Photo: "HOLLAND-WIEN-EXPRESS" Zeeland and buddy, January 1984

Station to Station

...is a line on the greatest album of all time.

From station to station back to Düsseldorf city
Meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie

Trans. Europe. Express.

After contemplating how best to present a WEB-size overview of my seemingly disconnected (and mostly highly obscure) book, music, photo, and film projects, suddenly (while staring at the below digital snapshot of JOE) it hit me. This 1977 album by Kraftwerk provides a thread that links all of my pursuits over 20 years -- even the most tenuous and marginal.

Straight connection - T. E. E.

THE IDIOT is the title of my favorite book by Dostoyevsky (with Frank Kafka, my favorite author).

THE IDIOT is the title of my favorite album by IGGY POP. That album was recorded in Berlin. Iggy grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is where I went to college before dropping out to move to Germany. The worst job I ever had was working the night shift as a waiter at a 24-hour restaurant off US 23 across the street from the trailer park where Iggy's parents lived.

PLEASE KILL ME is the title of a 1997 book purportedly documenting THE UNCENSORED ORAL HISTORY OF PUNK .

I haven't read it. But I will. Despite this irritating (style-challenged) Kirkus Reviews excerpt on Amazon.com:

"Lou Reed and especially the Stooges' drug-crazed Iggy Pop became icons for a generation of disaffected kids who identified with the impulse to roll around shirtless in broken glass while howling `I Wanna Be Your Dog.' [...] Despite the astonishing prevalence of drug addiction, the New York bands and scene-makers of the mid-'70s, led by the Ramones, had splendid instincts for music and style, and most subsequent pop culture is to some degree indebted to them."

"No shit."

For a couple years when I was a teenager, my ambition was to be a rock music journalist. My first published words were two letters I wrote to CREEM magazine. The first big influence on me as a writer was Lester Bangs.

David Bowie:
Station to Station

A very great man (I think it was the Isley Brothers) once said that the real bottom line truism re life on this planet is that it is merely a process of sequential disappointments. So there's no reason even to romanticize your betrayals. Just paying dues, kid. I get burned, therefore I exist. No words in the history of the rock poetic genre, from Dylan to Bernie Taupin, ever said it better than Sandy Posey's pithy catalog in "Born a Woman": "Born to be stepped on, lied to, cheated and treated like dirt."

That's who this intelligent review was written by.

David Bowie: Station to Station | 163

This is the first Bowie album without a lyric sheet, and I'm glad because aside from reservations voiced above I've always agreed with Fats Domino that it's more fun to figure them out for yourself. The first line on the album is the worst: "The return of the thin white duke / Throwing darts in lovers' eyes." Somehow, back in Rock Critics' Training School, when they told me about "pop poetry," I didn't and still don't think that they were talking about this, which is not only pretentious and mildly unpleasant, but I am currently wrestling with a terrible paranoia that this is Bowie talking about himself. I have a nightmare vision in my mind of him opening the set in his new tour by striding out onstage slowly, with a pained look in his eyes and one spotlight following him, mouthing these words. And, quite frankly, that idea terrifies me. Because if it's true, it means he's still as big an idiot as he used to be and needs a little more cocaine to straighten him out.

This is pretty much exactly how Bowie opened his set at Wings hockey stadium in Kalamazoo, Michigan on his "Station to Station" tour. I was pressed up directly against the stage, looking a little too much like CHRISTIANE F. in WIR KINDER VOM BAHNHOF ZOO, in the (staged) scene where she is pressed up directly against the stage at a Bowie concert watching him perform "Station to Station." Except that she didn't look as though she'd been waiting endless hours for a very tardy David Bowie during which time the PA played the same album over and over again: Kraftwerk's RADIOACTIVITY.

Last year I read LET IT BLURT: THE LIFE & TIMES OF LESTER BANGS, AMERICA'S GREATEST ROCK CRITIC.

In terms of personal style (and physical appearance) Lester and I could not be more different.

But I learned that he and I share the same favorite drink, cognac. And the same favorite means of getting drunk: cognac and beer.

It turns out Lester grew up in San Diego and did a lot of his best writing in Detroit. I grew up in Michigan and did a lot of my best writing so far in San Diego. Both of us suffered through our last-ever "day jobs" in San Diego. Lester wrote songs, played in a couple bands, and released one or two records that never went anywhere.

So did I.

While I was still at school in Ann Arbor I used my student loan to buy an ARP synthesizer. I formed a band with my oldest friend Brian, whom I've known since second grade. We did a cover version of a song from THE IDIOT. (It didn't sound like Bowie's watered-down Top 40 version of "China Doll," another song from THE IDIOT.)

Just before I moved to Germany one of our songs was released on a compilation cassette by a fledgling zine/record label based in Washington state. Years later SUB-POP would skyrocket from obscurity with their launch of a band called Nirvana.

In one of the movies exploiting the Seattle grunge scene there's a brief shot of someone perusing PSYCHOTIC REACTIONS AND CARBURETOR DUNG: ROCK 'N' ROLL AS LITERATURE AND LITERATURE AS ROCK 'N' ROLL, a collection of writing by Lester Bangs.

Lester died when he was 33.

I never expected to live this long. (I'm the same age as MOMUS and one year younger than MORRISSEY.) But the cold war ended without any nuclear strikes on Central Europe. The peak years of my promiscuous sex life passed without me expiring from AIDS (or for that matter even once contracting any "social disease"). It's awkward. I never made any provision for living to see middle-age.

A year ago this month two overstimulated sailors I was entertaining unexpectedly pulled out a gun. Whatever they started to say I rudely interrupted with the demand that they take a picture of me sticking the gun in my mouth.

They didn't know what to say, but humored my request. After the first photo, I told them to take another, maybe from a different angle. The sailor to whom the gun belonged could only think to suggest, "Stick it a little deeper down your throat." When they took off I immediately transferred the images to my computer. But was disappointed.

I look even sillier with a gun in my mouth than I do wearing a ball cap.

.... Are lyrics by my friend Nick Currie AKA MOMUS who was in Seattle the other week. He played "Steven Zeeland," "Psychopathia Sexualis," "My Kindly Friend John Ashcroft," but not another, earlier song of his called "What Will Death Be Like?"

When I was 19 I had a series of panic attacks contemplating death. I re-wrote my Last Will every month or so.

Now, death is the one thing I'm not afraid of. I told my friend Packard, "A year past 40 is like a bonus track on a remastered CD."

Last year a photo I took of Packard was featured in the last publication Lester Bangs wrote for, THE VILLAGE VOICE. The accompanying article was written by Richard Goldstein, an esteemed journalist who in the 1960's laid the very foundation of "literature as rock 'n' roll" while Lester Bangs was still selling shoes at Mission Valley Mall in San Diego.

The published article did have a stupid cringe-inducing headline. But it was through no fault of Richard's that his overview of the social world I inhabit (or inhabited until that article was published) gave rise to grievous misunderstandings locally. At long last I received my first serious death threat.

I don't have many regrets in life. But one regret I do have is that I let that bother me.

The last model I took photos of surprised me by pulling out Nietzsche:

346

Being misunderstood.— When one is misunderstood as a whole, it is impossible to remove completely a single misunderstanding. One has to realize this left one waste superfluous energy on one's defense.

I think I'm starting to warm to the 00's.

Time to do some remastering.

But you know, I wasn't always a writer whose slim claim to global sub-cult fame rests on the odd offhand mention of his name in The Manila Times; on page 197 of a novel by James McCourt; in a newsgroup list of "all-time favorite characters in Momus songs" (#10, "Steven Zeeland," #9, a monkey that "drinks heavily/ and plays with itself from dusk to dawn/ as wicked as the day is long"); . . .

I wasn't always a marginal author.

I have had other brushes with fame.

I was once a marginal musician.

A decade before I had my first book published I spent a year holed up in the staunchly religious-conservative hometown of Gerald R. Ford and AMWAY -- my hometown -- singing and playing dirge in the Midwest's preeminent proto-industrial noise band.

The only bands within a thousand or so mile radius we owed any debt to musically were Pere Ubu and Devo. We were as quirky; blessed with a not unrelated rustbelt-specific sense of humor; and at least as alienated. But they were conventional rock bands with guitar, bass and drums. We were 3 guys + 3 synthesizers -- droning on about youth taking poison to escape a poisoned world . . .

To an audience not quite prepared for us.

A "SYNTHESIZED SOUND SO EXPERIMENTAL THAT MANY PEOPLE FIND IT DIFFICULT TO CALL MUCH OF IT 'MUSIC'" declared our hometown daily, the GRAND RAPIDS PRESS.

"THE SOUND, WHILE ORIGINAL, LACKS DEPTH AS THOUGH IT WERE STANDING STILL. . . . MAYBE I'M WAY OUT IN LEFT FIELD ON THIS ONE, MAYBE YOUR INTENTION FROM THE START WAS THE STATIC APPROACH. HELL, WHAT DO I KNOW," shrugged the punk zine TOUCH AND GO in a review of our only vinyl release, a single pressed in mono.

But a fledgling zine/record label based in Olympia, WA accepted one of our songs for inclusion on a cassette compilation of American underground bands.

When the compilation arrived we were surprised to discover that actually only half of our song had been included -- midway through the track abruptly faded out! I winced; the other guys barked their indignation. A minute later we were on the floor laughing. . . .

By that point we were almost qualifed to make a career out of confusing people. A show we did in Detroit went over well. Our next gig was supposed to be in Chicago -- as the warm-up act for JAPAN.

But just when all our hard work showed some sign of paying off, I took off to chase a soldier. A week after the compilation came out I was in Germany. And so I missed out on the brief flurry of attention accorded my band-mates in the wake of our first and last national exposure: our song -- the "edited version" -- on SUB POP 7.

Six years later I was still living in Frankfurt and had shifted my focus to writing books. Sub Pop had moved its base of operations from Olympia to Seattle. They still championed music made by disaffected youth from backwater America. One track on the 1988 compilation was by an act from Aberdeen, WA (a Pacific Northwest town as broken-spirited as the one I live in today). The catalog number of Nirvana's first single: SUB POP 23.

Sub Pop became famous, made Kurt Cobain famous, made Seattle world famous for grunge, and godfathered the music industry category "alternative."

There is a "History" page at subpop.com as well as a discography. But you won't find the name of my first band there. There are cover art scans of their first two compilations, but no track lists.

I'm not complaining.

But I have taken stock of the pre-history Sub Pop relics in my collection: subpop 5 cass / subpop 6 zine / subpop 7 cass; and a 20-year-old envelope from Olympia, WA inscribed "THANX FOR YOUR CASSETTE --WE'LL PROBABLY RELEASE 'GARY, IN'."

After I find the right night to put everything else aside and give the tapes a proper final listen, I am going to auction these collectibles.

Why?

Because authoring alternative books costs money.

My late friend and mentor David Lloyd, the San Diego beefcake photographer, liked to tell me that I should author a play based on the life of Dr. Alfred Kinsey. On the other side of the Atlantic, Mark Simpson had an idea of his own for a musical based on The Kinsey Report itself!

There's something of a thread here . . .

Scottish alt.popstar Nick Currie, aka Momus, was just in Seattle performing material from his new album FOLKTRONIC. In one song, "Psychopathia, SX" Nick imagines himself a 1940's hillbilly stationmaster receiving a certain famous sex researcher:

Puffing round the railway track here comes the evening train / Bringing Dr. Kinsey back to talk with us again. . . .
The last MP3 I downloaded from Napster was from 1948: "Ooh, Dr. Kinsey!" by Martha Raye — a singer remembered for her "willingness to travel to the 'ends of the earth' to see soldiers."

The Haworth Press has just repackaged my all-time favorite of their backlist titles: BAD BOYS & TOUGH TATTOOS: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE TATTOO WITH GANGS, SAILORS, AND STREET-CORNER PUNKS by the late Sam Steward, AKA porn writer Phil Andros. In the early 1950s, Dr. Steward quit his career as a professor to open up a tattoo shop catering especially to Navy "boots." BAD BOYS grew out of a journal he kept at the urging of a friend and former colleague, who sometimes stopped in to visit. . . .

  "When Kinsey was observing in the shop I always used
  my best lines of patter to steer the customers into his
  areas of interest. This was not hard to do, since hope
  springs eternal in the human genitalia, especially those
  of sailors. . . . "
When the freshly redesigned BAD BOYS arrived in the mail last week, I was pleased. And proud; I'd had the honor of selecting the vintage photo for this cover.

Also, hot off the press, the import-only
THE QUEEN IS DEAD:
JARHEADS, EGGHEADS, SERIAL KILLERS & BAD SEX

This experimental epistolary collaboration between Mark Simpson and me has, if nothing else, violated convention. Heinously.

As one reviewer put it, kindly:

"Quite why a pair of armchair philosophers writing about trannies, military men's bottoms, and cats should make an enjoyable read is a mystery. But it does."
Honestly, I never quite believed that this collection of private correspondence really would become public. Indeed, most of my closest friends advised against publishing THE QUEEN IS DEAD until after I'm dead. And yet, here it is — not only in print, but garnering praise in prominent places.

"One of the most congenial, winning, intelligent and original 'gay' publications for many years."

— The Independent (London)

"This book is full of clever lines. But cleverness alone doesn't do it for me. What makes THE QUEEN IS DEAD different and moving is the graceful arc it makes as the two men become friends and confidants. . . . "

— Hot Press (Dublin)

"What makes this book so appealing is that you can read it on three levels. As a tale of bawdy exploits with enlisted men, it skirts the fringes of highbrow gay porn. It can also be read as a thoughtful critique of masculinity and the urban gay lifestyle, scattered with witty epigrams that are pure entertainment. Equally engagingly, it is a story about the relationship between the writers who, encountering misfortune in love, come to realise the value of friendship."

— The Guardian (London)

Click here for information on how to order this import title from amazon.co.uk.