Fetish will be coming out on Regimental as well. RU-486 will be doing tons of splits. One with
Zweizz, doing a split with Dravorium. I’m doing a project with him called Cult of the Swine.
Tons of little one-off cassettes. Two songs, ten minutes, chrome cassettes, that’s all you get.
Limited to 66-100 copies.”
“You gonna split from Huntsville?”
“Probably New England when the lease is up. I’m too damn nomadic to stay in one spot.
I want bright lights and big titties, not Joe’s Crab Shack and a hangover.”
“You mentioned traveling since I’ve been gone”…
“DC was one of the most interesting. I tend to forget the sleaze. It’s just cool to walk out
of a five star restaurant and there’s bums on cardboard right there. It’s the perfect dichotomy –
you can have culture and wholesomeness, then you walk outside and are surrounded in filth. It
keeps it real and earthly…”
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LITTLE ROCK (9/17)
Today it’s all about W.A.S.P. and Stratovarius as we roar through Mississippi into Arkansas. The
haul through Alabama had been astonishingly desolate. People riding horseback, cars pieced
together like that old Johnny Cash song. Dilapidated houses. weird bridges, industrial silos – a
poverty beyond mere description. Even the interstate is a dirt road.
We pull into Little Rock an hour before we’re supposed to start -- an Italian food joint
called Vito’s with a full concert hall. Casey Jones is again at the helm, and I stand behind him
creepily during his pinball fix until he notices me. Squinted eye confused response: “Oh… You’re
back.” Man I love doing that.
No one is there, 2 bands cancel, but we get free pop and 50% off our meals. One artsy-
indie band called Cinema Herd struggles through a set of faulty, dying equipment. DTB gets a
huge response from the 10 people hanging out and sell $60 in merch. One girl actually drove 3
hours to see them from Southern Indiana, and she knew the word to every song…
LITTLE ROCK (9/18)
I wake up totally insane, whacked by insomnia and humidity, still no REM sleep. Casey’s new
house is this giant three-level art commune that’s been doled out only to specialty cases since the
mid 70’s. I spend the sleepless morning chatting with his room-mate about these corrosive spiders
in Arkansas that with one bite’ll melt your appendages right off.
Daddy Long-legs are also more poisonous then Black Widow’s, although they can’t harm
you because their fangs are too soft to puncture human skin. However, if you boil a few in tea, a
single cup will kill someone instant as cyanide.
Another day off, and Casey doesn’t mind us hanging around. Off to Sonic Burger and the
$1 theatre where the family-friendly cartoon mascot is an alley cat puffing a cigarette. Live Fee
Or Die Hard is our selection. Decent, but it’s still a PG-13 John McClain… We score a Random
gig at White Water Tavern after haggling the promoter. Casey again shows up utterly perplexed,
surprised that Neil is ripping a solo onstage. We walk out with a lucky $65.
Back at the art-commune there is a guy in boxers & red devil horns aggressively trying to
get us to throw down on cocaine. Some band called Sleeping in the Aviary from Wisconsin is on
tour and crashing on the couch. They’re these snobby tight-pants indie kids huffing rubber
cement and painting mustaches on each other. They won’t let me interview them, but demand the
tape to roll naturally: “It’s great, it’s really great. Gum it, you know. Dip your finger in it and put
it on your gums…”
HOUSTON (9/19)
Humid as hell, mosquito bitten legs -- unsuccessfully tried to sleep on the porch but switched to
the van. While I was rolling cigarettes a Blood gang-banger walked up in full red outfit trying to
bum one… Sweating, trying to sleep, 100 degrees in the van… Long ass drive to Houston, and
we’ve been cranking Hall & Oates and the new William Shatner. Texas is even more desolate
then Alabama and the economy seems based around 10-wheelers and fake orange-cone
construction zones which are obvious speed-traps…
The second you get to Houston everything is HUGE. Giant 8 lane freeways, Walmart’s
that stretch for miles, and the most terrifying jet runway in America – “The George Bush
International Airport.” We’ve crossed into the heart of “THEIR WORLD.”
The venue is another art-kid commune called Super Happy Fun Land that’s surrounded
by industrial factories on a back street off the freeway exit ramp. It looks like Captain
Spaulding’s Chicken Shack from the outside & Billy Jack’s Freedom School on the interior.
Walls painted in murals, thousands of books lying around – bongos, pipe organs. Gargantuan
mosquitoes cause us to itch profusely alongside the sweltering humidity soup combo.
The black-rimmed glasses artsy chick that let us inside quickly disappears into the
backroom & locks the door. There are a few here all have that Pittsburg vibe, hiding & avoiding
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us. But there are couches everywhere, and we’ve been allowed free shelter. Still, no one can sleep
because the asphyxiating heat. Glover spends 2 hours pacing around with The Midget on the
phone, still determined to run away on the next tour…
HOUSTON (9/20)
The state motto of Texas is “Friendship.” Saturday morning, bright & cheery; Houston’s
epicenter looks like Fascist Italy. All the buildings are stark-black or of a single color, all squares
& quadrants of a perfect grid. There is no character, just neocolonialist tombs surrounded by
desert.
11am, eating breakfast burritos with a local tech/grind act called We Both Know. Both
bands dominate the length of the table, DTB just in the background observing like National
Geographic videographers.
Ryan Mitchell of WBK starts us off: “The difference between the two cities is that Dallas
is filled with people from Up North who move because they wanna be Texans and wear cowboy
hats like hicks. Houston is where all the Native Texas people go to do crime.”
“Are cops evil here?”
Tyler Irvine chimes in: “Absolutely. They tazered a singer over a noise complaint at a
real, established venue.”
“Anything you go to jail for. Pot laws around here are really strict.”
“Don’t ever do anything wrong to a cop or attempt running. The cops here are different
then the cops up North. Down here they’re like shaved bull dogs. They all do judo and shit.”
“Have you heard of this Super Happy Fun Land place before?”
“They own the Southmore House too, or their friends. Southmore, it’s basically the
crustie house. Houston has people who think there is a punk scene but they’re ridiculous. Houston
doesn’t know anything about punk. There’s a bunch of old dudes that think they’re the tough
because they beat up teenagers at shows.”
“The music scene’s changed a lot this past year especially ‘cause this younger crowd is
really into death metal. Screamo was really popular here, now you’re seeing death metal, grind
styles. Most of the metal scene is more of the nu-metal type stuff still, because that’s what the
older generation is into.”
“I was gone for a year in Seattle. I came back here and death metal exploded… Houston
has this hardcore scene with like role model dudes. That’s the bad deal about Texas, especially
the South. Everybody’s a badass… It’s so irritating. I tried to explain to my little sister who was
wearing a confederate flag shirt -- why do you wear shit like that? ‘It’s about my heritage.’ What,
ignorance and racism? Why do they even sell things like this? Fuck southern pride… As a band
our goal is to destroy the entire world and rebuild it in our own image.”
“Are the hardcore bands like straight-up gangs then?”
“We have crews. What is it… the…”
“Grown ass…”
The ‘GROWN ASS MAN CREW’”
“Did you just… The Grown Ass… hee hee hee BWA HA HA HA HA!!!”
“They go to all the hardcore shows, do their whole Gorilla Biscuit thing. Again, that’s a
small sect. It’s not a good representation of Houston.”
“They’re like Nazi’s, but at least Nazi’s believed in something. It went from role models
to ‘fuck everyone else we’re the shit’ to 20-30 year olds beating up teenagers at shows. It’s all
fine when they knock kids out in the pit, but when one of those kids punches them in the face
accidentally then 20 of them jump the kid outside.”
“Tyler, you mentioned Seattle.”
“I lived there for a year and filled in for a drummer in a band called CLR. They were a
crust punk band. I took a greyhound back here, it took like 3 days. Just when you think your back
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couldn’t possibly hurt worse some fat dude with night terrors sits in front of you. He like screams
in his sleep. That really happened too, he’s got like a bike helmet with bubbles…”
“Oh you have no idea… I heard that some congressman passed a bill where all the
kids in school have to pledge allegiance to Texas. There’s a Texas pledge after the classic
pledge…”
“They added “Under God” to the Texas pledge of allegiance this year.”
Texas in general – you love it or you hate it. As soon as you leave it you miss it, soon as
you get back you’re like ‘why did I ever come back to this sweltering hellhole?’”
“Got any good acid stories?”
“One time I took acid and I realized everything was connected to Mother Earth and then I
decided that I was going to find Mother Earth and I was going to fuck her. And then I got really
thirsty and fell asleep.”
“I don’t know where I heard it, but its an amazing story. These kids all took shrooms I
guess, they went out in the woods and started tripping balls. They were like ‘guys, lets catch
something!’ So they take a trash bag out there and catch something. ‘Oh my god, we got a
gnome!’ So they got like a gnome in a trash bag and they take it home and stick it in their closet.
They’re like, ‘Dude, we got to check it in the morning when we’re sober.’ They all go to work and
then see on the news a little 4 year old girl’s gone missing. They go back home and look in their
closet and there’s just this 4 year old girl standing there crying... They went and turned
themselves in. The so-called liberals on the West Coast would’ve nailed their balls to the wall.”
“Any crazy show stories?”
“There was this battle of the bands and a girl was crossing the street and got hit by two
cars. Hit and run, split her in half. Sucks. Everyone went outside crying and puking. We won, and
we’re like “yeah, we won” and everybody’s still kind of crying, like puking and stuff. She got hit,
went up, then got hit by another car. It was BA-BUHM. Her arms back here, her legs up here, her
torso… I couldn’t recognize the face. We were outside and I heard THUMP and I turn and see
feet in the air and I hear THUMP and then the ground. So my band were the first people up there.
I was cool with it… Not cool with it, but…”
“Yeah, getting pictures with it, ha ha ha… Yeah, that was bad…”
Determined to explore the alien habitat, we make the abominable mistake of going to the world’s
largest IKEA blown out on the most powerful grass we’ve smoked all tour. I’ve never entered
such a thing. These Texas people have turned furniture buying into a family-extravaganza
activity.
It’s got it’s own food court; this menacing labyrinth of $5000 davenports and bedroom
sets. You have to keep following these yellow lines that don’t actually lead you to any exit, just
deeper into the belly of the beast.
Neil gets a cell call and paces around a fake kitchen talking to the guy as if he’s at a party
late at night trying to have a moment of clarity. I see him get lost in the apparition, and the fear in
his eyes as he snaps out of it. We’re trapped in this goliath of other people’s fake lives, with false
family portraits in glass cases, cardboard TV’s, toilets with no plumbing. “Your” humble life and
memories, all easily selectable, lay out before the sterile consumer lens.
Running in circles seeking the exit everyone keeps looking at us funny. By the time we
finally spy the glass doors, it’s an hour later, and I hear a security siren going off. When I look
back we’re being trailed by 3 security officers – the “king-size mattress Gestapo.”
The hyper-obesity of Houston continues as we finish the roach and enter a Sams Club
that is just as monolithic and horrid. The aisles of frozen food are locked inside giant bank-styled
vaults, like Dachau chambers. As we pass the grocery baggers one radios his manager “10-12 on
aisle 13,” and again the boys don’t notice as we’re trailed by security.
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There is no way around it – this is where the lizard people will lock us after The Bush
Clan ignites Revelations. That’s why everything in Houston is so Gojira-like – it has to house the
post-apocalyptic survivors…
DALLAS (9/21)
Reading Ishmael at the apartment of yet another Detroit Expatriate, from Neil’s high school. He’s
a hardcore punker turned 27 year old mild-mannered accountant. The aftermath of Super Happy
Fun Land was no door money, no merch sales, another band opening with banjo’s.
The ride to Dallas is lengthy, and no oil fields to be spotted. Ulysses The Scumfuck calls
out of the blue, wondering where I was during the Summer of Love. It was the 40th anniversary
spectacular at Golden Gate, and an unrivaled psychedelic explosion.
Tonight’s show is at Fat Daddies in the Dallas Suburb of Lewisville. It’s another death-
trap with a big sign on the door that exclaims, “Attention Touring Bands: You get no money
unless you draw more then 30 people, and then we pay you $1 per head after that. Take it or
leave it. Crybabies go home.” Crumbling parking lot, 20 tight-pants kids with quaffed hair & a
Battle of the Bands contest to open for Drop Dead Gorgeous…
After a decent Lamb of God type metal band named INBRYO finishes, DTB go full
blast, talking mad amounts of shit on screamo culture. You’d think