Tag: Spidermammal

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

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Like the title of Henry Rollins’ 1994 memoir, my first and strongest inspiration was not to pick up any instrument but simply to Get in the Van. Before playing my first live show as Spidermammal I was already going to shows early for bands like Monotract – as much to hang out as it was to ask for help sneaking into the over 21 venues I wasn’t otherwise old enough to get into. Even for the Spidermammal show while I had been composing music and yearned to present it to a live audience the more urgent reasoning was as a pretense to hang out with my favorite band at the time Deerhoof.

In some part this must stem from the role of The Farm in my family mythology. My parents had met each other because of their individual decisions to simply show up at this commune so it only made sense that I would similarly show up once I thought I’d found the cultural and artistic pulse of my own generation. Another factor, somewhat paradoxically, was social awkwardness: after moving to the Bay Area with a couple friends to attend SFSU we failed so completely in making friends with our immediate peer group that we instead began seeking out our idols in underground comix and experimental music.

Symbolically speaking Fort Thunder was the ultimate van: a nexus of the most vital things happening in both the aforementioned music and comix but also the concept of the alternate living space, or punk house, as a form of expression in itself. Things might have wound up very differently if Fort Thunder hadn’t listed their phone number on their earliest web page or Jim Drain hadn’t picked that phone up when I decided to call it or if he hadn’t said “yes” when I asked point blank if I could show up and temporarily live there.

As serendipity would have it all these things did happen and my time at Fort Thunder brought me into contact with Friends Forever.

Even as I was going through a specific obsession with drum and bass duos like Lightning Bolt, godheadSilo and eventually Japan’s Ruins it was easy to overlook the fact that Friends Forever had the same lineup. Part of this was that their music, while incorporating the sludgy metal some of these other groups were known for, also subverted expectations by steering the riffage into exuberant, triumphant marches.

More importantly the overwhelming aspects of the entire live experience served to overshadow the underlying instrumental minimalism. First and foremost the show took place spilling out the side doors of a Volkswagen Type 2 “hippy bus”. This was unprecedented enough at the turn of the millennium but on top of that the music was supplemented by a light show, lasers, smoke machines, bubbles and eventually fireworks and custom inflatables.

I kept in contact with the band, primarily the drummer Nate Hayden who I bonded with over a shared interest in the OTC psychedelic Coricidin, but I wouldn’t cross paths with them again and literally “get in the van” until after returning to California in the wake of 9/11. Friends Forever essentially toured constantly from their beginnings around 1998 until their breakup in early 2005 but I think it was some time in 2002 that I was finally able to meet back up.

I did pass through Denver at least once before that but I didn’t know any way to get in touch with them or that their house was called Monkey Mania. I spent at least one long layover wandering around downtown and asking the teenage runaways and assorted scumbags that assembled on a grassy hill next to a bank if they’d heard of them.

Nobody had.

They had been the subject of a 2001 documentary film of the same name directed by Ben Wolfisohn. The indie documentary space was nowhere near as crowded in that year as it is now and this movie seemed to both reach a larger audience than and bolster the popularity of the band itself. Some of these memories are difficult for me to pin in place but I’m almost certain that a few of them happened before they were joined by a third member: keyboardist Jason or Rudy Bloody.

After briefly glancing at the discogs page it looks like he already was recording with them by that year. I’m ready to be incorrect about a lot of these details but the way that I remember it this first batch of memories happened when it was still just Nate and Josh. At the beginning I wasn’t literally riding in the van but rather following along the tour like it was The Grateful Dead.

My good friend Josh Harper had just gotten a very old car from his grandmother that he called Grandma and I was staying with him at his parents’ Culver City house with our friends Dain and Vanessa. Inspired by a San Diego tradition called Chicken Burrito Madness we were doing a lot of shoplifting, mostly liquor, and nonstop drinking. After catching Friends Forever somewhere in Los Angeles I drunkenly decided to steal a bunch of metallic fabric markers from a Party City on our drive to the Bay Area.

To my future embarrassment I used these to leave some sloppy tags around the inside of Josh’s car that lasted until Grandma eventually died many years later. One of the first places we visited was Berkeley’s People’s Park where an excess of quality shirts in the free clothing bin inspired us to use the markers to make some unofficial Friends Forever merchandise. The one that I remember featured Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: I added marijuana leaves, pills and syringes between his outstretched, gloves hands along with the band name.

Friends Forever were playing that night outside of a San Francisco bar, possibly Kimo’s, so we met back up and presented them with the garments intending for them to be extra merchandise. These shirts became the inspiration for a track called Ossian’s Shirts on one of their final unreleased recordings – once again throwing my entire timeline into question. Regardless, I remember this as the point where I began to ride along with the band.

Nate usually controlled the different aspects of the light show at the same time that he was playing drums but for a couple of shows I was offered a “stage tech” position. I took it seriously – I made sure to only add one new element per song so each one would feel like a revelation. First it was only flashing lights and fog machine, then lasers appeared on the second song and bubbles debuted on the third so the set could end with a mix of all these things.

I don’t know if this was more entertaining for the crowd but I always get bored watching bands like Caroliner if they reveal all of their visual and staging tricks right at the beginning of the set.

The first show I rode along to was at a warehouse space somewhere in San Francisco’s SOMA district. I’d been fascinated with the neighborhood since my year of college in 1998 when me and Francois would walk it’s streets to find pieces by big graffiti artists like Twist and copies of Iggy Scam’s Turd Filled Donut. I remember being taken with the space they performed outside of but unfortunately my only clear memory is a girl at the show leveraging my apparent closeness to Nate to ask if he was romantically available.

I don’t think I knew how to answer.

The next day the show was at a warehouse space near the intersection of Grand and Broadway in Oakland called Grandma’s House. This must have been around the time I met Rob Enbom – Friends Forever was probably playing a few shows or even touring with a band he was in called Vholtz. At that point gentrification had barely touched this part of Oakland and the neighborhood felt chaotic and dangerous in a way that was diminished in later years. Things felt especially tense as we drove in through a sliding gate in the alley through a cloud of hostile and openly aggressive stares from the locals.

I’m not sure exactly how this happened but somehow I had gotten my hand on some syringes and powdered cocaine. The most likely explanation is that I briefly separated from the band in San Francisco and met up with friends who were also IV drug users. Either in person or by mail Nate had given me a copy of a tape he made called Airick Heater : Poison Addict from a period in his life when he had similar interests.

[Author’s Note: I’ve been mistaken all these years in assuming Airick Heater was a pseudonym of Nate’s. Airick Heater is the name of another Denver artist who later moved to Portland and had a club night called Blowpony. While extant copies of this particular tape will still show overt references to IV cocaine use in the liner notes any other inferences are far from definitive.]

I was pretty tactless about that sort of thing in my early twenties and I thought he might still be into it. He definitely wasn’t. Whenever they were on tour the members of Friends Forever were perpetually sober which makes a lot of sense when you consider that nearly all of their sets ended with the police arriving and they needed to be ready to drive away at a moment’s notice.

He wasn’t judgmental about the fact that I was doing it but he was nervous about how the rest of the band or our hosts would react to the same information so I decided to take it to the inside bathroom instead of trying to hit in the van. I stepped out rushing to the sound of wild free jazz saxophones – most likely a set by the band Hospitals.

Friends Forever toured extremely slowly, mostly because the Volkswagen could never go above 60 mph, so they never spent the night where they played if there was a big drive ahead of them. I stuck around Grandma’s House while they drove on into the night. The main thing I remembered about the place was a huge orange and white parachute on the wall and a neighboring unit that had been turned into an impromptu swimming pool.

The next morning I walked up Grand Avenue with Rob so that he could catch a bus to his job at Rasputin Records and I could take a Greyhound back toward San Diego. I discreetly slipped the capped syringe from my pocket to a covered trash can as we walked.

In an odd coincidence my future friends and sometimes collaborators Complicated Horse Emergency Research moved into Grandma’s House when everybody was moving out and renamed the space Count Dracula Africa. They recorded videos in the space of microwaves full of animal skulls and light bulbs. Running the microwave causes the lightbulbs to briefly illuminate in what looks like a random order.

When I met back up with Friends Forever the following year they had just released the album Killball on the Providence experimental label Load Records. Dedicated to the Denver Broncos this album imagines a futuristic form of ultraviolet football and was probably their most successful and widely distributed release. Jason was definitely part of the touring lineup at this point.

Some thematic additions to the live show included using a fan to blow up some tarps that were sewn together and spray painted with their logo and throwing nerf footballs into the crowd with ropes tied around them. The ropes meant that the footballs could be pulled back and thrown over and over. The first show was a small festival in Hollywood in front of that domed movie theater by Amoeba Records.

I wish I could remember the name of the festival. Some other groups playing included the psychedelic folk act The Winter Flowers and Sam McPheeters hardcore supergroup Wrangler Brutes. Whoever organized the show helped Friends Forever drive their van into a part of the courtyard that wouldn’t ordinarily be accessible to vehicles. The night was intended to culminate in a screening of a rare original print of the Penelope Spheeris film The Decline of Western Civilization Part Three.

There were supposed to be a few moderately famous people there for the screening. I remember hearing that one of the footballs from the Friends Forever performance hit Kevin Nealon, the guy that used to do the fake news on Saturday Night Live, and he was pretty pissed about it. The real kicker to the night was that somebody stole the movie from the theater lobby and they had to cancel the screening at the last second.

When feature films still came in two octagonal metal cases for the 35 mm reels it wasn’t that uncommon to leave them sitting in the lobby underneath the projection booth. The things were heavy and you had to carry them up some narrow stairs to get to the projector. Plus the person whose job it was to carry them into the lobby and the person whose job it was to carry them up to the projector were usually two different people.

Anyway this was probably one of the first times that a thief had decided to target this specific vulnerability and make it a problem. Oddly enough I can’t seem to find any media coverage of this night although I’m moderately sure my specific details are correct. This was also one of the early times that I crossed paths with my future friend Ryan Riehle but failed to remember him.

While we were in Los Angeles we stopped by a house that might have been where Ben Wolfisohn lived and definitely some other guys who worked in the special effects industry. I know Nate had moved out to LA to try to do the same thing previously so maybe it was friends from that time and totally unconnected to the guy that made the documentary. Someone I talked to said he was working on a movie called Dead Birds – he described it as “kids go into a haunted house and get turned into weird monsters by ghosts”.

Or something like that.

I suggested that for the kid who gets turned into a monster they could make a body suit so an actor get’s on all fours but it looks like he’s bending over backwards like with his face upside down and his arms and legs twisted around the wrong way. I figured you could have a sequence where somebody’s body is getting bent like that and then when they run around at normal “all fours” speed but it looks like they’re bent the wrong way it’ll look creepy.

I know a movie called Dead Birds did come out but I’ve never looked to see if they used the idea or not. Maybe it had even already been done – I don’t keep up with all the creature effects in all the horror movies. I was just kind of the type of person who always thought I had really good ideas for fields I didn’t even work in.

The energy had been a little weird between me and Jason because I had known Nate and Josh for a couple years but didn’t really know him – or maybe it’s all in my head. The thing that happened was that we had gone by a health food store with bulk bins and me and Nate had bought some granola and I didn’t know at the time but Jason bought some granola too.

So we were chilling at these movie people’s house and what turned out to be Jason’s granola was on the arm rest of a futon and he was eating some. I thought it was the other granola so I was reaching in and eating some too. Every time I did that Jason would twist the bag closed but I just kept obliviously untwisting it and reaching back in for more granola.

This happened a lot of times, at least three, until Jason finally said:

“Hey, I’m not trying to be a dick or anything but I bought this for me!”

That’s when I realized the mixup and apologized. After Los Angeles we drove to some small town on the way to wherever was next – it might have been Riverside. It was Jason’s birthday and the movie Freddie vs Jason had just come out so we went to a movie theater to watch it. After that we all went on this hike up a mountain but it was really dark and we didn’t have flashlights. At least we had a couple of dogs with us so as long as we stayed close to them we could be reasonably sure we wouldn’t stumble off the edge of a cliff because dogs can see better in the dark.

Instead of everybody riding in the van Nate drove separately in a pickup truck with both of the dogs. The way that Friends Forever tour they basically never crash where the shows happen they just keep driving and sleep in the vehicles. I rode with Nate and we’d share the bed in the back of the truck which was comfortable enough except that I’m not really used to sleeping with dogs too. Josh and Jason made jokes about us being gay.

The next year when I met back up with Friends Forever it was the only time I set up a show for them at Scolari’s Office in San Diego. They were touring with Hale Zukas that was a band with Rob Enbom and some other Grandma’s House guys and also the first time I met John Benson. I had booked this local band I thought would be a good match called Electrocrypt that played what I called “psychedelic biker fuzz”.

The band was centered on this older couple of a German prog-rock style drummer with big white poofy hair and this goth granny lady that played a tiny keyboard on a little table with a Rolodex that had all the song chords and some kind of Halloween decoration like a fake spider. The other two members were a bit younger – a guitar player that always wore a leather vest that said Dead Boys, The Damned and his own band name in white out and the singer was like a hair metal guy.

I really dug Electrocrypt’s sound but they didn’t seem to be too popular with the rest of the San Diego scene around my age. They still played a lot. I did all the correspondence with Klaudia, the keyboard player, and she would fill the bottom of every e-mail with internet 2.0 style animated gifs of pumpkins, ghosts and black cats.

I randomly decided to look them back up last December and saw that she’d passed away.

Hale Zukas was named after a paraplegic man that John Benson worked with in his job called Easy Does It centered on power wheelchairs and disability transport. He was just getting into converting diesel vehicles to run on veggie oil and they toured in an ambulance that had been decommissioned after helping in the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks. It would always flip people out at shows because they’d assume that somebody had been injured and the show was probably cancelled.

Anyway there is a clear line from touring with Friends Forever and the work John Benson would go on to do with The Bus from the Living Hell tour and Larry Bus. Their unconventional style of playing out of their own van instead of inside the concert venues obviously inspired the idea of creating a vehicle as concert venue. Beyond that the overall touring energy – last minute shows, being unconcerned with making money and camping out in nature between performances carried over.

Ironically I think this night have been the only time I ever saw Friends Forever play inside instead of doing the van thing. There was already some static with Scolari’s over Hale Zukas wanting to bring in their own PA so maybe they decided it would just be better to streamline things. Friends Forever did play on the curb outside this same bar in either late 2002 or early 2003 though because I just saw it in the Friends Forever Documentary 2 that came out on VHS on Animal Disguise Records.

It also clearly didn’t bother the venue because you can see the popular bartender who used to breathe fire to amuse patrons happily dancing with their inflatable. I forget his name but he died of heart disease not long after. I’m in the same video wearing a skirt I made out of colorful tapestries.

Everybody stayed over at my parent’s house which eventually led to John Benson bringing my mother a power wheelchair when she started to have mobility issues from multiple sclerosis. I think Friends Forever stayed over too. The picture up there is the Hale Zukas ambulance and me walking on some stilts that had been in my yard for as long as I can remember.

The next show was at the Pixel Palace in Riverside and I rode along with my girlfriend at the time. It was Erin Allen’s spot but I’ll do the search engines a favor and not write out his band name from that era. The main thing I remember from this show was a ridiculous drunk couple.

Both of them kept talking to me all night about how much they liked doing cocaine so after several hours of this I was like “fine, let’s do some” and we all went into the bathroom and just stood around for a minute. When I finally asked “where’s the cocaine?” they said “I thought you had it!” That wasn’t the ridiculous part though.

A few hours later I was peeing in the bathroom when the girl ran in and closed the door behind her. She gave me an intense look and said:

“You have a girlfriend right? I have a boyfriend! We’re gonna be good… right?”

I told her I didn’t care what she did but I was going to finish pissing and get out of the bathroom. Despite all this we gave them tickets to go see The Cure or maybe it was Morrissey. My girlfriend had won them on the radio but for some reason we couldn’t go. I forget the specifics but we worked at a lot of events like Warped Tour and OzzFest.

Friends Forever and Hale Zukas drove toward their next spot after the show but we stayed over to catch a bus back to San Diego. Erin Allen’s girlfriend walked us to the bus station the next day. She pointed out this building that was supposed to have animatronics of Catholic Friars chasing Native Americans. After a bit of research I’m pretty sure this must have been a clock at The Mission Inn.

This detail might be out of order but my last memory of Friends Forever is a show they played outside a big theater with Sonic Youth and Erase Errata. One of Brian Miller’s projects was also on the bill but I forget which one. The thing that stuck with me was that while Sonic Youth had specifically asked them to play the venue couldn’t get the proper permits so they played outside anyway and were quickly chased away by police.

The bands that played inside were not only paid well but also given hotel rooms. I remember hanging out in somebody’s room that night and feeling like the whole thing was a bit of an injustice and that Thurston should have used his leverage to get them a better deal. Of course I don’t see it that way now.

The reality was that Friends Forever wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The thing about touring is that there’s always bad nights and disappointments. Shows that get cancelled or nobody shows up or everyone stands outside while you play or you don’t make enough money or your equipment breaks or somebody gets arrested. For Friends Forever at least half these things were certainties and even if some of the other things happened it never seemed to get them down.

It was like by self sabotaging and painting themselves into a corner they had made themselves immune to disappointment. The bar was already set so low that no amount of bad luck could possibly compete. You can see it clearly reflected in the name of the label that they used to self release almost all of their recordings:

Nothing Gets Worse Than This

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We never said it was!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s where Jay Leno lives…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’ve probably beefed up security protocols since then.

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

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

“Thanks Walter and Deborah and Timmy and…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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