[photo credit: Tod Seelie]
The last piece I put up was my hundredth post on here so I wanted to do something special to commemorate one hundred posts. One idea I had was to take an event that someone else I knew had almost as clear a memory of as I did and have them write up their own recollections of the night/show/party whatever and then post both of our recollections together but do it double blind so neither of us could read the other person’s memories before typing up our own.
I still think this is a great idea – if anyone has strong recollections of something I haven’t covered yet and would like to try this give me a shout.
My other idea was to go back and rewrite the introductory piece about going to see The Make-Up in 1999. It might not even be clear to my newer readers that this was the introductory piece but it was the first thing I wrote since BAD FISH several years ago and the device I used to kick off this entire Winter writing project. I was messing with the dates for a bit as a quick hack to put the pieces in the order I wanted but I decided to stop doing that. A friend and mentor whose advice and constructive criticism was instrumental in building both my confidence and momentum at the beginning of this voyage had always said that it was the weakest piece, and it had already gone through a couple of rewrites, so I always figured it would need some adjusting.
When I went back and actually read it again I was struck with how much my voice has evolved and changed over these hundred entries and I found myself mystified and baffled by my earlier overly ornamentative style. Attacking this piece as an editor would feel like I was pulling the legs off of some kind of fragile insect – they say that to write and edit effectively one must “kill your darlings” but as far as I could tell it was already dead. Much like I did with BAD FISH, I opted to leave it pinned to the page as a specimen and curiosity.
I fixed a couple of obvious grammatical errors and adjusted the year but I mostly left it in the form it was originally written in. To measure anything you need a starting point and that piece will serve as origin on the graph of my literary attainment. There is one small detail that needs addressing however – in that piece I made an absurdly empty promise to deliver these various tableaux as a background character. The truth is that I was never a fly on the wall but always a fly in the ointment and the only way to deliver these accounts is the way they happened – with me conspicuously buzzing right in the center of things.
The last bit of business I want to take this moment to deal with is the title – Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America. Barkev had introduced me to a book called Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America by a Spaniard named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca who became stranded on a failed expedition in 1527 and spent the next eight years living and traveling among indigenous groups who, for the most part, had never seen another European.
The book reads a bit like an ethnography, a bit like a travelogue and a bit like a picaresque novel. When I made the decision that I would be writing up my experiences and stories with what I’ve been referring to as Underground America it seemed like the perfect reference and organizing principle. An entire hidden landscape that pulsed beneath the surface but to it’s architects, initiates and participants the most vital thing in the world. Even in the ‘90s when the term “alternative” was on every music executive’s tongue it lay beneath the trends – the alternative to alternative.
With all of that out of the way I’d like to jump right into telling a story. 2007 to 2008 was an absurdly busy year for me. In Winter I was part of the crew that was laboring to get The Garden of Bling river-worthy while most hands were abandoning the Miss Rockaway Armada project and dismantling the other crafts. To deal with the Lower Mississippi we needed a higher power outboard motor but we would also need to attach a larger transom to the disintegrating plywood of the raft to use one.
Luckily we met one of the archetypical junk sculptor welders found in every post-industrial city living off of Cherokee Street in Saint Louis who was happy to help us and let us use all his fancy tools. He was just about meticulous enough to be a serial killer – he only wore jeans and plaid flannels, he only drank Jimmy Buffet Landshark beer and he only ate stews and chilis he’d made with venison he hunted himself and kept in a big rectangular freezer. I’m going to take a wild guess that he probably killed it all during bow season.
Everything we did was fueled by Sparks which was still available in the highly caffeinated version. Me and Alexis had already bought used wetsuits to go into the freezing water and try to replace the plywood bottom that had been scraped off in successive beachings. I might have explained this before but I’ll explain it again: the rafts didn’t have anything like an airtight hull. They floated on pontoons that were essentially plywood boxes stuffed with styrofoam.
With the bottom missing my favorite analogy was a bowl full of cheerios turned upside down in a bathtub. In this analogy just pretend like the cheerios can’t get soggy – their natural buoyancy keeps the bowl afloat and the edges of the bowl keep the cheerios trapped underneath. If the bowl is rocked by waves or wakes a few of the cheerios drift free. The wakes of passing barges were a constant reality on this section of the Mississippi so chunks of styrofoam, the allegorical cheerios in this situation, were starting to fill the water and litter the beach.
We had a name for our efforts to replace the bottom while floating, The Garden of Bling Dive Team, but we didn’t have much progress or material success. We were trying to drive lag bolts into the two inch edges of 2 x 8s but with the lumber completely water logged and the necessity of driving the bolts upward underwater while being rocked by constant wakes we weren’t really getting anywhere.
We did the same thing for our efforts to install the transom – we took pictures for an imaginary metal band called Transom. I wrote a song about the fact that I always had to retrieve dropped tools from the water because I had a wetsuit and I was the tallest:
“Why does metal always sink?
Why’s the River fucking stink?
Holy Shit I’m in the drink again!”
By November none of it was working and I decided to take the cat we’d found, Night Beaver, and go back to Chicago. I wasn’t gone long when I heard that Harrison had broken his back doing a triple flip off of the nearby train bridge while wearing a wetsuit. This might sound serious but he pretty much bounced back from it without issue. This is the thing with Harrison – he’s constantly reckless but when it comes time for life altering injuries or serious consequences it slides off him like mercury and lands on the people around him.
Usually women.
Because it was 2007 and we were underneath a major train bridge agents from the Department of Homeland Security were constantly coming by and expressing how much they’d love it if we were gone. The raft was registered however and we qualified as a “vessel in distress” so they couldn’t make us leave. Boat and water law is different from normal law or even weird Mexico and Louisiana law – when I think about it I picture a yellowed scroll with decaying edges and a red wax seal.
Anyway everything’s legal when nobody’s looking. With everybody off the raft at the same time to check on Harrison in the hospital it was easy for somebody to set it on fire. I’m not necessarily saying it was DHS that did it but they did want us to disappear. Scrappers used to come down to that river bank to burn the insulation off of copper wires so the scrapyard would give them a better rate. Maybe they burned the Bling.
Alexis and I used to talk about burning it once we realized that it wasn’t going to be earning the Coast Guard’s approval for safe navigation or making it down the river. I was mainly upset that somebody had beaten us to it.
So 2008 came around. I was probably in Chicago for New Year’s Eve. Maybe it was the party at Heaven Gallery or somewhere close to it where I fell and chipped my front tooth on the ice outside. There was a phenomenon at this party we referred to as “Frat-Bro Valhalla”. The way the space was set up there was a special balcony or mezzanine full of frat-bros that seemed to be looking down on the rest of us. I couldn’t figure out how they had gotten to that spot or if it was all the same party or anything else.
I got drunk and fell and chipped my tooth on the ice outside.
I made it down to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras and then to Miami for the International Noise Conference and a couple months later onto The Bus for the Living Hell tour. Out to California for the Living Hell reunion and then to Australia with my sisters. I played the first two Bleak End at Bernie’s shows in Brisbane and Sydney. Sydney is a beautiful city but freezing cold during Australia’s Winter which happens to be Summer in the United States.
The skies are full of sulfur crested cockatoos in the daytime and flying foxes at night. Leg had asked me to bring her back a cockatoo feather. After watching a fairly awful modernized production of Don Giovanni at the Sydney Opera House, it featured playboy bunnies and simulated fellatio, I spent the rest of the night walking the Botanical Gardens. At dawn I found it – a perfect white feather with just a trace of bright banana yellow along it’s edge.
It seemed too important to entrust to International Mail and Leg had moved up to Portland. It was getting harder to use the counterfeit Greyhound passes. I’m not sure if they changed something in their computers or the station agents were just catching on to us but it was getting to a point where the stations in big cities would turn me away and I’d have to try all the little satellite stations until one worked.
I stopped trying to use them in 2008. I’m sure a lot of people threw in the towel even earlier and some must have dragged it on even longer. It feels unlikely but I’d love to hear that somebody is making it work in 2023.
Anyway I accidentally got ahead of myself a little bit because I thought that the quick West Coast tour with counterfeit Greyhound passes happened when I came back from Australia but I checked a date and it would have had to have been before.
I bought my Boss Dr. Groove drum machine from Rand in Chicago at the end of the bus tour – I used to joke that it used to have a bit of a drinking problem because it would have drinks spilled on it and get knocked off of tables every time Carpet of Sexy played. When I first started writing on it only a few of the buttons would stick but it eventually stopped working altogether.
Bekah had been the other founding member of our rap group Chew on This and had just moved out to Los Angeles. I had only written a couple of Bleak End songs so we played mixed sets with half Bleak End and half Chew on This material. I have no idea what we billed it as but the shows were probably too last minute for us to be on fliers anyway. Cole from Deep Jew came along and played a second keyboard.
The detail that fixed the dates for me is that we went to GLOW – a public arts rave on and around the Santa Monica Pier. We weren’t playing this event but we were carrying all of our gear with us and I had one of the bigger keyboards tucked under my arm. Someone yelled out the window of a passing van that I looked like Bob Marley which was a little confusing as I was tall, white, wearing heavy eye makeup, didn’t have dreadlocks and was carrying an instrument I didn’t think he was particularly known for.
I guess it was an example of “out-group homogeneity” – to some people the entire diverse landscape of performed music must seem like the same thing.
I had a friend from the rafts named Jaci who lived down the street from the pier, I’ve written a little bit about her sister Jacki who happens to be in this chapter’s photo, and we stashed all the gear at the apartment she shared with her mom. Then I gave everybody acid which turned out to not be the best idea. Cole and I were old hands with the stuff but the girls were fairly, if not completely, new to it. I probably should have split a single hit between Jaci and Bekah but you live and learn as they say.
The plan was simple: spend the night having fun tripping at the public arts rave and catch a bus toward the Greyhound first thing in the morning to travel on to San Francisco and our next show. The moment the drugs kicked in both Jaci and Bekah freaked out and ran off so me and Cole ended up in damage control mode – too busy tracking them down and making sure they were ok to even notice that we were tripping ourselves. I do faintly remember a tiny bit of light shows and dancing but most of the night was spent searching and worrying.
We found Bekah sitting in the shadows underneath the pier, like among the pylons right when the sand hits the water. She was staring off into space and it took quite a while before she was ready to speak. Finally she offered this small glimpse of her internal world at that moment:
“Filas… They’re cool, right?”
I agreed that they were indeed very cool shoes and we spent most of the night on the sand and in the shadows. Carl Cheng’s Santa Monica Art Tool was on display – a giant concrete roller that leaves behind a topographical map of the city in the sand. In function it was quite similar to the cylindrical seals made of lapis lazuli and other precious stones in Ancient Mesopotamia. They rolled across clay envelopes leaving behind decorative scenes that doubled as proof that the contents hadn’t been tampered with.
The night had been planned to coincide with a grunion run and it may have also been a Full Moon. Me and Cole were splashing around in the tide looking for the fish, who seemed to have missed the memo, and he made some kind of joke about the grunions arriving as spectators to see the crowds of oddly dressed people assembled on the beach. The concept set off an avalanche of questions in my head about what it would like if the participants in any kind of sub-cultural spectacle were outnumbered by the spectators, or even worse if only spectators showed up.
The question only seems to have become more poignant in the intervening years as live shows have become seas of recording phones and cameras and documentation seems to have superseded experience as a primary motivation. It was very much on my mind when I finally made it to the Folsom Street Fair after years of hearing about wanton displays of BDSM-themed role play. It felt like everyone was there to gawk but nobody was there to be the spectacle.
I’ve also seen the other side of this equation being thrown out of balance when I went to SXSW in 2011. Obviously people show up to the festival just to watch bands but for the small shows I was playing it was nothing but artists hoping to be seen and noticed. The way I figured the only point to playing these shows was rolling the dice to see if you would end up forming a relationship with the band that played directly before or after you. Nobody else was going to see you – everybody had booked five or more shows a day and had to leave the moment they could take their gear down.
Just like my first story about The Make-Up I feel like the Underground is most vital when everybody is acting as both participant and spectator and the line between the two isn’t particularly distinct. I’m sure there are places where this still is happening and it makes sense that I’m not immediately privy to them. I’m forty-two years old and I live on a mountain in the middle of nowhere but I still have faith in the youth.
Back to the story we had found Bekah but we wouldn’t be able to play our next show without our instruments. We weren’t able to get Jaci on the phone during the night and now it was going direct to voicemail. I found out later that she had thrown her phone away in a momentary paranoid freak out. Google had one of it’s offices just down the street from her house and her and Jacki had a running joke where they would approach the receptionist with inane requests:
“Ahem… Naked pictures of Angelina Jolie please.”
In 2008 the special cars that drove around capturing images for Google Street View were still a common and conspicuous sight, this is when they had the special cameras on the roof that looked like soccer balls. There seemed to always be a lot of them in her section of Santa Monica – maybe the Google offices included a special garage that they were coming and going from. Anyway she was frustrated that none of the calls seemed to be going through and she thought the “Google Gang” was stalking her so she threw her phone into some bushes somewhere.
We didn’t know all of this but we knew we needed our instruments so the only thing to try was walking to her house and seeing if she was there. As we walked away from the Pier a group of cyclists started heckling us for being pedestrians. I tried to argue that walking had roughly the same ecological impact as biking but Cole came up with the following joke:
“Oh yeah? Why do you think they call it a carbon footprint?”
Two blocks later we passed the same group loading all of these bikes into a pair of oversized vans. For all of their bluster cycling was evidently only a thing they did to cover the short mile between the party and easy to find parking spaces.
We knocked on Jaci’s door and after startling her mother’s creepy roommate we learned what had happened and were able to retrieve our keyboards. The longer lasting consequence was that Jaci and Jackie’s mother went from thinking I was an excellent chaperone and influence on her daughters to thinking that I was a very bad one. Not that it would matter much – neither Jaci or Jacki would be living with her for very much longer.
We caught the bus toward the Greyhound in accordance with the itinerary I had mapped out to get us to the San Francisco generator show in time to perform. An old wino who was evidently an experienced musician noticed our keyboards and offered this timeless advice:
“You can play all the wrong notes. Every note the wrong note. Just play them on time.”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 