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)