ONCE THERE WAS A BAND....
One of the complaints I've always had about history is that it only deals with the big shots. You can read endless accounts about what this king did to that president and how that dynasty supplanted this oligarchy, but you never hear what life was like for the averange guy like you or me.
Even journalism, the history of the present, talks about the wealthy and powerful out of all proportion to their numbers. If archaeologists were trying to piece together a picture of life in the late 20th century from fragments of newspapers and videotapes, they would figure that most of us lived in huge houses, drove opulent cars, seldom if ever had to go to work, and spent most of our time dressed up in fancy suits and formal gowns toasting each other at glittering social affairs.
It's the same with the music business. If your band hits it big, the most minute aspects of your life will be detailed in full color glossies and video for anyone who cares to examine them. But most bands live and die with little notice ever taken of them. The reality of being in an unknown and struggling band is anything but glamorous, but that hasn't stopped millions of people from trying it. They must know they'll be lucky to make it farther than a gig down at the corner saloon or in someone's basement rec room. Doesn't matter; go find anyone who's ever plunked on a guitar or banged on a set of drums and ask them if they want to start a new band, one with no visible means of support or likelihood of success, and most of them will say, "Sure, when do we start?"
What's the big attraction? That's what this story aims to tell. For a little over three years it was my privilege to be part of a band called the Lookouts. In a way, I guess, we were luckier than a most bands. We put out a record that sold enough copies to break even, we played shows with bands that we admired greatly and with some of the best new bands around. We got to participate in an underground music scene that will someday be remembered with same kind of awe and amazement as the days of the Avalon and Fillmore Ballrooms are now. In a very small way, we got to take part in making history.
But for us it's over now, and when they write the books and film the documentaries of those days, we'll be lucky to be a minor footnote. After all the practices, the hauling equipment, the long drives scrunched into a tiny station wagon, guitars going out of tune and drum heads breaking, arguments and screaming frustration, and that handful of perfect magic moments when somehow everything worked, I'm left with a handful of unsold records, a few photos and fliers, and some of the best memories of my life.
I always knew I wanted to be in a band, but for most of my life I didn't have the self-confidence to think it was possible. The summer of 1964, just after the Beatles first hit America, half the kids in my home town started combing their hair down over their foreheads and twanging on Rickenbacker guitars. I'd hang around with them, watch their practices, go to their shows, but it never occurred to me that hey, I could do that, too.
A couple years later I got my first guitar, a Gibson acoustic, and got someone to show me the the chords to some Beatles and Rolling Stones songs. About the same time I discovered Hank Williams and Bob Dylan, and managed to figure out a few of their three-chord philosphical plaints all by myself. Eventually I could deliver a creditable rendition of all ten verses of "Desolation Row" (the words of which I remember to this day) and then sequé into a mourful version of "Your Cheatin' Heart." All in private, of course; even though I couldn't have been any worse than most of the infestation of young hippie folksingers cropping up about that time, my fragile ego wouldn't dream of letting me plunk myself down on a street corner or in a cofee house and say, "Listen to me!"
Another thing that never occurred to me was to write my own songs. What I loved about Dylan, and in a way even more about Hank Williams, was how they could take the simplest, most essential humam emotions and just say them in a way that was so plain and unadorned and yet somehow managed to rip your heart apart. All I was able to come up with was phenomenally bad poetry that couldn't be set to music without violating every rule of structure, harmony, and common decency.
At least half a dozen different guitars must have passed through my hands in the next ten years as I wandered through various states of confusion. Something about me resisted settling down, and every time I found things getting too comfortable, I'd leave everything behind and be off on the road again. There were a couple periods where I never touched a guitar for a year or two; others where I'd bang away for as much as six to eight hours a day. I never learned much, but I didn't forget much either.
In the late 70s, when everybody else was playing punk rock, I went off on a synthesizer tangent. If I'd kept at it, and gotten the right makeup consultant, I might be in one of those fabulously successful haircut and attitude bands that ruled the charts a couple years ago. But true to form, just as the balance was shifting from punk to new wave disco, I abandoned my synthesizer (my girlfriend kept complaining that everything I played sounded like funeral music) and finally got my first electric guitar.
It was loud! It was annoying! You could hear it for miles, and I loved it! I got a friend to show me how to play bar chords (yes, after 14 years, I hadn't got around to learning that rock and roll essential) and I was ready to go.
Within a month or two I had written some songs. The first one was called "Downtown," and was totally unlike the Petula Clark tune of the same name. It dwelt in gory detail on a post-holocaust urban setting where the handful of survivors spent their time dodging man-eating rats and new wave cannibals. Then I came up with another one about the tofu-chewing mantra-spewing sproutheads who infested Marin County, where I was living at the time. Next came one called "Death;" I still don't know exactly what it's about, but as you might guess from the title, it expressed a kind of negative outlook.
With this kind of material burbling out of my unconscious, it was obviously time to become part of a punk rock band. But that wouldn't prove so easy. There weren't a whole lot of people in Marin County interested in playing music that wasn't in harmony with the prevailing vibes of terminal mellowness. And the handful that were tended to be a lot more musically accomplished than I was.
In the spring of 1981, though, I met a girl who was new in town, and who, like me, made up in enthusiasm what she lacked in talent. We ended up living together, and trying, mostly unsucessfully, to play music together for the next four years. She already knew how to play drums, but she decided for some reason that she should play bass, which of course she knew nothing about. The first note she ever hit shattered the big E string, which for you non-musical people is the one that's thick enough to tow a Volkswagen with. Then we tried to jam for a while, until the police came. The cops had to ring the doorbell for like twenty minutes because we couldn't hear it. They said they got complaints from the hill on the other side of town, which was about three miles away. That was the high point of our early career.
We kept on auditioning drummers, but no one wanted to play with us, because we were so bad, I guess; they wouldn't come right out and tell us why. Then we moved away, to a place on top of a mountain twenty miles from the nearest town and 200 miles from the nearest punk rock show. There was no telephone, no electricity except what you could get from solar panels or a generator, and the closest neighbor was a mile away.
Most of the people who lived on the mountain thought we were strange because we did things like cut our hair and stuff, so we didn't make a lot of friends right away. I found out later that everyone called me "Punk Rock Larry," which I guess I was. We gave up music for a while and planted gardens and moved rocks around and played with our dogs and did other kinds of mountain stuff.
Then our friend Richard moved up to Laytonville, and started playing bass with us, and Anne started playing drums, and we were finally a band, sort of. I wrote a couple more songs, and we did a bunch of covers, and made a hell of a racket. But it was starting to be the kind of fun I always thought playing in a band was supposed to be.
The only trouble was that Anne and I weren't getting along so well anymore, so we'd usually fight most of the way through practices. I'm sure there were other things under the surface that were bothering us, but what it always came down to was that she couldn't play drums and/or I couldn't play guitar. True enough, but I figured that hadn't stopped other bands. But one day Richard suddenly announced that he couldn't take the constant fighting, so he was quitting.
No, wait! You can't do that to us! But he did, and now we were stuck for a bass player again. Suddenly I got one of those stupid brainstorms that once in a while turn out to be a good idea. Some friends of ours who lived on the other side of the hill had a son named Kain who was 13. He was big for his age, so we named him Kain Kong. He'd never played bass in his life, but the way I figured it, he looked like a bass player. Anyway, he agreed to give it a try.
The first few practices I would have to point to the notes that he was supposed to play, or even move his fingers for him, which wasn't too easy for me because I didn't know anything about playing bass either. But he was a pretty fast learner, and before too long we started to sound even more like a real band. A real bad band, true, but a real band.
And then we had out first show. It was July 4, 1984, and there was a party at our house for all the people we knew on the mountain. We figured that if they came and drank our beer and ate our food, they'd feel obligated to watch our band. And they mostly did. I think we only played a few songs, though. The real show was put on by three kids who were about 11 or 12. They got dressed up in camouflage clothes and sang a song they'd just written making fun of pot growers. That was the first time I'd seen the performing talents of Mr. Tré Cool. But more about him later.
We praticed pretty much the rest of that summer, but things were going downhill fast now for me and Anne. Then Kain went away to Europe for about six months, and while he was gone, Anne and I split up. She wanted to buy the drums from me, but I said no, because I had this feeling I was going to find someone to play them. I remember watching her drive away for the last time. I was standing in the music room, next to the drum set, holding my guitar and watching her truck disappear around the bend. I don't think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life.
That was a pretty bad time for me, but there were a couple things that may have saved my life. One was starting this magazine, and the other was music. I would play piano, sometimes for six or eight hours a day, and I would write stories, and then I would walk around outside and look at things. It was too quiet for me. I wanted to make some noise.
Now came time for stupid brainstorm number two. One neighbor kid had turned out to be a pretty good bassist. Why not find another one to be a drummer?
Only one person came to mind. It was the aforementioned Tré Cool. He'd been right there under my nose all along. He was 12 years old, and small for his age; maybe that's why I hadn't noticed him. Actually, though, I had noticed him at the party last summer. He had a natural stage presence. Of course he'd never played drums in his life. Do you think I cared at this point?
It took him about two weeks, maybe even less, to learn some simple rhythms. It was real comfortable playing together, and it was fun, too, because he was one of those people who's almost always happy. By the time Kain got back from Europe a month or two later, Tré and I knew how to play all the songs I'd written so far, and I was starting to write some new ones.
Kain wasn't so sure about the ideia of a 12 year-old-drummer; after all, he was 14 now, and he didn't see how we could be a serious band if we were playing with a little kid. But things went well enough that by summer we were ready to start thinking about playing shows and even recording.
Our official debut came at the now-annual July 4 party, and then a couple weeks later we did our first public show, July 14, 1985. It was in a dusty, sun-baked parking lot alongside Highway 101, and not that many people came. Those who did weren't very impressed; not only was our style of music almost completely alien to the Grateful Dead and 70s R&B-oriented crowd, but we weren't that good at it yet. In a punk setting our amateurishness might have worked to our advantage, but not here. Still, it wasn't a disaster or anything. We went on home and kept practicing.
We had a couple more local gigs that summer that didn't turn out so well. One was at a party where everyone was high on mushrooms and/or drunk. Most of the people completely ignored us, and one girl was so bummed out that she pulled the plug on us in the middle of a song. Another time our friend Indiana Slim invited us to do a guest set while his band the Red Hots was taking a break at an outdoor show. We played a few songs and were having a fine old time when one of Slim's band mates, the notorious Piano Jimmy marched onto the stage and ordered us off. He was big, and mean-looking, so we went. That was our last Laytonville show, except for one a couple years later in which Mr. Piano Jimmy would again figure prominently, this time by punching me in the face and giving me what was to become my famous black eye.
In September we went into a recording studio for three days and put together a tape of 26 songs. The studio engineer was Hal Wagenet, a veteran of the hippie band It's A Beautiful Day, and he didn't know what to make of us. We were pretty intimidated by all the high-tech stuff, and we later realized that we'd been badly out of tune on about half the songs. I was pretty pissed that Hal hadn't said anything about it when we were recording, but as he said, "It's not my job to tell you how to play."
Mistakes and all, though, we packaged the songs into a 46-minute cassette (26 songs in 46 minutes: yeah, I know we played pretty slow back then) with a booklet containing the lyrics and some fascinating facts about ourselves and the unique culture of greater Laytonville. We sent it off to the international punk bible Maximum Roocknroll, and were amazed when we got an excellent review, and started getting orders for the tape from all over the US and Europe.
Hmmm, we thought, maybe we aren't as bad as everyone around Laytonville seemed to think. We started looking for opportunities to play in the Bay Area, and in May of 1986 we opened a show at a pizza parlor in South Berkeley. Three of the bands on the bill that night have already gone on to much bigger things: No Means No, Victim's Family, and the Mr. T Experience. It was fun! Around that same time I happened to meet Dave MDC and casually mention to him that I was in a band. The next thing I knew we were opening one of the biggest shows of the year, the return from punk limbo of MDC. There must have been a thousand people at the Farm that night. Luckily only about a hundred of them had gotten there when we played, because we were scared shitless. We could barely remember who we were, let alone how to play our songs.
But things started picking up for us that fall. We went into the studio to make a record, and were playing gigs pretty regularly. We had some really good shows at the Club Foot in the last month before it closed. It was sort of like playing in your living room with all your friends there.
Those were some of the best times we had as a band. After the record came out, there seemed to be more pressure on us to take ourselves seriously. Gilman Street opened, and we found ourselves playing in front of bigger crowds, but we always seemed to be trying too hard. As much as we loved playing there, we never had a really good show until our very last one, in January of 1988.
For once everything seemed to go right. Well, not everything; I still hit some massively wrong chords, and my guitar got unplugged when half the crowd climbed on stage to sing along with us on our cover of Rabid Lassie's "Contragate." But that didn't matter; I hardly stopped smilling all the way through the set, and all the way home we were buzzed with excitement, thinking that we were finally on our way.
But I guess we were wrong. We played one more show, up north in Arcata, and it wasn't so hot; the old hesitancy and nervousness and trying too hard was back. A couple of practices later, we got in a fight about something or other, and I said, not really meaning it, of course, that I didn't know if it was worth putting up with all the aggravation the band caused me. Then Kain suddenly announced he'd had enough, and like one of those horrible slow motion nightmares, I watched the band disintegrate in front of me.
I guess it's like one of those marriages where it seems like everything's going along fine but because of a lack of communication or because people change and grow in different directions without noticing, it comes as a total shock when things break up. I don't know, maybe we'll get back together some day; right now it doesn't seem likely. It's hard to think about playing music with anyone else, because in order to play with other people, you have to be able to surrender so many of your ego defenses and leave yourself wide open and vulnerable. It's a lot like making love. You can't do it with just anyone and still have it mean something.