[Gillian Gaar will read from her new book on 9/15 at Orca Books in Olympia at 3 pm and on 9/18 at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle at 7 pm.]
My friend Gillian Gaar loved this story when I shared it with her many years ago, and asked me to write it up while she was preparing her wonderful new book, ENTERTAIN US: THE RISE OF NIRVANA, which covers the years leading up to their commercial breakthrough and the Grunge explosion. She includes a portion of it in the book, but here’s the whole crazy thang…
During my mid-to-late-twenties, I managed The Record & Tape Exchange, a fine if nondescript-looking used LP/cd/cassette store located in Fairfax, Virginia’s ever-sleazy Pickett Shopping Center, just off Route 236.
This served as my full-time gig from July 1988 to June 1992, when I departed suburban D.C. for Seattle’s Capitol Hill, and facilitated the expansion of my vinyl collection from an already-impressive 2000 to a semi-shocking 7000 titles!
To folks in Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg, let’s say, Northern Virginia constituted an appalling “Sodom & Gomorrah” in their fair seat of the former Confederacy, and at some point there were actual rumblings about trying to separate the “Southern” portion of the state and cede the suburban North to Maryland, if not an at-long-last “state-i-fied” District of Columbia!
In truth of course, NoVA has always been a sedate, necessarily-transient, bedroom community to the seat of Federal Government and the Pentagon, and about as politically radical as our famously-Republican Seattle suburb of Bellevue!
Anyhow, one dull-ish Saturday afternoon, just before Halloween 1990, some heavy metal kids burst into The RTX and excitedly told my co-worker Jim Harrison and I that the notorious Richmond-based Gothic/Death Metal/Performance Art band Gwar was playing that night out in the middle of the woods about ten miles past Fairfax City, somewhere on the extensive property owned by The Cedar Crest Country Club, where the father of one of Jim’s high school skateboard buddies had fashioned a full skate “half-pipe” in a huge clearing in said woods!
We’d long-since heard (and more or less dismissed) the near-religious reports of our former RTX colleague, one Chris Milner, who’d assured us that Gwar was “the most amazing band [he’d] ever seen!”
But hell, it was not much past noon, and we had nothing better to do that night. Since Jim actually knew how to find this truly obscure location, the prospect of seeing some kinda punk rock band(s) open for the already-infamous Gwar—who were allegedly going to start their set at the stroke of midnight (!)—seemed like the properly Pagan thing to do!
So, a little after 9pm, we closed the store and headed out Lee Highway (Route 29) toward Cedar Crest in Jim’s Chevy Blazer. At some point Jim veered off the highway and we followed a rutted gravel road for at least two miles into an ever-thickening forest. Finally, we came upon a wooden commercial barricade, surrounded by two or three middle-aged women. One of them had us roll down the window and loudly demanded, “TEN dollars!” We hadn’t thought to ask the kids at the store about admission, so Jim quickly inquired, “How about five bucks?” The Cedar Crest sentinel replied, “FIVE dollars!” Jim and I were able to scrape together about $4.80 and, as he handed over a fistful of change and a couple of bills, Jim asked, “Is that cool?” Mercifully, it WAS!
We bounced gingerly through several more muddy, water-logged potholes/ruts, until we suddenly emerged into an impressive, unexpectedly-large, clearing, with the much-ballyhooed metal half-pipe at its center, and an array of large-ish bonfires surrounding it!
Jim parked, and we sauntered over to survey the circa-10 O’clock action. Scores of kids from about 12 to 17 were scurrying here and there, and the fires were blazing away, mercifully not too close to the woods, as we observed what we soon learned was the second opening band, with the memorable moniker Coat Hanger Delivery (!), about to start their set.
A few of our regular RTX customers recognized us, and they immediately gave us props for even showing up, which seemed amazing to them, given our “advanced” ages (Jim was then 19, while I was a ripe old 27)!
We mingled a little, then climbed up onto the various wooden-slat platforms, which had been cleverly constructed on all four sides of the pipe, on several levels, accessible by metal stairs. This set-up afforded an excellent “overhead” view of the incessant skating action, which was remarkable enough, especially in those halcyon days long before coverage of “Extreme Sports” had migrated to its own cable channels, much less the Olympic Games!
Better yet, one of the platforms had been converted into a sizeable ad hoc “stage”, and various generators were powering an impressive “back wall” of amplifiers. To my great delight, the boys in Coat Hanger Delivery soon climaxed their set of high-generic Pistols-styled punk with “Sonic Reducer”, by my beloved Dead Boys.
During the long wait for Gwar and/or midnight, an amusingly-large segment of the crazed teens in attendance scurried home with long faces, to meet curfews or to avoid freezing-cold ten mile walks home in the dark. Just about then Jim said to me, “Hey Tom, that’s Dave Grohl over there. I met him a few times back when he used to drum for [D.C. punk legends] Scream!”
And so Jim and I strolled over to say hello. A few enthusiastic pleasantries ensued, and then Dave mentioned that he’d just moved to Seattle to join a band called Nirvana. We told him we were both fans of Bleach, and Dave asked if we knew about The Melvins, whom he’d just discovered since moving to the Northwest.
It was here that I played my trump card, as I was at that point one of the few folks on the entire East Coast who’d followed The Melvins’ then-deeply-obscure career, or even knew their name, for that matter. “You mean ‘The World’s Heaviest Band’?”, I deadpanned, deploying the honorific which The Rocket virtually never failed to append to any mention of the group within its smudgy pages during the Eighties.
Grohl’s face lit up into that now-world famous grin, as he exclaimed with excited surprise, “Yes! I LOVE them!”
Being impeccably well-mannered, and not wishing to in any way rain on Jim’s (or Dave’s) parade, I failed to add that I’d always considered The Melvins a decidedly-lesser version of my own sludge-punk faves, Flipper, though their slowwwwww-as-molasses aesthetic had always fascinated me in theory, much as the proto-metal heaviness of The Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly briefly had, as a Montana teenager during the late-Seventies.
Jim and Dave then chatted about some old D.C. and Northern Virginia punk shows and shared acquaintances, until it was time for the main attraction.
As promised, the chain mail-clad warriors of Gwar emerged at midnight sharp, and mayhem broke out amongst those lucky few of us hardy enough to brave the rapidly dipping fall temperatures and late hour.
With their headgear masks, elaborate armor, and mock-guillotine beheadings, Gwar were more Residents-go-Inquisition than anything musically substantial, or even all that prestidigitationally impressive, though I suppose a rudimentary speed metallic adequacy was within their grasp.
Still, the faux remnants of severed heads spurted blood and bodily fluids like nobody’s business throughout the hour-long spectacle, while the half-pipe-bound skaters revved things up considerably, the most able among them flying several feet above the lip of the stage every few seconds, sometimes mere inches away from Gwar’s frontmen!
And the 90% male crowd would gladly have eaten severed limbs out of the palm of Gwar’s shapely, pointy iron bra-clad female torturess, “Slymenstra Hymen” (Danielle Stampe), who performed and presided over most of the ritual decapitations, while providing occasional backing vocals.
As the bonfires began to fizzle out, and once Gwar had offered up the night’s final number, Jim and I exchanged knowing but thoroughly satisfied smiles. From the moment we’d arrived, it had been a night obviously never to be forgotten!
Over the years I’ve occasionally been asked, “Why didn’t you ever go see Gwar again?”
To which I’ve generally replied, “One doesn’t try to improve upon perfection!”
By Tom Kipp (19 November 2011)
