victory!

Here's one weasely excuse for not writing Euro Like Me often enough lately: my first German language newspaper story! Sort of. I wrote this article in English and the nice people at the South German translated it for me. Maybe I will get to do it again, we'll see.

Anyway it's about being cool and underground, neither of which I know much about, but it's also about Austin, Texas, my hometown. I'll try to post the English text a bit later.

Pictures of Home

Back at work today, though I probably shouldn't be. My chest still makes that ooey-gooey sound when I cough or laugh. Actually, I'm leaving early so I can go to the doctor. Maybe she can give me something to make my boo-boo all better.

I got a nice piece of news this morning though: I may be going back to the US again in the spring! On someone else's dime! I'm excited!!

In these times of financial calamity and associated disasters, maybe this is the best way for me to go back home: as a tourist. A business-traveler, frequent flyer zombie. The truth is, the longer I live in Vienna, the more a trip to the US will begin to feel like a trip to Pluto. But nobody has mentioned this to my heart.

So I'm happy. Working in DC for a week would mean eating amazing Ethiopian food, picking up some good books, and swimming in English, the sweet, profane jarbled-up and slanged out language of my life. And that would be okay.

I do think of Vienna as home, in a way. But in another, less laugh-out-loud sort of way, I think of the US as home. And always will.

But where bexactly in the US is "home" for me? Austin, where I grew up, ate jalapenos as a rite of passage, and got my heart good and broke for the first time? NYC, where I got slick, ate rock CD's as a rite of professionalism, and got my heart broke in a less laugh-out-loud sort of way? Seattle, where I discovered the most ironic pinball arcade in the country? Los Angeles, where I "hung out" with punk and hip hop stars, and otherwise lived like an expense account king? South Dakota, where we buried my father? Or was home for me truly the back of an Econo-line van, wedged in between the drum kit and the guitars, where I lay, furiously scribbling too many adjectives into a notebook just like the one I'm writing in today?

Home is all of those places and none of those places. In other words, home is just an idea. Home is old times, good times, a lost world. I can't go back there.

I am sure I'd like to go shopping, stuff my face and even maybe see some old friends in the USA. That would be so fucking...fun.

More Useless Lists, part 17

Places I have Bowled

1) Golem Bowl, Zlin, Czech Republic

2) Dart Bowl, and

3) Bowl-O-Rama, both Austin, Texas

4) the basement of an ancient music hall in the East Village ( I was wearing a lime-green polyester jumpsuit and a pair of fuzzy dice)

5) Brunswick Lanes, Wien

6) unknown shopping mall, Warsaw, Poland

7) Pioneertown (once owned by Roy Rogers!) Joshua Tree National Park

8) Chelsea Lanes, and

9) Bowl-Mor, both New York City

10) unknown old alley, Hollywood, California, USA.



Toys and Junk I once Owned

1) Spirograph

2) Major Matt Mason doll(s)

3) GI Joes

4) Legos

5) Baseball Cards, Football Cards and Wacky Packages

6) 45 RPM flexidiscs of songs by the Archies and Bobby Sherman, cut from the back panels of Honeycone and AlfaBits cereal

7) Many, many issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine

8) More than a few 7-11 baseball player souvenir Slurpee cups (including Roberto Clemente)

9) Aurora Model kits of Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolfman

10) Etch-a-Sketch.

50 Concerts

(Normally I don't do this sort of thing. Possibly because I like making lists too much. Like serial killer too much. But an old friend on Facebook started it and I needed to do this one. It's interestingly non-chronological. Facebook? Why would I need another time-sucking vortex in my life--I've got kids!)


1) Lynyrd Skynyrd opening for the Doobie Brothers, Austin Municipal Auditorium, Austin, Texas 1973 (my first)

2) Kreisky opening for TV on the Radio, Arena, Vienna, 2009 (my last)

3) The Replacements, The Continental Club, Austin, 1984?

4) The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Steamboat Springs, Austin, 1984

5) Standing Waves, in the parking lot of Inner Sanctum Records, Austin, 1980

6) The Punk Prom (Dicks, Big Boys, Sharon Tate's Baby), Armadillo World Headquarters, Austin, 1980

7) The B-52's, Armadillo World Headquarters, 1979

8) Journey, Austin Municipal Auditorium, 1978?

9) Peter Frampton, and Gary Wright, the "Dream Weaver," at a rock festival right next to Interstate 35, Austin

10) Rank and File, Dukes Royal Coach Inn, Austin, 1981?

11) Gang of Four, Club Foot, Austin, November 4, 1980 (the night Ronald Reagan was elected)

12) Fela, Austin City Coliseum, 1986

13) Devo, Armadillo World Headquarters, 1979

14) Butthole Surfers, Club Foot, Austin, 1982

15) Butthole Surfers, The Ritz, New York City, 1988

16) Terminal Mind, Rauls, Austin, 1980

17) Meat Joy, Voltaire's Basement, Austin, 1984?

18) Doctor's Mob, at a volunteer fire department garage, South Austin, 1984?

19) True Believers, UT Student Union, Austin, 1986

20) Flaming Lips, the Beach, Austin, 1985?

21) Pussy Galore, Siberia, New York City, 1988?

22) My Bloody Valentine, Maxwells, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1989

23) My Bloody Valentine, the Ritz, New York City, 1992

24) Laibach, the Palladium, New York City, 1989

25) Orbital, Lollapalooza, Randalls Island, NY, 1996?

26) Jane's Addiction, Madison Square Garden, NYC, 1990

27) Kiss (in 3-D, with 3-D glasses and 3-D rear-screen projections), Paramus?, New Jersey, 1998

28) Sun Ra, at dawn on the summer Solstice, Battery Square Park, New York City, 1989

29) The Residents, Warsaw, Brooklyn 2004?

30) Sonic Youth, Continental Club, Austin, 1985

31) Sonic Youth, the Ritz, NYC, 1988

32) Sonic Youth, Arena, Vienna, Austria

33) George Clinton, with members of ParliamentFunkadelic, playing "Tear the Roof off the Sucka" several times for a scene in a justifiably forgotten frat boy movie, 1992?

34) Teenage FanClub, unknown auditorium, Glasgow, 1991

35) Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Madison, Wisconsin, 1993

36) Fatboy Slim, Bowery Ballroom, New York City, 1999

37) Lenny D, a sports bar dive that reaked of PCP, some somewhere in Queens, 2000

38) Kraftwerk, Hammerstein Ballroom, NYC,2004?

39) Chemical Brothers, Hammerstein, NYC, 1998

40) Nirvana, Roseland, NYC, 1993

41) Fanfare Ciocarlia, sZene Wien, 2006?

42) Kaizers Orchestra, Arena, Vienna, 2007

43) Mudhoney, Pyramid, New York City, 1990

44) DopplerEffekt, the new club on Bleecker Street, New York City, 2009

45) Paul Oakenfold, Bowery Ballroom, NYC, 1998

46) Wire, Fluc, Vienna 2009

47) Rush, Armadillo World Headquarters, Austin, Texas, in either 1976 or 2112

48) Radiohead, unknown mega-auditorium, Brighton, England, 1998?

49) T Model Ford, under a tree, in a parking lot, somewhere in Mississippi, 2003

50) unknown homeless man, blowing twenty seconds of horrible saxophone noise, downtown No. 1 subway train, Harlem, USA, 1996.

Back in the Day, Part Two: an Open Question for you, Dear Reader

Five years later, the Austin punk and hardcore scene had burned up and blown away. Raul's got shut down and became the fratboy-friendly Texas Showdown; Voltaire's Basement reverted to being just a basement. Like some of the other best and brightest, Terry Marks left town: I did finally get to have an actual conversation with her, but I had to move to New York City to do it. Curiously enough though, the Hickoids--as a concept and an influence, if not as an actual band--did survive: in 1995, for example, my younger brother was playing drums in a country-punk band who revered the Hickoids, though they may have never seen them play.

But I believe the Austin punk, new wave and hardcore scene of 1979-1985 left permanent stains on the city, its music and its culture. In fact, as non-snoozing readers may have guessed, I'm working on an essay about this era for an upcoming museum show in Austin. Because of this, and because I know a lot of my Austin friends will have their own ideas about it, I'm gonna do something I've never done before (tee hee): I'm asking an open question or two of Euro Like Me readers, especially any of you Austin folk who are still tuning in. (Ed, are you there? B, are you still checking me?) Here's the question(s): What is the legacy of bands like the Big Boys, the Dicks, the Butthole Surfers and Scratch Acid in the Austin of today? Who are the extreme or amazing and freaky bands of 2008, and do they owe any debt of influence to some of the aforementioned superfreaks? And do any clubs in the city bear the traces of great old venues like Club Foot or Dukes Royal Coach or the Beach?

Back in the Day, part 1

I don't live in Austin, Texas, anymore, but I was at the Fluc, my favorite cool-kids bar the other night, and it made me think of the golden era of punk rock in my hometown: of Raul's club, and the Hickoids, and Terry Marks. It may be standard for bohemians the world over to believe that their local bands, and their club, and their scene is utterly unique and awesome. But it isn't always so.

So as I leaned against the DJ booth at the Fluc, too tired to blink, I watched a dumb-ass student film, shot in black and white and projected on the wall. It seemed intended as a film-noir remix of Mother Goose. Five feet away from me, a lithe, foxy lesbian was canoodling with her girlfriend. Then she crossed the room, started flirting with a man, and left with him! Finally, a conceptual artist, wearing one of those clean suits the Centers for Disease Control folks use when there is an outbreak of bat pox, swept through the club telling everyone that the next act of her S & M puppet show was about to begin on the sidewalk outside the place.

Actually, now that I think about it, the Austin punk and hardcore scene, ca. 1984, was usually not quite this silly.

But there are parallels. Back in the day, on any given night in the clubs--Raul's, the Ritz, Club Foot, Uncle SuSu's, Studio 29, Voltaire's Basement--you might have seen a singer with a toy airplane glued to her head, fronting an unlistenable new wave band. Or you might have gawped helplessly as David Yow, the singer for Scratch Acid, attacked Gibby Haynes, the singer for the Butthole Surfers, smashing him over the head with a beer bottle, and then grabbing the microphone to take over the song the Buttholes had been playing!

For every renegade who didn't get the attention from the scene that he deserved, like the filmmaker and experimental musician Bryan Hansen, who died very young, there was a band who probably got more juice than they deserved, like the Hickoids, who turned corn-pone and country punk into low art. Sort of.

And even though Austin bands like Scratch Acid, the Big Boys and the Dicks later became legends, especially for people who never saw them play, we tend to forget that this was a bar scene, and all this amazing music was spilling off the stage even as everyone else in the place was trying to get laid, look cool and/or drink themselves blind. Even as I craned my neck to get a better view of bands like Poison 13 or Sharon Tate's Baby, I was really hoping for a brief glimpse of Terry Marks, the foxiest motorcycle-riding, moshpit-conquering, asymmetrical haircut-having chick on the scene.

(To Be Continued)

texas hardcore explosion 1985 yeah! (it's on)

Now I've really done it. I did that thing I said I was gonna do. You know, that thing with the punk rock fotos. That.

So: All of you dear people are most lovingly invited to my new blog, which is more like an exhibition disguised as a blog. It's all photographs I took in Austin many many years ago of some of the people and bands I thought were the coolest cats pajamas what ever lived. It has a long unwieldy name, which may cause Google's web crawlers to mistake it for some sort of cowboy porn site, but hey, if that results in increased traffic to these pictures, I'm all for it. I've also set up a flickr site, and that looks pretty cool as well (I suggest viewing the pictures as a slideshow!) Here's the links:

http://texashardcore1985.blogspot.com/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26887314@N02/

I finished the flickr thing yesterday, then ran the slideshow to review it, and just started beaming. I was so happy and proud to see all of these old faces on the web screaming back at me and transmitting immortal. We were all so young and skinny and beautiful in our own scruffy way. We knew that the Big Boys had invented punk funk before our very eyes, that David Yow was the funniest homosapiens on the planet, and that the Butthole Surfers were the wildest band this side of Uranus. We thought we were culture rebels like none before us, and even if we were wrong about that last part, does it really matter?

Dirty-ass r & R

I've been hit by a couple of waves of hardcore nostalgia lately. In a lifetime previous to the one before the one before this one, I was one of the guys who always brought a camera to the punk rock show in my hometown. Since my hometown was Austin Texas, and this was in the mid-1980's, a lot of pretty great bands passed before my eyes, and some of them left an impression (and a few dents) in my camera. Some of these bands went on to be nationally known, if not exactly famous, like Doctors Mob, True Believers, Poison 13 and the Offenders. Some of the performers definitely were, and still are, infamous, like the Butthole Surfers and Daniel Johnston. And then there were bands that were somewhere in the middle, like Scratch Acid.

Scratch Acid were Brett Bradford, Rey Washam, David Sims, and David Yow. Brett was quiet and restrained, Sims controlled and vaguely menacing, Washam tempramental and probably the best drummer in Texas, Yow was a great frontman, and the most hilarious guy on the planet. For some of these reasons, and for their ferocious music, SA became known in some other regional hotspots, like pre-Nirvana Seattle (I imagine Kurt Cobain was familiar with wild-ass Scratch Acid magic), but they never became Mega. Sims and Yow's next band, Jesus Lizard, were better known (and hopefully better paid.)



But Scratch Acid.....boo-yah. They were truly amazing: scary, thunderous, cacaphonic and funny. They were as heavy as Led Zeppelin, but far more unhinged.

There's a guy in DC who's making a movie about Scratch Acid, and I want him to see these pictures, so that's one of the reasons I'm posting them. Looking at the images now, I'm struck by how sharply they document a pretty blurry phenomenon and cultural moment in my past. Scratch Acid burned across my life like some sort of a hairball meteorite, and though I couldn't have known it at the time, my life then was as wide-open as their music. Anything could have happened at one of their shows, and anything could have been around the next corner for me. But inscribed into these pictures is exactly who they were, and exactly who I was. You can see just how Yow wrapped his cowboy boots in duct tape, and you can see that I was one of the (many) people who loved the way he did that.

I'm so glad I have these pictures. Without them, I would be tempted to think Scratch Acid slayed me because I was young and stoopid. Now I know I didn't dream them. I can be sure that they were the real deal: bonified slobbbery monsters of rock.

the old gigs

Naturally, I'm not supposed to blog about my new job, so with apologies to Bukowski's Factotum, I'd like to offer my past and future Employee Index.

Most Ridiculous Job Ever Held:
Arcade Attendant and Manager, Austin, Texas, 1983? My duties included giving change, even though there was a change machine, and scolding Scientologists for smacking around the pinball machines.

Number of Movie Theatres I worked at in Austin and San Antonio:
Five

Number of Ice Cream Parlors I worked at:
Two

Worst On-the-Job Injury Ever:
While working in a shopping mall taco stand, I chopped up a mess of jalapeno peppers, got the juice on my fingers, and didn't wash my hands. Ten minutes later, I put in my contact lenses.

Most Justifiably Unpaid Job Held:
Manager of a rock band. I criticized the drummer for "ting-tinging" too much.

Profession in Which I Least Excelled:
Roadie.

Best Exchange Witnessed Within the New York City Magazine Business:
"We should do a music feature on Stone Temple Pilots."
"Why?"
"Because they sound just like Pearl Jam, but they do press."

Most Shameful Resignation:
Quitting my gig as a photographer's assistant by leaving a note on his apartment door.

Most Uncharacteristic Gig for Someone who has Trouble Operating a Can Opener:
Writing about technology for Wired magazine.

Second Most Uncharacteristic Gig:
Writing about water monitoring technology for a Viennese water monitoring company.

Coolest One Day Job:
Production Assistant for a Bill Moyers TV special on the history of the song "Amazing Grace." We shot one scene in a sweltering Baptist church in a rough neighborhood in Philadelphia, and the choir who sang the song were amazing.

Dream Job, age 70:
the guy in the Godzilla suit for Godzilla Versus Glendale (in production, 2032)

The Songs I Used to Sing Her

I've added a new lullabye to my repertoire for Adinah's bedtime. It's "Love Bug" by George Jones, a sweet but thoroughly ridiculous country and western song from the Sixties. I thought she might like to know why I call her "bug" all the time (although the real reason is that back in Texas, saying someone is "cute as a bug" is a form of high praise). And now that she's starting to understand most of the words that I'm singing to her, it's about time I introduce a song that isn't about desperation, loss or murder.

My choice of nighty-night songs for Adinah has always been mildly perverse. They're all songs that I love, and like to sing (in my homely, atonal croak) but they're not exactly Blues Clues material. For a while, I was doing "Roam" by the B-52's, which is about wanderlust, and loving someone enough to let them go. That made sense (to me) because Adinah's been a world traveler since she was eight months old, beginning with a two day road trip in a Toyota Landcruiser from the north of Ethiopia to the capitol, where we met her for the very first time.

I still sing Otis Redding's "(Sitting on the)Dock of the Bay" to Deanie,and no two ways about it, that's a sad sad song. Is the protagonist actually homeless, or just achingly lonely? I don't know, but it's always killed me when Otis starts whistling at the end of the number, and that, plus the way the bass bumps, and the wave sound effects that come in, makes the record sound like the most peaceful end of the road a living human can reach. So far, Adinah hasn't asked me any questions about what that song means, but she will soon enough.

Then there's "El Paso" by Marty Robbins, the original country crooner. I must have been listening to this song since I was 8, first on AM radios, then on Radio Shack stereos, then on CDs, but it only started making me cry when I got to be a grown-ass man, fully informed about what bad love can do to a cowboy (or a NYC rock critic.) Maybe I wanted to sing it to my daughter because El Paso was the town where my father lived and died. Or I started doing this one at bedtime because it's long and repetitive and I thought that would be soothing for D. When she was small, she'd always conk out just after the hero shoots his rival dead, but way before he himself dies in a hail of bullets. But really I just wanted to sing it to myself, because it may be the most gorgeously tragic song I know, and because it really does make me think of the sound of the wind on a moonless night in the West Texas desert.

Nevertheless, now that Adinah's starting to stop me after every line of it and ask why the first cowboy hurt the second one, well, maybe I'll phase "El Paso" out of my regular set.

"Love Bug" is a bit more upbeat. The chorus goes like this:

"Well, the little itty bitty teenie weenie thing they call the love bug\Nobody's ever seen it but it's got the whole world shook up\It all started with a little bitty kiss and a hug\Just a teeny weeny itty bitty thing they call the love bug!"

More Personal Questions

A friend back in New York forwarded me a questionaire, and it seemed relevant to those of us here at Euro Like Me headquarters, so I got up at six-thirty a.m. and started answering the section marked "MORE PERSONAL QUESTIONS." This is as far as I got....


- Can you make a list of the different places where you have lived until now?
As a kid I lived in North Dakota, though I was too young to remember much of that. The Dakotas were bound up with all the Norwegian food jokes my father made about lefsa and lutefisk, and all the stories he told about his family. I think I remember falling down on an icy bridge and biting through my lip in Wahpeton, but that could be a "recovered" memory.

I grew up in Austin, Texas. Suburban tract house, cool college town, suffocatingly snug at the end. I was a bookworm, then a stoner, then a drama fag and a stoner, then a new waver, then a journalist.

I moved to San Antonio, Texas (also a very cool town) to live with an experimental, multi-ethnic post-punk band of vegan anarchists. That lasted for a couple of months. After they caught me eating ham sandwiches and listening to Elton John, I slunk back to Austin.

Age 25 I moved to New York City. Stayed there for eighteen years. Nice place.

In May of 2005, my wife and kid and me moved to Vienna, Austria.



- How would you trace your personal background up until the moment you were born? What are the most significant points of your parents and grandparents pathways? Where are they from? And if they moved from place to place, why?
My great grandparents, Ole and Tomine, moved to South Dakota from Norway. It was an arranged marriage, and it was said that she watered her rose garden with her own tears. My father never knew his father. Dad grew up very poor and handicapped--he contracted polio as a kid, and nearly lost an arm to it. He studied social work, met my Mom, worked for a time on an Indian reservation, and then they moved to Texas and had me.

My mom's grandfather, Bennett Kerbow, ran the general store in the tiny west Texas town of Mertzon. He was a very high-ranking Mason, he sometimes carried a gun, and I remember him as a kind old man. My mom's father ran a Coca Cola plant. He was a bit of a grump and more than casually racist, but he was a good father to her: he taught her how to dance to country and western music, and he cried when she got old enough to thank him for that. Ma studied speech therapy in North Dakota, met my father, and then they moved back down to Texas. She had my older brother, then she had a daughter, Katherine, who died. Then she had me.

My parents raised my two brothers and I in Austin. They got divorced, and eventually my father moved to El Paso, Texas. My older brother left to live on the open prairie. I moved out to live with my new wave girlfriend in a beat-up commune called Halcyon. My mom left to marry a man in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. That left my younger brother living all alone in the house we grew up in, and I think that got to be pretty depressing for him.