Part Four

So we went back to playing the surprisingly burgeoning Wildwood party scene. Every couple weeks there was a crazy party replete with underage drinking and nudity (always dude), always ending the way any good suburban party does; in fisticuffs. The band had become something of a draw at local parties, making it a point to mix in covers everyone knew with our new songs, which people were starting to know the words to. The parties attracted a perfect blend of disaffected suburban youth. From the death metal crew, to the crusty hippies, to the rowdy-ass headbanger/BMX guys, to dudes in eyeliner. And, of course, the ever-prevelant, ever-powerful WHC crew, always making the scene.
It was around this time that our friend Dave’s mother moved back to Champaign where she was a college professor, and left the house in the care of her two sons Dave and Mike and also Arnold who was living there.
This proved to be a very bad idea.
Within a few hours it became the Delta House of Wildwood. The yard was littered with cans, the driveway full of spray-painted jalopies, the neighbors shrubbery viciously attacked.
The location was almost too perfect. It was walking (more likely, skateboarding) distance from the beach and our practice space over at John’s house.
I moved back to my folks’ house around this time, but ‘moving back home’ was really just a ruse to have somewhere to leave my stuff while I divided my time between Pete and Dave’s floors. The job I had with Roadkill had turned into an actual paying gig. Dave was going into business with a couple local dudes to start a record distributor and I was made head of shipping and receiving at $400 a month. Since my rent was also $400 a month, eating became a luxury reserved for trips to my parents’ and whatever food I could swipe outa the fridge at work. There were these two fruity industrial music types who lived at the loft we ran the distributor out of, and while they never had much food in their fridge, I didn’t eat much. Everyone would leave for lunch and I’d wolf down a couple of bread heels and some olives, then smoke a bunch of cigarettes to ease the hunger pangs.
Well, the company had a difficult time selling it’s incredibly eclectic array of records (I’d seriously heard of, like, three of the bands) and went bust after about a year. I knew it wouldn’t last, but it was fun while it did. I was 19, had my own apartment by myself in the city, a piece of shit car than ran for the most part, and while I was broke and at times miserably lonely, but for the most part it was an amazing experience. My bathroom window looked right out at the Sears Tower, and I would wile away the evenings with a little herb, the telephone, and the radio.
After the job went bust and the rent ran dry, I returned full-time to Wildwood. The party gigs had become more frequent and in a wider radius, and a small group of bands emerged to work together to get shows, parties, and each other on bills. There was JUNGLE ROT, a death metal band made up of Wildwood BMX dudes we were friends with, DYSLEXIC APACHES, a funk band our friend Mike was in, and LOCAL H, and they’re famous now, but they’ve been cool dudes since way before that. Good for them.
We had developed an honest-to-God following at this point and while they were of course our friends and skateboarding buddies, they actually seemed to like the music and we were all having a really good time. It felt special, even then. I think we all knew we had something special going on. There were bands, shows, zines, insane parties, huge skate sessions, crash pads…we knew we were doing precisely what we wanted to. Precisely what lots of kids our age wanted to be doing. We didn’t want to be part of the ‘Chicago scene’, we were our own scene. We forged our own paths, all of us.


One of the advantages of having more people coming to the shows meant we got to see video of ourselves. One time we were at Pete’s after a show at the Gurnee VFW we’d put on, when we noticed something seemed off. It looked right, it just didn’t sound right. Pete, Tom, John, and I watched the video in Pete’s room, trying to figure out what was wrong. As the camera shot panned across the stage at one point, John said “I don’t think Kevin is playing.” We rewound it and watched it closer. Sure enough, the reason it sounded weird was because THE BASS PLAYER WAS JUST STANDING THERE! It seemed unbelievable. We scanned ahead in the video and it became evident that Kevin was only playing at the beginning of the song, then he would lose interest and just kinda stand there swaying back and forth and bouncing his bass on it’s lame-ass elastic strap (Really, who uses an ELASTIC guitar strap?) like a creepy bobble-head doll. We were dumbfounded to say the least. Pete suggested we check some of the other videos, less frequently, but at some point or another, Kevin would just stop playing and stand there like a goof. Our friend Brian showed up and sat down on the floor with us to watch. “Kevin’s not playing.” Brian said. We told him we’d just figured that out. “That’s weak.” He said, picking at a guitar. He p;layed guitar for a local metal band and was into Satriani and stuff like that, and was just a RIPPING guitar player.
Pete, John, and I discussed what to do. It seemed like we had no choice but to kick him out. You don’t play in a band and DON’T PLAY IN A BAND, right? We decided to call him and tell him right there. We marched into Tom’s room, the three of us, and called him on speakerphone. At first he kinda freaked, yelling at us in this bizarre, croaky voice and calling us names. He swore he always played, and after having seen the video, he might BELIEVE he never drifted off and forgot to play mid-song, but the evidence was right there. After going back and forth with him for the better part of an hour (he was taking it surprisingly badly), we hung and went downstairs to tell Tom, Brian and Jim how it went. We all sat around discussing what had went down and what we were gonna do about bass, when Brian, who was still picking at that guitar, looked up and said “I can play bass.” Like it was a revelation. He said he’d never played before but it HAD to be easier than guitar. Two less strings, right? We agreed and were at John’s showing him the songs within the hour.
Later that evening when we returned to Pete’s, Kevin was waiting for us across the street. We hadn’t recognized his mom’s car when we’d driven past and went inside. When we walked in Jim said, “You know Kevin is sitting in his car on the street, right?”
I asked him how long he’d been there.
“Pretty much since you left.” He said with that wry Jim grin.
There was a loud knock at the door. We looked at each other. Good lord, why was he here? John went and answered the door, but Kev didn’t wanna come in. He wanted to talk to me. I think he wanted to fight me, but I still didn’t bother to put on shoes or socks to go out into the gravel lot.
I think he’d been crying. I was nice at first. “Look, dude, were kicking you out of a crappy punk band. It’s not this big of a deal.” I told him. He didn’t wanna hear it and eventually started spewing a staccato mishmash of curse words at me, in a less threatening than pleading sort of way. I left him standing there under the streetlight. It was time to move on.