Ow...Wow...It's David YOW!

We're going to do us all a favor and not use "master of mayhem" to describe him even ONCE.

Hot Topic poster boys in Seattle, once upon a time.

There’s a weird arithmetic afoot. A kind of calculus whereby people you meet who, when summing up your vibe, suggest to you other people you should meet, because tribes are not always obvious, leastways how they are formed.

“You should really meet Gira,” Rollins said while sitting on a couch in the garage I had called home and enduring an acid-fueled spiel about Meister Eckhart’s commentaries on the Book of John. “I think you two would get along.”

Nevermind that Gira hung up the phone on me the first time I called. And then called me back to tell me he was going to kick my ass for calling him the first time. I persevered and eventually, as in decades later eventually, we did indeed meet. At Brownie’s in New York City. Right after 9/11.

The timing was less significant than that Rollins as impresario was performing a function like Virgil which, while horses don’t always take to the water you walk them to, was useful to say the least.

In time I came to serve this purpose myself intuiting, like maybe a Hinkley or an Arthur Bremer, who it is that had been speaking to me, I mean really speaking to me, through the veil of repeated media exposure. I heard Diamanda Galas on the radio. I sat behind Diamanda Galas at a party. Decades later I wrote Diamanda Galas about appearing on an OXBOW record.

Though she hilariously declined, notably — “your voice sucks, your band sucks and you have small hands” — for a while a friendship existed and that confirmed for me what the interview had only suggested: fate meant us to meet us.

“He’s the most physically adept person I’ve ever met,” Albini said. “His musculature I mean. Him I would not want to fight.” He was speaking of David Yow. He of Scratch
Acid, later The Jesus Lizard, and the weirder side of where the eyes in Texas turned who weren’t already focused on the Big Boys, MDC, the Dicks, and even the Butthole Surfers to some degree.

[M]y wife introduced herself to him. Which caused him to ask, Don Rickles timing intact: “is she coming on to me?!?”

Besides that people spoke about them differently. Go-go dancers, tu-tus, bullhorns and that kind of Gallagher-esque theatricality (that I actually really quite liked back then) was absent in the retold tales of their doings. And they had hit a post-punk vein that I liked. High wire shit without nets and maybe more simply put: they may have been funny, but they were never joking.

As luck would have it about 27 years ago OXBOW got a call to play with a reunited The Jesus Lizard. I remember it because my wife at the time was pregnant with my first daughter who, in utero, was miserable with the show’s volume. I remember it more because it was the show where I passed out during the first song on account of holding a single note way out over the threshold of consciousness.

When I woke up the first song had not ended but I, in a vague way, wondered why so many people were in my bedroom until I realized that I hadn’t been sleeping and very much needed to get back to work.

I remember it even more because after the show I burst into their dressing room, realizing in brief that while I felt like I had known Yow for years on account of my shadow stalking, we had never met before.

Undeterred I foisted myself on him amidst the engaged glances of the rest of the band. I noted the Albini connection, as well as other friends in common and then I got down to business.

“I watched your show, and loved it by the way,” I leaned into the corner where he was sitting. “But I watched the audience afterward too and they all seemed…happy? You had actually made them happy.”

He crossed his legs.

“And I wondered about that. I mean that’s the last thing I want to see an OXBOW audience feeling. I think.”

He paused, like Wizard trying to suss out what to say to Travis Bickle, before he finally just sighed and said, “what is WRONG with you Black people?”

Which I thought then, and now, to be totally hilarious. Then to break the tension and because I’m a social clod and hadn’t, my wife introduced herself to him. Which caused him to ask, Don Rickles timing intact: “is she coming on to me?!?”

Funny, but not joking.

And while Albini had been wrong about the musculature, just my take as a former competitive bodybuilder, he had been very right in what he was suggesting about Yow. He was my kind of people and despite my later plans to beat up Duane Denison (another story for another time), I was in love. And here this is important: disproportionately to the amount of time we had actually spent together. So, yeah…just like Hinckley I guess.

Which explains in total that he’d be here for this month’s FIVE EASY PIECES. Five questions, five answers. None (sort of) about what the person is noted for.

Enjoy.

[ONE] At what point in time, if it at all, did you come to the conclusion that plans for your life would not adhere to most of the plans you had previously been exposed to? Or more simply: how is it that you did not become a doctor? Or a parent even?

DAVID: I have come to that conclusion SEVERAL times in my life. I imagine most have. Adaptability is a helpful trait. I never had any inclination to be a doctor, but as a child I did want to be a garbage man. My parents were plenty encouraging. By high school I decided I wanted to get a degree in Fine Arts and teach at some cool art school and the folks were supportive. But then punk rock came and whisked me away from such scholastic nonsense.

I wanted to be a father when I was a preteen though and for a while after. When I was married my wife got pregnant and we laughed and danced for days! She had a miscarriage and from then on our desires to procreate never lined up right. Now, with the way the future looks, I’m glad I have no brats.

[TWO] How much of your outlook frames reality from the vantage point of Texas?

DAVID: None. Texas is a thing to be ashamed of. Other than Austin, and the town I went to college in, San Marcos, there aren’t progressive, forward thinking places that I know of in the Lone Star state.

[THREE] Nigger, Nigga or despite the Texan in you, to be avoided completely?

DAVID: To be avoided almost completely. I have a recollection of some comedian saying that he wished white folks would go back to calling Blacks “colored”. I thought that was funny.

[FOUR] Are you as amazed as I am that the senior class of our hardcore musical antecedents have so aggressively gotten after actions or activities that have destroyed their legacy?

DAVID: I guess I haven't kept up. I don't know what our punk rock forefathers have been up to…I'm sort of chuckling.

[FIVE] How much do you believe that the world is a fundamentally brutish and nasty place that's not to be trusted any further than you can throw it?

DAVID: About 100%. I'm glad I'm old . . . I'll be leaving fairly soon. I have always been unreasonably optimistic and am pretty good at letting things roll off my back. But as time goes on and humans generally get more stupid I find it MUCH more difficult to just breeze through with an idiotic grin on my face.

Trailmix and Hondo. Just two rogue cops. Photo by Kasia Robinson