Author: James McNally

Nuggets

Great nuggets from Azerrad’s book. This from the chapter on the Butthole Surfers:

Often the whole band would rip apart stuffed animals onstage, like a frenzied pack of psychotic cannibals.

Hmmm. I think somebody from The Dismemberment Plan must have been to one of these shows…

And a tasty Minutemen anecdote:

In Florida, [Mike] Watt got food poisoning and suffered from chronic diarrhea for days afterward. “It got useless to keep changing my pants,” Watt wrote in the tour story anthology Hell on Wheels, “so I tied a shirt around my waist and rags around the bottoms of my pant legs and just said fuck it. After three days my pants were full to the knees. Luckily, my condition improved.”

Yet more Butthole Surfers fun:

Once, they had pulled up to the City Gardens club in Trenton, New Jersey, and were told their show had been cancelled in favor of the Replacements. (“We were replaced by the Replacements!” Coffey notes.) But the Buttholes pleaded poverty and successfully lobbied to open the show as Playtex Butt Agamemnons.

Best. Band. Name. Ever.

Our Band Could Be Your Life

If you’ve noticed that I’ve been listening to a lot of Minutemen, Black Flag, Mission of Burma, and Minor Threat recently, blame Andre Torrez. On his recommendation, I’ve started reading Michael Azerrad’s book, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991. Though I’ve been a Mission of Burma fan for a while, all of the other bands profiled in the book are fairly new to me. You see, I must confess that being a shameless Anglophile, I had discounted a lot of American music from the punk and new wave period until pretty recently. When I read Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s amazing Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, it restored my respect for New York bands of the period, and I think this book will do it for the American ’80s punk scene I had previously dismissed.

Incidentally, did you know that the criminally overlooked Mission of Burma have been playing together again since last year? There’s even a documentary being made about the reunion shows. Moby played guitar with them when they played in New York, too. Neat.

Survived

I survived the first run. Brooke told me that the guy she called at The Running Room had assured her that on the first night, we only ran for one minute. Though that seemed odd to me, with the cold weather and the snow it was welcome news. It turns out the guy must have mistaken “1 mi” for one minute when it was actually one mile! Metric moron. But I survived. Of the pack of about 60 of us, I finished in the first quarter, and Brooke actually finished a few people behind me. So we’re off to a good start, and I’m actually kind of excited about it. For me, joining a gym has always been out of the question. Exercise has to be social or it’s boring. Running (er, jogging) in a group can be fun.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re one of my single guy friends living in Toronto reading this? Get your arse out to a jogging class. The ratio of women to men is about 10:1.

Jogging Class

In a mild pre-emptive strike at my own corpulence, I’ve enrolled along with my lovely wife in a “Learn To Run” course with that great franchise of joggery, The Running Room. We begin our adventures in pavement pounding tonight, in the midst of an April snowstorm. And although Brooke, ever the cutting-edge observer of fitness etiquette, has warned me not to refer to our endeavour as “jogging,” I plan to refer to it just that way as much as possible, hopefully in an out-loud fashion. I’m fascinated to find out exactly what the “learning” will involve, frankly, other than substituting the word “running” for “jogging.”

P.S. Did I mention that Brooke has been running 5K several times a week for the past few weeks? The only thing she’ll be “learning” is how to slow down for me.