There were two things I wanted to accomplish while I was still a teenager. I wanted to lose my virginity and I wanted to grace the stage as a formally billed original artist. I remember very little about checking off the first of these boxes but I accomplished the second a scant few months before my twentieth birthday. If my band mate had wanted to boast this same accomplishment he would have been three years too early.
The path that brought me to the experimental milieux that would become my musical home had been a circuitous one. While my high school years were spent collecting Residents records and performing John Cage’s iconic 4’33 at the talent show the only concerts I was experiencing were a lot more traditional. Everything was a variation on indie rock, ska, punk or hardcore.
By senior year I was ostensibly in an actual band. My friend Tim had a shock of boyish blonde hair, an effortless smile and a sporty little Datsun convertible. He carried himself like the protagonist of a lost John Hughes movie. We had just collaborated on a series of Super 8 short films he had created as a student of the USC Film School and he decided our next project should be musical. Every decision was made in deference to image: I ended up playing bass because I was tall and he thought I would look cool with a low hanging strap.
Our friend Brandi had freckles, a blonde pixie haircut and a penchant for smart looking vintage dresses. I’m not sure if we ever decided what instrument she would have been playing but it was hardly the point. We called ourselves The Singles and took a series of promotional band photos in the spirit of Blondie’s Parallel Lines. We were doing ‘80s retro doing ‘50s retro, no matter how many layers you went down it was all pastiche.
When Brandi needed temporary roommates for her first apartment off campus from Chicago’s De Paul University it seemed like the stars had aligned for a big city Singles summer. We made the cross country trip with a middle aged High School teacher with a chronic Peter Pan Complex. He seemed more at home in our teenage friend group than he ever did in the company of his adult peers.
The expedient fiction of The Singles as a musical trio never quite survived the transplant to the harsher Chicago soil. I don’t remember Brandi ever explicitly stating that she wasn’t interested in being in the band anymore but all of the sessions were Tim and I playing with a cassette four track in our shared bedroom. We wrote songs about a Lake Michigan life guard, a big rig trucker and a truck stop waitress. Our style could best be described as pop punk due to our relatively limited musicianship.
It was nearly time to return to California and our respective colleges when we noticed a line of fashionable teens and twenty somethings snaking out of a nearby Bowling Alley. In 1998 The Fireside Bowl was still putting on shows that could truly be called eclectic. The size of the American underground meant that acts of diverse genres often wound up sharing bills. After a tasting flight of several flavors of indie rock a young trio of Venezuelan and Cuban-Americans from Miami took the stage.
The members of Monotract would go on to become some of the biggest names in American Noise Music but at this point they had barely begun their experiments in improvised music. Watching them set up their gear one could have easily assumed that the ensuing performance was going to be some species of a punk rock power trio.
It wasn’t.
How do I describe my first experience with face melting noise music to someone who has never succumbed to it’s seductive charms? It was as liberating and exhilarating as the accidental discovery at four years old that I could simply decide to piss on the floor instead of into the toilet. A phrase like “drunk with power” seems to just about sum it up. It felt like I had discovered a secret playground where anything was permissible and neither God nor parent could ever touch me.
Watching Monotract I was taken with their brazen sense of self assuredness, the palpable sexual tension between Roger Rimada and Nancy Garcia, their obvious indifference to the attitudes and expectations of their audience. For seven or so minutes they used drums, guitars and microphones in ways that I had never imagined were even possible. They were rough and they were new but they seemed like they were in perfect three way psychic communication. They were making it up as they went along but everything they did seemed correct.
As they left the stage Tim looked at me and smirked:
“We could have done better than that!”
I knew at that moment that I could no longer pretend to be in The Singles. It wasn’t that we were no longer on the same page regarding music and performance. We had found ourselves in different books.
Back in California I moved with Francois and Jonas to the Bay Area to begin my single year as a Physics Major at San Francisco State University. I had begun corresponding with some of the members of Monotract like I did with every artist that excited me in these years of youthful exuberance. I had made a few experimental recordings using a karaoke machine as an improvised four track and sent Roger a poorly recorded copy. I was still playing bass but now I was resting it against a small shiatsu massager. I mixed in scratching sounds on a 78 rpm red shellac record of frog calls and percussion from a metal bowl with a shifting puddle of water.
Monotract embarked on a second U.S. Tour that brought them to San Francisco’s Club Cocodrie. I showed up in the afternoon knowing I would somehow find them. I had an uncanny ability to cross paths with anyone I was set on seeing in those days. Once I met Brandi at the airport when the only information I had been given was the date of her arrival. I just stepped off the bus, walked toward the terminal and there she was. It unnerved her mother. The best way I can explain it is some form of psychic sense that people had before we became reliant on cell phones. There was no way to synchronize every minute movement so we simply found each other.
I ended up in a car with the members of Monotract and some of their friends from Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa. The show was 21 and up so I was depending on them to somehow sneak me into the bar. They smoked weed and did whippets while I hung out and made conversation. I hadn’t yet relinquished my straight edge.
Once inside The Cocodrie I was about to experience a performance from my new favorite band. They had been talked up by a friend in my Calculus class that I shared a passion for experimental noise with but this would be my first time actually seeing Deerhoof. I had snagged a copy of the Come See The Duck 7 inch based on his recommendation but had been mistakenly playing it at 33 rpm before I knew how Satomi’s vocals sounded.
After this show I realized my error and thereafter played it at the proper 45. This was the short lived lineup from their album Holdypaws: Greg, Satomi, Rob and Kelly. They were moving away from the raw, noisy roots of their first album and seven inch but hadn’t fully transitioned to the pop aesthetics of their most popular work.
I remember Rob hopping back and forth on the edges of his feet as he delivered slashing guitar riffs, Greg perched awkwardly on a milk crate as he pounded the edges and surfaces of his drums with splintering sticks, Kelly accentuating the pauses with twinkles of cheery synthesizer and Satomi just beginning to explore the innocent then grating vocals that would become the band’s trademark. They ended the set with an extended version of the song Data that held the entire club in breathless, enchanted silence.
I ended up back in Chicago after realizing that I wasn’t ready to be tied down with college and had started a correspondence with Greg Saunier. They were going to need an extra show in Chicago for their upcoming tour and I had gotten to know Brian Peterson from The Fireside well enough to book it. Setting up the show meant that I got to play it so it was time to put together a project.
I can’t remember how I made up the name Spidermammal but I probably just liked the way it sounded. I didn’t think that just me messing around on a bass would make for enough of a spectacle so I asked Justin if he wanted to be in a band with me. Justin was a poorly supervised ten year old who terrorized the block of Belden Avenue where me, Francois and most of our friends lived.
Now that Justin and I were in a band together I started spending more time with him to learn what he was like. He was probably putting on a bit of a show to impress his new teenage friend but he moved through the neighborhood like a chubbier take on Bart Simpson. When we passed a group of men passing around a joint he’d pipe up:
“Hey! Lemme get a hit of that weed!”
They shrugged and held it out so he yelled back “Hell No! I don’t do drugs!” then ran off laughing. Our walk next brought us to an automotive garage with the sliding metal door barely opened for airflow. He leaned down and tucked his head into the workspace. Cupping a hand around his mouth to direct and amplify his voice he yelled out “Ya Motherfucker!” then scampered off silently.
The man who had been working on a car looked around in confusion. The echo had created the illusion that the insult had come from some unseen person inside the actual building.
Sometimes Justin would come by to gripe about his troubles. After a frustrating day he’d complain:
“What I don’t understand is what’s the point of me even going to school? I gotta buy my own lunch!”
He missed his absent father and would pretend that he had a magical ring that he could use to communicate with him. He got in trouble for following a girl his age home from school, compounded by the fact that he was carrying a pocket knife. His family was from Tennessee and he’d clearly picked up some negative influences. He made racist remarks to Michelle who was Black and Janice who was Korean:
“Why do your eyes look all Ching Chong?”
This would always get him yelled at and kicked out but he eventually showed back up. On some level I must have realized that he desperately needed a positive role model and I was trying in some odd way to be one. I told him to start coming by my house after school so we could practice.
I was trying to teach myself to sing and play bass at the same time but I didn’t have a mic stand. Instead I stood and sang into the corner where two walls met figuring it wouldn’t move. Justin came striding in and laughed when he saw what I was actually doing.
“It looked like you were jerking off on the wall!”
Even though I was able to pull this off on several songs without losing time at our show the skill had atrophied by the time I tried to do it again thirteen years later. I was supposed to be doing it in a two piece band with Dalton but after a string of frustrating rehearsals we decided I would play drums and sing while Dalton took over bass in what became Dealbreaker.
Back at Spidermammal practice I gave Justin a microphone and started playing a jazzy bass riff that had actually been written by Brandi. He sang a bunch of “rotten made out of cotton” type jump rope rhymes but the boys and girls had been replaced by kids and grownups. It was the kids that were always rotten in his lyrics while the grownups were dandy and made out of candy. I’m not sure if he was dealing with some measure of self hate for being a child or was trying to impress me, a grownup.
Sometimes he would sing a version of I Believe I Can Fly that sounded more like the Seal version from Space Jam than the original. The night of our concert arrived and it was time for me and Justin to get into costume. He picked out a red crushed velvet pantsuit that belonged to Clara at Belden house and was given a long wig with bangs and some makeup. He looked like a miniature version of one of The Rolling Stones during a long haired glam era. I put on a maroon tuxedo with a big red velvet bow tie and painted my face with Black Metal style corpse paint. I hung a rubber skull with a generic ‘80s hair metal rocker wig from my bass for effect.
I hadn’t accounted for how much of a pain in the ass Justin was going to be at the show. He kept running over into the closed off bowling lanes and trying to stick his foot into the ball return machines. He convinced several bemused concertgoers to buy his autograph but some of his other antics were attracting the ire of the venue’s staff. I was excited to finally socialize as a “featured artist” but found myself constantly needing to extricate Justin from somewhere he wasn’t wanted or otherwise redirect his often destructive attention.
The other local act Missing Tooth took the stage. It was a couple of older ladies playing drums and keyboards while dressed up in sparkly outfits from the disco era. Finally Justin was sitting and watching a band with silent, unwavering attention. His legs were even neatly crossed as if he was at a public library story hour. I breathed a huge sigh of relief and took a seat next to him.
He looked at me and gasped “you can see the whole side of her boob!”, in almost reverent tones.
Many years later I would end up in a rap group with Virginia, the woman with the side boob, called Chew on This where she played drums and rapped KO d of like Sheila E. We unfortunately never recorded but we did get to play with my favorite Japanese Zeuhl band Kōenji Hyakkei when Chicago’s Cheer Accident invited us to do one of our raps during their set.
When it was time for Spidermammal to take the stage Janice pulled Justin aside for some last minute instruction:
“Now Justin make sure you don’t say any bad words or anything racist because the people here won’t like that.”
I know that she meant well but it probably wasn’t the smartest approach for this particular ten year old. I could literally see the light bulb form above his head. I managed to more or less sing into the microphone for our first song like I had practiced. Justin looked a little too excited when I handed him the microphone for his part.
I launched into the groovy, walking bassline.
“SHIT SHIT FUCK FUCK NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER!”
“SHIT SHIT FUCK FUCK NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER!”
Everybody stared at Justin with mouths agape but ultimately he was ten years old and it was an experimental noise show.
I kept the bassline going.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 