Lucky 13
Bad Religion, Stone Temple Pilots & Fishbone's Angelo Moore
The last few days have been blessedly cool here in San Diego. As I write this, I’ve got the doors and windows open and a light blanket on my lap. Sadly, it won’t be this way for long as this coming weekend looks to be the hottest of the summer.
That’s the way it goes in San Diego where the temperature yo-yos throughout September and October. But if temps in the high 90s is the worst of the bad new I will take that every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Also, I have some good news to share. Last Friday Publisher’s Weekly awarded the thirteenth spot on its bestselling hardcover nonfiction list to Do What You Want. We’re officially a bestseller!
What does that mean? Other than we sold more copies the book in the fourteenth slot and fewer books than the book in the twelfth spot, I have no idea. Publisher’s Weekly wrote a little blurb about the book, which I’ll excerpt its entirety:
Stranger Than Fiction: The members of seminal L.A. punk band Bad Religion, writing with music journalist Jim Ruland, debut at #13 in hardcover nonfiction with the memoir Do What You Want, released on the 40th anniversary of the group’s formation. “Readers will appreciate Ruland’s thorough reporting and insight on the various lineup changes over the years, along with his convincing analysis of punk history,” our review said. “This testament to the value of hard work and independent thinking offers a thrilling alternative to the conventional rise-and-fall rock narrative.” The book did best in the Pacific region, which accounted for a third of all sales.
I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but thanks to everyone who pre-ordered the book, attended an event, shared the news, etc. If you’d like to order a copy, it’s available at a slight discount at Book Shop and your purchase helps support indie bookstores.
One more thing. Yesterday, I talked with Mary and Danielle at 91X here in San Diego and the interview ran twice today and will air again on Thursday at 9:40 AM PT and Friday at 8:25 AM PT. If you’re not in San Diego, you can listen to 91X online.
March Plaidness
I’ve got several punk and punk-adjacent projects in the pipeline. Some I have alluded to, others I have not. I’m not a superstitious person and I don’t believe in jinxes per se, but I do believe in hubris and human folly, so I’ll chalk my reticence to discussing projects until they are a near certainty to my Irish Catholic / Military upbringing. Loose lips sink ships and all that.
With the publication of Do What You Want in the rear view, I suspect that will soon change. That said, there’s one bit of news I can share with you now. I’m thrilled to be participating in March Plaidness, the annual March Madness inspired tournament essays. Each year the theme changes and the name of the competition is derived from a terrible pun on “Madness.”
Two years ago, I won the Goth-themed tournament (March Vladness) with an essay about the song “Marilyn My Bitterness” by the Crüxshadows, a band I knew almost nothing about when I wrote the essay. I was a last minute fill-in after the person who’d selected the band dropped out of the tournament.
You can read the essay here but I’m not being falsely modest when I say that my essay won not because of its overwhelming merit but because Rogue, the band’s vocalist, exhorted fans to vote for it. And vote they did, in overwhelming numbers, and the Crüxshadows, a lowly 13th seed (there’s that number again), destroyed some titans of Goth.
The winner gets an automatic bid to the next tournament, which the winner can accept or defer to the following year, which is what I did. This was a prudent move. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic I paid very little attention to the tournament this year.
With my pick in March Plaidness, so named because the theme is grunge, I selected Stone Temple Pilots “Sex Type Thing.” Now there are many others songs I could have chosen that I love much, much more than “Sex Type Thing,” including several that dovetail with projects I am currently working on, but loving the song isn’t the point. Now I get to tell a story I’ve been sitting on for almost 30 years.
When “Sex Type Thing” came out in 1993, I was working at a place called Eagles Coffee Pub in North Hollywood. Everyone who has ever worked at a coffee shop in L.A. has stories about meeting famous people, but our coffee shop was located next to a recording studio and sometimes the people who recorded in the studio came into the shop with such frequency that the line between customer and coffee shop worker was blurred. This is one of those stories. Actually, it’s several of those stories.
For instance, here’s Angelo Moore of Fishbone who got hip to the open mic we held on Wednesday nights. In 1992, when I took this photo, every young white man in the spoken word scene wanted to be Henry Rollins. I wanted to be Angelo Moore. He taught me more about performance and art than any teacher I ever had.
I hope you’ll bear with me as I take a trip down memory lane to share a story of love and grunge and grinds at a place where the coffee is good but the service is terrible and everybody wants to be somebody.
The Life and Death of Breonna Taylor
If you read one thing this week, I hope it’s this New York Times article about the life and death of Breonna Taylor by Rukmini Callimachi.
It’s a complicated and heart-breaking story that’s worthy of your attention. It offers portraits of a broken police system and a woman who believed she’d turned a corner in her life. It’s messy and complicated and enraging and enthralling. If you, like me, have only read headlines and brief accounts of the tragedy on other people’s timelines, you owe it to yourself to read this.
The author, Rukmini Callimachi, is an expert on terrorism and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer on four previous occasions. It’s a deeply researched and incredibly well told story, and serves as the basis of a documentary that will be airing on Hulu this weekend.
That’s it for now. Provided I don’t melt away, I’ll be back next week with some thoughts about books I’ve been reading. Stay cool. Stay safe. And let’s cut each some slack. We could all use it.
Breonna Taylor photo by Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock