Nothing Changes On New Year's Day? Sez Who?

Dubious achievements, lingering doubts, nursed grudges and unearned rewards are expected to be solid buys in FY 2023!

“Happy” “New” “Year” “!”

Magic was in the air. Partially on account of the mysteries of calendar keeping and whatever happens when we step into January via this idea that life this “next” year will totally different from whatever “hopes” and “dreams” you harbored last year. But yeah, youth…youth is an admissible excuse and so it was that my New Year’s Eve 40 years ago would have me crossing paths with Giorgio Gomelsky (RIP).

The Georgian-born, Switzerland raised manager who started his professional life as Oscar Rasputin used to manage The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and Soft Machine. And he had just bought a multi-level former truck garage for his…amusement. Six, or so, stories, huge cavernous drop in the center of a spiraling driveway, scant lighting, grime encrusted, no exit signs in evidence and same with exits. The former bouncer in me knew it to be a death trap but hey…and here’s the functioning and best excuse that usually leads to total death and disfigurement…it was New Year’s Eve.

I don’t remember how we heard about it, but everyone who had been at the three-day CBGBs Bad Brains marathon days earlier was there. Which is why I was there. Skateboard, mohawk and two knives. Just in case.

I don’t remember much about the evening. I knew when midnight rolled around I was doing some version of “getting lucky”. I also know that I was smart enough to not try to ride my skateboard down the winding, circular driveway from the sixth floor to the ground floor.

But it was 5 in the morning now and walking to the big and largely empty avenue I dropped my skateboard, a Seaflex BoomKat that I bought for $50 of heroin (that is, what the previous owner charged me for it) in the middle of 5th Avenue. I hopped on and rode it into the Village, blowing through red lights the entire way. Stopping for nothing and no one.

Underdressed, overamped, I took stock of my life then, as we’re supposed to, and decided I would do so every year. Without promises to change, improve or resolve much of anything. Just an accounting. One that usually resulted in an understanding that like Conan I would spend the next 12 months like I had spent the previous ones: crushing my enemies, driving them before me and hearing the lamentation of their women.

So forthwith I share 2022’s reflection with you. For what it’s worth. Which is absolutely nothing/everything.

A WALK ACROSS DIRTY WATER + INTO MURDERER’S ROW: Deadline to deliver the manuscript for my new memoir on Feral House was end of November. Delivered two weeks early. Lydia Lunch has done the foreword. Harley Flanagan has done the preface. Thurston Moore and Steve Albini have done the back cover blurbs. If that sounds crazily fantastical know that it does to me too. Pre-order is up now. If you haven’t already, you should. Pre-order it. Through here or here, if you hate Amazon.

BUNUEL: Two tours with the Italian supergroup of which I am the only non-Italian. Three big festivals: Supersonic, Amplifest and Soulcrusher. New record Killers Like Us on Profound Lore and La Tempesta, completes the trilogy of A Resting Place for Strangers, and The Easy Way Out. Finished the lyrics for the double album that we started recording in November. It will be called Mansuetude. It will be produced by Timo Ellis. You heard it here first. And if you’re in Victoriaville on May 20th? Come over and say hello. Then get the hell away from me. I’m shit with small talk. Just kidding. I’m GREAT with small talk. Especially if you’re buying.

OXBOW: How many resignation letters did I write during the slog to the finish line of OXBOW’s next and newest on Ipecac, Love’s Holiday? Three. How many did I send? Zero. Such is the dark power of our 2023 magnum opus, again with Joe Chiccarelli and Niko Wenner at the helm. Ten songs to quote Aaron Turner about OXBOW in general, “not what I expected but everything I hoped for.” You think you know, but really you have no idea. And won’t until the Fall of 2023. Not strictly anything, genre wise, other than OXBOW. The year 2023 will see us bringing it to your town. Or as close as we can reasonably get. The most exciting new addition to the tour schedule? A possible show in Istanbul.

TENDON, ACHILLES: If you’ve seen me walk any time at all in 2022 you’ve noted something curious. Hobbling. To the stage, to kill it. Then off the stage: hobbling. The diagnosis recommended cutting my achilles tendons off the bone, shaving down the bone and reattaching, leaving me unable to walk for 12 months. So, that is out. I can still do jiu jitsu but so can guys without legs. Other option is to get it scoped, which will have me out two weeks and STILL able to do shows this year, as well as walk. With an 80 percent success rate for this surgery, it’s the one I am going for. I’ve been doing music for 41 years and training martial arts for just as long. This is a meager price to pay for the joy they've both brought me. Which brings me to my jiu jitsu point par excellence: I didn’t want my black belt. But I got it anyway. I didn’t want it because I believe I’m not ready for it, however believing you’re not ready for it is, Catch 22 style, a prerequisite for being ready.

THE END OF NOWHERE: I started this thing at WongDoody called The Live Five, a derivation of Five Easy Pieces. They spun these all into two live events, one in London and one in New York, and gave it a website all of its own. Called? Called: The End of Nowhere. And the website? Interviews with everyone from John Cameron Mitchell and Vaginal Davis to Sophia Chang, Chelsea Wolfe, and Mike Patton. Thanks to WongDoody for backing my play, funding my dream and making me the happiest Assistant Vice President that there ever was.

THE HOUSE IN SPAIN: They broke ground on it. So, now two years away from being able to go live with our derivation of Paul Bowles’ dictum: “Malaga is wonderful, you really must come and see it sometime. But please. Don’t come see me.”

VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR: I will sing on nothing that doesn’t have a video attached these days. That means for Killers Like Us, BUNUEL has no fewer than four videos, one of which has been winning awards all over the place, and one of which was done by the estimable Annapaola Martin. Notable here because she’s also doing one of the 10 videos OXBOW is doing for Love’s Holiday. The year 2022 saw us film three of them, and one mini-documentary as an explainer for Love’s Holiday because, yes, we figure you’ll need help figuring it out.

Of course there were other points of note: an article in the LA Times, Ad Age, Hunger TV, Ad Week, Muse By Clio, and more. There’s a retinue of healthy and living friends including those who have been stabbed and lived (my brother Scott Walter who “figured I had been stabbed when I started slipping in my own blood”), and those that I hold most dear, my family.

So, if we made it to 2023, let’s assume we can make it to 2024.

Get on your marks. Get set. GO!