The Fault in Bodie's Stars and Other Wrongdoings

Been working, off and on, with several novels-or-novellas-in-progress...the one that seems to be picking up steam is INDIGO. These passages concern the character of Bodie Lewis----think of him as the Robert Cohn character-----not to compare INDIGO to THE SUN ALSO RISES, but just looking for a butt-of-all-life's-bad-jokes thumbnail to roll with. Enjoy or whatever.

 I'm not sure I like Bodie. I like him but I don't.

As the get-together (I'm loathe to call it a “party”) wears on I hear him in the other room and he's in a heated discussion with this girl---I don't know who she is. She'd been having a loud conversation earlier about pheromones---how you give off a pheromone when you're involved with someone and people are attracted to you---you can't beat suitors away with a stick. When you're single, however----and apparently this relates to the fact that she'd broken up with her boyfriend---you can't give it away-----nobody's interested. Again, the mystery of pheromones.

Maybe there's something to all this jargon, I dunno. It imposes too many tacit rules and suppositions for my blood. You just need to be careful what you lay out there in front of Bodie, though, because now he's trying to get his foot in the door and it's not a pretty tableau.

“You said you can't give it away, right? I look at you, I look at me, I see two nice people who should just cut the shit and try being happy, you know? What's wrong with being happy?”

“I know, but, y'know.....no.”

“Come on!”

“You're just not my type, dude, no offense, just, y'know.....that's life! Oh well.”

“ 'Oh well', what the fuck's that supposed to mean?!”

“That's life, man, you just move on. S'not a big deal.”

“It's not a big deal for you, you can just shrug your shoulders and forget about it! I'm stuck here with this shit forever!”

“Yeah....maybe you are. I gotta go, dude.....”

Yeah, Bodie, maybe you are.

Eventually we all head down to the University Computer Lab, shanghai some terminals and fart around on the net. So we're all sitting at various points in the lab separate and yet gloriously together. Crazy Ed is in Goth Chat under a female persona then he cybers with some guy who thinks he's a 16-year-old hottie. He busts the third wall and scares the hell out of the guy. No one ever hears from him again.

Some guy from a Christian Chat site comes in and starts preaching at us, haraguing us, telling us we're all evil and going to hell. Why? I don't know-----because we like The Cure or some other nebulous reason. This prompts a mass exodus to the Christian Chat site where we heckle everybody there. Some cat calling himself Count Othmar starts calling himself “The Lion of the Tribe of Shecky”, which is a hoot and a half.

Bodie tries cybering with a whole slew of girls and they all laugh him off the net. He slams the table and leaves the lab in disgust, probably to the joy of several kids who are around waiting to work on their papers or do research. Life is tough.

The rest of us are there entirely too long. When we leave the lab it's early morning. The sun's not up, yet, but the night birds are scaring up one helluva racket. I'm almost sober again, and that just will not do.

                                                                    ***

    Bodie gets up and delivers some long, pompous, anal-retentive preamble about “intellectual property”, and how, if you relate something he said it's very important to tell people, even if all he said was a comment about the weather, that “Bodie Lewis said that,” that this is just as important as telling people “Bram Stoker said X” or that “ee cummings said x”. And by the point where folks are catcalling Bodie to get on with it we've all been appraised of how important all of this is to Bodie.

When the poem comes around it's a lot of rhymey doggerel about feeling one particular woman's “hot breath” on his neck (which he has never felt, obviously) and describing the look and feel of her legs (which he has also obviously never felt or seen)----the mystery woman is never mentioned by name, but I imagine it's Bessie.

                                                                   ***

                   “You really like that one girl, huh?” Says Bodie, and I'm getting a distinctly creepy, polluted vibe off him.

“Do what, now?” I don't look up at him, which is a more and more frequent occurrence in my interactions with Bodie. I can smell him, though, from the doorway. He smells like jerky, hotdogs, Budweiser, stale BO and stale, jizzed-in, unwashed underwear.

“That one girl,” he says. “I don't know her name.”

I choose not to fill in the blank for him.

“You're a cuck,” he tells me, a hint of practiced contempt in his voice.

“Do what, now?”

“I'm a MGTOW,” he says, with what I imagine to be a kind of subdued pride.....I misunderstand him at first and think he says, “I'm Big Now.”

“Proud of ya,” I offer.

“It means I'm a Man Going My Own Way,” he elaborates, correcting what I'd initially inferred. “I don't need women to make me happy. My eyes are open. I've taken the Red Pill.”

My first comeback to “I don't need women to make me happy” might be to respond, “Bodie, how do you know?” But I guess that would be mean.

“You know, that girl you like, she'll dump you. You know, that's what they do.” He repeats it, as if he's trying to implore me to listen. “That's what they do.”

“Nice to see you've got that figured out,” I shoot back.

“I do,” he says. “I see it all the time. It's my world. It always will be.”

“I don't doubt you're right.”

“Yeah,” he says, in a quieter voice. Whatever's going on in the next room draws him away, where I imagine he'll tell everyone out there he's big, now, and that he's taking red pills. He's no longer trying to pry Gayla's name from me, so....the desired effect.

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As of this writing I've got my irons in a few fires.....first and foremost “The Abbey of the Lemur” is BACK!!!! This is our first show since 2014 and we're hitting a string of milestones....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6OwLCpJ-0s

        This is the first-ever episode of the show where we embrace cellphone technology. The centerpiece for “Lemurs at Monte Ne” (the 15 minute video of our trip to the ruins at Monte Ne) was all shot on my phone. It's not great video, by any stretch, but it's one more stab at putting the production and dissemination of art and culture in the hands of whoever wants to do it.

It also marks the first appearance with written sketches of our little friends, the Devil Goats, since their brief origin in 2014's “The Megalithic Bamboozler” Beyond that we just padded it about with old stuff. Have fun.

Past that, expect two more episodes in 2017....one will be a tribute to late TAOTL cast member Adam “Dead Guy” Jardine----the other will be related to our 20^th anniversary on the airwaves in Fayetteville. Past that I couldn't tell ya, but like Joe Strummer said, “the future is unwritten”.

This also marks the very first episode of “The Abbey of the Lemur” to be uploaded on to YouTube in its entirety....all thanks to our wonderful providers at FPTV. You'll need to sign in to YouTube as an adult to watch it, and that's just what we gotta do. Prior administrations in the city (perhaps illegally) didn't offer the privilege of being shared online to VDA shows, so we're happy to let FPTV set up that precaution.

        ENJOY!

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          The SE Apocalypse Krew's album----tentatively titled “RISE”----is officially in the can! Yeah----it only took us 30someodd years!

You're gonna have to wait a little longer for the official release....right now I'm wrangling with the visual art aspects and then there are other logistics....but HEY! Lemme know if you're interested in covering this thing/reviewing or helping to promote it. Who knows? We could hook you up.

I'll personally tell you Mike and I are happy as hell with this beast----and it is a beast. 17 songs in 58 minutes and the thing just BLASTS. Mike had been floating me dailies on the production and even I wasn't ready for the face removal that is the final product, mixed and everything else. I spent over a week with it in the car, blasting it up and down the streets of Fayettenam. At long last, we're the monster I'd always hoped we'd be.

Heavy metal sprouted from the blues, originally, and in some respects, even as it's evolved into sort of a post-rock'n'roll genre, it is, in a lot of ways, similar to blues. Metal has its indelible conventions and tropes, just like blues does---its musicians and fans love these tropes and conventions and are dedicated to their perpetuation and preservation.

Mike and I, in that respect, are more jazz guys. Push to shove we'd rather hear someone break from the old tropes and take things in a direction we don't expect, and we like to do that ourselves. Not that you can't hear our influences----you'll hear a little Black Sabbath here, a little Black Flag there----a little Dead Boys here, a little Jimi Hendrix, there----a little Wes Montgomery here, etc., etc., etc. And yet at the same time we're our own animal.

Stay tuned.

APOCALYPSE NOTES: THE FEEL-GOOD MEDLEY CONTINUES

We kept plowing through our repertoire.

“KEEP WALKING”: A CONSCIENTIOUS UPDATE

“Contemplating, nature can be fascinating/Add to these a nose that I can thumb
And a mouth by gum have I/ To tell the whole darn world
If you don't happen to like it, deal me out/ Thank you, kindly pass me by”

---PEGGY LEE

The Apocalypse Krew, any way you slice it, are a dark fucking animal; Think of it this way----it's a world gone mad----popping out of every corner you've got homicidal valentines, soulless politicians lying through their teeth for the privilege of running your life and blowing you up in a nuclear war, scapegoating, bullshit, self-deception, bigotry-as-virtue, religion as commerce, workplace rage and garden variety stupidity and the Krew are kind of like your guides through all of this----stick close to us and we'll get you through to the egress. We hold the funhouse mirror up and society gets to see a really ugly reflection of itself.

We did two demos of “Keep Walking”----the earliest one was a very strange piece of music----Mike banged on an electronic drum kit (which sounded like a synth) and I grumbled the vocal through an octave divider, sounding like something that crawled out of a pond. It was kind of a hoot.

The second demo was more fleshed-out and it was obvious Mike had rebuilt it to be more of a legit song and not just an oddity. Most of its deficiencies were mine....the whole bit about “don't be fooled by the shit you read in magazines” was tackled in a way that (in my fevered imagination) was similar to the vocal interplay between Bob Mould and Grant Hart of Husker Du, who I worshiped at the time. My version sucked, long story short(I actually carried it off a lot better on “Kid Eternity”, a song I'll talk about here in a bit).

The new rendition Mike had recorded was actually very similar to the second demo----straightforward and stripped-down, a good foundation for what had become a really solid hard rock song. It was one song, though, that I felt like I had to revisit and mess with on moral grounds.

This is the back story to my rewrite of “Keep Walking”.

The Guy-who-doesn't-get-laid lyric was kind of a staple piece of subject matter with us. For every such lyric that made the cut there were 5 or 6 that didn't. “Keep Walking” was one that made the cut.

A friend once said he believed political correctness was a social contract---you were agreeing not to use hurtful language. As a writer, I want words to hurt, but I think it's important to be able to understand why they hurt and the reason behind using them. If you can't wrap your head around context, you're in trouble.

I go into anything I create knowing x number of people aren't going to like what I do for one reason or another, and I'm fine with that....but if people are going to hate what I do I want them to hate it for the right reasons----not because they didn't understand something. Nothing pisses me off more than not being understood.

The thing is this, though----I'm not the same person I was when I first helped form this band and wrote these lyrics. Are you the same person you were ten years ago? One year ago?

What happened with “Keep Walking” is that I heard, one morning, that a guy walked into a gym and gunned down a bunch of women because he was an Incel.

 

Incel, I learned, is jargon for “Involuntary Celibate”, e.g., a guy who can't get laid. From there I fell down a rabbit hole of Incels, MRAs, TFLers, MGTOWs, PUAs and other mental and emotional cripples. It's insane. A lot of these jokers watched “The Matrix” and apparently thought the shit was REAL. They ramble endlessly about the Red Pill and the Blue Pill as if any of it actually MEANT something! As frustrated and bent as I ever got back in the day (and I got to be one fucked customer), I never blamed an entire gender for my problems. And I had some fucking problems.

Going over the whole thing with my wife she recounted a lot of her early days of sexual frustration (That's right, incels, girls go through it, too) and said, yes, likewise, she never blamed all guys for what she was going through.

So there's no excuse.

I'm never going to apologize for swell-if-tasteless jokes like “First Stare” but I definitely thought, rather than make myself the poster boy for every psychotic charter member of the He Man Woman Haters' Club, I'd take an opportunity to inject some brains into the conversation.

The first part of the song is mostly part of what was in the early demos:

“I see you coming, you're like everyone else/

Don't look at me, don't bother with me/

None of your friends do, no, none of your friends do/

Keep on walking, turn your head, I'm not what you're here for/

Too uncool, trying to make the scene/

I'm on the outs if you know what I mean/

You're fooled by the shit in the magazines/

The real thing runs deeper than the screen/

I'm just a bug that got caught in your eye/

If you don't happen to like it, you'd better pass me by”

Inside tidbit: This last line references an old Peggy Lee song I used to hear a lot as a kid....lyrically, it's actually the same thing as “Keep Walking”, but more jaunty and carefree in its tone.

“Keep Walking!

CHORUS 1:

Ugly! Smart! Nothing you want/

Keep Walking, keep walking/

You're all alike, I know your type/

Keep Walking, Keep on walking”

The original line was actually “You're all alike. You're all the same”----the ultimate calling card of frustration and rejection. I play this out further and expand on it in the second chorus.

“The boys and the girls are all choosing their teams/

And if you're on the outs, then you know what I mean/

Don't wanna break their powder puff dreams/

Just two words---keep walking/

You're dodging a bullet, man, you're dodging a bullet/

Don't waste your time, Keep Walking”

Here I go from being the speaker addressing the girl he'll never win to being the guy who's seen it firsthand addressing the boys---and the girls----who are currently going through the same thing....you tell the people who are turning up their noses at you, “fuck off----keep walking”

“They're all alike, you know their type/

Keep Walking, Keep Walking/

Shallow, vapid, you heard what I said/

Keep Walking, keep walking”

And at the same time, “Keep Walking” becomes a phrase of encouragement. Don't let anyone make you feel like less than you want to be....stand up tall....keep walking.

“Don't let it bother you, I know you got this/

Keep Walking, keep walking”

We're walking an odd line, here...yeah, yeah, yeah, “Postal Rock”---but I told you about all the Free Speech Poster boys I don't wanna be thrown in with. The Elliot Rodgers of the world aren't going to get my help or support.

HOWEVER, we set ourselves up very early on as mouthpieces for disenfranchisement----so is there a middle ground? The world merrily going about its oblivious business like the big, dumb juggernaut it is won't stop alienated people from snapping, so what do we do? How can we bring the disenfranchised back into the fold and make them healthy participants?

What I would tell these Incels and other basket cases is that you need to go forth in life and find your voice, find your tribe, and apply your lives to something you're passionate about. Because if the only people you're ever running around trying to impress are people who don't know what you're about and who won't ever be able to relate to you, you're just gonna keep getting where you are now---NOWHERE. Nothing blows more than a loop of self-perpetuating failure. The further I got into music, art, writing, publishing and video---all the things I was actually good at and cared about---the more people I had that commonality with----the better things worked out for me. Do what you're built for and find your fuckin' tribe.

And work on your personality, goddammit. No----not your looks----I know a lot of you are down on your looks. Work on your personalities---I've seen a lot of ugly bastards get laid---I've seen a lot more guys who can't because they've got stank-ass personalities.

I tackled “Keep Walking” in much the same way as I tackled “Threats and Warnings”---pulled my punches, hung back and tried to let the words to the song breathe. My missteps were some screeching I did going into the last part....back in the 90s I might have been a little handier at hitting the high-pitched shit. Nowadays? Forget it....

 

“23”: THE SOFT ONE

“I'm a fuckin' artist! I'm sensitive as shit!!!!

----PHILTHY ANIMAL TAYLOR

“23” was a weird one---by our standards---by anyone's. I had initially wanted to make it the very last vocal I cut---after all the really hard, extreme stuff---when my voice was absolutely in shreds.

“23” is a ballad, for lack of a better term, and because I'm a bad singer, my prescription for a ballad is to lay my voice absolutely naked and raw and open up as many of its weaknesses (which are, of course, legion) as possible. Following the David Byrne line of thought for singing, be as vulnerable as possible, because the listener hears a bad voice and it's more human.

There were actually TWO demos for “23”---the original and an alternate take---they may have had the same instrumental track (I'm FAIRLY CERTAIN of this) but the vocals (and the lyrics) were different.

I hated the original vocal----I recorded it with a heavy cold and you can tell, when you listen to it, that I'm congested. You can hear my stuffed-up nose. I was also of the belief, at the time, that the lyric, and the vocal, were too wimpy. I wrote an angrier lyric and recorded a more strident vocal-----I heard it once and never again---”23” version 2 was lost to the ages, so all you get is me trying to be sentimental and sincere through a stuffed up nose.

Until now, anyway.

“23” was another song that remained fundamentally unchanged from the early days----same arrangement, same everything.

Listening back on it, I decided the first lyrics to “23” were actually among my best, and I chose not to change a thing from the original. Newer, meaner version? Hell with it.

The one difference in the new “23” is simply how much better Mike McAdam is. Musically it might be comparable to something like “Kangaroo” by Big Star, and I know that's a hell of a comparison. I'm no Alex Chilton, but that's not to take anything away from the song. It's a quiet, beautiful song dominated by layers of chimey guitar---Mike's creating all kinds of subtle insanity going on in the nooks and crannies.

There's a lot of quiet drama going on in the song---I am not the “Speaker” in “23”. I came up in an era of straightforward, minimalist poetry that came from the gut. Academics told us that confessional poetry was the earmark of an immature voice----our response was, “if not confessional, then what, and why bother?” If you weren't speaking from your own experiences, you were a pretentious phony. In my old age I'm more ambivalent to that stand, because these days I'm more interested in telling stories and conveying ideas than I am in spilling my guts. At any rate, the guts in “23” are just practical effects. A friend at the time had just turned 23 and she was bemoaning the fact that you could find a song dedicated to almost any age, but no one had ever written a song about being 23----so I took that as a challenge.

“Burning at 23/ Nothing was made for me/

I couldn't get with the program/ Or buy the complacency/

I beat my head against the wall/Called it catharsis, shutting you out”

 

Very dramatic.

One thing we seldom give credence is that once a kid turns eighteen they may legally be an adult, but they're not necessarily “grown up”. The young adult fucks up a lot---there's a lot of trial and error before you emerge mature.

And busting out of that chrysalis hurts most of the time.

“Screamed and I bled just to make you get human/

To see that screen flicker, just once”

Very dramatic....

 

THE SICK JOKE: “KID ETERNITY”

“Society nods its head at any horror the American Teenager can think to bring upon itself!”

---J.D., “Heathers”

At some point, “Kid Eternity” felt like a fine one to do.....it's a solid favorite of mine, hinging on an abrasive stack of riffs, a mean spirit and a sick sense of humor. If I were to give you a short list of songs to listen to as a basic crash course explanation as to “what are the S.E. Apocalypse Krew and what's a ballpark definition of their sound?” I'd probably throw you “Kid Eternity”, “Threats and Warnings” and “Pig” (which I'll write more about in another blog) and that would be a good nutshell picture.

“Kid Eternity” was going to be another basic one----there aren't a whole lotta frills in it or any need to be subtle or exotic....and it was another one where, arrangement-wise, it hadn't changed significantly since we'd cut the demo. I hadn't done any re-writing, here, I wanted to keep “Kid” as pure as we could.

What made “Kid” an interesting one to tackle was that I'd be doing two vocal tracks and playing against myself in kind of a schizo-vocal duel.

“Overdose on a stockpile of valium and gin/

Wake up with a rubber tube jammed down my throat/

looks like the kid loses again/

and everybody acts like it's my fault”

I start off squawking in unison with myself on the phrases, “Overdose” and “Wake Up”...in both cases the vocals aren't exactly harmonized---they're slightly off each other, giving it that chaotic feel...I will always love you, Husker Du...when it comes to the third line, the first vocal barks, “looks like,” and on the second vocal, I follow it immediately with a very sharp scream, “LOOKS LIKE!” and then the first vocal picks up again after a brief pause with a third, resigned, grudging “looks like” before I double myself again with “Everybody” on the last line.

On the chorus, I'm doubling myself in the early lines....on track one I'm singing,

“Brought back to a world where I don't wanna be,”

And with the second track I'm just rasping in unison, “Brought BAAAAAAAAACK....”

The effect, I hope, is pure audio venom.

The protagonist of the song engages in serial failed suicides, less in a miserable attempt to end his existence and more in a pathological “fuck you” to everyone around him. He expresses only dripping contempt for the people who are trying to help him, as well as the people who would be forced to deal with his violent departure:

“Shrink says, 'life is what you make it, son,' /

I say, 'fine----then let me make it go away' “

This was my one actual personal statement in the song...in the 80s, as an angsty young adult Asperger's case, most of my whining was met with the stoic phrase, “well, life is what you make it,” and I hated being told shit like that. The people who told me things like that never included me in their reindeer games, so in my opinion, they were the world's worst hypocrites.

And yes, of course, ultimately, you are in control of your own happiness and you do have a degree of control over your own life (A degree---never total). But in my late teens/early-to-mid 20s I was very far away from that realization.

“Take Dad's gun from the drawer and aim it at my head/

they'll sue Ozzy and be happy to have someone to blame”

And yeah----we had to go there! I know, once again, I'm dating us with the Ozzy Suicide reference, but is the stupidity of scapegoating ever NOT a relevant subject? It might be Ozzy, it might be Judas Priest, it might be Marilyn Manson, Eminem, Coldplay (okay---it probably won't be Coldplay) but some opportunistic Culture Warrior out there is always ready to point a finger at the arts when something goes south in the world of youth. And like I've already said, I've spent my whole adult life sharpening my blades for THAT fight.

Our hero doesn't stop at plaguing his doctors or his parents, though;

“Ex-girlfriend comes to visit me/

'We all care about you,' she says/

'stop trying to take your life!'

'You care so much you dumped me, bitch,'

and then I laugh and say goodbye”

In the end he's cutting off his nose to spite his face.

“Cut my wrists, blood all over the bathroom floor/

all stained---guess Mom's gonna be really sore/

Getting real sick of hearing everyone's shit/

Cut my ears off---now I don't listen anymore”

 

This kid's kind of an asshole.

I know this is one of those instances where people won't like it because we're making an ugly joke out of a very serious subject. I've lost friends to suicide and other stupid things, but every time someone blames a recording artist for their unhappy kid's suicide, their denial is making it a worse joke than we ever could...and folks can wring their hands as much as they want, it's still going on, so I guess they're the ones who are mishandling it.

I remember my Mom, who was an administrator in a mental health facility, pointing out my Suicidal Tendencies tee-shirt at that time and saying, “I hate that. Do you want to know why?”

I couldn't imagine. “Because I see it at work every day.”

I'm lousy with follow-through, but if I'd had my druthers, I might have played “Institutionalized” at her and said, “you know why I love this? Because I've felt like that three quarters of my life!”

All I wanted was a Pepsi......

 

Incidentally, I see what I did, there, and I'm sure somebody will want to try and hold my feet to the fire over it. I altered an original lyric because one group “didn't need any help” with their bullshit and I stuck to my guns with another.

So, in summary: The Elliot Rodgers of the world get no support from me with their demented, self-deceiving bullshit. Lonely kids who see outside the box get a nod because their lives will get better. Kids who are suicidal get a nod from me because they genuinely do need help. They aren't getting it, however, from the Culture War ballscratchers who claim to be in their corner.

There you go.

NEXT: THE FOUR FOOD GROUPS

APOCALYPSE NOTES: MANIFESTOES AND MAPS

“If you're crazy enough you'll get your own band.”

--FETISH

It took me three or four years to make the vocal end of the Apocalypse Krew album happen. The bitch of being a working class artist never ends. I watched the recording of the basic tracks happen from afar. Musicians were introduced to the project----some contributed, others had to bail. I got sent most of the basic tracks through Dropbox. I tried to send lyrics back through Dropbox but that didn't work so well. Oh, well. Technology turns to dried shit in my fingers.

Mike and I needed to address some things going into the project---most notably the fact that close to 25 years have passed since the Apocalypse Krew were actually a “Thing”. It's a different world, and goddammit, we're two very different people from the guys who formed that band back in the mid 80s. Do we come at it from a different, more mature perspective? Or do we pick up where we left off?

To put it bluntly: Does the S.E. Apocalypse Krew, in our old age, clean up our act?

Short answer: Hell no. To quote Mike, “political correctness is getting pretty ridiculous.”

“Getting”? Shit. It was an idiotic proposition when it first reared its ugly head in the late 80s/early 90s...I made up my mind back then that no one would ever convince me to call short people “Vertically Challenged”. Despite media fueled hysteria I'm personally convinced that ninety per cent of all people, whether they're on the right, the left or the two-headed giraffe contingent, don't give a rat's ass about political correctness. It has next to no bearing on anyone's actual life outside a handful of handwringing campus radicals who live in a bubble world they can't see outside of, but which disappears shortly after you graduate. Whatever will they do?

I've been a free speech advocate my whole life. It's been a driving factor in most things I've done. From the time the Chelmsford City Council decided to ban “The Warriors” at the local cinema in the late '70s to Tipper Gore and Susan Baker and their PMRC witch hunt in the '80s to the Dead Kennedys and their bullshit “obscenity” trial over the H.R. Giger art in the “Frankenchrist” album, my path was pretty much laid out for me. This was going to be my fucking war.

I carried that aesthetic with me from my days as a zine publisher to my days as a public access TV producer, where my crew and I actually faced an obscenity hearing. Yeah----thanks for presenting me with a battle I spent my entire adult life preparing for, douchenozzles....I got to make monkeys out of an entire city administration and all their sycophantic buddies in the newspapers who threw in to help make their arguments for them. And I got to dog them all for years afterwards. 

My journey (I hate that term, by the way---why's everything gotta be a goddamned JOURNEY these days?!) as a free speech advocate has been a bumpy one, though. Most of today's Free Speech Poster Boys are troglodytes and morons and I can't relate to them at all, don't want to be associated with them and am not interested in their quandaries. I was having a conversation a couple of months ago with an old colleague and we were touching on some pet peeves----political correctness, censorship, morality policing....he was alluding to a lot of the nonsense going on on campuses these days, what with PC brain police, trigger terror, Social Justice Warriors et. al. And he told me, “Gamergate was really just the tip of the iceberg!”

And that was about where my brain broke.

“Gamergate”. Okay---my read on Gamergate (as a non-gamer) was that it was primarily about a bunch of dingleberries who couldn't get any and who lived in their parents' basements freaking the fuck out because GIRLS were actually trying to assume a place in gamer culture and so they reacted the way any enlightened individuals would---with verbal abuse, harassment and threats of rape and murder. Yeah, gee, who couldn't get behind that?

“No, no,” goes the other side---”it's about ethics in Gaming Journalism!”

AH. YES. Okay---that explains away all the rape and murder threats PERFECTLY.

So it became apparent my old colleague and I were at a philosophical stalemate. I'm of two minds when it comes to the SJWs----more often than not I agree with them, at least until they start policing peoples' language and trying to put Trigger Warnings on everything. If their meds are balanced enough to where they don't need to go there, maybe we can sit at the table and talk.

This was a philosophical inner conflict that might not dominate the recording and rewriting of certain songs----but it came up periodically and it was always worth writing about when it did.

But from bands to writing to the zine to political activism to video and now back to the band, I knew in each and every instance the fight I was probably in for...I've fought against the death of irony since people declared it dead after 9/11 and I fought for the importance of context since 2007 or 2008, when a number of citizens fell all over themselves in an attempt to ban books in the local school system...they later wound up forming the crux of the local Tea Party---a much-overlooked blow to anyone who thinks these clowns are the new champions of freedom---the only freedom they're concerned with is their own.

And I'm still fighting for the importance of context—--something that should be a no-brainer to most people. It'll come up several times in this series.

Not that it should have to, but......pleebs.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BRANDING

“Know who you are...know where you're going to.”

---AMBROSE SLADE

If there was anything we were good at with the Apocalypse Krew, it was forging a distinct identity. Whatever the hell else was wrong with us---from living in a suburb without much culture to musical schizophrenia to our inability to find and keep musical collaborators----we were good at drawing a concrete picture of ourselves.

We were washing dishes at a hotel at the time—our white (and more often than not stained and mottled) work shirts became part of our visual identity; we began drawing band graffiti on our disposable folding paper hats and it was only a matter of time before we started defacing old work shirts with similar graphics. The “Band”, such as it was (and it was barely a band---it was more of an attitude problem on wheels), turned into a lifestyle. We'd rove around at night, stop in various fast food joints, people watch with glaring contempt toward everyone and scribble lyrics, legends, cartoon art and slogans in our notebook, assigning wherever we wrote the designation of “Pit”. Friendly's Pit. Mall Food Court Pit. Denny's Pit. They were all pits. We looked around us and there was no hope.

My original vision of the Apocalypse Krew was of less a concrete band and more of a loose collective engaging in a series of terroristic, random “performances”----home invasions set to music. I saw us as kind of an amalgam of the Fugs, the Sex Pistols and Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable, pulling up in a truck in a shopping mall parking lot, berating the consumers with horrific, antisocial acoustic “songs” and then blowing out of Dodge before the cops showed up.

Mike was learning to play guitar (his original musical experiences were as a drummer) and as he learned his way around the fretboard the band's music began to take shape. The vehicle was hard rock, although if you looked at any of our “Musicians Wanted” flyers you would have seen the immediate problem...musical influences included Van Halen, the Velvet Underground, the Mothers of Invention, the Sex Pistols, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Suicide, the Stooges and Black Flag.

Do WHAT, now?????

Musical schizophrenia.

So we'd get guys who were trying to put together a Fate's Warning cover band and they thought we were too punk. We'd connect with a Clash fan who thought we were too metal. We briefly had a Lynyrd Skynyrd-loving, music theory-obsessed drummer who wrote all his songs in G (“It fits my voice”) and whose frequent response to our songs was “I don't know where THAT'S going!”

It was best typified by us showing up to rehearsal wearing “The Two Dead Guys”----Mike in a Jimi Hendrix tee-shirt, me wearing an Ian Curtis shirt. No one would ever understand.

But goddammit, no matter who we confused the hell out of, we had our branding down!

A lot of the visual identity we crafted revolved around logos and catch phrases (“What your subliminal mind is coming to”, “Your worst nightmare come true: People who think”, “I hate Everything/Everyone/You”) and these little cartoon characters we called “DREGS”. They typically wore white short sleeve workshirts, long bangs that covered their eyes (a defense mechanism?) and were often seen curled into fetal positions as if they couldn't take one more minute of living. One Dreg I drew was all red-faced, aggro and enraged, with tears in his eyes, screaming, “go ahead, pig---beat me up----I'll make you pay!!!!” The guy knew he was going to get his ass kicked and there was nothing he could do about it-----but he would devote the rest of his life to hurting his oppressor/persecutor in every way humanly possible. The Dregs were what we saw as caricature proxies of our assumed audience, but also, to one degree or another, ourselves and the brash-but-maladjusted attitudes reflected in our songs.

I was coming up with phrases like “Nerd Rock” or “Loser Rock”----Mike preferred the term, “Fuckup Rock”. In the run-up to re-recording the songs I thought of “Postal Rock” (we were natural maladjusts who were fascinated by the trend of “going postal”---”Taxi Driver” was a common favorite movie and we even entertained the notion of writing a concept album about a guy going postal).

By the early 90s we had drifted apart a bit----I had begun focusing on novels and short stories (I eventually started this little zine that did okay for a while) and Mike had begun playing guitar for this prominent local prog rock band. Still, it was hard to let go of a beast like the S.E. Apocalypse Krew. A lot of our material was damned good---Lollapalooza was happening, Alt Rock was happening, bands like Jane's Addiction were breaking out and a lot of the old, archaic barriers between “Punk”, “Metal” and whatever else were falling apart...we liked this and we kept recording demos but it was never enough.

Mike got busy with a legit gig and I drifted further down the rabbit hole of writing and xerographic publishing. His fortunes took him on tour around Europe, mine took me across America, where I eventually landed in Northwest Arkansas and that led to eighty billion other things.

The Apocalypse Krew, though, like some latent tumor, never really left our brains.

SPIRIT, NOT THE LETTER

One thing I began noticing with the recuts of the old material was that not all of them were According-to-Hoyle. I had enough oldass demos on ratty, 20-plus-year-old cassette tapes to where a number of the arrangements were burned into my brain. This wasn't a major issue---it enabled me to mess with some arrangements and write some new verses to flesh things out. It led to some things getting interesting when we set down to record.

Mike informed me, while we were recording vocals, that when he and Brad the drummer recorded these tracks he went more from ballpark memory and didn't rely on the old recordings for a reference point at all.

And having learned that, I thought he did a stellar fucking job. For an intuitive methodology, Mike nailed it.

THE DEVIL SENDS THE BEAST WITH WRATH FOR HE KNOWS HIS TIME IS SHORT

Riding into Boston with my brother Steve we immediately went into planning mode. How many nights would I be spending in New Hampshire? Three. How much of that would be spent recording? I guesstimated, maybe two and a half days. “You guys are doing, what? Nine or ten songs?” I guessed---I had a few lyric sheets in my overnight bag. I really didn't feel like digging through it for an official count. “That's pretty rough, trying to get through that in two and a half days,” he said.

I inwardly shuddered. I hadn't done any serious singing, recorded or otherwise, in the twenty-someodd years since the Apocalypse Krew first stomped around Nashua, throwing our ugly business around however we could. Practice? You've gotta be joking. I've spent the last twenty years in Fayetteville living in a succession of tiny apartments, usually with paper-thin walls. “Practice” wasn't about to happen.

A daunting challenge, but where there's a will there's a way. I'd overestimated on one point: That first half day of recording wound up being a wash. And I'd underestimated on another. Nine or ten songs to lay down vocals on? No.

There were seventeen.

Seventeen songs in two days....quite the challenge indeed.

We had one strange bit of luck that was going to turn the whole circumstance in our favor, though; I'm a bad singer.

That's not to say I'm a badass singer or a really super-awesome singer....I'm a terrible fucking singer. Always have been.

NEXT: SOFTBALLIN'