Youthful Indiscretions

My brain, what's left of it, won't quite let the words escape to this digital page. Spend over a month watching schlock and b-grade nonsense, that'll happen. The last day of the Thursday Night Massacre triple feature I've been hosting every Thursday pops off tonight, sending us off into a real turkey of a month in proper fashion with Trick R Treat, The Thing, and, of course, Halloween. It's been nice having a bunch of drooling idiots cram in my living room for the past month and I'm already planning more tightly themed line-ups for next year's installments. A little more info on TNM, it's "presented" by Night of the Living Heinoids, which keen observers may remember from a checklist included on the back of Not Normal Quarterly #2. Keep those peepers peeled for forthcoming zine by that name, covering just these sort of topics. Death To The Heinoids! Long Live The Heinoids!

Beyond that, everything's quiet. Things are moving, but nothing loudly quite yet. Expect some new releases next month along with some sneak-peeks, but don't get your hopes up, ya mugs! The road we've tread is lousy with broken promised. Just one addition to the distro this week, a spicy little live tape from the punk-addled brain of Abi Ooze!

And now, a little more excavation:

NNT#002 Raw Nerve - Self Titled CS

Contrary to what I said a coupla weeks back, life yields no shortage of youthful indiscretions you absolutely deserve to be both ashamed of and shamed for. That’s how you learn, for instance, to not leave evidence of a “clean up” just lying around where a parent could find it, or, as in another hypothetical, how to avoid falling in dog shit at the tender age of four lest ye be dubbed Dookie Boy, an appellation which will follow you well into your adult life.

It’s interesting to revisit the origins of Raw Nerve, a group we started as relative children, especially after we retconned the ending as grown adults at the last EINOK. Lyrically, half of our self-titled demo dwells amongst my least favorite of anything I’ve ever contributed to, but there are a couple high points: Born Under A Bad Sign, my best and probably last opinion I’ll ever voice on the topic of that perennial punk menace religion, and Gun/Mouth, unhealthy though it may have been, putting those thoughts to paper is probably the only thing that kept me from going through with the subject matter during those darker days. Musically, it’s slow, falling far short of the wall of noise, sonic assault we strove for on the superior LP and Midnight EP, but it was spastic and immediate in a way that waned as time went on. Overall, a serviceable foundation.

But the truth is, a great deal of our existence was just so fucking hokey. Not the stuff you’d expect: the ski masks or the suspicions we planted in distant cities eager to solve the riddle of which members of which band’s side project we really were. But the slow revelation that we were McLarened to some degree, the stolen artwork, the aesthetic and creative decisions taking place beyond our control contrived between a well-coifed sociopath and an opportunistic businessman, the endgame interviews where I had to clarify “no we’re not voyeurs, no we were not glorifying that at all,” we were all left feeling like Dookie Boys, ya dig? The inevitable break-up has been documented in various capacities, but the details are comparable to most groups partially comprised of emotionally stunted, uncommunicative men in their early twenties: we plowed forward until absolutely nothing positive was left to be wrung from the project and obliterated a great deal of our social connections in the aftermath.

But that came later; before the $30 special editions, before the proprietor of Dude Fest cried about broken duct work or a similarly moronic Indy native demanded a birth certificate to prove I was actually born in this century, before, as with most marginally talented men, “our” every whim was catered to instead of being ridiculed unanimously (which is possibly the most ahistoric statement thus far, we got dragged, baby!), and, sure, before I told everyone in Chicago I was quitting the band without informing a single member, there were five brats with a real Kooky Idea, some masks, and some big plans who had our first practice in my grandma’s living room.

Trivialities: Two separate runs of 100. First 100 on black, second 100 on translucent yellow. Double-sided j-card/insert with lyrics. All of the standard j-cards had the cover infuriatingly inverted, but our guitarist was an art major so how can you argue with that? 24 copies of the second run had an alternate cover with a “crazy electric chair guy,” whipped up for a weekend jaunt to St Louis and Kansas City.

NNT#003 Guinea Kid - Self Titled EP

My earliest memory of Mat Williams is a simple, one line question, “Will Pygmy Death play my house in Crown Point?”. To hear Mat tell it, our first interaction was a year earlier, when I threatened him and his band mates with violence over some sketchy lyrics, a not altogether unreasonable conjecture given my frame of mind at the time (and always). Whatever it was, be it the belligerence of dirtstachioed peace punkers or the intriguing offer from an unknown punker, the answer was yes and a few weeks later we played his garage.

I’m unable to reconcile that the mythology of NWI as this supreme punk rock incubator and the mythos’ corresponding pantheon took root so many years later, because for me, it began in that garage, just twenty or so 13-19 year olds flailing and somersaulting along to Mainstream Mind Control, the gaggle of barely teenaged miscreants that would become Guinea Kids before chopping off the “S” and becoming that singular manifestation of Midwest Mutancy, Guinea Kid. I had a reckoning that day: Pygmy Death had been doing our vile mixture of Municipal Waste party thrash and Ceremony-esque pseudo power violence, Stubborn Attitude had their valiant but failed emulation of Negative Approach, and there was the tired-even-for-the-time GG-worshippin’ shock punk baloney of Religious Sex, but Mainstream Mind Control had already written Boneless.  It was time to pack it in.

I’ve seen this group through all the name and line-up changes, all the way up to what I consider the essential line-up, responsible for the Self-Titled EP, (consisting of Gwen Lopez, Brandon Stringer, Mat Williams, and Mark Winter), and that first time astonishment, that utter thrill of catching them play never subsided. I knew from the jump they had to be a part of NNT. Two releases deep, flush with that sweet, sweet Raw Nerve Cash, and after no small amount of hounding, we made it happen. 

It’s rare, I think, for any recorded medium to capture the same feeling and energy that the live setting allows for, but they got about as close as possible with this one. Divine Breed was a little meaner than the two previous times it appeared on CD. Boneless, a track which I was known to mosh for before they’d even start playing, got streamlined, but lost none of its bite and still expertly evoked a feeling of a suburban dog day, skating a parking lot, and getting harassed by cops and jocks. Annoying Dumb White Teenage Girl was as stupid as ever. These hits got joined by the comparably epic Night Time Here and Ghost, and the song that eventually became the Cherry Pie to GK’s Warrant, With A Nail. The track was a slammer, but I don’t think you have that in mind when you’re ostensibly writing about suicide. The guitars were nasty and spastic, Mat’s lyrics were relatable and quietly brilliant (a fact that has never changed, all the way up to his current project, Liquids), and the recordings caught his vocals at that perfect point between squeaky adolescence and gruff adulthood. To this day, I still consider this both NWI and NNT’s crowning achievements.

There were, of course, some behind the scenes issues that I wasn’t privy to until much later. Ryan, enlisted to help with the layout, unsurprisingly changed a lot of their ideas to better cohere to his Marketing Guy vision for the band, actions I would have never condoned.  There was also something about how the tapes were being sold, that they couldn’t move their copies because I was selling mine at the same shows, but even in the early days of the label I knew that you didn’t pull that shit! I think what really happened is that I was hustling hard in those days, bringing my little cardboard box to every single gig to be immediately defaced and sell tapes out of AKA doing my dang job, baby.

Trivialities: We did two runs of this tape, for a total of 300 copies. It’s been 9 fucking years, so cut me some slack, but I strongly believe the first run went something like this: 100 copies on Rhodamine red (objectively the best cassette color option), professionally imprinted with black ink. Second run: 200 copies on yellow, professionally imprinted with green ink. Single sided j-card remained consistent throughout runs.  First run of double sided inserts printed on a really cool, dull yellow paper, second run printed on standard white. Oh!, and Mat was right, I definitely threatened to fight him and his friends.