I’ve been really wracking my brain and I can’t seem to figure out how I ended up with the cassette copy of the Woods album At Rear House. I know for a fact that I have never seen the band live but I did look up the label Fuck It Tapes and I was definitely at shows for a lot of the artists releasing music on the imprint around the same time. Somebody might have been selling it along with their own tapes and records or maybe I picked it up as a distro situation when I did a big mail order from Not Not Fun or maybe somebody just gave it to me.
I only know that it became one of my favorite tapes from the first time I played it, the kind of tape that you just flip back over to the first side after the second side ends and keep doing this until when you finally do get into the mood to put something else on you wouldn’t even know how many times you had actually looped it.
I went to the ArthurFest in 2005 to see Yoko Ono, Earth and SUNN O))) but the “freak folk” phenomenon of the mid aughts had been largely a dud for me. I ended up in Providence for a Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom show at AS220 and felt nothing but second hand embarrassment. He felt like an uninspired Marc Bolan clone in imminent danger of eating his microphone; she seemed to be putting too much effort into coming off as fey or ethereal to actually do so. A creepy social climber with Rod Stewart hair from the El Rancho days was their road manager.
They ended things with a “family style” Rusted Root cover. I’d imagine this all sounds glorious to at least one of my readers but it just wasn’t my cup of San Pedro…
The Woods album was the rare kind of singer-songwriter work in the folk/acoustic vein that grips me. The styles are quite different but in terms of effect the closest thing would probably be the Palace Brothers album Days in the Wake. I have mentioned before that I view the acoustic guitar as somewhat unsavory by nature – my prejudice toward the instrument can only be offset by heroic virtuosity or an aptitude for writing “hooks”.
However I got my hands on the tape the period of time where it became a constant soundtrack was on board The Miss Rockaway Armada and more specifically The Garden of Bling. After most of the other project members had thrown in the towel and retreated to other realities the collection of catchy tunes accompanied our increasingly desperate attempts to rend our vessel River worthy in the face of the approaching winter.
A combination of the elements, the constant wakes of passing barges, successive beachings and the slipshod quality of the initial construction were beginning to take their toll. We transferred responsibility onto an aquatic mammal frequently spotted near the raft with the added fiction that it was secretly aided by one of our number; altering the lyrics to one of the Woods songs to reflect this:
“Night Beaver, Night Beaver, Where did you come from?
As I sit you are awful quiet now, when will you be gone?
And I’ve seen it now, you left your tooth marks on the bow, who helped you? Jacki! Who helped you? Jacki!”
One day while my ex-fiancée I’ve been referring to as Rocky was visiting we were driving near the Chain-of-Rocks Bridge when Harrison spotted a tiny kitten that some monstrous sadist had abandoned on one of those circular patches of grass enclosed by a Freeway on-ramp. The poor little thing was so hungry she was trying to catch and eat butterflies. Me and Harrison caught her by throwing a sweater on top of her and I started wearing it with her tucked inside until all the feral was out of her.
I named her Night Beaver and she became a member of our crew and my traveling companion until my hectic itinerary made it clear she would be better off living with Stephany, my room-mate in Chicago at the time. This arrangement was clearly the best thing for her as they live together still. It would have been Autumn of 2007 when we rescued her making her a little older than fifteen years old now. I talked to Stephany on the phone for the first time in forever recently and she briefly put me on speaker.
Night Beaver seemed happy to hear my voice again.
In early September of 2009 I had moved back to San Diego to help my father with end-of-life care. On September 5th I had ended up in Los Angeles and heard that Woods would be playing at an event called Fuck Yeah Fest. This was the first year that the festival grew large enough to require the move to Los Angeles Historic State Park near Chinatown and the only time I was interested in attending as a spectator. In later years when it moved to Exposition Park I would end up working at it on my birthday a couple of times for a pizza company called Spicy Pie.
I was hanging out with Rocky and another female friend I’ll call Snake and the three of us decided to try to sneak in to see Woods. Rocky actually found parking somewhere in Chinatown and we walked down through the Metro Station to sniff out a point of ingress. I had been to Coachella one time but the headliners were bands like Radiohead and The Cure – this was my first time seeing hordes of overly excited millennials thronging to watch bands I had always thought of as “underground” in a festival setting.
It was somewhat disorienting watching what happened when there was too much youthful enthusiasm in one place. Lightning Bolt, who were essentially headlining the festival, offer a simple way to demonstrate this. They had always preferred forgoing stages and setting up in the middle of the crowd but when thousands of kids all want to be the ones standing right there this sort of thing is simply no longer safe or practical.
The thing that always sticks with me was the kid who had just bought a pair of tiny red-eared sliders. We dressed and carried ourselves like cooler, older kids so he was super excited to show them to us:
“This one is called Slime and this one is called Fuck Yeah!”
The acute knowledge that both of these creatures would be dead by the end of the day was palpably painful – the weight of wisdom. You can’t just explain that to somebody in this situation where there is a visceral need to have anything to stick out, distinguish one’s self and appear more interesting. I mean similar turtles are sold and die in Chinatown every single day but I never thought it was something I would see in what I thought of as my community. Maybe I just sound like a condescending, pretentious asshole.
It was getting close to the time that Woods was supposed to perform so we quickly climbed over a fence and attempted to disappear into the crowd. This plan failed for two reasons: we were dressed for the opposite of anonymity and I had ripped the seat of my pants, a bright turquoise pair of Gloria Vanderbilts, while scaling the pokey barrier. Security was, quite literally, on my ass.
We were plucked from the crowd and escorted to the outside of a trailer while the festival’s authority figures most likely had a pow-wow concerning the exact method of ejecting us. You would think that people would have been sneaking in in a similar manner all day but the way that they handled us made it feel like the situation was unprecedented. Maybe we were just the only ones that had gotten caught.
The security trailer happened to be right next to the trailer where the bands checked in or did something else official and we immediately ran into the Brians of Lightning Bolt. Chippendale was surprised to see me:
“Oh! I didn’t know that you were playing this festival too!”
“I’m not. We just got caught trying to sneak in and they’re kicking us out.”
He quickly conferred with Gibson and a person I didn’t recognize who was most likely there in an official capacity then informed our gaoler that they intended to make us their guests. Authority is a drug that certain types of people seem incapable of ever getting enough of:
“Unfortunately they’ve already demonstrated a disregard for the rules of the festival by trying to sneak in so there’s no way they can be allowed to be here.”
I reassured him that we were content with our current relationship with impending consequences:
“It’s OK, Woods already played. Is there any chance either of you might have an extra pair of pants?”
I will always love Lightning Bolt and have seen them play at least two times since the events of this story but my enthusiasm has not sustained itself at the level of when I was twenty years old and they were my favorite band in the world. I imagine that both of the Brians, to at least some degree, have gone through a similar experience with their band. In 2009 I was most excited about their work as a printmaker and animator respectively. On that particular day while I absolutely would have stuck around and most likely had a wonderful time during their set I was most excited to see Woods.
Major Festivals are just all around weird experiences anyway. The next year I would end up performing at a Michigan Festival where Kool Kieth was set to perform the entirety of his Dr. Octagon album but ended up leaving before his set because the environment was making my tour-mates uncomfortable. That record was really important to me the year it had been released but the experience of watching a band at a major festival is comparable to having a drunken friend call you and hold up their cell phone at a concert across the country.
My brother actually did call me drunk and hold up his phone from a big U2 concert was. I became oddly obsessed with a cassette of The Joshua Tree around 2009 when I lived at Apgar but besides that I was never too interested in the band. I kind of remember the song that was playing through the phone though – it was about as exciting as watching anybody at Coachella.
Neither of the Brians had any extra pants.
All of the bands that happened to come by during the absurd amount of time that was spent deciding how to kick us out ended up being friends, or at least friendly acquaintances, of mine. I went through more or less the same routine with vetoed guest-listing and a futile plea for replacement pants with the members of Eat Skull and Japanther. In retrospect I probably should have just walked around outside until I recognized somebody who could get us in but it wasn’t the best thought out plan.
I was really in a situation with the pants though. They had been skin-tight and I wasn’t wearing any underwear. It wasn’t a little tear either, the whole back was as open as a New Orleans Liquor Store. I think Snake or Rocky eventually gave me some kind of scarf or extra shirt I was able to crudely tie over the offending area.
It was an especially hot day and as the process was taking forever I started asking for some water. The Security Guard said that I was in no position to ask for anything but I countered that we would become an even bigger headache for them under the effects of dehydration or heat exhaustion. I didn’t think to mention the Geneva Convention.
He angrily handed us a couple of bottles.
Finally a decision was passed down concerning which of the exits we were going to be walked to and cut loose from. This involved walking across a large expanse of the Park that was not being used for the Festival. The vegetation was sparse and more or less typical of Southern California: mugwort, anise, datura and Hopi Tobacco. There were a few rows of corn that appeared to be off season.
Up until this year I had managed to resist ever getting a cell phone but my parents felt that I would be more helpful to them if I started to carry one. My dad had given me an older one of his, it was whatever you call the kind that’s even smaller and cheaper than a flip phone. It had one of those little leather holsters with the clear plastic that clips onto your waist. It was the kind of cell phone that somebody would have gotten if they were already used to carrying a pager.
Anyway after the long wait and the long walk across the field I noticed that this cell phone had fallen out of it’s holster somewhere along the way. The way I look at it there are two possibilities: either the Security Guard had spent so much time in our company he was starting to enjoy it or he had learned enough about me to realize that I wouldn’t stop being a problem until we found my cell phone.
Either way he walked me back through the field and we found the thing. It materialized on the ground the way that things do when you’ve accidentally dropped them and you know that you’re about to retrace your steps and find them again. I feel like I can tell the difference the moment that I realize I’ve dropped something – like I can feel whether it’s gone gone or just waiting to snap back into existence when my eyes scan over it’s new location.
Once I retrieved the cell phone we were finally ready to go on with our lives and put the Festival behind us or at least it’s 2009 iteration. I can’t remember for sure but I think I bought myself some other pants at the Chinatown store that sells irregular pieces and samples from the many sweatshops of the garment district. I would be heading back down to San Diego where it would turn out that my father only had days to live. I’m not sure where Rocky or Snake would end up going next.
I’ve still never seen Woods live but I would very much like to. I don’t have that tape anymore but every now and again I listen to it online again. I checked out some of their other stuff but none of it hit me in quite the same way.
I’d like to think that I will never again have reason to set foot in another Major Festival for the rest of my life but at the same time I’m pretty fond of surprises.
If I’m ever in a band famous enough to headline I’ll make sure to always carry a couple extra pairs of pants with me.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 