Jason Traeger

INTERVIEW WITH CAROL GATES ON CORPORATE RADIO REJECTS PORTLAND...

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:18:03 -0700

INTERVIEW WITH CAROL GATES ON CORPORATE RADIO REJECTS PORTLAND 2013.

This is the first interview I’ve ever done about the Punk Rock era. Carol and I cover a lot of ground in this conversation.

https://soundcloud.com/corporateradioreject/corporate-radio-jason-traeger

Photo: Me onstage at YoYoAGoGo Olympia 1997.

CHRIS SMITH OF KARP PLAYING MY LES PAUL JR. OLYMPIA 1997 When I...

Thu, 02 May 2013 08:42:26 -0700

CHRIS SMITH OF KARP PLAYING MY LES PAUL JR. OLYMPIA 1997

When I saw this photo posted on my Facebook feed my mind immediately went back to the night it was taken at The Capitol Theater in Olympia, WA. on the last night of 1997’s Yo-Yo-A-Go-Go Festival. KARP were a truly fantastic band on an average night but when they were on fire like they were this night they were as a good a band as I’ve ever seen and that’s saying something because I have had the privilege of seeing some really great bands.

MY BEDROOM WALLS TACOMA 1982 I don’t know why but I...

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:28:00 -0800

MY BEDROOM WALLS TACOMA 1982

I don’t know why but I remember that at the moment this photo was snapped I was play-menacing our house cat, a cat whose name escapes me now.

I mention this because that same cat would later take a voluminous piss in the middle of a huge stack of my Punk flyers when I was in the process of rearranging my walls one weekend in 1982. This incident ruined half of them, sending them to the trash heap of history. I am glad I have this photo so that the image of some of those dead flyers can live on. After I discovered the pool in the middle of my precious paper I wanted to drop kick that cat but it was probably curled up on my lap the next day. What are ya gonna do, ya know?

As this photo suggests, I was a voracious collector of flyers in my Punk Rock youth. After moving to San Diego in 83 I also gained something of a reputation as a flyer artist myself. You can search the archives of this blog for evidence of my artistic contributions to the So Cal Punk aesthetic of the 80’s if you’d like to take a look.

When I was a kid I combed the streets and studied every telephone pole of Seattle for any Punk or Punk-like flyer I could find. I was also very forward about ingratiating myself with the jaded record store employees of University Ave. in an effort to get a hold of any posters like the ones I’d see hanging on the walls of the shops I visited every weekend. I still have that Dead Kennedys In God We Trust, Inc. poster you see behind me rolled up in a tube somewhere.

The other major source for amassing wall art was my compulsive pen pal and mailorder activities in that era. Half the time I received a letter from a kid in Detroit, LA, Texas or wherever there were flyers stuffed in the envelope too. The backs of show flyers were often themselves used as stationary. The people who ran my favorite record labels like Touch and Go, Dischord, and many, many more were also really just a little older than kids themselves and they were almost always responsive when I asked if they could throw in some local flyers with my record order.

I remember being particularly jazzed when Jeff Nelson from Minor Threat sent me that beautiful three color mini poster from the band’s Wilson Center show with Government Issue. That’s another one I still have around somewhere. It’s down in the left hand corner of the photo.

One other thing I want to mention is my Motorhead shirt. I loved that shirt. It’s funny to think back now from the vantage point of our hyper merchandised, consumer minded era but back in the early 80’s most Hardcore and Punk bands didn’t even sell t-shirts or anything at shows as far as I remember. Bands like Black Flag just set up, played, packed up and left. It wasn’t until around 84 that bands really got into the apparel business. Back in 81/82 you kinda had to look to the metal side of things to hit screen print gold.

How times change.

(Photo of me in my room in Tacoma, WA. 1982 from my personal archives)

FUGAZI DUBNARCOTICSOUNDSYSTEM WARMERS QUASI STAGE TIMES...

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:01:04 -0800

FUGAZI DUBNARCOTICSOUNDSYSTEM WARMERS QUASI STAGE TIMES PORTLAND 1995

Here’s a neat little scrap of Portland Rock history I’ve held onto these many years.

I don’t have any big story about this show except I remember it being a very good time. All the bands were great. Line-ups such as this were like family fun time for all my friends from Portland, D.C. and Olympia. I’m glad to have been a part of such a community in that era.

It turns out a live recording of Fugazi’s set from this night is available from Dischord as a download.

(LaLuna stage times sheet from my personal archives)

THE JASON TRAEGER SHOW OLYMPIA 2000 My Stand-up comedy career...

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:10:00 -0800

THE JASON TRAEGER SHOW OLYMPIA 2000

My Stand-up comedy career can be divided into three periods.

As a child I made a practice of memorizing routines and bits by Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin and George Carlin to perform for my friends and classmates. In fact my first performance in front of an audience was in 1977 when I did a medley of bits culled from Steve Martin’s classic albums of that era in front of my fourth grade class at Moorlands Elementary School in Bothell, Wa.

I was a big hit with the kids but my teacher was less approving. She was especially upset when I did the joke “…when a person asks me in a restaurant ‘mind if I smoke?’, I ask them ‘mind if I fart?’” Of course the joke that drew the most ire from my teacher got the biggest laugh of all from the kids. I was hooked!

As a nine year old stand-up in the late 70’s I found it exceedingly difficult to make a career of it. This was, after all, a few years before the comedy explosion of the 80’s and at the time I wasn’t allowed to stay up past 9pm so it was tough. Once I’d exhausted all the audiences in my immediate surroundings I put my comedy dreams on the back burner to pursue the completion of my primary school education.

It wasn’t until about 25 years later while living in Olympia, WA. that I got back into Stand-up. I don’t remember exactly what inspired me to start hitting open mics at that time. I do remember feeling inspired after seeing Mitch Hedberg and Marc Maron a few months apart at a club in Oly that briefly hosted comedy around that time. I think those shows helped push me to give it another go. The time was right.

This second, middle-era of my Stand-up career started primarily at Seattle’s Comedy Underground and at Giggles out in the U District and then at Comedy Underground’s Tacoma location. I eventually moved back to California (I’d lived there in the 80’s and 90’s) spending sometime in SF performing at places like Brainwash, then in LA performing at various spots around town most frequently at the Lucy’s Laundromat on Sunset in Silverlake. This era culminated with a national tour I did doing Stand-up as an opener for musical acts Scout Niblett and Swearing at Motorists. I learned a lot on that tour. Among other things I learned that doing Stand-up in Baton Rouge, LA. at a biker/frat bar is not for the faint of heart. I also learned that while it seems like a bad idea to do a fistful of magic mushrooms before going onstage in front of hundreds in Dallas, TX., it’s not as bad an idea as you might think.

When I got back to LA after that tour I didn’t know which way was up and I’d pretty much lost the trail completely in my life. I just didn’t have the center of gravity to do much of anything so I moved back to the Northwest, bounced around a little, went to art school, studied painting, blew through some money, played music, got jobs, left jobs, lost jobs, I was in a fantastic art collective called Oregon Painting Society that did comedy shows from time to time, did tons of shows with OPS, performed at the Tate Modern in London, quit drugs and alcohol, did a couple Stand-up shows in art-world settings, and all kinds of other stuff.

About five months ago I started doing Stand-up again here in Portland. This begins the third chapter of my career. I don’t know why I started back up exactly. It’s true I was running out of patience with the vagaries of the art world, I couldn’t afford to throw every penny toward a painting career that got plenty of attention but almost no sales at all, I also was transitioning into being single again, and I was frankly a little bored with music. I wanted a form of expression that was compatible with working a lot and being strapped for cash. More than anything else though I just felt a calling to get back into it.

In Portland I’ve found Stand-up comedy heaven. It’s a great scene with tons of open mics in a bunch of great rooms. There are a slew of talented young and not-so young comics, the scene is creative, fresh, friendly and I can’t imagine it’s not at the beginning of a comedy explosion of sorts. All the pieces are in place. I am more excited by and engaged in comedy than I’ve ever been and it feels great.

I’ve also been able to combine my love of visual art with my comedy career by sketching the ever changing faces and places of Portland comedy. I show my drawings on my Portland Stand-up Comedy Sketchbook Tumblr.

The above flyer is from a show at the ABC house in Olympia that was a held as a fundraising benefit prior to my move to California. I’m a little unsure as to what year that would’ve been. 2000 maybe? The flyer was drawn by my dear friend and brilliant artist Tae Won Yu. The bill featured my friends Lindsay Arnold who was making the rounds as a Stand-up at the time and Jared Warren of KARP, The Whip, Big Business and Melvins fame. Jared was between bands and was another one of my Stand-up Comedy mates for my trips up to Seattle to The Comedy Underground. Both Jared and Lindsay were and still are hilarious. Lindsay is a lawyer now and Jared is a rockstar still.

Me? I’m a Stand-up comic! If you wanna see me do my thing go to almost any open mic in Portland. If I’m not on stage just look for the guy with the sketchbook.

(The Jason Traeger Show flyer by Tae Won Yu from my personal archives.)

LETTER ART FROM TOM NIEMEYER OF THE ACCUSED TACOMA/SAN DIEGO...

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 09:17:00 -0700

LETTER ART FROM TOM NIEMEYER OF THE ACCUSED TACOMA/SAN DIEGO 1982/83

Once upon a time, in a far away land before Googles started Googling and no Tumblrs had ever Tumbld there was only one way for young Punked Rawkers to share their thoughts and images with other such youths in far away corners of the Kingdom. It wasn’t done with a click, it wasn’t done with a mouse, back in this time they had to leave the house…and go to the Post Office.

In some previous blogs I’ve written about the crucial role the Postal Service played in allowing the Punk Rock virus to spread, morph into a social network, and infiltrate all corners of the globe back in the 80’s. I’ve written about the pleasure of waiting for a package to arrive and of the delayed gratification inherent in these exchanges. Another viscerally delightful aspect of the written communications of this time that I can’t emphasize enough was the physicality of the exchanges.

When you read a letter a kid sent you from another town, state or continent you weren’t looking at a computer screen. You were looking at their handwriting written on a piece of paper that their hand had pressed on, that paper was from somewhere else and it was carried to your door from another city by people. The envelopes had weight, and texture, and they were often covered in and filled with drawings, band logos, and stickers. This handmade, tactile reality was a big part of the experience that was the Punk Rock social network of the early 80’s.

Looking through the shoe boxes of correspondence from my prime Punk Rock pen pal years of 1981-84 reminds me in a visceral way that Punk Rock/Hardcore was a user-generated folk movement. It was a mostly handmade, totally non-corporate, non-commercial, spontaneous burst of art and attitude made almost exclusively by kids for kids. After looking through a bunch of my letters from that era I realized that many of the heavily adorned envelopes were themselves a form of folk art.

One of the best envelope folk artists I corresponded with in the early 80’s was my pen-friend Tom Niemeyer of the now-legendary Splatter Rock, Grind, Thrash, Punk/Metal pioneers The Accused. I think I first met Tom at a Black Flag show in Seattle in 1982 though after 30 years I’m a little foggy on the what, where’s and when’s. All I know is he and I continued to correspond for few years after I moved from the Northwest to San Diego in 1983. He was and still is a super cool dude, whose music and artwork defined a whole wing of the Seattle hard and heavy music scene from the Hardcore days through the Grunge period all the way to today. Martha Splatterhead Lives!

Tom Niemeyer envelope art from my personal archives.

CARRIE BROWNSTEIN 21st BIRTHDAY INVITATION OLYMPIA 1995 What...

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 00:38:00 -0700

CARRIE BROWNSTEIN 21st BIRTHDAY INVITATION OLYMPIA 1995

What can I say? She’s Carrie Brownstein, right? What can’t she do?

Well, before this birthday she couldn’t drink legally in most of the United States.

I don’t know how or when I met Carrie exactly, jeez, looking back at it now she might’ve been a teenager when we first became accquainted! Could that be? Whatever the case, she was young but she always radiated a charisma and confidence well beyond her years. I loved spending time with her because she was smart and brilliant but mostly I dug her company because she was so darn funny! Go figure.

In a past post I mentioned our early comedic efforts as South Capitol Players in Olympia. The image of Carrie playing the suburban mom in one of our skits with a bob haircut, wearing a red Xmas sweatshirt with a white collar, stirrup pants and patent leather shoes will always be etched in my mind for some reason…some reason? I know exactly why I remember that outfit and that scene: because it was flippin’ hilarious! That’s why!

It’s been a true pleasure and inspiration to watch and hear Carrie do the stuff she does today with the show and the band. I am consistently amazed at what she gets done and done so well. I sometimes tell myself: “1/10th…1/10th of a “Brownstein”, that’s all you really need to do…that’s do-able right?” It helps me set lofty but realistic goals to think that way.

I have no trouble admitting now that back when Carrie’s star began rising, deservedly so I might add, with Sleater-Kinney I had a hard time celebrating her success…or anyone else’s success for that matter! I was so screwed up with my own tormented agenda, struggles and frustrations I found it impossible to move and as you might imagine when you’re stuck it can be borderline excruciating to watch your friends soar…and soar…and keep soaring. Oy vey!

Thankfully those days and those ways of thinking are well behind me now. Today I can honestly say I’m nothing but pleased to see anyone make a dream or an inspiration into a reality they can share with the world. In fact I’m still working on a few of them myself! Rock on Carrie B.! Rock on everyone, everywhere!

Side note: Portlandia fans click here for some “Roots of Portlandia” trivia involving ME!

(Carrie Brownstein’s 21st Birthday Invitation written by Corin Tucker (I think) from my personal archives)

BILLY RUFF AT DEL MAR SKATE RANCH SAN DIEGO 1984 I skated a...

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 23:32:00 -0700

BILLY RUFF AT DEL MAR SKATE RANCH SAN DIEGO 1984

I skated a little but wasn’t anything close to good. When I lived in SD we’d go to the Del Mar Skate Ranch to hang out. I was as into playing pinball or Centipede in the arcade as I was into skating because like I said I wasn’t any good. When I wasn’t tossing my quarters down the tube I’d just as soon watch as skate, after all when the other dudes skating were guys like Billy Ruff, Steve Steadham and a lanky kid named Tony Hawk it was as enjoyable to watch them tear it up as it was to do anything else.

Being that I’d just moved down to SD from Seattle/Tacoma, those sunny days and especially the warm nights under the bright flourescent lights at Del Mar were some of my most quintessential early SoCal experiences. Skating was very much an underground thing in the Northwest back in this era but in the Southland it was an entrenched part of the youth culture. I didn’t know it at the time of course but the guys I was watching shred at Del Mar were the ones who were about to take skating to the masses.

Rad.

(Photo of Billy Ruff at Del Mar Skate Ranch taken by me from my personal archives)

MAURO FROM RAW POWER AND JELLO BIAFRA AT A PARTY SAN DIEGO...

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 00:33:00 -0700

MAURO FROM RAW POWER AND JELLO BIAFRA AT A PARTY SAN DIEGO 1984

This is a little bonus blog entry to tack onto the one that preceded it.

I don’t remember who took this picture, I’m pretty sure I didn’t but I was there when it was taken. Like I said in the other post this was the second time I met Biafra who I’d end up working for at Alternative Tentacles a few years later in the decade.

I’m pretty sure Biafra’s leg got fudged up on stage in L.A. at the Olympic by some over eager stage diver. The venue was notorious for having a ridiculously porous stage policy that would often lead to the bands being almost totally lost in the crowd jumping, stage diving and slamming all around them on stage.

I remember it was weird seeing him do the show in San Diego perched on a stool with his leg out straight in front of him, doing his trademark hand gestures and stuff. He still rocked and the kids went crazy of course. That night though really belonged to Raw Power. Hardly anyone had heard of them and they simply blew the SD crowd away with their relentless attack. They were unstoppable and the hard-headed SD punks loved them for it.

SD Punks of a certain age take note of the Personal Conflict shirt in the other room!

(Photo of Mauro and Jello from my personal archives)

MARTA, GAVIN, ME and RAW POWER AT THE BEACH SAN DIEGO...

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 15:25:00 -0700

MARTA, GAVIN, ME and RAW POWER AT THE BEACH SAN DIEGO 1984

Life’s a beach.

In 1984 there was a big international punk show held at The Olympic Auditorium in LA that featured headliners Dead Kennedys with BGK from Holland, Riistetyt from Finland, Italy’s Raw Power and Tijuana Punks Solucion Mortal rounding out the bill. The same line up, minus BGK I believe, played in San Diego the next weekend at the Adams Ave Theater.

I was a high school kid living in San Diego at the time and would’ve been way stoked for this bill even if I hadn’t been asked earlier in the month by Chris BCT to host one of the bands during their stay in SD. Chris was a big booster of the international hardcore scene and was involved somehow in putting these shows together. I asked my mom if she’d let a band stay with us a couple nights and, if you follow my blog at all you know how cool she is now and was then, she said yes.

My friends and I went up to the LA show, and went backstage with Chris to meet Riistetyt the band I’d agreed to host. They were complete douches. They were no longer a hardcore band, they were now a glam rock band in the Finnish tradition of Hanoi Rocks . Along with their now crappy music they brought a crappy dismissive, drunky, druggy, rockstar attitude. I wasn’t going to let these guys into my mom’s world. No way, no how.

The dressing room next door was a whole other scene, even though only one of them spoke English, the guys in Raw Power were as warm and down to earth a bunch of guys as you could hope to meet. They were not only super friendly, they also played a brand of anarcho-metallic hardcore that was blisteringly manic and totally intense. These were the dudes I wanted to hang with. Hang with them I did.

On a side note: I also met Jello Biafra, the man I’d work for four years later, in the Raw Power dressing room. It’s funny to recall being a little star-struck at the time considering how well I came to know the guy in future days!

To make a long story short, my mom, my brother and I ended up hosting Raw Power for over a week! The couple of days got stretched out to over a week because after the SD show a couple of the Italians went down to Tijuana to party with Luis and Solucion Mortal, which was a big mistake because some of their papers were still in NYC with a woman who’d helped get them to the states. Even though this was pre-9/11 America, the border was still the border and a couple shaggy mediterranean looking guys, with the wrong papers, who didn’t speak English weren’t getting back into SD unless they were ready to hop the fence…which the TJ punks offered to help them do by the way.

After discussing the options, they decided to wait for the papers to be sent express from the East Coast instead of trying to get across illegally and potentially be barred from the US forever. It turned out okay, mom and the guys made tons of spaghetti, we got to know the folks at the gelato place in the neighborhood, and we went to the beach almost everyday. This photo was taken at Pacific Beach I believe.

I remember when Fabiano and Davide finally got back from Mexico to mom’s house and the company of their tanned, well-fed and rested bandmates they were rough around the edges and suffering from some gastric distress. Davide clutched his stomach and said “San Diego…very good…Tijuana…not so nice!”

My mom and I were sad to learn ten years ago that guitarist Guiseppe Codeluppi had a heart attack and died. He was a nice guy.

…oh yeah, I’m sorry to say the guy in SD who ended up hosting Riistetyt after the show was stuck with a huge bill for a bunch of international phone calls they made while he was at work. I always felt bad about that, but hey, I got first pick what can I say?

R.I.P. Guiseppe Codeluppi

(Pictured L to R: Mauro Codeluppi, Guiseppe Codeluppi, Maurizio Dodi, Marta Brandes, myself, my brother Gavin Traeger. Polaroid from my personal archives)

HISTORY OF MANKIND SOUVENIR STAND OLYMPIA 1990’S I love...

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 03:31:00 -0700

HISTORY OF MANKIND SOUVENIR STAND OLYMPIA 1990’S

I love this photo. My old friend Tae Won Yu took it at Olympia’s annual Lakefair festival sometime in the 90’s. The composition is awesome.

I dig the Joycean array of motifs in toy cluster behind me: “grey alien” figures from the nighttime visitations of our collective unconscious, next to what are certainly bootlegged Minnie and Mickey Mouses from our premier American corporate myth maker Walt Disney. A rodent Adam and Eve. The smallest, meekest little creatures whose image has conquered the planet in our age of hyper media saturated globalization.

They hang below a big bunch of electric guitars, the instrument that changed the world in the latter half of the 20th Century. The wandering minstrel’s lute gone space-age insane. A super-charged catalyst to countless revolutions and revelations. From Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner out into a million directions. These totems are themselves situated next to a cluster of baseball bats, the tool that generates the propulsion that is essential to the game that at least once was referred to as America’s pastime.

The cartoonish proportions of the bats also suggest a caveman’s club, which to my mind evokes Stanley Kubrick’s vision of man’s violent first step toward the stars in the opening scene of his masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. A film which incidentally my mother saw upon its release in a theater with me in her womb in 1968. Above the clubs hang the equally cartoonish spiky ball of a battle flail from the middle ages, a weapon only slightly more sophisticated in its no nonsense brutality. The flail was a weapon specially designed to penetrate a knight’s steel armor. This technological one-upmanship represents an early example of the arms race dynamic that would centuries later push our species to the brink of total annihilation in the nuclear age.

The flails are situated next to an oversized first generation cellphone. A tool that at the time this photo was taken was an object worthy of a child’s fetishistic coveting but which today is so common a child would likely have little interest in a toy facsimile and would instead demand the real thing. That real thing of course is usually no longer just a phone but rather it is a computer connected to a global web of servers and other computers that taken as a whole resembles a neural network containing and sharing something akin to the totality of man’s aspirations, machinations, and information at lightning speed.

Finally to my left you can see an upside down hand mirror reflecting the world back at itself. This mirror represents to me the self reflective nature of our species. A trait that seems to be the only thing that truly makes us an anomaly in the animal kingdom.

There you have it: the journey of homo sapiens on this planet from the monolith to the starship represented in one souvenir stand, at one summer festival, in one small city.

What do I do in the face of such visual poetry? I goof around and ham it up for the camera of course! After all if we’re indeed made of star stuff, and we’re perhaps destined for the stars, why not make like you’re a flippin’ star and shine a little while you’re here?

(Photo of me at Lakefair by Tae Won Yu from my personal archives)

BESSIE OAKLEY/ THE WRECKS PART TWO SAN FRANCISCO 1982 Paul...

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 11:14:00 -0700

BESSIE OAKLEY/ THE WRECKS PART TWO SAN FRANCISCO 1982

Paul Curran from MRR sent me this page from an early MRR issue and I just had to share it as a follow-up to my post about Bessie Oakley and her great trailblazing all-girl punk band The Wrecks. This interview with “Bess Ex-Wrecks” was one of my first introductions to Bessie back in 82. Thanks Paul.

(MRR interview page from MRR archives)

SAFEWAY CLUB CARD PHOTOBOOTH PHOTOS OLYMPIA 1990’S I am...

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 11:33:00 -0700

SAFEWAY CLUB CARD PHOTOBOOTH PHOTOS OLYMPIA 1990’S

I am a card carrying member of the club are you? If you’re not hip to the scene, just go down to your local Safeway and sign up, it feels good to be a part of something bigger than yourself and the it feels great to save money every time you shop!

This is my first Safeway Club Card. I’ll never forget the day I got it…actually I have no idea when I got it. In fact all I remember about the card is that I resisted getting it through a few purchases at Safeway because it felt ridiculous and demeaning. I felt like I was being coerced to jump through a silly hoop by a huge corporation dangling the Pavlovian promise of “savings” in front of my face. Savings I could only get if I got the harmless little card.

I could almost hear the genial spokesvoice over the P.A.:

“Dear valued shopper, you don’t have to get the card or anything. No one is forcing you to get the card. If you really don’t want the card for some reason (we can’t imagine why) all you have to do is pay a little more for the things you’re buying today or go shop somewhere else, but why would you want to do that when you could simply join the club and get a nice new attractive card for your wallet? Won’t you join the club and be a part of our family of savings?”

Okay, okay. Lemme have the card. I don’t know what the card does. I don’t know what it’s for. I don’t know how it is that stores could survive for centuries without the card, but WTF, I’m here now, buying this salsa and I want to save a dollar so I’ll take the card.

Fast forward 15 years…

I shopped at Safeway yesterday, as I do occasionally, and I used my current Club Card to save $3.33 which was 12% of the cost of my total purchase. Imagine how much I’ve saved since getting my first Club Card back in the 1990’s! I’ve probably saved enough to buy a plane ticket to an exotic vacation destination. All because I took the leap and joined the club. Thank you Safeway!

Speaking of clubs, there once was a club in Olympia called the North Shore Surf Club where bands used to play. I saw a couple shows there when it was the NSSC but its heyday was before my time in Olympia. I saw more shows in the room when it was called Thekla. I won’t go on too much about the venue because I’m not especially qualified to, I’ll just say it hosted tons of great bands over the years. Bands like Black Flag(*), Nirvana, The White Stripes, Beat Happening, Bikini Kill, Bad Brains, on and on.

My most vivid memories of the place are not of shows at all but rather they’re of the ordinary weeknights when the place was just a bar where different friends of mine and I would hang out and have a good time. Thekla was home to a really fun Karaoke night. Jared Warren of KARP, The Whip, Big Business, The Melvins fame was sometimes the KJ for those nights. Was Kathleen Hanna a KJ there too? My memories are a little foggy. Who worked there? Did Brian Boswell? Vern Rumsey comes to mind (*). Why am I asking you?

The Karaoke scene was a blast. I remember Chris Smith from KARP doing his spot-on Brian Johnson on “You Shook Me All Night Long”, then there was that one guy who always did “Friends in Low Places” by Garth Brooks, I myself pretty much always did, and still do, Journey or GnR. I remember one time when Ad-Rock was in town, he got up and did “U Can’t Touch This” by M.C. Hammer. As he stumbled through the track I was standing next to a hippie fella who turned his open-mouthed gaze from the stage to a friend standing beside him and said “That dude sounds like the guy from the Beastie Boys” It was true, in fact he sounded exactly like him.

Thekla was home to another import from Japan as well: one of those new-fangled digital photobooths with the silly caption and border options. This is the place in the story where the the Safeway Club and local night club meet because I used my Club Card as a wallet gallery of my friend’s sticker portraits.

Looking at the card today I see a nice little snapshot of the time as I knew it. This snapshot has a particular poignance because Scott Jernigan (top center) isn’t here to read this post and make a funny comment about his funny face. To say Scott was one of the most talented (really talented as in world class, drum-hero drummer), sweetest, and funniest people I’ve known still feels like I’m selling the guy short somehow. I guess it’s the past tense phrasing that gets me: he’s gone but on the other hand, he isn’t really gone at all.

Maybe it’s the Facebook effect, where everyone we’ve ever known seems to be out there somewhere doing their thing or maybe it’s just that his energy is too near and vital to the many people who love him, myself included. It just doesn’t feel appropriate to use the past tense when talking about him so I won’t. It’s not a cliche, it’s a fact that Scott lives on in all the people who love him and hold his memory and his music dear.

I’ll leave it to you to figure out who else is who on the card (consult the tags for the answer key). I’ll close by saying that that happy looking, attractive couple in the bottom right hand corner, Casey Lynn McKee and Noah Herlocker, are now married and have two of the coolest, funniest kids ever. Those kids are almost as funny as Scott Jernigan!

I don’t mean to sound glib about it, it’s just that as you get older and you say goodbye to more members of your family it is very heartening to meet fresh new additions to the human family that have a spark that makes you believe there is hope for us all in this crazy crap-shoot.

Hakuna matata, that beat up old circle of life bounces along.

*Sarah Utter says: “Jared was the KJ at the ‘new thekla’ and Kathleen was the KJ at the original. good times. employees were Brian Boswell, Vern Rumsey, Mike Elvin, Jennifer Hukee, myself (new thekla) and countless other weirdo punks. Joe Preston checked id’s for a while!”

*Tobi Vail says: “Before it was the North Shore Surf Club it was just The Surf Club a teen disco for 80’s new wave kids. Their 80’s night was weird because they often played the same songs as they did in the 80’s to the same audience who were in their 30’s. Black Flag played The Tropicana not Surf Club!

A very surreal moment for me was watching Alec Mackaye dance to Styx Mr Roboto at Thekla’s 80’s night in 1996 after Berzerk covered Minor Threat opening for the Warmers in the building where the Trop used to be….which is called Jake’s now…I can’t’ remember what it used to be called though?”

R.I.P. and hilarity Scott Jernigan.

(Safeway Club Card from my personal archives)

IAN MacKAYE INTERVIEW PART TWO OLYMPIA 1994 Here’s PART...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 12:23:00 -0700

IAN MacKAYE INTERVIEW PART TWO OLYMPIA 1994

Here’s PART TWO of my interview with Ian MacKaye.

This interview took place 7/16/94.

PART ONE can be read HERE

Do you ever have dreams that seem to have a power or meaning beyond the average dream? Like where you wake up just saying “What the fuck was that?!”

Yeah, I’ve been having a lot of dreams like that lately actually. Usually I don’t remember my dreams. Lately I’ve been having really vivid…uncomfortable dreams.

Have you ever gotten a song idea from a dream?

I’ve had dreams where I have this incredible song, like the best song ever but when I wake up I can’t remember it. I can start to kind of pronounce the drumbeat maybe but what I come up with sucks (makes an arhythmic slapping sound with his hands) but at the time in the dream I was fully sold on it,“This is the shit!” (laughs)

I’ve had some dreams featuring Fugazi that were out of this world, like nothing I’ve ever heard. I’ve also had some like that featuring Metallica so don’t let that go to your head! When I’ve had these dreams it makes me think about how music exists on so many levels inside and outside of us. Music is a mystery in and of itself. I mean, there’s no real reason that since the beginning of time people have played music, but we always have.

Well, it’s to echo the heartbeat. That’s how I think about it. It’s a rhythm and it echoes the heartbeat. You have a natural rhythm going on in you, music is a counter rhythm that works with or against your natural rhythm. That’s the way I kind of feel about it. It seems to me that’s what it’s about. You can construct a beat that slides right into you or you can make one that’s a weird counter beat or it can be something without a beat but you’ll put the beat in yourself. It’s like a canvas, an aural canvas of sound.

Most of my own Fugazi dreams are where we’re playing and we can’t remember a song. That kind of shit. I had an incredible dream once where much to my horror Jeff Nelson, Minor Threat’s drummer, had organized a Minor Threat reunion gig without asking me. I’m just totally horrified. I’m like, “I am not gonna do this!” but the tickets are already sold and I feel this obligation, the kids bought the tickets, they really want to see it, and it would be a dick move not to do it. So I go down to this gig, I’m totally embarrassed about it, humiliated frankly, because this is something I never was gonna do…

(Lois Maffeo walks up says, “Stop the tape!” tape stops/starts up again)

So back to the Minor Threat reunion dream…

…yeah, so I get to the show, totally bummed about the situation, but something about me is that if I’m obligated to do something, I fuckin’ do it. Straight up. If I say I’m gonna do something, I’m gonna do it. That goes for anything, if I have to clean up vomit, I’m gonna do it, as much as I may not want to, I just do it. So I get to this fuckin’ gig and the band is not there. It’s just a guy with a turntable and a Minor Threat record on it and there’s like 2000 kids chanting “Min-or Threat! Min-or Threat! Min-or Threat!”

So I walk out on stage and I’m like “Hmmm…this is really embarrassing. This is a total rip-off!” I’m thinking these kids are gonna be so bummed, none of the band is there, just me and the guy with the turntable…a single turn table...just one. So I’m thinking, “I’m gonna do this, I’ll just give it my all” so I tell the guy “Put the record on!” So he puts the record on and it’s just the record, with me singing on it and everything, and I just start singing along with the record!

Are the kids into it?

I’m just like “YaaaaaH!!” Screaming, totally jumping around, singing, and the kids are just standing there going “…wha? This is a rip-off!” And I’m just going “RED! I’m SEEING RED!!! Ahhhhhhh!!!” doing my best. I know on the one hand it is a total rip-off but on the other hand at least I’m trying.

It was such a fuckin’ surreal dream. I woke up wanting to kill Jeff! Most all my dreams with Fugazi are like, we’ll be playing Australia and then we’re all at home and I’m like “Wait a minute…we have another show in Australia! We gotta get back there in like 12 hours! It’s a 15 hour flight! Ahhh!” It’s usually organizational stuff because I’m the organizational one.

So it’s more anxiety dreams than power dreams about playing music?

Yeah. You know, but you gotta remember the difference between you and I is I play…

Yeah…

I’ve been in bands all the time. You don’t. You want to be a performer but you never do it, so your dreams might be working something out…

…yeah, maybe I’m realizing something internally you don’t have to…

In the early 80’s I was a total Punk fighting kid. I fought a lot. I used to have these incredible dreams where I’d be fighting with somebody and I’d throw my hardest punch at them and my fist would just end like a quarter of an inch from their face, it might even touch their face but I could never quite get a contact. I’d hit them as hard as I could but could never hurt them. But when I stopped fighting I’d have dreams where I would bludgeon people!

I stopped fighting in 1984. I never fought after that. After I stopped I’d have dreams where I’d be pounding people’s heads against the stairs and shit, just beating the fuck out of people! Before, when I was fighting, all my fighting dreams were really frustration dreams. I could never actually get a crack on somebody.

Interesting…

I’m not saying this is true for everybody, but for me it just filled in the blanks. I have had some dreams that I think were kind of prophetic. Where in life I’ve thought, oh my god…where something happens to me and I think “I dreamt this!”

Can you think of an instance?

I can think of a couple actually. For the most part I think they’re regenerative dreams I believe. I believe your mind is in a feedback loop or something. You think you remember something. I mean what is memory? Who knows what the fuck it is?

It’s elastic…

I can say “I remember this from a dream”, but do I? I don’t fuckin’ know, it could’ve been a computer chip stuck in wrong so it only seems like something I remember.

I do have one story: I got hit by a car in 1982 in Camden, New Jersey. Minor Threat was playing there with SSDecontrol, Flag of Democracy and…Agnostic Front might’ve been on that bill. I was standing out in front of this place, it was a little union hall, a fireman’s hall or something like that and I was standing out front in the street. It was a really shitty neighborhood in Camden, a very tough neighborhood. I’m in the street, there’s a kid skateboarding, Punk Rockers are all hanging around and SSDecontrol pull up in their black van, Al had bought this brand new black van, so I go out and I say Hey, How’s it going? I go over to the window of the van you know? There’s like 16 Boston kids in there. So I’m standing in the street talking to them through the window

On the driver’s side?

yeah…they’re stopped on their side of the street…kids skating around.

As I’m standing there talking to them I notice two blocks down a car makes a wild turn onto the street. The car was going pretty fast, I could see that. So I say to the kids in the street “Yo! Get out of the street this guy’s coming fast!” I squeezed up against the van and there was plenty of room for him to get between us and the parked cars on the other side. Anyhow, he’s driving up really fast and then about 20 yards away he pulls into the middle of the road and I just think “I’ve dreamt this before!”

The next thing I know there’s this insane explosionand there’s an orange light going in a circle, like a parking light, and then I’m lying somewhere behind the van. I’m in a fetal position. I wake up and I’m going “Where’s my shoe? Where’s my shoe?” because my left shoe is missing. It was like 40 feet down the street. What happened was this guy had totally plowed into the van, he’d run right into the front end of the van and totally destroyed stuff. I was looking for my shoe and everyone was asking me “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

The guy’s car is wrecked, he’s down the street. People see me coming and they’re like “Ian got hit!” Then the guy takes off. The point is I remember just before it happened thinking “I dreamt this! I remember this happening.” I knew he was gonna hit us.

Now I don’t know if I actually knew he was gonna hit us or not. My memory…well, I got hit by a car. I got flipped and landed on my head. I had a huge knot on my head, my calf was fucked up, I broke a toe. When I went to the hospital the guy there told me how lucky I was to be alive. I still played the show, as a matter of fact there’s a videotape and a bootleg single from that show. I was totally out of my mind and I fainted after the show. I woke up in Washington pretty much.

The one thing about it that was weird was that I talked with this one kid who witnessed it and he said about it afterwards, “Man you really looked like you knew what you were doing!” I asked him what he was talking about and he said, “well, the guy came down and he hit the van and it was like you were timing it because the moment he hit the van you grabbed the top of it, the little rail, and you jumped up and pulled yourself up so that when he hit the front of the van and slid down the side of it, the brunt of the car, you jumped over it!”

You pulled yourself up over the point of impact?

Yeah, I jumped over the grill of the car. My foot, this foot, hit the windshield. My leg and my toe hit the windshield and it flipped me around. I flipped upside down and landed on my head. The kid told me it looked like a stunt thing, like I knew what I was doing. I don’t remember any of this, all I remember is BAM! and then this orange light going in a circle…

Was this orange light an internal light from the impact or was it a light in your environment?

I think it was a parking light, like maybe on the back of Al’s van, a side light or something. I just remember seeing an orange light going in a circle…

…as you were going in a circle?

I guess! I don’t know, this is just what my mind tells me I remember. The fact that that guy told me it had looked so much like I knew what I was doing, that in tandem with my memory of right before I was hit feeling like I had dreamt it before…made me think…ya know...strange.

The only other thing like that involving dreams that I can remember, and I should say I don’t take a lot of stock in this stuff, believe you, me. A lot of people talk about this sort of stuff and they say “I dreamt it then it came true!” I’m not like that, I say “I think I dreamt this but I’m not sure”. I think my mind is more powerful than me, than I can give it credit for being, and that I didn’t actually dream these things ahead time…that’s what I really believe…that said, there is one time I can think of where I had some kind of proof that I’d dreamt something ahead of time.

Let me see if I can get this right. I dreamt once that I was driving down the New Jersey Turnpike and Mark Sullivan was in the backseat and he’s singing. He’s singing some 60’s song or maybe it was Chaka Khan’s Tell Me Something Good, a 70’s song. This is in the dream, he’s singing it and I’m singing and we’re laughing, and the next day I told Mark, “I had this crazy dream, where we were singing and laughing” and we laughed about it. It was some ridiculous song.

So anyway, about eight years later we’re driving down the New Jersey turnpike and he’s in the backseat and we’re talking about songs and Mark starts singing a song and I go “Mark! This is that fuckin’ dream!” and I reminded him about the dream and he goes “Oh yeah! I totally remember! You told me you had a dream about me singing this song!”

…from the backseat, on the New Jersey turnpike…

Yeah. It sounds crazy. Like “Wow, it’s proof!” but, you know,who’s to say A) the suggestion I made by me telling him the dream in the first place didn’t play a role in it happening later? B) Maybe the dream was about such ordinary stuff that it’s not so unusual that we would’ve lived it later, or C) Maybe I didn’t really have the dream, I just remember having had it, and he falsely remembered me telling him about it. That’s as close to something like that as I’ve come.

I did write down dreams for a while, but when I look at them now they’re hopeless, just totally nonsensical. My dreams are nothing special. I don’t think the power to see the future lies in some insane, holy injection into reality. I just think that when you think about stuff you can figure it out. It’s like gambling, if I put all my chips on 14 and I win it doesn’t mean I saw the future, I just played the odds. That’s the way it goes.

Can I ask you if you’ve ever seen a dead body or seen someone die or get killed?

Uh huh. Yes I have. I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies because I’ve been to tons of funerals and stuff like that.

How about in a circumstance outside where you might expect to see one?

Yeah, in 19…84…I went to go see a Yellowman concert, it was really packed, this was at the 9:30 Club and the place was packed. I knew a lot of people that worked there and they had asked me if I could help work security that night because it was a pretty crazy crowd. So I said yeah, sure. My job was basically getting Yellowman from the basement dressing room to the stage. At the club there is no direct access from backstage, the performer has to walk through the crowd to get to the stage. So our job was to open up a lane through the crowd and then work stage security.

Let me tell you, people went crazy for Yellowman. Like when he had to leave for an encore women were punching me in the face trying to stop me from opening up a lane, because they wanted him to play more. It was a very intense show. So when the show finally ends, after he does like four encores and finally we get him offstage, I go back to the stage to look after the equipment. People are exiting out of the place when all of a sudden I hear all this screaming. Everyone is screaming “GUN! GUN! GUN!”

We’re all diving to the ground because someone is shooting, right? So anyway, I’m lying there underneath, like, a keyboard on the stage, I’m holding down someone else because I thought someone was in the main room shooting up the place. Everyone is lying there then I realize the shooting is happening out front and some of my friends are out there so I decide maybe I should go out there to see what’s going on.

So I go running around to the hallway, there’s a long hallway at the 9:30 Club, from ‘F’ Street to the room it’s like maybe 30 or 40 yards. Halfway down the hall there’s a sort of little room, where there is an elevator and in that space I see a man lying there. He’s just lying there, and the hall is completely clear.

So I go running down the hall to the guy. He’d been shot. He’s lying there shot and when I get to him, I kneel down and he’s spitting and choking and stuff, vomiting, he’s pissed his pants and that kind of thing. So first off I get him on his side, so he doesn’t choke to death, cause I can see he’s choking and vomiting, so I turn him on his side and I get his shirt open and this guy Eric Lagdameo who sang for the bands Red C, Dove and Double O, he goes off to get some napkins, towels or something so we can stem whatever bleeding there is. I’m looking around for a bullet hole and I find one little bullet hole on his side but there’s no exit wound and there’s no blood to speak of, there was no blood because he was dying, he was on the way out.

I thought, fuck it, I’m gonna do anything I can for the guy so I’m sitting there telling people to get an ambulance and I’m holding the guy, talking to him, telling him, “C’mon, c’mon you can make it” or whatever. Then the cops come in and I say to the cops, “Hey is there an ambulance?” and the cop just looks down at me and says “That guy is dead, he’s fuckin’ dead.”

Was he dead?

Maybe…not exactly, he was jerking around a little but they were just his death throes. He died while I was with him. I remember driving home after that and I stopped fully at every stop sign because mortality was up my ass in a big way, ya know? One minute you’re totally happy, watching Yellowman and the next minute you’re fucking dead. It was weird. It was a very weird night.

It turned out it had been a drug-thing. This guy who died was the leader of a gang called The Baldies. They were Christian Jamaicans, they were called The Baldies because they shaved their heads. There had been a tit-for-tat drug shooting war going on with another Jamaican drug gang, or so-called posse, they were Rastas, dreadlock guys. This guy who died had already been shot twice before, his name was Patrick Grey.

I got called into the prosecutor’s office because I was listed as a witness and it turns out I actually knew the suspect, I found this out before I went down to the prosecutor’s office. The suspect was this guy I knew who used to hang out with the Bad Brains. I was like oh, shit. I knew a lot of the Rasta guys and this scene was involved with some very heavy players and I didn’t want to be called as a witness because I knew this guy and he knew me.

So I called up another guy I knew, one of these Rasta guys, and I said to him, “Hey, I’m in a bit of a predicament here, the prosecutor wants me to come down to testify and be interviewed, but this guy we know is the suspect…” My Rasta friend just stopped me and says, “Well, what did you see?” and I told him I hadn’t seen anything, I was inside when the shooting happened etc. so he told me to just tell them what I saw and not to worry about it.

It turns out it wasn’t the guy we thought had done the shooting who had done it, it was actually that guy’s brother. I went down to the prosecutor’s office and told him what I saw happen. They said “well, it’s nice that you had a guy die in your arms but it doesn’t help our case at all, so thanks for coming down.” I don’t know what exactly happened. I do know this though: the next night, the night after the shooting, on Georgia Avenue fourteen people were shot at a Rasta night club.

It was a related shooting?

It was totally related. It was a reprisal shooting.

How many died in that shooting?

No one died in that one. Fourteen people were injured though. The next night they just went in there and shot the place to hell. So yeah, I saw that guy die. That actually…you know what? That actually was a crucial time in my life, man. That really changed everything in my life.

In what way?

In that I realized it’s fucking hardball.

Life, you mean?

Yeah. It brought it all to a point. You know? This is the real shit and that all the fighting I’d been involved in, it was all just totally petty and ridiculous. It taught me…I just revamped…My whole life changed in 1984 so much. You can hardly imagine. There were all kinds of small, side things like I stopped eating meat. I stopped fighting. I just really started rethinking everything I was involved with and I thought about exactly what it was I wanted to do. That was the point.

You know with Minor Threat I knew I wanted to do something cause I was pissed. It wasn’t until after that, in 1984 that I thought “Hmmm…how is all this gonna translate into the rest of my life?” Seeing a man die was a major defining moment for me.

…violently too…

It was heavy. Other than that, I was there after a friend of ours had O.D’d. I was there when her body was discovered.

Were you the one who discovered her body?

I came pretty close to it, yeah. I went there to deal with it after another friend found her. She had not been answering her phone or her door for like two days. The door was locked from the inside. That’s kind of a bad sign. This was a case where it was like, she’s in there and she’s dead and you know it. So I went down there. She had been living in an apartment that my family owned. My mom wanted me to go down there so I could get there before this girl’s mom showed up. I ended up getting there like two minutes after her mom had gotten there.

Her mom and another guy had kicked a window in to get access. I had a key. So when I got there I went to the door of this basement apartment, they were already there, the mom was screaming. I asked the guy she’d come with through the door “Is she dead?” and he said “Yes, do you want to come in?” I said, “No, I don’t need to come in but don’t touch anything.” As far as I was concerned it could’ve been a murder. This was in a tough neighborhood.

I didn’t want to go in because as far as I was concerned it was a crime scene. It wasn’t though, she’d O.D.’d., straight up overdose. It was hard. I had to clean that joint out. I also cleaned out a place where my friend’s dad had died, after he’d been dead for a bunch of days. I had to clean that place out.

See, that’s the kind of stuff, like I was saying earlier, if I have to do something I’ll just do it. I don’t get fazed. I’ve had to put a lot of dogs to sleep too. That’s hard. I hold them when they put the needle in. I hold them right on the way out. That’ll fuck with you too. You just know, that on and off position. It’s not a fuckin’ game. You’re here or not.

I was with my grandfather when he died. It was an incredibly powerful experience. It really was like a light switch…where did that light go? Do you have any thoughts about that? Where the light goes after death?

It’s pointless even to make a hypothesis.

It’s totally pointless?

Yeah, for me it’s like, whatever! The pilot light is out, pal! The television is off, it’s just a box again. It’s definitely not present and you can tell too. When something is dead, it’s dead. That body is not being used anymore. When someone or some animal is dead, they might look like they’re living if you squint your eyes, but anybody who’s looking knows that thing is no longer alive. When I set one of my dogs down after it had died, it’s the same color, same shape, but it’s not sleeping, it’s gone. Straight up not there anymore.

The way the muscles go is really incredible when you feel something or someone die in your arms, the way the muscles relax is incredible. In a way it’s even kinda reassuring because it feels like they’re getting pretty comfortable. Everything just goes. It’s kind of amazing.

You said earlier in this conversation that death scares you…

Sure, because it’s like what the fuck does it mean?

Do you ever have a feeling of curious anticipation about the experience in any way or do you just accept that whenever it gets there it gets there?

Yeah, that’s how I feel. It’s so incomprehensible thinking about it just drives me crazy. I remember my first reckoning with death when I was about 11 years old. I was sitting on the porch with my older sister Katie and her boyfriend, we were looking at the stars and Katie said, “Isn’t it weird to think about how many stars there are?” and her boyfriend said, “yeah” and so I asked them “How many stars are there?” He told me there are more stars than you can even imagine and that it’s impossible to count them. I was like,“but you have to be able to count them! Is there a thousand? A million?” They told me that you just can’t count them.

So I’m thinking “How can that be!? How far out does space go? Where does heaven begin?” Then I started thinking “Wait a minute, heaven doesn’t begin anywhere!?” Up until that point I always had it really worked out in my mind ya know: 1^st floor earth, 2^nd floor space, 3^rd floor heaven...that’s the way I had it worked out in my mind. Then I started thinking about it differently, like, “Let’s say there is a heaven on the 3^rd floor, then what is on the 4^th floor?” Then I thought “What if there is no 3^rd floor? What if it’s just 1^st floor earth, and second floor INFINITY!?”

This line of reasoning started to fuck me up! I started to have a nervous breakdown at 10-11 years old! I thought this is fucked!

It scared you, the thought of infinity?

It scared the fuck out of me, because suddenly, god is impossible. I realized it’s only there if I choose to believe it. If I choose to take this mission, it’s there. I remember I went inside and called my dad 223-6575 The Washington Post. I’m on the phone saying, “Dad! I’m having a problem here!” I’m crying on the phone because there’s no god, right? I ask him, “Where do you go when you die?” and he says, “Nobody knows, that’s why people go to church to try to figure it out, but nobody knows, that’s why they try and have faith.”

I say,“That’s not enough! You’re my fuckin’ dad! Tell me what the fuck is gonna happen!” He tells me “Nobody knows, they might tell you they know, they might believe they know, but nobody really knows.” It fucked me up endlessly, even to this day. I can remember for a few weeks afterwards I was seized with panic about it. Every night I’d just lay there terrified. Completely and utterly terrified. It was a sensation so strong I can’t describe it to you now how fucked up it was. I can still experience it and I still can’t explain it to you.

No part of that realization makes you feel good, it still scares you now?

Yeah, but you know, it’s not the dying that bothers me, it’s the incomprehensible eternity factor! Like what the fuck does it mean!? It makes me almost hope that the light just goes completely out.

Isn’t that no more or less incomprehensible an idea? I mean what would that be?

I have no fucking idea!

…because that’s still infinity…

Exactly! So where are we? What are we? What are we dong here? I have no idea! It’s insane, man! It makes my fucking organs rumble. Just thinking about it. I have no idea what it all means, I’m just totally clueless. So a lot of times, when faced with this realization, some people might throw their hands up in the air and just say “fuck it! anything goes!” but the way I look at is like this: I don’t know what any of it means at all and I’m terrified about it in a way, but I’m resolved to be here, since that’s where I am. So I’ll just do it. I’ll just be here and while I’m here, no matter how fucked up it seems. I’m just gonna try to pass my time in a pleasant way.

Doing what you think you should do…

…trying to do the right stuff, while also trying to be thoughtful about what other people might be going through while they’re making the same tough passage I am. I’m trying not to kill people in my life and I’m trying not to help them get killed.

That’s the thing to me about taking drugs too. Some people say to me the thing about taking drugs is that by doing them you’re trying a bunch of different things and you’re living life to the fullest by getting all these different experiences. I submit that you’re not. I submit that if you want to experience life to its fullest, that you don’t cloud yourself. That you just take it at full volume. It’s like when you’re in the recording studio, you have straight signal and then you have all these effects.

The effects may make it sound weird and they might jangle it up and make it supposedly interesting or whatever, but ultimately the straight signal is what it is, man. That’s what it really is. A beautiful note that has an effect on it, if it affects you, if it moves you because of the effect, that’s cool. But If a single note moves you, without any help, that’s amazing. For me, I’m way more interested with having an uneffected existence. I hope I can be moved without having to alter myself to get there. I mean how many people have religious epiphanies when they’re totally out of their minds? Everybody!

It makes it all easier to believe when your mind is effected. I’m waiting to believe something when my mind is not effected. That’s the real shit. It’s funny though, I’m kind of a loner on that sort of thing. It’s a lonely sport, but it is the way I am. It’s also not because I think anyone else is so fucked or anything either, I just think everyone has to deal with their own situation as they are. It’s a tough situation whatever way you do it. I’m just trying to make things interesting while I’m here.

Would you like to have kids someday?

Yes, I do think the kid thing is pretty important. The more I think about it. I mean, I’ve always wanted to have kids anyway but I do think there are some answers there.

In raising children?

You see the thing is, if you have parents, some people don’t have parents, but if you have people in your life who are older than you, you’re given an opportunity to watch them and to exist with them. You get to see them dealing with their situation as they go. Then there’s you on the next level and then if you don’t have that next level, which is a kid, there’s something missing there that fulfills the picture.

I think of when my grandmother died two years ago, she had been dying for god knows how long. She’d be dying then she’d pop back, “I’m okay now!” and she and my dad had a deal that if it came to it he’d pull the plug, ya know? It just went on and on, she’d live in a nursing home for a while but we thought that was too depressing so we got a house for her, we had her living in a Punk house. My brother lived with her, she had a place in the basement.

She was part of a Punk group house for a while. It was cool, it worked out pretty good for her. Otherwise she sat in her fuckin’ apartment looking at television until the nurses would come in and feed her. At least at the Punk house there were the Punk Rockers coming and going. She didn’t want to talk so much she just wanted to see people walking around…to see life going on.

So any way, eventually she died at our family’s summer vacation place in Connecticut, a place she’d had for like 60 years. My father was with her and I felt like she was totally ready to go. I find an incredible amount of solace when I see that a person die when that person is ready to die. That’s a lucky thing.

When I think about dying…I flew on a seaplane the other day and I thought about the plane crashing. I thought “If I die this is gonna suck” not for me but for everybody that depends on me for stuff. I always think about my mom. If I died my mom would bum out. You know, no mom wants to see her kid go before her. That’s my fear of death: my mom would be bummed…

(Nikki McClure walks up. “Nikki!” tape stops/starts)

…so anyway…ultimately it’s about that kind of stuff. When I think of my grandmother I just think that’s the way to go, when you feel like you’ve kind of done it, now you’re tired and ready…

I also have a wacked theory about senility too. I feel like everybody contains the insanity clause in life, which is essentially what we’ve been talking about this whole time…that everyone is kind of kooked out on life. People I know who are 25 and they go crazy, any of us can go crazy at any time! You have a license to because this is a totally ridiculous situation we’re in! But I think you might as well just put it on hold, go about your business, and try to interact with people and live.

You’ll probably go crazy on some level. Most people do, they work, and do stuff until they lose it in the end. That’s what I think senility is: you’re old enough to finally just let go and go crazy. What better time to go crazy? You know a lot of people once they go crazy they have a hard time ever coming back from that, at least socially you know? If you meet somebody who is like eighty years old though and they start replacing food with color, “I’d like to eat some more blue!” No one is gonna fault them for it. It’s okay, they’ve been around. That’s my theory about senility…obviously it’s not scientific!

When I see younger people go crazy I often think, just put it off! I don’t care how fucked up your life is, put it off! People might think I’m pretty arrogant about this, but in a way I mean it. Okay you’ve been fucked over in life, your family treated you like shit, yes. I acknowledge that that happened but, you know, don’t let them or that shit fuck you up anymore if you can help it! Live the life you think you want. Live that life! Don’t continue to suffer because of what happened to you. You’ve suffered enough, stop! If you have to go nuts, wait til you’re old.

Of course you might play this tape a few years from now and say “Listen to this guy, now he’s a fuckin’ kook!”

My whole thing has always been really straight forward: you want to do something, do it. You don’t want to do something? Don’t do it. You don’t like something? Don’t do it. Something makes you mad, think about something else. It’s like who the fuck is in the driver’s seat around here? That’s the burning thing for me always, who the fuck is in control around here? I submit that we are in control of our own lives.

All this shit about ghosts and all that, we have the power to create paranormal phenomena in our own minds, that shows you the power of our minds. You just gotta step up and use your mind. Sometimes I think people suffer because the think it’s an effective tool.

In what respect?

It becomes part of their thing, their identity. Like, that dude suffers, he’s bumming. I say, let’s not suffer. Let’s not do that.

Don’t you think that that way of living is rooted in being chained to the past or living in fear of a possible future outcome? It seems to me that the happiest people I know tend to be the ones who are able to enjoy what they’re doing at the moment.

Yeah, right. I think you’re right about that.

It also seems like that’s where creativity thrives as well, unless you’re doing some kind of academic art or music that is a tribute to a past master or something. It seems like all art that is about self expression is rooted in the moment.

That’s true for me. I don’t think of myself as someone who is stuck in the past, but I’m certainly aware of it. I have a good memory. I can remember stuff. I think it’s interesting to think about but when we talk about these sorts of things, I don’t think of them as building blocks. To me I just like to consider the past because it’s interesting and maybe it did have something to do with who I am now. Sure it did, why not? I also don’t regret anything. I have no regrets. Everything I ever did was a step I needed to take in my life to bring me here.

People might ask me “You were a fighter? Don’t you regret that?” I tell’em “No I don’t regret that I used to fight” It doesn’t mean I think other people should do what I did, it only means that’s what I did. That’s all. It doesn’t make me a hypocrite either that now I think violence stinks. I changed…tough shit!

As far as worrying about the future, I do get impatient. There are moments in the present when I do get impatient. Like something’s gotta give. I hate waiting for the future! Like in my life right now, I’m in a stasis. I can’t move. I can’t write a fucking song. I’m in this band. Either I have to write or the band’s gotta stop. Maybe I gotta be in another band or maybe I’ll never be in another band again! Something’s gotta happen. I’m not hedging my bets and I’m not worrying about the future because I know something will happen but right now I’m clicking my feet.

I’m pretty well seated though, I’m excellently seated in the present. I mean I’m here now, seated with you now as though I’ve been sitting here for five years. I enter into pictures, scenes, and situations as if…from the moment I’m there I’m instantly comfortable…here I am. That’s the way my life is. I know people for a few days a year maybe. I’m really comfortable, like right now I’m here in Washington, in Olympia. A week ago I was in D.C., yesterday I was on Orcas Island on a seaplane! I love it. The present is something I’m pretty comfortable with.

Yesterday I was on a seaplane, today I woke up and I thought “I’m gonna go over and see Jason, do this interview” After that I’m gonna go look at a garden! You know, bring it on!

END OF TAPE

(Photograph clockwise from top left: Monte Seifert, Shelley Seifert, Joe Lally, Cynthia Connolly, Ian MacKaye, Jason Traeger and Star Seifert (center) sitting on the front steps of the Dischord house. Arlington, VA. 1995. From my personal archives.)

THUS SPAKE SRI RAMAKRISHNA BOOK FROM GARY FLOYD SAN FRANCISCO...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 10:41:00 -0700

THUS SPAKE SRI RAMAKRISHNA BOOK FROM GARY FLOYD SAN FRANCISCO 1990

Gary Floyd is one of the sweetest human beings I’ve ever known. I love the man.

It’s funny how now that I’m in my forties, the majority of people I hang out with on a regular basis are younger than I am. Many of them in their twenties. When I was in my late teens and early twenties I didn’t seem to have any friends that weren’t at least a generation, and usually a few generations, ahead of me. Gary Floyd is one of those older, wiser friends I cherished so much at that time of my life and still cherish to this day even though I only ever see him nowadays on Facebook. Whatever its faults, thank gosh for Facebook, huh?

I’d like to share with my readers the news that Gary is having a stent put in near his heart today at 2:00pm Pacific Time. Gary has always been a big believer and powerful practitioner of spiritual energetics (meaning: he likes and gives GOOD VIBES ). So I’m posting this today as a way to rally and urge all who love him to focus your best thoughts, prayers, and intentions out into the world and toward the man in his hour of physical challenge.

If you don’t know Gary, his legacy of true rebellion, free spirited conscious living, and music make today your Get Acquainted with Gary Floyd Day! You’ll be glad you did!

(Sri Ramakrishna booklet given to me by Gary Floyd in 1988)

IAN MacKAYE INTERVIEW PART ONE OLYMPIA 1994 This interview took...

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 23:25:00 -0700

IAN MacKAYE INTERVIEW PART ONE OLYMPIA 1994

This interview took place 7/16/94

PART TWO can be read HERE

When I was in high school in San Diego my crew of friends and I missed no chance to drive up to L.A. or San Francisco on the weekends to hang out with our friends and hopefully see a Punk show. Whenever we made it up to The Bay Area our first stop was always the MAXIMUMROCKNROLL house, first at its location in Berkeley and then later in SF when Tim Yo and the magazine relocated to The City.

The first time I met Ian MacKaye was during one of these trips up north in 1985. It was in the post-Minor Threat/pre-Fugazi era and he was out west visiting Cynthia Connolly, his long term girlfriend at the time, who was in town for an extended stay at MRR. I don’t remember a whole lot about that encounter except that they both were very cool and that I was surprised to see him sporting a full head of corkscrew hair.

In the following years I made it back to Washington a number of times and I was very taken with the people that made up that wonderful scene. When I was in town I always stayed at the Dischord house and had a great time every time I visited. I was moved by the down-to-earth, loving atmosphere of the place. I loved the dogs, the good food, the music, and most of all I loved the friendly, brilliant people I met there. Ian himself couldn’t have been a funnier or more gracious friend and host.

I have fond memories of going to a family dinner at the MacKaye’s Beecher St. house, where I met everyone including Alec MacKaye, another well-known D.C. Punk who would also become a friend. Later on in the Fugazi era I even remember once jamming in the basement with Joe and Brendan on Ian’s white SG while they were waiting for Ian and Guy to show up for practice (all I could think to do was to make Ian’s chugga-chugga sound). How’s that for a D.C. moment?

Now I’m just tooting my own horn.

I should keep this intro short and tell you a little about the interview. This conversation with Ian took place one sunny afternoon in Calvin Johnson’s front yard in Olympia. He was in town visiting his many friends while also checking out the Yo-Yo-A-Go-Go Music Festival that was happening that week. I interviewed him with the intention of putting together a zine that was to consist of two back-to-back interviews each issue.

I had recorded a conversation with Beck the day before, who was in town playing the fest. These two interviews were going to make up my first issue. For whatever reason, the zine never came out. In fact, I never got around to transcribing either interview until now: 18 years later! Better late than never I suppose. I haven’t listened to the Beck interview but I will soon. Luckily, I still have that cassette too.

Of course Ian has been interviewed countless times and some of the stories he tells in our conversation may be familiar to anyone who knows him personally or who has paid attention to his career over the 30 plus years he’s been an active force in the culture. What I think makes this particular interview unique is the slant it takes toward the mysterious, the strange, and the inexplicable. To give you a feel for what I mean, the term “straight-edge” never comes up once but we do talk at length about religion, death, ghosts, UFO’s, prophetic dreams and the mystery at the heart of the human experience. It’s a fun and fascinating read. I had a good time working on it.

I hope you enjoy this walk on the weirder side with myself and Ian MacKaye.

Were you raised with any religious beliefs?

I was baptized Episcopalian, my dad is definitely an Episcopalian but we went to a super, super radical church in Washington. A place called St. Stephen and the Incarnation. Throughout the 60’s, when I think of church it was embroiled with the Vietnam War protests and stuff. The church was a sanctuary for protestors and there was always all sorts of radical stuff going on there. They had soup kitchens, the first gay marriage, the first gay priest, first woman priest in the city, all that sort of stuff. It was an inner city church in what was called “crimes square” which at the time was the worst, so-called most dangerous block in Washington, between 16^th and 14^th on Newton Street. It was a super active, inner city church, it wasn’t a real standard “Christian values” kind of thing although there obviously were Christian values…

Truer Christian values?

…you would assume, what I would assume is a Christian value. You know, they were looking out for people. I can remember on Palm Sunday 1968, it was the day or two days after Martin Luther King was killed.

How old were you?

I was 6 and there was major rioting going on 14^th St. which was like a block and a half away and the whole church marched down the middle of 14^th St. and buildings were still on fire.

Were you a part of this march?

Yeah, I was totally there. People ask me what my earliest memories are and that’s gotta be one of my earliest memories. I might remember something before that but that’s the earliest memory I can actually date. I know I can remember that, straight up. That was the kind of upbringing I had. My parents…my mom is a Catholic but she converted to Episcopalian when she married my dad, but as time went on she started to go back to her original Catholic stuff, although she’s not a practicing Catholic in the sense of going to any kind of church, she’s just more of a Catholic expert. Both my parents are totally smart about all matters theological. They’re totally brilliant.

My dad actually was the religious editor for the Washington Post but I don’t think that had a whole lot of bearing on anything for us. The kids were made to go to church, we all had to go right up until about the early 70’s. Then the family kind of went haywire, as a lot of families did in the 70’s. Everything just kind of went to hell and it was sort of like…my dad was the only one who ever went to church after that. I stopped going to church in 19…I would guess…74 or 75.

My mom would never go back to church, the kids would still go on Christmas Eve with my dad because he still goes to St. Stephens. He’s still a super active person there, he’s on the board of the Washington Free Clinic which operates out of the church, they do a lot of AIDS outreach stuff. That church is, even today, and this is just relatively speaking, as way more mainstreamy and soft-core as they are, still compared to other churches, they’re pretty radical and they’re still super involved in the neighborhood. He still goes, we all go on Christmas Eve as a family. We come out, like “Hey it’s the kids!” shake hands, make an appearance.

I think none of my grandparents were religious at all, in fact they were almost all kind of anti-religious. My dad’s parents did not practice at all, he got into it on his own. He wanted to be a priest. My mom’s parents didn’t practice. My grandmother was a Baptist, a Hard Shell Baptist. Which means…Hard Shell Baptist means that sin doesn’t really count with them because they’re such good Baptists that sin just kind of bounces off them. So they can get away with all kinds of stuff. You know what I’m saying? That’s what a Hard Shell Baptist is, it’s not like the fundamentalists. My grandfather came from a super Catholic family but he didn’t practice. My mom got into Catholicism through her aunts.

It was weird, there was a lot of religion around us, my family knows a lot about religions, not just religion but religions. We still have a lot of dinner table arguments about it. None of the five kids, I have three sisters and a brother, I don’t think any of us are practicing anything, or have any interest in practicing anything, that I know of. I could be wrong. I personally totally have major problems with all organized religion. I don’t have a clue, I don’t have clue about how people can actually embrace something so preposterous. That’s my religious story.

What is your idea or concept of a higher power, or of God? Do you have one?

I don’t know. Ultimately for me something exists that gives people some kind of strength or faith or whatever. I don’t know what it is and I certainly don’t perceive it as anything really tangible other than the fact that it seems to really ease some people’s load. I think what it comes down to is people are terrified of death. Lord knows I am! But whatever, if by creating a scenario…well, you know… It’s sort of like outer space…what’s beyond it? You can say “it’s a sea of cotton candy” if that makes it seem good to you at least it’ll be fun and sweet. Fair enough! If it eases your load to think that, then cool. For me, when I think about it in terms like that it actually just exacerbates it because I know I’m bullshitting myself because I don’t really believe. I don’t think I’m an atheist…but I don’t even think I rate as agnostic either.

A lot of people say “well yeah, there’s a higher power or whatever” but I’m not even exactly so sure about that. I just think that something exists within human beings that makes them able to create something, and manifest something within themselves that gives them solace. I could be wrong, that’s okay, if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. People can get terribly offended when you doubt their decision, but it’s not that I so much doubt their decision, it’s that I doubt mine. They can do what they want.

I talk about this stuff with my dad all the time. I go to these Christmas Eve masses and I listen to these sermons and I think “this is just rife with fuckin’ contradiction and hypocrisy!” and I go back and I argue with my dad…I go like, how can you…like the Nicene Creed, are you familiar with it? It’s a creed that says something like “I believe there’s only one God…blah, blah, blah” It’s a creed, like The Pledge of Allegiance for Episcopalians. It terrifies me! It terrifies me because if there’s ever a major default self-destruct button in a religion for me, it’s when it refuses to acknowledge other religions. It immediately says “my fuckin’ pie in the sky is real but yours isn’t” Which is just bullshit. I have a lot of problems with that.

When I see people who are totally devout and really comfortable though, that’s cool…I envy that…at least I envy their ability to create that appearance. Some people might even assume I have that too. They might think “that guys really got it together, he’s really got it figured out” HA! (laughs)

I met some Buddhists a few months ago. There were these priests that were traveling around the country from Southern India, they’re exiles from Tibet. They were opening for The Beastie Boys in Washington, there was a benefit…

They were doing music?

Yeah, it was The Artists for Tibet, it was a benefit. The monks chant, they did music. There’s a lot of mystique about Buddhism and stuff like that, and whatever, I don’t have a lot of time for that kind of stuff. The guys were amazing though, they were very interesting fellas. They were all older dudes and they laughed all the time and seemed quite confident. I enjoyed being around them and they made me feel like they were actually kind of holy guys.

I talked to this woman who was traveling with them as their handler, and while they were watching The Beastie Boys play, it was insane of course the kids were going nuts, and those guys were just laughing and laughing. I said to the woman, “This must be pretty crazy for them.” She said “Not really, they’ve had a crazy tour this time…” I asked her “What do you mean?” She told me that during the trip their spiritual leader had died. He’d just dropped dead at age 90 or whatever. I said “Oh my god! Was it devastating for them?” she said no, for them it’d be sort of like, you know, if you and I were friends, talking and then one of us got on a bus to go to Denver. For them it’s like, oh well he’s just over there now, we’ll see him at some other point.

Then she told me they had been in Salt Lake City doing a performance in a library or something and some guy who had some kind of grievance with the world decided to take advantage of this gathering and he took it as an opportunity to kidnap some people and kill them. So this guy kidnapped the Buddhists and a handful of other people and while he was doing that there was a meeting next door of a bunch of off duty police and one of the cops happened to notice something amiss and he stepped out as the guy yanked the hostages into a room and he jumped in with them and became a hostage too.

Apparently the bad guy said to the hostages “okay, I’m gonna kill a couple of you to let them know I’m not kidding around, how many people have I got here?”The cop said “You got sixteen people including me.” So the guy says, “okay, line up against the wall, who wants to die first?” or whatever, you know, this is my version of the story she told me, which is probably her version of what happened…although she was there…

As a hostage?

No, not as one of the hostages but she was at the event where this went down. So anyhow she said this woman started to flip out, one of the hosatges started to flip out, and was screaming and she distracted the gunman and right when he turned the cop pulled out his gun, killed the guy, shot him in the head and dropped him. This was all in front of the monks, they were right there! She said the monks immediately ran over and circled the guy. He dropped on the floor and they circled the guy to make sure he had a good send off because, you know, the circumstances of his travel were not good. He was in a really bad karmic cycle at that moment. (laughs)

I’d say so!

Yeah, so I thought it was…they impressed me. I really respected the fact that they were so…I’ll just say they impressed me. So anyway when I came back I said to my dad, “Ya know, I think I’m gonna become a Buddhist.” of course, ya know, totally joking…and my dad was like, “Look, give Christianity a chance!”

I appreciate people like these monks or people like Mother Teresa or Father Wendt, the priest who baptized me who was a total fuckin’ fighter. The Barrigan brothers, Mitch Snyder, even people like Jimmy Carter, who talk about their faith being such a big part of what they do. Those people, that’s where faith seems pretty darn good. That obviously is, of course, totally offset by endless, stupid, silly wars and power struggles because of the whole organized religion thing.

But those guys, I think it’s cool when I’ve met Buddhists. I’ve been to protests, like once I was at a protest at The Department of Energy, everyone was like “We’re gonna shut down the DOE! We’re gonna block all the doors!” It was pretty terrifying. There were a lot of cops. We were all just standing around like, let’s all go get beat up! Then these Buddhists came, these guys with drums, and they start playing and everyone was less scared. It was really cool.

I’m not a Buddhist, I know some Buddhists, I’m not interested in being a Buddhist. I just think the one’s I’ve met, they’re at least using the stuff kind of right. Even with all the mystical stuff, I still have to say fair enough, good enough for them.

I usually don’t talk about religion at all because for me it’s a subject that’s really closed. I don’t talk about it except with friends. You know we (Fugazi) have a lot of Christian followers…

I was gonna ask you if you did.

We get tons of them and they often want to talk with me about Christianity. When I say to them I’m not really a Christian, although my dad would argue with me about that, but I say I don’t buy into that. A lot of times these kids want to know why I’m not more overt with my Christian message and I tell them it’s becauseI don’t have one. I don’t buy that. They think it’s bullshit. They accuse me of telling half the truth. I say to them “Fuck You! Don’t ever fucking tell me what my truth is!”

I had a Mormon kid come up to me once and tell me that he felt like it was really good I was doing such good work but that he felt bad because I wasn’t quite there and he gave me The Book of Mormon. I wrote him a letter and said, “I didn’t say fuckin’ shit to you about your fuckin’ religion, don’t ever, ever presuppose anything about me or my beliefs!”

My beliefs are complicated. What we’ve just talked about, that’s just the surface of it all really. Like I say, I don’t like talking about religion for the most part because it’s tedious, a lot of it, because if someone believes in something, anything you say to them at all to suggest that you don’t fully believe in it immediately throws them into a really weird defensive posture or mechanism because this is what they’re hanging their fuckin’ hat on. This is what makes them not scared. If you say to them “I don’t really think your truth is everybody’s truth”it immediately means “You’re fucked!” but that’s tough. That’s their decision.

I’ve known plenty of people who are totally religious and I feel like, well, cool. I guess I kinda equate that with people who are in really good shape and who take good care of themselves. They’ve got something covered and that’s really, really good but just because I’m kind of out of shape, or I’m in less good shape I should say, that doesn’t question their…it doesn’t mean I can’t admire them for having that part of their life sorted out.

Do you really think they’ve got it sorted out?

They seem to be at peace. If they are at peace, I’m happy for them. I don’t know…

Many people see in you, and in Fugazi’s music generally, a higher, more refined set of ideals and values than is typical for an artist working in your field. The power of your playing and your presence combined with your obviously serious message and intention, as you’ve said, have lead some to think of your work in spiritual terms. Does your own experience making music give you a sense of the spiritual or of a transcendent feeling of some kind?

Well, when people use words like “spiritual” I just feel like…well, whatever…we’re a band. We play music. When you say “spirituality” it suggests to me that something special needs to be accessed to get into it. Like you have to be “spiritual” to reach that. But that’s bullshit. To me it’s like music is the thing…there is a spirit to music, that’s the whole point!

People often ask me, “what is your message?” They ask if I can state my message more clearly or whatever and I tell them, “The message IS the music and the music is the message!” That’s the whole point.

Music is powerful, powerful stuff. It’s been trivialized because it’s a marketable thing. There is the commercial music that can be sold. That has trivialized it. To me though, if you think about a lot of the music that’s sold by the major labels, that’s bought and sold, a lot of it is like the Jim and Tammy Fae Bakker version of religion. It’s packaged and delivered, it’s easy to digest. But true religion, as practiced by people who are fully down, you can’t package that stuff. Music is the same. It is the real thing. It exists on its own. It doesn’t need to be qualified as “spiritual music” or as “political music”. Music, unto itself, as a singular thing is enough. It doesn’t need to be qualified by anything.

When we play, the way I look at it is any show, any show has potential. You have a venue, the setting. You have people, you have the band, you have the people in the crowd…then there are the circumstances around the gathering, you have the weather…there’s all these different things. The potential for something really good to happen is there. Because when people get together it’s an opportunity for this energy thing just because everyone is there. I see so many bands and frankly, I’m surprised how rarely it happens that people actually take it to that level. I think it has something to do with someone not giving it up right. I’m not saying it’s the band, it could be the crowd, it could be the band, it could be the setting, whatever.

The way I look at it, when I’m playing at least, I know I’m just there for the full…when I play, that is…I think it’s as free as I’ve ever been. Straight up. Because I just don’t give a fuck anymore. When I’m playing I try to go for the full commitment. The times when I’m not happy are the times when I’m aware that I’m playing. Those are the shows that suck. When I become self-conscious I hate it. When I’m just out there making a total fool of myself, just being totally gross about it, that’s fun.

When you and the band write songs, is that process of creating similar to the live experience, in terms of seeking a feeling of flow? I guess what I’m asking is how much is your material a product of conscious thought and what part of it is the result of letting go of yourself?

Musically or lyrically?

Is there a difference?

Yeah. Musically we write together as a band. The four of us just write. Sometimes we have an idea, then the four of us just mess around with it. We’ll tear it apart and play it like 10,000 different ways. Everyone just tries different things and we keep hammering away until something makes sense. So musically it comes really naturally. The four of us just play together. Brendan might come in with an idea or a piece and one of us might not be able to play it so we might say, “I’ll do this instead.” All four of us write our own parts for the most part.

It’s funny because sometimes when we try to remember songs, I’ll say “well, the song goes like this…” then I’ll play my part and that part will totally mean nothing to Guy or Joe, they’ll just look at me and go “…uuuh…I don’t know what you’re talking about.” So it’s like that. If someone forgets their part, the rest of us are of no help at all.

Lyrically, I don’t have a fuckin’ clue. I actually wish I could write a song right now. I haven’t been able to write a song in months and months and months. I’ve written like one half-assed song in the last two years and it’s really a fuckin’ drag to me. Actually, that’s not true. For the band I’ve written one half-assed song, for myself I’ve written a couple songs that I’ve felt pretty good about but they’re not really band songs. I can’t really explain to you why they’re not either. They’re just not.

When I’m writing a song, when it’s happening, there’s really no formula. A song like Repeater I must’ve rewritten that thing about 200 times. I’d just walk my dog every night and I’d keep going over the lines over and over and over again. Changing up certain lines, trying different ones, totally taking it apart because you know, that song has such a small amount of lines. Lyrically it’s sort of a bunch of interjections. So I was trying to find the most powerful lines for the eight lines that make up the lyrics. They had to be really concise.

Then for a song like And The Same, I swear to god…I know you hear people say this kind of shit all the time but I swear to god I woke up one night, I had this idea for a song, I turned my light on, sat up in bed, got a pad of paper and wrote the whole thing from the beginning to the end, straight out. Man, I wish to god I could figure out how I did that, cause I can’t do that anymore.

The same went for the Pailhead stuff, I used to write that stuff from beginning to end. I’d just sit down and go Plooowah! and just write it all out. Even on And The Same I have the original lyrics and there’s nothing even crossed out. There’s a song I’m working on now, I’ve replaced every line like 25 times and it still isn’t that great, it’s just okay.

You know what the problem is now? The problem is I don’t have a clue what I’m writing about! One thing that has changed is before, I had a really clear vision of who I was writing to. Throughout the time I’ve been writing songs I’ve been a part of a community and I knew who I was singing to. In 1994 I don’t have a fucking clue who I’m singing to anymore. This is due partly to the phenomenon of Fugazi, which crosses so many various lines. I mean we have Punk Rockers, we have skater kids, we have the political guys, we have the indie rock kids, college kids, older people…all these different types of people who come out for shows and who like us. It’s too hard to write…I just don’t know who I’m writing to at this point.

So if I write something really direct some would say “well it’s just typical, trivial political posturing” or whatever. “There’s another fucking didactic rant, another Sermon from the Mount.” Which I totally hate, I just hate that kind of shit. I mean opinions become sermons because you sing them? Then if I try to use a lot of metaphor and I try to smudge it a little bit, people say “He’s backing off and can’t be straight forward” or “He’s trying to get an “A” in some college poetry class or something” or even worse, they assume I’m actually singing about the metaphor! So like if I use something like this tree (taps on the tree) as a metaphor for a community or whatever, kids say, “Dude wrote a song about a tree!”

Ian’s some kind of Arbor Day freak?

Exactly, like if I used a thunderstorm as a metaphor for war they’d be like,“Dude’s into weather I guess.”

A Punk meteorologist…

Right! It’s partly because Fugazi is a phenomenon on the level it is but it’s also, I think mostly due to the fact that the music I’m involved with is just completely under siege at the moment. 95% of it is a fucking joke because the major labels have just come in and uprooted everything and changed the language. They’ve just completely changed the circumstances to the point that now the lines are so blurred, you have no idea…

On one hand it’s like, fuck the majors, fuck’em, fuck’em, fuck’em they’re such bastards! They buy up stuff and use money to undermine everything. On the other hand, I have friends who are on majors and I’m like hey, good for them, they’re getting some money, they can live. You know, fuck man, I’ve been playing music for a long time, people I’ve known for years play in bands, tour, get home and work their day jobs. For me that was sort of the point, it was okay to work a day job. It wasn’t really a goal to make music into a meal ticket. But what can I say? I haven’t worked a day job in a lot of years. On the other hand I would, I did work at a record store up until about 1987/8. Then again I could argue that motherfuckin’ Dischord is a day job!

I was gonna say, I think of you as someone who is on the clock 24 hrs a day.

The whole major label thing today has turned into a mess. I did an interview with this guy recently and I made an analogy to him about the majors, it went something like…

….In the beginning Punk Rock and underground stuff existed and we were like farmers who had a valley, a secret fertile valley, and everybody had a little plot of land and everybody took good care of their little plots of land or if they didn’t that little plot would die but everybody around them could still maintain theirs. Like every little indie label was a little garden in this valley. The valley where everyone was doing their thing and kicking ass. The valley didn’t make a lot of extra food but it made enough to keep everybody fed. It was a really healthy thing. No one was getting rich but we were all stayin’ warm, ya know?

Then one day someone left the valley and said to the factory guys “yo! I got this really fertile little piece of land over here, why don’t you check it out?” The factory guys say, “Cool! Let’s go check it out!” So they go to this one fuckin’ little garden and it just explodes with bounty. So immediately all the factory guys come in and buy up as many of the gardens in the valley as they can. They want what the land produces, they don’t want to reinvest in it, they just want to rape the land because that’s how they work…they’re factories.

They want to pull as much out of the land as they can and then they fuckin’ leave. All I’ve ever been interested in is maintaining and defending my little plot. I don’t want to sell it to anybody. This may be a totally bullshit analogy but for me it kinda makes sense. If I’m wrong, then at least I went out wrong on a poetic note. I am an idealist, a lot of people might say I’m a fucking idiot. Maybe I am an idiot! I guess I just feel like it’s far more interesting to go out like that. It’s just too predictable to become one of them.

Part of it is that I come from a point of view where I remember when it was us and them.A lot of kids nowadays see it differently, and I’m not saying anything bad about them, it’s just not as clearly defined as it used to be. Before it was way obvious. When people say or ask me “How can you say no to major labels?” I say…

How can you say “yes”?

Exactly! How can you say “yes”? Are you kidding? What do they have to do with anything? They just say “What’s the problem? They’re just trying to help you get exposure to reach more people.” I just say puh-lease…

I remember a time when the majors were totally disinterested in anything to do with us and I was happy about that. I loved the idea of us building our own world and the thing was, we DID! There was a network way before Nirvana did their record. I’d been all over, traveling the world before that. I knew people all over the country. The network did exist and everyone was perfectly happy about it. Then as soon as someone made some money people looked around and said, “This sucks! I want to make some money too!”

On the other hand, not only was it bound to happen, it’s just as well that it did. Everything just goes on. It only gives us all a new set of circumstances to work in and keep ourselves entertained. It has resulted, at least in this particular place and time, in the situation I find myself in though, where I don’t have a clue who it is I’m singing to.

(sound in the mic of a gust of wind…)

Fuck that!

…about 20 apples just fell out of the tree we’re sitting under…

I wanted to ask, and I’m not sure exactly how to put this but, I’m wondering how what you’re talking about might relate to what happened with Kurt Cobain’s recent suicide. I’m talking about the issue of not knowing who you’re singing to. Kurt was obviously someone who cared deeply about his music. Do you think the sort of disconnect you’re talking about might’ve played a role in his tragic end? I’m not suggesting that his signing to a major label killed him, I just see this disconnect between serious artists and them finding mass appeal as being a potentially treacherous issue.

I was talking with Beck the other day and he was telling me that as his own star is rising he feels the contradiction of drawing people together through music but then having stardom and all its trappings erect a barrier where there didn’t used to be one. I think this mix of adoration and alienation could act kind of like a speedball or something it’s a rush that can kill you, and maybe in Kurt’s case it is what killed him…

…yeah it did…

Do you ever find yourself struggling with these sorts of issues related to Fugazi and your own popularity and “bigness”?

No, not so much because I think I do a pretty good job of sort of…

(A guy walks up looking for Beck who was staying at Calvin’s house)

I feel like I’ve done at least a fairly good job of meting it out. I’ve had a lot of transition time. I mean by the time you first started going to shows I was already kind of a well-known figure. When was that?

1982.

Yeah, so it’s been like 14 years (laughs). I’ve had a lot of time to transition. Kurt’s transition was like, Hi, I’m in a band called Nirvana, we’re from the Northwest, we sell like 10,000 records… to the next day being...Hi I’m the guy who just sold 4 million records….

I’ve also…my whole thing has always been about community. You know, people often have talked about Fugazi, especially in the beginning as being “Ian’s band” but it’s really clear it’s not my band. I’m comfortable being a part of a community and being a part of the band. It’s not just me, with Kurt it was kind of all on him. Dave and Krist were always sort of like the others in some peoples minds. For me it’s like fuck that, the band is the band.

Washington, you know, where I’m from is all about the community. The community there is a really heavy deal. I’ve always felt like that’s part of who I am. I’m from Washington not because I think it’s like the best place or anything. It’s just that it’s where I’m from and I’m acknowledging that this is not me, this is about us.

I can take it to a further place with Punk Rock. It is a network I’m a part of. Even though I’m well-known and it can be frustrating when kids can’t relate to me as a person because of that, and I can find it hard to relate to them in return… but in the end that’s all just tough-titty, ya know? It’s partly due to age too. I’m 32 years old. A lot of these kids are 18, 19 ,20 years old or whatever. I understand that. That’s cool.

As far as I’m concerned, I feel really comfortable. Like when I’m at these shows (Yo-Yo-A-Go-Go festival in Olympia,WA.) I’m comfortable even though I know people are looking at me and saying “ “there’s the dude from Fugazi” or whatever. They may in their own minds have me confused with someone like a guy in Nirvana, they might think of me as a fuckin’ star or whatever but I’m really solid in my mind about who I am. That’s partly because I’ve had a lot of practice but, it’s also because I’m not shooting heroin. So it’s a little easier for me to hold onto my reality. I’m not a junkie. Whatever…with Kurt it was a combination of things. I mean a lot of people have to deal with fame and they don’t all die. He had a tough time, I don’t know…it’s not my place to talk about that though. The point is…

It is possible to stay grounded…

…well at least I can try. Maybe I’m not. Some people might say I’m not. Some people might say I’m a lofty little prick! I’d like to think though that if they ever talked to me they might find that I was approachable. I don’t walk around with an entourage or nothing. I’m just a guy who is around.

If I may I’d like to just switch gears completely here and ask you if you can think of an event or circumstance in your life that has been mysterious or inexplicable in some way. I’m interested in hearing about anything you’ve experienced that might’ve led you to question the nature of reality. Do you have a story like that?

Hmmm…you know when I was a kid I was really into supernatural stuff. I was fuckin’ fascinated by it. Totally. Ghost books, I loved that shit! Loved it! Any paranormal stuff, I was fully into it. As I’ve gotten older, and this is sort of one of the sad things of life, for the most part nothing that has ever happened to me has been beyond…well, there have been some coincidences that made me stop and go “Wow! That’s crazy!”

Can you think of one?

…oh I don’t know…stuff like where you’re reading the paper about some guy named Steve and the phone rings and what do you know…it’s Steve! That kind of thing.

Mundane miracles?

Yeah, whatever…I’ve seen music performances, seen things that have been totally mind-blowing but they’re just generated by people. That’s the thing, the thing I think is a miracle, what is unbelieveable is how insanely powerful human minds are. Things like ghosts and all that, it’s amazing that people have gotten themselves totally gassed on the idea.

I do remember this one time when I was kid, visiting this place in Washington called The Old Stone House. It’s the oldest house in Washington, built in the 1600’s. It’s in Georgetown and all my life I’d heard that place was haunted.

How old were you?

I’m not sure, maybe 12. It was a given, the place was haunted. It’s in the guide books, you know...no lamp will stay lit after 10pm, they go out inexplicably… that kind of thing. So we were down there one day, we’d go down there a lot, since it was in Georgetown we’d just stop by on our bikes and walk around. So anyway, this one time we were there and we asked the guy who worked there to tell us some ghost stories about the place. He told us about the lamps, and he told us about how a lot of people had reported seeing an old woman sitting in a rocking chair and we were like “Oh shit!”

Then he told us that sometimes just by talking about it spirits will enter the room! So any way, right when he says this a fuckin’ door just swings open! We all just totally flipped! Like…Fuuuuuuck!

There was no one there?

No. It was a big old door too, and there was no one there, it just opened. The guy was definitely nowhere near the door either. He didn’t push a button or anything. He even went “Whoa!” Most of that kind of shit, what’s amazing to me about it, is that our minds can just add shit up and be like…door opens: a fuckin’ ghost just came in the room!

Didn’t I hear once that Cynthia Connolly lived in a house in D.C. that people thought was haunted?

Yeah, I saw a ghost there supposedly. She lived in this house on Hawthorne St in Washington. It was a creepy house, it was definitely weird. She used to hear shit there all the time. It was a really old house, a Victorian they were renting. It was furnished too so there was other people’s stuff in there. It had a weird feeling, like someone else had set it up for themselves. It went beyond just that though. Like I’d be talking to her on the phone at night and at like 2 in the morning she’d say, “I can hear someone walking around in the attic.” This is when she was the only person there, ya know? Then she’d go “wait, shhh…” and I’d go “What? What’s going on?” She’d say “I can hear someone banging around up there!” I’d say…that sucks, ya know? She’d get freaked out then that would start to freak me out.

Once I was over there, this is my only experience with anything weird there, we were sitting in this room watching television andout of the corner of my eye I saw this woman, this blonde woman just come out of the kitchen and go by in the hallway, she just walked past the doorway. I assumed it had been her mom I’d seen and later we were talking and I asked her when her mom had gotten back from California and she told me her mom was still in California. So I asked her who was with us in the house, because I’d just seen that woman walk by and she goes “there’s no one here”. Maybe it was because all that other stuff had happened, it could’ve been a trick of my eye, I don’t know.

You know, when I was a kid, I’d be walking down the street…I’d be walking down the street, I’d be walking behind somebody, I’d see somebody walking ahead of me, and I’d look down for a second, look back up, and they’d be gone. That particular thing happened to me all the time. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if that means they weren’t there, I just imagined that they were, or that I lost track of time, I’d been looking down way longer than I’d thought I had and I’d missed it when the person had walked up into a house or whatever…in my mind of course I thought they were disappearing. That they were ghosts. I really wanted to believe in stuff like that.

As I got older I realized it’s not so pat. There’s not just a heaven, it’s not so easy. Once I realized this my mind started to disassemble all the things like that. Whereas before true ghost stories were believable to me, like check out this picture of a ghost! I look at those pictures today and I’m like Come on, puh-lease! Somebody just blew some cigarette smoke or some shit. When I was a kid my mind wanted to believe bad. Now my mind doesn’t want to believe, it might have something to do with growing up, it might have something to do with megrowing up, I don’t know.

It’s kind of a drag. I gotta tell you it’s taken a lot of…I mean, it’s made me much more of a boring hang. I don’t gas on stuff. I don’t get all excited and enthusiastic about a lot of things. I’m just not a believer like that, I’m a real fuckin’ rationalist. I look at things and I go, if something happens it happens because of this and that happens because of that. In some ways it’s kinda too bad, but ya know, what can you do?

I’ve had the thought before that maybe people experience or are led to believe mystical occurrences and supernatural phenomena as a reaction to the mysterious nature of life itself. You know, as a reaction to the big questions at the heart of being, like why are we here, How are we here, etc. etc. Life is very mysterious after all.

Sure.

Maybe UFO’s and ghosts are a way for people to imagine the mystery of life as a concrete phenomenon that can be seen and maybe even understood?

Yeah, I’ve encountered tons of people who’ve told me about far-out stuff and they’ve told me this happened. They’re very sure of it and I’m like that’s cool. I don’t believe the stories though. They may be sure whatever they tell me happened but in my mind I’ve already figured out what could’ve happened and why people could’ve said that.

The way my mind works is that I always try to think around both sides of a thing. If someone tells me these people all saw Sasquatch or whatever I immediately think it just doesn’t make sense that this creature would come out in this part of the country at this particular time and never again. My mind wants to figure things out. Like UFO’s, how could it be that all these motherfuckers see a UFO and then the Air Force can just cover it up completely? It just seems unlikely to me that all these guys who work for the Air Force and are in on the secret would go to their graves without ever spilling the secret, it seems unlikely. I can’t believe that. I immediately start thinking of the things that don’t make sense.

Things like The Loch Ness Monster, it’s all too pat. I like the stories. I get a kick out of hearing about local monster lore because I think it’s funny. Not because I believe it. I guess mostly because that shit just didn’t happen to me. A lot of times when people say it happened to them and they make a big deal about paranormal stuff there’s something at stake, they’re getting paid for it in some way. When I heard the guy who took the picture of The Loch Ness Monster died and admitted it was all fake, I was like, yeah, big surprise!

END OF SIDE ONE

PART TWO can be read HERE

(Photo of Ian MacKaye with my parakeet Tiny from my personal archives)

PUNK IS AN ATTITUDE THE WRECKS BESSIE OAKLEY RENO 1984 I...

Tue, 01 May 2012 14:44:00 -0700

The Wrecks by Cari L. Marvelli

Bessie Oakley by Cari L. Marvelli

Jone Stebbins by Cari L. Marvelli

Birthday collage to me from Bessie.

PUNK IS AN ATTITUDE THE WRECKS BESSIE OAKLEY RENO 1984

I don’t have a clue what goes on behind the scenes of incarnate reality aside from what I’ve gleaned from the countless glimpses behind the veil I’ve secured through close encounters of the trippy kind with minor to massive doses of psychedelic substances over the years. These psycho-spiritual excursions may have provided me with some very useful modeling of the post death/pre-birth state but they sure didn’t leave anything resembling a neat little cosmic answer tied up with string on my doorstep!

I’m compelled then by observation and experience to take a rather agnostic view of the realms beyond. It seems like the only sensible position to take, after all, if these bardos were well understood they wouldn’t be the realms beyond. Instead they’d be a Subway Sandwich location or something. My position on these matters means I can’t honestly say I believe in reincarnation, but I’m also able to say I don’t not believe in it either.

That said, there are certain people I’ve known who, without my even immediately recognizing it, are subtly related in my mind with another semi-specific place and time. My old friend Bessie Oakley is one of those people. As long as I’ve known her I’ve always associated her presence with that of a frontier woman of The Old West.

If you knew her you’d agree it wouldn’t take a great leap of imagination to see why I made that connection. It’s not rooted in bunch of metaphysical b.s. that’s for sure. Heck, all you have to do is say her name out loud…( )…. If that isn’t the name of a heroine from the out of cowboy days dag blammit, I’ll eat mah hat!

It also doesn’t hurt that Bessie’s from Reno, NV. (or was it Sparks that she grew up in?) Not to mention her look. She is very beautiful but not in a overly delicate or super girly way. Even though I knew her well as a young lady there was a flinty edge to her appearance and demeanor that gave her good-natured summery glow a formidable quality.

She wasn’t too tall, she wasn’t too small, she had a frame that would’ve served her well splitting a cord of wood or tearing up the dance floor in town at the saloon. If she wore make-up at all she never wore much of it. When she thought hard about something her clear blue eyes would get squinty and I could just picture her surveying a stranger riding up on his horse toward the porch of her homestead from across a sun bitten prairie.

Her personal style did nothing to place her squarely in the times we lived through together as friends either. All through the Punk/Hardcore days she wore her blonde hair down past her shoulders and often in braids. She wore denim, long skirts and sensible shoes and with only a minor tweak here and there she could’ve strolled onto the set of a Western movie and straight into the camera’s eye without anyone having to shout “cut!”

Her personality was right at home in her person too. She was and still is funny as hell with a sense of humor that reflected her love of John Waters and which could make even the guys blush. She is tender hearted and warm but she didn’t take any sh-t from creeps. I always knew her to be patient and very open minded but she didn’t put up with nonsense or suffer fools gladly.

She also happens to be the very definition of a maverick pioneer, if not in terms of settling the land and breaking ponies, then at least culturally speaking. She and her all-girl Hardcore band The Wrecks were matter-of-fact Riot Grrrl before the first people to call themselves “Riot Grrrls” were out of grade school! I might be forgetting one but I can’t think of another all-girl, or even girl-centric band, in that early American Hardcore era.

The Wrecks were a not-at-all-distant memory by the time I met Bessie in 1984 and soon afterwards, another Wreck, Jone Stebbins, who immediately became one of my dear friends as well. Bessie and Jone weren’t only known for being Wrecks either. They were equally well regarded and probably just as well known for their work as the co-editors of one of the most engaging and well loved fanzines of the time, a brilliant, funny, and charming off-the-cuff serial work of art known as Paranoia ”the magazine for blind and illiterate punks”.

As fate would have it, a few years later in San Francisco I came to be friends with the band’s drummer Lynn Perko. She and I even played music together a few times when her band Sister Double Happiness was on a hiatus. I sucked, she was great, our jams didn’t leave the practice place. I was an acquaintance of The Wrecks’ singer Helen in S.F. as well. At the time I knew her she was working at the old Hard Rock Cafe location over on Van Ness and we’d all hang out together with the likes of Gary Floyd, Debbie Gordon, Phillip Gilbeau, Roddy Bottum and that whole Texas/S.F. Dicks/ Faith No More /later to become Imperial Teen scene.

Even though most Punks, myself included, only got to experience The Wrecks’ music from their legendary cassette releases, I also had the good fortune of feeling the impact of their energy in my life as personal friends. It has to be said though that you didn’t have to know them personally or even know their songs to be touched by their influence. The fact is, if you were involved in the American Punk scene in that era you likely were affected by them whether you knew it or not.

I say this because they were hugely important individuals in the compact but very vital and widely influential Reno punk scene, a scene known by its nickname Skeeno. That city’s motto the “Biggest Little City in the World” could’ve very accurately been applied to its Punk scene alter ego as well in terms of the disproportionate size of its footprint on the national scene. All the touring bands played Reno back then. For instance if you lived there you probably saw Minor Threat, I lived in the much bigger city of Seattle and never had the chance to see them live.

Of course Reno didn’t just import the great bands they exported some too. By far the most well known of these exports is the mighty 7SECONDS. If you follow my blog you know I was great friends with 7 SECONDS (who I met through Bessie) and that as a teenager I had the life-altering experience of seeing the country as a roadie for the band. I also shared a place with Kevin, his girlfriend Angie, and some other folks in Reno for a while around the time of that tour.

When I said earlier that you didn’t have to know The Wrecks or have even heard them to be touched by their broader influence, I’m thinking primarily about how their presence was felt nationally through the gender inclusive, proto Punk Rock-feminist message woven into 7 SECONDS’ songs and aura. It may seem strange that in a politically radical scene like American Hardcore there were very few bands singing about gender equality but it’s true.

7 SECONDS weren’t just any band either. They were one of the most popular bands around and they toured a lot. Everywhere they went they made a point to address women’s and girl-centered issues head on from the stage. Kevin’s lyrics also spoke specifically about defending and promoting women’s roles and rights in Punk Scene itself.

Like I said, this was a very rare message to hear before 7 SECONDS but it was more common after they delivered it to the scene. So it was no small thing. I knew a lot of girls and guys, myself included, who deeply appreciated this strong pro-woman perspective being voiced in the very dude-centric, too often very macho wilderness of the scene at that time.

I’ve read many interviews, and I’ve heard Kevin talk on stage very clearly about how his gender inclusive perspective was influenced by the big role women played in the Reno scene. Bessie and Jone, The Wrecks, he and his brother Steve Youth’s sister Cari and other women helped shaped that scene into the special one it was. It should also be noted that the 7 SECONDS brothers were raised by a strong mother who was known to the scene, and thanked on every one of the band’s releases, as Ma Seconds.

That’s what I mean about the ripple effect Bessie, Jone, Lynn and Helen’s music has had and continues to have on the world. It’s also worth mentioning that I was urged several times to write this post by a woman who herself has long been a prolific and inspirational progenitor of The Wrecks’ motto “Punk is an Attitude”, none other than Bikini Kill/Jigsaw/3rd wave feminist icon, artist, and activist Tobi Vail.

So all you Tumblring teenage Riot Grrrls out there who have had your lives changed by Kathleen and Tobi’s shouts, wails, singing, playing, pounding and professing, you might want to Google ”Wrecks Reno Punk” sometime. You’ll be glad you did.

I’ll close on a personal note…

I can say this now over 25 years after the fact without a hint of embarrassment because it wasn’t a secret then, it’s no secret now, and it only shows what exceptionally good taste I have, and had in human beings even as a young Punk.

Bessie Oakley was my first true love. I hoped then that I wasn’t shooting too far out of my league as a 15 year old in my feelings for her, even if I was I couldn’t help it! My love for Bessie transcended the realm of being a mere crush on some older, unapproachable, scene queen that I could only admire from afar. Yes, she was and will always be, a total Punk Rock hero of mine but she was also one of my closest, most beloved friends and she was someone I (and half the guys in the scene, I’d imagine) simply adored. Like so many other people, I still adore her to this day!

…and I love Jone, Kev, Lynn, Steve, Troy, and all those Reno people who meant so much to me and taught me so many good things about life. Thanks guys!

I’d like to dedicate this post to all of you and to Tobi Vail.

R.I.P. Phillip Gilbeau.

The Wrecks, Bessie Oakley and Jone Stebbins photos by Cari L. Marvelli. Birthday collage made for me from Bessie Oakley (featuring Tim Yohannon, Jone, Silvio from Italy, Barry from Christ on Parade, Martin Sprouse and many more) from my personal archives. Thanks to Cari L. Marvelli.

YOUTH BRIGADE, STRETCH MARKS, SOLUCION MORTAL, MINISTRY OF TRUTH...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:12:00 -0700

YOUTH BRIGADE, STRETCH MARKS, SOLUCION MORTAL, MINISTRY OF TRUTH SAN DIEGO 1984

A group of friends of mine and I started promoting shows in San Diego in 1984 under the name United Effort. The name of our group might be a little obscure and difficult to understand so let me explain: our collective was made up of people uniting together in an effort to put on shows, does that make any sense at all?

Yes, this was back before teenagers were so immersed in the art and technology of branding and graphic design that they were experts in field by the mere fact of their immersion in them. My artwork on these flyers also demonstrates a decidedly unstudied and technologically crude approach to marketing common to most Punk flyers at the time.

This show was cool, I think it might have been the one where I had to physically assault a scene troublemaker who was starting sh-t. I wasn’t a tough guy by any stretch but when you put your own money and time into putting on a show and you’re doing it for no other reason but to “support the scene” and some joker who does nothing but start fights decides to work his magic under your tent…well, that’s all the motivation I needed to toss that sucker out.

It’s cool that all of North America was represented at this one little Punk show put on by a bunch of kids, held at a community hall in the hardscrabble City Heights neighborhood of San Diego. S.D. local faves Ministry of Truth opened the show. We had Solucion Mortal and T.J. punk king Luis Guerena up from Tijuana (It should be noted that they were added to the bill once enough of the band had snuck across the border that they were able to play!). Stretch Marks were down from Winnipeg, MB. and I believe were on tour at the time with our friends and headliners for the night Youth Brigade from L.A.

I can’t remember who Michael Brennan was* and what he did in cooperation with us to put on the show. The people I remember being a part of the United Effort were myself of course, Martin Sprouse, Pat Weekend, Greg Lipman, maybe Chris Lyons or Mark Mullin?…and a bigger, older S.D. Punk from Coronado Island named John Dollard.

We’d gotten to know John after word got out he was going to kick Martin’s ass for a reason that had to do with us “stealing the scene” since our crew put out a zine called Leading Edge that had a posi-straight edge slant that he didn’t like. I guess as we talked his drunk ass out of beating Martin up something clicked in his head and he realized we were not only okay but that we were actually cool and probably shouldn’t be beaten just for doing stuff. Like the old saying goes, only in this instance for John it went something like “If you decide not to beat’em, JOIN’em”

I remember thinking it was weird and cool to see John Dollard sitting in my mom’s backyard drinking lemonade with us when we’d get together to talk about shows we wanted to do. It was also cool to have him on board if sh-t really got out of hand at one of the shows because unlike us he could actually fight.

A United Effort indeed.

R.I.P. Luis Guerena

(* Pat Weakland reminded me that Michael Brennan was the guy who booked The Cathay de Grande up in Hollywood. He put some money into the pot so we could do the show. I think maybe he was hoping to get a piece of Tim Mays’ lock on the SD scene…)

Youth Brigade, Stretch Marks, Solucion Mortal, Ministry of Truth flyer by me from my personal archives.

FEAR, CODE OF HONOR, THE FARTZ FLYER SEATTLE 1982 No big story...

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 19:01:00 -0700

FEAR, CODE OF HONOR, THE FARTZ FLYER SEATTLE 1982

No big story about this one. It’s just a flyer I’ve carried around with me for exactly 30 years. It was one of the first few Punk shows I ever saw. I loved every minute of it.

Fear, Code of Honor, The Fartz flyer from my personal archives.

TRAD’R SAM DRINK MENU SAN FRANCISCO 1987-1992 I did a lot...

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 10:11:00 -0700

TRAD’R SAM DRINK MENU SAN FRANCISCO 1987-1992

I did a lot of drinking between my early teens and my early forties. I took a few years off once or twice but by and large alcohol figured significantly in my life all that time. That’s thirty years of very regular sipping, slurping, guzzling and gulping.

I drank in every mode and mindset imaginable in those years.

I drank socially in groups and crowds and often had a blast. I was more often than not funny, popular, witty, warm, and charming. People liked to drink with me because I was very rarely an out-of-control, boring, or boorish drunk. I had countless very meaningful, genuinely profound conversations and bonding sessions with good friends, close acquaintances, and with complete strangers while lit, smashed, and getting smasher’d.

I also drank alone a lot. These words immediately read as sad and tragic but it wasn’t always, or even mostly depressing or bummerish when I drank solo. In fact many times I had wonderful hours drinking alone, joking, cooking, and singing to myself. I did some of my best thinking and creating in those years while alone and buzzed. Looking back, this was probably due in part to the fact that I was buzzed so much of the time when I did any creating or living good or bad, happy or sad.

Everything I did straight I also did under the influence. I worked. I travelled. I read. I watched movies. I wrote. I slept. I dreamed. I played music. I performed. I argued. I joked. I cried. I laughed. I made out. I had sex. I fell in love. I drove. I rode. I walked, talked, staggered, ran, and crawled, all under the spell of that warm sensation that comes with alcohol consumption.

I could go into long a list of major life milestones I had while ripped, tipsied or merely feelin’ it. I won’t though because you get the idea. There are a bunch.

I drank when I was happy, sad, lonely, when I was content, when I lacked confidence, when I brimmed with it, when I wanted out, when I wanted in, when I wanted to celebrate, annihilate, or obliterate whatever I liked, loved, hated or loathed about people, places, things, situations, and my station in life. I didn’t need much reason, or any reason at all, to pull a cork, twist a cap, crack a can, or pop a lid. Sometimes I was able to stop drinking exactly when I wanted to, other times I couldn’t seem to stop at all.

I first started drinking in my late adolescence as I was struggling with the difficult task of trying to grow a garden of the heart and mind under the shadow of an oppressive, opaque cloud of inadequacy, low self-esteem, and fear. I experienced a tough transition between the magically inclined, imagination-centered world of my childhood and the harsher, more demanding social reality of teendom. Like many thoughtful, creative kids I wasn’t thrilled about entering this new world.

In alcohol I found a panacea custom made for me. Early on it gave me the added confidence to be social, a devil-may-care attitude, and the courage to take risks when they needed taking. It boosted my sense of myself as a thinker (a genius even!) when as the titanic waves of free-form association, inspiration, and revelation came crashing in I was able to stand up (on wobbly legs) and ride that wave where ever it took me. Plus it was fun, cool, and it was social to drink. So it was game on.

Looking at it now, I can see that all my life I drank the way I did for a complex web of motivations, many of which I may never fully understand. One obvious thread I have identified is the mysterious force of genetic predisposition. I’m ¾ Irish ¼ German. I don’t have to explain that these bloodlines in the human family aren’t exactly known for shying away from beers and boozes. We likes the drinks.

It also didn’t hurt that my parents weren’t drinkers but many in my extended family were. This meant I had plenty of exposure to alcohol without having been forced to live through the first hand devastation of in-your-face alcoholism of the kind that might’ve put me off the stuff all together. It might also be worth noting that when I was young the world was run by the generation that had survived The Great Depression and two World Wars. This generation set the tone for a culture that was totally unapologetic about drinking. (questions? see the TV show Madmen for details)

I started out experimenting with beer. As a young Punk Rock kid I liked getting trashed at Jr. High parties in Tacoma, at Punk parties with an older crowd, and on The Ave in Seattle. Sometimes we’d sit on the roof of Domino’s Pizza on The Ave and pound Mickey’s Big Mouths or we might make a plastic jug full of O.J. and vodka and drink it on the sidewalk until I’d find myself leaning against a plate glass window, trying hard to make sense of the visual field spinning around me. I remember really enjoying the feeling of wild freedom that accompanied these times.

As I got older, alcohol was still my party pal but it was also a companion when I found myself feeling let down, alone, and lonely. Drinking seemed to be the one thing that would always keep me afloat when I was adrift on a grey ocean of sadness, bitterness, and hopelessness about my life and the world around me. Alcohol didn’t give me some line about looking on the sunny side and it didn’t judge or reject me because of my grim attitude.

I may not have the love, talent, sex, money, fame, and adulation I want and deserve, and this world may be completely unjust and f-cked, but I have you my sweet friend. You’ll always be there for me. A refuge, a distraction, a collaborator, a lover, a pal. Never hard to find, you don’t ask me to be someone I’m not. All you ask is that I meet you half way and you’ll make sure we get to oblivion together.

It seemed like the least I could do, considering everything I was getting from the deal! So I did it, and did it, and did it again. The bargain seemed to work out most of the time too.

I got pretty blitzed as a teen whenever and wherever I could get away with it but it wasn’t until I was a legal drinker in San Francisco in the late 80’s and early 90’s that I really hit my stride with the stuff. In that era I still drank in houses, apartments, at parties, in parks, the streets, and on the beaches but mostly I drank all over the city in all kinds of bars.

I drank at stripped-down rocker bars on Haight St., super divey dive bars in the Tenderloin, dancey gay bars and quiet, soft-chaired old queen bars on Castro and all over the city. The big political Irish pubs on Geary and Clement Streets were some of my favorites. I liked getting hammered at Chinese places in Chinatown and in the Richmond District, Piano bars in the Marina District, South of Market punk bars, weird old-man bars out in the foggy Avenues, gimmicky yuppie spots in Pacific Heights, wood-paneled cigar bars in the Financial District, Post-Beatnik North Beach literary bars, Italian bars in North Beach too. I drank in old union laborer joints and mariachi places in the Mission. I got fuzzy, feely, friendly and I got ripped, blitzed, blotto and smashed in these spots. I could go on and on…

I walked into these establishments stone-cold sober, lightly buzzed, and already smashed. I entered them eagerly, sadly, bored, excited, in a group, with a friend, and all alone. I breezed out into the afternoon with buzz, I limped out into the night exhausted and broke, and too often I staggered out into it with one hand cupped over an eye wondering how the city could get away with installing sidewalks at such a ridiculously impractical angle!

I usually made it home alright, although I did from time to time find myself regaining consciousness in a doorway as the city woke up around me…

Good morning lady walking your dog! Good morning joggers! Top of the morning to you delivery guy…you wouldn’t happen to be delivering a truck load of aspirin would you? No? Oh, that’s too bad… excuse me while I…BlaaaAAAAARRRph!…

No huge disasters befell me but I made a fool of myself plenty of times, had tons of epic hangovers, made my girlfriend miserable, I more than once narrowly avoided being hit by cars. I fell off some barstools, did a slurred fake Irish accent once or twice (ouch!), may have skipped out on a tab or two. I shared WAY more than a few color-corrected, hyper-saturated accounts of my life and times. I definitely put in some long hours in some smoky, drinky dojos earning a black-belt in b.s. and blarney.

To my credit as a drinker, or maybe it was due to the kindness and irresponsibility of the bar staff, I was never cut-off and I was never asked to leave a bar, not even once that I can remember. I never got in a fight, I can’t even recall ever exchanging heated words with anyone. I never threw up in a toilet stall, I hardly ever spilled a drink. I was never arrested. I was polite to ladies. I didn’t break or even bruise too many hearts. I didn’t pick up any souvenereal diseases because most often once I was trashed I only wanted to be left alone to savor my moment of confusion and peace in peace.

I did more than my fair share of embarrassing sh-t but mostly I kept it together. It is possible I’m forgetting some truly awful story from those days, after all I was drinking at the time.

I wasn’t particularly into the romance of it all like a lot of younger drinkers are about their drinking. The fact that I didn’t read Bukowski or listen to Tom Waits is more proof of this fact than anyone should ever want or need. I didn’t aspire to write or be a character like them either. I just liked the way booze made me feel. It’s just as well that I didn’t try to be a writer anyhow because most of my material wouldn’t have been such a great a read.

My best/worst drunky drinky stories are simple tales of garden variety, slack-jawed, bleary-eyed, sub-felonious idiocy and not much else. A good example of this sort of sorry narrative mini-arc might be one like the time I found myself wending my way home in the wee hours of the morning, taking the scenic route while in a drunken stupor. I stopped along my journey to take a piss all over a beautiful vintage Vespa scooter innocently parked on the sidewalk in The Haight. I recall feeling inexplicably justified and somewhat delighted in this unwarranted random assault on another person’s prized possession.

…take thad you yubbie Mod, Vezpaaah riding azz-ole! Bay backz a bidge, huh…muhvugger?…haha…ha…take thad!…blaaahwww, haw haw…

The stuff of legends…I can almost hear Tom Waits’ gravelly voice singing this tale, only in his song a one-eyed Mod dwarf would probably come out of his house to punch me in the nuts…

I felt terrible about that act the next day for obvious reasons and I still feel bad about it today. Such a stupid sh-tty thing to do. I didn’t do a lot of stuff like that but in 30 years of drinking I did enough stupid sh-t to feel like I should issue a blanket apology to the world at large. Sorry! Sh-t like that hurts others, sends bad vibes into the world, and put major dents in my own shaky self-esteem too. Enough dents you have a banged up car, bang a car up long enough it stops working altogether. Not a great way to get where you wanna go in life.

I don’t recall where I picked up the vintage Trad’r Sam menu pictured above I think it might belong to my brother. It looks to me like it dates from the 1940’s or 50’s. By the look of the place I’d guess not a lot had changed about it by the time my brother, my friends and I started walking in (and staggering out) the door of the place in the 80’s. The prices might have gone up, but not as much as one might suppose. It was still very reasonable.

Trad’r Sam was a classic, well trodden, dog-eared, first-wave Tiki bar that made no bones about serving huge, super-charged boozy drinks. Just look at the drink special on that old menu: “…A LOW-DOWN SNEAKER WRECKER” What does that even mean? Is it a promise you’ll vomit? I guess so!

All the drinks on the menu had descriptive subheadings like that when we drank there. “This will have you seeing double”, “Guaranteed to give you sea-legs” stuff like that. We used to joke that they’d built the slurred voice into its very name, as in “I …hic…love Trdrrr Samz …hic…” The power of the potions was enough of a draw for me but there was plenty to like about the place.

The friendly middle aged female bartenders were warm and welcoming. They hosted a wide, unpredictable variety of drinkers that included elderly neighborhood regulars, working men tying one on after a hard day, gal pals out for a wild night, college-kid spring break types there for the implied sun and fun of the decor, and other assorted low-lifes, weirdos and absolutely normal, well-adjusted aspiring alcoholics like myself.

Like I’ve said, it wasn’t hard to get a little too brightly lit by Tradr Sam’s tiki-torch concoctions. I remember one time as I approached the front door watching a guy walk out, turn, walk nose first into the wall of the alcove the door was set in, apologize to the wall, straighten his hat, and keep on walking. A point for politeness goes to the gentleman in the hat!

The place usually had a vibe of hazy joviality but occasionally the pineapple did turn sour. I was there one time when two older guys started arguing at the bar until one of them stood up, pulled his sportcoat back to reveal a shoulder-holstered revolver. As he did this he repeatedly issued a very sincere sounding promise the other guy:

…Punch me and I’ll KILL ya! Go on…PUNCH ME…do it! I’ll kill ya!…c’mon…

Then a short guy suffering from a potentially lethal case of alcohol induced courage, stood up and put his hands to their chests and set about calming them down. Eventually he prevailed and the men sat back down on their stools.

Later when I asked the bartender about the potentially homicidal scene that had unfolded a little earlier she told me “I’d have called the cops but he IS ONE so I didn’t bother…the cops were ALREADY HERE! Haha..”

Yeeeah…hahaha, uhuuuh…(gulp)

One last story, I can’t resist…

One time my brother Gavin, our third brother by a different father and mother Sean Kelly, and I were drinking at Trad’r Sam until we closed the place and stumbled into the frigid young morning. We were completely out of our heads and we decided it might be a nice to stagger the twenty or so blocks between Trad’r Sam and Ocean Beach so we could enjoy the bracing December air with our toes in the sand and the smell of salt water in our nostrils.

Its hard to say where the warm numbness we’d acquired in Trad’r Sam’s tropical climes gave way to the hypothermic non-feeling we began to experience once we reached the dark emptiness and white noise roar of the beach. Whatever the source of the non-sensation, we were feeling none of it by the time we started wrestling and pile-driving one another into the wet sand and having whip-fights with the long leathery lashes of seaweed lying all around.

One of these seaweed whip battles was in full swing when I became aware of a white light illuminating the misty ocean air all around us. Maybe this was it. Had my core temperature dipped so low that St. Peter himself was scooping me up from the sand to deliver me to the lap of Heaven? Or maybe, juuust maybe, it was an SFPD patrol car doing a routine scan of the beach?

…yeah...it’s the cops.

The light stayed trained on us from beyond the tall concrete wall above the sand while we stood there illuminated, clutching our seaweed ropes, mouth’s agape, panting like dogs, squinting, covered head to toe in wet sand, in a halo of our rapidly cooling body fog and breath.

We are so…BUSTED. We… are going to…jail.

Then after a minute or two the light went out. Our eyes readjusted to the darkness. The ocean roared and the patrol car drove away. Can you imagine the laughs those cops had looking at us standing there with our seaweed, like three drowned rats? It must’ve made their night.

I don’t know what happened next except that we somehow dragged ourselves the sixty or so blocks between the crashing waves and our beds back home. I’ll also say that the next day Sean Kelly had a Christmas tree in his apartment that hadn’t been there the day before and the tree had a strangely rounded stump on it as though it had been dragged for miles along a sidewalk. He may have had a brutal hangover that day but at least he also had…

A Christmas miracle!

Oh yeah, if you want to know why I quit drinking it’s simple: I’m not getting any younger and I know my chances of living longer and better would increase if I did, I knew I’d be happier and more honest with myself and others if I did, and I came to realize there was tons of stuff I wanted to do that I’d never get around to doing if I didn’t quit. So I quit and not once have I been sorry I did.

Trad’r Sam’s menu from my personal archive.