Tag: The Locust

Mutations – The Many Strange Faces of Hardcore Punk : Sam McPheeters 2020

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The last time I wrote about a book, when I covered Arab on Radar memoir Psychiatric Tissues by Jeff Schneider, one of my oldest friends said that he had to read over halfway through the piece before he realized it was a review. This was my fault and this time around I think I’ll drop the review pretense entirely. That doesn’t mean that I won’t be saying anything about what I thought of this book on a qualitative level, as I’d need to deliberately go out of my way to avoid doing so, but rather that I won’t be particularly going out of my way to do so either. All of this exposition might be unnecessary for my longtime readers but on the off chance anybody found this essay expecting a quick summary of the book’s virtues and a mandative statement about whether they should buy it or not this is your quick warning that these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

I first became aware of this book when I was talking to Dan St. Jacque of Landed about a legendary 1997 show where he set himself on fire and the members of FORCEFIELD used a hose to baste the audience in the exhaust fumes of an idling moped. I wasn’t at this show, my own pilgrimage to Providence and Fort Thunder happened three years later, but I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about it. The only other shows I wasn’t at that have received comparable helpings of my mental energy are Woodstock ‘99, Bob Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and The Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway where the Hell’s Angels stabbed an audience member to death – vital myths on a national scale.

There is a video on YouTube of the first ten seconds when Dan runs out on fire but as it doesn’t include him being rapidly extinguished and then doing vocals for the entire Landed set I won’t be embedding it here. I was going to try to write an entire essay about this night but I haven’t succeeded in getting anyone who was in FORCEFIELD at this show to talk to me so I’ll just unload what I have here. If I was as organized as Sam is in Mutations this could have all been a footnote but I’m not so you’ll have to either follow my muddy footprints where they take you or skip ahead.

In my personal headcanon I had built this night up to be an analogue of the murders and church arsons surrounding the early nineties Norwegian Black Metal scene – I assumed that a culture of one-up-manship regarding extreme performances had led to this singular outlier of an evening where the health of performer and audience alike became secondary to the pursuit of spectacle. According to St. Jacques they just really didn’t like the venue, a downtown space called Met Cafe, and were hoping to either get the space shut down or be blacklisted from performing there in the future.

Neither panned out and Landed was back at Met Cafe a few months later but Dan toned things down and only set off a brick of firecrackers in the crotch of his jeans. While the member of FORCEFIELD I did talk to joined some time after this show his answer seems definitive:

“…to have to answer questions as a human being went counter to the ‘narrative space’ inhabited by [FORCEFIELD]”

In retrospect I think my attempts to get anyone from the group to talk to me about this show were as unreasonable as knocking on the door of 109 Minna Street when I first moved to the Bay Area and expecting to find one of The Residents. I had already been blessed to receive a direct communique from FORCEFIELD in the form of a VHS of their videos and when I popped it into a Chicago VCR and saw a shrouded figure address the camera in a distorted alien tongue I should have accepted it for the comprehensive and conclusive Artist’s Statement it was.

Anyway Sam had been at the 1997 show, performing in Men’s Recovery Project, and does a much better job couching the events of the night in descriptive language in his book. For this reason St. Jacques sent me an image of the two page spread and as I read onwards to a description of Fort Thunder I had an unexpected reaction and became incongruously territorial over the word “warren”. I have only been seriously writing for two years and this was the first time I had seen another writer use the exact same mildly esoteric word to describe the exact same mildly esoteric thing – in this case the conjoined tunnels that comprise a rabbit colony as metaphor for the chaotic system of interconnected living spaces that made up the backend of Fort Thunder.

You can look me up on Facebook and go spelunking through my last year’s status updates to read the tantrum in real time but I quickly ascertained that Mutations was published two years before my own account and charted a surprisingly accurate shared literary roadmap (Watership Down and The Martian Chronicles) to account for two entirely distinct brains landing on this particular and precise descriptor. Then I sent Sam McPheeters a letter.

Sam is a year and a decade older than me but I am still old enough to remember when physical letters were the primary medium for communicating with people who lived in different cities than you. My first chat room was on a BBS and my first year of college netted me an .edu e-mail address but most of my friends and underground peers held fast to the hand written missive rather than immediately embracing emergent technology. I have to salute Sam for his curmudgeonly insistence on only proffering a physical address to those wishing to contact him as it’s been a long time since I stamped an envelope for a stranger and variety in daily experiences makes for a pleasant lifetime.

I probably wouldn’t have bothered with a letter at all if the only purpose was to share my internal hysterics over the word “warren” but it just so happened there was something else I wanted to ask him about. I’ve written about this before but in 2003 I was on tour with Friends Forever when they played a small festival in the courtyard of the Hollywood ArcLight cinema that was supposed to culminate in a screening of a rare original print of Penelope Spheeris’s Decline of Western Civilization 3. I heard about these things second hand as I spent the set inside the Volkswagen Type 2 operating the lights and smoke machines but apparently one of the Nerf footballs used in the band’s Killball live show struck the SNL fake news comedian Kevin Nealon, angering him, and then the screening was cancelled because some enterprising scamp had stolen the film canisters from the lobby.

Wrangler Brutes, the last of Sam McPheeters’ bands, also played this festival and as none of the people I’m still in contact with from this show remember any additional details I was banking on Sam filling some in. This stemmed from a presumption that he had a comparable obsession with underground music history, a thing I now know to be true from his book, and a similar photographic memory to my own, a thing I now know to be false. Nonetheless he did have something and while the letter was addressed to me personally I imagine he won’t mind me reproducing the following paragraph:

While I was hoping for corroborating details on the Spheeris heist his anecdote is even better and, combined with the bit I already had, makes for a moralist fable about moderately famous actors going to watch a punk history documentary but being unwilling to experience the physical reality of an actual punk show. I got excited when I saw the letters Wrbr, thinking it might be the initials of a radio station that put on the festival, but then I remembered the Mississippi River K-W radio call sign divide and realized it was merely an abbreviation for Wrangler Brutes.

It is exciting to have the exact date but I’ve discovered an odd paradox where underground shows from 1998 to 2001 generally have some form of online footprint but later shows usually do not. Typing “8/16/03 Friends Forever Wrangler Brutes” into Google only turns up this strange FAQ with questions about Quakers, clit piercings and skanking and, in a manner that feels oddly cyclical regarding the history of the written word, the complete text of Beowulf.

If you’ve read my piece on Jeff Schneider’s Psychiatric Tissues you’d know from the introduction that the book ignited in me a strong ambition to take on the task of penning a more cohesive history of turn of the millennium experimental punk or “weird DIY” music. I have to credit Schneider for facilitating this mental breakthrough as even though I’ve spent the last two years thinking about the best way to document this scene and era, it was only after reading his book that I thought of specifically focusing on bands. As long as I’m crediting him I may as well write out some of my other evolving thoughts on his memoir.

After talking to some other members of the Providence, Rhode Island experimental scene I’ve come to realize that the idea of a “townie vs art school” divide is less a concrete reality of that town’s underground and more a specific myopia on the part of Schneider himself. I may as well address another question that arises in the text – Schneider writes of a “feud” between Arab on Radar and Olympia experimental metal band The Need that was kindled by the former band drawing Hitler mustaches on the latter’s tour posters. Now that I’ve spoken to a source close to The Need I know that the offending graffiti was not the iconic fascist facial hair but rather crude representations of penises going into the two female band members’ mouths.

This revelation certainly adds perspective to the passage where Schneider ponders whether the Riot Grrl movement was based on legitimate grievances and the scene was truly sexist or every single female voice in underground music was exaggerating and the scene was not. Considering that he goes with the second option I have to wonder if he deliberately misrepresented the defacing of the posters with a less blatantly misogynist version or his own memory has distorted this detail. I’ve written in other places about the humbling power of confirmation basis to bend and reshape reality and the two conflicting anecdotes could be yet another example of this.

I’ve just started working on my own music history book and I don’t want to jinx it by revealing too many details but it should be relatively safe to list some of the things I won’t be writing about. I’ve been consciously shying away from covering genres that were especially popular in the underground music of the nineties – particularly mathrock, Emo and hardcore. When I saw the title of Sam’s book I assumed it would be a straightforward history of the experimental side of hardcore and take on bands I’d already decided to omit like The Locust, An Albatross and Cerberus Shoal.

To be completely transparent I actually breathed a small sigh of relief with the assumption that someone else was chronicling this side of “weird DIY” music as I thought it would relieve me of any sense of responsibility to do so myself. I also imagined that Mutations would explain all of the new revisionist terms that are being applied to this music like Chain and Egg, Whitebelt and Sasscore. It actually turns out that if something neither resonates with truth or beauty you don’t necessarily have to write about it and as Sam was either unaware of these newer terms or chose not to write about them due to lack of interest my own disinterest is more than adequate cause for me not to write about them myself.

It also seems like my presumption that Mutations would be essential research for my own book turned out to be incorrect and it is less of a cohesive history and more of a collection of related essays. None of this means that I am disappointed in my decision to acquire and read the book and I am grateful for the things it did choose to shine a light on: early hardcore, a historical sampling of more “arty” bands and, most importantly, what it was like to be an older and completely different person than me while interacting with underground music.

Whether this is factually true or not I have always self-identified as a person who “doesn’t care about hardcore”. The detail that my sparse discography of recorded music includes a Youth of Today cover may make the categorization suspect but in my defense I’ve never heard most of the other hardcore bands Sam writes about and the book has only inspired me to listen to Doc Dart’s post-Crucifucks output and Discharge’s Grave New World – the one deemed “unlistenable” by fans of their earlier albums for morphing into hair metal.

The main reason I keep awkwardly referring to Sam McPheeters as Sam even though we don’t really know each other is that when I first moved to Chicago all my hardcore friends would refer to other people in the scene by their last names (McPheeters et al.) as if they were all undercover spies working for the British government and, while I admire this from an aesthetic angle, I can’t seem to feel naturally included in it.

NYHC in particular is a giant blind spot for me and the only group I even ironically listen to is 25 Ta Life – beyond them it all seems like a blur of neon signs in tattoo shop windows, baseball bats, suspenders and older sunburned muscular men with raspy voices. Sam gives a great account of when Born Against, his own NYHC band, debated Sick Of It All on the radio and, as a result, became pariahs in the NYHC scene. The audio document is readily available and I will probably be listening to it before any albums by old guard NYHC bands. (unless Chain of Strength is from New York, I literally don’t know these things)

Not the complete sequence but Murphy’s Law and Agnostic Front are here

I also don’t know if Sick Of It All is in any way related to Murphy’s Law or Agnostic Front but I’ll be telling my own story that tangentially involves these two bands. Matthew Barney, best known as Bjork’s ex-husband for those who don’t follow contemporary art, included both groups in a sequence called The Order from his Cremaster 3 film. The segment shows Barney as a highlander with a smashed in face free climbing up the central ramp of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and facing five challenges intended to symbolize the five stages of Masonic Initiation.

Murphy’s Law and Agnostic Front perform special songs with Freemasonry themed lyrics in white gloves while Barney completes simple puzzles involving Masonic symbols beneath the feet of moshing fans – also outfitted in white gloves.

I probably just said a bunch of words that are extremely uninteresting to the average NYHC fan but this is the artifact of that music most interesting to me. For a brief period of time I was even financially interested – a mysterious string of consequences had deposited a large cache of The Order promotional DVDs at the Skyline Amvet’s Thrift Store and I bought them all to unload on Amazon and eBay for the going rate of thirty dollars. Not long after LaPorsha and I moved down to Tijuana and while I initially left the stack of DVDs at my mother’s house I soon carried them all over the border so subsequent sales could be dropped in a San Ysidro mailbox without adding a four hour round trip to Spring Valley on public transit.

It was a bizarre time – I was using a strange form of heroin I’ve never seen anywhere else in the world and my only sources of income were selling these obscure art DVDs and moving cartons of duty free USA Gold cigarettes in and out of Mexico for a meager profit of ten dollars a carton. I was also writing songs in Spanish and booking shows for my friends which slightly bolstered my profits when I required every band member and friends in entourage to mule an extra carton for me as we passed back into the States.

If I’m going to be completely exhaustive I did also sell marijuana chocolate chip cookies in Mexico for 50 pesos apiece and a few hard boiled eggs for 10 pesos but the first of those things was the result of accidentally crossing the border with the contraband pastries and the second one was an abject failure. The important part of the story, and one I’ve likely already written about, came when I decided to stop living in Tijuana and had to attempt to carry the Cremaster DVDs back into their country of origin. A Customs and Border Patrol agent, in black gloves this time around, saw the words “PROMOTIONAL – NOT FOR RESALE” emblazoned across the top of each jewel case and, as I didn’t have a believable explanation as to why I had these objects that didn’t include selling them for illegal profits, forced me to leave them sitting on the sidewalk in Mexico.

The most painful part of this story to me has always been that the equivalent of several hundred dollar bills was entirely wasted but for the first time I’m realizing that this conclusion may be unnecessarily pessimistic. On average Mexico is less wasteful than the United States and as a DVD is a well known unit of value any person could have done a short internet search and seen the potential profits in following in my footsteps of international traffic. In a worst case scenario the DVDs may have sat on a blanket at either the Spring Valley or Coahuila Swap Meet until a pair of eyes as informed as mine came along.

Any way there was a plausible bluff I could have potentially used to hang onto them if I’d only thought of it in time: Murphy’s Law and Agnostic Front are underground music bands and I’m the kind of person who looks like I could be in an underground music band. I should have said that I was in one of these groups, listed on the back of the jewel case, and gave the DVDs away in the process of promoting my band. It’s not entirely implausible that a Customs and Border Patrol agent would be a well informed fan of NYHC, and such an agent would have easily called my bluff, but the odds seem much higher that I would have gotten by on a thing called “outgroup homogeneity”.

This is just a fancy way of saying that while someone within the hardcore milieux could instantly tell the difference between a scrawny junkie who screams over a drum machine and a member of a foundational NYHC group, to someone outside the hardcore milieux such categorical differences would not be apparent. I certainly would have failed the most basic of trivia checks – I know the names of no members of either group but if pressed I would probably guess “Sully” which I’m hoping will be slightly amusing to the better informed based on how accurate it is or isn’t.

Anyway the main reason I bring this up is that one of the major themes of Mutations is the concepts of authenticity and ethics as they relate to hardcore but I have no idea how to classify this hypothetical situation in regards to these two values. Clearly it would be a lapse of authenticity for me to present myself as a member of either of these well respected and dues-paying bands but would doing so for the express purpose of deceiving a representative of the United States Government be acceptable? Similarly it would be a lapse in ethics to profiteer off bootleg merchandise that could plausibly divert funds away from the legitimate enterprises of either group but something tells me neither does a brisk trade in Cremaster DVDs.

Somewhere in the footnotes Sam talks about two of his friends being confronted by the members of SS Decontrol for buying bootleg copies of their out of print debut record. If I was confronted by a member of Murphy’s Law or Agnostic Front, and had succeeded in the hypothetical ruse in the previous paragraphs, would I also have some ‘splaining to do? Would pretending to be in either band be preferable to pretending to be in the other one for any plausible reason?

I’d really like to know – the specific morality of small underground scenes is an exciting topic and it’s genuinely disorienting not knowing if this particular hypothetical behavior would be classified as reprehensible, permissible or even admirable. If you are a member of Murphy’s Law or Agnostic Front and have strong opinions on this subject please reach out and let me know. I’ve added lots of details, like the fact that the profits went directly to buying heroin, to make the process as easy and unambiguous as possible.

I’m getting toward the conclusion of this piece so here’s a final thought: it was making me feel morally uncomfortable that I’m not particularly excited by the music of Born Against or Men’s Recovery Project. I’m not a huge hardcore fan so the Born Against thing wasn’t bothering me that much but I did feel especially guilty about MRP as reading about Lightning Bolt in a Load Records promotional insert in an early MRP record was the genesis of my eventual pilgrimage to Fort Thunder.

I know that I don’t consciously choose the music I am or am not excited by but the fact that I am excited by so much music that occupies similar artistic space to Men’s Recovery Project made me feel like I was maliciously doing something to not be excited by it even though I would have no reason to do so and this obviously isn’t the case. Anyway deep in the footnotes about a disastrous crowded Dystopia show at The Smell I somehow missed (I do like Dystopia) I saw one small detail that salved my conscience. Apparently Sam’s wife plays in Amps for Christ.

I only started listening to Amps for Christ this year when my friend Ben Jovi sent me some video links but their music is a thing I’m excited by, have listened to multiple times and plan to listen to again. I’m well aware that none of this makes sense: neither my crisis of conscience nor the fact that I felt relief from it from the thing I felt relief from it from. I don’t even know Sam’s wife’s name.

The only explanation I can think of stinks of disingenuous outgroup homogeneity: I’m weird.

Buy Mutations here

Los Angeles 2000 : “It’s Where Jay Leno Lives”

berniebleak1 Comment

The music scene for mid ‘90s to early 2000’s San Diego is pretty legendary but for the most part I had been out of the loop on what was going on in my home town. I went to a lot of ska and punk shows in High School and occasionally came across something more interesting like the time I saw Los Kagados at a very early incarnation of the Voz Alta space near 16th and C. I heard a lot of the members went on to form Run For Your Fucking Life but the main thing I remember is that the singer was double jointed and contorting his arms and wrists at odd angles with an almost Iggy Pop-like stage presence. One of them had just gotten a colorful neck tattoo of a pair of dragons or something like that – it was so fresh that the skin was visibly raised and puffy.

These details stick out in more focus than any of the ska shows I went to at Soma or the World Beat Center for some reason. Maybe it was just the feeling of being downtown and in an alternative art space instead of a more curated all ages club – this could have been anywhere from 1996 to 1998. I guess they were a hardcore band, a lot of my friends at school talked about hardcore but I didn’t know anything about it and wasn’t particularly interested. For whatever reason I was really into ‘80s New Wave at the time, the stuff that was more synth heavy and classified as “New Romantic”. There was a lot of it in the record bins of Thrift Stores which helped.

My other chance encounter with the more remembered music scene of the time was that I somehow ended up at a space on Union and Beech and saw Tristeza. I don’t know what genre I would have classified it as at the time but I definitely liked it and bought the first seven inch, the one that was printed with gold foil on heavy black paper, when I saw it at Off the Record. At this point I had bought some CDs from local ska bands but this was my first time getting small label seven inches with Art object style presentation until I ended up at the Fireside Bowl in Chicago later that same Summer.

I went to Union and Beech at least one other time when Francois and I had missed the last bus back toward East County and spent the night wandering the streets downtown. The space was hosting a rave and we snuck in to get off the streets but spent most of the night sleeping in a closet instead of dancing. When it was getting toward dawn we realized that we had been sleeping next to a gorilla mask and one of us took off our shirt and ran out of the closet to dance around for a minute with the mask on. Oddly I can’t seem to remember which one of us it had been – maybe we both did it and took turns.

By the time we drove back to San Diego in the early Summer of 2000 I had gotten a lot more experience navigating music scenes. For my year at SFSU there was a surprisingly robust music community centering on shows in our Student Union and both twee and J-pop; bolstered by the high number of trendy Japanese exchange students. The kid who set them up was in a band called Wussom*Pow! that recorded a Strawberry Switchblade cover and helped me sneak into shows at bars like Edinburgh Castle. My first forays into bars were spent staring in fascination as cigarette smoke slowly drifted against a backdrop of dark velvet curtains and twinkling white Christmas lights – I didn’t drink yet.

I tried to convince Michael from Wussom*Pow! to set up a show for Tristeza in the student Union. I don’t even know if they were actually touring or looking – I just really dug that first 7 inch. I described the music as “emo” because some band members had black hair and that’s what I’d heard the social scene called but he said it was “space rock”. The show never happened to the best of my memory.

I was beyond clueless about the bulk of underground music then. I remember seeing a flyer on campus advertising a Melvins show that would have been small and intimate but I had no clue who that was even though Little Four had talked up The Thrones from a live set at Locust House and I was eager to see it.

Actually there was a show in the SFSU student Union where Thrones was supposed to play but Michael took Joe off the bill out of fear it would be “too loud”. They were on tour with The Rapture who you most likely saw on the flyer at the top of this piece and will pop back up in just a minute. The singer/guitarist (or was it bassist?) was jumping onto tables while playing and the Japanese girls in the audience would shriek and run a few feet away in a combination of surprise and delight.

I thought the most striking thing about the San Diego scene at that time was that Tristeza had a 7 inch that played at 33 RPM while The Locust released a twelve inch that played at 45. I felt the duality of how this went again convention in both directions said something poignant about what was happening in my home town but at the time I became more interested in other city’s music scenes.

After house sitting for a punk TA from one of my Physics classes in a Mission district apartment I spent most of the Summer of 1999 in San Diego before driving out to Chicago with Francois. San Diego music, especially The Locust, was intensely popular in the Midwest by this point but we knew next to nothing about it. We wouldn’t have known anything at all if we hadn’t convinced Little Four to move up to the Bay Area with us and gained access to the record collection she had curated from living behind and going to shows at the “Locust House” on 24th and E.

The scene around the Fireside Bowl in Chicago that year was primarily hardcore and math rock but also a lot of the theatrical experimental stuff that was coming out on the SKiN GRAFT label. I finally started to get into the hardcore most of my contemporaries were so fascinated with but the artier stuff was my real fascination. The two styles generally peacefully coexisted and informed and fed into each other but I do remember one situation when they came into direct conflict.

The band Black Dice was passing through town and a big group of people went up to Milwaukee because they were playing a basement show. I don’t think they were ever really a traditional hardcore band but their earliest stuff was closer to sounding like it and their first seven inch was on Gravity Records which was generally known as a hardcore label. I did a little bit of digging and figured out this show was in May of 2000 at a place called Bremen House.

I actually didn’t know that the band had a reputation for being physically confrontational and attacking their audience and breaking other people’s equipment but all of that would have played a factor in what ended up happening because I just read a different account that said people at the show were already planning on fighting them. From what I saw they were just playing unconventional and noisy music like lots of guitar feedback and drumming in odd time signatures when a bunch of straight edge hardcore guys assaulted them for “not being hardcore”. I’ve always thought of the incidence as “genre violence” – purely instigated by a band not playing in an expected and dogmatic style.

The main reason I think this is that one of the attackers was literally yelling “this isn’t hardcore” or “this isn’t what hardcore’s about” or something along those lines. The frustration was palpable when somebody in the band yelled back:

“We never said it was!”

The other account I read said that the singer threw beer on a straight edge guy but the way I remember it he was just pacing and thrashing around with an open tall can in his hand so that small amounts might have splashed onto people. The thing I have the clearest mental image of is dudes just running up on the bassist and guitar player and throwing punches at them while they tried to defend themselves as best as possible while being encumbered by their instruments. A lot of their equipment ended up getting broken and their attackers slashed the tires on their tour van as a parting gift.

I overheard somebody from either Black Dice or The Rapture, the band they were touring with, react to this final surprise with a touch of weary dark humor:

“You’d think that if they didn’t want us here so much they wouldn’t make it so hard for us to leave…”

I’ll throw the link I found underneath here so you can read and judge for yourself but even though I was there I don’t think I know enough to say if what happened in Milwaukee was just straight edge hardcore guys being typical violent assholes or a case of chaotic and destructive energy catching up with the people who had been irresponsibly pumping it out into the world. Maybe it was some of both. It’s interesting that the street was called Bremen as the Grimm Brothers fairytale called The Bremen Town Musicians is basically about a group of animals who have outlived their usefulness spontaneously turning into a noise band.

https://know-wave.com/black-dice/

One thing that I didn’t realize at the time was that Eric Copeland from the band had been part of an earlier project I really liked called The Ninjas that put out a couple of records on a label called Black Bean and Placenta Tape Club. It sounded like twee pop combined with uncharacteristically aggressive distorted guitars. I only mention this because I haven’t had the records for years or been able to find them uploaded on the internet anywhere in case somebody reading this might have them and a way to put them up somewhere.

San Diego in 2000 had a surplus of really good bands that seemed to have all formed over the past couple of years. I hadn’t actually seen either Three Mile Pilot or The Shortwave Channel but the core members of both groups were now playing as The Blackheart Procession and Camera Obscura respectively. One of the best bands to see live was the instrumental organ heavy doom metal outfit Tarantula Hawk who often had body modification enthusiast Eddie Castro suspending himself from hooks pierced through his skin and illuminated by a projection of black and white static. I wasn’t twenty one yet and every bouncer in town knew who I was so I spent a lot of shows standing just outside the door to listen and peeking inside of places like The Turquoise Room at the long defunct Aztec Bowl.

This story begins with an all ages Blackheart Procession show about halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles at the Koo’s Cafe in Santa Ana. Lightning Bolt would be playing at The Smell either the next day or the one after that so I got a ride up with the plan of trying to find kids at the show who would be returning to Los Angeles instead of returning with my ride to San Diego. I had gotten pretty confident with approaching strangers to ask for things like rides but the best I found was a couple kids who lived in Burbank. They both offered the same nonsensical explanation when I asked what part of LA that was:

“It’s where Jay Leno lives…”

They didn’t have the kind of parents that would be receptive to unexpected overnight guests so it was up to me to figure out a spot to sleep until public transit resumed in the morning. The neighborhood was the kind with large expensive ranch style houses, or whatever you call the style with stucco and adobe roofs and lots of little wrought iron railings, that also had thick hedges between them so they thought I might be able to hide underneath somebody’s bushes.

I laid out underneath one experimentally but immediately felt conspicuous and almost guaranteed to experience police harassment if I didn’t find something a little more discreet and less residential. Walking toward the traffic lights eventually brought me to a strip mall and a doughnut shop with the kind of locked roof access ladder you can climb by wedging your foot between the metal and the building. When I got to the top I could see that the roof was covered with the big chunked and sharp edged gravel that blankets accessible roofs and forsaken landscaping across Los Angeles.

If I had to spend a night in this sort of setting now I would locate a dumpster for cardboard, and probably just stay next to it, but I was a lot younger and less experienced. I did find a newspaper machine with free Auto Trader booklets to give me something to prevent having to sleep with my face right against the gravel. I’m sure a lot of people would struggle to fall asleep in this kind of environment but I’ve always enjoyed the rough urban camping – no sooner had I stretched out then I was waking up to the harsh glare of sunlight in my eyes and the unmistakable smell of fresh doughnuts and coffee.

I shimmied back down the ladder and came inside to be the first customer of the day. Wall length mirrors seem like an odd decor choice for the type of business that primarily serves the homeless and the sleep deprived but it did give me the opportunity to notice that I had a few lines of newsprint smudged across my cheek in the reverse of how the letters appeared on the page. I wonder if the man behind the cash register realized where I had just come from or if he would have even cared – I certainly wasn’t staying.

My next destination was an apartment my friend Tim shared with some other graduates of the USC film program near Hollywood and Highland. When I stepped off my final bus a pair of bright red sunglasses sat on the plastic bench like they were waiting for me to herald my arrival in Tinseltown. It’s not that deep – I was twenty years old, I put them on my face and walked to my friend’s apartment and knocked on the door and fell back asleep on his couch.

I had scarcely drifted back off when I found myself suddenly and violently woken back up by police yelling and pointing guns and putting everybody in handcuffs. I was probably the only person there who had absolutely no idea what any of it was about but it didn’t take them very long to find the objects and person they were looking for and leave the less immediately culpable among us to explain what was going on to each other.

I’ve mentioned in other places that Tim’s graduating class was the last year that the USC film program would be done using Super 8 and chemical developing processes before making the switch to various digital video mediums. One of his roommates had rationalized to himself that school equipment like cameras, editors and projectors was about to fall into disuse and it would be essentially harmless to appropriate it and even arguably beneficial as it would allow the equipment to continue to be used for its designed purpose.

I don’t know all the details but it must have been easy enough to falsify whatever logs were used in checking out this equipment to obfuscate the identity of whoever had ended up in possession of it. After a few months had gone by with no sign that anybody was looking the assumption was most likely made that nothing would be missed and he put a couple of things up on eBay. By modern standards this is an obvious rookie mistake but in early 2000 the entire concept of cybercrimes was relatively new and most people wouldn’t have immediately realized that anything done online is immediately and easily traceable.

Considering the kinds of things I would be getting into and people I would be hanging out with by the end of the year it’s interesting that my first experiences with many aspects of the criminal Justice system were with a friend I’d generally think of as being on the “straight” side of things. We spent the day driving around and running errands related to the morning’s sudden development.

Our first stop was a seedy bail bondsman’s office on the second floor of the parking lot strip mall that divides Chinatown and Pueblo Los Angeles. I’d gotten into plenty of petty offenses like trespassing, vandalism and even theft of things like a whale skeleton and motorized bumper boat – but so far had never actually gotten charged or caught. Downtown San Diego was full of businesses like the one we visited, and I often spent stranded nights wandering streets where their neon signs were the only things open for business, but I had never really thought about actually needing their services.

Tim was essentially guiltless himself and clearly enjoying playing the role of a character in a crime movie. There was one other friend who also had film equipment from the school and didn’t seem to have been raided by the police yet. Tim gave him a call to warn him to get rid of it but first he drove to a building on Wilshire with a loud outdoor fountain “in case anybody was trying to record his voice”. I seriously doubt that he honestly believed that this level of precaution was necessary but the cloak and dagger intrigue was fun for playing make believe.

Once all that was finished Tim took me to sneak into Universal Studios Hollywood by way of the soundstages in its backlot. He had an ID badge to get past the guard booth from his production work and instructed me to make up a common name for somebody I was supposed to be visiting. I think I went with “John Elliot” – I could see over the guard’s shoulder when he typed this into the computer that the only thing it needed to verify was if someone with this name had worked there ever.

They’ve probably beefed up security protocols since then.

From the backlot it was very easy to slip under a guardrail and get in line for the Jurassic Park ride. Thankfully the ET Adventure dark ride was still open and I got to see the bright psychedelic section with animatronic living flowers that is supposed to represent the titular character’s home planet. At the beginning of the ride they have all the passengers type their names into a computer so ET can offer personalized thanks at the conclusion.

I was curious how the computerized speech module might interpret my unique name after hearing it butchered by substitute teachers throughout my school career. It’s spelled “Ossian” but pronounced “ah-shin” and nobody’s ever gotten it on a first try. The tiny brown alien waved as we drifted toward the exit; addressing each person in turn:

“Thanks Walter and Deborah and Timmy and…”

The figure went silent and abruptly stopped moving. Maybe there was a module in place to prevent the figure from vocalizing profanities in a family park and it scanned the first three letters as an attempt to get it to say “ass”. Whatever the cause I found it amusing that the beloved character chose to make no attempt to address me whatsoever.

Emboldened by the ease we’d had in gaining access to the amusement park Tim went from stage to stage searching for an unattended golf cart. Once we had one he took me on a ride flying off curbs and doing loops around the courthouse square set used in Back to the Future. When the evening came on I needed to get downtown for the Lightning Bolt show.

This may well have been the first time that I ever went to The Smell. I knew that it was around Third and Main and when Tim dropped me on the corner in his little convertible Datsun I could already hear Lightning Bolt playing but I didn’t know exactly where I was supposed to go. It took a minute of running around before I realized that the entrance was in the alley and ran inside. They were playing in the corner of the room away from the stage – the space was huge and mostly empty; in less than a year Ride the Skies would come out and they’d be exploding with popularity.

At this point I’d already exchanged at least a couple of letters with Brian Chippendale. I’d been trying to order some Maggots mini comics and the Zone cassette that accompanies their first album. I got the tape but never got the comics – he apologized and gave me a copy of the Conan Tour Seven Inch instead. It was barely a couple days since I caught the ride up to Santa Ana from San Diego and now I was about to head back down.

I’ve talked a lot about how incredibly quickly everything was happening that year but it’s fun to lay things out on a comparative timeline. The Milwaukee show where Black Dice was attacked was at the beginning of May. I didn’t realize how closely they and Lightning Bolt were related yet but I might not have even heard Lightning Bolt yet either. My first show as Spidermammal with Deerhoof was a couple weeks later and then we were moving back to San Diego.

I don’t know when this Lightning Bolt show at The Smell was but I’m going to guess some time in June. Not long after Deerhoof came through the same venue and played with xbxrx. By July I was back in Chicago running into xbxrx playing with Missing Tooth from the Spidermammal show. In August I was living at Fort Thunder, got to read all of Chippendale’s comic notebooks and set up a show for xbxrx that wouldn’t be happening until I’d already left town.

All of this is just dates and band names but the point was that everybody was constantly on tour or traveling and writing each other letters and this loose grouping of what you’d call noise rock bands were crossing each other’s paths and playing together and a few of them were about to become hugely commercially successful. There isn’t any microgenre or -core or -wave name for the thing that was going on but it was definitely a certain kind of energy and the clock was ticking until 9/11 and everything changing.

After the Lightning Bolt show I walked across Skid Row to the Greyhound station for what was probably the first time and I wouldn’t have had any idea that I was about to be traveling to Fort Thunder and Providence and meeting some people that would make it so I probably spent as much time riding Greyhounds over the next two years as I did living in actual houses. I only knew that something exciting was happening and I didn’t care how far I had to travel or where I had to sleep as long as I could be there and be a part of it.

I couldn’t have known that this world had a looming expiration date but the way I was moving you’d almost think I did.

Berkeley 1998 : “What Is The Meaning Of Die Mark?”

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When I was handed the diploma that formally ended my academic obligations in San Diego I started running and never looked back. The only thing was that I was running in circles. We were standing on the football field that had been built for the World Fair style event called the Panama-California Exposition that also birthed the museums of Balboa Park that had been used in Citizen Kane. I don’t know the exact size of a High School Football lap but I’m pretty sure I did six of them.

I wasn’t particularly interested in going to college at that point but I was absolutely ready to get out of San Diego. Ironically my home town was the same kind of Youth Culture Mecca for kids as far flung as Chicago and Japan that Providence and Fort Thunder would become for me. I didn’t know anything about The Locust or any of the Gravity Records bands at this point outside of one of my Junior High crushes living on the same block of Golden Hills and once mentioning that the corner house was filled with “rockstar” looking guys.

I didn’t have any particular attraction to the San Francisco Bay Area either, my Physics Teacher just knew somebody in admissions at SFSU and called in a favor as I had missed the application deadline. Francois and I had been essentially friend married ever since his mother wanted to leave the country before his earlier graduation and had asked my parents if he could just come live at my house. In this sense my childhood bedroom in my parents home was essentially my “first punk house” as it was where I began living with friends and collaboratively building custom realities.

Once I had a specific destination Francois was unquestionably going to be tagging along and also brought along his previous best friend Jonas and eventually a fourth friend Chris Pearce. Another friend’s mother knew somebody who ran a kind of guest house near the UC Berkeley campus and happened to have a vacancy in a single basement room. It was decided that the three of us would share the room as a stopgap measure until we found something more permanent.

Our new landlord Wally was a portly man with a white beard who spent most of his days lounging in a hammock and eating watermelons, he was so fond of the fruit that he had bought a small watermelon patch. I never thought of it at the time but he basically looked like Santa Claus on an extended tropical vacation. Francois and I had started to experiment with baking in the basement kitchen and one day offered him some of a pineapple upside down cake:

“Oh that sounds really good but I probably shouldn’t, I just ate three entire watermelons.”

Because there was a surplus of watermelons we unsuccessfully tried to use them to barter access to the pledge week fraternity parties surrounding the nearby campus. Everybody thought we were joking, asked us if it was a special watermelon (it wasn’t) and generally wanted nothing to do with us. We made it into some of the co-ops but defensively rotated our social awkwardness into often confrontational pretensions. At an easy going hippy party I commandeered the bass from the living room jam band and played the one riff from Black Sabbath’s Iron Man until they kicked us out.

I didn’t drink, Francois didn’t drink much and Chris and Jonas were more natural at social functions but couldn’t escape the gravitational pull of mine and Francois’s aggressive asshole energy. We spent all our time trying to go to parties and meet people but at the same time did everything we could to push everybody away. In retrospect it seems frustratingly obvious like driving onto the freeway in the wrong direction but at the time I literally didn’t know any better.

Wally took stock of the situation, realized we weren’t going anywhere and found somebody to pawn us off on. I don’t have a full list of the professions that Mark was a miserable failure at but it definitely included landlord, home restorer and most likely contractor. I’ve been trying to pin point the exact location of the house we moved into but too much of the neighborhood has changed: it has either become a loft building or a parking lot for Berkeley Bowl West and was tucked into the side streets just north and west of Ashby and San Pablo.

The house had formerly served as an artisanal workshop for constructing traditional Japanese shoji screens and for this reason had them on all of the windows along with other picturesque minor improvements from these former tenants. I never saw any records as to how long ago this had been but the house had fallen into extreme disrepair in the interim. The south side was bordered by a tow yard for abandoned or illegally parked cars.

It wasn’t so much a bad neighborhood at that time as it was an empty one.

We still really wanted to make friends and continued to act like we didn’t want anybody to be friends with us. The best way to describe it was that we were feral: we invented strange, violently sadistic games and wandered the neighborhood looking for abandoned buildings to break into or broken things to break more. We could walk down the train tracks to the earliest version of the Emeryville Shopping Center and scam our way into movies by calling the theater and pretending to be a manager from another branch calling in tickets for his employees. Under this deception Francois casually inquired whether the screenings of the Eddie Murphy and Martin Short film Life were too crowded:

“Don’t worry about it. I’d rather have an employee coming to watch it than some thug anyway!”

This level of casual racism was par for the course in cities like Oakland and Chicago in the last few years before September 11th. It hasn’t exactly changed but people like movie theater managers have become less brazenly open about it. At the time such sentiments were barely considered problematic.

The one method that worked for getting friends was going down to San Diego and retrieving them. While visiting for a holiday we ran into Lil Four while she was working at an obnoxious cigar cafe. I had met her before when a girl at my high school brought her as a triple date to a school dance while she was in a skinhead phase. She complained that her bosses were assholes so we suggested she quit her job and come to live in the Bay Area with us. She agreed.

At this point in time Lil Four was clued into the San Diego Spock-Rock scene – mostly referred to as emo. She introduced me to The Makeup, The Thrones and in a roundabout way even Lightning Bolt because I first read about them in a Load Records insert that came with her Men’s Recovery Project record. She and I would go into San Francisco and hang around the Muddy Waters coffee shop hoping to meet people who looked. cool and fashionable. She developed a crush on this beautiful boy named Rex who was in a band called Das Audience so we would awkwardly and obviously stalk him around the Mission but never actually saw his band.

Lil Four clicked naturally into our almost ritualistic system of defensive meanness. She eventually did find a boyfriend at a 924 Gilman show, a punk rock boy with bright pink hair named Gabe, and she would bring him home for me and Francois to bully. The house had a dart board when we moved in but we eschewed the traditional method of playing in favor of running around the house and throwing them at each other.

This was the kind of thing we called a “game” but now that I’m actually writing it down it really wasn’t. We were just throwing tiny pointed projectiles at each other in the hope that it would break the skin and cause the other person to feel pain and bleed. We all got hit a few times in the hand, shoulder and back area but miraculously nobody lost an eye or took a dart to the spine and ended up paralyzed.

The nearby Berkeley Marina was home to a frisbee golf course and one day we found a forgotten frisbee and brought it home. The game we built around couldn’t have been further from the mellow pot smoker’s sport if we had gone for that on purpose. Our street never had a single car so we stood around it in a loose circle. Each person would toss the frisbee toward the next person in the circle who would attempt to hit it out of the air with an axe. If they succeeded they would pass the axe and then toss the frisbee to the next person.

If you missed the frisbee all of the other players would run up and punch you.

I was going to segue from that description into an explanation of how we specifically used this game to abuse Gabe but I feel like I need to stop here and say something about all this. I’ve never actually written any of this down, I’ve told these stories a few times over the years and looked back at them while browsing the memory pile but this is the first time I’ve actually held these recollections at enough of an arm’s length to allow my more mature eyes to actually focus on them.

Generally when I write about my past self I can to some degree identify with my prior actions and motivations – at least to the degree where even if something was irrational I can say “I understand why I felt and behaved like that”. This is the first time that I’ve found myself in complete and utter disbelief. Like let’s say I spent an entire night desperately trying to inject an increasingly bloody shot of cocaine. I’d hope that I wouldn’t find myself doing the same thing now but at least I understand that I was trying to get an intravenous cocaine rush.

This is the first time that having finally written the shit down I really do need to take a moment to say “what in the fuck was wrong with us?” Why would we look at a frisbee and think of this unwieldy and wantonly cruel game out of all the things in the world? There was only one axe, half the play time was spent walking over to pass the axe along. I haven’t even got into the ways that we weaponized this game against Gabe.

For the people who actually lived in the house we would toss the frisbee to each other so that we could more or less actually hit it. Occasionally we missed and would get punched but for the most part it was a friendly game of frisbee tossing and axe hitting. Once Gabe was in the circle we would give him one awkward toss after another so that we could all punch him, over and over. I realize that it probably sounds like this entire game was invented as an elaborate excuse to punch Gabe but it wasn’t. We had played it without him and hardly anybody ever got punched.

So the bigger question is once we did play the game as a pretext for punching Gabe why did he continue to play with us? Why did Lil Four start dating and presumably having sex with this guy if she was only going to be an accessory to her housemates abusing him over and over? I remember Francois getting frustrated with Gabe’s bike always being right inside the entrance to the house so one day he took it and threw it into the bushes. Gabe complained that Francois was being an asshole and Lil Four got angry and yelled at him:

“Hey! Don’t say that about my roommate!”

A simple explanation would be that Francois and I were acting out of sexual frustration and I’m going to add a couple details that would seem to support that theory but I don’t actually think that that was the case. Francois was really into painting at the time: he painted nude female figures representing the four seasons on the four walls of his room. He painted an image of Lil Four’s breasts on a skateboard surrounded by passionflowers. They were very nice breasts, it was a very appealing painting.

Before Gabe was in the picture Lil Four and I had ended up sleep cuddling on a single occasion. I can’t remember what the reason behind this was, maybe Lil Four invited me to come sleep cuddle because she wanted to sleep cuddle. Anyway I was working a lot of hours at Metro Publishing at the time. I spent a lot of time with copy machines – flipping through the pages of books and copying them one at a time while my hips were held tight against the machine and I could feel it’s vibrations as it made each successive copy.

When Lil Four and I sleep cuddled I had a dream that her body was a copy machine and for lack of a better word I groped her. It wasn’t that big of a deal – we just decided not to try sleep cuddling again. It’s not like I would get a hard-on at work while I was holding my hips against the copy machines, I’m just trying to explain that there was something vaguely erotic about copy machines to me at the time.

All of this is going to fly in the face of the next point that I am going to make which is this: there is no chance that either Francois or me wanted to fuck Lil Four on any level at that point in time. We viewed each other like siblings, however strange and complex our relationships were this fact and essential separation was true. Maybe deep in my dream I wanted to fuck the abstract idea of a copy machine but I didn’t want to fuck Lil Four. Maybe in his constant painting Francois wanted to fuck an abstract and idealized concept of the female nude but he didn’t want to fuck Lil Four.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that if one or all of us had been abusing Gabe out of a misplaced sense of sexual frustration then it would have been abstracted sexual frustration. This is the most I have ever written about sex in any of these pieces and the only reason that I feel comfortable doing it is that the things that I’m writing about aren’t really sex at all. We used the frisbee-axe game as an elaborate pretense to keep punching Gabe, he continued to come over and play the game to get punched and Lil Four essentially gaslit him that all of this behavior was appropriate and normal.

Socially we were all behaving like a feral kitten that needs to be fed and protected but hisses, scratches and bites anything that attempts to feed and protect it. Or rather me, Francois and Lil Four were behaving like that. Gabe was behaving like the baby monkeys in the experiment that cling to a fake mother made of barbed wire because it’s the only way to get fed.

I intended to write a lot more about the house and our other awkward attempts to make friends in this piece but I ended up getting sidetracked by my intense, visceral reaction to our past behavior. Anyway we hated our weird pathetic landlord Mark and we told him no when he tried to raise our rent and one day he tore our roof off because he found some cheap laborers to help him and then didn’t put a new one on and it started to rain.

He kept a bunch of rotting scrap lumber in the backyard and would come fuck around with it with the heavy equipment vehicle called a Bobcat and just generally pretend that he was going to improve something he owned instead of just watching it get shittier and more broken. We locked him out of the backyard and he called the police on us and the police came and told us that if we were his tenants he wasn’t allowed to come there without giving us at least twenty four hour notice.

He used to come knock on the back door to complain that we smashed everything with an axe or that we wouldn’t let him raise our rent or he had just been digging through our trash and wanted to chastise us for throwing something away. When the whole thing had mostly run its course Chris painted the words “DIE MARK” in big black letters on the side of the house and the very next day I heard a familiar knock on the back door:

“What is the meaning of Die Mark?”

I took German in High School. You can probably imagine exactly what I told him.