Bad Copy

Judging by the metrics, my stories about school kids getting into fights seems to strike a chord with you savages. Well, you bellicose brutes, you should be ashamed of yourselves, you sickos. And also, here is another one:

On my lonesome walk home from school in 5th grade a classmate, Mary Maslana, caught up and hotly redirected me towards a fight brewing in The Alley. The Alley was a thoroughfare connecting our middle and elementary school complex to the Birdland subdivision. All the after-school fights happened there, as did many shake-downs, first kisses, and underaged attempts at smoking clove cigarettes. You know the place, every suburb in America has one.

I was delighted that someone thought to include me because I had a fairly marginal social life at age 10. At age 8, on the other hand, I was one of the three coolest kids in school. We were the latchkey kids with no parental supervision so we – to put it bluntly – did whatever the hell we wanted, in school and out, and our classmates loved us for it. We could bounce from the kickball court to the swingsets to the Chinese jump rope sesh and were welcome at them all. We got invited to all the birthday parties. WE WERE UNTOUCHABLE. Then my family moved across town and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I never recovered from that, socially.

In my new neighborhood I was relegated to friends whose parents didn’t care that my parents were never home. That included a total of three people: Greg, who was on my baseball and soccer teams; Brian, who was best known for eating ants for money; and Gary, a paraplegic kid who got around town sitting on a skateboard. Gary made up for his disability by constantly committing petty larceny against me so I kept him at bay most of the time, and Brian was really into the devil so I didn’t like being at his house when his parents weren’t home. That left Greg, but I only ever saw him at school and at practices and games.

I lived in the opposite direction from The Alley so Mary Maslana and I had a ways to walk before we got there. Word had clearly gotten out about this fight because our scrum grew by magnitudes as we got closer, all of us migrating towards our own Thunderdome, alight with bloodlust, fueled by Jolly Ranchers. Such was the universal appeal of adolescent violence that kids I had never met before were including me in animated discussions about the forthcoming showdown. As details began to emerge it seemed that one of the kids in the fight was an underdog and the other was going kick the shit out of them without contest. This was the first time I remember hearing the term “bloodbath.”

By the time our tempestuous crowd got to The Alley we were over 100 deep. All around me boys were jostling to get ringside, as it were, but I easily managed my way to the front, almost as if the other kids sympathized with my small size and pushed me forward so I could be face-to-face with the action. Years later I would recognize this feeling when standing up front for an exciting band playing a small venue with no stage.

Remember, when I was 8 I ruled the playground – and I still hold the record for longest jump off the swings which resulted in a broken tailbone because I landed on the fence and after that no one was ever allowed to jump off the swings again thereby cementing my legacy.

But those glory days were long behind me now, so it was very thrilling to be a part of something again. That is, until I had the sickening realization that I was not merely in the front row. *I* was the one fighting. *I* was the underdog facing a bloodbath.

Two questions quickly surfaced:

• Why am I fighting this person?
• And perhaps most importantly, who was I fighting?

I was fighting my Greg, it turned out. The guy from my sports teams. The guy who shared my school desk with me. The guy with whom I had a school recital THAT VERY NIGHT where he and I were going to perform a duet on our recorders.

I couldn’t possibly imagine why anyone would want to fight me, let alone him. He passed the ball to me during soccer games so didn’t that mean we were friends?

Standing in the middle of everyone I didn’t think affect a game face. Instead, I started talking to Greg like any 10 year old who sees his friend out in the wild. “Hi Greg! What are you doing here?”

He answered by taking a wide swing at my head. I ducked it and the crowd went “OOOooooo.”

“Are you excited about tonight? I’ve been practicing.”

He took another swing and I dodged it too. Deftly, I might add. The crowd hit a fever pitch.

In case fighting outside school grounds still counted as a punishable offense I decided to experiment with the Rocky III technique of letting my opponent tire himself out. If I waited Greg out I might get out of this situation without throwing a single punch, and therefore remain technically innocent. I could wrap this up, go home, make myself a pizza bagel, take a few more passes at “Hot Cross Buns” on the recorder, and never even have to tell my parents any of this.

His third punch landed square in my mouth.

“Ouch, you’ve got a hard head!”

“Thanks!”

Rocky took a few punches during his experiment so I figured I would also, but tears involuntary flooded my eyes and blood flowed freely from my nose and lip, catching the attention of one of the older kids (who would, in just two short years, try to hunt me down with a real, live shotgun). He looked closely at my face in disgust and declared the fight over.

With Greg’s fist triumphantly hoisted high, the melee of kids swallowed him up while I was conversely spit out the same end of The Alley that I had just entered less than 5 minutes earlier.

I approached the nearby crosswalk, back to walking home alone. The crossing guard knew exactly what had happened and her mouth said, “Oh, honey, are you ok?” while her eyes pleaded, “Don’t get any blood on me.”

By the time my folks got home that evening I already had two black eyes. Coupled with my fat lips and bloody nose I looked more like I was hit with a shovel then just one fist. My step mom fawned over me with ice packs and Bactine while my dad tried to understand how I couldn’t answer the single question, “Why?” They called Greg’s parents and he denied the whole thing.

Half hour later Greg and I met up in the school auditorium and performed our duet like he hadn’t just hours earlier manufactured one of my core memories. The far left corner of my mouth was the only section not swollen and scabbed so I gingerly rested the recorder there and did what I was there to do, because even at 10 I understood the merits of rocking with pro gear/pro attitude.

(BELOW) Me utilizing those same skills as an adult (I’m the one playing guitar, Devon is the one responsible for my Spondylosis):

 

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The least gratifying part of this story is that Greg was expelled over this and I never saw or talked to him ever again. I still don’t know why any of this happened and I’m sometimes inclined to think it didn’t happened. But Mary Maslana, the classmate who first interrupted my innocent walk home, still likes to bring it up from time to time. Thanks, Mary Maslana.

Okay…

…so I’ve many times now established that I wasn’t particularly cared-about during this period of my life. But I had a latent skill and an untapped resource that would soon jettison me from the caste of Those Never Picked all the way up to Those Picked Last.

One morning around this same time, before the school bell rang, two landmark moments in pop culture simultaneously crossed my radar. Two kids were singing some song that went “I heard you missed us, we’re back. I brought my PEN-sull! Gimme something to write on!” while another kid was singing “get yourself an egg and beat it!” to the tune of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” (I still marvel at how I learned of both of these songs on the same day. What a time to be alive!)

My father was a lifelong music fan, and he specifically loved novelty songs. Dr Demento was a staple in our house which meant that songs like these were on regular rotation:

So it was a foregone conclusion that once I put my dad on the case – my own personal music historian who once took a class at UCLA taught by Dr Demento – he would crack the mystery and we would go to Musicland that weekend and buy the “Weird Al” In 3-D LP. Furthermore, the Columbia Record Club delivered Van Halen’s 1984 LP a couple weeks later.

Suddenly I was all caught up on absurd things kids sing on the playground. Skibidi! This occassion taught me that if I was going to be on the vanguard of anything amongst my peers it would be through discovering and identifying and procuring novelty music. Not only was I a willing scholar of these subjects, but this was going to be my ticket to making friends.

Spoiler: knowing all the words to this song, for example, did not turn out as socially fruitful as I’d hoped, at least not for a couple more years.

In the following decades I took advantage of my travels by finding obscure/novelty releases and b-sides and long-forgotten one-hit-wonders and unlikely songs covered by unlikely bands. In Australia we played a record store that paid us in records and that’s how I got a promo copy of Prince’s mythical-but-never-released The Black Album. In Sweden I found the single for King’s “Love & Pride” (which to date is one of my most viewed LoveSong of the Month tracks). In Germany I found a copy of Danzig’s first demo which is so, so bad that you can play it for any Rick Rubin neigh-sayer and they will immediately understand his contribution to certain records’ successes.

I found this record in Austria:

I found this record in Kansas:

The list goes on, but my greatest “get” happened after mentioning in an interview that I was looking for a single by The Cure’s side project, Cult Hero, titled “I’m a Cult Hero,” and a year later a cult hero from Italy sent me an ultra-rare Italian pressing of the record.

(The only record left in the whole wide world that I’m still seeking is the “Another One Rides The Bus” EP by “Weird Al” on Placebo Records, in case anybody reading this is sitting on an extra copy.)

Punk Rock is nothing if not a vast collection of novel music choices dating at least back to The Damned doing an amped up version of the Beatles’ “Help!”. Punk Rock’s very essence is being ephemeral and insubordinate, so of course many bands in this genre create music with the freedom only afforded artists with no future in which to suffer consequences.

And even amongst an entire community founded on irreverence I could find novelty nuggets, outliers amidst the outliers. It seemed every band – especially in the underground – had at least one song that was ridiculous…

* Descendents – the best love songs in the genre, yet they open their biggest record at the time with “Enjoy“?! (written by Doug, who played on Bad Copy’s very first LSotM feature, btw!)
* The Vandals made an entire country record in the 80’s
* TSOL – Code Blue
* Black Flag – TV Party
* Dayglow Abortions – Argh Fuck Kill

Every one of these bands has an amazing catalog, but those goofier songs were the ones that got me to buy their records. Kind of sad, now that I think about it. Imagine having something important to say, but you burp while you’re saying it and the whole world applauds the burp.

Anyway, FEAR is a band who have a number of iconic song (and acting) credits to their name. “New York’s Alright (If You Like Saxophones)” “I Don’t Care About You (Fuck You)” “Let’s Start a War”…all classics. But the song of theirs that I first tried to learn all the words to was this one. Probably because I was 13 when I first heard it. It is as sophomoric as novelty songs get, but I think Annie and Jackson and I were able to usher it into a new age by having Annie sing it and Jackson replace the guitar with an accordion (that HE JUST LEARNED!).

I look forward to hearing from any of you who listened to this and later found yourselves murmuring “beef beef beef, beef bologna” at an inappropriate time.

Before you watch the video I want to warn you that I used ai again. I’m getting pretty good at it so you probably won’t notice, but I feel obligated to be fully transparent about using it.

Download the audio here: