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)
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.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 