I’m testing out something new: a short video from the punk rock show I went to at the Casbah. If it doesn’t play or links you to a porn site please let me know.
I bought tickets to see the Spits way back in May of last year. It was so long ago I’d forgotten that my confirmation email came with some claptrap about how the tickets would be mailed to me. Well, that didn’t happen so we went down to the Casbah wondering if they would let us in.
We got into the show no problem. Nuvia and I had the same game plan that we used for the Bad Religion show back in December: mask up, keep our distance, and bail if got stupid. As soon as we walked in we bumped into an old friend we haven’t seen in a long, long time. We were so happy to see each other and so moved by the memories of good times we’ve had together and old friends who are no longer with us that we were practically in tears.
It made me realize how much I’ve missed quasi-chance meetings—going someplace knowing you’re going to see people you know without having to make a plan to meet someone there. The punk rock show has always been that place with me. When I first got sober, I had to stop going to shows for a while because the temptation to fall into old habits was too great.
Thankfully, loud music is its own medicine. One of the things I love about the Spits is you can always count on things not going as planned. The Spits are fronted by two brothers and they get drunk, play the wrong songs, lose the set list, bicker with each other, etc. It’s always a mess. I’m sure some of it is shtick but the band has dysfunction in its bones. What else would you expect from a band that has released six self-titled albums? From the moment the Spits hit the stage there was a sense of chaos taking hold. I mean look at the video.
The weird thing about the show was I had couldn’t yell or scream or shout, all things I’m wont to do at the punk rock show. I get carried away. That’s what I go to the show for—to get carried off by the music, the energy, the camaraderie, and—yes—the chaos. But I had to save my voice because on Monday morning I was starting a week of recording sessions for Corporate Rock Sucks audiobook.
The recording studio was in Kearney Mesa. Back when I worked at the casino, I used to produce radio spots at a couple different studios in the Kearney Mesa area, and driving down the streets packed with restaurants and commercial buildings brought back memories of those days, and not many of them were good. I used to sneak off to a bar before or after the session, and those 30 or 40 minutes when no one knew where I was were the highlight of my day.
It used to take the better part of an hour to record a 30-second spot. How long, I wondered, would it take to record 365 pages of text?
When I produced spots I’d sit with the engineer while the talent did their thing in a miked-up soundproof room separated by heavy doors and thick glass. Now, with COVID-19, the director oversees the production via Zoom. During the entire production I never saw her face because she didn’t turn her camera on. She was a very pleasant-sounding disembodied voice.
I sat on a stool, my face six inches from the microphone, and wore headphones that connected me to the director on Zoom and the engineer at the board. To cut down on paper noise, I read the manuscript off an iPad. If I botched a word or made a mistake either the director or the engineer would tell me where to pick up again. The engineer would also let me know if the microphone picked up the rustling of my clothes or the gurgling of my stomach, which happened a lot, especially in the hour before lunch. Kearney Mesa is close to Miramar naval air station where parts of Top Gun are set and occasionally we’d have to stop while jets passed overhead. The engineer said the action at the airfield increases whenever there’s tension abroad. He sarcastically called these interruptions, “the sound of freedom.”
Typically we worked from 9am to 12pm and from 1pm to 4pm with a bathroom break in the middle. I was anxious about my lingering post-COVID cough. Everyone kept telling me to stay hydrated. I drank lots of Lemon Ginger tea with honey and fresh lemon and water by the gallon. I also kept Ricola cough drops handy for the breaks, just to keep my voice lubricated when I wasn’t reading.
I read about 100 pages on the first day. I’d read the final proofs out loud so the material was fresh in my mind. But reading the manuscript over the course of week in my bathrobe or on the toilet is not nearly the same as reading them in a studio environment. But I wasn’t nervous. They were my words and I owned them. That first night I went home and went right to sleep.
On the second day I learned the San Diego pop punk band Blink-182 had recorded many of its albums in the same studio. Apparently, there was a porno shop across the street and the band members bought tons of porn that they left strewn around the studio “to set the mood,” whatever that means. The porno shop is still there, but I didn’t go in.
We made good progress and we ended the second day with the death of D. Boon. “It’s so sad,” the director said, and it is. Ever since running into my friend at the Casbah I’d been thinking about my friend J.J., whose overdose in 2009 was the catalyst for me getting sober. One of the sad realities of punk rock is you lose a lot of friends to death, drugs, and incarceration, and there’s nothing you can do about it except try to change. But guess what? All the change in the world doesn’t make the losses any easier to take. It was the eve of my thirteenth sober birthday and I would trade every one of them to bring J.J. back. I’m pretty sure Boon’s friends and bandmates felt the same way about him.
I’d been avoiding caffeine because the producer told me it dries out the throat, but on the third day of recording I said, Fuck it, I’m making an espresso. I felt so much better after that and the day flew by.
Reading an audio book is like getting tattooed: the body can only take so much. You might have some ideas about what your limitations are, but your body will let you know the real deal. At the beginning of each session, the voice takes a little warming up, and after five hours or so, your voice will tap out and say, I’m done. After the third day my voice felt wrecked and that evening I was pretty useless. I was feeling pretty heroic about it until a friend said, “Oh, it’s like a day of teaching.”
Every day we went to the ramen place across the street and I ordered the same bowl with variations in the type of noodle or broth. All that hot ramen, hot tea, and room temperature water did the trick because we finished the book on the fourth day, a full day ahead of schedule.
One of my fears of reading the audio book was that I would find typos and that those mistakes would haunt me. I could correct them for the audio book but not for the print version because it’s already been sent off to the printer. Any mistakes I found, I’d have to live with until the paperback comes out next year. Well, I did find typos, but they were pretty minor, all things considered (at least the ones I’m aware of).
The last thing I recorded was the intro and the outro. I almost got emotional reading “written and recorded by Jim Ruland.” Then, when we wrapped up the recording, I did a complete 180 and felt giddy. The book is done. That’s something you’ve heard me say a lot, but now it’s really true. The words are fixed. They are literally out of my hands. There’s not a thing I can do to change them. In a very real sense the book no longer belongs to me. It belongs to readers and critics and fans. It’s your book now, and that’s a pretty amazing feeling.
Melanie Nissen
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Slash cofounder and photographer Melanie Nissen about her new book HARD+FAST for the LA Times. Nissen generously provided a bunch of photos that appear with the story and it’s totally worth checking out.
The forming of Slash coincided with the arrival of the Damned. The Damned was the first English punk band to tour the United States and the band’s shows in LA were celebrated by Slash. Nissen’s iconic photo of Dave Vanian graced the cover of the first issue and it galvanized the nascent punk scene.
All this is in the interview but I know most of you don’t click on the links, but those shows by the Damned are important to me for personal reasons.
In April of 2002, twenty-five years after the Damned crash landed in LA, I hosted a show at Track 16 in Santa Monica called Punk Rock Revival. I had been doing some readings with the Razorcake crew at a place called Flor y Canto but we wanted to do more. Razorcake was new and I wanted to integrate the zine into the city’s scattershot literary scene. So I organized an event at the gallery that had put on the show Forming: The Early Days of LA Punk and assembled an all-star cast.
It was an incredible night. Masque founder Brendan Mullen and Keith Morris read from We Got the Neutron Bomb, which had come out a few months before (and is still the best book about LA punk). Tony read a heavy story about getting his ass kicked at Pioneer Chicken. I dressed like a monk and read an installment of The Discovery of America: the story of a punk rock tour told in the style of a medieval manuscript. After the show, Exene Cervenka came up to me and asked why she hadn’t been invited to read. That made me think I’d done something worthwhile, maybe even important. Video of the show exists somewhere because Exene’s ex-husband, Viggo Mortensen, was the cameraman. Viggo had a connection to the gallery and published a couple books under the galley’s imprint, Smart Art Press.
That experience set the stage for the first Vermin on the Mount event in Chinatown a few years later. My reading series has been on hiatus since the pandemic (but hopefully for not too much longer). Razorcake is still going strong. Somehow I’m still here, still sober, making connections between the ghost of punk’s past, present, and future. But if you want to hop into a time machine and see what the LA punk scene was really like, Melanie Nissen’s HARD+FAST will take you there.
Forbidden Beat
San Diego peeps: I’m doing my first live in-person event in two years and it’s 100% outdoors at Vinyl Junkies Record Shack in South Park. I’d love to see you there. Maybe we can all get tater tots afterward.
Take Back the Alley