And, in other VN-related new, while I originally hoped for the blog to be more of a collaborative enterprise, I’ve been unable to find anyone who’s been interested in contributing…until now.

A dear friend to us here at VN HQ, ‘Mr. Sensational’ Gino Vega, has agreed to come on board to offer his unique view on the world of ‘popular culture.’ So, while I’ll still be handling the weightier, more morose stuff, Gino will be foaming at the mouth as only he can on professional wrestling, video games, comic books, and all the other existentially bankrupt stuff we grew up on as kids that we’ve now repackaged and fetishized into having ultimate existential meaning.

Happy New Year, everybody!

– Scott Valid

Regarding the blog’s genesis, I’d experi- mented with a few other online writing projects prior to clacking away infrequently at the keyboard in service of Valid Neurosis, though in the case of those earlier projects the focus of my writing centered on subjects that were near and dear to me, subjects that, fortunately or unfortunately, tended toward the existentially baroque. The topical terrain that resulted was then akin to the fallout created by a four corners elimination pro-wrestling match between the works of Franz Kafka, Emmanuel Levinas, Andrei Tarkovsky, and David Lynch, and, that being said, those earlier attempts most often had a readership of one—myself, reading my posts as I wrote them.

The fact that these writings generated a decided lack of interest on the part of friends, acquaintances, and, god forbid, strangers wasn’t at all surprising considering the opaque nature of the interests I was asking them to be interested in. Neither was a lack of interest on the part of others necessarily a ‘bad’ thing. The need that drives me to produce a creative output, as meager or ineffective as said output might be, isn’t fueled by the desire to appeal to nor participate with a wide audience, but rather a desire to commune with individuals disturbed in ways similar to myself. The same goes when seeking the creative output of others. Generally, I’m not drawn to an art that attempts to be socially reassuring or that serves as a means of solidifying a sense of societal cohesion. Instead, the art that resonates with me is that art through which an individual shares his or her own idiosyncratic worldview and, in doing so, challenges and scars the worldview of its observers.

As such, I find myself suspicious of ‘professional’ artists. It’s not that there aren’t countless examples of those working in ‘the arts’ professionally whose work is of interest and inspiration to myself and others, nor do I hold some ascetic objection to individuals profiting from creative pursuits, but at the same time it seems that if a work’s appeal is broad enough to generate a significant amount of income for its creator, then the thrust of the work must be at least in part more concerned with enforcing societal norms than it is with shedding light on the peculiar.

Of course there are instances where a work, socially accepted in its own temporal context, is so deeply connected to existential truth that it can be at once both financially successful and transcendentally meaningful. Dostoyevsky, for instance, made a considerable ‘living’ from his work during his lifetime, yet this in no way takes away from the gravity his work has for an audience even disconnected by centuries, continents, and language. By the same token, if the peculiar isn’t a shard of something larger and more familiar it becomes strangeness for strangeness’ sake, a novelty as opposed to a uniqueness, and therefore self-defeating. The ‘strangeness’ of Kafka’s writing may have contributed to its being largely ignored in his own lifetime, yet his work, even defined as it is by personal symbolism, speaks to a truth great enough to have overcome its temporal social failings. 

For those of us who seek the idiosyncratic then, a razor’s edge is walked, as art that is massively appealing and readily available is oftentimes little more than a guidebook toward proper navigation through a given social system, while art that is truly unique and personal often rots within the drawer, on the shelves, or within the imagination of the artist.

Returning to my own clumsy attempts at creation, during my previous excursions into ‘blogging’ I tried as best I could to follow the example set by the work of Henry Darger—not in terms of content or form, but in terms of his approach and circumstances. Darger was a custodian by profession, quietly producing a sizable body of writing and visual arts that went entirely unnoticed until shortly before his death. Without any audience to speak of, Darger remained motivated to realize his vision and seems to have done so with untamed zeal, and this to me is the essence of the creative process—an inner compulsion that demands to be externalized, even if its externalization results in nothing more than an ignored heap stacked beneath a coffee table.

Art is then its creator’s response to the world, and the ‘value’ or ‘importance’ of this art lies in the response itself, not, it would seem, in its achieved level of material remuneration or institutional accolades. And so, Darger’s approach to creativity can be seen as the gold standard. However, not everyone is as gifted as Darger in committing to his or her response. In fact some individuals are decidedly ungifted, and in the course of my earlier blogging projects I found my stamina for creation without an audience to be pitifully low. It’s not that I was or am seeking an audience of any notable size or stature, but when I found myself writing to literally no one other than myself it became hard for me to expend the energy necessary to create. I felt as if I were engaging in an absurd sort of vanity project, and the more vain it seemed, the more I began to despise the words hanging on my screen.

Which brings me back to the topic of Valid Neurosis. In late 2009/early 2010, I’d recently emerged from a hermetical hole in which I’d been hiding (and from which my earlier online writing projects had come forth), and returned to a somewhat more active ‘social life’ within a sphere of old friends and acquaintances. Part of this return involved re-embracing certain forms of popular culture that I’d attempted to forswear during my seclusion, and as I eased my way into a new phase of life that involved one foot in the sober world I’d been living in and one foot in the drunken world from which I’d come, it occurred to me that I might gain a small audience for my creative compulsion if I softened the obscurity of my interests through the lens of the things I’d grown up with—heavy metal, professional wrestling, punk rock, video games, and so on.

I remember back in the early 1990s reading a ‘college music’ magazine that profiled a number of bands—Smashing Pumpkins, Swervedriver, Codeine, Nirvana—and the profile on the then just-rising Nirvana featured a quote from Kurt Cobain where, to paraphrase, he hoped that Nirvana could be a gateway for listeners to ‘better’ bands like Black Flag. That line stuck with me ever since, and harkening to it once again I figured I’d try to bug my poor friends and family into reading about that which I find important and essential through the gateway of popular culture, using the (relatively) accessible to lure folks toward the more obscure.

Latching on to punk rock music as a focus, I initially hoped Valid Neurosis would operate somewhat like a ‘webzine,’ centering on bands, records, etc. and featuring columns written by myself and others. However, the ‘others’ never materialized, and, left to my own devices, the ‘punk rock’ aspect of the blog became a thinner and thinner skin holding in my incorrigibly ponderous guts. Still, the ‘trick’ worked. For the first time ever, I had visitors, readers, and commenters. Nothing amazing numbers-wise, but compared to my earlier efforts, the difference was astronomical.

And now, heading into a new year, one in which I’m hoping to rededicate myself to my electronic communications, I’m wondering what to do with this project. What am I trying to accomplish? Should I abandon its threadbare focus completely, or continue to hide my ultimate interests behind it like an elephant behind a fig leaf? Sitting down to write this entry, I almost started off by removing the ‘punk rock’ tag from the site’s heading. But now as I’m writing it’s occurred to me that perhaps the site’s focus isn’t as flimsy as I thought.

‘Punk Rock,’ a nebulous title for sure, made even more so by my own distorted interpretation, dominated the imaginal landscape of my teens and early 20s. It was alienation and nihilism that drew me to it, a perceived sense of meaning that kept me engaged, alienation and nihilism that drove me away from it in my mid-20s, and finally alienation and nihilism that brought me back to it, in a tentative way, in my 30s, all the while the brass ring of meaning still hanging enticingly overhead.

Through punk rock music and its attendant ‘DIY’ ethic it felt as though I’d found a cultural haven in which it was OK to be a loser, a worm, a failure, in fact what appealed to me in the early days of my involvement with punk rock was the sense that, in an overarching social system fueled by a desire for power and an unending sense of ambition, here was niche where both power and ambition were scoffed at. Unfortunately, as it turned out, this feeling was mostly a product of my personal distortion.

Where to me DIY meant embracing my lowly status in the social world and walking away from attempts both to conform to societal expectations and to achieve institutional status and accolades (literally ‘doing it myself’ in terms of living a life apart from the hive mind of systemic functioning), the more common understanding and application of the ethic was something very different. True, many involved with punk rock in the 1990s were drawn to its being a common ground for those unable to fit easily into society’s Procrustean bed, but rather than celebrate this outsider status, ‘punk’ as a subset of an overarching social system looked to legitimize itself.

The taste-makers and trend-setters within the 1990s punk rock subculture weren’t inclined to delve deeper into their status as misfits and rejects, but instead attempted to establish an alternative structure of power and ambition, and in many ways they were successful. Punk became a business, a hugely successful business for some, and with this business structure came a list of rules and regulations one had to follow in order to be accepted. Punks, it seemed, were not interested in learning from their lowly position in the larger social sphere, they were simply angry about it and wanted to better their standing. As such, punk became, at first, an alternative marketing demographic to the ‘mainstream’ and eventually became the mainstream itself. Of course, this is a story familiar to most counterculture movements, regardless of external trappings and temporal context, and as a natural progression of systemic evolution it can hardly be considered to be a ‘bad’ one.

If the primary function of any codified system is to maintain its own viability, then one can’t be surprised when within the continuum of its existence counterculture becomes culture. But for those of us looking for meaning above and beyond culture, we’re brought back to the razor’s edge. While only a fool would believe in the ability to live life entirely outside the sphere of systemic functionality, life, it seems to me, can’t be lived with any kind of significance entirely within it. In my own experience and from my own perspective, meaning in all of its elusiveness discloses itself only at those points when we are able to momentarily step away from our social roles and designations into an unquantifiable, unqualifiable realm that is somehow more ‘real.’

Oftentimes this realm is accessed through engagement with the creative outpourings of others, and it’s only natural to seek engagement in places where such outpourings are concentrated—established ‘scenes’ and ‘communities,’ reputable and accessible purveyors of arts and creativity, etc. The most essential and vibrant outpourings of creativity might very well be emanating from the Henry Dargers hiding in plain sight before us, but without the proper alignment of fate and serendipity we may never encounter them, and so, barring such chance meetings, we’re left to cast our lot in the world of socially recognized art. Occasionally this casting will net life-altering surprises, but more often than not the results will be clipped wings and a grounding back to earth as we peruse the latest filmed, painted, recorded, or printed ‘how-to’ manuals of proper socialization.

And so, as I prepare at least in theory to focus more time and energy on this blog in the upcoming year, I find myself wondering if by masking (even if ineffectively) my more obscure interests with the relatively accessible artifacts of my youth I’m deforming the project into something ineffective on all fronts. ‘Valid Neurosis’ is meant to explore the validity of my neuroses—the alienation, confusion and disorientation I feel when confronted by the social world. At the same time, it claims to concern itself with ‘punk rock and other minutia of the mundane.’ If the blog becomes too comfortable with that minutia, then my neuroses become invalid. Yet if the blog doesn’t report on punk rock in the way that the majority of communicative conduits concerned with punk have deemed appropriate, how does it have anything to do with its alleged focus?

The answer that occurs to me as I write this entry is that the person I am today was molded precisely through the minutia of the mundane—the miniscule yet infinite nothingness of a meaningless suburban existence. Any view of the world I may have, even if it’s a view that looks away from the world in hopes of something better, is inextricably linked to the garbage landscape of 20th/21st century popular culture, and it’s only by delving through this garbage that I might emerge on the other side. Similarly, if my own interpretation of ‘punk’ is as a landing place for the backwards, broken, and wretched casualties of societal absurdity, what could be more ‘punk’ than to fly the flag for a vision of the medium that has little to no bearing on its socially accepted normative description?

I recall coming across a quote from Wayne Kramer once where he was asked for his definition of ‘punk.’ To paraphrase, a punk, he said, is someone who is on the receiving end of sexual intercourse in prison. In a sense, he couldn’t have been more right. While I’m not suggesting anyone be incarcerated or engage in any sort of sexual behavior through social coercion or against their will, the truth is in the spirit of the statement. To be ‘punk’ in my own experience is to be the lowest of the low, nothing, a nobody, powerless and without even the illusion that most folks have of control. Not only is it to be this, but, in my case, it’s to revel in it, and in all of this nothingness to find something.

That being said, Valid Neurosis will continue to lurch along the way it’s been lurching, hopefully with more entries, sometimes pontificating on about the most esoteric nonsense, other times throwing up the briefest blurbs about the most mundane trash, but always as a beacon in the dark searching for similarly lost souls. I’ll never be a professional artist. Even if I wanted to, I don’t have the requisite talent, ability, or know-how to make it happen, so there’s no concern on that front. In fact, I loathe the creative process. Some people who write actually enjoy language. To me, language is nothing but a barrier between what I want to express and what appears on the page. I hate it. But still, out of all this fear, all this loathing, I sometimes hear a slippery whisper of meaning. I want to try and share what little I think I’ve heard, and I hope to hear tell of the whispers coming from others around me.

THE GREAT

Keith Morris was born in 1955. When I was 14 and first getting acquainted with his music, he was 35 years old. At that time, to me, a 35 year old may as well have been Methuselah: from my pubescent vantage point Black Flag and The Circle Jerks were venerable echoes from a distant past (11 and 1 years prior, respectively), and Morris himself, while legendary, was an elder, an ancient, a rock and roll demigod spirited away from the active, teenage world of the here and now and into a kind of post-30-year-old suspended animation. He was an object to be looked up to and admired, for sure, though strictly in the past tense.

But again, why? Morris recorded his most significant music (socio-historically speaking) between the years of 1976 and 1989, taking him through the entirety of his 20s and well into his 30s, and therein lies the reason. Rock and roll, as we are told by any number of advertising firms, record labels, and publishing conglomerates, is a young man’s game. Particularly in the subgenre of punk rock, a lack of creative longevity is almost a requirement. In an art form centered around snarling, youthful rebellion, aging is an embarrassing impossibility. A 50 year old Johnny Thunders is a joke. A 60 year old GG Allin is an abomination. ‘Live fast, die young,’ or so the saying goes.

And so, according to my own ingrained prejudice, a 55 year old Keith Morris fronting a new band couldn’t possibly be worth listening to. At 55, Morris is a punk rock paradox, anathema to the very idea of the punk aesthetic. Yet, as I mentioned previously, OFF! is good. In fact, from what I heard, OFF! can go toe-to-toe with anything Morris produced in his younger years, and if this is the case, as I’d argue it is, a huge hole is then torn in the dogmatic fabric of rock-and-roll-as-necessarily-youthful-terrain.

To be fair, rock and roll’s own track record has done plenty to encourage the worship of novelty and youth. For every OFF!, there are scores of Aerosmiths, Motley Crues, Rolling Stones, and Metallicas whose later career output ranges from irrelevant to ungodly. It seems that in rock and roll’s more mainstream/established quarters, the function of a ‘successful’ band is less that of charting new or varied terrain and more a matter of dilutedly reproducing that which has worked in the past. ‘The Rolling Stones LLC’ is not as concerned with releasing something creatively akin to what ‘Exile’ was in its day as it is with releasing an album that’s just Stonesy enough to fill arenas for another rendition of ‘Start Me Up.’

Further, in ‘mainstream’ quarters, rock and roll ultimately serves as an advertisement for youth-oriented consumer products, and so, whether said products are being consumed by the young or the elderly, it’s important that the aura of youth surrounds its pitchmen. Mainstream rock and roll acts are then seen as either young people appropriately making rock and roll music, or aging rockers rehashing their youth. 

The response to this phenomenon in the world of indie/alternative/underground music has generally been to revile longevity in rock and roll. There is an ethos in the indie music scene that, in many cases, the lifespan of an act stands in negative correlation to the act’s credibility, abrupt and premature breakups being manna from the gods of esoterica.

Even if members of a disbanded group simply go on to produce music that could just as easily have been released by their previous outfit, there’s something more legitimate about this shuffling of names and individuals than there would be in continuing the original group.

Meanwhile, aside from a handful of exceptional standouts, those bands that continue past their temporal point of credibility are often shunted aside as tired or niche in favor of the latest, ‘youthful’ offerings, again even if said ‘youth’ is only the product of a name change and personnel shuffling, as ‘youth’ can come in the form of the actual ages of a band’s members or—so long as said ages have not sunk too far into the depths of ‘middle age’— the brevity of a band’s existence.

On one hand, this indie veneration of novelty can be seen as an understandable reaction to the mainstream rock and roll dinosaurs referenced above, a righteous rebellion against the bloated nature of corporate rock. Still, one could argue that the indie approach to youth, novelty, and rock and roll is itself rooted in the same world of gross consumption anchored by the arena set. Consumption, and the attendant machinery of advertising and planned obsolesence that fuels it, thrives on novelty. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: wrapped up within and secondary to its role as a social advertisement, a cultural product like rock and roll exists as a form of entertainment—something better to occupy one’s time with before death than staring at the walls—and new things can be entertaining.

So, whether it’s the low-minded world of mainstream entertainment clamoring for the idols of their youth to reproduce their youthfulness (even at the expense of losing the spark that made said idols stand out in the first place) or the high-minded world of indie entertainment craving the latest in credible newness (even at the expense of abandoning acts that might still have something left to give) both are two sides of the same coin, a coin that represents the cycle of production, consumption, obsolescence, and reproduction, fueled by the faceless, phantom tastemakers of sales and marketing that we so often give ourselves over to, unthinkingly.

This isn’t to say that there’s a vast and sinister conspiracy causing folks to think of novelty as mandatory for the making of rock and roll music, thereby causing long-lived bands to degenerate into shadows of their youthful selves, forcing indie bands with creativity left in the tank to implode prematurely, or making people such as myself think that entertainers over the age of 35 should be dismissed out of hand. As mentioned above, the cycle of production, consumption, obsolescence, and reproduction is the nature of commodified entertainment. In the world of mainstream music particularly, the notion of performer-as-commodity-to-be-reproduced-until-the-facsimile-is-no-longer-recognizable is a fairly easy one to swallow/understand. More troubling to me is the indie aesthetic of newness for newness’ sake.

From the most brain dead, knuckle-dragging punk rock band to the most pretentious, shoe-gazing display of organized indie brilliance, underground rock music purports, no matter how superficially, to be something other/more than entertainment.

Whether it’s an intellectual communication regarding the state of the world’s socio-economic affairs, an anti-intellectual statement regarding the absurdity of life in the post-modern world, a poignant waxing on love lost or found, or something else entirely, ‘underground’ or ‘independent’ stabs at rock and roll music come dangerously (and sometimes exhilaratingly) close to transcending the realm of consumption and entertainment in favor of the shores of art and meaning. However, when this stab is cut down at the knees by an arbitrary set of rules birthed from the very monotony that independent creativity seeks to rise above, that which could be so much more is made to be something less through nothing other than blind adherence to a herd mentality.

There are any number of ridiculous ‘rules’ music listeners allow themselves to swallow in regards to how rock and roll music should be made or how rock and roll performers should comport themselves, and the stereotype that rock and roll music is by its nature a playground for the young or novel is only one of them, but to my mind it’s the most constricting. Sure, ‘live fast, die young,’ is a cool, easy sell, but it’s a stilted, suffocating box when one looks at rock and roll as an art form with any kind of legs, as rock and roll’s earliest generations have already tread that ground well and better than anyone else ever can or needs to. Being, after all, a relatively young medium, it’s no surprise that rock and roll’s earliest practitioners would themselves be young and—in following with the medium’s incendiary proclivities—inclined toward an early burnout. But sixty years after the fact? It seems as though it’s time to move on and accept that there’s neither shame in rocking into one’s old age nor a necessity for age to be the death knell of rock and roll creativity.

By the same token, rock and roll consumers might be well served to forego the robotic practice of insisting, ‘I’m so over [insert act from five years ago], I’m only interested in new bands.’ There should be, could be, and is, I hope, room for both new and established acts in a world where quality rock and roll music is in such scarce supply.

True, there’s very little need to see Band X rehashing their ‘greatest hits’ once and again over a twenty year span of time, but in any art form, whether it be literature, cinema, visual arts or music, a good part of the interest, in my opinion, comes from growing with the artist, watching them unfold over the years, seeing how their worldview and their methodology of approaching it changes over time, and I see no reason why rock and roll should be any different. To me, the rock and rollers that are most compelling are those that have persisted through time and told their shifting tale as they’ve done so—the Ben Weasels, the Bob Dylans, the Paul Westerbegs, and so forth.

On a bleaker note, there are legions of ‘Working on a Dreams’ and ‘A Bigger Bangs’ out there casting all sorts of aspersions on the output of aging rockers, but again, I don’t think it has to be this way. As already mentioned, I myself was prejudiced against further works by Keith Morris until proven wrong by hearing OFF!. But imagine if rather than taking a multi-decade hiatus from any meaningful releases, Morris had stayed with Black Flag, or, more likely, The Circle Jerks and continued to put out quality music during the years when he was relatively inactive. OFF! says he certainly had the capability of doing so. Yet many appreciators of Keith Morris’ music seem to have punished themselves by not clamoring for more of it sooner, instead writing him off as done and middle-aged.

Logistics are, for sure, a wild card in the lifespan of a rock and roll band, as it’s often hard enough for a lone individual to coordinate creative efforts, much less a group of individuals to coordinate such an effort and sustain it over time. If it really is the right moment for a band to break up, there’s no sense in prolonging the death rattle. My argument though is that there’s no reason a band should have to break up for the sake of credibility, nor should a band feel it an inevitability that their later output must become a faded facsimile of their ‘glory days.’ Further, I don’t think consumers of rock and roll music should reject out of hand those people or bands that continue (or hell, even start) rocking into and past the mark of ‘middle age.’

If rock and roll is anything approaching a durable art form, then it doesn’t matter whether its practitioners are 18 or 80, or whether a band has been together for 20 years or two months. If the music is compelling, if it speaks to a listener, that’s all that counts. So why then does the specter of age loom so large over the the body of rock and roll?

I think the answer lies in death. For as much as rock and roll music can be seen as death obsessed—especially in light of its ‘live fast, die young,’ leanings—it’s more often and substantively in denial of death, a denial that’s twisted and self-defeating at its core. One of the tenets in the world of post-modern marketing is the notion that, through the right combination of consumer goods and services, one can somehow live forever. Be it through medications, electronics, vacations or what have you, the perfectly balanced, pain-free life of endless consumption awaits just around the next bend.

So long as rock and roll gives itself over as a pitchman for this worldview (and underground rock is just as guilty of this as the mainstream), it’s hard to expect the medium to do much more than languish in a sort of stunted adolescence, unable to ever evolve into the fully formed entity it might become.

Rock-and-roll-as-advertisement, no matter how catchy or memorable, can never progress past its miniscule field of interest into something more profound, whether by way of low or high brow. Instead it stands in place, stagnating, reproducing itself until the mimeographed ink has smeared beyond the point of recognition.

Rock and roll’s greatest gift as a medium, I think, is its playfulness, its snickering anger, its smirking snark, its mischievous rage, yet without growth over time these traits begin to lose their effectiveness and charm, and the once funny, plucky youngster becomes a perpetually infantile brat. Allowed to mature however, these traits might branch out into any number of salient directions, though in order to ever properly grow, rock and roll must first begin to accept death.

There are a few examples where this has happened. Johnny Cash, for instance, had one foot planted as firmly in the world of rock and roll as the other was planted in country, and he managed to release meaningful albums right up to the point of his own age-appropriate death. In fact, his final album is as immediate and urgent a meditation on the nearness of death as rock and roll has ever produced, though ‘The Man Comes Around’ is an anomaly in the greater world of rock and roll music.

More often we are stuck with vital artists either dying young or simpering into their golden years, trying to act like geriatric versions of their younger selves. Still, it seems to me that the rebellion, the sarcasm, and the humor inherent in rock and roll music deserves so much more. I don’t particularly want to listen to a rock and roll that’s comprised strictly of 18 year olds speaking to 18 year old angst, much less 30 year olds pretending to be 18. I want to know how one maintains a life of cultural rebellion into their 30s, their 40s, their 50s and beyond (though it’s fodder for another entry as to whether rock and roll music can possibly be culturally rebellious or whether it’s nothing more than a superficially rebellious outlet for cultural participation). Where does the snarling 70 year old stand in relation to the snarling 17 year old, and what took place in between?

As it stands now in the world of rock and roll (and again, I’m speaking largely in terms of independent/underground rock), a horrible cliche exists that if one continues to listen to a particular band or subgenre for an extended period of years or participates in a band beyond what is deemed a credible amount of time, one is ‘living in the past.’ However, one need look no further than Proust to realize that it’s only through the past that a present exists, and only through the present that we might find a future. And what waits us, ultimately, in that future? Death is without question the horizon, and that which transpires between now and then is the distance between us and it. It’s this distance that I’m curious to see, one way or another, infused into rock and roll music, the distance in its entirety and not just a microscopic sample size.

Obviously, I’m not saying that in every instance a person who creates rock and roll music should do so with the same group of people, unbroken through the course of an entire career, but more stabs at unfolding over the expanse of a non-intentionally shortened life, growing without fear and maturing without bounds would certainly be nice. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for, though many will probably, if only through apathy, disagree.

For those who do agree however, there’s then a debate to be had regarding the best way of achieving a mature rock and roll artistry: is it through a baroque methodology of intellectual posturing that veers into a territory unrecognizable from what was originally known as ‘rock and roll,’ or is it in keeping with rock and roll’s anti-intellecual roots while finding a way to let those roots grow into something even more cleverly stupid? I’d argue the latter, and at some point I might do so in another entry, but for now I’ll enjoy listening to OFF!, which, while not a perfect example, is at least one that gives a glimmer of hope in service of a rock and roll lifestyle that can indeed be nurtured from the cradle to the grave. Or, at least, from teen to middle age. Until things change, which they likely never will, it’s the best this dying, disenfranchised 30-something can hope for.

FROM THE AGES of 15-17 I attended a high school where—due to the school’s geography and related demographics—achievement and the acquisition of credentials were communicated as the highest aim of intellectual development.

Never mind the fact that most of the school’s students and their parents couldn’t have told you the difference between Socrates and Sophocles, much less Groucho and Karl Marx, there remained the amorphous notion that ‘education’ was ‘important,’ or, in other words, that it was incumbent upon the student population to excel at the memorization and regurgitation of facts and figures in order to graduate into a sufficiently prestigious institute of higher learning. Afterwards the individual student would then be rewarded with a corresponding level of social and/or financial stature, in turn establishing the student’s ego, along with the egos of his or her parents and family.

For those who took well to such a system, said system functioned neatly and efficiently, however, for those with whom the system was not a natural fit, a disservice was done. Since the high school I attended communicated to us that an individual’s choice was either the Ivy League or Skid Row, those of us choosing neither were faced with three years of wasted, directionless time.

Some poor souls were fortunate enough to have parents who steered them helpfully toward GEDs, the local Junior College, a form of trade or artisanship, or some corresponding alternative. Other folks were determined and resourceful enough to seek out these or similar directions on their own. Yours truly however, being cowardly and weak, did little more than to go half-heartedly along with the flow, scraping by with C’s and D’s while skulking through the hallways. Still, thanks to the nebulous and hard-to-pin-down subculture that is ‘punk rock,’ my high school years weren’t a complete loss in the ‘learning’ department.

Through my before, after, and eventually during-school forays into the world of loud three chord music, malt liquor, caffeine, nicotine, and naive political idealism, I received lessons—some hilarious, some crushing, some heart-warming, some painful—in everything from the practicalities of small business, to the differences between intentions and actions, to the distinction between the social and the personal, to the concepts of death and dying, and many points in between, though this can be summed up most succinctly by the fact that I learned how to sleep anywhere.

It may sound trivial, but it’s true. Due to the travels and circumstances related to my involvement in ‘punk rock’ as a high schooler, I’ve slept everywhere from comfortable beds to rocky terrain. From houses where someone’s mom took pity on a rag tag bunch of losers and even made us breakfast, to houses where we were told that if we weren’t gone by 6am, the owner would be calling the cops. There was even the crack house in Little Rock, Arkansas where I laid myself down to rest amidst a pile of feral kittens and their feces, and, while this particular setting stretched my abilities to their limits, I still managed to catch a few Z’s.

Years later, well after high school had come and gone, I returned to my hometown after having moved away for awhile. I was broke, alone, and fairly despondent, completely at my wits end as to what I was going to ‘do’ with my life. I’d been absent from punk for a few years, and it hadn’t occured to me that I’d ever return in any capacity, yet here I was, back where it all began, moving into a run-down house in a relatively sketchy hood with two fellow ne’er-do-wells.

The first night I moved in, I didn’t have a bed, and, after downing any number of cans of Tecate amidst the background of a meandering, blustery conversation running the gamut from French literature, to Japanese cinema, to mixed martial arts fighting, to feminism, all punctuated by the rattling of nose-rings and flashes of bright tattoo ink, I crushed my last cigarette of the night into an ashtray on top of the coffee table, and laid back on the filthy living room carpet, immediately falling asleep.

I woke up the next morning with a pounding headache and a burning in my stomach, and the first thing that occurred to me was the fact that—by virtue of my punk rock youth—I could indeed sleep anywhere at anytime with relatively little regard for personal comfort. My own system of education may not have been as neat or efficient as the one presented to me by my high school, but it was effective in its own right, and, paradoxically, it left me both better and worse equipped to deal with this life than the system I was supposed to have embraced. At the time, I set this realization aside, though I never let it stray too far away, allowing that morning to linger at the fringes of my thought for the next ten years.

Recently, a decade later, I found out that one of the two guys I’d roomed with at that house, the place where I’d first stumbled across this metaphor of ‘sleeping anywhere,’ killed himself a few years back. Suicide is a phenomenon that’s become startlingly familiar to me over the years, watching people I know both well and peripherally inflict it upon themselves with either dramatic finality, or slow, drawn out longing. For those who take or have attempted to take the slow, measured approach, there is, thankfully, the hope of changing course midstream. For those like my former roommate, there is, sadly, no such hope.

When I was in my teens and 20’s it never occurred to me that suicide would be so familiar by the time I was in my 30’s, but from where I stand now it’s no surprise. We live in a world that, from the surface, is both devoid of meaning and in denial of death. ‘Arrange the right combination of interests, activities, and consumer goods, and you too can live forever!’ There’s only so long the affected individual can swallow this line without being consumed by voidness and despair.

I didn’t know my roommate that well, and I hadn’t seen him in years. I don’t know anything about the circumstances surrounding his death, nor am I ghoulishly interested in seeking them out. I am, however, filled with a strange sense of urgent anxiety when I think of the fact that someone I lived with in such close proximity for 365 days is just gone. I can picture him so vividly doing the most mundane of tasks—sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette and watching TV, getting a beer out of the refrigerator, frying potatoes on the stove. This presence, that seems so real and tangible in my memory, is just gone.

How could I live that close to someone, yet not be close to them at all? How could someone be so disconnected from everything, yet seem so present on the surface? I ask myself those questions, and, while I don’t have any answers, I’m reminded again of learning how to sleep anywhere.

As a teenager, by participating in a superficially deviant counterculture, I was benefitted with the experience of having to live in multiple worlds at once, and, as such, was exposed to many different kinds of people following many different kind of paths. For whatever reason, rather than aligning myself with one of these kinds of people and paths over others or grossly relativizing the whole lot and proclaiming it, ‘all good,’ my youthful reaction was to begin to see the fragmented multiplicity that exists in most things.

A pile of rocks sucks to sleep on because it’s uncomfortable, but no one is going to come roust you in the morning. By the same token, a plush couch in a multi-story Houston, Texas tract home is very comfortable, but it’s hampered by its 6am leave-or-cops wake up call. There is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and every shade in between in all but the most extreme of experiences, and, this being the case, we inhabit a life of simultaneous beauty and ugliness, love and hate, life and death. By learning to ‘sleep anywhere,’ I’ve been able to see that multiplicity in things, and it’s been at once both crippling and liberating.

Through the happy accident of my experiences, I’ve been able to let go of a lot of fear that was socially instilled in me as a child. You CAN drop out of school and the bogeyman won’t come rend you in two. You CAN choose to follow a socially unconventional path in life and you won’t spontaneously combust. Life is both good and bad no matter what path you take, and, while pain and hardship are fundamentally unalleviable by anyone through any means, so too are peace and meaning usually lurking close by, if only for a moment here or there, should one be still enough to find them.

At the same time, through the unfortunate coincidence of my experiences, I’ve seen just how ugly and unrelenting this world can be. Disillusionment with the readymade system presented by my high school led to a cynicism regarding a lot of things, a cynicism that was exacerbated when I began to feel the same disillusionment in the very system—‘punk rock’—that I’d seen as my salvation.

Where many are able to see the smiling intentions of others at face value, those same intentions are often twisted into sickening grimaces of actuality from my own vantage point (and this includes looking at myself in the mirror). People, even people with the best of stated intentions and the purest of motivations, are capable of such callous cruelty that, when seen clearly (again, both in myself and others), it sometimes makes it hard to even get out of bed in the morning.

Because of this, I have mixed feelings regarding the system I chose to immerse myself in all those years ago. It’s no surprise, I guess, that a social system whose confines allowed me to notice the multiplicity of things would, by its very nature, peer back at me with more than one face. Sometimes I love the people, places, and things from my teenage years. Sometimes I hate them. Sometimes I’m totally indifferent. Sometimes it’s a mixture of all these feelings and something else besides. Ultimately, I think, ‘punk rock’ became, for me, the proverbial Buddha on the road that needed to be killed. I’ve tried to commit said murder several times through detachment and non-involvement, but each of those times its proven to be an ineffective method of killing. Much more effective, for now, has been what I’m struggling with today—patching fragments of my past on to the fabric of my future, in order to make my present. ‘Punk’ still has, and always will have, meaning to me, but these days it’s a meaning that’s much more personal and idiosyncratic.

In the end, I’m thankful. Thankful that the randomness of my life has thrown together the right puzzle pieces to disturb me without causing me to careen totally over the edge. While the debilitation that sometimes comes with my disturbance—the depression, the mania, the paranoia, the fear—can be horrendous, I can’t imagine a life without it or, inversely, the depth I feel when I encounter its flip side—the elation, the wonderment, the inspiration, the joy. In the meantime, I mourn for my roommate. I mourn for the fact that he wasn’t able to channel whatever emptiness he felt into a vessel to carry something else, something new, instead allowing that emptiness to consume him. I wish he could have seen the things that I’ve seen since, the things that were still to come. I can see him right now, his pierced brow arched, skinny and smoking a cigarette. I wish he’d figured out that he could sleep anywhere, too, the way he played a part in helping me figure out the same thing ten years ago. These days I can still sleep anywhere, most of the time, but those nights when the ghosts sit in the room with me, staring back and smoking…those nights are harder than the rest.

OF ALL M

While congregating in community plazas may be fine for movers and shakers, captains of industry, hustlers and bustlers, and any other manner of active, well-adjusted types, such is not the modus operandi Fate had in store for me. Still, this distaste for public gatherings isn’t as wholesale as I often make it sound. Given the right combination of persons, place, and activity, I too can don a TGIF shirt and a ‘fanny-pack,’ while ‘ooo-ing’ and ‘ahh-ing’ with the best of them. It just so happens that these combinations tend to be few and far between.

Following this line of thought, cafes typically haven’t been among the places that join forces with persons and activities to bring me scuttling from my cave. This is paradoxical in a sense, as sitting around while drinking coffee is one of my favorite pastimes, yet it’s precisely because this activity is so second nature that I usually find little reason to do it outside my own living room. I know how to make a cup of coffee I enjoy drinking, I have access to the music I want to listen to, the art I appreciate hangs on my walls (or at least more of it would if I could ever get around to interior decorating), and the people I like to converse with are usually on hand at home, either in person or only a quick phone call or email away. Why disturb a system that works?

Sure, there’s something to be said for challenging one’s routine, yet at the same time I learned long ago that seeking out novelty for novelty’s sake rarely leads to anything satisfactory. On those few occasions when I have gone seeking a cafe in which to conduct a public life, either the environments have been inhospitable, the faces have been unfriendly, or the coffee served has been uninspiring, and while I can live with any one of these three shortcomings on their own, two or more together spell a quick retreat to the comfort of home, and time and again such a retreat has been the case.

I do know, however, that it doesn’t have to be this way. As a young child living in San Francisco, my parents used to take me to their own public haunt, the Cafe Trieste in SF’s North Beach district. It was a real neighborhood joint, full of friendly and familiar faces whom my parents recognized and were glad to see.

There was Bruno, the old man with the blind-guy shades and beret, Matteo, the stately mandolin player, always with a warm smile, Yolanda, the effusive Italian woman behind the espresso bar who once gave me a toy Fiat car she brought back from Italy, and plenty of other folks whose faces swirl together in a child’s-eye haze of morning fog and cigarette smoke.

Meanwhile, in addition to the people, character oozed from the cafe’s smoke-yellowed walls as well—the ‘Clark Kent’ style phone booth in the corner, the jukebox overflowing with Italian crooners, the Colombus-discovers-America fresco on the back wall, the black and white photos of Bill Cosby hanging askance, in between pictures of customers’ babies (yours truly included), and so on.

The years since have not been kind to the Trieste, just as they haven’t been kind to much of San Francisco, unless you happen to be a tourist or an IT/business-minded immigrant from the Midwest. Most of the folks I remember from the Trieste are dead or gone, the place seems a lot cleaner these days, there’s no smoking inside, and the phone booth has been removed (or, if it’s still there, it’s strictly ornamental), but the memories and the standard they established remain.

And so it was with great trepidation that I set out on the morning of Friday, April 9th, 2010 to pay my first visit to the Atlas Coffee Company in Santa Rosa, CA.

The Atlas Coffee Company is a cafe that was opened recently in my neighborhood by two local musicians, one of whom I’ve known for years and who’s played in some particularly notable bands, and the other whom I’d never met in an ‘official’ capacity, but who’s also left an indelible mark on Santa Rosa’s musical landscape.

Jesse Wickman (the proprietor of Atlas Studios, a stone’s throw away from the cafe) played in, among other projects, Santa Rosa’s own Nuisance (an amazing band on the 1990’s Lookout Records roster), Fifteen (probably no explanation needed for readers of this blog), Undertoad (a 1990’s Santa Rosa act that channeled Mike Patton’s brand of rock/metal/jazz improv freakoutness), and Edaline (Matt Carrillo, the force behind SR indie greats Kid Dynamo’s follow-up project).

Jamie Voss, whose musical history I’m not as familiar with, played drums for the country-tinged outfit Cropduster, one of SR’s proudest musical moments, and so while I’m probably short-changing him by not referencing his full credentials, let it be known that participation in Cropduster is, in my mind, money in the bank. A lot of money. Meanwhile, these days, Jamie plays bass for Santa Rosa’s mighty Spindles.

Both of these guys are guys I like, guys I’ve admired from a distance, guys I looked up to growing up, and so I really wanted to appreciate their new venture. The fact that two individuals like Jesse and Jamie were the ones opening this business already signaled something different from my history of cafe sampling in Santa Rosa. Generally speaking, most cafes I’ve frequented (and a few I’ve worked at) were owned by detached businesspeople, and so even at their most pleasant, those places felt cold and calculated, as if—had the owner decided to follow a different business model—the joint could just as easily have been a carpet store, a dried fruit distributor, or a Baptist church.

Jesse and Jamie have both worked at cafes, they’ve hung out at cafes, they’ve probably played music at cafes, and while, let’s face it, a business is a business and has to be run like one in order to survive, there is a certain synergy that happens when the ‘right’ people are plugged into the ‘right’ enterprise for the ‘right’ reasons. If anyone knows how to create a neighborhood space for people to enjoy some beverages and mingle with one another in an organic, creative way, it HAS to be these two guys. Add in the fact that Jesse is one of the most naturally entrepreneurial spirits I’ve ever met—he works incredibly hard and he knows how to make things work—and my hopes were through the roof.

So Friday the 9th rolled around, and with it came a lot of hectic energy in the Valid household. We were preparing for a trip to an amusement park in Anaheim, CA, and I had a long list of chores to get through so that we could leave on our vacation that afternoon, but even still I was hell bent on swinging by Atlas, and so by the time the clock struck 11am I was out the door and walking to the site of a former Greyhound bus station on Santa Rosa Ave. that now houses a purveyor of coffee, tea, and baked goods.

As I approached Atlas I felt swamped with the usual wave of nauseating social anxiety. Were my shoulders slumped? Did my smile look forced? Would I open my mouth to make pleasantries, only to find myself accidentally letting loose a torrent of offensive slurs instead? And then, opening the front door and walking in, it all melted away in a soothing wave of green and orange.

The first thing that hit me upon entering Atlas was its ethereal airiness. One hundred and eighty degrees removed from the smoky cloister of the Cafe Trieste, though equally effective in terms of character, light floods through the windows of the Atlas Coffee Company and joins with its vibrant interior wall colors (the aforementioned green and orange) making the place seem about three times as big as it actually is. Any apprehensions forgotten, I wanted to sink into a corner and lose myself in some jittery conversation while sloshing back a few cups of caffeine.

But, I cautioned myself, I’d been on this precipice before—entering what seems to be an enticing spot, only to realize that it’s barren of folks I know or have anything in common with. Yet just as this thought crossed my mind, I looked over to see my friends Amber and Dave—Amber seated at a table, Dave at the counter adjusting his beverage—and another fear was put to rest. I hadn’t seen Dave in person for close to ten years, and here we were, brought face to face by Atlas’ cheery, inexorable pull.

So the setting was good, the company great, and boom, two of my cafe ‘musts’ were checked off the list, a sufficient score to make Atlas Coffee Company a place enticing enough to get me out of my living room on a regular basis. But wait! Stepping up to the counter area, all the while admiring both the countertop crafted by Slim Hoffman and the coffee spill-over stand made by Klaus of Whiskeydrunk Cycles, I was greeted by Jesse, Jamie, and barista Erin. Given a choice of a lighter or darker roast (whose specifics elude me at the moment, I’m bad at those sorts of details), I went with the lighter of the two and sat down with Dave and Amber.

The three of us launched into some conversation, and as we did I raised my cup to my lips, tasting the best brewed cup of coffee I’ve had outside of my own home for as long as I can remember. Suddenly I found myself in a euphoric state. Time seemed to slow. The constant tension in my jaw that causes my molars to grind and crush together relaxed. Birds were singing. The sun was shining. And it was at that moment, setting the cup back down, watching Jesse and Jamie smiling earnestly and enthusiastically behind the counter as a steady trickle of familiar and friendly faces came through the front door, that I realized I was in the middle of one of those time travel or dream sequences in a movie when the characters are transported to an idealized 1950s setting, a proverbial ‘simpler time’ that never really existed, although right then and there on that Friday morning at the Atlas Coffee Company, simpler times did in fact exist, for real, for a moment, but also somehow forever.

It was like in the film Blue Velvet when David Lynch shows us a perfect, lush body of green grass only to unearth the disgusting insects swarming beneath, but in this case the green grass was all that mattered. Oh, I knew the insects were out there, somewhere, but for a blissful thirty minutes, I really didn’t care. I was drinking great coffee, brewed by great folks, talking with Dave and Amber and listening to The Misfits playing ambiently over the house speakers. Atlas Coffee Company was a resounding success, and as I skipped my way home after my visit, amped up on lovely dark nectar and wanting to help little old ladies across the street while whistling show tunes, I was already day dreaming about my next visit.

So kudos to Jesse and Jamie for creating a true neighborhood spot that serves a quality product and appears to be inclusive to a nice variety of folks. I look forward to spending more time at Atlas as the years go by, and, after going on excessively in true Valid Neurosis style, I’ll end things simply by stating that Atlas Coffee Company is a great place. I really enjoyed it.

- scott

THE APHRODISIACS existed roughly from 1997 to 2004, going through several line-up changes and a few name switches along the way, all in a futile quest to bring moronic garage punk (and later moronic glam-metal-ish punk) to our own little part of Northern, CA.

Sonoma County, our home turf, was/is a land where rock and roll musicians often try to pass themselves off as the Second Coming of Mozart, and so back then I felt it my duty to inject a little blatant stupidity into the mix. I think my crowning achievement with the band was when a local musician approached me after a show and informed me that he, ‘understood what we were trying to do, but hated it.’ A close second was a time when, in full long-haired APHRODISIACS mode, I was stepped to at a party by a much-esteemed Sonoma County indie rock drummer. “No matter what you think you are these days,” this prick informed me, “you’ll never be anything more than this…” and he proceeded to hum an old INVALIDS ‘lead’ sarcastically while air guitaring. Love that guy!

Anyway, the sound and look of the band changed a bit over the years, but in retrospect our original lineup symbolized the intent of the APHROS at its purest and most effective. MORI PALEGIC (of ‘MORI IS A MANIAC‘ fame) on guitar, KEVIN ‘I AM A ROCK, I AM AN ISLAND‘ JAMIESON (aka DERF) on bass, MATT ‘BIG BOY‘ SILVER on drums, and yours truly (known then as SCOTTY STEELE) on vocals cut a mean swath through the pretense of Sonoma County’s indie rock obsession. Or at least we did in our own minds while practicing in MORI‘s parents’ backyard.

Earlier today I came across our old demo tracks from that era (some of which ended up on our BLOOD ON FIRE 7″ EP released by BEN SAARI‘s LAIDOFF RECORDS) and I thought it might be fun to post them here for public perusal. Then, after a little reminiscing, I thought it might be appropriate to pen a ‘complete’ history of the APHRODISIACS in all their imagined glory. Maybe I’ll get around to it one of these days. For now, consider this the introduction.

You can listen to songs in the media players below, or ‘right-click’ on the song titles to download…

THE APHRODISIACS - Original Demos (1997-ish)

Hey Man

Devilman

Without You

All I Wanna Do (is Rock and Roll)

Blood on Fire

Burnin’ Love

2000 AD

PENGUIN BOOKS

To be honest though, I couldn’t bring myself to read it. Instead, the night he dropped it off, I sat in a chair in my living room, cringing, my hands over my ears while my wife sat across from me on our couch and tore through the thing in a couple of hours. She’s a fast reader, and she probably could have finished the book even faster if I hadn’t been bugging her to repeat each chapter out loud as soon as she was done with it.

Using this admittedly irritating method (sorry Erin!) I was able to hear most of the book—partially paraphrased, partially verbatim—which, though still difficult to bear, was considerably less painful than reading it myself (thanks Erin!), perhaps causing one to wonder: why so much angst and gnashing of teeth over a book written about a kind of music I grew up listening to, from a part of the world I’ve spent my entire life living in? Well, right there lies the problem.

For a little background, I entered 7th grade at the end of the 1980’s—‘88-’89 was my 7th grade year if I’m doing the math correctly—a student at the wretched ‘Herbert Slater Junior High School’ (now Middle School) here in Santa Rosa, CA. HSJH was an emotional, intellectual, and existential wasteland. Seriously, one of the worst places I’ve ever been in my life. True, as with most unpleasant experiences plenty of people have gone through a lot worse, but relatively speaking this place was bad.

Being an institution concerned with the hyper-socializing of the under-socializ- ed, Herbert Slater Junior High School functioned in such a way as to break down the distinguishing components of the individual person. Group participation was rewarded, while deviation from the group was punished, ‘the group’ in this case being the overarching student body and staff as a whole, toward which all activities were designed to foster group membership, followed by a top-down hierarchy of sub-groups based around age, occupation, ethnicity, personal preferences, and so forth. Since deviance within this kind of institution is punished both officially by its overarching system and unofficially through its sub-systems, it becomes difficult for an individual to survive without support from a distinctive sub-group, and it’s here where my thirteen-year-old self ran into trouble.

I came from a thoroughly average, not particularly socially-saavy family—we were neither ‘poor’ nor ‘rich’, neither dramatically dysfunctional nor purposefully driven, my parents weren’t stand-out radicals nor were they by-the-book squares, our family was ethnically ambiguous, new-ish to the area, and so forth. Taken on my own I was exceedingly average as well—skinny and awkward, but not enough so as to reach ‘freakish’ status, neither stone stupid nor particularly smart, not noticeably talented in any given area, but at the same time unable to blend completely into the background, etc.

As such, I found it very difficult to ‘catch on’ with any of the sub-groups available to me at Herbert Slater Junior High, and I started to feel the consequences from day one. After weeks and then months of being slammed into lockers, tripped in halls, having signs glued to my back that read things like, ‘I’m gay and I have AIDS,’ then being sent to the principal’s office where I was berated for having those signs glued to me, getting strangled by the locker keys I wore around my neck, then being yelled at by the PE Coach for causing a disturbance, and any number of other socially corrective experiences, I became desperate to belong. Membership in the top or middle-tier hierarchical groups was obviously beyond my grasp, so I started to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

By default I had my own crew of friends from elementary school, most of them comic book geeks and gamer nerds, but we weren’t organized or connected enough to have a standing in the school’s political structure, plus my situation had started to make me feel bitter and cynical, and I wanted to find a group with an edge, one that would help me channel my feelings of resentment, so I finally settled on trying to land a spot with the school’s ‘Rockers,’ a group of metal-heads who would nowadays be called ‘heshers.’

The Rockers were tough and menacing at first glance, all decked out in ‘Metal Up Your Ass’ and ‘Appetite For Destruction’ t-shirts, and denim vests with ‘Live After Death’ patches sewn onto the back.

I studied them from a distance, letting my hair grow a bit longer and buying a few hard rock/metal t-shirts as I did, until eventually—having grown a suitable mullet and gathered a respectable collection of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Slayer shirts to rotate through on school days—I attempted to make contact.

This went badly. I’d thought beforehand that if I simply showed up near The Rockers one day, dressed appropriately and assuming the right stance, I’d automatically be assimilated into their ranks. Instead, I found myself following them around the school campus, awkwardly trying to gain their attention with little luck. While a few friendly members made half-hearted pleasantries, most of the group either ignored me completely or jeered at me for being a tag-along. The Rockers weren’t interested in ‘making friends.’ Their crew was largely nihilistic and world-weary, having come from ‘latch-key’ home situations at best and abusive, substance-riddled families at worst, circumstances I was absurdly naive to at the time. They didn’t want to hang out, as I’d hoped, watching TV and playing video games, instead they wanted to smoke weed and drink Jack Daniels, and at age thirteen this was entirely beyond my scope.

And so, after my failed early attempts, I thought to try a different, more aggressive approach. In studying The Rockers I’d developed my own healthy appreciation for heavy metal music, particularly its louder, thrashier varieties, yet for as tough as a lot of The Rockers tried to look, I’d noticed that most of them were more interested in the softer, glammier side of metal. There was this one little guy in particular with fiery red hair and freckles, a ringleader of the group, who wore a ‘Dr. Feelgood’ t-shirt almost every day of the week. Obviously, I thought, REAL Rockers would prefer the harder-edged stuff. They just needed someone to show them the way!

So, ill-advisedly, I decided to make the red-headed ‘Dr. Feelgood’ guy my target. For a few days, as a lead-in, I started talking loudly about Slayer and Megadeth, even tossing in a few nods to Venom here and there, probably a couple of Suicidal Tendencies references as well, and I might have even gone so far as to bring up The Mentors, though I hadn’t actually heard them. No one cared. In fact, the more I talked about these bands, the more I was ignored. Even the members of the group who’d acknowledged my presence enough to mock it now looked through me as if I didn’t exist.

That was cool. I figured they were just taking some time to process what I was laying down, giving me the perfect opportunity to make my final move, which was this: after a couple days of name-dropping heavy bands I approached ‘Dr. Feelgood’ himself, totally out of the blue, with no warning. He and I had never exchanged so much as a word before, in fact I don’t think I’d ever stood closer than a yard away from him, but that day in one of HSJH’s nauseating courtyards I walked right up to him, probably interrupting the transfer of cash for a dimebag or something like that, and I can still remember him squinting at me, totally unable to comprehend my breach of social etiquette as I said, plainly: “Motley Crue sucks.”

“What the fuck?” he answered.

“They suck.” I replied, grinning, feeling the group starting to surround the two of us and knowing that my words of wisdom were about to bring forth a surge of accolades and applause.

“You suck, fag.” Dr. Feelgood snarled, shoving me.

“Hey, you’re the one who likes that song ‘Without You,’” I said, my voice breaking as I attempted to make a comeback. “You should…um…listen to Slayer?”

“Fuck you.” Dr. Feelgood said, shoving me again, this time into the group of Rockers who were now standing directly behind me.

The group responded by shoving me toward Dr. Feelgood who in turn shoved me toward the group. For what seemed like an eternity I was then bounced back and forth between dudes with feathered hair and chicks with hairsprayed bangs, a sneering sea of band-logo t-shirts and acid washed jeans.

Finally the bell rang, the group dispersed, and we were all herded by adult ‘yard duties’ to our respective classes. Later that day, as a postscript, I was jumped in the bathroom by two Rockers, who, while strangling me, demanded I repay 25 cents I’d borrowed from them earlier to buy a lemon juice bar, and it dawned on me, without question, that even the bottom of the barrel was now beyond my reach.

Despite this abysmal early-going, I did manage to survive my years at HSJH, and without ever finding a place in any of its bonafide sub-groups. It was a bleak survival, but a survival nonetheless. I bided my time, lurking at the social fringes of the school, trying to remain unnoticed and to keep my exposure to physical and verbal assaults at a minimum, while occasionally gaining the slightest social foothold by bullying those poor souls who were even more wretched than myself. It was a pathetic existence, for sure, but along the way there was a fortuitous accident, one which I credit with keeping me from falling entirely into the abyss.

Long after my attempts to join The Rockers had failed, I continued listening to the heavy metal music I’d picked up during my field research. In fact, it was one of the only interests I had during Junior High. I’d lost most of my enthusiasm for comic books and role playing games—my two loves from elementary school—and my education itself certainly wasn’t interesting to me, so I’d spend most afternoons in my bedroom, my textbooks unopened, lying on my bed and listening to the likes of Testament, Anthrax, Vio-lence, Death Angel, and their kin, my walls covered with pictures of glowering men wearing black t-shirts and tight black jeans, tucked into impossibly white hi-top sneakers.

It was through this irreverent, anti-social music and imagery that I found a foil for the contempt I felt toward myself and others. The fact that there were people out there who hated life and the the world as much as I did—or at least pretended to—was a great comfort and, paradoxically, it brought me what little joy I had at the time, eventually leading me toward the sub-cultural world that would mark the rest of my teenage life.

In the days of their earliest iterations, heavy metal and punk rock music maintained an absurd enmity with one another, yet to me the two were always wholly complimentary, and as my immersion in all things metal (aside from a peer group) continued, it naturally led me to punk. I think it was by way of some stickers on one of Jeff Hanneman’s guitars that I got hipped to the Dead Kennedys, and the Dead Kennedys begat The Misfits, who begat The Ramones, who begat Black Flag, and so on and so forth, until four years later I was a cocky high school student with badly bleached hair and a hooded sweatshirt, cutting school to drink 40-ounce bottles of Olde English 800 malt liquor and spending my weekends crisscrossing all of Northern California to watch punk rock bands play in clubs and basements.

Where heavy metal music had a starker divide between bands-as-elevated-performers and audience-as-rabble, punk music had an illusion of egalitarianism. The audience was, supposedly, as important as the band, and everyone was said to have a part in what was going on. This being the case, punk rock music provided a way for young people like myself without any membership in a defined sub-group to create and participate in groups of our own. We formed our own bands, recorded and released our own records, made our own magazines (fanzines or ‘zines as they were irritatingly known), and in some cases even opened and ran our own music venues. The most notable of these, at least in my geographical area, was 924 Gilman St., a non-profit, all ages venue operated by volunteers in Berkeley, CA.

While I probably spent more of my overall time at venues other than Gilman St., Gilman was definitely the ‘biggest’ of the venues I visited regularly in terms of its notoriety. The East Bay was an epicenter for punk music back then, fueled largely by the efforts of Lookout Records whose roster featured such luminaries as Operation Ivy, Green Day, Crimpshrine, The Mr. T Experience, and Screeching Weasel, many of whom doubled, or had doubled, as regulars at 924 Gilman.

Due to my particular positioning in space and time, I had the good fortune of being able to sit on the sidelines and watch as this historical moment in popular culture unfolded, and in one sense it was exhilarating, but in another it was disconcerting in a way I wasn’t able to put my finger on until years later.

To be honest, I never really felt comfortable at Gilman St., though in all fairness I don’t really feel comfortable anywhere, except perhaps inside my own home. Part of my discomfort was a matter of geography. I was coming in from the far suburban fringes of Northern CA to visit Gilman, and as such I was always more of a ‘tourist’ than a ‘local.’ Part of it was also due to the fact that Gilman St. was a burgeoning social scene by the time my friends and I showed up—well established and certainly into, if not already past its prime. As such, Gilman had a very solid social structure in place, and for all of punk rock’s leanings toward egalitarianism it was fairly hierarchical. True, Gilman did as much as possible to be inclusive of individual persons, but ultimately, as I pieced together years later, at the end of the day an institution is an institution, and institutions, by definition, can’t help but come with certain constraints built-in.

As soon as a ‘movement,’ ‘happening,’ or ‘occurrence’ becomes formalized and structured, it becomes a ‘system’ like any other, regardless of content, and punk rock—with all of its good intentions and high minded ideals—was no different. When a thing, any thing, is institutionalized, the institution becomes the thing, and the institution’s ‘thing’ is to reproduce itself until it can reproduce itself no more. Therefore, in the case of Gilman and other punk rock institutions, egalitarianism becomes a medium through which the institution communicates itself. Whether or not the institution is egalitarian in anything other than name is beside the point, so long at the appropriate communication takes place. Meanwhile, the individual persons comprising the institution are required to serve their various functions, whether it be as ruling taste-makers, bands on stage, audience members consuming the bands and tastes they’ve been conditioned to consume, or what have you.

This isn’t meant as a judgement, negative or positive, but rather a statement of perceived fact. It also isn’t intended to be a slight against Gilman St. and all the hard work and good things its volunteers have produced over the years. It is, however, meant to be an explanation as to why I found my time at Gilman to be—while stimulating and inspirational—a bit dismaying as well. When it came right down to it, something so diametrically different than HSJH had, terrifyingly, at its core, some of the same components.

While the people working at and attending Gilman St. were decidedly friendlier and more interesting than those doing the same at HSJH, I still found myself, once again, in the awkward position of being barred from the groups that were off-limits to me, attempting to infiltrate the groups that seemed to be within my reach, and at the same time bullying those poor souls who were even more wretched than myself. Now, this could certainly have been a singular failing on my part—I’ve long since come to terms with the fact that I’m indeed wretched among wretches, guilty before each, and all of that—but it really did seem to be a systemic failing, not one that was confined to myself.

What’s more, in true systems-theory fashion, my own small, disorganized peer group from Sonoma County was irrevocably influenced by its exposure to this larger, more defined organism, and in turn the punk rock landscape at home began its own process of systematic institutionalization. Soon enough, the Sonoma County ‘punk scene’ had become a miniature replica of its older, East Bay sibling, complete with a lot of the same goodness, but also with the same disappointing functional divisions, group hierarchies, and power struggles as well. Again, inside a thing that was so personally transformative to me on one hand, lurked whispers of the familiar impersonal socialization that had been on full display at HSJH.

And this is why, fifteen years later, ‘Gimme Something Better’ provokes, for me, such dualistic feelings of ecstasy and agony. Some of the best memories in my life are tied up with experiences I had at Gilman St., but at the same time, so are some of the most defeating—namely, those first nascent insights into the inescapably impersonal nature of institution, whether that institution has the best of stated intentions or the worst.

Chronicling Bay Area punk history as ‘GSB’ does, the Gilman scene and its major players figure heavily into its narrative. More precisely, ‘GSB’ gives the Gilman experience an identity of record through the voices of those major players. Of course, this is the point of the book—a mainstream history of Bay Area punk—and the voices chosen for the project were and are completely appropriate and justified. It really is a delight to hear many of these historical tales told first hand, from the voices of the people responsible for them.

Still, by codifying the historical experience in such a way, an ‘objective’ history is created that can’t help but steamroll the multiplicity of unspoken subjective histories existing elsewhere. The history or histories on display in ‘GSB’ are a collection of histories, and significant histories at that, but they’re not THE history, as each person and group of persons attending Gilman St. in the 1990s—including the undocumented hoi polloi—have their own remembered series of events and cherished cast of characters dear to them from the era.

By way of ‘GSB’’s publication however, the history it presents has become THE history of the time period for all intents and purposes. Of course this is how any recorded historical narrative establishes itself—for history to be recorded, some dominant narrative must identify itself as historical—and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. At the same time though, for folks who lived through the experience subjectively, being confronted with an ‘objective’ history can feel jarring. Worse, in the case of a subjective/anarchic enterprise like ‘punk rock,’ objectification and institutionalization can threaten to pull parts of an otherwise significantly meaningful experience into the same realm as HSJH.

It’s a double-edged sword really, as without objectification there is no ‘thing,’ yet with objectification comes inevitable restrictions on freedom and spontaneity—not so much a problem within an institution like HSJH, but a bit of a problem when it comes to artistic and creative endeavors. The Gilman-Lookout institutional clout was such that it provided a stable, consistent beacon for those seeking exciting underground music and art, yet I worry that that beacon may have, at times, overshadowed lesser-known happenings that were just as interesting/important to some.

My own minor elbow-rubbing with Lookout Records provided the creative project I was involved with back then a level of exposure I never could have imagined, in fact the effects of that exposure persist to this day, and I’m immensely grateful for having had the opportunity. Still, what if we could give the same level of attention to the creativity of those immediately in front of us (our friends, family, etc.) as we do to institutionally certified strangers?

I can’t count the times I’ve painstakingly viewed a film by some renowned director, only to gloss over a friend’s short film, or devoured and analyzed every word of a dead writer’s novel, then barely scanned a letter from someone I know in person. We live in an institutional, information-driven society, this is true, and while it’s absurd to advocate the possibility of disconnecting oneself from mass-culture (or sub-culture), I think our personal lives could be greatly enriched by spending more time appreciating the creativity and art that takes place unheralded in the shadows—spontaneously and lawless—with the same fervor as that which has been presented to us ‘officially.’

I remember reading a quote from Alfred Peet shortly after his death, and while I don’t have the exact text handy, he was basically stating his regret that the coffee industry had evolved into a small handful of giants as opposed to a multitude of folks with their own small shops. This is, I think, a particularly salient metaphor for punk rock. As much as the great labels and scenes have done as far as providing quality art and music for those of us on society’s fringes, how better would it be to have even more labels, more bands, more opportunities for people to do their thing as participants and for us to take them seriously?

And this is why I had to enlist Erin as my medium for ‘reading’ ‘Gimme Something Better.’ The printed codification of a time and place that I have so many personal memories attached to was a bit much for my weak constitution to bear, and since she’s of far sterner stuff than me and unconcerned with such trivialities, her reassuring presence softened the blow. Still, all joking aside, there is a melancholy associated with my realization that, at their cores, HSJH and my later experiences with punk rock share some of the same sociological terrain. It’s nothing to be helped, simply part of the inescapable tension that exists between the social and the personal, a tension that, I believe, characterizes the existential task ahead of us in our life as human beings.

To manage that tension without being suffocated by one side or the other is the challenge, with the richness of a life that keeps this tension in balance as best it can being the reward. And, while later in life I developed an appreciation for certain aspects of metal’s softer, glammier side, I still maintain that REAL Rockers like the harder-edged stuff…

- scott

BEEN A LITTLE SLOW

Nevertheless, I want to take a moment and draw your attention to a band I found out about over the weekend. Plenty of folks are already familiar with them, I’m sure, but as I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been under a rock for the last couple of years, so this is all new to me.

The band in question is called The Zatopeks and they hail from London, though I’m not certain if that’s where they’re currently based. Their music is an exquisite mix of classic Lookout-inspired ‘pop-punk’ with a vintage rock and roll sensibility, the end result being something along the lines of Elvis Costello fronting a legit punk band, or, as the band themselves describe it, ‘Buddy Holly covering Rocket to Russia.’

By effectively evolving what can sometimes be a constraining genre, though without making it unrecognizable, The Zatopeks are a cut above the average ‘pop-punk’ band. Further, they’re strengthened by their lyrics and the vocal delivery of their frontman Will DeNiro—who doubles as the mind behind the blog Quality Footwear—proving that one can be authentically poignant and insightful while still making ‘damn fool music,’ which is what, in my opinion, rock and roll is all about (indie rockers please take note).

Do yourself a favor and check out the songs they have up on their myspace page. ‘Jumble Sale’ and ‘City Lights’ are my personal favorites, but all of them are ‘quality’ as Will would say.

First it was Dave Breedlove with his Bubbledumb bands (Nobunny, Personal and the Pizzas, and co.) as well as a few other recommendations (The Flakes, The Okmoniks, etc.), then it was The Prozacs, followed by The 20Belows, and now The Zatopeks. This is turning out to be Christmas in February for me as far as ‘new’ music goes…

- scott

Music Ruined My Life posts, according to its description, ‘fine, out-of-print
three-chord obscurica (punk, pop-punk, mod, power-pop, folk, country…whatever),’ along with expert commentary by its curator, Jeff.

and…

Quality Footwear, which I only just came across tonight, features some fascinating writing by a guy named Will, tackling everything from The Ramones to Friedrich Schiller.

- scott

We’d spend hours on an old stained sofa in our spartan living room, sitting underneath the gaze of a ‘Shout At The Devil’-era Mötley Crüe promo poster and taking in a steady diet of pro wrestling, early UFC, B-movies and art flicks, all on VHS. We smoked constantly, and indoors too. There were mountains of beer cans and vodka bottles piled up in the living room and kitchen. None of us had a vacuum cleaner, so vacuuming could only be done on those godsent days when someone’s parent would loan us one out of pity.

I was working as a cafe shift manager at the time, and I tended to work from around 5am to 1pm. I’d start drinking vodka as soon as I got home, and on days off sometimes sooner. It was an ugly period for me. The relationship I’d taken for granted for years was seemingly over, the music scene that had kept me busy as a hobby had dried up, I’d passed up an opportunity to go to college, and my friends had since scattered to all ends of the earth.

It wasn’t the lowest low point the world has ever seen by any means. I’ve known people who’ve faced much worse, some of them no longer around to reminisce about it, but for me this was fairly rock bottom. Things were bleak, without the slightest bit of inspiration coming from any direction, and it was in the midst of this haze that Dave came to my attention.

One of my two roommates worked in a bakery, and Dave was a co-worker of his. ‘Dave the Baker’ my roommate called him—it was between Tecate beers, sitting on our couch on some innocuous weekday afternoon, probably watching a video-taped episode of Monday Nitro, and my roommate started telling me a story about this guy he knew from work. I think the story involved a description of Dave getting drunk and doing something crazy, but more memorable was my roommate’s description of Dave’s transportation. If I’m remembering correctly, Dave drove a truck that couldn’t make turns in one direction (I can’t recall if it was left or right). That being the case, he’d plan out all his routes around town so he wouldn’t have to turn in the direction (left or right) that his truck was incapable of moving. I think he might have even based the place he was living at on how it fit in with his truck’s steering problems.

Whether or not I’m remembering these details accurately now is beside the point, because either way that story is cemented as my first impression of Dave Breedlove…this sneering, tattooed dude wearing a backwards baseball hat, rerouting himself all over town in order to avoid turns his truck couldn’t make. Try to find another car? Take alternate transportation? Walk? Fuck that. Dave was going to make what he had work, and on his own terms too. And it was on hearing this story, casually mentioned during a rambling, drunken back and forth in front of the TV, that a little bit of hope started to penetrate my glazed over, slack-jawed face. Not a lot of hope, but a little, and that was more than I’d experienced in a long time.

I can’t remember when I actually met Dave, or if I ever formally ‘met’ him. I’d see him out at bars at night, wasted, tearing it up, talking shit to some fool, maybe getting his ass kicked, and then the next morning I’d go to work at the cafe and he’d come in, pushing his little daughter in her stroller, stone cold sober, soft spoken and pleasant as could be. It was total Jekyll and Hyde stuff, but again it made the guy stand out.

Finally, in a world of one-track minds and one-hit wonders, here was a dude with a little complexity. I was sick to death at the time (and remain so now) of people insisting on being entirely one-dimensional. ‘I like a certain kind of music (or, if multiple kinds, they still must fit within a certain orthodoxy),’ ‘I think a certain way,’ ‘I act even-keeledly and predictably at all times.’ Fuck that. Life isn’t like that. Life is messy, it’s ugly, it’s ragged, and it’s beautiful. It’s getting black-out drunk and getting beat up by a dude twice your size and then pushing your daughter in her stroller the next morning. And this guy (Dave) was living it for real, out in the open, and with no apologies. Again, I saw a flash of hope.

A couple of years passed, I moved away from Santa Rosa, and, while I was still pretty messed up, things had gotten a little bit better. My girlfriend and I were back together, in fact we’d gotten married, and though our lives remained aimless and cynical, there was some stability there. I was even playing music again, but it was mostly out of anger. I’d decided that since a lot of the alternative rock bands I’d encountered around that time were totally pretentious phonies using a high-minded indie aesthetic to mask the same low-brow aims of any other rock and roll band—scoring drugs, scoring chicks, and scoring general adulation—I was going to start the ugliest, most knuckle dragging, cro-magnon rock outfit I could put together.

I’d tried to get such a band going briefly some years before, but it wasn’t until this time that The Aphrodisiacs got off the ground for real. Now in retrospect I don’t regret The Aphrodisiacs a bit, but I didn’t care about The Aphrodisiacs the way I’d cared about music in the past. Not at all. We were a soulless novelty. Point being, even though I was doing something ‘creative,’ it was with the same hopelessness that had been following me around for years. And again Dave happened on the scene.

Once in awhile The Aphrodisiacs would make the trip up to Santa Rosa to play shows, and there was usually a nice rowdy crowd of old friends, skateboard dudes, and punk rockers there to greet us. Dave was always at those shows, drunk, going off, and having a good time. He seemed to actually care about watching a band play, in a way I hadn’t seen anyone care in years. It was a totally abandoned kind of caring, miles apart from the contrived, studious, orthodox caring that had made me so angry at music in the first place.

I remember a particular instance when we played in Santa Rosa and my dad came to the show. My dad, for those of you who don’t know, is severely disabled from multiple sclerosis. In a hilarious aside, my parents have an old Invalids sticker on their van, and one time an able-bodied health professional lectured my dad about how offensive it was. Gotta love Northern, CA. Anyway, my dad insisted on sitting in his wheelchair at the front of the stage in this rowdy pub full of drunks. During our set, Dave did a flip or something and basically landed on top of my dad. It was electric. Totally out of control, and again, for a minute, there was hope.

Eventually The Aphrodisiacs disbanded, the years continued to roll along, and my life changed completely. My wife and I had two daughters and moved back to Santa Rosa. Cynicism was gone (for the most part) and we were fully committed to living our lives with a certain amount of meaning and purpose. Still, something was missing. I thought I had to completely turn my back on my past in order to live in the present, but in doing so I extinguished, or tried to extinguish, a lot of my creative fire. Like I said earlier, life is wild and unpredictable, and, when harnessed with the right sense of purpose and meaning, that wild unpredictability can lead to great things. When suppressed, however, it can lead to as many problems as when it’s tapped cynically. Once again, Dave—and this time a handful of other folks—lent an indirect helping hand.

Along the course of getting in touch with the past in a way that makes sense in the present, I became reacquainted with Dave, and, while I’d heard through the grapevine that he’d started his own record label at some point over the years, I finally found out about it from him firsthand.

For background, there was a time in my life when almost every other person I knew had a record label, and during that time I got pretty jaded. Of course people put out their own records! Duh. Then that whole scene came tumbling down, and now it seems pretty amazing when I think back. Sure there have been folks putting out music since, but generally (in my experience) it’s of a relatively safe and palatable variety (again, the dreaded orthodoxy mentioned earlier). Dave, however, is of a totally different school, in fact his label is kind of like the truck he had that couldn’t turn right. Or was it left? He makes it work, and on his own terms too.

Dave’s label is called Bubbledumb Records (‘Music That Sticks to You!’), and you should really do yourself a favor and check it out. So far he’s released LPs by The Trashies and Nobunny, and 7”’s by Eric and the Happy Thoughts, Hunx and his Punx, Poppets, and Personal and the Pizzas. It’s all great stuff, though I’m particularly partial to Nobunny and Personal and the Pizzas. The ‘Bubbledumb sound’ is punk rock like it’s supposed to be—simple, dumb, stripped down, 60’s pop-influenced brilliance, ragged, flawed, and inspirational, just like Dave himself.

There’s not an ounce of pretense in any of the Bubbledumb material I’ve heard, yet at the same time it’s a million times smarter than all those indie pretenders out there feigning intellectualism on stage and then going home to watch TV. Bubbledumb bands won’t even bother leaving the TV to go to the stage. Instead they’ll just invite you over to watch TV with them and offer you a beer when you come through the door. Dave has a copy of Phil Spector’s mug shot posted on the Bubbledumb Records Myspace site, and it really sums up the Bubbledumb situation as a whole—troubled, ugly, creepy, but somehow catchy and sing-alongable. Such is life isn’t it?

So cheers to Dave and the other folks out there like him who’ve reminded me what punk music is all about, the joy that can be found in three stupid chords repeated over and over again, and the creativity that can be birthed from this stupidity when approached in the right way.

While you probably won’t find me on my couch in a drunken vodka stupor at 11am anymore, you will see me with a little more pep in my step as I’m no longer trying to run away from what I used to be and instead trying to fuse it with what I am now, hoping to build something better. Oh, and I’ll be humming ‘Brass Knuckles’ by Personal and the Pizzas while I’m at it.

Postscript — These days Dave seems to be fusing the wildness of his younger years with a little grown-up perspective too. He has a lovely girlfriend named Amber who has a daughter of her own, and Dave’s daughter is a teenager! He’s currently looking for work in the SF area (Bubbledumb needs a day job), so any SF employers out there that are reading this (of which I’m sure there are legions!) hire this dude ASAP! He’s really a lot more responsible than I made him sound!

- scott

post soundtrack:

Bubbledumb Records – music from Myspace.com

Led Zeppelin – BBC Sessions

Justice – Cross