No Encore!

by Drew Fortune

  Everyone was getting into bigger and better drum kits at the time, like Pink Floyd, who had a huge setup. For my drum kit, we just took a bunch of stuff and piled it together. The performance was the guy on the surfboard making up lyrics, the dwarf trying to get sounds out of his guitar, the gun going off, and me piling drums and cymbals into this massive mess that couldn’t possibly be played. It was like twenty drums, and I sat down in the middle of it all, throwing expanded, polystyrene granules in the air like snow. That was the show! The hippies were completely baffled and silent the entire time.

  In the mid ’90s, I got a phone call from Nik Turner of Hawkwind, asking if I wanted to perform on a tour with the band. I agreed to be keyboard sampler and did three West Coast dates with Nik. We were in the dressing room the night of the first show, and I said to him, “You probably won’t remember this, but we actually did a gig supporting you in 1971.” Nik said, “You were the one with the snow! You fucking jammed all of our effects pedals!” He told me it took them ages to clean them out and get them working again.

  The first Throbbing Gristle record was an indie album, released in 1977, called Second Annual Report. We were the first to put out an album without a label. Side Two was a film soundtrack, which was one long twenty-three minute track called “After Cease to Exist.” When you watch the movie, you get the title, and then it’s blank, which is actually black film. The music keeps going, but there’s nothing to watch. After ten minutes, when you’re thinking, “Oh God, this is one of those weird, experimental films,” there’s suddenly five minutes of imagery, which included a fake castration of our bandmate Chris Carter.

  Our other bandmate Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson was part of the Casualties Union, and they were a group of performers that would act injured or have fits for authorities who were practicing for emergencies. He was taught how to make incredibly realistic cuts and blood, and we did a fast-edit cut of fake castration. We thought everyone would realize it was obviously fake, but lots of people thought it was real. It upset a lot of people but, thankfully, no one tried to have us arrested for showing a snuff film.

  The weirdest Throbbing Gristle gig was when we were invited to play for the students at the Architectural Association in London. In the early days, we tried to tailor each gig for the venue—to do something different every time. One time we found a bunch of huge mirrors made of mylar that we put across the front of the stage, so all the audience could see were reflections of themselves. Another thing we liked to do was put halogen lamps across the front of the stage. We’d turn them on full blast so the audience was blinded and couldn’t see anything.

  For the Architectural Association, we were trying to come up with something uniquely architectural that we could do for a stage. There was a triangular yard between three buildings at the Association, and we built a twenty-foot cube of scaffolding that we covered in tarps. We put all our instruments inside, and we put our PA system flat on the ground, pointing straight up. We had cameras inside the cube operating on closed-circuit TV because we noticed there were TVs all through the Architectural Association.

  When we went to play, if you wanted to see what we were doing, you had to stay in the building and look at the TV monitors, but there was no sound feed. If you wanted to hear what we were doing, you had to go upstairs and hang outside a window, or go onto the roof and look down. The students went nuts, and there was a riot. They smashed down a door into the yard, and somebody actually ripped out a toilet, and dropped it down from the roof. Luckily, it hit the scaffolding and didn’t kill anyone.

  It was a remarkable example of a really unexpected response. They were furious and enraged that they couldn’t see and hear the performance at the same time. They wanted a proper show. It got really scary as the students were hurling down all kinds of crap onto us. We weren’t into shocking people—it was always about the reaction. That’s what was interesting to us—breaking down the traditional structure of what people consider a rock ’n’ roll show.

  With Throbbing Gristle, none of us were trained musicians. We all agreed that we never wanted to become a traditional rock band, and we wanted to create something new and different. We wanted to constantly evolve. Our basic methodology—one we still use today—is to decide on a project, then strip away everything we don’t need or can’t have. That’s how we created industrial music, which was through a process of reduction. We were doing it because we were curious, and we decided that we liked the sounds we were making. We jammed every weekend for the whole of 1975. Our first album was recorded on cassettes, and it broke the old rock-and-roll system.

  It was the idea that anyone can be in a band, and anyone can create fascinating music. You can create any emotion you want to express without knowing how to play. Those glue-sniffers the Ramones said to learn three chords and start a band. My answer to that was why learn any chords at all? Drugs never played into our creative process. We had our ’60s psychedelic experiences, but during the Throbbing Gristle time period, we didn’t do any drugs. It’s ironic that we had this really decadent image in the public eye, but we were really as pure as the driven snow.

  The makeup of our audience was mostly eccentric punks. The first concert TG did was in a pub for twenty people. The local newspaper reviewed the show, and I’ll never forget the headline: “Even an ape with severed arms could play the bass guitar better than Genesis.” Isn’t that great? I wear it as a badge of honor. We also discovered orgone accumulators around that time. Orgone is that beautiful smell after a lightning strike in a storm. It’s negative ions that produce that smell, and it’s poorly labeled because negative ions are good for you. Positive are bad.

  We got an electrician we knew to build us a giant negative-ion generator. It took huge voltage, and it was very dangerous. It had a grill of wires in the front, and a fan that blew the ions through. When it was on stage, we put out a sign that read, “Do Not Touch. This can kill you!” Of course, people tried to put their fingers in it. It would crackle, and blue sparks would fly everywhere. It was amazing. I wish I still had it.

  In TG, we only ever played for sixty minutes. We had a digital clock on stage, and no matter where we were in a song or improvisation, we stopped immediately. We never did encores because it felt like another rock ’n’ roll cliché that we weren’t interested in following. One of the first TG shirts I wore read: Rock and Roll is for Ass Lickers. I wrote on my guitar: This Machine Kills Music. We hated when live bands sounded just like their albums.

  One reason TG stopped was that our shows were beginning to feel regimented. They stopped being loose, and we didn’t want to be one of those bands that toured all the time, like Pink Floyd. We were just starting to get recognition, but we didn’t want bigger and bigger audiences. We didn’t want hit records. We wanted to change the fucking world.

  The most outrageous moment in my career was probably a Psychic TV show at Thee Mean Fiddler in 1989. We were doing our rave-era music and had a great arrangement with certain venues, where they would turn a blind eye to the psychedelic aspect of what we were doing. We had friends that had access to quite a good amount of psychedelics and MDMA. They’d come to concerts and give it away for free. That night at Mean Fiddler, I decided to experiment with chemicals during the concerts. I dressed in three different outfits to match each drug I took.

  One was a pair of white pajamas, that under blacklight read, “Yes.” Under normal light it read, “No.” The next was a very psychedelic, flower-child jacket under the pajamas. The other was just a gray, nondescript shirt. Every third of the way through the concert, I took a different drug. We played for about six hours, so every two hours, it was a different drug and different outfit. The first drug was MDMA, which was very high-grade, pharmaceutical ecstasy. The next was magic mushrooms, followed by LSD tabs.

  There’s a video of the show, and there’s an amazing moment with a close-up of my face, with my eyes rolled back in my head. You can only see the whites of my eyes, and I look like a zombie. The ancho
r was the music, and we had a following at the time of people who would get naked and dance on stage. They were all going mad, doing weird dances in the nude. My daughter Caresse was there, dancing with her mum. It was a fantastic, beautiful experience.

  When it was over, we packed up, but I was still completely out of my tree. We walked out to the cars and realized that none of us were capable of driving. I certainly couldn’t, as I was way out there. People started shouting, “I can’t! I’m on acid!” Or, “I can’t! I’m still rolling!” When all was said and done, it was decided that I was the safest one to drive, and I drove everyone home. One by one. I’d say to the person in the passenger seat, “Tell me if the light is green or red.” By some miracle, I got everyone home safe.

  There was a point where I stopped learning anything with drugs, and I put them down. I’ve got leukemia now, and I’m fighting to stay alive. The last thing on my mind is tripping. I get tired very easily now, which is normal with leukemia. My kidneys completely failed a few months back, which was really scary. I was in the ICU, and they stuck a tube into my jugular vein, which went into a dialysis machine. I just had to lie there, with this thing sucking my blood out, cleaning it, and putting it back. I was incredibly close to death, and I’m only sixty-eight.

  What’s important to me now is getting as much done before I’m not here. I do what I do, whether or not the outside world gets it. People trust me to be honest, and that will always warm my heart.

  40

  DAVID YOW

  (Jesus Lizard)

  While writing this book, I’d occasionally post on social media, “What artists should I include?’ David Yow was unanimously the most requested, and he didn’t disappoint. He probably holds the record for “Most Naked” in the book too.

  We played Salt Lake City one time, in a pretty large room that was about 1,000 capacity, and only three people showed up. It was a drunk Native American, a drunk frat boy, and some other dude. The Native American and the frat boy heckled us between songs. It was the most humiliating thing I’ve ever experienced on stage. It was the only time, over the course of thousands of Jesus Lizard shows, that I turned to the guys and said, “You want to just stop?” But we played the whole show for those three assholes.

  One time we played England, and I had taken off one of my boots and put it on the mic stand. I was really broke at the time, and those were the only shoes I had. Some skinhead jumped on stage and threw my boot into the crowd. I knocked him down and started punching him in the back of the head. Remember the show Twin Peaks—the original one—where Bob comes crawling over the couch? As I was punching the skinhead, I looked up and this long-haired guy that looked just like Bob came crawling over the barricade. It looked like it was in slow motion, and it was the skinhead’s buddy coming at me. I thought I was doomed. Right before he got to me, our roadie came out of the blue and laid the guy out. It was fucking incredible. I broke my hand from punching the back of the guy’s head. Fortunately, I got my boot back.

  Our audience was extremely varied. I don’t think we attracted much of a hardcore audience because we were too arty and weird for them. Drugs weren’t really our thing, but alcohol? Uh…yeah! We would drink all day long, every day. We’d finish a case, then get another. At our shows, alcohol was a pretty important member of the band. There were a few times when I would overdo it and be embarrassed, which led to a talking-to from the band. There was a show in Arizona where the reviewer wrote, “David Yow now owes me twenty dollars.” There’s a live video of us playing “Glamorous” at CBGB, which was night fifteen of fifteen nights in a row. You can see we’re all exhausted but also completely wired on speed. You can see me grinding my teeth in the video. None of us were ever junkies or shit like that. At our reunion shows, the rule was no bourbon before showtime.

  I don’t know what the percentage is exactly, but I’d say I was naked on stage 20 percent of the time. I saw the Cramps back in 1979, and Lux had fallen into the audience. As he was climbing back onstage, somebody yanked his pants down. He finished the set with this pants around his ankles, and I thought, “That’s so cool!” I was pretty tight with the Butthole Surfers, and a lot of times, Gibby would end up in only boxer shorts, and those would sometimes come off. On the only West Coast tour Scratch Acid ever did, we played Seattle, and it was crazy sold out. For some reason, Seattle really gave a shit about Scratch Acid. During the first song, a guy pantsed me. I decided to be cool about it and finish the song. I noticed there were a group of girls elbowing each other, giggling and pointing at my dick. It was so small, like just the head without the dick. I talked to my bass player after, and he said, “Don’t worry. Girls know dicks are like accordions.”

  That was the first time I was naked, so it technically started with Scratch Acid. I honestly don’t know why I decided to do that with the Jesus Lizard. Many times it wasn’t my fault and a situation where the crowd undressed me. Most of the time it was me thinking, “Well, I don’t need these clothes anymore!” I obviously have some exhibitionist tendencies, but if I was being psychoanalyzed, I don’t know how I would explain it. We played the Roxy in Los Angeles, and after I got naked, this girl in the front row kept feeling my dick while we were playing. I put my hand down her pants and started fingering her. Because she was so close to the stage, I don’t think anyone could see what was happening. She just stared at me the whole time. She wasn’t smiling, and that’s as close as I ever got to sex onstage. That one was pretty intense and sleazy.

  I got arrested in Cincinnati once for public nudity. I had dropped my pants at a show, and a friend came over and said, “The D.A. is in the audience, and they said that if you do it again, you’re gonna get arrested.” I didn’t do it again, but after the show, two cops came backstage and put me in handcuffs anyway. They took me downtown. These cops were such fucking assholes. They kept saying, “Oh man, this is great! We haven’t had a rock star in here since Ted Nugent!” I get offended if somebody calls me a rock star. They made me take off my earrings and wedding ring. I yelled at them, “What? Am I gonna tunnel out of here with my fucking wedding ring?”

  I was detained for a couple hours and ended up with a fine. A couple of the cops asked for my autograph, and I wrote, “Fuck you, David Yow.” I went back to the venue, and Sonic Youth was finishing up. I was backstage talking to our manager about the situation, and Courtney Love plopped herself down on a table. She mumbled, “Aww man, I don’t know what the problem is! I showed my cooch, and they didn’t fucking arrest me, man!” I had to show up in court a few months later in Hamilton County. Everybody who went before me was charged with domestic violence. It was all these wife-beating motherfuckers, and when they called me up and read, “David Yow, for recklessly and willingly exposing his private parts,” everybody looked at me like I was Satan. It’s OK to beat your wife, but don’t show your dick! They fined me 400 bucks, and I couldn’t go to Hamilton County for a year. Big fucking bummer, right? Nobody likes Cincinnati anyway.

  I’ve never wished we were more popular or that we had broken through to the mainstream. I’m completely happy with what we did. I have famous friends who can’t even go to the grocery store without being recognized. I’d be OK with being rich, but I think fame is a curse. The reunion shows were a lot of fun, and people said we were better now than the old days. Money was never the reason that we made music. I was worried that, in some way, we did the reunion shows for the money. I thought people were placating me by saying, “If nothing else, you’re making a lot of people happy.” And that’s true. To look out and see those smiling faces—it’s really cool.

  41

  DAVE PIRNER

  (Soul Asylum)

  While forever remembered for “Runaway Train,” Soul Asylum shared the punk “Fuck it!” spirit of fellow Minnesotans The Replacements. Never comfortable in the mainstream, front man Pirner was more comfortable fighting audience members than appearing on MTV.

  This is so hard for me to do, because there’s such a shitshow of memories
that I’ve suppressed. There were so many things that went wrong that I’ve tried to forget, but there’s also the “look back and laugh” factor, which is a good thing for keeping sane. Twenty years ago, that shit wasn’t funny at all. One thing that immediately comes to mind was a gig we played in Iowa City at a bar called Amelia’s in the early ’90s. It was a punk show, and everyone was slamming around. We were playing most excellently, of course, and someone threw a lit cigarette at me, which bounced off my face. I saw who did it, and I saw red. I flew off the stage and wrestled the dude to the ground.

  It was an immediate reaction, which was kill. I tossed my guitar and attacked. Chaos erupted, and it turned into this huge hog pile. We were sitting backstage after the gig, and I was still pissed off. I’m grumbling to the band, “Who the fuck throws a lit cigarette?” This woman came into the dressing room, and said, “I’m so sorry about the kid that threw the cigarette. It was my son.” Turned out, she owned the bar. Then, she pulled out the biggest bag of cocaine I’ve ever seen in my life. She said, “Maybe this will make you feel better” and handed it to me. My only thought was, “This is a weird fucking life that I’ve chosen.”

  It was very chaotic when we did gigs with The Replacements. We were two bands that would drink any other band under the table. During the Bob Stinson days, there was a lot of hilarity and irreverence. The attitude was, “We don’t give a fuck. Where’s the beer?” I still have that attitude, and I’ve never really grown out of it. Even in the MTV days, we had that punk attitude and wouldn’t put up with bullshit. We wanted to do everything our way and wouldn’t let anyone tell us what to do. It became a challenge as we were increasingly asked to do more things. I never really knew where to draw the line because people are always amused by tomfoolery and debauchery. We didn’t give a shit about anything, but we still had to do the job. We still wanted to play our music and not fuck it up.