Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [15]
Who are you?
That’s where Buddhism comes into the picture. Stay tuned.
ZEN ART MAKING MONSTER MOVIES
…then you have your fear, which could be reality, and you have Godzilla, which is reality.
RAYMOND BURR IN GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS
FOLLOWING THE BREAK-UP of Zero Defex in 1984, I discovered the music of Syd Barrett, ex-leader of Pink Floyd, whose solo albums were full of weird dreamlike imagery set to even weirder tunes. It was as if his music were pop hits that had been written on Silly Putty® then stretched and compressed all out of proportion. Inspired by Syd Barrett, I started making lots of demos of my own neo-psychedelic songs. The Meat Puppets, with whom Zero Defex had played in 1983, had moved from hardcore punk to weird ’60s-influenced guitar freakouts, thereby proving there was some kind of market for psychedelia in the ’80s. But the clear white light hit me when I went to see a band called Plan 9 at a bar in Kent called JB’s Down. It was a nine-piece group with an astounding number of guitarists (four!). The number of people in the band was larger than the number of people in the audience that night. But it was the sound that got me. Plan 9 played garage rock in the style of a thousand snotty teenage bands from the ’60s. Think I’m Not Your Stepping Stone by The Monkees. Years later Oasis would rip off this sound, mix it with some Beatles influences, and pretend it was all brand new. When I saw Plan 9, that was it for me. I had— once again—found The Way.
IT WAS EASY TO TALK to the band afterward. I bought their album and discovered it was on a label called Midnight Records out of New York. They told me Midnight was looking for new artists, so I sent the label some of my crude demos. Several months later, I heard from JD Martignon, the owner of Midnight Records. He’d liked the demos and wanted to put something out. By “something” I assumed he meant a cut on a compilation or maybe a single. When I called him back he said, in a heavy French accent, “I want you to—’ow you say?—make ze album.” Gulp.
It was to be a “P&D” deal, he said, meaning Midnight would press and distribute the album but I had to supply the master tapes, recorded at my own expense. I had six hundred bucks in the bank, and the studio where Zero Defex had once recorded charged twenty dollars an hour. I did the math on exactly how long it would take to exhaust my life’s savings and worked out how I could record the ten tracks needed to make up a standard LP on that kind of budget. This meant knowing all the arrangements up-front and going in and recording everything in a single take. Mix-downs? I don’t need no steenking mix-downs! I’d done all my demos alone, crudely overdubbing the instruments by playing along to cassettes of myself while simultaneously using a second cassette machine to record the results. If I involved anyone else, I risked messing up my carefully laid plans, so I decided to go it alone. The total budget for the first album by Dimentia 13, the name I’d chosen when JD told me records by solo artists never sold, came in at $575. It came out in 1986 to great reviews in the underground magazines and sold respectably.
AT THE TIME, I was still a student at Kent State University, searching for some kind of academic direction. I’d dropped my communications major and switched to art; but after practically flunking out of art I’d started taking classes more or less at random hoping something would click. I was taking a lot of philosophy and I signed up for a class called Zen Buddhism. The prof was a scrawny, nerdy-looking white guy named Tim McCarthy, miles removed from anyone’s image of a Zen master. He wasn’t old, he wasn’t Japanese, he didn’t have a shaved head, he didn’t wear black robes. And he didn’t talk in that appalling tone of voice so many representatives of “mystical” religions like my old Krishna buddy