I wasn’t necessarily going to write up this whole tour but I wrote the first part last time and there’s a piece from Michigan that would come right after this one a while ago so I might as well do it all and string them together with links. Travelogue is one of those words I use when I want to bury my head in the sand from the problem that this is basically a memoir so I might as well hew closer to that for a hot minute. It sure as hell isn’t “Rock Journalism” or at least not particularly effective at pretending to be.
There was a photo from Iowa City I was hoping to use as the picture for this one where I was holding an ornate magnifying glass over one of my eyes. I just went to try to grab it from Facebook but it looks like it isn’t there anymore. I even had it as my profile picture for a minute but apparently that doesn’t make a difference if the original poster deletes it or unfriends you. The whole reason I joined Facebook in the first place was to get access to some of Joel’s photos from this tour but in the last decade he’s done both of those things: unfriended me and erased it all.
The Iowa City show was in a big warehouse and the closer we got to Chicago and Bitchpork it felt like things were accelerating like we were being pulled into its gravitational field so this was a bigger and better attended night than anything before it. I’d been hearing the name The Savage Young Taterbug for a second but this was the first time I’d actually met him. He was hanging out in Chouser’s room with Sci-Fi Sam when we pulled up.
Chouser wasn’t even Chouser yet, he was still “Jason”, but I probably met him on the cusp of the transformation. He was wearing a muscle shirt and had one of those hairstyles where it’s like a ponytail but on top of your head toward the back but he also had this big illustrated library book about the Wild Boys movement in pre-World War II Germany. By the time he’d finished digesting and synthesizing it he’d be himself.
This was the last show where the Generation set wasn’t ready yet and Rian performed solo as Baby Love. Iowa City has the same issue as a lot of college towns where women greatly outnumber men, especially in the Underground, and male creatives end up fetishized and put on a pedestal. During both of our sets [Rian was still male presenting at this time] we were more or less treated like bachelorette party strippers and got grabbed at to the point that they even ripped our clothes.
At the time I told myself that as a performer my body became temporary public property. I wrote this off as part of the implied social contract between entertainer and audience but now that I’ve had a great deal of time to process things I don’t necessarily look at it the same way. I feel like that kind of license should be explicitly stated – like in Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 piece. It wasn’t a huge issue but it wasn’t great and I’d hope our scene’s culture has evolved beyond this kind of thing.
I had a song that was intended to be a curse from this period when I was excessively careless with dark magic. I first wrote it as lyrics for a Living Hell piece but during my set at the first Mojave Rave I started recreating it as a Bleak End song. It was never directed at anything specific – more like a obscenely negative and negligent version of when they release a bunch of doves like in the UNARIUS Conclave of Light.
It had one section that went:
“This breath will fade, This bloom will wilt, This song goes on ‘til blood is spilt”
I felt like it would have more effect as both a spell and bit of stagecraft if that were actually true and the only way to do that ethically was to spill my own. I had been cutting myself every time I repeated that particular lyric with a hoof-handled knife a friend had received as a wedding gift at his Eastern European sham green card marriage but given to me when he’d realized it was cursed.
I wrote about this somewhere else but at this performance I’d gotten a little too giddy and forcefully slashed toward my own stomach. The crowd gasped and when I looked down I realized I’d severed the cord of the microphone I’d been singing into. I wondered about writing that out again but then felt like it would feel stranger to come to this exact point and not mention it – for the people who’ve read everything these bits will be like refrains in a very long song.
Joel had a lot of staging concepts he’d been planning to work into the Generation set including building some kind of oversized baby crib but with Bitchpork looming it had to be reinterpreted and pared down. What he and Rian ended up with was that they’d both hold worklights on long extension cords with very bright or colored lightbulbs and also wear leather bondage collars on long chains.
I would stand in the back wearing a grim reaper’s robe and constantly tug on the chains to pull them backwards as they were singing. The best way to refer to it was that I was their background dancer but a combination of the visually implied power dynamic and the staging for the Bleak End set meant that spectators didn’t always interpret things that way.
We were working out together every day we were on tour with a program of rotating exercises called P90X. There were five or six different ones but the really fun one was called Kenpo-X where you would kick, punch and karate chop at the air in front of you. I had the Pickells return the favor by choreographing a synchronized program of these moves for them to go through behind me while I was doing my songs.
A big part of why everything happened the way it did was that we were sharing a single performance slot at Bitchpork. I forget if this was the way things had been booked from the get-go or if either act was a late addition but with so many bands and a tight schedule it was advantageous to be able to rattle through both sets in under thirty minutes after a single sound check.
At this stage I was performing in a lacey white costume so for maximum surprise factor I’d get dressed where nobody could see me then hide this under the black robe until it was time to make the switch. It was never thought of like either act was “headlining” but having a transition where a robe and chains were quickly pulled off was just faster and made more sense than trying to put all this stuff on in the chaos and adrenaline of the big moment.
The unforeseen consequence was that a hefty chunk of the audience got confused and thought the whole thing was “my” set. I would have thought that the fact that I never touched the computer or sang into either microphone during the Generation half would have made it clear that I had no hand in creating the music – in fact we had even recorded all of my drum machine tracks onto Joel’s computer to speed things along and as he was the only one setting it up and testing levels before we all started it almost would have made more sense to view all of it as “his”.
Of course there were a lot more variables at play: I was older and had a history of living and playing in Chicago so a larger chunk of the crowd was already familiar with me as a performer. I also just take up a lot of space socially, or did back then, I had a large personality and was noticeably more extroverted than either Pickell. The big indication of what had happened was when somebody who hadn’t seen any of it approached me to talk about “my set”:
“I heard you had two girls on chains and you made them do anything you wanted!”
When I talked to Rian about this recently she mentioned how the remark feels affirming in retrospect but I think Joel was especially hit hard by the element of having something he’d been feverishly slaving over and just debuted credited to someone else. Joel is a colossal talent of a songwriter and while I need to say that his work is criminally unknown, even in the underground, I need to acknowledge his collusion as an accomplice in that crime. None of the Generation songs have been recorded and are only available in a dwindling cache of live recordings on YouTube.
For the rest of the tour we often flipped the order of our sets, sometimes did them at opposite ends of a night instead of back to back and on a couple of occasions either Bleak End or Generation didn’t play at all but the damage had already been done. Once we were back in Oakland the role of chain-puller was recast – for any subsequent performances of that Generation set it was John Benson without the black robe to ensure that nobody could even mistake the figure for me.
Nonetheless we had inadvertently birthed certain misconceptions that would cast a shadow over the second Generation tour two years later. The Trapped in Reality tour shirts only listed Sister Fucker and Generation but throughout the booking process we all talked about me and Dalton coming along and performing. Vanessa and Erin in Sister Fucker assumed that would be as part of Generation while me and the Pickells assumed it was so clear that such a collaboration had never happened and never would that nobody could actually assume that.
We had essentially been living in opposite and incompatible realities until the moment we were all in the van together. Now it had to be hastily reconciled into a single awkward reality that we all were trapped in – the tour name had been oddly prophetic. Sister Fucker would have never deliberately planned a three band tour for logistical reasons but on our end we hadn’t even planned it with Bleak End sets that are easy to squeeze in anywhere due to the plug and play nature.
Me and Dalton had created a live drums and bass project that went through a few names but landed on Dealbreaker. This name would also prove to be prophetic – by the end of the tour Dalton no longer wanted to do the project and the Pickell siblings would never collaborate again. Anyway I’m getting ahead of myself, I just wanted to show the far reaching consequences of the Bitchpork set and the confusions of author and membership it inspired.
Anyway let’s go back to Bitchpork. I somehow missed the first one even though I was in Chicago for a decent chunk of the Summer – maybe it happened the same time I was in Berlin. The second year was when it moved to Mortville and really started to blow up. It felt a lot like the 2008 International Noise Conference. Everybody was there, the creative energy of Underground America was bursting at the seams…
Actually let’s go back to just before Bitchpork. While we were driving through the cornfields between Iowa City and Chicago a song suddenly leaped out of the radio that pulled the three of us to instant attention. It started with a strumming acoustic guitar and a woman I later discovered was Rihanna singing an infectious vocal hook. Next Eminem exploded from the speakers and the two traded off building the energy and tension as high as humanly possible.
Love the Way You Lie tapped into everything each of us, in slightly different ways, loved about mainstream pop music. It completely transformed the energy in the car. The moment it ended we immediately wanted to hear it again. Then we did, then we heard it over and over again until it got to the point where we would change the station to try to get away from it only to find the exact same song playing everywhere we turned.
By the end of the tour we never wanted to hear it again.
[Michigan story here:]
Michigan 2010 : The Land of NOD Experiment “Hot Dogs and Mojitos”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 