Grafton High School cafeteria, circa 1982. My girlfriend Pamela sat at a large, round table with approximately eight or ten of her girlfriends. I sat at another large round table with my friends just twenty feet away. My friends were daring me to do a swan dive onto my girlfriend's table, offering money, and so I egged them on, trying to secure more cash. When the pool hit $100, I stood up unannounced, accelerated quickly towards the girl's table, and launched myself in a high, graceful arc towards the middle of that round target. I remember how slowly those couple of seconds lasted before impact. I remember making eye contact with Sue K during those two seconds, and I remember the horror in her eyes.
It is here that I must tell you that the large round table onto which I was diving was the kind of table that folds in the middle, and on that fateful day that table was not secured, or was simply the kind of table that never secured, and when I landed I was aligned with the gap between the two leaves of the table, and so the whole thing folded under my weight, the two half-circles collapsing in the middle, flipping trays of food upward, and sending nine or eleven sophomore girls screaming from the calamity.
I collected my $100 from my friends, who were roaring with delight at my stunt, with many of the other 500 kids in th cafeteria that day applauding, many of them standing to do so.
I then got a verbal beatdown from Vice-Principal Bliese, a monstrous 6'6" 350 pound man whom everyone feared. I also got the mop from the janitors and had to clean up the mess I had made.
I then got suspended the rest of the week (two days, BFD!)...
But the worst of it was the fact that Donna K got grape juice all over her pink cashmere sweater, which I had to replace at a cost of $85, leaving me a whopping $15 for my effort.
One of my best two or three friends (let's call him "Rocky") from 3rd grade to high school graduation ended up becoming a cop. A sheriff's deputy for the county, actually. In hindsight, I'm not surprised. His larger-than-life dad and fitter/stronger older brother were both Marines, but my friend was simply "too unfit" for the military, but nowhere near "too unfit" for the police academy. Growing up not only did he have to live in their shadows, never measuring up athletically, but he also had to listen to the both of them constantly telling him what a "fat fucking failure" he was. It was brutal.
The girls in the neighborhood called him "Porkchop". Some of the people in our circle were allowed to call him "Chunk" or "Chunks", and me or Wags dubbed him "The Sponge" at a party one night, on account of his impressive ability to consume beer, and that stuck within our circle, and expanded out into the general population at school. I can imagine he still knows one or two people who still call him "Sponge".
He had a bunch of different nicknames through the years, many of them unkind, and many of them said to initiate a kind of game = Some lame fuckstain would call Rocky "fatwad" or "enormo" or whatever, and Rocky would give chase. That was the game, and woe to those who lost, because Rocky would then beat their asses DOWN. And most people did lose that game in the end, because maybe Rocky wouldn't catch them right away, but he did have a good memory and a taste for the surprise, delayed attack. Sometimes weeks would go by, even months, and the fuckstain may have come to believe he was in the clear, that the taunts had been forgotten, and then, from around the corner, or seemingly from nowhere, there Rocky was, making life miserable for said fuckstain.
Other times me or any of Rocky's friends might simply catch the kid ourselves immediately, because really, those rotten fuckstains had it coming. GAME OVER.
Like I said, Rocky was one of my two or three closest friends, and I gave him shit the way friends do, but I never said a single word about his weight. If for no other reason than I didn't think he was fat. Sure, he was a big guy, but he was more of a barrel-chested kind of guy, you know? He was essentially a 15 year old kid stuck in the body of a 55 year old dude, and I think you get a pretty good picture of his body type.
Rocky was a decent guy, but alot of people pissed him off, and because it was so unrelenting and so cruel, especially coming from his dad and brother, I think he had an absolute right to be pissed off at these people. And so a kind of resentment built up in him. At eighteen, I would say he was already a misanthrope, and there he was, going to the Police Academy.
Anyways...
We were at a party at Hanson's house about a week or so after graduation. It was the beginning of our last summer before I went off to Madison and he went to Milwaukee, and everyone in our group went off in different directions, to different destinations, and I remember this conversation because it was early in the evening, and neither of us was drunk yet. There were about five of us, standing around on the driveway, passing around a joint. Rocky declined, and as I took the woolie in hand, he suddenly poked me in the chest with a bit of force behind that finger, and said "Someday I'm going to bust your ass for that shit." I started laughing, and he quickly added "I'm not joking." I continued laughing, saying "you're not serious", and he told me that yes, he was serious.
We discussed the seriousness of his statement for awhile, and suffice it to say things were never quite the same after that. What should have been a great and glorious last summer in Grafton for our group of friends wasn't all that. A slow, unsatisfying fade...Our circle losing steam... A silent collapse.
I do agree with Robyn Hitchcock - policemen do sing. In my experience, it's most likely going to be metal or country.
I played high school football at a "football factory", and one of our traditions every season, no matter if it was freshman, JV, or varsity football, was for all the players to pitch in $10 towards the best stereo we could get, because a high school football lockerroom simply didn't function without insanely loud music, especially pre-game. At the end of the season (as often as not we were state champs back then) we'd raffle off the system, and get beyond blitzed for a job well done.
And yes, we had our pre-game mix tape. This song was my contribution. Blood is an integral part of football. As we often chanted on the bus heading to away games, "blood makes the grass grow", which we'd be chanting even louder on the ride home after every inevitable win.
Anyways, last Sunday our beloved Green Bay Packers won Super Bowl XLV, and surely this sounds cocky, but their victory seemed certain the moment they grabbed that 6th and last seed in the NFC playoffs.
Congrats to the Packers and their faithful, and thank-you Jacobson Bros Delifor the bitchin' Kielbasa. I'd like to offer the Packers our old Grafton Blackhawks motto and most popular bumpersticker - GREEN BAY FOOTBALL - WE DON'T REBUILD, WE RELOAD.
The following story is true, only the names have been changed to protect my innocence.
It was homecoming weekend in the autumn of 1983, about ten at night, and I found myself walking home from my buddy Stan's house on the other side of town because I was trashed on cheap beer and cheaper weed. My usual path between our two places took me past Lime Kiln Park, and it was here that I encountered two teenaged girls sitting on the hood of their car in the parking lot of the park, about 50 yards away from the sidewalk along which I was stumbling.
I had no idea who these two girls were, but being a teenaged boy recently broken up with my girlfriend, when they started whistling at me and called to me to come over and talk to them, I hornily obliged.
As it turns out, they were from Port Washington, whom we were playing football against the next afternoon. Port scags or not, they were cute and I was, as I said, trashed and horny, so their hometown hardly mattered.
What mattered was that five minutes into our conversation, one of the girls pulled out a handgun and aimed it directly at my chest, ordering me to remove all my clothing. Again, I obliged, although my libido had vanished at this point. As a general rule, hand guns do not make for sexy fun times.
So there I was, standing naked in the Lime Kiln Park parking lot with my clothes piled at my feet. While the one girl continued levelling the gun at me, the other pulled a small can of lighter fluid from her jacket pocket and proceeded to douse my clothing.
"What the fuck is going on?" I asked.
"You're gonna dance for us", gun girl replied as lighter fluid girl bent down and lit my doused clothing on fire.
"What?"
"Fucking dance!"
And so I danced, naked, as orange-blue flames licked my knees, the two girls giggling as teenaged girls tend to do.
When the flames had died down, leaving behind a pile of scorched clothing, the two girls got back into their car and sped off into the night.
"Age Of Consent" by New Order was playing on the car's stereo.
I gathered up my scorched clothes, and jogged the rest of the way home, about a mile away, avoiding the streets the best I could by going through some cornfields and Bones Woods.
I hated New Order, being the punk metal kid that I was, but after that night, I didn't anymore.
One hundred and fifty-six editions of S4TW, and this is the first time I've streamed the Femmes...amazing...
Now, I don't know how it was/is by you, but in Milwaukee, we always simply called 'em "The Femmes" and never "Violent Femmes" or even "The Violent Femmes". We called 'em "The Femmes" because they were a Milwaukee band, homegrown, familiar...
I don't know how it was/is by you, but in Milwaukee the Violent Femmeswere pretty much legendary, at least among the hipper kids and the college crowds...Going from coffee house gigs and streetcorner busking to opening for The Pretenders at The Orientalon one fateful night in 1981, and from there they pretty much ruled the city for the next two to three years...
At least that's how I remembered it - I was a year or three too young to catch a full, first-hand account of the Femmes...By the time my friends and I were travelling into the city from the suburbs, the Femmes weren't busking anymore, and they were certainly too mighty for coffee houses and the smaller clubs around town...By the time I was old enough to see the Femmes, they were headlining the Oriental themselves, riling up 1000+ of the faithful, and that's a pretty impressive number for a band like Violent Femmes in a city the size and temperment of Milwaukee...By the time me and my friends started going to shows in Milwaukee, the Femmes were hanging out and recording in NYC, and starting to tour internationally...I seem to recall they "conquered" New Zealand and/or Australia on one short tour, and later on, from 85 to 87 when I was living on the east side of Milwaukee, I "ran into" bassist Brian Ritchie from time to time (well, four times, by my reckoning), including once at Lisa's Pizzaria where he recognized me enough to say "hello".
I sound like such a fucking fanboy!
But I don't know how it was by you...I don't know how much the Femmes meant to the typical youth in places that aren't Milwaukee, but considering the kind of raw, wild and literate kind of music the three of 'em made, they were loved enough, by enough, to get requested with regularity at our high school dances...And I also seem to recall RP The DJ getting his ass chewed out after spinning "Add It Up", during which he cut the PA as Gordon Gano sang "Why can't I get just one fuck?", leaving a cafeteria of 200-300 kids singing the line by themselves.
"Add It Up" never got played at a dance again, but there was still "Blister In The Sun" and "Kiss Off", "Prove My Love", "Gone Daddy Gone" and even "Good Feeling" during the slow dance romance segments of RP The DJ's3 hour set. What I'm trying to say is that the Femmes debut album is really fucking good and solid from start to finish, because here we are with "To The Kill", which is perhaps my favorite song on this album. So now I've mentioned seven of the album's ten songs, which I think is a pretty good indication of just how undeniably great and huge this album is, to me, and a few others like me that I know or knew...
Like I said, I don't know how it was or is by you...The critics generally adore Violent Femmes, at least in those early years, those first two or three albums. I tend to respect the field of criticism, but your opinion may vary. I happen to like their weirder, more difficult second album, Hallowed Ground, a bit more, but this debut is certainly the better album, a true object of art, imbued with the magic of the time and place from which it came to be, pretty much perfect in it's completeness of tone and flow from beginning to end. Every song a slayer, and the whole thing still sounds good, like it hasn't aged a day, much less 28 years!
28 years!
I guess "timeless" is just a nicer way of saying "Holy fuck, I'm getting old! The Femmes are getting old!"
05: Funkadelic: Maggot Brain [1971] Featuring..."Maggot Brain", "Hit It & Quit It", "You & Your Folks, Me & My Folks","Wars Of Armageddon"
Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time...For y'all have knocked her up! I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe...I was not offended! For I knew I had to rise above it all...Or drown in my own shit! Come on Maggot Brain! Go on Maggot Brain!
(I wanna know if you can get to that!)
I want you to hit it! Good god, hit it and quit it! I want you to (hooo-whoaa) Oh mama, hit it! Good god, hit it and quit it!
If you and your thing dig me and my thing, like me and my thing dig you and your thing, and we all got a thing, yeah, and it's a very good thing...
(We are back in our minds, again!)
More power to the people, more power to the people, more pussy to the power, more pussy to the people, more power to the pussy, more pussy to the power...Power to the pussy!
(Right on, brother...)
04: Motor Booty Affair [1978]
Featuring..."Mr. Wiggles", "Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop)", "The Motor Booty Affair", "Deep"
DG was the only black kid in my middle school, circa 1977-1979...The comfortably numb white middle-classed suburbs of Grafton...DG's family had moved to our languid town from the north side of Milwaukee, an area I knew well on account of my grandparents...
Stereotypes be damned, DG excelled at basketball and boxing...During recess, out on the playground, playing hoops, he'd take it to the rim and totally smoke some taller, gawky kid of ambiguous Nordic descent, and just to make things clear that the only black kid in the school wasn't to be trifled with, he'd start shuffling his feet like Ali when he was done with the rope-a-dope, and start jabbing and dancing, jabbing and dancing, getting in a quick lick or four, and then take off running in the opposite direction of Mr. Stangle.
I was a decent enough basketball player myself in those days, and smart enough not to get sucked into any boxing matches with DG, and so we became pretty good friends...Good enough friends that Stan, Paul and me would go over to DG's house during lunch sometimes, and we'd sit in his bedroom in the basement, passing around a bottle of rhubarb wine his mom had made, and listen to Parliament and Bootsy Collins records...
Never any Funkadelic, for some reason, though...I got into them via the One Nation Under A Groove album, which I bought for myself after DG had schooled me in the ways of George and Bootsy and the rest of the P-Funk crew...
I was a 12 year old white Polack in the suburbs, getting drunk on Parliament! So it shouldn't be so strange to consider the 43 year old white Polack in hipster Madison getting high on Parliament right now?
"I got a string on my thing, rhythm in my thing (Wind me up)... I can do my thing underwater!!! I got a string attached to my thing, when you pull my string, I can do my thing like I oughta!!!"
03: Mothership Connection [1975]
Featuring..."P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up)", "Mothership Connection (Star Child)", "Unfunky UFO", "Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)", "Night Of The Thumpasaurus People"
Back in those same middle school years, I used to go with my parents to rummage sales, and one breezy Saturday morning I was rummaging through crates of vinyl, both 7 inch and longplaying varieties in some crumpled uncle's garage, and I happened upon a promotional 45rpm of Parliament's "P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up)" with an extended, somewhat dirty version on the flipside...Rather rare these days, and you bet yr ass I got that baby tucked away in a sturdy case in the front hall closet...
Imagine a middle-aged man of ambiguous Nordic descent selling a Parliament 45 to a 12 year old kid of Polish descent out in the whitewashed bedroom community of Grafton!
And damn if I didn't jam that sweet sweet single frequently, full volume in my big fat KOSS cans, bouncing around at the foot of my bed, watching the neighborhood girls ride past and thinking about teenaged sex...
"Good evening. Do not attempt to adjust your radio, there is nothing wrong. We have taken control as to bring you this special show. We will return it to you as soon as you are grooving. Welcome to station WEFUNK, better known as We-Funk, or deeper still, the Mothership Connection. Home of the extraterrestrial brothers, dealers of funky music. P-Funk! Uncut Funk! The BOMB!!!"
02: One Nation Under A Groove [1978]
Featuring..."One Nation Under A Groove", "Who Says A Funk Band Can't Play Rock?", "Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad (The Doo-Doo Chasers)", "Into You", "Lunchmeatphobia (Think, It Ain't Illegal Yet!)", "Maggot Brain [Live]"
So wide can't get around it! So low you can't get under it! So high you can't get over it! Do you promise to funk, the whole funk, nothin' but the funk??? One nation under a groove, gettin' down just for the funk of it! One nation and we're on the move...Nothin' can stop us now!
'Bout that time they asked me where was I going, ya know? I, said, " Well, you have to be reasonable...So you know I've never been away from home before...And, uh, besides, they gave me a good deal, and I think that, uhhhh, Funkadelica is...you know... the nation, uhhhh, you know, I would like to, live under..."
(What in the world is this boy talking about?)
The world is a toll-free toilet...Our mouths neurological assholes...And psychologically speaking, we're in a state of mental diarrhea...Talking shit a mile a minute! Or in a state of constipated notions, can't think of nothin' but shit...And in this world of stinky futures, shitty memories and constipated 19 now-nows...Emerges from the hiney of your head...The doo doo chasers!! The Promentalshitbackwashpsychosisenemasquad!!! The prune juice of the mind! The doo doo chasers!! Friends of roto-rooter!!! Bringing you music to get your shit together by...The band in the tidy bowl of your brain!
(Fried ice cream is a reality!)
You know, it was in my hands, it was in my feet...I got it all over me! Yes, I did! I got it all over me! Got to go, got to go, got to go with the funk!
01: Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome [1977]
Featuring..."Bop Gun (Endangered Species)", "Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk", "Wizard Of Finance", "Funkentelechy", "Placebo Syndrome", "Flashlight"
What I consider the greatest Funk album ever made...Six fat, sick slabs of groove and hardcore funk, bookended by arguably the two best songs in the entire Parliament catalog...Or at least the two best-known and most-sampled...
I guess it isn't much of a surprise that two of my favorite Hip-Hop albums, Ice Cube's Death Certificate and Digital Underground's Sons Of The P, infringes upon this album hardcore...
I don't know what else to say at this point, about my favorite album by a band you might never expect would mean so much, and run so deep, for a guy like me...What might I have missed if I hadn't been such good friends with the only black kid in Grafton in the 1970's? Would we have jammed Grandmaster Flash on the boombox in the JV football locker room a couple years later? Would I have loved Run-DMC if they hadn't teamed with Aerosmith? What about Fela Kuti?
Of course, they were on the same label as KISS, so maybe all of this was inevitable...
We were parked on a rarely-used access road that's kinda hidden in the tall grass across Anderson Road at the end of the Madison Airport runway, wasting the night away on the hood of my '77LTD with a bottle of Maker's Mark and a baggie of a fairly potent weed she claimed was called "Blueberry Mist", though it tasted like bacon to me...I don't really have a problem with bacon-flavored weed, though...
"Bacon Mist"...
Anyways, we layed there on the hood of my '77LTD, with our backs against the windshield, staring up at the stars and waiting for the occasional airplane to fly overhead, roaring past no more than 200 or 300 feet above our heads...We talked about older days, the early '90's in Grafton, and all the crazy shit that happened at my old beatnik pad above the Sub Shop, and the even crazier shit that happened with Nuts The Amazing Man and all those other freaks and bikers up in Fillmore and Waubeka...
Memories of good times and crazy shit from a decade past, and as we began to hear the faint hum of another approaching plane in the distance, she asked if I rememebered the time we fucked on the roof of the laundromat, and I replied "how could I forget?", and before the question could land she had her hand down my pants and wrapped around my cock.
That was eight years ago, and late last night she called from a Vancouver area code and left a drunk and/or stoned message on my voicemail, asking me if I remembered the night she gave me a handjob on the hood of '77 LTD out by the airport.
"How could I forget?" I thought to myself as I listened back to her message this morning, though to be honest, I was mostly overcome by a deep and sudden craving for a BLT sandwich.
My dad loves guitar slingers, especially those from his formative years in the 1950's and '60's...Guys like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Duane Eddy, Scotty Moore, Chet Atkins, Eddie Cochran...And this guy, Roy Clark...
Roy seemed to hold a special place in our house...Not just with my dad, but also with my mom, and I always figured it was because my dad looks a fair bit like Roy Clark...
Roy was so beloved in our house, in fact, that I'm not exaggerating when I say that I've probably seen 99% of all the Hee-Haw episodes ever made...Every Sunday evening after dinner on the PBS station in Milwaukee, good ol' Channel 10...
Whatever...Circa 1963, when this album was released, Roy Clark did have lightning fingers, even in a town like Nashville, which has always been full of fast cats...What's great about this particular song, which is otherwise a fairly unremarkable Roots Rock song, is his imitation of a chicken at the beginning of his solo...Roy was always a pretty funny guy...So is my dad, or at least how I remembered him back then...
Nowadays he watches alot of Shirley Temple movies (WTF?!?!?!?) and plays bingo at Indian casinos...
But this album still cooks - bluegrass, rock, polka, swing, twist, surf - it's all here, and most of it's played lightning fast...
Once upon a time, in a suburb far, far away, I used to be a teenaged romantic.
I believed in love. And while my idea of love contained many wonderful and lovely things, it was the sight of my mom popping a zit or two on my dad's back one evening as they sat next to one another on the edge of their bed that came to represent love to me.
That was about 30 years ago, and while I don't remember what they said that evening, I distinctly remember my dad cracking jokes, cuz he's a joker, and my mom laughing, cuz she was a laugher.
But mostly I remember the zit-popping.
Alot of years have passed since that evening, and I've accumulated plenty of wisdom and experience, and while I still believe love is possible, it seems less probable. Or maybe it would be better to say love doesn't mean as much to me as it used to. It's not a priority anymore.
It's Mother's Day this Sunday, and I'm planning on visiting my mom's resting place in Milwaukee this weekend, where I'll probably sit quietly and wonder how and when I arrived at this place, my philosophy of love, and maybe even life.
Something went wrong along the way, and I'm often just...weary...these days.
Like alot of you, I hear plenty of music in any given year, so compiling a list like this is far from definitive...Basically, when I thought of putting this list together, I went with the first eight songs that popped into my noodle, and then made a couple of adjustments upon reflection...And since I'm an ALBUM guy, most of these great songs happen to come off great albums...Enjoy, and get it on! HPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHPHP
08: Fucked Up: "Crooked Head" [mp3] Why not start off this lump of tunes with a drum intro? Classic. Then bring in the chiming guitars and feedback like it's 1985. Sweet. And here comes the bassist, doing his fat-bottomed thing. Wicked. Now let's let Pink Eye bellow on the mic like he's got more than one axe to grind. Fuck yeah. And if this shit ain't enough to keep an aging crank like me awake, these guys have ten more tunes on the beautifully ragged The Chemistry Of Common Life album, and each of 'em is packed tight with hardcore surprises.
07: Be Your Own Pet: "Becky" [mp3] The last BYOP recording we're ever gonna get, cuz they broke up, and appropriately enough it's about asskicking and teenage homicide...About two BFFs who couldn't make it work when "Becky Facelift" made the scene and got in the way...RIP, BYOP!
06: Fuck Buttons: "Sweet Love For Planet Earth" [mp3] It all starts out so gracefully...The gentle bells...Like a spring breeze at sunset running through the windchimes on the front porch...A good friend, a pipe and a bottle of wine. It's a good life. Five minutes later, you become aware of the shift, that something isn't quite right, and then a minute after that, there's a crack in the sky, a crack in the dirt, a crack down the middle of the house and through the center of yr mind...Can it all be pulled back together again? Not the way it used to be. No.
05: M83: "Kim & Jessie" [mp3] I'm old enough to remember the 1980's rather well, and for those of you who came of age in that decade too, I think you'll agree with me that "Kim & Jessie" sounds exactly h0w it was...Exactly perfect...That was then, and this is now, 25 years beyond Mr. Walker's Current Events class, and this song makes it feel like last Friday afternoon right now. Heading to the Electric Connection to drop some serious quarters into Galaga.
04: Love Is All: "Wishing Well" [mp3] Another rollicking drum intro, this time leading into a trim and sarcastic 2:45 of girl group gang vocals, a roller rink organ, plenty of piss, vinegar, and even more drum rolls...It's wild! It's wooly! Now it's on yr iPod, babycakes!
03: Deerhunter: "Nothing Ever Happened" [mp3] "Well, Dick...I like the guitars quite a bit, and that chorus slays me every time. But mostly, it's got a nice, propulsive beat, and I can dance to it...So I'm gonna give it an 88. Dick."
02: Animal Collective: "Street Flash" [mp3] Animal Collective have lately mastered the sythesis of Pop chops with their trademark experimentation, and this song off their Water Curses EP is perhaps their best fusion of those two sensibilities yet...It's a weird and lovely tune, haunting and uplifting at once, from a band that makes me wish I had waited until the 00's to experiment with hallucinogens.
01: Santogold: "Lights Out" [mp3] The most perfect pop song of 2008 to my ears, barely edging out Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" or Beyonce's "Single Ladies" as far as these radio-ready massive pop things go, though you'd never find that bi-curious circus sideshow tune on this list..."Lights Out" is both retro and a few minutes into the future, making it timeless right now...Now, I might get sick of it someday, the way I can't listen to "Hey Ya!" anymore, but for earlier this year and even on New Year's Eve, this is the song.
Speaking of rock bassists of the mid-80's with permed and teased hair, here's Billy Sheehan from Talas, laying down a significantly better bass solo than Gene Simmons could ever fake with a DAT tape...
Now, I have a story about Billy Sheehan that is almost exactly the same as my Stevie Ray Vaughan story, and it is this:
For all I know, that is the top of my fucking head at the feet of Mr. Sheehan in this video...
Which is to say, Murph, Rosie and I saw Talas live at The Palms in Milwaukee in 1983, and we were pressed right up against the stage in front of Billy, and we talked and joked with him between songs, and handed him bottles of beer and cups of water...Unlike the SRV story, Billy Sheehan chatted with us after the show and autographed the covers of our Talas LPs...And then HE went backstage and drank some more and eventually made his way downtown via Lincoln Towne Car to the Hilton, where he fucked a thick Milwaukee groupie with fat Wisconsin tits out on the balcony of the 23rd floor. Or at least I imagine he did...
Murph and Rosie and I went to George Webb's for burgers and coffee, and then drove I-43 back to Grafton, all three of us sitting silently and listening to the ringing in our ears.
I would like to write about "values" today. The desire arose because once again this election year, we are hearing the term "small town values" bandied about by the Republicans in the context that people who live in major metropolitan areas (presumably more liberal/Democratic) have lesser values than people who live in small towns. This notion is complete and utter bullshit, of course, and I just thought I'd share some anecdotal evidence to counter this claim.
I grew up in a suburban town of 8000 people. For the most part, it is an upper-middle class community, and as I was growing up there in the 70's and 80's, there were exactly two black families in the entire town. This wasn't by accident, either. If you've heard the term "white flight", that's pretty much the reason why Grafton is 99% white - these white families were literally escaping the city of Milwaukee and it's minority populations in the aftermath of desegregation, as dictated by the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown Vs. Board of Educationruling. Grafton was founded in the 1870's, but didn't see it's one major population "explosion" until the decade or so after that ruling, and this holds true for many small towns just like Grafton. I mention all this because this trend, this phenomenon, illustrates a very specific value - that many white people simply do not want to live, work, play, or go to school with non-white people.
Racism is a value.
That's the most pervasive value in Grafton, but it's not a value that's readily apparent on the surface. No, this sort of racism is a quiet kind, so subtle that plenty of small town people don't even realize they're practicing it, but it is there nonetheless. It's part of a larger mindset that shows itself more readily in other prejudices and opinions, many of which are easiest to identify in the halls of a typical small town high school, where cliques inform the dynamics of the entire school, and one's status is pretty much wholly determined by surface and appearances.
In high school, if you are fat, you are almost guaranteed to never be one of the "cool kids", and you will have to suffer countless slings and arrows of outright mockery and public humiliation. If you do not wear the most current and fashionable clothing and shoes, you will be ridiculed and reminded of those shortcomings ceaselessly. If you are gay, you will face all those slings and arrows, nevermind the steady, neverending beatdowns (or threats of beatdowns) from "the jocks". If you are a girl who is sexually active, you will be called a "slut" and a "whore", but if you are a girl who who isn't sexually active, you will be called a "dyke" by the very guy who want to sex you up. If you are academically gifted, you will be marginalized, mocked and perhaps even beat up with some regularity. Hopefully, you are not a fat homosexual who is academically gifted.
I mention these sorts of things because they point to an overriding set of values that are pervasive in small town America, a set of values that is best described as xenophobic, I suppose. If you do not "fit in", or are merely perceived to be "different", the chances are quite good that you will be ignored, marginalized, ostracized, and perhaps even the target of physical threats and violence itself.
(WHO IS BARACK OBAMA? McCain's campaign commercial asks countless times every day, and if you do not believe his campaign is deliberately feeding into the xenophobia and racism of the Republican base, you're probably a part of that base, a base that is becoming increasingly rabid with vocal hatred, if you've seen the YouTube videos of recent McCain-Palin rallies.)
It would easy to say that racism and xenophobia are interchangeable, but that isn't quite true, because I moved to a small unincorporated farming town of approximately 120 people, a place called Helenville, where I lived for about two years before coming to Madison. Now, I'm a white male, so you would think my presence in Helenville would not be an issue, but I was instantly perceived as an outsider, an "other", and during those two years, I couldn't seem to shake that stigma.
First of all, I have a Polish name, which proved to be troublesome to a community that was almost entirely German. I was even asked by one of the locals once, "So, are you one of those Polish Jews?"
I shit you not.
In this small, unincorporated town of 120 people, there are three churches, two taverns, a post office and a bank. God and alcohol rule Helenville, and as you can imagine, drunken fundamentalism was rampant. Even in the most innocuous of conversations, somehow topics such as "fags" and "baby killers" would get woven in. At first I would protest, exposing my liberal tendencies, and I believe these outspoken protestations were responsible for the locals never liking or accepting me. Like most small towns like this, word travelled fast, so after the very first of my protestations, I started noticing the dirty looks, and the way the locals basically shunned me. A friendly wave to neighbors as I walked to the post office would be met with cold indifference. If I entered one of the local taverns, all conversations would cease immediately and all eyes would turn to me. It was unnerving at first, but soon became laughable.
Like I said, gossip is quite prevalent in communities like this, so from time to time I would hear word of alcoholism, infidelity, domestic abuse, and even incest. It would seem every last person in town had their secrets, except that there were no secrets.
In that way, Helenville is no different than Grafton. I can tell you that on my own block in Grafton, we had a married woman having an affair with a married man who lived in the house behind hers. More than once, my friends and I saw him sneaking from his house to her house late at night (yeah, most of us had very liberal curfews), when her husband was out of town on business. Across the street we had a raging alcoholic that beat his children with regularity. These children would grow into teenagers who were exceedingly violent and hateful themselves. Meanwhile, up the street, there was a kid who took great pleasure in torturing and killing cats, and was so creepy in general, that none of the other kids in the neighborhood wanted anything to do with him. When my sister's cat, Tigger, suddenly disappeared, never to be seen again, we immediately suspected this kid. I assume this boy grew up to be a serial killer.
Alcoholism and drug abuse were also fairly rampant in Grafton. In fact, around 1982, two former Grafton high schoolers stabbed a third to death in his bedroom over a cocaine deal gone bad. Stabbed him more than two dozen times, in fact. In my own experiences, it was just as easy to procure any kind of drug imaginable as it was to go to one of the four liquor stores in our town to buy beer.
I guess I could go on and on with anecdotes about small town life, but I hope I've made my point.
And my point is this - conservative Republicans can talk about "small town values" all they want, but the fact of the matter is, small town values are no better than the values found in any large city. People are people, flaws and all, no matter where you live, and if anything, I would argue that people are worse in small towns, because there is the sheen of hypocrisy that covers everyone and everything. Many people in small towns are doing the exact same bad shit that people in the cities are doing, but they wrap themselves in scripture and the flag, and claim to be better than all the "fags" "niggers" and "commies" who are supposedly a blight on those cities and a threat to their "small town values" and America itself.
So, Sarah Palin can invoke "Joe Sixpack" all she wants, but know this - plenty of those Joe Sixpacks are alcoholics who routinely abuse their spouses and children, and then they go to church on Sunday where they're repeatedly told that it is the Godless liberals and secularists who are the problem with America.
Now I'm living in Madison, a progressive, liberal city which those same smalltown Joe Sixpacks like to say is "20 square miles surrounded by reality". If places like Helenville are "reality", I'd much rather stay here, safely ensconsed in our relative "insanity", thank you very much.
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