You take the monkey, I'll take the llama

Notes from Schellraiser Music Festival

Greetings from the red room in Las Vegas, Nevada!

I arrived here two days ago exhausted from a three-day music festival and nonstop travel. So I holed up in a hotel with red-tinted windows and imagined that the world was coming to an end. Highly recommended.

Weird clouds over Las Vegas

I slept well, drank tons of tea, and got a lot of writing done. Somehow I have managed to revise part of my novel-in-progress every day since May 11 when I set out on the Midwest part of the tour. Yesterday I wrote an entirely new section of the novel and had an absolute blast. I don’t want to jinx myself by saying I’m “almost done” but I’m almost almost done.

I was also able to prepare for my event later today with Kid Congo Powers, whose book Some New Kind of Kick, is a must have. Kid had a knack for being in the thick of multiple music scenes and was a music fan long before he became a musician. There’s something very pure and obsessive about teenage fandom and he has a plethora of amazing stories. I’ll be speaking with him tonight at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona at 7pm so I better get on the road…

Two writers united by a love of the Ramones

First I want to tell you about the Schellraiser Music Festival. What is Schellraiser? It’s a three-day music festival you’ve likely never heard of in McGill, Nevada. Where is McGill? It’s about five hours north of Las Vegas on the edge of the Great Basin and about ten miles from Ely, Nevada. Both are old mining towns. McGill is where people lived. Ely—pronounced ee-lee—is where they played. It’s got a row of old casinos and looks like a town that time forgot. I’ve heard Ely described as what Reno was like 20 years ago but that might be a conservative estimate.

Ely, Nevada

Schellraiser is a music festival with two large stages with pro sound to accommodate a dozen or so bands per day. It’s held in McGill Park on a grassy slope in the shadow of enormous trees. The festival provided free spring water and invited vendors to sell food, drinks, records, and art. The people were exceptionally friendly and it was good vibes all the time. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see an eclectic mix of incredible bands in an intimate setting.

What Schellraiser doesn’t have is a reputation or a publicity department or a convenient location. That translated to very sparse attendance. I would say there were 200 guests there on Friday, 250 on Saturday, and 300 on Sunday, and from what I can gather these numbers were double the previous year’s attendance.

In many ways the festival felt like a private party in that I was able to get to know dozens of people—musicians, vendors, volunteers, and guests. Also, Schellraiser had none of the woes that bedevil other festivals: long lines for bathrooms, price-gouging for basic services, hordes of drunks. It was a hell of a good time.

It was a win for the guests who could sit in lawn chairs or sprawl on blankets and watch amazing bands. It was less so for the bands themselves who traveled long distances to play for small crowds—but a gig is a gig, right? But even less so for the vendors who need to earn a living from selling their services to guests and if there aren’t many guests…

Last fall the festival’s organizer reached out to me about doing some kind of conversation or Q&A about Corporate Rock Sucks. He was a big fan of SST Records and a bigger fan of the book. He offered to put me up in a hotel, pay a small honorarium, and give me a place to sell books. Even though McGill is 12 hours by car from San Diego, I told him to count me in.

Here's a rundown of some of the odd, unusual, and amazing experiences I had in Ely and McGill.

I saw so many great performances. Some bands I was familiar with like The Paranoyds, Frankie & the Witch Fingers, and Dinosaur Jr and some artists I didn’t know like Black Water Holy Light, Death Valley Girls, and The Joy Formidable.

My table was set up next to Steve Keene, an uber prolific artist who has sold or given away over 300,000 paintings. He did a three-day live painting demo and it was inspiring to watch him work. He never stopped painting. He was painting when I arrived to set-up and he kept at it for five or six hours straight. Then he’d stop and have a beer, do a little bit more painting, and watch some music before calling it a day. I never saw him sit in a chair. He was either standing or sitting on the grass.

I unexpectedly got to meet a writer that people have been recommending to me for years. Dozens of people have asked me if I’ve read Willy Vlautin and when I say, “No,” they tell me I have to read him. These recommendations have increased since I started writing music books since Vlautin is also a musician. In fact, his band The Delines performed at the festival.

During our tour of Arizona last month Joe O’Brien ran down all the reasons why it was inexcusable for me to have not read Willy Vlautin so I picked up a copy of Don’t Skip Out on Me at Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale. I had it with me at Schellraiser and I asked Willy to sign it, which he did.

Later that evening I ran into him at the casino at the Hotel Nevada and we traded stories about gambling strategies, bad beats, and foolproof ways to win at the racetrack. Willy shared with me that he has a new novel in the pipeline and for the first time this one is set in the world of music.
 

Approaching dusk on Day 1

I did have one negative experience at the festival. A local man in a Marine Corps hat approached my table one night. It wasn’t especially late but it was dark, too dark to be selling books to be honest. The local was going on about words to live by that his grandmother taught him and then devolved into a polemic about god. I cut him off.

“Are you a Marine?” I asked.

Marines never like to be asked if they “were” a Marine because you’re a Marine for life. I can respect that. I feel the same way about my service in the navy but have no qualms about using the past tense.

“Yes,” he said warily.

“I was in the Navy,” I said.

“You’re a squid. What was your MOS?” This means what was your specialty.

“I was a Boatswain’s Mate,” I said.

This usually gets some grudging respect from Marines who are always looking to put down sailors because if there’s one thing that can be said about BMs is we worked our asses off. There’s no easy duty if you’re a Boatswain Mate.

“I was going to become a Marine,” I said, but I couldn’t pass the final test.”

“What’s that?” the man asked, falling for my trap.

“I couldn’t fit my head in a jar.”

I heard someone use this line in basic training and I’ve been waiting 35 years to use it. The Marine was not amused.

“You’re a squid. You went the gay way.”

And with that the man showed his true colors. His message about living right like his grandmother taught him and following the word of God was just a cover for his rank intolerance, which had calcified into an ugly, outmoded view of the world.

“You have a good night,” I said.

“I see we have a different view of things.”

“You have a good night,” I repeated.

Photos by Shaun Astor courtesy of Schellraiser Festival

On the final day of the festival, I sat down on the small stage with Doug Fitzsimmons, who is writing a book about the early days of LA punk, a kind of who’s who of the scene, and we chatted about Corporate Rock Sucks in front of the audience.

It was the first non-musical presentation of the festival and I thought it might be strange but it went over very well. Doug kept the conversation flowing along and the sound was incredible. Afterwards, I couldn’t help but wonder if there’s an opportunity to expand on the literary portion of the festival, especially with so many musicians writing books these days. Hell, Ely would be a great setting for a writing retreat.

Not long after I gave my little talk, a bearded gentleman and a guy who looked like a soccer dad approached my table. The bearded gentleman said, “I read this! It’s great!” I thanked him and he apologized for reading it on his Kindle. I said I read tons of books that way. “I read Moby Dick on my phone!” I said.

The soccer dad said, “I’ll take this,” and picked up a copy of Corporate Rock Sucks. I took his money and asked him if I could sign it. “Sure,” he said and when I asked him his name he looked at me and said, “Murph.”

That’s when I realized I was talking to the rhythm section of Dinosaur Jr. I handed him the book and said, “I can’t wait to see you guys play tonight!” They walked away while I recalibrated my thoughts. Did Lou Barlow say my book was great?

It was the last night of the festival and I decided to try the Korean food truck that was selling tofu rice bowls with kimchi. The truck was at the end of the row and there was one other person there waiting. J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr.

I didn’t want to intrude on J Mascis who famously doesn’t enjoy speaking with the public. He seemed to have picked this food truck because it was the farthest from the crowds and the closest to wherever he was sequestered. I went to another food vendor selling vegetarian options but they were sold out. So I went back to the Korean food truck and placed my order. I stepped back and nodded at J Mascis. J Mascis nodded back. For the next two minutes we stood there as the sun went down over northern Nevada, not talking while we waited on our tofu and kimchi.

Dinosuar Jr