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His Philosophy

Got news from home that my Gramma died on the way from Little Rock to Oklahoma City. I called home and to see if I could maybe cancel the OKC show and get a round trip ticket from there to Pittsburgh and back. The cheapest one we could find was $500, even with the funeral discount, the bastards, and no one can afford something like that in one shot. So it sucked of course. I felt very weay and numb about the whole thing.

I owe my Gramma everything. At my Gramma’s house on Landis Street in Sheridan, across from Holy Innocents Church, when I was a little kid I got some of my first memories of real music, as real as it gets, the kind when red-faced half-drunk Irish uncles harmonize like angels in the corner with their guitars and banjos and sometimes just their voice. No stage, no microphones, no PA, just people singing old Irish and American folk songs and loving it, and the audience was me and my cousins running around half-mad like little Tazmanian devils on the old rug you didn’t have to worry too much about tramping your muddy shoes on and aunts bringing food in and out of the living room and maybe a few people watching with their drinks held high, and the old men singing along and remembering, and maybe if you were lucky you’d get all 8 of my Gramma’s children singing together and it’d be the best choir you ever heard in church or heaven. Black and gold on on football Sundays and green on St. Paddy’s. And there at my Gramma’s I got vague memories of the Superbowl parties when the Steelers were a triumphant band of heroes and Pittsburgh was finally a city to be proud of and no Dallas cowboy could ever feel something as pure and mighty as a Pittsburgh Steelers Superbowl victory in the 1970s. And my Grandmother had eight kids and 26 grandkids and 12 or so great grandkids and she never missed sending a birthday card for birthdays and St. Pat’s Day cards and Christmas and Easter.

One of the last conversations I had with my Gramma she was telling me about the old days. They used to go see live orchestras and that’s back when people actually knew how to have a good time and dance and wouldn’t even be ridiculed because, believe it or not, everyone danced to live music. She said they’d go all around the western side of Pittsburgh and dance until 5 in the morning and have to be at work at 6:30 the next day. We had this conversation after she had a horrible operation on her stomach which she never fully recovered from. She was telling me how the doctor said she can’t have any more beer, and she said it to me specifically because she knows I like to drink. There was always a maturity about drinking in my dad’s family, and I never saw any damage done when I was a kid as a result of drinking at parties. The only time it got hairy was when my dad would get into political conversations or conversations about the Catholic Church with his brothers John and Mike but even then there wasn’t any threatening atmosphere of any sort. It was entertaining. It was a whole celebratory thing anyway, which canceled out all ill-will. And my Gramma created it all and loved it all.

Oklahoma City, OK
8/28/02 @ 66 Bowl

The 66 Bowl is a bowling alley on the famous Route 66 in OKC, and the neon bowling pin and marquee said us and Billy Joe Winghead were playing that nigh. Immediately my mouth watered with the thought of the greatest beef jerky! in the world that Winghead brings to Sleazefest, but it turns out there was some kind of miscommunication and they weren’t playing after all. But some of the Winghead boys and their girlfriends came out and it was a damn good thing they did because that’s the only audience we had. We got some free food, free beer, and paid cash anyway courtesy of Mike, the guy who runs the place. He definitely took a dive that night but paid us anyway. The man is a saint.

At the Bowl there were photos of more populated weekend shows there with the Bell Rays, Truckadelic, and Hasil Adkins. Hasil played the Bowl twice, as Mike’s a big fan and broke even flying Hasil out and getting him a hotel room and some amenities such as Boone’s Strawberry Wine. I wondered if he had any good Hasil stories but he just described him as a laid back, polite dude who liked to drink and smoke cigarettes. We stayed over at Mike’s and drank some Heinekin and smoked and watched some videos he took of 66 Bowl shows from 2001 including Hasil and the Chickenhawks from Sioux City, Iowa.

In the morning Matt and Nick went and got the rest of the van fixed by a guy named Jeff Beck (not the Limey guitarist – the Okie mechanic), who worked on the vehicles of Dick Dale and Southern Culture on the Skids. While they were at the garage I killed time expanding my American music horizons with “The Wild World of Hasil Adkins” video. I dig this man a lot because he’s a nutcase, but in a good way, you know what I mean? The only nutcases we ever hear of are the terrorists and serial killers, and they give nutcases a bad name. I bet you know of a good nutcase in your town. Anyway the video showed Mr. Adkins drunk standing atop an old bus inside of which he throws parties parked in his yard playing a guitar plugged into an amp, drunk atop the skeleton of an old, oddly spray-painted car getting strange sounds out of an old carnival organ with a gigantic pink wig on his head, then kicking the thing off his car, stomping on his car, jumping off into the grass and laughing his ass off. Then it showed a gig at this little dive he was playing in Boone County, West Virginia (where he lives), where three middle aged West Virginny womens got into a raging catfight over who gets to sit next to Hasil Adkins on the stage. It went on for about 15 minutes and no one in the bar thought to step in to stop it. Who would stop all that pure entertainment? Anyone who wants to find out more about the man and the myth can take a look at The Hasil Adkins Hunch Club or The Hasil Adkins Headquarters.

After the video I got hungry and I went to the nearest 7/11 and got a microwave cheeseburger. It was a bit of a walk to the nearest station but it was cool to walk around the neighborhood. Walking alone is as free as reading alone is as free as shitting and showering with the door locked. There were three trees in Mike’s neighbor’s yard that looked like they’d been blown sideways with tornado winds and it looked like they were still blowing. In the 7/11 I saw an old Oklahoma man with a long forehead walk slowly toward the counter with his wife. He had a burnt orange shirt buttoned to the top and one of those stringy western ties.

Here’s a direct quote from the original notebook journal as I wrote. Sort of a flashback, I guess:

“I like Route 66 and OKC and all the weird old diners and shit. It makes the road a nice place to be. We’re heading into Texas today and I heard everyone there dresses like cowboys and cowgirls. There’s a Steeler exhibition game while we’re in Dallas but we probably won’t see it. As long as we see the regular season I’ll be happy. Nick and Matt are more tired than me and Vee because they got up early to go to the garage. The bread has a dent in it. Matt wants to make a bread box that hangs from the van ceiling for the next tour so no one dents it again.”

And next in my journal I have three pages of signs I saw on the side of I-35 headed south to Dallas I won’t bore you with.

Dallas, TX
8/29/02 @ Spider Babies

This is enemy territory for me, or any born and raised Steeler fan. I was hoping it would look as horrible as Birmingham but it turned out to be a nice city, visually. The architecture was all modernish and though I’m no architecture buff all I can say is it was interesting. Frank Llyod Wright. Didn’t do anything here that I know of but I he’s a famous architect and I just wanted to look like an architecture buff. Mike Brady.

We were playing at Spider Babies which was a club with some horror-psychedelic décor located Deep Ellum among rib joints various other establishments where one can devour pig parts. Deep Ellum is a former freedman’s town, post civil war, which has a rich history of music, the heyday being in the 20s and 30s, that I don’t know too much about but only heard about here and there. One of the bartenders there told us the way they got the name “Deep Ellum” was from neighborhood being on Elm Street. Elm also runs through the downtown part of Dallas, but since this part of Elm was on the other side of the tracks, literally, it became the “deep” part. The folks who lived here pronounced Elm with an extra syllable, and so you have “Deep Ellum”.

Well we were the only band tonight, and immediately we knew there wasn’t going to be any kind of draw whatsoever. To ad insult to injury the Gaza Strippers were playing that night in Dallas, so there goes the rock audience. But again, we run into some cool as hell people, namely the staff at Spider Babies. Saints all. They kept giving us free beer, Pearl and Lone Star which are two Texas cheap beers I never had before. We slept in the bar on some couches and left in the AM.

Gearfest USA in Austin, TX
8/30-9/1/02 @ Emo’s

Gearfest is an annual music festival that’s been going on for a few years up in Scandinavia, in cities such as Oslo, Norway and Stockholm, Sweden and Rveiuvyfvkqfgy, Vikingland. Gearhead Magazine/Records are the people that put this together. Mike LaVella, the CEO of Gearhead, invited us to the first Gearfest USA when we opened for the Dragons and “Demons” on their tour at the Local 506 in Chapel Hill. He’s a native Picksburgher that used to be in Half Life. They just did quite a huge reunion down there at the 31st Street Pub and Club Laga.

So we were all psyched (or maybe we were amped - yeah, a little more amped than psyched) to be there. There were a ton of great bands there. New Bomb Turks, Lazy Cowgirls, DMZ, Sons of Hercules, Riverboat Gamblers, Gaza Strippers, aforementioned Dragons and Demons. All rock rock rock! Damn how did wee little us get on this big hip happenin thingy?

We played on Saturday but went down there for the whole weekend, even though it meant missing a Friday night, but fuck it man, this was worth it. And it’s in Austin too! This town is fucking amazing, I’m thinking the whole time. Emo’s in right in the thick of things too, on the corner of Red River and 6th. They barracade 6th Street on the weekends because there are so many damn people down there at night. There was at LEAST 10 or 12 clubs in that block alone with live bands, country, rock, punk, everything, people lined up for dance clubs, a street artist did this cool shit with spray paint to techno music and he had about 30 or 40 people watching him, we got some good pizza from a window light by red lights and playing slow, trippy DJ music which I later learned was DJ Screw, and we were in the home of Willie Nelson. Yes beautiful butts and boobs everywhere for me to look at but not get. And I saw Jenna Bush all drunk and begging for cock. Well I didn’t see her but it probably happened, the poor gal. I’d hate to be the President’s daughter.

We got there Friday, saw Lavella and met his wife Cathy who runs Lookout Records and his mom Joanie from West Mifflin who was selling merch. Even an hour before the first band started there were already more people there than the last Sleazefest. I enjoyed myself and got butt wasted on $2 shots of Beam and Pearl in a can. Unfortunately that night I had a camera. It was fun taking pictures of peopleI never met beforeand I didn’t know at all. But we did talk to a few folks we knew that night like the Dragons and ”Demons”, who tore it up Sunday night. The whole set up of Gearfest was smart and worked spectacularly. The more popular bands would play the big stage, out in the open air. The actual stage and audience was under a roof but the rest of the outside was three walls and no ceiling. Somebody was saying there’s a lot of places like that in Texas, because of the heat I guess. Then the bands, most of them less known than the outdoor bands, would play immediately after the outside set – so everyone would walk up the ramp to go inside to chill in the AC and the place would be packed for a band like us who probably 90% of the people never heard of. Ingenious! The Immortal Lee County Killers pulled a stunt where they got done on the big stage, and JR picked up his snare and beat on it and said “Follow the Killers” like the Pied Drummer of Auburn, and tons of people went into the inside – I mean crammed in there – where their pals Total Sound Direct Action Committee (is that the name?) we all set up with horns all over the room and everything. (An Aside: The ghost of Charles Bukowski was apparently following me and speaking in signs because I spoke to Cheetah from ILCK just before we left Sunday and he said something to the effect of “As Charles Bukowski said…” out of the blue and I was like – holy shitballs! I forget what the quote even was… Probably “rallllph!”)

Saturday we played and kicked ass. Finally, a good show in front of an actual crowd. It was the show we’ve been itching to play after the sparse audience on this whole trip excluding Wilmington. Mike LaVella made me do the Irish jig on stage which I sometimes do because he told “at least 100 people” about it. So I did not disappoint. Even though I was quite hungover from the previous evening’s debauchery.

Sunday was probably the best day, although it’s hard to measure. We got there early and the Immortal Lee Co Killers were over at their merch table so we went to talk to em. JR made weed pipes out of beer cans (you know how you poke the holes in there with a thumb tack? Yeah, you know. Admit it – stoner!) and put little ILCK stickers on them and was selling ILCK cans for $1, and some ILCK mirrors where I guess you powder your nose in those. JR also had a Rock n Roll World Champion belt and he does a little wrestling interview thing where he stands up on his drums in between the songs – “We’re the World Champions of Rock n Roll – and if you doubt us, just call us up and we’ll come to any town in the USA and lay it down” - to that effect. It’s good to see some motherfuckin confidence in music again.

The New Bomb Turks were fucking grand. They busted it out like mad apes and with the recent news that they ain’t touring anymore or something, it was good to see them explode like that. Hell yeah. I guess they’re finally going to get real jobs or something. I know one of those dudes has an MA in something. Good for them, too bad for us.

I wish I could have reviewed every band but there were too many and I don’t remember half of it.

We said goodbye to the great city of Austin and drove off into the desert.