Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [142]
and a record FIVE the second. Took me months to get a decent set of songs written with the last buncha assholes I worked with in New York, and longer to actually make it onto the stage with our oh-so-elaborate “show” all worked out. Six weeks here, from first rehearsal to Duke's opening where we wowed ‘em unto St. Vitus in the aisles. It's almost too easy to make music in this town. The Delinquents have their own thing as well as working with me (in fact they sound completely different in the two contexts), and their thing is surf punks. Dick Dale and “Telstar” and alien beach parties and rantin’ ‘n’ ravin’ about whoever double-crossed you this time while the guitars flare free. Of course they’re great (I think), why else would I work with them? No, they suck. They act real mad when they sing sometimes, which is cute. Do I sound supercilious? Well I don’t mean to. It's just that this I feel is the essence of punk. When all is said and done. They also have yet another subgroup within the group, called Pelvic Thrust, which takes them over more towards RFE/Joy Division territory. Pelvic Thrust's most famous number is one I forget the title of all about various friends the composer had who OD’d and croaked on this, that, or whatall. It sounds exactly like “I Wanna be Your Dog” with Joy Division overdubbing, except the singer has more life than Joy Division's. Too bad. We played a frat party on Halloween where all the frats dressed up as punks and even decorated a whole room in black with torn STB posters, strips and straps hanging off the wall, everything spray painted jet black, giant smoke machines in all four corners belching out attars of mystery in which our feet did disappear, while up at the front of the room they’d built a whole little stage enclosed so come to think of it we kinda looked like we were in a big TV set playing. Maybe they figured it’d be more security precautioned for their girlfriends that way. Meanwhile, Becky is hoping no high hep whiskey’d frat takes a notion to go cop some pooz offa one o’ them free-livin’ punk chicks. Becky plays rhythm Stratocaster. But anyway them frat boys sure do have lots of extra moolah to throw around. I never was able to dude a party up to this extreme. We got to be little stars for a nite. We were cute, I’m sure. For instance, I was cute when I OD’d on nasal inhalers, cough medicine, Chlor-Trimeton, and malt liquor to the point that when they finally did call me up onstage to start singing my songs I of course was in no condition but through some transference of memory and association was seeing a traumatic room of my childhood and came on or at least felt like this tragic stricken gloomy poetic young soul who obviously was just too sensitive to live. I slurred through about a verse and a half and half-swept, half-tumbled off the stage. The whole Byronic romantic-agony schtick, with palpable overlay of skid row. Cute, eh? The frats didn’t care. They loved it. They loved everything we did: Byron, Pelvic Thrust, atonal feedback raveups, surf toons—it was all gravy to them. Musta had a wild old time that night. Before the set I walked into a room across the lower forty of the frat house where we were supposed to be able to just tap right up all the beer we could drink, gratis. Of course there was no beer. Somebody pointed me to a 30-gallon brand-new garbage can in the middle of the room filled with some red liquid substance almost brimming over yet still no one would say what it was. “Try some,” they smiled strokingly What nice folks. Southern hospitality. You really can’t beat it. I looked at this tub of what for all I knew might have been the blood of aborted fetuses mixed with chemical waste from bauxite ecologic rape and a generous quantity of Mello Yello treated with red food coloring. Then on the other hand it could turn out to be a consummate blend, importunate yet magisterial, of several of the finer chateaux in Europe's most cobweb-dusty vintage stock. You just never can tell. Momentarily sargasso’d by indecision, I cast back in my mind for some roughly analogous incident,