TexA.N.S. recorded its February 1986 performance for its first release, Live at Sons + Daughters Hall, a collection of 16 songs including the tongue-in-cheek “Big Dead Things,” a warning to step carefully across the kitchen and the front lawn.
Maynard collaborated on the band’s second release, Never Again, an independently produced 17-track cassette of garage punk. He did the best he could on bass—and unwilling to completely abandon the visual, created album art for both Never Again and local band Reel Bodeans’s single “I Won’t Take It.”
Porker’s unexpected move that spring left the band without a vocalist, and Maynard stepped up to fill the role. With a bass player and rhythm guitarist, a drummer, and Kevin on lead guitar, the band was complete. But it wasn’t long before Maynard realized it wasn’t merely TexA.N.S. reconfigured. The band was C.A.D.
Maynard’s ’76 Plymouth Arrow with its Batman logo and tiger stripes soon became a familiar sight on the Grand Rapids streets. Between classes, he dashed to the copy shop to run off fliers announcing upcoming C.A.D. performances and crisscrossed the city to attach them to message boards and lampposts, creating a grassroots buzz that reached the WLAV studios.
“The station did special programming for that kind of music,” Aldrich would recall. “Some of C.A.D. was almost novelty, some of it was noise. But then there was a sound like early Tangerine Dream. There were things in C.A.D. that if Maynard had had a producer, they would have gone, ‘Oh my God!’”
C.A.D. saw its media debut in April as part of public access station GRTV’s 1987 Peace Day programming. The 26-minute performance featured seven songs, Maynard, his eyes rimmed in black eyeliner, glaring intermittently at the camera as he sang. In his black tank top and tight black pants rolled midcalf just above the laces of his Grecian sandals, he tossed his head in time to the music to better call attention to his Mohawk and the bleached strands in his long curls. He strutted back and forth across the stage, his single metallic earring glittering.
In an interview following the performance, Maynard explained the meaning of the acronym C.A.D. “It’s not really a band name,” he said. “It’s more a concept behind what we’re all about. It stands for Children of the Anachronistic Dynasty, which is kind of like a bloodline of youth born out of sync with time, out of sync enough to where they sit back and observe rather than just take things for granted.”
Maynard wasn’t content to limit his work to one band and branched out with Meengs to form the short-lived Malicious Sissies, a hybrid punk-digital duo locally known for a time for its songs “Hallucination” and “Who Leads You?”
Mike was a computer dude who loved drum machines and programming and sequencing. He and I would go to Gaia, this coffee shop and organic restaurant on Diamond Avenue. They had an open mic night that was mostly acoustic, and “Last Train to Clarksville” was always the closing number.
Mike and I get there with a drum machine and I’m singing with a delay pedal through the mic. We were doing a very digital thing in a very crunchy granola setting, and people actually paid attention.
But C.A.D. was the band that true punk aficionados followed from gig to gig, from the Intersection bar downtown to the City Centre Mall, where shoppers paused in their quest for golf shirts and pillowcases and oversized chocolate chip cookies to stand and listen.
C.A.D. stood beneath the flashing lights of Top of the Rock, the audience clustered at the stage, eager to be among the first to hear “Burn About Out.” They swayed in the spiral of staccato percussion echo, Maynard’s insistent lyrics rising above the surge of sound. Count the bodies, he urged them, take note of the specter lurking just behind
Waiting like a stalking butler
Who upon the finger rests.
Murder now the path of “must we”
Just because the son has come.
“Keep going with that,” Chris Ewald told Maynard after the show. “That’s the song. Whatever that is, keep pursuing it.”
With C.A.D.’s popularity came the attention of Grand Rapids girls keen to date someone just like Maynard. It was the rare evening that no one waited for him after a C.A.D. performance or accompanied him to one of the clubs downtown.
A guy in a leather coat and a Mohawk is absolutely the polar opposite of what their fathers would choose for them. I’m the outsider, the guy not allowed to pollute the gene pool in any way. And I had the keys to the chastity belt. There was a lot of making up for lost time in those years, and I definitely made some mistakes, but I wouldn’t change any of it.
The highlight of the summer would be Black Flag’s Grand Rapids stop as part of its 1986 Michigan tour, Maynard’s opportunity to once again experience the band he’d seen in Austin, this time in the more intimate setting of Burton Hall. Drugstore turned punk venue, the hall had been gutted of all but a dysfunctional sink in one corner, and the space promised plenty of room for a packed house and a slam pit.
He arrived early, surprised to find no line at the door. He’d been certain a crowd would turn out to see Henry Rollins, if not the opening band, Das Damen. But with the first notes of the second opener, he forgot his surroundings. Gone, the instrumental side project of Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn, exploded in a fusion of sound and fury. Ginn’s crashing guitar, the percussive power of longtime Black Flag drummer Sim Cain, and Andrew Weiss’s ferocious bass transformed the drab hall to a swirling eddy of energy. Weiss’s was bass as Maynard had never imagined it, true playing, not merely a striking of strings in time to a kick drum, an artistic level far beyond his own anemic attempts.
Gone was followed by the equally commanding Painted Willie, the L.A. punk group formed by drummer and filmmaker Dave Markey, and by the time Black Flag took the stage, Maynard was aware only of the intensity, the professionalism, the purity and energy of a reality he could only hope to inhabit.
Then Ginn picked up his guitar again. His intense attack underscored Rollins’s vocals and his message of rebellious individualism and defiance of authority, the fierce lyrics of fear and isolation. Black Flag’s 90-minute set was a controlled bedlam of sheer sound, a crashing riot of syncopated metal, astonishing jazz fusion, and inventive percussion that brazenly defied traditional rhythmic structures.
But Burton Hall remained virtually empty, the sadly underpromoted show having attracted only a fraction of its capacity. “It was amazing to see these bands playing to the sparse crowd,” Maynard recalled in a 2012 interview. “The energy they put into their performance was breathtaking.”
His music might turn completely from the expected, Maynard thought, and envisioned an instrumental trio of his chordal base, Ewald’s guitar rhythms, and inventive percussion. And when Chris brought Steve Aldrich into the discussion, he agreed to come onboard. “I was way up for that,” he recalled, confident the sonic spaces he created with his Yamaha drum kit would complement the sound Maynard had in mind. “The music was going to be very, very dark,” Aldrich would explain. “It wasn’t going to be hardcore, but somewhere not too far from Killing Joke.”
Brainstorming sessions were sporadic and rehearsals few, but the three believed in their collaboration. This band would be so unique, so unconventional, so postmodern, that its very title must be unspoken. Maynard designed the symbol that would serve as its name, a black and white UPC bar code.
After their meetings, Ewald and Aldrich urged Maynard to join them at a nearby pub. “We tried to get him out of the house and have a beer with us,” Aldrich would recall. “He always said no, he had music to work on. He was so very, very dedicated.”
Focused as he was on his art, Maynard nonetheless made room for the comedic.
A friend and I would make mixtapes for a woman he knew. One day, we started fucking around in the studio making really dumb songs to send her as a joke.
Then we dressed all up and rented a VHS recorder and did one of those songs on camera. We wandered around Grand Rapids in stupid outfits
filming each other being silly. Our film ended with me walking in our door with cigarette butts stuck up in my lip and a baseball cap on sideways. On camera, my friend punches me in the face and I spit my teeth across the room. We called that character Billy Bob.
Maynard sat back on a bench in the downtown amphitheater. The early-July sunshine reflected from windows of banks and department stores surrounding the park was warm on his face, and he remembered the recent festival of disillusioned rebels on nearby Punker Hill, the chaos of leather and goth and spiked hair. But he couldn’t waste the afternoon in reminiscence. He must stop at the pet store for seed for the latest addition to the Evans Street apartment, the newly hatched zebra finch, the little bird with bright orange beak and shiny black eyes he’d named Harpo.
He watched a giddy group of neo–flower children in tattered jeans and bright flounced skirts weave hand in hand under the brick arch and up and down the tiered risers. They paused in their dance and breathlessly approached Maynard, eager to share their excitement. The Rainbow Gathering, they announced. The Rainbow Gathering in the Smoky Mountains, and they were going there now, and he must join them.
Maynard had considered visiting Scottville during his summer break, but four days in the mountains and valleys of North Carolina was tempting. He loaded his Chevy Sprint with a few essentials, left Harpo in the care of his roommates, picked up his friend punk musician Jonathan Haner, and set out for Franklin, North Carolina.
He wasn’t alone. From all across the country, New Agers and retro hippies and spiritual seekers descended upon the Nantahala National Forest to join the event billed as a week of peace, love, harmony, and freedom. They arrived by the busload, by car and by van and by thumb, and an assemblage of saffron-robed Hare Krishnas rode in on the back of an elephant. Whatever their reasons for coming, whatever their beliefs, they entered along the same gravel drive, each of them passing beneath a sign that read Welcome Home.
They pitched tents and teepees on the mossy forest floor beneath old-growth sycamore and basswood, and washed in the waterfall nearby. They wove for each other beaded bracelets and braided their hair with purple asters, and despite run-ins with state troopers and wildlife officers, dedicated the week to their mission of achieving universal consciousness. Swept in the infectious communion, Maynard and Jonathan surrendered to the experience and all it might offer.
In the afternoons, they joined the others in the meadow and listened to the words of Medicine Story, the graying Indian who’d been a Gathering fixture since the first was held in 1972. The eagle feather he held was passed next to a shaman or a neo-pagan, a Buddhist or an orthodox Jewess. Their stories of journeys and myths and mystical awakenings seemed to Maynard stories of people no different from himself.
In the gathering dusk, he helped bring branches from the woods to feed the campfire and sat in the circle of drumming and singing and more storytelling. Crimson sparks drifted into the darkening sky and the first-quarter moon gleamed white above the oaks and tulip poplars.
And in the early morning of July 4, the stories came to an end. The 7,000 walked quietly from their camps to the Main Meadow. In tie-dye and saris, faded jeans and black leather, they formed circles within circles and joined hands. Their silent meditation continued until noon, their breathing one breath. The sun rose high in the sky and a collective “Om” rose above the grasses and field flowers, echoed through the valley, and culminated in joyous shouts as children paraded from the Kiddie Village to the center of the circle, where they leapt and danced in the sunshine.
When thousands of people gather in a circle in a three-hour silent prayer, that shit’s powerful. Think about all we could do if we were just quiet and agreed on something. Imagine marching on Washington with 30,000 people not saying a word and then one person coming forward and saying, “This is what we want done.”
When we open our mouths, we screw it all up and assert our agendas. But if you’re quiet, you feel the energy you visualize. You don’t feel it until you shut up.
All these people holding hands were dead silent for hours. And even in that wonderful moment, I become aware that I’m stoned, wearing only a loincloth and sandals.
Maynard came home to find Grand Rapids going about its usual business. Housewives drove in from the suburbs to look at the new summer dresses at Herpolsheimer’s, kids practiced skateboard heelflips in the amphitheater, and office workers paraded to their cubicles in the morning. The Rainbow Gathering hadn’t transformed the world after all. But Maynard returned buoyed by four days of heightened awareness amid birdsong and sunshine, meals from the Hare Krishna kitchen, the hundreds of hopeful gathered for the express purpose of celebrating their collective tale. He’d never find words to explain it to Laurie or his bandmates, he knew, but it somehow didn’t matter. The experience had been his, one he would remember and draw upon later, and that too, he realized, was a part of the tale.
Neither did it matter much in his pitched state that while he’d been away, Bill had begun major renovations on the house, requiring his tenants to live elsewhere. Maynard’s roommates, accustomed by then to his impetuosity, had assumed his North Carolina jaunt was no jaunt at all but a permanent departure. He returned to find them gone along with most of his possessions—sold or discarded or taken as their own.
In one corner of his bedroom were his belongings: a few items of clothing, sketch pads and a clutch of Sheaffer pens, a black footlocker, and Harpo’s cage. Maynard unhooked the latch, and Harpo, a bit thinner perhaps after four days of neglect, fluttered out, perched on Maynard’s shoulder, and took the seed he offered from his hand.
Maynard and Ramiro set up their stereo in the living room of the apartment they rented in the fall. They filled the bookshelves with albums, Ramiro’s Led Zeppelin and Foghat and Maynard’s Cocteau Twins, Depeche Mode, and Ministry.
In the corners of the living room hung cages for Harpo and his offspring and the collection of finches that completed Maynard’s aviary. They flitted from potted ficus trees and back to their nests, where hungry chicks demanded to be fed. The birds trusted only Maynard and settled in his palm for their dinner of millet and grass seed.
On most evenings, Laurie joined them in spirited discussions of punk trends and anarchist ideals, the theories of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung that Maynard and Ramiro studied in their history class. They’d found most fascinating the concept of synchronicity, a theory they thought just might have something to do with the odd coincidences and misfortune that seemed to be associated with Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” “We’d notice whenever it was played,” Ramiro would remember. “It was always when something important was happening. I think it was just making us aware of things we might not otherwise have noticed. But we also liked the idea that it was some kind of mystical connection.”
And they talked too about the merits of sobriety. “‘Nothing to excess’ was a popular subject with all of us,” Laurie would recall. “We saw others around us doing too much anger, alcohol, or drugs, and we resolved to be careful not to do the same.”
The group looked forward most to movie night. After they’d finished their homework, Maynard and Ramiro would bring home Blue Velvet or Repo Man from the market nearby, often inviting Bill the landlord to add a generational dimension to their cinematic conversations.
They envied his ability to set his own hours, to sit back at the end of the day and enjoy the fruits of his labor and another viewing of Female Trouble.
Maynard ran the Hoover over the floor, and Harpo, terrified of the noisy vacuum, perched on the relative safety of his shoulder. While he swept, he imagined lyrics and melody and the wild idea that even humor could be incorporated into his act.
The lack of rehearsal space in the new apartment—and lack of motivation among his bandmates—had meant the end of C.A.D. and his duties as manager, accountant, advertising rep, and cheerleader. Unrestricted by the group’s wishes and abilities, he allowed his ima
gination free rein. He incorporated in his music Eastern mantras, the African rhythms of Dead Can Dance, and spare industrial elements borrowed from Swans.
He emptied his footlocker and pulled it to the middle of the living room, creating from it a makeshift acoustic box. He held above it a length of heavy fencing chain, dropped it at regular intervals, and recorded the sound with his Tascam. Afterward, using sound delays and looping techniques, he cut into the recording his minimalist chant: “Anahata, not hit. Anahata, not struck.”
He and Ramiro had learned the word in Professor McCaffrey’s history class, the mysterious Sanskrit word meaning “unstruck,” the word associated in the yogic tradition with the heart chakra. Anahata, the only sound not made by one thing striking another, Anahata, the creative hum of the universe, the silence containing the antecedent of all things, Anahata, an echoing stillness rising over a meadow in North Carolina.
Ramiro provided a steadying counterbalance to Maynard’s growing attraction to the mystical. He included Maynard in family holiday gatherings and invited him on Sundays to share his mother’s tortillas around a dinner table lively with conversation and laughter.
And one afternoon, they returned from their errands to find the back door torn from its hinges, their television, their boom box and cameras, the four-track recorder and the stereo gone—and with it, Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti album, the album that included “Kashmir.”
“We were left without media,” Ramiro would recall. “In hindsight, that was probably the best thing that could have happened to us. We started reading.”
With no television or stereo to occupy their free time, they took down their few books: cookbooks, a volume of da Vinci colorplates, The Portable Jung, and the volumes they’d read in their history course, Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By and Hero with a Thousand Faces, the only texts they hadn’t resold to the student bookstore at semester’s end.
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things Page 10
