round 1

(5) butthole surfers, “pepper”
ATE UP
(12) lemonheads, “it’s a shame about ray”
321-241
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 5.

WE WERE ALL IN LOVE WITH DYING: david turkel on “pepper”

Love and life only appear to be separate because everything on earth is broken apart by vibration of various amplitudes and durations. —George Bataille, “The Solar Anus”

I dropped acid on Valentine’s Day in 1988, when I was a senior in high school. It was my very first drug. I smoked cigarette number one (of probably well over a hundred thousand) while tripping that afternoon—pulled it out of a stranger’s mouth at a sub shop on Woodward Avenue, took a puff, pronounced it “disgusting,” and dropped it back onto their table. The acid cost me three bucks. I remember holding the tiny piece of paper in my hand and thinking it was going to be a bigger dud than grocery store fireworks. You just can’t conceive of losing your mind until you do, I guess. You can’t use your brain to imagine a you that’s still you even after everything you thought of as yourself has vacated the premises. I think Foucault said that.
I remember it was Valentine’s Day because I had to take my girlfriend to a dance that night. Before that, I had to have dinner with my parents. I was sitting on the bathroom sink, staring at myself in the mirror, my face as red as a baboon’s ass, my eyes fully black to their edges. I was by this point clear-headed enough to know that it was a problem, yet still deranged enough to have settled on the following solution: I would simply stare directly into the lightbulb above our kitchen table to make my pupils shrink before looking at either of my parents when we spoke. So that was our dinner. Them: “Why is your face so red?” Me: (stares at lightbulb) “We went sledding.” Them: “Where did you go sledding?” Me: (stares at lightbulb) “The...library?” My mother had made soup that evening, and that I remember almost thirty-three years later because of the pepper. She cracked fresh black pepper over the soup and the whole thing started to spin.

Paul Leary—guitarist and co-founder of Texas punk legends Butthole Surfers—explained the non sequitur title of his band’s one and only hit song this way: Teresa Nervosa, one of the band’s drummers, was out walking her dog when a stranger approached and asked her, “What’s your dog’s name, Sonny...Pepper?” Can’t quite tell if the joke here is that the stranger misgendered Nervosa (the literal poster child of Richard Linklater’s 1991 film Slacker), or that he seems to have thought he could actually guess the dog’s name. Of course, it’s really not possible to trust anything Leary says. It’s his story, for example, that the band’s van broke down during their first road trip in 1982 on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge and merely coasted to a stop in front of the Tool and Die on Valencia where a punk show was in the process of loading in—a show the Buttholes not only crashed (talking themselves onto the bill for three songs), but where they met Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, who agreed to put out their first EP on his Alternative Tentacles label. What a magical shitcan of a van, huh? Which is not to say that Leary is a liar, simply that Butthole Surfers are inscrutable by design. Nervosa puts it this way: “there was this unspoken code, and this is sort of what happens in a dysfunctional family, but we had a code among us that nobody told what the deal was.”

I didn’t want to go to college when I finished high school, but I couldn’t figure out how to explain that to my parents, so I did the next best thing: I enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit and moved into a house with the guy who had sold me my Valentine’s Day acid. In short order, he became the guy who got me drunk and stoned for the first times, as well. He also, as it happens, provided my introduction to Butthole Surfers. The song was “Lady Sniff” off their first, full-length album, Psychic...Powerless...Another Man’s Sac (1984). That album, like the majority of their seminal 80s output, was released on Touch and Go Records, unofficially headquartered in Detroit at the time, and the band was treated there like local heroes. Their full-length concert video, Blind Eye Sees All, was shot over two nights at Detroit’s Traxx club in 1985, one of which was an all-ages show I think my new roommate had actually attended as a high school freshman. By the time we moved in together, he was a skilled drummer who played with a band that opened up for the Buttholes. The experience changed everything for them. They began employing male and female dancers clad only in raw steaks tied around their waists and shooting homemade pornography to project against their gyrating bodies.
“Take me back to DEE-troit, Paaauuullll—Yeah heh heh!!” Butthole front man, Gibby Haynes, hollers on “Lady Sniff.” My roommate hollered along with him, playing the song for me and leering above the cassette deck. “Gibby’s a god,” he said and proceeded to describe the 6’5” Texan prowling the stage at their last performance, lipstick scrawled across his face, in a pointy bra with his dick out, waving a shotgun at the crowd. At the time, I thought my musical tastes were adventurous—I liked Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart—but I was unprepared for that song. It wasn’t that it was so challenging to listen to; it was weirdly the opposite.
“Lady Sniff” rocks. Leary’s guitar tone is blistering, and the dual drum attack of Nervosa and the band’s longest-serving drummer, King Coffey, is thunderously propulsive. In seconds you imagine everything the song could be if it wanted—you can hear the boot-stomping, ass- shaking Texas roadhouse party starting—but then it downshifts. And shits. And spits and vomits and arm-farts all over itself. “Lady Sniff” is a song that flushes the talents of its own makers down the john and hocks an enormous loogie at its audience’s every expectation.
I had never heard anything that seemed to care so little about what it was supposed to be. The punk music I knew at the time was frantic and hostile, but weirdly precious, too. It seemed so concerned about what it was and what it wasn’t and who it was for and who it was against. Butthole Surfers, by contrast, clearly didn’t give a fuck.

Performance artist Kathleen Lynch was working her job at a peep show in Times Square, sick as a dog, when she accidentally defecated on the stage and then uttered the words that would become her new name: "Ta da!” Or, as she was known at their shows, “TA-DA the Shit Lady”—the Butthole Surfers’ naked dancer. Whatever pact or wordless code the Buttholes adhered to that banned any serious reflection on their musical intentions doesn’t seem to have extended to Lynch, whom Leary refers to without reserve as “the true artist of the band,” citing in particular a months-long vow of silence that TA-DA observed during her three-year stint as a Butthole Surfer. And here, despite the obvious irony, is the thing about Leary, because this time I believe him—not only that one might know a true artist by her silence, but that the raucous cacophony of a band like Butthole Surfers could in fact revolve around a mesmerizingly silent center. “A seaweed boa wrapped around her neck, and teeth covered in tinfoil, and dressed only in a loose-fitting diaper, when dressed in anything at all,” James Burns writes in the wonderfully informative Let’s Go to Hell: Scattered Memories of the Butthole Surfers, “[TA DA} was the complete embodiment of the band itself. Impish: childlike, grossly horrific, yet somehow tantalizingly beautiful....it was as if she sprouted out of the stage.”
Silence, or at least an interest in absence, had been in the band’s DNA from the start. They’d chosen a name unspeakable on the radio and released their albums without any liner notes (or even, on one occasion, song titles). They spent years homeless, living out of a succession of beat-to-shit vans and busses--one of which was rumored to have been equipped with a custom gas tank that allowed for fewer stops between shows—and the result of that road warrior spirit, matched with their speed- and acid-fueled mania, was that the band seemed to be both everywhere and nowhere throughout the 80s: barely escaping the federales in Tijuana one minute, playing a New York City opera house with some of the most esteemed experimental musicians in the world the next. All the while refusing to “let on what the deal was.” They were too absurd and immature to be serious, too fanatical and outright dangerous to be a joke. Yet, even transgressive Murder Junky, GG Allin, offered more explanation for his outrageous behavior; Butthole Surfers were mum.

Being a teenager in the 80s felt like being Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes—only it was the 1960s, not Lady Liberty, shattered to pieces in the surf. For all that was captivating about that decade’s counterculture, the evidence of its ultimate failure was undeniable in Ron and Nancy’s America. And that tension, more than anything, is what Butthole Surfers captured for me. They were a parody of the 1960s in many ways: punks who played in the wreckage of that decade’s demolished architecture. They gobbled acid and jammed like the Grateful Dead, lived a commune lifestyle like MC5, were as cultish as Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, as arty and profane as the Velvet Underground. They sported the cock-rock guitar- worship of Grand Funk Railroad and were as trippy at the controls as Funkadelic and as homebrewed and wrong-headed as their Texas forebearers, psych-rock pioneers the 13th Floor Elevators. But they gutted the whole enterprise, turned it all on its head.
This is how they smuggled the music of the 60s (and early 70s) past the militant gatekeepers of the American hardcore scene: by serving it up empty of meaning, idealism or any belief system whatsoever. In the process, they exposed the naivety of that scene and redefined what it meant to be punk. Because ultimately, the bands and fans of hardcore that so rigidly structured their aesthetic as an uncompromising rebuke of all things Hippie still clung to the one core tenant of 60s counterculture that the Buttholes rejected: the idea that any of it fucking mattered.
Butthole Surfers brought extended guitar solos, studio trickery, eight-minute-long songs, theatrical stage shows and direct homages to Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer, and Led Zeppelin past the purity-policing of punks who were so reactionary, they wouldn’t even let Black Flag fool around with an alternate tempo on their second album. And they pulled it all off because the Buttholes clearly cared less, looked worse and went harder than anyone else around. In their wake, punk became not a style of music and a haircut, but an actual lifestyle— an orientation and attitude which could be applied to anything, or nothing at all.
It’s not uncommon for lovers of Butthole Surfers to talk at length about the band without ever mentioning their music. Mannequins full of hamburgers, cymbals full of fire, and a band and audience full of drugs predominate. This shouldn’t suggest that the music itself was inconsequential, simply that it soundtracked a broader, more transformative experience. In this sense, their shows were closer to happenings than concerts. But unlike Hippie lovefests, these shows, as you might suspect, were pulled inside out. Rather than wash the stage in trippy gobos and art films, they showed multiple movies at once—often sped up and in reverse—featuring graphic car wrecks, scatology and, most famously, penis reconstruction surgery. Instead of triumphantly smashing a guitar at the end of a set, the Buttholes were as likely to break four guitars on their first song. Their stages were swathed in smoke and bombarded with strobe light so intense, Nervosa eventually had to leave the band due in part to the seizures they induced.
Fans frequently fell ill. After one concert, Daniel Johnston—the brilliant but disturbed Austin-based singer/songwriter that the Buttholes helped launch to international attention—suffered a psychotic break so severe, he had to be institutionalized. But perhaps their most infamous performance was a 1986 concert at Manhattan’s Danceteria, in which TA DA and her friend Kabbage sprayed the audience with “piss wands” (plastic toy bats they’d filled with urine), Leary destroyed the PA system with a screwdriver, and Gibby and TA DA apparently had sex in front of the drum riser. That show lasted all of five songs, but catapulted the band to a new level of notoriety. Within days they were earning twice as much for performances—fans now adding the possibility of a live sex show to an already dazzling list of perverse thrills in store for them.

Though I couldn’t know it at the time, this incarnation of the band was coming to a close when I first heard them in 1988. But the world around me seemed to be only then catching on. These were the NEA Four days of chocolate-covered performance artists, sculptures made from human blood, urine-submerged crucifixes. There was a growing sense that art shouldn’t just push boundaries, but dissolve them altogether. GG Allin was arrested in Ann Arbor for assault and pledged to kill himself on stage at a Halloween performance. It felt impossible at the time not to hear an echo of the word “artificial” in any so-called art that failed to trouble the notion of its safe confinement. Audiences wanted the window into real psychosis that Daniel Johnston provided, the real truth about the street as told by Ice-T and NWA. Which is another way of saying that artists were expected to be their art, not just make it. And Butthole Surfers delivered on that premise in spades. They made genre-defying music in their kitchen and toured it while eating out of trash cans, but we were just as likely to discuss rumors—that they had been stalking Michael Stipe, or were wanted by Interpol, or had set the ceiling of a Philadelphia club on fire—as we were to talk about their lyrics, performance chops, or even their D.I.Y. ethos. This was the demented monkey’s paw they offered: the idea that the music itself was somehow only a byproduct of that lifestyle, not its aim. That art was ultimately the measure of one’s willingness to go too far.

There’s a tyranny to Butthole Surfer lore. If you’re not careful, the stories take over and you end up sounding like a carnival barker shilling a freakshow. But there’s one more chestnut which I will relate, if only because no one ever seems to say what it’s actually a story about. This is the fact that Gibson “Gibby” Haynes (son of Texas’s beloved children’s TV entertainer, Mister Peppermint) was an MBA at Trinity University voted “Accountant of the Year” before graduating to take a job at Pick Markham—then the largest accounting firm in the nation. Journalists enjoy the irony but fail time and again to pick up on a larger point, which is that Gibby and Paul (also a Trinity student on track to becoming a stockbroker at the time of the band’s formation) weren’t outcasts; theirs isn’t the story of rock-and-roll salvation, of two misfit kids headed nowhere until the day they heard their first electric guitar. No, the story of the Butthole Surfers is a story of self-exile: two highly functioning adults who simply decided one day to throw themselves into a gigantic fan blade to make splatter art.
At the same time, it’s the story of their band’s almost preternatural competence. Yes, their shows were chaotic beyond measure, but amidst all the fire, nudity and gunplay, the core rhythm section of King Coffey and bassist Jeff Pinkus remained in lockstep with Leary’s spiraling, spastic guitar; and the music—barring any intervention from the authorities—never stopped. And while it’s true that they would go 15 years before a hit song, the success of their catalogue anchored Touch and Go Records for much of the 80s, fueling that label’s rise to become one of the most adventurous and influential indie labels ever.
Though much of the audience that met the Buttholes through their 1996 smash hit “Pepper” would come to regard the band as just another of Kurt Cobain’s obscure obsessions, the actual fact is that when Nirvana formed in 1987, Butthole Surfers were the most successful independent rock band in America, fetching as much as fifteen thousand dollars for a single performance. They began the decade opening for bands like Minutemen, TSOL and Dead Kennedys, and finished it headlining sold-out concerts with warmup acts like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Green River, the Flaming Lips, Jesus Lizard, and L7. If grunge can be defined as the music of the 60s and 70s lensed from a post-punk perspective and laced with a nihilist, “oh well, whatever, never-mind” spirit, then Butthole Surfers are clearly the progenitors of that dumb baby. Or, at least, they are the primordial ooze from which it crawled. With the release of Electriclarryland—the album containing “Pepper”—they would become grunge’s undertakers as well.

I was back living with my parents in 1996, finally finishing up at Wayne State after a series of misadventures. I’d returned to discover that my old poetry professor, an avid sailor, had gone missing on Lake Michigan; my favorite bookstore on Cass Avenue was shuttered following the grisly murder of its owner; and my old college roommate—the Butthole Surfer fanatic—had graduated from experimentation to full-blown heroin addiction. I was working at a record store in a mall and I remember when the promotional copy of Electriclarryland arrived—we got the “clean” cover at our store with the prairie dog—thinking that the band’s name, redacted as “B***H***”, simply ended up looking like a series of buttholes pressed to the jewel case.
Some fans of the band thought it had been the ultimate betrayal when they signed to Capitol Records in 1992. I never felt that way. To me this was always part of their deal. Is betrayal even possible when you don’t know what something or someone stands for? Leary answered the accusations with his typical absurdism—they were never an independent band, he said, they were instead “a co-dependent band”; had never been punk, but, rather, “schlock rock,” even “pop,”—“we rhymed love and dove on our first record.” You’ll never get anywhere talking to a guy like that.
Their first Capitol release, 1993’s Independent Worm Saloon, had been decent enough, but it was never just about the music. The band themselves had seen to that. All shrugs aside, the Capitol deal pretty much destroyed them. They were sent on an arena tour as the opening act for Stone Temple Pilots. None of their old fans wanted to see them that way, or share a seated venue with the STP bros who hated Butthole Surfers almost as much as the Buttholes were rumored to have hated STP. Gibby succumbed to heroin addiction and took STP frontman Scott Weiland along with him, according to Weiland’s own very public accusations.
Throughout the 1990s, Gibby became the sort of Slenderman of Grunge. Everybody knew that Kurt and Courtney—grunge’s homecoming couple—had their meet-cute at a Butthole Surfers show. That’s his drunken voice playing the maniac preacher in Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod.” Later, Gibby lurked in the background of one public disaster after another: onstage at the Viper Room the night River Phoenix died, bunking with Kurt Cobain at the rehab center a week before Cobain’s suicide. Witnesses claim that it was under his hero’s influence that Cobain jumped the facility’s wall and abandoned his final attempt at treatment.
More than three years lapsed between albums and by the time of Electriclarryland’s release, the real news in Butthole Surfer-land was that the band was suing Touch and Go Records. Now the band’s peers and even heroes, like Ian MacKaye and Texas punk’s founding father Biscuit Turner, leveled accusations of betrayal. The Buttholes had only a handshake agreement with Touch and Go all this time—it was a very punk thing to do, but if you didn’t just hear Leary, they were never punk—they were a pop band founded by an accountant and a stockbroker.

Even STP bros know the words to Pepper’s chorus: I don’t mind the sun sometimes, the images it shows. For George Bataille, the sun itself is a butthole. As he explains in “The Solar Anus,” his 1927 parody of a manifesto, the entire world is “purely parodic...each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.” To me, the Capitol deal, the lawsuit—it was all just one more evolution in Butthole Surfers’ parody of the 1960s. They’d simply reached the sell-out phase. As with everything else, they were going to do it in their own inimitable style.
A lot has been said over the years about the comparisons between “Pepper” and Beck’s 1993 hit “Loser.” Both songs alternate spoken word verses with psych-rock choruses in roughly equal measure, both backmask those choruses into the bridges, both use a sitar. And while defenders of Butthole Surfers are correct in arguing that the band had done virtually all of those things long before Beck ever set foot into a recording studio (or had hair on his gonads, for that matter), I would like to do my part here in setting the record straight. Yes, quite obviously, Butthole Surfers stole the song. For my evidence, I simply submit the fact that the band vehemently denies these accusations. I mean, seriously, when have these guys ever given a straight answer about their music to anyone? It’s 101-level B.S. detection.
I have to question the instincts of fans who wish to defend the band on this score. It’s like thinking you have to defend racoons against accusations of dumpster-diving. Butthole Surfers were just doing what they’d always done—playing in the wreckage—and by 1996, that’s what was left of grunge. There sat “Loser,” Beck’s admittedly half-assed track, like a house with a broken skylight, which the Buttholes just sort of pried open, to shimmy inside and ransack the refrigerator. This happened to a friend of mine (with actual racoons) while he was away on vacation—the racoons couldn’t get out of the house and they ended up tearing the whole place apart and he came home to discover them in his bathtub. That’s basically what went down here, too—the Buttholes got stuck inside the song, only they’re radioactive racoons and so they ended up tricking the thing out, made it a lot cooler.
The real comparison that needs to be drawn between “Loser” and “Pepper,” in my opinion, has nothing to do with their structural similarities or relative merit. Instead, it’s a study in perspective. “They were all in love with dying, they were drinking from a fountain, that was pouring like an avalanche, coming down the mountain,” Gibby intones in the flat, disaffected patter of his song’s verses. Not “I”—as Beck implicates himself in “Loser”—or even “we.” They. He’s singing as an observer, casting his mind’s eye back on real figures from his Dallas upbringing: nutbags, freaks and weirdos (and the “ever-present football player rapist”) who fell to car wrecks, stabbings, viruses and sordid accidents. But when the chorus rolls around and things turn “cinnamon and sugary,” we hear what anyone familiar with 60s psychedelia knows right away—this is a drug song, and the names in the verses could just as well be Kurt, Scott, River, Hillel. The music has gone loopy and an “I” emerges, tasting and scenting sweet traces.
Then, yet another shift in POV: You never know just how you look through other people’s eyes. Of all the chicken-fried lunacy to come out of Gibby’s mouth over the years, this line may have my vote as the looniest. The only thing I feel that I can say with any certainty about Gibby is that he has always known exactly how he looks to others. Gavin Bowden, director of the song’s inspired music video, puts the lie to it right away, casting Gibby as the wild-eyed perpetrator of a seedy, unspecified crime (and Eric Estrada, of TV’s C.H.I.P.S., as its victim). Guilty is how the Butthole frontman looks here. And he knows it. He keeps his head down, buries his face in his hands. He’s tired, almost relieved to be caught:

Some will die in hot pursuit and fiery auto crashes
Some will die in hot pursuit while sifting through my ashes
Some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain

In almost every story about Gibby, there’s a moment when those on hand see the demon arrive and know things are about to go sideways. He could turn that certain look on and off like a flashlight. It happens palpably for one breathtaking instant in the video at minute 1:16. You can feel the wheels beneath you hitting black ice. It’s a look that dares you to cross the line: between music and mayhem, art and crime, freedom and madness. He’s flashed it from a thousand stages, and as one-time Butthole bassist Kramer attests in a 2020 Believer interview, in every other location imaginable, as well. Gibby has always known how he appears to those around him and what his effect on them will be. So, for me, the thing that’s most fascinating to consider about “Pepper’s” use of pronoun: the possibility that in his own mind, Gibby was never one of “them.” Like his infernally competent band, was he always a bit more in control than it seemed?
Gibby recently wrote a YA novel about a magic dog and claims to devote most all of his time these days to his sons. The band has reunited and even Nervosa (aka Teresa Taylor) is back onboard—the Buttholes having turned out to be not quite as dysfunctional a family as it once seemed. King Coffey won a “Yard of the Year” award from his Austin neighborhood committee, for god sake. Pinkus, when not busy as a Butthole Surfer, is steadily at work with his band Honky and on projects with the Melvins. And Leary has parlayed the tricks he learned recording Butthole Surfers songs in his kitchen into a successful career as a producer of acts like Meat Puppets and Sublime. And though Kathleen (TA DA) Lynch is not part of the reunion, Leary has this to say about the “true artist” formerly known as the Shit Lady: “I saw her about seven or eight years ago, and she was doing great...turned out to be a pretty normal person, with a normal kind of job, which made me real happy.”
Since I started writing this, I’ve spent more than a few nights staring at my old roommate’s Facebook page, weighing the pros and cons of reaching out, even just to ask a question or two about those early shows. I want to know if it was the Traxx show he attended or an earlier one at Paycheck’s Lounge in Hamtramck, and how their shows evolved with the lineup changes over those years from the mid to late 80s. And I also want to know if he remembers a certain night in May of 1996, when I followed him from a bachelor party to a crack house on Cass after he said to me, “You want to be a writer, don’t you?” It’s not that I don’t think he’d remember. Most of the pictures on his page are actually from those days. It’s just, how should I put this? Most of the pictures on his page are from those days.

David Turkel is a playwright and bartender--which, in pandemic, means that he is a cat-dad and personal chef. He teaches screenwriting at Oregon State University.

rockin’ stroll: greg oldfield on ”It’s a Shame About Ray”

Up until the year before my sister ran away, my aunt Barb was the most recognized member of my family. For years, we talked about her close-up as a grieving Amish woman during the opening funeral scene in Harrison Ford’s crime-drama Witness. My mom had a close family, and get-togethers involved matching outfits, campfire songs before meals, and scripted plays performed by the children depicting scenes from my grandparents’ lives. But Dando Christmas was the event.
We had our traditions. For me and my older siblings, Rob and Allie, it started on the twenty-third when we slept over my grandparents’ house while our parents celebrated their wedding anniversary. We’d decorate the tree with popcorn strings and tinsel and play bumper pool in the musty basement for hours beside my grandfather’s stain glass workshop. At night, we drove through their church’s live nativity on our way down to Philadelphia for the Wannamaker light show and the Dickens Village. The next morning, my grandmother made pancakes shaped into animals, and we fought over who poured the milk from her cow creamer.
We also had structure. Hor d’oeuvres before meals, presents before stockings, and youngest to oldest, which always sparked a debate between Allie and my cousin Jen because they were two months apart. If I reached my crab claw limit, I’d be cut off and steered toward the cheese and crackers or the veggie tray. When it was someone’s turn to open a present, everyone watched. My grandmother, a retired PE teacher and coach, redirected side conversations and maintained the flow. Present-opening required patience because the paper came from my grandfather’s company and tearing it to shreds devalued the work that went into its creation.
My grandparents’ gifts were significant. If Santa had forgotten to bring that item we’d searched for under our own tree that morning, my grandparents didn’t. When my grandfather had to ask for help to bring a present into the living room, we sat up because we knew it’d be something good: a basketball hoop, a TV, or patio furniture. They were also meaningful, often times followed by a backstory that showed considerable planning.
In 1992, my grandmother asked Allie and Jen to open together, which meant they had the same gift and required the room’s attention, worthy of my brother releasing his headlock on me. My cousin had the recognizable CD shape wrapped with a ribbon and bow, while my sister had the smaller cassette. “Wow!” they said, and a collective “ooh” followed as they revealed the cover of It’s a Shame About Ray.
I laughed at Allie because that morning I got a Sony recordable CD-cassette boombox, and she still had her double cassette player with detachable speakers. And the music wasn’t that big of a deal to me because I’d still been into the MC Hammer, Kris Cross, Marky Mark, and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince music that headlined that summer’s township teen dances where Johnny Small and Eric Bermudez danced off in a small circle while me and my friends practiced the Running Man, the Roger Rabbit, or the Typewriter off to the side and only joined in when it was “The Electric Slide,” “Humpty Dance,” or an opportunity to ask a girl to slow dance.
My aunt Barb, lounging with her back against a couch cushion, a clenched hand against her cheek, smiled, then said, “Did you know Evan’s your cousin?”
“What?” Allie and Jen yelled. I may have been sneaking another crab claw but stopped for confirmation from my mom, who nodded. Then we looked at my grandmother, who was above such fabrications. “Yes,” she said. “Third cousins.” Then she gave us the family run-down about how my grandfather’s cousins, known to us as Uncle Bill and Aunt Peggy, who lived down the street, were Evan’s grandparents, information that may have been lost on me as I prepared to open next and failed to realize teenage life would never be the same.
Another rule was that gifted music became Christmas music and had to be played. So Allie slid in her tape into the stereo system and cranked it up, which pleased the kids because the punkish music was hard and fast, nothing like the Swing and Jazz that usually came out of those speakers. “Rockin’ Stroll” lasted thirty seconds before my grandmother or my aunt mentioned that we should probably play the Christmas music in another room after dinner. The filet would be ready by three-thirty. So it was back to presents, “that’s its” whenever I sneaked another crab claw, and figure fours from my brother.

It’s a Shame About Ray

The length of a sitcom, a Super Bowl halftime show, a free delivery from Dominos, that’s how long it takes to absorb It’s a Shame About Ray, a juggernaut of guitar riffs, catchy melodies, and introspective lyrics, sometimes serious, sometimes not. Longer if you include the re-released edition with bonus tracks and the band’s cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” which made it up to number eight on Billboard’s modern rock tracks in 1992 and elevated the band to mainstream status along with its self-titled song, which reached number five. Joined by friend Juliana Hatfield on bass and backup vocals and David Ryan on drums, Dando added Nic Dalton, who he met in Australia while collaborating with pal Tom Morgan of Smudge. Despite the ever evolving and revolving makeup of The Lemonheads, this group remained intact during the band’s peak Atlantic years.
What followed was a burst of fame: appearances, photo shoots, interviews, widespread notoriety, and rumors, often about Dando’s exploitations into the rock star lifestyle. As Dando became a ’90s icon, he made the most of it, befriending the likes of Oasis, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love, and dozens of celebrities.
Appearing on Letterman in 1992, Dando weathered Dave’s jokes about the band’s refusal to play “Mrs. Robinson” and his hooded winter jacket with witty comebacks, which spurred respectful laughter from the host before the band broke into a killer performance of “It’s a Shame About Ray.” At the conclusion, Dando, shook hands with Dave, switched to a lumberjack grip, yelled “Peace, baby” into the mic, then shrugged off his jacket. He was jovial and energized, delivering the type of inspired performance you’d expect from a rising rock star.
Then there was Dando’s appearance on Regis and Kathi Lee, a contrast in conversational wavelengths as the hosts attempted to bridge the generational gap with minimal success. As Dando battled discomfort, talking about the origins of the band, fan necklaces, and his conception, the interview segued into a summary of the album’s hit song, which has developed multiple interpretations.
“It’s kind of about, um, could be the human race, kind of, you know,” Dando said, “a name like Joe, the average Joe, you know, like everyman.” He then clarified, “It’s a story about a specific imaginary person who’s disappeared, so you know it’s kind of like the Trouble with Harry sort of thing.” But as soon as Dando took the guitar and transitioned into a mesmerizing acoustic version of “Ray,” the awkwardness alleviated with the gentleness of his deep voice and delicacy of the guitar strings, reminiscent of the solo show where I first met him nearly twenty years later.
Directed by original band member Jesse Peretz, the video for “Ray” stars Johnny Depp, who in a New York Times interview in 2019 Dando said, “We were really good buds until I slept with his girl” in reference to Kate Moss, the modeling world’s grunge queen. Depp portrays the mysterious lead character, Ray, sequestered in a run-down shack in a barren desert landscape, recalling the memories of a blond woman.

The cellar door was open, I could never stay away.

The sequence of flashbacks tells a story of failed love while Ray’s sitting on a mattress inside a dusty room, burning a cigarette, deep in thought. The blond woman’s waiting, sliding on a ring, perhaps to signify a promise that Ray cannot fulfill. Then Ray’s stuffing clothes into a plastic bag. She gets into a car, we assume it’s Ray’s. The wind blows her hair as she rides along the open road. But Ray’s holding her ripped picture from a busted frame, puts it in the bag, too. The frame slams to the floorboards. In the car, the blond woman looks back and slaps the seat. Something has altered their plans.
Ray grabs his stuff, opens the door to leave, then vanishes, and the video ends with a final image of the empty car, leading us to believe that either the event occurred in the past or never happened at all. But we’re left with the affirmation that Ray is gone.

In the stone, under the dust, his name is still engraved.
Some things need to go away.

Is Ray Dando’s symbol for the forsaken? While we strive for significance, a loyal friend, a devoted spouse, a passionate lover, a nurturing parent, at some point, we go away, too, and are forgotten, maybe not in death but in life, fading into the background noise of its rhythms. What remains of us is a handprint in wet cement, a name scribbled under a desk, or one-half of the initials inside a heart carved into a tree off a wooded trail.
In another interview, Dando says that the title came from a headline in an Australian newspaper following the firing of local TV presenter Ray Martin. We say “it’s a shame” in response to some form of unsettling news, but is it an expression that shows minimal level of empathy? We’re not dicks, we understand, but how much do we care? It’s not long before we’re back to ourselves, flipping through channels, scrolling through phones, or preparing to withstand our own approaching storms, relieved that we’re not Ray.

Allison’s Starting to Happen

My grandmother stopped over to visit the next time Evan came to see Aunt Peggy. He played a few songs on the living room couch while my grandmother snapped random photos, one of which she copied and gave to all of her grandchildren. For years, mine hung on a corkboard beside Michael Jordan and Diego Maradona posters. My sister also gave her cassette to my grandmother for Evan to sign. When it came back, Evan had written Cousin Allison’s starting to happen.
My sister is a complex character, a free spirit. Allie liked sports but wasn’t an athlete, liked music but didn’t play in a band, was into art but wasn’t an artist. She was crafty, resourceful, and had a mind full of ideas, none of which were utilized in a suburban high school setting. Her network of friends experimented with drugs, went to concerts, and sometimes fought. A boy who used to be in her circle went to prison. Another friend dropped out of school. Her friends were tough, loyal, and often nice, so I looked beyond our differences because I had my own path.
Days after Christmas, the year before we found out about Evan, my parents went away for a rare night out. Rob was a senior in high school, Allie was a freshman, and I was in seventh grade. In normal circumstances, my parents warned my brother, and my dad would come home with a rigorous inspection of the house, revealing an overlooked detail that would lead to my brother’s grounding: a misplaced shovel from when my brother and his friends dug out snow from the nearby ice skating rink for their keg, a nick on the liquor cabinet door, a red plastic cup that missed the trash runs to the dumpster behind the middle school and had been tossed in with the regular trash.
That night, my brother took me to play indoor soccer. On the way back, as he drove down our street, the headlights lit up the row of cars in front of our house at the end of the cul-de sac and another row in the driveway. Kids ran across the front yard, around the back of the house, and some jumped into cars and pulled away as my brother blocked the rest when he parked.
A couple of Allie’s friends cut him off and said that they’d have everyone out soon. My brother was tough, way stronger than them, and he’d roughed a few of them up the last time my sister had a party. I still remembered that night, too, because her friend took her off her top and walked around the house, which was the first breasts I’d ever seen. So a part of me was anticipating something like that happening again.
But when we stepped into the mud room, a row of older boys, more like men, unknown to us, with patchy beards and reeking of cigarettes, stood on either side as if they were about to jump us. My brother played it cool, slapped one of them five. One dude staring at us had a puffy Raiders jacket with the hood up, the matching baseball cap pulled down just above his eyes, both hands inside his pockets. I was certain he was clutching a piece. Finally, one of my sister’s friends swayed over, hugged me, and said we were the brothers. The dude nodded, then took a sip from his forty.
My brother told me to get dressed, yelled at my sister about cleaning up, then took me over his friend’s house where he and his buddies drank in a basement until nearly two in the morning while I tried to sleep on a couch. When we came home, the party was over and everyone was gone.
My parents returned early the next morning. From my bed, I listened to the inspection, the opening and closing of drawers, footsteps down and up the basement stairs, shuffling in the garage where the shovels were kept, lifting the trashcan lids. It all checked out.
It had been such a late night that no one fed our dog yet. So while she was hovering over her bowl, my dad went into the laundry room where we kept her food and scooped out one and a half cups of dry Purina with the metal measuring cup. But when he dropped the cup back into the bag, it clanked.
My dad yelled for my brother, my sister, and me to get the hell downstairs. When I reached the kitchen, my family was standing around the center island, staring at a bottle of Colt 45. Later that morning, my brother discovered some of his Christmas presents had disappeared from under the tree. His girlfriend had bought him a pair of black Guess jeans with a matching white striped t-shirt. The first day back at school after break, he saw a kid who was twenty years old and still in eleventh grade wearing it in the hallway.

The Turnpike Down

For three weeks in July 1993, Dexter Davis was rumored to be hiding in the woods beside my neighborhood. A homeless teenager who used to live in a shelter community nearby, Dexter robbed a school, a church, and several houses, mostly for food. But he was reported to be harmless until one night on the 13th when an older homeowner who lived at the edge of the woods woke up to someone stabbing him in the chest with a steak knife. The man fought his attacker for several minutes until the attacker fled. The homeowner survived, barely. Dexter Davis said he only intended to steal until the man woke up while he was rummaging through the bedroom.
Everyone had Dexter stories. One of my friends said his dad came out one morning and found the trash had been picked. Another saw a search team gearing up in the school parking lot on his way back from baseball, the officers wearing armor and night vision, clutching assault rifles. Some kids said Dexter was bathing in their swimming pool, that he cut through their yard on the way to rob the 7-Eleven, that he had a gun.
Later that week, I woke up to the driveway motion lights going on. My room was above the garage, so I couldn’t see all the way out, only the lights. The dog started barking, the way she barked at the mailman, hysterical, ferocious. I didn’t think much of it and went back to sleep. My dad told us in the morning that when he came downstairs, the dog was on top of the couch, looking out the back window, the hairs on her back standing up. My brother said he heard someone jump the fence outside his room, then stumble on a roll of chicken wire my dad had out to repair a rotten post.
I told my friends that day that Dexter Davis was lurking outside my house but no one believed me.
Two days later, he robbed the bank across the street from my neighborhood and got away with $20,000 in traveler’s checks. A month later, he was arrested in Allentown coming back from Las Vegas.
Soon after, we went into the woods looking for his encampment but didn’t find it.

Rudderless

Two weeks into the 1993 school year, I was a freshman on the varsity soccer team, struggling to make a name for myself. As the youngest on the team, I was often the initiated, sucker punched, dog piled, or ball smacked, stuff that went beyond harassment but was just boys being boys. Some of my sister’s friends used to mosh pit me in the hallway, so most attempts at asking a girl out ended with rejection. Once, while I stood in a shooting line at practice, one of them wiped his ass with his hand then across my face.
On a Wednesday morning, I came downstairs to find my dad still home. He usually woke up, ate his two eggs and white toast, drank his mug of tea, and was gone. That morning, he was dressed for work, distressed and pacing through the kitchen while my mom was on the phone with a neighbor or a friend. The cracks in her voice told me something was off. “Your sister didn’t come home last night,” my dad said.
That weekend, the Grateful Dead was in Philly. Allie went to all three shows, then continued on to New York City, according to the information obtained from the private investigator my parents hired. For a week, I walked the school hallways, catching glances and hushed conversations as the brother of the girl who ran away. Our school had a second-floor catwalk that went from the main classroom building to the gym, pool, and auditorium. That’s where my sister’s friends hung out before reconvening at the smoker’s point, a cut-through into the adjacent neighborhood where students taunted the Dean from the other side of a boundary fence as she threatened to reprimand them for smoking on school property.
Her friends would say hi to me, snicker, ask if I’d heard anything. Some of them knew where she was but weren’t budging. I couldn’t look at them. That was the only week some of them didn’t beat the shit out me.
My aunts and my uncle took turns driving my parents up to the shows. My brother and his roommates left college to help track her down. They’d walk around before and after, passing out fliers while I stayed home, went to school, played soccer, pretending that everything was normal. My parents came home late each night and went back again early the next day.
My friend, Gonzo, a senior who lived up the street, drove me to school and would slip Soul Asylum into the car stereo and play “Runaway Train” as a joke. It was funny but it wasn’t. MTV aired the video at least twice an hour, which told the story of a runaway teenage girl and finished with a series of pictures of the missing kids who’d never been found.
On the last night of the New York shows, Aunt Barb found my sister walking out of a deli across the street from Madison Square Garden.
“Are you okay?” my aunt asked. “Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?”
“Yeah,” my sister said, “I’m not high.”

Bit Part

After Allie returned, things were weird. She went back to school, rejoined her friends, for a little while anyway. But she was different, as if she’d seen a world and wanted no parts of ours. Threats, groundings, curfews, pleas, it all went to hell. She’d changed in more ways than I’d ever know.
Three weeks later, I was riding the late bus home after practice and found my street blocked by dozens of police cars and news vans because of a hostage standoff. My first thought was of my sister, so I jumped off, ran around the block, and cut through my backyard to find SWAT officers in trees overlooking a house up the street, not mine. My parents were standing behind yellow caution tape outside my house along with several neighbors.
Paul Mutch was a former co-worker of the woman living four houses away. Early that morning, he broke in after the husband left and held the wife hostage at knifepoint along with her four kids, the oldest a couple years younger than me and the youngest a six-week-old who he claimed was his. He released the kids early that morning and allowed an officer to carry out the infant four hours later. But he kept the wife locked inside a bedroom for sixteen hours, and I spent the evening watching live updates from my street and staring at the floodlights of camera crews. Mutch released the woman late in the night before surrendering.
Mutch was sentenced seven to twenty years for nearly a dozen offenses, among them deviant sexual acts on the woman. Many years later, I learned that he was the father of the infant child and that the woman had left her husband and the kids to be with him when he left prison.

Ceiling Fan in My Spoon

A week after the hostage situation on my street, my friends and I rode our bikes through the woods where Dexter was hiding and across the major four-lane road to our record store. I could count my CDs on two hands: Automatic for the People, Siamese Dream, August and Everything After, Rage Against the Machine, Tuesday Night Music Club, and Zooropa. CD shopping was a calculated experience. Since my brother had all the Nirvanas, Pearl Jams, Radioheads, Tools, and Soundgardens, I couldn’t risk doubling up on an album.
I went straight to the New Releases and bought Come on Feel The Lemonheads, an album I listened to more than any other over the tumultuous stretch of my teenage years. “Into Your Arms” reached number one on Billboard’s modern rock tracks in November and stayed on top for nine weeks until it was replaced by Pearl Jam’s “Daughter.” My favorites drifted toward the humorous songs like “Being Around,” a lighter version of “Drug Buddy” where the narrator questions his own relevancy.
I often found myself in Lemonheads songs. The character struggling for survival is not me but in many ways could be. I always wondered to what extent Dando’s narrative musings can be attributed to his own difficulties with fame, rejection, creative control, or a lack of urgency to remain a fixture in an industry known for sucking artists dry before pushing them out of a moving vehicle and onto the side of a road.
Dando’s run was short-lived. Following two successful albums in consecutive years, there were troubles with addiction, his arrest in Sydney, rumors of his death. One interviewer called him the “model for his decade’s slacker bohemianism.” Critics speculated why he waited a decade to release an album after Car Button Cloth. Or why Dando hasn’t made another solo album since 2003’s Baby I’m Bored. Asking about his drug-fueled benders, his slip-ups, his reluctance to conform, they’d weave in digs about his oddities and shortcomings, personal jealousies disguised as criticisms, ignoring the burnout, blocking, pressure, and depression, or the simple fact that maybe he didn’t want to do it someone else’s way.
Dando Christmas wasn’t the same the year after we learned about our cousin. In one room, my parents shared their plans for my sister staying, while in the other room she talked about getting away. I used to get upset when people referred to her the same way journalists wrote about Evan. But who deserves more ridicule, people like them who found a way to break free or those who remain trapped in someone else’s criterion? There’s something to be said about originality and resilience. The Evans, the Allies, the Dexters. the Pauls, me, you, at some point, don’t we all become the stomping feet, the broken dish, the fist through the wall, the extra drink, or outbound train to prove that we’re more than just a Ray? Because if not, that may be the shame. 

Greg Oldfield is a physical education teacher and coach from the Philadelphia area. His stories can be found in Hobart, Carve, XRAY, and Schuylkill Valley Journal among others. He also writes about soccer for the Brotherly Game and the Florida Cup, and you can find his unsolicited sports takes on Twitter at @GregOldfield21.