Mraz on Richmond Circa 2005 and Other Quotes

In an interview in the Oklahoma State university newspaper in 2005, Mechanicsville's Jason Mraz said Richmond was too big a town for him and was "completely unattractive because of racial discrimination, crime and extreme poverty." He said he had no interest in coming back to help the city because, "I'm just a cow in a meadow, and I want to live in peace."

"Girls who aren't good at sports, who aren't good scholastically, have to find something they're good at to fit in. And if they start getting plumper or they start getting it in their minds that they're less attractive, that's when they become the girls who are very good at blow jobs, and the girls who can find you drugs. And it's not because they're having a good time."

-- Susan Sarandon

"The muse has to know where to find you."

-- Billy Wilder

Coincidence is God's way of staying anonymous.

-- old saying

"I have a large seashell collection, which I keep scattered on beaches around the world."

-- Steven Wright

"Really drunk is when you can't remember how you got home. Too drunk is when you start leaning on things that aren't there."

-- Fatboy Slim

"I couldn't go pop even if I had an asshole full of firecrackers."

-- Tim McGraw

The Ill-Fated Public Safety Festival of '05

I only attended this disaster because my husband was running sound for it. The promoters predicted 20,000 people would attend out at a park in the East End. It was co-billed as a Pep Rally for Richmond, and there was no beer. The reality was there were five friends for each band.

At the height of the afternoon, Funksion, which had come from Virginia Beach for this event, played to just me. Just me! The band Think was the headliner on the main stage, and there were less than a dozen people even for them. The single food truck and the police left at 5 p.m., and Think started playing before Ominotago, on the second stage, finished, so you had two bands playing at the time time to a open field of no one. The organizers must have been crazy to think they were going to attract a white jam band crowd to an event in the far East End without beer.

There had been a small gathering earlier in the day for a high school marching band performance and some BMX racing, and then everyone left. The Times-Dispatch, which covered the event, just quoted public officials about how good these events were for the community, without mentioning that the community didn't come.

The Danger of Being Even Pathetically, Marginally Famous

(This is an excerpt from one of my other blogs about my overall career as a writer, but this part pertains to the Journal.) I bring it up again now after reading about what a terrible time women in technology and online game playing and development are receiving on the Internet by the trolls who just can't stand women achieving anything they themselves cannot.

For 11 years I owned a monthly newspaper about local music that did not do puff pieces or advance stories. We just did reviews. We liked bands or disliked bands. I never printed more than 2,000 copies a month. I doubt I had more than 800 readers at any time, and the vast majority of them were the musicians being reviewed. Nobody influential read it. We did not make or break any careers. We could not help anyone get a record deal, or even a gig. We did not help anyone make any money, and we made no money ourselves producing the newspaper. The money we took in from advertisers went almost entirely to the Ashland Herald-Progress because they printed the paper. I paid reviewers $5 a review. I did not receive a salary from the paper. It just paid for itself.

What we did do was we liked some bands that other bands didn’t like, that other bands hated, and it infuriated them that we cast their enemies in a favorable light from time to time, even if the glow from that light meant absolutely nothing in the scheme of things. Musicians can be extraordinarily jealous and bitter people because so much of what makes one band reach the top over all the others is just sheer luck.

So the embittered would take out their wrath on me. Abusive personalities by nature, it was comfortable and easy for them to abuse me because I am a woman, an easier target, and they would do so the way men abuse women…by calling me fat, ugly, a skank, whore, bitter, desperate, unlovable, the c-word (and I don’t mean Cat Lady, but that c-word, too), all the insults used to bully and debase women. I am convinced to my very bones if a man had owned and edited that newspaper, they would not have persisted in their abuse as long and as viciously…or even at all.

(Isn't this the basic premise of the old TV show "Remington Steele," that for a woman to be a successful private detective, she had to pretend a man owned the firm, or why J.K. Rowling used only her initials, because the publishers did not think the Harry Potter books would succeed if written by a woman?)

Yet at the same time that I was being called all these horrible things, still -- in their minds -- I possessed the power to make something in their life better, to right some wrong for them, to elevate them to where they thought they should be, and I didn’t -- wouldn't -- do it. That was the perception. And for that I must be punished. It doesn’t matter how many times or how convincingly I explained that nothing I did or didn’t do would have made a difference in their lives.

I ceased publishing that newspaper in 2004 when I no longer had the time or interest to devote to it, and a couple of those characters continue to stalk me online, a full decade later, with all the same complaints and bitterness. It is now 20 years since the very brief period when the paper was actually a little popular, and this is still going on. In the past year, I received a message through Facebook that one of them intended to shit on my grave. I reminded my husband that I have no desire to be buried in this town, for other reasons than this -- but now also for this -- because even if I live another 30 years, this person will have this mission to accomplish because that’s the only goal  he has left that he might be able to fulfill, fame having eluded him. That is the terrible nature of fame, even in my most pathetic case.

End Things - 2005

Something that everyone needs is to be told that not everything you do is satisfactory, and that you have to do better. It is a life lesson.

-- Ludacris

We all fall in love and lose it over somebody, but it's 20 times more exciting to lose it over a guitarist."

-- advice columnist E. Jean Carroll

A purist will say that it was better at its inception, when the sound was an expression of something local and unique, before the money came, and strangers corrupted the music with their embrace.

-- Sasha Frere-Jones

Things always happen to me in good time, even when I can't see it at the time, whether it's meeting certain people, moving, or changing jobs. There are always signs that the time has come. So in 2004, when Boulevard Deli closed, the Music Journal lost one of our two precious full-page ads. Only Oasis Duplicating was left. For several miraculous months, I'd find a replacement ad, but then I had to scramble to find copy to put on page 2, which had always been ads. That was the first sign.

I took a month off from the paper in the fall of 2004 to move from Mechanicsville to the West End, and I didn't miss doing the paper. There was no outcry from the public. It was difficult to get back into the rhythm of the paper after the move. That was the second sign.

Then there was another price hike in the cost of newsprint! And Borders Books and Music moved their newspaper racks of local papers from a bad spot in the store to an even worse one. Finding good places to put the paper was a pain in the neck. You'd go back to some places and find another, worse paper that nobody wanted had put their pile on top of yours, and no one ever saw yours and all the copies were still there. Or store employees had moved it to some place where no one knew. That was the third and fourth sign.

When I started in 1993, I was using a black and white screen Mac Classic II computer, printing everything in Word 5.0 and cutting and pasting the copy onto big sheets of blue-lined cardboard. I didn't even have an email address. It was a slow, educational journey to shifting to QuarkXPress on an eMac and emailing an Acrobat file. 

I was excited about giving up music, about reading something besides Spin, Blender, and Rolling Stone. InSync and Britney Spears were not interesting to me. And getting married in 2001 was the end of going out to the clubs four and five nights a week to photograph local bands. I was getting too old to hang out at the places where the scene had shifted, Alley Katz and Nanci Raygun. So that was that.

My Craft Has Turned to Craft Beer

My husband had a weekend sound job and texted me after he got there that the Summer Moon Music Festival was at the same place where I used to have the Richmond Music Journal printed, the Hanover Herald Progress building. Only now it was the Center of the Universe Brewing Company. The Herald Progress had moved to a squat little brick building on Thompson Street in Ashland, between a feed store and a chiropractor.

I was filled with curiosity to see what had become of that building in the Hanover Air Park. For 11 years and two months, I drove out there at least twice a month to deliver my box of pasted up flats, and then to back up my little car at the loading dock and pick up from 1,000-2,000 papers. Toward the end, it was only one trip a month since technology made it possible to deliver my paper in the form of an emailed .pdf file. I wrote my check and got my papers. Easily 80 percent of everything I made those 11 years doing the paper went to pay the printer, maybe more.

I blew up two cars picking up and delivering that paper. The first, my old Toyota Corolla, was totaled on the Boulevard next to the porno shop and I chronicled that colorful incident on my other blog where it is my most-read blog post ever because it has the word porn in it. The trunk was full of my papers. I blew the engine out of my old Mercury Tracer on 295 heading from the printer to Innsbrook in 2001. My trunk was, again, full of papers. (Although the fact my trunk was full was not the cause of either disaster. It was just bad luck that I was on a delivery run both times.)

The newsroom that was my backup plan is no more. It's a tasting room.

The loading dock where I picked up my newspaper for 11 years.

My Front (and Back) Pages

When I started the paper in 1994, at first I didn't put a price, then I thought I should mention that it's free. So it said Free for a few issues, but on issue number six, I changed it to Very Free.

From there, I kept going.

Extraordinarily Free

Free if you play “Free Bird”

Free to a Good Home

Free if You’re Got A/C (this was the August issue, of course)

Free if you’re from around here

Free if you like a good beer buzz early in the morning (This one got mentioned in the Times-Dispatch during the Gwar/Flood Zone ruckus as indicative of the depravity of the alternative press.) It is, of course, a lyric from a Sheryl Crow song, "All I Wanna Do."

Cover photos in 1994 were of Jerry Garcia, The Seymores, Fulflej, Dean Owen, Lovesake, The Ernies, Boy O Boy, Steve Alberts, Mick and the Moondogs, Inertia, On Edge, Peter Bell,  and Gwar.

My full pages sold for $100, and the back page was a prime spot. Those supporting the paper so generously that first year were

King Kong Kases, Peter Headley (paid for by the Committee to Rename W. Cary Street Peter Headley Boulevard), The Bidder’s Suite, and local country musician Doug Price.

In our second year, I tended to use song lyrics as the modifier for free. Can you match the lyric with the song?

Free if you know the frequency, Kenneth

Free if penguins are so sensitive to your needs

Free if you’re the girl with the most cake

Free if you don’t know how it feels to be me

Free if the dude looks like a lady

Free if she don’t use jelly

Free if it’s good to be king

Free if you’d like to see a little more fat

Free if I kissed a girl

Free because I’m not sorry, it’s human nature

Free if we will get by, we will survive

Free because she’s a sad tomato

Peter Headley, Four Walls Falling, Iggy Pop, The Good Guys, Suzy Peeples, Bruce Olsen, Peter Headley (again), The Dude of Life, Wrenn Mangum, Mojo Nixon, The Ramones, Soul Asylum, Frog Legs, Joan Osbourne, Cynthia Lennon, Dave Matthews, Matthew Sweet, and Eddie Van Halen were our cover stories.

Our back page ads were Don Warner Music, Richmond Music Center (three times), King Kong Kases (five times!), Metro Sound and Music, and Los 10 Space. Scott Mills of Los 10 Space wanted me to post a photo of his ad.

Volume 3, 1995-96

Free because I've got one hand in my pocket

Free because despite all my rage I'm still just a rat in a cage

Free if you're friends with P

Free because you can't talk to a psycho like a normal human being

Free if you're more human than human

Free because I'm just a girl, yes, I'm some kind of freak

Free so breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out

Free so pour your misery down on me

Free so tell me all your thoughts on God

Free because I've got nothing to believe in except for you

Free but who sucked out the feeling?

Free because we pay our debts on time

Cover stories on Tori Amos, James Taylor, Peter Frampton, Joan Jett, Princess Tone, Janet Martin Band, Gwar three times, Garbage, Serotonin, Ira Marlowe, Jethro Tull, Joan Osborne, Beavis and Butthead, Cold Gin, Dean Owen, Aimee Man, Steve Alberts of Dime Store Hoods, John Richardson of Bullfrog, Used Carlotta, REM

Volume 4, 1996-1997

Free so put your hand in my pocket, grab on to my rocket

Free because I love you so much, it makes me sick, uh-uhhh

Free because I hear the mission bells calling out your name again

Free so swallowed, followed, swallowed, oh no, I'm with everyone and yet not

Free because if it makes you happy, it can't be that bad

Free because I want soup, I want soup

Free because it's been a long time since I've had sweet thistle pie

Free so don't speak, I know what you're thinking

Free so sell out with me tonight

Free because it's a la la la la revolution

Free because I'm one angry dwarf

Free because I might as well be walking on the sun

Cover stories on Kiss twice, Avail, Beau Beau, Used Carlotta, Eileen Edmonds, Car Bomb, Cashmere Jungle Lords, Type O Negative, Janet Martin, Marilyn Mason, Poe, Thelma Shook twice, Dean Owen, Aerosmith, Live, Notam, Regan, In Clover twice, Slack Family, 100th Monkey, Stone Kitchen, Suzy Saxon, Wonder Boy, Dog Psychology, Picasso Jones, Copper Sails, Leon Milmore, Vulva Boy

Volume 5, 1997-1998

Free because look who's perfect now

Free because dogs like trucks

Free because I get knocked down but I get up again!

Free because they killed Kenny

Free because there she was, like double cherry pie

Free like disco lemonade

Free because maybe I'm amazed

Free because I did it my way

Free because we're dressed up in orange

Free because I'm not sick but I'm not well

Free because it's mmm...beefy

Free but no cigars

Cover stories on Mason Mills, Fleetwood Mac, 1.7, Pat Benatar, Bullets from Oz, Carbon Leaf, Superchunk. Then we started doing photo collage covers, then Photoshop covers of local photos dropped into spots of bigger photos of the White House, the Titanic, Frank Sinatra, South Park, and Marilyn Monroe

Volume 6, 1998-1999

Free because it tastes like cherry cola, 

Free because I'll be waving my hand watching you drown

Free if you party like it's 1999

Free if you have a ticket for a runaway train

Free because if it ain't eggs, it ain't breakfast

Free because you've got the music in you

Free may the frets be with you

Free if you wear sunscreen

Free if you're living la vida loca

Free if you're sick of Eyes Wide Shut publicity

Free if you're a beautiful stranger

Free if your reality has consequence

Cover photos of Elton John, Marilyn Manson, Bert Morgan, a Spice Girl, Robert E. Lee with a guitar, Teletubbies (All Negative, All the Time, negative news, negative views, we hate you, you stink), Hitler, Easter Peeps smoking, Tommy Rodriguez, Yoda,  a package of Trojans (this one caused a big fight with my then boyfriend because I found them in the glove compartment of his truck and we never did it in his truck), Star Trek, John F. Kennedy's plane going down,  Jackie Kennedy holding Cartman, and Dave Matthews

Volume 7, 1999-2000

Free if you smell a pig from a mile away

Free because we left Carytown

Free because we're Y2k compliant

Free because it's gooey

Free if you want to be a millionaire

Free if you're my Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa

Free if you're Elian Gonzalez

Free if you fathered Scully's baby

Free if oops, you did it again

Free if you're not so innocent

Free if you were voted off the island

Free if you're going bye, bye, bye

Cover stories celebrated our 7th year of being unsupportive of local music, Bert Morgan, a llama, politicians and Teletubbies, a bare butt (it's not the end of the Music Journal yet issue), dog sniffing a dog's butt, Southern Culture on the Skids, just crazy, assorted, meaningless artwork

Volume 8, 2000-2001

Free if you let the dogs out

Free if you have a hanging chad

Free if she bangs

Free if Eminem wins a Grammy

Free if you're 50 years old (that was me)

Free if you like eating stale peeps (that was for my boyfriend)

Free if you are the weakest link

Free and comes with a tax rebate

Free and I hope you dance

Free if you know where Chandra Levy is

Free if you've been bitten by a shark

Free, and so the world we know changes (9/11 had happened)

Cover photos were Gwar, Frog Legs, Dog Psychology, Dave Matthews, Ultra Bait twice, Rocket 69, Log, the World Trade Center towers

Volume 9, 2001-2002

Still free and starting our 9th year of hatefulness

Free of anthrax and free of price

Free if your guitar gently weeps (George Harrison had died)

Free if you are a confused American taliban

Free if you're a French skating judge

Free if you won an Academy Award

Free as Britney Spears

Free if "The Osbournes" is the best TV show ever

Free if you got a kitten and HBO this month (that must be about me)

Free if your well doesn't dry up (me again)

Free if you pray for Sharon Osbourne

Free because Ozzy won an Emmy

Cover photos were Osama Bin Laden, Bobby Jorgenson, George Harrison (who died), Bill Clinton and Paul McCartney together, Betty Grable, Britney Spears, Tommy Rock, Ozzy Osbourne with his baby, Yoda, a pin up girl, Ozzy and Sharon, the Fighting Irishman

Volume 10, 2002-2003

Free as we begin our 10th year

Free because Anna Nicole is so outrageous

Free if you have weapons of mass destruction

Free if Saddam has weapons of mass destruction

Free if you're the next American Idol

Free if you're embedded with a military unit

Free if you watch Spongebob Squarepants

Free if you voted for Clay (Aiken)

Free if you found Nemo

Free if you were assaulted by an NBA star

Free if you're voting for Arnold

Free if you've got power (this was Hurricane Isabel)

The covers were all collages of photos I had taken that month or people had sent in

Volume 11, 2003-2004

Free if you've kissed Madonna

Free because iTunes rules

Free if you are the Lord of the Rings

Free if Simon thinks you can sing

Free if you're naked before the song is through

Free for Bugboy (Frank Daniel had died)

Free if you're Chandler Bing

Free if you liked John Stevens

Free if you're Spiderman, too

Free if Jimmy Buffett ever has a No. 1

Free if you have a Purple Heart

Free for Swift Boat veterans

Covers were more collages, and too many photos of my husband's bands because that was all I was going to by then.

Volume 12, 2004-2005

Free if you TiVo it

Free if Spongebob is gay

I was doing an issue only once every two months, and then it was over. The last cover was a young band called Zero Hour and the paper was declared "the terminally ill" edition. I carried on a little while longer with web editions you could download as .pdfs as I still had reviewers writing about the CDs we were still receiving, but eventually that ended, too.

How We Gave the Ramones Head

From the June 1995 issue of Richmond Music Journal

By Mariane Matera

Another writer is handling the Ramones show at the Flood Zone, so my job is easy. Deliver a gift from Gwar's Dave Brockie to Joey Ramone. It's Hitler's head. I show up with Tammy Rosenson, the writer/photographer, at the soundcheck at 5:30 p.m., but even though it was arranged by the publicist, we're blown off. We go to dinner at Moondance with Hitler's head still in the bag.

After dinner, we hump back down to the Flood Zone carrying the head and stand on line to get in. Tammy, with two large bags of photo and interview equipment, is passed right through. I get stopped.

"What's in the bag?"

I've been waiting for this moment all my life.

"Hitler's head."

We get a spot at the rail upstairs. We're supposed to be called back to interview the Ramones at 8 p.m., but the opening band, Otis (not the local band Otis), starts precisely at eight. I tell Tammy if the Ramones summon, she'll have to take Hitler's head so I can stay behind and defend our position. It is too good a spot to lose. The Ramones don't summon us.

Otis plays a loud, hard, 30-minute set. Resetting the stage takes 15 minutes and Rocket 69, introducing themselves as "a Ramones cover band. This is our soundcheck," does a loud, hard-driving 30 minute set. Stage diving and body surfing have been banned. The audience is quiet and patient throughout. There's another 15 minute reset.

(The next day we talked to Mark Zip, the Los 10 Space drummer, who we spotted slamming in the pit. He said he got his face hit and it hurt real bad. He was kicked in the shins five times and it hurt real bad. Someone stomped on his Achilles heel and it hurt real bad. He was slammed up against the barricades and pummeled, and it hurt real bad.

"I had a great time!" he said.

But he didn't think the opening bands did. In his view, the sound was set for the Ramones and the opening bands had to deal with it. He said Rocket 69 especially got screwed. He's never heard them sound worse, but could tell from their faces they were playing their hearts out. That might explain Dan-o's testy comments opening his set about this being their soundcheck.

"You couldn't hear the kick at all and there was too much low-end bass," Mark thought. "And they didn't use the lights at all for the opening bands.")

For the Ramones' set, the roadies come out and tune and check the guitars and mics. A fourth of the crowd must have waited outside for the headliner because now the downstairs floor is wall to wall. Upstairs at the rails, it's only three deep and comfortable.

The lights dim, the crowd roars, and the band takes the stage about 9:45 p.m. A wall of lights behind them pretty much blinds us. Although we're the only ones who cleared a photo pass with the band, there's two photographers at the barricade wall, one of them Mark Holmberg of the Times-Dispatch.

The Ramones appear to be (to me) Howard Stern, Mike Garrett, and two other guys. They play with their legs spread far apart, although Joey seems knock-kneed. There's very little talk between songs. Halfway through, the roadies take off the guitar and bass player's leather jackets and hand them different guitars. Joey never takes his jacket or leather gloves off. The others are wearing Yoo Hoo soda, A Hard Day's Night, and Plan 9 T-shirts. Joey leaves the stage periodically when C.J., the bass player, whose voice projects better, does vocals.

They do 45 minutes, concluding with a "Gabba Gabba Hey" sign held up and a giant dancing monkey or something on the stage, and then come back for two three-song encores. By the second encore, the pit, which has been slamming, looks exhausted, but the Ramones don't even seem sweaty. The band has water-proof hair. A fan on the side of the stage keeps blow drying Johnny, spinning his hair around like a plate. At the beginning of the second encore, we are finally summoned upstairs.

I tote Hitler's head to the third floor where we wait, then we're moved to a holding area outside the dressing room. We're on line ahead of the band sluts. The road manager, who looks like Lenny Bruce, says ominously "you can have one minute."

One band slut is telling the door guard, "We've been riding around with them all day," and something about it being her birthday. She stands very close to the guard at the door. I clutch Hitler's head in my arms. We're suddenly waved through with a "hurry, hurry."

The Ramones look remarkably youthful for a band that's been hitting it hard since 1974 and are just sitting there in the room alone. They still don't look sweaty. They don't look tired. Barely touched, cheese-heavy pizza and a veggie tray are on the tables. I notice more Cokes than beer.

Joey is not around. Tammy zeroes in on her favorite, Johnny, and asks him her interview questions. He says he noticed her taking photos. He doesn't seem to be in a hurry to blow us off. We give him Hitler's head. The 50th anniversay of the Fuehrer's death was that week and there's been a lot of Hitler stuff on television. Johnny says he watched some of it. They graciously give us time to load another roll of film and photograph Johnny with the head.

Now that I've handed the head over, I have nothing to do, so I start eating the Ramones' carrots. The band sluts are ushered in. One tells Johnny it's her birthday. He seems non-commital. Actually, her birthday is tomorrow, and she'll only be the age she is now for 20 more minutes, she says.

I wonder what she's implying, but I'll never know. Maybe for the next 20 minutes, she'll be eating the Ramones' carrots.

Joey, still wearing shades which he wore throughout the show, finally walks in. We walk out. Back downstairs, we spot members of Los 10 Space, Trauma Kamp, the Vapor Rhinos, and Mike Garrett of Single Bullet Theory. It's raining. Something doesn't feel right. I feel like less. I've been with Hitler's head for nine hours and now it's gone. Dinner at Moondance, a Ramones concert. That head was the best date I've had this year. I miss it.

(I dug this story out of the box because a) the last Ramone just died, and b) just this past week, I learned the girlfriend of my friend, Dean, was the band slut who was 20 minutes away from her birthday on May 4, 1995. She told me she has forgiven me for calling her a band slut. I asked her how she got upstairs. She said she knew one of the Ragdolls.)

In Tammy's interview, she is allowed to speak to Johnny only and learns they left Sire Records because they needed a change. They do not want to be playing in 10 years. "Rock'n'Roll High School" ruined their acting careers. They only planned to tour one more year. "We've been doing it for 21 years. That's long enough."

They ask Tammy if she liked the show and she says she was very happy. The year before she was hit by a beer bottle and had a lump on her head for days, but this year, there were no injuries! Johnny doesn't understand why people have to act crazy in the audience. Tammy asks them if fans do strange things to get to them. He says no. "We just go to the van and leave." When on tour, "we sit around and watch TV. Go out to dinner. Nothing much. Go out and see a band once in awhile." Johnny likes 1950s rock and roll. It's Tammy's recollection, that my now new friend the band slut asked Johnny for a birthday kiss.

Photo by Tammy Rosenson

Album Art Circa 1994-1996

Frog Legs Revisited

If I were to do this Frog Legs memoir right, I’d pull out the crate of old Journals and look up every article we ran on the band, but the crate is in the closet, under the Christmas decorations, behind the litter box, so that’s not happening.

The original cassette cover.

This is what I recall. I had a fax machine/answering machine combo in my apartment/Journal office, and I kept the ringer turned off so calls during the night or early morning would not wake me. This was before email was commonly used, and I wanted an easy way for my readers to send in their comments and letters. I assumed putting pen to paper might be too challenging, and musicians cannot afford stamps, but they can talk in the middle of the night. I was right. Each morning I had several spoken letters to transcribe for the popular letters to the editor page.

There was one frequent caller that, instead of comments on the local music scene, told acid trip type

stories that would always end with the admonition to go see Frog Legs. Sometimes two people were on the line during these messages and they would perform a play. I was intrigued. It was an effective way to get a reporter's attention. So, one night when I was on my way to a more important show, I dashed into Twisters to catch part of their set and was instantly blown away.

Their ambition in ’94 was to make the jump to the big time, which at that time was leaving Grace Street for Shockoe Bottom. Could I help? I could. I encountered a sort of drunk Chuck Wrenn wandering around the 17th Street Farmers’ Market at 2 in the morning one night. Tuesday was a slow night at his club, Moondance. I said, give me every Tuesday for Frog Legs. I guarantee you a crowd. He said okay. I called in every favor, twisted every arm, called everyone I knew, to guarantee at least someone showed up for that first show. I got people there. Each following Tuesday night went better and soon Moondance was the place to be on Tuesdays, not only to see the band, but to see each other. The gang’s all here. We went through wild dance nights, nights with choir robes, nights when no one knew where Wrenn was. But when the band started, he would pop out from under the Moondance stage. How and when did he get under it?

And yes, the legend you've heard elsewhere was true. Tom would quietly borrow a quarter from someone in the audience before the show and use it as a pick.

I don’t recall how long this went on, it seems like years, but probably was less than one. At some point the band wanted to get paid, which wasn’t part of the original deal. I am good at publicity, not at making money. Moondance didn’t want to hurt its food and beer sales by charging a cover on a Tuesday. The Journal’s gushing coverage became more of an embarrassment to the band than a benefit. We followed them to Crazy Charlie’s for a series of great shows. They had two cassettes out and did a CD, but the CD had new songs on it that the fan base wasn’t familiar with, and the few carry-overs were homogenized in the studio. The excitement of the live show didn’t carry over to the CD, and we had to give it a thumbs down, which didn’t endear us to their new management. Dave Matthews was able to preserve their stage sound on their first CD, but few other local bands got that kind of protection from their management. They listen to the studio engineers who want them to sound more like what’s currently selling.

Then they made – in our opinion – a fatal mistake by going with East Coast Entertainment on the college frat house circuit on tour through the mid-South. Frog Legs is not a frat band. Drunk frat boys don’t want their dates being distracted by Wrenn Mangum’s stage antics, and they didn’t appreciate Tom Illmensee’s amazing artistry on the guitar. They didn’t know the music from the magical first two cassettes. Life on the road for a young , unknown band is boring and costly. There’s no real money to be made. You are away from friends and family, and away from the hometown fans who know and appreciate you. Fighting Gravity was the perfect package for frat houses, and even they didn’t become famous after years and years on the road.

This suspicion was confirmed to me at a Battle of the Bands at Sunset Grill where I was one of the judges along with girls from East Coast Entertainment. I asked them how Frog Legs was doing, and they said the feedback from the frats was not good.

So ended Frog Legs circa 1997. Plus, the bass player moved away. Families and children happen. Steady jobs were needed. Wrenn developed a young Elvis act that expanded into an Elvis, Johnny Cash, rockabilly act that plays around the state five to 10 shows a month. The three remaining members came together for occasional local shows as Bone Anchor. Fifteen years go by. (Does anyone remember the original bassist? I do. He was either a med student or a dental student at MCV, the Pete Best of Frog Legs.)

Facebook, which replaced the Journal as a means of getting the word out about bands, told me there was going to be a last reunion show because Tom was moving overseas with his family. Bone Anchor would cease, too, and since Turtle was coming in from Crozet for the going away party, why not play a last show?

All the bands at the new, spacious Broadberry club near Boulevard and Broad would be interconnected. Johnny Cecka and the Jailswerves has Morgan and Tom in it, then Frog Legs, then Herro Sugar, a surprisingly excellent band of recent high school graduates – the bass player is Tom’s own son – and then Bone Anchor.

I seldom go out anymore, but this required an appearance. There were just as many familiar faces in the audience, and it was shocking how little the band had changed in appearance in 20 years. I guess the trip from age 20 to 40 is less physically transforming than the one from 40 to 60, which I’m on. Wrenn still worked the room before each set, sincerely thanking everyone for coming. He didn’t wear the little brown vest over the bare chest, and they didn’t play “Human Cannonball” or “Rubber Chicken,” but we did get “Midnight Radio” and memories of Batman underoos. Tom played sitting down, not in choir robes as he once did, but in a suit as he later did, and was – as always – completely oblivious to Wrenn’s antics on stage. We got the wiggle worm on the floor, and even the hand stand. There was plenty of sweat flying. 

You can probably find lots of videos of this show on Facebook and YouTube. At least a third of the audience was recording it on their phones or cameras, another reason a printed monthly newspaper is no longer necessary to share the news about great local bands. If you haven’t been, the Broadberry is a nice room, longer than it is wide, with seating in the back and plenty of room to see the band in the front. I parked across the street at the Children’s Museum and didn’t get towed or ticketed, or asked to pay a fee to park there, calamities that crushed the Shockoe Bottom scene.

My Interview with Dave Brockie

From the June 1995 Richmond Music Journal

Dave Brockie in his Slave Pit office

I was summoned to the Slave Pit. Despite the interest of other writers in doing the Gwar story, the band wants the mothership to handle the invasion. And why not? Gwar, to Richmond’s seeming embarrassment, is the biggest band in town. They are bigger than Single Bullet Theory, they are bigger than Ten Ten, they are more successful than anyone you want to name from here.

Who else has a CD available through the Columbia Record Club? Who else had a Grammy-nominated video? Who else is going on widely successful world tours? Who else gets on Beavis and Butthead? But they are a bastard child, local but not talked about. They are our secret shame.

Head Gwarster Dave Brockie peppers his phone conversation with belches, so I decide showering before reporting for duty at the Slave Pit would be unnecessary. I drive to the unpublicized, unmarked building on the north side of town and, as instructed, lean on my horn for a couple of loud blasts.

Dobermans run to the fence. A head peers down at me from the window. Someone comes to the door and interrogates me. Despite the building’s ramshackle appearance, there are intercom phones on the wall. The great man himself is informed of my arrival. I am ushered upstairs, where Brockie is holding court like any corporate executive in a simply furnished room full of electronics, printers, fax machines, phones, stereos, desktop computer, drafting board. It is orderly without being anal. Brockie, fielding phone calls and faxes like a typical CEO, lets loose a loud fart which begins the interview.

I thought what we’d do first is what’s going on with Gwar now, what’s here, and then go back in time to your days at VCU. Is that where it all started? 

Where what started?

Well, Death Piggy. Wasn’t that the first band you were in?
The first band was Nuclear Dogshit when I was in the 9th grade. It was a cool band, a punk band. I was 14 years old.

But what was the first band that put you on the map?

Photo by William Pickett, Death Piggy

Death Piggy was the first band people liked. I was in a band in high school called Yams on Wheels. We were so fucked up. It was a piano and fiddle. I was in a bunch of loser bands before Death Piggy. I was in the Flashbacks my first year in college. It sucked. One set was all hardcore. which I had written, and the other set was Police covers the other two guys insisted on playing. I was living in Farmville, going to Longwood College. I was so freaked out when I got out of high school, I went to the first college I applied to. I didn’t even give it a thought.

In Farmville, the only thing to do on the weekend was drive down to Richmond. It was the closest thing to culture within 100 miles. Wow, VCU! Lots of chicks here! Lots of punk rockers! There were none in Farmville. This was 10 years ago before punk became the pussified fashion it is now. You could get your ass kicked quite literally every day of your life back then if you walked your talk, and I did. I’m proud of that. I’m proud of getting kicked in the head continually! Look at this nose!

It’s crooked!
Eight times it’s been broken. I’m proud of the blows I took. I started hanging out with the local hardcore scene. I immediately ran into the Richmond wall of, “Oh, you’re not from here? You suck!”

Where are you from?
Northern Virginia and Canada. I subtracted myself from the scene here a long time ago. I have little interest in playing shows here except Gwar and X-Cops now. But I used to do little performance things, the F-Minus Art Players, little plays. I used to love to do stuff like that in Richmond, but it’s such a pissy attitude now.

People I respected right off the bat, people like Mike Rodriguez, Penn Rollins, were such dicks to me when I moved here and I’ll never forget it. I had weird shit and dressed up. I had a wind-up cow. It took people a long time to even pretend to like me. But they can all suck my dick.

Years ago I realized there’s an entire world out there. The whole world doesn’t focus around Richmond. That’s an attitude left from all the rich, white bastards who run this country. They think this place is special because it’s near Jamestown, we settled the states here, we fucked the Indians in the ass from here, the CIA’s in Fairfax, DC’s right up the road. That makes me hate this state more than anything in the fucking world and I think it’s funny that Gwar grows like a malignant fucking herpes in their midst.

Then why do you stay here?!
Because I travel six to eight months a year, but I’d be out of here in a fucking heartbeat if I could. This town has so many shitty, narrow-minded fucking attitudes. I’m not even talking about the music scene, I’m talking about the governor! The government! The ABC! This whole thing about the penis thing! Well, I have a little perspective on that matter. I’ve seen it happen six or seven times. This time it went to a new level. They actually had a hearing about it. I’ve seen clubs get burned to the ground because of who knows why? VCU. They’ll be after us over here now, I know they will.

Well, aren’t you big enough to relocate somewhere else?
We could, but everyone’s family lives around here. It’s not a money thing, it’s a family thing. People’s mothers are starting to get old, starting to die. A lot of people don’t want to move to Los Angeles. They need to take care of their families. Gwar cares about their mothers!

I’m going to Los Angeles tomorrow to slap the monkeys, knob-twiddlers, and parasites into line, the ones who rely on the artists to make tons of cash for them. Look at our calendar! All this blue is X-cops touring, all this red is Gwar touring! Nine months of touring! That’s why I can handle living in Richmond. I have a great studio here. I don’t generally go out. People usually ignore me or ask me stupid questions. I’m such a pariah around here, it’s gross.

What do people ask you?
Are you on crack? That’s a big one. Everyone thinks I’m on crack. All I do is work on my art.

I went down to the ODC one night with Heavy Duty, a motherfucker from New York who has more power in his pinkie finger than every fucking, half-assed dipshit in this town put together, and they wouldn’t fucking let us in because we didn’t have our IDs!

I talked to Tommy Rodriquez about getting the X-Cops on a show and he went, “Hfffffff!” like I had asked him to come over and summon Satan with me! The Vapor Rhinos suck! The Beex are the only good band; I love the Beex. They have more balls than any band ever will. The Vapor Rhinos can suck my dick. They’ll never be anything. Penn Rollins is my friend now, but all those guys who thought I was a fucking fuck-up can all kiss my ass, so fucking hard. That’s why we formed Death Piggy!

I was in the hardcore DC scene for years. I was there when it started. I saw Henry Rollins’ old band, SOA even before he was in Black Flag. I know what was going on. I was already sick to death of that straight-edged attitude, being beaten up for slamming the wrong way. I moved to Richmond and it was cool, but because I had such a weird attitude, a wind-up cow, would pour mayonnaise down their pants, people dissed me hard.

I get it all the time still. People are so jealous of what we’ve achieved. I just want to fucking spit in Peter Bell’s face. Who the fuck is he? I’m a Grammy-nominated musician! I have toured the world eight times now. He can suck my dick in hell for eternity!

People say do you really use musicians in Gwar? We’ve sold half a million records, asshole! Projects are the lifeblood of this organization. I have X-Cops, Gwar, solo projects, spoken word, surrealist histories, sort of Ween meets Tom Waite. It’s rad! It’s all about music, man! People ought to open up their fucking minds and see it!

In Richmond, the scene will always be a bitter, fucking grunge shithole, the same attitudes their fathers and the cops have. My advice to any musician who is worth a shit is to get out of town. The ABC has shut down every club.

I have a lot of friends and we do our art. But I got real disaffected with the scene and stopped going out. I read about it in the Journal now. There’s new good bands out there that I’m missing, but I’m too busy making my own music. I love Avail, I love Donkey Balls, I love Frog Legs. I have their tapes and they rule! They’re very creative! I wish I had more time to support those bands. People will come out in force for that shit. Avail is doing really fucking good.

How many people are working here?
This is a professional punk rock complex we’ve got, eight bands practice here. Twelve to 30 people work here, depending on the projects. We’re working on three music videos now, two for Gwar and one for the X-Cops, two 48-page, full color graphic novels, self-published, self-distributed. We have two world tours which will stretch into 1996. We have a T-shirt shop. We’ve got the shit! This building is an armed fortress of artistic rebellion and social reform!

If anyone ever doubted us when we said we were going to make Gwar last a million years, they should finally realize we were not fucking around. Gwar will outlive us. No matter what happens, those half a million records will exist after I’m dead. Not just Gwar, all this other stuff, and everything we make, we make because we want to fuck with the system. We are their sworn enemies and this is war. The Oklahoma federal building bombing is not going to be taken lightly and I’m fucking pissed off about it.

Who’s side are you on?
I’m not on anyone’s side, but I’m very interested in why they set that bomb off. What are they trying to prove? The government will not let us know why they did it, but it was revenge.

I’m a pacifist, a follower of Gandhi. I don’t believe that might is right. I don’t believe physical power is the bottom line, but it is in their world and that’s what I’m dedicated to destroy. The federal building in Oklahoma City was used as a staging area for the whole Waco tragedy. The morning they blew it up was the second anniversary of the botched raid. That morning, guys in paramilitary outfits laid a marker at the Waco site.

The Branch Davidians did not kill their own children. The federal government killed those people on purpose or they fucked up so bad, it was an accident. But I think they did it on purpose. Why didn’t they have a fire truck around? But that doesn’t give anyone the right to blow up the federal building.

But it shows you just how fucked up things are. The government murdered John F. Kennedy, and they’re doing it more and more, and one day they’re going to come for you unless you get in line and spend your life doing something you hate, which 90 percent of the people have to do.
  
We’re so lucky! That’s why we want to be artists! We want to be free! And they don’t want us to be free! I hate them with every fucking ounce of my life. I hate them so much, I would die, but not violently. I’m going to work myself to death with a smile on my face. These are our weapons of war, albums, ideas, comic books! We don’t need guns! We have pies, not bombs! That’s our war! When everyone finally realizes it, we’re going to get into politics. We’re already laying the groundwork. We will offer the people an alternative. We will create a populist movement in this country. It will knock their socks off.

You’re going to get into politics?!
Not now. But we’re going to use the same tactics the anti-abortionists use. We will bring people together literally with ducktape and chains, immobilize them, destroy their perfect schedules, terrorize them with humor, make a big joke out it and the joke will be on them because they will look so foolish trying to stop our movement. We’ll fight cops with squirt guns and pies, and when they arrest us, we’ll go limp and tape ourselves all together and make it as expensive as possible to fuck with us and we’ll never use violence.

McNamara said that would have stopped the Vietnam war, if everyone just laid down around the Pentagon.

I agree. We see our own war dead, but we don’t see the other side.

Tim McVeigh was the kid on the street who organized the haunted house! That tells me he was a smart kid, but when he went into the military, he got fucked, just like my dad got fucked. My father got shot in World War II; my mom was buried alive for four days in a building in London. War is still a legitimate means of solving our problems! Fuck that! I may have a tank on my door and the name of my band is Gwar, but I hate war. It’s the most sophisticated symbol of mindless stupidity we have. You don’t need war, you don’t need guns.

Don’t you have a gun?
I don’t want to have a gun. I wish I didn’t feel the need for a gun. I almost got carjacked the day of the Flood Zone show. People break into my house. I let “Style” print a picture of me with the gun for one reason, don’t come over to my house! The last thing I want to do is kill someone, but I would do it in a heartbeat if someone I loved was about to get hurt. I’d blow their fucking heads off. But it sucks! I think it sucks that I can’t ride my bike home at night! I think it sucks that I can’t have female friends come visit me at my apartment at night because they might get attacked.

Where do you live?
Around Boulevard and Cary. That neighborhood has gone to shit!

The phone rings again, Brockie is distracted and starts talking about his current favorite band, Thin Lizzy. We leave for the building tour, starting with the computer room.

“We’re changing the face of Slave Pit graphics,” Brockie says proudly. A color drawing is printing out. “We scan in a black and white drawing for the comic and color it in the computer. It has 16 million colors! We’ve only used 15 million!”

An entire colorized comic can be stored on a computer disk and mailed off to a printing plant in Texas for production and distribution. The one I’m looking out will be out in July. They do their own posters by computer, too. There’s a graphics lab I don’t see because people are doing secret things inside. Downstairs, Brockie walks into the rehearsal room and announces he’s fired someone. Everyone laughs.

“You can’t fire anyone!”

“I know I can’t! I was just giving my opinion.” Everyone laughs more.

“He’s going to change the locks!” The band thinks they should make a family tree of all the people who came out of Gwar and went into other bands, and the bands that came out of those.

“Kepone, Alter-natives, there’s tons.”

The foyer is full of black dirtbikes, Gwar mode of transportation. There’s a large, typically bare, but strangely clean, kitchen area, and a big calendar which bespeaks organization. Whoever feeds the dogs has to put an X on the calendar to show it’s been done.

The video production room has a professional looking blue wall, lots of squishy and pointy sculpture in progress, walls of fiberglass castle wall, a heating room where costume parts are cooking, and a loft loaded with wardrobe, heads and body parts. It looks like Hollywood. It’s astounding.

Brockie says their next album is “Rag-na-rok, an ancient Norse legend about the last day of the world, the end of the gods. We developed the music and idea. Cardinal Sin, an intergalactic KKK imperial wizard, a symbol of fascism and hatred with religious overtones, cruises through the universe, worship me or die!”

Brockie runs through the story while the band practices ominous noises in the background.

“We wanted to create a video with this character. A comet is coming to hit the earth Dec. 31, 1999. We’re artists! People have been prophesizing for hundreds of years and we want to take advantage of it. The comet is going to obliviate the earth, everyone will die. Gwar says cool, then they’ll ride back. They have a huge party as the comet gets closer, then when it gets here, it’s Cardinal Sin’s warship! We wrote the music along that theme. We’re not narrating the story but going with the ideas in that story, hating everything Cardinal Sin symbolizes. When you listen to Gwar’s music, you don’t have to know a damn thing about Gwar. The music is about radical change in this world.”

Brockie prepares a letter for me to give to The Ramones that night with his gift, Hitler’s head. He wants it presented to Joey Ramone.

“If I’m being a dick, tell me, get in my face, I need it,” Brockie tells one of the  minions he had yelled at earlier. He gives me Hitler’s head.

“Tell the Ramones, their crew and their bimbos to come by and see us,” he says, escorting me to my car like any proper gentleman would. “Take care,” he waves, adding, “Don’t you keep Hitler’s head for yourself or it will come alive! You’ll wake up and it’ll be eating your pussy!”

I put Hitler’s head on the car seat and cringe. No better warning could have been given. I used to get nightmares from “Reanimator.” But that was years ago. I’ve changed. Doing the Journal for two years can change you, being in the Slave Pit briefly can change you. Driving home, I start having sexual fantasies about Hitler’s head. At the stoplights, I gaze at him on the car seat. I stick my finger in his mouth.

-- Mariane Matera

My First Gwar Show

From the October 1994 Richmond Music Journal.

It's 45 minutes past 8 o'clock "doors" and there's a line down the block outside the Flood Zone. The first band, X-Cops, doesn’t come on until 9:43 and even though the Slave Pit, command central for Gwar, said Gwar was going on promptly at 11 because it's an all-ages show, it's closer to midnight when they do. By then I'm not timing anything anymore because I'm totally engrossed in a spectacle that's going to end with Dave Brockie naked on stage.

The next four hours are like rough seas on the Carnival Cruise Line. I hang on the rail the whole time because if I move, I lose my spot, and it's a good spot, scientifically selected in advance by guys from Mystic Biscuits and Digits who studied the terrain based on previous Gwar shows, computing the exact distance you need to see yet not get slimed.

Their computations are on the mark. Toward the end of the show when Brockie points a hose upward, we can see the haze of red droplets heading our way, but they dissipate before impact.

X-Cops play first in order to give them time to change into their Gwar costumes. Their music is loud with titles like “Paddy Wagon Rape.” They heap abuse on the restless youth of America jammed six-deep at the barricade. Guys are brought up on stage and clubbed until their faces are bloody (an illusion, although I can’t tell how they’re doing it). The keyboard player in charge of ominous noises stays back at the soundboard.

Another guy is beat up and shot to “You Fucked Up.” We can make out the lyrics to that song. They go “you fucked up.” X-Cops leaves the stage at 10:23 and Hose Got Cable comes on at 10:37, getting us momentarily excited by tuning up to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But then they don’t cover any Nirvana. What sounds like a warm-up turns out to be their first song, one that never seems to quite get started. They play with their backs to the audience. At one point the drum kit needs an emergency application of a lot of Scotch tape.

The crowd at the barricade is now 21 bodies deep and 20 wide in anticipation of Gwar, four-deep at the upstairs rails. We spot members of Letters from Earth and Bucket in the crowd, but we can’t move to see what other local bands are in the hall. The comic book-sci fi crowd is down on the first floor in force. Hose Got Cable has broken one of its guitars to bits. They go off at 11:12.

“How much did they suck? Did they suck? They sucked,” the Digits-Mystic Biscuits contingent around me decides.

After another long break, Gwar finally takes the stage in their monster costumes, their stagehands scurrying around naked except for dicks-on-steroids cod pieces.

“This is the biggest collection of losers since the Nuremberg Trials,” they announce to the devoted, who I bet don’t know what the Nuremberg Trials were. As Oderus Urungus sings to loud music, he moves frequently to the edge of the stage so eager hands can bat at his fierce looking, yard-long penis.

Somebody is disemboweled and intestines are ripped out and eaten. Somebody’s head is split open and their brains are eaten. Oderus shoots a stream of green liquid out of his penis. None of it is particularly gross because it’s so obviously fake, like Pee Wee Herman Meets Night of the Living Dead, but as theater of the absurd, it is vastly entertaining nonetheless.

If Hose Got Cable, then Gwar Got Hose. There’s ample Galligar-Gwar warning because you can see the stagehands plug in the costumes when a squirt-down is next in the script. But tonight the script has gone wrong. Being a first-time Gwar attendee, I could not tell, but Gwar veterans tell me later the show went badly amiss. Brockie is obviously frustrated.

“I made one mistake and now I have to suffer for the rest of the set?” he says to the band. Something isn’t functioning. But the show keeps rocking to Brockie’s repeated confessions that he has deviated from the script and is ad-libbing.

Three Neo-Nazi skinheads are decapitated and blood spurts out of their necks. Then Slymenstra Hymen impresses the hell out of me by doing a fire dance without burning her hair off or setting the Flood Zone stage ablaze. Smoke pours through the hall.

She rips a gigantic bloody tampon out of her crotch and tosses it into the crowd, which tosses it back. Then she has one of those Maximum MaxiPad Heavy Days right on the stage in one cascading splat and breathes fire. The entire Flood Zone has literally heated up. You can feel it at the back rails. We are damned impressed.

A big-headed Michael Jackson dances out to “Beat It” and is encouraged to jerk off. His feeble effort gets his dick lopped off and he sprays a ton of alternating red, green and blue liquid into the audience. In a patriotic display, it becomes red, white and blue all at the same time.

There’s a transvestite space alien, and then a big monster which looks like a giant uterus with pointed teeth in the cervix and two octopus-like ovaries attached by fallopian tubes on either side. The ovaries are sliced off and then a Hitler head comes out of the cervix and does battle with Oderus. He cuts it off. More blood spews.

Finally, the big worm World Maggot, which has been sitting quietly in front of the drum set, comes alive and stretches out. Girls and members of Hose Got Cable are jammed into its jaws, and then the

Maggot is decapitated and there’s more hosing down of the front rows.

This concludes the show, but whatever the encore is normally, we never find out. Something has gone amiss with Brockie’s costume and he rips it off before leaving the stage. When he comes back wearing nothing but the huge dick G-string, the rest of the band has to match him by pulling off their costumes.

Gwar veterans tell me the encore numbers were more Rawg than Gwar, Gwar’s uncostumed counterparts, and it is uncharacteristic for Brockie to break character in a Gwar show. They say he began doing it from the first miscue.

There’s a delay in getting the drummer to return at all. It’s hard to tell whether the anger and frustration on the stage is real or part of the act, but if it was real, that might explain why Brockie pulled off the last piece of his costume and paced the stage restlessly, completely naked, sometimes singing, mostly fulminating, and at one point, pulling a bag of golf clubs and taking a few practice swings.

(I glance across the Flood Zone in a news flash panic and my photographer, having exhausted her allotted time on the perch, has climbed down. Shit!!! She’s on the floor somewhere, her view blocked by uplifted hands. A photographer from France is up there now shooting away. France gets naked photos of Prince Charles and Dave Brockie. This is not fair! It is our punishment for Euro-Disney. I am way too far back to get a clear photo with my dinky camera and the room is still full of smoke from Slymenstra. My worst fears are confirmed when the film comes back a few days later. Brockie is barely discernible in the haze and my negatives are mysteriously missing, so you’re all going to have to take my word on this.)

Did he feel the show had not been up to its usual standards and offered himself like a naked Christ as a human sacrifice to the audience? It was the most amazing dramatic theater ever, and there was almost no response from the floor. Does he always do this?

No, the people around me shake their heads, silent.

Is that his real penis?

Seems like it.

The problem is if you’ve been strutting around for over an hour in a yard long monster dick, suddenly

unveiling your real one is like going from Disney World to Tweetsie Railroad. As penises go, Brockie could win a bronze in the White Boy Olympics. But compared to the satanic majesty of his alter ego organ, it loses something in the translation. When he went to the barricades with this one, no hands reached up to bat it.

What he intended to do next will forever remain a mystery. One of the guitar players is repeatedly yelling that he needs a beer. An empty beer bottle goes flying onto the stage and the band immediately becomes a Kennedy Assassination tableau, all pointing up at us as if we were the Texas School Book Depository.

Hey, it wasn’t us, we point back. It came from down there, the Grassy Knoll, and we all point down. The last thing we would have done is thrown a beer bottle at such a magnificent spectacle. But the band is in an uproar about this Single Bottle Theory that has killed whatever is left of Naked Encore, and they’re convinced it came from upstairs. They’re not going to play anymore, they scream.

Brockie is handed an apron or shirt to cover himself. He announces the cops have arrived, drapes himself, and the show ends suddenly as they scurry off the stage. The people upstairs rush to the windows to see if cop cars are on the street, but there’s nothing.

The place empties out and cool air whooshes through the windows, finally breaking the heat and smoke from Slymenstra’s torches.

“Brett,” I say to the major domo Cassis, who has come in with the clean-up squad. “Did you see that? What was that all about?”

“What?”

“Brockie was naked on stage. Can you do that in Richmond?”

“I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything about it,” he says wisely. “Did you throw the bottle?”

“No! It came from downstairs!” We would never throw a bottle at something we were going to vote for in the polls.