Directionless kids and distracted parents

An interview with Mies Per Gallon author Mike Magrann

On the way to Pioneertown

Today I have an interview with Mike Magrann vocalist and guitarist for Channel 3 and author of Miles Per Gallon, but first I want to tell you about my trip across the desert last week.

I decided to take the slow way from Las Vegas to San Diego through the Mojave National Preserve. Shortly after crossing the state line I turned off Interstate 15 and found myself on a series of long straight roads that climbed into the high desert. Signs warned that the roads were not maintained and to look out for tortoises, but I didn’t see any.

I was exhausted from Punk Rock Bowling, Nuvia was out of the country, and I didn’t have anywhere to be for several hours. So I took my time, marveling at the Joshua Trees that towered over the highway, some well over twenty feet high. No buildings, no houses, no road signs, no one trying to sell me something I didn’t want and would never need. It had been a while since I’d taken my time getting somewhere, just seeing what there was to see, and I felt the vastness of my surroundings seep into me.

I left the preserve and stopped in Amboy along old Route 66, which has a post office and an all-purpose café with a gas station and lodging. There is nothing else in Amboy. Just desert bisected by train tracks. That’s not entirely true. There’s also an airport behind the cafe but I’d reached the part of the desert where things take a counterfactual turn, where people, sculptures, and even airports exist in some weird marriage of mania and whimsy.

Scenes of ordinary psychedelia in the High Desert

In Amboy I drank an espresso and met a cyclist named Pavin who’d ridden his bike from Chicago. He had the slightly crazed air of someone who hadn’t talked to another human in a while. He was headed to the Santa Monica Pier where Route 66 comes to an end. I wished him well and continued on my way.

I entered Wonder Valley and started to see small settlements, many of them abandoned. I passed the Palms, which was closed for a movie shoot. I kicked around Twentynine Palms for a while, visiting Desert General bookstore and picking up a volume by Kenneth Patchen that I don’t already own: The Walking-Away World. Relatable.

I moved on to Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley where I headed north on Old Woman Springs Road to the Giant Rock Meeting Room, a bar and pizza place in Flamingo Heights with live music. There’s a set of lights from a cop car mounted on the ceiling and when a food order is ready to be picked up the spinners spin and the lights flash, which was a little unnerving. I ate half a pizza while a man sang country western songs from a bygone era that I’m certain Joe O’Brien would have known. (The last time I was out this way with Joe we got stuck in the sand, which he will never let me forget.)

I took the back way into Pioneertown as the sun was setting. A long thin cloud formed a jagged slash across the sky as the sun dipped over the mountain range and made them glow. I was on my way to Pappy & Harriet’s to reunite with Son Rompe Pera, the cumbia-punk band that I got to know in CDMX. I’ve seen the band play in an arena in Santiago, Chile, and a large dance hall in Mexico City. This would be my first time seeing them in a more intimate space.

Spaghetti Cumbia, Kacho & Son Rompe Pera at Pappy & Harriet's in Pioneertown

Spaghetti Cumbia from Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles opened the show. Their blend of cumbia, psychedelic rock and melodies inspired by Western movie soundtracks was tailor made for the setting. But Son Rompe Pera stole the show, which they do every night, no matter where in the world they happen to be playing.

The six-member unit led by three brothers—Mongo, Kacho and Kilos—with three percussionists would be unique enough, but what makes Son Rompe Pera special is that the centerpiece of the band is the marimba. Yes, the fucking marimba, but played with an intensity you can’t imagine possible until you see it. And when Kacho and Mongo play at the same time, pogoing up and down behind the instrument and banging their head like heshers in a heavy metal parking lot, the beauty gives way to the kind of bliss that only comes when you’re seeing something truly special.

Timo, the band’s manager, told me they’re adding more punk songs to their set, but they also recorded a stunning duet with Trish Toledo who was on hand to sing with Mongo. I made the two-and-a-half hour drive home and dragged myself through the door at 2 AM. I was exhausted and mildly delirious but also warped with excitement because I would be seeing Son Rompe Pera again in a few hours at the Quartyard in San Diego.

Fuck Trump and subscribe to Razorcake

Before the end of the year you’ll be able to learn everything you ever wanted to know about Son Rompe Pera when you read their interview conducted and translated by Andrés Romero in Razorcake. That means it’s the perfect time to get your subscription.

Friends, the timing is critical. Last year Razorcake was awarded a grant from the NEA for just the second time in the non-profit 100% independent music magazine’s 25-year history. Last month those grants were canceled by Trump’s agenda to crush the arts. Razorcake doesn’t rely on the government for funding. It relies on subscribers.

I urge you consider subscribing. You can subscribe at the one-time econo rate of $17.50 and get six issues mailed to you every two months like clockwork. It’s the best deal in print media if you ask me. Or, you can take the self-renewing supporter option of $35 a year so that Todd and Daryl and the hundreds of volunteers that make Razorcake happen every 60 days can focus on delivering the punk rock content you love and not fundraising. Already a subscriber? Give the gift of Razorcake.

June is Razorcake’s subscription drive. Let’s make it the best one ever.

Miles Per Gallon by Mike Magrann

Is there ever a bad time to get in the van with a group of punk rock degenerates obsessively spreading the gospel of distorted guitars and angry lyrics?

Miles Per Gallon answers with a resounding no. It’s a fiction-nonfiction hybrid based on Channel 3’s epic cross country summer tour in 1983. I reached out to singer, song-writer and guitar-player Mike Magrann to talk about how it came into being.

JR: Miles Per Gallon is such a well-written book that to call it a “tour diary” does it a disservice. Can you talk about how you decided to tell the story in this way?

MM: I had a few false starts trying to write the book. I tried out a straight band history and then a straight ahead memoir. But the band has been around for 40 plus years, so it was pretty daunting to get a historical record down (and rather boring!). I came across that old tour journal of 1983 and settled on using that one summer as a framing device, and weaving in the back story of meeting Kimm and growing up together, starting the band. The book ends in 1983 as well, so I didn't have to deal with the later legacy years of the band and all that.

I knew that we didn't have a very dramatic story compared to most punk bands of the era (relatively good kids, no jail time or deaths!) so I thought the story is really about friends growing up among the changing music scene, a couple of fans that somehow ended up on stage.

Are there any books that served as models while you were thinking about it and writing it?

I love Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, love the notion of a fictional memoir! It allowed me to write dialogue and scenes that may have not actually taken place, but the story as a whole is based on factual events and real people. Labeling it as such also gave me a pretty good excuse for any foggy memories or incorrect dates as well, so there's that!

A Fan’s Notes is a great book! I’m interested in the way you use time in the novel. You move back and forth in time to escape the drudgery of the van, but whenever we return to it we’re a little bit farther down the road.

I thought it would be interesting to go back and forth between the actual movement of the van and my early years. I know when I read a musician's biography I tend to sigh when we get into the "formative years" chapters. It's always like getting the boring stuff out of the way before dessert, you know? I thought I could break it up between the band antics and slip the medicine in.

By the end of the book both timelines come together, so it wraps up nicely. For all the chaos and noise, the characters in the book are just kids, so I thought of it almost like a YA novel, though one with a lot of booze and fucking!

When did you know this was more than something you wanted to do, but something you had to do.

It was one of those things that was haunting me for decades, really. I studied creative writing at Long Beach State, so you'd think I would've gotten around to this a lot sooner, yeah? But I just could never wrap my head around the right way to approach a book, all the while seeing all these great punk books being released, more with each passing year, as if to taunt my laziness! I started a blog on the band's adventures and that helped me find a tone, and then the pandemic hit. Had no more excuses not to write, so I sat down.

Cerritos isn’t part of SoCal one associates with punk rock. It’s not Hollywood, it’s not the South Bay, it’s not the OC suburbs. How is Cerritos simultaneously in the middle of everything and the middle of nowhere?

I always thought, as a band, we were Cerritos! It was a faceless planned community borne of the cow fields of Dairy Valley, right on the border of Orange County, but really part of LA. In the same sense, we were nobodies that came from nowhere, not part of the LA scene or the cool OC crowd, somehow included and shunned by each. The town grew into something pretty unique, with a world class library and performing arts center, that auto mall. It was a great place to grow up, just filled with directionless kids and distracted parents, a perfect breeding ground for punk, really.

In Miles Per Gallon you go into a lot of detail about the cookie cutter suburbs, but your household was anything but typical. You write so lovingly about your Japanese grandparents but your ancestry is also what set you apart and made you different.

My mom was Japanese American, while my dad was full Philly Irish, so it was a unique combination for the time. My mother and her family all went through the internment camp nightmare during WWII, which I was always fascinated by. We would beg my mom and grandma (Bachan) to tell the stories of the camps, but in the usual Japanese way they were pretty quiet about it, while I was enraged. My dad was a colorful character, a doctor and a rascal, and his wildman antics were a crazy match with my mom's reserved Japanese vibe. I can pretty much find both of them within me.

When we met at Punk Rock Bowling you mentioned you’re writing another book. Is it a sequel?

I like the idea of telling a story in three chunks. (Again, Freddy Exley with his trio of Fan books, and then you got your Star Wars!) It's not just the story of our band, but also of the changing culture surrounding us from the early 80's up to now. The second book deals with that odd time when the surviving punk bands grew out their hair a bit, slowed down the tempos, in a word, sold out.

It's pretty wild to think that the heyday of So Ca hardcore was only a few years before it imploded, and it left most of the bands we knew wondering where to go next. It's also the story of growing up, the realities of adulthood vs the adolescent dream. It'll be a quicker read but darker. I mean, you gotta have Empire Strikes Back before you get to the Ewoks and Leia in a bikini, right?

Channel 3 sounded great! What’s next for the band?

Thanks, that was a fun way to kick off Punk Rock Bowling! We are off to Camp Punksylvania in the Poconos June 21, then an early NYC show June 22, one of Drew Stone's great gigs that honor the old Sunday matinees of the NYHC scene back in the day. There is a local gig at Garden Amphitheatre for the Gutterfest July 12 and then we are off to Europe for a run of shows with our pals The Drowns and DI.

In October we go back to Japan. I'm really looking forward to that. It was always a dream to play there, and when we first went a couple years ago with The Avengers and The Vaxxines it was just overwhelming, the welcome we got. My Japanese is not good but I have the delivery of a Kurosawa samurai, so the stage banter kills!

Order Miles Per Gallon now.

Miscellaneous Mayhem

In case you missed it, here’s my article for the LA Times about FLAG’s performance at Punk Rock Bowling.

There was something in the air at Punk Rock Bowling in Las Vegas last weekend. No, it wasn’t the sound of distorted guitars, punk rockers puking, or Nazis getting punched in the face. Though there was plenty of all of that. It was the buzz surrounding FLAG, the most talked about band at the annual bowling tournament and music festival, now in its twenty-fifth year.

I reviewed Barry Gifford’s new book, No Daylight in That Face, for Alta.

The book offers a master class in blunt language and precise thinking, and the reviews are far from formulaic. Sometimes, Gifford provides a plot summary; other times, he focuses on an actor, a director, or even the novelist who wrote the source material. Considering Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 caper film The Killing, he suggests that the movie “really pulls in all of the sicko elements of noir that master novelist Jim Thompson specialized in. It’s basically cruelty heaped on top of cruelty; nobody can get it right so nobody gets anything. End of moral, end of story.”

If you’re a punk rock obsessive like me, and if you’ve read this far then I’m guessing you are, you owe it to yourself to pick up Tearing Down the Orange County: How Orange County Brought Punk Rock to the World.

Here’s the blurb I wrote for the book, that shamelessly riffs on a certain song by a certain band.

Like scientists in a lab, Jackson and Kohn dissect the mischief, magic, and mayhem that make Orange County punk rock such a vital part of the SoCal scene. From the beaches to the burbs, the backyard parties to some of the biggest stages in the world, the definitive account of OC punk is here, and you’ve never seen anything like it before.

Thanks for reading! Also, a big shout out to those of you upgraded to a paid subscription. Your support makes Message from the Underworld possible! If you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel about healthcare vigilantes Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. I have more books and zines for sale here. And if you’ve read all of those, consider checking out my latest collaboration The Witch’s Door and the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights.

Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get my deepest gratitude and Orca Alert! on most Sundays. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, crime, and killer whales.