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 ain't about that. Personal details are on a surface level, and friends, girlfriends and others are re-named to respect their privacy. People in bands generally put their names out there on albums and in interviews anyway, and are not in the habit of staying anonymous, and therefore are named here. That said, anyone who is in the blog that wishes me not to use their name has only to ask!
Mrs. Flower vs The Big C; Tennis Ball Can Lids + Punk = Fun For All! ; Wayne Meets DOA, Bails on College
My mom was pretty sick after she had her procedure and started doing chemo, which wore her down, especially as chemo in the mid eighties was very brutal compared to today. It was hard to see her so weak, and in pain. Luckily, my oldest sister and her family took her in at their place a lot. There, she could be watched closely. I visited often. Sometimes we tried a little walk as far as she could go.
She did, however, get some resolve and started to slowly kick cancer's ass in her mild, sweetly manipulative way (ok sometimes not so sweet, but who's always sweet? I myself was certainly no model son). She wanted to see her grandchildren grow up a bit, her son go to college, so much so that she helped me fill out grant paperwork and submit it, and helped me arrange to speak to a counselor at Boise State University.
And it was in the counselor's office, as he asked what I was interested in taking, that I said, pretty much instantly, "I don't want to go to school right now." I bowed out. Mom was disappointed. I did end up going to college not too long after for a a semester and a half, (I got nearly a 4.0) before rock and roll again pulled me in, and eventually out of state, following a whirlwind of change in my life.
Boise State University. God bless America.
SOC continued to tour as much as the schedules of shitty jobs allowed. Pat, being the oldest and the only college degree holder, usually had the best job. He worked hard at whatever it was. He was interested in journalism (he won a national award as an editor of the paper for his school in Santa Barbara), and he became the default marketer of the band (as well, since he had the best jobs, he became the default bank of the band). In doing the marketing, he got some good experience writing in a different vein. His art and words were always much like he was; rough around the edges but strangely sensitive and at the same time full of fury and kinetic energy. He was the opposite of his brother, Scott. Scott was as easy going as ice cream and he played that fuckin country electric guitar like a mellow madman (still does, minus the country git).
One road show that was monumental for us was a show with DOA, the infamous, relentlessly touring Canadian punk band. It was at a large hall on the campus of the University Of Idaho, in Moscow, Idaho, located in the mountains in the northern part of the state. We had previously played one show in Moscow in 1985. I hadn't mentioned it before. The show itself was not a major gig, but the drive, in the snow, Erik in his Volkswagon, me in my Datsun 710, known as 'The Blue Dog', with a bent rim (which ended up actually coming in handy in the snow acting as odd traction) was not to be forgotten. We really almost died.
I had a Datsun 710 similar to this (the 'Blue Dog') that was a tank, and in conjunction with Erik's Volkswagon bus, I carted our equipment around in it as well
The two things I remember most from that trip were; a moment where mud and sand (dumped on the snow for traction) splattered on my windshield and I could not see at all. We were on a thin, winding mountain road where a wrong turn was death. I looked at my friend Paul in the front seat, his eyes were wide, his mustache fluttering. I am sure I looked a sight as well. We slid in a circle and somehow came to stop without plunging off a cliff. And two; I met a really cute girl who put on the show, and we sort of hooked up later very briefly in Boise. But I digress....When oh when will you stop me? Oh well, no one else ever has.
DOA was amazing live. The perfect mixture of snarling punk and rock n roll. Joey Shithead was a force of Canadian spite and spunk. We played a pretty good set but were thrown off by the professional stage and sound system. We had never really played where you could hear yourself that well! And we were so damn far from the audience. I ended up interviewing DOA (I forget what mag published it, Silence, I assume, I will have to look) in their van. They were very gracious to me, as I remember.
We played Portland, Oregon a lot, as it was close. Many shows were played at the venue of choice then, a bar called The Satyricon. The Satyricon was like a big city bar, like the CBGB's of the Northwest, complete with internal graffiti and smelly bathrooms, with the trough style urinals (which they kept filled with ice, something we had never seen before). As I mentioned before, Portland is a tough town, especially during the hard times of the 80's. It was fun to play there, and great to have such an urban setting to blast out in so close to Boise. Most of my first impressions of Portland were not very good, since we mostly hung in what were then the shittiest parts of town. Years later when a friend lived there I would have great times in Portland, and come to appreciate it very much, and eventually end up living there.
The historic punk rock landmark, The Satyricon in Portland, Oregon - Gone but never forgotten
The site of the Satyricon today (September, 2011)
Another great band we met up with on the road in Spokane, Washington was Moral Crux. They played brilliant pop punk, well before it was a 'thing' (and was what we would end up playing soon as Treepeople). I remember being especially inspired by their bass player, who held down a serious pop groove with a smile on his face. They were fun without being cheesy and nice guys to boot.
Moral Crux (I had trouble finding a good picture of them - if anyone has one, please send it to me!)
Scott and Pat moved into an odd house out on the east side of town, over by Boise State University. It was awkwardly placed at the edge of a horse pasture, a 70's style house, made to look like it was nice but inside was fairly rough and 'rustic'. There were two apartments, upstairs and down, Scott and Pat had the bottom one.
State of Confusion began to jam there, in Pat's room. He just had a simple bed against the wall and a dresser and a filing cabinet and I think a small desk, a type writer.. Our equipment took up most of the room. He was living it. Scott lived in a closet. They made due.
Amazing party polaroid I snapped of Scott Schmaljohn, left (don't know who the woman is) and our friend Wayne Clark at the odd house that he and Pat rented
Also around this time, Scott and Pat both got jobs at a tennis club, doing maintenance. They scored the job through a really odd friend of ours, we will call him Rob, a 30 something east coast gay man with a dark nature but a good heart. He drove an enormous green Oldsmobile station wagon with crazy, cryptic black stenciled graffiti painted on it, bat-like shapes and interweaving patterns. They were his design, he was a decent artist.
One night I hung out with him and he dumped this box of hundreds of photos on his apartment floor. He said he got them from a photo mat dumpster. We spent hours going through them, acting out an odd, slow and deliberate voyeurism. It is fascinating. Once, I came across a photo of the girlfriend of the owner of the restaurant I worked for in leotards. "Dude! That is my bosses girlfriend!" Rob just took a pull from his cigarette and gave me that crooked, wry smile.
The raquet club job produced an odd gimmick that State of Confusion used, a short-lived one, for obvious reasons. Scott and Pat started collecting the lids to tennis ball cans, hundreds of them, in large boxes. I think it was Pat's idea, we started carting those boxes of lids to shows and tossing them out in the crowd. People would toss them back at us, at each other, and eventually it was all out war. The owners of the halls and bars hated it. Eventually, we had to quit doing it. It was the oddest sight I am sure; a blistering fast, sneering punk band playing to people flinging disks of plastic at each other...hard. I didn't miss catching them in the eye while I played.
Early marketing device/live gimmick for State Of Confusion; Tennis ball can lids. No, really.
6.3 Million Acres
It was time for SOC to record a proper album, put it out on wax, be legit, have something to send as a calling card and book a real tour. (we had put out a couple of demo cassettes by this time - here is a European release of one of them, with our permission: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kwg7SpTHTrI ) Pat got up most of the money to do this, I think he may have taken out a loan. We booked time at another farm studio, chose songs from our set list, a few were still Dissident Militia songs we carried over to fill it (20 songs!). We suffered the usual problem; that of the studio owner ending up in the role of engineer and default producer, mainly as a result of us not really knowing what we were doing, and the result was not the best it could be, but enough of a document.
We were insanely tight, so the album had that going for it. And it was crazy fast, with hints of rock here and there, some speedcore, and some amount of experimenting, by our standards, anyway (like the tongue and cheek party disco song called 'Where's the Love?'). We got the tape to a mastering plant, off to the vinyl factory. Now all we needed was a cover. And a title.
The idea for the cover was a good one, but it was not thought through. Pat decided that we were going to make the cover ourselves. We got some silk screens made of the artwork we wanted, and screened it on to the covers ourselves, and then we used the screen for a silkscreen's original intent; t-shirts.
The artwork was a drawing Pat had done, a simple drawing of a character he made, based on himself. His white boy fro was kinky and matted, and this was represented in full force in the drawing.
The character held a bass, almost prophetic, now that I think of it, as he ended up playing the bass in the Treepeople [After all these years, I just now noticed that there are 6 strings on the guitar - but otherwise it resembles a bass]. A couple years later, Pat would get a tattoo on his arm of this drawing. It became our first trademark for SOC. He became known as the 'Confusion Man'.
As to the reason why this cover idea was not thought through...some of the covers never dried properly, as we were using thick amounts of ink, and people would put them in with other records, and they would stick to them and dry, and rip them! It happened to me as well...Not the way in which we wanted our record to be remembered! But that was only some of them. We sent out a ton everywhere and began to make connections and friends through the mail, setting the groundwork for a tour.
We were really the only punk band in Boise at the time to put out a full blown album, rather than a 7 inch or a demo cassette (we also made cassette versions of the album) that I know of (anyone can correct me, could be wrong). At the time, it was quite a feat. And we promoted the hell out of it. We got it reviewed in Maximum Rock n Roll and many other well-read punk mags.
Pushead was writing a pretty cool article in the skateboard mag Thrasher called Puszone, where he reviewed the latest hardcore or wrote about skateboarding or art, and he kindly reviewed this album. He had to still be the critical Father of the Scene, however, ending the review with; 'With these guys it's easy to be critical, and there were no blackmail threats, but S.O.C. pulled it off, now if they could just get out of their state of confusion!'. We also formed our own label, Silence, named for the fanzine our friend Paul had created. We even wrote theme song for the fanzine that appeared on the album.
Puszone review of 6.3 Million Acres
The album was called '6.3 Million Acres', in the title, Pat was referring to the amount of untouched wilderness in Idaho, a statement to keep it that way and not encroach upon the wild with industry. This was a strong cause for Pat, and this rubbed off on us. We were environmental hardcore punk. A new twist. Pissed of crusty hippy punkers. With songs like 'Public Lands' ('public lands are owned by you and me/save the lands for my children to see/what are we gonna do when it's all gone?/destroyed by corporate greed it's like a bomb'), 'I-84' ('They keep buildin' bigger and better freeways/to get the people the places/that they wanna be/they won't let the wilderness stand/In their way - a country without interstates/is no country at all/a country without interstates/baby you'd have to crawl') and 'Freedom of the Hills'. As far as I know, no one was doing quite what we were doing, this marriage of hardcore rage and environmentalism, and it made us stand out, I think.
While we had our traditional 'anti-war-fuck-the-man' songs, we had this core to our message, mixed with personal political stuff. Looking back, and listening to the albums, I can say we were a damn good hardcore band, and that I am proud of what we did.
Sometimes people (jocks, usually) would say, 'It's just noise, you guys don't play your instruments right,' to which I would answer 'At least I am doing something.'In the last preview I mentioned I would be discussing the band The Dehumanizers, but this seems fit better into the next blog entry, in which I will cover an SOC tour, and the first time I 'quit' the band.
'6.3 Million Acres' the songs:
Save Face (originally a Dissident Miltia song)
Education
Public Lands
State of Confusion (Theme song. See lyrics in an earlier blog entry)
Foolish One
Hey
5 Lives (originally a Dissident Miltia song)
Imagination
I-84
Feel Safe (originally a Dissident Miltia song)
Silence
Dirt
Rut
Freedom of the Hills
Blanket Power
Discipline (originally a Dissident Miltia song)
TV Mutation
Choose Just One
Collection Bureau
Where's the Love
Mrs. Flower vs The Big C; Tennis Ball Can Lids + Punk = Fun For All! ; Wayne Meets DOA, Bails on College
My mom was pretty sick after she had her procedure and started doing chemo, which wore her down, especially as chemo in the mid eighties was very brutal compared to today. It was hard to see her so weak, and in pain. Luckily, my oldest sister and her family took her in at their place a lot. There, she could be watched closely. I visited often. Sometimes we tried a little walk as far as she could go.
She did, however, get some resolve and started to slowly kick cancer's ass in her mild, sweetly manipulative way (ok sometimes not so sweet, but who's always sweet? I myself was certainly no model son). She wanted to see her grandchildren grow up a bit, her son go to college, so much so that she helped me fill out grant paperwork and submit it, and helped me arrange to speak to a counselor at Boise State University.
And it was in the counselor's office, as he asked what I was interested in taking, that I said, pretty much instantly, "I don't want to go to school right now." I bowed out. Mom was disappointed. I did end up going to college not too long after for a a semester and a half, (I got nearly a 4.0) before rock and roll again pulled me in, and eventually out of state, following a whirlwind of change in my life.
Boise State University. God bless America.SOC continued to tour as much as the schedules of shitty jobs allowed. Pat, being the oldest and the only college degree holder, usually had the best job. He worked hard at whatever it was. He was interested in journalism (he won a national award as an editor of the paper for his school in Santa Barbara), and he became the default marketer of the band (as well, since he had the best jobs, he became the default bank of the band). In doing the marketing, he got some good experience writing in a different vein. His art and words were always much like he was; rough around the edges but strangely sensitive and at the same time full of fury and kinetic energy. He was the opposite of his brother, Scott. Scott was as easy going as ice cream and he played that fuckin country electric guitar like a mellow madman (still does, minus the country git).
One road show that was monumental for us was a show with DOA, the infamous, relentlessly touring Canadian punk band. It was at a large hall on the campus of the University Of Idaho, in Moscow, Idaho, located in the mountains in the northern part of the state. We had previously played one show in Moscow in 1985. I hadn't mentioned it before. The show itself was not a major gig, but the drive, in the snow, Erik in his Volkswagon, me in my Datsun 710, known as 'The Blue Dog', with a bent rim (which ended up actually coming in handy in the snow acting as odd traction) was not to be forgotten. We really almost died.
I had a Datsun 710 similar to this (the 'Blue Dog') that was a tank, and in conjunction with Erik's Volkswagon bus, I carted our equipment around in it as well
The two things I remember most from that trip were; a moment where mud and sand (dumped on the snow for traction) splattered on my windshield and I could not see at all. We were on a thin, winding mountain road where a wrong turn was death. I looked at my friend Paul in the front seat, his eyes were wide, his mustache fluttering. I am sure I looked a sight as well. We slid in a circle and somehow came to stop without plunging off a cliff. And two; I met a really cute girl who put on the show, and we sort of hooked up later very briefly in Boise. But I digress....When oh when will you stop me? Oh well, no one else ever has.
DOA was amazing live. The perfect mixture of snarling punk and rock n roll. Joey Shithead was a force of Canadian spite and spunk. We played a pretty good set but were thrown off by the professional stage and sound system. We had never really played where you could hear yourself that well! And we were so damn far from the audience. I ended up interviewing DOA (I forget what mag published it, Silence, I assume, I will have to look) in their van. They were very gracious to me, as I remember.
DOA; Canadian fury + charm + humor = excellent punk rock
We played Portland, Oregon a lot, as it was close. Many shows were played at the venue of choice then, a bar called The Satyricon. The Satyricon was like a big city bar, like the CBGB's of the Northwest, complete with internal graffiti and smelly bathrooms, with the trough style urinals (which they kept filled with ice, something we had never seen before). As I mentioned before, Portland is a tough town, especially during the hard times of the 80's. It was fun to play there, and great to have such an urban setting to blast out in so close to Boise. Most of my first impressions of Portland were not very good, since we mostly hung in what were then the shittiest parts of town. Years later when a friend lived there I would have great times in Portland, and come to appreciate it very much, and eventually end up living there.
The historic punk rock landmark, The Satyricon in Portland, Oregon - Gone but never forgotten
The site of the Satyricon today (September, 2011)
Another great band we met up with on the road in Spokane, Washington was Moral Crux. They played brilliant pop punk, well before it was a 'thing' (and was what we would end up playing soon as Treepeople). I remember being especially inspired by their bass player, who held down a serious pop groove with a smile on his face. They were fun without being cheesy and nice guys to boot.
Moral Crux (I had trouble finding a good picture of them - if anyone has one, please send it to me!)Scott and Pat moved into an odd house out on the east side of town, over by Boise State University. It was awkwardly placed at the edge of a horse pasture, a 70's style house, made to look like it was nice but inside was fairly rough and 'rustic'. There were two apartments, upstairs and down, Scott and Pat had the bottom one.
State of Confusion began to jam there, in Pat's room. He just had a simple bed against the wall and a dresser and a filing cabinet and I think a small desk, a type writer.. Our equipment took up most of the room. He was living it. Scott lived in a closet. They made due.
Amazing party polaroid I snapped of Scott Schmaljohn, left (don't know who the woman is) and our friend Wayne Clark at the odd house that he and Pat rentedAlso around this time, Scott and Pat both got jobs at a tennis club, doing maintenance. They scored the job through a really odd friend of ours, we will call him Rob, a 30 something east coast gay man with a dark nature but a good heart. He drove an enormous green Oldsmobile station wagon with crazy, cryptic black stenciled graffiti painted on it, bat-like shapes and interweaving patterns. They were his design, he was a decent artist.
One night I hung out with him and he dumped this box of hundreds of photos on his apartment floor. He said he got them from a photo mat dumpster. We spent hours going through them, acting out an odd, slow and deliberate voyeurism. It is fascinating. Once, I came across a photo of the girlfriend of the owner of the restaurant I worked for in leotards. "Dude! That is my bosses girlfriend!" Rob just took a pull from his cigarette and gave me that crooked, wry smile.
The raquet club job produced an odd gimmick that State of Confusion used, a short-lived one, for obvious reasons. Scott and Pat started collecting the lids to tennis ball cans, hundreds of them, in large boxes. I think it was Pat's idea, we started carting those boxes of lids to shows and tossing them out in the crowd. People would toss them back at us, at each other, and eventually it was all out war. The owners of the halls and bars hated it. Eventually, we had to quit doing it. It was the oddest sight I am sure; a blistering fast, sneering punk band playing to people flinging disks of plastic at each other...hard. I didn't miss catching them in the eye while I played.
Early marketing device/live gimmick for State Of Confusion; Tennis ball can lids. No, really.6.3 Million Acres
It was time for SOC to record a proper album, put it out on wax, be legit, have something to send as a calling card and book a real tour. (we had put out a couple of demo cassettes by this time - here is a European release of one of them, with our permission: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kwg7SpTHTrI ) Pat got up most of the money to do this, I think he may have taken out a loan. We booked time at another farm studio, chose songs from our set list, a few were still Dissident Militia songs we carried over to fill it (20 songs!). We suffered the usual problem; that of the studio owner ending up in the role of engineer and default producer, mainly as a result of us not really knowing what we were doing, and the result was not the best it could be, but enough of a document.
We were insanely tight, so the album had that going for it. And it was crazy fast, with hints of rock here and there, some speedcore, and some amount of experimenting, by our standards, anyway (like the tongue and cheek party disco song called 'Where's the Love?'). We got the tape to a mastering plant, off to the vinyl factory. Now all we needed was a cover. And a title.
The idea for the cover was a good one, but it was not thought through. Pat decided that we were going to make the cover ourselves. We got some silk screens made of the artwork we wanted, and screened it on to the covers ourselves, and then we used the screen for a silkscreen's original intent; t-shirts.
The artwork was a drawing Pat had done, a simple drawing of a character he made, based on himself. His white boy fro was kinky and matted, and this was represented in full force in the drawing.
The character held a bass, almost prophetic, now that I think of it, as he ended up playing the bass in the Treepeople [After all these years, I just now noticed that there are 6 strings on the guitar - but otherwise it resembles a bass]. A couple years later, Pat would get a tattoo on his arm of this drawing. It became our first trademark for SOC. He became known as the 'Confusion Man'.
As to the reason why this cover idea was not thought through...some of the covers never dried properly, as we were using thick amounts of ink, and people would put them in with other records, and they would stick to them and dry, and rip them! It happened to me as well...Not the way in which we wanted our record to be remembered! But that was only some of them. We sent out a ton everywhere and began to make connections and friends through the mail, setting the groundwork for a tour.
6.3 Million Acres album cover and sticker, featuring 'Confusion Man' - Artwork/design by Pat 'Brown' Schmaljohn
We were really the only punk band in Boise at the time to put out a full blown album, rather than a 7 inch or a demo cassette (we also made cassette versions of the album) that I know of (anyone can correct me, could be wrong). At the time, it was quite a feat. And we promoted the hell out of it. We got it reviewed in Maximum Rock n Roll and many other well-read punk mags.
Pushead was writing a pretty cool article in the skateboard mag Thrasher called Puszone, where he reviewed the latest hardcore or wrote about skateboarding or art, and he kindly reviewed this album. He had to still be the critical Father of the Scene, however, ending the review with; 'With these guys it's easy to be critical, and there were no blackmail threats, but S.O.C. pulled it off, now if they could just get out of their state of confusion!'. We also formed our own label, Silence, named for the fanzine our friend Paul had created. We even wrote theme song for the fanzine that appeared on the album.
Puszone review of 6.3 Million Acres
The album was called '6.3 Million Acres', in the title, Pat was referring to the amount of untouched wilderness in Idaho, a statement to keep it that way and not encroach upon the wild with industry. This was a strong cause for Pat, and this rubbed off on us. We were environmental hardcore punk. A new twist. Pissed of crusty hippy punkers. With songs like 'Public Lands' ('public lands are owned by you and me/save the lands for my children to see/what are we gonna do when it's all gone?/destroyed by corporate greed it's like a bomb'), 'I-84' ('They keep buildin' bigger and better freeways/to get the people the places/that they wanna be/they won't let the wilderness stand/In their way - a country without interstates/is no country at all/a country without interstates/baby you'd have to crawl') and 'Freedom of the Hills'. As far as I know, no one was doing quite what we were doing, this marriage of hardcore rage and environmentalism, and it made us stand out, I think.
While we had our traditional 'anti-war-fuck-the-man' songs, we had this core to our message, mixed with personal political stuff. Looking back, and listening to the albums, I can say we were a damn good hardcore band, and that I am proud of what we did.
Sometimes people (jocks, usually) would say, 'It's just noise, you guys don't play your instruments right,' to which I would answer 'At least I am doing something.'In the last preview I mentioned I would be discussing the band The Dehumanizers, but this seems fit better into the next blog entry, in which I will cover an SOC tour, and the first time I 'quit' the band.
'6.3 Million Acres' the songs:
Save Face (originally a Dissident Miltia song)
Education
Public Lands
State of Confusion (Theme song. See lyrics in an earlier blog entry)
Foolish One
Hey
5 Lives (originally a Dissident Miltia song)
Imagination
I-84
Feel Safe (originally a Dissident Miltia song)
Silence
Dirt
Rut
Freedom of the Hills
Blanket Power
Discipline (originally a Dissident Miltia song)
TV Mutation
Choose Just One
Collection Bureau
Where's the Love
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