Tag: Che Cafe

San Diego 2004 : “Let me rephrase that [grabs baseball bat]”

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I just watched a documentary about the mid-nineties San Diego underground music scene called It’s Gonna Blow! that I would definitely recommend checking out if the subject at all interests you. I just about missed out on everything featured in the documentary – I wouldn’t have been old enough to go to The Casbah but there were most likely all ages opportunities I didn’t take advantage of.

Most embarrassing is the fact that my friend Kevin who would later form The Beautiful Mutants invited me to come see Crash Worship at The World Beat Center but in my infinite fourteen year old wisdom I thought it “sounded like a stupid hippy drum circle”.

Around the time that I was in Ninth Grade friends at school would show me CDs for local bands they were into: Three Mile Pilot, Heavy Vegetable and Blink before they had to add the -182. For whatever reason I never asked to borrow or get a copy of any of it. The closest thing I did to checking out the local scene that year was accompanying my parents and grandfather to see the folk group The Electrocarpathians at the soon to be shuttered Better Worlde Galleria.

Not long after I started going to a tiny spot in El Cajon called the Soul Kitchen to see the punk bands forming out of SDSCPA – an arts focused high school that my sisters and most of my friends went to but my mom wouldn’t let me because I had to do the IB program at San Diego High. This included a precursor to The Beautiful Mutants called The Mutant Turtles, Diana DeLuna’s group The Vendettas and the late Nick Galvas’ project Wingdilly.

Many of the groups featured in the documentary also would have played there but they didn’t share bills with my younger friends and El Cajon was too much of a haul on buses to just check out casually. In the end the closest I ever got to the Golden Age of San Diego Alternative and Post-Rock was watching Lucy’s Fur Coat at some kind of free Balboa Park event and the two years where the former bassist of aMiniature was my High School Physics teacher.

One thing that they talked about for a lot of the documentary that I definitely did not miss out on was San Diego’s endemic violence – a result of the proximity to USMC base Camp Pendleton and the long term popularity of the skinhead lifestyle. Luckily for me the Marines almost exclusively frequented over 21 drinking establishments so in my teenage years I almost never came into contact with them. I say almost because I did have an unpleasant run in while riding the trolley.

Once I started going to school downtown and got my hands on a bus pass I became a dedicated thrifter and a bit of a clothes horse. On this particular day I was wearing a cheap costume style black bowler hat, blocky laboratory safety glasses with translucent red frames and a snap up black vest of an almost plastic like synthetic material over a red turtleneck. A large group of Marines thought I looked like a member of the band Spacehog and wanted to kick my ass because of it.

If anything my outfit on that particular day was more influenced by Devo but I didn’t press this detail. I got the fuck off the trolley and considered myself fortunate that they were too concerned with reaching their destination, most like the Tijuana border crossing, to follow.

In contrast the skinheads were a constant fixture in environments that I was spending a lot of time in – third wave ska shows. Judging by what people were saying in the film Nazi Skins, also known as Boneheads, were a significant threat at San Diego live shows in the Eighties but I can’t remember ever seeing any. Many of my friends would talk about how red and white laces in Doc Martens were code for Nazis and white supremacists but despite constant vigilance I never ran into anyone rocking these colors – the skinheads around were mostly Sharps.

Sharp is an acronym for Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice and they typically wear yellow bootlaces although black laces also seemed to be popular. Ostensibly they were supposed to fight and defend the scene against Nazi skins but if these clashes ever happened I never saw them. I would say they liked to fight but I never actually saw them fighting either – they would just typically look for a defenseless target to beat the shit out of.

I decided not to use his name but the one Black guy in the group of gutter punks that hung out with my sister later morphed into a Sharp Skinhead. He also got really muscular around this time – I remember somebody saying that he looked like a Ninja Turtle. One night at a party he got into some kind of disagreement with a wispy little indie rock looking guy and broke the dude’s fingers.

The person in question immediately started screaming out the N word so it was hard to feel too bad for him but the entire situation just felt sad. Besides being unpleasant to be around this kind of violence could often get a show or party broken up by cops – and if Skinheads were around it was nearly an inevitability.

We also had the militant straight edge flavor of Skinheads in San Diego. Not long after Off The Record opened it’s North Park store by 30th and University a local ska band called Unsteady played a free afternoon concert there. Francois was living about a block and a half down the alley and had just gotten into wearing a little crocheted cap in the signature Rastafarian colors,

The straight edge skins decided he looked like he was stoned and were threatening to beat the shit out of him. This was especially ironic as Francois and I were essentially straight edge ourselves at the time – we just didn’t write X’s on our hands or refer to ourselves as such. There wouldn’t have been anything wrong with either of us being stoned but at that point in time neither of us had tried marijuana or a single alcoholic beverage.

My father was also at this show and seeing how the music was essentially a form of reggae he decided to spark up a joint and offer it to anyone in the crowd that might be interested. Actually he did this at every live music event regardless of genre. The straight edgers shifted their violent overtures to him and unlike the situation with Francois they were not about to be redirected.

We had to slip him out through the alley and wait a while in Francois’s apartment because they even tried to follow us.

So many things about this are infuriating: the fact that a group of muscle heads would feel justified in ganging up on a single good natured and diminutive hippy man with visibly graying hair, the fact that they unironically considered themselves fans of a music form from actual Jamaica and didn’t see the contradiction in their actions but most importantly the fact that this behavior constantly went unchallenged in all of the spaces throughout our community.

That was San Diego though – I’m not sure when it first started and couldn’t say whether it’s in the past now but now that I think about it nearly every time I’ve been physically assaulted has been in my home city. I might have missed my chance at seeing early Three Mile Pilot and Crash Worship but this was one aspect of San Diego’s underground that was simply unavoidable.

This next incident took place on Valentine’s Day of either 2004 or 2005. It was during the period of time when I was with the girlfriend I’ve referred to as a “New England Pedigree Girl” and after we’d started using heroin together. She was working late somewhere, most likely a night game at Petco Park, so I went to this party without her but not before leaving a Valentine’s Day gift on the kitchen table of our apartment.

I had made a heart shaped card out of construction paper with two rattlesnakes facing each other and the message Fangs for being my Valentine. The inside said Happy Valentines Day Let’s Get Stung – a reference to both a colloquial expression for venomous snake bites and the second part of the gift: two capped syringes loaded up with black tar heroin resting in a champagne flute.

This is mostly not relevant to the story that is about to follow except for the detail that I would have been on a small amount of this drug when the ensuing events took place – but not to the extent of nodding out or anything.

The party was at a house that my friend Bryan Welch had just started renting with some other kids from the scene I can’t remember the names of. When we were still in High School he lived with his mother in Mission Hills and was clearly in a higher economic bracket than my family. The first time I ever went to his house he put on the Laurie Anderson song O Superman and while I immediately dug it he was already a bit of a music snob and I was nervous to display my ignorance by asking the name of the artist.

This resulted in me mistakenly buying the Barbra Streisand Superman album the next time I saw it in a Thrift Store and being severely disappointed when I got home and put on what I thought was the same song.

Anyway this new house he was living in was super fancy. It had a vintage Malm orange metal fireplace in the center along with some other mid century furniture and an actual bar that was very much in use. I can’t remember if it was just a rent party or if they were raising money for some other cause but they were slinging an assortment of fancy cocktails including one that was served in an actual coconut.

I should mention that this last beverage lost quite a few points in presentation due to the fact that somebody had forgotten to pick up straws and this detail was only divulged the moment the drink had already been paid for and was being deposited into the buyer’s hand.

Anyway some Skinheads showed up – I’m not sure if they called themselves Sharps but they definitely weren’t straight edgers or Nazis. As they always do they searched the party for somebody to beat up on and selected a pair of French guys most likely because they figured they wouldn’t have any friends there. To reiterate I have never once seen a skinhead looking for a fair fight.

One of the French guys got sucker punched and things were about to get uglier. While everybody looked unhappy about this turn of events nobody was actually doing anything about it. I am absolutely not a fighter but after dealing with this shit since my teenage years I hit a breaking point where I wasn’t going to just powerlessly watch it happen. I placed myself in front of the next targeted French guy and addressed the skinhead preparing to swing on him:

“You can’t fight here. Fighting is gonna get the party broken up. If you want to fight you have to take it somewhere else.”

I am fairly tall at six feet and four inches but I’ve always been thin and gangly. I should also mention that I had dressed up for the holiday: a pink pair of Gloria Vanderbilt twill jeans and a floral printed button up in pinks and purples. My hair was long and I was most likely wearing heavy eyeshadow in complementary colors. I might not have been as bold if I didn’t figure that looking stereotypically effeminate might have a protective effect.

With this first guy it basically worked the way I had planned. He tried to shove me out of the way but I’ve been in my share of mosh pits so I planted my feet and did not waver. He tried a couple more shoves but I remained steadfast and repeated what I had just said. As I was hoping he didn’t look at me as a person he could actually swing on so he finally growled in disgust and angrily stomped off.

Unfortunately one of his companions had no such compunctions. This skinhead was a Mexican guy with the body type that basically looks like a bowling ball with arms and legs sticking out – he probably wasn’t as tall as me but it wasn’t a big difference. He had watched everything that just transpired and now placed himself in front of me:

“Why were you talking shit to my friend just now?”

“I wasn’t talking shit. I told him there’s no fighting at this party because there’s no fighting at this party. Fighting brings cops.”

Without a word he turned and walked over to the back of a pickup truck with camper shell that was parked at the curb about fifteen feet away. He lowered the tail gate and then rubbed his hands together with glee like he was about to eat something delicious in a cartoon. He then pulled out a wooden baseball bat, hefted it over his shoulder and strolled back to where I was standing with a newly smug and self satisfied expression:

“Let me rephrase that. Why were you talking shit to my friend just now?”

I should clarify that I am well aware that not every person that dresses or identifies as a skinhead is like this. The first time I ever met my friend Lil Four she looked like a skinhead. It was 10th Grade and she was going to a dance at my school with me and a girl named Anne Gregory. We had taken the bus to where she lived by the beach with her mother to pick her up.

The movie The Nutty Professor had just come out and her mother evidently had a crush on the fat suit version of Eddie Murphy. She had cut multiple pictures of this character out of newspapers and framed them around the house. Lil Four, or I should say Danielle as she was going by her original name, seemed a little embarrassed by this.

She had a bleached Chelsea cut and wore a green bomber jacket over her dress. The dress was red because the three of us had coordinated a red and black theme for our outfits. I wish I still had the photos but they disappeared when I lost the box of papers going back to Kindergarten from my parents’ house. Anyway I’ve known plenty of other perfectly charming, pleasant and not especially violent skinheads.

But then there are the ones like the guy who is threatening me with a baseball bat. He’s already three times my size, I’m clearly incapable of fighting and I’m dressed like a stereotypical pansy. He could probably seriously injure me with one arm tied behind his back but that isn’t good enough for him. He needs a vicious weapon too so he can not just completely dominate me but put me in the hospital while he’s at it.

I remember feeling disgusted but I forget if I actually said anything or not. I turned my back on him and slowly walked back into the house. Of course I was worried that he could easily swing at the back of my head but in the moment it felt like the best available course of action. I tried to project certain things: disdain, an absence of intimidation and dismissal in the proper balance so that he would feel too foolish to retaliate in force.

Once I got inside my sister helped to find me a ride to get out of there. Just like I had done with my father years before I was smuggled out through the back. A friend pulled a car to the side of the house and I climbed into the back seat so I could lay out of sight and he drove me home to my girlfriend who was waiting for me to come do drugs with her.

I don’t know what happened with the party or the French guys after that. Maybe the skinheads renewed their attack on them or found a new target or simply left. I felt a bit disappointed that nobody had stepped up to back me up in the moment, after all there were so many more of us than them, but at the same time I understood. Everybody there had grown up with this exactly like I had and I had just stood by countless times before reaching a point where I had to stand up and do something,

Everybody had to reach this point for themselves and it may well never happen at all.

Nothing about it is easy.

As fate would have it this wasn’t the only time I got threatened by a skinhead with a baseball bat in San Diego. This other incident might have been a little before or after the one I just described but I feel fairly certain it was within a year. I was performing at the Che Cafe with Raquel – either as Sex Affection or right after we changed the name to Hood Ri¢h.

The show was sparsely attended and there were some especially aggressive younger kids there who kind of looked like skinheads and kind of looked like Circle Jerks era thrash punks. I can’t imagine who they would have been there to see as it would have been a mostly experimental flavored lineup – maybe xbxrx. Regardless they were lightly heckling us so I was heckling them back and said something about coming up so we could start a “big gay mosh pit”.

I confess it’s not especially clever. While the Che is officially an alcohol free venue I’d been drinking something, probably Captain Morgan and Vanilla Coke, from an innocuous opaque cup. I probably thought they were most likely homophobic and it would get under their skin.

Evidently it did.

A kid in a red and black plaid flannel ran up to the stage and started throwing punches. My friend Andreas later said it looked like I was expertly dodging every one of his swings but it was actually dumb luck. In the moment my first thought was that he was coming to dance with me and when I bobbed my head from side to side it just so happened to neatly avoid each successive strike. It caused me to drop and spill my drink which was probably for the best.

Andreas is an absolute teddy bear who I’ve never seen in another altercation but to his credit he sprang into action and quickly ejected my assailant from the side door and told him he wasn’t coming back in. Now that I think about we would have been sharing the bill with a short lived experimental band called Business Lady. The singer Mikey happened to have a similar build and was wearing an almost identical shirt to the kid who attacked me so for the rest of the night everybody would tense up every time he walked into the room only to relax when they saw his face.

If you’ve ever spent time at the Che Cafe you would know that there is a small circular table toward the rear on the parking lot side where attendees often hang out and smoke cigarettes. It sits in the shadows and due to this relative darkness is almost impossible to see from the inside even though it’s next to the window. Toward the end of the night I was sitting there smoking a cigarette and whoever I was with finished theirs and left so I was out there by myself.

I suddenly got approached by one of flannel kid’s friends. When I try to picture what this kid looked like the first thing that comes to mind is a baseball cap with the bill flipped up and tagged on in the style of Suicidal Tendencies. It actually doesn’t sound like these kids were skinheads at all – the connecting thread is more just the baseball bat as he was also brandishing one in a threatening manner.

He wanted to know why I had – in his words “gotten his friend kicked out”. The way he saw it the person who assaulted me was a hapless victim forced into action against his will by my uncivil and inflammatory provocation. Accountability was clearly wanting but it was difficult to focus on the exchange as a teachable moment when the surrounding circumstances necessitated that my thoughts pivot on how I might extricate myself while avoiding grievous injury.

I don’t know what I said but it isn’t so much about the what as it is the how. After a certain amount of time it becomes instinctual – you either learn how to fight or learn how to avoid fighting or join up with the people creating the situation in the first place. It’s something that marks every person who’s had to grow up there. I’m not saying other cities aren’t violent but just like music there’s regional varieties to everything.

I missed out on a lot of what was going on around me and experienced these things in other cities instead. The first time I saw The Locust was at 924 Gilman in Berkeley and I didn’t really get into hardcore or feel like I was part of a scene until I moved to Chicago. There’s a lot of San Diego bands like The Shortwave Channel that I didn’t start listening to until they’d already broken up.

But when I heard people like John Reis start talking about their experiences of inescapable violence, even though it was before my time in the ‘80s, at that moment I get a very specific feeling:

I was there…

San Diego 2005 : “This Song’s About Getting Fired”

berniebleakLeave a comment

After Spidermammal I didn’t actually have a band or project again until Sex Affection. Or at least nothing that ever made it as far as either finishing a recording or playing a show. Here are some of the things that didn’t make it: at El Rancho and The Red House me and Nick Buxton did a lot of planning to start a “8-Bit Metal” band called Dragon Warrior based on the U.S. Release of the first Dragon Quest game. This didn’t mean that we would use synthesizers with actual 8-Bit style sound chips but toy guitars, pots and pans for drums and an actual bass because I had one.

We had all the stuff and I even had a four track in those days but we were either too busy being on drugs or too afraid of failure to get around to actually doing it – probably a combination of the two. The imaginary or at least unfinished songs were Dost Thou Love Me? / But Thou Must!, an instrumental power chord bass thing I still know how to play called Imperial Scrolls of Honor and this one I wrote a few lyrics for called The Metal Slime Hath Taken Thee By Surprise!:

“In mortal combat this, first strike shall not be thine!

The honor-less amoeba hath struck thee from behind!”

Some point after I moved back to San Diego me and my older sister Sarah started working on this thing called The Pointy Reckonings – a reference to a threat that Winona Ryder’s character Abigail makes in The Crucible. I must have either written some parts on bass or used our home’s piano and some music software to create at least sketches of the background music – maybe a bit of all of it. We made songs about the vengeful spirits of drowned girls and mocked outsiders with demon familiars: I’ve Got Dark Things To Do My Bidding.

I remember the couple of songs we were working on being pretty okay but I never even recorded any of it on my four track.

Sex Affection started in San Diego in either 2004 or 2005 with a lot of regulars from the bar and party circuit with an emphasis on Gelato Vero employees. I didn’t make it to all of the shows before I became a full time member but I want to say that in it’s earliest incarnations it was an Art Rock band. I did see a performance in the back room of The Casbah that incorporated a maypole on one of the room’s pillars. Some of the songs were starting to include rapping parts and because I was already trying to grab a mic and start rapping at nearly half the shows I went to I was invited in as an additional rapper.

I came on board in a very transitional time where most of the original members were getting bored of and departing the project. Greta left, Jessica left, I’m not 100% sure if Kevin had ever been a member but if he had – he left. This left Mike Bova, Raquel and now me. Most likely a lot of songs were dropped from the set list at this time because the members who sang or played them weren’t there anymore. There must have been more than one song on the earliest shows I played but I only remember the “shady” song.

The song had been written as a way for the various members of Sex Affection to trash talk their exes. I might be wrong about Jessica trashing on Naked Mike in the original version but it for sure had bits of Raquel trashing on Mikey and Bova trashing on Kate. The first little bit of rap I had written for the band was a little couplet at the end of the Kate section:

“And if I were your boss and if I paid your wage

I’d take all your money and lock you in a cage

And then I’d fire you!”

In the standard incestuousness of a small to medium sized city’s underground music scene Kate and Mikey from the checklist of exes ended up in a relationship with each other. Then Mike Bova and Kate hooked back up and started seeing each other again. I didn’t necessarily know this at the time but this involved some pretty blatant cheating on the parts of both Kate and Mike Bova.

I don’t have the same moral outrage around cheating that most of my peers and contemporaries seem to. The thing I always say is that I’m a huge believer in serial monogamy, people leaving relationships where they aren’t happy and pursuing relationships where they will be. I’ve known plenty of stable, healthy and mutually fulfilling partnerships that began as one or both of the partners “cheating”.

I just learned that Raquel and Mikey are seeing each other again and engaged to be married and I’m sure that all of the things they’ve learned about themselves and what they want in a relationship from all of the different relationship experiences they’ve had over the past ten years can only make them better partners to each other. The thing I do get puritanical about is dishonesty. While I don’t see “cheating” as an inherently evil act I do look at lying about it and hiding it that way unless there is some kind of standing agreement between the two partners concerning discretion.

The main moral outrage is 2005 was, for me at least, that Bova had started seeing Kate again but continued to perform the song that trash talked her at our live shows as if nothing had changed. I can’t remember if he was even doing vocals on the song by that point but the fact remained that it was a song expressly written in part to denigrate his then girlfriend and with full knowledge of that fact he stepped onto a stage to perform it multiple times without a single caveat or qualifier.

Of course this wasn’t the only reason for what me and Raquel then did. The Sex Affection we inherited had a thin oeuvre of scraps of songs that had been written or improvised by the revolving door of former members and Raquel and I were feeling like we wanted to write more, practice more and just generally get more serious about where we were going to go with it. For Bova it was still a party band, an excuse to goof off and get some free drinks at Scolari’s Office, and he wasn’t particularly interested in moving past that.

So we met up in secret and rewrote all the lyrics to that particular song to shit talk Bova and inform him that we were kicking him out of the band. He was our friend and this was a super immature and petty thing for us to do. At the very least we should have been transparent with him about how we were feeling and let him in on the joke so he could decide for himself if he wanted to play the final show with the modified version of the song with us or not.

Now that I’m thinking about it, it would even have been cool if he was given the opportunity to prepare some lyrics shit talking us and I realize that this could be a great tradition for bands that are breaking up or changing members. Kind of like wedding vows, except that it’s totally the opposite thing, all the members could prepare special lyrics about all of the different things they hate about each other and being in a band together to share for the first time in front of an audience at their “farewell show”.

This kind of reminds me of a song called “We’re Sick of Music and We Hate Each Other” by The In/Humanity where the lyrics end with “fuck you” followed by all of the band members’ names.

Anyway that’s not what we did at all. I don’t think we even invited Bova to practice and then came up with this plan because we were angry he didn’t show or anything like that that would make it seem even slightly more innocent on our parts. We straight up schemed. I remember exchanging phone numbers with Raquel because even though we’d known each other socially for years we had never had any particular reason to call each other before this point.

I went over to her apartment for what would turn out to be the first of many writing sessions and practices and by the time we were taking the stage at our next Scolari’s show we were the only two people in the room who knew what was coming.

This brings us to the pull quote. The little couplet that I had originally written for the trash talk song had caught on as a viral vocal hook among our friends and the other band members. People liked it. They thought it was funny. At this last show Mike Bova was pretty much just playing guitar (unless it was bass, it was always bass later) but he grabbed one of the microphones to announce the next tune:

“This song is about getting fired!”

Me and Raquel shot each other the kind of look you can imagine this particular circumstance demanded and then we went into it. This isn’t the kind of prank that would be particularly effective if we had been a screamo band but we had been moving firmly toward our later sound of ‘80s style mid-tempo clearly enunciated rapping. You could tell from their reactions that our friends in the audience were understanding every word.

Mike Bova didn’t actually seem to. I will say in his defense that the Scolari’s sound system was fairly rudimentary with a mixing board right on stage so bands could do their own sound and either no monitors or not very good ones. Still it basically seemed like he wasn’t really listening. He went to the bar to grab a drink after the song, like he basically did after every song, and somebody over there explained what had just happened to him and he just never came back on stage.

He did seem to take it really well. My friend Andy Robillard had told me a story a few years earlier about learning that he had gotten kicked out of GoGoGo Airheart the moment he heard them start playing with a different drummer at a show that he had thought he was going to be playing. It sounded like a very unpleasant experience for him but I also think getting kicked out of bands is a more emotionally charged experience for drummers in general – most drummers I know in successful but not percussion-centric bands seem to live with the threat constantly hanging over their heads like the Sword of Damocles.

I’m not sure how I would have felt or reacted if I had been in Mike Bova’s shoes that night but that’s kind of the thing: me and Raquel had been too busy thinking about how clever and right we thought we were to think about how it was going to make him feel. We were never close friends but me and Mike Bova always got along pretty well – both before and after this incident.

There’s way too much to be said about Scolari’s Office – the neighborhood bar that became the home to San Diego’s underground and experimental music scene for most of the aughts, and Hood Ri¢h – the rap group that Raquel and I created after deciding that we had changed so much from the Sex Affection days that the name should change as well, for me to attempt to encapsulate either one of these things in the space left over at the end of this chapter.

Instead I’ll toss in the thing that Weasel Walter said the first time we played as Sex Affection at the Che Cafe. He would have been playing with xbxrx at the time but I knew him from frequenting Chicago’s Fireside Bowl as early as 1999 when he would have been doing The Flying Luttenbachers and other projects. Anyway, as someone I’d only interacted with as a teenage fan, I was excited to tell him that I would also be playing the show but he’d seen us load in:

“Yeah, I noticed the pro gear and attitude.”

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.