(This is an old piece of mine that has never
been published anywhere. It’s long, but I am putting it out there because it’s
good, funny, and a real time capsule for myself and a few others. I actually
tried to get it published by a wanky punk zine called Razorcake, but the pedant
editor I dealt with was so pernickety aboot crap like using umlauts and stuff,
and gave me cheek like I have never had in decades of writing, that I just gave
up. It has lain dormant. Until now, that is…)
Past
3 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, December 11th, 2011. I am sitting
drinking a beer watching the excellent comedy special Alcoholocaust by the hilarious Australian
adult comedian Jim Jefferies on the large motel room TV. There is currently
nobody else in the room but me. From outside the door muffled scuffling and
thumping sounds shatter the silence. I sigh expansively and get up and open the
door, to see three grown men facing off to each other and wrestling in various
combinations. The sight is funny and stupid and embarrassing at the same time.
“You’re all gonna get fucking arrested,” I say, waving a beer-bottle-filled
hand at them dismissively, then go back to watching late-night sleazy comedy as
the punk rock circus noises continue on behind me.
“It
began as a mistake.” – Charles Bukowski.
Well,
I have to say, me being witness to this inane insanity was my own bloody fault.
I had asked The Freakish Reasons (with Matt Coppens on vocals, Jeff Figueroa on
guitar, Sean Matthews on drums, and Doug McCullough on bass), the Chicago
buzzgrinder garage punk band with members who are the veterans of a million
Chicago meatybeater combos, if I could drive them on their two-date tour of
Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the 9th and 10th of December.
I needed a break out of the Windy City and they agreed, thus plunging me into
the maw of a world of madness and horror and hilarity almost beyond my ken,
something I would barely survive with all my faculties intact.
(Actually, that’s a bloody lie, it really wasn’t all that bad, but building up the drama and tension helps to keep things rocking and rolling and reels you further into the story on a hook of promised excitement to come that probably won’t even happen. You have been warned.)
Anyway. We arranged to have the band pick me up in Rogers Park at 10.30 a.m. on Friday morning. I reckoned we should be going earlier than that, to make it down in good time and give us time to find the venue and whatnot, with it being around a seven hour drive, but Doug had done the drive a few times and apparently swore it was only six hours; whatever. I was really literally only along for the ride, so what these guys wanted was fine by me. 10.30 came and went, with occasional texts from Jeff muttering darkly about ‘damned bass players.’ Then 11 a.m. Then 11.30 a.m. Just as I was going to call it a day and reckon that we wouldn’t get there on time, they turned up around noon in a rented white van and I jumped into the back. Jeff was driving and would drive us up there, ultimately; I told them I’d drive on the way back down and that was fine with them.
(Actually, that’s a bloody lie, it really wasn’t all that bad, but building up the drama and tension helps to keep things rocking and rolling and reels you further into the story on a hook of promised excitement to come that probably won’t even happen. You have been warned.)
Anyway. We arranged to have the band pick me up in Rogers Park at 10.30 a.m. on Friday morning. I reckoned we should be going earlier than that, to make it down in good time and give us time to find the venue and whatnot, with it being around a seven hour drive, but Doug had done the drive a few times and apparently swore it was only six hours; whatever. I was really literally only along for the ride, so what these guys wanted was fine by me. 10.30 came and went, with occasional texts from Jeff muttering darkly about ‘damned bass players.’ Then 11 a.m. Then 11.30 a.m. Just as I was going to call it a day and reckon that we wouldn’t get there on time, they turned up around noon in a rented white van and I jumped into the back. Jeff was driving and would drive us up there, ultimately; I told them I’d drive on the way back down and that was fine with them.
(Left to right: Dougie, Sean, Matt, and Jeff)
Matt was riding shotgun, so I plopped myself down onto a sleeping bag in a black trash bag for luxury travel comfort. I figured my role was just basically immoral support at that point, so I moved into my usual wisecracker mode to lighten the mood in the van, which seemed to work just fine. It was Matt and Jeff I knew most (I have known Matt for five years, almost since I emigrated to this country from Scotland – we used to work together), but had met Sean and Doug and we made smalltalk here and there, getting to know each other a wee bit, liking them both in different ways for different reasons. Sean is totally bald and Doug has really long hair, so I, sat in the middle with my inch-long cut, felt like some sort of intermediate stage in a weird follicle-growing experiment being undertaken on the conspiratorial highways and byways of bemused permissive America.
If you know what I mean.
A spirited and funny-cum-scary conversation ensued about D. Boon from The Minutemen who died when a load of the band’s equipment fell on top of him in the back of their van. I seem to recall some story about a guy from Metallica dying in a van too, but I can’t be bothered looking it up; Googling is far too much fucking hassle. I was acutely aware that, as the van got onto the highway that, with us not wearing seatbelts, if we braked suddenly I’d probably go straight through the windscreen as I was in the position where there was no other way to go but straight forward.
The other two lucky probable-survivors would crash into the metal at the back of the driver and shotgunner and would be saved a bloodsprayer graceless swandive onto fleshtearer tarmac and being run over by a fucking truck or something. These were not comforting thoughts, but just so long as no sick fuck was around to film it and stick it on the net for a chuckin’ fuckle for sociopath(et)ic shut-ins I thought I would be okay. Matt began to relay to us how many shits he’d had that day – he’s a vegetarian who goes regular as a star in a scatporn video. This stuff is part-funny, part bragging – and was laughingly told to shut the fuck up in no uncertain terms rapido.
I don’t know if you know anything about where Minnesota is in relation to Chicago – I certainly didn’t, but being a foreigner my faulty sense of American geography can be forgiven – but you have to go through Wisconsin to get there. The highway trip through the land of Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer is certainly an odd and slightly freaky one – the road we were on was just an endless slo-mo barndance of farms and water coolers and signs for fireworks, porn and cheese – we mused that they should have the ultimate firework porn cheese party and the world could end with a multicolor skyborne cheddarbang. With it being the winter the highway was lined with dead trees pointing skeletal accusatory fingers at the shrugging unyielding gunmetal-gray sky and it was oddly creepy and rural and slightly demented somehow.
And that ‘somehow’ was made eminently clear when we stopped to buy some food and such at a Janesville truck stop. They had a great tee-shirt there that I wanted (but wasn’t going to pay good money for) that had a picture of a scary-looking redneck wielding a huge spanner that said “MESS WITH ME AND YOU MESS WITH THE WHOLE TRUCKSTOP.” Behind Maniac Spannerman there was a whole group of strange, developmentally-challenged-looking waitress and trucker fucking freak types with weapons in hand and malice in what little mind they had.
But the other guys found the motherlode of horror and kitsch hatefuel knuckledragger redneckery. There was a display with loads of hunting and fishing bumper stickers on it, with various threatening and mocking messages about softies like vegetarians and non-hunters or people with an IQ higher than that of roadkill, you know, horseshit like how PETA stands for People Eating Tasty Animals, etc., hardly even worth recounting. But the best beast one was a bestial sticker lamely proclaiming itself to be a license to hunt illegal immigrants. I had never experienced anything like that in my Scotland-and-Chicago-sheltered life and found it to be an utterly fascinating and appalling mom’s-apple-pie-slice of psychotic frightening rightwing Americana. I mean, how many illegal immigrants do they get in fucking Wisconsin anyway? Is the shadowy phantasmal threat of The Brown Menace really that much of a sociological and societal problem in that (mental) state? It’s not like the place is at the Mexican border or anything!
Being an immigrant myself, albeit a legal one, this made me slightly nervous and I wanted to get out before the banjos started ready-to-slay-playing (the name Wisconsin always makes me think of the Crucifucks song of the same name, with Doc Dart’s mournful plaintive ear-assailing wailing about his pal being beaten to death) and Maniac Spannerman’s real-life counterparts started muttering guttural noises about “Doan like yoah funny-talkin’ furriner type round heah boy,” and wanting to gut me like a goshdarn preevert queer or deer.
After Doug got some crap food from Wendy’s (I was almost tempted to eat meat and start making homophobic and racist slurs just to show I wasn’t a soft vegan) we got the hell out of there, Jeff (whose lineage has left him olive-skinned) vowing to get one of the illegal immigrant killer-rant stickers on the way back. The graphic on the flyers for the Freakish Reasons gigs was the deformed performers from the 1932 Todd Browning movie Freaks going after the two ‘normal’ people to tar and feather them at the end of the flickershow, and I think the truck stop analogy is pretty obvious.
Back on the road we saw a Greyhound bus and I marveled and gawked at it like a tourist. I had never seen one before, only heard of the legendary country-crosser beast, and there are certain things that are just so quintessentially American, like yellow schoolbusses, that somebody who did not grow up in the country is nearly overawed on viewing them, like an American getting to see the Loch Ness monster or something. Doug advised Jeff to make sure and stay inside the speed limit for the last half hour inside Wisconsin, because apparently that’s where the traffic cops lie in wait (word to the wise), and we managed to avoid any speeding tickets.
We had made fairly good time getting up there, though it was dark when we arrived in Minneapolis (I had never been to Minnesota before) around 7.30 or so, with load-in for the band at 9 p.m. We parked the van, confused by the lack of traffic meters everywhere, convinced we must be parking wrong somehow…but we weren’t. We were just so conditioned by meter-hell Chicago to expect the worst that a city can throw at you to get cash out of you. But…amazingly…there were no meters where we had parked and no hidden tricks or traps! Plus the people were genuinely friendly and cool too, living up to their ‘Minnesota Nice’ label, which made us feel cynical and distrustful and scarred, so…FUCK YOU, MINNESOTANS! THANKS FOR THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX!
Back on the road we saw a Greyhound bus and I marveled and gawked at it like a tourist. I had never seen one before, only heard of the legendary country-crosser beast, and there are certain things that are just so quintessentially American, like yellow schoolbusses, that somebody who did not grow up in the country is nearly overawed on viewing them, like an American getting to see the Loch Ness monster or something. Doug advised Jeff to make sure and stay inside the speed limit for the last half hour inside Wisconsin, because apparently that’s where the traffic cops lie in wait (word to the wise), and we managed to avoid any speeding tickets.
We had made fairly good time getting up there, though it was dark when we arrived in Minneapolis (I had never been to Minnesota before) around 7.30 or so, with load-in for the band at 9 p.m. We parked the van, confused by the lack of traffic meters everywhere, convinced we must be parking wrong somehow…but we weren’t. We were just so conditioned by meter-hell Chicago to expect the worst that a city can throw at you to get cash out of you. But…amazingly…there were no meters where we had parked and no hidden tricks or traps! Plus the people were genuinely friendly and cool too, living up to their ‘Minnesota Nice’ label, which made us feel cynical and distrustful and scarred, so…FUCK YOU, MINNESOTANS! THANKS FOR THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX!
(Cough)
(Sound of crickets chirping)
Anyway. We walked away from the van, noting that it was fucking fr-fr-fr-fr-freezing, much colder than in Chicago at this time of year, with the temperature hovering delightfully between four and seven roasty-toasty degrees that first night. We found a bar and it was only then I realized I didn’t have my driver’s license because a few days earlier the pricks from the Evanston traffic police (state) had taken it from me after giving me a traffic ticket – a nice gesture of extortion and a major inconvenience.
Anyway. We walked away from the van, noting that it was fucking fr-fr-fr-fr-freezing, much colder than in Chicago at this time of year, with the temperature hovering delightfully between four and seven roasty-toasty degrees that first night. We found a bar and it was only then I realized I didn’t have my driver’s license because a few days earlier the pricks from the Evanston traffic police (state) had taken it from me after giving me a traffic ticket – a nice gesture of extortion and a major inconvenience.
I had to explain to the dubious-looking barman that I am honestly-for-fucksake over 21 years old and that the gray hair on my head wasn’t just fake – I couldn’t give him a photo ID because I simply didn’t have one. He looked somewhat incredulous, but let me in anyway – to do anything else but would have been utterly ridiculous. After that I realized I had the actual traffic ticket on me in my wallet with my date of birth on it, so I used it in conjunction with my debit and library cards to convince other booze sellers I wasn’t some ID-free illegal immigrant, as the first bouncer probably thought I was. What a pain in the fucking arse all round.
We tanned a quick couple of pitchers of beer as I sat admiring the holiday-season-tight-sweater-wearing essential female curvature of a young woman playing pool, then we motorvated round the corner to a place called Cause on Lyndale Avenue, which was where the gig was being held. I went in with Doug to see if we could find out what was happening and how and where to park to load. For some reason the band had asked me to say I was their manager, but it just seemed like so ridiculous an idea I hardly tried it. We eventually pulled the van up to the front door and unloaded it. I immediately regretted not wearing gloves as the metal parts of the instruments I moved almost stuck to my poor frigidity-assailed half-numb skin, but it really didn’t take too long to get it all done. I even helped another band load in some of their stuff too. I don’t know why. The cold must have gone to my head.
The inside of Cause was really cool. There
was a lot of strange and beautyfuel art on the walls for sale from what I would
assume were local artists, female portraits and other weird indescribable
stuff, with a superb huge cartoon mural of a flesh-rotted-zombie Ronnie Reagan
and Margaret Thatcher over by the stage. There were also, inexplicably and disgustingly
and disturbingly, three photos of Dave Grohl on the walls. I accosted a barmaid
to ask her why this hate crime against wall art was being committed, but she
seemed confused and slightly distressed by my irrational antipathy towards a
bland insipid liberal musician and I just walked away with no satisfactory
explanation for this decoration aberration.
I took a wander round and found that the club was a two-part affair, with the gig space in one half and a restaurant in another, filled with young Minnesotans who barely looked old enough to drink, plus another horrifying Dave Grohl wallpic! Going back to talk to the band, I was dispatched to find out about getting drink tickets and was told I had to climb a ladder to where the soundman’s room was overlooking the stage on the opposite wall. I got the green tickets from a huge alkie’s-wet-dream roll, two apiece, and carefully climbed back down. I would assume they put the tickets up there to dissuade people from asking for them, or if the person getting them falls and breaks their neck they can just take them off the body and re-use them without freeflowing any of the drink they may have had to otherwise.
I took a wander round and found that the club was a two-part affair, with the gig space in one half and a restaurant in another, filled with young Minnesotans who barely looked old enough to drink, plus another horrifying Dave Grohl wallpic! Going back to talk to the band, I was dispatched to find out about getting drink tickets and was told I had to climb a ladder to where the soundman’s room was overlooking the stage on the opposite wall. I got the green tickets from a huge alkie’s-wet-dream roll, two apiece, and carefully climbed back down. I would assume they put the tickets up there to dissuade people from asking for them, or if the person getting them falls and breaks their neck they can just take them off the body and re-use them without freeflowing any of the drink they may have had to otherwise.
There were four bands playing that evening – Cockfight (and I will stay away from any and all jokes about that name), Stunts, The Freakish Reasons, and Fuck Knights. They all sound garagey, to a greater or lesser degree, so just picture that raw-war warts and all sound heard in your head when I write about them, okay? I worried aloud that people may not come out on such a cold night to see a show. Of course, I was completely wrong, and am judging the hard, hardy music lovers of the area by my own used-to-warmth standards. These guys and dolls are accustomed to this extreme cold and are not fazed by it in the slightest, thankfully.
The smallish venue filled up to a reasonable level and Cockfight took to the low stage. They are two middle aged men surf-and-turf-guitaring it and, to be perfectly honest, they came off as if they have not practiced together in years (as I understand it, they only recently reformed, so my hypothesis may not be far from the truth) and were just goofing off sloppily jamming in front of a crowd; which may be fun for them, but not so great for audience. Dougie got onstage to join them for a song or two on bass, and he looked like he was having a fine old time. He’s a hometown boy, and spent the weekend getting hugs or hellos or handshakes (or any combination thereof) from many people he hadn’t seen in a while, totally in his element.
Stunts were next. They are a young band, early 20s, and were bouncing along when I noticed that when the singer sang into his mike that you couldn’t hear a word he was singing. I waited until a break after the first song and go up to the stage to tell him about his faulty setup, trying to be nice and helpful. He had a brief back-and-forth with the soundman (Matt despises soundmen, calls them all assholes, and the mere mention of them brings forth a vicious tirade at the irrational level Mel Gibson normally reserves for Jews or ex-girlfriends) and established everything was fine, started off again, and you still couldn’t hear the bastirt! This whole ‘shy inaudible singer’ thing was actually part of his schtick, and I simply couldn’t believe that a vocalist wouldn’t actually want to be heard when doing his singthing. You have to admit it’s a new one. Angry that I had made a fool of myself by trying to help him out, I shouted “SING UP FOR FUCKSAKE!” a few times until, probably frightened, he started to actually sing at an audible level; for whatever that was worth. I should have known by his fey foppish lunatic fringe haircut that they wouldn’t be much good. NEXT!
Who were The Freakish Reasons.
Who were The Freakish Reasons.
They had asked me to introduce them, and I had decided beforehand that I would
try and be respectful, to thank the other bands they played with and the venue
and everybody for coming out. Which I did, but I had had a few free-or-$2 Pabst
Blue Ribbons by that point on an empty stomach and couldn’t remember one
of the band names (Fuck Knights) and just ended up exhorting the crowd to “WAVE
YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR! WAVE ‘EM LIKE YOU JUST DON’T CARE! I HEARD IT ON A
HIP-HOP ALBUM! IT MUST WORK!” Which is hardly a scientific criterion for
getting a crowd going, but they seemed to enjoy the attempt and the sentiment,
and people told me they liked it after I got off the stage. The crowd initially
seemed a bit cowed but Matt urged them to move down to fill any vacant space
between the band and the audience and it really helped the energy of the
performance all round. I went to the bathroom as the band started and spoke to
somebody in the line.
“You are actually Scottish!” he marveled at me.
“Why the hell wouldn’t I be? You think that’s what we do in Chicago, come to Minnesota to impersonate Scotsmen for some reason? Get a bloody grip,” I griped, going into the cludgie (toilet), Dave Grohl mockingly watching me all the while from his lofty untouchable mainstream perch on the corridor wall. I have actually had guys tell me they pretended they were Scottish to get laid because the women love the accent, which is absolutely true, ridiculously so, but Americans can never do a Scottish accent and all come off sounding like a cross between Scotty from Star Dreck and a Russian stroke victim. My accent has the slight edge of, well, actually being real.
Anyway. The Reasons were having fun, a short sonic season in sedition and treason, bouncing and bounding along, and got off the stage after an energetic jetset. I was informed by Matt then that the person whose house we were going to be staying at was the sweet shy quiet boy from Stunts I had scared into audibility. I began to wish that I had kept my mouth shut but, well, it was done now. No point crying over spilled rants. Fuck Knights took to the stage, all five of them standing next to each other, which was an interesting setup, then started surfsounding away…then stopped. The singer, who was pounding a drum, was having problems with it, and was having none of it. I recognized him as a guy I had been talking to earlier on, with me mocking poets (for some reason) and pointing out the fact that ‘poem’ was an anagram of ‘mope’ and…eh…’emo p.’ Can’t get a thing past me!
So this guy wheedled and whined and whinged and bummed on about this drum, and eventually Sean lent him one. But even that wasn’t right and he made some snarky comment about making sure equipment he had to borrow was okay when he couldn’t be bothered to bring his own. Haw. Haw. Haw. I just shouted at him to stop poncing aboot and play a bloody song, and he quoted “that Scottish guy” (more on that appellation later) pointing out that poem/mope mix-up. They eventually got going and were pretty good, but his lengthy hissy-bitch pissy-fit prima-donna shit had partly killed the energy and spontaneity of the performance. I was told that he had just come back off a European tour so thought he could pull this nonsense, which I thought was laughable; but hey, each to their own.
At a fast food joint across the road, I got the first greasy unhealthy kebab I
have had in 6.5 years in this country (they’re like a national food in
Scotland, never mind haggis or deep fried Mars Bars) and it was an almost
sexual experience. We got all the gear and reprobates loaded into the van and
Dougie (whom I occasionally called ‘Doogie,’ which is the Scottish way of
saying ‘Dougie,’ cos he hated it) had set us up at the quiet mopey young man’s
house, so we drove over there…or tried to at least. Dougie had forgotten the
address and we drove for what seemed like forever in four-degree cold up and
down streets, with the drunk bass player going “4323…no 4232…no…uh…you can’t
fault me for thinking this was the address, these guys lived there a year and a
half ago…” He couldn’t phone our potential host because he had deleted the
number from his phone or some such ridiculous nonsense. I just lay in the back
half-drunk and making joking comments about freezing to death in the van and
wanting to go back to Scotland or Chicago. I was actually enjoying it and
thought it was funny. Years ago I drove a Scottish band called Arab Strap round
the UK for two weeks, so two nights was going to be a piece of frozen piss.
Eventually a not-popular-by-now Dougie got out of the van around 3.30 a.m. and went to a random door in the supposedly correct street, simply because there was a light on. No answer. We had visions of him getting shot dead as an intruder by some frightened homeowner protecting his property from the ghost of Joey Ramone, with us having to tearfully drive back to Chicago under the weight of this insane tragedy, but thankfully it never happened. What did happen was that we got a motel for the night, all five of us in a room with two double beds, and we sat drinking and watching some self-aggrandizing pokerstroker 80s doc about U2, making loud mocking comments about Bono’s poncey napper (head) apparel and suchlike; truly a tour moment to treasure. I was in one bed next to a fully-clothed Jeff, and Dougie and Sean were lying on the floor; nobody wanted to sleep next to Matt for some reason. I don’t blame them.
Eventually a not-popular-by-now Dougie got out of the van around 3.30 a.m. and went to a random door in the supposedly correct street, simply because there was a light on. No answer. We had visions of him getting shot dead as an intruder by some frightened homeowner protecting his property from the ghost of Joey Ramone, with us having to tearfully drive back to Chicago under the weight of this insane tragedy, but thankfully it never happened. What did happen was that we got a motel for the night, all five of us in a room with two double beds, and we sat drinking and watching some self-aggrandizing pokerstroker 80s doc about U2, making loud mocking comments about Bono’s poncey napper (head) apparel and suchlike; truly a tour moment to treasure. I was in one bed next to a fully-clothed Jeff, and Dougie and Sean were lying on the floor; nobody wanted to sleep next to Matt for some reason. I don’t blame them.
I don’t know why; maybe it was the taste,
maybe it was the convenience of access, maybe it was the fact it tasted better
than the Boxers beer that Matt and I had bought, but I started drinking a
bottle of Caramel Apple Liqueur (15%, by Hiram Walker, whom I believe is
Johnny’s special needs brother) that Sean had bought for some reason earlier
and filled his (un)hip flask from. He had bought this earlier in the day
and it was shaped like a silver cellphone for some reason; watching him take
sips from it upon occasion was a truly strange sight. I started calling the stuff Caramel Whip, cos it tasted like the caramel UK dessert Instant Whip. I had just finished
telling Matt that the crap was having no effect on me when I suffered a minor
allergic reaction, which is something I had only ever encountered 20 years
before, drinking some crap hooch in Scotland, turning me a fetching pink shade
I call Lobster Man From Mars (after an old shitty Troma movie) so I knew this
was a quality brew, the death metal of liqueurs, and continued to quaff the odd
mouthful here and there.
Just before lights-out a totally drunk Dougie came over and dropped a package of Cheez-Its next to me on the nightstand. “I know you like cheese, they’re for you, for the morning,” he told me in a moment both oddly touching and touchingly odd. I had jokingly mentioned a couple of times wanting to try Wisconsin cheese curds, and I would assume this was what this was about. You never know with drunk people. Everybody crashed out, with me taking far longer than others because of Jeff’s horrifying Texas Chainsaw Massacre snore level. He joked earlier that he could take “sleep with a Scotsman” off his bucket list. Then eventually we all drifted off to sleep perchance to dream of driving in endless terrifying loops in the frigid Minneapolis suburbs, forever searching for a hospitable address that would never ever come as a silent singer screamed his quiet emo laughter at our insoluble frozen roadkill predicament.
Just before lights-out a totally drunk Dougie came over and dropped a package of Cheez-Its next to me on the nightstand. “I know you like cheese, they’re for you, for the morning,” he told me in a moment both oddly touching and touchingly odd. I had jokingly mentioned a couple of times wanting to try Wisconsin cheese curds, and I would assume this was what this was about. You never know with drunk people. Everybody crashed out, with me taking far longer than others because of Jeff’s horrifying Texas Chainsaw Massacre snore level. He joked earlier that he could take “sleep with a Scotsman” off his bucket list. Then eventually we all drifted off to sleep perchance to dream of driving in endless terrifying loops in the frigid Minneapolis suburbs, forever searching for a hospitable address that would never ever come as a silent singer screamed his quiet emo laughter at our insoluble frozen roadkill predicament.
The next morning I ate the Cheez-Its. They were good. Thanks Dougie.
We decided that we would stay at the motel another night and use it as a base of operations, rather than risk hypothermia or death or the Dougster’s crap directions again. Everybody was up and about round about 11 a.m. and we went and got some breakfast at some lying place that teasingly promised beer and burgers, but only sold burgers after 2 p.m. for some reason; must be some weird Minneapolis statute, can’t have the locals clogging their arteries too early on in the morning. Bastirts! We dropped Mapquest Dougie off back at the motel and went on a wee sightseeing tour of Minneapolis, noticing a disturbing preponderance of hipsters everywhere.
Jeff wanted to see the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, so we headed over there for a wee while. They have some beautiful Egyptian stuff in there, the sort of artifacts that make you stand and look at them and think about who sculpted them for what pharaoh or princess and why, thinking that you yourself will never be remembered in two or three thousand years, but maybe you wouldn’t even want to be, and it just proved the hollow transience of sentience, the shortness of the life sentence that a few lifeless sentences on a monitor will never touch or explain or explore so it’s just as well to step away from that train of thought and jump back in the van with us as we drove round for a while longer. Jeff likes to photograph graffiti, what he calls ‘found art,’ and he found some great stuff in Minneapolis for his excellent Facebook album. Friend the fiend and take a look if you don’t believe me, it’s quite a treat.
After that quick sejourne into depressing mortality reminders (sorry, I mean ‘eternally beautiful art’) we went back to the motel and got Dougie, whom we occasionally called ‘Cretino Ramone’ after some character using that nom-de-punk on Youtube for some old Screeching Weasel videos that they have uploaded. When he puts on his shades and lets his hair hang down over his face Dougie does resemble Joey Ramone (I saw the last ever gig the Ramones played in the UK, at the Brixton Academy, and it was terrible; Joey’s health was fucked and kept going offstage in between songs, and half the set was sung by some other young guy whose name I can’t remember) a bit; except he’s still breathing, obviously. Stopping off at a gas station to allow us to go to the toilet, I ran into trouble. The male and female toilets only held one person at a time and I was third in line after Jeff and Sean, bursting to go, so I used the vacant female toilet instead. I walked out towards the door and the middle aged woman behind the counter was looking at me and shaking her head in disgusted matronly disapproval.
After that quick sejourne into depressing mortality reminders (sorry, I mean ‘eternally beautiful art’) we went back to the motel and got Dougie, whom we occasionally called ‘Cretino Ramone’ after some character using that nom-de-punk on Youtube for some old Screeching Weasel videos that they have uploaded. When he puts on his shades and lets his hair hang down over his face Dougie does resemble Joey Ramone (I saw the last ever gig the Ramones played in the UK, at the Brixton Academy, and it was terrible; Joey’s health was fucked and kept going offstage in between songs, and half the set was sung by some other young guy whose name I can’t remember) a bit; except he’s still breathing, obviously. Stopping off at a gas station to allow us to go to the toilet, I ran into trouble. The male and female toilets only held one person at a time and I was third in line after Jeff and Sean, bursting to go, so I used the vacant female toilet instead. I walked out towards the door and the middle aged woman behind the counter was looking at me and shaking her head in disgusted matronly disapproval.
(I just laughed out loud as I wrote that). I apologized profusely and sincerely, feeling like I had been told off by a stern schoolteacher, saying it would never happen again cos I would never be back that way again, and the incident provoked much hilarity in the van. An unprintable and hilarious conversation ensued about what exactly constituted frightening the doo-dahs out of a little girl. You just don’t want to know, trust me.
We drove over to the Nomad Pub on Cedar Avenue South for the show, and I was
once again dispatched, in my official unofficial capacity as their manager, to
find out where to unload the van. I found out that we needed to use a private
parking lot right next to the venue, where a currently-locked gate would be
unlocked to allow us easy access. You still had to pay to use the lot into the
early hours, which was a pain in the posterior, but there was no helping it. There
was some great graffiti-style artwork of a huge Jaws-like shark on the outside wall
of the place and Jeff, of course, was quick to get his camera out for it.
Jeff drove round into the (pay a) lot and I grabbed the drinks tickets (I had grown quite adept at finding these first and quickly and easily now) and doled them out (the band had mysteriously acquired a phantom foreign fifth member for both nights for the purposes of drinks tickets distribution) and got a free PBR, noting that the cans were twice the $2 of the night before. Jeff sagely noted that we still had loads of beer in the van and we could make a finances-saving beer run or two out there later on, before he disappeared off out into the night. Heartened, I finished my drink and went out myself to grab something to eat. It was still bloody cold, and I walked a scant block or so before deciding that a greasy fast food joint was the best I would do without being found the next morning stuck to the pavement with passersby muttering about “the poor dead derelict.”
Jeff drove round into the (pay a) lot and I grabbed the drinks tickets (I had grown quite adept at finding these first and quickly and easily now) and doled them out (the band had mysteriously acquired a phantom foreign fifth member for both nights for the purposes of drinks tickets distribution) and got a free PBR, noting that the cans were twice the $2 of the night before. Jeff sagely noted that we still had loads of beer in the van and we could make a finances-saving beer run or two out there later on, before he disappeared off out into the night. Heartened, I finished my drink and went out myself to grab something to eat. It was still bloody cold, and I walked a scant block or so before deciding that a greasy fast food joint was the best I would do without being found the next morning stuck to the pavement with passersby muttering about “the poor dead derelict.”
Jeff actually walked out as I
walked in, telling me he had had a killer falafel. I wasn’t into that and got
myself a horrible double cheeseburger and French fries and a can of orange
soda. The four pleasant members of another band playing, Ponyboy (named after
the character in the old S.E. Hinton book The Outsiders, of course, as I
mentioned to them – I unfortunately forgot to quote “Stay gold, Ponyboy,” to at
them at the end of the night), wandered in and we all sat and ate our serviceable
food with me making jokes and grilling them about the freezing weather. They
said that for six months of the year you could quite happily hibernate in this
city, and I certainly believed them. I was suddenly glad for Chicago’s
relatively even-tempered temperate temperatures and vowed certainly never
complain about them again. Which is a vow that’s already broken but, well, the
thought was briefly there at least.
When I got back to the Nomad the
gig had started and the first band, Speedboat Girls, two guys and a girl, were
playing their own brand of surf city slicklicking. They didn’t seem too
polished to me, but then I remembered Ponyboy telling me the Girls had just had
to get rid of their unreliable bass player and sequence all the bass riffs into
a machine (Ponyboy themselves were playing their first gig with a new member),
so I gave them some slack. Their gorgeous blackhair singer, with an
obvious-but-decent Siouxsie Sioux vocal influence, amazingly sexy curvature and
a fine sexy way of hopping around dancing, more than made up for their
occasional arrhythmia anyway. Have to say, I quite enjoyed it.
As they finished I looked around
and saw Dougie sitting with a man and a woman at a table in the back, probably
two Minneapolis friends of his, so I went over to say hiya. When I spoke to him
the young blonde woman, who was obviously drunk, squealed piercingly at me:
“Are you that Scottish guy?!”
“Eh…yes…what have I done this
time?” Stuff like that makes me a wee bit paranoid for obvious reasons. “I see
my reputation precedes me.”
“Yeah, it does, my friend Seth was at the show last night and told me about you.”
“Well, it’s good to know I haven’t stabbed anybody,” I smiled and walked off after a few more moments of desultory smalltalk. The whole ‘Scotsman in America’ thing can be pretty alienating sometimes, and you get tired of having the same tedious first conversation about Scottish heritage or golf or such rubbish time after time, and I wasn’t much in the mood for it right now. I located some of the band downstairs in the shabby-chic dressing room area, which housed a couple of chairs and a couch and a table, and marveled at the amount of stickers and names carved into wood from and by bands I had never heard of and likely would never hear of again.
I heard Ponyboy starting up and went upstairs, quite enjoying their thrillspill killbilly stiffriffs, and the female singer’s great voice, and sat and drank and chatted and idly flirted with a gorgeous young Indiana redhead (whose name I recall but won’t reveal) whom both Sean and Dougie both knew; a pretty decent time all in all. I also went outside in the courtyard where the bar had a small fire going and it was extremely pleasant in the cold air, wishing I had some marshmallows to roast, as that is something I have not done in many hungermaking-thought years.
After the second band finished, Matt came up to talk to me. You know how it is on tours, random people drift in and out here and there, mouths open and close, stories spill, tall tales are told, shifting allegiances are bought and sold. The singer was drunk and had a bug up his angry butt about something or other. He’s wiry and in good shape and into weightlifting and martial arts, a coiled cobra ready to strike, and sometimes this will come out as he demonstrates the best way to inflict brutal and crushing injuries on an opponent, disconcertingly grabbing at your head and neck to demonstrate his ninja (although he told me that a ninja is a made-up entity – I’ll take your word for it Matt) incapacitating deathgrip tactics.
On the whole trip he kept singing the refrain “El Guapo likes to dance/when he gets the chance,” which is the refrain from some fucking Dutch mixed martial arts maniac Bas Rutten’s rotten cheesy Eurodisco single. It was vaguely funny the first hundred times then it just got REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING. But Matt was riled up and on a different level, pulling out a razorsharp lock knife from his pocket and waving it around before I told him he’d get fucking arrested and to get a grip and put it away. He was not doing it entirely seriously, and would probably never stab anyone, but it was just a fucking stupid thing to do and you can never quite tell what can happen in any situation with alcohol and weapons in it. As the band moved to set up I went to go up to the front to ready myself to do the intro. The young woman who asked me if I was the Scottish guy was there:
“You’re not as Scottish as I thought you would be, but that’s okay.”
“What does that mean? Should I wear a kilt and talk about hills and Highlands and haggis and heather all the time and go ‘ocht crivvens, jings, help ma boab’ all the time to convince you of my authenticity?” I frowned at her. She was totally wasted and unfazed by my dripping sarcasm.
“Gimme a big Scottish hug,” she said. I shrugged…she grabbed and hugged me…squeezed hard as hell…her grip was really tight, especially around the neck, like that of a python crushing a small helpless animal to death…I began to breathe harder…blackout moved towards me at a grinning rate of deathknots…and then she released me again and I walked away. I cannot stand drunken obnoxious women, finding them to be utterly repulsive and the ultimate turn-off. I mean, drunken obnoxious guys are bad enough, but women push it much further because they have vaginas and know they can get away with stuff that men couldn’t without getting a smack for their troubles.
“Gimme a big Scottish hug,” she said. I shrugged…she grabbed and hugged me…squeezed hard as hell…her grip was really tight, especially around the neck, like that of a python crushing a small helpless animal to death…I began to breathe harder…blackout moved towards me at a grinning rate of deathknots…and then she released me again and I walked away. I cannot stand drunken obnoxious women, finding them to be utterly repulsive and the ultimate turn-off. I mean, drunken obnoxious guys are bad enough, but women push it much further because they have vaginas and know they can get away with stuff that men couldn’t without getting a smack for their troubles.
After a few minutes I got up and
did another made-up-on-the-spot intro, jokingly initially calling the place Las
Vegas and telling the audience members I empathized with the amount of facial
hair they have because it’s so fucking cold, and other such half-arsed rubbish.
When the band finally took to the stage Matt channeled all his aggression in
the right direction and it was fine enraged electric performance art. He staggered
and swaggered around with an arrogant fuck-you-all-or-nothing sneer on his
wasted features, waving a mike stand around his head and hitting some poor random
passing guy on the head with it.
He peeled off his sweatshirt to reveal his Formaldehyde Junkies tee-shirt, ignoring cries from Miss Annoying Drunk 2011 to take off all his clothes, and he rolled around on the floor and at one point freaked Dougie out by dropping down between the bassist’s legs and looking up and singing up to his defenseless-from-any-punches scrotum for some reason. And continuing on the pubic front, he shoved the mike down the front of his pants and underwear a couple of times. Which was funny, because M.A.D. 2011 grabbed the mike and sang into it not long after he did it the first time, and was up on stage later being annoying and grabbing the mike to sing a bit where Matt chants “faster…faster…faster…” as the song speeds up then explodes as the speed of foundsound.
She then stumbled off to cause some stupid anarchic shit somewhere else, no doubt, as the derailed-train-set shuddered to a traumatized halt and the Reasons got off the stage to make way for the last band of the night and weekend, Sex Rays. And it occurs to me that we could get a few of the bands together, what with names like Cockfight and Fuck Knights and Sex Rays, and have a good old low-down hoe-down aural sexstorm. Anyhow. The lights dimmed…dry ice started to squirt milky tendrils of coughsplutter nonsubstance into the substantially-reduced crowd…the band took to the lightstrafed stage, and there then started a safe hurricane of tight black jeans and black leather jackets and long black hair and shades (the minute I see anybody wearing shades indoors I just instantly tune out) and capital-A Atitood, dude!
It was clear that they, as the old Scottish phrase goes, would eat themselves if they were chocolate, so I really couldn’t be bothered from the get-go. They were trying to be ubercool rocknroll purveyors, but the stance, to me, just came across as so forced and narcissistic and studied it just wasn’t worth thinking about. They messed up the first song or so due to technical difficulties and whatnot, which was kind of funny to me, but I just shrugged internally and walked downstairs to see who was hanging around down there after making a beer run out to the van. I got talking to the pleasant and cool young Ponyboy drummer and swapped a beer or two with him, just having a general conversation about random shit as the hollow sex ray sonic squalls and storms crashed and raged crazily and boringly above our oblivious who-cares unhearing unheeding heads.
He peeled off his sweatshirt to reveal his Formaldehyde Junkies tee-shirt, ignoring cries from Miss Annoying Drunk 2011 to take off all his clothes, and he rolled around on the floor and at one point freaked Dougie out by dropping down between the bassist’s legs and looking up and singing up to his defenseless-from-any-punches scrotum for some reason. And continuing on the pubic front, he shoved the mike down the front of his pants and underwear a couple of times. Which was funny, because M.A.D. 2011 grabbed the mike and sang into it not long after he did it the first time, and was up on stage later being annoying and grabbing the mike to sing a bit where Matt chants “faster…faster…faster…” as the song speeds up then explodes as the speed of foundsound.
She then stumbled off to cause some stupid anarchic shit somewhere else, no doubt, as the derailed-train-set shuddered to a traumatized halt and the Reasons got off the stage to make way for the last band of the night and weekend, Sex Rays. And it occurs to me that we could get a few of the bands together, what with names like Cockfight and Fuck Knights and Sex Rays, and have a good old low-down hoe-down aural sexstorm. Anyhow. The lights dimmed…dry ice started to squirt milky tendrils of coughsplutter nonsubstance into the substantially-reduced crowd…the band took to the lightstrafed stage, and there then started a safe hurricane of tight black jeans and black leather jackets and long black hair and shades (the minute I see anybody wearing shades indoors I just instantly tune out) and capital-A Atitood, dude!
It was clear that they, as the old Scottish phrase goes, would eat themselves if they were chocolate, so I really couldn’t be bothered from the get-go. They were trying to be ubercool rocknroll purveyors, but the stance, to me, just came across as so forced and narcissistic and studied it just wasn’t worth thinking about. They messed up the first song or so due to technical difficulties and whatnot, which was kind of funny to me, but I just shrugged internally and walked downstairs to see who was hanging around down there after making a beer run out to the van. I got talking to the pleasant and cool young Ponyboy drummer and swapped a beer or two with him, just having a general conversation about random shit as the hollow sex ray sonic squalls and storms crashed and raged crazily and boringly above our oblivious who-cares unhearing unheeding heads.
Eventually it was all finished and
we got back into the van, with a really drunk Sean muttering about not wanting
to go to Minneapolis without checking out an aftershow party. But we had to get
up early the next morning to get Matt back at a decent hour for an evening out
he was having, so it was simply out of the question. Matt had wheedled some PBR
out of the bar because he felt the band weren’t getting paid enough; I guess
they were probably scared of him after his vagitated (a word I just made up that
means ‘angry cunt’) stagerage performance and just wanted to get rid of him
ASAP. I rode shotgun for a change (a blissful relief for my lower back, which
gets sore sometimes if I stand too much) and didn’t even really hear some
stupid comments Sean was making to Matt, who took offense and told him they
were gonna fight when the van stopped. I just thought it was stupid shit, but
Matt promised he was serious, and he was drunk too, so I just ignored them on
the way back to the motel.
When we got back there Dougie
buggered off somewhere to get some coffee or something, and the rest of us went
back to the room. I turned on the TV and found Jim Jefferies, whom I have met and
written about a few times, on the box, so I started watching a bit of it with Jeff.
Matt and Sean were outside and we heard bumping sounds, but I didn’t give a
shit, and so continued to watch Jim as Jeff went outside to see what was going
on. As noted earlier, this was after three in the morning. I heard more cursing
and bullshittery and went out to see what was going on. Matt had Sean in a
headlock and they were rolling round on the floor, with a spilled beer bottle
being soaked up by the thirsty carpet. Eventually Matt let him up and Sean
started whining about “I’m not the aggressor here,” before lunging at Jeff for
no clear reason. Jeff was having none of that shit and immediately overpowered
the drunk bald drummer, dragging him to the floor. As I said at the start of the
article, I just told them they’d all get arrested and went back inside to watch
the telly.
I lay on the bed drinking and
laughing at Jim’s hilarious gynecological misogynistic rantings, and Jeff and
Matt came in a few minutes later. Sean had wandered off somewhere in a drunken
strop and we had no idea where he was. We wondered idly if he would die in the
cold somewhere. I just told the singer and guitarist that they were nightmare
traveling companions and that I was glad that I wasn’t one of the neighbors
with all the noise going on, but they weren’t bothered their drunk arses. Dougie
came back in with loads of 7-11 type meaty sandwiches and I thanked him and dug
into one.
The channel got changed and that tedious endless-jabberjawing shite
Inglourious Basterds by Tarantino came on, which prompted a discussion about the
weird repressed homo angles in his plagiarist films and those of his bum-chum
Eli Roth, and about how the head Nazi was the only good thing in the worthless
movie. Jeff and I traded riffs, agreeing on absolutely nothing, and Matt
thought it was hilarious and would make a great podcast, us, like a drunken Statler
and Waldorf from the Muppets, just tearing the shit out of everything in sight,
and of both our views, without ever coming to a compromise. Don’t think so
Matt. We’d probably get arrested for slander, or vicious hate crimes against
cinematic stupidity.
Sean eventually came back after around 90 minutes. I can’t remember where he went, but he threw down an inches-thick pile of napkins onto the sideboard next to the TV and said “I got toilet paper.” We had toilet paper and couldn’t figure out why he’d done this, except for the fact he was still drunk. He and Matt started to wrestle briefly on the bed again, but when Sean’s feet lashed out and the plasma telly nearly got knocked over, as a lamp beside it did, we told them to calm fucking down and non-violent almost-silence reigned supreme again. Everybody was either tired, drunk, or both by this late point, and the night thankfully came to a close. I lay down next to Jeff again.
Sean eventually came back after around 90 minutes. I can’t remember where he went, but he threw down an inches-thick pile of napkins onto the sideboard next to the TV and said “I got toilet paper.” We had toilet paper and couldn’t figure out why he’d done this, except for the fact he was still drunk. He and Matt started to wrestle briefly on the bed again, but when Sean’s feet lashed out and the plasma telly nearly got knocked over, as a lamp beside it did, we told them to calm fucking down and non-violent almost-silence reigned supreme again. Everybody was either tired, drunk, or both by this late point, and the night thankfully came to a close. I lay down next to Jeff again.
Nobody slept next to Matt.
He made some
joke about me having a boner in my back and quick as a shot I shot back “It’s
not my imagination! I have a boner in my back!” in honor of Black Flag and Matt
thought this hilarious. Luckily I was genuinely only joking. Dougie lay on the
floor again, as did Sean, and sleep ensued. I was woken within about three
minutes by Jeff’s intolerably loud snoring, and even my previous night’s
silencing attempts, where if I bumped up and down on the bed he shifted
position and would be silent, didn’t work, so I went to the bathroom, fashioned
a pair of crude-but-effective earplugs for myself out of wet toilet paper, and
eventually got to sleep.
And then woke up again tired three
or four hours later, just in time for us to start going back to Chicago.
Metrosexual Matt took his usual 17-hour shower after being wound up by Jeff a
bit about the time we needed to get going, and we jumped into the van and hit
the road. I forgot my bloody phone at the motel and they said they didn’t have
it, so I hope whoever found it enjoyed the week or two left on the unlimited-talk pay-as-you-go piece of shit. I ended up in the back having
a really interesting left-of-field conversation with Dougie about literature,
with him talking about William Saroyan and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Ernest
Hemingway. He’d been going to give some books to a friend in Minneapolis but
had forgotten to, so he gave me a Saroyan bio and Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky
(thanks Dougie!), whom I have never read. It was a cool, weird wee unexpected
zinger of a moment and I really appreciated it, with Sean (who had been a wee
bit subdued on the trip back after the previous early morning’s proceedings) throwing
in some asides about John Steinbeck too. Who said they were just pretty faces?
We made good time and got back to Janesville, where an illegal immigrant hunting bumper sticker was duly purchased by Jeff. Eventually we got back relatively unscathed to Chicago and I was officially nominated the person they know who lives closest to the Lake Michigan, being only a scant half a block from its choppy frigid faux-ocean waters. They thanked me for tagging along and helping keep up band morale, I thanked them for a good time, and then they were off into four separate garage punk nights to come to pass.
Now. You may wonder why I called this tour diary Error in America. Well, GG
Allin’s last tour was called Terror in America (Bite It You Scum was going
through my head the whole couple of days I was with the band), and I just
thought that my title was a funny play on that one. Our short sharp shock-and-audience
tour was just like GG’s, except for the self-mutilation, and shitting, and
beating up the crowd, and venue trashing. So actually, in retrospect, my title
is a pretty damned stupid one; come up with your own. Myself, I need to go and
lie down after all that demented fuzzpunk stupidity and fun. Wake me and the
Minneapolis residents up after winter, as that Rogers Park hibernation sensation
is most definitely here…sayonara until spring…
THE END (FOR NOW)
PS:
On reading this, I realize one thing, that as somebody along to be a driver I
did not actually do: drive. Sorry
guys. Hope this tour diary is (scant) consolation for my roadrunner oversight…
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