You’ll remember that at the conclusion of The Bus chapters John Benson found a cheap house online in Albion, the closest town in Michigan to where The Bus broke down, and decided to buy it. The plan was to use this house as a base of operations while working to repair The Bus using the planned engine transplant method and even to store The Bus on the property. His reasoning was sound: one generally believes that owning a house gives you the legal right to occupy it and neighborhoods where most of the houses are unoccupied and selling for a pittance on eBay won’t be subject to the vicissitudes of HOAs and the like.
Albion, in these regards, turned out to be exceptional – or at least this particular block of it did. One neighbor decided from the moment John Benson first set foot into the house that we didn’t seem like the kind of people he wanted in his neighborhood and local laws and regulations seemed to be on his side. He found a law to prevent John from being able to move The Bus onto the premises and went to work on tracking down the legal loopholes to keep us out entirely.
This was more of a war of attrition then something that happened overnight – after it became apparent The Bus wasn’t getting fixed a few different people from the extended friend network tried their hand at small town living. Jason Crumer became so frustrated with Albion that he edited the town’s Wikipedia entry to say something to the effect of “full of ignorant assholes”. That didn’t garner a ton of good will with the populace at large.
This was the larger background situation when I passed through Albion on tour with Generation and walked into the house to find a wild opossum hissing at us from inside of a cage in the center of the largest room. No one we knew was supposed to be staying there at the time so as far as we could tell there was an unknown squatter who had a penchant for keeping angry marsupials in captivity. We were feeling a little apprehensive about sticking around long enough to find out when a more innocuous explanation presented itself.
There was one person in Albion that liked having us around and wanted to help in any way he could: a punk kid named Kevin who worked at the one coffee shop. He’d been keeping an eye on the house and had noticed that the opossum had taken up residence in it. He’d borrowed a live trap from the animal shelter and we’d just happened to wander in after the animal got caught but before he’d come back to check it.
I hopped into Coffee Kev’s car for the familiar activity of “taking it for a ride” – driving the opossum far enough away that it wouldn’t find it’s way back to the house. When I was younger a mother opossum had moved her brood into my family’s garage and I helped my father capture and relocate the juveniles. I’ll never forget the way they despondently grabbed onto the bars of the cat carrier with their tiny and oddly human looking hands.
The adult from the Albion house wasn’t being as cute about it’s temporary lack of freedom – it backed into the corner of the trap and hissed every time anybody looked at it. Regardless this is my most vivid memory of Albion: driving down backroads green with tall grass and pasture, chatting with Kevin about God knows what until we decided it was far enough and watched a frightened opossum scurry off into the undergrowth.
Once we got back to the house there was barely enough time to walk upstairs and look around before the cops showed up. Apparently the problem neighbor had dug into local codes and ordinances and figured out that the house was in need of various repairs and renovations that meant it was technically illegal for anyone to stay in it until an inspection indicated the work was finished. The cops seemed embarrassed and were apologetic:
“We wish nobody had called us but unfortunately somebody did and the law is on his side.”
I don’t know what eventually happened to the house or the first bus but I’d imagine that John Benson doesn’t own anything in Albion anymore. Some friends had done some digging on the neighbor and figured out that he liked parrots and motorcycles but that’s not exactly material for the kind of blackmail that could get him off of everybody’s backs. He wasn’t going anywhere. Something to think about when considering buying a dilapidated house sight unseen in a small town you know next to nothing about.
This section of the tour wasn’t that solidly booked and we ended up accepting an opportunity that was bizarre even by noise tour standards. We were supposed to be playing on a miniature bicycle powered stage provided by a recycling themed clown troupe at a major music festival. Our friend Books had been living in Detroit and getting into the clown troupe subculture with a group she called The Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos.
I don’t know very much about The Land of NOD Experiment except that there was some kind of New Orleans connection and in 2010 it was attempting to make the jump from a smaller friends camp and jam thing to a larger festival in terms of talent and infrastructure. The headliners were Of Montreal, Eagles of Death Metal and Kool Keith performing as Dr. Octagon with DJ Q-Bert. Besides that it was Trombone Shorty, Ratty Skurvics, some other New Orleans folks and a lot of smaller names.
The tone was set the moment we met up with Books for our wristbands and went through security. On this leg of the tour we were traveling and playing with Forced Into Femininity and an older female security guard thought it would be appropriate to reach out and grope Jill’s breast while asking a question made academic by her preemptive action:
“Can I feel?”
The fact that she asked at all showed that she had some awareness of the necessity for consent but just didn’t care. Trans awareness and social visibility were in a slightly different place in 2010 but this woman’s actions were egregious even for a small town like Jackson, Michigan. She was essentially communicating that she saw Jill’s body and identity as a joke and Jill herself undeserving of even basic bodily autonomy. I can’t remember how anybody reacted but the unfamiliar and isolated setting meant that this violation didn’t exactly feel like a teachable moment.
The second thing to portend how the weekend was going to go was that it immediately started pouring rain and continued through most of the first night. The festival setting was on the edge of some wetlands but the weather effectively changed this to a stiflingly humid mosquito infested swamp. Judging by the sizes of the stages, sound systems, crowd control barriers and the high number of porta-potties the promoters must have been banking on attendance in the tens of thousands but I only saw a few hundred.
I don’t know anything about Eagles of Death Metal, I really enjoyed early Of Montreal when I was deep into the Elephant Six thing and Doctor Octagon was one of my favorite albums in High School. Still I felt the selection of headlining talent was somewhat eclectic, or I’m just going to say haphazardly thrown together, it didn’t feel especially curated. It would have been a great lineup for a free outdoor festival subsidized through grants and corporate sponsorships but with the expectation that people would be paying festival money it just wasn’t there – it felt like something was missing although I couldn’t say exactly what.
Ticket pre sales had evidently been disappointing and any hopes for a last minute rush at the gates were dissipated by the unfortunate turn in weather. Anyone that was feeling out the possibility of a festival experience but riding the fence due to the tepid selection of headliners was probably deciding on the free and dry side of that aforementioned fence.
The crowd that did actually show up seemed to be mainly what I would call “performative festival tryhards” – face paint, some showy hippy/steampunk/raver fashion and a dancing accessory designed to draw attention to themselves. Things like hula hoops that can be set on fire, those fringed suede covered sticks where you knock a third stick back and forth, djembes, megaphones and a few other things I’m forgetting – probably at least a slack line or two.
The main thing was that it felt like these exhibitionist types were hoping for throngs of festival greenhorns they could dazzle and impress with their bouncey stick prowess but of course they were the only ones there. Nobody was directly saying any of this but the body energy seemed clear that their basic need of being watched was not being met as everyone was too busy putting on their own show. The ground was turning into mud and most of the tents had become miserable, collapsed puddles.
The clowns were visibly around and with a few free beverages being passed out in cans they had their work cut out for them. There was a newly launched energy drink on the brink of failure, the ever elusive Red Bull girls and I think even an alcoholic option – but that was only in the backstage areas our wristbands gave us access to. I wasn’t on any oaths or pledges concerning abstinence but I don’t remember drinking and wouldn’t have been taking drugs. If LSD showed up the obvious instinct would be to save it for a setting where you might actually enjoy yourself.
The Generation siblings had opted to sit up all night in the talent area because people had mosquito repellant and the bugs were so bad they couldn’t sleep. Both of them were still quite innocent of certain worldly matters at this time and one of the themes of this tour was aggressive young women making constant confrontational sexual overtures. This made the Pickells extremely uncomfortable.
We were starting to hear talk that a lot of the performers were jumping ship because a) the festival was miserable to be inside of and b) the anemic ticket sales made it a practical certainty that anyone who wasn’t paid in advance was most likely not getting paid at all. This would turn into an opportunity for us. They were serving basic hotdogs on stiff buns without condiments – a sign of things to come.
The first night ended with a surprise headliner: DJ Bad Boy Bill. It was a last minute replacement for another headline act dropping out – Eagles of Death Metal. Ticket sales were low to begin with and I’d imagine a decent number of attendees took this as a pretext for demanding refunds. For some that may well have been the act they had mostly come for but for others I imagine it just presented an opportunity to pull the plug and recoup money on an experience that was not shaping up as advertised.
I vaguely remember watching this set from a classic Chicago House DJ with some degree of interest. The music was decent and the stage show included pyrotechnics and some fancy light effects. I went to try to sleep in the puddle that was my tent fairly early to prepare for whatever performing tomorrow would look like.
While hanging out backstage the previous evening we had chatted a small amount with the stage manager / sound engineer on the smallest stage and mentioned that we were there to perform. I was beginning to discuss the logistics of the miniature bike powered clown stage with Books when he caught my eye and motioned for me and Generation to come and talk to him. It turned out that even the smaller level acts were cancelling at an alarming rate out of fear of no payment and he was struggling to keep live music going on his specific stage for appearances.
Simply rolling an iPod playlist though all the missing acts would veer too close to acknowledging what this whole festival was: a complete and unmitigated disaster.
Books was disappointed when I informed her we wouldn’t be needing the bike stage but she had far more serious disappointments looming on the horizon. We decided to do the kind of Generation / Bleak End set that we had done at BitchPork but switched the orders around due to an unfortunate trend of spectators crediting the entire Generation set to me on the strength of some unconventional blocking. Forced Into Femininity wasn’t interested in playing and Jill generally wanted to get out of there as soon as humanly possible.
There wasn’t too much of a crowd but it was easily the biggest, fanciest and loudest sound system we had the opportunity to play with on the entire tour. [Note: actually probably not – we were on the main stage at Bitchpork] The unconventional music styles did seem to capture people’s attention and it was exciting just for the bizarre flex of saying we played an official stage for a mid to large size music festival – albeit a failure of one. It’s definitely more fun talking about it now than it was to actually play it.
I was actually super into Kool Keith in High School and Dr. Octagon was my favorite of his albums and personas by a wide margin. Under other circumstances I would have been excited to catch his performance but this wasn’t my first time at this kind of festival. Years earlier I had gotten an unexpected late night phone call from my older brother who turned out to be drunk at a U2 concert in some large East Coast arena. He held his cell phone up for me to hear.
After going to Coachella in 2004 I thought of the drunken U2 phone call as the perfect metaphor for everything that was disappointing and unsatisfying about the experience. Your favorite band in the world could be playing but it still just feels like listening through a cell phone held up by a drunk friend on the other side of the country. This isn’t true for something like Bitch Pork but the Festivals with white tents, beverage sponsors and colorful plastic wristbands always end up feeling this way.
It would have been cool if the Dr. Octagon set had happened a little earlier but it wasn’t even worth asking my friends to stick around for a few more hours. Through the lens of a major Festival, even a sparsely attended failed one, all of the energy that makes live music appealing is simply lost in translation.
Once we came off stage the rest of the group came and found us, Jill, Sugar Tea and Popsicle, and the sentiment was that we should leave as sleeping in a truck stop sounded more appealing than staying here. We packed up our wet tents and started the trek toward the exit when we discovered that Generation had made a profound impact on one fan specifically. A young girl dressed in a zebra miniskirt came jogging up and enthusiastically recapped her impressions of their set:
“Oh my god that was so crazy! You were like “RRURRURRU” and then you were like “reereeree”!
In her impressions she seemed to be imitating the kind of low/high screaming trade off that can be heard in Crust Metal bands like Dystopia, Wisigoth and most likely others I don’t know the names of. I am quite fond of the vocal style but it wasn’t what Generation sounded like by any stretch of the imagination. She repeated this several times with an unflagging surplus of energy as the Pickell siblings chuckled in obvious discomfort.
Her demonstration took a bit of a turn:
“Yeah!, I was so blown away I was like…”
She bent forward at the waist and let her mouth hang loosely open. One would assume this was to indicate shock but she then began to bob her head suggestively while making gagging noises. In case that wasn’t clear enough she added this last bit of commentary:
“Like, stick a dick in my mouth already, ya know?”
There was a bit more nervous and forced laughter until Rain had a sudden flash of inspiration. They had printed these tiny paper flyers with pictures of alien faces and urls for some of their videos and other online resources. Rain quickly handed her one of the tiny fliers. This seemed to throw the zebra skirt girl for a loop and she spent a couple minutes scanning and attempting to decode it. We all took the opportunity to recommence power walking toward the exit as quickly as possible.
We were clearly too far away to chase down again so instead the zebra girl gave a giant wave then cupped her hands around her mouth to scream out a final message:
“I’m gonna stick this in my pussy!!!”
With those words we had reached the gates and The Land of NOD Experiment was firmly behind us. We had escaped. We called Amanda to see if she had friends in Ann Arbor and ended up at a punk house called The Meat House that just happened to have an upcoming generator show full of fresh degradations when we attempted to play it.
I’d like to end this story with some things I didn’t witness first hand but heard through Books – the final fate of the Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos. When the festival promoters found themselves deeply in the red and needing to pick artists, workers or vendors to not pay the clowns seemed like the perfect choice. They had been gathering cans all weekend and Michigan is known across the USA for it’s relatively high beverage can redemption value of 10 cents so they wouldn’t be leaving empty handed. Still the agreement was that they would be paid 200 dollars a head for keeping the festival clean and teaching attendees about the joys of recycling.
The main promoter invited the clowns to their tent for hot dogs, mojitos and a “friendly chat”. The message was essentially that they had to fuck someone and The Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos seemed more fuckable than any other entity in this specific scenario. The clowns weren’t trying to take this sitting down but they also didn’t appear to have any options to retaliate. They could dump all the cans back out but that would just mean losing the small money to cover gas and other expenses they would be getting for following through on the recycling message they had coalesced around in the first place.
To make things especially insulting the promoter’s younger sister was tripping on acid, not wearing pants and laughing at everything the clowns said for this entire conversation. Some empty promises were made to the effect that the promoters would be continuing to fundraise and the clowns would be paid just as soon as all the more important people that were owed money were paid first – things like parking attendants, paid hula hoopers and God knows what else.
Based on the logistical clusterfuck of this initial outing it seems highly unlikely that any fund raising was successful. When I checked it’s Facebook page it seemed like they’d transitioned to smaller rabbit themed events around New Orleans. The Festival was dead. I have a feeling The Recy-Clown Cir-Chaos didn’t exactly bounce back from this either. Our tour? Our tour went on.
On to Ann Arbor and a thing called “dick time!”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 