Small Good Things

The end of an error

It’s over. Trump is finally out of the White House. As a coworker at Hardee’s in Radford, Virginia, once told me, “Don’t let the door hit you where the good lord split you.”

I didn’t expect to feel much of anything today. Trump has caused so much anger, animosity, and rage—and that’s just in my household—that to expect an emotional counterbalance seemed illogical. But I feel lighter today. Not happy, but hopeful.

Trump has fucked this country in so many ways that the unfucking will be longer and harder than we’re probably prepared to admit. It will take more than a handful of executive orders. I think everyone recognizes that. 

When I worked at an ad agency one of our biggest clients was Hertz and from the late ’70s until 1994 the spokesman for Hertz was O.J. Simpson. During Simpson’s tenure he had infiltrated every aspect of Hertz’s advertising. It wasn’t a matter of pulling a few TV spots—Simpson was everywhere: in-store signage, welcome brochures, business-to-business mailings. When I started working at the company in 1996, they were still finding Simpson’s name on dummy contracts and lightboards.

It will be the same with Trump. At least O.J. was well liked until his fall from grace. (Though it wasn’t really a fall; the man was an abuser who was first charged with assaulting Nicole Brown in 1989.)  

It dawned on me yesterday that we can finally troll Trump. It never made sense to me to spend a lot of time and effort ridiculing a man who holds the highest elected office in the world. At the end of the day, he’s still in power. Ditto his feckless offspring. No cartoon, no meme, no cleverly edited video was going to change that. 

But now? Now he’s just a man with a lot of bills and a lot of anger issues. From here on out it’s going to be one long swirl around the toilet bowl until he gets flushed away forever. And that skidmark is going to be loooooong as all the dirty dealings come to light. And they will come to light. 

Biden wasn’t my first, second, or third choice. But that doesn’t matter. He’s a good person who will serve with honor and decency. He’s stated he will be a transitional president, and I hope that’s the case. I hope he accepts his role as the unfucker-in-chief and restores many of the norms that Trump and his flunkies flouted. And then I hope he passes the torch to a young, brilliant visionary who can literally save the planet. 

That is my hope. A small good thing to hold onto today. Tomorrow may be awful, and according to Dr. Fauci the coming weeks will be worse than awful. 

So for the rest of this newsletter, I’d like to share some small, good things.

A Band Called Backwash

I’ve been spending more time in our studio lately and shuttling various pieces of media from one storage area to another. I thought it would be fun to set up our boom box in the studio and listen to old tapes and CDs while I worked. I was sorting through a box of cassettes and found a tape from a band called Backwash. 

If you’ve ever reviewed new music for a magazine or a zine you’ve probably had an experience like the one I’m about to describe. When I moved to L.A. in the mid-’90s, I reviewed records for Flipside. I’d get a batch of tapes and sift through them. I was always excited to go through the new stuff, but after a couple of duds my enthusiasm would wane and it would feel like an obligation.

Inevitably, at the eleventh hour, I’d scramble to review the tapes I loved and the tapes I hated and try to find something to say about the vast majority that fell in the middle. But sometimes tapes fell through the cracks, especially demo tapes with crude hand-drawn covers on recycled cardboard. One day I was looking for something in my truck and found a tape that had fallen behind the seat. One of them was by a band called Backwash. 

I popped it into the deck and HFS. Pure punk thrash. Lightning fast riffs and even faster vocals. The songs weren’t the least bit poppy but they were catchy as hell. I loved everything about it. I think there were ten songs, five to a side. I could listen to the whole thing three or four times on my way home from work (the only tape player I owned was in my truck). And then do it again the next day, which I did for weeks and weeks.

I don’t know how long it had been in my truck when I found it, but it was too late to submit a review. I kept listening to it anyway. It became the benchmark for the kind of punk rock I liked: loud, fast, thrashy, irreverent. If it wasn’t as good as Backwash, I wasn’t interested.

Then, almost 25 years later, I found the tape. Just looking at the song titles brought the tunes back and when I popped it in the player again, the songs were just as rad as I remembered them. How did I still know every single note of these songs?  

Naturally, I wondered what became of Backwash. I looked them up, but my search didn’t reveal anything. The tape itself wasn’t much help. It was a demo with a yellow label, the name of the band, the song titles. The only contact was for Joe at an address in Metairie, Louisiana. I plugged that info into the internet and the only thing I could find was an old online zine that mentioned a New Orleans band that listed members that had been in Backwash. That band was called TONC aka Tomb of Nick Cage and they’re still active—or were before the pandemic hit. 

Tomb of Nick Cage is a horror punk band with a touch of comedy. They have a Facebook page, so I sent a note to the group thinking, “Well, this is a waste of time.” In less than an hour I was talking to Kym Trailz (get it?) the singer for TONC and former rhythm guitar player for Backwash.

I told her my story and she told me the story of Backwash, which like most punk bands is very short. After gigging around for a bit the band never recorded any more songs and broke up. But she put me in touch with the singer, Joe, who now goes by Tex Ramone. Neither one of them could believe that someone in California had such fond memories of their band. Tex told me, “Once in a while I’ll play it for someone and they’re just like, ‘wow, holy shit, that’s YOU? You sound so...mad’”

I went to TONC’s Bandcamp page to check out their latest album and it’s a total shred-fest. I can totally see my friends in San Diego horror punk band Forest Grove on a double bill with them. That’s my wish for 2021. Make it happen, President Biden!

Yesterday I got a package in the mail from Kym with a bunch of TONC loot. You can either be jealous or get your own…

And, yes, the Tomb of Nick Cage is real. 

Happy Anniversary Razorcake

Believe it or not, Razorcake is celebrating its 20th anniversary this month. That’s not 20 issues, but 20 years of do it yourself punk rock. There were many punk rock zines that came before Razorcake and there were a few that put out more issues, but none of them are still doing it. 

I’m proud to say I’ve been writing for Razorcake since the first issue and I continue to write my column six times a year. Six times twenty at approx. 1,700 words per column is over 200,000 words. Holy shit. I’ve written a big-ass book of columns!

For this issue, I spilled the beans about my next punk rock book project, but you’d already know that if you were a subscriber…

Why Razorcake? Because Knifepie and Donutsword were already taken…

Do What You Want 

Since I’m in a celebratory mood, I’m making some signed copies of Do What You Want available for sale with free shipping. (Just to be clear, these are signed by me, not by the band.) This offer is available in the U.S. only while supplies last or until feel like, which I expect to be sometime next week. 

in the meantime, Bad Religion released a new song today.

The Best Thing I Saw on the Internet This Week

(Compliments of my new pal, Tex Ramone.)

Just click it already.