Tag: The Germs

Advertising and marketing are things I’m fascinated and horrified by in equal measure. Maybe it’s similar to what people feel when they collect venomous snakes – “this thing has a certain inherent beauty that is both balanced by and stems from its undeniable power to negate my very existence”. Far be it from me to say nobody can sell anything or use any medium to inform other human beings that they have things for sale but something about it makes me deeply uncomfortable. It gives me the willies.

Here are some stories about how I’ve lent my life energy to this particular industry in exchange for money and also brushed up against it and thought about it in my day to day existence. They were originally a series of posts on Facebook, the first being a sort of tribute to commemorate the death of Ozzy Osbourne, so their format and certain references within the text reflect that.

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One of the many odd things I’ve briefly done to make money was be a brand ambassador. Somewhere around 2003/2004 this meant I was operating an oxygen bar at OzzFest to help promote Trojan condoms. A hallmark of most jobs is having the same conversation over and over but this is especially true as a brand ambassador because most interactions only last the second it takes to hand a person a free thing.

I had already been the Trojan guy at Warped Tour without an oxygen bar so I was intimately familiar with the three jokes I’d be hearing for the next six hours: “I need extra large for me”, “I need extra small for this friend I habitually bully” and the classic “give me lots of them because I will need a large number, today!” I had a new response to each one of these jokes this time though because after handing somebody a condom I could say “would you like to try this free oxygen bar?”

This invariably brought the same question: “will it get me high?” I didn’t bother to try the oxygen bar myself so my best answer was “probably not really, you try it and tell me”. It didn’t get anybody high. A small subset of people at Ozzfest were dressed in the industrial cyber metal style with a mix of colored dreads and contacts, goggles, face masks, wide legged JNCOs and that sort of thing. Those people were most interested in the oxygen bar because the disposable nose tubes I administered it with complemented their preexisting aesthetic.

Like most oxygen bars the one I operated offered a variety of flavors that were achieved by bubbling the oxygen through some thick colorful scented liquid. This oxygen bar had been on the road with OzzFest and the flavor bottles were hidden underneath a counter so this combination meant all these flavor bottles had a thick layer of dust floating on top of this liquid that the oxygen consumers were not privy to.

The clear demarcation between dust and flavor juice would have theoretically made it an easy thing to try to scoop off of the top but as this oxygen bar only passed through a chain of custody made up of temporary brand ambassadors like myself I’d imagine my counterparts in other cities came to much the same solution I did: make a mental note to not try the oxygen bar and then don’t try the oxygen bar.

In an attempt to make the Trojan condoms oxygen bar more topical to OzzFest itself the designers had named one of these flavors “Bark At The Moon”. According to the label this one was a combination of orange and peppermint, I didn’t smell it but it was certainly bright orange. You might think an environment like OzzFest would result in a more “risk taking” clientele where flavors of free oxygen are concerned but this turned out not to be the case. “Bark At The Moon” was relatively unpopular with most oxygen consumers going for the safer two options in grape and strawberry.

This is a memorial post, it is not a coincidence that I chose to write it on the day that Ozzy died. I could talk about how much I loved Ozzy and Sabbath or that the Iron Man riff was one of the first things I learned on the bass but I thought this tangentially related anecdote would be more amusing. RIP King

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More tales of a brand ambassador: Trojan condoms was not the first company I represented at youth oriented music festivals. That honor goes to Winterfresh Gum, also at Warped Tour. In my last post I wrote about hearing the same jokes regarding the product I was giving away ad nauseam. With Winterfresh Gum that boiled down to just one joke: “are you trying to tell me something?”

To be a brand ambassador is to operate with extreme latitude as the brands typically only want to pay for the ambassadors themselves so there’s no pit boss breathing down your neck. I had countless interactions to try to think of a snappy comeback and nobody to chide me on how my behavior might reflect on Winterfresh Gum. I eventually came up with “yeah, it smells like something crawled down your throat, took a shit and died”, delivered in a sarcastic tone to convey that I was not, in fact, trying to tell them anything.

It is not lost on me that in the twenty plus years since this incident, this style of irreverence has become the norm in much of advertising and corporate social media accounts. Clearly it works if everybody is doing it. I’d hate to think that my spicy repartee influenced anybody to prioritize Winterfresh for their future mouthwash adjacent gum needs but there’s nothing I can do about it now.

Being a brand ambassador is the kind of thing where, while you don’t want to actively sabotage the enterprise you are engaged in, you do want to bring as little energy and enthusiasm as possible. It comes with the territory that increasing the visibility of the given product will inevitably translate to actual sales but one wouldn’t want to contribute to this by doing anything as horrifying as a job well done. There’s nobody to assess you and weigh your performance concerning future brand ambassador opportunities anyway.

On that note I was brought into the brand ambassador game by my girlfriend at the time who I refer to in writing as the New England Pedigree Girl. Around this same time she received an assignment with even less oversight than usual to become an “Axe Angel” for Axe Body Spray. Our brand ambassador pimps were a marketing company called GMR and they kept photos of us on file so she was clearly selected for the qualities of being blonde and in reasonable good shape.

She shared the binder of confidential Axe Body Spray marketing strategy materials with me so I am able to report on the particulars of the “Axe Angel” initiative. She was supposed to dress in a sexy security guard uniform and approach boys in the target demographic of 14 to 20 years old then offer to spray Axe either directly on their bodies or, if they preferred, on small pieces of paper designed to transfer the scent. After this she was expected to playfully brandish a pair of plastic handcuffs and deliver lines such as “you smell so good I might have to take you with me!” and other things to the similar effect of “this scent has made you appealing to women and for that you must be punished with attention from women”.

I thought it would be hilarious if she pretended to either misunderstand the instructions or be really bad at assessing the age of children and exclusively targeted 6 to 10 year olds but she, understandably, did not want to do this. She didn’t want to do any of it – her method of clocking in and out was to use a company credit card to purchase a pack of gum within the same department store and she simply did this at the two requested times then waited in her car without ever putting on the uniform. An altogether reasonable choice as they really were asking a lot for just a dollar or two above minimum wage.

A year or two later I was substituting at a Junior High School and mildly disappointed to see how effective Axe’s marketing, though perhaps not the “Axe Angel” program specifically, had been. When one boy pulled out some Axe Body Spray after Gym Class every other boy in the class eagerly asked to be allowed to use it. Their simple and hamfisted message of “this will make girls want you” had evidently had the desired effect.

Just recently I was shopping in Grocery Outlet and was surprised to see Axe products with actual herbs and botanicals listed on the label including Vetiver, an aroma I am particularly fond of. Back in the early 2000s Axe seemed almost proudly synthetic with lots of the neon blue and green palette of energy drinks prominently featured on the labels. It wasn’t until this very moment of writing this that I suddenly remembered that when I first got into Vetiver an acquaintance told me that women almost universally love the scent.

I don’t think that’s the reason I started wearing it but it is interesting to see how fundamentally similar supposedly opposite ends of the cultural spectrum can be.

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Tales of a brand ambassador – third and final part: while I’m very good at remembering the things that happened I’m less good at remembering the years they happened in. After some digging I figured out that my OzzFest and Warped Tour Trojan condoms gigs had to have been in 2006. This was because I remembered Dragonforce playing Ozzfest, though I didn’t get to see them, and catching a few minutes of a band I liked the sound of called Bad Acid Trip. This was the 2006 lineup.

I should mention that I don’t really care to watch bands at major festivals. Once my brother called me drunk from a U2 show and held his phone in the air so I could listen. This is how I feel about seeing any group at a mid to major fest. It feels like Plato’s Cave analogy – you experience the shadow of the thing but not the thing itself. I even like U2, or the Joshua Tree at least, but it isn’t that exciting to hear them through a drunk relative’s phone and it isn’t that exciting to watch bands I care about at white tent and wristband festivals. C’est la vie.

I also corroborated the year because when I gave away Trojan condoms at Warped Tour the Germs were playing with actor Shane West, from their recent biopic, pretending to be Darby Crash as their vocalist. This only happened in 2006 and 2008 and I was definitely not a brand ambassador in 2008. I hadn’t really listened to the Germs then, and still haven’t now, but still felt some kind of way about the circumstances surrounding this reunion in terms of “punk ethos” and the politics of “selling out”.

It didn’t help that the alternative weeklies of the time were full of stories about Shane West pranking various bands the Germs shared stages with involving onstage antics, green room food throwing and that sort of thing. To 2006-me this kind of cosplay felt particularly offensive. I don’t know how to feel about it or what to call it in terms of the now significantly shifted cultural landscape – maybe prescient. Anyway on my free condom distributing rounds I happened to pass near the front of the stage during the Germs set so I threw a handful of condoms at them and shouted:

“Here’s some condoms to fuck Darby’s memory with!”

I doubt anyone in the band heard me over the big monitors they have at this sort of thing and I can’t really emotionally connect with my past vitriol but that’s what happened. I should add that I was wearing a really cheap foam version of the iconic Trojan helmet and distributing promotional product at the behest and on the payroll of a major corporation so I wasn’t exactly the paragon of punk values myself. At another point in the day I was moving through the crowd at one of the side stages and the singer of the ska-punk band that was playing (no clue who they were, sorry) amended the lyrics of his song to include:

“And get some free condoms from the Trojan guy!”

So that was fun. I thought this might have been the same Warped Tour where somebody threw a shoe, ironically a Vans slip on, at Opie Ortiz, the physically intimidating frontman of Sublime leftovers group The Long Beach Dub Allstars and he spent several minutes demanding the kid come on stage to fight him. However after consulting the impressive spreadsheet on Wikipedia of every Warped Tour lineup ever I’ve concluded that this must have been 2000 or 2001 when I was not a brand ambassador but snuck in with a group of friends to see Weezer.

After circling the festival grounds of the Coors Amphitheater we concluded that a combination of negligence and terrain rendered the best entry point to be slipping under the fence Peter Rabbit style into the backstage artist area. From there it was simple enough to stroll into the festival proper. Upon our emergence a small army of fan girls registered us as fellow plebeians rather than festival staff or proper Pop-Punk Valhallans and eagerly asked if we’d seen Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day.

We had not but it seemed more amusing to say that we had and they excitedly shrieked and attempted to storm the gates. As amusing as it is to imagine wacky hijinks in the vein of Beatles film A Hard Days Night where Billy Joe nervously and cartoonishly attempts to evade a horde of prepubescent fans the reality was probably that they were quickly checked and rebuffed by security. We didn’t stick around to find out as we’d tightly coordinated our unsanctioned entrance with Weezer’s start time.

I want to quickly add that while I had to use the band lineups to corroborate my activities at the 2006 Warped Tour and Ozzfest, no easily accessible records of Trojan condoms promotional efforts at these festivals exist, this was not the case for Winterfresh Gum. I was able to confirm that the gum happened at 2005 Warped Tour as another gum-giver-outer spun the experience into an inspirational origin story about becoming a road manager or something here.

Anyway I actually met Don Bolles either when I played my first Bleak End solo set on US soil at Ye Olde Hush Clubbe in 2008 or, if he was too busy pretending to be in the Germs with Shane West again that Summer, after I moved to Los Angeles on my 30th Birthday in 2010. We moved in the same social circles and I always found him an affable and charming fellow with good music taste where DJing is concerned.

In 2012 I was hit by a car on my bicycle and found that the best way to relieve the resulting lower back pain was to hula hoop. I did this for an hour every day in Venice Beach, outside of an oxygen bar where the proprietors kindly lent me free use of a rental hula hoop. To bring the threads of this narrative back around in a pleasing manner, while I hadn’t been a brand ambassador for six years in an official capacity my hula hooping did promote the oxygen bar in a more ad-hoc manner.

One day I saw a group of young brand ambassadors with a specialized trailer putting on a foam dance party for the glory of Dr. Bronner’s soap in the middle of the board walk. I wouldn’t be surprised if GMR also had a finger in this particular pie as they bill themselves as a leader in the “experiential marketing” space. Friends of Don Bolles and/or fans of the Germs may remember that in 2007 he was arrested while living in his van when the police claimed his bottle of this same soap tested positive for date-rape drug (and not Classic Punk band GBH) GHB.

This led to many amusing headlines along the template of “Germ arrested for soap” and the Dr. Bronner’s company underwriting a vigorous legal defense that cleared Don of all charges. While the altruistic nature of this gesture was no doubt genuine the inevitable publicity and promotional potential was nothing to shake a stick at either. Because of this shared history with the cleaning agent I thought Don Bolles might enjoy coming down and getting “freakay” in the foam so I tagged him on this very platform.

He neither appeared nor responded to the tag and presumably wasn’t interested. I won’t tag him now but perhaps these anecdotes will amuse him if they find their way to him. He looks great since his hair went white. I was going to end things here but I just thought of another peripherally related recent experience. LaPorsha and I started making our own laundry soap a few months back.

When we were assembling the necessary ingredients we had to ask a Wal-Mart employee for help locating the Dr. Bronner’s. The guy in a slightly younger couple overheard this and became excited. The Bronner’s brandname and all the positive associations that come along with it clearly sparked some forgotten memories in him but it was not lost to me that this couple seemed to sit slightly to the left of us on the basic-to-subcultural-continuum and our own interest in the product would have been to him what marketers call “aspirational”.

It really was shelved in a confusing part of Wal-Mart’s cosmetics section so we were together for a couple minutes while the associate helped us track it down. After quickly scanning the relevant section we opted to instead purchase the significantly cheaper copycat brand Dr. Natural and upon observing this decision the younger couple followed suit and did the same.

In some small way it’s relieving to know that after decades of being bagged and tagged by professional “cool hunters”, inadvertently co-signing corporations through attendance at the events they sponsor or even serving active tours of duty as literal brand ambassadors for a paycheck; even after all of this, insofar as we are the bellwethers for a certain sector of consumer behavior we can always take it back…