INTROVERTED LOUDMOUTH

IT ALL MAKES SENSE.

2012-01-18T16:03:00.001-08:00

SELLING T-SHIRT ART FROM LAST YEAR.

2012-01-11T16:00:00.000-08:00

I am looking at selling all of the original t-shirt art Idid for all of the last year, to hopefully an appreciative home who willlovingly enjoy it.

I have six designs:

Melvins – “News Of The World”, Descendents, Fucked Up –“PetSounds” , Honor Role, Voivod and DieKreuzen.

To see better scans of this work, go to:

http://brianwalsby.net/BrianWalsby.net/T_shirts.html

In any of this is interesting to anybody, please feel freeto write me back at:

reluctantking@hotmail.com

thanks.

SAM MCPHEETERS WRITES A BOOK.

2011-12-30T18:18:00.000-08:00

I was first aware of Sam McPheeters years and years ago as the singer for the band Born Against. I remember that my first exposure to them was from the magazine Flipside. It was a good read if I remember correctly but I never paid any attention to the band until right when it was about done. Suddenly I heard a bunch of of thier records and read some of Sam’s printed zines and writings and was impressed with both. Here was a band that at least to me sort of carried on with the same sort of spirit of much earlier hardcore bands that I enjoyed. Plus they were sort of a combination of outrage and having a sense of humor at the same time, which is a pretty good thing.

Anyways I started to write a few probably gushing fanboy letters and that is sort of how I know Sam. Except I really don’t know him at all. I met him once at a Wrangler Brutes show here in Raleigh years later and it was sort of nice and awkward, sort of like meeting someone you only know through say, Facebook. I have enjoyed much of whatever Sam has done as it has come along, and only recently I had learned that he is preparing the release of his first ever novel, a brisk two hundred and sixty two page effort called THE LOOM OF RUIN put out by Mugger Books and set to be released April 1st of next year. I have read it and it is definitely entertaining, funny and sometimes sort of..well, real weird. If you have ever liked anything that Sam has written before then you should have no problem at all enjoying his book.

This is by no means the greatest of interviews but it was still fun to do and I thank Sam for answering some fairly off of the cuff questions.

Brian: I really enjoyed the interview you did with Aaron Lake Smith awhile back and it touched on a few topics I found interesting. The comments about young musicians aping things that they enjoy with that great wall of tradition as their backdrop is something that I find to be true. What people don't understand is that the wall of tradition has always been there. Agree or disagree? I think that we have caught up with what people can be nostalgic for and it is ground zero now. Most of what I have been a part of musically was copying what had inspired us, even if it was back in 1985. So my question is musically what have you been involved with that you could hand to someone and say, "yeah this is still pretty good. check it out". I mean, I have enjoyed most of what I was lucky enough to be a part of but there is very little that I find to be unique to this very day.

Sam: I definitely don't think the wall of tradition has been as high as it is now. In "The Filth And The Fury", John Lydon talks about having to ape Richard III for his Sex Pistols stage persona because he had nothing else to go on. So while I agree that everyone draws on something, it's usually the more remote influences (meaning those coming early in a genre) that produce the most unique art.Personally, I haven't done anything musically I'd want to hand anyone. Born Against and Wrangler Brutes had some shining moments, but both were self-consciously retro pursuits. And MRP was a little too unique.

Brian: Can you think of at least five records off of the top of your head that came out of hardcore punk rock (whatever you want to call it) back in the eighties that you think still hold up and you can imagine easily putting on anytime because it is timeless? Why do you think it is timeless?

Sam: I don’t have an interesting answer. The hardcore I listen to now – Minor Threat, SSD, Void – is essentially indie-mainstream. Millions of people listen to these bands and still feel like they are participating in something illicit. It reminds me of the way me and my childhood pals treated "Star Wars" as our own private wellspring of in-jokes thirty years ago. I don’t, however, consider any of these records timeless. 1980's hardcore is too deeply entwined with both my own personal nostalgia (high school, the secondary high school of the ABC No Rio scene) and a specific era (Reagan-Bush America) to be anything other than a product of its time.It is interesting to me which albums defined which parts of my life. In my 20’s, I listened religiously to “Damaged” (the soundtrack for people who have lost their marbles). In my 30’s, I listened and relistened to the Cro-Mags’ “Age of Quarrel” (the soundtrack for people who view themselves as struggling underdogs). In my 40’s, I rely on daily doses of Slayer’s “Reign In Blood” (the soundtrack for conquering armies [and best selling authors]).

Brian: There are a lot of things I want to know so forgive me if this is somehow common knowledge. I discovered Born Against right at the very end of the band’s existence. I was amazed at what I thought about the band; good music, interesting lyrics, a total “no compromise” approach to thing matched with a sense of humor. You had a history of being pretty vocal about things. Did your band ever get into trouble with people because of it? I love that phone machine message in the “Born Against are fucking dead” song. Were your lives ever threatened? When those moments happened did you have butterflies in your stomach? And when you look back at all of that, what do you think?

Sam: There were frequent close calls with violence. BA's guitarist Adam was generally braver than me, but I think it was hard on both of us. That many (though not all) of our woes were self-inflicted makes my memories confusing. At the time, I felt like I was doing something very important. This is probably how people in low-level cults felt. I don't know what the lesson of Born Against should be. I'm glad it happened. I'm bummed about some of the things I did. A lot has happened since Born Against broke up.

Brian: The band moved to Richmond Virginia and from what I think I had read, pretty much disbanded two weeks after arrival. Did you move down there to continue the band initially? And what did you do after the band broke up?

Sam: The band broke up during a two-month collapse in my and Adam’s lives. I’d gone broke, he’d split with his girlfriend, most of our old pals hated us, and our landlord sold our house. Richmond had been one of our favorite cities to play, and we both knew we could live there for a fraction of what we were paying in Jersey City. We’d booked the final show before we moved. After that last show, I spent a year decompressing. I played a lot of basketball, learned how to ride a bike, made some zines. It was a nice break from a stressful period.

Brian: How long have you been living in Pomona, and of all places to live, why did you pick the town that Pillsbury Hardcore are from?

Sam: I moved to Pomona in autumn 1999. At the time I had a record label I could run from any part of the country, and no attachment to the east coast. My girlfriend was from L.A. County, so I agreed to give it a try. Although I'd known about the town from the Man Is The Bastard guys (and Pillsbury's "I Love Pomona"), I'd already spent years here as a kid, when my grandparents lived in Pomona.

Brian: Did you know at a certain point years ago that writing and maybe even your upcoming novel was going to be your future? Was it something that you had already been interested in long before these things started to happen? And perhaps the inevitable question (hey this beats asking about your musical influences or singing idols) is who along the way writing wise had some influence on the style that you have carved out with writing?

Sam: I've wanted to write fiction since before I could write. I've been working on novels and short stories since 1989. I like a lot of writers. John Updike was a huge inspiration to me, but it wouldn't be fair for me to list him as an influence, since I'll never be as good a writer as he was. Certainly I'd love to be able to write competent satirical fiction like Richard Brautigan, John Kennedy Toole, or Kurt Vonnegut.

Brian: Wrangler Brutes seemed to break up suddenly. What was the inspiration for getting into another sort of HC sounding band after MRP?

Sam: I wanted Wrangler Brutes to be far weirder than it was. I also wanted it to be a great live band. There were some complicated interpersonal issues involved, so I settled on getting one of my two wishes.

Brian: Your new book is a very entertaining read throughout with some laugh out loud moments in it (at least I did). You certainly were right when you said that if you liked the writing you did in the past then you would like the book. How long have you been working on it?

Sam: Between mid-2006 and late-2009, with a 9-month break in the middle. Also, thanks!.

Brian: I couldn’t help but notice that the book takes place in your adopted hometown of Southern California and the Los Angeles area. Coincidence? Did you know right away that you were going to base it in L.A.? Why or why not?

Sam: I like Los Angeles because I don't live there. I'm in Pomona, 30 miles east. LA still has a weird mythical quality to me. I've never gotten used to palm trees. Driving into Los Angeles has that strange feel of a nice interlude in the middle of a long tour. I'll probably write more about LA in the future.

Brian: I would have assumed that if you ever had an opportunity to do a book that you would have to re-print some of your writing from your various zines all of the way up to your now standard bigger pieces for publications. Instead, we get a fiction novel. Would there be any plans in the future to unearth some of that stuff in that format in the future?

Sam: I have over 300,000 words of freelance and fanzine material, but only a small fraction of those pieces are good. Any collection of my past writing would have been second-rate. Since I've closed out the part of my life where I do second-rate projects, it'll probably be a while before I release any anthologies. Hopefully someday I'll have enough quality pieces to do so.

Brian: Do you have plans for writing another fiction book?
Sam: Absolutely.

Brian: Could you see yourself getting back into music at this point? Why, or why not?

Sam: I don't believe in music any more. Bands no longer make sense to me. I wish it were otherwise. But even if I still bought records or went to shows, I still wouldn't sing in any further bands. Who wants to see a 42-year old version of me jiggling across a stage? That'd be gross.

Brian: At this point, have you been able to carve out a living based on your freelancing? I live in sort of this half assed world where I can combine my artistic projects with a part time job and maybe two months out of the year I am not stressed out. How about you?

Sam: Freelance is definitely a scramble. I wouldn't say I've made a consistent living at it. It's been hard finding supplemental jobs, although not impossible. After 2008, it definitely seemed like a lot more people were in the situation you and I are in.

Brian: I will conclude this with a Joe Preston question. What would you prefer, his cover of "The Trees" by Rush or the prospect of him doing a super exciting medley of songs from the first Bl'ast! album?

Sam: I would prefer an album of Joe Preston blasting apart trees, like in the 1908 Siberian explosion. Come to think of it, the album could be recorded in Siberia. I would proudly purchase that in a record store.

Pre orders for Sam’s book begin next month. Also, a book tour has been threatened. Bother him for more information at: http://loomofruin.blogspot.com/

THE LONGEST YEAR OF MY LIFE.

2011-12-16T07:53:00.001-08:00

BIG BOYS

2011-11-16T09:42:00.001-08:00

Big Boys logo by Chris Shary, artwork by me. This will for sure be a t-shirt in the future.

NAMEDROPPED IN VIDEO BY VOIVOD.

2011-11-14T07:15:00.001-08:00

Man, this has already made my day. And Away spelled my name in his style of handwriting to boot.

COMING SOON.....

2011-11-11T20:28:00.001-08:00

MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL INTERVIEW FROM A FEW ISSUES AGO.

2011-11-10T11:35:00.001-08:00

So here it is. You will probably be sick of me by the time you are done reading it. By the way if you double click you can see the pages UP CLOSE for both this and the Double Negative interview. I aldo urge you to buy the back issue because we all know that holding a ink staining magazine in your hands is the way to go. Pull up a chair and put another long on the fireplace,, kids:

SOME UPCOMING IDEAS FOR T-SHIRTS..

2011-11-08T09:01:00.000-08:00

Polvo, Melvins, Pulley, All with Chad Price singing.

NEW ALBUM COVER.

2011-11-08T08:54:00.001-08:00

This came out pretty great, for sure one of my favorite drawings.

PULLEY COVER and VIDEO.

2011-11-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

The band Pulley made a video of thier Big Boys cover taken from the recent ep that I drew the cover for. They were cool enough to put some of that artwork in this video..check it out:

IT ONLY TOOK A QUARTER OF A CENTURY....

2011-11-08T08:15:00.000-08:00

It only took a quarter of a century, but I got the cover story in the October issue of MAXIMUM ROCK N ROLL. Nice long interview that at times makes me appear to be thoughtful at times. And my real website was also written up recently. Thanks guys. You will have to go through these links to check it out..Obviously it isn't October anymore. So here is the link to the write up about my website:http://maximumrocknroll.com/2011/05/11/website-of-the-week-brian-walsby/And here is a link to the MRR website if you want to order the issue I grace:http://maximumrocknroll.com/2011/09/02/mrr-341/thanks....

MINUTEMEN, DIE KREUZEN SHIRTS NOW AVAILABLE THROUGH MY SITE.

2011-11-08T08:07:00.001-08:00

Holy cow, there are two new t-shirts at my site! They both came out pretty cool I might add. Stay tuned for two ALL shirts, PULLEY and POLVO in the future. Thanks kids.

THE LINK:

http://brianwalsby.net/BrianWalsby.net/Home.html

FATAL ERROR: THE MISSING LINK

2011-11-08T08:07:00.000-08:00

DRUMMER MATT CHARAPATTA OF FATAL ERROR..FATAL ERROR were some good friends of mine while I was growing up in SoCal all of those years ago. Me and the Scared Straight guys were from Simi Valley. Fatal Error were from Chatsworth. Both towns were separated by the Santa Susana Pass, six or so miles of mountains looming from the Northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley where Chatsworth lies. Between Chatsworth and Simi Valley is Hwy 118 (now called the Ronald Reagan Freeway..no shit) and Spahn Ranch, ol’ Charlie Manson’s summer vista for getting away from it all. So now that you know exactly where everything is, there won’t be a quiz. The time period of all of this is 1984 through to the end of 1986, I think. A long time ago. FATAL started pretty much like any other band, competently played skater thrash music done by some of the most Californian people I have ever met. The initial lineup was Trey Clinesmith on guitar, Jon Palmer on vocals, Dave Munn on bass and one of the greatest drummers that no one knows of, Matt Charapatta. Trey had braces still. It seemed like these guys sort of had their own language. They really did use all of those California words, stuff like “dude” and “rad” and “shred” and all of that. They made up a few words of their own too. They were all super cool guys. And yes, they also skated. Meanwhile, I was also friends with a fellow named Ron Cerros, who was about to join FATAL for a short amount of time. They all knew each other and went to Chatsworth High. I might have met all of those guys through Ron. Ron, like the rest of the FATAL guys, was sort of a expert on hardcore. I was introduced to a lot of Dischord stuff, the Neos, and stuff like Rudimentary Peni through him. He had every record on earth and was a funny super opinionated guy who was a bit on the Crass trip. He even joined the band America’s Hardcore on bass right before that band fell apart. So I thought he sort of a big shot. The band had their only vinyl appearance on a Mystic Records compilation with Ron on board and that was it for Ron. I wonder what he is up to these days? Enter Matt Nestor and Bob Davis.

BOB, MATT NESTOR AND JON Bob Davis was the resident longhaired dude who filled in the Dez Cadena spot in FATAL, if you know what I mean. He played a White Les Paul and looked pretty cool up there onstage. He replaced Ron initially. Matt Nestor came in a bit later. Matt was another buddy of the FATAL guys, a super cool guy with perhaps a..bit more intensity to him then the rest of them. I think that him and Matt C had already been playing together in a little sideband and eventually he joined FATAL ERROR and brought in all of this new material to the band. Well, Matt Nestor sort of took FATAL to godlike status without anyone knowing about it. One day both Matts came to my house and gave me the new recordings they had done, in a real studio somewhere near San Diego. Jon was still the singer. So I think it was the first of a few three guitar lineups of the band. What was it like? Well, I was blown the fuck away. It was like everything I loved about this music in one godly package. Matt’s songs were clearly a step forward, a potent combination of breakneck thrash with a bit of the mania of maybe Void somehow meeting lots of Black Flag Greg Ginn creepy crawl guitar work and suspended pauses. There was a little bit of metal damage in some of the material but not obnoxiously so. It was still rooted firmly in hardcore. Snotty vocals, amazing fucking drumming, some dramatic time changes and some downright eyebrow raising lyrics and songtitles completed the package. That was the other real deal maker is the single-minded bleakness of the lyrics. How many times can you say that War is horrible? Well, if you are tired of that, there is still plenty of songs about plagues killing everybody (“Walk Of The Plague”), pyromania as a means of killing everybody (“Playing In The Ashes”), night terror (“Scary Z’s”), cremation (“Cremation”) , a army buddy of the band going AWOL and hanging himself (“Horizontal Friend”) and plenty of other cheery songs. One of the best songs was the band putting new music behind Bob Dylan’s “Masters Of War” and letting it rip. The funny thing is if fits in perfectly with the rest of the material they had. Later on there would appear to be some light to fight off the darkness but it came in the form of songs like “I Remember Drugs” and “Cockroaches Shall”. It was so weird to look back and think that nothing seemed to happen for them. Bands like Cryptic Slaughter had records out. Mystic Records put out records by a million bands that FATAL had played parties with. The band even had what no one else had: A great sounding recording. And yet nothing. Maybe it was the bands fault, maybe not but when I listen to this stuff I am still convinced of its greatness and would think that if more people could hear it, they would dig it. It sounds like it could be a new band. These recordings are as good or maybe even better than most of whatever I have heard these days. They are sort of the missing link, the great unknown band. Or at least one of ‘em. Later on the band lost Jon as singer and Matt sort of stepped in. Another demo came. Then the band lost Dave on bass and then Matt took over bass and Simi Valley’s Mike Harder came into the band near the end as another guitarist. I had already moved out to the East Coast when all of this was going on. I don’t know why or when they called it a day but they did. And all they left were these two really awesome sounding demos from that weird San Diego studio and a small handful of demented sounding home recordings. Hopefully this will be the start of what could be the material getting out there somehow. They deserve it, and I think some people would really like it. .

from MANCHILD 2, based on a story Trey told me in a letter he wrote after I moved away!

THE GRUNGE CHRONICLES.

2011-09-26T15:07:00.000-07:00

Courtney Love can sure spin some good yarn! This charming tale comes from the new oral history book on the "grunge scene" and I tried to make her story come alive! Maybe we can work together in the future!

Q: AND CHILDREN? A: AND CHILDREN.

2011-09-15T07:53:00.000-07:00

MANCHILD 6, MAXIMUM ROCK N ROLL COVER STORY AND OTHER NEWS.

2011-09-15T07:48:00.000-07:00

So I am the cover story of the October issue of MRR. it came out (I think) pretty good and overall I am pleased with how it went. If you are interested in obtaining this issue, here is the link:

and this is my cover.What else? MANCHILD 6 has been discussed and it looks as though a mr. Will Butler will be doing the honors this time, letting Charles have some breathing room and learning the subtle craft of diaper changing with his new daughter. Thematically this will be sort of a continuation of the same layout idea that the last book had, except it will be sort of a Lester Bangs type of thing: writings and interviews with new art put between the chapters. No other news on this yet but I will let you know when we get the ball rolling. Other news? Well, my feet sort of hurt..but I will be okay I am sure. Thanks.

SHINY BEAST "STOP LOOKING AT US WE'RE WAVING GOODBYE" CD OUT ON LITTLE MAFIA RECORDS.

2011-09-15T07:37:00.000-07:00

Six years in the making and three diffirent owners later, the Shiny Beast cd is finally out on Oklahoma's Little Mafia Records.

I would like to thank Little Mafia Records for caring enough to put this out.

Who is/was Shiny Beast?

(here is a re-print from an older earlier entry:)

WHAT I CAN REMEMBER....

I remember the time when the original Shiny Beast lineup of David, Mike Meadows and myself recorded what would become the tracks for the Boner Records release, we invited our freind Mike Carden to sing on some of the songs. Mike was in the evil local band Garbageman, definitely a unsung class act of yesteryear. Mike was this intense brooding man of (usually) few words who could scream and shriek like the singers of Die Kruezen and Negative Approach. He had a serious hardcore record collection as well. When he did the singing at Jerry Kee's home studio in a residential area of Raleigh, it was maybe a hour later when the police showed up at Jerry's. The police explained that they were summoned to the place because a neighbor thought that someone was being murdered or tortured. No officers, just laying down some vocals. They soon left.

I remember one time when we were on tour with Erectus Monotone and we played at State College, Pa. It was a beautiful little town tucked away in the mountains and the show was pretty good. Some dude let us crash at what seemed like an empty bottom floor of a frat house or college rec room. Well, that was the night everyone decided to get real drunk or something. I remember bonding heavily with EM's Brian Quast that night over our mutual love of the Descendents. He was really talkative and drunk. David was out of control. When he drank he got really animated and funny, not really drunk just really wide open and excited. He got so excited he dove out of an open window, ran around sticking forks into electrical outlets to prove how he wouldn't get shocked: "See? You gotta stick both prongs into the socket to get shocked! See? SEE??" Kim told him to eat a flower that was growing out of a potted plant so he did. Everyone had a good time until there was some drunken conflict (sort of) that I wasn't really aware of and then EM's Kevin Collins got reeeeally bummed out 'cause everything had been going so well personality wise on the trip so far. Then the next morning most everybody was really hungover and quiet and no one really said much for a little while when we left town.

I remember when we played in Buffalo New York a few years later in this huge art loft near downtown. Polvo were nice enough to take us out with them on the road and this was when the band went through our "Fleetwood Mac" period. The three of us ended up sitting on a couch at the entrance drinking a twelve pack of beer. Now, this had NEVER happened before but for some reason it made sense that night. We ended up playing in this hot packed sweaty room where I played a semi drunken set that I alone really enjoyed. David and Kim less so. David had to keep re-tuning his Telecaster. People seemed to like us, some even knew about us. Afterwards some guy who looked just like Dez Cadena of Black Flag came up to us and complimented us and then offered to get us stoned. So we did. I remember Polvo played a set that melted my tiny little mind; they passed around this cowboy hat while they played. Afterwards I was still out of my tree and ended up packing up all of my stuff but stupidly left a cymbal stand at the loft. Later I enjoyed a horrible turkey sub with ranch dressing that made me throw up later on at the house we crashed at. Hooray!

I remember how I learned to get really tired of the one thing everyone yelled at us when we played, no matter where it was: "TURN UP THE VOCALS!! I CAN'T HEAR THEM!! HA HA HA!!"

Even better was the time I had a conversation with a drunk in Columbus Ohio who watched our whole set and then insisted that we had some "great singing". After the third time I denied this, he then compared the band to Rush and that David's playing was "just like Alex Lifeson". That was certainly a new one.

Mike Meadows was the first bass player. When we played our first show it was in Greensboro with Mike Carden singing. I can't stress how weird it all was..me and David had been in Willard before this and it was like this was the first time I had "met" David musically, if you know what I mean. He wrote most of our stuff. Meadows was a great player, a all around talented musician but there was this personality diffirence. Me and David were wimps. Meadows was this sort of swaggering machoish dude who would do things like walk around shirtless in the Greensboro club with some random bass that he just found there and without even asking permission would just walk around with it playing it unplugged. I don't know why that stuck out in my mind but it did. I have to say that when he wasn't in the picture it was sort of a relief...not playing with someone that you maybe wasn't sure if you liked very much but being afraid that he might get mad at you for it. We did lose something without him but gained a whole new thing in the process.

Kim literally taught herself how to play bass in maybe a month, tops. David helped her. In no time we were back in business. Kim was kind of like how it was playing with Wayne Taylor, they both played bass in this very odd way, weird stuff. Kim later on was in this Greensboro band called Taija Rae who were quite good, more of a straight forward rock thing , and she still played the same oddball way which was nice. She wrote a little bit of the music towards the end.

....yeah, we played with a lot of bands when we were one ourselves. We opened for Cop Shoot Cop once at the old Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill and they were pretty nice guys and seemed to like us even. We opened for the Melvins once when I somehow was able to get them in touch with a short lived and foolheartily ambitious booking agent that worked (breifly) at the Brewery here in Raleigh. I don't know how that one was pulled off but you could imagine how odd that was. The Melvins benfitted greatly from the Brewery's powerful p.a. (sarcasm) that night. We played our music with our rinky dink little candy ass gear and sort of held our own I guess. We played with Don Caballero a couple of times. Their drummer was..sort of a strange fellow, not very consistent personality wise and played in his underwear with his ass hanging out. Nothing you probably haven't heard a thousand times if you are familar with that band. I still like thier first record. We played with Rodan a few times and that too was really cool. We really liked them and had a good time I think. They were so much better then thier record.

Here in the Triangle we played with pretty much every band that was at least once. I remember how we played with bands like Archers Of Loaf, Superchunk and whoever else was peaking during that time when Chapel Hill exploded and eclipsed everything else. I would sort of scratch my head with a tiny bit of twisted jealousy mixed with bewilderment as I sat and tried to figure out what was going on. All of those people were basically pretty nice too. It seemed like I was the only one of us who even thought stupid stuff like this. I just couldn't pretend that I didn't already see bands like the Minutemen and Black Flag back in SoCal so I just chalked it up to that for the most part.

We opened for the "new COC" once and that was maybe the weirdest reaction that we had, or at least the most interesting. At that point, COC were into their Mike Dean-free five piece "heavy rock" period and somehow they let us or asked us to play with them at the Cat's Cradle. The reaction we got was just like the reaction the "animosity" era COC were greeted with the first time I saw them back in SoCal. They played a "crossover" show and the entire metal audience just stood there watching, unsure of what to do or how to react. Not like our band was ANYTHING like the old COC, but six or seven years later thier audience pretty much did the same thing. No one even went anywhere near the stage at all, not like they thought we sucked (well, who knows about that one). Finally, one lone headbanger went up to the front of the stage and started to furiously headbang for like twenty seconds to one of our songs. He then stopped and went back to the rest of the audience who were standing fifteen feet away form the Cat's Cradle stage. Pretty funny.

We usually ended up playing a lot with bands of the time in our area like Erectus Monotone, Orifice, Regraped, Vanilla Trainwreck and Polvo. This worked out well because we all liked those bands the best in the Triangle area. We toured with Erectus of course and that was fun. They had Brian Quast for awhile then and they were finally clicking on the road playing some furious shows in goofy locales like a pizza shop in Conneticut amongst twenty other "enlightened people". Orifice were just..a soundtrack for a absurd weird comedy..everything about them was just hilarious. We played at least seven billion shows with Regraped and those were always fine. Ben and Kip played bass and Brian Q. drummed. I wish they recorded a proper record. Vanilla Trainwreck, horrible name, inconsistent records and lengthy shows aside still could fucking kick it out. And you know about Polvo already, I guess. We all really liked playing with those bands and here is my paragraph dedicated to all of them. Good going, guys..and girls..

Little Mafia Records:

http://www.myspace.com/littlemafiarecords

VOIVOD T-SHIRT NOW UP FOR GRABS.

2011-09-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

I am pretty darn excited to say that the VOIVOD shirt is done and ready for pre-orders. It has been really cool to be able to do these t-shirts this year and to have a chance to work with some of my favorite bands and some great people but I think this one holds a really special place in my heart. Black and white design on a grey shirt. Here is the link once again to my site:

http://brianwalsby.net/BrianWalsby.net/Home.html

WHATEVER....

2011-07-20T17:01:00.001-07:00

CORROSION OF CONFORMITY SHIRT READY FOR PRE ORDER.

2011-07-14T07:36:00.000-07:00

And it is our first black shirt..so you will look tough.

the link:

http://brianwalsby.net/BrianWalsby.net/Home.html

LOU REED AND METALLICA RECORD AN ALBUM TOGETHER. WHO IS NEXT?

2011-07-06T00:11:00.000-07:00

THE IRON GANG LIVES.

2011-06-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

CASTING OUT MY LINE.

2011-06-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

Charles Cardello and his wife are about to have a baby! Congrats, guys!

Since Charles is going to be quite busy for the rest of his life, I am going to cast out my line to any would be publishers, actual publishers and other people who have money and also like me: i have a new idea for sort of a smaller book, along the same lines as MANCHILD 5 but with the focus being some of my better writing over the years, bookended with new artwork between the writings. There are interviews with all of the various people that I have talked to over the years, personal observations, slice of life stories and other little tidbits.

The idea would be to package it in a unique way, press up a small amount and also include something to listen to for fun.

Sounds good? Please drop a line if this appeals to you. Hell, it worked twice before.

thanks,
Brian

reluctantking@hotmail.com

WHAT IS BRIAN WALSBY.NET ALL ABOUT?

2011-06-18T17:16:00.000-07:00

Good question, kids. Mostly it is about getting people to spend some quality time checking out my work and me peddling my wares.

For instance, I have prints of my work available now. They are printed 24 by 36 and they look real good all blown up and stuff. Limited to thirty each, signed and numbered for all of those collectors out there.

We have been doing some t-shirts this year and so far they have done pretty good. We did MELVINS and DESCENDENTS shirts and those are about gone. Here are the three that are currently available:

The bands are Valient Thorr, Fucked Up and Honor Role.

And I have books out too. Five of them. Sadly, two of them are out of print. Here is what is available:

Manchild 5: Like Gold Down A Sewer is my newest book, a personalized oral history of all things Raleigh North Carolina related in the eighties. My fave book.
Manchild 2 is oddly enough the most consistent book as far as content goes.
Manchild 1: A Celebration of Twenty Years of Doodles is just that. A big book. Some "classics" are in here.

and oh yeah there are some links, downloadable artwork, and lots of mouth running too.

what is the link? Oh yeah..here it is:

http://brianwalsby.net/BrianWalsby.net/Home.html

DEDICATED TO MY FATHER..WITH AFFECTION.

2011-06-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

This charming slice of life cartoon talks about the unique "water boy" aspect of my adolescence, where i lovingly fetched peanuts and colas for my dad on the days where he wasn't at work and he wanted to relax/

PUNK ROCK..IT'S NOT YOU..IT'S ME..

2011-06-15T07:58:00.000-07:00

GENERIC SUPERHERO COMICS!

2011-06-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

Todays episode: token weak powered member joins the team and dies instantly in two minutes!

NEW NEWS!

2011-05-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

For whatever odd reason, MAXIMUM ROCK N ROLL has stated that my website is the "site of the week" and you can read all about it here. Thanks MRR..you were a big influence on me and you still exist! Most magazines do not:

http://maximumrocknroll.com/2011/05/11/website-of-the-week-brian-walsby/

And in other news, our newest t-shirt featuring the Toronto band FUCKED UP is ready to pre-order. It came out really good, my fave shirt so far, and here is the link:

http://brianwalsby.net/BrianWalsby.net/T_SHIRTS.html

There will be a massively gigantic interview with me in a future issue of MRR and if that isn't big enough, they are also going to let me draw the cover. So stay tuned..

HONOR ROLE SHIRT IS NOW AVAILABLE.

2011-05-05T00:01:00.000-07:00

It is my fave shirt so far. You simply can't go wrong. Please go to my site if interested and party down.

http://brianwalsby.net/BrianWalsby.net/T_SHIRTS.html

need convincing? Honor Role were from Richmond Virginia and existed from mainly the mid to late eighties. Back then they were one of the first bands that I got into that truly went from being sort of a standard okay hc type band to an amazing and majestic band with great long lasting songs, incredible lyrics and awesome guitar playing. Check this out:

Coming Soon: HONOR ROLE t-shirt.

2011-04-18T14:00:00.001-07:00

This will be the next (fourth) shirt, and I will make an announcement soon enough when it is ready. You all know how much I love this band, so it was a real honor to get permission to do it. Stay tuned!

BRIAN WALSBY.NET IS UP AND RUNNING.

2011-04-04T10:38:00.000-07:00

It has finally happened: I have gone "pro". My new website is up and running and if I do say so it looks good. Many thanks to Charles for making this happen. Go here:

http://brianwalsby.net/BrianWalsby.net/Home.html

We have some new goodies for you to boot.

Check it out, and have a good day.

SESSION DRUMMER CAREER HINTED AT.

2011-03-14T19:24:00.000-07:00

As of right now, I am no longer in Double Negative for a couple reasons. This has been a hard decision to make but I am stepping down mainly because I do not have enough sufficent time to devote to the band and all of the things that the band could do in... the future. I didn't know just how much time I could devote to it given the situation of my life now with two kids and a surgery for Willow on the horizon but this seems to be the right thing to do.

I would like to thank everybody out there who has enjoyed the band. It was a special thing to me and the fact that we spent five years together is not lost on me. i feel like I played some kick ass music, we got a chance to go to all of these great places and travel all because of this band that we started on a lark. I am proud of what we have done and of our records. I feel like it got better and better, the newest stuff is the best stuff, and I feel like I am going out on top of my game. It meant a lot to me and I am going to miss it. I hope down the line I will be able to play music very soon again. Maybe I could be a session drummer or something, who knows.

I wish the rest of the band the best of luck in the future, and thanks again for your support.

ROCK AND ROLL ACTION FIGURES PART TWO.

2011-03-12T04:27:00.001-08:00

The first installment of this idea ended up in a few efforts by Henry Owings a la his CHUNKLET book/website/empire. Here is the second. Enjoy.

NEW WEBSITE COMING SOON PLUS MORE...

2011-03-12T04:11:00.001-08:00

Pretty soon there is going to be a brand new website coming out called BRIAN WALSBY.NET. Charles is working on it and so far it looks really great. Awesome I might even add. There will be as ton of information as well as links to the books I have out that you can still buy as well as the t-shirts we have done. If that wasn’t enough, we will also have some 24 by 36 prints of some of my work available for purchase too. When it is actually ready, I will let the universe know.

In other news, next up in our t-shirt schedule will be one for the hardworking residents of Venus, VALIENT THORR. This shirt will be ready probably by the end of next week. So look for that as well.

After that we will be doing a small run of HONOR ROLE t-shirts followed by CORROSION OF CONFORMITY. As of this writing there is still maybe 12 or so MELVINS shirts left and the DESCENDENTS one is still available.

Double Negative will be opening for OFF! At the local 506 in Chapel Hill March 23rd. This will probably be my last show with the band for awhile as I am sitting out the bands upcoming summer tour and the boys need to break in their new drummer for that event.

OH CANADUH.

2011-03-11T12:49:00.000-08:00

....didnt I print this awhile back? I forgot if I did. This is a very naive yet still charming analogy of the country that brought us such great things as all things maple, No Means No and John Candy..

CROSSING THE LINE, REVOLVING DOOR.

2011-03-02T14:49:00.000-08:00

Having children is like crossing this line and joining most of the world in a club so universal that nothing I can say about the experience or what I am thinking or feeling does any real justice to anything, or adds newly discovered profound stuff. But I can’t help but notice certain things that have already changed quite a bit since Willow was born, and they were changing anyways so I can’t blame her completely.
Here is the first biggie: you will lose a lot of your friends, but not because anyone did anything. I have noticed that a lot of people who don’t have children, will no longer hang out with you if you have children. Dale Crover says it is funny because “at the time where you need people the most they are nowhere to be found”, even adding that one of his wife’s good friends stopped talking to her altogether after her first child was born. There is some truth to what he says. It is kind of weird, and you will be so busy that you won’t notice it too much, but it happens. So soon you have to find some like minded couples who also have children to hang out with because God only knows you won’t be seeing your bar buddies or your music friends again anytime soon. Unless they too have children with someone down the road at some point in time and rest assured you will be seeing them soon.
That is the weirdest part. Having children means that you aren’t really going to hang out at bars and strip clubs anymore (It was a huge sacrifice for me, but that comes later in about seven years). Instead, you are going to center your universe around this tiny little bald helpless person who cries a lot. Or you should. I try. That doesn’t mean that I always do the right thing because I am still the same jerk I was beforehand. The clouds didn’t part when I saw Willow’s face and everything magically fell into place but I think I have adjusted okay for the most part. I think that actual greatness is going to come a little bit later once I can grow a little more into the father role. You see, I don’t have milk giving boobies and it is like Carole’s boobs are chained to Willow’s mouth. They belong to her, and no one else.
She is carrying the main load here with Willow. Plus if you think about it hormonally, what does the whole birthing process do to any woman? You get big, your body changes, you go through all of these things, then you actually give birth. It looks like it hurts. A lot. No man will ever go through that. And then even after all of that, there is no break, your body is spent, you have no sleep, and you want to kill the father of your child at times because of the hormones, because we are sitting around doing nothing, and not having boobs to help out. Plus we say dumb things like, “Is there anything I can do? Do you need anything?”
It is joyous but it is hard at times though; sometimes I don’t feel like doing anything either. Now that I am a parent and father with Carole, it makes me wonder how ANYONE could stay together with children no matter what. Relationships are tough and ever-changing and they are twice as tough with children. I can see why people run away and leave their families. I can see why people flip out and lose their minds. For every child that grows up to be James Hetfeild and is able to take their father abandonment and make millions of dollars, there are plenty of others with the same issues that aren’t so lucky. You have to fight hard to be selfish, you know you can’t do that crap anymore, you lose all of your strip club bros and instead of having fun and serving your needs, you change lots of diapers instead and drop everything when the baby cries.
And in the process, my universe has been shrunken down to five, maybe six locations. Honestly, that is it. In one day, I cover a lot of ground with these five possible destinations.
What are they? Glad you asked:
THE GAS STATION DOWN THE STREET FROM MY HOUSE: I try and center my chartered trips around getting gas at the Handee Hugo’s down the street from where I live. One might be able to refer to this place as the “filling station”. Sadly, I am a frequent visitor of the gas station down the street but hey pal that’s life, and I try and deal with it. Gas is expensive everywhere else, anyways.
THE SONIC DRIVE THROUGH DOWN THE STREET FROM MY HOUSE: Conveniently located right next to the Harris Teeter that I also frequent, the Sonic Drive Through is a popular smash for the entire family: crappy yet satisfying corn dogs and Egg and Cheese Breakfast Burritos for Noble (just handy for leaving the house late for school/wanting to kill/missing breakfast altogether moments), Lime Aids for the rest of us. Bags of ice are also on sale there, which we do buy. I am here at least twice a week. Even though I have never stopped there to actually eat, it is also like a filling station.
PROJECT ENLIGHTENMENT: Noble’s school. He goes to a great school and the other kids and their parents are all great too. We have met some nice people there. Most of them have brought us food after the baby came which was really nice of them. The only drawback to this is from a selfish standpoint, I wish it was longer than three hours a day. Which you know…sort of sucks.
CUP A JOE: For better or worse, after all of these years I still like to hang out at this coffee place in Raleigh, and nowhere else. Still the only place you can go for coffee that offers a panoramic view of all types of weirdos; brain damaged hippies clash head to head with agro punk stereotypes while you will enjoy watching the curious “nubile girl who hugs everybody” types parading by. Plus the coffee is still decent, cheap and I can get a lot of work done if I get “in the zone”. Thought about bringing the baby there but it is too early to expose to something like that. I’ll wait. Some people that come in with children are sneered at by some of the sullen regulars.
WHOLE FOODS MARKET, KILDARE FARM CARY NC: For a change, I am going to keep my mouth shut tight about where I work. Yes, it is a job. David Menconi, a locaI music writer did a nice write up on me for my last book but had to mention where I worked in the article by name and I sort of felt violated (nothing against David, mind you). Anyways, I spend a good about of time here, what else has to be said? Everyone needs to make money to pay the bills. I am trying out for a signmaking position is the store. Wish me luck. Next.
DOUBLE NEGATIVE PRACTICE ROOM, CAPITAL BLVD, RALEIGH: The mecca. The home away from home. The chance to blow off steam, act like a jackass, play some music and get fucked up kind of. What can be more perfect than still playing this band in your mid forties? Playing means more now than it ever has.
My only other social outlets that I have time for are either computer driven or Double Negative gig driven…yeah I know. But now I really have an excuse. It is great to see people though. Going out to play a show is like going on vacation these days. I feel like I am in the Bahamas when DN played at Slim’s in downtown Raleigh recently as I chatted with fellow father Ian Shannon or talked about Sixteen Horsepower with Mary Lovell Hall or when I drove Ethan Smith home after the show. Seriously.
The only thing I need to work on is taking the revolving door out of that doghouse. I am in and out of that thing just a little bit too much recently. I have done something admittingly stupid shit that if I had thought about for more than two seconds, things would have been different. For example:
If you let a five year old ride in the front passenger seat to school because you are too lazy to fix van seats and lock them into place, you might as well strap him to the roof of your car with yarn and hold on tight. Plus, there is the chance the five year old will get mad at you and then rat you out to a very angry mom. Not that I am speaking from personal experience, mind you. I think I managed to have spent the last week doing nothing that could be considered life threatening or dangerous to my children so that is almost a milestone.
So, to end this:
Life sure is different. And time has really crawled by. Last year, for a variety of reasons was the slowest year of my life, and it wasn’t even just Willow coming. Quit one job, found another, went on tour with the Melvins for two weeks, did a lot of Double Negative shows including flying to Chicago and going to Europe, being perpetually broke, the usual up and down mood swings etc etc….a lot was going on. Since Willow has come along, everything still seems really slow. I mean slooooow. It really has seemed that way.
However, she will not be a baby for a long time, so I want to remember her nursing my nose and other cutey pie things like that.

FOUR FLYERS FOR ONE SHOW, COLLECT THEM ALL..

2011-02-25T15:10:00.001-08:00

..that is, after I make some next week..

DOUBLE NEGATIVE IN CHARLOTTE.

2011-02-21T09:21:00.000-08:00

We had a great show there a few weeks ago..

DESCENDENTS SHIRT NOW AVAILABLE.

2011-02-15T04:57:00.000-08:00

come and get it kids..available in all variety of sizes from the Bifocal Media site:

http://www.bifocalmedia.com/index.php

NICE REVIEW FOR MANCHLD FIVE.

2011-02-11T14:36:00.000-08:00

This was a nice review for the new book:

http://www.lightningsgirl.com/2011/02/manchild-vol-5-history-of-raleighs.html

PHOTO of FVK, Chapel Hill 1984 or so.

T-SHIRT SCHEDULE!

2011-02-11T14:03:00.001-08:00

The Descendents shirt should be available from Bifocal Media next week. The Melvins shirts are about gone, and one hundred were sent to them so if you are reading this and still want one, bug them about it and hopefully you can get one.

After the Descendents shirt, there will be shirts made of the following:

Valient Thorr
Corrosion Of Confromity
Honor Role

There might be a couple more as of yet unconfirmed bands that will for sure make this even more fun then it already is. Stay tuned!

NARDCORE!

2011-02-06T07:54:00.000-08:00

My old freind and mentor Tony Cortez (of Ill Repute fame) has been nice enough to feature me and my stuff over at the website he mantains that is dedicated to the area code I used until I was twenty years old. The "spotlight" may or may not be up by the time you go here. If not, then just go and listen to some Mystic Records in the meantime:

http://www.nardcore805.com/

MANCHILD 5 OUT ON JANUARY 25TH.

2011-01-17T09:25:00.000-08:00

You can place a pre order for it now if you would like..and don't forget to check out that Melvins t-shirt that I designed. The link is:

http://www.bifocalmedia.com/index.php

And here is some glowing praise that would make a mighty fine press blurb or something like that:

"Came home after a two hour walk through the icy streets of Winston, ready to take a major hot bath. Found MANCHILD 5 waiting at the mailbox. Needless to say, I dove into the bath with my book. The pages dry pretty quick and the cover curls quite nicely; and do I give a shit? What d'you think. MANCHILD 5 is one of those tomes full of everything you ever wanted to read about music. I was transported back to my teen years curled up with an SST or Subterranean catalog for hours, deciding what to spend this week's lunch money on. It's Maximum Rock & Roll and Flipside all rolled up into one beautiful volume on the North Carolina hardcore scene. (If only the print came off on my fingers like MRnR.) These things are made to be used, passed around, referenced and crammed in the pile of ever shifting importances beside your computer until it's a ragged out pile of dog-eared pages. After only five pages (hardly a tenth of the book), I had to stop and contact Brian immediately. I think he's right in hoping someone writes another volume on the period from 1982-86, but I'm throwing my chips in with MANCHILD 5. It's told the way this story should be told, first person. This isn't Walsby rambling on about conceptual threads that hold a scene together; I've done that and it's always missing something. I think it's the multiple voices bringing their own insights, vocabulary and humor; which one writer can never truly capture. Instead, this is Brian sharply editing together the words of the people who lived it. The people who did it. The people who were there. All this embellished with his righteous cartoons and buttload of rare pictures. Anyone interested in the NC/HC scene need long nor look no further; it has arrived. The story you've always wanted to read, and will never be told any better. This book gets my unconditional endorsement. It's only $12, shipping included. You could blow that picking up a snack at Subway. Dude! Get Manchild 5 or you're a freaking poser! And from where I come from...that still carries weight."

- sam hicks (author of How North Carolina Got It's Punk Attitude).

Here is another pretty nice review of the book:

http://www.giantrobot.com/index.php/blogs/martin-post/route_19_revisited_the_clash_and_manchild_5_coc_book_reviews

podcast interview last October!

2011-01-11T14:57:00.000-08:00

Hear me run my mouth in Chicago about the new book, COC, Double Negative, what a genius Brian Wilson is, Mike Love and other important topics. Held by Paul from G-Mart Comics and pals..all of us are quite funny, I assure you.

http://www.g-martcomiccast.com/?p=53

NEW WRITE UP ON MANCHILD 5 IN THE INDEPENDENT WEEKLY.

2011-01-06T07:59:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Brian Reed for writing a flattering review on the new book, and you can read it here:

http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/brian-walsbys-essential-history-of-raleigh-hardcore-manchild-5/Content?oid=1933563

photo of Woody Weatherman taken by Will.

BOOK RELEASE PARTY THIS WEEKEND.

2011-01-05T11:50:00.000-08:00

Read on, kids:

http://www.newraleigh.com/articles/archive/brian-walsbys-manchild-5-preview-and-book-release-party-details/

BRIAN WALSBY/MELVINS T-SHIRTS ARE READY TO ORDER!

2010-12-23T14:11:00.000-08:00

Up now at the Bifocal Media site. Two hundred of these. Available in small, medium, large and xtra large. Place your order today!

here again, is the link:

http://www.bifocalmedia.com/index.php

MANCHILD 5 PARTY AT KINGS IN RALEIGH JANUARY 8TH!

2010-12-22T07:28:00.001-08:00

Yes, you have heard it first. There will be food, books and bands.

The bands will be THE KICK ASS and (you guessed it) DOUBLE NEGATIVE.

I will have more concrete details in a few days, but did I tell you all that I am a brand new father? Yes I am.

This here is Sean Willow Pierce Walsby. I just call her Willow. She is a week old and boy are we tired.

NEW BRIAN WALSBY/MELVINS T-SHIRT COMING SOON.

2010-12-22T06:49:00.000-08:00

STOLEN FROM THE MELVINS FANSITE MESSAGE BOARD COURTESY OF CHARLES:

Not sure if anyone here gives a rat turd or not but everyones favorite rock art dude (Brian Walsby) is doing a series of limited (300 of each) band shirts. They're all legit and the bands all get a chunk of the booty. It may be of no surprise that the first one is for the Melvins. In true Walsby fashion, he's already posted the unfinished design on his blog for the Melvins shirt. It's a parody of Queen's "News of the World" album art and it's pretty bad ass. Make that 299 shirts up for grabs as I'll be grabbing one of them for myself. MANCHILD 5 comes out January 25. More soon.

Yes, this is true. the link will go up soon at the Bifocal Media site. First come, first serve. There will be some other t-shirts in the future too, and you can probably already guess what a few of them are..in the meantime, here is the link to Bifocal Media:

http://www.bifocalmedia.com/

BLACK FLAG CHANGED MY LIFE.

2010-12-03T08:15:00.000-08:00

HERE IT IS, THAT PHOTO! TAKEN BY THE INFAMOUS GLEN E. FRIEDMAN.

Black Flag changed my life. And yours too, I bet

From the start of me hearing about punk rock, they seemed to be it. I bought Damaged at the start of 1982 and was so riveted by the first side that I didn’t even get to the second side until a week later. The second side was even better. That record seemed to articulate everything I was feeling, and to some extent, it still does. It is a pretty timeless recording by a timeless band.

I grew up a couple of hours away from the epicenter of all of this raging stuff in Ventura County. A few months later that same year there was some sort of write up on Black Flag in the Los Angeles Times, the big paper across all five counties in Southern California. There was this picture of them that I couldn’t get out of my mind. All five of the then existing members seemed like distinct and separate individuals, all unique characters thrown together to form a tight five fingered fist that continually smashed your face in with its presence. I didn’t know much but I soon figured that theirs was a presence to be reckoned with and twenty five or whatever years later they still are. I reckon that no one has come close. Even to this day.

I admit I was duped momentarily about punk rock. I thought that there were rules. I didn’t realize that getting the music was enough, or that enjoying this music that seemed to come from another planet was all you needed to participate. I didn’t have a uniform and didn’t see the point in having one. I wasn’t tough; I was just a dork who didn’t fit in. These five men seemed to celebrate not fitting in just by their existence and the strength of their music. They also shattered my illusions of punk rock: You didn’t have to fit in, you didn’t have to adhere to a uniform, you just had to “get it”. Back then, getting it in itself was like going through a portal. Not a lot of people did and those who did go through seemed to be connected to each other somehow. It was all so small. But with time, all legends seem to grow and take on a separate life of their own.

That picture:

The first thing that seemed to stand out to me big time was Dez Cadena. Instead of some dude with a Mohawk or Sid Vicious haircut, here is this dude in a leather jacket that basically looks like Jesus: Long hair and a beard. Was this allowed? I guess it was. In fact, Greg Ginn and Chuck Biscuits also looked pretty..well, normal. Chuck Dukowski was bald. Henry Rollins was sort of off in a corner and looked like someone you didn’t really want to mess with at all. It was just five guys but that pic spoke volumes to me.

At this time, the only thing that was ever recorded by the short lived Chuck Biscuits lineup (that was released mind you) was the live track on the first RAT MUSIC FOR RAT PEOPLE record called “Scream”. I listened to that song over and over, its slow trudge like screaming two guitar squall paved the way for Henry to more or less howl like an animal in pain throughout. There didn’t even seem to be a lyrical idea to get behind, it was just one long (well four minutes) tortured dirge that made most people cringe and you know what, I think it still would. The feeling of the song seemed to be universal: pent up feelings followed by cathartic release. What was there not to love?

Since then, I bought every single thing that this band released. I loved just about all of what was released..even towards the end. I loved the previous three singers, I thought they were all distinct and great. I loved Side Two of “My War” and think that you could almost write a book about the polarizing effect that record had when it came out. I loved the Bill Stevenson/Kira Roessler lineup of the band and the “Slip It In” record. Basically, I seemed to be able to continually “get it” when it came to Black Flag. And then they seemed to lose their grip a bit. So they broke up, and it was almost in time. After they broke up, the legend started and continued to grow and grow.

These days you have people from every walk of life professing their admiration of Black Flag and what these people did and how it continues to affect them. I don’t know any of those people involved, and it was much to my naiveté to realize that after having the experience of being a part of this comet, most of the people involved have scattered far and wide. Put in this way, there is no twenty year high school reunion for those who had served. It hardly matters. In their day, Black Flag changed the world. They certainly changed mine.

And yours too, I bet.

THE RECENT FRUITS OF MY LABORS.

2010-12-01T06:44:00.000-08:00

There will be an announcement very soon about pre-orders for MANCHILD 5: RABID PACK WITH SIRENS HOWLING. There will also be a pre release show happenening in early January. I will have more details for that soon as well.

In the meantime, here is some recent artwork done as sort of a launchpoint for another project that I will announce as soon as the details are ironed out. It'll be good, though.

here you go:

the cover of MANCHILD number five.

2010-11-25T20:05:00.001-08:00

NEW ARTWORK FOR SOON TO BE CLASSIC FLYER.

2010-11-22T09:28:00.000-08:00

A RELEASE DATE...

2010-11-06T11:10:00.001-07:00

Here is some actual real news straight from Charles Cardello on his Bifocal Media website:

Manchild 5
Hello Folks! First and foremost I'd like to let you know that Brian Walsby's MANCHILD 5 (book) will be out on Bifocal on January 25, 2011. This one documents the 1980s punk/ hardcore scene in Raleigh, NC. Along with tons of photos and Brian's infamous comic art; this one is also packed with interviews and stories about events that went down in Raleigh from 1982 up to around 1990. If you are/ were into bands like COC, Bad Brains, No Labels, Days of..., Honor Role, etc, then there's a story here for you. This is an amazing documentation of how the underground worked in the 1980s. Think bands, fans, punk houses, traveling, scene drama and DIY mentality at its pure, unadulterated peak. Remember life before the internet? Remember when you discovered punk rock? Remember when the only videos on MTV were from bands like Winger and the Bullet boys? If so, this book may be for you. If you don't, here's your opportunity to immerse yourself in another universe. This was our generation's version of a viable counterculture filled with timeless music and a tireless DIY ethic that lives to this day.

Lumberjack/ Mordam distribution went under in 2009. This cost us and a bunch of other great labels and artists a ton of time, money and grief. We were lucky enough to have been picked up by Redeye Distribution and they've done a wonderful job getting our goods to the people who want them. And the beat goes on...

posted by Cardello on Dec 31 1969, 04:12pm.

http://www.bifocalmedia.com/index.php

G-MART COMICS PODCAST IN CHICAGO!

2010-10-12T17:41:00.000-07:00

When I was in Chicago I got a chance to run my mouth about myself in a very nice comic store and I think I rose to the occasion..here is the link:

http://www.g-martcomiccast.com/?p=53

a nice review of daydreamnation.....

2010-09-14T10:32:00.000-07:00

heads will swell:

STILL SINGLE

September 13, 2010 Double Negative – Daydreamnation LP (Sorry State)

-/- is a Carolina hardcore supergroup, staffed by Raleigh scene vets from Erectus Monotone, Snakenation, Shiny Beast, Patty Duke Syndrome, Polvo, and a handful of others. While their earlier LP clung too hard to convention, and the follow-up single swung away at abstract aggression almost to a fault, they have hit the proverbial sweet spot some years into a career that’s running exactly the way they want it to. Daydreamnation (they have a hard-on for name appropriation) rips so goddamned hard I can barely believe it, the band having grown into a sound that blends Flag, C.O.C., and all manners of loud, heavy music both inside and out of fast-paced punk into the smoothie of death, made of puke, lead paint, celery hearts and Pepto-Bismol. Mechanized wehrmacht, driven by Brian Walsby’s double- and triple-time drumming shifts, runs amok all over this new batch of songs, miles away from their beginnings and even their roots, as guitarist Scott Williams smears twisted, reckless riffage all over the place, bassist Justin Gray locks down in between, and vocalist Kevin Collins busts a lung with seriously upset-sounding rage. For once, the confusion within a band such as this actually works to their favor, a blur of sound with so many screws and bolts sticking out of it that it can’t help but leave an impression on you, maybe even in you as these thirteen songs detonate all over the place. Easily trumps the methodical HC-for-the-non-HC of Fucked Up as one of thee most important bands of its kind in action today, and since they rarely tour, you pretty much have to go to the mountain to see ‘em. Double Neg will be kept a secret for as long as these guys wish to stay down, and it’s your loss to ignore. Absolute fury in a beautifully embossed, metallic sleeve. First 286 copies on pink vinyl with numbered obi strip, long gone. Regular press is good enough for you.

(Doug Mosurock)

http://still-single.tumblr.com/post/1118992967/double-negative-daydreamnation-lp-sorry-state

DOUBLE NEGATIVE INTERVIEW OVER AT DOUBLE CROSS BLOG!

2010-09-14T06:10:00.000-07:00

The freindly folks over at DOUBLE CROSS blogspot have printed the first part of a massive DOUBLE NEGATIVE interview. Here is the link if you want to check it out:

http://doublecrosswebzine.blogspot.com/2010/09/double-negative.html

NEW INTERVIEW WITH ME OVER AT STRANGE REACTION.

2010-09-07T10:14:00.000-07:00

Read me running my mouth as usual but with some nice different questions for a change.

http://strangereaction.com/2010/09/03/interview-with-brian-walsby/

THE DETECTIVE..AT LAST, IN COMIC FORM.

2010-07-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

MELVINS "NEWS OF THE WORLD"

2010-07-02T14:13:00.000-07:00

MANCHILD 2, 3 AND 4 NO LONGER BUYABLE FROM ME.

2010-06-30T14:04:00.000-07:00

It seems sort of weird to say this but the last three of my books will no longer be buyable through me, as we are almost out of all three of them. You can still write to Bifocal Media and order them but time and supplies are running out.

I still have plenty of the first one, and if you haven't seen it, it is a pretty big book. I will be selling that until they are gone.

Look for the fifth book at the end of the year.

thanks.

ONLY IN AMERICA.....

2010-06-21T07:33:00.000-07:00

The world must be a right place when I can wake up in a hotel room across from New York City, draw cartoon posters of Adolph Hitler and then turn around and sell them at a rock show later that night. And even better is someone will post it on the internet less than twenty four hours later.

..profiting off Hitler. It is like a dream come true!

And if anyone who I have met on this most recent Melvins tour is reading this, I would like to thank each and every one of you for buying something of mine. I appreciate it a lot. No one has to give a shit, and people do so that is great. Thanks!

CUTE BAND ALERT: POLLUTION!

2010-04-03T18:40:00.000-07:00

Pollution is a band from New York City that people should check out, as they successfully cross the boundaries and subcultures of loud music that could appeal to the hardcore kids, the metal kids and even the hipster ironic tight pants wearing kids without ever pandering to or even noticing them. The band just plows through their songs and doesn’t acknowledge anyone’s existence. That is a great stance for any band. There is something so bone simple in a way about how they have re-thought aggressive music, an ever slight tweak to the program but it really works well.

A brutal loud quartet, Pollution is the brainchild of former longtime Raleigh resident Sean Livingstone. Double Negative’s Scott Williams and myself had played with Sean in one of our previous bands, Daddy. They were both the guitar players in that band and both wrote the riffs. You could almost see some of the roots in both Pollution and Double Negative stemming from Daddy when you look back on it, sort of tweaked and fucked up loud music that once in awhile was fast.

Sean eventually re-located to New York City where over a period of time he had tried to put something together, which I think was sort of tough. Eventually, he met each of his Pollution bandmates one by one by hanging out at shows. Sean is the only one in Pollution that isn’t in another band. They are all super cool people that I would personally hang out with all of the time if they lived in Raleigh, and the band is pretty fucking great. They seemed to have a little bit of a buzz behind them when they recently played down here due to the tapes and album that have trickled out into the universe. For once, it is deserved. Go see this band and support them. Look for a new record coming soon and get in touch with them to find out what it is all about.
It is just a tweak, a slight tweak in the program that Pollution offers, but it is a tweak that will make you scratch your head and go “man..why didn’t I think of that?”
You could have dude..but you didn’t!

Here is a recent article about Pollution that some guy from the Village Voice wrote about the band awhile ago:

No, Pollution Are Not on Twitter
Gleefully foul Brooklyn metalheads revel in the toxic stew you ignore

By Adam Ganderson
Wednesday,
Jul 22 2009

Greenpoint is home to various unnatural disturbances: the Death Star sewage plant, the unpleasantly visible air, the underground oil spill. Most residents, too occupied with frantic Twittering, etc., are indifferent. But local rockers Pollution are four men aligned against the mass delusion of thousands, in revolt against the digital toys that keep the public entranced. They're also adherents to the belief that humans are past the point of return—that, in addition to a poisonous dispersion of refuse, technological advances are only distractions from the neurotic toxins breeding inside each of us. They are purveyors of a reality that destroys—as stated on their recent release, the oddly titled n.s.DRUGS—the "glamorous poisoning process." Through the sound of a world drowning in industrial poison, they set fire to hippie communes and embrace Brooklyn's filth viscerally—not just with instruments but, if need be, with strong drink and drugs.

Though they're now flourishing amid our beloved industrial decay, Pollution's roots actually stretch deep into Raleigh, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia. The former is the hometown of mastermind/lead guitarist Light (a/k/a Sean Livingston); in the '80s, Raleigh gave birth to both the pummeling distortion of Corrosion of Conformity and the more technically mutated rhythms of Confessor, bands that would come to play a role in both Pollution's drum sound and guitar work. Meanwhile, Richmond established itself as a vital incubator for hardcore. "I saw Confessor a lot and was always blown away by their song structures," says Light. "But it was Pen Rollings [guitarist for Richmond bands Honor Role, Butterglove, and Breadwinner] who was a big influence. That guy was the guitar giant from '86 to '89.”

Rollings's innovative work is often cited as a touchstone of what would come to be called math-rock, a throwaway rock-critic term that, when used more accurately, is actually a clever way of describing a dissonant, off-kilter, ominously infected sound that Rollings dispenses in its purest form. Regardless, it's a sticky label that Livingston quickly puts aside: "I don't think the math-rock was an influence, but rather unconventional songwriting," he says, adding that such unconventional fare was, of course, not specific to the East Coast. "Later-era Black Flag are so fucking gross-sounding. I'm still trying to make something that sounds that gross and actually ties into Butterglove, who are the grossest-sounding band ever."

With Pollution, that unhinged fuse is lit by what Livingston describes as "a colossal amount of reference points coupled with very different approaches to playing." Raspy howls from vocalist/bassist Radioactive are grounded by drummer Invasive Species, who approaches his kit the way a hurricane approaches a coastal village. The rhythmic work of Atmospheric Dispersion strikes like a hammer drill in an abandoned building, whereas, on the floor above, Light focuses on feedback strains, often fitting them between notes, where they slowly emerge as electrical apparitions. "I love using feedback for a guitar 'lead' or even a main riff," he explains. "But I try to not overdo it. There is an entire slew of bands lately that are so saturated with feedback that it loses its impact completely."

Each member of Pollution contributes, in addition to pills and booze, his particular strain to the band's sonic poison. "Those guys kill it!" Light raves of his cohorts. "They've been writing a lot of the new riffs. But our greatest commonality is calling bullshit on the same exact crap out there."

For more information, contact Pollution at:

www.myspace.com/pollutionpollutionpollution

photo taken by Corey Kittrell

HEY...I GET IT.

2010-02-21T18:44:00.000-08:00

I have recently had sort of an ephinany about being in a band right now and being allowed to still play music in this day and age. It sort of also ties in with like..life and stuff.

I am very lucky to be able to keep doing this thing that I should treasure at all times because you know it is a gift, or a privilege, and it won’t be here forever, like anything else. I can remember looking back at the first year of this band I play in now and how I fought it, looking at it as this thing that was supposedly a pain in my ass but in reality was always this really good special thing to do. Especially with people that you have known and been friends with for over twenty years. That means something. You know, it isn’t everyday that you can re-connect with a handful of people from that long ago in this manner. It has been over four years now that we have been a band, and nothing has seemed to stop it, not ourselves, not our everyday lives, not our problems, not our ages, nothing. So that is pretty cool. Doing a band now seems to mean something FAR MORE NOW then it did when we were children. Back then, life was easier. You thought that you had all of the time in the world, so no big deal. Well, it is different now. You don’t have all of the time in the world, time is running out. I have found that being an adult with adult problems and concerns and responsibilities makes the outlet of having the outlet of playing fucked up crazy music seem more sacrosanct. It is way more of a release and makes me think that more oldsters should do it if they want to. Punk rock: originally designed for children, secretly made for adults. Who knew?

I will let you in on a little not so secret: I have more than occasionally had a love/hate relationship with the idea of being in a band and playing music. Being in so many bands over the years, it is easy to get that way. And as a lot of you know, being in a band is a lot like being in a relationship with three or four people at the same time, like being married to them or something. It can be tough at times. In this band, we finally learned how to yell at each other if need be and not make it a big deal. It took me YEARS to realize this. And then things were fine afterwards. It would have been nice to realize all of this earlier because it would have saved me a lot of unnecessary petty bullshit but that is okay…better late than never.

I am going to now talk very highly and somewhat lovingly about the concept of being in the band I am in now. This is not something I usually do, talking about how great something I am doing is, but here goes: A neat thing about this band is that in a way we are defying what is expected of anyone at our advanced ages; people at this point of the game just don’t usually play in bands, much less a band like this. We are not re-living old glories with an old band of ours, we are doing something new. We are not re-inventing the wheel or are on some holy crusade or anything; we are just weirdos doing what feels good. And I think that we have sidestepped all of the things that people who play music are supposed to care about. We are all years past wondering or hoping if we will be popular or famous, years past thinking that we are going to spend a month in a van on tour in hopes of some kind of career, years past impressing all of the right people or being cool or caring about that. Just playing is enough. And to have people at your shows is even better, especially when they are into it. To have kids come to your shows that wear homemade t-shirts with your band’s logo on it… I used to do that when I was a kid.

That is great. I can’t think of a better endorsement than that. I remember meeting creepy older people in bands when I was a dorky kid and how much it meant to me to find out that you could go up and talk to them, that they were actually people instead of heroes and you knew that it was okay. To become one of those creepy older guys with instruments in their hands that play scary music, to help send some people on the same path that we were all sent on years and years ago is really cool. It is like getting the torch, passing the torch, and then having it handed back.

An old band mate of mine told me years ago that if you weren’t going to be excited about what you were doing, than what is the point of creating it? took me awhile but I have actually relearned a few things just by being in this band, mainly, if it makes you happy, gives you purpose and it makes you feel good, than keep doing it. Don’t let anyone tell you not to do it, don’t talk yourself into thinking you shouldn’t do it because of your age or how you look or if it is good enough, just fucking do it.

HONOR ROLE LIVE AT THE CATS CRADLE, 1989.

2010-01-14T11:53:00.000-08:00

I have prattled on alot over the years about Honor Role, a band from Richmond Virginia that existed in the eighties, and I still think they made some of the most timeless and personal music I have ever heard. Here is a live song, "Observation" taken from thier last ever real show (the band reformed for a few shows in the nineties, but that has been it) ever at the old Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill. I am in this video funnily enough. Weird to think about how long ago this was! Enjoy.

KEVIN COLLINS IN YOUR FUCKING FACE.

2010-01-02T16:36:00.000-08:00

enough said.

DREAMS.

2009-12-01T15:47:00.000-08:00

WHY BRIAN ENO QUIT ROXY MUSIC!

2009-11-28T16:02:00.000-08:00

true story!

BIG BOYS.

2009-11-19T18:35:00.001-08:00

i miss this band.

CANADA AND ME.

2009-11-19T00:37:00.000-08:00

APRIL WINE: "Our drummer used to work at Bob Evans..he can put the sugar in your coffee!"

When I was a little kid, I remember not having too much of an opinion about Canada. Except I sure liked the way the country looked on a map. It was huge! Look at all of those islands! Plus it seemed weird enough and isolated enough to enter my consciousness of odd places I would like to go to, right up there with Australia, New Zealand, Iceland or the Soviet Union. So that is pretty much what I thought of when I thought of Canada as a little kid. By the time I was bitten by the rock and roll bug things were a little bit different. I still wasn’t aware of anything being Canadian but a few things stood out and slowly started to make sense. And it was virtually two things: The band Rush and the comedy show SCTV.

As maybe two of you reading this know, I think SCTV is still the best comedy show that ever was. Most of the cast members were Canadian, except for Joe Flaherty and Andrea Martin. These are still some of the funniest people ever gathered under one roof: John Candy, Catherine O Hara, Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Martin Short and Dave Thomas. Oh how I laughed and laughed and the funny thing is, I still laugh. A lot of the humor seemed more cerebral and slightly less “yahoo” based, if you know what I mean. Was there a comedic Canadian sensibility going on that I didn’t know about? Looking back, I don’t think so. The show never really did a whole lot of Canadian content as far as what I can remember. There was a parody of a Canadian movie about a kid who played hockey (John Candy in the prime role, a funny performance I might add). It was a pretty dry parody about something that I knew nothing about and yet I still thought it was hilarious.

What SCTV is most famous for is the dumbest thing that they did and the one thing that caught on in the states in 1982 or so. it was Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas doing their Bob and Doug Mackenzie “Great White North” characters, and the thing was huge. I clearly remember that. It was just a stereotypical view of Canada and it for better or for worse is what most people thought about when they thought about Canada.

The band Rush was the other thing that introduced me to Canada. Again, there was nothing really “Canadian” about the music they were doing: impeccably played proggish hard rock with wailing banshee vocals. And yet still..Canadians playing some really kick ass music! They seemed really serious. The rock press always hated them. Creem magazine, a influential and important rock magazine from the seventies REALLY hated them. I admit that they were a hard sell and seemed devoid of all the humor and sex that rock music often has, but if you have heard Geddy Lee sing “In The Mood”, you’d understand why it was best that they stuck to singing about Passages to Bankok and Cinderella Men. Years later, I saw some interview footage of all three of the members of Rush and was delighted to learn what I had suspected all along: These guys are a bunch of goofy nerds! Even Neil Peart! Thanks to SCTV and Rush, a few other things started to slip on by as far as my understanding a little of Canada.

So in the early eighties I started to realize who was Canadian and who wasn’t. I thought that Anne Murray was kind of hot in a manly sort of way when I spied those early seventies album covers back when I was a little kid. Turns out she is Canadian. Neil Young is one of my favorite songwriters on earth. Figured out he is Canadian. Bachman Turner Overdrive were some of the ugliest dudes I had ever seen, and they were Canadian. I already figured out that Triumph was Canadian due to the fact that they were always being called “a poor man’s Rush” and I thought that they really stunk. April Wine was a band that I also remember liking and lo and behold they were also Canadian, boasting a three guitar lineup and a huge bulky bald drummer named Jerry. A lot of the cover art of these earlier Canadian hard rock bands also seemed to be done really badly, like the bands had maybe a day to get it all together.

Eventually punk rock happened, and so my awareness of Canada expanded. I had lots of Canadian pen pals in the mid to late eighties and a lot of real kick ass bands came out of Canada. Yes, there was DOA. They are the band that everyone probably thinks of first but by the time I was aware of them the still living even now Chuck Biscuits was already in the Circle Jerks and DOA’s best days were behind them. The Neos from Victoria British Columbia were this weird little secret. I had a few Teenage Head records and liked them, especially “Frantic City”. Beyond Possession stayed at my house once, liked hockey and seemed baffled by gay people. The Stretch Marks were a great live band who put out a great seven inch and a shitty album. The band SNFU put on some of the best shows I have ever seen and even let me tag along with them for a week on one of their tours in 1985.

SNFU were quite popular in the states. My favorite lineup was when they had their big hulking death rock bass player Buck and the drummer Jon Card. They seemed to play in Raleigh on three occasions. We cooked them a big spaghetti dinner for then once back when it snowed a lot in the South when I lived with Mike Dean. They were real cool. Some of the locals were baffled by them. You’d ask singer Chi Pig or the Belke Brothers a question and you would get an answer, but it would be like talking to a Rubiks Cube that you are trying to understand. I know that doesn’t make sense, but still; why were we baffled by these Canadians and their straight forward nature? What is it about Canada that seems so pleasantly odd to me? Is there perhaps a small tweak in the program that has Canadians looking at things a little bit different then us stupid Americans? Well, I have a theory. It is probably full of shit, and not true at all, and I am sure somebody will let me know this, but hear me out:

My theory about Canada is that they have slipped by everyone. By seeming to be really benign and unassuming, they are left alone by EVERYONE! Not only that, I get this romantic impression that there just might be a wee bit more common sense up there, like “of course you wouldn’t hate a person because of their skin color..that just doesn’t make sense, you know eh?” Common sense and appearing to be benign so that you could be left alone..it seems like a great combination.

I also didn’t mention the band Voi Vod, who of course as everyone with any intelligence knows, is one of the best bands to ever exist. And the Band is also one of the greatest bands to walk the earth. So Canada alone is tops in my book for giving the world Voi Vod, SCTV, The Band and Neil Young. I f you told me I had to live the rest of my life with only these four things as music or entertainment I could easily do it, no problem.

Anyways, I finally had my chance to visit Canada a few years ago when Double Negative was invited by the Toronto band Fucked Up to play a festival that some friends of theirs were putting on. So I was excited needless to say. I would be going to the fatherland!

We were there for four days and I wasn’t let down at all. Toronto was a majestic big city that was real clean. Everyone seemed real nice. It was seemingly asshole-free. The donuts were good. The food was great. They put sugar in your coffee for you, which was an interesting concept for me to grab on to. The rest of the band was convinced I soon would be moving to Canada. Our host was a friendly yet cantankerous fellow named Gabby who was really cool and just let us stay at his house for no reason at all. He was very opinionated and funny and pulled no punches at all with what he thought.Luckily he showed his sensitive side to me when we went to a Asian supermarket by the water and we sat outside talking about all of the “sissy” music that we enjoyed. All of the punk rock types we met were all real sweethearts. We were treated very nice and were paid extremely well. I want to go back there. Hopefully one day I will.

Obviously my theories and thoughts on Canada, especially based on a big handful of records and some old comedy show from years ago and a four day visit isn’t a whole lot to go on, but if you Canadians out there reading this know how wrong I am, please don’t let me know. Some fantasies are good ones.

Anne Murray: hubba hubba

NEW SLAYER, NEW KATATONIA.

2009-11-12T14:27:00.000-08:00

Hey I actually had a tiny bit of money left over from living in these modern times, so I actually went to a store and bought a couple of cds!
I bought the new Katatonia release and the new Slayer release as well.

The new Katatonia is certainly their most advanced sounding release yet, the most varied and takes the most chances. Normally I would be really excited but after spending a little bit of time with it it still hasn’t hooked me the way I had wanted it to. Sure, it sounds great in the car, especially since it has been raining here almost non stop for a week or so but sometimes you don’t want to be reminded musically of being a little depressed so that could be the main reason why “Night is The New Day” hasn’t quite done it for me yet. The other reason is that it seems like the further away from “Last Good Deal Gone Down” they get, the more of a different direction they seem to be going in. Hey, it is still really good stuff but that release was great, a perfect blend of pound and melancholy that seemed to be all of their own. It doesn’t surprise me to see the leader of Opeth raving about this because in places they finally sound like Opeth. I am not sure I like that too much to be honest, but hey to each their own. Katatonia should finally be able to break out worldwide with this but I think that they are still too smart, too cerebral for dumbass mass consumption. I don’t think the kids who watch the fuse network are going to get this. Most metal people won’t either.

Speaking of metal, Slayer’s newest one “World Painted Blood” proved to be far more enjoyable. I don’t know what it is, but I hope to always be able to appreciate Slayer even when I am sixty years old. As long as people get angry and pissed off, Slayer will always have a future. Plus, most of this new one is really very high quality, perhaps the best they have done since “South Of Heaven”. Everyone sounds lethal and pissed off, Tom Araya’s bark is still highly appealing, and Dave Lombardo plays as well as he ever has. The real plus side is that Jeff Hannemen is the dominant force songwriting wise, and he has always been the better of the two guitar players in this band. So that also means a better Slayer record.
The topics are the usual pissed off and shocking in a high school kind of way type of thing. The cover is stupid, the lyrics are stupid and the playing is angry and vicious. It is Slayer. They even have tried a few tricky time signature things in some of these songs, making this the most “advanced” sounding Slayer record yet. When I listen to this in my car I naturally squinch up my eyebrows and purse my lips in an evil way. It is Slayer, and they are as brilliant and stupid as ever.
I give Slayer the crown for this one. Katatonia would benefit from putting away the goth records for a little while and maybe try to rip off Scott Walker’s “Tilt” instead.

MALE ROCK NERDFEST PART TWO.

2009-11-12T13:37:00.000-08:00

a cartoon I had spent a few years living, sad to say.

TODAY'S BLOG.

2009-11-12T12:07:00.001-08:00

Double Negative is going to finally play in Charlotte again this Friday..here is the flyer.

Taking my old high school chum who created Happy and Bally and taking him into Aerosmith's future (one of his favorite bands) was a good enough premise. What would a 1979 era hesher say about what happened? Here is the result.

DOUBLE NEGATIVE SHOWS PLUS ME SELLING MY STUFF.

2009-11-05T14:14:00.000-08:00

Like I have said earlier, DN will be heading out of town tommorow for the weekend to play a couple of shows, one in Philadelphia and one the next night in New York City. Here are the flyers for each of the shows:

PHILADELPHIA.

NEW YORK CITY.

We will have t-shirts and records and singles to sell and I will be selling them becuae I personally am also going to set up shop and sell all four of my MANCHILD books as well as bringing paper and markers to draw caricatures and whatever else I am requested during the night. Come up and say hello. I won't bite.

CARTOON OF THE DAY.

2009-10-22T13:26:00.001-07:00

For any fan of the Rolling Stones.

NEW 2 BY 4 SIZED ROCK DRAWINGS.

2009-10-21T13:55:00.000-07:00

these were all suggested by a friend of mine and I drew these almost a year ago and then colored all of them the other night, which was fun. These will more than likely be popping up again sometime soon. See and guess who is who.

TODAY'S DRAWING.

2009-10-18T16:08:00.000-07:00

Why, it is the legendary band, Cheap Trick.

DOUBLE NEGATIVE IN PHILLY AND NEW YORK IN EARLY NOVEMBER.

2009-10-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

Double Negative will be driving in a vehicle to play two shows with the New York band Pollution and using thier gear. Here are the dates:

Nov 6 2009:
Terrordome-Double Negative, Pollution, Wormeaters, Blackslide Philly, Pennsylvania.

Nov 7 2009:
The Charleston..Double Negative, Pollution and more New York..brooklyn, New York.

We also heard of a mystery second show that someone had booked for us at ABC No Rio the very same night of our other New York show. Although it is thrilling for me to think that someone would set up a second show for us, we can't do two shows in two seperate boroughs of New York City but it is flattering nontheless.

We will then play a show in Charlotte afterwards and do some demos for the record, then after that we will do a proper recording of the record. So stay tuned.

richard manuel part two.

2009-10-14T11:46:00.000-07:00

and here is part two..enjoy the happy story of a sad great motherfucking singer.

richard manuel part one.

2009-10-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

one of my favorite singers meets new watercolor based pencils brings nice results..this was a huge four part scan..part two coming soon!

TODAY'S HARVEST OF DRAWINGS...

2009-10-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

Here is a bunch of cartoony art stuff..some old, some new:

This one didnt make the last comic book...I thought it was kind of funny.

TWO BROTHERS: didnt make the last comic. hmm..

www.brianwalsby.com rip..

2009-10-07T06:01:00.001-07:00

It is with more relief than sadness that my old and outdated barely used website WWW.BRIANWALSBY.COM has finally bit the dust due to boredom and mainly a lack of money to pay for it.

there might be another one eventually but who knows...so this will be the only place to go to see my stuff and that is fine with me. Toodles.

DONT QUIT YOUR DAY JOB.

2009-10-04T14:27:00.000-07:00

OH, IRONY.

I would like to share my financial adventures that I have been having this year with you readers. Keep in mind that most of this was self inflicted, and if there is anything you can come away with from reading this, I would hope it would be some sort of example of a lesson in what not to do. Here it goes:

As some of you people know, I made a big deal about quitting my last held longstanding job. I waxed on and on about following thy dream, and it was rather amusing and dramatic when I look back at it. Certainly, good things happened afterwards. A Melvins tour to go on, one that was fun and extremely profitable for me. Some early on freelancing endeavors that made me think that I could continuously pull rabbits out of my hat at the last moment. A year ago, the world seemed like it was my oyster, and I was rich in pearls.

This year was different. It was almost as if I was testing the limitations of both being broke and possible mental illness. I never had any money and was barely scrapping by. I posted begging bulletins and messages almost pleading with people to buy my comic books and stuff. Not only that, but no one had any money anyways…damn economy. Rolling Stone magazine wasn’t calling me up to hire me as a cartoonist, and neither was the New Yorker. The timing of my freelance career and the extension of it was pretty neat. I just bought a house and now had a mortgage to think about, so there was no better time than now to “go for it, dude”. I put the freeze on three credit cards during the summer and now they take out minimal payments each month. I have had a couple of collection agencies hound me to the ends of my cell phone on a daily basis, and even got to exchange in a wonderful “good cop/bad cop” scenario over the phone with some swell folks from one of them. I am afraid to find out what my credit is like at this moment. Let me tell you, it has been a thrill. And it has done wonders for my brain.

So I got a good job now and it is almost worse! No, not the job. I am grateful to have one and it will pay off big time in the long run, but now the feeling I have is when you have probably stopped fighting some massive battle. The war is over and you are at the bottom of a hill of fallen soldiers who are all now corpses, and you can finally see how far up you got to climb over them to get back on top where you were. That is where I am at now. I will probably be climbing for the rest of the year to get back to some sense of normalcy. After that comes some serious budgeting plans, and a way to live as cheaply as possible for the next five thousand years, with no money to spend extra on pleasurable things, except envelopes, stamps, paper, pens and smokes, which I can no longer afford or justify right now.

The extra cool bonus of my publisher’s distro company going bankrupt earlier in the year (attention: LUMBERJACK/MORDAM!) and the vanishing act of thousands of dollars that was mine to spend will not be forgotten anytime soon, but at least accepted. Let’s just say that between my own stubborn idiocy and the idea of putting my financial eggs into one big broken basket, I think I learned a big lesson BIG TIME. And it is a lesson that will take quite awhile to turn around. At least it is nice to know that one day shy of my forty fourth birthday I am learning important lessons and building more character.

Don’t get me wrong; on the bright side, I learned how to put myself out there in many different ways, and did things to make money that I would never have thought of even two years ago. I drew at Shakori Hills and endured as well as listened to drum circles at night. I sent out hundreds of e-mails to anybody that I thought could give me work. I make these “e-mail sweeps” (as I like to call them) twice a week. Some of my more successful events were drawing and holding court at punk rock festivals. Drawing Pig Champion sure came in handy on those days. I learned how to hustle and will no doubt utilize that in the future when the opportunity strikes. People do drop a line more often now then any time before to hire me for freelance work, maybe not enough to not have a real job but still..extra income. So you know…that is pretty cool. Who knows what will happen a year from now?

But for right now, I feel like one of those fathers who just took his rock and roll musician bound son who is going to “make it” aside and told him that he needed something to fall back on. All I need now is a tie and a pipe to thoughtfully wave in the air as I talk, speaking from wise and knowing experience. So what I am ending this with is the following:

If you need any freelance work, let me know..but don’t quit your day job unless Charles Schultz comes back from the grave and offers you a cut.

ANOTHER DEEPLY IMPORTANT CARTOON OF CULTURAL CHANGE.

2009-10-01T18:24:00.000-07:00

RABID PACK WITH SIRENS HOWLING. - UPDATED INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK.

2009-09-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

Here is the updated with new interviews introduction to the next book. Hopefully next year we can get it done. I thought I would print the introduction to the book to see what people think. And I am changing the name of the book. The proposed new title is MANCHILD 5: RABID PACK WITH SIRENS HOWLING.

The original title and its origins were sort of a sarcastic joke. No one will get it anyways, so it amounts to a title that is kind of stupid. Have fun reading!

LIKE GOLD DOWN A SEWER.
BRIAN WALSBY: I became infatuated with the North Carolina punk rock scene of the early eighties when I started reading scene reports in the then brand new Maximum Rock N Roll magazine & it more or less started when I heard the “Why Are We Here?” seven inch that came out on No Core Records in 1983. A friend of mine, Ron Cerros, had it. It had the following bands on it: No Labels, Corrosion of Conformity, Stillborn Christians & Bloodmobile on it. We listened to it all of the time. Then I got a copy of the Paul Mahern (of the Zero Boys, a criminally under looked Midwest hardcore band)’s massive double LP compilation record he assembled on his own label, called “The Master Tape Volume II”. No Labels had two songs on it. I thought they were both great. By then I was a big letter writer and tape trader.
Then shortly afterwards, I got a dubbed copy in the mail from an Australian pen pal, of the No Labels “Jane Doe” demo. I thought it was one of the best hardcore tapes I had ever heard, & to this day I still think so. From then I started writing to all of those guys out there. It was what you did when you were involved in that scene. Then in mid 1984 Corrosion of Conformity put out their first record, which I also thought was fucking great. They played Hollywood’s Cathay De Grande club off of Selma Blvd in Hollywood a few days after I got their record, & I missed it. After their tour, I struck up a pen pal relationship with Woody Weathermen &No Labels’ Ricky Hicks. In January of 1985, they came out west again to record Side One of “Animosity” & I met them all formerly at the Sun Valley Sportsman’s Lodge in the San Fernando Valley, where the band was playing one of the first “crossover” shows ever. The funny thing that I remember is that the mostly heavy metal crowd kind of took ten steps back when C.O.C. played, not being exactly close minded, but not being sure how to react. It was pretty funny.
They agreed to stay at my parent’s house that night & after pulling over to urinate in some strip mall in Simi Valley (me & then roadie Simon Bob Sinister) local Simi Valley police accosted us while urinating. Strangely enough, they let us go. Soon afterwards as the infamously graffiti covered & messy C.O.C. van pulled up to the house, Woody accidentally knocked over my parent’s concrete pillar mailbox. We propped it up with a few rocks. To this day, no one ever knew why it leaned so funny all of a sudden.

Six months later I found myself in Raleigh, North Carolina.

A that time, I was in this band at the time called Scared Straight, which was one of the many hardcore bands to come out of the suburbs of Los Angeles. We went on a tour of the United States in the summer of 1985 with our friends and mentors form Oxnard, Ill Repute. But then both bands got all of our gear & personal belongings ripped off in Pittsburgh. End of the tour. I look back and realize that this was a pivotal moment in my life. I ended up going to Raleigh to hang out. I met everybody & had a good time. The COC folks introduced me to all of their friends who I thought initially talked kind of funny (those accents) and some of them even looked kind of funny as well (no names here). I stayed there for maybe three months & then went home. It was then that I decided to move to Raleigh. In early spring of next year, I flew out here & have been here ever since. It is odd to think of how all of that had happened in the space of a few months.
I would like to touch on this one main thing that a lot of the recent memoirs and books that deal with eighties punk rock and hardcore always seem to gloss over; the importance of the letter writer. If you don’t understand exactly what that means, it was a person that wrote letters to other people and bands all over the world. You had the bands going to places where no one had ever gone before, and then you had the promoters that booked the shows. You also had the people that made the flyers, fanzines, artwork, went to the shows and so forth and so on, but the overall importance of people writing letters and doing that networking cannot ever be underestimated. In these days of the internet it seems like a million years ago.
In my town, I was the guy who wrote the letters. It was a very important way to get involved. The two biggest fanzines of the time were gospels of information. Flipside and Maximum Rock N Roll. I can’t even begin to tell you how influential they were. Getting those early issues of Flipside in the summer of 1982 was like opening a genie out of a bottle. How could so much cool stuff exist? And anyone who was reading it could be a prt of it if you wanted to seek it out. Flipside printed scene reports until Maximum Rock n Roll started, and they sort of took over the whole documentation of what was going on all around the world via scene reports. They were both bibles of information. They both started to print my own primitive little cartoons, months before I was actually able to start going to real shows. Without those magazines existing it would be doubtful that I would even be writing this book.
Thanks to being a letter writer, I ended up in part re-locating to the East Coast, and adopted Raleigh as my new home. I could have ended up anywhere because of punk rock but because of my fondness to Raleigh and the bands and people at the time, that is where I chose to hang my hat. I did a lot of stuff here and wouldn’t have traded it for the world.
In conclusion to this introduction, I would like to say that of course this is by no means a complete picture of these times down here in Raleigh North Carolina. It has proven to be hard to fully grasp what was going on down here for the very simple reason that until the spring of 1986 I wasn’t living here. So what I had known previously was what I had read or what I was told by the people that were here. Thanks to the people that offered some of their memories for this, it filled in some big holes, but a lot of things were left out; bands, other movers and shakers, participants and the like. I knew I would never be able to cover everything or talk to everyone so instead of worrying about that I just tried to focus on telling my version of the story.
Also a lot of people that I tried to contact weren’t able to get back to me. I might have also not gotten back to some people as well, and of course some people weren’t reachable for whatever reason. So keeping that in mind, this might have some holes in it but it is what it is. I think it is still an entertaining read and I would like to thank everyone who helped me out on this six years in the making project.

ORIGINS
Brian Walsby: It is hard to figure out a way to begin this story but I think that the early friendships of Wayne Taylor, Reed Mullin and Ethan Smith is as good a place to start as any.
ETHAN SMITH: I was born in Winston-Salem. Then I was moved to New Orleans, Providence Rhode Island, Nashville, & then to Raleigh. We moved here when I was seven. My first memory was, we had this monkey, a squirrel monkey and the whole Taylor family-Wayne, Walter, Lila, came running across the street under the premise that they wanted to see the monkey. That is how I met Wayne. It was 1972. We grew up there. Wayne & I ended up trading music. He liked the old Beatles, who I really fucking hated. I hate love songs. He liked the Steve Miller band a lot. Anyways, except for that, we liked the same things. We bought records from John Swain’s store the Record Hole, & I used to listen to the radio a lot. When I moved here, I had never heard rock music before. The only stuff I heard was country & western, except for Elvis Presley who I seemed to like a lot. But I saw a commercial of Elvis Presley on television this one time, & he was singing hymns for God, & I never have ever fucking believed in God. Then there was Johnny Cash, who sang a lot about death & jails, so I kind of liked that.
WAYNE TAYLOR (NO LABELS, WWAX, ORIFICE): Reed went to a hippie school. Ethan and Reed and me, we were always together. Whatever I did, Ethan and Reed did, whatever Ethan did, me and Reed did, whatever Reed did, me and Ethan did. We all went in the same direction, we all kind of liked it. We had some friends that never went in this direction.
ETHAN SMITH: I met Reed at a bus stop. I was in fifth grade. There was this kid there who was new who looked a hell of a lot like that kid Oliver from the “Brady Bunch”. So the next day I was talking to Wayne-the Taylor’s were Catholics & went to catholic school, and I got Wayne to skip school, which was no big deal. So we went to meet the kid who looked like Oliver. We teased Reed relentlessly about looking like Oliver & he got kind of mad. Anyways, we all started hanging out with each other a lot.
ETHAN SMITH: The punk rock sort of bands before we became aware of things, the stuff coming out of Raleigh, I knew some of them, Like Richard Martin from Butchwax. The Hurtz were another band we knew about. There were a lot of new wave bands, stuff that reminded me of Oingo Boingo. The Cigaretz sounded like the New York Dolls to me.
WAYNE TAYLOR: We were young, we just said that we knew about them. We were a couple of years off. We were fifteen in 1980. We were all like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, products of the seventies. I don’t even know how it switched over into punk rock. All of those older bands, we saw them a couple of times, they were drunks, they weren’t what we thought punk rock was at the time. It was like something you’d see at Sadlacks right now or something.
KAREN WEATHERMAN (Mother of Woody Weatherman): Tony was born in Virginia but his parents moved here when he was four, and opened a jewelry store. When we met, I was in high school. Then we got married and he got out of the coast guard. He played music. On our first date he sang me a song. I was sixteen. We got married in 1964. We moved to Raleigh. Woody was born at Rex Hospital.
TONEY WEATHERMAN (Father of Woody Weatherman): We moved to Raleigh and pretty much settled into what we have been doing ever since, working at the jewelry store. We moved into this house in 1972.
KAREN WEATHERMAN: On Woody’s sixteenth birthday we asked him what he wanted for his birthday. He said he wanted a guitar, and his daddy always played an acoustic Martin. His daddy said, “what kind?” and Woody said, “A Gibson!”. And we said..”Oh! Okay.”
ETHAN SMITH: Woody came along in junior high. I hated school, so I used to sit outside and listen to music on a tape player. So one day I was sitting out there listening to “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath and Woody came up to me & started talking to me, like “hey! You like Black Sabbath? That’s cool.” He looked pretty much the same except he had shorter hair. So I started to get to know Woody pretty well from that, but he lived a couple of miles away so we’d hang out at school.
WAYNE TAYLOR: Woody was in a band called Middle Earth. Woody was good, we converted Woody into punk rock. We all hung out in Reed’s room. On a Friday night we’d go to Reed’s house and hang out in his room and play records and do stuff. Woody would come over and bring his guitar and we’d play him Minor Threat and he would be able to play it. We couldn’t even get fanzines down here, like Flipside or Maximum Rock N Roll.
JON MCCLAIN (Stillborn Christians, Ugly Americans): Lee Johnson has to get credit for adding "man" to my vocabulary. Man oh man, man! Hahahaha.
ETHAN SMITH: Lee Johnson went up to those old Wilson Center D.C. shows a lot, which is where Minor Threat and six other Dischord bands would play, and I liked the speed of all of that stuff, so I would give Lee fifty bucks and would say, “hey, buy me some records”. So I got all of those, & I would start going to Wilson Center shows with Lee & some other people. Somewhere along the way I transferred that stuff to Wayne, Reed and Woody, who all liked it a lot. Eric Eycke showed Reed how to play drums, & then that turned into what would be C.O.C. and No Labels a few months later. Suddenly Reed played drums a hell of a lot better then Eric. Around the same period, Black Flag did their first tour down here, a few weeks before “Damaged” came out.
WAYNE TAYLOR: Reed wasn’t aware of how good a drummer he became.
BRIAN WALSBY: Inspired by hearing (among others) Black Flag and Minor Threat, a handful of kids decided to form a couple of bands. The first band that came about ended up being called No Labels. They went through some members and different band names beforehand.
WOODY WEATHERMAN (CORROSION OF CONFORMITY, NO LABELS): Seeing Black Flag changed my life! My old man had to take me...it was this place called the Pier...you had to be 18 to get in because that was the drinking age back then...I was probably 15 or 16, Greg Ginn`s amp blew up in the middle of the show...these roadies came out with soldering guns and started working on it and fixed it and they kept on playing...I was like damn that is some pretty cool shit...Black Flag was the real shit...they were the real deal. .
ETHAN SMITH: Ricky (Hicks) appeared..I’m not sure where he came from, but he went to different schools and stuff. Ricky was funny because he was kind of serious about things, he thought the straight edge thing was a really good thing, he was into it. I remember one day talking to Wayne, Reed and Woody and suddenly they were playing with this guy Ricky who was a good guitar player and a real cool guy.
WAYNE TAYLOR: It was real exciting, things were cool. I didn’t want to be a singer but they already had the band with different members in it besides Reed and Ricky. It was like the original No Labels but they didn’t have the name. I came up with the name sitting around and talking one day. Joey didn’t want to do it and Roger and Grady..they asked me to sing. I didn’t want to do it, I sucked at it. My timing..it is illusive to me. They kept asking me because they knew I would do it and I guess they knew I would be a good frontman. Woody started to play bass, and it ended up being me, Reed, Ricky and Woody. And then right after that the COC stuff happened. It was during my senior year in high school and it was weird, because people liked us.
BRIAN WALSBY: No Label’s Reed & Woody also teamed up with two kids fresh from the Charlotte NC area, Mike Dean and Benji Sheldon. Charlotte already had a little scene going at that point as well. The new quartet went through short-lived dumb names like Misguided, Buckwheat’s Army, 7-Up and the Accused before settling on the name Corrosion Of Conformity. The original COC with Benji behind the mike was quite good, “a good fit”, as Ricky Hicks had told me.
Wayne Taylor: Mike Dean and Benji were not coming from middle class backgrounds. Those guys were different, even a little bit lower.
Ethan Smith: Mike dean was always a great fucking bass player.
MIKE DEAN (CORROSION OF CONFORMITY, RIGHTEOUS FOOL): I ran into these dudes that totally changed my life. This black guy had this total Jimi Hendrix outfit, which was kind of weird for North Carolina in 1981. He saw me looking at basses and said 'You play bass, man?', and I said, 'I'm trying to.' He said, 'Why don't you come jam with us, man?', and I said, 'because I'm not any good." They turned me on to all this weird jazz like James 'blood' Olmer, and all this funk. They said, 'Yeah, you're right. You can't really play, but you're a good guy. Why don't you take this bass cabinet and head with you? Our old bass player's in jail, and he probably stole this, so we don't want this hanging around but if you want to take it, you can have it.' He gave me a 1 15" bass cabinet and a custom head. I'd see them around sometimes and they were really weird, like, they kind of went the Afro centric trip and didn't want to talk to me, but they hooked me up with a starter rig.
ERROL ENGELBRECHT (TATTOO ARTIST, OWNER OF BLUE FLAME): I am from Wisconsin, I moved here in 1982, right on my eighteenth birthday…how did I get into punk rock. I was living in Wisconsin and pretty much hanging out with the loser greaser crowd at the time. The big thing was to cruise around in a big car, drink Boone’s Farm and listen to Boston on an eight track. And that was pretty much what I did but I was also heavily into skateboarding, and one day at school, I saw this kid who had green hair. Everyone freaked out on him; he was the only kid in school who looked different. This was ’79 or ’80. He was really into skateboarding, and I found out that he had a half-pipe in his backyard that he built. So I started talking to him, and then I went over to his house and started skating, and he played punk rock afterwards, and we hung out, smoked pot. At first I hated it. I was like, “this is shit, blah blah blah” but then I kept going over there, there was something about it that I really liked. There was something I really admired about the kid, you know..everyone in the school hated him because he was different and I was like, “Wow, at least people notice him”. I mean, everyone pretty much hated me but I was pretty much invisible at the same point. No one would look at me or anything, I was just..there. And I started listening to the music all of the time, he played the Dead Boys, the Clash, and the Pistols..stuff like that. And I just thought that this was the shit. And I stopped hanging out with those other kids. I went to Milwaukee with him and I went to this new wave salon, and I had long hair at the time and I cut it into a Mohawk, and there was dye in it, my friend stuck a safety pin in my ear, and I went to school the next day and boy..everyone freaked! And I thought, “Wow. This is cool.” (Laughter) So that was pretty much the start of it.
MIKE DEAN: I’m from all over man, I grew up in Nebraska and I was a teenager when my parents got divorced. I moved with my mom to Connecticut and then Charlotte North Carolina where I met a few people who were into that nascent Southern California hardcore scene as it was being born. Circle Jerks, Black Flag, Adolescents, Agent Orange, things like that. I ended up traveling with them to see shows in D.C…at that point we became where of all of the Washington D.C. bands. We met some people from Raleigh who liked to go to these shows a lot, so..just met some like minded people. We made some shitty attempts at being in a band back in Charlotte. I got a chance to play at some design school Halloween party in Raleigh..that was just by virtue of playing a new style of music not very well. This guy Jon McClain played the drums, and Benji Shelton, original singer for COC was involved. It was before we moved to Raleigh.
BILL MOONEY (Tannis Root): I was born in PA and moved to North Carolina just before high School, in 1981. I was the youngest of the group of kids I hung out with in Greensburg, PA and while I was in the 7th and 8th grade, most of my neighborhood friends were in the 10th grade and higher. We were all into rock music and manh had the benefits of older siblings with record collections but it was very much like Dazed and Confused: High School kids smoking dope, fucking in vans, partying in the woods, listening to Skynnyrd, Molly Hatchett, Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush. My best friends across the street had an older sister who liked Alice Cooper and had a boa constrictor and grew pot in her bedroom and another sister that dressed like she was in Little House On The Prairie, played the Harp, and I believe hooked up with Art Garfunkel. I liked Kiss, Ted Nugent and Cheap Trick, all of which were frowned upon by the older kids because Southern Rock, The Eagles, Jackson Browne - that was the scene with the older kids.

I remember going to see Star Wars and then going to the grocery store in the same shopping center, where the 25-cent gumball machine showcased a cigarette lighter and a plastic necklace that was a pistol with a Sex Pistols sticker on it. That was my first awareness of Punk. Maybe a year later, a TV show called PM Magazine had a feature on DEVO and then a nightclub, called Hardy's, which was just down the street from my neighborhood, had The Plasmatics play a show, which caused a stir. This was an hour outside Pittsburgh, so it is bizarre that they were playing there but it was a big deal in the town of Greensburg PA. So that was my intro to Punk and New Wave and it seemed both foreign and adult - it didn't really grab me. Shortly after moving to Cary, NC a neighborhood friend bought The Ramones LP and I bought the Rolling Stone with The Sex Pistols on the cover, at a yard sale. We would listen to the record and read that magazine repeatedly and we thought they were both hilarious. Johnny Rotten tells Rolling Stone that as a kid, he convinced his classmates that black people had hair on the roof of their mouths and that he had "piles" so bad that he had to cut them off with a razor. Both made punk rock seem funnier and more juvy. We thought the Ramones were hilarious the first time we played that record.
RICHARD BUTNER: I was born in Winston-Salem (two hours west of Raleigh) and lived there until coming to Raleigh in 1981 to go to NC State. My family didn't have a lot of money so I didn't have a stereo or very many records. I remember reading one of the first Time or Newsweek articles about punk (so, I must've been 12 or maybe 13) and thinking it sounded really dumb, because of course the article just concentrated on safety-pin fashion and not on the music or the ideas. The thing that really got me into punk was Devo. I loved them from the first moment I saw them. And they were very much associated with all things punk and new wave, at least in Winston-Salem if not in the big city. So, I quickly changed my mind about punk, too. The hardcore scene didn't really exist until a year later, though. Summer of '82 (which I spent back in Winston-Salem) was when bands formed, folks moved up from Charlotte, all the kids who had discovered Minor Threat and Black Flag got to know each other, and the hardcore scene coalesced.
SCOTT WILLIAMS (SECOND COMING, DAYS OF..,GARBAGEMAN,DOUBLE NEGATIVE): I had a pretty normal upbringing with a middle class family…Gastonia, North Carolina. My oldest brother moved out when I was ten. I was involved with skate boarding and was a product of the seventies. When I was thirteen, my parents let me stay up one night and I remember watching Devo on the show. I heard about new wave and punk rock but it was only in pictures, and that didn’t relay the message. Bands like Devo were radically different then all of the bands that I knew about, your Foghats and your Led Zeppelins. I never liked that stuff . And when I saw Devo it was like whoa! A week later I got a Ramones record. And I thought that it was really cool, but it still didn’t hit me. And I remember my parents saying, “you better not bring the Sex Pistols record home: so right then and there I knew I had to have it. So I went out and bought it and put it on and when “Holidays In The Sun” came on I was listening to eat on head phones and a rush went through my body. I had never heard anything like that, It blew me away. When I was sixteen I was able to drive so I went to Charlotte and started to see bands there at a place called the Milestone. The first band I really saw was 999 in 1980, and that was just insane. Like a lightbulb going off. Everything about that I can still remember. The first hardcore band that I saw was at the end of 1980 and that was the Subverts from Chicago. They were great.
Mark from No Rock Stars went to California to visit his family and came back with a bunch of records. The Black Flag seven inch and UXA. We were blown away by that stuff. And we began to see pictures in magazines of kids doing the Huntington Beach Strut. Shows in Charlotte were actually real violent. There wasn’t a circle pit or anything. Around the time of Black Flag playing in Charlotte, we met Lee Johnson, Eric Eycke and Debbie Shamblee. Maybe JD Holder. They came down and they were from North Carolina and they were..they looked hardcore. Eric Eycke, he had a shaved head, no shirt,,you know jeans..maybe a chain around his belt. I had never seen anyone look like that. I was like..holy fuck! It was weird, you know what I mean? And he was really kind of a snob to us. The Black Flag show was extremely violent, it was like people fighting in front of the band. I met Lee Johnson and started to write to her. She had started her magazine Southern Lifestyle so I wrote a Charlotte scene report for it.
JON MCCLAIN: no rock stars was playing the first night i went to the milestone. i was a mazed. i hadn't heard any punk music at that time. so it literally blew my mind. it was around '81/82. i was fresh out of high school. i had a scholarship to one college for music, from my brother's coattails again, and one for theater. but i really wanted to be in a band sooooo badly. i made a deal with my parents that if i could get ona record within a year i would go on to pursue that and if not, then enter dr mcclain! hahahaha. jonathan lee mcclain, it's an excellent name for a doctor. right? so i think no rock starts was my first punk band. we were sort of the house band at the milestone. but i joined the band as it started to fall apart. one of the bad things about being the jonny come lately. i hear it now when i listen to leadfoot or when picasso trigger played without me. the whole essence of the music changes. maybe it was just time for a change to everyone but me. but nrs didn't last as long as i wish it had. good players, charismatic singer, but baby sitting mark was a full time job! he was charlotte's original punk boy! ever had a bottle of nitrous oxide shoved under your nose while you were driving? hahahah i have. and even worse was when HE was driving!!! then i was in "the screaming shits" with benjy and a guy named rowdy remington. he was a fucking good guitar player and benjy rocks as a front man. i don't think we ever had a bassist. that was probably our problem. that band brought me to raleigh for the first time.
MIKE DEAN: Benji convinced me to move here after him and McClain moved down here. Pretty much straight away..he hooked himself up with a job straight away. And at some point my Mom moved to Raleigh, so I kind of had a place to crash for a little while. Shortly after that she moved to Florida so it kind of gave me a good base of operations for a few months.

ERROL ENGELBRECHT: It took a few months to find out what was going on down here. The very first night I moved here I just turned eighteen, and the drinking age was still eighteen down here and the Romantics were playing at the Pier. I thought, what the hell I’ll go down there. I wanted to see if there was anything interesting going on down here. And I remember that there was a really long line, I just walked by and everyone was like (makes face of shock) disbelief. Like, “Wow! That is a real punk rocker!” I went into the show and I think I just scared the hell out of everybody. But apparently Ricky Hicks was there and his story that he told me was that he saw me there and he wanted to talk to me, but he was afraid that I was going to spit on him, so he didn’t.
DANNY HOOLEY (UGLY AMERICANS): I was born July 15, 1962 to unknown (and probably, unmarried) parents in Yonkers, New York. Three months later, I was adopted by Stuart and Virginia Hooley of New Rochelle, who already had an adopted daughter, Kathy.
We moved to Durham in 1967, when I was 5, so that my father could work for the corporate office of Liggett and Myers Tobacco as a payroll tax supervisor. I was an artistic kid, and was fascinated by music from an early age. I went from teen idols of the day (Bobby Sherman, for instance) to loving The Beatles at around age 8. The Record Bar at Northgate Mall had a section of 45s that were archival -- there was a long row of Beatles singles going back to stuff like "Twist and Shout," and I got `em all.
I listened to the radio constantly (WDNC AM top 40, and later, WQDR FM album rock). I first picked up a guitar at age 11, inspired by my heroes Mick Ronson and Ritchie Blackmore. By that time, I was reading Circus magazine avidly, and I loved glitter rock -- Bowie, Alice Cooper, NY Dolls, even Kiss. I would shoplift at Arlan's department store, price-switch at K-Mart, anything, just to get the albums and 8-tracks I wanted.
I had to leave school in the eighth grade, when I was 13, because I had kidney disease, and I went on homebound teaching (a teacher would show up twice a week with assignments from Chewning Jr, High, and later, Northern High School). This have me a lot of free time to pursue music as a passion. I was reading Creem, Rock Scene, Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy and Hit Parader. Through Creem, Hit Parader and Rock Scene, particularly, I discovered punk rock in 1976. The moment I saw a Creem magazine photo of spiky-haired Paul Simonon wearing a graffiti-covered shirt and playing a bass with the notes painted on the fretboard, that was it. I went and got my long hair cut off immediately. I also started listening to Ken Friedman's late-night punk show on WXYC.
We moved to Rockland County, NY in 1979, when I was 17. We lived there four years. During this time I went to NYC to see shows on many occasions. I saw my all-time favorite band, The Clash, play four times, including one of the legendary Bond's International shows.
“SIMON” BOB MCILWEE (UGLY AMERICANS, COC): I grew up in San Diego. As a teenager I moved to Wisconsin and then North Carolina. I was going through the usual teenage rebellious behavior. I blamed all of my problems on my parents; the government; jocks, etc. This was the late 70’s so I was listening to the first wave of punk; Ramones, Sex Pistols, etc. My first show was in ’81 I think. It was Black Flag and Saccharine Trust at the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill. I was totally blown away. I had never seen anything like this. The energy was addictive.
SAM MAUNEY (SECOND COMING, DAYS OF..,GARBAGEMAN, PICASSO TRIGGER): I was born in Atlanta, GA. After my parents finished grad school in 1970 we moved to Pittsburgh, PA. We lived there up until the Fall of 1979. From there we moved to Raleigh. From a very young age I spent most of my time skateboarding and riding bmx. I had been a long time subscriber of Skateboarder magazine. Eventually, Skateboarder was repackaged as Action Now. Compared to Skateboarder it sucked but it did have a lot more music in it. That was where I first heard of the names and saw pictures of bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and other LA punk bands. At the time I had no way of acquiring the records so they just remained a curiosity. The only record store I knew of was the Record Bar in Crabtree Valley Mall. Punk rock records were non-existent there for a long time.
Eventually I was able to buy the Sex Pistols, Ramones ‘Road to Ruin, Dead Kennedy’s ‘In God We Trust, Inc’, and the Black Flag single ‘Six Pack’. I played that Black Flag single over and over again. The ‘Six
Pack’ artwork had a big impact on me as did a lot of the Pettibon artwork at that time. Simple and disturbing.

I didn’t have any friends at the time that were into punk rock so I was pretty much on my own in the search for more. Eventually I became aware of the wonderful world of mail order. I ordered every catalog possible and wrote to every record label I came across. Sometime in 1982 I found out about School Kids records. I would get my mom to drop me off at the NCSU library under the pretense of doing research work for school. I would then head on over to School Kids. I don’t remember what records I bought but I do remember buying copies of the Southern Lifestyle zine and a Xerox photo book that had pictures of bands and local punk rock folks. I lived way out in North Raleigh and too young to drive so seeing all the pictures and show reviews really blew me away. I really wanted to get involved but really had no idea how to go about it.
ETHAN SMITH: Before COC and No Labels started up, there was another older scene and they would have parties on Turner Street, where I lived. We finally got evicted from Turner Street by A.R. Perry, that was our landlord, and it was really funny because they were getting annoyed at these huge parties, and the previous Turner Street crowd, people like Eric, they had a party there, and Rick Cardner, Vic, and Sheldon Terry had stolen these huge cement lions from the Velvet Cloak over there. You know, they sit by the doors? They pulled up in front of there, and Rick distracted the doorman by talking about the free apples, which we always stole from them. And in the meantime, Shelton and maybe Eric lifted up the cement lion and threw it in the trunk of their car and then Rick said, “Oh, have a nice day!” and they all drove off with it. When they had the party, the final party at the previous incarnation of the house, there was a whole gaggle of hippies upstairs that I hung out with and smoked pot with, and right below them were the first generation of punk rockers. It was really funny. I’d be upstairs with those guys listening to Hawkwind or Traffic and we were greeted constantly by Shelton Terry banging on the door downstairs for “us fucking hippies to shut up” with an axe in his hand. And then in the meantime, I met Rick Cardner who lived downstairs, and he’d play me stuff like Public Image’s first record, and stuff like that. But they had this huge final party with like three hundred people, bands playing in the street; they made bonfires in the middle of the road. They spray painted dead figure outlines in the road. They just abused it, there was like melting asphalt in the road. And inside of the house-they had been evicted, by the way, inside of the house they had a five-foot bonfire going. People were picking up the three hundred pound cement lions and getting three or four people to heave them entirely though walls. They busted out every single fucking wall in that place.
Then, the funny thing was…after this, Eric Eycke, whose name hadn’t been on the lease previously, came up and he and J.D. got a lease from the “new” Turner Street, three or four months later. And the place had cheap wood paneling covering all of the walls that had been disemboweled. They had come up as these good upright citizens and re-rented the place and we proceeded to take the second generation there, and we’d have three or four hundred people there with bands playing again.
J.D. HOLDER (COLCOR) (writing in a early issue of Lee Johnson’s Southern Lifestyle fanzine) : 14-A Turner Street was a mere gleam in my eye eighteen months ago. Raleigh at that time was a void. Hardcoreially speaking, that is. 14-A was known to me by past association with the infamous Blind Boys, the happenings that went down there were enough to fill a book-but I’ll leave that to someone who cares. Midsummer of 1982, Eric and myself are looking for a band house capable of holding the walls in on max practice sessions as well as the occasional party. Turner Street was the desired location all along but the landlord complications denied us access to the closed property. After having no luck elsewhere in our search, providence smiled and I came face to face with A.R. Perry. Mucho mucho of the silver tongue convinced the dimwit that I was a responsible tenant. “Being from a good family, I can tell.”
MIKE DEAN: I was here in the fall of 1982. I might be wrong..I might be off a few months. I was back and forth for a few months between Raleigh and Charlotte. I met Reed and Woody through Eric Eycke. I met him pretty early on because he would come down to see the Bad Brains and DOA, things like that at the Milestone club in Charlotte, a horrible shithole.
JON MCCLAIN: Benji and mike dean convinced me that Raleigh was the place to be. there were also other factors. The Torres brothers are way up there. as is Davis Chamblee. Well Davis is how i actually met the Torres’s?! Davis used to play for a band call crucial truth. they opened for the bad brains in charlotte. the show got cancelled. me, keko, jose, and ivan were all out front talking about the bands and hating that the show was cancelled and we started talking about crucial truth and in concert, we all said davis at the same time. man he was a dynamo on bass. he'd be chugging along with a good solid rhythm. for me, a drummer, to be fixated on a bassist says a lot! if i could get him, he'd be the bass player in my all star band!
Back then we were all like family. we'd travel from charlotte to ral, dc, atlanta to see bands. so charlotte, raleigh, threre was a little "scene" rivalry, but we all supported each other. my plan was to move to ral for a couple of years, then to dc, and ultimately to nyc. but i loved it here and while i did eventually leave, i always came back. but i moved here to play in a band with davis. and i did. missionary. davis, jd holder and i. it was pretty interesting. if you've ever seen the movie quadrophenia, that's what raleigh reminded me of when i first moved here. it was the punks vs the jocks insted of the rockers. the bars really weren't inot what we did so besides sadlacks we had to go to the bali hai. apartment clubhouses like pickwick village, and then there was TURNER ST! 14 and 16. i lived at 14, 16, and 18. but 14 was when i first moved here. bands would play in the living room. there wasn't any furniture to speak of so it was pretty easy. but that was alive and kicking before i got here. stareted by vic fool, eric eyke, and guys like that. again, before my time so don't anyone bum on me if i forgot anyone or if i get some of the people wrong. but at 16 we'd have huge parties in the back yard. bands would come and play all day. the reelo, now handy hugo's provided a good source for beer. hahahaha. Eventually bars started to open and punk got legit. pc goodtimes/the brewery, and later the fallout shelter became the places to play.
MIKE DEAN: Things kind of clicked when I played with Woody because we had the same frame of references. He was really into a lot of seventies hard rock and metal that was coming out at the time, so it was a better frame of reference then some of these people who were coming out who had no musical foundation or who were more influenced by early punk which didn’t really do much for me.
SCOTT WILLIAMS: On my seventeeth birthday there was a show in Raleigh. It was Double O, Faith and some local band. Faith didn’t make it, and Colcor played as well as the Accused. They later became COC. Jeff Haney, John McClain and me rode up to Raleigh. I got there, Double O was there, and the funny thing was we drove into Raleigh through Western Blvd and I knew right then that this was exactly where I wanted to live. We got there, and I met Reed and Wayne and Woody and Mike Carter. It was weird to meet all of these kids who knew more about stuff then the handful of kids I knew back where I lived. There was a bunch of them and I thought that it was really happening. So I ended up spending the night just hanging out with all of these kids and the next day I ended up taking a bus back to Gastonia, one of many fun trips I would make back and forth to Raleigh. And I knew that that is where I wanted to be.
TONEY WEATHERMAN: Mike’s father was gone early and his mother lived in Tampa and didn’t have much contact with her and so of course Karen just…the mother instinct took over, she was going to look after Mike no matter what. And so we did what we could. But she looked after everyone that came through town, you know if they needed a shirt or whatever. They were all like Woody, really young and sort of out on tour in defiance of their family’s wishes. We used to buy people things to eat, there would be these shows with five bands and some of them wouldn’t have enough money to buy food. I think it was very enjoyable for us to do that too. It wasn’t like we were sacrificing. Whenever you help anybody it makes you feel good.
SCOTT WILLIAMS: When I saw COC it was when Benji was singing and I don’t care what anybody says, Benji had timing, he had the voice and the snotiness…Benji..these people weren’t trying to win any popularity contests. I don’t know if people would understand that now but if you were a hardcore punk rocker, it really was a “fuck you” kind of thing. It was the uncoolest thing that you could possibly do. It really was. Rednecks and everybody were coming down on you..you were just asking for it.
BRIAN WALSBY: Washington D.C. was five hours north of Raleigh, and was clearly the closest big scene so it made sense that the Raleigh kids would go. Reactions were mixed. Some of the results made on the upcoming “No Core” tape, courtesy of assorted Colcor, No Labels and Corrosion Of Conformity songs.
RICKY HICKS (1983) (NO LABELS, FVK, FINGER) (explaining things in a old fanzine interview): On Raleigh and D.C.: Because of Raleigh’s small size, a relatively small scene and narrow minded club owners, very few national bands make it to the area. No Labels and others have relied on D.C. as a place to go and see shows. They have some of the best bands anywhere. This is important because the song “hardcore” on the North Carolina cassette compilation No Core has seemed to cause a lot of tension between NC and DC. It is unnecessary and misfortunate. We would like to explain that we personally think DC as a whole has a great scene with good attitudes and good people, but within any scene because of its size, one is going to find problems. We cite DC in the song because we are familiar with the place. Its intention is not to breed ill feelings, but to serve as constructive criticism from an outside view stressing the distinction between territorialism and localism, and the stupidity of the hypocrisies people commit just to be “accepted” in the “scene”.

ETHAN SMITH: We’d go to shows, & I never looked any different from how I look now. Jeans, a t-shirt and a flannel shirt or whatever. I never had a shaved head. We’d go up there and they seemed to me like they were..pretty dumb. I mean, it just seemed like these people mistook me for a redneck or something not punk rock, and very often you’d find things like when people were dancing, they’d go out of their way to intentionally run a shoulder into you or that kind of crap like that. The funniest story is when we went up there to see the U.K. Subs, and Lee had kind of a look going on, and then Errol, who had appeared in high school was very punk rock looking, very nice guy though. Leather and studs, the Discharge look. The rest of us didn’t look punk rock, and it was the funniest thing when people would go up to Errol and ask him where he was from and being pretty accepting. & then Errol would say, “Oh, these are my friends” and those guys would be like..it didn’t seem like they didn’t feel that there was any common ground for relations. Anyways, a lot of those got transferred into the anti D.C. thing. (laughter) I mean, there came a point when Reed and Wayne and Woody and everyone, a cotangent of people started to shave their heads which was kind of more making fun of it more then anything else. And when they arrived in D.C. after that point there were no communication problems. But when they had hair, it was…kind of a problem. (Laughter) I liked a lot of the D.C. bands and I met some of those people and they are really nice. So it was nothing personal.
Wayne Taylor: We looked like redneck hicks from the south.I looked like Prince Valiant. It was like snobbery. We weren’t dressed in chains or were bald, we didn’t know any of that. I didn’t care. What was cool to me about punk rock was you didn’t have to give a fuck about what other people thought about you. But there were certain people up there and I guess Reed was pissed off. People up there when they were slam dancing would target you. And we were not from some rich family...it wasn’t everybody but you know...Minor Threat...white middle class people. There was some bullying and we were goofballs.
MIKE DEAN: Even at the time, it was clear that it was a good gimmick. Confrontation, there is no better gimmick then to single out something to criticize. There is always going to be a few “cool” kids like that, snobby to outsiders. So I think that the bands on the No Core tape just took that ball and ran with it pretty far. And I think that a lot of people from New York and Philly had met the same kids too, so they applauded. They could relate to our denouncement.
BRIAN WALSBY: And lets not forget the Bad Brains, who had re-located down here for a little bit. Everyone was having their minds blown by the music. Clearly they were as influential down south as they were in Washington D.C. and their legendary contradicting behavior also traveled with them.
ETHAN SMITH: The best Bad Brains story is all of the stories. Any contact with them was fucking ridiculous. I went out to where they lived in Wendell. A joint was being passed around to one of the Johnson sisters and then it was handed to one of the Bad Brains people. I can’t remember if it was H.R. or Gary or Doctor Know or whoever. They refused to smoke pot after the female..uh..smoked some. This was due to-as they put it, “their religious beliefs”. We couldn’t believe it. It was like, “fine. more for me.” (Laughter) The Bad Brains would play somewhere, and something would always happen. The redneck owner chased H.R. out of the Big Bad Wolf when they played there with a baseball bat. There were words exchanged like “Redneck” and “Nigger”, blah blah blah. Then fifteen minutes later, H.R. ran through again, still being chased by the redneck owner. It was very funny. I saw the Bad Brains like two dozen times before that ROIR tape came out & they were probably the greatest band in the world. They were incredible to see and it was always kind of a dilemma going to see them because I disliked their personalities so much. I thought their shows were great but the “jah” crap I always thought was a put on.
ERROL ENGELBRECHT: I personally never had any dealings with the Bad Brains. Being a man I guess made it easier but if you were a woman though-apparently from what I had heard people had problems with them because they didn’t seem to care for females too much. I just liked to see them play and didn’t really get too much into the politics involving their band, didn’t want to sit there and start arguing with them.
BRIAN WALSBY: All of a sudden, there was a scene in Raleigh. There were some bands, so things needed to be documented. Released in the fall of 1982,The No Core cassette compilation featured No Rock Stars from Charlotte and Colcor, No Labels & Corrosion Of Conformity from Raleigh and it should be noted as the first hardcore/punk compilation in the state.

ETHAN SMITH: J.D. Holder was the main one who organized it (the No Core tape), & then Reed had a very fair amount of input. No Rock Stars were on it; they were people that Mike Dean and Benji had known. Oh, this is a great story: Eric & J.D. had a skate ramp in their front yard. On the inside of the tape it shows a picture of Eric sitting there. Eric and J.D. started to really hate each other a lot but it started when Eric accidentally hung J.D. in J.D.’s picture. (laughter) Eric was taking that picture and it was like, “Man, you’re doing a really good job! That’s really life-like!” and he walked up to him and looked at him and saw that the chair had accidentally slipped out from beneath him. The noose had tightened and his face started to turn blue and there was froth coming from his mouth, he nearly suffocated. He was intensely pissed off at Eric for a really long time. J.D. had nerve damage in his face for a few months after that.
Wayne Taylor: Jd .it was weird to me cause he drove a BMW. He was clean cut and yet he was this guy who was all into punk rock.
Ethan Smith: I actually burned the Southern Flag on the No Core tape.
Wayne Taylor: It just makes me laugh looking back. Certain people thought that they were going to make money from it. A certain singer of COC at the time from Charlotte gave JD shit because he would go up to DC and sell the No Core tape, like he was going to pocket a hundred dollars. It was all done on four track.
SAM MAUNEY: Eventually I got my hands on the No Core tape. I thought all the bands and songs were great. Still do. I eventually called Reed Mullin out of the blue from a number that I found in Southern Lifestyle. He was very nice from the beginning. I would eventually call/pester him on a
regular basis to find out what was going on. A couple of times he drove out to North Raleigh and met me at the Kerr Drugs at Stonehenge Shopping center. I remember asking him a million questions about
different bands, etc. We met a couple of other times at the shopping center where he would give me mix tapes. Later on I would sell COC and “Why are We Here” t-shirts at Millbrook High School. He would meet me at the shopping center to deliver more shirts and to get the money from the sold ones. Never asked for a cut from sales, I was just very happy to somehow be involved. I will always be grateful to Reed for going through the trouble of driving out to North Raleigh hang out with me.
KAREN WEATHERMAN: I will tell you something about my son putting me in my place. We are very liberal and we don’t think that anybody is better than us or that we are better than anybody. But I came home one afternoon and Woody was about sixteen I guess, and Errol was outside and there were about six or seven other guys out there too. And Errol had safety pins all of the way up his ear. And me being the jeweler, it was a little grim to me you know. And Woody came in the house and I said, “Woody. I don’t know about that guy.” And Woody said, “Mom. I like him. You always said don’t pre-judge people.” And I felt about this big. He didn’t put me in my place but he did teach me a lesson. We picked up Errol once at Halloween and he said it was one of the only times that he felt comfortable, because everybody else was dressed up.
BILL MOONEY: I remember hanging out with Woody and going back to his parent’s house and Woody’s father was like, “Woody I bought you this amp today. I had to haggle on the price some but he came around” and Woody was like “okay..thanks.”. It was a Sunn cabinet. And Woody’s dad was asking if Woody wouldn’t mind trying it out. He didn’t know if the amp would be okay. And Woody plugged his guitar into it and cranked it up as loud as it would go and it was like RRROOOOAAAARRR!!
Then Woody said “It sounds fine” and we went upstairs to listen to some records and I thought that it must be really hard to rebel against parents that are so nice.
SCOTT WILLIAMS: I think Reed was fifteen and he dropped out of school. And for someone like that to drop out of school and to have a Mohawk and playing in these bands, his parents were pretty fucking liberal . He was allowed to do it and sit back..his parents encouraged him. The bands were allowed to practice in the upstairs office of the Mullins business. It was a soundproof room. And I think Reed being really inspired by this music and totally identifying with it, and having access to drums, he excelled at it. He became a really good drummer, and the first time I had seen him play I don’t think he had a kick drum pedal on the kit.
MIKE DEAN: We were a hardcore band that was challenging the boundaries of it and challenging the little subculture with bits of unfashionable things like Ted Nugent. We were really inspired by Black Flag, and by Void, a band from D.C, that was really underrated. They were on all the Dischord compilations, and they had a split album with Faith way back in 1983 or so. They were this intense...metal-meets-really-fast-hardcore with real psychotically strange arty twists. Very demented. They influenced us a lot.
GRADY ORMOND (UNICEF): No Labels were my favorite NC hardcore band. I liked their music. They didn't seem to care about fitting into the tough guy punk rock stereotype. Very much the opposite of the jock-like "Boston Crew" thing that I was used to up north. Wayne was quirky and fun. Ricky was a great guy. I was very disappointed when they broke up.
SCOTT WILLIAMS: No Labels were my favorite band. They were great everytime. I thought they were really cool. As much as I liked COC, there was something special about No Labels. They were a little bit different. No Labels started out as pretty much a hardcore band but if you listened to the songs off of the “Jane Doe” demo compared to the “No Core” demo, the songwriting ability had changed and developed.

Woody and Reed of COC at the Cathay De Grande in Hollywood, summer of 1984. Photo by Andy Nystrom.

THE SCREAM, PART TWO.

2009-09-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

Does anyone remember Krk from Flipside? Thier last great writer. These are his kids.

awesome labor day sale!!!

2009-09-07T10:51:00.000-07:00

Happy Labor day..here is some stuff I am looking to sell:
I have three copies of the MELVINS eight song 1987 “Making Love: demos. Recorded between the first two records. Lo fi and ferocious. ten dollars each.
(this pains me a little but..)The first two Erectus Monotone singles released on Merge. In good shape. Make an offer.
Two copies of the BATTLETORN/DOUBLE NEGATIVE Volcom Records split seven inch. Will let them go for ten bucks each.
Does anyone want to own the second Merge Records release? Why it is the WWAX “Live/Left” cassette album. Hard to believe but it is in perfect shape. Have played it twice in twenty something years. Comes perfectly intact with original sleeve. Make an offer.
A copies of that large punk rock coffeetable book called PUNK IS DEAD, PUNK IS EVERYTHING.

KISS RULES FOREVER.

VIETNAM VETS GO TO SEE CRADLE OF FILTH.

KIRA.

MILO.

DINOSAUR JR.

GOOD OL' D. BOON.

I still have those Jer Warren/Brian Walsby limited silkscreen posters at fifteen bucks a pop. Subject matter is: Milo Aukerman, Dinosaur Jr., Kira Roessler, Greg Ginn and D. Boon. I also still have a small red D. Boon t-shirt of the same design.
I have a few paintings too. Nick Cave, a tribute to Gene Simmons of Kiss, a Honor Role tribute black and white painting, Vietnam vets at a Cradle of Filth concert, Richard Manuel of the Band and a nice one of Scott Walker. I don’t want these hanging around, will make a sweet deal on these.
And of course I have all of those MANCHILD books of mine. I have four hefty collections of my strips. The first two are ten dollars each, the second two have MELVINS discs in them and they are fifteen dollars each. Original artwork in any of these books are also on sale. Fifty bucks might get you a page. Or two.

WRITE BACK AT: reluctantking@hotmail.com

Anyways, thanks kids..Happy Labor Day!

THE SCREAM..WITH SPECIAL GUESTS!

2009-08-30T07:42:00.000-07:00

Ollie and Noble show up to lend support!

VALIENT THORR - "EXIT STRATEGY" VIDEO

2009-08-21T09:13:00.000-07:00

Working on this was a massive and fulfilling pain in the ass. But I keep forgetting that I did this, crude animation for the rock band Valient Thorr and thier video "Exit Strategy". This is a few years old but it remains a feather in my cap and I need to keep re-posting it just so people can see it. So here it is:

DOUBLE NEGATIVE AT HOUSE PARTY IN RALEIGH.

2009-08-19T21:52:00.001-07:00

HOW I SURVIVED GRUNGE.

2009-08-18T13:54:00.000-07:00

This has already been printed in one of my books but as time goes on I remain insanely proud of this four page satire. Cheers!

ERECTUS MONOTONE PLAYS SECOND REUNION SHOW AT TIR NA NOG.

2009-08-15T09:39:00.000-07:00

Erectus Monotone, "Vertigogo" from Mann's World on Vimeo.

YET ANOTHER KAREN A MANN VIDEO LITERALLY STOLEN FROM HER SITE TO PUT ON MINE. SHARE THE WEALTH, RIGHT?

It was a lovely evening to drive downtown with my brights on (long story) to see Rocket Cottage and The Loners play with Erectus Monotone in what will probably be their last reunion gig. It was a real good one too, much better then the Mergefest show. For starters, it was free. So that meant that everyone in Raleigh was able to go. So there was a nice crowd at Tir Na Nog and then Rocket Cottage played. Sporting a brand new single, the band played a good set that also featured a sax player which was a good call and cemented the band and their quasi-SST tendencies. The Loners played another solid set of their newer material with a few of their golden chestnuts thrown in.
Erectus were really really good. Unlike the show at the Cat’s Cradle where it seemed like it could fly apart any second, this one seemed more grounded and the band seemed more in control. I didn’t weep this time, but the band was in top form and the audience was very VERY receptive. I would like to point out drummer Brian Quast for a amazing overall job. Brian has always been one of my favorite drummers to come out of town and if anything he just gets better and better. It was like, wow. Andy Freeburn has spent so little time in public with a guitar in his hands that you could easily forget what a good player he is. He was point on with everything he was playing and added these little fuck ups and flourishes that recalled one of his heroes, Pen Rollings. He is also a fucking HAM, spelled h-a-m. Ham. Jennifer played and sang solid as always and Kevin also did a admirable job. Being surrounded by so many people from my relative past, it was like stepping into a time machine going back to the early nineties, except that I think Erectus Monotone played better at this show then they probably ever have in the past.
It was fun. I had a good time.

A COUPLE NEW DRAWINGS.

2009-08-10T17:04:00.000-07:00

I am a big fan, but I still laughed a lot doing this.

it was important, man.

FINALLY, DOUBLE NEGATIVE AND "DAYDREAM NATION".

2009-08-06T07:52:00.001-07:00

Things have been pretty exciting in the Double Negative camp these days..we have been writing a bunch of new material out of nowhere. All of us (except for Kevin, who has his hands even fuller then usual what with Erectus Monotone playing those reunion shows) have been writing. Even me. Usually we wait for Scott to show Justin something who in turn shows me what Scott showed him and then we have a song. Not anymore. I have had a few songs, Justin has had a few songs, Scott has had a few songs and we all re-write everyone’s songs. We have enough new material, not counting the odd song on a single here and there for the proposed DAYDREAM NATION second album. Twelve new songs. We will be tightening up the songs and then finally FINALLY record them. I can honestly say (although I know everybody says this) that this will be at least ten times better then the first album. There is some different stuff going on, a real progression. Really. And even though it has been a long absurd time this will be worth the wait.
DAYDREAM NATION will be released on album courtesy of Sorry State Records. If Sorry State deosn't want to do a cd version of the release, we will probably have Bifocal Media release the cd version. I guess we shall see.
Also, Ryan Adams is starting a record label. Details will be announced as soon as Ryan gets it together to make a website but there will be a single with two songs released on his label. One of the songs is a slowed down version of one of our other songs and the best part is, it sounds like a completely new song. The other will be a surprise.
Here are most of the song titles you can expect to see staring back at you from the cover of the second Double Negative album, DAYDREAM NATION:

Voice Recognition
Beg To A Vile Nude
Endless Disappointment
Impatient Out
Emergency Rooms
Near Birth Experience
Hospitality
Discovery Machine
Knife On A String
Side Three
Super Recourse

NEW ARTWORK FOR TODAY...MOSTLY..

2009-08-04T15:52:00.000-07:00

KATHERINE POINDEXTER INTERVIEW.

2009-07-31T22:59:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, I like to interview people from my neck of the woods, or people that did time playing music in bands in Raleigh North Carolina. I was very happy with my interview of Kip Larson ex member of Regraped. He really gave me some great stuff. Thinking that I might be on to something, I bothered another Facebook Friend, Kathy Poindexter for a interview. What she returned to me exceeded my wildest dreams..okay, I didn't dream of anything but Kathy gave me the best interview that I have ever done. I don't even know what to say about it other then except for a little editing this is still one of the most honest and interesting things I have ever read.

Reading this is pretty amazing. Kathy is pretty happy these days, and in the end that is all you can really ask for in life, right?

1. Lets have a background on your upbringing: where were you born, how the heck did you end up here and what made you gravitate towards music and all of that punk rock stuff?

I was born at UNC's hospital 2/2/73 while my dad was in graduate school and living with my mom in a modified garage in Carborro. We moved to Raleigh and my dad started teaching at NC State when I was still an infant. My parents divorced when I was 5 and I went to live with my mother in Atlantic Beach, NC. My brother stayed with my Dad in Raleigh, so we both kind of grew up in totally different worlds. I went to several years of elementary school and middle school in Morehead City. We lived in an airstream trailer at the Triple S Pier when I first moved there, but then later moved to a townhouse right of the "circle" or main drag of Atlantic Beach shortly thereafter. My mother was a school teacher at White Oak School in Swansboro, NC for about a year before she was fired. Not sure why, but hearing phone calls, it was either for her drinking or for cursing at a student. She then started bartending, working for Peppertree selling time share, cleaning houses on the side, doing whatever to make $. I was a typical latch key kid, was mostly ignored by my mother, and raised myself. She was drunk a lot and not at home much. When I would get up in the morning, she was asleep and when I got home, she was leaving for work or to "party." I ate a lot of peanut butter and dorito sandwiches, saltine and ketchup snacks, and other interesting concoctions just to feed myself. I spent a lot of time being mad.

Musically, at that point in my life, I really loved country music. I guess that's b/c that was what I was exposed to. That... and beach music, which .... dare I say... was good beach music. It wasn't the lame ass Clarence Carter "strokin'" kinda beach music... it was like Clyde McPhatter Drifters kind of beach music. The country music was of course.. 50's, 60's and 70's versions, which I also loved. We had a hi-fi in my house and it had a microphone that you could plug in and sing along to songs on the radio. I knew all the words of the songs that would come on and entertain myself singing and pretending there was an audience and I was Tammy Wynette and would one day have hair and dresses like Tammy Wynette, etc.... I used to tie my t-shirts around my non-existent boobs and wanted to emulate the girls that were on Hee Haw. That kind of stuff. I still LOVE country music and never stopped despite being made fun of incessantly by my peers later.... just don't like the new stuff, obviously.

BUT, something happened when I was in 6th grade. I think it must have started with the fact that I used to sit up late to watch t.v. b/c there was no one around to tell me to go the fuck to bed. NIGHT FLIGHT. It was the greatest show ever. It was like MTV before MTV was available. They aired rock shows, short documentaries, explanations of who was up and coming and where they came from, etc. Now, understand, when you live in Carteret County, there are 2 kinds of people: White rednecks and Blacks.. ..(which unfortunately they described with a less savory name). THere is NO diversity there and if there is... it comes in the form of a surfer or skateboarder and they were very mild deviations of a norm for that area. There were no "punk rockers" or "hippies" or people who lived alternative lifestyles or dressed alternatively or listened to 'weird' music. And if there were, they would most definitely be thought of as Gay.

In 6th grade, I distinctly remember watching night flight and seeing Blue Cheer doing their version of Summertime BLues and thinking that guitar sounds was insane! And the guys looked so crazy! I just loved it. And in that same episode there was this scrawny, black haired cracy bitch with a striped t-shirt and wearing ghostly white make up and bright red lipstick smeared accross her face singing this song "Christine... the strawberry girl..." and I thought, "Oh my god... I want to be just like her." That of course ended up being Siouxsie Sioux who to this day.... I think is one of the coolest singers in alternative rock history. Maybe she's a close second to Polly Styrene... I dunno... ANyway, from that year forward, I was on a quest. At first it was very hard to satisfy my urge for this music b/c it simply didn't exist where I lived. FOr chrissake, the first record I bought was a 45" single from the pac-n-sac grocery in Morehead City, Foreigner "Hot Blooded." Far from punk rock.

There was a girl in my school, can't remember her name, but she must have moved from somewhere else b/c she had weird shoes and a short haircut with a very long rat tail. I know now that is so cheezy, but at the time, it was so daring. And I wanted to look like her. I had permed and feathered hair like everyone else and my mother wouldn't let me go to the hairdresser ... it cost money. So I cut my own rat tail. Now, I though... "this is punk." Hahahahhahaha... meanwhile, I am at home singing along to Conway Twitty's "Lay Me Down" and Juice Newton's version of "Call me Angel" on the hi-fi on the weekends.

So, the shit hit the fan in Atlantic Beach by the time I was in 7th grade and I was forced to live with my dad in Raleigh. In retrospect, it was perfect timing. I had already started drinking and smoking and was most assuredly going to wind up pregnant at 16 and living in a trailer in Smyrna if I didn't get out of there. MOving to Raleigh was equal parts exciting and difficult. I was sort of a redneck (more than sort of), was very behind in school and didn't fit in with anyone. I didn't come from money and didn't have the cool clothes Raleigh kids had and I had a funny "down east accent" (Karen Mason and Karen Mann know what I 'm talking about), I was skinny... I had a stupid fucking rat tail... and had already seen and done way more than most of the kids I was around. So, I started naturally gravitating towards people that I guess were considered "rejects" so to speak, in that they were not the popular kids, or the rich kids or the top 40 well dressed kids. I tried to do some of that stuff... was a cheerleader for 2 years (all along with a funny skateboarder girl haircut and an affiinity for the CIrcle Jerks), but truth is, I never shared any similarities with the people onthe team.

BY the time I was in 8th grade, I was at Ligon MIddle School and was introduced to lots of bands like Circle Jerks, Black Flag, Violent Femmes, Adolescents, Exploited, Dead Kennedys, Ramones, Siouxie & the Banshees, Cure, Smiths, etc. some of the more "accesible" punk rock and alternative bands....and I started to hang out with skater types, a few skin head types (they were unavoidable), and eventually, people that I would consider "true" punk rockers. Through their influences, I learned much more.

By the time I was in 9th grade, I was spending most of my weekends in School KIds records, and elsewhere, thumbing through records and picking out any and all records that had ANYTHING on it that looked "punk rock" and made a list of the stuff I wanted to buy. I mean, I had criteria...I wasn't going in completely blind.... the record at least had to have a skull on it, or pictures of people with mohawks, or some cursing on it, or something! If it did, I wanted to buy it, or get it somehow. That's how I learned about punk rock music and how I got to know people.... that and going to shows locally. I was young, sometimes too young, but I had a lot of older friends that sort of took me under their "punk rock wing" so to speak (Karen Mason, John Fletcher, Reed Mullin, etc.) that looked after me early on, helped me get into shows, and treated me well.

I loved the music. And I can't lie... I loved the fashion just as much. I was skinny and always had a hard time finding clothes that fit, so I learned how to sew. I made good friends. And I loved being part of a 2nd or perhaps even a 3rd generation of punk rock. I loved the community of it all and feeling like I belonged to something...after years of feeling like I belonged to nothing and nothing belonged to me.

I still love country music. Stop laughing.

2. What was the first local show that you were able to go to? Who was it? What did you think?

I cannot remember. I remember in close proximity going to a Circle Jerks matinee show at the Brewery, but also to a Social Distortion Show at the Brewery. I also saw JFA a number of times at some house where a bunch of skin heads lived. Come to think of it, why did they come to Raleigh so much Brian? I also saw the Butthole Surfers when I was 17 years old in Richmond. I was with Susie Grinstead and a girl named Carey that was from D.C. and always wore striped stockings. I used Susie's ID to get in. There is NO WAY they could have believed I was old enough to be there. It was at Rock'its. It was fucking mind-BLOWING. They still had the naked dancing girl back then and GIbby looked like Satan and they had videos of chickens getting their heads cut off and breast implant surgeries etc. I was so high. It was so exciting. When I went back to school that Monday, I felt cooler than any mother fucker in that place b/c of what I saw. I remember telling Kurt Midness about it and he was basically like, "who the fuck cares?" Really????

3. I am not sure if I remember if you were in any bands before Picasso Trigger. Were you? And if not, please explain how and why the band got together.

I was in no real bands before Picasso Trigger... it was my first.

4. I remembered you went through a lot of drummers before sticking with Jon McClain, who is a fucking great drummer. Who played before him, and why did you go through so many before Jon?

The way I got into the band was through Tom White essentially. I was at a party at "Pine Haus" (REmember MIke Pilmer, Skip Elseimer and that crew?)... Sam Mauney and LIsa Cooper were standing around with Tom White and talking about their new band which was originally started as a joke. They needed a singer. I volunteered, thinking it would be fun and maybe funny too (hearing what they were saying) and Tom urged them to take me on b/c I was loud. (I kind of hate that being the outstanding characterisitc that got me signed on, but oh well).

Tom White played drums for us for about 1 year before LIsa fired him. She hated hom lots... thought he was a jerk and lazy and a shitty drummer. He showed up high all the time, late, if at all, etc. Usually, it was me and/or Sam trying to calm her down, but eventually Sam joined in and wanted him fired too. He was fired. To this day, I think Tom thinks it's my fault for getting him fired. And I thikn he may still hate me? Wow.

THen we tried out MANY drummers that we didn't know (and didn't like) and finally settled on Steve Brian (who played with Jade, remember?) who just wanted to do it. I thought he was a great drummer and a good friend and super funny too. But then he had a young mid-life mental crisis and joined the Navy. He's still in the Navy and doing well. Probably better than if he stayed in Raleigh. He was melting.

Who was next? Chris Jones I think? Also a teriffic drummer and great friend. So talented. But I think streched too thin. I can't remember exactly what happened, but I think he was playing with Vanilla Trainwreck and MayEven at the time? Too much stuf and we were too serious at this point (we were no longer a "joke" we wanted to travel more, etc.) Not sure...

Then, I think we tried out Crow from Flat Duo Jets who, for some reason, was a big P. Trigger fan. He really wanted to do it at the time b/c I think he and Dexter had some falling out... but then they kissed andmade up and he was not in it....

THen, Jon McClain. Fucking awesome. So fun. Amazing drummer. Killer personality. A great back up when I got myself into fights (He called me "big tiny" which also became my CB handle on tour).

5. Looking back, you guys did a lot, put out some records and toured. How was that experience for you? I remember it was during the whole Chapel Hill explosion, which had some advantages for the Raleigh bands, at least that is what I think now! I am sure I didnt feel that way then. Do you agree? Why or why not?

We did do a lot and toured a lot, though I don’t think folks in Raleigh realized it, or cared. We didn’t play in Raleigh a whole lot because people just didn’t come see us there. Maybe it’s because everyone knew us, or knew us to the people we were, or didn’t “get it” or maybe we just plain sucked and we didn’t realize it. But they sure loved us in Chapel Hill. I have always thought that “Raleigh Rocks” way more than Chapel Hill and if you wanted to catch some lite f.m. post-punk alterna-crap, and do some pogo-dancing, or if you wanted to hear some washed up Athens-esque jangle pop, then Chapel Hill is your town! But in the same token I liked a lot of stuff from Chapel Hill that was sort of off beat, Pipe, Polvo, some Zen Frisbee, I always loved Flat Duo Jets, Southern Culture is/was fun…. but it’s interesting that such a different scene can exist just 30 miles away from one another. The truth is, a lot of the Raleigh bands had a buzz about them prior to the attention that Chapel Hill got during the big record stardom convention. Finger, Vanilla Trainwreck, P. Trigger, … etc. everyone was starting to edge onto the cusp of something ‘bigger’ before any of that Chapel Hill Stuff. HOWEVER, I agree 100% that the attention Chapel Hill got had a direct impact on greater attention being paid on Raleigh bands and may have resulted in bands from Raleigh being signed to the labels they did get signed to. We got signed to Alias, along with Archers of Loaf and Small b/c they happened to be at that shin-dig in Chapel Hill. Had we not played that show, we might not have been signed with them. We did get approached by SONY previously (gee, why didn’t we take that 1 million dollar offer again? Punk Rock Cred? WTF?), we had been targeted by Thurston & Kim as a fresh up and coming act (yawn), we did play with lots of riot girrrrrl bands that were all the rage (gag)… but yeah… seriously… the attention that Chapel Hill got, certainly helped Raleigh get on the map.

6. Why did the band disband?

This is a tough question to answer and I think everyone would answer a bit differently. I remember the night we broke up and what happened that night. I also remember exactly what had transpired the couple of nights before and what had been happening that tour… and while what happened over those few days and nights might have been the catalyst for the breakup, it was a long time coming.

My impression is this: We had just put out what I think was the best record yet. There was a significant buzz about the band. We were playing better shows, in better venues, with better bands, at good time slots, with reasonably good guarantees. And yet, shit was not going well. For example, we’d show up in Austin, where we had a great draw, and b/c one of the larger bands on the bill decides to add a band to the bill, we get shoved down to the 9:00 slot when no one is there. It didn’t matter what our contract said. There were nights that we would only get $200 of our $400 guarantee or something b/c not enough people showed up. We showed up at places where the bar had closed and our label or our booking agent hadn’t alerted us (e.g. – Wichita, Kansas). We had van trouble and the label wouldn’t bail us out. We argued with each other a lot. The label wouldn’t ship us shirts and CD’s when we ran out. They fucked up the artwork on our record and refused to fix it. They put us on the back burner for distribution, etc. So, all of these things made for angry people.

We argued a lot. Lisa, rest in peace and I loved her so much, could be very, very, mean. Sam was the consummate diplomat, but often felt like the mediator and/or parent of the bunch. And it was true. We had a pow-wow about mid-tour where we decided that we were no longer going to take the shit from the scabby club owners and if they refused to pay us our contracted amount, we would steal a mic stand, or speaker cable, or something. We agreed that no matter how many people were there, we would put on the best, craziest show, people had ever seen, and sort of… take the “Dwarves” approach of playing loud, fast and for no longer than 30 minutes no matter what. We agreed that we were through with being the nice guys and being understanding of the “do you all mind starting a little earlier/later…”

But even that came at a cost b/c I took that as carte blanche reason to act like a total fucking lunatic. So, now I have to tell you what my part in all of it was… embarrassingly …

I drank A LOT. I acted really crazy A LOT. And the truth is, that is what Lisa and Sam always wanted in a front person.. but they didn’t want to have to ride around in a van with that person. Sure, I was funny and jovial most of the time… but I also became a total pain in the ass, I am afraid. From the moment I stepped in the van to go on tour until the day I came back (30+ days at a time) I acted a fool. At shows, I would throw shit, jump on bars, spill drinks, ruin microphones, piss on the floor, kick in amps, break lights, wear diapers, take my clothes off, challenge people to fights (that I couldn’t win alone), shout obscenities at people, etc. OF course, this was part of the show at times… but at other times, it was a great way to get killed. (hence the nick-name “big tiny”). I was blessed, I guess, with the gift that I could talk my way into fights really well, but also was pretty good at talking my way out of them too.

The night before we broke up, we had played a show at some ivy league school in the north east. We were touring with Lazy from Cincinnati, OH and the Leaving Trains and a few shows with the Cows and Unsane. That night, I got really drunk and hopped up on the bar where a bunch of frat boys were sitting and kicked a bunch of drinks in their laps all the while making fun of their fratty ways, etc. They club owner turned us off, didn’t pay us, insisting that we pay the dry cleaning bills of the people that were there and the cost of the glass ware. Sam went to the van without saying a word to anyone. Lisa screamed at me back stage about how I needed to go talk to Sam about what had happened and apologize or he’s taking us all home the next day. I refused, pridefully, b/c I had done exactly what we talked about doing, as a band… at least so I thought. I was left to try to collect money from the owner. He basically chased us out and threatened to call the police practically. When I went to talk to Sam, he (who never gets mad) was so extremely upset he was almost despondent. Johnny was sitting in the back and Lisa was in the driver’s seat. They were pulling an intervention on me, of sorts… but of the kind that was, “Kathy, do you give a shit about this band, b/c if you do, you will apologize and stop this fucking craziness.” I didn’t apologize and Sam called the band off. Johnny started to cry. Lisa punched him in the gut and said, “man up you fucking pussy.” Just kidding about that part. Same summed it up by saying, and this is an exact quote…. “I just can’t do this anymore. I can’t be the dad anymore. This band is like being in a sick fucking relationship with a girlfriend that you just can’t leave.”

The next night, we played the Cyber Pass in Philly with Lazy. It was a packed house and the show was phenomenal. After we announced that it was to be our last show, we sold almost every piece of merchandise we had. I called my dad and told him that we were coming home a few weeks early, that we were not going to Europe as planned, and that I was really bummed. His response was, “sounds great hon, when are you going back to school?”

Driving back to NC, not ONE WORD was spoken other than to say, “does anyone need to use the bathroom.?”

Once we got home and the air cleared 2-3 months later. WE booked a last local show in Chapel Hill of COURSE… and we played a sold out show. I had written a long and apologetic letter to Sam in the hopes that we could reconcile, but he, at that point, didn’t want to do it anymore… period.

7. I remember that when i joined Polvo, it was when you were dating Steve. Joining Polvo was a great thing for me so let's get that straight, but it seemed really odd, the way that they worked at the time. I remember talking with you once about how maddening it was for you to watch these guys be so "whatever" about everything, which you know..they sort of were. Of course you don't have to answer this but Polvo was the only band in Chapel Hil that I really liked. Why was it frustrating?

Hmmmmmm. I'll try to answer this one. I have a hard time understanding why people don’t try to fulfill their potential. Anyway, …. I loved Polvo musically too (and of course, loved Steve), but it was frustrating for me to watch them have SO MUCH attention and not take advantage of that. Perhaps some jealousy? I am not sure. Perhaps it’s not the goal of every band to get signed, tour 8 months out of the year and make millions of dollars… but maybe touring some, playing out some, laying off the bong occasionally and taking charge…. marketing yourself… maybe that would have allowed you to at least make more money than you did? I just never understood the stoner mentality, though I have loved the weed myself occasionally…. “Fucking get up and do something” is kind of how I felt. “Strike while the iron is hot”… was my general emotion about that band…. And they (like All Night from Greensboro, for that matter) just never would take the plunge and get big when it was so at their finger tips!

8. You came back into music again as a bassist for I bleieve it was Bucks Deluxe. How was that? Was it fun? Liberating to play bass? How long was the band around for, and why did it disband?

I started playing in Bucks DeLuxe when I was introduced to Todd Sandvik by a girl I waited tables with at Café Luna. I had played bass since I was 18, but not in a band, or very well. I had written a few songs for P. Trigger but by far, wouldn’t have considered myself a “bassist” by any means when I joined B.DL. And I told Todd this, but it was okay. I learned as I went along and it was fine. I love playing bass and have played in a couple of bands up here in Richmond as a “bassist”. I guess I can finally call myself that now. I can play scales after all… ahahaha. It was super fun playing bass w/Bucks Deluxe b/c I really loved playing with those folks, Practice was fun, not hard work, which is how it became in P. Trigger. We’d drink and practice for hours… talk shit about our loved ones, etc. It was like a lodge meeting. What was super awesome about it was Christie Eames. She had been P. Trigger’s ride-along merch gal on many tours and was a dear friend. Being in a band with her was fun. Chris Niellson (sp?) and Todd were both really nice people. We were together for hmmmm…. Maybe 2 years as the members I just described? I left them and moved to NYC with Jeff Stewart (huge mistake). I went there to go to grad school, but instead ended up working at Citibank and drinking every night at Greenpoint Tavern, which is kind of like Bourbon Street used to be, but with Polish speaking people. (Also a huge mistake). They kept playing and got a new bass player, but I am not sure how long they were together thereafter.

9. When Double Negative went on tour awhile back we ran into Lisa Cooper. Rather then dwelling on what she was going through, we simply had a good time. Is there anything you would care to say about the passing of Lisa? She is one of a few ghosts hovering around, like Jere.

I am having a hard time with her having passed away. I actually went to see her back in the earlier days of her illness when I first found out b/c I knew that when she was diagnosed with inoperable Stage 4 cancer that she would be short-timer. I know other folks were more positive about the possible treatment options for her, but I just knew I needed to go see her. I was 7.5 months pregnant when I got out there to see her and of course, she had lots of funny things to say about that. She, by all appearances at the time, was well. She looked a little puffy from the radiation and was markedly low-key and depressed, which was unlike her. We did the same thing, in terms of trying to keep it light and have fun. She was 100% convinced that she was going to survive it and that she would be cured. I didn’t share that sentiment and felt that it might the last time I saw her, but tried really hard not to cry or to talk about ‘treatment plans’ or ‘length or %rate of survival’ kind of stuff… but I really wanted to know. And over the following months when I would talk to her (or try to talk to her, she avoided a lot of her old friends more as she got worse off), I would ask more questions about her well being. When I had heard at the end of 2008 that she had taken a downward turn, I knew that it was the end. Sam Mauney and I arranged a trip together to go see her. We were going to leave on a Friday and come back on a Monday. I was going to drive to Raleigh and we’d take a plane together and have a chance to talk on the plane, which we hadn’t done for many years. I was really excited to go with Sam and to see Lisa and I knew that she would be so very excited. We told her good friend Tommie (from St. Louis) that we were coming and Dianna Mayo knew, but they didn’t tell Lisa we were coming until a couple of days before we were to board. Her response was luke warm with a “I’m not sure if I’m up to seeing anyone.” She was so very sick and in so much pain at that point. I was sorry we had waited so long cause we’d talked about it so many times…. Planning that trip…. Anyway, she died on that Wednesday before we were to leave. So we were about 2 days late getting there. I was despondent for days after that, wondering if she had anyone at her bedside when the lights went out. Wondering if anyone had visited her that day. Wondering if she wondered… if anyone in the world gave a shit about her. She came from such shitty family. Her family sucked so fucking hard. As their daughter lay dying in some hospital in St. Louis, they are back in Clayton probably complaining about the cost of cigarettes these days or some shit.

Lisa was hard-boiled. But she was witty, a musically gifted person, an incredible writer, a great friend to others, and just generally, very fun. She was like a big sister, to be really cliché, I guess. She shared a lot of dark stuff with me that formed a trust between us that doesn’t happen often, even with girls. I think of her now and sometimes laugh out loud at how she would react about something I’ve seen, or what she would say if she was there….. she was so sarcastic!

Her passing away, of course, has made me realize my own mortality to some degree. I knew, simply b/c I know so many smokers, drug doers, hard-livers, etc., that sooner or later, I would have some friends or I myself, would get the cancer and perhaps die prematurely. I just didn’t think it would be Lisa… I didn’t think it would be so soon… I didn’t think it would hit me so hard.

Incidentally, I just received a 3 part box-package from St. Louis from Tommie Uptagraph, her friend from St. Louis. He was probably her closest friend. He was in charge of emptying her house, taking things to goodwill, etc. He found 3 boxes labeled “P.Trigger” which has many, many, many tid-bits of articles, news clippings, tapes, videos, mags, pictures, etc. in it. I got through box one Wednesday and sobbed. Decided to stop and try again this weekend. So, tomorrow, I’m going to try again.

It’s not that I saw her often, … it’s that she existed and I could see her, or call her… that made her alive. I missed her before… but now I miss her in a way that can’t be treated… And I’m not handling that too well to date.

10. What is your life like now? What are you doing these days? And when you look back on your time involved in music in Raleigh in the eighties, are you proud of it? Why or why not?

What is my life like now….. Whew… I’m lame.. I’m old… I’m washed up and no one really knows who I am, or who I was, or what I’ve done before. I live in Richmond, VA. Seriously…

I am pleased with the decisions I’ve made in the last 3-4 years. I hit a rough patch that I was not sure I was going to make it out of that lasted a couple of years. When I came to Richmond in 2000 to go to lawschool, it was my hope to quickly get in and out, come back to NC, take the bar exam and resume my life with Steve, at Octavia Street (of all places), maybe open a restaurant, practice law, get married, have a kid, help run Kings, whatevs…… I just knew I didn’t want to live in Richmond for sure. But 2003 came….. I stayed in Richmond to take the Virginia Bar Exam instead (at my dad’s urging… another mistake)…I failed the bar exam, Steve broke up with me after 11 years, my mother died, I had no friends in Richmond and I lived in a shitty fan apartment with nothing and nobody. As a result of the break up with Steve, I lost my dogs, the house that I had lived in off and on for years with Steve, all the furniture and pictures and memories and shit we built, all of my friends that ran in that little circle. I felt so betrayed and abandoned. It was the loneliest I had ever felt in my life and I really frankly, didn’t want to live it anymore. I guess I had always been defined by something, which maybe sounds ridiculous, but I was always, “Kathy Poindexter from P. Trigger” or “Kathy Poindexter that works at the Sting Ray” or “Kathy Poindexter, Steve Popson’s girlfriend” or “Kathy Poindexter that drives that ridiculous big car.” Or something like that….. Now, I found myself just being Kathy Poindexter, who wasn’t really all that special after all. I thought about moving to West Virginia where I had a close friend and help to run their storefront for a log cabin business. I thought about moving into a trailer I inherited down near Harker’s Island in Carteret County and just working on a boat for a while. I was so sad, I didn’t know what to do.

After about 2 years of nearly killing myself with PBR and makers mark, I managed to get my shit together, finally pass the bar exam on round 2, make some friends and start playing in 3 bands: Wiseacre – Played bass in a band with ex-member of dismemberment plan and unrest; The Celebs – A poppy punk band with local legend Nikki Price; and my own concoction, Death & Taxes – which was a traditional country/blue grass band. It seemed the busier I was, the less time I had to waller and I started to feel better. I was singled for 3 years and kind of liked it. I also waited tables… a good social job… and finally landed my first law job, which sucked, but paid really well. I ended up buying a house and resolving myself to just living in Richmond.

Death & Taxes started taking off and we were traveling a lot on weekends… there was a little buzz about us… we are playing in New York and Baltimore and… and blammo…. I started dating Mark Waterman! I hadn’t seen him for years, but we played a show down in NC (Oak Island) and Mark came there. We started talking over the phone and rekindling our friendship, etc. Then we started to get serious. We got married and now we have an awesome 2 year old named Abe and another baby on the way that is due in December. Death & Taxes played its last show when I was 7 months pregnant… I got kicked out more or less, from Wiseacre for not being able to practice enough. And the celebs drummer moved on to greener pastures. I now play in no bands, which I miss, but anticipate changing in the near future. I have been writing songs with Eric Johnson from Archers of Loaf and finishing them over email audio files. Odd?

I suppose I am happier in my life now than I have been in so many years.

It’s not what I had envisioned for myself. But, it might be better. I have never really been able to shed that Carteret County trailer park film that sort of covers my skin and haunts me at times. Sometimes I just have to sit back and be thankful for everything that has happened to me and the decisions that I’ve made… even the bad ones… b/c it all really has ended up having a good purpose.

(1) I’m glad my mom was a gutter drunk, b/c if she hadn’t been, perhaps her nagging ass would have been at home forcing me to turn off Night Flight. I might have never seen the Ramones or Blue Cheer or anything edgy. I might have not ever been drawn to the punk rock music and still singing along to Juice Newton songs on the hi-fi. Egads.

(2) I’m glad that I got a rat tail. I know it was totally fucking dorky, but at the time, it made me stand out just enough (that along with my fake vans) to not be accepted by the popular kids so that I could gravitate to and be accepted by the punk rockers!

(3) I’m glad that I drunkenly volunteered to sing for P. Trigger, not having any idea that what was intended to be a short lived joke band, would eventually be a very influential factor in my life and believe it or not, the lives of others!

(4) If I hadn’t joined Picasso Trigger, I might not have met Steve and had the experiences I had with him. I might not have had my heart broken for the first real time in my life. I might not have been humbled as I was… and so needed to be… so that I could be accepting of who I was alone as just plain old’ Kathy Poindexter…

(5) If I hadn’t moved to Richmond, I might have wound up living in some trailer park in Carteret County with 8 kids and a wife-beating husband…. Instead, I snared me up a good North Caroliner boy via long distance love affair and that has worked out quite well. Who the fuck knows… what I can say is this. I am 37. I am a lawyer and not just any lawyer, but a public defender. I am – and have always gravitated toward – the underdog. I am punk rock and have been since the 6th grade. I don’t care what anyone says! I may look really lame now, but the punk rock constitution is attached hereto. I married someone that has known me for many years, rather than marrying a stranger and with him, I have begun to build a life that has meaning beyond anything else. Luckily, he is from the same “culture” and our lives together make sense.

Playing in a band from Raleigh in the 80’s (and 90’s) was one of the greatest experiences of my life and one of my greatest accomplishments to boot. You shove any 4-5 people in a van with no A.C. for a month and half, playing shows for $5 a head and a free pizza, and if you can come back in one piece…. That’s a hell of an accomplishment! I am very proud of any part I or we may have had in fostering a healthy music community back then. I truly felt that I belonged to a community of musical superheros. They were friends and I guess… still are, even though I don’t live in Raleigh anymore… and I miss them and Raleigh, or at least what Raleigh used to be. I really, really, loved us.

If Lisa were here, she’d punch me in the pussy and call me a hippy for sure.

So, did you get more than you bargained for? This has actually been very cathartic for me actually.

ANOTHER WRITE UP THAT WILL PROBABLY UPSET SOMEONE.

2009-07-31T22:55:00.000-07:00

On the day that me and Carole were burying our late lamented one hundred and twenty pound dog in our backyard, I got a phone call and did a interview, and here it is:

http://www.101distribution.com/article/Brian-Walsby

I am pretty sure that I will never ever be able to get Dischord Records on my side but I do appreciate the back up from Charles and Dale Crover.

OH MAN..DID THIS MAKE ME LAUGH.

2009-07-27T21:52:00.000-07:00

this is just pure comic gold/genius.

ONE PAGE ARTICLE IN THE NEW ISSUE OF DECIBEL MAGAZINE.

2009-07-22T12:38:00.000-07:00

This came out really nice! Thanks for the great opening statement..that makes me feel pretty darned good.