Steve Bannon's Acid Flashback

Isabelle said, “I want to start a band called Steve Bannon’s Acid Bath.”

We were talking over the phone, the way we do now, reflecting on an article I had shared with her from Wonkette which described anapartment Steve Bannon rented that has a Jacuzzi full of acid (“the dissolvey kind!”) in it. She often calls me on bluetooth while she’s driving the 45 minutes to her home in Encinitas from her work in Lemon Grove.

She’ll be heading up the 5, with the deep blue ocean sparkling on her left, all that wasted beauty. I’ll be staring out the window 1400 miles north of there in Olympia, looking at grim, grey, relentless rain. It’s weird we live in the same universe, I’ll think, much less on the coast of the same country.

“Steve Bannon’s Acid Bath,” I say admiringly. “Musically, itshould sound exactly like GWAR.”

“Yes, yes. With everyone wearing giant masks with exploding cysts on them…goo-ing up the audience.”

I giggle. “Remember the time we went to Iguana’s in Tijuana the night after a GWAR concert and the stage and everywhere was still all messed up with paint?” We both laugh, a little ruefully.

”Yeah, you got some on your best pants.”

"...and then I made butt prints everywhere!"

And we fell silent, remembering. Isabelle’s and my past is littered with these colorful moments, bright and shiny memories that twinkle through the dull patina of reality: kids, commutes, rain; layoff notices, bills, college entrance exams…the usual bull crap that makes up our little lives. Our music fandom used to be our escape, but now it often feels like there is no exit.

Later that night, Isabelle sent me an e-mail with a fake press release for Steve Bannon’s Acid Bath.

“Formed in the basement of a DC squat, Steve Bannon’s Acid Bath is set to tour the US. Taking a page from the Richmond, Virginia performance art act GWAR, the band that performs in giant rubber masks, each representing a member of Trump’s inner circle. Bannon’s mask is clearly the most detailed, complete with cysts and a real rodent crawling under his skin. The band, whose fans now refer to it just as Acid Bath, are selling Bannon Masks on the internet that have propelled the band from obscurity to mainstream fame.

Calling its music “fake music,’ both the band and and its fans aren’t concerned that the band members can’t play their instruments, read music, or sing. The band’s singer, Kellyanne Conway Twitty, says, “If Trump can be President with no talent for the job or training, then it only makes sense that we can do the same thing with music. We are to music what Trump is to government. That is why we are so beloved.”

Next week, the band is set to perform on Saturday Night Live.”

I wrote her back. “We should print this up and send it to every media outlet, without the last sentence, and with a photo. It can be our follow up to the Free the Fronds movement.”

“Free the Fronds” was a fake protest group we formed back in Palo Alto when we first met, right out of college. The group (i.e. that is, the two of us, plotting it all out at a table at the Peninsula Creamery, Palo Alto’s only all-night eatery) demanded that a local hotel untie the fronds of their three brand new palm trees. We made flyers and hung a banner over the train overpass and stuff like that, and although the whole thing was absurd, just a way for Isabelle to use all the cool copy equipment at her job, we were only half joking. We really didn’t like the way the poor trees looked, with their fronds tied up like troll-doll hair for weeks and weeks on end, even though we found out later (when the hotel finally consented to untie them and invited us to the opening ceremony) that it was the healthy way to transport them.

It probably says something terrible about Isabelle and I that we were always more likely to start a fake protest movement than a real band. That was true then and its true now: we both would sooner be in the audience than on the stage, or even back stage. It’s our single commonality, and it’s uncommon, I think. Backstage is a place of broken dreams. It is unromantic and cold there, but those who covet it feel happy to be there, so privileged, so special. I did myself once, but I learned not to: it wasn’t safe there, in any case. It was a place where you were going to be ignored or belittled.

Later on, when I became a music professional, we found ourselves permanently ensconced there, and it wasn’t…it wasn’t a pure place. Being backstage brings out the worst in people. One time I was backstage at a show – the Three O Clock at the Keystone Palo Alto -- and the next day this girl Francine kept boasting to me about how she was backstage and hung out with the band, and I was so horrified, because I had been there the whole time and thus knew that she hadn’t, and I couldn’t speak. I felt like I was seeing her in her underpants, viewing her naked soul in all its ugliness, exposed.

And the worst was, I knew I had just such a soul, and that it too was tempted, all the time, to show itself.

To be honest, I probably still have it, but everything is different now. I fain to say it, but we grow old, Isabelle and I; the bottoms of our trousers are rolled, and the peaches are less and less tempting. Life is harder and the news is faker, and stuff that seemed hilarious back in the 1990s now seems positively sinister.

Of course, maybe it always was and we just didn't know it: for instance, someone recently told me that the cost of the care and maintenance of a single one of the palm trees on Palm Drive in Palo Alto is exactly the same as the cost of a Stanford education, and I believe it.

Our frond liberation front was on to something, we just had hold of the wrong end of the stick. Way wrong.

Meanwhile, today there is no chance that we’ll be going backstage at anything, and that’s OK; we don't much like going out at all anymore. But we still like making fake protest groups, and this time I think we know which end of the stick is up. Isabelle thinks that Steve Bannon's Acid Bath should be like a cross between ghost-band camp and a fantasy baseball league: you-all can join in with fake songs you've written or fake flyers you've made, or however you think you can contribute to the project. We're planning on sending Acid Bath out on tour next week. Each of you will have to post your flyers up in your own city one by one.

The only thing is, you all will have to swear yourself to secrecy, since our goal is to hoodwink someone into booking them, at which point they'll have to cancel -- Milo-like -- because of the threat of white supremacists.

Who's in?