So Much Music in So Little Time

By spring of 1994, I was a curious bystander to the meteoric rise of The Ernies, based on their ska appeal and following in Boy O Boy’s big footsteps. They went from gigs at Crazy Charlie’s and Buffalo Joe’s to opening for the Screaming Cheetah Wheelies at the Flood Zone in just nine months, covering everything currently popular with an overtone of ska. I was doubly curious because the lead singer, Will Hummel, had been in my Cub Scout troop when he was a sprout. Would one of my former Cubs become a rock star? Could I sell my story to the National Enquirer?

Now they were back at the Zone, opening for their mentors, Boy O Boy, packing them in, much to the dismay of the FZ bouncers who warned me alcohol-fueled fights always broke out. (Boy O Boy, if you don’t know, became Fighting Gravity. As far as I can tell, only two of the guys have hung in and for some reason, I would always get anonymous hate mail whenever we wrote about them, usually directed at the lead singer, Schiavone McGee.)

On this night McGee, without the band, started the show singing one line. “All I need is a holiday,” and then went silent. The audience sang the rest back to him. They were good at taking directions. Hands in the air! Jump! Bounce! You could tell they were in college. I almost expected McGee to sing, “Close your bluebooks and pass them to the front.”

(2007 aside: Do colleges still give exams in bluebooks?) Anyway, The Ernies just seemed destined to make it. They were signed almost immediately, yet like Boy O Boy, the style that established them was a passing fad and they didn't sound like themselves once the record company finished with them.

We went to the 1708 Social Gallery in the Bottom, a club I described as looking like a stage set from “Brideshead Revisited.” We sat on white sofas and drank Dinosaurs: Long Island Iced Teas turned green by a dose of Midori. “They were so strong, we attracted Jurassic narcs.”

(“Jurassic Park” was big then. Was that clever or was I still high on Dinosaurs when I wrote it? In any case, the Social Gallery hosted bands like Lovesake which featured civilized instruments like upright basses and violins. Then it became something like a goth disco.)

On a Sunday night, we endured an unusual opening act at the Hole in the Wall, a poet whose poem consisted almost entirely of “Daddy’s going to take out the Harley. Want to go for a ride on the Harley?” The band was Gibbon Hick, with Marty McCavitt on keyboards and baritone sax, Pippin Barnett on drums, Paul Watson on cornet and guitar, and Steve Williams on bass and vocals. I sold an old telephone to Watson once and he seemed very glad to get it. He was in a lot of bands.

“Jazz audiences are attentive. No talking, no wandering around. They really listen as if their collective concentration is another instrument in the band. After the set, they literally passed a hat. ‘Feel free to contribute to the deconstruction of music,’ and the audience willingly did. It was jazz church of the holiest kind.”

At the Sunset Grill, we saw the band that all the other bands hated because they got all the gigs, The Fredds. They were the Sunday night house band at Mulligan’s in Innsbrook and always got the big money shows, the bachelor auctions and chili cook-offs.

“They play progressive dance music! They’re a cover band, but they cover, like, the new stuff on the radio, the stuff you can dance to,” I was told, as I tried to imagine people dancing to Beck’s’ Loser’ or Counting Crow’s ‘Mr. Jones.’”

One night, I saw five bands in five hours in five different places. We caught up with No Small Feet, another big cover band, at Lightfoot’s, a hotel lounge where “bank secretaries go to meet insurance salesmen.” Lee Covington was playing behind a rack of three keyboards and the band tried to resist the pleas from women who just wanted to dance to songs they knew.

“Guess what, we’re going to play another original song and you might not be able to dance to this one either,” Andy Edmunds chided them over the microphone.

It isn’t always easy being a dance band, although don’t tell that to Bio Ritmo. Even in ’94 at the Metro, they had everyone dancing, at the same time declaring the Metro had the worst PA in town. A block down Grace Street, we watched Rocket 69, “New York-style, ‘70’s punk a la The Heartbreakers” drown out their lead singer Dan-o; then we joined the preppy people packed into the Flood Zone for NRBQ. Across the street, BS&M were playing the outside patio at the Sunset Grill, but we opted to stay warm and go inside Scarlett’s for the last three songs in The Useless Playboys set. The stage was decorated in glittered moons and stars that vocalist Mike Geir had made from cardboard he salvaged from Marvin’s basement.

We finished the night at an after-hours downtown place called Casablanca’s and had pancakes smothered in peaches and cream. How did I do it? I didn't pay covers. I had a little press pass I made and laminated at Kinko's.

(I was startled when I arrived at the BS&M website. This band has sure changed, although it still seems to belong to Dave Barton, another hated guy in '94 because he got all the good gigs.)

A private Rites-o-Spring party at Peter Headley’s house on W. Cary was better attended than most club shows, and even advertised on the Rock Line. Headley wisely nailed his bedroom door shut for the duration. White Cross, with the reunited line up of Crispy Cramner, Mike Rodriguez, Joel Benson and Rob Mosby, opened for the Vapor Rhinos. Stuffed animals bounced all over the house until the stuffing was literally beat out of them.

My writer Kami Godbey was no slouch at descriptive prose. I could picture her night at the Metro with Sliang Laos and “a crowd as diverse as a family-sized pack of General Mills cereals. Grunge kids, goth chicks, skinheads, punks and freaks were all jammin’, or maybe all that motion was just everyone trying to unstick their shoes from the tacky gook that layers Metro’s floors. I kept getting stuck to the wall.”

Kami also discovered the Trip Thugs at the Metro and she was enthralled enough to seek them out at the “Thug house” on the 2400 block of West Main. They were Patrick Corregan, John Ekermeyer, Kelly Turner, and Mark Young. They even had a staff “manager and artist” Russell A. Duerr, and soundman, Mike Brady. They had been together five months and were already clocking in seven or eight gigs a month at places like the Metro and Crazy Charlie’s.

They were from Northern Virginia except Young, who was from Salem, and Turner, from Los Angeles. Inspired by Avail, they come to Richmond to seek their fortune, although it ultimately didn't help. Kami got creative with my recommended questions and asked things like when was the last time they were naked, could they tell the difference between different brands of toilet paper, and if they ever had that “not so fresh feeling.” Maybe that’s why the serious music writer guys in town hated the Journal and still do. All they blog about is how great Punchline used to be. Still, I give the girl props, and she took photos, too. After a year or so, she disappeared on me.

For reasons I can’t remember now, we had to Photoshop the band photo Kami took of the Trip Thugs, even though we didn’t have Photoshop. Photoshop may not have been invented then. We took two different photos and pasted them together into one, and it worked perfectly. It was Scissorshop.

The 1995 Musician Quiz

We ran a variation of this quiz in a 1995 issue. All the girls I met who had dated musicians had the same stories about how these guys lived, and a pattern developed.

You have seen every episode of “Ren & Stimpy.” +15
You have seen every episode of “Southpark.” +10
You can quote from memory the entire movie “Spinal Tap.” +5

You are in a committed relationship. +5
You were in a relationship, but she was committed. +10

You own a house. -5
You rent an apartment. +5
You rent a room in someone else’s apartment. +10
You never know whose sofa you’ll be sleeping on tonight. +15

You have gone to an all-night drug store to buy Kwell. +5

You are half deaf. +5

You have more than 500 records. +10
You play on half of them. +20

You have a futon mattress and you’ve been saving up for the frame for the past five years. +10

Your wardrobe is black, gray, black, and gray. +5
Your underwear is just gray. +10.
You don’t have any underwear. +15.

You play in another band. +5
You play in two other bands. +10
You’re John Leedes. +15. (The 1994 15 point answer was You’re Charlie Kilpatrick.)

You have lived in the Fan District. +5
You have lived in The Ritz. +10
You have lived in the Ellwood Sweat. +15
You have lived on the Spine. +20.

You never have a condom when you need one, but you always have a guitar pick. +5
You can make a girl come with a guitar pick. +10

The best time you ever had, you were drunk. +5
The best time you ever had, you were stoned. +5
The best time you ever had, you were drunk and stoned. +10
You don’t remember the best time you ever had, but people tell you it was great. +15

You have a full-time job that has nothing to do with music. -5
You have a part-time job that has nothing to do with music. +5
You work part-time as a bartender. +15
You work part-time as a restaurant cook. +20
You work part-time washing dishes. +25
Your girlfriend has a job. You play music. +30

You have more stereo equipment, amps and instruments than furniture +5
You have dishes, but you use them as ashtrays +10
You have an ashtray you use for a dish +15

You have never owned a car newer than 10 years old +5
You have never owned a car. +15
Your dream is to own a van. +5
You are living in a van. +20
You and your entire band are living in a van. +25

Your girlfriend has dated another guy in your band. +5
Your girlfriend has dated every guy in your band. +10
Your girlfriend is dating you only to get to another guy in your band. +15
You wouldn’t even have a girlfriend if you weren’t in a band. +20

To you, the major food groups are the Village, Joe’s, Third Street Diner, and Denny’s. +10

You can name every band you’ve played in and the set lists for each, but not the last five girls you dated. +5

Your wife/girlfriend has never been with you on New Year’s Eve because you’ve always been working. +10

Bonus points:

You have worked at more than 20 Richmond restaurants. +20
Your bar tab is more than you made playing. +15
Your girlfriend's bar tab is more than you made playing. +20

175-200 points: You are a real Richmond musician!
75-170 points: You’re a musician.
0-70 points: You’re not a musician. Why did you even take this test?

Christine Gibson

Here's the obit from the Times-Dispatch website. Since it is going to disappear from the site after Dec. 13, I've moved it here so it never disappears.

Christine Ann Gibson
GIBSON, Christine Ann, 55, of Richmond, Va., died on Dec. 9, 2007 due to complications after a courageous battle with breast cancer. She is survived by her awesome daughter, Maria Christine Gibson Applegate; her loving husband, Thomas William Applegate; sister, Susan Gibson of Mont Clair, N.J.; and aunt, Hazel Tipton of Fresno, Calif. She was born Sept. 12, 1952 in Newark, N.J. to Richard and Margret Gibson. She left New Jersey and came to Richmond to attend classes at VCU. Once in Richmond, Christine became a vocalist, visionary, and the attitude for Richmond's legendary punk rock band, BEEX. Under Christine's direction, BEEX enjoyed a 30-year run from its beginning as one of Richmond's first punk bands, established in 1977. At the same time, she became vice president of operations at Vatex America. After a career span of 24 years beginning as an embroiderer, rising through the company and ending as vice president, she was proclaimed Vatexian of the Year several times over. Christine was also the creator of the BARBIE GARDEN, an ongoing art installation featured in her yard on one of the Fan's many interesting streets. Christine was more than any of this and then some. Those who knew her are better for it and they know it. Donations may be made to OAR of Richmond Inc., 1 N. 3rd Street, Richmond, Va. 23219.

Hollywood Grill

I admit it. Oregon Hill scares me. I used to have a friend who lived on S. Pine Street, known as “the spine” among the ancient, formerly cool people. I liked going to see him in his dollhouse apartment. Over the years, I met other people who lived in the Hill in various states of bohemian poverty. Then I met people who were buying houses in Oregon Hill and getting these massive, funky spaces for hardly any money.

Still, it scares me. Especially at night. I think it has something to do with the necessity of knowing how to parallel park and the claustrophobic, narrow streets.

So it took much bundling up of my courage to go to the Hollywood Grill, former site of the notorious Chuck Wagon where you never knew what was going to happen and you had a 50/50 chance of ending the night at MCV. But that was the old days, before the demographics of Oregon Hill began to shift.

Hollywood Grill is not named after Hollywood, Calif. It is named after Hollywood Cemetery, which predates Tinsel Town. I was immediately surprised. Oregon Hill is on the cusp of a massive gentrification, with rehabs and new townhouses that look architecturally like the old townhouses, popping up everywhere. No parking skills were required. China Street had plenty of open spaces on this particular Tuesday night. To further acclimate you, the Grill is about two blocks south of Mamma Zu’s.

This is a small place with a wall of booths, a six-seater bar, and one overpowering pool table. The blackboard special on Tuesdays is 50 cent tacos, (also a great name for a band.) Monday night is free pool, Wednesday is someone called Uncle Bob on his guitar, Thursday is karaoke, and Friday and Saturday is live music. On this particular night, an experiment was in progress: do 50 cent tacos need a band to bring people in? That is the question.

The band serving as the lab rats in this experiment was the Harrison Deane Band, in which my husband plays bass, explaining why I made this trip in the first place.

The spotlights on the pool table kept the band well-lit, although it must be very distracting for them when people are lining up shots literally right under their noses. And if someone’s playing pool, you can’t really dance without bumping into them.

Hollywood’s menu is strictly school cafeteria style, serviceable and inexpensive. Sodas are served in the can with a plastic cup of ice, all the better for taste and fizz since Coke shot out of a bar spray nozzle is just nasty. There are no desserts on the menu, but at a workingman’s bar, dessert is a Marlboro Red anyway. Sunday brunch starts at the late hour of noon and there’s a choice of four things! Woo woo!

I thought I was in for a slow night at 8 p.m., with only six others in the place, but as the evening progressed, the crowd grew like an amoeba, doubling in size every hour. By 10 p.m., we had a shouting woman holding her cell phone up to the band and noodle dancers fueled by PBR moving the chairs back so they could undulate to anything that sounded remotely like a Grateful Dead song.

My bill for two tacos and a can of Dr. Pepper came to $3.75 (the soda was $1.75?!). I left a $2 tip because I am just that fabulous, and so is the band. With two guitars, bass, drums and keyboards, their layered, polished sound is worthy of a crowd of 200. But that would have required 400 tacos.

A Trip to Grandpa Eddie's

Anything with the name “grandpa” in it seems like it’s not going to be what’s happening now, but I kept hearing about bands getting gigs at Grandpa Eddie's , so off we went.

I thought we’d find it at the former location of the Three Chopt Sports Grill, a split room in a strip mall on Three Chopt near Cox Road that kept the band on one side and the drunks on the other. But it wasn’t there. It was on the west side of Cox in a brand new brick building. We arrived at 9 p.m. on a Friday, just in time for the band, but long after the dinner crowd had cleared out.

The restaurant, which moved to the Far West End from its original Goochland location, is positioning itself as the Tobacco Company of the West. Most of the places on the West End that host local music are not known for their food. Grandpa Eddie’s wants to be all things to all people, a place to eat as well as linger after dinner. Bands play Friday and Saturday nights from 9 to midnight. The restaurant’s great looking website has the line-up posted.

Jack Taggart, who books the music, says, “There’s nowhere in the West End to play that is totally geared around the music. We need to find those pockets of people. It’s a long way to go downtown for West Enders, so to get a place established out here would be great.”

I like clubs where you don’t have to stand, clutching your beer. At Grandpa Eddie’s, you can sit with a clear view of the band from just about every booth in the place, as well as the bar, which is behind large glass windows, and also serves to separate the smoking area from the non-smoking dining room. The room is a warm, cozy copper color and the acoustics are, in my sound tech husband’s estimation, “dry,” i.e., reverb isn’t bouncing off the walls. Grandpa Eddie’s politely turns off the wide screen TV above the band, always a nice touch. There’s no dance floor. If you get happy feet, you’ll have to dance by yourself next to your table.

Our food arrived before we could even settle into the booth or finish the baby cornbread muffins served as a free appetizer. That was fast! Everyone has their own opinion of barbecue, so we won’t argue that here. The menu is online. We had a sandwich, “Kansas City’s Famous Burnt Ends,” with slaw and fries, and a rack of ribs with collards and slaw. For dessert, we split the donut sundae, a glazed donut with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, whipped cream and a cherry. That was just odd. Doughnuts are not easy to negotiate with a fork or spoon, so it was a dessert that fought back. With soda and tea, our bill for two was $33.55. The house dessert is peanut butter pie.

Where does used restaurant ketchup go? Everywhere I eat, the bottle of ketchup at the table is always brand new, even at Arby’s. How can that be?

Back Alley Hoodoo was playing that evening. They also have a good website and if you Google them, you’ll find links to videos on YouTube, too. They are older, seasoned blues musicians, as are most of the bands currently on the schedule. No loud kid bands for Grandpa Eddie.

I’ve never understood how you can play the blues as a band. Something like “Red House,” which Back Alley Hoodoo covers, sounds more poignant when wailed by one solitary guy and his acoustic guitar. If you’ve got enough buddies for a band, you shouldn’t have the blues!

Tell Me Something New

This makes me sad because I don’t want to come off as sounding snarky, but we really need to control our enthusiasm, at least to reasonably normal levels, when writing about bands. During the newspaper days, when I sensed the reviews were coming from friends and family, I ran them in the letters column rather than in the reviews column.

Now everything goes onto the same web page, although no doubt the readers can detect a biased review. It depends on the size of the room, but normally, less than 20 people is not a crowd. Two couples dancing is not a crowd dancing. It’s four people dancing. Watch those adjectives or you’ll give yourself away as a publicist and it dilutes your message. The very fact that my paid reviewers were so hard to please gave them credibility when they were surprised by a good band. Don’t be so easy that you’re suspect.

And remember who your readers are. The audience on the Journal’s website is mostly musicians, and they don’t really care how good a band is because they’re probably not going to see you unless you’re opening for them. They’re interested in the room, the acoustics, the stage, whether there’s regulars who come to the club all the time or if the place will be rolling in tumbleweeds unless they bring their own friends. If you have insider information about how much the club owners pay, or if the doorman gets to keep half the money, whether the house PA barely works, or the TV is going to be blaring sports right over the vocalist’s head – share that.

Otherwise, we already know that every one of you is the greatest band that ever was and deserves to pack the house with standing room crowds every night. We already know you cover songs fantastically, yet with such originality you make them truly your own. Your originals are indeed No. 1 hits that everyone will be singing next week. We all know you “will not disappoint,” a favorite cliché used in all the hundreds of reviews I’ve published. Every bar is wonderful because they booked you and you want them to book you again, so their food is fantastic, the microwaved chicken fingers are where microwaved chicken fingers were born, the beer is the coldest ever in history, the bathrooms so clean and sparkly, and the manager and waitstaff are saints. They practically give foot rubs, they’re so accommodating. Your thousands of fans are the most fun people; so much fun that all the rest of us must go to your next show and rub elbows with them so the fun will spread. We will have a great time, maybe the greatest of our lives.

Yes, we know all that. Now tell me stuff I don’t know.

Heavy and Light

The Vapor Rhinos were a fun band that always put on a show, but because all their songs were comical and rudely off-color, other bands didn’t seem to appreciate them. Our lavish coverage of the Vapor Rhinos resulted in much jeering. They had elaborately painted stage sets at every show and often shredded a bunch of stuffed animals at the finale. They’d buy up all the stuffed animal stock at thrift stores for these ritual sacrifices.

The band was Tommy Rodriquez, the guy who actually builds guitars, on guitar, George Reuther on bass, Dean Owen on drums and Peter Headley on vocals. Not only did they play out a lot, they went to see other bands a lot, so you saw this gang, together or apart, everywhere all the time. They became part of stories that weren’t even about the Vapor Rhinos. George has disappeared, but the other guys are still in town.

One of the first places I went to see them was New Year’s Eve at the Red Light Inn on Grace Street, a topless bar. This bar was a loyal advertiser for many years and the easiest money I made. I’d walk in, find the guy who had the money and he’d hand me the $25 for a quarter page ad without any discussion as soon as he spotted me. Handing cash to women was just second nature in this club.

The band was never serious, so all the stories verged on crazy. I did the band interview in person at Marvin’s, with everyone around the table arguing with the waitresses about mayonnaise and complaining about morning hair, even though it was 11 p.m. It was like a scene from a Marx Brothers movie.

I used the same basic 20 questions for all my band interviews, one of which was “origin of the name.” Before this, I had never thought about the band names that were combinations of light and heavy images.

George and Tommy were sitting in the Village trying to think of a name, and Tommy wanted something heavy, and George wanted something light and airy. Like Iron and Butterfly. But it was taken.

Or Concrete and Blonde.

Or Led and Zeppelin.

Hence, Vapor and Rhinos.

Can you think of more?

Brushes with Greatness

In the first year of the paper, we covered some Brushes with Greatness. When David Letterman had the good late night show on NBC, not the one he has now on CBS, he would go into the studio audience soliciting stories of commonfolk encounters with celebrities.

Seeing Fishbone was in itself a brush with greatness. I described their show at the Flood Zone as “a happy version of Dante’s Inferno.” The lead singer was wearing baggy gray pants held up by suspenders, but not held up enough. His pubic hair was visible. The drummer wore only boxer shorts and played with his back to the audience, the better to show off the fish skeleton tattoo on his back.

Our technical brush with greatness was encountering Bruce Hornsby on the top level of the Zone, autographing women’s breasts. From there, we watched a female crowd surfer in white stockings, a lacy aqua bra and a flowered dress get passed repeatedly over the heads of the crowd on the floor. Each time she broke the surface and sailed over the crowd, she was missing more of her clothes.

The highlight of the show was a song called “Swim,” which seemed to consist entirely of the lyrics, “swim, muthafuka, swim muthafuka, swim, muthafuka, swim.” The singer climbed onto the amps, reached the rail of the balcony, climbed up and dangled himself over the crowd, which beseeched him to “Swim!” A stagehand kept feeding him more mic cord as he continued to climb along the balcony and finally made a dramatic leap into the crowd. He was cleanly caught and sailed as if sliding on ice from one end of the Flood Zone to the other, still holding the mic. It was totally awesome.

Then we had the pleasure of publishing Anthony Dowd’s story of playing piano for Frank Sinatra at the Jefferson Hotel before Sinatra played the Mosque and passed out from the heat. Dowd was offered twice his usual fee to extend the hours he played at the Lemaire Restaurant until Sinatra left.

Sinatra arrived at 10 p.m. surrounded by guys with walkie-talkies (remember, this is pre-cell phone days), an advance man with a clipboard, comic Tom Dreesen (Sinatra’s opening act), two beefy bodyguards who handled the money, and a coterie of friends. They stayed in a private dining room for an hour while Dowd played, then came out and sat around his piano. Sinatra sang along to “Autumn in New York,” even though he had just performed a show. Then he stumbled through “Everything Happens to Me,” forgetting the words.

Dowd’s hands were aching by this time, but saxophonist Skip Gailes came in to help, and the bodyguards slipped him a $200 tip. Various people kept whispering for him to play “Laura,” Sinatra’s favorite song. He did twice. Sinatra and his party stayed until after 1 a.m., then left. The next night, the singer collapsed at the Mosque and was taken to MCV.

The last brush belongs to the band Animal Farm, a group that moved to Richmond from North Adams State College in Massachusetts because they heard Richmond was “nice and cheap. We didn’t know the crowds were going to be so tough. In Boston, the crowds were just more. It was a bigger, more active scene.” Like it was really going to be easier to launch a band from Richmond. Ha!

I think they really moved down here because vocalist Mike Hsu got a job as a DJ on WVGO on the 2-7 p.m. weekday shift. The other guys, Wayne Driscoll, Steve Gullotti, Aaron Tunnell, manager Gary Engel and soundman Bill Crowell, had to make do in this foreign, backward land. Driscoll worked at Sign Graphics, Tunnell was a dispatcher at Dominion Service, Gullotti was a “food service manager.” They shared a practice space in Shockoe Bottom with Zag Man Zig, All Natural Band and Mirage. But the band’s best days were behind them, back in Boston. Richmond was the beginning of the end. There were rumors about this one getting extreme religion and that one putting a hand in the collective kitty. Either can break up a band.

But here’s their brush with greatness. They met Jon Stewart, then a show host on MTV, now the mega-star of the “Daily Show” on Comedy Central. He was doing stand-up at Shotz in Farmville and dropped in on their gig. “He said we were awesome.”

When Harry Met Sally

Women who aren’t married and want to be sometimes ask me how I met my husband. It was a long path through a chain of bands, which could have gone several different ways – and in that sense, it seemed like fate.

I could have met him right away if I had gone to a Stiff Richard show at the Metro. There was a blackboard above the downstairs bar that listed the bands for the week and I saw the name. The band was Guy Pettengell, guitar and songwriter, Billy Britt, drums, and Bobby Jorgenson, bass. In due time, I received their CD “Squeeze” in the mail and gave it to Peter Bell to review because he knew Pettengell from somewhere and was eager to review it. The review was okay but not glowing.

Time passed and Bell himself got into a band, October. Ironically, Jorgenson was playing guitar in that band, a holdover from the original line-up called Solid Ground. Bell urged me to see them because, he promised, Jorgenson looked like Frank Daniel, a guy from Single Bullet Theory and My Uncle’s Old Army Buddys who I had a futile crush on.

It was true. They could have been related. I saw October at Jimmy Ryan’s and Moondance. Before the Moondance show, the band Thelma Shook had decorated my front door in the dead of night with flyers and cardboard “Shook” eyeglasses, and left me a whole box of cassettes. I was passing out those cassettes to everyone at Moondance, encouraging people to submit reviews. One of the people who got a cassette was Jorgenson.

I still remind him that if he had only written a review and gotten in touch with me to submit it, we might have met a year sooner, but he didn’t. (Small World aside: He went on to play bass in Thelma Shook.)

Time passed. I had heard of the band Joe America. Frank used to go see them play, and never invited me, which made me very curious about this mysterious local music scene that hardly anyone knew about that didn’t start until 11 o’clock at night. We’d go to dinner and a movie, and then he’d leave and go on for part two of his evening without me. Where did he go? What did he do? Who did he meet? That curiosity birthed the Richmond Music Journal, so now I had a reason to see Joe America for myself, without a date. I was a reporter.

This band took me to venues I had never been to before, and never went to again, like the Bus Stop in Shockoe Slip and Cimarron Rose on Midlothian Turnpike, a steakhouse famous for its superdelicious cinnamon buns. There’s a Walgreen’s now on Buford and Midlothian where this place was. I loved their cassette, “What World?” and knew all the songs by the time I first saw them, so their originals were as familiar as covers to me.

The band was Chris Douthit, JJ Loehr, Keith MacPhee, Chip Farnsworth and Merewyn, a background vocalist. The other background vocalist, Chuck, had been promoted to “management” and their soundman, Flash, had gone on tour with Reba McEntire, so now they had Bill Murray on sound and lights. It was the first big operation outfit I encountered. (Small World aside: MacPhee had been in Single Bullet Theory, too. Loehr had traveled with Bell as an opening act when Bell was in Ten Ten and had been in a band with Frank.)

Even before 9/11, Joe America stood for patriotism. “We’re watching CNN, a lot of political debates, we’re thinking about racism, looking at both sides of things. We’ve got the best of everything in America and we should be praising that. That’s Joe America. We go after things harder. We can stand in the face of all kinds of things. America is still a place where if you try, and work hard, it’s going to come true for you.”

Their song “Bad Days” was a tribute to people who fought in Desert Storm.

They had talent, equipment, great songs, enough covers to placate the bookers, a great PA, lights, and touring truck, but there was mysterious “bad blood going around town with the clubs…if you get on the wrong side of people in this town, it really hurts, and we’ve made the mistake of trying to expose ourselves at some wrong times.”

What?

“Where we belong is having the Dave Matthews Band open for us. We have values, we’re straight with people; we’re upfront; we don’t tell lies. That’s the greatest thing about our band. We’re trying to work through the music scene in Richmond, but there’s a whole lot of schmucky people.”

Douthit was proud of the fact their songs varied. “You check the Beatles out. Every song doesn’t sound the same. But you go down to hear Fulflej, the Pleasure Astros, every song is the same, even the same lyrics. These kids have one good idea and they do it every time on every song. We do acoustic, electric, go over the edge, overdrive, but we keep it dynamic.”

The real reason their songs sounded different was they had three very distinct songwriters, MacPhee, Loehr and Douthit, bringing in material. I especially liked Loehr's "Think About a Song" and "Every Little Danger." I still have a version of the latter on my iTunes. "Guardian Angel" and "Lies" were my MacPhee favorites.

Soon enough, they dissolved. Time passed. When MacPhee formed a new band with Keith Clarke called Grumbledog, I got a call from Clarke to come out to see them at Twisters. It was MacPhee’s Joe America songs again, interspersed with Clarke’s excellent pop tunes which sounded like radio-ready ‘90s hits. It was a good show, so I was ready to go see them again next time they called. They were going to be at the Sunset Grill. But they weren't a three piece anymore. They had a new drummer, Farnsworth from Joe America. And oh….they added a second guitar, Bobby Jorgenson. By the end of their set on the Sunset Grill’s outdoor stage, I had made up my mind. It took a couple more shows to bag him.

And that’s how we met. It only took three years and four bands. No woman who has ever asked to hear this story has made it to the end. They want to know an easier way to meet a guy. Or at least a quicker one.

Letters, We Get Letters

Several months into the first year of the paper, the letters to the editor section was rocking, and it stayed rocking almost until the end of the paper’s run. We’d often have two full pages of them, and not made-up letters like Punchline or Brick, either.

This was accomplished by eliminating the biggest hurdle to writing letters to the editor: the writing part. This was before email became commonplace. You actually had to put a stamp on a letter back then. I got a second phone line and put an answering machine and a fax on it just for letters, comments, complaints, whatever, day or night, and that line often rang through the night. This was also more than a decade before the Richmond Times-Dispatch thought up the “Your 2 Cents” call-in line.

The fax line did okay, but the answering machine steadily produced pages of copy for the paper every issue. People called in from the clubs to shout their approval of whatever band they were watching…and this was also before cell phones were affordable, so they were calling from pay phones. Someone regularly called from the Village pay phone to complain about the local music scene. Guys called post-coitus from bed and put their husky-voice girlfriends on the line to comment. Mostly they called to complain about the paper, complain about the music scene, complain about local radio, and promote themselves.

“It’s weird to me that you guys are trying to promote local music, yet every issue is about what you guys did every night at a club. There’s more than three or four ways of looking at the scene here in town.”

But I only had three or four writers.

“The jazz scene in Richmond is tired. Jazz is an emotional thing, and all these white guys in Richmond are trying to make it a technically academic, non-emotional thing, headwise great jazz, but heart-wise, no…All the same guys are still all the same guys. The ones who were popular 10 years ago and running the show are still doing it.”

Guess what, still all the same guys.

“We want to read more about the new bands. You could be using the ‘Lyrics and Deep Thoughts’ page for more band interviews. Just do band interviews and record reviews.”

There is nothing duller than a band interview. It is essentially the same story over and over. Guys meet. Form a band. Think they have lightning in a bottle or a different sound. Want to get discovered. Gigging for dollars in crappy bars to small crowds of indifferent beer drinkers watching sports on the TV right over the band’s heads. Van keeps breaking down. Drummers keep quitting. Get money together to finally record debut album. Recording process is so acrimonious, band breaks up when the album is finished. The two guys most serious about the music, usually the ones who wrote the songs, form a new band. Process starts over.

Then for a few lucky ones, they actually do get signed by an offshoot of a major label, or even a major label. Record producer makes them change their sound to something more like what is currently popular. The songs that got them noticed are homogenized until they sound derivative and overproduced. The band is sent out on some grueling tours with little marketing support for the tour or the album. Label doesn’t pick up their option. They come home, sometimes broke and with nothing to fall back on, sometimes with just enough money to buy a house, start their wife in a business, or open a recording studio.

I don’t know if that’s exactly what happened to Fighting Gravity, Agents of Good Roots or The Ernies, but I do know their shows and their self-produced music sounded better than their label releases. I was especially disappointed in Agents. Their little cassette they sold at shows was terrific. Their label debut CD: barely recognizable as them.

“Nobody cares about bands like My Uncle’s Old Army Buddys and Useless Playboys. You should be writing about bands like King Sour, Kepone, Used Carlotta, Spike the Dog, Bucket and The Seymores. They’re all signing record contracts.”

Then there was Frog Legs, who found a way to do theater on my answering machine. With various members on different extension lines, they could record nonsensical improv in tandem.

“Well, I was riding the mechanical bull with the fly roper and the transcendental maggot when I was surprised to see the munificent cheerleader with the rose pink memorandum stapled to her forehead. Written in lipstick across that piece of paper was: ‘Pretty girls love Frog Legs.’”

This was before digital answering machines, when there was a tape I could remove and put into a tape player to transcribe. I couldn’t do that today. There’s email, but that isn’t as purely anonymous and impulsively liberating as voice messages left in the dead of night, and that anonymity gave birth to much creativity and safely vented the frustration from the local music community.

Bands We Shall Not Name

Most of the bands we interviewed the first winter of the paper in ‘94 turned out to be problematic.

There was the band that won the Yamaha TicketMaster Flood Zone contest in 1993, but I doubt that meant anything, even at the time. I can’t think of many bands that benefited greatly from winning a battle of the bands type competition, which is why I disdain contests. Song contests, too. It’s just a mechanism for collecting entry fees.

Anyway, they came from Hampton Roads to play “aggressive alternative rock,” with one band member in Newport News, one in Colonial Heights, one in Chesterfield, and the practice space an abandoned house in Church Hill where they kept three cats. Poor cats are probably long dead now.

I had a writer who was into bondage sex, and apparently a guy in this band must have been, too, and there was an incident when he caught her being tied up by someone else and people were climbing up the sides of buildings like Spiderman, and breaking windows, and I received tearful phone calls in the middle of the night (from him, not her!) asking why, why, why. Hearts were breaking along with the windows. It was all very sad.

Then there was this other band that I thought was very good and I went to many of their shows. But they turned out not to be particularly nice guys. They got to the point where they couldn’t keep the electricity on in their Fan rental, so they lived in the dark and cold. The drummer borrowed money from my too trusting boyfriend (for drugs, not electricity!) and never paid it back, so I felt robbed. I have since tossed their cassette. I still see one of their most loyal fans downtown from time to time. He must work nearby. Every time I see him I want to kick him, even though he probably didn’t have much to do with the nastiness. I don’t think he recognizes me, thank goodness.

Then there was this folksy trio, who were mediocre music makers, but a few years later, the lone female in the trio wanted to write for the paper. She did a few things, but she wasn’t a particularly good writer, so I had to fix her articles, and she took offense at that because, it turned out, she considered herself a professional writer. She wrote porn on the Internet for money. She did not look the type.

So, during the winter of 1994, we interviewed two bands I can mention by name, Blotto Diablo and Useless Playboys, neither of which caused me trouble. One of the guys in Blotto Diablo actually made crowns and other dental work for a living, and he left for a better job in another state. I wasn’t a fan of their style of music, so I didn’t see them often. Useless Playboys was the house band at Scarlett’s, now Main Street Station, and did a big swing type show in the bar, which is now the entrance foyer to the train station. They were very entertaining, but I never felt comfortable in the room because it was a scene. Their fans liked to dress up in vintage swing era styles and it was like walking through a time tunnel. I, unfortunately, tended to dress more on the goth side, so I stuck out. Jonny Cecka was in Useless Playboys. He played an upright bass and sometimes would jump on the side of it. Always made a good photo.

Pump Down the Volume - 1994

“John and I were working in his office and there was a record on the turntable and it was turned up LOUD. The director of the film walked in and asked John to turn down the music. I think only people in our generation know what the phrase ‘turn down the music’ represents. I saw the look that shot across his face. He walked over and turned up the volume twice as loud. In my opinion, if God is the kind of fellow I think he is, this one act alone should grant John automatic admission into Heaven.”
— Don Novello’s obituary for John Belushi, 1982

“Every sound person in Richmond is almost deaf.”
— Scott Burger in “Throttle,” on why the music’s so loud

Dateline 1994 - John Belushi would think some of the Richmond clubs are heaven. Good, bad or indifferent, things are certainly loud, and we have to ask, if it’s so loud to the point of being indistinguishable, is this what the bands really want? Not be heard as anything but a consistent homogenized roar that all sounds alike?

Nik Turner of Hawkwind had a full-page ad in Swill magazine promoting his Space Ritual ‘94 tour “featuring an amazing light show,” and there Richmond was on the sked, squeezed in as usual between Chapel Hill and Baltimore.

Cleopatra records had sent me the CD and their repugnant catalog. We had dutifully listened and heard a lot of undescribable (as opposed to indescribable) music from guys who were pretending like they were on spaceships or something. We could a) not go and always wonder if we missed something “amazing” or b) go and see something “amazing” or c) go and know for sure we didn’t miss anything “amazing,” so we went, and it was pretty amazing, all right.

A little after 10 p.m., we’re debating whether it’s too early to go in. We want to avoid the opening bands, but Twisters shows are starting later and later. “Nobody comes until after 11 p.m.,” majordomo Steve Douglas says, but there’s a line forming at the door so in order just to secure a good standing spot for after midnight, we are being forced to set up camp on the bleachers and risk band burn-out long before the exalted Nik Turner shows up.

Whoa, band burn-out is instantaneous. They have white-guy dreadlocks, nasty devil goatees, gazillion tattoos, and they look like that Muppet band that has Animal as the drummer. They buckle down in some stance like they’re holding back hell and do something to the very bottom of the top guitar string that creates just a tremendous roar. The lead singer, who looks like an evil troll, is screaming. This goes on non-stop for an hour. Between songs, while sampled “War of the Worlds” type chatter plays on the PA, they turn their backs to the audience and light lots of cigarettes, pass them back and forth, and guzzle beer which is lined up on top of all the amps.

I don’t know who this is. They look like Sleep from San Francisco, rude, crude and multi-tattooed, but they don’t sound like the CD I have at home, so I turn to this blondie blonde guy on the bleachers next to me, and yell at him, “WHO’S THIS BAND?,” giving him a free ear blow in the process.

“THE FIRST ONE,” he says.

Aha ha ha. Wise ass.

Turns out it’s Buzzoven, or Buzzov•en as they prefer. Buzzov•en would have done a good job accompanying the Los Angeles earthquake. It sounded like the ground beneath Twisters was going to open up and suck us all down into a spiral of steaming lava. Equipment breakdowns did nothing to deter the roar. Douglas just swarmed around the rafters and over the amps like a monkey in a baseball cap, gluing, sticking, plugging, and screwing things back together. When the band finished, he swept up the broken glass.

The bill was attracting an almost exclusively male crowd, Richmond’s entire underground science fiction contingent, all these guys who spend their lives in their rooms reading comic books and look like Mr. Potato Head as rendered by Salvador Dali. It was a relief to see semi-normal Don’t Call Me Jimmeeee. We could send Don’t Call Me Jimmeeee on forays to the bar to get beer without losing our camp site on the top bleacher, although he was subsequently put on Twisters house arrest for drawing a picture of the United Nations logo on the men’s room wall.

The band Sleep came on next, and once again there is an hour’s worth of roaring from hell. Anne, who’s supposed to be covering this band for the Journal but has been rendered inoperative because she’s on a date, says, “this is better than a vibrator,” as a sonic buzz saw sound slams the air. We sit down on the bleachers to experience it properly. It is like a vibrator. Film from a moon landing plays on a screen behind them. The guitar player is wearing only red sweat pants and he has no shoulders, no chest, no hips, and the sweat pants are creeping lower and lower. There’s a tattoo on his tail bone.

“WHERE ARE THEY FROM?” Don’t Call Me Jimmeeee yells in my ear. I write on my pad, “San Francisco.” He yells back do I like them? I write back, “We’re waiting for his pants to fall down.” Kami has the camera ready to go for the moon shot but it doesn’t happen. The crowd on the floor is dense and bobbing. After Sleep comes off stage, Red Pants is standing right in front of us talking to somebody. Don’t Call me Jimmee is holding Kami’s camera looking for motor speed or F-stops or something and we go into a panic to get it back because suddenly WE HAVE CRACK! Red Pants’ drawers have now slipped to appliance repairman level right in front of our faces and we can’t get Don’t Call Me Jimmee’s attention to hand the camera back. We’re hysterical. Kami finally rips it out of his hands, but by this time Red Pants has wrapped a shirt around his mostly bare ass. No posterior is caught for posterity.

Now it’s finally time for Nik Turner and as if some walkee-talkee communication is going on, the last crew of sci-fi heads come in at exactly the right moment for the headliner, accompanied by the extraordinarily dapper looking Buzzy Lawler. We swoon. It’s 12:40 a.m. How he’d know exactly what time to come? How do you compute these things?

The “amazing light show” is floating green blobs on the wall. I’ve seen this done better in little psychedelic bars back in the Sixties where some hippie sat in a booth and dripped food coloring on glass slides and held them up in front of a projector. There’s a white strobe light flashing which is always a cool effect, and a fog machine, but where’s Nik Turner?

And who’s this guy trying to fight his way through the crowd wearing weird goggles and a bicycle racing helmet with flashing lights on it, shaking two phone-book sized maraca things? The crowd doesn’t let him through. Goofs dressed like this are so common on Grace Street, it takes awhile for people to realize this is the star of the show! Let him through!

The star is wearing black long winter underwear with electric blue lights imbedded in them. He has an old man’s body, skinny, narrow, emaciated shoulders, flaccid thighs, and a little, low hanging, poochy stomach. But his helmet and goggles and weird mechanical voice and hand movements have a certain erotic style and so we have a show.

Don’t Call Me Jimmee is howling, “They all expected Hawkwind playing with Motorhead and what they’re getting is Devo!” He thinks this is a hoot. We are fairly entertained, but it would have been better earlier without two hours of head-exploding opening acts. Kami says the lighting for a photo is hopeless and has gone; Anne has moved to another venue; Don’t Call Me Jimmee is now formally under Twister house arrest for graffiti crime; Buzzy has disappeared; I’ve had too many beers, too many Camels, and feel like my head’s been banged against the wall too many times. At 1:45 a.m., at a point I estimated was two-thirds through Turner’s set, I surrender, hoping whatever truly “amazing” thing about the light show didn’t happen after I left. (Later I hear Turner played until 3:45 a.m., another two hours! Is this possible?!)

Just as I’m pulling away, I see the delectable Dirtball drummer Peter Headley coming down the street. His timing is even better than the sci-fi heads. Come at the end of the last set, see the finale and pay no cover. Some people have got the knack of this down. Well, damn.

All the way home I hear crickets. Something has happened to my hearing. Inside my apartment I hear crickets. Even though I live in the city, crickets roar in my head all night. Fortunately crickets is not a bad noise to sleep to. Next morning I hear crickets. All day long I hear crickets. I call Anne that evening and Anne’s hearing crickets. Everyone who was at the show is hearing crickets. We now live in an invisible cricket-filled sci-fi environment. Maybe this is the amazing thing that happens on the Space Ritual ‘94 tour.

YOU WILL HEAR CRICKETS FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

Epilogue 2007: This was the beginning of why you have to yell at me now if you want me to hear you.

They Hated Us

From the very beginning, we were hated. Our slogan was, "Everybody hates us. Everybody reads us." In chronological order, the Hate Parade:

1. The first to hate us was the club managers in the Grace Street corridor. We started to go see bands playing in Shockoe Bottom. That pissed them off. One pulled his ad. The only real music was at Twisters, Hole in the Wall, and the Metro. The Bottom was cover bands and frat boys. I was a traitor. Right off the bat.

2. We gave the Richmond Music Cooperative CD so-so reviews, so they hated us. They were the "cool" people, too, so that was deadly. We were the only exclusively local music newspaper and didn't treat the RMC like the second coming.

3. We liked the Vapor Rhinos. So everyone who hated the Vapor Rhinos hated us. The Vapor Rhinos were bad because they weren't serious about the music. (But that's what we liked.) One guy, an acoustic folk musician, gave us fits about this. Then he had a sex change operation. Really.

4. The guys who took writing about music seriously hated us because my writers were mostly female and they wrote more about the social life of the scene and the desirability of the musicians, rather than the music -- the art of music! These serious writer guys venomously aired their hatred of us in the articles they wrote for other publications, often with very nasty and cruel comments about our physical unattractiveness. During the latter half of the RMJ’s print years, I had all male writers who strove to be serious, so the disdain subsided. I still think the paper was more amusing when it was a tongue-in-cheek Tiger Beat.

5. The waitresses at Marvin’s hated us. Marvin’s on Laurel Street across from the Hole in the Wall, was like the communal living room for Oregon Hill. The waitresses there were the lovers and mother-figures of choice for the musicians who sat in there all night every night. Marvin's waitresses brought them beer and food, and cleaned up after them. What more can you want in a woman? The waitresses didn’t like the girl reporters from the Journal invading their turf.

(The cool thing about Marvin’s was within minutes after someone famous died, photos of that person would be plastered all over the restaurant. Also, if someone well-known was in Playboy, they had a copy on the counter you could borrow so you could see the famous naked woman without having to buy the issue. Yes, I mean you, Tonya Harding.)

Anyway, I was an interloper and never received a warm welcome at Marvin’s. In fact, I suspect many of the middle-of-the-night anonymous hate calls came from Marvin’s waitresses accusing me of being sexually frustrated and desperate for a man. One of the more colorful attacks said I dressed in “Garanimals” clothes, a high-waisted style favored by toddlers. That was actually true.

6. Then the guys mismanaging the Flood Zone and whichever radio station was The Buzz hated us. I won't go into it in detail here. It was the whole GWAR nudity, ABC Board deal, which was more about the Flood Zone's ABC violations regarding signage and selling, but the publicity about GWAR was in the forefront in the media. Both GWAR and the RMJ spent big money on lawyers so we wouldn't have to testify against the Flood Zone, but the case was settled in the hallway, and the Flood Zone guys still couldn't make a financial go of it. The undeserved blame clung to us like skunk funk for years. The ABC enforcer tried to shake my hand when it was all over, after attempting to kick in my front door with her foot just weeks earlier, but I was having none of it. She cost me $500 for nothing. My lawyer didn't even get to speak.

7. Local radio hated us anyway because our readers were always writing in about how much they hated local radio. Getting an ad from a radio station was next to impossible.

8. People who hated Frog Legs hated us because we liked Frog Legs. It was another case of the men don't know, but the little girls understand. The guys did have to give props to Tom Illmensee's guitar skills, though. There was a respectful hush when he soloed.

9. Like the Richmond Music Cooperative before them, we gave so-so reviews to all the CDs of the Floating Folk Festival, so some members of that group hated us. One guy's hatred was so far-reaching and intense, I think I could have actually sued for malicious libel and won. But he also hated Wal-Mart.

10. The Metro hated us. After the Flood Zone/Gwar show incident, they didn't want to admit me to shows anymore. I was detained and sent packing every time by those Arabian brothers and their army of gigantic bald bouncers. Guest list? Your name is not on the guest list. That's your name? No, it's not. Not on guest list. No guest list for you. They thought I was a double agent for the ABC Board, or if any of my photos of Metro shows got published, they'd get shut down. Maybe so. There were holes in the floor upstairs big enough to see downstairs. You don't want to hear about the bathroom.

11. Cracker, David Lowery and Sound of Music hated us. I actually liked that band and bought two of their albums, but Lowery didn't like a review I wrote of a Flood Zone show. (I liked that show. What's better than Sweet Thistle Pie or Nothing to Believe In?) He was insulted because he thought we wrote he wasn't doing anything to help the local scene. What we actually wrote was none of the bands he championed were successful. It seemed at the time Dave Matthews' management team was doing more to launch Charlottesville musicians, but looking back now, all the ones he championed fizzled out, too. Remember those solo girl acts who were going to be the next big thing?

12. Then, surprise, Frog Legs got management and now they hated us. Frankly, I thought the CD they did was not good and the girls who worked at East Coast Entertainment told me the feedback from the frat houses was not good. They were not a frat band. They were getting bad career guidance. We said so and got hated for it. The Bone Anchor website remembers the tours as a good time, but then the next entry has the band dissolving. (We don't even get a mention for booking that weekly gig at Moondance for them in the first place. That wasn't easy. We had to chase Chuck Wrenn through the Farmers' Market when he was loopy to get him to give us Tuesday nights and then call everyone we knew and beg them to show up the first few Tuesdays until the word of mouth got going.)

13. People who hated Peter Bell (Ten Ten) hated us. We gave him a platform to express his views. Some of his music reviews may have been tainted by his disdain for the players, but they were colorful. Our gigantic interview with him, which ran over several issues, was very well-read and talked about, even by the people who insisted it was all lies.

14. One of Peter's pet targets was a large and financially lucrative cover band Spectrum. In fact, none of our writers liked that band much, so Spectrum hated us and we got a rep for being hostile to cover bands. (They're actually good. They just didn't appeal to my pierced-tongue writers.)

15. So cover bands hated us. The Fredds hated us. BS&M hated us. And they were the only ones who had money to buy ads! We're screwed! And the truth is, I'd actually rather hear a good cover band.

I forget who hated us towards the end. There's this one guy who sent some super vicious emails just recently (and the old, ugly and fat slams were there, and this guy isn't even a Serious Writer Guy!) because I didn't write something about him on the website, but I just never answered back. I don't care. I used to let everyone have a say. I printed all the hate mail. Now I don't. But I recently found a 2000 interview I did with Scott Mills about the first eight years of the Journal, and we talked about everyone who hated me. It brought back these fun memories I'm retelling here. Being hated is not so bad. At least people were talking about the paper!

(Overnight, a very small, grainy photo of a topless Tonya Harding mysteriously disappeared from this entry! Apparently there are people whose job it is to search and delete those things through the night. Where do I apply for that job? Anyway, I have substituted a more clothed photo. Then a week later, I noticed our famous cover photo of a Gwar phallus being patted by many hands also disappeared. I think you can still see it and other Gwar photos if you take the link, but this is very mysterious. Even the Frog Legs photo was censored. It was just a band photo. Everyone was wearing clothes. Why would it get flagged? Are frog's legs obscene?

Still, I guess it's a good thing that blogspot is not full of porn, even though my stuff was "art.")

Scarien Nation Now Be One

In 1993, I discovered The Scariens through The Weakley Whirl Knews. I was in awe of this free distribution paper because it had no real ads in it and they published more copies than I did. I had to raise at least $500 a month in advertising to print 2,000 copies and they were distributing 5,000. To quote the Sundance Kid, who are these guys?

They were guys with day jobs (i.e., some money). Two of them worked for the City of Richmond’s recreation department, and The Weakley Whirl Knews did more than just promote the Scarien philosophy, it also took satirical jabs at the City administration, especially 2Bob, their name for then City Manager Robert Bobb.

But who they really are is not important here. This is how I found them.

Mad Dog and Chuck Wrenn operated the Rockline. You called the Rockline number and heard a recording of Mad Dog and Chuck reading a list of what band was playing where that week, along with some jokes. Mad Dog worked out of a little office in Scott’s Addition, promoting bands, writing screenplays, inventing gag gifts, doing voiceovers and commercials. He did weekend gigs as a local DJ on various stations. We both had fax machines (uncommon and expensive back then...they used thermal paper rolls!), and since I’m shy, I preferred faxing people to calling them.

He was always in and always faxed back right away, so he was a valuable asset. He clued me in on the Scariens. He said it was a father and son band. Not too many around like that.

I found them at Twisters, playing a show that began at midnight with an onstage haircut. The haircutter was Angie, a girl I would have more dealings with three years in the future when she was living in a rented cubicle in an art space and would come to my Carytown apartment to use my shower. She looked like the child of Cher and Jeff Beck and she was everywhere on the scene for many years. For someone who seemed constantly on the brink of homelessness, she always looked dramatically fabulous. (Another story for another day.)

The Scariens’ lead singer, “Huk L. Bury,” wearing a fire engine red suit, told the audience Angie’s subject was “having the evil cut out of his hair.” The Scariens had a loyal following that I described then as “people who needed to be accompanied by Big Nurse.” Later, after I became one of The Scariens’ loyal following myself, I would get to know these people. A more adorable motley crew you couldn’t ask for. One guy, I recall, got hit by a car while bicycling across the Lee Bridge and was out for a long time. I'm still scared of the Lee Bridge.

The Scariens’ act was, in short, a hocus pocus collage of lyrics, one song sang over the music of another, new lyrics laced into familiar songs, and medleys that went everywhere. “Bury” told me all songs basically have the same chords, so all are interchangeable. (You can extend that philosophy to politics as well.) Costumes were a mix of Middle Eastern garb meets Las Vegas, with what looked like props from old magic shows spinning around the stage. (I always preferred bands with a show. There was more to write about if you knew nothing about music, which I didn’t.)

At a Bidder’s Suite (used to be in a basement on the 900 block of E. Grace St.) acoustic Scariens show, I met a Scarien relative, Anne Thomas Soffee, whose knowledge of the past and present music scene would be endlessly helpful. Sometimes she could even be persuaded to write something for the Journal when you could get her away from the Useless Playboys shows.


Some of our adventures in the mid-90s would find their way into her bellydancing memoir, Snake Hips: Belly Dancing and How I Found True Love. There was even talk of making the book into a movie.

The Scariens knew how to work the media. Not only did they have their own newspaper, they got on the Internet early and there are remnants of them everywhere. They also videotaped performances and got them on public access television on constant rotation, so in future issues of the Journal, I had letter-writers complaining about the onslaught of Scarien concert footage on their TVs. And this was long before YouTube. (I’m surprised I can’t find any Scariens on YouTube now.)

Earlier this year (2007), “Kareem Awheet,” the Scarien drummer, died. Conquering yet another new wave of communication, the band lives on at MySpace.

See also Scarien bozo bucks. I have yet to get one, so I guess this movement didn't catch on.

December 1993

By the second issue of the Journal in December 1993, I was hearing about more bands beyond the few I had encountered at the August 1993 Carytown Watermelon Festival and built my first issue around.

I heard from The Waking Hours – who are still struggling to make it in Los Angeles 14 years later – The Petals, Liberation, Mike Edwards and the Banned, Kyle Davis, Useless Playboys, Shadowvine, Ululating Mummies, No Small Feet, Frog Legs, Bio Ritmo, Kepone, The Seymores, Hegoat, Pleasure Astro, The Good Guys, Mick and the Moondogs, Scariens, Coral, Sketch, and the Dumm-Dumms.
 

The Seymores were considered the best bet for fame and fortune, despite the efforts of Twisters manager Steve Douglas to push Pleasure Astro, his girlfriend’s mostly girl band. The pair would be future major players in Plan 9’s Planetary Records label. Like the Local Music Store, it was another flawed business plan that provided employment for a variety of local music scene characters, without regard to business saavy.

I last saw Steve a few years ago, out on Grace Street where he had moved after leaving his family in Oregon Hill. He was going to Florida and before he left town, he wanted to write a shocking expose of his experiences in the Richmond music scene, but he never did. Some bridges are better left unburned, especially if you might come back.

Over the years, he had some strong opinions about what I was doing wrong with the Journal and when I didn’t comply, he’d withdraw advertising support if he was in a position to do so; hence, our relationship was terse. His vision was that the paper was supposed to be supportive to a fault of the local music scene. We tended to find fault. Douglas later put his support behind exactly that kind of newspaper, and it failed within a few months. I can’t remember the name of it but it was financed by members of Mr. Pink, a band I first enjoyed but then had to boycott because of their invasion onto my fragile advertising turf.

(Mr. Pink, not coincidentally, was signed to the Planetary label. Like so much of the Richmond scene, it was all interconnected and who-you-know, which doesn't always work out well. Sometimes you need who-knows-how instead of who-you-know.)

It’s hard to get out of my head some of the colorful and grimy stories of Steve’s exploits told to me by other guys. Even if they didn’t admire Steve’s music or business practices, they all took their hat off to his equipment, the punchline of many a Steve anecdote. There’s the "on the floor in Twisters in front of everybody" story with a well-known band groupie – who actually has a really good job now – and the "pull it out and whop it on the table" story, etc.

David Fera of The Seymores

The Seymores, fronted by David Fera, scorned the local music press as beneath them. I knew they were a serious band because they had 8x10 glossies. They were meant for greater things, but it never happened. They were signed by two labels, Vernon Yard and then David Lowery’s Pitch a Tent.

Remnants of The Seymores still float on the Internet, with the same publicity photo from 14 years ago, promoting the same three albums I remember, including the wonderfully titled “Treat Her Like a Show Cat.”

In October 2005, the Independent Weekly out of Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill reported Fera was still an “almost famous musician.” His new band was the New Orleans-based Big Blue Marble, and there's plenty about that band on the Internet if you want to catch up with David. (photo)

Our First Band Interviews in Nov. 1993

The first three band interviews were Big City, Dirtball, and The Trouble with Larry. Dirtball had a professional looking, 8x10 black and white photo. Big City had a snapshot. The Larry guys, who lived in a sprawling Fan apartment with cats, had a professional looking CD.

Big City was Billy Ray Hatley, Velpo Robertson, Audie Stanley, Mark Szafranski, Mike Edwards and soundman Karl Erickkson.

Hatley is with Billy Ray Hatley and the Showdogs now. Szafranski still owns Metro Sound Company, and it’s still downtown. He moved from a small store on the northside of Broad across the street to a bigger space. He was consistently the most annoying full page advertiser I had to deal with because he always had to be persuaded, and was very particular about the ad. The deal was never done; it was a constant negotiation.

Big City, which was formed in 1987, was the house band at the Bus Stop in Shockoe Slip for almost three years. They recorded a CD, “Big City Live: Kissed by the Gods” at the Flood Zone, when the club had a recording studio upstairs. Their goal was to be on “Saturday Night Live.” It didn’t happen.

“If you want to work in this town, you have to do covers. We do whatever it takes because we’re old guys,” said Hatley.

Dirtball was Wes Freed, Neal Furgurson, Jim Garthoff, Peter Headley, Kirk Henderson, Jeff Liverman, John Mosher, Mike Rodriguez, Paul Watson and soundman Curt Blankenship.

You can see Freed now on TV commercials for a car junkyard. Headley still lives in the same house on Cary Street, now surrounded by pricey renovations. I went to a party at that house once when there were no interior walls, except for around his bedroom. He nailed the door of his bedroom shut to keep partygoers out. The bathroom was lined with blankets, but you could see down inside it from the staircase. You could see the lower floor from holes in the upper floor. Outside in the backyard was the car that had brought Headley to town. It was one big planter. I hear the house is superdeluxe now, although you can't really tell from the outside.

Dirtball was a relatively new band playing “hillbilly soul.” Their biggest problem, they said, was “Peter’s toilet doesn’t flush and we practice in his house.” Freed would travel through a few more bands with relatively the same sound during the next 15 years.

The Trouble with Larry (scroll to the bottom of article at link) was Richard Sarvay, Mark Abba, and Kathy Jones --who would soon leave the band -- and a drum machine. For awhile, toward the end, they actually had a drummer. Finding local welcoming stages for their “art punk” style of music was a neverending problem, although they could and did play out of town. (The interview was written by Rebecca Edwards, who probably never wrote for me again because I don't remember her.) They were one of the few bands still advertising towards the end of the Journal's print run, although with dark and scary ads featuring two-headed calves.

Their CD had Easter Island style heads on it, and we determined it was cursed. Something bad happened to everyone who had it to review.

“Being self-taught hinders you because you don’t know the rules and you come across stuff in a torturous manner, but on the other hand, you’re not bound by the rules,” said Sarvay in ’93.

I suspect Richard is now selling music and comic memorabilia on eBay out of Bumpass under the name hillbilly_behemoth. I say that because Hillbilly's store is Good Kitty Collectibles, and Richard's music company was called Good Kitty, too.