I've been asked to write an autobiographical essay for an anthology about punk and academia. No idea when it will see the light of day, or more accurately the dust of the library, so I'm putting it here too.
I was born in Long Beach, CA and raised in the adjacent city of San Pedro, graduating from San Pedro High School in 1988. I’d like to be able to tell you all about how I was influenced by our hometown heroes, the Minutemen, or Black Flag or the Descendents or any of the other hardcore bands that emerged from the nearby cities of Los Angeles’ South Bay at this time. I can imagine a really good story about how the radical politics and do-it-yourself ethic of the local hardcore scene would inspire me to become the Marxist sociologist I am today. However, that story would be a lie, because the truth is that my paths to both punk rock and radical sociology were never that direct or linear, and I’m just not that cool.
In high school I was a devout partisan of thrash metal bands like Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax and a couple dozen others with a more limited following. By the second half of the 1980s the California hardcore scene had fizzled out. There was this one punk dude who had “Minor Threat” written on the jacket he wore to school every day, but I didn’t know anything about them because the only people I hung out with were other longhairs and stoners. Still, there was a lot of punk influence in thrash metal, which was less about devils and dragons and more about indicting real world authorities, creating a local scene with indie record labels, and maintaining a veneer of authenticity that mocked the posturing and pomposity usually associated with heavy metal.
My headbanging roots notwithstanding, I almost voted for George Bush in the first election I was old enough to vote in, until my mother talked me out of it at the last minute. Like many other metalheads, I was personally rebellious but my half-baked political views amounted to nothing more than simple, knee-jerk libertarianism. I was entranced by power, enthralled by violence, and envious of wealth, and I also hated people I thought were weak or dependent, so it probably isn’t surprising that I almost voted for Bush.
I had begun college during that fall of 1988, as my parents were eager for me to leave my troublemaking metal friends behind and move north to attend San Jose State University. It wasn’t long before I found myself in classes taught by veterans of the New Left. One of them was Professor Douglas Dowd, who had been part of the Monthly Review editorial team with Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy and cofounded the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Dowd would typically begin his classes in Microeconomics with some thoughts about Marx or Ricardo before launching into a series of tirades that indiscriminately covered everything from the wastefulness of capitalism to the insanity of war and nationalism to the cruelty of child labor. This 70-plus year-old man would yell and point and curse and then stop suddenly, look out the window, and silently shake his head while muttering something about the insanity of our world. Many of the students in class were horrified and stopped attending after the first two weeks, but I was captivated. One day Dowd recited the lyrics to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and asked the class if that sounded like the kind of world any of us would want to live in, and I was the only student to raise my hand. “Then you’re a God-damn Communist!” he shouted at me.
O.K., so I guess I’m a Communist now. This was admittedly a major political about-face, but to this day I think my metal roots and cultural rebelliousness prepared me to embrace this stigmatized, marginalized political identity. I had grown up in a working-class seaport with a vague sense that the world wasn’t right, and now I was engrossed in my education to try and understand why. I was listening to the Bay Area’s progressive radio station KPFA and reading everything I could get my hands on, especially Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. My identity and style morphed from headbanger to something like a retro countercultural radical as I became absorbed in Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and anything else I could read or watch about the 60s, Students for a Democratic Society, and the counterculture.
I enrolled in a social theory class the following semester, and it was there that I read Marx for the first time and met my friend Mike Roberts, who today is also a sociology professor at San Diego State. Mike and I started a left campus organization and worked on publishing a newspaper that was unfortunately sabotaged by some other students just before it was about to be printed. Our social theory professor, Talmadge Wright, had also started a group called the Student Homeless Alliance that we became involved with. This was late 1990, and the United States was gearing up for our first war with Iraq, so Mike and I began working with other campus activists to create an anti-war coalition and organize an anti-war demonstration. I experienced my first 15 seconds of fame when my speech commencing the demonstration was sound-bitten for the local TV news.
At this time I knew a lot of people who were into punk rock, but my tastes hadn’t progressed that far yet. Some of my friends regularly made trips up to Berkeley to go to the Gilman Street club, but I never went. They played Dag Nasty, Green Day, and Big Drill Car for me but I absolutely hated all that melody. I thought it was cool that Bad Religion could reference Noam Chomsky and the like, but to this day their singer’s voice drives me crazy. One of my roommates was really into Fugazi, and although they’ve since become one of my favorite bands they just didn’t compute to me at that time. What my metal years had prepared me for was grunge and the whole Sub Pop/Seattle scene, so of course I took to Mudhoney and Soundgarden almost instantly. And then more locally there was Primus, Mr. Bungle, Psychefunkapus, the Limbomaniacs, and a bunch of other bands that formed a metal-funk-punk scene in the Bay Area.
By now my career goals had changed such that I wanted to go to graduate school and hopefully grow up to be a tenured radical like my professors. UC Santa Cruz was known to have a lot of Marxist and radical faculty members, especially in the sociology department, and so I transferred there in the fall of 1991. I did an internship with Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, the journal of Marxist ecology founded by James O’Connor, and worked with the Bay Area activist Frank Bardacke on a project about farmworkers. Other than that, however, there were a lot of people who talked radical politics at UC Santa Cruz but there wasn’t a lot of action, a possibly intentional result of the campus’ relatively isolated location in the mountains of central California. I joked with friends: what if a bunch of students demonstrate in the forest and there is no TV crew there to film them, do they make a sound? My only brush with revolution was accidentally getting hit in the side of the head with some sort of firecracker on the night of the Rodney King riots as the Santa Cruz students marched into town and trashed the local police department headquarters.
Nirvana’s Nevermind came out during my first semester at Santa Cruz. I remember that for weeks I would walk around the dorms and count how many rooms were blaring “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or some other song from the album. I knew it was a really big deal when the dreadlocked hippie kids who spent all day playing hacky sack and, as far I knew, listened to nothing but reggae and the Grateful Dead were suddenly talking about how much they wanted to see Nirvana when they came to San Francisco. The next two years or so would represent the pinnacle of the alternative rock/Lollapalooza era. Then the questions began: Did Nirvana sell out? Is alternative the new mainstream? Did I really just see a runway model wearing Doc Marten’s? Does anyone know anyone who likes to be called “Generation X”? Did that douchebag on the TV really just tell me that the new Subaru Impreza is just like punk rock?
At Santa Cruz I took a great class in the history of U.S. imperialism in Central America, read the Frankfurt School for the first time, and wrote research papers about the Black Panthers, American foreign policy, and the Wobblies. But by this time I had also been introduced to cultural studies, both in my courses on mass media and popular culture and in my conversations with activists who were influenced by identity politics and postmodernism. My relationship to cultural studies, as I discuss in more detail below, has always been deeply ambivalent. In the context of all these questions about alternative culture and Generation X, I could see that the issues raised by cultural studies about youth subcultures, hegemony, and resistance were still very pertinent and could not be ignored. I was especially taken with Lawrence Grossberg’s We Gotta Get Outta This Place, which as anyone who’s read it knows is loaded with pomo jargon but still raised what I thought were prescient questions about postmodern society, the ironic cynicism of youth culture, and the role that these had somehow played in maintaining the hegemony of conservatism.
I wrote a senior thesis under the direction of Professor Herman Gray about the media coverage of the movement against the Gulf War and graduated from UC Santa Cruz in the spring of 1993. I was on my way to graduate school and chose to enroll in the sociology program at UC San Diego because it advertised itself as having a strong emphasis in culture, which had quickly become my main field of interest. My first two years of graduate school were a rude awakening. I had chosen to study sociology because as an undergraduate it seemed so interdisciplinary and open-ended, like it was the best of all possible homes for my combination of interests in critical theory, radical politics, social history, and cultural studies. But as a graduate student I quickly discovered that professional sociology was a different animal altogether.
In time I learned that the sociology department at UC San Diego had indeed specialized in culture at one point in its history, but in recent years there had been a major shift toward historical-comparative sociology, and those faculty always seemed to be repeating the mantra that they were trying to make the program more “professional,” “competitive,” and “rigorous.” Yuk. Moreover, what the department did offer in terms of culture was mainly rooted in the apolitical traditions of microsociology like symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. Double yuk. Fortunately, critical theory and cultural studies had made strong inroads in UCSD’s departments of Communication and Literature, and in Ethnic Studies I discovered Professor George Lipsitz, who would serve as a de facto mentor in my study of neo-Marxist theories of culture.
San Diego was home to a bustling alternative music centered at a club called the Casbah, and I began going to shows there on a regular basis. After the success of Nirvana and other grunge bands, the major labels had gone scouting for new alternative rock acts to sign, and San Diego was one of a number of cities that was pegged as a potential “next Seattle.” Seven San Diego bands had signed with major labels during this time, and everyone from Rolling Stone to Details to the E! television network had done feature stories about the local scene. Beyond the hype, I discovered that there was indeed an exciting and musically diverse scene, and I instantly became a fan of the spastic noise of Trumans Water, Drive Like Jehu, and Heavy Vegetable, the retro punk of Rocket From the Crypt, and the cyborg prog-rock of Three Mile Pilot.
I was beginning to envision a dissertation project that brought together the cultural studies focus on music and subcultures with the sociological methods of ethnography and the neo-Marxist inquiry into the place of culture in post-Fordist capitalism. How all those pieces of the puzzle actually fit together would be something I would have to figure out along the way. Unfortunately, most of my sociology professors were vocally unsupportive of this idea. I had impressed many of them with my self-motivated interest in social theory, but for them music was a frivolous concern without any real sociological import. When I told the professor in my field methods seminar what I planned to do, he replied with a snarky tone, “It sounds like you’re just going to hang out with your friends.” Another one begged me to do something else—anything else, really—because I was “too close” to my project, and he eventually removed himself from my committee when I refused.
In actuality, I didn’t have any friends inside the scene, and rather than being “too close” I constantly felt like an outsider because not only was I not a musician, I was this geeky grad student who had all these esoteric theoretical and political questions about music and the scene. Lots of people told me that my project sounded like “fun,” and it was fun to go shows and hear live music in what I thought was a great scene, but it was nerve-wracking as hell to approach these people in a club and awkwardly ask them if we could arrange an interview. Let’s just say I found myself drinking a lot of “liquid courage” during those years.
Getting into the local scene enhanced my political consciousness, not because the bands themselves were concerned with political issues (most of them weren’t), but because I could see how they had formed a community based on creative work and participation. It wasn’t a dogmatic scene of the sort advocated in the pages of Maximumrocknroll, and therefore a great variety of musical styles and influences could be thrown together without apology. And so I began to see the form of democratic cultural production as more significant than the content of any particular political protest or “message.” This understanding of “punk” as a method of production rather than a specific style or sound opened up whole vistas of possibility and informed my belated musical education. Maybe I can explain it this way: Drive Like Jehu led me back to Fugazi and then even further back to Wire and then forward to the Minutemen and Hüsker Dü and then back again to the Gang of Four and Television. See, I told you my path to punk was ass-backwards.
While the Casbah and other local nightclubs were becoming a second home for me, I was still suffering from quite a bit of intellectual homelessness on campus. I was getting a lot more out of the graduate courses I was taking in other departments, so I stopped enrolling in sociology seminars after completing my minimum amount of required coursework and came very close to dropping out of the program. I took a position as a teaching assistant in an interdisciplinary freshman-level writing course, where the levels of overwork were legendary. Before long I had become heavily involved with the effort to unionize the academic student employees at the University of California and would be elected to serve on the strike committee as we planned a number of strategies for work stoppage. This took me further out of the bounds of the sociology department, as my social circle was now mainly composed of humanities students who were involved with me in organizing the T.A. union. Intellectually, however, I never embraced the kind of cultural studies that is practiced in the humanities, where meaning is mainly located in the “text” and acts of resistance are conceived as symbolic matters of reading and style. I was still fundamentally concerned with social process, and the Marxist in me still sought to link culture back to social structure. My experiences in the music scene redoubled these convictions: resistance was a matter of how people organized their community and engaged in creative work, not what people wore, how they cut their hair, or what they sang about in their lyrics.
My intellectual homelessness was glaringly evident and became a huge liability when I went on the job market for the first time in the fall of 1999. It seems that what transpired in my graduate program was something like a microcosm of what was happening in American sociology in general. There has been a great expansion of interest and research in culture among American sociologists since the 1980s, but these cultural sociologists have taken great pains to distinguish and insulate themselves from the broader field of cultural studies. The studies of popular culture and media, much less popular music, are very few and far between. American cultural sociology is significantly more conventional, eager to be accepted within the mainstream of the discipline, and rarely engaged with questions of power and resistance. Don’t take my word for it, listen to what one of the leading proponents has to say in its favor: “American cultural sociology is conservative rather than revolutionary in its academic program, unlike the British cultural studies model which has attempted to transgress disciplinary boundaries and create a completely new academic and discursive field.”
No matter what kind of theoretical and methodological spin I try to put on it, my work reeks of cultural studies simply because it is has the word punk attached to it. I sent out over 100 job applications during my first 3 years on the market without landing a single on-campus interview. I nearly gave up on the idea of an academic career on several different occasions, but a lack of other marketable skills and job experience made me feel trapped, and I still had a deep intellectual passion, not necessarily for sociology but for understanding social processes and contributing to social change. Fortunately I was able to hang on as an adjunct instructor of sociology at UC San Diego, as my courses on popular culture and youth attracted very high student enrollments; I taught a total of nearly 1,000 students during my final year there in 2001-02.
As my contract with UC San Diego and a long-term romantic relationship both came to an end at virtually the same time, I found myself living with my mother and collecting unemployment in late 2002. I was ready to give up on academia once and for all when I miraculously got a temporary position at the University of Kansas that began in the Spring 2003 semester and lasted through the 2003-04 school year. I sent out another heap of job applications but still couldn’t land a satisfactory tenure-track position, so I accepted another temporary appointment at Colgate University for 2004-05.
In 2005 I finally landed a tenure-track position at Florida Atlantic University. It’s not a prestigious school by any means, but it’s a good place for a punk like me: lots of older, “non-traditional” and working-class students, many of whom have roots in the Caribbean. Securing a permanent academic home has afforded me the time to finally finish turning my dissertation into a book titled Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis which will be published by New York University Press in 2009. Meanwhile, American sociology continues to aspire to the status of a science along the lines of economics and political science while attempting to avoid the stigma of the humanities conferred by cultural studies, and so there is no reason to expect that the study of punk or any other form of music will be moving into the center of the discipline any time soon. But somehow this feels like the appropriate place for a punk rock sociologist: screaming from the margins, denouncing the mainstream, and maybe—just maybe—developing the new ideas that are destined to shake up the establishment.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Jane's Addiction and Nine Inch Nails
A handful of observations about last night's NIN/JA show...
First off, Trent Reznor now bears an uncanny resemblance to Bruce Springsteen. Seriously, he's got short hair and long sideburns, he's sobered up, healthy looking, and even a little buff, and last night he was wearing good 'ol American blue jeans and a button-down black shirt that was quickly drenched in sweat. I'm not a big NIN fan, but they sounded good, especially on the thrashing "March of the Pigs," my favorite song of theirs. I kept waiting for them to play "Closer" so I could watch all the drunken frat boys pumping their fists while collectively singing "I wanna fuck you like an animal," but alas it didn't happen, to their credit I think. They finished their set with "Head Like a Hole." Eventually I just sat down on the lawn and watched them on the big screen, so it was sort of like listening to a Nine Inch Nails album while watching Springsteen at the Super Bowl. Honestly, the thing I will remember most is the beautiful full moon that arose at dusk between the palm trees in a brilliant orange color illuminated by the setting sun. Oh yeah and then this drunk girl fell over my friend Katy and then tried to make out with her as she was trying to console her.
Jane's Addiction, on the other hand, proved themselves to be the Rock Gods they have always been. Perry Farrell pranced around the stage with a set of maracas and some sort of feather boa like the old Jewish drag queen he's become. Let's just say he looked perfectly at home in West Palm Beach. And as cheesy as he is, Dave Navarro is still one motherfucker of a guitar player. Their show began with a black-and-white film showing some topless ladies engaged in a burlesque dance and then segued into the rolling bass line of "Three Days." I'm so glad that Flea is gone and Eric Avery is back in the band because those simple, rumbling bass lines are one of the things I love most about Jane's. "Three Days" has got to be one of the best epic rock songs ever written, and Navarro absolutely shredded on what I think is his most beautiful heroin-drenched guitar solo. Unfortunately their stage set was missing that opium den/Voodoo/Catholic idolatry of candles and red velvet that Perry's girlfriend Casey Niccoli used to design. But unlike NIN, Jane's lived up to their stadium rock billing because Perry and Dave are old-fashioned rock stars who somehow manage to fulfill their enormous egos, especially Perry, who always had a devious shit-eating grin on his face while peridoically drinking straight out of a huge bottle. Other highlights included a gorgeous version of "Then She Did...," which caused me to be close my eyes and get so blissed out that my friend Erin started watching me and laughing, at which point I shoved her and told her to fuck off (sorry Erin, but you had it coming bee-yatch!) There were some other songs that I didn't recognize because they must have been from that crappy album they made after reuniting, but there were rocking versions of "Been Caught Stealing" and "Ted, Just Admit It," with the latter including a cool film collage of sex, violence, violent sexuality, etc.
Rock 'n' Roll Marathon=Worst. Accomplishment. Ever.
June 1 was the one-year anniversary of the one and only marathon I will ever run. Here is the blog I wrote shortly thereafter. Allow me to begin with a quote from Jean Baudrillard: “Decidedly, joggers are the true Latter-Day Saints and the protagonists of an easy-does-it Apocalypse. Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his walkman, cocooned in the solitary sacrifices of his energy, indifferent even to catastrophes since he expects destruction to come only as the fruits of his own efforts, from exhausting the energy of a body that has in his own eyes become useless. Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop him. He will either hit you or simply carry on dancing around in front of you like a man possessed” (America, p. 38)
You'll never understand why after reading this, but I agreed to run the "Rock 'n' Roll" marathon in San Diego on June 1. Those who are familiar with my lifestyle and habits were rightfully incredulous. Nonetheless, I trained for this thing for a solid four months along with Pizza Fusion's "team in training." This involved getting up every (OK, most) Saturday morning before dawn to run progressively longer distances (16 miles, 18 miles, 20 miles, etc.) along Delray Beach. I've done a little long distance running before and in the course of training discovered that I'm actually pretty good at it. So let me qualify everything that follows by saying that I have nothing against jogging per se and will continue to incorporate it into my exercise routine.
So it's the morning of the race. My buddy Mike and I get up at an unholy hour and he starts driving me to the starting line in Balboa Park. But as we're approaching the site, the streets turn into a parking lot of cars and buses. "To hell with this," I tell Mike at one point, "let's just turn around and go back to sleep," but the traffic is so bad we can't turn around either. Joggers are hopping out of their rides and walking uphill to the site, and so I finally decide to do the same. I tell Mike I'll call him for a ride when it's all over.
I know it sounds too ridiculous to be true, but as I arrive at my position I find myself surrounded by Elvis impersonators (this is the "Rock 'n' Roll" marathon, after all) who are evidently going to run 26.2 miles in pompadours and polyester. I am grumpy but there is an air of anticipation and excitement around me. We begin running as U2's "Beautiful Day" is playing over the loudspeakers. The first 10 miles seemed to fly by. We ran through downtown San Diego, then up the 163 freeway and I was feeling pretty good. I paced myself, stopped to eat a cliff bar, and drank plenty of water and "accelerade" being doled out along the way. Alas, this would not turn out to be a "beautiful day," after all.
At various points of the race there were people grouped along the sidelines cheering on the runners. Some were holding signs with a particular individual's name, but most seemed to be cheering indiscriminately for all the runners. You'd pass by these total strangers and they'd cry out, "Way To Go!" or "Looking Good!" or "Don't Stop!" And then there were these squads of cheerleaders from various high schools and middle schools who would be doing coordinated cheers as you passed by them. Well, at some point the onset of fatigue turned my mood from merely grumpy to intensely foul, hateful, and potentially violent. I began to loathe the sight of these people cheering me on and felt immense relief in their absence, only to feel my blood begin to boil once again at the first sound of their cries of enthusiasm and encouragement.
I think it was around the 16th mile that my mind started playing tricks on me and I began to periodically experience something like hallucinations. Technically I was still "running" because my arms were swinging back and forth, but I was getting really frustrated because I couldn't pass a bunch of people who were walking alongside me. Then in the distance I heard another one of those damn spirit squads. "Less than 10 miles to go! Let's go runners! We know you can do it!" Then the vision came to me. I saw myself horizontally extending my left arm and systematically clotheslining every single one of those cheerleaders. I imagine how each and every one of their necks feel against my forearm. Onlookers cry out aghast: "Stop that man!" Teary-eyed witnesses are interviewed for the local news: "Those girls just wanted to show their spirit. What makes someone want to do something so evil?"
OK, so I didn't do it, but things got worse from there. The marathon was planned to finish at what in my mind is the most un-rock 'n' roll of all possible places, the Marine Corps depot. At some point I had taken my number off my chest because the safety pins holding it on were making my nipples bleed. But as we approach the Marine Corps depot I hear "Sir, I need to see your number, Sir!" Now I am really pissed because I have to stop "running" at mile 26, when the only thing keeping me going is sheer inertia and I feel as if my legs may collapse underneath me if they stop moving. Fortunately I have tucked the number inside my fanny pack (yes, I have resorted to purchasing and using a fanny pack) and I take out and wave it right in the face of this Marine. I'm almost never this courageous or confrontational. "Sir! It's just regulations! Sir!" The words "fascist jarhead babykiller" are flashing in neon inside my brain, but I restrain myself and continue "running." Only .2 miles to go now. There are now bleachers full of people cheering as I head to the finish line. My mind is repeatedly chanting the word "Peace." I want nothing more than to be free from my own anger and see this training ground for murderous imperialism transformed into a schoolyard for pagan homosexual children.
I finish with a time of 5 hours and 15 minutes. A medical volunteer asks me if I'm OK. Some girl gives me a medal. I sit on the asphalt on the brink of tears. People around me are hugging and telling each other they "did it." Another medical volunteer comes over and "encourages" me to stand and walk to keep the blood flowing or whatever. There's a photo booth but I do not want to know what I look like at this moment, so I walk around it.
I wish I could say this was the end, but I still need to catch a ride from Mike, and because we are at the Marine Corps depot there is no access for automobiles. So I have to walk to a place where he can pick me up. As I'm walking the place is guarded by all these Marines who are telling people not to walk on the grass and such, and some of them are holding these huge machine guns that look like toys. I hallucinate again and imagine I am at Guantanamo Bay. All the people around me are walking in a daze like zombies. My vision goes blurry and for a second I think we are all torture victims.
I finally make it out of the Marine depot and call to arrange for Mike to pick me up in front of a gas station. I make a point of sitting on the grass in front of a sign indicating $4.57 for regular unleaded. Mission accomplished. There are a few runners around me trying to hail a cab. And--I would swear to God if I believed in him/her/it--an Elvis impersonator walks by with a 12 pack of beer in hand. Mike picks me up and laughs his ass off as I struggle to stand and walk using my non-bendable knees. I immediately instruct him to remind me never to do anything like this again.
You'll never understand why after reading this, but I agreed to run the "Rock 'n' Roll" marathon in San Diego on June 1. Those who are familiar with my lifestyle and habits were rightfully incredulous. Nonetheless, I trained for this thing for a solid four months along with Pizza Fusion's "team in training." This involved getting up every (OK, most) Saturday morning before dawn to run progressively longer distances (16 miles, 18 miles, 20 miles, etc.) along Delray Beach. I've done a little long distance running before and in the course of training discovered that I'm actually pretty good at it. So let me qualify everything that follows by saying that I have nothing against jogging per se and will continue to incorporate it into my exercise routine.
So it's the morning of the race. My buddy Mike and I get up at an unholy hour and he starts driving me to the starting line in Balboa Park. But as we're approaching the site, the streets turn into a parking lot of cars and buses. "To hell with this," I tell Mike at one point, "let's just turn around and go back to sleep," but the traffic is so bad we can't turn around either. Joggers are hopping out of their rides and walking uphill to the site, and so I finally decide to do the same. I tell Mike I'll call him for a ride when it's all over.
I know it sounds too ridiculous to be true, but as I arrive at my position I find myself surrounded by Elvis impersonators (this is the "Rock 'n' Roll" marathon, after all) who are evidently going to run 26.2 miles in pompadours and polyester. I am grumpy but there is an air of anticipation and excitement around me. We begin running as U2's "Beautiful Day" is playing over the loudspeakers. The first 10 miles seemed to fly by. We ran through downtown San Diego, then up the 163 freeway and I was feeling pretty good. I paced myself, stopped to eat a cliff bar, and drank plenty of water and "accelerade" being doled out along the way. Alas, this would not turn out to be a "beautiful day," after all.
At various points of the race there were people grouped along the sidelines cheering on the runners. Some were holding signs with a particular individual's name, but most seemed to be cheering indiscriminately for all the runners. You'd pass by these total strangers and they'd cry out, "Way To Go!" or "Looking Good!" or "Don't Stop!" And then there were these squads of cheerleaders from various high schools and middle schools who would be doing coordinated cheers as you passed by them. Well, at some point the onset of fatigue turned my mood from merely grumpy to intensely foul, hateful, and potentially violent. I began to loathe the sight of these people cheering me on and felt immense relief in their absence, only to feel my blood begin to boil once again at the first sound of their cries of enthusiasm and encouragement.
I think it was around the 16th mile that my mind started playing tricks on me and I began to periodically experience something like hallucinations. Technically I was still "running" because my arms were swinging back and forth, but I was getting really frustrated because I couldn't pass a bunch of people who were walking alongside me. Then in the distance I heard another one of those damn spirit squads. "Less than 10 miles to go! Let's go runners! We know you can do it!" Then the vision came to me. I saw myself horizontally extending my left arm and systematically clotheslining every single one of those cheerleaders. I imagine how each and every one of their necks feel against my forearm. Onlookers cry out aghast: "Stop that man!" Teary-eyed witnesses are interviewed for the local news: "Those girls just wanted to show their spirit. What makes someone want to do something so evil?"
OK, so I didn't do it, but things got worse from there. The marathon was planned to finish at what in my mind is the most un-rock 'n' roll of all possible places, the Marine Corps depot. At some point I had taken my number off my chest because the safety pins holding it on were making my nipples bleed. But as we approach the Marine Corps depot I hear "Sir, I need to see your number, Sir!" Now I am really pissed because I have to stop "running" at mile 26, when the only thing keeping me going is sheer inertia and I feel as if my legs may collapse underneath me if they stop moving. Fortunately I have tucked the number inside my fanny pack (yes, I have resorted to purchasing and using a fanny pack) and I take out and wave it right in the face of this Marine. I'm almost never this courageous or confrontational. "Sir! It's just regulations! Sir!" The words "fascist jarhead babykiller" are flashing in neon inside my brain, but I restrain myself and continue "running." Only .2 miles to go now. There are now bleachers full of people cheering as I head to the finish line. My mind is repeatedly chanting the word "Peace." I want nothing more than to be free from my own anger and see this training ground for murderous imperialism transformed into a schoolyard for pagan homosexual children.
I finish with a time of 5 hours and 15 minutes. A medical volunteer asks me if I'm OK. Some girl gives me a medal. I sit on the asphalt on the brink of tears. People around me are hugging and telling each other they "did it." Another medical volunteer comes over and "encourages" me to stand and walk to keep the blood flowing or whatever. There's a photo booth but I do not want to know what I look like at this moment, so I walk around it.
I wish I could say this was the end, but I still need to catch a ride from Mike, and because we are at the Marine Corps depot there is no access for automobiles. So I have to walk to a place where he can pick me up. As I'm walking the place is guarded by all these Marines who are telling people not to walk on the grass and such, and some of them are holding these huge machine guns that look like toys. I hallucinate again and imagine I am at Guantanamo Bay. All the people around me are walking in a daze like zombies. My vision goes blurry and for a second I think we are all torture victims.
I finally make it out of the Marine depot and call to arrange for Mike to pick me up in front of a gas station. I make a point of sitting on the grass in front of a sign indicating $4.57 for regular unleaded. Mission accomplished. There are a few runners around me trying to hail a cab. And--I would swear to God if I believed in him/her/it--an Elvis impersonator walks by with a 12 pack of beer in hand. Mike picks me up and laughs his ass off as I struggle to stand and walk using my non-bendable knees. I immediately instruct him to remind me never to do anything like this again.
Slayer!
Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, CLEVERLY answer these questions. Pass it on to a gazillion people and include me. Try not to repeat a song title. It's harder than you think.
Pick Your Artist: Slayer
Are you male or female: The Antichrist
Describe yourself: Angel of Death
How do you feel about yourself: Can’t Stand You
Describe where you currently live: South of Heaven
If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Hell Awaits
Your favorite form of transportation: Altar of Sacrifice
Your best friend is: Necrophiliac
Your favorite color is: Raining Blood
What's the weather like: Born of Fire
Favorite time of the day: At Dawn They Sleep
If your life was a TV show, what would it be called: Sex. Murder. Art.
What is life to you: Serenity in Murder
What is the best advice you have to give: Mandatory Suicide
If you could change your name, what would it be: Ice Titan
Your favorite food is: Dead Skin Mask
Thought for the Day: Here Comes The Pain
How I would like to die: Piece By Piece
My soul's present condition: Cleanse The Soul
The faults I can't bear: Criminally Insane
My motto: God Hates Us All
Pick Your Artist: Slayer
Are you male or female: The Antichrist
Describe yourself: Angel of Death
How do you feel about yourself: Can’t Stand You
Describe where you currently live: South of Heaven
If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Hell Awaits
Your favorite form of transportation: Altar of Sacrifice
Your best friend is: Necrophiliac
Your favorite color is: Raining Blood
What's the weather like: Born of Fire
Favorite time of the day: At Dawn They Sleep
If your life was a TV show, what would it be called: Sex. Murder. Art.
What is life to you: Serenity in Murder
What is the best advice you have to give: Mandatory Suicide
If you could change your name, what would it be: Ice Titan
Your favorite food is: Dead Skin Mask
Thought for the Day: Here Comes The Pain
How I would like to die: Piece By Piece
My soul's present condition: Cleanse The Soul
The faults I can't bear: Criminally Insane
My motto: God Hates Us All
Cat Power: A Good Woman
When I’m depressed and for reasons I still don’t quite understand I absolutely must listen to something even more depressing, only the music of Chan Marshall’s Cat Power seems to do the trick these days. She replaced Nick Drake in this regard many months ago and has been in heavy rotation around my house ever since. So when one of my graduate students (thanks Alexis!) informed me that Marshall was the subject of a new biography (*Cat Power: A Good Woman*, by Elizabeth Goodman, published by Random House), I moved it past all the other books to the top of my reading list (and yes, I am geeky enough to maintain an actual reading list).
Marshall grew up around Atlanta with parents who were immersed in the music scene that emerged as the hippie counterculture morphed into Southern rock during the 1970s. Her father was an aspiring musician, and their household was awash with alcohol, drugs, and rock music. Her parents divorced when Chan and her sister were young, and their mother was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and became an alcoholic. The tumultuous relations with their insane mother caused the Marshall girls to move in with their father, which lasted until they were in high school, when he kicked them out of the house so he could live with his new girlfriend. Chan then dropped out of school and moved to the Atlanta hipster neighborhood known as Cabbagetown, where a local music scene had developed in the late 1980s and early 90s.
There is some intrigue surrounding *Cat Power: A Good Woman* in the fact that Chan Marshall refused to be interviewed or cooperate in any way with the making of this biography and even went so far as to ask her friends and family to do the same. The author, Elizabeth Goodman, begins the book with a story about the day that Chan’s mother called from her tobacco shack in rural North Carolina demanding to know Goodman’s credentials and to speak with her “superiors.” And yet despite all this resistance Goodman did a fine job of reconstructing Marshall’s life and career by drawing on previous interviews and painstakingly tracking down all the people who surrounded her in Atlanta and New York’s Lowest East Side, where Chan eventually moved and developed her musical career in the 1990s. I will admit I was initially afraid this biography might read something like a glorified zine article penned by what I imagined to be an English major fresh out of an elite liberal arts college, but the journalism is outstanding given the circumstances and Goodman’s writing style is incisive and witty while steering clear of the flowery prose that Cat Power’s melancholy music or Marshall’s melodramatic personality could have provoked from a more indulgent author.
Many people feel that to hear Cat Power’s music is to feel Chan Marshall’s pain. There’s just something so vulnerable and intimate about *that voice* which seems to channel not only her own experience but all the other Southern women whose suffering and longing for redemption have been expressed for generations by singing in church in the way Chan learned to do as a child. Some of this has become part of the Cat Power spectacle itself, like in an infamous concert at the Bowery Ballroom where Marshall broke down in the middle of the set and then walked out into the audience, laid on the floor, and curled up in the fetal position. More routinely, Marshall has been known to suddenly stop mid-song and constantly apologize to her audience or to perform in the dark or with her back turned. Goodman doesn’t hesitate to expose this behavior as passive-aggressive manipulation or admit to being a little grossed out by a certain type of Cat Power fan for whom this is a voyeuristic form of entertainment. But it’s clear this isn’t all just for show, either. By early 2006 Marshall had become the kind of alcoholic who drinks around the clock, and she cocooned herself in her Miami Beach condo with the intention of committing suicide. Delusional to the point where she was chasing evil spirits away with sticks of incense, Chan was eventually rescued by a friend who tricked her into being hospitalized for detox treatment, where she again hallucinated that she was sharing a room with a vampire and a growling lion.
So, yeah, Chan Marshall is “crazy as a shithouse rat,” an inexplicable phrase that my dad would use to describe me when I was a kid. One song that always gets to me is “Metal Heart,” from her breakthrough album of 1998, Moon Pix. “It’s damned if you don’t and it’s damned if you do/Be true ‘cause they’ll lock you up in a sad, sad zoo.” To have a metal heart is to be alienated from your own emotions, to experience your heart as if it were a thing, not an organ but a cold machine with a life of its own that you can’t control. When you have a metal heart you end up in a lot of no-win situations and it’s not even a question of being misunderstood by others because you don’t understand yourself. As the music builds, Marshall sings “Metal heart you’re not hiding/Metal heart you’re not worth a thing” as if to say that the best one can hope for is the ability to disguise those insane emotions, and if you can’t do that then you should just tear that worthless fucking thing out of the center of your chest and throw it away.
Another track on Moon Pix is the classic ode to the alcoholic life, “Moonshiner,” a traditional folk song that Bob Dylan covered in 1963 and has subsequently been performed by Uncle Tupelo, Elliot Smith, and Bob Forrest among others. Cat Power regularly records other artists’ material and has issued two full albums of nothing but cover songs, with Marshall putting her distinctive stamp on each one (the gorgeous “Sea of Love” and nearly unrecognizable “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” immediately come to mind). With “Moonshiner” she steps into some enormous shoes, as Dylan’s version is one of the best recordings of his folk period, and the cover by Uncle Tupelo is supremely haunting to boot. And yet Marshall not only steps up to play with the big boys, she spins the song into something of her own, putting an exclamation point onto the alcoholic’s desperation in yelling out “You’re already in hell/You’re already in hell/I wish we could go to hell.” When Dylan and others sing “Moonshiner,” they finish with the line, “When the bottle gets empty/ It sure ain’t worth a damn.” When Cat Power does it, Chan more bleakly concludes “When the bottle gets empty/Life ain’t worth a damn.”
These are two songs that make the hairs on my arms stand up, but my favorite track of all on Moon Pix is “The Colors and the Kids.” The song begins “Must be the colors/And the kids/That keep me alive/’Cause the music is boring me to death.” I don’t know what she meant, but I catch myself singing those lines a lot lately because I’m an aging guy who is constantly surrounded by young people who never fail to inspire and disappoint me at the same time. They’re in my class or at a show or in a meeting, so fresh-faced and full of life in this dead world of ours, and then the next thing you know they’re saying something so dumb about how Conor Oberst is a genius. I’m drawn to their brightness and vitality like a moth to light, but I just wish they would do something more…I dunno, interesting or whatever…but then again I’m not even sure what that would be, I just know when it’s boring me to death.
The beauty of “The Colors and the Kids” in enveloped by Chan’s voice and a piano, because there’s nothing else in the song. Don’t take it from me, listen to what my identical twin Dave Grohl has to say: “That song is so heart wrenchingly beautiful and romantic--it makes me want to kidnap her and run away and hide forever.” When the song hits its most dramatic moment, Chan sings the futile cries of a lover who swears that he or she can change if you’d just give them another chance: “I could stay here/Become someone different/I could stay here/Become someone better.” The sense of loss continues into the next verse as she mourns: “It’s so hard to go in the city/’Cause you want to say hello to everybody/It’s so hard to go into the city/’Cause you wanna say, ‘Hey, I love you’ to everybody.” Yeah, it *is* hard when you live the rootless lives that so many of us do (and musicians on tour are only the most extreme example) because people keep passing in and out of your world, and then you run into each other again and you can’t believe how much time has passed, and it turns out Dave Grohl is right because you want to kidnap that person and run away or at least freeze that moment in time, but the next thing you know you’re saying goodbye and you have no idea when, or if, you’ll see each other again. Modern life is just sad like that.
Moon Pix has my most beloved songs, but on the whole my favorite Cat Power album is You Are Free (2003). I’m sure she intended something more optimistic but sometimes I think the album’s title is taunting me, like if I need to reminded that I’m free then I’m not really free after all. On the ghastly ballad “Baby Doll,” Chan poses a question that I swear has been asked by everyone who ever had the misfortune of caring about me and became distressed by my periodic states of despair: “Baby/Black, black, black is all you see/Don’t you want/To be free?” The first track on You Are Free is called “I Don’t Blame You” and it concerns a musician who is just going through the motions, faking it onstage and not wanting to play the music their audience wants to hear. Many people believe the song is about Kurt Cobain, and they’re probably right, but I think that sort of diminishes the point because it’s a predicament that any of us could find ourselves in when called upon to perform according to someone else’s expectations. Any of us could be massively popular and successful yet fundamentally un-free if other people’s image of us became an alien thing separated from our “true” selves or held against us with a demand to perform like a trained seal. “Just because they knew your name/Doesn’t mean they know from where you came/What a sad trick you thought you had to play.” Chan apparently knows what it’s like, and she’s right there to console us: “They never owned it/And you never owed it to them anyway.”
Freedom is a cruel joke for the kids profiled in “Names,” the gold medal winner in the fiercely competitive battle for the title of Most Depressing Cat Power Song Ever. One by one Chan introduces us to her childhood friends who ended up as casualties of American abuse and neglect. First, there’s Perry, a boy with a learning disability whose father burned his skin and sent him to his death when he was 10 years old. Next we meet Naomi, the 11 year-old girl who taught Chan “how to please a man” after school in the back of the bus. Chan begins telling us about Sheryl, her BFF at age 12, whose “father would come to her in the night,” and then stops singing as if to emphasize that what came next was so horribly unspeakable. Donovan was also a very good friend who started selling cocaine, and Chan hasn’t seen him since he was 13 years old. Finally there’s Charles, who told Chan he was in love with her when they were 14, but then he began to smoke crack, and then he had to “sell ass.” She says she doesn’t know where he is, just like she doesn’t know where any of the rest of them are. Yeah, I know, Chan. I knew a few kids like these growing up, and I don’t know where they are either. These days I find them at the homeless teen center where I volunteer or alternating between recovery and addiction in south Florida’s massive and growing drug treatment industry. They’re like a little nation of disposable youth unto themselves.
I have two personal memories of Cat Power performances. The first was at the now defunct Studio A in Miami. It was one of Chan’s first shows after her alcoholic breakdown, and the crowd was abuzz with rumors and speculation about what kind of crazy shit she might pull this time. Instead she delivered an absolutely riveting performance that was capped off by the most beautiful a cappella I’ve ever heard. The crowd was annoyingly restless, however, and the moment she stopped singing the club put on some dance music, forcing all the sheepish indie rockers to shuffle away to make room for those who were there to bust a move. That’s Miami for you. They must have heard that Chan was friends with Karl Lagerfeld and had started modeling for Chanel, otherwise I can’t explain why they were there. The second memory is of Cat Power’s show at the Langerado Music Festival in 2007, where the set ended with a cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” I laughed when she started playing, because it took on a whole new meaning when Chan sang it. I think I’ve heard that song about a thousand times, and I do believe it’s one of the best songs of our short century, but I’ve only heard Cat Power do it that one time (she’s never recorded a cover in the studio) and yet for some reason it’s still burned in my memory and I’ve never heard that song the same way since.
Marshall grew up around Atlanta with parents who were immersed in the music scene that emerged as the hippie counterculture morphed into Southern rock during the 1970s. Her father was an aspiring musician, and their household was awash with alcohol, drugs, and rock music. Her parents divorced when Chan and her sister were young, and their mother was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and became an alcoholic. The tumultuous relations with their insane mother caused the Marshall girls to move in with their father, which lasted until they were in high school, when he kicked them out of the house so he could live with his new girlfriend. Chan then dropped out of school and moved to the Atlanta hipster neighborhood known as Cabbagetown, where a local music scene had developed in the late 1980s and early 90s.
There is some intrigue surrounding *Cat Power: A Good Woman* in the fact that Chan Marshall refused to be interviewed or cooperate in any way with the making of this biography and even went so far as to ask her friends and family to do the same. The author, Elizabeth Goodman, begins the book with a story about the day that Chan’s mother called from her tobacco shack in rural North Carolina demanding to know Goodman’s credentials and to speak with her “superiors.” And yet despite all this resistance Goodman did a fine job of reconstructing Marshall’s life and career by drawing on previous interviews and painstakingly tracking down all the people who surrounded her in Atlanta and New York’s Lowest East Side, where Chan eventually moved and developed her musical career in the 1990s. I will admit I was initially afraid this biography might read something like a glorified zine article penned by what I imagined to be an English major fresh out of an elite liberal arts college, but the journalism is outstanding given the circumstances and Goodman’s writing style is incisive and witty while steering clear of the flowery prose that Cat Power’s melancholy music or Marshall’s melodramatic personality could have provoked from a more indulgent author.
Many people feel that to hear Cat Power’s music is to feel Chan Marshall’s pain. There’s just something so vulnerable and intimate about *that voice* which seems to channel not only her own experience but all the other Southern women whose suffering and longing for redemption have been expressed for generations by singing in church in the way Chan learned to do as a child. Some of this has become part of the Cat Power spectacle itself, like in an infamous concert at the Bowery Ballroom where Marshall broke down in the middle of the set and then walked out into the audience, laid on the floor, and curled up in the fetal position. More routinely, Marshall has been known to suddenly stop mid-song and constantly apologize to her audience or to perform in the dark or with her back turned. Goodman doesn’t hesitate to expose this behavior as passive-aggressive manipulation or admit to being a little grossed out by a certain type of Cat Power fan for whom this is a voyeuristic form of entertainment. But it’s clear this isn’t all just for show, either. By early 2006 Marshall had become the kind of alcoholic who drinks around the clock, and she cocooned herself in her Miami Beach condo with the intention of committing suicide. Delusional to the point where she was chasing evil spirits away with sticks of incense, Chan was eventually rescued by a friend who tricked her into being hospitalized for detox treatment, where she again hallucinated that she was sharing a room with a vampire and a growling lion.
So, yeah, Chan Marshall is “crazy as a shithouse rat,” an inexplicable phrase that my dad would use to describe me when I was a kid. One song that always gets to me is “Metal Heart,” from her breakthrough album of 1998, Moon Pix. “It’s damned if you don’t and it’s damned if you do/Be true ‘cause they’ll lock you up in a sad, sad zoo.” To have a metal heart is to be alienated from your own emotions, to experience your heart as if it were a thing, not an organ but a cold machine with a life of its own that you can’t control. When you have a metal heart you end up in a lot of no-win situations and it’s not even a question of being misunderstood by others because you don’t understand yourself. As the music builds, Marshall sings “Metal heart you’re not hiding/Metal heart you’re not worth a thing” as if to say that the best one can hope for is the ability to disguise those insane emotions, and if you can’t do that then you should just tear that worthless fucking thing out of the center of your chest and throw it away.
Another track on Moon Pix is the classic ode to the alcoholic life, “Moonshiner,” a traditional folk song that Bob Dylan covered in 1963 and has subsequently been performed by Uncle Tupelo, Elliot Smith, and Bob Forrest among others. Cat Power regularly records other artists’ material and has issued two full albums of nothing but cover songs, with Marshall putting her distinctive stamp on each one (the gorgeous “Sea of Love” and nearly unrecognizable “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” immediately come to mind). With “Moonshiner” she steps into some enormous shoes, as Dylan’s version is one of the best recordings of his folk period, and the cover by Uncle Tupelo is supremely haunting to boot. And yet Marshall not only steps up to play with the big boys, she spins the song into something of her own, putting an exclamation point onto the alcoholic’s desperation in yelling out “You’re already in hell/You’re already in hell/I wish we could go to hell.” When Dylan and others sing “Moonshiner,” they finish with the line, “When the bottle gets empty/ It sure ain’t worth a damn.” When Cat Power does it, Chan more bleakly concludes “When the bottle gets empty/Life ain’t worth a damn.”
These are two songs that make the hairs on my arms stand up, but my favorite track of all on Moon Pix is “The Colors and the Kids.” The song begins “Must be the colors/And the kids/That keep me alive/’Cause the music is boring me to death.” I don’t know what she meant, but I catch myself singing those lines a lot lately because I’m an aging guy who is constantly surrounded by young people who never fail to inspire and disappoint me at the same time. They’re in my class or at a show or in a meeting, so fresh-faced and full of life in this dead world of ours, and then the next thing you know they’re saying something so dumb about how Conor Oberst is a genius. I’m drawn to their brightness and vitality like a moth to light, but I just wish they would do something more…I dunno, interesting or whatever…but then again I’m not even sure what that would be, I just know when it’s boring me to death.
The beauty of “The Colors and the Kids” in enveloped by Chan’s voice and a piano, because there’s nothing else in the song. Don’t take it from me, listen to what my identical twin Dave Grohl has to say: “That song is so heart wrenchingly beautiful and romantic--it makes me want to kidnap her and run away and hide forever.” When the song hits its most dramatic moment, Chan sings the futile cries of a lover who swears that he or she can change if you’d just give them another chance: “I could stay here/Become someone different/I could stay here/Become someone better.” The sense of loss continues into the next verse as she mourns: “It’s so hard to go in the city/’Cause you want to say hello to everybody/It’s so hard to go into the city/’Cause you wanna say, ‘Hey, I love you’ to everybody.” Yeah, it *is* hard when you live the rootless lives that so many of us do (and musicians on tour are only the most extreme example) because people keep passing in and out of your world, and then you run into each other again and you can’t believe how much time has passed, and it turns out Dave Grohl is right because you want to kidnap that person and run away or at least freeze that moment in time, but the next thing you know you’re saying goodbye and you have no idea when, or if, you’ll see each other again. Modern life is just sad like that.
Moon Pix has my most beloved songs, but on the whole my favorite Cat Power album is You Are Free (2003). I’m sure she intended something more optimistic but sometimes I think the album’s title is taunting me, like if I need to reminded that I’m free then I’m not really free after all. On the ghastly ballad “Baby Doll,” Chan poses a question that I swear has been asked by everyone who ever had the misfortune of caring about me and became distressed by my periodic states of despair: “Baby/Black, black, black is all you see/Don’t you want/To be free?” The first track on You Are Free is called “I Don’t Blame You” and it concerns a musician who is just going through the motions, faking it onstage and not wanting to play the music their audience wants to hear. Many people believe the song is about Kurt Cobain, and they’re probably right, but I think that sort of diminishes the point because it’s a predicament that any of us could find ourselves in when called upon to perform according to someone else’s expectations. Any of us could be massively popular and successful yet fundamentally un-free if other people’s image of us became an alien thing separated from our “true” selves or held against us with a demand to perform like a trained seal. “Just because they knew your name/Doesn’t mean they know from where you came/What a sad trick you thought you had to play.” Chan apparently knows what it’s like, and she’s right there to console us: “They never owned it/And you never owed it to them anyway.”
Freedom is a cruel joke for the kids profiled in “Names,” the gold medal winner in the fiercely competitive battle for the title of Most Depressing Cat Power Song Ever. One by one Chan introduces us to her childhood friends who ended up as casualties of American abuse and neglect. First, there’s Perry, a boy with a learning disability whose father burned his skin and sent him to his death when he was 10 years old. Next we meet Naomi, the 11 year-old girl who taught Chan “how to please a man” after school in the back of the bus. Chan begins telling us about Sheryl, her BFF at age 12, whose “father would come to her in the night,” and then stops singing as if to emphasize that what came next was so horribly unspeakable. Donovan was also a very good friend who started selling cocaine, and Chan hasn’t seen him since he was 13 years old. Finally there’s Charles, who told Chan he was in love with her when they were 14, but then he began to smoke crack, and then he had to “sell ass.” She says she doesn’t know where he is, just like she doesn’t know where any of the rest of them are. Yeah, I know, Chan. I knew a few kids like these growing up, and I don’t know where they are either. These days I find them at the homeless teen center where I volunteer or alternating between recovery and addiction in south Florida’s massive and growing drug treatment industry. They’re like a little nation of disposable youth unto themselves.
I have two personal memories of Cat Power performances. The first was at the now defunct Studio A in Miami. It was one of Chan’s first shows after her alcoholic breakdown, and the crowd was abuzz with rumors and speculation about what kind of crazy shit she might pull this time. Instead she delivered an absolutely riveting performance that was capped off by the most beautiful a cappella I’ve ever heard. The crowd was annoyingly restless, however, and the moment she stopped singing the club put on some dance music, forcing all the sheepish indie rockers to shuffle away to make room for those who were there to bust a move. That’s Miami for you. They must have heard that Chan was friends with Karl Lagerfeld and had started modeling for Chanel, otherwise I can’t explain why they were there. The second memory is of Cat Power’s show at the Langerado Music Festival in 2007, where the set ended with a cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” I laughed when she started playing, because it took on a whole new meaning when Chan sang it. I think I’ve heard that song about a thousand times, and I do believe it’s one of the best songs of our short century, but I’ve only heard Cat Power do it that one time (she’s never recorded a cover in the studio) and yet for some reason it’s still burned in my memory and I’ve never heard that song the same way since.
Not A Happy Camper
My brother, sister-in-law, and I are about to go an extended camping trip in the Mountain West. I'm super excited, but I'm also re-posting this blog from last year as a reminder of how things can go horribly, though humorously, wrong....
I love camping. I've camped at Big Basin, Lake Tahoe, Bryce Canyon, and the Grand Canyon among other places. But after this weekend on the Russian River, my brother Kevin, his wife Lauren, and I put the tents and sleeping bags back in storage and vowed it would be a long time before we camped again.
It all started easily and innocent enough with the desire to get away for a Saturday night to a conveniently close campsite. I borrowed some gear from my mom, but it turned out that Kevin and Lauren's stuff was still at her mom's house. So our Saturday began with a trip up to the heavily mulleted suburb of Concord--a little of our way but really not a big deal. We arrived to find Lauren's mom sweeping the floor of her garage, which already looked to me to be immaculately clean, but whatever cuz Lauren's mom is just like that. Kevin got out the ladder and climbed up to get the gear, and he didn't fall down or anything so we were off to a good start.
From there it was across the bay into Sonoma County. By this time, however, we had already gotten stuck in a few inexplicable Saturday afternoon traffic jams. Something wasn't quite right and we just couldn't get a break. From my perspective, however, the foreshadowing of the disaster to come can be traced back to an ill-fated trip to Taco Bell, where I haven't eaten in years and won't be back anytime soon. I ordered 3 tacos that came drenched in sour cream that might not have been sour cream at all, and after one bite my crispy shell exploded in my hands, leaving me in the back seat with a giant mess of sour cream, taco "meat," and lettuce with the consistency of Easter basket grass. I could only make it through one and a half of these things before I had to wrap up the remaining mess, stuff it all back in the paper bag, and remove it from my sight.
Needless to say, my stomach was in a state of revolt by the time we reached the campsite, providing me with a good opportunity to check out the bathrooms. From there we picked out our site and starting setting up our tents. My mom had given me a very small backpacking tent, and being a very poor follower of directions I struggled to get it up and it just didn't look right but was still functional enough. The sites were very small and crammed together, but the campground master or whatever he's called had assured us that he strategically placed the young "party kids" at the back of the site and we wouldn't be disturbed. To our right there was a wholesome family of white people that I immediately suspected of being Christians. To our left there looked to be no less than 8 tents with a bunch of middle-aged guys milling about. I gave the patriarch of what I was sure was the Christian family an evil eye that attempted to say don't you dare take out an acoustic guitar or sing any of your damn Christian songs, but otherwise things seemed like they'd be OK.
With our tents set up, Kevin and Lauren and I looked at each other with that unspoken campers' recognition of "well the sun won't be down for several hours, now what do we do?" So down to the river we would go, or try to go as it turned out. The campground master or whatever he's called had told us about a path we could take to get down to the river, but on our way down things became increasingly thorny and bushy, leaving Lauren to wish we had brought a machete. We finally arrived to find only the tiniest of river banks that had already been occupied by--you guessed it--those damn Christians, as I was now certain they were (how else could they have beaten us down there if not for Jesus?) After exchanging some awkward and muffled hellos, we went back into the brush and thorns to look for an alternate path, but with no success. Now what do we do?
We walked back to the campsite and Kevin cracked a beer, but Lauren and I were determined to get to the water, so the three of us got back in the car and started driving. Well, it turns out that this weekend of all weekends was the annual blues festival on the river, which is cool and all but means that thousands of people had descended on this tiny river town. And so we got stuck in another traffic jam. And we still couldn't find another way down to the river, so we turned around. And then we got stuck in another traffic jam. Kevin, being the negative Nancy that he is, wanted to call it a day. Lauren and I were still determined. We parked near the festival and started down to the river, only to be blocked by security. As we walked the band was singing something about being "thankful," but Lauren heard it as "painful." You know you're in trouble when I'm not the most pessimistic and unhappy person in the group. Finally we got to a place with river access but by then the fog had rolled in and it was getting cold. Kevin and I skipped some rocks, and Lauren tried to skip some rocks, and that was pretty much all we had to do. Time to go back and sit in more traffic.
At least now that the sun was almost down we could do what good campers do, which is start a fire and do some cooking. Kevin cooked a bunch of crappy hot dogs but Lauren and I had picked out some pre-made kabobs at the grocery store, and they were hella good as the kids in No Cal are known to say. Kevin chopped wood without losing a finger, and we had a good fire that lasted for several hours. Time to get some shut eye.
Around 10PM some twentysomethings had rolled into the campsite in a Prius, and while getting stoned they started talking about the upcoming election, Clinton, Obama, etc. They weren't talking loud at all, but I guess one of the middle-aged guys to our left had heard enough and started yelling at them. Whatever, I thought, maybe these guys are Republicans, or maybe they just like their peace and quiet. To our right, the people I suspected of being Christians had 3 flourescent lights so bright they could have found a contact lens in the dirt, but they seemed to be playing scrabble and weren't doing any weird Christian shit. Throughout the night the middle-aged guys to our left had their radio tuned into the local classic rock station, and this was fun enough for awhile as Kevin, Lauren, and I rocked out to such staples as "Don't Fear the Reaper" and "In-A-Gadda-Vida." They still had the radio on when we went to sleep, but if they couldn't stand people talking about the election then surely they would be going to sleep soon, right?
It was becoming an increasingly cold night. I hadn't properly blown up my air mattress so I was essentially sleeping on the ground. I had a lot on my mind but eventually I drifted off to sleep. Then I was awake again. Two guys from the campsite to our left were having perhaps the most moronic conservation in the history of conversations. Turns out they were shrooming. With a tone that approximated the illegitimate fathers of Beavis and Butthead, I heard them exchange such barbs as "Man, I believe Jesus was a real person, but he wasn't no son of God." "Yeah, I think the prophets just made that shit up." Then they started talking about threesomes. The radio is still playing this whole time, and the sounds of classic rock have become instruments of torture in my ear as "Cats in the Cradle" comes over the airwaves. The next thing I hear is Kevin get up, unzip the tent, and walk over to say, "It's 5AM, can you turn it down?" Evidently they were so high they didn't even notice his presence until he was standing right in front of them. "Sorry man," they reply and Kevin says "It's cool" and then Lauren starts yelling, "It's NOT cool! You kept us up all night!" I chuckle. Poor Lauren: my brother's flatulence is legendary, and after he filled up on Taco Bell, ball park franks, and beer, he had a farting session that was so bad that she actually had to leave the tent at another point in the night.
The sun is starting to come up in that horrible way when you haven't gotten enough sleep and you know you won't be getting any more. Someone from the campsite to our left has bitched out the shrooming morons, packed up his stuff, and driven away. Then I hear, "Man, you guys burned all the firewood, now what are we gonna do? Ah, you've been up all night, I'm not even gonna try to reason with you." I am half asleep and cursing and muttering. Lauren asks me if I'm OK, and I yell out "I hate life and I wish I was dead!" Then I simply scream at the top of my lungs, "FUCK!!!" Yeah, that's how I roll when I don't get enough sleep.
We get up and start breaking camp. We promise to look back one day and laugh, but we also vow not to go camping for a long, long time. Lauren and Kevin need coffee, and I need a Red Bull, so we're off to Safeway. We pull into the parking lot and in the car next to us there's a guy just sitting there eating a bucket of chicken wings first thing in the morning. What the hell is wrong with this place?
I love camping. I've camped at Big Basin, Lake Tahoe, Bryce Canyon, and the Grand Canyon among other places. But after this weekend on the Russian River, my brother Kevin, his wife Lauren, and I put the tents and sleeping bags back in storage and vowed it would be a long time before we camped again.
It all started easily and innocent enough with the desire to get away for a Saturday night to a conveniently close campsite. I borrowed some gear from my mom, but it turned out that Kevin and Lauren's stuff was still at her mom's house. So our Saturday began with a trip up to the heavily mulleted suburb of Concord--a little of our way but really not a big deal. We arrived to find Lauren's mom sweeping the floor of her garage, which already looked to me to be immaculately clean, but whatever cuz Lauren's mom is just like that. Kevin got out the ladder and climbed up to get the gear, and he didn't fall down or anything so we were off to a good start.
From there it was across the bay into Sonoma County. By this time, however, we had already gotten stuck in a few inexplicable Saturday afternoon traffic jams. Something wasn't quite right and we just couldn't get a break. From my perspective, however, the foreshadowing of the disaster to come can be traced back to an ill-fated trip to Taco Bell, where I haven't eaten in years and won't be back anytime soon. I ordered 3 tacos that came drenched in sour cream that might not have been sour cream at all, and after one bite my crispy shell exploded in my hands, leaving me in the back seat with a giant mess of sour cream, taco "meat," and lettuce with the consistency of Easter basket grass. I could only make it through one and a half of these things before I had to wrap up the remaining mess, stuff it all back in the paper bag, and remove it from my sight.
Needless to say, my stomach was in a state of revolt by the time we reached the campsite, providing me with a good opportunity to check out the bathrooms. From there we picked out our site and starting setting up our tents. My mom had given me a very small backpacking tent, and being a very poor follower of directions I struggled to get it up and it just didn't look right but was still functional enough. The sites were very small and crammed together, but the campground master or whatever he's called had assured us that he strategically placed the young "party kids" at the back of the site and we wouldn't be disturbed. To our right there was a wholesome family of white people that I immediately suspected of being Christians. To our left there looked to be no less than 8 tents with a bunch of middle-aged guys milling about. I gave the patriarch of what I was sure was the Christian family an evil eye that attempted to say don't you dare take out an acoustic guitar or sing any of your damn Christian songs, but otherwise things seemed like they'd be OK.
With our tents set up, Kevin and Lauren and I looked at each other with that unspoken campers' recognition of "well the sun won't be down for several hours, now what do we do?" So down to the river we would go, or try to go as it turned out. The campground master or whatever he's called had told us about a path we could take to get down to the river, but on our way down things became increasingly thorny and bushy, leaving Lauren to wish we had brought a machete. We finally arrived to find only the tiniest of river banks that had already been occupied by--you guessed it--those damn Christians, as I was now certain they were (how else could they have beaten us down there if not for Jesus?) After exchanging some awkward and muffled hellos, we went back into the brush and thorns to look for an alternate path, but with no success. Now what do we do?
We walked back to the campsite and Kevin cracked a beer, but Lauren and I were determined to get to the water, so the three of us got back in the car and started driving. Well, it turns out that this weekend of all weekends was the annual blues festival on the river, which is cool and all but means that thousands of people had descended on this tiny river town. And so we got stuck in another traffic jam. And we still couldn't find another way down to the river, so we turned around. And then we got stuck in another traffic jam. Kevin, being the negative Nancy that he is, wanted to call it a day. Lauren and I were still determined. We parked near the festival and started down to the river, only to be blocked by security. As we walked the band was singing something about being "thankful," but Lauren heard it as "painful." You know you're in trouble when I'm not the most pessimistic and unhappy person in the group. Finally we got to a place with river access but by then the fog had rolled in and it was getting cold. Kevin and I skipped some rocks, and Lauren tried to skip some rocks, and that was pretty much all we had to do. Time to go back and sit in more traffic.
At least now that the sun was almost down we could do what good campers do, which is start a fire and do some cooking. Kevin cooked a bunch of crappy hot dogs but Lauren and I had picked out some pre-made kabobs at the grocery store, and they were hella good as the kids in No Cal are known to say. Kevin chopped wood without losing a finger, and we had a good fire that lasted for several hours. Time to get some shut eye.
Around 10PM some twentysomethings had rolled into the campsite in a Prius, and while getting stoned they started talking about the upcoming election, Clinton, Obama, etc. They weren't talking loud at all, but I guess one of the middle-aged guys to our left had heard enough and started yelling at them. Whatever, I thought, maybe these guys are Republicans, or maybe they just like their peace and quiet. To our right, the people I suspected of being Christians had 3 flourescent lights so bright they could have found a contact lens in the dirt, but they seemed to be playing scrabble and weren't doing any weird Christian shit. Throughout the night the middle-aged guys to our left had their radio tuned into the local classic rock station, and this was fun enough for awhile as Kevin, Lauren, and I rocked out to such staples as "Don't Fear the Reaper" and "In-A-Gadda-Vida." They still had the radio on when we went to sleep, but if they couldn't stand people talking about the election then surely they would be going to sleep soon, right?
It was becoming an increasingly cold night. I hadn't properly blown up my air mattress so I was essentially sleeping on the ground. I had a lot on my mind but eventually I drifted off to sleep. Then I was awake again. Two guys from the campsite to our left were having perhaps the most moronic conservation in the history of conversations. Turns out they were shrooming. With a tone that approximated the illegitimate fathers of Beavis and Butthead, I heard them exchange such barbs as "Man, I believe Jesus was a real person, but he wasn't no son of God." "Yeah, I think the prophets just made that shit up." Then they started talking about threesomes. The radio is still playing this whole time, and the sounds of classic rock have become instruments of torture in my ear as "Cats in the Cradle" comes over the airwaves. The next thing I hear is Kevin get up, unzip the tent, and walk over to say, "It's 5AM, can you turn it down?" Evidently they were so high they didn't even notice his presence until he was standing right in front of them. "Sorry man," they reply and Kevin says "It's cool" and then Lauren starts yelling, "It's NOT cool! You kept us up all night!" I chuckle. Poor Lauren: my brother's flatulence is legendary, and after he filled up on Taco Bell, ball park franks, and beer, he had a farting session that was so bad that she actually had to leave the tent at another point in the night.
The sun is starting to come up in that horrible way when you haven't gotten enough sleep and you know you won't be getting any more. Someone from the campsite to our left has bitched out the shrooming morons, packed up his stuff, and driven away. Then I hear, "Man, you guys burned all the firewood, now what are we gonna do? Ah, you've been up all night, I'm not even gonna try to reason with you." I am half asleep and cursing and muttering. Lauren asks me if I'm OK, and I yell out "I hate life and I wish I was dead!" Then I simply scream at the top of my lungs, "FUCK!!!" Yeah, that's how I roll when I don't get enough sleep.
We get up and start breaking camp. We promise to look back one day and laugh, but we also vow not to go camping for a long, long time. Lauren and Kevin need coffee, and I need a Red Bull, so we're off to Safeway. We pull into the parking lot and in the car next to us there's a guy just sitting there eating a bucket of chicken wings first thing in the morning. What the hell is wrong with this place?
50 Concerts
1. KISS and W.A.S.P. at the L.A. Forum, 1986. My first concert, unless you count the time dad inexplicably dragged me to see Linda Ronstandt. Mom dropped me and a friend off outside the parking lot to save me the embarrassment. Or did that just happen in Almost Famous? I can’t remember.
2. Iron Maiden, Long Beach Arena, and Irvine Meadows Ampitheatre, Somewhere In Time tour, 1987-1988. For the Irvine Meadows show I slept outside the Warehouse the night before tickets went on sale and got front row, and Lars Ulrich made a cameo appearance.
3. Monsters of Rock, L.A. Coliseum 1988—Van Halen, Scorpions, Dokken, Metallica, Kingdom Come. When Metallica started playing the headbangers tore down the fences separating the Coliseum seats from the field and we all ran past the security to the front of the stage. Security turned off the sound momentarily. I remember hearing “Harvester of Sorrow” for the first time, and nothing else from this show.
4. Alice Cooper, Long Beach Arena, 1988. The one and only time I got Laurie Ahlin to make out with me. Sigh.
5. Dio, Irvine Meadows Ampitheatre, 1988. Dio slayed a mechanical dragon with a sword that must have been ten times bigger than himself. Very impressive to a teenage metal dude.
6. David Lee Roth and Poison, L.A. Forum, 1988. The only time I went to a concert for the sole reason of seeing hot chicks in spandex. Camel toe aplenty from what I remember.
7. Yngwie J. Malmsteen’s Rising Force, Long Beach Arena, 1987 or 1988? Can’t remember what inspired to want to see this, but I did.
8. Dark Angel, Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach, 1988? For whatever reason I was pulled onstage to toss stagedivers back into the pit.
9. Primus, multiple times, Cactus Club in San Jose, 1989-1990? Primus sucks!
10. fIREHOSE, San Jose State, 1988-1989? First time I became aware there was this band from San Pedro, where I grew up, with this crazy bass player named Mike Watt.
11. Metallica, …And Justice For All tour, Cow Palace in San Francisco, 1989.
12. Anthrax and Public Enemy. 1989 or 1990? The Cow Palace in San Francisco.
13. Clash of the Titans, 1989-1990?, Cow Palace in San Francisco, Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax. Before the show I remember some kid who looked like he crawled out of the sewer was in the parking lot and smashed a beer bottle and yelled “Slayer” at the top of his lungs. Slayer was just amazing that night.
14. Bridge School Benefit, 1989, Shoreline Ampitheatre. Tom Petty, Neil Young, Tracy Chapman, Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and Young later, of course).
15. The first Lollapalooza tour, 1991, Shoreline Ampitheatre--Jane’s Addiction, Living Colour, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nine Inch Nails, Ice-T and Body Count, Butthole Surfers, Rollins Band. I remember being unable to swallow my sandwich during the Rollins Band performance because the bass was so loud. Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers kept firing a gun. Nine Inch Nails was painted green.
16. Mudhoney, Slim’s in San Francisco, 1991. Bob and I got drunk on Mickey’s big mouth in the car. The Giants had eliminated the Dodgers from the NL Western division race that day. I was wearing a Dodgers shirt and in a drunken stupor threw it on stage. Mark Arm picked it up and showed it to the crowd and everyone booed. I got my shirt back but I have no memory of how.
17. Sonic Youth, Helmet, and the Jesus Lizard, the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, 1992-93? I had the misfortune to see David Yow of the Jesus Lizard naked. And then Kim Gordon got all pissed off because some dude hit her mic stand and it hit her in the mouth.
18. Soundgarden and Monster Magnet, The Warfield in San Francisco, 1992. Monster Magnet was incredible. Seriously.
19. Jane’s Addiction, the Pixies, and Primus, San Jose State, 1991 or 1992?
20. Lollapooza, 1992, Shoreline Ampitheatre—Peal Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Ministry, Ice Cube. Eddie Vedder jumped the shark that day with all his shirtless crowd surfing and epileptic shaking.
21. Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, Pavement. Somewhere in the California desert, 1993? Pavement had become my new favorite band but we didn’t get to see them because we were stuck in line waiting to get in. Kurt Cobain came out and did a solo acoustic set that included “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” Only time I managed to see him.
22. Green Day, UC Santa Cruz, 1992. Pre-Dookie, when Green Day was just another Gilman Street band, they played outside our dorm at Porter College for some sort of end-of-the-year spring event.
23. Lollapooza, 1993. Primus, Alice in Chains, Dinosaur Jr., Fishbone. Shoreline Ampitheatre. The one and only time I saw Rage Against the Machine. I had no idea who they were, they came out naked for their encore with the letters PMRC painted on their bodies, and I absolutely hated them. I saw Tool on the side stage and Timothy Leary came out to introduce them saying they were being the next big thing in music.
24. Royal Trux and Truman’s Water, the Casbah in San Diego, 1993. My first show at the Casbah featuring two of the most underrated noise bands of the 90s.
25. Babes in Toyland, the Casbah, 1994. Kat Bjelland spit like every 5 minutes and was so much hotter than Courtney Love.
26. Rocket From the Crypt, multiple times, various venues in San Diego, 1994-2002, and many other times when I didn’t see them because they were sold out and I didn’t my shit together in time. I can’t remember a Rocket show I didn’t enjoy.
27. Drive Like Jehu, the Casbah, 1994. Once and only once, right before they broke up. I just remember sheets of noise and thinking that Jon Reis looked like Superman.
28. Pavement, Soma Live in San Diego, 1994-95? By the time I saw them in the Crooked Rain era they had their tongues lodged too far in their cheeks to be truly enjoyable.
29. Beck, San Diego, 1996? At his peak in the Odelay era, a fantastic show interrupted when the sound system suddenly failed, at which time Beck stood on the edge of the stage and did an impromptu acoustic set. I didn’t feel gipped at all.
30. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Soma Live in San Diego, 1996. My introduction to the theremin with Spencer at the height of his powers circa Orange.
31. The Supersuckers, the Casbah, 1995-96? Foam fingers and ironic devil/metal hand salutes galore. Amazing live band.
32. Weekly shows at the Casbah, San Diego, 1994-2002, fluf, Truman’s Water, Three Mile Pilot, aMiniature, Heavy Vegetable, Lucy’s Fur Coat, Chinchilla. San Diego had a really great local scene in the 90s and I will always love the Casbah.
33. Phish, some forgettable place in San Diego, 1999-2000?. I got super stoned in the parking lot and walked around the shakedown for a long time. That was the fun part. But the music was so Godawful that I got in a fight with my girlfriend because I couldn’t stop going off on how horrible Phish was.
34. Sleater-Kinney, The Fillmore in San Francisco, 2002. They were so great and I saw Jim Jarmusch there. Unfortunately they were so great that I decided I also had to see them in LA and that was the show where Sarah Schrank and I had our infamous meltdown break-up. That’s a story for a different list.
35. The (International) Noise Conspiracy, some club in San Francisco I can’t remember the name of, 2002. It was an excellent show and one of only 2 times I’ve seen them, but this show is especially memorable to me because this gorgeous blond hipster girl came up and just started talking to me and I…just…froze.
36. Hot Snakes, somewhere in San Francisco, 2002. Not as good as the Drive Like Jehu show, but damn close.
37. Yo La Tengo at the Granada in Lawrence, KS, 2003. I got massively drunk with another professor and had to teach at 8:30 in the morning the next day.
38. The Shins and the Rapture at the Granada in Lawrence, KS, 2003. Katy Livingston came up to me and we flirted and she tried to get me to go to an after-show kegger at her house, but she was still my student at that point. Sigh.
39. Spiritualized, the Granada in Lawrence, KS, 2003, As with Phish, a show I remember only because of how horrible it was. I convinced a bunch of people to go and dude just sat there in a chair with his guitar, not looking at the crowd with this look like he was just so pissed off to be in Kansas. We had paid $20 each to see this bloke but we all walked out like 10 minutes into the set and I couldn’t stop apologizing to my friends.
40. Q Not U and the Black Eyes at the Bottleneck in Lawrence, KS, 2003. The best show I remember from my days in Lawrence. I became a true believer in the Black Eyes from that day forward, at least until they broke up like 2 years later.
41. Ozomatli, Colgate University, 2004. I’m pretty sure this was the only concert I went to during the dreaded Colgate year. And they were good, but I was drunk, so what do I know?
42. Le Tigre, the Granada in Lawrence, KS, 2005? Not a big fan ordinarily, but man they were great that night, closing with a great version of “I’m So Excited”
43. Suicide Girls, the Granada in Lawrence, 2005? Technically not a concert, but more hot mostly-naked chicks than I’ve ever seen in one place at one time, unless you count strip clubs, which I don’t.
44. Bob Dylan, Montana State University at Bozeman, 2005. One of two times that I saw Dylan, but this one was especially memorable because I went with my dad and his wife, and Dylan enraged my father because he performed with his back to the side of the arena where we were seated and didn’t say anything between his songs. I remember that Dylan was his usual mumbling self but his band was really awesome, but the best part was that my dad got so pissed off in the parking lot saying something like “Would it kill him to just say, ‘Hello Bozeman’” and threw his hands in the air in exasperation. My dad was just like every teenage kid who’s waiting for the rock star to say the name of his hometown. Then he and his wife went on a diatribe about how much better the Sting concert they had attended in Missoula was.
45. Cat Power, Studio A, Miami, 2005. Chan Marshall did some amazingly beautiful a capella that night. And no one really cared, they just couldn’t wait for that crazy bitch to get off stage so they could dance to Latin-flavored techno.
46. Langarado Festival, 2006 or 2007? Fort Lauderdale? Cat Power and Explosions in the Sky, plus about a thousand horrible jam bands and reggae bands, the only one of which I recall was Widespread Panic. Katy and I got drunk, watched Kansas beat Texas to take the Big 12 championship, and I bummed some hits off a joint from these kids and I swore that Explosions in the Sky was like the new classical music and that if these other stoner kids had any brains or ears they’d be into them rather than Widespread Panic.
47. The Flaming Lips at the Pompano Beach Ampitheatre, 2007? So beautiful and happy and hopeful that it briefly restored my faith in the power of live music.
48. Miami Noise Festival, Churchill’s in Miami (duh), 2009. An evening of irritating but beautiful noise and vomiting on cymbals. Please read my blog on the event if you haven’t done so already.
49. Timb, Zombies! Organize!!, and the Freakin’ Hott, Fort Lauderdale, 2009. So good to see the kids keeping the local scene and live music thing alive. The Freakin’ Hott is just fantastic—think AC/DC-ish stoner rock with female vocals, and if you don’t know about Zombies you can read my blog from an earlier show of theirs. Timb is this giant freak who does a good acoustic show of witty songs. It was his birthday that night, and there were maybe 50 people there but I swear if it was NY, LA, or SF it would’ve been a big deal.
50. Gogol Bordello, Revolution in Fort Lauderdale, 2009. Had to dust off some very rusty mosh pit techniques for this one and came out drenched in sweat. Talking Marxist theory with Chris Robe and Carol before the show while trying to hold my ground against a bunch of smelly gypsy punks has to be one of the most surreal moments in my recent life.
2. Iron Maiden, Long Beach Arena, and Irvine Meadows Ampitheatre, Somewhere In Time tour, 1987-1988. For the Irvine Meadows show I slept outside the Warehouse the night before tickets went on sale and got front row, and Lars Ulrich made a cameo appearance.
3. Monsters of Rock, L.A. Coliseum 1988—Van Halen, Scorpions, Dokken, Metallica, Kingdom Come. When Metallica started playing the headbangers tore down the fences separating the Coliseum seats from the field and we all ran past the security to the front of the stage. Security turned off the sound momentarily. I remember hearing “Harvester of Sorrow” for the first time, and nothing else from this show.
4. Alice Cooper, Long Beach Arena, 1988. The one and only time I got Laurie Ahlin to make out with me. Sigh.
5. Dio, Irvine Meadows Ampitheatre, 1988. Dio slayed a mechanical dragon with a sword that must have been ten times bigger than himself. Very impressive to a teenage metal dude.
6. David Lee Roth and Poison, L.A. Forum, 1988. The only time I went to a concert for the sole reason of seeing hot chicks in spandex. Camel toe aplenty from what I remember.
7. Yngwie J. Malmsteen’s Rising Force, Long Beach Arena, 1987 or 1988? Can’t remember what inspired to want to see this, but I did.
8. Dark Angel, Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach, 1988? For whatever reason I was pulled onstage to toss stagedivers back into the pit.
9. Primus, multiple times, Cactus Club in San Jose, 1989-1990? Primus sucks!
10. fIREHOSE, San Jose State, 1988-1989? First time I became aware there was this band from San Pedro, where I grew up, with this crazy bass player named Mike Watt.
11. Metallica, …And Justice For All tour, Cow Palace in San Francisco, 1989.
12. Anthrax and Public Enemy. 1989 or 1990? The Cow Palace in San Francisco.
13. Clash of the Titans, 1989-1990?, Cow Palace in San Francisco, Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax. Before the show I remember some kid who looked like he crawled out of the sewer was in the parking lot and smashed a beer bottle and yelled “Slayer” at the top of his lungs. Slayer was just amazing that night.
14. Bridge School Benefit, 1989, Shoreline Ampitheatre. Tom Petty, Neil Young, Tracy Chapman, Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and Young later, of course).
15. The first Lollapalooza tour, 1991, Shoreline Ampitheatre--Jane’s Addiction, Living Colour, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nine Inch Nails, Ice-T and Body Count, Butthole Surfers, Rollins Band. I remember being unable to swallow my sandwich during the Rollins Band performance because the bass was so loud. Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers kept firing a gun. Nine Inch Nails was painted green.
16. Mudhoney, Slim’s in San Francisco, 1991. Bob and I got drunk on Mickey’s big mouth in the car. The Giants had eliminated the Dodgers from the NL Western division race that day. I was wearing a Dodgers shirt and in a drunken stupor threw it on stage. Mark Arm picked it up and showed it to the crowd and everyone booed. I got my shirt back but I have no memory of how.
17. Sonic Youth, Helmet, and the Jesus Lizard, the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, 1992-93? I had the misfortune to see David Yow of the Jesus Lizard naked. And then Kim Gordon got all pissed off because some dude hit her mic stand and it hit her in the mouth.
18. Soundgarden and Monster Magnet, The Warfield in San Francisco, 1992. Monster Magnet was incredible. Seriously.
19. Jane’s Addiction, the Pixies, and Primus, San Jose State, 1991 or 1992?
20. Lollapooza, 1992, Shoreline Ampitheatre—Peal Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Ministry, Ice Cube. Eddie Vedder jumped the shark that day with all his shirtless crowd surfing and epileptic shaking.
21. Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, Pavement. Somewhere in the California desert, 1993? Pavement had become my new favorite band but we didn’t get to see them because we were stuck in line waiting to get in. Kurt Cobain came out and did a solo acoustic set that included “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” Only time I managed to see him.
22. Green Day, UC Santa Cruz, 1992. Pre-Dookie, when Green Day was just another Gilman Street band, they played outside our dorm at Porter College for some sort of end-of-the-year spring event.
23. Lollapooza, 1993. Primus, Alice in Chains, Dinosaur Jr., Fishbone. Shoreline Ampitheatre. The one and only time I saw Rage Against the Machine. I had no idea who they were, they came out naked for their encore with the letters PMRC painted on their bodies, and I absolutely hated them. I saw Tool on the side stage and Timothy Leary came out to introduce them saying they were being the next big thing in music.
24. Royal Trux and Truman’s Water, the Casbah in San Diego, 1993. My first show at the Casbah featuring two of the most underrated noise bands of the 90s.
25. Babes in Toyland, the Casbah, 1994. Kat Bjelland spit like every 5 minutes and was so much hotter than Courtney Love.
26. Rocket From the Crypt, multiple times, various venues in San Diego, 1994-2002, and many other times when I didn’t see them because they were sold out and I didn’t my shit together in time. I can’t remember a Rocket show I didn’t enjoy.
27. Drive Like Jehu, the Casbah, 1994. Once and only once, right before they broke up. I just remember sheets of noise and thinking that Jon Reis looked like Superman.
28. Pavement, Soma Live in San Diego, 1994-95? By the time I saw them in the Crooked Rain era they had their tongues lodged too far in their cheeks to be truly enjoyable.
29. Beck, San Diego, 1996? At his peak in the Odelay era, a fantastic show interrupted when the sound system suddenly failed, at which time Beck stood on the edge of the stage and did an impromptu acoustic set. I didn’t feel gipped at all.
30. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Soma Live in San Diego, 1996. My introduction to the theremin with Spencer at the height of his powers circa Orange.
31. The Supersuckers, the Casbah, 1995-96? Foam fingers and ironic devil/metal hand salutes galore. Amazing live band.
32. Weekly shows at the Casbah, San Diego, 1994-2002, fluf, Truman’s Water, Three Mile Pilot, aMiniature, Heavy Vegetable, Lucy’s Fur Coat, Chinchilla. San Diego had a really great local scene in the 90s and I will always love the Casbah.
33. Phish, some forgettable place in San Diego, 1999-2000?. I got super stoned in the parking lot and walked around the shakedown for a long time. That was the fun part. But the music was so Godawful that I got in a fight with my girlfriend because I couldn’t stop going off on how horrible Phish was.
34. Sleater-Kinney, The Fillmore in San Francisco, 2002. They were so great and I saw Jim Jarmusch there. Unfortunately they were so great that I decided I also had to see them in LA and that was the show where Sarah Schrank and I had our infamous meltdown break-up. That’s a story for a different list.
35. The (International) Noise Conspiracy, some club in San Francisco I can’t remember the name of, 2002. It was an excellent show and one of only 2 times I’ve seen them, but this show is especially memorable to me because this gorgeous blond hipster girl came up and just started talking to me and I…just…froze.
36. Hot Snakes, somewhere in San Francisco, 2002. Not as good as the Drive Like Jehu show, but damn close.
37. Yo La Tengo at the Granada in Lawrence, KS, 2003. I got massively drunk with another professor and had to teach at 8:30 in the morning the next day.
38. The Shins and the Rapture at the Granada in Lawrence, KS, 2003. Katy Livingston came up to me and we flirted and she tried to get me to go to an after-show kegger at her house, but she was still my student at that point. Sigh.
39. Spiritualized, the Granada in Lawrence, KS, 2003, As with Phish, a show I remember only because of how horrible it was. I convinced a bunch of people to go and dude just sat there in a chair with his guitar, not looking at the crowd with this look like he was just so pissed off to be in Kansas. We had paid $20 each to see this bloke but we all walked out like 10 minutes into the set and I couldn’t stop apologizing to my friends.
40. Q Not U and the Black Eyes at the Bottleneck in Lawrence, KS, 2003. The best show I remember from my days in Lawrence. I became a true believer in the Black Eyes from that day forward, at least until they broke up like 2 years later.
41. Ozomatli, Colgate University, 2004. I’m pretty sure this was the only concert I went to during the dreaded Colgate year. And they were good, but I was drunk, so what do I know?
42. Le Tigre, the Granada in Lawrence, KS, 2005? Not a big fan ordinarily, but man they were great that night, closing with a great version of “I’m So Excited”
43. Suicide Girls, the Granada in Lawrence, 2005? Technically not a concert, but more hot mostly-naked chicks than I’ve ever seen in one place at one time, unless you count strip clubs, which I don’t.
44. Bob Dylan, Montana State University at Bozeman, 2005. One of two times that I saw Dylan, but this one was especially memorable because I went with my dad and his wife, and Dylan enraged my father because he performed with his back to the side of the arena where we were seated and didn’t say anything between his songs. I remember that Dylan was his usual mumbling self but his band was really awesome, but the best part was that my dad got so pissed off in the parking lot saying something like “Would it kill him to just say, ‘Hello Bozeman’” and threw his hands in the air in exasperation. My dad was just like every teenage kid who’s waiting for the rock star to say the name of his hometown. Then he and his wife went on a diatribe about how much better the Sting concert they had attended in Missoula was.
45. Cat Power, Studio A, Miami, 2005. Chan Marshall did some amazingly beautiful a capella that night. And no one really cared, they just couldn’t wait for that crazy bitch to get off stage so they could dance to Latin-flavored techno.
46. Langarado Festival, 2006 or 2007? Fort Lauderdale? Cat Power and Explosions in the Sky, plus about a thousand horrible jam bands and reggae bands, the only one of which I recall was Widespread Panic. Katy and I got drunk, watched Kansas beat Texas to take the Big 12 championship, and I bummed some hits off a joint from these kids and I swore that Explosions in the Sky was like the new classical music and that if these other stoner kids had any brains or ears they’d be into them rather than Widespread Panic.
47. The Flaming Lips at the Pompano Beach Ampitheatre, 2007? So beautiful and happy and hopeful that it briefly restored my faith in the power of live music.
48. Miami Noise Festival, Churchill’s in Miami (duh), 2009. An evening of irritating but beautiful noise and vomiting on cymbals. Please read my blog on the event if you haven’t done so already.
49. Timb, Zombies! Organize!!, and the Freakin’ Hott, Fort Lauderdale, 2009. So good to see the kids keeping the local scene and live music thing alive. The Freakin’ Hott is just fantastic—think AC/DC-ish stoner rock with female vocals, and if you don’t know about Zombies you can read my blog from an earlier show of theirs. Timb is this giant freak who does a good acoustic show of witty songs. It was his birthday that night, and there were maybe 50 people there but I swear if it was NY, LA, or SF it would’ve been a big deal.
50. Gogol Bordello, Revolution in Fort Lauderdale, 2009. Had to dust off some very rusty mosh pit techniques for this one and came out drenched in sweat. Talking Marxist theory with Chris Robe and Carol before the show while trying to hold my ground against a bunch of smelly gypsy punks has to be one of the most surreal moments in my recent life.
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