by Drew Fortune
Most bands are about sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Our story is struggle, violence, and rock ’n’ roll. Violence followed us everywhere. People’s reaction to us was very visceral, and my reaction was the same. I was basically doing security while singing lead, because I would not allow any insult or slight at the band’s expense. I was diving off the stage every night to get at someone. Most fights in bars are shoving matches, and most people who yell shit think they’re protected by the fourth wall. Nope. From day one, I was ready to attack and, if necessary, I would physically address the situation. Back in the platform shoe days, I was about seven feet tall. For someone drunk and high in the crowd to suddenly be attacked by this loony in spiked heels and silver lamé was definitely a sobering moment.
The most violent night of my career was a post-show moment. Before we broke, we were a regional phenomenon in the tri-state area, playing for thousands of fans five nights a week. Being in a confrontational band, if you couldn’t beat up the lead singer, or if the band embarrassed you in front of thousands, the response was usually to take revenge on their vehicles. Until we learned better, our cars were usually parked right by the stage door. The assumption was that it must be one of our cars, and they would smash windows, break antennas, windshield wipers, or slash tires. We started sharpening the metal on our windshield wiper blades to a razor’s edge. I’ve seen people slice their fingers open trying to get at our wipers.
On this particular night, we had just finished our set at a club in Long Island. We had security and barricades at that point, and one of our security guys said, “We’ve got some kids here with a dead battery. They’re looking for a jump.” I went out to let them use my car and cables for the jump. I turned on the ignition and quickly realized that my car battery had been stolen. The road crew had the hood up of the kids’ car, trying to get them going. I walked over to them, looked under the hood, and saw my car battery. It was a Delco Energizer with a cracked cap, just like mine. The odds of them having a cracked cap in the exact same spot was ludicrous. I said, “You fucking idiots. You stole my battery.”
I have four brothers who often talk about stealing car batteries and siphoning gas—petty crime stuff, and we’d laugh about it. Now I’m thinking, “Is it still funny now that it’s my car?” These kids didn’t know—they were just looking for a battery. Before I could even come to a reaction on the situation, the crew went into action. They started beating the shit out of these guys. Since everyone, including our crew, had their cars scraped, kicked, robbed, and broken that night, it was them taking out all their frustrations on these people. I called them off, but at that point, their asses were kicked. But, this wasn’t even the violent part.
We go back inside, and our drummer at the time—an asshole who will remain nameless—was beating the shit out of someone. He was kneeling on the ground, smashing the guy’s face in. I had no idea who he was beating or what the situation was all about. The girlfriend of the guy getting pummeled is screaming and pleading for our drummer to leave him alone. Our piece-of-shit former drummer turns, looks at her, and straight-arms her right in the face, laying her out flat on the ground. I remember thinking, “Shit. Now we’ve got problems.” You don’t bad mouth someone’s mother, and you never hit a woman. Ever.
Eventually, the girl started dragging her boyfriend away. I’m still trying to process all this. I go to exit the venue, and there are twenty-five people marching towards us. It’s about 3:00 a.m., and they weren’t there to be nice. They were carrying bats, boards, chains, and hammers, and they were coming for us. It turned out that our asshole drummer had mixed it up with some guys earlier in the pool room. This was a lynch mob out to get him. The girl had also told them that she had gotten punched, so it was gonna be war. These people, who were looking for a fight but not knowing exactly who they were after, now had an additional cause. Twenty-five guys approached us, and there were only about ten of us. An old school, street-fighting rumble was about to ensue. I rushed into the venue, yelling that we needed help. “There’s a shitload of guys outside coming to get us!”
Behind me, I hear the door slam. It was the security guard of the club, which was run by these old mob guys. These crooked-nose, mobster, Guido-guys said, “Nobody’s going outside.” I screamed, “My band members and crew are out there! They’re gonna get killed!” But they wouldn’t let me out. All I could hear were the sounds of screaming, smashing, crashing, and glass breaking. When the dust settled, I was finally allowed outside. My band members and crew were laying on the ground, some badly hurt. The opening band, Zebra, had locked themselves in their car. The mob had broken their windows out with bats and were hitting and stabbing them as they were trapped. Those guys all went to the hospital.
Our asshole drummer—the original target—was so banged up that he went to the hospital. There were broken limbs, blood, and teeth everywhere. It reminded me of the ending of an old movie called The Wanderers, after the Ducky Boys attack and leave behind a sea of bodies. This was not rock ’n’ roll. One of the attackers had left behind their car, and the club was located on a canal. As a final fuck you, a bunch of us pushed this Monte Carlo off the dock and into the canal. It was righteous retribution. I had a straight razor held to my throat one night, but that night was the scariest.
16
ZAC CARPER
(FIDLAR)
When I first moved to LA in 2011, FIDLAR (Fuck It Dog, Life’s a Risk) were one of the most notorious, and rowdy, live acts. The party quickly turned into a hazy, heroin death-trip, and lead singer Carper barely made it out alive.
The weirdest thing that ever happened to me during a show was on New Year’s Eve. I can’t remember which year, but we were offered to play a show in Highland Park, which was five blocks away from where we were all living in this recording studio warehouse. It was strange because this place was so close, but we had no idea there was a venue around there. Since it was so close, we started making this drink with Everclear and Tampico, which is basically shitty fruit punch. We put it all in a fucking huge cooler and brought it with us. It tastes like sweet rubbing alcohol. It’s horrible. We got to the place, and it was just a fucking trailer park with no stage. We set up in front of the trailers and started taking this weird drug that was like fake molly. We started playing, and I immediately got an electric shock, because the whole thing was wired through extension cords. We could barely play because we were fucked up and getting moshed.
While we were trying to play, this older woman from the trailers came up behind us, pulled down her pants, and just shit right in front of everybody. To my right, there was this steaming pile of shit. She pulled up her pants and walked back to the trailers. We tried to play it off like, “Uh, that was totally planned. It’s all part of the show.” To top it off, we loaded up my fucking Volvo with gear, and it broke down. Then the tow truck driver was completely wasted, so I had to help him hitch the fucking car. It also sucked because I had just met this girl that I was into, and we were gonna go back to the warehouse to party. It was all over once the goddamn Volvo broke down. You don’t hear about literal shit and bands much anymore. I think GG Allin took it to a whole other level, so people don’t even try anymore. It’s a shame.
Playing big stages or festivals like Lollapalooza is definitely not as much fun. It’s fun to see that many people going crazy or the sound being great in a legendary venue. But I miss the days of playing the smaller, DIY shows because it’s way more fun. It’s like learning to play sober. I had to realize that if I was gonna keep doing this for a long time, I had to learn to not get fucking wasted every night. It sucks to say, but it’s a lot more fun playing wasted. I’ve done it both ways, and it’s just way more fun. Everything is way more fun. When I first got sober, I was really nervous about playing. Every once in a while, I still throw up before shows, strictly because of anxiety. But right when we start playing, it goes away.
The thing about playing shows on heroin, and I think this is a universal, scientific truth, is
that it kills your low end. You don’t hear lower frequencies as well. It feels like you’re floating, and it’s a fucking horrible drug to play on. You can’t hear shit. The best way I can put it is that it feels like you’re being compressed. On top of that, you throw up a bunch. I was constantly ducking behind the amps to throw up during shows. Everyone knew what was going on, and I didn’t try that hard to keep it a secret. I remember the day we found out China White heroin was in LA. We were doing a West Coast tour with Off! We only had black tar heroin in LA, so I was drooling. “Oh my God!” We found a bunch of white from Australia, and I bought a shitload of it. I was shooting up this China White dope every night before playing, and I only had a broken needle. The tip was fucking bent, so it was like I had to hook it into my veins. Super gross. I don’t know about the air bubble thing with needles because I’ve shot a ton of air bubbles and didn’t die.
Anyway, in the middle of the tour, I fucking ran out. I was kicking in the middle of the tour, and I was playing these shows totally dope sick. I remember Dimitri Coates, the guitarist for Off!, saying, “You’re a dark motherfucker, man.” That’s all he kept saying to me. At one point, Keith Morris pulled me aside and said, “You’re gonna kill yourself.” Everybody knew, because I looked like I was kicking drugs. You can’t hide that look. Did Keith saying that to me make any difference? Nope! We did a tour with the Pixies, which was about the biggest deal in the world to me. On the tour, I realized that I still wasn’t happy. We played Lollapalooza, and I was still miserable. I went to rehab, and when I got out, I was all ready to just start shooting smack again. Right after I got out, I got a call from Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. He told me to stick with it. It was this weird happenstance of a random phone call that stopped me from tripping out about shit. Ever since that call in 2015, I haven’t touched smack.
17
JARED SWILLEY
(Black Lips)
Black Lips could be viewed as garage-punk godfathers to FIDLAR, as they were the dirtbag kings of millennium male nudity, excess, and shock. Founding member Swilley recalls a gig SNL’s Stefon would have loved: an illegal, warehouse space featuring Georgio, the Human Carpet.
Written by Jared Swilley
It’s been about twenty years since Cole and I started playing shows as the Black Lips, and we had a long, slow climb to the middle, or whatever you wanna call it. Never quite made it to the top, but we made a life of it. In those twenty years it’s kind of hard to pick the craziest show. There were more bad ones than I can remember, but this one sticks out. It was sometime near the end of 2011. We were all renting a place in New York City while recording our sixth album, Arabia Mountain, with Mark Ronson. It was our first time in a real studio and our first time working with a producer, and that’s a hell of a first producer to have. Still can’t believe he agreed to do it.
We always say Black Lips can’t have nice things, and there’s some truth to that. One night after fucking killing it all day in the studio, we decided to go and celebrate at a Japanese joint that was near the studio. The last song we finished that day was called “Raw Meat,” an ode to our collective penchant for raw flesh. Mark had never tried raw liver, so as a show of celebratory solidarity, he partook in the feast. That didn’t go so well. The next day we all showed up to the studio, and the whole place reeked of death. We were all pretty sick, but Mark turned weird colors and couldn’t really move. Turns out he was pushing 104 on the thermometer and had to go straight to the emergency room until further notice.
He got hauled off to Cedars Sinai. That left us in an expensive city, on the clock with nothing to do. Well, if a band is not recording, they gotta play, so we did just that. No legit club would book us with two days’ notice, but we spent the better part of the first decade of our career playing basements, house parties, wherever and whoever would have us, so it wasn’t something we were too worried about.
Now, the reason we weren’t too worried about finding a place was due to the fact that when you spend a lot of time on the road, living like we did, you tend to run into some—and I mean this in the best possible way—shady characters that don’t really go by the book, if you know what I mean. See, we had this old friend named Lonnie (name changed for the story). He was a career con man and criminal that spent a lot of time in and out of prison, with his longest stretch being around seven years. We loved and grew up with him. Good guy if he’s on your side, but not someone you’d wanna go into business with or share your personal information. Still, a good guy in my book.
One of his sources of income was running an all-hours, illegal warehouse space in Brooklyn called The Shank. He had some tenants living there, a recording studio, drugs were sold, and they paid off-duty cops to tell their buddies to look the other way. I called up Lonnie and asked if we could do a last-minute show there with our friends Cerebral Ballzy, a hardcore band from east New York. He said sure, and it was on. What I didn’t know was that he had been kicked out of the Shank about a week before, and the city had condemned it. Being the guy that Lonnie is, he made it happen. I shoulda gotten suspicious when we got there and he took out bolt cutters to open the door because he said he lost the keys. Classic Lonnie.
We get in, start setting stuff up, and there’s no electricity. No problem. Lonnie gets two generators from the back of his truck, and we’re cooking. We hook that up, I go to take a piss, and the commode isn’t flushing. No plumbing in a warehouse that’s about to have 800 beer-swilling bozos with busting bladders. I thought all was lost, but Lonnie knows some union guys down the road, and they get two porta-potties there within the hour. This was a very large warehouse, and the PA that we had was tiny. There was never gonna be a chance of hearing anything. Not that it mattered. We announced the show that day via whatever the popular social media platform was back then, and by 8:00 p.m. it was packed. There was a line around the block. Chaos ensued. It was supposed to be a five-dollar show, which was a steal for us at that time, but there wasn’t really a door person.
Everyone kinda quit, and we weren’t even supposed to be there. The only semi-legit thing was the off-duty cop, but even that was pretty sketchy. Inside, it was about three hundred over capacity. There was no place to move. No ventilation and no exits, except for a tiny front door beyond a narrow hallway. I started feeling lightheaded from all the spray paint. A team of graffiti guys came in with ladders and were spraying everywhere. Everyone was smoking, and it was a hot August night with no ventilation. I noticed that everyone—girls and boys—were using the back wall, or pretty much any available space, to piss. There was a river of urine saturating the entire floor. This was about 9:00 p.m.
It was around that time that I saw a rolled up carpet on the piss-soaked floor, and people kept running across it, laughing hysterically. Turns out, there was a man inside the carpet who was a well-known figure in Brooklyn at the time, and he got his kicks by going to parties and rolling himself up in a carpet and having people walk on him. That was “Georgio, The Human Carpet.” It was finally time for Cerebral Ballzy to play, and that didn’t last too long. It sounded like barely audible, static-fuzz farts, and the PA collapsed because of the mosh pit. Right after that, the shoddily constructed staircase collapsed under the weight of one hundred people.
We were up next. I had two friends post up next to my mic and PA because I knew our stage wouldn’t last very long since it was two feet high, and it was dangerously overcrowded. The heat and fumes were almost unbearable. I’m not sure if we even played any cohesive songs. The mics had a life span of around three or four seconds, and it seemed like the crowd’s goal was to destroy the stage and everyone on it. If I said we played fifteen minutes, that’d be generous. Maybe four or five songs, if you could ever call them songs. It was basically a huge, smelly fight where nobody had any idea who they were fighting or what they were doing. We were the centerpiece of the madness. It’s a miracle that nobody got seriously hurt, at least as far as I know. I can honestly say that was our most dangerous and chaotic show. It wa
s a total blast, but I wouldn’t do it again.
I went to help clean the next day, and I can still smell it to this day. I do a lot of things to my body that can cause cancer, but I think being at The Shank that night was probably worse than a few decades of smoking.
18
NATHAN WILLIAMS
(Wavves)
Thinking about younger acts for this project, along with FIDLAR, Nathan Williams and Wavves was the first thing on my mind. In addition to a blackout Primavera set, Williams offers sobering advice to any young band, warning that mental and physical health is more important than a massive tour schedule.
Drunken, druggy, and rowdy is par for the course when it comes to Wavves shows. The most highly-publicized one was the first time we played the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona. Wavves started as a recording project in my parents’ garage. I was twenty-one and making these records myself, without really thinking about a future, a band, or a career. I had no expectations. I was playing everything myself—guitar, bass, drums, and synths. I was producing everything myself, and the songs “No Hope Kids” and “So Bored,” started making their rounds on the internet during the Myspace days in 2008. It caught on pretty quick, and I was suddenly signed and making money for the first time.
