Sh*t I Could Watch Over and Over and Do # 11

It's weird, staring down the barrel of thirty years. You have lines most indelibly etched into your steadily sagging face. Your bones hurt a lot more; there's less energy. You're taking a tackle box full of medication, and your hopes and dreams swirled down the rusted drain pipe of yesteryear, along with your ability to lose belly fat, retain hair, or get an erection.

The technology has advanced beyond what you ever dreamed was possible--we live in a Neuromancer reality now. The world, as California noise artist Xdugef once observed, replying to one of my posts, "is no longer analog." Damn straight; the horror is a stereophonic "symphony of Hells," as Arthur Rimbaud might have put it.

Dystopia calling.

But you can still relive a little bit of that ...I don't want to call it magic, or this is some maudlin, hackneyed shit. But a song, or a bunch of them, the memories imprinted on your subconscious by a band you've seen multiple times, well, that shit can take you back, G.

This represents my childhood of 1996.

I first saw Sloppy Seconds during the recording of their Live: No Time for Tuning album, sometime around the august year noted above. The audience that night was pretty young, and looked like death on a stick (at least the gutter-punks). The friend of mine I went with that night has now passed. The others that were along for the ride--I haven't seen any of them in many years.

The gig opened with a clip from Female Trouble by John Waters. Sloppy launched into their first song, "I Don't Want to be a Homosexual," (the band has always stressed that this song is not to be taken at face value, but these were not really "woke" times, so nobody stressed much I take it), and the crush of the crowd, the fury of the pit, and the rain of human bodies jumping from the stage, was bloody on. It might not have been London in the mid-seventies, but it was Pure-D, Grade-A punk rock nonetheless.

That was almost thirty years ago. Sloppy was still going (according to their Facebook), as of last year. Seeing a video of one of their performances in 2008 brings back memories of seeing them half a dozen times in the mid-nineties, with all that entailed.

I can still feel the crush of spiked leather, smell the smell of clove cigarettes, and hear the heavy buzzsaw sound of the guitars splitting the amps, and my ears, as I spent wasted youth, pissed down the toilet of the Emerson theater, and slipped and slid in the puddles on the floor.

And when you fell over? Always someone to pick you back up.

Because that was punk rock. At least how I remember it.

I always thought the kids who were "coming of age" in that era must have been psychic. They must have instinctively felt, at some level, just how fucked their futures, both individual and as a demographic group, were going to be. And maybe that was where the anger came in, the fury that drove the era's punk rock revival. So many bands took the cheap and easy route of commercial viability and pandering to the greatest demographic they could reach via MTV's crass commercialism. (This is fine; I don't condemn anyone's particular taste or style, and I feel all music has to be judged on its own merits without the resultant hype surrounding it as a factor.)

Sloppy Seconds was never a sellout. A video of them in 2008 looks like a video of them from 1996. Flash forward in time to a few years ago, they look older. But they're still unmistakably who they are and have always been.

Love and napalm,

"Cretins from Indy"

Insubordination Fest 2008 - Sloppy Seconds