Tag: Coil

I just heard today that Unwound is going to start playing shows and being a band again and I’m trying to wrap my head around how exactly this makes me feel. I only saw the band once and never knew them personally but they did some time in my heart’s favorite band slot way back in 1999 when I was nineteen years old and got excited about music the way you only can when you’re still a teenager. I was on this same mountain when Francois passed on the news that Vern Rumsey had died back in the Summer of 2020.

I walked through the woods for a couple of days playing Fake Train and some Long Hind Legs and read all the things that different people wrote on the Unwound Archive about Vern and the dissolution of the band. While I didn’t actually disagree with anything that anybody else was saying I still had a distinct feeling that I should say something or write something. I didn’t know what to do with the feeling at the time but now that there’s more news and more feelings it occurs to me that I’ve built myself a little platform for saying and writing things right here.

Before Tim had come up with the idea of The Singles and convinced me to pick up a bass I hadn’t actually spent much time thinking about what sounds the different instruments in a band made. Things like horns, synthesizers and bowed strings stuck out but I had been looking at the guitar, bass and drum parts as a single seamless lump. Now that I was thinking about what a bass does and identifying as a member of Team Bass I had a newfound appreciation for bands that dispensed with the guitar entirely like godheadSilo and eventually Lightning Bolt.

I hadn’t been particularly into punk bands but now that I was trying to learn how to play an instrument the simpler songs from groups like The Ramones, The Clash and The Talking Heads were a natural starting point. Tim and I taught ourselves a couple quick covers and went onto the constant prowl for any shows or parties where we might jump on some amps for a quick minute. We got matching bellhop style jackets from a Downtown Uniform Supply Store and spent a bit more time fussing over how we’d look playing Beat On The Brat than how well we’d actually play it.

I don’t remember how we ended up on a triple date with Lil Four trying to sneak into my High School’s Senior Prom at the U.S. Grant Hotel. This memory kind of floated up out of nowhere when I thought about Tim Ford and Lil Four in the same sentence and elevates the number of school dances that Lil Four and I at least attempted to attend together to two.

However it happened Tim and I had on the matching uniform jackets and Lil Four was wearing a simple solid dress in red or black: we looked great. None of us actually had tickets but that wasn’t the reason we were turned away. We were turned away because they believed we had already been inside and nobody was allowed to go in and out. I think the policy had been made to crack down on students either bringing in or being under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

It was an entire lifetime later in November of the same year when Francois and I convinced Lil Four to move up to our house in Berkeley. She had been living behind the Locust House and buying records from all the bands that were coming through. I was about to repeat the sentiment about bands and music making a larger impression to an eighteen to twenty year old but I suddenly realized that there was also an unnaturally high number of great bands making great records in the last couple years of the last millennium.

Among Lil Four’s records was the album by Unwound called Fake Train. If Tim Ford had inadvertently taught me how to pay attention to what a bass player was doing then Vern Rumsey taught me why. After a more subdued and noisy introductory track the instrument begins pacing in hypnotic circles on the Valentine Card triptych and continues to bend and divide time in such a way that when the first side comes to an end it was impossible for us to flip the record over for an entire month. Whatever spell the bass was casting would cause us to compulsively play that first side again – over and over and over.

Unwound was my favorite band for at least a few months so I don’t want to diminish either Justin or Sara’s heroic contributions but I have to say that I was there because Vern pulled me there. I’ve never actually looked at tablature or attempted to play these songs myself but I’m pretty sure that nothing he was playing was particularly complicated. I’ve heard a decent number of great bass players over the years: Amanda Warner of MNDR was a thing to behold when playing with Mark Treise in Jealousy for example. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the quality that makes them great isn’t virtuosity or timing but something small and invisible and very close to the center of what it means to be a person.

There was no question that lots and lots of other people were seeing and feeling the thing that I am doing a poor job of describing. A band from Columbia. Missouri called Warhammer 48K were so taken with this thing that they hired Vern especially and brought him to the MidWest to be the recording engineer on their record. Everything they told me about the experience played out like all of the tired cliches about never meeting your heroes: he was always late, he didn’t seem to particularly care about their record or anything other than making sure he was constantly drunk and once he was drunk he didn’t care about anything.

This brings us to the question of what it even is that I felt like I wanted to say or write. After reading many different accounts about how Unwound fell apart because Vern couldn’t stop drinking or start caring about anything I’m not only saying the same things but adding additional incidents of the same behavior. What I am trying to say is that all of the different parts of a person come locked together in a person shaped box and there’s no way to pick and choose the parts you want while leaving out the parts you don’t.

It’s not about what a disappointment he was when the band brought him out to master their record but rather about that irreplaceable quality that made them ever even want to. I suppose that I have some empathy for a person who exhibits some sought after creative talent or power but also drinks, uses drugs or engages in other self destructive behaviors that cause the outside world to want to neatly snip the bitter from the sweet. It’s just the endless question of whether Vern could have even played bass like that if he didn’t drink too much and not care about anything and of course now he’s gone and the world will never know.

It had always been a dream of mine to hear Vern Rumsey play bass while Greg Saunier from Deerhoof played drums and I did actually know Greg back in 1999 and whenever I mentioned this he would just kind of nervously laugh presumably because he had some idea of what Vern was like to deal with as a person. In February of 1999 I went to see Unwound at the Great American Music Hall and on the way there I ran into this industrial guy named Caliban on the BART who always wore a forest green coat with a long, modified wizard hood and had some distinctive face tattoos and piercings.

We used to run into each other on public transit a lot because I was a full time student at San Francisco State University and we would always talk about music. He asked me who I was going to see and then sort of scoffed, presumably because he didn’t know who the band was, so I asked him what his favorite band was. He told me that it was Coil who I hadn’t actually heard of at the time even though I had read the Throbbing Gristle RE/SEARCH:

“Unwound could unwind that Coil!”

It was a weird empty statement of childish bravado in a pointless favorite bands pissing contest. I’m trying to think why me and this guy even always talked to each other because while he was a clearly very interesting looking industrial guy I was just a kid in a corduroy jacket. I know who Coil are now but I don’t listen to them as much as I probably should. I was talking to another Ossian in a group I made for Ossians about how there are sometimes Ossians in the same field but more successful than us and that Ossian Brown who sometimes played with Coil is a more successful industrial musician than me.

Unwound originally stopped being a band in the aftermath of the September 11th Terrorist Attacks. I like thinking about how that event forever scarred and changed the face of Underground America so having this band break up forever resonates very strongly with that but I can also empathize with wanting to try to bring back a band as good as Unwound was. There was always kind of the question of why they didn’t try with somebody else ages ago as a bass player is often considered the most replaceable in a power trio but now it’s no longer a question.

I understand that the person who will be taking over was very close to Vern and close to the band and has been in some great bands like The Melvins and Karp. I remember reading that when Vern was desperately trying to leave after September 11th he was offering to teach the bass parts to the guy in the van who was doing merch. This didn’t happen though I wonder if passing a torch would have somehow been more possible in the now remote psychic landscape of a 2001 tour van.

It looks like a lot of people are very optimistic about this reunion but right now I can’t bring myself to look or listen. I pull up a video of the first side of Fake Train. Valentine Card begins, slowly spinning in a circle the constant tones hook deep and pull me in…

“I know, I know, I know it seems so long ago

To be so stuck on a face that won’t go away

I can’t, I can’t, I can’t seem to wait for the day

I know, I know, I know it don’t matter anyway”

***********************************************

It’s been quite a while since I wrote this but there are thoughts and ideas that seem obvious now but I was somehow unable to consciously verbalize the first time around. This first bit isn’t one – I’ve just thinking been thinking about what it felt like for me to have a “favorite band” around the turn of the millennium. I’d listen to them constantly, search for every recording or interview I could find and most importantly travel halfway across the country on a counterfeit Greyhound Pass or sneak into a 21+ venue anyway I could to see them.

I’m not sure when this stopped happening for me but I remember an xbxrx show at The Che either around 2005 or 2010 where a kid had come all the way from Texas to see them. That was the moment I realized I just didn’t have favorite bands on that level anymore. Here are a few I remember having: Twisted Sister, They Might Be Giants, The Residents, The Make Up, godheadSilo, Lightning Bolt, Unwound, The Thrones, The Need and others I’m most likely forgetting in the moment.

I do still listen to new music and occasionally find stuff I really like. A couple years ago I discovered a song called A Different Age by a younger artist named Current Joys and listened to on repeat for like a month. It was similar but still not quite the same as what having a “favorite band” felt like. What came closer was when I suddenly became interested in a kickboxer named Benny “The Jet” Urquidez and watching all the videos of his fights.

I’d never been into any kind of wrestling, boxing or MMA in the past but the feeling I got watching “The Jet” slowly dominate time after time brought me the closest to that forgotten feeling I’d been in well over a decade. He’s a small guy and competes in light weight classes – in every match he takes a bit of a beating to start but seems to do it to study his opponent’s patterns and weaknesses. Once he’s got it worked out it’s like watching a skilled spider or other predator at work.

I think he’s undefeated except for a couple of weird technicalities. I know next to nothing about kickboxing but items not like I knew anything about punk rock when Unwound first got its grip on me either.

Okay here comes the more controversial part. I was recently playing Fake Train right as we were driving home up the mountain and when LaPorsha asked who it was I explained that the band had been broken up for just over twenty years but had recently started playing again although the bass player had died. That’s when it hit me:

Unwound is playing live shows again because Vern Rumsey is no longer alive.

I don’t have concrete proof from any specific statement or interview from either Sara or Justin but it really is the only thing that makes sense. Somewhere around 2010 it became a trend for All Tomorrow’s Parties and similar festivals to start courting long defunct but critically acclaimed groups to come back together for a “hell freezes over” performance or series of performances.

Of course it makes sense that Unwound is precisely the type of band that wouldn’t reunite only because somebody dangled a big bag of cash over their heads but that wasn’t the only type of reunion going down. I remember trying to convince The Centimeters to return to the stage for a Halloween show with me and Bernard Hermann and while that didn’t work out they did start playing again soon after. When The Centimeters did pick the banner back up it wasn’t about a huge payday but rather a newer legion of fans who had heard the band through file sharing and music blogs and were ready to give them some much deserved flowers.

I find it impossible to believe that nobody was either pressing for or offering to facilitate an Unwound reunion while Vern was alive so there must be some explanation why it never happened. It could have been that Vern didn’t actually want to do it or that Sara and/or Justin didn’t want to do it again with him or that they did but only if he was going to be sober for it.

There is actually an interview with Sara about all of this. I’m not going to throw a link in but it should be easy enough to find. She talks about letters written with the aid of therapists and describes alcoholism as a disease a handful of times in the course of the piece. If you want an official version look there – I’ll only be speaking very loosely from the thoughts and feelings of someone whose only connection to the band was that it spent under a year as my absolute favorite.

Earlier in this piece when I talked about Vern Rumsey not caring about anything I was oversimplifying things and unfairly exaggerating. He helped run a great label called PNMV that put out records by artists like The Thrones and Yind. He made music with other projects like Long Hind Legs, Red Rumsey and Flora v. Fauna. He played bass and helped with recording for bands like Blonde Redhead.

I wrote earlier in this piece about my friends in Warhammer 48K having an awful time bringing him out to be a recording engineer but I’ve heard of people having positive experiences working with him too. I forget the name but there was an article in San Diego City Beat about some band around a Banker’s Hill bar I also forget the name of inviting him out to play bass with them and they all seemed happy about how things were going.

It should be mentioned he was holding a bottle of Maker’s Mark in the accompanying picture.

That’s not really what I want to talk about though. I want to talk about how Unwound is only playing shows again because Vern has passed. Supposedly the other members had his blessing to play again with a replacement while he was still alive but I just can’t see that actually happening. Since I wrote this piece I’ve talked to several friends who excitedly mentioned recently seeing the band, for many of the them as their first time, and I wonder what it would feel like if I just decided to go.

Would it still feel like I was watching Unwound? Would I even want it to?

When I was singing in the hard rock band Sexting I wrote a song called Aschenputtel about the Cinderella fairy tale and how it relates to the concept of loss. Regarding the symbol of the glass slipper I saw the object’s size, an important plot point in the original story, as less important than the delicate material it was made from. To me a glass slipper is a flawless metaphor for memory itself – it holds the form of the feelings and experiences that give it meaning and in the light of nostalgia it even sparkles with a newfound beauty.

The problems begin when you pick it up from the shelf and try to put your foot inside of it. Even if it were to fit you perfectly attempting to walk in it, that is attempting to recreate a memory from an idealized past in the imperfect present, can only cause the slipper to shatter and cut into the flesh of your skin. With this limitation is it worth it to pick the slipper up from the palace steps at all?

I don’t begrudge Sara or Justin their right to bring back Unwound in the only way available to them. It was a life changing band and new fans deserve the right to experience it in a live setting just like they deserve the right to play it. I just wonder about the slipper – is it still on the stairs? Did somebody pick it up? Did somebody try to put their foot in it?

It’s a painful reality to come to terms with but who came to terms with it and when? People are complicated, music is complicated, relationships are complicated… I close my eyes and I can almost see a pile of broken glass sitting in a puddle of blood…

Whose blood is it?