Love With the Perfect Non-Stranger

Tis the season...to publicly declare your love for those who have no idea you love them. And so a year-end list to end all year end lists.

In the spectrum while on the spectrum love hits in all kinds of ways.

Last week’s SubStack? Admittedly, a drag. Born in a certain kind of outrage, and sustained through the horror of a now-specified disaster it caused a number of you to unsubscribe. Which is fine. As I said to one unsubscriber who felt a need to explain, in line with “the customer is always right”, this space is never about what’s good for the reader, but rather what I think is good for the reader in light of what’s clearly good for me.

So, if an exorcism is what’s good for me, it’s what’s good. That being said, and in the spirit of a growing fatigue with my algorithm of misery, this week we’ll zag. Straight into the space where I spend a lot of time, specifically: my outsized affection for those peers who usually have no idea that I have some amount of outsized affection for them.

These are people, mostly, who are known to me and who know me, who you also know, but whom I’ve never collected in one place to sing their praises or maybe even share my sub-logical love for them. That is to say, their presence on this holiday listing might be a surprise to them given that I’ve not ever voiced it directly, but in the spirit of the 12 days of Christmas, or the eight days of Hanukkah, my pre-death appreciation for those peers whose association has enriched my understanding of the world is a timely addition to this record of the lives and times of my place in this space.

And while I can see that some of these might make no sense to you, you must believe me that they makes sense. So forthwith…my list of love for those who have no idea I love them.

CHUCK DUKOWSKI

Sure, sure, Chuck and I did BlackFace together. The conceit was simple: we’d do all of the Black Flag songs he had written plus the Black Flag songs that he had written that he hadn’t had time to record with Black Flag. It never succeeded beyond the one seven-inch that was released, but this was not the end, or even the beginning, of my deep appreciation for Duk. Which extends as far back as my first viewing of 1981’s The Decline of Western Civilization and earlier: my first Black Flag show in New York in 1979. Like everyone had their favorite Beatle, Chuck was my favorite Flagger, for reasons not really easily articulated. But having everything to do with how his mind works, his angle of attack and the fact that while it had been assumed that the guys in Black Flag were just acting crazy, the reality was and is that they are, in actual fact, really crazy. Always an essential element in an enduring love.

LYDIA LUNCH

As photographed above, Lydia, a mix of big sister and hot nanny (sorry, creepy I know), has exerted a steady and steadfast influence in her indefatigability and recalls nothing if not the JayZ line, “I…won’t…lose!” Or maybe more like Max Cady from Cape Fear, the likelihood that you will outwork her, outthink her or outfight her? Very, very low. In the spirit of not being able to lose if you don’t quit her entire catalog, full of coruscating genius at times, drives my appreciation for a woman that calls me her male doppelganger. And even more than that, my mother loves her. Which really seals the deal. Because my mother doesn’t like anybody.

BARRY ADAMSON

If it wasn’t the band Magazine that got you, or his work with the Bad Seeds, his solo work and his soundtrack work for David Lynch? Well, that’s really more than enough. I’d been stalking him in a casual way — if there is such a thing as casual stalking — since Magazine so you can imagine my shock, surprise and totally embraced joy when he actually called me. Out of the blue it felt to me like being called by Frank Sinatra.

You see during a photoshoot with the great Steve Gullick, another one of my unlisted loves, he stopped the session and asked what the hell was the music they were listening to. Steve went over to the CD player, took it out and handed him An Evil Heat. Adamson called and his request was simple: would I be willing to sing a Tom Waits’ song for him at the London Jazz Festival in the Royal Albert Hall. Along with Nick Cave.

Like your best and most favorite crazy uncle Adamson, both a gentleman and a scholar, gave me a peak experience that it would take decades to duplicate or exceed.

STEVE ALBINI

Forget for a second the great work he did on Let Me Be a Woman or our Serenade in Red. Or his own stuff with Shellac, Big Black, or any of the other bands whose work he recorded and framed for the ages, Steve’s greatness, for me, started with and continues as one of his unsung and major contributions: his writing for Forced Exposure. Funny, acerbic and without any interest in taking prisoners, reading it was like letting someone toss a shock grenade into my head. A grenade that showed no interest or concern for prevailing orthodoxies.

How good is his writing? So good that a mutual friend of ours, on her way to an untimely death, preceded by a decline into insanity, believed that he was sending her secret messages through his food recipes. Something I had also, strangely enough, thought. Just different messages. I hope.

DIAMANDA GALAS

Was it when she told me as she did when declining my invitation to sing a duet: “your voice sucks, your band sucks and you have small hands”? No, but that helped in ways that I still laugh about. Was it when she threatened to stab my eyes out? No, not that either. It was, in all likelihood, when Lou Reed asked her to sing with him and she dismissed him out of hand with “You can’t even sing in key.”

To which Reed replied, “well some of us don’t think that that’s that important.”

To which she sniffed, “If your guitar player shows up tonight and his guitar is out of tune I bet you say something.”

Point to Galas.

Which is to say I’ve never not loved her. While the days are gone when we’d talk for hours on the phone — see “eye stabbing”, above — there’s very little I’d not do for her even now.

DIG “BUZZ” WAYNE

Facebook is for shit. We all know that. But for one of the briefest moments in time it was not. When? When through the miracle of accessibility, I saw that Wayne was there, and so I wrote him with a quickness and described the moment where he had changed the entire course of my life. It was while crossing the street in front of Trash and Vaudeville in the East Village. I was coming from it, not having been able to afford anything from there and he was heading toward it, presumably to go to work. Everything he wore seemed electric blue, and to quote Warren Zevon, his hair was perfect, and I stopped mid-street as he sauntered by taking no notice of the 16-year-old me at all, and I thought that if I could live my life with one ounce the style he had casually thrown off on some Fall day in 1978, I’d be a lucky man indeed.

I had a chance to tell him that story and while we still have not met again in person, him living in LA makes that more likely than not and even not, if you ever had a moment like this you know it’s not just enough. It’s almost too much. [Honorable inclusion here also goes to Andy Hernandez, aka Coati Mundi, from Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, as well as Kid Creole and the Coconuts. He kept me from getting my head kicked in by bouncers at the Ritz and he later worked with my sister Maya Azucena. Which is much more than enough.]

KING COFFEY

Since 1982 when I stayed with him during a Whipping Boy tour, I’ve talked to King Coffey, he of the Butthole Surfers, one time. It was immediately following a riot/show that OXBOW played at SXSW. I got braced as I walked along an empty hallway, pantsless, my objective being the street since the club itself had descended into violence and bloodshed over some overzealous bouncers and their request that I should put my pants on. Because the “police” had requested it.

So, my objective? To find a cop, to take a pic with, while I was pantsless.

“Eugene?”

I didn’t recognize him. Dude had been hitting the gym, had more bass in his voice than I remember, but he ID himself and I remembered, hugged him, bullshit a bit before I hit the streets and found a cop to take a pic with.

A casual, possibly a southern calm marked my interaction with him, and I valued our scant time together for reasons I can’t frame other than to acknowledge that he was, and remains, a sweet guy. [Honorable mention also goes to another son of Texas, Thor Harris. Love him too.]

BIBBE HANSEN

Pictured above, she and I first met at the Barcelona Poetry Festival where Lydia had brought us all together to blow minds. Sure her father was famous, and her son, the same, but it was this former Warhol Factory girl herself that drew my affection. We talked a lot in Spain, and again on the next few times we’ve met and like a good meal my mind turns and returns to the conversations we’ve had, the work that she’s written and her generalized and genial…appeal. My life is richer for our association and while I’ve never told her this, I’m much more than glad to tell you this.

So that covers the eight days of Hanukkah. The remaining four days of Christmas? Read on…

TOM MALLON: for all he ever did for Whipping Boy in general, and me in particular. He’s dead now. And I think of him, weekly at least.

HUGO RACE: we did a run of shows together in Germany back in the 90’s and while there was a lot of that whole Nick Cave-esque cool to Race, I couldn’t help but ignore it all and like an annoying kid brother, I couldn’t keep myself from foisting myself on a very patient and, well, kind, Mr. Race.

BJORK: She came to an OXBOW show at ICA in London and though she and I never spoke the fact that she had done so warmed the cockles of my heart. Yeah…I said cockles.

JOE CHICCARELLI: Sure he’d produced the last three OXBOW records, but that’s not even it. The biggest of big brothers, Joe’s the kind of guy that when I, in a burst of self-denigration regarding my shortcomings as a singer said, in total life and death seriousness, “no. Don’t say that.” For which I’ll love this man forever.

And if you got that most of these folks are, in family order, closer to fitting the bill of older siblings, you’d be right and it’s as befits an actual older sibling, which I am (the oldest of five actually), maybe game recognizing game. There are others, considered more like peers to me, and mentioned here because I can’t help myself and if I died without them knowing, I’d be depressed about it.

But they, my professional peers, should know this: I’ve noted your contributions to making our time on this planet suck just a little less. And when we next meet, know this.

JAMIE STEWART, JOHN BRANNON, THURSTON MOORE, HARLEY FLANAGAN, AARON TURNER, LARISSA STRICKLAND, KIRA ROESSLER, VINNIE STIGMA, JAMES CHANCE, JOHNNY THUNDERS, MARK THOMPSON, and finally, though this list is far from complete, MIKE PATTON.

Everyone here makes life in this toilet bowl of Earth just a little bit more…somehow…bearable. At least to me. So there you have my year-end list of those I love who are not family, but totally are family.

Peace on Earth now? Well, not likely. But can we just try for a little bit?

---

OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?

Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?

I’ve been told it matters, somehow. So please: review away! Unless you think it sucks. Then, maybe, just keep that part to yourself.

And STILL time to order and have it arrive in time for the holidays….