The Beat Goes On

Forbidden Beat, Hunter S. Thompson, Meat Loaf, Fight Club, D. Foy & Chunks

I think I’ve finally turned the corner on this COVID thing. I’ve still got a bit of a cough, a dry wheezy rasp that isn’t so much a cough but a game of tug of war between the virus and body.

“Kick rocks!” my body says.

“I think I’ll stick around for a while,” the virus responds.

Last week I had to cancel a trip to interview a writer that I’ve admired for years. (I won’t tell you her name, but her initials are Sara Gran.) I didn’t want my cough to become the focus of the interview or freak anyone out in the public space where we were scheduled to meet. So we did the interview over Zoom and it turned out fine and my profile will run next month. (Now would be a good time to preorder Gran’s excellent new novel The Book of the Most Precious Substance.)

The biggest surprise has been how brain foggy and fatigued I felt weeks after my last positive test. COVID-19 hits everyone a little different but my experience has been dispiriting to say the least. I’ve compared by grief to COVID in the past but the comparison has proven to be apt. I may be done with it but it isn’t done with me.

I’ve been spending a lot of time outdoors and that’s definitely helped. Turns out that cool breezes, babbling brooks, and birdsong are pretty rad.

Forbidden Beat at Vinyl Junkies

You know what else I’m feeling optimistic about?

Live in-person events. I’m doing an actual book event on Sunday, February 6 at 2pm at Vinyl Junkies Record Shack at 2235 Fern Street in South Park neighborhood of San Diego and you’re all invited.

It’s an outdoor event and I’ll be discussing the book Forbidden Beat: Perspectives on Punk Drumming with the editor S.W. Lauden. I wrote a chapter about Bill Stevenson so we’ll probably talk about Black Flag and the Descendents, at least for a little while, but the book is full of rad essays and Steve is an actual drummer with serious chops who, unlike me, actually knows what he’s talking about.  

Bad Religion fans will want to note two contributions (three if you count the title): A Top 5 from Pete Finestone and Ian Winwood on Brooks Wackerman. SST-related contributions include Mike Watt on George Hurley and Joey Shithead on Chuck Biscuits. Plus, many, many more. Louder Than War has the complete rundown.

The conversation will be 1) brief and 2) outdoors so come on by, say hello, and maybe we’ll go have coffee and/or ice cream afterward.

Hunter S. Thompson Reconsidered

There must be something in the air because my in-box has been bombarded with “news” about Hunter S. Thompson lately.

First came an email from The Paris Review reminding me of its excellent interview with Thompson by Terry McDonell and Douglas Brinkley. I came away from the interview impressed with the infamous journalist’s energy and ambition, how deeply he cared about the work, which has kind of taken a back seat to the shenanigans we typically associate with HST.

Then Sophia Stewart reviewed Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson the Weird Journey to Gonzo by Peter Richardson in Alta’s Monday Morning Book Review and tackled Thompson’s misogyny, domestic abuse, and other well-documented failings. As much as one would like to separate the art from the artists, you really can’t do that with Thompson. His persona was central to whatever story he was writing.

When I encountered HST’s work while serving in the Navy, I was deeply impressed with this approach to journalism. Yes, when Hunter S. Thompson came to San Diego during Super Bowl weekend in 1988, I took a bunch of acid when I went to go see him, but my commitment to his work went deeper then pharmacological cosplay.

I intuited fairly early on that in order to write about the things the way Thompson wrote about them, one had to immerse oneself in one’s subject. It seemed obvious to me then (and still does) that you couldn’t write like that from the sidelines. You had to get your hands dirty, so to speak, and if you did it would prove to be its own reward. That was something I could behind.

Granted, it’s not like I was applying HST’s lessons to any kind of writing practice. I was a deck seaman who couldn’t write a high school book report if I tried, but with a little bit of desire (and a lot of recklessness) I felt that I might get to the point where I had something to say. At first, I viewed this attitude as a kind of prerequisite for living that eventually became a force all its own. The Navy, curiously, helped with his ambition. The ship kept spitting me out at ports-of-call all over the world. I could either stay in my rack and save my money or I could hit the beach as if I’d been shot from a cannon.

Today, I’m grateful for Hunter S. Thompson for lighting that spark. I think there have been stretches of my life where the fire went out (alcohol and advertising will do that to you), but today that torch burns as brightly as ever, and I’m itching for the next adventure. In fact, I’m about to embark on one this morning. . .

Thinking about Meat Loaf

Speaking of interesting experiences, I wrote an Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times about playing fantasy football in Las Vegas with Meat Loaf. I can’t really take credit for that one. It was a buy-in league and the teams were randomly assigned to a league, but still.

That experience led me to re-watch Fight Club over the weekend and it’s a much more transgressive film than I remember. You may recall that Meat Loaf plays Bob Paulsen, a man the narrator meets at a recovery meeting for testicular cancer survivors and who is later recruited by Tyler Durden for Project Mayhem. Bob is killed by a police officer during an act of petty vandalism that results in the destruction of a Starbucks. Eerily, at one point in the movie the other members of Project Mayhem chant, “His name was Bob Paulsen” over and over again.  

I think Fight Club’s popularity and the way it was embraced by MMA bros who completely missed the movie’s message kind of ruined it for me as a piece of popular culture, but its message is very compelling. (I’ve never read the novel so I won’t discuss it.) At least once a year I wonder why some grassroots Project Mayhem-like organization hasn’t tried to take down Fox News. It would be a lot easier to wipe out its infrastructure than, say, overthrow the government.

Anyway, two things struck me about the film. There’s a scene where Ed Norton’s character confronts his boss and basically says, “It would be a shame if someone showed up with an Armalite AR-10 and shot up the office.” This line got a lot of lulz during test screenings, but then Columbine happened, and the audience stopped laughing. I’m actually surprised they kept it in.

The other thing that changed after Fight Club was 9/11. Suddenly, the notion of blowing up buildings as a solution to society’s problems didn’t seem so “cool” anymore. I remember toying around with a screenplay modeled after a Unabomber-style bombmaker called “Bombs Make Sense” but 9/11 put the kibosh on that project. But there’s no denying the power of the film’s final scene.

D. Foy

Old friend D. Foy, author of the novels Made to Break, Patricide, and Absolutely Golden, is battling a rare form of bone marrow cancer. His partner has set up a GoFundMe page and it’s very close to being fully funded. If you’d like to learn more about his story and contribute to the cause, you can do so here.

PssSST!  (Compilation Edition)

It’s been a minute since I’ve done one of these but I’ll be ramping up my coverage of my SST collection in the coming weeks. Today I want to talk about the SST compilation Chunks (SST 069), which isn’t really an SST comp but a reissue of a record that was originally put out by New Alliance Records, which was run D. Boon, Mike Watt, and (for a while) Martin Tamburovich.

Although Chunks was given a relatively low catalog number, it wasn’t reissued until 1988. The original pressing in 1981 was NAR’s third record and second comp. Aesthetically, Chunks looks a lot like its predecessor, Cracks in the Sidewalk (SST 092)/(NAR 001). It’s got a series of illustrations by Raymond Pettibon done in one color with many of the same artists on both comps: Black Flag, Minutemen, Saccharine Trust and Artless Entanglements, a studio project by Spot.

Spot told me that when he first started working at Media Art Studio he was technically homeless and when the owners realized he was sleeping in his car, they gave him a key so he could crash at the studio. Spot suggested that his presence at the studio had the added benefit of serving as a deterrent to would-be thieves because there’d been a number of break-ins at the studio prior to his arrival. Spot learned how to use the studio’s equipment by experimenting with it during the downtime and the result was a series of tracks that he called Artless Entanglements.

SST used compilations to promote bands that had or would soon release records on the label. Blasting Concept and Program: Annihilator serve as showcases for its artists. New Alliance had a looser view and included tracks from friends of the label. This makes for some interesting selections.

For instance, Chunks features “Sick and Crazy” by the Stains, which has one of the sickest opening notes. If you’ve never heard it, check it out:

SST released the Stains only record (SST 013) in 1983, several years after the album was recorded. What’s interesting is that NAR got the drop on SST all the way back in 1981, shortly after the track was recorded. In fact, the Stains self-titled debut was the last album SST recorded at Media Art before it shut down.

The Stains were all but written out of the history of LA punk rock until Jimmy Alvarado published his oral history of the band in Razorcake several years ago. I was able to fill in a few gaps with interviews Stains drummer Jack Rivera and guitar wizard Robert Becerra.

Another interesting track is “You’re My Favorite” by Vox Pop, the band Don Bolles joined while drumming for the Germs. Apparently, Darby Crash didn’t like the fact that his drummer was in a “joke band,” but Vox Pop played some interesting shows, including the night it opened for Throbbing Gristle alongside an early iteration of SWA.

“The Lonelys” by the Cheifs, who never let proper spelling get in the way of a good time, is another fascinating selection. The Cheifs were admired by many musicians in LA but like so many others never quite made a mark. While I was writing for Flipside, it released the Cheifs’ Hollywest Crisis, a full-length LP cobbled together from recording sessions between 1980 and 1982. I wore the hell out of that record and could never understand why the Chiefs weren’t more popular. As near as I can tell, Hollywest was a squat on Hollywood and Western where many of the members lived, so perhaps they didn’t have the financial resources to start up a label and release a record. Wouldn’t be the first time a punk rock band was too broke to make a record and it won’t be the last.

In the early days of SST, bands had to wait months and even years for their records to be released. NAR was able to get records out a bit more efficiently. It’s interesting to speculate what New Alliance might have been able to achieve with a bit more capital. What if the Stains’ debut was released on NAR in 1981 instead of in 1983 on SST? Would the two years have helped establish the Stains as one of LA’s most unique punk bands? Would this have led to the Stains being included on more comps, or even in the film The Decline of Western Civilization? I’m just speculating here, but what if the attention that went to bands like Bad Religion or the Adolescents, bands that would also break up by 1983, went to the Cheifs or the Stains?

The point I’m trying to make here is that a lot of bands on Chunks had strong connections to NAR and SST but it wasn’t enough to make a splash outside of San Pedro or Hollywood, never mind LA. The calculus of popularity is a strange and fickle thing.

So many bands came and went and while compilations like Chunks illustrate how diverse the scene was they also serve as reminders of what might have been.

Thanks for reading. Next week’s edition of Message from the Underworld might be a bit delayed because I’ll be in the studio recording the audio version of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records. but we’ll see how it goes.