There was a really scary goth girl- notoriously scary and the only goth in the school of 3000 kids. She was in the room once with a friend in my art classroom and I was the only other one there and I was petrified but we ended up saying hi to each other and talking and she turned out to be nice. Her name was Sunshine, and we remained friendly with each other until, after high school, she said that her boyfriend wanted to start a band and was I in. Her boyfriend was a guy named Charly who was much older than us and he had also had Sunshine recruit a friend of mine named Jesse, who was a year younger than me, to play the bass.
We played punk music that sounded just like the Misfits, but with Sunshine singing. We made a cassette tape, and played lots of shows- me sneaking into bars, jesse working around his school schedule. I used to have to carpool with Sunshine and Charly from home in Alpine (Sunshine lived in Highland and commuted all the way to SLC to work at the Hot Topic in the downtown mall) to SLC, where I'd get dropped off at Eli's house (Sunshine also sang in the band Mouthbreather, who practiced at Eli's house) and then spend the entire day moping around his disgusting house until Sunshine would get off work and we'd practice-- funny now I can't even remember where we practiced! I don't think it was at Eli's. I would also spend the entire day in Charlies sick basement apartment for the same reason. I think that Charlie actually re-recorded all the guitar tracks over mine on the tape we made.
Eventually, we practiced regularly at my friend Josh's house (how nice of him to have us). There, much to my chagrin, Charly (he was the band leader, producer, and songwriter) got a 2nd guitar player for the group, a guy named Greg, and Charly was stoked because Greg, like himself- and even moreso- was an actual punk rocker. Sunshine was still goth, and me and Jesse were both grunge. Greg was in the band for about a year. A decade later, He and Jesse had a real punk rock group and had lots of success, and still probably play today (Jesse became a real punk).
The whole group lasted 2 years, at which point I quit, because I had been starting my own group, Red Bennies, and I had become mortal enemies with Charlie simply on a personality basis. Then they got a girl play guitar and then Jesse quit and another girl played bass and they were called 3 1/2 girls for awhile and moved to boston and played there for years. Charlie lived in LA after that, also, and had a group called Half Cocked, and at one point, I believe he played drums for Danzig, his hero.
Right before I quit the group, we planned a short couple of tours (must have been 4 or 5 shows each) with the seattle band, Pipefitter (actually from Sela, Yakima, and Ellensburg). When we got to Seattle (the mecca of the age), something mysterious went wrong, and Charly was in the van refusing to play, and Jesse was freaking out and Sunshine and Charly had just asked each other to marry earlier in the evening at the pizza place, but someting had changed obviously and I don't know what happened the rest of the night because I took off.
I then decided to stay with the Pipefitter drummer, Jeff, in Ellensburgh until Deviance came back the next month to do their second tour- my main motivation being to just get out of our weekly practices and avoid seeing my bandmates.
I got bored very quickly there, though I did make a few friends, and then by coincidence, the guitar player of Pipefitter called me up and asked me if I wanted to drive back to SLC with him so he could visit a girl he had met while we were there (this was 2 weeks or so into my stay). I jumped at the chance. Later, after hearing about similar drives from other people, I concluded that the biological desire to copulate might sometimes be stronger than I had imagined. I myself have never driven across the country for love- however, I did make it back to SLC, right to Josh's house where my friend Gunnar was coincidentally recording with the Numbs hip-hop group that night, and then hitched a ride with them through a blinding blizzard all the way to provo (I left on the tour originally in a blinding blizzard, too) and then right into the loving arms of Leena, who I had actually had the embarracing misfortune to write a letter to from ellensburg professing my love for. Or maybe fortune, as our relationship began to progress a bit from there, and I'd been following her around as an admirer for a long time.
I think I quit the group then, but still went on the 2nd trip a couple weeks later to washington and then back. It was no big deal, as they were sick of me too and my hippiness.
The band was at first called Denial, but for the greater part of our career called Deviance, as another Denial was discovered already existing. Back then, that kind of stuff mattered a lot. We were in it for the big bucks. I think we were a pretty popular band, or at least very well known in the day.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Finally, Time to Work on My Memoirs
THE TALE OF MY 11th GRADE BEST FRIEND
I learned how to play guitar in my junior year of high school. I had a best friend named Josh who devoted his time to the hobby of putting together model jets and dreamed of joining the airforce, as his dad used to shoot machine guns from hueys in Vietnam. We spent long hours in sleepovers discussing jets and playing NES or Sega Genesis in his basement littered with action figures and toys all over the musty carpet. His little brother Dax played with those, mostly ninja turtles, but I believe that through my influence (I was the one who supplied the video games), he became a great nintendo nerd when he became our age.
Josh was from a broken home, and lived with his dad and step mom in Highland, while his real mom lived in SLC. In Highland, he lived next door to a kid named Kevin, who knew how to program computers and had worked on a video game (a figure with a sword walked across the screen) and his older brother and his friends were famous new wavers in the 80's, inspiring the new wave party shown in the movie SLC Punk. Anyways, his best friend from his big city summer home during the summer- or perhaps it was kevin- gave him a blonde, super cheap, old strat copy in an even older case (from some old 60's Tiesco or something), and he gave it to me. He may have charged me 40 bucks for it. He was always very generous and a very good friend.
He was very much into Jets, Guns, Vietnam, and other 60's stuff (he had real machine gun bullets and an expended rocket launcher in his basement storage). This also included Jimi Hendrix music, which I had never really heard before. I began to love the music and even bought a few tapes from the tape store at the mall that were post-death rehashes of his rougher recordings and throwaway songs (proving me to be a real fan).
When I was very young, my dad had taught me some guitar chords, and once bought me a finger-style dylan song book. My brother Joshua (who had studied the guitar for years at this point) once showed me the 12 bar blues and also how to play the rest of the basic chords, and he loaned me his private teachers book and cassette called "Larry Green's Guitar Method for Rock Guitar" or something like that, and I learned how to play rock licks. Then, for christmas, I got a book called "Jimi Hendrix: Axis Bold as Love complete Tabs" or something, out of which I learned a few complete songs, and became the best rock guitarist from Alpine to Orem. One day, later that year, my dad took me to the guitar store in Orem and actually bought me a 200+ dollar Epiphone telecaster and a crate 12" combo amp which sustained my music career for years and years to come, but that's another tale.
I played my crappy strat copy and listened to the Larry Green tape, played Nintendo with Josh, drudged through High School at American Fork High School, rode the bus to and fro repeatedly early in the cold, black, frozen morning or beautiful daybreak and then back home to Alpine. And, in my memory, the days passed like the quickly flipping pages in a book with only those parts being noteworthy, and the title of the book was "Getting Up Early Makes Life Hell" subtitle "The Search for Meaning in a Numbingly Mundane Routine".
Me and Josh drifted apart during our senior year as we both began to discove and hang out with friends we thought were cooler. For the life of me, I can't remember what happened to the blonde strat copy, which is very distressing as I've only thrown one guitar away in my life, and I regret it. The Epiphone my dad bought is hanging in my school, stripped and mangled, with many paint jobs showing through, and with permanant marker around the border saying, "Food, Heat, Sleep, Aesthetification". I never actually had a proper guitar again until Leena bought me one for my birthday six or seven years later.
I saw him ten years later at the bar and he said he had a Ghosts'n'Goblins arcade game that I could have. It was in his dad's garage back in highland. I met Josh at his house in SLC, which he rented with some friends, and he showed me that he had learned to play the guitar in the meantime and he played me, with singing, a shredding rockabilly song he had written for a group he wanted to start. Then we drove to Highland and got the game and drove back, and I can't even remember just we we talked about during the drive, but I havn't seen him since. I think the reason I found him appealing in the first place is because he would selfishly dominate the conversation, which is something I've always done.
I learned how to play guitar in my junior year of high school. I had a best friend named Josh who devoted his time to the hobby of putting together model jets and dreamed of joining the airforce, as his dad used to shoot machine guns from hueys in Vietnam. We spent long hours in sleepovers discussing jets and playing NES or Sega Genesis in his basement littered with action figures and toys all over the musty carpet. His little brother Dax played with those, mostly ninja turtles, but I believe that through my influence (I was the one who supplied the video games), he became a great nintendo nerd when he became our age.
Josh was from a broken home, and lived with his dad and step mom in Highland, while his real mom lived in SLC. In Highland, he lived next door to a kid named Kevin, who knew how to program computers and had worked on a video game (a figure with a sword walked across the screen) and his older brother and his friends were famous new wavers in the 80's, inspiring the new wave party shown in the movie SLC Punk. Anyways, his best friend from his big city summer home during the summer- or perhaps it was kevin- gave him a blonde, super cheap, old strat copy in an even older case (from some old 60's Tiesco or something), and he gave it to me. He may have charged me 40 bucks for it. He was always very generous and a very good friend.
He was very much into Jets, Guns, Vietnam, and other 60's stuff (he had real machine gun bullets and an expended rocket launcher in his basement storage). This also included Jimi Hendrix music, which I had never really heard before. I began to love the music and even bought a few tapes from the tape store at the mall that were post-death rehashes of his rougher recordings and throwaway songs (proving me to be a real fan).
When I was very young, my dad had taught me some guitar chords, and once bought me a finger-style dylan song book. My brother Joshua (who had studied the guitar for years at this point) once showed me the 12 bar blues and also how to play the rest of the basic chords, and he loaned me his private teachers book and cassette called "Larry Green's Guitar Method for Rock Guitar" or something like that, and I learned how to play rock licks. Then, for christmas, I got a book called "Jimi Hendrix: Axis Bold as Love complete Tabs" or something, out of which I learned a few complete songs, and became the best rock guitarist from Alpine to Orem. One day, later that year, my dad took me to the guitar store in Orem and actually bought me a 200+ dollar Epiphone telecaster and a crate 12" combo amp which sustained my music career for years and years to come, but that's another tale.
I played my crappy strat copy and listened to the Larry Green tape, played Nintendo with Josh, drudged through High School at American Fork High School, rode the bus to and fro repeatedly early in the cold, black, frozen morning or beautiful daybreak and then back home to Alpine. And, in my memory, the days passed like the quickly flipping pages in a book with only those parts being noteworthy, and the title of the book was "Getting Up Early Makes Life Hell" subtitle "The Search for Meaning in a Numbingly Mundane Routine".
Me and Josh drifted apart during our senior year as we both began to discove and hang out with friends we thought were cooler. For the life of me, I can't remember what happened to the blonde strat copy, which is very distressing as I've only thrown one guitar away in my life, and I regret it. The Epiphone my dad bought is hanging in my school, stripped and mangled, with many paint jobs showing through, and with permanant marker around the border saying, "Food, Heat, Sleep, Aesthetification". I never actually had a proper guitar again until Leena bought me one for my birthday six or seven years later.
I saw him ten years later at the bar and he said he had a Ghosts'n'Goblins arcade game that I could have. It was in his dad's garage back in highland. I met Josh at his house in SLC, which he rented with some friends, and he showed me that he had learned to play the guitar in the meantime and he played me, with singing, a shredding rockabilly song he had written for a group he wanted to start. Then we drove to Highland and got the game and drove back, and I can't even remember just we we talked about during the drive, but I havn't seen him since. I think the reason I found him appealing in the first place is because he would selfishly dominate the conversation, which is something I've always done.
Monday, March 31, 2008
First post on Blob
This is Ookla from "Thundarr the Barbarian" cartoon. I love him because he has a jacked-up face but no one knows why, and he is SOOOOO strong. Tonight, he got chucked from a dragon tail so hard that where his butt hit the ground, a fault line opened up.
Once he got caught flying a helicopter (which he didn't know how to do) and he became so frustrated (very quickly) that he kicked the control panel out through the front of the cockpit and then immediately crashed and exploded, and the show didn't slow down for one second. If you've seen the intro to the show, that part where he's kicking with his arms in the air, that's what's happening. He also has a great sense of humor.
He has also beaten up people with a whale, punched -well, just about anything- in half, he's always falling of cliffs, and his horse has a worm tail-- which is actually the only thing I remembered about the show from when I was a kid. I kind of remembered Ookla. I can HONESTLY SAY that I HAVE NEVER seen an episode of thundarr the barbarian that hasn't stretched my imagination to the ULTIMATE LIMITS. And his weapon is a bow and arrow, but his arrows don't stick in people, they just punch them out (they have blunt ends).
Tonight, when he was sinking in quicksand, the bad guy wanted to hurry up the process, so he threw a huge boulder at him, which he caught for some reason, and held above his head while he helplessly sank faster and faster. Thundarr told him to throw it at a nearby tree, which broke in half and fell towards them (that's how they got out).
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