Yes, Bakersfield's Indie music boys, Lost Ocean, released their self-titled album a few months ago. It's in Barnes & Nobles, Borders, online at target.com, amazon.com and more...
Here's an excerpt from the article I wrote on ABC 23 today:
If music fans thought Korn’s success would open Bakersfield’s musical floodgates into the rock and roll world, they were proved wrong long ago.
More than a decade later there’s a new sound rising out of the Bakersfield band scene through the alternative music talents of Lost Ocean. And they’re not Nu-Metal at all.
Lost Ocean’s Bakersfield quartet of Jeff Gray, Christopher Short, Bret Black and keyboard virtuoso, Skyler Johnson, features rocking keyboard-driven Indie sounds on EMI’s Credential Recordings label.
Mysterious photo of Jon Harte of the Californian hard at work
I had a good time at the Slim the Drifter show last night. The best moment? Giving Slim’s widow, Debbie, a hug. She knows why.
I never knew Slim, but I almost cried right then. She seemed genuinely happy about all the great music and people getting together for the event
Friends, family and Bakersfield area musicians from a wide range of musical backgrounds packed the house before the show even began.
And that’s in a city where first acts usually perform to a sparse crowd.
Fishlips is a great venue, and even though I arrived ten minutes early, I couldn’t get a table. I didn’t mind. I hung out at Willieboy’s corner. He knew Slim the Drifter back at West High.
Jean E.
Dave W.
Monty Byrom
Spoken Word Poet
Other moments that were really great: seeing Dave Wulfekeuhler sing, and Jean Erraserrett sound just like Slim; Three Chord Whore performing for about two minutes of hard rock, and my kids in Black Dog. I enjoyed when Lando, after playing a slow song he wrote for Slim, said, “I can see you’re all falling asleep” and then he and his brother, Jordo, who plays a mean violin, kicked into their duo-rendition of Wilco’s “Acuff Rose”. Monty Byrom even tapped his foot a couple of times.
Willieboy
Lando
Black Dog
Lando
More favorite moments included Monty Byrom singing a song off the Guilty Ten, and then borrowing Lando’s guitar for some acoustic blues.
Lots of original music on a night of many Slim the Drifter songs. Chuck Seaton and Billy Russell sang their own original Slim tribute song. It was just as good as Lando’s and Jean’s.
Always hot Darcie of Three Chord Whore
My family capped off the night with a trip to Zingo’s, the location for part of Slim the Drifter’s video for “Ballad of Bill.”
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In 1968, blonde-haired Walter Scott Sturtevant, only eight years old, pulled on an elegant cardigan sweater. It’s what all spoiled brats of the middle class youth wore to Central California schools in those days.
His short hair plastered with hairspray like other school kids, Scott walked out of his house and tore his way into Millie Munsey Elementary School. Although his thoughts were likely more on the dramatic adventures that young kids imagine rather than school, he did have a beef with one of his friends this day.
Even at such a young age Sturtevant had an underbite and strong chin. He once jutted it out and smiled during class while the clownish Jeff Wray hummed, making good ol’ Principal “Leadbottom Lee”, a short, squat woman who always wore grey, even more angry at troublesome students. Though Scott wasn’t an upstart, he was rascally and already had a flair for at least appreciating clownish antics.
In class he shot a sideways glance at friend Greg Goodsell. He had a few words he wanted to say since finding out his buddy was leaving Munsey for a mentally gifted program at another school.
Sturtevant played a lot as kids did in those days. His mind wandered far from the likes of today’s video game culture, reflecting the black and white of TV-made perils—imaginative G.I. Joes on rescue missions akin to adventurous after school episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Voyage was the perfect metaphor for a kid who would later become a poverty-stricken explorer-soldier of Bakersfield’s music streets. Years later he would embark on his own travels that took him across cresting waves of punk, New Wave, alternative music, spoken word poetry, even to the self-glamorized bottom of a country rock star sea.
Yet this was the third grade, a turning point for a young intellectual in the making. Already, he showed a flair for rebelliousness—he was about to confront his friend, Greg Goodsell, the very kid he watched TV shows and played G.I. Joes with. He amazed Goodsell with an eloquent speech as he spouted streetwise philosophy. “He told me ‘Nobody likes intellectuals,’” says Goodsell. “He wanted me to experience life rather than go to the mentally gifted school program at Roosevelt School. He didn’t want me to sit in a dusty study. He wanted me to go into the world.”
Strong words from a wise young spoiled kid with vision? Or better yet, words from a kid who wanted his friend to stay in his middle class cultural world so he wouldn’t be alone?
Rex Karz who met Sturtevant in the 1990s says Scott was later teased in junior high, that there were some altercations. Goodsell himself notes a behavior change that may or may not be typical of young adolescents. Perhaps Scott Sturtevant’s formative years reached him at a younger age than most.
Curran Junior High was a mere jump over the backyard fence on LaVern Street where Sturdevant lived. During school at Curran he showed a mean streak with a cutting sarcasm. Goodsell met up with him again there and hadn’t noticed such talk before leaving Munsey.
Was Sturtevant’s biting sarcasm normal behavior for a snobby middle class kid who could get whatever he asked for? What’s more likely true is whatever happened to him as a youth when Goodsell wasn’t around possibly affected his behavior in later years.
Sturtevant never finished West High School though Buck Owens Buckaroos’ drummer Dave Wulfekeuhler, former new wave artist Jean Erassarret III and graphic designer Mike Willis all remember meeting him there around 1976. Willis considered him a loner. Some remember him as dramatic, dressing preppy, and picking on geeks as some kids do. All considered him a kid with Thespian roots and a penchant to be a band roadie. “He was at all the art dance gigs,” says Wulfekeuhler.
Dave Wulfekeuhler, the younger years, circa late 1970s
Mike Willis broke guitars onstage for Justy Queet (1975-1978: Dave Wulfekeuhler, Jean Erassarret III, Will Roland and Tony Flores). He also helped burst flash pots that smoked up the South High gym, getting them kicked off the West High band list. Scott, enamored with such antics began hanging out with the band in 1977, soaking in the drama as impressionable kids would. During such rebellious youthful days, the then chunky Sturdevant along with the rest of the band probably wondered, “What can we do next to outdo ourselves?”
Scott Sturtevant, late 1970s
It was quite possibly the beginning of Sturtevant wondering about how people could affect one another through changing perceptions of one’s character.
“Our funnest times together were at Jean’s music studio,” says Wulfekeuhler. “We’d hang out and look at a yearbook and make fun of fellow high schoolers as if they were outrageous characters. You know, give students fictitious names. We’d just laugh and laugh.”
Dave W. (bottom), Jean E. (top right), Jordan from Black Dog (top left)
Jean E. and Dave W. (Buckaroos) remember Slim
Marvin Jolley in his blog Marvin in the Land of Milk and Honey writes:
I met him in high school when he was 16 and he was pretty amusing and charming to everyone then. He was the clown the class loved, not the class clown. There *is* a difference you know. Yes, he was a little pudgy then... We made fast friends and then I can't tell you how many times we laughed ourselves silly while watching movies or the latest Saturday Night Live or some other silly thing in the 70's. And he was a good laugher. Big, horse-toothy laugher. Capped by a girlish, snickering squeal.
“His dad was a geologist who forced math on him. He rebelled,” says Jean Erassarret III. Scott had become what he says Goodsell shouldn’t do when he told him not to go away to Roosevelt. He became an intellectual. Only, now he was too good for high school. Another West High student, Marvin Jolley, along with Sturtevant, dropped out of high school.
Sturtevant soon attended Bakersfield College. He took up writing, photography and forensics and hung out with the college debate crew throughout 1978-79.
He continued to follow Justy Queet, whose members encouraged him to make music. “I remember his first song. It was ‘Grandma’s Pussy’. He performed it at a party. He got up and jerked around…He was known as the drama guy. Some of us thought he was destined for Saturday Night Live,” says Wulfekeuhler.
Jolley writes, “He certainly understood how to be dramatic and that was his foil.”
Around 1978 Justy Queet came to an end, and while Wulfekeuhler moved on to perform in bands such as Sweet Smoke, a crossover in Bakersfield’s black music scene, Erassarret III angered Sturtevant by joining the burgeoning New Wave movement. “It pissed him off,” says Erassarret III. Sturtevant liked a different blend of music, having sung with punk band the Lizerds at one or more house parties. Yet Sturtevant eventually bought into New Wave. In late 1979, before the movement turned “safe”, Sturtevant wandered into a party filled with forensics students and bragged, “Me and my friends are going to start Bakersfield’s first New Wave band, The Gags.”
Sturtevant soon wrote “Drop Out” and “Snow Clones”. The band had few gigs. And so Sturtevant began his transformation into one of his first music scene characters. “He was one of the first people in Bakersfield to have the clean cut new wave look with the skinny ties and suitcoats. It was very Ric Ocasek,” says Goodsell who featured Sturdevant at the time in the Renegade Rip newspaper in an article about New Wave and punk.
Unfortunately, the Gags didn’t work out. They transformed into the Phones, in which Sturdevant wasn’t a part. By late 1979 he told his friends, “I’m going to LA to make New Wave…”
Sturtevant couldn’t have been more wrong.
*****************************
In 1977 Los Angeles, California, hardcore punk was born, many giving credit to Jan Paul Beahm, A.K.A, Bobby Pyn, A.K.A Darby Crash. The band’s name was the Germs and their legendary hardcore punk status was one filled with drugs, decadence, debauchery and suicide. The Germs only album, G.I., is considered a classic and was produced by Joan Jett. It has a cult following spanning the world and influences all ranges of punk music even today.
“I still have a photo of Darby Crash in my wallet from the LA Times,” says Shantell Waldo of Bakersfield band Three Chord Whore. “He is still everything punk to me.” Anyone who has seen The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) by Penelope Spheeris might agree with Waldo. The film is a cult classic about Los Angeles punk 1979-1980 and featured Darby Crash on the promotional poster and soundtrack record cover.
Darby Crash wasn’t tame by any means. Beware of getting lost in the romanticism of the Germs being the first hardcore punk band.
Darby attended a Hollywood hype school filled with Scientology and strangeness. He rebelled, transforming himself into a self-imposed punk messiah, his followers burning their wrists with cigarette butts to mark their faith in Darby Crash and the Germs. His and the lives around him were filled with music, drugs, sex, and lots of alcohol. The book, Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs paints a disturbing late Seventies punk scene. One reviewer writes about the book:
Germs vocalist and songwriter Darby Crash appears as both a taunting jester of the burgeoning West Coast punk scene as well as mischievous if not malevolent pied piper leading impressionable thrill seekers into would-be decadence of the type predicted by Oswald Spengler in The Decline Of The West. Through the remembrance quips, Crash also reveals a side as an extremely image-conscious and thus insecure youth struggling more to obscure his homosexuality rather than create a cohesive and worthy artistic legacy.
A harsh criticism? Maybe. Yet Darby’s disturbing and decadent legacy will grow even stronger with the punk genre film What We Do Is Secret slated to be released in July, 2007.
The truth is most venues banned the Germs and their enigmatic leader. The Starwood allowed the band but hosed the venue after each show. Darby Crash himself was a hell-bent self-aggrandized drug user on a suicide mission. He also happened to make great music during a violent youth movement. He warned those around him endlessly about his leaving the band, a metaphor for exiting life and entering rock god status. He was the pinnacle of hero worship for Seventies middle class punk kids upset with what their youth movement saw as a decline of society and music. They wanted to instill change, to do it themselves, and to fight against mainstream society. They chose in part to be disgusting because the middle class world around them was farthest from. So they waded into the darkest streets and lifestyles Los Angeles had to offer.
Within such a dark world Darby Crash had a persona that was as raw as L.A.’s drug and prostitution-filled streets could get.
Alice Bag of The Bags writes on her blog, Diary of a Bad Housewife in 2004:
I met Bobby Pyn (later to become Darby Crash) early on. We became friends and used to talk on the phone. We were both very much interested in philosophy and ethics and would often have heated discussions. Darby was into Nietzsche and I liked Kant, so of course we clashed. But at first we got along more than we fought. We were drinking buddies and were both known for our stage antics. Between the Bags and the Germs, we probably had the wildest audiences of the scene and we did several shows together. As Darby submerged deeper and deeper into his persona of “Darby Crash”, he and I began to grow apart. My observation was that he began to have less real friends and instead surrounded himself with fans and followers whom he could use and control. I totally disagreed with this and we got into an epic fight over the “proper role of fans” one drunken night. Darby thought that people who could be controlled, should be controlled and he disliked the way I treated Bags' audience members as equals. I wanted to erase the line between performer and audience and Darby saw his role as an artist being closer to that of an idol.
It was this raging Los Angeles punk scene that Scott Sturtevant entered in 1979-1980. It was perfect timing. The hurricane was in full force and he stepped right into it. He was the same age as Darby Crash, and was wholly impressionable by the maelstrom of change taking place among youth on L.A.’s punk streets.
Marvin Jolley writes in his blog about introducing Sturtevant into the L.A. punk scene and using him as a replacement in one of Darby’s pet band projects:
He tagged along on our forays into Los Angeles. One night, Scott and I drove down to see the Germs at the Whiskey at the invitation of Bill and Dick of the Assault from Ventura. I will never forget the chaos, maelstrom of energy and exuberant embrace of disaster. I was certain that nothing would ever be the same. And I was right. Outside, we met Rik L. Rik who was very nice with us and shared cigs.
Later, after Lizerds imploded and I went down to play in a band managed by Darby with Donnie Rose and Laura, I determined that it wasn't a path I wanted to take so I came back from LA and Darby's pet project. I recommended Scott to them as a replacement for me. He wanted to be a part of that world. I took him to the bathroom and cut his hair. Chopped is the better verb. I made him retire the Hawaiian shirt. Coached him on a few things not to say or do: New Wave Folk. Elvis Costello. And above all, NO FUCKING BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. Off he went…
It’s said that Sturtevant ended up at Skinhead Manor, a rented Hollywood Mansion on Highland Avenue near Hollywood High where the Germs along with Circle Jerks, Youth Brigade, and No Crisis all hung out to rehearse. One group of rough-looking girls practiced there. They later became the GoGos. There was a living room stage, a beer machine in the foyer, and Darby Crash was in the mix.
Skinhead Manor was a short-lived venture, though it came at a crucial time to influence Sturtevant who met Darby Crash himself. Did Sturtevant acquire a cigarette burn scar on his wrist, marking him as a Germs follower? Erassarret III thinks so. Maybe he simply idolized Darby to the point where he wanted to become a star with similarities.
No burn required.
And if Darby Crash really controlled those around him, what kind of impact would that have on the impressionable Sturdevant through the years?
Energized, Sturdevant re-entered Bakersfield with a bootleg mix tape of one of the Germs shows where he declared, “Listen to this punk scene!”
Never forgetting Sturtevant’s Thespian roots, Dave Wulfekeuhler says, “I was on a date at Marie Calendars and in comes this guy with a hardcore punk look…safety pins, his hair was short cropped. But it was still Scott. I knew his heart…I later wondered if Scott was just acting. But then I thought, No, you can’t act and live that hardcore. He pulled it off.”
By 1979 heroin had entered the hardcore punk scene. Until then it was mostly beer, speed, pot and cocaine. The punk movement was a youth movement and Sturtevant fit the mold, and like other hardcore punks, he likely didn’t perceive much of a future in a world deemed fatalistic.
Though punk had a Do It Yourself (DIY) philosophy, some, like Sturtevant got caught up in the scene’s darker side. Waldo reflects, “He was always the enigmatic punker guy. He knew all my idols: Darby, Exene Cervenka…and he was around people, the heroin, the other drugs. Maybe that path took him down a darker road…”
Marvin Jolley writes:
He lasted there for a few weeks and decided it wasn't a good match either. But the exposure catalyzed him. He became darker after that. And unfortunately the heroin thing. Yes. He got exposed to them as well. We all did. Best not to linger there. You might not come back.
In December, 1980, after Sturtevant returned to Bakersfield, Darby Crash committed suicide in L.A. on a mega-dose of heroin. He hoped to begin his push to becoming a punk god in post-life. It’s suggested his suicide had been part of his plan for years to secure his idol status as an original American punk legend.
Greg Goodsell reflects on a day he’ll never forget:
I showed up at his house. The old neighborhood had gone to hell. Scott was frantically calling friends in L.A. and trying to piece together the story of Darby’s death. He was punked out, intense looking, skinny, intimidating. At the time, L.A. had a huge scene that included the Germs, X, Black Flag and Circle Jerks. He gave me some punk albums to play on my radio show. I went home.
Twenty-three hours after Darby Crash died, John Lennon was murdered.
Darby Crash, the self-made martyr of the hardcore punk scene was quickly forgotten by much of the world. But not in the punk scene in L.A. or Bakersfield. Some rumors even flew around that Sturtevant injected Darby with the fatal dose. But that was just a localized myth. Darby had bought $400 worth of heroin, injected the girl he was with, then injected himself with an even larger dose. She survived.
Yet the death of Darby Crash gave Greg Goodsell an idea. He’d been running a punk rock show at KBCC, Bakersfield College. And so he contacted Sturtevant and told him, “Get a band together. I have a venue.”
It was at that moment Bakersfield’s first hardcore punk band, Teen Suicide, was born. Jolley adds, “Upon his return, he wanted to do something more punk, not return to the new wave thing. Hence Teen Suicide. From our little circle of outsiders. More craziness ensued…”
On a dreary overcast day in February 1981, hundreds of youth gathered on the Bakersfield College campus. They crammed themselves into the tiny quad area that joined the student union and cafeteria buildings. Some were dressed in punk clothes, most weren’t. The band set up on the east side of the quad in front of the men’s bathroom entrance, a huge message board and some vending machines. The quad itself was filled with round tables fitted with multi-colored umbrellas. Some students sat at the tables. Some stood on brick planters for a better view. Others wandered, lingered or just passed through.
Fliers for the show showed two feet in a V-shape with a toe tag that read “Teen Suicide”. Before the show, band members stuck them to windows with Superglue, which didn’t make a lot of people happy. The band itself was an hour and a half late.
The original line-up had Scott Sturtevant on guitar/vocals, Gary Bratcher also on the bass, and two former members of The Lizerds: Brad Ryerson on bass/vocals and Bruce Brink on drums.
In a surviving video of their performance, the skinny Sturtevant can be seen wearing a cut-off red Cardinals shirt and jeans. His hair is cropped and he looks the part of a punk icon himself.
As the video begins, Sturtevant screams and moans into a broken microphone. He takes drags of a cigarette and begins a punk anti-Beatles song called “Day Tripper”, clearly a jest that Darby Crash was the more wounding death to be mourned, at least to Bakersfield’s newest hardcore punk band leader. Soon he leans against a wall, then returns to the microphone and belts, “Yeah. Beatles suck anyway! You know that!”
Teen Suicide’s performance is what Dave Wulfekeuhler, who saw a video of the performance, would later describe as “horrid, pure utter noise.”
Greg Goodsell describes the show: “In the first two minutes it was obvious that the band hadn’t practiced. It was noise. There was no song list. People fled.”
Some people stood around hoping for something to happen. Most left right away. For those who stayed, what Sturtevant showed was stage presence. He hung at the front of the band like a true leader. On his left arm he had scratched a huge cross with radiating lines, perhaps a self-afflicted reminder that Darby Crash’s body was found in a cross-like pose and had risen again through Sturtevant’s noisy tribute.
On Sturtevant’s face there was a deep self-made gash that helped him grab more attention from the crowd. One person threw an orange and he threw it back. Later, a Mormon girl claimed Sturtevant cut himself and spit at the crowd. Although witnesses say he gashed himself before the show, at one point in the video he smiles, stares, spits on the ground and says, “Lick it up…this is art!” He soon grabs the guitar and speeds into an instrumental, taking further control of the band. After a short stop between songs he says, “Were you offended? We don’t mean to be anything but pure shit!”
Nevertheless, Goodsell remarks on the failure of the day, “I could never book another band there…”
VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Teen Suicide, circa 1981
After the Bakersfield College debacle their next show was at the Falafel on the corner of 19th and Eye Street. Only 12 people showed. Bakersfield band, The Terrorists (1981-1982) homepage has this to say about the Falafel:
Teen Suicide played several legendary live shows at the Falafel, a trendy little dive downtown. Scott would stagger drunkenly through the audience, drinking out of people's beer pitchers and chucking chairs around. The sound they made was the most beautiful noise. Fortunately one recording from a live show remains, the song “Coming Back From The Dead”…
Sturtevant wrote just before his death in 2007 about losing a few of Teen Suicide’s original recordings:
Bruce Brink was the drummer in TS. You could however, write chapter and verse about the long list of drummers that we played shows with when Bruce couldn't make it back to town…that was an important night in Bakersfield punk rock history. The drummers name was Brian and he had played in the Contaminators before he started playing with Jean in the Phones. Brad and I left with a cassette tape that eventually broke. Brad and I really loved the way the recording sounded and wanted to release it (I hope to hell he remembers). As I recall, we were sitting in Brad’s truck in his parents’ driveway when the tape fell apart. We didn't speak for about thirty minutes because we found out that the recording, which was made on Brian's reel to reel had been recorded over. If my memory serves me well, Brad put in the Carpenters and we sat and smoked cigarettes. What the hell else can you do?
Yet he didn’t always play well with others. “He had an artistic temperament,” says Goodsell.
What he really wanted was to go solo.
*****************************
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Scott Sturtevant began a transformation to the street poet/musician character, Slim the Drifter.
Jean Erassarret III, affected by Sturtevant’s dark transformation, wrote the song, “Contorted Boy” about his changing persona and travels to Hollywood during the time Darby Crash took him in.
LIFE IS GETTIN' ME DOWN ALL THE TIME I HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT PEOPLE TO DEFEND MY KIND MY TRADEMARK IS A BUTTON AND A LEATHER COAT AND I'M TRY TRY TRYIN' JUST TO HIT THE RIGHT NOTES BECAUSE I'M
I'M A CONTORTED BOY I'M A SKINNY BOY, BUT THAT'S LIFE IN THE CITY CAUSE I'M, I'M A CONTORTED BOY A DRAMATIC BOY LOOKING FOR CHANGES
WELL I'M GOING TO HOLLYWOOD GONNA SEE IF SOMEONE CAN SIGH ME ON A RECORD LABEL SIGN A PIECE OF PAPER WHEN ALL THE HANDS ARE UNDER THE TABLE
OOH, THIS CAN'T HAPPEN TO ME, NO NO CAUSE YOU KNOW THAT I CAN'T GO BACK HOME
PEOPLE STANDING AROUND ME GOD GIVE ME ROOM TO BREATH ALL THE HOMETOWN PEOPLE SEEM NO NIEVE HOW CAN I BE RIGHT WHEN EVERBODY'S WRONG I'LL TAKE IT AS A CUE TO LEAVE THIS TOWN
I WON'T GO TO HOLLYWOOD CAUSE NO ONE SAID I SHOULD CAUSE LIVIN' ON THE SIDEWALK IS NOT THAT GOOD MAYBE I CAN MOVE TO A BEACH PUNK TOWN START A NEW BAND AND MAKE A NEW SOUND BECAUSE I'M
I'M A CONTORTED BOY I'M A SKINNY BOY, BUT THAT'S LIFE IN THE CITY CAUSE I'M, I'M A CONTORTED BOY A DRAMATIC BOY LOOKING FOR CHANGES
SOME PEOPLE SAY THAT I HIT MY STRINGS TOO HARD BUT THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND ME CAUSE MY FEELINGS ARE SO SCARED BUT THAT WILL PUSH ME HARDER JUST TO PROVE MY POINT THAT NO ONE'S GOOD FOR NOTHING UNLESS THEY THINK THE WAY I DO BECAUSE I'M
I'M A CONTORTED BOY I'M A SKINNY BOY, BUT THAT'S LIFE IN THE CITY CAUSE I'M, I'M A CONTORTED BOY A DRAMATIC BOY LOOKING FOR CHANGES
How to best describe Slim the Drifter? Country pop, alt country, black, dark, shady, hobo, punkish, self-depricating, moody, talented, working class but not a worker, all-American, Elvis, poor, Bakersfield-centric, Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, and a hidden Darby Crash temperament.
Rex Karz suggested that Sturtevant’s Slim character showed no elements of Darby Crash, brushing such notions off. Rex met Slim around 1991. He mentioned that Slim did say he went with Darby Crash to “hang out in disgusting places”, and that Slim’s persona was filled with “miss-me-when-I’m-gone bullshit.”
It can be said that Slim took on some of Darby Crash’s traits, who consistently predicted his own death in lyrics and suggestions to band members. Suicide and death was a large part of the early punk movement and seemed to bring an authenticity to Slim’s character that wallowed in depravity. In a 1992 video of his show at Hollywood’s Club Lingerie, Slim tossed confetti, handed out small prizes and said, “This is your prize. It will be valuable even after my untimely death.” Slim can be heard muttering similar cryptic statements in a preamble to the same show.
The video also shows haunting footage of Slim heading through the darkness of the Hollywood freeway right after the show. The next morning he sits in a stained Modesto JC T-shirt and proudly shows off an issue of LA Weekly that advertised his Southland appearance.
Rex claims another old friend of the Slim character recently commented, “Slim had been writing suicide notes for 30 years.”
A lot of people didn't know Slim was an artist. He stenciled clothes, hats, equipment, and a zine
Yet Slim’s literal death was slow, due to alcohol abuse and other rough living carried over from his days in the Los Angeles punk movement.
Slim’s wife Debbie who he married on an Oregon cliffside in 2005 says Darby Crash “was a very big influence. Slim tried to emulate his persona.” Her words suggest Slim the Drifter was a character severely influenced by the early days of hardcore punk, even 28 years later.
Shantell Waldo discusses Slim’s strange spiral after meeting Darby Crash and wonders, “Did he do it because he was once in the company of punk rock greatness?” She further discusses Sturdevant’s transformation into Slim the Drifter:
Right before he became Slim, he started touring around with the Gang of Hair release. As far as I know, he’d gotten some money, but they didn’t promote him and he didn’t put out the effort. It marked his metamorphoses to Slim the Drifter. The Los Angeles scene formed what he became. He was proud of the working man image. He became a guitar slinger always dressed in black…
Sturtevant brought a boom box for taped accompaniment. Sometimes dressed like a hobo, he had a poor man’s preamble to many of his shows. He had a jittery Elvis swagger and swoon. He moved around the stage a lot and leaned and posed as if caught smoking on a street corner. He seemed to accept the streetwise L.A. Beat Generation philosophy of “poverty is a virtue” and the punk movement’s Do It Yourself mentality. L.A. poet S.A. Griffin recently said in a phone interview, “The L.A. beat scene transformed into the punk scene.”
Slim the Drifter was an evolution of both the Beats and Punks. He took his all-American alternative cowboy pop songs and spoken word to people seeking whatever was new on the streets of Hollywood. And he took it a step further to do it by himself. At Club Lingerie in Hollywood, Sturtevant’s new persona, Slim the Drifter leaned against a wall, pressed play, began mumbling and throwing confetti. Was this his thespian American roots in transformation again?
“He honed in on believable characters,” says Dave Wulfekeuhler.
“Slim the Drifter was a sellable project,” adds Erassarret III. “He brought hardcore punk to Bakersfield. But when Slim the Drifter came out, no one was doing that.”
Slim the Drifter was a poet, a singer, a poverty stricken voice of the people that offered hope through his own afflictions. Where Darby crashed, Slim drifted in emulation of Crash, who never quite left his psyche. Like L.A.’s punk icons getting affected by Neil Young’s comments, “It’s better to burn out than fade away,” the new Slim character, hanging under the shadow of Darby Crash, was a streetwise poet drifter, a spokesman for a generation in pain, a folk-based rock poet who wasn’t about money, but had words to offer the world by using his own life as a metaphor.
And yet, according to Goodsell, Slim the Drifter was a character chronically unemployed in the 1990s. “Not passing high school finally caught up to Slim,” says Goodsell, who often tried to get Slim jobs. Marvin Jolley adds to the idea that Slim avoided traditional work:
I don't know, but I remember that he would do anything to get out of work. Oh totally. That was Scott’s mission in life. Stoned in his dad’s truck sitting on the range watching...something to do with electricity towers.
One of the biggest ironies is that during high school Sturtevant had a lust for egging bums. He would take friends out in one of his father’s work trucks, find a bum, and say, “Before you do it, it’s mandatory to yell, ‘Get a Job!’” One has to wonder if Slim developed a guilty conscience from having tormented transients, or was his persona a reflection of his love for Bakersfield, his need for acceptance, and his appreciation for country music and small town mentality? Could have been a mixture of all of the above and more.
Slim the Drifter side project?
On occasion, Slim the Drifter performed. And though he created great albums throughout the 1990s, not many people heard them. Slim himself disappeared much of the time.
His debut album, Callin’ Cali came out in 1992.
In April of that year, Slim recorded a video at one of his Bakersfield gigs, possibly Suds Tavern. He turned on his beat box, had a guitar, a pompadour that bounced as he sang with his western drawl; his voice a clamoring echo reaching to the audience. It was one of only a few performances to promote his album. He tossed confetti which landed on his black jacket, and later threw a red streamer out toward his audience. The poppy beat box blended with his swooning voice, and his chin jut out with each dance step. He even poked fun at lip synching and performed some in jest.
“His stuff is beautiful pop,” Waldo says, “although if you listen to the album, every part reflects his life in the early 1990s. That whole album is so Slim. Damn he’s an asshole, but an American original with all the aspects of American music.”
Slim spent some time before Callin’ Cali at Dino Giacomazzi’s dairy farm in Hanford, California. The song, “Dino’s Farm” made the album’s final cut. According to Erassarret III and Wulfekeuhler, there was even a film about cow tipping that accompanied Slim’s time on Dino’s farm. And Dino is a musician himself, responsible for the Gang of Hair label that Slim was briefly on.
A broken marriage and rough living after recording Callin’ Cali caused a nervous breakdown that resulted in Slim’s isolation from music for several years. “He just locked himself up,” says his wife, Debbie. He went to Arkansas, almost made it to Tennessee. He hung out on the streets of Austin.
Just before Slim’s breakdown was a period of intense creativity. He painted, spray painted, created stencil art with a country theme, and even painted a Fender bass head in his splatter style. But that was followed by severe depression and ensuing medication that turned him zombie-like for several years.
During much of the 1990s, Slim made incredible music, lived in and out of Bakersfield, was completely manic at times, speaking in metaphors. He came back to Bakersfield again after floating through Austin and toured around as a carnie on a Tilt-a-whirl for a season. He was even rumored to steal, or at least try to once in a while. He had truly metamorphosed into his character of depravity.
Eventually Slim came out of isolation to record the albums The Ballad of Kurt & Courtney and PIMP.
The Bakersfield Californian ran an article in their Eye Street section in 1997 simply titled “Slim the Drifter”. The article promoted his album The Ballad of Kurt and Courtney, which he recorded in one take on a break from working carnivals. Logan Molen, Vice President for Interactive Media for the Bakersfield Californian in his brief blog piece, “Slim the Drifter, R.I.P.” reflected about the 1997 article:
I fondly recall putting a big picture of Slim on the cover…and delighted in handling several complaints that came in from irate readers upset that we would give a "punk" more than a sentence. Good times.
Greg Goodsell raised his eyebrows when the article was brought up, a piece that he believed wrongly glamorized Slim the Drifter and his harsh lifestyle. He discussed Slim’s character of depravity:
That article, just like Slim, put a glamorous spin on desperate circumstances. I don’t think you can glamorize poverty, sadness and desperate circumstances for artistic vision. Collecting cans isn’t performance art. Yet Slim is Bakersfield’s other favorite son. Although he was tinged with doubt, depression and despair, he had charm. Incredible charm even in the most desperate circumstances. He was very nice, cordial and uncompromised in his vision. That isn’t the same for a lot of people I know. But the character of Slim was about brokenness, failure, broken promises and shattered dreams. He romanticized the notion of being in a small room with cockroaches…
Greg Goodsell remembers Slim
It’s said that Slim was too trusting of people, which during the recording of PIMP, someone stole his keyboard that held many music samples. Although Slim’s wife Debbie says “PIMP was meant to be a goof”, Shantell Waldo described that when PIMP was created, “it wasn’t at a time when he had the ability to be serious about music. It was about he and a girl and the madness they were going through.” He recorded the album at Bakersfield’s Tower Motel, a rumored area where questionable characters lurked. Yet he had enough recording equipment to get the album done in one of the motel rooms. Waldo says the album is filled with “drum machines and cool cheesy synthesizers…”
Ethan Green lived with Slim in Bakersfield in 2005. When Scott asked why he wanted to stay in Bakersfield, Ethan said, “Well, the train stopped there.” He had recording equipment and be-bopped around with Slim making some tunes. Somewhere in there, Brad Coats joined them to form the.
Slim the Drifter Trio’s album, The Guilty Ten is a country masterpiece that Slim and his partners finished recording in June, 2006 at a location in Bakersfield. Five days later Scott and Debbie moved out of town. The trio floated apart and never met up again.
Material from The Guilty Ten was performed just a few times live, including at Scott and Debbie’s wedding at Umpqua State Park in Oregon. Scott refused to perform at his own wedding, He said it was bad luck.
Literally, one of the lost tape collections of Slim. How many are there?
Eventually, he and his wife moved 30 miles east of Reno, Nevada to a little high desert agricultural and ranching town called Fernley, marking the end of the road for the character of Slim the Drifter and the complex musician, Scott Sturtevant.
Darby Crash, a host of punks through history, Slim the Drifter and writers from the Beat Generation all glamorized human depravity and got away with it. The Beat Generation’s Jack Kerouac died at the same age of 47 also from a liver saturated from too many years of alcohol abuse between bouts of extreme creativity. It was Kerouac who wrote:
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!
Perhaps Slim just needed someone else to tell him how great he was, his music was, how bright of a firework he was. Slim couldn’t be kept down or away from music. He kept recording, self-published a book, and made a cassette with a singer from Shafter—hidden tracks meant to one day be revealed—not to mention his haunting album with the Slim the Drifter Trio.
Stay tuned. I'll be posting my Slim the Drifter article here tonight, and another article on www.turnto23.com. Here on Paperback Writer you'll see footage from Teen Suicide band, circa 1979, and some never before seen images of his work... Here's a link to his Obit.
His tribute show is tomorrow, 7PM to whenever, Fishlips, and it's all going to be great music...
In 1968, blonde-haired Walter Scott Sturdevant, only eight years old, pulled on an elegant cardigan sweater. It’s what all spoiled brats of the middle class youth wore to Central California schools in those days.
His short hair plastered with hairspray like other school kids, Scott walked out of his house and tore his way into Millie Munsey Elementary School. Although his thoughts were likely more on the dramatic adventures that young kids imagine rather than school, he did have a beef with one of his friends this day.
Even at such a young age Sturdevant had an underbite and strong chin. He once jutted it out and smiled during class while the clownish Jeff Wray hummed, making good ol’ Principal “Leadbottom Lee”, a short, squat woman who always wore grey, even more angry at troublesome students. Though Scott wasn’t an upstart, he was rascally and already had a flair for at least appreciating clownish antics.
In class he shot a sideways glance at friend Greg Goodsell. He had a few words he wanted to say since finding out his buddy was leaving Munsey for a mentally gifted program at another school.
Sturdevant played a lot as kids did in those days. His mind wandered far from the likes of today’s video game culture, reflecting the black and white of TV-made perils—imaginative G.I. Joes on rescue missions akin to adventurous after school episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Voyage was the perfect metaphor for a kid who would later become a poverty-stricken explorer-soldier of Bakersfield’s music streets. Years later he would embark on his own travels that took him across cresting waves of punk, New Wave, alternative music, spoken word poetry, even to the self-glamorized bottom of a country rock star sea.
Yet this was the third grade, a turning point for a young intellectual in the making. Already, he showed a flair for rebelliousness—he was about to confront his friend, Greg Goodsell, the very kid he watched TV shows and played G.I. Joes with. He amazed Goodsell with an eloquent speech as he spouted streetwise philosophy. “He told me ‘Nobody likes intellectuals,’” says Goodsell. “He wanted me to experience life rather than go to the mentally gifted school program at Roosevelt School. He didn’t want me to sit in a dusty study. He wanted me to go into the world.”
Strong words from a wise young spoiled kid with vision? Or better yet, words from a kid who wanted his friend to stay in his middle class cultural world so he wouldn’t be alone?
Rex Karz who met Sturdevant in the 1990s says Scott was later teased in junior high, that there were some altercations. Goodsell himself notes a behavior change that may or may not be typical of young adolescents. Perhaps Scott Sturdevant’s formative years reached him at a younger age than most.
Curran Junior High was a mere jump over the backyard fence on LaVern Street where Sturdevant lived. During school at Curran he showed a mean streak with a cutting sarcasm. Goodsell met up with him again there and hadn’t noticed such talk before leaving Munsey.
Was Sturdevant’s biting sarcasm normal behavior for a snobby middle class kid who could get whatever he asked for? What’s more likely true is whatever happened to him as a youth when Goodsell wasn’t around possibly affected his behavior in later years.
Sturdevant never finished West High School though Buck Owens Buckaroos’ drummer Dave Wulfekeuhler, former new wave artist Jean Erassarret III and graphic designer Mike Willis all remember meeting him there around 1976. Willis considered him a loner. Some remember him as dramatic, dressing preppy, and picking on geeks as some kids do. All considered him a kid with Thespian roots and a penchant to be a band roadie. “He was at all the art dance gigs,” says Wulfekeuhler.
Mike Willis broke guitars onstage for Justy Queet (1975-1978: Dave Wulfekeuhler, Jean Erassarret III, Will Roland and Tony Flores). He also helped burst flash pots that smoked up the South High gym, getting them kicked off the West High band list. Scott, enamored with such antics began hanging out with the band in 1977, soaking in the drama as impressionable kids would. During such rebellious youthful days, the then chunky Sturdevant along with the rest of the band probably wondered, “What can we do next to outdo ourselves?”
It was quite possibly the beginning of Sturdevant wondering about how people could affect one another through changing perceptions of one’s character.
“Our funnest times together were at Jean’s music studio,” says Wulfekeuhler. “We’d hang out and look at a yearbook and make fun of fellow high schoolers as if they were outrageous characters. You know, give students fictitious names. We’d just laugh and laugh.”
Marvin Jolley in his blog Marvin in the Land of Milk and Honey writes:
I met him in high school when he was 16 and he was pretty amusing and charming to everyone then. He was the clown the class loved, not the class clown. There *is* a difference you know. Yes, he was a little pudgy then... We made fast friends and then I can't tell you how many times we laughed ourselves silly while watching movies or the latest Saturday Night Live or some other silly thing in the 70's. And he was a good laugher. Big, horse-toothy laugher. Capped by a girlish, snickering squeal.
“His dad was a geologist who forced math on him. He rebelled,” says Jean Erassarret III. Scott had become what he says Goodsell shouldn’t do when he told him not to go away to Roosevelt. He became an intellectual. Only, now he was too good for high school. Another West High student, Marvin Jolley, along with Sturdevant, dropped out of high school.
Sturdevant soon attended Bakersfield College. He took up writing, photography and forensics and hung out with the college debate crew throughout 1978-79.
He continued to follow Justy Queet, whose members encouraged him to make music. “I remember his first song. It was ‘Grandma’s Pussy’. He performed it at a party. He got up and jerked around…He was known as the drama guy. Some of us thought he was destined for Saturday Night Live,” says Wulfekeuhler.
Jolley writes, “He certainly understood how to be dramatic and that was his foil.”
Around 1978 Justy Queet came to an end, and while Wulfekeuhler moved on to perform in bands such as Sweet Smoke, a crossover in Bakersfield’s black music scene, Erassarret III angered Sturdevant by joining the burgeoning New Wave movement. “It pissed him off,” says Erassarret III. Sturdevant liked a different blend of music, having sung with punk band the Lizerds at one or more house parties. Yet Sturdevant eventually bought into New Wave. In late 1979, before the movement turned “safe”, Sturdevant wandered into a party filled with forensics students and bragged, “Me and my friends are going to start Bakersfield’s first New Wave band, The Gags.”
Sturdevant soon wrote “Drop Out” and “Snow Clones”. The band had few gigs. And so Sturdevant began his transformation into one of his first music scene characters. “He was one of the first people in Bakersfield to have the clean cut new wave look with the skinny ties and suitcoats. It was very Ric Ocasek,” says Goodsell who featured Sturdevant at the time in the Renegade Rip newspaper in an article about New Wave and punk.
Unfortunately, the Gags didn’t work out. They transformed into the Phones, in which Sturdevant wasn’t a part. By late 1979 he told his friends, “I’m going to LA to make New Wave…”
Sturdevant couldn’t have been more wrong.
*****************************
In 1977 Los Angeles, California, hardcore punk was born, many giving credit to Jan Paul Beahm, A.K.A, Bobby Pyn, A.K.A Darby Crash. The band’s name was the Germs and their legendary hardcore punk status was one filled with drugs, decadence, debauchery and suicide. The Germs only album, G.I., is considered a classic and was produced by Joan Jett. It has a cult following spanning the world and influences all ranges of punk music even today.
“I still have a photo of Darby Crash in my wallet from the LA Times,” says Shantell Waldo of Bakersfield band Three Chord Whore. “He is still everything punk to me.” Anyone who has seen The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) by Penelope Spheeris might agree with Waldo. The film is a cult classic about Los Angeles punk 1979-1980 and featured Darby Crash on the promotional poster and soundtrack record cover.
Darby Crash wasn’t tame by any means. Beware of getting lost in the romanticism of the Germs being the first hardcore punk band.
Darby attended a Hollywood hype school filled with Scientology and strangeness. He rebelled, transforming himself into a self-imposed punk messiah, his followers burning their wrists with cigarette butts to mark their faith in Darby Crash and the Germs. His and the lives around him were filled with music, drugs, sex, and lots of alcohol. The book, Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs paints a disturbing late Seventies punk scene. One reviewer writes about the book:
Germs vocalist and songwriter Darby Crash appears as both a taunting jester of the burgeoning West Coast punk scene as well as mischievous if not malevolent pied piper leading impressionable thrill seekers into would-be decadence of the type predicted by Oswald Spengler in The Decline Of The West. Through the remembrance quips, Crash also reveals a side as an extremely image-conscious and thus insecure youth struggling more to obscure his homosexuality rather than create a cohesive and worthy artistic legacy.
A harsh criticism? Maybe. Yet Darby’s disturbing and decadent legacy will grow even stronger with the punk genre film What We Do Is Secret slated to be released in July, 2007.
The truth is most venues banned the Germs and their enigmatic leader. The Starwood allowed the band but hosed the venue after each show. Darby Crash himself was a hell-bent self-aggrandized drug user on a suicide mission. He also happened to make great music during a violent youth movement. He warned those around him endlessly about his leaving the band, a metaphor for exiting life and entering rock god status. He was the pinnacle of hero worship for Seventies middle class punk kids upset with what their youth movement saw as a decline of society and music. They wanted to instill change, to do it themselves, and to fight against mainstream society. They chose in part to be disgusting because the middle class world around them was farthest from. So they waded into the darkest streets and lifestyles Los Angeles had to offer.
Within such a dark world Darby Crash had a persona that was as raw as L.A.’s drug and prostitution-filled streets could get.
Alice Bag of The Bags writes on her blog, Diary of a Bad Housewife in 2004:
I met Bobby Pyn (later to become Darby Crash) early on. We became friends and used to talk on the phone. We were both very much interested in philosophy and ethics and would often have heated discussions. Darby was into Nietzsche and I liked Kant, so of course we clashed. But at first we got along more than we fought. We were drinking buddies and were both known for our stage antics. Between the Bags and the Germs, we probably had the wildest audiences of the scene and we did several shows together. As Darby submerged deeper and deeper into his persona of “Darby Crash”, he and I began to grow apart. My observation was that he began to have less real friends and instead surrounded himself with fans and followers whom he could use and control. I totally disagreed with this and we got into an epic fight over the “proper role of fans” one drunken night. Darby thought that people who could be controlled, should be controlled and he disliked the way I treated Bags' audience members as equals. I wanted to erase the line between performer and audience and Darby saw his role as an artist being closer to that of an idol.
It was this raging Los Angeles punk scene that Scott Sturdevant entered in 1979-1980. It was perfect timing. The hurricane was in full force and he stepped right into it. He was the same age as Darby Crash, and was wholly impressionable by the maelstrom of change taking place among youth on L.A.’s punk streets.
Marvin Jolley writes in his blog about introducing Sturdevant into the L.A. punk scene and using him as a replacement in one of Darby’s pet band projects:
He tagged along on our forays into Los Angeles. One night, Scott and I drove down to see the Germs at the Whiskey at the invitation of Bill and Dick of the Assault from Ventura. I will never forget the chaos, maelstrom of energy and exuberant embrace of disaster. I was certain that nothing would ever be the same. And I was right. Outside, we met Rik L. Rik who was very nice with us and shared cigs.
Later, after Lizerds imploded and I went down to play in a band managed by Darby with Donnie Rose and Laura, I determined that it wasn't a path I wanted to take so I came back from LA and Darby's pet project. I recommended Scott to them as a replacement for me. He wanted to be a part of that world. I took him to the bathroom and cut his hair. Chopped is the better verb. I made him retire the Hawaiian shirt. Coached him on a few things not to say or do: New Wave Folk. Elvis Costello. And above all, NO FUCKING BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. Off he went…
It’s said that Sturdevant ended up at Skinhead Manor, a rented Hollywood Mansion on Highland Avenue near Hollywood High where the Germs along with Circle Jerks, Youth Brigade, and No Crisis all hung out to rehearse. One group of rough-looking girls practiced there. They later became the GoGos. There was a living room stage, a beer machine in the foyer, and Darby Crash was in the mix.
Skinhead Manor was a short-lived venture, though it came at a crucial time to influence Sturdevant who met Darby Crash himself. Did Sturdevant acquire a cigarette burn scar on his wrist, marking him as a Germs follower? Erassarret III thinks so. Maybe he simply idolized Darby to the point where he wanted to become a star with similarities.
No burn required.
And if Darby Crash really controlled those around him, what kind of impact would that have on the impressionable Sturdevant through the years?
Energized, Sturdevant re-entered Bakersfield with a bootleg mix tape of one of the Germs shows where he declared, “Listen to this punk scene!”
Never forgetting Sturdevant’s Thespian roots, Dave Wulfekeuhler says, “I was on a date at Marie Calendars and in comes this guy with a hardcore punk look…safety pins, his hair was short cropped. But it was still Scott. I knew his heart…I later wondered if Scott was just acting. But then I thought, No, you can’t act and live that hardcore. He pulled it off.”
By 1979 heroin had entered the hardcore punk scene. Until then it was mostly beer, speed, pot and cocaine. The punk movement was a youth movement and Sturdevant fit the mold, and like other hardcore punks, he likely didn’t perceive much of a future in a world deemed fatalistic.
Though punk had a Do It Yourself (DIY) philosophy, some, like Sturdevant got caught up in the scene’s darker side. Waldo reflects, “He was always the enigmatic punker guy. He knew all my idols: Darby, Exene Cervenka…and he was around people, the heroin, the other drugs. Maybe that path took him down a darker road…”
Marvin Jolley writes:
He lasted there for a few weeks and decided it wasn't a good match either. But the exposure catalyzed him. He became darker after that. And unfortunately the heroin thing. Yes. He got exposed to them as well. We all did. Best not to linger there. You might not come back.
In December, 1980, after Sturdevant returned to Bakersfield, Darby Crash committed suicide in L.A. on a mega-dose of heroin. He hoped to begin his push to becoming a punk god in post-life. It’s suggested his suicide had been part of his plan for years to secure his idol status as an original American punk legend.
Greg Goodsell reflects on a day he’ll never forget:
I showed up at his house. The old neighborhood had gone to hell. Scott was frantically calling friends in L.A. and trying to piece together the story of Darby’s death. He was punked out, intense looking, skinny, intimidating. At the time, L.A. had a huge scene that included the Germs, X, Black Flag and Circle Jerks. He gave me some punk albums to play on my radio show. I went home.
Twenty-three hours after Darby Crash died, John Lennon was murdered.
Darby Crash, the self-made martyr of the hardcore punk scene was quickly forgotten by much of the world. But not in the punk scene in L.A. or Bakersfield. Some rumors even flew around that Sturdevant injected Darby with the fatal dose. But that was just a localized myth. Darby had bought $400 worth of heroin, injected the girl he was with, then injected himself with an even larger dose. She survived.
Yet the death of Darby Crash gave Greg Goodsell an idea. He’d been running a punk rock show at KBCC, Bakersfield College. And so he contacted Sturdevant and told him, “Get a band together. I have a venue.”
It was at that moment Bakersfield’s first hardcore punk band, Teen Suicide, was born. Jolley adds, “Upon his return, he wanted to do something more punk, not return to the new wave thing. Hence Teen Suicide. From our little circle of outsiders. More craziness ensued…”
On a dreary overcast day in February 1981, hundreds of youth gathered on the Bakersfield College campus. They crammed themselves into the tiny quad area that joined the student union and cafeteria buildings. Some were dressed in punk clothes, most weren’t. The band set up on the east side of the quad in front of the men’s bathroom entrance, a huge message board and some vending machines. The quad itself was filled with round tables fitted with multi-colored umbrellas. Some students sat at the tables. Some stood on brick planters for a better view. Others wandered, lingered or just passed through.
Fliers for the show showed two feet in a V-shape with a toe tag that read “Teen Suicide”. Before the show, band members stuck them to windows with superglue, which didn’t make a lot of people happy. The band itself was an hour and a half late.
The original line-up had Scott Sturdevant on guitar/vocals, Gary Bratcher also on the bass, and two former members of The Lizerds: Brad Ryerson on bass/vocals and Bruce Brink on drums.
In a surviving video of their performance, the skinny Sturdevant can be seen wearing a cut-off red Cardinals shirt and jeans. His hair is cropped and he looks the part of a punk icon himself.
As the video begins, Sturdevant screams and moans into a broken microphone. He takes drags of a cigarette and begins a punk anti-Beatles song called “Day Tripper”, clearly a jest that Darby Crash was the more wounding death to be mourned, at least to Bakersfield’s newest hardcore punk band leader. Soon he leans against a wall, then returns to the microphone and belts, “Yeah. Beatles suck anyway! You know that!”
Teen Suicide’s performance is what Dave Wulfekeuhler would later describe as “horrid, pure utter noise.”
Greg Goodsell describes the show: “In the first two minutes it was obvious that the band hadn’t practiced. It was noise. There was no song list. People fled.”
Some people stood around hoping for something to happen. Most left right away. For those who stayed, what Sturdevant showed was stage presence. He hung at the front of the band like a true leader. On his left arm he had scratched a huge cross with radiating lines, perhaps a self-afflicted reminder that Darby Crash’s body was found in a cross-like pose and had risen again through Sturdevant’s noisy tribute.
On Sturdevant’s face there was a deep self-made gash that helped him grab more attention from the crowd. One person threw an orange and he threw it back. Later, a Mormon girl claimed Sturdevant cut himself and spit at the crowd. Although witnesses say he gashed himself before the show, at one point in the video he smiles, stares, spits on the ground and says, “Lick it up…this is art!” He soon grabs the guitar and speeds into an instrumental, taking further control of the band. After a short stop between songs he says, “Were you offended? We don’t mean to be anything but pure shit!”
Nevertheless, Goodsell remarks on the failure of the day, “I could never book another band there…”
After the Bakersfield College debacle their next show was at the Falafel on the corner of 19th and Eye Street. Only 12 people showed. Bakersfield band, The Terrorists (1981-1982) homepage has this to say about the Falafel:
Teen Suicide played several legendary live shows at the Falafel, a trendy little dive downtown. Scott would stagger drunkenly through the audience, drinking out of people's beer pitchers and chucking chairs around. The sound they made was the most beautiful noise. Fortunately one recording from a live show remains, the song “Coming Back From The Dead”…
Sturdevant wrote just before his death in 2007 about losing a few of Teen Suicide’s original recordings:
Bruce Brink was the drummer in TS. You could however, write chapter and verse about the long list of drummers that we played shows with when Bruce couldn't make it back to town…that was an important night in Bakersfield punk rock history. The drummers name was Brian and he had played in the Contaminators before he started playing with Jean in the Phones. Brad and I left with a cassette tape that eventually broke. Brad and I really loved the way the recording sounded and wanted to release it (I hope to hell he remembers). As I recall, we were sitting in Brad’s truck in his parents’ driveway when the tape fell apart. We didn't speak for about thirty minutes because we found out that the recording, which was made on Brian's reel to reel had been recorded over. If my memory serves me well, Brad put in the Carpenters and we sat and smoked cigarettes. What the hell else can you do?
Yet he didn’t always play well with others. “He had an artistic temperament,” says Goodsell.
What he really wanted was to go solo.
*****************************
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Scott Sturdevant began a transformation to the street poet/musician character, Slim the Drifter.
Jean Erassarret III, affected by Sturdevant’s dark transformation, wrote the song, “Contorted Boy” about his changing persona and travels to Hollywood during the time Darby Crash took him in.
LIFE IS GETTIN' ME DOWN ALL THE TIME I HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT PEOPLE TO DEFEND MY KIND MY TRADEMARK IS A BUTTON AND A LEATHER COAT AND I'M TRY TRY TRYIN' JUST TO HIT THE RIGHT NOTES BECAUSE I'M
I'M A CONTORTED BOY I'M A SKINNY BOY, BUT THAT'S LIFE IN THE CITY CAUSE I'M, I'M A CONTORTED BOY A DRAMATIC BOY LOOKING FOR CHANGES
WELL I'M GOING TO HOLLYWOOD GONNA SEE IF SOMEONE CAN SIGH ME ON A RECORD LABEL SIGN A PIECE OF PAPER WHEN ALL THE HANDS ARE UNDER THE TABLE
OOH, THIS CAN'T HAPPEN TO ME, NO NO CAUSE YOU KNOW THAT I CAN'T GO BACK HOME
PEOPLE STANDING AROUND ME GOD GIVE ME ROOM TO BREATH ALL THE HOMETOWN PEOPLE SEEM NO NIEVE HOW CAN I BE RIGHT WHEN EVERBODY'S WRONG I'LL TAKE IT AS A CUE TO LEAVE THIS TOWN
I WON'T GO TO HOLLYWOOD CAUSE NO ONE SAID I SHOULD CAUSE LIVIN' ON THE SIDEWALK IS NOT THAT GOOD MAYBE I CAN MOVE TO A BEACH PUNK TOWN START A NEW BAND AND MAKE A NEW SOUND BECAUSE I'M
I'M A CONTORTED BOY I'M A SKINNY BOY, BUT THAT'S LIFE IN THE CITY CAUSE I'M, I'M A CONTORTED BOY A DRAMATIC BOY LOOKING FOR CHANGES
SOME PEOPLE SAY THAT I HIT MY STRINGS TOO HARD BUT THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND ME CAUSE MY FEELINGS ARE SO SCARED BUT THAT WILL PUSH ME HARDER JUST TO PROVE MY POINT THAT NO ONE'S GOOD FOR NOTHING UNLESS THEY THINK THE WAY I DO BECAUSE I'M
I'M A CONTORTED BOY I'M A SKINNY BOY, BUT THAT'S LIFE IN THE CITY CAUSE I'M, I'M A CONTORTED BOY A DRAMATIC BOY LOOKING FOR CHANGES
How to best describe Slim the Drifter? Country pop, alt country, black, dark, shady, hobo, punkish, self-depricating, moody, talented, working class but not a worker, all-American, Elvis, poor, Bakersfield-centric, Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, and a hidden Darby Crash temperament.
Rex Karz suggested that Sturdevant’s Slim character showed no elements of Darby Crash, brushing such notions off. Rex met Slim around 1991. He mentioned that Slim did say he went with Darby Crash to “hang out in disgusting places”, and that Slim’s persona was filled with “miss-me-when-I’m-gone bullshit.”
It can be said that Slim took on some of Darby Crash’s traits, who consistently predicted his own death in lyrics and suggestions to band members. Suicide and death was a large part of the early punk movement and seemed to bring an authenticity to Slim’s character that wallowed in depravity. In a 1992 video of his show at Hollywood’s Club Lingerie, Slim tossed confetti, handed out small prizes and said, “This is your prize. It will be valuable even after my untimely death.” Slim can be heard muttering similar cryptic statements in a preamble to the same show.
The video also shows haunting footage of Slim heading through the darkness of the Hollywood freeway right after the show. The next morning he sits in a stained Modesto JC T-shirt and proudly shows off an issue of LA Weekly that advertised his Southland appearance.
Rex claims another old friend of the Slim character recently commented, “Slim had been writing suicide notes for 30 years.”
Yet Slim’s literal death was slow, due to alcohol abuse and other rough living carried over from his days in the Los Angeles punk movement.
Slim’s wife Debbie who he married on an Oregon cliffside in 2005 says Darby Crash “was a very big influence. Slim tried to emulate his persona.” Her words suggest Slim the Drifter was a character severely influenced by the early days of hardcore punk, even 28 years later.
Shantell Waldo discusses Slim’s strange spiral after meeting Darby Crash and wonders, “Did he do it because he was once in the company of punk rock greatness?” She further discusses Sturdevant’s transformation into Slim the Drifter:
Right before he became Slim, he started touring around with the Gang of Hair release. As far as I know, he’d gotten some money, but they didn’t promote him and he didn’t put out the effort. It marked his metamorphoses to Slim the Drifter. The Los Angeles scene formed what he became. He was proud of the working man image. He became a guitar slinger always dressed in black…
Sturdevant brought a boom box for taped accompaniment. Sometimes dressed like a hobo, he had a poor man’s preamble to many of his shows. He had a jittery Elvis swagger and swoon. He moved around the stage a lot and leaned and posed as if caught smoking on a street corner. He seemed to accept the streetwise L.A. Beat Generation philosophy of “poverty is a virtue” and the punk movement’s Do It Yourself mentality. L.A. poet S.A. Griffin recently said in a phone interview, “The L.A. beat scene transformed into the punk scene.”
Slim the Drifter was an evolution of both the Beats and Punks. He took his all-American alternative cowboy pop songs and spoken word to people seeking whatever was new on the streets of Hollywood. And he took it a step further to do it by himself. At Club Lingerie in Hollywood, Sturdevant’s new persona, Slim the Drifter leaned against a wall, pressed play, began mumbling and throwing confetti. Was this his thespian American roots in transformation again?
“He honed in on believable characters,” says Dave Wulfekeuhler.
“Slim the Drifter was a sellable project,” adds Erassarret III. “He brought hardcore punk to Bakersfield. But when Slim the Drifter came out, no one was doing that.”
Slim the Drifter was a poet, a singer, a poverty stricken voice of the people that offered hope through his own afflictions. Where Darby crashed, Slim drifted in emulation of Crash, who never quite left his psyche. Like L.A.’s punk icons getting affected by Neil Young’s comments, “It’s better to burn out than fade away,” the new Slim character, hanging under the shadow of Darby Crash, was a streetwise poet drifter, a spokesman for a generation in pain, a folk-based rock poet who wasn’t about money, but had words to offer the world by using his own life as a metaphor.
And yet, according to Goodsell, Slim the Drifter was a character chronically unemployed in the 1990s. “Not passing high school finally caught up to Slim,” says Goodsell, who often tried to get Slim jobs. Marvin Jolley adds to the idea that Slim avoided traditional work:
I don't know, but I remember that he would do anything to get out of work. Oh totally. That was Scott’s mission in life. Stoned in his dad’s truck sitting on the range watching...something to do with electricity towers.
One of the biggest ironies is that during high school Sturdevant had a lust for egging bums. He would take friends out in one of his father’s work trucks, find a bum, and say, “Before you do it, it’s mandatory to yell, ‘Get a Job!’” One has to wonder if Slim developed a guilty conscience from having tormented transients, or was his persona a reflection of his love for Bakersfield, his need for acceptance, and his appreciation for country music and small town mentality? Could have been a mixture of all of the above and more.
On occasion, Slim the Drifter performed. And though he created great albums throughout the 1990s, not many people heard them. Slim himself disappeared much of the time.
His debut album, Callin’ Cali came out in 1992.
In April of that year, Slim recorded a video at one of his Bakersfield gigs, possibly Suds Tavern. He turned on his beat box, had a guitar, a pompadour that bounced as he sang with his western drawl; his voice a clamoring echo reaching to the audience. It was one of only a few performances to promote his album. He tossed confetti which landed on his black jacket, and later threw a red streamer out toward his audience. The poppy beat box blended with his swooning voice, and his chin jut out with each dance step. He even poked fun at lip synching and performed some in jest.
“His stuff is beautiful pop,” Waldo says, “although if you listen to the album, every part reflects his life in the early 1990s. That whole album is so Slim. Damn he’s an asshole, but an American original with all the aspects of American music.”
Slim spent some time before Callin’ Cali at Dino Giacomazzi’s dairy farm in Hanford, California. The song, “Dino’s Farm” made the album’s final cut. According to Erassarret III and Wulfekeuhler, there was even a film about cow tipping that accompanied Slim’s time on Dino’s farm. And Dino is a musician himself, responsible for the Gang of Hair label that Slim was briefly on.
A broken marriage and rough living after recording Callin’ Cali caused a nervous breakdown that resulted in Slim’s isolation from music for several years. “He just locked himself up,” says his wife, Debbie. He went to Arkansas, almost made it to Tennessee. He hung out on the streets of Austin.
Just before Slim’s breakdown was a period of intense creativity. He painted, spray painted, created stencil art with a country theme, and even painted a Fender bass head in his splatter style. But that was followed by severe depression and ensuing medication that turned him zombie-like for several years.
During much of the 1990s, Slim made incredible music, lived in and out of Bakersfield, was completely manic at times, speaking in metaphors. He came back to Bakersfield again after floating through Austin and toured around as a carnie on a Tilt-a-whirl for a season. He was even rumored to steal, or at least try to once in a while. He had truly metamorphosed into his character of depravity.
Eventually Slim came out of isolation to record the albums The Ballad of Kurt & Courtney and PIMP.
The Bakersfield Californian ran an article in their Eye Street section in 1997 simply titled “Slim the Drifter”. The article promoted his album The Ballad of Kurt and Courtney, which he recorded in one take on a break from working carnivals. Logan Molen, Vice President for Interactive Media for the Bakersfield Californian in his brief blog piece, “Slim the Drifter, R.I.P.” reflected about the 1997 article:
I fondly recall putting a big picture of Slim on the cover…and delighted in handling several complaints that came in from irate readers upset that we would give a "punk" more than a sentence. Good times.
Greg Goodsell raised his eyebrows when the article was brought up, a piece that he believed wrongly glamorized Slim the Drifter and his harsh lifestyle. He discussed Slim’s character of depravity:
That article, just like Slim, put a glamorous spin on desperate circumstances. I don’t think you can glamorize poverty, sadness and desperate circumstances for artistic vision. Collecting cans isn’t performance art. Yet Slim is Bakersfield’s other favorite son. Although he was tinged with doubt, depression and despair, he had charm. Incredible charm even in the most desperate circumstances. He was very nice, cordial and uncompromised in his vision. That isn’t the same for a lot of people I know. But the character of Slim was about brokenness, failure, broken promises and shattered dreams. He romanticized the notion of being in a small room with cockroaches…
It’s said that Slim was too trusting of people, which during the recording of PIMP, someone stole his keyboard that held many music samples. Although Slim’s wife Debbie says “PIMP was meant to be a goof”, Shantell Waldo described that when PIMP was created, “it wasn’t at a time when he had the ability to be serious about music. It was about he and a girl and the madness they were going through.” He recorded the album at Bakersfield’s Tower Motel, a rumored area where questionable characters lurked. Yet he had enough recording equipment to get the album done in one of the motel rooms. Waldo says the album is filled with “drum machines and cool cheesy synthesizers…”
Ethan Green lived with Slim in Bakersfield in 2005. When Scott asked why he wanted to stay in Bakersfield, Ethan said, “Well, the train stopped there.” He had recording equipment and be-bopped around with Slim making some tunes. Somewhere in there, Brad Coats joined them to form the.
Slim the Drifter Trio’s album, The Guilty Ten is a country masterpiece that Slim and his partners finished recording in June, 2006 at a location in Bakersfield. Five days later Scott and Debbie moved out of town. The trio floated apart and never met up again.
Material from The Guilty Ten was performed just a few times live, including at Scott and Debbie’s wedding at Umpqua State Park in Oregon. Scott refused to perform at his own wedding, He said it was bad luck.
Eventually, he and his wife moved 30 miles east of Reno, Nevada to a little high desert agricultural and ranching town called Fernley, marking the end of the road for the character of Slim the Drifter and the complex musician, Scott Sturdevant.
Darby Crash, a host of punks through history, Slim the Drifter and writers from the Beat Generation all glamorized human depravity and got away with it. The Beat Generation’s Jack Kerouac died at the same age of 47 also from a liver saturated from too many years of alcohol abuse between bouts of extreme creativity. It was Kerouac who wrote:
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!
Perhaps Slim just needed someone else to tell him how great he was, his music was, how bright of a firework he was. Slim couldn’t be kept down or away from music. He kept recording, self-published a book, and made a cassette with a singer from Shafter—hidden tracks meant to one day be revealed—not to mention his haunting album with the Slim the Drifter Trio. – N.L. Belardes ************************* www.noveltown.net www.myspace.com/noveltown
An article on Salon.com, "The struggle for independents" is a great peek into panicking Indie Publishing markets. Thank goodness Noveltown is still just a little kid on the block...
Might as well tell you now as I'm going to start appearing on the news cast. So pay attention to the ABC 23 MySpace (www.myspace.com/kerotv23). Your comments might get on the air... I'll also be blogging from the news room. So stay tuned for that.
I'm writing and posting content to www.turnto23.com. There, Jason Sperber, are you happy now? hahaha...
In related news...
Gotta love shuttle landings. Check out the video. Big thanks to Erin for teaching me how to compress and post the file. It was a fun story to write.
Short and sweet and one more shuttle landing in Kern's rich aviation history.
Here's a funny video ABC 23 is making just for the Web called a Daily Dose of Bull...
Bakersfield and its Air Force community neighbor are in a bit of a surreal zone today with Al Sharpton coming to town and the shuttle Atlantis zooming in, slated to land around noon. Click for details.
In 2003 I stood in front of a small class of history students at Bakersfield College and named a certain war correspondent. I said I had a bad feeling about him. I asked the students to watch him closely. He was embedded in a combat transportation vehicle that sped across the Iraqi deserts toward Baghdad. He beamed reports to the nightly news.
Many Americans watched him with glee. I was filled with dread.
After he died, classroom moments were surreal. I think students thought I was some freaky mystic who could predict the deaths of journalists. I figured I just saw the danger in what journalists were doing. Entering a combat zone isn’t always the safest of bets. It can be a death wish.
Little did I know at the time, another war correspondent had become embedded with a Marine attack-helicopter squadron for the Wall Street Journal. More mysterious is how I would come to have a few MySpace conversations with him more than four years later in 2007 regarding a fiction novel set during the early weeks of the War in Iraq’s race to Baghdad.
Yes, looking back, it does seem like some of the media portrayed the beginning of the war as a reality TV cross country race, complete with checkered flags, megaphones and a crashing statue at the end…
Nicholas Kulish, now the Central Europe correspondent for the New York Times has sprinkled a few of his own war correspondent memories into his roaring satire of war journalism and the War in Iraq, with his new book, Last One In (July 1, 2007 release).
A quick, engrossing read, Kulish’ novel is written with movie narrative quality. It’s the story of a feisty protagonist who transforms as a journalist. He mingles with the youth of war in a conflict that in its earliest stages, for most ground troops, is a dangerous desert caravan penetrating windstorms and boredom.
Kulish captures the malaise of war with comedic talent as he’s able to satirize a conflict without degrading the men and women of America still serving overseas. His novel is very patriotic, and is respectful of battle-hardened soldiers and war correspondents alike. Yet, Last One In also raises the issue of nouveau embedding programs with journalists who must eventually face one of the biggest and most tragic of all journalistic credos: how to stay out of a war while in one. The question of ‘can you stay out’ proves more difficult than it seems.
War often sucks those in who don’t mean to go there. Main character Jimmy Stephens is the most unlikely candidate for war, a gossip columnist railroaded into a one-year tour (Read the fictitious New York Daily Herald stories by Kulish' character, Jimmy Stephens). His unlikely planting into the American launching of the war in 2003 is a testament to the idea that war can indeed find and grapple with any person, even the most undetermined and under-trained, like Jimmy Stephens, who up until his embedding seemed socially placated by a life of movie stars and entertainment antics.
Real or comedy news site? I caught up with Kulish and asked him a few questions about Last One In: Noveltown: Have you been criticized for writing a comedy-drama in relation to the War in Iraq?
Nicholas Kulish: I’ve had some uncomfortable questions about it, without question. I think that people who read the book recognize that it’s a satire rather than slapstick. There’s a lot of humor, but at its heart this is a serious book. It’s also confined to the initial stage of the war, the gung-ho rush to invade. I find that to be its own, isolated event – different from the long hard slog of the last four years.
Noveltown: I’m guessing some real comedic experiences imprinted themselves upon you while you were embedded with a Marine attack-helicopter unit for the Wall Street Journal. This one even made it into your novel as one soldier writes about March 13 2003: “In other developments, our “embedded media” person has arrived. His name is Nick Kulish, and he writes for the Wall Street Journal. Seems like a nice guy – he’s about 27 and is getting the lay of the squadron. Some of our pilots initiated him last night… at about midnight, they all got dressed up in their gas masks and ran into his tent screaming “Gas Gas Gas!!!” Pretty hysterical – he jumped out of his rack with a wild look on his face, until he saw everyone busting up laughing in their masks and realized what was going on. One of the guys even got it on videotape for the rest of us to watch later.” Comments? Nicholas Kulish: That’s some great sleuthing. I can’t believe you found that old blog post. The “gas attack” is one of the few remaining experiences of mine that was translated into the book. The first draft had more of that, but the pure inventions tended to be livelier and funnier than the based-on-real-life experiences. But that was the kind of seminal hazing experience that – video camera included – would be hard to top. Noveltown: In your Book Review article, “Embed cred: how close is too close for embedded reporters?” you wrote some poignant thoughts: “When I contemplate the success or failure of the embed program, I think about those briefings in Qatar, at the Pentagon's press office, not the numbing recitation from the podium, but those moments when a questioner, with a newspaper or television transcript clutched in one hand, refuted a bit of stilted Pentagonese by saying, "But an embed with the 3rd I.D." or "ah embed with the 1st Marine Division reported ... " And that's why we were there.”
Now, how do you reconcile your real experiences and criticisms of the embed program with your own message about embeds that you relate to readers Last One In? Nicholas Kulish: Context is always important. That review was written at the peak of criticism of the program, when everyone was railing about the media manipulation, the co-opting of the reporters, the lapdog patriotic press. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have civilian observers going along with your military as long as it’s balanced with outside reporting from all sides. I always had a Heisenberg Principle theory that a company of infantry with a reporter was less likely to do something borderline knowing that the notebook, the camera and the microphone were around somewhere. I thought there were some issues with the embedding program and the rules, as well as the way a lot of the coverage went, but in general transparency and access are good. As far as “refuting Pentagonese,” I think it’s important to realize the difference between the politicians, the brass and the troops. The troops in my experience are bright, dedicated, impressive people. You can criticize the strategic decisions while backing the troops on the ground.
Ernst Thälmann monument in East Berlin, where Kulish first lived in 95, was back from 03-05, and is moving again in August, 2007.
Noveltown: As an author, I’m sure you get bugged with this question daily: How much of you is the gossip columnist Jimmy Stephens in your book? Nicholas Kulish: Very, very little. He was always a separate human being in my head. A lot of the experience he fakes to sound like a legit reporter was my own real experience. On the other hand, we all feel like fakes sometimes and you draw on feelings that you had at various points to round them out. As a writer you have to put yourself in the shoes of a character and try to imagine their reactions, but that means there’s a little of you in every last one of them.
Noveltown: I can’t help but think there was a series of real inside jokes by the kinds of journalists and war correspondents you created for your story: real people, journalists likened to battle-hardened commanders, and folks who mutter lines like, “No one gets laid like a war correspondent.” Thoughts?
Nicholas Kulish: I think in these situations you have a lot of people who are scared but who are hard-wired not to let anyone know it. So you get a lot of joking on the one hand and a lot of tough talk on the other. “You think this is bad? You should have been in Mogadishu.” At the same time, my perspective was that of an outsider. I hadn’t covered Haiti and Bosnia and Cambodia like some of those folks. So a lot of the jokes are outside-in, based on Jimmy’s ignorance of the folkways of this tribe of war correspondents, rather than vice-versa.
Noveltown: I’m curious how you shaped your idea of a novel. When was the seed planted? Before you were embedded? During? Afterwards? Were you already a novelist in the making?
Nicholas Kulish: The seed was planted during the Media Boot Camp, a lot of journalists doing a three-day version of Basic Training. It’s not a bad idea, actually, because you need a familiarity with military procedure just to – I mean this literally – stay out of the way when soldiers react to something. Still, it was pretty ridiculous. Standing there with our lattes as an Army Ranger tries to get us to do calisthenics, firing blanks at us, making us crawl on our bellies. I kept thinking, “We don’t belong here.”
Old Berlin, New Berlin. Kulish says: "The rehabbed buildings versus the fall-of-the-Wall look. I have nostalgia for the latter that most locals don't."
Noveltown: I’m certainly not accusing you, but do you think there are journalists out there who are trying to be the Upton Sinclairs of military reporting? And, do you see any smoking gun kinds of Sacco and Vanzetti style books against the government that people should read cautiously?
Nicholas Kulish: There’s probably stuff on the fringe that I haven’t run across, but I haven’t really seen that. This gets back to the brass-versus-grunts question, I think. If you read Tom Ricks’s book “Fiasco,” it is highly critical of the war-planning and execution. But Ricks loves the Marine Corps (read “Making the Corps”), is wildly well-respected by military professionals, and cares deeply about the people involved. I myself come from a military family. My Dad was a career Army officer and hanging out at Ft. Meyer in Arlington was a regular part of my life growing up. My Uncle Gene was career Navy. My novel is inherently critical about aspects of the war, but one of my friends described “Last One In” as a “love letter to the Marines.” You can do both in a democracy that values free speech and open debate.
Noveltown: Final questions, and thanks for taking part in this interview. I hope you have a great time as the Central Europe correspondent for the New York Times. Maybe a few novels will appear out of those experiences as well. Tell us a little about your hopes and dreams for the novel, Last One In, and for yourself as a novelist?
Nicholas Kulish: That’s the hardest question you’ve asked. There are easy, obvious answers: I want people to read it, to care about the characters as much as I do, to think differently about the war. Then there’s the inherent problem that I don’t want to “explain” the book, or tell people what to get out of it. I hope the book can be read many different ways, by a working mother in Bakersfield one way, a young Republican congressional staffer in Washington another and a scholar of Evelyn Waugh yet another. I hope that it defies expectations or easy categories, and that I have the chance to write many more that do the same thing. Thanks for letting me respond. It’s been a thoughtful, enjoyable experience on my end. ******************************************* Click here for AMAZON ORDER INFORMATION
