My (De) Generation

Every so often I go eat lunch by myself at the Pho-Teriyaki joint next to Target in West Olympia. It’s one of those extremely bad looking places with less than no atmosphere but it is the only place I’ve found in this godforsaken town where the Asian food actually tastes Asian. They are always playing this easy listening station on Pandora, and I have to admit that sometimes I kind of enjoy hearing songs by the Carpenters and Roberta Flack. Truth be told, I have a deep seated (yet easily sated) taste for songs from 1973.

The other day, however, it was playing “Ventura Highway” and I was simply struck dumb by how terrible a song that was. It made me want to go invent punk rock all over again, all by myself. Instead, I settled for tweeting my ire. “Listening to America. Christ what a bad band.”

Immediately, my friend Kim Warnick responded. “I know their current drummer! He was in the Posies and Jesus and Mary Chain.”

Ok, well, that was unexpected. I mean, think about that for a second: the drummer for Jesus And Mary Chain now drums for America. That’s just so wrong. America’s songs barely even HAVE drums.

But of course the worst thing about the above sentence isn’t the juxtaposition of JAMC and America, it is really the word ‘current’.

It makes it sound like America is on tour, which they probably are. And let me tell you, if they come here, I will be there, with bells on, yelling “Just Like Honey” in the front row. Maybe Kim’s friend can get me on the guest list. LOL.

(Just so people know, I never actually yell the things I say I’m going to yell. I just think about yelling them.  I yell them to myself.)

Later that day, Kim called me from Maine. We hadn’t spoken in ages, so we had a lot of catching up to do. I told her I was eagerly awaiting America’s advent at the Emerald Queen Casino, and she told me she’d seen David Lee Roth there once, which, honestly, I can’t even. We laughed and laughed just thinking about it. Kim and I both now live in towns which don’t exactly host a lot of rock shows. But Kim went to Foxborough Stadium recently to see Guns N Roses, because their drummer, Duff, is/was her best friend in High School. “You wouldn’t believe the crowd,” she commented. “All these old men, who’d brought their kids along, going absolutely bananas.”

The other day, Kim added, Death Cab For Cutie came through, and she went to see them and they ended up dedicating a song to her. Sadly, she had already left the building. That sounds so bad, but it  happened to me once, kind of. It was at a Lollapalooza, and I hadn’t left, I was just spacing out somewhere else in the fairgrounds and I guess Rancid did a shout out to me. At least, someone told me they did it and I was so sad that I missed hearing it that I wanted to fall through the grass and die. In fact, maybe I DID die, and that explains the downhill slide of the rest of my existence: it has all been my punishment for my rudeness. Or maybe it never even happened.

I think about that time, lately, whenever I see Rancid’s tweets from all over South America, where they are currently on tour. And this means I think about it constantly, since my twitter feed is completely taken up solely with posts from (horrified) rogue white house correspondents, (rightly) enraged black people, and, as a welcome contrast, a very, very happy Rancid. I suppose I need to get a better grip on the twitter algorhythm or something. Or perhaps twitter, being essentially evil, has a line deep into my psyche, because it really knows how to pull my chain. Rationally I know that I get @Rancid’s and its associated accounts tweets from twitter because a) I followed them b) I liked them and c) they have a good social media manager who floods the gates with pictures of their every move, from airport to stadium, from load in to load out, from front of stage to audience to backstage to giant wide angle photos of giant fields of Sudamericanos going mad in the mud in between. But…the thing is…it takes me back to my youth. And what makes twitter seem so insidious is that because Rancid is now touring with Metallica, and since once upon I time I went on tour with both those bands together, it feels like  twitter knows my personal history and is kind of unspooling it in front of me, Pensieve-like, to remind me of my own personal temps perdu.

Here's a cool link to the Yo Yo A Go Go Rancid show.

Of course, the tour I went on was very different than this one. To begin, there was no twitter or iphone to document our every move, there was only me with my pen and my lurid and probably inaccurate and biased take on what was going on around me. I was also a victim of my own, not to mention Rancid’s own, 924 Gilman-born notions of anti-avaricious authenticity. I remember staring in horror at the giant number of anvil cases Metallica was loading out…it was so un-punk rock.  Metallica were flying between gigs and staying in special hotels and just generally being rock stars; I think they even had a humidor in their tour bus. A humidor! By contrast, little Rancid was going around the country with a van and bus which they shared with the Ramones. Besides their (minimal) equipment, they had two little BMX bikes and a blow up wading pool, because that was their idea of luxury.We used to get the bikes out and ride the perimeters of Lollapalooza's fairgrounds in Kentucky, or Texas, or Arizona, or wherever it was that day. Usually it was during Soundgarden's set, and to this day the song "Black Hole Sun" reminds me of a stupid hot Texas afternoon, the sky so full of it.

Judging by twitter, that is not the situation now: I saw a picture on Instagram of their anvil cases and it made me gasp. And yet, I don't know why I was so surprised. In a perfect world, everyone should all grow up to be big boys and girls and be able to buy all the guitars and all the anvil cases we could possibly want. That's what America's all about, right? Anyway, judging by twitter, Rancid have, through the means punk rock, achieved what Roland Barthes called "the sublimation of labor by its magical effacement," and fuck it, everybody: if they can, we can too. We can, too.

Thanks to social media's helpful photo essays on Rancid's recent rampage, I know that this is what's happened, and I am super happy for them. I hope they don’t have a humidor, but it's OK if they do now. I like watching them conquer Mexico and Columbia and Argentina and Brazil, but it is also kind of bittersweet, a glimpse over at the other life, the one I didn’t live. It is really weird to look at from afar, from my box-like house in the fucking rain forest; it's like looking down a long, long, magic tunnel, but not being able to climb inside it. Rancid once wrote a song about playing Yo Yo A Go Go in Olympia, which somehow makes the whole thing seem more ironic. I think of that song sometimes, when I am walking down Sixth Street (well, fourth; Sixth is now called Legion) and avoiding all the little street punks, many of whom have Rancid  stickers on their backs. It's weird. Why them?

Maybe all these big bands, GNR and Rancid and Metallica, and the actual human beings who populate them, were just born lucky. And since unlike (the band) America, they’re my (de) generation, I am happy that none of them are playing the Emerald Queen Casino. But though I don’t wish that on them, I do wonder what makes the difference. Is it just the twenty year time gap that separates America’s biggest hit with Metallica’s? Is Guns N Roses really worthy of that kind of adulation? Will Rancid be playing there in 2025?

Kim, who knows this kind of thing, tells me that the Emerald Queen Casino plays bands big bucks, like in the five figure range, so it isn’t the worst fate in the world. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Childhood's end

My daughter and I were hanging out in the airport staring at our phones, as one does. We were passing the time by making desultory remarks about stuff we came upon. You know, her: “Check this out." 

Me: “Lol, that’s awesome!”

This continued for some time, until, at some point it became clear to me that, between our other interests – basically politics and cats -  we were both vaguely following the doings going on at Lollapalooza Brasil. Only I was watching the posts from Rancid and she was watching those from Melanie Martinez. And I thought: What went wrong, Lord, what went wrong?

I don’t know why I feel that way. I have always felt that people who try to impose their musical taste on their kids are barking up the wrong tree, although I know a number of people who have done so with some success. Not me though. When she was a baby her dad used to put on the Ramones and make her little feet tap out the rhythm. He said he wanted to make her into a girl drummer – because what could be cooler? But I was like, “Are you crazy? Have you ever met any drummers?” 

I don’t mean to sound unduly harsh. I know some nice ones, but actually being a drummer must be the worst. You’d have to haul all that equipment around, plus, imagine having one in the living room.

 Anyway there comes a point in every baby’s life when they do not want to hear the Ramones, they want to hear Raffi. We did our share of Dan Zanes, Ralph’s World, “Me and My Arrow” and They Might Be Giants, but you can only shelter your children from Radio Disney so long. I am still proud of the fact that I am the only human on the face of the planet who has not seen The Lion King in entirety, but my daughter, of course, has (although not at our house).

Anyway, pity the poor former rock critic with a seven year old music fan in the back seat. There was an era – a long one – when I used to drive around listening to music I despised. Sometimes, on a drive to grandma’s house, I’d be listening to things that made me want to cry, they were so horrible. Then one day when she was about nine she said to me, “Mom…have you noticed that radio has gotten a lot worse lately? They always play the same things over and over!” I had to laugh.

Pop music has been bad throughout the ages, not just in the years between when my daughter was 7 and now, so I’m not going to complain about the barrage of Justin, LMFAO and Taio Cruz that I endured. Anyway, it wasn’t all bad. Sometime in that era, Michael Jackson died, and both her summer camp and her elementary insisted on having school wide tributes concerts, which involved millions of children doing the dance from “Thriller” and “ABC” and other people singing “I’ll Be There,” which is never a wrong thing. Also, Adele. My personal favorite version of “Rolling In The Deep” will always be the New Traditions alternative  fourth grade’s rendition, with the entire audience doing the percussion.

Eventually my daughter began to break out with her own taste in music and for some reason she hit on Melanie Martinez as her favorite artist ever. Melanie Martinez, for those who don’t know, is a former Voice contestant who subsequently carved out a career for herself as an indie artist, writing songs about her spooky feelings and so on. She’s not bad – I like the song“Doll House” – but to begin, she only had one EP out and my daughter listened to it ad nauseum for about 36 weeks in a row. And the thing is, I have a real horror of listening to things that I didn’t choose to listen to. It’s like having to read books that are not of your own choosing.

 And then Melanie went on tour and suddenly, I was plunged into the awfulness of being the bored parent in the balcony, the ones I had seen over the years and always felt really bad for. Melanie’s first gig was at  the Chapel, a tiny club in the Mission that I like going to, so that wasn’t so bad, but then she played the Great American Music Hall and I found myself literally crouching down in the balcony, huddled by the only electrical outlet charging my phone and contemplating my sins. Honestly, my life flashed before my eyes. I think actually met my daughter’s dad backstage at this venue, lo these many years ago. I surely did not see myself, then, as being one of the cadre of the damned. I always thought there was something off about parents who took their kids to shows, anyway. My own parents never would have dreamed of it…but then, I didn’t need them to. I had an older brother and sister and cousin who took me to stuff. And that is why I am who I am.

Prior to Melanie Martinez, I think the only thing I took my daughter to was Nashville Pussy when she was 9 months old and I was working and didn’t have a sitter. I remember because I was still nursing, which I couldn’t possibly forget because, well, Ruyter Suys made me feel selfconscious. It all seemed so damned inappropriate that it was practically what sent me to graduate school. After that, I stopped going to anything. Realistically I know that I am in the minority on this issue and that most people drag their kids to see the stuff they like, Bruce Springsteen, Guns N Roses, the Rolling Stones. But I really feel like kids need to find their own music. It grieves me greatly that my daughter doesn’t like R.E.M. – or “Little House on the Prairie” books, or diving – but she is a person in her own right, not a mini-me. Anyway, how could she ever feel about – experience – the Replacements like I did? It’s not an experiment worth trying.

So she has her own obsessions and I have mine. But to make up for it, the last time we saw Melanie, at the Regency Ballroom, I somehow wangled passes to the meet and greet – you know those things that artists do to make extra money now, where they charge some exorbitant amount to shake hands with their fans? It cost an extra $75, which I did not have or at least was not up for paying, so I called in, like, every last corpuscle of rock critic chutzpah and hustled my kid backstage.

And that was that. I was done. She can go to shows by herself now – or else to things we both want to see – and thanks to headphones, streaming, and all the different ways we can now access music separately, even in the same car, I don’t even have to subject myself to the entire new mix tape of J. Cole, K Flay or Childish Gambino, unless I really want to.

The weird thing is, I am now finding that I want to. I mean, you never know, do you? And when it comes to search, kids have super powers we don’t have. Once she googled “bands with animated videos like Gorillaz” and the computer returned this Finnish act called the Studio Killers, who we both like a lot.

  

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?