3 Poems
Morons Streaking In Goobertown: 16 Blogs
The best and worst of the Buzz Fugazi Screaming From The Basement Blog
(MSIGARMY.com 2005-2015)
Buzz Fugazi
Lost Cross House – Carbondale, IL 2010
1. Glad to be here in the matrix This was the first Buzz Fugazi blog on MSIGARMY.com.
2. Iraq Now! Buzz wrote this off the top of his head at MSIGARMY studio a couple years before he quit smoking weed. This is the best and worst of Buzz in a single blog. He mentions mercury in child vaccines. He is not an anti-vaxer but alluded to a concern he’d heard about the rise of autism and the correlation of mercury in child vaccines. This concern has been officially debunked.
For more information about the use of Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used in vaccines, please consult this link to the Center of Disease Control
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/thimerosal/index.html
Regarding mercury in the drinking water.
https://www.epa.gov/mercury/what-epa-doing-reduce-mercury-pollution-and-exposures-mercury
There is also the matter of lead in drinking water, and lead in the air, but that is another subject and is not mentioned in this blog.
3. Slow Train To Blogtown Stream of consciousness journaling ain’t always pretty. Buzz does not remember why he initially disliked Bad Santa. Upon further review, it became one of his holiday favorites.
4. The New Test To Find Terrorists four and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, the War on Terrorism remained the driving political force in US foreign and domestic policy.
5. Answer the fucking question, Mr. President Though opposing the war in Iraq, Buzz frequently cited legitimate reasons for supporting it. He lashed out at President Bush for failing to do that.
6. Chicago Punk on MySpace
7. Professor Chaos Hates the Funeral Protesters From Westboro Baptist Church
8. Trick or treat? Tangent Man is just saying… The previous day’s blog “And we finally know what the meaning of is is” was Buzz Fugazi’s simple missive responding to George W. Bush changing his well-worn “Stay the course” directive on Iraq to “We never were stay the course.”
9. Clash of the photo opportunities
10. Blog for the booing broken-hearted Cubs fans who are disowning the team
11. Yet another reprint (October 16, 2008) Buzz was on hiatus while real life alter-ego Adam Broad worked on the Obama campaign. Mikey Snot blogged an Adam Broad November 24, 1994 alter-ego letter responding to a query from an ivy league alternative press project. From the mid ‘80s to the mid ‘90s Buzz was part of a co-op that produced a “quasi-underground” tabloid, BASEMENT. The co-op also contributed to numerous other local alternative publications, including Satyagraha, which received an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for 2nd Best Independent Student publication in the Midwest.
12. I scream, you scream, we all scream waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares that Bush is still President. Barely producing blogs or podcasts after 2008, Buzz repackaged an email from Lee “the Lorax” Dynamo.
13. The real dirt on Obama (February 10, 2012)
14. We’re supposed to be dead (April 17, 2013) By this time, blogging three or four times a week was reduced to once a year.
15. We’re back, but not quite (July 3, 2014)
16. Cecil the Lion (July 29, 2015) Putting aside any new work resulting from plans to reboot MSIGARMY.com at the end of 2023 or early 2024, this was the last Buzz Fugazi blog on MSIGARMY.com.
Glad to be here in the matrix
Thursday June 23, 2005
I’m plugged in and it’s great. I’m not here to tell you how it ends. I’m here to tell you how it begins. Some of you wanks who came in and out of the C-dale ’80s-’90s scene may remember my angry satirical political culture snob rag: BASEMENT. Yeah, me and my staff were the smug smart kids who understood that the only goal in life is to rule the earth by getting one cool bean and three shells (a left, center, and a right). We knew we were supposed to hide the bean, juggle the shells while we made smiling distracting jokes, and then grab the money and make the suckers weep.
Some of the highest ideals of journalism went into that project and I want to bring the same integrity to the MSIG ARMY: Our truth is more useful. Our lies are more fun. Aside from giving you a good wank to relieve the stress of your day, I want us to work together like hippies singing “I’d love to teach the world to sing” in an old Coke commercial. I think we should seize power for fun and profit. Let’s mobilize, organize, see our enemies driven before us, hear the lamentations of their women, throw a party, build nuclear power plants and nuclear dump-sites on every block.
Iraq Now!
Friday, July 1, 2005
Old punk rockers responsible for instability in Iraq… Ask not what George W. Bush does for your country, ask what your country can do for George W. Bush (or burn in hell!)…
It’s not just Mikey and I who unwittingly deprive the long-suffering Iraqi people of a functioning democracy. The liberal press and the trapped at 40% liberal enclave may contribute sons, daughters, and some portion of the 360 billion defense dollars, but not much more, except tossing negative vibes. Maybe it’s time we stop Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and Senator Dick Durbin from owning the major networks. If the people who stuff their pockets in the defense industry had a fair say in what goes on in this country, we wouldn’t have all these cry-baby liberals preventing total victory.
The left is way out of style. The Red Scare of 1986 is over, comrades. Choose a fundamentalist religion and prepare for Armageddon. Quit whining about fringe special interests like these oxygen breathing freaks demanding cleaner air. Just because the President thinks more pollution is a Clean Skies Initiative is no reason for us to call him an insane liar. Name calling makes us look bad. Americans understand the President’s hostile space alien attitude about the environment is not a hint that he breathes toxic fumes to survive, but rather, a sign of his deep religious faith. Be grateful for mercury in child vaccines and in your drinking water. It is a gift from Culture of Life, Inc.
If the President makes his religious faith a political issue, we have no reason to wonder if he’s a big fucking liar about that, too. It’s important we learned the truth about John Kerry: his war service was just a big photo-op to get him elected. It was all media manipulation funded by SEIU and George Soros.
There is no media manipulation going on in Iraq. Photo op capers of the Bush Administration are fair and balanced.
It’s time for the rest of us to ask: What can I do to help the more fortunate? What can I do to win the War Against Terrorism without putting more of a burden on the people who are getting rich off of it? Ask yourself: do I need to spend the day with my children? You could be volunteering on an oil barge instead. Family values means spending your time promoting the policies that make the world a better place. Positive thinking is the best way to start. That’s why my family vacation will be at a religious retreat in Iraq.
Slow Train To Blogtown
Wednesday July 13, 2005
The Unbearable Wordiness of Writing the 1st Graph Like A Deranged John Kerry Speech In Love With The Sickness… Security matters and “that terrorist bullshit”… bonus joke for people who endured “Bad Santa”… More boring and crazy adventures in Chicago…
(Note from the Editor: Posting the Wednesday blog was delayed for reasons that will become apparent in the following dispatch):
I’m on the Metra heading into the city, so I figure I’ll read the Sun-Times and find something to have an opinion about. There’s the Mid East deal, of course, but not only is Bush making me sick, I am making me sick. Suicide bombers make me sick. I am offended when a Palestinian child is killed. I am offended when an Israeli child is killed. I am the opposite of the President when it comes to children: he is the champion of fetus and embryo rights. I think they are fair game until the 2nd trimester and not beyond that unless they fuck with my car, bust into my house, represent the wrong clique on my block or otherwise disrespect me. It’s okay to kill people for lots of good reasons but only if you do it with a handgun face to face or with a baseball bat. Other forms of killing are immoral (except, of course, punching someone to death in a sanctioned boxing event or just sparring around the gym and you sucker-punch someone because they made you look bad… also it’s okay to off someone at the gym when you’re hooping it and the motherfucker never pass the ball or play defense. Die, wannabe, die! And death to starting pitchers who give up 5 or 6 runs early and punk out and roll over and wait for the bullpen to come in and chew their arms up with long innings while punky takes a vacation and prays for his punk-ass fastball to come back with an extra skip). For the most part, I am very much opposed to genocide. (Is that a Kerryism? You better believe it might be! Is his abso-fucking-lutely piss poor campaign at least partially to blame for this living abortion we call Dubya’s 2nd Term?)
I was for Kerry before I was against him, but I was against him before that, and until tonight, I was for him again… I need more time to reconsider, but I’m sure he’d rather be where he is and not stuck with the responsibility of the Presidency. Certainly the London bombing would not be putting an extra spring in his step like it seems to be doing for President Bush. Does the length of this paragraph remind you of Kerry’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention? Most of the Democrats at the Duval County shin-dig were grooving on it, but me and a couple of guys had to get the hell away from it. We took a long break in the next room at the punch bowl and snack table. This was after listening to a whole bunch of it, but it was okay. After we shared our life-stories and made friends and ate and drank our fill, we made it back for the last three hours of the speech. Somewhere in Outer Space… Kerry’s speech is drifting toward the Sun in a large haze that may deplete its energy. Not to worry: A Bushco implode-the-Sun-for-profit expedition is scheduled to get there first… with all the money as cargo.
But I don’t want to write about the Mid East, the President, Sen. Kerry, baseball, Florida, or any of my normal topics. I see a Lauryn Hill quote that catches my eye. I think about it for 10 minutes. I throw the Sun-Times in the garbage. I think about it for a couple minutes then I get it back. I tear off the remaining scheduled games for the Cubs and White Sox and the Lauryn Hill quote in my journal:
“As a young woman, I saw the best in everyone, but I did not see the lust and insecurities of men.”—a quote from Lauryn Hill’s “first interview in years” lifted by the Sun-Times from “the new issue of Trace magazine” (A total surprise that “Trace” James is publishing a mag and didn’t tell me or Funkmeister).
This is an awful lot of writing and my train is nowhere near Chicago. I’m stuck, according to the voice on the intercom, with a “signal malfunction.” It’s a typical Metra Rail message: Ding-dong! “We are sorry for the delay and we appreciate your patience. We will continue to do everything we can to make your trip a pleasant and convenient experience that resembles a 1950s sci-fi movie. The security guards with guns and black uniforms will only drag you screaming from the train if you act drunk or ghetto. Do not be alarmed. Remain calm. You will continue to hear loud pre-recorded messages blaring out of the speakers every 10 minutes for an indeterminate amount of time. Thank you for riding Metra.” Ding-dong!
Loud voices from young dudes on the upper level are blaming “that terrorist bullshit!” and they are wanting “a g-ddamned cigarette!”
Every time I look up to see what the conductor is doing I see some shaved head guy in the opposite side of the car glaring at me. He reminds me of the character sitting on the opposite side of the bar from Billy Bob Thornton’s character in Bad Santa (Bad Movie).
I raise my alert level to “orange.” I fully expect him to attack me.
If so, I’m guessing the pre-med hottie who was nice to me in the station won’t be much help. She dug through her entire backpack to give me the time, but I was a condescending jerk about her cigarette smoking. She said she’s been scuba diving for 7 years and her smoking didn’t interfere. I didn’t ask, “Do your parents know you smoke?” but I was in that same ballpark. All I could do is sniff and tell her she is kidding herself.
I snap out of my memory of the gal at the station, which remains only a few yards behind me. The train is rolling again. Now the voice on the intercom contradicts the line about the signal malfunction. Something about a “security matter” resolved. The train stops again. We’re at a station. We don’t leave. The doors are open. We wait. The young dudes from the upper level bolt outside for a smoke. Time passes and there is another “security matter.” The young dudes will not be allowed back on the train and they are pissed. One of them is demanding a refund. The Metra conductors call the cops. We sit. We wait. The young dudes are venting. I turn on my digital recorder and go to take a closer look.
Miss Pre-Med Scuba-Diver does the same thing. Turns out her name is Missi. I apologize for being condescending about the smoking and thank her again for going through so much trouble to let me know what time it is (add that to my list of “things it took me 40 years to figure out”). Missi is cool. So is Heather and her two friends. And Steve. He has his baby’s momma’s name tattooed on his neck. I’m asking them, “Do you like punk rock? Go to msigarmy.com!” Missi is frantically working her dying cell phone to line up a car ride at the next stop. She tells a buddy, “You know I’ll fill up your tank. I always help with gas.” She wants to get to North Avenue Beach before the cops chase everyone out.
I go to the upper level to chat with her and escape the bug-eyed gaze of the guy who looks like he attacked Bad Santa in the parking lot. I’m tempted to ask my new pal if I can get a ride with her, but decide that’s too forward. Big mistake. Just after Missi’s escape, the train hits a pedestrian. The first two delays were just a warm up for the third.
I should be in Chicago now, but I’m sitting on a parked train and I’m thinking: ‘the train is already an hour late… someone is probably dead. Was it a security matter with young smokers that synchronized this train with the person who got hit?’
I’m talking to the professional photographer across the way, but he has his laptop; he is polite, but doesn’t need my small talk. The only real communication we have is when the long tall drop-dead gorgeous woman in the short shorts goes by… our heads swivel and we grin.
I end up at the back of the train across the aisle from her. “Can we talk?” I ask. “Will you save me from my boredom?”
She snubs me at first. Her cell phone is buzzing like the phone at a cab dispatch when the bars issue Last Call! She’s talking Spanish, but I know the accent isn’t Mexican. It sounds a bit exotic for Puerto Rican, but that’s my first guess. Not Spain, I keep telling myself, but I keep asking myself: Spain? “I can’t quite place your accent,” I tell her. She gives me a dirty look.
Eventually I ask to use her cell phone.
She warms up a little for the rejection. “Oh, I’m sorry, baby, but I’m already using up all my minutes and it’s almost dead.”
“I understand,” I told her. “I wouldn’t even ask but there’s no payphone and if I don’t get in touch with my friend I’ll end up wandering the streets all night. I’m supposed to be there by 11.”
After a silence she asks, “Do you have any condoms?”
I’m blushing, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I do.”
She says I can use her cell phone for a couple of condoms while I’m already digging them out of my backpack. The one I got from the free condom basket at Longbranch Coffee House in February looked pretty mint, but two left over from Jaime one year ago look a bit ragged, the rings almost pushing through the package. “Sorry,” I say. “A couple of these have been banged around a lot. It’s been awhile since I had a girlfriend.”
I give her the shortest version ever about what happened with Jaime. “She was from Jacksonville. I fell in love with her, but she was young and went to Europe with a rugby team. She’s in England, but she’s okay. She left the rugby team for a soccer stud. She blogs about his football team in Leeds.”
Jasmine is from Manhattan and she told me about all the different kinds of men she used to fuck there. She hates Chicago. It’s crazy and boring. She misses her Italian boyfriend who went insane from taking too much X. All this fucking around, but she would like a real boyfriend.
We were talking about how much we hate drugs and all the people we knew who got screwed up doing the hard stuff. I told her the good advice of my late great philosophy professor George “Easy A” McClure: Stick to the tried and true. Do the stuff that’s been around for a thousand years and we know what to expect from it: alcohol and reefer.
She didn’t like that advice. She doesn’t like either drug. She gets off on looking hot and knowing she’s got it going on. She talked about married women hating her because they know their husbands would rather have sex with her. She talked about men who are angry with her because she is their wildest fantasy and they can’t have her. “There are so many haters in Chicago,” she said. “In New York I can wear a wig and high heels and come out of the club and ride the bus and it is no big deal. But here…”
“Yeah,” I said with sympathy, “our busses are a bit too grungy late at night for dressing fancy and coming out of a club.”
The part where she said, “they can suck my dick!” jarred me a bit, but I didn’t say anything. Then she said something about knowing who she really was in heart and starting her hormone treatments at age 11 back in Puerto Rico. The others are just pretenders trying to be women, but she started early, so she’s the real thing.
“Your family is cool with this?” I asked.
Sadness dulled her anger: “My father: no. He is not cool with it. My brothers are not cool with it. But my sister…” she stumbled, choking with emotion, fighting back tears… “my sister… my mother… give me so much love.” She had regained her composure. “That is the only reason I leave New York.”
I pointed my index finger toward the ground. “But you still have your equipment?”
“Yes, I’m not going to do that to myself. It’s mine! I cut it and I can never take it back. Guys love my cock. Straight guys…”
“Straight guys?” Straight guys love your cock? What the fuck?
She asked why I didn’t get another girlfriend after Jaime. “Well, there’s this one gal I like who I met on the internet last weekend.” I paused. For a moment I sounded pathetic to myself.. wasn’t I just as love-starved as a lonely fuck-mad transexual whore? I showed her the description I wrote of her in my journal before I met her: “Long tall drop dead gorgeous woman.”
She smiled. “That’s nice. Thank you.”
The train is finally pulling into Union Station. Three hours earlier I copied a quote out of a newspaper and started writing a blog that ended up writing itself. I overheard a conductor say the train hit an escaped mental patient who is still alive. I had a psychological adventure riding the rails. I met three different attractive single women (except one of them has a penis). I didn’t get blown up by terrorists, but my attitude still sucks. I can see the attraction of being holed up stoned and alone in a bombproof shelter flirting on the internet and pretending I am Stud-1138.
Long Live The New Flesh.
The New Test To Find Terrorists
Thursday January 19, 2006
It is the responsibility of El Presidente Bushco to decide who is a possible terrorist. That is why the Department of Homeland Security proctors a written test as a screening device for those not white, but not black, hispanic, or asian guys who fit the profile of possible terrorists.
Question #1: Are you a Saudi Citizen who receives money and instructions from Osama Bin Laden?
Question #2: Do you receive a paycheck from the government of Iran or Syria? If you are a US Congressman with donors who have Iranian back-door investments through the Cayman Islands or Vice President Cheney you may write EXEMPT. If the terrorist act you are planning (for example: torture or killing a journalist) is on behalf of the US Government you may write EXEMPT.
Answer the fucking question, Mr. President
Saturday March 25, 2006
Six years after neo-Confederate anti-negro voting procedures in Florida got George W. Bush into the White House, the Great W. Hope finally held himself accountable to a real journalist, fielding a question from the venerable Helen Thomas.
In a nutshell, she told him his ever-changing rationales for the war in Iraq have proven to be bullshit. Specifically, she asked: What is the real reason for the war?
This was a golden chance for the President to think of the sacrifices made by our troops, sit tall in the saddle, bite the bullet, take the heat, and give some straight talk to the American people about geo-political reality.
Why should I expect this guy to be half the man Harry S. Truman was? Or half the man Dwight D. Eisenhower was?
He’s a populist President in his own way… except for his devastating ought-to-be-criminal-but-isn’t environmental agenda… he may be no better or worse than me or any other shmuck. That’s a sorry statement, but true. In fact, he may even be, in relative terms, upright among his peers, as the Bible might put it.
The American people are increasingly aware of the gulf between honesty and what people in the politics biz call “message”…
But how many people noticed the President didn’t answer the question? He said he didn’t want the war.
Ms. Thomas didn’t ask if you wanted the war, sir. She asked, “Why?”
And you didn’t answer.
Mr. President, in your darkest hour with your popularity at an all-time low, a man on record as one of your staunchest opponents stood up to offer support for US intervention in the region. That man had nothing to gain except the intangible benefit one gets from listening to conscience. I am quite an asshole when the mood strikes me, Sir, but you made me look like an even bigger asshole than I am. Incredible achievement.
Thanks, Mr. President. I give a fuck about my own reputation or yours, but for the sake of the kids dying over there… compared to you and I they are kids, same age as your hot, silly daughters… how about it, Mr. President?
Answer the fucking question.
Be a man. Take responsibility. You are already a giant Judas goat anyway.
What do you have to lose?
Why do I have to be the one to bail your sorry ass out?
Answer the fucking question. No bullshit. Be real.
Why?
Chicago punk on MySpace
Monday May 8, 2006
Is it pathetic that I have a make-believe internet girlfriend I found on MySpace? Very pathetic. But what about 2 make-believe internet girlfriends? Not quite so pathetic anymore. What about 3 or 4? What about 3 or 4 HUNDRED? Not quite as studly as a Congressman at a strip club with defense contractor lobbyists, but not too shabby…
I think having a stable of MySpace babes is pretty damn cool.
Wait, it actually is pathetic. Why am I always the last one to figure this kind of stuff out?
Professor Chaos Hates the Funeral Protesters From Westboro Baptist Church
Monday April 17, 2006
When a 24 year old Marine dies in Iraq and the Chicago Sun-Times runs an article about people who will go to the funeral waving signs like “Thank God For Dead Soldiers,” it is easy to imagine something about ghoulish punk rockers finally going too far beyond redemption.
But the people who decided to publicly scorn the Christian burial of John Philip Martini are not punkers, hippies, nor communists.
While it may sound like a satirical story from the satirical Landover Baptist Church, it is real people who actually pass themselves off as United States citizens from Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas that decided to make the journey to South Holland to disrespect the memory of a fallen Marine and issue the following statement:
“He died in shame, not honor—for a fag nation cursed by God.”
Always ready to throw the first stone, this is following the logic of a previously offered argument from the American Taliban that God lifted his shield of protection from America because we aren’t doing enough to persecute gays. Enslaving Africans and wiping out Native Americans didn’t make a stain upon our grace, apparently, but letting gay people out of the closet is a deal breaker.
That is why the funeral protesters from Westboro Baptist plan to discredit the Baptist Church and free expression together by waving signs and shouting slogans at the mourners.
Further twisting the dying myth over who is the backbone in this nation and who is the threat to society, a motorcycle club — The Patriot Guard Riders — are offering comfort to the mourners by volunteering as a human buffer between them and the Taliban wannabe fuckos.
The Illinois Legislature is considering a measure called the Let Them Rest In Peace Bill. It would prohibit disruptive protests within 200 feet of funerals. The W.B.’s are citing the US Constitution to protest the bill despite their apparent contempt for the secular document (which, among other things, was intended to prevent our nation from suffering the bloody religious wars drenching Europe in centuries prior to the Revolution).
I have heard that Heaven’s Streets are guarded by the United States Marines and that does not bode well for these holy rollers. Perhaps these are just bored assholes that don’t have the brains to find anything better to do back in Topeka. Maybe someday they will receive G-d’s mercy, the kind of tender mercy that characterizes other Christians, as well as the righteous among Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Pagans, Jews, and Atheists… the tender mercy they cannot find in their own hearts, the kind that is in ever-shrinking supply in my own. Whatever eternal judgment awaits their sin of vanity, I can only hope that drunk, obnoxious lesbians play Bikini Kill at their funerals and gay men have anal sex on their graves.
Trick or treat? Tangent Man is just saying…
October 31, 2006
Never was stay the course. Never was. See us start a war over Weapons of Mass Destruction? What happens next in the Axis of Evil? North Korea blows a nuke. Some tool cranks out a story about what a punk ass nuke it was. North Korea blows another nuke… heh-heh.
Iran calls us the Great Satan… then becomes a mutant bastard offspring of the Western Enlightenment: the President of Iran, Iamabigjagoff, mutters something about Iran having “the right” to nuclear power. My answer: Find that for me in the Koran, you asshole, and then you can have them. Maybe the US will pay Israel to drop some off for you. Stranger things have happened. Organized crime is as organized crime does.
Is there another choice besides Gangsters or Clerics? Maybe: Dreamers with a Social Conscience. Hmmmm… you can find them anywhere among any ethnic group. What does it mean? What does it mean?
Mikey thinks meeting the President with a gathering of his True Believers is more intimate than ever. Aside from the people who drank the Guyana Punch at the New Church of Almighty Delusions, the hardcore rational support always did come from a rather exclusive group.
There’s also the matter of those Iraqi people that believed a man subverting Democracy in the United States knew how to establish it in Iraq.
I can only imagine how disappointed they are. Disappointed and afraid. Who gets left behind?
Certainly the big money interests would rather be hiding behind Barack Obama and a New Spirit of Optimism than be tied to this DUI to Armageddon we call the Bush Administration. Any insurance or pharmaceutical bigwigs getting their pictures taken with the President lately? Really? Let’s see it. I want names… heh-heh, only kidding fellas… I am just a song and dance man, really.
My guess is that those guys will plead “Businessman”… they don’t do politics, don’t you know. Besides, they are smart and they probably already sent a bunch of “we’re on your side, too” checks to the Democrats. Lobbyists gotta eat, too. A lot of ‘em are great and amusing people. Did you see the movie THANK YOU FOR SMOKING? What was the name of that lobbyist character, the tobacco industry guy… MACK THE KNIFE, or something. We oughta elect that actor guy President. Or George Clooney. Or better yet, President Oprah. No joke. I’ll vote for Oprah. And Christopher Walken.
As for the tens and hundreds of millions spent by the now ex-friends of the GOP, that money they get from you, that money spent to pay the administrative cost of taking human cattle to market. (Be honest. Do you really deserve any better?)… that’s not politics.
And your healthcare cost, the price you pay at the pump. Those aren’t taxes.
And we never were stay the course.
We’re inventing new tactics everyday for taking over and relinquishing the same pieces of turf. The implication is that we have good policy (though President Bush was very careful not to say that). The counter-spin is that the opposition is a bunch of assholes (though President Bush was very careful not to say that), and I will concede that point even though it is only being made in a wussy chickenshit manner through proxy. And even if it is true that somehow, someway, John Kerry is truly a bigger asshole than the President (there are strong arguments for either side of this debate)… does this argument mean that Iran will not someday have the capacity to nuke us (just because mobs sponsored by the Iranian government still have not bored themselves to death chanting, “Death to America!” is no reason to assume the worst… they are, as we are fond of saying about Israel, one of the few democracies in the region).
Anyone feel that establishing a Shiite theocracy in Iraq was worth paying for or dying for? Everyone okay with Iran and North Korea having nukes? No one asked you one way or the other, did they?
Happy Halloween. Vote early.
Clash of the photo opportunities
March 23, 2007
The insurgency is in its final throes **mortar attack in the green zone… duck and cover… kaboom!**
But wait, there’s more… you not only get the incessant brutality and lies, for no extra cost we will waste all the money and come asking for more!
Still not convinced?
You get the mortar attack, bankruptcy, hypocrisy based on false piety, the vvegematic… and a certificate of authenticity from the Vice Presidency announcing that after all the fighting in Iraq, Al Queda is resurging!
Send more blood and money now to help our mismanaged failed policies!
If you are still not satisfied, we guarantee that we will blame the entire mess on people who had no say in the matter until we totally fucked it all up!
If you don’t act now, this entire mail order house will be indicted and convicted so hurry while there’s still a chance to declare martial law!
Blog for the booing broken-hearted Cubs fans who are disowning the team.
October 7, 2007
I know how you feel, but you’ll come back. There’s no known cure for being a Cubs fan. Even if you ignore them, you’ll still have to carry that hurt feeling around for the rest of your life. Even winning it all next year is no guarantee you won’t die a little bit every October for the next 100 year draught after that.
Here’s an image for you to take with you in the offseason… Cliff Floyd’s dad on a stretcher at the ballpark hooked up to an IV unit with his Cubs hat on while the Cubs launch an improbable come from behind win…
Steve Goodman in the middle of the ’84 season (on the verge of death) in the studio with some of the Cubs recording Go Cubs Go! (and A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request).
Steve didn’t live to see the collapse in San Diego, but he could’ve guessed… just like me seeing Augie Ojeda take the field in Game One… you gotta know somewhere deep down that the stage is set for another disappointment.
Maybe next year we’ll know what it’s like to see our team as the last one standing. Maybe not. It’s baseball. It’s the greatest game ever invented, but it always breaks your heart in the end. Always. Even the greatest teams and the greatest players wear down from the seasonal marathons and get replaced by up and comers. Every champion, every dynasty, has to take the pennant down eventually and pass it on. That’s what happened to the Cubs and they are still waiting for their turn to come around again. New teams like the Mets, Padres, and D-backs keep coming along to get in the way.
Cubs usually start playing out the string around July or August, if not April, but this year it was October. We got beat by a better team. Maybe next year we’ll be the better team. The Cubs were pressing at the plate a bit, but good pitching will do that to hitters. Arizona looked sharp turning those double plays. Those were not flukes. Our guys came hard into 2nd base, but the D-backs hung tough. The Cubs were not losers this year. The D-backs were winners. Arizona played the games hard and tough with pitching, defense, speed, and power. What didn’t they do right? We did not lose to a bunch of clowns and if I would’ve been at the ballpark I would’ve given both teams a standing ovation. I understand the disappointment, but booing shows a lack of appreciation and respect for the game. It’s a great game, one of our great cultural contributions to the world and someday the world might appreciate it. Hopefully we’ll see the Cubs go all the way before that happens.
This year’s team played one of the best months I’ve seen any Cubs team play to get back into the race (June, wasn’t it?) and despite a season long lack of power, they set the team record for homers in September to make the playoffs.
I felt like I was done with the Cubs after watching them get swept by the Mets at the end of ’04, but seeing my 2nd favorite team, the White Sox, go all the way in ’05 only made me realize there’s only one cure for that boyhood longing that inexplicably remains inside me… to see the Cubs jumping around and celebrating the Championship.
If I go into a coma and wake up and discover a Cubs championship 10 years after the fact, I’m pretty sure my emotions will be soaring like I’m right there on the field with them in the moment. So will yours. We won’t know if winning will cure this disease until it happens, but I remain with my theory that there is no cure.
So put your Steve Goodman tunes on the boombox and raise a toast for the generations of fans who have come and gone in the hundred years since the last Cubs championship in 1908.
Dry your tears and know the leaves will fall, the snow will come and we’ll dig it out and try to call dibs on our parking spaces with cheap lawn furniture. The cruel hawk wind will howl off the lake like it’s the end of the world, but from our icy grey world we’ll see the Cubs warming up in the Arizona sunshine and we won’t be thinking about the Diamondbacks, but it will remind us that winter doesn’t last forever and soon the sun will shine in Chicago again.
We’ll know we shouldn’t get emotionally involved with the Cubs, but eventually they’ll win two games in a row, our sons and daughters will look pleadingly at us or a buddy will score an extra ticket, and you’ll think, ‘maybe it’ll be okay to take an afternoon off at the Friendly Confines and see the sun shining on the ivy.’ Despite the wisdom of experience we’ll shout “Go Cubs!” and there will be legions of ghosts swirling in the wind shouting it with us, and maybe that shouting will make the ball do a funny trick that helps us instead of killing us.
Wait ’til Next Year, Cubs fans. That’s what we do.
Yet another reprint
October 16, 2008
(Editor’s Note: Buzz Fugazi continues to be on a leave of absence. With the My Senator Is Great Brodzky poll showing Barack Obama edging ahead of his out of touch opponent, the distinguished Senator from Exxon, we decided to reprint this Buzz response to a query from an ivy league alternative journalism project in 1994).
Introduction: A letter I wrote to a name I couldn’t make out from an alternative journalism project at Cambridge University.
To: Rirb Coura, or whoever…
From: Basement c/o Adnon Kitkuda (Editor’s Note: Though the nickname Buzz goes back to 1975, Buzz used Adnon Kitkuda as an alter ego in the Southern Illinois alternative press from 1989 to 1994).
RE: alternative campus journalism
11/24/1994
Good Samaritan House
Carbondale, IL
Dear University Conversion Project Comrade(s):
I was very pleased and excited to receive your inquiry postcard. The only reason I did not respond sooner is that I hoped to enclose a November ’94 issue of BASEMENT. This proved unrealistic; the new BASEMENT was supposed to be more relevant than ever, but it’s just another bad college try.
As you can see from the enclosed back issues, BASEMENT is—as an editor for a local daily put it—“sort of an ego thing”: cultural catharsis, satire, etc. It’s good for a few snicks, but it’s hardly a speed bump on the fast road to a rigid crypto-fascist theocracy. We won’t be laughing when we get there. We’ll need back issues of BASEMENT to throw in our trashcan fires as we stand disenfranchised in East St. Louis—along with the crackheads—contemplating our thought crimes, begging Quayle for a presidential pardon.
Forgive my hyperbole. Too much newsprint has soaked into my fingers and polluted my brain. Plus, I’ve been a staff resident of this emergency shelter for over a year and I actually get to watch herds of children being escorted on American’s peculiar deathmarch for “the underclass” (or whatever it is we’re supposed to call those who probably won’t belong in the New World Order)…
Anyway, I’m impressed that your outreach efforts extend to obscure characters in minor league cities like Carbondale. I would like to know more about your organization and the kinds of papers you’re hooking up with. The corporate media is doing a suck job of informing the public and we can thank them and our inexperienced, poorly organized selves for all the goofy Gantry-type assholes who are marching to power under the gold (twisted?) cross.
I’ll be relocating to Chicago in a couple of months, gearing up for the ’96 election. I’m interested in joining forces, sharing info and experience with anyone who can help combat the dangerous manipulation of information by Pat Robertson and friends, an arrogant and corrupt circle of elites who hid their disdain for civil liberties and economic justice with carnival evangelism. I hope we can learn from the way the New Right overcame factionalism with money and incessant grassroots networking.
Good ideas that seem politically impossible now may be very feasible after years of concentrated hard work. Let’s get busy. Meanwhile, let’s try to maintain some sense of humor. Go Team, Rah, Rah, Rah.
Don’t Tread On Me.
Adnon Kitkuda.
I scream, you scream, we all scream waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares that Bush is still President.
February 11, 2009
What will we do at the MSIG Army without our favorite Bobo clown? Well, the haters dogged Clinton until they had President Obama to help them ignore their own shortcomings. Far be it from us punks to act superior to the opposition. We’re going to get down in the mud with them… with extreme ice cream humor.
Here’s something from my email inbox forwarded by progressive activist Lee Dynamo:
It’s cold but sweet…
Ben & Jerry created “Yes, Pecan!” ice cream flavor for Obama.
For George W. they asked for suggestions from the public. Here are some of their favorite responses:
– Grape Depression
– the Housing Crunch
– Abu Grape
– Cluster Fudge
– Nut ‘ n Accomplished
– Good Riddance You Lousy Motherfucker… Swirl
– Iraqi Road
– Chock ’n Awe
– WireTapioca
– Impeach Cobbler
– Guantanmallow
– imPeachmint
– Heck of a Job, Brownie!
– Neocon Politan
– RockyRoad to Fascism
– The Reese’s-cession
– Cookie D’oh!
– Nougalar Proliferation
– Death by Chocolate… and Torture
– Freedom Vanilla Ice Cream
– Chocolate Chip On My Shoulder
– Credit Crunch
– Mission Pecanplished
– Country Pumpkin
– Chunky Monkey in Chief
– WMDelicious
– Chocolate Chimp
– Bloody Sundae
– Caramel Preemptive Stripe
– I broke the law and am responsible for the deaths of thousands… with nuts.
The real dirt on Obama
February 10, 2012
He’s too left.
He’s too right.
He’s too black.
He’s too white.
We’re supposed to be dead
April 17, 2013
Greetings, punks. Fuck you. And fuck me, too. And fuck the Westboro Baptist Church. Seems like they could use it. 7 years ago today Mikey posted a blog I wrote about the religiously justified pathos of these sad, terminally bored assholes and now, BOSTON, and the subsequent media orgy with the theme of spectacular violence, the Westboro Baptist Church is in the news again. They’re still out on the road jumping in front of every news camera they can find… doing everything in their power to avoid returning to their formerly unpublicized lives in Topeka. I suspect the boredom and absurdity they carried with them when they left there is heavier than any cross, and no amount of attention will ever relieve the burden. They are sick. I’ll pray for them. And that’s all I have to say about that.
Killers in America work seven days a week, and neither Mikey nor I have time to mourn every victim of every senseless killing. Four were shot to death in Chicago over the weekend. Pretty low-key. Barack Obama, before he was President, referred to the parade of inner-city gun violence victims as “the forgotten children”—the Dems want to invent more rules to the game. Nevermind the existing rules against shooting people that are ignored, the existing gun laws, drug laws, etc. the prison-industrial complex that is overfed. They are amazed by their own usefulness. The GOP wants money to make up its own rules. I sometimes get indecisive about which political party should be destroyed first. Mostly I am pretty sure it should be the GOP, but I wonder if we can get rid of both at the same time? What are the odds that a new party can be any better? There’s a lot more I can say about all that and I will, given the time and inspiration.
Furthermore, no respectable media outlet spends too much time covering the relentless carnage on the roads. Just a small price to pay for the honor of feeding the oil companies and maintaining the status quo. Almost everyone is guilty of that and so the full depth of the horror is barely worth mentioning. We’ve had a few more oil spills here and there. I can hardly wait… for the assholes to start spilling nuclear waste. And if it’s true there’s a fool proof methodology for carting nuclear waste safely, would it be insane to suggest that somehow someway the mind-boggling profits of the oil industry should be used to adopt those? I suppose it is some kind of unacceptable ism to suggest that. Well, I guess that’s why we’re still here. Even if it’s only light entertainment for ourselves, our friends, or anyone out there who is still making an effort to make a positive difference while maintaining a sense of humor and the occasional impulse to jump up and down screaming.
Punk is dead. Long live punk.
We’re back, but not quite
July 3, 2014
Howdy, strangers. Been awhile since I tossed any words onto this site. I suspect I’m writing a note to the future and you, dear reader, are sitting in front of your screen, or maybe the internet implant chip is merely buzzing inside your head ten years from now and you’re just flabbergasted to discover MSIG ARMY blogs more recent than 2006.
Furthermore, there was an actual scheduled recording session for Mikey and I yesterday. The return of Over The Top streaming on a Live365.com station, CDFR, Chicago Daily Fuse Radio (“The Fuse”). But when a project popped up at my job and I went to call Mikey to cancel, I found a voice mail waiting for me. A project popped up at Mikey’s job and he cancelled.
Reminds me how the whole thing started. Nine years ago, after leaving a station that wouldn’t let me play punk rock, I discovered Mikey wanted to do podcast work on his website with punk rock. Furthermore, I had a blogging platform to play with. Did I mention that Mikey owns an espresso machine?
I remember the first blogs were about the first show coming soon and how Mikey’s professional life was causing delays. Well, here we go again.
It’s the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. We have a legacy to think about and now that a new generation of activists are holding the torch, where are we going? Who is trying to stop us?
Congress is up for grabs. The battle for the Presidency is already in motion. The Wingnuts are trying to copy the Dem formula from 2008: Worst President in History. We can’t have more of this.
Are we truly blind libtards marching lockstep with our Kenyan Socialist master, Kwame Nkrumah Obama? Where did we succeed by backing him? Where did we fail? What can we do better moving forward?
The Wickerman wants me to abandon the Democrats for a new third party. Not going to happen this time around, but we are going to explore Project 2024.
The First Rule of Project 2024: Talk about Project 2024.
Fake Mayor For Life Daley returns to give his fake assessment of Chicago and maybe some tips for Project 2024. Probably something to do with getting kickbacks from contractors and selling public assets to the UAE. I understand some oil sheiks will pay the city’s bills for a month if we agree to drain Lake Michigan and have all the water transported to the Middle East. That and other bright ideas to be considered amid the noise and waste. Punk rock.
Cecil the Lion
July 29, 2015
There’s a backlash against white liberals concerned with Cecil the Lion. Supposedly, if I am appalled that some dickhead needs to kill a cat for sport, I am a hypocrite because I am unconcerned with Africa otherwise. For the record, my campus activism began by demanding University divestment from South African Apartheid in ’85, and thanks to personal letters from a friend in Rwanda, I was well aware and concerned with genocide there long before it reached limited public consciousness in this country. My government has been reluctant to take my foreign policy advice and while many people in my generation were chasing dollars during the Reagan Years, I was a card-carrying DSA… writing, agitating, and organizing for a new Democratic Left. That being said, I do not wish to be a white colonial overlord of African politics, but at the same time, I will not object if the Great Cat Hunter is thrown into a cage to be dismembered by crazed chimps for pay per view entertainment. If anybody has a problem with that, go ahead and cry me a fucking river.
Little Snot and Buzz Jr.
at the Airwaves reunion, 2010
Blog for the booing broken-hearted Cubs fans who are disowning the team.
October 7, 2007
(This blog is part of a slightly edited collection Morons Streaking In Goobertown: Sixteen Blogs. The best and worst of the Buzz Fugazi Screaming From The Basement Blog on MSIGARMY.com)
I know how you feel, but you’ll come back. There’s no known cure for being a Cubs fan. Even if you ignore them, you’ll still have to carry that hurt feeling around for the rest of your life. Even winning it all next year is no guarantee you won’t die a little bit every October for the next 100 year draught after that.
Here’s an image for you to take with you in the offseason… Cliff Floyd’s dad on a stretcher at the ballpark hooked up to an IV unit with his Cubs hat on while the Cubs launch an improbable come from behind win…
Steve Goodman in the middle of the ’84 season (on the verge of death) in the studio with some of the Cubs recording Go Cubs Go! (and A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request).
Steve didn’t live to see the collapse in San Diego, but he could’ve guessed… just like me seeing Augie Ojeda take the field in Game One… you gotta know somewhere deep down that the stage is set for another disappointment.
Maybe next year we’ll know what it’s like to see our team as the last one standing. Maybe not. It’s baseball. It’s the greatest game ever invented, but it always breaks your heart in the end. Always. Even the greatest teams and the greatest players wear down from the seasonal marathons and get replaced by up and comers. Every champion, every dynasty, has to take the pennant down eventually and pass it on. That’s what happened to the Cubs and they are still waiting for their turn to come around again. New teams like the Mets, Padres, and D-backs keep coming along to get in the way.
Cubs usually start playing out the string around July or August, if not April, but this year it was October. We got beat by a better team. Maybe next year we’ll be the better team. The Cubs were pressing at the plate a bit, but good pitching will do that to hitters. Arizona looked sharp turning those double plays. Those were not flukes. Our guys came hard into 2nd base, but the D-backs hung tough. The Cubs were not losers this year. The D-backs were winners. Arizona played the games hard and tough with pitching, defense, speed, and power. What didn’t they do right? We did not lose to a bunch of clowns and if I would’ve been at the ballpark I would’ve given both teams a standing ovation. I understand the disappointment, but booing shows a lack of appreciation and respect for the game. It’s a great game, one of our great cultural contributions to the world and someday the world might appreciate it. Hopefully we’ll see the Cubs go all the way before that happens.
This year’s team played one of the best months I’ve seen any Cubs team play to get back into the race (June, wasn’t it?) and despite a season long lack of power, they set the team record for homers in September to make the playoffs.
I felt like I was done with the Cubs after watching them get swept by the Mets at the end of ’04, but seeing my 2nd favorite team, the White Sox, go all the way in ’05 only made me realize there’s only one cure for that boyhood longing that inexplicably remains inside me… to see the Cubs jumping around and celebrating the Championship.
If I go into a coma and wake up and discover a Cubs championship 10 years after the fact, I’m pretty sure my emotions will be soaring like I’m right there on the field with them in the moment. So will yours. We won’t know if winning will cure this disease until it happens, but I remain with my theory that there is no cure.
So put your Steve Goodman tunes on the boombox and raise a toast for the generations of fans who have come and gone in the hundred years since the last Cubs championship in 1908.
Dry your tears and know the leaves will fall, the snow will come and we’ll dig it out and try to call dibs on our parking spaces with cheap lawn furniture. The cruel hawk wind will howl off the lake like it’s the end of the world, but from our icy grey world we’ll see the Cubs warming up in the Arizona sunshine and we won’t be thinking about the Diamondbacks, but it will remind us that winter doesn’t last forever and soon the sun will shine in Chicago again.
We’ll know we shouldn’t get emotionally involved with the Cubs, but eventually they’ll win two games in a row, our sons and daughters will look pleadingly at us or a buddy will score an extra ticket, and you’ll think, ‘maybe it’ll be okay to take an afternoon off at the Friendly Confines and see the sun shining on the ivy.’ Despite the wisdom of experience we’ll shout “Go Cubs!” and there will be legions of ghosts swirling in the wind shouting it with us, and maybe that shouting will make the ball do a funny trick that helps us instead of killing us.
Wait ’til Next Year, Cubs fans. That’s what we do.
Is War? Is Good?
“Lost generation, where will we go? Off to die in the Russian snow.” – Unsuccessful Abortions (1984)
Children in Ukraine being bombed by Russia! In fact, their organs are being harvested and fed to the brutal and insane dictator Vlad “the Impaler” Putin.
Bombing children in Ukraine… unacceptable. Invading Ukraine… unacceptable. We should avoid doing these things. We should stick to bombing children in Yemen. Or Gaza. Or anywhere else, but there are very good strategic reasons why sometimes children are target practice and other times they are sacred.
To know when is good strategy we elect philosopher-kings like Grandpa Joe, Trashtalk Donnie, Barry Obomber, George Dubya “Mission Accomplished” Bush, Bill “Starve the Children” Clinton, and George “Papa Bush” Bush. Special shout out to Ronnie “Weapons for the Ayatolla and Death Squads” Raygun. Fight among yourselves about who loved babies more. I vote for Barry, my favorite talk pretty but don’t rock the boat conservative of the bunch.
None of this excuses Vlad the Impaler devouring the harvested organs of Ukraine. Vlad remembers Ukraine was part of Soviet Union but now is no Soviet Ukraine no Russia Ukraine, except for parts Ukraine with Russian army saying, yes, here is Russia Ukraine.
Russia says to United States, “You have very many very good nukes and maybe sold weapons to Ukraine, we have not so many not so good nukes, but had bad experience last time we ignored foreign government we thought we could avoid major war with and try to ignore until they were in Moscow suburbs saying, ‘where is blankets, Fritz?’ ‘Vas? Hans, I thought you bring blankets?’ – ‘Nein, Fritz, du told to bring blankets, dumbkoff!’ Maybe you study this in your history? Maybe story about Napoleon? Or maybe even America winner winner vodka dinner and take all everything winner, maybe then, best case, you do this for to run around 20 years bleed money bleed blood and get bored and go home and we are right where we are… Russia Ukraine, so go home now, save 20 years.”
But wait, Joe the Assyrian added on… and FYI, this is not Slats Grobnik alter ego. I am already alter-ego.
Joe, the Grobnik of another ambivalent politico trying not to be permanently blacklisted from working in politics by saying what is in his heart and mind: Our country is run by idiots… This “invasion“ was 10 years in the making. And we did everything to provoke Russia… For 25 years Putin has said that he would never allow Ukraine to join NATO and we kept pushing the Ukraine to join NATO. So he said “fuck you“, you wouldn’t allow an angry Mexico or Canada or Cuba to have nukes at your borders… But at least we fully equipped the Ukrainian army so when they fall next month the Russians will have new western gear.
WTF have we and NATO countries been doing about it? Our idiot leaders just made clear five days ago that we would not invoke “article 5”- basically telling Saddam to invade Kuwait, -er, I mean Putin to invade Ukraine.
All the talking heads are saying that Putin is manipulative or that he is a liar or whatever… He has said in plain Russian and in plain English for 25 years that he would not allow Ukraine to join NATO. Yes, Putin is evil and 100% of Ukrainians are gentle fawns- but this was so predictable…
February 26, 2022 – Editor’s supplement
Is more from 2018. Is very interesting, but Pozner, perhaps playing to bourgeois Yale audience forgets after Czar and in early stage of Russian Revolution, Russia way the frack more democratic than United States ever has been. Historic fact for you to research, but this does not dismiss Pozner making other great points that do have historic accuracy.
Warning: Bitter SATIRE. Buzz is back.
Consume this blog with alcohol or large quantities of leaded water.
LET’S HAVE A WAR!
When you look at our Congress and the leadership of both corporate parties during the 20 year fiasco in Afghanistan, it’s easy to think… yes, these same people should be in charge of another war, which we should start immediately without reforming the complete lack of oversight and accountability that produced a tragic farce and resulted in the Taliban being more entrenched than they were before we got there!
Rapid response editorial from Joe the Assyrian: Are you talking about Bush 41? Who gave all our secrets to our strong democratic ally Saudi Arabia? Or are you talking about Clinton? He gave everything to China, including weapon systems. Or are you talking about Bush 43? He also supported our good Democratic ally Saudi Arabia and went easy on Russia because he looked into Vladimir‘s eyes and fell in love. Or are you talking about the Chosen One (a.k.a. Bamz a.k.a. the B Rock) who didn’t do jack crap with anyone and told the world how weak we could be? Are you talking about Trump? He simply told Vladimir, “It’s bad for business so let’s not fight?” Meanwhile we have Uncle Joe. His entire team is in search of an adversary because he is too stupid to figure out how the world works.
NEWS FOR TODAY: #ClimateEmergency tick tock tick tock
Military Times: Up to 8500 US Troops on heightened alert in case of Russian move on Ukraine.
Yet another reprint
from Morons Streaking In Goobertown: Sixteen Blogs.
The best and worst of the Buzz Fugazi Screaming From The Basement Blog on MSIGARMY.com
October 16, 2008
(Editor’s Note: Buzz Fugazi continues to be on a leave of absence. With the My Senator Is Great Brodzky poll showing Barack Obama edging ahead of his out of touch opponent, the distinguished Senator from Exxon, we decided to reprint this Buzz response to a query from an ivy league alternative journalism project in 1994).
Introduction: A letter I wrote to a name I couldn’t make out from an alternative journalism project at Cambridge University.
To: Rirb Coura, or whoever…
From: Basement c/o Adnon Kitkuda (Editor’s Note: Though the nickname Buzz goes back to 1975, Buzz used Adnon Kitkuda as an alter ego in the Southern Illinois alternative press from 1989 to 1994).
RE: alternative campus journalism
11/24/1994
Good Samaritan House
Carbondale, IL
Dear University Conversion Project Comrade(s):
I was very pleased and excited to receive your inquiry postcard. The only reason I did not respond sooner is that I hoped to enclose a November ’94 issue of BASEMENT. This proved unrealistic; the new BASEMENT was supposed to be more relevant than ever, but it’s just another bad college try.
As you can see from the enclosed back issues, BASEMENT is—as an editor for a local daily put it—“sort of an ego thing”: cultural catharsis, satire, etc. It’s good for a few snicks, but it’s hardly a speed bump on the fast road to a rigid crypto-fascist theocracy. We won’t be laughing when we get there. We’ll need back issues of BASEMENT to throw in our trashcan fires as we stand disenfranchised in East St. Louis—along with the crackheads—contemplating our thought crimes, begging Quayle for a presidential pardon.
Forgive my hyperbole. Too much newsprint has soaked into my fingers and polluted my brain. Plus, I’ve been a staff resident of this emergency shelter for over a year and I actually get to watch herds of children being escorted on America’s peculiar deathmarch for “the underclass” (or whatever it is we’re supposed to call those who probably won’t belong in the New World Order)…
Anyway, I’m impressed that your outreach efforts extend to obscure characters in minor league cities like Carbondale. I would like to know more about your organization and the kinds of papers you’re hooking up with. The corporate media is doing a suck job of informing the public and we can thank them and our inexperienced, poorly organized selves for all the goofy Gantry-type assholes who are marching to power under the gold (twisted?) cross.
I’ll be relocating to Chicago in a couple of months, gearing up for the ’96 election. I’m interested in joining forces, sharing info and experience with anyone who can help combat the dangerous manipulation of information by Pat Robertson and friends, an arrogant and corrupt circle of elites who hide their disdain for civil liberties and economic justice with carnival evangelism. I hope we can learn from the way the New Right overcame factionalism with money and incessant grassroots networking.
Good ideas that seem politically impossible now may be very feasible after years of concentrated hard work. Let’s get busy. Meanwhile, let’s try to maintain some sense of humor. Go Team, Rah, Rah, Rah.
Don’t Tread On Me.
Adnon Kitkuda
This resolution, addressed to me, is really about all of us working together
Former Vernon Township Trustee Adam Broad “the socialist that lowered the property tax levy” became a school bus driver for three years after an unsuccessful attempt to elect Bernie Sanders and win election to Congress.
This is a re-edited Drama Queen Facebook post from Oscar Night. I prefer to think of myself as Drama King, but Lee “The Lorax” Dynamo insists I’m DQ. Wishful thinking, Lee? Kiss, kiss.
Golda Meir famously said, “Don’t be so humble. You’re not that great.” With her good advice in mind, let me share this resolution (HR 233) almost two years ago by the Illinois General Assembly that honored my public service.
HR 233 Broad jokingly referred to this as his participation trophy. Former Township Supervisor Dan Didech, later elected to Representative in the General Assembly, was recruited by Broad to join the Vernon Township Democratic slate. They met in an Obama Alumni email chain…
View original post 753 more words
A brief history of the Drive-By Truckers becoming my favorite road trip band
Southern Rock Opera has been described as a break-thru album for the band. Never did a survey of the heAthens and wannabe heAthens that love this band, but for the former community organizer that is my alter-ego, that is the album that turned me on.
It was 2004 and I was on my way to Duval County Florida to be a Regional Field Director for a non-partisan voting rights/voter registration thing. While Democrats, in theory, mostly approved of this work (African-Americans lean D in the 70 to 90% range), some obviously did not. I don’t know the exact number of Dems that give zero fracks for black voting rights or the black experience, I met at least as many in Jacksonville as I met canvassing the raw racist white flight collar suburbs of Chicago.
While Republicans remained mostly disapproving or indifferent, some provided great help. Some still proudly stand for the Party of Lincoln. As an Illinoisan, I can appreciate that, despite the Republican party losing my vote in Beirut and never winning it back.
We received death threats and had our cars vandalized. We were harassed, but no one got killed or beaten with clubs. One of us did get jailed, however.
It was tough work. We had a hell of a team. This song was a part of the daily soundtrack in our field office. Sometimes playing in an hourly loop. It was as much a part of our culture as the picture of Jackie Robinson stealing home or the fridge filled with cold water and cold beer.
Fast forward to me driving home from Louisville, Kentucky after the 2008 Democratic primary which put Barack Obama over the top in the delegate math for a Dem nomination over Hillary Clinton. She didn’t get the memo, but I was more concerned with seeing my boy and buying Brighter Than Creation’s Dark first chance I could.
Generally speaking, I’ve never been able to keep up with TV shows or bands or anything else because I’m trying to survive which is more than a full-time effort and also be some kind of working class hero/True American Revolutionary. Also, like to spend a lot of time completely wrapped up in myself. Also a full time job. There’s the duality of striving constantly for love and constantly being somehow ill-equipped for it. And then there’s this…
So I went to see the band in Milwaukee and impressed my girlfriend.
MEMO to the INCEL CROWD: turning your girlfriend onto cool bands she’s never heard instead of berating her for perceived flaws might increase your chances of getting laid. I’ve done both and following your heart and expanding your mind with music seems to work better. I’ve had all kinds of people become my friend just out of pure love of music. I’ve had all kinds of friends share my love of music and hang out with me to explore more of that. Never had someone come back to my place so I could tell them why I think they’re wrong (even if they are).
On a lighter note, if I were Jimmy Page, I’d wear those Dragon Pants everywhere and woo you with my prowess…
After seeing the band in St. Louis, I started digging deeper in the band’s discography
There is so much more I can say about why I relate to this band and how much hard work they put in to be so well loved by a fiercely loyal group that ought to be so much larger, but I need to grab dinner and get ready to do some radio on WORT at 8pm Central tonight.
I just wanted to play some of the songs that didn’t make my playlist and I look forward to posting some pics and telling more about why this is a band worth adding to your collection.
I don’t just talk this group up, I bought all their albums and I’ve seen ’em every chance I can. I drive a lot and this is a great road trip band.
Tonight’s Psychoacoustics with Bad Sister Heidi, Rev. Sly Velveteen, and guest DJ Drive-By Truckers Geek can be live streamed on WORT or streamed on the archive for the next two weeks.
If Nirvana Played To Nobody, Would They Make A Sound?
By Ron Synovitz (reposted from currently offline Rude Truth website)
Editor’s Note: This Basement report, written in 2021 by international correspondent Ron Synovitz, is a contribution to Craig S. Wilson’s forthcoming book: “Carbondale Underground: Tales From The 90s.” A fix of Rude Truth from a first-hand witness of Nirvana’s July 4, 1989 visit to Carbondale, Illinois, this testimonial document is aimed at dispelling decades of myths and misinformation told by people who weren’t there.
If Nirvana Played To Nobody, Would They Make A Sound?
By Ron Synovitz
The 1990s started six months early in Carbondale, Illinois, with a punk rock version of the philosophical question: “If a tree fell in the woods…”
If Nirvana played a tiny family-owned venue before they were famous and almost nobody was there, would they still make a sound?
The answer is “yes.” But the myths echoing into the future would have little to do with historical reality.
The fact is, Nirvana did play 611 Pizza in Carbondale on July 4, 1989 during their first U.S. tour. But they didn’t stay in town longer than seven hours, maybe less.
They spent the whole time on “the Strip” — a section of U.S. Highway 51 lined with restaurants and student bars alongside the Illinois Central Railroad.
Normally crowded, the Strip was like a ghost-town that Fourth of July. Nirvana’s 611 show got no advance promotion because of the holiday and because it was added to the tour just days earlier.
They played for about 35 minutes to almost no one. Then they loaded their gear back into their van and drove to Iowa City for a gig the next day.
I know this for a fact because, although I missed the show by minutes, I arrived in time to meet Nirvana as they were loading out.
“We drove across the Mississippi River today,” Kurt Cobain told me. “It’s huge. I had no idea. This is the first time I’ve ever crossed east of the Mississippi.”
Mutating Myths
Some fan websites doubt Nirvana’s 611 Pizza show happened and omit it from their gig lists.
Their assessment is based on the lack of advertisements or reviews in the student newspaper, “The Daily Egyptian,” and the fact that no fliers, photos, video, or audio recordings of the show have surfaced on the Internet. “If it’s not on the Internet, it didn’t happen.”
There are punk fans in Carbondale who also doubt the show happened. They say they or their friends would have heard about it and been there. But at the time, Nirvana was barely known outside of Seattle.
If any local music journalist was interested and capable of shooting video or photos, it would have been Patrick Houdek – the teenaged publisher of Thrasher’s Digest.
Patrick used his camcorder to document many punk bands at 611 and in Carbondale’s basements during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Unfortunately, he was out of town on July 4, 1989.
Tall-tale versions of “it happened” also have mutated into myths via the rumor mill.
One myth has Nirvana going to a party afterwards at the Lost Cross punk house where Kurt Cobain “got so wasted he puked on the floor.” Another has them playing at Lost Cross and “blowing the roof off the place.” There are tales of Kurt crashing on the Lost Cross couch while the rest of the band slept on the floor.
All these myths, including claims that the 611 show never happened, have taken on lives of their own – defended as truth by those who want to believe whatever version they’ve become invested in.
Claims and counterclaims about a historical event by those who weren’t there are inevitable in the absence of physical or written documentation.
It’s the typical substitution of fantasy for fact that forms rock myths from Elvis and The Beatles to Nirvana’s 611 show.
But I am a first-hand witness who spoke at length with Kurt Cobain at 611 Pizza that Fourth of July. And when the truth about that day mutated into local myths, I wasn’t in Carbondale to set the record straight.
Within two months, I’d finished my master’s degree in journalism history at SIU and moved from Carbondale. By the height of Nirvana’s fame, I’d left the United States altogether to work in the Balkans.
I became a foreign correspondent and was focused on covering other kinds of history unfolding before my eyes – political and economic transition across post-communist Europe and Asia, the eastward expansion of the EU and NATO, and the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
For more than three decades, it has been the essence of my profession to dig out the truth from conflicting perspectives and separate fact from fiction.
It’s time I put down in writing what really happened in Carbondale the day Nirvana played.
Load In, Set Up
It was a Tuesday on July 4, 1989. Most SIU students were gone for the summer. Of the few still there that semester, many took Monday off and left town for an extended Fourth of July weekend. Carbondale seemed deserted.
Sound engineer Mike Blaine Sharp was in the gravel parking lot behind 611 Pizza that afternoon when Nirvana arrived in a white 1985 Dodge van rented for them by their record label, Sub Pop.
The venue didn’t have its own sound system, so Sub Pop rented a PA from a Carbondale-based firm called Robco Audio. Sharp was there to deliver Robco’s PA and help Nirvana set it up.
I actually met Sharp at 611 Pizza later that night. In August 2021, I phoned him to discuss what he remembers. It was the first time we talked since 1989 when we’d spoken to Kurt Cobain together.
“I initially thought they were from Texas,” Sharp said. “When they pulled up, they were like ‘Hey, we just drove all the way from Dallas, man!”
“They weren’t dog tired. There might have been a certain exuberance that they’d finally made it to their next destination… ‘All right! We’re here!’ That kind of thing,” Sharp recalls. “I used to play with a band called October’s Child and we played all over the Midwest. I was like, ‘OK. Guys on the road. I know this.’”
Sharp remembers Nirvana’s bassist Krist Novoselic getting out of the van.
“He was a tall fellow – like a short person in a tall person’s body. He did not look like he was walking well. And I thought 12 hours in a vehicle will probably do that to you.”
Sharp describes the drummer, Chad Channing, as “the chatty one of the bunch” who “seemed to do more talking than the others.”
As Sharp hauled the PA through the back door of 611 Pizza, Nirvana carried in their drums and amps themselves. They didn’t have a roadie.
Sharp says he was impressed by how quickly Channing loaded in first and got his drum kit set up.
For a cost of “probably about $50,” Sharp says the gear rented to Nirvana included two of Robco Audio’s Klipsch La Scala speakers – each with a 15-inch woofer, a horn midrange, and a smaller horn tweeter.
He says Robco also provided a small 150-watt Peavy power amp with a couple of microphones and mic stands.
Sharp let Nirvana use his own mix board, an eight-channel Yamaha PM430 stereo board from the 1970s.
Robco Audio owner Robbie Stokes says he didn’t remember that his company had supplied a sound system to Nirvana until years later when he was reminded of it by Sharp.
“It has slipped my memory because, at the time, if somebody said something then, what did ‘Nirvana’ mean to me? Or any of us? Nothing. It was just some punk band from the West Coast,” Stokes said.
When told in 2021 about naysayers who claim Nirvana never played at 611 Pizza, Stokes insists: “It did happen! Why does Mike Sharp say it happened, in such detail? He was on site!”
Still, Sharp wasn’t at the venue when Nirvana performed. The Robco rental deal did not include his services as a live sound engineer.
“Nobody mixed Nirvana that night,” Sharp says.
He says the band was a bit “annoyed” when he told them he had to run off to Paducah, Kentucky to do the monitor mix for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils at a Fourth of July concert on the banks of the Ohio River.
To supply Paducah Riverfest ’89, Robco Audio had pooled together most of Stokes’ gear with Carbondale’s other main supplier of concert equipment, Sound Core.
“They needed the gear from both companies to make that show happen like that, so there was very little left over in town for Nirvana,” Sharp explains. “I don’t think there were even monitors, to tell you the truth, because all of that had gone down to Paducah.”
For Nirvana to hear Kurt’s vocals, Sharp angled one of the main PA speakers toward the band. It was a stop-gap solution that risked creating a feedback loop from the vocal mic, especially without a live soundman to keep feedback under control.
“I think it was just basically vocals and maybe I did kick drum,” Sharp says, recollecting that he’d put a Shure Sm-57 or Sm-58 vocal microphone inside the kick drum because all the good drum mics went to the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.
The windowless 611 Pizza was so tiny that it didn’t need mics on all the drums and amps.
The “stage” was just a space on the floor in the middle of the back room with a fake ceiling and walls painted black.
There were two black upholstered booths on one side of the band and another booth across the room. A bench ran along the back wall. An audience of a few dozen would fill the venue.
Sharp says he didn’t even hear Kurt Cobain sing to test the vocal mic, quickly checking it himself to make sure it was working.
Once the drums were set up and the PA was connected and working, Sharp says he left his mix board on “default settings.”
“I was out of there before anything began,” Sharp remembers. “I didn’t do the sound check or the show. I was out of the room before they even had guitar amps running.”
“I wasn’t even sure who the vocalist was at that point. I asked if they wanted to check the microphone and they declined. They were, like ‘Nah, no.’ So I said: ‘OK, I’ve got to get going. It’s a long drive to Paducah.’”
Sharp also knew he’d have to drive back to Carbondale later, before 611 Pizza closed for the night, to get the PA back.
“Their show was already over by the time I got back,” he says.
‘Finding Nirvana In Carbondale’
By the summer of 2021, the mayor of neighboring Murphysboro – 40-year-old Will Stephens – had become so fascinated by the conflicting tales he’d heard that he launched his own podcast investigation: “Finding Nirvana In Carbondale.”
“My ultimate goal is to have the city put up a historical marker on the site,” Stephens told me when he tracked me down as a first-hand witness. “I don’t want to leave any stone unturned.”
Stephens quickly discovered that Carbondale’s main entertainment newspaper of the era, Nightlife, didn’t begin publishing until March 1990 – too late to leave a printed account.
Nightlife editor Chris Wissman told him that even after his paper started publishing, it was difficult to get information from 611 Pizza.
“People at the venue often didn’t know who was playing or their [gig] book wasn’t there,” Wissman said. “If the book wasn’t available or the people you’d call were busy slinging pizzas or Schaefer Lights or whatever, they wouldn’t tell you what was in the book.”
“You had to call at the right time and talk to the right person to get that information,” Wissman said. “It probably wasn’t on the Daily Egyptian’s radar to get that.”
But 611 Pizza was on the radar of Sub Pop Records in Seattle by the summer of 1989.
Sub Pop booking agent Danny Bland arranged Nirvana’s first U.S. tour to promote the “Bleach” album.
He told Stephens that he has a “drug-addled mind” and can’t specifically remember adding 611 Pizza to Nirvana’s itinerary. But he said he does remember 611 Pizza as a venue where he routed Sub Pop bands on cross-country tours like Nirvana’s.
“Oh yeah, I did a lot of shows there,” Bland told Stephens. “I booked several Sub Pop acts in that place.”
“I remember there were a few places we could do shows just on the sort of power of the Sub Pop label name alone,” Bland explained. “For a lot of bands on the roster, the Sub Pop logo would be bigger than any band name because that’s the thing that people recognized. And there were certain college towns…”
“I could book stuff in Fort Worth but I couldn’t get it in Dallas for some reason. It was a sort of pre ‘before-anyone-cared’ time,” Bland said. “So [611 Pizza] was one of the places that I put bands, yeah.”
“I booked the first couple of Nirvana tours,” Bland recalled, adding that “no other agents were interested.”
“I was over my head but young and confident and no one knew any better,” Bland said. “Any records that I’d kept have long since disappeared.”
Still, Bland was able to point Stephens to one “artifact of the grunge era” on display at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle – a hand-written itinerary he’d given to Nirvana before they set off on that first tour.
“It was hand-written by me because that’s basically how I handed out information back then,” Bland says.
When Stephens tracked down the document, he discovered to his chagrin that it only contains the second page of the itinerary – starting on July 9. For years, Stephens says, it was thought that the first page was lost.
But another copy of the itinerary, with the first page intact, has been discovered. On display at the museum’s Experience Music Project, it’s a Sub Pop office copy written before the tour started — not the papers Nirvana carried with them as they added shows along their way.
It lists a July 2 date in Fort Worth, Texas, at a venue called “Axis Club” and a July 5 gig at “Gabe’s Oasis” in Iowa City.
It does not list Nirvana’s July 3 show at The Electric Jungle in Dallas nor the 611 Pizza show on July 4, because both of those gigs were added after the tour had begun.
At 611 Pizza that July 4th, Kurt Cobain told me their Dallas and Carbondale dates originally were meant to be days off after playing eight nights in a row.
The Dallas gig was arranged when Nirvana was in neighboring Fort Worth. Video and hastily made fliers from Dallas exist, proving the show happened even though it’s not on the pre-tour itinerary.
Kurt said the 611 Pizza show was organized “by our record label” while they were in Texas.
That means Danny Bland would have arranged the date by telephoning Aaron Nauth – the 611 Pizza employee who had taken on the task of booking shows there and at Lost Cross.
When Stephens asked Bland if it was normal to add shows in the middle of a tour, Bland said: “We’d go wherever we could go – whoever would have us. We did do crazy drives and played for no money. That’s pretty standard practice. We had a miserable time and we loved it.”
Aaron told me in 2021 that he doesn’t remember taking Bland’s phone call to book Nirvana’s 611 gig. But he also admits that his memory is foggy.
Unfortunately, Aaron didn’t keep written records of many shows he booked, other than promo fliers he made. He did not make a flier for the Nirvana show and did not work there that night.
Empty College Town
While Mike Sharp was setting up the PA for Nirvana, I was working on my journalism master’s thesis in the basement of the SIU Communications Building.
I’d been given an office in the art shop of WSIU-TV for my graduate assistantship. Coincidentally, underground publisher Adnon Kitkuda and I also worked covert graveyard shifts there in 1989 to put together his newspaper “Basement: Little Egypt’s Fix Of Rude Truth.”
The School of Journalism was eerily quiet that day. The student-run Daily Egyptian wasn’t published through the holiday weekend. The printing press room was locked. The windows had been dark since the previous Friday.
When I finished my research for the day, I went off to look for friends at the House O’ Voodew, a punk house in the 400 block of East College Street.
I crossed the railroad tracks near 611 Pizza and made it as far as the 200 block of East College when I bumped into Mike ‘Taz’ Kartje, the drummer from a Carbondale punk band I’d recorded called Diet Christ.
Taz had a big grin on his face. He held a brown-paper bag full of bottle rockets. Soon, a few other friends arrived who’d been hanging out at the House O’ Voodew.
Jim Reed was there along with a young goth girl named Cassandra. Jim was an undergrad who’d just moved into Lost Cross with Aaron Nauth.
Rob Koss, an art student who’d painted the 611 Pizza sign, also showed up along with a mohawked SIU student named Donny Selmarten.
We had a bottle-rocket fight right there, oblivious to the fact that a future-world-famous rock band was on the Strip just a couple blocks away.
At dusk, Taz said he had to run off and our bottle-rocket fight ended. As the rest of us sat on the grass, I asked if there were any shows or parties that night.
Jim said nothing was planned at Lost Cross because his housemate, Aaron, “had some other shit to do.”
No parties were planned at House O’ Voodew or Club Romex either.
But Cassandra said: “There’s a band from Seattle playing at 611 tonight. They’re called Nirvana. There’s a buzz about them. They just released an album on Sub Pop.”
“How did you hear about them?” I asked Cassandra.
“I saw a magazine article about the whole Seattle scene at House O’ Voodew,” she replied.
“Oh yeah,” Jim chimed in. “Aaron got a call a couple of days ago from some record label guy on the West Coast to book a band at 611 tonight. Never heard of them.”
“Aaron’s too busy to deal with it,” Donny added. “I forgot about it, but we’re supposed to go over and see if they need a place to crash.”
It was quite normal for friends in Carbondale’s punk scene to help out-of-town bands that way.
In February 1989, when the Oakland band Neurosis passed through on a tour to promote their Lookout Records releases, they stayed for a week at “The Quadrangle Apartments” where Aaron, Jim, Rob, and Donny were living at the time.
Aaron ended up booking two shows for Neurosis at 611 Pizza that week.
Carbondale punk houses and 611 Pizza hosted a lot of bands from Chicago and other Midwest cities, along with West Coast bands on independent labels, like Plaid Retina, Mr. T Experience, and Eyeball.
I was interested in seeing a Sub Pop band from the Pacific Northwest. I’d lived in Eugene, Oregon, a couple of years earlier and had recorded bands there with the same reel-to-reel 4-track I used to record Diet Christ in the House O’ Voodew basement.
“They’ve probably already started,” I said. “We’d better head over now if we want to see them.”
Jim and Cassandra said they’d come over later. Rob said he’d be there soon.
We agreed to meet at the show. Donny Selmarten and I walked straight over. Rob would meet us there, but Jim and Cassandra never made it.
Blank Pizza
When Donny and I arrived at 611 Pizza, I was surprised to see a friend from Club Romex, Malcolm Robertson, working the door.
Malcolm would become a regular employee of 611 Pizza the following year. That night was the first time I saw him working there.
Unlike Aaron Nauth’s usual spot near the pizza counter, Malcolm was perched on a bar stool halfway down the entrance hallway.
“Are you working here now?” I asked Malcolm.
“Nah, I’m just filling in for Aaron tonight,” he said. “He’s got some other stuff to do.”
“How much is the cover?” I asked.
“Nothing now. It was three bucks, but they just finished.”
“Oh, crap. That sucks,” I said. “Were they any good?”
“Well, I sat here most of the time. I didn’t really see them other than peeking around the corner for a bit,” Malcolm said. “They sounded great. But I think their name is stupid.”
“It’s a great name,” I replied.
“It’s stupid,” Malcolm insisted.
A guy and a girl who’d seen the show, paying audience members, walked past us on their way out. I didn’t recognize them from Carbondale basement shows and they weren’t dressed like punks.
“How was the band?” I asked.
“They were incredible,” the girl said with exhilaration, as if she’d just had a life-altering experience. “They played a song called ‘Love Buzz’ that was amazing.”
The guy nodded in agreement but wasn’t as excited as she was.
I asked them if they were SIU students. They said they were both studying broadcast journalism.
To this day, I wonder if they’d randomly wandered into the venue and whether, years later, they realized they’d seen the nascent Nirvana just two weeks into their first U.S. tour.
Malcolm looked toward the end of the hall where a short guy with long blond hair had just walked up to the pizza-ordering counter. He wore a black leather jacket, a plain white undershirt, cut-off shorts, and sneakers.
“That’s the singer over there if you want to talk to him,” Malcolm said, waving Donny and me in.
“You guys played too early,” I told the singer, unaware I was talking to a future rock legend named Kurt Cobain. “A bunch of friends are coming over later to check you out, too.”
“Sorry man,” Kurt said as he turned to grab Malcolm’s attention. “Hey, can we get some pizza?”
“Oh, we’re all out of pizza sauce and cheese,” Malcolm lamented empathetically.
Then Malcolm had an idea — a kind of blank pizza called “focaccia.” It’s an oven-baked Italian bread known in some parts of Italy as “pizza bianca.”
“We’ve still got pizza dough,” Malcolm said. “We can make fresh bread in the oven with olive oil and salt like they do in Rome.”
“That sounds great,” Kurt replied. “We’re pretty hungry.”
Malcolm went behind the counter and poured beer from the tap into plastic cups for Kurt, Donny, and me.
Then he turned to the cook, Sam Chang, who was standing by the oven. I could see Malcolm there explaining how to prepare the blank pizza — telling Sam that he shouldn’t flatten the dough.
Sam Chang owned 611 Pizza. He usually stayed in the kitchen smoking and making pizza while bands played. Not surprisingly, Sam now says he doesn’t remember any details about the Nirvana show.
“I don’t have any record of that,” Chang told Stephens for his podcast. “Sorry about that. If I had, you’d be welcome to have it. But I just don’t keep anything. There were a lot of bands that played there. I might be confused with other bands. I don’t recall much.”
Malcolm stayed busy in the kitchen with Sam during most of my conversation with Kurt.
I told Kurt: “You guys should have put fliers around. We only heard about it a few minutes ago by word of mouth. We came straight over.”
“We have fliers,” Kurt insisted. “Our record label sent them out ahead of time to the venues. They’re supposed to make copies and put them up.”
Then Kurt explained how Nirvana was originally meant to have July 3rd and 4th as rest days. Since Sub Pop added the Dallas and 611 Pizza shows after their tour had begun, he said 611 probably didn’t get the promo materials in time.
Donny leaned back against the wall while Kurt explained why Nirvana didn’t have time to put up their own fliers around Carbondale that day.
“We just got into town this afternoon,” Kurt said. “We drove straight from Dallas. We haven’t seen anything. We just set everything up for the show. I hung out in here the whole time, watching our gear.”
I asked Kurt how the tour was going. He told me how crossing the Mississippi River for the first time that day was a big deal for him.
“It’s been long drives, but things are really starting to happen,” he said. He was upbeat and confident about the future. You could feel from his energy that Nirvana was on a rising curve.
“We’re going to be big. Bigger than the Ozark Mountain Daredevils,” Kurt predicted with a passive-aggressive sneer.
“The Toppermost of the Poppermost,” I joked, making a reference to a phrase John Lennon used to pep talk The Beatles in their pre-fame Hamburg days.
“I love The Beatles,” Kurt replied.
He told me how Sub Pop arranged the tour to promote their album. He said he was really happy about how the record sounded.
“Bleach” was officially released on June 15. The tour started with gigs in Seattle and San Francisco on June 21 and 22.
“In the last 10 days, we drove from L.A. across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas,” Kurt said. “We did four shows in Texas – San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, and Dallas last night.”
Knowing other bands whose vehicles broke down from such demanding treks, I asked if they’d had problems with their van so far.
“We stop every 400 miles and do a vehicle check,” Kurt explained. “We check all the fluids – oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid, the water in the battery. We even check the radiator hoses. The last thing we need is a breakdown.”
Kurt didn’t seem to mind that almost nobody saw their 611 Pizza show. He was already thinking about getting to the next gig.
Nirvana’s bass player came over. He had long dark hair, cut like a member of a 1960s garage band. He looked intimidatingly tall standing next to Kurt. But he was very friendly.
“Hey Kurt, the bass amp is all loaded,” he said, signaling that the rest of the gear could be packed in the van.
“Bass amp first?” I asked him.
“Yeah, well, we’ve got our bed rolls. Then the bass cab has to go in. It’s the biggest thing,” he said. “Bass cab first. Then, amps and guitars. Drums last.”
He introduced himself as Krist and asked Kurt about pizza.
Krist Novoselic was happy enough when Kurt told him they’d have fresh bread.
“I’m not as hungry as Kurt is,” Krist joked. “I went to that place across the street and got myself a gyros before we played. El Grecos.”
Kurt laughed and said: “You should have brought me one.”
You could tell Kurt and Krist were tight friends.
The drummer, Chad Channing, came round the corner from the stage room. Dave Grohl hadn’t yet joined Nirvana.
Chad was followed by the band’s other guitarist on that first U.S. tour, Jason Everman.
Soon to leave Nirvana and play bass briefly for Soundgarden, Everman would go on to become a U.S. Army Ranger and a member of the U.S. Special Operations Forces – serving combat duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kurt repeated the news about the pizza.
Chad shrugged and went back around the corner to finish packing up his drums.
Jason Everman moaned. He was grumpy. Total different vibe from Kurt and Krist. Negative energy. The tension between him versus Kurt and Krist was palpable.
Kurt said bluntly: “Jason, go load the amps and help Chad get the drums in the van. It’s your turn to be roadie.”
Jason grumbled and walked off.
“It must be tough living on the road with three other guys in a van,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” Kurt replied.
Common Friends, D.I.Y. Values
I asked Kurt what was happening with the Pacific Northwest scene, mentioning that I’d recorded a band called Snakepit a couple of years earlier when I lived in Eugene, Oregon.
Kurt’s face lit up. We had common friends in Snakepit – the singer and lead guitarist Mike Johnson, who would later become the bass player of Dinosaur Jr., and rhythm guitarist Billy Karren, who’d soon be the only male member of the Riot Grrrl band Bikini Kill.
“I know Mike Johnson,” Kurt said. “He came down to L.A. to see us play at Rhino Records in Westwood. Do you know that neighborhood? We had a really good show there.”
Kurt also knew the Snakepit cassette album I’d recorded in 1987 – “From Vegas to Memphis.” Released by Dunghill Records, it was voted “Pacific-Northwest Best Home Recording” in 1988 by readers of Seattle’s “Rocket” newspaper.
I’d gotten letters from Snakepit since then and knew Billy Karren was doing a project in Olympia called The Go-Team on Calvin Johnson’s K Records.
Kurt said he’d played guitar on a Go-Team record being released that month – “Bikini Twilight,” with Calvin Johnson on guitar and future Bikini Kill drummer Toby Vail.
“This tape was a big reason I quit school and moved to Eugene in 1988,” Toby Vail now says about Snakepit’s “From Vegas to Memphis.”
By the end of 1989, Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic would be in the studio with Mike Johnson for the first solo album by Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan — “The Winding Sheet.”
Mike Johnson produced Lanegan’s version of the Lead Belly song “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” with Kurt on electric guitar and Krist on bass.
Nirvana would reprise the song in 1993 with Kurt singing for their MTV Unplugged performance.
Krist asked me what the best bands were that I’d seen in Carbondale.
I mentioned a concert the previous September by Rapeman – former Big Black frontman Steve Albini’s band with the drummer and bass player of Scratch Acid – and how the name spawned an anti-rape “Take Back The Night” protest in front of the venue, Two Hearts.
Kurt got excited again, saying Rapeman was one of the best bands he’d ever seen.
I told them how Steve Albini and I were interns together at the Marion Chronicle-Tribune in Indiana during the winter of 1982-83 when Steve was a journalism student at Northwestern University and I was an undergrad at Ball State.
We spoke about Albini’s dedication to punk rock ethos and how he liked “vicious noise” that made his head spin, “like a jolt,” pushing him, “the music, the audience, and everything involved as close to the precipice as possible.”
In February 1993, Albini would spend two weeks with Nirvana recording their final studio album, “In Utero.”
Broken Mix Board
Malcolm brought the blank pizza out to Kurt and Krist from the kitchen. They were rectangular single slices, the shape of 611’s usual thin-crust offering. But the dough had risen into a thick crust.
The smell of stale beer was replaced by the scent of fresh bread. When Kurt bit into it, he was ecstatic. He spun around with a big smile on his face and took another bite.
As we continued to talk, Mike Sharp walked round the corner from the back room. Sharp had returned from Paducah, come in through the back door, and quickly loaded out the rented PA.
He apologized for not being able to work the mix board. Kurt was friendly and seemed to appreciate what he had done.
Sharp asked whether they could hear the vocals loud enough without any monitors.
“It was good for half a PA,” Kurt replied, describing how one of the main speakers dropped out in the middle of the show.
Mike looked surprised and concerned.
“I was worried that they’d blown the horn out on one of the Klipsch speakers – something that would be hard to replace,” Sharp now recalls. “But it was my mix board. It was a stereo board, so one side of the stereo feed must have disappeared during their show. It was one of the main outputs.”
“They might have been pressing the thing to get a little more oomph out of it,” he says. “Or maybe it was just its time. I bought the board in 1977, so it had a few years on it.”
Having never repaired his board, Sharp now laughs about owning a vintage 1970s Yamaha mixer that was blown out by Kurt Cobain’s voice.
Standing next to Krist Novoselic that night, I noticed he didn’t have a beer. I offered to buy him one, but he declined: “No thanks. We’re supposed to get them free anyway, but I’ve got to drive.”
I told them there was space at the Lost Cross house if they needed a place to crash. But both Kurt and Krist were determined to get right back on the road.
“We’ve got to drive all the way to Iowa City for a show tomorrow,” Kurt said, looking at Krist. “What is that, like, another six or eight hours?”
“Where’s the itinerary?” Krist asked.
“It’s in the van in the front,” Kurt replied.
“It’ll be about an eight-hour drive,” Mike offered. ““Where are you playing in Iowa City?”
“Some place called Gabe’s Oasis,” Kurt said.
“Oh, I know the place,” Mike said. “You’ll have to carry stuff up to the second floor for the load in. But it’s a cool place, and there should be a sound man too.”
Art Grotesque
Rob Koss, the artist who painted the 611 Pizza sign, arrived.
Rob was a stalwart of the Carbondale punk scene. He drew illustrations for Thrasher’s Digest and another Carbondale fanzine called Extortion. He also made fliers for gigs and did the cover art for several do-it-yourself releases by southern Illinois punk bands.
Disappointed to find he’d missed the show, Rob joined the conversation.
Kurt noticed Rob’s black cloth bag and recognized that it was an expensive set of color drawing pens.
“Oh, you’re an artist. I’m an artist too,” Kurt said. “Well, I do illustrations and stuff for fliers. But I’ve really been getting into making collages lately.”
Rob and Kurt immediately hit it off. They discovered they shared a fondness for Winston Smith, the American illustrator who used the medium of collage to design cover art for Dead Kennedys records on the Alternative Tentacles label.
Kurt said he was making collages from photos taken by a doctor to document his patients’ diseases and injuries.
“Are they autopsy photos?” I asked.
“No, they’re living patients,” Kurt said. “I found a whole photo album at an estate sale of some doctor who died. You’re not supposed to be able to get things like that. Privacy issues. It should have been destroyed.”
Kurt said he’d put one of the photos, a diseased vagina, on his refrigerator.
He said he was enthralled by images of human flesh rotting on a person while they’re still alive.
That struck a note with Rob. “I was fascinated by the human condition. I still am,” Rob said when I phoned him in 2021 to ask about the artists they’d discussed.
“I was surely talking about Ivan Albright, a grotesque Chicago-based painter who did The Picture Of Dorian Gray in the 1940s. He is a fantastic artist,” Rob said.
Rob also told Kurt how he’d snuck into the university medical library to copy photos from a book on victims of industrial accidents – “people who’d got their hands stuck in machinery and things like that.”
“One guy sawed himself in half with a band saw because he was upset at his wife,” Rob said. “I made a T-shirt of that.”
Kurt laughed at the idea of committing suicide by throwing yourself on an industrial band saw.
As Rob and Kurt talked about art grotesque, Donny went to the pay phone just inside the front door and called Aaron Nauth at Lost Cross.
Aaron had just finished whatever he was doing and was ready to join us. But Donny told him the show was over and the band was going straight back out on the road. Nirvana would not be staying at Lost Cross.
The new plan was for us to meet up with Aaron and Jim at The Quads. There was a keg left over from a barely attended party that needed to be drained.
Shortly after Donny hung up the phone, it was time for Nirvana to go.
We said goodbye and went out the front door while they left through the back.
Donny, Rob, and I walked together to The Quads where we met Jim and Aaron by the keg.
None of us realized the significance of the band we’d just met.
Aftermath
On July 18, 1989, exactly two weeks after performing at 611 Pizza, Jason Everman played his last gig with Nirvana at the Pyramid Club in New York City. Everman told music journalists that he quit Nirvana. Kurt Cobain insisted Everman was fired for being moody.
Whatever the case, their tensions brought an end to the band’s first cross-country tour nearly a month early. Ten more gigs that had been booked through August 13 were canceled.
In May 1990, Chad Channing played his last Nirvana show and was replaced on drums by Dave Grohl.
Mike Sharp still works as a soundman in the Chicago area. He jokes that if he ever fixes the mix board that Kurt Cobain’s voice broke, he’ll encase the broken part in plastic and keep it on his desk.
Rob Koss lives in Switzerland where he runs a tattoo business.
“I don’t have a very good memory for details,” Rob said when I asked him what he could remember about that night. “I have a very visual memory. I do remember our bottle rocket fight.”
For me, a strong memory for details has been a vital tool as an international correspondent.
But Nirvana was just one of many unknown punk bands that toured through Carbondale before I left the United States three decades ago.
It took me about 25 years to realize I’d met Nirvana before their fame.
It happened around 2015 when I was contacted by a Nirvana fan website that was trying to confirm whether the 611 Pizza show really took place.
The webmaster said a “doorman” named Malcolm Robertson was the only person on the Internet “claiming” it happened. The webmaster said Malcolm had offered my contacts as another witness.
For years, Malcolm had been telling mutual friends in Carbondale that I also met Nirvana at 611 Pizza that night. But I wasn’t around anymore to back Malcolm up and confirm that he was telling the truth.
Malcolm says he’d been bullied online by fans from around the world who insisted he was lying. He was pretty fed up with arguing about the few details he could remember.
Either to avoid being the victim of more social media dogpiles, or simply because of blurred memories, Malcolm now expresses uncertainty about the event.
He refused to be interviewed by Stephens for his “Finding Nirvana In Carbondale” podcast. Malcolm replied to Stephens’ request with a short text message, saying he thought that he had been in Chicago on the night of the show and didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Malcolm did not specify to Stephens that he was actually in Chicago for the Fourth of July 1990.
Unsure what year the Nirvana show had been, Malcolm wrongly concluded that it couldn’t have been 1989 because his payroll records show he wasn’t a regular employee of 611 Pizza until 1990.
He’d forgotten that he was just filling in for Aaron Nauth in 1989 on the night of the Nirvana show.
When I asked Malcolm about it around 2015, though, he mentioned how hungry Kurt Cobain had been and how happy he was to eat a piece of pizza bread without any cheese or sauce.
Those words triggered a revelation – a moving image in my mind, the recollection of Kurt grinning and spinning as he ate blank pizza at 611.
It opened a floodgate of memories. Funny. In all those years, though their music was omnipresent, I hadn’t put it together.
I’d met Kurt Cobain in Carbondale when he was just 22 years old, playing to an audience of almost no one, and predicting that his band was going to be “bigger than the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.”
(Copyright 2021 by Ron Synovitz, all rights reserved; published with permission from the author. Ron Synovitz graduated from SIU-C in August 1989 with an M.A. in journalism history. He is a senior international correspondent at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and a partner at Golden HIVE recording studios in Prague, Czech Republic. He also contributed to Chris Bryans’ 2020 authorized biography of Killing Joke, “A Prophecy Fulfilled,” documenting more than a decade of the English band’s work in Prague.)
https://widgets.wp.com/likes/index.html?ver=20220105#blog_id=197728712&post_id=123&origin=rudetruth110572515.wordpress.com&obj_id=197728712-123-63767209a98f0Posted byBuzz FugaziPosted inPunk RockTags:1989, 1993, 611 Pizza, Aaron Nauth, Adam Broad, Adnon Kitkuda, Afghanistan, Alternative Press, Asia, Axis Club, Balkans, Ball State, Basement, Basement Writers Cooperative, Bikini Kill, Bikini Twilight, Billy Karren, Calvin Johnson, Carbondale, Cassandra, Chad Channing, Chris Wissman, Craig Wilson, Dallas, Danny Bland, Dave Grohl, Diet Christ, Dodge, Donny Selmarten, Dunghill Records, EU, Eugene, Europe, Fanzine, Fliers, Fort Worth, Gabe’s Oasis, House O’ Voodew, Illinois, Illinois Central Railroad, Indiana, Internet, Iowa City, Iraq, Jason Everman, Jim Reed, K Records, Kentucky, Klipsch, Krist Novoselic, Kurt Cobain, L.A., Leadbelly, Los Angeles, Lost Cross House, Malcolm Robertson, Marion Chronicle-Tribune, Mark Lanegan, Mike ‘Taz’ Kartje, Mike Blaine Sharp, Mike Johnson, Mississippi River, MTV, Museum of Pop Culture, NATO, Nirvana, Northwestern University, October’s Child, Oregon, Ozark Mountain Devils, Paducah, Photos, post-communist, Rangers, Rapeman, Recording, Rhino Records, Riot Grrrl, Rob Koss, Robbie Stokes, Robco Audio, Ron Synovitz, Sam Chang, Schaefer Lights, Scratch Acid, Seattle, Shure, SIU, Snakepit, Sound Core, Soundgarden, Southern Illinois University, Steve Albini, Sub Pop, Take Back The Night, The Daily Egyptian, The Electric Jungle, The Go-Team, The Winding Sheet, Toby Vail, Two Hearts, U.S. Special Operations Forces, Underground, United States, Van, Video, Westwood, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, Will Stephens, Yamaha, Yugoslavia
Non-leftists describing the left is nothing more than repeated gossip.
Are you getting screwed by a rigged economy? Working more for less? Getting set up for a fall?
Maybe it’s time for all of us to stop listening to the money talk and stop repeating lies, distortion, and distraction planted by greedy, corrupt bad political actors.
Epiphany seen on Facebook:
The radical left tends to be more measured and strategic than the noob social media left.
Seriously, look at what World Socialist Web Site or Communist Party USA puts on social media vs the confederacy of rando lefty social media jag-offs.
Shouldn’t the commies or the international socialists be more indicative of “the left” instead of random twitter frackheads or Hillary Clinton or rando pundit wannabes that somehow get ascribed to represent a vast social movement with nothing but a grabbag of twitter followers?
Aside from disregarding random trash leftwingers (except for me, because my truth is more useful and my lies are more fun), maybe we should disregard corporate hypes, y’know the mounted corporate media, the professional stooges in the two-faced political farce, etc. To quote Joe Rogan: “I’m not a respected source of information, even for me…”
Rogan added, “But I at least try to be honest about what I’m saying.” Let me add a quote from a muppet, Master Yoda: “Do or do not. There is no try.”
Good morning, America… this is the left… they can speak for themselves:
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