Looks like NYC is finally getting a real answer to MASH.
I can’t seem to embed Vimeo and am too tired to figure it out right now. It appears to features a bunch of messengers, alley cat racers, that guy Tom who I thought was from PA. and everyone’s favorite fixed gear freestyler internet fixture, Prolly.
When I was in middle and high school there was an older guy who hung out and skated with us occasionally named Jeff S. He was a gangly, tall guy, easily like 6’ 4” and a pretty accomplished skater. From what I knew of him he was a great guy, he was always nice and tolerant of us kids and had the kind of effortless cool that came just from him being in his 20’s that was amazing to my awkward teenage self. Much of my early exposure to punk and hardcore indirectly came from him as well. I am almost positive that my prized tape with the first MDC album and Salad Days EP on the A side with most of Flex Your Head on the B side originally came from a tape he made for another friend. Also, in my mind, he was the same guy that taught me how to skate the ditch we always went to and stressed the (aesthetic) importance of riding Independence trucks, but I think I may be confusing him with someone else there. Regardless, for some reason there were more stories about him than any of the other guys. The two that follow are the ones I remember most vividly.
There was supposedly a young teenage girl that Jeff was involved with that had a party while her parents were away. That in itself is probably kind of scandalous but it was also the norm as far as we were concerned. There was this girl Reba who lived down the street from me that was famously dating a pro or pro-am skater from Pennsylvania when she was 13 or 14. Anyway, as the story goes, Jeff was fucking this girl up in her bedroom while everyone else sat downstairs drinking and listening to music when her parents unexpectedly came home. The father barged up stairs and opened his daughter’s door to catch her, in flagrante delicto, with a fully grown man. Jeff then supposedly stood up, shoved her father down, grabbed up his clothes and ran downstairs, stopping to get his tape from the stereo, and took off down the street on his skateboard, naked. Then, in what is clearly a later embellishment designed to raise the story to a Beowulf style epic hero tale, he was said to have ollied the train tracks in bare feet. God knows if this was based on anything or not or merely the creation of our over active teenage minds.
The second story about him has probably a bit more bearing in fact, as it occurred several years later when I was near the end of high school and we knew the other party involved. Something happened, but I am sure it is not the story that got told. There was this punk girl Julie who was, ironically, the daughter of my school’s feared Vice Principal and disciplinarian. She did phone sex for a living so of course was the subject of endless rumors. My friends would occasionally hang out at her house during her work hours, she had to be home to answer a special line, and try to stifle their giggles as she talked dirty. Jeff had been in or was in some kind of relationship with her and she allegedly owed him a good deal of money. Soon after Jeff split town the story came out that he had gone over to Julie’s place, tied her up under the guise of kinky sex and then stolen all sorts of stuff from her and left her there. Again this is almost surely fabricated but it was the fitting end to a man who figured heavily in our childhood mythos.
The last time I saw Jeff, he had shown up to help us build a vert ramp. I remember him hack sawing through the steel coping that we were struggling with. He had two plastic toy rats with him for some reason. I always collected stupid plastic animals and dinosaurs and seeing that I was really excited about his rats, he gave me one of them. I still have it. Right now it is on my kitchen table, perched atop a fake plastic pizza that came from Japan, artfully arranged so that it looks like it is eating an olive. Years later he showed up in a picture in some skateboard magazine, skating some ramp out in the southwest I believe it was. That is the last I ever saw or heard of him.
The next story has much more grounding in reality than the previous two about Jeff, as I was an actual witness to some of it, but the details never clear and all sorts of shit was obviously made up to fill in the blanks.
There was this guy in my high school, Steve (or at least I think that was his name, my memory is failing me), that opened a short lived punk club named Pie Weasels. Steve was what back then we called an ‘art fag’, meaning trench coats and EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN. He had worked at a local pizza place and had somehow gotten the keys to it. He began holding shows and punk/metal/industrial DJ nights there. My memory is especially fuzzy, I think that at some point it was actually in an empty shop next door, one that got completely covered with graffiti, but the final show was definitely in the back of the pizza place. You had to walk through the kitchen to get to the show area. At that show I remember the 4 FIENDS played or at least were supposed to play. To digress for a minute the 4 FIENDS are a much better band than I gave them credit for back then, female fronted, they played a kind of slow, gloomy punk rock that owed as much to Goth and early peace punk as it did to things like horrorpunk and the slight rockabilly of bands like X. Listening to them now they remind me somewhat of some of the slower SIGNAL LOST songs. Anyway, the last show at Pie Weasels was busted. We never knew whether someone had called in a complaint or if the cops had just seen a bunch of punk teenagers hanging out outside a closed pizza shop on an industrial access road and decided to investigate but it was amazing it lasted a long as it had. Steve disappeared in to the crowd and no one, to my knowledge could answer the cop’s questions about who was in charge. The keg that was out back by the train tracks was supposedly spirited away into one of the bands vans, thus avoiding the even more serious serving minors charge.
I have no idea if Steve was ever caught or charged with anything, much less if he had permission to be there in the first place. I am pretty sure he was no longer an employee at this point, so it was exceptionally illegal. I never found out because he was suspended from school soon after and, as the story goes, phoned in a series of bomb threats. He was then allegedly expelled and there was even, supposedly, a bomb robot employed and attempts to charge him with making terroristic threats and for the cost of the robot itself, which we all took as fact at the time, but thinking back on it I don’t have any memory of any of that actually happening. It was all just hearsay. None the less, we never saw him again.
I think I will probably revisit this theme in future columns if I can remember some other good stories, but for now this will do.
ENDNOTES:
1. I mentioned in last month’s column that I was going to try to help MRR build their review database. I started on it, and actually transcribed issues 1 and 2 into text before slacking off. I don’t know if anyone from the ‘zine reads this but I apologize for flaking. I had and still have every intention of doing this but between work, post season baseball and my increased bike riding, my normal excess of spare time has been close to zero. Sorry guys. Hopefully I will get back on track with it.
2. I am sliding hard in to the full lyrca roadie category and am loving it. The dirty punk kids on their stupid fixies with bandanas tied on them are starting to look really ridiculous to me. I probably look like total yuppie scum to them, but fuck it, I built my new bike up for easily a 1/3 of what it would cost new and it is just a real joy to ride.
3. I’m still scared to death about putting together my “Best” of 2008 show. As I slide farther and farther out of touch, I have been hearing less and less new music that I actually like. Most of it only has the most tenuous connection to punk rock as well, being bedroom DIY and the like. Which is totally cool, but as I always complain about, I just wish that some guys that aren’t Punk Core style clown punks would bash out a bunch of killers and reinvigorate me.
10.19.2008 Speed of History Show 149
Playlist:
Black Flag - Nervous Breakdown
Chain Gang - Son Of Sam
The Dils - I Hate The Rich
Endtables - Process Of Elimination
The Germs - Lexicon Devil
The Huns - Busy Kids
Mentally Ill - Gacy’s Place
The Misfits - Bullet
Nervous Eaters - Just Head
Nothing - Scream ‘N’ Cry
The Pagans - Six And Change
Plugz - Move It
Mike Rep And The Quotas - Rocket To Nowhere
Rhino 39 - Xerox
Tapeworm - Break My Face
Unnatural Axe - They Saved Hitlers Brain
The Urinals - Black Hole
Vomit Pigs - Baby’s Playing Games
Insults - Population Zero
Mad - The Eyeball
Vktms - Midget
The Weirdos - Neutron Bomb
Count Vertigo - I’m A Mutant
Defex - Psycho Surfer
GG Allin And The Jabbers - Bored To Death
Fingers - Isolation
Sleepers - Seventh World
Snuky Tate - New Time
The Victims - Annette
RIP Levi Stubbs. I was just turned on to this Billy Bragg song about him. Expect to here it in an upcoming show.
10.12.2008 Speed of History Show 148
Playlist:
Ivy Green - Wap Shoo Wap
Ivy Green - Another Sub-Culture Going Bad
Ivy Green - Damage
Ivy Green - Dreaming Of You
Ivy Green - Hamburger Heaven
God’s Heart Attack - Treat Me Like A Doll
Llygod Ffyrnig - NCB
London PX - Eviction
Pack - Come On
P.V.C. - Eva Braun Is Back In Town
Clorox Girls - Eva Braun
Boomtown Rats - (I Never Loved) Eva Braun
A Frames - Eva Braun
No Slogan - No Pasaran
Momo Lamana - Buddy O
Defektors - Doomsday Girl
Defektors - Torn To Pieces
Hjertestop - Vi Ses I Helvede
BGK - Rules
10.05.2008 Speed of History Show 147
Playlist:
Charles De Goal - Exposition
Tubeway Army - That’s Too Bad
Tubeway Army - Bombers
Tubeway Army - Listen To The Sirens
Tubeway Army - Down In The Park
Gary Numan - Metal
Gary Numan - I Die You Die
Joy Division - Digital
O.M.D. - Electricity
The Distractions - Time Goes By So Slow
Tunnelvision - Watching The Hydroplanes
The Buzzcocks - Boredom
Magazine - Shot By Both Sides
Magazine - Permafrost
Howard Devoto - Rainy Season
Peter Murphy - The Light Pours Out Of Me