Pigtail's Blog

Call Me Pigtail 12/20

2012-02-22T15:52:00.000-08:00

...and this dude next to me turns on his barstool and looks me in the eye and says, "Honestly, and I really mean this, you guys are the worst band I have ever seen in my life."

Mission accomplished!

Here's a little post-script to our utter and uncontested triumph over Tipitina's: the next night we are still in New Orleans, having found a groovy bunch of young fans to crash with, their messy apartment actually overlooks the noisy French Quarter (harsh morning light streams in through the ancient white-washed horizontal slats on the shutters; somehow it's meaningful to be seeing them from the inside, instead of gazing up like all the tourists), and that night we hear about an event at Tipitina's, a movie opening party or some such official closed event with popular people and free food and drink, and somehow the idea of crashing this party gets stuck in our minds. So we get seriously tricked out in our finest white tuxes and green pants, adorn our strong young bodies with trinkets, beads, and other swag from the Quarter, get a little liquid courage on board, pull our Hawaiian punch brims low over our eyes, and follow the searchlights over to Tipitina's. In a purposeful single file the three of us walk in past the velvet ropes and black-clad bouncers like we own the place. Which, in a sense, we do. If anyone shouts at us to stop, I certainly never hear it. Inside we mingle and drink and eat, entirely at home among the celebrities we do not recognize. High class. Right where we belong.

But here's the punch-line: at the bar, we overhear the manager-type, who never bothered to show up the night before when we played, bitching about something. Apparently the assholes in one of the bands last night threw fucking marshmallows all over the place. They got ground into the fucking carpet, and there was no way to get that shit out before the party. They almost had to move the whole thing to the fucking DoubleTree hotel! If he could just get his hands on those guys...

Tipitina's: outpunked!

Jackson, MS was pretty wicked cool as well. Here's the story, recorded in our tour diary that some of you may have seen, but most of you have not, I'm guessing:

We were in the van on tour, hurtling down the road in probably Georgia or Mississippi. We were on our way to a gig at a club in Jackson called W. C. Don's, which was nothing more or less than two decrepit trailer homes nailed together to form a "T." The nailing together of the two homes had been done in a very half-hearted and probably illegal manner. You could see the sky from anywhere in the club and when it rained it basically rained right on your amps and your drummer.

We were playing there for what they called "Teen Night," an event that drew about 300 hot-looking youngsters to this nasty dive bar. It was a huge social event for the entire southern area! Since everyone was between the ages of twelve and seventeen, the bar couldn't serve any alcohol. So all of these young people were out of their minds on Extacy. The owner of W. C. Don's was no dummy -- he realized that this unpleasant drug actually sucks the fluid out of your brain and makes you ferociously thirsty, so the bar sold little plastic cups of tap water for $1 apiece. When he was paying us our $125 at the end of the night he told us that the bar had made $1,500 on tap water alone.

Later we learned that there was no one actually called Don, or even W. C., involved with this skanky place in any way. It was called that because the owner and his friends were sitting around trying to think of a name, and the best they could manage was "We Couldn't Decide On a Name." W. C. D. O. N.' s.

But we rocked W. C. Don's! The drug-addled teens hugged and shouted, especially when GT tossed florets of raw broccoli to them. We couldn't fail, because the drugs they had taken forced them to fall in love with anything anyone did. They loved us passionately. It really didn't matter that we were scorching the hell out the place. But we were anyway -- NDI doesn't know how to NOT rock!

The last few days of the tour were fuzzy with fever and face gruffle. But we did make it home! And when we did, it was time to record our first album...

Call Me Pigtail 11/20

2012-02-11T15:16:00.001-08:00

It's hard to leave the Country Rockers in the middle of their second set and go across the street to the dark and nasty confines of the Antenna Club, but we're due on stage in a half an hour and we need to put on our stage tuxes and get our voices limbered up. There are a few people there, not many, it's a Wednesday night and we're pretty unknown, but there's a good rock feeling in the air. We hit the stage and people stop what they're doing to stare at us, always a good sign, and afterward we collect quite a few names for the mailing list, a few more sick and twisted fans.

After the people are gone and the gear is more or less packed up we're sitting at the bar having a post-gig cocktail, watching a flickery image on the black and white TV behind the bar. It's hooked up to a VCR and they are showing a video of last night's show here, some slimy motherfucker rolling around on the ground, and I'm watching, and I realize it's gg allin, a true madman, a bad person, a performance artist really, who strips naked and shits on stage and throws his poo into the crowd, and generally goes one big step farther than any other "punk" act in existence. His music is without any merit whatsoever but I guess you have to give him some kind of credit. We're watching, transfixed, and gg is rolling on the stage in broken glass from a bottle he smashed on himself, there's shit and blood all over -- how did they clean this up? The club does smell like bleach, come to think of it. This is really disturbing. Then gg rolls over and there's something coming out of his ass, a tube of some kind, a thin black cord. A microphone cord. "Whoa," I say. "Does he have that mic completely up his ass?" The bartender dude looks up at the screen and laughs. "Yeah," he says. "It took us forever to clean that fucker off."

“To clean off what – the mic?”

“Yeah,” says the bartender. “Nasty.”

I have to put two and two together, though God knows I don't want to: the mic I had spent all night singing into had spent much of the previous evening up the ass of one of the most unclean humans alive. What place on earth could be more toxic than gg allin's colon?

Bartender, another drink!

The Antenna club out-punked us, maybe, but a couple of nights later we get our revenge by out-punking Tipitina's, apparently a legendary club in New Orleans. Already over a week into our first NDI tour, we're submerging into our new identities with alarming ease. We are basically always in character, at breakfast, in truck stops, at the hotel, and of course at the shows, and our first glimpse of the moss-heavy trees and wrought-iron balconies of the old town feels like coming home. We can be our new selves here without thinking twice, since everyone else seems to be engaged in their own inside joke, their own bit. Some folks are wearing hats just like ours. Fans? Not yet...

We pull up and hike on into Tipitina's, a classy joint that is gorgeous and big and by far the nicest club we have played on this tour, or ever. How the fuck did we get this gig? Apparently Kenn, the suddenly motivated booking agent for the New Duncan Imperials, had convinced them that the band would be perfect for their weekly "Live from Tip's" radio broadcast on WTUL, the Tulane University college radio station. So we are in the middle of a triple bill of bands playing what would these days be called "alternative rock," and the entire performance will be broadcast live on the radio. Can you see snazzy tux coats and flying chicken claws on the radio? No, but who cares? All we have to do is be exactly on-time to the stage. And no swearing.

The old band would have taken this shit seriously. The new band doesn't take anything seriously, and so ninety seconds before we're supposed to take our positions on stage Skipper decides that our matching green pants, purchased the day before at a Salvation Army store in a town somewhere around Birmingham, would look slick with our white tux coats. He's right -- we absolutely need to change. So the NDI start pulling off their pants in the dressing room while the dead-voiced college radio deejay girl begins introducing the band. "Next we have The New Duncan Imperials, from Bucksnort, that's in Tennessee... and we've been promised a highly visual show... The New Duncan Imperials... from Bucksnort..." It's a long and wonderfully awkward moment, the empty air and this helpless college mouse with nothing behind her voice, no power, even when she intones in disgust, "amazing...", and then finally, five minutes late, the band bursts onto the stage, banging drums and throwing handfuls of breakfast cereal at the crowd, and we strap on and the first shot of power knocks them back, it has this entire tour, and after everyone gets their feet back under them it's off to the races, forty minutes of prehistoric riffs mixed with Klassic Kountry, including a song we picked up from our Country Rockers cassette, "Rockin Daddy from Ding Dong Tennessee," and then GT is out in the crowd handing out our free-shit gift of choice these days, Sta-Puft marshmallows, and he shows the crowd how to whip them at us, and now we're playing in a hail of the harmless things, they patter against us while our power riffs push the crowd around like drunken sailors on a sinking ship, and this is what it is, why we are what we are. “Aw,” says Skipper after a brutal take on “Jimi Page Loves Country,” “you fuckers are the best!” He really means it, and it's true, but he forgot we're not supposed to swear, and soon a stage manager dude, the kind of person we have come to refer to as a "squid," is at the side of the stage waving his arms around, trying to get us to stop. But Skipper says it again: “No, really. I mean it. You guys are the fucking BEST!” The squid is losing his mind, they shut off our vocal mics, and we do “Velour” and just yell the title at the crowd, and we're done, we leave the stage, we rule. The lecture from the squid is a foregone conclusion, and as it turns out pretty entertaining in its own right. The deejay girl will not speak to us. We wander out into the crowd and people are smiling and laughing, we entertained them, mission accomplished, and I am high on life and a fair amount of Jagermeister and I lean up on the bar to get another drink and this random dude next to me turns on his barstool and looks me in the eye and says, "Honestly, and I really mean this, you guys are the worst band I have ever seen in my life."

Mission accomplished!

Call Me Pigtail 10/10

2012-02-05T08:38:00.000-08:00

The day comes, it's Leaving Day, and the van rolls up to get me, and right away it's clear that touring NDI-style is a new game. GT and Skipper are wearing thrift-store suit coats and garish ties; they both reek of Hai Karate, and Skipper appears to be growing a fu manchu. It's five hours to Iowa City, and with every passing mile we sink deeper into the hermetically sealed hyper-reality of our new selves. A stop at a travel plaza for gas and Little Debbies and MD 20/20 wine; by the time we pull into the featureless outskirts of Iowa City the show has basically already started.

Loading into the club, trucking our gear and props up the slippery iron stairs in our thrifted old-man shoes, we pass each other and giggle. And on-stage, heads swimming, the band is sloppy and uncontrollable, rolling through a set that is dangerously close to falling apart, a hurtling train; there are some kids there, fans of the opening band, along with a few weirdos who go to clubs without knowing who's playing, and that new magic, the rock and roll fairy dust with which we are now somehow frosted, is in full effect. The crowd is jumping and thrashing and laughing, just plain bonkers, and we are all in love and it is so loud and nothing matters, after so long when everything mattered, now nothing matters; and now the show is over and we load out down the slippery metal stairs in our old man shoes and straw hats and sweat-sodden tux coats, pile everything and ourselves into the van; and then we are at the Motel 6 in Coralville Iowa, poured into bed; and the room is a swirling black and sparkly universe of noise, and the noise is in your head, and then it's five hours later, and the sun is burning through the ugly motel curtains and the phone rings and the front desk wants you to know that check-out was half an hour ago, and even then, even when you are miserable and subhuman, even then, you still feel the rock and roll angels hovering over you, lifting you up, whispering in your ear: "Get up, motherfucker. You are Pigtail."

Into the van and on to St. Louis. We load in, we play, the people clap, we load out, we go to the hotel. So okay, we don't see God every night. This is still rock and roll at the very lowest level, and we can forgive the world for not rolling over to have its belly scratched every night. So it's on to Louisville. And at this gig, God does show up. On stage in Louisville, pounding through the third song, "Hamhocks," it's time for my guitar solo, and I hoist my Les Paul strings-side-up, and I site down the neck at the crowd like I'm aiming a gun, get my slick-as-shit two-tone loafer on the old Crybaby wah wah pedal, and here's my solo: a frantic back-and-forth across the strings, open and unfretted because I'm holding the heavy guitar up with my other hand, just six open strings at full vibration, full volume, and the wah wah glissandos up and down the tonal range, and it sounds like shit, noise, a harsh wall of shitty noise, but with GT pounding that tribal beat and Skipper doing his best to keep up, it sounds right. And look here, in front of the stage: almost a hundred people crammed up front, rocking, blissed-out faces upturned. We can do no wrong, because the more wrong we are, the more they love us. This is how it works, after all: people tell people tell people tell people, and next thing you know you're a rock star, people reaching arms up to you, laughing and singing and dancing and falling down and getting back up and shaking their hair and laughing and singing and dancing – three encores, we are out of songs, so we start making them up, some we will remember and play for the rest of the tour. I wake up the next morning still wearing my hat. Actually, no -- Pigtail wakes up the next morning still wearing Pigtail's hat.

Memphis. We load in and set up. The Antenna Club is big and dark, black spray-painted plywood inside and out, top to bottom -- a real punk rock crypt. Sound check, fine, no mysteries there, except the microphone smells atrocious and the monitors sound like shit, and here we are, it's nine o'clock and the bar isn't even open yet, we don't go on for hours, and sitting around here isn't really our style, so what else is there? Skipper pokes his nose out the door and comes back with a report: "Fellas, there's a real swank bar across the street. We need to go get a cocktail."

Walking together into bars, or truck-stop diners, or small-town thrift stores, has become a source of amusement for the NDI, and this little dive bar proves no exception. It's that scene from a movie: people stop in mid-sentence, swivel in their seats, eyes on the new dudes in town, three swinging dicks flashing through the door in matching tuxes and ties, raggedy Hawaiian Punch hats low over their eyes, looking for space at the bar, teeth smiling at the strangers around them. We're friendly and we drink interesting drinks and GT can play pool, so these scenes pretty much always turn out fine. In this case we order three black russians and light up cigarettes, smile at the world. And looky here -- there's a stage, orange and red lights and a tinsel backdrop and drums and amps, but no band, they might be on break, and we give each other a nod or two, people resume talking, and we drink our drinks and soak up life and enjoy the mind-meld, no talking necessary, and then there's a sound, the band is taking the stage, and we make our way up front to check them out, and oh my goodness.

A three-piece band, bass, guitar and drums. Matching jackets. Hats. They start playing, a simple, powerful riff, "Rockin Daddy from Ding-Dong, Tennessee." It's all so familiar, but check it – the drummer is so old he can hardly stay on the throne. His eyes are puffy and squinty and he's totally bald, maybe five feet tall, barely mobile. His arms and hands and fingers are weirdly short, stubby, like a cartoon -- he might have only four fingers on each hand. How does he hold the sticks? The guitar player/singer dude is no spring chicken either -- at least in his sixties. The bass player is the youngest of the three, and he looks drunk, wobbly. But oooh, listen, Skipper. Listen GT. These cats have got something. "My Happiness," -- "whether skies are gray or blue/any place on earth will do"... crooned by the drummer in a cracked, croaky voice, then "Pistol Packin' Mama," "Bucket's Got a Hole" -- the drummer swinging behind his kit, little stubby arms pounding the beat. Who are these motherfuckers? How do they manage to be so great, so right, when they're so messed up and strange? We're not so drunk or stupid that we don't immediately see the connection: it's us, us in some future decade, here at this Memphis dive bar, slinging the shit for a half-wit room, running down the old songs, the old standards, not for the people at the bar but for ourselves, for the love of music, even if it long since stopped loving us back. After the set we rush the stage, bring them drinks, babbling. They tell us the drummer's name is Ringo. It's all so perfect.

Now Skipper's doing it again -- the band wad is out. He's talking to the singer, Gene, the cat most likely to be capable of carrying on a sensible conversation. But I repeat -- the band wad is out. Skipper is buying something -- a cassette! He's actually buying another's band merch. But we approve -- of course we do. We now have a precious artifact, a bone for the reliquary, a memento of our future. This cassette will stay in the van tape player for weeks and months, and we will cover nearly every song on it, from those already mentioned to "There Stands the Glass," "Barrooms to Bedrooms," and "Yearnin Burnin Heart." Everything we do in the country vein from here on out will be either a cover or a direct rip of the songs on this album.

Back inside the Antenna Club...

Call Me Pigtail 9/20

2012-02-04T03:52:00.000-08:00

On The Road Again (Again)

The wanderlust is building, the countryside is calling. Time to wake up and go outside, back out to where we were, the clubs and college towns. Let's get in the van and drive and drive and drive and fill foreign stages with our glorious tacky debris, blast their brains out with our new-found power, make them hate us, make them love us. It will be hard at first, there will be some empty clubs, just like in Chicago. But we don't care. We've seen worse.

Somehow the old band always managed to get gigs in towns from San Francisco to Winnipeg, from Memphis to NYC. We never drew crowds or made any money, yet they booked us again and again. Why? Well, that band looked good on paper. We had four albums and a decent press kit, and we know how to manage time and distance and money and promotion. But now, who is "we"? Does Skipper Zwakinov know how to pick up a phone, dial a number, and deliver a coherent pitch to a busy club owner? Does Pigtail Dick know how to package and address a stack of fliers with the correct date on them? Can Goodtime Dammitt read a map and tell the band how to find the club? No, no, and no. The solution is obvious, at least to us: Let Kenn, Rick and John book, promote, and plan the tour. But in that process always, always, refer to Skipper, Pigtail and GT in the third person. Deny any association. Put our logistical expertise and experience to work on behalf of these three idiots who are incapable of wiping their own noses and who, of course, are also us. Only they aren't. It can get a little confusing. Only it's not.

So in the little office from which he books our old band along with a few other local semi-losers, Kenn picks up the phone and dials a club in Iowa City and asks to speak to Dan, the booker. Kenn has booked our other band there many times, the two dudes are friends, and Kenn says "Yeah, Dan, listen. We got a new band over here. I'm pretty sure you're gonna like these guys." And then he goes into some detail about this hot new property, but never mentions he's in the band, or that it is in fact made up of three guys Dan knows well, we've even done a few short tours together with his side band, so when NDI finally does pull up in front of the Iowa City club and climb out and wander into the club, in our matching hats and matching snazzy coats and encounter Dan at the bar, he'll give us a "what the fuck?" look and Skipper will walk up to him and stick out his hand and say, with the most unruffled straight face in the business, "Skipper Zwakinov. Nice to meet you." There are a lot of Dans out there, a lot of clubs our old band played, and Kenn spends a lot of time on the phone talking up the new rock ensemble.

Those clubs where we have never played, have never been invited/allowed to play, are a little tougher to crack. So how does NDI approach a club for the first time? For most bands at this time, the standard promo pack includes an 8x10 black and white glossy photo with the band's name, a poorly executed bio with dubious claims and outrageous spelling, and a stapled-together packet of photocopied clippings from local papers and zines. Bands with recordings to flaunt, like our old band, toss those in as well. It's a conformist and awkward little exercise.

NDI has no recordings, no reviews or press clippings, no photos to speak of. We're unknown and stupid. But what the fuck -- it don't matter. We put one together in the same spirit that we set up the stage and make up our songs. So here's what's in the official New Duncan Imperials promo pack that we mail to clubs::

* a thrift store TV with the guts removed and a photo copy of Skipper's grinning face taped to the screen

* a hand-written plea from Goodtime to book our band "because we are nice."

* a copy of "Sir!" magazine

* a double handful of confetti

* two or three packages of pork rinds and moon pies

* condoms

* noisemakers and party horns

* an assortment of class-C fireworks

* a genuine custom-wrecked NDI straw hat

* random items on hand from constant foraging; stuffed animals, dolls with parts missing, Mexican candy, mismatched socks, pomade, off-brand cologne, trucker speed, old sunglasses, a handful of change, 8-track tapes, and so on.

No mention of our music, our sound, our history; no press clippings, no recordings. But we're pretty sure it's going to get us noticed. We start sending these love bombs out to clubs, plotting our first ever real road trip as NDI.

But where are we going? Ah. Yes. Iowa City, for a start. Dan will give us $200 for a Friday, that's gas and food for a few days. Then St. Louis, get an opening spot at Cicero's Basement Bar, a place the old band played, a weird and cramped little cellar with a support pillar smack in the middle of the stage, but they pay okay thanks to the restaurant upstairs. Maybe then keep going south -- can we get back to Louisville? Fuck yeah, pretty sure that'll be a good night, after the lunacy that transpired last time, probably enough money to coast for awhile. There's no place in Lexington that'll hire us, but the Antenna Club in Memphis does a lot of punk bands, too hardcore and cool for the old band to get a gig but the owner will probably like the TV we send him, so let's pursue that. Keep heading south! LaFayette, Louisiana! Send 'em a TV and a thrift-store hairpiece and see what happens. And since we're in the neighborhood, howabout New Orleans? We've never even tried to get a gig there, but clearly Skipper, Pigtail and Goodtime understand the concept of bars without doors and free shit giveaways. Send 'em a TV and a filthy Barbie Styling Head and see what happens. That's over a week out, almost two including travel days, and now we need to get back before we starve, die, or completely lose sight of reality. So let's drive north, and pick up a gig or two on the way back -- Jackson Mississippi is routed right, send 'em a TV and a Don Ho album and see what happens. Then maybe Carbondale, or Springfield. Some cheap-ass weeknight gimme gig on the last leg so we don't have to drive too far from Jackson. DONE. Get Kenn on the phone, get those packages sent out. The world wobbles a little farther off-axis. Invasion USA starts NOW.

Call Me Pigtail -- Part 8

2012-01-26T18:19:00.000-08:00

Engines to Power; Turbines to Speed

Back in Chicago, home again after the Louisville jaunt, we start to pursue more gigs. Full speed ahead. Songs pour out, riffs and titles -- don't look to close, don't stop to figure anything out, don't think. Just do. Somewhere in here Sue at Lounge Axe buys us our first set of matching tux coats, powder blue, prom-date tacky, a little tight in the shoulders, but MAN they go nice with our helmets. Or do they? Skipper finds a fucked-up straw hat in a thrift store, and as much as we love our spelunker look, we love the hayseed look more. Soon we each have one, three matching "hows-about-a-nice-Hawaiian-Punch?" dandies. Those and a few ruffly shirts, a bow-tie apiece, and suddenly we look -- good, sure, but it's more than that, we now look -- alike. The NDI tux-and-hat combo is an unmissable visual symptom of our mutual mind-meld, our shared dementia. We look the same because we are all three clinging to the back of the same rampaging, tacky, loud, irresponsible rodeo bull. We begin giving the same misleading answer to the same dumb question.

A few more gigs, Cubby Bear, the random party, a suburban basement or two, back to Cubby Bear, and sometimes people come and sometimes they don't, but we are having such a surreal good time that we barely notice. It Don't Matter. The second or third time we play Cubby Bear, though, there are maybe fifty people there, loosely gathered on the dance floor, watching us closely. It feels like a lot of people, but maybe that's just because they're all paying attention.

The white trash spectacular, the stage littered with an increasingly bizarre collection of toys and found objects, relics of our childhood obsessions, songs about our love of the awkward and the pretentious and the tacky, it's strumming a chord. Plus we're all more accomplished musicians than we need to be for these songs, and we've played together for years and years, so the blunt force we began with is evolving, without our conscious involvement or guidance, into something that is basically impossible to ignore. The band is coincidentally becoming a force to be reckoned with, heavy in an off-hand way, cycling through regressive riffing and twangy country rips. We're still writing songs without really thinking about it.

And some people, okay plenty of people, absolutely HATE us. But it's part of the deal! What else did we expect? Some of the things a few disgruntled people have said to my face would have sent me into a weeks-long tailspin in a previous life, when peoples' appreciation of my art and my own self-image were basically equivalent. Now? I LOVE it. In the glorious regression that is NDI, this is infancy: for a baby, attention is attention, whether mommy is screaming in anger or playing kissy-poo. Being in the old band was like being invisible. It was one reason we cashed it in: nothing could be worse than being ignored for another show, another album, another minute. TELL ME how much you fucking hate my band, how stupid I look, how you want your money back. Ha haaa! Yes! You get it! We are TRYING to make you mad. The fact that so many people love us is a surprising and unexpected side-effect.

Then Sue Miller leaves Cubby Bear for Lounge Ax, on Lincoln Avenue. So we play there. Sue loves us and she gives us a headline spot on a Friday night. The club has an anarchic air, and Sue and us the people who work there, we all find the same things funny, we're already friends for the most part. Before we even play there it feels like home. So it's Friday, we have the stage set just how we like it, a barely-navigable mess, and we're getting ready to go on, hanging out in the nasty cluttered rooms up on the second floor that used to be someone's apartment and is now the band dressing room, and we are writing the set list and adjusting each other's ties and drinking shots of Jagermeister, bottles of beer, and GT goes down to get another round and he comes back up and there's this look on his face and he says something I've never heard anyone in any other band I've ever been in say, ever:

"Boys," says GT, "There's a line of people out front."

What does that even mean?

The second-floor apartment/dressing room has a big dirty window with no blinds overlooking Lincoln Avenue, and together we look out, the snaggly brims of our straw hats scrabbling against the glass, and yes, it's true. There are at least two dozen people standing along the sidewalk, waiting to get into the club. One of them has on a fucked-up straw hat, so we know they're not lined up for the ATM next door. They're here to see us. Am I nervous? No! I'm Pigtail! I am a loud, strutting, talentless hillbilly with a big heavy Gibson Les Paul and two bandmates who look like my inbred brothers. Together, like He-Man, We Have The Power. Plus, and this is the part that doesn't make sense, the GOOD part: So What? There's a line of people out front? Okay, cool, great, but nothing will change, because nothing matters. We got this far by not giving a shit -- if we start giving a shit now just because we appear to be getting a little bit popular, then we will screw it all up. We tried and tried for ten years and never got popular and finally we woke up to a new world, a new directive -- stop trying -- and now look. Look out the window. See those people?

Try and fail; stop trying and succeed. The American Dream in reverse.

Showtime, bitches, strap on and let's hit the stage. We have begun a policy of coming from the back of the club, handing out toys and food and horns and sparklers and whatever, and we come down the stairs, the door opens out to the bar near the front door, and we're trying to get to the stage in the back, and holy god where did all these people come from? We don't know how to even think about it -- we lack the language. Like Eskimos and their 200 words for "snow," the old band knew a hundred ways to describe empty rooms, flat crowds, pointless shows. But the idea of a packed room is so novel that it might as well be meaningless. We wind through the narrow front room, it's hot and smelly, they take our little gifts, they seem to know us; some faces are familiar, and we squeeze between the bodies and up onto the stage, GT begins the jackhammer intro to "Jackson, Mississippi," and this place has a good P.A. and we are amped and jumping and loud and confident and careless and me and Skip come in together, the stolen riff is beyond simple, and I look down in front of me and something is weird. What is it? Something not right, or inexplicable. One of our old-band buddies, a funny and wise cat in a band a little like ours, once called the empty space in front of the stage at every single gig the "moat of indifference." We had become so used to it that we didn't even mind it anymore. It was just what was. Part of our existence. Sometimes some people ventured into the moat, stood for a while drinking a beer and kind of watching us, and once in a long while some kids got up to dance for a song or two. So this here, this scene before me, not three feet from the toes of my two-toned patent leather slip-ons, this is something that in many years of rock life I have literally never seen before. These people here at Lounge Ax are bouncing, happy, excited. Some of them are even singing along. Dammit! This is how it should have been all along!

Next: Gearing Up.

Call Me Pigtail, part 7

2012-01-23T14:24:00.000-08:00

Solos!

What could be more ridiculous than a bass solo? It sums up everything stupid and self-important about rock bands. So let's have a bass solo! From Skipper, who literally can't play bass! Let's have him just stand there on stage and hit one or two spastic notes, lots of dead air, that ever-present gnarly hum of corroded wires, and here's the thing -- let's act like it's awesome. Because compared to any other rock and roll bass solo ever played by anyone, it is. All bass solos are stupid, and Skipper's is no more or less stupid than the most artistic, studied, accomplished, serious bass solo by any other rock band in this or any other century. We know it, and soon the crowds know it. It's funny because it's true.

What could be more ridiculous than a drum solo? Pretty much nothing. We absolutely love Led Zeppelin, but our love encompasses their stupidity, so we fully appreciate John Bonham playing a drum solo with his hands. So let's get GT up there, and give him not drums but our heads, our mammoth-cave-helmet-wearing heads, to bang on. Listen to the sharp rat-a-tat of wood on safety plastic! It cuts through the smoky club, impossible to ignore. And now that we have your attention, you can't miss GT's true virtuosity -- he's playing the other dudes' heads, good bit, pretty funny, but check it -- he's fucking wailing! Seriously.

What could be more ridiculous than a guitar solo? A fancy, twiddly, spot-lit guitar solo from a wealthy and famous rock god? A long one, too -- so long the other dudes leave the stage for a smoke backstage. A guitar solo that, I don't know, also includes a theremin, or a violin bow, or another guitar you play with your foot, or all three. Glorious! I want in on it! So without thinking it through too much we combine the most blockheaded, and therefore most important, rock riff ever -- the intro to "Smoke on the Water" -- with a feat no rock cretin has ever tried: we'll see your theremin and raise you an oven mitt. Can it be done? Can I play the riff with, as Skipper announces, "a fully functional oven mitt" on my left hand? I don't know. But I do know this: It Don't Matter. Pretty soon it's a regular part of The Show.

Over time our sick and bubbling brains cough up variations on the ridiculosity of the Official Rock Solo. Here are a few:

* Squeaky Balloon. Skipper produces a balloon, blows it up, and does that squeaky air-release thing into the mic, while I instruct the sound man in the correct way to make the innocent little squeal sound like a Concorde jet landing an a sperm whale: "Soundman, please apply 50 dB's of backward reverb and 3 grams of double-sideways echo to the microphone!" Some sound men get it, some don't -- the sound man at Little Brother's, in Columbus Ohio, who is actually a sound woman, is one of the best ever. When it works it's a frightening tempest of feedback and escalating screechy echoes. One of my favorite parts of the show. And even though it's a balloon solo, it's still a bass solo. It's a bass solo.

* Liberal Art. Once the NDI starts blowing minds in college towns, we begin providing the kids with object lessons in what we think of as liberal art -- art we take liberties with. We're getting a little ways away from our bone-headed trailer-trash roots, but a solo is a solo, so I bring out a big thing of orange or green tempura paint; I get a big old mouthful of that salty/nasty/wrong tasting shit, and GT and Skipper unroll a big thing of shiny white paper and I SPIT that shit, the paint and drool and beer and maybe a little vomit, across the virgin white gleaming surface. And then we tear it off and reward it to a random/cute member of the crowd. It slows things down a bit, but we're up for anything. And remember, it's a guitar solo.

* Goodtime Plays the Harmonica and Sings. The NDI begins with a few assumptions, among them that drummers should never sing. Ever. Or write lyrics (see "Rush"). But that doesn't stop GT from bellowing/singing random children's songs and bleating out two notes on a toy harmonica. For money! It's a strange and wonderful world.

* A few more: The raw pig's head I banged on my strings. Skipper singing show tunes in a cracked Bette Davis voice. Goodtime blowing stuff up. Playing the saxophone theme to "My Three Sons." Ummm... There other solos I can't fully remember or have blocked out. If any of you people remember a solo I have forgotten, feel free to share!

That's all for now! The narrative arc returns for part 8. See you soon you big baboons!

Call Me Pigtail, part 6 of 20

2012-01-14T07:22:00.000-08:00

It's like Christmas, literally like Christmas. We can't wait...

At the club: Load in. One bass amp, one guitar amp. A guitar, a bass, a "drum set," really only enough for one or two trips. That's it. Bare bones. Then comes two big fat garbage bags of yard-sale plunder, hauled in and dumped smack in the middle of the dance floor in front of the stage. Except for the vodka-cranberries in our hands, we could be children on Christmas morning, laughing and playing with our new toys. Who cares if they're all used or broken or stained with something? To us these things are now valuable possessions. How is it that the useless refuse of a road-side Kentucky family can be so precious to us? Well, who's us?

The best part is putting everything up on the stage. Everything, more or less, fits somewhere: The Twister board we tape up behind GT as a kind of a backdrop; the grimy stuffed animals we lovingly array around the amps and drums. Christmas lights, the half that actually work, we drape all over everything. The Halloween masks, broken and too-small, will be worn by GT at random moments behind the kit. The Fashion Barbie head, the one that some child made-up with markers before sawing off the synthetic blond hair with a kitchen knife, is propped up in a place of honor on Skipper's amp. The torn Farrah poster, the big ugly wall clock, the light-up Pabst sign, the scummy blow-up pool toys, the spinning table-top disco light that keeps getting stuck -- it all goes on stage, and holy fuck it all looks SO amazing. Happy in its new home. When we hit the stage, exhausted from spelunking, wobbly from vodka, snazzy in sport coats and helmets, when we start the set amid this debris, somewhere the Rock Gods smile. The thundering rock and the blazing stupidity of the band and its music, the trailer-park-after-the-tornado stage set up; it's senseless, it makes perfect sense. The twenty people there are going bananas. We are beyond thinking; we know. This is it. The Rock Gods have cracked open the door, and we have shoved in a big white patent leather slip-on.

The first set is over, and the room is vibrating, and then one of us, who knows who, has an idea that pretty much guarantees that this show, if it didn't already, will go down in history, or at least our history. "OK!" shouts Skipper, unsteady in the middle of the dance floor. "We're taking you fuckers out for White Castles. Everyone in the van!" Seriously? The crowd wavers. All of us? Yes, all of you. Into the van. We have to get back in time for the next set. Five minutes later and I am heels-over-ass in the back of the van, packed in with over a dozen drunk strangers, laughing, rolling with the turns, GT driving I think, on our way to the White Castle three blocks down the street and around the corner. Now we're there, stop the van, everyone spills out, and Skipper leads us into the ungodly bright fluorescent interior of the restaurant, and at the counter the hopeless dude in the paper hat says "may I help you?" and Skipper says, and I will always love him for this, and it fits him so perfectly: "One slider, please." "One slider?" says the dude. "Yep," says Skipper, and three minutes later we are all back in the van, all of us, the band and its audience, rolling with the turns and passing around that one single slider, that tiny hot package, and everyone takes a little bite and hands it on, all of us brothers, all of us sisters, and the love we have been holding in for years flows between us.
The second set, if indeed we played one, is lost in the fog...

Next: Solos...

Call Me Pigtail -- Part 5

2012-01-11T08:02:00.000-08:00

And now it's time to take our show on the road...

Louisville

Kenn/Skipper books us a gig at Uncle Pleasant's, a cool little bar run by Uncle Mark, a twisted and friendly southern gentleman who agrees to pay us $100 for an actual headlining gig on a Wednesday night. Pretty much guarantees zero crowd, although the old band did have a good show or two at this place, so why not?
We still have our terminally ill van, so transportation isn't a problem. The problem is more vague than that. How will this trip not feel like just another old-band journey to a familiar town? How do we keep this strange and freaked-out feeling alive? Soon enough we have our answer, found in a crumpled brochure on the floor of our van: we'll go spelunking. Cave exploring! It makes so little sense that it makes perfect sense. The Mammoth Cave "Wild Tour" will take us for six hours through the deepest darkest heart of the earth under central Kentucky, crawling through muck and slime, dangling from ledges. GT is claustrophobic, Skip and I are out-of-shape smokers, we've never done anything remotely like this, ever. We'll have to drive down the night before, spend extra money on a motel, get up, when? Six o-fucking-clock in the morning? Seriously? Yes. Get up and get to the cave and spelunk our brains out, and then afterward drive straight to the club, set up, and play. It's pointless, it's stupid, it's dangerous. It's NDI.

In the cave, half a mile underground, crawling on my belly for two hundred yards through an 18-inch-high crack, getting kicked in the face by GT's big muddy boots, I feel this wave of unreality, an existential loss of control. The fake is overcoming the real. Has the bit gone too far? Down here in the cave for no other reason than "why not?," I wonder if someone shouldn't be watching us, keeping an eye on our stranger impulses. Protecting us from our new selves, our alter egos who are, after all, 100% id. We climb and crawl and slither and finally emerge into reality through a crack in the ground, like demons from hell, the old ladies creeping along the nice paved easy-cave-tour path watching us with slack jaws. A smack on the ass, a big first breath of fresh air and soon we are blinking in the bright sun, covered with mud and muck. We're exhausted but happy, and there's an added bonus: they let you keep the helmet! And guess what, we're wearing our new helmets for the rest of the night. We have already established a group policy of hats-on-stage. Our tacky/classy sport coats and old man shoes will go beautifully with our new matching protective headgear. We climb into the van and set off for Louisville and our first-ever road show.

Drive to the club? Sounds pretty straightforward. The old band has been there before. But NDI, we are learning, never does things the easy way, and so instead of the fast highway we are compelled to follow the twisty blue one that runs through oddly named towns, across rivers. We're trying to find something, not sure what, but it has to do with all the little lives and small worlds that we bypassed for so many years with the other band. Back then we zipped from club to hotel to gas station to club. Now we pull over at the slightest provocation. An American Legion weenie roast in the parking lot of the Bardstown Tru-Value? Sure! A sparsely attended back-country carnival? Ok! A go-cart track, at any place, at any time? Absolutely! A permanent-looking yard sale in front of an abandoned-looking farmhouse that will surely make us late to the gig? YES!

So we pull over and climb out and hike up the steep little embankment to this yard full of -- what. Crap. Beauty. An American history lesson. An archaeological dig. The fossil record of a family, of child-rearing, school projects, momentary passions, spent appliances. Bowling nights, bad novels, outgrown shoes. Twister. Too much to swallow. First, there is a lesson here: pull over, and good things happen. The old band never pulled over. NDI, from this point on, will ALWAYS pull over.

So with our van ticking by the side of this blue highway, we stroll among the offerings in our nice sport coats and matching spelunking helmets, picking out the precious plunder from this road-side museum with a new and wonderful shared sense of what is priceless. And then, wonder of wonders! Skipper/Kenn does the unthinkable: he pulls out the band wad. Skipper/Kenn, the keeper of the cash, the retainer of resources, the doler-outer of per diems! Skipper/Kenn, of all people! Holy fuck but yes, he's taking out the band wad, the motel money, the gas money, and it's like a dream, an underwater dream -- he is actually paying the fat old lady in the print dress, I see a ten dollar bill, and then a five, and then at least two singles, maybe three.... Am I going to faint? Faint and roll down the embankment and into the road?

When I come to, we are in the van again, GT behind the wheel, and next to me on the back seat is not one but two big-ass garbage bags just stuffed with stuff. What's in there? I don't know. It's like Christmas, literally like Christmas. We can't wait.

At the club: Load in...

Want Some Candy? Here's Part 4!

2012-01-05T08:32:00.000-08:00

Call Me Pigtail
4/20

Repeat after me: stupidity is entertaining, and entertaining is stupid. We are finally ready to do what it takes to be entertaining, to be fun to watch, to make people happy. We're ready because we are now, finally, stupid...

But we are not stupid. Not quite. We are, and have always been, a few steps up the idiot ladder from the dudes in the other bands that we encounter on the road or at local shows. There's proof: somehow we have managed to stay alive for years with virtually no other income than the proceeds from the gigs, albums, and merch sales of a band that nobody truly gives a crap about. We get the shows, hustle promotion, show up on time, leave the club intact. Our press kit is organized and well-written. We can keep a calendar. We understand things. We are not losers. Plus we absolutely love music.
This new thing, THEE New Duncan Imperials, these dudes also love music -- just not the same music as the old band. A side-effect of becoming Skipper and Pigtail and Goodtime appears to be an entirely new idea of what good music is, and what it should be. Our old band listened to and referenced REM, the Smiths, The Replacements, worthy and acceptable artists. But now we are not that band. Not only that -- We have never been that band. We have always been NDI, and we have always loved a very short list of similarly fucked-up artists. We steal blatantly and liberally. No apologies! From the start we refer to our songs as "riffs we stole," and from the start we turned to three, and only three, bands to steal from. So write this down: we steal from Jon Wayne, we steal from The Country Rockers, and we steal from The Mentors. That's the list. That's all. Go look 'em up on-line. As far as contemporary influences on The New Duncan Imperials go, that's them.
So much for the present. But the past? Our non-contemporary influences? Oooh yeah. Foghat, Pablo Cruise, George Jones, Black Sabbath, Chuck Berry, Kool and the Gang, the Sex Pistols, The Action, Motorhead, Blue Oyster Cult, KC and the Sunshine Band, The Osmonds, and on and on. Also: Saturday morning cartoons, go-cart tracks, space food sticks, Which Witch, sibling rivalry, front yards with cars in them, garage sales, grits, the Brady Bunch, Yogi Bear, Spectre Man, NASCAR, camping, minibikes, girly magazines. Lots of girly magazines. But not that newfangled airbrushed Playboy bullshit -- we're mainlining vintage smut. Somewhere along the line we steal/are given a big stack of old 50's and 60's naughty zines with titles like "Men" and "Sir!" and "Rogue." Not sexy at all, really, but flip past the awkward black and white photo spreads of ladies in big ugly underpants and you get to page after page of sleazy, sketchy advertisements, beautiful, nasty, primitive ads for hairpieces, 8mm dirty movie reels and projectors to watch them with, correspondence courses to become a plumber or a private eye, shoes that make you taller, something called "French Ticklers" that they evidently aren't allowed to illustrate, offers to set your poems to music, five adult novels for the price of three, spy kits, x-ray glasses, pinkie rings, on and on. And always at least one full-page thing for Frederick's of Hollywood, with some actually hot ladies in racy brassieres. Somehow this parade of desperation and bad taste nails the NDI state of mind. The fleshing-out of the NDI acquires a layer of slime.
Another bit that we start almost right away is a policy of giving free shit to whoever is standing in front of us. At our first show at the Cubby Bear, a Chicago club booked by Sue Miller, a tolerator of our old band and a true fan of our new one, GT decides to put out little cups of cereal and milk on the tables in front of the stage before the gig. Why not? Like a little reward for our friends. But he puts the cereal in surplus urine sample containers that he found in a corner of his basement. Are they clean? Sure! But there's something about the gesture that fits our new personalities: we're nice and outgoing, but we're also kind of dumb and assholic. We'll give the audience free shit from here on out, even play a variety of "giving out shit theme songs," but the giveaways will almost always be something odd, like raw broccoli, or dangerous, like a lit sparkler. We'll send GT running out from behind his drum kit to hand out whatever he's got -- raw pig ears or chicken feet, handfuls of unwrapped candy, toy soldiers. Sometimes they throw the gifts back at us. Fair enough. The chicken feet hurt, though, so soon we gravitate toward softer items. Marshmallows are popular. But that's still to come.
So we've done a few more Chicago club shows and sometimes twenty people come and sometimes fifty, but no matter what there's a new feeling, a tinge of the manic, people singing along, laughing, sometimes screaming. Also in spite of ourselves we're getting better, or at least better at being NDI. We're benefiting from a kind of hybrid vigor: as stupid and dumb as we now are, there's still the awareness and something like shrewdness that kind of bubbles up through our characters. We're a new and maybe dangerous species: fake hillbillies with real ambition. And now it's time to take our show on the road.

Call Me Pigtail -- 3/20

2012-01-03T07:52:00.000-08:00

We still do not give a shit about anything...

Our first-ever gig is at someone's backyard birthday kegger. We wear our nicest thrift-store sports coats and hats, baseball caps or whatever, pulled low over our eyes. The sound is atrocious and hardly anyone we know is there, but It Don't Matter. The songs are easy and we're hitting the tap. Somehow these alternative identities we have accidentally invented, these entirely new people, have blown up inside us and become almost real, and it's like they're playing and singing and talking between songs while we watch. Also there's this weird contradiction: We're a joke, but we're not a joke band. The difference will forever escape some people, but as time goes by it is maybe the only thing that actually does matter to us: we're a joke, but we're not a joke band, because these songs, funny and stupid though they may be, are not necessarily funny or stupid to the guys playing them. Skipper and Goodtime and Pigtail take this shit seriously, or they might. They would if they were real, put it that way. And are they real? Not yet but soon we will have to wrestle with that idea. Who are we? Where are we? Is it more fun being them than it is being us? Oooh, heavy. And deep. Way too deep for the NDI to take time to figure out.

Call me Pigtail! I am up on the non-stage at this kegger, this non-gig, and we are making a hell of a racket, crude and crass, an insult to our talent and our art, to all talent and art. Booooorrrrrrn, born to be hit! The crowd is not really a crowd, it's a party, assorted types milling around a back yard, but they are tolerating us, and a few are actually curious, that stock-still tilted-head look that we will soon be seeing a lot more of. They drink cold draft beer from big shiny red plastic cups and watch us, then wander away, then come back and watch a little more. Pensacola 99 -- yeeaaah, right! The sound we have unearthed in the basement has been dragged out into the sunshine, but it still sounds dark and heavy. GT hammers that poor snare and Skipper's blister-encrusted fingers are actually starting to find the right string, if not always the right fret. We are very close to sucking, to being bad, but it's like a game of chicken -- the closer to truly bad we get, to real awfulness, the more we rule. It's like a game of chicken. If we actually did hit bad head-on, it would immediately be over. We would be dead, and since this is already our second life, our newborn reincarnation, dead would be truly dead. If we were to miscalculate and hit bad head-on, there would be no second second chance. We would be home with Mom and Dad. Our one golden summer would be over. So we keep veering away at the last minute, blowing right past bad, feeling the hot wind, letting it wash over us. How do we do it? No way to know. How does someone win a game of chicken? We are gambling with our futures, and It Don't Matter.

The first gig shows us that yes, we can play this stuff for other humans. Now load the van and get back in the basement. Another two weeks, another 15 songs created, or stolen -- we don't care: we have another show, this one inside an actual club, Phyllis's Musical Inn on Division Street. Phyllis's is generally known as the easiest gig to get in the entire city, way below our status in the rapidly receding real world, the one where we have a well-known band with five albums out and reviews in the paper and all of that meaningless bullshit. God bless Phyllis's for taking a chance on us! We never tell them our real names or mention our other band, and we wind up with a Wednesday night, opening for some out-of-town band, the poor suckers. The club is echoing and empty, the home of the hands-down worst P.A. in town, an old hang out for hard-drinking laborers from the first Polish immigrant neighborhood in Chicago. But when we climb on stage and strap on and peer out into the gloom, instead of a completely empty bar we see... a not-quite empty bar! There are a few people here, inexplicably. I recognize some close friends, people we kind of had to tell what we were up to, and some faces from the backyard party, fewer than twenty people total, but it's Wednesday, it's 9:30, it's Phyllis's, and they're here. We rip into the set, and it's louder than god in this echoey little dive bar, we're rattling the old joints, overdriving the muffled and distorted sound system. And I know they are our friends, and I know they kind of have to like us, but these kids seem to be having an actual blast, laughing at the funny bits, shouting back at us, singing along here and there. Our stone-ages riffs, choruses, verses, stops, starts, are increasingly looking and sounding like actual songs. Or something. Our little bunch of people whoop it up, holler, laugh. It's hard to miss: why is it that our other band, the one we worried and sweated over for ten years, NEVER got ANYONE to make these noises?
After Phyllis's we are hot to trot baby, thinking more and more about the new band, rolling out ideas, charting courses. The dangling, googly-eyed skeletons, Skipper and GT and Pigtail, start gaining flesh and blood. Are they becoming more real? The confused but competent humans behind the white trash puppets, Kenn and John and Rick, are learning how to stay behind the scenes, how to make their characters dance, sing, talk. In our shared office room in Kenn's Devon-Avenue apartment, I am standing by the desk, Kenn on the phone. He's booking the next NDI gig, at Misfits, and he's referring to the band, of course, in the third person. "Yeah, they'll be there by seven." Soon enough we have the title of what might be the truest NDI song: "I'm Schizophrenic (No I'm Not)," inspiration courtesy of GT but true of all of us.
The Misfits show is a repeat of Phyllis's -- shitty club, shitty P.A., shitty week-night opening slot -- with the same little bunch of people. Maybe a few more, maybe not. But they are here. They came out again. We know better than to ask too many questions. So we play another show, draw a few more people, and after a few weeks a new truth is dawning, a truth built on a lie, maybe, but a truth nonetheless. The idea is so simple that it takes awhile to sink in -- stupidity is entertaining. And entertaining is stupid! Repeat after me: stupidity is entertaining, and entertaining is stupid. We are finally ready to do what it takes to be entertaining, to be fun to watch, to make people happy. We're ready because we are now, finally, stupid!

Here's More, If You Want -- 2 of 20

2011-12-30T07:28:00.000-08:00

Call Me Pigtail
2/20

...And just like that, it is. The revolution is complete.

Silence in the basement, except for the ongoing hum from the cheap-ass bass. Skipper is nodding and if he ever smiled he would be now. But he isn't. The game is still on. "What's it called?" I say.
"I don't know," says Skipper. "Let's make it about food."
Ten minutes later and we are playing again only now it has a title, "Hamhocks," why the fuck not, we don't even know what hamhocks are, but it sounds hillbilly and nasty and funny and the two syllables fit into the two-note riff, and Skipper is singing and the song is finished. Just like that. Every song the old band did was an object of careful study, a gem to polish, an artistic statement. We would work on one song for weeks. This one is finished in a half hour.
Here are some lyrics from one of our old songs:

An endless wind takes down the barn one side at a time
It's a forever train-wreck, your head on my pillow
Behind every wall...

Lovely, right? That song was recorded, sold in stores, played for many, many audiences, strummed at acoustic bedsides for fair-haired girlfriends and potential lays, fussed over, pampered. That song was given every opportunity. And nothing happened. So off the stage, pretty one, you had a nice run. Here are the lyrics to the New Duncan Imperials' new song, "Hamhocks:"

Hamhocks, I wish I had some hamhocks
Hamhocks, I wish I had some hamhocks
Wish I had some hamhocks,
Some motherfucking hamhocks

So as it turns out, all you really need for a rock song is a riff and a title. That song keeps us happy for another ten minutes, pounding the dank air in that basement, and then it's time for another. The adrenaline is rushing, though we could never admit it to each other, and the next riff just flops out on the cold cement floor like a bloody, squalling, two-headed baby: the same two notes as Hamhocks plus one, played on a different string, it's all Skipper can handle, and this one's called "Don't Hate Me Just Because I'm Beautiful," 100% stolen from a TV commercial for shampoo or some shit, and that's it, another powerhouse tune. Here are the lyrics to this one:

Don't hate me just because I'm beautiful.

Fuck, this is easy. Is this how it's actually done? How it's been done from the start? It's possible. The madmen who invented rock, the old blues dudes or whoever, surely didn't fret over voicings and dynamics, fuck no, just banged out the three most obvious chords, coughed up a nasty title, and DONE. Next is "Feelin' Sexy." Why? By now we should all know better than to ask that question, right? So this song is, what, a hardcore thrash number. For this one Skipper has to learn a new skill, playing on the 2nd fret. His fingers are growing blisters. 1-2-3-4 and holy shit GT is playing faster by 100 mph than we have ever heard him, some demented polka beat on those three pathetic little drums, and I have never played this fast before either. We shouldn't even be able to do this. The wheels should have come off after the first verse (lyrics: "I'm feelin' sexy"), but we're still blazing, still holding on to this runaway truck that we have suddenly created out of nothing. Out of nothingness! Stop trying and see what happens.
Okay done. Look around. More. We're now hicks, so we need some country music. This shit is beyond easy -- three chords, relaxed beat now, a little swing to it, but still just a title, it just pops out without any thought, any poetry, any reflection: "Born to Be Hit." These verses need actual words, but there's no stopping to think: it's improvised from the start, whatever flows, "Lately my luck's been going from bad to weird to worse [stolen, weirdly, from "Underneath the Bottle," a song on Lou Reed's album The Blue Mask]/Last night I drove my truck into the side of a hearse/ I killed a dead man and half his family..." -- these words pop out and little do we know that they will immediately stick and harden and become a thing, a song to sing, a thing that exists. We play it for ten minutes. Done.
One hour, four new songs, and a ragged hole hacked into the jungle of indifference growing around us. Anything else? Anything more? Fuck yes there is. We will play today, tomorrow, and the day after, into the night, drinking Schaeffer beer, Skipper nursing his blisters, Goodtime mastering his minimal battery, me still trying not to try. In a week we have fifteen actual songs, or really 15 riffs with titles, a few verses here and there. But the template of the first four songs guides us: heavy two-or-three note riffs, a few hardcore rips, a few trad country throw-downs. Our hardcore songs are about camping and vomit; our country songs are about mobile homes and cheating farm wives. We still do not give a shit about anything.

Our first-ever gig is at someone's backyard birthday kegger......

More to come! Check back soon...

Hey I Wrote a Book!

2011-12-27T12:32:00.000-08:00

Hi kids -- I decided to start posting the actual mostly-true story of the NDI here on my blog, to see if anyone likes it. So let me know what you think please!

Call Me Pigtail
(part 1 of 20)

Spring, 1989:
I wake up on a nasty unknown couch and say it out loud: "The New Duncan Imperials." My two best friends and most dedicated enemies are still asleep on another couch in this horribly sunny living room, someone's apartment in Louisville, so they don't hear me at first. I say it again. "The New Duncan Imperials. Like the yoyo. Wake up, fuckers." John and Kenn, who are about to lose their names and most of their identities, move a little bit. Someone is up in the kitchen, making noise, but I can't remember who led us here or who lives here, girl or boy, so forget it. "Hey Skipper." That's funny to me now but soon it will be normal -- "Hey Skipper. You're no longer Kenn, mediocre keyboardist in a mediocre band playing mediocre gigs. You are now a cartoon, a parade balloon, a fucking hillbilly. Also, you now play bass." Forget that Kenn has never played bass, ever, and that his first instrument will be fretless, and covered in plaid contact paper. These are details.
It is time to wake up. We have been living in a dream, a dangerous, repetitive, romantic, stupid dream, in which young men with a little talent and a gigantic, permanent sense of alienation can drop out of college together, buy a van that wants only to die, and set off to play songs they wrote in front of strangers in strange towns. Phoenix! Youngstown! Reno! Louisville! A lot of shows in Louisville. And we have to admit it: the dream is over. We tried, godDAMMIT we tried, but it's time to wake up.
Wake up, fuckers. I feel around on the floor for something to throw at my friends on the couch, a lighter will do, hits one of them, and John wakes up a little. Last night before we passed out he suggested we call our new band The Manures, "because we get plowed every night." Funny maybe once and true enough, but, you know, if we're really starting over we need a name that sounds new. Right? So let's just put that word in the title. The New somethings. And also something that sounds fucking royal, something to contend with, something that rules. So Imperials. The New Imperials? Sounds like a fucking 1990's iteration of a 50's doo-wop band, like you see on public television, right? So fuck that. Free association, hungover and thirsty and demoralized and broke, nothing to lose, leads us to the yo-yo aisle. The New Duncan Imperials. Perfect. Hopefully we'll get sued.
So I say it again, out loud, and John and Kenn, soon to be Goodtime Dammit and Skipper Zwakinov, sorry but yes we don't care, these fine gentlemen hear me finally and maybe make a noise. Not much. But it has started. The sick seed of our glory and our downfall has found a purchase in our irresponsible brains.
More noise in the kitchen, and now someone is coming -- a girl, yes, full-faced, earnest, walking through the room, eating a bowl of cereal. I wave and she smiles and calls me by my name, but it's not my name, it's whatever comical pseudonym I came up with last night. We're knee-deep in comical pseudonyms. I'm Ricoh-Sid-Lawrencio, and soon enough, Pigtail Dick, my New Duncan Imperials name that will eventually be shortened to just Pig, and I'll wear it proudly. The other couch boys are stirring, sitting up, hair pushed sideways, meeting my eyes. "New Duncan Imperials," I say again, trying it out, feeling for strength, durability. "Like the yo-yo." Goodtime smiles, he loves a pun, god bless him. Skipper loves irony, in flavors both icy and absurd. They are both ready for a change.
The girl sits on the floor in her torn jeans and superhero t-shirt, slurps her cereal. She's a little big but interesting-looking. What is her life like here? Why would she let four broke-ass dudes from a band that didn't even draw crash in her apartment. Well -- four. Where's Jeremy? Right. Jeremy scores again. Except that Jeremy has also lost, because he's not going to be an Imperial. He's not going to get a funny fake name, get semi-famous, or get pets named after him. He's getting none of this because he's the main reason The Imperials are necessary in the first place. We fucking hate Jeremy. We will break up the band before we take another step with his self-pitying, shower-hogging, ankle-spraining ass.
Plus he got laid again. Motherfucker.
There's a moment, there on our saggy couches, still sunk in wake-up misery, when our eyes meet, me and Skipper and GT, and we experience a tiny little magic electrical zing. I feel it, and I know they do. Things Are Changing. The Jeremy thing is over. Our future, which, if I am allowed to paraphrase the poet Matthew Arnold, had lately promised neither certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, was now somehow a thing of interest, if not optimism. Here was this new thing, and we were so eager and ready to just fuck the old thing. Speaking of which, here he comes, old Jeremy, lovely hair, skin like milk. Lips like sugar. Once I woke up with him in some too-hot Motel 6 room, on the box-spring with him curled up away from me, and his beautiful blonde hair flowed around his slim shoulders, that soft white skin with a constellation of coffee-brown moles high up near his long neck, and I thought, "God-damn. How did I get a girl like this?" Jeremy gets laid so much because he's beautiful. If any of these pretty little things actually spent an entire day with him, they would hand him a fake phone number and go home to take a shower.
Cock-bite strolls into the room, absently scratching his flat stomach. "Awesome," he says, to no-one.

One more show to go, one more night in Purgatory, literally, Purgatory Ohio, down where it's basically West Virginia except it's dry, motherfuckers, and you have to either drive 40 minutes each way over a bridge to buy a bottle of genuine 80-proof generic vodka or walk down the street to the strange alcohol-only shop and spend half as much money on a bottle with half as much power, 35-proof vodka, jesus fuck, whose idea was that? The bottle drinks you -- you wind up weaker than when you started, half-full, wondering when the good feeling will start, only it never does. The club, JB's Basement Bar, is in Purgatory but the whole area is actually part of some state college scene connected to a real town called Portsmouth. One last show. The death rattle for this two-week jaunt through the Near South, St Louis-Memphis-Nashville and then a few cheap-ass weeknight gigs in college towns like this one, and then the weekend again, Lexington-Huntington-Cincinnati, and then here. We are going in circles but that is all we could get. We are half-sick and touchy, fighting like children. Filthy clothes crowd our travel bags and the small cash reserves we each started with is gone. We smoke generic cigarettes, steal bottles of trucker speed from gas stations. We will drink anything, even 35-proof vodka. We drive to the club and load in and hang around and get up on the stage and sing songs about -- about what? No one is sure, but some of them are serious and catchy, just enough to keep us going. A curse, really. If we had no redeeming qualities this slow death would have been a quick dismissal. We are just good enough to make the suffering worthwhile.
So these towns, oh Lord these towns and clubs, we come back and we come back and some nights people come and most nights they don't, and we play our rough and ready little songs to little knots of people hiding in the shadows off the dance floor, and we try to get drunk and we try to make friends, but let's admit it: it's not working. We Are Not Going To Make It. We're not even sad about it, because we're not surprised.
But, but, but. Here at the end of the line we do have a surprise waiting. We have stumbled onto the spark of an idea, and somehow, I don't know how, we know what to do. We pass each other coming in and out of the door loading our hopeless amps and drums into JB's Basement Bar, and our eyes meet, me and Kenn/Skip and John/GT, we catch each other's eyes and that little electric jangle is still there. The idea is still alive.
What is the idea? It's so simple, but so not-obvious: stop trying. Stop writing songs like it matters. Stop working on arrangements and sounds like anyone gives a fuck. Stop taking rock music seriously. Sacrilege! Realize and accept the inverse of everything that we had assumed was true and real. Immediately we had a slogan: It Don't Matter. Over time we adapted it, in true dada fashion, to our band initials: NDI. N -- It. D -- Don't. I -- Matter. It Don't Matter. The enormity of the idea will take days and weeks to fully settle in, but in that first blush at JB's Basement Bar I swear we are feeling the earth move. The old routine -- walking the gear into the club, setting up, running through sound-check, leaving to eat cheap at the taco hole down the street, coming back to a dead room, climbing on stage, blasting the back walls with our art -- it is hurting less tonight. And it is hurting less because we have new armor.

Back home, we fire Jeremy practically before he is out of the van. Take your shit and go, motherfucker. We have work to do. First of all: get Skipper a bass. He can use his keyboard amp for now. Second of all: get ourselves new identities. We wear hats over our eyes because we don't want anyone to know it's us (as if anyone would care at all); we know it's a dumb and ineffective disguise, but, repeat after me, It Don't Matter. We are now Skipper, Goodtime, and Pigtail, and we know NOTHING. We are dumb, snide hillbillies from a non-existent town in Tennessee called Bucksnort, and we have never heard of our old band or the losers in it. We are sui generis, and we will slap down with sarcasm and fake accents anyone who suggests otherwise. It's the beginning of a long and consistent bit of improv, funny to us, and if anyone doesn't get it or won't play along then guess what, yes, fuck them, because, guess what, yes, It Don't Matter.
A bass for Skipper, check. Fake names, check. Now we need songs.
In the basement of GT's apartment building, where we pay $50 a month for the privilege of storing our gear and practicing in a half-crouch under the five-foot ceiling, we meet for our first try at not trying.
The first rule is in place: we're using code names. Always. After being his best friend for more than ten years, I will never call Kenn anything but Skipper from now on.
So here we go. Skipper plugs in his bass and starts playing through a noxious hum of unshielded wires and clanking strings. Two notes on the heaviest string, back and forth. He uses one finger on each hand, kind of like you play Chopsticks, but this thing he's creating is primordial, eons before Chopsticks, a slimy, swamp-dwelling mess. Skipper's riff has primitive gills. Goodtime is setting up his drums while Skipper plays his first ever notes on his new instrument, and then, while I watch, he starts taking his drums down. What the fuck? Is he quitting already? I really can't blame him, given the noise Skipper's making. Oh well. Fun while it lasted. Down come the nice wooden tom-toms, down come the splash and crash and ride cymbals. The big fat floor tom -- trucked off to a dark corner of the basement. GT returns, and then instead of walking out forever he sits down at the set. The set! It's now a kick drum, a snare, and a hi-hat. That's it. And then he starts playing it. Playing the holy bejeezus fuck out of it. Putting his weight into it, his solid bones, heavy legs, strong back, pouring it on, smacking the shit out of it, rolling the hi hat, now making it crash, rim-shots, brutal bass hits. Years of held-in power, anger, release, smashed down on this poor little collection of innocent targets. A fucking air-raid. I'm standing there like a goddamn zombie, not sure what to do, and now somehow GT and Skipper are playing the same thing, kind of, the master and the moron
meeting in the middle. The riff is still two notes, as simple and as stupid as any music I have ever heard, a violation, an anti-song. What had just happened to our last ten years of song craft and aestheticism? It was not only gone, it was negated, contradicted, reversed. It was over.
The mess blasts on, and I plug in my guitar, but not my nice real band one -- I choose a back-up piece of shit hollowbody with a tree-trunk neck, a Japan-made knock-off I got at a garage sale for $25, the strings corroded and stiff, basically unplayable, and turn every knob on my amp in the opposite direction, a random, senseless configuration of tonal control. I look at Skipper's two fingers, get the idea, and join in the cathartic noise. We play the same two notes for fifteen minutes, until we're sure the old sound, the old band, the old music, is dead and gone. And just like that, it is. The revolution is complete.

Fireworks, part one

2010-02-15T06:56:00.000-08:00

First of all, no one was hurt in this entry. That is pretty amazing on the face of it. It is a questionable idea, in my opinion, to put gigantic fireworks warehouses right by the highway where anyone with a car and maybe a license can just tell themselves "Cool, fireworks!" and pull in and buy some. The mighty NDI never postured ourselves as deep-thinkers, or responsible, so it is extra-questionable to put gigantic fireworks warehouses on the highway right where we could see them in Charleston, West Virginia in 1991. This is right around the time we began to see some profits from our musical stylings. So in addition to eating at restaurants with names on the front, we also began investing in entertainment-grade explosives.
The first awesome idea we had came about after we found a deal on some very basic "bottle rocket" fireworks. These are just re-tooled firecrackers stuck onto a stick about a foot long, and instead of exploding they shoot up and into whatever is overhead, like powerlines or the ceiling. We found a deal on these little guys at a fireworks store that was really just a huge tent open all night and where we staggered in at about 4 in the morning after a massively loud dose of chaos at a club called The Hammered Miner (I think). We strolled along under the buzzy fluorescent lights and tried to find the most potential damage to fit our budget, which was about 5 dollars. We were about to give up when as luck would have it Skipper tripped over an infant and fell right up against a HUGE bargain, a pallet of these bottle rocket things for $2.99. It took two of us to lift it into the van.
Our first idea was to see if we could build one of those backpack lift-off thingies that guys have in spy movies. The answer to this was "NO," but it was completely awesome watching GT screaming and running around the parking lot looking like he had fire shooting out of his butt. We had to admit that, as usual, we were being waaaay too ambitious.
So the next idea was to turn our van into a space attack warship vehicle. For this all we needed was a van, which we had, some bottle rockets, which we had, and a roll of ducktape which we were pretty sure we had somewhere. GT emptied the entire van and swore a lot before we found it in the pocket of Skipper's tux coat.
Here's why we needed the ducktape: it seemed reasonable that we could fasten empty beverage bottles to our side mirrors in such a way that they faced forward, and then load them with rockets and fire them like missiles as we traveled the late-night back roads of rural West Virginia.
At this point in the story I need to have a quick consultation with a lawyer friend of mine. Hold on just one minute --

He says I should insert the url or Earl or whatever of a site I like: Junior High is COOL!

The Big Noodle

2010-02-08T17:47:00.000-08:00

Hey hi howdy! I have been away from my desk for a few weeks but now I have found it again and I am ready to wail on your sense of decency with another tale from the funky-smelling vaults of memory. I am speaking of today of one of the two subjects the mighty NDI is at all familiar with -- FOOD. I know I already talked about mullet so don't get all worried that I forgot I already told you that one and you will have to sit though me telling it again as if you were hearing it for the first time, and fake laugh. No kids, today I have a double handful of new delicacies that I hope you find as horrifying and tasty as I did!

The Big Noodle

This item was encountered on a trans-hemispherical airplane ride to I think Holland, a fascinating and real country where we found out they have tiny horses called "Shitland Ponies" roaming around in the fields. They are about the same size as sheep but they are horses and therefore somewhat cuter. Holland also has honest-to-god windmills here and there. If you are planning on going into a windmill, WATCH YOUR HEAD. There are no signs to that effect like there would be if the windmill was somewhere in America -- these Hollanders just trust you to realize that there is a ridiculously huge wood and canvas propeller headed for your bean and that you should get out of the way without being told. So although Skipper's injuries were not life-threatening they were, in my opinion, preventable.

Also in Holland they have "The Netherlands." We never went there but everyone kept telling us how beautiful they are so okay, they are beautiful.

On the plane, though, it was time to eat. The menu and all the signs were in some language that was impossible to figure out just by looking at it real hard and sounding out the syllables, so we were pretty much at a loss. I was sitting a few rows behind Goodtime and Skipper and there was the usual drunk German between me and the aisle so I couldn't even ask those guys. Skipper has traveled a lot and eaten a lot, or so he claims, and I would have liked to ask him what "Skhasr Brodtgaarvid" meant before I ordered it. But I couldn't. But it had the word "brodt" in it and that sounded like "brat," and the stadium sausages in Finland were pretty tasty, and Holland and Finland both have "land" in the title, so I just ordered it.

Some of my readers of a more recent vintage may be confused when I speak about ordering from a menu on a plane. But it used to be that you could get an actual meal while you were going 500 miles an hour 7 miles up in the air. The good old days!

So I ordered Skhasr Brodtgaarvid and settled back to wait. The drunk German ordered another triple-sec and cane liquor. The hum of foreign-language muttering filled the airplane air.

Then the feeding cart was on its way! I was pretty hungry but also a little apprehensive because once in Brussels I ordered something based on a hunch and it turned out to be tiny birds in sauce. Then the feeding cart was at my row! The drunk German got his booze and I got my Skhasr Brodtgaarvid. It was under a fancy silver lid thing which was HOT so using my napkin I grasped the handle and picked up the lid and beheld my meal.

I could tell right away that it wasn't a brat, or probably any kind of sausage. It looked like a good-sized cod filet, floating in a kind of buttery pool and sprinkled with bacon bits. The German looked at me sideways and grunted and took a long pull from his cocktail. What was this odd food item? I wished desperately that Skipper was within earshot so that he could identify my meal before I bit into it. I am not crazy about fish of any kind (except for mullet) and anyway it seemed possible that this dish was actually land-based. Was it veal? A big slab of congealed oatmeal? Marzipan?

I was really hungry, though, and a good sport, so I wielded my knife and fork and hacked off a good-sized chunk. Into the pie-hole! And then I knew -- it was a noodle. A big noodle! A noodle the size of a slipper! Never had I encountered a dish that was one noodle, and never had I encountered a noodle of such epic proportions. I contemplated slicing it into many small noodles and thereby converting my foreign dish into an American one like spaghetti, but that sounded like too much work.

So I dove into that big noodle. And do you know what? That big noodle was delicious! Thick and gluey and endless, but delicious! It made me wonder why we even bother to divide up our noodles into rotinis and rigatonis and so on in the first place. It all winds up in the same place!

I thought about going to tell my band mates about the awesome noodle, but the German was entering the first phase of passing out and I knew from experience not to touch him or interact with him in any way. Besides, they would never believe me. So I just sat there, full of Skhasr Brodtgaarvid, secure in the knowledge that there was a noodle out there that didn't need to be broken into little pieces, that could stand united, solid, a weighty reminder of how semolina flour and water and maybe an egg could be formed into something huge and edible and just left that way.

When we got to Holland we rocked them out of their socks. I like to think the big noodle helped.

And that is that, kiddies, the actual story of an actual meal at 500 mph. There are more food stories to come, only maybe not at such high speeds. Stay tuned! And another thing -- if you have a lot of time that you are contemplating wasting, why not waste it here, reading my entertaining articles: Pigtail on eHow.com!

Wait -- I keep forgetting to tell people to sign up as a regular member here. This is so I won't have to spend valuable time spamming all of my friends -- it will just happen automatically!

rock on!

These Are a Few of Our Favorite Things

2009-12-04T08:40:00.001-08:00

Ahoy! That is how people would greet each other back in the olde days. It means "Hi!" So since it is close to Christmas and other assorted holidays, I thought we would do something to go along with the famous Christmas song, "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things." Raindrops on windows! Schnitzers with noodles! But most of the things I want to talk about involve rock, and the most awesome yet not very famous rock stars of all time. So let's go!

The first awesome rock group is one you may have never even heard of, except their name is the same name of the most famous fake cowboy of all time, and also the only dude my dad has ever heard who has also received a verbal beat-down by the rap group Public Enemy -- I am speaking of course of Jon Wayne. Jon Wayne was one of the first groups we, the mighty NDI, ever listened to. We had their record, "Texas Funeral," and we said to ourselves, "Dang, these guys are worse than us!" But they weren't just worse -- they were both worse AND better than any band you can think of. It sounded to us like these pig-stickers weren't even trying, which ran pretty close to our own work ethic. Also they had awesome songs that I am pretty sure they flat-out stole. Impressive. So we stole a bunch from them! We got the basics for our songs "Born to Be Hit" and "Jackson" straight off that first Jon Wayne album. The whole record had that warpy sound like the hole was off-center, or it sat in the sun up in your tree house all afternoon in the middle of summer vacation.

We never actually played with Jon Wayne, or even saw them. I am not sure they actually ever played live -- it doesn't sound like they could even if they wanted to. Skipper did write them a love letter but they never reciprocated. This was way before Facepage.com or any of your other social terrorism computer sites. Nowadays we would probably have tracked them down on-line and embarrassed them with our questions and importunities.

But the next band we did see live. Oh yes! To quote Bob Seger, "we are older now than these guys were then." But not the drummer! He has always been older than us. I am now talking about The Country Rockers, whom I mentioned in a previous blog entry, and their drummer, Ringo, who could barely walk or move his arms but still swung that beat so hard it made you dizzy. We first encountered these old boys in Memphis, Tennessee, where we were playing at a big dark empty punk club called The Antenna. This was a Tuesday night and it was raining and no one had heard of us yet and Skipper and I were both suffering from lung badgers, so our state of mind was a little bit on the dismal side. We needed some cheering up!

After we set up the band gear and inflatable clowns at the Antenna we decided to go across the street to this old-man bar that looked cozy and comforting. We crossed the street in the rain and entered a scene both familiar and strange. The beat-up bar was lit glowing red from beer signs, cloudy with smoke from unfiltered Camels, and populated by a few dozen serious drinkers who all turned their heads to behold these three straw hats walking into their inebriated little world. But most of all, there was a band on the stage whom we instantly fell in love with. It was The Country Rockers, and to us they looked something like where we might be in 50 years -- a three-piece band of croakers just trying to get through the set, slinging the prehistoric classics with casual authority. The primitive beats chased away our blues as we sat in the glowing red haze and sucked down icy PBRs.

The songs they played! The Elvis nugget "My Happiness;" stone weepers like "There Stands the Glass" and "Barrooms to Bedrooms;" a hot little number that we quickly adopted as a part of our set, "I'm A Rockin' Daddy From Ding-Dong, Tennessee." The Pigtail Character, I am going to go out on a limb and say his name was Gene, knew all the licks and possessed a gravelly twang that I know I will never earn but may be able to copy some day. The bass player was the youngest of the crew but was still well-seasoned, and I believe I have already mentioned the drummer, Ringo.

We did play in Memphis with The Country Rockers some short time later, when our fame had grown to the point where we could actually choose our own opening band. The Antenna was well-packed this time, and we all circulated happily through the crowd.
After the show the Pigtail Character asked Skipper if he could get a ride to his friend's place so he could pick up a bucket of barbeque that the dude apparently owed him from a bet. "Sure," said Skip, looking forward to dipping into the real world of our idols. So they headed off in the Zebra Van.

About two hours later Skipper showed up at the club alone. It was now about 4 in the morning and we were all a little worse for wear, but still going strong. Skipper walked in with an odd dazed look.

"Hey!" we said. "How did that go?"

"Well, we went to see his friend for the barbeque," said Skip. "Actually, it was a hotel room out by the interstate. His friend lives there."

"Cool!" we said.

"Yeah, said Skipper. "And his friend turned out to be Alex Chilton."

So that is how Skipper had barbeque with the unheralded king of 70's rock and the Pigtail Character from the Country Rockers.

The last band I will just mention here is not even a band, but a dude. His name is Jesco White, and he is the star of a TV thing called "The Last Mountain Dancer." There is no good way to describe this scene -- you really have to kind of experience it yourself. The magnificent world of old Jesco can be seen on the Youtube channel on the computer. Probably best not to go out there in person.

Right! I hope you got a little something out of this chapter. Also I just thought of about five more celebrities for future posts. I won't give them away just yet but trust me, they are pretty famous!

How Our Van Got Stuck in a Tree, Parts One and Two

2009-11-25T05:22:00.000-08:00

Hi and howdy! This story is a long one, so I divided it up into two parts. You can read them all at once, if you want, just like you can eat both peanut butter cups at once. On the other hand, if you're the kind who just eats one and then stashes the other one somewhere neither me or the kids can find it, then you may want to take this one part at a time.

Either way, it's the same mostly true story!

Part One

These events came to pass way out west, in California. The west coast is long way from where we live, smack in the middle of this enormous nation, but we had a van and we had dreams. So plans were made by our agent, Mr. Michael P. Halston of Big City Bookings, to send us and all of our talent and props out on a three-week trip to see what would happen if the mighty NDI live show was shoved in front of people from California.

I won't spend much time here explaining the route and the roads and the towns we passed on the way, since I figure everyone pretty much knows how to get there, although to be honest with you I did not know at the time how FAR it was. Once you clear Kansas the world around you stops looking like it is supposed to. Then that one giant mountain rears up in the distance. This is the mountain that you never ever get to, no matter how fast you go or how much coffee you drink.

Some things did of course happen as we wended our way west, but I will come back to those in another story, maybe. The important thing for now is that we got there. The Zebra Van actually made it to the Western Ocean, to Los Angeles. We dipped our toes in the salty surf and contemplated life, but the mighty NDI did not waste much time with Los Angeles. That place was okay but really it looked kind of flimsy, like it could tip over. Mr. Michael P. Halston was right when he said we didn't want anything to do with a scene like that. Instead he had cleverly booked us a string of shows in lesser-known but up-and-coming locales in the northern stretches of the state of California. So we drove north, for a long time.

I think the first place we rocked without mercy was a little town somewhere north of San Francisco. It was built on a pretty steep hill so when we unloaded our gear, all of the round things like drums and Barbie heads kept trying to roll away downhill. This place was crawling with what I guess you would still call hippies, although to me they mainly looked like more casual versions of some of my mom's friends.

This is where I got my first pair of used paratrooper jump boots. There was this hippie dude with long scraggly grayish hair selling stuff that wouldn't roll downhill on a blanket in front of the club. He had a sign that said "Just Tryin' to Get Back to the Garden." I didn't have any idea what that meant but there was a sweet pair of heavy nasty black lace-up boots on his blanket. "How much are these?" I asked politely.

"Those are from 'Nam," he said. He was smiling a lot. "My brother came back and he lived in the basement for like 30 years, man. These are boots, brother."

Right! "So will you take like 5 bucks?" I asked.

He leaned in toward me a little and I could see that he was missing a lot of teeth, and also that he was batshit crazy. "Do you know Maryjane?" he whispered.

"No, I don't think so," I said. This was the truth. I have never known anyone named Maryjane anything.

"Would you like to?" He was nice and smiley but really I just wanted the boots. I did not want some random skanky hook-up from a hippie selling his refuse on a 45-degree angle.

"No, thanks. Will you take ten?"

"I will take ten, man! Alright!" I gave him half of my entire bankroll and picked up the boots and walked away but I don't think he realized he had just made a sale. When I glanced back at him he was looking at where I had been standing as if I were still there.

The boots fit perfect and went nice with my retirement-man shorts. I wore them the rest of the trip. I was wearing them when we saw a bighorn sheep on a rocky hill by the road, and when we saw whales spewing whale-water out of their butts in the ocean. I was wearing them when we saw otters at play in a river by the sea, and I was wearing them when we stopped to pee in the middle of the fairy-tale giant redwood forest.

I was peeing on a tree the size of a moon rocket and looking at a banana someone had carelessly thrown from their moving car, thinking, "man, that is one fresh-looking discarded banana," when suddenly the banana moved. Seriously. I had not slept in a few days and the cold medicine was wearing off but I was pretty sure that this was really happening. Upon closer inspection the banana turned out not to be a fruit at all, but instead some kind of animal! Never had I seen an animal this color, at least not on land. It was huge and slimy and squirmy. I picked up the leaf it was clinging to and the thing pulsed and glistened. It was heavy, too. "Skipper! Goodtime!" I called. I needed someone to confirm this living hallucination. I was happy and relieved when they said they saw it too.

What now? Should we leave this animal, clearly new to science, to roam the primordial woods? Or should we take it with us and charge people $3 admission to see it at the merch booth? We were full of ideas, but in the end decided to put it back and hit the road, with our universe just a little bit bigger.

At the next stop for gas, in yet another little uphill hippie town, I was standing at the checkout counter buying some more cold medicine when my eye fell upon a little sales display. For $1.29 you could buy a lollipop the exact size, shape and color of the yellow slime-monster we had just encountered! There were dozens of them! A little sign read "Get Your Banana-Slug sucker Today." Talk about your unexpected development! The counter hippie told us that banana slugs were not only common in the area, they were a serious garden pest throughout the entire Great Northwest. And nobody ever told us!

The suckers were delicious. With our universe widened even a little bit more, we again hit the road.

But the event I wanted to tell you about involves a giant redwood tree and our Dodge Zebra Van.

Part Two

We were on maybe the sixth day of driving uphill when we came across a sign that said "See the Tree of Wonder! See the Giant Drive-Through Redwood!" Then there was another sign. And another, and another, one every few hundred feet. We figured they must be serious, seeing as how they had cut down so many trees to make signs to advertise this tree. So we pulled in to check it out.

What the signs were talking about turned out to be a gigantic redwood through which someone had actually bored a tunnel wide enough to drive a car. Somehow this unfortunate tree was still alive, with big green branches fanning out hundreds of feet overhead. The clever people who had gutted this tree were turning a nice profit on tourist suckers like us. They had it set up so once you pulled into the little drive to just see the tree and satisfy your curiosity, you discovered you were also in line to drive through it, and that cost $5, and good luck backing up or trying to turn around because everyone honks at you and shakes their fist. Five bucks was a considerable sum in those days, at least to us. But there we were, in line to drive through the Tree of Wonder.

When it was our turn the attendant hippie took our $5 and then looked at our van and shook his stringy head. "Better fold in your mirrors, man." That was all he said. You would think that as a professional Tree of Wonder attendant he would have developed keen skills of estimation and car-to-tree ratio assessment, but he hadn't. He had made a mistake. But we didn't know that yet.

With the mirrors folded in we inched forward into the tree. Goodtime was driving, and he is highly skilled, but this one was beyond even him. We were about halfway through when up above, coming from the roof, there was a sound like this: "Screeeeeeee!" Suddenly all forward movement ceased. GT gunned the motor. No dice. We were wedged solid in the Tree of Wonder. People behind us began to honk.

"Whoa, man! Stop!" The incompetent hippie attendant appeared at the front of the van, waving his arms. "You're stuck, man!"

As often happens when events are spinning beyond your control and people are yelling and you haven't slept since Wednesday, things began to take on a comic air. Inside the van we were curled up in our seats, helpless with laughter. Except for one of us -- GT. He wasn't laughing. He was mad.

He rolled down his window and shouted, "Why did you tell us it would fit? Are you stupid?" He shouted this into the blank wood wall of the tunnel. I doubt the hippie heard him. People started getting out of their cars and coming around to the front to stand next to the hippie and peer in at the Zebra Van full of rock n' roll idiots that was stuck in the tree. They weren't all that mad. They were more curious. Their slack faces made our view of the scene even funnier.

So what do you do when you get your car stuck in the Tree of Wonder? As it turns out, there was a solution. But it took the mad owner guy getting out of bed from his afternoon siesta at his house up the hill and waddling down to the tree, smoking a cigarette and waving off the hippie attendant. He stuck his head into the front of the tunnel and shouted, "Stay there for 15 minutes!"

That was a good one. But it calmed everyone down a little and the people got back in their cars to read their maps or take a nap. We got out a guitar and tried to write a song about the experience, but for some reason it didn't really lend itself to any of the riffs we had kicking around.

After fifteen minutes the owner guy came back. We expected him to have a tow truck or some kind of complicated specialty tool for prying vehicles out of trees, but he was empty-handed and unaccompanied. "Okay," he yelled, "Give it a try!"

Give what a try? Had the tree expanded? Had our van miniaturized? But we did what he said. Goodtime started her up and eased on the gas. The "screeeeee" sound returned, but we did make a little headway. We were actually moving! More gas, more "screeeeee," and before we knew it we were through the tree and out the other side, blinking in the bright sunshine of freedom!

I am more of the type to thank the Rock Gods and not question miracles, but GT knew there was a secret behind our escape and he wanted to know it. He leaned out the window. "Hey!" he shouted. "How did you know that would work?"

The owner guy stopped berating the hippie attendant long enough to turn his attention to us. "Easy," he said. "You come off the road, your tires are hot, they're expanded. You sit there a while, they cool down, they lower your vehicle." He turned back to the hippie, who was obviously receiving some on-the-job training.

"Huh," said Goodtime.

And what else was there to say? We had certainly gotten our $5 worth. We left the Tree of Wonder and continued north, free and easy.

Okay this one was loooong! Hope you liked it, folks. Come back soon for more tales inspired by true events.

If Fish Were Sliders

2009-11-23T19:03:00.000-08:00

Well first, I am happy to report that there have been not one but TWO comments to my blog here, and both of them have suggested ideas for stories. It must be more obvious than I thought that I have already run out of good ideas. Thanks for the suggestions and I intend to take you up on them. I like comments because it give me the illusion that people are reading these.

I understand that if you click on this, you will go to the place where I wrote this article. Amazing. They also have some other stories I wrote.

Okay. Now.

This one is going back into the dark and fuzzy vaults of memory. I am almost sure that it happened. If it didn't then it did anyway.

This is a little story about Uncle Pleasant's which was a bar in Louisville, and might still be, but I doubt it. It was the first place the mighty NDI ever played that wasn't within sleeping distance of our homes. The owner dude was named Uncle Mark and we liked him. He gave us our first real gig!

But this happened at maybe our tenth real gig, when it felt like things were a big ball rolling faster and faster downhill, and we couldn't stop it or even get in front of it, because it was us, getting famous. That would be impossible, to get in front of yourself. So we didn't try. We just rolled with the big ball of fame and tried not to get food poisoning or fall out of the van on the highway.

But this happened before we were the household name we are today. A LONG time before that. At this gig we were still making up songs as we went along, and not unrelated to that was the fact that there were about 16 people in attendance. But they were frantic. They were onto something.

At Uncle P's, on like I said maybe our tenth ever road gig, we had a nice idea. At the end of the first set, Skipper announced that we had decided to treat the crowd to a trip to White Castle. We had maybe 20 minutes between sets, and none of us knew where White Castle was or if they even had them in Kentucky. In those days we trusted things like that to the Rock Gods.

So we piled the entire crowd into the back of our undependable van and blasted off. It was empty because all the gear was on stage, and the crowd rolled and tumbled as GT drove us in search of our fast food goal. And do you know what? They DO have White Castles in Kentucky. The Rock Gods did not let us down.

We parked and the doors opened and the crowd spilled out and we rushed into the fragrant, affordable restaurant. Skipper led us up to the counter and a hush fell over the multitude and the counter guy in the paper hat said "Welcome to White Castle may I take your order" and Skipper held up one finger and said:

"One White Castle, please."

The paper hat said, "You just want one?"

"Just one," repeated Skipper.

Well, we got that slider and we got back in the van and we handed that little bitty burger to the crowd and everyone had a tiny bite and passed it on. No one went hungry. It was a little like Jesus and the fishes, if Jesus wore matching tuxes and fishes were sliders.

Back at the club the crowd went back in and we went back on. We were bonded for pretty much ever.

Okay let's let that sink in for awhile. More to come, and no mistake.

Goodtime's Big Adventure

2009-11-22T17:07:00.000-08:00

Okay so today I would like to recall some of our rock and roll exploits in a far-away land, in this case the land they call "Winnipeg Manidosa, Canada." This is a place so close to the North Pole that it is cold and snowy even in July, so you have to plug in your car to heat up the engine block. This is true. Every vehicle has the business end of an extension cord dangling out of the grill like a limp electrical johnson. And the parking meters all have plugs, so you just park and plug your car's man-part into the waiting receptacle and head off to Tim Horton's for a donair. Your car will make it with the parking meter and generate enough heat to keep your engine from freezing up like a beer you put in the freezer and forgot about... Oh crap -- hold on a minute...

Okee! Back and ready to begin. The mighty New Duncan Imperials, of which I am one, has been coming to this frigid port of call for up on thirty-six years. We generally play at a rock palace called The Royal Albert Arms. This is a massive old hotel in the bad part of Winnipeg with a rock club on the first floor and rooms up above. I have to say, and here I am being as sincere as I can be, that this place will be in our hearts until the day we die by electrocution or some other means. This is a special place, folks. It is LOUD and beat-up and dark, and the people rock hard, and it has an enjoyable air of desperation and violence.

When we started coming here you could still smoke in bars, and usually it was so thick in there you'd think there was a tire fire smoldering in a back room. People started in on their Extra Old Stock bottles at about 10AM, so by the late afternoon the atmosphere was like a zombie party in Satan's cave. The best part was that we usually played two nights or more, and we stayed in the rooms upstairs, where our neighbors were recovering heroin addicts and aging post-traumatic servicemen (this is why we sometimes called it the "The Royal Amputee Arms"). It was not unusual to find needles on the floor in the halls, and someone was always pounding on a door in the middle of the night looking for a dude named Randy. Awesome.

The best part was that we each always got our own room, with a sproingy mattress and no phone or TV or light bulbs or curtains. For a young rock band accustomed to fitting five people into a Motel 6 single, this was our idea of heaven. There were old dressers and tables in the rooms, and if you opened the drawers you would find forgotten belongings like half-empty tins of pomade and crumpled-up legal notices and old belts. The smell was nothing a couple scented candles from Shoppers Drug Mart couldn't cover up, kind of. We really felt at home. We blazed through our shows, then rode the elevator up to our rooms for rest and relaxation. No tear-down, no load out, no muss, no fuss.

Being so comfy and on top of each other like that really made the creative juices flow, and we did some of our best prank work at the Albert. One night we moved all of the furniture from our rooms onto the stage. It took awhile due to the elevator being not big enough for more than one dresser at a time, but by the time we went on, the stage looked like someone's living room, complete with plugged-in lamps.

Another hilarious stunt involved Kernel, our road manager. This was during the phase in our career when we would occasionally wear these nice dresses that we got at a lady store, and Kernel had one also. We hadn't put them on in several weeks. One night right before show time we all put on our attractive dresses and we told Kernel, "Okay! Tonight is a dress-up night! Get your smock on!" Kernel was a funny nice dude built like a short bull, and his dress fit him like a pantyhose fits a beer barrel. He sighed and squeezed into his outfit and went down to start the show, where he would be stationed by the side of the stage, in full view of the crowd.

As soon as he was gone we immediately changed back into our awesome he-man matching tux coats with white pants and shoes. When we hit the stage Kernel was of course the only man in the bar wearing a tight skimpy dress, and he kept us well-amused during the set with his attempts to conceal his feminine wares behind a monitor wedge.

Good times, Kernel!

But I am really here to tell you of a death-defying stunt that nearly went fatally awry. Since we were always knocking on each others' doors to go out to Salisbury House or down to the Cowboy Lounge (a dance club), somehow a joke developed where the person knocking would not be there when you answered the door, or it would be someone entirely different from who you expected. It worked both ways -- once when I had some dudes from the opening band hanging out, and GT came to get me for an expotition, those boys got together and yanked the door open and screamed. That almost killed Goodtime.

It wasn't that funny at first, but then it started to mutate. Soon you would open your door to find an empty pair of shoes or a puff of cigarette smoke hanging in the air. Then it evolved into more ambitious items, like a stray dog, or the Coke machine from the lobby. We were at the point where you could open Skipper's door and find an elaborately made dummy with "I am Skipper" pinned to its chest hanging from the pipes, when Goodtime raised the stakes of the whole game, and also almost died.

It came to pass that at about four-thirty in the morning, after a Friday night rock set that could only be described as "schmuuhhh," when I had just excused myself from Skipper's swinging post-gig party to go to my room to do some serious passing out, it happened that GT got it in into his head to execute the Knocking Joke, only from the outside of my window. The band rooms were all on the third floor, and GT was not a skilled rock climber, or even slightly prepared mentally for this endeavor. But he was not listening to advice.

So he opened the window of his room, which was right next to mine. A blast of wind cold enough to shrink a tetherball hit him but did not smack any sense into him, so one leg went over the sill, then the other, and then the rest of Goodtime followed, giggling. He said later that he had figured out that the restaurant awning was underneath him, and that if he fell it would save him.

Skipper and assorted party guests had followed GT to the room and were trying to keep him from killing himself, but also trying to keep him from attracting the police, who were actually mounties, since this was Canada and as far as I know still ride their mounts to crime scenes, although technically this was not yet a crime scene.

GT hauled his wobbly, sharply dressed self out on the skimpy ledge. His green and tan golf shoes were not designed for adventure sports, but he was a strong man and he clung to the sheer rock face of the Royal Albert with determination. The wind, which had traveled from the north for 1600 miles unhindered by any geographical features of any kind and was therefore going close to the speed of sound, ripped at his spangly tux jacket. He pressed his face to the Royal Albert and inched on, giggling at this ultimate version of a joke that we, his bandmates, honestly thought had played itself out.

Closer...closer... Then one snazzy foot slipped off the ledge and GT had a sick moment of dizziness! But he was more than used to those and got his foot back on the ledge and continued on. On, into the frigid Canadian night. Finally, and I do mean finally, he was within knocking reach of the window. He balled up his furry fist. He knocked!

No one answered!

He knocked again!

No one answered again!

Nearly in tears, which would have frozen on his face, Goodtime knocked yet again. Where was Pigtail? Why didn't he answer? Didn't he know how close to destruction Goodtime truly was? After he knocked the forth time, the curtains stirred. And parted. And Goodtime peered into the grinning face of...

Kernel! The last person he expected! Kernel was wearing his slinky lady dress and dancing seductively in the window, beckoning to wide-eyed Goodtime. There was a colored light from the stage set up behind him, and it played on every curve and crinkle as he wriggled and pranced. Kernel had come to my door to wake me up and we had quickly set up GT for this ultimate version of the prank. Goodtime was so horrifiyingly amused that he let go of the Royal Albert and plummeted like a stone through the restaurant awning, which, as it turned out, did indeed save him. He sprained both thumbs and wrecked his straw hat, but overall he was fine.

The next night he rocked twice as hard as any of us.

Kernel, if you're reading this, let me tell you again that that was a red-hot idea. You may not remember the events just this way, but trust me, this is what happened. You are and always will be a funny man. Give us a call because I think we are headed back up to the Albert pretty soon.

BOY are my thumbs sprained. Typing is hard and takes FOREVER. Hope you liked this Pig-tale. There will be more.

Food A La Road #1

2009-11-19T15:36:00.000-08:00

Well hi and welcome back. So far this blog idea is a pretty hot potato. I have almost TEN friends, which is five times more friends than I had before. And only one of those ten friends is also my brother!

If this episode turns out okay, maybe there will be more eating stories to come. For now let's just see how this sounds:

We were in the van on tour, hurtling down the road in probably Georgia or Mississippi. We were on our way to a gig at a club in Jackson called W. C. Don's, which was nothing more or less than two decrepit trailer homes nailed together to form a "T." The nailing together of the two homes had been done in a very half-hearted and probably illegal manner. You could see the sky from anywhere in the club and when it rained it basically rained right on your amps and your drummer.

We were playing there for what they called "Teen Night," an event that drew about 300 hot-looking youngsters to this nasty dive bar. It was a huge social event for the entire southern area! Since everyone was between the ages of twelve and seventeen, the bar couldn't serve any alcohol. So all of these young people were out of their minds on Extacy. The owner of W. C. Don's was no dummy -- he realized that this unpleasant drug actually sucks the fluid out of your brain and makes you ferociously thirsty, so the bar sold little plastic cups of tap water for $1 apiece. When he was paying us our $125 at the end of the night he told us that the bar had made $1,500 on tap water alone.

Later we learned that there was no one actually called Don, or even W. C., involved with this skanky place in any way. It was called that because the owner and his friends were sitting around trying to think of a name, and the best they could manage was "We Couldn't Decide On a Name." W. C. D. O. N.' s.

But we rocked W. C. Don's! The drug-addled teens hugged and shouted, especially when GT tossed florets of raw broccoli to them. We couldn't fail, because the drugs they had taken forced them to fall in love with anything anyone did. They loved us passionately. It really didn't matter that we were scorching the hell out the place. But we were anyway -- NDI doesn't know how to NOT rock!

In addition to broccoli, we also offered them a hurled gift of dozens of samples of coleslaw in little cups. This was back in the day when we would cruise out to the local supermarket when we got to town and acquire large amounts of any likely looking food item to offer to the crowd, in order to lure them closer to the stage. Alas, we had to lay off this practice as our fame grew. Huge unruly crowds would often hurl the items back at us, and if you were ever hit in the face with a raw chicken foot while you were on stage trying to sing, you would stop handing out raw chicken feet to drunk hicks, too.

While we are on topic of food, let's return to the topic of food. The morning after W. C. Don's, we went to eat and abuse each other at the nearest truck-stop diner. I cannot count how many times we went to places like this, always expecting to find some kind of authentic experience of the real flavor of the region. They say that you can tell if someone is insane because they do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Well, there we were in Mississippi, expecting different results. But it was the same thing! The same smell, the same sticky plastic tablecloth, the same menu, the same flies. The same waitress. It didn't matter if it was Louisiana, Maine, or Flin Flon, Manitoba: any place where the sign just said FOOD was going to serve up FOOD.

But the reason I am telling you this is that at this place there was one little different result: a menu item that was new to us! It was not a Monte Cristo, or a Lumberjack Skillet, or Chicken Planks. It was handwritten on a greasy little card that said "Special's" at the top and it was this: Mullet. What could it be? I guessed it was sheep. Goodtime, who at that time actually had a mullet, only a hair one, guessed some kind of giant pancake. Skipper was the only rock tourist who actually wanted to try mullet, so he decided to ask the waitress what it was the next time she came waltzing by with the Bunn coffeepot.

We are coming to what I guess you would call the "punch line." But you have to be paying attention or it will slip right past you.

The waitress hove to. She had her waitress pad out and her waitress pen, too. She was ready to take our order. But Skip upset the usual order of things by asking his question. He pointed at the greasy card and said, "What's mullet?"

The waitress thought for a second and then she said, and this is the punch line I told you about:

"Well, have you ever had mullet?"

I have been told by lots of people that explaining a joke is worse than telling it wrong, so I won't. But I will say that the waitress lady's question made about as much sense as us being in this restaurant at all, expecting to find a real experience of the local people and their way of life, their way of thinking.

Unless, wait, maybe we did find it.

Anyway it turns out mullet is a kind of trash fish, like croaker or buffalo. Skipper did order it and it was actually pretty good! It tastes kind of like mullet. We ate hearty and then we hit the road, heading out to a new town, a new club, a new FOOD.

Okay that is enough for today. See you soon you big baboons --

Estonia by Hovercraft

2009-11-14T07:31:00.000-08:00

I am told by my manager, Mr. Kenn Goodman of Pravda Records, that you can put pictures and what-not on here and make it more appealing to the general populace. I am not sure how appealing pictures of me or my band would be to anyone but he has been right lo these many years, so maybe I'll try. Some day.

Since the last couple of chapters have concerned celebrities, I figured I would leave that topic alone for the next year or so. Plus I am out of celebrities.

Today we are going to Estonia, a country most of you only dream about visiting. A land of leggy models, ancient fortresses, and buses, and also bus drivers who yell at you for not speaking Estonian. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The journey began with a long airplane ride to Finland. The mighty NDI had an actual tour of this country, due to the efforts of a superfan name Miettinen who worked at a record-pressing plant and wanted to actually see the band whose records he had been seeing roll down the conveyor belt at work. The tour suited us pretty well -- a total of five gigs, spread out over two and a half weeks. We had time to truly experience Finland!

The first thing we learned about Finland is that everything is divided into three levels, and by everything I mean the stadium sausages and the vodka. So you can get Good, Medium, or Dangerous meat and booze, depending on the kind of cash you intend to spend. At this stage of our lives we were strictly in the "Dangerous" category, so that's the way we lived. Our hosts encouraged this reckless behavior and treated our bad choices as a spectator sport.

At some point in the trip Miettinen took us out to his uncle's lake cottage to experience the rural aspects of Finland. I can't say I recall much about this venture, but I do remember spending hours in a boat, fishing with a 12-year-old kid who spoke zero English and had zero interest in trying to learn. We floated around all morning in total silence, reeling in panfish and avoiding eye contact. Why? I do not know.

Also somewhere in here Skipper accidentally set himself on fire.

This is becoming a story about Finland, which I had hoped to save for some future date when I seriously run out of ideas. So let's move on to Estonia!

After the cottage in the woods, Skipper and I decided to take the hovercraft across the Gulf of Finland to Estonia, a country I had literally never heard of. Goodtime decided to stay in Helsinki and visit the galleries and art museums. So it was just us two tourists.

Somehow at 7 AM we were at the hovercraft port. I guess you would call it a hoverport. We were shaggy and starving, and Skipper made the mistake of eating a cold Finnish cheese and tomato sandwich from the only open lunch counter. Neither of us was in the best of shape but that really pushed Skip over the edge. It was a cold and nasty gray day, and the scene was complimented by the enormous grimy red and blue hovercraft that came skimming over the choppy waves. It looked like a beater UFO that couldn't get up into the air. The cool part was the 20-foot chopper blades on all four corners. Very dangerous in appearance.

Skipper's face had become an interesting color and a fat German dude was taunting us and falling on us. "Haben sie eine probleme?" he shouted at me. He was hammered and it wasn't even 8 in the morning. Give him credit.

The ride was problematic because the enormous gray waves of the Gulf of Finland kept smacking the bottom of the Hovercraft. This appeared to contradict the idea of "hover" and jostled us harshly. Skipper looked as bad as I've ever seen him, and believe me that is saying something. Inside the Hovercraft it was smelly and hot. Smelly and hot and LOUD. You couldn't talk or even really think.

After about a year of this abuse the engines changed their tone and we pulled into the ocean parking lot of Estonia. The next thing I can remember is walking, staggering really, into a place where I didn't know where I was. I had never been in a medieval city before and the rocky streets that never went straight seemed impossibly weird. Also the place was crawling with glamor model ladies in miniskirts and heels, pretty much the last thing I had expected. We poked our puzzled noses into the many hard-to-define shops where they usually had an abacus instead of a cash register and sold everything from can openers to maps. It was amazing to realize that this odd place had been existing for all the years I had been alive, and even now at this moment it is odd to realize that it is still there, existing.

One cool thing: We figured out that there is a tradition of visiting people after work and bringing them a little bouquet of flowers. So all along many of the streets there were little booths, basically little flourist shops, selling these pretty little bouquets, and everyone we passed was clutching a bunch of fresh flowers. I am not big on flowers but it gave the place a pretty nice feeling.

We checked out a concert in a park and shared a cold Estonian beverage in a bar that also sold clothes and knives. Then we realized it was starting to get a little late and we needed to get back to the hoverport to catch our hovercraft. We decided to take a bus.

First of all, Finnish is considered one of the top hardest languages to understand. It looks like mirror writing and the letters never repeat. Estonian is one step harder than that, so unless you grow up there you have no chance of communicating with anyone, especially if they are a furious bus-driver lady on a bus where you aren't allowed to get off through the front door. No-one got hurt, exactly, except for Skipper, who re-injured his nose, which had been broken during a fistfight in junior high. There was a lot of yelling. But I have to say that when people are yelling at you in a language you can't understand, it kind of turns funny. So although Skipper was bleeding all over the place and the stupid little dog who started it all by getting caught in the door was trying to bite someone, even though all of this was suddenly happening in the country of Estonia, I was basically trying not to laugh. Even when a cop car zoomed by us -- on its way to an actual crime -- the "wee-oh" siren also seemed more funny than official or threatening. I know this sounds terrible, like I don't care about other people or something, but there it is.

Thank god we were close to the hoverport and we could get off, through the correct door, and get the holy hell out of there. We fled the scene and joined the hovercraft herd, back to Finland, back to our reunion with GT, who didn't understand our incoherent story but was still glad to see us. That night we ROCKED a community hall with a statue of a cow out front.

Man my hands and brains are tired. I can't even guess what's next.

Skipper and Prince

2009-11-12T07:38:00.000-08:00

This next true tale concerns one of the shortest yet most funky performers to ever come out of Minneapolis, not including the drummer for Husker Du -- I am talking of course about Prince. By the way, forget all that nonsense about your name being an unpronounceable symbol. That in my opinion is a blatant attempt to not only hide your true identity, but also make a lot of cash. I say whatever your name is, that is what you should answer to.

So we had a show in Minneapolis at a new club there called The Glam Slam. This was Prince's brand new club. It was so brand new that when we got there a crew of guys was applying varnish to a 50-foot-wide artist's rendering of the Prince symbol that took up the entire dance floor in front of the stage. We were not allowed to roll our amps or walk on or even really look at this work of art. It was supposed to be dry and finished by show time but we had our doubts.

This was one of those clubs where the band had to pay for water and the dressing rooms had furniture. There was no rock feeling whatsoever, and why we, the mighty and still-unknown NDI, were playing there was beyond any of us. But our manager at the time, Michael P. Halston, had wangled us a $135 guarantee on a Thursday night. Big money in those days.

We were playing that night with the truly weird but entertaining Dread Zeppelin. Some of you may remember these chicken-scratchers -- they played reggae versions of Led Zeppelin classics and their singer was an Elvis impersonator. Pretty much the whole enchilada! We admired the highness of their concept.

Our set was earth-shaking and we left the crowd in the usual stunned silence. Dread did their bit and played like champs.

The show was barely over and we were hanging out backstage, looking sharp, when every light in the club went dim and the music stopped. It was a spooky moment. Everybody froze. Then the first funkopated beats of the Prince classic "When the Doves Fly" came bumping out of the P.A. speakers. Suddenly the back stage door flew open and a flock of huge dudes in fur coats swarmed in. In their midst was a dwarf dressed in a sparkly ice-skater outfit. Obviously this shimmery little guy was a big deal, but it took us a few moments to realize that we were in the presence of the actual club owner himself: Prince! They cruised past us as we stood flat-footed, unsure what to do. Then Skipper, with nothing to lose, sprang into action.

"Hey, Prince!" he shouted.

Prince kind of turned his head a little and flashed a lovely smile and said, "Hey."

Well sir, that was enough for us. Within a day or two the story had written itself. Skipper and Prince had met and hit it off backstage at the Glam Slam, had exchanged phone numbers, and were planning to release a double album. This historical meeting of musical minds was immortalized in one of our biggest ignored hit songs: "Skipper and Prince," from the Loserville album. The song also includes a few other love connections we have made through the years: me and Dolly Parton, and Goodtime and Ringo, the drummer for the indescribable Country Rockers, from Memphis.

Okay then. That is enough about celebrities for a while. Next time maybe we'll talk about Estonia.

Incident in Iowa

2009-11-10T13:47:00.000-08:00

Okay I haven't figured out the links on my computer here at work at the Jack in the Box, so if they're no here yet you can just wait, goddammit.

This is my second official blog writing, and no one can tell me, or will tell me, what people write in these things. "Just stuff." Well okay that does sound pretty entrancing, but in my case all I have really is dim memories of the past, along with some not-so-dim fears of the future. So here's a dim memory of the past for you to chew on:

It was I think early 1993, and we were on tour in Iowa. I was listening to a lot of live Osmonds and feeling sorry for myself, dealing with some serious knots in my hair, feeling itchy in my jeans. But we were on tour, rolling in our impossible-to-ignore zebra van, which looked like this here, minus the word "Zebra" on the side and those dorks standing next to it. Ours said "Bernie Hoffman's Animal Kingdom," I think, and we got it from Animal Kingdom on Milwaukee Ave, and the actual Garfield Goose, or one of him, used to ride in it along with the actual Ray Rayner, who was his boss.

We stopped at a normal old gas station on the windswept plain outside Iowa City. While the pump did its thing we all went inside to mill around. Check out the belt buckles and pork rinds. Maybe visit the men's. Well there we were when we noticed this freaky dude reading a Hot Rod magazine and acting squirrelly. He had long hair for a gentleman in his sixties and in addition it was also streaked with green. He had an amazing beaky nose. He looked like Tiny Tim. He WAS Tiny Tim.

"Tiny Tim?!" we said. "Yeees?" said Tiny, waving his hair back from his face like a lady. He kinda seemed like a big witchy lady, and that's how he talked, too. He wasn't making a whole lot of sense. "I live here in Iowa,' he said in his lilty, fluffy, old-man voice. "I'm on tour. Do you fellows know 'Leave it to Beaver?'" Yeah! we said. We know all the shows. "I have Jerry Mathers out in the car," said Tiny. "We're on tour."

What a tour that would be! Tiny could sing and I guess Jerry would act. Or maybe sing. Or maybe Tiny would just hang around on stage. We had so many questions, but Tiny had to go. We never got to meet Mr. Mathers but we did get Tiny's business card, which was just the middle cut out of some condolence Hallmark card with his phone number scribbled on the back.

Well sir, that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Our manager, Mr. Kenn Goodman of Pravda Records, took that card out of our hands the minute we got back. He called Mr. Tim to see if he would like to play with the mighty NDI, or just come over for dinner, but Tiny was on tour in Australia, playing heavy metal songs with some bar band. Well, we reasoned, if he was desperate enough to do that, maybe he would do something with us.

That something turned out to be one of the most brain-challenging records of all time, Tiny Tim with The New Duncan Imperials Live at Martyrs. We assumed Tiny would be playing some awesome hard rock tunes, but when he got off the plane at O'Hare, toothbrush sticking up out of his suitcoat pocket, ukelele in a battered shopping bag, he declared, "Oh, I am done with the loud stuff! The modern stuff! I am now playing the greats, the classics of ought-seven and ought-eight!" What he meant was, songs that not even my Grandma Dick would have heard of, that's how old they were. Songs like "The Spinning Wheel Shall Turn E'er My Love Grows Sweeter" and "Sing, O Spangled Turtledove!" Stuff in keys like G minor. Impossible stuff. If you listen to that record, you will hear a guitarist, me, who is in so far over his head that he is not even playing notes, just keeping time against the strings. I became a rhythm instrument and I wasn't even so good at that. The person who saved the show was Crispy, the fourth Imperial, who actually knew some of these crusty old songs and played along on his squeeze-box. He saved the show!

I wish this story had a tidy nice ending, like something meaningful Tiny said when we said goodbye, or how a label executive heard the record and almost released it in Greece. Nothing like that happened. He just flew back to wherever, I guess Iowa, and we never saw him or talked to him again. Not so much later Tiny died. He was an odd person but who isn't?

Okay that's enough story for now. Go to bed.

I am not so good at this ye

2009-11-09T16:08:00.000-08:00

t, so if things are messed up or mispelled that's pretty much your fault for forcing me to do this, goddammit. We were in Austin Texas last weekend, I mean my band THE NEW DUNCAN IMPERIALS, the least popular legendary band in the world, and while we driving to Houston Skipper and GT started demanding I write a blog, so I got on my kid's computer and after HOURS of my neck starting to hurt and my fingers too big for these little buttons here I am. I cannot over-emphasize how much of this is their idea, so when I have nothing to say like now that is pretty much their fault too.

We played some loud hot rock in Texas. We also drove around in Wet Dawg's 1978 Holiday Rambler motorhome. It is a spectacular vehicle. It has shag carpeting everywhere including the ceiling, which I think is intended to make a roll-over crash a little more comfortable and stylish. Other than my incorrect assumption that the toilet worked, this vehicle made the highway part of the trip more like the living room part of the trip. We talked and lied and listened to some music. Wet Dawg plays in lots of bands including ours sometimes and also El Orbits -- check out these hot-potatoes!

I am going to make a big old pork tenderloin for my kids now. The recipe I favor can be found here. I will post, as I think they say, more details of the Texas trip pretty soon. Maybe after dinner.

Rock!
pigtail