“I
love rock ‘n’ roll, so put another dime in the jukebox, baby!”
--Alan
Merrill
“The
only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with
someone else while you're uncool.”
--Lester
Bangs
“Out
beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll
meet you there.”
--Rumi
Hello,
my fellow Travelers and Troglodytes! This is Electric Dave, and, yes,
I’m a friend of Jim’s. [Hangs head, then slowly raises head,
stares out into the audience defiantly, and says:] And I’m damn
proud of it! Jim recently wrote a blog about receiving a DVD of a
film his brother Al shot of our band back in the 80s, and Jim was
kind enough to send me a copy. I foolishly wrote back to him to thank
him for it and for asking me to join his band in the first place way
back in the day and lavished some other praise in his general
direction. Big mistake. Basically, he’s now blackmailing me by
threatening to publish my letter in its entirety if I don’t come up
with some copy for his blog. So, to give you a clue, this is how this
guy operates . . . .
Be
that as it may, this will be the first installment of the amazing
saga of TWO BUCK HOWIE and his musical and pharmacological exploits
during the years I played guitar in his bands (roughly 1984-1989).
Let me preface my remarks by assuring you, dear reader, that no
matter how hideous and reprehensible Jim’s comportment was back in
those days, he has since become a contributing member of society, a
loving and caring husband and father and grandfather, and, as you can
tell from reading his blogs, a true advocate for equality, liberty,
and world peace. So no matter how sick or twisted a tale I tell, no
matter what depraved and subhuman shit he might have pulled, please
keep this in mind. People grow and this is America, dammit, the land
of second, third, and 73rd
chances! Besides, I’m pretty sure he’s probably gonna edit out
all the demonic stuff and rewrite himself into some kinda saint and
sign my name under it. ‘Coz that’s how this guy operates.
(Actually, “Saint Jimbo” has a nice ring to it.)
But
seriously, I first met Jim back in the early 80s when he was the bass
player in a fairly successful local Milwaukee punk rock band,
Politixs. I met him through the felonious Brian K---- (now, alas,
deceased), who became the drummer for that band until the Munson
brothers, who formed the other half of the band, and whose ancestors
were big winners during the Norman Invasion, decided to move in the
direction of industrial synth post-punk techno. Go figure. Jim
quickly formed another band, The Uncalled Four, with himself as front
man on guitar, Boz B---- on bass, some lead guitarist whose name I
can’t remember, and the aforementioned criminal, K----, on the
drums. When the lead guitarist had the good sense to decide to leave
the band, Jim asked me to audition for the band, and I was in. So
that
TUF lineup practiced together a few times and then played all of one
set at Scandals in
Cudahy and another gig before that band imploded into gritty little
fragments of fear, loathing, and multidirectional acrimony. I wish I
could say Boz and K---- went their separate ways because of
irreconcilable creative differences, but the bad vibes owing to other
things over which history shall charitably draw a curtain were
freakin’ palpable.
Boz hated Jim, Jim didn’t trust K----, K---- hated Boz, Boz hated
K----, and I was sitting there wondering WTF I had wandered into. So
that was that. The only good thing to come out of that was that Jim
had written some originals that were pretty damn good that we played
for the rest of the decade and actually recorded at Cornerstone
Studio in MKE. (I’ll come back to those songs later.) That, and Jim
made the hottest chili on the planet and served it up with Guinness.
He claimed he made the chili with Rocky Mountain oysters, but I
disbelieve it . . . .
Sometime
later, I invited Jim to come jam with my buddies, Jack (guitar,
vocals) and Todd (drums, TODD-A-TRON™) in the Mushroom Lounge
(Jack’s basement) and but with no plans for forming a band or
playing out, just to jam and hang out. However, I’m sure from the
get-go the malevolent and evil mind of TWO BUCK HOWIE was hard at
work wondering how he could bend these naive and malleable creatures
to his musical will, BWAA-HA-HA! Now, Jack and Todd and I had gone
through a few band names, but at that time a friend had dubbed us The
Mudsharks, and so when Jim came onto the scene, we started calling
ourselves The Uncalled Mudsharks or sometimes The Uncared Four as a
sarcastic nod to TUF. Jack and Todd and I had mostly just covered
Neil Young and some rock standards, and we did some weird originals
(we wanted to be the next Couch Flambeau), and when Jim came aboard,
we continued in that vein for about a year, playing house parties and
mainly just goofing around in the Inner Mushroom Sanctum, as we
called Jack’s basement. It got crazy down in there and I used to
jump up and down while playing guitar to give a certain élan to my
performance, and I used to get pretty high with my jumps (heh, heh,
heh) and once Jim pointed up at the rafters while I was leaping à la
Pete Townshend to punctuate a rock ‘n’ roll ending, and when I
looked up, there were all these rusty, gnarly nails protruding
nastily down from the floorboards, on which I could easily have
impaled my head giving me tetanus and rabies and turning me into a
zombie and they would have had to chop off my head or something. So,
thanks, Jim, for the heads up, as it were!
The
other good advice Jim gave me years later before one gig was to tape
the lyrics of the one
song I was gonna sing
to the monitor, but I just sneered at him saying, “I wrote
the song, Howie—I’m not gonna forget the lyrics.” He just
shrugged and said, “OK.” Sure enough, that night up on stage, I
got brain freeze, forgot the second and third verses, and had to sing
the first verse three times. Embarrassing.
Jim
and I started teaching Jim’s originals to Jack and Todd—remember,
this was all part of his diabolical plan to infiltrate our minds--but
we also interspersed them with our own stuff that the whole band
composed (no, that’s the wrong term—Bach and Beethoven
composed—we mainly just spewed). We wrote and performed ditties
such as “Boll Weevils” (no, not that “Boll Weevils”; no, not
that one, either), “How Many Eggs Do You Want, Ricky?” “Aladdin’s
Hymn,” “Admarski Blues,” "Noise Suite #37," and the
infamous “Lorsban 15-G,” an instrumental based on the popular
insecticide. Eventually, however, Howie’s hoodoo took effect and we
began playing more of his originals interspersed with some punk stuff
and some 80s stuff like The Cure and The Church, but also still some
Neil and other little shanties like “Steppin’ Stone” and “Sweet
Jane” thrown in. We played our first gig with this lineup in the
fall of 1985 at Camp Wowitan (a farm out in the sticks that had been
converted into campgrounds), appearing as DEF-CON 4 because the guy
who was making the posters for the event couldn’t remember what the
name of our band was—he just knew it had a “4” in it--and those
were the dark ages of rotary phones and only the filthy rich could
afford answering machines and many peasants starved or were made into
bricks by the fabulously well-to-do, who also exercised the lex
primae noctis quite
regularly. (Bricks, people! Historically accurate, look it up.) We
played atop a haywagon—I shit you not—and I was almost
electrocuted to death when my dangling guitar strings (I didn’t
trim them at the headstock back in those days because it was hippy
chic not to) grazed the mic I was about to sing into and a fireball
exploded right in front of my face. That was back in the bad old days
before three-prong plugs, and ya took yer life in yer hands just
plugging in yer guitar. When the fireball exploded, the beer-sozzled
groundlings thought it was part of the light show and cheered. They
probably woulda cheered even harder had I actually been electrocuted,
those crazy Milwaukee kids. So, with Howie fronting us, the gig went
fairly well except for the near-electrocution and the weird harmonica
warblings which had no place in the proceedings and we later had the
guy making them excommunicated from the band even though he was a
nice guy and was supposedly going to be our band manager. But bad
harmonica playing cannot be forgiven, I’m sorry. I can’t remember
much after that except we woke up the next morning hung over,
provisionless and starving, so we went foraging up in the hills and
ate some crabapples to tide us over until we packed all our gear into
one wee car and skeedaddled back into the big city.
We
started rehearsing more “seriously” (very scary scare quotes) and
Jim whipped the band into shape with his wheedlings and cajolings and
bon vivant encouragements whilst plying us with psychotropics, which
we were nothing loath to accept. A few months later, a lean and mean
rock machine, we played Club Garibaldi in Bay View, which is a
neighborhood on Lake Michigan in MKE, and that was the gig that Jim’s
brother Al memorialized forever in his video. Forever,
people. Except for our
final encore song (Alice Cooper’s “Under My Wheels,” during
which Jim went into his zombie act), Jim was on point that night,
which is to say he was mostly
sober despite the fact that it was his 30th
birthday party; which relative sobriety I consider as a miracle right
up there with the lágrimas de sangre of our Lady of Guadalupe or
Soupdujour whoever. His timing, his banter, the scream on “Don’t
Take the Children” (Jim’s rock ‘n’ roll screams sounded like
he was being strangled and having a hernia at the same time—crude,
but effective), his bass playing, all aces. One thing though—and
there always is at least one thing, ain’a?-- our sound was at times
hideously marred by treacherous acts of sabotage by the putrid band
that opened up for us, the little bastards. After the gig, Jim
explained to me as I listened, horrified, that bands did that to each
other back then to make themselves look better. WTAF?! They were
messing with the PA and smirking about it, and during one set, the
echoes and wild banshee feedback made it almost impossible to sing,
but we plowed through anyway, quite heroically, if you ask me.
Miraculously, Al did not record those songs and most of the ones he
did record were at tolerable levels, but the PA system, even without
the dirty work of those little creep saboteurs, sucked and we
couldn’t hear the monitors, which we complained bitterly about from
the second song on. And yet Jim graciously thanked the
asleep-at-the-wheel PA guys at the end of the night for the sound.
Yeah, thanks a lot, you hoodlums! The important thing, though, is
that we had people up offa their asses and dancing and having a
raucous good time, so all’s well, eh? And Howie's adoring fans were
half heckling him and half wishing him a happy birthday, which was
pretty funny. We would consider it an insult if our fans didn't care
enough to heckle us. When we were first jamming at a house party at
The Mushroom Lounge, one of our friends said after we finished a
song, "Hey you guys should be a band or somethin'." It was
the "or somethin'" that got me.
And
even though we weren’t The Politixs, Jim had us do some political
songs. Two original songs we played were “Don’t Take the
Children,” which lamented the breakdown of the nuclear family owing
to drug addiction (and even has a “rap” break in the middle—white
boys rapping in the mid-80s? Bite it, Insane Clown Posse and Limp
Bizkit!); and “El Salvador” was an attack on the Cold War proxy
militarism of the US and Soviet Union, who jointly precipitated the
Salvadoran Civil War of the 1980s. Very Clash-esque. Talk about yer
progressive lyricism! Never mind that many of the other songs
featured and even (ironically? who knows?) valorized such disparate
anti-social activities as drug-taking, drug-smuggling, cannibalism,
homicide, mindless cruising for chicks, demented states of mind, the
“desesecration” of nuns, the heartbreak of psoriasis, and did I
mention cannibalism? Nothin’ to see here, folks, just move along.
But it was all for a good cause, as all the proceeds from that night
went to feed poor little El Salvadoran refugees—leastways, whatever
proceeds were left after the band paid our bar tab. Anyway, that’s
our story and we’re stickin’ to it.
Thus
endeth installment one of “TWO BUCK HOWIE: THE MAN, THE BAND, THE
MUSIC, THE LEGEND.” If you liked what you read, click on some ads
and stuff and earn Howie one one thousandth of a drachma or whatever
they’re paying blog sites these days to get people all riled up and
whatnot. Next time we’ll deal with the parabola and apex of the
Howie rock 'n' roll years when we cut our studio album, White
Cars! But you'll also
hear along the way about the casualties of rock 'n' roll. And lions
and tigers and bears, oh my! Oh, and turn off the lights when you
leave, please.
The Author Is Using A Pen Name To Protect Innocent
Bystanders
Jim Hauenstein
P.S. No one was ever hurt during one of our performances.
Unless of course,
you consider destroying a few hundred-thousands of their brain cells because of the loud
MUSIC
and alcohol use.
And,
“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC”
-
-
That is my story and I am sticking to it!
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Be Kind To Everyone.
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