“Where do you go? When Santa Ana winds blow?” Shadows of Compton, Ikky Shivers.

THE SECOND COMING OF DOGVILLASAN

We — Reality, Yoshi and I — arrive at Pat Boone’s television studio minutes before the show starts. The producer, director and presenter are all disturbed and anxious at not only our tardiness, but at our very existence.

Each of them has a clipboard with a pen tethered to it. The writing utensils and the clipboards appear to have the delirium tremens. The producer pulls me aside and half-whispers, “What is that?” and points at Yoshi.

Yoshi is in fishnets and more. In addition to the multiple layers of pancake makeup and the rouge that it making his cheek implants burst like a glowing diseased chancre at the core of the Rising Sun, Yoshi is wearing a leather miniskirt, a sort of meter maid’s vest, and a pair of patent leather shoes that would make Dorothy click three times.

“That is our guru and mentor.”

“Your what?”

“That is Yoshi, the Voice and Living Embodiment of Dogvillasan, Coyote God from Vietnam.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means that the true Wisdom of the Braindead Soundmachine is channeled through Yoshi’s Earthly Carbon Capsule. The Braindead Soundmachine is merely a vessel for Dogvillasan’s message.”

“Okay. Does it even speak English?”

“‘It’ speaks a Universal Language of Enlightenment, Just stick a microphone on Yoshi and prepare to be brightened with light and awareness.”

“What about him?” The producer points to Reality, who has been mute ever since we were rushed through the Studio’s security gates and hot lapped it out of the parking lot and into the sound stage.

Reality is fiddling with some gizmos — a series of knobs, switches and speakers — all of which are attached to his leather jacket and Nitro, Inc. uniform, as an extension of his flesh and clothing. The device is a World War I field surgeon’s telephone that mounts to the medic’s chest. Ikky, our synthesizer player, picked it out of a dumpster behind a movie studio and has wired the telephone into a series of fuzz boxes and a small, portable Pignose guitar amplifier, which Reality has carried onto his hip, not unlike a transistorized colostomy bag. He is nothing, if not biomechanoidal.

“He has throat cancer,” I say. At that utterance, the rest of the production staff gather around me, tethered pens dangling. I inform them that he has had a recent operation that has rendered him mute, except when he speaks into this special voice transducer that allows his speech patterns to be electronically encoded, then decoded and then broadcast.

“What? Like Stephen Hawkings?”

“Hawking. But yes, something like that.”

“So the cancer victim has to talk too?”

“Occasionally, there is a language barrier with Yoshi and Reality is the only person who translate his message. They are... simpatico.”

The show starts.

THE CLASSIFIED AD

After an aborted attempt at college in Jackson, Mississippi, I left home and moved to Los Angeles. My possessions are a guitar, an amp, a vibrato pedal, a suitcase stuffed with clothes and a milk crate full of punk rock records. In Jackson, I had managed to get my hands on punk rock records produced in Los Angeles. These records make me actively despise the music I had been exposed to in high school. I drive across the country in a green Ford Pinto and my grandmother puts me up because she figures I am going to further his education in California. And I do, just not in a formal environment.  The school I enroll in is Hard Knocks U., and the campus is in Wilmington. The first course is how to survive as an art fag in the barrio.

*****

Once in LA County, I answer a classified ad placed by the drummer of Outer Circle, a self-described “art fag” band who are seeking “a guitar player who makes up his own chords.” No rules about chord structure.  This is as punk rock as it gets. This definitely sounds like something I can sink my teeth into.

I am late for the audition. Outer Circle’s rehearsal studio is a transformed storefront in the warehouse district of Wilmington. Outer Circle itself are not punks as much as deconstructionists. They are a motley ensemble of art fags completely incongruous to everything, including each other. Phlegm, the singer, wears a foosball man around his neck and has a permanent stalactite of hair that points towards magnetic north regardless of where he faces. He oozes sticky, sweet booze and nondiscriminatory sexuality. The Synthesizer Guy is a Huntington Beach surfer and sports a beard — the nadir of couture — and never uses more than one finger at a time on his “instrument”; with his other hand, he either fingers a pitch wheel or stifles a yawn. A guy with a Hawaiian shirt sits on a black stool and runs a lap steel guitar through a battery of foot pedals and creates a sonic roar that shakes the plaster off the walls. It is as if Don Ho has been cornholed by Beelzebub as they share a hit of butyl nitrate together during a moment of mutual orgasm. Ikky, the drummer, doesn’t want to drum.  He uses his kit only half the time, preferring to program a primitive analog drum machine, Dr. Rhythm; when not programming and pushing buttons, he smokes cigarettes and observes and analyzes the cacophony. The Bass Player is completely normal.

Somehow these disparate individuals manage to coexist and share rehearsal space with the militant hardcore punk rockers (Black Flag, Secret Hate, the Nip Drivers, the Minutemen) that also rehearse in this industrial city block of converted storefronts. It is the end of an age where anything is possible, I suppose.

I set up my gear — a guitar, an amp and a vibrato pedal — and am delivered to this bizarre anti-Xanadu, or Camelot or Shangri-La or Oz or something, where all these strands of cables are hooked up to a battery of weird devices, with these art-damaged humanoids controlling them.  This whole scene really speaks to me; it’s like you know there is something happening on parts of the planet that you are only vaguely aware of, and it finally lands in your lap. It is yours to tap into. It is like you did something right, and this is your reward. You are not in Jackson, Mississippi.

I cast my eyes upon many things for the first time, not the least of which is this mystical drum machine, this magic box that, heretofore, I had only read about in music magazines. It should be noted that the editorial commentary regarding drum machines was rather disparaging. The general consensus is that drum machines are ruining music. I disagree.

THE DAY OF THE HOUSE OF PIES

I meet BZ the Screenwriter for a cup of jake and some lemon meringue at a place called the House of Pies on Franklin and Vermont in East Hollywood.  The HOP’s habitués are old folks, the last vestiges of another Los Angeles, another Hollywood. Or maybe another lifetime on another planet. They are from an era when folks dressed in suits and put on a hat just in anticipation of a trip out of the house to get a piece of banana crème pie. In those days, pie was an occasion.

The House of Pies. Its architectural design is a weird, flattened variation on the Googi architecture that dominated the landscape in Southern California back when the car culture really took root in the 1950s and 60s. Sharp, salient and pointy, Googi would puncture the sky and catch the attention of passing motorists by its very shape.

*****

Except for the House of Pies and some forgotten car washes in the ghetto, Googi has all but disappeared. Los Angeles has always possessed a real hankering to obliterate its past. It has no sense of history, and doesn’t want one. What earthquakes and fires fail to accomplish, the limited intellect and attention span of Los Angeles does. Most examples of Googi architecture were razed and bulldozed long ago, but somehow — perhaps because it was a muted variation on the style — the House of Pies survived the purge. In that tradition, the House of Pies angles are smashed two-dimensional and obtuse. It is one of the few buildings left that survived LA’s architectural purge of the 1980s, when boxy mini-malls, industrial complexes and 99¢ stores infiltrated the landscape like a virus.

BZ fits right in at the House of Pies. There is something about the old gomers there that makes him feel right at home. BZ is also not of this time. He considers this modern era — the Infotainment Age — a mistake.

*****

I am late and when I get there he is already working on his pie as well as a weathered copy of the Nathanael West novel, The Day of the Locust. I order a cup of jake and a piece of pie. I ask about the plot and the theme of the book, which BZ tells me debuted in 1939 and scandalized Hollywood as an expose´ on the damaging effects of the motion picture industry.

“West not only tapped into the hubris of this town, but how the Dream Factory creates not just illusion, but its logical byproduct, disillusionment.” BZ stabs the air with a forkful of gooey pie foodstuff. “It’s not that different from the people who make this pie filling.”

Jump-started by gobs of processed sugar and caffeine, BZ is off to the races, kicking into high gear on a soliloquy on the Entertainment Industry as the New Military Industrial Complex.

“Hollywood is a self-perpetuating cottage industry,” he continues, “that must churn out more and more entertainment in order to survive. To grow. To flourish. Its insidious nature is such that it has to convince the Locusts, the consumers that they need to purchase and absorb this stuff in order to make their lives meaningful. Which was a lie worthy of Goebbels, who was just beginning to reach his stride in the Third Reich when The Day of the Locust was written. West was prescient in that he knew that entertainment is merely cultural fascism.”

“Are you telling me that there was little difference between, say, Irving Thalberg, Paramount Picture, pie filling and the Third Reich?”

My coffee and rhubarb arrive.

“The manufacture and distribution of pie filling is the least problematic. There is very little difference between what product is coming out of the studios and what propaganda was issued from the Politburo or the Reichstag after the fire.”

“But isn’t a screenwriter such as yourself equally complicit? Aren’t you as evil as, say, some Kraut in a guard tower at Dachau?”

“That is where you are wrong, sir. It all boils down to self-awareness. Read this book. No one in it is exempt from West’s wrath. But the protagonist-slash-anti-hero, Tod Hackett, shows uncanny and astute self-awareness that makes him the least dubious character in the entire manuscript.”

“Self-awareness?”

“Yes, self-awareness. It makes all the difference. Tod Hackett shows such traits in a painting he calls ‘The Burning of Los Angeles.’ Hackett finishes this painting just as Locust reaches it dénouement in the form of a holocaust of fire on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“So this book is about the Apocalypse?”

“Yes. Rapture. The Judgment.”

“So you’re saying Hackett’s self-awareness spares him somehow? Umm, I still don’t see how self-awareness gives any of us an exemption.”

“Of course you don’t. You do not possess any. You are lost in East Hollywood and you happen to play guitar, the most reductive form of expression since the Sex Pistols immolated in San Francisco in 1978.  You have this delusional idea that music is somehow different from the other forms of electronic media that corrupt the sanctity of the human spirit.”

“I am trying to reconcile this with your script, Zombie Cop.”

“You are missing the point then.  As an artist, you are fucked but you do not know that you are fucked. Therefore, you are truly fucked. On the other hand, I am fucked, but I know that I am fucked. Therefore, I am not truly fucked.

“Do you see the difference? Of course not, because you are truly fucked.”

JOHN FANTE’S WORST HALLUCINATION

Wilmington. Wee-mas. Or “Another Green World,” as the song goes. Something else I had only read about. Rock and roll magazines were rife with features about the weird punk rock movement sprouting like a poisonous, defiant algae in various pockets of Los Angeles, a city already more toxic than John Fante’s worst hallucination.

Mutant organisms and great art thrive in mephitic environments. This much I knew. And, in 1983, Los Angeles is where it is happening NOW.  The South Bay of Los Angeles, in specific, from Redondo Beach, down to Long Beach, and as far south as Huntington Beach, all places where the hippies cut off their hair, put down the granola and the cannebinol and picked up skateboards and began spitting on the sidewalks. Those who made the transition began threatening the hippies who haven’t made the metamorphosis to a lifestyle of nihilism, discord and smoking elephant tranquilizers spritzed on mint leaves.

THE BLACK BOX WITH RED BLINKING LIGHTS

Apparently, Outer Circle likes the chords I make up.  I’m in the band.

Getting the gig is an exalted feeling. Aye, somehow I belong in these dank surroundings, with its smell of power lines arcing, of chemicals balling up like snakes with the sweet and wet ocean breeze; and my fellow art fags with their bizarre and Bosch-like couture. And the weird, ultramodern, clunky technology — the synthesizers, the heavily processed lap steel guitar, the rhythm box — that helps shape this strange sound emanating inside a parallelogram in a neighborhood of cholos and vatos.

And the totem that encapsulates this strange and beautiful parallel universe is Ikky’s drum machine, the Dr. Rhythm.  It is black and red and shaped like a box of candy. Its suggestive shape and its promise of a plethora of taste treats is duplicitous, as this beatbox only has four sounds: a bass drum that goes “phhuuttt”; a snare drum that sounds like “tick”; and a hi-hat that makes like “pffftt” and a crash cymbal what sounds like “ttsssh.” It is a very narrow palette.

“Simplicity is my essence,” says Dr. Rhythm. It has only a couple of knobs, including one for tempo and another for volume. A flickering red light emitting diode announces the beats per minute. Other potentiometers are for shaping the artificial drums waveform — and this in where the art comes in.

Ikky twists the knobs and gives the machine soul. Or maybe the machine already has soul; he is just channeling its spirituality. Regardless, the black box with the blinking red lights emits a detached, yet funky and syncopated rhythm.

It takes a true artist to make the Dr. Rhythm sound like something.

*****

That night, having passed the second audition, I spend the night at Phlegm’s house in Long Beach. It is an under-lit and gaudy two-bedroom cottage, hidden behind a white picket fence stitched with clumpy sheets of ivy.

It smells of warm beer, candles and Top Ramen. It smells of blue and purple. No light escapes nor enters the cottage, even when the door is open and the shades are raised.

There is a small party raging. Many hours and many empty bottles later, every one has left a rather raucous, debauched party except for Phlegm and the Bass Player’s vaguely vampiric bleached blonde girlfriend. Knocking over a lamp with a shade spray painted purple, Phlegm bails in an alcoholic haze to his bedroom and I try to call it a night, angling to carve out a spot on the couch amongst the objects’ de clutter.

The vampiric vixen is wide-awake and is not done partying. She puts on a David Bowie record and begins slithering in time to its guitar melody. I feign sleep, but open one eye. This is her moment to strike. “Phlegm is in there all alone,” she coos in my ear. “I think we should go join him.”

“No. I think YOU should go join him,” I tell her.  And I roll over. She sticks her tongue in my ear. It is like trying to reason with a German Shepherd...

OUTER CIRCLE

Outer Circle is named after a traffic circle in Long Beach. It is this velodrome for automobiles that is designed to keep traffic flowing at all times, obviating the need for something as quaint as stoplights and left turns.

During rehearsal, the lap steel player tells me that the civil engineer who designed the traffic circle was killed in the very loop that he created.

Apocryphal or no, there is some meta-irony attached to this fable. Outer Circle, the band, exists to debunk the hubris of this society and to point out its foibles and pretenses. While smoking cigarettes on an under-lit stage, of course.

THE GREEN HAIRED ART CHICK

Having ingratiated myself into roommate status, I am fucking around in Phlegm’s apartment, reading mimeographed punk rock fanzines, eating Top Ramen, listening to records and drinking wine that should only be used in cooking.

It seems like a great time to be alive. It is about to get even better. A girl with green hair knocks on the door. She used to live here, but has just moved out and Phlegm owes her part of the deposit. Or something. I am mesmerized. They talk about aesthetics. She is an art major at Cal State and crafts art out of donut boxes found on the street. She makes fun of me because I own cassette tapes of poofter new wave bands. Aesthetically, I am still finding my way. Artistically, she has found her way. But I don’t understand the donut boxes.  I am in no position to argue, however, because we are fucking. A phenomenon I don’t want to jeopardize over arguments about art.

Intellectually, she has all the leverage. But so what? I am pleasuring a Green Haired Art Chick who doesn’t care if I can afford guitar strings or not. California is truly the land of opportunity.

One complication: I come to find out The Green Haired Art Chick is Ikky’s girl. Ex-girl, but girl. They have just broken up. My first night with Outer Circle I had been invited into the sack with the bass player’s bipolar girl friend and Phlegm.

Two nights later, and I am fucking the drum machine programmer’s arty-ex-girlfriend. This is going to require some finesse. We go to rehearse and set up our gear. Ikky turns on Dr. Rhythm.

I greet Ikky. “How’s it going’?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

He smells it on me. Our friendship will survive it.

REALITY AND YOSHI ARE PLAYING FOOTSIE

“This is the Braindead Soundmachine,” the television presenter says, coming out of a commercial break, as a song from Come Down from the Hills And Make My Baby plays accompanying a video of dragster crashes and explosions. Reality and Yoshi are playing footsie. Cameramen and the stage manager look genuinely disturbed at their playfulness. I sip espresso from a thermos.

Dead air fills the studio, except for Yoshi’s giggling.

“Can we get a close-up of Yoshi’s shoes?” I ask. Obsequiously, the camera zooms in. Reality begins a garbled and distorted dissertation on how Yoshi cribbed his/her footwear from the Wizard of Oz. He’s right: Yoshi has carved out a certain fantastic parallel existence for him/herself. Yoshi — disinherited and shunned from his family in Japan — has recreated a life on the other side of the Pacific, where Asian cross-dressers are just another vignette in the Dream Machine. And so if Yoshi imagines him/herself as an Asian re-invention of Dorothy or Judy Garland, fuck that is as valid as anything else, yeah?

THE WIND TUNNEL

Ikky, Reality and I jam to a drum machine in what we call the “Wind Tunnel,” which is in an apartment building in a lower-rent section of Beachwood Canyon in Hollywood.

Trying to park on Beachwood Drive is to defy the law of ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. Further north, Beachwood is a boulevard of beautiful people and sit-com stars, but the south end is its barrio. Not even relatively speaking, it is utter and genuine squalor, a ghetto amongst the palm trees that form a parabolic, a parallax pointing towards the Hollywood Sign.

It is the housing for the low-lifes who are barely making it. The ones who bought the Dream Factory’s pitch hook, line and sinker.

Technicians, actors, musicians, screenwriters. They don’t stand a chance against the sharpened teeth and tentacles of a machine that is brutal in its indifference to human suffering. They are cannon fodder for the modern entertainment industrial complex.

So, because the supply of dime-a-dozen wannabes overwhelms the availability of low-rent housing, these folks huddle in crumbling apartments like a nest of dirt daubers drunk on the promise of a nectar that dried up a long time ago.

Ergo, there is no parking. City enforce “Street cleaning” days make it worse as one half of the street is off limits to automobiles, so tenants double up and park on each other’s lawns, creating a mise-en-scène of disheveled rapture, general antagonism and literal turf wars.

Scientologists, panhandlers, strippers, heavily-opiated guitar players, aging queen barflies and actors who can only get a gig as telemarketers, all trying to find a place to park, and all pissed because the laws of supply and demand do not exist below the poverty line. Particularly on Street Cleaning Days.

*****

Both my upstairs and next door neighbors come from foreign countries, both play guitar and both smoke heroin. The French guy (upstairs) wants to write the next “Sweet Jane” and hammers out variations of that chord progression for hours on end, only stopping, it seems, when it is time to score more scag. The Canuck (next door) is nice enough guy for a heroin addict and is in more existential pain than he can articulate, even though he is a bright guy and can actually string a sentence together. So the walls moan as he spends all night manipulating his guitar’s wiggle stick and his echo machines. Then the moans stop at 3 AM and he raps on my door, with his hair out of his eyes and asks to borrow some aluminum foil. He would hit up the frog Lou Reed, but then Frenchie would know that the Canuck had some dope and the price of aluminum foil would get prohibitively expensive.

Still, when the echo-y moans stop, so does “Sweet Jane,” as the Frog knows something is up with the Canuck.

The constant tension of trying to stay alive in the bowels of Beachwood Canyon is underscored by the guitars wars that seep through the Wind Tunnel’s walls from perpendicular axes. Life’s losers cusping millennium — an update of Nathanael West’s bit players from The Day of the Locust, only this time they got no place to park.

It is under this setting that the Soundmachine thrives. Or at least practices and records.

WE REHEARSE ONCE

The Braindead Soundmachine started with a drum machine.   A Roland TR-505. It is pretty simple to program.

After I figure it out how it works, Reality and Ikky come over to record some stuff at my black hole of an apartment.

It is decided we will be a trio. We call ourselves the Braindead Soundmachine because we figure the only way to connect with the culture is to, as Ikky puts it, “get as braindead as possible.”

We get a gig in Hollywood. The venue is a punk rock dive with a completely incongruous Middle Eastern name. We rehearse once.

Ikky has some old synthesizers that are twenty years obsolete. Approximately.

He can’t read music, which is okay, because we are in mute agreement that we are doing isn’t about music.

Ikky understands. He contorts and pulverizes electrons through filters, oscillators and envelope generators. He is the right man for the job. What he is creating is not music.

Reality has borrowed my Japanese bass. Except in matters relating to the consumption of chemical effluence, he is a fiscal conservative, and an out-and-out tightwad when it comes to giving any facet of the music business any money whatsoever. Ergo, the borrowed gear. He runs the Japanese bass through a series of Ikky’s transistors, nanotubes and micro-signal processors, a functionality ultimately turning every thing Reality does into one big square wave. He only hits two notes per song, but he makes it sound like one.

Reality has a binary approach to playing the bass. Square wave on = one; square wave off = zero.

I start the drum machine and then chink-a-chink ala Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade on three guitar strings, as trebly as possible.

Nobody wants to sing with us, so we figure that for gig we’ll have the Missing Eyebrow, our hippie soundman, run cassette loops of Tammy Wynette through an answering machine for us. He will raise the Tammy Wynette phone machine fader whenever he feels the tune could use a vocalist. (“When is the right time to raise the fader?” he asks. “There are no mistakes,” Ikky tells him.)

During the rehearsal, Ikky makes meticulous notes and precise markings about the filters, oscillator and envelope settings.

After he leaves, as a prank, Reality and I dumpster his notes and replace them will pieces of paper that read, “skronk, screek, woop!  boop boop boop! sshrree-AAAHHH! gack gack bleep”... This is what his music sounds like.

The next night, we set up onstage. No sound check. Ikky notices the onomatopoetic scrawl from Reality and me has been replaced his crib sheets. Ikky will have to improvise. He shrugs.

I start the drum machine. We play for twenty minutes. We stop playing. I turn off the drum machine.

There is an awkward silence in the darkness, then some righteous applause. Ikky shrugs.

In our collective history of notes and dots and chords, this is our finest moment.

After the gig, Reality and I walk down Hollywood Boulevard to a liquor store. People pass by, roll down car windows and yell things — positive things. “That was cool.” Sundry encouragement. Apparently they saw the performance and then left, ignoring the bands they actually paid to see. On a night when Ikky, Reality and I tried to do nothing right, we could do nothing wrong.

Reality and I laugh.

THE JESUITS

In the 1920s, Jesuits bought up small parcels of Hollywood, Echo Park and Silver Lake, lined the streets with stone, and built quasi-craftsman style dormitories for the devoted practitioners of their fringe branch of Catholicism.  (A couple of decades later, famous writers of meaningful and internationally renowned works of literature — Faulkner, Anais Nin, Huxley and others — would swallow their pride, take a sabbatical from writing important books and write treatments and screenplays for the film studios instead. It would be a hike in pay and a cut in dignity. Their home offices were some of the same dorms built and then sold by the Jesuits.)

The Jesuits are ascetic in discipline, and ergo their ceremonies and rituals are not nearly as hellzapoppin’ as the plethora of cults and wham-bam faith healers that would take Hollywood by storm. With no sense of spectacle, the Jesuits were doomed to implosion once real estate values ballooned and shadowed the means and wherewithal of a such a simple sect.

If the Jesuits’ lack of pizzazz and melodramatic flair meant small box office dollars, such production values which could be found in spades down the street at the Angelus Temple in Echo Park. There, faith healer extraordinaire Amy Semple McPherson had the Jesuits’ and the people’s number, with a glitzy, gallant approach to faith healing punctuated by live radio broadcasts and crisscrossing klieg lights lighting up the skies like the Second Coming of the Messiah was in the can already.

This too was fleeting... After years of top billing, McPherson was bumped off the marquee when she was busted en flagrante, after eloping with her Latin cabana boy in the Great Southwestern Desert. She claimed she was abducted and held for ransom, and for a while her flock and the newspapers believed her. But law enforcement reckoned that when she was found in the desert, she just wasn’t dirty enough to be a kidnap victim.

It was a ruse. Amy just wanted to get her freak on and avoid scandal. It backfired.

Again, all of this theater — salvation, greed, sex and the Inevitable Fall — took stage in the Silver Lake/Echo Park area of Los Angeles, halfway between downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood.

Around the same time McPherson’s lust and wanderlust became her undoing, Raymond Chandler wrote that Los Angeles considered Hollywood a sort of bastard or redheaded stepchild. Moreover, he maintained that dynamic was 180 degrees bass-ackwards. Los Angeles should be grateful Hollywood was around to give LA some kind of identity, because other than that of being a satellite of Hollywood, it has none. Los Angeles is a black hole of a city, persona non grata in a world highlighted by real metropolitan centers such as New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris or Milan. In Chandler’s day, Los Angeles was more like Bakersfield with bigger buildings.

So there was Silver Lake/Echo Park, caught in the crossfire of a sibling rivalry of Hollywood and LA, two towns suffering from dueling identity crises. Adding to the schizophrenia?  The post Jesuit-meltdown and McPherson’s career immolation, which created a pop theology vacuum ultimately satisfied by Scientology, a “religion” started on a wager among a social club of science fiction writers.

*****

Yeah so, Echo Park is where the real writers gathered: Faulkner, Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley, Bukowski and Nathanael West. Before getting killed in a car crash on his birthday in the 1940s, while living and writing in Echo Park West penned the pivotal, definitive tome that dropped the pretense out of Los Angeles/Hollywood: The Day of the Locust.

Its message? Los Angeles is not about art. Anybody attempting to create such is merely grist for the mill in a booshwah, company town. Another lesson of West is thus: entertainment is illusory. Illusion begets disillusionment begets violence. Once the moviegoers populating the darkened theaters see through the smoke and mirrors and the silver emulsion, they begin to feel cheated. They not only want their money back, they want a karmic eye for a karmic eye, and a karmic tooth for a karmic tooth.

This is the energy the Braindead Soundmachine is trying to explore, come to terms with and possibly exploit. The Soundmachine is an Infotainment Age exercise: A pop music combo with a pedantic running commentary on a culture of saturation as its ethos. An update of The Day of the Locust, with the uroboros of modern culture as its motif. “The culture is going down on itself,” BZ said to me one night in a Hollywood watering hole where Raymond Chandler used to order vodka gimlets.

And here we go, in the Pacific Rim on the Cusp of what BZ would call “the Zulu Dawn,” as Garden Grove becomes Little Saigon and dreamers fail to make ends meet and property repossession merely means opportunity for those who have attended Tom Fu’s seminars and the Church of Scientology updates McPherson’s psychic snake handling with the banality of Self-Actualization and Free Personality Tests.

CHAIN CONVENIENCE STORE

Reality is between vehicles, due to discrepancies between his checkbook, parking enforcement and the Department of Motor Vehicles. But another man’s misfortunes are Reality’s providence...

Reality and I are motoring through Hollywood in Num-E-Num’s brother’s Ford Ranger. It’s a Four Wheel Drive number, a cartoon of a monster truck and barely street legal, pearl white.  The truck’s stylistic coup de gras is its brown mud flaps with silver silhouettes of Vargas-type girls sewn on. The flaps are of mixed efficacy, if the splatters of the mud lining the wheel wells are any indication. Reality tells me that Num-E-Num’s brother is in jail for outstanding warrants related to a battery of moving violations, not to mention DUIs and possession raps. Num-E-Num’s brother lent the truck to Num-E-Num who, seeking to curry favor, lent it to Reality, all while Num-E-Num’s brother stewed in the hoosegow.

Reality is grinding through the gears, a process that seems to be inspired by the shrunken skull four-on-the-floor shifter. Pedestrians are genuinely frightened. Reality is genuinely oblivious to their fear. To Reality, the 4WD is a Panzer tank, he is Rommel and the entire city is now the North African Desert.

“So when he not in jail, do you think he eats a lot of sticky bush in this thing?” I ask.

“Between Coors Party Balls,” Reality says.

And with that he manhandles the steering wheel to the right, climbs over the curb and power drifts into a Chain Convenience Store parking lot.

As we slinky into the parking lot of a 7-11, a street person is pacing to and fro in front of the store, waving at us and shouting, “HEEYYY!!!”

We wave back and return his greeting.

“HEEYYY!!!”

“HEEYYY!!!”

More waves and smiles from all parties. There is a man wearing a turban on the other side of the glass, behind the counter, and he is shaking his head and scowling.

The street person gives us one last wave and “HEEYYYY!” and then changes gesticulation and points.

“Yawl’s musicians!” he froths.

“YESSS!”  I say. “YESSS!”  Reality says. We both point. To ourselves. To each other.

The street person continues to bond. “I’m a musician too!” He sticks a finger in his chest and then does some impromptu air guitar gesticulation.

“YESSS!”  I say. “YESSS!”  Reality says. We both point. To ourselves. To each other. Any combination thereof.

“I play the bass.”

“ME TOO!” Reality says. More pointing. More brotherly congeniality.

“Right o-n-n-n-n! Hey man! How’s about helping a fellow musician and bass player out with some ch-ay-nge-uhhh for some new strings.”

“Fuck no.”

“Forget it. Fuck off.”

Reality and I enter the Chain Convenience Store and the Turban behind the counter continues shaking his head.

*****

Street people, music biz types, Scientologists. One cannot even drive to the nearest Chain Convenience Store for a twelve pack of watery beer without getting hustled for something by some pod of a human being, looking to scam enough spare change to buy crack.

No wonder Reality relishes and thrives upon every opportunity to run over the sidewalks.

PINK TITS AMONG THE PALM TREES

Jutting through a caustic gray sky choking on its own smog and dirty hydrocarbon vomit is a billboard pink as Pepto Bismol and red as a junkyard dog’s dipstick. The billboard is an advertisement for Amberlyne, a sort of fashion model or actress or singer, a hyper-blonde caricature of a human being with breasts whose enormous girth threatens to alter the pull and tug of the entire cosmos. These milky pink orbs are massive, and their dimensions are hyper-accentuated by the glossing techniques used on her original photograph, before it was blown up, color corrected pixel-by-pixel and expanded to the size of a flat pink planet.

Amberlyne’s patron leases this billboard. He owns the billboard company. This billboard could only be suspended in the space-time of Los Angeles.  There is a hideous quality to the image. Everything about it accentuates the bimbo’s plastic surgery. Everything about this billboard is an airbrushed lie. It is brutally honest in its own fraudulence.

It is a two-story totem to the shrill, neurotic cry for attention as pandemic. It represents entire generations failing to come to terms with the passing of adolescence, and failing to acknowledge that youth, beauty and perfection are fleeting, and that first gravity and then the carbon cycle will squash terrestrial vanities and precocity into moot, inconsequential pancakes of dirt.

Los Angeles. Where the precious gather and converge, summoning a mass hallucination where they delude themselves into believing that the sun shines out of their behinds.

The smog and toxic gas is a compendium of what comes out of this collection of humanoids’ various orifices. Every self-important fart and belch is so much pollution.

This foul miasma is from the exhaust of the unchecked ego. And this billboard is a monument, a totem, a shrine to the unchecked ego and what happens when vanity meets too much money and free billboard space.

Drive down LaBrea Boulevard and look at the pink tits and the palm trees. And realize that the grotesque self-parody of the Uber-bimbo would end up singing for the Braindead Soundmachine. And later still, would run for governor of the state of California.

RAPPER’S HALL OF FAME/WOODSTOCK BAD 

1988. The Indie Rock Manager and I go to a loft to visit some friends, King Hang and his roommate, Tex. I have just gotten a bootleg rap cassette tape called Rapper’s Hall of Fame, from a soul brother who is employed as a grip on the same television talk show we work on together.

The grooves on the tape are indisputable. The four of us hang our legs over the ledge of a five-story building and listen to the “dope jams,” as it known in the idiom of Compton, where these records were recorded.

“Rap is cool because drum machines are not utilized they are embraced,” I say, as we continue to dangle our legs. “Embracing the machine is crucial. It is Zen.”

“It is also postmodern,” Tex says.

Tex once threw a television set off of the fourth story of his building, because King Hang was watching too many daytime talk shows and the constant bombardment of marketing and entertainment drove him to distraction.

“I have to have that drum sound,” I tell Tex, King Hang and the Indie Rock Manager.  “The sound” is a TR-808, a machine discontinued by the manufacturer because its drum sounds are not “realistic” enough.

****

As I explore the drum sounds off of rap records, a few blocks away from King Hang and Tex’s loft, Reality is in jail for traffic warrants.  He had been pulled over for driving on the sidewalk in Num-E-Num’s brother’s monster truck. He is down in LA County, wearing an orange trustee jumpsuit and trying to not get killed or molested by the Crips and the Bloods.

Like sharks, the gang members smell blood on a white boy with hair down to his waist. Because of his hair length, the brothers call Reality “Woodstock.”

They want  “Woodstock’s” white tennis shoes, but Reality uses his wit to keep his possessions. He encourages the gang members to play a game of name that tune.

“Hey Woodstock, what song is this? OOHHHH-WWHHEE-OOHHH”

“That’s the harmonica part for “The Wizard” by Black Sabbath.”

“That’s RIGHT. That’s Black Sabbaths! Homey, Woodstock bad.”

So that is how Reality and the other jailbird passed the time: By playing stump the band and humming and whistling heavy metal riffs to each other.

In a strange symmetry in downtown Los Angeles, the black man is mimicking heavy metal guitar sounds. The white man is listening to rap records — and trying to nick the drum programming.

BAD VISHNU AT JUMBO’S CLOWN ROOM

Reality’s day job is making speed metal records for music fans that don’t speak English so good.

It is a caterwaul of white noize, and a squall he is not particularly proud of. He equates what he does with the making of cheese logs.

He has other sources of income that are rather clandestine, but seem to involve junk bonds in Japan.

Whatever the pitch, there seem to be no shortage of venture capitalists willing to cut him a check.

He wants to expand his professional and artistic palette, and he has been approached by Flame Starr, a stripper who dances with a boa constrictor at Jumbo’s Clown Room in East Hollywood. She has some “backing” (whatever that means to a lap dancer) from some industry types whom she has convinced that she can sing and so now she wants to make a disco record. She says she has a record deal in Australia.

Reality wants me to write some chords changes, play guitar and program the drum machine. It is agreed that we use the one and a half chord dirges we had foisted upon one hundred people in Hollywood. The difference being that we add another chord or two, and instead of the Tammy Wynette loops recorded on phone machine tapes, the stripper will warble about whatever it is she finds necessary to share with the world. It is my understanding that the lyrics are all vaguely about various New Age themes.

“So this has to have a didgeridoo,” Flame Starr the Lap Dancer says. “At it has to be tuned so that it resonated with my shakra. My third eye.”

Reality takes the money, books the studio time and tells her she’ll singing to a new beat. “It’s metaldisco,” he sniffs pedantically.

“With a didgeridoo?”

“Yes. With a didgeridoo.”

“Oh goody. But the waveforms must be tuned so that they resonate with my shakra.”

“Your what?”

“My shakra. My third eye.”

We lay down a rap beat. Fuzz bass. Funkafied guitar chords. Simulated didgeridoo on a Casio micro-synthesizer.

Over the basic tracks, the Lap Dancer begins caterwauling about various Vishnu platitudes, while writhing suggestively and simulating intercourse with the snake.

“What’s up with the didgeridoo?” I ask Reality. “It’s not like aborigines are going to be buying this record.”

She can’t sing. Reality is attempting to assemble a useable vocal syllable-by-syllable. It doesn’t work.

The whole process is excruciating and time consuming. On one song, she has nailed the phrase “You and Me-e-e-e...” On just those three words, it’s like she has perfect pitch. I ask her to sing “you and me-e-e-e...” on a spare track throughout the entire song. “It’s like a mantra,’ Reality tells her. “Just sing it over and over and over.”  “It’s for the re-mix,” I lie.

So she does it. “You and me-e-e-e...” (beat) “You and me-e-e-e...” (beat) “You and me-e-e-e...” etc., for three minutes.

We begin mixing and editing. In every instance of her singing flat or sharp, we just insert “... you and me-e-e-e...” in lieu of her half-baked Vishnu drivel. “It makes as much sense as the rest of her lyrics,” I say.

The record tanks. Even in Australia.

About a year later, I read in the paper about a lap dancer-hyphenate-aspiring pop music singer killed in the alley behind Jumbo’s. A lot of good the third eye and that snake did her, I say to myself.

I make another pot of coffee.

DIE MOTHERFUCKING DEPECHE MODE

DMFDM insists their name is a loosely translated German acronym for “Die Mother Fucking Depeche Mode.” They all wear leather and are all German, except for their tour manager-slash-back up singer, who is a farm girl from Kansas. One Kraut plays guitar, another punches buttons on machines and yet another bangs on tuned and amplified metallic pipes and household appliances with a crowbar and a sledgehammer. The leader of the group wears dark glasses indoor and says very little. His sidekick and co-lead singer is a 6 foot 7 inch skinhead who wears a trench coat over a leather miniskirt and fishnet stockings. The guitar player wears long hair and has a sense of couture generic enough to be in any rock band on the planet.

DMFDM came to prominence after wiring a bunch of vari-speed vacuum cleaners for sound, and circuiting this through some fuzz boxes and amplifiers.

They called it art and then put a dance beat underneath it; they got a record deal. As their art grew, they chucked the vacuum cleaners for guitars and samplers and got pretty famous. Postscript: their last record, No Time For Dachau, was released the day of the Columbine massacre; some teenagers maintain that it was this act’s lyrical content that inspired a pair of loser goth rockers to unleash all of their pent up anger in the form of brutal, wanton bloodshed at a high school in Colorado.

REVENGE OF THE MTV BABIES

They are children born after Video Killed the Radio Star. They have been nursed on a constant diet of licentious imagery, cut only with the violence of major motion pictures and video games. It got them fat.

Post-Vietnam. Post-Watergate. Post-MTV. Post-PCs.    An entire generation born inside the head of the chicken. This is DMFDM’s — and by extension, the Braindead Soundmachine’s — target audience.

Our audience is post-everything. “Absolutely no hope” is DMFDM’s message to them.

THE TOUR MANAGER

She is one of those girls who think that combat boots and an Addams Family lunch box is some postmodern manifestation of haute couture.

Because of the recent Milli Vanilli debacle/scandal and subsequent class action lawsuits that destroyed careers and cost record labels money, the girl with the lunch boxes is commissioned to sing DMFDM’s background vocals “live.”

There is a new law to prohibit consumer fraud that scares DMFDM and Maximum! Records enough to where they feel that even though the female background vocals are coming off of samplers and tapes, the presence of an actual female vocalist will placate both consumers and promoters.

I feel that having a person with a microphone in her mug and no sense of pitch is actually more fraudulent, but this pales in comparison to her attempt to masquerade as a tour manager.

Reality is even more vociferous in his contempt. From the moment they meet in St. Louis, the two of them are at constant loggerheads. They HATE each other.

MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS         

We are in our hotel room looking out at the arches. The Gateway to the West.

The phone rings. It is the record label, explaining that the funds had cleared to pay for the motor home that we insisted we travel in.

It had been a non-eventful trip. I-40 into Albuquerque as the sun came up was quiet and exquisite, and the journey continued becalmed north through Denver and into St. Louis, the town that Judy Garland sang about while addled on diet pills at the insistence of some studio executives.

As I pull back the shade and look out of the hotel window, the phone rings again. It is Glen, from the RV rental place. He tells Reality he is “madder than a shit house monkey” about the late payment for the rental. He says he is sending over law enforcement to repossess the unit. Reality assures him money is on the way. Again.

There is a distinct lack of oxygen in the hotel room. I say I am going across the street to the Arch. The Lebanese lounge singer asks to see it too.  Bo and Reality stay behind with the Missing Eyebrow and discuss Black Sabbath’s body of work.

We ride the elevator together and take in the outrageous expanse of the Mississippi. It is an inverted parallax... we can see forever.

It is about hope. It is about promise. It is about opportunity. And as her hand skims across mine as we continue to take in the view, it is about her forgetting about her boyfriend in Los Angeles.

LOOKING DOWN

We are all cowboy hats, pit uniforms and checked flags. The view looking down stage is rather awe-inspiring.

A wave of humanity coalesces into some strange gelatinous mass. Jell-O that breathes and almost thinks.

Pasty faces. Oblong haircuts. They are malleable. They can be formed in any image in a Machiavellian cum PT Barnum sense. It is euphoric yet appalling. Contempt as a coefficient to the endorphins rushing. I start the drum machine and the show commences. Now I know how Norma Desmond felt.

Reality is whipping his hair around like a dervish set on fire. Despite never having even rehearsed with the Soundmachine before (excepting that one night over the phone with me), Bo Fingers is ack-ack-acking his synthesizers with the aplomb and confidence of a tail gunner. Khalsoum is radiant. She is Keely Smith at Howard Hughes’ nightclub in Vegas.  Forty minutes later I stop the drum machine. It wasn’t a bad gig, really.

COLUMBIA

Reality is beginning to sense that something is up with the Lebanese lounge singer and me. I am beginning to sense that something is up with the Lebanese lounge singer and me. Indeed, in St. Louis, our hands touched on the railing that keeps tourists from falling through the glass windows at the apex of the Arch.

I haven’t had a girlfriend in over a year. A few months before the tour started, I met a girl at a gig in West Los Angeles and we were making time until I told her I had to go.

“Why?”

“Because I gotta go start the drum machine.”

“Give me something real,” she said and began walking away in a pique of righteous, leftist Luddite indignation.

“I can give you something surreal,” I said as she walked away, but I don’t think she heard that sentiment, nor my asking for her phone number.

As I started the drum machine, I thought about the Purple Haired Girl, the girl who left because of drum machines and other issues.

THE ARCHITECT

A smart sartorial sense anchor a thin and not yet doughy face accentuated by thin but sturdy black eyeglasses.

He has a groovy girlfriend who is a gaijin chanteuse in Little Tokyo. He designs post-postmodern buildings that gentrify squalor and improve the human condition.

The Lebanese chanteuse wants a commitment. He does not know exactly where this is coming from. If he commits, he has an instinctual knowledge that it will turn to shit on him.

He hedges his bets. He enjoys the hipster cred of being seen with the lounge singer who is in the mix, singing Kurt Weill, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland standards.

She goes on tour with a metaldisco musical act. She complains about her relationship with the Architect. The Guy Who Starts the Drum Machine listens one too many times. Their hands glance at the top of the Arch in St. Louis.

Eventually, they kiss. Then they pleasure each other.

“You have to tell The Architect what is going on,” he says.

“I will,” she answers.

She doesn’t.

At a party one night, he says that Frank Gehry has replaced Frank Lloyd Wright as the definitive architect of Los Angeles. I tell him that Gehry is the Mick Jagger of Architecture — an embarrassment who should have retired a long time ago.

COMMON SENSE

Hormones and testosterone short circuit common sense. I want to give somebody credit for self-awareness, when it is really self-absorption that envelops that person like a portable mushroom cloud.

I just can’t see the mushroom cloud for pheromones and perfume. I want to do what everybody else wants to do at a rock concert — I want to fuck the singer. And I am.

DOTS AND NOTES

Two dates into the tour and Reality is appalled at the precious, prima donna temperament of our singer. She had been singing for a handful of hipsters and couple of half-dead doddering dandies in a lounge when the Soundmachine vacuumed her out of that existence and put her in front of 2000 angry teenagers. BZ was right. She is our Faye Greener. But the tragedy of The Day of the Locust is not that there is a riot and stampede in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, in which hordes of consumers are caught up in the violence and begin stomping child actors to a pulp of blood and gristle. No, the tragedy is that, not unlike Tod Hackett in his pursuit of Faye Greener, men who should know better will forsake common sense and dignity in order to diddle dime-a-dozen actresses who were not exactly Helen of Troy in scope and magnitude — but the fall is the fall, just the same.

Reality intuitively understands all of this and he know I understand this also, but he can’t articulate his feelings because he is gobbling Fingers’ cache of out of date pharmaceuticals and guzzling tequila. But his sense of betrayal is soothed by the chemicals and the booze — but not without side effects...

Reality is not a bass player as much as he is attitude and id in waist length hair and a leather jacket. Dots and notes are not his strong suit. He is borrowing my chromatic tuner to tune his bass. There are four strings to tune. E, A, D and G. But the nature of the chromatic tuner means you can calibrate a string to any note in the western scale — flat, natural or sharp — any one of twelve tones. A small diode lights up when one is tuning to, say, A sharp or B flat instead of A natural. A light that Reality is oblivious to while tuning his instrument. In Columbus, Missouri, he tunes the A string to A#. It is one of two strings necessary to play Braindead music.

We go on and we create a god-awful racket. More god-awfuller than normal. It is an utter discordant cacophony. Fingers and I look at each other, trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong. Reality and the Lebanese lounge singer are in their own orbit, oblivious to just how many layers of skin we are taking off of the limbs of the innocent.

Between songs, I tell Reality, “I don’t know what key you are playing in, but if you want to tell Fingers and me, we’ll try and follow you.”

“You’re on glue. We’re all in the same key. Shut up and restart the drum machine.”

So I do. It is still beyond unlistenable. I think to myself, “This is a real test of our Zen mantra, ‘There are no mistakes.’” One third of the band playing an entire set in the wrong key is not a mistake.

But this feels like a mistake.

THE REVIEWS ARE IN

The record is released and the reviews are in. “This record is so bad, not even their parents will buy it,” says Alternative Press. Meanwhile, Playboy Magazine says four stars out of five.

Various college newspapers and sundry music magazines ask for interviews, hoping for us to explain our vision and ethos. “There are no mistakes,” I tell them. Reality says, “It is pointless to talk about the politics of music. Dogvillasan, our spiritual leader, tells us that everything is pointless. Do you understand that the entire planet is going down on itself?”

REALITY IS PISSED

Reality is pissed.

I am in the back of the rented recreation vehicle, making time with the lounge singer, as we motor through the ghettoes of Detroit. Reality and Fingers are in the driver’s compartment, smoking cigs and talking gew gaw while listening to music.

Earlier that day Reality had scored a cassette tape of some forgotten heavy metal recording.

So after the gig as we are leaving Detroit, en route to Windsor, Ontario, Reality breaks the wrap on his new Judas Priest cassette.

Thundering heavy metal rattles the particleboards of the motor home. It is more than I can take. The lounge singer and I had been whispering, kissing, touching, and soaking in the streaking flares of streetlights, each burst of photons punctuating every gesture.

I know this is wrong, but I cannot stop myself. Like most acts of debasement, the moments are stolen. But they are ours.

The blasts of chugga-chugga ack ack ack heavy metal guitars obliterate our pleasure. I reckon it is a calculated act of jealousy and antagonism.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I tell her.

I march to the cab of the motor home. I straddle the console and hit the eject mechanism on the cassette deck, palming the audiotape.  The stereo defaults to an FM radio station, all talking heads talking and static. I lower the volume with my left hand, pivot to my right, reach across Reality and roll down the passenger window. It is a continuous motion, form in lock step with function. With a flip of the wrist, I zing the tape into the dark, benighted streets of the Detroit ghetto. I can only assume it splinters and unspools upon impact with the pavement.

“What did you just do?”

“What do you mean, ‘What did I just do?’ I threw out your Judas Priest tape.”

“No really. What did you just do?”

“Listen, dude. That was no sleight of hand. It was no magic trick. I threw out that tape.

“Why?”

“Because it is fucking unlistenable and I am trying to sleep.”

“You are doing everything back there, but trying to sleep.”

“Whatever, pal.”

Reality is pissed. “Stop the motor home.”

Fingers looks confused. It is three in the morning in the gnarliest part of Detroit. Every instinctual impulse in a white man’s psychology says to keep the hammer down and continue getting down the road.

“Just keep driving, Bo.”

“Fuck that. Stop this fucking thing.”

Fingers stomps on the brake pedal. The motor home seizes momentum and stops.

Reality gets out of the passenger door. And... he... is... gone...

We are stopped in the middle of the street. The lights are no longer streaking by.  In the ghetto after dark, time, space and fate are both stolid. Impassive.

“What do we do?”

“I’ll go get him.”

“He’s gone.”

“I’ll find him. Lock the doors.”

I walk for blocks through the projects. It is like breaking curfew in a war zone — The DMZ of crack dealing.

I stop for a nanosecond and attempt to get my bearings. Through the darkness, an apparition of a human being metastasizes behind me.

“Hey man, I see you looking over there.”

I say nothing and start moving again.

“Hey man, I see you looking over there.”

I don’t respond. My hope is that my strategic oblivion will clue this drug dealer into the fact that I am not interested in buying rock cocaine. Drug dealers cannot take a hint.

His breath cuts through a night where nothing is moving except me.

“Why are you looking over there, when you can look right over here for free?”

Only in Detroit does Samuel Beckett sell narcotics.

THE COWBOY HAT

Reality is back. The tour continues. In the audience in Iowa City, a bespectacled teenager (or maybe a twenty-something) wears a cowboy hat as an ironic fashionable stance, a gesture that embraces and yet mocks the redneck ethos. I don’t want to deal in irony, which I consider the disease of his generation. But I am wearing the same make and model of cowboy hat.

If this kid is all hat and no cattle, as it were, what does that make me?

Our shtick is eating its own young.  I am suffering from an instant personality crisis. Moreover, I am not sure I want to make music for teenagers in fucking Flyover, USA.

I tell this to Reality.

“Our audience is the least of your problems,” he says.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning who is singing in this band is a far bigger obstacle to you keeping your shit together.”

“What the fuck are  you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you and the Lebanese chick fucking. It is affecting your ability to lead the band.”

“You’re on glue.”

“Maybe, but you’re on ginch. And she is everything we are supposedly against. When we hired a lounge singer to sing these dirges about the apocalypse, we thought we were getting over. But we’re not — IT is giving over. ‘It’ wins; we lose. And because you are sticking your manhood in this thing, you are the conduit.”

I did not have an answer for Reality, but I knew I wasn’t giving up getting laid. I was thinking short term, immediate gratification, and was oblivious to the consequences: how it was costing me friendships and song writing partnerships.

I knew this woman did not have the intellectual aptitude to keep me stimulated. Moreover, she was crushingly banal and unimaginative. But she is beautiful — olive skin and brunette hair that summons Mesopotamia and the birth of civilization. Her beauty speaks to me on an atavistic, primordial level. The physical beauty trumped any intellectual and emotional reservations I had about getting involved in a love affair.

Reality sees me zoning out, lost in reflection.

“How did you get so pussy whipped?”

THE COWBOY HAT REDUX

I can’t stop thinking about the bespectacled kid in the audience wearing a cowboy hat as an ironic gesture.

How is his ironic gesture different than ours? I ask myself. I am of the opinion that we are less smug about the whole cowboy hat as fashion statement thing. This touch of couture had been inspired by the crewmembers of Arley Langlo’s Top Fuel team at a drag race in Pomona. The crew guys all wore the coolest cowboy hats and then blew up the motor on their dragster with the reckless abandon of Hezbollah or the Nevada Test Site.

Yet years later, seeing this college student grooving to the scene, trying to pick up chicks and appear superior to the culture he mocked rubbed me the wrong way.

The Cowboy Hats playing to Cowboy Hats. It is too incestuous in the Uroboros sense. “The culture is going down on itself” as BZ prophesied, the shark is eating its own entrails, etc.

But seeing this bi-focaled Frat House Cowboy grooving to our dirge...  inspired an Epiphany. I was coming to terms with the Braindead Soundmachine as redneck minstrel show. Stepin’ Fetchit meets Lonesome Rhodes.

The first seed is planted concerning doubt about what it is the Soundmachine is doing: Using dance music as a platform for social commentary. And for the benefit of whom? The kid in the Cowboy Hat? It is a futile gesture.

Seeds of doubt. Fuck. I am changing. I am wondering what I am doing. With drum machines. With music. With women. With Reality.

CHANGE YOUR JOB

The wheels are coming off. Only Fingers is keeping together. Otherwise, Reality’s drunk, Khalsoum is completely histrionic, I am trying too hard and the Missing Eyebrow is pulverizing the audience with a mix that is an ice pick between the ears. During one show, somebody threw up a piece of paper into the sound mixer’s workspace, which read only three words:

“CHANGE YOUR JOB”

This is probably because his approach to mixing is to, in his words,  “make everything louder than everything else.”

I told the Missing Eyebrow that maybe it was time to tame some of the Soundmachine’s random sound elements.

“There is a lot of noise being added off of the stage, and then you are adding yet more noise.”

“I know, it’s fookin’ brilliant, innit?”

“People are complaining.”

“Awww, c’mon. Just because you are fucking the singer, don’t go soft on me now.”

IOWA HIGHWAY PATROL

After spending a couple of nights crisscrossing the Midwest, we conclude a gig in the roarin’ podunk of Iowa City. We leave the gig and hit the road. Our destination: Chicago.

Due to every other member of the Soundmachine mistaking our tour across America as a 3-month holiday (thus their constant imbibing of any libation and/or pharmaceutical they could inhale down their gullets), yours truly was voted the only member cogent — and sober — enough to guide our tour vehicle into the Windy City.

Reality tells me later that his descent into chemical depravity had been a reaction to my liaison with the Lebanese Lounge Singer. Her function was merely perfunctory and utilitarian, and her self-absorption was beyond insufferable. My sleeping with the enemy was a betrayal that he took personally. Looking back, he was right.

Cut back to I-80, Eastbound, I haven't slept in damn near two days and all I want to do is get to the Windy City, get a hotel, draw the curtains and hibernate. Before we can make time on the interstate, however, we must appease the appetite of the Lindy, which contrary to the wisdom of Glen (the owner of the RV Emporium where we got the vehicle), consumed far greater than a mere 10 mpg.

In Tipton, Iowa, I find an exit with a convenience mart/petrol parlor; everybody in the Soundmachine entourage is either playing possum or is truly zonked, so I grab my traveling coffee mug and exit through the side door of the motor home, give the lady behind the counter a couple of twenties and commence dispensing with the fossil fuels.

After topping off the tank, I drag ass back and get my change from the portly clerk, refill my coffee and retrace my steps back into the Lindy. I turn over the motor, put 'er in drive and SHIT!

In my haze, I neglected to disengage the fucking hose from the vehicle. The kiosk itself is completely thrashed... FUCK... As band members begin to wake up, I truck back into the convenience mart, humbled and completely apologetic. The counter wench is completely FREAKED and hysterical — “You’re the second asshole this week to ruin one of our pumps, yadda, yadda, yadda.” I’m calm in comparison, I offer my license, the insurance papers, and a copy of the rental agreement but she’s having none of this. “I don’t care about the paperwork, you’re gonna have to wait until the boss lady gets here.”

(It turns out that the boss lady lives over ninety minutes away. It's now 1 AM — I need sleep! I tell the gal, “Look, call the Highway Patrol, I’ll fill out an accident report, here's the paperwork...” “I don't care about no paperwork, you’re gonna wait until the boss lady gets here.” “Look, I don’t how you handle traffic accidents in Iowa, but in California we show our insurance papers and the officers fill out accident reports.” More hysterics on behalf of the counter wench, she refuses to call the HP, so I leave.)

So there we go, EVERYBODY in the Soundmachine is wide awake as we motor for about one hour towards the Mississippi River, out of Iowa and into Illinois and Freedom! We get to Davenport, I can see the fuckin’ muddy-ass river and BHHWOOOPPP — it’s the law dogs.

I am asked to step out of the vehicle as Fingers and Reality are stuffing more pills that have long passed their expiration date into the crevasses of various analog, monophonic electronic keyboards.

“I understand you had a little trouble back there in Cedar County. The clerk at the Jiffy Stop said you fled the scene of an accident.”

“No, not really," I says, “I offered her my license and proof-of-insurance, but she was having none of that.”

“That lady is my neighbor, she lives right down the road from me; Are you calling her a liar?”

“Umm, no not exactly, but she did refuse to listen to reason,” I backpedal.

They haul my ass back to Tipton, Iowa in the squad car, with Reality and Fingers in tow. We get to the Big House and the bailiff decides not to throw me in with the drunks, but with the felons who are waiting there until the State Penitentiary can create some more room for real criminals. Great. It's about 5 AM at this point and I still haven’t slept. I decide to sleep on my back because if I'm going to be violated, at least this way I'll see it coming.

I’m awakened at 6 AM — “Getup!” — for a meal of flapjacks and coffee. I refuse the coffee, because I am going right back to bed (or so I think) after some carbo-loading and a phone call to my lawyer. I am told I’m in for “criminal mischief.” Worst case, according to Lolita’s Mom’s Attorney in Los Angeles: “Ten years.” But that’s worst case, he assures me. Until the phone call, I have refused to make eye contact with my fellow cons because I was sure I would be released at any moment. Wrong. After a morning of cleaning the jail bars with a tooth brush (I actually didn’t want to interfere with the other fellows routine, it kinda looked like I would just get in the way — ironically, these guys really knew how to work a toothbrush, although you would never know it from their smiles) and putting Field & Stream magazines in a stack (“They’re already in a stack,” I tell the trustee, “Put 'em in another stack,” he counters), I am finally shuffled off to the Courthouse to see the Magistrate around noon.

Handcuffed, I pass Fingers and Reality in the corridor as they take snapshots of me with their Instamatics. Their goddamn cameras have flashbulbs popping and I feel like Frances Farmer on her way to the Funny Farm. Two hours later — after sixty minutes of shuteye in the last two days, I am led into a small office with the “magistrate.”

The judge is in a wheelchair and his hands are all sclerotic and discombobulated. He immediately tells me that he was interrupted from a luncheon and a golf game (!) to come review this matter. He then feebly attempts to turn the page in the police report concerning my arrest. Great, I think to myself, I’m going to jail for the next ten years because I put a crimp in social calendar of the Stephen Hawking of Jurisprudence — who apparently golfs.

At this point the Magistrate’s phone rings. And rings. I’m new at this: I don’t know whether to help him left the receiver off its cradle or whether that will piss him off more. I decide to let him struggle with the telephone. He finally gets it positioned in the groove of his shoulder blade and tells the party on the other end: “Yes, I’m reviewing it right now; I’m really disturbed by this.” Ten Years.

He wrestles the phone back into its holster. “It says right here you accidentally destroyed a fuel pump at the Jiffy Mart out on I-80.”

“Uhh, yeah, I accidentally destroyed the fuel pump.”

“If it’s an accident, then how could it be mischief?”

“Uhh, yeah,” I say.

“I suggest you get Iowa in your rear view mirror as soon as possible — like now.” Not a problem...

GETTING PAID FOR IT

As Reality pounds out the bass line to “Dogvillasan” at the end of our set in Minneapolis, Khalsoum leaves the stage and I borrow the mic. “You are braindead, we are Braindead. The only difference is that we are getting paid for it.”

The Lead Kraut takes it upon himself to wire a variation on that message into the end of his band’s performance.

“You are DMFDM. We are DMFDM. The only difference is that we are getting paid for it.”

I AM FUCKED

I am fucked, but I know I am fucked; therefore, I am not truly fucked. Or so BZ’s theory goes. But I think I am more fucked, know that I am fucked. I am fucked because I am worse than Faye Greener. I am fucked because I am fucking Faye Greener. Faye Greener doesn’t know any better. But I should.

It is more than Reality can take.

THE NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE

We are motoring through New Jersey towards New York City.

Reality is driving the Lindy; I am in the sleeper berth above the driver’s compartment, sawing some serious logs in a deep REM state. Reality, who has been piloting our craft in the fast lane of the Jersey turnpike, is being pulled over by the Highway Patrol. Apparently Reality has been hogging the passing lane in the motor home, with all four barrels of the carburetor wide open, sucking down petrol like a camel and maxing out at 62 mph.

This is a thermodynamic exercise in diminished returns. The more fuel you throw at the Lindy, the slower it runs, bloated on hydrocarbons. It just blubbers.

No matter. Reality is king of the road and everybody will have to take a number as he cranks up the Black Sabbath and puts the proverbial hammer down.

But commandeering the fast lane in New Jersey is against the law, apparently. A state trooper hits his baby blues, and Reality slides all four tons across four lanes of traffic and stops. Despite cop lights, sirens and a panicked flock of band members I sense something, but nothing of enough importance to wake me from my sleep.

“Hey Man, wake up. You gotta drive,” Reality bellows.

“What... what?” I stir.

“Listen I have a couple of ‘failures to appear’ and some warrants.”

“What?”

“If the cop runs my CDL I’m going to jail.”

“Fucking hell.”

I sit in the driver’s seat and wipe my eyes. I buckle up, and try to gather my still-deep-in-a-coma sensibilities in preparation for dealing with a Joisey patrolman. As I roll down the window, Fingers is still stuffing placidyls into his Korg analog synthesizer.

The trooper walks up to my window.

“I suppose you know why I’ve pulled you over?”

“Actually officer, I have no idea.”

The cop explains the law about monopolizing the passing lane. It turns out the last time he had pulled over an RV with California plates he had struck the mother lode in the form of a massive cocaine bust; I listen and I nod. I am stupefied. My brain is trying to kick in and I am attempting to formulate a sentence that will articulate my contempt for narcotics. Words fail so I continue to nod.  I get off with a warning after he tells me  “not to do this again.”

I promise him I won’t.

WE ARE FRIENDLY...

We get to New York City. The front page of the Arts Section of the New York Times has a half-page spread on DMFDM.

The Bald Kraut in the Skirt had given the interview. They asked if his band was made up of fascists. He didn’t really understand the question.

“We are friendly fascists,” he explained.

DMFDM: FRIENDLY FASCISTS COME TO MANHATTAN read the headline.

That evening, back stage, The Lead Kraut is livid and is waving the newspaper around like a whirligig. The Bald Kraut in the Skirt is cowering in the corner, smoking a cigarette and dropping ash on his trench coat.

“Vot ze fuck did you tell them?” The Lead Kraut yells into a cloud of smoke and running mascara.

PHILADELPHIA

After the New York show, I drop off Khalsoum at La Guardia Airport and she flies back to Los Angeles. JenJen is en route to take over the job of vocalist. Bo, Reality, the Missing Eyebrow and I drive to Philly and unload the gear at the club, the Trocadero. The rats in the alley behind the Trocadero are the size of car tires. They are everywhere, but I am the only one who can see them.

I pick up JenJen at the airport. She is unrehearsed. Unbeknownst to me, she was put on the plane moments after some rather intensive and invasive female trouble-type surgery.

As she and I drive back from the airport, she tell me that she is worried about not being able to remember how the songs go, and that she might lose her place in the tune.

“Listen, if you get lost, just start chanting our mantra.”

“I didn’t even know we had a mantra.”

“Sure, it goes like this: ‘’We believed it then and I believe it now... This music is a manifestation of the rising tide of awareness on the planet... This music contributes to a positive environment, it feels good and it casts a comforting spell over every one who hears it.’”

“I think it would be easier just to rehearse the songs, don’t you?”

“There is no time. Okay, if you get lost onstage and don’t know where you are in the song try this. Just chant, ‘Come Down from the Hills and Make My Baby.’ Over and over and over.”

I do not know that, as of the last few days, her emergency surgery has left her barren.

CLUTCH DISCS

We are in Memphis. We have a day off, so we drive out to the drag strip, where a drag race had been run the day before. There are used, surplus clutch discs lying on the starting line and in the deserted pit area.

I gather them and say, “These are for the Krauts.”

In Memphis, The Lead Kraut wires them onto his percussion kit. And bangs on the metallic disc as part the act. Asbestos dust shakes off the discs and hangs in the air, caught up in the nightclub’s wind machines.

DALLAS

Ikky flies into Dallas. We drop off Fingers in Memphis, motor south through Jackson, Ms. and head east to Dallas.

Dallas is where lives are changed, permanent-like, but maybe not for the better.

I also did not know that Ikky would walk into a minefield of amour with the girl with the lunch box. The entire coterie of Krauts would conspire in ways to get off of their very expensive tour bus and mooch rides with the Soundmachine and their increasingly decrepit motor home.

So yes, Ikky and the Tour Manager are overheard discussing Hitchcock lighting angles backstage in Dallas and then the next that happened is *SHE* wants to cop a ride with us, whom she seems to hate unequivocally.

She wants to get on the motor home. Reality threatens to walk out if she gets onboard. He has survived Detroit. Can he survive Dallas?

Meanwhile, in the hotel pool, JenJen and The Bald Kraut in the Skirt are dipping their toes in the shallow ends, smiling at each other and basking in the reflection of the Dallas sun. They have become fast friends. They seem to have matching polish on their cuticles, although he has on more mascara. They are giggling and lightly splashing.

I am bemused and appalled. Of all the couplings on this tour, theirs makes the most sense.

SAN ANTONIO

JenJen looks down the parallax of railroad tracks running east and west. She looks back towards the east, where we just came from. She sees nothing, just spare, desiccated bits of shrubbery, abandoned railroad ties, coated with goops of oil and tar; rocks broken not from the violence of the crushing weight of a freight train’s wheels, but that of a gradual splintering from the ennui of a relentless cosmic heat.

The tour is creating some strange couplings. JenJen is trying to come to terms with her budding romance with the Bald Kraut in the Skirt. Making time with a man in a skirt is more than a little strange and surreal.

She walks outside the gig and disappears down a parallax of railroad tracks. She is completely disoriented. And lost. She then looks west, as the sun sets over her home, 1300 miles away in the Pacific Rim. That doesn’t excite her either. She stares at the broken rocks.

Next is El Paso, Phoenix, San Diego and then back to Los Angeles.

She quits the tour in Los Angeles. Khalsoum gets back in the Lindy.

FREE PERSONALITY TEST

We get to Los Angeles. After the gig I go backstage, in DMFDM’s dressing room. The Bald Kraut in the Skirt is cocooned in a leather trench coat and is chain smoking.

“You always looks like you are waiting for a train,” Ikky Shivers says to him.

I laugh. The Krauts laugh. I point to the Skirt. “You’re coming with me,” I say and tug on his trench coat. The Skirt had been fascinated by Los Angeles, as he heard the Soundmachine sing about it for months. He had come to equate LA with the Final Judgment. I told him we were going to see the town, all bright lights and big city. I tell him we are going to see what JenJen, his new girlfriend, has been singing about.

“Yah? We go see the epicenter of the Apocalypse?”

“Ground Zero, pal. I am going to show you the three building in Hollywood which will survive the Wrath of God.”

After The Skirt grabs a bottle of tequila and stuffs it into a pocket of his coat, we leave through a stage door that dumps us onto the parking lot. The night is thick with the smells of Hollywood: burritos, marijuana, car exhaust and coyote shit. Adding to the olfactory stew are the followers of DMFDM who are mixing and mingling outside the theater, smoking pot and clove cigarettes and urinating as they make their way to their cars.

The Bald Kraut’s trench coat only partially covers his leather miniskirt and his fishnet stockings. Still his haberdashery is not any more outrageous than that of his fans, most of who look like they have just come from a séance for Sharon Tate, and he blends in the assembled rather seamlessly.

We are directly across from the Capitol Records building. I gesture to the top point of the building — a spiral needle which adds another couple hundred of feet to the building’s height — which the architects designed to resemble the spindle of a turntable from the era when teenagers stacked a bundle of vinyl records onto the record player.

“So, zis building, he vill survive?”

“Yes,” I tell him. “Think of the Reichstag fires. Despite its crimes against humanity, the Capitol Records building will survive the forty foot wall of water that will envelop this city, washing away the mountains of bullshit as the cosmic consciousness attempts to purge itself.”

“Undt zhvy vill it survive?”

“It has proved itself bigger than any of us or our attempts to topple it.”

“Like Nietzsche, ya?”

I tell him about an unreleased Beach Boys recording, SMILE, whose master tapes rest in the vaults of the Capitol Records building. After writing dozens and dozens of smash hits for Capitol with a formula of Chuck Berry guitar riffs underscoring a smorgasbord of Four Freshmen harmonies and melodies singing out simplistic paeans to surfing, drag strips and malt shops, Beach Boys’ wunderkind Brian Wilson endeavored to write something that would transcend the temporality of pop music.

“The record was conceived as a ‘Teenage Symphony to God.’ That was Brian Wilson’s direct quote: ‘A Teenage Symphony to God.’ It was never released after the label heads put the kibosh on its completion.”

The Skirt raises an eyebrow.

“The same men who vetoed SMILE’s completion — the Coyote Gods that run Capitol Records — are courtside at Laker games nowadays, and they will be swept up in the Almighty’s tsunami. The denizens of Capitol won’t survive, but the edifice will.”

The Bald Kraut in the Skirt steps on a cigarette and smiles. His mascara smiles with him. “Like ze Indiana Jones and das Temple of Doom?

“Something like that.”

*****

We make our way down Hollywood Boulevard, as often as not with the bottom of the Cuervo bottle pointed towards the stars.  We walk for miles. I show the Bald Kraut the Scientology HQ on Virgil. On the marquee overlooking the boulevard is the verbiage: “COME IN FOR YOUR FREE PERSONALITY TEST” I point and say, “That’s us.”

“I need my personality examined zhvy?” he asks.

“I’ll explain later. Just take the test. It’s just a series of multiple choice questions about basic metaphysics, potential chemical dependency and junior high school psychology.” He nods.

With a closed fist, I knock on the glass doors, which are locked shut. The Kraut takes a hit off of the bottle and rings a buzzer.

“Can we help you?” comes a disembodied response from a speaker.

“Definitely. We’re here for our Free Personality Test,” I croak toward the general direction of the speaker.

“Ya. Free Personality Test,” the Kraut echoes.

“We’re closed. Please go away.”

This is unacceptable. As many times as I have been hit on by Scientologists to take their free personality tests and I now I am ready and I am being denied.

“Look. We demand our free tests, dammit.”

“We’re closed sir, please go away.”

And so it goes, a contest of wills, which volleys to-and-fro for about five minutes. The confrontation reaches it crescendo with the Kraut screaming “Achtung!” and goose-stepping across the well-manicured lawn and my banging on the glass door like Stanley Kowalski.

Unfulfilled, we begin to leave.

“Will zis building survive ze Apocalypse?”

“Yes, mien fruend, this too will survive.”

A six foot eight inch Teutonic cross dresser is more than the Scientologists can process. It is beyond their ken. The Kraut looks hurt, and forlorn not unlike Frankenstein coming to terms with rejection.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him. “You didn’t fail the test. They did.”

*****

We cross the street and begin making our way west. We pass Jumbo’s Clown Room and enter the back door of Club Mugi.

“He-rro gol-geous,” Yoshi croons. Shots are proffered. Shots are downed. More are lined up.

Hospitality aside, tonight is not about free shots for me, with the vague tease and pretense of Yoshi getting into my pants. No, tonight there is a bigger agenda, one of Biblical proportions, one that portends of Revelations in the New Testament and Genesis in the New, New Testament.

Yoshi and the Kraut eye each other and mutely compare eye shadow.

I explain to the Kraut that this is the third and last building in Los Angeles to survive the impending and imminent rapture.

  But there is bigger issue than the survival of buildings: the survival of the human race.

“When the shit gets weird, you will come here to ensue the perpetuation of the species.”

The Kraut raises an eyebrow, like a Black Alsatian.

“Yes, you must come here to claim your mate, Yoshi. When the winds die down, 2/3rds of the Axis powers will be reunited. You two will climb the gleaming spire of the Capitol Records building and there you will consummate your relationship. You will create a new master race. Germany and Japan, together again.” I am torn on Cuervo, but the drunken riff connects with both the Bald Kraut and Yoshi.

“Like ze Fay Wray undt King Kong on the Empire State Building?” he asks.

“No, me Jessica Range,” Yoshi demands.

“Whatever.”

PLEASE DON’T HATE OUR TOWN

 “Now is ze time

To get on ze right side

You’ll be God’s Reich”— “God’s Reich,” DMFDM

It is a small town, a suburb of Chicago and some weird bastion/pocket of White Supremacy. The skinheads and the master race types have come out en masse for the Krauts.

The fact that one of them is a sexual deviant in fishnets is a minor, unfortunate detail for these Seig Heil skinheads, an aberration that can be overlooked until the master race machinations are installed in the United States of America.

To the assembled in the VFW Hall in Elgin, Illinois, this is a homecoming of sorts for those who want to repatriate or reconnect with Das Fatherland.

Elgin. It is a Nuremberg Rally set in Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell. Or maybe the suburbs. I am trying to figure out how we are complicit in this Teutonic/Aryan freak show. Maybe I am overanalyzing the situation.

As soon as I start the drum machine, the booing starts. They HATE us. The hatred is very palpable. It manifests in the form of a chorus of extended middle fingers, arcing rooster tails of beer and a cacophony of catcalls that are louder than Reality’s bass rig. It is truly intimidating: four musicians against a thousand hoodlums high on the scent of what could be construed as the Return of the Final Solution.

The pandemonium expands like a balloon and is beaten down like a piñata. In their zeal to eliminate the one obstacle between themselves and the Second Coming of the Final Solution, the throng begins working as one ball of bad energy, maneuvering their way towards the stage and attempting to climb on.

I look over stage right and Reality has stepped towards the fracas, belching bass notes and extending his gut. Ikky is twisting knobs, smoking cigarettes and laughing.

I think to myself that people die in these kinds of situations. I am trying to ascertain why these lovable skins hate us so much. Possibly it is the skin tone of the Lebanese Lounge Singer. Maybe it is the fact that we are preaching the Apocalypse, a scenario where everyone gets it, including the blonde haired and the blue-eyed. Perhaps we are not the buzz saw of noise that DMFDM is. Maybe we just suck.

The violence is on the cusp of critical mass. The skins have broken through the perimeter, as it were, and begin to attack the Lebanese Lounge Singer. She stops crooning and begins fighting back, drawing blood from the distended foreheads of the skinheads who have perpetrated the virtual concertina wire of the concentration camp we have found ourselves in.

I am in awe. I don’t know why I fell in love with this woman, whom I met while she serenaded drunk hipsters and doddering dandies at a piano bar in Koreatown section of Los Angeles.

It is the kind of moment that will stoke, inflame and prolong misguided affection. I stop playing guitar for a few bars and just admire her bravado.

But the ugliness continues to simmer. I stop the drum machine. The Lebanese Lounge Singer walks off. Ikky stops playing and concentrates on his nicotine fix, his synthesizers looping in a “Look Ma! No Hands!” two-bar arpeggio of doom. Reality, however, is in a groove, regardless of the possibility of the Braindead Soundmachine’s imminent crucifixion or no. He continues with one foot on top of a floor wedge, a looping, loping bass pattern ad infinitum.

I am on my knees and I restart the drum machine, hitting the play button on the downbeat of the musical phrase Reality is driving into the ground. Ikky stubs a butt with his snakeskin cowboy boots and joins in. I walk into the mic pattern center stage and begin to filibuster about the futility of existence in a town upwind of the Chicago stockyards.

Driven by Reality’s relentless sense of purpose, we continue to play the same song for twenty minutes.  BLAHTT... BLUH BLUH BLUH BHANT... BLUH BLUNH BLUH BLANNTT...  Finally, I get on my knees and turn off the drum machine. Then jeers.

Silence. We pack up our gear among sporadic showers of beer.

The Krauts begin their set. I can hear them through the concrete, steel and insulation. I am sure they are appalled by the Pavlovian reactions of their audience. It is a not-so-friendly-fascism.

We walk up the street, looking for a tavern so we can have a beer.

A carload of teenagers drives by us with their window down. “Please don’t hate our town,” one pleads.

Ikky comments on the Doppler shift in the voice as it passes us by.

REALITY BAILS

The tour ends. Ikky flies back from Chicago. The drive back from Chicago is more than Reality can stand. Khalsoum and