Music History, Part 7: The Early Boise Years: 1985 to 1986

Originally posted on My Space May 6th, 2007

Disclaimer: Memory is a funny thing, and an elusive one. Meaning; I might have some of this wrong, as 1. my memory is not always accurate, like anyone and 2. it is from my perspective only. Any friends who were there, feel free to correct me or add things I have missed. It helps! Also, no gossip on anyone here, it aint about that. Personal details are on a surface level, and friends, girlfriends and others are re-named to respect their privacy.
 

Wayne Home Alone

I moved from the SOC House to an apartment located close to where I grew up in the North End. The apartment was in the back of an old apartment house, above the landlady's apartment, who was a wonderful old Basque woman.

There is a considerable Basque population in Southwest Idaho, I assume because it is similar to their home climate, and that there were opportunities in the early days for experienced shepherds. Basques are like a cross between French, Italian and Spanish people to me, with extremely long names (I won't even try to spell my landlady's name) and spicy cooking, cooking that my apartment constantly smelled of, and I wasn't complaining, as I had just come from a house of unidentifiable smells.

For the first time in my life, I lived alone. I have always been ok with being alone in life, but I got bored, and often found myself over at the SOC House, where all the action was. Admittedly, I liked the partying as long as I didn't have to deal with the fallout. Scott once called me out on this, and said "…Oh, so you come over here and trash our house and go home to your nice clean apartment, eh?" The truth is that I was hyperconcious of cleaning up after myself when at the SOC House for this very reason! But his point was taken.

Shows continued to happen at the SOC House, and we continued to jam in the basement. My old room was taken over by our friend Paul, who, with the help of other friends, Ken Cole and Ted, started a fanzine called 'Silence', which SOC members all became more and more involved in, and eventually Silence became the self-formed record label on which we put out SOC records and Treepeople records later on.

Some covers of editions of Silence Fanzine

Pat started booking SOC locally wherever he could, which was a challenge in those days. Punk bands had very negative connotations associated with them, and I have to admit; understandably. Halls got trashed, fights started (even if unprovoked, they happened). But Pat was resourceful and persistent. He would rent a hall and rally some bands and we were in business.

We started playing some road shows here and there as well, though not yet full on tours. We played in towns surrounding Boise at first. Then Portland OR, Salt Lake City. Eventually Seattle and towns near there. This all started as soon as we recorded a demo, which I believe we did in 1985-6 in a studio that a local country musician set up in his house.

As you can imagine, a dirtbag punk band recording at a farm studio run by a country musician produced interesting results. And by 'interesting' I mean shitty production. He had never heard amps that loud! Music that fast! He did his best, and kept trying to convince us to turn the vocals up "You can't really understand the lyrics as it is, ya wanna turn them up." Naaa. Turn the guitar up, dude!

Farm studio where State Of Confusion recorded '6.3 Million Acres'

We were pretty stoked, no matter the quality, to have our music recorded, to be able to give it to people, something we could only do before with shitty dubs of boombox recordings of jams in Dissident Militia (sadly, Dis/Mil never made it to the studio, only bad live recordings remain, from the same tape with the recordings of Septic Death that were actually used on a record of theirs).

In those days, people had shows in their living rooms. I suppose that will always be a possibility for a band, but it did seem much more prevalent then. This made touring easier, since, if you couldn't get a club gig in a town locked down by certain bookers, you could still get a show, get paid, have a place to crash, mix it up with cute girls, etc. We began to mail tons of cassette tapes to get more road shows.

French version of SOC demo cassette ( I sure wish I had a copy of this!)

Allow me one more 'in those days', if you will...In those days, cassettes were a major innovation, and were my friend. They held a ton of material, were portable, just about everyone had a cassette player, and, you could record whatever the hell you wanted to on them, including jams, shows, spoken word, Scott snoring, you name it. And, you could listen to them in your car! Brilliant. At the time, anyway.

If someone made you a cassette compilation, it was a great honor, especially to anyone who bothered to take the time to sit and manually record individual songs and fill a 120 minute tape. It was a major pain in the ass, and therefore a labor of love. I still have some choice comps people have made me, and I swear I made hundreds for people in my time, something I became somewhat of an artist at myself. Here is a sample of bands from a comp tape I made myself that I still have, a tape now older than today's college graduates!:

Double-O

Minor Threat

7 Seconds

Gray Matter

Rites of Spring

The Stench

Bad Brains

I digress (don't I always?) So, we shipped and gave away a ton of tapes. Got it reviewed in Maximum Rock n Roll. Pat found a van. A 76 Chevy, with a home paint job; army olive green (the hub-caps too!). We were mobile.

As I mentioned earlier, initially, we played locally as much as possible. Our live shows were fast furious and chaotic as hell. Pat was a madman on stage, always. He had an amazing vertical leap range, and he started growing out his hair, which evolved into an awesome white-boy-fro, that made his leaps even more dramatic and animated. Between songs, he would antagonize the crowd, most of the time they deserved it, and sometimes when they didn't.

Battle of the Bands

A memorable show (which was a little bit after the time period I am in the blog now) was when Pat got us in to the local 'battle of the bands' show put on by some rock radio station. I have no idea how we ended up being accepted. You can imagine the bands we were 'battling' with, in the mid eighties, in Boise Idaho, at a bar called 'The Whisky River' (this bar was redeemed by years later becoming Boise's first gay bar, The Emerald City. Is it still there anyone?)

We went on after some band who did AC/DC covers, I think, and just wailed. I remember it being one of our tightest shows, but we had no illusions of winning. We just wanted to fuck them up. And we did. The tension in the air was palpable, and Pat heaped it on, dissing rock n roll and commercial radio, dirtbags and hicks in a fell swoop, between leaping and screaming as we rose smoke from our strings and drums collectively. I wish it could have been videotaped. We had to literally get the hell out as quick as we could when finished, lest we start a riot.

Situation Normal all Fucked Up

Another time we almost did start a riot on the road, in Twin Falls, Idaho. We had the honor of opening for the great Canadian hardcore punk band S.N.F.U, who had just released their landmark album, 'And No One Else Wanted To Play'. We played a small hall, I think it was VFW hall (a thank you and 'shout out' to Veterans associations everywhere. They were the only ones with balls enough, and who were nice enough, to let kids put on punk shows in their halls without judging us).

S.N.F.U was amazing live and the whole place, packed with kids from all over Southwest Idaho and Utah, came alive. We played a great set. All was going well, except for for our friends from the Boise band (and later Seattle based) H-Hour, featuring TAD on drums, more on them later, who were to open with their side project punk band, The D.T.s. Unfortunately, their car broke down.

Left: SNFU live (not sure where - I couldn't find any photos from the Twin Falls gig - if anyone has any let me know!)

Right: The awesome album 'And No One Else Wanted to Play'.

I seem to remember the whole scene emerged after we went to the back of the hall after the show to talk to Tad Doyle (later known in Seattle as the infamous TAD) of the D.T.s, who had managed to get the car working and had made it to the show too late to play. There were these punk kids from Sun Valley, all gussied up in British style punk duds, mohawks and all, who had been causing trouble, picking fights, and generally trying to ruin everyone's fun.

Left and Right: Flyers from the Boise SNFU show

Often, the members of SOC were like big brothers of the scenes, and we would try and root out trouble makers when we could, whether it be by preventing fights or making eye contact with each other and zeroing in on some asshole who thought slam dancing involved punching people, we targeted them, and literally took them out with a bodyslam sandwich. We were not violent overall, but were willing to do what needed to be done.

This all sounds very noble, and I believe it was, but at this show, Pat decided that these assholes needed to be shown up. As they walked through a crowd of some 50 kids gathered in the back of the hall, Pat jeered at them, gave them shit for picking on kids and being dicks in general. The one with the largest mohawk charged at Pat, and the whole crowd became one, arms and hands grabbing him, flailing, bodies swaying. A fight was avoided due to cooler heads controlling the mass and holding back the would-be warriors. But there was an intense moment there where it felt like a full on riot was going to break out.

I am sure someone else remembers the incident, as any I recount, differently. As always, anyone who was there feel free to add/correct. A few times already old friends have helped me remember so much. It makes the blog evolve and get better!

See flyers from another SNFU/SOC show in Boise, and other cool flyers here: 

http://www.treepeople.0catch.com/soc.htm

"They PISTOL-WHIPPED me, Bro,", or, Gays Bash Us

There is one night that will, as they say, Live in Infamy. We had caught wind of a party from a girl we knew, a huge party, one held every year by a wealthy older man who had a huge house in the foothills, with a giant airplane hangar on his land. Beer, drugs, girls and boys. He was an old queen, but what did we care? While we weren't exactly exposed to enough gay people to be fully liberal about it, by Idaho standards in those times, we were exposed to more gays than most, and had several friends who were openly gay. While, like many straight boys, we would justify our masculinity by occasionally making gay jokes, we would do it with our gay friends, and we would defend them any day if someone wanted to mess with them because they were gay.

The rich old queen needs a little back story. He had been in Boise for decades and was part of a huge scandal that happened there in the 50's, where wealthy businessmen hired young male prostitutes, and through a bizarre series of events, were rounded up in a witch-hunt like policy carried out by the Boise Police Department and the FBI.

They rounded up anyone who was gay and questioned them, mentally coercing many to say they had done things they had not, or twisting accounts of their sex lives with perfectly legal adults into perversions. It was the '50s, but it was one of the greatest travesties of justice in American history, to be sure. 

Many men were imprisoned unjustly. And the children affected were given no guidance, no counseling whatsoever, and what followed was a major crackdown on youth by the police and the school board that I felt growing up. It may still affect youth in Boise today. The whole story is chronicled in a well-written account called The Boys of Boise, by John Gerassi. It is a fascinating read, even if you are not from Boise: http://www.amazon.com/Boys-Boise-American-Columbia-Northwest/dp/0295981679/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-3222043-9381437?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183577529&sr=8-1

A fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of Boise, particularly history that the city doesn't want anyone to know about.

Also, here is a pretty detailed wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boise_homosexuality_scandal

Ahhh, justice.

The man's first name was Art, I remember. I wish I could remember his last name. It is a name that should be tarnished, as you will see. I am sure he has long since passed. So we drove up to Art's mansion in the dry hills. You could see the large airplane hangar like a dinosaur in the weeds as you drove up the windy road. Lights of the house came into view, a house that in the '60s was all the rage.

There were cars everywhere, music was blaring out of the house. We went inside to see kids from every walk of life inside, gays, straights, new wavers, punks, hardcore skater punks, nerds, jocks...you name it, they were there. Watching giant screen televisions, listening to blaring music, swimming in the stepped pool in the back.

I had actually been to a party at this house years before, and swam in the pool, which I remembered as being very nice. This time, there were weeds surrounding the pool, the hangar looked abandoned, whereas before it glowed with light like an alien ship. It seemed that Art was running out of money.

After awhile we were getting a little bored and decided to leave. As we left the house, we saw Art coming up the stairs from the basement that led to the front door where we were exiting. He had his hand on the shoulder of a boy, about 13, who was saying "...don't tell anyone about this." Our first instinct was to smash some things up, but Art had these older rough looking kids as kind of bodyguards, and there were not enough of us to handle that.

We decided to raid the place and steal beer and food. We rounded up a stock of both and left the house. Some of the tough kids were alerted and they followed us outside. Somehow we got a bit split up, and I was trying to find everyone on the parking area. I heard Ted ahead, yelling "Fuck YOU!! Knock it off!"

I saw Ted and he was holding his head, leaning down. In front of him was one of the tough kids, holding something. He saw me approaching, turned toward me, and pointed a gun at my head. I thought, 'this is it. Bye.' He pulled the trigger and...POP!...a blank gun. Oh my God. I cannot describe what went through my head when I thought a bullet had my name on it. I got the fuck out of there so as not to miss my ride.

I saw Erik and crew climbing in to the bug, I hopped in the back seat, behind Eric. Ted was yelling "They PISTOL-WHIPPED me!! They fuckin pistol-whipped me!!!" Then out of nowhere, Erik was taking punches to the side of his head (yes, once again Erik's head was a punching bag). It was one of the Queen's bodyguards, running alongside the VW Bug, throwing punch after punch until Erik managed to accelerate to the road. Complete chaos, and the fun was only just beginning.

We rendezvoused at the SOC House. Pandemonium there for a bit, everyone gesturing and yelling and recounting separate experiences. Ted was still yelling "They pistol-whipped me, BRO!!" At one point someone noticed that someone was missing. Pat!! Where the hell is Pat?? We all looked at each other in horror. We left Pat behind!! We piled back in the Bug and headed back to the Queen's castle, like soldiers to battle.

We drove up to the house and could see the Queen's knights peering down at us and readying for more battle. I got out of the car and walked up a grassy hill and ran into a guy holding a huge stick. I said, "We just came to get our friend, we left him behind. Then we will leave." At that moment I saw Pat's fuzzy head come into view behind the guy. He waved, beer in hand. We piled in Eric's bug and got the hell out...again.

Back at the SOC house, it was pandemonium once again, Ted still yelling "They PISTOL-Whipped me, Bro!!"

Worst Dentist Visit EVER

My mother was at a routine dentist visit when the dentist found some sores inside her mouth he had never seen before, so he sent her to a doctor, who then sent her to a specialist. And just like that, out of nowhere, my mother was diagnosed with Acute Luekemia. The news hit me hard, as I had become pretty good friends with my mother as an adult, so it was beyond just a mother being sick.

The fuckers who killed my mother.

The family prepared to rally round her. She was tough in the sense that she raised me and my sister on next to nothing, as I have mentioned (the other 3 sisters and one brother were already on their own then), but not so much physically tough. She was in her early 60's, so she had a fight on her hands. She fought it with everything she had, and stayed with us for a few more years yet.

I moved out of my apartment I had just moved into and back into the duplex with my mother, to be there for her, though eventually, she ended up pretty much living with my oldest sister and her family.

Music became even more important to me, as I was not close with most of my family in any traditional sense, it was all I had, the only stable thing in my life. We (music and I) became even better friends as I tried to be strong for my mother.

Next: Salt Lake City Rockers, SOC on Wax, Coming Soon to Your Town