are multiple inaccuracies here
While I pride myself on the detailed nature of my memory the reality is that like anyone else’s it is entirely fallible. I am about to reveal the identity of “Featured Artist” in detail but first I need to correct myself on two points. First he picked up the hammer in self defense rather than over a name dispute. That argument was actually over the tag name of one of his friends and verbal intimidation was more than sufficient.
Second he may or may not have hit anybody with it but he was provoked, threatened and largely outnumbered. Some goons from a rival tag crew had shown up and were trashing the gallery and attacking him. Shepard Fairey would likely remember more specifics.
RIP RAMBO
I am talking about Lance De Los Reyes who created his largest body of work as RAMBO but was writing CHIE at the time of this incident. I was recently reminded of Lance when I saw his cameo in a Safdie Brothers film coincidentally called Daddy Longlegs only to learn that he had tragically passed away.
At this early stage he made images of insect cocoons on scraps of rusted metal and other found object refuse that were displayed on the walls of Pokez before making the jump into Galleries. He had named this show Modest Behavior because Shepard had just introduced him to Modest Mouse and it was directly behind The Loft at 1027 Sixth Avenue.
2000 was the year for this
This opening was about a month after the article about The Loft’s eviction and most likely after the legendary party era there had been over for at least a year. The other artist I really remember from the opening was Grimey aka Bhagavan or “Bugs”. He was good friends with Harmony Korine and the two of them got matching hand tattoos of his trident or pitchfork tag. I thought he might have gotten his name from Circle of Friends but it turned out to be a Hare Krishna thing.
He was very inspired by Norwegian Black Metal and made an entire installation in a recessed part of the space – a darkened area with candles and an atmospheric evil sounding soundtrack. I always think about how ahead of his time he was when I see environmental works from artists like Neckface and hope he is doing well. I was tagging WORM then as a kind of metal logo with a pentagram in the O and a lower case R as a candle so I felt a bit of artistic kinship.
More on Bhagavan via Chris Woo
Me and Francois had a bit of “fame” in the moment due to our highly visible pieces on the California Theater. When Lance learned our “street” identities he was impressed enough to invite us onto the roof and generously offered a pair of desirable paint spots. The show was in the building with the big glass “SPORTS CARDS” sign but we jumped over to the next roof to get at two pieces of wall.
The bit of red wall is The Loft building
Francois’ skills were well beyond mine so he got the cream colored spot visible from Broadway for a JUMP piece while I whiffed whatever I did on the grey wall invisible from this angle. In the course of the night we quickly went from elation at the connections we were making to dismay at the possible consequences of accidentally covering somebody or any other transgression. We quickly gave up painting.
When I started working at my alma mater San Diego High in 2003 or so I picked it back up as a way to connect with my students. I swapped out paint cans for streakers and shoe polish but my bigger focus at the time was on battle rapping and it’s covered in other chapters. I must have painted once or twice with Nick Feather – another friend that we lost far too young to an epidemic that’s only getting worse.
I could have never tracked down these exact details without the hard work of Eric Elms. Eric worked on Shepard’s street team at the same time as Lance and also used to do poster art under the name ADORN. I would always laugh to see the ones with giant pictures of Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock on electric boxes as the prevailing trend in youth fashion and music of the moment was called “Spock Rock” after the boxy black haircuts.
He now does a mix of fine art, design work and the considerable overlap between the two and occasionally uses the name ELMS. You can find his work at:
I will close this intermission with some thoughts from the as-yet-unidentified admin of The Loft at Sixth & Broadway Facebook group. While it doesn’t identify 9/11 as the official end of the era it does reflect many of my own thoughts of San Diego at the time, and it’s Downtown 81 vibe, as well as the “American Underground” as a whole. This is understandable as the developers were very much present and palpable and even if you’re living under it you simply can’t see the shadow of something that’s in the future.
If you could we’d have a word like “foreshadowing” or something…
It’s coming up on, if today isn’t actually the exact date of, the one year anniversary of me starting this writing project. Unfortunately I obfuscated the dates of the first handful of pieces in an attempt to impose chronological order without having to pay WordPress for a table of contents plug-in. The site is as messy as ever but this will be the 135th post with total all time views inching toward 21k from viewers around the world.
Running the numbers that works out to one new post every 2.7 days which doesn’t seem too shabby but I’ll leave the judgements as to where this output sits on the quality/quantity continuum to others.
I’m no closer to my original goal of publishing a book unless you count having at least several books worth of unsorted material. What I view as the largest stumbling block remains stubbornly in place – what I intended to be an ethnography of underground culture is looking more and more like a memoir. As my only tool of documentation has been my own memories I’ve found it next to impossible to nudge myself out of the viewfinder of the camera of my mind’s eye.
As the character Chester Kent says in Guy Maddin’s criminally under-appreciated film The Saddest Music in the World:
“I’d say you qualify as the star of your own life.”
For any readers who share my concerns you’ll be relieved to hear that the central focus of this chapter is a nexus of culture where I never set foot at all. To get there you will need to accompany me for a text version of a now popular genre of YouTube video: an internet rabbit hole research detective story. The trail began when one of my earliest pieces dredged up a fragment of memory from an old acquaintance and intermittent mentor.
I’ve brought up Martin Bilben and his art space Plasticratic one or two times in passing but for this piece a closer gaze is appropriate. I forget what first brought me to his home and workshop but the most likely explanation would be that he hosted a group show that included some of Steve Lawrence’s paintings. At Fourth and Laurel it was just close enough to San Diego High School to come around during an open campus lunch or after school.
He was best known for making colorful lamps with a retro futurist aesthetic but my primary attraction was to the hoard of audiovisual gadgetry he’d assembled. Although I don’t remember ever seeing a performance he collected electric organs and used them to create music roughly comparable to Mr Quintron from New Orleans and Providence’s John Von Ryan.
The fact that he tangentially figured into my experience with The Make-Up that I chose to highlight as origin story caused me to reach back out after decades when beginning this project. Without his encouragement, advice and occasional proofreading in those first weeks it is unlikely that these writings would have persevered to their present stage.
I will link the piece that triggered his recollection here but the relevant passage involved nearly dying to a booby trap as me and Francois were breaking into the shuttered California Theater to paint graffiti.
We had gotten into a routine of chatting after I posted each new chapter, then a daily occurrence, and our conversation that night included this unassuming element:
San Diego has something of a reputation for cults – the world famous Heaven’s Gate mass suicides, UNARIUS and a chapter of Psychic TV adjacent Temple ov Psychick Youth are a few of the more famous examples. I hadn’t heard of anything like what Marty was describing though and the idea of an entire cult squatting the same derelict structure seemed fascinating. I tried to tease out more details or suggest that maybe he was thinking of the Jyoti Bihanga group on Adams Avenue but everything led to a dead end.
Here is a picture of Sri Chimnoy from Jyoti Bihanga lifting the FDNY
My next move was to go to Reddit. On r/sandiego I posted the scant details I had to see if anyone could fill in the the blanks. While I didn’t get anything concrete one commenter both reaffirmed Marty’s story and added new tantalizing details.
Thanks to u/satanic-frijoles for this vital clue
I now knew that not only was a yoga cult of some kind occupying a large downtown space, it was also filled with cutting edge computers and animation software. Amigas were of special interest to me as I grew up with a Commodore 64 and would drool over the box art of Amiga releases while renting software for my older computer at a La Mesa shop called The Commodore Connection. It looked light years ahead of the graphics on my friend’s Nintendos.
Unfortunately the comment also emphasized what was ultimately a red herring. The repetition of C Street kept my focus on The California Theater and the squatters that had inhabited it. The guy who chased us out and rigged up the fire escape had been playing a computer game the first time Francois and I tiptoed past his open apartment.
As unlikely as it now sounds I had convinced myself that the person I’ve dubbed “The Ogre of the California” once led a cult and attracted a gaggle of young attractive female followers. As is so often the case the truth proved to be far stranger than the fiction.
Without new leads and with other stories asserting themselves in my memory the mystery found it’s way to one of my back burners. I shifted focus to Fort Thunder, El Rancho and 134 other chapters worth of recollections but never quite gave up the chase. San Diego is full of intriguing legends: the story that finding all three troll bridges in a single night (there are only two of them) would cause an actual troll to materialize; the existence of a community of miniature houses built for actual dwarves and others I can’t think of at the moment.
Something about this story about a cult in an abandoned theater told me that it had to be based on a truth and when I found that truth it would justify however much time it took me to find it. In a strange way I could feel this story pulling to me, like the invisible forces created by a powerful magnet, even though I had never seen or experienced it’s elements in a physical form.
Things didn’t really change for close to a year. Every now and then something would remind me of this story and I’d start poking into it again. I found a blog called Hidden San Diego that had a piece on the California Theater. It had a lot of great pictures of the interior and some vague sentences and comments about squatters but nothing that sounded like either a cult or whatever I was looking for.
A little over a week ago an unrelated Reddit post pointed me toward a documentary on the San Diego music scene called It’s Gonna Blow!. This got me thinking about everything I had missed out on from a combination of youth and questionable taste. Crash Worship sat at the top of this list – even at a time when my favorite book was the issue of Re/Search with Burroughs, Gysin and Throbbing Gristle and my favorite movie was Tetsuo: The Iron Man I somehow thought a Crash Worship show sounded like a “stupid hippy drum circle” and simply didn’t go.
With that fresh in my mind I stumbled across an interview with Alaura O’Dell – better known to fans of Industrial Music as Paula P-Orridge. I had actually managed to see Throbbing Gristle on their very last tour but some details in the interview reminded me that Temple ov Psychick Youth at least had members, if not an entire cell, in San Diego.
To be clear I never thought that the mysterious theater cult was actually TOPY but I did figure there might be enough crossover to get some solid leads on whatever I was searching for. I joined a Facebook group that used the acronym TOPI – my first assumption had been that the final I was adopted to distance themselves from Genesis Breyer P-Orridge but the opposite was actually true. Genesis had chosen TOPI after splitting with the first incarnation of TOPY but regardless of final vowel the group claims no affiliation or association with Gen’s controversial legacy.
A lead seemed to materialize but the person was actually thinking of an old church by Pokez where members of Crash Worship had lived.
At this point I thought to message a friend who still lives in San Diego. He had some interesting tidbits of information: a pornographic film most likely shot in San Diego by Sleazy and Monte Cazzaza included on a VHS called Psychic TV First Transmission; the as-yet-unconfirmed sculpture of a beetle outside The Natural History Museum with a Psychic Cross imprinted in it’s back (I’d appreciate a photo of this if accurate and someone can take one)
All roads seemed to be leading back to Crash Worship so I joined another Facebookgroup and posted there. I got some interested comments and compliments on my other writings but that was it. I decided to start writing anyone from San Diego that was older than me and involved in the Industrial scene. A message to Bob Barley from Tit Wrench and Vinyl Communications is most likely languishing in his requests folder as we aren’t Facebook friends.
That’s when I started getting replies back from John Goff.
I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that John had played in Crash Worship although it was something I knew. I had been a fan of Physics in my teenage years, I was a science geek and originally majored in it, and got to see them in Chicago in 1999. I had met John a good handful of times and even exchanged some messages ten years ago when I misremembered the name of his Wizards of War project with his brother as Bishops of Battle after watching the 1983 film Nightmares.
John said he knew exactly what I was talking about and sent me my own Reddit post from a year earlier. I started to feel a bit like a snake swallowing it’s own tail, like the only evidence for what I was searching for were my own digital footprints and Marty’s hazy memories were only the result of, in his own words “a vial of lsd, gallon of ghb, and a steady supply of tj pharms”.
Just as I was starting to give up hope John blew the whole thing open.
The building was never a Theater but a four story structure at Sixth and Broadway called at various times The Loft, The Hypnoloft, The Dildo Dave Loft and finally The World Evolution Loft.
The cult was a Sufi based group founded in Colorado called Circle of Friends which is almost impossible to Google unless you add in the pseudonym of it’s leader Murshid Van Merlin.
He dropped in this next link with the simple message:
Since that first click the information and stories have been pouring in. From roughly 1992 to 2000 this building was home to more than I could possibly imagine: a truly shady sounding yoga cult, legendary parties in multiple genres of music, the world’s first computer edited magazine and the world’s first amateur video pornography studio, the biggest producers in West Coast underground rave culture and even the most infamous party in San Diego Comic-Con History with appearances from Roger Corman and Glen Danzig.
It seems ironic that the same year this place ended I travelled all the way to the other side of the country to see Fort Thunder while all of this was happening right under my nose and I wasn’t there for any of it. I’ve been collecting stories for the past few days and expect to keep hearing new things for some time to come.
I just watched a documentary about the mid-nineties San Diego underground music scene called It’s Gonna Blow! that I would definitely recommend checking out if the subject at all interests you. I just about missed out on everything featured in the documentary – I wouldn’t have been old enough to go to The Casbah but there were most likely all ages opportunities I didn’t take advantage of.
Most embarrassing is the fact that my friend Kevin who would later form The Beautiful Mutants invited me to come see Crash Worship at The World Beat Center but in my infinite fourteen year old wisdom I thought it “sounded like a stupid hippy drum circle”.
Around the time that I was in Ninth Grade friends at school would show me CDs for local bands they were into: Three Mile Pilot, Heavy Vegetable and Blink before they had to add the -182. For whatever reason I never asked to borrow or get a copy of any of it. The closest thing I did to checking out the local scene that year was accompanying my parents and grandfather to see the folk group The Electrocarpathians at the soon to be shuttered Better Worlde Galleria.
Not long after I started going to a tiny spot in El Cajon called the Soul Kitchen to see the punk bands forming out of SDSCPA – an arts focused high school that my sisters and most of my friends went to but my mom wouldn’t let me because I had to do the IB program at San Diego High. This included a precursor to The Beautiful Mutants called The Mutant Turtles, Diana DeLuna’s group The Vendettas and the late Nick Galvas’ project Wingdilly.
Many of the groups featured in the documentary also would have played there but they didn’t share bills with my younger friends and El Cajon was too much of a haul on buses to just check out casually. In the end the closest I ever got to the Golden Age of San Diego Alternative and Post-Rock was watching Lucy’s Fur Coat at some kind of free Balboa Park event and the two years where the former bassist of aMiniature was my High School Physics teacher.
One thing that they talked about for a lot of the documentary that I definitely did not miss out on was San Diego’s endemic violence – a result of the proximity to USMC base Camp Pendleton and the long term popularity of the skinhead lifestyle. Luckily for me the Marines almost exclusively frequented over 21 drinking establishments so in my teenage years I almost never came into contact with them. I say almost because I did have an unpleasant run in while riding the trolley.
Once I started going to school downtown and got my hands on a bus pass I became a dedicated thrifter and a bit of a clothes horse. On this particular day I was wearing a cheap costume style black bowler hat, blocky laboratory safety glasses with translucent red frames and a snap up black vest of an almost plastic like synthetic material over a red turtleneck. A large group of Marines thought I looked like a member of the band Spacehog and wanted to kick my ass because of it.
If anything my outfit on that particular day was more influenced by Devo but I didn’t press this detail. I got the fuck off the trolley and considered myself fortunate that they were too concerned with reaching their destination, most like the Tijuana border crossing, to follow.
In contrast the skinheads were a constant fixture in environments that I was spending a lot of time in – third wave ska shows. Judging by what people were saying in the film Nazi Skins, also known as Boneheads, were a significant threat at San Diego live shows in the Eighties but I can’t remember ever seeing any. Many of my friends would talk about how red and white laces in Doc Martens were code for Nazis and white supremacists but despite constant vigilance I never ran into anyone rocking these colors – the skinheads around were mostly Sharps.
Sharp is an acronym for Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice and they typically wear yellow bootlaces although black laces also seemed to be popular. Ostensibly they were supposed to fight and defend the scene against Nazi skins but if these clashes ever happened I never saw them. I would say they liked to fight but I never actually saw them fighting either – they would just typically look for a defenseless target to beat the shit out of.
I decided not to use his name but the one Black guy in the group of gutter punks that hung out with my sister later morphed into a Sharp Skinhead. He also got really muscular around this time – I remember somebody saying that he looked like a Ninja Turtle. One night at a party he got into some kind of disagreement with a wispy little indie rock looking guy and broke the dude’s fingers.
The person in question immediately started screaming out the N word so it was hard to feel too bad for him but the entire situation just felt sad. Besides being unpleasant to be around this kind of violence could often get a show or party broken up by cops – and if Skinheads were around it was nearly an inevitability.
We also had the militant straight edge flavor of Skinheads in San Diego. Not long after Off The Record opened it’s North Park store by 30th and University a local ska band called Unsteady played a free afternoon concert there. Francois was living about a block and a half down the alley and had just gotten into wearing a little crocheted cap in the signature Rastafarian colors,
The straight edge skins decided he looked like he was stoned and were threatening to beat the shit out of him. This was especially ironic as Francois and I were essentially straight edge ourselves at the time – we just didn’t write X’s on our hands or refer to ourselves as such. There wouldn’t have been anything wrong with either of us being stoned but at that point in time neither of us had tried marijuana or a single alcoholic beverage.
My father was also at this show and seeing how the music was essentially a form of reggae he decided to spark up a joint and offer it to anyone in the crowd that might be interested. Actually he did this at every live music event regardless of genre. The straight edgers shifted their violent overtures to him and unlike the situation with Francois they were not about to be redirected.
We had to slip him out through the alley and wait a while in Francois’s apartment because they even tried to follow us.
So many things about this are infuriating: the fact that a group of muscle heads would feel justified in ganging up on a single good natured and diminutive hippy man with visibly graying hair, the fact that they unironically considered themselves fans of a music form from actual Jamaica and didn’t see the contradiction in their actions but most importantly the fact that this behavior constantly went unchallenged in all of the spaces throughout our community.
That was San Diego though – I’m not sure when it first started and couldn’t say whether it’s in the past now but now that I think about it nearly every time I’ve been physically assaulted has been in my home city. I might have missed my chance at seeing early Three Mile Pilot and Crash Worship but this was one aspect of San Diego’s underground that was simply unavoidable.
This next incident took place on Valentine’s Day of either 2004 or 2005. It was during the period of time when I was with the girlfriend I’ve referred to as a “New England Pedigree Girl” and after we’d started using heroin together. She was working late somewhere, most likely a night game at Petco Park, so I went to this party without her but not before leaving a Valentine’s Day gift on the kitchen table of our apartment.
I had made a heart shaped card out of construction paper with two rattlesnakes facing each other and the message Fangs for being my Valentine. The inside said Happy Valentines Day Let’s Get Stung – a reference to both a colloquial expression for venomous snake bites and the second part of the gift: two capped syringes loaded up with black tar heroin resting in a champagne flute.
This is mostly not relevant to the story that is about to follow except for the detail that I would have been on a small amount of this drug when the ensuing events took place – but not to the extent of nodding out or anything.
The party was at a house that my friend Bryan Welch had just started renting with some other kids from the scene I can’t remember the names of. When we were still in High School he lived with his mother in Mission Hills and was clearly in a higher economic bracket than my family. The first time I ever went to his house he put on the Laurie Anderson song O Superman and while I immediately dug it he was already a bit of a music snob and I was nervous to display my ignorance by asking the name of the artist.
This resulted in me mistakenly buying the Barbra Streisand Superman album the next time I saw it in a Thrift Store and being severely disappointed when I got home and put on what I thought was the same song.
Anyway this new house he was living in was super fancy. It had a vintage Malm orange metal fireplace in the center along with some other mid century furniture and an actual bar that was very much in use. I can’t remember if it was just a rent party or if they were raising money for some other cause but they were slinging an assortment of fancy cocktails including one that was served in an actual coconut.
I should mention that this last beverage lost quite a few points in presentation due to the fact that somebody had forgotten to pick up straws and this detail was only divulged the moment the drink had already been paid for and was being deposited into the buyer’s hand.
Anyway some Skinheads showed up – I’m not sure if they called themselves Sharps but they definitely weren’t straight edgers or Nazis. As they always do they searched the party for somebody to beat up on and selected a pair of French guys most likely because they figured they wouldn’t have any friends there. To reiterate I have never once seen a skinhead looking for a fair fight.
One of the French guys got sucker punched and things were about to get uglier. While everybody looked unhappy about this turn of events nobody was actually doing anything about it. I am absolutely not a fighter but after dealing with this shit since my teenage years I hit a breaking point where I wasn’t going to just powerlessly watch it happen. I placed myself in front of the next targeted French guy and addressed the skinhead preparing to swing on him:
“You can’t fight here. Fighting is gonna get the party broken up. If you want to fight you have to take it somewhere else.”
I am fairly tall at six feet and four inches but I’ve always been thin and gangly. I should also mention that I had dressed up for the holiday: a pink pair of Gloria Vanderbilt twill jeans and a floral printed button up in pinks and purples. My hair was long and I was most likely wearing heavy eyeshadow in complementary colors. I might not have been as bold if I didn’t figure that looking stereotypically effeminate might have a protective effect.
With this first guy it basically worked the way I had planned. He tried to shove me out of the way but I’ve been in my share of mosh pits so I planted my feet and did not waver. He tried a couple more shoves but I remained steadfast and repeated what I had just said. As I was hoping he didn’t look at me as a person he could actually swing on so he finally growled in disgust and angrily stomped off.
Unfortunately one of his companions had no such compunctions. This skinhead was a Mexican guy with the body type that basically looks like a bowling ball with arms and legs sticking out – he probably wasn’t as tall as me but it wasn’t a big difference. He had watched everything that just transpired and now placed himself in front of me:
“Why were you talking shit to my friend just now?”
“I wasn’t talking shit. I told him there’s no fighting at this party because there’s no fighting at this party. Fighting brings cops.”
Without a word he turned and walked over to the back of a pickup truck with camper shell that was parked at the curb about fifteen feet away. He lowered the tail gate and then rubbed his hands together with glee like he was about to eat something delicious in a cartoon. He then pulled out a wooden baseball bat, hefted it over his shoulder and strolled back to where I was standing with a newly smug and self satisfied expression:
“Let me rephrase that. Why were you talking shit to my friend just now?”
I should clarify that I am well aware that not every person that dresses or identifies as a skinhead is like this. The first time I ever met my friend Lil Four she looked like a skinhead. It was 10th Grade and she was going to a dance at my school with me and a girl named Anne Gregory. We had taken the bus to where she lived by the beach with her mother to pick her up.
The movie The Nutty Professor had just come out and her mother evidently had a crush on the fat suit version of Eddie Murphy. She had cut multiple pictures of this character out of newspapers and framed them around the house. Lil Four, or I should say Danielle as she was going by her original name, seemed a little embarrassed by this.
She had a bleached Chelsea cut and wore a green bomber jacket over her dress. The dress was red because the three of us had coordinated a red and black theme for our outfits. I wish I still had the photos but they disappeared when I lost the box of papers going back to Kindergarten from my parents’ house. Anyway I’ve known plenty of other perfectly charming, pleasant and not especially violent skinheads.
But then there are the ones like the guy who is threatening me with a baseball bat. He’s already three times my size, I’m clearly incapable of fighting and I’m dressed like a stereotypical pansy. He could probably seriously injure me with one arm tied behind his back but that isn’t good enough for him. He needs a vicious weapon too so he can not just completely dominate me but put me in the hospital while he’s at it.
I remember feeling disgusted but I forget if I actually said anything or not. I turned my back on him and slowly walked back into the house. Of course I was worried that he could easily swing at the back of my head but in the moment it felt like the best available course of action. I tried to project certain things: disdain, an absence of intimidation and dismissal in the proper balance so that he would feel too foolish to retaliate in force.
Once I got inside my sister helped to find me a ride to get out of there. Just like I had done with my father years before I was smuggled out through the back. A friend pulled a car to the side of the house and I climbed into the back seat so I could lay out of sight and he drove me home to my girlfriend who was waiting for me to come do drugs with her.
I don’t know what happened with the party or the French guys after that. Maybe the skinheads renewed their attack on them or found a new target or simply left. I felt a bit disappointed that nobody had stepped up to back me up in the moment, after all there were so many more of us than them, but at the same time I understood. Everybody there had grown up with this exactly like I had and I had just stood by countless times before reaching a point where I had to stand up and do something,
Everybody had to reach this point for themselves and it may well never happen at all.
Nothing about it is easy.
As fate would have it this wasn’t the only time I got threatened by a skinhead with a baseball bat in San Diego. This other incident might have been a little before or after the one I just described but I feel fairly certain it was within a year. I was performing at the Che Cafe with Raquel – either as Sex Affection or right after we changed the name to Hood Ri¢h.
The show was sparsely attended and there were some especially aggressive younger kids there who kind of looked like skinheads and kind of looked like Circle Jerks era thrash punks. I can’t imagine who they would have been there to see as it would have been a mostly experimental flavored lineup – maybe xbxrx. Regardless they were lightly heckling us so I was heckling them back and said something about coming up so we could start a “big gay mosh pit”.
I confess it’s not especially clever. While the Che is officially an alcohol free venue I’d been drinking something, probably Captain Morgan and Vanilla Coke, from an innocuous opaque cup. I probably thought they were most likely homophobic and it would get under their skin.
Evidently it did.
A kid in a red and black plaid flannel ran up to the stage and started throwing punches. My friend Andreas later said it looked like I was expertly dodging every one of his swings but it was actually dumb luck. In the moment my first thought was that he was coming to dance with me and when I bobbed my head from side to side it just so happened to neatly avoid each successive strike. It caused me to drop and spill my drink which was probably for the best.
Andreas is an absolute teddy bear who I’ve never seen in another altercation but to his credit he sprang into action and quickly ejected my assailant from the side door and told him he wasn’t coming back in. Now that I think about we would have been sharing the bill with a short lived experimental band called Business Lady. The singer Mikey happened to have a similar build and was wearing an almost identical shirt to the kid who attacked me so for the rest of the night everybody would tense up every time he walked into the room only to relax when they saw his face.
If you’ve ever spent time at the Che Cafe you would know that there is a small circular table toward the rear on the parking lot side where attendees often hang out and smoke cigarettes. It sits in the shadows and due to this relative darkness is almost impossible to see from the inside even though it’s next to the window. Toward the end of the night I was sitting there smoking a cigarette and whoever I was with finished theirs and left so I was out there by myself.
I suddenly got approached by one of flannel kid’s friends. When I try to picture what this kid looked like the first thing that comes to mind is a baseball cap with the bill flipped up and tagged on in the style of Suicidal Tendencies. It actually doesn’t sound like these kids were skinheads at all – the connecting thread is more just the baseball bat as he was also brandishing one in a threatening manner.
He wanted to know why I had – in his words “gotten his friend kicked out”. The way he saw it the person who assaulted me was a hapless victim forced into action against his will by my uncivil and inflammatory provocation. Accountability was clearly wanting but it was difficult to focus on the exchange as a teachable moment when the surrounding circumstances necessitated that my thoughts pivot on how I might extricate myself while avoiding grievous injury.
I don’t know what I said but it isn’t so much about the what as it is the how. After a certain amount of time it becomes instinctual – you either learn how to fight or learn how to avoid fighting or join up with the people creating the situation in the first place. It’s something that marks every person who’s had to grow up there. I’m not saying other cities aren’t violent but just like music there’s regional varieties to everything.
I missed out on a lot of what was going on around me and experienced these things in other cities instead. The first time I saw The Locust was at 924 Gilman in Berkeley and I didn’t really get into hardcore or feel like I was part of a scene until I moved to Chicago. There’s a lot of San Diego bands like The Shortwave Channel that I didn’t start listening to until they’d already broken up.
But when I heard people like John Reis start talking about their experiences of inescapable violence, even though it was before my time in the ‘80s, at that moment I get a very specific feeling:
After Spidermammal I didn’t actually have a band or project again until Sex Affection. Or at least nothing that ever made it as far as either finishing a recording or playing a show. Here are some of the things that didn’t make it: at El Rancho and The Red House me and Nick Buxton did a lot of planning to start a “8-Bit Metal” band called Dragon Warrior based on the U.S. Release of the first Dragon Quest game. This didn’t mean that we would use synthesizers with actual 8-Bit style sound chips but toy guitars, pots and pans for drums and an actual bass because I had one.
We had all the stuff and I even had a four track in those days but we were either too busy being on drugs or too afraid of failure to get around to actually doing it – probably a combination of the two. The imaginary or at least unfinished songs were Dost Thou Love Me? / But Thou Must!, an instrumental power chord bass thing I still know how to play called Imperial Scrolls of Honor and this one I wrote a few lyrics for called The Metal Slime Hath Taken Thee By Surprise!:
“In mortal combat this, first strike shall not be thine!
The honor-less amoeba hath struck thee from behind!”
Some point after I moved back to San Diego me and my older sister Sarah started working on this thing called The Pointy Reckonings – a reference to a threat that Winona Ryder’s character Abigail makes in The Crucible. I must have either written some parts on bass or used our home’s piano and some music software to create at least sketches of the background music – maybe a bit of all of it. We made songs about the vengeful spirits of drowned girls and mocked outsiders with demon familiars: I’ve Got Dark Things To Do My Bidding.
I remember the couple of songs we were working on being pretty okay but I never even recorded any of it on my four track.
Sex Affection started in San Diego in either 2004 or 2005 with a lot of regulars from the bar and party circuit with an emphasis on Gelato Vero employees. I didn’t make it to all of the shows before I became a full time member but I want to say that in it’s earliest incarnations it was an Art Rock band. I did see a performance in the back room of The Casbah that incorporated a maypole on one of the room’s pillars. Some of the songs were starting to include rapping parts and because I was already trying to grab a mic and start rapping at nearly half the shows I went to I was invited in as an additional rapper.
I came on board in a very transitional time where most of the original members were getting bored of and departing the project. Greta left, Jessica left, I’m not 100% sure if Kevin had ever been a member but if he had – he left. This left Mike Bova, Raquel and now me. Most likely a lot of songs were dropped from the set list at this time because the members who sang or played them weren’t there anymore. There must have been more than one song on the earliest shows I played but I only remember the “shady” song.
The song had been written as a way for the various members of Sex Affection to trash talk their exes. I might be wrong about Jessica trashing on Naked Mike in the original version but it for sure had bits of Raquel trashing on Mikey and Bova trashing on Kate. The first little bit of rap I had written for the band was a little couplet at the end of the Kate section:
“And if I were your boss and if I paid your wage
I’d take all your money and lock you in a cage
And then I’d fire you!”
In the standard incestuousness of a small to medium sized city’s underground music scene Kate and Mikey from the checklist of exes ended up in a relationship with each other. Then Mike Bova and Kate hooked back up and started seeing each other again. I didn’t necessarily know this at the time but this involved some pretty blatant cheating on the parts of both Kate and Mike Bova.
I don’t have the same moral outrage around cheating that most of my peers and contemporaries seem to. The thing I always say is that I’m a huge believer in serial monogamy, people leaving relationships where they aren’t happy and pursuing relationships where they will be. I’ve known plenty of stable, healthy and mutually fulfilling partnerships that began as one or both of the partners “cheating”.
I just learned that Raquel and Mikey are seeing each other again and engaged to be married and I’m sure that all of the things they’ve learned about themselves and what they want in a relationship from all of the different relationship experiences they’ve had over the past ten years can only make them better partners to each other. The thing I do get puritanical about is dishonesty. While I don’t see “cheating” as an inherently evil act I do look at lying about it and hiding it that way unless there is some kind of standing agreement between the two partners concerning discretion.
The main moral outrage is 2005 was, for me at least, that Bova had started seeing Kate again but continued to perform the song that trash talked her at our live shows as if nothing had changed. I can’t remember if he was even doing vocals on the song by that point but the fact remained that it was a song expressly written in part to denigrate his then girlfriend and with full knowledge of that fact he stepped onto a stage to perform it multiple times without a single caveat or qualifier.
Of course this wasn’t the only reason for what me and Raquel then did. The Sex Affection we inherited had a thin oeuvre of scraps of songs that had been written or improvised by the revolving door of former members and Raquel and I were feeling like we wanted to write more, practice more and just generally get more serious about where we were going to go with it. For Bova it was still a party band, an excuse to goof off and get some free drinks at Scolari’s Office, and he wasn’t particularly interested in moving past that.
So we met up in secret and rewrote all the lyrics to that particular song to shit talk Bova and inform him that we were kicking him out of the band. He was our friend and this was a super immature and petty thing for us to do. At the very least we should have been transparent with him about how we were feeling and let him in on the joke so he could decide for himself if he wanted to play the final show with the modified version of the song with us or not.
Now that I’m thinking about it, it would even have been cool if he was given the opportunity to prepare some lyrics shit talking us and I realize that this could be a great tradition for bands that are breaking up or changing members. Kind of like wedding vows, except that it’s totally the opposite thing, all the members could prepare special lyrics about all of the different things they hate about each other and being in a band together to share for the first time in front of an audience at their “farewell show”.
This kind of reminds me of a song called “We’re Sick of Music and We Hate Each Other” by The In/Humanity where the lyrics end with “fuck you” followed by all of the band members’ names.
Anyway that’s not what we did at all. I don’t think we even invited Bova to practice and then came up with this plan because we were angry he didn’t show or anything like that that would make it seem even slightly more innocent on our parts. We straight up schemed. I remember exchanging phone numbers with Raquel because even though we’d known each other socially for years we had never had any particular reason to call each other before this point.
I went over to her apartment for what would turn out to be the first of many writing sessions and practices and by the time we were taking the stage at our next Scolari’s show we were the only two people in the room who knew what was coming.
This brings us to the pull quote. The little couplet that I had originally written for the trash talk song had caught on as a viral vocal hook among our friends and the other band members. People liked it. They thought it was funny. At this last show Mike Bova was pretty much just playing guitar (unless it was bass, it was always bass later) but he grabbed one of the microphones to announce the next tune:
“This song is about getting fired!”
Me and Raquel shot each other the kind of look you can imagine this particular circumstance demanded and then we went into it. This isn’t the kind of prank that would be particularly effective if we had been a screamo band but we had been moving firmly toward our later sound of ‘80s style mid-tempo clearly enunciated rapping. You could tell from their reactions that our friends in the audience were understanding every word.
Mike Bova didn’t actually seem to. I will say in his defense that the Scolari’s sound system was fairly rudimentary with a mixing board right on stage so bands could do their own sound and either no monitors or not very good ones. Still it basically seemed like he wasn’t really listening. He went to the bar to grab a drink after the song, like he basically did after every song, and somebody over there explained what had just happened to him and he just never came back on stage.
He did seem to take it really well. My friend Andy Robillard had told me a story a few years earlier about learning that he had gotten kicked out of GoGoGo Airheart the moment he heard them start playing with a different drummer at a show that he had thought he was going to be playing. It sounded like a very unpleasant experience for him but I also think getting kicked out of bands is a more emotionally charged experience for drummers in general – most drummers I know in successful but not percussion-centric bands seem to live with the threat constantly hanging over their heads like the Sword of Damocles.
I’m not sure how I would have felt or reacted if I had been in Mike Bova’s shoes that night but that’s kind of the thing: me and Raquel had been too busy thinking about how clever and right we thought we were to think about how it was going to make him feel. We were never close friends but me and Mike Bova always got along pretty well – both before and after this incident.
There’s way too much to be said about Scolari’s Office – the neighborhood bar that became the home to San Diego’s underground and experimental music scene for most of the aughts, and Hood Ri¢h – the rap group that Raquel and I created after deciding that we had changed so much from the Sex Affection days that the name should change as well, for me to attempt to encapsulate either one of these things in the space left over at the end of this chapter.
Instead I’ll toss in the thing that Weasel Walter said the first time we played as Sex Affection at the Che Cafe. He would have been playing with xbxrx at the time but I knew him from frequenting Chicago’s Fireside Bowl as early as 1999 when he would have been doing The Flying Luttenbachers and other projects. Anyway I was excited to tell him that I was going to also be playing the show but he’d seen us load in:
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 