I KILL EVERYTHING I FUCK (aka BAD BAND NAMES, PART 1 of 150)

Strikes Again! just played at the Trash Bar with World War IX, an old school hardcore punk band. Great show, mostly by WWIX (missed the Pills, who I heard were great).

I've been in NY for 11 years, but as a Midwestern kid, I go wide-eyed and Marvel anytime I run into someone whose backstory intersects with mine. This particular intersection was extremely tenuous, but it's a good story nonetheless.

Strikes enjoys playing at the Trash Bar, which features great sound, open bar for an hour, free food if you know when to ask for it, and a chance for our Billyburg friends to wander out in their afterhour pajamas from last night's Union Pool party to support us. The booker at Trash set us up with WWIX.

A few days before the show, Justin from WWIX sends us a very nice note, making sure we're all set. I notice that Justin works at the Daily Show; my good friend Chris Pace worked there for years, so I check it out. It turns out that Justin recorded with Chris awhile back.


Anyway, I let Justin know that we were both friends of Chris, and then went over to the WWIX site and found the GG Allin comic. Shitface! Drop lip! For those of you who aren't familiar with GG Allin, he's the most disgustingly intense performer of all time; he makes Iggy Pop look like Russell Hitchcock. I don't have a strong enough stomach to figure out exactly why GG did exactly what he did, but he certainly saved a lot of money on costuming, what with him going naked, covered in his own feces and blood...

From the comic I learn Justin was maybe the biggest GG Allin fan; he bought all his records, read all his interviews, corresponded with him while GG was in prison, started shooting a documentary before being upstaged by a hotshot NYU director. Read the comic here.

Why did I give a shit? (Wo-ho! pun intended!)
****************************************************************************
In college in West Philadelphia, I joined a fraternity. Our neighbors were fraternitys on both sides; on one side was Sigma Alpha Epsilon, who paid hundreds of stripper dollars to fashion gold-painted lions outside their front door. On the other side was another fraternity who ran their joint like a Bingo house for their stepmothers.

Our joint happened to be a W. Philly marketplace for illicit substances and one of the best music venues in Philadelphia. And, as my once-good friend Dan Shepelavy put it, "a halfway house for cool people." We were punk-rockers and Deadheads. We were lazy and dirty. But we loved the local music scene.

We won't get into the particulars on the drugs, but very early on, someone turned the living room of this hovel into a stage. Bands who cared nothing more than playing hardcore punk or ripping off the Butthole Surfers hung out in our living room where bands played, and kept us up until dawn, or weeks at a time. In 1987, the Dead Milkmen played there during the Human BBQ, the annual noon-til-dawn-the-next-day party, and broke the floor. And not like they put a hole in it, but the supports just vanished, and eyewitnesses saw it ripple like a snow cone. Fortunately, the living room backs up to a big set of windows that overlook Spruce Street, a major thoroughfare in Philadelphia, and we had a concrete porch as well. So the Milkmen just turned theirselves around, everyone went outside, and they finished their set playing through the living room window, out onto Spruce Street. God bless the Dead Milkmen.

Back to GG. I was in a band in college called the Bloated Goats, who got a gig at the Human BBQ. We had the uncoveted noon (first) slot, and played our hearts out, but our influences ran more Beatles and Stones. But the 1pm band! These guys were years older, formed just for the occasion, and were certainly woodsmen judging from the instruments they had - the guitar, bass and drum kit were all handmade from wood. I laughed off the first half of their set and wandered into an adjacent room. Then, I don't know what it was; maybe someone turned on the tv, or a Deadhead put Steely Dan on upstairs butust then, the music stopped, and they got really angry. *Really* angry. They'd been going to Human BBQs for years and were fucking *displeased* at what they saw. So they gave us a "fuck you all, we're going to kick your asses, this is our last song" attitude. Sure, we've all seen that, but they followed it up with a song called "I Kill Everything I Fuck, I Fuck Everything I Kill". I had no reason to believe it was anything but the truth--I hadn't seen Deliverance or Hellraiser yet, so I had no reference point for these guys--so I found a safe distance and watched. Maybe they played it for 30 seconds, maybe for 16 hours, but afterwards, they smashed everything within sight, homemade guitars into homemade drums. I had never seen anything like it.

I didn't find out until a few weeks later that it was a GG Allin song, or that bands routinely destroy their equipment. These were both firsts for me. And it all went down in my living room.
************************************
GG died at some point while I was in college, and his brother Merle took the band the Murder Junkies out on the road, and somehow ended up playing in our living room the following year. I couldn't make that show, but the next day there were feces on the drum rug. I told Justin this right after the World War IX set on Saturday, and he was in disbelief that Merle would do such a thing; he knew Merle pretty well. That leads me to the only obvious conclusion:


Ghost Feces.