Tag: The Bus

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

Missouri 2008 : “It seems pretty weird that something could ride around in a truck for ten years and then just walk off one day!”

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This will probably be a shorter story because other pieces scrape right up against the edges of it. Things pick up right after the end of the final Miss Rockaway Armada chapter and then lead into a train ride which after a lot of digging I figured out is briefly described in The Bus Chapter Five. Now that there’s so many of these I occasionally get the feeling that I’m repeating myself or perched on the edge of an incident I had described the opposite side of elsewhere.

Sometimes it can be hard to remember exactly where this happened because almost anything can remind me of something else and there’s little anecdote orphans all over the place. Before I got back into writing Rockaway stories I had ended up with some bits and bobs and even entire chapters that are Rockaway stories in everything but name.

This bit is going to be about my first time going down to New Orleans to experience Mardi Gras but just the hitchhiking part. This also worked out to be my first long distance ride on a freight train but Alexis wanted to catch a specific train that runs between Memphis and Metairie. To get from Saint Louis to Memphis we’d need to hitchhike.

I forget how many different rides it took us altogether but I just want to talk about one truck driver anyway. At this point I already had a handful of experiences hitchhiking with truck drivers but in a lot of ways they pretty much just run together. It got me thinking about how rarely I actually bother to provide complex visual descriptions of the characters in these stories but for truck drivers this is especially challenging for one particular reason.

They’re practically invisible.

Society doesn’t want to see them – we’re only interested in the products hidden away inside their trailers for which they represent a necessary inconvenience. You notice when your local store suddenly doesn’t have the thing you were looking for on the shelf but the person that needs to drive all night to get it there doesn’t cross your mind. Even as a hitchhiker your primary interest is something in whatever your destination city is no matter how much you love the little bits of color along the way.

The other thing about truck drivers is they’re kind of drained of color – especially if they’ve been doing it for a long time. Just like the faded upholstery in an old car they’re right there for every mile of highway and every hour of glaring sunlight even if they throw on a pair of BluBlockers sunglasses. Also even though long distance trucking is actually a very diverse profession I’ve only ended up in long rides with the white ones.

One of these did refer to himself as a “coon ass” in sloppily lettered stick and poke tattoos covering every inch of his exposed skin but besides that he didn’t look too different.

It makes sense. If they’re contract guys instead of owner operators the white guys are going to be a lot more comfortable flouting the company’s “no riders” rule as if it didn’t apply to them while their black and brown counterparts are going to be aware that a single slip up will mean their asses. Even if they are owner operators there are plenty of good reasons to feel less safe giving hitchers a ride.

It’s not so much what we might do to them as what we might accuse them of.

Back in 2000 a special cabinet started popping up in arcades called Sega 18 Wheeler. It was designed to mimic the cab and controls of a big diesel truck and if you picked the Japanese character you get a custom vehicle covered with flashy LEDs and cultural decorations around the windshield. Now that I live by Mount Shasta I constantly see Sikh truckers on the road who decorate their vehicles with special art for fallen comrades similar to tribute airbrushed t-shirts in the hood sphere.

One of those makes a good featured image for this chapter but unfortunately I’ve never had a chance to ride in something like that. It’s usually a monochrome Peterbilt with air ride and a dark wood like walnut for the switch panels. Those do have a cool look, and I always make sure to complement a driver on a sharp, well maintained ride, but if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.

Anyway it’s hard for me to remember exactly what the driver in this story looked like. He probably had a baseball cap that had grown to look like it was part of his head and denim pants worn down around his keys and wallet. A bit of a belly in front but completely flat in back – the usual result of truck stop food, little exercise and long hours trapped in a single seat. A beard going white and a sleeveless tee with an eagle or something on it.

You know what truck drivers look like.

The ride had been unremarkable enough. Maybe he was the driver who asked me to make sure not to brush my hair as he’d never be able to explain away a long black hair to his wife. Light hearted jokes like that. The fact that there were three of us hadn’t been a problem – there’s a lot of room in those cabs with attached bunk area in case you’ve never been in one. It was an overnight ride and the energy abruptly changed at the crack of dawn.

We’d smashed some decent miles but he’d just pulled into a lot to stretch his legs and brew some coffee. He pulled out a miniature three cup drip pot while happily chattering away about how great it worked and how he’d take regular Folger’s over the fancy stuff every time. He suddenly froze.

After what seemed like a quick internal debate he asked us if we’d seen a small Tupperware container of ground up beans. We told him we hadn’t and made an exaggerated show of shifting our bags and bedrolls to the side so he could see every inch of his bunk. There was no sign of the thing. He popped open a Coca-Cola from his mini fridge and took long drags from a Marlboro Light while staring vacantly into space:

“You know, it seems pretty weird that something could ride around in a truck for ten years and then just walk off one day!”

We didn’t say anything. What was there for us to say? A tense silence lasting the time it takes to smoke a single cigarette settled over the scene. At the end of it he shook himself with new determination. From the moment he’d stiffened up when his search came up empty he’d been purposefully avoiding our eyes but now he made sure to give each of us a meaningful stare:

“Whatever. I’m gonna step outside to take a piss. I’m sure it’ll be here when I get back!”

He was halfway out his door when his eye caught a mug full of loose change in his cupholder. He reached back in to grab it and held it close to his chest while shooting each of us a final glare. He closed the door behind him.

Finally we were free to talk among ourselves:

“What the fuck? This dude thinks we stole his coffee! We gotta get the fuck out of here!”

The situation was palpably absurd. What would we, who were on the road without electricity, do with a couple of dollars worth of unbrewed coffee? It wasn’t the instant kind and it’s not like you can just eat the stuff.

Still it hardly mattered. The sense of menace was real enough and his demeanor had clearly shifted to that of a rattlesnake. He was on the ugly side of sudden caffeine withdrawal and paranoia. We had no idea what weapons he had or what else he might blame us for if we didn’t slip away now. I was already reaching for the handle of the passenger door when the driver’s side one flew back open with the reassuring sound of lighthearted laughter:

“Man I suffer from CRS sometimes! Can’t remember shit! I was laid out in my bunk puffing a roach yesterday when the DOT guy came to the window! There’s a little hole that goes to my cargo containers (little spots for personal property that lock and are accessed from outside the truck) and when I dropped the roach in the coffee must have fallen with it!”

He never apologized for the accusations that he hadn’t quite directly made but the danger had clearly passed. The change mug returned to the cup holder. As the pot of coffee was brewing he eagerly wafted the rising hot air into his open nostrils:

“Oh man, the juice! If God made anything better he kept it for himself,,,”

I’ve heard a lot about truckers and harder stimulants and saw a lot of meth when I was homeless at a truck stop but never came across it hitchhiking. I didn’t need to. Plain old caffeine was plenty scary enough.

We rode a little farther with him. It wasn’t all the way to Memphis because we got to Memphis when Alexis ran up to an entire rugby team leaving an ampm. They were actually going the whole way to New Orleans for a game but we only wanted to ride as far as Memphis so we could do freight.

They took us all the way to the yard which was nice as it’s a bit out of the way.

They were about what you’d expect. Mostly talked about getting fucked up and partying but there were a couple of them broing down hard over Twentieth Century American Short Fiction:

“JD Salinger? Those are some good ass short stories! You read Hemingway bro?”

Probably just took a class or something.

Michigan 2010 : The Land of NOD Experiment “Hot Dogs and Mojitos”

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You’ll remember that at the conclusion of The Bus chapters John Benson found a cheap house online in Albion, the closest town in Michigan to where The Bus broke down, and decided to buy it. The plan was to use this house as a base of operations while working to repair The Bus using the planned engine transplant method and even to store The Bus on the property. His reasoning was sound: one generally believes that owning a house gives you the legal right to occupy it and neighborhoods where most of the houses are unoccupied and selling for a pittance on eBay won’t be subject to the vicissitudes of HOAs and the like.

Albion, in these regards, turned out to be exceptional – or at least this particular block of it did. One neighbor decided from the moment John Benson first set foot into the house that we didn’t seem like the kind of people he wanted in his neighborhood and local laws and regulations seemed to be on his side. He found a law to prevent John from being able to move The Bus onto the premises and went to work on tracking down the legal loopholes to keep us out entirely.

This was more of a war of attrition then something that happened overnight – after it became apparent The Bus wasn’t getting fixed a few different people from the extended friend network tried their hand at small town living. Jason Crumer became so frustrated with Albion that he edited the town’s Wikipedia entry to say something to the effect of “full of ignorant assholes”. That didn’t garner a ton of good will with the populace at large.

This was the larger background situation when I passed through Albion on tour with Generation and walked into the house to find a wild opossum hissing at us from inside of a cage in the center of the largest room. No one we knew was supposed to be staying there at the time so as far as we could tell there was an unknown squatter who had a penchant for keeping angry marsupials in captivity. We were feeling a little apprehensive about sticking around long enough to find out when a more innocuous explanation presented itself.

There was one person in Albion that liked having us around and wanted to help in any way he could: a punk kid named Kevin who worked at the one coffee shop. He’d been keeping an eye on the house and had noticed that the opossum had taken up residence in it. He’d borrowed a live trap from the animal shelter and we’d just happened to wander in after the animal got caught but before he’d come back to check it.

I hopped into Coffee Kev’s car for the familiar activity of “taking it for a ride” – driving the opossum far enough away that it wouldn’t find it’s way back to the house. When I was younger a mother opossum had moved her brood into my family’s garage and I helped my father capture and relocate the juveniles. I’ll never forget the way they despondently grabbed onto the bars of the cat carrier with their tiny and oddly human looking hands.

The adult from the Albion house wasn’t being as cute about it’s temporary lack of freedom – it backed into the corner of the trap and hissed every time anybody looked at it. Regardless this is my most vivid memory of Albion: driving down backroads green with tall grass and pasture, chatting with Kevin about God knows what until we decided it was far enough and watched a frightened opossum scurry off into the undergrowth.

Once we got back to the house there was barely enough time to walk upstairs and look around before the cops showed up. Apparently the problem neighbor had dug into local codes and ordinances and figured out that the house was in need of various repairs and renovations that meant it was technically illegal for anyone to stay in it until an inspection indicated the work was finished. The cops seemed embarrassed and were apologetic:

“We wish nobody had called us but unfortunately somebody did and the law is on his side.”

I don’t know what eventually happened to the house or the first bus but I’d imagine that John Benson doesn’t own anything in Albion anymore. Some friends had done some digging on the neighbor and figured out that he liked parrots and motorcycles but that’s not exactly material for the kind of blackmail that could get him off of everybody’s backs. He wasn’t going anywhere. Something to think about when considering buying a dilapidated house sight unseen in a small town you know next to nothing about.

This section of the tour wasn’t that solidly booked and we ended up accepting an opportunity that was bizarre even by noise tour standards. We were supposed to be playing on a miniature bicycle powered stage provided by a recycling themed clown troupe at a major music festival. Our friend Books had been living in Detroit and getting into the clown troupe subculture with a group she called The Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos.

I don’t know very much about The Land of NOD Experiment except that there was some kind of New Orleans connection and in 2010 it was attempting to make the jump from a smaller friends camp and jam thing to a larger festival in terms of talent and infrastructure. The headliners were Of Montreal, Eagles of Death Metal and Kool Keith performing as Dr. Octagon with DJ Q-Bert. Besides that it was Trombone Shorty, Ratty Skurvics, some other New Orleans folks and a lot of smaller names.

The tone was set the moment we met up with Books for our wristbands and went through security. On this leg of the tour we were traveling and playing with Forced Into Femininity and an older female security guard thought it would be appropriate to reach out and grope Jill’s breast while asking a question made academic by her preemptive action:

“Can I feel?”

The fact that she asked at all showed that she had some awareness of the necessity for consent but just didn’t care. Trans awareness and social visibility were in a slightly different place in 2010 but this woman’s actions were egregious even for a small town like Jackson, Michigan. She was essentially communicating that she saw Jill’s body and identity as a joke and Jill herself undeserving of even basic bodily autonomy. I can’t remember how anybody reacted but the unfamiliar and isolated setting meant that this violation didn’t exactly feel like a teachable moment.

The second thing to portend how the weekend was going to go was that it immediately started pouring rain and continued through most of the first night. The festival setting was on the edge of some wetlands but the weather effectively changed this to a stiflingly humid mosquito infested swamp. Judging by the sizes of the stages, sound systems, crowd control barriers and the high number of porta-potties the promoters must have been banking on attendance in the tens of thousands but I only saw a few hundred.

I don’t know anything about Eagles of Death Metal, I really enjoyed early Of Montreal when I was deep into the Elephant Six thing and Doctor Octagon was one of my favorite albums in High School. Still I felt the selection of headlining talent was somewhat eclectic, or I’m just going to say haphazardly thrown together, it didn’t feel especially curated. It would have been a great lineup for a free outdoor festival subsidized through grants and corporate sponsorships but with the expectation that people would be paying festival money it just wasn’t there – it felt like something was missing although I couldn’t say exactly what.

Ticket pre sales had evidently been disappointing and any hopes for a last minute rush at the gates were dissipated by the unfortunate turn in weather. Anyone that was feeling out the possibility of a festival experience but riding the fence due to the tepid selection of headliners was probably deciding on the free and dry side of that aforementioned fence.

The crowd that did actually show up seemed to be mainly what I would call “performative festival tryhards” – face paint, some showy hippy/steampunk/raver fashion and a dancing accessory designed to draw attention to themselves. Things like hula hoops that can be set on fire, those fringed suede covered sticks where you knock a third stick back and forth, djembes, megaphones and a few other things I’m forgetting – probably at least a slack line or two.

The main thing was that it felt like these exhibitionist types were hoping for throngs of festival greenhorns they could dazzle and impress with their bouncey stick prowess but of course they were the only ones there. Nobody was directly saying any of this but the body energy seemed clear that their basic need of being watched was not being met as everyone was too busy putting on their own show. The ground was turning into mud and most of the tents had become miserable, collapsed puddles.

The clowns were visibly around and with a few free beverages being passed out in cans they had their work cut out for them. There was a newly launched energy drink on the brink of failure, the ever elusive Red Bull girls and I think even an alcoholic option – but that was only in the backstage areas our wristbands gave us access to. I wasn’t on any oaths or pledges concerning abstinence but I don’t remember drinking and wouldn’t have been taking drugs. If LSD showed up the obvious instinct would be to save it for a setting where you might actually enjoy yourself.

The Generation siblings had opted to sit up all night in the talent area because people had mosquito repellant and the bugs were so bad they couldn’t sleep. Both of them were still quite innocent of certain worldly matters at this time and one of the themes of this tour was aggressive young women making constant confrontational sexual overtures. This made the Pickells extremely uncomfortable.

We were starting to hear talk that a lot of the performers were jumping ship because a) the festival was miserable to be inside of and b) the anemic ticket sales made it a practical certainty that anyone who wasn’t paid in advance was most likely not getting paid at all. This would turn into an opportunity for us. They were serving basic hotdogs on stiff buns without condiments – a sign of things to come.

The first night ended with a surprise headliner: DJ Bad Boy Bill. It was a last minute replacement for another headline act dropping out – Eagles of Death Metal. Ticket sales were low to begin with and I’d imagine a decent number of attendees took this as a pretext for demanding refunds. For some that may well have been the act they had mostly come for but for others I imagine it just presented an opportunity to pull the plug and recoup money on an experience that was not shaping up as advertised.

I vaguely remember watching this set from a classic Chicago House DJ with some degree of interest. The music was decent and the stage show included pyrotechnics and some fancy light effects. I went to try to sleep in the puddle that was my tent fairly early to prepare for whatever performing tomorrow would look like.

While hanging out backstage the previous evening we had chatted a small amount with the stage manager / sound engineer on the smallest stage and mentioned that we were there to perform. I was beginning to discuss the logistics of the miniature bike powered clown stage with Books when he caught my eye and motioned for me and Generation to come and talk to him. It turned out that even the smaller level acts were cancelling at an alarming rate out of fear of no payment and he was struggling to keep live music going on his specific stage for appearances.

Simply rolling an iPod playlist though all the missing acts would veer too close to acknowledging what this whole festival was: a complete and unmitigated disaster.

Books was disappointed when I informed her we wouldn’t be needing the bike stage but she had far more serious disappointments looming on the horizon. We decided to do the kind of Generation / Bleak End set that we had done at BitchPork but switched the orders around due to an unfortunate trend of spectators crediting the entire Generation set to me on the strength of some unconventional blocking. Forced Into Femininity wasn’t interested in playing and Jill generally wanted to get out of there as soon as humanly possible.

There wasn’t too much of a crowd but it was easily the biggest, fanciest and loudest sound system we had the opportunity to play with on the entire tour. [Note: actually probably not – we were on the main stage at Bitchpork] The unconventional music styles did seem to capture people’s attention and it was exciting just for the bizarre flex of saying we played an official stage for a mid to large size music festival – albeit a failure of one. It’s definitely more fun talking about it now than it was to actually play it.

I was actually super into Kool Keith in High School and Dr. Octagon was my favorite of his albums and personas by a wide margin. Under other circumstances I would have been excited to catch his performance but this wasn’t my first time at this kind of festival. Years earlier I had gotten an unexpected late night phone call from my older brother who turned out to be drunk at a U2 concert in some large East Coast arena. He held his cell phone up for me to hear.

After going to Coachella in 2004 I thought of the drunken U2 phone call as the perfect metaphor for everything that was disappointing and unsatisfying about the experience. Your favorite band in the world could be playing but it still just feels like listening through a cell phone held up by a drunk friend on the other side of the country. This isn’t true for something like Bitch Pork but the Festivals with white tents, beverage sponsors and colorful plastic wristbands always end up feeling this way.

It would have been cool if the Dr. Octagon set had happened a little earlier but it wasn’t even worth asking my friends to stick around for a few more hours. Through the lens of a major Festival, even a sparsely attended failed one, all of the energy that makes live music appealing is simply lost in translation.

Once we came off stage the rest of the group came and found us, Jill, Sugar Tea and Popsicle, and the sentiment was that we should leave as sleeping in a truck stop sounded more appealing than staying here. We packed up our wet tents and started the trek toward the exit when we discovered that Generation had made a profound impact on one fan specifically. A young girl dressed in a zebra miniskirt came jogging up and enthusiastically recapped her impressions of their set:

“Oh my god that was so crazy! You were like “RRURRURRU” and then you were like “reereeree”!

In her impressions she seemed to be imitating the kind of low/high screaming trade off that can be heard in Crust Metal bands like Dystopia, Wisigoth and most likely others I don’t know the names of. I am quite fond of the vocal style but it wasn’t what Generation sounded like by any stretch of the imagination. She repeated this several times with an unflagging surplus of energy as the Pickell siblings chuckled in obvious discomfort.

Her demonstration took a bit of a turn:

“Yeah!, I was so blown away I was like…”

She bent forward at the waist and let her mouth hang loosely open. One would assume this was to indicate shock but she then began to bob her head suggestively while making gagging noises. In case that wasn’t clear enough she added this last bit of commentary:

“Like, stick a dick in my mouth already, ya know?”

There was a bit more nervous and forced laughter until Rain had a sudden flash of inspiration. They had printed these tiny paper flyers with pictures of alien faces and urls for some of their videos and other online resources. Rain quickly handed her one of the tiny fliers. This seemed to throw the zebra skirt girl for a loop and she spent a couple minutes scanning and attempting to decode it. We all took the opportunity to recommence power walking toward the exit as quickly as possible.

We were clearly too far away to chase down again so instead the zebra girl gave a giant wave then cupped her hands around her mouth to scream out a final message:

“I’m gonna stick this in my pussy!!!”

With those words we had reached the gates and The Land of NOD Experiment was firmly behind us. We had escaped. We called Amanda to see if she had friends in Ann Arbor and ended up at a punk house called The Meat House that just happened to have an upcoming generator show full of fresh degradations when we attempted to play it.

I’d like to end this story with some things I didn’t witness first hand but heard through Books – the final fate of the Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos. When the festival promoters found themselves deeply in the red and needing to pick artists, workers or vendors to not pay the clowns seemed like the perfect choice. They had been gathering cans all weekend and Michigan is known across the USA for it’s relatively high beverage can redemption value of 10 cents so they wouldn’t be leaving empty handed. Still the agreement was that they would be paid 200 dollars a head for keeping the festival clean and teaching attendees about the joys of recycling.

The main promoter invited the clowns to their tent for hot dogs, mojitos and a “friendly chat”. The message was essentially that they had to fuck someone and The Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos seemed more fuckable than any other entity in this specific scenario. The clowns weren’t trying to take this sitting down but they also didn’t appear to have any options to retaliate. They could dump all the cans back out but that would just mean losing the small money to cover gas and other expenses they would be getting for following through on the recycling message they had coalesced around in the first place.

To make things especially insulting the promoter’s younger sister was tripping on acid, not wearing pants and laughing at everything the clowns said for this entire conversation. Some empty promises were made to the effect that the promoters would be continuing to fundraise and the clowns would be paid just as soon as all the more important people that were owed money were paid first – things like parking attendants, paid hula hoopers and God knows what else.

Based on the logistical clusterfuck of this initial outing it seems highly unlikely that any fund raising was successful. When I checked it’s Facebook page it seemed like they’d transitioned to smaller rabbit themed events around New Orleans. The Festival was dead. I have a feeling The Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos didn’t exactly bounce back from this either. Our tour? Our tour went on.

On to Ann Arbor and a thing called “dick time!”

Detroit 2008 : The Bus Part Thirteen “Blew A Piston…”

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I’ve actually already written the Vermont show up so I need to retitle that one so as to throw it into sequence with the rest of these. We took a fairly roundabout way to get to Detroit that took us by Niagara Falls. I can’t remember if this was my only time coming here or if I paid to go on the elevator. The structures that are built around the natural waterfall give me a strong archetypical feeling like maybe I’ve visited them, or structures similar to them, in my dreams.

Sometime between this 2008 visit and this current moment I saw the movie with Marilyn Monroe that is set there. The memory is really hazy, I thought it might have been Lucille Ball or an Alfred Hitchcock picture until I just now looked it up. Anyway I liked seeing the structures like stairs and viewing platforms in the movie – what had changed and what had stayed the same. Some things have probably changed since the visit in this story too.

I don’t know why but all of the utilitarian architecture designed around giving tourists a place to stand while they look at the waterfall is more interesting and compelling to me than the waterfall itself. I remember posing for a photo in front of the waterfall where I pretended to be talking on a cell phone as a crass joke about obliviousness to it’s grandeur and beauty but that isn’t what this is. I’m not trying to only remember cement stairs and coin operated binocular machines to be funny, that’s just the way it is.

It just occurred to me that maybe I just didn’t properly see it. Not long after this Bus Tour I went to see a Spanish Language shadow puppet show that my friend Caryl from the Rafts was involved with in Oakland. For the first time in my life I became consciously aware that the words on an opera screen were too blurry for me to read with my naked eyes – I was nearsighted. It’s hard to say if this change had been sudden or gradual. I went to a lot of operas in High School but since then it was mostly foreign films.

I did learn that if I had to listen to Spanish without being able to read the translations I could follow well enough to understand what was going on. I had taken a few semesters of Spanish in College and spoken it here and there but this was my first experience with “getting pushed in the pool” style fluency. Anyway I also went and got myself glasses and it feels entirely possible that Niagara Falls didn’t make as much of an impression for me because I was squinting at it and it was a blur.

The fastest way to get to Detroit from Niagara Falls would have been to pass through Canada but we weren’t about to test the hijinks potential of trying to pass through an International Border. There is a story about getting hassled at the Canadian Border in the El Rancho chapters but this time around we just took a much longer way. It almost seems unbelievable when you consider how much fuel The Bus required but driving over a few extra hours of road ultimately seemed easier than having every single object on board passed through a colander.

There was a lot going on in Detroit and I almost thought this could have been my first time visiting the city until I remembered that I just wrote about a 2007 trip with Garbaj Kaetz. There was a big electronic music festival going on and the Pistons had just won one of their Playoff games which resulted in a parade. When the bus succumbed to total mechanical failure just outside the Motor City it became a very weak joke about performing fellatio on one of the victorious athletes:

“I went to Detroit and blew a piston…”

Not particularly funny but you have to take into account that it was a dark and depressing time for us and double entendres and dick jokes represented a welcome relief from the grim reality that our ship of dreams had run aground. Still I’m getting a bit ahead of myself – in Detroit none of this had actually happened yet and therefore had no impact on our emotional state whatsoever. We went to Belle Isle and explored an empty factory building and sort of but didn’t really play a show.

Question Mark and the Mysterians were performing at MOCAD. I don’t know how official this whole thing was but to some degree we were allowed to pull the bus up and do a Living Hell set. I think Suzy Poling from Pod Blotz had set this up for us – she had been living in Detroit for a while and was just about to make the big move to Oakland and the West Coast.

I had forgotten that Suzy had performed on The Bus while everybody else explored the abandoned factory until I just now typed her name. It was the kind of site specific performance that The Bus was perfectly equipped but almost never used for. The acoustics worked out in such a way that Pod Blotz could be heard from anywhere inside the multilevel factory. I think it was Suzy’s idea that everybody run ahead and explore the structure while she stayed behind to provide the soundtrack.

It was kind of like how I imagine perfect wine and entree pairings must be for the people who are genuinely into that sort of thing. Industrial decay and the remnants of manufacturing machinery taken in under the sparse illumination provided by cell phones and flash lights while tape effects and synthesizers provided novel juxtapositions of sonic textures ranging from barely audible whispers to deafening shouts.

Many artists in the experimental genre have tackled the idea that simply watching them manipulate their instruments and mixers might not be the most compelling visual accompaniment to the diverse sounds produced but this was the most elegant solution to that question I’ve personally witnessed. As an awkward footnote this entire experience was quite stressful and no fun whatsoever for John Benson as he had to stay behind with The Bus and white knuckle through the attentive lights of a police cruiser while hoping that they didn’t realize a small army was trespassing throughout the empty factory he was parked outside of.

So at MOCAD this legendary garage rock band Question Mark and the Mysterians is playing. I would say that they were the biggest name Living Hell ostensibly shared a bill with but some guys from Matmos who jumped the bill in Providence are a close second. When John asked if they could play Jeremy Harris said “the Matmos?” so obviously they are kind of a big deal. In Detroit it was more like we were jumping the bill.

When I was a young child I was curious about and wanted to experiment with the concept of cooking. My first experiment was to put a slice of bologna in the microwave for about fifteen seconds. It wasn’t very good. Anyway that’s what the singer guy Question Mark’s skin kind of looked like – he was wearing dark glasses and didn’t have a shirt on. They played their one famous song 96 Tears and it was great.

We were super excited to invite them onto The Bus but they were very clear about thinking that the invitation felt like a plot device from a horror movie and they wouldn’t be falling for it. Maybe their days of stepping onto mysterious buses full of freaks were behind them or maybe they would have declined the same invitation in 1962 – I couldn’t really say. What I can say is that the MOCAD crowd was overwhelmingly older and looked to the proto-punk band to set the tone as to how to respond to The Bus.

Maybe one or two people in attendance were feeling adventurous enough to take a look onboard. I can’t remember if we went through with performing a Living Hell set or not. Either way it’s awkward – do you perform for the two people who actually showed up or do you inform them that they aren’t enough of an audience for the thing you just invited them to? There’s no good answer.

Pod Blotz outside of an abandoned factory under cover of night was the perfect act to perform for people who weren’t physically standing on The Bus. Living Hell was not – our spectacle was overwhelmingly visual in nature and we played three different times without The Bus after this night in Detroit that were far more memorable than whatever did or didn’t happen this night.

Detroit was tons of fun besides this. We slept at Dave’s mom’s house which I want to say was on Belle Isle but maybe it wasn’t. We drove over to that neighborhood with the stuffed animals and polka dots on the houses. I met up with a girl named Leg that I used to be in love with and she took me to an African themed bead shop where I might have bought some brass effigy bells.

It was time to hit the road and the road hit back. It was about four hours outside of Detroit when, as the title says, we blew the piston. Was it loud? Was there smoke? Did it smell bad? I just remember that we knew it was the end. There was still some hope that The Bus would ride again but certainly no time soon. The more immediate question was how everybody and their music equipment would be moving beyond the side of the road in Michigan.

Ok, how do I even approach this? I don’t follow any iteration of The Grateful Dead but I like to go places to do things and I can say with no reservations whatsoever that “the road” is a place where miracles happen. Case in point: another empty bus pulls off the highway to see if we might need assistance, it just so happens to belong to a Chicago bicycle racing team and is being brought home to Chicago for this purpose. In fact the home of this team and this particular bus’s destination just so happens to be within a couple miles of Mister City – the art space we are scheduled to play in that very night.

Of course our new acquaintance was happy to give us and our equipment a ride to the place where he was basically already going. It was a lot of conflicting emotions – the thing was broken and something was obviously over and some of us were crying but at the same time Holy Shit! Rolling into our scheduled concert on a different bus entirely it was impossible to avoid feeling like the natural laws governing coincidences weren’t at least a little warped in our favor.

John and Dave stayed behind with The Bus to ensure that it got towed to some form of safe storage. The nearest town ended up being a place called Albion. Not long after John Benson impulsively bought a house there when he saw it listed for next to nothing on eBay. The plan was to use this house as a base of operations while working to get The Bus moving and operational again.

None of that really worked out. I’m sure the house will end up popping into some stories here but other people would have better stories than me and more of them. For now I’ve got this one: The first time John Benson ever set foot in the place he found seven dead starlings. I had been the magic consultant on board The Bus so he texted me to ask what it meant. I figured that the counting rules for crows could be applied to any of the corvidae:

One for sorrow, two for mirth

Three for a death, four for a birth

Five for silver, six for gold

Seven for a secret never to be told

That’s magic for you. You might not get an answer that you can use but at least you always get one. You may be thinking: “what if there were eight starlings? Or nine?”

Simple: it wouldn’t have been magic.

Bus Section Epilogue with Documentary Videos:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/02/22/nashville-2008-the-bus-epilogue-brand-the-dude/

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/

Pennsylvania 2008 : The Bus Part Eleven “Cannery Row”

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I put Pennsylvania in the title but I guess this might have happened in Ohio, West Virginia or any number of Northeastern states. I wasn’t involved with booking any of the Living Hell shows so for most of the tour I didn’t need to think about where we were located geographically for any particular reason. The things I am certain of is that there were gigantic colonies of tent caterpillars for this leg of the journey and we left the bus in a picturesque little village with an “Old Dutch” feel.

Dave had a couple friends named Jeff and Shira who were getting married and apparently decided to surprise them by crashing the wedding with the entire Bus. There must have been an announcement in the last preceding major city so that anybody who didn’t feel like being at a remote destination wedding could hop off and meet back up with the tour later but I wasn’t about to miss it. Who doesn’t love a wedding?

I didn’t know as much about the ins and outs of wedding planning at the time but I’m retroactively impressed with the graciousness and flexibility of the bride and groom and their respective families for accepting the last minute addition of a bus full of a dozen or so freaks without so much as raising an eyebrow. I guess that’s an exaggeration – a single eyebrow actually does a fair job of approximating the extremely minor reaction. Somebody referred to us as “wooly” – a description of our freakishness which was both accurate and of less than mammoth proportions.

The venue for the wedding was somebody’s family farm. I’m not from that region, I don’t even know where I was, so I couldn’t say if the wild abundance of tent caterpillars was typical for that time of year or not. I mentioned being in Illinois for the emergence of Brood XIII in another one of these pieces but those cicadas had less of an appreciable effect on the overall landscape than these caterpillars. You’d be hard pressed to find a table cloth that they weren’t crawling across.

It created a nice visual theme for the whole affair by lending every single one of the guests coordinated living accessories. I’m the type of person who enjoys the look and feel of being covered with living invertebrates but even for anyone that wasn’t they could only remove the caterpillars that they had actually become aware of. In that way everybody ended up looking “wooly”.

A special pavilion had been set up for performances as the happy couple came from a musically inclined community. All of the guests had actually arrived on a bus though it wasn’t The Bus – a specially chartered shuttle bus ferried passengers from a parking area to the more remote farm. Without our mobile home we weren’t going to be offering up a Living Hell performance but it was the perfect opportunity to try out some other things.

Corey Hucks was already a friend of Jeff and Shira’s and did a few songs on acoustic guitar. The wedding might have even been the moment that brought Corey onto The Bus and tour – I don’t remember the precise details but I know he wasn’t there from the beginning. I also forget if it had been me or Vanessa that first came up with the concept for an a cappella industrial project called Cannery Row but the wedding offered the perfect opportunity to turn an inside joke into a reality.

Dalton joined up with us for this one. The idea was to make rhythmic sounds that simulated a cannery as a back drop for spoken and syncopated lyrics but in practice this presented extremely similarly to what would generally be called beatboxing and rapping. That ended up being something of a theme for me: I had no way of knowing at this point that I’d soon be creating the project Bleak End at Bernie’s that awkwardly toed the line between rap and industrial.

I couldn’t say if our performance was inspired by or prescient of our visit to a former cannery in Liberty, Maine because I can’t remember the order that the two things happened in. Based on my limited knowledge of our tour itinerary and everything else either way would make equal sense. If I had made up the project name I wasn’t inspired by anything in the actual novel, which I hadn’t read yet, but only the status of a cannery as a thing that is industrial.

Vanessa clearly had read the novel as she came up with all the lyrics that directly reference elements of the book. Perhaps Dalton had also read the book and helped make them up. I just remember both of them quickly teaching me the following words:

“What you know? What you know about Cannery Row?

And what you need? It’s all on credit at Mr. Lee’s

Down by the water, across the tracks, in your face!

<raspberry sound>“

It all came together very organically and naturally. I had later, separate collaborations with both Vanessa and Dalton where I basically treated them like flying monkeys – my term for a collaborator who isn’t given any creative input. In Vanessa’s case she played guitar on the second Bleak End at Bernie’s tape and Dalton and I toured the country with a project called Dealbreaker. It can be fun to be a flying monkey, up to a point, and I was acutely aware of the point when it stopped being fun for both of them.

That’s my own weakness as a collaborator. I can be too infatuated with my own ideas to leave enough space for anyone else’s. It would have been nice to do more things like Cannery Row but in my cowardice I always felt creatively safer in total control. Lately I’ve been thinking more about what I would get if I were able to wrest certain things from the cold bony fingers of intellect but I wouldn’t quite rate any of this as a regret.

We make the best little thing we can out of the Legos we were given. Some of us have a knack for it, others might have just gotten cool pieces from the outset.

Cannery Row was a moderate success insofar as it had a certain energy that appealed to the people that ended up seeing it. What I remember was that either Shira or Jeff, the bride or the groom, hadn’t actually seen it because whichever one of them it was had ended up stepping away to use the bathroom or handle some logistical issue. I guess using the bathroom is a logistical issue.

Anyway neither of them actually knew the three of us but the one that had missed it was a little bummed in that their new spouse had just seen it and was a little excited about it. It almost sounds like something out of a fairytale – a performance offered as wedding gift that fate causes one of the partners to miss. The kind of thing that would end in a bad bargain with a dwarf or goblin. In the real world they just wanted us to do it again but the thing about an improvised performance with a certain energy is that you can’t exactly do it again.

To make up for this we improvised a new performance that centered on me freestyle rapping and culminated with me and Vanessa peeing our pants at the same time as I rapped about us doing exactly that. You could say that that was a logistical issue. We were pretty drunk. It was a really fun wedding.

I’m not sure if I’ve ran into Jeff and/or Shira since but I had a great time meeting them at their wedding. I hope they’re happy or if they realized they weren’t happy they were at least happy about the decision to stop being married. That probably sounds really weird – what I mean is that I’m a big believer in serial monogamy and people figuring out that they are either happy together or happier apart. There’s a lot of different ways of being happy – it doesn’t always look the same.

I love being married and the institution of marriage. Here’s to it!

<imaginary glass>

Cheers!

Next Part:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2022/12/20/vermont-2008-the-bands-called-death-turkeys-a-ghost-story/

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Oakland 2009 : “Speaking of the Hell’s Angels…”

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I had been nominally living with Stephany Colunga across two apartments and the better part of a year but in practice this generally meant that Stephany lived with some of my things and the cat Night Beaver while I was off on the rafts or the bus tour or a tour with CAVE or any other number of things. Eventually I stopped pretending and moved most of my stuff including records and large plastic kaiju monsters into the spacious and completely unutilized attic where I would unfortunately never return for any of it.

I had a little bit of a going away party where I attempted to give away some of my clothes but my personal style seemed to be too eclectic and specific to be much use to anyone else. I didn’t want to see all of the stuff wasted but the little bit that was repurposed ended up being equally psychologically painful. There was a really cool King’s Dominion long sleeved shirt that had belonged to my father and had pictures of the different rides printed along the sleeves. Will took it but he cut the sleeves off and threw them away: maddening.

I ended up getting blacked out drunk and unreasonably aggressive as the night progressed. The party concluded with me spraying Will with whipped cream and then urinating on him as he lay in a pile of my unwanted wardrobe. The next morning I just piled it all into garbage bags and left it in the alley. A charitable but completely untrue explanation would be that I was trying to spare Stephany the emotional pain of losing her favorite roommate so I behaved like so much of an asshole that she would be able to be happy with my departure.

The last time that I performed live music also happened to be the last time that I ever saw Will at a Halloween party several years ago. I improvised some backing drums while singing about destigmatizing opiate use, testing for fentanyl and being sure to carry nalaxone in order to be able to reverse overdoses for your friends. At this point in the party Will was already passed out on the ground so he didn’t hear the performance although none of it would have been new information for him.

On the first day of the following year I got the news that he had died. Passing out on the ground had been more or less standard party behavior for Will and allowed everyone to keep an eye on him and make sure he was still breathing in the course of normal partying. He had just gotten his own van which was a warmer and more comfortable place for him to pass out at. It also meant that nobody was there to check on him in the critical moment.

It could have happened anywhere. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.

Anyway in early 2009 I had showed up in Oakland for the Living Hell reunion show and John Benson invited me to stay in a special attic room he had set up for his daughter Quinn above his own room at the Purple Haus. I actually have barely met Quinn even though she and John had done a band together for a few years called Evil Wikkid Warrior – I was never in the right time or place to see it. In a way it felt like Quinn and I played a similar role in John’s life so both of us being around at the same time would just be excessive. That probably sounds completely random but even in this situation – I was in her room because she wasn’t there.

John first started living at the Purple Haus while he was a student at UC Berkeley and eventually ended up owning it before transferring that ownership to a non-profit created specifically to sustain the house as a true cooperative. The space has been known for shows and parties, with some concerts for legendary East Bay Crust group Dystopia, as well as serving as a host kitchen for Food Not Bombs and similar community resource programs. When my father first went to scout out San Diego as a place for my family to move to he crashed at a hippy party house that eventually became more of a punk party house that my sister and I went to shows at.

The Purple Haus probably has a similar history but I wouldn’t know exactly how far back it goes. It’s cool to imagine the same living room I’ve played in hosting poetry readings for jazz era beatniks but I couldn’t tell you if it would actually be accurate. Somebody probably could.

One of the Purple Haus traditions is to celebrate the Mardi Gras season with a sequence of parties and finally a parade centering on a large papier-mâché frog that usually rests on the porch. For somebody with an amphibian totem I know way less about this parade and tradition than might be expected. The reason for this is that the whole thing was ever-so-slightly soured for me for reasons that I’m about to explain.

One of the long time residents of the Purple Haus co-op was a woman named Terry Compost with graying dreadlocks and a slightly Mediterranean complexion. I spoke in the last piece about the necessity of having a system for keeping out undesirables if a punk house is going to properly function. Terry stepped into this role with a bit more enthusiasm than most of her housemates might have preferred. When John invited me to stay in the attic I had been warned about Terry insofar as she would almost certainly give me a hard time and I should make efforts to avoid getting on her bad side.

A couple of the earlier chapters talk about a woman named Eleanor who John Benson had been helping convert a box truck to run on vegetable oil toward the beginning of 2007. I was told that Terry had made Eleanor cry.

I was making a specific effort to avoid spending too much time in the kitchen but I did drink coffee at the time and the Purple Haus kitchen is the perpetual home of a freshly brewed pot of coffee. I made extra special sure to rinse my mug out in the industrial style sink every time I was finished. My mother had a very considerate habit of buying me subculture adjacent books that she thought I might enjoy if she came across them in the thrift store.

She bought me my first copy of Naked Lunch when I was fourteen years old and had gotten me a copy of Crash around the time of the David Cronenberg movie. There’s actually a story I like about that copy of Crash and this is probably the best excuse I’ll get to tell it. I had heard that a girl who went to my High School had been in a serious car accident that resulted in metal pieces being put inside her body to repair a broken bone or whatever.

I think it was supposed to be on her skull in the upper jaw area. For reasons I can’t completely explain this information excited me sexually and I started to feel intensely attracted to her. I suppose she must have been appealing to me physically but nothing of the sort had crossed my mind before I heard about the car accident. I gave the copy of Crash to her in an awkward and completely ineffective attempt at flirting.

Around this same time I would routinely fantasize about another girl I was attracted to shooting me in my left should with a low caliber bullet from fifteen to twenty feet away. This kind of industrial eroticism has only ever appealed to me as a pubescent teenager. LaPorsha and I got into a bad car accident in 2020 that necessitated the addition of metal parts to both of our skeletons but nothing about this information does anything for me in regards to intimacy.

Anywho big detour. In 2009 my mother had just given me a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels. I was holding the book when I went down to get coffee and carrying a book is always a good pretext for a person who was looking for an excuse to start talking to you to start talking to you. She asked me what I was reading. I answered which segued nicely into the actual sentiment:

“Speaking of the Hell’s Angels what are you doing here?”

I do have to admit that I’d been wearing a lot of studded black leather around the time and it was reasonable to presume that I might end up presenting some of the problematic behaviors of the outlaw biker club. I answered, of course, that I was staying in the attic room that John had made for Quinn and was, at that moment at least, cleaning out a mug I had just used to drink coffee. She mentioned an upcoming Mardi Gras party that she needed to make a King Cake for and asked if I might be interested in helping to make it.

Of course this whole thing was something of a test and it wasn’t like I needed to impress Terry or earn her approval but it did sound like the kind of thing that I might be interested in. I had gone to Mardi Gras in New Orleans for the first time the year before but I was either too late in the season or hanging out with the wrong people to actually cross paths with a King Cake. I had heard of the pastry and surrounding traditions though and I was certainly curious.

I actually did like baking a cake with Terry. The whole thing would have been an overwhelmingly positive experience if not for one detail but that detail is significant. I had never worked with live yeast before and actually haven’t since although recounting the story is making me want to do it again. It’s fun: the dough puffs up as if by magic and then you punch it down and wait for it to puff up again.

This next bit actually left a lasting impression on me as a baker. Rather than using standard food colorings Terry thought it would be fun to look for ingredients that would add the required colors naturally. She used powdered spirulina for green, turmeric for yellow and a dark berry jam for the purple. The best part about this is all of these things do have distinct flavors even if they end up being subtle ones.

Later that year I made a layer cake with jalapeño jelly in the middle and spirulina with minced mint mixed into the buttercream icing. The final step was to carpet the outside with nasturtium leaves and a few flowers. The final product gave an appealing contrast between cooling and heating mouth sensations and whatever you call what spirulina tastes like.

A few years later me and LaPorsha got into making cakes and icings with Kool Aid powder for color and flavor. Very different from, but still in part inspired by, Terry’s more organic King Cake colorings.

Anyway enough of the sweet – let’s get into the bitter. The big tradition with King Cakes is that an inedible object is placed inside the ring shaped cake while baking and whoever finds this in their slice is obligated to host the next party of the Mardi Gras season. I think this might have been a button back in the Middle Ages but nowadays it’s generally a small plastic baby. The Purple Haus tradition is to use a small ceramic frog.

Back in 2009 there was a squat called Hellarity around the corner from Purple Haus on Genoa. Hellarity depended on the more stable and established Purple Haus for a million little things – most importantly an extension cord that was run from the backyard. Not the whole time, they must have been stealing power from the city in the usual squat way for at least part of it, but at one point at least.

Terry didn’t want Hellarity to host the next Mardi Gras party. There were lots of people from lots of different punk houses in attendance and her general instinct was that almost none of them would have done an acceptable job of hosting the next party. She was making the same kind of assumption she’d made with me – that these people wouldn’t even help make a King Cake and the fact that this assumption had turned out to be wrong didn’t change her general outlook in any meaningful way.

It wasn’t about what she wanted though, it was about what she did. She knew exactly who she did want to host the next Mardi Gras party and she slipped the ceramic frog into that person’s slice of cake right before she gave it to them. She essentially dosed somebody with an obligation. Obviously this did not sit well with me.

I care about things like ritual, tradition and magic. The King Cake tradition is designed the way it is for a reason and I didn’t appreciate seeing it thwarted. It felt like a perversion of a thing that I had honestly put my time, effort and energy into and nobody likes how that feels. There were things I liked about Terry – she was into folk music, she cared about the environment and I did actually appreciate how ready she was to challenge and be unaccommodating to strangers. It’s an important role and somebody’s gotta do it.

The thing with the frog was a dealbreaker.

Ultimately Terry didn’t quite click with the way most of the other Purple Haus residents wanted to do things. It wasn’t a good match and I think she eventually moved on more or less organically. I’d imagine she did a lot for the house – there’s probably still things growing in the various gardens that she originally planted and things that are organized a certain way in the kitchen because she organized them that way. I mean I wouldn’t know at all, I’m just guessing.

I do hope she’s doing well wherever she ended up. The whole thing reminds me of this Will Oldham song I like:

“Did you like the cake? Some of it was nice

I have made a cake like that in my own home once or twice…”

Happy Mardi Gras season everybody!

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Maine 2008 : The Bus Part Nine “That Shack’s Got a Lot of A”

berniebleak1 Comment

When we played at Waterfall Arts in Belfast a couple came onto The Bus and expressed their disappointment at the treatment we had received from the local authorities. Because of the significant difference in their respective ages I first assumed that they must have been a father and daughter and have to admit that I was being a bit of a flirt. When I apprised the reality of the situation, that these two people cohabitated romantically, I regretted any liberties that I might have taken as I came to regard the gentleman as somebody who, in my own words, would be “capable of indescribable cruelty”.

Speaking of liberties they invited us to bring The Bus to the cannery they lived in that was located in Liberty, Maine where a dinner party would be held in our honor at the museum opposite Liberty Tool. The couple was Dan and Sveya.

The origin story of Liberty Tool was that Dan and it’s proprietor Skip had found themselves regarding both sides of a mid century phenomenon where historic Maine farming families were throwing in the towel just as countercultural back-to-landers were determined to come pick it back up. They were able to acquire farming tools and related implements from this first group at a pittance and then turn around and sell them to the second at a premium. It obviously helped that in those situations where utopian visionaries might end up discovering that they had bitten off more than they could chew there would also be a profitable turnaround on the crumbs.

The part of the story I don’t remember is if the duo had grown up in the area themselves or arrived with an early wave of back-to-landers but either way Dan bought and began renovating the cannery while Skip ran Liberty Tool. The Museum on the opposite side of the street presumably came about in close to the same manner as Bob Cassilly’s City Museum in Saint Louis. Occasionally objects passed through their hands that seemed to be of too great historical and artistic value to just resell and then grew to a large enough collection to be displayed in a museum.

The Bus had been continuing to exhibit engine problems and their had been some discussion of seeing whether or not flushing the radiator might improve things in any capacity over the last several hundred miles. It was decided to use the time at the cannery to undertake this process and John Benson and Dan were brainstorming the most efficient method of going about this. I don’t think I understood what the whole thing actually entailed at this point in time but I wanted to contribute by digging a hole into the ground with a shovel.

I don’t know what I was thinking – maybe to flush the water and coolant into this hole and then bury it? I must have just felt like I wanted the physical satisfaction of exerting myself through labor or another strenuous activity. Rain and I weren’t doing any kind of workouts on this tour although it would become a feature of our next two U.S. Tours together. The hole idea was vetoed and the radiator flush was accomplished with a sequence of buckets instead.

Like every other fluid on The Bus the water that came out was distressingly filthy. Flushing the radiator was clearly a good idea but most likely made little difference as to the ultimate fate of The Bus.

Dan was giving a tour of the cannery. I don’t think I took the entire tour but I saw a lot of the place and remarked about how satisfying it was that everything there seemed to be made of either wood, metal or glass and nothing was plastic. Dan joked that they had a small jar somewhere that they kept all the plastic in to prevent it from contaminating or spreading it’s influence to the more stolid materials. Maybe this wasn’t a joke. There was a bit of talk as to whether or not it would be a good idea to decant what was evidently a very large container of steel cut oatmeal.

Spring had come decisively to Maine and the weather was nice enough for everyone to go to the river to swim. Sveya pointed out some of the wild herbs along the way: Jack-in-the-pulpit and False Seal of Solomon. The Taboo kids had come along and were talking about how their dog Criminy was only ever interested in the largest stick in any given situation. Criminy had growled at me when they picked me up by the graveyard and when I asked them why they said he was a bad dog.

That was refreshing. So many people are quick to explain it away as a superpower the moment their dog doesn’t trust somebody:

“He wouldn’t act like this for no reason. Something must be wrong with you!”

I don’t know if the museum in Liberty was called the Davistown Museum back in 2008 or not. The one display that everybody gravitated toward was a glass case full of unidentified tools. One in particular burned itself into my memory – a piece of hardwood was carved into a cylindrical “T”, almost like a three way dowel. All three terminations were upholstered in ox blood colored leather that was held in place with what looked like furniture tacks.

There is a small section for unidentified tools on the museum’s current website but I couldn’t find a picture of this thing. Maybe that means that between 2008 and now somebody succeeded in identifying what it’s original purpose was. The whole thing looked well worn and I couldn’t help but suspect the leather had been added to soften the wood as all three ends came into repeated contact with something. An improvised piece of machinery? A shoe or furniture maker’s signature leather-smoother-downer?

I definitely wouldn’t mind if somebody who works at that museum see’s this and can tell what I’m talking about and wanted to tell me if they figured out what it was for.

Considering that I had taken acid during our New York show and then taken acid to walk the Liberty Trail in Boston and now I was taking it in Liberty, Maine I had been taking a whole lot of acid. A group of us took it for this dinner party but not any of the other people in Living Hell – me, the Taboo kids and Ryan who had rode along from Boston. I don’t know if this was the moment that Annapurna Hmal Von Wagner and I first laid eyes on each other but it was definitely when we first noticed.

She strode over meaningfully and slammed something into the palm of my open hand while staring directly into my eyes:

“What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you really do?”

If people are going to take psychedelic drugs and believe in magic then who’s to say what’s actually happening ever? I was writing a few pieces ago about the definition of the word Noumena – “things that one becomes aware of the existence of without one’s senses”. It’s a hard word to define but it’s opposite is phenomena. Which one would you call it when people experience a shared hallucination or impression?

I had a dagger that I used to focus intention and energy during Living Hell performances but some train police stole it from me when I was later riding freight to California for our reunion show. I was trying to figure out what I would replace it with for that final concert when I found a conductor’s baton stabbed into the ground at People’s Park in Berkeley. I felt like this represented both a message from the cosmos and a clear sign that I was maturing as a magician.

If we view the magician’s tool as an extension of their will then it can certainly be argued that using a conductor’s baton or wand brings a sense of subtlety and finesse that a dagger lacks.

I used to play a game where I would use the wand to focus energy and intention toward somebody’s back at a crowded show or party and they would invariably turn around. If we go with the supposition that this was more than just a coincidence every time it happened then the only explanation would be that these people were somehow sensing the energy I was directing at them but there’s no objective way to measure this. Whether you believe in it or not it doesn’t exactly make for a headlining act at the Magic Castle.

It felt like Annapurna had captured a live bee or wasp and pressed it into my hand so it would sting me. When I looked down to see what was happening it was only an acrylic prism on a thin ball chain. The stinging sensation was only temporary – a painful shock at the moment of contact. Her expression seemed to be saying:

“Yes, I just did that. That’s a thing I can do.”

I never ended up getting to know Annapurna very well so when I heard that she had ended her own life it more or less came as a complete surprise. I find the idea of wishing you had gotten to know a person better before they die somewhat pedantic and insulting. When one of my friends died of a heroin overdose a girl that I had used to have a crush on told me that she regretted not getting to know him better before his death but added that she didn’t want to make the same mistake with me.

The implication was that I would be dying of a heroin overdose sometime in the near future and she wanted to make sure to get to know me first – kind of like when Netflix or Tubi tell you the shows and movies that they will be losing the streaming rights to in the next week or month so you can prioritize watching them. I was so insulted that I never spoke to that girl again. She also ended up killing herself.

I savor this memory that I do have with Annapurna – the gift of a token of interest and a demonstration of magical prowess. We exchanged contact information and spoke a few times and sated our mutual interest by learning a little bit about each other before getting on with our lives. If I were to hope or wish anything it would be that I hope she was satisfied with her decision to end her life and the method that was available to her to end it. Many of us die by accident or surprise so I’m happy for her that she was able to do so by an informed choice.

One of the girls did the trick at the dinner party where you dip your finger into a wine glass and then move it around the rim until it produces a single resonant tone. It might have been Annapurna but it also might have been Bonnie. I do remember that whoever did it made a self deprecating comment about being a dilettante and this being the single noteworthy thing she was capable of – kind of like when the girl in The Breakfast Club puts the lipstick on with her boobs.

It’s such a beautiful sound. I wonder if I would be able to do it.

I found myself talking to Dan in the deepest throes of the drugs. I forget how we ended up on the topic but he was telling me about how the optimism of his youth was brutally disrupted by the Vietnam War and the lives of so many close to him completely truncated. His skin wasn’t particularly unhealthy for someone of his age but in that moment I saw every mark made by time as a wound of circumstance.

It wasn’t long after this tour that John Benson passed along the news that Dan had taken his own life. This one ddidn’t surprise me in the least.

Liberty is a small town. When you walk down from Main Street and turn onto Water Street there is a small dilapidated shack as you pass the trees – or at least there was in 2008. The dinner party was over and everybody was walking back down to the bus. Party Steve offered some commentary in his “funny” voice as we passed the shack but I’m not sure if it could properly be called a joke:

“That’s an ass shack! That shack’s got a lot of A!”

Most nights on tour I had been sleeping in the hammock at the highest point of the bus but the weather was nice that night and I decided to sleep in the shack. There was a phenomenon around those years that came with taking a lot of psychedelic drugs and believing in magic but basically I experienced a personal pantheon of what I would call Cardinal Deities. The first experience was in San Diego while I was trying to read Under The Volcano.

Very early in the book is a passage about lightning in the mountains to the west. The moment I read that I had a vision – I saw a dark and stormy mountain pass, a crescent moon, a silver dagger and a man with shaggy grey hair and a mustache dressed in dark layered cloaks. My instinctual understanding was that I was seeing a personification of the direction West but the name I knew him as was Silver. I feel like I should mention that I wasn’t under the influence of psychedelic drugs when this happened but I was for the other ones.

I still haven’t actually read much of the book but I’ve heard good things about it and should probably give it another chance.

The next experience came while riding a freight train through Mississippi to New Orleans and taking a lot of acid. The train passed a building called Southern Pipe Supply with a large red stylized “S” that bore a gold crown. In that moment I thought “The South is a Red King” and then I saw him. He was dressed in a long red robe with blonde hair in a grown out page boy (maybe the term Masonna cut will be more evocative for some) and a simple golden crown.

He wore a haughty expression like he had power once but lost it and was biding his time until he might have it again. I saw ravens flying and the circles defined by the edges of their wings like in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by William Carlos Williams. I knew him as South.

Looking out the window of that shack and waiting for the drugs to wear off and to fall asleep I saw the third of the Cardinal Deities who I knew as Maine. One of the trees looked like a human face and two stars shone through it to define his eyes. He had an iron thrall’s collar around his neck and facial hair in the shape of the Greek Letter Omega. His hair was like a short mullet with shaved sides and his nose was long and perfectly conical in shape. His color was green.

I understood that he governed over sex and death.

The final one came a little later and broke the pattern in small ways. While the first three appeared in the sections of the country that corresponded to their cardinal directions this one was in the East Bay rather than the East Coast. In the darkest and quietest part of the night I heard an engine attempt to turn over and die – I had probably been on drugs. I had a sudden vision of that scene in Dumbo where his mother is chained down and you see her tiny eye in contrast to her large body and she’s crying.

I knew her as Strength Succumbs Under Bonds.

Her color was black and her metal was lead. I hadn’t gone out of my way to look for these entities but once I had a full set it felt distinctly satisfying and useful. You could say I invented them or made myself suggestible but for a little while it was my go to organizing principle. I realized they should have elements in a Classical sense instead of just a Periodic Table one so clockwise from West it was Water, Earth, Air and Fire. I might have mentioned using them when haunting a house in 2009 and it was Ghost, Witch, Vampire and Goblin.

It’s interesting looking back at this time and how important magical thinking was in my day to day life. It still is but in a very different way. The Cardinal Deities are still here but they’ve faded into the background and I don’t think about them as much. If they seem useful to you, or real, feel free to use them for anything you want.

Next Part:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/02/11/jacksonville-2008-the-bus-can-you-run-in-there-and-grab-me-a-cherry-coke/

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Maine 2008 : The Bus Part Eight “Yeah Man, Masturbate in Heaven”

berniebleak1 Comment

It’s been a little while since I picked this thread back up and I won’t be picking up exactly where I last set it down. I think the only show in between Boston and Belfast was Portland. Besides being the largest city in Maine Portland’s biggest claim to fame is that it has the same name as the one in Oregon leading to infrequent scenarios where people might have to ask “which one?” There are also quite a few Oaklands peppered across the United States that are generally good for a passing chuckle through the tour vehicle windshield but these are between shows.

Nobody ever actually plays in these Oaklands or if they do I’ve never heard about it.

I guess I’m actually going to talk about the Portland show. This guy named Ed set it up and his band Stand By Me was playing. I think they would have usually been somewhere on the hardcore to post hardcore spectrum but their singer had lost his voice before this performance so they played with a recording of some Americana type author. I’m just going to say Studs Terkel with full knowledge that this is probably wrong but whoever would know enough to correct me will probably decide it’s funnier this way.

You know that thing where somebody has only seen a word written down and the first time they say it in mixed company they make a shambles of the pronunciation and people laugh at them? I did that with that guy’s name. I said it “STOODS TARE-KELL” like I somehow genuinely assumed that the most unlikely of all possible pronunciations would just be correct.

I mean I did assume. I thought that was how you say it. People laughed at me.

The show was in an open field at the edge of town somewhere. A girl approached me and asked if she might do the dance thing with the spinning fire on top of the bus. I told her that that would not be possible and she conceded that this was probably an appropriate restriction from a safety perspective. I assured her that the decision was purely an aesthetic one.

The next show was up in Belfast. Many of the highway underpasses between Portland and Belfast were on the low side and there was some concern that the bus’s hunchbacked loft might not properly clear them. We were feeling especially cautious after a minor incident in a place called Folly Island near Charleston, South Carolina. We had assumed that some low hanging tree branches would “probably” be fine and ended up breaking a top window and admitting a veritable battalion of tiny spiders.

This had various repercussions. One of them was that the piece of plexiglass that got hastily fastened into place to replace the broken window surrendered to the wind somewhere along our route and only narrowly avoided triggering some larger catastrophe. The other issue was that in Cayce, South Carolina the onboard performance space was permeable to rain – bringing an abrupt conclusion to a performance by a project called Bald Ego featuring Adam Keith from CUBE:

“I gotta stop playing. My Kaoss Pad is soaked!”

All of this meant that the driver wanted to be especially cautious that the island’s folly not be repeated and had been abruptly slowing in order to ensure that each new vertical obstruction could be safely navigated. This was evidently concerning to some of the other motorists and an anonymous Good Samaritan decided to do us the courtesy of calling in the local constabulary. When we saw the familiar lights and pulled off the Interstate we found ourselves on an aptly named county access road called Dyer Strait.

To our good fortune Upper Dave happened to be behind the wheel and it just so happened that some kind of minor and easily remedied oversight back in California had left him with a recently suspended license that he had no knowledge of being a continent away from his mailbox. With the State Motto of Dirigo or I Direct embroidered in clear letters on their patches the officers were kind enough to direct him all the way to their county lockup. We rolled into Belfast’s Waterfall Arts Center minus a friend, companion and more relevantly for the night’s Living Hell performance a drummer.

Dan Beckman, whose constantly evolving project name has finally settled as Village of Spaces, set up the show for us and had been working at Waterfall Arts as a janitor. A lot of folks on the bus were long time friends of him and Amy Moon but it was my first introduction. I had been eager to see him play since an experience I had in Chicago the previous Winter.

I had come bursting into the Blog Cabin from a snowy night I wasn’t dressed for with a head full of dark thoughts and acid. A girl named Amanda was listening to his music on the computer and began rubbing the life back into my near frozen hands as the lyrics to a song called Greensboro, NC similarly smoothed the cold and chaos from my thoughts:

“You can walk it off, you can walk on home they swear

You’ll be all right they swear, you’ll be OK”

This show was also my first time meeting Crissy and Bonny from Taboo. The band was in the process of developing their more theatrical style but I was most excited about their personalities. It felt like I had stumbled into a cabal of nineteenth century cartoon villains that I had secretly always belonged to. It got to my head: when I rode along to pick up Dave from the police station I was practically twirling my hair like a besotted schoolgirl:

“Hey Dave, should I move to Maine and live with all the other vampires?”

“Yeah man. Masturbate in Heaven.”

We stayed over at the house called RoHeGe that I’ve always heard is named after three sisters that grew up there but nobody has ever told me when this was or how anybody knew about them. I took a walk alone the next morning and ended up in a small village graveyard looking at colorful turkey tail mushrooms. For most of the tour I was wearing a white rabbit fur coat and women’s corduroy pants so with my long hair I would have been easy to mistake for a woman from behind.

The next Winter in Chicago the Pilsen Police began a campaign of targeted harassment against the women in our subculture who lived in that neighborhood. They claimed to be under the impression that they were working as prostitutes which seems unlikely as I’ve never heard of anybody soliciting from a bicycle in any city on Earth. Anyway it was a common thing that Winter to notice a searchlight on my back as I was biking or walking home until to have the cops speed off the moment I turned around and they saw my facial hair.

I assume that something similar was happening in the Belfast graveyard but I suppose it’s also possible that I actually represented exactly what this person was looking for and they had just been preternaturally lucky: a tall, thin genderqueer glam rocker. Anyway I heard whistling and when I turned to look a generic somewhat older somewhat balding somewhat heavy man was masturbating in my general direction while darting from tree to tree and continuing to whistle. My next move is somewhat mystifying but I will attempt to explain my thought process.

I called the police.

I thought that this person was actually targeting women and was a sexual predator and me alerting the authorities might help make Belfast a safer place for the women that lived there. Obviously the third part is ridiculous. It actually just occurred to me that the graveyard could have been a cruising spot and I might have looked like exactly the sort of person who would have been there to cruise too but even if we accept the first two parts of my statement as true I had already been given ample evidence that the local police had no interest whatsoever in helping or protecting people anything like me.

If I thought that this person constituted an actual threat to women’s safety the best thing I could have done is confront this person myself and try to convey that their behavior was unacceptable through either force or the threat of force. I would have been wearing a dagger on my belt – pointing it in his direction and saying something along the lines of “hey don’t wave your dick at me creep” would have done more to change this person’s future behavior than calling in an authority figure who would never believe me to begin with.

The Belfast Police were clearly more of a threat to women in my community than a random pervert masturbating in a graveyard and the one upside to my calling them is whatever officer responded to my call would have been too busy for the hour or so that this took to otherwise harass, victimize or be a general nuisance to the women, punks, queers or otherwise vulnerable citizens of Belfast.

Be all that as it may I did in fact call the police. I didn’t have a cell phone so I walked to a nearby pharmacy or grocery store and then back to the graveyard to wait. A police officer came and I explained to him what had happened. He looked at me incredulously:

“You sure he wasn’t just taking a piss?”

I offered the universal gesture:

“Do you piss like this officer?”

He rolled his eyes:

“When did you say y’all were leaving town again?”

At that moment the members of Taboo happened to be driving by in a short black bus they had converted to run on vegetable oil so I told him that it wouldn’t be long now and ran over to get a ride. They asked me why the cop had been harassing me and I explained that I had actually called him.

A small epilogue to this incident happened several years later when I was talking up Taboo to a friend and pulled up the first live video I could find on YouTube. I can’t remember if this would have been LaPorsha or somebody else I had a brief romantic fling with or crush on I just remember the clear feeling of having some level of that kind of energy toward the person and pulling up the video in a very “check out my cool friends who also think I’m cool” way only to discover that it was a video of them making fun of me for having called the police.

It’s harder to find things on YouTube than it used to be. Some things got taken down and there’s more stuff up there and maybe in one of their mergers they changed the way the search function works. I only know that a lot of things that used to be easy for me to find on there are impossible to find now. I feel this way about so many things that used to be on the internet between 2000 and 2010: Flickr groups? Old noise forums? Anything that got uploaded to MySpace? It’s all gone now and your odds are better of finding an obscure record that was pressed in the ‘70s than any of this stuff.

Or I’m just stupid and bad at finding things. Anyway I don’t think they had a whole song devoted to making fun of me for calling the police – it was just a really long interlude of between song banter. I think it was one of the performances from the armband era when misguided protestors would try to get their tours and shows cancelled under the assumption that they were at least promoting neofascist imagery if not ideals.

So much wasted and misguided effort: protesting appearances by a band you know nothing about, touring the country in black suits with red armbands in the full knowledge that people will take it out of context and get offended, calling a police department that just arrested your friend in a clear display of contempt for your artistic community and the values you share. I hope that all of us are making better decisions and spending our time in more meaningful ways.

I was reconnecting with an old friend recently when the conversation took an unexpected detour into what sides we might have ended up on in the vaccine debate. I’ve been avoiding whatever the next step is but I’m tired of playing ideological hot lava with Venn diagrams. Obviously there are ideologies and ideas that are objectively horrible but what I’m getting at is I can’t imagine going out of my way to ask anybody if they got a vaccine or not in 2023 but I know I have friends on both sides that this is all still really important too.

I was going to write about going to Liberty, Maine and the tool museum but it got really late so I’ll write about that tomorrow.

Next Part:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/02/10/maine-2008-the-bus-that-shacks-got-a-lot-of-a/

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Boston 2008 : The Bus Part Seven “Where’s My Shoe?”

berniebleak1 Comment

I never learned to ride a bicycle as a child. I have vague memories of circling my family’s cul-de-sac on one with training wheels that must have belonged to someone else. My parents took me to Toys R Us to get one of my own but I told them I would rather have a coloring book. They laughed and explained that the price of the second one of those things was so trivial compared to the first that I could just have both. I told them that I’d just take the coloring book.

I did have a childhood best friend but he shared my indifference toward bicycle riding although I think he did own one and probably knew how to ride it. We were into skateboarding but in a way that bore more resemblance to sledding than the craze that was exciting our contemporaries. We carried the skateboards under our arms to increasingly steep hills around our neighborhood and sat down on them to ride to the bottom. I can’t remember ever standing on it and kicking the ground for momentum – it was like we didn’t know this method of riding a skateboard even existed.

The first person to try to teach me how to ride a bicycle as a young adult was a Spock-Rocker named Paul. The story about this guy was that his life’s ambition was to get a girlfriend and move to Portland. Once he got to Portland the relationships would end up not working out so he would move back to San Diego to find another girlfriend. I don’t know why he never tried to meet new girls in Portland. It could be that he was looking for specific qualities: Spock hair, star tattoo, lei pants and Tredair UK shoes – but it seems like there would have been just as many girls like that in the Portland of 1998 as there were in San Diego.

I never heard if it finally worked out for him and he built the perfect partnered up Portland life of his dreams or if he adjusted his expectations or found new and different ambitions. I’d like to think that he is currently in some stage of the same cycle: either preparing to move back to Portland having just met someone or preparing to return to San Diego after another breakup. There’s no chance it’s true though, I can’t remember who had told me this story about him but it seems likely that it was an exaggeration to begin with. Maybe it was the other Paul.

If the thing they say about learning to ride a bicycle is true, that once you learn you never forget, then Paul never actually taught me how to ride one. He definitely tried: I remember going down a single block of Golden Hills several times. Later that same summer I was finally taught for real by Brandi’s boyfriend Ben on the California block of North Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. Every time I attempted to ride one later I already knew how.

The point is that sometimes it takes doing something or learning to do something several times before it actually sinks in. I did eventually have the kind of best friend bicycle riding summer that countless television shows and movies have told me is supposed to happen in early adolescence but it wasn’t until 2012 in Los Angeles with my friend Ryan Riehle. I met Ryan Riehle on the Living Hell bus tour when he set up a show for us at a Boston studio for artists with disabilities he was working at called Outside the Lines.

The only thing is that I had actually met Ryan multiple times before this show but it hadn’t actually worked insofar as I didn’t actually remember. I still don’t remember even though I can remember lots of other little details about the shows and parties that we evidently met at. We talked about it again today, reminiscing over shared details like the theft of a rare original print of the Penelope Spheeris film The Decline of Western Civilization Part III, but when it gets to the moment when we would have met there is only a blank spot in my memory.

Ryan lived in an old house in Allston with cramped staircases that led to long, narrow hallways that divided the upper floors into individual bedrooms. On my return visits to Providence I had passed through parts of Atlantic Mills, Boy’s Town, and another space in the same building that I forget the name of but showed up with a dance troupe called Club Lyfestile. Anyway Ryan’s house was the first space in larger New England I had stepped into that had the same hardwood and screen printed posters feel as all of those Providence spaces.

This guy named Keith Waters lived there, I had seen some little comics he had drawn here and there about tiny anthropomorphic talking airplanes. He said he didn’t draw comics much anymore. There was a gigantic iguana named Azrael in the bay window that barely moved and almost looked like a stone carving under it’s red light. Ryan would be climbing aboard the bus to accompany us up to Maine and that would become something of a pattern every time I returned to the house in Allston. It was the pregame Maine spot.

So at Outside The Lines I was finally meeting Ryan in the way where it’s like riding a bike and you never forget. I had been inside of a place that did the same sort of thing as OTL called Creativity Explored in San Francisco where I saw issues of a mini comic called Whipper Snapper Nerd that I really liked. At Outside The Lines the thing that jumped out was these hand made t-shirts with different Gods drawn on in colored sharpies. I can’t remember the artist’s name. I got one that said Disgusting God.

Sometimes on this tour we didn’t actually feel like doing a Living Hell set and would just make up a different band. In Providence we had played as an improvised punk band called Max Capacity – I can’t remember 100% if I sang for that one too but it seems likely as the main reason for me becoming the singer was that nobody else wanted to do it. At Outside The Lines we created a band with a rotating group of the artists that worked there called Wednesday Surprise.

I can’t remember if this happened instead of or in addition to a Living Hell set but I do remember that it came together in a very casual and natural way – the OTL artists saw the instruments and wanted to try playing with them and then we were making up songs. We went through a long gestural number called Where’s My Shoe? that had it’s genesis in one of my shoes getting misplaced in the general chaos of a combined living and performance space on wheels.

It wasn’t the case with the Outside The Lines artists that nobody else ever wanted to be on vocals. I moved over to bass for a little while. I had heard that a couple of the OTL artists had been in a relationship but it hadn’t ended up working out. One of them was on the microphone while his former partner played the drums. He was singing in the quietest voice you could imagine, absolutely exuding frustration and loneliness for anyone close enough to the speaker to actually hear it.

I was going to put it into pull out quotes but there isn’t really much point to it: I still love you, I miss you, that sort of thing. It wasn’t so much the words as the way he was singing them.

He stared at the ground and seemed to feel like his words were falling off the edge of the earth the moment they left his mouth, drifting into the depths of space, never to know gravity again.

Next Part:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/02/06/maine-2008-the-bus-yeah-man-masturbate-in-heaven/

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

berniebleak1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Part:

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

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

berniebleak1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not here. Haiti only.”

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

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

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

We returned to the chaos of the International Noise Conference.

Next Part:

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

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

berniebleak1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Stop it! You’re making a scene!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you’ll be taking your…?”

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

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

Next Part:

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

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Thank You, We’re Occasional Detroit. This Was Our Last Show. We Just Broke Up.

berniebleak2 Comments

This winter writing project went through a lot of different incarnations in my head before ending up as what it is. The question as to what this thing even is is already a ticklish one. I don’t add very many links or photos because the only way I can bring myself to write this stuff is by believing it will end up as a physically published book but the current reality is that it is almost certainly a blog. Similarly I like to refer to these pieces as an ethnography, travelogue, rock journalism, picaresque novel or anything else other than the thing that it almost certainly is: a memoir.

The earliest seed of what you are now reading came about through a desire to correct a perceived injustice in 2016 and was almost entirely unrelated to telling my own story: I wanted to tell Occasional Detroit’s story. I think the trigger was LaPorsha being offered a role she declined in a music video for the rapper Antwon. I may as well mention that the role was to do some standard “video ho” shit that she wouldn’t have accepted in a million years and the dude turned out to be a straight up rapist but the incident took on importance for completely different reasons: it made me realize that the noise-rap trend had become ubiquitous.

I’m not sure if it would have made a difference but I probably came to this realization on the tail end of the trend as opposed to whatever you would call the other end, I guess the head end? Kanye West had released his experimental influenced album Yeezus three years earlier in 2013 and both Death Grips and clipping. had been around since the turn of the decade. I had even shared a bill at The Smell with clipping. way back in 2009 but it wasn’t until this declined video offer in 2016 that I began to view things in the form of an injustice that I might be able to help correct:

I felt like the music and culture outlets of the day were presenting noise-rap as a phenomenon that had suddenly materialized out of thin air and nobody was talking about the group that had actually pioneered the genre: Occasional Detroit

I can’t pretend like I even know how to get a piece published in an art and culture outlet now but I’m pretty sure I was going about things in the wrong way then. I sent e-mail proposals to Vice, SPIN and every author that had written articles about the more popular noise-rap artists but I never heard anything back. It probably would have made more sense to just write the piece up, I had gotten in touch with Towondo and Demetrisa, and then shop it around in at least first draft form.

When I started writing these pieces back in October I had decided that I could revisit the idea of a profile or interview once I had gotten a book published or otherwise established myself as a voice on the intersection of art, music and DIY culture I have been referring to as the American Underground. I felt like we had all the time in the world. In our last messages from April of 2020 Towondo was talking about having a huge archive in his mother’s basement ranging from VHS tapes from an early tour with Wolf Eyes to Master DVDs from a public access television show they’d done in Albuquerque.

I don’t know how to copy and paste text from Facebook messages so I’m just going to drop in an image of the last message here:

I found out today that Towondo “Beyababa” Clayborn passed away in December of 2021. I must have somehow missed the news around the time it happened. I’m not including this information to satisfy anyone’s morbid curiosity but to prevent any unsavory assumptions: Towondo was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer that ultimately killed him. Deme is going by AkashaG and doing well in Phoenix, Arizona. It looks like the interview I had planned won’t be happening and the piece I had always envisioned as a profile will now be more accurately described as a tribute.

In the first decade of the 2000s a lot of different artists in the American Underground were exploring a thing I referred to as “extreme noise tour lifestyle”. The artistic values of our community were centered on experimentation, iconoclasm and transgression. People were pursuing these ideas with what they presented as music, how the members of a group were composed, their stage performances, the presentation of recordings and other merchandise as physical objects and eventually in the unconventional methods of traveling between shows.

Some examples would be Friends Forever playing outside of the actual venues in a Volkswagen Type 2, John Benson creating a bus as mobile concert venue and a band from Boise, Idaho called Monster Dudes where a father toured with his young son on drums from the time he was three years old. Occasional Detroit approached this in a way that consistently blurred the lines behind life and art and kept their contemporaries guessing how much of what they were watching was an “act”.

The American Noise scene that developed in the wake of the Seattle Grunge Explosion is generally thought of as a white and culturally middle class phenomenon but Occasional Detroit rank among the earliest artists of the movement. It’s hard to think of a more successful name in noise than Wolf Eyes whose 2004 Burned Mind album brought critical acclaim, reviews in main stream music publications and a national tour with Sonic Youth. O-D and Wolf Eyes actually started in the same town, Ypsilanti, and frequently performed and even toured together.

I don’t know a lot about the earliest days of the group and figured that instead of repeating second hand information I should just write about the incarnation I was actually familiar with: the duo of Towondo and Demetrisa. I first met and performed with them at a 2005 Festival called the Che Cafe Super Pizza Party. I was in an actual band for the first time in my life but had finagled a way to perform all three days of the Festival under different project names.

That’s another piece of the conceptual envelope pushing that everybody was concerned with in those days.

Anyway I was freestyle rapping as Gypsy Feelings and instead of an electronic beat I had a live drummer behind me, kind of doing a vaudeville comedy style thing. I’m trying to figure out who this would have been but it’s nearly impossible: nearly every band there had a drummer and I was friends with almost all of them. I was doing a piece called What’s Your Name? that centered on asking audience members this question then ad-libbing rhyming insults based on their answer. When I came to Towondo he answered with “Occasional Detroit” and kind of threw me for a loop because that’s a lot of syllables but I must have come up with something.

That quickly created some rapport, no pun intended, between us because there weren’t a lot of rappers in the scene at the time. When it was time for O-D to perform they went into a medley of rap duets, rambling freestyles and abstract sound collages. Suddenly Deme dropped to the ground and started violently convulsing while foaming at the mouth. Towondo dropped down next to her and started shaking her and calling out in what looked and sounded like genuine panic and concern. There might have been somebody in the audience that had been touring with them and knew the score but all of us locals fell for it completely – jaws on the floor as they say.

The old Alka-Seltzer tablet in the mouth trick…

I remember them disappearing for almost the entirety of the next day of the Festival and then emerging from the spacious woods behind the venue near night fall. I asked Deme where they’d been:

“I just needed some nature in my life.”

I want to shy away from any racial stereotypes, be they negative or positive ones, but I think we can all agree that when the term “free spirit” is applied to people from a broadly White American cultural background it inevitably sounds like some degree of privilege is involved but when applied to people from a broadly Black American cultural background the connotations are different. Like the difference between trying on a “freak” persona as a brief and interesting diversion on the way to a comfortable life versus fully embracing the “freak” identity with the instinctual knowledge that you will be bearing the full weight of that freak-dom.

This brings us to the next piece of the story. The main volunteers at the Che Cafe in those years lived in a Hillcrest house that also hosted parties and shows. A few of the groups from the Festival had been crashing there including Occasional Detroit but they disappeared after a week or so most likely at the first intimation of a “worn out welcome”. The kids at the house were pretty certain that they hadn’t left town completely because they had left a keyboard behind but didn’t think too much about it.

Several months later they showed back up for the keyboard and casually mentioned they’d been living between Tijuana and the Saint Vincent DePaul Homeless Shelter. At this point in my life I’ve been through a nearly identical lifestyle but in 2005 it was pretty mind blowing. When I talked to my friends about it the general sentiment was that while most noise artists aspired toward reckless abandon in their art Occasional Detroit were on a whole other level – actually living it.

I know that we kept in touch to some degree after this Festival but my next clear memories are from 2010. I can’t remember if I had hit them up before the 2010 Generation tour or if it had just been a chance encounter in Denver and unfortunately all the MySpace era messages are lost. Deme was performing solo at an all women’s festival called Tit Wrench in Rhinoceropolos and Towondo was a little salty that he wouldn’t be allowed to play. It probably didn’t help that I was invited to play the same event as an “honorary woman” due to having just had a bad show at the punk house personification of toxic masculinity.

Me and Deme played right next to each other in a loading bay. I noticed that we both used the same drum machine.

I asked Deme about her timeline and experiences in the group today so I am adding her response in order for her to be represented in her own words:

“I started playing with Occasional Detroit in 2001 & our last show was Parkview Riverside CA we tour the United State from the east coast to the west and south we still played local shows and and did lots of fundraisers I definitely feel bad about the situation told Towondo told me that he had a rare type of cancer and it was spreading through his body after he worked for the Cruise line he traveled all over the world we as Occasional Detroit will always be the best hip hop rock duo group ever to hit the noise generation I still make music and put out our old music”

We found out that they had just moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico and ended up needing a date in that general area for the return leg of our U.S. Tour. Towondo had just started working as a videographer, mostly weddings and stuff, and they were living in one of those generic apartment complexes with carpeted floors and stair cases made of cement and metal. They had just gotten an orange kitten, probably a boy.

We played in a local bar or cafe, I forget which it was, and it was one of those sparsely attended indifferent crowd situations that pop up on every national tour. Their set escalated into an argument that seemed like a performance and totally real at the exact same time. Towondo shut off the electronics and grabbed the microphone:

“Thank you, we’re Occasional Detroit. This was our last show. We just broke up.”

Now that I’ve been married for ten years I completely understand the energy. I can’t count the number of times that we’ve “broken up” and I’m sure we’ll be together for the rest of our lives. Towondo had told me that they separated in 2013 when I first hit him up about this writing project in 2016. I’m talking to Deme now and she tells me their last show was in 2006 and I’m not sure if that’s a typo but I guess it doesn’t really matter.

This piece can’t really be the thing that I conceived it as and unfortunately the interview will never happen now and this isn’t the best platform but I think the best move was to just write it. Maybe the platform will grow or it will end up on a larger one. Ultimately the noise-rap thing was a trend and what Occasional Detroit was about was always so much bigger than that. I hope that this gets to people who are interested in the genre and it’s history but you can’t make people care about things.

I never knew Towondo’s family but I hope that this gets to them and they know that what he did with Occasional Detroit mattered to people. The Noise community has gotten a lot more diverse in recent years but around the turn of the Millenium you could have counted the number of Black Women in Experimental Music on a single hand and it is absolutely overdue for Demeat, now AkashaG, to be recognized as a trailblazer and icon. I’m not sure if that box of tapes, DVDs and videos still exists in a basement somewhere but if it does whoever is taking care of it should know that there are people who are interested and want to see it.

I’ll help in any way I can.

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

berniebleak1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cut the wick, light the spark!

Be the candle, pierce the dark!”

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

“That’s a real knife?”

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

“Well it’s a dagger.”

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

“I won’t say nothin’.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Part:

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

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West Virginia 2008 : The Bus Part One “This Beer! This Rock!”

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This isn’t going to be the chapter where I lay down all the exposition about The Bus and the Living Hell tour but I should at least throw down a little bit of background. This wasn’t the regular style AC Transit bus called Larry that might’ve ended up lasting longer and hosting more shows than this earlier version: the totally tricked out one with plexiglass floors and an elevated loft in back that blew a piston on this tour and never quite made it out of Albion, Michigan. For either version the core concept is essentially the same – John Benson and a crew of collaborators install a bank of power wheelchair batteries underneath a stage in back to create a mobile concert venue.

There are two important things about this earlier bus that may or may not have been the case with Larry. I can only say definitively that I didn’t experience these things on the Larry bus. First off it had been converted to run on used vegetable oil. Everybody was doing these conversions during the first decade of the 2000s. For the earlier part it was a way to convert a resource that most of the world viewed as garbage into what was essentially free gasoline. Toward the later part the world had caught on and pumping out of random grease traps wasn’t always viewed as charitably.

This brings us to the second of the things: the original bus was an absolute cop magnet. Poking around behind restaurants to collect veggie oil without asking for permission didn’t help but there was also the fact that it was just plain weirder looking and the Living Hell tour brought us to some pretty remote sections of America. Whatever the cause I wouldn’t experience the same level of constant attention from law enforcement again until I moved to Tijuana as a guero.

Besides the supply issue that I already mentioned running the bus on vegetable oil was putting a lot of stress on it’s engine. Short trips around town when there had been plenty of time to find the best grease and make sure it was well filtered was pretty different from playing catch-as-catch-can in unfamiliar territory. Or maybe that wasn’t the problem at all – I know that the bus had done a whole other U.S. Tour before I was ever on it and it might have run on veggie just fine for the entirety of that one. Maybe it was just old and worn out, every engine in the world only works for so many miles.

By West Virginia we’d had to cancel a few consecutive shows and the bus was still acting iffy. I can’t remember the name of the West Virginia town but it had a Cummins service shop where John had decided we should try getting an oil change and we were going to have to wait overnight to get it. There was a shopping mall in town that was playing Iron Man in it’s movie theater, nobody went to see it but this detail helped me figure out what year it was.

There was a toy shop set up in the common area with a surprisingly good selection of plastic dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals – I bought a Glyptodon for my nephew and a local cop working security ended up ringing me up. The Glyptodon was similar but unrelated to the modern armadillos and about the size and shape of the cheapest tent at Target. I’ve done a little research into plastic prehistoric animals and come to the conclusion that this was probably the Scheich version that stopped production in 2011. All the best plastic animals come from Germany.

Behind the mall sat some fairly spectacular nature. A cliff leading downwards of a reddish material that you could reduce to dust with your bare hands if you had the time and energy. Off the top of my head I want to say shale but I’m not a geologist. The cliffs acted as a staircase to get down to a river and some sections of forest.

With nothing else to do we all went for a hike behind the mall. John Benson took a picture and put it on the bus Flickr so I’m including it here. You can see me in a fur coat and visor and Shon carrying his unicycle and Upper Dave bringing the party with a case of Milwaukee’s Best. It seemed like a good time for a beer so most of us settled into drinking them. The conversation devolved into a string of repetitive requests and queries centered on passing specific beers from specific rocks.

I really want to explain this so I’m going to just go into it in mind numbing detail. People were saying things like: Could you pass me that beer? This beer? No, that beer over on that rock. This rock? No, that rock. We were in a landscape that had been reduced to beers and rocks. Theoretically anybody could have just picked up and drank from any beer just like they could have crushed any of the rocks just by squeezing them but you know how it is: people want the one they were already drinking out of. Anyway I want you to understand the mind state that caused Vanessa to suddenly stand up and yell out:

“This beer! This rock!”

Maybe it’s a “you had to be there” kind of thing or maybe it’s not even funny or interesting at all. I don’t think it matters that much whether you actually know the people in this story or not. Anyway she wasn’t talking about any specific beer or any specific rock. It was rhetorical.

I was taking LSD a lot at that time which basically meant I was always carrying LSD and selling LSD because that’s the only way to really make sure it will always be around and available. Selling LSD feels more like doing this weird kind of community service than being a drug dealer because the price always more or less stays the same and people will come complain if the LSD they bought six months ago didn’t work. It’s like putting on punk shows – it’s always supposed to be five dollars until the end of time and it’s not really about the money but like everything else it costs money.

Anyway I decided that it would be a good time to take some LSD and Shon with the unicycle wanted to take some too but nobody else felt like it. I don’t think I was selling it in that context – behind a mall in West Virginia wasn’t really the time or place to worry about money. So we wandered into the woods and everybody else drifted back toward the bus.

Once things started getting weird I was bouncing on fallen trees and peeling this thick lichen off of trees and eating it and just generally being a weirdo and it was all a bit much for Shon. He was kind of dissociating and just seemed to be moving toward a quiet introspective kind of thing so I left him in the woods and wandered back to everybody else and the bus.

Obviously the residents of the small town in West Virginia had noticed when a bus full of freaks showed up and then hung around the mall for a little while and then didn’t seem to be leaving town at nightfall. The police had been waiting for a pretext to come descend on us en masse and figure out exactly what we were up to. This turned out to be Upper Dave and Vanessa sneaking into some demonstration prefabricated homes to see what they looked like on the inside.

There might have been alarms or the police might have already been following them but they waited until they had walked all the way back to the bus before popping out to enforce the law. Talking to the police while tripping on LSD is either the worst possible thing in the world or really really fun depending on your personal level of control and experience. I had a feeling that it probably would have been the first one for Shon which is why it was fortunate that he had stayed behind in the woods but it was definitely the second one for me.

They seemed like they were afraid of us but not in a “might randomly shoot us” kind of way – they were just nervously standing together in a line and constantly adjusting the crotch area of their pants and spitting chewing tobacco on the ground. You know the way that cops stand: if you let your legs touch it means you’re gay or whatever. They were giving Dave and Vanessa a hard time and saying a lot of “what, you don’t know what a locked door means?” and then they offered us a deal: unless we let them search the bus and run everybody’s information they were going to arrest Dave and Vanessa for trespassing.

We picked the second option because even though I had a sheet of acid and somebody must have had some marijuana it seemed unlikely that they would actually find it. At some point Shon had called John Orlando on the cellphone and John told him the cops were there and his reaction made it clear that we had to make sure they didn’t interact because he wouldn’t have been able to handle it. The problem was they started asking all of us how many of us there were and people were giving inconsistent answers and they started to suspect we were hiding something.

We had to line up so they could run our identification information and see if anybody had any warrants even though it was obviously a waste of time as we wouldn’t have agreed to the option if anybody did. It got to my turn and I savored staring into the cop’s eyes like a predatory animal as he nervously spit on the ground and avoided my gaze. One of the cops asked me if I had bought a plastic armadillo and I told him it was called a Glyptodon. Dalton and John Orlando were shooting baskets on the back of the bus and I asked them if they were playing HORSE:

“No, PIG.”

We stared the cops down as we tossed the ball at the basket and they nervously adjusted their pants and spit and avoided our eyes and flinched every time the ball hit the metal rim and made a noise. When they searched John Benson he just so happened to have a tiny plastic figure of a police officer in his pocket. He hadn’t been carrying it for the whole tour – most likely he’d found it on the ground that very day. The cop did the thing where something they don’t entirely understand ends up in their hand and they look like they’re trying to will it into disappearing.

Actually when they had searched me I had a tiny bottle of White Flower in my pocket – a topical menthol rub for muscle aches if you’re not familiar. The cop asked me what it was and I told him it was Chinese analgesic ointment and he visibly flinched. Most likely he hadn’t understood the Greek derived name for pain relievers and was dismayed to think he was touching something designed for “butt stuff”.

Next it was time for the cops to run Jill’s background information but none of them would look at her and they kept telling her to go talk to the other officer until she had done a full circle and they were all just kind of looking down and nervously laughing: it was incredibly awkward. I’m sure things are still far from perfect in small towns in West Virginia but in 2008 most of the national conversations surrounding transgender identity hadn’t happened yet.

They couldn’t believe that they hadn’t found a giant pile of drugs anywhere on the bus so they went and got a drug sniffing dog to make sure. The dog was thrashing around nervously because of all the people and the smell of our dog Kloot and maybe a bit of stage fright. It kind of looked like a blur of eyes and teeth – it’s reasonable to think that the acid might have had something to do with that. Acid doesn’t smell like anything and Kloot’s smell was too strong for a little weed to get noticed but it did find somebody sleeping in the loft in the back of the bus.

We were so nervous about Shon nobody had really noticed that Rain wasn’t around and she awkwardly climbed out of the bed so the dog wouldn’t bite her. I’m not sure if she was genuinely sleeping or just hiding. The way we all reacted and nervously laughed at her sudden appearance made the cops think there had to be at least one other person. Vanessa said somebody had gone to watch Iron Man and they didn’t press the issue further. They were angry that their strategic gambit had failed and they’d ended up with nothing.

They asked us if we were “following the rainbow”.

I want to throw in that earlier in the night somebody had asked me what Iron Man was about and I told them it’s about a wealthy alcoholic who got hit by some shrapnel so he had to build armor to put around himself to make sure that nothing ever touches his heart. Some of it was the acid but I do really like how archetypical and basic those Marvel origin stories are. I’ve never actually seen the movie.

Finally the cops left and everybody got to do the thing where they’re like “oh shit! You’re tripping on drugs! Are you ok? Let’s go get our friend who’s tripping on drugs!” We walked over behind the mall where Shon was riding his unicycle and listening to his iPod and just generally appeared to have gotten a handle on things. We told him that the cops had been real but now they were gone and we could safely bring him back to the bus where he could lay back and talk about how hard he was tripping to his heart’s content.

I was still “on” meaning I was aware of and sensitive to things I might have missed in an unaltered state. I could feel the town’s disapproving hostility radiating out toward us from the streets, trees and sky. People were clearly aware that we had broken into an imaginary house and the cops hadn’t been able to do anything about it and they wanted justice. A red pick-up truck slowed and rolled down it’s window.

This was it – every muscle in my body tensed up for the coming confrontation. A voice drawled out from the dark interior:

“You fuckers…”

The window went back up and the truck sped off. Clearly the small town in West Virginia had done it’s worst.

I’m pretty sure we were going to be okay.

Next Part:

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/2023/01/22/new-york-2008-the-bus-we-know-when-were-not-wanted/

https://zerstyrschonheit.home.blog/